Paul Dorpat has captured Seattle's mundane moments on film dating back to his hippie days. Canisters of film that he has shot over the years spill over into his kitchen.

Actually, Paul Dorpat lucked out. Not every yard sale is thrown by an extrovert calling herself the Funky Bunny, who rides around town on a glitter-flecked motor scooter with plastic doll heads for tail lights. The Funky Bunny is a ham in front of a camera and therefore a perfect subject for Dorpat to deconstruct.

Over the past three years, Dorpat has trolled Seattle's weekend yard sales in search of bad art pieces and the people to share the stories behind them. He rolls his video camera to capture the precise moment the seller makes the release. The "Forsaken Art Project" is another of Dorpat's projects in a life's worth of projects. Some have resulted in books, including three collections of the weekly "Now & Then" column he has written for The Seattle Times' Pacific Northwest magazine since January 1982. Other projects await his attention while aging in flat metal canisters, stories locked within miles of celluloid dating back to the days he filmed naked hippies rolling beach balls in the surf.

Dorpat provides a market for tacky art that owners are willing to forsake. The "Scream" mask is just one of many pieces he has picked up for a pittance at garage sales.

Newspapers and TV are around to record and archive the history of the obvious. But only Dorpat is around to record flashes in time not so clearly remarkable, like the moment the Funky Bunny abandons a nondescript brass candle holder she once felt compelled to own. With his camera on, Dorpat asks the Funky Bunny to touch the candle holder for perhaps the final time. "Give it a second chance," he urges. She cups it in her hands but feels nothing; whatever emotional connection she once had is gone. She is willing to forsake it to Dorpat for $1.

At the same yard sale, Dorpat's camera finds a fashion model named Katie. (His camera has a way of zeroing in on interesting, beautiful women.) Katie is hawking a one-of-a-kind piece of art — a papier-mâché helmet, ornamented with silvery shards of broken compact discs, that swoops at the tip like a soft-serve cone. Dorpat presses her for details about the odd creation's creator, an artist named Alicia. "Her stuff is kind of Marie Antoinette going to a disco," Katie says. He pushes for more and finds out Alicia is a sassy one with quite the potty mouth. Dorpat buys the helmet, too, for another buck. One day, if he can find the time — and time is at a premium these days for Seattle's dean of local history — he will prepare an exhibit that displays the forsaken art alongside film loops of the seller explaining the willingness to give up something once valued.

Reflecting upon the now in light of the then. It's the same challenge Dorpat poses to readers each week in his column.

WITHOUT STORY, history is a recluse refusing to invite you in. Dorpat has made it his business to share Seattle's history by telling its stories, using photographs as entry points. His "Now & Then" columns are contemplative explorations into the progress, sacrifice and error that are parts of any city growing up. Dorpat begins with photos of the old city he unearths in libraries and museums, attics and hope chests. He contrasts them by returning with his camera to the place where the "then" photo was taken and shooting it in the "now."

A quirky moment at a garage sale hosted by a quirky artist calling herself the Funky Bunny is more than a quirk in time to Dorpat: It's history in the making.

"Photos are tricky," says Dorpat, 62. "They seem to be two-dimensional windows into the past. But once you enter into them, they may take you anywhere." Dorpat eagerly follows that winding road in search of surprises, traipsing all over town, prepared to pursue whatever tangents and oh-by-the-ways he may encounter. Diversions often focus on the people within the old photos. Dorpat spent the bulk of a recent column getting into the mind of the photographer instead of getting to the point about the place depicted in the photographs. It was, according to his editor, quintessential Dorpat — interpretive yet informative, fanciful yet factual.

Pacific Northwest published Dorpat's 1,000th column on June 3. As a body of work, his columns cover Seattle's history comprehensively, from then to now. But Dorpat lays it all out like the streets of Venice, meandering and random. History presented in no logical order. He treats history like a collage, not unlike the abstract, mixed-media art pieces he created as a younger man.

"You never know where it is leading you," says Dorpat, describing the collage artist's technique. "You keep slapping things on and covering and erasing. It's ripping paper and pasting it down and painting on it, flopping new paper on top of that and cutting out things and arranging."

As much an artist as an historian, Dorpat, left, attends the 1977 opening of printmaker Don Scott's show at the Traver Gallery. Also pictured, from left, Stephen Hazel, Fred Bauer, Scott, Sheila Farr and Paul Heald.

Seven-year-old Paul Dorpat in Grand Forks, N.D., during World War II. "Saving the world for democracy," he says.

ALL SUMMER long, Dorpat has tried to focus on the now, which for him always includes the then. The most pressing project on his list of pressing projects has been to complete a documentary retrospective of Bumbershoot's first 30 years. The film is to debut during next weekend's festival. At the same event, Dorpat will receive Bumbershoot's "Golden Umbrella Award," given every year to a local artist who has risen to the top of his or her field.

Dorpat views history through the eye of an artist, says Norm Langill, head of One Reel, the nonprofit company that produces the festival. Langill, who shared a Capitol Hill apartment with Dorpat in the early 1980s, remembers Dorpat taking a photo of a bus stop across the street from their place every day without fail for six months. These days, Dorpat can't cross the Fremont Bridge without filming it first. "Paul always stops to smell the roses," Langill says. "He reacts to anything in front of him as an artistic experience. This is a guy who can get pleasure from going to a store to buy soap."

Nothing bores Dorpat. Not even himself. He admits that he talks out loud in empty rooms — extemporaneous, enthused monologues that can be nothing more than nonsense. Sometimes, though, it's such wonderful nonsense that he'll grab a tape recorder so he can transcribe later. He has a knack for transforming something tedious into an intellectual exercise that amuses himself and those around him. "I really do have a great variety of interests," he says. "I think that's one of the great secrets to happiness, to not get stuck in something."

Stuck with friends in a traffic jam trying to flee this summer's Fourth of July fireworks at Elliott Bay, Dorpat got out of the car to count the number of vehicles in line, consider how many of them needed to merge into the line, time the duration of the green light at the intersection at the head of the line and tally the number of cars making it through each green light. Then he challenged his mates to figure out by mathematical equation the amount of time it would take for them to reach the head of the line and get out of the jam. Heads spun. While walking the line of cars, Dorpat came across an impasse — a heated argument between two drivers over one honking at the other. Dorpat played peacemaker, telling one driver in a sanguine tone that the guy who honked was just a little excited.

"Paul has an ability to genuinely project his benevolent temperament onto others," says Jean Sherrard, Dorpat's friend who witnessed the whole thing. "He has a powerful sense of wellness, a way about him that says everything is right with the world. Let me put it this way — he is still friends with all of his past lovers."

Researching today's "Now & Then" column, Dorpat searches for the exact spot at Ballard's Golden Gardens where an old photo was taken.

Dorpat "then," in Port Townsend in 1980.

DORPAT IS A HULK of a man with a thick grey beard who counters his intimidating physical presence with a mellifluous voice, a habit of resting his hand gently on the shoulder of the person to whom he is speaking and a disarming sense of humor. During the fireworks ceremony, he borrowed the 3-D glasses of a stranger and left her in stitches when he observed: "This is like watching the fireworks with cataracts." Dorpat watched the show from a VIP tent sponsored and catered by Ivar's restaurants. He weighed down his plates with food, then scraped what he couldn't finish into Ziploc bags he carries with him for occasions such as these. "This is for the cats," he said, emptying leftover salmon into one bag. Another he filled with fruit and desserts. This was for him, for later. "I don't believe in wasting food," he said. "I don't apologize for this. This is sensible." It was tough to tell if Dorpat was performing, following the example of his late father, a Lutheran preacher who presided over a church in Spokane.

"This is the same man who would come home and put his face over the steam bucket to get rid of aching sinuses and who would fall asleep at the television set and snore through the night," Dorpat says. "I saw this definitely human creature also have this tremendous persuasive quality. That's why preachers' kids are sort of weird. We're affected by fathers who are performers."

As a teenager, Dorpat studied to be a preacher, the same route that not only his father but a grandfather and an older brother took. He detoured, going to Whitworth College on three scholarships, including one for music. He sang the bass line in the choir and performed solo in the male quartet. But he also read the works of tormented philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and ultimately got expelled from the choir. He gravitated toward the studies of literature, psychology and philosophy, pursuing degree programs baffling to the pedestrian mind — comparative aesthetics and semiology, the study of symbols and signs. He considered history as a vocation in the early 1970s only after a friend sought his help in researching the background of the Merchants Cafe, a Pioneer Square haunt the friend was reopening. Dorpat had helped instigate and organize Seattle's counterculture movement in the 1960s. He managed the Free U, an alternative university that operated above a University District greasy spoon, and founded the city's first alternative newspaper, the Helix. Dorpat also produced communal festivals that combined rock music with other things that made older people nervous.

In the psychedelic storm of Seattle in the '60s, Dorpat was a calm center, says Tom Robbins, the Northwest counterculture novelist who ran in the same circles. Robbins says Dorpat was never a flower child, less impetuous than his compatriots. He was neither a doper nor a drinker, and consequently less obtuse. "He was never the kind of guy who got up on a soapbox and made shrill speeches," Robbins says. "Even in the '60s, Paul may have had the point of view of a sociologist or historian. He was most interested in observing and reporting the phenomenon. He participated, but more at a planning level, bringing people together to make things happen." Walt Crowley, another local historian who evolved out of the Helix, says Dorpat preferred writing love poems to Tina Turner to slugging out essays condemning the Vietnam War.

At a birthday party for a friend, Dorpat is both detached observer and center of attention.

WITH THE RECENT passings of legendary Seattle chroniclers Murray Morgan and Emmett Watson, Dorpat has graduated to elder among Seattle historians. "You are the establishment," Sherrard bluntly told Dorpat recently. "You are no longer the hippie." Being an elder carries responsibility. But Dorpat says he views his role in the same way Morgan and Watson did. "Responsibility is more the language of obligation, and I think we're more enthusiasts," he says. "The language of joy is more appropriate to what we do."

Dorpat has sought out apprentices and regularly lectures to groups of history buffs and preservationists who read his "Now & Then" columns like affirmations. Dorpat is a willing advocate but not someone who wants to lead a charge to save a cherished old structure. "There is often a desire on the part of the reader to interpret what I write through a rosy screen of nostalgia," he says. "I certainly often feel that we've made a lot of mistakes and destroyed a lot of things we should have kept. In many ways, I do fulfill the expectation of many readers to be a champion of a lost past, but I don't always feel that way. Sometimes I think there are qualities of a contemporary city that are quite inviting and appealing."

Dorpat's view of contemporary Seattle, however, is an arrested outlook colored by tens of thousands of sepia-toned photographs of the old city, antique images burned into his brain. "It's typical for me to negotiate the city — the central business district especially — by reason of landmarks no longer there," he says. While walking through the Denny Regrade neighborhood, he sees a cliff where a high-rise now looms, a ravine where an alley now runs.

"I'm actually walking through a city I imagine through my considerable familiarity with photographs showing how the place looked at one time," Dorpat says. "I am like an enchanted tourist in my own city."

Stuart Eskenazi is a Seattle Times staff reporter. Benjamin Benschneider is a Pacific Northwest Magazine staff photographer.