Silicon Alleys

Foreword

How to Love San Jose

I met Gary Singh a few years after moving to our beloved, gets-no-respect burg of San Jose. My true job was, as always, writing avant-garde science-fiction novels, popular science books, and whatever journalistic pieces I could sell. But my family needed for me to have a salaried job as well, and I’d found a pleasant niche as a professor of computer science at San Jose State.

Sometime in the late 1990s, Gary appeared in my office on the third floor of MacQuarrie Hall on a by-now-turfed-over block of San Carlos Street. Immediately I sensed him to be a kindred soul. He has a captivating style of speech, he bursts with fresh ideas, and his voice is a confiding, well-modulated baritone. I always feel like Gary is letting me in on important, unknown facts. Somehow it’s like listening to a magic talking crow. I’m all ears.

His visit had little to do with my expertise in CS—no, he was there because of my rep as a semi-underground cult novelist. Gary was writing a Master’s thesis for a project in—well, I never did quite understand what the field officially was. He’d majored in Music at SJSU, and his Master’s project was an absurdist, surreal, transreal, SFish novel about a character who builds a device called a Ridiculometer. Gary felt that, obviously, it would be handy to have a ridiculometer to calibrate how effing ridiculous everything is.

Gary is a striking figure: tall, dark, with piercing eyes, an aquiline nose, a curly shock of black hair. He’s a bemused prophet, energetically depressed, cautiously hilarious, a man of parts, with none of the parts quite matching. Over and over my wife and I encounter him at events around our strange and disparate San Jose—or we might spot him trucking along an empty-as-usual downtown sidewalk.

Often, when seeing Gary, I silently misquote an inspiring Bob Dylan lyric to myself: I dreamed I saw Saint Augustine, as live as you or me / Tarrying through these quarters with the utmost empathy.

Over the years I’ve had a number of journalist friends. They’re a bit different than novelists. Novelists are like farmers or like builders. We’re boring, we’re out in the field day after day, season after season, nursing our crops, hammering our frames, worrying about the rain, fitting in windows. Journalists are more like hunter-gatherers. Or hyenas. Gary goes somewhere cool (or uncool), merges into the scene, notices anomalies, snaps up choice quotes, goes home to his laptop, and has at it.

Or, wait, maybe Gary’s like a graffiti artist with a tote bag full of spray cans, a virgin wall to defile, and one glorious night to do it in. Or like a cameraman shooting a portfolio of photos. Or like a poet, whittling his experience down to a few mots justes. Or, hell, he’s like Gary Singh and none other.

By the way, Gary is in fact a photographer, with works in galleries, and a poet, with screeds hither and yon. One of Gary’s favorite poems, which he refers to several times in this collection, is Allen Ginsberg’s short 1954 work In Back of the Real, taken from his seminal Howl, and composed, one imagines, while he was visiting our local Beat icon Neal Cassady in downtown San Jose. (See Gary’s 2018 column, Neal Cassady’s Old House on Santa Clara Street.)

railroad yard in San Jose

I wandered desolate

in front of a tank factory

and sat on a bench

near the switchman’s shack.

A flower lay on the hay on

the asphalt highway

...

Yellow, yellow flower, and

flower of industry,

tough spiky ugly flower,

flower nonetheless,

with the form of the great yellow

Rose in your brain!

This is the flower of the World.

One of Gary’s specialties, which I enjoy exceedingly, is to visit some seemingly dull, blah, forgettable or even ugly precinct of San Jose—and totally get into it, like he’s an alien visiting from Mars, and then describe the hell out of it. When in this mode, Gary refers to himself as the urban blight junkie. As recently as 2019, with his ridiculometer running full bore, Gary walked a few blocks along San Carlos Street. Let me quote in extenso from Urban Blight Junkie Returns to San Carlos Street, with a few editorial annotations.

This stretch of road takes us to a different era. The streetscapes are left over from decades ago, when San Jose wasn’t entirely filled in with suburbia...

Falafel’s Drive-in was jammed at lunchtime on a Saturday. There was a Faction sticker on the front window, right underneath the Zagat designation—a yin-yang of punk and luxury. It doesn’t get any more San Jose than that.

[As Gary explains in a 2018 column, The Faction and Lars Frederiksen at The Ritz, the Faction is a San Jose skate-punk band founded in the early 1980s, and skate-punk is one of the numerous indigenous San Jose movements that San Ho doesn’t get much credit for. Back to Gary now.]

A slew of beautifully disfigured facades highlighted the next mile, including San Jose’s celebrated row of antique shops. As always, each one featured its own janky panache and each one was doing business when I slithered in. Believe me, the experience of hearing ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’ by Tom Jones while exploring the labyrithine confines of a San Carlos Street antique shop is more necessary than anything WeWork will provide.

[WeWork being the short-term-office-rental biz, which is just the kind of 21st C development that’s likely to tweak Gary’s ridiculometer. Back to the man himself.]

Neighborhood bars are important, too. If your hands are shaking pre-noon, like mine used to be, Alex’s 49er Inn remains a highlight on this strip. .... At these legendary watering holes, you will not find $17 artisan pickle sandwiches or craft brew hipsters bathing in beard oil. Instead, you’ll find heroic denizens of the gritty underbelly with stories to tell.

Gary’s Silicon Alleys Metro column hasn’t missed a week yet, and by now it’s been running for fifteen years. It’s wonderful to have so many of his pieces assembled here. You sense the epic sweep of history—characters emerge, caper, and a few years later Gary’s memorializing their death. Also there’s the intimate history of Gary Singh himself. As a true and deep writer, his columns are about himself as much as they’re about our SJ quarters. He’s looking through a two-way mirror, with his solemn, amused visage overlaid upon our scenes.

San Jose isn’t like any other city I’ve known. First of all, we’re incredibly diverse, so much so that, at times, the familiar race or ethnicity or gender categories don’t always apply. And in terms of income, we have our share of entitled one-percenters (the guy in the Tesla doing a U-turn in a busy two-lane street), but we have a ton of old-school working types as well. In certain locales you might think you’re in Nebraska or El Paso or Saigon or, rather, all three at once. And that’s when it gets real San Jose.

Beats, skaters, punks, acidheads, coders, chip etchers, transrealists—all have left their mark here. But often as not it feels like nothing is going on. Where’s the action? We count on Gary Singh to find it—in his persona of the anti-man-about-town. An incurable romantic. A brooding, sarcastic hipster. You have to have lived here awhile to understand his attitude.

Does Gary hate San Jose? Short answer: No. Longer answer: see the following words from his 2005 column, Hitting Rock Bottom.

Occasionally folks get into a tizzy-fit when they interpret something I write or say as disrespectful to San Jose. It doesn’t matter what the topic is. With the phlegm-spittle of a rabid gopher, they usually wind up saying, Well, if you hate San Jose so much, then why don’t you just leave? ...

Maybe it’s love, I say. Inverted love. I don’t know.

Thank you, Gary, for showing us the way.

—Rudy Rucker, March 11, 2020

Introduction

In the Beginning

In 2005, the editors of Metro Silicon Valley gave me a weekly column so I could document the San Jose condition from a perspective only a native wacko could offer. With no expectations, I took them up on it. At the time, I already navigated the guts of the city in various other sections of the paper, writing art reviews, music pieces, cover stories, streams of consciousness and whatnot, yet they saw a potential I didn’t know existed. In order to open up the paper each week with bizarre ruminations on something, anything, the editors turned me loose to write whatever I wanted. I figured it would last maybe a few months.

Ultimately, no one could have predicted the Pandora’s box that would explode on the Silicon Alleys page. The column became more popular as every year unfolded, spreading almost entirely by word of mouth, so there was no way to stop writing. Over time, the missives began to feel like offspring, with me putting my own bent spin on every local subject I could possibly find, for as long as I could keep plugging away. People began to compliment me on the street wherever I went, often multiple times a day. I did not expect this. I wasn’t accustomed to being liked.

Yet that’s what happened. Over and over again. And for better or worse, each column seemed to trigger a craving to write another one. The dopamine rush wouldn’t stop. As long as I was engaged in the process of writing, my spirits improved and I became happy. No matter how many times I fell deeply for a woman that only wanted to be friends, if I just kept writing, then I could surmount any degree of pain and heartbreak, regardless of the situation. I became able to communicate with my fingers on a keyboard much better than I could ever do in conversation. Even better, people actually wanted to read the stories. Go figure.

For once in my life, I’d found a way to harness my entire life-matrix of experiences, interests and perspectives and tap into my own innate talents. No one had ever asked me to do that. No one had ever wanted me to do that.

Of course, each week was different, depending on what mood the muses were in and how they decided to string me along. If the muses were happy, then the column was a happy one. If the muses were in a difficult mood, then the column either became more pessimistic or devolved into me taking my own inadequacies out on something else. In any case, I always at least tried to provide a subversive sense of humor. Over the years, many others told me that even when scraping the bottom of the barrel of cynicism, even when bashing the city up, down and sideways, I always seemed to offer a sense of hope, somehow. They pointed out that underneath the darkness, hope existed. Whether they were talking about the city of San Jose or me personally, I don’t know. But this was probably the best compliment I could ever ask for. I have nothing but gratitude.

Subjectwise, my home town gave me a wide open palette, from punk rock to high art, from dive bars to luxury digs, from literary fixations to local history, plus arts criticism, business profiles and abstract mystical screeds. Sometimes I even wrote journalism. In 15 years, I rarely figured out the column more than a week in advance. It’s just how I rolled. And once I began the mechanical process of writing, I often felt like I had no conscious command over where the words came from, as if I was channeling the columns from somewhere else, or at least the first drafts. That’s not a cliché. It really felt that way sometimes. As I went back to select the columns you now have in front of you, there were many instances in which I couldn’t remember how or why I wrote what I did.

The Silicon Alleys page thus became my ever-changing impermanent self, my true nature, my natural voice. It was me. It reflected the trials and tribulations of however my brain was operating on any given week. Nevertheless, as long as I found an ability to elevate the ignored people and stories of San Jose, then I was content. In a sense, the city of San Jose will always be ignored and disregarded by everyone else in the world. Most natives know this. So much that the whole city itself seems terminally off the beaten path and thus always ripe for zonked-out column fodder. I was sitting on a gold mine.

As a result, I have the editors to thank first and foremost: Dan Pulcrano, for giving me the space when I didn’t realize what I even had to offer, plus all the editors I’ve ever worked with at that newspaper, in alphabetical order: Corinne Asturias, Mike Connor, Michael S. Gant, Dean Hinton, Stett Holbrook, Traci Hukill, Todd Inoue, Eric Johnson, Josh Koehn, Steve Palopoli, Nick Veronin, Traci Vogel, Jennifer Wadsworth and Heather Zimmerman. All of them somehow managed to put up with me. Plus, I cannot leave out several other employees over the years, not just those that helped lay out and design the book you now have in your hands, but some of those who toiled away uploading the columns to the website, designing the pages, selling the ads, shooting the photos, proofreading my screeds and other heroes that tolerated the chaos of me trying to love San Jose every single week: Sean George, Kathy Manlapaz, Kara Brown, Gordy Carbone, Jim Carrico, John Haugh, Dave Miller, Jimmy Arceneaux, Tabi Dolan, Felipe Buitrago, Harry Allison, Allie Gottlieb, Sarah Quelland, Vrinda Normand, Greg Ramar, Jeanne Sullivan, Richard Von Busack and Anne Gelhaus. Special super-duper thanks goes to Lisa Thomas, who facilitated the process for me to interview at Metro in the first place. To all those I’m forgetting, my hat goes off to every one of you!

Subjectwise, it would take another 450 pages to recognize everyone. I will say this, though: Just because you or your predicament did not make it into any of these columns does not mean you were unworthy of coverage. Quite the opposite. Everyone is worthy. There is simply too much to write. I can only hope that my journey has inspired others to take up their pens, or keyboards, and engage their own cities in brand new ways. Don’t ever give up. Never say die!

Years ago, I began to understand the city of San Jose as a character in one long story, told via Metro columns each week. So herein you will find a small 400-page overview of that city, my home town, as I’ve come to know it, warts and all.

2005

Alien Notion: Jacques Vallee

Besides being a successful Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Jacques Vallee has researched the UFO phenomenon perhaps more than any other person currently alive. He has written almost a dozen books on ufology, and he was the real-life model for the French UFO scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Vallee lives in San Francisco, but he recently infiltrated Silicon Valley to summarize his four decades of research in a public presentation at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto.

The reason Vallee has irked so many ardent UFO believers for decades is that he doesn’t believe UFOs are nuts-and-bolts machines from outer space or spinning silver disks operated by aliens from another universe. Crudely simplified, he was the first scientist to suggest that UFO experiences are in fact interactions with interdimensional beings that have always existed among us—invisible hands toying with human society from a different level of consciousness. It’s not just a physical phenomenon. It’s a sociological, spiritual and psychic experience all wrapped up into one.

Vallee also suggested in several books that many of these so-called abduction tales are the result of manipulation, either by the government or the interdimensional beings themselves. Even though his work was documented in former Metro scribe Jonathan Vankin’s 80 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time, Vallee has commanded a huge amount of respect over the years, even from UFO debunkers. As he’s been quoted everywhere, The UFO Phenomenon exists. It has been with us throughout history. It is physical in nature, and it remains unexplained in terms of contemporary science. It represents a level of consciousness that we have not yet recognized, and which is able to manipulate dimensions beyond time and space as we understand them. It affects our own consciousness in ways that we do not grasp fully, and it generally behaves as a control system. He has also theorized that UFO experiences echo those of traditional contact with nonhuman consciousness in the form of elves, fairies or demons throughout several cultures for millennia.

Since Vallee has spent decades filtering out the lunatic fringe on this matter, he didn’t want any advance press about his lecture, and I went along with that. He understandably didn’t want kooks with preconceived conclusions showing up and turning the whole presentation into a circus. Instead, he wanted to keep the lecture purely a scientific one.

So it only makes sense that the event was hosted by the Foundation for Mind-Being Research (FMBR), a 25-year-old Silicon Valley-based organization of scientists, engineers, spiritualists, artists, philosophers, psychics and psychologists devoted to establishing consciousness studies as a bona fide science. One of FMBR’s main principles is that the four-dimensional space-time world of ordinary human experience may be inadequate to accommodate the physics of the mind sciences. Vallee’s research throughout the last four decades intertwines with that theory.

This lecture was an experiment, he explained via email afterward. I am staying away from the media and public presentations because the field has become so polarized between different ideologies that anything I would say as a scientist would be lost in the noise. The FMBR group is unique because it is open-minded and understands the nature of research. Thus it provided an opportunity to test my current conclusions about the phenomenon before a responsive, yet critical audience.

In the presentation, he explained that the entire UFO discourse has degenerated into a confrontational and polarized situation between the hard-core skeptics and the extraterrestrial believers, and we need new radical hypotheses. So Vallee and others are going back underground and returning to the days of the Invisible College, the title of his 1975 book about a group of scientists researching UFOs while keeping their names and activities out of the press.

The phenomenon presents great opportunities to learn about the world and human nature, he explained. I continue to do research, but I do it with my own resources, in communication with a small network of scientists and investigators around the world. Good progress can be done this way, in an environment of trust rather than confrontation or hype.

Kepler’s 50th Anniversary

Long before Barnes & Noble, Borders and Amazon, there was Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park. As of right now, the independent bookstore is turning 50 years old. World War II conscientious objector Roy Kepler first opened the place in May of 1955. Several other South Bay bookstores have come and gone in the meantime, but Kepler’s still reigns supreme. The stories are endless.

It seems odd now, but back in the ‘50s, most publishers (as well as the general public) didn’t consider paperbacks to be real books. Roy Kepler, along with Fred and Pat Cody in Berkeley, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights in San Francisco, changed all that. Bay Area bookstores became the leaders of the paperback revolution.

Kepler himself drew considerable attention for his antiwar efforts, and in 1960 he was arrested at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory for anti-nuclear weapons protesting. Throughout the ‘60s, Kepler’s blossomed into a counterculture mecca. According to Grateful Dead historian Dennis McNally, The Grateful Dead started here. Jerry Garcia was a fixture at Kepler’s in the early ‘60s. He got his education stealing things off the shelves.

In John Markoff’s wonderful book, What the Dormouse Said: How the ‘60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, he says Kepler’s served as a beacon for an eclectic group of intellectuals who were outsiders in a community that was largely split in its economic dependence among Stanford, a fledgling electronics industry, and large military contractors like Lockheed.

According to former store manager Betty Sumrall, If you had long hair, you could come in—there were places at this time where you could not even go if you had long hair. If you were too poor to buy a book, you could come in and read. Anyone, radical or not, was welcome.

Kepler’s didn’t endure the ‘60s without problems, of course. There were arson attempts and bomb blasts, due to the antiwar nature of the place. In 1968, someone blasted out the front windows in the Los Altos store.

An ad from the time read: It’s hard to say which is growing faster—the peninsula war industries or Kepler’s Books. Unlike the Stanford Research Institute, Kepler isn’t planning an underground shelter yet, but with books lining the walls and floors, we may be forced underground, too.

After moving around a few times, the store eventually made it to its current location at 1010 El Camino Real in Menlo Park. It continues to be one of the most successful independent bookstores around. A huge public party Saturday afternoon (May 14, 1-4pm) will feature live music, raffles, games, prizes and book bags filled with the best books from the last five decades.

Which leaves us with one burning question: Why on earth can San Francisco, Berkeley, Menlo Park and Santa Cruz support independent bookstores, but San Jose can’t? I’ve posed that question to several San Joseans over the years and no one seems to have an answer.

Clark Kepler, who currently runs the store, said he wasn’t qualified to analyze San Jose’s situation, since he doesn’t know the community well enough, but he said folks should demand an alternative to the nauseating strip malls.

The phenomena of big box retailing and chains are ones that are very seductive to the consumer, he explained. The perception of having everything there—convenience, low pricing, to be on every corner, the strip mall look—is something I think a community wants an alternative to. I think a lot of times people like the idea of an independent bookseller or grocery store, and the question is whether you want to shop it and give it your business all the time. That’s the key component in being able to maintain a community, a downtown that is local.

So call your favorite real estate mogul and demand lower rents and more independent bookstores in San Jose. Tell them you need better places besides Barnes & Noble in which to slug coffee, lurk in the occult section and hit on New Age women.

Neighborhood Art at Singh’s Laundromat

Now it has been said that journalists are lazy bastards and that much of what appears in print is within walking distance of the journalist’s office. That theory is only partly true, but when I saw the flier for a MACLA-sponsored movie at the dive Laundromat at Second and William streets around the corner, I nearly broke out in tears from laughing so hard.

That dump?

You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought. For years, I saw more haggard toothless hookers parading around that corner than anywhere else in downtown San Jose. People with no shirts or shoes would be in the place doing their laundry while crackheads peddled their wares outside. The place was riddled with graffiti, garbage and unsavory characters. So when MACLA, two doors down from Metro, decided to paint the place and show a community screening of an animated film, I had to get the skinny. That sounded too ridiculous to be true.

It turned out the place is called Singh’s Laundromat (no relation, I swear), and MACLA had the same reaction to it that I did.

We walked by the Laundromat and said, ‘Wow, that’s ugly,’ says Tamara Alvarado, MACLA’s executive director.

But the whole project is part of MACLA’s effort to get in touch with the local community and encourage neighborhood folks to get to know one another.

At MACLA, we’ve always been involved with different neighborhoods, but not necessarily our own neighborhood, explains Alvarado. We started doing a couple of different focus groups in the neighborhood, and said, ‘What d’ya all wanna see in your neighborhood?’ And how we can serve as a connector, if you will, between the different types of residents that live in the neighborhood now as opposed to 10 years ago?

So they painted the inside of the place and put up vinyl lettering, and voila, a movie house was born. Local residents were then invited to wash their clothes and eat popcorn while watching a movie in the middle of the day.

We just said, ‘Hey Singh, we noticed a lot of malarkey goes down at your Laundromat and are you willing to work with us?’ Alvarado says. Part of our project is to work with small business owners. And he said, ‘Go for it.’

About 15 people showed up, and some even asked if MACLA would show movies every week.

We know a little paint goes a long way, Alvarado said. We’re not done with the place yet. We’re thinking about having a poetry night there. Like doing something at nighttime. It’s experimental. The people who were there loved it.

After all, the Laundromat is perhaps the ultimate public space. A Laundromat can be a lonely space or a people-watching space, but it is an anonymous space. No one talks to each other. You just hate it when folks look at your dirty laundry. That’s not good. There’s always a sock left behind that no one wants to pick up and throw out. And MACLA is changing all this.

A lot of conversations that we’ve had with people have centered around the fact that people don’t know each other,’ Alvarado said. Time and time again, people have said, ‘We want to get to know our neighbors.’ It comes up every single time we’ve had a formal focus group or an informal thing."

So there you have it. Something should be said for taking a dumpy Laundromat and doing something artistic with it. At Wash America on Santa Clara Street, you get blind-sided by the distorted classical music, but not at Singh’s Laundromat.

The idea is that the more public spaces there are, the better, as more people will establish a sense of community. Even in Laundromats. Everyone has a Laundromat idea, so all you panty-stealing perverts out there, get ready. And Laundromats represent the last frontier when it comes to anarchically taking over a public space without regulatory difficulties and authoritarian intervention. Being the radical art movement that it is, MACLA figured this out. And no, I’m not just writing about this because the place is around the corner from my office.

Cloak and Dagger: Barry Eisler

Menlo Park author Barry Eisler has finally admitted that he used to work for the CIA. Until now, all he would divulge was that his checks came from the U.S. State Department Foreign Service. In any event, he’s created a whopping-good noir thriller series, all centering around the exploits and mind-states of a Japanese-American assassin named John Rain. It’s a killer thriller series and even if you’re not interested in underground Japanese culture, you’ll get a kick out of these novels, as Rain is the most interesting assassin around these days.

Eisler spent years working in Japan and he places scenes in the labyrinth of Tokyo streets with astonishing detail. Just like Lost in Translation, if you’ve actually been to Tokyo, Eisler’s novels—at least the first two—will take you right back. You’ve got whisky bars, smoky jazz joints, hostess bars, fight clubs, thugs, mobsters and all sorts of seedy goings-on in several Tokyo districts. Eisler describes the dark atmospheric underbelly of Tokyo with precision and flair.

He even includes the Almond Cafe, a main pickup spot in Tokyo’s heavily foreign Roppongi neighborhood. In the immediate area, expatriates abound due to the plethora of embassies, and Roppongi is where many young Japanese go to practice their English.

But enough of that. In the books, assassin John Rain is a freelancer, a straddler, connected to many worlds, but a part of none—pretty much exactly what it’s like being a freelance journalist. Rain has perfected the art of assassination, but makes it look like the target died of natural causes. Inspired partly by assassin Nicholai Hel in Trevanian’s 1979 international espionage masterpiece, Shibumi, John Rain represents the romantic concept of the assassin as poet, as artist. But not without the emotional backlash, of course.

Shibumi is an untranslatable Japanese concept referring to the understated beauty that underlies everything in life. It represents an active spiritual tranquility, a personality of overwhelming calm, an effortless state of perfection and a natural urge to find harmony in all action. You can apply it to chess, ikebana flower arranging, architecture, gardening, Japanese rope bondage (nawa shibari) and, especially, martial arts. Just like Nicholai Hel, John Rain applies it to the art of assassination. Of course, Eisler himself is also an accomplished practitioner of mixed martial arts. He holds a black belt from the prestigious Kodokan International Judo Center in Tokyo.

Eisler appears at Kepler’s in Menlo Park (1010 El Camino Real) on Thursday, June 23, to launch his tour for the fourth John Rain book, Killing Rain. The first three, Rain Fall, Hard Rain and last year’s Rain Storm, don’t necessarily have to be read in order, but it helps. And since Eisler has changed his status, allowing him to divulge his former CIA employment, he’s got a lot to say about current world events that you don’t hear from all the scream-head circus entertainers on the cable networks.

Killing Rain draws inspiration from recent events in Iraq and Afghanistan—where the U.S. government’s bounties on Osama bin Laden and other terrorist figures have spawned a huge private effort to track down these targets. When asked why the CIA can’t directly infiltrate Al Qaeda, Eisler says: The problem is that there are certain things the CIA can’t do. Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations undoubtedly have a test for new initiates that involves killing. It’s similar to the mob’s concept of ‘making your bones.’ Why does the mob use murder as a prerequisite to becoming a full member? Because no matter how deep undercover a government law enforcement agent might be, there’s no way he can commit a murder. The same holds true for the CIA vis-à-vis Al Qaeda. An undercover agent who tries to infiltrate a group like that will, at some point, be faced with a similar initiation. That’s why private organizations are somewhat better positioned to infiltrate these groups. They don’t have to explain to Congress how they got in.

Counterculture A.D.

Inside the old Camera One Theater on South First Street, the chairs are gone and the screen is nowhere to be found. Behind it, weeds grow out of the concrete, flyers from nearby clubs litter the parking lot and an empty pint bottle of Jack Daniels sits on the air compressor. Shattered glass covers the back porch. The place is gutted and Brian Eder of Two Fish Design is tearing out what’s left of the front counter with a crowbar. It’s pure manly destruction on a hot Wednesday afternoon, reminding me of when I used to work in the Spartan Bookstore receiving department in my college days, smashing old store fixtures on the receiving dock off San Fernando. The store always seemed to be in a state of remodeling, so we always had a wealth of old junk to physically destroy and throw into the dumpster—that is, the stuff we didn’t take home and use for furniture. A co-worker would show up and work a 3-5pm shift—at $7 an hour—and do nothing but break shit out on the dock. God bless Spartan Bookstore.

Downtown is likewise in a constant state of remodeling and Eder, along with his partner Cherri Lakey, is moving their Anno Domini art gallery operation into the old Camera One building—a perfect return of counterculture to the SoFA district. It’s about freakin’ time. The district was always supposed to be a Bohemian artsy nexus and now that Anno Domini is moving on up (yep, start belting out the Jeffersons theme), the district will only get better. Actually, it hardly makes sense to call it a district, since it’s just two measly blocks—the equivalent of calling Market and San Carlos the Hotel District. Only in San Jose ...

But anyway, Anno Domini represents the only counterculture arts operation around these parts and it has hosted several noteworthy shows, film screenings, performances and overall subversion over the years. For example, legendary San Francisco illustrator Barron Storey closes out his show with an artist talk this Thursday the 21st. Anno Domini has hosted Guerrilla News Network a few times and they once even convinced legendary S.F.-based countercultural publisher V. Vale from RE/Search to infiltrate the San Jose Museum of Art for a panel session. Who else would have pulled that one off? Vale would never have visited San Jose in his life if it weren’t for Anno Domini.

Now, the word counterculture is problematic at best, and I’m using it loosely. This is not to say that Anno Domini is necessarily counter to any other establishments in the neighborhood. With the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, MACLA, the SoFA Lounge and the new locale for the Quilt Museum, the strip could finally revert back to the originators’ artsy intentions. (Don’t trash the Quilt Museum, by the way—they’re a nice bunch of folks. Sure, they’re displacing what used to be the best thrift store anywhere in San Jose, but that’s another story ...)

And will Anno Domini’s clientele clash with the furs and suits attending the California Theatre across the street? No. A resounding no. Folks from every part of the social and antisocial spectrum attend shows at the gallery and the artwork usually sells. The whole point of all this, for chrissakes, is just to support the artists, and folks who go to the opera or the symphony just might find a piece of artwork at Anno Domini they like. In fact, I know they will.

According to Eder, the new place will feature two galleries, a studio space and a permanent home for Anno Domini’s collection of zines. The First Friday receptions will continue, but the monthly shows will now last a little longer. It’s a much more lucrative location than their current one—some old brick building by the train station. And, most importantly, it will be a catalyst for bringing the insurrectionary disruptive culture-jamming mind-set back to South First. I can’t freakin’ wait.

Michael Ochs: 1000 Record Covers

Terminally unimpressed cynics like me pointed out in the ‘80s that CDs would just be a transition between vinyl and something else. Whether or not iPods eventually become that something else, we’ll see. I sold off a good portion of my records long ago, but about a thousand of them still inhabit boxes in my mom’s garage. And because of the new version of the Michael Ochs book 1000 Record Covers, I’m just inclined to sniff through all those boxes and whip out Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell just to look at the artwork on the cover.

Ochs is the kingpin at Michael Ochs Archives, a gargantuan library of millions of music photographs and records in Venice, Calif. Basically, if you’re a journalist or graphic designer and you need to access a photo of, say, Wendell Packard & the Half Notes, Ochs is the guy you get it from.

1000 Record Covers is one of several re-releases to celebrate publisher Taschen’s 25th anniversary. Taschen is renowned for publishing over-the-top glossy art books, and this one is no different. But most importantly, it brings up a discussion that is taking place more and more often in these days of ubiquitous iPods and youngsters who’ve never seen a vinyl LP in their lives: the entire concept of the album cover as an art form has fallen by the wayside. Of course, this discussion is not new—pissed-off graphic designers were complaining back in the ‘80s that with CDs, cover art was now reduced from 12 inches to 5 inches. Nowadays, folks are downloading a zillion tunes and either burning them onto their own CDs or filling up iPods. The whole concept of cover art has been decimated. Folks don’t realize that with LPs, the cover artwork and the packaging were completely part of how one experienced the music. Who could imagine listening to Sgt. Pepper without knowing what the cover looked like?

Enter Michael Ochs again. Last year he came to SJSU to speak at an art show he curated with designer Craig Butler. The show was titled The Greatest Album Covers That Never Were. Here’s what Ochs and Butler did: they contacted 100 established graphic designers and fine artists and asked them to paint or draw a hypothetical album cover for their favorite artist. No boundaries were to be imposed on the work at all. The artists had free reign to do whatever they wanted. It was an ingenious concept.

Much to our surprise, the response exceeded our expectations, Ochs explains on his website. Many of the most renowned artists in the graphic and fine arts fields loved the concept and came on board. For generations, the 12-inch album cover was the standard iconography for music and it was more sorely missed than we thought.

Ochs says it’s life in the past lane and the nostalgia will not go away. Mark Pothier, a senior assistant business editor at the Boston Globe, shared that nostalgia in an uproarious piece for the Mercury News recently. In an article I really wish I had written, he lamented the days when you could go home with a potential lover and then scope out the person’s record collection to determine whether you wanted to continue the relationship.

It used to be easier to judge people unfairly, he said. "A cursory scan of their record collection revealed secrets. Telltale copies of REO Speedwagon’s Hi Infidelity were known to wither budding relationships overnight. Soul-deep conversation and physical attraction could not compensate for the nagging doubt planted by Frampton Comes Alive. ‘I must have been really drunk at the time’ did not explain away Air Supply’s Greatest Hits."

So what’s the next step? Well, think about it. If people are going to download 20 Jimi Hendrix tunes and burn them onto their own CD, why not download cover art and packaging also? Well, that’s exactly the grandiose scheme that Ochs has, but he said he doesn’t know if it will ever happen.

So next time you see someone walking down the street with an iPod and those evil white cords stuck in his ears, don’t rip the cord out of his face and strangle him with it. Instead, go down to your favorite thrift store and drop one dollar for a vinyl LP just for the cover. Don’t even listen to the music, just buy it for the cover. Please.

Hitting Rock Bottom

Occasionally folks get into a Mayberry-style tizzy-fit when they interpret something I write or say as disrespectful to San Jose. It doesn’t matter what the topic is. With the phlegm-spittle of a rabid gopher, they usually wind up saying, Well, if you hate San Jose so much, then why don’t you just leave?

My answer is that hatred has nothing to do with it. Instead, it’s frustration. There are many of us—many more than this town realizes—who really wish it could become more than a sleepy suburb. Perhaps, maybe in some fantasy utopian future, a place with a thriving counterculture, several live music clubs, street pranks, world famous neighborhoods, historical landmarks that people under 70 actually care about, skyscrapers, a functional public transportation system, killer Russian delis, 100 art galleries, a million different things to do past midnight and cops who don’t act like power-hungry meatheads who couldn’t make the football team in high school.

If that makes me a dreamer, then so be it. Like John Lennon said, I’m not the only one. I just want my hometown to be something I’m not embarrassed about.

But, alas, I’ve finally come to grips with my denial in this matter, and as much as I want to pretend this is not one more ridiculous I wish we were San Francisco complex, it is. I will now admit to having the same identity complex about San Jose that I ridicule everyone else for having. Instead of SJICA standing for the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, the acronym should instead stand for an association called San Jose Identity Complexers Anonymous, like Alcoholics Anonymous or Gamblers Anonymous. I’ve hit rock bottom and I need to get clean.

The main frustrating thing is that there do exist a lot of interesting bizarre characters in this valley to converse with—whether in scientific think tanks or dive bars. But unlike San Francisco, you have to go search them out. It’s not as obvious here. There’s a phrase I use elsewhere in this week’s issue—nauseating boredom—to describe what it was like growing up here if you were someone beyond the pale. It fits. To use a milk carton metaphor, this city is long past its sell-by date and even they know it.

Whenever someone accuses me of hating San Jose, Henry Miller’s novel Nexus comes to mind immediately. During one exchange, a woman was accusing him of a being a dreamer. Miller’s answer was that we’re all dreamers but few of us wake up long enough to put it down in words. She then said Miller was someone trying to live a thousand lives in one—someone eternally dissatisfied with life and with everything, including himself.

You’re a Mongol, she told him. You belong on the steppes of Central Asia.

As was the case when I first read this passage years ago, I was vicariously right there with the author. So allow me to quote in full the rest of that passage because it sounds disturbingly similar to a conversation I just had a few days ago. But I’ll substitute San Jose for America and Gary for Henry. Here we go—this is Henry Miller writing in the first person:

You know, I said, getting worked up now, "one of the reasons why I feel so disjointed is that there’s a little bit of everything in me. I can put myself in any period and feel at home in it. When I read about the Renaissance I feel like a man of the Renaissance; when I read about one of the Chinese dynasties I feel exactly like a Chinese of that epoch. Whatever the race, the period, the people, Egyptian, Aztec, Hindu or Chaldean, I’m thoroughly in it, and it’s always a rich, tapestried world whose wonders are inexhaustible. That’s what I crave—a humanly created world, a world responsive to man’s thoughts, man’s dreams, man’s desires. What gets me about this life of ours, this San Jose life, is that we kill everything we touch. Talk of the Mongols and the Huns—they were cavaliers compared to us. This is a hideous, empty, desolate land. I see my compatriots through the eyes of my ancestors. I see clean through them—and they’re hollow, worm-eaten ..."

I took the bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin and refilled the glasses. There was enough for one good swallow.

To Napoleon! I said. A man who lived life to the fullest.

Gary, you frighten me sometimes, the way you speak about San Jose. Do you really hate it that much?

Maybe it’s love, I said. Inverted love. I don’t know.

Tripping Through Silicon Valley: Sacred Elixirs Conference

I crouched over the bar at Gordon Biersch one recent afternoon and shared beers with a Western yogi of many years. We discussed entheogens, psychotropic substances and breathing—none of which I know how to do. Eventually he whipped out a vial of Salvia divinorum tincture that he had purchased from a website and then squirted one drop of the stuff underneath his tongue. Right there at the bar. He explained that this particular extract from a psychotropic plant from the Oaxaca region of Mexico is a bona fide legal hallucinogenic. He had never once consumed the extract in a public place, but decided the time was right since I had just given him the lowdown on probably the most interesting conference to hit downtown San Jose in recent years: Sacred Elixirs: Drug Plants in the History of Religions, which takes place in the Montgomery Theater over the weekend of Oct. 22 and 23.

The yogi in question is correct in that Salvia divinorum is completely legal. Google it if you wish—there’s info everywhere. It’s not a party drug like LSD or marijuana. It’s something that shamans in Mexico have used in spiritual and/or healing rituals for a few thousand years now. Think self-reflection, meditation or inner peace. The substance is something this yogi implied you might want to ingest while lounging alone among the redwoods or in your millionaire friend’s outdoor spa in the hills of Woodside. The yogi, 64, tells me stories of how Salvia makes you much more self-aware, and how it’s a cheap ticket to a reality outside the shallow-breathing, three-dimensional lives most people unschooled in yoga lead. The trip, he says, lasts only 10 to 15 minutes or so, unlike LSD. He calls the stuff Sister Salvia.

The online user’s guide for Salvia divinorum says it’s for older, mature, more philosophically minded folks, and that it’s not addictive whatsoever. The yogi hadn’t known about the Sacred Elixirs conference, and instead of scribbling the website down on a cocktail napkin like I would have done, he whipped out a digital voice recorder and uttered a quick sound bite to remind himself.

In order to find out more about the Sacred Elixirs conference, I just had to hook up with the organizer, Welshman Mike Crowley, a former Silicon Valley software engineer who is currently working on a book called Secret Drugs of Buddhism. He actually footed the bill for most of the conference himself—there has never anywhere been an academic gathering solely devoted to the role of drugs in religion.

Crowley and I met at a downtown San Jose Starbucks and grabbed an outside table that had just been vacated by four policemen. He argued that scourges of fundamentalist kooks are using religion to stamp out drugs, but the reality of it all is that drugs have been an integral element of all faiths everywhere.

There’s a kind of knee-jerk reaction, an anti-drug message, and it’s especially tied to religiosity, he explained. And one assumes if you’re religious, you’re against drugs. Well, this is a gross distortion of the historical position. All religions seem to have a favorite drug. In Christianity it’s wine. In Hinduism, Shiva devotees, for instance, take cannabis—or marijuana as it’s called in this country—except it’s drunk as kind of a milkshake.

The Sacred Elixirs conference will feature several renowned speakers. Alexander Schulgin, 81, is probably the foremost psychedelic chemist in the world. He’s discovered about 200 psychedelic drugs, Crowley explained. And that’s about 198 more than most other psychedelic chemists.

Ralph Metzner, one of the earliest LSD researchers, will also make an appearance. John Winslow will host a panel discussion called What Was Soma? that explores that sacred psychoactive something-or-other from the Rig Veda of ancient India. There will also be books, artwork, psychoactive plants and entheogenic elixirs available for purchase.

Coming back to Salvia divinorum, Crowley was adamant in not recommending it for beginners. [It’s] very, very potent and very, very strange, he said. If you’re going to do it, you need a sitter. Somebody who can sit there with you and make sure that you don’t do anything dangerous. It’s very unusual for people to actually freak out on it, but it’s not unusual for people to try and walk through a door which they see is there but isn’t there in reality.

Nashville: 1,000 Points of Live

Every time someone from out of town asks me where to go see some original live music, I have to bite my tongue and explain that there’s hardly anywhere in the valley to do so. Maybe three or four places. The emergence throughout the last decade of a mass clientele who prefer DJ clubs and vapid cover bands pretty much slaughtered any chance for original music to flourish here. Wanna be a songwriter? Go somewhere else.

Since it’s fruitless to complain, I left town and journeyed straight to a place at the polar opposite end of the live music spectrum from San Jose: Nashville, Tennessee. You see, Nashville has over 1,000 live music venues. Now, to be fair, that includes every dive bar, theater, cafe, coffee shop, restaurant, nightclub, airport, concert hall and more. Wherever you go in Nashville, there’s live music, even at 10 in the morning. It really is Music City USA—a songwriter’s mecca, as they say. Many an aspiring tunesmith flocks to the city with nothing but a backpack and a guitar, hoping that someday Garth Brooks will pick up one of his songs. Hundreds of songwriters from California have moved to Nashville over the recent years.

The city has several music strips where bands play all night for nothing but tips and beer, just hoping that someone walks in and discovers them. One such joint is Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, probably the most famous country music club in the world. Movies have been filmed in the place. Willie Nelson, Roger Miller, Patsy Cline, Kris Kristofferson, Mel Tillis and Waylon Jennings were some of the original customers in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.

Another legendary joint is the Bluebird Cafe, an intimate place where the audience encircles a small group of performers, who trade off playing their own songs. Cover tunes are not allowed. Seven nights a week, folks pile into this small joint to hear original tunes. Our party ate and drank for a few hours while four musicians took turns belting out their own songs. It turned out one of them was Alan O’Day—the guy who wrote Helen Reddy’s Angie Baby and who also wrote and sung Undercover Angel in 1977. He also played a novelty tune, Suite California, about California cities washing away in an earthquake, a song that contained the line: Do you know the way to San Jose/ They say it was here just yesterday.

Now, if you had run into Alan O’Day playing Undercover Angel in a restaurant in San Jose, you’d immediately have thought, Oh, how the mighty have fallen. But not in Nashville. This kind of stuff happens all the time in that city. It’s not uncommon to find yourself drinking in a bar with some guy who wrote a few No. 1 smashes for other people—but you have no idea who the guy is.

And of Nashville’s 1,000 live music venues, more than 200 of them have music at least four nights a week. So the city got an idea to identify those 200 clubs by installing sculptures of giant guitar picks in front of the clubs. On the picks, it says, Live Music, so tourists and locals can quickly find the places that showcase original talent on a more regular basis.

Over dinner I told several locals that San Jose has maybe four places that showcase original talent. Their jaws all dropped to the floor in utter bewilderment.

Most of all, Nashville is not just about country music. This is important, as when you mention Nashville, folks who aren’t in the know automatically think Hee Haw, which is nonsense. The city has blues, rock, metal, gospel and all sorts of stuff. The city has about 10 different equivalents of what used to be San Jose’s Cactus Club. Classical music is also widely popular. When the Nashville Symphony Orchestra played at Carnegie Hall a few years ago, 1,100 local fans flew to New York to attend the show. How’s that for a music scene?

Comparing San Jose to Nashville would be a thoughtless exercise in futility, so I have to do it. By 2002 estimates, the Nashville area is the 24th largest city in the United States and they have over 1,000 music venues. Here in San Jose, we’ve all had it beaten over our heads now that S.J. is the 10th largest city in the country, yet there exist about three or four places to see original live music, even on a semiregular basis. People in this valley just don’t support it. I told this to some folks in Nashville and they all shook their heads in utter disbelief.

Northside Neighborhood Association

This has been a year of many anniversaries, and one in particular stands out for a few locals. San Jose’s Northside Neighborhood Association (NNA) celebrated its 40th anniversary this year. Founded in 1965, it is the city’s oldest neighborhood association. Especially nowadays with almost every other 1-square-mile section in San Jose breaking up into its own neighborhood, the NNA can call itself the granddaddy of them all. Covering the area bounded by Julian on the south, Hedding on the north, Sixth Street on the west and Coyote Creek on the east, the NNA is constantly engaged in some sort of community building effort. They are a community that binds together like Eastman adhesive and bends over backward to improve the neighborhood. They’ve built gardens, refurbished parks and eradicated blighted areas. They’ve encouraged family businesses, home improvement and committee-based work. Their website contains a wealth of stories from old-timers and wonderful historical information about the neighborhood, going back almost 100 years. Above all else, the neighborhood is a great locale in which to saunter around and look at all the old houses.

According to their bylaws, the NNA’s mission includes many community-boosting endeavors—everything from flea markets to litter removal to other social functions. After listing their goals, their statement says those goals include any other lawful purpose which generally benefits Northside or its membership.

Speaking of lawful purposes, my fondest recollection of living in the Northside Neighborhood is back in 1990 when I shared a run-down house near Backesto Park with way too many roommates. A classic example of our maladjusted overgrown-teenage behavior was the VHS movie-switching pranks we used to perpetrate at a local Northside Neighborhood corner market. It was called One Stop’s Market. That’s right—with an apostrophe s. The facade said in hand-painted letters: Cold Beers, Hot Movies, TV Guide Magazine—as if someone would suddenly pull over and stop in solely because the store sold TV Guides. Inside the place you’d find moldy bread, cans of chili with an inch layer of dust on them, and coolers chock-filled with bottles of malt liquor and cheap beer. There was no cold storage in the back of the place whatsoever, so by the time the beer made it to the regular cooler, it tasted like it had sat in the trunk of someone’s car for months. One Stop’s was your quintessential dive corner market, but it fell by the wayside years ago.

The store’s video rental section contributed the most to its diveness. The movies were located off in the back of the store and the porno section had its own side entrance around the corner, through a rickety half-broken door. Back in those days of rental movies in VHS format, usually there would be a small silver sticker with massive adhesive draped over the edge of the tape, warning you to not to remove the sticker under penalty of law.