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““Job Job J b Restored to Prosperity“ by Laurent De La Hire, 1648
WIN IN DINNER AATT JUNNOON MME METROACTIVE.COM/SURVEY MET ET TROACTIVE TRO CTIV CCTI CT TIVE T TIV VE..CCOM VE OM OM/ M/S //SU SUR SUR RVE VEY VE EY
Waters’ Wall p54
The Job of Books Bound print’s future in a post-Kindle/iPad world p16
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Santa Clara Valley Water District
Public meeting
METRO SILICON VALLEY A locally owned company.
You Y ou are invited o invited Topic: T opic: o
R obert W ond 1A Fish Scre en Project Robert W.. Gross P Pond Screen
Who:
Santa a Clara Valley Valley a Water Water District
What:
Publi ic hearing to approve the Engineer ’s R e eport and project Public Engineer’s Report
When:
T u uesd dayy, December 14, 2010, 10 a.m. Tuesday,
Place:
Santa a Clara Valley Valley a y Water Water District Board Room Roo om 5700 0 Almaden Expressway San Jose, J CA 95118
Valley Water hearing Engineer’s The Santa Clara V alley a W ater District invites you to a he earing to approve the Engineer ’s Report Robert Pond R eport and the proposed p project, R obert Gross P ond 1A A Fish Screen. The project is Penitencia Road Avenue located near the e intersection of P enitencia Creek R oad and Noble A venue v in San Jose. Pond The primary goal goa al of the project is to prevent non-native e aquatic species in P ond 1A from entering Upper Penitencia Penitencia Creek. comments The water district districct will consider all written and oral com ments to the proposed project at hearing.. Copies review the hearing Cop pies of the report are available to revie w at: Berryessa Public B P Publ bllic li Library Lib Reference R eference Desk Ave., 3355 Noble A ve ve., San Jose, 95132
550 S First St, San Jose, CA 95113 408.298.8000 Editorial Fax: 408.298.0602 Advertising Fax: 408.298.6992
EXECUTIVE EDITOR & CEO DAN PULCRANO EDITORIAL Managing/Arts Editor: Michael S. Gant News Editor: Eric Johnson Food Editor: Stett Holbrook Music Editor: Steve Palopoli Contributing Writers: Gary Singh,
Richard von Busack,Tori Eakes Photographer: Felipe Buitrago Calendar@metronews.com
ART/PRODUCTION Design Director: Kara Brown Production Director: Harry Allison Graphic Designer: Tabi Dolan Editorial Production: Sean George Advertising Graphic Artists:
Jimmy Donald, Dave Robison Valley Water Santa Clara V a alley W ater District, Headquarters Lobby Lobby 5700 Almaden Expressway E San Jose, 95118 8 www.valleywater.org, Review And on the web at www .valleywater.org, ““Quick Quick Links”,, Public R eview Documents project, Project For more information inform mation about this hearing or this project t, contact Senior P roject Manager Ngoc Nguyen at a (408) 265-2607, ext. ext. 2632. 2632. Reasonable efforts R easonable e effort ts will be made to accommodate persons with disabilities wishing to attend hearing. this public hearing g. For additional information on attending g this hearing including requesting accommodations for disabilities or interpreter assistance, please p contact the Office of the Clerk of the Board at (408) 265-2607, least hearing.. ext. 2277, at leas st three days prior to the hearing 11/2010_GS
Trafficking Coordinator: Mercy Perez
DISPLAY SALES Advertising Director: John Haugh Marketing Manager: Jennifer Anderson Senior Account Executives: Bill Stubbee Promotions Coordinator: Sharona Oshana Account Executives: Gordon Carbone,
Billy Garcia, Michael Hagaman, Jonny Manak, Tammy Patterson Account Manager: Mercy Perez Movie Promotions/Sales: Jim Carrico
CLASSIFIED SALES Senior Account Executive: Michael R. Hill Classified Sales: Dave Miller
ACCOUNTING/OPERATIONS/ ADMINISTRATION Chief Financial Officer: Robert Heinen Accounting Manager: Tisha Rae G. Muñoz Circulation Manager: Gary Sunbury Information Systems: Chris Giancaterino Office Manager: Dave Miller
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FINE PRINT Declared a legal newspaper of general circulation by the Superior Court of Santa Clara County Decree No. 651274, April 7, 1988. ISSN 0882-4290. Entire contents © 2010 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in any form prohibited without publisher’s written permission. Unsolicited material should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope; however, Metro is not responsible for the return of such submissions.
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THIS T HIS MODERN M WORLD W ORLD D
I SAW YOU
9p T TOM OM T TOMOROW OMOROW
ISawYou@metronews.com Send us your anonymous rants and raves about your co-workers or any badly behaving citizen—or about citizens you admire. I SAW YOU, Metro, 550 S. First St., San Jose, 95113, or via email.
Stupid Girl @ nXj nX`k`e^ ]fi dp kXb\flk Xj pfli Yfp]i`\e[ gXZ\[ Xe[ Z_\Zb\[ d\ flk2 pfli YXZb nXj klie\[ Xk k_\ Zflek\i% 8e[ k_\e Xj pfl Xcdfjk j\ej\[ `k# pfli dl^ kn`jk\[ Xifle[ Xe[ j_fk d\ X _Xk\]lc jkXi\% @k nXj Zc\Xi n_p @ ^fk k_Xk cffb ]ifd pfl ÊZXlj\ pfl Xi\ X Ylkk\i]XZ\ Xe[ Xe^ip XYflk k_Xk% 9lk efk kf nfiip Y\ZXlj\# kiljk d\# pfli jZiXggp Yfp]i`\e[ `j efk dp kpg\ Xe[ `k nXj X _l^\ i\c`\] n_\e pfl knf ÓeXccp c\]k% >ifjj Xe[ ^ifjj%
COMMENTS Letters@metronews.com Letters@met tronews.com Metroo welcomess letters. Like any gr Metr great eat work of art, they shou should uld be originals—not copies of material sent elsewher elsewhere. e. Please include your name, city of rresidence esidence and daytime telephone number. numbber. (Phone number will not be published published.) d.) Letters may be edited for for length and cclarity larity or to cor correct rect ffactual actual inaccuracies inaccuracies kno known own to us. SanJoseInside = SanJose Inside
= via email
Politics P oliticss As Usual I ccan an only sp speculate e eculate that R Rep. ep e . JJerry erry Lewis L ewis thinks the answer answer is more more 100 10 0 percent percent subsidized s highways highwayys (preferably (pr efferably e in n his rural district) vs vs..
paartially subsidized rail or an partially anyy ot other ther transportation tr ransportation alternativ alternatives es (“Fastt Train Tr rain R Robbery,” obbery,” Fly, o Flyy, Nov. Nov. 24). Way Wa ay to go Jerry—more Jerry—more high highways ways y ffor o or our alr already eady chok choked ed ccountry! ountry! TIM T IM WIL WILSON SON | SAN SAN JOSE JOSE
Numbers N umbers Games “W “Would Wo ould cconnect onnect San Francisco Francisco and d Los L os A Angeles ngeles aatt a ccost ost of of some some $43 $ 43 b billion illion an and nd rresult esult iin nu upward pwarrd off 1100,000 o 00,000 jjobs. obs.” How How could could it it possibly p o ossibly result result in 100,000 100,000 jobs? Do Does oes Southwest So outh hw west Airlines emplo employ oy upw upward waard of 100,000 10 00,000 p people eople ffor o or just its S S.F.–L.A. .F F..–L.A A. flights? fl ights? D Did id tthey hey jjust ust take take F France’s rance’s jjob ob n numbers umbers ffor or iits ts m multiple ultiple T TGV GV high-speed h igh-speed rail rail lines lines and and paste passte them them
into the projections? projections? I would lo love ove to see high-speed high-speed rail throughout throughout o the United U nited S States, tates, b but ut tthe he p proponents roponents ha ave got to get real real with witth the numb ers. have numbers. IIt’ll t’ll h have ave tto o be h heavily eavily subsidized subsidized b byy the government, government, as it is i in Franc e, France, Germany, German ny, Japan Japan and China. C AEEL O’ CONNOR | SSAN AN JO SE JOHN MICH MICHAEL O’CONNOR JOSE
Att the T A Trough rouggh The main pr promoters omoters of o this pr project oject probably pr obably don don’t ’t ccare are much m whether it eever ver gets built or not. R Rod od Diridon, et al., ccontinue ontinue to gr grow o rich ow rregardless—the egardless—the quinte quintessential essential public tr trough ough ffeeders. eeders e . JOHN GGALT ALT | SAN SAN JOSE JOSE
SSuspect usspect M Models odels Well, W eell, to o sell the pr project oject in the 2008 20 08 election, e the proponents proponents had to gloss over over the negativ negativee points p oints and use questionable models mo delss to ccalculate alculate ridership ridership.. Now N ow the th he chick chickens ens ar aree ccoming oming home to t rroost oost as facts come come out. The fin financing nancing of this pr project oject ccontinues ontinu ues to b bee susp suspect ect and nobody nob odyy believes believes that costs costs will ccome ome iin n at $42 billion. HUGH HU UGH JARDONN JARDONN | SAN SAN JO JOSE SE
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THEFLY FLY THE
SVNEWS
The Joke’s on Jay A visit to the website fordandbonilla .com is not as entertaining as it once was. For a few weeks this summer, visitors to the site were redirected to a cell-phone video capturing a heated exchange between San Jose political consultant RYAN FORD and council candidate AARON RESENDEZ, who was then running against XAVIER CAMPOS, the brother of Ford’s then-boss, NORA CAMPOS. (Whew!) The vid was blurry and the sound was bad, and it would have made no sense to any potential client shopping for services from Ford and his partner, ROLANDO BONILLA. But local insiders got a kick out of it—that was the point. The redirect was a prank pulled by another political consultant, JAY ROSENTHAL, who had registered the URL when he found out Ford and Bonilla were launching their enterprise. Rosenthal swears the whole thing was meant purely as a joke, and says he offered to Don’t turn the URL over to forget its rightful owners back to tip! in June. But by then, Ford and Bonilla had FLY@ already ďŹ led an appeal METRONEWS. with GoDaddy, the COM domain-registration service, and the account had been frozen. Rosenthal couldn’t take down the redirect, and Ford and Bonilla couldn’t put up a site of their own. It only took GoDaddy a month or so to settle the matter in favor of the edgling consultancy; Ford and Bonilla ďŹ nally got around to launching a legitimate (unfunny) site last month. And earlier this week the two served Rosenthal with a notice that they are suing him for almost $5,000. While Rosenthal sounds vaguely contrite if not embarrassed by the whole thing, he says he will “vigorouslyâ€? ďŹ ght the small-claims suit, which he labels a “shakedown.â€?
Paper View J:I<<E J8M<I K_\ `GX[ _Xj Y\\e \dYiXZ\[ Yp X _Xe[]lc f] glYc`j_\ij `eZcl[`e^ N`i\[ dX^Xq`e\# Ylk efe\ n`k_ Dli[fZ_ĂŠj j`e^c\$d`e[\[ ]\imfi%
;f\j Ilg\ik Dli[fZ_ĂŠj Xe[ Jk\m\ AfYjĂŠ `GX[ Xgg i\gi\j\ek k_\ ]lkli\ f] aflieXc`jd6 9p RYAN TATE
R
LG<IK Dli[fZ_ `j glkk`e^ *' d`cc`fe Xe[ ('' aflieXc`jkj Y\_`e[ Xe `GX[ e\njgXg\i ZXcc\[ K_\ ;X`cp% He has taken to the project with a zeal not seen since he grossly overpaid for The Wall Street Journal in order to have a prestigious, national newspaper to play with. The News Corp. chairman loves the iPad and loves Apple’s charismatic, tightly wound CEO, Steve Jobs, who is rumored to be co-hosting The Daily’s launch and who might, we hear, even bundle the app with new iPads. The Daily is quite literally a dream of Murdoch’s: It came to him in a 2am vision during a restless night in his Fifth Avenue penthouse. So he can’t be enjoying the coverage of his newspaper of the future. Every media pundit seems to have his own
pet reason or two (or three or four or ďŹ ve) why The Daily will op. Stitch those arguments together and you’ve got a veritable wall of skepticism. The Daily will be put to bed each night for consumption the next day, just like a newspaper. As David Carr put it in The New York Times: “a button will be pushed and it will be ‘printed’ for the next morning.â€? That decidedly retro delivery model might sound appealing for Murdoch, a newspaper sentimentalist, but it’s going to seem poky for a generation of Facebook readers who tend to want read yesterday’s news yesterday, not today. As Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg wrote, “Wonderful! Slower news—and at a higher price.â€? Like an old-fashioned newspaper, The Daily will try and cover everything. Music writer Sasha FrereJones of The New Yorker is on board, as are a handful of New York Post news veterans. Other hires include ex-Politico reporter Avi Zenilman
and Hunter Walker, formerly of the entertainment website The Wrap. There will be people writing about politics, crime and society. Quaintly, there will even be an a dedicated opinion section. That broad scope might be workable for 100 journalists if there were some aggregation going on—some borrowing and sharing work done by others—but the vast majority of The Daily’s content is supposed to be original. Murdoch’s past online efforts constitute a long series of defeats. News Corp.’s greatest misses include MySpace, bought for $580 million in 2005 before the pioneering social network was surpassed by Facebook, bled money and users, and eventually surrendered its original mission to try and become an online media sharing hub. There’s the New York Post, home to one of the most persistently terrible websites in the business as well as an extremely short-lived spinoff called PageSix.com. Then there’s the recent paywalling of the Times of London, which new-media pundit Clay Shirky calculates has brought down web traffic around 97 percent, attracting 40,000 dedicated subscribers at best.
Extremist Business Model
Then Again . . . The Daily looks like a dumb, risky bet—especially if you tune in to the growing chorus of well argued critics. But here’s some fodder for contrarians: Steve Jobs is on Murdoch’s side. Both the London Guardian and blogger John Gruber have reported that Jobs will join Murdoch on stage for The Daily’s launch. We’ve also heard scuttlebutt that Murdoch expects Apple to eventually bundle the publication with iPads. Apple has not previously bundled third-party apps with either the iPad or iPhone, but The Daily gives the tech company an incentive to change that: The app will be among the first to support a new subscription billing option from Apple’s iTunes Store, meaning Jobs & Co. will get a share of subscribers’ recurring fees. The iPad is exploding. iPad sales are estimated to total roughly 15 million by the end of this year and, optimists believe, 40 million in 2011. As a source told the Guardian, “If only 5 percent of those 40 million subscribe to The Daily, that’s already two million customers.” Fantasy math is fun! It would be even more fun if this iPad newspaper were compatible with the iPhone, which would more than quadrupling the number of compatible devices. Fox News seemed pointless, too. Now gushing more than half a billion dollars in annual profits, Fox News Channel spent several years in the red after launching in 1996 and before honing its conservative voice. As CJR said, “Murdoch . . . [has] got the capital to keep a money-losing operation going for quite a while—as Fox News was— . . . while he waits for the iPad market and all his potential readers to catch up.” Or to leave him further in the dust.
Ryan Tate edits Gawker Media’s Silicon Valley blog, ‘Valleywag,’ at valleywag.gawker.com.
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On the iPad, no one has proven you can make money selling news, even without 100 seasoned (read: expensive) journalists to feed. In fact, Apple’s top-selling iPad app chart is consistently dominated by games, which made up six of the top 10 this past week. News apps that sell well tend to fall quickly back to Earth; Wired’s iPad debut sold 100,000 copies before falling dramatically to below 30,000, where they have remained. That’s for a magazine with a print circulation of 750,000. The Daily hopes to attract about 17 times as many iPad buyers as Wired. No wonder: At 99 cents per week, the newspaper will generate only $5.1 million in subscription revenue for every 100,000 subscribers—minus Apple’s cut, typically around 30 percent. Murdoch’s newsroom expenses alone should easily run north of $7 million. There are certainly examples of successful paid content on the web, including News Corp.’s own WSJ. com. But The Daily isn’t a website; it’s an app, available only to iPad owners who pay for a subscription to it. Which brings us to another problem. Since The Daily is an iPad app, there will be no inbound links, and reportedly no outbound links to the web, either. And there will be no web version. That isolation instantly kneecaps the paper’s ability to promote itself; the web will convert The Daily’s big scoops into blog summaries, tweets, Facebook rants and even iPad screenshots—but not into traffic for the publication that generated the buzz in the first place. Being walled off will hurt not only The Daily but its readers, too, who expect, as Rosenberg puts it, “news that you can respond to, link to, share with friends.” As World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners Lee recently wrote, “walled gardens, no matter how pleasing, can never compete in diversity, richness and innovation with the mad, throbbing Web market outside their gates.” A winning iPad newspaper, were it to exist, would be more than a bucket of content; it would be an interesting app, too. But all the boldface names around The Daily are media people: newspaperman Angelo; his college friend Greg Clayman from MTV
Networks; and a trio of managing editors from newspapers and TV. Clayman, at least, was on Viacom’s digital side, and one of the managing editors did a stint at AOL News. But what Murdoch is missing, or not savvy enough to put forward to the media, are top managers with real engineering chops. Someone with, say, Google on his résumé. Or Apple, Twitter, or Facebook—or at least Microsoft or Yahoo.
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sv 411.com Zuckerberg Interviews Bush at Facebook Looks like President Obama isn’t the only one resorting to Facebook as a way to reach the American people. In a ďŹ rst for a U.S. president past or present, former QL:B&9LJ? >\fi^\ N% [ifgg\[ Yp =XZ\$ YffbĂŠj GXcf 8ckf ?H Dfe[Xp ]fi X Z_lddp President George Z_Xk n`k_ DXib QlZb\iY\i^# n_`Z_ nXj W. Bush held a jki\Xd\[ c`m\% discussion and Q&A live from Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto. Bush will be talking to Facebook employees about his new book “Decision Points,â€? and those of us not employed by Facebook had the opportunity to watch it on Facebook Live and Livestream. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg moderated the discussion along with Facebook general council Ted Ullyot. Ullyot also happens to have been an attorney for the Bush White House, which might explain why the former president’s only Bay Area appearance is at the social network. Bush belatedly joined Facebook over the summer primarily to promote “Decision Pointsâ€? through his fan page. W. currently has 619,516 fans as opposed to the 16,889,927 people “likingâ€? the decidedly more web-savvy Barack Obama. —ALEXIA TSOTSIS, TECHCRUNCH.COM Adam Vogel W must not realize you don’t have to physically go to Facebook to start an account. Vibrunazo He knows it’s somewhere near the internets. Vladimir Medvedev It’s not easy to get away after turning multibilliondollar surplus to trillion-dollar-plus deďŹ cit and abuse the whole world with global
ďŹ nancial crisis. But George W. and Dick C. were able to roam free even after all this and no one even talks about it. I’m highly impressed by those two and just became their fan. Go W!
Slingbox for the iPad I’ve been playing with Slingbox for the iPad for a couple of days now, and in most ways it is exactly what you would expect: A bigger, better version iPad Slingbox for the iPhone which turns your tablet into a crisp, portable at screen TV that you can watch in any hot spot in the world. But what is more remarkable is how this might change viewing habits at home. In a few short hours it’s become my primary means of watching TV in the house, a lovely companion on this long holiday weekend. Left to my own devices (pun intended) I’d probably use it almost 100 percent of the time. There are issues—chiey latency of TiVo command and control and somewhat uneven performance under 3G—but if you are already well on your way to adopting a tablet lifestyle, this bit of “TV Anywhereâ€? magic adds another solid brick to the wall. This is a winning combination of hardware you own, an open-source network and realtime programming you choose to pay for served up on a device that doesn’t seem like TV light. Because there is more real estate to work with, there are more controls, and they are less obtrusive than on the iPhone version. And somehow the quality seems just as good as on the iPhone’s retina display, which the iPad lacks. TiVo’s interface is very accessible, though not quite as friendly as the computer version which provides an exact replica of a TiVo remote. Is this app worth $30? It’s the same decision you faced for the iPhone, and if you answered yes then you might (like me) think paying full
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price again is a tad rude. First-timers will also need about $300 in Sling hardware at home and some savvy setting it up. And you can still only connect one device to your Slingbox at a time—no multiple streams. But this is as close to personal TV Nirvana as I have seen. —JOHN C. ABELL, WIRED.COM/EPICENTER
oscil8 Where does Tivo come into it? Can you still achieve personal TV Nirvana without it? How about walking instead of triple-jumping through this topic? JCA No, you don’t need TiVo or a DVR to achieve Nirvana, though many people do and I thought it would be helpful to describe the latency issue because many people do have timeshifting devices. But I do take your larger point that this piece assumed a great deal of knowledge on the part of the reader.
SAP Owes Oracle $1.3 Billion Billions or millions. That was the central question in the Oracle v. SAP case and in the end, the jury determined its answer to be billions with a “b.� For the theft of Oracle’s intellectual property by its now shuttered TomorrowNow division, SAP must pay Oracle $1.3 billion. This in addition to the $120 million in attorneys’ fees SAP agreed to pay
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when the trial first began. SAP, which believed that the damages amounted to about $28 million, had argued that Oracle was looking for an undeserved bonanza out of the jury, while Oracle contended the market value of licensing the IP was between $1.65 billion and $3 billion. As Nucleus Research’s Rebecca Wettemann notes, the damage award is “a drop in the bucket” to Oracle, but a stern warning to the industry. Looking forward, she said, “You have to bet Oracle will be reminding customers they’re choosing between thought leaders and intellectual property thieves— and what that indicates more broadly about how SAP does business.” In a statement issued after the verdict , SAP was contrite: “We are, of course, disappointed by this verdict and will pursue all available options, including post-trial motions and appeal if necessary. This will unfortunately be a prolonged process and we continue to hope that the matter can be resolved appropriately without more years of litigation. The mark of a leading company is the way it handles its mistakes. As stated in court, we regret the actions of TN, we have accepted liability, and have been willing to fairly compensate Oracle.” On behalf of Oracle, president Safra Catz sounded as clinical as Jack Webb wrapping up an episode of “Dragnet.” “For more than three years, SAP stole thousands of copies of Oracle software and then resold that software and related services to Oracle’s own customers,” she said in a statement, concluding that “this is the largest amount ever awarded for software piracy.” —JOHN PACZKOWSKI, DIGITAL DAILY.ALLTHINGSD.COM
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SanJoseInside.com An inside look at San Jose politics
A Bartender’s Vantage Point
T
?< GL9C@: JX]\kp# =`eXeZ\ 8e[ JkiXk\^`Z Jlggfik :fdd`kk\\ kffb lg k_\ kfg`Z f] lee\Z\jjXip ]fiZ\ `e ZfealeZk`fe n`k_ [ileb$`e$glYc`Z Xii\jkj% K_\ gfc`Z\ [\gXikd\ek Xcfe^ n`k_ k_\ Z`kp Xl[`kfi# Z`kp dXeX^\i Xe[ @e[\g\e[\ek Gfc`Z\ 8l[`kfi jg\ek Xggifo`dXk\cp ,'' _flij ^f`e^ k_ifl^_ gXg\i kf glcc flk [XkX% There are many times that we ask for specific data sliced in a certain way and/or queried a particular way, yet the deliverable borders on impossible. If we are to get the data, the lag time is so long, it is sometimes obsolete. There is a legitimate need for upgrading information technology in our city— but there are few dollars. Staff put in a great effort but should spend their time on more pertinent public safety matters. I never accused the police of racial profiling or excessive force. Rather I walked our downtown late at night and saw that club patrons did not mirror the San Jose population as a whole. Or put another way, the nighttime crowd did not match the Turkey Trot crowd. So if drunk-inpublic arrests downtown did not exactly mirror the population of San Jose that made sense to me. I was a bartender for more than 10 years, as it was my second job on top of my day job. I can say, with good authority, that when people drink excessively they have poor judgement. They may get silly, argumentative and sadly belligerent. It did not make a difference if the person was blue
collar or white collar; I would see people transform over the evening and sometimes in a negative way. Several times at the end of the night I would see that problematic individual arrested for doing something dumb, in downtown San Jose and Los Gatos. For the record, a majority of the belligerents in Los Gatos were Caucasian, which coincidentally mirrors the Los Gatos bar scene. Also, if you are a police officer assigned to an entertainment district, you encounter different situations than you would in a neighborhood. If one officer has the Almaden Valley neighborhood during the day and another has the downtown at night, it is completely different. So calling out certain officers that have too many arrests of a certain category or arresting a certain type of person does not make sense. Most police officers I have met are polite, but when faced with a belligerent, intoxicated person, police need to manage the situation according to their training. Basic Rule: If you want to be treated with respect, show respect. —Pierluigi Oliverio
Benjamín Castaños I]Z Ijg`Zn Igdi XgdlY YdZh cdi Zi]c^XVaan$ ZXdcdb^XVaan gZÓ ZXi HVc ?dhZ# Tina Morill 6cY cZ^i]Zg YdZh i]Z Ydlcidlc WVg hXZcZ XgdlY! 7Zc_Vb^c! VcY i]Vc` ]ZVkZc [dg i]Vi# Anon1 BVg` IlV^c edejaVg^oZY i]Z e]gVhZ! ÆI]ZgZ VgZ i]gZZ `^cYh d[ a^Zh/ a^Zh! YVbcZY a^Zh! VcY hiVi^hi^Xh#Ç > WZa^ZkZ i]Vi i]Z hd"XVaaZY XdbeVgVi^kZ hijY^Zh i]Vi kVg^djh bZY^V djiaZih hjX] Vh i]Z BZgXjgn CZlh ]VkZ ejWa^h]ZY dc i]Z ide^X d[ ejWa^X Ygjc`ZccZhh VggZhih VgZ V XaVhh^X XVhZ ^c ed^ci d[ i]^h `^cY d[ YZXZei^dc# Pierluigi Oliverio represents District 6 on the San Jose City Council.
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Dr. Hector L. Cervantes D.P.M., FACFAS Board Certified By The American Board Of Podiatric Surgery
Phone (408) 272-2211 "You can't run away from your foot problems", says Dr. Hector L. Cervantes, a podiatric physician and surgeon of the foot and ankle. "Left untreated, foot problems will not disappear. In fact, they can become worse and end up costing you a lot of time, money and discomfort." Dr. Cervantes' office is at 2114 McKee Rd., in San Jose. Dr. Cervantes provides comprehensive treatment of all foot and ankle conditions including fracture repair, bunions, ruptured ligaments repair, heel pain, hammertoes, diabetes and arthritic related conditions, work and industrial related injuries, heel spurs, planter warts, and ingrown nails and all dermatological foot and ankle skin infections. He also provides treatment for patients with diabetic, arthritic, and circulatory problems, including patients with diabetic ulcerations to the lower extremities. If your condition requires surgery, you can be sure that Dr. Cervantes and his staff are highly skilled, trained and qualified in the very latest surgical techniques and treatments. Many procedures are done with minimal swelling, discomfort and time off work. Patient education is part of every visit. So, whatever your foot and ankle problem is, you can expect to learn a lot about it here. Most insurance plans, as well as Medicare, San Jose Medical Group, PMG, HMO's, PPO's, are honored as well as cash and payment plans are available. In composing this 2011 Holiday Consumer Business Review, the editors, are proud to once again recommend Dr. Hector L. Cervantes to our readers.
Jeda Marketing Generations Auto Upholstery Complete Interiors * Restoration of Classic Cars Domestic & Imported Cars
Call: (408) 213-2263 Custom restoration and upholstery is professionally done by Jeda Marketing/Generations Auto Upholstery. They're the professionals in vintage car restoration. Stop in Jeda Marketing/Generations Auto Upholstery at 220 Barnard Ave., Unit #B, in San Jose, and they will be proud to show you some of their fine quality workmanship. Jeda Marketing/Generations Auto Upholstery has restored vintage automobiles for many clients all over the South Bay. With more than 64 years of experience in the restoration field, Jeda Marketing/Generations Auto Upholstery is unmatched. Select from a wide variety of graphics, paintwork and upholstery. Their designers will help you choose from sample books and pictures, so you will receive exactly what you order. Jeda Marketing/Generations Auto Upholstery puts skill and dedication into every automobile that they work on. Call 213-2263 or bring in that old vintage automobile for an accurate estimate. The editors of this 2011 Holiday Consumer Business Review recommend Jeda Marketing/Generations Auto Upholstery for anything that requires truly professional restoration work!
DR. ANDRE M. CHEVALIER Board Certified American Chiropractic Board of Sports Physicians 1265 El Camino Real Suite 100, Santa Clara, CA 95050
Phone (408) 241-TEAM (8326) www.TEAMCLINIC.com For many years Americans considered health care only when they were sick. They also associated the words Sports Medicine with Pro Athletes needing orthopedic surgery. Today with the rise in interest in preventative care and physical fitness, many Americans are seeking doctors with a natural approach to health, injury prevention and human performance. TEAM CHIROPRACTOR for all Division I Teams at San Jose State University inclusive of the 2006 New Mexico Football Bowl Champions, DR. ANDRE CHEVALIER practices this natural approach through the science of Chiropractic Medicine, Physiotherapy, Myofascial Techniques and Physical Rehabilitation Programs. Event Chiropractic Physician at the 1997 NHL and 2001 MLS All Stars games, Dr. Chevalier was Chiropractic team physician for the 2001 & 2003 MLS Champions San Jose Earthquakes from 1998 until the team moved to Houston in 2006. For more than 18 years, DR. CHEVALIER's T.E.A.M. CLINIC has been one of the leading multidisciplinary clinics in Northern California. Not only do College and Elite Pro athletes such as All Star MVP & National Olympic Team Soccer Player Landon Donovan have benefited from DR. CHEVALIER'S expertise, average weekend warriors also get the same most effective treatment protocols for their aches and pains. So you're not an athlete…maybe you have been involved in a car accident or suffered from a sudden injury… no worries… the same goes for you for your prompt and effective recovery. Most importantly, DR. CHEVALIER's team will also recommend specific home care exercises that will enhance your self-reliance and speed up your release from his professional care. Pain is nature's way of telling you something is wrong. That's why the editors of this 2011 Holiday Consumer Business Review highly recommend DR. ANDRE CHEVALIER's T.E.A.M. CLINIC to all of our readers for the sixth consecutive year. Call (408) 241-8326 for an appointment today and visit the award winning 8000 sq/ft state-of-the-art facility at The Atrium, 1265 El Camino Real, Suite 100, in Santa Clara. Live Better From The Inside Out Experience The Edge Altitude Simulation Technology CALL TODAY… FOR A PAINLESS TOMORROW!!!
Mexi-Café & Cantina Taste Tempting Mexican Food at its Best! Fabulous Sunday Brunch & Live Mariachi Music Friday Night Over 75 Margaritas
Call (408) 559 0810 "La Comida Suprema!" That's what you'll find when you dine at Alicia's Restaurant. This popular dining destination offers your favorite South of The Border flavors and authentic tastes, served in a comfortable, clean, yet gracious atmosphere. Bring your friends, family or your "Special Someone" to 14408 Union Avenue in San Jose for a truly enjoyable meal. Hearty combination dinners, lunch and buffet style dining means no one leaves hungry. Sunday brunch includes perfectly prepared menudo, which you'll soon agree is the best you've ever tried. Order your preferred mixed drink, beer, wine or other beverage to compliment your meal. For tequila lovers, Alicia's Restaurant offers over fifty from which to choose. Come hungry! Leave happy! Make plans now to visit Alicia's Restaurant and taste "real Mexican cooking" for the first time! The editors of this 2011 Holiday Consumer Business Review recommend Alicia's Restaurant to our readers. mo m oc c. .t tn na ar ru ua at ts se eR Rs sa ai ic ci il lA A. .w ww ww w
Marks of Art Tattoo Studio 16 Years at the Same Location Open 7 Days A Week Call: (408) 377-1924 If you are contemplating getting a tattoo, but are not sure where to get the best one for the money, contact Marks of Art Tattoo Studio, at 3014 Union Ave., in San Jose. Marks of Art Tattoo Studio are experts in beautiful skin illustrations. From their large selection of creative designs, they will help you select the perfect one for you. Choose an award winning tattoo from their own creation. Marks of Art Tattoo Studio has received many awards for their work and are the recipients of the highest honors for displaying the most professional attitude and ethical practices. Marks of Art Tattoo Studio has a reputation for being the finest in design as well as realistic initial cost. Marks of Art Tattoo Studio uses the latest equipment and tools featuring auto clave sterilization, and will expertly create the design of your choosing. The editors of this 2011 Holiday Consumer Business Review recommend Marks of Art Tattoo Studio to all tattoo enthusiasts. We know you'll like the friendly safe, businesslike way you are treated.
Yuko Straightening * Color Experts * Hair Extensions American Board Certified Haircolorists Stylists Training: Mod Hair in Paris * Vidal Sassoon Academy, Mahogany Toni & Guy in London * Bumble & Bumble Academy
408.984.0989 A man or woman's total image depends a great deal on healthy, fashionable hair. A lovely head of hair can make any person look and feel exquisite. Busy people find Allan's Salon at 4483 Stevens Creek Blvd, in Santa Clara, to be the most progressive hair design studio...and for good reason. The precision haircuts they specialize in provide you with high fashion styling along with easy-to-care-for simplicity. The hair experts at Allan's Salon are known for technically correct haircuts and styling done according to your facial bone structure and hair texture so that your haircut flatters your face. That's the way it should be done! They carry a full line of brand name and organic products, so you may achieve that radiant, healthy, glowing look at home, between salon visits. Allan's Salon also provides perms, highlighting, coloring, and more The editors of this 2011 Holiday Consumer Business Review highly recommend Allan's Salon as the best place in our entire readership area to achieve the "Look That Spells Success." www.AllanSalon.com
M E T R O S I L I C O N VA L L E Y | D E C E M B E R 1 -7, 2 0 1 0 | SA N J O S E . C O M | M E T R OAC T I V E . C O M
FOOT & ANKLE CENTER
M E T R OAC T I V E . C O M | SA N J O S E . C O M | D E C E M B E R 1 -7, 2 0 1 0 | M E T R O S I L I C O N VA L L E Y
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outdoor Ass iin lo llove ve with i h the h outdo door ic iicee rink. i kA brought Always a rresult, esult,, she br ought in n her Alw ayys Dream Foundation help D ream F oundation tto oh elp ssupport upport 2010, the whole thing ffor or o 20 010,, which, subsequently, brought Hawaiian subsequently y, br ought in Ha awaiian Airlines Founded A irlines aass aanother nother ssponsor. po onsor. F ounded Hawaiian Airlines has iin n 11929, 929, H awaiian A irlines aalready lread dy h as aan n8 1-yearr h istoryy o afe aaviation, viation, aand nd 81-year history off ssafe on Ha awaaiian one ccan an alr aalready eady fly dir ect Hawaiian direct tto oH onolulu ffrom rom S an JJose. ose. T hat ffact aacct Honolulu San That alone mak es San JJose ose inter iinteresting. esting. makes F or the grand op eniing last week, For opening K risti ad ddressed tthe he aaudience, udience, w owed Kristi addressed wowed the TV cr ews and eeven ven n to ok to the ic crews took icee a ffew ew times ffor or eeveryone o veeryon ne to witness witness.. She is the cconsummate onsummatee non-r ock k-star non-rock-star ttype yype of ccelebrity elebrity athlet te. P eople lined athlete. People up to ttake ake photo graph hs with her photographs her,, while hil she h chat h tted t d and d hung h outt with ith chatted who eveer w aanted hangg out. whoever wanted IIt’s t’s n ot o ften o ne ccan kulk aaround round an sskulk not often one an eighborhood an nd ssuddenly uddenly ssee ee neighborhood and Kristi Y aamaguchi sk kati a ng underneath Yamaguchi skating a ccircle ircle o alm ttrees. rees. IItt llooked ooked pe rffect: off p palm perfect: H awaiian nA irlines llogos ogos eeverywhere veryywhere Hawaiian Airlines aand nd a llive ive H awaiian nb and p an laying Hawaiian band playing
in the back kgr g ound. The Downtown background. A ssociation n eeven veen issued flower leis to Association eevery veery singl le one of us in attendance. atttendanc t e. single N o one w a spar as ed. All in all,, it would No was spared. be a ttravesty ravesty of of justice justice if if D owntown Downtown IIce ce eeventually ventually ggoes oes aaway way o ets orr ggets ccanceled anceled due d to lack of funding funding.. N ow, ffor or ssome ome sserious erious ffun, un, I ccan an Now, en nvvision a brand-ne w game show w, envision brand-new show, ““Make Make S an n Jose Jose IInteresting, nteresting,” an nd iitt San and w ould d ebut o nC reaTV, w hich, by by would debut on CreaTV, which, tthe he w ay, iiss aan n iinstitution nstitution already allready way, making Sa an Jose Jose more more inter esting on San interesting a daily basis. bassis. The show will include an MC and th hree panelists three panelists.. The MC will un nveil a ph hoto of a San Jose Jose p erson, unveil photo person, plac vent on a giant screen, screen,, and placee or eevent tthe he p an nelists will will slam slam their their hands han nds panelists down on the t appropriate appropriate buz zers, buzzers, vvoting oting on whether o w person, that person, p lacce o vent m akes San San JJose ose m ore place orr eevent makes more inter estingg or less interesting. interesting. interesting Y ou ccan an eeasily asily ssee ee h ow iitt w ould ggo o You how would down: JJapantown? apaantown? Mor re inter esting! More interesting! Walmar t? LLess ess inter esting! South Walmart? interesting! F irst Fridays? Fridaayys? Mor esting! Oliv First Moree inter interesting! Olivee Gar den? LLess ess inter esting! That guy Garden? interesting! wh pla who ayys flute in front front of the Camera Camera plays 12 2 Theater rs? Mor re inter esting! Barr Theaters? More interesting! Barryy Sw wenson? W eell . . . Swenson? Well E tc., eetc. tc. IIn n ffact, aacct, I ccan an ssee ee q uite a Etc., quite ffew ew sscenarios cenarrios eemerging merging for for tthat hat game game sshow, how, iiff iitt actually actuallly happens. hap ppens. I think think it it sh hould. V o olunteers who want waant to mak ke should. Volunteers make Sa an JJose ose in nteresting ccan an ccall all Cr eaTV at San interesting CreaTV 40 08.295.8815. 8 408.295.8815. A n eeven ven be tter holiday holiday iidea: dea: By By An better n ow, m any h ave sseen een tthe he ““Keep Keep now, many have S anta C ruz W eird” stickers, stickers, since since Santa Cruz Weird” the y’vve been beeen around around for for o years. years. It’s It’s a they’ve m ovement, a p hilosophy an nd a way way movement, philosophy and o ife. People People jjust ust llove ove tthe he Dickensian Dickensian n off llife. cir t str eets of that cit ty, and cus on the circus streets city, the ant to k eeep it weir d. I suggest theyy w want keep weird. we mak ke similar s stickers that sa ay, make stickers say, ““Make Make S an n Jose Jose IInteresting. nteresting.” I ccan an San eenvision nvision ssomeday omeday sseeing eeing tthose hose sstickers tickers all o ver Sa an JJose. ose. It rreminds eminds me of the over San Situationis st propaganda propaganda slogan: slogan: “W We Situationist “We demand ga ames with great great seriousness. seriousness.” games S o, tto o al ll S an JJoseans oseans o ut tthere, here, I So, all San out challenge yyou ou o to lo ok in the mirror mirror look and ask yyourself o ourself a ffew ew questions. questions. A re yyou ou making making San San n JJose ose more more Are iinteresting? nteresting? Or Or aare re you you making mak king it it less less inter estingg? Do yyou ou o care? care? interesting?
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MEMORY THEATER 17
9lk aljk Xj @Êm\ Y\^le _fc[`e^ fekf Yffbj# k_\ k\Z_efcf^p f] gXg\i Xe[ gi`ek [i`]kj `ekf fYjfc\jZ\eZ\# n`k_ fecp le]lcÓ cc\[ k\Z_ef$ ZfigfiXk\ gifd`j\j kf i\gcXZ\ k_\d% much was missing. I would find myself turning to those stacks in desperation for a connection, a memory, or the loosest association. What suddenly became most evident were the absences, the missing books I could hazily remember having read and digested, yet which would need referring to again. They had turned, terrifyingly, into phantom limbs. Having at last found a stable place to live, one with wooden shelves already mounted on the walls, I shed the old asceticism and began the process of reassembly. But just as I’ve begun holding onto books, the technology of paper and print drifts into obsolescence, with only unfulfilled techno-corporate promises to replace them. The point here isn’t to be steampunk; I’ll take my library in any form, so long as
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Ever since the habit of writing first took hold of me as a teenager, I knew precisely why I did it, and why I did it so compulsively: to hedge against the terror of having a terrible memory. Though still young enough to expect no sympathy, I constantly feel the burden of this handicap. Confirmation of it, and that writing is its cure, I discover every time I pick up something I wrote years, or even months ago. Reading those things puts me in an uncanny state, like a past-life regression. Meanwhile, unrecorded impressions, sayings, old friends, and good books vanish without warning or trace. Some read and write to win eternal life; I would be happy enough just to keep a hold of this one. One of the books that I used to habitually pick up from my college library, and which, recently, I finally bought used, is Frances Yates’ classic The Art of Memory. First published in 1966, it chronicles lost mnemonic techniques, passed down from the ancient orators to the Renaissance humanists: spaces people would conjure in their minds to help them remember all the precious accoutrements of civilized knowledge. Yates takes us back to the Greeks, who held memory to be the plumbing of one’s soul, a vital tether between the sensory world and the eternal forms. They knew that Mnemosyne, memory’s personification, was by Zeus the mother of all the muses. The Greeks and then the Romans created imaginary edifices by which they could carry entire speeches, taxonomies and epics in their heads. By the medieval period, this tradition was expressed in Dante’s circles of Hell and Aquinas’ placement of memory within the cardinal virtue of prudence—thereby elevating it to a moral responsibility. As Renaissance polymaths drew from classical and esoteric sources, they designed and even physically built more elaborate theaters of
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room on the floor, as orderly as I could manage and as high as they’d get before tumbling. The collection I had was a good one—largely unfashionable theologies, seductive philosophies and my prized bestsellers from the 1970s about ancient alien gods and futures unrealized—but so
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MEMORY THEATER 19
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memory. In place of an audience, the 16th-century memory theater of Giulio Camillo presented to its stage an array of images, symbols and archetypes that amounted to a microcosm of the cosmos. Standing before it, a person could loose the binds of forgetfulness and access the mind’s resources unrestrained. “Whoever is admitted as a spectator,” reported Erasmus, having heard about the theater from a correspondent of his, “will be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero.” Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, Yates controversially argued, was designed in this way to help the actors remember their lines. Francis Bacon reportedly had a private memory theater in his home, with painted glass depicting “severall figures of beast, bird and flower.” In those millennia between the advent of knowledge worth clinging to and the invention of the printed word, the Western mind had a desperate obsession with memory— or, one could say, a sensible concern. The art of memory made possible the health of one’s soul, the possession of one’s culture, and the means of reaching God.
Format Creep In the age of inexpensive, printed books, our memory theaters have become both richer and more banal; we have entrusted them to our bookshelves rather than to tricks of mental contortion or cosmic schemata. As I look over my own shelf, I see my life pass before my eyes. The memories grafted onto each volume become stirred and awakened by a glance at the spine, which presents itself to be touched, opened, and explored. Without the bookshelf’s landscape to turn to, that manifest remainder from a lifetime of reading, how would one think? What would one write? Modern life, if we can still call it that, occurs as a sequence of gleeful apocalypses. One world constantly gives way to another. If it doesn’t, “consumers”—as people now call themselves—get anxious. We’re familiar with the drill: new audio/ video formats arrive every decade; a new “generation” of cell phone every couple years; and, on a rolling basis, there’s the expectation that several totally unexpected paradigm shifts are in the works—the Internet, global climate change, a new fundamental
21 Libraries absolutely cannot keel over and let Google replace them. They are our collective bookshelves, the memory theater for a community. As Robert Darnton suggested in the Dec. 17, 2009, New York Review of Books, the U.S. government might do well to acquire Google Books outright. France, after legally blocking Google’s plans to scan its books, is undertaking a digitization initiative of its own. This is, after all, a basically political matter; the bookshelf is a political arrangement. It carries our words, ideas, convictions, memories, identity, and language—the imaginative substance of any political order. Just as a personal bookshelf becomes the extension of one’s body, a democratic society must ensure that its books are held democratically. One could phrase the basic demands of a hypothetical bookshelf manifesto like this: forlife, liberatedness and the pursuit of eclecticism. They’re all related. “For-life” means the right to keep one’s books as long as one lives and, just as importantly, to pass them on to one’s descendants. They must not be take-away-able by the fiat of a far-away corporation. They must be in a medium and format that will be readable in a hundred years and, if we know what’s good for us, in 5,000. “Liberatedness” means that the texts are truly ours to do with as we please, short of harming others. We can lend them to enemies and friends. We can mark them up or damage them. We can move them around wherever we like, and wherever the technology allows, freely organizing and categorizing them to all the limits of our private compulsions. Finally, “the pursuit of eclecticism” means that there should be no limit on the breadth of our collections. Plainly, no censorship. These are all things that my shelf of paper and cardboard do quite well and that the most celebrated digital alternatives, so far, do not.
E-Catastrophe The Amazon Kindle is a catastrophe: an interface to a proprietary market managed by a profit-motivated outfit
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particle, and that sort of thing. The decline of actual, physical book-publishing has been taking longer than it was supposed to. Way back in 1992, Robert Coover announced in The New York Times that printed books were as “dead as God.” His doomsday was premature. But the digital offerings of Amazon and Google, along with their everbetter delivery devices, promise that finally the end may be nigh. Crotchety complaints about screen-reading aside, it should be obvious to anyone who cares about information that in many respects digital text is a superior technology to the printed page. On Google Books, I just searched “the printed page” (without the quotation marks) across “some seven million volumes of books,” instantly returning results in 76,000 of them. And that is not mere statistical flourish; for the several years since I lost my borrowing privileges from research libraries and have had to leave my source texts behind, I’ve come to rely on Google and Amazon searchable previews. My old dream of a possessionless library, unencumbered and mobile, seems possible again. The very meaning of the word “book” has become something more powerful, dynamic, and accessible than ever before. Every good reactionary knows well that there arises, in the process of using these wonders, the opportunity for laziness. Days, weeks and years of archival labor are replaced by a keystroke and, with it, much of the discipline, erudition and tenacity that the old ways required. But there’s no time to be nostalgic and grumpy. Living well with technology has always been a matter of beating it and abusing it. No one cared much about the electric guitar until somebody turned it up too loud. Now our job is to figure out how to be cleverer than the search engine; when certain ways of finding information become easy, the knowledge really worth having becomes what those methods don’t turn up, what the crawlers somehow managed to miss. As the Temple of Knowledge comes to look ever more like the Googleplex, public libraries are downsizing their reference desks, presuming that for every query an Internet search will suffice.
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MEMORY THEATER 21 the option of selling their books in nonproprietary formats, which means that when you want to switch to a different kind of reader, your books can go with you. This is a basic condition of liberatedness that amazingly has been absent from e-readers until recently, and it remains way too far from being business as usual. Until these companies take seriously the needs and, above all, the rights of readers (the human beings, not the machines), they deserve ruthless suspicion. Just because the Kindle and iPad might seem to work relatively
K_\ jc`Zb\i 8ggc\Êj gif[lZkj ^\k# k_\ dfi\ fm\iY\Xi`e^cp k_\p j\\b kf Zfekifc k_\ lj\i \og\i`\eZ\ reliably now, and because Google tells itself “Don’t be evil,” we shouldn’t keep from entertaining darker, more paranoid, even Orwellian fantasies. Never before has the technology been so good for totalitarian urges, should they arise. Already, the agreements being hammered out between Google and the publishing industry are likely to allow Google to withhold as much as 15 percent of its scanned, copyrighted archive from the public. It’s unlikely that anyone will bother (or pay) to scan most of those books again. Whoever controls Google Books already controls the future of public knowledge to a very considerable degree. Far from its pleasantly chaotic salad days, the Internet is now tending toward mass consolidation. Companies are less and less interested in helping us store information ourselves and more and more eager
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that wants to own and monetize your memory theater. On July 17, 2009, in an act so bumblingly ironic that even Amazon called its behavior “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles,” the company removed copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 (!) from customers’ Kindles without warning or permission. The editions, it turned out, were illicit. While the company was sure to apologize and pay a pittance in damages to the affected customers after the ensuing outrage, this incident demonstrated the sort of powers Amazon has reserved for itself in the design of this new, presumably paradigm-changing device. Books (as well as the annotations one makes while reading, which Amazon saves on its servers) are encoded in a proprietary file format, depending utterly on the device and its software in order to be read. No Kindle—and no Amazon to sell you one—no book. The law has yet to determine precisely what it means to access an e-book on a device like the Kindle: is it more like a lease, a subscription, or an outright purchase? These are complicated questions, and rightfully so, since they involve the fortunes of publishers and authors as well as of readers. While lawyers quibble and companies duel, the Orwell debacle showed that Amazon’s technical capabilities far exceed what it, constrained by public relations and legal counsel, has so far taken the liberty of doing. But even those constraints could be transitory ones. The Kindle’s license agreement also states that it can be changed without notice at Amazon’s will. Apple’s iPad, the overgrown smartphone that has been eating up the Kindle’s market-share in the e-book business, isn’t much better. The slicker Apple’s products get, the more overbearingly they seek to control the user experience. Like the iPhone, the iPad is a closed system that goes out of its way to prevent the kinds of misuse that stop the people who use it from being anything more than customers. It will only load software—and its bookstore will only carry books— that survives Apple’s censors. The iPad does offer publishers
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MEMORY THEATER 23
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to do it for us. We’re not keeping our email and documents on our computers’ hard drives anymore; Gmail and Google Docs have them on distant servers. Apple wants to follow suit with its subscription-based MobileMe system, pulling more and more of our data into its so-called “cloud.” Facebook has already done so with no less than our friendships. So far, for all the wonders they offer, the digital alternatives to a bookshelf fail to serve its basic purposes. The space of memory and thinking must not be an essentially controlled, homogenous one. Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad are noxious ruses that must be creatively resisted—not simply because they are electronic but because they propose to commandeer our bookshelves. I will defend the spirit of mine tooth and nail.
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If my non-Luddite credentials aren’t fully in order, let me say this: The most remarkable memory theater I’ve ever known is on a computer. It is the work of my uncle, once a biologist at the National Institutes of Health, a designer of fish farms, a nonprofit idealist and a carpenter. Now he has devoted himself fulltime to his theater. A “Cartesian theater,” he calls it, subverting the philosopher Daniel Dennett’s epistemological derision; it’s a digital environment he has built to manage his life and, among other projects, to present a never-to-be-finished play called The History of the World. His theater consists of a series of computer programs written in Turbo Pascal, running on DOS and Windows 98. They revolve around an ingenious text editor, which also functions as a file manager, a viewer, a jukebox, and a programming environment. It is truly, as they used to say, hypertext—text and computer code are one and the same there. Words perform actions. Form is content. A powerful search engine follows you everywhere you go. You feel close enough to the machine to sense its electric pulse behind the two-color display with its blocky, fixed-width characters. My uncle does most of his reading on that screen. As he reads digital
books and articles, he formats them in plain ASCII text, adjusted to fit into his editor and his screen. In the process, every text (or image or sound), whether it be a letter from his daughter describing a dream or Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You, becomes a part of this single, searchable, integrated organism. When he tells me about it, he uses evolutionary metaphors cribbed from his years researching genetics. The creature mutates and adapts. It learns and grows. Guiding
8dXqfeÊj B`e[c\ Xe[ 8ggc\Êj `GX[ Xi\ efo`flj ilj\j k_Xk dljk Y\ Zi\Xk`m\cp i\j`jk\[Æ efk j`dgcp Y\ZXlj\ k_\p Xi\ \c\Zkife`Z Ylk Y\ZXlj\ k_\p gifgfj\ kf ZfddXe[\\i fli Yffbj_\cm\j% its progress is my uncle’s frenetic brilliance and his awareness, like my mnemonic terrors, of running up against the limits of his own mind. Once, he called himself a “biologian,” merging the subject matter of life with the method of a theologian. More recently, he told me that he is an alchemist. For years, nobody in our family bothered to learn about the world he had constructed. When I first discovered it, I was in college. I immediately dropped almost
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MEMORY THEATER 24
G`Zkli\ X c`YiXip# `e Ô Xd\j# fm\icffb`e^ k_\ Z`kp `e il`ej Y\cfnÆ k_\ C`YiXip f] 8c\oXe[i`X le[\i :X\jXiÊj XjjXlck Xcc fm\i X^X`e In the last year, though, I’ve been proven wrong. My mother had an enormous book project in front of her, a bookshelf all its own: editing an eight-or-so-volume biography of a South Indian saint. Never having been comfortable with computers, she would call me for long conversations about what software to use and how to go about using it. I hoped to make things simple, so I stuck her with the usual brandname suspects. I was soon happy to learn that she had ignored my advice entirely. She started calling to tell me how my uncle had set her up to do the work on his system and how much pleasure she got out of every hour she spent applying herself to it. Now, they are expanding the project beyond its original proportions
to digitize and catalog a decadesold library of materials about the guru. As they discuss it together, I can see in them the spell that must have driven ancient monks (or, for that matter, the future monks of A Canticle for Leibowitz), in their mutual solitude, to amass the great libraries of their time. This collection, this digital bookshelf, as hand-wrought as any shelf my uncle ever fashioned as a carpenter, was becoming a medium and artifact of their care for one another and an artifact of their love. It was theirs, and their children, I desperately hope, will inherit it. In my own ways, with less patience than my uncle, I’ve tried to build my own electronic memory theaters. Blogs have been useful, though never, as a rule, exhaustive. I’ve stored thousands of pages of reading notes in text files, searchable and as sure as can be not to become obsolete. With each attempt, I become convinced that the bookshelf of the future is yet to come and that we’re in desperate need of it. Perhaps I am asking for simply the right piece of software. Or, better: a messy, ingenious variety. Even if Google keeps its promise and doesn’t turn evil, and even if the Kindle becomes a noble purveyor of reading material to the people, our best ideas will come from our most inventive memory theaters. The point of all this worrying is to dig a spur in the capacity of human creativity to outsmart the enemies of imagination. I am in no position to end with prognostication, to predict how all this business will turn out, or to recommend particular policy directives and consumer rules-ofthumb. The companies will have their way, of course; as the filmmaker Chris Marker once put it, I bow to the economic miracle. But I can end with a vision, and it can point to a posture. Picture a library, in flames, overlooking the city in ruins below—the Library of Alexandria under Caesar’s assault all over again. Books by the thousands audibly crinkle as they incinerate, disappearing for all time, never to
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everything and, for a year, took all the courses I could in the computer science department. My uncle and I had long conversations about it all, and I began to get a sense for what he was doing. But the more I learned the rights and wrongs of conventional wisdom, the more idiosyncratic his tactics seemed. I never stopped admiring his creation, but I could hardly even figure out how to use it. His theater can only be his own, I thought, and the rest of us are doomed to dependence on Apple, Microsoft, and the clutter of open-source alternatives.
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MEMORY THEATER 27
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be read again and, in a generation or two, never to be remembered. They are all irreplaceable; their loss is exactly incalculable. They are now good only to fuel the fire. As bystanders, we’re consumed by horror. We imagine ourselves as the books, the books as ourselves. Everything is lost with them. Right? Or, on the other hand, might we instead laugh and cheer? It wouldn’t be the first time at a book-burning. Why not? Isn’t there also comedy—a divine comedy—in what freedom would follow the immolation of civilization’s material memory? We have only ourselves again, ourselves and our God. Perhaps these flames might go by the name of progress. I confess to feeling the allure of the burning library. Maybe we all do, a little. A culture so willing to downsize and sell off its libraries must. It gestures toward the shadow side of being so dependent on, and thus protective of, a bookshelf. When it becomes my memory theater, what have I become? What becomes of me without it? A passage comes to mind that I first discovered in Yates’ Art of Memory, from the Phaedrus of Plato. Socrates is repeating the speech of an Egyptian king named Thamus to Theuth, the god who has just invented writing: [T]his invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are not part of themselves, will discourage the use of their memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise. As a student, I worried that this passage prophesied exactly what I was being trained to become: a functionary of a culture that had
handed itself over to inanimate objects, amassing such vast and detailed knowledge that no person could possibly possess it, much less translate it into the wisdom that should be the basis of any life worth living. What if, after Google becomes “The Last Library,” a computer virus—or the cataclysmic solar flare that some 2012 enthusiasts like to warn about—finds a way of separating us from our databanks? Or what if my own shelf were lost to fire, forced relocation, or any of the possible calamities of history that might befall it? These thoughts first redouble my zeal for defending our memory theaters against every threat, so surely do they stand as the bulwark against pathos; but that pathos, I must also realize, is partly their invention. As the business of reading technology continues along its trajectory, whether apocalyptic or utopian or both, perhaps those of us who continue to fancy ourselves concerned readers—however much we give in to the new and shiny— might turn our attention anew to what one might call “inner work.” In the part of ourselves which is not technological, we could rediscover the tautology that what makes knowledge so precious is its precariousness, not the surety of our control over it. We’ll need to cultivate the arts of memory and forgetting alluded to in these lines by William Blake, which came to me in a letter from a friend, a librarian who, for years now, has been slowly dying in a monastery: He who binds to himself a joy Doth the winged life destroy He who kisses the joy as it flies, Lives in eternity’s sunrise. Even among these wonders now available to us and still to come, all having remains no less a preparation for loss. Ready? Because that’s what is at stake. Nathan Schneider is co-editor of Killing the Buddha, an online religion magazine; he blogs at www.therowboat.com.
29 M E T R O S I L I C O N VA L L E Y | D E C E M B E R 1 -7, 2 0 1 0 | SA N J O S E . C O M | M E T R OAC T I V E . C O M
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Felipe Buitr B Buitrago ago
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Horse, H orse, B Byy tthe he B Bucket, ucket, tthe he O Oasis), asis), b but ut ssomehow omehow I n ever m ade iitt tto oH enr y’s never made Henry’s Hi-Lif H Hi Liffe until now Hi-Life now.. Henr y’s has b een around around sinc Henry’s been sincee 19 96 0. It op ened in a diff ffeerent 1960. opened different llocation o cattion b ut m oved tto o iits ts ccurrent urrent but moved sit te a ffew ew yyears ears later in a building building site on nce occupied occupied b orino Hot o tel. once byy the T Torino Hotel. T he re d cclapboard lapboard b uilding still still The red building lo o oks an old workingman ’s hotel, hotell, looks workingman’s bu ut to daay it ’s par estaurant, par rt but today it’s partt rrestaurant, part ba ar and par bar partt hideout. D ay o ight, tthe he d im llighting ighting Day orr n night, dim in the in h di i room ro om and d narr dining narrow ow b ut cozy cozy sside ide ro om, ccomplete omplete w ith but room, with p otted plastic plastic poinsettias, poinsettias, vintage vintage potted fr ramed photos and male - dominaated framed male-dominated cclientele, lientele, m akes yo u fe el aass iiff yo u makes you feel you sstepped tepp ed iinto nto K ennedy- era ssupper upp er Kennedy-era cl lub. Only the well-lit —and well lclub. well-lit—and wellsstocked—bar to cked—bar w ith televisions televisions ttuned uned with
Sharks) places you tto o ssports ports ((go go S harks) p laces yo u iin n the 21st ccentury. entur y. fakee flowers and a Along with the fak no-dessert policy, Henry’s no - desser t p olicyy, Hen nry’s has a ffew ew quirks.. During dinner dinner,, yyou other quirks d ou number givee yyour must ttake ake a numb er and a giv our order gatekeeper or der to a gatek eeper while yyou ou wait bar.. When w ait in the bar n yyou’re ou’re seated, waiting forr tthere’s here’s a sskimpy kimpy ssalad alad w aiting fo yyou ou (all dinners ccome ome with salad, bread warm, ketchuplike ggarlic arlic b read aand nd w arm, k etchuplike barbecue saucee ffor dipping), barb ecue sauc or dip o pping), and soon after. dinner ffollows ollows o so on aft fter. number doesn’t The numb er ssystem ystem m do esn’t rreally eally makee sense to me me.. I ccan mak a see doing it an when place busy, does w hen tthe he p lace iiss b usy, aand nd iitt d o es busyy during eevents get bus ventss at the HP Pavilion, but why do when P avilion, b ut w hy d o iitt w hen tthere here half dozen orr m more aare re h alf a d ozen o ore eempty mpty tables? Odd, but place ta bles? O dd, b ut aatt a p lace tthat’s hatt’s been quirky b een aaround round tthis his llong ong q uirky eequals quals charming.. charming wonderfully spare. The kitchen is wond derfully spar e. and open, oak-JJust ust a long ccounter ounter an nd an op en, oak fired with kind off ggrate you fi red ggrill rill w ith tthe he k ind o ratte yo u roll up down with wheel, ro ll u p aand nd d own w ith a w heel, tthe he off w which you find llikes ikes o hich yo ufi nd aatt a ccountry ountr y site.. park picnic site about The menu is all ab o the meat, out
but nothing b ut tthere’s here’s n othing sspecial pecial aabout b out (Organic? Grass-fed? Aree yyou it (O (Or ganicc? G ga Grass-f ass feed ed? Ar ou kidding?), USDA k idding?), jjust ust ffactory-farmed a c t o r y- f a r m e d U SDA beef. But doesn’t cchoice hoice b eef. B ut iitt d o esn’t ccome ome cheap.. T Top cheap op sirloin will run yyou o ou $20.50. 20-ounce Porterhouse $ 20.50. A 2 0- ounce P or terhouse goes $31.95. go es ffor or $31 o 1.95. was The rib eeye ye ($26.95) w as ccooked o oked myy sp specs nicee oak oak-to m ecss and had a nic smokee fla flavor, smok avor o , but other than that was pretty unremarkable. iitt w as p retty u nremarkable. JJust ust a All with big ssteak. teak. A ll eentrees ntrees ccome ome w ith a b ig baked potato scoop butter. bak ed p otato a with a sc oop of but ter. Vegetables? Other V eegetables?? O ther than salad and potato, choicee is a but buttery, p otato, the only choic tery, slow-roasted barbecued slow-r oasteed barb ecued onion ffor or o $4.99 that’s satisfying. $4.9 9 that ’s quite satisf fyying. babyy back ribs ($24.95/full The bab $16.95/half-rack) were rrack, ack, $ 16.95/ half-rack) w ere a disappointment because weren’t d isapp ointment b ecause tthey hey w eren’t barbecued. They’re baked oven b arb ecued. T hey’re b aked iin n aan no ven finished over fire. They aand nd tthen hen fi nished o ver tthe he fi re. T hey pick up hint off ssmoke flavor but p ick u pah int o moke fl avo v rb ut deep, smokyy flav flavor lack the dee ep, smok vor that have ccomes omes ffrom rrom rribs ibs tthat hat h avve sspent p ent hours barbecue leave urs in a barb b ecue and leav ve an aroma on fingers after oma o n yo yyour ur fi ngers llong ong aft fter you’ve stripped bones dry. u’vve strip pped the b ones dr y. The takes T he ggrilled rilled cchicken hicken (($15.50) $15.50) ta kes on a b beautiful mahogany eautiiful maho gany glaze from grill, m the gr rill, but I ffound ound o it quite dry. would have more y. I w ould h avve lliked iked a llittle ittle m ore seasoning off, too. aso oning to t set it off ff,, to o. thing,, head If meat m iss not yyour our thing forr tthe fettuccine Alfredo fo he fe ttuccine A lfrredo (($9.25) $9.25) intensely creamy, cheesyy garlick garlickyy an intensel ly cr eamy, chees mass pasta hits m ass p asta tthat’s hatt’s h its tthe he sspot p ot iin n aan n over-the-top kind o ver-the-top IItalian-American talian-American k ind of w way. ay. Att lunch lunch, enjoyed myy A h, I enjo yed m hulking patty ccheeseburger heeseburger (($7.75), $7.75), a h ulking p attty served airyy but subst substantial ser ved on an a air antial bun. Good, too, was toasted bun n. Go od, to o, w as the barbecued b arbecued ttri-tip ri-tip ssandwich andwich (($10.75), $10.75), a special myy visit. sp ecial on m off tthe found IIn n sspite pite o he ffault ault I fo und iin n off tthe food, hard not ssome ome o he fo od, iit’s t’s h ard n ot tto o ffall all forr H Henry’s. The uniformly fo enry’s. T he sstaff taff iiss u niformly welcoming. The bar ffriendly riendly aand nd w elcoming. T he b ar beckons, and God’s sake, b eckons, an nd ffor or Go o d’s sak e, yyou ou won’t leave hungry. Portions aree won ’t lea ave hungr y. P ortions ar man-sized. m an-sized. Trends Trends have have v come come and and but Henry’s remains. Silicon ggone, one, b ut H enry’s re mains. S ilicon Valley better placee ffor V aalley is a b etter plac or o it.
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31 M E TR O S I L I C O N VA L L E Y | D E C E M B E R 1 -7, 2 0 1 0 | SA N J O S E . C O M | M E T R OAC T I V E . C O M
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Campbell ¿book online at campbell.net
CAPERS Well-heeled sports bar and restaurant. $$$. Capers is a sophisticated restaurant that uses sports as its theme. Welldevised menu full of inventive recipes and delicious finger foods. 11am-10:30pm Mon-Thu, 11am-midnight Fri-Sat and 9:30am-10:30pm Sun. 1710 W. Campbell Ave. 408.374.5777.
LA PIZZERIA Italian. $$. La Pizzeria specializes in simple pizzas that stand on the strength of a few high-quality ingredients, expertly prepared. Open for lunch and dinner daily. 11am-10pm Sun-Tue, 11am11pm Wed, 11am-midnight Thu-Sat. 373 E. Campbell Ave. 408.370.0826. MICHI Japanese. $$. Sushi standards are transformed into palate-awakening presentations; culinary boundaries are stretched. 11am-10pm daily. 2220 S. Winchester Blvd. 408.378.8000 or 378.0838.
NEGEEN Persian. $$. Mira ghasemi, grilled and puréed eggplant in a tomato sauce with scrambled eggs, and kashk-e-bademjan, puréed eggplant topped with mint and a creamy yogurt sauce, are great, as are the kebabs. Don’t miss the excellent Persian ice cream. 11:30am-10pm MonThu, 11:30am-midnight Fri-Sat and 11:30am-9pm Sun. 801 W. Hamilton Ave. 408.866.6400.
OLIO Mediterranean. $$$. Olio serves simple but expertly prepared Mediterranean food that dips into the underexplored cuisines of North Africa. Small but smart wine list. Dinner 5-9pm Sun-Thu and 510pm Fri-Sat. 384 E. Campbell Ave. 408.378.0335.
PSYCHO DONUTS Donuts. $. Psycho Donuts has taken rings of fried dough into new territory with flavors like apricot, the Cookie Monster (topped with Oreos) and Do-Nilla (sprinkled with bits of vanilla wafers) and the intimidating Psycho Donut, a maelstrom of marshmallow, pretzel and chile powder. 6am5pm Mon-Thu, 6am-11pm Fri, 7am-11pm Sat, 7am-5pm Sun. 2006 S. Winchester Blvd #C. 408.378.4540.
RUSSIAN CAFÉ AND DELI Russian. $$. This is a small Russian grocery store with a good little restaurant tucked in the corner. Borscht soup, pelmeni and solyankya sbornaya, a thick soup studded with chunks of mild pork sausage, black olives, pickles and barley all satisfy. 11am-8pm daily. 1712 S. Winchester Blvd. 408.379.6680.
SUSHI ZONE Japanese. $$. Fun sushi meets fun surroundings in this zone. 11:30am-2:30pm and 5-9:30pm Sun-Thu and 11:30am-2:30pm and 5-10pm Fri-Sat. 75 S. San Tomas Aquino Rd #1. 408.866.1323.
TIGELLERIA. Italian. $$. Tigelleria’s menu centers on fine cheeses and Italian salumi paired with tigelle, free-flowing, piping hot flat-breads the size of mini pitas. The bread forms the addictive heart of the meal. Lunch 11:30am-2pm and dinner 5-10pm daily. 76 E. Campbell Ave. 408.884.3808.
TWIST CAFE AND BISTRO French and American. $$$. Twist describes itself as “American food with a French twist,” but the menu includes Middle Eastern, Asian and Italian influences, too. Cafe 9am-3pm Tue-Sat, 9am2:30pm Sun; Bistro 5-9pm WedThu and 5-10pm Fri-Sat. 247 E. Campbell Ave. 408.374.8982.
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¿= book online $ = $10 $$ = $11-$15 $$$ = $16-$20 $$$$ = $21 and up Ranges based on average cost of dinner entree and salad, excluding alcoholic beverages
CCupertino ti ¿book online at cupertino.com
ALEXANDER’S STEAKHOUSE American-Asian steakhouse. $$$$. Alexander’s is much more than a steakhouse. Add a 500-bottle wine list, multiple dining rooms and Asianaccented ambience and you’ve got a standout South Bay restaurant. Full bar. 5:30-10pm Mon-Thu, 5:30-11pm Fri-Sat and 5-9pm Sun. 10330 N. Wolfe Rd. 408.446.2222.
CAFE TORRE New Italian. $$$. A gem tucked away in an unassuming little mall, with a sophisticated interior and congenial hosts. Even better is the great pasta and seafood. Beer, wine. 11:30am-2pm and 5-9:30pm Mon-Thu and 510:30pm Fri-Sat. Closed Sun. 20343 Stevens Creek Blvd. 408.257.2383.
CUPERTINO BAKERY Indian and bakery. $. Don’t be fooled by the name. Cupertino Bakery is really a great South Indian restaurant. Unlike many South Indian restaurants, Cupertino Bakery isn’t vegetarian. Good lunch buffet for $7.99. Don’t miss the dosa and utthappam. 11:30am-9:30pm daily, but weekdays kitchen closes 2:305:30pm. 102521 S. De Anza Blvd. 408.517.9000.
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DYNASTY SEAFOOD RESTAURANT Hong Kongstyle Chinese. $$$. Dynasty specializes in Hong Kong-style seafood. The seafood is very fresh, especially the creatures swimming minutes before they arrive on your plate.
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For full menu log on to willowstreett.com 1072 Willow Street,, Willow Glen-San Jose 408. 4 971. 7080
SVDINING
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WINE
Wine News and Notes
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There is nothing more festive than bubbles for the holidays, and for those of us who are watching our budget, this thrifty sparkling wine event at San Jose’s WINE CLUB might be the perfect place to taste and stock up on a few bottles of Gruet sparkling wine. The event runs from 4 to 6pm Friday at 1200 Coleman Ave. in San Jose. For more information, call 800.678.5044. Start your shopping on a happy note at the annual GUGLIELMO WINERY gift fair. Entrance and food are free. Wine tasting $5. Shop while sipping wine, munching Italian goodies and being serenaded by carolers. The event runs the first two weekends of this month: Dec. 4–5 from 10am to 5pm and again Dec. 11–12 from 10am to 5pm. For more information, call 408.779.2145 or visit www.guglielmo winery.com. In the mood for zin? Try six different bottles of RIDGE VINEYARD’s new releases at Mountain View’s ARTISAN WINE DEPOT. The event is Dec. 4 from 2 to 5pm at 400A Villa St. Tickets are $19.22 in advance and $24.71 at the door. For more information, visit their website: www.artisanwine depot.com.—Liza Mock
33 Good dim sum, too. Full bar. 11am-2:30pm and 5-9:30pm Mon-Thu and 10am-3pm and 5-9:30pm Fri-Sat. 10123 N. Wolfe Rd (in Cupertino Square). 408.996.1680.
FLORENTINE RESTAURANT Italian. $. Bold flavors, fresh ingredients and lavish portions. Casual to dressy. Beer, wine. 10257 S. De Anza Blvd. (plus six other locations, some with full bars). 11:30am-9pm Mon-Thu, 11:30am-10pm Fri-Sat and 4-9pm Sun. 408.253.6532.
FONTANA’S California/ Italian. $$$. A steady performer, Fontana’s rarely disappoints pasta lovers. Beer, wine. 11:30am-9pm Mon-Thu, 11:30am-10pm Fri, 5-10pm Sat and 4:30-9pm Sun. 20840 Steven Creek Blvd. 408.725.0188.
GOCHI Japanese. $$$. Gochi
is a globally inspired izakaya (small plates) restaurant. Most of the food is straightup Japanese fare, but there are a few American, French and Korean twists. Highly recommended. 19980 Homestead Rd. 408.725.0542.
LOON WAH Chinese. $. The kitchen produces good wokcentric dishes, but its main draw is fresh, hand-pulled noodles. Casual. Beer, wine. 11am-9:30pm Mon-Thu and 11am-10pm Fri-Sun. 1146 De Anza Blvd. 408.257.8877.
TODAI Japanese. $$. Billed as a Japanese seafood buffet, Todai doesn’t limit itself to Japanese dishes. Pan-Asian and just plain odd specialties rotate. 11:30am2:30pm and 5:30-9pm Mon-Fri and 11:30am-3pm and 5:30-9:30pm Sat-Sun. Cupertino Square mall (near Sears), 10123 N. Wolfe Rd #2001. 408.996.3444.
Los Altos ¿book online at losaltos.net
AKANE Japanese/sushi bar. $$. Nigiri and maki treasures are gracefully presented at this attractive restaurant. 11:30am-2pm Tue-Fri, 5-9pm Tue-Sat. Beer, wine. 250 Third St. 650.941.8150. ALDO LOS ALTOS Italian. $$. Downtown Los Altos is ghostly quiet after dark but Aldo has injected some life into this corner of town with its lively wine bar, friendly service and welcoming atmosphere. 11:30am-5pm, Mon-Fri. 5pmclose Sat-Sun. 388 Main St. 650.949.2300.
BEAUSÉJOUR Continental. $$$. Elegant seafood, meat and game dishes lean toward reducing fat without compromising taste. Call for reservations. Full bar. Lunch
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SVDINING 11:30am-2pm Mon-Fri; 5-9pm daily. 170 State St. 650.948.1382.
CHEF CHU’S Chinese. $$. Speedy service, superb preparation and the ability to cater to varied tastes keep this landmark in business. Casual. Full bar. 11:30am-9:30pm Mon-Thu and 11:30-10pm Fri, noon10pm Sat, noon-9:30pm Sun. 1067 N. San Antonio Rd. 650.948.2696.
ESTRELLITA RESTAURANT Mexican. $$. Estrellita’s reverence for regional Mexican cooking distinguishes it from the enchilada-andtaco masses. The menu is full of Mexican-American standards, but the changing selection of specials make this restaurant a star. Full bar. 11am-2pm, 5-9pm Mon-Thu, 11am-2pm, 5-9:30pm Fri-Sat and 5-9pm Sun. 971 N. San Antonio Rd. 650.948.9865.
LOS ALTOS GRILL American. $$. The handsome Los Altos Grill celebrates big plates of grilled meat and fish with plenty of fixings on the side. Try the spit-roasted chicken, fresh fish and big burgers. The long, horseshoe-shaped bar is a big draw, too. Full bar. 4:30-9:30pm Sun-Mon and 4:30-10pm Tue-Sat. 233 Third St. 650.948.3524.
RESTAURANT ZITUNE Moroccan. $$$. Morocco was colonized by the French and has strong Mediterranean influences, so Moroccan food is familiar, but ingredients like preserved lemon, harissa and argan oil cast an exotic glow. Zitune takes the cuisine to new heights. Lunch 11:30am-2pm Mon-Fri; 5:3010pm Tue-Sun. 325 Main St. 650.947.0247.
SATURA CAKES FrenchJapanese bakery. $. Satura Cakes offers sweet treats for adult tastes. A Japanese take on a French patisserie, these confections are prepared fresh daily and meticulously crafted using the finest organic ingredients. 8am8pm Mon-Sun. 200 Main St. 650.948.3300. (Also 320 University Ave, Palo Alto. 650.326.3393)
SUMIKA. Japanese. $$. Sumika is a Japanese pub, but that doesn’t do it justice. It’s elegant, yet still a great place to drink beer and sake. The specialty is kushiyaki, small bites of grilled chicken, beef and vegetables cooked on bamboo skewers over charcoal. 11:30am-2pm, 6-10pm Tue-Fri, 11:30am2pm, 5:30-11pm Sat and 5-9pm Sun. 236 Central Plaza. 650.917.1822.
Menlo Park ¿book online at paloalto.net
ANGELO MIO Italian. $$. A small space with a large menu, sporting the traditionals that have been mainstays at local eateries. Appetizers and salads are the best bets. 11:30am-2:30pm, 4:30-10pm Mon-Sat; noon-2:30pm, 4:309pm Sun. 820 Santa Cruz Ave. 650.323.3665. BACK A YARD CARIBBEAN AMERICAN GRILL Jamaican. $. “Back a yard” is Jamaican slang for “the way things are done back home” and one of the few Jamaican restaurants around. Jerk pork and chicken shine. 11am-3pm, 5-8pm MonThu, 11am-3pm, 5-9pm Fri and noon-3pm, 5-8pm Sat. 1189 Willow Rd. 650.323.4244.
BISTRO VIDA French $$. Impeccably authentic bistro dishes and welcoming prices are spun through Bay Area culinary consciousness to create regional homey French cuisine. Brunch 11:30am2:30pm Mon-Fri, 9am-2:30pm Sat-Sun. Dinner 5-9:30pm Mon-Thu, 5-10pm Fri-Sat, 59pm Sun. 641 Santa Cruz Ave. 650.462.1686.
FLEA STREET CAFE New American. $$$$. Carefully crafted, impeccably chosen food featuring seasonal local produce and Niman Ranch meats. Atmosphere is casual and eclectic. Full bar. 5:309:30pm daily. 3607 Alameda de las Pulgas. 650.854.1226. IBERIA. $$. Spanish. Iberia’s cheap tapas menu is available at the bar anytime or in the dining room at lunch, but these nibbles alone are worth the trip. Lunch noon-2pm
SANJOSE.COM
Mon-Sat and dinner nightly 5:30-10pm. 1026 Alma St. 650.325.8981.
JZCOOL EATERY & WINE BAR American. $$. Fresh, local, sustainable, organic is the mantra of jZcool. Look for straightforward, flavorful dishes like pasture-raised chicken breast stuffed with creamy goat cheese, tangy preserved lemons and salty olives. Lunch 11am-2:30pm Tue-Thu; dinner 5-9pm TueThu, 5-10pm Fri-Sat. 827 Santa Cruz Ave. 650.325.3665.
KAYGETSU Japanese. $$$. Kaiseki is a rarefied Japanese cuisine born in Kyoto with impeccably seasonal ingredients and poetic presentations. Kaygetsu bills itself as “classic Japanese cuisine” but its kaiseki menu is like discovering a new galaxy of food. Closed Mon. 325 Sharon Park Dr. 650.234.1084.
LEFT BANK Grandma’s French. $$$. Wise country fare combined with metropolitan savoir faire and a dash of Gallic attitude. Full bar. 11:30am-10pm Sun-Mon, 11:30am-11pm Tue-Sat. 635 Santa Cruz Ave. 650.473.6543. MARCHÉ Modern French. $$$$. Under new executive chef Guillaume Bienaimé, Marché offers some of the most inspired, impeccably sourced and thoroughly delicious food in Silicon Valley. Bienaimé’s cooking is based in French technique, and he flirts with modern methods and elements of trendy molecular gastronomy like flavor-infused foams and dehydrated and crushed sauerkraut, but at its core his approach is rooted in superb, often locally sourced ingredients simply and expertly prepared. 5:30-10pm Mon-Sat. 898 Santa Cruz Ave. 650.324.9092. SULTANA Turkish. $$$. If you’ve eaten Greek, Iranian or Middle Eastern food, you’ll find much that’s familiar here. Sultana makes your introduction to Turkish food easy with its warm service, well-executed dishes and soothing ambience 11am2:30pm, 5-10pm Mon-Fri; 11am-10pm Sat-Sun. 1149 El Camino Real. 650.322.4343.
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More dining coverage
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LIVE FEED
Chocolate Boutique
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Well, like anything, the art and craft of doing something well is in the details. Sunnyvale’s SNAKE AND BUTTERFLY chocolate (www.snakeand butterfly.com) has perfected the details of chocolate making. The boutique company creates some truly outstanding chocolate by using superb ingredients in small batches and taking its time. The tiny outfit began three years ago with CELESTE FLORES and BEN BULIK. Flores was looking for a home business that would allow her to spend time with her young child. Bulik was experimenting with raw chocolate as a way to promote better health. After going out on a few dates, they cooked up the idea of going into the chocolate business. The name Snake and Butterfly comes from Aztec mythology. The Aztecs revered chocolate and reserved it for royalty. Flores and Bulik liked their chocolate creations and decided to try scaling up, bringing in Flores’ dad, Vince Flores, to help write a business plan, and Jen Sorenson to make organic marshmallows and raw chocolates. Vince Flores, a musician with experience in the food and high-tech worlds, decided he wanted to be more than a consultant. “I found out I really like doing it and here I am,” he said. Now he oversees the production of caramel, confections and wholesale accounts. In Silicon Valley, you can find Snake and Butterfly chocolate at Whole Foods in Campbell and San Jose, Barefoot Coffee Roasters in Santa Clara, Good Karma Vegan Cafe, Satori Tea Co. and the J. Lohr winery in San Jose, and the Campbell farmers market. Like good coffee, what makes Snake and Butterfly’s chocolate stand out is the source of its beans. The company specializes in single origin, fair-trade beans with distinct flavors. The Papua New Guinea beans, for example, are roasted over a wood fire and have a strong smoky flavor that pairs particularly well with almonds and salt. The Madagascar chocolate has a more citruslike flavor. Bulik roasts each kind of bean differently to coax out its unique flavor. The company also sells raw, or “live,” chocolate made with unroasted beans. It has a more subtle nature but still exhibits an imminently chocolatey flavor. Chocolate is very high in antioxidants, and the raw chocolate is particularly high in the beneficial compounds. In addition to bars of distinctive, single-origin chocolate, Snake and Butterfly makes some great truffles, chocolate confections and flavored bars like cherry and chile, sea salt and smoked almond, ginger and cacao nip, and maple syrup and bacon brittle. The company has also created some custom blends with beans from Barefoot Coffee Roasters. Snake and Butterfly only makes about 60 to 80 pounds of chocolate a week. At nine bars of chocolate per pound, that’s not a lot of chocolate. It’s a slow, labor-intensive process. The chocolate is refined for three days in a simple, stone wheel “melanger.” In spite of the popularity of the chocolate (Snake and Butterfly picked up five awards at last year’s San Francisco International: Chocolate Salon), the quartet of chocolatiers wants to stay small. “When you start making chocolate in large batches you lose something,” says Celeste Flores. “We would become a factory at that point and we don’t want to do that.”—Stett Holbrook
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metroactive
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VooDoo Lounge, San Jose Thu – 9pm; $35-$40 Did you know there are two different J-Boogs? So now, as you stare at the VooDoo Lounge calendar trying to decide is this is the J-Boog that’s right for you, allow me to clarify. The J-Boog that will not be performing is that handsome young singer from the boy band, B2K (the one starred in the film You Got Served.) Sorry if that’s your J-Boog—maybe next year! But if, on the other hand, you’ve been looking forward to seeing that husky Hawaiian singer/rapper whose hip-hopreggae Caribbean dance songs are taking off like wildfire, you
are in luck. His songs are catchy, but I suspect his biggest appeal is his casual “regular guy” charm. His single, “Let’s Do It Again” has a tender sweetness not found in most hip-hop dance tracks. (AC)
*fri
STAND FIGHT RESIST Johnny V’s, San Jose Fri – 9pm; $5 Perhaps Rodney Dangerfield said it best while being tested on Dylan Thomas’ poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” in Back to School: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light! It means ... I don’t take shit from no one.” Stand Fight
Resist conveys the same message with a mixture of progressive rock and a heavy, old-school punk sound. Think Descendents offshoot All and Black Flag meshed with the Police’s Andy Summers—strange combo, but it works. Now, if they could only work the Triple Lindy into their live show. . . . (BD)
TIL I FALL Nickel City, San Jose Fri – 6pm; $8 What is up with Till I Fall and their fascination with rock bands from Florida? They cover not only the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus’ “Face Down” but also Mayday Parade’s “Jamie All Over.” And at their show this week, they’ll be doing a song by Anberlin. They do seem pretty good at acoustic tributes to Southeastern music, and it’s easy to see why they cover RJA—Till
I Fall’s Yasmin Shirazi is heavily influenced by Ronnie Winter. Shirazi’s vocals blend nicely with those of guitarist Brandon Leland, making for a distinctive sound. Oh, and they do have original material, which they’ll also be playing Friday. Fights Without Fears Within, Era Escape, The Monterey Jacks and Ilikeyou start things off. (BD)
SOUTH FIRST FRIDAY South First Street, San Jose Fri – 8pm until late; free The monthly art gallery event pays homage to the shopping season with the Fresh Produce exhibit at Anno Domini, for which more than a score of international artists have contributed unique works priced low enough to for gift-giving, and the “Rockin’ Stockings Holiday Show
and Sale” at Kaleid, with even more tempting gift pieces. The night also features openings as Higher Fire Clayspace (on Market Street), a spoken-word and drumming performance at MACLA, a Festivus blowout at SLG Art Boutiki, a new members’ show at WORKS/San Jose called “Ring in the New,” a night of live body painting at South First Billiards and opera favorites sung live at Caffe Trieste. (MSG)
*sat
SYMPHONY SILICON VALLEY California Theater, San Jose Sat – 8pm, Sun – 2:30pm; $39-$75 The symphony principal French horn player, Merest Brown, steps forward
* concerts
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TRIPLE HO SHOW STEVE KRAUSE
FIRST FRIDAY
Dec 2 aat 7:30pm, Schultz Cultural Arts Hall, Palo Alto
CALIFORNIA BACH SOCIETY, CA STORY OF THE NATIVITY Dec 4 at a 8pm, All Saints’ Episcopal, Palo Alto
NOVA VISTA SYMPHONY AND NOV SAN JOSE SYMPHONIC CHOIR, MAN MANY MOODS OF CHRISTMAS Dec 4 at 7:30pm, Church of the D Ascension, Saratoga
PENINSULA WOMEN’S CHORUS, PENIN MAGNIFICAT CONCERT Dec 4 at 4pm, St. Patrick’s Seminary, Menlo Park; Dec 5 at 4pm, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Palo Alto
ANDRE RIEU Dec 4 at 8pm, HP Pavilion
STARRY, STARRY NIGHT, BEV BAR BARNETT AND GREG NEWLON Dec 4 at 7:30pm, First Presbyterian Church of San Jose
CHRISTMAS PIPE ORGAN CO CONCERT AND SING-ALONG Dec 5 at 3pm, Grace Baptist Church, San Jose
EL CA CAMINO YOUTH SYMPHONY PREPARATORY PRE ORCHESTRAS ik jkXik`e^ =i`[Xp K_\ nXccj Xi\ Xc`m\ n`k_ X if[lZ\ j_fn% Xk 8eef ;fd`e`Êj =i\j_ G
Dec 5 at 1:30 and 3:15pm, Atherton Center C for the Performing Arts
OCTOBOP 10TH ANNIVERSARY OCTO CONCERT Dec 5 at 7pm, City Lights, San Jose
in a performance of Mozart’s Horn Concerto no. 2 with Symphony Silicon Valley. The guest conductor for the program is Italian opera expert Giampaolo Bisanti, who will lead the way on the Overture to Rossini’s Barber of Seville and Schubert’s Third Symphony, which echoes with Rossini influences. (MSG)
JONNY MANAK AND THE DEPRESSIVES Britannia Arms Cupertino Sat – 9pm; $5 Jack (or jerk, according to the title of his new album) of all trades Jonny Manak merged dirty ’50s garage rock and punk with his past two releases, Rebound Town and 1.21 Jiggawatts. But his latest effort, I Am Not a Bum . . . I’m a Jerk, has taken his grease-infused sound
to the next level. The addition of Curtis Meachum on keyboards has helped the band evolve to include space traveling rock & roll, trippy psychedelic treats and beach party surf nuggets. Depressive? Hardly. Citabria, Silent Treatment and Flexx Bronco open the show. (BD)
DICK DALE Blank Club, San Jose Sat – 9pm; $20 When I interviewed Lou Reed a few years back, we discussed which ’50s rocker was the first to invent guitar distortion by jabbing a pencil into his amp or some other violent, semi-accidental method (at least four guitarists lay claim to this history-altering punk rock move, by the way). I mentioned that Dick Dale is one of the contenders, and Reed replied: “Not Dick Dale. That’s just surf music.” Oh, snap! But really,
“just” surf music? C’mon, Lou, Dick Dale is the man! He shreds his picks into fine plastic dust every night blasting out the kind of heavy riffs usually reserved for bands whose genre ends in “core.” Though he’s best known for his ’60s singles like “Let’s Go Trippin’” and the Tarantinoapproved “Misirlou,” his ’90s albums are significantly more intense—like the crush of a Mavericks-size wave, they take no prisoners. (SP)
*sun
BRING IT BACK TOUR 2010 VooDoo Lounge, San Jose Sun – 9pm; $10 Hip-hop has grown and expanded quite a bit since its forefathers
were beatboxing and reciting nursery rhymes back in the late ’70s and early ’80s. (Yes, and also conveying the hard realities urban life.) The Bring It Back tour hopes to reunite various cultural elements of hip-hop, including graffiti, turntables, MCs and breakdancing. (I remember the good ol’ days of breakdancing competitions at the school bus stop. These kids today don’t know what they’re missing.) Headlining the event are Charlie 2na of Jurrassic 5, Kanetic Source (of Ozomalti) and Abstract Rude (of Project Blowed.) Additionally, there will be roughly 32,000 more rappers and DJs that plan to take the stage, along with B-boy competitions, breakdancing shows and live graffiti art exhibits. (AC)
SAN JOSE WIND SYMPHONY, PIRATES AND PINAFORES Dec 5 at 3pm, McAfee Performing Arts Center, Saratoga
STRAIGHT NO CHASER, A CAPPELLA GROUP Dec 5 at 7pm, Flint Center, Cupertino
YOU-SING-IT MESSIAH, SAN JOSE SYMPHONIC CHOIR Dec 6 at 7:30pm, California Theatre, San Jose
PHILHARMONIA BAROQUE, HANDEL’S MESSIAH Dec 7 at 7:30pm, Center for the Performing Arts, Atherton
ROGER WATERS, THE WALL IN CONCERT Dec 7-8 at 8pm, HP Pavilion
LIVE-105 NOT SO SILENT NIGHT Dec 10 at 7pm, HP Pavilion
GARY HOEY, HO HO HOEY’S ROCKIN’ HOLIDAY TOUR Dec 11 at 8pm, Club Fox, Redwood City
M E TR O S I L I C O N VA L L E Y | D E C E M B E R 1 -7, 2 0 1 0 | SA N J O S E . C O M | M E T R OAC T I V E . C O M
Dec 1 at 6:30pm, SJSU Event Center
Praint ‘Abductor’ by Fred Tomaselli, a detail from cover of ‘Nomad Codes’
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metroactive ARTS
Nomad Man
STRANGE RANGE E DAYS Y No subject is beyond the philosophical investigations of Erik Davis.
In his new collection of essays, ‘Nomad Codes,’ Erik Davis fuses tech ideas with mystical impulses By GARY SINGH
I
FIRST discovered Erik Davis back in the mid’90s, when he moderated a listserv on the work of poststructuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (D&G). At that time, the World Wide Web was first emerging, with academics and street intellectuals alike beginning to apply idea-tools from D&G’s A Thousand Plateaus to analyze the interconnected fashion
in which the web functioned. A plethora of critical studies on cyberculture emerged throughout the rest of the ’90s, with most of them overacademicizing the interrelations among new communication technologies, digital art, cultural theory, new media and the information age. But Davis’ contribution, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information, was completely different. Somehow, Davis managed to fuse technological impulses with mystical and spiritual impulses, conjuring up an entire history of their interconnections. And he did
it in a half-academic, half-colloquial fashion, with which I totally identified. Taking lessons from D&G, TechGnosis was nonlinear, nonhierarchical, a network of intensities, with the power of the work emerging out of the dynamism developed from those connections, although most people didn’t “in-jest” it that way at first. But that’s how the occult always works, doesn’t it? I say this looking back at TechGnosis, along with Davis’ essays during that era. I saw his name all over the place, in many different outlets, some commercial, some obscure, both in print and online. I began to see a body of work emerge, but I couldn’t explain in linear conversation what that body actually was. But more and more people were beginning to pay attention.
Well, those who’ve followed any one of Davis’ interconnected trajectories will gasp with delight at his new collection, Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica. Some of the essays are new, some old, but with the publication of this anthology, he finally decides to characterize the quantum (m)other field that presides underneath and throughout the breadth of his life’s work. Each one of the trajectories he straddles in the book is like a quantum wave function of that original Supreme field. “Call it occulture,” he writes. “Or . . . modern esoterica. It’s a hazy noman’s-land located somewhere between anthropology and mystical pulp, between the zendo and the metal club, between cultural criticism and extraordinary experience, whether psychedelic, or yogic or technological. It is dodgy terrain to explore; I like to think that it calls for the intrepid adventurer to shed any territorial claims and go nomad.” Five plateaus materialize in the book: Orientalismo, Invocations, Inner Space, Mad Science and Kalifornika. From beginning to end, Davis shakes out like a blanket his entire spectrum of interests—H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, wandering Sufi mystics, Burning Man, Buddhism, DMT, LSD, the Sun City Girls, Jimmy Page, the Golden Dawn, Goa trance, the Kabbalah, Star Trek conventions, UFOlogies, Hermes Trismegistus and a 1995 Crash Worship gig in San Francisco I actually attended myself. In the end, Davis’ writing is best described in D&G terminology. It is a connection-machine. The reader is left to decode the connections.
Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica By Erik Davis Verse Chorus Press 352 pages; $17.95 paperback
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Jessica Fromm, Metro
Free lobby events before every performance. Meet Maria, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.
PERFORMED AT THE SAN JOSE CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS Maria Jocobs-Yu and Ramon Moreno. Photo by John Gerbetz.
HOLIDAY EVENTS AT MONTALVO ARTS CENTER A Celtic Tenors Christmas Celebration Thu, Dec 9, 7:30 pm Starting at $32 A special Christmas performance, by this internationally acclaimed trio, will feature classics such as “O Holy Night” and “Silent Night.”
Rockapella Holiday Show Sun, Dec 12, 4 pm & 7 pm Starting at $36 Often imitated, never duplicated, Rockapella remains an innovative burst of talent. Hear them spread the joy of the holiday season in this special performance.
The Little Engine That Could, The Musical Sat, Dec 11, 11 am & 1 pm $20 adult/$10 child Members: $16 adult/$8 child “I think I can! I think I can!” Bay Area Children’s Theatre brings this delightful classic tale to Montalvo for the holidays!
PIANO MASTERS SERIES
Taylor Eigsti Trio Sun, Dec 5, 7 pm
Starting at $36 Legendary Dave Brubeck says of two-time Grammy nominee and Bay Area native Eigsti, “He’s the most amazing talent I’ve ever come across. Remember him.” Visit montalvoarts.org for more information on the Piano Masters Series.
Carriage House Theatre Box Office, 408.961.5858, M-F, 10am-4pm ticketmaster.com or montalvoarts.org Free on-site parking!
15400 Montalvo Road Saratoga, CA 95070
M E T R O S I L I C O N VA L L E Y | D E C E M B E R 1 -7, 2 0 1 0 | SA N J O S E . C O M | M E T R OAC T I V E . C O M
"A vision of iridescent fantasy. Ballet San Jose’s Nutcracker gives parents and kids alike spectacle to spare."
More listings:
metroactive ARTS
METROACTIVE.COM
Doug Speidel
FEATURED LISTINGS
The Nutcracker Friday, 10:30am and 7:30pm, Saturday 2 and 7:30pm, Sunday, 1pm; San Jose Center for the Performing Arts; $20–$50 San Jose Dance Theater kicks off the Nutcracker season with one of the longest-running productions of the family favorite ballet in the Bay Area—since 1966. The show, done in concert with Los Gatos Ballet, showcases the talents of young dancers along with professionals. Silicon Valley Symphony plays along.
The Meshuga Nutcracker! Wednesday–Thursday and Saturday, 7:30pm, Sunday, 1:30pm, Dec. 1–19; Retro Dome, San Jose; $24–$36
Tracy Martin
There are Nutcrackers aplenty, but only one MeshugaNutracker! This unusual reworking of Tchaikovsky keeps the composer’s score and adds new lyrics and traditional Jewish harmonies. The costumes include dancing dreidels, and the holiday comestibles are latkes.
A Christmas Memory Previews Wednesday–Friday, 8pm, opens Saturday, 8pm, runs through Dec. 26; Lucie Stern Theatre, Palo Alto; $31–$48 For its holiday show, TheatreWorks unveils a new musical based on a Truman Capote story. This childhood memoir, set in the 1930s, tells of the eccentric connection between a young boy and his beyond-the-fringe aunt.
The Gifts of the Magi Friday. 8pm, Saturday, 3 and 8pm, Sunday, 2pm, Dec. 3–19; Theatre on San Pedro Square; $10–$24 After Dickens, the most reliable theatrical voice for the season is short-story writer O. Henry. Tabard Theatre Company presents The Gifts of the Magi, which encompasses two heartwarming O. Henry stories—“The Gift of the Magi” and “The Cop and the Anthem”—and stitches them together with music.
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Hairspray Thursday (Dec. 9), 7:30pm, Friday, 8pm, Saturday, 2 and 8pm, Sunday 1 and 6pm (1pm only Dec. 12), Dec. 3–12; Montgomery Theater, San Jose; Graduates of Children’s Musical Theatre and actors from around the Bay Area come together for the Marquee Production of the rowdy musical Hairspray about hairdos, dance shows and tolerance in Baltimore in the 1960s. Artistic director Kevin R. Hauge oversees the action.
Dance
BALLET AMERICA A full-length version of the “Nutcracker” with dancers of all levels. Fri, 7pm. $18-$39. Fox Theater, Redwood City.
THE MESHUGANUTCRACKER! A different angle on the famous holiday ballet. WedThu, 7:30pm, Sat, 7:30pm, Sun, 1:30pm. Runs Thru Dec. 19. $24$36. The Retro Dome, San Jose. 408.404.7711.
SAN JOSE DANCE THEATER In association with Los Gatos Ballet and Silicon Valley Symphony. Fri, 10:30am and 7:30pm, Sat, 2 and 7:30pm, Sun, 1pm. $20-$50. San Jose Center for the Performing Arts. 408.286.9905.
WESTERN BALLET NUTCRACKER Fri, 7pm, Sat, 1 and 7pm, Sun, 1 and 6:30pm. $24-$29. Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. 650.903.6000.
WINTER DANCE SHOWCASE Dance students perform in a variety of styles. Thu-Sat, 8pm. $10/$12. Smith Center, Ohlone College, Fremont.
Theater ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S BIG GAY DANCE PARTY Aaron Loeb’s farce is given its South Bay premiere by City Lights Theater Company. Thu-Sat, 8pm, Sun, 2pm. Runs through Dec 19. $25-$35. City Lights, San Jose.
ARCLIGHT REPERTORY THEATRE A fundraising event celebrates four years of productions by Arclight. The evening includes music, dessert, a raffle and scenes from plays. Sat, 8:30pm. $30. Eulipia, San Jose.
BACKWARDS IN HIGH HEELS A musical about the life and career of Ginger Rogers. Opens Dec 1. Regular shows: Tue, 7:30pm, Wed, 8pm (plus 11am, Dec 8), Thu-Fri, 8pm, Sat, 2 and 8pm, Sun, 2pm. Runs thru Dec 19. $35-$74. San Jose Repertory Theatre.
A CHRISTMAS MEMORY A musical about family and
EVERY CHRISTMAS STORY EVER TOLD A romp through the holiday classics at high speed from San Jose Stage Company. Wed-Thu, 7:30pm, Fri-Sat, 8pm, Sun, 2pm. Runs thru Dec 19. $20-$45. The Stage, San Jose.
THE GIFTS OF THE MAGI A musical version of two O. Henry stories by Tabard Theatre Company. Fri-8pm, Sat, 3 and 8pm, Sun 2pm. Runs thru Dec 19. $10-$24. Theatre on San Pedro Square, San Jose.
HAIRSPRAY A Marquee Productions staging from Children’s Musical Theatre San Jose. Opens Fri, 8pm. Regular shows: Thu, 7:30pm, Fri, 8pm, Sat, 2 and 6pm, Sun, 1 and/or 6pm. Runs thru Dec 12. $25. Montgomery Theater, San Jose.
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE A musical based on the Frank Capra film. Thu-Sat, 8pm, Sun, 2pm. Runs thru Dec 19. $32. Hillbarn Theatre, Foster City.
NOISES OFF South Valley Civic Theatre presents the farce by Michael Frayn. Fri-Sat, 8pm, Sun, 2:30pm. Runs thru Dec 18. $14/$18. Morgan Hill Community Playhouse.
AN O. HENRY CHRISTMAS Broadway West Theatre Company mounts Howard Burman’s play about a stranger who starts telling stories to some homeless people. ThuSat, 8pm, Sun, 1pm. Runs thru Dec 18. $17/$22. Broadway West Theatre, Fremont.
SANTASTIC! A holiday musical review. Opens Fri, 7:30pm. Regular shows: Fri, 7:30pm, Sat, 1:30pm, Wed-Thu (Dec 15-16), 7:30pm. Runs through Dec 19. $24-$36. The Retro Dome, San Jose. 408.404.7711.
A TUNA CHRISTMAS The holidays done Texas style. Wed, 7:30pm, Thu-Sat, 8pm, Sun 3pm. Runs thru Dec 18. $34-$30. Bus Barn Stage, Los Altos.
OUR HATS ARE OFF Broadway by the Bay puts on
a benefit for its Youth Theatre Conservatory; hosted by Tony Tripoli. Fri-Sun, 8pm. $50. Club Fox, Redwood City.
WHITE CHRISTMAS West Valley Light Opera does the Irving Berlin classic for the holidays. Fri, 8pm, Sat, 2:30pm (Dec 4) or 8pm (Dec. 11), Sun, 2:30pm. Runs thru Dec 11. $18$30. Saratoga Civic Theater.
Comedy ROOSTER T. FEATHERS Wed, 5:30pm: Intro to Stand-up Comedy Class. $35. Thu, 8pm, Fri, 9pm, Sat, 8 and 10:30pm, Sun, 8pm: Mike Pace. $12-$18. Sunnyvale.
SAN JOSE IMPROV Wed, 8pm: Chicano Kings of Comedy. $12.Thu, 8pm: Joey Coco Diaz. $14. Fri-Sat, 7 and 9pm, Sun, 7pm: Paul Rodriguez. $25.Tue, 8pm: Brian Scolaro. $12. San Jose.
*art
Museums CANTOR ARTS CENTER “Vodoun/Vodounon: Portraits of Initiates.”Thru Mar 20. “Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas.”Thru Jan 2. WedSun, 11am-5pm, Thu, 11am8pm. Stanford.
HISTORY PARK SAN JOSE “Celebrating Local Artists: The Fifth Anniversary of the McKay Gallery. Thru Mar 2011. Inside the Pasetta House. Tue-Sun, 11am-5pm. San Jose.
SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF ART “The Modern Photographer: Observation and Intention.” Thru Jul 3. “Leo Villareal.”Thru Jan 9. “Retro-Tech.”Thru Feb 6. Tue-Sun, 11am-5pm, closed Mon. San Jose.
SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF QUILTS AND TEXTILES “Cream of the Cloth: Quilts From the Marbaum Collection.” “Yvonne Porcella: Bold Strokes.” Both shows run thru Jan 30. Tue-Sun, 10am-5pm. San Jose.
TECH MUSEUM OF INNOVATION “Body Worlds Vital.” Mon-Wed, 10am-5pm, Thu-Sun, 10am8pm. San Jose.
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*stage
giving at the holidays by TheatreWorks. Previews Dec 1-3. Opens Dec 4, runs through Dec 26. Tue-Wed at 7:30pm, Thu-Fri at 8pm, Sat at 2 and 8pm, Sun at 2 and 7pm. $19$67. Lucie Stern Theatre, Palo Alto. 650.463.1960.
M E T R OAC T I V E . C O M | SA N J O S E . C O M | D E C E M B E R 1 -7, 2 0 1 0 | M E T R O S I L I C O N VA L L E Y
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metroactive ARTS 45
Featuring acclaimed cclaimed guest aartists rttists andd llocal ocaal danc dancers ers Saturday,Dec. urday,Dec. 11, 2:00 & 7:00 Sunday,Dec. day,Dec. y 12, 1:00 & 5:00 5 Santa ta Clara Convention Center C Theater
Tickets are on sal sale le now www.santaclaraballet.com www w.santa . clarab ballet.com or ccall all 408.865.9 408.865.9780 9780
Galleries OPENING ANNO DOMINI Fresh Produce. With art from more than 30 participating artists. Reception Fri for South First Friday. Thru Jan 8. San Jose.
CAFFE TRIESTE
The Santa Clara Ballet School : Official school of the Santa Clara Ballet B Company Classes age 3 – adult Call 408.247.9178 4 or visit our website for f more info.
“Robot Girl.” Works by Christine Benjamin. Reception Fri with opera singers.Thru Jan 28. San Jose.
DOWNTOWN YOGA SHALA Works by clay artist Paul Rubio. Dec 3-Jan 28. San Jose.
GOOD KARMA VEGAN CAFE
SAN JOSE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Gallery walk with Amy DiazInfante; performance by MACLA Spoken Word All-Stars with drumming by Jaliya and Jimmy Biala. Fri evening as part of South First Friday. San Jose.
METRO LOBBY “Edge of Nowhere.” A show by First St. Photo Collective. Dec 3Jan 28. San Jose.
PSYCHO DONUTS “Creatures, Donuts and Such.” Local artists show pieces. Dec 3-Jan 28. San Jose.
SLG ART BOUTIKI “SLG Festivus.” A celebration complete with feats of strength plus an open mic for airing of grievances, as well as holiday art by Andy Ristaino and live music. Fri evening. San Jose.
SOUTH FIRST BILLIARDS “Bring It Back Tour.” Featuring live art, body painting and more. Fri, 9pm. San Jose.
WORKS/SAN JOSE “Ring in the New.” A member exhibit. Reception Fri evening. Thru Jan. 7. San Jose.
Silicon Valley JCC presents a community festival. Sun, noon4pm. Addison-Penzak Jewish Community Center, Los Gatos.
CHRISTMAS IN THE PARK Vintage holiday displays. Runs thru Jan 1, 9am-midnight. Plaza de Cesar Chavez, San Jose.
FANTASY OF LIGHTS Vasona Park is transformed into an illuminated wonderland along a 1.5-mile driving route. Runs thru Dec 31, 6-10pm. $10/$15 per vehicle. Vasona Lake County Park, Los Gatos.
Books
HERITAGE HOLIDAY
CENTER FOR LITERARY ARTS
SALMAN RUSHDIE
MACLA
CHANUKAH PALOOZA
“Old Technology.” Painting, sculpture and installations by the SJSU artist Tony May. Thru Feb 26. Tue-Fri, 10am-5pm, Sat, noon5pm. San Jose.
HIGHER FIRE CLAYSPACE & GALLERY
“The Rockin’ Stockings Holiday Show and Sale.” Reception Fri, 79pm. Thru Dec 30. San Jose.
METROGIVEAWAYS.COM
“Hybrid Spaces: Family Origins & Collaborations.” Works by Las Hermanas Iglesias and Amy Diaz-Infante. Thru Jan 8. WedThu, noon-7pm, Fri-Sat, noon5pm. San Jose.
A joint reading by reporter Julie Reynolds and short-story writer Leah Griesmann. Wed, 7pm. Free. King Main Library, San Jose.
KALEID GALLERY
Enter to win online
MACLA
“SJSU Color 112: Exploring the Hyperreal.” An exhibit by photography students. Dec 3-Jan 28. San Jose.
“Geo Geometry.” Works by Doris Fischer-Colbre and Linda Mau. Dec 3-Jan 1. San Jose.
WinFree Stuff
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More listings:
METROACTIVE.COM
The novelist signs copies of “Luka and the Fire of Life.” Wed, 7pm. $30 admission and copy of book. Kepler’s, Menlo Park.
*kids
THE CHRISTMAS MOUSE By the Santa Clara Players. Fri, 7pm, Sat, 11am and 3pm, Sun, 3pm. Runs thru Dec 12. $7/$10. Triton Museum Hall Pavilion, Santa Clara. 408.248.7993.
ELVES AND SHOEMAKER/ MADELINE’S CHRISTMAS California Theatre Center. “Elves” shows Fri, 7pm, Sat, 11am. “Madeline” shows Dec 4, 7pm. $11/$12. Sunnyvale Theatre.
MADELINE’S CHRISTMAS Palo Alto Children’s Theatre. Dec 7-19. Evenings at 6pm, weekends at 2 and 7pm plus Dec 18 at 4:30pm. $8/$12. Children’s Theatre, Lucie Stern Community Center, Palo Alto.
*events CAMPBELL TOY PROGRAM
Donations of new, unwrapped toys are taken at local fire stations. The program finishes with an evening of music, food and raffles. Thu, 6-9pm. Sonoma Chicken Coop, Campbell.
A day with carolers, local food tastings, Santa and a traditional tea (seatings at 11am and 2pm; $25/$40). Sat, 10am-4pm. History Park San Jose.
INFLATION CELEBRATION Featuring the blowing up of balloons for the Hot San Jose Nights Christmas float. Sat, 3-7pm. Market Street and Park Avenue, San Jose.
LATKEPALOOZA! The Peninsula JCC sponsors a celebration with music, latkes, kids’ activities and a sing-along. Sun, 1-4pm. Peninsula Jewish Community Center, Foster City.
LIGHT IT UP A Chanukah celebration for ages 21 and up. Features music an open bar. Sat, 9pm. $10/$15. Congregation Beth David, Saratoga.
ST. JOHN VIANNEY’S FAIRE An annual event with arts and crafts, plus entertainment and food. Fri-Sun, 8am-9pm. St. John Vianney Catholic School, San Jose.
SAN JOSE HOLIDAY PARADE Floats, balloons and Santa. Sun, 8:30am. Free. Downtown San Jose.
SANTA IN THE TOWN PLAZA A chance to visit the man himself. Sun, 11am-3pm. Thru Dec 19. $5. Downtown Los Gatos.
SANTANA ROW CHANUKAH Eight nights of arts and crafts,. Dec 2-9, 5:30pm, plus 3:30pm Fri. Santana Row, San Jose.
WINTERFEST 2010 A day of crafts hosted by the Girl Scouts. Sat, 10am-3pm. $10. Expo Hall, Santa Clara County Fairgrounds.
STAGE
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8J 8YiX_Xd C`eZfce ^Xp6 ?\ `j befne kf _Xm\ j_Xi\[ _`j Y\[ n`k_ fk_\i d\e# Ylk jlZ_ jc\\g`e^ XiiXe^\d\ekj n\i\ _Xi[cp flkj`[\ k_\ (0k_$Z\eklip efid% E\m\ik_\c\jj# jfd\ jZ_fcXij `ej`jk fe C`eZfceÊj _fdfj\olXc`kp# gf`ek`e^ kf gXjj`feXk\ ]i`\e[j_`gj n`k_ d\e c`b\ Afj_lX Jg\\[ Xj \m`[\eZ\% Fk_\ij [`jX^i\\ \dg_Xk`ZXccp# Ylk k_\ hl\jk`fe i\dX`ej1 nXj 8YiX_Xd C`eZfce# fli ^i\Xk\jk gi\j`[\ek# X _fdfj\olXc6 This controversy ignites the action in Abraham Lincoln’s Big, Gay Dance Party, now running at City Lights Theater Company. When a schoolteacher (Karen DeHart) 8YiX_Xd in modern-day, rural Illinois tells her third-grade C`eZfceÊj 9`^# class that, yes, our 16th president was gay, she is prosecuted for trying to indoctrinate them with >Xp ;XeZ\ the “gay agenda.” The trial becomes a political GXikp cause célèbre, especially after both prosecuting attorney Tom Hauser (Michael Riley) and Through Dec. 19 defending attorney Regina Lincoln (Lani Wong) City Lights Theater decide to run for governor. Things get even more Company, San Jose complicated when a reporter with a score to settle $15–$28 (Noah Averbach-Katz) arrives in town, and Tom’s son (Alexander Prather) is apparently attacked by gay protesters. The title is bound to raise eyebrows, and the play itself is just as flamboyant, if more than a little unwieldy. The entire cast, in addition to their main roles, play Abraham Lincoln (beard, top hat and all), and there is the added novelty of a random audience member getting to decide in what order the acts will be performed. Most of it is played for laughs, with slapstick gags and some extremely goofy dancing by the seven different Lincolns. However, things turn serious toward the end, and while some may find it a welcome change of pace, the sudden transition is jarring. An energetic ensemble helps make a worthwhile production out of this rather disjointed material. One standout performance is Riley’s far-right, gay-baiting prosecutor who, in one courtroom scene, envisions everyone around him as a flaming homosexual, falls to his knees and screams, “Gay!” Also good is James Mantell, who plays Tom Hauser’s slimy staffer. If you want killer dance moves, watch out for Alika Spencer, who plays Regina Lincoln’s assistant. While often hilarious, this big, gay dance party isn’t for everyone. If you’re a Republican, you should probably stay home, and even liberals may find that their tolerance doesn’t extend to two-plus hours of Abe Lincoln in tights.—Sean Conwell
M E TR O S I L I C O N VA L L E Y | D E C E M B E R 1 -7, 2 0 1 0 | SA N J O S E . C O M | M E T R OAC T I V E . C O M
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metroactive FILM
Bogart on Edge DRIVING IVING G LESSON S Humphrey Bogart puts a move on Gloria Grahame in Nicholas Ray’s ‘In a Lonely Place.’
‘In a Lonely Place’ and ‘Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ show tortured side of tough-guy Humphrey Bogart By RICHARD VON BUSACK
A
VARICE AND WRATH make up the subject of two of Humphrey Bogart’s finest films (showing Dec. 4–6 at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and In a Lonely Place (1950)—essays on the way of all flesh.
What can one conclude about a man who shot a movie in a replica of his own house—and called that movie In a Lonely Place? The title comes from J.M. Synge, but the sentiment is all Nicholas Ray, cinema’s reigning Mr. Vicissitude, whose furious work mirrored the bipolar disorder that tormented the director. (One incident from
a manic-depressive career: Ray won the Grand Gross of Isabella the Catholic from the Spanish government for making the cruciflick King of Kings, which he followed up, not many years later, by making a satirical porn film titled Wet Dreams.) Bogart showed extraordinary range as screenwriter Dixon Steele, 86’d from the movie studios for his drinking and his terrible temper. Suffering from “rage that only requires a victim” (Ray’s own words), Steele’s last human hope is his neighbor, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), an ex–kept woman trying to retrieve her self-respect. When Steele is accused of a murder, their fragile affair is strained to the breaking point. During the making of In a Lonely Place, Ray was separating from Grahame, his wife at the time. There’s a theory that the atmosphere
off life lif going i haywire h i is i due d to t the th real-life split-up. Ray’s origin in the theater is seen in the inexpensive but compact setting, which was based on the design of his own apartment when he first arrived from New York in lonely California. The sets are bracketed with a bare minimum of exteriors. Ray’s trick in this transformation was to make violence violent—in other words, to make Steele’s rages not formally introduced with lighting, mood, music and foreshadowing. Instead, they detonate out of nowhere and with very little warning, as sudden, irreparable shocks. “A hero has to sometimes be shown just as confused or screwed up as you,” Ray wrote in notes for a script (quoted in Bernard Eisenschitz’s massive Nicholas Ray: An American Journey). This statement sums up exactly Ray’s best films from about 1949 to 1960, a series of bold vivid works about repression, in which the characters’ bids for freedom are accompanied by a fury that’s simultaneously justified and unjustifiable. Whether the antiheroes are artists (In a Lonely Place), teachers
(Bigger Than Life, 1956), the police (On Dangerous Ground, 1952) or the young (Rebel Without a Cause, 1955), Ray’s films of that period were all set in the same locale: a closed-in and buttoned-down America—hell with the lid on. Compared to In a Lonely Place, the co-billed Bogart hit The Treasure of the Sierra Madre exhibits more moral simplicity—it’s been called a fable. Bogart plays a bum called Dobbs stuck in the Mexican port town without a job, panhandling the same American (played by director/writer John Huston) over and over again. After being ripped off by a contractor, Dobbs meets a fasttalking prospector, Howard (Walter Huston), who has discovered Marx’s Labor Theory of Value on his own. Dobbs, the prospector, and a comra called Curtin (Tim Holt) comrade head into the Mexican mountains to fin nd a gold claim; up there, they learn about the peculiar poison of m that metal. The villain is one Alfonso Bedoya, G as a Gold Hat, a sly rapacious bandit. Bedoy haunted decades’ worth Bedoya Lat American studies theses. of Latin Alfon Arau, who did a pretty Alfonso good imitation of Bedoya’s kind of man in The Wild Bunch (what gringo director, beside Sam Peckinpah, liked Mexico as much as Huston did?), claims that Bedoya came from a village where there were mineral deposits in the water, and that when he got his teeth cleaned, he never worked in Hollywood again. But to call Gold Hat the villain is to misread the movie; bent by bad luck, Dobbs snaps in a lonely place on the side of a hill. Bogart, in the 1930s often a doomed mug, in the 1940s the smoothest of action men, acted his way through his last decade of life playing some of the most existentialist characters in the movies—homely, very male; moreover, human, all too human.
‘In a Lonely Place’ and ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ Saturday–Monday Stanford Theatre, Palo Alto
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metroactive FILM THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE/IN A LONELY PLACE
THE WARRIOR’S WAY
(1948/1950) See article on page 48. (Plays Dec 4-6 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.) (RvB)
(R; 100 min.) Jang Dong-gun and Kate Bosworth star in an action adventure set in the West with Eastern ďŹ ghters invading the Badlands. (Opens Fri.)
WHITE MATERIAL (Unrated; ) See review on page 50. (Opens Fri.)
Revivals THE BIG HEAT/THE SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR (1953/1947) Two by Fritz Lang. In The Big Heat, Glenn Ford is a cop whose wife is killed by a gangster: he turns in his badge and pursues the thug (Lee Marvin) by other means, with the help of the bad man’s girlfriend (Gloria Grahame). Indispensible viewing; this particularly evil, tough and polished ďŹ lm noir was scripted by ex–police reporter Sydney Boehm. BILLED WITH The Secret Beyond the Door. Michael Redgrave—the schizophrenic ventriloquist in Dead of Night—stars as a plutocrat with a peculiar hobby; he lures a lady (Joan Bennett of Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window) into marriage. Photographed by Stanley Cortez (The MagniďŹ cent Ambersons) and scored by Miklos Rozsa. Not available on American DVD. (Plays Dec 2-3 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.) (RvB)
Reviews 127 HOURS (R; 94 min.) 127 Hours is director Danny Boyle’s version of the truelife story of climber Aron Ralston. In spring 2003, Ralston was pinned under a half-ton boulder in a remote Utah canyon; what he did to survive became worldwide news. 127 Hours records an ordeal so singular, Poe couldn’t improve on it. Unfortunately, Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) tries to blow up the story’s elemental horror through pyrotechnics. He starts with a burst of relentless motion, as in his Trainspotting. Unfortunately, this ADD style has been thoroughly appropriated for sports-drink commercials. James Franco’s visceral acting in the service of this horror story probably should be praised, even if it’s not a pleasure to watch. One would have to be fairly simple-minded to think of this ghastly story as some kind of triumph of the human spirit. (RvB)
DUE DATE (R; 100 min.) Forced to drive from Georgia to Los Angeles, a pair of men try to get along. One is a deluded
INFRA-MAN (1976) “Six million light-years beyond believability! Is he man or machine? Electronic circuits integrated with living cells, in the living body of a man! Powered by nuclear energy! Thunderbolt ďŹ sts! Rocket feet!â€? Stan Brakhage–style light bursts complement this story of the atompowered hero in his quest to save the world from the planet of the Sid and Marty Kroft aliens. In 35 mm. (Plays Dec 3 at midnight in Campbell at Camera 7; free.) (RvB)
would-be actor named Ethan (Zach GaliďŹ anakis), a half-bright stoner bearing a lapdog. The other is a mean executive, Peter (Robert Downey Jr.), trying to get home to be there in time for his wife’s C-section. Uneven, in a word. Indeed, the movie is just as middling as it was when it was called Planes, Trains and Automobiles; it’s a road-trip movie with nowhere to go, emotionally speaking, and director Todd Phillips may not be as handy with the Laurel and Hardy dynamic as he was with the Three Stooges vibe in The Hangover. We get the postApatow method—extended improv may result in something you can keep; meanwhile, keep throwing up good comedians as if they were skeets. Not a total loss. Photographer Lawrence Sher provides some ďŹ ne landscapes and nightscapes, Downey explores some really deep rancor and Phillips demonstrates admirable comedic ruthlessness. (RvB)
FAIR GAME (PG-13; 108 min.) Doug Liman’s account of the felonious Valerie Plame business is a model of exciting, intelligent espionage lore. It’s shot with braced but uid camerawork.
Naomi Watts’ performance as Plame is one of the year’s best. In the short period between the Sept. 11 attacks and the Iraq invasion, members of the CIA ask the independent consultant Joseph Wilson (Sean Penn) to go to Niger to conďŹ rm conďŹ dential reports of uranium being sent to Saddam Hussein. Wilson quickly discovers there was no such shipment. In a Nixonian attempt to silence a whistleblower, high Bush administration ďŹ gures leak the name of Wilson’s wife, Victoria Plame, to columnist Robert Novak, a move that destroys her career and puts her operations in jeopardy. It’s hard for a ďŹ lm to be all things to all people. Fair Game’s script is less surefooted with the domestic drama than it is with the paranoid/political tale-telling. Penn gets to play a different kind of character: decidedly upper-class, peremptory and with little patience for fools. He gives one of his strongest and slyest performances, but he becomes mannered. (RvB)
FASTER (R; 98 min.) Not half bad, but that other half is real bad. It’s scripted by po-mo trashistas the Gayton brothers
(The Salton Sea) and directed with robust obviousness by George Tillman Jr. Duane “The Rockâ€? Johnson stars as “Driver,â€? a man just out of the joint after 10 years. He is loose in BakersďŹ eld hunting the people who killed his bro while being hunted in turn by a fey and yacky killer for hire (the whimsically cast Oliver JacksonCohen of Lark Rise to Candleford). Meanwhile, two cops, one of whom is smack-addicted (Billy Bob Thornton; excellent, actually) try to solve the case. Warden Tom Berenger’s farewell speech to the sizable convict (“When you met trouble you did not run away from it. It’s as if you were born to the darkness of this place.â€?) exempliďŹ es the ďŹ lm’s aspirations to reach high C over E, and is the ďŹ rst of several “Oh, no, they didn’t!â€? incidents in the script. The important spiritual statement of it all is mitigated by a roaring Chevelle and a rousing, all-backward getaway in the beginning: the best car chase I’ve seen in months. Fine Thelma Rittering by Annie Corley as Driver’s Mom. Most of the ďŹ lm is dominated by the ever-perplexed, physically inconceivable Rock himself: dwelling in some harmonious space beyond
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For showtimes, advance tix and more, go to
cameracinemas.com
Best Theaters -- SJ Merc, Metro & Wave Readers Always Plenty of Free Validated Parking All Sites Seniors & Kids $6.75 / Students $7.50 • * = No Passes $7 b4 6pm M-F / 4pm S-S, Holidays • = Final Week = Presented in Sony 4K Digital (C7 only) • Pruneyard/Campbell • 559-6900 • Pruneyard/Campbell • 559-6900
Limited D-BOX Seating Available!
HARRY POTTER 7 (Part 1) (PG-13) * TANGLED IN DISNEY DIGITAL 3D (PG) *BURLESQUE (R) *LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS (R) 127 HOURS (R) MORNING GLORY (PG-13) MEGAMIND in RealD 3D (PG)
NILES FILM MUSEUM
• 41 N. Santa Cruz • 395-0203
Regularly scheduled programs of silent movies. Dec 4: Human Hearts (1922). In the Ozarks, a young man (House Peters) faces temptation from a wanton city slicker (Edith Hallor). Plus shorts: Koko’s Field Days (1928), It’s a Gift (1923) with Snub Pollard— in which Pollard demonstrates the latest in magnet-powered automotive technology—and Air Pockets (1924) with Lige Conley (it was short for “Elijah�). Judy Rosenberg at the piano. (Plays Dec 4 at 7:30 in Fremont at the Edison Theater.) (RvB)
MORNING GLORY (PG-13) • 201 S. 2nd St, S.J. • 998-3300
HARRY POTTER 7 (Part 1) (PG-13)
Student Night Wednesdays -- $6 after 6pm *THE WARRIOR’S WAY (R) *TANGLED 3D (PG) THE NEXT 3 DAYS (PG-13) *LOVE & OTHER DRUGS (R) *BURLESQUE (PG-13) *FASTER (R) WAITING FOR SUPERMAN (PG) HARRY POTTER 7 (PG-13) DUE DATE (R) MORNING GLORY (PG-13) MEGAMIND (PG) COLORED GIRLS (PG-13) UNSTOPPABLE (PG-13)
• 288 S. Second, S.J. • 998-3300 *WHITE MATERIAL (NR) INSIDE JOB (PG-13) GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST (R) OPENS 12/10! THE TOURIST BLACK SWAN
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M E T R OAC T I V E . C O M | SA N J O S E . C O M | D E C E M B E R 1 -7, 2 0 1 0 | M E TR O S I L I C O N VA L L E Y
An IFC Films Release
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REVIEW
metroactive FILM seriousness and humor, beyond irony or moral importance. (RvB)
HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS
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A Problem Like Maria DIRECTOR Claire Denis (35 Shots of Rum) creates a situation in which it would be easy to take an either/or opinion—and then she gradually complicates it. At first, White Material seems to be a story about a blinkered French colonialist who can’t tell that the country around her is on fire, even after the army has pulled out. Conversely, we may be watching a smarter, smaller-scale Out of Africa. And we’re meant to applaud a courageous woman risking everything to hang on to her property, a coffee plantation somewhere in Francophone Africa. Surrounded by violence, decay and lassitude, Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) is trying to bring in the crop. The unnamed country around her (Denis shot in Cameroon) is up in arms. Most of the men around her are ill or worthless. Maria’s son, Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), is a day sleeper with tattoos, and a serious fool: the worst kind, who goes straight from inaction to overreaction. Christopher Lambert plays her ex-husband: yesterday’s glamour-puss is today’s satiated tomcat. Maria’s ex-father-in-law, the patriarch who lives on the premises, is dying slowly. Meanwhile, the noblest-looking man in the film, a revolutionary known as “The Boxer” (Isaach De Bankolé), is being hunted down; mortally wounded, he takes refuge on Maria’s farm because he’s the nephew of the foreman. Denis scrambles the time sequence with flashbacks and flash-forwards, to upset the flow of action and consequence. It’s impossible to form an opinion about
the rebellion and that’s exactly what the filmmakers had in mind. There are dropped hints about what the director or screenwriter thinks (the script is by the celebrated French writer Marie NDiaye). Maria says she stays in Africa because she has no way to prove her bravery back in France—a statement so vibrantly insane that one swallows it fast before considering its N_`k\ madness. The boy rebels and DXk\i`Xc the uniformed government Unrated; soldiers profess the same 106 min. aim: getting the colonialists out. We hear a chorus to this Opens Friday film’s Greek tragedy in the form of radio broadcasts, made by a calm reggae fancier who is urging the populace to loot (“and don’t be gentle”). He’s replaced by a government soldier who says the same thing in different words. The ageless, ever-ambiguous Huppert is beautifully posed. In one dream sequence, she smokes marijuana, her hair fanned on a embroidered pillow, as she has her son’s fortune told. (The strange fortune comes true, with the all brutality of a prophecy in a folktale.) Denis displays great skill with startling images: black survival kits falling out of a helicopter like animal droppings; a goat’s severed head emerging from a basket of cherry-red coffee berries; Huppert, as pale as milk and thin as a wire, clinging to the back of an overcrowded jitney. —Richard von Busack
(PG-13; 146 min.) A second Battle of Britain has broken out between the mortals and the wizards; the Hogwarts alumni (Rupert Grint, Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe) flee through a blitzed-out land. Unfortunately, the single most flabbergasting part comes early on: an armada on broomsticks breaking through the cloud ceiling, straight into a dogfight of death-eaters. In the middle, the trio hides in the countryside amid blasted heaths and burned-out trailers, and things start to resemble Twilight before the film gets on its feet again. The startling Balinese-style puppet animation of the title’s fable is a highlight of the series. Grint, the clumsy/suave best pal Ron Weasley, seems to be growing into another Malcolm McDowell. Our beautiful Snape (Alan Rickman) towers over his evil cohort. Helena Bonham Carter is almost as nasty as Margaret Hamilton. (RvB)
INSIDE JOB (PG-13; 108 min.) More nauseating than Jackass: it’s a whirlwind tour through the economic rubble of 30 years of deregulation of banks and financial institutions. Charles Ferguson’s enraging documentary discovers that the famous revolving door turns 360 degrees; grossly overpaid gamblers from Goldman Sachs and elsewhere are returned to government offices they left for Wall Street. Some of these spoilsmen go to formerly honorable Ivy League institutions, there to legitimize the kind of fiscal policies that made
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them superrich. Few have regrets, but some have anger at being asked impertinent questions about ethics by a lowly submillionaire with a camera. Inside Job records a nonpartisan disgrace. One of the prime disappointments of the Obama administration is the way he found work for the familiar rogues from the Meltdown of ’08. Ferguson asks great questions. Don’t expect a lot of great answers about how a glorified Ponzi scheme left most of America either overworked or unemployed, heavily in debt and a few millimeters away from homelessness. (RvB)
LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS (R; 113 min.) Pseudo-sophisticated romance by Edward Zwick, loosely adapted from Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman by Jamie Reidy. In the 1990s, a breezy Pittsburghbased pharma-salesman (Jake Gyllenhaal) and a free-spirited lady (Anne Hathaway) meet in a doctor’s office. A hot yet hostile relationship breaks out. But Jamie quickly diagnoses what’s eating Maggie: she has stage one Parkinson’s and is determined to have a reckless good time while her body holds out. Hathaway could have carried this as light comedy, but she comes on furious and knocks this unsteady movie flat. And she’s not a sweeping force meeting an equal, opposite reaction in Gyllenhaal, who is about as deep as Jason Biggs from the American Pie movies. The official use of the Pfizer name here tells us the filmmakers are not going to be all that harsh on Big Pharma. Under the direction of the nice guy who created Thirtysomething, it carries the kind of happy ending you’d need a happiness drug to accept. (RvB)
51 (PG; 96 min.) Rivals from the moment their planets were destroyed and they were sent to Earth, Megamind (Will Ferrell) and Metro Man (Brad Pitt) have competed in the usual battle of good vs. evil in the new animated ďŹ lm Megamind. The movie has an enjoyable twist when Metro Man is eliminated, and Megamind is left to rampage Metro City with his best friend, Minion (David Cross). Following the unconventional yet delightful storyline, Megamind seeks to ďŹ ll his boredom of having no one to ďŹ ght by creating a new good superhero, Tighten (Jonah Hill). However, Tighten has other plans; he intends to use his newly acquired laser vision, superstrength and ability to y for his own interests. Megamind, Metro Man and even Tighten all have their sights on Roxanne Ritchi (Tina Fey), a newswoman in the Lois Lane mold.
Ferrell and Pitt should have given Fey and Hill lessons on ways to alter their voices, because it took me out of the movie when their characters were onscreen sounding like their real-life selves. The themes—never taking things for granted and being careful about what you wish for—offer lessons for people of all ages. Megamind also touches on the subject of not judging a book by its blue, alien cover. Expected to be evil his whole life, Megamind ends up ďŹ ghting for good in order to save the city from Tighten. (Shiva Zahirfar)
MORNING GLORY (PG-13; 102 min.) The forced nervous energy and desperate eagerness to please of the wakey-wakey TV show is evident. Chirpy Becky (Rachel McAdams) is on her way up as the producer of a despondent morning news show, essentially fourth-
ranked in a ďŹ eld of three networks. Becky takes a celebrated but now languishing former anchorman, Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford), and partners him with the current AM show host, Colleen (Diane Keaton). Colleen knows Pomeroy of old, and she loathes him. As Pomeroy, Ford is a very amusing grumpus—a newsman frozen in distaste for the parade of exotic animals, cooking tips and celebrity chat. Ford and Keaton have a comedic rapport that’s like an elegant version of the “Jane, you ignorant slutâ€? routine between Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin in ancient episodes of SNL. The ďŹ lm has terminal third-act problems, the kind that force a trip into suddendeath overtime, just to reassure us that Becky has a choice in her career. (RvB)
2008 French thriller Pour Elle (Anything for Her), The Next Three Days centers on John Brennan (Russell Crowe), a college professor happily married to Lara (Elizabeth Banks). Brennan’s seemingly idyllic existence gets turned upside down when Lara is arrested for the murder of her boss. Circumstantial evidence strongly suggests Lara’s guilt. After three years
and unsuccessful appeals, Brennan decides there’s only one alternative left: breaking Lara out of prison. Despite the sermon-ready subject matter, The Next Three Days doesn’t feel like a movie-with-a-message for most of its two-hour running time. Director Paul Haggis proves that he
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“ “ � �
THE NEXT THREE DAYS (PG-13) A remake of Fred CavayÊ’s
For a chance to win a pass, good for two, to see
at a special advance screening in San Jose Thursday, December 9, send your name and mailing address to SJPromos@metronews.com A FILM
AND PRESENT IN ASSOCIATION WITH A AND PRODUCTION IN ASSOCIATION WITH COSTUME CASTINGBY MUSICBY DESIGNER EDITORS , A.C.E. PRODUCTION DIRECTOR OF EXECUTIVE DESIGNER PHOTOGRAPHY , ASC, ACS PRODUCERS PRODUCED BY
DIRECTED SCREENPLAY BY AND C AND BY
with subject line: THE TOURIST Passes are limited and will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis, while supplies last. This film is rated PG-13. Theatre is overbooked to ensure a full house. Passes received through this promotion do not guarantee admission and must be surrendered upon demand. Seating is on a first come, first served basis. EXCEPT FOR MEMBERS OF THE REVIEWING PRESS. No one will be admitted without a ticket or after the screening begins. All federal, state and local regulations apply. A recipient of tickets assumes any and all risks related to use of ticket and accepts any restrictions required by ticket provider. Columbia Pictures, SJ Metro, and their affiliates accept no responsibility or liability in connection with any loss or accident incurred in connection with use of a prize. Tickets cannot be exchanged, transferred or redeemed for cash, in whole or in part. We are not responsible if, for any reason, winner is unable to use his/her ticket in whole or in part. Not responsible for lost; delayed or misdirected entries. All federal and local taxes are the responsibility of the winner. Void where prohibited by law. No purchase necessary. Participating sponsors their employees and family members and their agencies are not eligible. NO PHONE CALLS!
IN THEATRES FRIDAY, DECEMBER 10
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BLOW YOU AWAY.
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SCREEN GEMS PRESENTS A DE LINE PICTURES PRODUCTION A FILM BY STEVEN ANTIN CHER CHRISTINA AGUILERA “BURLESQUE� ERIC DANE CAM GIGANDET JULIMUSICANNE HOUGH ALAN CUMMING PETER GALLAGHER WITH KRISTEN BELL AND STANLEY TUCCI SUPERVISOR BUCK DAMON MUSIC EXECUTIVE PRODUCED BY CHRISTOPHE BECK PRODUCERS STACY KOLKER CRAMER RISA SHAPIRO BY DONALD DE LINE WRITTEN AND STEVEN ANTI N DIRECTED BY CHECK LOCAL LISTINGS FOR THEATERS AND SHOWTIMES
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MEGAMIND
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c direct tense, suspenseful action can sscenes. Unfortunately, Haggis chooses cclarity over ambiguity, a closed ending instead of an open ending. (Mel in Valentin) V
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Two Kinds of Kisses DIRECTED BY Ireland’s Lance Daly, Kisses (2008), now out on DVD, might be sold on the same shelf as Once. But this tale of young runaways in Dublin is much sharper in music, sentiment, tempo, locations, use of space and, most importantly, humor. Eleven-year-sold Dylan (Shane Curry) and the slightly older Kylie (Kelly O’Neill) are next-door neighbors in a part of Ireland one would prefer to drive through at 65 mph. Kylie has some pound notes stashed in her shoe, and she and Dylan hitch a ride to Dublin on a barge. In the city, they spend all their money on new clothes and candy, and end up at night without food or shelter. Daly makes this adventure impressionistic, with a focus on the kids’ faces and the city they discover. During their trek, the two runaways are guided by a suite of songs by Bob Dylan. Daly uses the Jim Sheridan trope of always having the nicest people in the ďŹ lm be immigrants, such as the friendly foreign barge operator or the West Indian lady who gives the ďŹ lm its title. Still, all told, Kisses is a winner, a smart, sweet ďŹ lm with gentleness that never devolves into mere softness. Extras on the DVD—another winning release by this discerning New York indie distribution company—include a commentary track by the kids, and a profane yet adorable outtake reel. In Score Uncensored (1972), four jaded Americans take a sexual holiday in this
ďŹ lm by Radley Metzger, a declared (and worthy) disciple of Michael Powell and a director praised by Warhol and The New York Times’ Vincent Canby alike. It’s shot in the ancient village of Bakar on the Croatian coast, standing in for the more expensive French Riviera. Derived from a play that owes a debt to Who’s Afraid of Virginia B`jj\j Woolf?, it’s an aesthetic Oscilloscope masterpiece of slightly hardLaboratories; core but mostly soft-core $29.99 bisexual erotica. How to put it? Thanks to Metzer’s crafty JZfi\ lens work and penchant for LeZ\ejfi\[ mirrors, you end up thinking Cult Epics; you’re seeing a lot more than $29.95 you’re actually seeing. In the Sandy Dennis part is Lynn Lowry, the actress you’d want for a live-action version of Bambi; the other, more predatory wife is the heavy-lidded Claire Wilbur, a sort of female Frank Langella. Gay-porn icon Casey Donovan (under his real name Calvin Culver) shows a little of what made him renowned. Sometimes one thinks of erotic ďŹ lmmaking as one more example of ’60s idealism, crushed under economic realities and lowest-common-denominator appeal. Score, shot beautifully in its singular location, breaking its genre’s rules, seems to come from another universe. Extras include a commentary track by Metzger and Michael Bowen, as well as an on-camera interview by Lowry.—Richard von Busack
( 92 min.) Directors Nathan Greno (PG; aand Byron Howard stress the most rresonant interpretation of the tale: Rapunzel as a myth for all parts of R tthe world where girls aren’t allowed tto run free. The imprisoning witch Gothel is a curvy villainess feeding on G tthe youth and hopes of the girl whom sshe imprisons. Remodeled as a Disney pprincess (voiced by Mandy Moore), tthis Rapunzel is freed by a rakish yyoung thief. Third-act developments ttake the plot into a different rresolution than the Brothers Grimm ccharted, adding to the surprise of the ccartoon. You can see the inuences aand salute them as they pass: the aantique charm of 3D Viewmaster fairy-tale slides, Romanian villages, fa Utah’s Canyonlands, the oating U lanterns of the Japanese Obon festival; la tthe block-headed yobs at the Snuggly Ducky tavern look as if they modeled D ffor Britain’s Spitting Image. As for
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actual hero Maximus the horse, there hasn’t been such a hilarious steed since Chuck Jones died. (RvB)
UNSTOPPABLE (PG-13) Only Tony Scott would het up a runaway train movie, a subject het up enough on its own. In Unstoppable, old dog (Denzel Washington) and young pup (Chris Pine) race a single engine to catch up with an unmanned train heading for catastrophe; news helicopters buzz around the runaway train as it speeds down the track. Scott crowds the location changes with captions, including my new alltime favorite: “Zinc Plant, Southern Pennsylvania.â€? Pennsylvania in the full Amazonian green-hell of summer would be a perfect background for a hell-bound train, but this is forlorn, waning fall. Computer animation allows the bad train into something able to do things trains can’t ordinarily do, like dance sideways on the rails. This impedes the free enjoyment of the heavy-machinery porn, something Scott usually does very well. Every Scott ďŹ lm is heavy on the exclamation points, but this one is as worn out as America’s rail infrastructure. (RvB)
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Writing on ‘The Wall’ IN NT THE EF FLESH Roger Waters rebuilds ‘The Wall’ at HP Pavilion Dec. 7–8.
R Rogers Waters Waters’’ re-creation of Pink Floyd’s most famous tour may cement his legacy for good By STEVE PALOPOLI
I
N Noah Baumbach’s 2005 film The Squid and the Whale, 16-year-old Walt Berkman plays “Hey You,” from Pink Floyd’s album The Wall, for his parents, telling them that he wrote it. They believe him.
But that’s not the end of it. He enters a school talent show, again claiming the song as his own. We’re never told exactly why he does this—perhaps he’s acting out over his parents’ divorce, or fearful of never escaping the shadow of his father’s success. Who cares, the crazy part is that he wins. We’re expected to believe that no one involved—not his family or his friends, nor anyone running the talent show—would
know a song from an album that has gone platinum 23 times over. And the worst part: We actually do believe it. There’s just something about the way The Wall fell off the cultural map for so many years that makes it seem remotely possible. A gold standard of headphone-listening cool after its release in 1979, and then a midnight-movie staple when the film adaptation was released in 1982, The Wall—like everything else about Pink Floyd—eventually became the height of uncool. Through the ’90s, the album and the film were widely written off as cynical musical masturbation from an out-of-touch rock dinosaur. That dinosaur? Roger Waters— back then, at least. But over the course of the last decade, Pink Floyd’s reputation has skyrocketed, their music recognized once again for its far-reaching influence. A few years ago, I wrote an article about
how Floyd was becoming cool again, and the trend has only continued. Waters’ new tour re-creating the original spectacle of The Wall live is starting to look like a victory lap.=
A Brief History of Pink Perhaps the grumpiest man in the history of rock, Waters is best known as the driving creative force behind the best years of Pink Floyd. Sure, we all have a soft spot for original Floyd leader Syd Barrett, but thanks to his overly romanticized and totally tragic descent into madness, we’ll never know if he had more than one genius album in him. And I wouldn’t call David Gilmour untalented, but he was always better as Waters’ creative foil. Once they split in the mid-’80s, with Gilmour carrying on the band, Pink Floyd actually became the bloated, bland rock dinosaur it was accused of being. What kept it from becoming that for all those years was Waters’ uncompromising and brutal creative nature. Through The Dark Side of the Moon, Animals, Wish You Were Here, The Wall and even the much-maligned The Final Cut, Waters oversaw the construction of epic rock manifestos
that definitively defined the album format. His music could be pompous, depressing and excessive, but it also spoke to almost anyone willing to slip on a pair of headphones and give a listen to Waters’ bitter assaults on the darkest impulses and weaknesses of the human condition. For better or worse, The Wall has become his personal rock legacy, partially because there has never been an album like it before or since, and partially because it was so freaking gigantic in its scope and execution that it continues to bowl over new listeners seeking an escape from songs about girls, cars and ice-cold beer. The original 1980 tour for the album is legendary; with its huge inflatables, intricate plot and an actual 40-foot wall built between the band and the audience, it was like nothing anyone had ever seen. It was also too ambitious for its own good, somehow lo losing more than half a million dollars de despite the fact that the album was at th the top of the Billboard charts for 15 w weeks and ended up selling 11 million cop copies. Waters swore never tto perform The Wall again until the Berlin Wall came down, and when iit did, he embarked on an equally oversize and far more profitable 1990 tour that was unfortunately watered down by its cast of guest singers (Bryan Adams doing “Young Lust”? Really?). Waters’ solo work has never gotten its due (his masterpiece Amused to Death is probably a better album than The Wall), and despite having been an ex-Floyd for 25 years, he can’t seem to leave The Wall behind. With the album having been covered at this point in styles from rock to bluegrass to electro, he seems to have accepted—perhaps even embraced—that despite the ups and downs in its cool factor, it’s not going away. And perhaps after this newest tour, we may finally be able to watch the talent show scene in The Squid and the Whale and know for sure that that could never happen.
ROGER WATERS ‘The Wall’ Tuesday, Dec. 7, and Wednesday, Dec. 8, 8pm HP Pavilion, San Jose $58.50–$253.50
More listings:
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FEATURED LISTINGS
So Timeless Thursday, 8pm, Mountain Charley’s, Los Gatos; $5 Thanks in part to the sudden ascension of Fitz and the Tantrums (mainstream TV commercials? Didn’t see that comin’!), soul music is experiencing a revival (though of course it never really goes out of style). That’s good news for two excellent bands that have been taking point for the retro-R&B invasion in the South Bay, So Timeless and Almost Honest, who share a bill tonight. (SP)
Takacs Quartet Friday, 8pm, Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Palo Alto; $48–$56 Moving from Budapest to Colorado has got to be a hell of a culture shock, but the four original members of this string quartet did it almost 30 years ago, after their first tour of the U.S. Why they picked a frostbitten state that didn’t even have South Park yet, we may never know, but after a couple of lineup changes, they continue to find acclaim around the world, including a 2003 Grammy for Best Chamber Music performance and an award earlier this year from the University of Colorado. Karma! (SP)
Taylor Eigsti Trio Sunday, 7pm, Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga; $40/$45 Pianist and Menlo Park native Taylor Eigsti got some lucky breaks at an early age, playing with David Benoit when he was 8 freakin’ years old. By 12, he was practically a vet, opening for the likes of Diana Krall and Al Jarreau. He parlayed those early opportunities into jazz fame with the incredible energy of his playing and sheer unpredictability of his improvisation. (SP)
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Rock/Pop ANGELICA’S BISTRO Sat, 8:30pm: High n’ Tight. $50. Redwood City.
AVALON Fri: Rob Base, old-school party. Santa Clara.
THE BLANK CLUB Sat, 9pm: Dick Dale acoustic set, plus Fascinating Creatures of the Deep. $20. San Jose.
BOSWELL’S Wed: Jack Rip Off. Mon: Drive! Campbell.
BRITANNIA ARMS ALMADEN Thu, 10pm: After party. Fri, 10pm: Metal Shop. Sat, 10pm: Mad Karma. San Jose.
BLINKY’S CAN’T SAY Sat, 9:30pm-1:30am: 4-Trak Band, rock and blues. Free. Santa Clara.
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9pm: Barb Rocks presents Flexx Bronco CD release show with Silent Treatment, Jonny Manak and the Depressives and more. Cupertino.
CAFFE TRIESTE Sat, 8pm: La Verita, Dirty Pillows, the Record Winter. San Jose.
CAPERS Fri-Sat: Live music. Campbell.
FIREHOUSE BREWERY
BRITANNIA ARMS CUPERTINO
Fri: Jeff Hinkin. Sunnyvale.
Thu, 6pm: Afton presents live bands in all-ages show. Fri, 9pm: Dave Abbott band, proceeds for Toys 4 Tots. Sat,
Fri: Punk show with Stand Fight Resist. San Jose.
JOHNNY V’S
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metroactive MUSIC 55 MOUNTAIN CHARLEY’S Thu, 8pm: Almost Honest. $5. Los Gatos.
NICKEL CITY Fri, 6pm: Till I Fall, Era Escape, the Monterey Jacks, Ilikeyou. Fri, 6pm: The Revolting Mental Disaster, the Druids. San Jose.
NUMBER ONE BROADWAY
More listings:
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PARRANDA NIGHTCLUB
WOODHAM’S LOUNGE
Thu-Sat: Live music. Sunnyvale.
RISTORANTE FRATELLO
Fri and Sun: Pro Jam with rock and blues local musicians. Santa Clara.
Fri, 7pm: Claudio, Italian classical guitar and vocals. San Jose.
C&W/Folk
SENZALA Fri, 7:30pm: Capoeira show. Fri, 9pm: Leo Brasil and Wallace. $10. Sunnyvale.
CAFFE TRIESTE Fri, 8pm: Opera Night with Mission City Opera. San Jose.
Thu: Second Story Band. Fri, 9:30pm: Joint Chiefs. $10. Sat, 9:30pm: Jam Funkshus. $10. Los Gatos.
Jazz/Blues
THE GRAPEVINE
ANGELICA’S BISTRO
QUARTER NOTE
Fri, 8:30pm: The Hat. $10. Redwood City.
MISSION CITY COFFEE ROASTING
Wed-Thu, 8:30pm: Pro Jam. Fri, 8:30pm: Humdaddyz with Ron Beck, Dave Gonzales, Tony Macaroni. $10. Sat, 8:30pm: ESB, Ashley Nicole, Preaching to the Animals. $8. Sunnyvale.
VOODOO LOUNGE Thu, 9pm: J Boog Servants, Mago Kings. $45/$0. Fri, 9pm: Drunk Injuns. $5/$10. Sun, 9pm: Bring It Back Tour. $10. San Jose.
World ALBERTO’S Wed: Bachata. Thu: Pantea. Fri: Salsa. Sat: Sabados Latinoamericanos. Sun-Mon: Argentine Tango. Tue: Pantea. Mountain View.
ANGELICA’S BISTRO Thu, 7:30pm: Molly’s Revenge and Moira Smiley. $18/$20. Redwood City.
ARYA GLOBAL CUISINE Fri-Sat, 8pm: Live music and belly dancing. Cupertino.
BRITANNIA ARMS CUPERTINO Sun, 5:30pm: Jazz Jam. Cupertino.
CLUB FOX
Tue, 7:30pm. Irish music. Mountain View.
Sat: VW Brothers. Morgan Hill.
FAIRMONT HOTEL Wed, 8:30pm: The Girlz Band. Thu, 8:30pm: Contemporary or Latin Jazz. Fri-Sat, 9pm: Jazz and Pop Dance Bands. MonTue: Piano Music. Fairmont Hotel, San Jose.
HEDLEY CLUB Wed, 7:30pm: Hedley Club Jazz Jam. Thu, 8pm: Russo Alberts Trio. Hotel de Anza, San Jose.
J.J.’S BLUES CAFE Live blues nightly. San Jose.
LOFT BAR AND BISTRO Thu, 7pm: Live jazz. San Jose.
MURPHY’S LAW POOR HOUSE BISTRO
Fri: Floyd’s Ordeal. Sat: Holiday celebration. Tue: Irish dancing. Sunnyvale.
MOROCCO’S RESTAURANT Wed, 6pm: Flamenco Fri, 6pm: Ambient lounge music and belly dancing. Free. Sat, 6pm: Vic Morago. Sun, 6pm: Moroccan music. Mon: French Music Night. San Jose.
Sat: Tara Priya. Mountain View.
D’VINE JAZZ AND WINE
Mon: Pro blues jam. Sunnyvale.
LILLY MAC’S
RED ROCK COFFEE ROASTING STEPHENS GREEN
Fri-Sat and Tue, 9pm: Live music with Son de Kali and Orquesta Saboricua. San Jose. Thu, 9pm: Kaweh. Sat, 8:30pm: James Robinson. Mountain View.
Fri, 7pm: Bay Area songwriters with Leanne Weatherly, Rick Glaze and Wendy Waller. Sat, 7:30pm: Sad but True Christmas concert. Santa Clara.
Wed, 7pm: Steve Freund, Club Fox Blues Band. Redwood City.
AZUCAR
CASCAL
Thu, 7pm: Daemon City Lights and Peter Chung. Willow Glen.
Wed, 6pm: Ron Thompson. Thu, 6pm: Lara Price and Yesterdays. Fri, 6pm: Dave Workman Band with John Tucker. Sat, 6pm: Kicking the Mule with Freddie Hughes. Sun, noon-4pm: Wall Schnalle Jazz Trio and student drum performance. San Jose.
THREE FLAMES RESTAURANT Sun, 6pm: Touch ‘N Go. Willow Glen.
UNWINED Thu, 7pm: Randy Whiting and @ Jazz. Sat, 7-9:30pm: Jazz Night. San Jose.
SAM’S BBQ Wed, 6pm: Sidesaddle and Co. Tue, 6pm: Bean Creek. San Jose.
THREE FLAMES RESTAURANT Thu, 9pm: Live country music with Cowboy Larry. Willow Glen.
Open Mic ANGELICA’S BISTRO Wed, 6:30pm: Open Mic. Tue, 7: Pro Jazz Jam. Redwood City.
BAREFOOT COFFEE ROASTERS Wed, 7pm: Musical open mic. Sign up by 5pm. Santa Clara.
BRITANNIA ARMS CUPERTINO Wed, 9:30pm: Open Mic Night. Cupertino.
MISSION CITY ROASTING CO. Thu, 7pm, and Sat, 7pm: South Bay Folks Open Mic. Santa Clara.
MOUNTAIN CHARLIE’S Wed, 8-11pm: Live music, comedy and poetry. Los Gatos.
RED ROCK COFFEE CO. Fri, 8pm: Highway Christmas Open Mic. Mon, 7pm: Cavin and King. Mountain View.
THREE FLAMES Wed, 8pm: Open Mic. Willow Glen.
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CONCERT
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Triple Ho Show MOVIN’ 99.7 FM’s big show is a lucky break for hip-hop fans who missed Nelly at WET a couple of weeks ago. It’s been almost 10 years since “Hot in Herre” was Wednesday, 6:30pm making it hot in pretty much every club in the country. That was when Nelly officially “made SJSU Event Center, it” as a pop-culture superstar—in other words, he San Jose had his song parodied by Weird Al Yankovic. Since then, he’s been up and down with his little-bitcountry sound, but moved enough butts and units to make him the third most successful act of the decade. His latest hit is “Just a Dream” from the brand-new 5.0 album. He returns to the South Bay as part of a lineup that also includes Far East Movement, Taio Cruz, Enrique Iglesias, Miranda Cosgrove and Jay Sean. —Steve Palopoli
Karaoke 7 BAMBOO Wed-Sat, 9pm: Karaoke. Tue, 9pm: Karaoke. San Jose.
BLUE BONNET BAR Wed-Thu and Mon, 8pm: Karaoke. No cover. Sunnyvale.
BLUE MAX Fri-Sat, 9pm-1:30am: Karaoke. Sunnyvale.
BLUE PHEASANT Tue, 7pm: Steve Tiger. Cupertino.
ALEX’S 49ER INN
Wed and Sun, 10pm: DJ Hank. San Jose.
BRITANNIA ARMS CUPERTINO Sun-Tue, 10pm: Karaoke. Cupertino.
BRITANNIA ARMS SAN JOSE Wed, 9pm: August. Sun, 9pm: Karaoke. San Jose.
BRITISH BANKERS CLUB
Nightly except Sun, 9pm-2am: Karaoke. San Jose.
Mon, 9:30pm: Karaoke. Menlo Park.
THE BEARS
C&J’S SPORTS BAR
Fri, 9pm: Ryan. San Jose.
BENNIGAN’S GRILL
BRITANNIA ARMS ALMADEN
BOGART’S LOUNGE
Sat, 9pm: August. Santa Clara.
Wed, Fri and Sun, 8pm-2am: Karaoke. Sunnyvale.
BLINKY’S CAN’T SAY
BOSWELL’S
Fri, 9pm-1am: Danielle. Santa Clara.
Tue: DJ Davey K. Campbell.
Thu, 10pm: Melissa and Heather. Santa Clara.
CREEKSIDE LOUNGE Wed and Mon-Tue: Stephanie.
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1011 PACIFIC AVE. SANTA CRUZ 831-423-1336 Thu., Dec. 2 In the Atrium ALL AGES POPULATION 5 $8 Adv./$10 Drs. ($8 w/Student ID) • Doors 8:30/ Show 9 p.m.
-YPKH` +LJ AGES 16+ Vital SC welcomes
ZEDS DEAD
plus Vaski/ Mark Instinct $20 in advance • Drs. 8 p.m./ Show 8 p.m. Friday, December 3 In the Atrium AGES 21+
FRIDAY NIGHT FUNCTION
DJ Aspect. DJ Tone Sol, Nima Fadavi plus MONTEREY BAY FIGHT CLUB presents
MMA RING GIRL CONTEST
$7 Drs. • 9 p.m./ 9 p.m.
Saturday, Dec. 4 AGES 21+ KPIG Humbug Hoedown
Elvin Bishop & Band
$16 Adv./$19 Drs. • Doors 6:30 p.m., Show 7:30 p.m. Saturday, December 4 In the Atrium AGES 21+
CANDYE KANE
$10 Adv./$14 Drs. • 8:30/ 9 p.m.
Sunday, December 5 In the Atrium AGES 16+
THE VANDALS plus Versus the World
also Assorted Jellybeans
$12 Adv./$15 Drs. • 8:30/ 9 p.m.
Tuesday, December 7 In the Atrium AGES 21+
RASTA CRUZ REGGAE TUESDAYZ
with DJs
Don-ette & Lion-S
+ weekly guest DJs Models/Dancers
NO COVER B4 10PM • Ladies Free/Guys $5 after 10PM • Show 9 p.m.
Dec 10 & 11 Expendables (Ages 16+) Dec 11 Departure (A Tribute to Journey) Atrium (Ages 21+) Dec 14 Rasta Cruz Reggae Atrium (Ages 21+) Dec 17 Los Lobos (Ages 21+) Dec 31 SambaDá (Ages 21+) Jan 7 Willie Nelson (Ages 21+) Jan 8 Vital SC: Diesel Boy (Ages 16+) Jan 28 Railroad Earth (Ages 16+) Feb 8 Badfish a Tribute to Sublime (Ages 16+) Feb 10 Trombone Shorty/Los Amigos Invisibles (Ages 21+) Feb 22 Less Than Jake (Ages 16+) The
Unless otherwise noted, all shows are dance shows with limited seating. Tickets subject to city tax & service charge by phone 866-384-3060 & online
www.catalystclub.com
metroactive MUSIC Thu and Sat: Randy. Fri: Jerry Sauceda. San Jose.
DAN BROWN’S Thu and Tue, 9pm-1am: Brian James. Palo Alto.
DIVE BAR Wed and Tue, 9:30pm: Karaoke. San Jose.
SHOOTERS BAR & GRILL
DIVE BAR
Thu, 9:30pm-1:30am: Karaoke. Sunnyvale.
Thu, 9:30pm: DJ Otrebor. Fri, 9:30pm: DJ Otrebor. Sun, 310pm: DJ Venom 347 and guest DJs. San Jose.
SOUTH FIRST BILLIARDS Sun: Karaoke. San Jose.
WILLOW DEN Wed, 9:30pm: Thomas. San Jose
Wed: Sin. Fri: Altrasound. Sat: Club FM and Wild Wild West Party. Sunnyvale.
Thu, 8pm: Karaoke. San Jose. Wed-Sat and Tue: Uncle Dougie Show. No cover. San Jose.
GALAXY Thu, 9pm-2am: August. Milpitas.
WOODHAM’S LOUNGE Wed-Thu, Sat-Sun, Tue: 9:30pm: Vinnie. Santa Clara.
Dance Clubs AGENDA Wed, 8pm: Salsa Wednesdays. Fri: The Workout. Sat: First Saturday Champagne Life. Sun: Reggae. San Jose.
AVALON THE GOOSETOWN LOUNGE
Fri: Bay Area Bollywood. Santa Clara.
Fri-Sun, 9:30pm-1:30am: Karaoke. Willow Glen.
AZUCAR
GOOSE LOONEY’S BLANK CLUB Thu, 9pm: Atomic, DJ Basura. San Jose.
KATIE BLOOM’S Sun, 9:30pm-1:30am: Karaoke. Campbell.
KHARTOUM Thu, 9pm: DJ Davey K. No cover. Campbell.
BRANHAM LOUNGE Wed: Humpday Wednesdays. Thu: DJ. Fri: Ladies Night. Sat: DJ Jazzy and DJ Chaos. Sun: Happy Hour All Day. San Jose.
SAN JOSE BAR & GRILL Tue, 10pm-close: Kamikaze Karaoke. San Jose.
SHERWOOD INN Wed and Sat-Sun, 8:30pm: Chris. Thu-Fri, 8:30pm: Thomas. San Jose.
Fri: Gothic night. San Jose.
MOUNTAIN CHARLEY’S Wed, 7pm: House Party. Thu, 7pm: Throwback Thursdays. Los Gatos. Thu, 8pm: DJ Akustik. No cover. Fri, 8pm: DJ Mayo. Sat, 8pm: DJ Mayo and DJ Akustik. Sun, 7pm: Latin Beat. Sun, 9pm: Sonidero Night. With local DJs spinning salsa, cumbia and more. Sunnyvale.
PEACOCK LOUNGE Fri, 8pm: DJ, R&B, Top 40. Sat, 9pm: DJ, Chill, R&B, Top 40. Sun and Tue, 9pm: DJ. Sunnyvale.
STEPHENS GREEN
PEACOCK LOUNGE
Tue, 8:30-11:30pm: Karaoke. No cover. Santana Row.
JOHHNY V’S
Sun: Reggae. San Jose.
Thu: Singles party. Los Gatos.
ROSIE MCCANN’S
Thu-Sat, 9:30pm-1:30am: DJs and dancing. Campbell.
SABOR TAPAS BAR
NUMBER ONE BROADWAY
Tue, 9pm: Sherrie and Sue. No cover. Sunnyvale.
KATIE BLOOM’S
Sat: Perfecto, DJ Spryte. San Jose.
Thu, 9pm: DJ. Sunnyvale.
QUARTER NOTE
Thu: Ladies’ Night. Fri-Sat: Old School. Milpitas.
PEARL
LILLY MAC’S
Thu, 9pm: Brian. Sun, 9pm: DJ and karaoke. Tue, 9pm: Ryan. Sunnyvale.
GOOSE LOONEY’S
PARRANDA NIGHTCLUB Thu: DJ Che. San Jose.
Wed-Thu: August. Fri, 9pm: August. Sun: August. Milpitas.
Wed, 9pm: Reggae Riddims. Mon, 8pm: Monday Night Madness. Tue, 9pm: College Night. San Jose.
FIBBAR MAGEES
EL RANCHO SPORTS BAR FLAMES COFFEE SHOP
FAHRENHEIT ULTRA LOUNGE
Fri, 10pm: DJ Cesar. Sat, 10pm: Peruvian night. Mountain View.
BRITANNIA ARMS ALMADEN Wed and Sun, 10pm: DJ Hank. Mon, 9pm: Beer Pong. San Jose.
BRITANNIA ARMS DOWNTOWN Fri: DJ Check O. Sat: G Beats the Soulchild and Metrorock. San Jose.
BRITISH BANKERS CLUB Wed, 7:30pm: Blues. Thu: College Night. Menlo Park.
CLUB ILLUSIONS Fri: Fuz. Palo Alto.
TOON’S Wed: Beer pong with Armando. Thu: Clash of the DJ Santas. Fri: DJ Tito. Sat: Billboard countdown with DJ Bravo. Sun: Hip-hop showcase. Mon: Dance, pool, sing, fun. Tue: Lady Elves Night. San Jose.
VOODOO LOUNGE Sat, 10pm: First Saturdays dance club. $10. San Jose.
WET Fri: Jermaine Dupri. Sat: Mr. Choc. San Jose.
59 M E TR O S I L I C O N VA L L E Y | D E C E M B E R 1 -7, 2 0 1 0 | SA N J O S E . C O M | M E T R OAC T I V E . C O M T
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More listings:
METROACTIVE.COM
metroactive SVCLUBS
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@e pfli i\jgfej\ kf k_\ nfdXe n`k_ k_\ glYc`Zcp ^ifg\p Yfp]i`\e[# pfl [\\d\[ =i\eZ_ b`jj`e^ Xk X nfibgcXZ\ \m\ek `eXggifgi`Xk\ G;8% ?fn XYflk =i\eZ_ b`jj`e^ fe\Êj ^`ic]i`\e[ [li`e^ X g\i]fidXeZ\ f] ÇJkfdgÈ dlj`ZXc k_\Xk\i 6 K_\ nfdXe Y\_`e[ d\ k_Xk \m\e`e^ ^Xm\ d\ e\^Xk`m\ ]\\[YXZbÆn_`Z_ nXj f] ef `ek\i\jk kf d\% Dp kXb\ fe g\fgc\ glk f]] Yp G;8 `jeÊk `k i\Xccp fecp nfd\e6 `j k_Xk k_\`i [`j^ljk `j YXj\[ dfi\ `e \emp k_Xe jlg\i`fi [\Zfild% Jfd\fe\ i\XZk`e^ e\^Xk`m\cp kf j\\`e^ dp kfe^l\ ^f `ekf dp ^`ic]i`\e[Êj dflk_ `j jl]]\i`e^ Xk k_\`i fne [f`e^ÆY\ZXlj\ f] _fn k_\p gifZ\jj k_\`i n`ke\jj`e^ f] dp XZk`fej% @Ê[ cfm\ kf _\Xi k_\`i i\XZk`fe kf dp _Xm`e^ j\o `e X dfm`\ k_\Xk\i% :fd\ fe# n\ n\i\ `e k_\ YXZb ifn# Xe[ k_\ j\m\e g\fgc\ k_\i\ nflc[Êm\ _X[ kf klie k_\`i _\X[j (/' [\^i\\j kf j\\ Xepk_`e^% 9Xj`ZXccp# @ fne dp XZk`fej Xe[ @Êd Óe\ n`k_ k_\d% Fk_\ij e\\[ kf jkXik fne`e^ k_\`i i\XZk`fej# Xe[ pfl e\\[ kf jkfg gifdfk`e^ XiY`kiXip jkXe[Xi[j f] Y\_Xm`fi% ÆDp Knf :\ekj There’s public display of affection and there’s public display of foreplay. If you’re incapable of understanding the difference, let’s hope your name is Koko or Bongo, and you aren’t allowed out unsupervised from your cage in the primate exhibit at the zoo. Social standards for behavior aren’t arbitrary. There are minor variations across cultures, but do you think there’s a person in Japan, Belgium, or Saudi Arabia who thinks it’s OK to take off their shoe and bite their toenails at dinner? There’s private behavior and public behavior, and we’re all pretty clear on which is which. If ever you’re unsure about the polite thing to do, there’s a pretty simple guideline to go by. As I write in my book I See Rude People, at the root of manners is empathy (might your makeout session or your loud discussion of your loose stool make people around you seriously uncomfortable?). You have a very different standard: total disregard for anyone’s feelings but your feeling that you’d like to get your rocks off ASAP. And sure, maybe your cinema sex escaped notice by your fellow moviegoers, but if there’s a wet spot for the next audience to avoid, they’d like it to be a puddle of Pepsi One. Outrageous behavior is sometimes an exercise of free speech, like when a bunch of women go topless (typically, those most desperately in need of bras) to protest how women get arrested for toplessness when men don’t. But, let’s get real here. In nixing the public sexcapades, you won’t be setting back the course of democracy, just keeping from grossing a lot of people out. By the way, I’m not exactly the park ranger for prudishness. I love seeing couples being affectionate in public—in a way that says “I’ve got a thing for you,” not “I’ve got a thing for
you in my pants.” People do need to take into consideration what they’re doing where and whether they have a captive audience. Nobody wants to see you sucking your girlfriend’s ear in the pharmacy line or hear you making sex noises at the coffee bar. If you’re making out in a corner at a nightclub, you still might yuck somebody out, but, well, it’s dark, people are drunk, and they also probably aren’t Grandma or age 4. You tell yourself that only women are bothered by PDA, and only out of envy. Right. If a woman does feel envy, it’s typically at the sight of a guy acting loving to his girlfriend, not feeling her up at the mall. The lady at Stomp got steamed because she paid roughly 80 bucks to see some pretty unique theater —not a close-up of some guy jamming his tongue in his girlfriend’s mouth. Had seeing a live sex show been her goal, she could’ve saved $79 by going to one of those places you put a dollar bill in a slot, the window opens, and for the next three minutes, you get to watch the triplets with the chicken. Your final justification is the best: “I own my actions and I’m fine with them.” Oh, yay. Nothing like murky new-age language used to take responsibility for taking no responsibility at all. (Follow that mantra far enough, and you can “own” a machine gun, and “own” using it to take out 14 people.) In privatizing public space as your own, what you’re actually “owning” is acting in a way that’s only appropriate if your zip code traces to a neighborhood on the moon (population: one narcissistic jerkwad). You are right about one thing: that those forced to watch you getting your freak on should “start owning their reactions”— especially those who grew up on farms and who react to two animals humping each other by running to get the hose.
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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY ARIESS (Mar ARIE (March ch 21–April 19): Phy Physicist ysicist SStephen tephen
Hawking would H awking bbelieves elieves iitt w ould bbee ddangerous angerous ttoo gget et iin n ttouch ouch w ith eextraterrestrial xtraterrestrial ccreatures. reatures. ““If If aaliens liens vvisit isit uus,” s,” hhee with much says, “the outcome would be muc ch as when Columbus America, which well llanded anded iin nA merica, w hich ddidn’t idn’t tturn urn oout ut w ell ffor or tthe he Native Americans.” who’ve N ative A mericans.” TThose hose w ho’ve sstudied tudied tthe he tteeming eeming UFOs would Hawking’s warning eevidence vidence ffor or U FOs w ould ssay ay tthat hat H awking’s w arning mysterious iiss ttoo oo llate. ate. SSome ome m ysterious nnonhuman onhuman iintelligence ntelligence wee aare hhas as bbeen een hhere ere ffor or a llong ong ttime, ime, aand nd tthe he ffact act tthat hat w re around proves they’ree no Spa Spanish still ar ound pr oves they’r anish conquistadors. Aside from let’s marvel A side fr om that, though, let ’s mar rvel at the stupidity Hawking’s Ass aany mildly wise ooff H awking’s llame ame aadvice. dvice. A ny m ildly w ise pperson erson knows, exploring the unknown is not only an aid to our health—it’s That’ll mental and spiritual heal th—it’ss a prerequisite. prerequisite. That ’ll weeks. be especially true ffor or you Aries in n the coming week s.
TAURUS T AURUS (A (April pril 220–May 0–May 220): 0): ““At At ttimes, imes, aalthough lthough one wrote one is is perfectly perfectly in in the the right, right, one’s one’s llegs egs ttremble,” remble,” w rote philosopher V.V. Rozanov. philosopher V .V. R ozanov. ““At At oother ther ttimes, imes, aalthough lthough one one is completely in the wrong, wrong, birds birds sing in one’s one’s soul.” That may have been the case for for you last month, Taurus, Taurus, a but these days it it’s ’s the exact reverse. reverse. If your knees are wobbly, missing mark, are w obbly, yyou’re ou’re ooff-center, ff-center, m issing tthe he m ark, oorr ffar ar from matter. from tthe he hheart eart ooff tthe he m atter. IIf,f, oon n tthe he oother, ther, bbirds irds aare re singing singing iin n yyour our ssoul, oul, iit’s t’s because because you’re you’re united united with with tthe he beautiful truth. Ther Theree ar aree a couplee of caveats, though: The beautiful truth won won’t simple it’ll ’t be simp ple and bright; it ’ll be dense, convoluted, and kaleidosco kaleidoscopic. birds’ opic. And the bir ds’ songs will sound mor moree like a philh philharmonic orchestra harmonic or chestra pounding pounding out out Beethoven’s Beethoven’s FFifth ifth SSymphony ymphony tthan han a ssingle ingle flute playing a quaint folk folk song. GEMINI (May 21–June 20): Are Are there there any actors
different types of who have impersonated as manyy different characters characters as Gemini chameleonn Johnny Depp? From From rogue chocolatier,r, fr from rogue agent to chocolatier om psychotic barber to astr astronaut, onaut, he is a model of inconsistency—a incconsistency—a master of not imitating himself himself.. (To (TTo glimpse 24 24 of his various personas, go here: here: http:/ //bit.ly/GeminiActor.) /bit.ly/GeminiA / ctor.) According According to my reading reading of the omens, o you now have a poetic license to follow follow his lead. There There have been ffew ew times in the last two years whenn you’ve had this much freedom multiple, freedom and permission to be soo mul tiple, mercurial, mercurial, and mutant.
CANCER (J(June une 21–July 21–July 22): 22): A tattoo tattoo nnow ow adorns adorns the neck of pop star Rihanna. Rihanna It says says “rebelle “rebelle fleur,” fleurr,” which which is is a French French phrase phrase meaning meaning “rebel “rebel flower.” flower.” The The grammar grammar police protested protested her new new body art. They wished she would have rendered rendered it correctly—as correctly—as “fleur rebelle”—since French, adjectives aree supposed to rebelle”—since in Fr ench, adject tives ar follow, follow, not precede, precede, the nouns they theey refer refer to. But I’m guessing guessing Rihanna Rihanna knew knew that. that. In In reversing reversing the the order, order, she she was double-asserting her right too commit breezy breezy acts of of insurrection. insurrection. Let’s Let’s make make “rebelle “rebelle fleur” fleur ” your your keynote keynote in the coming days, Cancerian. Cancerian. Break Brreak taboos, buck tradition, tradition, and and overthrow overthrow conventional conventional wisdom—always wisdom—always with blithe grace grace and jaunty charm. charrm. LEO LE O (July 23–Aug. 22): Research Research by German psychologists psychologists suggests suggests that that positive positive superstitions superstitions may be helpful. Reporting in the journal Psychological discovered ed that peo people ople who think they ar aree Science, they discover in in ppossession ossession ooff ggood ood lluck uck ccharms harms ooutperform utperform ppeople eople who who don’t. don’t. ““Superstition-induced Superstition-induced cconfidence” onfidence” sseems eems to act in ways akin to how placeb placebos bos work to heal sick people: It can pr provide mysterious (Moree her here: ovide a mysterio us boost. (Mor e: tinyurl.com/LuckCharm.) tinyurl.com/LuckCharm.) Just ffor or the fun of it, Leo— and with and iin n aaccordance ccordance w ith tthe he aastrological strological oomens—put mens—put this finding to the test. Get yours yourself self a magical object that stimulates your power to ac achieve chieve success. VIRGO VIR GO (Aug. 23–Sept. 22): Psychologist Psyychologist CCarl arl Jung
aree all connected too each other via the said that we ar psyche collective unconscious. YYour oour psyc che and my psyche taproots have tapr oots that sink deep intoo the memories entiree hum human According and capacities of the entir man rrace. ace. A ccording your taproots aree now to my rreading eading of the omens, you ur tapr oots ar moree vigor vigorously functioning mor ously than n they have in a long moree intimate con contact time YYou’re time. ou’rre in mor ou ntact than usual with the primal pool of possibilities. And A what good is that, Well, you may ask? W ell, it means you u have the power to draw transcends your dr aw on mojo that tr anscends yo our personal abilities. liquid ambrosial osial Could you make use of some liqu uid lightning, ambr dreams, from thee beginning of time? dr eams, or healing balm fr om th
LIBRA (Sept. 23–Oct. 22): If yo you ou want to get a gallon of milk directly directly from from the source, source, you have to squeeze a cow’s cow’s udder over 300 times. I recommend recommend you use that as a metaphor ffor the It’s or your task in th he days to come. It ’s going to take a lot of squirts or tugs or tweaks t tweaks to get
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the totality of what whhat you want. Be patient and precise precise as you fill your cup cuup little by little. There’s There’s no way you can hurry by skipping some steps. hurry the process process o
SCORPIO SC ORPIO ((Oct. Oct. 23–Nov 23–Nov.. 21): “Blessed are are the meek,
inherit ffor or they shall inh erit the earth,” says the Bible. That doesn’t what doesn ’t mean wh hat most people think it does. The wordd tr translated Greek wordd pr wor anslated as a ““meek” meek” is the Gr eek wor praus aus, which in ancient times didn’t didn’t mean “weak-willed, passive, mild.” Rather, great Raatherr, it rreferred eferred to gr eat power that was under rigorous control. soldiers’’ rigorous o contr ol. For example, soldiers warhorses were were considered c consider ed pr praus aus. They heeded the commands of their theeir riders, but were were fierce fierce warriors warriors that fought fought g with tireless tireless fervor. fervor. In this spirit, p , Scorpio, p , I’m predicting predicting you’re you’re about to get very “meek”: “meek”: offering offering your tremendous trem mendous force force of will and intelligence in disciplined service serrvice to a noble cause. (Thanks (Thanks to Merlin Hawk for for the info info I used in this ‘scope.) ‘scope.)
SSAGITTARIUS AGITT TARIU A US (Nov (Nov.. 22–Dec. 21): Philosopher Friedrich Niet Nietzsche zsche wrote wrote a book called Ecce Homo: How One Become Becomes es What One Is. I’d love it if in the next ffew ew weeks weeks you y would think a lot about how you are weree born to are on your way to becoming what you wer be. Current Current astrological astrological omens suggest you will have special insight in into to that theme. For inspiration, inspiration, you might want to bo borrow Nietzsche’s orrow some of Niet zsche’s chapter titles, including tthe he ffollowing: ollowing: “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Cle Clever” ever ” and “Why I Am a Destiny.” Destiny.” CAPRICORN CAPRIC ORN (Dec. ( 22–Jan. 19): During some of
her concerts, CCapricorn appricorn singer Hayley Williams (lead Paramore) vocalist of P aram more) has worn a tank top that bears phrase “Brand encourage the phr ase “Br and New Eyes.” I encour age you to consider making that your own guiding principle ffor or pointedly a while. By pointe edly declaring your intention to view the world with rrefreshed e eshed vision, you will be able to efr tune in to sights that have been invisible to you. You You secrets will discover secr rets hidden in plain view and maybe carve wheree bef before theree had been even car ve out a window wher ore ther wall. a thick, blank wa ll.
AQUARIUS A QUARIUS ((Jan. Jan. 220–Feb. 0–Feb. 18): 18): Much Much ooff my my rrecent ecent
book, Pr Pronoia roonoia Is the t Antidote ffor oor P Paranoia ar aranoia a , is rrated ated PG. R.. B But X.. N Not PG. Some Some is is R ut tthere’s here’s oone ne sstory tory tthat’s hat’s X ot iin n the same way that it’s thaat porn is. While it ’s uninhibited in in its its rendering rendering of of eecstatic cstatic eeroticism, roticism, iit’s t’s a feminist feminist meditation on spiritual spiritual intimacy, intimacyy, not a heap of vulgar stereotypes. couldn’t stereotypes. Still, Still, when the book came out, I couldn ’t bear bear the the thought thought of of ssending ending ccopies opies ttoo ccertain ertain rrelatives elatives of of mine mine who who are are a bbit it pprudish. rudish. SSoo I ccame ame ttoo aan n honorable honorable compromise: compromise: Using Using a rrazor azor bblade, lade, I ssliced liced oout ut the myy lloved the nine nine pages pages in in qquestion uestion aand nd ggave ave m oved oones nes tthe he mostly-intact remainder. rem mainder. May I suggest you consider a comparable Aquarius? main comparable editing editing ooff yyour our eefforts, fforts, A quarius? YYour our m ain object right now is to win friends and influence people.
PISCESS ((Feb. PISCE Feb. 19–March 19–March 20): 20): In In the the waters waters off off the the
Africa, ssouthwest outhwest ccoast oast ooff A frica, the the small small fish fish known known as as tthe he bbearded earded ggoby oby hhas as aalways lways bbeen een preyed preyed upon upon by by jellyfish—until rrecently. e ecently . Now this fformerly ormerly mildmannered species, manner ed specie es, whose diet used to consist of overthrown phytoplankton, hhas as overthr own the ancient status quo: It is ffeasting easting on tthe he jellyfish that once feasted feasted on it. aren’t why.. I fforesee Scientists ar en’tt sur ssuree why oresee a metaphorically comparable development life, compar able deve elopment in your lif e, Pisces. How it will w ill pplay lay oout ut eexactly, xactly, II’m ’m nnot ot sure. sure. Maybe Maybe you’ll you’ll gain gain over an advantage ove er someone or something that has advantage always had an ad dvantage over you. Maybe you will bbecome ecome tthe he ttopdog opdog iin n a pplace lace where where you’ve you’ve been been the the underdog. maybe drawing under dog. Or may ybe you’ll begin dr awing energy energy from from source a sour ce that hass in the past sucked your energy. energy.
Homework: What Wh hat if you didn’t feel feel compelled opinion to have an opi inion about every hot-button Try living opinion-free issue? T ry r livin ng opinion-fr ee ffor or a week. Report rresults esultss by going to Freewillastrology. Freewillastrologyy. clicking com and clicki ing “Email Rob.”
Go to REALASTROLOGY.COM to check out Rob Brezsny’s Expanded Weekly Audio Horoscopes and Daily Text Message Horoscopes. Audio horoscopes are also available by phone at 1-877-873-4888 or 1-900-950-7700
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FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT #544597 The following person(s) is (are) doing business as: Hui Hui Health Center, 3535 Ross Ave., #106, San Jose, CA, 95124,
Huiyi Liang, 2554 S. King Road, #217, San Jose, CA, 95121. This business is conducted Be seen by one of the largest, by a Individual. most active audiences in the Registrant began transacting business under the fictitious South Bay! Your ad will business name or names listappear in both print and ed herein on 11/12/10. online. A Powerful /s/Huiyi Liang Combination for one great This statement was filed with price. To advertise visit the County Clerk of Santa metroactive.com or call Clara County on 11/12/2010. 408/200-1300. (pub Metro 11/17, 11/24, 12/01, 12/08/2010) Carpet/Floor
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STATEMENT OF ABANDONMENT OF USE OF FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME #543320 The Following person(s) / entity (ies) has / have abandoned the use of the fictitious business names(s): Season Style & 2nd Street Pure Water, 404 South 2nd St., Suite B, San jose, CA, 95113, Hoang, Thu Van, 122 Avenida Espana, San Jose, CA, 95139. Filed in Santa Clara County on 1/4/2010 under file No. 532567 This business was conducted by a individual. /s/Hoang, Thu Van This statement was filed with the County Clerk of Santa Clara County on 10/7/2010. (pub Metro 11/3, 11/10, 11/17, 11/24/2010)
FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT #544278 The following person(s) is (are) doing business as: The Nahal Law Firm, 4471 Park Bristol Place, San Jose, CA, 95136, Harpaul Nahal. This business is conducted by a individual. Registrant began transacting business under the fictitious business name or names listed herein on 11/3/2010. /s/Narpaul Nahal This statement was filed with the County Clerk of Santa Clara County on 11/03/2010. (pub Metro 11/10, 11/17, 11/24, 12/01/2010)
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Boulder Creek
290 acres ! Run your dirt bikes or quads or take a hike and have a lot of fun on the Homes Under $600K 11 parcels ranging in size from 18- 40 acres. Santa Clara county. Sun, Views, Boulder Creek Spring, Creek. Off grid. a beautiful building site in Excellent Owner financing. the sun. Half acre. Private $1,150,000. gated road. Easy location. Donner Land & Mortgage Co., All utilities in place. Plans Inc. www.donnerland.com included, too. Excellent neighborhood. Owner financ- 408-395-5754 ing. $249,000. Donner Land & Mortgage Co., Inc. www.donnerland.com 408-395-5754
Land
Los Gatos Mountains
4 acres. A perfect spot for the home you have been dreaming of. Incredible view and Full Sun. Shared well. Power at lot line. Some reports. Paved access. Plans included. Owner financing. $450,000. Donner Land & Mortgage Co., Inc. www.donnerland.com 408-395-5754
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Boulder Creek
10 acres. Ridge top. 3 mile private bumpy road leads to this quiet and serene site. Beautiful view and plenty of sun. Off grid. Owner Financing. $189,000. Donner Land & Mortgage Co., Inc. www.donnerland.com 408-395-5754
Real Estate Services ALL AREAS ROOMMATES.COM.
Browse hundreds of online listings with photos and maps. Find your roommate with a click of the mouse! Visit: www.Roommates.com.
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Ah, yes—Ladysmith, B.C., justly famous as the birthplace of Pamela Anderson. Pam left long ago, of course, evidently repelled by her countrymen’s inadequate understanding of efficient furnace operation. Thanks to you, Bill, she won’t need to stay away much longer. The blue flame of enlightenment is about to ignite. Lowering your thermostat during times when you need heat less is called thermostat setback; the equivalent practice in summertime is thermostat setup. In theory, thermostat setback and setup will almost always save energy, based on the following simple principle of heat transfer: the rate of heat loss (or gain) is primarily a function of the difference in temperature between two objects, such as your house and the surrounding air. Although your heater may run for a while during the recovery period when it’s bringing the house back up to temperature, you still use less energy than you would keeping the house at a constant temperature around the clock. A lot of people don’t get this—in fact they’re baffled by the entire subject of thermostats. Failing to grasp the subtleties of home heating can be expensive. At one time the U.S. Department of Energy was urging Americans to install programmable thermostats, which can be set to automatically turn the heat down when it’s not needed. These devices were thought to generate savings of 10 to 30 percent, and close to half of U.S. homes now have them. In 2006, though, the DOE stopped pushing the thermostats, which aren’t cheap, after multiple studies showed the actual savings was zero—not because the inventors hadn’t understood the laws of physics, but because consumers didn’t use the things right. They couldn’t figure out how to program the thermostats, didn’t believe they’d work and so didn’t bother, set the temperature higher during the day and thereby canceled out the savings from the setback at night, and so on.
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Used correctly, however, programmable thermostats indisputably work, and so does setting back the thermostat manually, provided you do it systematically. My indefatigable assistant Una conducted a long-term research project in which she installed a programmable thermostat in her house, aggressively dialed back the nighttime setting for winter, then tracked her energy use for three years, using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to correct for outdoor temperature differences before and after installation. Result: she saved about 28 percent on her winter gas bill, enough to recover the thermostat’s $120 cost in three months. Granted, Una’s situation was unusual: © DQ OQDEDQQDC VHMSDQSHLD SGDQLNRS@S setting had long been a toasty 76. © GD RDS SGD NUDQMHFGS SDLODQ@STQD on the new thermostat all the way down to 50. © DQ GNTRD HR NKCDQ VHSG ONNQ windows and Eisenhower-era insulation, and may fairly be described as an energy sieve. What kind of savings are more typical? Tough call due to wide variation in houses, heating systems, climate, and energy costs. One rule of thumb is that each degree Fahrenheit you set the thermostat back over an eight-hour period translates to a 1 percent savings in heating costs. A study of two identical Canadian test houses showed an 11-degree setback overnight and during work hours generated a 13 percent savings in gas and a 2 percent savings in electricity. My guess is that’s better than most people will get. A U.S. study of 2,658 gas-heated homes using programmable thermostats found a 6 percent reduction in energy use. Still, you ought to see some savings. If not, various confounding factors could be in play, one of which may be that you’re a knucklehead. You won’t know till you try. Good luck.
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metroactive STYLE
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Operated by SHARON MAXWELLYAMAMOTO, DIVA SHARON’S DIVINE VINTAGE celebrates the high styles of
the 1950s and ’60s with an invitation to join in the fun of wearing vintage clothing. “This is happy stuff,” says Maxwell-Yamamoto, “and I want to spread it around.” On a mission to break the notion that vintage clothing is too tiny for anyone but the most petite among us, Maxwell-Yamamoto focuses on easy-fit outerwear and accessories to create outfits that are easy to put together and very wearable. “Wearable is the key,” she explains, while modeling ensemble after ensemble in a fashion show that rivals any Hollywood quick-change movie
montage. Wraps, jackets, stoles and shrugs are combined with some black basics and eye-catching accessories, from broaches and foldable cat’s-eye glasses to lorgnettes that double as decorative clips, hats that “aren’t too hatty” and bags that are a custom match to a jacket. “People think they need to be going to the opera,” says Maxwell-Yamamoto. “But you don’t need to be going to a fancy place. Anybody can wear these.” Maxwell-Yamamoto, who is a trained opera singer—hence the “Diva Sharon” thing—and a veteran of the stage, attributes her passion for vintage clothing to her background in theater. “I’m a theatrical person, and I’ve always liked vintage and costumey things,” she says, but explains that she had trouble finding vintage clothing that fit her well. “Being hard to fit,” she says, “I wanted things that I could wear and feel the elegance of the past.”
She discovered that with a few nicely placed pieces, she could transform an outfit from ordinary into extraordinary. “It doesn’t have to be a big commitment,” MaxwellYamamoto says, while demonstrating, with a bolero and vintage sunglasses, a remarkable transformation from a 21st-century gal about town into a fine and fabulous 1950s lady. The clothing at Diva Sharon’s feels handcrafted and well made, as if it could last a lifetime. And indeed, it has. “I chose these eras [the 1950s and ’60s] because I find them very ladylike and glamorous; the height of the glamour age in Hollywood,” Maxwell-Yamamoto tells me. “And if stuff is much older, it generally would be a little more fragile,” she explains, reiterating the focus that she keeps on wearable clothing. “These [pieces] are sturdy enough to really wear and be comfortable, and you generally don’t have to worry about tearing them, or taking them off before you get in a car.” Maxwell-Yamamoto derives great joy in wearing the glamorous clothing and styles of the past and appreciates the bridge that the clothing creates between today’s wearer and its original owner. “I leave the initials and names in,” she says, describing the connection she feels to the woman whose name is on the tag. “I think about the woman who was so happy to get this. She wore it to parties and to the theater and felt like a million bucks when she wore it,” says Maxwell-Yamamoto with a swoop of her stole and a smile. Far from being just a peddler of vintage clothing, Maxwell-Yamamoto is like a messenger right out of time, sent to remind us that life is short and sweet, stylish and fun. Her approach to clothing is both a nod to eras gone by and a refreshing resurfacing of the notion that fashion is an art to be enjoyed. “When I wear these things I make people smile and that’s why I do this,” she says. “It makes me smile and I just want to share.”
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“I realize that I can try to take over a game whenever, and I did it too late in Bakersfield,” Oliver says. “Coming here, I wanted to put my mark on the game.” He did just that on Sunday, making his first six shots en route to scoring 35 points to lead the Spartans to an 80-77 win. “He’s just a terrific player and we had no answer for him,” Riverside head coach Jim Wooldridge says. With the Spartans up 72-71 with less than three minutes to go, Oliver was double-teamed in the post and found senior point guard Justin Graham wide open. He buried a 3-pointer that was the back-breaker. “I noticed that another guy was about to come and double, and he just totally lost Justin,” Oliver says. “I was just baiting him in. I had no plan to shoot the ball.” On the Spartans’ next possession, Oliver had no intention of passing the ball, drawing a foul by bulldozing his way into the lane. “If he drives it, many bodies will arrive and they will try to be as physical as they possibly can with him,” head coach George Nessman says. “But again, it always ends up giving Adrian some freebies at the free-throw line.” Oliver, whose career average from the foul line is 82.5 percent, sank both free throws, but the Highlanders had one more run left in them. Down by six points, Riverside guard Kareem Nitoto went coast-to-coast for a layup. The Spartans then turned the ball over in the backcourt, leading to another Nitoto layup, cutting the SJSU lead to two. With seven seconds to go, Graham split his two free-throw attempts, giving the Highlanders a chance to tie the game with a 3-pointer. But Javon Borum’s attempt hit the front rim and time expired, giving the Spartans their fourth win in five games. “It was
9@> JK8IK 8[i`Xe Fc`m\i# n_f _Xj Xm\iX^\[ ).%/ gf`ekj g\i ^Xd\ k_lj ]Xi k_`j j\Xjfe# _Xj c\[ k_\ JAJL YXjb\kYXcc k\Xd kf X +$( i\Zfi[% really a classic seesaw game, and we had just enough to get over the top, and I thought the play of our two seniors was a big part of that,” Nessman says. Oliver’s hot start gave the Spartans a 19-7 lead, which was their largest lead of the game. But behind 14 first-half points by Phil Martin, the Highlanders trailed by just four at halftime. Early in the second half, the Highlanders took their only lead of the game, 44-43, when they went on a 10-1 run with nine of the points coming from Martin. The Spartans withstood the Highlander run, and Nessman says a key to the win was limiting Martin to just four points in the final 16:18. “I would also credit Calvin Douglas and Chris Jones for outstanding defense in the second half on Martin, slowing him down a little bit,” Nessman says. “We were able to hold them off.” —Joey Akeley
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company, the Beverly Hills–based real estate investment ďŹ rm Kennedy Wilson, is taking over the towers, and they are expected to make some signiďŹ cant changes. Harry Mavrogenes, the executive director of San Jose’s Redevelopment Agency, says that Kennedy Wilson’s strategy is to turn the condos into rental units. He’s excited by the prospect. This will give people an opportunity to experience life downtown, he says. Once they see how exciting the area is, he’s convinced that they’ll be eager to stay. The Three Sixty’s one- and twobedroom apartments still feature all the premium amenities of a luxury condo. The bedrooms and living room offer sweeping views of the valley, with some offering views of San Francisco Bay and others gazing at the Santa Cruz Mountains. Each gourmet kitchen features CaesarStone Quartz countertops and Del Tongo Italian cabinets, all carefully selected and all brandnew, as are the stainless steel Bosch appliances. Bathrooms feature 6foot soaking baths, complete with Grohe chrome ďŹ xtures. There’s also a spa and ďŹ tness center and a heated outdoor pool open to all residents. Basic needs can be attended to by a concierge service in the lobby, and there is 24-hour security on the premises. At Kennedy Wilson, they are convinced that what begins as a brief stay might turn into a long term commitment. —Danny Wool
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