Just about everyone who watches television knows that Feb. 17 was supposed to be the historic day of the digital TV (DTV) transition—that is, the last day for full-power TV stations in the United States to broadcast in analog. After that date, they were to broadcast in digital only, meaning if you wanted to continue receiving over-the-air broadcasts on your analog TV, you needed to purchase a digital-to-analog converter box.

Well, as of last week, the federal government put the final touches on delaying the date until June, because despite the transition being hyped for God knows how long, 6.5 million people apparently still weren’t ready yet.

In an Aug. 13, 2008, cover story, I channeled the Urban Blight Exploration Junkie and raved over the Pink Elephant Center, that landmark rundown strip mall at the corner of King Road and Virginia in San Jose City Council District 5. I had quacked about the place once before in a previous column, but for that travel feature, titled “Postcards from the Edge of San Jose,” in which I mapped out ignored masterpieces in each district, striking visuals were necessary to properly document the shabby outré ugliness of that East Side monument.

Last month saw the passing of John Byrne, lead singer of the ‘60s San Jose garage-rock band Count Five. He penned the immortal fuzzed-out 1966 hit Psychotic Reaction, which peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard charts and was listed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Top 500 songs that shaped rock & roll. A whole two years before Dionne Warwick sang that tune we all know and despise, the Count Five staged its famous promo picture, wearing Dracula-style capes in front of the Winchester Mystery House.

Since 1921, Faber’s Cyclery has occupied a legendary, leaning building at the corner of First Street and Margaret in San Jose. The structure was already steeped in local lore when Alex LaRiviere took over Faber’s in 1978. Built in 1884, the place began life as a saloon called Benjamin’s Corner. A well-preserved old blacksmith shop still sits out back, right next to a heritage pepper tree eight feet in diameter. The original wooden bar from 1884 still sits inside the place and serves as a parts counter.

My vote for the Best Apocalyptic, Post-Suburban-Wasteland Photo Book of 2008 goes hands down to a glossy hardback aptly titled Frezno from Process Books. Photographer Tony Stamolis grew up in that Central Valley city, and spent six years chronicling the dreadful, doped-out, deranged and disregarded underbelly of the city whose airport code is FAT.

Last month, for the seventh year in a row, the folks at NVIDIA—the Santa Clara–based visual computing giant—decided to do forego their annual company holiday party and commit themselves to a knock-down, drag-out community service effort called Project Inspire. One thousand employees, along with students, friends and family, volunteered and made their way out to Overfelt High School in East San Jose for the shindig last month.

One of the shows that defined my childhood was the late-night masterpiece, Creature Features, on KTVU, Channel 2 in the ‘70s. On Saturday nights at 11pm, there would be a table. With a skull on it. With a candle emerging from the skull. Bob Wilkins would sit there in a faded rocking chair, cigar in hand or mouth, wearing the most hideous checkerboard sports coat, the ugliest plaid slacks, and he would show the most insipid, utterly worst horror movies imaginable.

Recently I learned that the Cat Lady of San Jose, Sadie Malone, sadly has passed away. She was the hero who for 16 years cared for several wild cats out in the ivy trenches between the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts and the Guadalupe River. She went out of her way to make sure these cats were always provided for, and out of pure kindheartedness people would regularly donate money for her cause. You could just feel the overflowing compassion involved with such an effort. That Malone died the day after Christmas made the situation even more poignant.

Most cities revel in their own pop culture landmarks or specific locales tied to things that celebrities did there. For example, much hoopla survives about the road outside Paso Robles where James Dean crashed and died, the garage that spawned Hewlett-Packard, or that stretch of highway in Malibu where Mel Gibson got his infamous DUI.  San Jose has a few similar sites, for example, the house on Jackson Street where Nirvana stayed in 1990.

I will suggest another local landmark which might possibly achieve similar notoriety: the city utilities box at the corner of Fruitdale and Southwest Expressway, where Shepard Fairey, on Aug. 2, 2000, plastered a promotional poster for his art show at Anno Domini the next night.

Tom McEnery has plans to revamp the entire San Pedro Square historic district in downtown San Jose and build a permanent outdoor public market neighborhood, anchored by the Peralta Adobe and the Fallon House, and inspired by world-renowned locales like the Granville Island Public Market in Vancouver, British Columbia. Now, for decades San Jose has excelled at allocating public money for failed downtown projects, so some of the citizenry out there in the suburbs is hyperpessimistic about such an ambitious project, especially one that yet again asks for a taxpayer “loan.” But the San Jose Public Market is a great idea, if you flesh it out. I’ll leave the political, legal and financial brouhahas for more specialized commentators and instead offer my own conjecture.

You never know what you’ll find in the California Room at the Martin Luther King Jr. Public Library. Every time I invade the place, I wind up staying at least an extra 30 minutes, because the room is so utterly jammed to the gills with crackpot historical miscellanea. I always wind up rummaging around for something I wasn’t even planning on looking for in the first place. If you aren’t familiar with the cargo of books, pamphlets, maps, old newspaper clippings and photographs within its walls, you should be.

Since there just aren’t enough documentaries about 19th-century Mexican banditos who were hung in San Jose, resident author and publisher Charlie Trujillo decided to begin making one. The scalawag under discussion is every local historian’s favorite forgotten troublemaker, Tiburcio Vasquez, who rampaged across California during the post–Gold Rush era.

LAST week’s Veterans Day parade provided an opportunity to reacquaint myself with the Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus, Mountain Charlie Chapter No. 1850. The Clampers, as they call themselves, are a men’s drinking fraternity of the absurd that doubles as a historical preservation society. They sport Old West duds and install historical plaques at various locales throughout California, swilling drinks in the process. The Mountain Charley chapter, our local faction, is named after “Mountain Charlie” McKiernan, the legendary Santa Cruz Mountain trailblazer and grizzly fighter.

Silicon Alleys

Of all the books I initially acquired just for their titles, Eric Maisel’s Staying Sane in the Arts was one that stuck with me. Maisel is a renowned therapist who specializes in the psychology of the creative person. He’s written 30 books, delivered keynotes at numerous writers’ conferences and regularly runs creative workshops in both Paris and San Francisco. Staying Sane was the first of his books I happened to come across. I yanked it out of the library during the winter of 2000 when I needed something to read while stuck at a humdrum job with way too much downtime.

Silicon Alleys

When it comes to contemporary American classical music composers, John Adams is probably the most widely performed while at the same time the most provocative and criticized. To this day, his 1990 opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, about the Achille Lauro hijacking in the Middle East, causes political and emotional trauma whenever it’s produced. Other stage works like Nixon in China and A Flowering Tree have sent critics and purists into uncomfortable tizzies worldwide.

Silicon Alleys

“What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.”
—Victor Hugo

When people yak about the beginnings of Silicon Valley, a few component parts usually enter the conversation: Hewlett-Packard, Stanford Industrial Park, Varian Associates, Lockheed, Fairchild, etc. When it comes to the medium of radio, people usually begin with Lee de Forest, who invented the vacuum tube amplifier in Palo Alto around 1912 or Charles Herrold, who basically started the first radio broadcasting station out of San Jose in 1909.

But what truly makes history a rocking subject to study—no matter what part of the social static you may be from—are the forgotten stories, the failures and those individuals whose contributions have long since been overlooked.