LAST YEAR, when my alter ego, the urban blight exploration junkie, decided to prowl around the industrial wastelands of Stockton Avenue in San Jose, fans of San Jose underbelly came roaring out of the woodwork to laud the elegant monstrosity of urban decay sitting at the corner of Julian and Stockton—that decrepit falling-to-pieces old Westinghouse warehouse. The building is famous, and several folks who appreciate the artistic value of urban blight photography have shot the place for their collections. Metro photographer Felipe Buitrago brilliantly captured it in the July 25, 2007, issue of Metro.

SO MUCH for urgency ordinances. Last week, the San Jose Redevelopment Agency recommended deferring until August a specific urgency ordinance originally slated to be railroaded through Council on June 17. The ordinance was to place a “moratorium on the installation and relocation of freestanding news racks within the downtown core and the Civic Plaza Redevelopment project area; and to establish a consolidated pedestal mounted news rack zone pilot program within those same project areas.”

Silicon Alleys

IT SEEMS like the San Jose McEnery Convention Center just can’t get enough attention these days, and the brutal paradoxes keep on coming.

LAST WEEKEND, the 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge took place in downtown San Jose and it was a mammoth cultural achievement, both for the city and SJSU, as well as the public and private sectors—true collaboration as only Silicon Valley can achieve. Some random notes:

01SJ Diary

DURING THE opening ceremonies for the 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge, Luis Valdez made an appearance and wowed the crowd with a Mayan performance justifying Robert Graham’s Quetzalcoatl statue in Plaza de Cesar Chavez as “art & technology.” Metro didn’t take notes, but it had something to do with how the Mayans, not the Hindus, invented the zero and that the coil of the statue referenced a spiral dance of some sort.

RECENTLY, I joined local video engineer Mark Hager on the first trial run of a literary tour through a slice of Silicon Valley underbelly that no one talks about. We’ll call them the Ancient and Mystical Brotherhood of Union Stagehands (AMBUS) who toil away behind the scenes at all your favorite arena rock shows and grand-scale conventions and industrial events. Yes, the same crew of riggers, ironworkers, A/V techs, lighting designers and their ilk who bump into each other backstage at Shoreline Amphitheatre at least partly overlap with the folks running cable and troubleshooting satellite feeds behind the scenes at conventions and high-tech product launches. Hager, a Bellarmine graduate, is possibly the first one to ever write a book about the lifestyle. Boom! Backstage Pass is now complete and available at http://www.boombackstagepass.com. Aside from juicy gossip about high-tech celebs and rock stars, the book is filled with flashes of what life was like at the beginning of the dotcom bubble:

THE 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge—or 01SJ for short—is not one of those harebrained schemes to “put San Jose on the map,” or yet another attempt to alleviate San Jose’s inferiority complex. The festival isn’t taking place in San Jose just because Vancouver, Venice and São Paulo all have world-renowned cultural biennials and we don’t. The festival is happening here because, plain and simple, it must happen here.

WITH LITERARY TRAVEL on the rise these days, more and more people are feeling the need to follow in their favorite authors’ footsteps or to explore the locales that writers have placed in their novels. Longtime media consultant and video engineer Mark Hager is currently working on a novel about backstage life in Silicon Valley’s corporate venues, and if I’m still around when this thing comes out, I will organize similar tours like the one he and I recently undertook.

IN THE TRAVEL writing business, one always runs across those service-type articles with titles like “72 Hours in Casablanca,” “A Weekend in Montreal” or “Three Perfect Days in London”—the point being that the reader should be able to easily replicate the author’s experience. Since nobody anywhere has bothered to enlighten us with a “Five Hours in Alviso” exposé, allow me to furnish an example of how just such a piece might begin.

BEGINNING this weekend at Discovery Meadow, San Jose gets its first primordial high-tech preview of what’s to come during next month’s second biennial ZeroOne (01SJ) Global Festival of Art on the Edge. In conjunction with Black Rock Arts Foundation, artist Peter Hudson and a squad of at least 50 dedicated pals have created Homouroboros, a 24-foot-tall, 30-foot-diameter spinning zoetrope that depicts 18 life-size monkeys swinging from branch to branch in a circle around the tree, eating an apple fed to them by a serpentlike hand. The interactive steel and aluminum sculpture debuts Saturday from 4 to 6pm and will close a month later.

WITH all the recent spats about historical preservation and my fond retro-kitsch memories of downtown San Jose’s old Woolworth Building, I felt like a higher cosmic intelligence was directing me southbound to fill the hole in my soul when I discovered a redevelopment mecca in Ventura County—the Woolworth Museum. Someone in downtown Oxnard, Calif., had restored that city’s old Woolworth building and turned it into a museum, so I just had to make a spiritual trek and investigate the place.

THE SAN JOSE Earthquakes soccer home opener is this Sunday, while at the same time, the latest round of the Little Saigon sideshow is coming soon to a theater near 200 E. Santa Clara St. And leave it to yours truly to suggest a sick and perverse connection between the two. Here we go:

John Mitchell shows me a photo of the San Jose Museum of Art building as it was about 105 years ago—back when it was the post office and back when it still had the clock tower. “You could show that picture to everybody in San Jose today and about fifty percent of them wouldn’t even know what it was,” he explains. “‘We have a clock tower?’ they would ask. ‘San Jose has a clock tower?’ They wouldn’t even know about this.” I added that those fifty percent probably don’t even know where downtown is to begin with.

IF YOU’RE one of the thousands who’ve trudged their way through the knee-high piles of bike parts in the yard of Faber’s Cyclery over the years, you will be blown away by how clean and orderly the place is these days. Located at the corner of South First Street and Margaret, Faber’s is one of the oldest buildings in the South Bay and it soaks in over a century of history. The place was a corner saloon in 1884 and has been a bicycle business since 1921.

Your birth is a mistake you’ll spend your whole life trying to correct.
—Chuck Palahniuk

PART OF being a respectable columnist is to exhibit a strong degree of self-confidence and integrity when admitting one’s mistakes. Since I have committed more than my share of embarrassing howlers over the years, I feel the time is right to do just that. So here are a few to get us started.

No, it’s not Brandi Chastain, Sarah Winchester or Madison Nguyen. Since I grew up watching reruns of Maude, I am compelled to cast my vote for Adrienne Barbeau, who graduated from Del Mar High School in 1963. About a year ago, she came back to San Jose to fill in for George Romero at a horror convention and I asked her about Del Mar High. She said it was a flagship school in those days.