contado prjct

The Silicon Valley: an endless metropolis where wire meets iron and cool cyberpunk kids drink liquid nitrogen and get digital jazz plugged straight into their ears. Right? THINK AGAIN. While our digital 21st century owes a lot to the Bay Area, the present youth culture may be a bit different than the William Gibson you read in your history class.
Alison Frost calls her generation the “first generation” of Milpitas, 10 miles east of San Jose. For this project I wanted to feel the pulse of the East/South bay's beating heart, immerse myself in unromanticized, unadulterated social realism. My interview with the Junior student from Porter proved to both insightful and humbling. But before I get into drama of the city over the hill some must needed historical background of Milpitas will ensue.
San Jose has a rich fertile past graced by the likes of Steinbeck in novels. The latter half of the 20th century proved dramatic for the corn ridden land. Few tourists passing through highway 880 would believe that as late as the 1980's farms stood where great concrete buildings now tower. The corn of of the land gave Milpitas it's name, which is a rather cute and informal variation of Spanish word milpa, “land where maize is grown.” The town began as many others did under Spanish rule in the 1800's. The soldier Jose Higuera established the first large scale ranch and abode hacienda, now a tourist attraction in Higuera Adobe park (1). San Francisco's horses were fed by Milpitas hay well into the 1980's; fields of hay can be seen in Bob Burill's cult horror movie The Milipitas Monster (1). The Silicon Valley got it's start a century behind with the opening of Stanford University in 1891, a “practical” university encouraging science and cooperation with local industry (2). In 1912 a San Jose radio station began America's first serial broadcasts; in 1927 Philo T. Farnsworth transmitted the first television image (a dollar sign...prophecy?) in San Francisco (2). Santa Clara County birthed IBM, Apple, Adobe, Intel, Netscape Communications (first commercial internet browser) (2). “San Francisco itself, for many years, mainly participated in the high-tech boom second hand -- through its investment banks, law firms, graphics studios and trade publications. But over the course of the '90s, technology has reached right into the heart of the city,(2)” claims a SF Chronicle article titled “Growth of a Silicon Empire.”
Fast forward to yesterday, ten o clock PM. Frost provides the cookies and the non fiction. Minutes before I was on the phone with her, complaining of a lack of ideas for a certain Contado project, wanting experience from a blood native of the Bay Area. She immediatley became excited; hers was a story waiting to be told.
“Do you want to know why people come to Milpitas?” she began. Because Milpitas is one of the most diverse cities in the united states, one where the number of foreign born residents outnumber the locals (our country's ninth) (3). First Alison told me about her immediate group of friends. Ivy and Katherine's parents are part of the Vietnamese diaspora that fled to a capitalist/democracy during the war. Exactly when they came, Alison could not say, citing that “Vietnamese moms won't admit their age.” Their fathers were acquaintances in their adolescence. “It was too hot in Vietnam-- when they wanted to cool down they went to the graveyard to put their faces on tombstones.” Katherine's dad fought with the South Vietnamese in the war, and when they left the country for America with a communist/North Vietnamese flag to mark severed ties. Lenine grew up in Manila, Phillipines and came to Milpitas at age eight. In Manila she was kidnapped by a jealous neighbor as a one day old child; in America she learned English from “Sweet Valley High.” Carlos is from Mexico but doesn't talk about it much. Tommy grew up in Jalisco where he “saw much slaughter,” open air markets full of chickens getting twisted.
And now most of their parents work in the tech industry, or so Alison thinks. “Most of my friends don't really ask their parents exactly what they do, or aren't told.” Even Alison, who claims to be the “only white person in Milpitas (sic)” is herself a daughter of immigrant parents. Her father spent the first few years of his life in Southern England. His parents fought with the Royal Air Force in WW2. After reparations they settled down for a child and moved to the Bay Area to work for IBM. “Employees of IBM used to joke that it stood for 'I've Been Moved.'” Alison's father now works for CISCO writing computer manuals.
Nobody in Milipitas, even the first generation kids, associate with being American. “They're still Chinese, or Mexican when you ask where they're from. Upon being asked the same question myself, I responded, 'England,' which surprised her. 'Oh, I thought you were white,' she said.” Alison calls it a culture just starting out, a timid place governed by a distinctly “asian” form of ethics. The youth are well behaved compared to there more central Bay Area peers. “Asian Disappointment” is taken very seriously. “I was always the only white person in my AP classes.” Most of the 3,000 members of the student body graduate to continuing education at a university or JC. Alison was considered rebellious amongst her peers because she seemed to care the least about her grades, despite graduating with, what, Alison, like a 3.9? “Uh-huh.”
Vietnamese people love Clinton, Alison claims, for the dot com boom. Most Vietnamese vote Republican as a way to distance themselves thoroughly from Communism. According to recent article by the New American Media, “Vietnamese refugees to the United States subsequently found strength and inspiration in Ronald Reagan, who stood steadfast against communism during the Cold War and who made boat people into political symbols of the horror of communism.”
“It's a pretty strange place,” says Alison. Filipino dancers, ASB kids, World of Warcraft nerds, non assimilationist white goths. “I could write about this place for my Contado assignment,” I decided as the cookies were coming out and the milk was being poured. But it is really strange, as Alison would like my readers to believe? Or is this mult-ethnic experience becoming the norm for the 21st century? Furthermore, how does this tie into the literature we've been studying in class?
I began having second thoughts. But then, on my way home, I thought of something Alison said, something to the effect that in Milpitas there is no age, “everything is new, and there are no antiques.” There is a kind of transformative process happening in the bay area that the beats fantasied about in North Beach. This kind of story is becoming boring, routine, mundanely urban. I think that's healthy. White people are now experiencing marginalization in their own country, its shaking things up. The craziest thing Alison ever did was not study for an AP test; she is a rebel of a new generation. To many the Silicon Valley may represent the industrial Moloch prophesied by Ginsberg's Howl. But to Alison, Milpitas is home.
My hometown experience, a few hours north, was also similarly diverse. The Napa Valley is as much a part of the SF contado, the wine industry everyone is trying to claim as their own (people have gotten trouble for selling “Napa Valley Wine” that wasn't grown in the valley!) And that industry is very much centered on migrant culture. Our locals are marginalized, although not as drastically as in Milpitas. This area is home to a lot of people enrolled in this class, and many will be aware of this here paradigm shift that been occuring for the past few decades. And it is "strange," growing up in the places we do, in this brand new consumer society that hasn't really been attached to a specific culture yet. Kids grow up bored. Well, I think all that boredom is coming to an end. We may not think it, but we are all cyberpunk products of the Silicon Valley. We are the YOUTUBE generation. The kind of generation....well, that's for you to decide.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekoVRComzzQ




SOURCES

(1)
Munzel, Steve. Milipitas History Home Page, http://www.milpitashistory.org/home/index.html#milpa

(2)
Norr, Henry. "Growth of a Silicon Empire: Bay Area's Fertile Intellectual Ground Helped Sprout High Technology Industry. SF GATE, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/12/27/BU52171.DTL, Posted: December 27 1999

(3)
Lam, Andrew. "Why Little Saigon and Hanoi found Common Ground in John McCain." New America Media, Commentary, http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=986c40a1109ae5ad1c47b8eb34ec455a, Posted: Oct 30, 2008

Interview with Alison Frost. Nov.9th, 2008, her house.

Monday 10-20

This exasperated collection of Brautigan’s musings on the state of nature is one to ponder. The personification of Trout Fishing in America is the theme of interest to this response. I am going to assume that Trout Fishing in America as a character represents the “gemeinschaft,” or rural America as it was before the colonialism of industry.
As a “legless, screaming wino” on page 45, T.F.I.A. (with “shorty” added to the end of his title) is despised by the children pressured into charity for the sake of the barely movable man. The protagonists of the chapter, (be they the children or not) relish him as sort of an antique. “Maybe a museum might be started. Trout Fishing America Shorty could be the first piece in an important collection.” (46) T.F.I.A.S. gets his brain cleaned at a Laundromat and is likened to have “pedaled down to San Jose in his wheelchair, rattling along the freeway at a quarter of a mile an hour.” A backwards individual, T.F.I.A.S. has a hard time functioning with societal norms.
This chapter illustrates a direct comparison between T.F.I.A. and the San Francisco homeless community. Chewed up by the urban social order and spit out upon Washington Square, the “winos” are as equally displaced as the decaying environment surrounding the city. In a later chapter titled “The Last Mention of Trout Fishing In America Shorty” the homeless man is revisited by Brautigan and his infant daughter. The attempts to steal from the man and is intimidated when he welcomes her. She is driven to a sandbox, a symbol of nature encapsulated and convenient. It is as though the modern generation that fosters the child rejects the wild, uncontained natured of T.F.I.A. that “stared after her as if the space between them were a river growing larger and larger.” (97). The gap between the old and the new is widening and the old ways of the free spirit are handicapped like the old man.
All of the “replies” signed by T.F.I.A. denote a hint of nostalgia towards nature despite being seemingly unconnected with fishing. “Tomorrow I’m leaving for Alaska. I’m going to find an ice cold creek near the Arctic where that strange beautiful moss grows and spend a week with the grayling” (76). Thus T.F.I.A., fed up with New York, moves to Alaska. Perhaps a final line is crossed with T.F.I.A.; maybe New York was his last attempt to educate the masses on the theory of Trout Fishing. Are the “friends” T.F.I.A. is visiting the city itself? Are they the “dead people” (77) that invade his bathroom to use his sheet to cover themselves up?
In a similar letter style chapter titled “Trout Fishing in America with the FBI,” (41), T.F.I.A. denounces the FBI’s investigation of a criminal as a way to exploit the trout stream. “The FBI agents watched the path, the trees, the black stump, the pool and the trout as if they were all holes punched in a card that had just come out of a computer.” The government is extending it’s law enforcement to patrol the trout stream. Order is placed on the environment according to the laws of modern culture The notion of surveillance adds a mechanical element to the stream, and the FBI agents see the natural environment as another extension of their job (“it appears to be part of their training” 42).
The character of Trout Fishing in America, while taking different pseudonyms and personalities, maintain true to Brautigan’s notions of rural Americana. A thing of the past, something forgotten by most and scorned by modernity. Trout Fishing in America, the man.

A Very Funny Poem by Lucas Turner and Lawrence Ferlinghetti

all the seagulls, seagulls,
awake
and I am dead
and yet my dream is the wake
and I am the opposite

assignment 1 ferlinghetti

“In Golden Gate Park That Day” is a very interesting portrait of SF in Ferlinghetti's repertoire. Here the mongrel space city is captured very cohesively. Ferlinghetti's use of the past tense in “the enormous meadow which was the meadow of the world” twice in the poem. This gives the poem a remorse for the two deadbeats, wadding in a dream long lost (whether or not the two can be called “beats” is indiscernible due to Ferlinghetti's pronounced separation from the movement- maybe hippies?). As the wife hands out grapes to squirrels, “as if each were a little joke,” it is not apparent in the poem who is receiving the pun of the joke: the squirrels or the humans. The tone does not change much until the very when the mood is revealed in a “certain awful look of terrible depression.” Prior to the reader knowing the girls state of emotion, the “joke” can be of life to the two carefree hippies enjoying themselves in nature, pursuing the beatitude between nature/civilization. The trees “dreamed and seemed to have been waiting thru all time for them,” suggesting a home setting and oneness. The two do not speak to each other seemingly in the harmony of the moment. Yet the silence is suggested by Ferlinghetti's repetition of phrases that separate the couple: “without looking at each other” (twice), “without saying anything,” “without any particular expression.” Thus, what could considered a classically romantized portrait of flower children is turned lamentful in the climax. I noticed Ferlinghetti's use of irony in the climax of previous poems; this ending however, does not provide comic relief. The age of free love of the San Francisco sub culture may be on the decline. The hostility suggested with the “without's” make the couple seem dysfunctional. If this poem were written in the 1960's it could have been taken for a critique of the emerging culture. However in a contemporary setting the two figures are much more appropriately “lost” and thus the critique falls upon the larger San Francisco community. Those still seeking the 1960's in public parks may have much to be depressed about.