My first impression of Silicon Valley vs Uncanny Valley : A Memoir by Anna Wiener

Fresh off the boat, San Francisco Bay Area / Silicon Valley was my first home in the US of A. Above is a screenshot of an old blog post from my now defunct Live Journal describing my very first impressions, written 4 years after the said impressions were first registered. The static nature of the content is a tell-tale sign that it belongs to a prehistoric time when blog posts and not reaction videos ruled the day. 

Silicon Valley was and is a bubble, floating in an ether of its own making, far above in the exosphere and beyond the comprehension of the rest of America and the world. It is a strange place full of contradictions that questions its own existence. Is it for real? How could such a place exist where a roof over your head - the rent of a one-bed apartment could set you back $4-5K/month easily but you could get a filling burrito from a hole in the wall eatery for $5?

Anna Wiener calls it the uncanny valley in her memoir, "Uncanny Valley." Documenting her move from East coast to SFO after accepting a job at an eBook startup,  Wiener's memoir provides access to the inside track of the Silicon valley in 2010s populated with 20-somethings. Reflecting on the peculiar feelings that Silicon Valley evokes, the title could also be a play on words pointing to Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori's original concept of the uncanny valley. 

You know you have arrived in downtown San Francisco if you can spot homeless people wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the logos of Silicon Valley companies taking a shit on the sidewalk. A city of opposites where the homeless junkie shares the streets with hoodied 20-something CEO of a startup, both probably wearing the same hoodies although most tech companies have a strict policy not to give away company merchandise to people who do not provide any value to the company.

As you walk/read/proceed across the (uncanny) valley in the shadow of meth, you will fear no evil, for Ms.Wiener walks among angels(investors), evangelists, CEOs, CTOs and brogrammers who would rather overdose on protein bars and vitamin D pills. Reading the 2010s version of the tech boom, I realize the Valley has not changed at all from the dotcom boom era of the late 90s-early 2000s that I briefly brushed against. It is still riding the roaring twenties. It will always be the roaring twenties in Silicon Valley. I am older and too tired to keep up. I am glad we got out of that forever young place while we were still nimble to make a break.

Most of Wiener's observations about San Francisco's tech industry elicit a sigh of relief from me. It is similar to the calm feeling you get after committing the premeditated murder of your Facebook account. You no longer have to play catch-up with your 500 'friends' posts and their photos living the high/lie-life. You can live at your own pace, stress-free.The tech-bros in Japanese denim can micro-dose and meditate on their next big disruption or take nootropics and bio-hack their way to being the pioneers of the better world they aim to create. 

But you are free. You are delighted to find that you are still in a world where you can be a wee bit evil and you are not pressured to think different all the time. You are no longer part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. It could be a different planet for all you care. In case you still want to keep in touch, once in a blue moon, read inter-planetary dispatches like Ms.Wiener's. She does a really good job as an outsider looking in. The outsider who almost became an insider and bowed out before being sucked into the cult of the Valley.

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Rehashing old blog posts: My favorite poet, once upon a time when I used to read poetry - Rod McKuen

This is rehashed blog post, (not much of a rehash other than changing tenses to match the changed lives and times,) first posted fourteen years ago in my now deleted LiveJournal.

The only readers of poetry are angsty teens, wannabe poets or desperate lovers sniffing around to make off with a verse or two. In the early nineties I gained entry into the first category and started to write...poems! Thereby getting admitted to the second category as well.

I must have just crossed in to my teens. I could be often seen thumping through the pages of yellow moth eaten slim volumes of contemporary poetry, before deciding which one to take home, at our city's public library. Some of these were as recently published as in the summer of '69, which more or less marked the end of the period called contemporary at this historic place of books and learning. That was as current as I could get in 1990s without straining my pocket.

And then I met him….. in a lonesome city, listening to the warm – Rod McKuen. Here was a man after my own heart. A poet singing of love, loneliness, angst and all things in between. Reading McKuen was the closest I came to reading paperback romances, but it does not undermine the value of his works nor do I regret reading them, I enjoyed every secret bite I took of his poems. He was my first girlish crush in the world of words and had a permanent seat in my altar before T.S.Eliot unseated him some years later.

This former rodeo cowboy, lumberjack, cookie cutter, railroad worker, surveyor and US Army infantryman in Korea (wonder whether they still make such renaissance men?) had sold 75 million copies of his books, translated into 28 languages world-wide. A poetic mouthpiece of the sixties flower children, McKuen had recorded 215 albums of original music, 67 went platinum and 115 gold. McKuen’s songs have been recorded by hundreds of artists from Frank Sinatra to Madonna and from Barbra Streisand and the Boston Pops to The Kingston Trio.(Thanks, Wikipedia)

Rod McKuen at Stanyan St., SFO.  Photo by Ralph Crane

Critics said he had no rhyme or rhythm, it was prose faking as poetry, cheap kitsch for the unrefined masses. Who cared, back then I enjoyed it. I hate the maze of metaphors, or in the present day, the overuse of thesaurus. Poetry should be simple, understandable and from the heart. If someone blamed McKuen of being self centered, for pimping his life, I pity him/her – isn’t a person an agglomeration of his experiences and some scattered leaves of memory in someone else’s scrapbook when s/he is dead?

Looking back, most of the McKuen stuff I had once liked with their recurring love-loneliness-sex themes seems cheesy for my now evolved, refined senses(ROFL, who am I kidding), but once upon a time they served my girly teen spirit just right.

Turned out that the first city which became my home in the US was also a favorite muse of McKuen and his place of birth (Oakland technically.)

Here’s a McKuen poem about a familiar street (to me,) at the corner of the hippydom’s Mecca in San Francisco's Haight - Ashbury dist., there’s Stanyan Street and other sorrows….

And now unable to sleep
because the day is finally coming home
because your sleep has locked me out
I watch you and wonder at you.
I know your face by touch when it’s dark
I know the profile of your sleeping face
the sound of you sleeping.
… I have total recall of you
and Stanyan Street
because I know it will be important later.
It’s quiet now.
Only the clock
moving toward rejection tomorrow
breaks the stillness.

-Rod McKuen, from Stanyan Street and other Sorrows 

Not earth shattering, not even poetry by many people’s standards, but somehow those lines got me started on writing and have led to this day that you’ve to endure my blog.

McKuen was still hale and hearty when I had made the original post in 2006. I had assumed he was still alive. Today while checking upon him on the internet after ages, I found that he had passed away four years ago, this month at the age of 81.

Rest in peace, my dear poet and thank you for your songs.

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Kannur, an old post : A prelude

Kannur is close to my heart, for undisclosed reasons. I have spent many childhood summers tearing across its red laterite hilltops and endless cashew groves with the local kid brigade. I had written a few lines in my old blog about this piece of heaven I was fortunate to spend a few weeks every summer, cut-pasting it below..... (I am running short of writing fuel that I have to resort to rehashing my old stuff.) I was planning to post a movie and a book review, both set in Kannur. But from the length of it, the reviews will have to wait, here's the prelude first.

Kannur is one of the northern districts in the southern Indian state of Kerala, on the west coast of India. Here's Kannur's Wikipedia page.

a post from Oct 17, 2009 Paradise in those days of bruised scabby knees and wild hair was set in red laterite country. It had grandmothers who moved around in an ether of Ayurvedic oils handing out admonitions and sweat-meats with equal ease. The main citizens of this nation were a mob of tanned and rowdy cousins who would crawl out of the woodwork the minute we city-dwellers landed. Within the next few weeks we’d map every nook and cranny of the wild farmlands to the last earthworm and the last dragonfly (Dragonflies were particularly useful as these when tied with a string on their tails could be used as backhoes for picking up stones.) Our feet would tear fields and playgrounds to shreds as a determined sun watched on while vaporizing an occasional itinerant cloud. …..and what you see above is a piece of that paradise. If it was a human this photo will be eligible to purchase and consume alcoholic beverages by this year. It doesn’t know what it is missing. But you know. You are looking for 72 virgins, swaying palms and cool emerald water that are notable by their absence in my dated version of paradise. Instead what you see on either side of the mud road are rice fields getting roasted in ample solar radiation typical of April in South India. A river which could’ve salvaged the otherwise dry and dusty frame hides a couple of hundred meters behind me, the photographer. I took the picture with my trusted Yashica. A few of my cousins and my sister are in the photo. The two men in lungi are passersby. The photo has been tickled a bit by my funny photoshop bone. I couldn’t help but contribute to the mutilation of the photo already warped by time, weather, scanning conditions and a 13 year old amateur camera aficionado. The only person untouched in the picture is the man wearing thoppikuda (thoppi= hat, kuda = umbrella.) It is my homage to an extinct age when thoppikudas could travel inconspicuously in public without eliciting puzzled glances and when I was at an age, like the one perfectly summed up in this song, It was always summer and the future called We were ready for adventures and we wanted them all And there was so much left to dream And so much time to make it real Earlier in the day this song (or rather the refrain, I do not know any song beyond their chorus) was making rounds in my brain. Sung by the beefy bard of modern rock ballads a line from it was adopted by automakers world wide and affixed on many rear-view mirrors. The automakers might claim it was the other way around. But I wouldn’t doubt the ingenuity of bards of any kind, from anywhere, whether from New World or Old Country. I’ve unstuck a line from the lyrics and have pasted it on the photo. The rest of it is here. ..There are times I think I see him peeling out of the dark I think he’s right behind me now and he’s gaining ground But it was long ago and it was far away, oh God it seems so very far And if life is just a highway, then the soul is just a car And objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are And objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are Like Kenny in the song this photo has a cousin of mine who is with us no more (you can only see his brown legs, not his face) and there are times I think I see him peeling out of the dark…..I am thirteen again and it is summer blazing up in the lost paddy fields in far-off Malabar.

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