The faded pink facade couldn’t possibly have been painted in decades, it seemed, and the entire property just exuded the quaint, dry, dusty underbelly of a San Jose long forgotten. The whole parcel of land just reeked of landlord neglect, the sort of which begged to be captured with only the finest of blighted-landscape photography.

Fortunately or unfortunately, for whatever curious reason, someone recently decided to paint the place. That’s right, the dictators of cleanliness have upgraded one of San Jose’s finest dilapidated buildings and made it look nice. Maybe it was the landlord, I don’t know, but now the place explodes with fresh hues of pink, brick-red and olive green. Updated signage appears above each store front, including the Pink Elephant Barbershop, which still claims 1958 as its year of inception.

Of course, I would be elevating my own self-importance to even suggest that two Metro articles celebrating the hideousness of the property would result in the landlord suddenly fixing up the facade after years of neglect. That would be presumptuous, now, wouldn’t it?

But it strangely happened somewhere else also. A second travesty of tidiness recently went down over at Lincoln Glen Center, that historic suburban wasteland strip mall at the corner of Almaden Expressway and Foxworthy. The Urban Blight Exploration Junkie relished in the hideous aura of this dump while compiling a July 25, 2007, cover exposé titled “Tour the Obscure.”

If you don’t know the place, this is the rundown center where you’ll find the Sherwood Inn, one of San Jose’s classic old-school dive restaurants—the one with the green cow overlooking the expressway. That cow has been there for decades, although it used to be black not green. But the bovine still commands a presence as it seemingly gazes due west, straight down Foxworthy toward the far southern expanses of Willow Glen.

At the time of that exposé, the Lincoln Glen Center sign was a gorgeously haphazard, pieced-together-over-decades monstrosity showcasing the history of all the places within the center that have come and gone over the years. It hadn’t been updated in at least 20 years—a paean to cheapskate landlords worldwide.

You saw a square sign with the words “Barber” and “Cocktails” and “Health Foods” arbitrarily sandwiched between other more faded and slanted signs from times past or present or both—all of which inhabited a pole slanting 70 degrees off the pavement in a pure ’50s kitsch sort of design. Now all of that is gone and you see one brand new shiny boring square sign in its place. Drat. All grandiosity and narcissism aside, the Urban Blight Exploration Junkie just has to wonder if he hadn’t penned that exposé celebrating the property owner’s glorious disregard of all things modern and kept up—and announcing such grace to hundreds of thousands of readers all over the Bay Area and beyond—that the wonderful dilapidated sign would not have been finally replaced. Go check it out for yourself.

Either way, it brings to mind a tale freelance writer and pal Larry Tritten once relayed to me. He said that years ago a certain SoCal porno theater replaced its movie screen solely because he had complained about the quality in one of his reviews. There you have it. Maybe the pen is mightier than the sword after all. The Urban Blight Exploration Junkie will resurface at a later date.

Such were my thoughts when I wrote a Dec. 12, 2007, column titled “Meet Me at Count Five Place,” suggesting that the city of San Jose name a street after the band. Aside from the fact that San Jose and Dublin are already sister cities, other locales have done similar things. For example, the legendary Oklahoma City band the Flaming Lips has been known for its surreal rock madness for more than 20 years now, so the city—apropos of the band’s career—took an indistinguishable side street behind some clubs and renamed it Flaming Lips Alley. The band’s singer, Wayne Coyne, who still lives in that city, dug the idea, actually preferring a back alley over a main street. “Any time you’ve got an alley with dumpsters and trucks loading beer out of the back, I thought, maybe that’s a little better,” he said. “I like to think that, in fact I almost prefer that we’re one of these great little secrets—that people sort of stumble upon us—while looking for something more obvious.”

Exactly. That would probably be the case for “Count Five Place” as well. But this is not a matter of being “secret” just to be secret. Renaming a street can be difficult due to the red tape involved. A lot of people have to be in the loop—the nearby residents, the postal service, the historians, the folks who make the maps, plus God knows how many layers of city bureaucracy. It’s much easier to either create a new street and then name it, or just find an inconspicuous nonresidential road with a previous name that nobody would miss.

One such street in particular comes to mind, as suggested by the Blank Club, a live-music nightspot that sits on an older stretch of Almaden Avenue in downtown San Jose. You see, in this horribly planned city, there currently exists an Almaden Expressway, an Almaden Road, an Almaden Boulevard and an Almaden Avenue—a confusing mess that bugs the hell out of nonnatives looking for anything on one of those streets.

The parallel streets of Almaden Avenue and Vine run north and south, branching off from where Almaden Expressway ends at Alma. Before Park Center Plaza, the Center for the Performing Arts, the old library and the convention center all went in, those streets ran all the way north to Santa Clara Street and beyond. After the developments went in, Vine Avenue from 280 to Santa Clara Street was eventually widened and renamed Almaden Boulevard.

The Blank Club is located on one of the remaining stretches original Almaden Avenue just south of Santa Clara Street, the same side-street home to the Greyhound Bus Station and a popular dive bar called the Caravan, which also features rock bands three nights a week. Newcomers constantly get confused over the different Almaden streets, and since that entire two-block stretch has an edgy, back-alley punk-music kind of feel to it, I don’t think anyone would complain if it was rechristened Count Five Avenue. I can’t think of any better way to foster the San Jose/Dublin sister city relationship than to rename Almaden Avenue south of Santa Clara Street. No one lives there. No one would care. Let’s do it.

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. No one can vouch for how long the poster lasted, as the authorities painted over it soon thereafter. In fact, many of Shepard’s other posters throughout San Jose that weekend were covered up or removed with impressive and extraordinary quickness. Little did anybody in San Jose know that eight years later, Time magazine would commission Shepard to create an image of president-elect Barack Obama for the cover of their 2008 Person of the Year issue—the one you see on the newsstands at this very moment.

Shepard is a world-renowned cultural provocateur who works with viral marketing and street art campaigns as forms of communication. He creates propaganda-style imagery that explores and confounds the role of subliminal advertising in our everyday lives. His most notable operation, “Obey Giant,” began with just a few hundred stickers of the professional wrestler, Andre the Giant, containing the words,  “Andre the Giant has a posse,” including Andre’s height and weight. The stickers, in themselves, meant absolutely nothing, but after Shepard and his friends started placing them around Charleston, S.C., an entire street art campaign exploded and the stickers began surfacing in major cities all across the country. Casual observers on the streets became confused. Some folks thought the stickers represented a religious cult, while others thought it was a gang. The campaign was a ridiculing of propaganda and a wiseass stunt to see how the populace would interpret the imagery, but it eventually grew into a worldwide movement, especially when Shepard added the “Obey” slogan to the stickers. “Obey Giant,” as a brand, then went big time. “Obey” clothing lines, mural art and even musical instruments emerged and the iconography has infiltrated many facets of pop culture around the globe.

Then came Barack Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and Shepard was hooked. In what was seen by many as a departure from his standard inflammatory, anti-establishment tactics, Shepard, working independently, created the now-ubiquitous Obama “hope” poster, with the candidate’s face silkscreened in red, white and blue. The picture became the iconic image of Obama’s campaign. When the editors at Time chose the president-elect for their 2008 Person of the Year, they commissioned Shepard to create the cover image for the issue.

Mind Over Metal, a rocking story where I infiltrate a psychic spoonbending party. James Randi himself makes an appearance.

Bidet, Mate Hysterical cover story about $5000 Japanese toilets with bidets built in.

Tour the Obscure. My anti-travel guide to the back alleys and urban decay of San Jose. I’m actually ON the cover this time.

Art on the Edge, The first and definitive story about the ZeroOne Global Festival of Art on the Edge in San Jose. Ignore the copycats.

Silicon Valley’s chapter of the Slow Food movment. The first cover story for Metro I ever did. Decadence as politics.

Rudy Rucker. The cyberpunk science fiction pioneer and yours truly tour the streets of San Jose and Los Gatos, exploring the locales in his novels, and using Conway’s Game of Life to ridicule San Jose’s redevelopment strategy for downtown.

South Bay Riot. An oral history of San Jose skate punk in the early 1980s.

Earth to San Jose How a group of diehard soccer fans saved the San Jose Earthquakes soccer franchise for one more season.

Hit Man Yakking with local author Barry Eisler about his thriller series that is now taking over the world.
]]> http://www.metroactive.com/siliconalleys/?feed=rss2&p=221 http://www.metroactive.com/siliconalleys/?p=231 http://www.metroactive.com/siliconalleys/?p=231#comments Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:15:04 +0000 gsingh http://www.metroactive.com/siliconalleys/?p=231
About a year ago, Adrienne Barbeau came back to San Jose to fill in for George Romero at a horror convention. I just had to ask her about Del Mar High School, since that’s where she went. Well, it turns out that a copy of the 1963 yearbook exists in the California Room at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. I’m going to go rent Swamp Thing immediately.

Or did they?

Today, mayor Chuck Reed and Councilmember Madison Nguyen caved in to the protestors and released a memo saying that they want this Little Saigon mess on the ballot in November. So now everyone in San Jose will get to vote on whether a stretch of Story Road should be renamed Little Saigon instead of Saigon Business District. And they now want to reallocate the funds that were to be used for the Saigon Business District signage and use that money to help pay for this ballot measure.

Now, is this really caving in to the pressure, or is it just a sly political move in order to make sure the two of them are finally seen as “democratic?” In either case, this is a dangerous move that could seriously backfire right in their face. A good portion of San Joseans, right or wrong, are just plain sick of this whole issue. What next? 30 years from now, when thousands of Iraqis takeover Willow Glen and insist on renaming it Little Fallujah, should the city pay for an election to vote on it?

Anyway, the fact that it’s come this far proves the whole thing is political theater of the absurd in its purest form. It more than screams for absurdist quotes, so here we go. These quotes perfectly describe the entire situation. Feel free to leave your own quotes.

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.
–Oscar Wilde

In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.
–Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

When you know to laugh and when to look upon things as too absurd to take seriously, the other person is ashamed to carry through even if he was serious about it.
–Eleanor Roosevelt

My turn of mind is so given to taking things in the absurd point of view, that it breaks out in spite of me every now and then.
–Lord Byron

Bad Planning, No Donut

A STRIP OF ROAD that adequately represents a microcosm of all things San Jose is the entire length of Auzerais Avenue, from the Children’s Discovery Museum straight over to Meridian. My local travelogue began right there on Auzerais underneath Highway 87, just a stone’s throw west of the light rail tracks at the Discovery Museum. I eagerly inspected the fenced-off construction area and all its wonders: Piles of unused steel girders, pallets of wooden planks, heaps of gravel, knocked-over stacks of cones, discarded pieces of rebar, a lone pickup truck and one portable bathroom. What a sight, and the chain-link fence was erected by Thompson & Thompson Fence Company in San Lorenzo. I don’t know who the Thompsons are, but I like ‘em already.

Venturing westward, I came to the corner of Delmas, where the building that used to house Lou’s Living Donut Museum sits. It is a travesty of justice that Lou’s is no longer in existence. The only thing gracing the storefront is an untouched rack of Auto Mercado magazines.

The next few blocks of Auzerais are highlighted by a few rundown trailers, a panel wagon from the ’40s, a slew of dilapidated houses, the San Jose Fire Station No. 30 and a handful of auto repair shops. Continuing, I just had to stop and gawk at a beautiful local market from the old days. The sign above the place says this: Mi Rancho Grocery Beer Wine Vegetables. Someone should do a photography exhibit of dive corner markets in San Jose before they’re all gone. Across the street, I just had to feast my eyes upon Janco Welding Supplies, housed in a building that is God knows how old. And at 525 Auzerais, I looked at an unidentifiable building with three blue awnings and a “closed” sign on the door. A glaring red sign on the black iron gate said: Herman’s New Location. I know nothing of Herman, but I like him already, too.

After that, one of the best vacant lots in all of San Jose beckoned me over to have a look-see. Like a glove, the 6-foot-tall weeds completely enveloped the broken-down chain-link fence that looked like a truck had backed into it. On the other side of the fence, I saw abandoned cars, empty 12-packs of beer, a shipping container and a rotten wood fence that connected the lot to the dilapidated Victorian next door. Yeah! From there, I just had to keep on trucking across Bird Avenue, past Hitchcock’s Construction Lawn And Garden Equipment and the bags of mulch that occupy a section of Orchard Supply Hardware across the street. The water tower from the old Del Monte Cannery stood above it all, beaming down like an ancient relic from the past that just refuses to die.

Just a stroll down the road sits one of the all-time fortresses of old-school San Jose: Paradiso’s Delicatessen. I couldn’t even tell you what decade it opened, but the Royal Crown Cola sign still holds court out there in front. If that place goes away, I’ll blow up the new City Hall.

Now, to clarify: I’m not some crotchety old-timer against all progress—I just believe “development” should just be something that looks and feels freakin’ real, for crying out loud. And speaking of that, as soon as I carried on down Auzerais and crossed the creek, the “new days” arrived. KB Homes is putting up yet another gargantuan mess of homogeneous condos. Passing them up without even looking, I passed by some wonderful abandoned warehouses at Sunol and made it to Lincoln, a gorgeous intersection graced by AJ’s, the dancing girlie place, and Rossetta’s Rain Gutters and Sheet Metal.

Finally, I came to where Auzerais dead-ends into an embarrassing minicity of hideous cookie-cutter condos between Race and Meridian, near where the Saddlerack used to be. I escaped through to Meridian and then segued left into the parking lot of Paramount Imports, where I bought my first music T-shirts 24 years ago. Standing there in that famous long skinny parking lot, looking at the doors of the building behind the place, I gazed at a sign above those doors that perfectly befitted the end of this journey: Lost Horizon.

Hail Trapezoid

DESPITE the maneuverings of developers to slaughter everything original in this town, there still exist local occult centers of primal activity that continue to radiate their hidden powers. So for this week’s sermon, allow me to proselytize about yet one more: A hallowed area that I will now christen as “The Saratoga/Kiely/Stevens Creek Trapezoid.” Strip mall aficionados have always worshipped the seven deadly sins that emanate from this locale.

You see, even a casual glance at a road map shows that the area bounded by Saratoga Avenue, Stevens Creek Boulevard, Kiely Boulevard and Northlake Drive forms a trapezoid, and those schooled in the occult arts and sciences know that trapezoidal symbology pops up in many hidden philosophies. We’ll get back to that in a second. But for now we shall begin by summoning the occult powers of the legendary San Jose establishments that inhabit this trapezoid.

First there’s Harry’s Hofbrau, one of S.J.’s great meccas for cheapskate carnivore fundamentalists. Harry’s has graced Saratoga Avenue with Gluttony for years now. This particular branch is one of four left in the Bay Area, and together they supposedly go through a combined 1 million pounds of turkeys each year. You cannot enter this trapezoid without conjuring the gods of Harry’s Hofbrau, nor can you ignore another San Jose institution right across the parking lot, the Garden City Casino, that beautiful bastion of Greed and Envy. The history of Garden City is way beyond the scope of this column, but it’s safe to say that, from the outside, the building looks like a combo of a chateau and a church, probably contributing to its overall holiness.

Also in that parking lot sits an empty space that used to be the Cabaret, an infamous ’80s rock club that encouraged all the sins you’d expect from the devil’s music, including Sloth and Wrath. In case you’re counting, that’s now five of the Seven Deadly Sins, and if you throw in the Tinker’s Damn gay bar and Hot Stuff adult toy place, which are kitty-corner across the intersection, those would appropriately constitute Lust, leaving us with just one more sin: Pride.

Across the street the other way, one finds Saratoga Plaza, a classic suburban strip mall with signs going back decades. We must make sure that it remains off the redevelopment radar enough so that it won’t get remodeled and defaced with the standardized faux-Southwestern color scheme of rustic brown, bile-colored olive green, beige and faded canary that you see on almost every other post-2000 strip mall around here. Since the developers really are the self-proclaimed deities of this town, I’m left with no other choice in my reactionary paranoid rage but to give the devil his due here and prevent them from destroying the wonderful seven sins of this sacred territory.

In “The Law of the Trapezoid,” Church of Satan founder Anton La Vey explains that contrary to pyramids—which are seen as “pleasing” objects, as finished symmetrical forms that are godlike to the eye—trapezoids can represent deliberate aberration and misdirection. They can provoke anxiety and disturbances. He then extends this to explore how subtle aberrations in topographical symmetry can elicit unconscious revulsions in even the most tranquil of individuals.

Such metaphors are common in magical rituals, so we should expand on this by using the trapezoid of Saratoga, Kiely, Stevens Creek and Northlake to instill emotional imbalance, hardship and tragedy in the spirits of those godlike developers who are secretly meditating on prayer beads to baptize it anew with their next phase of hideous uniform abodes. Long live the trapezoid!

Too Far Gong

LAST WEEK, media everywhere reported on the “historic” San Jose City Council meeting where most of the council emotionally asked Mayor Ron Gonzales to throw in the towel. Following Gonzo’s recent indictment on several charges including bribery and conspiracy, the councilmembers unleashed a last-minute agenda to thrash out the details of what they should do in case he doesn’t resign. More than the usual amount of television cameras, reporters and security guards filled City Hall for this “special meeting.” Every possible emotion—joy, sorrow and disgust—was thrown right in your face.

By the time you read this, everyone will already have written, screamed and blogged about it, so allow me to furnish an alternative description of the clown show that this was: You see, back in the ’70s, America was blessed with an ingenious TV program called The Gong Show. Legendary game show impresario Chuck Barris went out and solicited the worst acts he possibly could, put ‘em onstage and paid three celebrities to get drunk and judge the whole thing. If the celebrities deemed an act absolutely atrocious, they would stand up and bash a huge gong, signaling the end of the performance. The concept of the “gong” thus forever ingrained itself in American pop culture.

This special session of the City Council should have been an episode of The Gong Show. Here are a few of the highlights: At the onset, Gonzo defiantly declared: “I plan to complete my term as your mayor.” One person booed, and one person applauded. About 20 members of the Gonzales family were in the audience and he directed them all to stand up while he explained that this whole ordeal was about preserving the Gonzales family name and the family pride. Someone in the audience immediately yelled, “Save it for the jury!”

As the grumblings from the crowd escalated, the mayor reminded the audience that they must remain quiet until the public session commenced. He then asked his staff to stand up as he bragged that their combined efforts added up to two centuries of public service—a claim about as meaningless as a tag-team pro-wrestling duo being ticketed at a “total combined weight” of 750 pounds.

Councilmember Forrest Williams—one of two along with Madison Nguyen who didn’t vote for Gonzo’s resignation—went on to compare the efforts of those calling for Ron’s removal to the 1933 lynching in St. James Park. I immediately thought, Where’s the bloody gong when you need it?

Councilmember Linda LeZotte, on the other hand, did not deserve a gong. In a poignant attack, she told this to Gonzales: “I am judging as I can under the charter your fitness for office and whether or not the 10th largest city in the country deserves a mayor with your obvious lack of judgment and the ability to lead under this cloud. Your refusal to resign speaks volumes about your arrogance, and of your failure to recognize your ethical shortcomings, not about your guilt or your innocence. Today is not about you. It’s about what is best for this city. So again I ask you to do the honorable thing and resign, for the good of the citizens of San Jose.” Hear, hear!

The public session constituted the main attraction of this episode of The Gong Show and many folks actually defended Gonzo, blasting the council for originally assuming they could simply sit down and remove the guy from office. Bill Chew went to the podium, sans the roller skates, and accused the council of being a lynch mob. Several Latinos also took center stage and played the race card, saying things like, “This didn’t happen to the last white mayor.” The lack of a gong really became apparent when a Bible-thumping zealot took the podium and compared Ron Gonzales’ adultery to King David’s adultery. He then blasted Gonzo for supporting gay marriage and voting to give health benefits to fornicators.

Lastly, let me point out that a regular on the original Gong Show was the Unknown Comic, that famous comedian who wore a paper bag over his head. There’s a metaphor here somewhere, although I just don’t know what. Let’s just redo this whole City Council meeting with Chuck Barris as the emcee. I’ll volunteer to be one of the judges.

A column from 11/28/2007 to kick off this category. In my humble opionion, the only good thing written about the Little Saigon debate. I laughed out loud while writing this.

Political Theater Of the Absurd

THIS WEEK, an acid rain shower of absurdities for y’all. The Anti-Man-About-Town (AMAT) infiltrated San Jose City Hall once again last Tuesday to witness the spectacle surrounding the council’s decision to rename part of Story Road “Saigon Business District.”

Usually AMAT has no difficulty entering City Hall and overseeing the circus, no matter what issues are being thrashed out, what bones of contention lay on the table or who isn’t allowed to wear roller skates. For example, if William Garbett is at the podium addressing the council, I can usually weave and bob my way through the snoring audience and find a seat to collapse into.

But not this time. I couldn’t even make it to the bloody elevator, as the entire place was overtaken by a shrieking battery of Vietnamese-Americans who wanted to name the stretch of Story Road “Little Saigon” instead. In fact, “battery” barely even described it, really. It was hard to navigate through it all and I had to swim upstream and hightail it out of their way.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for witnessing hundreds of folks verbally abuse the City Council, especially when they have bullhorns and especially when it’s in a language I can’t understand. But due to the overwhelming masses, there was no way for me to even get my foot in the chambers, so I ventured elsewhere.

With all due respect to both sides of this confrontation—and it is a confrontation—I cannot help but willfully debase the entire dialogue. Look at it this way: San Jose first belonged to the Ohlone Indians, then to the Spanish and Mexicans, and then to Thomas Fallon and then to Tom McEnery, who still thinks it belongs to him.

Nowadays we have both a thriving Mexican-American and a Vietnamese-American community. What’s the big deal? I love it all.

How about this: 30 years from now when 200 Iraqi-American businesses exist on Lincoln Avenue between Willow and Minnesota, should we rename it Little Fallujah, Ba’ath Party West or the Fifth Dynasty of Ur? In fact, I’d love to see the looks on faces of Willow Glen residents if that actually happens. I hope it does.

And then some of the protesters at the City Council meeting had the audacity to call Councilmember Madison Nguyen a communist for not supporting their particular side. Give me a break.

Look, in my day I’ve been called a “communist” by more than a few right-wing Bible-thumping bigots, so I know what it feels like. I may be a post-Nietzschean anarcho-Taoist beer mystic, but I ain’t no stinking communist.

And neither is Madison.

Now some of these same folks want to recall her. Since the entire charade has degenerated into nothing but an irrational farce, AMAT will now describe the spectacle as a revamped version of le Theatre de l’Absurde, a la Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, since the French trying to reoccupy Vietnam is partly what created this whole stinking mess in the first place.

As Beckett famously said, “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”

Anti-Man-About-Town over and out.

In 2005 I wrote a column on Mailer which received a few wonderful hate letters from folks who just didn’t get the humor. If I had it over again, I could have written it much, much better, but hey, the spirit was definitely there.

My obituary of Mailer just last year was also quite a hoot. There really is something to this birthday concept. I don’t condone everything he did in life, but you’ll just have to read it. The quote from Gore Vidal at the end frighteningly sounds like he’s describing yours truly. Ugh.

January 31st also happens to be National Gorilla Suit Day, which was started by Mad Magazine’s Don Martin decades ago.

May both Mailer and Martin rest in peace. Their memories will always be with me.

–Gary

THE CIRCUS that is the Little Saigon debate isn’t going away, and people are still congregating in front of City Hall every Tuesday to protest San Jose City Councilmember Madison Nguyen because she and others voted to rename a part of Story Road “Saigon Business District” instead of “Little Saigon.”

Since the entire scenario is bordering on surreal, I have to suggest a solution that will satisfy everyone: just rename the street Madison Avenue.

We’re talking about the stretch of Story Road that runs from Highway 101 all the way to Senter Road, which is a grand esplanade if ever there was one, and since this area has a baffling tradition of naming streets after politicians who are still alive, it shouldn’t be a problem.

But in order to reassure myself that such a progressive idea makes sense, I conjured up the urban blight exploration junkie once again and walked the entire length of the area in question, beginning at Story and Via Ferrari, which is just west of 101. A gorgeous industrial grade-A recycling plant began the journey.

The next breeze-by had to be the Story Road Animal Hospital, a neat-looking tiny hamlet of a building. It’s old-school architecture at its jazziest. The yellow sign out on the sidewalk is one of those archaic traditional signs that just begs to be photographed. It stands there like royalty, with the hospital sign perpendicular to the slanting vertical pole. A black dog is standing on its hind legs, trying to climb the pole and get to a cat that sits on top of it. Many folks have documented and/or photographed old-school San Jose signs, but this one often gets lost among the nearby Asian shopping malls, empty retail buildings and graffiti-laden placards. It rules. And the building has paw imprints painted all along the edge of the roof.

As the journey proceeds westward even further, the junkie then comes to the crossroads of Story and McLaughlin—one of those legendary congested East Side intersections where at least five cars run the red light in every direction to avoid getting stuck in a second or third cycle. And don’t even get me started on the clowns who consistently try and make U-turns on McLaughlin when there’s obviously not enough room. You can stand there and count the people who end up driving over the curb.

There are good things about this intersection, though. We have three liquor stores, a Save Mart, a Burger King, a bunch of killer Vietnamese and Mexican stuff and a barber shop right next to a place that says, “Cleaners. Alterations. Libreria Christiana.” I guess you can get both your suit tailored and your Biblical fix in the same place.

But the journey couldn’t stop there. Continuing westward, one finds the Grand Century Shopping Mall, which is Vietnam central—an awesome place to hang out. The food court is a thoroughly rocking place. Right across the street, one finds the now-ubiquitous Lee’s Sandwich shop with a noble, imposing sign that says, “Got hot baguette.”

And one couldn’t possibly traverse this length of road without mentioning the KLIV/KRTY building that sits right in the middle of it all. This recently replaced what used to be a decades-old landmark radio building. You can look up the photos.

As the urban blight exploration junkie reaches the end of this now hotly contested stretch of Story Road, he then passes the Taco Bell at Roberts Avenue and crosses to a green meadow which is basically a fenced-off landfill on the other side of the creek from the sheep at the Happy Hollow Zoo. Man, what a stretch of road. The entire thing is a grand, majestic, all-inclusive, distinguished promenade worthy of being renamed Madison Avenue. This is the future of San Jose, right here and now. I’m a Madison Avenue Man.