Crossroads Dispatches

yet another way to Demo, to Launch, to Lunch, to Flock, to Frolic

I want to jump in the fray around Demo this week with a pre-announcement. Since everyone's asking what I'm baking these days, here's a peek inside the oven:

Imagine walking right into a set, a living theater of sorts, a pop-up teahouse and brasserie evoking the artistic foment and intimacy of the Parisian salon.

A laidback running showcase for eclectic installations of provocative and live social art, aesthetic and green designs, Web 2.0 demos (including a boutique digital screening room, etc.)

A convivial spa of conversation catalyzing fertile verges.

A community space for people to commune with people of every stripe. (Devoted but not pushy about transforming "the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.")

Each production comes once around for less than a season, never to be repeated again, to instanteously pop up in another incarnation somewhere else in the Bay Area (initially).

This time, the swirling philosophers and literati of a Vienna coffehouse with Art Nouveau vibe

(exit stage left)

Now, the Silk Road beckons saffron and cinnabar colored plush pillows spice-laden opium den  (sans opium)

(exit stage right)

Now, what does your fantasy fancy?...

"All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players" - Shakespeare, As You Like It

I haven't seen anything quite like it I can point you to. But something about Colette's in Paris reminds. Something about New Frontier on Main at this year's Sundance Film Festival reminds: 

"New Frontier on Main is Sundance's newest venue, showcasing moving-image [video] installations, live performances, microcinema screenings, new media technology, and the Rabbit Hole, a DJ lounge cafe." (more in this great article, "Sundance's New Frontier preserves artistic integrity", Variety, January 17, 2007)

"I've always loved DEMO-style conferences (like the one going on in Palm Desert today) where entrepreneurs show off their creations for the first time to an audience of their peers, the press, and investors." - Jason Calacanis, "Taking the payola out of DEMO-ing: The TechCrunch 20 Conference (or, I'm back in the conference business baby!)

This doesn't replace any expos or conferences, but I'm yearning for gatherings more sassy than a conference, and I'm willing to bet others are too.

I applaud the launchpad that Mike and Jason are giving visionaries to demo their dreams based on merit, not who's able pony up fees:

"It is a well known secret that if you are willing to pay the $15,000+ fee, your startup will really need to suck to be turned down." - Mike Arrington, "The TechCrunch20 Conference"

I don't have my model entirely cranked out, yet. But, claro que si, it's about the artists, innovators, entrepreneurs pushing the edges.

p.s. Comment, blog, email, text, or call 408 513 7324 if you are interested in participating in anyway.

dancers? investors? musicians? VJs/DJs? sponsors? videographers? filmmakers? accountants?  real estate gurus? conceptual artists? chefs? burners? producers? set designers? experimental theater folks? etc. etc?

(I'm notoriously behind on email, but I will get back with you.)

Slow Food, Slow Sex, Slow Travel...Slow Marketing

In a recent conversation with a friend and business associate, I bring up the "slow food, slow sex, slow travel" movements. He perks up, "Slow sex?"

I purposedly chose the provocative title of "Barbershops, Trading Posts, Coffeehouses, Parisian Salons: How Intimacy Seals Deals" for a session I led at MarCamp held Tuesday at France Telecom/Orange because marketers' intentions are nearly always suspect.

Seals deals? Sounds slimey, eh?

And people sometimes think that's who I am: I'm a role. I am a marketer (pssst, I'm just me). So if I'm a marketer, I must confess that I'm into slow marketing lately. Not that it's necessarily opposed to buzz marketing, but slow marketing is a focus on human, one-on-one connections sans stress ("yikes, will it scale?!?') rather than a focus on the mass, aggregate, broadcast-blast level.

Slow marketing is intricately tied to slow conversation, naked conversations. It's  very very old-world. I learned it by osmosis in the piazzas of Italy, the cafes of Vienna, the chicken-buses of Guatemala, and I let it seep inside while chatting on donated furniture in a makeshift wooden shelter where a family that lost everything, including a son, shared tea and cookies and their tears with me.

Slow marketing's a bit harder to map out a concrete campaign for. I had no intention of spending the entire afternoon at Vino Locale in Palo Alto (I was checking them out for an upcoming interview series, and a potential hosted salon). I hadn't anticipated that Mary Beth's favorite book was East of Eden, or that she was a English Lit major/Art History minor who worked in high-tech marketing for 25 years and is working on a novel herself or that Mike Mann of Mann Cellars (yes, they grow wine not just garlic in Gilroy) would walk in and open his silky Syrah 2004 for a tasting or Lynn Fielder, a talented jeweler and art curator for Vino Locale to sit down beside me, or Kirpal, a rosé lover and software entrepreneur, to waltz in after his lunch at Zibbabu because he heard the laughter.

"Everyone must take time to sit and watch the leaves turn." - Elizabeth Lawrence (from one of my favorite slow magazines, La Vie Claire)

"No sane adult moves to the Bay Area for the lifestyle," says Paul Kedrosky. He, he, well, my sanity is questionable, but I am living here precisely for the lifestyle. I live a Mediterranean-inspired slow-food life right in the heart of Silicon Valley (yup, I reside near HP and Apple).

And I'm not alone. "There was an increased hunger for connection, and people were eager to find out about these things - the farmer, the fisherman, the cheesemaker," says Jim Denevan of Santa Cruz. Jim's company, Outstanding In the Field, brings one-evening impromptu restaurant right to small farms. In 2004, he took his farmer dinners national rippling out from his Northern California roots.

Denevan says it was modeling in Europe in his twenties that planted the seed: "Seeing the richness there inspired me. When you ate at little cafes and agriturismos, it was all very intimate, very direct. I remember a beautiful old farmhouse with a kitchen garden and vineyards right out the door. It really left an impression."  (All Denevan quotes from article "Feasts of the Field", La Vie Claire, Fall 2006)

Slow marketing? Denevan: "It's amazing hearing from the people who make the products, who create the culture of the table.  You get to hear the farmers telling their story, how and where they spend their days."

Slow travel? When life is a possible poem, then it becomes one grand adventure. Even marketing. A pilgrimage of discovery, mystery, serendipity, synchronicity, spontaneity. Joy:

For one friend who had difficulty remembering details from his travels,  I suggested he take on the task of writing a poem every day during his journey abroad. The daily task proved impossible for him, so he decided to focus his attention on a one-week stretch through Paris, Prague and Florence. To this day, his memories of that time are the fondest of all his travels because, as he has told me, "when everything is a possible poem, the world is suddenly far more interesting." - from The Art of Pilgrimage, by Phil Cousineau

And slow sex? What's the hurry, we'll get around to that eventually too.

p.s. I'd love to go to the next Outstanding in the Field dinner (that is one that's not already sold out). Email if you want to come along too: Details: October 15: Soquel, California at Everett Family Farm (photos from I Love Farms). Guest chef: Justin Severino, who is busy opening his butcher shop, "Pigs in Zen," makes a return appearance to Outstanding in the Field. $150/pp.

images 1) Photo by Wyatt Dexter from Outstanding In the Field's site 2) Gary Ibsen, host of the Carmel Tomato Festival. Mike Mann - "Are you the winemaker?" "I'm the wine grower, salesperson, delivery person too" - reminded me I justed missed the Tomato Festival (slow travelinig in Manhattan). Yet another reason to live in the Bay Area: heirloom tomatoes. Photo by © Tana Butler from I Heart Farms: Stories and Pictures of Real People and Real Food blog (a heavenly slow blog).

John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath and Thundering Inspiration

Ten years later, he recalled those months working on The Grapes of Wrath: "A few times I have in work heard the thundering and seen the flash which must have been the universe at work.  In that participation there was a glory that shadows everything else." - "A Journey Into Steinbeck's California", by Susan Shillinglaw

Flipping through A Journey Into Steinbeck's California (highly recommend), I stop at the black and white photo of a book burning in Bakersfield. The Grapes of Wrath was banned in many libraries throughout California as "unfit for its patrons." Even John Steinbeck's hometown of Salinas burned the tome. "A lie, a damned lie," foamed Congressman Lyle Boren of Oklahoma on the floor of the Senate. "We would not want our women and children to read so vulgar a book," wrote Executive Secretary Harold  Pomery of the Associated Farmers.

I spotted a hardcover edition of The Grapes of Wrath in my mom's bookshelf when I was woman-child of eleven, or twelve. I snuck off to my room where I'd hungrily wolfed children's classics like The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and the Nancy Drew series. To say reading The Grapes of Wrath was a turning point in my life would be an understatement. Books opened up a window to worlds I knew not existed -  inviting fresh air, natural sunlight, moist rain - into my overwise parched, caged immigrant upbringing.

I grew up in that reading of Steinbeck's classic. Plus it plunged me headlong into classics and my adoration of electrified writing that continues to enrich my life.

A flake of the croissant descends like an oak leaf unto the biography and I think about Steinbeck conceiving his signature works Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath surrounded by the orchard blossoms of apricots, almonds, and plums in his hillside home with vistas of enveloping oaks and the town of Los Gatos below. It's also later in Los Gatos at the Biddle Ranch where Steinbeck "recovered from his exhausting pull to write The Grapes of Wrath in five months."

Five months.

The thunderbolt of inspiration sometimes pulls you in a rarified, accelerated, dizzying direction. Pull is an apt word.

Years ago up on the ridges above Estes Park, Colorado, I felt the electric charge vibrate through the grasses, smells were heightened as if all the live things overflowed perfume and everything pulsed in advance anticipation of the splitting sky.

The first time I circumnavigated the ivory gingerbread 1891 Victorian mansion, a gem lying deserted in Los Gatos, I saw the whole thing. Even though the how was a mystery. Still is a mystery. I can't claim the vision. It simply is there. The seeing is like a current, like the perfume before the thunder. There, I saw a contemporary arts center with working artists' studios and a Colette's of Paris-like showroom. Here, I see a tea salon for writers and for those who venerate the sung word (lyrical prose, poetry, songwriting) to congregate. And I saw it before I learned anything about Los Gatos' artistic legacy, or Steinbeck's pull there.

It's a white grey day in California. So I justify being inside, writing here, on a rare September day where the sunny Mediterranean aura makes way for more reflective Irish pasture haze. I realize anyone that can afford to set foot in Palo Alto, stroll the broad University Avenue and walk upstairs to the Caffe de Doge with strawberry jam, a croissant and Italian espresso certainly can afford to be a philanthropist. It's all a matter of putting your wealth, in all its guises, where your heart is.

There is a persistent myth that one needs to be as wealthy as the Medicis in their day to be a patron of the arts, or to a philanthropist. I fell for it myself. I think the final dissolution of the fantasy came when I read about the postal clerk and librarian jointly earning less than $50,000 a year residing in a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment.

Nothing surprising there. Yet over the decades they cultivated friendships with artists and bought paintings, drawings, sculptures from the likes of John Cage, Christo, Donald Judd. This modest couple donated their $10 million art collection to the National Gallery of Art in  Washington.

It came down to their love of art, not their salary, in the end.

p.s. This post is in honor of Banned Book Week, September 23-30. Outright book burnings are rarer these days; stifling  challenging, controversial, provocative books has become more sophisticated.

p.p.s.  Upcoming Literacy and Literary Arts events I'm supporting/attending:

October 2nd. Very next salon has a The Red and the Black theme. Private home in Noe Valley, San Francisco. Inquire for invite. (Think red and black visual art, food, and couture plus life imitating art, human rather than omniscient Godlike narrator, Napoleanic empires and clergy.)

October 5th. Literacy for Change Benefit dinner in support of First Book, Room to Read and Bring Me a Book Foundation, sponsored by Kepler's Books. In attendance: Jason Roberts (of The Writer's Grotto), Andrew Sean Greer, Beth Lisick, James Dalessandro and others. Tickets are $85 per person. Private home in Atherton. Call Kepler's 650-324-4321 for more information.

October 6-14th. Various events. LitQuake Festival.

October 10th. Next meeting of my new Bluestocking Lit Salon (named after 18th century London meetings: "The entertainment was rigorous intellectual conversation, mixed with tea and literature readings," at Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Coffee (every other Tuesday, 7-9 p.m.). Teri Hope, the owner, is an enthusiastic supporter of community arts and an artist herself.

October 17th. An evening with the lyrical word (tentative, but 92% sure date) at Vino Locale in Palo Alto (they're all about local wine, food and art). I'm encouraging them to reinstate their Tuesday open mic by hosting Salon #5 there on a Tuesday night and thus inviting salonists to participate in original song and prose.

Bonus: "It's a beautiful morning and I am just sitting in it and enjoying it. Everything is ripe now apples, pears, grapes, walnuts. Carol has made pickles, and chutney, canned tomatoes. Prunes and raisins are on the drying trays. The cellar smells of apples and wine. The madrone berries are ripe and every bird in the country is here - slightly tipsy an very noisy. The frogs are singing about a rain coming but they can be wrong. It's nice." -  letter written by John Steinbeck writing from their ranch off Santa Cruz Highway circa 1938

Fertile Verges, Belle Epoques and Salons

"Salons are an example of what the historian Daniel Boorstin would have called "the Fertile Verge" - "a place of encounter between something and something else." Boorstin (and here I am wholly indebted to Virginia Postrel) pinpointed such "verges" as being nothing short of the secret to American creativity.

Postrel sums up what Boorstin was saying as follows:

"A verge is not a sharp border but a frontier region: where the forest meets the prairie or the mountains meet the flatlands, where ecosystems or ideas mingle . Verges between land and sea, between civilization and wilderness, between black and white, between immigrants and natives...between state and national governments, between city and countryside - all mark the American experience." - Jeremy Geelan (oh, I tweaked one teeny word, exchanging salons for Web 2.0, in above snippet)

The next salon is an afternoon tea nestled in a Belle Epoque evoking tearoom in downtown San Jose kitty-corner from the upcoming Central Place, part of the future urban revival of San Jose (imagine highrise penthouses, tree-lined promenades, shops, outdoor cafes, public art, galleries).

"There are few hours more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea." - Henry James

Why Monday? Galleries, restaurants, fashion boutiques, chocolatiers, jewelers, jazz clubs are often closed and thereby these artists are free to salon Monday evenings, and the intent of a salon is to hand-select an "eclectic combustible crowd of people that aren't "supposed" to go together like the fusion chefs mix ingredients into culinary taste explosions." What happens next is unpredictable: renaissances, movements, improvisations, belle epoques perhaps.

"Occurring at the midpoint of the Third Republic, the Belle Époque was considered a golden time of beauty, innovation, and peace between France and its European neighbors. New inventions made life easier at all social levels, the cultural scene thrived, cabaret, cancan, and the cinema were born, and art took new forms with Impressionism and Art Nouveau. Art and architecture in the style of this era in other nations is also sometimes called "Belle Époque" style." - Wikipedia entry

Gwendolyn: You have filled my tea with lumps of sugar, and though I asked most distinctly for bread and butter, you have given me cake. I am known for the gentleness of my disposition, and the extraordinary sweetness of my nature, but I warn you, Miss Cardew, you may go too far. - Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest

Let's go too far: Let's verge to beauty, innovation, peace. Details: Date: Monday, September 18th, 4 to 7:30 pm Location: Chic Chateau, 96 S. 3rd Street, San Jose, CA (corner of San Fernando and 3rd) Map Please request an invitation if you are to grace us with your charm, wit and artful verging banter. Limited to an intimate prime number 23. RSVP required. Yes, by all means, your confidants, collaborators, muses, lovers, and aseres (Afrocaribbean/Cuban slang for soul sibling) are warmly invited too. Cost: $15 includes exquisite teas, delectable old-world inspired treats served by owner Luvi Navarro whom left high-tech corporate HR to share her trio of passions with us at her new boutique: fashion, tea, and home decor. (Includes all tax & gratuities.) p.s. Look for upcoming salon at the gorgeous "live in the moment, live in the season" Tanglewood Restaurant, Santana Row, San Jose.

Wordplay: (I love etymology)

verge (n.)

"edge, rim," 1459, from M.Fr. verge "rod or wand of office," hence "scope, territory dominated," from L. virga "shoot, rod stick," of unknown origin. Earliest attested sense in Eng. is now-obsolete meaning "male member, penis" ( c.1400). Modern sense is from the notion of within the verge (1509, also as Anglo-Fr. dedeinz la verge), i.e. "subject to the Lord High Steward's authority" (as symbolized by the rod of office), originally a 12-mile radius round the king's court. Sense shifted to "the outermost edge of an expanse or area." Meaning "point at which something happens" (as in on the verge of) is first attested 1602. "A very curious sense development." [Weekley]

verge (v.)

"tend, incline," 1610, from L. vergere "to bend, turn, tend toward, incline," from PIE *werg- "to turn," from base *wer- "to turn, bend" (see versus). Much influenced by verge (n.) in its verbal form meaning "to be adjacent to" (1787).

image Closeup of the Chic Chateau tearoom.

Whisked to 1740s Paris: Next Salon Sept 6th, Gervais Restaurant

"For more than a century, pilgrims from all over the world seeking romance and passion have made their way to the City of Light. The seductive lure of Paris has long been irrestible to lovers, artists, epicureans, and connoisseurs of the good life..." - film historian and author John Baxter's memoir, We'll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light

Inspired by 1740s Parisian salons, join us at Gervais Restaurant in downtown Saratoga village (right next door to the yummy Saratoga Chocolates!) on Wednesday, September 6th. Enjoy a Paris-styled menu, engaging renaissance-sparking conversation in a cozy sidewalk patio reserved for 20 of us, and a private reception for the evocative paintings of a French-born painter and friend of mine, Gilbert Marosi.

Parisian journalist and video-blogger Jean-Baptiste Su lives in Silicon Valley covering the high-tech world for La Tribune, France's Wall Street Journal equivalent, shares his passion for food with his newest creative baby, the Gervais, along with his chef-partner Vietnamese-born Vanessa Van Trang. They are totally in tune with bridging and mixing the ingredients of the food, arts, social media and technology worlds. And they totally get the European-styled slow scintillating foreplay of conversation.

We're still dreaming up a 1740s salon-inspired menu...but expect delectable temptations in range of $25 (excluding alcoholic beverages).

Please request an invite if you are attuned to slow food, slow conversation, inspiring living and a Silicon Valley renaissance. We are limiting to 20 to assure camaraderie and intimacy.

More details forthcoming, but I know this is enough information to follow your heart's desire. Again Wed, Sept 6th, we'll start gathering the salon at 6 pm. The patio is ours for the evening. Please, yes, your partners, significant others, mistresses and lovers (well, perhaps use your discretion!) are most certainly warmly invited.

"The [Paris] salons of the 1740s [composed of writers, artists, nobility] were, as has been well put, "un lieu de brassage social intense (places of intense social ferment)." - Madame de Pompadour: Mistress of France

Oh, the rest of the backcover of Baxter's "We'll Always Have Paris" is too lusciously tempting to leave out, especially if you, like I, wish to be whisked to Paris at the very least in spirit, if not flesh:

"...a delightfully salacious tour of the sultry Parisian corners most guidebooks ignore: from the literary cafes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and de Beauvoir to the brothels where Dietrich and Duke Ellington held court, where Salvador Dali sated his fantasies, and Edward VII kept a sumptuous champagne bath for his favorite girls." 

Au revoir,
Evelyne (nom de plume for the next salon)

images Three Graces, Arms Akimbo, and Rome by my friend, Gilbert Marosi

Silicon Valley Salon: Ferragosta, Celebrating the Fertility and Slow Modernness of August

"It's unhealthy to eat alone," Fiorella says. She welcomes guests to the table with an innate sense of hospitality. Another plate or three or four, what's the bother? At a summer dinner, Marco looks down at the row of plates and says, "It's good to have at least twenty at dinner," and he's right. - Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

Diane Michlig and I invite you to a midsummer night's Italian holiday feast and conversational salon at Diane's intimate garden patio within Legends Fine Crafts Gallery, downtown Menlo Park, Tuesday, August 15th 6 p.m. Guests of honor include artist-couple Stephen and Jacqueline Osborn (current works will be on display).

If you are passionate about digging deeply into the locali soil and being engaged in a fertile Silicon Valley renaissance and cross-pollinating among the agriculture/gastronomic, arts plus technology communities, please request an invite at c r o s s r o a d s d i s p a t c h e s -at- gmail -dot- com. Your significant other is certainly warmly invited (after all, lovers and muses inspired much of the Renaissance beginning with Dante and Beatrice). Limited to first 20 guests.

Ferragosta, August 15th, is an Italian holiday originating from 18 BC "when the Roman Emperor Augustus declared that all of the month of August would be dedicated to the Feriae Augusti, a series of festivals and celebrations that paid homage to "Diana, the Goddess whose task it was to oversee the woods, the phases of the Moon, and Maternity" and "celebrate Vortumnus, God of the Seasons and therefore of the ripening of crops, Conso, the God of the Harvest, and Opeconsiva, who personified the abundant harvest. In short, the Feriae were a celebration of fertility and maternity."

These long summer Mediterranean days often has me dreaming that the defacto capital of Silicon Valley, San Jose, is poised and sitting on the cusp of where Florence was perhaps in the year 1492, and given enough passione and clarity dreams manifest into the world as marble Davids, and concrete Googles (this Friday San Jose Mercury News thought the same possibility too):

"Both in country and in town, according to humanist precepts, Lorenzo [de' Medici, ruler of the Florentine city-state during the Italian Renaissance] established a convention whereby there was no pecking-order in the seating at meals: those first to arrive either took the 'highest' seats, or simply sat where they chose. In addition to scholars, translators and philosophers whom he subsidized and encouraged, he also gathered around him such cultivated men as the book-dealer and chronicler of his times Vespasiano da Bisticci, the musician Antonio Squarcialupi, the painters Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, the sculptor Bertoldo, now a relatively old man who was the last surviving pupil of Donatello; and, towards the end of Lorenzo's life, the difficult, fiery, teenaged prodigy, Michelangelo. He provided a forum for all these artists and art lovers and under his aegis they flourished." - Il Gigante: Michelangelo, Florence and the David, by Anton Gil

Shopping list: Ripe fruits in the farmer's markets including lusty heirloom tomatoes (pineapple, brandywine, etc), figs, white peaches and fresh basil, Bravo Farms cheese, Bay Bread roasted garlic loaf, Spenger balsamic vinegars, Saratoga Chocolates, variety of iced and hot peach black and oolong teas...basta?...

Ferragosta, at first, baffled us as a holiday until we began to understand it as a state of mind. We, gradually, have entered this state of mind ourselves. Simply put, ferragosta, August 15, marks the ascension of the corporeal body and soul of the Virgin Mary into heaven...But the day itself is only a marker in the month, for the broader meaning of the word is August holidays and a period of intense laissez-faire. - Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

images Stephen Osborn's La Morra, Jacqueline Osborn's Beach Hut and Afternoon Affair.

Bonus: The coalition of Silicon Valley CEOs and cultural organizations, 1stACT.org, includes in its reading list Carl Honore's In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed (2004) saying:

Canadian born, London-based journalist, Honore, goes in search of balance and illustrates how changing the pace of life is changing the face of commerce. This book is a useful augmentation to reading on creative economies and particularly adds to thinking about cultivating your distinct advantage within a community whether it’s a village of hundreds or city of millions.

p.s. The Slow Food movement began in Italy. If anyone has talents to share -- whether its playing a mandolin, or concocting the cocktail art of a Bella Bellini, please do share and let us know.

Italy on My Mind

"I thought -- and now I know -- that Italians claim more time for their lives." - Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

It was love at first sight. The first post I saw front and center on the new Simona Invites You to Italy blog was about chocolate. (Thanks Yvonne for the announcement.)

Ah, Italy. Memories of 2003. Memories of abandoning my first blog (titled The Big Picture):

"I abandoned my first blog somewhere in the vicinity of the Duomo in Milan. Strolling in the shadows of the cathedral, I noted families walking slowing in the plaza, laughing, immersed in the languid Sunday evening tradition.

Waiting in line that thick July evening for my nocciola gelato was savored just as much as the first lick of the cone.

Italians perfected “Il Dolce Far Niente" ("the sweetness of doing nothing") to an art and I was an ardent student." - "The Artistic Gifts of Women Bloggers", New Communications Review, July 22, 2005, Evelyn Rodriguez

I've been noting a definitive love affair for all things Italy (and it has hardly anything to do with the World Cup game) especially within the Palo Alto/Menlo Park vicinity.

I only have time for one anecdote: A friend shares that his Stanford semester abroad program was at a lush villa outside Florence. Back home, his Palo Alto dormitory was called Casa Italiana and everyone spoke Italian in the hallways and their Italian chef was the envy of the campus. Tom recounts, "In Italy, I'd walk into stores with my sister-in-law [Italian] and she nods, 'Bella' when just the right shirt or tie is brought out. Whereas here, I'm greeted with clerks asking what color I need or if it the jacket is for an interview. I know bella when I see it, feel it. It's not a matter of function."

In Italy that April 2003 it felt ludicrous to be squirrelled away after hours in my client's offices flinging out blog posts when the streets and smells of Italy beckoned.

"Whatever a guidebook says, whether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct." - Frances Mayes

Back in Silicon Valley, I never picked my original blog back up because I realized it was missing an essential vital ingredient: passione. I was too self-conscious. Or, in other words, I was contained.

"For many Italians, passion is an emotion we simply can’t contain. If it is there, it must come out." - Simona

The other day I wrote in my journal: The secret to life -- Don't resist it. I believe it's not physically going to Italy that calls us so much as psychicly going to Italy. It's living the vita Italiana that's highly contagious.

Contagious? I should say seductive. "Go to Piacere Mio. It's a very seductive kind of store," Sara, my calligraphy instructor says. Yummy, I can't wait to go:

Owner Nancy [Verdtzabella] is enthralled with Italian culture. "I love the beauty and care they put into everything," she said of the Italian merchants. - "New downtown stationery store offers paper imported from Italy", Los Altos Town Crier, December 17, 2003

Murano glass pens, luxuriant Italian paper, a flamboyant love of writing personal handmade letters and notecards rather than e-mail, and they visit, know and like the suppliers they carry -- what more can one ask for in a store? (Btw, I'm making my own business cards by hand now. Each it's own piece of art. That's another story.)

Yesterday, via Jeff Nolan's blog, I stumble onto a new VC blog from Tom Cole at Trinity Ventures that was love at first sight too. The first post I saw front and center on the new Consuming Ambitions blog was about chocolate. Déjà vu.

Called Consuming Ambitions, it might just as well be called Consuming Passions (uh, but that site is already claimed by a porn site). Any VC that blogs about the top 5 ways to enjoy heirloom tomatoes rather than the top 5 tips on negotiating your term sheet is on my ever-shrinking list of blogs to read.

"I'd never guess that Amy would gravitate to gardening," says Jerry, a former Hollywood film executive and now a marketing consultant. A lifelong urbanite, Amy [Giaquinta] had been involved in media too, working in television production about ten years ago." Now, their two-acre Napa Valley estate is home to organic heirloom tomatoes with "names like Moonglow and Aunt Ruby's German Green...Today she has an informal business, supplying seedlings and tomatoes to friends and local chefs with kitchen gardens." - "Tomatoes: A Love Story", Food & Wine, August 2006 (I noticed this eco-epicurean issue of Food & Wine laying at IDEO's offices the other day.)

The Italian mindset flourishes in the angel community too. Via Tom Cole's blog, I revisit the Angel Forums site. In addition to the usual suspects, I note the Angel Forums portfolio is onto this post-industrial boutique artisan trend:

• A very avante garde restaurant experience (restaurant, art-gallery, stage and club) named the supperclub  ("Supperclub is founded by artists and therefore art will run through the veins of the club forever.")
• The yummy Charles Chocolates (hat tip from Charles Chocolates: invite blogger connoisseurs to your press tastings and tours, merci beaucoup oops, grazie.) The founder was an art major, btw. ("Everything is made by hand in very small batches using traditional techniques, and all of the chocolates are shipped to our customers within three days of being created.")
• Speciality's Cafe and Bakery ("You will always see ovens, mixing machines, dough, flour, grain, and many other odds and ends a real bakery needs and uses...healthy, wholesome products from scratch")
• Tea Living (children's apparel, global aesthetics with tagline "the world is a big place, especially through the eyes of a child". Plus: "We envision with a sense of art, approaching the process of our work organically—moved by the distinctive beauty of a global source towards the creation of an inspired, original interpretation.")

Va Bene!

p.s. This is the last weekend of the Tuscan-inspired Napa Valley Festival del Sole ("music, art, cuisine, wine, wellness"); you'll have to catch it in Cortona, Italy for its next stop.

p.p.s. Have you evere noticed that Panera Bread's warm colors - mustards, olives, plums - and its ambiance seem Tuscan-inspired too?

images from August 2006 Food & Wine, chocolatier Andrea Slitti from Simona's blog, cover of Chocolate Therapy: Dare to Discover Your Inner Center, and the Chocaholic event poster at supperclub from Tom Cole's blog

Art is Either Plagiarism or Revolution

It was either that quote by Paul Gauguin, or this these two interrelated ones for a headline. Gaugin won out as I'm in Parisien frame of mind, but I still want to share the two runners-up.

• "Thus the tea-master strove to be something more than the artist - art itself." - Alexandra Stoddard

"It is time to come out as yourself." - Neil Crofts

My little contribution to a new renaissance in Silicon Valley? Reinstating the Parisien tradition of the salon:

In the early 17th century, the behavior of male aristocrats still reflected the idea that physical strength and military prowess were a man's most important virtues. Around 1610 a young noblewoman, fed up with the prevailing loutishness, did something unprecedented: she abandoned Louis XIII's court and set up her own "alternative space." The Marquise de Rambouillet remodelled a mansion near the Louvre, creating a suite of adjoining salons, or large reception rooms, culminating in her sanctum sanctorum, the so-called chambre bleu. In this room (also known "the sanctuary of the Temple of Athene"), the marquise received her visitors from her bed. - Salon.com's "Brief History of Salons"

Centuries of salon culture ensued. It was a salon hostess who published James Joyce's Ulysses when no one else would. Women were instrumental in arranging that the leading thinkers of the day attended: artists, writers, philosophers, politicians, scientists.

These are busy influential men, and as Salon.com rightly caught on: "Without erotic intrigue, it is unlikely that so many 17th-century men and women of, uh, affairs would have sacrificed their evenings to debates over Racine's prosody." This wasn't simply idle gossip, it was an intimate private place where folks were introduced to people that were outside their normal public social spheres (for instance, politicians don't hobnob with avant-garde painters).

Anything I say here is just tip of iceberg. I'd love to converse more. Face-to-face. If you live in the Bay Area, come over to an open house this weekend at Legends Fine Crafts Gallery, 516 Santa Cruz Ave, Menlo Park from noon to 8 pm Saturday and noon to 6 pm Sunday (coincides with 20th Annual Connoisseur's Marketplace, so tons of art, food but not parking).

Ben Franklin went to Paris salons to raise funds for the American revolution. Later he'd present his scientific ideas such as electricity to these same salons.

The French, certainly, loved Franklin. With his fur hat and his Poor Richard homilies, he was everything they imagined America to be. Or at least he knew how to play the part. He also loved the cosmopolitan whirl of pre-Revolutionary France, and apparently made out like a bandit in the Paris salons. The beautiful Madame Helvétius (to whom Fontenelle, at age 100, was moved to say, "Ah, madame, if I were only eighty again!") took a liking to Franklin and scolded him for not coming to see her. "Madame, I am waiting until the nights become longer," he said. (Take my word for it, in the 18th century that was pretty risqué.)" - "It's Mostly About the Benjamins", Rob Macdougall blog, 12/2/04

John Adams accompanied Franklin to one Parisien salon and was rather appalled. Adams was a bit puritanical.

The Parisian salons were the opposite - provocative, scintillating.

Sort of how Menlo Park used to be. A little controversial even.

Steve Jobs waltzing into Don Valentine 's office (yep, 3000 Sand Hill Road is a Menlo Park address) for Apple's funding wearing cutoffs and barefoot (or maybe it was flip-flops) was controversial.

Imagine Ken Kesey tripping out (it's research, man) at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital on LSD while he worked the night shift in the psychiatric ward. He spawned not only his own novel but Tom Wolfe's too. The Grateful Dead hanging out in Kepler's bookstore in Menlo Park and playing bluegrass and folk at a nearby field in Palo Alto. Marxists meeting at Kepler's and working by day at the national labs. (John Markoff, New York Times technology columnist, writes that the whole personal computer revolution can be traced to within a ten-mile radius with Kepler's as the hub.) The Homebrew Computer Club gathering at a garage in Menlo Park ("From the ranks of this club came the founders of many microcomputer companies, including Bob Marsh, Adam Osborne, and Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.")

Anyway, in my calligraphy class Monday, that's when I first saw this quote by Paul Gaugin, "Art is either plagiarism or revolution."  And it's stuck with me.  Haunted me. When I'm writing, it feels natural, it's just flowing.  Of course it's original. I'm not trying to be provocative, scintillating -- that would be contrived. I'm just expressing what wants to come out.

So a friend is playing devil's advocate. She mentions a local Menlo Park art institution. They could hold salons. Why would any philantropist invest in mine? (First, the Medicis were hardly philantropists, and second they're not mine. It's more of a platforrm, an API, if you will.) (I'm currently reading Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence. Sure, there's a few parallels with Sand Hill Road and the Florentine  Medicis.)

So I had to check out this institution for myself. Perhaps we could host salons at their location too (I am on look-out for places to host where people already congregate, gather, stroll), I thought. Well, not as is, it's like a purported arts theater that only plays Disney films. I like Disney films, yet....

I certainly couldn't imagine reading my white peach poem there. The dripping juice, the erotic play in the Trevi Fountain symbolic of the dawn after the dark night of soul. "And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) until Crayola and the civil rights movement change it to "flesh" became "peach". And there's Bellini's 'Agony of  the Garden' where Jesus prays until dawn in the foreground with Judas and the trailing soldiers and that painting's pink dawn glow inspires the Bellini made from white peach puree and prosecco at Harry's Bar, Venice, the haunt of  Hemingway and Maugham, and you get idea, yeah, it's a long poem in progress.

I imagine reading there, and I'm tempted to compromise. To fit into what's deemed acceptable, rather than true to me.

This year's tricentennial of Benjamin Franklin's birth, has brought a slew of biographies and articles. Reading one review, it begins: "It is a popular axiom today, that no one with "great ideas" and a passionate commitment to uplift all humanity, can be "politically successful." That's left to the "practical man," the compromiser, the manipulator. No one exposes the falsity of this axiom more completely than Benjamin Franklin..."

Hmmm, you could say the same of the Founding Fathers. They had a passionate commitment to high ideals.

I have a lot of friends pushing me to explain my latest obsession with art. Why? Of course they end this same discussion admitting they were daydreaming about Goya and the Prada Musuem the other day. (Why are you converting your apartment to a boudoir is a second popular query.)

"The idea behind "The Accidental Masterpiece," writes chief art critic for the New York Times Michael Kimmelman, "is that art provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully..."

"I hope to approach the art of seeing here in the spirit of an amateur," he writes in his introduction. "I mean amateur in the original sense of the word, as a lover, someone who does something for the love of it, wholeheartedly."

Art gives me a nudge -  as if we need a license - to be a lover, my natural self.

A lover doesn't compromise. They are. They are wholly themselves. Wholeheartly.

Whole, total, absolute - intero - in Italian. Whole, entire, all - entero - in Spanish. A lover remains open. A lover coasts in the direction of themselves, gently takes the foot off the brakes.

A lover reads white peach poems with aplomb.

p.s. A lover builds cathedrals.

There's an old story about a passer-by who stops to ask three stonemasons: "What are you doing?"

"Doin' me job," replies the first stonemason, gruffly.

"Cuttin' stone," says the second one, irritably.

The third stonemason straightens his back, looks up and says, with passion in his eyes: "I'm building a cathedral."

images white peaches via Flickr by Old Shoe Woman; "Agony of the Garden" by Giovanni Bellini; "Sweet Dawn Study" by James McCallum

Update: A philanthropist and friend reminds me: "Well I think it all depends on the intention. I like to think of Vittoria Colonna as a well-intentioned patron/philanthropist versus any of the Medicis."

That sweet poet and nun (alright, technically: "Although she did not take the veil, Vittoria Colonna lived the last years of her life in a convent, dressed like a nun, and was buried as a nun") and beloved of Michelangelo was a bit of a radical in her day. She lived her intention and ideas:

• The idea of gifting freely.
• The idea of art as a free gift.
• The idea of God's grace as a free gift. (And this during a time when Medicis and everyone else were earning and buying their way to Heaven. At this time, money-lending and banking regardless of interest rate is considered an unnatural sin according to the Church: "It's like money copulating.")

So I'm reminded of my post, "An Abundant Fertile New Renaisssance" about gifts and patronage and renaisssance and Vittoria and Michelangelo.

And I'm re-reminded of my intention. How easy they are to compromise. It all depends on intention.

And there in that post I find another answer to Why art?

"Love is like a painter. The works of a good painter so charm men that, in contemplating them, they remain suspended, and sometimes to such an extent that it seems they have been put in an ecstasy and have been taken outside of themselves, and seem to forget themselves." - 15c Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola

Seek Life Away From Keyboard? Luddite or Splitting Away From the Pied Piper?

Full week. I'd meant to comment on Tom Brokaw's Stanford commencement speech. This Monday's San Jose Merc front page reads, "STANFORD CHEERS: Seek a life away from keyboard, Brokaw urges graduates."

Seek a life away from the keyboard.  Hmmm, I'm finding myself doing just that more and more. If and when I am online I'll take my laptop out to the garden (thank god for Wifi). These days I spend much more time with folks that have absolutely no interest in being the first to know what's new from Google and neither are they obsessed creating the next Google-killer.

And I've never ever been happier.

It's actually an anamoly that I'm here at Supernova this week. (I'll be blogging my big picture highlights later on their blog.)

It's not exactly that I'm a Luddite. I have a BSEE and been a CTO. Yet I totally understood the woman (and there's not that many women here) who snuck out of the dark conference room on a beautiful yesterday in downtown San Francisco to stroll into an art gallery.

I'd left the windowless room early Wednesday myself to hit the nearby Ferry Building's vibrant marketplace with local producers of fresh fruit, caviar, wild mushrooms, artisan confections, wine, and even organic chocolate madeleines. I sit outside at the lovely cafe, Boulettes Larder, and nibble on brioche soaked in orange blossom water and almond cream with an iced hibiscus drink and feel the breeze off the waterfront and watch the people.

Call me crazy, but I want my technology to enrich my life, not complexify it nor drag me away from life. And if not, I simply cannot get excited about gadgetry and bytes anymore.

The strange thing is I'm finding I now have more common ground with 'regular' people - those folks that don't have a clue how to code in Java (yup, they think it's a drink) or Ruby (yup, they think it's a gem).

On page two of that Monday paper, there's a blurb from Johnny Depp taken from this week's Newsweek that resonated deeply for me. Depp explains why he spends more time at his home in France (I'm living an European lifestyle myself without leaving Silicon Valley):

"The phones don't ring as much. Movies are never brought up in conversation. I'll take the kids and we'll go out to the trampoline and the swing set, and we'll stop by the garden and see how our tomatoes are doing. You know, old-fart stuff. Good stuff."

Depp says he life was irrevocably changed when his daughter Lily-Rose was born in 1999. Jack was born three years later. He continues: "I was never horribly self-obsessed or wrapped up in my own weirdness. But when my daughter was born, suddenly there was clarity. I wasn't angry anymore. It was the first purely selfless moment that I had ever experienced. And it was liberating. In that moment, it's like you become something else. The real you is revealed."

After the Ferry Building, I decide to visit the Hotel Vitale, which I've heard a lot about. It's a "post-hip" boutique hotel. "It's a concept that we sum up in two words: luxury, naturally," says Chip Conley, founder and CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality.  (A review of my impressions sometime, later.)

I love the idea, "luxury, naturally" which is all about happiness, joie de vivre, well-being and time for tomatoes, strolling, slow food, intimacy, family, friends, simple joys. 

I don't think it's a concidence that "this year’s most popular class at Harvard is Psych 1504, also known as “how to get happy." You'd think this would mean I'm spending less money, but I'm finding as I'm awakening to that which brings joy, a sense of life's abundance is inextricably woven in and I'm buying more without the guilt. $10 for lilac soap? Oui! $1.50 for a miniature bar of spring jasmine tea chocolate! Oui! Oui! An overnight trip to Seattle? Why not!

Next door to the Supernova conference room is the breakfast area and coffee service. There a large painting covers the entire side wall: a throng of colorfully-clad village children mesmerized by the Pied Piper. It must be the scene just before they're lured by his siren call of his music, all one hundred and thirty boys and girls following lockstep out of town. Whether they march straight into the river, into a cave to be sealed to their fate, or where they disappear to, you can speculate your own ending to the legend. A reminder to be mindful of the lure of Pied Pipers and following the throng.

To cut my commute into SF, I'm staying at a friend's place in Pacifica (the pinks - smoky roses, lavenders, mauves - come into being after the sun like a burning boat slinks into the blues of the summer solstice) and I read this as I flip through his book:

"Have you ever, in moments of deep silence, heard the song of your soul? Can you recall a time when the beauty, the sweetness of life, welled up in you by surprise? One day, perhaps, you fell in love. Or for one blinding instant, lovemaking called you back to an ecstatic relationship with life. Perhaps it happened for you with the birth of a child. Suddenly you were filled with an overwhelming, all-encompassing love such as you had never experienced. Perhaps you glimpsed ecstasy in the spaciousness of meditation; during a five-mile run; or while contemplating a clear mountain stream, listening to a symphony, walking in a thunderstorm, or dancing or singing through the night. Perhaps you were propelled beyond your mind and body into a transcedent moment when life, which had seemed ordinary, became suddenly mysterious, poignant, and filled with grace, and time seemed to stop as you stepped into eternity."  - The Art of Everyday Ecstasy, Margot Anand

Update: I mentioned I'm back to reading a few (very few) VC blogs. Two years ago because of my work (for instance, clients using their blog to raise their profile/buzz with VCs, analysts, press) I read all of the VC blogs. Feld's Thoughts is one of them. Here's a clue why from a recent post (Brad's Art category is another good reason):

At some point in the conversation, we started discussing the ever present “introduction” question that comes up often, which is “What Do You Do?”

We decided the best answer – inspired by one of Amy’s friends – is “I’m Happy.”

In Sri Lanka, the "What do you do?" question might come up fifth or sixth (maybe not) after Where are you from? Are you married? How many kids? Would you like tea? Have you taken lunch (a no brings out dishes)? What brings you to Sri Lanka? Are you Christian, Buddhiist, or a 'free thinker'? Needless to say, I fell in love with the Sri Lankan people.

image from The Five Best Things to Eat This Summer at the Ferry Building, a plate from Recchiuti's 

Monied Sex, Sexy Money, and Silicon Valley's Word

"Wealth precedes culture," says a really cool man that I met at my Peet's the other day. Yeah, yet another Dave, I swear. 

We're talking renaissance. And this is a good point to mention I totally missed today/yesterday's reboot8 conference themed can you believe it: Renaissance.

First, though before we get to the renaissance, this is how we met: "You a theology student?"

As a child I developed a habit of doing homework intense in concentration blocking out the sound and color from the surrounding TV sets. (My parents were making up for growing up in Cuba with a porch for entertainment; plus I think that's how they picked the social nuanes on how to fit into America. I can't say watching Dallas or Gilligan's Island really clues you in too much though.)

So I was totally absorbed in reading this paper "Intellects Inflamed by Christ: Women and Spiritualized Scholarship in Renaissance Christianity" and a bit startled when he spoke. I had no idea what he's talking about. Theology? Huh? Where'd he get that idea?

I chuckle when he leaves a half-hour later because also at my table is a Jungian analysis of the Biblical/Jewish/Islamic tale of King Solomon and Queen Sheba and a book by Vietnamese monk Thich Nan Hanh. I guess it's all theology for me...

But at that time what I actually said was: "No, not exactly. I'm not a student. I'm just reading up on the Italian Renaissance."

I note the thick Photoshop bible on his table. He shares his view that he finds digital photography, digital art and Photoshop simply another way of imagining art. I totally agree.

That's when he starts on his theory that Silicon Valley is poised for a renaissance.

I smile after his discourse: "I've been thinking the very same thing myself."

So it was interesting after a lengthy blog-reading-hiatus seeing Fred Wilson and Robert Scoble refer to Paul Graham's essay How to Be Silicon Valley. Having read the essay it boils down to: Create an atmosphere that rich folks and nerds both want to live in.

I am neither rich nor a nerd by any conventional sense of the two terms. (Okay, okay, yeah I have a BSEE and worked in high-tech more than a decade, but I swear I'm not a nerd.) Yet I love living a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in an area where free wifi cafes have been a given for years. It's so much more than nerds and wealth.

I'm at the Cupertino-San Jose border, right smack in the heart of the parking lot that Graham refers to. I too thought that San Jose was a wasteland and I'll spare you the details how I ended up here with all the varied choices in the Bay Area, but suffice it to say it was certainly not my first choice.

And I'd be the last person to guess that I'd be writing a book set in San Jose, CA of all the places on earth that is reminscent of A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, or perhaps Walden Pond. A few weeks ago my neighbors Don and Beatrice showed me a black hooded oriole that is nesting in the towering palm through their binoculars. Just this week I had a Proustian epiphany with a magnolia tree walking home by cresent moonlight - btw, have you noticed they are all blooming fragrant right now? And the redwood grove on my four-block walk to the grocery store are my personal sentinels and teachers.

Trust me I don't live anywhere particularly 'special'. I'm not nestled in the tony hills of Woodside or Los Altos or Saratoga or Los Gatos. It's just an average everday Silicon Valley neighborhood surrounded by dim sum restaurants, strip malls, Fry's, Asian kids sequestered after school at tutoring centers I can't pronounce.

What strikes me is that no one has mentioned what really distinguishes Silicon Valley.

Actually Paul's essay is an essay on the sense of place, on belonging. In Eat, Pray, Love, writer Elizabeth Gilbert traipses through Italy, India, Indonesia to find herself (psst, you don't have to leave home). In Italy, her friend Luca Spaghetti posits that every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there.

"...if you could read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever that majority thought might be- that is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don't really belong there."

Lotus Reads shares, "According to Luca, SEX was Rome's word and for the Vatican it is POWER. In New York City the word is ACHIEVE, in Stockholm its CONFORM, in Naples it is FIGHT and so on."

I have searched high and low for the blog post to no avail, but another blogger thought NYC was more like CREATE.  And Berkeley was RIGHT (which I can say having lived there is so true; as in smugly RIGHT). The author was stumped for a word for San Francisco - which though is an altogether different vibe than Silicon Valley.

So what's the word for Silicon Valley?

Methinks, it's KALI.

Nope, not Kali as in Kali-fornia  (hmmm, what would -Fornia stand for?)

KALI, as in the goddess.

Related aside: the state of California was named after a mythical Queen Califa, the black ruler of the land of the Amazons, who lived in a wonderful country awfully reminscent of Queen Sheba's kingdom, possibly the Garden of Eden "filled with fragrant flowers, fresh fruits, and other delights." Queen Califa incidentally was also a disciple, a follower, of Artemis, the virgin-priestess-hunter goddess and Apollo's sister. In Virgil's day, a virgin wasn't simply chaste. A virgin referred to a woman "complete unto herself", a fully individuated human beholden to no one, or the androgenous mind that Dan Pink's A Whole New Mind refers to.

KALI. Oh, we could call it disruptive innovation, or creative destruction, but do I look like Clayton Christenson or an economist? If you belong to Silicon Valley, the notion of recreating Silicon Valley is absurd. "How to Be Silicon Valley?" You might as well ask "How Do I Cling to the Past?" "How Do I Capture that Musical Note Ten Minutes Ago during the Symphony?" Heck, go right ahead there, meanwhile those of us here in S.V. will create the next thing. Accept no imitations, baby.

Sure Kali is a Hindu goddess totally far far from these shores, and this post is already running to infinity, there is a long rich thread of the triple goddess theme that Kali represents throughout Western history. (And lest us not forget Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code 's current popularization of the Mary Magdalene cult which was catchy during the Italian Renaissance...which is really the Artemis cult refashioned.)

For instance, consider the witch in Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. Once in the Slavic region of her origin she was known as Baba Yaga, an Artemis-following-priestess-goddess that was grossly misunderstood, until today we know her as a cricketedly evil old witch instead of shamaness. Where's Salem when you need it?

The symbolism of oven in the Baba Yaga fairy tales is very powerful since from primordial times the oven has been a representation of womb and of baked bread. The womb, of course, is a symbol of life and birth, and the baked bread is a very powerful the image of earth, a place where one’s body is buried to be reborn again. It is interesting that Baba Yaga invites her guests to clean up and eat before eating them, as though preparing them for their final journey, for entering the death, which will result in a new clean rebirth. - "Baba Yaga: A Demon or a Goddess?"

Madonna was the buzz this week. First a few Wine Campers brag they have tickets to the sold-out show. I hear folks talking about the show the day after at cafes. The San Jose Merc agrees, "A Confession: Reinvention Becomes Madonna." Madonna is an obvious incarnation of Kali. Heck, even her name tells all. No wonder San Jose worshipped her performance.

My guru/teacher once said: "Everyone wants to be reborn," he starts chuckling a little bit like the proverbial witch's cackle, "but no one wants to die."

Living in Silicon Valley means journeying through the Tibetan Book of the Dead's bardo on a monthly, weekly, daily, momentary basis. An inclination to die to the past in every single moment. A very Zennish quote typifies S.V. (although I'm more in an Italian or French Zen frame of mind of late than traditional Zen myself): This moment, this particular moment, doesn't care that you jumped off a 100-foot-pole yesterday.

Now is this true for everyone in S.V.? Heck no, but it's truer here than anywhere else I've lived.

I'm not wedded to Silicon Valley (remember "woman complete unto herself"). Truth is the renaissance is probably further along elsewhere - like Seattle, for instance. The Italian Renaissance didn't just happen in any one city - and in those days, Florence, Venice, Rome, Milan, probably seemed as far apart as I am today to DC, Shanghai, Prague in travel time. I can enjoy anywhere (except okay maybe Las Vegas) since I'm a child of the universe. Being an explorer-nomadic spirit I can move in a heartbeat, but while I'm here I'm soaking in the Kali energy because it's the elixir of lifie that I can carry with me wherever I go.

What would accelerate the next renaissance? Reacquainting ourselves with the value of art, getting over our collective hangups over sex and money (or broader still, beauty/sensuality & adundance), and moving from the scared feminine towards the sacred feminine for starters. But that's a thousand posts worth of stuff...stay tuned.

This post's headline wasn't just an empty teaser. The creative/destructive force that represents Kali and the relation to sex and money is important to consider for yourself (and that's what Google is for).

Sex & money, both really basic lower chakra stuff if you know what I mean and quite repressed/denied/guiltified in our society. I was watching an intriguing documentary with my friend David Chamberlain (oh yes he's a diva) before he took off to Vietnam, Cambodia and Burma for a month.

1 Giant Leap explores universal human topics including identity, death, God, happiness and art and its creators journeyed to "Senegal, Ghana, South Africa, Uganda, India, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, America and Europe, equipped solely with a digital video camera, a laptop and a vision - to capture and weave together a unique fusion of sound, image and spoken word from some of the world's most happening musicians, authors, scientists and thinkers and to explore 'The Unity in the Diversity'." Whew!

It's a beautiful compendium of life-affirming views, people and places and unforgettable haunting world music. Yet I came away wondering why in an otherwise positive balanced film, the sex and money section were blatently dark and full of dogma. You'd think sex and money are the root of all evil. I mean the most lucid thought-stopping comment in either of those two sections came from a pro dominatrix.

If you're squeamish about either sex or money or the creative force of the universe, you may want to give this blog a very wide berth here for a bit. Otherwise, it's going to be a wicked fun ride for a while.

Call me crazy, but that means I'll be reading tons more VC (sexy money) and advertising (monied sex) blogs  and kali-mommy and art blogs - and sharing. What, did you think I'd read pornography blogs? Ah, try again, then, you are missing the essential essence of Kali.

Viva la renaissance.

p.s. Silicon Valley is, as you've surmised, a state of mind, not a geography.

photos In case you've never been blessed to have Audubon Society neighbors share their passion for birds, this is the type of oriole we spotted together; even magnolias are sexy (click for large delicious full-size); a possibe artist's rendition of Queen Califa; Madonna and Kali of course.

tags reboot8 renaissance silicon valley innovation goddess reinvention creativity art zen tantra, women venture capital advertising