Kinja reply list

Read More
JdaddyKen Layne
2/28/14 5:35pm
What a load of crap. I live here, and the area described in this article is nothing like the place I call home. Cities like Mountain View, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, and Redwood City have delightful downtowns, all full of independent restaurants (many Zagat rated) and shops. Sure, El Camino is a hell-hole of urban sprawl down the heart of the peninsula, but there's more to the area than that one road.

I'm also tired of the Gawker narrative that the only people who live in Silicon Valley are libertarian-minded ultra-rich techies. The South Bay is home to all sorts of people, and the only conversations about "separating Silicon Valley from the rest of the state" are happening online. It's just not a topic of conversation at the local bar.

The majority of people eating lunch at the Stanford Shopping Center are not spending 100 dollars on a meal for two. Perhaps you are simply seeing what you want to see, and are creating a narrative based around those expectations? It is true that the rise of Google and Facebook has resulted in exploding rents and a bit of douche-baggery here or there, but out of control rent has been a hallmark of the Bay Area for the last twenty years. People continually find ways to survive, I'm sure it will continue.
Reply
- Read More
  It was a Mud Shark, not a Red SnapperJdaddy
  2/28/14 5:56pm
  Ha, yeah I couldn't help but see this as a journey with a pre-determined narrative. This guy walked through a bunch of office parks in a city that is not very walk-able and pulled some "insights" to support his attitude that the only things that exist in SV are Stanford, Facebook, and techies. Riveting journalism, I tell you.
  Reply
- Read More
  Official Witch of Los AngelesJdaddy
  2/28/14 6:00pm
  Awww, you must be one of those newbie techie transplants. I feel bad that the suburban hellhole that is Silicon Valley is appealing to you. I guess if you came from, I dunno Iowa?, the area would seem cool and cultured. But, as someone who grew up there and (reluctantly) has to return several times a year for family reasons, there are many other places that are more diverse and captivating than the South Bay.
  
  Also, having been a nanny to a family who lived across the creek from Stanford Mall, I assure you that the ONLY people not dropping hundred of dollars at the Stanford Mall are the ones getting paid minimum wage to watch the rich tech folk's kids. Everyone who grew up in the area knew that Stanford = rich people mall, Great Mall = ghetto mall. No matter how many times you want to convince yourself otherwise, the fact of the matter is YOU ARE WROOOONG.
  Reply
Read More
Official Witch of Los AngelesKen Layne
2/28/14 5:38pm
This is where I grew up. Sure, it seems glamorous from afar — tech! money! power! influence! Apple! — but at its core, the Silicon Valley is a wasteland of office complexes, chain restaurants and crappy strip malls. My high school is/was close to 1 Infinite Loop, so many a night was spent at that lowly, sad BJs inexplicably situated by the Apple Campus. (You also forgot to mention there's a Target around the corner, dude.) My mother, an HP employee for 30+ years, worked at the Palo Alto campus until Facebook bought it up and douched it out a year or two ago.

Anyway, thank you for capturing my homeland in all it's banal, douchey, unattractive glory.
Reply
- Read More
  Perry DowningOfficial Witch of Los Angeles
  2/28/14 6:07pm
  I grew up in Menlo Park, such a trip to read this article. I watched it all grow, when I was little Apple was new and Jobs was just some schmuck. All I knew was that my best friend's dad quit after the Lisa project because he was such an arrogant twit. My dad worked at Stanford, keeping the mainframes happy. I doodled on the punch cards.
  
  There was a time when Palo Alto was just a pleasant town where the professors and brilliant computer nerds lived. Upper middle-class to be sure, everyone had at least a BA. But it changed when I was in high school. It lost its wild west, Xerox Park persona. It became about venture capital and all the funky little shops along University Ave shut down. I knew it was over when the great little Varsity Theatre, where I met my first boyfriend at Rocky Horror Picture Show, became a Borders.
  
  East Palo Alto was always an island in the midst of all that whiteness. The creek providing an honest to god moat around the brown and poor. I inherited a house in Menlo Park, but I know I won't move back.
  Reply
- Read More
  ohmyheavenlyjesusOfficial Witch of Los Angeles
  2/28/14 6:26pm
  You seem a bit bitter.
  Reply
Read More
La.M.Ken Layne
2/28/14 5:22pm

Walking is the only pleasant form of traveling by land.

I literally got derailed by the first sentence of this article (was that your intention). As a cyclist, I was fully prepared to argue this, but after a brief moment of reflection, I think you are right. Walking is truly pleasant. BRB, going to finish the article now.
Reply
- Read More
  ahduthLa.M.
  2/28/14 5:42pm
  Heh, I was going to dispute it re running, but then I realized only the insane truly think running is "pleasant."
  Reply
- Read More
  La.M.ahduth
  2/28/14 5:47pm
  The only travel by land that I could think of that would be more pleasant than walking is hiking. And that is just walking in cool places.
  Reply
Read More
Jerry-NetherlandKen Layne
2/28/14 5:41pm
A reasonable assessment of the Palo Alto landscape and certainly a well-earned snipe at the incestuous culture of billionaires millionairing each other into the club, etc. But just for shits and giggles, would a walk around another suburban area 30 miles from a city be any different? Let's say, oh, Jericho, Syosset and Oyster Bay, for example.
Reply
- Read More
  VeeDeeisforfreeJerry-Netherland
  2/28/14 6:03pm
  The difference is that those places, and any other boring suburban area, don't claim to be saving the world and don't have the same sense of smug superiority.Silicon Valley is really into itself.
  Reply
- Read More
  Jerry-NetherlandVeeDeeisforfree
  2/28/14 6:16pm
  I acknowledged the particular douchiness of Silicon Valley, but was referencing the similarity of a suburb known for it's affluence (but pocketed), with similar dreary non-sidewalked commercial streets and miles of malls and commercial business parks. All of that, for a pedestrian, is the same. Ditto Costa Mesa/Irvine in Orange County, Ca.
  Reply
Read More
tito_swinefluKen Layne
3/02/14 12:03pm
Thanks so much for writing this article! I've spent a lot of time at many of the big tech campuses in the peninsula, and I can't imagine why anyone would tolerate working in such a terrible wasteland, even for a large salary. I used to work at a robot factory in Redwood City, in a faceless corporate park that made me want to kill myself. It was right next to a giant mountain of salt harvested from the bay. Somehow that seemed like the final nail in the coffin - come for the excess concrete and fried cafeteria food, and have you visited our salt mountain? A factory town in Stalin's Russia would have more character and culture.
Reply
- Read More
  FDtito_swineflu
  3/02/14 4:11pm
  My parents met in a factory town in Siberia during Stalin's time. I live in Silicon Valley. Redwood City may not be a cultural mecca but you have no idea of what you're talking about.
  Reply
- Read More
  tito_swinefluFD
  3/02/14 5:17pm
  I was raised by the Amur river. While we did not have roads, we did have Tolstoy, and the long night to talk about it. My father died when I was young, and I was raised by uncle Ilovitch until he was taken by a tiger. After that, we came to San Francisco. I found a zx80 motherboard in the garbage can besides the tenement on 14th and Guerrero where we lived, connected it to the membrane keyboard from a Merlin, and the rest is history.
  
  When I roam the concrete taiga of Menlo Park, I feel an infinite sadness. Where are the Elk? Where are the bears? Where are the women computer programmers and women nuclear physicists? In soviet Russia, we had all of these things. Here there is nothing but the hiss of late-model bmw's on highway 101. Instead of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, we have Cheryl Sandberg.
  
  I think I know very well what I am talking about.
  Reply
Read More
cheerful_exgirlfriendKen Layne
2/28/14 7:36pm
25 miles a week! That's awesome, seriously. I really need to move my ankle more. I have nothing nice to say about SV except I really like the Rodin's at Stanford and the Ikea near there is okay.

So I started this and then took a break to Watch Dallas Buyer's Club (really good btw) and I peeked at my Twitter and found you are leaving me us, I'm bummed and because it's you I will actually check out the new site.
Reply
- Read More
  VeryWellcheerful_exgirlfriend
  3/01/14 12:43pm
  It crossed my mind when KL did that piece a couple of weeks ago wherein he granted anyone who asked a gif and said "You are...insert name" felt a little like the end of The Wizard of Oz. I dismissed it then but thanks to your post I see his balloon blowing back to Kansas, Frank Morgan making his escape for now. So it goes.
  Reply
- Read More
  cheerful_exgirlfriendVeryWell
  3/01/14 5:33pm
  There's nothing there yet, save a good quote, but here's his new "home".
  
  I really like Ken, he'll still be doing his American holiday pieces according to Cook.
  Reply
Read More
nakedtruthKen Layne
2/28/14 5:42pm
Q. What's the difference between Silicon Valley and yogurt?

A. Yogurt has an active culture.

(Couldn't help it. You provoked me.)
Reply
- Read More
  seeyanakedtruth
  2/28/14 7:15pm
  Win.
  Reply
- Read More
  nakedtruthseeya
  2/28/14 8:55pm
  Bitchin moniker. Have you seen the old Gregory Peck movie, The Big Country? Burl rules in it.
  Reply
Read More
BuckStarkKen Layne
2/28/14 5:46pm
I don't understand the point of this "article". Is the point that world famous Silicon Valley should be glossier? Is the point that people are jealous of its money?

No matter the (non) answer to these questions, I say so what? You can go to any urban area, be it Paris or NYC or Quebec, and find ugly parts.
Reply
- Read More
  bropocalypsBuckStark
  2/28/14 6:10pm
  there are no "ranch houses" in Job's old neighborhood. He obviously assumes no one who actually lives there will read this
  Reply
- Read More
  garykaukenbalzbropocalyps
  2/28/14 6:42pm
  The writer said the street was Waverly. Because of the wonder of Google Street View I was able to "drive" down Waverly as I read the article. The houses I saw were exactly like what the Wikipedia article on "ranch houses" depicted. So, in short, you're wrong.
  Reply
Read More
hildyburnsKen Layne
2/28/14 6:26pm
That's my land. And of course I'm having that initial reaction common among those of us who grew up in and left suburbs: I can knock them, but I want to fight you for ripping on them yourself. But that's not all of it. I'm reminded of my friend Augie, who's a poet, talking about how poetry is NOT essential: "Ninety percent of adult Americans can pass through this life tolerably well, if not content, eating, defecating, copulating, shopping, working, catching the latest Disney blockbuster, without having a poem read to them by Garrison Keillor or anyone else." Plenty of people do plenty of things in Silicon Valley without giving a crap about silicon or its derivative and related products.

Growing up in Menlo Park, even in early Silicon Valley days, was both preposterous and beautiful. We walk all the time, there, by the way. Behind that shopping mall, in which I worked and sold Laura Ashley dresses to Japanese tourists (I think it's a SoulCycle now), there's a beautiful path along the San Francisquito Creek, over the Bike Bridge, and into my neighborhood. You can sit for hours there, reading a book, smelling the eucalyptus trees I thought were native until I got out of college. Once we found a transistor radio (old timey!) in the creek, and a homeless Veteran waded in and out of it all the time, keeping to himself, only occasionally angry out loud.

I suspect you actually hate the careless, shitty attitude of the moneyed. The terrible things you describe as the most terrible you see sound as much to me like Los Angeles or Washington DC or New York or other places I've lived and worked. And if they seem larger, more gauche, more offensive here, I'd suggest that a shorter history means when a cyclone of economic development descends on a place like this, it tears up more of the landscape.

I think it's easy to hate a region. But it's lazy and inaccurate, and I think you're better than that. Let's just hate the people whose shitty values and bottomless thirst (for more status or money or bullshit) are slowly killing what's left of beauty there.
Reply
- Read More
  MattyWollyhildyburns
  3/01/14 7:55am
  The problem with suburban Multiple Use Paths is not so much the paths themselves - many in fact are quite lovely - but that they are isolated streams of nice in an otherwise bland and shuttered auto dominated world.
  
  The fact is most people have to carve out time and drive to the paths in order to walk. The MUPS are essentially a mall allowing consumers to do pick up some real life living in between the rest of their programmed lives.
  
  It's not enough to fix what is wrong with suburbs.
  Reply
- Read More
  hildyburnsMattyWolly
  3/03/14 9:01pm
  Um, okay. You're probably right. I ain't standing here to defend suburban planning, or lack thereof. (Not even sure the leaf covered track I was talking about has multiple uses, unless you count walking AND drinking in the woods. Or walking AND your dog shitting.) Palliative measures at best, those kinda paths are.
  
  Implied in what I wrote was that the fast, cheap, and out of control boom of development is all of those things - fast, cheap, out of control. Explicit in what I'm saying is, let's unite in a hatred that can tear down or at least start a war with shitty out of control moneyed development anywhere.
  
  I seek to separate the sin from the sinner. The sin is the thoughtlessness. The sinner isn't just Silicon Valley. You can find this crap in Overland Park, KS, and Washington, DC, and any number of cities. Nominate your own favorite gross development! I feel somewhat tragic about some of the land Ken Layne walked over, but I sure as hell don't feel alone.
  Reply
Read More
Cam/ronKen Layne
2/28/14 5:30pm
Walking? Maybe it's my 80's/90's upbringing but I thought that the classic techie mode of transportation in Silicon Valley was bicycling. You gotta stick to those soulless, corporate metal coffins, man!

GIF

Reply