Steve, here, Ian's younger older brother, with nothing so meaningful to talk about as creating art, appreciating art, enabling artists, or reminding us to seek out live artists.
Well, OK, I did bicycle from work in San Francisco's Potrero Hill up to the Mission District last week to find my friend Marta at the preview of her show at San Francisco Open Studios at Art Explosion (organized by ArtSpan). I know nothing about painting, but I enjoy Marta's work, and I especially enjoy her relaxed but committed attitude to her work.
But other than that, I haven't taken much time lately for art. I admit it, I've been distracted by a far more crass phenomenon: Since the beginning of the year, I've been living 24/7 in the surreal echo chamber that we in the Bay Area call "Web 2.0," or "web twenny," when we're trying to be cute.
Only six years ago, the dot-bomb deflated the first internet bubble, with its pet-food sock puppets and $100K-a-day gains and losses (yes, even my IRA had a few of those days). We all swore we'd learned a lesson, but now it seems we're back at it, more self-aware, to be sure, but still getting caught up in the hype. We claim to be "enabling the masses" to "create a participatory culture," but when your peers are getting bought for 1.65 billion dollars (it's fun to say it like Dr. Evil!), it's hard to remember how shiny and pure Blogger seemed back in '99. We all work 80-100 hours a week building stuff that has, yes, some slim chance of actually being disruptive and revolutionary, but it's as much the roller-coaster-whupsie kind of excitement as real commitment to social change.
Despite my unease at the meta-ness of it all, I must say that since January I've worked at my dream job. I've been a working programmer for 30 years, never having wanted any more than to build an elegant boolean clockwork, wind it up, and watch it tick away at some interesting or useful task. Now I get to work on a little machine that must respond instantly and personally to a million people without breaking down. That's fun for someone like me.
So I've been coding (and, yes, doing some fun volunteer stuff) every waking minute, and enjoying it. For months, I was commuting by car up the peninsula every day, and finally couldn't stand those 90 minutes away from the computer, so I switched to the train. Now I can put the laptop to sleep, jump on the bike, and be back to work in ten minutes with the bike racked right next to my seat on the train. I've even got high-speed wireless internet access. Sweet.
Commuting by train only adds to the perception that life in the Bay Area web biz is a blur of young geeks furiously writing code, stealing ideas, mashing up each other's web sites through APIs and RSS feeds, and self-organizing into flash mobs of indecipherable purpose. The express train whizzes by start-ups and venture capitalists in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, San Mateo, Redwood City. The train stops, a bunch of geeks (and a few young marketing and finance sharks) get off, and others get on, and we blast off for "the city." Sometimes I ride BART over to Berkeley, where they have more whole-grain geeks, but still working on stuff that's meaningless to anyone outside of the Bay Area who isn't in college. Last week, when Caltrain shut down after an accident, I led a mob of geeks that descended on Samtrans, the only alternate available. The bus growled slowly down dark El Camino, festooned with bicycles, lit from within by the flourescent glow of a dozen laptops.
After only a few days on the train, the experience changed from surreal to alarming for me, as I somehow crashed my bike on the way from work to the 4th & King station. I have no memory of that day, except for flashes of the CT machine and my sister arriving at the hospital to drive me home. Over the next few days, I had to reverse-engineer the code I had no memory of writing that day. (At least I found and fixed a few bugs.) I feel a little bad that I can't remember what I did to precipitate the accident. I feel a lot bad that my computer, strapped to my back when I fell, now has a crack in the corner of its titanium shell. I like to think I'm careful enough to commute on the bike. I'd hate to think that it's not safe enough, because I don't want to go back to the car and lose those 90 minutes of uninterrupted work each day.
I'm trying to let the Web 2.0 craziness flow past me, enjoying the most fun job I've ever had, and not count any chickens. But 1.65 billion dollars, wow.
Posted by sbw at October 17, 2006 11:33 PMMy mother fainted while on a bike and only remembers being on the bike and then waking up in the hospital. Perhaps that's what you did. It was the only time she's fainted.
Steve, I'm glad you weren't badly hurt in that fall. BTW, I adore train travel. Cool that you can commute that way.
Can I just say here that the Williams family is amazingly creative, articulate, versatile, and thoughtful? Ian, thank you for writing "Coastopia" way back you-know-when, because that's how I found this blog, and I've never left.
Eek, glad you have a job you love, and feel better, Steve!!
Glad you are okay!!!
It is amazing how much time and resources are lost in our society in the one person one car mentality. Glad you are out of it!
I second Anne's comment above that it's been fun to hear from all the family members. It's amazing how the creative genius gene has mutated and been expressed in each of you in very individualized but obvious ways. I imagine your holiday get-togethers must be interesting experiences filled with lively debate and banter, but maybe I'm wrong and you all just stare at the TV and eat like everyone else in this great country.
Fabulous entry. From one bicycle commuter to another -- good on you. And let's be careful out there, m'kay?
When people like Anne complement us as a group, I remember what our Mom always said to respond when someone complements you -- "say Thank You."
But maybe a peek behind the Williams Family Curtain: we were all raised to think we were extraordinary, and that being merely good wasn't enough. We weren't normal people, we were Williams! to paraphrase National Lampoon "Vacation."
Now my mom will want to jump in and say that wasn't the precisely the case, but that's what I took away from the experience. To be fair, our father, the "brilliant young conductor" was more responsible for the elitist tone. We started out feeling we're better than everybody else. Reality of course rears it's ugly head, and we all had to learn the hard way that no matter how smart or talented you are, there's someone in the room who can top you.
This incipient elitism always left feeling a little inadequate, actually, because whatever talent I may have, it's coupled with grand lashings of laziness. I was always 'promising' but now I'm old enough that I've broken that promise many times over. I also found that a lot of things I wish I was brilliant at, I'm not. If you heard me sing you'd know this for certain.
Maybe this blogging thing will be our real moment to shine because if there's one thing we're all good at, it's talking shit. But back to Anne, let me say, "Thank You."
Really, I'm not here to get complemented, I want people to talk shit. Keep the ball in the air kids! Your battle cry: "We're not normal people, we're XTCIAN readers!"
I get my sense of elitism from being a Tar Heel.
Not so much during football season . . . but in basketball season I think I'm immortal.
Go Tar Heels!
Speaking of nobody outside college being up on Berkeley, I still feel cutting-edge and I haven't been back there in a decade. It's just my imagination, but it's a nice feeling if you can get the narcissistic mindset to stick.