There’s something deliciously perverse about the whole goddamn thing, this monument to digital salvation squatting in what used to be a temple dedicated to Mary Baker Eddy’s particularly American brand of metaphysical optimism. I was raised in that faith, back when I still believed you could pray away a broken bone or that matter itself was just some cosmic misunderstanding. I’m not anymore, obviously, reality has a way of asserting itself with compound fractures and mortality and all the other inconvenient truths that don’t respond to affirmations.
So walking back into a Christian Science church, even one that’s been gutted and repurposed, carries its own weird charge. The building itself on Funston Avenue has that heavy-browed, vaguely Greco-Roman authority that churches love, columns and gravitas and the unmistakable architecture of certainty. The architecture remembers even if I’d rather forget. But cross that threshold now and you’re confronted with something else entirely: server racks humming like mechanical monks, endless rows of hard drives spinning their digital rosaries, preserving every half-formed thought and manifesto and cat GIF humanity has puked onto the web since 1996.
It’s a cathedral to impermanence trying desperately to be permanent, staffing its pews with engineers instead of parishioners, replacing hymns with the white noise of cooling fans. One kind of faith replaced by another, both trying to transcend the fundamental problem of disappearance.
Brewster Kahle understood something Mary Baker Eddy didn’t: that memory is the only immortality we’ve got, and you need hard drives, not hard prayer, to preserve it.
I’m going to tell you about a place that got murdered. Not quick, not clean. Slow, by a thousand cuts from people in Patagonia vests who convinced themselves they were improving the neighborhood.
The building’s still standing on California Avenue. The sign still hangs there like a tombstone. But Antonio’s Nut House? The real Antonio’s? That beautiful, filthy, necessary thing? Dead. Fucking dead. And I watched it happen.
I grew up in Palo Alto, which means I got a front row seat to the greatest act of cultural strip-mining in American history. I watched my hometown sell its soul, auction off its guts, and call it innovation. Antonio’s was one the last places in town that wouldn’t bend the knee. That wouldn’t prettify itself. That wouldn’t apologize for being exactly what it was: a working-class bar in a town that spent thirty years pretending it never had a working class.
Let me be clear about something: Antonio’s was never just a bar. It was a statement. An act of defiance. It was the last commons in a town that had declared war on the idea that people without Stanford degrees or stock options deserved to exist in public.
I knew Antonio’s before I could drink there. Every day after school, I’d ride past on my bike around three thirty, four o’clock. Shift change. And there they were: guys who’d already worked eight, ten hours. Guys whose hands were wrecked. Whose backs were shot. Whose faces carried the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from actual labor, not the performative exhaustion of some product manager who spent all day in meetings about his feelings.
They’d lean against that bar with a beer and just… breathe. That’s it. The first beer of the afternoon wasn’t escape. It was punctuation. The period at the end of a sentence written in sweat and repetition and the quiet brutality of working for a living.
As a kid, I didn’t understand what I was seeing. But I understood it meant something. These guys looked real in a way nothing else in Palo Alto looked real. They had dirt under their fingernails. Grease stains. The thick, heavy stillness of people whose bodies hurt. And they had something the Stanford kids, the venture capitalists, the future billionaires would never have: the right to their own goddamn time.
Antonio’s was a real bar. Not a fake bar. Not one of those artisanal shitholes with Edison bulbs and $20 cocktails and some bearded mixologist explaining the fucking provenance of your vermouth. No. Antonio’s had sticky floors. Peanut shells. Christmas lights stapled to the ceiling in 1973 that no one ever bothered to take down. A jukebox that worked when it felt like it. It was ugly. It was perfect.
For decades, this was where Palo Alto’s actual people drank. The mechanics who kept the BMWs running. The line cooks who fed Stanford’s precious children. The retail workers. The laborers. The people who built and fixed and hauled and made the entire infrastructure that allowed tech assholes to pretend they were changing the world.
They tolerated the college kids because every town needs a place for the young and stupid to be young and stupid. But everyone knew whose bar it really was.
What Antonio’s had, what these fucking people could never buy, could never replicate, could never code, was integrity. The stubborn, beautiful kind. The kind that comes from just showing up, same owners, same vibe, same refusal to become something else because someone with more money told you to. In a region obsessed with disruption, with iterating, with pivoting, Antonio’s insisted on the radical idea that not everything needed to be optimized.
Some things were allowed to just be.
Years passed. Middle school became high school. The faces at the bar changed; the ritual didn’t. Clock out. First beer. Slow exhale. Over and over. Antonio’s was the church of the working day, and those guys were the faithful.
And then October 17, 1989.
The Loma Prieta earthquake hit. Seven point one. The earth folded. The Cypress Structure collapsed. The Bay Bridge cracked. The Marina caught fire. Everything went dark.
Except Antonio’s.
They had a generator. Of course they did. While the rest of Palo Alto sat in their dark living rooms wondering what the fuck to do without electricity, Antonio’s fired up that generator and opened its doors. People stumbled in from the darkness looking for light, for company, for proof that the world hadn’t ended.
I was old enough by then to be inside instead of watching through the window. And here’s what I remember: the place was packed. The generator hummed. The peanut shells crunched underfoot exactly like they had the day before. And somehow, through some miracle I still can’t explain because this was before cell phones, before GPS, before any of the technology that now makes us forget how we ever found each other, Lise was there.
Lise. My girlfriend. An artist. A waitress. The kind of person Palo Alto would spend the next three decades erasing. We met at Antonio’s that night. I have no idea how. Did we have a plan? Did we just both know that when everything goes to shit, you go to the place that stays open? I can’t remember. But there she was.
The bar hummed with the generator and with something else. The collective heartbeat that only happens when the world has just proven it can kill you. When the infrastructure fails and reveals just how thin the whole act really is. We drank. We waited. We were together. The earth had moved and Antonio’s stayed put.
That night crystallized everything. Antonio’s wasn’t just a bar. It was a social anchor. A battery that stayed charged when the grid collapsed. When civilization took a hit, Antonio’s was there. Steady. Unpretentious. Real.
That should have meant something. That should have bought protection. But this is Silicon Valley, where nothing is sacred except the frictionless accumulation of wealth, and even an act of grace like keeping the lights on during an earthquake won’t save you when the money decides your neighborhood needs “improvement.”
The siege started earlier than most people think. When the smoking laws changed, Antonio’s was slow to adapt. Not out of defiance. Out of continuity. Suddenly there were noise complaints. As if Antonio’s had become magically louder after thirty years. Everyone knew what this was: bureaucratic harassment as cultural cleansing. The city couldn’t just say it was expelling the working class, so it weaponized regulations instead.
Rich people don’t like being reminded that the help exists. It disrupts their fantasy that meritocracy is natural law instead of a rigged game.
Antonio’s survived the insinuations that it was dangerous, anachronistic, out of place in a neighborhood that had decided it was too precious for reality.
And then Facebook arrived.
Suddenly the bar was full of twenty six year old engineers making six figures to optimize human loneliness. The body language changed. The space felt occupied. Colonized. These people didn’t understand what they were destroying because they’d never had to understand anything. They just showed up, oblivious, entitled, convinced their presence was an upgrade. The shift-change rhythm broke. The ecology collapsed.
Facebook didn’t destroy Antonio’s through malice. It destroyed it through presence. Which is worse. Because you can’t fight presence. You can’t argue with it. It just spreads.
Then Facebook fucked off to Menlo Park, leaving behind the wreckage it always leaves. Real estate agents. Noise complaints. Million-dollar condos next to a bar that had been there for decades. And the new residents, shocked, shocked that bars make noise.
The old-timers drifted away. Some died. Some found other places that hadn’t been sanitized yet. Integrity, once broken, heals wrong. You can see the scar tissue.
I think about that night in 1989 all the time. The generator. The darkness. Lise appearing like a miracle. The peanut shells. The shift change guys who taught me what dignity looks like when no one’s grading you for it. They showed me that community isn’t built from ideology or apps or fucking networking events. It’s built from the ritual of return. From choosing a place, over and over, until it becomes part of your architecture.
That’s what we lost. Not just affordable rent or decent food or breathable traffic. We lost the infrastructure of belonging. The places where people with dirt under their fingernails could exist in the same room as their economic betters without someone filing a complaint.
Antonio’s Nut House is still there. The sign still hangs. Go drink there if you want. Keep it alive if you can. But know that you’re drinking to a ghost. A reminder of a Peninsula that once understood the difference between price and value. Between a social network and a society. Between optimization and life.
The earth shook in 1989 and we held onto each other. Thirty some years later, the ground is stable but everything else is trembling.
How do? Welcome to my shop Let me cut your mop Let me shave your crop Daintily, daintily…Hey, you! Don’t look so perplexed Why must you be vexed? Can’t you see you’re next? Yes, you’re next, you’re so next! Bugs Bunny, Rabbit of Seville (1950)
This Cardinal Barber Shop is the real fucking deal: it’s been perched in that Palo Alto hotel since 1925, outlasting every goddamn trend, every manufactured scene, every slick haired venture capitalist who thought they invented disruption while Gerardo Macareño’s been running scissors and straight razors through the same ritual since 1982. There’s something gorgeous and defiant about a place that just is, you know? No pivot, no exit strategy, no reimagining the barber experience, just a man and his shop holding the line while Silicon Valley churns through its manic phases like some speed freak Ouroboros eating its own innovationspeak. The Bugs Bunny quote hanging there like a Rosetta Stone is perfect: “Daintily, daintily…Hey, you! Don’t look so perplexed.” Because that’s exactly what this place does: it keeps clipping hair with the same unperplexed certainty while everyone around it acts like the world’s being born again every fiscal quarter, when really it’s just the same humans needing the same haircuts they always did, thank you very much.
The phone rings. Can’t tell you who. I’m sworn. But trust me, Google images knows things.
¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí. ¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión, una sombra, una ficción, y el mayor bien es pequeño; que toda la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son.
What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough: for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams. Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Life is a Dream, Act II, l. 1195.
This is theater department politics. Knife-fight in a phone booth, but with plastic spoons and a lot of crying.
They’ve already got their shooter, some three-hundred-dollar wedding hack who specializes in groomsmen doing synchronized jumping photos. The Olive Garden of photography.
But someone inside wants better. So I smuggled cameras in as if they’re a flask at high-school prom.
The irony kills me. This exact department. Same building. Twenty years ago, I’m in grad school here playing the goddamn king in Michael’s production. Four pages of Calderón memorized. Four. Pages. Baroque Spanish philosophy turned into blank verse that sounds like someone having an existential crisis in iambic pentameter.
Back then, this department made theater. Did the work themselves. Now? They hire it out. Except their hired gun photographer shoots like he’s covering a bat mitzvah.
I’m a ghost photographing ghosts. Segismundo trapped in his tower, questioning reality. Me, trapped in institutional pettiness, documenting shadows.
Stanford Indian at 735 Emerson St, Palo Alto, CA 94301.
Every society needs educated people, but the primary responsibility of educated people is to bring wisdom back into the community and make it available to others so that the lives they are leading make sense. Vine Deloria Jr.
The Indian. Stanford’s mascot from 1930 to 1970. Forty years of putting a race on a jersey, on a banner, on the field for entertainment.
1972: fifty five Native American students and staff at Stanford had enough. They put forward a petition. Not just asking, demanding. The University had made promises about its Native American Program. Improve it. Support it. Make Native American education a reality instead of a PR footnote.
And while you’re at it, stop using the name of a race as mascot for your football team.
The petition didn’t mince words. The Stanford community was “insensitive to the humanity of Native Americans.” By removing the Indian as a symbol, the “University would be renouncing a grotesque ignorance that it has previously condoned.”
Grotesque ignorance. They said it.
Stanford listened. The mascot went away.
But this sidewalk on Emerson Street? Laid in the early 1950s. The Indian is still there, pressed into the concrete. There’s something righteously fucked and pathetically American about stumbling onto this concrete fossil today. It’s the kind of banal, stubborn artifact that screams the quiet part loud: we’ll retire the mascot when the protests get too noisy, sure, but we’ll leave its ghost embedded in the infrastructure, stepped on daily by tech bros power walking to their next pivot meeting, utterly oblivious or (worse) nostalgic for a time when casual racism was just team spirit. This isn’t heritage, it’s laziness and cowardice calcified, a totem to the Ivy adjacent smugness that lets a place pat itself on the back for “evolving” while refusing to actually sandblast away the evidence of what it celebrated. Vine Deloria Jr.’s quote sits there like a knowing rebuke: wisdom means confronting this crap, not walking over it pretending it’s invisible.
But Palo Alto gonna Palo Alto, disrupting everything except its own embedded mythology, one footstep at a time.
So here’s the shot. Stanford’s quad, that cathedral to optimism and endowments, and right there in the middle: six bronze figures who understood that sometimes the price of collective survival is individual annihilation. Rodin’sBurghers of Calais. Cast number seven, if anyone’s counting.
Look at them. 1347, their city starved and surrounded, and these six guys, merchants, leaders, bourgeois in the truest sense, volunteer to walk out with ropes around their necks, keys to the gates in their hands, ready to die so everyone else gets to live. That’s the deal. That’s the social contract written in flesh.
thinking: one of these guys should be holding a Louis Vuitton trunk. I mean, why not? If you’re going to your execution, might as well carry your existential dread in monogrammed calfskin, right? The absurdity would be perfect. Suffering as accessory, sacrifice as statement piece. We’ve turned everything else into a commodity. Why not martyrdom?
The robber baron who built this place, Leland Stanford, railroad magnate, guy who knew how to move merchandise across a continent, understood monuments. Bronze in a public square says, “This happened. This matters. Remember.” But here’s the thing about Rodin: the French bourgeois who commissioned this piece wanted heroes on a pedestal. Rodin gave them humans at ground level. Terrified. Hesitant. Broken. He wanted people to bump into them. To walk among them. To accidentally brush against a bronze shoulder on their way to class and be forced to reckon with what sacrifice actually looks like.
That’s what great public art does. It refuses to let you off easy. It doesn’t pander. It gets in your way. Stanford’s founder wanted legacy, wanted his name in bronze and marble. He got it. But he also got this: a daily reminder that real courage looks nothing like triumph. It looks like six guys shuffling toward death because it’s the only decent thing left to do. And they’re not above you. They’re with you. In your space. Unavoidable.
The light in this shot is clean, honest. No magic hour, no Instagram bullshit. Just Rodin’s vision against Stanford stone, old world sacrifice meeting new world ambition.
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely, Rodin said.
So look at them. Really look.
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely. Auguste Rodin quoted in Heads and Tales (1936) by Malvina Hoffman, p. 47
sometimes I want to break the structure down into certain areas, and I use color to do that for me. I use color to accent or as a destructive element on the figure. Manuel Neri
Alonzo King LINES Ballet hosted an evening of music, dance, and discussion highlighting the company’s upcoming Spring Season world-premiere of SUTRA. Held at the Taube Atrium Theater, Wilsey Opera Center
