Two hands rise, separating into yīn and yáng Left and right like a yīn and yáng fish Movement springs from extreme stillness, opening then closing Relax the shoulders and sit on the leg as if embracing the moon
Two hands form into yīn and yáng palms Two palms crossed over for locking joints
Wait for opportunity before moving, watch for changes Create opportunity by following the opponent’s force
Wu Jianquan, son of Wu Quanyou (from a didactic poem quoted by his son Wu Gongzao in Wu Family T’ai Chi Ch’uan (吳家太極拳)), Hong Kong, 1980 (originally published in Changsha, 1935)
These bodies in Golden Gate Park, caught mid-gesture, practicing forms that are older than anyone’s grandparents’ grandparents’ bullshit. I stand there with my camera or my stupid fucking aesthetic appreciation and I think I’m getting it, I think I’m capturing something real.
I’m not.
Because what I see are dancers doing T’ai Chi in public space, and what they’re living is something else entirely. The space between intention and execution, between what they mean to do with their bodies and what actually happens, that’s where all the real shit lives. That’s the irony Wu Jianquan was writing about in 1935, except he was being poetic about it: “Wait for opportunity before moving, watch for changes.” What he meant was I can plan all I want, but the world’s going to fuck with my choreography.
I’m documenting something spontaneous, random, which is just another word for trying to get closer to something that keeps sliding away from me. Every photograph here is an admission of defeat. I’m outside their body, outside their experience, and all I can do is point my lens at the surface of what they’re doing and pretend that means I understand the physics of their pain, the geometry of their discipline.
Because that’s the hustle, isn’t it? I consume other people’s art, their struggle, their form, their tragedy, and I tell myself I get it. I don’t get shit. Somebody else’s perfected gesture, their moment of grace captured between the de Young Museum and the Academy of Sciences, that’s not mine. I can witness it, I can appreciate it, I can even be moved by it, but I can’t climb inside their skin and feel what they felt when they finally nailed that transition from stillness to motion.
The cruel joke is that I keep trying anyway. The dancers keep moving, photographer keeps shooting, and maybe you keep looking at these images thinking maybe this time you’ll break through the membrane and actually know what it’s like. You won’t. The best you’ll get is a beautiful document of your own incomprehension, which, if we’re being honest, is still worth something.
Bodies moving in sunlight, separate tragedies we’ll never fully comprehend, transformed into pixels we can scroll past on our way to the next thing we’ll fail to understand.
I’m standing there in Golden Gate Park with my Leica and two dancers decide to play with gravity under an umbrella built when the last century was still drawing breath, and what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do when two bodies make architecture out of air and Ive got maybe three seconds before the whole thing dissolves into what it was before: just people, just rain, just another Friday getting swallowed by the fog?
The viewfinder. It’s not a window. It’s a trap door. I look through it and suddenly I’m not the one doing the looking, it’s looking at me, demanding something, asking questions I didn’t know I was supposed to answer. The camera doesn’t give a shit about my intentions. It just sits there, this cold gorgoeus mechanical witness, waiting to see if I’m brave enough or stupid enough or desperate enough to let the moment possess me instead of the other way around.
Because here’s what I figured out, what, I think, every photographer who’s worth a damn eventually figures out: Photography is a reflection that comes to life in action and leads to a form of meditation. I see it first, that suspended moment, but it sees me back. Spontaneity intervenes right there in the viewfinder, that fragile instant where everything could collapse or crystallize, and what precedes it is reflection on the subject, what follows is a meditation on finality. And it’s in that exalting, trembling space between a before and an after that the real photographic work happens, the sequencing of images, the syntax of light and shadow and two people dancing under an umbrella who didn’t ask to become permanent.
This requires a writer’s spirit. Has to. Because isn’t photography just writing with light? Except, and here’s where it gets mean, where it gets true, while the writer possesses his words, the photographer is himself possessed by his photos. Possessed by the limit of the real, which he must transcend or become its prisoner.
And that’s the bargain, right? That’s the whole sick, beautiful bargain. These images of Babatunji and Yujin Kim doing their umbrella dance, they’re not about dance. They’re about that millisecond when the world forgets to be the world and becomes something else. Something that demands you look at it, that won’t let you turn away even though you know, I know, it’s already gone by the time the shutter clicks.
Love me, love my umbrella. Joyce knew. The umbrella’s not protection. It’s complicity. It’s saying: yes, I see you, I’m willing to stand under this absurd canopy with you while everything else pretends to make sense. And I was there with my camera, getting possessed, getting written on, letting the light do what light does when I shut up long enough to let it speak.
San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth. William Saroyan
The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence … The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand ‘it is not there,’ on the other ‘but it has indeed been’): a mad image, chafed by reality. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
May 9th, 2018. High noon. East Palo Alto shoreline. Sixty-four degrees and sunny, the kind of day that makes you forget, for a moment, that everything ends badly. Especially here, where the ground itself is a monument to bad decisions.
We’re standing on a Superfund site. Toxic landscape. The kind of place where American ambition literally poisoned the earth, where someone’s “path of steady success” left behind carcinogens and heavy metals in the soil. The irony isn’t lost on us, it’s the whole fucking point.
We staged a fragment. One of Euripides‘ lost tragedies, no one knows which one anymore, because history is a hungry thing that eats most of what we make. Five minutes of ancient Greek warning delivered to maybe fourteen people, maybe sixteen, on land that’s still sick from progress. We called it Path of Steady Success, which suddenly feels less like a title and more like an indictment.
The fragment itself? Pure Greek darkness dressed up as wisdom. It’s a warning shot across the bow of anyone who thinks they’ve got it figured out: The gods get bored. That’s the message. You’re riding high, everything’s golden, you think you’ve earned it, you’ve deserved it—and somewhere up on Olympus, the divine is filing its nails, yawning, thinking, “Yeah, we’re done here.”
It’s about hubris, obviously. That Greek obsession with pride that comes before the fall. But it’s more specific than that, it’s about the shelf life of success. The universe doesn’t hate you; it’s just indifferent, and that indifference has an expiration date. Even divine favor has its limits. The gods won’t prop up the same winner forever. They get tired of the same old story.
And here we are, performing this ancient warning on contaminated ground, proof that they were right. Fortune isn’t permanent. The heavens got tired of propping up whoever poisoned this place. Success ran out. What’s left is us, and a few people willing to stand on toxic earth to hear words that are 2,400 years old and still true.
This is what we’re doing with IOTA: resurrecting the scattered fragments of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, the plays that didn’t make it. The warnings that got lost. Bringing them back to life in places like this, site-specific theater, where the water meets the poisoned land and everything feels both temporary and permanent in the worst possible way.
Because that’s the point, isn’t it? Nothing’s permanent, not success, not luck, not even the plays themselves. But the damage? That sticks around. The ground remembers what we’d rather forget.
For five minutes on a Wednesday afternoon, in front of a handful of people who showed up during their lunch break, these ancient words lived again. A warning about hubris, delivered on a landscape that proves we never fucking learn.
The Fragment The man on the path of steady success should not think that he will enjoy the same luck for ever, for the god— if one should use the name ‘god’— seems generally to grow weary of supporting always the same men.
Mortal men’s prosperity is mortal; those who are arrogant and assure themselves of the future from the present get a test of their fortune through suffering.
Location
Two Superfund sites. In a residential neighborhood. Bay Street, East Palo Alto. And here’s the kicker, neither one is on the EPA’s National Priority List. Because apparently, some poisoned ground is more of a priority than other poisoned ground.
1990 Bay Street. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priority List, Inc. used to make pesticides there. Arsenic-based pesticides, because of course. Zoecon Corp. bought the place in ’72, kept making agricultural chemicals. They say no contamination traces back to Zoecon’s operations, which is corporate-speak for “don’t look at us, look at the other guys.”
Then there’s 2081 Bay Road. Romic Environmental Technologies Corp. Twelve-point-six acres of what they called a “chemicals processing plant.” What it actually was? A toxic waste recycling facility. They took the nasty shit from companies like Hewlett-Packard, you know, the printer people, and did God knows what with it. Started in 1956. Ran for fifty years until they finally shut it down in 2007 after, and I quote, “a series of environmental and safety violations.” Which is like saying the Titanic had “a minor leak problem.”
The monitoring wells? Contaminated. Arsenic. Lead. Cadmium. Mercury. Selenium. It’s like a greatest hits album of things that shouldn’t be in your water. And here’s the part that should make your blood boil: approximately 58,000 people depend on wells within three miles of this site as their source of drinking water.
Fifty-eight thousand people. Real people. Families. Kids. Living their lives on poisoned ground, drawing water from poisoned wells, because someone decided East Palo Alto was a good place to park their toxic waste.
This is what success looks like from the other side. Someone made money. Someone made pesticides and processed chemicals and built a business. And when the gods got tired of propping them up? They left. But the poison stayed. It always does.
Collaborators Daniel Guaqueta Drummer. Electronica artist. A guy who grew up split between Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Bogota, Colombia, two worlds that shouldn’t fit together but somehow do in his music. He’s got cumbia in his blood and Delta slowness in his bones. The kind of musician who hears rhythm in everything: bicycle chains, truck engines, the way waves break on a shore.
When he was in college in Mississippi, studying classical music and jazz, getting into Megadeth and Firehose, he stumbled on a Mermen album (note: if Santa Cruz had an official band it would be the Merman). That album, Be My Noir, begins with the sound of waves. He put the needle down and everything changed. Now most people, when they discover a band they love, they buy the t-shirt, go to a few shows. Daniel? He started his own surf-rock band, even though he’d never surfed. And later, after Daniel moved to Palo Alto, he became a Mer-sideman, filling in on drums when they needed him.
The guy’s a true artist. A Mississippi native who makes electronic music that blends ambient avant-garde with pop, who understands that music isn’t just notes on a page, it’s texture, it’s atmosphere, it’s the space between the sounds. A sonic landscape.
For this performance on the toxic shore, this five-minute warning about hubris delivered to maybe sixteen people on poisoned ground, Guaqueta brought his 5 gallon bucket of a drum, his understanding of rhythm and space, his willingness to stand in a place that America forgot and made something beautiful anyway.
He’s the kind of collaborator you want: someone who gets that this isn’t just about the music. It’s about where you make it. Why you make it. What it means to resurrect ancient warnings in a landscape that proves we never fucking learn.
RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then, try trusting it for awhile.
RULE TWO: General duties of a student — pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher — pull everything out of your students.
RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.
RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined — this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.
RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.
RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.
RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
RULE TEN: We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.
HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything — it might come in handy later.
John Cage Ten Rules for Students and Teachers originates not from John Cage, but artist and teacherCorita Kent who created the list as part of a project for a class she taught in 1967-1968 at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles.
I spent most of my life pretending I knew what the hell I was doing. And then one day, somewhere along the line, I stumbled across these rules, technically Corita Kent’s, not Cage’s, but whatever, and realized I’d been doing this backwards the whole goddamn time.
“Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.” That’s the one that gets me. Because trust is the hardest thing, isn’t it? We’re all so busy performing, so terrified of looking stupid, that we never actually commit to anything long enough to let it work on us. We’re tourists in our own lives.
The rule about pulling everything out of your teachers and fellow students, that’s about hunger. Real hunger. Not the polite kind where you raise your hand and ask permission. You take what you need. You steal techniques, ideas, the way someone holds their body when they’re thinking. That’s not plagiarism; that’s survival.
And “nothing is a mistake”? Jesus, if I’d understood that at twenty-five, even thirty-five instead of forty-five, imagine the neuroses I could’ve avoided. I’ve spent so much energy constructing elaborate narratives about my failures when I should just be making the next thing.
But Rule Seven, that’s the one that matters. Work. Just fucking work. Not when I feel inspired or when the moment is right. Work when I’m tired. Work when I’m hungover. Work when I think everything I’m making is garbage. Because the people who show up every day, who do the tedious, unglamorous labor of their craft, those are the ones who eventually make something worth a damn.
The last rule, though, breaking all the rules, leaving room for chaos, that’s where life happens. In the X quantities. In the spaces between what you planned and what actually occurred. That’s where you find something true, something that might outlive you. Everything else is just static.
You don’t understand what it means to be in that room until you’re in that room. Not watching, that’s what tourists do, what the assholes with the expensive seats do. I mean in it, close enough to see the sweat, the micro-adjustments of his fingers, the way his whole body becomes an argument with silence.
Zakir Hussain doesn’t play the tabla. He doesn’t perform. He demolishes the space between intention and sound, between mathematics and ecstasy. And when he’s creating for dancers, it’s not accompaniment. It’s combat. It’s seduction. It’s a conversation happening at a frequency that bypasses your brain and goes straight to your spine.
Every time you step out on to the stage, you learn something which helps you grow and be a better communicator. It’s not like you’re the master. You’re always a student.
The dancers are already moving before he strikes the drum, they’re moving because they know what’s coming, what’s inevitable, the way you flinch before the thunder when you see the lightning. And he sees them, tracks them, builds something that’s simultaneously ancient and being invented in real-time. Every note is a choice. Every silence is violence.
And I’m there with a camera, trying to freeze something that exists only in motion, trying to capture proof of magic for people who weren’t there and won’t believe it anyway. The privilege isn’t the access. The privilege is understanding, for those moments, that you’re watching someone operate at a level of mastery that most humans never even glimpse. That you’re witnessing the thing itself, not a representation of it.
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.
Antonio’s Nut House, California Avenue: A Love Letter to a Dive Bar That Refused to Die
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 twenty-dollar 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.
