Tagged — Jamie Lyons
Engineering 2020
The real perfectibility of man may be illustrated, as I have mentioned before, by the perfectibility of a plant. The object of the enterprising florist is, as I conceive, to unite size, symmetry, and beauty of colour. It would surely be presumptuous in the most successful improver to affirm, that he possessed a carnation in […]
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Engineering 2020
The Fry’s chain completely taps into MSE: Male Shopping Energy. This is to say that most guys have about 73 calories of shopping energy, and once these calories are gone, they’re gone for the day—if not the week—and can’t be regenerated simply by having an Orange Julius at the Food Fair. Douglas Coupland, Microserfs. The […]
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Byxbee Landfill Park – Pole Field, 1991 American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash — all of them — surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw […]
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Engineering 2019
One RV. One of hundreds in Palo Alto. Families living in these things because rent in Disruption Town is no longer a number that makes sense to anyone who actually works for a living. State and city laws say they have to move every 72 hours. Can’t get too comfortable. Can’t put down roots. Keep moving, […]
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Engineering 2019
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. Henry David Thoreau, Walden Look at this shit. Emerson Street, Palo Alto. A driveway. And in that driveway, a lineup of chairs that looks like someone staged an intervention for ergonomic seating and nobody showed up. They’re just standing […]
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Engineering 2019
There’s something about a joint that refuses to die that makes you believe in America again, or at least in the stubborn, beautiful refusal to give up on what matters. Peninsula Creamery sits there on that corner like a middle finger to everything Silicon Valley pretends to be: all its disruption and optimization and whatever […]
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Thousands have lived without love, not one without water. W. H. Auden, First Things First, 1956 Seventy eight feet of reinforced concrete. Corner of Alma and Hawthorne. Built in 1910. A water tower. 155,000 gallons. It helped establish Palo Alto’s city-owned utility system, back when the city actually built things for the public good, imagine […]
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Resistance 2018
Look at this beautiful goddamn relic. A payphone. At a boat launch in Palo Alto, ground zero for the tech apocalypse that murdered these things. There’s something almost obscene about it standing there, isn’t there? This monument to a slower, dumber, better world. Back when “faith backed by dollars” meant stringing copper wire across America […]
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Engineering 2018
After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was. Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right Tim Cook showed up to bless the product launch at the Apple Store in Palo Alto like some corporate pontiff, anointing the faithful who’d lined up to hand over a […]
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Engineering 2018
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, […]
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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? […]
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Engineering 2018
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 […]
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Engineering 2018
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 […]
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Engineering 2017
The eye exists in its primitive state. The marvels of the earth a hundred feet high, the marvels of the sea a hundred feet deep, have for their witness only the wild eye that when in need of colours refers simply to the rainbow. It is present at the conventional exchange of signals that the […]
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I think cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals. I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object. Roland Barthes, The New Citroën, 1957 Rolling […]
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Engineering 2012
So here’s what nobody tells you about escaping Palo Alto: you can’t. Not really. You can put continents between yourself and those manicured lawns where old men in white execute shots with the precision of surgeons, but the Ghetto, yeah that’s what they call it, the Faculty Ghetto, like living in five million dollar Craftsman […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2011
I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations Look at this photograph I took and tell me something isn’t dying right in front of you. The Stanford Movie Theatre on University Avenue in Palo Alto. The marquee reading Great Expectations […]
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Individualism 2011
So Steve Jobs died last week, and I’m sitting here trying to figure out what the hell that means to me, this guy I never actually knew but who was always just… here. Growing up in Palo Alto, I couldn’t escape him. Not in the celebrity sighting way, not in the “oh look, there’s someone […]
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