.Places and Faces and Points in Time in the California Theatre

Last week, Laurene Powell Jobs interviewed House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi on stage at the California Theatre in downtown San Jose. Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park sponsored the event.

As I sat in the jam-packed theater, a matrix of survival memories infiltrated my mind, taking on a Zen-like dimension of interbeing.

Powell Jobs was the widow of Steve Jobs, the legendary traveler who tripped around India with a copy of Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums in his duffel bag. Later, he was also the CEO of Apple Computer.

Almost 20 years ago, I watched Steve Jobs on the very same California Theatre stage. He stood there with Bono and The Edge from U2. All three announced the U2 iPod and the complete U2 digital box set with 400 tracks, then available at iTunes for $149. In 2004, the iPod and iTunes were still relatively novel ideas. For context, no one had smartphones yet and some Mac PowerBooks still had RJ-11 modem line ports.

When Jobs introduced Bono and The Edge, the Cult of Mac went wild.

Of the crowd, Bono said, “These hippies love us,” after which they all championed the destruction of the traditional recording industry. The Edge said when he first realized folks were using computers to store all their music, he knew the entire system of media distribution was changing. He was glad digital downloading came from a tech company as opposed to the record execs.

The Edge played piano at that event, not something I will ever see again on South First Street, but it was great to hang with the salivating tech media hordes and Apple employees, all worshiping at the altar. Bono promised that next time we’d see the whole band. After the gig, I ran back to the Metro office and banged out a story on deadline.

Last week, the ghost of Steve Jobs was lurking in the shadows as I contemplated a zillion events I’d seen in the California Theatre over the last 20 years—Cinequest films, conferences, San Jose Jazz Summerfest gigs, award ceremonies, opera, symphony and whatever else. But somehow Mr. and Mrs. Jobs were now the ones to shatter spacetime on the 300 block of South First. Steve Jobs returned in 2005 with the Wynton Marsalis quartet to introduce the video iPod.

Thankfully, Kepler’s Books put on the event, since San Jose doesn’t have its own indie bookstore and never will at this point. Just like many club-level bands come to San Francisco and Santa Cruz, disregarding San Jose entirely, so do many author events and publishers.

Kepler’s is now almost 70. The store has a long anti-war history, going back to 1955, when WWII Conscientious Objector Roy Kepler first opened the place. As I observed the anti-war protestors outside Pelosi’s event, I couldn’t stop thinking about the history.

On this very page, I wrote about the Kepler’s 50th anniversary party in 2005. At that event, in the bookstore, I sat right next to Joan Baez. Ten years later, I attended the 60th anniversary party.

There was no way for those memories to remain suppressed as the Pelosi event unfolded. There was too much to unpack.

Elsewhere in time and space, Steve Jobs said the intuition and experiential wisdom he witnessed while traveling through India deeply influenced him. After seven months in Indian villages, he realized no one in those villages knew of Western rational thought, and that people there used a flavor of intuition far more developed than in the rest of the world. He returned home and eventually learned more about meditation, along the way migrating to Zen perspectives.

“I learned the truth of the Zen saying that if you are willing to travel around the world to meet a teacher, one will appear next door.”

Or maybe across the street from the Metro office. For me, events and experiences can be teachers too. At this point, it was all about survival. The two amazing women on stage were survivors in every sense of the word. The California Theatre has survived. Kepler’s has survived. Alt-weekly newspapers have survived. Joan Baez has survived. Even U2 is still here.

If you’re reading this, then you survived too. May we all survive even more.