1999
Ron Gonzales sworn in as 63rd mayor of San Jose after narrowly defeating Pat Dando – AMD debuts Athlon chip – Governments prepare for the Y2K bug
Dust in the Wind
Richard Weiskal swings a rock hammer as he strides up a bright green hillside in south San Jose. His dog, Woody, trots, nose to the ground, picking up scents from the nearby cow herd. Following the contour of a low ridge, Weiskal stops at a footstool-sized rock and swings his small hammer. Bits of rock dust leap into the air, careening off his glasses. A small chunk of the dark green stone rolls into his palm. “See that?” he says, rubbing his thumb over the white fibers running in a band across the rock. The fibers peel off the rock and take flight, like dandelion seeds blown into the breeze. “That’s asbestos,” he says. “It’s everywhere.” Jim Rendon, March 11, 1999
Man Jose
Marvin Raab, 35, is the kind of guy Silicon Valley loves. Employers find new Marvins just out of college; they poach them from other companies or lure them from around the globe. Once the guys get here, they are paid handsomely, they have gourmet cooks prepare their meals, and they’re allowed to dress like schleps. But something happens when all these engineers go out and try to find a date at ground zero of the Guy Glut. Population numbers for Santa Clara County show a slight disparity overall, 51 percent male to 49 percent female. Where it becomes dramatic is in the prime dating years. In 1997 there were an estimated 40,641 more men than women in the county between the ages of 20 and 44. Never-married men outnumber never-married women in every ZIP code in Silicon Valley. Michael Learmonth, April 8, 1999
Donnas Party
The Donnas are not the types to demolish hotel rooms. It’s easier, in fact, to imagine them giggling over room service. Some Donnas fans would be disappointed if they knew how nice the members of the hedonistic, hard-edged nymphet quartet from Palo Alto really are. Although the Donnas are hurtling toward stardom—they have scored photo and story spreads in Spin and Rolling Stone, will soon embark on their second European tour and are about to release their third album, Get Skintight—offstage they can only be described as sweet and self-effacing. The Donnas, one 19-year-old and three 20-year-olds, are strenuously down-to-earth. Although they’re forever being compared to Joan Jett and Lita Ford, these four are more about fun than fury. If anything, their music resembles the goofy defiance of the Beastie Boys singing “Fight for Your Right to Party” more than Courtney Love bellowing “Teenage Whore.” Michelle Goldberg, June 24, 1999 [Former Metro staffer Michelle Goldberg has written two books, the New York Times bestseller ‘Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism’ (2007) and ‘The Means of Reproduction’ (2008).
Smash and Learn
Of the 23 rock bands who are going to yell “Hello, San Jose!” today, none can ostensibly do it with the same kind of fervor as Smash Mouth—hometown boys made good. Smash Mouth’s members are like a spiffed-up, grown-up, mirror image of the audience, four well-coifed guys in perfectly pressed thrift store T-shirts and baggy shorts who look like they stepped right off the street—as, in a way, they did. And just as Smash Mouth’s look somehow captures the aesthetic of today, so does the sound they are pumping out, a breezy, slow-tempoed hybrid of punk, ska and ’60s garage rock that seems to embody something about the here and now. The band’s hit “Walking on the Sun” evokes the rich Californiate world of the late ’90s. It’s a world where instant success is not so much a dream as a promise, a world where music is a commodity rather than an emotional experience. Smash Mouth has made its way to the top in this world, the first and foremost band from this area to encapsulate, in sound, exactly what it feels like in the here and now. Gina Arnold, Aug. 12, 1999
New Human
Scientists know this much: the kind of work people do in the modern world is unlike any work humans have done before. It involves huge amounts of information and demands that people wrap their minds around different subjects on cue, bouncing between instant email messages and urgent phone calls, pagers and websites. Multitasking used to be making sure the rolls didn’t burn while also talking on the phone and chopping vegetables. Now it means pingponging not just between ideas but between the way they’re presented. People strive to work as quickly as their computers will let them, an unfair competition that always leaves the humans coming up short. Silicon Valley prides itself on its hectic pace of life, so much so that the image of exhausted startup employees slumped face-down in cold pizza has become an icon. Traci Hukill, Jan. 6, 2000 [Traci Hukill now edits the Santa Cruz Weekly.]
