With the 2024 edition of Metro’s Best of Silicon Valley upon us, there is no better moment to recommend a few upcoming events that emphasize the arts and humanities.
First of all, the San Jose City Hall Rotunda is a perfect place for a perfectly titled event: “A Post-Election Gathering for Undocumented Voices: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio in Conversation with José Antonio Vargas.”
With the GOP running on a hate platform of mass deportation, and with voters giving the presidency back to Donald Trump, whose henchmen fantasize about violent policies like ending birthright citizenship, it will be refreshing to hear two of the most unapologetic voices for undocumented immigrant rights holding a timely conversation on Nov. 14, from 6 to 8:30pm.
The peeps: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is one of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard. An Ecuadorian-born author and National Book Award finalist, her latest novel, Catalina, confronts themes of belonging, identity and survival, mirroring the harsh realities faced by many immigrants today. Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and Emmy-nominated filmmaker. Mountain View recently named an elementary school after him.
According to the press release, the evening—cosponsored by MACLA, Define America and the office of Vice Mayor Rosemary Kamei—“is designed to bring the undocumented community together, to process, reflect, and find strength in collective resilience.” As I write, the event was completely sold out, though there is a waiting list on Eventbrite.
Up in Menlo Park, a more lowkey gathering, also on Nov. 14, will unfold at Kepler’s, the legendary bookstore celebrating its 70th anniversary next year. World War II conscientious objector Roy Kepler first opened the store in 1955 and helped start the paperback revolution. I attended the 50th anniversary party in 2005 and the 60th anniversary celebrations in 2015. In the latter case, some attendees were even given a copy of journalist Michael Doyle’s book, Radical Chapters, in which he documented the rise of Kepler’s and its role in the peace movements of the 20th century.
A new paperback version of Radical Chapters features a preface updated for the current moment. Doyle will return to Kepler’s for a conversation with legendary Silicon Valley correspondent John Markoff, whose own 2005 book, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, remains, in my view, a very entertaining text. No other book more joyously connects the rise of tech-land with the various counterculture ideologies of the US in the mid-20th century. Kepler’s is featured in many parts of the story. What the Dormouse Said is also a great refresher on what Silicon Valley was always supposed to be about in the first place—striving to improve humanity. That is, before CEOs and VCs started fetishizing right-wing dictators and buying social media platforms to spread hate propaganda from totalitarian regimes.
It’s amazing that Kepler’s will still exist in 2025 because tech companies, along with the sycophantic journalists that cover them, all keen to “disrupt” anything, usually act happy when bookstores go out of business. None of them read anything on paper anyway.
And what would literature be without music? If any organization deserves a Best of Silicon Valley lifetime achievement award, it’s San Jose Chamber Orchestra. On Nov. 17, the ensemble will perform Pablo Furman’s “Paso del Fuego,” a concerto for string quartet and string orchestra. A piece the orchestra originally commissioned in 2010, “Paso del Fuego” blends inspiration from Furman’s Argentinian youth and his Eastern European ancestry.
Why do I say this? For over 30 years the orchestra has prioritized the works of living composers, rather than fetishize the dead ones. This is important, especially in a town where some classical music enterprises and their lumbering old-school patrons still bludgeon to death the same repertoire from centuries ago. On a San Jose Chamber Orchestra program, by comparison, you’ll almost always see contemporary composers in the mix with more traditional pieces.
Full disclosure: Furman and I go way back, as does San Jose Chamber Orchestra music director Barbara Day Turner. Also, I wrote a cover story about Jose Antonio Vargas in 2018 and a cover story about Markoff’s book in 2005. All of which makes me appreciate humanity even more. Each event feels like a personal moment. In the same way that Taoists and quantum physicists might understand reality, I, as the observer, cannot separate myself from that which I recommend here.
