Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Holiday Silicon Valley - Random Acts of Social Media

"Flash Mobs" and "Random Acts of Culture" have become internationally popular "spontaneous" public events in recent years.

Some of the most widely viewed Youtube flash mob events were arranged in 2009 by T. Mobile, with over 25 million hits for the T-Mobile Dance held at Liverpool Station in London, plus my favorite, 13,500 people Singing "Hey Jude" in London's Trafalgar Square. The most recent 2010 T-Mobile event, "The T-Mobile Welcome Back," was a surprise event for arriving travelers at Healthrow Airport's Terminal 5 in London. Although the 2010 event is tightly chorepgraphed, the awed expressions on the faces of the public are the real draw of these T-Mobile promotional events.

The popularity and mainstreaming of these events has led to some wonderful holiday surprises, as non-profits and local musical groups have organized flash mobs and random acts of "spontaneous" cultural events in their own communities.

It is not often that we may be surprised with the unexpected gift of joy and beauty, or the generosity of our fellow man, especially during the busy holiday season in cramped and crowded malls. These videos will gladden your heart, whatever your religious beliefs, as they illustrate how joy may be found in the most unlikely places, when we least expect a magical and remarkable gift to appear.


This lovely Hallelujah Chorus surprise took place at Seaway Mall in Niagra Falls Ontario, Canada, on Nobvember 13, 2010: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE&feature=related




Our own Symphony Silicon Valley Chorus surprised San Jose shoppers with a Random Act of Culture at Westfield Valley Fair Mall last November, with this performance of Amazing Grace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X__Izoyw7Yo&feature=related




The most stunning event took place at Macy's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp_RHnQ-jgU&feature=fvw when, as their site states, on "Saturday, October 30, 2010, the Opera Company of Philadelphia brought together over 650 choristers from 28 participating organizations to perform one of the Knight Foundation's "Random Acts of Culture" at Macy's in Center City Philadelphia. Accompanied by the Wanamaker Organ - the world's largest pipe organ - the OCP Chorus and throngs of singers from the community infiltrated the store as shoppers, and burst into a pop-up rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's "Messiah" at 12 noon, to the delight of surprised shoppers. This event is one of 1,000 "Random Acts of Culture" to be funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation over the next three years."



Not only has social media changed how we connect in crowds, with spontaneous events and online with uploaded videos, but it could have changed how the Christmas story unfolded, if the birth of Jesus had taken place in 2010.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other Silicon Valley giants are featured in this witty and clever video which retells a "Digital Story of the Nativity - or Christmas 2.0," (once you get past the ad) using social media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZrf0PbAGSk

Happy Holidays,

---C. D. Alexander, Silicon Valley Librarian

Friday, December 10, 2010

Write Roots - Online Genealogy & Memoir Resources

Today I read that Ancestry Library Edition, the public library subscription version of Ancestry.com by Proquest, is one of the most widely utilized electronic subscription databases for genealogy in our Silicon Valley public libraries.

With the popularity of scrap booking, Census, and family tree-maker sites and software, plus the expansion of local historical society resources and projects as Baby Boomers age, I suspect that our generation will play a major role in documenting and recording the lineage and memories of our first, second, and third-generation relatives. In doing so, we will create a tangible record of our own rites of passage, as "memoir" scribes of our generation.

In writing about memoir, especially within the constraints of history, first learning the historical record and details of one’s heritage (even when the opportunity for gathering oral histories may no longer be available), may provide a valuable breadcrumb trail through creative options of how best to organize your writing.


In my own family our cherished family oral historical beliefs were discovered to be a bit scrambled. Of course, the online heraldry sites said we come from royalty, that we were from another nationality altogether, and that we had a family crest. Well, it sounds like fun, but I think we are a lot like every other family, only special because we love each other, not because we are related to knights, kings or queens.

In reality, generations of the maternal side of my family fished along the rocky Adriatic coast, when they weren't growing grapes or making wine. Some were from generations of educated folk whose heritage was linked to regions which were home to the ancient Celts. The paternal side of my family is Northern European, and not much is known about them as borders and records changed or were lost during war times. But there was another stunning revelation.

When a distant cousin researched our family records, she found that much of what we thought we knew, which had been handed down through our family's oral and written histories, was wrong.

In trying to remember the past, our family's elderly first generation had some dates and places confused, and there was a secret first (or second wife) attached to our great grandfather, depending whose side of the family was telling the story.


Instead of clinging to what we wanted to believe about our past, we received the gift of our real heritage and history. It was wonderful and all courtesy of records which my cousin found through online record searches, a historical path of detection which you can follow yourself or with the help of a librarian and a local genealogy center.


Aside from taking you deeper into your personal or family journey, genealogy and history sites will ground you in the authentic events which shaped your historic past, the silent backdrop which sets the atmosphere and tone of your memoir.

The following works illustrate several methods of writing an historic memoir:
• Placing your family memoir within an historical perspective and framing it as an allegory of the times, offers readers a broader view of your personal story within regional or worldwide events of significance. Greg Mortenson’s books, Three Cups of Tea (2009) and Stones into Schools (2010) integrate one man’s journey from failed, scruffy mountain climber to respected international humanitarian, all within the framework of cultural and political events in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

• 
Likewise, taking a much-documented political or international event and telling the story of its personal impact on you, or the lives of a handful of people you knew well, personalizes history and brings it vividly alive for the reader. The ongoing popularity of era-based oral histories by Studs Terkel, some even contemporized in graphic novel format illustrates the multigenerational appeal of presenting real people who survived and thrived during typically summarized major local or world events, clustering a common major cultural memoir into vignettes, with one individual, one story at a time.

• 
A more recent work, Angel Island: immigrant gateway to America, by Erika Lee and Judy Yung (2010) employs oral histories, holding-cell drawings, and government records to tell the story of Pacific immigrants who were endlessly becalmed on this San Francisco Bay gateway island while attempting to gain entry into the United States. Both Lee and Yung are descended from Angel Island detainees, which lend certain pathos to their memoir.

• 
Contemporary biography may also highlight an era, a personal transformation, or handle difficult subjects and memories within an historic perspective. Keith Richard’s new biography, Life, Keith Richards (2010) has received positive reviews for its surprising poignancy as Richards reveals aspects of his childhood and adolescent years which are markedly different from the hard-driving, drug-saturated public persona which unfolded across the tabloids in his role as a founding member of the Rolling Stones. Transformational stories like these, framed by a specific era and its music, fashion, and world events, enrich the ability of readers to relate to the subject of the memoir. Even those readers who are unaware of Richards, per se, may relate to a story of self-annealing honesty.

Writing memoir from these perspectives closely follows aspects of Journalism, with its requirement for factual and accurate reporting of documented events. A subset of journalism which includes chronological reporting on authentic events, coupled with personal impressions and view points, has been termed, Narrative Journalism or “Creative Nonfiction.” One of my favorite introductions to this marriage of Journalism and memoir is Telling True Stories: A nonfiction writers’ guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. In this work noted nonfiction writers like Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron, Susan Orlean and others, share their insights on the meaning and craft of narrative journalism.

To increase your breadth of historical knowledge while writing memoir, these online sites are particularly helpful:

• 
The Ellis Island Foundation The American Memory Collection
The U.S. Census Online
• The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration U.S. Census page and related genealogy pages featuring passenger ship manifests, immigration records, and military service records, among other resources.
• LDS Family History Centers - Family Search
• University of Houston’s Digital History site
• American Cultural History: The Twentieth Century (by decade)
• Ancestry Library Edition is available for free at some local libraries and can be accessed online with your library card.

---C. D. Alexander, Silicon Valley Librarian

Kerr Jars - A Silicon Valley Holiday Memoir

The peeling, creaky ladder went over, spilling at least half a bucket of juicy, Burgundy-colored Royal Ann cherries, most of them tumbling in a sorry heap in the dirt at my feet.

It was 102 in the shade at 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning, and if I weren't trying to keep pace with my buff, older male cousins, I would have cried some deeply female pre-adolescent tears. I was dirty, sweaty, shy, and tired, and I had two more miserable hours among the cicadas, bees, and fruit flies, before cooling relief, in the form of the Meyer lemonade and liverwurst sandwiches which were waiting in my mother's linoleum-patterned kitchen.

Pears soap. A long shower. My faithful Woodhue Cologne. My pink bedroom with it's white lace pillows, collection of special rocks, and dog-eared Agatha Christie novels, one bookmarked and waiting. I would disappear from the jovial warmth of family to find my quiet indoor oasis, although our house had only one bathroom and our entire, gregarious family had descended for the cherry harvest.

We grew Blenheim and Moorpark apricots, along with Royal Ann and Bing cherries, cots which my aunts, cousins, and I would cut faithfully every summer, then dry. Our French Prune crop would be picked and sent to dry yards, then packaged by a local family conglomerate who would make their fortune selling dried produce internationally.

During summer the valley air would smell like a candy store of ripe fruit, sticky with juice and sugar, at least until the peaches were harvested and the canneries would leave the skins to sour and decay in large, steaming piles. All of these visions, scents, and memories live on in my mother's fruit-filled Kerr jars, still tucked away on a shelf, cool and dark, waiting to restore me back to another time, rich with family, the scent of summer, and bounty in the life that was astonishingly simple compared to today.

Our family's European heritage would translate into a holiday gifts of our dried fruits to the postman, to our neighbors, doctors, dentist, tax accountant, and to out-of-state relatives and friends. We would stuff our dried prunes with chopped walnuts or whole roasted almonds, then dip them in dark chocolate, lining up the warm nuggets in dripping rows on old, bent cooling racks. My aunt and uncle, who had an apple orchard in the Wine County, before they converted it to grape varietals, would give us boxes of their spicy, sweet Gravenstein apples, more intensely delicious than any other apple I have tasted since. From this we made our own applesauce, cider, and apple cake, staples on our holiday tables.

I have no idea how my parents managed to produce a large tomato crop every year, since my plants seem to disappear from the valley's clay-hard soil, roots and all, long before they have a chance to produce. From their large crops of tomatoes, bell peppers, and herbs, my mother made her own canned, stewed tomatoes, which appeared in some form at every evening meal, cherry-red, gently tart, and carrot-sweet.


I have a deep, new respect for my father, now that I am tending his garden and caring for the family home. I earned my own advanced academic degree to escape the farming life and work as a public librarian, although I now long to recreate the simplicity and abundance of my agricultural memory, while relishing visits to my cousins and their wine and vineyard-related businesses in Napa and Sonoma counties.My father was a wonderful cook, an accomplished dirt gardener, a skilled carpenter who erected redwood patios, decks, a workshop, and other outbuildings. 

He was also a dedicated home journeyman who wrestled skillfully with his own electrical and plumbing work, all while working dawn to dusk as a butcher. I never remember him once being home sick in his 40 years of employment. I wish I had his strength, knowledge, and skill, as I slowly restore the old family home and gardens, now surrounded by Hewlett Packard and Apple Computer, in what has become one artery within the heart of California's Silicon Valley. The picture I have included shows him with three of my six California cousins. He bought them all cowboy outfits around this time, in the late 1940's.

It was a European tradition in our family to have a kettle of Cioppino on Christmas Eve. Everyone would gather and contribute some portion of the fish, Polenta, Ciabatta, or produce. The lace tablecloths would come out, wine glasses would appear, and a tray of relishes and French onion and clam dips would be set out in crystal bowls. As a special treat we would carefully boil ravioli's, either home made or from La Villa Deli in Willow Glen, and have their Cucciddata cookies for dessert, which was a special treat. For summer holidays we would have large bouquets of gorgeous chrysanthemums from our neighbor's hothouses, at least in the early years, before they moved to farm their acres of blooms in the Fresno area.

During holiday meals my father would have a few glasses of red wine and talk wistfully of his Navy days in Guiuan (Eastern Samar) in the Philippines. He was in charge of the vegetable garden near his Quonset hut (and of censoring mail), and would send my mother long letters about his produce, including photos of himself holding boxes of his vegetables and flowers while wearing native dress. He was a kind-hearted and fun-loving man who would find the horrors of war heartbreakingly unbearable. His Navy garden gave him solace, plus my mother's agricultural family, with it's seasonal rituals and strong ties, would strengthen and ground him with wonderful meals filled with fresh produce, among a family who thrived on European traditions and cookery in all its forms.

As I run an old broom down the stacks of my mother's fruit-filled Kerr canning jar cases, I remember the beautiful molasses-colored eyes of one horse, it's large ivory teeth reaching over an old, white-washed corral, to grasp and crunch my offerings of late-summer carrots and apples. My mother and I regularly passed the same horse ranch as we walked down our rural, country lane to "Joe the Egg Man's house," as we called it then, where we would watch Joe candle each egg lovingly, before gently placing it in the cartons which we saved between visits. It's hard to believe that these early years existed in Silicon Valley, now home to a highly educated, high-tech international brain trust, a renowned center of venture capitalism, several world class universities, an astonishingly successful hub of ethnic diversity, and a thriving cultural explosion of opportunities. Back then, it was a dusty, verdant river valley, lush with produce and hard-working first and second generation Asian, Latin, and European families.

Today my mother and father are long gone and the orchard has been subdivided, yet I still have a shed filled with my mother's home-canned apricots, peaches, and cherries from 40-50 years ago. They are no longer safe to eat and some day I will have to dispose of them, but they carry the life-blood of so many family summers in their sealed, sweet chambers, that the time to finally let go of their Dandelion Wine-like magic may not exist in my lifetime.

Recipes (Click images to enlarge)


Brandied Cherries

I was surprised to find several large jars of brandied Royal Ann cherries in my mother's closet after she passed away. 


I have included her recipe for this treat, which is luscious over ice cream or cheesecake. My grandfather made his own wine, whiskey, and brandy when he had a ranch in Cupertino near the current site of the county library and Cupertino City Hall. He used goats to keep the weeds down in the orchard, but that's a story for another time.



Sherry Prune Cake

If you have not tried Prune Cake or Prune Muffins, they are naturally sweet, incredibly moist, and delicious with spicy goodness. I like to add some walnuts to my muffins, and usually leave out the egg yolks, while cutting down on the sugar from my mother's original recipe. I also replace the milk with buttermilk.


After all these years, Prune Cake with whipped cream remains one of my all-time favorites. My mother's recipe for Sherry Prune Cake is shown in her handwriting. Baking temperature is 325 degrees or 300 degrees for glass pans (which is not shown on the recipe card.) 


Make sure to oil the pan well and line the bottom of the pan with wax paper, as this cake has a tendency to stick to the baking pan. Baking times will vary based on the moisture in the prunes (watch the browning of this cake and test with a toothpick to determine that adequate baking time has taken place.) For all of these reasons, using a bundt or tube pan is not recommended.

To find books with holiday recipies, California Farm life records, and holiday memoirs (on WorldCat):

---C. D. Alexander, Silicon Valley Librarian