Silicon Valley men's stores and (half-baked) Hlaska

For years I've been on a somewhat meandering and not at all thorough quest for a really decent men's store in Silicon Valley.

Plenty of locals would say we already have one and it's Frys. Fair enough, but I'm after clothing, too, and a worldliness -- dare I say cosmopolitanism -- that Frys absolutely eschews.

Here's what I'm looking for: firstly, a clothing store that is to Silicon Valley as the Paul Smith store in Covent Garden is to London -- a place that both captures and helps define a region's unique style. So where's our poet of the tie-less shirt and the somehow-interesting-at-last khaki? Who can help us navigate that small but tricky step from the penniless student engineer affect to looking like the proto-tech titans that we all, so obviously, will one day be? 

Who, moreover, can take all the cultures -- old American money, new American money, Preppy, Japanese, Indian, nerdy, Chinese, Taiwanese, Russian, extreme sportsman, Burning Man-regular, Pacific Islander, old Mexican California, it goes on and on -- that are woven into the fabric of this very particular global melting pot and make of it something truly our own?

We have mensware outposts here -- of San Francisco's tony Wilkes Bashford, for example, along with the surf chains, the mountain sports outlets, the fake-Bahamians, the fake-Hawaiians, a men's Macy's. None of them are about who or what we are, though. Right now, it's basically Dockers that define our look.

And what about accessories? In my Valley dreamscape exists a store combining the international chic of a Monocle outlet, the design rigor of an Apple store, the deeply nerdy whimsy of Berkeley's Boss Robot and the hard-assed, no-return commitment of a tattoo parlor in Santa Cruz. Oh, and let's throw in the exquisite taste of quite simply the best store in the world.  

What would that add up to? Who knows. Maybe it would the great-outdoors-meets-dog flavor of Calistoga's intriguing A Man's Store. Certainly, it would sell me interesting clothes for work and play, and shoes and bags and watches that I didn't even know existed. But maybe it would also have self-launch rockets, rare Lego minifigs, steampunk cufflinks, one-off pillows found on Etsy, crazy felt octopi. Heck, it might sell me a Bentley or a tank if I wanted, but also palms and cacti, quality sailing rope, or surplus pieces of defunct labs to decorate my home. All those things would fit right in here.

Most importantly, though, it would be our own thing -- helping define for us our own look -- and that's what we're lacking.  

Could such a place survive? Men here are stereotyped as uninterested in anything beyond the virtual, but they do need clothes. And Valley Man is not immune to fashion. Wander down University or California Avenues in Palo Alto of a lunch time and you can't move for the gaggles of well-remunerated male engineers (and VCs and industrial designers and lawyers and marketers), most still unencumbered by salary-draining families, mortgages or the time for expensive hobbies and yet who clearly care about how they look at least to the extent that they all dress exactly alike.  

This week I thought I might have found my Valley men's store Eldorado in Hlaska, newly arrived at the Stanford Shopping Center (see picture below) and co-founded by Chad Hurley of YouTube fame. And it gets part way there. 

The shelves display suit jackets over hoodies instead of shirt and tie combinations, which is right. And it has a highly enviable selection of lovely iPad carriers. The clothes are fairly interesting takes on familiar themes. I could definitely see them adding the right understated flair to pitch meetings in local cafes.

But Hlaska's selection is also limited: clothes, shoes, bags and little more. And, like many things started here, it feels like it was built to be reproduced -- and fit in -- anywhere. Scalability, after all, is a metric treasured by our VCs. Unfortunately, though, coupled with its chain-ified mall location, that pushes Hlaska far from being the sui generis, place-defining, destination store of my dreams.  

For now, then, I'm still looking.

As I say, I've not been particularly thorough in my search. If you know of a truly of-the-Valley men's store, do let me know.

New hope for public art in Palo Alto?

As a town, Palo Alto has a troubled history with public art. 

Its clearest successes have been deeply traditional, photo-realistic, or utilitarian. But too often work chosen for the city's public spaces has tipped into the simplistic, the banal, the insultingly obvious, and the outright trashy. Some works even terrify children, without giving off the sense that terror was ever the intention (it would at least be interesting if fear were the object, I guess).   

The sad thing is the most recent stuff is the worst. There was a time when important public work was done here.  It still happens at Stanford. 

Tomorrow, though, will see a return to something much better. It's a site-specific work by East Coast sculptor Patrick Dougherty, commissioned by the Palo Alto Art Center and the frequently taste-challenged Palo Alto Public Art Commission. This time, at least, they made a good call.

It's hardly uncommon to find sculptors creating large scale works from young willow these days. Here are yet more amazing examples (willow also has a venerable history as the source material for living, decorative fencing). Among the artists in the field, Dougherty's work is often good but not great. It's not, for example, enormously varied. Woven houses and figures are mostly what he goes for, although he can break out of that mold with spectacular success. 

So I was expecting Dougherty's Palo Alto piece to be a little too domestic for my taste.

Actually, though, it's pretty fun - whimsical but substantial, organic but kookily off-kilter. 

The willow is local -- from Pescadero.  

The piece will stay up a couple of years, I gather. I think it's a great addition to the city. 

Here's a rather over-exposed shot of the artist himself adding some final twigs.

If you are in the Palo Alto area and want to see it, it's right outside the Palo Alto Art Center on the corner of Newell and Embarcadero.  

A good year for cymbidiums

After a washout last year, I've got a ton of flower spikes on my cymbidiums this season. These are the first to open up -- with five or six more pots of them to come.

I think one reason for the change is that I've moved them into a much brighter location. Sheltered under a tall live oak, they get lots of light, but little direct sun.  

Our house has Angry Birds -- Live in 3D!

Here's a brief contribution to the perennial 'how should we raise our kids?' debate that is currently raging afresh thanks to Amy Chua.

One popular parenting technique among well-off, educated American parents is to massively curtail their children's consumption of video games.  It an approach with which I have a lot of sympathy. 

Despite the fact that video games 1) do improve hand-eye coordination, 2) can offer entertaining ways to learn everything from languages to math concepts and 3) will get even sedentary kids jumping around their living rooms, I'm happy to side with those who say that for the most part children can find more rewarding things to do.  

But does that mean no video games ever? I don't see why. My children have discovered Angry Birds and love the game. They'd play it all morning if I let them.  And on Monday, a school holiday, they did.

But here's the cool thing. At 8:10 AM my six-year old decided that Angry Birds would be a great way to start the day. I knew he'd bug me incessantly if I said no (he has great focus in such situations). So I said yes, he could play on my iPhone for ten minutes only, as could his sister.  

At 8:30 AM I took away the phone. The kids' wanted to keep the game going, but knew my limit was a firm one. So they found another way to get what they wanted. They built their own Angry Birds game -- in 3D.

This occupied them for next three and a half hours. Doing it required listening to each other and working together to a common end, along with the ability to take a 2D concept and realize it in three dimensions. They drew their own birds and pigs, adding new ones of their own creation. Then they scored the game.

Math, problem solving, creativity, cooperation. Left-brain and right-brain thinking. All inspired by ten minutes of extremely fun video play. Everyone happy. Lots of blocks getting noisily smashed everywhere. What's not to like about that?

My point here is not to call out my kids as exceptional. Just the opposite. I think they are utterly typical in their love of, and need for, play. And play, as people like Chua seem to forget, is an extraordinary vehicle for both emotional and intellectual growth. 

But some of Chua's fiercest critics would be as uncomfortable as she appears to be in allowing their kids recreational screen time. And yet play needs inspiration, and if that sometimes (and quite properly) comes from books or real life experiences, it can just as productively spring from video games, or TV.  

All that's required, really, is just the barest of parenting frameworks from within which to work. 

It seems to me that we weren't working with much more than the following:
1) a clearly-set and firmly followed rule on video usage to which all agreed in advance
2) some available unscheduled time
3) some basic plays tools (blocks, paper, pens, an old catapult from a toy castle)

Once again, the parenting middle path, while not the one most likely to sell books or get people arguing, turns out to be the most humane and the most likely to add to a family's collective happiness and growth.  

Here's one of their set ups, just before it got smashed.  

Acorns - the next hip ingredient for Bay Area foodies?

Any elementary student in California can tell you that the state's first human inhabitants ate acorns as a major part of their diet.  But few ever get the chance to learn what acorns actually taste like.  

I'd thought that was simply because acorns taste horrible and no one would ever be so foolish as to try and get a bunch of kids to eat them. Well, it turns out that I was wrong on both points. 

Acorns actually taste pretty good, even to children. I saw -- and tasted -- proof last week when I accompanied a third grade class to an excellent educational program run by Coyote Hills Regional Park in the city of Fremont. Over a full school day, it introduces students to a variety of aspects of native Ohlone culture and ends with the cooking of their traditional acorn mush.

When cooked right, that mush turns into a kind of oatmeal substance with a hint of walnut. The picture below (of the very mush we got to try) has the look re-fried beans, but there was no taste of fat. It was more like a delicate porridge made from an obscure grain. Most of the children lapped up their portions and asked for more.

So why don't we eat acorns still? My guess is that it has a lot to do with the preparation required to get them into an edible state. As the kids discovered, it's a laborious, time-sink of a process. It also involves placing red hot stones into the mush and mixing them about while the whole thing sizzles. I got the impression that if you take the stones out too late or too early, or if you don't cook the acorns evenly, then you can end up with something distinctly inedible.  

But cook acorns right and, I'm delighted to discover, you have a treat. 

Native, abundant, with a historic connection to the people who first lived here and a pleasant, novel flavor: I wouldn't be surprised to see acorns become the next must-have ingredient in the Bay Area's ever-innovating food culture.  

Duck Blind (verse)

We all are
even the children.

They see what fills their 
questionnaires:
egrets, tides, marshland, mud.

Hard by, commuters pay their tolls
then bridge the Pacific Flyway undistracted.

The students run the old salt pond levy, 
embody bird migrations, 
human predations on the Bay, 
habitats lost, 
the tenuous hope of promised restorations. 

Behind us rots 
a shack built by European men 
to hide in overnight, 

whose single shot, 
come dawn, 
could lift ten thousand pair 
of migrant Scoter, 
Bufflehead, 
Merganser, 
Scaup. 

Across the slough 
two homebody mallards swill saline 
unremarked, 
their nonchalance deceptive, surely. 

In neighboring ponds this designated
refuge accommodates yet-extant hides. 

And the season still 
has two cold months to run. 

(Written on the occasion of a third grade field trip to the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge.)