Last weekend, to celebrate my friend Vandana’s completion of her dissertation and PhD we went for dinner and afterwards to a bar on Santana Row in downtown San Jose.  It was a Saturday night but, still, a strong presence of the Happy Hour crowd filled the room.  Everyone seemed to have just gotten off work and unbottoned the top botton of their 140-thread Oxford shirts.  The bar was dark with neon around and their drink menu included a list of gourmet martinis three pages long: you could get a lemon-drop martini, mango-tini, melon-tini, noir-tini, etc.  Long, thin rows of metallic beads hung from the ceiling in a straight line to separate the bar space from a hallway that led to a bigger, brighter room for meetings or, perhaps, conventions.  This bar was on the second floor of the five-star Hotel Valencia.  We got our drinks and found that all of the seats and stools had been taken, so we spilled our way into the hotel lobby in search of a place to sit and talk.

We found a very small, shadowy room with round walls that formed a circle and came together at the ceiling to resemble a small hut.  The interior wall had a layer of caked-on terra cotta that had been combed to make deep parallel ridges.  This earthy texture was emphasized by the spot lighting in the floor skimming the walls from the ground up.  The lights had been placed just behind the couch which curved around the entire room.  In the middle was a low wooden bucket which held a thin layer of those smooth stones you might see bamboo growing out of if you bought bamboo from a department store of any kind.

What was this "third world" pre-industrial architecture and atmosphere doing right next to the neon and ostentation shining down upon a room swilling apple-tinis?  Is there something deeply offensive in the way in which the post-industrial city seeks, in its leisure time, to rediscover and implement the modes of experience that have been annhilated in the wake of its developing history?  I suppose this is the corresponding global irony to villages in Italy, India, and Indonesia that do not have running water nor sewage disposal, but whose inhabitants increasingly feel the need and use of owning cell phones.

We sat in this round, cryptic hut for about ten minutes.  A party of three, dressed to the gills, joined us.  Completely hammered, they carried into the room a blustering, unrelenting laughter that turned their faces pink and watered their eyes.  We left before the laughing man could manage to repeat the punchline.