San Jose Holiday
This is the story of how Garden City was transformed into Silicon Valley.
San Jose, in Santa Clara County, during the early 1980s was still suffering from an identity crisis. Up until the 1960s or so, Santa Clara County in general, was more or less known as The Valley of Heart's Delight, because of its vast fruit orchards. However, with the development of various electronic technologies influenced by Stanford University in Palo Alto which spun off into the various semiconductor industries which greatly invigorate the nascent microprocessor/software explosion as well, the valley's agricultural areas began to be gobbled up by the geometric expansion of industrial parks to house what was becoming to be known as The Silicon Valley. San Jose, as the county seat of Santa Clara County, was somewhat reticent to exchange its old appellation at first with the somewhat dubious technology ("Is it really that significant?"), and it took some time before it declared itself The Heart of Silicon Valley. During the period of this transition, the city's powers-that-be were still promoting the fruit-growing aspects of the area. During a rare visit to California in the 1980s, the mayor of San Jose invited the Queen of England to visit the local sewage treatment plant in order for her to see a prime example of what makes San Jose a leader in World-Class Technology. Why would an industrial park devoted to creating a new technology that would change the world be of interest to anyone? Needless to say, she had a busy schedule in California and could not visit the treatment plant.
Around the same period of time, however, San Jose was blessed by another visitor, Ceratitis capitata, known by its common name locally as the Mediterranean Fruit Fly. The county leaders were still not sure that this new computer thing would really catch on or that there would be any money in it, so they had to take whatever measures necessary to save the fruit crops against this visiting pest. They literally went to war with the flies -- got out their big guns, and enlisted the aid of a large number of helicopters from somewhere to visit everyone in San Jose and several other areas in the county late at night. They would line them up at one end of the valley and proceed to sweep the whole place while dumping truckloads of bug spray on every neighborhood near an orchard.
The sprayed insecticide was strong enough to take the paint off of a car. There were several lawsuits filed against the city as a result. It also caused a number of health problems. Then a helicopter pilot was killed when he crashed and burned on someone's front lawn just barely missing a family home. The whole episode was a public relations nightmare and the Mediterranean Fruit Fly, though substantially reduced, continued to be a much-monitored nuisance. Ultimately, the powers that be got rid of this pesky visitor by tearing up the rest of the fruit orchards in the valley and replacing them with tastefully modern industrial parks, multiple-story condominiums, and lots of concrete and asphalt.
The texts for San Jose Holiday were extracted and recomposed from some informational brochures about the fruit fly infestation. They were read by Andrea Muller, Ellen Zweig, and Alice Prussian. Instrumentation included a Buchla series 200 synthesizer, Boda vocoder, and a homemade digital sampler with digitally controlled filters and amplifiers which I had constructed, and of course extensive use of tape manipulation. The processed and unprocessed environmental tapes in this piece included recordings made of tourists waiting at a bus stop, the sounds inside the Victoria Train Station in London, and the roar of about twenty helicopters passing over my apartment down on First Street near the center of San Jose one morning at around 3 am. When you can not sleep, record!