I Sing The Caltrain Electric

After many years of construction, weekend shutdowns, and political maneuvering, the Caltrain system servicing the Peninsula has finally been electrified.

To celebrate the accomplishment, free rides were offered to the public at all stations last weekend from San Francisco to Gilroy.

According to Philip Rohrbough: "This model is called KISS. I love the German language, and this acronym is a classic: Komfortabler Innovativer Spurtstarker S-Bahn-Zug. They were built by Stadler, a Swiss company, in Salt Lake City."

I miss the old-fashioned funk of the previous carbon-burning trains, but won't miss the slowness and bumpiness and constant breakdowns.

Brian Barneclo's 2011 System mural near the San Francisco station is still impressive, even covered in graffiti.

One thing that hasn't changed are the many passengers immersed in their virtual worlds...

...while ignoring natural wonders like the Brisbane Lagoon.

There was an afternoon celebration near the station in downtown San Mateo, with politicians making speeches...

...to huge crowds looking for giveaways at various booths.

At least it was heartening to see Brian Barneclo's mural from 2017 has fared better at its San Mateo location.

CalTrain Commute to Super Evil Megacorp

For the last nine months, I have had a permanent, full-time job in Silicon Valley that requires a two-hour commute each way involving two Muni buses, a modified bullet Caltrain, and a shuttle van from San Carlos to Redwood Shores.

The San Francisco Muni portion is a perpetual nightmare with mentally ill people acting out in front of horrified captive audiences, but I have fallen in love with Caltrain.

Unlike Muni, the predominantly cute, smart young commuters on Caltrain have usually taken a shower, and are a remarkably diverse mix of characters from many countries.

An incidental pleasure is passing the massive Systems by my favorite living muralist, Brian Barneclo while being rocked back and forth and groggily waking up on the old-fashioned Long Island Railway style train ride.

At the San Mateo station, there is a computer games startup with the all-time great company name of Super Evil Megacorp.

I recently pointed out the sign to a seat companion, a very expensively dressed female lawyer, and she smiled, "At least they're owning it."

Next to Super Evil Megacorp, yet another Brian Barneclo mural has recently arisen, and it's a colorful beauty.

Every Peninsula town with a Caltrain station should commission Barneclo for their very own mural. The series would be a wonder.

Systems of Transport

The early morning Caltrain commute to Silicon Valley offers a number of felicities.



First and foremost is driving slowly by Brian Barneclo’s great Systems mural at 7th and Townsend Streets.



The 60-foot mural, created in 2011, is aging beautifully…



…framing a view of downtown San Francisco as you are chugging out of the city.



Another happiness is not having to endure the hellish freeway commute into Silicon Valley, particularly today. A lane-splitting motorcyclist died on Highway 101 after being run over by a truck in Palo Alto during the morning rush hour, closing all northbound lanes for hours. In an unintentional irony, the California State Senate passed legislation today legalizing motorcycle lane splitting, and the bill awaits approval in the State Assembly.

Red Door Coffee Opening with Brian Barneclo

The four corners at the intersection of First and Howard Streets in downtown San Francisco each have their own coffee shops after the opening of Red Door Coffee in a new location on Friday.



There is a Specialty's Bakery outlet on one corner, a Noah's Bagel on another, and a Peet's Coffee and Tea across the street, but they are all corporate chains, and it doesn't say "Four Barrel Coffee, WiFi and hip cafe digs" on a Google Map as it does for Red Door Coffee..



During the Pineapple Express downpour on Friday afternoon, they held a lively opening party with free coffee, beer and wine, food, and live music.



I was invited to the event by my favorite artist in San Francisco, Brian Barneclo above, who had been commissioned to paint a mural for the kitchen.



In comparison with some of Barneclo's monumental murals around town, such as System near the 4th & King caltrain station or his Food Chain mural in the Mission, the Red Coffee piece is a relative miniature.

DeepArcher to the Bleeding Edge

Recently I have been working for a Silicon Valley tech firm which does not have a special shuttle for its employees from San Francisco to the Peninsula a la Google. So I take two Muni buses to the 4th and Townsend Caltrain station at an ungodly hour of the morning, ride the modified bullet commuter train to San Carlos, and then board a once-an-hour shuttle to the suburban office parks of Redwood Shores.



It's hell, but I need the money, and Silicon Valley is fascinating in its own ineffable, disembodied, science fiction way. Plus, I get to see Brian Barneclo's astonishing Systems mural every morning as we pull out of the downtown San Francisco station.



Possibly the best description of our new digital age and its weird discontents comes from the great American novelist Thomas Pynchon in Bleeding Edge, published last year when he was 76 years old.



It's one of Pynchon's more accessible novels, sort of a combination of The Crying of Lot 49 with its heroine stumbling over elaborate conspiracies and Vineland, with its mixture of family warmth and political warfare between federal fascists and California leftists.



Bleeding Edge takes place in New York City from Spring 2011 to Spring 2012 after the first dot-com bubble popped in Manhattan's Silicon Alley followed by the 9/11 World Trade Center collapse. The characters are predominantly Jewish, ranging from capitalists to commies, Zionists to anti-Zionists, fighting many of the internecine battles that have dominated the 20th Century.



The protagonist is a plucky, very funny, Jewish Mother named Maxine Tarnow. In her career as an accounting fraud investigator, she gets mixed up in the dark deeds of a powerful, shady tech company called hashslingerz, founded by Gabriel Ice, who reads like a cross between Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Sergei Brin. Her journeys with family members, friends, artists, multi-culti gangsters, government assassins, detectives, hackers, and finally into the Deep Web is fascinating.



Silicon Valley and the World Wide Web has always felt a bit surreal and evanescent, as if it's a particularly outlandish invention from a Pynchon novel itself. Reading this book while journeying on a train to work there has been like wandering in a hall of mirrors. Highly recommended.

Barneclo's Systems Mural Endures

One of the joys of Caltrain, the old-fashioned Peninsula public train system, involves slowly passing by the curved, 600-foot-long Systems mural when leaving or entering San Francisco's 4th and Townsend terminal.



The wildly ambitious mural was painted less than two years ago by Brian Barneclo, and I was curious how it would age in the elements.



The short answer is fabulously.



Barneclo's mixture of whimsy and serious commentary, along with his restrained color scheme...



...is a provoking reflection for its hordes of commuting workers who are cogs in a larger capitalist system.



Most of them hardly notice the mural as the train goes by, wrapped up in their own mobile devices and lives, but Barneclo's gift to San Francisco always manages to brighten my mood.

Caltrain Commuting

The 7:19 AM modified Caltrain bullet south from San Francisco to San Carlos has become a new morning ritual over the last year.



The Brian Barneclo Systems mural near the 4th & Townsend station is a touchstone, and the piece is looking more classically perfect with each passing day.



Industrial southeast San Francisco at sunrise is also a powerful, interesting sight, especially as it's followed quickly by the San Francisco Bay slough below which is spectacularly beautiful in a different way every day.



After that, I barely look outside for the next thirty minutes and luxuriate in gazing upon print. People using Kindles or working on laptops are missing the point of reading on public transport. Since we all seem to spend our entire days interacting with computer screens, having the time to stare at reflective print feels like a blessing. Check out some photos by Jan Adams on BART making exactly that point.

Marching Systematically to Silicon Valley

Besides the occasional beautiful sunrise, a Caltrain trip south to Silicon Valley takes one by Brian Barneclo's stupendously huge Systems mural near the San Francisco station.



Riding Caltrain is really the only way to see the mural up close since the railyards are fenced off to the public for obvious safety reasons, and even while riding the train, there is no way to see the entire System at one time. It's rather marvelous.

Silicon Valley Death Trip

Brian Barneclo's 600 x 40 foot "Systems Mural" has been finished in a more minimalist three-color palette and design than originally proposed. It works beautifully on this huge scale, providing a mysterious backdrop for arrivals and departures to and from San Francisco and the Silicon Valley.



The atmosphere in the Valley last week was shadowed by very public death dramas that couldn't have been more different from each other yet felt connected through time and place.



The most heart-tugging demise was that of "Broadway Bound," a sea lion who had been shot in the face by someone, and who then pulled herself out of San Francisco Bay and somehow crossed eight lanes of traffic on Highway 101 in Burlingame. (Click here for an article by Carolyn Jones.) At the end of the week, she was euthanized and the possible feel-good story turned into a sad tale.



Later in the week and further down the highway in the Cupertino/Sunnyvale area of Silicon Valley, a middle-aged black quarry worker named Shareef Allman went insane at a 4AM work meeting on Wednesday, and proceeded to shoot close to a dozen of his mostly Hispanic co-workers, murdering three of them. He managed to escape through the suburbs on foot like a trapped animal for the next 24 hours before being killed in a barrage of bullets in a stranger's driveway by three deputies who stumbled across him.



On the same Wednesday, there was the announcement of the death of Saint Steve Jobs the Evangelist in Palo Alto, which brought forth a huge outpouring of public grief and testimonials to his greatness. Part of the intensity of that reaction was because Jobs had been dying publicly from pancreatic cancer for the better part of a decade, and watching his health ebb and flow had become something of a morbid global spectacle. I am glad for his sake that it is over, and that he managed to accomplish what he was put on this planet to do.