SLAM Dunk

What would a true Renaissance be without poetry and painting? First came semiconductors, now comes SLAM, Silicon Valley's new literary and art magazine. (Story first published in Red Herring, April 2000.)

Ed. note: This story was the fourth in a series of annual April Fool's articles perpetrated by Red Herring.

(Photo byJean-Marc Lubrano.)

Greed. That’s been the subject matter of several cover stories by technology business magazines, including this one: the pursuit of wealth over innovation, or the relatively recent shift from the desire to change the world through technology to the compulsion to foist a dot-com idea upon the credulous public markets as fast as possible. But for those venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and lucky coattail-riders who’ve made their millions, there can be a bit of a post-IPO letdown. A ticker symbol or two, after all, is not much to leave for posterity. As the technology industry’s boom continues, a growing number of its constituents are realizing that spending 12 hours a day, seven days a week, at the office has turned them into ... well, bores.

As an antidote, many are taking up outdoor hobbies, volunteer work, and—in a surprising twist for such presumably left-brained people—continuing education classes in the arts. "There’s always a daydream of more creative work," says Jan English-Lueck, chairman of San Jose State University’s anthropology department and director of a 10-year, 1,000-person study of work, play, and family habits in Silicon Valley. "A lot of our interviewees have talked about how the job they have now is their moneymaker, the one that will allow them to pursue their creative interests later."

GAME BOY

Back in mid-1992, SLAM cofounder Arthur Zawacki was depressed. Origin Systems, the electronic-gaming company he had helped found, had just been acquired by industry leader ERTS, and the multimillion-dollar cash-plus-stock deal had left him financially secure for the next several lifetimes. He could have gone to Electronic Arts and continued to create the densely layered, alternate realities that had formed the basis for such successful games as Crusader 2: Constantinople, or he could retire at the ripe old age of 32. For two years, he did nothing.

"I traveled. I visited each of the continents—even made it to the North Pole," Mr. Zawacki recalls. "I learned how to play the theremin, and I almost married a Scandinavian model. But I was miserable. All I could think about was, do I want to remembered as the guy who wrote the back story for Planet of the Termites?" Returning to his home state from the Quonset hut he had bought in Puerto Rico, he began taking classes in short-story writing through the University of California Extension: "I’d essentially been writing interactive fiction for several years," Mr. Zawacki says. "I just had to learn to do it without visuals and without launch deadlines."

Daniel McCann, who has taught composition classes at night to technology denizens through San Jose State University, says, "I’ve seen an occasional but nevertheless genuine interest in some students to understand their imagination as independent, capable of creation, and a necessity for survival." Simply understanding this is not enough, he says. "Technological society, along with its millions of extraordinary minds, is obligated to interrupt the persistence of electronic hedonism and voluntary disengagement."

Mr. Zawacki, for one, is trying. In late 1996, he felt brave enough to send a few of his stories to Ploughshares, Grand Street, and other well-respected literary journals. The response was not encouraging. "Form rejections, all around," sighs Mr. Zawacki. "One editor, after I tracked him down, told me that science fiction was for juveniles and serial killers." But in early 1998, something significant befell Mr. Zawacki: the attractive, vivacious Maria Ruskin sat next to him in his poetry class. "I won’t say it was love at first sight," he hedges, "but we liked all the same books—Maria’s read everything—and she just sort of made me feel ambitious again."

They were married in January 1999. For years Ms. Ruskin, who has a master of fine arts degree from the University of East Anglia, had put her creative talents to work as a sought-after PR consultant to startups. Her contacts include most of today’s Silicon Valley players, like the venture capitalists Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson and "Surreal" J. Neil Weintraut of 21st Century Ventury Capital.

"A lot of people I knew just weren’t happy," says Ms. Ruskin in her soft, somewhat babyish voice. "They were making all this money, but they felt like it wasn’t enough. Everything was work, work, work, business, business, business, but in their spare time they were taking pictures, even writing poems. So I had this idea."

PUBLISH OR PERISH

The idea was SLAM—a creative outlet for the technology industry. (The name is intended to invoke the populist performance-poetry movement.) "There were so many frustrated people like Arthur [Zawacki], who were being turned away by the mainstream literary journals," Ms. Ruskin says. "I knew if we could find a way to publish them, perhaps Silicon Valley could become a mecca for the arts the way Florence was in the Renaissance."

According to Cesaré Rustica, a professor at the University of Illinois’s Center for Renaissance Studies, the time is ripe. "Silicon Valley is generating more ideas than Italy at the dawn of the 16th century. I wouldn’t be surprised if a Leonardo da Vinci turned up somewhere in there."

The comparison is apt. There are certainly enough Medicis living in the area, and they liked the idea of SLAM. With the help of Mr. Draper, who has been taking painting classes and dabbling in poetry, Ms. Ruskin and Mr. Zawacki soon raised $250,000 from investors like Clarence Madison, head of the innovative venture capital firm New World Associates and a self-professed patron of the arts.

Next they set about hiring an arts-savvy staff willing to pull long hours debating, for example, the merits of free-form verse over sonnets. Unlike the cutthroat, options-haggling negotiations characteristic of the technology industry, "it wasn’t difficult," says Ms. Ruskin, who is editor in chief. (Mr. Zawacki is the publisher.) "You’d be surprised how little the literary journals and 'zines pay; most of these people are happy to have a steady job and all the espresso they can drink."

DREAMS TEAM

SLAM 1.0 is surprisingly hefty, printed on Yupo, a durable, synthetic paper that is waterproof and tear-resistant. The design is both retro elegant and futuristic in sensibility. What is most eye-popping, however, is the array of contributors.

Tim Draper’s acrylic painting of a sheep is rendered in soothing, bucolic colors. "My influences are the color wheel, van Gogh, the ocean, and all the rainbows I’ve seen," he explains. Venture capitalist Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad has submitted a watercolor of herself and fellow VC Heidi Roizen as teenage cheerleaders. There is a stunning series of black-and-white photographs by Jamis MacNiven, owner of Buck’s Restaurant in Woodside, California. And Steve Jurvetson, Mr. Draper’s partner at DFJ, has assembled a montage of Polaroids taken at conferences, newspaper clippings about , Golden Gate Bridge toll receipts, and other day-to-day technology detritus, then layered it with lacquer and gold dust. The result is reminiscent of collage artist Winston O. Smith’s Pax Americana (1988).

And it doesn’t stop there. Mansoor Zakaria, CEO of the knowledge-management software developer 2Bridge, has penned yet another Pindaric ode to the spirit of entrepreneurship. (His poetry first appeared on our Letters pages; see "Dream On, Tired Warrior," March 1999.) PR doyenne Melody Haller, founder of Antenna Group, contributes an alternate-reality story, "Koan Heads," about a Zen Buddhist monk who morphs into a Kalashnikov-wielding vigilante following a Y2K Armageddon.

The distinction of authoring SLAM’s longest piece belongs to USWeb/CKS and Intend Change founder Joe Firmage. Undeterred by the chilly reception of his multi-megabyte online treatise, The Truth, Mr. Firmage submitted a 25,000-word novella about the invention of the mainframe computer by aliens who surreptitiously visit Earth in the ‘40s. "Some science fictions are more real than others," he explains.

RAISON D’ETRE

It’s an eclectic mix. After sitting in on a selection session, our best efforts to grasp the magazine’s criteria revealed this: you either have to possess a recognizable name in the technology industry or take its milieu as your subject. (Overheard during a heated critique of a Petrarchan sonnet: "Yeah, the caesuras don’t quite work, but it’s by the founder of Zefer.") SLAM is unapologetically elitist; in a slap in the face to the medium that made most of its contributors’ fortunes, the magazine won’t be published on the Web. Ms. Ruskin also declined to divulge the submission process, saying ungraciously—given her previous line of work—that she didn’t want to be inundated by more poems like "Marketspeak Lament."

Like most literary journals, SLAM will face some obstacles to survival. The magazine business is notorious for its failure rate: according to Samir Husni of Oxbridge Communications, whose Mr. Magazine directories are the bible of new consumer publications, of the 535 new magazines launched in 1996, only 20.8 percent are still being published today. The failure rate for art and literary magazines is one of the highest.

However, the top category for new launches last year was media personalities (107 magazines), a possible niche for SLAM. There’s profit potential: $15.5 billion’s worth of ads bulked out 1999’s magazines, up 12.8 percent from the previous year, according to the Magazine Publishers Association.

To add to the challenge, SLAM will contain no advertising, the principal source of revenue for most magazines. "Ads are so ugly," sniffs Mr. Branteg. "The last thing I want spoiling my design is some investment bank’s tombstone billboard." But can subscriptions and newsstand sales alone recoup the cost of printing, not to mention pay for all those espressos?

Apparently, it doesn’t have to. "I know this magazine’s never going to make money," says Mr. Madison, the investor from New World Enterprises. "The point, which I think we in the tech industry have all forgotten, is to do something you love." And, it seems, to put your money where your paintbrush is. One lesser-known contributor leaked to us that once her piece had been accepted for publication, she was asked to contribute $1,000 toward "administrative and production costs."

For Silicon Valley’s best and brightest, then, this odd venture may essentially be a vanity press. Or, putting cynicism aside for a moment, perhaps it truly is a labor of love. In their founders’ note, Mr. Zawacki and Ms. Ruskin quote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke: "For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are barely able to endure and are awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us."

Beauty, of course, lies in the eye of the beholder. Still, SLAM’s contributors should be applauded for having the courage to emerge from their artistic closets and for giving something back to the community—whether the community knows what to do with it or not.