While certain tech industry CEOs embrace the global far right and advocate inhumanity, inequality and cruelty as policy, it can be a form of self-care to elevate others who thrive on kindness and generosity instead.
Back in the day, people called these types of columns “round-ups.” In this case, it was easy to cherry-pick a few human examples because kindness is more popular than you might realize. As a result, Dolly Parton, former Synopsis CEO Aart de Geus, and the late artist Susan O’Malley all came back into my life.
Dolly Parton was one of the most righteous individuals that ever lived. A truly good person in every respect.
For one day, Tony & Alba’s Pizza on Stevens Creek Blvd will raise money for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, her heroic initiative dedicated to gifting books free of charge to children from birth to age five, no matter their family’s income. Inspired by her father’s inability to read and write, Dolly started the Imagination Library in 1995 for children in East Tennessee, but today the program spans several countries. Through her own funding and that of local partners around the world, the program has now gifted, at the time of this writing, more than 332 million books.
On Friday, September 25—that is, 9/25, a play on the film and the song—Tony & Alba’s will sell $20 packages of specialties Dolly often raved over, Mexican pizza and banana pudding. Half that amount, $10, will go to her foundation.
I am a huge fan of the Imagination Library program, not just because my mom, a career librarian, taught me how to read at age two, preventing me from embracing more criminal paths later in life, but also because we live in an age when certain tech industry CEOs and their favorite politicians love to dump on libraries. They would love to smash every library out of existence and replace them with environmentally corrosive data centers. Who cares if kids ever develop reading or writing skills? What do we need books for anyway?
It won’t happen. The ghost of Dolly Parton won’t let it happen.
Speaking of tech industry CEOs, a recent hero emerged in the form of Aart de Geus, former honcho of Synopsis, who recently donated a whopping $500,000 dollars to the Levitt Pavilion project, an effort to bring a permanent outdoor stage to St. James Park in downtown San Jose. The Levitt Pavilion project is one of the best ideas ever to emerge in San Jose and musicians are the ones driving it.
De Geus is also a musician, of course. I remember when the San Jose Jazz Summer Fest included a “CEO Jam” at the Fairmont. Those gigs were amazing. And hopeful. And egalitarian. No one set out to destroy democracy. Nobody gave fascist salutes or regurgitated white nationalist BS at the microphone. Everyone was there for the music. There was actual humanity involved.
In a valley littered with tech CEOs intent on wiping away anything emphasizing the arts and humanities, de Geus is a different character altogether. His half-mil donation includes giving the naming rights for the Levitt Pavilion green room to Chris Wilder, another musician and former Valley Health Foundation executive director.
And then there’s the late San Jose artist Susan O’Malley, who tragically passed away in 2015 at the age of 38. Originally from Willow Glen, O’Malley specialized in “social practice” a brand-new term at the time. She made bright, colorful banners, posters, buttons and mega-optimistic sloganeering projects that appeared all over the Bay Area and beyond, successfully blurring the boundary between healing arts, graphic design and quirky-on-purpose motivational advice. She was the queen of memes before social media even existed.
For years, Susan was also the curator at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. At that time, I’d often leave the brick Metro building next door and stop in to shoot the breeze.
I tell you this because as of last month, a new glossy hardback is available, a career-spanning coffee-table volume, titled, “IT WILL BE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN YOU COULD EVER IMAGINE.” The book presents all Susan’s major works in photographs that burst with color and energy. A book launch unfolds at SFMOMA on Oct. 8.
In these dark times, the optimism of these people should inspire us all.
