When I read a book, there are phrases I want to remember, words I want to look up and places it takes me. So I've decided to start recording these things here. There are 3 books in the wings that need recording. Here's the second:













STEVE JOBS, by Walter Isaacson

HERE'S TO THE CRAZY ONES. THE MISFITS. THE REBELS. THE TROUBLEMAKERS. THE ROUND PEGS IN THE SQUARE HOLES. THE ONES WHO SEE THINGS DIFFERENTLY. THEY'RE NOT FOND OF RULES. AND THEY HAVE NO RESPECT FOR THE STATUS QUO. YOU CAN QUOTE THEM, DISAGREE WITH THEM, GLORIFY OR VILIFY THEM. ABOUT THE ONLY THING YOU CAN'T DO IS IGNORE THEM. BECAUSE THEY CHANGE THINGS. THEY PUSH THE HUMAN RACE FORWARD. AND WHILE SOME MAY SEE THEM AS  THE CRAZY ONES, WE SEE GENIUS. BECAUSE THE PEOPLE WHO ARE CRAZY ENOUGH TO THINK THEY CAN CHANGE THE WORLD ARE THE ONES WHO DO.

Joseph Eichler - social activist & developer - "inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's vision of simple modern homes for the American 'everyman' " - whose company spawned more than 11,000 homes in various California subdivisions between 1950 and 1974, including Steve Jobses' childhood home "Jobs said that his appreciation for Eichler homes instilled in him a passion for making nicely designed products for the mass market' "; "clean and simple modernism produced for the masses"

Herbert Bayer: "In Aspen, [Jobs] was exposed to the spare and functional design philosophy of the Bauhaus movement, which was enshrined by Herbert Bayer in the buildings, living suites, sans serif font typography, and furniture on the Aspen Institute campus. Like his mentors Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Bayer believed that there should be no distinction between fine art and applied industrial design. The modernist International Style championed by the Bauhaus taught that design should be simple, yet have an expressive spirit. It emphasized rationality and functionality by employing clean lines and forms. Among the maxims preached by Mies and Gropius were 'God is in the details' and 'Less is more'."

"At that time there was not much exciting happening in the realm of industrial design, Jobs felt. He had a Richard Sapper lamp, and he also liked the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames and the Braun products of Dieter Rams ['less but better'] ... +Raymond Loewy, Issey Miyake, I.M. Pei..."

Hartmut Esslinger - code name 'Snow White'

Windham Hill jazz artists

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Alan Kay

GUI - graphical user interface
WYSIWYG ('wiz-ee-wig') - what you see is what you get

"Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away." SJ

John Lasseter (Pixar): 'Lady and the Lamp' 1979 short made during his junior year at CalArts won the Student Academy Award; 'Luxo Jr.' was Pixar's 1st (computer graphics) (short) film, 1986, & was nominated for an Academy Award. 'Tin Toy' was 2nd short & won 1988 Academy Award for animated short films.

"It's kind of fun to do the impossible." Walt Disney

"One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are." SJ

"Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do." SJ

Jony Ive: "Ive and Jobs would soon forge a bond that would lead to the greatest industrial design collaboration of their era."

"Simplicity isn't just a visual style. It's not just a minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to do really deep...go deeper with the simplicity. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential." JI

"White isn't just a neutral colour. It is so pure and quiet. Bold and conspicuous and yet so inconspicuous as well." JI

"Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers." SJ

Apple Store, 5th Avenue: 18 pieces of glass on each side - "This was state of the art in glass technology at the time. We had to build our own autoclaves [glass laminating autoclaves are used in the production of automotive, architectural, safety, and decorative glass] to make the glass." SJ

"Skate where the puck's going, not where it's been." Wayne Gretzky

"nature loves simplicity and unity" Johannes Kepler

Richard Feynman: theoretical physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics

"The Pixar building was Steve's own movie" J Lasseter 
Peter Bohlin, architect of the Apple stores; designer of Pixar building

'The Autobiography of a Yogi' the book SJ "first read as a teenager, then reread in India, and had read once a year ever since."

peripatetic: 'traveling from place to place, especially working or based in various places for relatively short periods'
"memento mori": 'remember you will die'
"ars moriendi": 'the art of dying'

Sunday, June 29, 1975: a milestone for the personal computer "It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer's screen right in front of them." Stephen Wozniak

April 1, 1976: Jobs, Wozniak, Ron Wayne draw up a partnership agreement [11 days later, Wayne withdraws]

June 15, 1983: "Jobs publicly discussed his embrace of the Bauhaus style in a talk he gave at the 1983 design conference, the theme of which was 'The Future Isn't What It Used to Be'."

January 22, 1984: Super Bowl XVIII, 3rd quarter, Apple '1984' commercial introducing the Macintosh, directed by Ridley Scott: "On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984'."

January 24, 1984: the launch of the Macintosh

January  20, 1985: Super Bowl XIX, Apple commercial introducing Macintosh Office, directed by Tony Scott

Forbes: After 1984: The Super Bowl Ad That Almost Killed Apple After the 1984 ad aired, Apple sold 72,000 computers in 100 days,  50 percent more than even its most optimistic sales productions. After Lemmings, Apple closed three of its six plants that year and laid off 20 percent of its employees. Among those who left the company in the post-Lemmings bloodbath?  Founder Steve Jobs."

April 20, 1995: Smithsonian oral history intereview with Daniel Morrow

October 23, 2001: Job unveils the iPod [iPod=Walkman]

April 28, 2003: Job unveils the iTunes Store

October 2003: Job announces launch of iTunes for Windows

January 2004: iPod Mini introduced

January 2005: iPod Shuffle introduced [songs play randomly = no navigation = no screen] "embrace uncertainty"

June 12, 2005: Steve Jobs gives Commencement Address at Stanford

January 2007: unveiling of the iPhone at Macworld in San Francisco: "Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything... [the original Macintosh] changed the whole computer industry... [the first iPod] changed the entire music industry. Today, we're introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device. Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone."
gorilla glass: It was called the iPhone...the project was code-named Gorilla Glass

May 2007: Wall Street Journal columnists Walt Mossberg & Kara Swisher bring Jobs & Gates together for a joint interview

July 2008: the App Store for the iPhone opens on iTunes

January 27, 2010: iPad unveiled: 'the Jesus tablet'

March 2, 2011: iPad 2 unveiled

Oct. 5, 2011 Steve Jobs dies at home, surrounded by his family

Oct. 24, 2011 After two years of work, and forty interviews with Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson publishes authorized biography of the Apple and Pixar co-founder

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart." SJ

When I read a book, there are phrases I want to remember, words I want to look up and places it takes me. So I've decided to start recording these things here. There are 3 books in the wings that need recording. Here's the first:

THE INNOVATORS: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, by Walter Isaacson

Wordsworth (re: the French Revolution): "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive." 

"Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that's what I wanted to do." Steve Jobs

"She realized that math was a lovely language, one that describes the harmonics of the universe and can be poetic at times" re: Ada Lovelace; math "constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world" it allows us to portray the "changes of mutual relationship" that unfold in creation.

Claude Shannon "who [in 1937] turned in the most influential master's thesis of all time, a paper that Scientific America later dubbed 'the Magna Carta of the Information Age' " (a short video of Shannon & his machines juggling)

"War mobilizes science. Many of the paramount technological feats of that era - computers, atomic power, radar and the Internet - were spawned by the military."

"silicon - after oxygen the most common element in the earth's crust and a key component of sand"

madrigal: a secular vocal music composition, usually a partsong, of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Traditionally, polyphonic (2 or more simultaneous lines of independent melody) madrigals are unaccompanied; the number of voices varies from two to eight, and most frequently from three to six

"...one of the most influential papers in the history of postwar technology, titled 'Man-Computer Symbiosis' " by J. C. R. Licklider (1960); he also wrote 'The Computer as a Communication Device'

oral history: the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews

Buckminster Fuller's 'Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth'

" 'To my mind,' Bill Gates would later declare, 'the Altair is the first thing that deserves to be called a personal computer.' " Steve Dompier's Altair playing "Fool on the Hill"

the WELL (Steward Brand & Larry Brilliant) "Let's just have a conversation and get the smartest people in the world and let them figure out whatever they want to talk about." SB

Enquire Within Upon Everything, a Victorian-era almanac & advice book = Whole Earth Catalog launched by Steward Brand

"The design of the Internet and the Web is a search for a set of rules which will allow computers to work together in harmony, and our spiritual and social quest is for a set of rules which allow people to work together in harmony." Internet Engineering Task Force

Wikipedia: "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

memoirs of the physicist Richard Feynman: "who touted the power that comes from joining art to science the way that Leonardo da Vinci did"

Douglas Hofstadter "combined the arts and sciences in his 1979 best seller, Godel, Escher, Bach"

"Human creativity involves values, intentions, aestheic judgments, emotions, personal consciousness, and a moral sense. These are what the arts and humanities teach us - and why those realms are as valuable a part of education as science, technologh, engineering, and math. If we mortals are to uphold our end of the human-computer symbiosis, if we are to retain a role as the creative partners of our machines, we must continue to nurture the wellsprings of our imagination and originality and humanity. That is what we bring to the party."

"Kathy Kleinman helped bring recognition to the women programmers after first meeting them when researching her Harvard undergraduate thesis on women in computing in 1986, and she coproduced a twenty-minute documentary called The Computers, which premiered in 2014."

april 3 - laid out my first piece of the season, 'cloud perspective #1', which i think is the beginning of a new series.

april 8 (today) - NPR posted new music and by the 2nd song, i was hooked.
the shouting matches, 'grownass man'

actually, it's been a good week for my ongoing music education.

it was the 40th anniversary of led zeppelin's 'houses of the holy'. i discovered 'the crunge' is their funk tribute to james brown...well of course it is.

on april 5, 1973, david bowie released the single 'drive-in saturday' (this is really great 1973 live footage from uk's 'the russell harty show'). still brilliant after all these years.

yesterday, i discovered the  fatboy slim/christoper walken video (with lead vocals by Bootsy Collins, directed by Spike Jonze, and featuring actor Christopher Walken, who trained as a dancer before his acting career).

Muddy Waters was born april 4th, 100 years ago, to help make the blues.

watched dick cavett's august 19, 1969 'woodstock' show, with joni mitchell, who forfeited woodstock (august 15-18, 1969) to perform here, 'jefferson airplane' and 'stills & nash' who arrived from the festival tired & muddy. steven stills performs a beautiful '4 + 20 years ago' (+ another beautiful version, 1969, big sur).

and then last night we watched michael rapaport's documentary of 'a tribe called quest'. this + ice t's 'something from nothing: the art of rap' documentary is what i've been looking for to teach me about a music genre that i love but know nothing about. a genre so compelling that i'm (un)willing to dodge and wade through the  misogyny to get to its singular groove.

and finally i discovered, sadly because of his death, jason molina, whose song 'John Henry Split My Heart', has indeed captured my heart and caused me to pick up my bass again. rest in peace mr. molina.

p.s. and my boyfriend introduced me to 'cake' :)

oh my. a blog.

well, there were a few things...

last night we had the first fire of the year. with a beautiful sun setting. the smell and crackle of campfire.
the geese are loud and fill the sky.
i learned that at equinox, the sun rises and sets due east and west.
i just washed my car on a sunday afternoon in spring. :)