Steve Jobs: 1955-2011

I am terribly sad today. Which on the face of it makes very little sense as I did not know Steve Jobs, enjoyed but did not worship his company's products. He wasn't even a very nice person and I have little patience or time for not-nice people. 

But Steve Jobs represented much of what I value most in the world, much that I try my own life upon--innovation, creativity, usefulness and the power of dreams. He also was an incredible showman in an industry that believed that aesthetics, flair, hell even joy were afterthoughts. Computers were supposed to work, to do things, to solve problems. They were not supposed to be fun. 

Heck with that, said Steve Jobs. He loved computers, loved technology, and saw their potential in all of our lives, not just those who went to MIT or could program. He wanted to share that love with all of us. Yes, he wanted to make a pile of money too but that never seemed to interest him that much. He wore the same clothes everyday, bought two giant fancy houses and never moved into them. He was worth nearly $8 billion but how many times did you read about his hot air balloon races, his antique car collections or other wild excesses? 

Never. There weren't any. Mr. Jobs wanted everyone in the world to have great technology. Business is the fastest most efficient way to make that happen.

I'm an Apple enthusiast as I sumply haven't found a better alternative to living as a citizen of the 21st century than with the iPhone, iPod and Macbook Pro. Those are the tools of my trade. And yes, someone could design better ones someday. But they haven't and probably won't. As magnetic as Steve Jobs is, his competetitors simply don't believe that values like fun, humor, and beauty belong to technology. They are wrong. 

My favorite Steve Jobs moment is the video above. it's 1984 and he is announcing the Apple Macintosh. He is not quite 30 and the computer he's about to unveil will change the world. But he's already done it once with its predeccesor, the Apple II.

He will flip our lives over at least 5 more times in the course of his, with the Laptop, iPod, Pixar, iPhone, and iPad. He will bring the world's attention to Northern California as the center of innovation and entrepreneurship. He will also do it after getting booted out of Apple then returning, as perhaps the greatest second chapter in the history of American business.

And yet here, all of that is yet to come. He is young, handsome, a bit cocky and yet at heart, still a nerd. The "Chariots of Fire" theme he used was 2 year past its sell date by then. And yet it works as it implied speed, triumph, going for it, despite obstacles, despite it seeming crazy. It means tomorrow, as F. Scott Fitzgerald called tomorrow.

"Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms faurther..."

 Fitzgerald also said most American lives have no second acts. He died in his early 40s having drunk himself into the grave, convinced he was a failure. Steve Jobs spent the last 10 years of life with a terrible illnes and pushed on anyway. He figured he had one of two more revolutions left in him so why not? And then he changed the world with the iPhone. And again with the iPad. 

Steve Jobs had a second act, then a third then several more. He was lucky enough to know what he wanted to do early in life and he then pushed it and pushed it again for all it was worth. Most of us are not so lucky and fall into rather than know our life's mission. But when we find it, go for it, Mr. Jobs said. Run faster, stretch out your arms further. 

Your heart and your intuition already know what you are supposed to become. 

Yesterday and today, there are flowers, candles, tributes being left in front of Apple Stores around the world. One I saw had a cardboard sign, attached to a storebought boquet. The sign read "Keep Thinking Different".

 For a CEO, a businessman. Normally we see these commemorations for artists and heads of state. But it would be wrong to see this as strange.

We do this for our heroes. For people that inspire us to be more than we thought we could. Who saw the world as bigger than we did. 

When Leonard Bernstein died in 1990, his funeral procession drove through the streets of Brooklyn where he was born. A group of construction workers stopped working, removed their hard hats and waved. "Goodbye Lenny", they said. 

Maybe they said it because they thought Bernstein one of them. Maybe they were classical music fans or maybe Bernstein had converted them. I think they related to him, as the son of small businessmen who accomplished something great. But they thought him one of their own because he shared the thing he created. He didn't horde away the thing he loved. He devoted his life to making it more fun, to filling it with joy. 

Steve Jobs did that with wires and microchips. He helped the entire world believe that the future was coming, maybe already here and it would be wondrous, exciting, creative. Fun. 

And it belong to each of us. Each of us with dreams and the willingness to chase them. Chase them fast. 

I heard the news of Steve Jobs's passing and sat down to write. Its the only kind of creativity I know. And I do not have time to waste not working at it. 

That you for our future, Mr.Jobs. We will do our best with it.  

 

For Martin Luther King Jr. And each of us...

"The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.

Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

...Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul."

--Robert F. Kennedy

8 Reasons I Love Me'shell Ndegeocello:

I've been poking around the online archives of Bomb Magazine (28 years of artists interviewing each other = Mountain of Crack) when I came across a conversation between Me'shell Ndegeocello and singer/songwriter Marc Anthony Thompson. Mr Thompson and I haven't had the pleasure. Ms. Meshell I know and love all two well.

I'm been talking some crazy jibberish for at least ten years about what a genius MN is, what a gift she is to contemporary music and its fans about how your ears, mind and heart are missing out if you aren't familiar. But after printing out this interview (haven't read it yet), I asked myself why. Why'd I pick this one out of the hundreds in Bomb's archives.

Which lead straight to a list of 8 reasons why I love Me'shell NDegeocello. 

• She's widely credited with launching the Neo Soul movement with her first two albums Plantation Lullabies (1993) and Peace Beyond Passion (1996). Her breakthrough third album Bitter (1999) came right when the movement was in full flower and is, to my mind one of its crowning acheivements. Right next to D'Angelo's Voodoo and Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of...

• Bitter is an album written in the wake of a horrible breakup, mostly about heartache, pain and regret. At the same time, it manages to be quiveringly erotic and sexy, a get-down album if there ever was one. To be hot and melancholy at the same time is a feat rarely heard.

• Ms. Ndegeocello was the first woman ever featured on the cover of Bass Player magazine. Which probably says more about that publication than her but still...

• Her given name is Michelle Lynn Johnson. She choose Me'shell Ndegeocello as a teenager and kept her unpronounceable moniker even after signing a record deal. More than likely, dozens of managers, agents, executives, guys in suits advised her to change it back. She hasn't and more than likely won't.

• I heard an interview with her on KPFA a few years ago where she asked an innocent question "Why can't Outkast do a blues record?" She was arguing that blackness (or any race for that matter) should not confine a musician to a specific genre and that Jimi Hendrix, Living Color, Ben Harper and TV on the Radio may have a lot of white fans but that doesn't remove who they are from the music they make. It's an argument we need way more of in discussions of contemporary music and culture which often is about very much about race but insists to the death that it isn't. If it is not, I ask you, how many of the artists in your music collection are of a different race than you?

• MN is equally unrestricted by race and genre when collaborating, having worked closely over her career with John Mellencamp, The Indigo Girls, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Zap Mama and Basement Jaxx.

• In the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown, Ms. Ndegeocello held Eddie Willis, a white studio musician old enough to be her father whom she barely knew, in her arms as he wept over the demise of Detroit after the city's 1967 riots.

• Even though they had broken up, Meshell and her former partner Rebecca Walker raised a son together who undoubtedly grew into an incredible human being like his mothers.

Where to start: 

Get thee a copy of Bitter and listen to it, start to finish, preferably on headphones with the lights turned off. Then have a lot of wild sex or wild sexy thoughts.

To say in the slow, sensual groove, jump over to Comfort Woman (2003) or the jazz-based Dance of the Infidel. To shake your butt heavy bass-style, begin at Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape (2002).

John Hughes: "The Audacity of Empathy"

This essay appeared in The Huffington Post on August 18, 2009

Director John Hughes died on my 36th birthday, which means I'm now the age he was when Ferris Bueller took his day off. Hughes reportedly wrote Ferris based on the high school adventures of his best friend, himself, and his girlfriend, whom Hughes married shortly after their graduation in 1968. By the film's release in 1986, when John Hughes was the reigning master of what Courtney Love called "the defining moments of the alternative generation," he was also a father to two young children, a boomer family man and the demographic against which his audience saw their identity as an "alternative".

Following his fatal heart attack at age 59, that audience (now family men and women ourselves) hurried to claim Hughes as ours. Director Kevin Smith called him "Our J.D. Salinger." Jud Apatow: "None of what I do would exist without him." Diablo Cody: "An idol to this magna-zoom-dweebie."

I went ahead and emailed my parents, explaining that this passing meant to me what John Lennon's death meant to them. "We liked John Hughes movies too," my mom wrote back.

Of course they did. The same way they liked American Graffiti and Splendor in Grass as late-youth fables from at a time long ago. My 13-year-old cousin Zoe probably files Pretty in Pink or Weird Science next to Mean Girls and She's all That, befitting the endless now adolescence feels like when you're in the middle of it.

With the petulance then of an overlooked middle child, wedged between Boomers and Millennials, my generational urge to lock up Hughes's children up in the library then stand out outside the door screaming "Mine! Mine!" isn't just a personalization of loss. It's also an endowment of cultural legacy, a declaration that Duckie, Watts, Cameron Frye and Jake Ryan belong yes, to history, but really to us.

Every generation slams the door on the one behind it. We can only grant Tie Dye, The Muppet Show, Pearl Jam or Facebook to those borne of one age by implying everyone else is too old to "get it" or too young to understand. As if by nature, generational identity seems a fierce melding of two unequal parts -- what it is and everything else it isn't.

With John Hughes, this had the unintended consequence of turning appreciations of his work into a nostalgic land grab, relegating it to the same garage shelf as New Coke or the Atari 2600. Michael Jackson, another recently deceased '80s icon, had the benefit of a career with his brothers the decade before and presence in the tabloids until the day he died. Hughes last directed in 1991. It's easy then to confine his contributions to his heyday, the middle years of the Reagan administration, to shoulder pads and Spandau Ballet.

But if that were the whole story, would there have been this kind of outpouring? We return to John Hughes's movies because they didn't just speak to a moment in time -- they also transcended it. Remove the floppy disk jokes and Sixteen Candles is ageless as a Hudson/Day romantic comedy. Ferris Bueller may as well be subtitled Chicago! Chicago! It's a Wonderful Town! Call the Breakfast Club an adolescent Iceman Cometh, a chorus of characters imprisoned and waiting for something to happen who realize they are the only something that will.

Hughes's are not just movies about the mid-1980s, but movies set in the mid-1980s that now live as archetype and fable. I know this because, last year, I threw myself a "Come Dressed as Your Seventh Grade Self" birthday last year and guests from ages 20 to 55 all showed looking like his characters. I didn't ask them to. They assumed "John Hughes Movie" and adolescence meant the same thing.

None of my friends, however, dressed like The Athlete, Brain, Basket Case, Princess and Criminal of The Breakfast Club, perhaps because the lessons of that film are too painful for a celebration: The world wants to separate us with labels. If we look past those labels, at least we have each other. It's garden-variety adolescent alienation, sure, but of a very different kind than the majority of Hughes's work. Which is probably why fans regard The Breakfast Club as his greatest achievement and a generational touchstone in a way that, say, Weird Science is not.

Courtney Love and her cohorts would spend the early '90s glorifying the alienation Hughes offers up in The Breakfast Club. But amid his filmography, it's a rare exception. Overwhelmingly, The Hughsian hero does not question the rules of adolescence but tries to find their place within them. Samantha Baker wants to be cool like Jake Ryan and they meet somewhere in the middle sitting atop a dining room table. The lovers of Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful accept that money and class divide them but make a go of it anyway. Ferris Bueller most likely walked in his high school graduation while the parents he loved applauded, then went to a good college. He most likely did not drop out, form a band and never speak to them again.

If the cinema of the 1990s was all about the created family in absence of the biological one (Goodfellas, Boogie Nights, Reality Bites), Hughes venerated the traditional family in a manner both of and ahead of his time. Remember the mid-1980s was the era of The Parents Music Resource Center, the Satanic Panic and a cinematic alternative to the Hughesian Mainstream (The Legend of Billie Jean, The River's Edge) about generational hostility and its violent consequences.

The message? Parents and kids don't understand each other, don't want to and never will.

But that's not what happens outside of Shermer High School. In rest of Hughes's teenage canon, venerable character actors like Harry Dean Stanton, Paul Dooley, and John Ashton play fathers whose arcs end in sympathy and understanding for their teenage children. John Ashton relents and lets Keith, the hero of Some Kind of Wonderful, not go to college. Harry Dean Stanton gives Molly Ringwald the pink dress she wears to the prom. And Paul Dooley, as Samantha Baker's dad in Sixteen Candles, has one of best parent/teenager scenes in recent memory. "If he can't see all the beautiful and wonderful things I see in you" he tells his grieving daughter, exiled from her room on her birthday and ignored by the popular boy she likes, "then he's got the problem." He finishes by telling her "not to let him boss you around," a proto-feminist idea a half-decade before Riot Grrls.

Jim Baker, Jack Walsh, Cliff Nelson and Tom Bueller represent the value Hughes placed on intergenerational tolerance, where dads like him admitted their mistakes and struggled with empathy over judgment. We don't see much of it in The Breakfast Club, where detention is a lonely island surrounded by adult misunderstanding. Fast forward and we can imagine that long Saturday inspiring the cultural mileposts of the 1990s -- grunge, strong coffee, Quentin Tarantino, and Napster. But it would be the "nice" Hughes families whom would have the last laugh. Another son of Illinois would mirror their attempts at open communication and declare moving beyond the psychodrama of generational warfare his highest priority. It got him elected president.

I'll be married next spring, shortly after The Breakfast Club's 25th birthday, where friends, parents and grandparents will all dance to "Don't You Forget About Me." Perhaps if I were in my early 20s when John Hughes died, I too would have eulogized him as the poet laureate of my youth. But I'm an adult now, maybe a parent someday. Sam, Duckie, Ferris and Keith have all grown up and so have we. Part of that means remembering John Hughes for all that he was instead of just all that he was for us. And what he captured onscreen was an adolescence to be learned from instead of suffered through and forgotten, where parents and their teenagers tried to do right, even though they couldn't always do good, and, in the end, understood that We Are Not Alone.

It's an adolescence I wish I had. Thanks to John Hughes, it is an adulthood I can imagine and make real.

John Hughes 1950-2009

I cannot believe that John Hughes is gone. I owe the understanding of my youth to this man and his movies.



That's me and some friends recreating the iconic Breakfast Club movie poster.


This is a montage of his movies set to the Who's Baba O'Reilly (via Laughing Squid). Which is perfect as John Hughes was a Baby Boomer who understood my own Generation better than just about anyone. More later. This is all I got now. Too sad.

A Rabbit Looks at 69...

Happy Birthday Bugs Bunny! On this day, in 1940, the world's most famous long ear made his debut in a short film called The Wild Hare. The original concept was a rabbit-version of Groucho Marx, the carrot standing in for a cigar and the catch phrase "Of course you release this means war," lifted from the Marx Brothers film Duck Soup. In the 2000 documentary "Chuck Jones: Exremes and In-Between," the director Jones claimed that Bugs's voice and mannerism were that of a Brooklyn cabdriver (Blanc called the voice "a blend of the Bronx and Flatbush"), met to contrast the flater heartland affectations of Walt Disney's characters.

First directed by animation legend Tex Avery and voiced by the peerless Mel Blanc, Bugs appeared in over 150 before-the-movie cartoon shorts from until the medium faded from popularity in 1964. The "What's Opera Doc?" parody of Wagner's "Ring Cycle" (Kill the Wabbit! Kill the Wabbi!) was the first cartoon short inducted into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. In 2002, Bugs Bunny was named the greatest cartoon character of all time by TV Guide, an honor he shares with his crosstown rival Mickey Mouse.

Bugs Bunny was my boyhood hero, a smart-aleck unimpressed by pretense who outwitted rather than overpowered naysayers. He rarely lost his cool and rebounded from setbacks. He was the perfectrole model for a short, shy kid who wished he was as funny as his dad.

Happy Birthday Bugs. I can't imagine where we'd be without you.

New Year's Day Birthdays!

Betsy Ross                                E.M. Forrester                             J.D. Salinger

Plus my friends Jeff and Meg. Oh and Ellis Island opened today in 1892. Happy Birthdays to all. 

I'm fascinated by people who have birthdays that overlap with major holidays as it smacks right into the duality of a) No one forgets your birthday because the date is already memorable but b) your birthday often gets overlooked because folk's minds are elsewhere. My college roommate Justin celebrates his birthday on New Year's Eve "along with the whole world." I once worked with a guy who was born on April 15th and his parents never remembered his birthday. They were too preoccupied with paying Uncle Sam.

The only thing that happened on my birthday was the final day of the Watergate Hearings. And since it was always summertime it meant a) I never got to bring cupcakes to school but b) I had entirely too many birthdays at Putt-Putt. 

(via The Writer's Almanac)

Goodbye Paul Newman...

"I was always a character actor. I just looked like Little Red Riding Hood."

Paul Newman (1925-2008).

Robert Kennedy's Assassination:

40 years ago today, Robert Kennedy stepped off the dais at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, congratulating his supporters after winning the California Democratic primary for president. Led through a back kitchen exit by his bodyguards and friends (including writer George Plimpton, football star Rosey Grier and Olympic gold medalist Rafer Johnson), Kennedy was ambushed by a young Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan who fired a .22 caliber revolver at the candidate. Kennedy was hit four times. He died early that morning.

Two months earlier, on the evening of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy made the following address. I reprint it here because these words are as true now as they were then.

This is a time of shame and sorrow.  It is not a day for politics.  I have saved this one opportunity to speak briefly to you about this mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It is not the concern of any one race.  The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed.  No one – no matter where he lives or what he does – can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on.

Why?  What has violence ever accomplished?  What has it ever created?  No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by his assassin’s bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders.  A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of the people.

Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily – whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence – whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

"Among free men,” said Abraham Lincoln, “there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs.”

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach nonviolence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some looks for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all. I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we known what must be done. “When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies – to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our bothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear – only a common desire to retreat from each other – only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is now what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember – even if only for a time – that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek – as we do – nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

Remembering Sydney Pollack:

Just the other night, I was showing my girlfriend Tootsie, one of my favorite movie comedies ever, and raving about the scene above where the film's director Sydney Pollack, holds par with Dustin Hoffman, playing the legendary actor's agent.

In one of those wild coincidences, I woke up the next day to find out that Sydney Pollack has died from cancer. He was 73.

I'd lone known Pollack as "the anti-love director" because the main characters in his films (Absence of Malice, Tootsie, Out of Africa) never ended up together. But looking closer, he was a director and actor that eschewed flash, knew his limits and chose quality projects. Some more than others yes, but you'd have a hard time scanning his filmography and singling out the movie that was ego run amok or a valentine to some actor or pet cause.

No, Sydney Pollack was an Acura: Solid, dependable, understated integrity. Even in a business like Hollywood, I'd call that the stuff of a life well lived.

Mr Pollack leaves behind his wife of 50 years, Claire Griswold and two daughters, Rachel and Rebecca.

Notes:

• NY Times obit.

• Assessment in Slate.

• June 2nd salute to Pollack on Turner Classic Movies.

• Thoughts from David Dylan Thomas.

• Sketches of Frank Gehry. A sweet little documentary Pollack did about the legendary architect.