Ha! Priceless.
Charlie Parker laughing at Coleman Hawkins’s attempt to do playback on his own recorded improvisation
This is the coolest thing ever. In one of two known pieces of footage of Bird performing, the music is pre-recorded and the band is supposed to be pantomiming along. But he clearly thinks it’s stupid and starts to laugh until someone off-camera tells him to stop and then just look at his face. Bird was too cool for this world.
Just found this, more than a year after the term was coined onstage in Lake Arrowhead, CA. God bless the fan base.
“Me and Robot” by Wes
This photo is by my 4-year-old nephew Wes, shot this morning with his brand new Discovery Kids Digital Camera. He’s got an eye!
“We played the spot once, and when it finished, Jobs said, “It sucks! I hate it! It’s advertising agency ****! I thought you were going to write something like ‘Dead Poets Society!’ This is crap!”
Clow said something like, “Well, I take it you don’t want to see it again.” And Steve continued to go on a rant about how we should get the writers from “Dead Poets Society” or some “real writers” to write something.
Behind the Scenes of Apple’s ‘Think Different’ Campaign (via implodr)
The biggest thing that bothers me about the “Cult of Jobs” is that people often seem to mistake the unfortunate, frequently counterproductive, side effects of the personality that made him great for the very cause of his greatness. Steve has long been, and always will be, one of my heroes, but I really worry that an entire generation of entrepreneurs is learning the folkloric lesson that the secret to success is to be a mercurial asshole who abuses everyone and listens to no one. There’s a reason people like Steve start successful companies: because they believe in themselves, envision their success unwaveringly, and don’t compromise. But there can be a dark side to that fanatical self belief: a disdain for the ideas of others. I think there are a lot of reasons for Steve’s late-in-life success at Apple, but I suspect one of the biggest is that he finally managed to surround himself with brilliant people (like Chiat Day’s Lee Clow) who knew how to handle him, curb his worst tendencies, and present important ideas to him in a way that he would accept.
(via buzz)
I’ve thought about this like Buzz has, but really, I don’t think it’s a concern. Entrepreneurs who take away these anecdotes of Steve’s sociopathic tendencies as instructive and critical to their own success are oblivious and no one will give a shit about them anyway. Watch this incredibly revealing documentary from his NeXT days in 1985 (probably the most intimate view of his process I’ve ever seen) and you’ll see a side of Steve that works well with others and weighs the ideas of others and feelings and things.
(via buzz)
Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola
I love how all five of these titans of cinema are fully-bearded except Scorsese (always the maverick) wears his beard on his forehead.
(Source: filmcrack)
:(
“That’s the whole secret, is if you hire great people and you don’t mess them up with a lot of analysis and conversation and speculation and nonsense—if you just get out of their way and shut up, they give you the performance that has made them the great performer that they are.
Human-computer-human interaction
There’s an unformed thought I’ve had bouncing around in my head since I first tried out Siri on my 4S. I’d have liked to develop it into something more robust, but it’s a pretty simple idea so I’ll just leave it here.
You can’t say to Siri, “I guess I’d like to do something later like maybe a movie or just something laid back like coffee in the area or probably not a bar because they’re so noisy—maybe one of those coffee places with lots of books and definitely not Jitters because that place smells like underarm” and expect Siri to help you in any way.
You learn quickly that Siri has certain expectations, certain limitations, and must be spoken to with a certain cadence reflecting a certain pattern of thought. Speaking to Siri is a lot like speaking to someone whose English isn’t so strong. It works better if you naturally pre-diagram your sentences and order them rudimentarily.
From Siri’s acceptance or rejection of our commands or requests, comes a feedback loop that trains us to constrain our thoughts to the crucial data.
As we learn to speak to Siri, we’ll learn more about how we formulate ideas into words, how to express those so that they may be understood with less margin of error, ultimately shortening the gap between intention and comprehension.
It’s safe to assume that as we learn to talk to Siri, Siri learns to listen to us. So we’re not simply assimilating with the robot culture, we’re fostering a new understanding between our vastly different types of intelligence.
Which is to say, Siri will teach us how to talk to Siri but maybe more importantly, how to talk to each other.
