Crossroads Dispatches

Art is Either Plagiarism or Revolution

It was either that quote by Paul Gauguin, or this these two interrelated ones for a headline. Gaugin won out as I'm in Parisien frame of mind, but I still want to share the two runners-up.

• "Thus the tea-master strove to be something more than the artist - art itself." - Alexandra Stoddard

"It is time to come out as yourself." - Neil Crofts

My little contribution to a new renaissance in Silicon Valley? Reinstating the Parisien tradition of the salon:

In the early 17th century, the behavior of male aristocrats still reflected the idea that physical strength and military prowess were a man's most important virtues. Around 1610 a young noblewoman, fed up with the prevailing loutishness, did something unprecedented: she abandoned Louis XIII's court and set up her own "alternative space." The Marquise de Rambouillet remodelled a mansion near the Louvre, creating a suite of adjoining salons, or large reception rooms, culminating in her sanctum sanctorum, the so-called chambre bleu. In this room (also known "the sanctuary of the Temple of Athene"), the marquise received her visitors from her bed. - Salon.com's "Brief History of Salons"

Centuries of salon culture ensued. It was a salon hostess who published James Joyce's Ulysses when no one else would. Women were instrumental in arranging that the leading thinkers of the day attended: artists, writers, philosophers, politicians, scientists.

These are busy influential men, and as Salon.com rightly caught on: "Without erotic intrigue, it is unlikely that so many 17th-century men and women of, uh, affairs would have sacrificed their evenings to debates over Racine's prosody." This wasn't simply idle gossip, it was an intimate private place where folks were introduced to people that were outside their normal public social spheres (for instance, politicians don't hobnob with avant-garde painters).

Anything I say here is just tip of iceberg. I'd love to converse more. Face-to-face. If you live in the Bay Area, come over to an open house this weekend at Legends Fine Crafts Gallery, 516 Santa Cruz Ave, Menlo Park from noon to 8 pm Saturday and noon to 6 pm Sunday (coincides with 20th Annual Connoisseur's Marketplace, so tons of art, food but not parking).

Ben Franklin went to Paris salons to raise funds for the American revolution. Later he'd present his scientific ideas such as electricity to these same salons.

The French, certainly, loved Franklin. With his fur hat and his Poor Richard homilies, he was everything they imagined America to be. Or at least he knew how to play the part. He also loved the cosmopolitan whirl of pre-Revolutionary France, and apparently made out like a bandit in the Paris salons. The beautiful Madame Helvétius (to whom Fontenelle, at age 100, was moved to say, "Ah, madame, if I were only eighty again!") took a liking to Franklin and scolded him for not coming to see her. "Madame, I am waiting until the nights become longer," he said. (Take my word for it, in the 18th century that was pretty risqué.)" - "It's Mostly About the Benjamins", Rob Macdougall blog, 12/2/04

John Adams accompanied Franklin to one Parisien salon and was rather appalled. Adams was a bit puritanical.

The Parisian salons were the opposite - provocative, scintillating.

Sort of how Menlo Park used to be. A little controversial even.

Steve Jobs waltzing into Don Valentine 's office (yep, 3000 Sand Hill Road is a Menlo Park address) for Apple's funding wearing cutoffs and barefoot (or maybe it was flip-flops) was controversial.

Imagine Ken Kesey tripping out (it's research, man) at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital on LSD while he worked the night shift in the psychiatric ward. He spawned not only his own novel but Tom Wolfe's too. The Grateful Dead hanging out in Kepler's bookstore in Menlo Park and playing bluegrass and folk at a nearby field in Palo Alto. Marxists meeting at Kepler's and working by day at the national labs. (John Markoff, New York Times technology columnist, writes that the whole personal computer revolution can be traced to within a ten-mile radius with Kepler's as the hub.) The Homebrew Computer Club gathering at a garage in Menlo Park ("From the ranks of this club came the founders of many microcomputer companies, including Bob Marsh, Adam Osborne, and Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.")

Anyway, in my calligraphy class Monday, that's when I first saw this quote by Paul Gaugin, "Art is either plagiarism or revolution."  And it's stuck with me.  Haunted me. When I'm writing, it feels natural, it's just flowing.  Of course it's original. I'm not trying to be provocative, scintillating -- that would be contrived. I'm just expressing what wants to come out.

So a friend is playing devil's advocate. She mentions a local Menlo Park art institution. They could hold salons. Why would any philantropist invest in mine? (First, the Medicis were hardly philantropists, and second they're not mine. It's more of a platforrm, an API, if you will.) (I'm currently reading Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence. Sure, there's a few parallels with Sand Hill Road and the Florentine  Medicis.)

So I had to check out this institution for myself. Perhaps we could host salons at their location too (I am on look-out for places to host where people already congregate, gather, stroll), I thought. Well, not as is, it's like a purported arts theater that only plays Disney films. I like Disney films, yet....

I certainly couldn't imagine reading my white peach poem there. The dripping juice, the erotic play in the Trevi Fountain symbolic of the dawn after the dark night of soul. "And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) until Crayola and the civil rights movement change it to "flesh" became "peach". And there's Bellini's 'Agony of  the Garden' where Jesus prays until dawn in the foreground with Judas and the trailing soldiers and that painting's pink dawn glow inspires the Bellini made from white peach puree and prosecco at Harry's Bar, Venice, the haunt of  Hemingway and Maugham, and you get idea, yeah, it's a long poem in progress.

I imagine reading there, and I'm tempted to compromise. To fit into what's deemed acceptable, rather than true to me.

This year's tricentennial of Benjamin Franklin's birth, has brought a slew of biographies and articles. Reading one review, it begins: "It is a popular axiom today, that no one with "great ideas" and a passionate commitment to uplift all humanity, can be "politically successful." That's left to the "practical man," the compromiser, the manipulator. No one exposes the falsity of this axiom more completely than Benjamin Franklin..."

Hmmm, you could say the same of the Founding Fathers. They had a passionate commitment to high ideals.

I have a lot of friends pushing me to explain my latest obsession with art. Why? Of course they end this same discussion admitting they were daydreaming about Goya and the Prada Musuem the other day. (Why are you converting your apartment to a boudoir is a second popular query.)

"The idea behind "The Accidental Masterpiece," writes chief art critic for the New York Times Michael Kimmelman, "is that art provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully..."

"I hope to approach the art of seeing here in the spirit of an amateur," he writes in his introduction. "I mean amateur in the original sense of the word, as a lover, someone who does something for the love of it, wholeheartedly."

Art gives me a nudge -  as if we need a license - to be a lover, my natural self.

A lover doesn't compromise. They are. They are wholly themselves. Wholeheartly.

Whole, total, absolute - intero - in Italian. Whole, entire, all - entero - in Spanish. A lover remains open. A lover coasts in the direction of themselves, gently takes the foot off the brakes.

A lover reads white peach poems with aplomb.

p.s. A lover builds cathedrals.

There's an old story about a passer-by who stops to ask three stonemasons: "What are you doing?"

"Doin' me job," replies the first stonemason, gruffly.

"Cuttin' stone," says the second one, irritably.

The third stonemason straightens his back, looks up and says, with passion in his eyes: "I'm building a cathedral."

images white peaches via Flickr by Old Shoe Woman; "Agony of the Garden" by Giovanni Bellini; "Sweet Dawn Study" by James McCallum

Update: A philanthropist and friend reminds me: "Well I think it all depends on the intention. I like to think of Vittoria Colonna as a well-intentioned patron/philanthropist versus any of the Medicis."

That sweet poet and nun (alright, technically: "Although she did not take the veil, Vittoria Colonna lived the last years of her life in a convent, dressed like a nun, and was buried as a nun") and beloved of Michelangelo was a bit of a radical in her day. She lived her intention and ideas:

• The idea of gifting freely.
• The idea of art as a free gift.
• The idea of God's grace as a free gift. (And this during a time when Medicis and everyone else were earning and buying their way to Heaven. At this time, money-lending and banking regardless of interest rate is considered an unnatural sin according to the Church: "It's like money copulating.")

So I'm reminded of my post, "An Abundant Fertile New Renaisssance" about gifts and patronage and renaisssance and Vittoria and Michelangelo.

And I'm re-reminded of my intention. How easy they are to compromise. It all depends on intention.

And there in that post I find another answer to Why art?

"Love is like a painter. The works of a good painter so charm men that, in contemplating them, they remain suspended, and sometimes to such an extent that it seems they have been put in an ecstasy and have been taken outside of themselves, and seem to forget themselves." - 15c Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola

Seek Life Away From Keyboard? Luddite or Splitting Away From the Pied Piper?

Full week. I'd meant to comment on Tom Brokaw's Stanford commencement speech. This Monday's San Jose Merc front page reads, "STANFORD CHEERS: Seek a life away from keyboard, Brokaw urges graduates."

Seek a life away from the keyboard.  Hmmm, I'm finding myself doing just that more and more. If and when I am online I'll take my laptop out to the garden (thank god for Wifi). These days I spend much more time with folks that have absolutely no interest in being the first to know what's new from Google and neither are they obsessed creating the next Google-killer.

And I've never ever been happier.

It's actually an anamoly that I'm here at Supernova this week. (I'll be blogging my big picture highlights later on their blog.)

It's not exactly that I'm a Luddite. I have a BSEE and been a CTO. Yet I totally understood the woman (and there's not that many women here) who snuck out of the dark conference room on a beautiful yesterday in downtown San Francisco to stroll into an art gallery.

I'd left the windowless room early Wednesday myself to hit the nearby Ferry Building's vibrant marketplace with local producers of fresh fruit, caviar, wild mushrooms, artisan confections, wine, and even organic chocolate madeleines. I sit outside at the lovely cafe, Boulettes Larder, and nibble on brioche soaked in orange blossom water and almond cream with an iced hibiscus drink and feel the breeze off the waterfront and watch the people.

Call me crazy, but I want my technology to enrich my life, not complexify it nor drag me away from life. And if not, I simply cannot get excited about gadgetry and bytes anymore.

The strange thing is I'm finding I now have more common ground with 'regular' people - those folks that don't have a clue how to code in Java (yup, they think it's a drink) or Ruby (yup, they think it's a gem).

On page two of that Monday paper, there's a blurb from Johnny Depp taken from this week's Newsweek that resonated deeply for me. Depp explains why he spends more time at his home in France (I'm living an European lifestyle myself without leaving Silicon Valley):

"The phones don't ring as much. Movies are never brought up in conversation. I'll take the kids and we'll go out to the trampoline and the swing set, and we'll stop by the garden and see how our tomatoes are doing. You know, old-fart stuff. Good stuff."

Depp says he life was irrevocably changed when his daughter Lily-Rose was born in 1999. Jack was born three years later. He continues: "I was never horribly self-obsessed or wrapped up in my own weirdness. But when my daughter was born, suddenly there was clarity. I wasn't angry anymore. It was the first purely selfless moment that I had ever experienced. And it was liberating. In that moment, it's like you become something else. The real you is revealed."

After the Ferry Building, I decide to visit the Hotel Vitale, which I've heard a lot about. It's a "post-hip" boutique hotel. "It's a concept that we sum up in two words: luxury, naturally," says Chip Conley, founder and CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality.  (A review of my impressions sometime, later.)

I love the idea, "luxury, naturally" which is all about happiness, joie de vivre, well-being and time for tomatoes, strolling, slow food, intimacy, family, friends, simple joys. 

I don't think it's a concidence that "this year’s most popular class at Harvard is Psych 1504, also known as “how to get happy." You'd think this would mean I'm spending less money, but I'm finding as I'm awakening to that which brings joy, a sense of life's abundance is inextricably woven in and I'm buying more without the guilt. $10 for lilac soap? Oui! $1.50 for a miniature bar of spring jasmine tea chocolate! Oui! Oui! An overnight trip to Seattle? Why not!

Next door to the Supernova conference room is the breakfast area and coffee service. There a large painting covers the entire side wall: a throng of colorfully-clad village children mesmerized by the Pied Piper. It must be the scene just before they're lured by his siren call of his music, all one hundred and thirty boys and girls following lockstep out of town. Whether they march straight into the river, into a cave to be sealed to their fate, or where they disappear to, you can speculate your own ending to the legend. A reminder to be mindful of the lure of Pied Pipers and following the throng.

To cut my commute into SF, I'm staying at a friend's place in Pacifica (the pinks - smoky roses, lavenders, mauves - come into being after the sun like a burning boat slinks into the blues of the summer solstice) and I read this as I flip through his book:

"Have you ever, in moments of deep silence, heard the song of your soul? Can you recall a time when the beauty, the sweetness of life, welled up in you by surprise? One day, perhaps, you fell in love. Or for one blinding instant, lovemaking called you back to an ecstatic relationship with life. Perhaps it happened for you with the birth of a child. Suddenly you were filled with an overwhelming, all-encompassing love such as you had never experienced. Perhaps you glimpsed ecstasy in the spaciousness of meditation; during a five-mile run; or while contemplating a clear mountain stream, listening to a symphony, walking in a thunderstorm, or dancing or singing through the night. Perhaps you were propelled beyond your mind and body into a transcedent moment when life, which had seemed ordinary, became suddenly mysterious, poignant, and filled with grace, and time seemed to stop as you stepped into eternity."  - The Art of Everyday Ecstasy, Margot Anand

Update: I mentioned I'm back to reading a few (very few) VC blogs. Two years ago because of my work (for instance, clients using their blog to raise their profile/buzz with VCs, analysts, press) I read all of the VC blogs. Feld's Thoughts is one of them. Here's a clue why from a recent post (Brad's Art category is another good reason):

At some point in the conversation, we started discussing the ever present “introduction” question that comes up often, which is “What Do You Do?”

We decided the best answer – inspired by one of Amy’s friends – is “I’m Happy.”

In Sri Lanka, the "What do you do?" question might come up fifth or sixth (maybe not) after Where are you from? Are you married? How many kids? Would you like tea? Have you taken lunch (a no brings out dishes)? What brings you to Sri Lanka? Are you Christian, Buddhiist, or a 'free thinker'? Needless to say, I fell in love with the Sri Lankan people.

image from The Five Best Things to Eat This Summer at the Ferry Building, a plate from Recchiuti's 

Monied Sex, Sexy Money, and Silicon Valley's Word

"Wealth precedes culture," says a really cool man that I met at my Peet's the other day. Yeah, yet another Dave, I swear. 

We're talking renaissance. And this is a good point to mention I totally missed today/yesterday's reboot8 conference themed can you believe it: Renaissance.

First, though before we get to the renaissance, this is how we met: "You a theology student?"

As a child I developed a habit of doing homework intense in concentration blocking out the sound and color from the surrounding TV sets. (My parents were making up for growing up in Cuba with a porch for entertainment; plus I think that's how they picked the social nuanes on how to fit into America. I can't say watching Dallas or Gilligan's Island really clues you in too much though.)

So I was totally absorbed in reading this paper "Intellects Inflamed by Christ: Women and Spiritualized Scholarship in Renaissance Christianity" and a bit startled when he spoke. I had no idea what he's talking about. Theology? Huh? Where'd he get that idea?

I chuckle when he leaves a half-hour later because also at my table is a Jungian analysis of the Biblical/Jewish/Islamic tale of King Solomon and Queen Sheba and a book by Vietnamese monk Thich Nan Hanh. I guess it's all theology for me...

But at that time what I actually said was: "No, not exactly. I'm not a student. I'm just reading up on the Italian Renaissance."

I note the thick Photoshop bible on his table. He shares his view that he finds digital photography, digital art and Photoshop simply another way of imagining art. I totally agree.

That's when he starts on his theory that Silicon Valley is poised for a renaissance.

I smile after his discourse: "I've been thinking the very same thing myself."

So it was interesting after a lengthy blog-reading-hiatus seeing Fred Wilson and Robert Scoble refer to Paul Graham's essay How to Be Silicon Valley. Having read the essay it boils down to: Create an atmosphere that rich folks and nerds both want to live in.

I am neither rich nor a nerd by any conventional sense of the two terms. (Okay, okay, yeah I have a BSEE and worked in high-tech more than a decade, but I swear I'm not a nerd.) Yet I love living a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in an area where free wifi cafes have been a given for years. It's so much more than nerds and wealth.

I'm at the Cupertino-San Jose border, right smack in the heart of the parking lot that Graham refers to. I too thought that San Jose was a wasteland and I'll spare you the details how I ended up here with all the varied choices in the Bay Area, but suffice it to say it was certainly not my first choice.

And I'd be the last person to guess that I'd be writing a book set in San Jose, CA of all the places on earth that is reminscent of A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, or perhaps Walden Pond. A few weeks ago my neighbors Don and Beatrice showed me a black hooded oriole that is nesting in the towering palm through their binoculars. Just this week I had a Proustian epiphany with a magnolia tree walking home by cresent moonlight - btw, have you noticed they are all blooming fragrant right now? And the redwood grove on my four-block walk to the grocery store are my personal sentinels and teachers.

Trust me I don't live anywhere particularly 'special'. I'm not nestled in the tony hills of Woodside or Los Altos or Saratoga or Los Gatos. It's just an average everday Silicon Valley neighborhood surrounded by dim sum restaurants, strip malls, Fry's, Asian kids sequestered after school at tutoring centers I can't pronounce.

What strikes me is that no one has mentioned what really distinguishes Silicon Valley.

Actually Paul's essay is an essay on the sense of place, on belonging. In Eat, Pray, Love, writer Elizabeth Gilbert traipses through Italy, India, Indonesia to find herself (psst, you don't have to leave home). In Italy, her friend Luca Spaghetti posits that every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there.

"...if you could read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever that majority thought might be- that is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don't really belong there."

Lotus Reads shares, "According to Luca, SEX was Rome's word and for the Vatican it is POWER. In New York City the word is ACHIEVE, in Stockholm its CONFORM, in Naples it is FIGHT and so on."

I have searched high and low for the blog post to no avail, but another blogger thought NYC was more like CREATE.  And Berkeley was RIGHT (which I can say having lived there is so true; as in smugly RIGHT). The author was stumped for a word for San Francisco - which though is an altogether different vibe than Silicon Valley.

So what's the word for Silicon Valley?

Methinks, it's KALI.

Nope, not Kali as in Kali-fornia  (hmmm, what would -Fornia stand for?)

KALI, as in the goddess.

Related aside: the state of California was named after a mythical Queen Califa, the black ruler of the land of the Amazons, who lived in a wonderful country awfully reminscent of Queen Sheba's kingdom, possibly the Garden of Eden "filled with fragrant flowers, fresh fruits, and other delights." Queen Califa incidentally was also a disciple, a follower, of Artemis, the virgin-priestess-hunter goddess and Apollo's sister. In Virgil's day, a virgin wasn't simply chaste. A virgin referred to a woman "complete unto herself", a fully individuated human beholden to no one, or the androgenous mind that Dan Pink's A Whole New Mind refers to.

KALI. Oh, we could call it disruptive innovation, or creative destruction, but do I look like Clayton Christenson or an economist? If you belong to Silicon Valley, the notion of recreating Silicon Valley is absurd. "How to Be Silicon Valley?" You might as well ask "How Do I Cling to the Past?" "How Do I Capture that Musical Note Ten Minutes Ago during the Symphony?" Heck, go right ahead there, meanwhile those of us here in S.V. will create the next thing. Accept no imitations, baby.

Sure Kali is a Hindu goddess totally far far from these shores, and this post is already running to infinity, there is a long rich thread of the triple goddess theme that Kali represents throughout Western history. (And lest us not forget Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code 's current popularization of the Mary Magdalene cult which was catchy during the Italian Renaissance...which is really the Artemis cult refashioned.)

For instance, consider the witch in Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. Once in the Slavic region of her origin she was known as Baba Yaga, an Artemis-following-priestess-goddess that was grossly misunderstood, until today we know her as a cricketedly evil old witch instead of shamaness. Where's Salem when you need it?

The symbolism of oven in the Baba Yaga fairy tales is very powerful since from primordial times the oven has been a representation of womb and of baked bread. The womb, of course, is a symbol of life and birth, and the baked bread is a very powerful the image of earth, a place where one’s body is buried to be reborn again. It is interesting that Baba Yaga invites her guests to clean up and eat before eating them, as though preparing them for their final journey, for entering the death, which will result in a new clean rebirth. - "Baba Yaga: A Demon or a Goddess?"

Madonna was the buzz this week. First a few Wine Campers brag they have tickets to the sold-out show. I hear folks talking about the show the day after at cafes. The San Jose Merc agrees, "A Confession: Reinvention Becomes Madonna." Madonna is an obvious incarnation of Kali. Heck, even her name tells all. No wonder San Jose worshipped her performance.

My guru/teacher once said: "Everyone wants to be reborn," he starts chuckling a little bit like the proverbial witch's cackle, "but no one wants to die."

Living in Silicon Valley means journeying through the Tibetan Book of the Dead's bardo on a monthly, weekly, daily, momentary basis. An inclination to die to the past in every single moment. A very Zennish quote typifies S.V. (although I'm more in an Italian or French Zen frame of mind of late than traditional Zen myself): This moment, this particular moment, doesn't care that you jumped off a 100-foot-pole yesterday.

Now is this true for everyone in S.V.? Heck no, but it's truer here than anywhere else I've lived.

I'm not wedded to Silicon Valley (remember "woman complete unto herself"). Truth is the renaissance is probably further along elsewhere - like Seattle, for instance. The Italian Renaissance didn't just happen in any one city - and in those days, Florence, Venice, Rome, Milan, probably seemed as far apart as I am today to DC, Shanghai, Prague in travel time. I can enjoy anywhere (except okay maybe Las Vegas) since I'm a child of the universe. Being an explorer-nomadic spirit I can move in a heartbeat, but while I'm here I'm soaking in the Kali energy because it's the elixir of lifie that I can carry with me wherever I go.

What would accelerate the next renaissance? Reacquainting ourselves with the value of art, getting over our collective hangups over sex and money (or broader still, beauty/sensuality & adundance), and moving from the scared feminine towards the sacred feminine for starters. But that's a thousand posts worth of stuff...stay tuned.

This post's headline wasn't just an empty teaser. The creative/destructive force that represents Kali and the relation to sex and money is important to consider for yourself (and that's what Google is for).

Sex & money, both really basic lower chakra stuff if you know what I mean and quite repressed/denied/guiltified in our society. I was watching an intriguing documentary with my friend David Chamberlain (oh yes he's a diva) before he took off to Vietnam, Cambodia and Burma for a month.

1 Giant Leap explores universal human topics including identity, death, God, happiness and art and its creators journeyed to "Senegal, Ghana, South Africa, Uganda, India, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, America and Europe, equipped solely with a digital video camera, a laptop and a vision - to capture and weave together a unique fusion of sound, image and spoken word from some of the world's most happening musicians, authors, scientists and thinkers and to explore 'The Unity in the Diversity'." Whew!

It's a beautiful compendium of life-affirming views, people and places and unforgettable haunting world music. Yet I came away wondering why in an otherwise positive balanced film, the sex and money section were blatently dark and full of dogma. You'd think sex and money are the root of all evil. I mean the most lucid thought-stopping comment in either of those two sections came from a pro dominatrix.

If you're squeamish about either sex or money or the creative force of the universe, you may want to give this blog a very wide berth here for a bit. Otherwise, it's going to be a wicked fun ride for a while.

Call me crazy, but that means I'll be reading tons more VC (sexy money) and advertising (monied sex) blogs  and kali-mommy and art blogs - and sharing. What, did you think I'd read pornography blogs? Ah, try again, then, you are missing the essential essence of Kali.

Viva la renaissance.

p.s. Silicon Valley is, as you've surmised, a state of mind, not a geography.

photos In case you've never been blessed to have Audubon Society neighbors share their passion for birds, this is the type of oriole we spotted together; even magnolias are sexy (click for large delicious full-size); a possibe artist's rendition of Queen Califa; Madonna and Kali of course.

tags reboot8 renaissance silicon valley innovation goddess reinvention creativity art zen tantra, women venture capital advertising

Sound Familiar? Apple's Psychedelic Psychographics

Daring Fireball chastises and riffs on SF Chronicle's Sunday story on "Stubborn Apple at Risk of Making Same Mistake Twice":

In a way, Apple’s survival is remarkable, author Kahney said, like a dinosaur living beyond the Ice Age. All the early PC-makers like Amiga, Commodore and Acorn crumbled, but idiosyncratic Apple hung on.

Daring Fireball's reponse: "Is it not perhaps the case that Apple “hung on” not despite its idiosyncrasies, but because of them?"

My guess is Apple doesn't look to newspaper columns for advice on bucking trends. The subtitle for Time Magazine's October 24, 2005 cover story reads, "Conventional wisdom says its strategy is wrong, yet it keeps turning out great products. TIME looks inside the world's most innovative company."

In a January 2004 Fast Company article chides Apple for its relentless emphasis on innovation and underscores that Apple's execution and revenues fall short. It warns of the folly of following in Apple's footsteps: "If your cool new thing doesn't generate enough money to cover costs and make a profit, it isn't innovation. It's art."

It is about art. Sunday Times UK writer recently says, "I couldn’t have written this article about Dell, BMW, BP, Microsoft, Sony or IBM. No company I can think of is quite as consistently interesting as Apple, and I can certainly think of none that might qualify as a corporate work of art."

"The [Apple] store is done in iPod shades of white. "We chose hand-selected Tuscan stone for the floors--a stone that's somewhere between sandstone and limestone," Johnson says. "It's the same stuff Florence was built on." - FC

Apple is all about "overtly challeng[ing] convention." Lest we forget the Renaissance didn't flourish through contentional thinkers and artists either we can slide across its stone floors to jog our history brain cells.

Apple Insider reports that maybe it's Fast Company that got it wrong: "For fiscal 2005, the Company generated revenue of $13.93 billion and a net profit of $1.335 billion, reflecting annual growth of 68 percent and 384 percent, respectively, and representing the highest annual revenue and net profit in the Company's history."

What most people miss in all of this is that the suggestion Apple needs to sell to the corporate market to succeed is flawed, because Apple's carefully cultivated brand image will never appeal to the bean-counters of the world. From a brand point of view, Apple sells to the "Think Different" market irrespective of whether the particular customer works in the corporate sector, in design, in film production, or in education. Apple appeals to an attitude choice and not a market segment. Market segmentation is a conservative marketing tool that fails to recognise the strength of brands working at a deeper level. - "The Branding of Apple: Apple's Intangible Asset"

"Reacting to an overwhelming number of messages each day, people filter out the chatter and focus on what resonates with them. On an emotional level, what appeals to a 47-year-old mother of two from Boise might be the same thing that appeals to a 21-year-old college student in New York. This revelation from consumer psychographic research is changing marketing and creative development as we know it. What has been traditionally a conversation about age, race, gender, location and income has been transformed into a dialog about lifestyle, mindset, behavior and feeling." - "Trend:  Psychographics Once More with Feeling", Spring 2006, Create Magazine

Mindset - Attitude - Feeling - We filter out chatter and focus on what resonates. (In other words, you don't flip-flop from Revolutionary to Establishment and expect your core follow suit.) 

Something is happening and it affects us all. A global revolution is changing business, and business is changing the world...

Here's What We Set Out to Do: Identify the values of the revolution and the people who are building companies that embody them: a commitment to merge economic growth with social justice, democratic participation with tough-minded execution, explosive technological innovation with old-fashioned individual commitment, from Handbook of the Business Revolution: Manifesto, 1995.

Why don't you get Fast Company anymore? I asked Enrique, a first-issue subscriber friend more than a year ago. He shrugs, "It doesn't speak to me anymore."

The San Francisco Chronicle reporter continues: “The reality doesn’t fit with the image. Jobs is the only cool guy there.” I beg to differ; and it's not about 'cool' because you can copy-cat cool. I live in the epicenter of Geekdom and yet Apple employees I know don't entirely fit the geek mold.

Ah well, it's all so banally familiar. Those Squares never get bohemians ("They were committed to a life of freedom, work, and pleasure, and eschewed the corruption and rotten values of conventional society"), even since the days of Cafe Momus, do they?

"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the trouble makers. 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." - Apple Computers, Think Different campaign

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars." - Jack Kerouac

p.s.  In the 2005 book What the Dormouse Said, New York Times reporter John Markoff quotes Jobs describing his LSD experience as "one of the two or three most important things he has done in his life." (Wikipedia)

Update: SF Chron reporter Dan Fost responds.

images: I was at Caffè Macs yesterday (ate lunch at Apple's cafeteria) and couldn't help thinking the new iPod posters look inspired by the psychedelic poster art of the sixties. Someone else noticed they seemed inspired by Eninem ads. You can still purchase this collector's Bob Dylan psychedelic poster "Dylan, Blowin' In the Mind (20" X 30")" (yep, Mind as in tripping or enlightenment, not Wind as in lyrics).

tags web2.0 blogs sixties art innovation startup passion entrepreneurs inspiration inspiration beat generation counterculture apple brands creativity marketing

How Bloggers Ate the World

"In some futuristic hell, robotic serfs gaze at a giant screen showing the crazed rantings of what is plainly George Orwell’s Big Brother. An athletically clad girl races in. She is pursued by helmeted goons and she carries a sledgehammer. With a cry, she hurls the hammer at the screen. It explodes. The serfs gaze on, bewildered and open-mouthed, as a voice tells us that, thanks to the Apple Mac, 1984 will not be like “1984”. Join us and be free." - "How Apple Ate the World", Sunday Times UK, March 19, 2006

In retrospect renegades may be revered, in real-time they're most often reviled. 

Don't hold your breath for praise. Don't spin your wheels legitimizing pointless debates. Continue with the work at hand, digging into the soil and staying true to the muse.

"While he was alive, academia (for the most part) dismissed him as a joke," writes blogger Erik Lerouge on his March 12 birthday tribute to Jack Kerouac.

Beatnik was once a derogatory term given to those Beat poets. Today one single poem from a beatnik, "Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail", raises $10,000 for the 80-year-old publisher of Charles Bukowski's earliest works made homeless by Hurricane Katrina.

'Blogger' may one day be a badge of honor, but does it matter, really, right now?

Decades later, beatnik Marxists met in salons at Kepler's bookstore and spun gold from flax and entertained wild-eyed ideas. Wild-eyes ideas like the personal computer.

Very (very) doubtful the folks at Sperry-UNIVAC were singing their praises. Computers aren't for everyone - they're for elite scientists, donchaknow.

First they ignore you,

then they ridicule you,

then they fight you,

then you win. -  Mahatma Gandhi

Update: Keen: "Either we are pro-transhumanists or we are Luddites." Me: "Either we are pro-Keen or we are Marxist digital utopians." (The world's not so black and white. I actually like Keen's edgy thought-provoking blog even if I only agree with half of it. His "Confessions of a Silicon Valley Thief" is a FANTASTIC piece of writing.)

Inspired by: Many, many comments re: Sunday's Berkeley Cybersalon on Elitism in the Media, Blogging & Podcasting, Tara Hunt's "Marx is Back - Get Used to It" (I especially enjoyed Tara's last tag), Scott Rosenberg's "Blogs: threat or menace?", and The Berkeley Blog's writeup Berkeley Cybersalon: Blogging vs. Journalism = Yawn (I especially resonated with reference to Shakespeare's "a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing"), Lisa Stone's "Cybersalon: I'll always be both Daddy's and Mommy's girl", Steve Gillmor ("maybe just maybe the next time we have this conversation we can pick up where this one ended, in the streets at the intersection of What used to be and What might be"), Andrew Keen (and blog), Apple Computer (Happy 30th!), and What The Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, by John Markoff (coincidentally a panelist).

Related: (My first post - last night - over at Corante's Media Hub ->) "Is It Journalism Debate Getting Banal"'; "An Internet Fed Mostly By Amateurs is Fascinating" (in response to a SJ Merc column titled "An Internet Fed Mostly By Amateurs is Frightening"); "LSD, Litmus Tests, Hackers and Blogging For Dollars"; and yesterday's "Salons, Primal Howl and Satisfying Yourself First."

p.s. I did not grow up in privilege. Many realize that the privileges we do enjoy now comes with responsibility to give back. Which is where blogging's origins stem from - the old-time hacker ethic of giving, sharing.

photos Steve & Steve (miniscule print reads: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage, ca: 1975), Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski top to bottom.

tags web2.0 blogs citizen journalism art innovation startup passion entrepreneurs inspiration inspiration beat generation counterculture apple steve jobs amateurs rule

Cafe Culture and Fueled Entrepreneurs

I'm in the mood to write more slices of life about Silicon Valley. Dig into what makes Silicon Valley unique. (Of course now I want to delve into my homebase just as I get ready to leave for Asia for two months on the tsunami anniversary tour.)

I read the other day (god knows where) that China is like "Silicon Valley was in the '90s" which made me chuckle. If this place gets to be what it was like in the 90s, I'm outta here. It's decidedly different than 1999 - very stimulating yet grounded. One thing you can't help notice is how the café culture and fueled entrepreneurs are intertwined:

Pop into the newest hot spot of the geek set, Coupa Café just around the corner from 285 Hamilton, and you’ll overhear seed deals getting done over spiced Venezuelan hot chocolate, along with much excited talk about can’t-miss new business plans. On a recent afternoon, one nervous entrepreneur asks a harried Coupa barista for a description of Netscape founder Marc Andreessen so he won’t miss him when the big guy arrives for a meeting. - Tech's Big Comeback, Business 2.0, October 26, 2005

The last meeting at Coupa I'm told at the onset: "You can not blog this." Tomorrow I'm meeting at one of my favs in Menlo Park. I wasn't certain if it was cool to bring a dog to the place so I Googled Cafe Barrone. And voilà I find World66: The Travel Guide You Write. Cool! The First Person Revolution brings us this wikipedia inspired entry:

Near the Menlo Park train station and Kepler's Books, Barrone is one of the best cafes on the peninsula. It has a substantial crowd of regulars, and is also a gathering-place for VCs and entrepreneurs; in fact, at least one startup has used Barrone as its offices.

Not a bad choice for an office, I say.

It's no accident I chose sitting down to have coffee with someone as the closest metaphor to reading someone's blog.

p.s. Just like random serendipitious conversations at coffee shops, social media has brought me a new connection (plus the Cafe Barrone photo at top). A new (to me) blog read, Askpang contributed the World66 Cafe Barrone entry; Alex Pang is also a "research director at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Silicon Valley." Here's just one cafe-inspired and very intriguing post:

"[H]ow religious ideas or values contribute to the moral economy of the Valley, I can't say; but sitting here, watching people at alternate tables do e-mail, read the Wall Street Journal, and talk about the Book of Matthew, I can't help but think that someone should find out." - Askpang, God and latte at the Menlo Park Starbucks*