Day: November 6, 2011

It isn’t surprising that the backlash against Steve Jobs is underway, given the nearly volcanic hype about him, his life, and the very excellent biography of him by Walter Isaacson, which I finished yesterday. Bloggers and journalists are clobbering Jobs online as a nasty, ego-centric maniac. But it’s a gripping book, all two pounds of it, and I could not put it down. Jobs life and times seem very personal to me, as a life-long Apple computer user, and a writer and photographer whose works was shaped as much by Apple products and software as anything. Jobs designed the company for people like me in many ways. I needed technology, but didn’t need to know how to use it. So I never did.

Getting an Apple when I became a writer was something of a political statement, a creative expression of individuality in a Microsoft-Wal-Mart world. I didn’t have to worry about the technology inside my Mac, something Jobs did for me. Lately, I have become more aware of the underside of that choice, as I am ever more dependent on Apple as the number of cool things in my cabled life grow – photos, videos, words, songs, blogs, pings. Apple is becoming a cradle-to-grave experience, tech wise – Jobs built a company that controls every single part of the consumer experience and they have a lot of my money – and sometimes I feel as if I am trapped inside that very cool fruit. If the company goes sour, I am really screwed.

I thought the book was wonderful, if a bit stiff and formal at times.  Isaacson is from the journalism establishment, not Silicon Valley, and it does show. But that’s a quibble. The book is very readable, fair, thorough and quite powerful. Jobs was an amazing man, as messed up as he was brilliant, as awful to the people around him as he was an advocate for the people who bought his neat and far-sighted products. Jobs didn’t follow the creative impulses of people like me, he created them. When I go on book tour, the first thing I stuff into the suitcase is my MacBook Pro, my Ipad2, my Iphone and the attendant cables. And I use them all. My work life occurs within the ICloud and when my ATT  contract runs out, I will get to know Siri, the new personal assistant.

I thought Job’s life was fascinating and quite wrenchingly sad. He worked hard for a spiritual life but never seemed to find one. He was almost sociopathically cruel to the people around him and thoughtless of them. He had a brilliant vision for technology and its potential intersection with humanity. He was a ferocious advocate for the consumers of his products. He was uncompromisingly committed to quality and design and he demanded the best of everyone around him. He built a company that seems nearly unique in its risk-taking, creativity and disdain for market research and timidity – the hallmarks of modern corporatism.  Almost every good thing he did was in spite of journalists, boards of directors, and fellow CEO’s, who predicted failure at every turn, and never seemed to notice that it wasn’t happening. Jobs  was the anti-Microsoft, the biological opposite of Wal-Mart or Bank Of America.

Job’s illness and death – meticulously chronicled by Isaacson – speak powerfully to the false promise and confusion of the medical system, and the almost medieval suffering it inflicts in the name of health and progress. Jobs seemed to succumb to that false promise, even though a part of him knew better.  When it came to health, he knew better than to trust too much in technology, even as worshipped technology and personal expression and creativity. His decision to avoid conventional medicine and cancer surgery is presented in the book as a monumental mistake, but I have to say I didn’t read it that way, not after following his long and tortuous journey. I think he had it right the first time.

Should you buy and read the book, in my opinion? Absolutely. It’s an extraordinarily tale, to me a brutal indictment of most contemporary corporate thinking. Instead of asking why nobody else is doing anything like Jobs or his company, our  tepid and profit-obsessed business and media culture seems content to  gush over somebody almost none of them would have hired, emulated or emulated. Jobs with all of his grievous warts will be remembered long after almost all of them are gone.

Mother is curious about the Daily Egg, but Simon even more so. One second after I took this shot he came over and ate it. I’ve never seen a donkey eat an egg, but Simon will eat almost anything. Turns out he loves almond butter.

Sunday morning is special. It’s the first time in weeks we’ve been home (the book tour) and we hung around, visited the animals, caught up on some work. I went up in the pasture with Rose, and she is enjoying it. So am I. Got a lot of chores to catch up on. The car needs service. The Iphone isn’t working. Having serious and continuing problems with my mail and Internet. Might have to switch service providers.

Took a video of bits of the morning. Come and see. We are loving the time back with the dogs and the donkeys. Maria’s love suffuses the life of the farm and the animals, and humbles  and inspires me.

My heart was pushing me all week to go Occupy one place or another, especially Glens Falls, N.Y., and see what the protestors are about, but when the day came, I didn’t. I am very drawn to these protests, especially to the message that corporations are hurting people and damaging the very idea of work and life. People tell me every day that the point of their lives is to pay their bills, afford health care, build up their retirement funds. This, to me is not the point of life, but the absence of life and choice. A meaningful life, a life of self-determination, what I have always come to see as a self-determined life, is about freedom, choice and safety. About finding our light, and living our dreams. Almost noone I know believes they can afford to do that.

Corporations have degraded work, health care, and security. To me, they are simply too powerful, too big, too focused on profits and utterly disinterested in the consequences of what they do on human beings and human life, as well as Mother Earth. They have polluted the air, the ground,  politics, creativity, media, medicine, the law and the right of individuals to be secure and cared for.  If money is the only focal point of a culture, and if business is the only interest we protect, then we are barren and life becomes empty and frightening, as well as spiritually bereft. Any movement that calls attention to this draws my attention and my sympathy.

Yet I don’t want to occupy anyone else’s space. The police are not my enemy. I think a movement build on enemies is just trading one poison for another.  I may not like Wall Street, but I do not believe they are evil, and if people wish to work there, that is their business, not mine. I do not blame them for any of my life or trouble. And I have no desire to be anywhere near their space. The leaders who practice peace and empathy are the ones who rock the world, at least in the history books that I read. I am responsible for my life, and I am not crafting yet another struggle story for myself, another way of seeing myself as someone else’s victim. One way to fight back is to withhold our money from the greediest and most callous corporations, something that will get their attention in a hurry, as happened with Bank Of America last week. Anybody who spends money in this society has power.

Activist Grace Lee Boggs, who is 96 and has spent her life working as a feminist and social activist, gave a piercing interview this week about the current protest movement, and I related to it. It isn’t enough, she said, simply to expose the enemy. The challenge is to reinvent society, and the meaning of life and opportunity and  work and fulfillment. If we live simply to pay bills, afford health care, fatten up our retirement funds for a life of confinement and medical procedures then we are, to me, enslaving ourselves. Living only to pay your bills and your mortgage is not work, it is a new kind of enslavement. It is the corporate idea of work, creating things we are frightened into wanting, letting go of the life we really want.

The protestors seem to sense that our political system is out of control, moving away from our interests and into their own. Perhaps that is a good start. You begin with the protest, and then you move on to another stage.

Reinventing society is a simple thing to want, a difficult thing to do. I’m up for it, if such a movement or political leader emerges or if Occupy wants to move on to solutions and ideas. The very notion is pretty exciting.

I’m not unbiased, but it seems to me my former girlfriend is on fire with her art, her streaming pillows, her beautiful quilts, and over the weekend, she astonished me with her newest creation, “High-Heeled Potholders.” Maria is reinventing the potholder, giving it function, voice,  beauty and style. The evolution of her potholders – she is now selling them all over the world – is delightful to see. They just blew me away. Potholders coming to life.

. She is only making 20 of these highly attitudinal potholders (she sees them as political), a Limited Edition, each for $15. She will finish them today, and I’m trying to scoop her.  You can see them and order them at fullmoonfiberart. I love her, and I love her art. Maybe both are the same thing.