Category: Our World

…at four a.m., you can bring along a midget, a bear and four ladies, drag them to your room and no one cares about it at all.

-Leonard Cohen

Spent last week producing for some British friends at the Chelsea Hotel. And dear readers, you owe it to yourself to spend a night there.

Or at least pop your head in next time on 23rd street. Ride the elevator up, take the stairs down and see the art gallery that ranges from masterpieces to art brut. Smell the odd mix of chlorine and sensimilla. Pause on all the brilliance that has flourished between those walls, and if you stay a while, maybe make some odd new friends.

“If I’m obsessed with anything, it’s the problem of failure. As human beings, working in medicine, you’re going to have to think about that as a surgeon. At a certain point along the way you’re going to hurt people, and trying to find that balance between harm and good is your constant struggle, and that’s the largest struggle of anyone who works in anything with moral dimensions.”

Dr. Atul Gawande – McCarthur Grant Fellow, on Charlie Rose

“It has always been an advantage to have direct contact with eminent men, if only because proof positive of their essential mediocrity spurs younger talent. So long as talent is remote from those of eminence, it droops in awe and paralysis.”

Marshall McLuhan – “Space, Time and Poetry”

“For me, success is not about accolades. It’s about fucking up on your own terms. If there are
mistakes in the
movies–and they all have mistakes–at least they’re yours, and you can learn from them.”

-Guillermo del Toro, in The Onion

“Fail. Fail again. Fail better.”

– Samuel Beckett

Apple Phone: A master class in product development, design of several types, and a careful look at consumer needs and wants, filtered through the needs of the corporation. It’s beautiful because it’s a system that respects all of it’s parts, with maybe a bit of favor given to the company.

It also makes me thing of the future. It’s hard to believe that when information and technology design become even more indespensible to our lives, for example when motor vehicles become interface and information driven, rather than mechanical, all those involved will be as open and forward thinking as apple, showing respect and restraint. They’re obviously not saints (DRM, etc.), but they’re closer than most who design and sell.