A lot of young, creative people will read this book, individuals – such as myself – who never really thought of or cared about business models, board meetings, and CEOs. And, of course, as Walter Isaacson’s exhaustively researched biography shows, Steve Jobs exemplified none of these things in the typical sense. He was a prototype, a worthy model for new thinking and future innovation.

With full access to Jobs, family members, friends, associates, colleagues current and former, Isaacson had finally agreed to write the biography on commission when he learned Jobs was about to undergo his first cancer operation in 2009. Jobs encouraged everyone to be open and honest with Isaacson, surprisingly giving the author full control over the finished manuscript – with exception to the cover design. Jobs’s primary desire behind the biography was that he wanted his four children to know him better.

What we’re left with is a candid and sometimes brutally honest look at the professional and private life of one of the world’s greatest modern innovators. From his birth in 1955, subsequent adoption, high school years in California, LSD experiments, dropping out of college and travelling to India for seventh months, to creating Apple in his parents’ garage with Steve Wozniak. We learn about the rise of Apple’s early years and how and why Jobs was ousted from his own company only to heroically return in 1997 for what many consider the most successful business story of our time.

The second half of the book mainly focuses on the development of Apple products after Jobs’s return, as well as his time with Pixar. It is interesting to see how Jobs functioned at the helm and rejuvenated the company but may not be enough to quench the appetite of hardcore tech enthusiasts and Apple junkies. (Hey, you can’t satisfy everybody.) Another fraction of readers, meanwhile, will have by this point decided Jobs was too much of an eccentric jerk to warrant their care or to demand much of their reading time, which is unfortunate and unfair.

Jobs viewed people and the world around him in binary terms. Everything for him was either trash or ingenious. No middle ground. This was a component of his own genius, which worked against him at times, especially when coupled with his ‘reality distortion field,’ a blatant disregard of facts in order to achieve perfection. Isaacson’s take on Jobs is balanced and honest enough, that a lot of readers will walk away with rounded view of Jobs.

Toward the end, Isaacson even writes himself into the book, which there is no way around, seeing as how he was part of Jobs’s life for those last two years. It is this proximity that makes the book’s only true shortcoming all the more surprising. The third major arc of Jobs’s life is his illness and death. Isaacson treats this in a detailed yet respectful manner but unfortunately misses the emotional impact found in Jobs’s sister Mona Simpson’s eulogy, published in the New York Times. Perhaps such insights are best left off the printed page, but on the other hand, Simpson’s words show that the way Job’s died carried more significance and beauty than anything he’d ever done, defining himself above all his other achievements. That his legacy has only just begun.

What Isaacson does capture is that Jobs always had a premonition that he would die relatively young. It explained the urgency in all his work and fuelled his desire to contribute and achieve.

There are enough lessons between the pages of this book to give the newer generations something to chew on as they approach the next age in innovation, biology intersected with technology, as Jobs accurately points out to Isaacson toward the end.

Isaacson’s biography serves as an important key to understanding Steve Jobs. His lessons on life you can carry around in your pocket if you want to engage in work that will help people, work that will change the world, work that will “make a dent in the universe.” Or at least you can try. Always try.

Over twenty five years of making music and The Flaming Lips are still turning heads, attracting new fans and re-inspiring the old ones. Their latest headline involves their announcement to record a 24-hour song to be released via hard drive inside five human skulls on Halloween. Quite a progression from the six-hour song they just released, which actually turns out to be worth listening to.

This group has always blazed its own path – sometimes with actual fire, onstage psychedelic freakouts that won them a record contract with Warner Bros. in the early ‘90s. Since then they’ve evolved over a number of albums, from the early days of scene-changing surreal noise punk to critical masterpieces like The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.

At the end of their 20-year contract with Warner Bros. last year, record company execs offered the band complete creative control of which in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Wayne Coyne said “Well, I think they are relieved that we can do it. Because for the last three or four years anyway, there has been desperate talk of ‘What do we do, as a record company? What is the way to make records now?’”

Recent projects include releasing music through a life size gummy skull, with a USB of four tunes embedded in a gummy, marijuana-flavored brain. At the end of September the band turned even more heads, recording and releasing the six-hour song, designed to be played as “background noise while you’re doing something cool.” They allowed fans, for $100, to add their name to a list read by Sean Lennon at different intervals throughout the six hours, the twenty thousand dollars in proceeds donated to the Oklahoma City SPCA and Academy of Contemporary Music at Oklahoma City University.

The six hour song was such a hit that this Halloween The Flaming Lips plan to top themselves yet again, this time with a 24-hour song to be released inside a skull. In another interview, Coyne explained the skeletal provider Skulls Unlimited: “Nothing that we’re doing is bizarre or illegal. Heads come into this place and they have these flesh-eating beetles which literally eat every molecule of flesh off of these things and you’ll end up with a human skull.”

I propose to write a profile on the band, joining them on part of their current tour and interviewing friends, fan, family, and band members for an up-close look at what is perhaps one of the most innovative music groups in modern history, their music, their stage show, everything about them embodies a colourful message of truth, wonder and cognitive freedom. This band is a beacon of hope and inspiration for young people everywhere, and they are about to set everything on fire again. Maybe they already have.

Below, the six hour song “I Found a Star on the Ground” divided into three parts. Enjoy.

“before, therapist, after”

I dressed casually, had hours before my appointment with my therapist so looked around to see if anyone was home.  My little brother was, so I put my finger in his cereal bowl and he told me it didn’t bother him.

“Why aren’t you up to something?”

“I will be, I just wanted some cereal.”

I repeated Cereal like he’d said it funny, but he knew he hadn’t, so that was a draw.

Then I called my friend Vladimir and we agreed he would drive me to get coffee if I bought him coffee, too.  Vladimir also agreed to drive me to my therapist session, asked me a lot of questions about it, asked me, most specifically, if I thought it was helping and I got really earnest that it certainly seemed to be, felt a little like I was trying to sell him on seeing a therapist, too, but he’d never do that because he was against talk as a cure for anything—if I broached the subject he’d rattle off a list of wars and find things to blame them on then would sum up by saying how everyone should “just shut up”.

The coffee he ordered was darker than mine, but neither of us knew why since it had come from the same pot.

***

As usual, my therapist told me about what she’d watched on television some random time to get me at ease, then asked me how things were with my girlfriend Lexi.

“The same.”

Pointless answer, but it was kind of necessary.  We’d been discussing how I’d stepped out on Lexi after we’d had a fight about something insensitive I’d said—only it had taken two sessions for me to honestly see how it had been insensitive as opposed to just “something I shouldn’t have said”—how I’d, for some reason I could recall less and less, brought up how her nipples were brown and not pink and that it was odd because it kind of went against how I’d, just unconsciously, been brought up to think about breasts.  This had escalated from there into me telling her not to be angry when she got angry and by an hour after it got catastrophic.

It had taken some convincing to get my therapist to understand that I honestly did like my girlfriend’s breasts and particularly her nipples and specifically that they were brown, but still it all got tied in to general thoughts of infidelity and that maybe I wouldn’t be satisfied, would continue to be hurtful and self-destructive in matters of the heart until I’d gotten the “pink nipple thing wholly out of my system,” something I said I couldn’t really do without defeating the point of therapy.  Rightfully, my therapist had pointed out that “getting it out of my system” did not necessitate infidelity or, indeed, any kind of sexual activity at all, she had just meant that we talk about it and then about the underlying causes of it.

But, this session it all got off on the wrong foot because I’d said, and it was true, that I thought women could more easily get laid, in a random way, by an attractive member of the opposite sex than could men.

“You know that’s a very chauvinist thing to say, don’t you?”

“Is it?”

I knew it was, maybe, but tried to explain what I’d meant in a non-chauvinist sounding way until it got all too complicated.

“What isn’t chauvinist?”

“Most things are, actually.”

“So what am I supposed to do about it, spend all day long thinking what may or may not be chauvinist?”

“Does that seem like a burden to you?”

“What’s the female equivalent of chauvinist?”

Wished I hadn’t asked, because she was very erudite in her explanation and it made me feel like a dolt, a feeling I kept to myself.  I was uncomfortable because she was intelligent, but at the same time I wanted an intelligent person to disagree with me about pretty much everything I thought.  Principally.  I knew, smart as I might think myself, that pretty much every time I read or heard something said by an obviously really really intelligent person it was either in opposition to what I thought or else just way out in left field, as far as I could ever come up with, so I kind of needed to be put down on.

Again, I kept this to myself.

“Have you and your girlfriend been having sex?”

“No.  We’re not to that point, yet, it wouldn’t be comfortable.”

“It would be comfortable for you, right?”

Her office was fairly makeshift, made me wonder about the other offices and things in movies set in therapist offices—realism in cinema tended to mean dull looking, drab, real equated to “not a lot of effort put into it.”

“What?”

“You would be comfortable, having sex with her again?”

“Yes.”

“Does she know that?”

“I think so.”

“Have you told her that?”

“No.”

“Have you told her the opposite of that?”

I had.

“Yes. I tell her that I’m not ready either, that I think we need to get that unconscious feeling with each other again, comfortable and all.”

“Why do you tell her that?”

“You’re not tape recording me are you?”

She leaned back, seemed honest when she said she wasn’t, but really I didn’t care.

“Well, I tell her that because I think  I’m ugly and not a good lover, I kind of feel comfortable, kind of feel more comfortable not having to have sex because I think I can’t please her, really, that I’m ham fisted and overall kind of middling and I don’t think she makes sounds like sounds in pornos and stuff not because people don’t do that, in reality, but because I’m not very good at pleasuring her—I think it’s gotten to the point that even in her thoughts she isn’t turned on by me, the idea of me even, she doesn’t see me as sexual so it’d just be awful for her to hear that I wanted to have sex with her again, I think she’s really waiting for the point that I tell her I’m fine with not having sex so that she doesn’t have to worry about it, not with me.”

“You think she’d leave you?”

“Yes.”

“You want her to?”

“Yes.”

But the push of honesty left me, I clammed up, made her promise she hadn’t tape recorded that or anything.

“I didn’t tape record it.”

“Or videotape it.”

“I didn’t videotape it.”

“Or have someone else tape recording it or video recording it or don’t secretly have Lexi in another room listening.”

“What do you think she’d do if she’d overheard that.”

“I don’t know.”

“No, tell me.”

“I don’t know. I guess I think she’d find me pathetic but she’d keep quiet about it because she’s not the sort who would admit to listening in on my therapy sessions and also she wouldn’t want you to get in trouble or something.”

“Why would I get in trouble?”

I tried to turn the tables on her by asking her if she ever had nightmares—the ruse being she’d either tell me “she was the one asking the questions” or else she’d think I’d suddenly brought up “nightmares” for some important reason and we could talk about the nightmares I had I never told her about, but she didn’t do either of those things.

***

Vladimir showed up wearing a new shirt which I told him I hotly disliked.  There wasn’t enough time in the day to deal with Vladimir and all his new shirts, I decided, so I told him maybe he better just keep things like that to himself.

“You’re moody.”

I just rode in silence and we wound up going to see a movie, but then after we’d bought tickets wound up talking to some people in the coffee bar and that went on for a long time.  Vladimir did his best to get a refund, but came back saying they’d just given him free passes to see something else—we tried to sell these to people, but they all could see the blood in the water, offered us half price at best which was unacceptable, we would just use the free tickets, another time.

My dear friend George Zymarakis often compares his 75 years of life to Homer’s The Odyssey. The first time I met him we talked about a lot of things, and at the end of the conversation he said that he was Odysseus and that after three Odysseys, he’d reached Ithaca. “Do you understand?” he asked. And I said, ”What do you mean by Odysseys, George?” He turned his finger in the air, tracing the circumference of a slow motion frisbee. “Each Odyssey is a marriage, you see? Now I’ve reached my Ithaca.”

George has continually suggested I read Homer’s The Odyssey, the Fitzgerald translation, saying that we would then be on the same page.

At the bookstore last night, I could only find a different translation. A prose version of the Odyssey, translated by T.E. Shaw. The alternative was a specially bound and illustrated edition translated into rhyming verse. Horrid. I hate poetry that rhymes. Plus the T.E. Shaw version was only 4 Euros. I took it home, looked up this T.E. Shaw fellow. Turns out his real name is T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia of international fame.  At the beginning of the introduction he writes, “The twenty-eighth English rendering of the Odyssey can hardly be a literary event, especially when it aims to be essentially a straightforward translation. Wherever choice offered between a poor and a rich word richness had it, to raise the colour.”

It’s a shame that I’m just now reading this epic, but trust me, I’m reading as fast as I can. Also making my way through Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon and The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. More on these works later.

To get a feel for the language of Shaw’s version:

By now the other warriors, those that had escaped head-long ruin by sea or in battle, were safely home. Only Odysseus tarried, shut up by Lady Calypso, a nymph and very Goddess, in her hewn-out caves. She craved him for her bed-mate: while he was longing for his house and his wife. Of a truth the rolling seasons had at last brought up the year marked by the Gods for his return to Ithaca; but not even there among his loved things would he escape further conflict. Yet had all the Gods with lapse of time grown compassionate towards Odysseus – all but Poseidon, whose enmity flamed ever against him till he had reached his home.

Okay. Too much computer for me. I raise my coffee mug to a new day, another private apocalypse in the spirit of personal and spiritual revelation. “Have a happy” as my dear friend George likes to say.

Gregory Frye

July 2011

Athens, Greece

Growing up, the most intimidating man in my life was not my father. The most intimidating man in my life was perhaps the father figure from Ren & Stimpy

I never had a father of my own, so I absorbed—subconsciously or no—fatherly lessons from the men and male peers around me. I was never the leader. Never the authority on the playground. I was always the low rung on the ladder. I accepted this role, and today I’ve even learned to embrace it. To this day I tend to play the role of the bumbling apprentice.

I never cared much about tools, or sports, or pussy. And still today, the first two of those three don’t thrill me at all. Lacking the stable father figure gave me a warped “cartoon family” mentality about dads (and to an extent, about family in general). To me, fathers come in two flavors: the slapstick, endearing oaf and the strict disciplinarian. There is no middle ground in cartoons and therefore no middle ground in real life. I am the former. Ask my wife, even in the most inappropriate situations I’d offer a quick one-liner before I’d capitalize on the chance to teach my child a life lesson.

So to me, the extreme, anger-fueled father figure from Ren & Stimpy represented a reality that I was always glad to have avoided. My father could have been this man. I could have been raised in his image. I could have cared about sports. Dear God!

This unique relationship I have with the fatherly roles makes the themes explored in Stranger Will even more interesting, I think. On its surface, the novel is a story of a man unsure of his impeding role as a father. His fiancée is seven months pregnant; this man is further than two months from accepting this role. Deeper, the story is about what it means to carry on for another generation. Why do we have children? Surely, we aren’t controlled by instinct; humans are ethically independent creatures. The only answer I could come up with is that another generation represents another chance at perfection. But we all know there is no such thing as perfection, right? And thus the dilemma for our soon-to-be-father.