40 Day Dream - Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros
saw them at Bowery last night. great band, great show
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WSJ: How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent? Cormac McCarthy: Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time. WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work? Cormac McCarthy: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
— Excerpted from John Jurgensen’s “Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy” at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529703577274572.html
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“The Wolves(Act I & II)” a Bon Iver cover by Ellie Goulding
8. Start with Something Minimal Lots of founders mentioned how important it was to launch with the simplest possible thing. By this point everyone knows you should release fast and iterate. It’s practically a mantra at YC. But even so a lot of people seem to have been burned by not doing it: Build the absolute smallest thing that can be considered a complete application and ship it. Why do people take too long on the first version? Pride, mostly. They hate to release something that could be better. They worry what people will say about them. But you have to overcome this: Doing something “simple” at first glance does not mean you aren’t doing something meaningful, defensible, or valuable. Don’t worry what people will say. If your first version is so impressive that trolls don’t make fun of it, you waited too long to launch. [3] One founder said this should be your approach to all programming, not just startups, and I tend to agree. Now, when coding, I try to think “How can I write this such that if people saw my code, they’d be amazed at how little there is and how little it does?” Over-engineering is poison. It’s not like doing extra work for extra credit. It’s more like telling a lie that you then have to remember so you don’t contradict it. [3] This is a variant of Reid Hoffman’s principle that if you aren’t embarrassed by what you launch with, you waited too long to launch.
— Excerpted from Paul Graham’s “What Startups Are Really Like” at http://paulgraham.com/really.html
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Whole Lotta Love (Led Zep cover) - Prince and his acoustic guitar
this is called talent
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. … No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
— Excerpted from Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement address at http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
— Excerpted from Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement address at http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
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“On September 7th, one day before the release of Jay-Z’s ‘The Blueprint 3,’ Brooklyn’s DJ Ayres released ‘D.O.J.: When Jay-Z Was Good,’ a collection of thirty-four Jay-Z songs. The title of the mixtape expresses a clear opinion of ‘Blueprint 3,’ and Ayres expands in the brief text of the post: ‘He sounds like he’s coasting along, so I wanted to go back and pull out a bunch of his music that made you bob your head, marvel at his flow, puff out your chest, or even raise the little hairs on the back of your neck…. Not included: #1 singles you’ve heard a million times, lazy one-take flows, lyrics about inventing the button-down shirt, songs dissing rappers who would later be signed to Jay-Z’s label, and songs produced by Eminem.’ The selection is spot-on, though there are at least three other mixtapes of the same length that would live up to Ayres’ title without duplicating a single track.”
Excerpted from Sasha Frere-Jones’ “Goalposting” at http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones/2009/10/recommended-listening.html
Essentially, Twitter left a ball and a stick in a field and lurked on the sidelines as its users invented baseball.
— Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter | Magazine (via fred-wilson)
this guy’s photos are seriously awesome and we own a couple of them. apparently he’s selling a bunch and gotham gal’s got the scoop.
