Hasta La Ideas

Jumping ahead of this November’s launch of Walter Isaacson‘s authorized Steve Jobs biography, which forests across the earth are likely already suffering from given how many billions of copies are likely to be sold, Apple’s relatively unknown third founder has just released his own life story in book form. Although Ronald Wayne was only briefly involved with the company that would eventually become the behemoth it is today, coming on board as something of an “adult supervisor” between its two well-known founders, the aforementioned Jobs and Steve Wozniak, he left an indelible mark (MacStories reminds us that he not only “contributed to the first Apple logo” but also “drafted the initial partnership agreement to establish the company”). His recently-released autobiography, Adventures of an Apple Founder doesn’t concentrate entirely on his short time at Apple, given that he also had a long career in economic, socio-politics, aerospace and video games, but is sure to be just the thing to get people over the hump until Isaacson’s book is released. Here’s an interesting bit more from MacStories:

He was given a 10% stake in Apple which, however, he sold for $800 after a few weeks. He later received an additional $1500 for giving up on any claim of ownership in Apple, thus bringing his original 10% to $2300 worth of “profit”, whereas if he stayed on Apple until today his 10% would be worth $35 billion.

Today’s Ronald Wayne says he doesn’t regret his decision, made “with the best information available at the time”.

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A book designed for the See Better to Learn Better program guides providers through the process of selecting free eyeglasses for children. (Photos: fuseproject)

This just in from Copenhagen: designer Yves Béhar has received one of five 2011 INDEX: Awards for See Better to Learn Better (Verbien), a program in partnership with Augen Optics and the Mexican Government for the design and distribution of free eyeglasses to schoolchildren in Mexico. The fuseproject founder is no stranger to the award, bestowed annually by a Danish nonprofit founded in 2002 to promote “design that improves life.” INDEX: recognized Béhar in 2007 for his design of the XO laptop developed by Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child organization. Béhar plans to use the 2011 award purse of €100,000 (approximately $144,000) to fund the next phase of See Well to Learn Well. The project will expand into the U.S. this fall, beginning with the San Francisco Bay Area. Since its launch in 2010, See Better to Learn Better has given free eye exams to 500,000 children in Mexico and has supplied 358,000 of them with glasses. An additional 240,000 kids and 20,000 adults are expected to receive glasses during the 2011-2012 school year.
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Having never been to Burning Man, the temporary city/festival that pops up around this time every year in the middle of the desolate Nevada desert, we’d always assumed that the whole thing had no planning at all, as a sort of “anything goes” mantra seemed like the guiding principle of the whole thing. Oh but how wrong we were, as per usual, there’s always a much more interesting story lying around the corner. The NY Times this week published an obituary for Rod Garrett, a landscape designer who became the event’s city planner, as it were, in 1997. Over the next few years, Garrett had well-honed “Black Rock City,” the name the temporary site is given, into a finely tuned bit of city planning, with things resembling neighborhoods, city centers, and functional roads. It’s a fascinating read, from both a planning-out-of-nothing aspect, and for those of us who likely will never attend (we’re not big on getting dirty) but are wildly curious about. Here’s a bit:

Mr. Garrett made a list of almost 200 planning goals and began trying to find a way to satisfy as many of them as he could. When he sketched a circle, with the Man in the middle and the system of radial roads, things started falling into place. The area closest to the Man would be reserved for art installations, creating a parklike zone that complemented the “residential neighborhoods” in the same way Central Park makes Manhattan livable. City services like an ice dispensary and a medical station would be concentrated under a temporary roof within the inhabited zone. (Each year Mr. Garrett designed the vast, tentlike structure, which is known as Center Camp.)

Unrelated other than tangentially, the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Spud Hilton recently posted this piece, also challenging our “free to do anything” conceptions about the event, about Burning Man’s extremely tight restrictions on photography.

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Oscar Niemeyer will be 104 this December, but he’s still apparently going plenty strong, with none of those back and forth trips to the hospital that so plagued him last year. Following his recent appearance in the soon-to-be-released Urbanized documentary, the opening of his new foundation, and hopefully still working on his new interest in songwriting, the AP reports that the legendary architect has just released a new book, launched this week in his home city of Rio de Janeiro. Details on who is publishing and if and when it will be released here in the US aren’t known, but the title is The Churches of Oscar Niemeyer and, as the title would suggest, it contains “photos and sketches of the churches and chapels he has designed over his long career.” While his 1943 Church of St. Francis in Pampulha, Brazil is arguably his most famous, you can see a number of images of his additional impressive, thoroughly modern work on churches over at ArcSpace. Whoever winds up publishing, we just hope it doesn’t cost $650 like his last did through Assouline. Though fortunately, they also put out a regular, $25 version as well.

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So apparently the internet gets all enraged when singer Rihanna and her director copies David LaChappelle, Beyonce and Co. borrows liberally from photographers Pieter Hugo and Ed Kashi, or when Beck, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Keith Schofield repurpose strange images found on the internet, but when Lady Gaga does the same, she’s applauded or the whole thing is just ignored. Maybe it’s because she describes herself as an artist with dreams of an exhibition at the Louvre? Whatever the case, the singer’s latest music video, You and I was released last week and it’s being viewed as either a) an homage to Marina Abramović, b) a slight copy of Abramović’s work, particularly her video piece, The Great Wall Walk wherein the artist walk toward one another across a wide stretch of China’s Great Wall (it’s sort of the same basic plot in Gaga’s clip), or c) the vast majority of people don’t know who Abramović is, so it doesn’t matter, or it’s good that the singer, who is a well-established Abramović fan, is trying to at least raise partial awareness of another person’s work (without every really doing that). To get extra, fine-tooth-comb picky, we recommend hitting up Flavorwire, who have put together this piece on “Lady Gaga’s Most Blantant Contemporary Art Rip-Offs,” which is just as it sounds, comparing her previous music videos to the art that, at times, seems that “inspired by” might not be the most accurate phrase, when “copied directly” would perhaps work better.

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