Heroes

I'm reading a book right now called Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics, and it is going into great detail about two remarkable people, Goethe and Neils Bohr.

Goethe is widley believed to be one of the most brilliant people the world has ever seen - and the last great polymath.

Neils Bohr was not only a genius (although his talents were focused on physics, while Goethe's spanned all of science, as well as art), but he was a beloved father figure in his field.

So what do we do with heroes? Do we emulate them? Do we simply admire them?

One of my heroes is John Lennon - I admire his bravery in following his vision through all of the turmil that surrounded him sometimes. I love his artistry, and his dedication to it - post-Beatles Lennon was both still a talented and meaningful songwriter, but also an inspired activist, interested in other forms of art, like his wife Yoko Ono's interest in avant-garde. I am also pleased to discover his sense of humor, which was most pronounced (to the public at least) while he was a Beatle, but you could see it beyond that as well.

Having said all of that, I'm not sure if I would want to be John Lennon. Aside from being murdered when he turned 40 (I hope to last a little longer), Lennon was also a very tortured soul. You could hear it in Plastic Ono Band distinctly, but it was there, although not apparant, back early in the Beatles (he wrote "Nowhere Man" about himself).

So artists are tortured, that's a familiar motif, isn't it? Lennon would say he needed that pain in order to create art, and there is no doubt that many artists would agree. So do I want to be an artist like Lennon, at the cost of being miserable?

Was Neils Bohr, or Goethe miserable? Well, I know that Bohr wasn't, and I don't know much about Goethe. Sadly, I can never be as clever as them. Yet I can still work hard. And there is no doubt that these two worked very very hard.

Beethoven had this to say about a prince who was paying him to compose "What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven." Beethoven was a notorious hard worker - his sheet music was famously market with edits and scribbles, as he orchestrated the best note possible.

I think it is good to have many heroes, many whom are all different. It is probably the benefit of history for us to not only admire past people, but also to learn from them what worked best for them.

I should make a list of heroes I admire, what I admire about them, and what I can learn from them.

Visualizing "On The Road"

"Rather than mapping physical geography, her maps capture regularities and patterns within a literary space. The pieces featured in On the Map focused on Kerouac’s On the Road. The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac’s literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec’s approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor. And similarly, the act is near reverential in its approach and the results are stunning graphical displays of the nature of the subject. The literary organism, rhythm textures and sentence drawings are truly gorgeous pieces. It’s not often that I am so thoroughly impressed by the depth of an artist’s work, but somehow, for me, these pieces do it all. I know, who would’ve thought I’d have stumbled upon such incredible work in the gallery across from our hotel in Sheffield! It just goes to show the world is full of surprises."

She's talking about this
This came from here

Design

I love this video

"[Design is] the synthesis of form and content. In other words, without content, there is no form. And without form there's no content. A work of art is realized when form and content are indistinguishable. When form predominates, meaning is blunted. But when content predominates, interest lags. But the genius comes in when both of these things fuse." -Paul Rand

My favorite quote explaining why art is important comes in Kurt Vonnegut's book Mother Night.

"Howard-" he said to me, "future civilizations better civilizations than this one, are going to judge all men by the extent to which they've been artists. You and I, if some future archaeologist finds our works miraculously preserved in some city dump, will be judged by the quality of our creations. Nothing else about us will matter."

Acutally, I suppose this is only a motivating quote if you're concerned about legacy. I don't think that I am...

First Post

I've found that SICmoney has been a great learning experience, but there are other topics that I want to talk about, which go beyond the markets.

So this blog is devoted to what is on my mind - what I am interested in at that moment (as long as I get the time to blog about it).

Hopefully, this will be interesting.