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Sat 10 May 2003
A pianist doesn't spend time peeking inside the piano
Category : Commentary/nevillebrody.txt
I like this quote from Neville Brody at the Apple site, "I liken working on the Mac to jazz. To play jazz properly, you have to become highly skilled at an instrument. Working with a Mac, you have to learn the technology just as you would learn to play an instrument or learn to paint with a brush. Then you have to forget it and then simply start creating and building. A pianist doesn't spend time peeking inside the piano." I happen to read his bio at the Apple site. Just yesterday, I was looking through some old issues of "The Face", and the designer of a lot of the typefaces "The Face" used then was this guy called Neville Brody. And only a few days ago, I had been writing about how, if you're really serious about using computers well, you wouldn't bother wasting time opening and closing the PC box, pulling out cards and such. So I'm in the midst of some cross currents. I remember Arthur Koestler describing, in "The Act of Creation", how the act of creation comes about when you have "an intersection of lines of thought which brings together hitherto unconnected ideas and fuses them into a creative synthesis". That's an interesting book to read in conjunction with Robert Pirsig ("Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance") who wrote about how, when a craftsman is focused on the act of creation, he is at one with his creation. Like the archer fused to his target, the bow ceased to exist.
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