New America Media, News Analysis, Behrouz Saba, Posted: Oct 06, 2011

On the morning of October 5, an unseasonable winter storm rumbled into Southern California, drenching the Los Angeles basin and creating an appropriately somber setting for the news to follow later in the day of Steve Job’s demise after a long and courageous battle with pancreatic cancer.

I spent most of the morning with a client at my desk, weighing each word of an important business document. His wife sat unobtrusively on the sofa, first working and then watching a film with earphones on her featherweight, bright orange iBook. Her peals of laughter indicated that she was quite enjoying herself.

When my work was done, I asked her what movie she had been watching. It was “Just Go With It,” she told me, a comedy starring Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler.

The incident confirmed my long-held belief that movie audiences will make the best of it, even though Hollywood now offers vapid Sandler comedies instead of the incisive satire of films like “The Graduate”, while music fans have to do with the likes of Lady Gaga instead of Joni Mitchell and Jimi Hendrix. Perhaps American literature has fared the worst; David Baldacci and John Grisham now dominate the same bestseller lists which were once graced with the names of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow.

Jobs, perhaps more than any other human being, created the machinery to put music, film and books at our fingertips even as writers, filmmakers and musicians came to rely on his trustworthy hardware and nimble software to compose, edit and refine their works. Apple also proved that computers needed not to be eyesores, introducing products whose sleek lines and functional forms have defined a new era of elegance in industrial design.

Yet this evening, teary eyed and emotional, I am hunting for words to mourn him and to honor his legacy even as I consider the fact that American art, from film and music to literature, has been on a downward spiral while information technology has continued to make breathtaking breakthroughs in ease and possibilities of creativity.

I have attended numerous product launches in which proud engineers of Avid software have used Apple laptops to show just how easy it is to acquire, edit and manipulate cinematic images, performing miracles that once required spools of film, unwieldy Moviolas and clunky cutting machines. Such events are sometimes presented on soundstages of major Hollywood studios where legacy equipment was used decades ago to create “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Casablanca,” masterpieces in the brightest of colors and the sharpest of black-and-white that digital wizardry can never touch.

Jobs is a legend and an idol to countless admirers, yet I find myself all the more respectful of his memory as I introduce a note of criticism in my own admiration. I am most wary of Pixar, the computer animation company which he acquired and led during the years when he was forced out of managing Apple Inc.

Pixar produced such animated feature films as “Cars,” “Wall-E” and “Monsters, Inc.”, soulless attempts one and all that play desperately for laughs and approval, lacking decisively the human touch, grace and fluidity that defined such hand-drawn Walt Disney animation landmarks as “Fantasia” and the matchless “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” I like even less Pixar’s maudlin tear-jerker “Toy Story” franchise, which is a huge audience pleaser worldwide.

Jobs, with his insatiable curiosity, inventive mind and generous soul, would be happy to know that I am taking this opportunity to caution a new generation of creative artists, be they writers, musicians or filmmakers. All the technological magic, as Jobs so clearly demonstrated himself, is no match for the singular gifts of human imagination and discipline. Just as he traveled far and wide, dropped acid and dared to tinker with once-unpromising proposals in a garage, heirs to millennia of human creativity owe themselves some time away from their iPads, iPhones and iBooks.

Jobs has left the world with powerful gifts of navigation, yet it is in losing oneself that genuine ideas begin to form and true paths forward begin to appear.

I was lucky to come to Monterey, California from Tehran in 1966 to attend community college. I knew only a few words of English at a time when there was no long distance phone service to Iran and an airmail letter took five days to reach me.

For the next year I watched in mute wonder as America went from Doris Day to Janis Joplin in a seismic shift, an experience which would later endow me with abundant—some say excessive--loquaciousness. Never having heard of Steve Jobs, one evening I attended a dinner party at the home of an IBM engineer in Los Gatos, peering down at the shimmering spectacle of Santa Clara Valley below, realizing that I was watching a future that some of the best of human potentials had to offer.

In June of this year Jobs appeared before an electrified Cupertino City Council, articulating plans for Apple's new circular, glassed-in “spaceship” campus with optimum green space and the latest in ecologically sustainable infrastructure. He was, only months before his death, still envisioning and shaping the future.

Most of us may not, yet all of us should, aspire to the passion of Steve Jobs. He endeavored, until the very end, to leave the world a better place than he had found it.