My mom was an amazing singer and music was a big part of my life, so I grew up listening to Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, Henry Mancini; I used to watch ‘The Andy Williams Show’ on TV. I was very musical, so I was watching stuff that most kids my age wouldn’t be interested in.
Whatever it is that’s bothering me – interacting with annoying guy at a restaurant, contemplating my age, or losing friends to illness – I’ll start to chip away at it. If you can poke holes in it, it’s not as formidable; it’s not as scary, and ultimately, it becomes another truth.
People who think that Sylvia Plath was a poor, sensitive poet are not getting that she had great amounts of ambition and anger that moved her along, or she wouldn’t have been able to fight against that depression to produce such an incredible body of work by the age of thirty.
If you don’t physically age gracefully, it’s a bit sad. I think Steven Tyler can get away anything, because he still looks like he did in ‘73. Especially from row Z backwards in an arena. As long as the Stones keep their hair and don’t get fat they’ll get away with the wrinkles.
The appeal of the Golden Age heroes for me is their simplicity, even their naivety – they represent the fundamental building blocks of the whole superhero genre, whether it’s a ‘super’ man able to lift cars, or a vigilante who terrorises criminals at night like Batman.
What came up at age 49 is I realized that of all the things I’m interested in, the thing I’m most interested in is figuring out what makes people tick, why people think the way they do, why they act the way they do. And I realized that music is such a great way to investigate why people do what they do.
In Silicon Valley, there are a lot of startups using computer vision for agriculture or shopping – there are a lot for clothes shopping. At Baidu, for example, if you find a picture of a movie star, we actually use facial recognition to identify that movie star and then tell you things like their age and hobbies.
One day, at my office, I wrote down some names and dates and notes, and I wrote a title, ‘The Age of Despair,’ and then some other ‘Ages’ – Innocence, God, Reason, Hope – and I wrote this as well: ‘Woman, born in 1930, lives till the age of 80 or so, suffers depression, marries a car dealer, has children who grow up to confuse her.’
One of my favorite tools is ‘flip it.’ ‘Flip it’ can become your new favorite mantra when you are having one of those mean thoughts. You can choose to flip it and change how you are feeling about yourself in that moment. This is helpful at any age.
In this age of communications that span both distance and time, the only tool we have that approximates a ‘whisper’ is encryption. When I cannot whisper in my wife’s ear or the ears of my business partners, and have to communicate electronically, then encryption is our tool to keep our secrets secret.
One of my favorite things, coming of age, reading comics, was these ideologies and these philosophies of these characters. Seeing those on the page really represented in amazing ways some of my favorite ‘Batman’ comics like ‘The Killing Joke’ or ‘The Dark Knight Returns.’
I’ve always been quite mature because of the way my parents brought me up. They were very good at talking to me like a person rather than a baby, and I was around so many actors and directors from such a young age because my dad is an actor. I was more comfortable with adults rather than actually being an adult child.
Researchers have been looking for biomarkers of age for a long time and have failed. People sell tests out there to measure your biological age, and none of them work. There’s no evidence that you can measure biological age with any reliability.
I think I’m one of those guys who was sort of always in comedy. I thought of myself – and other people seemed to think of me – as funny from a very young age. I was a very young comedy nerd and I even did sketch comedy in high school and college. I wrote and shot sketches on video and acted in them.
We, as artists, we have the right to express ourselves. That is our first amendment, freedom of speech. But I also believe that we have an obligation to the youth to be somewhat responsible in what we say on records. But I think that comes with age. I think that comes with artists growing up and becoming assured of who they are as people.
Bitcoin may herald the dawning of a new age in currency. It holds superior traits as a form of ‘good money.’ As a tangible form of asset (its core tangibility being its mathematical basis), it could become an incredibly important building block for the 21st century’s global economy.
Jobs are a centuries-old concept created during the Industrial Revolution. Despite the reality that we’re now deep in the Information Age, many people are studying for, or working at, or clinging to the Industrial Age idea of a safe, secure job.
The appearance of aged persons is too well known to make detailed description necessary. The skin of the face is dry and wrinkled and generally pale. The hairs on the head and the body are white. The back is bent, and the gait is slow and laborious, whilst the memory is weak. Such are the most familiar traits of old age.
I wanted to be a teacher. I love children, so I wanted to deal with children. Then I wanted to be a veterinarian. But by the age of ten or eleven, when I opened my mouth and said, ‘Oh, God, what’s this?’ I kind of knew teaching and being a veterinarian were gonna have to wait.
I had just discovered jazz, and I started singing in a kind of blues cover band at the age of 15. We called ourselves – it was a terrible name – the Blue Zoots. We couldn’t actually get our hands on zoot suits, nor did we dress in blue. We did covers of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and kind of Blues Brothers repertoire stuff.
I learned so much during my time at United. Sharing a dressing room with Paul Scholes, Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Ruud van Nistelrooy, and Ryan Giggs at such a young age was an amazing experience. I didn’t play as much as I would have liked, but it was a master’s degree in development both as a player and a person.
At the age of nine, I simultaneously fell in love with two Dutch sisters because they seemed so beautifully strange, and their clothes were mysterious and alluring – added to which, they could not speak a word of English. More than anything, I wanted to connect with them and embark on a vast journey of exploration.
We live in an age where there is a firehose of information, and there is no hierarchy of what is important and what is not. Where the truth is often fashioned through a variety of digital means. Are you your avatar? Who are you in social media? What face do you turn toward the world? How much does it have in common with who you actually are?
I think the thing I miss most in our age is our manners. It sounds so old-fashioned in a way. But even bad people had good manners in the old days, and manners hold a community together, and manners hold a family together; in a way, they hold the world together.
At the age of 6, a teacher full of ambitions, who taught in the small public school of Biran, convinced my family that I should travel to Santiago de Cuba to accompany my older sister who would enter a highly prestigious convent school. Including me was a skill of that very teacher from the little school in Biran.
