Tag: British Invasion

The Filipino Invasion

You will find a bunch of Filipino bands around Saigon, from Hard Rock Cafe to Acoustic.

When the British rock bands gained noteriety in America back in the 60’s, the phenomenon was coined The British Invasion.

Now Vietnam is experiencing similar invasion by their neighbors.  They got the language (English), the look (still brown-skinned), and the connection (E2 in cross-cultural distance).

Acceptance rates have been high.

You will find in Saigon clusters of APEC (Japanese Alley, Korean district , backpackers district and Chinese district).  The Filipino bands just show up, when it’s their turn to play.

Rap and rock.

All with long key chains, tight jeans and wool caps.

Some Western faces were there in the audience. Beer choices are also varied, from Tiger to Heineken, Corona to Coors.

To see Saigon of the future, you need to tap into this crowd.

Kids who first are in step with the beat from strange shores, then to eventually be resettled there (Ivy League even). It happened to me with “California Dreaming”. Now, a bunch of my classmates are living there.

This Christmas will see a wave of Vietnamese from overseas back for a vacation.

Fuel to the fire.

Rock on.

The irony is the Filipinos who taught ESL in the refugee camps back in the early 80’s, kept staying put, while their Vietnamese students (the audience in this case, which often had a feel of a “repeat after me” English class ), moved on to America, where the British Invasion once took place.

For now, while the set last, nobody noticed if you were black or white.

Music unites. Especially when singers stick their mikes to the audience during the refrain “I try so hard, and get so far, in the end, it doesn’t even matter”.

Movements

In the latest  issue of the New Yorker we find a cartoon, showing two women with huge brand-name shopping bags, blurting out “I am going to start my own Occupy movement on 57th St”.

Scott Peck, on Organization, observes that organisations go through phases: honeymoon , chaos then, compromise before reaching full functioning.

Movements however are little bit different (spontaneous and horizontal spread) e.g. Ms movement.

Wonder Woman, shopping for Wonder Bread and raising wonderful children, although a few grew up to be “flower-children”.

If you want to understand the human potential movement, you need to see that “naked gestalt circle” in TIME. We were into breathing, feeling and (organic) gardening.

The thing about movements is that they morph and move on.

In their wake, Ms movement for instance, we have a whole generation of children grow up without close supervision from either parent (pre-Mr Mom era).

I was both fortunate and unfortunate to grow up with two sets of parents: one biological, and the other, already-grown-up siblings (who to this day can’t grow out of their surrogate role). With two women of the house being out of the house, I learned to grow up quick on my own.

While sorting through various upheavals, from the British Invasion (Beatles) to “the Invasion of the Body Snatchers“, I was mindful of movements, but always missed out on them by a few years (sexual revolution, de-apartheid movement, organic movement and computer revolution).

There is nothing inherently evil or good about movements. It’s an exploitable situation when people are seeking and open to change e.g. Jim Jones and San Diego suicide pact. One can easily be swept away in clashes and chants, in mobs and marches.

The very leaderless nature of a movement gives it both authenticity and vulnerability. By the time it fizzles out, we have no central figure to blame (or send city-sanitation bills to).

In Egypt, they had arrested a Google executive, but a few days later, he was surprised that the Arab Spring had taken hold during his detention.

Right now, the movement to go online (shop until you drop) has surely advanced way pass its honeymoon phase (dot.com) and chaotic phase (dot.com burst).

Web 2.0 is here to stay (Groupon was so confident that it had refused Google’s best offer) and to push to the Cloud (Facebook has just picked Sweden to anchor its large server farm). A digital joke: can your parent tell a server from a waiter? Or as in our New Yorker’s cartoon, Occupy Wall Street vs Occupy Fifty-Seventh St?

When it comes to movements, you need to zoom out and take a balcony view. While having less fun, detachment helps you see the DNA strand that runs through all : dis-contentment. History is made up of movements, large and small. In my short time, it just happens to be full of both. Now, where should we Occupy next?

Imagine, again

By now, we all have seen the picture of Congresswoman Giffords, in glasses, recovering from a near fatal shooting. Let’s rewind to 1980, and imagine John Lennon with that same  “luck”.

I can only see Lennon as the nemesis during the 80’s, if not again during the Iraq war.

We would have been stronger, not weaker, in the presence of harsh critics.

It would be a test, to see if the draft (Vietnam) itself was the main driver behind war opposition.

On the arts side, we would probably have seen Lennon in various designer’s sunglasses. Perhaps Paul and John would have played together at the marquee of the Ed Sullivan theater in New York City.

Thirty years is a lot of time for an artist to stretch his imagination, expand his vision and mature in his expressions.

If the US hadn’t been innovative enough, it would never be even with government mandate.

Creativity came from within. Intrinsic,  not forced or legislated.

I propose this time, not “American in Paris” as in the last century, but “American in the Orient”. Come to learn, not to loot. Columbus set a bad example and precedence (among the unintended consequences is tribal casinos, a legalized form of taking back what’s been taken). As of this edit, the Chairman of Blackstone did just that: offering scholarships for American to come to China and learn about China.

We watched in amazement as the head of an investment fund in Vietnam gave an interview on BBC, answering in Vietnamese, his second language.

http://bbc.in/kpiHH7

His obvious competitive advantage.

Britain might or might not have planned it, but the Beatles and subsequent ” British invasion” , have accomplished much more than all the germs, guns and steel. Soft power in the age of declining monarchy.

Artists and musicians connect at the emotive level. Memoirs and white papers are for PR folks. We got our Gaga on the ” edge” since she was “born that way”, or Madonna who had admitted long before Paris Hilton appeared on the social scenes that she was “a material girl”.

But then, I couldn’t have come up with a better plot than reality itself.

By shooting John Lennon, Mark Chapman forever became a publicity parasite, dangling on the looming shadow of a great artist and icon of all time .

I don’t know where John Lennon is today (we will all find out by default), but I do know every time I hear those piano notes from Imagine, it brought me back to that scene, with me waiting, under a tree, with my heart beating fast (puppy love).  Every generation has to come to terms with its own illusion and delusion. Mine happened to be eclipsed by war. One thing I know, time went faster when you lived in the extremes. Yet even then, we took time, to dream, to love, to hope and to imagine.

And John Lennon, shot down, but not out, helped us along.

I cannot imagine a scenario for Imagine 2.0, because one cannot mix oil and water, analog and digital. Genius and talent came once in a life time to grace us with their combination of the 7 notes. Can’t legislate that. Being outside of the box, we don’t have to be told  to “think out of the box”. What one sees depends on where one stands.

Short-tail product pool

Muzak pipes out “Beautiful stranger” by Madonna. Yahoo celebs still carries head-shots of Paris Hilton.

And Vanity Fair features Cher-is-back.  Holiday best-seller list shows John Grisham and Harry Potter. Across the pond, we are refreshed with royal wedding. I know 20 per cent of celebrities dictate 80 per cent of what we see or hear.

Easy comes, easy goes (Ricky who?).

At least, via I-tunes, you can still buy Beatles music. Long tail.

The British invasion, still.

I thought about taking a picture in front of the book shelves. It will be a documentation of a great transition (from print to online). I am sure future generation will look back and ask, what are those things behind great grandpa?

And I hope in the background, one can zoom in to see a variety of authors and subjects.

Why would anyone want to go through life, watching formula-movies, franchise TV shows, and read plots whose outcome one could already guess? The whole point of this side of life (art), is to surprise you, to uplift you, and to awaken you to new possibilities and twist.

No wonder children can’t stand going through the Edu-mill. They opted for stimuli on-line, whether it’s gaming or texting.

Friedman even op-eds that Education is the latest frontier (of warfare).

Seeing the intellectual poverty on display, kids “got it”. Doesn’t matter what they come up with, the market economy still dictates what and who are to be sold.

Blair-witch Project will go down in history as one of those rare blips on the radar.

And perhaps, with more affordable cam(era), young filmmakers will risk new narratives. Growing up digital, they have “mashed” multi-source in their brain.

What comes out will , at the very least, surprise us all, if not a call for change: kids ain’t dumb. We just don’t listen to them that often. Too busy to “follow”  the Armenian sisters, the wedding across the pond and who Paris is seen with last night.