Tag: Cinema Paradiso

Cyclo in the time of Google

By now, you can still see a few weather-beaten cyclos around albeit restricted to tourist quarters.

I still remember the sound of horse carriage in the streets of  old Saigon.

My kid will be lucky if she knows what a cyclo is.

She knows Google though.

Paperless and painless search. Now with semantic search.

My profile, age in particular, triggers online ads on retirement funds.

Each day, we clear out trash in our home office and online.

Meanwhile, cyclo guys paddle along, knowing that their trade is joining the ranks of old scribes, horse shoe makers and Kodak shops. And the cinema is about to close its curtain. My uncle’s cinema is now a storage.

I came back fully related to the character in Cinema Paradiso,  with nostalgia.

The underlining theme is still there: where is that old blind film projectionist/mentor ? Mine is a guitarist who has recently been out of work.

We both need a gig. Maybe it will work out for him since he has upgraded his play list on an Ipad. But not for the cyclo guy whose best day constitutes but a few passengers hauling bulky merchandise. Cyclo is now relics of a colonial past: white folks and colored coolies, on a leisurely ride along smoke-filled streets packed with motorcycles made in China. Future shock has moved on to its Third Stage (Muscle, machine and Mind), from cyclo to motor-cycle and onto Google. People are making money by a click of the mouse, and not by paddling those three-wheelers, using 21st-century skill set and not primitive strands of muscle.

Modern technology doesn’t come without criticism, starting with the Luddites onto soon-to-be-released Circle.

Consider a huge percentage of Search are on the subject of Porn, to shut it down altogether would present a dictator’s dilemma.

No turning back, or you will turn into salt. Gosh, I miss the sound of horse carriage at Ben Thanh market. I miss being skinny , vulnerable and trusting. Faith that can move mountain. That some day, I will see face to face, although only through a glass darkly in the mean time.

Wisdom comes from mistakes, not missed opportunities.

I’d rather tried and failed than failed to try.

Tell that to the cyclo guy, who ordered two glasses of sugar-cane juice, while I could barely gulp down one. All I did was googling, while he was cycling. Muscle man in the age of Machine.

 

Poor substitute

We are so connected (Google Fiber) and disconnected (from people) at the same time.

Starting with TV broadcast which reduces viewership from a theatre like in “Cinema Paradiso” down to a nuclear family in their living room, to a Youtube video download for personal  use.

With smart phones, we don’t have people knocking on the phone booth for their turn or get listened in on party line In fact, the screen has taken over what used to be folded newspaper on morning commuter train..

In Asia, where technology-sharing is common (fridge, TV, rice cooker etc…) we now see a great divide between the old and new generation, of those who are low and  high-tech. Technological divide piling on top of generation gap.

It’s a lonelier place out there, although we “friending” more. Hello World! Any one out there?

American homes are connected via all sorts of devices: from set-top to desktop.

According to a study, per capita work space has reduced drastically since devices are getting smaller yet can store more data or because people simply work from home (no longer at Yahoo).

You would think we should then have more space in the office for a couch or extra chair, so co-workers can just pop in and chat.

It turns out, all those devices are poor substitutes for the one real need: human connection. No wonder English people now turn phone booths into pubs (third places). That is a good substitute and good use of industrial waste. If only we know what to do with those first generation big-screen TVs (intended as Lazy Boy’s Cinemas).

Stars and stunts

They stretched the truth to “show” it in better lights (as in Argo).

They twisted some arms, pushed the envelopes and burned both ends of the candle (one end is dream, the other memories).

They stepped into characters, sang the chorus and spoke the lines.

Light, sound, camera and …”action”.

Moving pictures. Marketing of dreams and merchandising of goods.

Set the theme and set the stage for next year and years to come.

This year is of no exception.

Except for newer versions and interpretation of old materials (Karenina, Lincoln and Hugo). Streisand finally sang Memories the way it meant to be from this vantage point when the composer himself had passed on. The last time it etched in our memory was that of  Robert Redford and herself in Black and White (Redford’s hair looked even blonde in Black and White).

Editors could afford growing hair. And soundtrack for foreign movies montage was still from Cinema Paradiso (our early moving-going experiences).

The Oscars. Hollywood annual Pilgrimage, with one billion followers, and millions of tickets and tapes sold. Stuff of dreams yet turned into hard cash.

Stars and stunts sell, even and especially in time of Sequester.

Saigon Skyline

Like a scene from Cinema Paradiso (when the film producer returned to his village just to find out his beloved movie house demolished for a parking lot) I too start seeing the skyline of Saigon rising, blocking the old bank where my sister used to work. Another one is being planned next to cho Ben Thanh where on a Sunday stroll, one could hear restless horses tapping their shoes on city pavement.

Modernity and memories.

Future and nostalgia. Progress and the Past.

More square feet from above and less stretching room down below.

Skyscrapers and shanty towns share the same eco-sphere.

Pedicabs and taxicabs, Marlboro and cappuccino.

Let’s go.

I remember the go-go bars on what used to be called Tu Do (now Dong Khoi). Our first rock and roll band played there at Ritz (Jo Marcel) with matinée show, which I sneaked in to hear. Toi muon minh la thu co cay, vui trong gio va khong uu phien (just want to be wild flowers, flirting in the wind without worry).

The 60’s America sang about “share the land”, while its military industrial complex “spray the land”. Now people are planning to build on the land.

Green building and green bag of money.

More living space on top of bank, more trees in the middle of  concrete structure.

Let’s do it.

Let’s do a deal.

Let’s build and they will come. Like Vegas and Venetian, like Macau and Madrid, Shanghai and Singapore.

No more Cinema Paradiso.

Just lost love and lost youth.

The village fool still stands in the town square, wondering what all the fuss was about. To him, cinema or parking lot, skyline or battle line, are the same. He never got a chance to be in the game.

He never even registered that his presence was acknowledged, much less his opinion.

Our iconic producer however felt a lump in his throat, seeing  the icon of his youth got demolished. As of this edit, my old neighborhood cinema just happened to catch fire.

You can never swim in the same river twice.

Certainly not here in the Saigon River.

 

Jobs’ off switch

Steve Jobs hated the on-off  switch. Perhaps more so because it was a relic of electricity (Edison) and automobile manufacturers (Ford). He did not like old wine in the same wineskin, given our always-on Cloud Service in  A/C data centers.

Apple chose North Carolina as a site to store music, video and the rest of its customers’ files. The FCC recently allowed the roll-out of White Space, wi-fi on steroid, also in NC.

Who needs the on/off switch! It had some utilitarian legacy (activate and deactivate) when hardware used to rule.

Now, software eats your lunch.

Of BMW’s  thousand components, a large portion are software-controlled. From Buggy to Beamer, the engineers have made a giant leap.

Jobs was quoted as saying (this was counter-intuitive and anti-academic):

“if Ford had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have said,

faster buggies”.  In short, it’s categorically different with revolutionaries.

Think different!

No on/off switch.

Just the dial.

Circular motion.

The experience economy.

Control the product from end-to-end to make every touchpoint with the customer an iSee! (Disneyland).

Progress , like time, waits for no man.

If you keep standing on the track, you will likely get run over.

Not a single word in Jobs biography states directly that he was a  futurist. Yet he could intuitively sense what was coming – his biography itself was well orchestrated (momenti mori) and ironically open-sourced (counter-culture life style, but proprietary business model).

In fact, religious zealots did take a shot at him for his views.

I wonder if those people secretly borrow an I-pad from friends to touch and feel (where is the on/off switch?).

I wonder what their legacies are as opposed to Jobs’?

And their destination : paradise or purgatory?

Jobs took his son to a business meeting (antennaeGate) mostly for I-phone IV damage control . “It would be a two-year worth of Business School  education” said he.

His biography, which offers more than a two-year worth of B-school, is a must-read for technologists, marketers and culture critics who want to understand the Valley ethos.

When arts (music in this case) found new venue (I-pod) and revenue (I-Tunes), it is unchained melody for the mass (unbundled as singles not whole album).

Be spoiled with IT 3.0 (cloud and social media) but also be thankful sitting on giants’ shoulders

An image evokes in my mind was that of Cinema Paradiso, where the kid got a ride home on the bike’s frame, wearing his mentor’s hat and chatting up as a fee for the ride. However long, enjoy the ride. That’s our reward . As Southwest Airlines would say, please collect your items to ensure faster turn-around at the gate.

Au cinema

When Facebook profile (soon to be called Timeline) needs me to complete my favorite movie section, I put down Cinema Paradiso.

It’s in Blu-ray now (Oscar-winning, well-preserved quality). It’s about growing up in an Italian village, with the cinema , Cinema Paradiso, as central theme. It was later demolished to make room for a parking lot. It’s a coming-of-age movie, with movie house no longer pro-fit-able (like Friendly’s ice-cream chain).  It mourned for the Best of youth, with melancholy and nostalgia.

It’s every man and woman’s twist-and-turn of fate, like an amusement park ride.

Mine was also related to a neighborhood cinema, one of dozen own by my uncle.

So I got in free, double or single features. My cousin just waved me in, no ticket was required.

I shed a lot of tears there in that darkened theatre.

I also watched Woodstock, the movie, a couple of times (Ten Years After, remember?) and was amazed at the energy and freedom of  American youth.

I even took my first date there, and half way through the movie, we sneaked out for a smoothie.

The theater is now own by someone else while both my uncle and cousin were no longer with us.

I sat across the street from it on one of my trips back to Vietnam. After I had finished my smoothie, I stood up and did not look back.

One cannot swim in the same current twice.

Yet, like the character in Cinema Paradiso, I often wonder what’s like to have lived the second time around.

Would I be embarrassed by a sudden surge of youthful feelings?

Can grown-ups like me indulge in another treat that of a child?

Will my first date and I even recognize each other however precarious the encounter may turn out to be?

I wish I could fade in the music piece (Cinema Serenade) from the movie right now.

It never fails to bring back scenes from the movie, but also, scenes from our own interrupted lives.

It’s so Italian yet so universal. “Go, don’t come back here”.

A little over ten years ago, they demolished a drive-in theater in Southern California to build a Walmart. Every time I drove past that site, I couldn’t help thinking of the old drive-in (teenagers were denied another place to hang out, unlike when my cousin took the projector home to show family wedding clips to hundreds of kids out in the open).

I guess that same sentiment was a trigger for the making of Cinema Paradiso: the loss of a gathering point, a common space and screen where we all are projectionists (self-projection). People nap, snore, kiss, eat and sometimes, just escape summer heat.

Now, we got home theaters (buy now, pay later) but it’s a solitary not communal act of viewing.

And certainly, no adult is going to take time to show a kid how to load a film reel inside the projections booth, or as in my case, wave me in to see a movie for free.

Yes, it’s now in Blu-ray: neither grainy nor counting down (or waiting for the second projector to kick in during intermission.) And certainly no attendant with flash light.

Technology (digital) brings change, at neck-breaking speed (hockey-stick curve), while our ability to adopt is bell-shaped.

I have waited for Alvin Toffler to come out with more of his series (which began with Future Shock). But apparently, yesterday’s futurist is today’s museum curator.

The thing with speed is, like the bullet train in Shanghai, no one knows how damaging the impact is going to be when two fast-flying objects collide.

I felt that gnawing in my stomach when taken up to the top of an amusement ride. I know it will soon drop me mercilessly with kids sitting behind screaming like characters in a horror movie.

The best scene in Cinema Paradiso was the one which our Toto enjoyed a stress-free ride leaving Alfredo with all the hard pedaling.

When men cry

At the last World Cup, the team from Netherlands, who lost, cried.

Ten years ago, at the World Trade Center, women and men cried (white dust on black suits).

And last night, I cried, while watching The Best of Youth, an Italian saga of a family coming of age since the 60’s. So much idealism, and helplessness.

Men don’t share the pain, and are not supposed to cry ( King Harald V of Norway cried openly, and this got a mention in Newsweek’s “What Now Little Country” piece).

They might email, text and tweet but not tears.

But this near-double-dip Recession should make both  men and women cry.

e.g how a push for sub-prime housing (NJNI , no job no income) turned the world on its head.

Now they are seeing an uptick in sub-prime auto loan (spreading out to 63 months).

When the unexplainable occurred, we blame it on the gods.

Archille. Made by the gods, and return to them.

Matteo, one of the main characters in the Best of Youth, exuded both gallantry and sadness.

He tried to carry the chip on his shoulders, at the neglect of his own well-being.

The uncompromising solution: jump to his death on New Year‘s Eve (most suicides are over the holidays).

His brother cried. His family cried. The entire Italian cinema viewers cried.

You had to be there to feel the force of emotion that had been built up from the beginning.

(the fireworks, the caller-ID rejects, the failure to pin down the bad guys who eluded justice, failure to de-institutionalize a friend…).

Last night, on PBS Nightly Business Report, a commentator was wise-cracked when suggesting we should have been thankful

that consumer sentiment ( euphemism for “when men cry”) was at its lowest just as it had been at the beginning of the Recession.

Turned out that his suggestions were not financially related at all.

He proposed thanking loyal customers who stuck around.

In short, gratitude as a substitute for economic incentives.

Meanwhile, another fresh face, the handsome man from Princeton, is to take over the top Economic Advisory post (First Harvard, now Princeton as long as they are from an Ivy League school).

Tough men don’t cry.

Only when the dream died (World Cup championship for instance).

This time around, just make sure the American dream lives on, flickering but not put out.

(At least, Henry Ford understood this when he decided on high wages for workers, who in turn, could afford to buy his model T’s).

That way, whoever imploded just went quietly. Don’t we wish an Italian-style on current malaise (where men are allowed to cry).

That way, they won’t go postal (or cut the grass violently w/ chain saw).

In today’s world, it’s hard to pin down who the bad guy is. Hence, no catharsis.

Except for one clear-cut case, this past summer, in Pakistan, when the world

agreed, that crime doesn’t pay. No tears were shed on that one, men’s or women’s.

Things we wish we could take with us

When at Indian Town Gap in 1975, I was busy helping out at the Bureau of Child Welfare so time passed rather quickly.

But not for my fellow countrymen. Many sat there worried: how were they going to make it in America, that winter was coming.

Many hurried weddings took place at the camp chapel.  People were busy matching up sponsors and foster children.

For me, I was glad I could earn a few bucks by being a translator. And spent them all on cassette tapes.

We recorded music (one machine would play, the other recorded, in the barrack’s bathroom).

“Lovin you” was number 1 on the Hit Parade that year. And ironically, someone was playing “Band On the Run”.

We left unfinished youth: time spent at cafe, listening to Lobo‘s number 1 hit “You and Me and the dog named Boo”.

Or felt so spiritual with “My Sweet Lord” .

If you want to “break in” to the Vietnamese market, best way is to figure out your niche, then play those music subliminally.

Mix in some French songs, because the Romantic era never left Vietnam, especially Hanoi. In fact, time seems to freeze there.

You can still see a Citroen on a good evening.

Back to my odyssey. So when I got to Penn State, I immediately made friends and we threw a party.

It’s one of those times when you could spot someone Vietnamese on a cold Harrisburg night, and he would let you sleep on the floor.

And never forgot the hospitality of people of the same human condition. And I realize now the things I wanted then to take with me: my dreams, my expressions of those dreams, and the heritage I left. No wonder song writers wrote about Hanoi after the evacuation of

1954, and Saigon, 1975. Those places are symbols of one’s lost times, unrealized dreams and definitely, curators of both wise and foolish choices.

To tourists , these cities are just crowded network of concrete dividers, and  trees are few. Tourists would place Hanoi, Hue and HCMC against a back drop of 100 places to see before they died. But little do they know, they have their own” Hanoi” and “Saigon” too. They just didn’t care to acknowledge, until the 11th hour.  No wonder I can identify with Cinema Paradiso. The Italian have a lot in common with the Vietnamese. We both like Sophia Loren.  We know what’s nostalgia is and do not feel ashamed to admit it.

What’s wrong with burning incense and feeling reconnect with loved ones, since they might not be living, but the relationships are very much alive. In fact, one loves one’s parents more when they are gone because absence makes the heart grow fonder. ” I love you too much to ever start liking you, so don’t expect me to be your friend”. Lobo knows how to say it, in a very Asian way. No wonder he can still have some Asian fans, late in his career.

cyclo in the time of google

By now, you can still see a few weather-beaten cyclos around albeit restricted to tourist quarters.

I still remember the sound of horse carriage in the streets of  old Saigon.

My kid will be lucky if she knows what a cyclo is.

She knows Google though.

Paperless and painless search. Now with semantic search.

My profile, age in particular, triggers online ads on retirement funds.

Each day, we clear out trash in our home office and online.

Meanwhile, cyclo guys paddle along, knowing that their trade is joining the ranks of old scribes, horse shoe makers and Kodak shops. And the cinema is about to close its curtain. My uncle’s cinema is now a storage.

I came back fully related to the character in Cinema Paradiso,  with nostalgia.

The underlining theme is still there: where is that old blind film projectionist/mentor ? Mine is a guitarist who has recently been out of work.

We both need a gig. Maybe it will work out for him since he has upgraded his play list on an Ipad. But not for the cyclo guy.

Perhaps the best they can hope for are a few passengers per day, hauling bulky merchandise. Cyclo and modern supermarkets don’t go well together. Instead, it is now relegated to being a ride to a colonial past: white folks and colored coolies, on a leisurely ride along smoke-filled streets packed with motorcycles made in China. Future shock has moved on to its Third Stage (Muscle, machine and Mind), from cyclo to moto-cycle and onto Google. People are making money by a click of the mouse, and not by paddling those three-wheelers, using 21st-century skill set and not primitive strands of muscle.

No turning back, or you will turn into salt. Gosh, I miss the sound of horse carriage at Ben Thanh market. I miss being skinny , vulnerable and trusting. Faith that can move mountain. That some day, I will see face to face, although meantime, only through a mirror darkly.

Wisdom comes from mistakes, not missed opportunities.

I’d rather tried and failed than failed to try.

Tell that to the cyclo guy, who ordered two glasses of sugar-cane juice, while I could barely gulp down one. All I did was googling, while he was cycling. Muscle man in the age of Machine.