Tag: Elton John

Your chance

Elton John had a song out a while ago. Your Song.

Newsweek, when it was still in print, had a page called My Turn (that had been before the Internet with immediate comments and re-tweet).

Now, the Art of the Start‘s author, Guy Kawasaki, asked readers what they want included in his next revision of the book.

Your chance.

Your 15-minutes of fame.

Smile, take the diploma and get off campus.

We all know that feeling of emptying out the space made for incoming replacement.

An office, a house or even a car with too many mileage on it.

We know we have had our chance, or exhausted it.

Others will see and seize the opportunity differently, from their angle and maybe the timing is better.

Tina Turner  said that she had sung Proud Mary a thousand times, but the way it was delivered was different each time (largely because of different venue and audience).

So we have had our chance. Or making ways for new ones.

As long as we don’t waste our talent pursuing second-best options.

At work or in life, natural selection will nudge us along the time continuum.

No way around it.

Something in the DNA combo that send out signals to the world.

I am here.

I exist in the now.

Come and get me. Find me. I want to be found, to be validated and to be heard.

Some need stroking more than others. But all of us need and deserve a chance to make our marks.

With current almost-bounced back economy, here is our chance. Once again, to “see the good side of the city… on the riverboat Queen”.

The fact that we are still here is a testimony to everyone’s resilience. I might not write as smoothly as Tom Clancy, look as husky as Paul Walker, or think as different as Steve Jobs. But I am still here, blogging along. So are you. Go celebrate life. Explore and exhaust all your chances. Chances are, there are still plenty , unexploited and begging to dance (to quote Jackson Browne ” Opportunity likes to dance with those who are already on the dance floor”). “I hope you don’t mind, I hope you don’t mind, I wrote down…these lines”.

Albert Einstein once said ” the saddest tragedy in life is a wasted talent”. Along that line, I would say, the most disappointed thing in life is to miss your Andy Warhol’s 15-minutes of fame. So walk up there, take your diploma, and smile at the camera. And one more for your mom. It’s a digital age now. Don’t worry about those wasted shots way back then, when each of us was rationed with only 36 shots on a roll or  the weekly My Turn. In Marketing class, we used to dream of inventing deodorant to sell to the billions in China. Now, we got 14 Billions eye balls ready to peruse our pitch, 24/7. Turns out that it’s not the lack of opportunity on the dance floor (or the floor itself for that matter). It’s our feet which are reluctant and us recluse. Frogs-in-slow-boiled state. Don’t know where to start? Tell Guy Kawasaki. Your chance to have input and insecurity dissipated.

My 70’s

Needless to say, my hair was long, my pants were bell-bottom and my shirt shiny.

I spent half of that decade in Vietnam, the other half in America.

But the youth culture helped bridge the cultural gap: we had already listened to James Talor, Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Young, Elton John before I jumped on to Year of the Cat and If by Bread (in the US).

In between the two worlds, I got stranded one whole summer in Wake Island,

listening to armed force radio station (Loving you, Theme from Mahogany, Band on the Run).  “Where are you going to, do you know?”

Towards the end of the decade, we watched a bunch of movies whose statures haven’t been surpassed since: Midnight Cowboys, Taxi, Deer Hunter.

The disco craze was well underway, with John Travolta and the Abba.

Dancing Queen.

American couldn’t stand the look of anything that reminded them of Vietnam (negative pair-association).

Cat Stevens was still OK then. George Harrison still had some staying power with “Here comes the sun”.

I was into media (post-Watergate hip major).

Journalism was cool, while computer science was a new field (my friend Al T. was quite nerdy and he belonged more to Bill Gates clan ).

America came across as weak after Watergate, Vietnam and the Iranian hostage crisis. Reagan landslide election was the reincarnation of John Wayne‘s shoot from the hip style (he himself got assasinated by Hinckley in 1981, but reemerged stronger for the line “tear down that wall”).

As of this edit, people are still protesting about sectioning it to build upscale high rises in E Berlin.

Meanwhile, Vietnam in the early 70’s lived life on the fast lane with the last PX supplies, napalm. Plenty of Agent Orange.

A large percentage of US enlisted men was into drugs (facts on file).

A repeated theme from “Last Men Out” was “how can this be”.

But this was how. We breathed our last breaths. Band on the Run.

Celebrating my last Tet (1975) here, I knew we were on oxygen mask. I shaved my head, trying to hit the books instead of  the night clubs. But still, the rumor and rumble or war had gotten near.

It’s like the Angel of Death was breathing down our necks.

You could feel your back hair stand up.

That’s how tense life was in my early 70’s.  Even today, many people are still living in denial, albeit with flashbacks. I forgot to mention  the Carpenters somehow managed to sneak into our consciousness even though by all measures, they look like a bunch of Mormons (unlike the Mamas and the Papas).

But we knew then that “We’ve only just begun”. Their cut of “SuperStar” still engages me today (but it’s just the radio….)

When you had a bunch of young people wearing tight jeans and tight shirts, on campus,

and all they wanted was to wait for Saturday Night to come (Fever), you know it’s peace time. The disco ball was our cross, and the DJ, our priest.

Today’s version of nightclub is version 3.0, with synthesized techno music, and a few easy refrains (suicidal…). In the 70’s you sat and watched the “Soul Train” with black folks doing the dancing, and the Huxtables doing the laughing.

Welcome to America. Now could you help push the car (Oil crisis).

Random meet

In Vietnam, don’t be surprised when you are placed  next to a complete stranger, who knows someone who knows your host.

It happened to me at Christmas party this year.

Next to me was a Vietnamese-American returning from multiple tours in Iraq.

He was here to fly his wife out. She had flown in as well, but from Australia.

Happy ending: he was back from the war zone while she from a former one.

The company she works for has agreed to transfer her to the US.

I was like NYT‘s Friedman, marvelled at how “flat” our world had become.

A teen-age girl at the table couldn’t help “omg”, “omg” “so you’re like in Hurt Locker?”

We were trying to break the ice waiting to be served when the spot light turned to our returning soldier. Rest of the night was “omg” etc…

I couldn’t help reflect on “the Deer Hunter” syndrome, and how drastic the change had been in our reception of veterans.

This story hasn’t taken into account how high-tech this war was as compared to Vietnam. Incidentally, I read a statistic that mentioned the average life expectancy for Vietnamese: 1960-40 years, 2010 – 73 years.

No wonder it’s jam-packed “scooter nation”.

When my fellow dinner guest left on his perhaps in-law scooter, I said “if you can make it in Iraq, you can ride in Vietnam”.

We were joking about his need to keep in shape after all the good foods.

One common ice-breaking tip is “who would you choose to be dinner guest.”

Some people mentioned Bill Gates, others, Kennedy.

My favorites would be Charlie Rose, since he can draw anyone out of his/her shelf.

Barbara Walters would be interesting if she stopped being a journalist, and just be a conversationalist.

I then would invite Elton John, George Harrison and John Lennon.

Let the party begin.

Random meeting but more enlightened towards the end of the dinner.

I realise one thing after last night: you might not agree with a policy (what Mass Destruction Weapon?) but you need to accept the person, soldier or civilian. We are all floating together (Christ Church in New Zealand got struck twice sitting on the ring of Fire) on the seabed and sitting around the table together.

Disagreement or agreement, we are fellow human beings, seekers of truth and beauty. And perhaps, for a moment there, he and I were both “viet-kieu” (you need a second helping there).

Random meet, but perhaps not quite random after all. Merry Christmas soldier boy!

The extraordinary of daily life

If you look hard enough, you will find them: a Queen wearing Green, a show host wearing “color purple”, bidding farewell to a dream career a black, single mom couldn’t have imagined 50 years ago, or a fairy tale went awry with California Dreamer, bodybuilder that pumped more tragedy to the Kennedy clan than pumping iron.

Reports about the tsunami clean-up in Japan (10 years at least), and financial tsunami are still trickling in(bottle-necked at foreclosure proceedings.) For personal “escape”, I picked up “Last Men Out”, true story of the last Marines out of Vietnam (embassy guards). Their last day was “le jour le plus long” of my generation. ie. tragedy which brought out the best and worst in human being.

It’s ironic that they couldn’t junk helicopters fast enough to clear the aircraft carrier’s deck, while just a few years later, during the Iranian hostage crisis, the team was short of just one to pull it off.

Pundits and philosophers have pondered about outliers: how gene pool could produce extraordinary out of the hurdled mass: a Van Gogh here, an Elton John there.

All I know is that Sir John thought highly of Lady Gaga. And she of Farmville. There must be a trend worth- noticing for game developers. First generation gaming was mostly about kill-or-be-killed. Maybe gaming 2.0 will help players discover the extraordinary in the ordinary: planting tomatoes, milking a cow… For two generations now, kids (in a less-than-3-percent-agriculture environment) have grown up not knowing where milk came from.

We went to the store, and brought home a flat screen TV. From there, our real life turns to just “being there”: mummified and dumbed down. This came from a horse’s mouth, Mary Hart “we do, we do want to know what’s going on with celebrities, the high-profile ones”.

OK, so Kardashian lost a few pounds. That’s great. But Oprah didn’t stop there. She went on to build a media empire, so huge that the O in ChicagO might as well be capitalized. Now, that’s extraordinary!

It triggers the imagination. It inspires and motivates us. Perhaps we, single mom or stay-at-home dad, can rise to touch the face of God after all. If Stephen Hawking is right (that we are like computers), then let’s boot it up, I-pad as launching pad. Still, I believe the extra-ordinary in daily life.

Never let them go!

B3, CVA

Black and White. Grainy. Shirts and Skins.

Friends from junior-high , whom I shared the ping-pong tables and school canteen.

We sat through civic lessons, English lessons, Math tests and Lab tests.

The photo must have been taken at one of those off-site PE classes.

I learned about honor, honesty and history; the institution and the Constitution. Friends looked out for friends, clique against clique.

Pass the ball, you selfish b…

Play your guitar but with less volume!

(Invaders from a rival school) They are coming (so we stuck together , believing there were safety in numbers.) Often times, we got a kick out of pulling pranks on our English teachers or being chased by the Priest who tried to protect his church lawn.

And inch by inch, we grew from boys to men.

I remember being picked for the school magazine sales team (to visit nearby high schools – notably co-ed) and learned to pitch (and got my first date with daughter of a furniture store owner).

I reached out to new classmate, made new friends in our high school band.

John Lennon‘ s Imagine served as background music, to place us in context

(classes resumed normal after the Tet 68 incident).

I grew up with those now-men-with-wives-and-grown–up-children.

We weren’t fully grown men back then. In school uniform, crew-cut and unbounded energy, we roamed the school yard: volley ball, football and ping-pong.

During recess, everybody ran, jumped and rushed from one place to the next.

Recently, one of the guys on the Skin team just dropped in (via a phone call). It forced me to look up old photos, among which, one of mine, taken at a cousin’s wedding.

You can run from the past, but you can’t hide.

Sure, the waist line grew and hair-line receded. Just signs of maturity, which means hard-earned lessons in character formation i.e. learning to deal with intuition and inhibition.

When you know someone from high school, you know him well.

After all, habits were formed during those years: taste for food (not fast-food), for fashion (bell bottom) and for friendship (tribal kinship).

We listened to Elton John’s “Your Song“, theme song for a siesta-induced radio program.

“I’ll buy a big house,….” or Seasons in the Sun “skin our head and skin our knees”. I knew then just as now, that the ride wouldn’t last. And that fate will alter our course (after all, we were living in war-time).

And I wrote in our Wall Poster that year “whichever turn we end up taking,

let’s greet one another later in life as if no time had passed in between”.

I sure hope for this at our reunion.

I sure hope I can still recognize some of them.

And most importantly, to find myself once again, as seen by others.

Of all the ills society exacts on us,  the worst is self-alienation.

I am still stuck with a desktop and have not had I-pad 1, much less I-pad 2.

But I refuse to be viewed from a materialistic stand point. We were put there in the same class by our nearest grade distribution.

To be among peers as we walk down memory lane is a luxury. That’s where a man can for a moment, experience reverse transformation back to a boy. This time, please pass the beer! You can have the ball. I miss them already, those guys in grainy Black and White photo, the only class picture I have in my possession after years of moving around.

This time, I will never let them go.

P.S. We ran into one of the guys in that same picture this past summer, after 40 years of drifting apart. Wow!

all flesh!

It must be hard to keep reinventing one’s self, especially when it comes to topping your own high marks.

Gaga does it again on Vogue cover (all- meat bikini ).

http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2010/09/07/2010-09-07_lady_gaga_dons_raw_meat_on_cover_of_vogue_hommes_japan.html

Use all your resources. Follow the money and your instincts.

This is to show that when it comes to imagination, we have no bound.

We are the ones who limit ourselves.

Try YouTube.

Have a laugh at some videos, then turn around, and laugh at yourselves.

Why can’t you do it better? Why don’t you do it at all!

The last time I saw Lady Gaga, it was on the cover of the Rolling Stone (gun and bullets).

Why all the complaints, now that she did away with guns and try meat and butter?

It’s designed as a publicity stunt. And in my book, it works.

It triggers the imagination. It opens up something in my brain. It moves me and motivates me.

Shouldn’t it motivate you? One human being do something unheard of before, leads to many more mutations.

Vietnamese math award winner was said to “have thrown the bridge across the river” for others to see and solve the many “lemma”.

Whatever multi-sided equation he was working on, I am sure humanity can someday benefit from much (the way we have profited from the size and speed of the silicon chips).

On the creative side, Lady Gaga now stands on top of earlier giants such as JLo and Madonna, to reign supreme. I had a good feeling about this, seeing Elton John and her in a duet.  I knew then, that Elton was pairing with her, and endorsing her as heiress apparent. It’s our garden of Eden, with Eve not wearing any clothes.

All flesh!

 

Saigon open-air concert

Local singers here command higher caches seven nights a week by bar hopping. But occasionally, like last night, they showed up at an open-air concert to entertain the mass. Sandwiched between numbers were the Viet-Kieu comedian couple as special guests. They talked about how the US economy barely stayed out of the red. And of course, they picked on middle-aged men and women who opted for cosmetic surgery yet were so stingy that they overdid (cup size for instance) it to save money.

I took it all in.  I noted that years ago, I was among the mass of young people at an outdoor concert as well. Back then, you heard Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and the Doobie Brothers‘ ‘”We are American Band”. We were all-hair!

The CBC band was one of the highlights then. I heard them again in Houston a few years back. They were still playing at their own club but only on weekends. The once-skinny sisters/singers in the band are now in their late fifties.

Still, they shined in some of the French songs (Tous les garcons de mon age se promene dans la rue). And I am sure, their comedian counterparts are also doing what they must: traveling the distance in search of an audience.

The occasional breeze was quite refreshing, as rare as those few moments audience and singers feel connected.

What struck me was whatever the economic condition and whatever the political climate, people manage to survive, to love and be loved and try to make sense of what’s going on around them.  Here in Saigon, due to the weather, people interpret shared events over a Heineken. And whether the economy is up or down, Heineken is always up, in sales and branding, bottles or cans.

I was just glad I was among the mass. It took some traveling and resettling before I could be counted as one of them. One of us.