Tag: Paris

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.

La vache qui rit

Forbes recently printed a McKinsey report about the coming consumer society in Vietnam. In other words, we will soon see La Vache qui rit in supermarkets along side real cows which are still allowed to roam free in the country side.

Vietnam 2040 will very much resemble US 1950, when the going was good: chicken in the pot and Chevy in the driveway.

Auto dealerships have sprung up at the outskirts, such as Dong Nai: Toyota, Honda and Ford.

Billboards build brands: Liberty Insurance, Prudential and VNPT.

Supermarts, hypermarts and convenient stores are found everywhere, selling of course, high margin, high carb items. KFC, Carl’s Jr and Lotteria employees are tasked to ask if you wanted fries and soda (combo no 1).  An underground mall has recently been opened in Hanoi to much fanfare.

In the country side, people however are happy with satellite TVs, internet hook up and mobile phones. Every house is an enterprise, either bed and breakfast, or coffee shops.

There is a price to pay by giving up traditional society for a consumer one. Vietnam will encounter those social problems Westerners already knew too well:

attachment to things will only lead to addiction, called shopaholism.  Shopaholic sometimes turns shoplifter as well.

It’s an unending cycle: the more things you owe, the less satisfaction you get out of them, hence, the more you think you need to reach old-level high. More results in less and not more happiness.

But advertisers will push this Pavlovian model to the brink.

Kids with glasses spend more screen time than face time with their parents or friends.

And they will eat La Vache Qui Rit, an inherited brand since before 1975,

and never know or see a real cow. It will be the age of vending machine: putting in a coin, and the coke comes out. No question asked. Period. Have you ever seen a real cow laughing? Or the sound of one hand clapping? Get real!

Vietnamese love for French songs

When traveling in Vietnam, you can still hear French embedded in every-day culture:

fork (fut-xet) , suit (com-plet) and tie (ca-ra-vat). Apparently, they just use the phoneticized versions for lack of dynamic equivalents and use literal translation, such as “Hop Dem” (Boite de Nuit) as last resort.

Some old hands can still carry a tune or two in French. From the music of Christophe to Art Sullivan, from Dalida to Charles Aznavour.

Ask anyone from the older generation, they will tell you they know Alain Delon, Catherine Deneuve, Jean Paul Belmondo and Brigitte Bardot.

And you should listen over cafe au lait. You find French imprints in gastronomy and architecture (Notre Dame Cathedral), traffic cop stations and the ambivalent tie (a rare thing given its tropical climate).

Older scholars are still conversant in French. Their worn-out La Rousse copies testify to that (or as Cuban classic Detroit cars – relics of the island’s past).

Chances are they still have a beret laying around (up North, or in Dalat).

Old Time-and-Life pictures show French officers smoking in Hotel Continental and Caravelle in the late 50’s (in shorts). It was also featured as a set in The Quiet American.

Practically every nation on Earth, even North Korea, has an expat den e.g. French Quarter in New Orleans.

Vietel won the Haiti Telecom contract despite the quake. The thing they have in common: speak French as former fellow colonies. Lately, France tries to compensate for its colonial “sin” 200 years late.

Speaking of history. Madame Nhu (the title says it all) was overexerting her derivative power with bad PR comments (they can barbecue themselves all they want; nobody asked them to) about the burning monks. She once had been tutored by her soon-to-be husband presumably in French and in Dalat where the last King’s Imperial Villa was located.

A friend told me I should try to make it to Paris before dying.  Apparently, Paris is our new Rome and Mecca (it’s still among the top ten despite the recession). Even the hyper-savers in China couldn’t help spending an average of $1800 there for shopping at Capitalist temple. When Paris sizzles!

Since they arrived on tour bus, their schedules barely allowed for sitting down dinner. Just shop (although both the Chinese and the French love cuisine).

And if I can’t do it, a trip to my local supermarket will do. There, I get my French Roast coffee, and a baguette plus cheese (La Vache qui rit).

And on YouTube, I can just select French songs e.g. Francoise Hardy‘s. Those singers, in tailored suits, sang with utter confidence and vulnerability:

“Mal, je suis mal…” or, “Il fait de soleil, je pense a toi.”

As a Vietnamese of origin, I was wired from birth to love French songs. No way around it. It’s a good start for my schooling, in French, at early age. The principle of Ecole L’Aurore and her brother lingered on in post-colonial times, much like those souped-up Detroit automobiles still be around in Cuba.

Frere Jacque, dormez vous? I didn’t know I was homesick, until one day, I happened to listen to Adieu Sois Heureuse by Art Sullivan. It not only brought me back in time, but to a place where dreams entertained yet unrealized, and friendships, half-baked, left wanting.

French is the best language for nostalgia. And where else better than in Vietnam where you can still find it embedded in every-day culture and etched in memories of exile.

On being a foreigner

Train, plane or automobile, we all try to get somewhere, point A to point B.

Far enough to be looked at as “foreigner”.

The Economist has a piece on this subject to highlight the decade of globalization.

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15108690&source=hptextfeature

I was surprised to find Vietnam, especially in HCMC and Hanoi, to be very cosmopolitan i.e. a large body of expats and international tourists. Meanwhile, young Vietnamese themselves travel overseas for educational and occupational opportunities.

Recent news showed violent incidents among the Vietnamese expat workers in Eastern Europe and Vietnamese students in Taiwan.

This is a withdrawal syndrome of a minority group (cocoon) when facing the “threat” of a larger majority, the Others.

And while regrouping, they turn onto each other, love or hate. It happened in Paris with the Russian immigrants, Little Italy in the US etc..

In the 1920’s, Americans found Paris, its cuisine and culture (as Parisians perhaps now discovering Big Mac and small Mickey) fascinating. Hemingway and Maugham all had memorable recollection on this era.

Something about greeting the New Year in a foreign land, far away from home.

The balloons, the balls and booze are the same, yet in the company of strangers, one experiences “lonely crowd” syndrome.

And everybody is aware that while it is New Year there, it’s not yet New Year else where (a testimony to our globalized world) e.g. Russian New Year lands on the 13th, Chinese a month later etc….

The Greek have two different words to express this sense of time: kairos and chronos.

Kairos is the fullness of time, while chronos is just the ticking of time (like 60 minutes on CBS, or 24 hours with Jack Bauer). In Kairos, one can greet the New Year with a sense of awe and anxiety e.g. a decade ago with the Y2K scare. Kairos brings about convergence of chances and choices. Cultivation and harvest time.

Other time zones will have to endure the chonos, to take their turn at counting down. Ten, nine, ….

Everybody sings Abba’s “Happy New Year“. Cheap champagne was passed around. Balloons were popped. Kessler described this experience of Russian celebrating their expat New Year in lowly quarter of Paris (The Night of the Emperors).

It is only to show that we have no control over the passing of time, and the changing of places.

More and more cities are being transformed to accommodate population growth. And real estate are in demand, driving the poor to the outer edges. Dark side of change.

The hard part is to get pass that denial: the more things stay the same, the more they have to change.

Thatcher was found to be utterly against the influx of Boat People into former British Hong Kong.

And look at where things are now . The economy in Asia is resilient, just as its people.

In this 21st century, the real foreigness perhaps lies within ourselves: that ardent refusal to admit that the world had moved on, and that it will be easier to be Margaret Mead than Margaret Thatcher. Not with the broadband penetration, not with the mobility of smart phones, and not with supersonic boom in E commerce and global commerce. If Made-In-China is no longer foreign, then nothing is foreign today. Just a hop on the plane, you will be from point A getting to point B.

Global shuttle and reshuffling of the card deck. An illness or blessing? All in the eyes of the beholder. But no longer a foreigner in 20th-century sense. Not with I-pod, I-phone and I-nternet.