Tag: Paul McCartney

Music was saved

When Steve Jobs came up with his 99-cent song idea, he saved musicians from the curse of piracy.

It’s all in the ether. But musicians get paid, however long the tail. Better than nothing at all.

More people get to hear those beautifully written pieces. I walked by a coffee shop yesterday.

On its walls displayed the AKAI tape decks. A by-gone era. We used to gather around it to listen to Steely Dan‘s DO IT AGAIN,  again and again (ironically, we followed the imperative i.e. Do it again) .

Musicians like George Harrison was throwing a concert for Bangladesh, wearing white suit, with his  rendition of “My Sweet Lord“‘s I really want to see you Lo.

Something about being together, globally and ecologically.

That was before the internet. Or else, with today’s broadband, more would have joined in with near-zero latency.

We live in an exiting age, with technology at our disposal. But do we see huge crowdfunding that does humanity proud?

I know, I know. It’s all ad-hoc now.

Think global, act local.

OK. I am all for green weekend.

And Electric Vehicle conversion, one car at a time.

But in the grandeur scale, we need a hero. Be they from the entertainment or sports, politics or business.

Something is broken. Perhaps the spirit of togetherness, of committing to a cause larger than ourselves.

Like Jobs, I do hope some technologists can come up with apps or simple business proposition that saves the music and saves the day.

Simple solution. Less than a dollar. And let music sing. Not when we can still spare a dollar for the brother. DO IT AGAIN.

PLAY IT AGAIN. I really want to see you Lo.

Long Winding Road

To your door……

I woke up to a Friday. Not any Friday. But a birthday Friday.

Long and winding road. Like a graph, your life can be “manipulated” to make it a more positive-trending (not Bell-shaped).

Depends on how you look at it. People have said that President Obama looks older than when he first took up office. Oh well, who wouldn’t  after three and half long years.

I share concerns with friends these days. Always with long shots, and high hopes, from Electric Vehicles to Electronic Medical Records. Stuff that earlier generations had never heard of.

(except for the EV part).

The same with Mars and upcoming discoveries in Science. How they will shape and reshape the human race.

Yet one thing stays unchanged: human nature itself. We still react under certain principles, Pavlovian, for instance.

Ring the bell, the dog salivates. Facing danger, fright or flight.

Oh well. Long and winding road.

Friends said no matter how far and how much traveling they had done, when they came home, they just wanted mama’s cooking. Acquired taste. Subliminal and unconditional trusting. Talk not to strangers (yet I keep connecting with the multitude of you out there via Social).

Talking about networking. Since it’s my birthday. Can you send me a referral. Some doctors who need to install EMR?

Or a telecom engineer department that need their software tested offshore. Long shots? Yes. Long winding Road? Yes.

We , social animal, do need each other and do reciprocate.

I am here today thanks to the help of many friends and families.

I in turn have helped friends and again, some families.

That’s how the circle of Life operates. How pay-forward  works. And how the virtuous cycle is. There is no need to recast that graph. Just be and become better. Each life is different and each person unique. Born on a different day and dies at a  different  hour. While living, let’s make it a pleasant journey. The tilted clock on the wall reminds me that there was an Earthquake a few days ago. Even time is not standing still. Nor is the clock that shows time. How can you assume too much that it (Life) is going to be a straight line? To me, it’s more like a long and winding road.

Play element

We seem to have lost touch with the play aspect in life and work.

I am thinking of John Lennon and Steve Jobs at the moment.

Both pursued their passion, and both were dead.

One married interracially, the other just loved all things simple (even foods).

They were famous, and still are, although they could not take that with them.

Their legacy is huge. Just listen to #9 Dream on the I-pod.

Sit back and have a siesta.

Then you’ll know what I mean.

How can someone who sang about dream but brought us so much life!

Could it be that life is all illusion? Then within an illusion we can still dream up another?

I was at my best when company’s culture encourages creativity, collaboration and tons of energy.

When it’s a chore, we lost the play element.

Conversely, when it’s play, it’s no longer a chore.

To serve with gladness.

Love those we interact with. Just love them first, as a person, then our service to their need will be an extension of that human connection.

You can tell when a singer just sings for the money. To him/her, it’s just a gig. He/she faked the emotion.

But once in a while, we feel sad or lonely, or abandoned. then a song seems to voice our feelings.

Then we  got a hit. It’s a hot night. The heart feels glad. There is vibration, that feeling of being alive and realizing it at the same time.

No Play, the world see only zombies and walking dead.

Dream on. And on and on. Jobs did not believe in the off switch.

Strange sounds, familiar shores

Instead of “I woke up to the sound of music, Mother Mary comes to me…” like Paul McCartney,

I woke up to strange sounds these days: peddlers who use “low tech” au parleur (bull horn) mounted on bicycles or tri-cycles (selling boot-legged CD‘s). In fact, it was my first time got chased by pleasant sound from behind (most of the time, it was emergency vehicle with a sense of urgency). By music here, I mean, not Beatles‘, but Slow Rock (nhac Sen), lamenting heart ache and heart-break.

In the evening, you can hear metal belt sound for in-home massage ( I have never tried).

I miss those wood-on-wood sound of a noodle peddler.

Those were the best snacks a boy could wish for. Speaking of Vietnam childhood and music.

Steve Jobs and friends were listening to music with headsets so they could do it while laying down.

One of his signature photos was an empty room with just a lamp, with him sitting cross-legged.

Very Zen-like. Minimalist. Pure simplicity in design.

He went on to take classes in calligraphy (even Reed College curriculum was still too restrictive for his type).

The sum of all these experience gave us the I-pod with ear-plugs, and later on the I-phone and I-pad.

Studies mentioned that babies could hear before birth.

If this is true, I must have heard an early scooter, a vendor on wheels, someone trying to get the grill going, or a rooster announcing a new day.

Dawn in Vietnam and dusk in the US. (You can experience similar feel, let’s say by traveling down Mexico, but then they got the same time zone as in the US).

Sharing the same Moon.

Sharing the same hope, fear and dream:

Will my kids grow up “con nha lanh” (teachable), and not into drugs.

Will they stay or leave for strange shores?

Will they listen to our voice, those familiar sounds, or they will just “follow the money” and “hearing voices”.

In the end, especially in our flat world, the sound of jet engine and popping soda cans will bring us home from any strange shore.

For a moment there at my friend’s party, we danced and jumped to a familiar tune (sound), felt our hearts go on beating (The End of the World) and saddened “when you say, ‘goodbye'”. The day can’t go wrong when you “get up to the sound of music”, let’s say in “Beautiful Sunday” (when you said, you love me, hey, hey, it’s a beautiful day). Or at night, when soothing sound you first heard while inside Mummy’s womb was that of the noodle man’s peddling.

Faith in humanity

A graduate of Penn State, I related well to the scenes from the Deer Hunter, set in an industrial town of Pennsylvanian.

Smokestacks on the slope, familiar faces and friends and the “Welcome Home” sign for returning soldiers from a distant war.

But unlike other wars before and since, this one was controversial.  It showed when the main character, portrayed by DeNiro, ducked behind a taxi driver and asked to be driven pass his own Welcoming party.

Out of three “deer hunters”, one came back without injury to the mind or the body. Am I thy brothers’ keeper?

In CBS  Vietnam‘s documentaries, soldiers were shown sitting in the shade, smoking and listening to transistor radio which was playing “Oh, I don’t want to die”  (Reflections of my life).

Yet decades later, land mines still exploded claiming many more limps and lives.

The late Princess Diana was advocating the elimination of land mines.

At long last, the largest nuclear bomb in TX is being disassembled (the article said engineers have since died off, so it’s hard to locate the blue prints).

Farewell to arms.

Hemingway, go home.

All we need is love.

Faith in humanity. Speaking of humanity. We saw quake in Turkey and flood in Thailand.

The heavy rain and flood forced Thailand to close its airport and evacuate parts of its capital (the toll: 506 deaths).

When it rains it pours there in South East Asia.

I was in Vietnam last year. All of a sudden, it poured really hard.

From a sidewalk cafe, I saw a middle-age lady in cone hat tried to push a scrap metal cart whose wheels were half buried in water-covered pot holes.

Now, the UN is advocating Environmental sustainability, with 7 Billion people sharing Earth’s limited resources, foremost is clean water.

China was quick to beef up R&D in solar and desalinated water.

We can not pretend we live in complete isolation. Debris from Fukushima quake drifted to California.

Flood in Thailand slow down server production, which pushes companies to the Cloud.

First wave: Main Frame, second wave: personal computer and third wave: cloud, which brings us in full circle.

Talking about automation, and unemployment. Stats shows high unemployment among returning veterans of the two wars. It’s time for that Welcome-Home sign again.

Hope they find a job and not wait too long for to receive those benefits.

Hope they won’t  have to duck behind the taxi driver.

Farewell to arms, to guilt and to self-recrimination.

All we need is love and a little faith in humanity. Princess Diana would have been proud to see a female film Director received an Oscar for Hurt Locker. The subject: land mine.

Choppers that chop the seas

The news of Premier Nguyen Cao Ky passed away brought back a long time passing.

In my youth, the sound of hovering helicopters was as common as street vendors’ chants.

On the war’s last day, ambassador, flag, ground-keepers, pilots and anything that moved, tried to get out to International Waters . Buses, barges and yes, choppers.

Lone pilots angled and abandoned choppers, then swam for aircraft carriers.

Their last sortie. (Years later, I met a man in New Orleans who found work as a commercial pilot for an oil company, transferable skill set I would say).

But on that fateful day, the choppers chopped the seas. One helicopter force-landed and hit our barge’s sandbagged wall. The loosed blades then flew wildly toward our ship, the USS Blue Ridge. I lied head down but eyes glued to the scene of action. That same barge had been our home for the previous 24 hours. Floating barge and flying blades was my brush with war and death.

Words circulated that many, VP Cao Ky included, went to Guam, where they had erected tents for refugees. For us, who ended up in Wake Island, we spent a purgatorial summer (“Do you know, where you’re going to” theme from the Mahogany). One of our folk singers sang for free to keep up our morale. She just came up short of singing “by the  river of Babylon…there we sat down and wept”.

I overheard “Band on The Run” by McCartney  from the barrack next door.

Not sure that was fitting or insulting. After all, I have spent the last three decades and a half trying to live down deserter’s guilt.

On a recent trip to Vietnam, a drunk at the table even screamed in my face that I was no longer a Vietnamese.

The burden must have been heavier for those who had invested more in the conflict (Cold War, but hot spots) e.g. the likes of Premier Cao Ky.

Occasionally, the two sides – reconciliators and extremists – were still at it.

We should put on the Holllies’ He Ain’t Heavy.

That’s how it will end. And how everything eventually ends, with time. My narrative just happened to be accompanied by the sound of choppers normally associated with Vietnam. One thing VP Cao Ky showed us and the world, was that, despite the hefty death toll and billions of dollars spent on bullets and agent Orange (later, he was resettled in Orange County), one still needs to live out one’s life, flamboyant or faced down. Army divisions used to distinguish themselves by various colors of their scarfs (red for paratroopers, green for Green Berets, so it’s not unusual for pilots and stewardess to pick their colors as well).

When you are near death on a daily basis, the least you can do for yourself is to look in the mirror, and say “not today”.

That today finally came for him, at age 80, and as fate would have it, resting in peace near South China Sea. But for many of us, “band on the run”, we live on to be memory keepers, story tellers and hopefully history-makers. It’s interesting to note that the younger generation tends to be more careful and conservative (model minorities) while their predecessors lived their lives in flying colors (go on YouTube, and click on any bands of the 60-70, like Chicago), least of which, a purple scarf, from a former Vietnamese pilot. Band on the run. Leader of the band dies today. The music, however, plays on. War and Peace. Dogmatism and pragmatism. Man and machine, romantic and robotic, pilot and chopper, laid to rest at Vietnam War epilogue. For me, not today. Not yet.

Someday, they will excavate in the South China Seas, and find hundreds of choppers, one of which without blades. Further excavation on the outer ring will find millions of skulls (boat people). They are all there, hidden underneath, but, still served as reminders of the long Cold War that took its heavy toll both in men and materials (choppers).

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.

the Me in a changing We

NYT columnist sums it up and I have nothing to add to it, maybe except the cross-cultural angle about change or perish.

I hear Yesterday’s lyric ” I am half a man I used to be”. ..

Technological leap forward (surround sound, anyone?). Star Wars itself has to keep up with its own 3-D version.

Google Eric Schmidt says “there is always the OFF button”, implying that we, human, are still in control (or IQ>AI).

Yet, how many of us even want to turn it off, just to again boot up.

Semantically, “friend” is a new definition for “contact”.

Acronyms are too long. We speak in short bursts “3-D”, “4-G” , “Hi-def” etc…

Stephen Cannell, Hollywood prolific screenwriter, recently passed away. The obituary shows him sitting  next to an IBM Selectric (not I-Pad).

That generation (Norman Mailer, Andy Rooney …) has passed away.

Raw meat, raw man (BTW, Bruce Willis appeared on David Letterman, wearing a raw-meat toupee. He even dared Letterman to taste it).

Talking about paradox: the more society changes and moves on to the “cloud” somewhere, the more likely we long for the real and raw stuff of “yesterday”. (as of this edit, there is an op-ed in the NYT about French’s Bonjour Tristesse).

I never understood people who collect antique, until I put on Lennon’s Dream # 9 (he might be dead, but his dream is still alive).

Yesterday, I waited for an oil change.  So I sat with my second of the Tatoo-girl trilogy (adult version of Harry Potter). Next to me was a gentleman immersed in his Sony E- reader. And here I was, still in paperback version.

Change or perish. It would be ironic to read “A La Recherche du temp perdu” by Proust, on a Kindle.

And the best book, according to Amazon’s Bezos is The Remains of the Day.

Thank you Mr Cohen of the NYT for a beautiful summation about where we are: at the crossroads of change. And the streets are now paved with conveyor. So even if we stand still,

it still carries us forward, no matter what.

The more we want to stay in place, the more we will have to change.

It is so true of what John Lennon said “life is what happens when you are planning  something else”.