An Ozomatli Day: Am I doing enough? III

My dad used to say I was "burning the candle at both ends" whenever I had a few things going on at one time. He didn't think it was a good idea but to me it was simply that I could do a number of things at one time and thought it a shame to not do any one of them. I was asked recently, after having been observed teaching a class, if I had ever considered acting as a profession. "Sure", I answered, "I did that from the ages of 13 to 20 in a semi-professional community theatre troupe", along with being a student, Boy Scout, newspaper editor, video game arcade owner, sign painter, son and boyfriend. And for all of that, I ended up in the advertising business - but there was never one thing that was more important than another - without them all, I would never have experienced the full effect of actually having done them, as opposed to just studying them. And sometimes all of whatever it is I happen to be doing at any one point in my life shows up in just one day. Here's just another one of those days.

Another one-day diary:

7:00 am
Contrary to my last "am I doing enough post", I popped up like a piece of toast today and jumped onto a full plate of life.
8:05 am
By 8 I'm through two cups of the country's most famous and savory beverage, Bloomberg, and the olde shit, shower and shave. Almost ready to rock.
9:15 am
A bit more Bloomberg -only because I have fallen madly in love with Betty Liu, but fear she's been taken already, judging from the size of the rock she was sporting in the Warren Buffet interviews - and I'll be ready. Still under 30 with a Pulitzer nomination to her credit she is not so much a rising star, but a star who has already risen, and done it in record time. Certainly worth my time every morning. They could give that girl the nutrition panel off a bag of dog food to read and it would still be worth my TV time. And I'll eat the dog food too, if she commands me to whilst wearing calf-high black stiletto boots.
10:00 am
It's off to the bus station. Today I'm heading northeast to a part of town I know, Anh Phu, but have never been to on the bus, so figuring out which bus to take will be job #1. Job #2 will be getting on the damn thing and job #3 will be figuring out just exactly which stop, on a long crowded expressway, to get off at. A wrong decision could cost me miles, many minutes and any number of limbs. Yes, in Vietnam there are bus stops on the expressway. Right on the expressway.
10:15 am
This kind of travel requires keen eyes and as we all might be familiar with, the sharpening of one sense once others have been been lost - what happens here, or in any other country where one doesn't speak the language, is that your visual senses grow to fill the void of the listening and speaking ones. On a Vietnamese bus, that means sitting by a window, so you can see what's going on, because the bus driver never announces anything over the PA, if they even have a PA. Today, I'm looking for a big-box department store - similar to a Sam's or a Costco, called METRO. That's where I get off the bus. The man at the station who had limited English, but was extremely helpful, had never heard of the place but got me on the #56. The rest would be up to me.
10:45 am
Ever play Frogger? Once off this bus it's free, the only catch being that you are the frog and the cars, trucks and a few million motorbikes are real. I need to cross an 8 lane highway to find the smaller surface road that would lead to my two afternoon destinations.
11:10 am
The Australian International School (AIS) had an ad recently promoting their summer Journalism course and I thought I would drop by and submit my CV. The address was listed as a 4 letter acronym "compound" having nothing to do with Australia, International, or schools whatsoever so henceforth, none of the locals knew where the hell I wanted to go - even though I had a copy of the ad with the address clearly printed at the bottom - but as things go in the orient, nobody ever wants to tell you that they don't know something, so my motorbike driver assured me he understood the direction in which we were going and then proceeded to get us lost. Once we finally did find the place, - that wasn't really all that difficult - the driver whined incessantly about the final fee, looking all Paul McCartney-puppy-dog and such, and not considering at all that he had been the person to have gone off half-cocked and off-compass. We settled on my original offer.
11:30 am
AIS is a tiny place, but the compound, as it's called, is a nicely manicured land of peaceful lanes dropped down seemingly by aliens to be the home for, well then, aliens - foreigners of many a stripe. Once in the school I am showed to the office and meet a cordial lady who turns out to be of course, the office manager. We talk about the journalism program and I am informed that the school, at least as much as this manager knows, has nothing to do with the program itself. I am told that curriculum and promotion are being handled by a local magazine and that I should talk with them - so for the morning, a dead end so to speak.
12:05 pm
I'm hungry. Time for lunch. The smell of grilled meats in Vietnam makes it actually hard to walk around the streets without dropping in for a bite - everywhere - every few feet. I select a joint that's packed - that being the mark of decent eats - and park my carcass. The woman behind the food selection immediately points to a pork chop and sets up the requisite side dishes along with a cold cha da (iced tea). The entire staff chuckles at my request for more diced chillies and loves watching me mix them into my rice and chops. It's tasty.
1:00 pm
One o'clock rolls around and it's time to pack my kit and head off to Mad's photo studio. Mads Monsen is an absolutely wonderful fashion photographer and somehow I've gotten him off his stock and trade and into creating an image for a public service campaign that I'm not sure either one of us knew how difficult would be to create, but in our first meeting, when I was drawing the idea out for the first time, Mads jumped all over it and had a sketch out before me that absolutely matched mine - so we had a meeting of the minds and have been following that muse for the last few months.
1:15 pm
Arriving at the studio I am greeted by the barking dog and a young female staff who informs me that Mads has just left. The place is empty and whilst we have worked together in the space before, don't feel exactly comfortable going back into the workspace and getting on a computer that is not mine. Our job today is to do layouts with rough images married to copy and typography but without the owner of the place, it seems I just need to sit and wait.
1:30 pm
Instead, I take a nap on the sofa in the lobby.
2:30 am
I awake to an image of an alarm clock chiming 5 o'clock. Fuck! I have to be at another appointment at 5:45 and I am nowhere near the other location! Fuck again.
2:45 pm
Luckily it's only 2:45 in real life, but still no Mads. The studio door is now open and I do see a Macintosh on and functioning, so it's time to work. I get started and in another 15 minutes the missing man arrives and we talk about what a looney day it's been for the both of us so far. But my time is running out. I need to leave by 4:30 and get back to town to step in and cover for someone who can't do some work tonight. In the next hour and a half I manage to get one half-assed layout done, and although it's pretty shabby in terms of proper kerning and general balance, it's the first time Mads and I have seen our idea at least 90% close to completion and we both feel good to have jumped the precipice between concept and reality - to be continued another day.
4:30 pm
A motorbike ride back to town because Mads needs to pick up his son at school, we blaze through traffic that jams on the way out of town but sails fairly smoothly on the way into the evening rush hour. Earlier in the week Mads and I had made plans to attend an Ozomatli concert, sponsored by the US consulate but both of our schedules got attacked by paying work and I made plans to get to the show after 9 when my gig finished. We part on the street, once back in the city proper and agree to meet up later at the show.
5:45 pm
I show up for my teaching gig and whiz through three hours thinking about the show. A quick bike trip would get me there.
9:00 pm
Ask me how many rock shows I've seen in my three and a half years in Saigon and I'll give you a big fat "O", which now stands for Ozomatli. My Chemical Romance was here last year but that oddly escaped my radar and was reportedly prohibitively expensive. The Ozomatli show is a free show put on by - who in our government would have ever thunk up this one? the US State Department! Actually inspired - and certainly not a Condi Rice initiative. In all my years in Korea, 10 to be exact, I never saw the US bring in anyone except soldiers and as cultural experiences go, I can tell you, the Koreans have seen quite enough of that. Tens of thousands of drunk, crew cut, American high school graduates let loose on the streets of any foreign country has got to be a public relations masterstroke. But this show promised to be a complete turn of yet another American page. A more than welcome one, here where the apocalypse was once now.
9:15 pm
The Lanh Anh club is a proper in-city country club that anyone can access that includes 12 tennis courts, a full modern gym, outdoor pool, Czech microbrewery and a covered outdoor concert facility seating, I would guess, around 2500. It's a wonderful place. Truly.
9:20 pm
Handing the man my free ticket, I can feel the building moving. No shit. And once inside the entire place, packed, is on their feet - jumpin'. Really. Tejano-rock-rap is the order of the day and as an Ozomatli member explains on the band's website, their style is like pulling up to any street corner on Sunset Blvd. in L.A. and having the windows rolled down on every car to stir a multicultural musical stew that would be unimaginable in any other city outside of Los Angeles. And the Vietnamese are eating it up.
9:30 pm
The members of the band met through their affiliation with the Peace and Justice Center of Los Angeles, and all 8 of them are jumping all about the stage in their signature style, mixing rap, a Latin horn section and a rock and roll groove - not a radio hit in the mix but no one seems to care as they pound out their mildly political message of tolerance, social justice and loud music justice. It works. I've seen a number of Vietnamese shows at this and other venues and I can tell you - nobody jumps around. Not even for their own pop stars. This band played Myanmar (Burma) just a few days before and how many bands do you know who can say that? "I rocked Rangoon!" I don't think so. Heading for the end of the show the band members, one by one, descended the stairs from the stage and played in the crowd. Two very serious security guys were following the sax player until they realized it was just impossible to "body guard" the guy and they gave up. The music was fun, upbeat, danceable and groovable but where they excelled - and you never get this from local performers - was in showmanship. That and the fact that they were really singing and playing instruments which is all but unheard of at most Asian concerts. A huge hit for sure.
10:15 pm
No encores on this show but who needed them? These guys played their hearts out and the crowd saw to it that they were rewarded for their efforts on every song. After the show I found the backstage door and had a chat with one of the guitarists. I gave him a copy of this blog address and promised a review - little did I know at the beginning of my day, that it would turn out to be a review of my whole day and not just the band.
10:30 pm
Alas, it seemed that Mads had never made it to the show. He had had quite a long day as well. I wandered over to the Czech microbrewery and found plenty of friends there though, Interestingly enough I met a woman who had seen me at the Australian School in the morning - another small world experience in what is turning out for me, to be a very large world.
12:00 am
Arriving home at midnight, I make myself a salad, have a glass of milk and chill. "Am I doing enough?", I ask myself. I've found that to be a virtually impossible question to answer in that simply doing a lot of things is no guarantee of any sort of success. One must do something extremely well - and on this particular day I can say I certainly did that - because I lived my life, at least what God had given me that day, to the best of my ability, and it made me happy.

I should want for nothing more.

For more in the "Am I doing enough?" series, check below:
II Blimps & bullshit: Am I doing enough? II
I "I've spent many years making up for not being a genius": Am I doing enough?

Blimps and Bullshit: Am I Doing Enough? II

Monday, March 16, 2008
A one-day diary:

9:00 am
I don't wake so early most days. If I have a business meeting or early appointment I will, but generally I work until 2am or later so seven hours sleep is good. I work often on less but find, that a bit more sleep makes me more productive and happy.
9:05 am
Rice. Coffee. Rubber. Those are Vietnam's three largest exports in that order. My morning coffee is made with a single-drip container that sits atop your standard cup. Hot water poured through, a rounded tablespoon makes a splendid cafe with about an 8th of an inch sweetened condensed milk in the bottom. A gentle stir with a tiny spoon and I'm ready to go. 100 grams of Arabica lasts me a week and costs around 50 cents.
9:15 am
Coffee and first cigarette in hand it's a mere swing and roll over to the charmingly antique (2003) Powerbook G4 12". General email and such. "There Will Be Blood" has finished downloading. Now I've got a movie for the evening.
9:20 am
Phone rings. Land-line. Something's wrong with the cell-phone and I'm off to the MobiFone shop to see if they can sort it out today. On the land-line is Crispin. He's invited me for breakfast. Crispin and I met two summers ago when we both DJ'd on different nights at the same club. I on a Monday and Crispin on a Wednesday, we became fast friends being fans of Britpop, psychedelic, Eric Satie, Broadway show tunes, Sinatra, Trip-hop, Hip-hop and alternative music of uncommon variety in Saigon. Crispin is visiting from England to which he has returned to pursue a career in the "real world".
9:30 am
Ye olde shit, shower and shave and I'm off for an Irish breakfast.
9:50 am
Crispin meets me in the lobby of my building and we jump on his motorbike to one of the local cheap-eats breakfast places.
10:00 am
The "All-day Irish Breakfast" is Vietnam's friend to hangovers from all over the world. Served on a 16" plate, not a spot of porcelain is visible amidst the pile of food served. Two eggs – poached, four slices of bread – toasted with butter on the side, two hash browns, four sausages, 4 strips of bacon, baked beans – helped by a dash if Tabasco and two slices of fried tomato. Cost: around 5 dollars with coffee. Tasty and filling.
10:30 am
Crispin and I discuss all things Vietnam, England and America. We talk about this blog and about Crispin's plan to work in the university system in the UK helping Asian students with their educations in an administrative function. He's visiting his girlfriend and really does miss Vietnam. He is experiencing the kind of post-traumatic-stress disorder that follows many expats back to their home countries after having been away for awhile and having realized that the "stress" was actually their home country. Being away from it for long enough can mellow a person out so much that they never truly recover to a land that doesn't allow smoking, excess drinking, street corner marijuana sales, naked girls playing pool with you or felatio being delivered at your barstool. Of course, that's not the life that everyone lives, but it is possible, and purchasable if one desires. What's the bigger idea is that there are simple freedoms that can be had, well beyond sex and drugs in this categorically communist country that can not be had in many democracies. So what, they don't really vote for their leaders? We do and look what we got last time. Anyway, just a perspective you won't see in Boise. Or SoHo. I suggest to Crispin that he start a blog – to channel his thoughts.
11:30 am
Crispin and I bid farewell, vow to keep in touch over the web and off we go. He on his motorbike and I on a short walk back home. Need to burn a few calories off.
11:45 am
From 11:30 to at least 1:30 everyday, Vietnam shuts down. It's a bit like a siesta and a holdover from the colonial days of no air-con or international clients to tend to. Switchboards turn off, air-con goes down and people flee the office buildings to the cafes, street restaurants or maybe home for a nap. You'll even find rows of office workers sleeping on the floors of darkened rooms once they've had their fill of "pho" (noodle soup) and maybe a little "kem" (ice cream) on a particularly hot day. It's pointless to try to get anything done in Vietnam during this time. So just don't try. I'm quite sure that Bentley dealership is closed.
12:00 noon
And so it's back home for a little computer geeking. An email to a client, some work filling out the calendar and an hour goes fast.
1:30 pm
Off to sort out that pesky phone issue. A few weeks back in a post titled Perspective II I had made note that I had not had the best of days. Because on that day, on my way home from working, my cell-phone was pick-pocketed. She was a crusty old whore and one I wanted nothing to do with. I could see her silhouette in the shadows of the car dealership now closed on a deserted stretch of a block or so of my route but tried not to notice. The Vietnamese are perplexed by my insistence on walking almost everywhere but I prefer it. I see a lot more of life by walking and keep a trim figure in the bargain. I politely refused her offer of "massage baby" twice and tried not to make eye contact but on the third approach one trained hand went for my crotch and the other for my left pants pocket. My pulling away was not enough to keep the phone from joining its new owner. Stealing phones is an international pastime in Southeast Asia – almost a legitimate job. So it became another week or so of replacing the phone and getting a new sim card to make it work. But today was to find out why the new sim card wasn't working.
2:00 pm
MobiFone bustles with customers, paying bills, opening new accounts and fixing old ones. A machine gives you a number and then you wait. Usually 20 minutes max. There are a few advertising posters on the wall but it's best to have a book or magazine. It took just minutes for my attendant to figure out what was wrong. I had only paid the bill that morning and the new sim card had been "inactive" until then. It worked now.
2:30 pm
Another short walk to a client meeting at three. Saigon is charming downtown. The French built cathedral Notre Dame and the Gustav Eiffel designed post office were on my way.
3:00 pm
Meeting with a client and a request for proposal. Job? They've got a contract to bring a blimp, a derigible, a zeppelin, into the country and want to use it for advertising purposes. They want me to write a plan that covers all of the blimp's advertising plans, expenses, potential media consumers, schedules and fees. I don't know fuck all about blimps but I'm gonna learn fast. Now this is the point where I pinch myself just to make sure I'm still on an oxygen breathing planet. How much fucking fun is this? I'm gonna get paid for figuring out how to sell blimp advertising to the Vietnamese. Never been done. No background information. Need to write this one from the ground up. Shit, bad pun. But it's just this sort of thing that makes my life fun here. No, I won't be going to L.A. to shoot any million dollar commercials but I might get to ride in a blimp over Vietnam. This place is just fucking nuts.
4:00 pm
A city bus to my next appointment. At rush hour it's best not to be a pedestrian around here. The buzz of motorbikes is just deafening and without a steel enclosure around you, you're just a walking target.
4:30 pm
Cafe Sua Da, means "iced coffee". Within every city block there must be at least three old ladies who will make you a glass of the stuff. The coffee, made presumably that morning, is poured, syrup-like, from an old liter and a half Pepsi bottle. The ice, crushed by hand from a chiseled block and beaten into half inch chunks with a small wooden bat and a towel. And the whole treat topped off by maybe a quarter inch of sweetened condensed milk in the bottom of the glass. Cost: about 30 cents. Taste: With a cigarette? Priceless.
5:15 pm
The way many people make a steady buck around here is by teaching. And in the marketing business there's a huge clientele in corporations, private institutions and universities. I've worked for them all. My 5:15s are college students who speak well enough but are painfully shy. Oh, I'll bust them of that over time.
6:00 pm
Knock on the classroom door and it's one of the administrators. She wants to know if I can fill in for another teacher at another location at 7:30. No problem. A few more hours on my bill.
7:15 pm
Off to the substitute job.
7:30 pm
Before my class I'm asked if I can do an evaluation on a new student. After a 20 second check of her speaking ability (excellent) I run through our evaluation criteria. She answers all the questions easily on our highest level class. Probably she won't be my student but I hope she doesn't get bored. It's odd. Those who truly need an education don't seek it out and those who don't really need it keep getting more.
9:30 pm
A 30 minute walk home should wash the work out of me. I'm thinking more now about blimps. Jeezuz. Now I'm a blimp salesman.
10:00 pm
I'm not halfway up the five storey walkup that is my flat when the cel-phone rings. It's Ryan, a 26 year old American computer and music geek who likes to come to my place, have a few beers and participate in some of the local sharecropping that goes on from time to time. He wants to know if William, another friend of mine, wants to play some guitar tonight. Fuck, I'm bushed. I enter my flat and within five minutes there's a knock on the door. It's William, guitar in hand. Looks like the jam session's at my place tonight. We all merry about for a couple of hours and have a nice time. Ryan can write and William can play. William and I go all the way back to Korea. We met whilst hanging around at the open-mic nights in town. It's good to have friends in the music business.
12:00 am
Those guys kicked out, it's time to check that torrent I downloaded of "There Will Be Blood". Awesome.

Blimps, tomorrow.

For more in the "Am I doing enough?" series, check below:

III An Ozomatli Day: Am I doing enough? III
II Blimps & bullshit: Am I doing enough? II
I "I've spent many years making up for not being a genius": Am I doing enough?

"I've spent many years making up for not being a genius": Am I Doing Enough?

I'm listening to a musician named Sufjan Stevens and reading about the sheer volume of work he has already done, not to mention his ambitious plans for the future. Last week I downloaded and cataloged over 30 Todd Rundgren albums – the week before, all of Zappa and Brian Eno and some Ennio Morricone. Here are are a number of extremely prolific creative people and I ask myself, "am I am doing enough?".

My wife used to say my life was too complicated and maybe she was right, but I was doing a lot. And I like doing a lot.

Oh, I wrote a book last year and even in that book it seems I've got a million things going on at one time in that rendering, but am I doing enough? I collect as much music as I can get my hands on, work a regular job, I write, I make films, I attempt musical composition from time to time. I read. I cook, I clean and keep a journal – different from what I do here.

But do I do enough? Do we all do enough? One thing I have always brought to the creative process is the idea of a million influences. From music to architecture to the social sciences to whatever. How can I create if I don't know anything? How can you give if the tank is empty? So my tank is probably brimming over most of the time.

But I'm not sure I always get more from it. Because many of the people I deal with only want a certain amount. Too many ideas is not what a lot of people want.

I like and old quote from Bill Bernbach. He said, "I've spent many years making up for not being a genius".

I suppose it's going to take me more than many years. That's why I always ask myself if I'm doing enough.

For more in the "Am I doing enough?" series, check below:

III An Ozomatli Day: Am I doing enough? III
II Blimps & bullshit: Am I doing enough? II
I "I've spent many years making up for not being a genius": Am I doing enough?