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?

People are dieing to get out of here: Nothing Much Happened Again Today In Vietnam: VIII

11:05pm Friday - Drinking beer with Adam was just relaxing and enjoyable. Out of our usual Internet cafe we made it down to my favorite deer-meat restaurant and pulled up a table streetside across from the no-tell motel that sports a large sign boasting rooms for 70,000 dong per hour. That's roughly six bucks. The stream of taxi girls in and out of the place stands in stark contrast to the daylong reports of financial crisis on Bloomberg. Whatever crisis we're having it certainly isn't affecting the boom-boom business - in fact it may just be helping it. What better relief from a tough day on the market floor than a good healthy shag - sure we'll have two more bottles of cold BGI beer. B.G.I, pronounced "biggy" by the staff is a damn fine beer that costs about 50 cents and comes in a 16 ounce bottle. Adam and I, drank a bunch of them. - 3:00am Saturday - is a darn fine time to leave the streetside restaurant - having watched them disassemble the place, the tables have all been folded up, woks scrubbed and unbrellas collapsed before a thorough bleaching and sanitization of the concrete and asphalt happens out of big ten gallon plastic buckets - Adam, who has worked in the F&B business remarks on their near hospital-like attention to cleanliness. - 3:10am Saturday - I arrive home to an uncharacteristicly bright building. Why the hell are all the lights on at this hour of the morning? On my way up to the third floor I see that my friend's apt is lit and I can hear the TV. A rap on the door and I'm greeted by a man who looks fresh from a streetfight - his chest cut, arms scratched and a large cut black eye beginning to swell - he invites me in. Not a small man, but a more than robust Irishman who looks to be able to hold his own in most any altercation, he recounts to me a story of playing Jimi Hendricks too loud in another friends apt. and incurring the wrath of another tenant. He tells of the tenant first hitting him with a tazer stun-gun and then returning to his room for a pair of what seem to be described as barber-wire brass knuckles - geez it's all done quite a job on my buddy, but he'll live. Then, almost as if the current story doesn't have enough intrigue he tells me that Rico has died. Rico, an affable German of certain beer adoration was just in his forties and didn't seem to have any physical problems aside from his daily love of suds. The cause of death was described as a heart attack - Around here, in the past year I've heard heart attack and stroke both used to describe deaths that were more probably caused by a combination of prescription drugs and alcohol. I begin to think that the environment I've surrounded myself with may not be healthy. - 3:27pm Saturday - after a sleep worthy of a man who has been up till 4:30am I answer my phone. It's a man I have just recently met at my Internet cafe. He promises to stop by my apt. just to say hi and takes more than an hour to accomplish this. Once in my apt. he tells me that back in Australia he learned he could see other people's thoughts and futures and such, which lead him to understand that he also had the power to cure people's ills with the laying of hands - and things are just getting interesting. His tales proceed to a discovery of the meanings and truths contained within Scientology and his revelations on his first readings of L. Ron Hubbard. Rather than be critical or judgemental or disbelieving, I decide that this would be an excellent time to ask a Scientologist a few questions - I tell him I thought Travolta's BattleField Earth was one of the worst films ever made and he is taken aback - to him it was gospel. I then ask him if he misses the loss of his powers - apparently he could do mystical things in Australia but it doesn't work in Asia due to what he described as "repressive societies". He responds, "No, I was going crazy walking down the street and seeing everybody's thoughts" - It's time we got out of my house. I was beginning to feel uncomfortable and questioning the idea of if any of the days input was healthy. I decided it was not. - 5:47pm Saturday - Exiting my house we are greeted by Robert, a newly found acquaintance of the Scientologist. Robert is from Australia as well and seems a nice enough fellow. I suggest that we all head back down to the deer-meat restaurant. Arriving there we pull up the same table I had had the evening before with Adam and we order some food and again beer. When Robert's female friend arrives it is fairly clear that she is a "working girl" but that not being particularly unusual around here doesn't seem to be much of an issue - at least not to me. But for the Scientologist it seemed to be quite another matter entirely. Seeing the conversation between the Scientologist, Robert and his friend not going in a particularly friendly direction, I decide it's a good time to take a break to the men's room across the street. Upon my return it is explained to me that the Scientologist left in a huff and flurry of unkind words for all the women of the world's oldest profession - strange the most wildly different sets of rules we all set up to govern our inner selves. - 12:02pm Sunday - A text message on my phone and an email from my photographer friend Mads tells me that our public service project is going to be a big hit - great shots, I'll write more about this later. - 2:37pm Tuesday - Reactions to the book are nice and generating a lot of Twitterfare. Had two conversations with other writers this week and felt a little more healthy about life. By the end of the week I finished two days at a new job and was given a nice review by the boss - and other people are just dieing to get out of this place - 6:16pm Sunday - And as I've said before, nothing much happened again in Vietnam today.

Make sure to pause the podcast before playing the video.


For more in the "Nothing much happened" series, check below:

VIII People Are Just Dieing To Get Out of Here
VII The Hair Job
VI Happy New Year! Chúc Mừng Năm Mới!
V The Vietnam sNews
IV At The Center of Miss Universe
III My Walk in the Park Today
II The Stevie Wonder Post
I Ear Cleaning

Crisis What Crisis? A review of the last one...

This year begins not unlike the spring of 1998 - a looming financial crisis across all Asian markets in 97 had mushroomed into a full blown meltdown by the fall of that year and by spring of 98 any of us who were around to lick our wounds were just happy to be able to do that. My quote from the story below sums things up pretty well: "Times are tough," says Carlson. "Our mantra is: do, not die." In March of the year before I had founded CarlsonCreative, Korea's first 100% foreign invested advertising agency and little could I have known what the next year would be like. That's me and our entire staff in the photo. Our business plan had prepared for us to survive 18 months without a billing, but what we didn't expect is that our currency, the Korean won, would devalue itself by 50%. On the bright side, whatever we had left in dollars by that point was worth twice as much as the year before and since I had paid our office rent in one chunk, one year in advance, had nowhere to go. David Kilburn, the AdWeek correspondent in the region wrote the story below in the spring of 98. It's interesting to see some of the parallels to today, but maybe even more interesting to see that we're not in so near as much shit today as we were in those days. I have used excerpts here. You can read the whole thing by clicking on the title.

Coping with Crisis
by David Kilburn for AdWeek magazine USA, 1998

The new year in Korea begins with touches of ceremony. Company presidents, for instance, usually make Agincourt-style speeches about future challenges. These stirring words gird troops accustomed to 20 years of breakneck growth and achievement.

This year, however, the charge is more circumspect. The OECD's newest member is being bailed out by the IMF, a rescue operation made necessary by profligate corporate spending funded by mountains of short-term debt. And since the free-spending conglomerates generate 80 percent of South Korea's GDP own most major agencies, advertising is hard hit.

Consider the fate of Korad Ogilvy & Mather, South Korea's highly profitable and fourth-largest
agency. On Jan. 6, dejected agency president Myung-Ha Kim explained that the company faced serious problems caused by a financial crunch at Haitai Corp., the agency's majority owner.

More bad news came a week later, when Ik-Pyo Kwon, a Korad senior director, suggested board members take a 50 percent salary cut and staff a 30 percent cut. As many as half of the 288 staffers would be asked to take a "voluntary unpaid leave of absence" for one year. Then on Jan. 21, the staff learned that Korad was unable to pay salaries on time. Ogilvy & Mather quickly wired funds directly to its own people.

In truth, the crisis had been brewing for months. Expatriate staff from Ogilvy & Mather, who have a 30 percent stake in the agency, had quietly canceled their Christmas holidays to put the finishing touches on contingency plans in case their partner failed. These plans included a short-term transfer of media buying to JWT Korea (a wholly-owned JWT subsidiary) and incorporating a new, wholly owned Ogilvy subsidiary in Korea. Buying a controlling interest in Korad was an interesting but largely theoretical option. Lack of financial transparency in South Korea makes it difficult to value corporations fairly. Daewoo was touted as a potential saviour, but when the Korea Economic Daily posted a Web story quoting Daewoo denying such intent, that hope faded. And as the Oriental Year of the Tiger began in February, management was still trying to raise money for January's salaries.

Much like Korad, many agencies are reducing head counts. Korean ad expenditures are set to plunge drastically this year. The big advertisers are the same financially strapped companies who own the large agencies. "We currently estimate it will drop 30 percent, but some think it might fall 50 percent," says Wan-Keun Yoo, planning manager of KOBACO, the government agency that controls airtime sales. "There could be bankruptcies, both among media and agencies. These are Western market forces; there's no escape," says Yoo.

Now, shock, austerity, and economic chauvinism are part of the Korean consumer's new mood, aptly captured by a Welcomm Advertising spot for Prospecs athletic shoes, a homegrown Korean product: "Are you wearing dollars'"

Still, problems bring opportunities. David Carlson, an American creative director from Seoul's Leo Burnett Sonyon, launched his own agency, David Carlson Creative Inc. in January 1997. Inaugural clients include LG Electronics, the Korean Government and the U.S. Army. "Times are tough," says Carlson. "Our mantra is: do, not die."

Similarly, Miles Young, Ogilvy's Asia/Pacific president has opened 'ad factories' in Thailand and Malaysia. "These are studio-based, low overhead agencies geared to recession-hit clients with communication needs," he says. Called Design Direct, the new shops use shift labor and freelancers. In Bangkok, Design Direct has attracted over 40 clients new to the Ogilvy stable. All have been attracted by Design Direct's low cost, no-frills service. Ogilvy has also published Communication: Tough Times in Asia, a book about advertising and marketing in a recession, complete with Thai, Indonesian and Malaysian editions.

In Malaysia's recovering economy, advertisers are responding rationally, says Azizul Kallahan, chairman of Spencer Azizul in Kuala Lumpur. "But total billings could nonetheless be 10 percent down this year." In Thailand, creative has responded quickly to the changes caused by the economic collapse last summer. A devalued currency creates bargains for visitors. Leo Burnett Thailand's "Amazing Thailand" campaign hopes to woo tourists from Europe and Asia. An Ogilvy & Mather Bank of Asia campaign plays with the words baht (the currency) and its homophone bahd, meaning 'cut,' to introduce a new savings account to heal devaluation wounds. Faced with a 50 percent budget cut, Ogilvy also persuaded TV stations to run 7.5 second ads likening the crisis to drinking Singha beer. As a result, most people think the worst is over and are optimistic about the future, according to a poll by J. Walter Thompson. Although total spending fell 30 percent last year, forecasters predict a modest 5 percent recovery this year.

Elsewhere, China, India and Taiwan continue to be growth markets. Japan, where over half of Asia's ad spending is found, is a depressed giant. Despite economic problems, Indonesia's ad industry remained largely unscathed until Jan. 8, when the rupiah plunged. "The next day we saw cross-the-board cuts. First-quarter spending now could be 40-60 percent down for the industry," says Yusca Ismail, managing director of Perwanal DMB&B in Jakarta.

His sentiments are echoed by Alan Fairnington, Asia/Pacific president of J. Walter Thompson. "Multinational advertisers are prioritizing their brands and markets'a rational response," he says. "It's not a meltdown," agrees Harry Reid, FCB president international. "There are growth opportunities," adds Young.

Though there's less preaching about the supremacy of Asian values these days, a high degree of social cohesion will help the troubled Asian tigers regain their stride. In South Korea, people lined up at banks after a government appeal for their gold jewelry. Within a week, the country was able to export $110 million gold bullion. In a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, Harvard economists Steven Radelet and Jeffrey Sachs noted that the Asian currency crises of 1997 don't signal the end of Asian growth, instead, it's a pattern of instability that often accompanies rapid economic growth. Ride the tiger.

Our agency powered through that year winning first, The Korean Ministry of Finance business to direct the government's efforts to communicate how they were effectively dealing with the crisis to foreign journalists and business partners, and second, British American Tobacco's largest brand in the country. Everyday the newspapers would blast headlines proclaiming which of the next "too big to fail" companies had gone bust and everyday I would charge into the office saying "We're not one of them! Man the phones!"

Recently I saw Nouriel Rubini, Professor of Economics at New York University being interviewed on Bloomberg regarding the financial crisis. His view of Asia's place in the mix was quite different than what it might have been ten or eleven years ago. Ten years ago the world looked at Asia and said, "You'd better get your shit together". Today, Asia looks back at the West and says the same thing.

From the story above, three companies are no longer in business. Daewoo was allowed to go under by the Korean government and now exists as a number of independent brands in automotive, electronics and other industries. DMB&B was part of Leo Burnett's unsuccessful Bcom3 holding company and dismantled after Publicis' purchase of the entity. And CarlsonCreative was sold, at a profit, in 2003.

If there's anything I learned from my last crisis is that creativity, and not only money, will power you through. During tough times inefficiencies are exposed in old "too big to fail" companies and opportunities are opened for competitors. I'll finish with another excerpt from the first story David Kilburn wrote featuring our company - before we knew we had a crisis:

"With the old ways of doing business proving ineffective, the horizon for fresh ideas gets brighter," says David Carlson, a former Leo Burnett creative director who opened CarlsonCreative, a creative agency in Seoul. Carlson hopes to capitalize on the growing need among Korean and international clients for creative and strategic advertising.

I have generally found this to be true and suspect it will be true this time again. Now, about that next big idea?