ADS Design School, Saigon - Rubbish?

Welcome ADS. Probably the first real Advertising and Design school in Vietnam. And thank them for asking me to help.

As I understand, ADS found me from LinkedIn and approached me to be their Program Director, based on my professional background and award winning history.

Rubbish.


What matters most? Can I teach their students to think? In the end my personal background and experience won't mean a thing if I can't instill questioning, critical thinking and an extreme aversion to all things tried and true and lacking in originality. What matters most about my background is not the companies I worked for, but the work I did at those companies compared to the standard product they were turning out. And in the end, a school promising to make a difference and bring an international standard to design and advertising education in Vietnam won't mean a thing unless they can turn out graduates who can compete on an international level and challenge the status quo. And in this country, that's a tall order. Being different or original is not valued half as much as being the same or being wealthy. Can the values of creativity and originality really be taught over the prevailing values that money and status conquer all? And did the school buy my name and international history as a logo on a polo shirt or did they buy a concept that an international education is broader, more liberal and more adaptive to change than one steeped in conservative rhetoric? Only time will tell.

Should you have questions about the school either as a student or faculty, please let me know.

I am no longer associated with ADS Design School. Please click here for notice.

Fries with that sir?

I wonder how I will look in that paper hat? I was recently advised that taking a job at McDonald's is a way that many foreigners get a work permit for Germany. And with just a couple of months here I can understand why. With a full-time job one is able to participate in the social system which includes health insurance and for all that's a primary importance. My current status is as a freelance worker and that requires I provide my own insurance at around a hundred dollars a month. Recently in an email from my father he advised that I not come back to the US. 'There are no jobs here', he says and as a 53 year old professional, I wonder if there will ever be any more conventional jobs for me. Recently, in Vietnam, where the advertising business actually enjoyed a 30% increase in adspend, I know of at least three senior level people who were released with companies looking to trim budget and reduce losses globally. And how will I enjoy that paper hat? Better than I might enjoy a paper blanket on the street, I expect.

"The most trusted man in America" dies: RIP Walter Cronkite

CNN) -- "Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman known as "Uncle Walter" for his easygoing, measured delivery and "the most trusted man in America" for his rectitude and gravitas, died Friday night in his New York home, CBS reported. Cronkite was 92. Cronkite covered World War II's Battle of the Bulge, the Nuremberg trials, several presidential elections, moon landings, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Watergate scandal of President Richard M. Nixon's administration. At his height of influence as CBS anchorman, Cronkite's judgment was believed so important it could affect even presidents. In early 1968, after the Tet Offensive, Cronkite traveled to Vietnam and gave a critical editorial calling the Vietnam War "mired in stalemate."

Noting Cronkite's commentary, President Lyndon Johnson reportedly said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." Johnson announced he would not seek re-election less than two months later."

At the time Cronkite entered the medium of television, TV was to the world, what the Internet is today. An infant, a newcomer. He was and always will live as a pioneer and sadly, throngs will not gather at the Staples Center for an all-star memorial service. Let's just bid him farewell quietly. He would have liked that. He will be missed.

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?

He Would Have Shot Me 40 Years Ago - Perspective XI: The Little Things V

O A bus is a bus is a bus - or Gertrude Stein would have said about Vietnam today. And there are a lot of buses, but the #4 is a little one, what you might call a shuttle bus, and although it goes past the airport, this is not the one, one would take to actually get to the airport. It goes much farther than that and generally carries the Vietnamese to their homes after a day of toiling in a low pay job or selling something on the street downtown in District 1. Businessmen do not ride this bus. O And I've yet to see a foreigner, aside from myself on this route. The entire trip from the big station at Ben Thanh Market takes roughly 45 minutes to one hour, depending on the traffic. And it's as efficient a trip through a construction war zone as a skilled driver can make it. The road to the airport is a collection of obstacles from a bazillion motorbikes to large green metal-sheeted barricades in the center, in the midst of a citywide hole digging project for a drainage system, and the odd pedestrian, lady with a cart of chickens or motobike deliveryman transporting large sheets of glass or mirrors with the help of an assistant riding on the back to hold the glass. O The Vietnamese bus of today is the urban equivalent of what an American tank might have been here 40 years ago. They just don't give a shit and dutifully plow through whatever happens to be lying before them. It is an absolute damn sight to behold. These drivers should be given a medal just for surviving a day in this transportation firestorm. And so I board. O Once on the bus the biggest choice is one of seats and considering that I start at the start of the route, I'm happy to have a choice. I choose the copilot's chair right to the right of the driver with a big clear-screen view of the road in front of me and all the chatter that he and his ticket-taker care to banter throughout the trip - and that can be considerable, considering - I'm just a man on a bus going from point A to point B- and not in the market for any more Vietnamese entertainment than the 20 cent ticket entitles me to. Sit your ass down white boy. You must be this tall to get on this ride. O And so I plop down next to the older man who rides shotgun in the furthest right seat. And he immediately says, "hello" with an accent and confidence that makes me immediately understand that he learned his English during the war here, so many, many years ago - an occurrence that is not unusual at all. So as the #4 gets underway we begin to converse, in the kind of small talk that pervades all participants of diverse cultures on the way to finding out what might be common to them both. The old "Where are you from - how long have you been here" questions ensue, peppered by the old pleasantry or linguistic peace offering. "Thank you", I say to him in response to a compliment about New York. "Interesting", I say to him in my response to his telling of a French proverb that roughly translates into "You can't take it with you". His name is Hanh and he has told me that he is 73 years old. And he is quite obviously not wealthy. He clutches a plastic shopping bag that I see is full of VCDs, the old cheap Chinese equivalent of a DVD, no longer a medium of use today to even the most basic Vietnamese. And he opens his bag. He presents to me some VCDs of traditional Vietnamese music and historical dramas and implores me to look at them. I do. An opening of the cover and brief scan of the language and visuals is all I am able to accomplish but it is of obvious proportion that he feels their cultural worthiness so much more than I. It's pretty old stuff. I can't imagine that he has much luck selling these to even people of his own age and even at that, not for a cent or two over whatever he paid for them. O And the bus trundles on. He explains to me how happy he is that the war is long over and that the country is now "open". The Americans and the French and god knows all sorts of countries that the Vietnamese could never have imagined are pouring money into building projects and infrastructure and education and whatnot making this man's post-war world of 73 a virtual fantasy land that Speilberg and Lucas together could not have created. The road we travel is a living breathing organism of every single day of his life rolled into one 45 minute trip and encapsulated into one blink of this man's eye as only he can see it. And I am a blind man - on the ride with my Vietnamese seeing eye dog with an eye towards the peace that all people long for far beyond the shortsighted actions of their respective governments at any one point in time. "I would have shot you forty years ago", he says, "but today we ride on a bus together. I am very happy for that", he bookends. He goes on to explain that during the war he worked in medical supply and carried medications to needy soldiers in the field. "I no ever carry gun. I no ever shoot anyone. And no anyone ever shoot me", he says, with just a hint of a wry smile - as if he could have seen this bus ride so far into what would have been his future. O He explains further that he has had ten children and that two of his daughters live in the US and two in Europe - so much pride and peace in his ideas. He goes back to the French proverb meaning "you can't take it with you" and recants it for me in impeccable French. I apologize for my miserable Francais. "But you and I, here today", he finishes, "and much money no make us better men", as he clutches the plastic bag. He looks quite softly into my eyes after I have informed him that my stop will be coming up and I must depart. "You good man", he says, "You good heart in eyes", as we shake hands in farewell. O The #4 always overshoots my actual stop, but today not at all. I know I arrived historically at just the right place and time. It's fucking perfect. O

For more on the "Perspective" or "Little Things" series, click below:

My Morning Wake-Up Call - Perspective XX: The Little Things XII
We'll Have A Gay Old Time - Perspective XIX: The Little Things XII
"Rolled Foggy Disposed Ricepaper" - Perspective XVIII: The Little Things XI
Joyeux Noel - Perspective XVII: The Little Things X
Lunch With Obama - Perspective XVI: The Little Things IX
One Motley Crue On The Bus Today - Perspective XV: The Little Things VIII
Attraction vs. Conversion: How To Power Your Blog - Perspective XIV: The Little Things VII
A glass box full of deep fried chicken heads - Perspective XIII: The Little Things VI
Seoul Searching - Perspective XII
He Would Have Shot Me 40 Years Ago - Perspective XI: The Little Things V
Chomsky on Colour & Sleep - Perspective X: The Little Things IV.2
Running With Scizzors - Perspective IX: The Little Things IV
Henry Miler II - Perspective VIII : The Little Things III.1
Henry Miller - Perspective VII: The Little Things III
Big Brother - Perspective VI: The Little Things II
This Carnival of Life! - Perspective V
The Art Walk - Perspective IV: The Little Things
Bentley #5 - Perspective III.2
Bentley vs. Vespa - Perspective III.1
Bentleys Invade Vietnam - Perspective III
Death Of A Colleague - Perspective II
Perspective

American Foreign Policy since WWII

Go ahead. Take me out back and shoot me. I'm at a loss for words. And that ain't nomal, is it? Watch the video. It's a snippet of my current life as done by Sam Kinneson and Rodney Dangerfield.



Brilliant.

We loose wars because we don't give a shit. We're basically in it for the money. But military mite never beats a nation's natural patriotism. We need to get back to our roots. Paul Revere and Thomas Payne were insurgents. Thomas Jefferson was a participating enemy of big government.

I graduated High School in 1974, the first year of no draft – so my impression of Vietnam is very different from that of someone just a few years older than me. Today, a host of vets and journalists still live here and I have spoken with many. This month marks the 33rd anniversary of the end of the war. The last American helicopter departed from Saigon on April 15th, 1975 and by the end of the month, North Vietnamese tanks had stormed through the gates of the presidential palace. Having lived now both in South Korea and in Vietnam, America's two primary post WWII theatres, I've come to wonder if the Cold War was just the result of a business deal gone bad. The accompanying chart illustrates WWII deaths by country. Considering that our ally, the Soviet Union, lost nearly 26 million people, or 14% of their population, and America lost less than 1/2 a million, just .32% of it's population, one might wonder if the Soviets expected more spoils for their efforts after the war and if the actions in Korea and Vietnam were just past business partners fighting over assets in the divorce.

For more in Political Satire and Satire see:

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Pope Prays For Embattled Putter's Promiscuous Pecker: Tiger Woods Pardoned

Obama Sends 30,000 Troops to Tiger Woods' House!

Obama's Puppy in Rehab After Just a Week

Recession Profit Stategies II

Recession Profit Strategies I

Bush Surveys Presidential Disaster Area

MENSA Endorses McCain/Palin

Putin Hot As Hell Over Palin

SNL Palin/Hillary Open

Cheney Delivers 1 Billion in Aid to Georgia

Obama Splits Ticket - Boots Biden

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Obama Brandishes a Bud for the Bubbas

American Foreign Policy Since WWII

America Overseas - Citizen Mekong to the Rescue