Make Sure To Tip Your Local Blogger This Holiday Season or: Bank Errors In My Favour Kindly Accepted!

Holy shit. What did that that email say?

"Notification of Donation Recieved"

This PayPal email confirms that you have recieved a donation of $50 from...

Holy shit again. The mail goes on to explain that this money has come as a support donation for this blog from a devoted reader. And I couldn't say it could have come at a better time. Thank you. So here's my pitch to encourage a bit more:

As any of you loyal readers know, I've been at this endeavor for well over a year and a half and it has never been designed as a profit making venture, more a promotional tool for myself and of course the book, Wild Wild East, but as time goes on I would like to be able to justify it in some financial terms so donations and subscriptions have always been gladly accepted. And without this prompting, a very nice reader ponied up.

So here's the pitch: Make sure to tip your intrepid blogger this holiday season!

It's Bavaria. It's cold. And getting colder. And as anyone who's followed recently you know my business partnership has been delt a tough card. So basically, I could use the help. Work has begun slowly here but I'm a bit shaky about the holidays, now without a partner, and have been told that things will begin to slow here in the next few weeks but also have good commitments for January so my job is simply to keep warm, pay the rent and bully on through. With your help I can do that. Please do consider a drop in the hat. If you consider anything at all here entertainment of any kind then this work is not of the charity variety but more of the kind of me faithfully producing a product that is faithfully and hopefully enjoyably consumed.

That said, here's another cool story: A few days later I received another email from my beloved alma matter, SIU. It read like this:

Dear Mr. Carlson;

Our records indicate check #555343 written to you in September 2005 for $35.00 has not been cashed. If you will respond to this email, I can email you a form requesting a replacement check.

Thank you,

Erin

No shit. I'm laughing my ass off. So I emailed back and found that I had actually overpaid for a service way back in 2002 and they had had the refund check returned from my old address in Korea. I had ordered a copy of my diploma and some transcripts but paid too much. And so this is how this one works out:

Recently, in some confusion over my current goings on, I left my bag on the subway. Unfortunately, inside the bag were my passport, diploma and transcripts. I had just come from a job interview and had all my gear with me. Stupid me. I left it on the train. But with this new development, I am now told by the university that I can have a brand new diploma and two transcript copies for the same $35. Ha! Doesn't that work out.

Now, I wouldn't consider sending your kid to SIU for accounting, certainly not timely accounting, but cheers to my old Salukis! They finally got something right.

And for the holidays, the really cold friggin' Bavarian holidays - kindly remember your friendly neighborhood blogger, because the world is my neighborhood!

For more on digital marketing and social networking see:

Xing vs. LinkedIn: Round II
Trial and Error: The New Normal
What's Wrong With My Social Networking? Xing vs. LinkedIn I
Low Tech Germany. Who Knew?
Advertising People and Blogs
How to Write the Best Blog in the World
What If Gutenberg Had a Blog?
If Blogs Are Free Does That Make Them Worthless?
Detri-Viral Marketing II: The Top 10 Social Media Blunders
Bright Lights, Big Internet and the WWED
Saigon Digital Marketing Conference Successfully Avoids Plumbers Convention
A Tale of Many Marketing Conferences
Detri-Viral Marketing I: How Web 2.0 Can Go Against A Brand
Marketing Predictions for 2009
Barcamp Saigon 2008
"Ignore Everybody" is Born: A Plug for Hugh MacLeod
Are the Bloggerati Missing the Market? Asia has Risen,
Into the Gapinvoid - Web 2.0 Social Networking Born 20 Years Ago

Falling Economy: Recession Profit Stategies - #1

Okay, you don't need me to tell you things are tough. Hell, in Vietnam when stockbrokers jump from the roofs of bamboo huts they just get up and do it again. This can go on for days. But the boys in this video have figured out how to make a buck even when the banks are going up in flames. Make sure to scroll down and "pause" the lite-green podcast button in the right sidebar to stop the background music while you play the video.

Give it a look and see if you can't apply a similar strategy to your recession profit woes. For more ideas go here, and teach your employees how to market their way out for your firm.

For more Recession Profit Strategies, click below.

#4 Rubber Stamp Post-It Note Business Cards
#3 The Recruitment Process
#2 Saving On Employee Costs

A big thanks to Wayne Borg, one of the good old SIU boys from Chicago, for this one.

For more in Political Satire and Satire see:

White House Party Crashers Board Plane Loaded!

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

Belgian Prime Minister Quits Over Budweiser Purchase

Obama Brandishes a Bud for the Bubbas

American Foreign Policy Since WWII

America Overseas - Citizen Mekong to the Rescue

The Boys of Winter - SIU Reunion 1992

Okay, I know I seem to be getting nostalgic of late, what with posts about old Super Bowl commercials, That Embarrassing 70s Show and Has Beens and whatever, but what it truly is, is an attack of my own Vanity Fair in the fact that I just looked a whole lot damn cuter in those days than I do today. I mean, look at me now. Who wants a cute 52 year-old man? Nobody, that's for sure.

What people do want however, is a chance to page through your old photo album and tell you how cute you used to be, fully well knowing that it will make you feel like positive shit now and thus thus reinforcing their own fragile belief that they look like shit now too, but at least they've got company. The pains we all endure for having been attractive youngsters.

And so with that rather dour introduction I harken you all back to the days of yesteryear - the days when men were men and woman were, well, women. The accompanying photo comes from 17 years ago and was shot on the roof of my wife's and my apartment building, the Belden Stratford, on Lincoln Park West in Chicago. The occasion was the first ever Every-Thirteen-Year college roommate reunion. By whatever serendipity that caused us all to be in the same city at the same time for the first time in thirteen years, we had all planned to go out for a 5-star meal at a first class joint and dressed the part - except for the guy in the middle with the yellow trench coat. I am reminded now, that that was my coat and I had loaned it to him for the shoot because is was just blinding fucking cold outside and it was all I had, aside from what I was wearing.

From left to right, are myself, Tom Kirkhart, Steve Lind and Kevin O. Mooney. You can find us all on Facebook - Kevin has more Facebook friends than the rest of us combined so he's the only nice guy in the lot apparently. Over the course of two years at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Illinois, we all lived in the same flat and shared house duties, cooking and at more than one time, girlfriends - and we all still got along. Feeling fairly sure that none of us will be running for President, pretty much ever, I can also say that there was some marijuana involved. Oh those college boyz. Now professional athletes call it "poor judgement" while being released from their cornflake endorsements.

Tom is currently Chief Marketing Officer at CRM Studios, a video and TV production studio in Fort Worth, Texas. Steve is a National Sales Rep for CBS Outdoor Advertising in Seattle and Kevin is Assistant Professor of Photography at Indiana University as well as running his own studio at Kevin O. Mooney Photography. Along with myself at university we were a self contained advertising agency in our tiny Lewis Park apartment with me handling creative duties as a Graphic Design major, Tom in Radio and Television production, and both Steve and Kevin as Photography majors. Steve and I once threatened to be on the cover of Soldier of Fortune magazine with a shoot we had done for a local businessman, Ricky, who kept and trained attack dogs along with a small hashish trade on the side. Failing to collect the money which Ricky owed to my boss, a sign painter, we escaped with our lives and the negatives, never to see fame in the business of black-ops. Ricky reportedly did a fair amount of jail time later for his turned-out-not-to-be-so-small sideline.

And then there was the time that a lawyer from San Francisco paraded into my office at Student Center Graphics and proclaimed that he needed a bunch of creative advertising guys to run his father, a Democrat, for a high county office - his (the lawyer's) only problem being that he didn't have any money, but would happily pay us in pot, he claimed he had procured for the Jefferson Airplane, to be downgraded that year to Starship. We took that job.

Upon moving into our shared apartment, Steve and Kevin wasted no time in converting the downstairs bathroom into a darkroom with the benefit that Tom and I could look at all the female photography students and aspiring models they had managed to convince to disrobe for the camera in the name of art. Amazing how many girls bought that shit. And then there was the time Tom and I spent an entire afternoon painstakingly drilling holes in the wall, before a huge house party and wiring Steve's room for sound, with a microphone - TV announcer style - placed under Steve's bed, and Tom and I, set up in his room next door with a huge reel-to-reel TEAC tapedeck to record Steve's horribly rehearsed advances to yet another young lady with the line, "Do you wanna come to my room and see my portfolio?" Unfuckingbelievable. The latter tape from the house party that evening, that ended in Steve's room, would provide us all humour for months - squeaking springs and all - nearly as funny as the reverse sound piping we did later to pump the Todd Rundgren song "Can We Still Be Friends" into Tom's room during the absolutely tearful dumping he was giving his latent hippy girlfriend duJour. Her name was Sunshine. Gimme a fucking break.

All this from a disparate bunch of young men just hungry for knowledge and feeding at the trough of academia in the pursuit of the creative arts. The only one of us who never had any bad shit done to him was Kevin. I froze his underwear once along with the other guy's by disguising it as ground beef, soaked and wrapped in aluminum foil, and stacking all of it in the freezer and telling them all that I was storing it for a friend. Dumbshits. They bought this for days while the stench of unwashed Jockeys and the minute-by-minute desire to just piss myself laughing finally brought me to surrender. The boyz had earned this unholy prank after throwing me out the front door in the snow one night - buck-assed naked- and flashing the porchlight on and off for all the neigbors to see, while I danced and froze my skinny little butt off.

Who needs enemys.

The photo and stories today were all inspired by a one Wayne Borg, a friend of ours from the dormitory days who just popped up on FaceBook last week and started dragging up 30 year old muck after that long of an absence. Thank you Wayne. You asshole.

But mostly, thanks to all these boys of winter. A few days ago I was lamenting the fact that my Super Bowl commercial didn't make me rich and famous or some other silly-assed shit and the guy said to me, "But Dave, you've got the stories. You've got great stories". Thanks everyone. The stories come from you. To quote Henry Miller, "Life becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show." I just write em' down.

America, The Land of the FREE, Home of the Slave!

Gotta thank Brian Romero for this one! To quote Mike Belcheck, the "Freeman" of late 70s Southern Illinois University fame, "I will work for free, if everything I need is free".

The Art Walk - Perspective IV: The Little Things

Today is so right and so ready.

Did anyone die today? Did you make a million dollars? Was there a tsunami in your part of the world?

Doubtful.

In truth, nothing happened today. And that's, oddly, where we all got it wrong. A whole lot happened today and maybe people were just too stoopid, dim or unaware to have seen any of it. It pisses me off. Because I saw a whole bunch, and I'm chirping mad to know why nobody else saw it. Here's the list:

A week's worth in one day: (Click on the pics to make them bigger)

THE ARTIST:
In a previous post, I mentioned my insistence and pleasure in walking in Saigon. I know, it's farking nuts. Leave me alone. Today I walked home from a client and passed many of the shops that produce the kind of art you can buy at an art exhibit at the Holiday Inn in Bentonville, Arkansas - art for everything from trailer homes to McMansions. You know, copy Mona Lisas and the like. And honestly, some of them are quite nice. The Vietnamese, for the record, already got their colonialist lesson in how to paint in the style that the intruders liked - and they're absolutely crack at it. You can get your hands on a Warhol, DaVinci, Steadman (No shit...Fear and Loathing!) and anything else you like for maybe thirty bucks – better if you live here. So I know the routine on the locals pickin' off tourists to pay way-the-hell-more than they ought to for a damn nice copy.

My cost on a crack Patek Philippe watch is $14. Take it to your jeweler dude, and then give me shit. But back to the artist.

The walk I took is a mix of motorbike repair shops full of 60's Vespas, garbage Hondas and rubbish what-evers from Russia, Hungary, Korea and... art galleries. Go figure. I can almost see the well-healed New Yorkers, Parisians and Abu Dabbers traipsing this odd turf in search of the next Keith Haring. Fat fucking chance. This bit of the Wild Wild East is mine and I'm the sheriff. That's why I get to walk home on this street – and do anything I fucking want.

So I hit the shop. Another shop – like any one would be any different from any other. There must be 1000 versions of a sultry Vietnamese farm woman, baring a bit of a breast, and pouring water from a jar with a forlorn look in her eye. Yeah, every rice farmer's got a copy of that one – right over the Harley in his garage – the only place his wife will let him keep it. C'mon ... Vietnamese don't buy this stuff.

But this artist must have known something – whatever gallery owners know when a prospective buyer walks in the door: "Is he newly divorced?", "Looking for something to match that Crate and Barrel sofa?" or "just another stiff off the boat? " Come in...

My guy doesn't go there at all. Instead, he walks me up to a painting that I don't like very much at all. It's an original of a butterfly hovering over a plant of some sort. Wretched. But I'm nice enough and have an art poker face that works in all the major markets – so he begins to explain the piece: The tuft of a willow sort of bit is an eyebrow. The butterfly, a nose. Another bit of a flower, the lips and the stem of another unseen flower, the outline of a female face. It's an incredibly innocent concept, but one he presents to me as his own. His idea. And I am floored. The idea is to see the positive images in reverse and that will reveal the face he has really painted. It works.

But of all the guys, and dammit - white guys - that he sees in his joint everyday, did he decide to show me his "thinking" instead of his copies? I am in love.

And no, I will never buy this painting. But I'm in love with the idea that no matter what we have to do to pay the bills, that some of us will still gravitate to what lives deepest in our hearts – our ideas. Because life goes on. Nothing really happens. Except when we think.

WALKING:
Do not come to Vietnam to walk. Not in the city at least. Like I said about the Afghan technology in their roads, it gets no better on the sidewalk. The sheer number of steel rods sticking out at inopportune times, shifts in pavement height and general disregard for anyone who walks is appalling. Got it?

CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?
The cacophony of houses in Saigon is absolutely artful. The minute you are charmed by a fading French Colonial masterpiece, you'll be blown away by some new bit of urban blight that puts the term "McMansion" to shame. Shit, they don't even have McDonald's here so how the hell would they know? In any case, the dichotomy in urban housing is masterful. Mansions next to certified shotgun shacks and that's how it's going to stay. And all because of Ho Chi Minh.

With the communist takeover of the south in 1975 there shortly came a grand re-appropriation of real estate. The spoils of war. And those southerners who were rich and now on the loosing side? Well, they became the famed boat people we had so artfully framed in the US as poor Vietnamese farmers who were driven out by the evil empire. And who were they really? Well, lawyers, doctors and other professionals who had had the misfortune of befriending America when we had pretty much abandoned ship here. You have no idea how much it cost to buy even the most unseaworthy of craft at that time. Farmers? Hardly.

I know. I was part of a church "big brother" program in college to help a Vietnamese family relocate to the US in 1975. My little brother was 28 and a former lawyer in Vietnam. I was 19 and an art student. We had to teach the family how to use Levelor blinds and electric can openers but my brother, despite his lack of language skills, was determined to become a lawyer again. I'm sure he is today.

Yet, however horrendous the takeover – and yes, you can find plenty of unsavory stories on the internet, the dust settled and peace became – and the houses were reassigned. The little house you see today, next to a mansion, may have been that of a driver or mechanic of a victorious general. The driver still lives there. And somehow, that's all fair. Everybody gets along.

MOTOBIKE YOU?
That means, "Would you like a ride on my motorbike?", the modern day Vietnamese equivalent of a taxi driver having his light on. I am accosted by this statement/question at least 20 times a day as I ply the city. My friend and I used to joke that the national slogan for Vietnam should be "Motobike, Marijuana, Boom-Boom!" Because that is precisely the order in which street hawkers will try to sell you the three things they think a foreigner is most ready to buy: Transportation, pot and sex. Why do I think they are more right than wrong?

PERFORMANCE ART:
He didn't mean to make art but he did. The man who will sell you a new muffler or tailpipe for your motorbike has a limited amount of street space – because his shop is in the back and the other vendors own squatting rights to the sidewalk in front of their TV repair joints, restaurants and other shops. So the muffler guy simply put all the mufflers and pipes he could fit into a shopping cart and wheeled it out next to the curb. Everybody knows what that means. It's a sign that says, quite clearly, "Muffler guy, here". Now, should you buy a muffler, that will change the art – a deceptively calculated part of the performance, I suspect.

HOW DO YOU DEMOLISH A JUNKYARD:
You'd think the shit had already hit the fan in this place. Old Citroens, a few Mustangs and a mess of other stuff that is just what junkyards out to be. I fucking loved this place. And it was just down the street from what routinely sell as million dollar plus, 20 ft wide, three storey, street properties. Today, a fully functioning Komatsu tractor is raking the joint over. My junkyard is gone. I used to come here for meditation. To see the visions of the past that had now come to call this part of urbana their home. Shoot. Now I'll have to go to a park or church like other people. I won't like that near as much as I will miss this.

# 4,446,976
I slapped out at my friend Hugh MacLeod recently for wanking about his Technorati ranking. Gapingvoid.com is #409 and Hugh just signed a book deal with Penguin, the same people who published Seth Godin's "Purple Cow".

And then I found my ranking. It's like - a million-sumthin'.

Doesn't look immediately good. Until you realize that Technorati claims to rank over 112 Million websites – and that puts me well inside the top 5%. So " f " off, anyone who says I ain't shit. I'm in the top five percent of shit apparently.

On a sidebar, the website Wild Wild East, which is my book site and not the fun or active one, ranked in at # 2,910,025. That's top 3% and better. And that's a 75 + page site with no breaks and basically one post. Go figure.

THE MOST DOCUMENTED LIFE IN HISTORY:
Is blogging obsessive/compulsive? Are we all just digital wankers? Probably yes , but we're not even close to holding any records. That one, and one not likely to be eclipsed by any blogger, goes to R. Buckminster Fuller, creator of the geodesic dome, the Dymaxion car, the modern FIFA soccer ball and former Professor Emeritus at my alma mater. He is dubiously credited with having the most documented life in modern history – owing to his having kept a journal, to the minute, throughout his life.

DIGG, DUGG, BLIM, BLAM AND WHAM BAM THANK YOU MAM:
See all that rubbish at the bottom of the post. Wanna "Digg" this or "Mixx" that? If anybody knows what the hell all of that is please feel free to click away and Digg, Mixx, or Spooge this article to your liking.

BRAZIL ROCKS!
My Brazil campaign is kicking butt and here's the map to prove it. Brazil loves me! Read the post and you'll get it. And all because I reached out to them. Brazil is now on the map but watch out – India is still the house favourite for a surge. Wait until I decide to go after Mongolia. Brutal is the only word I can think of.

DIRTY WORDS:See any lately? Around here they're becoming de rigeur – and I wonder, should I be concerned? A friend of mine was fired recently, from the most prestigious university in town for comments she made on her personal blog in relation to Vietnamese women. Let's just put it this way, think of all the words that equate with "money for sex" and that was the analogy she was making – probably not in a literal or truly antagonistic way but it didn't come out well for her. She was turned in by a fellow worker who took offense at her opinion.

So where does one draw the line? Do you stop at saying the "F" word or does it go further? Does it go to the heart of your matters? For me, I'm not going to get all motherly about the use of certain words but I will keep a mind about how and why I use such words – and the ideas they, combined with the clever crafting of other words around them, communicate the heart and spirit of ideas. In short, I may be terse, blunt, pointed and theatrically profane but I will not be a nasty bastard. No point.

TO SEE:One day, on the walk out of our office in Korea, I stopped to examine the bark on a tree. The molting of this particular tree bark created a three dimensional pattern that I had neverseen on a tree before. It was a big flowering Korean tree but I'll be damned if I can tell you what it was. Seeing me fascinated with the tree, my staff, Nam Mee-Hyun, remarked, "David, you're the only person I have ever seen pay any attention to that tree at all". And honestly, I didn't think twice about the attention I paid to trees, or old cars, or anything. It's simply the beauty of walking more than most. You see more than most. That tree, that day was at least worth this story.

WHAT'S A LITTLE THING?
Maybe the beauty of little things is you never really know what is little or what is big unless you look at the little. A lot. What's big is just so fucking obvious that we should really regard it all as an illusion. Texas. A Lincoln Navigator. The ocean. Maybe there's nothing there.
But there's a million little things – everyday. If we look.

Today, my friend just opened a site to celebrate the life and little things of her son, Colin , who is no longer with us.

Today a million little things mean everything. They are simply, what happened.

Today is just so right and so ready.