If we're all living in a fantasy, I think I'll just believe in mine a whole lot more than the other people believe in theirs.

Gapingvoid.com

I'll criticize things in a meeting. I'll ask the tough questions. And I'll kill ideas on all the levels they don't work - and then look for better ones. I'm critical of food in restaurants, films, music, fashion, business models - whatever.

Because I'm an optimist, and I want things to work like baseballs flying over outfield fences as many times as they can. A pessimist won't do that, because he's afraid of winning, not loosing. Too many people fight to loose, so if life is just all one big fantasy, I get to win one every once in a while. The rest is what most of us just call work.

D a v i d E v e r i t t - C a r l s o n

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Find me on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Read my blog: The Wild Wild East Dailies and keep up on our efforts with aSaigon/CreativeMorning.

"It Wouldn't Have Made Any Difference"

Daryl Hall and Todd Rundgren from 'Live at Daryl's House' - Episode 40, live from Todd's house in Hawaii.

D a v i d E v e r i t t - C a r l s o n

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Find me on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Read my blog: The Wild Wild East Dailies and keep up on our efforts with aSaigon/CreativeMorning.

Did I make a mistake? I fell in love.

Maybe with the wrong person and maybe for the wrong reasons, but I believe it's the first time I have ever done that. I submitted. Surrendered. Gave all. It didn't work But I'm so glad I did it. Once in a lifetime? Maybe I learned something about myself. What it took to give in. To give up. To be there. To not be me, if only for a minute. Or two. And maybe again. In a better world. But in this world, I suspended disbelief and saw the best of life. If only shortly.

July, 2009 - Reprinted from The Wild Wild East Dailies archive

A death and birth in Dalat. Long live Michael Jackson. 

My birthday week in Dalat was inspiring. I was taken as a 
birthday gift and if one can be given peace, comfort, 
hope, inspiration and confidence in a big box with a ribbon 
on it, that was my gift. A gift from God. No cakes cut, no 
candles lit and no songs sung. It was perfect.  

 The Ana Mandara resort is an old French colonial weekend 
colony that has been meticulously refurbished to maintain 
the architectural integrity of the original villas whilst 
bringing them up to date with WiFi, microwave  cooking 
and the like. The staff are courteous and casual and make a science out of staying 
out of your way while still making sure that all service points are met. 

Birds sing daily and nights by the fire are standard. Our villa had three fireplaces, 
making me a full-time Boy Scout and just as happy as could be. Candles are lit in 
groups of three always. Flowers arranged immediately. A trip to the market 
one day brought tuna, vegetables, fruits and the finest of Dalat's vineyards - and 
with the help of the resort kitchen for pots and pans, I was able to cook a meal that 
rivaled  what  the chefs had been preparing for us the whole time. Magical. 

With a jazz soundtrack. Morning was delivered in waves of reflection and care. 
Introspection and extroversion. Exploration and discovery of truth, love, logic, loss, 
magic and pro-activity. Beautiful mystery, explained - explained again.  Then 
Michael Jackson died. 

Turning on the BBC while having my morning coffee, it was like a replay of 
Princess Diana's death in August of 1997 except the celebrities had been changed 
and the person to whom I would deliver the news would be different. In 97 I had  
driven from the lake house to the local convenience store for the morning's milk 
and eggs when I saw the newspaper headline as big as it could have been printed, 
"Di Dies!". This I knew somehow, would be reacted to profoundly by my wife who 
was still sleeping back at the cottage. When I asked her why this was such 
important news, during the day long coverage her response was simple. "David",
 she said, "Don't you know that every little girl wants to grow up to be a 
princess?" This response would prove to be a milestone in my understanding of 
women in general but not prepare me much for my traveling companion's reaction 
to Jackson's death.

"Michael Jackson was a foolish man. He couldn't manage his life or his money", 
was the statement. No sorrow, no sympathy, no regret. Just a cold hard statement 
of what was essentially the truth. Michael Jackson was a victim of himself and no 
one else - now relegated the the historical oddity chamber of pop fame. And did he 
contribute to my life?  Yes. But did his death have the impact on me of that of John 
Lennon's? No. Because with Lennon a part of my childhood died but with 
Jackson only a part of his childhood died. He seemed to live in a perpetual Peter 
Pan state and that, in the end, may have been his demise. He refused to grow up. 
And my week in Dalat would teach me that, that was exactly what I needed to do. 
 Grow up a little bit more.

I have always been extremely guarded of the childish part in me that looks at a white 
sheet of paper and conceives castles to commerce and so showing that to others has 
been something I have avoided - even to my wife during our 15 years in marriage. 
Yet here in Dalat I was being confronted by a friend, confidant and full-time muse 
to look beyond my reality and into a future of intelligence, stability and growth
 - a future so unlike anything that Michael Jackson could have ever conceived. And 
so a death, and a birth, were happening in Dalat - all at the same time. 
It was coincidence, and contradiction and contrition to the fact that I would need to 
leapfrog some things in business and jump-start the machine again - all inspired 
by the most unlikely person I had met through a failed job interview. Who knew. 
Well, it seems that God knew. 

For readers in Germany, France and Africa stay tuned for an upcoming tour schedule 
as the Wild Wild East goes west. A death in Dalat. A birth in Dalat. From the loss of 
Michael Jackson to the birth of something new. The one to thank, already knows. 
It's time to take this show on the road. Long live Michael Jackson.

D a v i d E v e r i t t - C a r l s o n

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Find me on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Read my blog: The Wild Wild East Dailies and keep up on our efforts with aSaigon/CreativeMorning.

Complete Spam Blog helped by the Australian Consul

Oh, I hate this shit. This got sent to my email and it's a blog, designed to look like it might be a Vietnamese author and then when you want to make a comment, like, "this sucks" there is no response button. Who do we call? Aussie Ghost Busters?

Hello boyz. New Facebook account is that? Nice blog. Dinos.

The Drive-by Technorati and Why You're Fucked up

Oh dear. I said I would never use a four-letter word again. I did. Because it was necessary. Read this. Nuff said.

D a v i d E v e r i t t - C a r l s o n

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Find me on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Read my blog: The Wild Wild East Dailies and keep up on our efforts with aSaigon/CreativeMorning.

"Hey, could you make this a little more, uh, average?"

I pitched an idea to a local magazine to use the library of 500 stories that is the Wild Wild East Dailies for a new column and they said they'd consider it. I sent a 6-10 story suggestion for updating blog posts I had done on a variety of subjects from movie reviews, to observations, some satire, music and more, all with the voice that had become that particular blog. Wild, Wild, as you might say. The voice here is different, for different purpose. But the voice on WWED came from a part of my life that I will never experience again and I will never write quite exactly like that again - so it sort of lives in the voice in which it was written. Holden Caulfield was never heard from again for a reason.

A few days after I sent my story samples, I received a note from the editor and three samples from their magazine. "Do you think you could revise your style to be  little more like these?". he asked.

So I read the stories he sent me. He had written one of them. But the interesting thing is that  in moving from story to story, they all had a sameness, a sort of soft edge. There was nothing particularly wrong with them, but there was nothing particularly right about any of them either. They were just sort of straight reporting with little personal angle - and this is a feature publication, not a newspaper. The writing sucked. You could have switched the writing credits between all three and you wouldn't really know the difference.

So I asked myself the question, "Could I make my stories like theirs?",  and the answer was, "not really". But if I'm asked to write newer things in a style similar to something I am given for example, sure. In Korea I taught myself to write brochure copy for the Korean Ministry of Finance. I simply read all the brochures from Financial Times writers before me and put what personal twist I could on that. I learned the lingo and tone they needed and, maybe only because I was a white guy, got it approved with little issue. I got ten grand for a 36 page brochure. It was good money. It wasn't exactly War and Peace, but I was happy with it for what it was. Similarly, I've written for American Airlines, Nintendo, and a plethora of diverse clients and they all need their own particular 'voice'. Not my voice, their voice.

And so it is for work I did for my own purpose, as my own client. It can be edited, revised, updated and have the four letter words taken out where needed, but it can never sound like other stuff that was written from a completely different point of view by other people. Because after that, it's just not fun, or interesting or me. The book Wild Wild East and recently retired blog, the Wild Wild East Dailies are now capsules in time. Products if you will. My job is to sell them as such and preserve as much of the attitude as possible in their publication.

D a v i d E v e r i t t - C a r l s o n

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Find me on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Read my blog: The Wild Wild East Dailies and keep up on our efforts with aSaigon/CreativeMorning.

Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like - Luv this site!

We suggest you
not run your country
like America.

Hi all. Now, for those of you who have never lived overseas as an 'expat' they say, this may not make any sense. But for those of us who have, and primarily in developing countries (that means poor as f-all) this makes a great deal of sense. Aid workers belong to the business class we call NGOs, or Non-Governmental Organizations. You may refer to the Red Cross or Unicef or Doctors Without Borders to get your bearings here. These are organizations from rich countries that run TV spots in your country looking for just $20 a month to support an African child or drill wells in Mongolia to irrigate the Gobi. Rubbish. So much of this does little to help the locals and a whole lot more to make the foundation holders feel as if they are helping the world - like inventing dynamite and then giving out a peace award is in some way, making up for the dynamite.

Country managers and high ranking staff ( and anybody from a rich country who went to a brand name university ) live in nice houses, have Land Rovers and drivers and rarely spend a day in the 'poor' villages they show you in the brochure. The last 'Foundation' CEO I met had an office on the 26th floor of one of the prime office towers in town. And then I went to Danang and saw their 'Foundation' retreat on the beach. Any poor people there?  I didn't think so. Looked more like cabanas on the beach and championship Colin Montgomerie golf across the street. Thank you Mr.Corp.

When I was in Mongolia, George Soros bought an old Russian mansion in town and had it refurbished to look like what? And old Russian mansion - just so they could run what he calls the Soros Open Society Foundation. They teach poor people how to make newspapers.Rich people creating the illusion that if you followed their lead, that you might actually be like them. So cruel, so wrong. Just selling another Gucci handbag - maybe a real one, made by your cousin.

The people who work for these NGOs are called Expat Aid Workers. But what it really means is a bunch of  upper middle class kids at least from very respected schools come to do 'non-profit' work for what in the end, works out to be considerable profit in terms of local lifestyle - not to mention some serious street-cred back at the old sailing club. Oh, sure, it's less than they might get at J.P. Morgan or Goldman, but WTF, they're in BumFudgeNowhere helping 'poor' people and not shoveling the same old horse shit they'd have to back on Wall Street. Cheerio chaps!

Read away.

#31 Using Words in Other Languages

MARCH 7, 2011

tags: #stuffexpataidworkerslike, using words in other languages

by J.

One of the few things that Expat Aid Workers love more than having a deep, nuanced and specific understanding of many local cultures, is being able to demonstrate (show, don’t tell)  to others that they have a deep, nuanced and specific understanding of many local cultures. And there are few things that get this across as effectively as using words in other languages.

Many will confuse “using words in other languages” with “speaking another language.” But these two things are not at all the same. Speaking another language is a great skill to have if you’re tied down to one place. Speaking another language can make it easier to “go native. ” Phraseology in another language can certainly help those Expat Aid Workers who like to explain local culture to locals. It can also make those who dress like locals (perhaps in an attempt to blend in) or who make a point of not seeing other foreigners more convincing.

But using words in a variety of other languages helps to show that you have been around. Peppering your speech, skype chats, Facebook updates with words in other languages lends thatje ne sais quoi of a true global nomad. “Accidentally” murmuring phrases in a random language during sex  (“I just don’t know how to express that in English….”) helps you play up the mysterious, nomadic part of your persona. Using words in other languages communicates that you have a deep, phuc tap personality. You have spent so much of your life as a mzungu or bule that very little can phase you. (read more by clicking the title)

D a v i d E v e r i t t - C a r l s o n

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Find me on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Read my blog: The Wild Wild East Dailies and keep up on our efforts with aSaigon/CreativeMorning.