Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts

Wednesday 8 February 2023

Birmingham Royal Ballet - Swan Lake




I haven't been to the ballet since Paquita, by the Ballet de l'Opera national de Paris in Beijing, 2008. You can read that linked review if you wish but at the time I couldn't tell the full story as I was a career-focused guy and this blog was mainly for advertising professionals. Well, I got stoned before heading out to the ballet at the Egg cultural centre. I lived just off Tiananmen square, and hopped onto my electric bike to see the show. I was just a smidge too stoned and miscalculated the time I'd need to take a different route around the square than usual, so I was the last person to arrive at the theatre. The ushers at the end of a long corridor were beckoning me wildly to move my ass as the show was just about to begin, so I legged it down the corridor and they let me in, closing the doors behind me.

I was high, out of breath, heart beating wildly, and as I looked around the theatre, the entire Beijing audience turned to gaze at me disapprovingly, knowing full well it was me that had held things up. I had a really good centre seat ticket, so half an entire row had to stand up to let me get there, while I apologised profusely. I sat down and the ballet began immediately. 

I'd heard that sometimes performers will choose a person in the crowd to play to on a personal level, to bring out the best and most sincere dramatization, and that night, I was that guy. The lead dancer, a beautiful Parisienne based swan looked at me straight in the eye all night, even to the last pirouette where she gracefully collapsed to the stage floor, arms open looking at me. 

Wow, what a night.

Southampton has one of the largest theatres outside of London and is the largest on the South coast. It only takes ten minutes to walk there from my home and I'm grateful to have exceptional cultural content so close to me.

As soon as the curtain raised for Swan Lake I was mesmerised. Stagecraft has progressed noticeably since my last ballet and it looked more real than reality, but in a holographic sense, more three dimensional and I was excited. Act I introduced our hero Prince Siegfried, his wingman Benno and his mother the Queen dowager who is recently widowed. Permit yourself to an appetiser if the text is worth returning to, or not. Let it speak for itself


The first intermission was described as a three-minute scene change but took so long many of the audience seated near me pointed out that a toilet break or a quick drink at the bar may have been possible but eventually the curtain raised and Act II commenced.

Siegfried and Benno have followed a flight of swans to a lake in order to hunt them. This felt transgressive as I am aware that killing swans in the United Kingdom is illegal to kill or eat as they are considered the property of the King. However, the swans they are chasing are in fact human between the hours of midnight and dawn. It is here Siegfried is amazed to see a swan change into the beautiful Odette played by the magnetically tall and exquisitely gifted Yijing Zhang. Some of her moves I'd never seen either a human or a fictional media character ever make. 

There was a time when I was training as a gymnast that I did ballet to improve balance, elegance and control. I regret not taking it up professionally. I would have been good. How good? That's another question but the principal male lead, Siegfried played by Tyrone Singleton did an amazing job. This will sound mean but it's just the truth. In these days of the obesity pandemic it's heart lifting to see beautifully formed men and women during ballet. Tyrone's strength raising up Yijing is a sight to behold. This is what the human form was designed for and I'll write about the purposeful destruction of our bodies one day. I now have the date it started and by whom and how.

Many of you will know that I make bold claims fortified with photographic evidence and documentation trails about the use of doubles, masks and clones in the high-profile business of politicians and billionaires and so forth. Swan Lake's central story mechanism is about a double for Odette. Our hero Siegfried falls in love with her but in Act III she is replaced by a black magician double, whose real name is Odile but is for simplicities sake also played by our heroine Yijing. Swan Lake is as contemporary as is possible and for those who recognise the name Odette she was a British agent and French operative Odette Sanson also known as Odette Churchill and Odette Hallowes or Lise as an agent for the clandestine Special Operations Executive.

It's close, isn't it? 

Doubles, clones, deception, espionage and subterfuge but in Act III we're back to the Royal court which is now dripping in illuminated red and black shadows for contrast, which is a colour coded and symbolic leitmotif I've been researching for quite some time now since the dance edit of ELO's don't bring me down.

Our handsome hero has fallen for Odette but at court sees double vision Odile and makes the mistake of erroneously pledging his love for her, which is the only magic spell rule that Odette had specified in order for their love to be conjugated. 


In a last attempt to gain his attention our Odette locks eyes with Siegfried who finally recognises his mistake and pursues Odette to the lake. After a stunning display of the swans emerging invisibly from ground floor mist before unforgettable choreographed dance scenes, both Odette and Siegfried throw themselves into the lake, thus ensuring that by the morning, their lives will be united in a world of eternal love.

Wednesday 2 February 2022

Reclaim The Streets - 25th September 2021/Southampton






As Outlined in Jerk Jam at Palmerston park, Southampton's Reclaim The Streets day was for all the family.

I noticed that some of those street paving art ideas couldn't resist a little 'it's not woke, it's awaken' efforts above.

Don't forget to check if you had the good, the 50/50 or the bad juice at howbad.info if you or your loved ones, were duped into getting juiced. Most Maxine injury takes a few years to strike if there was no immediate injury in the days and weeks following injection(s)

You might want to consider an HIV test too.



More information here, although it can't suggest the obvious correlation.

Thursday 27 January 2022

Jerk Jam Soundclash - Palmerston Park







This is probably the slowest post I've ever finally got round to. 

On Friday the 24th of September last year (2021), I was walking home through Palmerston Park and a sound stage was being erected (excuse the pun) for the next day, by the old fashioned bandstand, which leaks quite a bit when it's raining. I know because I've taken shelter there and been joined by all sorts of interesting people ducking for cover in a downpour. That's my electric bike on the right, I want to come back to that subject because as some of you know, I had two electric bikes when I lived in Beijing, during the 2008 Olympics. and there's an obnoxious scam going on with electric bikes in the EU. Let's park that and come back to it another day. Keep the vibes nice because on Saturday 25th, there was music in the park I've previously mentioned right near my gaff, and indeed all over the city centre which was hosting a reclaim the streets day. Art, Music, Culture, Festivities and loads of stuff for children and parents to do. Southampton is close to winning the bid for cultural city of 2025, and as I've mentioned previously, the city has transformed since my years abroad living and working in foreign countries.



When I left Southampton, nobody smoked a joint outside. We had to sneak around and be careful as well as paranoid. But on my return I was blown away when my old mate Chris, who along with his missus, generously put me up (when I returned to be  with my terminally ill mother), lit a joint up walking to Common People Bestival festival on Southampton Common, 2017. I thought I was in Amsterdam for a moment, but the reason I mention it, is that by 2021 I was comfortable having a doobie before I joined the crowd dancing at Jerk Jam. The music was reggae and the weather was a bit iffy at one point, but one of the London MCs, literally predicted that the clouds would part and the sun would come beaming through and lo, it happened as he prophesied.

Probably one of the best feelings I've had, or at least up there in the top 20. It was memorable and awesome. 

I was so happy for Southampton.

It's come a long way, and there's more to go.

Tuesday 24 June 2014

Brideshead Revisited



The entire series of Brideshead Revisited  is up on Youtube for the time being. I've just watched the series again for the second time in 3 years and it's completely fresh. I'm looking forward to watching it again in a couple of years when I've forgotten a few details.

Sunday 23 December 2012

Rogert Scruton & Terry Eagleton




Ostensibly this talk is about culture but that's such a flabby word I prefer to use counterculture to define where the debate is at.

I can't imagine these two people disagreeing on anything important in life except the labels they use (and are obliged to defend). Against my expectation as I'm huge fan I found Eagleton (not his real name) applying labels more ubiquitously. I've not listened to Scruton before and found him very charming and gracious, but in the end it is the name checking these two scholars are able to apply to history and historical figures that makes it fascinating. You know... bit of Shakespeare  bit of Roman and bit of Greek along with a history of the Western Orchestra? That kind of thing.

It's not actually a great talk. It just mentions stuff worth thinking about or looking up.

Monday 17 September 2012

Joseph Chilton Pearce: The Biology of Transcendence




Joseph Chilton Pearce is unaware of the forces that thrive off dividing humanity and even admits to believing in the Flavian dynasty created Jesus figure. However he's well informed on the corrosiveness of culture and it's anti-human dynamics that are all there to serve the power elite. He also knows that we are not by nature a warring species. I could illuminate him quite a lot on that subject. He knows, but he doesn't know why it seems.

Wednesday 11 January 2012

How To Deal With Slow Walking Pedestrian Traffic




Earlier this week I took a thought I had one step further. Ten years ago rushing in Thailand was seen as vulgar and so people walked slowly. I always complained about it to my girlfriend and she explained that it wasn't proper to be seen rushing. Cultured people knew the value of time and so finely developed people took things slowly and this rubbed off on the peasant classes too. 

These days Bangkok is much like any other big city in many places but I realised the single largest catalyst towards this was not business but the Skytrain which was  launched I think in year 2000. At first the locals shunned it ( I have photography of empty rush hour carriages) but when it connected up with the underground in 2005 (I think) that really shoved people into rush mode and now I find myself regretting that I never appreciated the not so old days when people moved with elegance and grace.

Wednesday 9 November 2011

Chinese Pensioners Trivialise Lady Gaga's Sexual Violence Glorification




It's hard to take the white-trash icons of smut-pop and sleaze-agenda seriously when Chinese pensioners are ripping it to shreds with grandma and grandpa mash-ups. 

My prediction? 

Lady Gaga's reputation is taking a last few swirls around the toilet bowl before disappearing with the turds where her corrosive imagery belongs. I have nothing against the woman (my suspect she's Monarch mind control) but everything against the system that deliberately tries to subvert young minds by pumping out 24/7 MTV sexualised-violence-glorification-trash like her videos.

Saturday 15 October 2011

Chris Hedges - Empire Of Illusion (Society Of The Spectacle)



I was just watching Chris Hedges being insulted by Kevin O'Leary of CBC. He asked him if he was a left-wing nutbar after Chris made an uncontroversial and appropriate response about the people at the #Occupy movement being perfectly aware which institutions are at fault. Chris then went on to dismantle Kevin O'Leary live on TV before departing with a derisory comment that he wont be returning to CBC who till then, he imagined, hadn't yet sunk to the depths of FOX news. 


You can watch that video which is shooting up the Youtube charts here but for a much more comprehensive display of one of the last remaining erudite and well informed Americans I urge you to watch the video embedded above where he burrows down into the pornification of wrestling or the wrestle-fication (violence) of porn and ultimately the corporatisation and commodification of everything in the United States.

I've blogged about Chris Hedges before when I first discovered him and somehow I forgot how respectable he is. I realise now that he's a person I need to go through his entire video archive as he has an ability to articulate that is the essence of calm, thoughtful and lucid analysis. Kevin O'Leary broke CBC rules of conduct with his insult but it's a little late for him to recover any credibility he aspired to for being anything other than the odious money grubber he is.

Saturday 24 September 2011

Culture & Ideology Are Not Your Friends




There are a number of shorter Terence McKenna clips condensing this theme but I don't think there's any substitution for listening to one of Terence's finest think pieces on the subject of culture and ideology, which just like nationalism, flag waving and patriotism are the most urgently needed legacies of the nation state era that we need to dispense with

I say it again. People who wave flags (metaphorically or literally) are dangerously misinformed. Those ideas belong to the 18th century and are part of the problem instead of a global solution we most urgently need.

Sunday 24 July 2011

Internet K-Hole





It isn't called the Internet K-Hole for nothing. Seriously addictive slice of prurient mullet-life in 80's Americana. Lots could be written but the photos do the talking.

Sunday 17 April 2011

Amazing Thailand



It's the Thai New Year Festival called Songkran, and pampered society is outraged by the water festival revellers stripping in the heat. I can't say I'd appreciate my daughter stripping naked so I'm not condoning it, but that's only a hypothetical scenario when compared to the reality of the doubled military budget since the sniper head shots of last years civic protests.  That was hands-down infinitely more vulgar and shocking than acts of unwise diminished modesty, and irreversibly shattered the illusion that the Royal Thai Army does anything other than shoot it's own citizens decade after decade after decade.


The elites are invariably the first to heap shame on these young girls who without exception have a limited array of life options when considering becoming a wage slave in the paddy fields or shelling prawns or the ubiquitous prostitution that is woven into the very fabric of every day Thai male living. The topic is so boring it's seldom even mentioned that the tourist sex trade is but a sliver of the nationwide industry. It's just business after all.


Evidently it's OK for those same self-selecting elites to turn a blind eye to the Ratchadapisek massage parlours they attend and/or own for some ab ob nuat, but as soon as they can venomously attack the vulnerable, they do so publicly while cleverly distracting attention from the real issues of deliberately holding down an entire working class female population with a shamefully repressed and wilfully ignorant education system. 



It's no freak of statistical standard deviation that Thailand's teachers failing their own curricula tests is quietly ignored. The news media attacks individual girls who aren't sufficiently educated to protect themselves from a momentary lapse of indiscretion. Instead the usual hypocritical elites looks for ways to jail the unwitting for up to five years to protect an hallucinatory international reputation as the land of smiles and subjugated serenity. 

An imaged bathed in the bathos of bell curves.

I would normally have blacked out the girls eyes in the pictures above to protect them from the predictable hypocrisy of societal double standards but they are already in the public domain as indeed was the original nudity if the predictably pious were paying sufficient attention. Please leave a comment if any unintended offence is caused.



Friday 22 October 2010

This is England



It took me a couple of weeks to watch this movie. I could only do five or ten minutes at a time. Too painful in too many ways. It's every reason why I'd make flags, national anthems and all the other false idols from the makers of brain-dead culture-curators the first victims of  an enlightened education system on the first day of infant school. We're never too young to learn. This is only one of the hard to ignore themes in this quite special movie.

Wednesday 9 June 2010

Inbox



Some days my email inbox is one thick Smuckers chocolate fudge jar leaking pure intellectual indulgence of sweet but lucid and illuminating thinking. This morning's paragraph is from Thomas in the UK as we're having a discussion about music and Jaron Lanier (who I think we're in violent agreement on, is punching above his intellectual weight with his latest book).

Thomas writes:


As a perhaps superficial example, the 50's seem utterly distinct from the 60's which seem fairly distinct from the 70's. The 70's have a soundtrack that is distinct from the 80's. But 90's from Millenial? The sharpness of the contrast is becoming more and more attenuated. Perhaps this is because I didn't live through those periods but we've been to the Moon and now we've stopped bothering because it seems so pedestrian. The wide eyed wonder and mystery has become implicit and uninteresting, so full scale shifts in our cultural attitudes seem less likely, and thus there will no be soundtracks to accompany those shifts.

Is good yes?

Friday 11 December 2009

Terence McKenna - Culture & Ideology Are Not Your Friends



A few weeks back I was listening to Doug Rushkoff's media masters podcasts and introduced to an unusually voiced character (actually they all have strange voices - Robert Anton Wilson, Bucky Fuller and Tim Leary) talking about Marshall McLuhan.

The person who captured my attention was Terence McKenna. His vocabulary is compelling. I've never heard anyone speak as interesting as this remarkable man although in a different way I'm also completely wrapped up in James Ellroy's spoken word too recently.

I've been hoovering up his entire Podcast oeuvre this last couple of weeks. So far this is probably 30 hours of first time listening and then as I tend to do repeats of exceptional episodes you can add another 15 hours on top of that - I've probably got another 20 hours to go on topics that have been repeated elsewhere or shared discussion formats, so I'm coming to the end of his solo audio captured work and I'm pretty sure now that there's very little I don't know what it took the man 50 years or so to accumulate before he died prematurely just before the millennium. It was the same when I got into Chomsky a few years back and I wouldn't mind if these discoveries happened a bit more frequently, but the reason they are greats is because they are few and far between.

I can't tell you how awesome it is to listen to someone who is exceptionally erudite and articulate expound on topics as diverse as James Joyce, Ethnobotany of Shamanism and Marshall McLuhan talk on two or three subjects close to my heart that I've never heard anyone else articulate. One of those is Culture & Ideology are not your friends and I think it's a terrific introduction to the man's work. You may or may not recall I wrote something similar here.


If you like that podcast, you may find his unusual adventures into the use of hallucinogenic sacred medicines as at the very least some of the most original thinking I've come across. Even if we discount his experiences in different dimensions I haven't explored since I did this tattoo, I find his thinking, hypothesis and conclusions rewardingly creative and intelligent.

You can download "Culture Is Not Your Friend" Over Here and below is a Scribd document of the speech. You can add the iTunes library of McKenna's free flowing and unscripted orations that defy conventional use of language over at Psychedelic Salon on Matrix Masters as they  raise the bar for the spoken language of English. Terence fucking rocks. Word.

Friday 4 December 2009

Book Competition - Chief Culture Officer



It feels like there's an air of unreality and hyper reality colliding in a mid jet-stream spectacular of post-modernism meets earnest-but-pedestrian commercial cheese. 


Well anyway that's how I would start writing a critique of the above video before tapering off into silence, because the task Grant has set out to is challenging but definitely not humourless.


All you need do is head over to Grant's blog Cultureby because he's giving away a copy of his warmly anticipated book Chief Culture Officer which is easily the most compelling argument for pinning down the stiffs and psychopaths in the boardroom and letting the humans of our species inside. You know it makes sense.

Thursday 19 November 2009

Cultural Media Studies






I wrote most of this on paper and so you may detect a different tonality and flow to the text. I guess I need to start somewhere on the long road to another vast topic I want to connect with here, and that's culture, but I'll start with media, move on to books and then scratch the surface of culture: something I think I'm qualified to comment on. I pride myself on living with real people in different countries and have managed to achieve that with a bit of planning and a little bit of luck including what may have seemed like bad luck at the time but often yielded gems along the way. So here goes.


I've blathered on about the awe I have for Marshall McLuhan and particularly his 1964 classic "Understanding Media". It's a seminal tour de force that contributed greatly towards my  never ending discovery of communication theory and for that I'm very grateful. It's rare that I find the view reflected upside down in my retina as unintresting or unable to provide questions I need answers to. 


I recall a long time ago in a distant agency within the M25, that I was the first to request the retro-tech short message service from HR, who explained what it was or why our banana Nokia phones had the alphabet on the keypad. Fortunately and unlike fax machines I didn't have to wait for anyone else to subscribe and immediately had a lot of fun 'interrupting' the creative team with SMS messages sent from the de facto 'planners room' called the library a place where we tended to cluster.


It was not a service like today where all mobile providers automatically make revenue from service provision. Back in the day (1998) it was a service that so few used, it needed to be subscribed to seperately. This was around the cusp of when it was about to take off, big-time and globally. The rest is history and we now see it as a utility of life that cannot be substituted and is arguably the basis for status updates on messenger platforms and the increasingly ubiquitous Twitter.


Why am I once again resurrecting, McLuhan's 'medium is the message'? Well I've never stopped giving it consideration and I guess in some way it's finally losing (or at least occasionally feels like diminishing) its overwhelming philosophical momentum, despite the internet and it's mind bogglingly immense challenge to the twin notions of hot and cool media conjured up by Marshal's book nearly derailing me totally. Perhaps it has forever.


I've since reconciled most of the neurological dynamics that constitute media temperature, engagement and distraction (a critical and too seldom discussed dimension) with the content; you know, the bits we brief and that the creatives deliver on).


In any case my recent enforced seperation from the internet means I was once again consuming printed words from a creative underground's bookshelf in a manner that would shame a Hoover into mutating mechanically into a Dyson.


"Suck it". "Suck it and see" I was once told by someone who didn't want to answer all my questions. Well I'm sucking it now. Hoovering up printed works for the first time in a long time and I'm pleased to see that my early thoughts immersed in digital are confirmed. It's   possible I've concluded, to neurologically rewire my brain back to the state it used to be. 


One where I would devour long thick chunks of printed text for hours on end, day after day, week after week and well, you get the picture. That was before RSS snacking became the best god damm information buffet one could wish for. When the information highway suddenly cranked up a bit, resembling the 1993 Corvette I wrote about in this post over here.


Since writing this I've dined on Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers (over rated and dripping with inconsistency - the sort of book I imagine I'd be guilty of writing) as well as the insufferably over stretched "Wikinomics" which is not so bad when picking and  choosing the chapters that matter, but is nevertheless borderline sea sick boredom if compelled under orders or circumstances like myself to eat the entire spread.


Wikinomics is, compared to RSS, like enforced consumption of no-label crisps and curling  and dried salmon-spread sandwiches before say a cool dip on a hot summers day in an inflatable pool with the kids in a back garden over freshly sliced prosciutto wrapped around bread sticks, ace deli pickles, avocado and vinaigrette with bruschetta and black olive tapenade and hell, let's go for it, a yellow bell pepper coulis - just because I can.


It's a good book in parts, but fuck me (metaphorically) it has whole chapters that are more iterative and circular than Marble Arch roundabout playing Hotel California on a car stereo, looping endlessly on a scorching hot day with bumper to bumper traffic. Ah the Eighties - how I loved you.


So you don't believe me eh? Well feel free to read what I wrote a few months before Hong Kong Clown Investigation Department (CID) busted my intravenous digital drip compelling me to read all these books.


OK, I'm only into my third book while dipping sporadically into the Holy Quran before hitting the Talmud and the Torah while taking a never ending feast on Therevada Buddhism (which I interrupted recently with a book on Mormonism - The American Religion), and keeping an eye on The Tao 'n stuff. I can't take the Bible too seriously these days despite some awesome chapters, but that may be over familiarity breeding testimonial contempt. I do however like the observation I read recently over on Lee Maschmeyer's blog, that the Bible is an early example of open source collaboration which brings me (as only the Bible could) on to Tapscotts & Williams Wikinomics. There's an inverse proportionality to Wikipedia content and value itself. This highly padded (and thus time wasting) book Wikinomics is a 21st century publishing irony of the highest order?


There are however in this book, as I've mentioned, great parts. I loved learning about the LAMP stack. Linux, APACHE, MySQL (Database) and PHP (Perl Scripting). Frankly that is one sexy fucking combo and they should cut out the nonsense we often teach kids and introduce infants to that lot from Kindegarten age - I'm serious, it's a language isn't it? 


Or is it the case that since English became the Lingua Franca we no longer entertain ideas of placing emphasis on learning languages. I can imagine George Orwell with his Spanish(or was that Catalan?), Urdu and several Burmese dialects would have recognised this as a national and systemic weakness brought on by globalization. Yet we feel this everytime as a Brit we sit in meetings where people are arguing their case more effectively in their second or third language than we can in our first. It's awe inspiring and only my own understanding of Thai, Burmerse, German and weak French provide succour against this overwhelming feeling of inferiority. You'll feel worse if you speak just the one. I'm just saying.


Despite the ace LAMP stack chapter in Wikinomics, there's waffle McCheesy summertime specials like the chapter on IDEAGORAS which  could be wrapped neatly into a couple of concise blog posts or bundled into an Harvard Business Review circular, for corporates who want to play with the new boys on the block - that's us isn't it? I mean, come on! That part about printing on cakes as one memorable example illuminates what the writers of Wikinomics perceive as the peak of  intra/extra corporate innovative collaboration? Do me a favour. Fucking cup cake printing. Don't believe me? Check it out. It's a weak book and riddled with stretched arguments though that doesn't mean a weak argument will never manifest itself as an argument that is proven robust through subsequent realization.


Yeah right.


So anyway, in pursuit of complexity, inconsistency, contradiction and general woolly thinking. I would like to now pull out of Gladwell's skinny and twitching ass (complete with walnut timbre voice) a real nugget of a find which he begins to tease out of his latest book Outliers. It runs beautifully consistently with what I imagine not too many of you are aware (though it's all in the archives here) are my own views on culture. That mile wide and inch deep tarmac of delusional self construct. Beautiful for pulling away at speed in our own directions but less suitable for landing a plane without buckling the surface up under the pressure like fresh linguini. You get the picture.


Because culture both matters and it doesn't. Or maybe it's just inconsequential if the spirit has the courage to overcome the cultural conditions imposed on us and then enforced by us in yet another myopic loop of recursive patriotism. In other words "You're as big or as small as your culture" but never bigger than the ultimate fighting club called humanity. United we stand so to speak.


Here's the evidence to support it, because me and Malc are at one on this.


In Gladwell's outliers, he tiptoes round an inch of culture that is easy to drill through and set up some cone induced traffic jams around, for as long as John Major's hotline is a telephone call away. You see Macolm introduces Geerte Hofsteder's cultural dimensions. Don't let that scare you off because I"ve stuck the boot into Hofsteder about four years ago while working on the Unilever business regionally and in this presentation I wrote over here. It is now dated somewhat, by a lot of new thinking and reading I've done. However Geert's work is pertinent as is Malcom's chapter on Korean Air's little accident streak which I'll talk about a little later 


Because It's Gladwell's ionospheric 10 000 hours - Practice makes Perfect (ubung macht den meister) mantra that beggars  belief. Rather than rip to shreds "Talcum Malc" equating the whole U.S. population into four outliers which is inconsistent with the books theme in so many ways, I'd prefer to hone in on that point about The Beatles who Malcom writes, riffed for a couple of thousand hours while in Germany but actually improvised from sheer boredom rather than a manic obsession with perfection that Malc implies (Beatles Anthology - 2000) in Hamburg's Star Club. And don't even get me started on why a few thousand hours isn't even close to 10000 hours. No. The Beatles were Spesh because they were spesh. I'll never forget that Mexican kitchen I talked about in LA (in The White Album Post) where the kitchen staff had only two words in their vocabulary for me when I turned up for work and explained in crap Spanish that I was English - The Beatles. Hooligan. They grinned. That's the Brits isn't it. Off the scale creative or out of order repugnant.


So instead I'll pick up on the interesting chapters or is it chapter because sport isn't interesting, sport is a media/social object for (generally speaking) allowing men of questionable masculinity, the self confidence to talk to each other (often passionately) unhindered by accusations of homosexuality permeating the air. One only needs to observe the silence on Australian Football and tight fitting shorts, America's obsession with Canadian Ice Hockey and anal sex (or is that just right wing nut US obsession? Probably) , steroids and poppers for American Soccer and/or well hung African American (strange fruit hangs differently) basketball players. Did I just write that? Yes. But nobody will question it. Nobody ever does.


I digress. Where was I?


Oh yeah. Gladwell's Outliers, but not in the hung, drawn and quartered black American populace (see how I revived the last paragraph's ending) there's a chapter where Malc writes about Korean Air going through a bit of a rough patch. It's important for the cultural question that keeps on cropping up all round the world in the planning game because Korean Air's history was beginning at one point to be littered like a Lockerbie bomb's cadaver sprawl with aviation accidents and so the Korean Aviation authorities compelled the airline to do the unthinkable and contact the Federal Aviation authority to see what was the cause of the unmistakable trend for ditching Jumbo Jets in awkward circumstances.


Could it be a cultural issue? Fuck no. Culture is only ever a good thing. It's what we wrap out inner pride and outer flags around. It's worth going to war for and is never flawed. In short Culture is King. It's magnificent where ever one travels which is why when in Rome one makes praise for Prada. Nobody inside an entire country could point out that Korean air needed outsiders to investigate the insider issue because the Feds can only be invited in an emergency and not imposed on a nation. Which is why the US needs to listen right now to criticism of foreign policy because Hillary and even Obama are already spoiled persimmons. Capiche?


Could one culture be less perfect than another? This is the sort of dangerous question that can lead to justifiable accusations of racial bigotry or prejudice. The answer is in all cases. Sometimes.


The issue that led to a series of aviation disasters (it's always a disaster isn't it when an Afghan wedding isn't involved) was the power distance ratio mentioned earlier and which draws on Geerte Hofsteder's principle that different cultures have different hierarchical language constructs  for engaging with senior (or subordinate) ranks.


For example, in this instance the senior air pilots were unable to be addressed by the second in command pilots in a direct manner that would avert impending doom. Much like my argument with Hong Kong CID as I tried to convey they should get off their asses and talk to the cab driver sat outside with my suitcases in his cab. I could say what I like in that instance but my urgency wasn't their urgency so everyone got even more overtime.


The power distance ratio which varies from country to country meant that immediate danger could not be averted through direct language. Formality is a cultural protocol in Korea (and across Asia). This is where culture needs to be examined more closely as ressponsible  for and contributing towards less than satisfactory solutions.


Korean culture is (or was) structured in such a way that safety could not be maintained.


It's so funny it's not funny for those in the research influenced business but even the research findings  were so sensitive a subject to broach that the presenter to Korean Air was unable to say directly "Look it's our  culture that is the problem". That's a self referential joke of the highest order isn't it?


Eventually the problem was defined and the Federal Aviation Authority was brought in to culturally 'retrain' the pilots and crew to address each other in a manner that once implemented, saved their own lives. It's like a scene from Black Adder isn't it. With the men in the trenches jumping through hoops to point out the bleeding obvious to the donkeys leading the lions.


But it took the US to make the emphatic point that some cultures (as Morrissey might have sung) are bigger than others. And it's true they are. Though context is everything, like those Afghan weddings bombed by war drones can testify.


The conclusion?


Like I've said many a time (though even the observation is culturally biased), culture is a mile wide and an inch deep. If Pilots to cabin crew can retrain, then so can all of us. It's not insurmountable and it's because of this that while I'm endlessly fascinated by culture (I like to live outside of my own), I'm also deeply unhappy with an all too frequent dependancy by different nationalities to pull the culture card out as either a mark of superiority. Or an excuse to do less than is internationally up to standard. The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed.


As a last example of counter cultural exceptionalism I suggest Windows by Microsoft. My answer to the "we're different card" is that if the world is so diverse, then why is it that with different scripts and reading directions. Left to right, right to left and top to bottom that there is only one position for Start in Windows and one for minimise. The drop down menu is global. But if you focused grouped it there'd be pandemonium.


So culture is great, and culture is important, but it's also not necessarily essential that things need to be different given the extent of our commonalities. So few actually get that. 






Plus ça change (plus c'est la même chose)


Wednesday 8 July 2009

And Love



My career is dotted with ads I ideas I couldn't coax through the system. There was the "Freedom" idea for Coca-cola or "We Miss You" for Post Tsunami Thailand and yet when I see work like this, I feel that I'm not the only one to roll this way. Levi's suddenly become relevant again. 

I'm reminded that I recently read that Americans often insist on having their Jeans Made in the USA (complete with label), and that the luxury end of the market is paradoxically robust. This just makes sense as the United States is the home of Denim (Well you get what I mean). Great work from Levi's here. Via Influx Insights

UPDATE: The director for this movie is Cary Fukunaga and the words are by Walt Whitman who you may remember from back here. The more I see this film the more I love it.