a unique perspective on this crazy world

wear prada and drink veuve ;)

April 1, 2014

I am watching an extraordinary man (my crush Stephen Colbert 😉 while writing about an extraordinary evening with another extraordinary man talking about a third extraordinary man.  Do I feel extraordinarily privileged?  You betcha 😉

I wrote about my friend Sean last year.  Ideally I would love to never have to write about death but I am at that age where it is no longer possible.  And one needs to figure out how to deal…

family guy :)

family guy 🙂

It’s the first anniversary of my friend Sean’s death.  It’s a tough day.  Life offers few magic bullet solutions and death is one of the most elusive and slipperiest quandaries we have to figure out how to cope with and work through.

I am one of those super analytical, make a plan, and get it done kind of people so death has stumped me.  You can’t analyze it, you can’t blame anyone and there is no five point or five year plan to set up and work your way through.

Time helps… and heals.  Mostly you have to figure out what works for you.  For me, it’s about celebrating and talking about the person you no longer have an opportunity to hug in the flesh.

I always look for something unique that resonates for me at least as being part of the person’s identity so it becomes a tribute to his life and personality.  So, tonight it was C restaurant with his best friend drinking Veuve Cliquot champagne in Prada shoes and celebrating his life and toasting his memory.

As I wrote last year, Sean changed my life and my perspective on life in such a profound way that it is impossible to imagine my life without his youthful influence.  His life was so extraordinary it almost sounds like something you made up.  But it was real.  He led a celebrity lifestyle without being written about in the tabloids.

He conquered Toronto, then New York and finally London.  But he was a guy from Niagara Falls so he brought all his friends with ordinary lives along for the journey.  He was incredibly generous and he blew your mind and expanded your horizons and shared all his new experiences and insights.

He was so ordinary and so extraordinary all at the same time that it took many years before I ever even began to appreciate the extraordinary impact he had had on my life.

Like everyone who knew him, I wish there had been more time, more experiences, more hugs.  But all we can do is remember the great times.  Toting his son around in a baby basket in Vancouver while I learned how you cook sweetbreads… attending one of his daughter’s wonderful birthday parties in London… going on a jaunt to France for dinner in a Michelin star restaurant…

There were so many incredible experiences… so many great times… so much fun.

It’s the important thing to remember when all you have is the memories.  Tonight was extraordinary and I know Sean was there sipping the Veuve with us.  And commiserating with Phil, our server, who had lost a friend on the anniversary of his death.

Life and death are both mysterious, crazy adventures.  What really matters is that we share them with people who matter to us.  Who challenge us.  Who inspire us.  Phil was drinking Guinness in honour of his friend.  We were drinking Veuve.  A toast to Sean – and all the extraordinary impact he had on my life.

 

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life philosophy

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apparently kevin bacon has nothing on me ;)

March 29, 2014

Interestingly, Kevin Bacon WAS at SXSW talking about the six degrees of kevin bacon.  The community with which I try to connect is much broader and more global than this game would allow.  But that’s what makes the random connections that have popped up in my life requiring only a couple degrees of separation all the more astonishing.

I don’t think I will ever top that the random girl I met in the summer of 1983 because she was my next door neighbour in the University of Calgary dorm that was housing us during our summer jobs was best friends with a girl whose name I have now forgotten.  Her name wasn’t important.  The fascinating point is that Candace (I think that’s right 🙂 was dating a guy who lived in Bermuda who was my cousin’s best friend in small town Manitoba.  I had met the Bermuda guy because he was a Chartered Accountant and I was looking for career advice.  He was my first mentor and invited me to come to Bermuda when I graduated and had four months to wait before my first real job began.

I’ve never even met Candace but when Jean told me about her long distance boyfriend in Bermuda, I said, “I know him.  I stayed at his house!”  Candace then went on to date one of my other friends making my connections to this woman I have never met even more bizarre…

But right now we are at SXSW… I am hoping to write all the posts about my incredible SXSW experience before it’s time to get on a plane to another destination…

As already noted, I found the interactive and film overwhelming but that was nothing compared to the music.  Seven or eight pages of showcases (6 bands per showcase) in small print every night!  And the same concept in the afternoon.  I really wished I had some bands to support but I was there to make discoveries…

So I took a haphazard approach of supporting countries that I liked… in most cases, it worked pretty well, but when I wandered into the Aussie BBQ I got a little more action than I expected.  Obviously, I don’t attend a lot of heavy metal shows.  I arrived just as they were setting up and THAT was entertaining.  You could see there was a lot of bluster and weird, unattractive clothing and hairstyles.  These guys seemed to be really into showing off their beer guts via naked torsos… I guess it’s a look…

It all seemed tame enough until the show started.  The lead singer started by throwing water on the scant audience.  Then he was throwing water bottles.  Plastic so pretty harmless but generally I am not a fan of audience participation 🙂  When he started jumping off the stage into the crowd, I snuck away from the stage and finished my beer at a safe distance from the band.

Hey, not all experiments work!  But sometimes miracles come from experiments, even the ones that might appear to fail at first glance.

Since the Aussies had frightened me – and tried to destroy my hearing – I decided I would run to Canada House.  Surely, Canadians would not be so aggressive 🙂

I arrived just in time for “Toronto Turns It Up”.  It was a revelation.  All the bands were good – and completely different.  You should check them all out!  What was the most cool though is that I was texting with the son of one of my best friends (the famous Yvonne who helped name this blog :).  He is a musician and has been to SXSW so we were trading stories and I told him about this great hip hop act I had seen – and he has produced him!  The world is so much smaller than we think 🙂

Here are links to everyone, including Shea and Abstract Artform.

http://abstractartform.com/

http://cargocollective.com/moreorles/

http://arkells.ca/

http://www.arianagillis.com/

http://julytalk.bandcamp.com/

 

I also met some guy from Calgary named Greg who had dragged some colleagues from Houston to hang out at Canada House and support July Talk.  You really should see July Talk live.  You don’t normally put someone who sounds like Kate Bush and someone who sounds like Tom Waits together but it works 🙂  And she really works the crowd.  I am sure there were boys walking on air out of that show…  especially the ones with lipstick kisses on their cheeks…

What does this teach us?  Do lots of stuff.  Talk to many strangers.  Take chances… but run when the scary dude with the tattoos jumps off the stage 😉

 

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artsy stuff, life philosophy, travel stories

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back when I was political ;)

March 26, 2014

WOW!  Jimmy Carter is on Stephen Colbert… he is almost 90 and he is SO cool!  I used to be wildly political.  I think I still am but I am not as sure the most effective political channel… but I watched Jimmy win.  My father and I used to watch all the elections… the primaries and the leadership conferences… the whole shebang…

and Jimmy was president during the Iran crisis… not the Argo nonsense… but the sensible American president and the impressive Canadian ambassador… not the stuff of Hollywood drama and still not well publicized but the stuff of honour and self-esteem.

It was interesting to see that Jimmy really was the dude to make ex-presidents cool… I always kind of thought he invented it but was far too busy when I was young to be able to fact check…

But, yes, the peanut farmer from Georgia whom I revered as a teenager was one of the original “good guys”… go, Jimmy!

Warren, Bill, Bill… good to see you out there waving your arms around, throwing money at the third world and issuing press releases… but you will never be Jimmy Carter…

Jimmy and Stephen – thank you for tonight.  You both inspire me to be a better person, give me faith in the great ideals on which the United States of America was founded, and – most impressively – show that the south can be a place of inspiration for anyone in the world who wants us all to get along better and create a community of cooperation and equality.

If these two amazing dudes are not yet on your radar, check them out!

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eat crickets or educate girls? ;)

March 25, 2014

WTF… at SXSW, that stands for “what the future?”  It was one of my favourite parts and I spent most of the final day learning all kinds of wild things about the present that had escaped my attention since the regular media is more interested in Kardashians than crickets.

I started the day in the very first session learning about the next industrial revolution according to the CEO of inventables.  He was very convincing!  And we even got to see the mayor of Chicago make a personalized bottle opener live using the company’s 3-D printing technology.

https://www.inventables.com/about

It’s definitely food for thought.  Long ago, when I was at business school, the concept du jour was just-in-time manufacturing.  At the time, it was revolutionizing the business cycle and suggesting Americans should be doing group calisthenics like the Japanese.

The other concept I remember was the idea of customization – moving away from Henry Ford’s factory and letting customers have more say in the final product.  The concept was very compelling but the mechanics of the production process and the supply chain made it difficult to make customers happy AND maximize profits.

But then Apple started making ipods in different colours.  People were willing to spend more to express their individualism.  And individualism came at a much cheaper price thanks to new global supplies of cheap labour and containerization.

But, if the inventables CEO is right, we won’t need cheap developing country labour or container ships.  We will be able to customize and manufacture products in our own garage.  It’s a seductive and revolutionary concept – the point of WTF.

The next two sessions offered literal food for thought!  Apparently there is some recent study that predicts the already overcrowded planet earth will add another 2 billion people by 2060 – and it will be impossible to feed all those mouths without some really inventive changes in the way we think of food.  I’m not sure the spoiled western world is quite ready for most of it yet but it’s exciting to know someone is thinking of the future.

The first idea is growing hamburger from stem cells in a lab!  Dr. Mark Post actually made a hamburger in a lab in Maastricht.  If petri dish hamburger isn’t your thing, another very enthusiastic presenter shared his vision of 3-D printer food.  It sounds nuts but the concept is kind of a cross between a blender and a manufacturing extrusion device.  You put various components into separate chambers and they are combined in the machine and popped out in time for dinner!  You can even add medicine or vitamins.  Apparently Star Trek wasn’t as far-fetched as it seemed.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/aug/05/first-hamburger-lab-grown-meat-press-conference

These food concepts are enticing and appealing but also expensive.  The next presentation was focused on saving space, conserving resources and cutting costs.  Of course, it’s a hard sell in the western world where insects are not considered a proper food source but rather a gross challenge for reality show contestants.

But the intrepid team put forward a credible case for insect farms and cricket flour.  I didn’t get a chance to try the cricket cookies as I had to run back for the keynote presentation but I did eat a deep-fried locust in Thailand – and can confirm it just tasted like deep-fried batter rather than bug 🙂

Around the same time as I was learning about the threats to the global food supply from overpopulation, I caught an episode of Bill Maher where he interviewed Alan Weisman about his book “Countdown”.

http://littlebrown.com/countdown.html

I still find it shocking that not everyone realizes the way to save the planet is simply to educate girls.  Educated women don’t have so many babies – and women tend to be more concerned about the collective so it’s all win-win.

Of course getting there is the challenge.  The one thing I learned from Alan and Bill that I did not expect is that Iran is a model for population control.  No weird, destructive one child policy required. They simply made contraception free and educated women.

So, the choices is yours, people… don’t call women sluts for using contraception, support organizations that help girls go to school (the more the better) or learn how to not gag on your insects… 🙂

 

 

 

 

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is this your first time? ;)

March 23, 2014

It took a few days to realize this is what I would be asked most often.  The place is teeming with virgins.  I haven’t wandered into some creepy harem in Abu Dhabi… I am in Austin, Texas for my inaugural South by Southwest.  Or I was when I wrote this…

Home

Newbies pronounce and write all these letters.  Once you are in the know, it’s SXSW in print and South By in speech.  I had planned to put more effort into tracking my experience on the blog as it unfolded but my life philosophy is to make sure that I get the full experience even if I forget a few details by the time I get to documenting it.  And SXSW is very expensive so I was focused on getting my money’s worth 🙂

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I have been working every minute until I stepped onto the flight to Austin so I was totally unprepared for my SXSW experience.  I delusionally thought I would be able to figure out a plan once I arrived.  But then I went to the registration desk to secure my Platinum Badge and was presented with a cloth bag so heavy I had ridges in the shoulder for the first four days from carrying it around – and the music information wasn’t even ready yet!

As if all the official SXSW options weren’t enough to immobilize me, I’d also signed up for RSVPster to RSVP to parties with minimal effort required.  I’d managed to comb through about 130 emails before I left home and noted events by day but new emails and event reminders continued to pour into my in box every day so I quickly just gave up any hope for an optimized plan.

SWSW is a live human experiment in big data.  Every hour you have tons of options.  Not everything will be great but there will be enough great events that you are always missing something no matter what you choose.

It is easier if you have a focus.  There are three separate conferences – interactive, film and music.  Of course, I love it all and these ten days were some of the most delightful and stimulating of my life.

There is talk that SWSW has lost its way and is too corporate.  There is definitely a lot of branding and sponsorship going down – but that’s just the way of the world.  If you are clever, you just take the free stuff and ignore all the marketing.  Corporations only win if you let them 🙂

I definitely wish that I had lost my virginity in the 90s, back before the geeks made the internet easy to use and the world wasn’t inundated by 24/7 marketing.  But I’ve always made my own choices based on careful analysis so it’s all background noise to me.  And if ridiculous levels of marketing means an open bar, I’m OK with that 😉

Losing my virginity was a thrilling, mind blowing adventure… details to come…

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artsy stuff, social commentary, travel stories

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bring an extra suitcase ;)

March 1, 2014

Finally, my big work season is drawing to a close so hoping to catch up on some of my travel stories… today we are going back to Cambodia!

Since I wasn’t sure the state of my health my first full day in Cambodia – and I was really weary from dragging all my bags around while I was sick – I postponed my first Angkor Wat day to Monday and spent Sunday exploring the town.

There are streetlights in Bangkok these days so the chance of getting hit by a bus, tuk-tuk, motorbike, etc have reduced substantially.  But if you want that thrill every time you cross the street, you will love Siem Reap J

The real challenge is that there are various forms of traffic going at different speeds all operating in the same theatre with no street lights… the positive part is that the streets are a lot smaller than the ones I crossed in Bangkok in 1991 in the same scenario.

When you grow up as a spoiled first world child of the universe, crossing six lanes of traffic going at totally different speeds feels like you have been airlifted into an action film or a video game – except that the traffic is real!  And you WILL be at least maimed if you screw up!  But at some point you have to take your toes off the sidewalk or you will never get anywhere… after many minutes of immobilization in Thailand, I finally decided the safest strategy was to wait for the locals to make a move and then tuck in behind them as close as possible…

I DO think traffic lights, stop signs and driver training IS a wonderful thing and really does reduce fatalities, but you can’t change the world order as a tourist so you just need to learn how to survive 😉

What is the most challenging for those of us with red lights and traffic rules is that the best approach is often to be bold.  You walk into the traffic like you mean it and you are not planning to stop.  Traffic in many countries is something between a symphony and a jazz riff… there is a flow and a rhythm and, if you follow it, the traffic will flow around you – but if you panic and break the flow you might just get plowed down so panic and second-guessing are your best chance to end up in hospital… of course, I normally just try to find a gap and gallop across as fast as I can… as long as you don’t trip, it works too 😉

In between my galloping I did also manage to see some stuff that only required me to take off my shoes or open my wallet.

I think normal tourists just hire a tuk-tuk to take them from the hotel to the attractions or the entertainment district but I always like to walk.  It gives you a feel for the place and you really get to know your way around so the chance of getting lost in the dark on some evening adventure is greatly reduced.

strolling along the river

strolling along the river

Siem Reap is pretty tiny so I just headed to the main street next to the river and followed the signs to the Old Market.  The first thing that caught my attention was Preah Prohm Rath Monastery, the oldest in Siem Reap I learned (over 500 years old).

Preah Prohm Rath Monastery

Preah Prohm Rath Monastery

Asians are not minimalists so it was decorated in a riot of colours and textures with lots of allegory.  I don’t know what all the panels mean but very interesting to check out.  Will have to learn the symbolism at some point…

I then kept walking – and dodging traffic – until I got to the Old Market.  It’s a mix of traditional market, souvenir shops, bars and restaurants, including the famous Pub Street.

one of the fascinating murals

one of the fascinating murals

I began buying for my new scarf shop 😉  Cambodian silk is wonderful and there are lots of different styles and textures to choose from.  And tons of colour!  So it is very hard to resist, especially when the prices are so low.  Just helping to support the Cambodian economy 🙂  Definitely had to sit on my suitcase to fit in all my purchases.  There are lots of hand-made crafts to tempt the tourists.

Before I went back to the sanctuary of Shinta Mani, I had some lunch on Pub Street.  Fish amok, a Cambodian specialty.  All the food I had was uniformly good.  It’s definitely a great place if you like fish.

It’s also a dream destination if you love local crafts… just remember to bring a really big suitcase 😉

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travel stories

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silver is hardly a participant’s ribbon :)

February 22, 2014

Perhaps I will eventually record all my 2013 travel stories… the 2014 stories will be beginning soon so we’ll have to see which year produces better stories… my insane let’s see if I can still work 7 days a week and survive a 100 hour work week period is finally drawing to a close for a few months so hoping to add some stories to the blog…  my survival mechanism to the relentless work schedule for the past couple of weeks though has been to listen – and occasionally pop my head up for the replay – to CBC Winter Olympics coverage…. Conveniently it has been on in an almost 24/7 schedule that matches my work hours 😉

The last Winter Olympics was in my hometown.  It was a mad festival where we shook our image as being no-fun and danced in the streets, waved paper Canadian flags as we cheered on athletes in public squares and sometimes spontaneously sang the national anthem in crowded restaurants.

It was a time of magic and watching the incredible Crosby goal in the public park across from my apartment with thousands of other patriots will always be one of those incredible life moments that you will never forget.  Fourteen gold medals!  The most ever won in a Winter Olympics.  And, for Canadians, of course the important gold medal – Olympic hockey.  Apparently the entire nation shut down biting their nails – there was a stat that almost no one went to the bathroom across Canada while the game was on…

And now we have another shot at it.  I will be staying up until 4am.  If we’re lucky, it will be less nail biting… maybe we can have a game like the Finns… the women already gave us enough drama this Olympics 🙂

It’s different this time.  The city is a lot quieter and everyone isn’t talking about the latest Canadian performance.  No incredible cultural events to check out.

At first I was worried I might not care.  But I witnessed practically every Canadian medal live on TV in 2010 so this time I know many of the athletes and have some favourites I had to watch.

There were new heroes – and repeat performances that left you breathless.  But we didn’t win as many gold medal as in 2010 so it seemed more Canadian.  A little less chest thumping – but the athletes did us proud and, while people weren’t dancing down Granville Street, I am sure there was dancing and cheering in pubs and living rooms.

This is my third obsessive watching of the Olympic games and I think watching a lot changes one’s perspective.  It’s wonderful when a Canadian wins a gold medal but I was equally jazzed by watching Tessa and Scott win silver.  And Denny Morrison’s silver medals?  Probably more heartwarming than any of the golds.

I have been working at an Olympian level while I mostly listen to the games in the background so it has likely given me additional perspective.  My heart always goes out to the 4th or 5th performance.  The pomp and circumstance is much lesser – but you are one of the top five people in your given sport.  How astonishing is that?

It’s hard not to get caught up in the competitive nature of the country medal count, often conveniently listed by gold or by total count depending on which version will make your country seem more impressive.  But what always makes me teary during the Olympics is the back story, the personal achievements, the hardships overcome.

When I started watching this year, I was worried that all the crass commercialism that has crept into the Olympic circus might turn me off and I would switch the channel.  But, somehow, the athletes manage to shine through the advertising and the sponsorships and make you care about the values sport can teach us – perseverance, dedication, mastery, hard work, good sportsmanship, team spirit.

I am a dreamer, a geek, an intellectual… definitely NOT an ATHLETE.  But I respect what they do and am inspired by them to take the values they bring to sport to my everyday life.  The colour of the medal is not the important thing.  Not even winning a medal.  The important thing is to hone your life skills to the point that a gold medal is a possibility – even if you aren’t an Olympic athlete and no one is going to give you a gold medal.  If you live your life as though your actions could earn you an Olympic gold medal, you will feel as though you have stepped on the podium and heard your national anthem played as the crowd cheered.  It’s not about the medal… it’s about living to the height of your potential…

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life philosophy, social commentary

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