2Q12

The Holiday Season is upon us. Just back from South East Asia, where the temperature never fell below 28 and I had a dragon-fruit juice every morning, I am now gastronomically jetlagged and thermally out of sync. On the flight back I picked up a hefty volume of Haruki Murakamis 1Q84, a book about a parallel universe. I keep staring at it’s sci-fi cover, a mix of Bladerunner and Wong Kar Wai.

A part of me is still in Hong Kong and Singapore, where the future is now and the past always present. Back home I browse through technology news every morning, only to find them already passé. In search for new ideas, I watch an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, and it occurs to me that the only other guy I know who doesn’t blink is a friend from MIT who also made millions right out of college. It must be a genetic “tell”, a mark of 2.0 genius.

Out of Fashion

I do not know how relevant fashion is to you. Do you know that this season the fuzzy stuff is in? You know, the fluffy white element which leaves white residue on your car seat, and, when you put it on, makes you look like an unshaved mutton version of LMFAO? No, perhaps you do not know what I am talking about, and the images of last spring’s runways are not floating through your brain like a Style.com slide show. Then you might not care to read the rest of this column, which is too bad because the point I’d like to make matters, even if the last designer purchase you made was when Ralph Lauren still went by Ralph Lifshitz.

Fashion, as Oscar Wilde defined it with great authority, “is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” Over a century later we still stick to this calendar, though for the stars and the insanely wealthy we also have couture and cruise collections (not to mention pre-fall) to make life more bearable in between the sacred four weeks of spring and fall runways.

As the fashion editors jet between New York, Milan, London and Paris, there’s a lot of excitement and a desperate search for new words to describe something no one involved really needs – new clothes. The editors still live under the impression that it is their duty to tell a woman what to wear. They do so by ingesting hundreds of catwalk parades and regurgitating a succinct version of what’s in this season – kind of like my fuzzy white thing (which I have bought, by the way, and that’s how I know about the car seat).

Yet what the editors do not know, as they jetset in IRL (“in real life” – e-speak), is that their world is being slowly eroded by the new media geeks they have hired to run the online pages of their magazines.

Dangerous Tides

A curious thing happened at my final high-school exam. “ Why don’t we skip the questions”, smiled the literature teacher “ You’ve worked so hard, I don’t even need to test you. Just read me your favourite poem”. A straight A student with a mousy demeanor, I happily recited a beautiful piece by Sergei Esenin. I will never forget the teacher’s eyes turning wide and slightly scared, as the final verse went something like this: “I cherish a dream that one day… I too will slit someone’s throat… They will lead me in chains up the rocky slope, where the free mountain air will cure my sadness…”

Brain Games

A sultry Tuesday afternoon in Bali. A gentle breeze flutters the white curtains of my beach bed, making it look like a magic white carpet floating above an untouched beach. I should really be doing yoga, or at least getting up to get a drink, instead of waving the pool boy over. Or should I?

Star Wars 2.0

The entrance to Google’s new Parisian headquarters is a non-descript door on a non-descript street. There is no sign, just a shabby printout saying “Are You Feeling Lucky?” Once the reception buzzes you in, a makeshift cardboard hallway leads you through a leafy courtyard of a sprawling hotel particulier…

Once Upon A Wedding

An hour or so after two billion people, none of whom I know, happily endured an endless royal wedding broadcast, I made myself a cup of tea and decided to wait for the return of the British sense of humour.

A typical offspring of Russian intelligentsia, I am a born and bread anglophile, brought up on Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott, not to mention the collected works of Mine Reed, a British writer who seems to only be read in Cyrillic (The Headless Horseman, anyone?) From Wilkie Collins to Rudyard Kipling, from Conan Doyle to Lewis Carroll, my childhood’s bookshelves careened under the weight of hefty tomes, all telling stories of a far off land that was, most certainly, the centre of the universe. There was a swing in my grandpa’s dacha, where I would sit for hours composing yet another novel – they all began at the Tower of London which I assumed was the only acceptable backdrop for a self-respecting story…

When Tweedledum and Tweedledee Agreed To Tweet A Battle…

Alice in Wonderland was the first book I ever read, and throughout my childhood it comforted me against the absurdities of the world. The main absurdity of all was the Soviet Union, a universe of subtle lies transparent even to the eyes of a twelve year old. At the age when everything appears exactly as it is, albeit a lot bigger, how else do you vote in an election with only one candidate, respect some obviously senile man as he rambles on TV about his illustrious leadership, or take seriously a teacher as she extols the virtues of the economic regime, while you queue for hours to buy a piece of meat and know you will never be as popular as the girl in your class whose dad brings her Levi’s from the West?

Shaolin Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

This is a story of two boys born in Chinese countryside around 1964. One comes from a destitute family, is sickly and frail and almost dies at the age of two, like his siblings before him. The father sells his only treasure – a calligraphy brush – to pay the doctors, but they can’t help. As the boy’s shattered parents carry him home to certain death, a man in rags stops them and asks why they are crying. He tells them to unwrap the child and with a few needles brings him back to life. Convinced that the stranger was a Bodhisattva, parents take the boy to Shaolin monastery where he reveals an uncanny talent for martial arts and becomes the pride of Shaolin kung fu.

Broke In China

The trendy restaurant at the Grand Hyatt Beijing is called Made In China and looks just like what I imagined China to be like. It is one huge and shining lacquered box of red and black, every wall a backdrop from a Hong Kong filmset. A glass window separates us from the brightly lit kitchen, where smiling faces of chefs and sous-chefs emerge from clouds of steam, as they roll their dumplings and dissect crispy ducks with happy abandon…

Rain And Other Liquids

No place is more appropriate for a TV convention than Venice in November. Quiet and melancholy after the tourist season, the city is perched precariously on its own reflection. Every morning grey waters swallow the sidewalks, while sleepy shop owners lay out battered wooden planks outside their doors, so that once glamorous metropolis suddenly looks like a flooded bathroom. Come mid-day, the water releases the pavement back to its ancient grandeur, and the shining city yet again seems frozen in time, untouched by centuries. But the next flood is never too far. Venice is a great metaphor for the evolution of things… television among them…

You are what you click

On a rainy October morning, the port of Cannes was swelling in waves, both sky and sea the color of charcoal. I was drowning in my MIPCOM agenda. It was a hurricane of my own making: meetings overlapped with meetings, Wednesday clients showed up on Monday, while important looking strangers dropped by to set up appointments which I would not be able to keep. The moral of the story was clearly “Don’t change assistants mid-stream” – something I did, quite stupidly, a month before the convention…

All Hail the Little Brothers

In a recent study by a US company PC Tools, 25% of those surveyed said it was OK to be online during sex. Now that’s the news to brighten any advertiser’s day. The incessant complaints we hear about media budgets shrinking, and online advertising never quite getting there – and here you have it in a nutshell: consumers have never been an easier prey…

Desperate Spies

When in the midst of a sweltering Moscow summer Prime Minister Putin sat down with the newly repatriated Russian spy ring at an “undisclosed location” (probably somebody’s dacha), they spoke of life, promised to seek out the enemies who betrayed them, and sang a song “Where does our Homeland begin”. Any Russian born in the 20^th century knows this song by heart, as it is as much a part of the folklore as Anna Karenina or Stolichnaya. Before the days of 24 and Mad Men, it crowned the soundtrack of the first Soviet spy TV series “Shield and Sword”. The telefilm portrayed a glamorous Russian spy with a heart of gold and nerves of steel, as he successfully convinced Nazi Germans for a whole of 4 episodes that he was one of them…

Generation Who?

I abhor demonstrations and parades, and refuse to belong to any movement or group whatsoever. I have never voted in my life – not since they kicked me out of a young pioneer summit in the 5^th grade for laughing during the keynote. I staunchly distance myself from any ideology or social construct, be it feminism, nationality or digital networking. I reject any attempt to organize me in a group with a name or a mission, and have a tendency to unwillingly insult people when they sound too righteous for my taste…

All That Bling

When the Los Angeles police broke up the “Bling Ring” last month, it took all of a few days for its members to become famous. The intensely photogenic teenage burglars pillaged celebrity homes armed by Internet maps of star homes and TMZ.com information on when their intended victims will be out at some red-carpet event. In between their busy schedule, the high-school robbers found time to hang out on the beach, Twitter about offers from Playboy and sign up for reality TV shows. They hawked some of their loot for cash, but kept most of it to wear and show off to their friends…

The Box Wars

It is always fun to report a revolution. Particularly when the old king was getting doddery and, frankly, a bore – and the new ruler is young, digitally savvy and chosen by the masses. What a great story it makes, and I am certainly glad to have a story on my way back from MIPCOM in Cannes. The convention has become so repetitive over the past years, I was worried I will once again wind up writing about anxious TV executives searching in vain for answers in the prisons of their minds…

The Sad Fate Of Comedy

On a recent flight to New York I wound up watching a movie so bad it was actually painful to follow. Sadly, it reminded me of a similar film I saw on an overseas flight just a few months before. I have trouble sleeping on planes, you see, and reading for seven hours requires a really good book. So, sooner or later, I end up turning to the movie options…

South-West Blues

As we drive along the smoldering red rocks of Arizona, the radio is blasting the latest country sensation, Colt Ford – “ I got no trash in my tra-ah-iler , not since I kicked you out of here…”
Life is good. The office is nine hours of jetlag away, and closed for the day by the time I get up. The August heat has melted my brains. There’s not a cloud in the sky, and not a thought on my mind…

High Street Media

My friends joke that I came to this world with lots of lofty ideas … and a shopping allowance. This myth started in college, where I managed to have a rather flashy style, while living on about 50 $ a week – courtesy of cheap discount shops unknown to my trust-funded Harvard friends. My flamboyant style fueled a certain mystery, suggesting Russian Mafia ties or a Bond Girl lifestyle – in fact, it was a 70%-off bin at Urban Outfitters. Needless to say, a decade later my “high-street” secret has gone legit. A US magazine ran a feature last month, where some clever editor juxtaposed 2 similar outfits – one costing over 2,000$, another – under 200$. They showed pictures to random women and asked them to guess which getup was the expensive one. Unbelievably, the cheap knock-off won two times out of three…

Cyborg, You Borg

When I left the MIT Media Lab 10 years ago, someone told me: “Congratulations, you now have the coolest education on Earth. There is only one glitch… It will take the world at least five years to have any use for what you’ve learned here”…