A Room with a View

On a cold and rainy day in Shanghai, I sat leaning back against the carved calligraphy wall of my hotel room and thought that life truly looks different from the 85th floor. The streets below – or what I could see of them – were empty, for Shanghainese are notoriously against the bad weather. Across from me, however, construction workers happily continued laying the walls of a new skyscraper, and I wondered whether it would eventually rise above my building, the tallest one in Continental China.

Besides the height snobbism, I was happy with my hotel choice. It was away from the touristy Bund, yet with a perfect view on the minaret-like TV tower, the Tour d’Eiffel of China’s Paris. Seeing the tower was nice, but seeing it from above was strange, unexpected, shifting my perspective and my expectations.

This could have been a typical China business trip: 36 hours in a megalopolis, business meetings, traffic jams, dinner in some private dining room, a walk through a touristy street, a drink in a hotel bar, a few unsuccessful attempts to take pictures that do not look like postcards, the lingering feeling of not quite being there, of looking at China through a tinted glass window of a foreign car.

But shift the perspective, and things suddenly become clear. It is a well known fact that by the middle of this century – and possibly before –, China’s GDP will be twice that of the United States. While clearly zooming into a poll position as world’s leading economy, China is showing no sign of becoming like the West. To quote an insightful book by Martin Jacques “When China Rules the World”, Western analysts have misjudged China’s cultural and political trajectory, assuming that economic growth will make the country more like a Western democracy. This was the very essence of “globalization”, a concept put forward by Fukuyama and seemingly obvious to anyone reared in the Western way of thought. Instead, while happily adopting Western brands – from Louis Vuitton to Starbucks –, China continues to grow in its own unique way, maintaining what Jacques calls a “civilization state”, keeping a link to a culture and values that date thousands of years back. Some of these values – such as seeing the State as the spiritual “father” of the family – might seem backwards to the “enlightened” West. But so did daily bathing and tea-drinking , when British empire first encountered Chinese culture.

Culture is maintained through its stories – whether it’s a Qin dynasty fairytale, or a Jackie Chan movie. This is why instead of just looking at economic statistics we might want to look at the state of Chinese media today. Ernst & Young reported recently that China’s entertainment industry is growing even faster than the overall economy, and that the country’s film box-office will surpass that of the US by 2020. Digital entertainment and social media in China are expanding at an exceptional rate, way more impressive than that of their Western counterparts. To quote CNN Money report, “ Baidu is often referred to as China’s Google. That might be insulting to Baidu”.

TV or not TV?

That is the question, literally, which we will be facing for the rest of the decade– a silent question which no one dares to ask, and even less people dare to answer.

When I graduated from MIT fifteen years ago, it was easy to claim with absolute certainty that television was a dying medium. It was as easy to predict it’s future, as it was to imagine what will happen to fax machines after receiving first email from Grandma.

Internet-delivered video was going to replace TV, of course, just as soon as bandwidth got up to speed. What would you rather do – chose your own entertainment, of watch some dumb TV channel programmed for the masses ? Moreover, even if you would rather “lean back”, there will be a million of others wishing to program your experience for you, and TV distribution paradigm is much too constraining for that. The advent of YouTube channels, on-demand services, from Hulu to Netfilx, and overwhelming statistics of youngster watching video mostly on PC or tablet have all but confirmed what by now has become a commonplace observation: traditional TV days are counted.

Having personally made a living of the “forget linear TV” paradigm, I found myself going from iconoclast to someone practically boring in a span of a decade. In light of the latest industry convention where every suit and tie brandished a tablet in my face, trying to show me his on-demand video service, I have decided to adopt an alternative stance: television is our future.

I have several reasons for so drastically changing my beliefs. First of all, experience has taught me that things are never what they seem. It has also taught me that suits and ties at conventions are always wrong, eagerly jumping on the bandwagon of the past.

Gangnam World

It’s a chilly stressful morning in Paris, and I am rushing to catch a plane at Charles de Gaulle. The cab radio is blasting Gangnam Style, the K-Pop track which at the time I write this article has had 700 million views on You Tube – meaning it might be close to a billion by the time you read this.

Yes, a billion views for a song in which a pudgy singer named Psy confesses to a succession of preppy girls: “on top of the running man is the flying man, baby, baby – I am a man who knows a thing or two” – before going into “opppa Gangnam Style “, the magic mantra which defies all translation.

On my flight to Hong Kong I ponder the profound meaning of the most popular song in the universe. 13 sleepless hours later I am in a Hong Kong cab, and am happy to discover that local radio stations now have something in common with the French ones – they play Gangnam Style.

At the television convention, everyone asks me if our channel features K-Pop. Sheepishly I name some alternative Korean acts we have acquired from an educational outfit years ago, but the inevitable question comes up: “Do you have Psy? “ No we don’t. I am actually not even sure how to pronounce his name. Last time I followed K-Pop, Super Junior was huge. I was still trying to buy their show when the Gangnam bomb hit the planet and now all bets are off.

A digital streaming company invites a number of TV channel execs to a fancy lunch. The company’s CEO quotes some impressive numbers, and assures us that any entertainment brand today needs a bespoke video streaming solution. “Some of you think that putting your content on YouTube is an answer” he admonishes and most of us sit up from our soup and look guilty, ”Let me tell you something. YouTube is great. You can find anything on YouTube. It’s a bit like Walmart. But if you were Hermes, would you sell your bags at Walmart?” The table nods in agreement.

Dreams-à-porter

It is my firm belief that life is not worth living if we cannot, at regular intervals, encounter parallel realties so different from our own that we may as well have been reborn as four-eyed midgets in some distant Star Trek galaxy. It is good to jump headfirst into an ocean of someone else’s illusion, just to remind yourself that everything you take for granted is only as real as your desire to believe in it. We build our sturdy homes and social safety nets, surround ourselves with friends and bank accounts, virtual and real – but we may as well have been building castles in the sand, or gigantic windmills in the Grand Palais… which is exactly what Karl Lagerfeld did a few weeks ago, for Chanel’s Spring 2013 fashion show.

Being a complete outsider to the fashion world, I got an invitation through a distant connection. I knew I would see something different; perhaps get a quick jolt of second-hand glamour – a pick-me-up I could use after staring at web developers for days on end. I stuffed my little Leica in the only Chanel object I own – a beaten-up chain bag picked up at a friperie years ago. I figured a camera would make me look busy – a handy trick when attending an event where you know no one will recognize or speak to you. And it was an excellent idea. From the moment I entered the Grand Palais, swallowed up by the gigantic white womb Kaiser Karl had painted a day before, with monumental white windmills towering above everything and spinning along to a hypnotic electro sound, I could not put the camera down. It was as if I just woke up in a movie, a sci-fi vision of something done a long time ago, a dream unrolling in front of my eyes, unreal to such an extent that I thought nothing of taking pictures of everything and everyone, as if they were wax figures in the Tussauds museum.

I came an hour early, but not a minute too late to capture the actual show, which is the audience coming in and greeting each other. Against the white background of the white seats and white columns and white catwalk, I took in the half-familiar faces in the front row and the not so front row, the Asian buyers somehow all grouped in one section and wearing bunny ears on either their heads or their iPhones, the strangely unglamorous characters filing in first and proudly filling up their seats, Ines de la Fressange striking a permanent pose which makes her look like a drawing of herself, someone in a plastic trash bag pursued by TV cameras, wildly dressed creatures rushing across the slippery catwalk to blow fake kisses at each other, a Woody-Allenesque photographer who has been covering this for the New York Times since at least two world wars, the woman who you think wears Prada even when she doesn’t and her red-head alter ego, a Hollywood star arriving late and causing a paparazzi massacre… Floating up and down the rows as an absolute outsider, with no strings attached to the rules of this particular world, I kept shooting and shooting, and thinking of the dear maestro Fellini and how he would have cast everyone on this set and then put the set itself in one of his dream sequences, and what a gift it was to see this film unrolling in front of my eyes, because it will never play in a cinema near me.

High (2.0) in Ibiza

On a glorious summer evening of what’s supposed to be the busiest weekend in August, the sleepy town of St Rafael in Ibiza resembles a De Cirico painting. The streets are empty, and the bouncer of the island’s trendiest dinner spot, El Ayum, sits bare-chested outside of his swanky joint, lazily eyeing the camel above the entrance.

While the rest of vacationing Europe is out having drinks and starting dinners on breezy terraces across the Mediterranean, Ibiza crowd is off to its 8pm siesta, getting ready to come to life again just before midnight. As you speed down a deserted highway, strangely non-descript faces of famous DJ’s loom at you from the gigantic sun-bleached posters, like a surreal remake of Apocalypse Now.

Come midnight the clubbers will gather to worship these un-photogenic demi-gods, as they groove behind their computers, bewitching the crowd with hypnotic sounds. And instantly the social digi-verse will come atwitter with pictures of party and fun and never-ending youth that the island bestows for a fleeting moment on those who jump head-first into the infinity pool of its myth.

A disco, a football match, a concert, an Olympic game – any public event gets augmented digitally these days, transmitted, digested, blown up, snapped by a myriad of little smartphone lights, each of us eager to nail the moment, to capture it forever and to post it right away, instead of living it and seeing it fully.
Nowhere is this fact more remarkable than in Ibiza, an island hippies once came to forget themselves, and to find union with nature while basking in the yellow sunset since then hopelessly identified with Café del Mar CD covers.

The Facebook Heist

A few weeks ago a Colombian police squad arrested a couple of thugs who had robbed an Internet café. It took an unusually short time to locate the thieves thanks to the mind-boggling fact that prior to sticking up the cashier they forgot to log out of Facebook. I imagine the detectives had a good laugh, as they poked the unfortunate robbers, prior to to slamming on the hand-cuffs.

Around the same time, Facebook went public, and quickly became the laughing stock (excuse the pun) for those who were smart enough not to buy the inflated shares, and to ask the obvious question: “100 Billion what?”

If you ask me, these two stories share a common denominator, a sad moral that in these times of avarice and delusion, one should beware of social networks. They steal your peace of mind, by permanently reminding you that you are missing messages and notifications. They steal your privacy and force you to live in a permanent fear that everything you do online might be accidentally posted to your profile. They steal your real friends, who now wish you a Happy Birthday on your Wall, instead of calling you. They steal your time …. They steal your kids’ attention… the list could go on forever, but now, to top it all, from a coffee joint in a South American slum to the unattainable heights of finance, they steal your dreams that one day you too could be rich. One can no longer peacefully rob an Internet café or make a quick buck on the Wall Street hype, because these social networks are so virtual they have actually become real, and the only bubble left to burst is our dreams.

We are in the process of leaving the Eden 2.0 of the permanent digital bliss, where everyone is your friend and any social media startup will make billions , and returning to the hell of reality, where life is tough and there is no free lunch.

At an MIT gathering five years ago a rather accomplished serial entrepreneur told me: “ To pitch a new business to Silicon Valley investors today, you have to present it as a social network play”. Five years is just enough time for a baby start-up to go through growing pains and a few investment rounds, to fire and hire a few CEOs and get itself into a healthy shape for the much-awaited “exit”.

Over the Top But Not Enough

The Asia Pacific PayTV Operator Summit takes place in Bali in late April. Set at the former Ritz, recently renamed because of a property dispute, this is not a gathering to be missed by television execs whose wives for once do not mind coming along. Some of the key industry people in the region turn up for the event, and the two-day conference is packed with cleverly titled sessions, positive but with a reflective twist: “The Fragility of Growth”, “Gatekeepers to Digital Noise”, or “Digital Deliverance”.

The conference starts on an upbeat note, with speakers happily talking of growth and sharing tips for success, while the audience savors the good news with free refreshments, sponsored lunches and daily surprise gifts in the rooms. (One such gift – an HBO-branded suitcase–scared the sh***t out of most delegates. Having discovered it in their room they alternatively thought it was 1. a bomb, 2. not their room, 3. an industry girl-friend not realizing he was there with his wife). And so the guests are fed and entertained from morning to dawn, including the priceless sight of a local network boss karaokeing “My Way” and a Top-Chef finalist making their dinner.

Unlike stingy European industry events, held in halogen-lit venues of gloomy London hotels, this particular summit is literally over the top… yet, if you ask me, not nearly enough.

Over the Top, you see, is the issue that should be the main concern of PayTV industry. To put it simply: PayTV operator charges consumers for premium TV channels and his key business advantage is his control of the gateway. The operator decides which channels the consumer can and cannot get. Because his offer has to stay competitive, he must lure the consumer in with a basic (free) bouquet of channels. Recently he had to add other “goodies” like Internet connectivity. This simple “added-value”, which was supposed to increase his ARPU, might become his downfall: now the customer can buy a SmartTV, connect it to the Internet, and get the same premium content – channels and on demand – directly via the TV set, bypassing the operator’s gateway altogether.

The Customer Blues

The not so recent Grammies 2012 left me thoughtful. I didn’t follow much of the usual noise, as the results of the event were so obvious, with Adele looming large on every music industry radar and all over YouTube for months before the show. I’ve also never really cared for Grammies which seem both “closed circle” and “lowest common denominator” at once – the two things I dislike most about the show business. It was refreshing to read the New Yorker article the day after, the opening line of it: “There was little to redeem the 54th Grammy Awards.” I’ll spare paraphrasing but highly recommend you Google it during the precious work hours you spend on Facebook and other 2.0 distractions.

Having read the article, I decided to refresh my memory by watching promo clips for the two songs that won awards: Adele’s “Rolling in The Deep” and Kanye West/Jay-Z “Otis”. And it struck me, watching these videos back to back, that being so far apart they are actually much alike, their message being the destruction of the lifestyle that the artists in question represent.

Let’s start with Adele who is known to appeal “to all ages” – which means she is extremely popular with housewives. There she sits in her video, in the middle of an empty living room, dressed like a perfect middle aged hausfrau, her make up and hair all done and oh so desperate, water dripping from the ceiling, drop by brain-numbing drop, into a myriad of transparent water glasses. And then she just starts throwing things. Breaking the faceless Ikea homeware. Thrashing it up against the wall. Her truly amazing voice, surging up from somewhere really deep, resonates with cups and dishes breaking and breaking and piling up on the dusty floor, and they better call the cleaning lady soon as this little dame ain’t picking anything up in the near future.

The Year of Good Dragon

In 2004 Nike ran into some trouble with its commercials in Asia. It hit the first hurdle in Singapore where over 700 hundred street-art posters had to be pulled down, after 50 or so citizens complained that graffiti hooligans have vandalized their sanitary clean bus stops.

This little glitch was nothing though, compared to the fate of a multi-million dollar commercial starring the basketball prodigy James LeBron. The Hong Kong movie spoof “Chamber of Fear” featured LeBron fighting a number of opponents, Bruce Lee-style – culminating with him knocking out the ultimate enemy, “self-doubt”. The trouble is, much as the spot strived to imitate the martial arts B-movie classics, its Western creators have completely missed the point. When Chinese authorities banned the commercial for “insulting national dignity” and disrespecting “the motherland’s culture “, the Western media thought this had to do with Le Bron roughing up a grey haired sifu in the first round. They still did not get it. The real trouble was the fourth challenge, where Le Bron beats up a dragon.

If we were to look for one symbol, one single archetype to best summarize the distance that separates the West and the East, the Dragon would certainly make the shortlist. In Western mythology he is one evil spirit, spitting fire from its many heads. The hero’s task is to fight him, tame him, and eventually slay him with a nice thrust of a spear.

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…