St Louis-Show Me On The Bear Where TSA Touched You

Chase Plaza Hotel Lobby

Those TSA airport pat downs are for the birds, I mean the bears .

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Indianapolis-Come Together

The Fifth Beatle

From Xerox To Infinity-Copy Right? Wrong!

Almost all music is distributed today in digital, rather than analog, thanks to itunes  Back in analog days, music insisted on being triaged  by a record label,  and produced in commercial  recording studios where musicians were  often backed up by large symphonic orchestras. 

In France this week, I met with Legendary Record Producer  Jean Claude Pierric, who showed me  his  albums, a  catalog of 2000 plus Jazz Funk  hits from the 60's, 70's and 80's.

 Like the Beatles, JC resisted the allure of digital downloads, instead selling old-fashioned compact discs  after remastering his  catalog. Of course, his songs still made their way to digital. Many hip hop artists are "inspired" by his  sound(s).

As Picasso once said, Good artists copy, great artists steal. Make the call- Do these two sound alike? Are The Beat Nuts GR8!

Jean Claude Pierric 70z funk Black Night

Rappers Beat Nuts 90's Muchacha Heist version

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Indiana-Man In The Mirror

Why be a man when you can be a success? Self Presentation 2.0

.A narcissist used to be  someone better looking than you are.Yet what is the internet, if not a narcissist's dream come true?  JBI- Just Be It!

Digital  Narcisism or shared experience?  Everyone will be famous for 15 megabytes. Er I mean 15 people, 

Authorship is no longer the transmission of experience, but rather the construction of utterly personal experiences. Telling your own story plus technology control the editing rooms and you get to run your own show.

For a long time now, the United States of Unconsciousness   has seemed like a country where most people stared at TV, most of the time. But only recently after my YouTube Epiphany  video on The Carnival Splendor went network on ABC with over 22,000 unique hits in 48 hours, did I notice that it is also a country where television watches us. (GMA's Amanda Keegan sent me a gmail, as well as  Nightline Producer Ben Newman who sent me this e mail 5 minutes after I loaded on my youtube channel:

Hi Ed -- I'm a producer for ABC News Nightline. Would love to use some of your 'home-video' shot aboard the Carnival Splendor in tonight's show.  Send me an email or give me a call!...

Latter after I scanned a release-

Hey Ed -- wanted to thank you again for returning my call. Great to talk to you. Can we just confirm in writing what we spoke about over the phone re: using your web videos etc along with an on-screen credit to EdReif.com? Also – please send me any links to new media you upload. Would love to see what you documented!

The future won't be 500 channels -- it will be one channel, your channel. UGC, User Generated Content- the expression of our many virtual selves, is not a Nike Commercial "just do it,"  predicting the present  will be built much more around "just be it".

More about UGC 

 I started as a  Twitter Cell Phone Novelist. Now I am posting stuff to Facebook regularly and of course here at Blogger and Hotel @nyware- After visiting Versailles, I wonder what it would be like not to live in a house of mirrors, evereywhere I go being reminded of myself. -These days I skip through life; twenty years ago I was  dragged through it. I sometimes wonder whether we are moving through time of time is moving through us. 

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CDG--Mind, Body And France

When I landed in Paris, things started to take off.I was on a different plane.  7 days made one weak/week. Avi-Navi-gation seems as natural to me as  sending an e mail or going to  Starbucks.  I fold up my self and carry "me"around as if I were a gym bag. CDG-Charles De Gaulle Airport is no exception.

 Unchecked Baggage- My Airport My Self

If you want to be a multinational soul, you cannot do it in New York or Los Angeles, London or Tokyo alone-you need to get consecrated in Paris. Yet writing about this is not PC. it should only be done on a MAC because  this place has style.

I meet therefore I am- a multinational soul. I shrink therefore  I am part of — and apart from  American, European and Asian culture. and the  countries I visit(ed) and live(d) in  are as eclectic and restless as airports I "inhabit". Along with the displacement, and the associated jet lag, I  am simply a fairly glib product of a movable feast, living and working in a world that is itself increasingly small and increasingly hybrid---a transit lounger, forever heading to the departure gate.

People  come to airports and never leave

Airports used to be fun or dramatic -Remember the movies, like "Airplane" and "Air Force One ". Yet, getting hit over the head by the recent TSA pat downs in LAX and post 9 11 angst worldwide, we are spending more time in airports for better or worse-They are not just visited by we as  tourists, but inhabited by us  for a few hours. I  travel(ed) a lot but also can appreciate what it feels like to be Other. What I mean by that is, not having an internet connection! Technology is not the nameless Other. To embrace technology is to embrace, and face, ourselves.
 
The cult of the amateur  wanderers is growing; global souls who haven't been everywhere but it is on their list; for whom home is a feeling,  not a place in the soil but inside yourself. I am one of the privileged homeless. Is there a  new kind of person being created by a new kind of life?

"Every day is a journey," wrote Basho, "and the journey itself is home." If the Zen poet hadn't said that more than 300 years ago, I would have. I am Basho on a frequent flyer pass, with complimentary mojo on take off.

Where there's a Will, there's a play

 I no longer am looking for love, I am taking it with me. Shakespeare a écrit «la fin de la réunion Journeys les amateurs, tout homme sage sait cela. Je vous remercie de me conduire à l'aéroport Isabelle! Je t'aime. 

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Versailles-Singing In The Reign

 I am the state
@The Chateau Versalliles,visiting the reign of the sun king.

Has God forgotten all I have done for Him.
 Louis XIV

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Paris-Nothin On You BéBé

Mission To Mars
Located on the Champ de Mars in Paris, The Eiffel Tower,  a global icon of  Brand France,  makes me think of Bruno Mars, and that song -Nothin On You.

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Paris-La Joconde

 
DaVinci Code

Possibly one of the most famous paintings in the world, the portrait of the Mona Lisa is referred to as simply the Mona Lisa, La Joconde, or La Gioconda. It hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris, France and was   visited by me today.

An Army of One

Could Macbeth  have been written by a committee, a group of people who individually can do nothing, but who, as a group, can meet and decide that nothing can be done or the Mona Lisa painted by a club, because Leornardo would have refused to join any club that would have him as a member.

Creative ideas do not spring from crowds. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam.

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
Leonardo da Vinci

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Paris-The Albert Einstein Experience

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast. 

Nothing Left To Choose

Back to the future in Paris.  Although it has been a staple of science fiction; I feel like I have been time traveling with proof. One of my  greatest insights is realizing that time is relative. It speeds up or slows down depending on how fast one thing is moving relative to something  else. 

"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty woman for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity." Albert Einstein

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San Diego- Go Big or Go Home

No Noose Is Good News

It is better to ask for forgiveness than Permission To Go Ashore. 

On the U.S.  Midway flight deck, with the crippled Carnival Splendor in the background.

Ironically, Aircraft carriers are accidents looking for a place to happen.This time it wasn't a Battle Ship but  a cruise ship.  These guys at CCL, however,  were the Tim Gunn's of the industry. You know, because they made  it work no matter what.

CCL ships are flagged under Panama.Therefore, when you buy a ticket, you essentially give up your constitutional and consumer rights. Carnival Cruise Control, nevertheless went into overdrive and has gone overboard with comp upgrades-as we are staying three nights at the Hyatt. Headed for Paris tomorrow-Carnival is paying for the flight, reimbursed the voyage and is giving us another one too. The WalMart of cruising is living up to its moniker-pay less and have more fun.

Didja (here about The Carnival Splendor) Story or Black Swan Event?

While it was like wining the lottery, having a catastropic power failure at sea, this was no BP oil Spill, no Stock Market Crash, no 9-11. Nevertheless, when Disaster strikes, blame it on the Black Swan, dynamic--- something higly improbable that we retrofit a narrative later and rationalize as being entirely predictable.

The ship certainly has had bad luck. I wrote about the recent crew member jumping overboard two weeks ago. After that, I was joking "I don't want to be the last man out of a burning building" metaphor, and decided to leave the Splendor as Art Director, after five ships and 15 months at sea, but booked this cruise and couldn't get the money back.

Exerpt from my post: Denmark-My Fine Feathered Friend

Makes me think of"meaningful coincidence" and  Being Fooled By Randomness ...the architecture of my own brain that thinks things are happening by chance when they are actually happening by design.

Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know. Isn't it strange to see an event happening precisely because it was not supposed to happen?

Black Swan events are The Computer, The Harry Potter Books, Nine  11, Susan Boyle; mainly and increasingly shaped by unlikely twists that nobody can ever successfully forecast. The more we think we know what will happen, the more we will be sideswiped by what will actually happen, which will becomes  the in to our sane!

Not only world events but for We the living---it goes something like this: nothing, nothing, boring, hard work, minor breakthrough, work, tedious, nothing, setback, routine, nothing, and then, suddenly – BA- BAM! Out of the blue, a major can of whoop-ass is delivered to my door.The combination of low predictability and high impact is coming on schedule, with my personal globalization, a cumulative effect of a handful of significant shock and awe experiences are having black swan dynamics.

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Ed Reif -Citizen Journalist -Goes Network on ABC and Nuclear on YouTube

How To Recognize The Future When It Lands Right On You.

ABC Nightline

Bud Light Salutes Mr. Blogger-You Tube Cruise Ship Guy with a cellphone camera and access to wireless.Yes, you. Mr Cruise Ship Guy, You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world, master of the Youniverse Mr. Real Man of Genius.

I have seen the future and it works!

My cellphone is my credential, my ABC press corp pass, My  thirty  something years in-the- the trenches-experience. Mr. Cruise ship guy will be Professor Emeritus and guest speaker at Columbia' Graduate School Of Journalism next semester, and hosting an upcoming Larry King Live on CNN to discuss his "Let's Make Sausage" the tipping point moment of Citizen Journalism.

You see, you don't have to be a navaho code breaker to use a cell phone. Just post something to Youtube.

An I for An I- From Bradcasting to Narrowcasting.We don't watch tv, tv watches us

Good Morning America

The world has always been seen through different I's, people who made a difference all had their own library of three minute user-generated videos, filmed by participants in the events.

First, there were handheld videos cameras that captured history- The Zapruder film, the most complete real-time version of the Kennedy assassination, and L.A where they treat(ed) everyone like a king, Rodney King. Now, The Carnival Splendor will have 3,500 video and  still images to document our "dead in the water" staycation, including mine.

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Cruise Ship Splendor Arrives With Cargo Cult Believers

Carnival Cruise Ship Splendor Arrives at Port of San Diego,
originally uploaded by Port of San Diego.

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Carnival Splendor-Baby Boomers or Baby Boon

Getting lost at sea has its advantages--- Thank you Carnival Cruise lines, ---I shall call my next child, Splendor, where he was conceived in total darkness for the past 4 days!

Weight Lose Gallery-

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Baja California-Smoke on The Water-Melon

What Time And What Aircraft Carrier?

Who says you can never be too rich or too thin--for the past five days I couldn't spend any money and I lost weight! drifting at sea in Mexican waters, fighting off pirates, onboard the Carnival Fun Ship, Splendor, after an engine fire left us without electricity.

We are not those Chilean  Miners, or even that 9-11 crew who said "Let's Roll".
Being stranded on the Carnival Splendor was like Camp Cupcake-With an open bar, and a free cruise to nowhere- an episode of The Biggest Loser-- With a lot of veggies and fruits and some good old American Watermelon, a food of our people.

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Los Angeles-There's No Limit Like No-Limit

The Sex of Poker
First, you do it for love, next, for others, Finally, for the money. With props to DJ Khalid and "All I do is Win, Win,Win"

"Hello, I'm All In"

And I ask myself  "Am I better off than I was $5000 dollars ago?" The answer is a resounding,"Yes!"

In the City of Los Angry Cars-L.A. to start my two week vacation-First up is Mexico, then Paris France.

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Missouri-Show Me The Movie

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St Louis-The Bob at the EDward Jones

Any Given Sunday

With three minutes left to go in the Rams-Panther's game, I looked up on the Video screen, and  the inspirational speech
Inch by inch speech(Full)by Al Pachino,  Inch By Inch, was playing. Thanks Bob

Because in either game
life or football
the margin for error is so small. I mean
one half step too late or to early
you don't quite make it.
One half second too slow or too fast
and you don't quite catch it.
The inches we need are everywhere around us.
They are in ever break of the game
every minute, every second.

On this team, we fight for that inch
.

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Saint Louis-Random Acts of Ramness

 Uncle Ed, Chase, Bob Reif

Happy Father's Day

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