The mighty Mekong River, which appears on the bottom of the Vietnam map like a vast hand-print, starts its journey somewhere in Tibet and travels through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia before spilling its muddy lifeblood into the South China Sea in the vast sprawling delta whose name was always in the news in the 60?s. The good news about the delta for a cyclist is that it?s very flat – the bad news is that there are ferries and numerous rickety bridges to be negotiated as you travel across it – oh yeah, the place is riddled with malaria too. This means I?ve been taking malaria tablets for weeks. I had been warned that the side effects of the tablets might include sleeplessness and a speed-like state involving vivid hallucinations. Sadly none of the above occurred – even after I listened to a Hawkwind album at very high volume with the lights turned down.

The end of today?s ride saw us parking our bikes in Can Tho and we greedily gorged ourselves on pizza from the hotel bar – today?s packed lunch had been so awful it made me want to rush back home and stick a five star recommendation on the window of my local Subway. We were excited it was New Year?s Eve and a stage had promisingly been erected next to the swimming pool. Someone was yelling loudly into the PA. ?Is that what ONE TWO, ONE TWO, CHEW, CHEW, sounds like in Vietnamese?? I asked. No-one seemed to know and no-one got the joke either. It seemed there was a chance of a good poolside frug tonight. I wasn?t optimistic about hearing the latest 12? mixes from New York or London later on but I figured that at least some nostalgic Bee Gees or Michael Jackson might be on offer. From such dreams are terrible disappointments conceived.

2001 was on it?s last legs as we convened in the bar for our New Years bash. All the girls were wearing the outfits they?d had made in Nha Trang and all the boys were wearing what they?d worn the night before and the night before that. As I nursed my aperitif I became vaguely aware that a musical something was obscuring the Billie Holiday CD playing in the al fresco bar area. Suddenly it hit me – I was listening to a karaoke version of a Kenny G tune! Out by the pool a local man with a suspicious looking rug was cajoling the G-sters notes out of his aging horn. The already insipid backing to Kenny?s tune had received the requisite karaoke treatment and been further emasculated. Like diluted water such a thing seem impossible.

As we moved outside to our tables Kenny?s pal left the stage. No-one clapped. I felt the need to lift up my spirits and went to check out the buffet but the food was as listless and as brown as the waters that slipped by a few yards away and I quietly wondered if things might have been improved had our German chef spent less time chatting up the guests and more time in the kitchen. Then it dawned on me that the large and attractive crowd of young and nervous Vietnamese beside the stage were not revelers who?d crashed the hotel to get on down with the unquiet Americans. Something much more terrifying was afoot. It seemed they were all fanatical, card-carrying members of some local karaoke club with fabulously appalling musical tastes. They not only intended to karaoke their way to 2002, they were going to do it in public and had actually planned ahead – a programme of stunning New Year musical moments had been printed up and placed on every table. Mr. Gorelick?s #1 fan (Far East division) had three more appearances scheduled before the midnight hour. Wham?s ?Last Christmas? was to be performed by a ?duo? – ?Feelings? required only a ?soloist.? A martial arts display was scheduled after ?Close To You.?

I made my excuses and slipped away. As I turned out the light in my room I heard the opening lines of ?Let?s Twist Again.? ?Come back Rod Stewart all is forgiven,? I thought as I tumbled off to sleep.

Before leaving Los Angeles I cracked a joke saying that I was ordering a handle-bar mounted napalm launcher for my cycling trip in Vietnam and I chuckled as I talked about ?gooks? and scenes from Apocalypse Now. As I struggled up the pass to Dalat today I deeply regretted those careless comments. Perhaps my failure to scale the toughest hill I?ve tried to cycle up (5,210? of vertical climbing inside 20 miles) was divine retribution for my careless and unnecessary comments.

Certainly there are moments when you cycle along a dusty road between the rice paddies and watch pitifully simple houses glide past that you think of the fear young GI?s must have felt as they walked here 30 years ago waiting for an ambush from ?Charlie.? As you look up the valleys and see the rugged green hills you can practically hear the sound of chopper blades and you expect Norman Greenbaum?s ?Spirit In The Sky? to kick in and set your heart racing.

But nothing prepares you for the happy smiling faces of the people of Vietnam. As you cycle past, lycra-clad and helmeted looking like a visitor from another planet – and believe me most Americans are from another planet when compared to Nha Trang or Ninh San – you are constantly waved and smiled at. Children appear from shacks and behind trees giggling and yelling ?Hello, hello!? When you reply or wave back they scrunch up their faces and laugh with glee. By rights after decades of war and misery you?d think the vast majority of people in this country would despise anyone looking vaguely French or American i.e. me. But they don?t. How can they be so welcoming to us when we dropped more ordinance than in WW2 onto their little nation which is about the size of New Mexico? And who thought we could win a war here anyway? Why didn?t they fly LBJ in and give him the one hour cyclo tour I had the other day? Any man in his right mind would instantly have realised that our ideals and values are not necessarily suited to other countries and cultures – especially this one. More importantly he might have realised that a war here was simply unwinable.

This trip is teaching me a lot about colonialism and the missionary spirit that sent Europeans over vast distances to educate the ?savages? in the errors of their ways. I?m starting to feel strongly that might is not always right. The European soldiers, merchants and land grabbers of the last millennium, whether they were British, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch or Belgian did more harm than good in Asia and Africa. Arguments that the British left their justice system and the French their culture look suspiciously like straw-clutching justifications for centuries of exploitation, cruelty and subjugation.

As I struggle up today?s hill (both real and imagined) and finally reach the plateau that leads me to Dalat every smiling face, every unusual custom, every peculiar clothing choice I experience tells me that diversity is good and surprising and stimulating. We may not approve of their politics or their traffic sense or their plumbing and personal hygiene but that just makes them different – not better or worse.

We?d spent the morning sightseeing – walking about 6km between two pagodas somewhere outside Hanoi. The bus had ferried us there and back and we eagerly stared out at the chaotic traffic we?d soon be cycling through: there are 78 million Vietnamese and 50% of them have mopeds, it seems the rest have bicycles. It?s a fascinating living experiment in 2 wheeled transport in which the participants seem to care little for the niceties of traffic lanes, hand signals or actually ANYTHING except pointing their vehicle in the desired direction. But even the wonderful free-form traffic could not prepare us for the afternoon?s main event: a cyclo tour of old Hanoi.

Imagine a comfy steel chair suspended between two bicycle wheels. Behind the chair is a bike seat, 2 pedals and a third wheel. This is a cyclo and you sit in the front while some poor bastard pedals his heart out behind you and points you directly at the 3 million residents of Hanoi all hell-bent on cycling, mopedding, running, walking or driving somewhere before tea-time. Some of them are going your way – most of them aren?t and they?re carrying a mind-boggling collection of cargo as they pedal and scoot hither and thither. Favourite moped cargo option: the rest of your family – all four of them. Typical cyclo option: a battered three piece suite including sofa, 2 easy chairs and footstools. Possible bicycle option: 20 metal buckets, a full length mirror (in it?s frame) and a pig. When it comes to the ?Remarkable two wheeled cargo options? section of the next All Asian Bicycle Olympics I expect the Vietnamese to be the clear winners – they will sweep the gold in both artistic and technical categories.

And every moped has a horn which, it seems, is directly connected to both the throttle and the brakes and every cyclist could care less. And so you start your tour amidst the cacophonous honking and buzzing of 2 stroke engines. You approach the Opera House where 3 different weddings have simultaneously reached that picture-on-the-steps moment and five roads meet at one point. There are no traffic lights and, as there doesn?t appear to be a single traffic cop in the entire country, the thousands of travellers converging on this junction just merge, swerve, dodge and avoid and somehow come out the other side. The locals emerge nonchalant while the tourist Johnnies (i.e. me) emerge breathless and aghast with eyes like saucers and heartbeats like Gattling guns.

You start to notice that a piece of pavement and a wall is a perfect location for a haircut; a rebuild on a Honda 50; a post-abattoir meat dressing station or any number of other occupations that might normally require a license, a sense of hygiene or some form of specialized work surface more complex than a dusty flagstone with an adjacent gutter of stagnant, oily water.

You turn a corner and suddenly you?re in old Hanoi proper. One street is full of stores selling nothing but cheap plastic toys; another is filled with leather jacket shops; two blocks are populated entirely with businesses manufacturing headstones – the marble is cut, carved and polished on the pavement while pedestrians carrying live ducks step over the cables running to the water cooled power saws whose fluids pour into the gutter. Another area is filled with steel-working businesses – gratings and steel doors are being manufactured on the sidewalk while chickens, dogs and three year-olds play amongst the welding torches and rusty steel shavings. The front of a one room shop is all business – manufacturing plant, storage facility, sales office and showroom, whilst the back of the tiny establishment serves as granny flat, TV room, kitchen, laundry space and bedroom. So much activity is going on it?s truly impossible to absorb all the tasks that are simultaneously being accomplished in such close proximity.

Then you notice the faces. The people are busy, focused, happy, talkative, smiling and productive. You are so astonished and mesmerized by it all that you realise it is more stimulating than anything that could be dreamt up by the star performers of the combined R&D departments of both Universal and Disney Theme parks. Like a goldfish with lock-jaw your mouth has been open in awe and wonder for an hour and you step from your cyclo wishing you could do it all over again – those 60 minutes were as spectacular and as breath-taking as ANYTHING you have witnessed in your entire life!

We touched down in Hanoi at 9pm – the airport was shiny, brand spankin? with clean toilets and deserted. Is there is a more misleading way to enter Vietnam? It was pitch black outside and the headlights of our cab picked out the occasional cyclist as we made our way into the city over dusty, rutted roads and under a half-finished freeway. I?d been wearing the same underwear for 40 hours and was eager to catch a bath and fall into bed.

However once we?d checked in we decided that perhaps we should catch a beer in the hotel bar. Employing the tactic of a Scottish friend I ordered a Vietnamese beer (when in Rome etc.) but it was a Heineken promotion night and a can of Holland?s finest was all the attractive waitperson would serve us. I hadn?t been in town 10 minutes and I was failing the tourist test already.

I studied the band and the motley selection of Euros and Yanks watching them. I could have been anywhere in the world. Was this what I?d travelled half the way round the world for? The chubby band-leader bent sullenly over his piano which needed tuning as badly as Michael Bolton once needed a haircut and the singer sang phonetically: ?I lef tmy har tin Sanf rancis co…? The violinist soloed, Grappelli-style, over a version of Desperado that was easily three times longer than the original version. It was time for bed.

Last night I sat in my house with my old pal Brian and discussed at great lengths the intricacies of Joni Mitchell?s music. Yes, this is what musos get up to when the sun has gone down and the nights are closing in.

This morning I got out of bed, turned on my computer and learnt that George Harrison had died. My heart took a dip and tears filled my eyes but it was hardly a shock, the waves have been filled with rumours of his illness for months.

As I sadly made my breakfast I realised that last night?s discussion and this morning?s news are umbilically linked together for me. Quite simply without the Beatles I might never have become a musician, have abandoned traditional job opportunities and made my way to America. For those of you who weren?t there in those ground zero months of ?64 when the Beatles first appeared they swept across the public consciousness like a fast moving plague of teenage joy and bravado. The western world had seen nothing like it and their sudden power to captivate all who encountered them was so awesome that it nearly overwhelmed the remarkable freshness and agility of their music.

For the first time since it exploded their music is frankly starting to sound a little dated now. So many subsequent fads have come and gone and the arrival of computer assisted recording and a thousand other sonic breakthroughs have finally placed their music into history rather than something that is entirely now. This has always been inevitable but its a tribute to their brilliance that it has taken so very long to happen. But if you look at the footage of them playing onstage their energy, enthusiasm, rebelliousness, joy and sex remains undimmed and is just as captivating, if not more so, than this week?s lively Strokes video.

John was my favourite Beatle, he was the one whose bubble gum card I cherished as an 11 year old. I still have that card tucked into the corner of an original Dezo Hoffman Beatles print in my office. For me George was just the smiling one who played his Gretsch somewhere up by his chin and played those extraordinary guitar solos – check out Can?t Buy Me Love – Phew!

But this morning, George, along with dignitaries, heads of state and music fans the world over, I salute you. You were an integral part of The Fabs and uttered one of the most memorable post Beatle-era lines: “As long as John Lennon remains dead there will be no Beatles re-union.”

Sadly George?s death has now made that prediction a certainty. Isn’t it a shame?

It?s official – I?ve directed over 250 music videos. Which was the REAL quarter millennium gig depends on your counting method, but it seems I am now the most prolific music video director of all time. What does it all mean?

Well, nothing really. From an artistic perspective any decent critic would ignore a purveyor of quantity for a producer of quality though my irreverent pride smiles mischievously at the ?never mind the quality feel the width? relevance of my personal landmark. A kind peruser of my resume could conclude that I have certainly directed some videos of amazing resilience and supposed relevance however a more skeptical evaluator might also start referring to an aphorism that mentions monkeys, typewriters and the complete works of Shakespeare. Let?s be honest the Vinnie Vincent Invasions, the Great Whites and the The Verve Pipe clips are hardly pinnacle achievements are they? Quite simply I?ve thrown so many darts at the rock video wall that it was inevitable that some of them would lodge firmly in the bullseye of the collective consciousness. How or why a one-time Sewage Division photocopy clerk has managed to create such a body of work I?m not quite sure but I confess I?m immensely proud of my achievement.

A number of years ago a friend of mine worked as a production assistant on the ?Walk The Dinosaur? video by Was Not Was. He then set off on a round the world trek and sent me a postcard from Shanghai where he?d visited a disco and seen hordes of young Chinese doing the ?Walk The Dinosaur? dance as Don and Dave?s song blasted over the PA. It was the first time I truly realised how much power I have at my finger-tips. I am old enough to have bought ?I Wanna Hold Your Hand? the weekend it was released yet young enough to get a buzz out of shooting Staind this last week. I think I can now reasonably conclude that I have had some part in the evolution of this wonderful thing called rock n? roll that has been the central force of my life and there?s a wonderful ?Bloody hell!? feeling about that. It?s the same feeling that Carson Daly talked about after he interviewed Michael Jackson on TRL last week. What?s a one-time counter clerk doing interviewing the King of Pop?

What life-lessons can I dispense from the rock video front-line? Perhaps the greatest is that film-making is a collaborative art. Certainly no-one has been there to watch me in the cold, dark hours writing countless concepts and sketching endless storyboards but I have been helped in my journey by many special people who have travelled the world with me to create this massive pile of video tape. If you look at the ?dickfilms? page on my site you will see the same names appearing over and over again: Nina, Vance, Liz, Brian, Declan to name just a few. Those 250 videos represent millions of hours of work yet I?m the guy who gets the name-check and the web-site. Doesn?t seem entirely fair does it? If you are someone who did one of those hours of work can I say a belated thank-you?

It?s perhaps significant that I?ve reached this milestone in the same week that Propaganda, the company I co-founded, has finally closed its doors – proof perhaps that people endure though companies can fail. I?m in a hotel room thousands of miles from home preparing to shoot video #252 and once again I find the need to remind myself what a privilege this is.

Please go and see Amelie.

If Hollywood made movies like this; funny, intriguing, idiosyncratic, human, observational, wonderfully if misguidedly romantic and beautiful, the world would truly be a better place.

A recent journey took me back to England for a week and I was stunned again by the proliferation of vehicles there. By and large cars in the UK are about 30% smaller than in the US but with a population a fifth of the USA crammed into a space about the size of California, and many of them car owners, you can tell that there?s likely to be something of a problem on the roads.

To compound this problem many thoroughfares in Britain were designed to cope with horse drawn carriages or pre-war levels of traffic and no amount of modernisation can solve the congestion. The great North Circular Road is a good example: a sort of English semi- Peripherique that takes traffic round the northern suburbs of London. Parts of the North Circular are four lanes wide, beautifully surfaced, and perfect for speeding round the city but suddenly within a few hundred yards the road becomes a simple two-lane blacktop making its way over a bridge and squeezed between sets of dirty houses that must be hell to live in.

No matter what time of day you?re travelling you are doomed to find yourself in a major jam in most British cities, and the constant modernistaion and upkeep of the roads doesn?t make travelling any easier. Then of course you need somewhere to park. Any city street, town or village in England is now invisible below chest level: all you can see is an endless length of shining metal, glass and rubber. But while the cars get faster and more luxurious the average travelling times get slower…and here?s the conundrum.

While prepping for a recent job I decided to check out the work of a director who seems to specialize in car commercials – mostly for the British market. One commercial shows a car hurtling across the desert in a race with a massive train to see who will be first to make the level crossing. The car wins of course. In another a 60 year old Dennis Hopper driving through the bleak terrain finds himself driving alongside the 25 (?) year old image of himself from Easy Rider. Conclusion: drive this car (a Peugeot I think) and you?ll be an Easy Rider free to go wherever you like. In a third, which was at last in a city, Steve McQueen had been brought back from the dead to race some nimble little number through the streets of San Francisco to park in a garage along with his hog. At the end of the spot the bike disappears inferring that with this car in your carport you won?t be needing a Harley and a biker chick to get your kicks. Ironically the traffic in San Francisco is now so bad you?d need a permit and a whole bunch of traffic cops to get up to the kind of speeds we see in the commercial.

My point is we?re all buying into a big pile of car-doo here. How many of us actually get to drive down the endless grey ribbon with the warm wind in our hair and our foot on the floor? If you live in Europe you?re more likely to be stuck in traffic than zooming down the open highway. Even if you live in Arizona or New Mexico and have an endless stretch of road in front of you you?re not really allowed to drive over 65! None of us will EVER live this automotive dream!

The car represents so much to us all: prosperity, success, status, freedom, nostalgia, power – but are we really getting any of this? If only public transport were better. It?s more sociable, you can actually WATCH the scenery go past and you can read a book. Oh yeah I think trains are really sexy too. Ever got it on on a train? Fabulous!

Consider the knife. Not the black-handled or serrated object you keep in the drawer with the bottle openers, wooden spoons and spare garage keys and use for cutting bread, chopping vegetables and chasing serial killers from the house when you?re starring in a horror movie, but the simple everyday piece of flatware. The everyday knife is made from one piece of steel, has a rounded nose and is perfect for slicing eggs in two, and pushing mash onto the end of your fork. However it is so singularly useless as a cutting implement that any self respecting household also has steak knives (specifically designed for cutting meat) in a drawer somewhere.

Now imagine, if you will, the average flatware knife?s younger, less developed sibling – the one with the slimmer handle, and the far shorter but equally useless blade – and you would have in your palm the typical airline knife, perfect for dissecting rubbery chicken and smearing greasy margarine on tasteless puck-sized bread rolls. I ask you to imagine the airline knife because you probably won?t be seeing one any time soon. Since September 11th I?ve flown seven times and been presented with steel forks and spoons and PLASTIC knives!

Which raises the question what has happened to all the steel knives? Are they being quickly melted down into shrapnel and shipped overseas to be lobbed into likely looking Afghan caves? If so your average AK47-toting Taliban dude must be wishing the 9-11 Nineteen had used hamburgers or band aids to terrorize those unfortunate passengers two months ago.

Now, call me unsentimental, but your average airborne commuter has a thicker skin than a piece of perfectly cooked tenderloin – and if the average household flatware knife won?t cut a steak what damage do the FAA believe an airline knife is going to do to my neck? That fork I?m using to spear the elastic yardbird while I desperately try to saw through flesh with a plastic knife, is far more dangerous than the airline knife which has now gone the way of the 8-track stereo and the Vanilla Ice fanclub.

WINNERS: 1) The people who manufacture plastic knife, fork and spoon sets. They?re making a killing (oops) and can melt down the brotherless forks and spoons to make more useless knives. 2) Cows. No sharp knives on planes means fewer in-flight steak / dining options.

LOSERS: 1) The environment (again). Plastic, plastic and more plastic. Though most plastic items are washable people will just discard the knives and add new ones to the existing washable steel fork and spoon sets. 2) Airport Wolfgang Puck Pizza Parlors (their pizzas are greasy and served uncut). When you try and cut one of their pizzas you break 5 plastic knives (See Winners #1 and Losers #1) and then accidentally send your pizza frisbee-ing across the terminal into a terminally bored Home Guardsman. Look out for the up-coming news headline: ?English Music Video Director held on terrorism charges for assaulting one of America?s finest with tasteless, fattening faux-Italian eating product.?

Until pencils which could stab, laptops which can k-o as effectively as a brick and forks which can spear a passenger as easily as a coq-au-vin are outlawed I think it?s worth pardoning the unloved airline knife and releasing it from its death-row melting pot.

There?s certainly been enough written about the terrible events of September 11th and I suppose like the rest of you I have spent many hours trying to process those terrible images that were pounded into our heads on that sunny morning two weeks ago.

As we try to understand what has happened to us all, and believe me it has happened to all of us, there is one thing of which I am sure. This is just another test that has been given to us and we will show our strength and our freedom and our humanity (or god forbid our lack of it) by how we pass or fail this test.

Tonight I opened a letter written by William F. Schulz, the Executive Director of Amnesty International which had this to say. ?The best that is in us knows that the guilty (underlined) deserve to be punished – not those who share their names or their language, their skin colour or their religion…blind hatred corrupts the hater…the greatest power evil has is to entice the innocent to mimic its practices.?

May we all have the courage to be tolerant and patient and understanding enough in the weeks to come to pay heed to these words. Be Safe.