In 2008, when I snapped this photo in a Tripoli bazaar, no one knew his time was almost up.

No, I never met Kadafi. But I did once go to Libya, ostensibly to help him.

This issue of “sleeping with the enemy” will exist as long as commercial opportunities present themselves within the borders of some of the less salubrious regimes of the world.

Last night in Mongolia I dined with a gentleman who is considering bringing a dozen North Korean citizens to Ulaanbaatar to work in a textile business he’s involved with. We talked about the difference between the ethical realities of this (namely, that there is arguably a ton of good in it for all involved) and the easily anticipated ignorant knee-jerk reactions many would have (“You’re helping a dictator! You’re using slave labour!”).

Back when I worked at the Cato Institute in the mid ’90s (and probably during a lecture from Tom Palmer, but I can’t quite recall), I had a key sociopolitical realisation: countries don’t trade with countries — people trade with people. Never since that satori moment I have tarred a population with the same brush as its government; no longer will I ever conflate  a society with its present form of governance; forevermore will issues of right and wrong in international commercial relations be one big grey area for me, always to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

When interviewed recently about my involvement in Libya in 2008 (which never got far off the ground anyway), I remained, as they say, defiant:

Libya was, and [still is], a charming and dynamic emerging economy attractive to foreigners. And there was a window when sane people believed Libya’s governance under Kadafi was on the verge of turning a corner. As it played out, Kadafi walked his nation right up to the precipice of being a respectable regime, but then pivoted and went back the other way. But people who say “I told you so!” either don’t know what they’re talking about, or are the type who lack the ambition or idealism to avail themselves of unconventional opportunities to get rich and/or make the world a better place.

The full interview is in three parts: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. If you only have enough time or interest for one section, just read Part 3.

Source: BBC, January 2013.

Source: Jeremy Hildreth, March 2002.

On the banks of Loch Ness is an odd location to grow suddenly nostalgic for Burma, for it’s a stretch to connect the two places: “This is Burma,” wrote the half-Scottish Rudyard Kipling (whose ”road” to Mandalay was/is actually a river, the Irrawaddy, long and narrow like the loch), “and it will be quite unlike any land you know about.”

The fact is, though: I get sentimental about Burma at the drop of a hat. And there I was in the Scottish Highlands — practically hanging out the cottage’s dormer window waving my phone in the ether to snag a precious data signal — when I ran across a BBC headline about the Moustache Brothers comedy trio.

The memories flooded back as I read the article about their ongoing success.

Burma was one of my first grand adventures abroad. In 2002, Chris Robbins and I ignored the LAND ROUTE NOT PERMISSIBLE stamps on our visas and became two of the first westerners in decades to retrace the Old Burma Road from Mandalay to Kunming, crossing the Chinese border on foot. Two weeks later, in an Internet cafe in Christchurch, New Zealand, I wrote what turned out to be my second-ever article for The Wall Street Journal (“The Real Politically Incorrect”), about the Moustache Brothers’ subversive comedy show. 

Eleven (!) years on, I’m delighted to learn that Burma’s three “top bananas” are still plying their trade (and not from a jail cell), and pleased that their country now seems on the verge, at long last, of emergence into the modern world.

Hildreth in Machu Picchu: the rare place that doesn’t need branding.

Risking immodesty, I do declare: if you hand me your camera at a scenic location and ask me to snap a photo of you with your arm around your buddy or boyfriend, you have made a good decision. Because while I’m no extraordinary photographer, I tend to take excellent snapshots — probably better than yours, based on my extensive experience of handing my own camera to strangers, so in a minute I’ll make you a better shutterbug with some easy tips.

But first, the lead in, by way of travel anecdote.

It occurred to me to write this post because I’ve recently been the beneficiary of some truly wonderful and fortuitous snapshot-taking, for which I am grateful. Last week, Peru became the 71st country I’ve visited in my life so far. I was there primarily on business, but you know me: I couldn’t get that close to Machu Picchu without making the pilgrimage.

On the evening train through the mountains from Cuzco to the “base camp” of Aguascalientes, I met Gabriel Ruiz, a Brazilian guy my age on vacation from the Sao Paulo grind, and we became fast friends. We crashed at the same hotel, and set out at 5am the following morning to schlep to the top of the ancient Incan city…only to find it totally socked in. People, including Gabriel, grumbled. “We got up early to watch the sun come up over Machu Picchu, and now this!” Be patient, I urged all within earshot, for I was confident that something more spectacular and mystical than a mere sunrise awaited us.

I was right.

Contemplatively, I sat still on an agricultural terrace facing into the occluding cloud. Over the course of an hour, the rays of the sun burrowed their way into the scene and pushed the mists aside. By 7am, the city, built around 1450 A.D. and abandoned within a hundred years, was visible: boy, and how!

I confess that as dead civilisations go, the Incas leave me cold — primitive mountain worshippers, I say — but credit where it’s due: they had a hell of a knack for high-altitude real estate development. Machu Picchu is, as the Michelin folks would say, worth the detour.

Knowing a Kodak moment instinctively, and with the last of the great cloud ebbing, I handed Gabriel my camera. I offered up a suggestion or two about composition, and urged him to take a bunch of pictures, but basically, as I once heard legendary creative director Michael Peters put it beautifully, I “gave him his head.” I let him do his thing. Call his own shots. The result, at the start of this post, speaks for itself.

So, my friends, take heed of these tips and you will take significantly better travel photos:

1. Compose mindfully. The basic decision: are you taking a portrait with a background, in which case you want to zoom in on your subject(s) and take care about what’s over their shoulder(s), or are you taking a photo of a scene that has people in it? The Machu Pichhu photo of me by Gabriel is an example of the latter; I am small and in the corner and you can’t really see my face — and it’s perfect that way.
2. Don’t cut off people’s feet by accident. Just don’t. I would support a globally enforced 100 USD spot fine for this misdemeanour.
3. Level the horizon. Generally unless you’re doing something artsy, a level horizon looks better in a picture.
4. Don’t press down on the shutter button — instead squeeze the camera. With your index finger on the shutter and your thumb beneath the camera body, apply equal pressure from top and bottom. This keeps the camera steady. (Side note: I’ve heard that professional snipers and biathletes pull the trigger so gently and gradually that they are themselves unsure of the exact moment the rifle will fire; that’s the spirit of a stable shutter release.)
5. Keep your elbows in and hold your breath. In bright light, you can ignore this. In dim light, it can be shot-saving.
6. Give an audible 1-2-3 count. Hearing this puts the people you’re photographing at greater ease and helps them pose and compose themselves.
7. Take four or five shots. Just as my grandmother still thinks long distance phone calls are expensive, I sometimes notice myself acting as though between film and processing costs I’m paying $2 a shot. Of course, it ain’t so anymore, and that’s a good thing, because more photos means more good photos. For various reasons, you’ll get A LOT more keepers by capturing a solid handful of versions of a shot than just a quick one or two. Don’t be lazy.
8. Exploit a golden opportunity. If the light is sweet and the scene is special, loosen up, sharpen up, and take full advantage; concentrate; go crazy; empty your clip. Pro photographers sit like hunters in duck blinds. At the moment of truth, they unload both barrels. Then they put away their camera till another right moment emerges. (FYI, it’s almost all about lighting; I promise that 90% of your best photos will be taken in the morning or late afternoon.) You can always delete images, but you can’t recreate a rare moment. So go for it. Yeah, people might grumble when you say “This is a really nifty scene…let’s just take a few more here,” but they’ll thank you 20 years later when that photo’s still framed on the mantlepiece.

A blue-footed boobie holds a pose. “You have to tip him, you know” I told a lady photographer.

The travel agent in the hotel lobby laughed at me. “Yeah, you can do it,” she said, “but it’s crazy.” I was in Guayaquil, Ecuador, for business, with some time to spare — just enough time for an overnight trip to the Galápagos Islands, a place people normally go for a week or two. It was ten minutes to 6pm, closing time, and the flight was first thing the next morning. I had to decide.

“Let’s do it,” I told her.

Frankly, although I made the appearance of hemming and hawing before plunking down my credit card, it was a foregone conclusion. The outcome was determined at birth, I think, for this is how travel is for me. If I so much as get in the orbit of some extraordinary place or event, I predictably succumb to its gravitational pull. And I’ve yet to regret my impulsiveness.

So I’ve now gone where The Beagle and the puritanical genius Darwin have gone and can briefly convey to you my impressions.

And the main thing is this: visiting the Galápagos is like being behind the bars at the zoo. This isn’t my turn of phrase — I picked it up from a Louisiana man with a 400m zoom lens I was talking to at the giant tortoise reserve — but it is my sentiment exactly.

The thing about the animals in the Galápagos, on top of the fact that you won’t see 30% of them anywhere but here, is that they don’t run away. I heard a few explanations for this, but none convinced me as to why, precisely, Darwin’s finches think nothing of landing on you, and the smooth black iguanas sit unfussed at your feet, spitting and stinking up the joint. To be so close to wild animals in their world, on their terms, is fun. It is more fun, in fact, than you’d think it would be.

On top of the thrill of these close encounters with exotic creatures, I had the sense that the 737 that flew me to Baltra airport, the island’s main ingress point, from Guayaquil, the only airport you can fly to the Galápagos from, wasn’t so much an airplane as a time machine. And when I climbed down the gangway, I set foot in some other era or epoch of geological time — the Pleistocene, perhaps (whatever that is) or the Mesozoic.

There are bizarro trees — especially the cacti with trunks like a douglas fir — and the famously overlarge “E.T.”-headed tortoises, which look as prehistoric as anything alive in 2012 possibly could. The most famous of these fellas was the one they called Lonesome George, but early this summer he “reached the end of his lifecycle,” as his minder put it, making headlines around the world; I read his obituary in The Economist myself, which quite possibly was what planted the seed of this side trip in my mind in the first place.

The heir to George’s celebrity tortoise throne is, clearly, Super Diego, or Diego El Profesor as he’s also known. Diego was returned to his home islands to live at the Darwin Research Station from the San Diego Zoo some years ago. He’s 130 years old, but of course has a bevy of much younger girlfriends. Basically, he’s Hef in a gran tortuga shell. And unlike George, who despite being the last of his line of Pinta tortoises, stubbornly refused to mate, the Española-type tortoise Diego is padre to a slew of offspring. Moreover, he earned his nickname “El Profesor” because he taught the two other blokes in the enclosure how to do it: they’d been slacking in their filial obligations, but since Diego’s arrival, the three have collectively sired some 1,800 bebés.

As the guide explained in deeply clinical terms, “Diego came in from California with his surfboard under his arm, a gringo accent, a laidback attitude. And the señoritas were like, hey there.”

Not even the homeland of evolution, it seems, where the birds and bees are the stuff of legend, is immune to the charm of a golden boy from the Golden State.

Unimpressive top speed of a Galapagos tortoise from Jeremy Hildreth on Vimeo.

A land untamed and untainted (Source: GERTIL)

Day 9

Back at the Hotel Timor, I rang my main island contact from the front desk to make arrangements for my last two days. ‘You’ll never guess what I have on my desk,’ she said. ‘Your mobile phone’. I couldn’t believe it. It’s an expensive phone, the sale of which would supplement most Timorese incomes considerably. I hadn’t expected to see it ever again.
________

Setsuko (of Atauro bikini fame) is well-connected and her goodbye dinner was attended not only by her friends from the University of Hawaii (where a number of Timorese students are on scholarship) but by their friends, who are friends in high places indeed – an MP who’s the son of a former resistance leader, an adviser to the prime minister, a lawyer in the justice department, et al.

Sitting around a beachside table in front of the Victoria Restaurant, we ate excellent local food – particularly the fish. Talk turned inevitably to the plight of the country. Scott (the UN gentleman from One More Bar) talked about how proud he is of the UN’s involvement here (and correctly pointed out: “Timor has managed to hold the world’s attention for a long time now,” which certainly says something good about the place).

Harold proffered that Timor has been chosen by God to teach the world profound lessons. Jose related some recent exploit of Foreign Minister Ramos-Horta’s and laughed with admiration at the cleverness of it. And somebody poured me another glass of red wine. Xanana wrote a short entry for the Lonely Planet guide where he explains to the would-be visitor: ‘Sometimes we recount the most horrific stories with smiles on our faces. Don’t be alarmed – it is our way of coping, the strength of a people who dared dream of freedom’.

I could tell I was witnessing something of this strength at that table that night. The laughter, hopefulness and all-round cheerfulness were made even more poignant when Setsuko whispered in my ear that Jose’s surname is Lobato. His father was Nicolau Lobato, first leader of the resistance and a folk hero ever since he was killed in 1978 in a fire fight with Indonesian forces, his death clearing the way for the rise of Xanana. The national airport and at least one major Dili street are named after him. Jose’s mother Isabel was publicly executed in December 1975 on the first day of the Indonesian invasion. All of this ran through my mind as I looked across the table at Jose, who cannot be more than about 35. He could hardly have known his parents.

Once again I felt humbled by the burdens the Timorese have borne and the dignity and resilience with which they have borne them. They could be forgiven for holding a grudge against Americans, Australians, Japanese, Indonesians, etc. – those at whose hands they have suffered, indirectly or directly. But they don’t, and it’s remarkable, incredible even. “We have forgotten”, said Harold with incomprehensible magnanimity, “how they killed our mothers and raped our sisters, because we need to go forward”.

In Bali the week before, someone – a Javanese – had said to me, “I don’t understand those Timorese. Why did they fight? It would have been so much easier not to.” Perhaps. But for the Timorese, spirited warriors at heart, such a pacific course – however attractive it might have been for some – was unthinkable.

Day 10

Scurrying around Dili in a taxi, I picked up some Timor coffee for a souvenir, and a couple of books at the Xanana Reading Room, and then headed to the airport. Along the way, we passed the everyday sights of Dili: Chinese-owned electronic stores, men selling oranges strung from sticks and countless open drains.

The drains, I reflected, are like the ones Adolph Ng hides in at the climax of The Redundancy of Courage, Timothy Mo’s gripping novel set in a thinly disguised Timor, a foreign-occupied place Mo calls Danu. I had finished reading the book a week before and quickly forgotten about it. But now I remembered, and it hit me full on. What a story it was…what a story this country is!

The more I knew about Timor, I realised, and the more I saw of it, the more interesting and worthwhile its story became for me. In turn – and more than in other places – what I read about this nascent country, its history, culture and geography, enhanced my experience as a visitor. Timor, I concluded, as much as it could be a trip you took on a plane, is also a journey you take in your mind, your heart and your imagination.

SEAN CONNERY RELAXES ON THE BUMPER OF HIS ASTON MARTIN DB5 DURING THE FILMING OF LOCATION SCENES FOR ‘GOLDFINGER’ IN THE SWISS ALPS. COPYRIGHT NOTICE – © 1964 DANJAQ, LLC AND UNITED ARTISTS CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

A long time ago, David Ogilvy, the world’s most famous advertising man until Don Draper came along, said that a good ad campaign should last at least 20 years, past the point when people who commissioned it find it tiresome. Well, James Bond as a film character is 50 this year, and his ongoing run, more than double Ogilvy’s threshold, is the most enduring franchise in cinema history – a successful campaign if ever there was one.

To celebrate this half-century milestone, the Barbican in London put on Designing 007: 50 years of Bond style. I love Bond, but didn’t much like this exhibition, and gave it a negative review in The Wall Street Journal. There were some good reasons for my dislike; one of the not-quite-as-good reasons, a more personal one, was that the exhibition hardly mentioned Bond’s travel, whereas I feel that these settings are part of the design of the films. I opined:

Fleming painstakingly chose evocative locales where things could happen to James Bond that wouldn’t happen in real life. In his nonfiction travel book “Thrilling Cities” (1963), billed on the dust jacket as “a Baedeker as exotic as any of his adventure novels,” Fleming goes deeper: “All my life,” he writes, “I have enjoyed the frisson of leaving the wide, well-lit streets and venturing up back alleys in search of the hidden, authentic pulse of towns, and looking at people and places and things through a thriller-writer’s eyes.” There is scant evidence that the planners of this exhibition shared any of the writer’s curiosity.

Ultimately, one wonders what Fleming would have made of his character’s silver-screen success. The author died in 1964, so 48 of the 50 years this exhibition covers would come as news to him. For one, I imagine he’d be perplexed by what big and serious business Bond has become. After all, as the exhibition notes in a footnote adjacent to a wall containing the original books, Mr. Fleming spent only eight weeks writing each Bond novel. Doubtless nowadays it takes twice that just to negotiate which wristwatch Daniel Craig will wear in Scene 38.

A new Bond film, opening in the U.S. on November 9th (and earlier in Britain),  will be number 23 – or number 24, if you count 1983’s Never Say Never Again, which you should since it starred Sean Connery and Kim Basinger and followed Thunderball’s plotline. It is only because it was not produced by Eon Productions, who’ve done the rest of the lot, that it’s omitted from the canon.

Read my review here.

Two Vimeo-hosted videos about the exhibition, which the press packet directed me to and which I enjoyed rather more than the exhibition:

• The design and craft of the world Bond inhabits – the sets, cars and accessories
• Bond’s Look – the tailoring and styling of the icon

Steve Jobs gave an interview as part of a Smithsonian oral history project that’s one of the greatest things I’ve ever read, full stop. If you read this (along with the Playboy interview I’m about to mention), and you read between the lines, too, you’ll know what Steve Jobs knew.

One of the things Steve Jobs knew was that motive matters. Your motive is what’s in your heart and your mind when you’re making or doing whatever it is you make or do that people pay you for.

Walter Isaacson, in his Jobs bio, quotes from another equally lengthy and superb interview with Jobs, from 1985, for Playboy. Jobs’ recalls what his dad told him about one of the hallmarks of a real craftsman.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

That’s a long run-up to my point: I had Steve Jobs on my mind when I visited the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, to see an exhibition on furniture maker Sam Maloof. In The Wall Street Journal article that resulted from my visit, I couldn’t help but reference good ol’ Steve.

On the surface my article is about Maloof, an American midcentury woodworker-modernist who became a legend in his own time. Beyond that however, it’s about integrity and motives and bringing soulfulness to your work. Since it lives outside The Wall Street Journal‘s pay wall, you can read it for free here.

I’m loving Mongolia. Yesterday I stood in a stockroom containing US$2 million worth of de-haired cashmere, combed, carded, teased and fluffy. It was taupe, and cream, and bursting the drawstring tops of stagecoach-ready sacks piled ceiling-high.

I’d like to think it was destined to be knit into sweaters for gods and demigods. But I know it’ll end up, ill-fitting and pilled, on the backs of dolts who haven’t got even 10% of the requisite appreciation for this exceptional fibre, and who (to boot) are morally unworthy to possess such a precious, rare and laboriously-had commodity.

Okay, maybe I’m taking my job too seriously. But they’re paying me to make a big deal out of cashmere. That’s my reason for being here. So I’m practicing.

As usual, there are some nuggets of wisdom in this interview–things I didn’t know I knew till an interviewer provoked me to say something pithy. This is why I rarely decline an interview invitation, and why I hope it shall always and ever be so. This one I gave in Serbia recently, with some local business magazine or another (it’s hard to keep track, and even when they promise to send you a copy of the published piece, they actually do it about 10% of the time. But I don’t do it for them, anyway, or for the PR–I do it as a pop quiz on myself, and for the chance to share whatever I know with whomever happens upon it.

What does it mean, ‘place branding’?

The brand is the impression, the reputation, the ideas people have about you in their minds. Branding is the art of trying to change or embellish that.

You say that you combine unusual set of talents in your work…please describe…

I’m curious about everything, and I have a mind that likes to synthesize things, to put seemingly random things together. For instance, when I helped develop a new identity for London’s tourist board, I remembered that despite London’s wet reputation, it’s actually one of the driest capitals in Europe. So, I wrote a slogan which they used for awhile: “Visit London: It rains more in Rome.” (That is a fact, by the way. You can look it up.)

Who are your gurus in place branding?

The discipline of place branding, and specifically nation branding, has two forefathers: Wally Olins and Simon Anholt, both Englishmen, both Oxonians, both with a real sense of history and culture. As far as I know I’m the only person to actually have worked with both of these gentlemen. Simon, Wally and my own experiences – those are my three gurus.

Where can we study place branding?

Simon Anholt’s books Places and Competitive Identity are excellent. There’s an introductory essay I wrote which a lot of people seem to like. You can find on my web site:http://bit.ly/qMlFgJ

Please describe your team involved in place branding.

I work alone, or with colleagues and partners I handpick (or who handpick me) for a particular job.

Which was your first place branding project?

Latvia, a country of 2.5 million people in Northeastern Europe who’s capital is Riga.

Problems which you were faced were…

The main problem was being too literal, and direct, in developing a creative solution to the answer “What’s Latvia?” Place branding is best approached indirectly, from the side. By which I mean, it’s best to build the brand around something specific, interesting, relevant and “off centre” rather than trying to use branding to summarize the whole of a place. We correctly pegged Latvia as “the keystone of the Baltics” – but who cares? If I could do it over again, I’d gear the brand strategy toward making Riga famous, and eventually letting people find out that Riga is in Latvia. (Note: I believe Anholt the Great took this very tack with Latvia/Riga two or three years after JH & Co. had our crack.)

Who or what did you help?

We got people talking to each other – artists and politicians and advertising folks and diplomats and journalists – and sharing a conversation about the image of Latvia. And even if the strategy wasn’t perfect, the analysis behind it was strong, and would be helpful even today to someone wanting to understand Latvia. The report is online still at the Soros Foundation’s page:http://bit.ly/osOPSE

Please describe an evolution in your work, from your first projects to the present day.

I used to favour the conventional place branding approach of developing a brand strategy first, and then formulating an action plan from that. Now I know that’s backwards, and I advise that after a small amount of thinking and discussion, the client take a few definite actions; only then should more discussion and strategizing take place.

Do you find inspiration in movies, books, art, design? Please mention them…

Yes, and also in writers and designers. Stephen King’s On Writing is a great book about marketing, though he never meant it that way. And Frank Gehry shares some great insights into the creative process in his interviews and in that documentary film about him, Sketches of Frank Gehry (and also in this TED conversation, when he says contrarian things like “I used to think it was necessary to take clients seriously” [I'm paraphrasing]).

Which was your most successful project?

Visit London, maybe. Because it had the tightest brief. The trade press called the result “near perfect” which is basically unheard of.

Which was your failure project?

East Timor. Because it was really valid work, but it went nowhere; they didn’t implement any of it, I don’t think.

What project has given you the most satisfaction?

East Timor again. Through that project I realized it’s possible to create perceptual assets even when you have near-zero tangible, conventional assets. A fascinating country—a scene of momentous human triumph—but there’s not much on the ground to look at. And it doesn’t matter, because you can have a one-of-a-kind, CNN-quality experience of resistance and revolution, in complete safety.

Please tell me more about your project “Visit London” and collaboration with Boris Johnson.

With Saffron, we made a new corporate identity for Visit London, who are the city’s leisure and business tourism promotion agency. Later, with Johnson’s backing as mayor, Saffron widened the application of that visual identity to more London departments—the whole city, basically, except for London Underground, whose identity is iconic—and I worked separately on the strategy for that, which linked everything under the Big Idea-type headline “London is front-row seat.” I heard through his advisers that Boris liked it a lot, but I have not met him personally.

Have you ever been on Balkan peninsula? How can we position ourselves?

Balkan peninsula? I’m intrigued. I don’t know what you should do. What about luring a famous novelist to live there for six months while writing his or her next book?

Your next big project is…

I will try to make Mongolian cashmere famous and super-expensive. Already it is the best soft wool in the world, they tell me; we need to find ways to give it the reputation and cache to match. We need to brand Mongolian cashmere. [Ed: I've now been in Mongolia two weeks and this is shaping up to be possibly the most interesting project I've ever worked on. If you know anything about cashmere, wool, or outdoor fashion, and are interested in place of origin branding, please write me.]

What books do you have on your bedside table?

Jonathan Raban’s Soft City (‘A psychological handbook for urban survival’) and The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov.

Where do you get news from?

I like to talk to taxi drivers. Also, I’ve installed the PULSE and Reeder apps on my iPhone and am constantly tweaking my RSS feeds. Along with Twitter and Facebook, this is how I keep tabs on the world. I try to keep it so that 50% or more of my reading comes from outside my industry, country and comfort zone. It gives the right balance of staying informed and keeping fresh.