Montmartre

Perhaps it's the memory I return to the most. I'm 16 years old, the summer heat is stifling – it's 2003, a year of record heat over much of the region. The elderly are dying, forests are on fire. And yet here, above Paris on the heights of Montmartre, on the steps of Sacré-Coeur, I can breathe, and a gentle breeze is blowing over a cityscape bristling with steeples and chimneys, a light smell of jasmine on the wind. The sun is slowly setting over the Champs-Élysées, guitarists play, couples hold each other, and I'm away from home, with the money I've squirreled away from summer farm jobs, and I read the line from Italo Calvino that makes me gasp:

“An oracle was questioned about the mysterious bond between two objects so dissimilar as the carpet and the city. One of the two objects – the oracle replied – has the form the gods gave the starry sky and the orbits in which the worlds revolve; the other is an approximate reflection, like every human creation.

For some time the augurs had been sure that the carpet's harmonious pattern was of divine origin. The oracle was interpreted in this sense, arousing no controversy. But you could, similarly, come to the opposite conclusion: that the true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness.”

The bells clang as the sun disappears, a collective sigh, and the awkward American teenage boy knows he will be thinking of this forever.

The name “Montmartre” had always held some magic for me. As a young child, I saw reproduced images of the paintings of Maurice Utrillo, showing the haunted-looking streets of the neighborhood, in a light that could be either dusk or dawn. And not long after, I remember being at some pâtisserie in some American city – and seeing an elegant-looking pastry called a Montmartre, next to the little Sachertortes and Réligieuses and other things that I'd never heard of.

The name retained its cachet, something about its association with various -isms of the artistic and philosophical worlds, even in the way some kind of vague notion of Parisian bohemianism was presented to us in the moronic textbook sidebars in high school French class (you know the kind – “C'est Patrick. Il est un élève. Il aime aller au café”).

But it wasn't until I climbed those steps, saw the city laid out before me, and just as important, sat down with the book that would probably inform my life and thinking more than any other, that the name truly meant something to me.

So it was preserved in amber for me for so many years, another sepia-toned memory of another place, another time.

I come up the stairs at the Pigalle station in October 2018, into a light rain after a long journey.

Part of me was somehow expecting the worst, and the din of voices of 20 year olds from my homeland wasn't helping. Nor was the Steak 'n Shake that had popped up on the Boulevard de Clichy. Nor was the self-conscious supposed naughtiness of Pigalle, nor the crowds of mouthbreather tourists coming out of the Moulin Rouge, expecting whatever ooh-la-la bullshit the came to Paris for.

I walked around town all of the next couple of days. A lovely meal of rabbit in mustard sauce and escargots à la gascogne, balanced with the motherfucker who caught my jeans on a metal bar, ripping the knee open. Curling up with a book at Shakespeare & Co., knowing full well that James Joyce almost certainly had sat there, balanced out with the braying crowds at the Musée d'Orsay of what I termed the 5Ms (that's Minnesotan Moms on a Mission for Monet and Merlot). The delight in the fact that the Panthéon was carefully restoring extensive murals of French victories over Moors and in the Crusades (preserving the long-standing Gallic love of casual racism and Islamophobia) and venerating the body of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (preserving the long-standing Gallic love of sexual deviants with grand and unworkable theories of human nature who wrote like whiny high school sophomores).

And at the end of the day, I walked back to the top of Montmartre.

I followed each street up, up, up, the chill of the fall evening setting in between the fairy-lit streets, the air of the neighborhood taking on that of a street carnival more and more. Groups of unbelievably attractive young people sitting on the steps drinking wine, a brass band, all in fezzes, playing a cover of Serge Gainsbourg's “Je T'Aime... Moi Non Plus” (which Bangkokians may know as one of my 2:00 a.m. shitfaced-at-a-Japanese-karaoke-bar standards). And lastly, at the very crown of the hill, pop-up stands selling wine and regional foods, singers and guitarists, a beardy hypeman in a striped Breton shirt (Mr. Too Damn French over here) getting in some crowdwork.

What shocked me the most was that these didn't seem to be tourists. None of the conversation was in English. This wasn't the image of the city, it was the city itself.

The next day, I climbed the steps again, to say my goodbye to the place. It was a different Montmartre, the Montmartre of quiet, swept streets and the smell of morning baguettes, the Velvet Underground's “Sunday Morning” drifting from a cafe. On the steps made famous by Brassaï's photos, the assorted detritus of the previous night littered the stairs, broken glasses and wine bottles, a few revelers still up, a XXXtentacion (of all people) song playing from an open window, disembodied voices.

That week, Paris had decided it was in mourning for Charles Aznavour, the father of French chanson, and a singer whom I never quite understood the appeal of. But his 1965 hit about life in Montmartre, “La Bohème” was a hit because the bohemia he sang about was the nostalgic one everyone had thought/wished they had had, once, even if the ending line was a bit of a screw-you.

La bohème, la bohème
Ça ne veut plus rien dire du tout

“It means nothing at all,” he sings, the closer to line after simpering line about lilacs and café au lait.

I don't think anyone can say much of anything new about Paris. It's like New York. Most of the time someone tries, it comes across like a voiceover from Gossip Girl.

My feelings are the same, as rapturous as they might be.

The unfailingly arrogant and tiresome Ernest Hemingway famously called Paris “a moveable feast,” but it has always struck me more as a Xanadu, a place always beyond the horizon for us homely, try-hard self-loathing Americans.

And yet up on the now-deserted steps in the morning sunlight, I didn't want to leave. Sighing, I walked back down the hill, gathered my bags, and took the Métro to the Gare du Nord, looked at my ticket. Bruxelles-Midi. A new country. I took my seat and set off north.

A Eulogy

I was hesitant to write anything about the recent death of my father. After all, the topic of the death of a parent in the long form just seems like such a heavily covered topic that has become one of the great banalities of the modern novel or New York Times-baiting work of creative nonfiction. Furthermore, it's such an intensely personal topic that to write about it at length seems somewhat dishonest, with the danger of turning the intense complexities of human life into a lame biography filled with platitudes. Conversely, to write a short-form reminiscence, while a seemingly more appropriate and universal expression of grief, just isn't me. I don't do brevity well.

And yet writing was the thing I did that my late father seemed proudest of, and to not cover the subject of his death – and I want to say death, not that horrifically deceptive term “passing” – would be a sin of omission, a failure to act when I was perhaps most obligated to do so.

So who was the late Giles Fowler? I could mention the inevitable boxes to be ticked – father, aesthete, professor, journalist, jazz lover, travel junkie, Southern gentleman – but all of these social roles come off as hollow, prepackaged tropes.

As his son, I saw everything through a son's eyes, the kind that start as fawning admiration, turn into a brief “fuck you” at some point in adolescence, before mellowing into something more nuanced. He wasn't a particularly closed-off man, and as anyone who knew him would tell you, he was always at the ready with a witty story from his long and varied life. But what I see still has an angle, an angle made up of personal memories, of old photos, of narratives told, of bits I wasn't supposed to see but saw anyway.

At some point, I picked up a dog-eared and forgotten book about Middle American culture written when Middle America was at its Keynesian peak, a kind of book we don't see too much of anymore – too functionalist or structuralist or old-school humanist in its analysis, too many claims to metanarratives, not enough pathos to find a mainstream publisher, not enough Foucauldian (on one side) or evo-psych (on the other) analysis to find an academic publisher. My answer as to why it was even there was a line I remember describing my old man as “Giles Fowler, one of America's young, hip, dangerous film critics.” And all I could think was him? The man shining his shoes in his sweatpants yelling “That fucking Rumsfeld!” at 60 Minutes.

All I can think of is the scene in the first season of Six Feet Under where Nate, reeling from the death of his father and trying to settle his accounts, smokes his late father's weed in his late father's secret man cave above an Indian restaurant, imagining his dad ripping bongs with bikers, getting a beej from a hooker, firing a sniper rifle from the windows as the Amboy Dukes' “Journey to the Center of the Mind” plays on an old record player, wondering who his dad was when his dad wasn't being a dad.

But of course there were the stories I knew of my dad as my dad, the sorts that will live on fondly, that I'll tell other people, and while I'll probably never have children of my own, they are the sorts of stories I would tell them. Of him telling me the difference between a classic dry and a Gibson martini while he gave me a bath. Or how Hemingway's writing was like a Cézanne painting on the way to school. Or asking me as a college freshman if PCP-laced weed was still a thing, with the honest, non-judgmental curiosity of a man who had seen the beats, the hippies, and the punks all come and go, and assumed the bohemianism of my own generation would, like any other, have its own linguistic, sartorial, aesthetic, and narcotic standards, which he had been around the block too many times to be shocked by.

And last of all, of springing him for the night from the rehabilitation facility where he was, we thought, recovering from a nasty full-body infection, a faux-colonial building by the side of Highway 69 where ancient men in baseball caps watched reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond in a stupor in a lounge that smelled of instant mashed potatoes, to get him back to the world of the living and lift up his spirits, to take him out for a hanger steak and an illicit cognac sidecar. He talked about his prognosis, which was then looking quite positive, about his delight that he wasn't too ill to submit an absentee ballot against Steve King, about how glad he was that his two eldest sons, both of whom lived in other countries, could be back at the same time for a visit.

I flew out the next day, and a week later he was gone.

I'm now left with my memories, a fair bit of the sort of haze that comes in the wake of a loss, and I'm listening to a Coltrane album he loved, drinking Bulleit – a personal favorite of his – and I find one of his last emails, mentioning a trip he had just taken to see the homes and graves of his ancestors in Pettis County, Missouri, where his people come from:

“A lot of ghosts in that town – men in straw hats and white suits and women in filmy finery drinking highballs on the Staffords' lawn across the street from Granddad's. Strange that I was alive there.”

I'll miss you, Dad.

The Nostalgia Industry

Nostalgia is a bitch. You have something so personal, so confined to one's own field of view and one's own experience, and suddenly you find that your nostalgias have been transformed into commodity, part of the nostalgia machine.

At least that's the way it was the first time I heard Green Day on the classic rock station, on an icy day in the mid-2000s on the boom box in my dorm's bathroom while I was shaving. It was official. An element of my childhood had become a commodity, or rather, it was revealed as the commodity it always had been, now hermetically sealed and fitting in comfortably on an FM radio station for aging boomers, less talk, more rock.

So it was with some trepidation that I picked up Lizzy Goodman's excellent Meet Me in the Bathroom, the recent oral history of the New York rock scene from the late '90s through the late '00s, from its early precursor in Jonathan Fire*Eater up through around the time I graduated from college, and the transformation of the Lower East Side and then Williamsburg from shooting galleries to the sanitized rock and roll theme park they are today.

It was almost inevitable reading it that I started listening to albums I hadn't listened to in years, albums I'd once held very close to my heart – The Strokes' Is This It?, Interpol's Turn On the Bright Lights, The Walkmen's Everyone Who Pretended to Like Us Is Gone, The Rapture's Echoes (while confirming that I still couldn't stand Vampire Weekend or most of LCD Soundsystem's discography). Each contained a memory – memories of dances with vodka bottles in the snow, Nag Champa incense in shared houses, an empty pack of Turkish Silver cigarettes on a well-worn Modern Library edition of The Trial, bags of mushrooms stuffed into empty canisters of Republic of Tea jasmine green.

I first developed a musical consciousness of the sort I can actually look back fondly upon in those heady days when Limewire was the download technique du jour, and the industry was still trying to peddle garbage albums for 15 dollars at Sam Goody on the strength of one modern rock radio staple single.

It wasn't a great time for American pop music. The rock charts were dominated by inoffensive trash like 3 Doors Down (bands with numbers in the name tend to suck, from Three Dog Night on through 21 Pilots) and moronic nu-metal bands, the pop charts were full of hip-hop in its worst phase, the phase of Ja Rule and “Drop It Like It's Hot”-era Snoop, and like so many American teens – the sort that now contribute infinite Youtube comments – I decided that the best days of music had basically ended with Nirvana, and the heights of the Beach Boys, Public Enemy, Otis Redding, and the Dead Kennedys could never be summited.

So when I discovered the wilder, weirder world of what was going on in New York, and in Montreal, Oslo, Reykjavik, Athens GA, I went in with all the enthusiasm that only a 16 or 17 year old can muster.

Of course I was far too earnest in my disposition to be cool. Which is why I don't want to let this devolve into yet another meditation by an aging hipster on sex, drugs, and rock & roll. The world has too much of that as it is.

And eventually, as with all things, the wave receded, and I cared more about other things than about hearing new albums a month before their official release date, even as much as I might be crushing on the latest album by Mitski or Angel Olsen.

As that wave receded, likewise, the music world moved on, with the sort of rock music that I found particularly endearing becoming less and less relevant to the discourse. The latest wave of SoundCloud rappers, themselves remarkably informed by those same shitty nu-metal bands and Dirty South platinum enthusiasts that annoyed me as a teenager, by and large do next to nothing for me, with some notable exceptions, and I realize more and more that I'm not of a demographic that anyone is interested in, and that's fine. I'm getting older, and I'm not supposed to like Post Malone. When I was younger I figured that at a certain age, you stopped caring about musical trends, and you instead settled in for a long engagement with the past, confined to your echo chamber, as reactionary as that may be.

Hell, rock music has itself largely become a reactionary genre, with its most ensconced forms becoming the soundtrack of the so-called silent majority that has never been either silent or a majority, with good times and great oldies! becoming what is in essence a conservative reaction to newer forms of predominantly black music. When Jimi Hendrix played his version of the national anthem at Woodstock, it was revolutionary. Now it would fit in with Rush Limbaugh throwing the opening pitch at a Cardinals game, just like how Stravinsky's Rite of Spring caused riots upon its opening, but not long later was used by Walt Disney in Fantasia. A supposed postmodernism eats itself just as readily as a supposed modernism.

The fruit of that reaction can be found in the infinite number of obnoxious “don't make 'em like they used to” Youtube comments made by soapboxing boomers and gen X-ers (as well as younger commenters who are upvoted for espousing nostalgia for a time they never knew, echoes of my own early adolescence there), and my generation is quickly en route to doing the same.

Now would be a good time to point out that what I liked about the Lizzy Goodman book was its refreshing refusal to play the nostalgia game, even if the nostalgia was probably a salient marketing point for its publisher.

So when the nostalgia industry will start using my youth as grist for its mills in a few years, all I can do is to hold my very individual memories dear, and tell anyone trying to sell me a variant to fuck right off.

The American Political Book

All books have a half-life, but political books seem to have the shortest half-lives.

I reached this conclusion upon deciding not to read grand magister of American journalism Bob Woodward's latest installment in the "Why Trump Sucks" book series (reports on which have been dominating my news feed for the past year or so), Fear. Part of this is simply that I need no reminder that the current commander-in-chief is an illiterate, reactive oaf. This is pretty fucking self-evident. And part of the reason that I don't pay attention to my news feed anymore is that I need no further reminders of this, nor do I have much patience for the various encomia to only marginally less repulsive figures (looking at you, Comey).

But political books have, by and large, always been awful, given that they are usually designed to either rouse up the base or address hyper-specific moments rather than engage in the sort of deep, long-term analysis and study of historical, cultural, social, economic, environmental, and indeed political trends that make up any kind of real look at the world in which we live. They seem to come into two types.

- Type 1: The Airport Bookstore Version

This version seemed to be omnipresent in the Bush years, both in its liberal versions (such as those by well-meaning amphibian Michael Moore) and its conservative versions (by Sean Hannity or any other American flag lapel-pinned slug-humans who blather on about freedom while happily taking it in the ass from whatever loathsome authoritarian comes their way). You know the type, with the picture of the smiling pundit on the glossy cover and the supposedly incendiary title, jeremiad prose, and lots of floating-block insets of text with glib asides that make the whole damn thing look like “Talking Points for Dummies,” ideal for the sort of reader who buys books not because they enjoy reading but because it was written by their favorite cable news talking head.

- Type 2: The Insider's Approach

These books usually have a plain-ish cover and a tasteful font, I guess to indicate that these are Real Books, and quite often have forewords by US senators. Extensively footnoted and decorated with fleurons at the beginning of each chapter, these are longer-form versions of the sorts of articles that appear in the Atlantic or National Review that address specific policy issues, and extrapolate to reach the conclusion that resolving this one particular issue will, in some way, fix everything. The authors are largely DC types for whom the lanyard is the equivalent of a teardrop tattooed under the eye, and who spend a lot of time talking about “healing America's political divide,” whatever that means.

What connects the two, other than the subject matter, is their intellectual myopia. By failing to examine the breadth of history or ask the necessary and uncomfortable deep questions about the nature of the discourse which we conduct, what we are left with are the hollow cheers and boos of the political class at one very specific moment in time, and they are painfully out of date within months of their release.

But this is to be expected, given the denigrated nature of the public sphere (although “denigrated” makes it sound like there was a golden age, which there wasn't, and if you don't believe me, read Dwight MacDonald's “Masscult and Midcult,” a thorough skewering of the middlebrow faves of the 1950s). Blowhards and Ted-talkers like Jordan Peterson, Thomas Friedman, or David Brooks have the right appearance of authority (elderly white men in suits, frequently bespectacled) and the right jargon to be anointed as serious intellectuals by a public that has, by and large, never bothered to understand the humanities and social sciences in any meaningful way. Sure, there's a lot of very justified frustration nowadays with the rise of Internet conspiracy theories and clickbait journalism, but so many of the same people who get in a tizzy about these things are just as likely to be taken in by these fucking hucksters.

For a long time, I felt the need to keep up with these things in the spirit of being an informed citizen. But then again, I don't go to Marvel movies because, no matter how big a part they are of the dialogue at large, I don't care about how the magic man feels sad even though he's magic. And likewise, I don't care to read some commentator's painfully oversincere takes on the past week and what it means for America.

But when I read a book by David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon or Joan Didion, then everything becomes crystalline, and it does so because, while very much of a time, it is ruthless in its analysis. Or if I do want to read something explicitly political, I'll have a look at any article in the Jacobin, which in one issue contains more wisdom, insight, and analysis than the complete oeuvre of a mediocrity like Chris Hedges or Bill Maher.

And therein, I think, layeth the path to liberation. Not in any political sense, mind you, but psychically. To be both more able to comprehend the world around me more clearly and to engage in a more meaningful dialogue, I have to turn off the white noise, and while the world is not necessarily any prettier, it is freer of artifice. And damn, the clouds are nice this afternoon.

A Volcanic Island

I arrived in Jeju, halfway between Japan and the Korean peninsula in the midst of a heat wave. I'd known that this wasn't an ideal time to travel in this part of the world, especially given my love of autumns in East Asia, but I'd feared typhoons more than anything else. Which was why I didn't go to Taiwan or Okinawa or Luzon, all other options I'd considered, but here.

It's a peculiar little island, well-known in this part of the world owing to its frequency as a setting in KBS soap operas, but completely obscure outside of it. I knew little other than that it looked pretty, with a complex volcanic landscape, that flights were cheap, and that I had a few days to spare. So with little preparation, I packed up my tweed suitcase, downed three Tigers, an Asahi, and a Gordon's and tonic, and boarded a redeye.

The heat of more continental climates is somehow more oppressive than the tropics, where the sultry humidity is balanced by afternoon showers. It's a heat and a sunlight I'd largely forgotten, that I associate with the Middle American landscape I grew up in. I'd forgotten the sort of heat that demands an ice cream after a long walk more than a beer, the sort of heat that leaves sweat streaming down my face instead of lightly gathering at my temples.

And in spite of it, I did what I always do when I travel by myself, and, as so often occurs, I'm not really sure what the fuck I'm doing where I am -- I wandered.

Of course, I did the expected tourist things -- I saw the mountains, the crater lakes, the lava tubes, the “sea” of fir trees, the waterfall where the sage Xu Fu reflected on his journeys, having been sent by the Emperor Qin Shi Huang to look for the elixir of life, and where he finally said “fuck this,” sparked a fat blunt, and booked it back to the motherland.

And I ate the expected regional dishes, the abalones and the sea urchin noodles. I drank makgeolli, the viscous rice wine of the region, flavored with peanuts and with local Hallabong oranges. I had the famous barbecued black pork, which tasted like any other decent quality pork. And most memorably, I went to the central fish market for a raw fish feast, where the ajumma in charge insisted on rubbing her mitts all over my sashimi, wrapping it into shiso leaves and spreading it with ssamjang to show me how to eat it properly.

But to talk about all these things is to miss the heart of the place. They are the window dressing, the superficial level. What interested me far more were the micro-textures of the island.

Each evening, I walked down the road past the city hall, past rows of concrete buildings with makeup shops blasting Seoul's latest pop anthems, chicken-and-beer joints, shuttered storefront evangelical churches, posters for sex shows, all the trappings of a provincial Korean town. Night after night, I watched the waves crash over the breakers in the harbor, young couples on dates, groups of friends drinking on tarps, black cars gathered outside the casinos with signboards showing grotesquely made up lady croupiers, tinny electronic music pulsating from the rooftop discos on the hotels with their bisexually pink and ice-blue floodlights, all punctuated with the screams from the kids on the boardwalk rides, the flashing neon of the seafood palaces reflecting across the harbor.

And then I walked back up the hill, to a sort-of-dive bar that had a selection of local craft beer -- the kind of “American”-themed joint that has Texas truck license plates on the wall, chips with “guakkamol” on the menu, and the world's last surviving Big Mouth Billy Bass, something like a diner in Arkansas filtered through a Chili's filtered through the Republic of Korea – to write down my impressions, and to read my book for the journey, Gary Indiana's Three Month Fever, an account of Andrew Cunanan's youth defined by a spiderweb of infinite lies, culminating in a murder spree across the country ending in Miami Beach, where he hid out at a hotel that:

“... was faced partly in black glass, and had a ground floor of vacant storefronts. As with many buildings in Miami Beach, it was impossible to tell whether the Clarion Suites was being finished or undergoing an extremely languid demolition.”

A blank spot on a map for Westerners, a dramatic landscape immortalized in film and television for millions of Asians, and for Koreans, their personal Blackpool or Jersey Shore, connected to Seoul by the world's single busiest air route.

I thought it made sense, more or less.

I got to the airport, having had a nice trip, ordered a drink, and turned on the in-flight entertainment.

What I didn't know was that the hills I traipsed around held a secret. In 1948, under the auspices of the Syngman Rhee government, and concomitantly that of my own country, more than 10 percent of the island's residents were slaughtered, with whole villages on the slopes of Hallasan burnt to the ground, their bodies thrown in those lovely craters. A further several thousand fled to Japan, where many of them were fully radicalized, a number of their modern descendants still forming a miniature resistance group adhering to the Juche ideal, widely mocked by the rest of the world, and frequently harassed by Japan's version of 4chan lowlifes. And those who survived the purge and remained in Korea are still awaiting compensation, even as the Seoul authorities gleefully brand Jeju “the island of world peace.”

We form our ideas about what something is, and history always manages to thrust the knife into your gut.

Tropical Depression

When I meet people traveling, I tell them I live in Bangkok, and I can always see a certain look cross their faces. This can go one of two ways. One way, perhaps the more predictable way, is the assumption that I am that lowest of creatures, the Western failure who goes to a supposedly more permissive clime to engage in multifarious degeneracies and perversions, someone with an insatiable yen for white male privilege, cheap booze, and local pussy.

But there's a second look, one of jealousy, that I get to live in said supposedly permissive clime, an assumption that I live a carefree life of sea, sex, and sun (as that king of the lechers Serge Gainsbourg put it), an eternal Valencia-filtered happy hour under whispering palm fronds.

A certain irony, given my buttondown, stale-coffee sort of life.

It's a particular sort of myth, one that has been perpetuated by the tropical milieu that has come to occupy a central position in the public imagination. Sure, those of us who come from cold-weather lands have always looked up to all things tropical – how long have Americans flocked to Cancun and Fort Lauderdale for Spring Break? – but it seems more ubiquitous than ever. You see the countless pop music videos set in exotic locales, the house remixes that name-check Ibiza, Goa, Bali, and every other place that seems to elude the strictures of Anglo-Protestant morality. It is found in every palm-print t-shirt at H&M and Zara, in every “nomad” type blog, in every Instagram photo that features flowing linen beach dresses and chilled glasses of Prosecco.

Photo Credit: Chompoo Baritone, whose work is one of the better skewerings of bullshit I know of

These things come in phases, don't they? Eventually this will seem just as dated and embarrassing as, par instance, the fetishization of an ostensible hedonism in early '80s hair metal-era L.A., or that hiccup in the late '90s when everything marketed to teens was required to be X-treme.

Which is why I hate all of those “look how millennials be” think pieces – sure, my generation might have slightly different shit that it gloms onto or rejects, but the fact is that the shit itself isn't nearly as interesting or worthy of commentary as the conditions that surround it.

While culture invariably moves in waves, crazes, fads, and gestalts, they all, in a society saturated with mass media, seem to have their roots in a terrible and unseemly lack, something missing from daily experience that is latched onto first by artists, musicians, and designers, and then following suit, by media companies, corporate marketers, and advertising agencies. Some collective dream that we see faintly, a mirage of a better life that seems so real, even if distant.

It was a little less than 10 years ago that I first noticed this tendency. It started with the musical trend for “Balearic” music in America, an interpretation of the long-enshrined European experience of those Spanish islands well-known as a place for Northerners to escape from the winter drizzle and beery neurasthenia, before music critics settled on the repugnant and much-mocked name of “chillwave.” Consider the cover of 2009's Washed Out's then-overplayed but still excellent Life of Leisure EP, with its lavender tones and its sea-nymph cover girl going for a sunset swim with seaside hotels in the background.

The context, of course, was that the global economy was falling to pieces. We couldn't have the life of leisure, so we listened to it.

And the tropical gestalt has continued in its way since, with some variations – samples of cheesy '80s soft rock here, yachty fashion trends there, little nods to the pop culture and music of France, Japan, or Brazil, all times, milieux, and places close enough to the youthful American consciousness to be superficially familiar, all distant enough for any incursions of ugly reality to be kept safely at bay.

I'd seen it before, during the darkest years of the Bush regime, as my nation plunged headlong into a particularly insane and pointless war. Mainstream American liberalism seemed to respond with callow, smug irony in lieu of action, the world of top 40 radio was peppered with shitty pop music remaining more or less unaltered from its lousy late '90s self and hip-hop in its absolute lamest phase, and meanwhile, the world of independent music – a place that had long prided itself on standing against the bullshit going on in the world at large – seemed content to traipse about in a folky dreamscape that seemed utterly unmoored and unwilling to confront the horror of contemporary foreign policy.

So we are like the Depression-era family playing Monopoly as the bank threatens to take our house. The stack of $1000 bills on goldenrod-colored paper gives some comfort.

A woman is driving home from downtown of Des Moines or Milwaukee or Omaha or Cincinnati. The fucking asshole wants her in on Saturday. She drives past the campus of the university where her psychology degree sent her 30,000 dollars into debt, further down the freeway, to her home, a cheaply built townhouse where newly paved asphalt roads run down into the cornfields. An icy gale is blowing in from the Northwest. Her parents called, she's not calling them back. Lying down on her couch, she vaguely wonders what there is to eat in the fridge, and goes through her phone. She opens up Instagram, past coffee, of charcuterie plates, of yoga balls and spandex, and sees a radiant Bella Hadid in front of a Costa Rican waterfall, her eyes dancing with some point beyond the camera's lens, and presses the heart-shaped button.

Misery Tastes of Frozen Scallops

I fully realize that a lot of what I write is, in many ways, hermetic, willfully dense, frantic, and fully ensconced within a very specific world of signs and allusions. This isn't one of those. If most of what I write is designed as a high-intensity sprint, this is a Netflix-and-chill.

A few days ago, I went to a French restaurant near my office for lunch. Owing to the almost litigation-bating nature of Thai defamation law, I'll leave it nameless, but quite a few people familiar with the Silom-Sathorn area dining scene should be able to figure it out.

So therefore let this not be a description of a specific restaurant in a specific place, but a typology of awfulness, an index of bad taste and poor decisions both fiscal and aesthetic. Because what is universal is not necessarily something abstract – it can be as concrete and as simple as a cracked, dusty window.

You hear about a place nearby with a lunch discount. It's the sort of place you've walked by countless times, vaguely wondered about, especially given the setting, a particularly lovely, creaking old mansion in a neighborhood full of restaurants in lovely, creaking old mansions. There's the old adage about it being impossible to get a bad meal in Paris, and if you're someone like me, there's a strong appeal for French ingredients, French technique, both in terms of its complexity and its position as an antique tradition.

And hey, there's that big lunch discount. What could go wrong?

There are too many waitstaff on the floor, half of them checking their phones. The only other visible customers are elderly Thai women with elaborately ugly hairdos – this at the lunch rush in the middle of the city's financial district. There are plenty of awards by the door, but all of them seem to be 10 or 15 years old, and come from a magazine largely dedicated to the charity efforts of socialites whose Armani suits and Birkin bags are paid for by wage theft, environmental degradation, tax evasion, and rent-seeking.

The main decor is, of course, kitschy bullshit of various types. Kitschy art-deco bullshit in the form of reproduced classic movie posters, kitschy Victorian bullshit in the form of reproduction Tiffany lamps, and kitschy Rococo bullshit in the form of silhouette portraits of Georgian ladies and gentlemen to indicate the bathrooms, which reek of artificial jasmine scent, so you'll feel like Marie Antoinette when you're taking a dump.

And of course, the cherubim. Cherubim in plaster moldings, statues of cherubim, and a particularly hideous painting of a cherub stealing a kiss off of the other, so poorly rendered that their gender is indistinguishable, other than the rounded choad-nubbin standing in for male genitalia on the one, and the facial expression of a recent sexual assault victim on the other.

Dejected, your eyes turn to the menu. A cocktail to start? Other than a few stalwarts, there seems to be all too much creativity of the 1980s variety (a nod, perhaps, to the smooth-jazz mix of the unmarried boomer aunt variety they've selected for the dining room). Blue curacao makes numerous appearances, along with other dubious, artificially flavored cordials, and completely misnamed cocktails – what the fuck is amaretto doing in an old-fashioned?

The food isn't any better. Foie gras on top of cream sauce and other menu items that have made the crucial error of conflating cholesterol with luxuriousness. And of course, instead of local produce, the owners feel the need to prove how far away their product comes from by serving lobster, scallops, and “snowfish” (local jargon for Chilean sea bass), all of which have been languishing in the freezer for months, taste like low tide, and are simultaneously spongy and rubbery – seafood platter a la Goodyear.

I've put on the fake smiles, knowing full well that the waitstaff can do nothing to rectify this bullshit, and get the bill. Had I not gotten the discount, it would have come to more than 2000 baht (about 60 dollars US) for a couple of small, “recommended” dishes and a glass of Semillon. I walk back to the office in a lousy state.

None of the above will come as any surprise to Bangkokians. There are any number of familiar types of terrible, overpriced eatery in a city rightly renowned as a place to get an excellent meal for dirt cheap. There is the shitty hipster place opened by recent grads from wealthy families who care more about the Instagrammability of the place (check all that apply: menu on clipboard, metal shelves with like three books on them that the owners almost certainly didn't read, Edison lightbulbs, squid ink) than the quality of the food, the tourist-friendly Thai restaurant that purges local favorites of any spice or complexity and is decorated with all manner of chintzy “Thai” bric-a-brac, the brightly-lit seafood-market type joint that caters to busloads of mainland Chinese, and so forth. The out-of-date French or Italian restaurant is just one more iteration.

Which is why I'll be making my trout amandine at home, and enjoying it far more.

Memoriam Edition

Years ago, on a foggy morning in Aberdeen, Washington, I stopped at a small bridge over the Wishkah River. I went with the expectation of some kind of cosmic misery-mojo, the kind that comes with a slowly dying old logging town, a place once known as the “port of missing men” for its reputation as a place where a sailor could safely be robbed and murdered without too many people coming and looking for him, on an especially gloomy stretch of the Northwest Coast (more than twice the annual rainfall of Seattle), home of the Melvins, whose brand of sludgy metal would become profoundly influential in '90s rock music, particularly thanks to a tow-headed kid whom they inspired, who used to cry under this bridge on the Wishkah.

And what I got, and this shouldn't have surprised me, and didn't especially surprise me, were the paraphernalia of more steadfast pilgrims, half-burnt cheap candles, Sharpie graffiti from California gutter punks – “You changed my life, Kurt” – and things of that nature.

I wasn't sure then, and I'm not sure now, how I feel about all of this overt sentiment. On one hand, it does come off as corny and cliché, but on the other hand, it is the very legitimate expression of emotional honesty, even if it is a rather silly and confessionalist and very adolescent format, and it's the sort of emotional honesty that comes with the experience of loving someone's art who died too soon. And regardless of whatever the public memory is, there is an ineffable personal memory, one that can't be reduced to the image that is intentionally projected in a mediated society.

Cobain died when I was seven years old. I barely knew who he himself was, but I'd certainly heard plenty of Nirvana songs around. And some of those are so intimately connected to such hyper-specific early memories, to beaded covers over vinyl seats in someone's shitty, beat-up Chevy Caprice Classic.

This notion of the divide between personal and public memory has been at the forefront of my mind lately as I've seen the media response to the suicide of Anthony Bourdain, which is the first celebrity death in years I've actually cared about – hell, for that matter, for which my first thought hasn't been “how can I make this into a tasteless pun?” From what I've seen, the media has been fairly restrained in its treatment, and I haven't seen anyone try to translate the “cynicism” which he was often said to have (one of the many flagrant misuses of the word, whereby it is used as a catch-all for snarkiness, dark humor, or pretty much any emotional response other than Anglo-American earnestness) into a reading of his death. Which is refreshing... after all, it was only a few days that countless media sources were using Kate Spade's suicide as a simplistic fairy tale about how “money can't buy happiness.”

I'm sure plenty of people have ways that Bourdain did change their lives. He inspired them to travel more, to eat better, hopefully to enjoy the works of those who inspired him -- whether Antonioni, Joan Didion, or the New York Dolls -- and I can probably attribute a fair amount of my own fawning over classical French cuisine to his writings. So I won't leave a candle, I won't scrawl anything in Sharpie. But I will pour myself a goddamn Negroni.

On Other Dystopias

It seems like every day I get on the subway, or go to the movies, I see a promo for some new dystopian film. And what, really, could be duller at this point. The plucky band of teenage heroes, the cruel overlord, the pleas to human freedom that every political group from far left to far right will find sympathy in.

This isn't to denigrate the “dystopia” as an artistic trope. It has its place – in some fine novels, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things, and in some fine films, Brazil, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Mad Max: Fury Road and the like. But it has gotten so overplayed, so transformed into the most banal of cultural artifacts that the mere mention of a dystopia automatically triggers my bullshit radar. Compare David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas – a monumental story of the invisible threads running through history – to the godawful film version by the Wachowskis, which feels like it was written by a 15 year old that just discovered Buddhism.

Of course, the notion of the dystopia, particularly in its cyberpunk forms, has been an essential component of literary and cultural theory since its 1980s heyday, especially in how these cyberpunk fictions reflect themselves in our reality, often to the point of absurdity – Giorgio Agamben's claim in Homo Sacer that modern life was indistinguishable from Auschwitz is perhaps the most offensively bourgeois notion I could imagine, and pretty much anything written by Jean Baudrillard comes off as borderline parody today. Sure, we don't have flying cars or AI romantic partners, but in other respects – Snowden, Bezos, facial recognition software – we are living in a world that would be familiar to Philip K. Dick or William Gibson.

By the 1990s, with books like Mike Davis' City of Quartz or Edward Soja's magisterial Postmetropolis, Los Angeles was being called the postmodern, cyberpunk city par excellence – after all, this is the city whose economic fortunes are inextricably entwined with the image industry, a city without center that arose in the high-capitalist age, and the place where Rick Deckard and Roy Batty had their final showdown in the rain.

But recently, attentions have turned more towards East Asia, perhaps best articulated by Ian Buruma in his essay “AsiaWorld.” Particularly, the monster cities of China, for which the prototype is Shenzhen (population, 1980: 30,000, population, 2017: 12.5 million, well-known as the place where all your shit comes from).

And it's hard not to accept this notion – walk down Nathan Road in Kowloon on a rainy night, and tell me you don't feel like chasing a replicant or two – but I question the singularity of this vision. When I look at the great cities of East Asia, while I do see a pattern, even if it takes on myriad forms, all of them distinct, all still shaped by their own localities.

The first thing you might think of is the cartoon-scape of Tokyo, especially as it is in movies like Akira and Enter the Void. This is the world of postmodernity at its shiniest and most superficial level, the geospatial equivalent of cotton candy. This is a city of English text overlaid on ancient katakana and hiragana, themselves overlaid on even more ancient kanji, a snow crash of signifiers, bright neon signs, oddball fragments of traditional East Asian architecture, sex for sale, particularly in its most commodified and fetishistic form.

Or you could draw your attentions to Hong Kong, the interzone that is neither Chinese nor Western, postcolonial but not national, with its looming high rises (more than three times as many buildings over 100 meters tall as New York), its migrant workers living in warren-like housing on the Kowloon side and in the New Territories, its role as a vital artery in the system of global finance and banking, and in the dingy hallways of Chungking Mansions, where backpacker guesthouses, bootleg watches, and its Nepali and Nigerian vendors hustling every manner of goods you could imagine.

 

For a darker perspective, you could look at Phnom Penh, a city of wage slaves working to produce the goods that even China wants to outsource, still suffering under the collective post-traumatic stress disorder in the wake of the Khmer Rouge, with its capitalists completely indistinguishable from its politicians, its firm-handed authoritarian rule firmly in the hand of global capital and its local compradors, its cheap hookers, its armies of begging gangs and ragpickers.

But perhaps it is Singapore that most reflects the cinematic vision, at least, of the cyberpunk city. It is the place that no less an authority than William Gibson called “Disneyland with the death penalty, ” and it should be remembered that Germany's current chief philosophe and noted mustachioed crank Peter Sloterdijk said that if statues of any political leader of our time will be put up, it will be Lee Kuan Yew. The reportage of the marriage of Confucian and Victorian rigidity is nothing new – people have been doing it for 30 years – but as authoritarian capitalism seems to spread over the world like a dark pall, it seems like too many of us in the rest of the developed world have accepted the Singaporean worldview part and parcel. The prioritization of the image of the city over the content, the embrace of the security state, the reduction of politics to ritual, the reliance on massive pools of cheap labor while keeping that cheap labor invisible and damn near stateless, its superficial claims to the multicultural masking a profoundly regressive racial dynamic. 

 

Tokyo, Hong Kong, Phnom Penh, and Singapore, each of them expressing different modalities of the global city as it occurs in the early years of the 21^st Century. And yet two of these – Tokyo and Hong Kong – are cities I utterly adore, despite some of the underlying horror. Repeat for Bangkok, Seoul, Fukuoka, Penang. It reminds me of that beautiful bit from Baudelaire's Paris Spleen:

“In the evening, a bit tired, we wanted to sit down in front of a new café that formed the corner of a new boulevard, still strewn with debris and already gloriously displaying its unfinished splendors. The café was sparkling. The gaslight itself sent forth all the ardor of a debut and lit with all its force walls blinding in their whiteness, dazzling sheets of mirrors, the gold of the rods and cornices, chubby-cheeked page-boys being dragged by dogs on leashes, laughing ladies with falcons perched on their wrist, nymphs and goddesses carrying on their heads fruits, pies, and poultry, Hebes and Ganymedes presenting in out-stretched arms little amphoras filled with Bavarian cream or bi-colored obelisks of ice cream – all of history and all of mythology at the service of gluttony.”

So, as in Baudelaire's Paris, I take the position of the flaneur, the wanderer, making some attempt to process what I see, to correlate.

Which brings me around to film representations. What could be duller and more simplistic than the current cinematic representation of grim futures. What does it say about us that we would rather consume fictional dystopias, and express ourselves vicariously through fictional revolutionaries than actually taking any kind of stance in a moment of rising authoritarianism? Or postulating a “rebel” stance by flogging conspiracy theories, faux-leftist stances that Karl Marx would shake his head at if he were alive today, or any of the many moronic flavors of adolescent edginess on social media. Or perhaps even more horrifyingly, presuming that the more populist flavors of that said authoritarianism are in some way superior to the more universalized, neoliberal versions, and throwing our lot in with Putin, Erdogan, Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Shinzo Abe, Duterte, or any of the other absolute cocksuckers whose supporters think they're sticking it to the man?

And so instead, I look to the city around me. The Burmese graffiti and the stubbed-out green cheroot at the construction site on the corner tell me far more about the world around us than anything in Hollywood ever could.

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places

In my mid-teens, I was given a Christmas present, a copy of a book called The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (binding already cracked – guess my parents couldn't help themselves). And when I look back on it, it's impossible to calculate the influence on my thought since.

The whole premise is that it is a catalog of imaginary places, along with tips for imagined travelers, which are actually quite narrowly defined. For instance, any place that is really just a stand-in for a real place is excluded (e.g. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi). As is anything “not on Earth,” whether in heaven or hell or on another planet. And last, and most controversially and infuriatingly, those places that “could” exist based on the logic of how we assume the world to work, such as the decaying home of Dickens' Miss Havisham. These were places of pure irreality, and this was designed as the guidebook.

This was also natural extension of who I was as a child who had loved the classification of all things, taking out all of my toy cars and baseball cards and sorting them in infinite ways, who had loved atlases and encyclopedias and anything that sought to contain the world. Sure, for several years, I had been an American teenager, with everything that implied, and moreover had been a smart enough, snarky enough American teenager around the turn of the 21^st Century (see attached items: Nirvana's “Nevermind,” Outkast's “Stankonia,” Donnie Darko, Lost in Translation), and had a lot of fuck-you in me, but I was still someone who loved the scientific organization of things, especially in geography (the laws of all space) and geology (space and time as expressed in the ground beneath our feet).

I was already familiar with a number of the authors mentioned. A number of the haunts of broadly familiar characters showed up – the Wizard of Oz, the Beauty and the Beast, Sherlock Holmes, and Harry Potter all made appearances. But a few of the locales reflected what I considered to be a more idiosyncratic vein. Like H.P. Lovecraft, an unhappy proto-neckbeard who tried to write like a vampire lord locked in his castle, and decorated his prose with long-abandoned archaeological and paleontological jargon. Or Jorge Luis Borges, with his famous classification of all animals by a Chinese scholar, most likely a fiction of Borges himself, a man who could rest comfortably with the unchallengeability of his breadth of esoteric knowledge in a pre-Internet era, and who could therefore simply be cast as an all-knowing mandarin (as an aside, one of the co-authors, Alberto Manguel, had occupied role previously held by Borges, as the director of the National Library of Argentina).

But there was something else, a hint of the future. A whole index of names to look into for starters, writers who also dreamed of vast imaginary worlds, but also didn't constrain themselves to the “speculative” genres, and who certainly weren't widely read in Middle America.

And the text was accompanied with these almost Victorian maps and unearthly engravings, so clearly modeled on the frontispieces of the sort of books I would find at used bookstores and libraries, antique editions of Gothic romances and boys' adventure books and epistolary novels and scientists' travelogues no one had read in years.

Perhaps those that I would most obviously fall in love with could be called “postmodernists,” and I was to read their books in short order. Umberto Eco, for one, and Italo Calvino, whose work I would soon develop a fawning love of.

After all, the first edition of the Dictionary of Imaginary Places was published in 1980, just as American audiences were first becoming familiar with the concepts that would soon become ensconced in college humanities departments as “theory” – intertextuality, Barthes' death of the author, the idea of the world as essentially consisting of sign systems.

But what interested me more, in the long run, were all of the forgottens and also-rans from much earlier eras. Who knew, for instance, that L. Frank Baum wrote countless other books set in the world of Oz? And there were other writers, people like Anthony Hope, Paul Féval, Horace Walpole, and James Branch Cabell who once commanded massive audiences, but have now been left to gather mildew. It's not so much that I was necessarily interested in these guys as writers – to be honest, I still haven't finished a single book by most of them, and some of them that I have tried to read have proven turgidly unreadable in that particular pre-modernist way – but more that they represented a current in popular fiction, which back then constituted a major part of the popular imagination that has since been abandoned.

And some were simply unavailable – I'm remembering one in particular. A book by the 19^th Century Italian author Amedeo Tosetti, Pedali sul Mar Nero, in which “Tartars” on bicycles lived inside a steel egg called Malacovia in the marshes at the mouth of the Danube. Something I always kept an eye out for, before realizing it was never translated.

It was only in discovering places that never existed that I discovered places and times that did exist. So consequently, it did act as a guidebook for me, albeit in a completely different way.

Fiction becomes the way in which we see features of our reality separate from immediate perception. Like a camera obscura, we see our world turned upside down, and see the things we never saw before.