Dining alone is rarely ideal, but there's something especially dismal about eating something flambeed alone. Here you are, the waitress seems to say, shall I have the kitchen send you a single slice of birthday cake and a party hat as well?
It wasn't a good day, nothing better to do, stifling weather, and the walls of my home becoming increasingly claustrophobic, as if the cracks in the paint threatened to consume me whole.
But I had a nice view at least, 37 floors high above the most perfect representation of Downtown Bangkok life. The towers of brooding banking headquarters and airy five-star hotels, the narrow quiet streets where a few tiny lanes of wooden houses still managed to hold on even as the city – as the now-forgotten Booth Tarkington once so gloriously put it, spread and darkened around them, the Vietnam-era fleshpots of Patpong now transformed into this weird sort of Amsterdamized sex-positive amusement park with galleries and dispensaries, the dinner cruises on the turbid river that curls around into the distant darkness.
But what attracts me so much isn't the social landscape, but the optical landscape – and I mean that in the physical sense, in the infinite varieties of light laid out before me. In the soft, warm light from inside the condos, the frigid glow of the antiseptic offices that left their lights on, the rush of taillights and headlights, the cheap ice-blue glow of the four- and five-story shophouses, the distant twinkle of the oil refineries, and the greasy glow of the Chao Phraya. No stars, of course.
Just city lights.
The very name “city lights” has somehow sustained its romance. Chaplin named his love story accordingly nearly 100 years ago, and B-sides are still released with variations on that name. No matter how much the world changes, even as the urban increasingly becomes the norm and the rural the exception, there's still something about the twinkle of skylines that captures the imagination. There's still something for us to dream of – in the past it may have been the dream of the kid from the farm, but now it's more likely to be the kid from the suburbs.
In our media, each of the lights themselves plays a specific role – the harsh sodium of the streetlights as seen in a thousand intro-credit establishing shots of LA, the strobe flash of a darkened Berlin disco, the lurid desire of flickering neon and the bleary rush of passing elevated trains, the hedonistic interplay with tropical sunsets in polychrome cities by the sea.
Because it's not just a marriage of optics and geography, is it? It's an aspirational term, and a consistently aspirational concept. It's one of the oldest tropes there is. Aesop wrote about his city mouse and his country mouse more than two millennia ago. Take it to the present. Being the oldhead I am, it was only recently that I learned about the Night Luxe hashtag slash “aesthetic” (ugh) trending on TikTok over the past year, glamorizing a world of smoky eyes and Givenchy dresses and champagne flutes.
Conversely, there
is one of the second-oldest tropes, the displaced bumpkin. You know
the one. “Aw gee, is there really an underground train down
there?” This is, in its most classical, Horatio Alger form, to
be followed by their rise to glory, but more frequently it is
followed by their fall to oblivion, ending their days as diseased
wastrels. But let's face it, that's the more Old World version. Us
Americans prefer the redemptive ending in their return to the
maternal embrace of their farmstead. Or, as Bobby Bare worded it in the most underrated country song of all time, The Streets of Baltimore, it could be both. You return shamefaced to your holler, flat broke and dead inside, she's getting felt up for 20 bucks.
And that leads us to one of the third-oldest tropes, the seduction not of the wealth and glory of city lights, but of the diseased wastrels themselves, the darkness and weirdness that city life invites. Of disappearing into an urban bohemia of sex, drugs, and to complete the hendiatris, rock and roll (or at least for the past few decades). The promise of Rimbaud and Kerouac and the Velvet Underground, of mysterious and undisclosed forms of erotic and narcotic endeavor, of a life beyond acceptable society. Like all gardes that were once avant, this has been fully metabolized into the mainstream, and yet for a certain kind of youth it still resonates, and I sincerely doubt it ever will stop resonating.
So given the city's very pragmatic allure as a locus for economic activity and its far more romantic allure associated with that economic activity, whether that is the potential for an elegant rooftop restaurant or the nostalgie de la boue of a life on a much-marketed edge, the aspiration is still there.
Once upon a time, I was a sad kid from a long way from anywhere who had read too many of the beat poets, who had stared for long hours at Edward Hopper paintings, who saw shoegaze less as a musical genre and more as an ideology.
And so I cast my eyes cityward. It would be tempting here to regale the reader with tales of my city life, whether as a flex or to offer deliciously sordid anecdotes, but what purpose would that serve?
Suffice it to say that this is the life I choose – it's either this or a cabin in the British Columbian woods, and fuck everything in between. I have this 37th floor view. I have the walk home past the late-night diners and the closed-up shopping malls and bank headquarters and the gay clubs still bumping, even on a Sunday night. I have the quaint apartment to return to with the view and the patio where I'll doubtless smoke a quick bowl to ease the path into Monday morning.
And when I do, I'll still find an appeal, however vague, in the lights all around me. They'll be the last thing I see before I fall asleep.
