My moto was stopped as we crossed the barracks that lent the Sanam Pao ("target range") BTS station its name. As the national anthem began to play, my driver, like everyone else in plein-air, immediately stopped. Three soldiers stood at attention, rifles at their sides, facing an arrangement of flags-- that of the king, that of the queen, that of the nation, before the rising eastern sun.
Like many other expatriates in Bangkok, I've come to bristle at the playing of the national anthem, a product of 1930s fascism in both its origins and spirit, with lyrics referring to blood and soil that very much fit the ethos of Field Marshal Phibun's tinpot tropical reich.
The bells that precede the anthem's play-- 8 AM and 6 PM sharp, another remnant of the Phibun era-- are Pavlovian at this point. I want nothing more than to run away and hide to someplace where I don't have to stand at attention, to prostrate myself as a gesture towards the nationalism I have always hated.
Of course, lots of foreigners in Bangkok maintain a principled contempt for the Thai national anthem, the hollow rituals that accompany it, the militant veneration of nationalist ideology, and the various flavors of gloomy propaganda pushed by Ministry of Culture bureaucrats. I certainly sympathize.
But, when so many of these Westerners are interrogated, they seem to be under the delusion that this ideology is essential and unchanging, and that an undefined "culture" prevents the citizens of the nation from actually possessing the capacity for critical thought. It's the same perspective found among British colonialists in pre-partition India (it's all caste, don't you see, if we leave there won't be a virgin left between Calcutta and Karachi) and Halliburton functionaries in the America-damaged sections of the Middle East (Islam makes them think this way, the Arab mind hates democracy). Though to be fair, what I find especially galling about the local version of this sort of intellectual imperialism is simply that I have to deal with it on a near-daily basis, so it pisses me off more, natch.
Now, there are also Westerners whose practice goes in the opposite direction, who are at pains to adopt Thai ways, and decry modernization and urbanization as a loss of "Thainess." These are the same Westerners who wai obsequiously at every turn, who are at near-constant pains to show off their (lousy) Thai language skills, and who attempt, with starry-eyed naivete, to adopt Buddhist practice.
Both of these approaches reflect fundamentally orientalist understandings. Yet both can speak to higher virtues on one level-- of iconoclasm, and of cross-cultural understanding, respectively-- but are bogged down as their practitioners let their unbending convictions obfuscate the messy complexities of human existence.
And, fundamentally, both are seen through the lens of the Western expatriate's single-minded pursuit of pleasure. What you hear being bitched about in Sukhumvit Road pubs by expats of both persuasions are the most superficial goddamn things: excessive fees imposed upon foreigners, the Asiatic obsession with fair skin. You don't hear those expats bitching so much about, say, the virtual enslavement of Burmese migrant workers, the Charoen Pokphand Group's near-criminal push towards American-style industrial agriculture, or the prawn farms that are destroying miles of the Gulf of Thailand coast. No, they get rankled by the incidentals that deny them the gloss of white privilege that they cling onto as their claimed birthright, much like the dispossessed aristocrats in interwar-period England trying to maintain their gentility.
I don't mean to tar every Westerner in Thailand with the same brush. Some of them are, even, ostensibly, close friends of mine. And these are the ones who haven't chosen either of the two above paths. They tend to be pragmatic, thoughtful, and cosmopolitan. Much like the people I try to surround myself with wherever I go.
But it is one of the central questions of living overseas. You are forced to ask yourself who you are, what your beliefs are, what your assumptions are, how to balance personal integrity with larger-scale respect.
And those questions are drawn into even sharper relief when the streets of your city are filled with marching demonstrators waving national flags and chanting slogans, when the people you knew as your florist, as your noodle vendor are out with colored armbands. When government buildings are being stormed, when students are being shot, when dismal demagogues like the red-clad Jatuporn Prompan and the yellow-clad Suthep Thaugsuban attempt to commandeer the national media outlets, when all the talk is of a "people's council" (a phrase that summons up the sound of boots in synchronized march on dusty boulevards, of slit throats and dumped bodies in the mangroves).
And those questions make me nervous about even writing this, about my position as an outsider-- after all, it wasn't long ago that an esteemed member of parliament from Chumphon Province led a crowd to assault a German photographer for being too nosy. I'm a bit anxious, but I know I'll be far more anxious if I simply remain in silence, or restrict myself to grumbling in the pub with the other Westerners.
So I write something, in order to palliate my doubts, in order to make peace with the place I've chosen to inhabit.
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Thursday, November 14, 2013
American Airplanes
The American airplanes that once flew over this part of the world have long since departed. Once they filled the sky in olive-green flocks, but now we only have remnants.
A concrete strip is cut into an island in the South China Sea. Chemical plumes lace the groundwater of Manila, Saigon, and Khorat. Horizontal concrete hotels stand in Southeast Asian cities, their bars paneled in wood with potted palms and velvet drapes, Jim Beam and Bacardi blended into tropical drinks for lieutenant's wives.
And of course the strips of bars with names like "Oriental Nights" where girls in pink fishnet stockings and go-go boots have been catcalling for decades, the sorts of places where Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken pointed guns at their heads, in towns where dislocated children with hazel eyes are born into uncertainty.
Sometimes the American airplanes were applauded. Other times they got spat on. And on the coraline islands of Vanuatu, they inspired the holy devotion of Melanesian fisherfolk.
Some of the Americans stayed. Others left and came back. You see the old men who live in concrete houses with local wives in old air-base towns like Nakhon Phanom and Udon Thani, or laughing over a seven-and-seven in the secret military bar on Sathon Tai in Bangkok.
Or you see them in sadder places, in sleazy pink-lit bars on Sukhumvit 22, eyes fixed in the middle distance, a Tiger beer in one hand and a slowly burning Marlboro in the other, and maybe they've got a greasy, thin burger made with gristly local beef on a chipped plate, cold fries going limp in a pool of ketchup. You see them leering in sleazy nightclubs where they listen to a band play covers of contemporary pop songs they can't stand.
And when they've reached their end you see them at the embassy in crooked sunglasses and a baseball cap that says U.S.S. NEW JERSEY, pushed around in a wheelchair by a Thai or Filipina wife who hates them, American children who pity them, signing their will.
Do you know what you're signing? the embassy official says.
The American airplanes came to Asia at a time when America was at its blindly optimistic industrial peak, when you could call Detroit "the Arsenal of Democracy" without smirking. The photos of the pilots are as bright-eyed and apple-cheeked as the Waltons.
They left Cambodia and Laos as UXO-riddled kingdoms of ghosts, Vietnam as a by-word for disaster, a legacy of hundreds of thousands of midnight murders in Indonesia, full-hearted support for the corrupt thugs running Thailand and the Philippines.
The lazy analogy is to call the Americans "cowboys"-- it's inapplicable, and yet somehow legions of clueless French and Germans still buy it-- but to be a cowboy implies self-sufficiency and a ruggedly individual spirit.
On the contrary, the American military machine in Asia in the mid-20th Century was just that, a machine, scientific in its approach, with lessons learned from cybernetics and systems engineering. War was laid out by men like the accountant Robert McNamara and the policy man Henry Kissinger, men in nerdish glasses, applying Taylorist principles of management to destruction and violent death.
And the ruins are accordingly mechanical: sulfur and phosphorus, carbon steel and vulcanized rubber. Even the food of Fordist America remains in the Carnation condensed milk poured into the coffee cups of Vientiane, in the Spam pressed into rice in Guam, in the slashed hot dogs on skewers offered as a street snack in Phuket.
But for me, the young American, it is now an antique society, existing in the same amber haze of history that cloaks belle-époque Paris and Dust Bowl Oklahoma. Things that, to a generation previous, were part of childhood TV broadcasts are now as horses and buggies.
And so, perhaps one day, I'll have nieces and nephews writing about the waning days of the imperial American urge. About their conversations with a Kurdish taxi driver, or their visit to a Pakistani town destroyed by drones. Atrocity is immediate. The process of history lets the act of killing unfold into a million subtleties.
A concrete strip is cut into an island in the South China Sea. Chemical plumes lace the groundwater of Manila, Saigon, and Khorat. Horizontal concrete hotels stand in Southeast Asian cities, their bars paneled in wood with potted palms and velvet drapes, Jim Beam and Bacardi blended into tropical drinks for lieutenant's wives.
And of course the strips of bars with names like "Oriental Nights" where girls in pink fishnet stockings and go-go boots have been catcalling for decades, the sorts of places where Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken pointed guns at their heads, in towns where dislocated children with hazel eyes are born into uncertainty.
Sometimes the American airplanes were applauded. Other times they got spat on. And on the coraline islands of Vanuatu, they inspired the holy devotion of Melanesian fisherfolk.
Some of the Americans stayed. Others left and came back. You see the old men who live in concrete houses with local wives in old air-base towns like Nakhon Phanom and Udon Thani, or laughing over a seven-and-seven in the secret military bar on Sathon Tai in Bangkok.
Or you see them in sadder places, in sleazy pink-lit bars on Sukhumvit 22, eyes fixed in the middle distance, a Tiger beer in one hand and a slowly burning Marlboro in the other, and maybe they've got a greasy, thin burger made with gristly local beef on a chipped plate, cold fries going limp in a pool of ketchup. You see them leering in sleazy nightclubs where they listen to a band play covers of contemporary pop songs they can't stand.
And when they've reached their end you see them at the embassy in crooked sunglasses and a baseball cap that says U.S.S. NEW JERSEY, pushed around in a wheelchair by a Thai or Filipina wife who hates them, American children who pity them, signing their will.
Do you know what you're signing? the embassy official says.
The American airplanes came to Asia at a time when America was at its blindly optimistic industrial peak, when you could call Detroit "the Arsenal of Democracy" without smirking. The photos of the pilots are as bright-eyed and apple-cheeked as the Waltons.
They left Cambodia and Laos as UXO-riddled kingdoms of ghosts, Vietnam as a by-word for disaster, a legacy of hundreds of thousands of midnight murders in Indonesia, full-hearted support for the corrupt thugs running Thailand and the Philippines.
The lazy analogy is to call the Americans "cowboys"-- it's inapplicable, and yet somehow legions of clueless French and Germans still buy it-- but to be a cowboy implies self-sufficiency and a ruggedly individual spirit.
On the contrary, the American military machine in Asia in the mid-20th Century was just that, a machine, scientific in its approach, with lessons learned from cybernetics and systems engineering. War was laid out by men like the accountant Robert McNamara and the policy man Henry Kissinger, men in nerdish glasses, applying Taylorist principles of management to destruction and violent death.
And the ruins are accordingly mechanical: sulfur and phosphorus, carbon steel and vulcanized rubber. Even the food of Fordist America remains in the Carnation condensed milk poured into the coffee cups of Vientiane, in the Spam pressed into rice in Guam, in the slashed hot dogs on skewers offered as a street snack in Phuket.
But for me, the young American, it is now an antique society, existing in the same amber haze of history that cloaks belle-époque Paris and Dust Bowl Oklahoma. Things that, to a generation previous, were part of childhood TV broadcasts are now as horses and buggies.
And so, perhaps one day, I'll have nieces and nephews writing about the waning days of the imperial American urge. About their conversations with a Kurdish taxi driver, or their visit to a Pakistani town destroyed by drones. Atrocity is immediate. The process of history lets the act of killing unfold into a million subtleties.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
A Gunman in New Jersey
I am at work. I periodically click on things between assignments, and I find myself on Reddit. There's a shooting going on right now at the Garden State Plaza, a large shopping mall in North Jersey.
Click. He's shooting outside the Nordstrom.
Click. I switch to a music video. I check my-email and take a sip of my coffee.
Click. The area is being evacuated.
"Real time." What an odd idea. As we follow the events in what we consider to be real time, the chances are probably higher that we don't know anything that's happening. A photo here. Some video of a distraught witness there. But, despite the zoom lens that we have on the events as-they-are, we interpret them like the Twitter feed of a B-list celebrity, with about the same degree of passion.
Garden State Plaza. Paramus, New Jersey. Is that where the Seinfeld episode takes place where Jerry gets caught taking a piss in the stairwell?
The ads tell me that the stream of updates is sponsored by the NFL Network. TOGETHER WE MAKE FOOTBALL. White font, black background.
He's stopped shooting. Or has he? What's he wearing? Is he still in the mall? Accuracy takes second place to speculation. The speculation, after all, drives traffic and therefore revenue.
The next banner tells me there is "1 FOOD THAT KILLS," next to a rubicund man with a sow-pink paunch. "1 FOOD THAT KILLS. Top doctors admit that this popular food puts deadly fat into your belly, thighs, and internal organs. Never eat this food."
The Reddit update is filled with phrases like:
• Not sure of the validity of it.
• Unconfirmed.
• Take it with a grain of salt.
We think we see something when we absolutely don't.
It's New Jersey. For me, it's the other side of the planet. I don't know if I know anyone in New Jersey. I probably don't.
But I'm first-world enough to never be too far from the 24-hour news cycle. We are endowed with a certain omnipresence. Time and space have, as David Harvey said, compressed.
These things tend to follow a pattern. Eventually, facts are established, guilty parties named, the fog will clear and bathos will set in. Melodrama supplants empathy. Guilty parties are named and shamed. Genuine analysis is smothered under the desire for a morality play.
Meanwhile, down the street, protesters are marching through Sala Daeng, Uruphong, Ratchadamnoen. I see a photo, and even though I see the same intersection where I bought my breakfast, it feels just as mediated and distant.
Christopher Isherwood, living in interesting times, could say that he was a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. My camera is shut. I am only thinking, recording nothing at all.
At the end of the day, as I'm at home with my whiskey-and-soda, the poor bastard has shot himself in a dark corner. Another unstable person, another regrettable decision. The main story is finished, and now the bottom-feeders in the comment threads will take over.
Click. He's shooting outside the Nordstrom.
Click. I switch to a music video. I check my-email and take a sip of my coffee.
Click. The area is being evacuated.
"Real time." What an odd idea. As we follow the events in what we consider to be real time, the chances are probably higher that we don't know anything that's happening. A photo here. Some video of a distraught witness there. But, despite the zoom lens that we have on the events as-they-are, we interpret them like the Twitter feed of a B-list celebrity, with about the same degree of passion.
Garden State Plaza. Paramus, New Jersey. Is that where the Seinfeld episode takes place where Jerry gets caught taking a piss in the stairwell?
The ads tell me that the stream of updates is sponsored by the NFL Network. TOGETHER WE MAKE FOOTBALL. White font, black background.
He's stopped shooting. Or has he? What's he wearing? Is he still in the mall? Accuracy takes second place to speculation. The speculation, after all, drives traffic and therefore revenue.
The next banner tells me there is "1 FOOD THAT KILLS," next to a rubicund man with a sow-pink paunch. "1 FOOD THAT KILLS. Top doctors admit that this popular food puts deadly fat into your belly, thighs, and internal organs. Never eat this food."
The Reddit update is filled with phrases like:
• Not sure of the validity of it.
• Unconfirmed.
• Take it with a grain of salt.
We think we see something when we absolutely don't.
It's New Jersey. For me, it's the other side of the planet. I don't know if I know anyone in New Jersey. I probably don't.
But I'm first-world enough to never be too far from the 24-hour news cycle. We are endowed with a certain omnipresence. Time and space have, as David Harvey said, compressed.
These things tend to follow a pattern. Eventually, facts are established, guilty parties named, the fog will clear and bathos will set in. Melodrama supplants empathy. Guilty parties are named and shamed. Genuine analysis is smothered under the desire for a morality play.
Meanwhile, down the street, protesters are marching through Sala Daeng, Uruphong, Ratchadamnoen. I see a photo, and even though I see the same intersection where I bought my breakfast, it feels just as mediated and distant.
Christopher Isherwood, living in interesting times, could say that he was a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. My camera is shut. I am only thinking, recording nothing at all.
At the end of the day, as I'm at home with my whiskey-and-soda, the poor bastard has shot himself in a dark corner. Another unstable person, another regrettable decision. The main story is finished, and now the bottom-feeders in the comment threads will take over.
Monday, October 14, 2013
Notes on a Conspiracy
I recently watched the excellent documentary-- well, excellent story, and serviceable as a documentary-- Resurrect Dead, about the hunt for the creator of the Toynbee tiles, the odd messages that mysteriously appear embedded in streets, primarily in and around Philadelphia. The story eventually focuses on one person, suspected of communicating through the most indirect of possible means: messages in the street, pseudonymous letters, short-wave radio, intercepted late-night television broadcasts.
Which leads to my own conspiracy obsession of late, the so-called Cicada 3301 sequence of events.
An apology before I further elaborate. Embedded citations are a symptom of an attention-deficit society, and I'm normally loathe to use them, but this seems to be one of the few cases where my writing really does call for them. I recognize that most, normal people aren't especially bothered, but I do feel a certain need to apologize to myself.
We, the public, know next to nothing about Cicada 3301, the big who behind it, or even the what of its existence. Certain leaked documents have suggested it to be a group of hacktivists, or a self-identified "think tank." Obviously, these documents are of questionable authenticity, but that's about all I have to work from. But I can say, with relative certainty, that if it's a lark or a prank or a viral marketing scheme, it is perhaps the most sophisticated in human history-- suggesting it actually is an organized, directed effort of global scope.
On January 4th, 2012, an image of white sans-serif text on a black background with a dark-gray watermark of a cicada appeared on 4Chan, saying that an organization was "looking for highly intelligent individuals." Hidden in the background, a steganographic message revealed to a Caesar cipher, which in turn led to an Imgur-hosted JPEG. Later puzzles involved mysterious phone number, encrypted Twitter feeds, haunting guitar music, and flyers pasted up in cities in seven countries. The full story has been told in detail and with greater journalistic flair in an article on Mental Floss, so I won't elaborate further here.
I spent some time looking at the specific puzzles, without taking up any of the challenges myself. I discovered Cicada well after both their 2012 and 2013 puzzle series. Furthermore, I rather doubt I'd be able to complete most of them. When I go through the technical details of each puzzle, I can summon forth some understanding, but I lack both the cryptographic skill set and the computer experience to really examine such problems lucidly.
So mostly I run into dead ends. A wiki, Uncovering Cicada, covers the Cicada mystery as it is known (which is to say almost exclusively through its puzzles that were solved by devoted Internet users), but a great many of the webpages that relate to Cicada seem to be dead links. The usernames of those who took part in the Cicada puzzles reportedly disappeared from the Internet after each month-long series. And as of a week ago, on October 6th, the Wikipedia page pertaining to Cicada was unceremoniously deleted.
This near-complete lack of documentary evidence seems perfectly in-line with the nature of the modern Internet. Rumor abounds, and the activities of Cicada take place almost entirely in the non-searchable, so-called "deep" web, a vast space orders of magnitude larger than the web we see every day. IRC users claim to have heard Cicada winners talk about activities, but these are obviously unreliable. And 4Chan and Pastebin, where much discussion has taken place, are specifically designed for high turnover of content.
One leak intrigued me. It seems to have been written by a native Korean speaker-- the author refers to the game of go as "baduk" and the letter's most glaring syntactical error places the verb at the end of the sentence, indicating a writer who is used to communicating in subject-object-verb word order, a characteristic of the Korean language-- but, dealing with this much opaque information, one begins to think that these are deliberately placed decoys to make the author's identity. There is something oddly compelling about it, though, with its paranoid evangelical-Christian jargon referring to "Jesuit thinking" and the "left-hand path." And while the ideas that the writer links to Cicada are presented as shocking, they frankly seem like rather normal quasi-anarchist thinking, suggesting the writer as one of those right-wingers who can't go to bed at night without checking under the bed for atheists.
After hours of reading and searching, and hours and hours of failed attempts at finding meaning, I have to wonder why I care so much.
Most people use the Internet for purposes ranging from the mundane to the imbecilic. We plug ourselves into the emotionally hollow world of social media, shopping socially, reading socially, thinking socially, our thoughts expressed in the devolved forms of the hashtag and the selfie. We are steamrolled by the major idiocies of the present zeitgeist: mushy confessionalism, a mass genuflection to the masters of marketing and advertising, a submission to the surveillance state in exchange for a false sense of security.
The appeal of the Cicada concept lies in its negation of all of these three, at least in its outward appearance. Instead of being confessional, it is terse. Rather than marketing itself, it hides. It has been speculated that it is in fact an espionage organization, but if so, like all espionage, it largely functions in a world that, for most entities that operate there, is shrouded in mystery. It emphasizes all that is cryptic and tenebrous within the web, and it emphasizes the hermetic, the baroque, the irreal, the cavernous, and the sublime in an Internet landscape that by and large emphasizes the opposite.
And for that, I'm waiting for something from them to surface again.
Which leads to my own conspiracy obsession of late, the so-called Cicada 3301 sequence of events.
An apology before I further elaborate. Embedded citations are a symptom of an attention-deficit society, and I'm normally loathe to use them, but this seems to be one of the few cases where my writing really does call for them. I recognize that most, normal people aren't especially bothered, but I do feel a certain need to apologize to myself.
We, the public, know next to nothing about Cicada 3301, the big who behind it, or even the what of its existence. Certain leaked documents have suggested it to be a group of hacktivists, or a self-identified "think tank." Obviously, these documents are of questionable authenticity, but that's about all I have to work from. But I can say, with relative certainty, that if it's a lark or a prank or a viral marketing scheme, it is perhaps the most sophisticated in human history-- suggesting it actually is an organized, directed effort of global scope.
On January 4th, 2012, an image of white sans-serif text on a black background with a dark-gray watermark of a cicada appeared on 4Chan, saying that an organization was "looking for highly intelligent individuals." Hidden in the background, a steganographic message revealed to a Caesar cipher, which in turn led to an Imgur-hosted JPEG. Later puzzles involved mysterious phone number, encrypted Twitter feeds, haunting guitar music, and flyers pasted up in cities in seven countries. The full story has been told in detail and with greater journalistic flair in an article on Mental Floss, so I won't elaborate further here.
I spent some time looking at the specific puzzles, without taking up any of the challenges myself. I discovered Cicada well after both their 2012 and 2013 puzzle series. Furthermore, I rather doubt I'd be able to complete most of them. When I go through the technical details of each puzzle, I can summon forth some understanding, but I lack both the cryptographic skill set and the computer experience to really examine such problems lucidly.
So mostly I run into dead ends. A wiki, Uncovering Cicada, covers the Cicada mystery as it is known (which is to say almost exclusively through its puzzles that were solved by devoted Internet users), but a great many of the webpages that relate to Cicada seem to be dead links. The usernames of those who took part in the Cicada puzzles reportedly disappeared from the Internet after each month-long series. And as of a week ago, on October 6th, the Wikipedia page pertaining to Cicada was unceremoniously deleted.
This near-complete lack of documentary evidence seems perfectly in-line with the nature of the modern Internet. Rumor abounds, and the activities of Cicada take place almost entirely in the non-searchable, so-called "deep" web, a vast space orders of magnitude larger than the web we see every day. IRC users claim to have heard Cicada winners talk about activities, but these are obviously unreliable. And 4Chan and Pastebin, where much discussion has taken place, are specifically designed for high turnover of content.
One leak intrigued me. It seems to have been written by a native Korean speaker-- the author refers to the game of go as "baduk" and the letter's most glaring syntactical error places the verb at the end of the sentence, indicating a writer who is used to communicating in subject-object-verb word order, a characteristic of the Korean language-- but, dealing with this much opaque information, one begins to think that these are deliberately placed decoys to make the author's identity. There is something oddly compelling about it, though, with its paranoid evangelical-Christian jargon referring to "Jesuit thinking" and the "left-hand path." And while the ideas that the writer links to Cicada are presented as shocking, they frankly seem like rather normal quasi-anarchist thinking, suggesting the writer as one of those right-wingers who can't go to bed at night without checking under the bed for atheists.
After hours of reading and searching, and hours and hours of failed attempts at finding meaning, I have to wonder why I care so much.
Most people use the Internet for purposes ranging from the mundane to the imbecilic. We plug ourselves into the emotionally hollow world of social media, shopping socially, reading socially, thinking socially, our thoughts expressed in the devolved forms of the hashtag and the selfie. We are steamrolled by the major idiocies of the present zeitgeist: mushy confessionalism, a mass genuflection to the masters of marketing and advertising, a submission to the surveillance state in exchange for a false sense of security.
The appeal of the Cicada concept lies in its negation of all of these three, at least in its outward appearance. Instead of being confessional, it is terse. Rather than marketing itself, it hides. It has been speculated that it is in fact an espionage organization, but if so, like all espionage, it largely functions in a world that, for most entities that operate there, is shrouded in mystery. It emphasizes all that is cryptic and tenebrous within the web, and it emphasizes the hermetic, the baroque, the irreal, the cavernous, and the sublime in an Internet landscape that by and large emphasizes the opposite.
And for that, I'm waiting for something from them to surface again.
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Find Me at the End of the World
There is a reverie I keep having, one that I can trace to the memory of a
summer day, the spin of a dust-covered and yellowed fan, a scuffed
wooden floor, and myself as a boy with a globe and a well-worn atlas,
afternoon light streaming in through the twelve-paned windows,
highlighting neatly typed Italic fonts next to impossibly small islands
scattered, like unnamed constellations, across what seemed to be the
uniform, turquoise plane of the world's oceans.
The names alone were an endless source of fascination-- Tristan da Cunha and Diego Garcia, Howland and Jarvis, Palmyra and Clipperton. There were, of course, better-known places-- Easter Island, the Galapagos-- whose names have become bywords for remoteness and exotic lifeforms and bizarre histories, and which have become havens for adventure tourists. At this point, they are part of the media-driven myth of the desert island, a place where us "civilized" people can escape from the angst of modern existence. But these tiny islands, along with the icy granite massifs of the polar regions, fascinated me because they didn't conform to this fantasy. They were null spots, uninhabited or inhabited by only a few hundred people, claimed by incidental nearest nations-- Chile, Mauritius, Colombia-- or by the remnants of the French, American, and British empires.
And so many of them carry the scars of those imperial endeavors. There are the islands pocked with the remnants of phosphate mining. Ghost towns with Yankee and Aussie names haunt the atolls of the Pacific, rusted railway tracks running down to decrepit harbors, gravel airstrips overgrown, fresh water fouled and root-colored.
And there are the islands that bear the remnants of war, rusted fuselage and unexploded ordnance littering the idyllic beaches. A great many continued to have remote naval operations through the Cold War, and some do even today. Others were used for secretive negotiations. Yet others had the misfortune to be targets for bombing missions, nuclear and conventional, now transformed through imperial whim into red zones of shattered hillsides, uranium-laced soil, and malformed chromosomes.
After economic disaster and military conflict, the few remaining residents of the world's remoter islands have largely been displaced. Some are native. Others are the descendants of old colonials. And others, huge numbers, are the descendants of the slave- and coolie-labor forces that carried out the imperialist project, Africans and Chinese and Indians. As the smaller islands of the world slowly depopulate, the only people left are the military personnel that maintain the islands' connections to the metropole, and the scientific personnel that chart the motions of waves, magma tubes, schools of cuttlefish.
For the human story is only one of the many of each island. There are the odd flora and fauna that have emerged in geographic separation from the mainland, there are the underwater jungles of coral, there are the nesting sites and the seabirds' routes that cut invisible lines in the noonday sky.
My sights these days, are set especially on Kingman Reef, adrift in the Pacific, a few degrees above the equator. It's technically an American territory, although it barely rises from the surface of the water, a calcitic gravel boomerang as low in profile as an abandoned railway grade in a small town.The life all lies underneath. A single coconut palm sapling attempts, with absolute futility, to rise. It is a beach without a land, a single point where the whorl of the Pacific Ocean gives up. And I see myself on the end of that strip, looking out at the endless and unforgiving vastness that extends all the way to Hawaii, a full thousand miles to the north.
As climate change claims more and more of the world, these last isolated freeholds will, in all likelihood be snuffed out, along with the cormorants' nests, the travelers' trees, and the ruins of churches and lighthouses.
Part of me, the part of me that's been reading a lot of Rosa Luxemburg lately, wants to deem this to be the logical end result of capitalist expansion-- discover, enslave, exploit, vacate, destroy-- but most of me knows that I'm imposing a fairly tenuous narrative on something far subtler, more complex, more difficult to pin down, less attributable to any one social or environmental force.
But I know, more or less for certain, that I will never go to those little black dots on the atlas page that I used to dream about before the sun sets on them one last time and they disappear beneath the tides.
The names alone were an endless source of fascination-- Tristan da Cunha and Diego Garcia, Howland and Jarvis, Palmyra and Clipperton. There were, of course, better-known places-- Easter Island, the Galapagos-- whose names have become bywords for remoteness and exotic lifeforms and bizarre histories, and which have become havens for adventure tourists. At this point, they are part of the media-driven myth of the desert island, a place where us "civilized" people can escape from the angst of modern existence. But these tiny islands, along with the icy granite massifs of the polar regions, fascinated me because they didn't conform to this fantasy. They were null spots, uninhabited or inhabited by only a few hundred people, claimed by incidental nearest nations-- Chile, Mauritius, Colombia-- or by the remnants of the French, American, and British empires.
And so many of them carry the scars of those imperial endeavors. There are the islands pocked with the remnants of phosphate mining. Ghost towns with Yankee and Aussie names haunt the atolls of the Pacific, rusted railway tracks running down to decrepit harbors, gravel airstrips overgrown, fresh water fouled and root-colored.
And there are the islands that bear the remnants of war, rusted fuselage and unexploded ordnance littering the idyllic beaches. A great many continued to have remote naval operations through the Cold War, and some do even today. Others were used for secretive negotiations. Yet others had the misfortune to be targets for bombing missions, nuclear and conventional, now transformed through imperial whim into red zones of shattered hillsides, uranium-laced soil, and malformed chromosomes.
After economic disaster and military conflict, the few remaining residents of the world's remoter islands have largely been displaced. Some are native. Others are the descendants of old colonials. And others, huge numbers, are the descendants of the slave- and coolie-labor forces that carried out the imperialist project, Africans and Chinese and Indians. As the smaller islands of the world slowly depopulate, the only people left are the military personnel that maintain the islands' connections to the metropole, and the scientific personnel that chart the motions of waves, magma tubes, schools of cuttlefish.
For the human story is only one of the many of each island. There are the odd flora and fauna that have emerged in geographic separation from the mainland, there are the underwater jungles of coral, there are the nesting sites and the seabirds' routes that cut invisible lines in the noonday sky.
My sights these days, are set especially on Kingman Reef, adrift in the Pacific, a few degrees above the equator. It's technically an American territory, although it barely rises from the surface of the water, a calcitic gravel boomerang as low in profile as an abandoned railway grade in a small town.The life all lies underneath. A single coconut palm sapling attempts, with absolute futility, to rise. It is a beach without a land, a single point where the whorl of the Pacific Ocean gives up. And I see myself on the end of that strip, looking out at the endless and unforgiving vastness that extends all the way to Hawaii, a full thousand miles to the north.
As climate change claims more and more of the world, these last isolated freeholds will, in all likelihood be snuffed out, along with the cormorants' nests, the travelers' trees, and the ruins of churches and lighthouses.
Part of me, the part of me that's been reading a lot of Rosa Luxemburg lately, wants to deem this to be the logical end result of capitalist expansion-- discover, enslave, exploit, vacate, destroy-- but most of me knows that I'm imposing a fairly tenuous narrative on something far subtler, more complex, more difficult to pin down, less attributable to any one social or environmental force.
But I know, more or less for certain, that I will never go to those little black dots on the atlas page that I used to dream about before the sun sets on them one last time and they disappear beneath the tides.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Postpostmodern
We all have the books we've never read that lurk around our house. They sit on their shelves, ignored but for an occasional dusting, cursing us. But when so many readers use devices of one kind or another to mediate their reading, the books we've never read hide from us in unopened folders.
So I decided to take a look through the vault, and found a set of PDFs I'd downloaded nearly four years previous. I had a lot more free time back then, and was still quite dedicated to that big project of cultural studies, the "postmodern" dissection of human knowledge. And I wonder why, four years on, do so many of them remain unopened?
My first introduction to this project, so often known with a wonderful smugness simply as "theory," began a little less than a decade ago. I arrived at my little liberal arts campus, a gawky 17 year old with a boxful of my high school idols. Ferlinghetti. Kierkegaard. Camus. And god did they look fantastic on the bookshelf of my dorm room, next to the posters of R. Crumb comics, the Interpol LP sleeves, and the giant beneficent head of Jack Kerouac with that quote about the mad ones and the burn burn burning.
But these were adolescent heroes. At smoke-hazed house parties, in my English classes, I was suddenly surrounded by a whole new raft of predominantly French surnames. I knew that these writers, or at least a passing awareness of them, seemed to go hand-in-hand with any number of other things that I felt were worth my time: various psychedelia, whole bottles of red wine, noise rock, sex with arty girls.
And as a freshman, my attempts at theory-- much like my attempts with the psychedelia and the red wine and the noise rock and the arty girls-- were stabbing and met with mixed success.
But looking back, I don't think my embrace of theory was in any way insincere. The avenues of thought offered by European celebrity intellectuals suggested that whatever progress I thought I'd made was illusory, that I needed to revise my worldview. That struck me as a challenge, and off I went with a thick stack of reading material-- glossy new Verso editions, classic texts re-bound in plain, primary-colored card, LOC catalog numbers stamped on the spine in white ink. The opacity of French academic prose didn't faze me-- if anything, it emboldened me. This was not writing for weak minds, and I fully believed that it was only in the France at the height of the evènements de mai '68 that academics had the courage to fire such volleys at the system.
And, for some time, I swore by the power of theory to change lives. Each text I read seemed to swing a hammer at some bias, some invidious way in which the logic of late-capitalist society had penetrated my psyche. Reading became a giant Whac-a-Mole game, and I smashed away at orientalism, at phallocentrism, at the spatial fetish, at scientism.
But at some point, I began to read less and less theory. Slowly, I started checking out fewer and fewer library books by Gilles Deleuze and Herbert Marcuse, and instead opted for William James and Primo Levi. It happened so imperceptibly slowly that, looking back, I have to wonder why it happened.
The story of the postmodernist apostate returning to the humanist fold has, in the past decade or so, become something of an intellectual cliche. Any number of center-left magazines abound with the narratives of onetime theory fanatics recanting their heresies. These stories have a few common themes: a citation of some of the sillier claims made by big-name theorists (Jacques Lacan being a particularly egregious offender), a misty-eyed recollection of a foolish and idealistic youth, and a return to soberer thought-- typically the world of cognitive science and its unfalsifiable handmaiden, evolutionary psychology.
But that seems like bullshit too. Because a lot of theory does have value. As Terry Eagleton pointed out, we-- society as a whole, and especially those of us who like to think about things and write about what we think about things-- cannot return to a pre-theory age of innocence. The conversation has changed.
I still read theory from time to time. And not only because a lot of it is dense and interesting in the same way good poetry is-- Jean Améry, Theodor Adorno, and Roland Barthes were perhaps better stylists than philosophers-- but because a good metaphor can provoke us out of an intellectual slumber. In earlier eras, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein refused to systematize their philosophies, and no one doubts their importance and influence.
But the problem lies in the fact that it is just a set of provocative metaphors. The more I read, the emptier I felt. When you boil the world down to nothing but contradiction and a truth that might not even be intersubjective, you're left with a sickly feeling of inability.
Which of course allows for neoliberal capitalism, in all its ruthless, mechanical efficiency, to completely logroll any attempt at liberation. After I graduated from college, I spent the wet Seattle winter of 2008-09 in a rat's-nest apartment, with unemployment spiraling upwards, with working class black and Latino homeowners waking up to find the properties they'd invested their life savings in valueless. Somehow, all of the metaphor systems that suggested the predominance of the virtual, the evil of late capitalism lying essentially in its dullness, and the suggestion that the welfare state is in many ways as evil as the 19th Century liberal-capitalist state due to its totalizing quality-- ideas I can pin to Baudrillard, Debord, and Marcuse, respectively-- turned to dust when I was faced with a dwindling bank account, an empty e-mail inbox, and the marginal, insecure position I held in the much-vaunted "creative economy" when I finally found employment. All that was solid had, as Marx had put it, melted into air.
Yet whole swaths of the left still seemed entrapped in the mode of Baudrillard and Debord and Marcuse and their disciples, most of them operating under the baleful influences of orthodox Freudianism or the dark seductions of late-period Nietzsche.
A perfunctory look at any number of anarchist and left-wing blogs or the cultural studies shelf at an academically inclined bookshop or any of the manifestos issued by the erstwhile leaders of the Occupy movement-- oh how my hopes were dashed there-- will reveal a certain writing style. This cant is characterized by delirious cold opens, a sense of deathly ennui, and a poetic airiness without admitting its essentially literary character. It's been imitated enough to be commonly parodied, it doesn't sound nearly as good in English as in French, and it's something I self-consciously try to steer away from when I edit my own writing. And I hope to the god I've never believed in that anyone who reads what I write doesn't class me with those assholes.
Then what comes post-postmodernism? Being the sort of person who loses sleep over things like the correspondence theory of truth, I sort of flail about. I pick up book after book, whether it's science or philosophy or sociology or whatever. I read them with the same enthusiasm and for the same reasons my countrymen devour books by simpering self-help gurus.
So all I can say, without answers or solutions, is that I will continue to sit under my pile of books, no matter how futile it might be. Read and read and read, and do your best to ignore the abyss that keeps threatening to swallow you.
So I decided to take a look through the vault, and found a set of PDFs I'd downloaded nearly four years previous. I had a lot more free time back then, and was still quite dedicated to that big project of cultural studies, the "postmodern" dissection of human knowledge. And I wonder why, four years on, do so many of them remain unopened?
My first introduction to this project, so often known with a wonderful smugness simply as "theory," began a little less than a decade ago. I arrived at my little liberal arts campus, a gawky 17 year old with a boxful of my high school idols. Ferlinghetti. Kierkegaard. Camus. And god did they look fantastic on the bookshelf of my dorm room, next to the posters of R. Crumb comics, the Interpol LP sleeves, and the giant beneficent head of Jack Kerouac with that quote about the mad ones and the burn burn burning.
But these were adolescent heroes. At smoke-hazed house parties, in my English classes, I was suddenly surrounded by a whole new raft of predominantly French surnames. I knew that these writers, or at least a passing awareness of them, seemed to go hand-in-hand with any number of other things that I felt were worth my time: various psychedelia, whole bottles of red wine, noise rock, sex with arty girls.
And as a freshman, my attempts at theory-- much like my attempts with the psychedelia and the red wine and the noise rock and the arty girls-- were stabbing and met with mixed success.
But looking back, I don't think my embrace of theory was in any way insincere. The avenues of thought offered by European celebrity intellectuals suggested that whatever progress I thought I'd made was illusory, that I needed to revise my worldview. That struck me as a challenge, and off I went with a thick stack of reading material-- glossy new Verso editions, classic texts re-bound in plain, primary-colored card, LOC catalog numbers stamped on the spine in white ink. The opacity of French academic prose didn't faze me-- if anything, it emboldened me. This was not writing for weak minds, and I fully believed that it was only in the France at the height of the evènements de mai '68 that academics had the courage to fire such volleys at the system.
And, for some time, I swore by the power of theory to change lives. Each text I read seemed to swing a hammer at some bias, some invidious way in which the logic of late-capitalist society had penetrated my psyche. Reading became a giant Whac-a-Mole game, and I smashed away at orientalism, at phallocentrism, at the spatial fetish, at scientism.
But at some point, I began to read less and less theory. Slowly, I started checking out fewer and fewer library books by Gilles Deleuze and Herbert Marcuse, and instead opted for William James and Primo Levi. It happened so imperceptibly slowly that, looking back, I have to wonder why it happened.
The story of the postmodernist apostate returning to the humanist fold has, in the past decade or so, become something of an intellectual cliche. Any number of center-left magazines abound with the narratives of onetime theory fanatics recanting their heresies. These stories have a few common themes: a citation of some of the sillier claims made by big-name theorists (Jacques Lacan being a particularly egregious offender), a misty-eyed recollection of a foolish and idealistic youth, and a return to soberer thought-- typically the world of cognitive science and its unfalsifiable handmaiden, evolutionary psychology.
But that seems like bullshit too. Because a lot of theory does have value. As Terry Eagleton pointed out, we-- society as a whole, and especially those of us who like to think about things and write about what we think about things-- cannot return to a pre-theory age of innocence. The conversation has changed.
I still read theory from time to time. And not only because a lot of it is dense and interesting in the same way good poetry is-- Jean Améry, Theodor Adorno, and Roland Barthes were perhaps better stylists than philosophers-- but because a good metaphor can provoke us out of an intellectual slumber. In earlier eras, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein refused to systematize their philosophies, and no one doubts their importance and influence.
But the problem lies in the fact that it is just a set of provocative metaphors. The more I read, the emptier I felt. When you boil the world down to nothing but contradiction and a truth that might not even be intersubjective, you're left with a sickly feeling of inability.
Which of course allows for neoliberal capitalism, in all its ruthless, mechanical efficiency, to completely logroll any attempt at liberation. After I graduated from college, I spent the wet Seattle winter of 2008-09 in a rat's-nest apartment, with unemployment spiraling upwards, with working class black and Latino homeowners waking up to find the properties they'd invested their life savings in valueless. Somehow, all of the metaphor systems that suggested the predominance of the virtual, the evil of late capitalism lying essentially in its dullness, and the suggestion that the welfare state is in many ways as evil as the 19th Century liberal-capitalist state due to its totalizing quality-- ideas I can pin to Baudrillard, Debord, and Marcuse, respectively-- turned to dust when I was faced with a dwindling bank account, an empty e-mail inbox, and the marginal, insecure position I held in the much-vaunted "creative economy" when I finally found employment. All that was solid had, as Marx had put it, melted into air.
Yet whole swaths of the left still seemed entrapped in the mode of Baudrillard and Debord and Marcuse and their disciples, most of them operating under the baleful influences of orthodox Freudianism or the dark seductions of late-period Nietzsche.
A perfunctory look at any number of anarchist and left-wing blogs or the cultural studies shelf at an academically inclined bookshop or any of the manifestos issued by the erstwhile leaders of the Occupy movement-- oh how my hopes were dashed there-- will reveal a certain writing style. This cant is characterized by delirious cold opens, a sense of deathly ennui, and a poetic airiness without admitting its essentially literary character. It's been imitated enough to be commonly parodied, it doesn't sound nearly as good in English as in French, and it's something I self-consciously try to steer away from when I edit my own writing. And I hope to the god I've never believed in that anyone who reads what I write doesn't class me with those assholes.
Then what comes post-postmodernism? Being the sort of person who loses sleep over things like the correspondence theory of truth, I sort of flail about. I pick up book after book, whether it's science or philosophy or sociology or whatever. I read them with the same enthusiasm and for the same reasons my countrymen devour books by simpering self-help gurus.
So all I can say, without answers or solutions, is that I will continue to sit under my pile of books, no matter how futile it might be. Read and read and read, and do your best to ignore the abyss that keeps threatening to swallow you.
Monday, September 9, 2013
Saturday, Late Afternoon, Middle Sukhumvit
It's late afternoon on a strip of Middle Sukhumvit. I'm out for a day
of shopping-- looking through discount paperbacks at a used bookshop and
glossy coffee table books I can't afford at Kinokuniya, idling over a
cup of tea, ogling the expensive liquor selection at Villa.
The solitary walker in Bangkok will occasionally encounter sections of utter loveliness-- there are the rotting old canalside neighborhoods near near the river, the procession of white bridges with spilling bougainvilleas over the Khlong Prem Prachakon, the broad, tree-lined plaisances of Ratchadamnoen Nok and Phaya Thai, the old hyper-specific neighborhoods-- districts of luthiers and tanners, flower markets and Afghan jewellers, that dot the more antique sections of the city.
But there are also countless neighborhoods that make your skin crawl. A neighborhood like that around the Phrom Phong metro stop seems fine in the evening-- the shop windows are brightly lit, the bars and restaurants are just starting to fill up, and you might be a bit drunk yourself, you might be on your way to meet friends, you might have a date.
It's in late afternoon, during the smoggy, saffron-colored stage an hour or two before sunset, that it is at both its most horrifying and its most pathetic. The sois are exhaust-choked canyons lined with '60s shophouses, some of them left to rot, carrying the scars of typhoons, car crashes, smashed windows. Others bear garish renovations-- there is nothing more uniquely atrocious and tasteless than plaster Corinthian columns framing blue tinted-glass windows. Tourist restaurants-- the sign says THAIFOOD WESTERN FOOD VERY CHEAP-- serve up watery curries and thin, limp cheeseburgers with wilted lettuce. And above all else, there is the omnipresence of the sexualized industries-- whether as direct as strip clubs, or as indirect as sports bars with waitresses in skin-tight dresses advertising Beer Chang. And for the clannish Japanese businessmen that make their homes in this neighborhood, cracked signs indicate karaoke bars where Thai girls in bunny ears and schoolgirl outfits get felt up by Johnny Walker-soaked keiretsu functionaries.
The architecture and the commerce of the area are mirrored by the denizens. A sickly red wet-season twilight sets in. Stringy backpackers with serious suntans and filthy t-shirts cross the intersection in swift-moving twos and threes. A small group of heavily made-up young women in lacy white dresses have just finished doing a promotion for a brand of skin cream and they sit down, exhausted from having spent the day standing and smiling in four-inch heels. Toadlike white men, sweating through their shirts and their buzz cuts, mill about, led on invisible leashes by squat, flat-nosed Northeastern Thai wives with rusted complexions and knockoff Gucci bags. The beggars go out of their way to degrade themselves for extra pity. Aiming squarely for the tourist market, the legless drag themselves on their bellies across the rough pavement, and the armless wave their stumps like flags at a parade.
I often tell my friends in more northerly climes that the character of Thailand is rather Mediterranean-- Vespas and great food, coups and messily parked cars, ancient civilizations and primary colors, guitarists and prizefighters. But in the humid, sighing, late afternoon around here, Bangkok reminds me more of Weimar-era Berlin-- likewise a decadent society in perennial economic and political chaos, a furious nightlife catering to those rich enough to be insulated from this chaos, its streets filled with disfigured panhandlers and cackling streetwalkers.
And for this very reason, I've felt powerfully drawn, lately, to the expressionists and their fellow travelers.
The leering faces make up the carnival masks of James Ensor.
Half the amphetamine-riddled faces I see on the street could be in Egon Schiele paintings.
And the slum children, the old ladies, the hunchbacks, inhabit the woodcuts of Käthe Kollwitz.
It should be said that this sense of decadence and decrepitude is by no means unique to Bangkok-- plenty of places from Rome to New Orleans to Prague to Shanghai to Buenos Aires have similar reputations. But I've rarely been any place that has the same sense of innate rot, a flagging ferroconcrete sigh of a place sinking into the salt marshes.
I sometimes find the proximity of horror in Bangkok to have a certain comforting quality-- stare the devil in the face every day and blow him a raspberry. I can claim that I'm living comfortably in a contradiction, willing to confront the miseries that define the lives of vast numbers of working people haunted by the specter of capitalism, living without first-world blinders. I can maintain my world-weary edge, and posit myself as not one of those foreigners in Thailand, the mindless horde who refuse to face themselves or their place in the world. And while there is at least a grain of truth in these stances, they are also postures of self-deception. I construct a narrative for myself in an attempt to justify my own uncertainties, insecurities, and instabilities.
All of which leads me to something of a dead end. Now, I'm sitting here in front of a coffee, feeling glum. The sun has finally fallen behind the rain clouds, leaving only a smudge of light on the far horizon.
This neighborhood at night seems jet-black at times. Certain roads are lined with brightly lit white towers, while others project a rather jankety but homey street carnival mood with their food stalls and machinists' shops. But this stretch of Sukhumvit right now is only empty restaurants and dirty signage, the steely glare of emptied office buildings and an architecture that, after sunset, absorbs the blackness of night into its steel and masonry armature.
But some stories, I'm afraid, have no resolution in real life. No matter what stories I try to weave about where I am and where I am going and why I am here, I'm left with more questions than answers. The city yields nothing. No theme, no plot, and no real sense of character, but the streetlights do line up to form an ellipsis in the soft rain.
The solitary walker in Bangkok will occasionally encounter sections of utter loveliness-- there are the rotting old canalside neighborhoods near near the river, the procession of white bridges with spilling bougainvilleas over the Khlong Prem Prachakon, the broad, tree-lined plaisances of Ratchadamnoen Nok and Phaya Thai, the old hyper-specific neighborhoods-- districts of luthiers and tanners, flower markets and Afghan jewellers, that dot the more antique sections of the city.
But there are also countless neighborhoods that make your skin crawl. A neighborhood like that around the Phrom Phong metro stop seems fine in the evening-- the shop windows are brightly lit, the bars and restaurants are just starting to fill up, and you might be a bit drunk yourself, you might be on your way to meet friends, you might have a date.
It's in late afternoon, during the smoggy, saffron-colored stage an hour or two before sunset, that it is at both its most horrifying and its most pathetic. The sois are exhaust-choked canyons lined with '60s shophouses, some of them left to rot, carrying the scars of typhoons, car crashes, smashed windows. Others bear garish renovations-- there is nothing more uniquely atrocious and tasteless than plaster Corinthian columns framing blue tinted-glass windows. Tourist restaurants-- the sign says THAIFOOD WESTERN FOOD VERY CHEAP-- serve up watery curries and thin, limp cheeseburgers with wilted lettuce. And above all else, there is the omnipresence of the sexualized industries-- whether as direct as strip clubs, or as indirect as sports bars with waitresses in skin-tight dresses advertising Beer Chang. And for the clannish Japanese businessmen that make their homes in this neighborhood, cracked signs indicate karaoke bars where Thai girls in bunny ears and schoolgirl outfits get felt up by Johnny Walker-soaked keiretsu functionaries.
The architecture and the commerce of the area are mirrored by the denizens. A sickly red wet-season twilight sets in. Stringy backpackers with serious suntans and filthy t-shirts cross the intersection in swift-moving twos and threes. A small group of heavily made-up young women in lacy white dresses have just finished doing a promotion for a brand of skin cream and they sit down, exhausted from having spent the day standing and smiling in four-inch heels. Toadlike white men, sweating through their shirts and their buzz cuts, mill about, led on invisible leashes by squat, flat-nosed Northeastern Thai wives with rusted complexions and knockoff Gucci bags. The beggars go out of their way to degrade themselves for extra pity. Aiming squarely for the tourist market, the legless drag themselves on their bellies across the rough pavement, and the armless wave their stumps like flags at a parade.
I often tell my friends in more northerly climes that the character of Thailand is rather Mediterranean-- Vespas and great food, coups and messily parked cars, ancient civilizations and primary colors, guitarists and prizefighters. But in the humid, sighing, late afternoon around here, Bangkok reminds me more of Weimar-era Berlin-- likewise a decadent society in perennial economic and political chaos, a furious nightlife catering to those rich enough to be insulated from this chaos, its streets filled with disfigured panhandlers and cackling streetwalkers.
And for this very reason, I've felt powerfully drawn, lately, to the expressionists and their fellow travelers.
The leering faces make up the carnival masks of James Ensor.
Half the amphetamine-riddled faces I see on the street could be in Egon Schiele paintings.
And the slum children, the old ladies, the hunchbacks, inhabit the woodcuts of Käthe Kollwitz.
It should be said that this sense of decadence and decrepitude is by no means unique to Bangkok-- plenty of places from Rome to New Orleans to Prague to Shanghai to Buenos Aires have similar reputations. But I've rarely been any place that has the same sense of innate rot, a flagging ferroconcrete sigh of a place sinking into the salt marshes.
I sometimes find the proximity of horror in Bangkok to have a certain comforting quality-- stare the devil in the face every day and blow him a raspberry. I can claim that I'm living comfortably in a contradiction, willing to confront the miseries that define the lives of vast numbers of working people haunted by the specter of capitalism, living without first-world blinders. I can maintain my world-weary edge, and posit myself as not one of those foreigners in Thailand, the mindless horde who refuse to face themselves or their place in the world. And while there is at least a grain of truth in these stances, they are also postures of self-deception. I construct a narrative for myself in an attempt to justify my own uncertainties, insecurities, and instabilities.
All of which leads me to something of a dead end. Now, I'm sitting here in front of a coffee, feeling glum. The sun has finally fallen behind the rain clouds, leaving only a smudge of light on the far horizon.
This neighborhood at night seems jet-black at times. Certain roads are lined with brightly lit white towers, while others project a rather jankety but homey street carnival mood with their food stalls and machinists' shops. But this stretch of Sukhumvit right now is only empty restaurants and dirty signage, the steely glare of emptied office buildings and an architecture that, after sunset, absorbs the blackness of night into its steel and masonry armature.
But some stories, I'm afraid, have no resolution in real life. No matter what stories I try to weave about where I am and where I am going and why I am here, I'm left with more questions than answers. The city yields nothing. No theme, no plot, and no real sense of character, but the streetlights do line up to form an ellipsis in the soft rain.
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