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.