Bugman in a Termite Mound, or The Barcades Project

One of the best ways to learn about a cultural or political epoch is to look at its epithets. Back in the ‘60s, the standard term for a certain kind of paranoid and gin-blossomed right-wing freak was to call them a “Bircher.” By the time I was a political animal, that had turned into “teabagger,” and of course in both eras, the term “fascist” was pretty standard – a term completely delinked from historical fascism, but awfully easy to deploy against the usual array of cops and chamber of commerce scharführers.

The right, for their part, haven’t been big on novelty in their slurs. “Communist” of course was always a favorite, along with its derivatives – “red,” “pinko,” and so forth – but those had largely been subsumed by more self-identifying terms: “liberal,” “feminist,” (and at least at its origin points, “woke”) and so forth, with the pejorative indicated more by the tone than the terminology. I am deliberately leaving out some of the terms used in the American South – lest large black men materialize in my living room and kick my ass for using certain words without the necessary pass.

But in the post-4chan era, they’ve gotten a bit more creative. What’s off-pissing is that frankly some of them are actually pretty pointed insults. Things being “soy,” for instance – fuck yes, there are pictures of me with my neatly trimmed stubble, chambray shirt, and Japanese glasses in full soyface mode, although it was more likely to be over a bottle of vintage Burgundy or an industrial ruin than a Marvel movie poster or something made with bacon, no matter how epic.

However, the term du jour for a certain type of effete metropolitan male seems to be “bugman,” coinage of Costin Alamariu, a.k.a. Bronze Age Pervert, someone you probably don’t need to be aware of. He tries to do the Nietzschean bitter aphoristic philosophy thing, but comes off as an undergrad tryhard who keeps the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in an open tab. He also tries Nietzsche’s humor, and fails miserably. However, there’s a regrettable shortage of definitions in his Bronze Age Mindset, and all we get are allusions to the nefarious means by which bugkind seeks to overthrow noble souls.

So for a working definition, let’s go to the Substack of former writer of painfully unfunny British sitcoms (The IT Crowd, Black Books) turned professional transphobe Graham Linehan:

“On closer inspection of the day to day life of a bugman one finds at its core the implementation of social erosion, everything that is taken from its origin is likewise bastardized into a regressive, virtual, stir-crazy version of its former self: eSports, Fantasy Football, Copy ‘n Paste Vidya (à la Bethesda/Ubisoft), New Atheism, Beards-as-personality, etc. each of these characteristics is of course filtered through the latest piece of cutting-edge high-brand technology the bugman can afford. One may have noticed already that bugmen’s ‘personalities’ are nothing more than the accumulation and composition of various popular brand names, technologies, TV shows, bands etc. The bugman is entirely defined by that which they consume. Thus the bugmen easily assimilate into their own groups, for their archetypes and traits are based off material possessions, as such grouping is quick, painless and has the added benefit of instantaneous conversation: ‘Sweet mechanical keyboard dude!’”

It’s not 100 percent wrong. And in the critique of the late-capitalist subject… the parallels with, say, Mark Fisher are numerous, even if Fisher was a genuinely humanistic thinker and Linehan is a whiny tittybaby who happened to get something right. Although given the fact that Linehan is himself a chubby, Twitter-brained new atheist, methinks the lady doth protest too much.

(And in another point against his credibility, he used a picture of Owen Jones as a type example, and frankly it’s difficult for me to imagine Owen Jones ever saying “sweet mechanical keyboard” in between his principled coverage of Gaza)

But that is the rough assemblage of ideas that was on my mind when my office moved from a rather dowdy modernist office tower built at the height of Bangkok’s ‘90s irrational exuberance to a shiny mixed-use development on what for years been a vast concrete lot on some of Thailand’s most valuable property. You can still smell the fresh paint.

Anyone who’s been in a similar complex knows the drill. It’s deliberately confusing – in that same way Vegas casinos are – office blocks and condos unified with a network of interconnecting passages, with near-identical cafes, ramen shops, Instagrammable objects, and earth-tone boutiques with messages about sustainability and pictures of gently smiling cotton farmers (definitely not the Uighur ones). The network runs on facial recognition scans with omnipresent and means both subtle and unsubtle to keep out the poors. The view of one of inner Bangkok’s last remaining slums is covered with a statue that reminds me of Goatse (if you weren’t there for the Y2K shock internet, don’t look), only a few mid-rise government housing blocks peeking out over its prolapsed hole.

But saying “high-security postmodern complex suxxxxxx” is nothing new, nor is a discussion of its innate bugmannishness. We’ve all seen Fight Club. Or for that matter. The Lego Movie. By now it’s hack. But when I look down at the ugly corporate-minimalist sculpture dangling over the chain coffee shop, I cannot help but entertain ideas. Needless to say, everything is not awesome.

So what is far more interesting to me is not the fact that it sucks, but the ways in which this genre of non-place is perceived. Because architecture easily becomes a proxy for culture and politics more broadly – unlike the other arts, which are increasingly siloed off into specialized and inaccessible realms, architecture shoves itself in your face daily.

Dense, mixed-use, transit-accessible, sustainability-minded development is posited by self-styled “urbanists” as a solution to the woes of our current era, and there’s a truth there, and their hearts, at least, are in the right place. We just crossed 1.5 degrees Celsius of mean global temperature increase, our dependence on the automobile is slowly killing us, and North American cities in particular are seemingly designed to alienate and isolate. So why not build things that are readily accessible by metro system or other public transportation, that combine residences, office space, and retail, that get people out of their cars and hopefully sharing a coffee in a more welcoming and inclusive atmosphere?

To which the main riposte is always… well then why is it so shit? Whether it’s the ugly condo-over-barcade-and-vegan-noodle-bar developments with chilly concrete plazas that constitute dense infill across the United States, or the sort of Erewhon’d and Uniqlo’d complexes with an architectural idiom that builds on the worst ideas of Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid that have blossomed all over Rising Asia, the actual environment fails to live up to how it is marketed. In these ostensibly public spaces that are run purely for the benefit of the private sector, dependent on mass surveillance and creepy biometric data theft, rife with hostile design elements, community simply becomes a shared purchasing pattern. Sustainability is at best a means of getting a tax break, and is more likely just another branding element. Inclusivity is great as long as it sells more matcha lattes.

Furthermore, my particular complex is just so fucking jankety – how fragile-looking some of the fittings are, as slapdash as Ikea furniture, the persistent sense of the temporary, the way the QR code readers I have to use in lieu of giving them my facial data are unstable at best. Again, we should know how this ends. The story of how the nice tweedy middle-class British professionals went ape in High Rise was published in 1975. My god, the story of an attempt at a firmware update leading to mass chaos, R.U.R., was written in 1920. The fact that the term “robot” comes from a play about robot failure should have been a warning, shouldn’t it?

So the complex has become targets for traditionalists of one kind or another. Some of them are architectural traditionalists, of course, who want to return to golden-ratio classicism and Ionic orders, and who are mostly just harmless nostalgics.

Others are rather more sinister -- those who don’t want to return, they want to RETVRN. Those whose conservatism is an incoherent blend of 1950s suburban American dream, Victorian moralism, grandeur both Bayreuth operatic and classical Roman, and completely romantic and mythological conception of nation and volk that quickly reveals itself to be more a function of aesthetic desire than any kind of actual intellectual or political program. The lack of program is important here – that would require them to actually commit to the bit.

Consider Alamariu, whose gigglewanks about “xenoestrogens” and silly classical-hunk posturing that’s frankly one step away from full-on man-boy love have filtered down through the brain-rot of the discourse, particularly in its techie, Peter Thiel-affiliated corners, whose participants seem pretty terminally bugmale – far too chinless and Fortnite-brained to have a chance at Periclean heroism.

So the bugman’s termite mound is a product of the capitalist institutions, with the only major challenge to their hegemony being pure reaction – appropriate in an era in which the representatives of electoral politics in so many of the Occidental power centers have devolved into a bunch of impotent centrist dorks on one side and a group of hooting vandals on the other side. But regardless, the processes of wealth accumulation continue – more power is in the hands of a tiny brahmin class, protected by the surveillance state, while the rest of us burn in the trenches.

How hot that fire burns and how deep that trench is both vary.

As for this bug? He could use a whiskey.

Among the Passport Bros

When one thinks of Bangkok expats, there’s a pretty standard image – the cadre of elderly creeps and potential 90 Day Fiance subjects. You don’t have much trouble conjuring that up, do you?

But for a long time, I’ve noticed a second, younger, less internationally renowned category. Rather than meeting women on the wrong side of 35 in neon minidresses at beer bars with Harley-Davidson signage and rawk-and-roll cover bands, they meet their partners free of charge and on the apps. Fewer Hawaiian shirts, more streetwear, or if there is a Hawaiian shirt, it’s very much of the Zoomer maximalist persuasion than the Saigon R&R variety.

For years, I’ve found them more moderately annoying than anything else. Some are socially awkward gamers, others have the douchey aspect of aspiring campus date rapists, and quite a few manage both. I knew that this was not a purely localized phenomenon – over the past several years, I’ve seen the prospering of a class of digital nomads in the throes of satyriasis emerge over the past several years, in Bali, in Chiang Mai, on the Iberian Coast, and in every other Coney Island of the mind that promises chill vibes. Wherever there are smash burgers, craft beer, and custom neon signs, they are sure not to be far behind.

But then on a rainy Saturday afternoon I discovered the term “passport bro.” And found their forums. Woof.

Think of it as the manosphere-ification of the sexpat phenomenon. A large number of (mostly) young-ish, extremely online men who had been posting misquotes of interviews with primatologists have decided to take their ideology out into the real world, in search of comely tradwives, their figures not deformed by the Five Guys diet. Being thoroughly online, they were unable to accept that they simply want someplace to park their peepee, and like to travel around, neither of which is objectionable in and of its own right, and so had to transform it into an identity tag. Furthermore, an awful lot of them give it a pseudo-political valence of standing against some form of “Western degeneracy.” Because nothing is less degenerate than booking a flight just to get laid.

As for how that manifests, its varies. Some of them seem dopey to the point of gee-golly, praising their inamoratas’ cooking and cleaning prowess, while others are more to the point (one highly upvoted commenter inquires as to which country has girls “most down to do butt stuff,” with remarkably sincere responses). In all cases, this is a phenomenon that could easily have been predicted, and when I first heard rumblings about incels “SEAmaxxing” in Southeast Asia, I was informed but not surprised.

There is also a racial dimension, of course, although it’s not necessarily the obvious one you might imagine. Because this is actually a pretty diverse demographic in my experience. Among the usual and expected crowd, you get an army of desperate dudes of East and South Asian descent, which upon reflection is rather unsurprising, given the common feelings of sexual and romantic devaluation among those populaces within the metropolitan core. And so they ask which countries are they less likely to be scoffed at in, and so off it is to Manila, where their passport holds more sway than their skin tone.

If I’m being empathetic, I could point out the many ways in which the Sexual Revolution has failed to live up to its promises, or if it has, they were very much the promises of a bourgeois realignment. The ways in which the apps have even further subjected dating to the cruel logic of the free market, the ways in which desire is constantly being redefined with a remarkable number of people having trouble catching up to how the process works, the ways in which gloomy economic horizons and broad-scale cultural pessimism have led to new varieties of romantic desperation, the ways in which social media and infinite free porn present a vicious hologram for the sexual desires of adolescents, the ways in which love is, in our reality, contra Lennon, something that can indeed be bought.

But that empathy fades with every Instagram reel of a sigma-coded influencer in some gray Slavic city or sun-dappled Colombian beach, every Youtube thumbnail with a shitty AI pic of a coy and demure Vietnamese maiden.

Whether I have met any self-described passport bros, I’m not sure – it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that people go around advertising. However, I live in fucking Bangkok – the type is everywhere, and I encounter them more often than I would like, and I have certainly spent time among them in practice.

When I meet a member of this approximate class at a party or event, they quite often assume that I am One of Them. Which to be fair is not unreasonable. I am an American dude living abroad in his 30s, and they are quite often also American dudes living abroad in their 30s, so it’s not difficult to imagine them projecting. To give an example, years ago, before such a term was ever coined, I ran into a young American at the club whom I knew but had never much cared for, who looked a bit like a white version of Yoshi and acted like Johnny Drama. I guess he’d struck out with the girl he was attempting to wrap his arms around, because before even saying hi, he slapped me on the shoulder and barked “bro, she’s not feeling me, go try your luck.” A bit like he was having trouble with a particularly tough GTA mission.

Then I have to then go out of my way to make it obvious that I am not on their team in any meaningful way, and if I am feeling drunk and ornery enough, I wind up mocking them until they leave me alone (something which often backfires, as there is a tendency to assume my actual contempt and allusions to their shriveled penises is really just friendly ballbusting among bros). I have a tendency to then feel terrible, feel like a shitty and judgmental person, before I look over to see them attempting to kino-escalate with a Singaporean girl too shy to push them away. I feel no happier having been correct.

But it is irrelevant I am not One of Them, I am, by default thought of as One of Them. Salt in my stubble, forearm tattoo, bourbon on the rocks in hand, and a certain psychogeography of the soul, and I know that there will be people who meet me – there have been people who have met me – who will logically apply their knowledge base of tropes and memes, and come to that conclusion.

I’ve never put much stock in the ideas of Freud and Jung – psychoanalysis was always a bit too disconnected from the ground, a bit too akin to religion in the ways it which it posits this detailed and almost mythological system of narratives and metaphors that it then uses as a read on the human condition as a whole. But damn, those narratives and metaphors can be compelling.

And the idea of the Shadow in the human psyche, there being this thing within you that the ego cannot reconcile, is to me the most compelling of those. The idea that there is this part of you that you try to tamp down that can still haunt you in moments of anguish, or what is worse, comes out of nowhere in the carefree reverie of an afternoon stuck inside.

On a bitter and overheated Sunday morning, with five hours of sleep, I might look at my face in the mirror with the same repulsion, along with the adipose tissue around my waist, the failures to meet my goals, a bit dehydrated, reaching for the half-empty bottle of sparkling water gone flat, the messages deliberately left unread.

And I have to wonder what's lurking behind my back.

The Courts of Bangkok

 Over the past 20 years or so, the term “Mid-Century Modern” has made its way first, from an outre hipster preference, or what would get called an “aesthetic” nowadays, to a standard term within the layman’s design discussion, to its final form, something dangerously close to being turned into mere cliché (let’s call this process “steampunking”).

A certain irony, given the degree to which the principles of mid-century design were quickly disparaged after the peak years of the design idiom.

Cultural liberals would evoke mid-century modernism as the aesthetic representation of the horrors of Stepford-wivery, of Levittown’s postwar American garishness, of the final victory of mass production over the natural world, of the arrogance of better living through chemistry, of the last dying gasp of the hegemonic straight white male patriarch.

Conversely, conservatives would seek a return to more conservative form, to flowery Laura Ashley living room sets, to the first suburban McMansions with their fanlights and cathedral ceilings and other echoings of previous eras (funny how the conservatives were OK with this form of postmodernism), mewling equivalents to a doddering old ham declaring that it was morning in America.

Now, I’ll always argue that an aesthetic principle can, to a certain extent, be decoupled from its point of origin (certified author-killer up in here), but it’s hard when looking at mid-century modern furniture, architecture, and product design not to be enraptured to a certain degree by this past moment of unbridled optimism, when the future still seemed shiny.

I started with a metal desk and a manual typewriter purchased at a school auction when I was a teenager, and now I have the whole package.

For the past several years, I have woken up every morning to my teak parquet floor, to high clerestory windows. To the sun slanting in through those windows, and through the screen patio door, designed to let just the right amount of sunlight in but to not overheat, with high ceilings to cool the air, a building truly constructed with the monsoon climate in mind. I can step out onto my cool tile patio, with the wicker cage around the hanging light, palms and bougainvilleas whispering outside, something of a vision of a jet-age tropical paradise, Viewfinder slides of the lands of stone idols and bronze Buddhas and drooping serapes in the high-modern decades between the signing of the instrument of surrender aboard the USS Missouri and the appointment of Paul Volcker as the chair of the Federal Reserve.

I can hear the opening chords of a Joni Mitchell song as I pour my French press, leftover charcuterie and dry Riesling in the fridge, with no comment as to why the Cathay Pacific stewardesses at the party last night were sniffling so much after coming back from the bathroom.

But what I am living in is a remnant of a remnant.

My apartment is what is known as a “court” in this town, a term widely applied to the apartment buildings of the 1960s and 1970s built as Bangkok transformed from a raggedy and malarial third-world outpost to an international city, as Yankee GIs did their resting and relaxing (and a whole lot else), as Thais in pursuit of the good life for the first time turned their eyes more towards Los Angeles than Hong Kong. And I live in one such building.

 

 

They’re disappearing, slowly. Torn down to make room for higher buildings in the city’s most expensive districts, left to rot. Hell, they already ripped out the tennis court and put in a KFC.

And yet this translates into a sort of Gothic splendor.

What portent is there in the rotting concrete beams? In the members of the old and well-connected family who live in the houses along the perimeter of the property, dying off one by one? In the relief sculpture of the mermaids by the pool, cracking, House of Usher-style before falling apart completely, only to be followed by the papaya tree that crashed into the pool the next day?

More than a few people have commented on the similarity of my court to that portrayed in the (mediocre) BBC miniseries The Serpent, about the life of Charles Sobhraj, the bastard son of a Saigon whore, a teenage petty criminal turned hanger-on of the glittering Parisian high society of the Gainsbourg/Bardot era, before becoming a sort of Charles Manson of Southeast Asia, carrying out the murders of backpackers on Ngam Du Phli Road – what was then the backpacker ghetto, and coincidentally where I first stayed – with the help of a ragtag band of deluded Western hippie girls. His actual killings took place at a court called Kanit House, once one of several in the neighborhood, just across the street from my own court, torn down sometime in the 1990s.

The series was filmed, too, in an old court in seedy Sukhumvit Soi 4, likewise about to be demolished at time of filming.

You still see the concrete panels tumbling, woodwork ripped out, ready for the new “smart building” office complexes and condos designed for Chinese and Saudi money launderers.

I too am waiting for a deal to be finalized, for another bit of Bangkok during the era when the country was thought of as a critical domino, when Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn and his men slithered through the city at the behest of Kissinger and McNamara and all the rest. When real money first flowed into this town en masse, accompanied by Chinook helicopters, and the crisis of modernity suddenly arrived, optimism and terror intertwined.

Once again, we look backwards to remember what forwards was supposed to look like.

Hideous Interviews With Men in Briefs

When one self-describes as an “introvert,” certain assumptions are made, both by people who identify as such and people who do not. It seems to me most people who call themselves introverts are just assholes hiding behind the language of clinical psychology, but I'd like to think I'm a true introvert – someone who gets their energy from being alone, and someone for whom a weekend cheek-by-jowl with another human, even one I love, is a strain, despite the fact that I like spending time with those around me.

And when I go out into the world, it's far less draining to talk to those who don't know me, to those who don't have any expectations. I don't know whether it's latent charisma or, more likely, the relative social isolation of the past couple years that has made people more talkative around me over the past couple of years. To meet the myriad weirdos of the public sphere – there are basically no stakes. As the teenage-boy fantasy movie I saw like 10 times put it, single-serving friends. They can be saintly and sweethearted. They can be absolute cunts. Sometimes they buy me drinks, not necessarily with the intention of boning me down (those that wish to bone me down, I'm leaving out of this brief musing). Sometimes they buy me drinks because it makes me more obligated to listen to their bullshit. Regardless, I walk away from the situation, to be forgotten by the parties in question in a matter of days.

So let this be a compendium of sorts, with the caveat that it's mostly going to be the gloomier of these myriad weirdos – it's much less interesting to talk about the kind, friendly, wholly ordinary people, or the simply boring people, or even the majority of the cruel and ignorant, who are simply cruel and ignorant, and about whom that's about all there is to say. But if David Foster Wallace took the diseased strains of the human ego and turned it into something both bitterly real and empathetic in his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, then these are my hideous interviews with men in briefs.

Case No. 1:

He, in theory, knows at least some of the same people I do, and he seems several years older than me. At first, the chat is pleasant. It seems we share similar taste in wine and movies, and he seems to fall into one of the most universal categories – a good dude. And yet as the evening continues, I can see him starting to crumble a bit, he starts throwing out phrases like “everyone says I'm an asshole,” and I'm not sure if this is typical Northern European self-deprecation, or whether he is admitting the fact that he is an asshole, or an asshole with a persecution complex who finds other people's interpretation of their asshole behavior to be evidence of their interlocutors' stupidity, and I have to wonder whether or not I should vacate the premises. I slowly sidle away, talking to someone else, until he mutters something a little too loudly to not be noticed, a little too softly to not be audible over the soundsystem, before going back to frowning into his old fashioned. What was it that he muttered? Was it that he felt slighted in some way? Did he feel the world's opinion of him was confirmed? Was this more on the evidence pile? And in my bitter moments, am I any fucking better?

Case No. 2:

He's a tourist here, but a regular tourist – we get them a lot in this part of the world, people for whom Thailand is the standard escape. Many are retirees looking to get a bit of sunshine before returning to higher latitudes, many are the standard sex tourists, a remarkably high number are various flavors of queer people from various countries who enjoy being able to publicly show affection without fear of state-sanctioned violence, and some are a bit cagier in their reasoning. This man is one of them. He's in his fifties, with the muscled-running-to-fat look of aging athletes. I should have known he would start making political points with me, to which I responded as I normally do – state my position, point out why I believe what I do, and push back as appropriate. Of course, he was a Tory, which is to be expected, and pivoted to a different subject the minute that a counter-argument was presented and contradicting himself often enough. And of course he talked about how glad he was we could have a “civil discussion,” and more or less sucked his own dick talking about how civil he was being. I would have left earlier, but the edibles were kicking in and it was raining out. But the more he talked, the more he mentioned his boyhood as the son of an English schoolmaster, I started to feel a bit bad. I imagined a childhood of Protestant morals, in which athletic prowess and high test scores as a child and financial success as an adult had long since become stand-ins for any kind of divine grace, in which law and order had substituted for righteous justice. The jowly middle-class product of a childhood of gray meat and caning. I used to have to listen to The Smiths and read Philip Larkin to encounter this sort of personality.

Case No. 3:

He invites me over for a drink, with a very uniquely Israeli sort of enthusiasm, asking me for advice on writing. I try my best to offer a few succinct pointers, but he's not having it, demanding more, and in exchange he promises me he can teach me how to get any girl I want. I hadn't heard that particular line in a while. It turns out he's in the porn industry, and he's more or less exactly how I imagine an Israeli pornographer to be – someone who's 50 and still seems pretty into hookers, molly, and trance music. He is perplexed as to why I cannot recommend a preferred bordelle.

Case No. 4:

He is a small Thai man of indeterminate age – definitely over 30, but could be anywhere between there and 60, although context clues suggest an age around 40. He's been at some event, and is moderately shitfaced, and strikes up a conversation about cocktails with me – I am, as always, happy to discuss my passion for the Angel Face, the Last Word, and all those other concoctions that conjure up lost worlds in my mind, but he's more focused on a perceived exclusivity. Unfortunately, he claims to know my boss – not my actual boss, but one of the top partners. He points out that whenever he goes to New York, he stays with a friend on Park Avenue. “You've got money too, I know” he says with a smile, as if that's true, and as if that's supposed to be a compliment, a recognition that we can look down on the plebs together. It's a reminder that in this part of the world, the elites make no attempts to humanize their image. There's no Bill Gates proudly driving a Subaru, no Mark Zuckerberg handing out grilled cheese sandwiches at Burning Man. There is only the man with tobacco-stained teeth showing off his skrilla (and god help me, I just looked up how to spell “skrilla,” because it occurs to me I've never actually heard that word written down). I politely decline a night of clubbing with him. On a Sunday.

And what sticks out about all of these cases is the way in which they reflect my own particular failures – the misanthrope, the self-righteous grandstander, the nihilistic sensualist, the endless consumer. And that in and of itself could constitute a whole set of other failures – the allure of fatalism, a difficulty to self-forgive, and a dreadful terror at the thought that destiny might be real.

I would say it sounds pompous if I quote Hermann Hesse, but fuck it, let's go: “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.” – Hermann Hesse, Demian

There but for the grace of god, go I, I think. Maybe you would think you go too.

I try my best to find the wounded heart – the logic that leads these people to where they were, and it's not hard to identify the lines of environment and nation and religion and history, of upbringing and inputs, of the infinitely complex contours of the human mind. And you have to wonder, could they have turned out any different? Could any of us? 

A moment of terror that passed the other day: at lunchtime, I see an man of maybe 80 or 85 shuffling down Silom Road with a walker – he looks exhausted, you can almost feel him squinting through his sunglasses against the glaring midday tropical sun. About my height, dressed not too differently from me. And with the same fucking tattoo in the same fucking place.

I move past, my heart racing, I look back, my elderly doppelganger walking away from me, and I look in the mirrored window of an office tower. Exhaustion on my face. The image of the city reflected and distorted behind me.

Scenes from an Izakaya and the Joys of City Life

I tend to use the phrase "the joys of city life" ironically. The screaming drunk bankers with Home Counties and New Jersey accents ruining your favorite bar? The joys of city life. The traffic jam caused by a pointless motorcade? The joys of city life. The homeless dude lying across the bus shelter bench at midday jerking his cock with abandon? The joys of city life.

But as of late, as we emerge from a multi-month lockdown here in Bangkok, I've come to use the phrase unironically. At a time when I'm reminded of everything I adore about living in a place I share with 15 million people, somehow managing to live cheek by jowl in relative harmony, lives intersecting, people working together, living together, eating together, drinking together.

Sure, at my worst moments, I trudge through the city under an umbrella, repulsed by every goddamn thing I see. But at my best moments, I practically dance through it, engaging with the rather old-world cafe society elements of it, how everyone kind of knows everyone within a certain negroni-swilling caste of which I am a member, sighing as the afternoon light dances off the river.

And there is no better venue to experience those true joys of city life than a good izakaya.

The izakaya is Asia's only real competition with the English or Irish pub as an institution of social and gustatory life, and unlike those two, the food is actually good. Furthermore, there's a far smaller market for phony izakayas -- whereas every college town in America has Irish pubs seemingly fitted out by the same wholesalers -- and so you're far more likely to get the genuine article, someplace that would be at home in a quiet out-of-the-way chome somewhere in Tokyo.

However, there are always signs of a good izakaya outside Japan. The lighting should be at just the right level of gaudiness, and generally I find marquis-style single bulbs to be a good sign. Furniture should be shabby and seemingly made from cast-off beer crates and things of this type. Specials should be written on long strips of paper on the wall in Japanese, even if virtually none of the staff and a minority of the customers actually speak Japanese. Paper lanterns advertising Japanese breweries and distilleries are a must. There should be at least one large smoking section with cheap aluminum ashtrays, possibly hidden on an upper floor, probably in complete contravention of local laws. No more than one TV screen is allowed, and it should be playing some highly stylized NHK cooking show involving mackerels being effortlessly filleted, or a baseball game, and if there are only two Japanese customers, they should be two middle-aged men cheering on the Hanshin Tigers or the Yakult Swallows.

So I sit down at my favorite table at my preferred izakaya -- certainly not the one with the best food, or the tastiest beer, but one with a good location and the atmosphere of this seat is unbeatable, right by the window. I nurse my beer, look at the infinite mix of reflected lights at sunset over the city.

This is my human aquarium: signs in Thai, English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and more, headlights and taillights, the parade of people coming home, going to night shifts, on their way to dinner and drinks, the couple in a tuxedo and ballgown on this perfect cool-season evening, 23 degrees celsius and breezy, the three (presumably) Burmese migrants, probably no more than 19, young men with fuck-you smiles at the city as they ride in the back of a pickup truck, the same look of defiance and adventurousness you see on any young man out to beat the odds far from home.

And at the tables around me, I'd forgotten what it was like to simply people-watch at the restaurant. Here's a young couple, a guy in a shell jacket with a corporate logo -- maybe he's a warehouse worker or a motorbike courier -- with a gold earring and a Ron Jeremy mustache, and his partner a chubby girl with a blonde streak who claps and gets out her phone to take a video when they bring out the pickled mackerel and blowtorch it, filling the dining room with the strangely tantalizing aroma of seared fish fat, both of them clinking their gigantic beers.

And over here, at first I thought she was a sex worker given the combination of gold sequined skirt, killer body, and fat old white dude accompanying her. But then the two are joined by an almost pathologically normal looking halfie girl of 18 or 19 in black plastic glasses and a Supreme shirt (his daughter? definitely his daughter) and my theory is thrown out the window. Guess this is just dad's new girlfriend... always awkward.

The next couple over is a bit more predictable, the Thai woman in her early 30s on her #grind living her #bestlife working on her laptop in her workout clothes as she drinks a highball, more than happy to ignore the highly replaceable hot French boyfriend of the sort replicated at a factory somewhere near Lyon to be the reference points for shitty partners for women around the world.

And directly in front of me, a rather fugly local couple, maybe 32 or so, ordering girly fruit-flavored beers and clearly, obviously each other's absolute soulmates in stupid love with each other, as wholesome as a strawberry milkshake down the shore.

There's another solo Westerner here, a man with a sticker-festooned Macbook, some marginal creative, maybe a graphic designer, maybe a video editor, someone working in the blurry world of "content" who washed up on this particular fatal shore -- although it might as well be Saigon or Sao Paulo, and it might as well be the same card flip of shaven head or manbun to hide the male pattern baldness.

He briefly makes eyes at the group of office girls feeling just a bit naughty, bitching in whiny tones about all the calories they're going to be eating, but still screeching with joy when their drinks and their giant hotpot come, all anxieties disappearing in the frothing beer foam and steaming dashi.

One of the women looks at me, wondering who the fuck this guy is with a giant notebook -- my giant Thai taxman's notebook in which I do all my writing -- on a Friday night at an izakaya in Central Bangkok. Not out of any romantic or sexual interest, mind you, but just out of perplexity. And I can see it in her eyes that she kind of wants to ask me, but she doesn't want to bother me. Eye contact is made, and she quickly averts.

And so I smile just a bit and take a sip of my drink and return to my notebook, and look out at the flash of lights and turn up My Bloody Valentine as loud as it can go on my earbuds.

T.S. Eliot on the Subway

Sunset. The rainy season, Bangkok, walking through the crowds of masked commuters. A rope is lifted, and a certain number are let through the electronic gates and onto the subway platform. As we board, the announcement is polite and almost cooing in Thai, stilted in English “Please refrain from talking.”

It's a line that has haunted me since I first read it, and I had to look it up again.

    “Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

     And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

    And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

    Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about.”

I was around 12 or 13 when I first read that, an early winter twilight falling over the prairie states, around the time I truly internalized how tawdry and depressing the world around me could be. T.S. Eliot wrote those lines from East Coker in 1939, fully aware of the much greater darkness the world was settling into once again.

I didn't know that then. I knew it from context. Paul Theroux was quoting it in a bit from The Old Patagonian Express, using it to describe the New York subway of the pre-Giuliani days – and even that, I only knew from transmitted experience, from reruns of The Equalizer and from cable viewings of the Death Wish movies, that showed New York as an ongoing turf war between gangs which somehow admitted both black-nationalist kids in leather jackets and sunglasses and white punks with pink mohawks.

I didn't know anything about T.S. Eliot's life, and nothing of his poetry other than bits of The Hollow Men and The Waste Land that I'd found in my parents' books. I didn't know that he'd written East Coker to expound upon his belief that science and material progress and art had failed to make people happier in any fundamental way. He was the scion of industrial wealth, his family owning a Saint Louis firm with the gloriously Victorian-positivist name of the “Hydraulic-Press Brick Company,” affiliated with the sunny, inclusive, progress-affirming Unitarian Church. And none of that really seemed to matter after 1,000,000 men got vaporized at the Somme. I didn't know about his stuttering attempts to turn himself into an English country gentleman, I didn't know about his bomb-dropping effect on literature in the English language, his fully-formed modernism signaling the rise of a new literary idiom.

I did know, though, that it resonated. Hard.

And it's a line that I think about in my darker moments, when the things that sustain me – whether that's art, travel, experience, hedonistic abandon – fail to suffice. When I am forced to confront my own atomization.

And I reflect on this line in particular because it seems so absolutely of the moment – the faces on the train, the growing terror of nothing to think about, the fear of not being entertained. All the new Netflix series look like garbage. You're scrolling through your phone when you're taking a shit.

It's an easy out to look back to a time -- around Eliot's own time -- when people often presume things were simpler, less alienated. But Eliot was looking back much further, to a time before the Industrial Revolution, when all reasoning was analogy, every moment was imbued with symbolism, and the notion of physical laws separate from the watchful eye of God verged on the inconceivable. To the time of the Medieval passion play and the charivari and the tales of the fisher king, when the sun rose and set through divine will.

It was a path already trodden by people like Henry Adams and D.H. Lawrence. Like H.P. Lovecraft, like Aldous Huxley, like Ezra Pound he saw the malaise of the present, mass destruction and new forms of totalitarianism, but lacked the confidence to move forward into the future, and instead fetishized the mythic past.

Lovecraft died, forgotten, a miserable incel avant la lettre a little before East Coker was published. Huxley quickly became a weird sort of proto-hippie, writing dull panegyrics to Hinduism and LSD. Pound disappeared down the rabbit hole of Mussolini worship and mental illness.

I read the full text of East Coker several years later as a college student, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Eliot's portent-laden avant-garde babblings suited the worldview.

But rereading the thing, I don't know how I missed the point. Eliot, having spent the interwar years saying fuck it all, seeing the rising tide of fascism, finally realized the world he lived in was worth fighting for, and he closes the text with uncharacteristic hope – I got the uncertainty of it, the dissociation, the clutching at straws. But then I read the last line as the train left the Sirikit Center station.

    “We must be still and still moving

    Into another intensity

    For a further union, a deep communion

    Through the dark cold and the empty desolation

    The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

    Of the petrel and the porpoise. The end is my beginning.”

A flower in a bomb crater, as it were.

I emerge from the subway at Asok, the electronic billboards leering, rain spitting. I shut my eyes, and I can almost hear the crash of waves all around me.

The Flight of the Black Swan

Chances are that when you hear the word “tropical breeze,” you think of the rustle of palm fronds, the billow of a floral-printed skirt, white sand, a sun-dappled sea, distant laughter.

You're not likely to think of a Saturday night on Sukhumvit Road, an abnormally strong wind thick with tropical humidity, doing nothing to ameliorate the heat, nothing to refresh. It's a couple of hours before all malls, restaurants, and bars are ordered to close, and quite a few places are still open, trying to get a last bit of trade before the tough times begin.

The staff at the malls are dejected, trying to shutter their shops. The escalator stirs to life as I place my foot at the base.

In August, the katabatic wind known as the Foehn blasts out of the Alps, turning people – according to legend, at least – to migraines, wifebeating, suicide, murder, a phenomenon known as the Foehnkrankenheit. It is a meteorological brother to the Santa Ana winds of Southern California, shown to lead to the dispersion of the spores of the fungus Coccidoides, which grows in the lungs, primarily asymptomatically, but causing pneumonia in those with weakened immune systems.

The trains have emptied, traffic is reduced, the Chinese tourists are gone, and if it wasn't so damn ominous, you'd say, on this Saturday night, that Bangkok had never been more livable.

A go-go bar plays pounding music, neon lights flashing for no one, a woman in a gold lame and pancaked skin whitener pouting desperately for me to come in.

I step into an izakaya around the corner where the staff are mostly milling around, a handful of customers remaining. Sitting next to me, a chubby Japanese man shares a mackerel and a beer with a transsexual hooker, the two attempting to banter in equally broken English, each dropping a few lines of the other's native tongue in. She gets a bit frustrated as the price negotiations begin. She manages to get him to agree to 7,000 baht, and then gives him her bank account number for him to transfer money to.

Camgirls must be making a fortune right now.

The nice woman in my bed turns over under the duvet and puts a Taylor Swift song on her phone, and threatens to cough on me if I change it. “It was fun,” she says, and gives me a perfunctory kiss on the way out the door. I still drink the last of the bourbon she wanted in her morning coffee that she'd left in the mug on the patio table.

I was going to go to China to see my sister, tuck into Sichuan hotpots, climb holy mountains. That obviously got canceled. I was going to go to Sri Lanka to explore tea plantations and colonial alleyways. That got canceled too.

“War, war, war. This war talk's spoiling all the fun at every party this Spring, I get so bored I could scream!” – Scarlet O'Hara

I hunker down. I'm supplied with gin, frozen duck breasts, dried lentils, and jasmine tea. My Internet connection is good, and there's relatively little work to do from home – something that will change in a few months as every company in the world will be passing liabilities around like a hot potato. In the hot season my pool is cool in the depths and warm at the surface.

At night, every light in the Banyan Tree Hotel is off. It stands there like the black monolith from 2001 at the end of the bed.

I shut my laptop and collapse into a restless sleep, only to wake up the next day, my sheets twisted, my heart pounding, to the chirps of the orioles.

Notes on a Steakhouse From a Murakami Novel

We live in an era in which our restaurants are designed, more than anything else, to be photogenic. Our dining rooms are decorated to catch the camera's eye. Our plates are garnished to act as indicators of lifestyle more than anything else.

Naturally, I fucking despise this. Which is why I'm deeply in love with a quietly and magnificently off-trend restaurant, hidden deep in the labyrinthine recesses of the older and grimier of Bangkok's two Japanese quarters, a dusty street where at night, the ladies of the evening come out in full costume to appeal to the tastes of salarymen, row after row of prim schoolgirls, nurses, prom queens, and kimono'd quasi-geisha on folding chairs.

Walk down past the security gate, past the signs for "erotic lady clubs," past the half-empty '90s shopping arcade with its postmodernist fanlights and glass-brick partitions, to a barely marked door. There is a sign in Japanese, but nothing in English to indicate the name, just the words "Teppanyaki," "Japanese," and "Dining" in tiny Helvetica Narrow tucked beneath the katakana characters, and an equally tiny Thai spelling of the establishment's name.

This is where I will pause to conspicuously not give the name of this fine eatery -- for those of you living outside Thailand, you probably don't care, and for those of you living here, I want to make it a treasure hunt. I'm sure you can follow the clues to get there.

Once you walk in the door, you see a dining room that was once peak trendiness, and its peak trendiness of course coincided with peak Japan in the early '90s, in the kind of shitty "Asian minimalist" décor in dark wood with lots of potted plants under track lighting. The soundtrack, is, naturally, piano jazz (the only other choice for such an institution would be the sort of '60s and '70s easy listening that enjoys an enduring popularity in Japan -- Claudine Longet, Judy Collins, and the like). Take a seat on the low chairs upholstered in walnut-brown vinyl, next to the little caddy of liquor bottles for the most conservative possible choices in digestif spirits -- Glenmorangie, Courvoisier, etc. – and I can't imagine the face they'd make if you asked for a craft cocktail.

Having sat down, a warm towel between your hands, take a look at the menu -- all of the à la carte items are written in Japanese, with no English translation, just a transliteration into Latin script. I've only gone at lunch, and I've focused on the lunch set items, all attractively priced, and in keeping with the teppanyaki tradition, it is a set vaguely modeled on Western dining, of the sort developed in Kobe in the wake of World War II during the MacArthur occupation -- a Japanese interpretation of an American interpretation of classical French service à la russe, brought from Moscow to the salons of Napoleon's France by Prince Alexander Kurakin (shortly before Napoleon returned the favor by marching 700,000 men into Kurakin's homeland).

And so what you get is a teppan-grilled steak or a "hanbagu" (oh how the Japanese can completely warp a borrowed English word) steak served under a fried egg with what the Japanese call demi-glace, and which tastes more like teriyaki sauce than a classical French demi-glace, but is wonderful all the same. It comes with the sort of Japanese salad that is designed more as a garnish than an edible, a natural coming from the country that perfected plastic models of food to place in restaurant windows -- fluffed pieces of cos lettuce, a few strips of Vegetable Incognito, a whole cherry tomato – along with a bowl of rice, a remarkably bright and flavorful miso soup, and three sauces (soy and shaved radish, kind-of-chimichurri, and maybe-mayo?), followed by coffee and a beautifully inscrutable Japanese dessert.

Everything is so aggressively outdated, it almost seems studied in its languor. The weird future-Japan '80s aesthetics haven't been preserved like treasured jewels, but have to a certain degree left to fade. One teppan sits mostly abandoned, and they sit me at one solitary chair at the end where a copper cloche sits on the grill alone, fake flowers dusty, and wrinkled, a decorative plate sitting next to the cardboard box the air conditioning unit came in. Sitting alone at the teppan, a piano soundtrack playing, unsure whether the palms are real or not, you can feel like you've stepped out of our reality and into a Murakami novel.

But it is a reflection of its surroundings. A relic within a relic, on a back street in a neighborhood dedicated to the flesh industry.

I often comment on the ubiquity of vaporwave aesthetics in the wild in Bangkok. With the Thai economy having collapsed in 1997 (immediately following Japan's deflationary period, and exacerbating Japan's problems in the process), and having not really recovered since, it becomes inevitable that the architectural style of early '90s Asia has become the definitive standard of the city, much in the same way New York is defined by the style of the years leading up to 1929, and the way Paris is defined by the style of the years leading up to the collapse of the Second Empire.
We can think about food in the context of history pretty readily. You can imagine the thick steak on the plate of a '50s Madison Avenue accounts man taking a big client out, or the massive joint of poultry being gnawed upon by a Medieval king.

So my curious little restaurant is but one instance -- one that takes the impersonal aesthetics of architecture and design and carries them into the intimate aesthetics of gastronomy. And for that it is a monument worth preserving akin to a row of old commercial buildings, an antique tea set on a dusty shelf.

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.

Arcades Project

I'm not entirely sure why Walter Benjamin failed to finish his Arcades Project. It may have been his untimely death in the Pyrenees, but it could have well been the nature of the thing. When you read the massive, uneven pile of notes and quotations that forms the Harvard edition of this half-finished (or quarter-finished, or nearly-finished, who knows) “Arcades Project,” you question whether or not such a thing would even be feasible, or whether, like a perpetual stew, it would always be subject to revision and addition and deletion. He was reaching for this vast, barely visible constellation of ideas, and he was accumulating his inspirations and documentary evidence, never forcing them together into a coherent message. Because Benjamin was, above all else, an archivist of ideas, a natural collector.

The Arcades Project takes as its primary character the flaneur, the wanderer of the grand arcades of late 19^th Century Paris, a world so remembered and so glorified as la belle époque, even as some of its most beloved figures, like Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Courbet spent their artistic life exposing the underlying contradictions of that world.

You could say that the artistic descendants of the flaneurs are those devotees of the endless labyrinth of the modern metropolis, whether renowned writers like Iain Sinclair in London or Georges Perec in Paris, or in the scattershot urbanist meditations of Rem Koolhaas, or among the countless urban explorers who post their photos and descriptions of abandoned subway stations and missile silos around the Internet. And yet as much as I like this approach, the space they work in is not the economic or spiritual inheritor of the arcades.

Becuase the arcades were sites of bourgeois consumption. When we Americans think of Parisian boulevards, we think of accordionists on the Champs-Élysées or some such thing, or maybe Monet paintings. We forget that in France, the term “théâtre de boulevard” refers to cheap, easy-to-understand, middlebrow theater, the local equivalent of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. And when Benjamin was calling Paris the capital of the 19^th Century, he was, as a good Marxist, calling Paris the capital of the high-capitalist era. And so, au contraire, the modern arcades in their economic and spiritual form is found in the suburban shopping mall.

This isn't entirely a coincidence. The modern incarnation of the American shopping mall was pioneered by Victor Gruen, an Austrian socialist who fled the fascist tide that swept his home nation. And he deliberately wanted to create something akin to Mitteleuropa coziness and hominess, something that had been so largely destroyed by the Second World War, and which stood in marked contrast to the auto-centric American consumer culture.

To this end, he designed the Southdale Mall in the posh Minneapolis suburb of Edina, with the hopes of turning it into the locus of a planned community of apartments, schools, and parks. These were never built, all that was left was a shopping center, surrounded by acres of asphalt parking lot.

For so long, I avoided malls, and I still, by and large, fucking hate them. In my West Coast life, I was able to avoid them by and large, avoid the recirculated air, and the mingling smell of Pretzelmaker, Yankee Candle Company, and Bath and Body Works. This isn't anything that countless other people haven't harped on for decades, and I feel no further need to elaborate.

And yet in Bangkok, the mall is the prima facie standard of commerce, unavoidable. Part of this is unquestionably climactic – if you're shopping for hours straight, you want to spend as little of that in the tropical heat as possible. But it also has to do with the stage at which Bangkok developed as a modern metropolis. The city passed overnight from open-air markets to malls without passing through much of a stage of grand department stores and shopping boulevards that marked the development of European, American, and Japanese cities.

Likewise, the malls of Bangkok continue to multiply, growing ever taller, grander, even as their American counterparts wither and die as my countrymen do more and more of their shopping from within their own homes.

How many malls are there in Bangkok? It's hard to say, because it's hard to know what to classify as a “mall.” Everything turns into some kind of shopping center. Cineplexes, big-box stores, they all have countless small businesses, ranging from simple stalls to major chains, springing up like mushrooms in the corridors. The result is that a continuum from the old market days emerges, with little shops selling banana leaf-wrapped desserts or a few racks of polyester dresses tucked underneath escalators or between the Starbucks and the KFC. In the dead malls of the city – closed-down branches of department stores, for instance – the market vendors move in, selling cheap Chinese bras out of bins, and fortune tellers set up shop on formica tables.

Not long after I moved to Bangkok, the whole vaporwave concept reached peak relevance, and it seemed especially pertinent to the city in which I found myself. A tangle of the artifacts of '90s irrational exuberance, virtuality, unfamiliar graphemes, bright colors, fluttering palm fronds, cheesy Greco-Roman and baroque motifs, and the sense of immanent destruction lurking just outside the camera frame. The image...

...matches eerily with reality:

These have become my arcades, the places I wander in and out of.

I move quickly eastward, barely leaving the air con. This is the pathway I know, and on an afternoon, like John Cheever's swimmer, I move from pool to pool. I start among Arab tourists and bootleg mobile phone vendors, in a structure futuristic on the outside, but tawdry on the inside, and move over to a photography gallery, catch my breath, and then stroll through two recently renovated centers, one with an interior all in white, one with an interior all in black. From there, I cross the fountain plaza past the line of teenage girls all taking identical selfies, past the revolving door and the doorman dressed like an Austro-Hungarian admiral, past Gucci, Prada. Over a concrete walkway choked with shoppers, and through the building burned down in the 2010 riots. This is the junction. I could walk north, into a thick, crowded market of Ugandan and Pakistani hawkers, an impossible tangle of narrow corridors and knockoff goods and tuk-tuks full of Chinese package tourists, but I keep walking east, and the crowds suddenly dissipate, and I walk into a pristine white cube. Empty hallways, distant, pulsing music. I pause for just a second, before crossing another concrete skywalk, past an incense-thick shrine with traditional dancers, into the curvilinear shopping arcades of a pedigreed hotel, before moving east into another largely empty, dying shopping center, with desultory restaurants and bored-looking market vendors. Next is the only major gap in the connected network of escalators and halls. Breathe in the heat, the smell of diesel, before going into a vast and well-heeled mall I've never fully understood, seeming to be in direct competition with a nearby establishment with the same owners. From there, I cross over a white breezeway over the valet-parked Ferraris into the final major name, quickly stop to look at wire cutters in a multi-story hardware and housewares shop, and end in a quiet, supposedly “ecological” complex of bamboo floors, where, exhausted, I get a cup of coffee.

This is the end of the river. I stand underneath the expressway, at a point where two of the city's major arteries connect, but as this one minute segment is a one-way road, little traffic trundles past. Some kids sit on the rails of the grassy, largely forgotten freight railway that goes down to the port, and motorbikes gather at the end of a long, sun-baked frontage road. A handful of ultra-luxury hotels are being built to the west, and further east, another, less cohesive tangle of interconnected passageways emerges, but this is the quiet lacuna in the middle of a very big city, a momentary pause. Here, nothing begins, only ends.