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.

Ozymandias at Arecibo

It's remarkable how much of my education I can attribute to my childhood/teen habit of watching late-night television. Before the Internet, this was where the mystery lay.

I was seven or eight years old, watching the X-Files – a habit that helped instill in me a lifelong love of the weirdness and darkness lurking around the American fringe. There was a lot of snide talk about “little green men,” a lot of cagey dialogue, gray sky.

Agent Mulder ran along the edge of what was identified as the Arecibo Radio Observatory – white guy-wires criss-crossing the elegant curve of a massive, concave satellite dish, precise lines contrasted against the verdant Puerto Rican jungle.

 

Nothing seemed more indicative of the modernist idea of the future. It was the same impulse I'd registered in old atlases from the 1950s and 1960s, with their breathless prologues proclaiming exploration as the... dramatic pause... destiny of man, at a time when such grand notions could be contemplated. I'd registered this impulse in diagrams of orbital paths, the ocean depths, cloud patterns. Nothing seemed to be a purer representation of the human will to enter communion with the stars.

On December 2^nd, as I scrolled through the headlines of the day – continued political fracas and pandemic spread across America (expected, miserable), the transitioning of a pint-sized Canadian actor (and pausing to wonder, over my coffee, if any nerdy dudes were no longer able to masturbate to Kitty Pryde) – there it was.

My childhood image of scientific progress lay there shattered,the jungle lurking beneath the cracked concrete.

 

In 1960, construction began on the Arecibo Radio Telescope, designed to study the ionosphere as part of a DARPA project to allow for more effective scanning of ballistic missiles. As with so much American science of the mid-20^th Century, the spirit of discovery was facilitated by Cold War interests. And yet it became known not for any defense against the ICBMs that never came, but for its pivotal role in astronomical observation. This was where solid evidence of the neutron star was found, where the binary pulsar was first observed, and where, in 1974, Carl Sagan and others transmitted a radio frequency towards the Hercules Global Cluster in the impossible hope that some alien species would find it, decode it, and nod towards us as an intelligent species.

That kind of optimism seems, in 2020, to be so damn naive. And it's not just the fact that it's been a shit year (not helped by Facebook Boomer “2020 duhr huhr huhr” memes). It's the fact that this was a once-mighty site of scientific endeavor, slowly defunded as the American public sector was strangled to death by increasingly fiscally hawkish governments over the '90s and '00s, until it was a mere shell of its former self. In 2016, Arecibo lost its position as the world's largest single-aperture telescope to the new Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope in Guizhou Province, China, and in 2017, Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, leaving millions of Puerto Ricans without power and water for months, even years, fully revealing the colonial nature of the island's relationship to the mainland. Cracks had begun to appear, and by the time Arecibo collapsed, plans were already underway for decommissioning.

It would be a hack metaphor if it was in a movie, wouldn't it be? The proud American institution crippled by the neoliberalizing state, before final humiliation by Chinese competition, a hurricane in all likelihood exacerbated by climate change, before finally giving up the ghost. Insert undertones of militarism and colonialism that existed since the beginning.

But if there's one thing I've learned over the last year, it's that things that would be hack metaphors in sci-fi movies are depressingly close to the reality we have, the reality of deepfake videos, Silicon Valley choked in orange haze, major news leaks coming through Tiktok, the Internet being dominated by clips of braying idiots demanding their right to not exercise pandemic protections at Yankee Candle, and Belle fucking Delphine.

Perhaps that's why I mourned Arecibo more than expected.

And perhaps that's why Sagan's hopeful message of 1974 seems more like a retelling of a certain Shelley poem:

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

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.

On Kyushu

My memories of Kyushu flicker, somewhat. All memories do of course, still-frame images linked by erratic motion, frayed by semantic qualifications, by overlays of sentiment, by conflations, by mis-remembrances, by objects out of place, post-production edits, and all the other things that separate memory and event. But what I remember of Kyushu flickers in the way light does, each image bursting with a flashbulb's glare.

And perhaps this is because the landscape seethes with fire. It is an island of smoking volcanoes, subtropical fruit orchards, massive caldera craters filled with seawater, rich seams of coal.

Whereas most of the country produces sake, given the warm climate, the preferred tipple has always been shochu, a distilled drink sometimes made from barley, sometimes from rice, and most popularly and most deliciously from local sweet potatoes, I came to adore its warm flavor, its aroma of candied yams and burning leaves, the combination of a malty, Scotch-like complexity and a clean vodka finish. And the way it paired with the local specialties – tonkotsu ramen swimming with pork marrow, rich Saga ribeye, almost more like foie gras than beef, the heavy seafood and pork broth of Nagasaki champon noodles, muscular little Kumamoto oysters, and the spiced, briney strips of roasted cod roe.

It was here that the newly emboldened Japanese Empire's sun first rose, with Admiral Togo's defeat of the Czar's navy, crossing the T of their fleet at the Tsushima Straits, leading to the seizure of Russian territory throughout Asia.

And it was here that the same imperial urge ended 40 years later, with the citizens of Kitakyushu at the northern tip of the island burning coal tar and releasing steam from power plants through the night to prevent American planes from repeating their attack on Hiroshima a few days previous, forcing them to reroute to a misfortunate nearby shipbuilding city, where the B-29 Superfortress Bockscar would drop the Fat Man bomb, detonating 1500 meters over the roof of Urakami Cathedral in the northern suburbs of Nagasaki.

In Fukuoka, my first stop, there were of avenues of Washingtonia palms abutting narrow canals, persimmon trees heavy with vermilion fruit, brightly lit signs along the river advertising an “exciting adult club,” a Germanic beer festival I wandered into, Japanese men in Bavarian hunting caps and Japanese women in dirndl singing underneath fairy lights about liebe and ambrosia and Goethe's Erlkönig.

In Beppu, the surrounding hills were obscured by the heavy clouds of sulfurous steam that came out from underground, a product of the hundreds of hot springs that fill the city, along with the jigoku, the so-called “hells,” boiling hot azure-blue and burnt-orange pools guarded by statues of tusked demons and the Chinese goddess of mercy, one filled with burbling mud, one spraying boiling water a few meters into the air every half-hour, and one teeming with crocodiles.

In Nagasaki, the harbor is crowded with cranes and shipyards, and the streets lined with old Dutch warehouses that were once stocked with the exotic products of the outside world during the era of the hermit kingdom – clockworks, gin, cloves, and lenses passing through on their way to the shoguns' households. I walked up to the epicenter of the nuclear blast, to the last surviving fragment of the old cathedral, a section of an archway, a Chinese lion growling at the base and at the top, European saints with El Greco faces staring into the void.

And I took a boat across the harbor, guarded by a statue of the Virgin Mary, to commemorate St. Francis Xavier's death in the city, past little islands where Catholic fisherman guarded their virgins as Shinto goddesses, where their crucifixes were hidden within Buddhist iconography, to the island of Hashima, studded with concrete towers from the early years of the 20th Century, where countless men (including Korean slave laborers in the war, didn't mention that in the audio guide) worked to extract coal from beneath the East China Sea.

I had come to Kyushu looking for some insight into destruction. I'd known about Nagasaki, of course, and also the Tsushima Straits and Hashima, and the eruptions of Mount Unzen and Sakurajima, and also Kyushu's reputation as a breeding ground for yakuza. I'd read Shusaku Endo's Silence, with its themes of trials of faith and the ways in which we negotiate belief in the face of an unforgiving reality. But as I crossed the island, destruction seemed to be a tangential factor.

Of the classical elements, fire is the only one which cannot be called a substance as such, but rather a process, which is why Heraclitus – whose work, what little we have of it, seems to me to be the most far-reaching of any of the pre-Socratic philosophers – believed it to be the basis for all other elements.

And in Kyushu, the fieriness seems to be barely contained. I was at a point on the surface of the earth where the very soil barely suppressed magma flows, and where what had once been an isolated, inward-looking, insular kingdom first faced every process of the modern world, mercantile trade, missionary religion, imperialist desire, and ultimately nuclear war.

On the Negroni

It was in 1937 that M.F.K. Fisher first said that there were two different kinds of food writers, those who imitated Brillat-Savarin, and those who didn't. It is as true now as it was then, although nowadays, it could probably be split into those who imitate Fisher herself and those who don't. She condemns memoirs in which “from each chapter rises a reek, a heady stench of truffles, Chateau Yquem, and quails financière” (naturally), and also the books where young men cycle around Europe staying at charming inns and denouncing “the barbaric horrors of the cocktail.”

I write this as I sip the barbaric horrors of a nice Negroni at a French bistro in my neighborhood. As much as I hate the term “mixology,” it's such a standard part of the gastronomic repertoire now that it's hard for me to imagine an alternative reality, a time when a well-made cocktail wasn't appreciated.

But when I think about what exactly a cocktail is, the context makes a bit more sense. Consider that Negroni I'm drinking, a classic of the génération perdue recently revived from obscurity. And, in 1920, it must have seemed so modern, so detached from any kind of preexisting tradition.

Start with the gin, a drink that's Dutch in origin, but English in soul, and which was one of the first truly commercially distributed alcohols. In England in the early 18^th Century, the hearty, traditional drink of the peasantry was local beer, but as the population moved to the cities, and a market opened up for a distilled drink made from lower-quality grain, gin became the crack cocaine of Enlightenment-era London, as immortalized in the famous William Hogarth print.

Or consider the vermouth. While herbed wines were a major part of the Roman and Medieval drinking traditions as well, vermouth took off as a likewise highly commercialized product in Continental Europe in the 19th Century, with brands like Martini & Rossi and Noilly-Prat all angling for the lucrative cafe market. Such an integral part of the new, highly branded world of alcohol was it that the world's first neon advertisement was for Cinzano vermouth.

And last, there's the Campari, which, while it has its roots in traditional Italian bitters, is a proprietary drink, invented in 1860, a pure capitalist-era product.

Now take those three things, themselves all delinked from the distinct, local traditions of ales, wines, and brandies, and blend them.

So I have to conclude that like the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, or the paintings of Henri Matisse, the Negroni has become a symbol of an older iteration of the modernist idea. Its pedigree comes with the passage of time. Just as how Matisse and his cohorts were once denounced as fauves, the insult became a badge of honor, before becoming a simple historical descriptor. The cocktail is no longer a “barbaric horror,” a bucking of antique tradition, but a part of that antique tradition itself.

I might be drinking this thing because of its delicate balance of sweet and bitter, but, like wearing a vintage shirt, or listening to an old 45 rpm record, there is the joy of placing oneself within the narrative of history. Part of me drinks it because, after a dull, monochrome day, when I see the countless stories contained in one object, it is like holding a prism to it. The whole spectrum becomes visible.

Lobster Thermidor

It seems so odd and arbitrary that we only occasionally think about the history of the things around us, and only at the things that we deem "historical" in nature. A 19th Century church, an old family photo, these are things where their oldness is an essential feature in the collective imagination, and so we always consider their histories. Or we see something new that has a specifically antiquated design, or something in which we know the history of why it was built that way, or the intent of its inventor or designer, and we can tell ourselves the story of how this thing that we see came to be in the world. We might let the shape of our electrical plugs, the bright red of a Solo cup, go without comment that day. But sometimes the narrative emerges, uncoils, and becomes visible. And so it was recently, when the narrative came to me in the form of a lobster.

The story of how lobster became gentrified is one of the more popular pieces of kitschy American food lore, especially in the wake of David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster. What was once considered an inedible pest became a cheap protein and a standard meal in the colonial prison system before its eventual, full rehabilitation as a luxury food. Or perhaps you've heard about the six-foot lobsters that reportedly roamed the shores of Manhattan Island in the Colonial Era, like animal symbols of the hyperabundance of a supposedly virgin continent.

 

And when the lobster came to me, that crossed my mind. But what was far more interesting was the way in which it was served. The beast came with its claws already cracked, its insides splayed open and blended into a rich, creamy filling, lashings of egg yolk crystallized along the sides of the shell.

 

The name smacks of antiquity. The dish was named at Maison Maire in late 19^th Century Paris in honor of a play, Thermidor, by Victorien Sardou, a titan in his time, but likewise now mostly forgotten. The play opened in 1891-- a time, known in popular memory, as the Paris of La Belle Époque, of Monet water lilies and boulevard flâneurs, but which was also a time of near-constant military intrigues, the Dreyfus Affair, the beginning of France's colonial incursions, and the far-right populism of General Georges Boulanger's revanchist political campaign, before Boulanger's suicide on the grave of his mistress several months after the opening of Thermidor. The play is the story of the Thermidorian Reaction, the 1794 French counter-revolution that lead to the execution of Maximilien Robespierre and the bloody purge of leftists in 1795, a subject so volatile that the government of Sadi Carnot banned the production at all state theaters... until Carnot's own assassination shortly afterwards, in 1894.

 

And the lobster thermidor has become something of a rarity. Once a luxury staple, it has faded into obscurity, along with other out-of-fashion dishes codified by Auguste Escoffier. Roux-thickened soups, sauces heavy with crayfish butter and meat glaze, breaded chunks of beef and veal, compound salads drowning under gelatin or mayonnaise, and grotesque, floral garnishes of puff pastry and vegetables have been relegated. We see their photos lurking in old cookbooks, with shimmery surfaces in oversaturated colors.

 

And so what I have on my plate is not just a dish, but a high-modernist relic-- a dish borne of the capital and excess and tumult of the 19^th Century, enshrined in the ideology and iconography of the 20^th, before being junked in favor of new tastes. A culinary Cadillac.

L'Avventura

I know I belong to the binge-watch era. Most people I know go through downloaded TV series, popular book series, whatever, in a matter of weeks if not days if possible. And yet I've always been the opposite, wanting to linger over things for as long as I can, sometimes to the point of waiting for years to finish movie trilogies.

And thus it was that I finally got around to watching Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse, the final film in his trilogy of “modern life” movies, one of the landmarks of world cinema, one name-checked by countless respected critics and filmmakers.

I'd been putting it off for the better part of a decade. When I was 19 or 20, I watched L'Avventura, the first film in the trilogy as part of my drive to become a serious film buff, the sort of guy who wouldn't just namecheck a movie, but prefix it with the name of the director... “Lynch's Blue Velvet,” you get the idea.

Like a lot of teenage boys with intellectual pretenses, when I first started to consider movies as art, I was drawn to the films of Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, movies that in addition to being generally quite well-made, had the additional benefit of having enough moment of badass and detached cool for a 16 year old boy to really dig. Escapist fantasies, really. All I really wanted to do was do the twist with Uma Thurman, or to turn a basement fight club into an anarchist cell.

And from there I moved onward, in fits and starts, through the films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Cassavetes, Kurosawa, until, after being delighted by Antonioni's far more popular Blowup, I got around to his early landmark L'Avventura. Here were the bright young things of postwar Italy on a fateful pleasure boat journey where one of their number disappeared. Panic, followed by a frantic search, and then everyone just... kind of forgot. Their friend's disappearance simply became a buzzkill, a distraction from their lives of weekends in Mediterranean resort towns, elegant aperitifs, and chain-smoked Gitanes. This was it, I thought. Ironic distance. Ironic title. The blasted landscape of a desert island off of Sicily, the garish horror of the unthinking rush into the modern.

The '60s had begun, and Italian cinema was changing. The neorealists-- wartime poverty, workers trying their best to make ends meet, bread lines and desperate situations-- were on their way out. Italian neorealists like Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti transitioned into lush period films, Pier Paolo Pasolini started the decade with the mean streets of Rome in Accattone and endied his career 15 years later with fascist mountaintop orgies in Salò, Fellini announced his new sensibilities with a helicopter-borne Jesus carried over Rome, and Antonioni began his long journey into vermouth-flavored ennui.

And yet, as I continued to explore the European art cinema of the '60s, somewhere along the line, it ceased to impress me. When I watched the second film in Antonioni's trilogy a couple years later, I was singularly unimpressed. In fact, I can barely remember the thing. It blends into countless other films I'd seen around that time, by Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Buñuel, and their fellow travelers, all using the same actors, Marcello Mastroianni, Alain Delon, Catherine Deneuve, Monica Vitti... how many expressionless middle-aged men entombed in their book-lined studies and painfully tasteful high-modern pieds-à-terre cold-shouldering their neurasthenic, be-Prada'd wives, the whole nasty scene pinned down by self-conscious reflections of Freudian and Lacanian devices.

Antonioni reached his low with his voyage to America in 1970, making the mind-numbing hippie fantasia Zabriskie Point, which tries to draw the, in retrospect, beyond-laughable connection between property crime, revolutionary Maoist politics, and human orgasm as equally liberatory urges in a late-capitalist society, all culminating in an en-masse fuck in the California desert.

Watching L'Eclisse saddened me. All these years after being stunned by it, I have to admit that L'Avventura is truly daring, is truly a wonder, and his Blowup is just as good.

And it's not like what Hollywood has on offer most of the time is any better. If I try to go to the latest CGI spectacle, I come out deeply glum, feeling that I didn't just watch a movie, I just watched a heavily marketed magic trick, seemingly designed by a cynical production team with a mission to condescend to its audience's basest instincts.

After a year or two of obsessive film watching, I sort of trailed off. I went through long phases, of whole months even, without watching a single movie. But that period had transformed the way I saw movies, the way I saw art more generally, and the way I saw the world. You so often learn more from what you don't like than what you do.

Atomic Number 10, Atomic Weight 20.18

When Primo Levi wrote The Periodic Table, his 1975 collection of stories and autobiographical pieces, his task was to employ chemical elements as central themes-- of the 106 elements known to the scientific community at the time, he selected 21 to act either as metaphors (argon for the destroyed Jewish community of Emilia-Romagna) or real-life materials that feature in the narrative (nickel as a trace metal he was employed to extract from mine).

He did better than most. There are some elements-- iron, gold, sulfur, arsenic-- that have imageistic value and metaphorical weight in everyday speech, but most remain obscure. When was the last time you saw a piece of rhodium, or even heard about it? A high school chemistry test? Ever? There's a reason that screenwriters can make up the names of elements in sci-fi movies, and we as the audience will accept them at face value.

But one of the few elements that does retain symbolic value is neon, and it's something of an odd man out. It's an invisible and stubbornly nonreactive gas, and it was isolated and discovered barely more than a century ago. And yet in its human uses, it has become so ubiquitous, and has come to be a byword for so many things.

In 1913, the world saw its first neon advertisement in Paris, and it rapidly spread around the world, the electric equivalent of the tropical lianas that spread and wrap themselves around every structure they come into contact with. As the world rushed to banish darkness (and its brother phenomenon, silence) from urban space, the neon light became the symbol of brightness, speed, and modernity. America got its first neon light in 1923. Within ten years, Times Square looked like this.

And with its universality came inevitable doubt and pessimism. There were nostalgics, like Tanizaki Junichiro, who wrote In Praise of Shadows in 1933 as a eulogy for tenebrous, traditional Japanese aesthetics. And there were the dissenters, like Nelson Algren who published his short story collection The Neon Wilderness in 1947, or a young John Kennedy Toole, who wrote The Neon Bible in 1954.

And then, as lighting evolved, neon seemed far sleazier, tawdrier, and more garish. It became the aesthetic token of Las Vegas, and of Taxi Driver-era Times Square. Rather than conveying an optimistic modernity, it became a symbol of decadence and false aspirations, a reputation it still has to a certain degree. In my adopted city of Bangkok, there is an inverse relationship between the reputation of a neighborhood and the preponderance of neon. It's concentrated in the semen-drenched quarters of Nana, Patpong, and Ratchada, and in the backpacker ghetto of Khaosan. The “karaoke” bars and other outposts of sleaze of course have neon signs, and rainbow-toned neon is almost as universal an indicator as a cigar store Indian.

With the sudden love affair with “vintage modern” aesthetics in the '90s, neon became itself subject to the fantasies of the nostalgics. Faux-vintage neon signs were put up, and surviving signs from the mid-century were bought up from decrepit steakhouses and meth-riddled motels across the country and artfully renovated for kitsch purposes. In certain circles, the buzz and glow of neon no longer signified excess and decrepitude, but the flickering imagery of a David Lynch film. And in saying that, I should note that it reflects both sides of Lynch's aesthetics, both the moronically grinning and cherry-cheeked facade of Hollywood's representations of America, and the vileness and filth that lurks underneath.

 

This doesn't mean that neon lighting or neon color schemes have been in any way “rehabilitated.” The grotesquely grinning clown of Circus Circus still stands tall on the Las Vegas Strip, and when you see a book cover with a neon color scheme-- Pynchon's Inherent Vice comes to me out of the blue as a perfect example-- you can predict the number of femmes fatales and brooding jazz trumpeters. For all intents and purposes, it has become the aesthetic signifier of the last century.

And so it seems to me that neon as we know it, a transfigured image coursing through a tube, entails all the hope and anxiety, the violence and optimism of that century, a time in our history when we really believed that utopian age would be an era of the machine.

The Ruins of the Contemporary World

At least a couple times a week, I find myself on the highway that extends north from the Din Daeng area of Bangkok towards Don Mueang Airport, through a set of dismal, sprawling nowhere suburbs, past minor government ministries, bottling plants, overgrown cane fields, and gravel lots filled with abandoned buses. And immediately to the west, it is impossibly not to notice the concrete arches and columns that flank the railroad tracks. Most people assume at first that they are a project under construction-- a new highway, or a new metro line.

At first, they seem to be blank, geometric abstractions, their purpose uncertain. But as their function faded over the years, their form took precedence. One has a stencil at its base, another bristles with rusted, cement-daubed rebar. Like the terra cotta soldiers at Xi'an, their seemingly identical profiles reveal their personalities on close inspection, and you see the individual features of each pillar.



This, in the dizzy years of the Thai Economic Miracle in the late '80s and early '90s, was the first stage of the Hopewell Project, a planned high-speed rail and road route to link the Hua Lamphong Railway Station to what was then Bangkok's primary airport. The project was suspended under the Anand Panyarachun government, but was still considered a viable plan until 1997.

But after the 1997 devaluation of the baht and the accompanying collapse of most East and Southeast Asian economies, the remnants became a stark reminder of overexuberance and its consequences, an ugly precipitate of the business cycle.

But they aren't alone. Bangkok is a city of abandoned spires, of half-completed office towers and unfinished condos, its skyline broken by the gray hulks of stillborn development. And there are the projects abandoned in the earliest stages-- fields littered with concrete stakes, drained marshes with lonely cracked, asphalt roads leading into their depths-- that are as oblique and mysterious as pictographs in the desert.

It reminds me, rather, of California City-- the radically failed attempt at grand-scale modernist urban planning in the Mojave Desert. Or, more contemporarily, to the half-built suburbs that blight the edge of countless Sun Belt cities, my own home nation's equivalents of Bangkok's unfinished ruins. What could be lonelier, more fatalistic than those cul-de-sacs-- the heart of America's white-picket-fence collective fantasy-- falling to pieces amid an arid wasteland?




We don't want to see the vision of the contemporary world-- something so embodied by the image of the modern skyline (and, to a lesser extent, the superhighway and the mega-suburb)-- already going decrepit. It remind us too much of the not-too-distant era in the future when everything we inhabit will be relegated to the history books, or simply forgotten.

But it seems to me that these remnants are almost essential to contemporary life. In a neoliberal economic landscape marked by radical concentrations of wealth, abrupt crashes, and the celebration of massive fiscal risk as a healthy manifestation of the investor's animal spirit, they are in one way not images of our world destroyed, but our world distilled.

A final question: how long will the ruins remain where they are? Built with the latest techniques of concrete reinforcement, they aren't easy to demolish, and some of them remain quite structurally sound. Eventually someone will come along and clear them, no doubt. But part of me-- any pragmatic considerations of economics, safety, local wishes, and urban aesthetics aside-- wants the city to keep them as somber reminders. They are a network of monuments, commemorating this era's desire and greed, and ultimately, its fate.

Creative Destruction

The other night I was walking around the intersection of Rama 9 and Ratchadaphisek. Above looms a massive façade, stretching with what looks like blocks down the busy road. It blinks with multi-colored lights, on again and off again, waving like auroras.

The same ad copy greets me every few meters as I walk down the road:

RAMA 9
NEW CBD
LOCATION IS WEALTH FOR THE NEW GENERATION

All under a photo of a handsome, pale, Pan-Asian male in a cardigan, sipping a coffee in his bamboo-floor condo, fawning over his equally handsome, pale, Pan-Asian child.

To build this new CBD, the clearances have begun. When urbanists and geographers make the claim that Bangkok mirrors Los Angeles, this is the sort of place they're thinking of-- isolated towers separated by vast parking lots, 25th story Japanese-fusion restaurants and rooftop terrace bars, palm trees silhouetted against a golden sunset.

You are recognizably in a place in transition. Entire neighborhoods seem to have been demolished wholesale, leaving vast tracts of blasted flatland, a few houses remaining here and there, lonely as prairie homesteads, separated by fields of rutted soil. The new skyline hasn't been built yet. Now there is only wasteland, and the cranes that hang overhead like the slender legs of an enormous arachnid.

I'm reminded of Baudelaire in his Paris Spleen. Mass destruction becomes the essence of modernity. During the Haussmannization of Paris, the broad, military boulevards (beautiful, yes, but could there be a more totalitarian mode of building? "Champ de Mars"-- how fascist is that?) cut across in ignorance of the old city. On the edge of the new boulevards, the rag-dressed residents of the old Medieval slums stare into new cafes.

I suppose the same sentiments were expressed by Marx when he said that "all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

On the right, Joseph Schumpeter famously claimed that "this process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in."

Now, a great many neoliberal economists will provide arguments about why this is a good thing, invoking the principle of lower prices thanks to greater efficiency and the axiom of economic liberalization preceding political liberalization, meanwhile invoking the twin bugbears of Mao and Stalin as the sole alternative option. But I have to conclude that these are mere bromides, poorly supported by empirical evidence and, on a more philosophical level, ultimately and deeply inhumane apologias delivered by the apparatchiks of Empire.

In the fields around Rama 9, we don't see what was destroyed-- we only see an emptiness, a cipher. Perhaps we see Baudelaire's street children begging at streetside bars in Sukhumvit 11, but this particular strip is a massive void.

And yet there is something so rapturous about it-- the flicker of distant lights, the lunar emptiness, the ice-blue glow of sodium vapor bulbs, the rush of oncoming traffic.

Because, despite all of the claims about postmodernity, we are still aching to be moderns. We don't want to give up on the thrill of the present, the near-sexual infatuation with the now.

The result is a dissonance, a raw ecstasy running headlong into rational empathy. Recognizing this dissonance, for me at least, tends to result in an especially bleak view of humanity's prospects.

The writer Marshall Berman claimed that the spirit of modernism was to embrace the uncertainty and contradiction of contemporary life, to thrive on the thrill of this modern moment, to see it for all its myriad possibilities and potentials. It's a lovely idea, and I'd like to embrace it, but I'm not so sure, and most certainly not as hopeful.

But I suppose that's my strategy at the end of the day. I continued walking down the road until I came to the bar where my friends were and ordered a vodka-tonic. And the next day I sat down at the coffee shop and started to write the above paragraphs.

On Pike & Boren

Four pillars stand on the corner of Pike Street and Boren Avenue, on the Western edge of Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. In the summer, gutter punk kids hang out there, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, busking for quarters.

Until the '60s, these columns held up the entrance of Plymouth Congregational Church, demolished when I-5 was built  They have been left as remnants of an older, more innocent Seattle, a quiet Victorian seaside town that only exists today in faded photographs. Stripped of their Ionic capitals, they jut out of the Earth. It is a monument without memory, a footnote to a glittering young city.

The skyline has become the symbol of the American city, the Protestant work ethic translated into an image. It is the glossy picture on the cover of every tourist brochure, of every Chamber of Commerce booklet.

Approach closer. At night in downtown Seattle, you see empty office buildings glowing with cold fluorescent light, crackheads muttering to themselves on street corners, the homeless Indians, the secure entrances with triple-sheets of plate glass, rough concrete walls, loading docks. The contradictions of the city are made apparent.

In ancient ruins, the monuments have been cleansed of their contradictions. We only have sphinxes and palladia, the glories of the past. In the 19th Century, the Brits built fake Roman ruins on the manicured grounds of their estates, an attempt to transpose a nostalgia for the halcyon days of Greece and Rome to their own provincial, petty aristocracy.

At Sukhothai, I wandered among crumbling laterite stupas and elegantly carved Buddhas. On the bone-dry plains of Central Thailand, all that was left were pools and palaces, temples and throne halls. Gone were the ordinary rice farmers and laborers, the Lao slaves, the lepers, the broken backs and crushed arms, the purges and burnings. We have only traces of ancient majesty, the serenity of the dharma-king.

So much of the modern skyline is made of glass and steel. With North American weather, it seems likely that they will fold and crumble. All that will remain of Seattle's Washington Mutual Tower, Space Needle, and Columbia Center will be fragments. They will dissolve into silica and ferric oxide.

This isn't a bad thing. Albert Speer famously designed his Nazi halls to decay beautifully, to evoke the romantic sensibility of future poets. There's a sick fatalism in that, a sort of cultural refusal to consider present realities, a privileging of the mythic over the real.

I walk past the pillars again. The sun is setting behind the Olympic Mountains. What is beautiful and valuable about a city isn't the monuments it builds, the narratives it tells itself. It is transient moments like this, when light and color and shadow seem perfectly harmonized. The dark shape of a ship, loaded with cargo bound for Asia, cuts across the still water of the sound. I wait for a moment and stare, breathing in the cold air, before walking back up the hill to go have a slice of pizza and a drink.

In Memory of Modernism

About a month ago, my attention was drawn to a set of photos by the Dutch photographer Jan Kempenaers.  He'd gone around the former Yugoslavia with an old map to track down the monuments commissioned by Josip Broz Tito to commemorate the nation's suffering in the Second World War.  Battlefields, concentration camps, and other sites of national import were memorialized in one of those high-minded Communist projects that are so often forgotten.  The monuments were built as a material reminder of the victory of ordinary people over the fascist armies that marauded Europe.

They're all rendered in this unearthly, brutalist style that, as Foucault says, "heroizes the present."

Some look like the gears of abandoned spaceships:

Others like the skeletons of prehistoric sea monsters:

And others, like my favorite, near the Kosovo town of Mitrovica, seem to be nothing but a profound and monolithic gravity:

Take away the graffiti and restore the concrete, and you can imagine the little socialist automobiles gathered outside, the Yugos and Skodas and Trabants and Dacias.  Neckerchiefed Young Pioneers are gathered around, posing for photos, shielding their eyes from the Sun while they salute.

The Yugoslavs put so much effort into memorializing the defeat of fascism.  And think how quickly after the fall of Communism the peoples of the old Yugoslavia slipped into a new fascism.  Tito combated the ethno-nationalist impulse with a vengeance, recognizing it threatened the unity of the state and by extension his own power.  1989 saw the flowering of Prague and Budapest, but further South it marked the dawn of a decade of religious sectarianism and territorial revanchism.

Religious and ethnic wars slashed the Balkans to ribbons, and modern monuments crumbled in the hills.

When I was off seeing the world, I passed through the little Cambodian town of Kep (during the Indochine days, it was Kep-sur-Mer), some 10,000 people on a rocky shore a few hours out of Phnom Penh.

In the '60s, this was the Cambodian Riviera.  Squint at the old town, and you can almost see it.  Men in white suits strolling along the quay, lacing their Khmer conversation with French.  Lon Nol's cronies must have sipped Scotch at the nightclubs, where Ros Sereysothea and Sinn Sisamouth sang.

The streets are quiet now.  When the Khmer Rouge marched into Kep in 1975, they torched the modernist seaside villas.  Teenagers in black pajamas, faces covered with red-checked krama scarves, must have gone through these buildings, ripping out velvet curtains and tossing volumes of Victor Hugo and the Reamker into the Gulf.

The black hulks of the old villas loom over the seaside today.  A number of them bear the bold designs of Vann Molyvann, Le Corbusier's Cambodian disciple who imbued fused the International style with design elements from classical Angkorian architecture.

Modernism is annihilated by another modernism.  Two radical approaches are incommensurate: the new architecture of Corbusier and the beyond-Maoism of the Democratic Kampuchea dictat.

Today, the peasants hang their wash on lines strung from the concrete columns.  The Khmers are tough as nails.  Everyone you see over 30 is a genocide survivor.

The government of Hun Sen, the one-eyed former Communist who has run Cambodia in some capacity since 1985, has announced bold plans to sweep away the ruins and restore Kep as the gem of the coast.  Onward marches the new capitalism that dominates East Asia-- the Chinese and Vietnamese and Cambodians have abandoned the anti-Western philippics and embraced the shopping mall.

So much of me still wants to be a modernist, to believe that Schoenberg can save the world, that a liberationist Marxist praxis will lead to a saner, less alienated society.

All I can be convinced of is that anything and everything is temporary and contingent.  We leave traces of our old desires around the landscape.  The old clashes fade into memory.  But in Mitrovica and in Kep, the flowers are still blooming.