Leaving the Manazuru Station

Was I the only one who got off the stop at Manazuru?

I was priced out of the posh hotels in Hakone. So I looked on Google Maps. Just down the coast, I recognized the name nearby. Manazuru.

Someone close to me had stayed here. But now that I think about it, I didn’t ask her whether she liked it or not.

And in her novel of the same name, Hiromi Kawakami had a way of describing Manazuru as a slightly decrepit seaside town, with the same starry-eyed tone that she used in novels like The Nakano Thrift Shop and Strange Weather in Tokyo. Yet in those, it felt a bit too fluffy. Manazuru, though. It hit me across the jaw.

I do adore slightly decrepit seaside towns. I imagined, as I booked my hotel, long days of sightseeing finishing with Asahi and grilled fish by the pier, shops getting ready for high season, goofy statues of Poseidon.

And now that I think back on it, it seems a bit embarrassing. Letting a book choose your fate has the potential to be a shitty trope. Something from a saccharine NYT-bestseller magical realist book, something sufficiently “young adult” to prevent any meaningful challenges seep in.

But I am a fatalist. Even if I don’t believe in fate. So I booked a hotel.

It had been a long day of travel. First, Kanazawa to Ueno Station, where the homeless day laborers who had, decades earlier, built Tokyo, dozed against the art deco columns, where the crowds of tourists crammed onto the subway after taking their cherry-blossom selfies in the park, and where I switched trains to the pokey local on the old Tokaido Main Line, past the endless drip of Tokyo suburbs, through faceless Shinagawa, Kawasaki, Yokohama, before crossing into open countryside around Odawara, and eventually arriving at this little town on a little peninsula, hard pressed between the mountains and the sea.

“In Tokyo, we have a life. We can hide in our everyday life. There is nothing in Manazuru.”

What the hell was I doing here?

I had no other choice. I dragged my suitcase through the street. The streets, empty. The port, empty. The hotels, boarded up. The plum trees were in full bloom and the rain fell on them, scattering the petals to the ground.

My hotel was left over from Japan’s economic boom years in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The online reviews all mention how good the food is. They were not serving food.

The only way to shower is at the communal onsen. One would say this was a bit awkward, but it turns out that I am the only guest. The doors of each room are left open, lights off, futons neatly folded, carpets perfectly vacuumed, waiting for no one in particular, the hum of the ice machine the only sound.

The rain falls heavier. I find a sushi place down by the empty harbor, which supposedly closes at 9. I’m here at 7, and the old man behind the counter barely acknowledges my existence. He is already closing up shop.

“Le meilleur ‘sushi’ de nos vacances!” says an enthusiastic note accompanied by a yellowed photo of a Frenchman with a much younger version of this chef. From an era when “sushi” had to be put in scare quotes.

It wasn’t bad sushi.

I pour myself a little glass of Old Overholt and stand out on the balcony of my hotel, and I can hear the waves crashing 100 meters or so below.

The next morning the rain dissipates enough for me to walk down to the cape at the tip of the peninsula, across the putting green and through the woods. A torii gate is perched high on an impossible spire over the sea. It was built by the Tokugawas to protect Japan from the unknown menaces of the exterior world.

And then I return from whence I came. I cross the putting green again. Ancient Japanese men in flat caps and cable sweaters play out like projected holograms, and I wonder if someone is going to ask me if they saw me last year at Marienbad.

I spend the next few days making my way around this odd little stretch of coast west of the Tokyo metropolis, where fairytale railways and funiculars make their way up steep slopes to the old leisure towns of the Tokyo middle classes – to Hakone, like a version of Japan as seen in a Viewmaster of an old World’s Fair, cozy, manicured, with its old shrines in the cedars, and its futuristic sculpture garden with children of many nations hiding behind Henry Moore reclining figures, to the old restaurant in Odawara with its dusty light fixtures and grandmotherly porcelain-cabinet plating of simmered snails and delicate fishcakes, to the hideous, raggedy tourbus parking lot town of Kawaguchiko at the foot of Mount Fuji that took me five long train rides to get home from due to overcrowding.

Although I just learned that that very raggedy tourbus parking lot town is blocking certain views of Fuji due to the omnipresence of slackjawed yokel tourists with no sense of propriety. Much in the same way that, a few weeks previous, I was one of the last foreign tourists to walk the back streets of the Gion in Kyoto before our banning. And nothing will make you feel more reprehensible in your status as an outsider than seeing a poor geisha getting mobbed by dickheads with cameras like she’s a Kardashian when she’s just trying to go to her job that evening.

But now I was in Manazuru, and I was alone. And the contempt could only be directed inwards.

I spent the next few nights taking the train back to the deserted Manazuru Station, past the gravel parking lot with the stroad-side Nepalese restaurant and the smell of reheated butter chicken, up the mountain road to my softly lit and utterly empty hotel. I would slip into the burble of hot spring water coming into the onsen.

“On a date one month before his disappearance, in a ballpoint pen’s thin strokes, he had written ‘Manazuru.’ I fold the sheet of paper into a square and stick it back between the diary’s pages. Ma. Na. Zu. Ru. I whisper the syllables. I hadn’t noticed. Or had I forgotten?”

The central question of Kawakami’s novel is what happened to the protagonist’s husband, who had disappeared without leaving a trace some years earlier.

It was only a week or so before I arrived in Manazuru, that, by coincidence, I was reading about the johatsu, the population of the disappeared in Japan. Numbering in the tens of thousands, these are those who, like the missing husband of the novel, simply disappear. Sometimes they flee debt. Sometimes they flee shame. Either way, it is, like hikikomori, an almost uniquely Japanese phenomenon. Supposedly they wind up in large part in the fly-by-night quarters of Sanya in Tokyo and Kamagasaki in Osaka, refuges of quasi-homeless, quasi-employed Japanese men living in rundown boarding houses, something akin to the Bowery or Bunker Hill in past iterations of America.

There, they can live unbothered. They can pay people to disappear them: I looked up one of their corporate websites, as sunny as a suburban real estate office (I was originally going to link to their website, but that seems unreasonably edgelord even for myself, search for yourselves, it’s not hard you filthy ghouls).

Just as incidentally, I found myself, in the sunny, piney mountains above Manazuru, compelled to listen to a song by Connie Converse. I, too, was in between two tall mountains.

And I had somehow neglected the fact that having been wracked apart by her personal failures and disillusioned by an America that stubbornly remained just as ugly and racist and warmongering as ever, she, too, became johatsu.

“Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy; I just can’t find my place to plug into it. So let me go, please; and please accept my thanks for those happy times that each of you has given me over the years; and please know that I would have preferred to give you more than I ever did or could – I am in everyone’s debt.” – Her last letter, left behind in her home in Michigan

It occurred to me, then. I was in a ghost town of the elderly, dying on the seashore below Tokyo, plums in blossom, the winter’s citrus rotting on the tree. A coastal town they forgot to bomb.

And before I left, on the way out, I stopped on the hillside above, where Hiroshi Sugimoto collected and arranged his artifacts – ancient Japanese architectural features, allusions to local history and primitive astronomy, fossil beds, representative flora, representations of the mathematical forces that govern our universe, a remnant of a Shinto shrine scarred by the atomic blast at Hiroshima.

I have been there many times in my dreams. Chances are you have too.

Only as I was typing this did I learn that this approximate site – not mentioned at the installation itself – was the approximate location of a landslide that killed hundreds in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1922, among other things crushing a passenger train at the little station where I had alighted.

Now all that is left are mandarin orange trees. The oranges are excellent.

“What was it there, in Manazuru? Momo asked. I don’t know. I remember it, and yet I can’t remember.”

To Tokyo – to the rundown room near Shinjuku Station, in dense streets where Korean signs dominated and an ajumma who spoke neither English nor Japanese slept behind a partition down the hall. There is a sad Thai streetwalker who stands in the next door down, behind the vending machine, barely murmuring her come-ons to passing salarymen.

Before switching to a discount “art hotel” in Shibuya with faux-graffiti art, subway tile, lo-fi hip-hop, complementary Keurig cups with only the shitty flavors left, and free IPA for an hour.

A place where one could so easily disappear. And one where you’re reminded of the futility of doing so.

When you travel, you are, to a certain degree, not you. In the tribal imagination, you could get lost forever if you didn’t complete the ritual and come back home.

So I flew home. And in the vicious summer heat, waking up after a few hours’ sleep, putting on my H&M buttondown to go into the office, running a brush with my hair, I have to stare at myself in the mirror and confront who I am.

Place, Grief, and a Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Once upon a time, there was a watering hole I loved deeply – it wasn’t just that they made good drinks, that’s dime-a-dozen. It was the excellent bartender, who not only was handy with the shaker and bitters, but had great chat and knew how to wrangle some of the ornerier customers, who left feeling respected even as they were being 86’d. And more importantly, it functioned as a gathering spot for all of us fucking weirdos – bohemian fuckups, queer artists, masochists weeping over the ramifications of coldness and cruelty, cocaine enthusiasts zipping to and from the bathroom, veterans of the hospitality industry hardened by years on the line or behind the stick, septum-pierced and preening Onlyfans girls, mainland Chinese alienated from the Beijing consensus retreating into a world of wine and letters, and every other kind of degenerate that I had the privilege to call a friend, or at the very least a drinking buddy.

And yet owing to a recent change in ownership and staffing, what is left feels like a skeleton. The menu is the same, the live jazz remains excellent, but the clientele is different, the mood is different... something’s just wrong. And it’s honestly painful to witness.

This shouldn’t bother me as much as it does. After all, there will always be places to socialize and imbibe. So why is it that I’m in this mood?

Millions of pages have been written about our relationships with the people in our lives, but one of the strongest and most affecting relationship we have is to place. The concept of "home," however we choose to define it. Maybe it's the maternal farmstead, the place where generations of your ancestors were laid in the ground after lifetimes of trying to bring forth life from the exhausted soil. Maybe it's the rattrap urban apartment you fled to after that maternal farmstead rejected you, the place where you decided, on your own terms and with your own values, what constituted the good.

Or maybe it's something larger scale, a community, a nation, a language, a religion, again whether inherited or chosen. The only thing it really cannot be is humanity writ large. Because the concept of "home" is fundamentally an interior standing in contrast to an exterior, a place in which one can be as close to one's "authentic" self as that fractious term will allow.

Which is why the idea of losing one's home (small-scale) in, say, a fire, or (large-scale) a human conflict is so horrifying. And why the term "refugee" triggers such strong emotions, whether that is an empathy with those who can no longer return home or a visceral fear and desire to cast out, lest we be reminded that we too might eventually occupy such precarious positions.

But it doesn't have to be home. It is just as much the little corners we carve out that we mark with our memories. The favorite wooded glade where, as a child, you were free to be Cinderella or Aladdin. The house down the street where you had your first kiss. The hospital where your daughter was born.

Or simply that curve of the highway you love because it's where the trees and the sun line up in just the right way.

We live in a world in which housing prices around the world are spiraling out of control, "third places" as we commonly understand them are dying throughout the English-speaking world owing to market forces that have little capability to provide the sorts of coffee shops and arcades that can act as second homes for a minimal fee, and hell if we're going to be catastrophic about it, in which environmental horror threatens to dislocate millions and destabilize billions.

So we hang on to those precious few spots in which we feel something like what Heidegger called the heimlich, which can be very roughly summed up as a sense of ease. The effacement of one of those places is, inevitably, bound to hit a pain point or two.

So when we find those little places, it can be, conversely, a singular bit of hope.

I'm finishing my evening in a quiet, 100 year old tavern in Kyoto. When Secretary of War Henry Stimson made the decision to spare Kyoto from the bombings so many other Japanese cities were subject to, he not only saved the city's ancient temples, but also its fine stock of Taisho Period commercial architecture and its attendant businesses of the sorts depicted in ukiyo-e paintings of the 19th Century. And so it is here, with the tobacco-stained ceilings and well-worn tables.

Out there? America is trapped in an improbable political and economic morass with no positive outcomes, the UK is slowly sinking into poverty, with the average British child having lost a full centimeter of height over the past 10 years due to malnutrition, Eastern Europe is embroiled in war, the Middle East is worse than it been in my lifetime with countless Palestinians murdered and starved with the tacit approval of the developed world, heat indices are set to reach record highs globally, everyone over 50 is facing the future shock of being unable to parse reality, while everyone under 50 is facing a future that has rarely looked bleaker... and unlike in previous bleak times, all the bleakness is on all our screens all the time.

But here I am, beneath those smoke-brown ceilings, among the bottles of forgotten brands of tonic water and rye whiskey in my clean, well-lighted place. I'm the only customer left, save the elderly salaryman already passed out in front of his highball, cigarette already long turned to ash in his hand. And yet here, somehow... I'm at peace.

Ue o muite aruko

Namida ga kaborenai youni

Omodaisu haruno hi

Hitoribotchi no yoru

- Kyu Sakomoto, 1961

For this moment.

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.

Main Street USA

When I was in the fourth grade, I went to Disneyworld for the first and only time. For the most part it was a pretty standard experience. Like all kids, I was both totally pumped and completely shit-scared on Splash Mountain, I was just as shit-scared on the It's a Small World ride for completely different reasons, and I somehow realized, even then, that the Epcot Center reflected a kind of techno-optimism that already seemed passe, even to a child in 1996.

But my first view of Disneyworld was Main Street USA. This isn't exactly a hallmark attraction, but it's what you see when you first come through the gate, and its equivalent, which I'd experienced much younger, is also what you see when you first come through the gate at Adventureland in Altoona, Iowa, where I had my formative funnel cake and log-ride experiences.

And maybe that's because the welcoming experience is designed to be a comforting, familiar Americana, reproduced at 3/5 scale. It is an imagined America of the sort that Ronald Reagan invoked in his speeches about the horse-and-buggy days in Dixon, Illinois. We want to believe that at some point in America, there was this transcendent and indivisible notion of community. Nowadays, we think of the 1950s. But when the first Disney park opened, in the actual 1950s, the time of nostalgia was the 1910s, a time when Main Streets were indeed more vital, when small towns were still served by the railroad. And even in the 1910s, in the era of Fords and suffragettes, nostalgists invoked some kind of vaguely Jeffersonian or Jacksonian ideal.

It's hard to escape this particular cultural delusion. Both left and right political currents continue to appeal to “Main Street,” despite the fact that this is by and large a hologram.

Sure, there was a Main Street in my hometown – the “Main Street Cultural District” as it was eventually re-branded. What was “cultural” about it I never quite figured out. What it actually is and was is a strip, a few blocks long, of largely characterless early 20^th Century buildings, occupied by an American Legion hall, full of shops selling things like quilting supplies and diabetic footwear, and a clutch of bars at one end under the shadow of a coal-burning power plant -- an area I remember from my childhood as a vaguely sinister but somehow thrilling strip smelling of stale cigarette smoke and spilled beer, filled with the sound of clacking billiard balls and the roar of trucks from the nearby lumberyard.

Maybe the people in the 1950s or 1910s thought differently. But even in the 1910s... that was when Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street, the landmark work about the hypocrisy and loneliness of life in a small Minnesota town, considered a classic, but increasingly little-read as that world becomes a memory of a memory.

Yet fewer books have had a greater impact on me. His store-by-store description of the Main Street of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota on a hot summer day, as experienced by the young doctor's wife, Carol Kennicott, of the rotten bananas in the shop-windows, the feckless locals at the saloon door, the rusticated masonry designed to provide a semblance of architectural manners. More than anything else, this seemed to be something that related to what I knew.

At that age, 15 or 16, I devoured books that seemed to get to that idea, reading nearly forgotten writers like Sherwood Anderson and Thomas Wolfe and Booth Tarkington – writers whose books I found on dusty library shelves and under cats at used bookstores. And I didn't just love them because they spoke to my experience, I loved them because they seemed to see through the veil in a way that contemporary writers didn't (and still by and large don't, but I'll leave that for another day).

We look to the Main Street iconography nowadays because of the spiritual poverty and hopelessness of the present, in the same way that people of Lewis' and Anderson's day looked to Main Street because it seemed to represent a purer America than the industrial cities. And more often than it ought to, it forms the backbone of a grotesque and reactionary politics.

So I decided to go back to where it all began – not in person, but through the all-seeing eye of Google Street View. And not to Disneyworld's Main Street USA, which is probably the same simulacrum it has always been and always will be, but to the basis for Main Street USA, Walt Disney's hometown of Marceline, Missouri.

I knew what to expect. Few areas of America have been as thoroughly depopulated over the past 100 years as Northern Missouri, an area of soil too poor to compete with the rich black loam of Northern Iowa and Minnesota, and rangeland too constricted to compete with the plains of Kansas and Texas. Lacking in substantive industry, mineral resources other than a sulfurous coal only suited to steam engines, or towns of any size to serve as hubs, largely isolated from major transit routes, and without the mountains and lakes of the southern part of the state that attract droves of tourists, Northern Missouri, along with adjacent areas of Southern Iowa and Western Illinois, has become a dead zone.

What one sees in Marceline, Missouri, is a town, like many others, destroyed, with a vacated town square, American flags fluttering outside abandoned shops.

 

Meanwhile, in Anaheim and Orlando, and at the versions Disney has exported to its properties in the greener pastures of the Far East, it is still a place of parades and baton-twirlers, barbershop quartets and soda fountains. Somewhere in the distance, "In My Merry Oldsmobile" or "Daisy Bell" plays.

Most of the clientele has never seen a quartet sing in a barbershop, never been to a soda fountain, and the songs that are playing were hits before even their grandparents were born. But the nostalgia is not their nostalgia, it's the national nostalgia. And like most nostalgias, it acts as a cover for the fact that we have given up hope.

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.

Kansas City

My first memories of cityspace as such were of Kansas City. Not exactly an iconic American city, I know, but perhaps like its denuded sister city, Saint Louis, it deserves to be. Neither fully Midwestern nor fully Southern, industrial but distinctly agro-industrial, it perhaps embodies American urbanity, in its essentially sprawling, at times near Sunbeltish character, in its transition between McMansion'd Trumpiste suburbia and poor, black inner city, in its attempts at “revitalization” of the urban core.

It was where a lot of my family were, some in suburbia, some in the high-security white holdout zones along Ward Parkway and Wornall Road, akin to Park Slope in Brooklyn around the same time, or to those other areas of DC, Atlanta, Cleveland that remained steadfast in their thin-lipped whiteness in the face of mid-century “urban crisis.”

We crossed into Kansas City each time over the Paseo Bridge, named for the road that it connected to, some Babbittian idea of a Catalan rambla in a Middle American factory town, now the artery of Tech N9ne territory. The exit signs flickered past, “Oak – Grand – Walnut – Downtown,” the image of the city at sunset, which, for a kid from rural America, was an Oz of golden light.

Although what struck me as a child was not so much the normal signifiers of the American city – the skyscrapers, the wide expressways, the cultural institutions of the zoo and the museum – but the other figureheads of urbanity as sheer decay.

But before we reached it, we had to cross the marginal zone. The smell of grain milling permeated the air, and the whole area seemed broken, with its railyard, its smoke, the greasy, flat Missouri River, and the gaudy “riverboat” casino that had more in common with the outfit of a Brazilian transsexual at Carnival than anything Mark Twain ever sailed.

This was a mysterious landscape, which held a simultaneous terror at the brokenness of it all and a thrill of the unknown. I somehow came to love the antique brick warehouses, the glimmer of prairie light through broken orange panes of industrial glass, the old hand-painted signs on the side advertising long-dead shipping and storage concerns, manufactures of bakelite radios, manual typewriters, men's haberdashery, cars with names like Hupmobile and Pierce-Arrow. And dug deep into the chalky limestone bluffs, mines and quarries had been turend into storage units, or else left to collapse underneath fall foliage, barely visible from the car window.

On one trip – just me and my father, as I remember, when I was about seven or eight – we took the wrong exit, Bonfire of the Vanities-style. I saw the name of the exit, “Prospect Avenue,” which seemed innocuous enough. “Lock your doors,” he muttered between his teeth.

I hadn't really seen anything like it before, the billboards covered in obscure graffiti, the old men with bottles in paper bags, the check-cashing joints. And the people on the street were all black, a concept I could barely imagine coming from a lily-white Iowa town. Black women in suits, black men in leather jackets, black kids walking in groups, people who were doing the exact sorts of things people did back in my hometown, except with added melanin, which, embarrassingly, was something that I'd really only encountered before on Family Matters and The Cosby Show. I suppose I was old enough to know about Martin Luther King and slavery, but the narrative being told at Roosevelt Elementary School was that things were all better now, because life in America is good and just keeps getting better. And I couldn't for the life of me figure out why these people were living in this place. Which looking back, might be the most fucking naively white thought one could imagine.

But that memory was 20 years ago, and I wonder whether the city of my memory exists anymore.

I click on Google Street View, slowly go into town. There it is, on a highway sign, the gnomic little poem of my vacation days, “Oak – Grand – Walnut – Downtown.”

But the warehouses are all gone, the art-deco bridge replaced with something colorless and characterless, the setbacks from the highway wider, greener, planted with dwarfish Austrian pines.

I suppose that this was city council's half-baked attempt at “beautification.” Replace the aesthetics of a previous era with something that only looks good in an artist's rendering. Never mind that the broad, suburban-style lawns are completely incongruous with dense urban space, or with the lonely wood-frame houses and brick commercial buildings pushed to the fringe, their neighbors long since knocked down to make way. Never mind that the cheap, isolated conifers they've planted are ugly even in an exurban office park, let alone in an inner city. And never mind that this space is completely unusable, a park for nobody, a vista for primarily non-local passengers that only lasts in their eyes for a few seconds, if they bother to even glance up.

And those warehouses that have survived on the fringe, a great many have been turned into lofts, the sort you imagine with exposed brick walls and fittings one step up from Ikea, or bar-and-grills that seem suspiciously of the sort that serve “Kobe” burgers that have little connection to Japan, and “truffle fries” made with oil from the New Jersey perfumery plants.

I recognize that I view my beloved abandoned older forms as objects, entities separate from the economic processes that brought them into being. Like an oxbow lake cut off from a river, they become placid, isolated end results of the torrent of capital. And furthermore, it's all too easy to imagine one's own memories to be the most “natural” forms of things.

Yet I truly believe the empty space has become symbolic of the new urban decay. Unlike the old ruins, which left a nasty, corporeal reminder of failure and iteration, the new decay is conversely characterized by emptiness, lack of density, osteoporosis. Sometimes it is insignificant, a vacant lot. Sometimes it is intentional “greening,” the eight-laner that tries to emulate something more verdant, rather than a gray barrier akin to New York's infamous Cross-Bronx Expressway. In an era of demolished public housing, of the repurposing and re-whitening of the urban center, the phony parkland is the new signature of neoliberal displacement.

Consider the blank spots of Detroit. You've seen them all on the news – vast, unused green lawns and tracts of scrub separating houses like farmsteads, both inhabited and not, empty auto plants, smokestacks. Repeat for St. Louis, Buffalo, Youngstown, New Orleans.

And so the zones that are not deemed worthy of growth and replenishment are simply erased, until all that is left are cracked foundations and crabgrass.

The Cinnamon Shops

I set out on foot from On Nut Road – a bow-shaped arterial which links the Sukhumvit corridor to the Lat Krabang area on the eastern edge of Bangkok – to the Ekkamai intersection. It was an uncharacteristically cool morning, and ideal for a bit of exploration.

It's a fast-changing strip that I walked through. It was not long ago that this area was mostly known has the haunting grounds of Mae Nak, subject of one of the most celebrated ghost stories of Thai folklore. According to legend, she dies while her husband is off fighting the Burmese, and unable to leave her beloved, she stays behind, only to be left again.

A shrine to her remains at Wat Mahabut, but now the rice paddies and mangroves she wandered are but a distant memory, long since replaced by oil refineries and textile plants, and, more recently, the condos that have mushroomed up as the metro system has pushed further east and south, the wooden houses torn down to make way for 30-story towers, the cottage-industry workshops superseded by “lifestyle centers,” deep-fried mackerel and cheap coffee made sweet with condensed milk replaced with mediocre espresso and unagi rolls.

But the new can only displace the old to a certain extent, and in fugitive corners, the old still thrives.

I walk down Sukhumvit, first past a row of shops selling bargain appliances wrapped in plastic, followed by another row all selling caged doves and goldfish. And as I cut down below the bridge over the foul smelling Phra Khanong Canal, itself beneath the entwined concrete serpentines of a freeway interchange, a few open-air barbershops ply their trade, ancient men clipping away at military flat-tops underneath insect-swarmed lights, each stall with a single, torn brown leatherette seat.

Perhaps “fugitive corners” is the wrong term, because they aren't corners, but margins. Much like how in the American Midwest, prairie species continued to thrive along the embankments of railroad lines and cemetery fences, the remnants of the old Bangkok form a tentacular pattern, likewise along railroad lines and canals, underneath highways, pressed hard between six-lane roads choked with barreling delivery trucks.

Underneath the shadow of the crystalline new city, the lumpenproletariat make their living among rust-stained concrete and rebar, and these spaces are filled with hidden patterns, specialized markets, ethnic and linguistic links to the parched Burmese plains, the hills of Java, the swampy ground of the Mekong Delta.

I haven't explored these areas thoroughly. When I've walked through their hearts, more often than not, I've felt unwanted, an interloper, past living rooms open to the street where families gathered on duvets on the floor to watch the evening game shows and soap operas, before foyers that seemed like junk shops gathering years of scrap wood and old calendars, into engine shops and hardware stores smelling of oil and metal, parts of antique Fiats and Datsuns oxidizing on creaking shelves.

The cinnamon shops, I think, as I cross the bridge over the canal.

In 1934, Bruno Schulz published his story of that name, the story of a young boy adrift amid the magical junk shops of Schulz's hometown of Drohobycz, now part of Ukraine, but variously Polish, Russian, and Austrian in previous times. The cinnamon shops, to Schulz, were the wondrous repositories of the exotic and the forgotten, “Bengal lights, magic boxes, the stamps of long-forgotten countries, Chinese decals, indigo, calaphony from Malabar, the eggs of exotic insects...”

And this resonated so closely when I read Schulz. For as long as I could remember, I had been attracted to the ancient and the forgotten, and had scoured garage sales and used bookstores for antique atlases and postcards. I was just at the age, when I read Schulz, when I dove headlong into the “vintage,” wearing shirts that had been worn for years by Iowan farmers. To see this desire reflected in a totally different time, that of the Galician steppe 70 years before, but in identical form – and what the fuck was calaphony? – was bracing.

So wherever I have lived and traveled since, I have been aware of entering the cinnamon shops. I had seen them in vellum scripts in Oxford, their 18^th Century handwriting verging on the illegible, in the dusty junk-drawer Main Street storefronts of Iowa and Minnesota, in a pile of old printing blocks in Nikko, an hour north of Tokyo.

As the city moves upwards, what were once the main form of commerce in Bangkok become the cinnamon shops. The standard Chinese remedies are now patent medicines in dusty jars. The weekly magazines of the Thai housewives of the 1960s are now a mildewing pile. The decorative temple-mural pattern on a notebook becomes a cheap relic. The once brand-new row of masonry houses now lurks beneath the expressway.

In the digital era, will our relics experience the same fate? Is our Instagram photo, already cinnamon'd, already filtered to look like it was taken with an old Lomo, going to be a talisman of a bygone era?

Our lives are as still images. We never see the subtle shifts in the aesthetics around us until they're gone. Then they're gone and we look back, and call it nostalgia. And we archive our nostalgias, relegate them to the museum of our own past, whether that our is a single person or the entire human collective memory.

And we organize those nostalgias into gestalt images of a place, a time, forming these abstractions, and if the abstractions become objects of fixation, they run the risk of becoming caricatures, grotesques.

I arrive at the Ekkamai intersection, now fully back in the modern city. To cool off a bit, I walk into Gateway, a disorienting Japanese-themed mall, where women in cosplay uniforms bark at you to take a shampoo sample or come into a sushi restaurant. A man clumsily trods past in a giant robot outfit.

I'm thrust from a hazy, dusty nostalgia, into another abstraction, one of Shinjuku hypermodernity. 50 years, five minutes. As I walk out into the blinding sunlight, the whole city seems to fall quiet for just a second.

In America, Part 1: Up the Hill

A trans-Pacific flight is not so much a flight as you normally take as it is a vortex. Upon leaving, you are at the mercy of the pilot, the cabin staff, your fellow passengers for half a day. Maybe you try to sleep, with the help of the complementary box wine or with a Vicodin hastily swallowed before hitting airport security. Maybe you watch a string of movies, or episodes of some dumb comedy. You do whatever you can to negate the experience of being somewhere up there, losing all sense of time as your day is severed by the International Date Line.

And yet, after that long flight from Seoul-- muddy palace grounds, warm cups of pine needle tea to beat the pounding, frigid rain-- we come down from the clouds over the Skagit Valley, to a landscape where sun hits the snows of distant mountains, reaching down to an immaculate, blue fjord. And it was then, in a return to the city I called home for three years, that I felt that I was where I should be at the moment.

I was experiencing it, this time, more or less as a tourist. “Where you visiting from?” the market vendors asked. And at least in some areas, I still felt like a tourist. A wine tasting here, a plate of excellent local Virginica oysters there, a long, meandering walk along the waterfront. “Oh, used to live here, but just seeing old friends in town,” I'd tell the lady at the fruit stand or the Quebecois tourist I was sipping wine with.

And I could do the tourist-guide description. I could talk about the beautifully fresh salmon, the great view from Kerry Park, the artfully arranged soaps and artichokes in the Pike Place Market, my favorite dive bars. But, like all tourist guides, that says nothing about the actual experience of being in the city, its shapes and textures, especially when you've lived there.

So I went deeper, and did what I used to do every Saturday-- leaf through old books in the library, grab a cup of coffee, and begin the long, steep, lonely walk up Capitol Hill, through used-car lots and past the old shipping warehouses where countless 30 year-olds with startups imagine themselves as nascent Bezoses and Brins.

Sure, there were a few of my old haunts. The shitty bar where I did my regular trivia night. The pizza place where I read Borges as I tore into two-dollar slices of Mediterranean. The bookshop where, on cold, dark nights I could step in, just for a bit, to read a Raymond Carver story that reminded me to keep on.

But, those bright spots aside, not only had things changed, they had changed radically. Whole blocks were torn out, replaced with cheap trash that reached for “industrial aesthetic” but just reminded me of a school gym in New Jersey. The grotty boutiques staffed by grumpy grunge-era rejects were closed or closing. And saddest of all, the neighborhood has an increasingly short supply of the bars it used to specialize in, places where you could be anyone, a fat transsexual, a college professor reading French philosophy, a streetwalker taking a quick five, a scuzzy lurker with a shitty arm tattoo and a whole litany of lies to tell, places where all the pariahs and weirdos and a few putatively model citizens could share a round of boilermakers.

It is, of course, common to blame the tech industry for these developments. It's both easy and fun to lay the blame on a business world that rewards the sort of fucker who thinks it's OK to act like Don Draper as long as he rides a longboard to work.

Yet while there is a certain truth to that-- or at least, there seems to be, based on the sorts of businesses popping up all over the Hill-- there's also a certain inevitability to this. Any group of freaks, artists, and their attendant sycophants and wannabes knows that the neighborhood dream is fated. As soon as that repulsive label for geographic locales-- “creative”-- is applied, a wealthier clientele will move in, and the previous residents will move to other places, areas further out or more dangerous or in some other way less appealing.

A phrase like “you can't go home again” was probably a cliche even before Thomas Wolfe made that the title of his final novel. Hell, it was probably close to a cliche when Heraclitus said “ever-newer waters flow on those who step in the same rivers” around the turn of the 5th Century BC.

However, regardless of how many times and in what ways the sentiment has been expressed, it was still unsettling to wander around the web of my own memories, see my own particular desires, my own projections onto the built environment, supplanted by those of others.

And then, dejected, I walked down a hill and up another, to the warm place where I knew I could count on a cat, a good book, and a beer, three things that have rarely failed to disappoint me. And when I flew out on the redeye to Detroit not long after, I knew that Seattle and I had had the conversation we'd needed to have.

In Din Daeng

My friends live in other neighborhoods throughout the city. In Thong Lo ("Golden Forge"), with its glittering cocktail bars and valet-parked Porsches, in Aree ("Generosity") with its tiny cafes and elegant mid-century homes, its warm colors and banana trees. But here, in Din Daeng ("Red Earth"), the city expresses itself as a blank zone, colorless and without shape.

Not too long ago, I went to an exhibition of photos of ordinary street life in Bangkok, most of which was rather anodyne, the sort of thing you see in tourist guides... street vendors frying chicken, beaming classical dancers in golden dresses, monks with alms bowls, all of them counterpointed against something like a businesswoman on an iPhone to indicate the juxtaposition of traditional and modern. But also on display were the photos of Rong Wong-Savun, a sort of Thai Walker Evans, depicting my neighborhood as it once was.



In the early '60s, at the height of the first Bangkok construction boom, the National Housing Authority redeveloped the old dumping ground on the northern outskirts of the city in the Robert Moses mode. The NHA tore down the slums, and in their stead, five-story housing blocks, akin to the khrushchyovka apartments built in the USSR in the same period, rose up with modern angles and white walls.

Nowadays, Din Daeng is to Bangkok what Southwest DC or certain areas of South London are to their respective countries-- a cast-concrete backwater at the heart of the national capital. From the window of a taxi, the apartment blocks continue for what seem like miles, the doors of identical buildings illuminated by floodlights, lining street after street, interspersed with minor government ministries, the overpasses and brick walls sprayed with angry political slogans.

On a closer level, Din Daeng is the migrant workers that smoke cigarettes from tenement windows, it is discount mu katha restaurants with mournful upcountry songs playing over the grilling of meat, it is the exhaust clouds over Vibhavadi Rangsit Road, it is the harmlessly insane woman who dances to the music in her head all day in front of her family's shop at the bottom of my street.

Why then, do I choose to live there? A lot of foreigners who live in obscure Bangkok neighborhoods praise their authenticity and friendliness. And there's a truth in that. I have my coffee lady, my washerwoman, my satay man who always makes the same dumb joke about not hitting my head on the aluminum hood over his stall. But "authenticity" is a problematic concept at best. And while there are genial people for sure, there are also the meth gangs that sit around chain-smoking and practicing their tough sneers, and lately, the tear-gas clouds that covered the area after political violence on Mit Maitri ("Friendly Relations") Road.

We build up slow relationships to the spaces we occupy through our daily and repeated motions, whether they're relationships of love, or hate, or neither. My walk to the metro stop or the supermarket slowly fixes my relation to the city I live in, as the infinitesimal motion of coral polyps builds a reef.

I can, when protected by a thin layer of capital, move from place to place, and have done so any number of times, happily. Many others in this globalized era do so without that, with only an empty stomach and the hope of a job in Dubai or Los Angeles or Hong Kong. But it's hard to be truly adrift, to not have some link to place. And for this moment, I have found that link. I wake up, and the corner of the city that I see from my bedroom window is familiar to the point of intimacy.

Saturday, Late Afternoon, Middle Sukhumvit

It's late afternoon on a strip of Middle Sukhumvit. I'm out for a day of shopping-- looking through discount paperbacks at a used bookshop and glossy coffee table books I can't afford at Kinokuniya, idling over a cup of tea, ogling the expensive liquor selection at Villa.

The solitary walker in Bangkok will occasionally encounter sections of utter loveliness-- there are the rotting old canalside neighborhoods near near the river, the procession of white bridges with spilling bougainvilleas over the Khlong Prem Prachakon, the broad, tree-lined plaisances of Ratchadamnoen Nok and Phaya Thai, the old hyper-specific neighborhoods-- districts of luthiers and tanners, flower markets and Afghan jewellers, that dot the more antique sections of the city.

But there are also countless neighborhoods that make your skin crawl. A neighborhood like that around the Phrom Phong metro stop seems fine in the evening-- the shop windows are brightly lit, the bars and restaurants are just starting to fill up, and you might be a bit drunk yourself, you might be on your way to meet friends, you might have a date.

It's in late afternoon, during the smoggy, saffron-colored stage an hour or two before sunset, that it is at both its most horrifying and its most pathetic. The sois are exhaust-choked canyons lined with '60s shophouses, some of them left to rot, carrying the scars of typhoons, car crashes, smashed windows. Others bear garish renovations-- there is nothing more uniquely atrocious and tasteless than plaster Corinthian columns framing blue tinted-glass windows. Tourist restaurants-- the sign says THAIFOOD WESTERN FOOD VERY CHEAP-- serve up watery curries and thin, limp cheeseburgers with wilted lettuce. And above all else, there is the omnipresence of the sexualized industries-- whether as direct as strip clubs, or as indirect as sports bars with waitresses in skin-tight dresses advertising Beer Chang. And for the clannish Japanese businessmen that make their homes in this neighborhood, cracked signs indicate karaoke bars where Thai girls in bunny ears and schoolgirl outfits get felt up by Johnny Walker-soaked keiretsu functionaries.

The architecture and the commerce of the area are mirrored by the denizens. A sickly red wet-season twilight sets in. Stringy backpackers with serious suntans and filthy t-shirts cross the intersection in swift-moving twos and threes. A small group of heavily made-up young women in lacy white dresses have just finished doing a promotion for a brand of skin cream and they sit down, exhausted from having spent the day standing and smiling in four-inch heels. Toadlike white men, sweating through their shirts and their buzz cuts, mill about, led on invisible leashes by squat, flat-nosed Northeastern Thai wives with rusted complexions and knockoff Gucci bags. The beggars go out of their way to degrade themselves for extra pity. Aiming squarely for the tourist market, the legless drag themselves on their bellies across the rough pavement, and the armless wave their stumps like flags at a parade.

I often tell my friends in more northerly climes that the character of Thailand is rather Mediterranean-- Vespas and great food, coups and messily parked cars, ancient civilizations and primary colors, guitarists and prizefighters. But in the humid, sighing, late afternoon around here, Bangkok reminds me more of Weimar-era Berlin-- likewise a decadent society in perennial economic and political chaos, a furious nightlife catering to those rich enough to be insulated from this chaos, its streets filled with disfigured panhandlers and cackling streetwalkers.

And for this very reason, I've felt powerfully drawn, lately, to the expressionists and their fellow travelers.

The leering faces make up the carnival masks of James Ensor.



Half the amphetamine-riddled faces I see on the street could be in Egon Schiele paintings.



And the slum children, the old ladies, the hunchbacks, inhabit the woodcuts of Käthe Kollwitz.



It should be said that this sense of decadence and decrepitude is by no means unique to Bangkok-- plenty of places from Rome to New Orleans to Prague to Shanghai to Buenos Aires have similar reputations. But I've rarely been any place that has the same sense of innate rot, a flagging ferroconcrete sigh of a place sinking into the salt marshes.

I sometimes find the proximity of horror in Bangkok to have a certain comforting quality-- stare the devil in the face every day and blow him a raspberry. I can claim that I'm living comfortably in a contradiction, willing to confront the miseries that define the lives of vast numbers of working people haunted by the specter of capitalism, living without first-world blinders. I can maintain my world-weary edge, and posit myself as not one of those foreigners in Thailand, the mindless horde who refuse to face themselves or their place in the world. And while there is at least a grain of truth in these stances, they are also postures of self-deception. I construct a narrative for myself in an attempt to justify my own uncertainties, insecurities, and instabilities.

All of which leads me to something of a dead end. Now, I'm sitting here in front of a coffee, feeling glum. The sun has finally fallen behind the rain clouds, leaving only a smudge of light on the far horizon.

This neighborhood at night seems jet-black at times. Certain roads are lined with brightly lit white towers, while others project a rather jankety but homey street carnival mood with their food stalls and machinists' shops. But this stretch of Sukhumvit right now is only empty restaurants and dirty signage, the steely glare of emptied office buildings and an architecture that, after sunset, absorbs the blackness of night into its steel and masonry armature.

But some stories, I'm afraid, have no resolution in real life. No matter what stories I try to weave about where I am and where I am going and why I am here, I'm left with more questions than answers. The city yields nothing. No theme, no plot, and no real sense of character, but the streetlights do line up to form an ellipsis in the soft rain.

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.

The Fate of Mes Aynak

Within a couple of months, in all likelihood, a few pieces of construction equipment will climb a highland track in a remote area to the east of Kabul. They will begin to scratch away at the earth, dislocating stones and drilling deep bores, piercing the vast reserve of sulfide minerals at the heart of the mountain range.

Two thousand years ago, this was an intersection of beliefs, a point on the transit route between the empires of the East and the West. Through these dusty passes came caravans loaded with silk and cinnamon, ultramarine and celadon.

Now it is a remote nowhere on the fringe of human dominion. Above here are the vertiginously high Spin Ghar Mountains. Irrigation systems provide enough snowmelt for agriculture, and, in a province where only a fifth of adults can read or write, the local people's existence relies on what they can extract from a lunar landscape.

Here are the old monasteries of Mes Aynak. As at other archaeological sites the world over, new layers are constantly being found, cities atop cities, a new town always superseding a predecessor. Here were Chinese and Persians and Punjabis and Greeks, Zoroastrians and Shiites and Nestorians, and the countless peoples and faiths that have long been forgotten, their practices unrecorded, their deities beyond memory.

What remains is the Buddhist city, an arrangement of temples and wells and steles. Once, this area was ruled by King Menander, who sat in a throne hall asking the Buddhist sage Nagasena about consciousness and perception. Faithfully adopting the tenets of this new religion, he commissioned the building of stupas with Grecian columns and Corinthian capitals. The Buddha statues of his kingdom possessed the same straight noses and impassive curled lips of the Olympian gods as rendered by Praxiteles.

And as the city fell out of use, it became a simple campsite. Countless armies warred over control of the region, as progressive waves of Mauryas, Parthians, Sassanids, and Mongols marched through, only to be followed later by Brits and Soviets and Americans. It's hard not to think of this area as a cursed place: a lovely mountaintop garden torn apart by the demons of history.

Yet it survived. Unlike the Buddhas of Bamiyan further west, it was never targeted for destruction by the Taliban. Their troops camped here, on the run from the Northern Alliance.

But its destruction is imminent, not because of the old reasons of ideology or religion or feudalism, but for reasons of simple economics in a neoliberal era. With global copper prices quintupling in value over the past decade, and with Afghanistan becoming just stable enough to pillage, the mining companies are moving in, and within six months, the arches and friezes too, will pass into memory.

The mining industry refers to this area as part of the Tethyan Eurasian Mineral Belt, named for the prehistoric ocean that was dried as magma from the mantle of the earth surged to the surface. The ocean, in turn was named for the titaness Tethys, who, in legend gave birth to the rivers of the world. Even the history of a name passes from myth into geology into engineering into business.

There's been some sound and fury in the West about the site's destruction. Online petitions have been drafted, which, as with virtually all Internet-based activism, are exercises in self-congratulation. Global mining syndicates continue their pillage, and the Afghan elites who run the country from their condos in Dubai continue to line their pockets. A Kickstarter fund has been started to fund a documentary film about the site and the project. But that, at the end of the day, will probably be some very lovely footage of a site that will have already ceased to exist-- a rather more intellectual equivalent of a snuff film.

The Anglo-American news media is at pains to point out that the company with the contract to mine the copper reserves at Mes Aynak is, of course, a Chinese company, thereby absolving the profligate consumers in the NATO member states of any guilt.

Every article and every campaign, the above paragraphs included, are alienated experiences predicated on a deeply abstract relationship to the site of Mes Aynak. Somehow we want to identify with these temples will almost certainly never visit. Regardless of all of the entirely good reasons we want to preserve a piece of history-- archaeological knowledge, aesthetic virtue, preservation of the cultural heritage of a third-world nation-- much of our desire is something ineffable. It's that beyond the logic of capital that seems to dictate and delimit our daily life, we still aspire to some difficult virtue that lies just beyond a distant horizon.