I keep a file on my computer called "Miscellaneous Writings." Initially, I envisioned this as a seedbed for ideas I would have later on. But it increasingly developed into a repository for ideas that would never come to fruition-- an infinitely expandable library of half-conceived thoughts, interesting ideas that could never lend themselves to a compelling narrative, brief sketches, quips and bons mots, short reviews of books by Tanizaki Junichiro, Cesare Pavese, Susan Sontag.
A significant numbers of the ideas contained here came to me in dreams. Typically, they seem utterly lucid and brilliant in the early morning haze. By the time I'm on the train to work, I realize just how shit they are. These are interspersed throughout the list, but don't expect me to reveal which stories they actually are.
Other stories were inspired by very specific experiences-- listening to one song, or reading one short story, or watching one movie. These sorts of experiences yield a great creative outflow within a few hours of the actual experience, but fail to have any real staying power-- they are mere images, fragments of dialogue, and settings.
Like all junk drawers, it grows in complexity and mystery while rarely yielding anything of value. So consider the following to be the steel washers, gummy electrical tape (bought for a home improvement project 5 years ago), expired coupons, and wheat pennies of my literary pretensions.
1. The story of the unspoken feelings between two old friends, told entirely through emoticons.
2. A day in the life of a professor of animal languages at a major American research university, rooted in the parlor-game absurdity of so much contemporary analytical philosophy.
3. A variation of the Canterbury Tales retold in the bar of a seedy budget motel on the Pennsylvania Turnpike (called, of course, the Canterbury), with the pardoner as a gay antique dealer, the wife of Bath as a soccer mom, the clerk as a broke grad student, etc.
4. Close biographies and micro-level stories from one single Seattle neighborhood over the course of 100 years, using a fake (but potentially real) coffee table book of oral histories of said neighborhood. This coffee table book will be attractively priced at $29.99, and available at the Made in Washington Store in Pike Place Market.
5. The story of the last two weeks of someone's life as told through items in his or her garbage bin. This person has just committed suicide, or been hit by a car, or something equally dramatic.
6. A documentation of the presence of the map of a city that may or may not exist as it occurs, seemingly at random, through sketches in the margins of notebooks, frost crystals on icy windows, and other meeting points of intention, causality, and stochasticity.
7. Story opening: "Amy and Liz were at a bar in Pioneer Square drinking Diet Cuba Libres after work on Thursday." Where it goes from here, I don't know.
8. An observation: when I look at black and white photos from the early 20th Century, everything looks like it should be depicted in black and white. When I look at color photos taken in the same years, everything looks like a BBC costume drama. The story will be the analysis of color (one color, or maybe a class of colors, or maybe the entire spectrum) as it wanes and waxes over the course of centuries.
9. A postal worker begins reading other people's letters. He develops whole mythologies about who they are, what they do, but is ultimately overwhelmed by the stupidity and the venality of the people around him. He documents his own failures in a book he calls The Book of Disappointments, consisting of letters, bills, and other ephemera, followed by his commentary on them. The story follows the postal worker as he writes the book, including some of the letters and some of the commentary.
10. Two young men watch the Beijing Olympics in a house in some anonymous part of the West Coast, eating nachos. It's one of those houses with sheets for curtains that has the aura of a permanent hangover. An argument over something unknown and unknowable begins between the host and his girlfriend. The other is left alone in the livingroom, watching North Korean gymnasts.
By committing these ideas to the never-to-be-written, I am fully consigning them to their fate. Even if I am struck, for some reason, to continue writing one of these stories, my own stubbornness will almost doubtless preclude the urge to write them.
Italo Calvino wrote, in the introduction to If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, the story of all the books we'll never read that stare down at us, glumly, from their shelves at the bookstore. As more and more books are published year in and year out, this list expands indefinitely. My own to-read list expands at an exponential rate, and I am quite comfortable with the fact that I will die before ever reading a great many of these books.
Likewise, it is useful to take account of the things we'll never write. I won't call them books-- they are the ideas that must be disposed of before we can compose the things we want the world to see. Consider this short piece to be my salute to all the dross that we dispose of as we write, all the half-formed ideas that must be tossed aside in the creation of something greater.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Industrial Civilization
Lately, I've been spending hours looking at the photographs-- or "typologies," as they preferred-- of Bernd and Hilla Becher. We see a water tower, a blast furnace, shot in a strict, almost clinical style.
Function is transformed into aesthetic. This plain, positivist architecture could some day be as worthy of beauty and admiration as the spires of the Hagia Sophia.
I've always had this fascination with industrial ruins. In other countries and other times, children could look around them and see the Romans and Cathars, the Wars of the Roses and the Ottomans and the Tokugawa Shogunate. Growing up in Middle America-- too far east for cowboys and Indians, too far west for minutemen and redcoats, too far north for Yankees and rebs-- this was the dramatic history around me. Past civilizations hadn't left cathedrals and battlefields, they'd left smokestacks and grain elevators.
When I first studied art history, I came upon Charles Demuth's paintings of the factories of his Pennsylvania hometown, and he called one of them "My Egypt."
And when I drove up to Minneapolis and wandered along the soft banks of the Mississippi River, it struck me as no coincidence that the 19th Century wheat barons had built their mills as the temples of industry, with Hellenic columns and massive arched windows.
As my home nation began its long, slow, brutal process of deindustrialization, industrial imagery took on a trendiness. 30 years ago, this was probably cool. Since then, it has become thoroughly obnoxious. We might fetishize shiny chrome and exposed brick, but we have scrubbed it clean of all of its implications. When I see a pile of rusting, jagged metal, it no longer looks like a pile of rusting, jagged metal, but a sculpture.
And now that I live in the new industrial sphere of Southeast Asia, the gloss dissipates, and I am left with the brutal contradictions of industrial capitalism.
I come home to the smell of welding flux wafting up to my apartment from the tangle of Chinese machinists' shops below me. The city of Bangkok is ringed by vast industrial estates. On the expressway to Chonburi, past the appropriately if charmlessly named Bearing Road, the landscape turns into Antonioni's Red Desert: low buildings covering acres of land; jagged rooflines beginning to rust in the tropical humidity; workers originally from Chiang Rai and Samut Sakhon dressed in identical blue boilersuits; 50-meter tall electricity pylons marching off into the sunset, the same pylons that grace the backgrounds of Stalinist paintings.
For the Thais, the imagery of industrial positivism is not retro, it is the present. They reserve their nostalgia for the old peasant Siam, memories of teak houses by the canalside, gardens of tamarind trees and jasmine flowers, the motion of the catfish in the rice paddies.
The old lie of post-industralism was that the new "information economy" would liberate humanity from the Dickensian mills. What has happened is that we are more dependent on the mills than ever before. Entranced by our computer screens, we are reliant upon a massive network of steel works, refineries, coal-fired power plants, mining operations for fossil fuels, tungsten, chromite.
Those of us who have or have had jobs in the suburban office parks and "revitalized" city centers of the west live in a tidy green illusion. In the tropics, one hears screaming from beneath the earth.
Function is transformed into aesthetic. This plain, positivist architecture could some day be as worthy of beauty and admiration as the spires of the Hagia Sophia.
I've always had this fascination with industrial ruins. In other countries and other times, children could look around them and see the Romans and Cathars, the Wars of the Roses and the Ottomans and the Tokugawa Shogunate. Growing up in Middle America-- too far east for cowboys and Indians, too far west for minutemen and redcoats, too far north for Yankees and rebs-- this was the dramatic history around me. Past civilizations hadn't left cathedrals and battlefields, they'd left smokestacks and grain elevators.
When I first studied art history, I came upon Charles Demuth's paintings of the factories of his Pennsylvania hometown, and he called one of them "My Egypt."
And when I drove up to Minneapolis and wandered along the soft banks of the Mississippi River, it struck me as no coincidence that the 19th Century wheat barons had built their mills as the temples of industry, with Hellenic columns and massive arched windows.
As my home nation began its long, slow, brutal process of deindustrialization, industrial imagery took on a trendiness. 30 years ago, this was probably cool. Since then, it has become thoroughly obnoxious. We might fetishize shiny chrome and exposed brick, but we have scrubbed it clean of all of its implications. When I see a pile of rusting, jagged metal, it no longer looks like a pile of rusting, jagged metal, but a sculpture.
And now that I live in the new industrial sphere of Southeast Asia, the gloss dissipates, and I am left with the brutal contradictions of industrial capitalism.
I come home to the smell of welding flux wafting up to my apartment from the tangle of Chinese machinists' shops below me. The city of Bangkok is ringed by vast industrial estates. On the expressway to Chonburi, past the appropriately if charmlessly named Bearing Road, the landscape turns into Antonioni's Red Desert: low buildings covering acres of land; jagged rooflines beginning to rust in the tropical humidity; workers originally from Chiang Rai and Samut Sakhon dressed in identical blue boilersuits; 50-meter tall electricity pylons marching off into the sunset, the same pylons that grace the backgrounds of Stalinist paintings.
For the Thais, the imagery of industrial positivism is not retro, it is the present. They reserve their nostalgia for the old peasant Siam, memories of teak houses by the canalside, gardens of tamarind trees and jasmine flowers, the motion of the catfish in the rice paddies.
The old lie of post-industralism was that the new "information economy" would liberate humanity from the Dickensian mills. What has happened is that we are more dependent on the mills than ever before. Entranced by our computer screens, we are reliant upon a massive network of steel works, refineries, coal-fired power plants, mining operations for fossil fuels, tungsten, chromite.
Those of us who have or have had jobs in the suburban office parks and "revitalized" city centers of the west live in a tidy green illusion. In the tropics, one hears screaming from beneath the earth.
Monday, August 13, 2012
36 Images
I took a train to a remote area of East Bangkok to go to a movie. 36, a new Thai experimental film directed by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit. The theater stood at the wrong end of RCA, in a half-demolished shopping center surrounded by low-slung '70s brutalist concrete.
The film is a series of long takes, occurring chronologically but seemingly without pattern. Two movie studio employees, Oom and Sai, take photographs of odd places around Bangkok-- an apartment building, an abandoned love motel, a vacant lot where a clinic once stood. As Sai looks through her old hard drives, she finds her photos destroyed, with only a few oblique shots remaining. She returns to the places, and finds what has changed and what has disappeared. Oom has long since disappeared. At the end, we see the desktop of Oom's computer, with one photo of the two of them still there.
Over the past few months, my phone has periodically had trouble receiving text messages. So many phone calls have started with "Did you get my text?"
As I left the theater and turned on my phone, my inbox was suddenly flooded with messages. Here were all of the parties I hadn't attended, all of the reminders to bring something somewhere. I'd been relying on this little device to mediate my social life, and, in sequence, were all of the mechanical failures that had translated to personal inaction.
Digital memory supersedes organic memory. Our digital memory is supposed to be a metaphor for human memory. But unlike human memory, digital memory is but an imprint, stripped of any subjectivity, rendered in bright plasma screen colors and encoded in countless binary digits.
And while this digital memory is more visually and auditorily perfect than our own, it is equally immaterial, easily replicated and easily deleted. We may hold on fast to our personal recollections, constantly replay them in our heads over the course of our lifetimes, hunt down the photographs and souvenirs and albums that reflect those memories. By comparison, digital records are as fleeting and ephemeral as cicada shells.
Somehow the old forms of recording-- cassette tape, Polaroid film-- become objects of nostalgia. These devices that, at mid-century, seemed so cutting edge and blatantly positivist, now seem quaint. We use lo-fi recording and photo alteration techniques to smear the digital memory with Vaseline.
Because we're yearning for subjectivity, for some notion of authenticity and humanity. We stare at the screen, and it might as well be a void. Walter Benjamin was correct in that the age of mechanical reproduction, the work of art would be stripped of its ritual meaning. But that didn't mean that the artistic endeavor was married to the high-minded ideology Benjamin envisioned-- rather, it became far more of a commercial enterprise than he could ever have imagined.
The title of the movie comes from each of its consisting of 36 unmoving shots, each meant to represent one photo on a film roll. Digital representation trumps mechanical representation, old places are destroyed. But somewhere in there, we can still find sentiment.
I walk back to the canal boat pier through Makkasan past the ruins of old houses and offices, over train tracks, below freeways, beneath billboards and vinyl banners for new condo developments. I take a shortcut across what was once someone's tile floor. A spirit house is surrounded by climbing vines. Inside, a pudgy ceramic god guards over the people that left years ago.
The film is a series of long takes, occurring chronologically but seemingly without pattern. Two movie studio employees, Oom and Sai, take photographs of odd places around Bangkok-- an apartment building, an abandoned love motel, a vacant lot where a clinic once stood. As Sai looks through her old hard drives, she finds her photos destroyed, with only a few oblique shots remaining. She returns to the places, and finds what has changed and what has disappeared. Oom has long since disappeared. At the end, we see the desktop of Oom's computer, with one photo of the two of them still there.
Over the past few months, my phone has periodically had trouble receiving text messages. So many phone calls have started with "Did you get my text?"
As I left the theater and turned on my phone, my inbox was suddenly flooded with messages. Here were all of the parties I hadn't attended, all of the reminders to bring something somewhere. I'd been relying on this little device to mediate my social life, and, in sequence, were all of the mechanical failures that had translated to personal inaction.
Digital memory supersedes organic memory. Our digital memory is supposed to be a metaphor for human memory. But unlike human memory, digital memory is but an imprint, stripped of any subjectivity, rendered in bright plasma screen colors and encoded in countless binary digits.
And while this digital memory is more visually and auditorily perfect than our own, it is equally immaterial, easily replicated and easily deleted. We may hold on fast to our personal recollections, constantly replay them in our heads over the course of our lifetimes, hunt down the photographs and souvenirs and albums that reflect those memories. By comparison, digital records are as fleeting and ephemeral as cicada shells.
Somehow the old forms of recording-- cassette tape, Polaroid film-- become objects of nostalgia. These devices that, at mid-century, seemed so cutting edge and blatantly positivist, now seem quaint. We use lo-fi recording and photo alteration techniques to smear the digital memory with Vaseline.
Because we're yearning for subjectivity, for some notion of authenticity and humanity. We stare at the screen, and it might as well be a void. Walter Benjamin was correct in that the age of mechanical reproduction, the work of art would be stripped of its ritual meaning. But that didn't mean that the artistic endeavor was married to the high-minded ideology Benjamin envisioned-- rather, it became far more of a commercial enterprise than he could ever have imagined.
The title of the movie comes from each of its consisting of 36 unmoving shots, each meant to represent one photo on a film roll. Digital representation trumps mechanical representation, old places are destroyed. But somewhere in there, we can still find sentiment.
I walk back to the canal boat pier through Makkasan past the ruins of old houses and offices, over train tracks, below freeways, beneath billboards and vinyl banners for new condo developments. I take a shortcut across what was once someone's tile floor. A spirit house is surrounded by climbing vines. Inside, a pudgy ceramic god guards over the people that left years ago.
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Vientiane
How perplexing it is to revisit a city you visited before, trying to identify the places you remember. What street runs parallel to the river bank? What was the name of the cafe where I met Natalie for a beer? Which bus was it that ran to the monument visible from the other side of the center city?
The city in question is Vientiane, a minute capital of a minute nation. It is overwhelmed by the turbid brown Mekong that separates it from Thailand. Under the heavy sky of the monsoon season, the city is perpetually drowsy. Only a handful of people are on the street, a couple of bearded backpackers and a few local girls in embroidered silk sarongs. The launderettes and restaurants are lifeless, and the masseuses that normally tout their shops stare dejectedly at the walkway.
A handful of temples grace the riverbank, the sole remnant of pre-colonial Vientiane. Surrounding them, the old city is French: mango trees shade narrow streets, heavy teakwood shutters adorn shophouses, restaurants are named L'Alsace and La Côte d'Azur. The new city to the east is Soviet: massive arches stand alongside dusty concrete boulevards with Communist names: Kaysone Phomvihane (the first Secretary-General of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party), 13 Singhakhom (or August 13th, the date of decolonization). A ten minute walk from center to periphery traverses the complete spectrum of history and ideology.
As I walked into the Musée Nationale, that spectrum is reflected in the exhibits. The history of Laos is a complete reversal of Marx's conception of progress. Tribal and feudal society is suddenly transformed into Marxism-Leninism. Marxism-Leninism rapidly becomes authoritarian capitalism in the Deng Xiaoping mode. Rather than proceeding dialectically, time becomes a chaotic set of accordion folds. We see Lahu fabrics decorated with images of bombs and helicopters, Buddha statuettes carved from the aluminum of downed American fighter planes.
My country played no small part in this process. The poorly blown up photos of Lao intellectuals holding up signs reading "À bas Monsieur McNamara" speak for themselves. And the Mekong River, the artery that gives life to Laos and her neighbor states, is a name associated in the American imagination with bloodshed and atrocity and the slow decline of our national dream.
Slowly, the wounds are healing. The guns have fallen silent in the hills. Laos is still a ragged landscape, marred with landmines. The local people in Xiengkhouang Province have taken to using rusted bomb casings as fenceposts. Vines curl around them now, obscuring the flaking instructions written in English, Russian, and Vietnamese.
I went for one last long walk along the quay at dusk. As clothing stands and food stalls were set up, I found myself walking out beyond the lights to the back alleys in the west of the city.
Beyond the edge of town, a thin veil of mist obscures a set of low mountains that straddles the border. Behind me, I can hear the sound of children playing, the screech of an electric guitar through cheap speakers in the introduction to a mournful luk thung song. Before me is the dark swirl of the Mekong River, a vast volume of water bearing masses of foliage fallen from the jungles that lie upstream. As the sun sets, I turn back, walking alone among the big families congregated around the noodle shops.
As I trudge back to the hotel, I walk past a shop called "Douangdeuane." Roughly translated, it means "Astral Weeks." I get back to my hotel room, and I put on the first track of the album: "To lay me down / In silence easy / To be born again / From the far side of the ocean."
The city in question is Vientiane, a minute capital of a minute nation. It is overwhelmed by the turbid brown Mekong that separates it from Thailand. Under the heavy sky of the monsoon season, the city is perpetually drowsy. Only a handful of people are on the street, a couple of bearded backpackers and a few local girls in embroidered silk sarongs. The launderettes and restaurants are lifeless, and the masseuses that normally tout their shops stare dejectedly at the walkway.
A handful of temples grace the riverbank, the sole remnant of pre-colonial Vientiane. Surrounding them, the old city is French: mango trees shade narrow streets, heavy teakwood shutters adorn shophouses, restaurants are named L'Alsace and La Côte d'Azur. The new city to the east is Soviet: massive arches stand alongside dusty concrete boulevards with Communist names: Kaysone Phomvihane (the first Secretary-General of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party), 13 Singhakhom (or August 13th, the date of decolonization). A ten minute walk from center to periphery traverses the complete spectrum of history and ideology.
As I walked into the Musée Nationale, that spectrum is reflected in the exhibits. The history of Laos is a complete reversal of Marx's conception of progress. Tribal and feudal society is suddenly transformed into Marxism-Leninism. Marxism-Leninism rapidly becomes authoritarian capitalism in the Deng Xiaoping mode. Rather than proceeding dialectically, time becomes a chaotic set of accordion folds. We see Lahu fabrics decorated with images of bombs and helicopters, Buddha statuettes carved from the aluminum of downed American fighter planes.
My country played no small part in this process. The poorly blown up photos of Lao intellectuals holding up signs reading "À bas Monsieur McNamara" speak for themselves. And the Mekong River, the artery that gives life to Laos and her neighbor states, is a name associated in the American imagination with bloodshed and atrocity and the slow decline of our national dream.
Slowly, the wounds are healing. The guns have fallen silent in the hills. Laos is still a ragged landscape, marred with landmines. The local people in Xiengkhouang Province have taken to using rusted bomb casings as fenceposts. Vines curl around them now, obscuring the flaking instructions written in English, Russian, and Vietnamese.
I went for one last long walk along the quay at dusk. As clothing stands and food stalls were set up, I found myself walking out beyond the lights to the back alleys in the west of the city.
Beyond the edge of town, a thin veil of mist obscures a set of low mountains that straddles the border. Behind me, I can hear the sound of children playing, the screech of an electric guitar through cheap speakers in the introduction to a mournful luk thung song. Before me is the dark swirl of the Mekong River, a vast volume of water bearing masses of foliage fallen from the jungles that lie upstream. As the sun sets, I turn back, walking alone among the big families congregated around the noodle shops.
As I trudge back to the hotel, I walk past a shop called "Douangdeuane." Roughly translated, it means "Astral Weeks." I get back to my hotel room, and I put on the first track of the album: "To lay me down / In silence easy / To be born again / From the far side of the ocean."
Thursday, July 12, 2012
The Far Shore
The other day, I got a ride with a cab driver who spoke a decent amount of English. Her husband, it turned out, was a fellow American.
The story unfolded; they'd been together for over a decade now, and he'd been living visa-free and under the radar for most of that time. "The police, they don't care about what white people do," she told me.
His son, my own age, was living in Thailand as well, teaching without a university degree in a bleak Bangkok suburb, a nightmare zone of industrial estates and boxy white houses and swampy, overgrown abandoned cane fields out beyond Phra Khanong.
In these corners of Asia, squalor can be covered up by superficial respectability. The outcasts, the failures, the desperados of the Western world wash up here. European skin is the mask they can use to conceal their manifold scars.
I've been asking myself a lot lately, as all those who have chosen to live far from their place of origin do, why, exactly I am here. I came here with a vague idea of what I wanted to do, I had my brief honeymoon, and now I have to ask myself a hard question: how long can I stay here now that the briefly flickering candle of novelty has gone out?
Expatriates in Bangkok have a tendency to go through a second adolescence. Liberated from the expectations of their native society, they indulge in whatever vice floats their way, be it sex, alcohol, drugs, or some combination thereof, all readily available at bargain prices. You see them in various states of inebriation, their eyes fixed forward, stumbling down Sukhumvit Road.
They come in all types, but are predominantly men. Some are the stereotypical red-faced lechers. Others are younger sybarites, with close-cropped hair and designer T-shirts. There are the eternal travelers for whom expatriation in a newly industrialized state has become another way to save money. And yet others are the losers running, half-heartedly, from their own responsibilities and failures back in their home countries, faceless and shapeless. I do sometimes meet those farangs who came to Bangkok for highly specific reasons, but for most, they came to Thailand through a strange alchemy of dissatisfaction, fear, lust, alienation, loneliness, curiosity, and international currency exchange rates.
This isn't a new thing. George Orwell was writing about the same scene in Burmese Days. The hateful white people are still here. Merely replace the overgrown maidan and gin-soaked billiard room with a happy hour in Asok. Instead of teak merchants and colonial officers, we have the precise equivalents of Flory and Lackersteen and Veraswami in the era of global capitalism.
I've gotten used to this world: the parties and faux-English pubs; the detritus of empty Sangsom whiskey bottles and crushed up blue packs of L&Ms littering whitewashed balconies; the bitter conversations about life in Thailand; the endless string of men who seem to hate nothing more than the Thai people who stand in the way of their mindless pursuit of the pleasure principle, and their utter contempt for the Siamese nubiles that they persuade to suck their dicks.
We've gone through the massive process of decolonization and globalization, of the fall of old empires, of the incipient rise of new ones. And yet the same brutal, sneering colonial attitude remains.
Which of course begs the question in my own mind, where do I fit into all of this? Is there a better way for one to live on a far shore?
I don't know. I can't know. Lying in bed at night, my mind oscillates between narrative and counter-narrative. It's as if I'm on a perennial trans-Pacific flight, jet-lagged but unwilling to sleep, half-dozing, half-wide awake, vaguely looking at the flickering LED light and listening to the warm hum of the engine, not sure which side of the ocean is Here and which side is There.
So I try to fix my mind on the things that embed me in this place at this time. I step off the train into a rainy dusk near Lumphini Park. The street vendors are grilling strips of meat rubbed with fresh herbs. The lights of the offices are turning off and the lights of the apartments are turning on. A flock of birds flies upward, flies out over the canals, moving in formation towards an unknown point.
The story unfolded; they'd been together for over a decade now, and he'd been living visa-free and under the radar for most of that time. "The police, they don't care about what white people do," she told me.
His son, my own age, was living in Thailand as well, teaching without a university degree in a bleak Bangkok suburb, a nightmare zone of industrial estates and boxy white houses and swampy, overgrown abandoned cane fields out beyond Phra Khanong.
In these corners of Asia, squalor can be covered up by superficial respectability. The outcasts, the failures, the desperados of the Western world wash up here. European skin is the mask they can use to conceal their manifold scars.
I've been asking myself a lot lately, as all those who have chosen to live far from their place of origin do, why, exactly I am here. I came here with a vague idea of what I wanted to do, I had my brief honeymoon, and now I have to ask myself a hard question: how long can I stay here now that the briefly flickering candle of novelty has gone out?
Expatriates in Bangkok have a tendency to go through a second adolescence. Liberated from the expectations of their native society, they indulge in whatever vice floats their way, be it sex, alcohol, drugs, or some combination thereof, all readily available at bargain prices. You see them in various states of inebriation, their eyes fixed forward, stumbling down Sukhumvit Road.
They come in all types, but are predominantly men. Some are the stereotypical red-faced lechers. Others are younger sybarites, with close-cropped hair and designer T-shirts. There are the eternal travelers for whom expatriation in a newly industrialized state has become another way to save money. And yet others are the losers running, half-heartedly, from their own responsibilities and failures back in their home countries, faceless and shapeless. I do sometimes meet those farangs who came to Bangkok for highly specific reasons, but for most, they came to Thailand through a strange alchemy of dissatisfaction, fear, lust, alienation, loneliness, curiosity, and international currency exchange rates.
This isn't a new thing. George Orwell was writing about the same scene in Burmese Days. The hateful white people are still here. Merely replace the overgrown maidan and gin-soaked billiard room with a happy hour in Asok. Instead of teak merchants and colonial officers, we have the precise equivalents of Flory and Lackersteen and Veraswami in the era of global capitalism.
I've gotten used to this world: the parties and faux-English pubs; the detritus of empty Sangsom whiskey bottles and crushed up blue packs of L&Ms littering whitewashed balconies; the bitter conversations about life in Thailand; the endless string of men who seem to hate nothing more than the Thai people who stand in the way of their mindless pursuit of the pleasure principle, and their utter contempt for the Siamese nubiles that they persuade to suck their dicks.
We've gone through the massive process of decolonization and globalization, of the fall of old empires, of the incipient rise of new ones. And yet the same brutal, sneering colonial attitude remains.
Which of course begs the question in my own mind, where do I fit into all of this? Is there a better way for one to live on a far shore?
I don't know. I can't know. Lying in bed at night, my mind oscillates between narrative and counter-narrative. It's as if I'm on a perennial trans-Pacific flight, jet-lagged but unwilling to sleep, half-dozing, half-wide awake, vaguely looking at the flickering LED light and listening to the warm hum of the engine, not sure which side of the ocean is Here and which side is There.
So I try to fix my mind on the things that embed me in this place at this time. I step off the train into a rainy dusk near Lumphini Park. The street vendors are grilling strips of meat rubbed with fresh herbs. The lights of the offices are turning off and the lights of the apartments are turning on. A flock of birds flies upward, flies out over the canals, moving in formation towards an unknown point.
Monday, June 25, 2012
Image and Material
About a month ago, I was wandering through the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. Amid the textiles and pottery, I came on a painting by a not terribly well-known Thai artist named Pongdej Chaiyakut.
From another angle:
In the grid, we have an unsettling group of images: crushed skulls, moon-faced generals in uniform, baby elephants that look weirdly fetal and primordial, stray dogs with their assholes open.
This is, in reality, the imagery of what people see every day in the news and on the streets, rearranged and contorted as if seen in a dream. The viewer is really seeing the lurid crime scene photos plastered across the front page of every Thai scandal sheet newspaper; the massive military parades, commandants in sunglasses saluting the tricolored flag; and the grimy curs that lurk on every street corner, mangy and sunburned, too lackadaisical and degenerate to even bark.
The farang tourists come to see a sun-drenched little kingdom by the sea, the golden Buddhas that recline amid temple bells, the heavily misted monsoon forests that tumble down the sides of the mountains; in this romanticized vision, even the peasants and urban poor are little more than pastiche images providing local color. Look underneath the freeway, and find another world entirely.
And what I love about artists like Pongdej is their unabashed willingness to confront this other world.
Ordinary people in Thailand have fought, tooth and nail, for real democracy since the fall of the absolute monarchy, against the petty despots that have so often come to power here. It's taken decades, but the country seems, shakily, in fits and starts, to be moving toward that ideal.
Yet there is the lingering taste of fascism. Its aesthetic expresses itself everywhere. At the level of "high culture," it is faux Greco-Roman concrete, and epic, three hour long nationalistic cinema in which the integrity of the kingdom is perpetually assaulted by faceless outside forces. At the level of popular culture, it is soap operas and the tabloid press. In a fascist climate, focus group-tested media becomes therapy. Intellect becomes paranoia, despondence.
What we get is a hologram. The horror and grit as well as the humanity and the beauty of daily life are trapped within a fleeting image. Inundated in reproduced image, it becomes harder and harder for us to accept what goes on under the dancing sheen of digital light.
As someone who claims to be politically and socially aware, I try to and have to keep alive the hope that someday, somewhere, people will awaken from their stupor. Marx called this principle class consciousness, Thomas Paine called it common sense. I can't say I know what an ideal society might look like. All human action is buried in obscurity and contradiction. But at the end of the day, I am trying to hold onto the same vision: that guided by some distant star, we can find out how to be less awful to each other.
In the grid, we have an unsettling group of images: crushed skulls, moon-faced generals in uniform, baby elephants that look weirdly fetal and primordial, stray dogs with their assholes open.
This is, in reality, the imagery of what people see every day in the news and on the streets, rearranged and contorted as if seen in a dream. The viewer is really seeing the lurid crime scene photos plastered across the front page of every Thai scandal sheet newspaper; the massive military parades, commandants in sunglasses saluting the tricolored flag; and the grimy curs that lurk on every street corner, mangy and sunburned, too lackadaisical and degenerate to even bark.
The farang tourists come to see a sun-drenched little kingdom by the sea, the golden Buddhas that recline amid temple bells, the heavily misted monsoon forests that tumble down the sides of the mountains; in this romanticized vision, even the peasants and urban poor are little more than pastiche images providing local color. Look underneath the freeway, and find another world entirely.
And what I love about artists like Pongdej is their unabashed willingness to confront this other world.
Ordinary people in Thailand have fought, tooth and nail, for real democracy since the fall of the absolute monarchy, against the petty despots that have so often come to power here. It's taken decades, but the country seems, shakily, in fits and starts, to be moving toward that ideal.
Yet there is the lingering taste of fascism. Its aesthetic expresses itself everywhere. At the level of "high culture," it is faux Greco-Roman concrete, and epic, three hour long nationalistic cinema in which the integrity of the kingdom is perpetually assaulted by faceless outside forces. At the level of popular culture, it is soap operas and the tabloid press. In a fascist climate, focus group-tested media becomes therapy. Intellect becomes paranoia, despondence.
What we get is a hologram. The horror and grit as well as the humanity and the beauty of daily life are trapped within a fleeting image. Inundated in reproduced image, it becomes harder and harder for us to accept what goes on under the dancing sheen of digital light.
As someone who claims to be politically and socially aware, I try to and have to keep alive the hope that someday, somewhere, people will awaken from their stupor. Marx called this principle class consciousness, Thomas Paine called it common sense. I can't say I know what an ideal society might look like. All human action is buried in obscurity and contradiction. But at the end of the day, I am trying to hold onto the same vision: that guided by some distant star, we can find out how to be less awful to each other.
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Text and Solitude
The monsoons are coming in, and I've taken refuge in one of the many giant malls that dot the vast expanse of North Bangkok. I don't know where I am. It could be Lat Phrao, Huay Khwang, Din Daeng.
This coffee shop has comfortable chairs, and I'm sitting here scratching at my e-book reader. Living in this country, my typical sources for a steady supply of books are no longer available. So I've been downloading and collecting, and trying to come to terms with a magnetic screen.
For someone who holds books in such high esteem, it feels somewhat uncomfortable to transpose the experience of reading a novel to yet another session with a screen. I've always had this feeling that books were somehow different from any other medium-- I've watched lord knows how many awful movies, how many hours of trashy television, but most every book I've read has been a book written for a higher purpose, whether it be art or philosophy or science. When I engage with a screen, I expect it to be nothing more than a distraction, even if it turns out far more than that. But when I open a book, my hope for it is that it might be a sole point of light in a world I so often find to be venal and disappointing.
And this might be because reading a book is such an inherently solitary and personal experience. The act of reading is a full confrontation with oneself. I stare at the words on the page, and come face to face with my own thoughts, my own prejudices, my own hopes and fears.
This is what makes the act of opening a book so remarkable, especially at this cultural moment when there is an enormous pressure on all art forms to be maximally social. Even when we are alone in our rooms, we are plugged into a network, pressing like/dislike buttons on websites, chatting with friends, writing in comment threads, looking through our acquaintances' photos, poking into the lives of Facebook friends, gaming socially, buying socially, reading online magazines and newspapers that develop content based on its potential to go viral.
Which means that for so many of my generation, the act of reading a book is a little intimidating. I know so many people-- fiercely intelligent, curious people-- who pick up one, maybe two books over the course of a year. When one is ensconced within one's network for an entire waking day, the idea of not only being alone but radically alone can be terrifying.
It's not that people are dumber now than they were in the past. Consider that the average young American probably reads now more than ever before. With the constant access to a stream of information, we are constantly submerged in textual ephemera, in text messages, e-mails, articles, blogs, Tweets, chats, and wall posts.
But when I go into the 2 hour cycle of e-mail/Facebook/Youtube/Reddit/various blogs/various newspapers, I emerge exhausted, somehow wanting more from each site, somehow feeling insufficiently entertained. No matter how much raw text I consume online, I will never feel invigorated or fulfilled by it.
It is this textual inundation that makes the notion of a solitary, concrete text that much more therapeutic. I open a book. I read a paragraph about light and color, and it seems that every page flies out at me.
Which brings me back to the coffee shop. All around me, teenage couples split slivers of cake, expatriate men chug coffee while their Thai wives send text messages written in a script their husbands can't read, and office workers peck at their smart phones. Outside, the monsoons blow hard against the flimsy tents of the street vendors. I sit by the window, skirting the line of separation between a harsh reality and a plastic middle class fantasy. I look briefly at the words in front of me, before closing my book, and I couldn't be happier to be alone among the crowd.
This coffee shop has comfortable chairs, and I'm sitting here scratching at my e-book reader. Living in this country, my typical sources for a steady supply of books are no longer available. So I've been downloading and collecting, and trying to come to terms with a magnetic screen.
For someone who holds books in such high esteem, it feels somewhat uncomfortable to transpose the experience of reading a novel to yet another session with a screen. I've always had this feeling that books were somehow different from any other medium-- I've watched lord knows how many awful movies, how many hours of trashy television, but most every book I've read has been a book written for a higher purpose, whether it be art or philosophy or science. When I engage with a screen, I expect it to be nothing more than a distraction, even if it turns out far more than that. But when I open a book, my hope for it is that it might be a sole point of light in a world I so often find to be venal and disappointing.
And this might be because reading a book is such an inherently solitary and personal experience. The act of reading is a full confrontation with oneself. I stare at the words on the page, and come face to face with my own thoughts, my own prejudices, my own hopes and fears.
This is what makes the act of opening a book so remarkable, especially at this cultural moment when there is an enormous pressure on all art forms to be maximally social. Even when we are alone in our rooms, we are plugged into a network, pressing like/dislike buttons on websites, chatting with friends, writing in comment threads, looking through our acquaintances' photos, poking into the lives of Facebook friends, gaming socially, buying socially, reading online magazines and newspapers that develop content based on its potential to go viral.
Which means that for so many of my generation, the act of reading a book is a little intimidating. I know so many people-- fiercely intelligent, curious people-- who pick up one, maybe two books over the course of a year. When one is ensconced within one's network for an entire waking day, the idea of not only being alone but radically alone can be terrifying.
It's not that people are dumber now than they were in the past. Consider that the average young American probably reads now more than ever before. With the constant access to a stream of information, we are constantly submerged in textual ephemera, in text messages, e-mails, articles, blogs, Tweets, chats, and wall posts.
But when I go into the 2 hour cycle of e-mail/Facebook/Youtube/Reddit/various blogs/various newspapers, I emerge exhausted, somehow wanting more from each site, somehow feeling insufficiently entertained. No matter how much raw text I consume online, I will never feel invigorated or fulfilled by it.
It is this textual inundation that makes the notion of a solitary, concrete text that much more therapeutic. I open a book. I read a paragraph about light and color, and it seems that every page flies out at me.
Which brings me back to the coffee shop. All around me, teenage couples split slivers of cake, expatriate men chug coffee while their Thai wives send text messages written in a script their husbands can't read, and office workers peck at their smart phones. Outside, the monsoons blow hard against the flimsy tents of the street vendors. I sit by the window, skirting the line of separation between a harsh reality and a plastic middle class fantasy. I look briefly at the words in front of me, before closing my book, and I couldn't be happier to be alone among the crowd.
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