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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The Streets of Bangkok

I'm walking through the streets of Bangkok at dusk. I pick up small pieces of the conversations going on around me, the rapid-fire Thai of taxi drivers and fruit sellers, many of them speaking the thick patois of the Northeastern provinces.

It's a city so often called heartless, a vast and sprawling megalopolis with suburbs dribbling out across the marshy plains of Central Thailand. Expatriates cling to Silom and Sukhumvit Roads, dusty strips of pirated DVD stands and streetwalkers and seven year old girls selling flowers, office and shopping complexes spiraling upward, away from the contradictions of street-level life.

But I've become far fonder of the older sections of the city, especially around Hua Lamphong Station, where numerous passageways narrow down to a couple of meters wide. Walk down Yaowarat Road, a long boulevard lined with food stalls and hung with Christmas lights, a million chirpy conversations at every streetside table in Thai, Chinese, and English. Turn left or right, down into one of the sois, and the streets are empty, the shop doors locked. A fluorescent light glows as an old man eats noodles and drinks beer and watches the TV news, but otherwise the old neighborhoods are devoid of life.

The buildings down here are of uncertain architectural vintage. A few stylistic details stand out, an occasional Victorian window or art deco clock. Built at some anonymous point between 1880 and 1950, they look, to the Western eye at least, removed from time or place. At night, their heavy wooden shutters seem permanently closed off to the world. The power lines hang low over the pavements, and walking home through here, the walker can feel as if a net is slowly descending from above.

Largely forgotten, these streets hold the key to the memory of an older Bangkok, a sunny tropical port town where golden stupas were the highest points piercing a multi-hued tropical sky. The spirit and the memories of the old city, uncomfortable in its modern, glass-and-steel armature, shifts around in the night. It is a rotten leg twisting against the brace.

If we look deeper, below the asphalt, we find many of the old canals that once crossed the area now buried under roadways. Bangkok was built on primeval marshlands, and due to overbuilding and climate change, will quite likely soon sink into the loamy soil. Listen late at night to the storm drains, and you can hear slowly running water-- the sound of the city slowly being reclaimed by the swamps.

An Imagined Yugoslavia, A Real Malaysia

I spent an afternoon walking through the belt of parkland that girds the western end of Kuala Lumpur's central business district. As I approached the hill crowned by the National Monument, the path became lined by abstract sculptures laid out amid the palms and raintrees.

In each sculpture, I was reminded, eerily, of the spomeniks that Marshal Tito erected in the former Yugoslavia to commemorate the defeat of fascism in Europe. Except rather than great monoliths falling to pieces in the Balkans, these are built on an intimate, small scale and neatly maintained in a tropical garden.

At Korenica

At Kuala Lumpur

At Podgaric

At Kuala Lumpur

At Ostra

At Kuala Lumpur

Was there a connection? Or was this just another sign of the universalizing tendencies of abstract sculpture? In so many sculptures where form trumps representation, where syntax outpaces semantics, everything starts to look the same.

This convergence of form and idea has happened to me, to everyone, hundreds of times before. We see something that looks like something else and we wonder if these two things are connected by some common strand of thought and experience. Perhaps there is a connection here. These Malaysian and Yugoslavian sculptors could have both studied under the same art theorists, or read the same books, or been to the same galleries. The great mass of collective experience buries whatever connections may or may not exist.

The image is translated from the former Yugoslavia to Malaysia, a country few Western media outlets cover. It is a small, peaceful country, quietly developing into a first world state, a serene peninsula balanced above the equator.

I've never been to Eastern Europe. My encounters with the Balkan states have been a few Bulgarian and Croatian friends, the writings of Danilo Kis and Ismaïl Kadaré, and the grainy images of the shellings of Sarajevo and Belgrade that dominated the newscasts of my elementary school years.

But I've spent weeks traipsing up and down the western coast of Malaysia, wandering through the rabbit's warren of old Kuala Lumpur, walking along the seaside in Penang, sipping tea and hiking through plantations in the Cameron Highlands, eating laksa and nasi lemak and curry puffs.

I encounter the reflection of the imagined Yugoslavia in the Malaysia I know so well. If I had first seen these sorts of structures in a Malaysian garden, I would have wandered off, maybe thought about what I'd seen over a cup of coffee, and then forgotten about them. But having only seen them in photographs, I can take flight with them, weave a narrative about their existence heavy with the weight of ideology and modernity.

Instead, I look inward. I stare at the sculpture perched over the ornamental pool, and place it in the continuum of experience. It is the monument that looks like the monument that I saw in a photo that reminds me of something I know about history, which is something I read in a book or saw on TV. I follow my idea back through the infinite regress of memory, until those memories become too hazy to recognize as such.