The Gaddafi/Westlife memorial blog post

...and suddenly, when I really ought to be preparing light artillery to repel looters, something leaps unbidden into my head about a piece I wrote for Careless Talk Costs Lives, about going to see the LA band The Warlocks in some smelly back room in London, and how a drunk and/or mad man singing Eddie Cochran songs (or was it Hank Williams?) on the station platform on the way home seemed to act as a sort of digestif to the whole gig, and there were discursions about the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead (both of whom had been called The Warlocks at some stage or another) and Beavis and Butt-head (who weren’t, so far as I know) and the article had 17 footnotes, and when they used it in the magazine, it appeared that the designer couldn’t really cope with that sort of thing, but in any case I can’t find a copy of it anywhere, but while I’m in that frame of mind I try to find some songs by The Warlocks and they aren’t nearly as good as I remember, and I start to doubt whether the missing article was all that great in the first place.



Every time I use footnotes, it seems that there’s someone in the publishing chain who can’t cope. They cut them back, or shove them to the end of the book, or both. They really ought to read this article, by Alexandra Horwitz.

Incidentally, thanks to everyone who has expressed concern about the flooding in Bangkok. We’ve been untouched so far, but the run-off is expected to reach the canal nearest us in the next few hours. Our luck may well continue, but if in the event that it doesn’t, we have plenty of food, water, improving reading material and other necessaries, and also the advantage of a second storey if things do get damp down below. The most likely forecast is a few days of grumbling inconvenience at worst. And if the next blog post washes up on your shore in a bottle, think of it as part of the analogue revival I was talking about last week. But in the meantime, this is pretty damn fabulous:

Hitler has only got one fishball

Sorry, yet another attractive-Asian-teenagers-in-swastikas story, closely following the Japanese cosplay and Thai game show tales. And we’re back in the Land of Smiles, for the tale of a Catholic school in Chiang Mai where the kids interpreted fancy dress in a manner that the present Pontiff might find a little disturbing (albeit less so in his younger days). The link, incidentally, is to the Daily Mail, in case you’re sensitive about associating with such a rag; but since we’re discussing TEENAGERS dressing as HITLER, a certain sense of proportion might be in order here.

However, if you really don’t want to go there, this gist is this. The Sacred Heart school in Chiang Mai has a tradition  of holding an elaborate fancy dress parade on sports day. This year the procession was led by a female Hitler; some students were dressed as SS guards (wielding toy guns) while others waved Nazi flags.  Many offered up an enthusiastic “sieg heil” or two. Some of the expats in attendance voiced their reservations but many of the teachers, let alone the students, simply didn’t understand why anyone might take offence.

And this is the issue. The notion of Hitler as the epitome of evil, a sort of über-bogeyman, just doesn’t resonate in most of Asia, especially with the young. Sure, they know he was one of the baddies – but just one of them. It’s not as if he’s Voldemort.

Still, at least Hitler’s Café in Mumbai has changed its name now.

PS: And some even more startling images from prachatai.com:

 

The revolution will not be televised if they nick all the televisions

(Those who have been following me on Twitter over the past few hours may find some of these observations a little familiar. My only defence is that, in true postmodern spirit, I’m just looting myself.)

A year and a bit ago, there was a period of civil disturbance in Bangkok. I wrote something about it at the time. It’s not helpful – nor is it my place – to divide the participants into goodies and baddies, but I think it’s fair to say that most of the protesters originally came to the city with honestly held grievances. In their view, the democratic process had failed them, after elected governments aligned to Thaksin Shinawatra were forced out of office, first by the army, then by the courts. Non-violent protest degenerated into something nastier, 90 or more people were killed, and much damage was inflicted on the city. But, as far as I’m aware, nobody stole any flat-screen TVs.

Some of the more strident opponents of the protesters argued that if this is how ordinary Thais behaved when they had the merest sniff of democracy, it might be better for the country if it were sealed off from these new-fangled notions for a few years. To his credit, Prime Minister Abhisit rejected such a move, in due course called an election, and was soundly defeated by Yingluck Shinawatra, Thaksin’s sister/proxy. So the protesters got pretty much what they wanted but – crucially – they got it through the ballot box, not through brute force.

Recent events in London and beyond seem to have followed an initial trajectory that’s superficially similar to that of the Bangkok protests, with a peaceful demonstration against a perceived injustice getting out of control. But what happened next was at once less serious (nobody, so far as we know at the moment, is dead) and more reprehensible, as participants quickly ditched all pretence to a political motive and began to loot and burn for its own sake. Condemnation was quickly and rightly forthcoming from all quarters, even if some of the proposed responses (water cannons, troops on the street, martial law, shoot on sight) suggested that some people don’t follow recent events – those in Bangkok, for example – as closely as they might. And some other rumours banging around Twitter, such as the meme that the animals had been released from London Zoo, just prove that some people read too many John Irving books.

The looters in London and Birmingham and Liverpool and elsewhere don’t have the excuse that they were the victims of an anti-democratic fiddle; moreover, they’re considerably wealthier, in material terms, than most of the farmers and labourers who marched under Thaksin’s banner. The electoral system in Britain is far from perfect, but by chance, last year’s election gave an outcome that was closer to the intentions of the voters than many in recent times: as ever, no one party took an overall majority of votes, and unusually, no one party was able to govern unaided. It wasn’t the result I wanted, and maybe it wasn’t what the people lugging flat-screen TVs through smashed shop windows wanted (an analysis of voting behaviour among the hooded opportunists might throw up some surprises, although I suspect not) but it’s what happened.

But just because the looters aren’t noble, selfless freedom fighters, it doesn’t mean their behaviour doesn’t warrant analysis. It was in that spirit that I tweeted:

The looting is an unholy synthesis of welfare dependency and consumer capitalism. Discuss.

...and while some appreciated the contribution, and some agreed, and some didn’t, one or two hinted that such Hegelian chin-stroking is inappropriate right now, that our responses should be practical or emotional, but not intellectual; after all, not that many bookshops were ransacked over the past few nights. It’s pretty sad when the word “understanding” becomes freighted with negative connotations; if you’re trying to understand a criminal, does it really mean that you automatically want to hug him and forgive him and buy him a Wii? Surely it’s quite consistent to want to understand and analyse an act of wrongdoing, and at the same time to sympathise with the victims and punish the wrongdoers and try to prevent the whole fiasco from happening again.

Or should we just say fuck it, and wheel out the water cannons?

PS: Hurrah! Zoe Williams brings Baudrillard to the (street) party!

PPS: And at Prospect, David Goodhart throws a slug of Fukuyama into the punchbowl...

Dog whistle politics

At CNNGo, I admit to not understanding the Thai election campaign, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one...

Don’t vote, it only encourages them

An election looms in Thailand, and the roadsides are festooned with images of awkwardly gurning candidates, most of which survive a matter of days before being stolen or defaced. The most interesting are those put up by a spin-off of the People’s Alliance for Democracy which, notwithstanding its name, argues that popular democracy isn’t entirely suitable for Thailand. Although PAD activity was to a great extent responsible for the accession of current Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva in 2008, the organisation holds all the mainstream parties in fairly low esteem, albeit reserving its fiercest condemnation for former Premier Thaksin Shinawatra and his cronies; as such they are depicted in unflattering animal guises.

As such, the Electoral Commission has banned the posters, on the basis that they don’t advocate any particular candidate, and because they’re the wrong size. The notion of “a plague a’ both your houses” seems just a little too nihilistic for Thailand’s image as the Land of Smiles. A pity; I liked the monkey. (More on posters here.)

Meanwhile, the big talking point is the success of the Bangkok-set über-sequel The Hangover II, and whether it presents Thai culture in a positive and/or accurate light. My friend Cod deals with the conundrum at CNNGo. And if you don’t understand the minutiae of local politics, you’ll just have to trust me: the following, from Thai White Papers via Punk Planning, is rather amusing.

Bad books

Yesterday I spent a few hours at WordPlay, apparently the first literary festival ever to grace Bangkok. As enjoyable as the talks and events were, it was a passing sentence in the programme that really caught my attention:

If you notice anything strange or disturbing, please contact the event organisers.

Surely at a literary festival, it’s the absence of strangeness and disturbance that would be more of a problem?

Art about tarts

At CNNGo, I discuss Chris Coles and his paintings of the Bangkok demi-monde.

Which in turn got me thinking again about Jonathan Jones and what he said about the distinction between great art and great food; that what distinguishes art is its ethereality, its essential separateness from the banal necessities of being nourished or clothed or sheltered. But Coles’s work succeeds precisely because it engages with those banal necessities, and the things that people have to do to ensure them.

I’m not saying, of course, that a good picture can’t just be a very pretty painting. But think of the impact that the persecution and arrest of Ai Weiwei is having on Hong Kong artists, or the creative inspiration that’s been unleashed by the Arab Spring; the recent attack on Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ photograph (read David Mitchell on the competing artistic visions of Serrano and his detractors) or the anti-BP stunt at Tate Britain. This is art that refuses to be ethereal or transcendent, and is in fact most effective at the point where imagination and reality meet. Not sure what it tastes like, though.

Bof

For CNN, I explain to Bangkokians the joys of tough duck and rough Côtes de Rhône.

Big big honey blues

Something I wrote for CNNGo, that might upset members of the ghastly misogynist failure community.

Original sin

In an effort to make a story about interior design a little less like a story about interior design, I visit a gently funky art gallery on Silom Road. They’re showing paintings and sculptures by Preyawit Nilachulaka, and the collision of childlike cartoon imagery, sexual transgression and violent humiliation immediately makes me think of Jeff Koons and/or the Chapman Brothers. Now, you could argue that this another example of Asia appropriating an aspect of Western culture and working out how to remake it just that little bit cheaper; and sell it back to the dumb farang; except that Jeff and Jake and Dinos already did that to Popeye and Goya and any number of other flakes from the scalp of occidental art. And then I thought that a Thai wandering through a gallery in London or New York might come across a Koons or a Chapman and think, bloody hell, some cheeky bugger’s ripping off Preyawit. Or whatever that might be in Thai.

And then I pop into the Sri Maha Mariamman temple, which I’ve passed dozens of times over the years, and watch the devotions to the goddess Uma (as in Thurman) and hear a four-note mantra, repeated over and over, a female voice, and I think, bloody hell, some cheeky bugger’s ripping off this:

Top table

Because I’ve spent a big chunk of the past few weeks going to fancy-schmancy restaurants (I know, I know, pity me), I do find myself pondering even more deeply than usual the precise methods that allow us to identify some things (food, books, music, shoes, whatever) as just that little bit better than something else in the same category. Of course, ultimately it’s subjective, but equally, sometimes you don’t just *think* it or *feel* it, you know it. I’m thinking of two restaurants in particular, which for reasons of personal safety I’ll call X and Y. Both have hugely talented chefs, pay top money for the best ingredients and have helpful, charming, well-informed staff. And neither, needless to say, is exactly inexpensive.

So why do I know in my bones that X is better than Y? It’s something to do with the service: when a waiter at Y brings you a dish, the whole process is meticulously choreographed and scripted. I’m sure the staff at X have equally rigorous training, but it doesn’t show; or rather, you can’t see how it’s done. You can believe they’re serving you because they want to, because the transaction brings them as much pleasure as it does you. This may, of course, be a cruel illusion, but its one that is expertly sustained throughout the meal.

I could argue that it’s a matter of class, but that’s a pretty loaded word, even more so in a hierarchical country such as Thailand than in the West. On the other hand, I’ve heard Americans use “classy” to describe someone who not only knows what fork to use, but also helps old ladies across the road. Maybe that’s more like it. OK, a brief anecdote that clarifies why restaurant X is classy. A few years ago, a group of wealthy Chinese businessmen dined there. At one point, one of them snapped his fingers to summon a waiter. The waiter began to respond, but the maître d interposed himself, appeared at the businessman’s side and asked: “I’m sorry, sir, have you lost your dog?”

Of course, it’s very easy to turn this into a declaration that a certain kind of person isn’t allowed to play with the pretty, sparkly trappings of high living or high culture. From the New Yorker a couple of months back, Kelefa Sanneh discusses Jay-Z’s book Decoded:

One day four years ago, Jay-Z was reading The Economist when he came across an article bearing the heading “Bubbles and Bling.” The article was about Cristal, the expensive champagne that figured in the rhymes of Jay-Z and other prominent rappers. In the article, Frédéric Rouzaud, the managing director of the winery behind Cristal, was asked whether these unsought endorsements might hurt his brand. “That’s a good question, but what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it,” he said, adding, slyly, “I’m sure Dom Pérignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business.” Jay-Z was irritated enough that he released a statement vowing never to drink Cristal again, and he started removing references to Cristal from his old lyrics during concerts. (He eventually switched his endorsement to Armand de Brignac.) In Jay-Z’s view, Rouzaud had not only insulted hip-hop culture; he had violated an unspoken promotional arrangement. “We used their brand as a signifier of luxury and they got free advertising and credibility every time we mentioned it,” he writes. “We were trading cachet.” (Actually, the book, not free of typos, says “cache.”)

It’s that last sentence that really puts the knife in. The problem with Jay-Z isn’t that he’s black, or a rapper (Sanneh is a black hip-hop fan), or even that he’s so crass as to discuss the mechanics of product placement in the open. And the matter of whether he can tell Cristal from Krug in a blind tasting is left unraised. Sanneh’s complaint is that he can’t be arsed to hire a decent proof-reader, which betrays a lack of respect for his reader. Not classy.

To be fair, in Jay-Z’s celebrity world, one might have to trade class – however you define it – for credibility. His latest protégé, Hugo, has raised a few eyebrows, bluegrass reimaginings of hip-hop million-sellers not necessarily being what you’d expect from the English-educated spawn of Thai aristocracy. I met him at a party a few weeks ago (Hugo, not Mr Zed); he’s frightfully well-spoken, far posher than I am. I didn’t check on his spelling skills, but I bet he’d never snap his fingers at a waiter.

Pneuvel cuisine

And in my latest screed for CNNGo, I sabotage what nugatory chance I might once have had of becoming a Michelin inspector.

PS: Jay Rayner also had something to say.

Biting the hand

At CNNGo, I grumble about all the nice restaurants that give me free meals. Cleverly naming no names, so if anybody gets shirty, I can say “No, of course I didn’t mean your place...”

Gentlemen and prayers

I was going to liven up your Sunday with a fairly long and convoluted post about how recent events have proved Marshall McLuhan right – how the process of transmitting information becomes the story – people focus on Wikileaks itself more than on the US spying on Ban Ki-Moon or Prince Andrew sanctioning corruption – tabloids blaming the BBC’s coverage of FIFA skulduggery for the failed World Cup bid, ignoring the skulduggery itself – and even as I type, I see someone complaining about a supposedly offensive Twitter hashtag, demanding that the complaint is RT’d, thereby managing to turn said unremarkable tag into a global trending topic. (Thinks: what’s the Thai for “D’OH!”?)

But I won’t, because all I want to do today is to share this picture with you:

The ballad of Samuel K Amphong

Some time in the late 1970s, when the letters page of NME occupied an equivalent level of cultural significance to, say, Stephen Fry’s Twitter feed today, the following epistle appeared:

Where is Beatles band? This band who have not been as of late clear of circumstance. Beatles Band! Can we no longer hear there medolious throng? John! Paul! All in Beatles Band come forth! What question have we to put? Now? Arguments neccessary can begin with whole results expected for any return. Ringo! Here in Thailand Beatles band experience is long loved and can be hurt away from John, Paul etc. Please give any news to Samuel K. Amphong of address similar to above. yours as in rock!
Samuel K Amphong, Thailand

It is lost in the mists of time and sulphate as to whether this was a genuine enquiry or a bit of space-filling devilment on the part of Danny Baker, but more than three decades later, I set off to find out. The answer is here. Sort of.

Yummers

Usually when I tell people I’m in Thailand, their immediate response is “Oh, the Thai people are all so lovely and gentle,” to which the only sensible response is that some of them are. And some are abject arseholes, and most of them are a mixture of the two, just like Swedes and Peruvians and Moroccans and, well, any nationality really. And then they tell me how utterly bloody wonderful the food is in Thailand and I say pretty much the same thing. The difference is, every now and then I’m allowed to help out with a bit of qualitative analysis of the food, as I did recently for CNNGo’s Best Eats survey. Take a look, and feel free to disagree violently, ideally from a position of ignorant prejudice.

Maybe I should do the same thing on the people.

Knowledge is powerless

I’ve always been uneasy with the notion of Chinglish, as so often it’s an excuse to laugh at the fact that some foreigners aren’t entirely fluent in English. Ha ha. Of course there is no real equivalent in Asian culture (amusing examples of idiot gweilo making clumsy mistakes in Chinese), not because of westerners’ faultless grasp of oriental languages, but because we so seldom even make the effort and thus risk failure.

That said, there is fun to be had with the collision of languages and cultures. Sometimes a text makes perfect sense in objective terms, but still seems ever so slightly weird; for example, when a packet of Japanese incense is described as:

A convenient item to carry with you when visiting a grave.

And then there are those moments when all pretence to meaning is abandoned and what seems to be a random selection of English words are thrown against a wall; take the following, which I saw on a Bangkok billboard a few days ago:

You’ll find original super supecial road, it’s so great future!

Or indeed those that really are slightly off-target attempts to say something special in English, like this:


from the protests that took place in Bangkok earlier this year. As Andrew Marshall of Reuters explains, the slogan expresses (or would, if these purportedly educated Thais had got to the page that covers verbal adjectives) the disdain that many within the anti-Thaksin middle classes have for their poorer compatriots in the provinces, where the former Premier’s support is concentrated. But, presumably unwittingly, “UNEDUCATE PEOPLE” also communicates the agenda that countless governments and businesses and media concerns seem to be following these days, although few would admit it.

Chai yo

At CNNGo.com, my musings on Bangkok’s less poncy wine establishments.

The Ballad of Damien Day

Tracking the Bangkok brouhaha on Facebook and Twitter and similar media, Small Boo said: “Have you noticed how many people are suddenly calling themselves journalists?”

Live rounds and armoured vehicles and tear gas and looting certainly offer an opportunity for people to become war reporters for the duration, especially because many of them have little else to do right now. (One of the first things the Thai government does when things get hairy is to announce a public holiday; and if that doesn’t work, they announce another one. I think today is the fourth successive day off.) And obviously technology makes things much easier, and a judicious scan of Twitter has provided the most reliable source of information about what’s been happening here over the past week. The best of the self-starters don’t try to offer too much analysis, and just tell you what they can see and hear. They expect their readers to do a bit of work, to check out other sources, and form their own overall picture by putting the pieces together.

Foreign reporters on the whole don’t show the same modest restraint, which is understandable; why would the New York Times say that if you want to find out what’s happening round the next corner you’ll have to read Yomiuri Shimbun or El País? But in their effort to tell a self-contained story that discourages the reader from looking elsewhere, they seem obsessed with recasting the whole sad business as some kind of liberation narrative, implicitly aligning it with those big struggles, some won but many lost, that tend to win Pulitzers: Budapest in 1956; Prague and Paris in 1968; Manila in 1986; Beijing and Berlin in 1989; Jakarta in 1998; Tehran only last year. There’s an element of truth to this treatment; but ultimately, it’s no more the whole story than the lone Tweeter, telling us he’s just seen a dead body or a shopping mall in flames. The Thai media, meanwhile, seems far too close to those who control the political and economic levers; moreover, a combination of legal restrictions and social taboos means that the really interesting stuff is what’s left unsaid. Sometimes it all gets deliciously incestuous, with legit media reporting on the citizen hacks: for example, France 24’s story about the shadowy FreakingCat. Not to mention the bloggers sneering at the professionals...

But do an iPhone, a fondness for Graham Greene novels and a studied disregard for one’s own personal safety really define a journalist? If people outside Thailand wanted to find out what was going on in Bangkok, I’m guessing they went to the BBC or CNN first, then maybe checked the blogs and tweets afterwards; you have to finish your main course before you’re allowed pudding. I don’t know how long that will continue, but for the moment you’re defined not by the work you do, but what happens to your work after you’ve done it.

PS: Manik Sethisuwan offers up some delicious word clouds of all the coverage.

PPS: And Not The Nation gets it right as well.

PPPS: Yet more, from Cod at CNNGo.

Bangkok