Hot times in Thailand

This morning I had an interesting experience, one that I will now relate, sparing you any need to conduct your own field research.

In short, don’t put namman muay (“Boxing Liniment”) in your eye.

I awoke with a sore shoulder and, in jockish high spirits, I splashed some of this fiery oil onto the offending muscles with such enthusiasm that quite a lot of it went instead into my eye. Both hands being already contaminated, I couldn’t rinse the eyeball

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Life is terrifying

How’s the new year going for you guys? I had a piece of exercise equipment, in a somewhat inauspicious vein, try to crush my skull about 7am on the morning of January the first. Ever since, I’ve been reflecting on the fact that, just when you least expect it, irony can leap out and mash you. I hope, despite appearances, that incident wasn’t a harbinger of things to come in 2011.

Given the fact I was almost bitten to death … Read more

Tequila Mockingbird: Magic potion divinely inspired

The secret potion I revealed several months ago has proven a great success, in terms of interested visitors from around the world. And the world should rejoice, for  yet another formula has recently come to me in a vision. Preliminary testing is complete.

Tequila Mockingbird (serves 4-6)

Tequila                                                       500ml

Dried & roasted hot chili peppers       4-5  or to taste

Chaser/antidote

Lime juice                                                   500ml

Sugar                                                         4 tblsps or to taste

Salt                                                             2 tspns to mix in

Coarse salt                                               enough to rime … Read more

Jazz piano par excellence: FCCT Friday night happy hour

Bob King’s pianos don’t believe in musical spaces. This rendition of “Night in Tunisia,” e.g., presents a solid wall of brilliant but super-dense improvisation. When Bob’s in this mode, he says, the piano starts playing him. He’s capable of playing the most delicate, subtlest jazz you could want; but his piano doesn’t always want him to play it this way. So Bob can appear to resist, asserting his basic autonomy by demolishing a piano with his bare … Read more

Entertaining war with the spin doctors

Last night I watched Fair Game with friends at RCA House. A thriller with real teeth, this film presents a barely fictionalized account of events related to how the Bush administration apparently lied on a massive, perhaps criminally reprehensible, scale regarding Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program, seeking justification for America’s going to war with Iraq.

One of the most interesting things about Fair Game, for me, is how an entertainment based on actual events cycles back to … Read more

Submarine garrets for starving writers

Writers look for budget accommodation  (Bangkok, 2027)

Here are some things that didn’t fit on the graph in my “Things fall apart redux” post.

The price of fish in Villa Supermarket is soaring, the Gulf of Thailand is getting fished out, China is behaving more aggressively as the superpower-in-waiting, I’ve lost my mother’s copy of Ben’s secret recipe for Montreal smoked meat and I now learn Ben’s deli closed two years ago. It’s as likely I’ll get to … Read more

Digital bedlam

Yesterday I was riding the BTS here in Bangkok, when I noticed a guy standing in the corner of the car. What first caught my attention was his face, which was bathed in an unholy glow. Short of sleep as I was, my first thought was, yow, this is some kind of divine messenger, maybe sent by my dear, departed mother to have another go at finally setting me straight.

Then I realized the light came from the iPad he … Read more

Starbucks and the social construction of reality

Sara and I are having breakfast at Starbucks. Being a kee niaow species of curmudgeon, I’m complaining about everything from the prices to the clonish docking of people and their digital devices. Discerning impatience in her manner, I eventually desist.

“Give me a break,” she says, going on to explain that Starbucks doesn’t sell coffee; it sells a lifestyle experience, and I should dummy up about it, she’s trying to relax.

Ah, I reply. So we’re banking some sort of … Read more

Pretty good sandwiches. Questions of relativity and quantum theory

The other day I went to meet the charming Ms. Weow at the new Dean & Deluca coffeeshop, a glitzy branch of the New York deli in what’s to be the ground floor of the Ritz Carleton Residences, still under construction.

On my way over, I phoned her to check that I had the correct location.

“Right at the Chong Nongsri BTS Station,” she said.

“West side or east?”

“Which way are you facing now?” she asked me.

“What do … Read more

Graphically engaging: The sequel

Has anyone else noticed what’s happening with skirts and short-shorts around Bangkok? (Or are writers just unusually perceptive?) Are there such things as benign epidemics?

Haikus are so much easier to write than novels. Of course the commercial prospects, including their chances on the Big Screen, are even more uncertain. Whatever. Here’s what I’m going to call a mixed-media haiku.

A spiritual (to be sung with full chorus)

God is there in the hemlines

Ascending, praise be,

Heavenwards. Oh, Lord.

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