Go KL Arts Scene!

I've been back from Kuala Lumpur since the 7th and even Bangkok's blanket of insipidness hasn't completely doused the enthusiastic buzz I returned with. During a nonstop five days of article research, I met and interviewed a variety of people in the alternative arts scene. They were universally interesting, interested, articulate, politically savvy, friendly, informative and so so smart. Everyone freely shared time and information with me and most miraculously of all, I encountered none of the nasty gossiping and badmouthing so ubiquitous to the Bangkok scene. (The guy in the photo is the fabulous Pang Khee Teik, programming impresario for the equally fabulous The Annexe Gallery Studio Theatre.)

I've been dancing on the fringes of the Thai arts scene for many years so maybe I'm just bored and jaded. But even in the mid 1990s when I first started writing about the local scene I wouldn't have ascribed such a list of positive traits to it. Here you really can't ever know who you've inadvertently offended until they suddenly stop talking to you. In the mid 1990s I received a fax saying "Fuck off Yankee, go back to your own country, Thailand is not your home." The sender is now a famous personality in the arts scene and though we now interact as if nothing ever happened, at the time I felt utterly betrayed and shocked. To this day I still haven't a clue what I did to engender such maliciousness.

Thailand is the land of nothing-lasts-forever. This Buddhist outlook on life sets up extremely positive as well as negative outcomes. The latter apply especially in the realms of trust and friendship. Maybe if I spent more time in KL my back would start feeling as stabbed as it did here when I was writing frequently about contemporary arts and culture. Somehow I doubt it. In any case I'll know soon enough because I'll be back in KL on the 14th of July. I can't wait!

Right Writing

I wasn't expecting flak from my Tiesto post in late April. For starters I was stunned to learn that anyone would even READ my blog, much less be offended by being named in it. So I crawled into a creative hole and shut up for fear of displeasing you, dear reader. (If you exist.) Which is strange since in my "real life" mode I'm supposedly renowned for pissing people off with some regularity. (Though because bitchy gossiping is more the norm in Thailand than trying to mend fences, I'm usually blithely unaware of the putative affront.)

It's impossible not to piss someone off some of the time. Even Abe Lincoln agrees with me. So I'm renewing my New Year's resolution to blog. Back on 4 January I forswore to be creative on a daily basis. Now I promise only to write as regularly as I can and be as unfettered as possible within the confines of Thai political and cultural norms. I desperately need to rehone my verbal acuity skills so it doesn't take me a ridiculous TWO hours to write these two paragraphs. And just as importantly I hope to rediscover the joy I once experienced observing and describing the myriad wacky and noteworthy facets of my life.