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!