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.

The Color of Money

Last Wednesday I was in a taxi heading from home to my dear friend Bob's for a day of movie watching. The driver pulled up to the fare booth at the Rama IV-Hualumphong expressway entrance to and opened his door--a sun visor on the side window meant he couldn't roll it down--to pay the 40-baht fare with the 500 baht note I'd given him.

Fare Guy handed the driver the change. The driver shut his door and then handed me the change which was neatly folded inside a receipt. (Whenever you pay with a large denomination bill, fare guys always give you a receipt.) We started up the incline towards the expressway. "Hey wait a minute," I told the driver. "I gave him 500 baht but he's only given me three 20-baht notes in change! He owes me another 400 baht" "Yes, I saw you gave him 500 baht," agreed the driver. I felt hugely supported by that remark because Thais generally avoid taking a concrete stand on either side of an issue unless it's absolutely necessary.

Since we'd barely moved from the toll booth, the driver carefully backed up, stopped the car, talked to Fare Guy for a moment or two and returned to the taxi. He went through a series of searching-for-money motions--checking under his seat, under the car etc. even though we both knew the change had gone directly from Fare Guy's hand to the driver's to mine. By asking the driver to check around the taxi, Fare Guy was tacitly admitting he knew I'd handed him a 500 baht bill. For all the good that did.

OK, enough of this sense diddling around. I got out on the passenger side and walked toward Fare Guy's little booth doing my irate-Farang-demanding-her-change-now routine. He summarily told us to get in the car and move over to the side of the expressway next to the office, effectively putting three lanes of slowly moving vehicles between him and us. I immediately sent the very sweet and patient taxi driver back to the tollbooth for an update. After waiting patiently for five minutes, the driver returned telling me to "jai yen" (keep a cool heart).

After 15 years in Thailand, I know absolutely that staying calm is the only viable option in these sorts of powerless situations. However a cool heart is also the LAST think I tend to keep at these moments. Fortunately just then Fare Guy emerged from his booth, holding a plastic basket under one arm and crossed carefully over three lanes. He walked silently past without looking at me and went into the office. Not pleased about being left on the hot and noisy roadside, I trailed after him.

Thai officialdom specializes in constructing large spaces wherein a couple of government employees languish in air conditioned comfort behind closed doors, while a lower-grade functionary or two sit outside at a desk and pretend to care who enters inside. I barge past them into the "office." (No Thai would ever act in this manner but since I'm definitely not Thai, nobody's particularly surprised.)

Fare Guy was laboriously counting the contents of his plastic basket, shoving bundles of 500, 100, 50, and 20 baht into an automatic money counter and jotting numbers in columns on a form. He counted the loose change and the tollway vouchers. He muttered something to the other person in the room who was adding numbers on a calculator. Then Fare Guy repeated the entire process, this time changing amounts in the margins. "How much longer will this take?" I asked impatiently. "I have a plane to catch." That was a big lie but it hardly mattered because I might as well be wrapped in Harry Potter's Invisibility Cloak for all the attention it netted me. I just knew Fare Guy was trying to fritter away enough time so I'd storm out and leave him 4oo baht richer. I wasn't having it.

Finally, some 25 minutes after I first passed the 500 baht note to the taxi driver, Fare Guy put his palms together and raised his hands in front of his face in an incredibly half-hearted "wai." He muttered a barely audible "sorry" under his breath and shoved four 100-baht notes at me. I grabbed them and stormed out. He'd been guilty from the git go and deserved no thanks for not ripping me off. I've talked to about this to many taxi drivers since and none have ever seen or heard of such a blatantly dishonest tollbooth scam.

I'm Too Sexy for Tiesto, Too Sexy for Tiesto

The minute I arrived at Sathorn Pier, I knew I'd picked the absolutely wrong event to attend for the second social sortie of my Thursday evening. For the first one I chose Chris Phongphit's photo exhibition at Nospace Gallery on Soi 71. I loved how he blocked the entrance gate to gallery with a green baht bus he somehow managed to commandeer for three hours (complete with the driver cum ticket taker and his very curious little son). The public entered through the front door of the bus, paid the 7-baht fare and exited out the back into the gallery courtyard. Christian's concept of standing on pedestrian overpasses and photographing the colorful and rusted rooftops of the Bangkok buses whizzing by underneath was also a first.

For the next event of the night I'd originally planned to check out Happy Monday on Ekamai 10, a bar/hangout run by the same hip and socially conscious group of artists, writers and musicians who created the fun-while-it-lasted Gig Grocery. But after a really funky Songkran (as in I was in a funk) I decided a Major Event offered potentially better mood altering opportunities.

A sweet friend kindly offered me his spare hottest-ticket-in-town so I could check out Tiesto, the hottest-DJ-in-town (or in-the-world if you believe local PR). He was performing his The Element of Life world tour at The River Promenade, the hottest-venue-in-town (at least for this week).

The glass-fronted two-storey River Promenade located on the Thonburi side of the Chao Phraya opposite the Shangrila Hotel is actually a gussied up sales office for a ritzy riverside condo by developer Raimon Land. Scheduled for completion by 2012, two-towered The River promises to be even more obscenely over the top than the myriad other condos shooting up on tiny sois around town....But that's for another rant.

Back to Tiesto. Up until I stepped onto the riverside hotel pier at Sathorn Pier for the two-minute ferry ride across the Chao Phraya, I knew zilch about either Tiesto or The River Promenade. Apparently, the former does trance; the latter does events that promote condos to rich clients and attract whichever local press, sycophants and acolytes can score an invite. Me? I'm in the Curious-Onlooker-With-Free-Ticket category.

A steady stream of Beautiful People (i.e. anyone with a coveted free ticket) arrives in attire ranging from working girl slinky (sycophant or girlfriend) to designer jeans and t-shirts (hip acolyte) and boring business suits (client). I look OK in my black ruffled Nathalie Joubert shirt and Rai Van Buren's Sexy Little Beach orange silk skirt. But schlepping a daypack while every other female dangles a teensy reticule or nothing at all is a serious fashion faux pas on my part. The one guy carrying a briefcase massively gets teased for bringing work to a party. He calls his girlfriend, who's already at the party to ensure he can ditching it in her car trunk the minute we arrive. If indeed we ever do.

It's 8:30 pm and we've already waited 20 minutes with no sign of the 18-meter River Boat, an elegant launch cruiser powered by two Volvo Penta engines. Of all the shuttle boats operated by the various five-star hotels and condos along the river, it's the only one with air-conditioning and Italian leather seating. It's also the only one that apparently never picks up its waiting passengers.

We party animals are becoming restive and by now there are way too many of us to fit into an 18-meter vessel. The organizers are frantically mobile phoning to the other side to see what's happened to the transportation. From our vantage point so near and yet so far away, we can see The Promenade ablaze in colored neon and searchlights

Eventually a longboat pulls up. No cruiser this, it's more like a gussied up tourist boat. The paint is fresh white instead of peeling blue and the comfy padded seats, arranged in pairs along the both sides, are upholstered in beige vinyl. We all settle in for the more proletariat than expected non-airconditioned journey.

Getting across the river takes two minutes but docking is more problematic because the pier access is blocked by the very same River Boat that couldn't be bothered to pick us up. Not only won't the unsmiling black-attired pier boat minions let us tie up, but they're actually waving at us to move off! Don't they know some of us (not me of course) are important guests? Don't they care that some of us (not me of course) have serious image building and partying on our minds?

Stuck in riverine limbo, my friend and I content ourselves with listening to Tata Young blaring her warmup set across the night and looking at her dancing image projected onto the gigantic screens surrounding the stage. Her set ends as we continue to tread water (or whatever idling boats do). Our hearts skip a beat as an obviously Important Person in a black suit was escorted onto the River Boat. NOW! we think. But then he walks back up the ramp to retrieve something he'd left ashore. Eventually Mr. Who-Cares-How-Many-People-I-Inconvenience reembarked and I believed our Docking Moment was nigh.

But no, Mr. W-C-H-M-P-I-I is as much dust in the wind as we are compared to Tata Young and her entourage who turn out to be the real reason for the inordinate delay and frosty welcome reception. After they've all been regally shepherded into the climate-controlled comfort of the River Boat, our comparatively tacky craft FINALLY pulls up to its destination.

It's now 9 p.m. and I'm hot, starving and immediately overwhelmed by the onslaught of people and noise. Surely an event of this caliber will provide a few sugar-free, meat-free hors d'oeuvres for its guests. But before any nourishment needs can be met, I must be thoroughly vetted at the entrance. Though I hold a "gold" ticket, it counts for naught in River Promenade hierarchy, or at least naught as much as a "VIP" ticket. An unsmiling black-attired female minion attaches a small band to my wrist and points me toward the crush of humanity packed onto the sweltering terrace.

"Can't I go inside the building?" I ask querulously, gazing through the huge plate glass windows to the spacious interior where people are milling around, dishes of munchies in hand. Nope. Like the River Boat, the climate-controlled interior of River Promenade is reserved for the upper echelons of Bangkok society like Tata Young and local VIPs. Beautiful People though some of us terrace proles may be, we're entitled to free drinks only. (I don't even drink alcohol.)

We second-tier Beautiful People can't even pee stylishly, but are relegated to the row of Porta Potties outside the main entrance. It's all very mean spirited and arbitrary. Like giving me a free ticket to the Kodak Theatre and then making me watch the Academy Awards on outside monitors near some side entrance.

Of course had this been the Academy Awards I would have swallowed my wounded pride, shrugged off the unfriendly treatment and hung around for the show (after running to the nearest loo). But to linger for two hot and hungry hours claustrophobically surrounded by people who have no desire to meet me (and vice versa) so I can listen to some DJ I've never heard of anyhow....Nah, I think not.

The most satisfying aspect of the Tiesto concert at River Promenade was leaving it. I don't have to wait a millisecond for the ferry boat which is already moored at the pier. A trio of minions smilingly usher me aboard. As I sail off into the hot night toward Thaksin Pier, the sole passenger on the large vessel, I experience my own Tata Young moment.

Security Charades

Little's changed since last May when I whinged about the form-without-function bag checks at the entrances to the MRT stations. I bet nobody in the upper echelons of the MRT even remembers the original raison d'etre of this inane exercise, if indeed one ever existed. In any case, whatever the obviously bored to distraction security "guards" are looking for--or more aptly NOT looking for--could never be found during the millisecond of scrutiny they devote to the bag checking procedure.

Yet woe betide anyone who attempts to bypass the bag check for the sake of convenience. A few times when schlepping a computer-laden daypack I tried striding purposefully past the "guard" rather than laboriously taking if off and on. But I only ended up feeling guilty because my blatant violation of protocol utterly discomfited the poor guy whose job depends on casting a pseudo glance in the direction of each passenger's bag.

So now, with the speed of a flasher undoing his raincoat, I unzip a section of whatever reticule I happen to be carrying and present it for inspection. Both the "guard" and I know he would no more rifle through my bag than I would carry anything illegal. All that matters is that we dutifully play our parts in this futile exercise.

I much prefer the approach to passenger security adopted by the BTS Skytrain pooh bahs. At each station they've set up an umanned "Security Check" table near the ticket machines. Like a surreal art installation, the white formica-topped table epitomizes the actual Thai attitude toward transportation security.

First Drunken Taxi Driver

My usually infallible taxi-suitability radar failed utterly a couple of Tuesday nights ago on a desolate and dusty stretch of Rama IV near Chua Pleung and the Expressway.

From afar I could tell by the shape of the headlights that the oncoming taxi was a newish model. The rooftop Taxi-Meter sign was turned on, the headlights functioned, and the driver wasn't out to set any Daytona Speedway records. My admittedly subjective exterior criteria having been met, I hailed it (arm held out at waist level, palm facing down, wrist moving slowing up and down). As the car approached, I peered into the cab to determine whether the driver looked like a reckless teenager or a catatonic septuagenarian. (My equally subjective interior criteria.) The driver's face looked ordinary enough and as always, I climbed in the front seat.

The driver immediately began asking why the beautiful younger woman waiting on the sidewalk with me hadn't come along too. I muttered that he could turn around and pick her up if he wanted only gorgeous creatures in his cab. And on a dangerous six-lane road near the onramp to a flyover he prepared to do just that!

"Are you drunk or what?" I screamed at him.

"Oh just a little," he replied with a lopsided I-could-give-a-shit grin.

My heart started pounding. "You pull over and stop this car immediately!"

He made no move to do so. "You pay first," he sneered.

Though I had no intention of paying him, I fumbled inside my pack in a show of doing so. He slowed down, pulled over and came to a rolling stop. But as I opened the door and tried to jump out, he sped up. Nobody who's had four hip replacement surgeries in the past three years and could finally walk normally again would be stupid enough to try exiting a moving vehicle. I put my left leg back in the car.

"OK, OK, here's your money." I threw two 20-baht bills at him. "Now you stop!"

I've only been that terrified in a taxi once before; when a sober but erratic idiot tried to force me out of his car in the middle of a freeway.


2. Insane Public Transport Security Checks Continue
Little's changed since last May when I whinged about the form-without-function bag checks at the entrances to the MRT stations. I bet nobody in the upper echelons of the MRT even remembers the original raison d'etre of this inane exercise, if indeed one ever existed. In any case, whatever the obviously bored to distraction security "guards" are looking for--or more aptly NOT looking for--could never be found during the millisecond of scrutiny they devote to the bag "checking" procedure.
Yet woe betide anyone who attempts to bypass the bag check for the sake of convenience. On the days I'm schlepping a computer-laden daypack I've tried striding purposefully past the "guard" rather than wasting time and energy offloading my heavy pack. But then I end up feeling guilty because my blatant violation of protocol utterly discomfits the poor guy whose job depends on casting a glance in the direction of whatever zipped pocked I choose to open. (Of course he'd no more rifle through my bag than I'd carry anything illegal.) So I play along with his futile charade.
I really love the approach to passenger security adopted by the BTS Skytrain pooh bahs. At each station they've set up an umanned table marked with a "Security Check" sign near the ticket machines. Like a surreal art installation, the white-topped table honestly exemplifies the true Thai attitude toward transportation security.

Don't Be Slender in America!

Nobody could ever call me fat. The most I ever weighed in my life was around 130 pounds back in the late 1960s when I lived in London and smoked too much of that hunger-producing substance Bill Clinton never inhaled.

I now weigh 50 kilos (110 pounds) which is perfectly OK for someone 5'4" tall who stays in shape with Qi Gong exercises and a good fishetarian diet. In Thailand where I live no one ever tells me I ought to weigh more, although lately friends do say my cheeks look a bit sunken. You can't tell the aging process where to take its toll and if it wants to suck face, I'm glad that someone--or something--still does.

On the 17th I celebrated my birthday morning whale watching on Bodega Head with Annie and Thea, two fabulous women I've known since the late 1970s when we were pounding pillows in Lois's gestalt group in San Francisco. The terrible storms of the previous week had given way to a perfectly clear blue sky, a cool crisp temperature even someone who lives in fetidly sticky Thailand could enjoy, and a mini-bouquet of hardly wilted pink and yellow roses stuck mysteriously into a small outcropping of greenery on the cliffside. (I think it was a birthday present from my mother who died in 2003....a roses-on-the-beach tale for another posting.)

Anne and Thea told me later that while I chatted up cute Christopher (a 35 year-old tree pruner from San Francisco), his mom asked if I was a cancer survivor because of my short hair and slender body. She probably didn't want her son messing with such a stylish example of the aging process!

Two days later in Santa Rosa, Thea was showing me around her co-housing abode, introducing me to many of her co-residents, all dressed in their drab blue, green, or gray sensible winter clothing. "Are you a Buddhist nun?" one frumpy older woman asked me. "Your hair's so short."

I'm so happy to be back visiting my oldest and dearest friends in the world, but these kinds of stereotyping remarks remind me why I left in 1990. Thanks to the two hip replacement surgeries I had in Belgium in July and August 2007 to revise the two bad ones done in Thailand in 2005 and 2005, I feel better than I've felt in YEARS.

And just for the record, I understand lesbians too have short hair (dunno about their body size) and not that it's anyone's business, I'm not a lesbian either.

I'm just me and for the first time in ages, I really celebrate that!