Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
This morning I had an interesting experience, one that I will now relate, sparing you any need to conduct your own field research.
… Read more
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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)
… Read moreGod is there in the hemlines
Ascending, praise be,
Heavenwards. Oh, Lord.
