I’m not giving up, at least not just yet.  This site has eaten my notes, dissolved my pictures and refused my attempts to communicate.  And it advertises itself as user friendly.  It’s turning out to be the internet version of the gingerbread house.

Long ago when I did the translation of Eco’s book about languages, I remember him writing that if Germany had won the war instead of the Allies, Western culture would be dominated by German culture and we’d all be dancing polkas today.  I remember thinking, ‘Not so fast, Umberto my friend.  It’s one thing to win a war, it’s quite another to win a peace.’  In fact Germany had already lost the peace; they’d lost it before the war had even ended.  I found that out a while ago when I learned that to keep up spirits in the Fuehrerbunker Hitler had Goebles screen the same movie night after night.  That movie was Walt Disney’s Snow White and the 7 Dwarves.  It turns out that even before the end of the fighting, the peace had already been decided.  The score was:

Thousand Year Reich 0 – Mickey Mouse 1

Game, set and match to the small California rodent.

If that victory has never been sufficiently appreciated or celebrated by those who wrote the Kulturgeschichte of the post-war period, it was in part due to the fact that serious people found the California rodent and his gang of cronies unworthy.  Indeed, insofar as they talked of the rodent’s victory at all, it was in as part of what they considered the ‘Americanization’ or even ‘Coca Cola-ization’ of post-war European culture, an unfortunate by-product of the victory, rather than one of the reasons why the Allies won in the first place.

I thought of this today.  English is the uncontested lingua franca of SE Asia from Korea to the southernmost islands of Indonesia.  And the usual gang of serious people cite the usual reasons.  If you dislike the English, it’s a hangover of British imperialism.  If it’s the Americans that make you angry, it’s the result of Yankee neo-colonialism.  Granted, there’s a lot of history and a lot of politics.  Still, the issue is a good deal more complicated than that.

In the first place, the argument shouldn’t apply to Thailand.  Thailand has always been an independent monarchy.  Unlike Burma it was never a part of the British empire (or French empire in the case of Cambodia and Vietnam).  Unlike the Philippines and Korea it was never the base of American military operations or even backroom CIA deviousness.  For a few years during the war, it was more of less a Japanese colony, and indeed today Bangkok is filled with Japanese restaurants and Karaoke bars filled with Japanese businessmen.  But the odd thing is that, in these bars, the karaoke that the Japanese businessmen and Thai sing in is English.  They order their sushi in English because, despite the fact that everyone likes sushi, English is the lingua franca.  Thais learn English and Japanese do the same.

There are some special reasons as well.  Thais and Laotians, for example, speak similar and mutually comprehensible, languages.  But their writing systems, similar as they may be to look at, are in fact utterly dissimilar and incomprehensible to each other.  So, of course are the writing systems of Japanese, Chinese, Khmer and Korean.  These alphabets moreover were developed in the 13th century to translate Buddhist scriptures from Pali, and none of them have been changed since them, which rather discourages the development of literature, though not pop music or films which ignores the alphabet.  The Latin alphabet, by contrast,is a doodle which SE Asians find easy to master.

I spent some of last week visiting temples.  Not the Wat Pho complex, which I’d already seen; but instead, I took a taxi a bit out of town and visited some non-touristy big temples.  For the most part I was the only farang around.  At least the only flesh and blood farang.  For Mickey was there with me, at least in spirit.  Thai Buddhism has assimilated all the animal tales of Buddha’s earlier re-births as well as a full cast of Hindu Apsaras, Rakshas and other minor dieties plus Chinese dragons.  The result is that the grounds of these temples look like menageries with fantastic beasts sprinkled in.  It’s more a playground with places for kids to play and for families to picnic which supports activities like ringing bells, hanging flower wreaths on statues and putting little pieces of gold leaf on exposed parts of the Buddha’s bod like his toenails.  I imagine folks are perfectly serious about making their prayers and offerings, but they’re neither solemn nor particularly silent.

I thought about it coming back.  Long ago at Princeton I was taught that religion naturally evolved from primitive animism to organized polytheism and finally to strict monotheism.  It didn’t make any sense to me even then.  Monotheism is a terrible explanation for anything; it’s incoherent.  Animism on the other hand is simply the assumption that everything in nature is alive and everything has a spirit that can be appeased or irritated.  The assumption is probably wrong,  but it’s sort of a sensible starting place.  Thais are all un-repenitent animists and it doesn’t do them any harm.  It makes their shopping centres much jollier places.

I went to the Emporium center yesterday and bought myself a new shirt.  The Bangkok shopping malls seem less techy than those of Singapore; there’s more little fashion shops here.  What’s more, Thai designers add little snarky elements, often involving tigers or dragons.  It’s a little bit Terry and the Pirates tongue-in-chic retro-chic, but it counter-acts the vacuous Miss Kitty look of the rest of the stuff.   I also bought a little notebook, something in the school supplies section.  I didn’t even look at it until I got back.  On the cover there are two bunny rabbits, one seen from the front and the other seen in silhouette from behind.  The bunny rabbit seen from the front has for eyes a pair of red disks (in the carton version they would surely be pulsating).  The caption reads, ‘Hug your enemy, so you can dig the right size grave.’  There’s more to Miss Kitty than I immediately thought.  Miss Kitty, it seems, has her dark side.  It’s like a teen movie: the vampires have hit town and no one knows where they are going to strike next.  Cut to the girls’ locker room in the high-school gym.  The girls are finishing dressing for the day.  The camera trails one particular girl; she’s a sweet-looking blond with a dreamy, innocent look in her eyes.  She rounds a dark corner and there’s a muffled scream.  In the next shot the girl comes back around the corner, same clothes, same hair-do but somehow not quite the same.  She’s not quite so innocent-looking anymore; in fact she’s rather debauched and dangerous-looking, someone who’d be much more fun.

 

So I saw Wonderwoman last night.  A great movie.  The audience loved it.  But I think they were even more excited about the trailer for the new transformers movie.  There is nothing like a transformers movie to tempt the imagination of an audience of animists.

If I finally get this posted, I’ll try and do some pictures next.

Talk about Beta versions!  I really need someone to hold my hand.  I have no idea whether this is a separate post of a continuation of the post I made two days ago.  Anyway:

I like the rainy season.  It’s less crowded.  At least that’s what I read.  But I don’t know; I haven’t been trying to get reservations in the normally over-booked hip places.  I don’t even know what the hip places are.  In fact, I’m about as qualified to write a guide to Bangkok living as Donald Trump is qualified to be president of the US.  At least I’m not tweeting.

It’s drier in the mornings, though it still can be muggy and unpleasant some time and then I have to stop every so often and duck into some air conditioned place along the road.  Two days ago searching for a language school , I stopped in a Holly’s coffee shop.  Holly’s seems to be a Korean knock off of Starbucks, down to the 3^rd World friendly, we-support-good-causes décor.  The drinks and food menu are similar too, with the addition of some gooey, gelatinous deserts.  There was some sort of Chinese karaoke video playing on a screen in back however.  The screen showed a little stick figure trying to navigate its way around a stick-figure landscape with stick-figure benches, trees and houses.  Sometimes the stick figure had a dog and sometimes an umbrella; they just seemed to appear from time to time.  As the little figure wandered around, however, Chinese characters kept appearing in front of it, forcing it to turn either left or right. These characters kept unfurling and blocking its way until finally they took up so much space that the little stick figure had nowhere left to turn.  At this point a new banner unfurled; the same size, except this one said, “help!”.  I have no idea what the words of the song were about, but the meaning of the graphics was all too clear.  It was the heart-rending predicament of an English-speaking stick figure submerged in a sea of incomprehensible signage.  I watched slowly sipping my iced mocha frapucchino as the video looped and looped, I sensed the growing desperation of the little stick figure as it set out on his journey fresh and full of hope, met a dog, found itself with an umbrella, only to be buried once again in a junk heap.  It seemed sort of poignant warning to anyone foolish enough to venture out on the steamy and traffic-clogged streets of Bangkok during the rainy season season.  I couldn’t figure out what the dog was supposed to mean though.

Alternating with the stick-figure videos there were ads for Holly Coffee.  These featured a smartly dressed young man in various poses, young man at work, young man at school, young man relaxing.  The young man was always surrounded by young females with adoring and simpering smiles, ‘Oh please look at me young man, please deign to notice my humble existence.’  And he did always notice one of them, naturally the one that had thought to offer him a fresh Hollys Coffee.  What struck me so forcibly was not the commercial message but the fashion statement.  Everyone in the ad was dressed like a character in an Archie comic (does anyone remember Archie comics?).  I couldn’t figure it out.  Starbucks looks ‘80s or ‘90s but Archie is resolutely stuck in the 1950s.  The young man was wearing the stripey sort of cardigan that today would make him look uber-gay.  It also gave me prickly heat just to see him in it  It might have been just the thing to wear at a missile launching sit in Pyongyang, but it was definitely unseasonable for Bangkok.

The only think that was un-Archie about the young man was his hair, which was uber-bouffant, so bouncey that, though quite short, it still seemed that there might be a furry animal breathing in and out on the top of his head.  Pat Boone’s (remember him) hair never did that, Anderson Cooper’s hair still doesn’t (I just checked).  I noticed all that because last night I myself had my own hair cut in a little back street establishment with a barber pole and joss sticks and was plopped down in front of a poster of four young men of indeterminate age, nationality and sexual inclinations, obviously the components of some sort of boy band.  I know enough to remember that in order to appeal to the Asian-boy-band-consuming public, the boy band member’s grungy ragamuffin look had to be tweaked until he as clean and spiffy as a 1950s American teen idol.  The only difference was an advance in hair-dressing products.  In the 1950s it was either very short (like Pat Boone or early Beatles) or greased down like Elvis.  Now it’s bouncey and bouffant.  The boy-band poster was in between a flourescent painting of lotus flowers on black velvet and a beaded curtain with hearts made of pink shells.  It was a Bangkoky sort of barber shop cum beauty parlor whose female barber/beauticians all had fingernails so long and pointed that it was a wonder that they even needed to use scissors on me.

So I confess to be writing rather randomly.  I am trying to understand something of this blogging business (and the internet here is only iffy), so I play with whatever pops intomind.  Still, there’s a point in randomness as there is a point in Rohrschach ink blots.  You never think of yourself or your tastes or your patterns of consumption as weird because you’re the archetype of normal.  Bangkok barber shops are weird, Korean coffee bars are weird, but you’re not.  One of the reasons for coming here is to overcome that smugness.

 

 

I think I must be out of my mind to do this.  Not so much the writing; that just sort of comes out by itself especially when the brain is addled from a 13 hour and 6 time zone trip; it’s the technological bits and the certainty that I will inevitability that I will f£$%ck up bigtime and somehow leave the security keys to everybody’s bank accounts to the Somali pirates.  Anyway, my excuse is that certain people (I will not name them out of a sense of delicacy) have asked me to do this.  So here goes.

Sunday, 4 June 2017

I remember the first time I walked into a Starbucks.  It was years ago.  At the time I hadn’t been back to the US in a while and it was all new to me.  I didn’t know that everything had been transformed.  So I walked into the Starbucks and asked for a coffee.  The teenager behind the counter replied, “hazelnut, caramel or vanilla?”

I thought he hadn’t understood me, so I repeated the order, “I’d like a coffee, please.”

And he repeated the enigmatic response.

Eventually I found out that these were three syrups that were added to your coffee.  If I’d been more aware, I would have remembered that hazelnut, caramel and vanilla had already been around for a while because they were the three flavours that the non-dairy creamers came in (these had been showing up in nonna’s fridge for years, compliments of the nursies).  My first reaction after figuring this out was, I blush to admit it, rather bramble-ish.  ‘Shocking!’ I exclaimed to myself, ‘they are adding artificially-flavored sweeteners to coffee.  How unspeakably vulgar of them.’

I should instead have reflected that for millennia the plebs have been less concerned about artificial flavors in their coffee sweeteners than about straining the mouse turds out of their drinking water.  If today things have gotten somewhat inverted it’s less a case of a decline in manners and good taste than what German psychologists call Spieltrieb or the instinct to play around with things.

I’m telling you all this because I got up this morning, first day in Bangkok, still jet-lagged out of my mind, and I staggered into the adjacent shopping centre with eight floors, each of which has its own food court, and was unable to find anything so basic and simple as a Starbucks coffee flavoured with hazelnut, caramel or vanilla syrup.

Katy probably remembers the Bangkok shopping mall food-court experience (identical to the Singapore shopping mall food-court experience, etc.).  One way to describe them might be ‘the Revenge of Miss Kitty’ (or, if it were not politically incorrect to put it this way,  ‘the Wet Dream of Miss Kitty’, because, whatever else you might like to say about that animal which even though it defines itself as a kitty cat still looks like a rodent, is that it sure has a sweet tooth).  Do you remember Roald Dahl’s descriptions of the candy shops of his boyhood, filled with mysterious things like ‘doodlewangers’ and ‘licorice humbuggies’, things that seem to travel directly from Roald Dahl to Harry Potter’s Diagonalley shops where they all became animated?  Well, the Bangkok shopping centre food court seems to be the next stop on the outward journey of such things.  There were hundreds of little shops decorated with pictures or plasticated replica of the foodstuffs on offer inside, foodstuffs sometimes cheerfully dancing around in animated videos, together with descriptions in any number of (to me as yet) incomprehensible scripts.  Inspiring!  It was thrilling to discover how far Spieltrieb, the human urge to play with food could go.  ‘How childish,’ I thought, ‘how infantile, what fun!’  Audrey would soon run amuck in this place, especially if she had a visa card.  Fortunately for me, my better angels were whispering in my ear that even standing still leaning on my crutch in a place like this was increasing my susceptibility to type 2 diabetes up to the critical level, so I exited, my running amuckness limited only to the toothbrush I had come in to purchase.

 

Speaking of Audrey, on the Roma – Doha leg of my journey I saw a film called Logan.  It was a father-daughter bonding story where the daughter is a princess with super powers.  Just the thing for certain little girls, I thought.  But then I have to admit that the film had a bit of a dark side, so maybe Audrey ought to wait a few years.

Qatar Airways wanted to give me a full wheelchair treatment.  I said ‘no’ at first.  At first I’m rather scornful; ‘they’re trying to treat me like an invalid,’ I think resentfully.  ‘But I’m not an invalid.  I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself.’  By the time we got to Doha, however, the nice stewardess was entreating me; so I said ‘yes’ and soon found myself being wheeled around the ultra-smart and ultra-modern Doha airport by a team of Indian wheel-chair pushers in special uniforms.  ‘Unless these wheel-chair pushers find someone to push around in wheel chairs,’ I thought, justifying myself, ‘they probably are out of a job.’  So it’s therefore perfectly ok, I decided, to let these workers practice their trade.  I don’t have to feel guilty.  But Doha was nothing compared to what Qatar Airways had arranged for me at Bangkok Airport.  I was whisked from airplane through priority immigration control, through baggage claim and into a taxi while my bags were being loaded for me in about twenty minutes without hardly moving a muscle.  I was 100% delighted by the experience while at the same time being 100% mortified.  It was like being shuttled off to heaven while your soul is screaming ‘I don’t belong here!  I’m a very bad person!’  I really wanted to hide myself because I was so embarrassed about this special treatment I was getting and about the resentful looks I imagined I was getting from fellow passengers who were naturally desiring to spit on me.  In the end, no one spat on me, however, so I sat in my air-conditioned Bangkok taxi with the driver chatting to me in confused English and reflected.  The truth is that everyone had not only been very helpful, but that they had all been kind and friendly as well.  Especially from Doha onwards, people seemed to take a genuine pleasure in helping me, and that even though my instincts rebelled a little, I was being ungracious not to accept their assistance.  Graciousness is a two-way street: it’s not enough to be kind and generous in the giving part; you need to be gracious in the taking part as well.  Welcome to SE Asa.