Stilgherrian » bangkok

A recursive photo from Bangkok

Stilgherrian — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:03:24 +0000

This is my photo of ’Pong taking this photo in Bangkok. Recursion is always an interesting phenomenon.

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Stilgherrian in Thailand: photographic evidence

Stilgherrian — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 06:17:10 +0000

Speaking of my journey to Thailand, ’Pong has just published a bunch of photos of me he took there, only one of which you’ve seen before. Some of them are not particularly flattering.

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Even in defeat, he haunts us… via our folksonomies

Stilgherrian — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 22:29:44 +0000

I’ve been working on the tag cloud page, and one of my attempts to clarify things has revealed a disturbing fact.

I decided that the “category cloud” on the left-hand side of the website was already showing that the biggest categories were politics, the Internet, human nature, media and business. I didn’t want the tag cloud to repeat that information. So I decided to remove all the tags which were also the names of categories.

Boy, that certainly changed the emphasis!

Even in the reduced screenshot (right), one name dominates. Yes, out of 944 posts, counting this one, 91 are tagged “john howard”.

My own boyfriend comes in a poor second with just 42.

Is that right?

I’ve tried to placate ’Pong. I’ve said that at least he doesn’t frustrate me to the point of inspiring lengthy rants about the destruction of social values and the end of the Enlightenment. I’ve never suggested that he be tried as a war criminal — though after that night-time canal boat ride in Bangkok I may reconsider that.

(Actually I haven’t told you about that canal boat properly yet. It’s another Unreliable Bangkok piece waiting to be written. I’ve been back in Sydney two months now, it’s not too late is it?)

However this does raise an interesting point about how tags work…

In a traditional information system, you’d plan your keywords in advance. You’d invent a taxonomy (that is, a formal classification system), and then you’d develop a controlled vocabulary (that is, a set of authorised keywords). For example you’d decide that it’s the “construction” industry, not “building”. Everyone would work off that controlled vocabulary.

Save confusion, y’see.

Everything filed into neat little pigeon-holes.

However in the Brave New World of the Social Internet, no-one bothers with all that. Everyone makes it up as they go along, throws it all into the ether, and with luck it’ll all sort itself out. Or Google will do it for us.

Instead of a taxonomy, you have a folksonomy.

This development mirrors many, many aspects of the post-Industrial Age. In the Industrial Age everything was centrally planned, like the Soviet Economy — one of history’s great success stories, no? Now, everyone just works at it as best they can, and problems are ironed out through group consensus — or just ignored because no-one’s interested.

And by golly gosh, it actually seems to work.

A 2005 study by Nature (which is behind their paywall, so we’ll link to C|Net’s report too) found that the centrally-planned, professionally-edited Encyclopaedia Britannica is only marginally more accurate in key areas than Wikipedia.

OK, Encyclopaedia Britannica disputed [PDF file] the study, and then Nature bit back. But the core point is that the Wikipedia approach generates a product which is just fine for everyday purposes, and it does so a lot faster, with a relatively small trade-off in accuracy.

So, to get back to my main point… assuming this actually has a point…

Mostly I write about politics. A very broad range of politics. Through my ad hoc assignment of tags to blog posts, I’ve shown that John Winston Howard dominated my political writing. I suspect that everyone else’s was much the same.

Yes, 2007 really was all about JWH, just not in the way he wanted. And now, Sir, can you please bugger off out of my website? Ta.

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“Tom Yum Goong Disease”

Stilgherrian — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 01:46:00 +0000

’Pong’s photos of the urban decay in Bangkok are much better than mine.

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Unreliable Bangkok 9: Train

Stilgherrian — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 05:20:53 +0000

’Pong’s movie Bangkok Express slices through the city at the height of the motorway. Yes, you can see urban decay, but it’s abstract, in the distance. The train slices the city differently: just above human eye level.

The photos I took from the train in Bangkok reminded me that a sign at Ashfield Station in Sydney has got it all wrong. That sign tells us that railway stations are for catching trains — and if I’m not catching a train right at that moment then I’m not welcome. I might be a terrorist. Move on, nothing to see here.

Bullshit.

Railways are the Grand Physical Arteries of the Industrial Age. While we can catch trains at a station, yes, we can also pause to marvel at this expression of industrial confidence. Railway signalling, for me, was a childhood geeky fascination. How do you keep this whole system running without crashing? Switching, signalling, communication, plans, timetables — all the things that computers do, but laid out before you on a scale you can comprehend.

And, as this photo (above) reminds us, in many countries today the railways are still all of that, and more. Here, they’re a walking path, a playground, a rubbish dump — the streets of Bangkok are swept clean daily, but not the railway — and in some cases a home. Where officially-sanctioned housing ends at the edge of railway land, the slum begins. Clearly, it’s been there for years.

CityRail, how dare you narrow the horizons of the next generation, so the railways are nothing more than a place to be herded, sheep-like, from point A to point B. They’re our railways, and if we want to stand and watch for a while, we will.

[P.S. Out of 9 "Unreliable Bangkok" pieces so far, at least 3 have featured transport. I suspect it's because being a passenger gives you time to pause a reflect upon what you're seeing.]

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Unreliable Bangkok 8: Henge

Stilgherrian — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 07:02:16 +0000

When the Thai economy was booming in the early 1990s, construction started on a 60km high-speed elevated train and motorway link from central Bangkok to the international airport at Don Mueang. However when the currency collapsed in 1997-98, work was abandoned.

These stained concrete fragments (pictured) are all that remains of the Bangkok Elevated Road and Train System (BERTS) or Hopewell project. They line the old diesel-fuelled railway through northern Bangkok like a modernist Stonehenge.

Meanwhile the new international airport has been built at Suvarnabhumi and the Suvarnabhumi Airport Link is under construction, currently expected to be completed in November 2008.

Bangkok is filled with abandoned building projects from the late 1990s.

One (pictured right) reached a height of around 40 storeys, and many of the curved balconies were completed, before work just stopped. Since all of them were abandoned around the same time, all these abandoned buildings have their concrete stained to exactly the same shade of dark grey.

However there is growth in Bangkok, plenty of it. I shall return to this theme…

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Unreliable Bangkok 6: Haircut

Stilgherrian — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 13:10:38 +0000

In the Old City of Bangkok, on the afternoon of Wednesday 28 November 2007, this barber (pictured) gave me the best haircut I’ve ever had.

It wasn’t because I looked particularly handsome afterwards, though it was an improvement. It was the meticulous care and attention shown.

’Pong took the photo with a proper camera, not a telephone. He’s got a better eye than me, too, and he’s certainly captured the mood.

I’m a dag when it comes to haircuts.

When I used to be cool (roughly 1990 to 1993), I’d go to a “proper” salon. Often it was the highly-fashionable Swerve Haircutters on Rundle Street, Adelaide. That’d set me back $40 — back then! I suspect my affection for Swerve was more about having my hair washed in a sensual scalp massage by a certain very attractive young apprentice. Lately, though, it’s all been about practicality: a #2 crop or a short back and sides at the local Lebanese barber.

On my second full day in Bangkok, I realised I needed a haircut. Badly. We stumbled across one barber in our wanderings near the Grand Palace, but as we entered the darkened shop an old woman chased us out again. “No-one here. Come back tomorrow!” Ah yes, Thailand is a superstitious country, and it’s inauspicious to cut your hair on a Wednesday. Nevertheless, a little further down the street was a less-superstitious barber.

So why was this haircut so good?

The neat and tidy shop was treat enough, with proper leather and cast iron chairs, and mirrors correctly placed to afford full view of the proceedings. But that was only the beginning. The green cape was clean and unworn. The barber’s tools were neatly arrayed under the Buddha’s protection. And the haircut itself was prefaced with the application of talc across my head to better lubricate the clippers.

Our local lad, bless him to the core of his Leb-boy heart, operates his hair clippers with a robust, masculine boldness. I’m sure that like many blokes he harbours certain fears of any gentleness with another male. There’s no such insecurity in Bangkok. With a light, almost caressing touch of his fingers, my Thai barber held a fine cream-coloured comb against the skin of my neck with one hand, using it as a guide while he operated the clippers with the other.

Those clippers had been cleaned and oiled immediately before use, too, and they purred. Nothing like the harsh buzz I was familiar with.

As he moved from the base of my neck upwards, the barber gradually shifted the angle of the comb, so the hair at the sides of my head was graded — short at the bottom, longer at the top.

After 20 minutes of careful work, I was the proud owner of a haircut just like any army officer. Or, for that matter, any Thai schoolboy. Except possibly with a little more grey hair showing. Price: 80 baht, or about AUD$2.60.

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Unreliable Bangkok 5: Polite

Stilgherrian — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 01:40:47 +0000

One of the most important differences between Bangkok and Sydney is that Bangkok isn’t full of arseholes. I’ve already mentioned that Skytrain security staff are helpful. Unlike CityRail’s. But it goes way beyond that…

In virtually every bar in Bangkok, you don’t pay for your drinks up front. You sit, you order your drinks, they go on your tab, you consume, you enjoy the company of your friends. And when you’re ready to leave, then you get the bill. In virtually every Australian bar, though, you pay for your drinks in cash at the time of serving, thank you very much.

In other words, Australian pubs operate under the assumption that you’re the kind of arsehole who’d leave without paying.

Is this because Thais are more trusting? Or gullible? No, it’s because Thais are more trustworthy people.

Because they’re not arseholes.

If you look at the photo (above), you’ll see a dustpan and broom leaning against the concrete post on the left. They belong to the street sweeper. She (all the street sweepers I saw were women in practical straw hats) leaves them there at the end of the day, unlocked, and knows that they’ll still be there when she needs them again the next morning.

You simply can’t do that in Sydney because you can almost guarantee that the dustpan and broom would be either (1) stolen (who steals a dustpan?), (2) vandalised (what sort of desperate arsehole does that?), or (3) thrown into the canal “as a laugh”.

Because, as I say, Sydney is full of arseholes.

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Unreliable Bangkok 4: Lust

Stilgherrian — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 03:51:33 +0000

Leena Jangjanya (ลีนา จังจรรจา, pictured above) is the most beautiful, most sexy woman in all of Thailand.

She’s usually just called Leena Jang, and since she’s a candidate in Sunday’s Thai general election her posters are everywhere in Bangkok’s northern suburbs. There’s three versions, including one in her graduation robes (law) and one where she’s looking like a successful businesswoman in white. You can see them both below.

But for me, that first image is the killer. The pink blouse! Those alluring eyes! The hair!

Julie Bishop, you’re so dumped!

The densest concentration of Leena posters is around the Chatuchak weekend markets — a massive concentration of more than 15,000 stalls over 1.1 square kilometres where it would seem Leena has her strongest support base. She’s seen as fighting for the poor and “ordinary people”, people such as the stallholders, and fighting against corruption.

I guess she’s a bit like Pauline Hanson without the racism. Or a left-wing Bronwyn Bishop, if that’s possible.

Apart from the legal foundation and her political ambitions, Leena runs a cosmetic business.

One of ’Pong’s friends, a political journalist, tells me Leena doesn’t have a hope in hell of getting elected. Still, she has profile.

It was interesting hearing the Thai perspective on Australia’s federal election, which took place only a few days before I arrived in Bangkok. While many Australian commentators were talking about “Me-too Rudd”, supposedly identical to John Howard in all significant policies, Thai commentators could see real differences.

One late-night talk show host was even jealous that Australians had choices. Thais, he said, could really only choose between different sets of cronies. Rudd, he said, was very different from Howard: he was signing Kyoto, getting out of Iraq and apologising to the Aborigines. The me-too of economic issues didn’t get a mention.

And yes, Chairman Rudd’s skills in Mandarin were mentioned a lot in the newspapers, as was the Malaysian heritage of our Minister for Climate Change, Senator Penny Wong.

Whichever set of cronies gets elected tomorrow, they’ll be engaging with an Australia whose eyes are, once more, on the region instead of being focused solely on Washington. I get the feeling they’re expecting big changes.

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Unreliable Bangkok 3: Bureaucracy

Stilgherrian — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 09:53:46 +0000

I’ve mentioned before that our time in Bangkok wasn’t your typical tourist experience. One day, for example, we spent six hours in the Don Mueang district government offices. Here’s a photo of the men’s toilet.

Thailand has a general election on 23 December. It’s important. Well, all elections are important, but this one is the first under the new constitution, and the first since last year’s military coup. ’Pong needed to register to vote from Australia. But there were complications…

’Pong’s government ID card expired 5 years ago, but you need an ID card to register to vote.
Your government ID needs a “home” address in Thailand, but ’Pong doesn’t have one. That meant giving brother Khong’s address.
When you sign onto a household, the head of the household has to be there in person to counter-sign.

And so, on a sunny Thursday morning, we took the Bangkok Skytrain to its northernmost station, Mo Chit, and then a cab to Don Mueang to meet Khong who, sensibly as it turned out, had taken the entire day off work to deal with this.

The district government offices are a grey marble building at the side of the highway north and, apart from minor Thai design elements, much like government buildings everywhere — apart from being draped in yellow for the King’s Birthday.

Inside, the staff were your typical public servants doing the usual public servant thing: slowly processing paperwork as people waited for their number to be called. With the election fast approaching, they were busy with voter enrolments.

It was quaint to hear the sound of a dot-matrix printer, though, and to watch one chubby girl with glasses, a clerical assistant, dividing up the output from a continuous-feed 132-column line printer. A young child ran from desk to desk — obviously a family-friendly workplace!

We explained our mission, and a further complication was revealed. As ’Pong was moving his registration to a new district, it would have to be processed by the Investigations Officer — a longer queue. And then the Investigations Officer told us it needed to be approved by the district manager, but she was at a meeting. No-one knew when she was due back.

We were advised that we should go and have lunch.

Being Thailand, there were food stalls across the road. We chose the one with the most public servants. I wondered why the walls had photos of old aircraft — Ford Trimotors, DC-3s and so on — as well as a huge model of a Lockheed Tristar. It turns out the head of this family business is a retired aircraft maintenance supervisor from the nearby airport with 40 years service. They’re “his” planes. We exchange aviation gossip.

After lunch, a walk through the suburbs and some high-quality waiting around in the office getting bored, we were finally graced with the presence of the district manager and we soon had the requisite signature (pictured). Just one more short queue for a photo and a new ID card — and paying the crippling 20 baht fine for letting the old card expire (about 70 cents) — ’Pong’s identity was restored.

We caught the train back to central Bangkok. I’ve already posted one photo from that journey, but I’ll have more to say about trains soon.

Why the photo of the toilet? Well, I was the only farang in the entire building, and was already attracting attention. I seem to recall some Australian government travel warning about taking photos in foreign government buildings — and I believe everything our government tells us.

[P.S. I've decided that these memoirs are unreliable not only because I didn't take notes but also because they're failing to appear every day as promised. If this disturbs you, I'll give you your money back.]

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Unreliable Bangkok 2: Street

Stilgherrian — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 04:22:12 +0000

I read somewhere that when it comes to culture shock, little things have the most impact. So on my second day in Bangkok it still smells different, people speak Thai not English, but I take that in my stride.

In our emerging global culture, though, there’s also much that’s familiar. In this photo, for example, the style of street art is much like home — and I’ll publish a nice selection later this week. The office worker in her neat grey dress could be from any major city, anywhere.

So what are those little differences which matter most?

Here’s what I noticed on our first day in Bangkok, on a trip to the Siam Square shopping district:

Security staff on the Bangkok Skytrain are busy, courteous and helpful, whereas Sydney’s CityRail equivalents are slow-moving, fat and rude.
The streets are clean and generally well-maintained.
On a footbridge over a busy intersection, two women with a bucket of soapy water were washing the railings methodically. In Sydney, footbridges are filthy.
Stallholders don’t grumble if they have to change a large banknote, even first thing in the morning.
Yes, electrical and telephone wiring really is strung randomly all across the city in ways which would be illegal in Australia. Nevertheless, I felt that I could see a method to the madness. After a while, my brain decided they were just exotic vines and they became invisible — until low-hanging loops nearly choked me.
Even though Thai traffic drives on the left of the road (well, at least in theory — I’ll have more to say about the traffic another day), on a footpath or staircase you walk on the right. It took a lot of collisions and polite apologies to get my head around that one!
Beggars are generally people with an obvious and often disturbing physical disability, rather than just plain lazy.
Pepsi dominates the city, not Coca-Cola.

I also noticed something important about curved shapes, but I’ll save that for its own essay.

And what’s the same as Sydney?

Shopping malls were the same brand stores as everywhere, and the staff were the same bored-looking kids. I avoided them wherever possible.
The cool, arty café Oc-Co-Bots held the same slacking-off university art fags and their hags as those I remembered from my own time at uni in Adelaide.
The higher the price of the coffee, the less service you actually get. Not that I’d actually go to a Starbucks in Bangkok, I’m not there there to experience American franchise businesses.
Tourists are, in general, loud and ignorant self-centred wankers. Except for me, of course. Oh, yes, and you.

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Paul Hamon’s birthday party

Stilgherrian — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 17:06:26 +0000

’Pong has just published another photo essay from Bangkok, this time some “happy snaps” of a birthday party for Paul Hamon. Paul used to work with me in Adelaide on The Core magazine and has been a rave promoter ever since. He now lives in Bangkok.

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Unreliable Bangkok 1: Smell

Stilgherrian — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 04:28:26 +0000

When I arrived in Bangkok a fortnight ago, the first thing I noticed was the smell. But before I discuss matters of odour, let me explain how I’ll bring you my traveller’s tales…

As I’ve mentioned before, I wanted to spend my time in Thailand experiencing the country, not writing. I didn’t want to see it through the viewfinder of a camera either, but directly with my own eyes. So I didn’t take notes, and my only photos are a few pimple-cam images for reference.

Now that I’m back in Sydney, I’ll write a daily essay. Each one will be a personal, even idiosyncratic reflection. I probably won’t write about tourist things. Indeed, ’Pong and I avoided most standard tourist sites. But without notes, this will be an Unreliable Bangkok memoir — hence the title.

So, smell…

’Pong and his friend Yo met me at Suvarnabhumi Airport (ท่าอากาศยานนานาชาติกรุงเทพ-สุวรรณภูม) late on a Monday night. I wound down the window of her small sedan and the smell hit me. At first I thought it was smoke, something like wood burning but not quite. But the smell stayed with us as we took the expressway west towards central Bangkok and I started to notice its subtle complexity.

Smells trigger memories. The smell of Bangkok triggered memories of mangrove swamps, or that black, sticky mud that collects near weed-filled rivers. And of course Bangkok is a river city, sitting on a broad flood plain and threaded with muddy and sometimes stagnant canals like Khlong Saen Saeb (คลองแสนแสบ), the one in the photo.

I’m far from being the first person to notice Bangkok’s unique smell. In London, Xanthe lists “as you step outside the airport doors in bangkok” as one of her favourite smells. Conversely, Werewolf doesn’t seem to like it — but he grew up in the fresh air of the Atlantic coast, so I can understand. Plus his description is wonderfully detailed.

For me, that first smell of Bangkok said “You are now in a strange land,” the first real message that I’d left Australia. It wasn’t unpleasant, just different. It was exciting, too, because it told me there’d be more to discover the next day, once I had sunlight to see by.

By the way, that boat on the canal is part of the Khlong Saen Saeb Express Boat service. I’ll have more to say about that in another essay.

Smells… If you know Bangkok, what are your thoughts on its unique smell? And what other places have their own unique smell?

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Long Live the King!

Stilgherrian — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 17:12:15 +0000

Our last night in Bangkok happens to be the 80th birthday of King Bhumibol Adulyadej (ภูมิพลอดุลยเดช). The TV will have shown you the official celebrations of the world’s longest reigning monarch but, as usual, ’Pong and I chose a different path.

Instead of joining the squillions of yellow-clad Thais in the streets of the old city, we were on the notorious Patpong Road in the Silom district. The soi (ซอย) was lined with bar girls and ladyboys and rowdy street vendors — all wearing yellow shirts and holding yellow candles — plus a few confused-looking tourists.

’Pong has some great photos, taken when the video screens which normally show adverts for the girlie shows instead beamed us images of the King in all his finery. We all held burning candles, and those who knew the words (i.e. every Thai) sang the Royal Anthem, a song traditionally sung on royal birthdays and a third, new celebratory song, We love the King.

Very moving, though I wanted to knife the tiny handful of inconsiderate tourists who barged their way through the singing. Most, however, were soon handed a candle and joined the happy throng. Many had even bought their own yellow shirts earlier in the day.

Five minutes later, we were once more being offered ping-pong shows and “sex DVD, sir?”

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Suvarnabhumi Airport lacks a safety certificate

Stilgherrian — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 17:12:02 +0000

A fact I’m glad I didn’t know before I arrived in Thailand. Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport (ท่าอากาศยานนานาชาติกรุงเทพ-สุวรรณภูม) doesn’t have a Department of Civil Aviation airport safety certificate. Suvarnabhumi continues to operate because the requirement has yet to be adopted into Thai law.