Mail Order Bride Biz Booms in Thailand

You’ve all seen the ads directed at single white males: “Get your Asian wife, your Thai darling, your Philippine dream girl, your Chinese fortune cookie, your Japanese cherry blossom.” They all feature a pretty thirty-ish Asian woman smiling radiantly for the cameras, exuding the good old-fashioned values of motherhood, well-scrubbed floors, dish-pan hands, and economic security. They might not directly speak of sex-on-demand or docile submission, but there is definitely a not-so-subtle message to take advantage of the opportunity to get a girl ‘unspoiled by feminism’. Apparently many men still appreciate the old-fashioned stay-at-home wife, guardian of the kitchen, keeper of the keys. Apparently many women do, too. Similar ads tell women to “get your Farang husband,” though the pictures tend to still be of women, since they’re probably better looking. Of course problems do arise sometimes. That Asian wife may not be so submissive after all and that smile may be little more than window dressing, and even serious problems such as spousal abuse and virtual slavery have occurred. This prompted the newly enacted ‘feminist endorsed’ International Marriage Brokers Act in the US, which attempts to monitor and regulate the booming business. This requires potential wives to be supplied with a background check of their foreign ‘dates’ before the relationship can proceed.

The practice of local women marrying foreigners is so wide-spread in Thailand now that the society is being transformed in the process. If it was taboo for a Thai woman to be seen with a foreigner twenty years ago, it’s certainly not now. It’s not only open, but encouraged. My wife’s mother even told her, once upon a time, that she ‘wanted a Farang son-in-law.’ The rest is history, and a new generation of Siamese is being created, whiter and brighter. If that was something once limited to sleazy settings and GI bars, now it takes place on the Internet, the world wide web of social intercourse without borders. Live cameras have revolutionized the process, allowing potential couples to ‘chat live’, more or less in jerky motion, building new lives and healing broken hearts with broken English. Peasant girls in the Thai countryside get up at three in the morning to meet potential suitors in Europe and America, gradually settling on mutual favorites and mutual favors, like ‘going steady’ on the world wide web. The men pay the company for this service, not surprisingly, while women join free. If a potential couple hit it off, then he’ll come visit, and see what happens. Many a happy marriage has resulted, and more than a few dollars have changed hands, lonely men with plenty of money joining hands with women poor in finances, but with lots of love.

The story can get complicated, of course. Many times couples are mismatched by age or life-style, economic or emotional incentives failing to close the gap between cultures. Sometimes the men are abusive or the women are manipulative. Sometimes the companies themselves are little more than outright frauds. One company takes the customer’s money with promises of hassle-free Czech girls, educated and daring, with US entry privileges only accorded EU citizens. Once the middle-class middle-age Americans pay their money, they see girls in tattered newspaper clippings, and arrive in Prague to find equally tattered women who’ve been promised a nice meal. No refunds, no exchanges. East Europeans, in fact, dominate the marriage brokerage transactions, especially Russians, perhaps because their white skin mixes easier in pockets of Europe and America where that still matters. Thai companies seem the most aggressive, however, their ads showing up on Google searches for brides of any nationality, whether Russian, Latina, or any other Asian country. Thai commercial instincts don’t hesitate to find the back door into any market.

Of course web cams have revolutionized more than marriages. Telephone sex was rendered obsolete the day that they hit the market. Now web cam cuties line the honeycomb rookeries of the Net like girls in the windows of Amsterdam’s red light district, scantily clad with little more than a laptop, ready to perform for you in their ‘private room,’ jerky camera but an appropriate little side-joke snicker. Some of the backgrounds look suspiciously like cheap apartments in Thailand, with sparse and uninspiring furnishings. In reality, not surprisingly, most of them are probably in the Philippines. Problems arise when customers for these sites expect similar responses from good girls in legitimate dating services. Kinda’ makes you wonder what’s next. I think the Thai government’s given it some thought, hence recent attempts to make visa applications stricter and 'restore social order' by closing nightspots well before daybreak. I doubt that girls are the number one export in Thailand yet, but, like the slaving period in Africa, you have to wonder if they’re aren’t some profound sociological repercussions in the works as social demographics become shifted. The Philippines, for one, has outlawed the marriage brokerage business locally, though that hasn’t stopped other companies from ‘out-sourcing’ to the Philippines. Pinoys do speak good English, after all. Personally I wonder what happened to the good old days when you could meet women in bars. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be, after all?

Thailand’s F***** word

Farang: 1) person of European extraction, 2. anything of European extraction, 3. guava. So here in Thailand potatoes are man farang, white people are khon farang, and Christmas is trut farang, ad infinitum.

So go the Thai dictionaries, talking much and explaining nothing, not least of which is the origin of the f****** word. It follows you around like a bad smell if you’re a white person in Thailand. It speaks volumes if you’re Thai. It explains why the weather’s hot and the food is not. It explains why some cars are big and so are some bellies. In fact, there’s not much that can’t be described as either Thai or Farang, or maybe sometimes Chinese, but that’s a sore subject, because Thais are sure of nothing so much as that they’re NOT Chinese, even though, genetically, well, you’d be hard-pressed to find the chromosomal difference and in raw immigration figures, well, that’s OK, because they ‘become’ Thai, if not in the first generation, then at least by the second or third. That’s convenient, since their features are largely indistinguishable facially and racially. It’s even more convenient since they run the country. Chinese names are forbidden to be used by Thai citizens and Chinese language is only recently making a comeback because of its obvious commercial utility and the success of the China Dolls’ song ‘Wo Ai Ni’ across the sub-continent in both Thai and Mandarin languages. Thais are nothing if not pragmatic. The number of pragmatists walking the streets of Pattaya after midnight would shock the socks, and maybe more, off Jesus, Muhammad, and Hasan-e Sabbah, too. The Buddha just smiles. He’s seen all this before.

Farangs are different, regardless of what you call them, be it Gringo, Gaijin, or Lao Wai. They have to mess with everything, sticking their big noses where they don’t belong, Africa, Asia, and America, building factories and building fences, drawing lines and claiming countries. The last Mexican governor of California Pio Pico probably said it best as he saw his state being overrun by Yankees “cultivating farms, establishing vineyards, erecting mills, sawing up lumber, building workshops, and doing a thousand other things which seem natural to them, but which Californians (i.e. Mexicans) neglect or despise.” And he was Spanish, a European mind you, so the distinction is as much cultural as racial. This has always been my objection to the term ‘Farang’, in that the white skin itself means nothing, and says much more about the person using the term than the persons referred to. Does a Russian really have anything in common with a Portuguese person? In most cases the people referred to are northern European of course, they of the Industrial Revolution and the Big Bang for your buck, the same ones who forced China and Japan’s ports to open at gunpoint. Farang. They mess everything up. The nay-sayers have a point to be sure, the list of transgressions easily filling the narrow zone between Iraq and a hot place. But Farangs also brought “liberte’, egalite’, and fraternite’”, democracy and doughnuts, on their wish list. So the problem, if there is one, is largely academic, and depends on the tone of voice to establish its intent. Any word can be insulting if it’s said in an insulting way, and of course if I want to use the word, then that’s fine, just as any black American feels free to use the ‘N’ word.

My objection to the term ‘pahsah Farang’ (Farang language) has been especially vitriolic, objecting to the former Premier’s use of the term as especially misguided. “There is no such thing as Farang language! It’s English,” I would object. On this I concede defeat. There is a ‘pahsah Farang’ and long has been, likely even being the origin of the term in Asia. It started in the Crusades, when all Europeans were considered ‘Franks’ by the homies, and their language was the ‘Frankish language’ or lingua franca, literally ‘pahsah Farang’. This was not French, mind you, but a mixture of French and Italian and anything else handy in the Mediterranean region, maybe a final attempt to re-unify Latin. Marco Polo wrote in it, or something like it, it being fluid by definition. The term now means ‘compromise language, used when there is no common language’. The common jargon typically spoken by Thais with foreigners would hardly qualify as real English, but it would certainly qualify as Farang language. It’s as though nothing has changed except that Pidgin English has supplanted Pig Latin as the axis of Western civilization moved west, and the rest is history. And so is the mystery also solved as to where the term ‘Farang’ comes from. Most have assumed a derivation of ‘France’. Well, close, but not exactly, for those were the days of the Holy Roman Empire and nationalism was still but a racial wet dream. Thus those Romanized post-Gallic Germanic Franks left their imprint on the footnotes of history. They must have had a lot of gall.

Of course the issue is not so academic when you have to hear the word all the time, usually directed at you, if you’re of European extraction. It’s not so insulting as it is tiring, until somebody gets the bid idea to charge you ‘Farang price’. Now we’ve got a problem, and it’s hard to avoid when the government itself does it, as in Laos. Well, OK, maybe foreigners shouldn’t get the socialist subsidized rate on public transportation. I doubt they’ve signed on to the WTO. Vietnam even charges three rates, one for locals, one for foreigners, and one for returning overseas Vietnamese. Communist Vietnamese don’t miss too many tricks at turning a buck, usually at your expense. If the street vendor smiles too largely, beware! He’s probably ripping you off! Thailand should be beyond such nonsense, but don’t be too sure. Prejudices die hard, even petty ones. The local ChiangMai-ChiangRai bus at one point printed on the ticket, in Thai of course, that ‘full Farang price’ was paid. Huh? (I don’t make this stuff up btw.) Interestingly, I never found any proof that there was an actual price differential, so the issue, as usual, was one only of principle and symbolism and good manners. These things matter. Ask Kramer. The blurb was eventually removed at someone’s behest other than my own btw. I persevere, and have developed a non-responsive psychological ‘blocking mechanism’, which is basically a way of ignoring problematic speech and behavior. Ignore the ignorance! Now there’s some useful symmetry for you.

CAMBODIA: Next Thailand or Last Resort?

The first time I went to Cambodia, some eight or nine years ago, it was pretty sad. The country was still recovering from the years of Pol Pot’s insane Maoist tyranny, the subsequent Vietnamese ‘liberation’, and prolonged civil war. As far as most of the outside world knew, the Vietnamese were the bad guys, so foreign aid was limited to the trickle of subsidies from a Soviet Union in terminally ill health. When the Soviet Union finally went belly up in 1991, political compromises around the globe began to happen rapidly in some sort of inverse ‘domino theory’, Cambodia included. The Vietnamese left, and Cambodia was again ‘open for business.’ But wounds take longer to heal than political stalemates, and the scars still showed. Eye contact was difficult in a country that had attempted suicide. The Khmer Rouge were Khmer killing other Khmers, after all. The best and brightest were long gone, either to other countries or shallow graves, all for the crime of being city dwellers in a rural country. Cambodia is the greatest culture ever to arise in Southeast Asia, mind you, now reduced to one of the world’s thirty Least Developed Countries, an honor it shares only with Nepal in Asia, Haiti in the Americas, and most of sub-Saharan Africa.

That’s all changing. Unlike Myanmar (they should rename the country again, this time to ‘Bummer’), Cambodia is not digging the hole deeper and looking ever further inward. Sure, Hun Sen is a strong-man, a one-man party intent on holding power, but democracy takes time, and Cambodia is not ready; neither is Laos. Stability is more important. Even Thailand has severe growing pains, wallowing in the aftermath of a populist usurper and the ghost of army coups past, true democracy dependent on an educated populace slow to develop. But Cambodia is looking up, and it shows in the faces of the people. During my visit there last month, I saw supermarkets, new construction, and a vital tourist industry. Mostly, though, I saw happiness, and a fresh attitude. Entire families line the river in Phnom Penh until 9pm, buying and selling, and partying in general. This spills over into surrounding neighborhoods, and includes cultural events such as traditional music and dancing. Phnom Penh now even has an annual film festival. TV is the same, local programming with some interesting content. Things are looking up, way up, something that hasn’t been the case since the 60’s, when Cambodia rocked and rolled while Vietnam wept and wailed.

The 60’s were a golden age for Cambodian popular culture. Inspired by Dengue Fever, the musical group, not the disease, I went looking for a resurgence of this musical spirit. I found the spirit, but the music is still lagging, mostly copying Thai pop songs with new Khmer lyrics. There is some interesting folk music, though, kind of a Mali-like Cambodian blues which I’d like to hear more of. I think I will. The country is highly likeable, and much diversified from its previous reputation as a haven for degenerate recreational adventurers, both sexual and chemical. Cambodia has much more than that to offer, from the beaches of Sihanoukville to the tribal outback of Mondulkiri to the ancient cultural heartland centered on Siem Reap to the bright lights of the big city Phnom Penh. The language, both spoken and written, is eminently learnable for someone with knowledge of Thai, and indeed is something of a linguistic genome project, charting the mutations and deletions as one language is cross-bred into another, something that occurs more often with English nowadays. If it weren’t for the Khmer language’s love of consonant clusters and the Thai’s abhorrence of such, you might assume a common source for both. If there is one, it’s ancient.

Whether Cambodia’s the next Thailand or not, a tourist Mecca for millions, I wouldn’t hazard a guess, nor whether that’s a blessing or a curse. Thailand is not an appropriate role model for everyone, certainly, though its recent economic successes are notable, and the comparison is an obvious one. Laos, for one, seems unsure of itself in a post-Communistic world, except in that it’s NOT like big brother Thailand, brash and free-wheeling, in much the same way that Canada is not totally like the US, despite its closeness, and has no desire to be. Laos tends to follow Vietnam’s lead, a country with which it has scant genetic relation, but a significant political one. Cambodia is different. Cambodia predates them all, and in an important sense, spawned them culturally, taking over where the Dvaravati-era Mons left off in the creation of an empire that encompassed almost all of modern-day Thailand and Laos and much of Vietnam. Khmer ruins still dot that landscape and the roads are open, even if all the mines are yet to be cleared. They probably never will be.

Multiple land entries are now possible from Thailand in addition to the ones with Laos and Vietnam, including one possibility that includes a boat ride to Sihanoukville. From there it’s only a 3-4 hour bus ride to Phnom Penh. This might be preferable to the all-day bus ride to or from Poipet, through a nice, but uneventful, Battambang (there is a coconut shake there that is to die for, btw). This is no small accomplishment consider the riots in 2003 that destroyed the Thai embassy and Thai businesses in Phnom Penh. This occurred after an article appeared in a Cambodian newspaper accusing a Thai actress of insulting Cambodia by stating that she would only visit Cambodia when they returned Angkor Wat to Thailand. Ouch! Well, that may have been a fabricated story or a misinterpretation at best, but that didn’t stop Hun Sen from announcing that the little Thai cutie was not worth ‘even a blade of glass from Angkor.’ Though he may have had a point, this is not diplomatic, and major destruction ensued while the Khmer police looked on. The plot thickens. However bungled and misinformed the causes of this event may have been, the case of Preah Vihear (‘Pra Viharn’) is not. That set of ruins sits squarely on the Thai-Khmer border south of Sisaket in Isan, and for years was considered part of Thailand. That’s not surprising, considering that Thailand had previously occupied much of Cambodia, only relinquishing it as its punishment for playing footsie with the Japanese during WWII. When the International Court ruled in Cambodia’s favor in 1962, Thailand responded by closing the only access to the splendid, if small, set of cliff-top ruins. Only with the Khmer Rouge’s final surrender there in 1998 and the completion of a road from the Cambodian side in 2003 has tourist access become unlimited.

Despite the current thaw in relations between Thailand and Cambodia, Phnom Penh is still not the place to go for a quick easy Thai visa. I swore I wouldn’t talk about things like this in this space, but OK, maybe, later. Go check it out. If it’s not your cup of tea, then maybe it’s your cup of coffee. If you don’t like the local food, then maybe you’ll like the French bakeries. If nothing else, the ruins at Angkor are uniquely splendid, and if Cambodia is indeed your last resort, it may not be a bad one.

The Elephant King

There's a movie making the festival rounds this year called “The Elephant King” and it’s about, you guessed it, Thailand. I don’t know if it played the Bangkok Film Festival last July or not, but it should have. There’s nothing wrong with sneaking a peek at yourself through someone else’s mirror. I saw the film at the Huntington Beach Film Festival in August and, seeing Thais speaking Thai in the trailer, assumed it was a Thai film, part of the burgeoning film industry here, growing up and ‘going inter’, in search of more mature markets for more mature films. This gender-bending ‘new wave’ was pioneered by Apichatpong Weerasetthakul with ‘Sut Pralat’ (‘Tropical Malady’) which was well received in overseas festivals, including gay and lesbian ones. This new genre, including ‘Ma Nakorn’, ‘Fa Talai Jon’ and others, specialize in bold, almost surrealistically garish colors, absurd plots and irrational characters, kind of an Asian magic farce genre in comparison to Latin American magic realism. But ‘Elephant King’ is not like that. It’s not even Thai. It’s gritty, realistic, and heterosexual, with all the betrayal, confusion, and hurt that that implies. In short, it’s about me, and my first year in Thailand, and presumably that of many others, something I always thought could hardly be explained, much less filmed. But first-feature writer and director Seth Grossman has done it. Perhaps I should explain to the uninitiated.

Thailand is weird, wacky, and wonderful, just how much so depending on your own individual circumstances. Things are fairly predictable for younger foreigners here, travelers and NGO workers, doing a stint, having fun, then moving on or going home. It's probably even more so for older male foreigners, taking Thai wives, and enjoying those golden years with the help of Viagra and alcohol, older Budweiser. It’s that vast middle ground in between where things get unpredictable and sometimes turbulent, both for the Thais and the foreigners involved. Many a Thai woman aged 25 and up finds herself dumped by her Thai husband for a younger woman, and left with kids to feed. Many a Western man approaching middle age finds himself divorced, bankrupt, or unemployed, frustrated and fed up with ‘the West’ and looking for alternatives. This is fertile ground for drama, both real and imagined. Sometimes it even works, and the Western guy finds himself reborn in the matrix that is Thailand, or the Thai woman finds herself recast in a new role in some foreign country. Sometimes it doesn’t, usually because the guy forgot the most basic rule: never mix alcohol and women. Many basic rules are broken in ‘The Elephant King’ and the results are tragic, just like real life sometimes.

More than two cultures, ‘Elephant King’ is really a story of two brothers, one younger and weaker, over-sensitive and slightly suicidal, one older and aggressive, over-confident and insensitive. Of course there’s a woman planted squarely in the middle of this mismatch, and of course she’s got a Thai male friend on the side, a love triangle gone rhomboid gone rumpus. There’s even a real elephant for comic relief. Care to guess who gets the girl? I ain’t tellin’. That’s not really the point, anyway. The point is: how do you know what’s real in a world where emotion is currency, and how can you truly find another when it’s so hard to even find yourself? Nothing is resolved, of course, so the writer/director turns out to be the most honest person in the story. The film works visually as well, ‘taking advantage of seedy Thai locales’ (Variety), such as a certain ‘bar beer center’ and a certain ‘warm wet massage’ parlor, all in Chiang Mai, my old stomping grounds. I even know some of the extras. It’s not an all-star cast, mostly unknown except for Ellen Burstyn, who plays the brothers’ mother, unless you count Joe Cummings, Mr. L.P. Guidebook himself, who does a quick drug deal for the cameras when he wasn’t busy being local production coordinator. Being a former film student myself and currently co-producing a festival back in the US, I can be a pretty harsh critic, fully expecting to snicker silently in the back row as the homies got their kicks touring the seamy tourist underbelly of Chiang Mai (of course the really seamy Thai underbelly is out at Santitham), but I didn’t. I got jealous. Seth Grossman told the story I’ve long wanted to tell, but found it too difficult, maybe because I was too close to it. Writer/director Grossman must have spent some time in Chiang Mai to achieve that level of realism, but I doubt that he spent ten years.

Try to find this movie if you can. Considering that it debuted at Tribeca over a year ago, it should either be finding its way into theaters or DVD store by now, though it’s likely ‘too artsy for the mall, too mainstreams for the art houses’ (Variety again). Somebody could probably make a buck packaging it for Thai audiences, though; hhhmmm…..

It's party season in Thailand

Sounds a bit superfluous, doesn't it, in the party capital of the world? But this is certainly the prime season for it, and Loy Krathong last weekend probably qualifies as the second largest festival in Thailand, after Songkran. Not that Thais need any reason to party any more than they need excessive reasoning for anything else, still it's nice to know where the festivities originated before they degenerated into generic loud fireworks-fests reeking of beer and teen spirit. For those of you who don't know, Loy Krathong is distinguished by the floating of candles down rivers and the lighting of lights. Though it's now increasingly called 'Festival of Lights' and current interpretations try to connect it at some point in the remote past to the Hindu festival of the same name, I've never heard it called that until recently and suspect some retrofitting of history for dramatic effect. Though the drifting hot-air lanterns would certainly dove-tail nicely with both lights and floating ('loy'), the krathong is invariably a water-borne device and I've always associated the festival more with water than the lighting of lamps. The fact that the Khmer water festival occurs on exactly the same day, the same full moon, and considering the large amount of Thai culture borrowed wholesale from the Khmers, that is at least a possibility. The Khmer water festival consists now largely of boat races and competitions, though, while the Divali festival of lights occurs on the new moon, not the full moon.

I heard years ago that the Loy Krathong festival originally derived from the Mons, who once were a great people and author of the Dvaravati culture, with connections to Thailand, Cambodia, and India, but who are now sharply reduced, on the road to assimilation and extinction as a distinct culture. I don't hear that story anymore, but it bears merit, given Loy Krathong's northern roots and the Mon's once-vast extension there, in both time and space, which persists to this day in isolated pockets. And let's not forget the Thai love of cultural syncretism, especially when it comes to holidays, nor their love of historical, uh, relativism. At some point in the future, Loy Krathong will likely be known as 'the fireworks festival'. That's why I don't go anymore. After having an M-80 (or was it an M-150?) blow up in my face one time in Chiang Mai, I decided that sometimes it is indeed best to save face, in order to save one's life, if nothing else. So much for the advantages of being 'Farang'.

The Phuket Vegetarian Festival last month in Phuket has equally murky origins, if more straightforward manifestations. Basically it's an Indian thing that Chinese people do, eating only vegetarian food for nine days during the ninth lunar month (sound Chinese?) in order to purify the self physically and mentally. I've never been, so claim no relevant experience, but the pictures are pretty gruesome. I personally don't see the connection between purification and self-mutilation, but maybe that's just me. It also seems that that's what the Buddhist 'middle path' seeks to avoid in the path to enlightenment, extremes of any form. But, though most participants are Buddhist and Buddhism comes from India, this is more like some Hindu festivals, perhaps the Navaratra ("nine nights") which occurs at the same time of year in India, or perhaps the chariot festival for the god Jagannatha (from whence 'juggernaut') a procession famous for its excesses and held in the town of Puri in Orissa, a notable point for dissemination of Hindu culture overseas to southeast Asia. Phuket is a likely entry point for that culture en route to Nakorn Sri Thammarat. Chinese people performing Indian ceremonies? Sounds like Thailand to me.

Did you know that Phuket used to be called 'Junk Ceylon' on 19th century maps? Well, that set my little brain to clicking, imagining the fifteenth-century Chinese admiral Zheng He beating the Arabs at their own game, usurping their trade routes and clearing the way for the eventual arrival of the Portuguese to the region. Turns out its just a mis-pronunciation (presumably British) of the Malay name Ujung Salang. A Tai Dam (tribal 'Black Tai') girl in Meuang Sing in northwestern Laos once told me her people came from Vietnam, certainly the Black Tai homeland and likely the original dissemination point for the whole race, but a long way from Meuang Sing. I was imagining ancient trade routes and circuitous paths, cultural survival through the most impossible of circumstances. Then she informed me that that migration had occurred three years before. She probably got on a bus. Tai Dam people are in Luang Prabang now. They weren't ten years ago.

I personally like the so-called 'Elephant Round-up' in Surin, in southernmost Isan, which occurred last week. For one thing I like Surin and the Thai-Khmer borderlands. For another thing, the show is pretty surreal, like the movie set of Bangrajan, with opposing sides fighting it out with elephants and horses in a football stadium. You almost expect the Carabao soundtrack to start blaring out the loudspeakers at any moment. The origins of this festival are anything but mysterious, starting around 1960 as the logging trade upon which elephants and their handlers depend began falling upon hard times before its eventual banishment. The 'round-up' helps preserve the elephant culture in an eco-friendly way, certainly better than roaming the streets of GT Mahanakorn and begging for bananas. Unfortunately the town is covered with random elephant defecations when it's all over, especially around the railroad station for some reason, but that's the price of diversion.

Personally I was there last year to listen to Thai-Khmer 'gantreum' ('kantrum') music, which is found in the Surin area and no where else, and which shares affinities and likely cultural ancestry with 'mor lam' from rural Isan, given their similar rhythms and intonations. Unfortunately it's unknown outside the region, being ethnic Khmers, though they all speak Thai and tend to mix it up. The album covers even write Khmer words with the Thai alphabet, strange considering their similarities and the ease of learning one if you already know the other, until you realize that ethnic Laos do the same in Isan, and those two are much closer, maybe a ten percent mutation, a mere few hundred years on the glotto-chronological scale. But I like 'gantreum', especially in a Southeast Asia with very little 'roots music', and it shows signs of adapting to survive, now using guitars and modern arrangements instead of the previous 'sor'-based dirges, though still relegated to weddings and local Khmer parties. Hey, that's where Ch'hom Nimol of Dengue Fever was five years ago, playing Cambodian weddings in Long Beach, USA, so work's work. I particularly like Dao Rung Buriram, though she maybe uses the term 'jeut k'mao' ('jai dam'- evil heart) a bit much. She's been hurt. She's not alone.

Nevertheless 'gantreum' music has long since been superseded by more popular Thai genres for the Round-up. I got stuck in the stadium waiting for Loso to show up, unable to swim out against the massive inward tide. I noticed the police weren't having that problem, so I attached myself to their group, who were anxious to clear up a little traffic problem outside. Well, the ruse worked, but there's still no explanation of why a van would be stuck trying to drive through this swarm of people, aggravating an already bad situation. Must be somebody important. Out of the claustro-cluster now and breathing easier, I stuck my big head up to the window to see who it was causing all the traffic jelly. Sek Loso stuck his big head up to the other side and looked back, grinning like the proverbial Cheshire cat. Welcome to Thailand.

Of course the real party season doesn't start till next month, beginning with Father's Day (the King's birthday), building steam with Constitution Day, gaining speed with 'Trut Farang' (Christmas), and culminating with New Year's Eve, pretty similar to New Year everywhere. Then you barely catch your breath before it starts up all over again with Valentine's Day (a natural for Thai conversion), 'Trut Jeen' (Chinese New Year) and finally the Songkran Buddhist New Year water-fight and general mayhem blow-out. Whew! I'm tired just thinking about it, and feeling a bit tipsy, too. At last count Thailand celebrated about four different new year's days, but those figures are tentative. Stay tuned. There's more.

Carabao: more than a breakfast drink

I know this is not supposed to be a music blog, at least not THE world-music blog I have planned, not yet anyway, but well, Carabao is special. Though it may come as a surprise to recent Thai converts who only know them from their energy drink Carabao Daeng and their modern middling folk-and-roll music, in their heyday twenty years they were probably the best rock-and-roll band in the world, and would rank in the top ten all-time world-wide on my list. I'd almost forgotten them myself until my wife's 14-year-old son went bonkers over them a couple years ago, ignoring the dominant 'string' pop music and the emerging rap and hip-hop, and so I took another listen myself. Well, I liked them a lot ten years ago when I first came to Thailand, but now that I can understand the lyrics... my God! There's nothing like it! So they get a space here as part of the 'sometime ex-pat mostly-Thailand' section of my travel blog.

Not that there were any other foreigners at their show last night in Chiang Rai as far as I could see. Actually that wasn't too far, since mostly I was standing on a chair in the parking lot, too lazy to get tickets in advance, much less show up early, or even show up at all if if the traffic situation was too cluster-fornicated. My claustrophobia outweighs my loyalty. This was a free concert, you see, a Toyota promotion, but you still had to get tickets. By the time I got there the show had already started and the place was packed, and tickets long gone, so people were being turned away. So I followed the lead of others standing on chairs and tables and in pickup beds. The view wasn't bad actually. Finally someone took pity on me and handed me a ticket half-way through, as they were leaving, so that was cool. The other parking-lot viewers may have had another opinion.

Being a foreigner ('farang') has its privileges, I suppose, though I've often wondered exactly what they are. I've thought about it a lot. There's not the kind of racism in Thailand that's vicious, contemptuous or even conscious of itself, but it's still equally pernicious and tenacious. Mostly it's there in the background, poking fun or at worst insulting, all spoken in Thai, and frequently right in the target's face, as if to add insult to insult. The only way around this, of course, is to learn the freakin' language, and watch their faces turn red as you gently bounce the verbal offense back at them flowingly, slight for sleight. The best offense is a good defense. It'll pay off in the long run, I keep telling myself, and while I'm sure I wasn't the only Farang at the show, and may not have been the only Farang watching from the parking lot, there's good odds that I was the only Farang there who knows all the words to 'Beauty Queen in the Glass Cage', and even better odds I'm the only one to have adapted the lyrics to English ("because she's so poor, society won't stoop to bless, so she helps men relieve their stress; she props up the President's cabinets"). So much for self gratification.

But the music was great, as usual, though not always. Leader Aet's been known to sip some wine before show time, and rumor is that right-hand man and alternate vocalist Tierry's has had to help him remember the lyrics from time to time. That's OK. When you're the John Lennon or Bob Dylan or Bob Marley of you're country, you're entitled. Let's not forget John Lennon's 'lost weekend', nor the fact that these guys have played and toured constantly for twenty-five years to secure their retirements, while their counterparts in wealthier countries 'wake up and count their money', as Keith Richard tells it, and a healthy eight figures U$ at that, too. If it's sad to see them promote Toyota as part of the show, and even more so to lend their name and good auspices to an 'energy drink', that's only me imposing my righteous artist's perspective. They're not sad. They're having fun, and it all shows in the on-stage banter that is part of their trademark style, all with an informality that would disarm a Deadhead.

Carabao Daeng was at number three in energy drink sales in Thailand last I heard, so something's working right. Lead guitarist Lek even felt obliged to comment on the fact that Carabao is sometimes seen as having gone capitalist, since 'Songs for Life', the genre they put on the charts, was originally a form of protest music. After some sincere on-stage searching for the right words to best explain their (market) position, he finally let us all off the hook by deciding to 'let his guitar do the talking', and then proceeded to rip into an inspired version of 'Khon Nung Nieo' ('thick-skinned SOB') about lay-off day at the factory ('I've still got two arms; I've still got two legs') that would've made Springsteen cry. When they finally close with 'Bua Loy', you don't know whether to weep or wail, smile or scream, but you know you're alive, and you may or may not get to sleep that night. The magic is still there. It'll keep you warm on a cool late November Chiang Rai night.

I don't mean to sound like a dinosaur or anything, but hip-hop leaves me cold, though I appreciate its socio-political undercurrents, if not its misogynist overtones. It's just not music; it's prose. A few lyrical geniuses like Aet Carabao notwithstanding, music is mostly about the music. I stayed on the English-language cutting edge of music from the 60's to the 90's, from Dylan through Patti Smith to Nirvana, but now I diverge, preferring the likes of Dengue Fever, Mana', and Tinariwen (Timbuktu anyone?), all from other places and races. If you want to know about the Bangkok hip-hop scene, Thaitanium and assorted DJ's, then read Matt the 'Lost Boy'. He does a good job. If you want to hear about Carabao and 'Songs for Life' and up-country Thailand close to the Golden Triangle, then talk to me. I'll be here.

Future Blogs

Hi! I'm back! That moment of silence lasted over a year, didn't it? I just wasn't ready I guess. Seems the blogosphere has changed since those first tentative efforts. For one thing, the word 'blogosphere' exists now. For another, everyone wants to make money on it now. How? Advertising, of course. Cool. So I get to be the viral vector hanging ad sheets on your virtual doorknob instead of the usual bulk e-mails. I reckon my canned ham is better than that spam. Of course the blogs getting the most traffic are the ones talking about blogging itself, as if newspaper columnists might be commenting on the future of editorializing, or appropriate lengths and widths of columns, or circulation estimates, or maybe the cost of Mississippi pulpwood. They don't, of course. They talk about politics and religion and social issues and entertainment. But the blogosphere is still that wild wild West where anyone with a gun and guts has got a job, ultimate payoff at the end of the trail. Chaos slowly but inexorably organizes itself and the true professionals will rise to the surface as they must if the medium is to survive and thrive as more than yellow journalism or a mutual admiration society of conspiracy buffs or post-grad jornalistas hesitant to get a 'real job'. For now the medium is neither rare nor especially well done, and alarms bells go off when the saying 'it must be true; I read it on the Internet' becomes de rigeur sarcasm.

Drink deep. The medium is no longer the message. The message is the message. Before diving back in, I researched to see who was doing what with blogs to see where I might make a contribution. Now my main blogging interests are travel, Thailand, and music, especially world music, and I expected them to be fairly equally blogged. I was wrong. Music is weak, as if writing and music were mutually exclusive activities. Travel is off the charts, with probably more blogging networks than music has individual blogs. These may be largely temporary, of course, as travelers blog their trip and then go back to 'real life', happy to have blogged 'for free' while earning ad revenue for their sponsors and filling hotel rooms and tour vans for their advertisers. Thailand had quite a few, quite natural considering the trials and tribulations of expatriation and the need to establish contacts beyond one's neighborhood to find acquaintances with mutual interests. This may be the Net's saving grace actually, for though it may not foster up-front social skills and may create a few more Nerds than might otherwise be the case, at least now those Nerds have a place to go for mutual succor and enlightenment, and the school quarterback may the odd man out now. The real surprise is the number and quality of scientific blogs, giving the lie to those who think that the Internet is only for losers and social misfits incapable of talking to a real live girl, or about much of anything else except the Net itself.

Me, I just want to write. I got my poetic license and I want to write. I've done the research and the groundwork, connected with Google, Adsense, andFeedburner, got Pay Per Post, Linkworth, and Technorati on the back burner, even learned a little HTML, and now I just want to write. If I was burned out a year ago after countless poems, screenplays, and novels, all 'in turnaround', now I'm not. Now my brain is atrophying from lack of stimulation. Of course most people don't come to Thailand for intellectual stimulation, but I do. Unless you've got a university gig, then the only way to pursue intellectual interests is to simply allow yourself the time and economic space to do so. No, this is not an ex-pat blog with typical thinly researched cultural conclusions masquerading as matters of world importance, nor the worldly concerns of visas and entry requirements, though Thailand certainly has plenty of those at the moment. Nor will I issue opinions on how to deal with your Thai wife, and certainly nothing of ladyboys, demimondaines, courtesans, and farangs, though my wife assures me that this is what people really want. Of course my wife watches Thai soap operas as if they were the true path of Buddhist enlightenment, so... okay, maybe a little of that, but only in the abstract. The pleasure centers do reside in consciousness, right?

This will be a travel blog, of a sort, in space and in time. I do have thirty years experience, so any revisits will be a comparison with what it was like before as much as a comparison with what it's like in the US or elsewhere. How can you do a full-time travel blog, you ask? Easy. Practice. Seems the older I get the more feverish the travel bug, as if it could all come to a precipitous end. Uh huh. This year alone I've been to the Brazilian coast, Guatemala (after many years), Cambodia, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta and the North West Territories, not to mention my home base and safe havens of Thailand, US, and Mexico. Last year I was in Alaska, South America, Spain, Morocco, and the Canaries. Next year Mali and Iceland are on the agenda for January, same trip, so you get the idea. Frivolous frolics, you say, only for the idle and wealthy? Hardly, since I'm neither. Much occurs in the way of research for my world music interests, and the rest is kill-time while waiting for US projects to bear fruit. Anyway, all my travel and costs of living in Thailand certainly add up to no more than what it would cost to live in the US full time, far less Europe, so why not? Yeah, you know. It's a way of life. Please stay tuned. When I'm not traveling, I'll do the ex-pat thing, and when I've got nothing better, I'll include excerpts from my book Rivers of Consciousness. Of course the best trips can only be told in past tense anyway, since the real outback has few, if any, Internet connections, and hardly the time for it. Actually, what I'd really like to do is maybe write the first Internet book about the Internet, kinda' like Kramer's coffee tables, and for those without Internet or maybe with extra bucks, it might even come in the form of a cheapo little laptop or something. Yeah, I like that, so stay tuned. Welcome to my nervous system.
p.s. I'll leave the old stuff on, for now at least, sorta' like junk DNA, the kind in your double helices, not your bedsheets, just so you'll know where I'm coming from.