Thai immigration: will that be Visa? or American excess...

That Darwin guy is not making things any easier for any of us. No, I’m not talking about Charles, or even Grandpa Erasmus, but that guy whose canoe was lost at sea, then turns up a few weeks ago safe and sound, long declared dead, life insurance long paid to his wife. Only problem is that there are pictures of him in Panama during that time with his wife. Uh-oh, something’s rotten in Denmark besides old cheese. But that has nothing to do with Thailand, right? We’re all normal, aren’t we (unless you maybe grew up in a family of faith healers in the deep US South during the Segregation era, and the only clear-cut choice was to conform or rebel, but what are the odds of that?)? OK, so maybe we aren’t all normal-normal, but still we’re all honest ex-pats, hard-working, sober, and respectful, aren’t we? Well, yeah, sorta’ kinda’ maybe if you don’t ask too many questions. Certainly there are a few among our numbers who have skipped out on some child support, and a much larger number who’ve loaded up the Visa card while packing the bags, one-way ticket in hand. This works best with older retirees. This is why many companies in the US won’t accept cards with a foreign billing address. But here we’re still talking about the typical Western ex-pat, safe and secure, and these little problems are of small consequence to the Thai government.

But Thailand is a haven not just for Western retirees and adventurers, but also Chinese and Indians looking for business, and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis looking for work, resource-poor but hard-working. And then the waters get really murky- Russians with Mafia connections, Arabs with jihad connections, and Nigerians with heroin connections. These people are the real problem. So what if some loose flakes get shaken out in the process? I’ve got friends who have crossed the border every month for years, getting a thirty day entry without visa every time. Some even have kids by local wives now. Many wouldn’t have air fare ‘home’ if they had to. That’s getting harder. Now you only get three of those visa-free entries in a six-month period, and then you gotta’ go get a visa somewhere, most likely Laos if you live in the North here. As long as you can leave, then you can stay, or something like that, seems to be the operative concept. But the new visa regulations in Thailand are not the real problem, not for me at least; arbitrary, capricious, and incompetent enforcement of them is the problem. According to the posted regulations, only ninety days of visa-free entry are allowed every six months. But the lady stopped me at Chiang Mai airport on my fourth entry within six months, even though it totaled up to less than ninety days. I had to go cross the Burmese border again the next day. Similarly, visas with two, or even three sixty-day entries are allowed with the same visa, the last entry occurring before the visa expires, usually six months from the date of application, though the traveler may remain in the country beyond that expiration date. That didn’t help me any last Sept. 27 with a visa that expired Oct. 29. She gave me thirty days. “Mai bpen rai.”

Partly this is tit-for-tat. Other countries don’t throw open their borders to Thais, so Thailand doesn’t throw open its borders to them, except in a few cases. How many of you fellow ex-pats know that citizens of five South American countries get ninety days on arrival in Thailand, no visa required? This even includes Peru, one of the poorer countries in the American hemisphere. That would explain all the Peruvians here. That’s a joke. Brazilians have money and, loving sunny beaches, have certainly long since discovered Bali, and may very well have some numbers in the southern Thai islands, but other than that, the effects are purely symbolic. Even Korea, the only non-South American country in that favored list, has few citizens here, though Japan certainly does. Koreans are still Asian; they travel in groups; Japanese have long joined the West, culturally as well as economically. They do whatever they want. Nobody loves to travel any more than Thais, for example, but no one more hates to be alone more, either. When Thais travel, it’s not ‘How many people are going?,’ but ‘How many vehicles?’ And so they go, caravaning over the countryside, taking pictures of each other and carrying their little world(s) with them. Same with foreign countries- they’re surrounded by so many family and friends from home, that they may have no contact with the locals at all, except for maybe a few intermediaries and salespeople. But I digress.

If I thought that the new visa regulations wouldn’t impact me, since I come and go so much anyway, the reality is just the opposite. It’s worse, because that’s the first line of defense. Keep potential malingerers away from the start. These measures are draconian. At the Thai consulate in LA, not only do they want to see a return or onward ticket within two months for the standard two-month tourist visa, not only do they want to see hotel reservations, but they want to see bank statements! That is offensive. Bank statements are shared only between me, my wife, and my God. And this is from a consulate that won’t even accept cash because of the risk of corruption?! I refuse. Still I persevere. The lesser honorary consulates outside the main ones at LA and New York are a bit more sympathetic, and available! Be polite, and don’t let on that you’re visa-shopping, if you are. They might ask. As onerous as the new visa situation is, it’s certainly not the worst in the world, as some spoiled ex-pats say in the on-line forums. Many other countries are the same or worse. At least a Thai tourist visa is only $25. Brazil is $100 for US citizens, for purposes of reciprocity. That means the US charges them $100, so they charge the same. Mali, one of the poorest countries in the world, not only charges $100, but they want to see a return ticket and hotel reservations and a yellow fever certificate at $100-150 a shot. ‘Cheap country’ doesn’t mean ‘cheap hotel’, either, at least not self-bookable by internet. Cheapest I found was €50 in Bamako. Bangkok’s half that. Maybe I’ll get lucky and get a five-year visa. Some countries have gotten easier over time. Thailand itself used to allow only fifteen days without a visa the first time I came in 1992. The first time I went to Guatemala in 1977 they made me cut my hair, and then gave me five years multiple-entry, but only thirty days per entry. Now they give you ninety days, visa free, same as Peru, same as Thailand, if you're Peruvian.

I know where they’re coming from, probably far better than they know where we’re coming from. They want control of their borders, their society, and their public image. We want good lives, good and cheap. Like the H’mong, Yao, Lisu, Lahu, and Akha tribes who have filtered down over the last century or so, on the same routes that Tais themselves filtered down seven hundred years ago, the European tribes filter down by jet when they decide to ‘Phuk-et’, and the rest is history. It’s not that we washed up on the beach here because we didn’t know how to swim. Rather it’s because we liked the beaches here, warm and attractive. Some build new lives and accomplish things they might not have accomplished otherwise. Others ‘Phuk-up’ royally and someone has to come get them and accompany them back, the gravity of decadence is so strong, just like in the movie the Elephant King. Well come to Thai land, land of smile. Pero ten cuidado con la migra, hombre.

In Love and Politics the Dark Side Still Wins in Thailand

I doubt that anybody was too surprised when the tanks rolled through the streets of Bangkok last year except perhaps Doctor Taksin himself, he of the invincible luck and the impenetrable skin, ready to speak at the UN while the ground crumbled beneath him back home. This is how things are done, after all, in banana republics, where big ideas are planted in infertile soil, and democracy is left to its own devices in a culture barely literate. Thailand is the field of dreams, after all, just build the stadium first and the players will rise to the occasion somehow. Such a situation is ripe for a ‘big man’ populist promising favors, and so the Taksins, Juan Perons, and Huey Longs prey on the hopes and dreams of its mostly rural populace, doling out petty favors in return for undying loyalty, pennies on the dollar. To this day Taksin still has great support in Thailand, especially in the rural and northern areas, something which banning his party won’t change. After all Taksin created the party, not vice-versa. Buddhist passivity doesn’t help much in the political arena either, as easily seen in Burma, when people are easily convinced that good comes to the good and bad comes to the bad some how some way, though not likely in some Newtonian cause-effect equation, but almost certainly in some magical incomprehensible quantum effect. If it were comprehensible, then it wouldn’t be Thailand. And you can expect Taksin back at some point, if not before, then after the King dies. We may even want him at that point. After all, Thailand needs a Pa, and you know what the choices are. We’ll see what happens with the upcoming election.

Of course sometimes things go too far. Even my wife, not known for her political liberalism, gasped when I told her that Duangchalerm Yubamrung had been acquitted a few years ago. This son of a prominent politician not only shot a policeman in the head at point-blank range in a crowded bar, all for the crime of his foot having been stepped on, but then left the country while the police waited for him to turn himself in. After a trail that apparently led to Cambodia then Malaysia, he finally showed up after many months had passed, and stood trial for the crime. By then of course nobody ‘really remembered what had happened,’ and the young man was acquitted. Compared to this, OJ was innocent. As daddy said, “even a mother cat protects her kittens.” His son then entered a monastery and all was presumably made right with God and the world. Welcome to Thailand. But my favorite is the one about the prostitution king-pin and real-estate mogul who gave his short-term tenants notice of termination by razing their stalls one night as they slept. He later explained that he didn’t raze them; the demolition company did. As his case gained publicity and the details of his bribes to local officials for prostitution gained attention, he responded by running for the Senate. He won, of course. Thais respect a man with wealth even if the money comes from their own pockets.

So the conclusion to the popular soap opera Pruksasawart shouldn’t have come as any surprise last Sunday night. In this long-running series a young up-country girl goes to live with a prominent Bangkok family, where the older middle-age brother proceeds to fall in love with her. So does everybody else, of course, including the younger brother closer to the girl’s age. She likewise falls in love with him, but by this time, the older brother has already claimed his prize, and, for some reason that I can’t remember, his rights have priority. Well, the young girl spent most of every show crying, I’m sure including and even during the conjugal visit in which the act of engagement was consummated. Well, of course other things had to happen to pass the necessary nine months to bring this little love-child to full term, so another woman has to intercede and cause all kinds of shenanigans. The little fiancee’ keeps crying right up to the end, when in some flash of sympathetic magic, the girl decides that the older man is indeed her true love, even though he’s kept her locked up for most of a year, forced her into unwilling sex, and refused to allow her even the most minimal freedom to follow her own path. This is the happy ending that everyone wanted, except for the younger brother, of course, and the fact that he would’ve gotten the girl if this melodrama had been set in Western Europe or the US is little consolation. After all, these absurd circumstances would never have even occurred in a Western country.

Women marry for money here all the time. It has little to do with Farangs or globalization, just as slavery in Africa had little to do, initially at least, with those same Europeans or even the African war chiefs who took war prisoners and then offered them for sale as slaves. It’s just that the price of a human was well-established, just as it is in Thailand to this day. Last time I checked that was about $3k for a Farang and about half that for a Thai, though inflation has probably upped the ante. Marriage is more creative than that, of course, with multiple payment options and long-term financing available. That flat-rate ‘ante’ is usually more of a ‘post’, blood money to be paid in the case of accidental death. This is the reason that when Thais run somebody over accidentally, they might back up and do it again for the coup de grace; it’s neater and cheaper and if push comes to shove it’s still only the difference between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. Or so the pundits say. They also say that a Farang will never collect any money when a Thai causes a traffic accident, that by definition it’s the foreigner’s fault. I did collect, however, when a thirteen-year-old caused my motorcycle wreck. I swerved hard to avoid slamming into him and his three-year-old sister when they cut in front of me on a major highway. They got scratches. I got traction. Welcome to the dark side.

Once, shortly after our marriage, I jokingly referred to myself as my wife’s ‘owner’. “That’s right!” she responded. “How did you know that?” I swear to God she looked disappointed when I told her that I was joking. Pop songs use the term frequently in reference to relationships. This is the background against which planned marriages and marriages-to-order occur. It’s little wonder that half of all marriages here fail, and even less of a wonder that blood relationships are more important than the artificial relationship of marriage. You’re not likely to reject your own blood kin, though marriages are always subject to re-negotiation. Do Asians not feel the same emotions as us Westerners? I have a theory that tonal languages tend toward tonal emotion, i.e. since inflection of pitch is rigidly prescribed for pronunciation, it is therefore incapable of being used to show feeling. In the process feeling becomes more rigid, if not actually reduced. The only pitch modulation left for emotion is volume, more or less, louder or softer. I better leave that one for later. I could talk all night, and I don’t need a fight, not with some Chomskyite. Nope.

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.

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.