International Vagrant In Burma, Japan, Thailand & Hong Kong

Hurrah!! I just received my portable hard drive back from over a year in storage and I've been looking through all the stuff again. I'm really pleased because I've got a bunch of files including my first digital photography back from when I travelled around Burma with an Olympus C-2000 that I wrote about over here. I'm really chuffed to rescue those amazing fishermen shots just down the road from Ngapali beach that you can see above and which I wrote about here and here. Then there's also the Nokia 8250 launch party in Bangkok on Feb 23, 2001. I can only remember the phone model because of the sign to the rear of this chap Johnny Doran from Saville Productions below, with 'Walk on the blue side'. Remember when a blue Screen was the latest thang? Before mobile cameras and colour displays.

There are the trips to Bagan, the ancient capital of Burma. You might need to click on it to see this stitched together panorama shot. The journey took me over 24 hours on a nightmare bus journey that I wrote about here. Bagan took a hit during an earthquake in '74 I think but its still breathtaking to imagine the monks, merchants, families, kids and officials running around this place, breathing life into it around the time that the Normans gave us a good hiding at the battle of Hastings isn't it?


I've now also got the shots from many trips to Cambodia (but not the one where I went missing in the heart of darkness for a few days) including Angkor Wat, which is just plain spesh because of all that South Indian influenced Jayavarman architecture. Khmer culture is so important to S.E. Asia.

Then there is me during my camp yachting period around the Andaman Sea. Never was a hangover washed away so quickly than by jumping off the Piraya (our boat) in the morning.



Not to mention my gay cowboy look long before Brokeback mountain was a hit. That was quite a smash hit with the ladies, if I recall correctly. Cowboy boots 'n all.

The Tokyo period which was all too short because Tokyo ROCKS as far as I'm concerned.

But the wack stuff I've saved is from Hong Kong.


And no photo story can be complete without those Bangkok nights. As a friend of mine once said. More can happen in a Bangkok night than most might expect to happen in a year. This was taken on Soi Cowboy.


And of course those Hua Hin days, weeks and months. It never occurred to me before but I guess this blog is as good a place as any to explain why this bug very memorably fell in LOVE with me and then scared the very life out of me.

Any requests? ;)

Sacred Mysteries With Jay Weidner

Sacred Mysteries With Jay Weidner - The videos are a click away

The interviewer isn't very familiar with Jay's work and so it's a useful entry point for the beginner to learn a little about one of the most interesting people around. Not that it's dull for experienced fans either. It never is with Jay.

The photograph is of the newly finished Upatassanti Pagoda in the (also new) relocated Burmese capital Naypyidaw. It's been too long since I was last in Burma and I feel it calling.

Asia's First Lady - Aung San Suu Kyi

I was cynically optimistic when I read that Gordon Brown's last correspondence as Prime Minister was a hand written letter to Aung San Suu Kyi. I suspect that this didn't happen without some smoke filled corridor meetings attended by the United States and China. Principally with trade deals as the sacrificial lamb whereby everyone benefits but the environment. Thailand most notably signed a reported 8 Billion dollar deal just recently with Burma so clearly they were privy to yesterdays news.

Burma is the place I've explored the most by backpack and skull bustingly long (24 hours +) dilapidated bus journeys outside of Thailand. I spent an idyllic week or so a few years back on one of the most beautiful and peaceful beaches off the bay of Bengal in Burma and took this favourite picture of cattle used by the fishermen to haul in the catch while immersed in the water. It's here and across the country that I got to know a little more of the people. Most importantly that the ethnic tribes of Burma are another Yugoslavia or Balkanisation of S.E Asia waiting to happen.

I'm extraordinarily happy that an historical olive branch as been extended. It's by no means going to be any easier from now on. Indeed it will be harder to avoid bloodshed, but this first difficult step has been taken by the military junta. Which means somewhere inside the General's clique, the story of evolution continues to gather speed with what is to employ  metaphorical adumbrations; a race against extinction. 

Sold

 

I'm really happy to have found a buyer for the Burma painting. It's just been put in the post to Daria Radota Rasmussen of Social Hallucinations. All proceeds will go towards the Google  Disaster Relief in Myanmar fund where Google is chipping in to the effort. Nice one Daria. Thanks.

Burma

Burma is a very special place for me. It's very poor and like Tibet, the last thing it needs is dramatic regime change or the different states will just slug it out like they did in the Balkans. If you read Monocle recently that article on Kosovo might help you understand because its great but also deeply depressing when the tribes get all....tribal. The best chance it has is for ASEAN to do SOMETHING but Asians have a culture of non inteference to the point where I've seen people run over by a car in Bangkok and nobody helps. It's not evil, its just a cultural fault. We have lots and lots too.

However China pretty much uses Burma as one of its Southern Ports so they have a lot of influence. But probably not enough to tell the Generals they are scum. They may not want to burn their bridges either.

So yesterday I finally bumped into my dealer again. I've been avoiding him because he sold me that Pop Communism painting and even though he's a nice guy, he's a bit pushy on the sales but yesterday was unavoidable so I did the decent thing and took a look around his gallery. That was a mistake because I found a painting about Burma there.

A Chinese person doing a painting about Burma takes a sort of internationalism that is hard to grasp to those outside this country. My heart melted and I bought it instantly. But I've been thinking about it, because I don't necessarily need to stack up on paintings and actually I put a deposit down on another painting that is about China and will be with me for the rest of my life. More on that later.

So I want to repay Burma and Rangoon back for the haunting beauty of Bagan and the tranquility of Pyae by offering this painting for sale. All money to the Burmese even if I have to fly there and stuff some dollars in someone's hand because I think they might be hit by a famine after that cyclone/hurricane/tropical monsoon that wiped out a 100 000 or so. 

It's pretty desperate as I understand things.

If someone knows how to turn this into a meme/contagious content I'd be very grateful.

Virgin Ata - lantic ; We salute you

I like the randomness of different travel modes and rarely do much thinking about what form of travel will be best. I like variety. I've taken fourth class trains to Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand, heaving with noisy chickens and snoring rice farmers in intense heat, or more memorably one dangerous 26 hour coach journey from Rangoon to Ngapali beach on the Bay of Bengal in Burma (easily the most beautiful and tranquil beach in the world I've come across). The driver on that particular trip used vocal instructions to a "co-driver" pulling a piece of string which led out the window and underneath the bus to control the breaks. I was OK with that (I had no choice actually) but late into the darkest of nights towards the end of the journey I was compelled to use some ferociously strong language as the driver started nodding off and careering across the road until he was jolted awake by some innate ability to save his and our lives.

I was the only one witness to notice we were facing impending death as my co-passengers were asleep, so despite having only a few words of Burmese I made it clear I would personally throttle him if he fell asleep again by roaring at him in language that would have made mid 80's Millwall fans proud, and gesturing wildly like I was wringing a chicken's neck. This worked a treat and he woke up permanently at this although the snoring passengers were none the wiser.

So it was with some surprise that I received a text from Virgin Atlantic the night before my flight asking for my passport number. We were all having a few cleansing departure ales the night before and eating my red rose that darling Sasha gave me, so I couldn't oblige at the time.


I called first thing the next morning and to my surprise was confirmed as having a chauffeur to Heathrow which kind of made me feel a bit spesh. But once you've flown Bangladeshi/Ethiopian Airlines or Air India its all Bisto after that as Ricky B would say. I was however highly impressed with the whole experience because once inside, the very pleasant driver checked me in with his mobile phone, and within no time at all I was driven into the new Virgin Atlantic 'Upper Class' entrance and passed through the whole shebang within minutes. Without even time to conclude that I wasn't going to have my socks X rayed by a surly Heathrow security attendant, I sashayed into the Upper Class lounge. Virgin have got it going on and I wont even go into the massage treatment on board the plane or the bar that allows travelers to socialise and mingle a little.

Here's a brief 'squirt' as they say in the TV trade, of the lounge. I was most impressed with the food selection which included brilliant breads, roll mop herrings, fresh anchovies and lots of yummy salty things that only the Scandinavians know how to do best. All in all, Virgin Atlantic have got it going on. We salute you.

Darkie

ybboey

It was on my first trip to Burma in 2001 that I knew something was going on in a global cultural sense that I should try to understand. I was traveling light from one military checkpoint state to another when I saw the only sign of dissent in the whole country. It was a gang of youths dressed in cheap baseball hats and basketball vests playing of all things the unmistakable genre of Rap in Burmese. They were doing no harm but for sure they were saying things suck in Burma, and that's a fact because in Burma they really do.

I guess the reason for my incomprehension was that I didn't 'get' Hip Hop or Rap. I thought it was the lowest common denominator of music to dance to. Anyone could do it. A couple of gang gestures, a bobbing head and some Yo Yo exhortation meant that anyone was down with the bad asses. But it wasn't working for me. I couldn't see why people loved it so much and would frequently walk out of clubs in protest, as I always do if the music is rubbish.

Then I got some education.

Some years on from that Burma trip I was with some friends and invited to hang out in a bar on Royal City Avenue (RCA) in Bangkok called Hip Hop. The crowd were an unpretentious and friendly bunch and the music was really rather good when the DJ dropped a Diana Ross Hip Hop mix that blew me away and I knew what the problem was. I'd been listening to bad Hip Hop for all those years.

A conversation with a very smart DJ friend of mine helped also to clarify that Hip Hop was a culture, a movement and not just a genre of music and so now I have no problem hitting a bar for Hip Hop, but like all my music tastes I'm just a bit fussy about what I expose my ears too and need something that makes me think as well as feel.

Well yesterday I came across yet another brilliant Smashing Telly recommendation called The Hip Hop Years. The Origin of Hip Hop. Its on another level and sucked me in for the full 2 hours and 20 minutes 7 seconds. Its completely delicious and to ignore this fine documentary is probably on a par with ignoring the impact that Rock & Roll and Punk had on popular culture. Hip Hop is constantly reinventing, has embraced all genres of music from death metal to classical and brings young people together from the South Bronx to Burma.

But the reason for this post is that I've noticed something while globe trotting and parachute planning in a few countries. I've never come across an African or Afro Caribbean planner. There are plenty of great Indian marketing folk that I've worked with, but I'm starting to get the feeling that planning is predominantly a middle class, Indy music loving, Caucasian pursuit and that is most definitely not a good thing. As I've made clear elsewhere homogeneous advertising is made in homogeneous agencies. As far as I know only two three London planners have expressed an interest in the world's largest and fastest growing music genre and it leaves me asking a difficult question. Are we OK in advertising when it comes to rebranding a toothpaste from Darkie to Darlie but failing abysmally when it comes to black culture? Because if so, we are not representing.

Educate yourself and watch this seminal video.

Mao - The Unknown Story

Ricksoloway

I'm reading Mao: The unknown story, by Jung Chang who wrote the first book that ignited my fascination with Chinese history, Wild Swans.

A few years ago sitting in a painfully and aesthically hip bar in Shanghai's Xintiandi district (real gold leaf walls, solid coloured glass bar, candles and Buddhas on postmodern plinths) with an extremely bright, hard working and well educated Coca-Cola native-Chinese client in Shanghai, we serendipitously stumbled across a mutual realisation that we both harboured a dirty political hypothesis.

Not only were we both big political history fans but as the banter ranged over Mao Tse Tung's rapacious reading habits and Tsing Tao beers, we concurred that there might also be some credence in the idea that in the big scheme of things, maybe the Cultural Revolution and The Great Leap Forward were statistically a reasonable thing to pursue. That is in an armchair-General, moral relativism course of discourse. Post Yugoslavia break up, and the Balkan states subsequent internecine warfare it's arguable that losing tens of millions here and there to hold a country as huge as China together is an ugly but a priori, reasonable price to pay. I still suspect it might be in a desperate kind of way for the Shan, Karin, Mon, Kachin and other ethnic groups of Burma; you know save a million lives here and ignore a million rapes there - who knows anyway?

Prior to starting this book I had already concluded that Mao's power had ebbed significantly during the cultural revolution with one of those political fratricides that takes almost everyone out, and isn't unique to communism, although it was certainly most visible say in the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror (that's proper terror, not the overblown petrol bombs that delayed a few punters bound for the Balearic isles this weekend) in Tuol Sleng. If you think you're life is a bit shit and stuff closer to home like asymetrical warfare in Lebanon doesn't hit the radar, you should try to get out to the killing fields a few clicks south of Phnom Penh in Choeung Ek and see the infamous tree where in the mid 70's the Khmer Rouge (who were once backed by Prince Norodom I might add) was used as a target to swing babies by their feet so that their skulls smashed instantaneously on the bark of the trunk. I guess that's better than say the women who for example had their breasts cut off in Tuol Sleng.

Anyway I've changed my mind. Reading this book its clear that Mao wasn't some sort of freedom fighter who galvanised China on a path that is unambiguously now paying debatable dividends and then made philosophical judgements on social engineering, that will in time see the occidental variant of capitalism crushed. He was a brutal thug that intuitively knew that the times were right to divide, and kill, and rule, to achieve his own agenda. Sorry Winnie, I'd love to get a bottle of red in and sit through another intelligent discussion on this one but as this well written book is not allowed on the mainland, having a debate isn't the same if both parties aren't fully informed. Even if that is to discuss the veracity of the text.

Update: I got into a very feisty discussion with an extraordinarily stylish Chinese lady in The Endeavour Endurance Pub on Berwick Street about this book, and she was very angry that it portrayed Mao as having bourgeoisie tendencies. I accept her point about the possibility of bias in this book but not about Mao's innocence to kill his own. It was a good argument though. Sexy actually and I really liked the protection sock she gave me for my iPod as a gift.