Pyramid pimping! The first business of this post is to pimp the new small fandoms community for pimping your obscure, esoteric, tragically hip fandom in any medium. It started a couple of days ago and has mushroomed mightily already. Come along and proclaim your out-of-the-way love. (Do read the posting rules first - the idea is to keep posts brief and confine flailing to the comments.)

Speaking of the out-of-the-way, the other day while house-hunting I took shelter from a heavy rain shower in an obscurely located antique shop where I found, in a dingy glass case, some old guns, including a few flintlock pistols, one stamped “Madrid 1820″ — think highwayman or pirate pistols, with two barrels and two triggers, engraved metal, fancy side hammers and the whole sexy works. The asking prices were $100 for a cute stubby one and $120 for a serious long-barrelled number just made for waving at toffs with a cry of “Stand and Deliver! Your money and your wife!” There’s a chance they’re genuine; Thailand specialises in fake Buddhas, not fake European firearms. I also found, elsewhere, a bottle of Cannabis Rose perfume, which I had been looking for without much hope of finding it in BKK. Very nice, bloody expensive. However, Stu managed to find a bottle much cheaper in London, so I shall soon be smelling of dope and roses. I don’t know if I’ll get a gun, but I’m hopefully going back with a friend to fangirl over them, and I guess I might give in. What I would do with it, I don’t know, other than play dress ups. Sell it, probably, if it’s worth as much as the ones for sale online. If I ever want to bring it home I’ll have to get written permission from the police, which is less than I need if I want to bring home a sword.

After lunch I found a horse-shaped Swarovski crystal chandelier, probably a copy of this one designed by Stella McCartney. Here’s the one I saw:

Ok, I’m not going to buy that. I also found some interesting trumpet flowers, orchids growing on a tree outside a Starbucks, and the jungle reclaiming a vacant lot near a station:

A couple of days later, at a shopping mall, I was menaced by creatures of the night (uncommonly tall they were, too, for Thai creatures):

Last, but not least, and speaking of the dead, I came across this news item from a few years ago. The American artist Shishaldin applied for permission to marry the late Isidore Ducasse, aka Comte de Laureamont, author of Maldoror. Yes, under French law you can marry dead people, apparently without their consent. I’ve been unable to find whether the nuptials ever went ahead. If they didn’t, or even if they did, I wonder if I could marry him too. Would it be bigamy to be married to a live man and a dead one, or for a dead man to be married to two living women? Could we still have a honeymoon in Vegas? At any rate, I hope Shishaldin did marry him. She sounds like his type, according to this article :

“She went on a high-fiber diet of Kashi to promote spiritual revelations, auctioned off her DNA on eBay, and subsisted on a regime of foreign-acquired lactation drugs so as to nurse herself with her own breast milk. That all three efforts failed (no visions were had, eBay deleted her auction, and the drugs just made her sick) is beside the point. In her world of artistic eclecticism, it’s the idea that counts.” (Or comtes?)

I’m down with it being the idea that counts. I think I’ll call my writing/non-writing of book#2 performance art — a five year long piece titled “She is Indisposed; She Flails; She Subsides; She Eats Chocolate”.

Don’t mind me. I’m going to talk about flats again. I’m going back to Aus-speak; I can’t be bothered typing “apartments” anymore.

[Much rambling deleted. But I feel better for having typed it all out. It was cathartic.]
A current of Francocozzoitis circulates around Sukhumvit, and I’ve walked out of more than a few places feeling glad that I have reasons besides fear of the furniture to turn them down. Some feel over-furnished, too — done up nicely, but so much to the owner’s taste — or a decorator’s — that there’s a feeling of being in someone else’s house. Unless their enthusiasms happen to coincide with yours (as is the case with an awesome joint I saw yesterday, re which I have to find out if the owner will drop the price), it’s hard to imagine how you’d make these places homely for yourself.

I got talking to an old lady on the park the other day. From what she was telling me I first understood that her aged mother had had a leg amputated at a clinic in Soi 8, but for some reason had been evicted from the clinic by police on Monday and sent back home. Further discussion and analysis led to the conclusion that the old lady herself was a tailor who took up trousers, working on the sidewalk on the corner of Soi 8, and that the police made her clear out on Mondays.

I think I’ll get her to take up my jeans.

The public areas of Edifice B are, to my mind, remarkably nice. The pool is big, sheltered, and surrounded by attractive potted plants. There’s a clean, well-equipped gym, and even a library / reading room. The lobby looks like a hotel, with posh sofas, a chandelier, and large portraits of the King and Queen. Everything is spotless, and if it can gleam, does. The library is a bit basic, but the fact that it’s there at all strikes me as an unusual bonus.

So I was surprised when a junior estate agent who had come along for experience told me that she thought all this looked a bit old. I know that Thai people prefer new buildings, for reasons of visible prestige and guaranteed absence of ghosts, but this place looked at most 20 years old — a well maintained 20, at that. She was surprised when I explained to her that farang generally don’t set great stock by a place being spanking new, and that we may even prefer a patina of age, as long as the place is clean and isn’t obviously infested with the undead. Old-style apartments, I said, with all that lovely teak — some of them are positively baronial, with wooden floors, dados, even whole walls panelled — are likely to appeal to Western notions of luxury. “Really?” she said, eyes wide. I said that your average farang can’t afford that kind of decoration back home; that generally one has to be an earl or something and inherit it.

So, mutual surprise. Another agent turned her nose up at our current dwelling for being “not very new”. It might be 30 years old. The Thai notion of “new”seems to be really that: brand new, never used. Some of the agents I’ve talked to have expressed reticence about showing me places that aren’t new, in case I think they’re trying to foist crap on me. Yes, some of the non-new places are skanky, but that seems to be due more to neglect of maintenance than age per se.

I’ve looked at a few baronial teak places and have been mighty tempted, but in each case there has been something not right — no view, or, more often, baronial size. Great value for the price, but more space than we need and more than we want to pay. And there was a lovely, cozy one, wooden throughout, like a hobbit hole, that was charming and affordable — but, at the same price as Edifices A and B, lacking the same access to supermarkets, restaurants and public transport, as well as having a much smaller pool and lower security, and the views weren’t as good. My heart went for it despite the negatives, but the head’s list of points regarding convenience should by no means be disregarded, especially when there are the two of us to consider.

Oh, dear, I seem to have drifted from the vein of cultural differences back to the main throbing artery of house hunting. Don’t mind me. I’ve started dreaming about apartments the way a dog dreams about rabbits. I’m in the zone. Writing about it like this is a kind of therapy. To be honest, I think I’m a bit sad to be leaving the skybox. I felt at home here the moment I walked in. You know how some places are like that. The positives stand out, the negatives recede; something between you and the household spirits clicks. The two places we had in Melbourne were like that, both the rental and the one we bought. I have to say, I’ve never felt that click when viewing a brand new apartment. I also have to say that very old places tend to give me the willies — when I’m sure there are ghosts. But 20, 30, 40 years old — dwellings of that age often seem, to me, to have some sort of uncomplicated presence in residence — something with the supernatural intensity of, say, a dog or a cat.

Now I’m being fanciful, but I like the idea of an evolving household ghost. Perhaps each resident leaves an impression on the spirit of the house, bequeathing something of themselves to it, and ghosts and apparitions are no more than puppet-shows performed by the impressionable spirit.

I might have mentioned that I’m hunting for a new apartment, a construction site having taken up residence outside our dear little box in the sky. We would also like a second bedroom, so that we can have a separate office space and somewhere to put guests and suitcases.

The process has been made much more difficult than it would be in many cities due to my insistence on being a) on the skytrain route and b) nowhere near any damn construction site. This also includes destruction sites. As I’ve found out, you have to be quite a way away to completely escape the delicate sound of jackhammers. We are also insisting on a  washing machine, quite airconditioners, a pleasant view, and various other little things.

I’ve more or less narrowed the search down to a couple of enormous edifices on a major road, since the little leafy side streets are either too expensive, too skanky, too remote or too thickly carbuncled with building works. I have five estate agents engaged in the search. I’m sure at some point I’m going to be embarrassed by bumping into one of them while I’m with one of the others.

There are some delightfully odd places available. Yesterday, in Edifice A, I was shown a teensy little flat with a gorgeous, massive balcony, more like an elevated patio, that was larger than any room in the house and had potted palms, outdoor furniture, and a handsome wooden gazebo in one corner. I could imagine simply living out there in the gazebo, but for the traffic noise.

I may have found a place in Edifice B. It meets all requirements save the furnishings in the bedrooms and living room, which are old and indescribably awful — think “serial killer’s hotel room”. The owner has agreed to renovate, but will not paint; he wants new wallpaper. I am going to look at samples of paper and curtains with Agent A on Wednesday before I think of committing. I confess my hopes are not up, knowing what Thai tastes in wallpaper run to. Even if something not remotely suitable for a brothel is procured, the renovation budget is tight — new aircon will consume most of it — so we might still be left with some scary furniture that we’ll have to replace at our own expense.

I’m a bit torn, because there are beautifully presented apartments in the same building. However, the scary one is on a high corner, and has views, airflow and blessed peace — a building next door appears to be in the right position to deflect the traffic noise without intruding on any view except from the main bedroom, which doesn’t matter so much as you only sleep there, and there’s still a line of sight across open space to a lake.

Anyway, Agent B is showing me more dwellings in the same edifice today, and I’m having a look at another on my own. Agent D is showing me some other places before work this morning. I sort of hope B will have something perfect, as he’s a gentle, unpushy young man who hasn’t tried overtly yet to sell me anything, and on that account I would like to see him succeed. There’s a certain strength within his softness — he got an owner to knock 15,000 baht off a large apartment that would have been fine it if wasn’t directly facing the massive wall of another building.

This domestic palaver does consume the mind. It wouldn’t matter so much if we knew we were leaving, but as it is, we’re looking for a long-term pad — dare I even say, a homely home. We’ll see what today brings. Now that I’ve seen how far owners can be willing to lower the asking price, I might go back to a leafy street I liked and make a few offers.

This from my friend Clint at work — a reminder that the Land of Smiles isn’t always in a good mood:

“I saw a shootout the other night, scared the fucking shit out of me.  It was right across from Rockwell [ed. — the school where we work].  On Thursday night I finished at 9pm and then hung out in the alley between Rockwell and the parking lot of the Chinese restaurant right there on the corner, drinking beer with the construction workers and shooting the shit, when we heard this big bang.  At first I thought it was a motorcycle wreck around the corner, but it was followed by 20 more bangs, and we realized it was a gun fight.  We ran away into the building, and one of the construction workers pulled out a sword from his bag, I shit you not, and charged outside, thinking it was part of the political upheaval and wanting to take a bite out of some protester’s leg or something.  But it was the motorcycle taxi dudes across the street who take up that whole corner, some dude came by on a motorcycle and started shooting at them, and one of them started shooting back.  The motocrycle assailant took off and got away, and I think one guy was dead (some medics leaned over him and then threw a white sheet down on top of him) and another guy I think wasn’t dead but unconscious and was being treated for a gunshot wound to the arm.  Aren’t you glad you don’t work nights?”

I am glad I don’t work nights, although avoiding gunfights wasn’t the kind of safety I had in mind.

In other news, I have to rave about a movie. It’s called The Fall. This is a picture from it. I suck at writing reviews, so here’s an intelligent one, and another. One great strength of the movie is it’s strange and gorgeous, exotic imagery; another is Catinca Untaru, who plays the young girl, Alexandria, who together with injured 1920s stuntman Roy (Lee Pace) is at the heart of the story. It’s a fantastical movie with a grounding in reality. If Pan’s Labyrinth was your thing, The Fall might well be worth your time. Official site here.

Yesterday, one of my adult students told me that her mother used to write gay Gatchaman (Battle of the Planets) doujinshi. To which I could only reply, Awesome!

I also crossed a rubicon of Thai literacy yesterday. At a snack food shop I was able to read the name of the thing I wanted (khanom jeep), ask for it without pointing, and get the thing I’d asked for.

In other news, I have fucking awful PMS this month. Nothing physical of note, just baaaad wolf blues, in honour of which I drew this monster:

The monster has his own problems. He — being normatively male, thus PMS-less — is blue for other reasons. Mainly, he’s blue because people don’t taste good anymore. Everyone’s damp and stringy and musty inside, he says, like old macrame left out in the rain.

I write this to the sound of jackhammers, which have been going since 8 a.m. because, hey, who wants to sleep in or do a bit of work on a Sunday morning? I am entirely fed up with construction noise, and with the alternative of wearing earplugs all day and night. I have been looking for a new, quieter apartment. It is hard to get away from construction or incipient construction in this area, so we might be moving farther afield.

Friday afternoon I met up with Alex for a wander in Chinatown. In one shop we found plastic bottles in the shape of superheroes, robots and monsters — including one that I thought was Spiderman with boobs, though as Alex said, they were probably his huge pectoral muscles — filled with coloured liquid. They looked so much like similar things we used to have at home when we were kids, which were cordial drinks, that I thought these ones were also drinks — until I noticed the label stating that they were bubble liquid. I managed to do this a second time at another shop where there was a display of what looked like the coloured balls of gelatin that feature in dessert concoctions here. It dawned belatedly on me that as these were brilliant blue and fluorescent pink, perhaps they were bath balls. Which they were. Having mistaken distinctly inedible things for food twice in ten minutes, I felt it was just as well that I don’t want children, since had I had any they probably wouldn’t have survived infancy.

It then started to rain, quite spectacularly. Although we had umbrellas, in uncovered alleys the ground was soon sloshing with dirty water, so we stuck to one long covered passage, then ducked up a random offshoot that yielded a surprise; the alley ran beside a canal lined with picturesquely ramshackle houses and crossed by rickety bridges with little makeshift coffee stalls on them. Banyan trees with their roots dug well into the canal walls overhung the water, with their thousands of fine aerial roots creating a weeping willow effect. Here, I thought, was perhaps a glimpse of old Bangkok; the scene merged in my mind with paintings of Asian canal and river life before the rise of the Concrete World, and I was able to imagine something visually idyllic, aided by the darkness and the rain sheeting off sloping roofs, which together helped to obfuscate present reality. By now we were into Little India, but most of the shops were closed, although by the canal we found a small restaurant where we were able to wait out the rain. The masala tea was really only average, but, cold and wet as I was, it tasted divine– and it was only 25bt, where the same average tea on Sukhumvit is 60-80bt.

Alex is out with her friend from Australia today, and I am about to take my computer down to the lovely Nielsen Hayes library and see if I can plug it in somewhere. The office says I can work there, for a 100bt fee, which I’m happy enough to pay, but they don’t know whether there’s a power point.  If not, I guess when my battery dies I’ll just head off to the less posh environs of work; there’s usually a spare classroom.

Alex D M (Alankria) is in Thailand for a couple of weeks, staying at the hotel next to us. We wandered around Sukhumvit the day before yesterday looking at the blingy watches in which our local vendors specialise, then went to Cabbages & Condoms, a local restaurant with a large menu and a safe sex theme — mannequins dressed in costumes made entirely from prophylactics decorate the joint — and ate on the mezzanine, with a large banyan tree dangling its many aerial roots outside the open balcony, making a curtain through which we overlooked the ferns and fairy lights in the courtyard.

Yesterday Alex and I went on the underground to Klong Toei market. Alex liked the spotlessly clean, aggressively airconditioned Bangkok version of the tube — as do I. I think of the London Underground practically as a wonder of the ancient world and love the historic resonances of its stations, but travelling on the deep Northern Line in summer isn’t an experience that I’m keen to repeat.

Klong Toei market is an old-fashioned outdoor food market, distinctly no frills, and lots of meat, dead and alive. There were chickens in large round communal wicker cages under tables of chicken carcasses — I felt sorry for one rooster with lovely feathers, who really looked too handsome for the pot — and live fish in shallow tanks, out of which we saw two inmates jump out while we were there. Next to a pork butcher’s stall, dogs lay gnawing on scraps. The pigs’ heads were strange — boneless, detached from their skulls, the flaccid faces lay like folded clothing in a store, one behind the other in sloping lines; yellow, for some reason, empty eyes closed in mimicry of the peace of sleep. There were also vegetables, and a lot of chilli and garlic, including a basket full of large, succulent-looking garlic cloves that I think might lure me back to Klong Toei.

Wat Hua Lamphong, at the station where we had to leave the comfort of the underground and take to the streets, isn’t one of Bangkok’s famous temples, but its lavish, recently renovated interior, lit by chandeliers, was well worth climbing the stairs and taking our shoes off for. Although the wall paintings were done in the traditional style, in the corner where sinners and sybarites were depicted the artist had painted one man guzzling whisky from a realistically painted bottle.

Next on the itinerary was River City arts and antiques mall. As we walked down the road we came to a high wall in the process of being torn apart by a banyan tree. In a cleft of the tree was a discarded spirit house, quite a recent discard by the looks of it (as I might have mentioned before, you can’t just throw a spirit house out, it has to be deposited under one of these trees), and in the bricks of the wall, which were hollow, so that each one was like a little frame, were shelved spirit figurines and other, surprising things — a mirror, a stuffed snowman. One can imagine all sorts of stories behind their being there.

River City is more a place for browsing than buying, as it’s quite upmarket. Amongst all the Buddhas, garudas and carved wooden doors — presumably from houses no longer standing — were unexpected interlopers from abroad, such as — I think it was — the head section of an Egyptian sarcophagus cover, and bits and pieces that looked African, though I guess they might have been from Oceania.

After a detour to Asian specialty bookshop Orchid Books, and then a siesta, we went out to a gay bar called Classic that I’ve wanted to visit for some time. Since the street is full of boy bars we had to run the gauntlet of numerous touts to reach it. Seating was rather basic, in rows facing the stage, and drinks priced sky high at 200bt — even for beer. The bar fine, however, was 400bt, which is low. The show was less raunchy than the Tawan bar — no actual sex — and the dancers/escorts were much more svelte, ranging from medium build to extremely thin and petite. I enjoyed the show, which included an underwater segment performed in a tank at the back of the stage. Our companion for the night was Sen, of gamine looks, puckish smile and charming manners. There is something special about these people who can carry on small talk with poise while sitting next to you dressed only in briefs. I could imagine him in a 1920s or 30s setting, dressed in tails, as a taxi dancer in a swish ballroom. His English was very good. When I asked where he had learned, he said he had mostly taught himself with books and tapes. He had been a waiter and a stylist for beauty contests before becoming an exotic dancer. He was gay, but was happy to go out dancing with women, obviously with payment for his time. He said he didn’t really like doing the underwater show since water got in his ears, and if he wore earplugs he couldn’t hear the music. I tried to ask how much they had to rehearse for the show, but he didn’t know “rehearse” or “practise”, so if I go back I will have to be armed with a bit more vocabulary. We didn’t take him out, but we or I might another time, since he seemed like an interesting person and his ability in English made it possible to have a conversation.

Some readers of this blog may have seen in the papers that there have been anti-government protests in Bangkok and that following the death of a man in a clash between rival protest groups a state of emergency has been declared. This is not as dramatic as it sounds, I don’t think; the purpose seems to be simply to let the army intervene if demonstrations become violent. Away from the protest sites, life goes on as usual, except for delays and interruptions due to strikes. I’m posting this here to allay possible fears of friends and relatives and assure everyone that Stu and I are miles from potential troublespots. What with the strikes and all, it is possible that internet services might be disrupted at some point, so if I don’t answer email that will most likely be the reason (aside from my usual tardiness).