Sodom & Gomorrah

Here’s a little photo report of Jatujak, of the there caged and tied down animals’ Sodom & Gomorrah. There’s hardly anything you can’t find at Jatujak.

And no pet that isn’t for sale, be it dogs, cats, birds, fishes, scorpions, turtles, spiders, snakes, etc. In apocalyptic conditions that is.

It’s heartbreaking to stroll along Jatujak’s animal shops. Animal rights, like other basic rights, are no speciality of Thailand.

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August 30, 2009 | Filed Under Culture Shock, Nature, Photography, Truly Bangkok | 8 Comments 

Supinya Klangnarong, Graceful Voice Of Freedom

She’s not only a media rights advocate. She’s charmingly attractive, highly intelligent, a true Thai power woman – and many people’s hero, against her will: Supinya Klangnarong, who rose to fame when she got sued by former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s family empire Shin. A hero against her will because there lies a beautiful irony in her fate:

The man, of all people, who tried to destroy her, this very man kind of made her. Thaksin somehow became the most important man in Supinya’s life. “A bitter-sweet experience,” Khun “Kay” told me when we recently sat down for an interview accompanied by hot chocolate and a veggie meal. And not that she bears a grudge, as you’re about to learn. And her take on the reds? And all the hush hush in the land?

Born in 1973, the year of the uprising, the milestone-year for liberty and democracy in Thailand, Supinya Klangnarong holds the vice-chair of the Campaign for Popular Media Reform (CPMR) and is a board member of the Thai Netizen Network. For a backgrounder on Khun Supinya read our earlier story The Truth Be Told. You can get further information about Thailand’s Iron Girl on her website www.supinya.com or if you follow her on Twitter. Here’s the interview:

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August 26, 2009 | Filed Under History, Politics, Society, The Interview, The Thai Mind | 14 Comments 

Thailand Executes Drug Traffickers

Not much to add. They execute, and neither will drugs nor addicts disappear. Or does the embattled Thai government try to show some sort of determination? For once the law is followed.

Fact is: Two Thai drug traffickers on death row received lethal injections on the evening of August 24th, at Bangkok’s Bang Kwang high security prison.

Richard Barrow over at Thai Blogs has an excellent write-up, mirrored further below. Thai media are covering the execution low key. It will be graphically all over the front pages. But nobody wants to stir even more domestic conflicts. We see, for once, a unified front. Thailand’s Last Executioner wasn’t the last after all.

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August 24, 2009 | Filed Under News & Media, Politics, Society | 1 Comment 

Home Sweet Container

Dreaming of your own home in paradise? Your dream may come true. Thanks to ingenious Thai designer Chutayaves Sinthuphan of Site-Specific. Creator of small container homes that not only need hardly any land. Khun Chutayaves’ homes are small, mobile, minimalist, cheap – and best: fully functional and habitable. Just put some designer furniture in there and you even exponentiate the whole idea behind it.

A collaborator of the designer cum architect recently built the small container home R-2×20 (top right) with one bedroom, one bathroom and a living area. Big enough for a young family. And there is much more to it than meets the eyes. The two twenty-foot containers and a prefabricated bathroom on the outskirts of Bangkok are an “exercise in the making of a good, affordable housing for Thais which our government cannot seems to manage,” Khun Chutayaves writes on his website.

Will his prefab concept catch on? Or is he an utopian at the right time at the wrong place? Seems so. Because he has been studying the container housing scene closely and added significant contributions to the genre. Take his recent design around the theme of “Green Home Effects” for the Bangkok Baan Lae Suan home show. What his team came up with was a concept that circled around the 4R’s – reduce, reuse, recycle, renewable:

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August 24, 2009 | Filed Under Business & Economics, Culture & Arts, Property & Investment, TTT - Top Thai Things | 5 Comments 

TIME Archive & The Art Of Titillation

TIME Magazine’s online archive is a compelling treasure trove. The archive reaches back to – believe it or not – the year of 1924. That is, if you search for bangkok. Searching for thailand, the archive starts in April 1931. Because Thailand didn’t even exist yet back then? Covers are available back to 1923. My point though: an astonishing encyclopedia.

Assuming the reporting was accurate, that is. Strolling through this archive you discover stories such as Siam: The Dancers Mourn; about the magazine’s “censor-shy Bangkok correspondent” and the police chief’s shooting of a, well, in parliament to make a point. (The Age in 1959 reported this).

The oldest Thailand-related story I found, Siam: National Paradox, is dated Monday, December 13th, 1926. But this post here is about a classic written not too long ago: The Art of Titillation published in June 2003, about “a curious – but telling – irony that the one country in Asia that boasts of never having been conquered is colonized in the imagination night after night after night.” Did anything change? Enjoy:

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August 24, 2009 | Filed Under Books & Movies, History, News & Media, Nightlife & Entertainment, The Thai Mind | 2 Comments 

Harem Culture & Colonialism’s Dirty Little Secrets

It’s hard to agree on something in current Thailand. But there is one topic without controversy. Sex. With the words “something we can all agree on, sex,” he was recently introduced at the FCCT: Richard Bernstein, a former New York Times book critic and TIME correspondent in Hong Kong and Beijing. And author of The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters. The book about to be introduced.

It was one of those rare evenings that for once I didn’t feel like the oldest guy in the audience. The mostly elderly expat flock though was there to intellectualize something others obviously just do and don’t bother to think too much about. Historic and academic elaborations were about to be made how different the Oriental and Occidental cultures of love are. “Colonialism’s dirty little secrets,” as Bernstein puts it.

Bernstein’s didn’t loose his virginity in an Asian brothel, as the author confessed straightforwardly in the opening minutes of his discourse. Even though, he said, that wouldn’t have been something to be ashamed of. Still, some critics had denounced his book as a “sweaty, pseudo-academic justification for the author’s Asian-based” whatever. Bernstein couldn’t care less. But why would one research such a subject?

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August 23, 2009 | Filed Under Being Farang, Books & Movies, Culture & Arts, History, The Thai Mind | Leave a Comment 

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