It was really nothing....

Chad Taylor, over at his Marginalia, has a series of end of year thanks and is kind enough to mention me. I'm not sure whether to laugh or hide, but he's clearly nailed it rather well: I'm a grumpy bugger at the best of times and my wife, bless her, says I'm getting worse as I age. I hope so, I quite enjoy a good grump and grizzle.

But this all of course, lays something of a burden on me at the moment. I'm in Bangkok now and I was going to have a few, two month in, reflections on the place. The problem is I quite like it, so that targeted box in Dresden might have to wait, Chad.

Of course there are downs. The air quality in BKK is pretty shitty, but, figures say, improving at some rate, and over the years you can feel it. And I find that that is compensated for by the fact that, for an Asian city of some 10 million, it's pretty clean at ground level, certainly much more so than poor Bali is these days, where the roadways, valleys and waterways are increasingly clogged by garbage and plastic.

And, yes, the sex tourism makes me cringe. The dirty old men with young true-love Thai girls are just horrible and much more in your face than Bali, where of course it exists but tends to be rather more hidden, or found in those grimy old retired expat bars in Sanur and Ubud. The one thing I've not seen here is the old man (whose family don't know he's in Bali I'd guess) with young local boy thing that you see a lot of in Bali. I'm guessing that may be out of town, or, hopefully somewhat cleaned up.

But if you keep away from a couple of areas in BKK you avoid all that, so we do and we do. And I'm throughly over people in the home country making jokes about it...

But I'm here to prove Chad wrong, so a quick bullet pointed list of things I like about Bangkok:

• The markets. There are dozens, big and small selling everything you might and most likely don't want. You have tourist hell markets (the late night ones near Patpong and the ones by Lumphini Park), you have markets in Chinatown with whole streets that sell just about every kind of button you may ever see, next to alleys filled with ribbons, and ten minutes from there you can be in a mega mall which hocks $3000 shoes and $500,000 sports cars, if you were so inclined. You can then wander on, after they close, to 24hr flower markets that stock every bloom you could imagine. You literally can buy almost anything, and I've gone from a land where it's hard to buy anything, to a veritable land of consumer plenty, where not only do they have it, whatever it may be, they have an enormous range to choose from. Then we have the weekend markets...10-15,000 stalls that cover everything from snakes to designer footwear to high end furniture to second hand jeans to hand crafted glassware with everything imaginable in-between. All in a clean, hassle and completely smoke free environment, which I love. Or you could simply sit in the coffee shops there, listen to the DJ and watch the Thai punks, fashion victims, & rockabilly boys, or the Germans in too tight shorts and Birkenstocks, go by.
• Yeah, the malls. I'm a sucker for big malls, and no-one, not Singapore, not HK, not the US, not Jakarta (which has more but they tend to repeat the same bits in every mall, lacks the range of most things, and the foodhalls & gourmet supermarkets but it's the closest to BKK), does malls like this town. Three Kinokuniya bookstores, any one of which has more range than every bookstore in NZ combined. And all joined by the spotlessly clean, uber-fast and cheap skytrains or skywalks.
• The way that shop staff not only take your purchases down to the taxi rank, but hail a taxi, tell them the address, then put your purchases in the cab and wave you smilingly on your way. It's called service. And the cab only costs about $3 to get home. Oh, and you never have to count your change..or get offered a candy as change (when the store till has a draw full of coins).

• Christmas...why does Asia, the non-Christian parts, which is all of it really, do this so well? No baggage of pretending to celebrate faux religious dogma perhaps? Whatever, Bangkok does Xmas so much better than any western nation, way better than London (although it's been few years since I've seen it in the weeks building up to December 25} and waaaaayyyyy better than New Zealand with it's Santa and depressing Farmer's Parade. Here, simply, they celebrate the fun, and don't try to hide behind religious symbolism. Half the buildings festooned in walls of lights and OTT decorations have nothing to gain commercially from the season..they just do it. The guy installing the washing machine here (free, part of the service..and the machine was a third the cost of the same thing in Auckland) kept on smiling widely at me and saying Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas.. And Merry Christmas to you too.
  

• Just about everything here is cheaper than Bali. And transport, electricity, and internet (the net is about ten times the speed for one tenth the price, it's like the world has opened up) are not only a fraction of the price, largely they work.....win/win
  

• The smiles..I was warned repeatedly by silly old expats in Bali that the Thai people don't smile. Rubbish, and mostly they're genuine with the grins and humour that comes with much interaction here. But like all national stereotypes, that's all they are, silly generalisations, and I've found smiles, I've found cold silence and I've found every emotion in between. Like anywhere else.
  

• I love the food. I love Thai food. I love the food on the side of the street. I love the foodhalls. I love the late-night outdoor food stalls at Soi 38 (with the girl who grins so joyfully as she welcomes us back and she prepares our Mango and sticky rice..which tastes there like it does nowhere else). I love the cheap hole-in-the-wall places that serve you so much food it's hard to walk and then hand you a bill for about 500B ($15) for three people. I love the spices and herbs, and the mind-bending chili, in almost everything. I love the Indian food. I love the market snacks..the banana roti and rice sweets. I love the food.
  

• I love the drinks..not just the juices and blended drinks, but the the wonderful wine everywhere, at a passable price, and the wonderful beers..the local beers and the Belgian bars and so much more. It's like arriving after years in the desert.
• Oh, and the rivers and klongs..water transport is efficient, very fast, very, very cheap and the klongs are way cleaner than the naysayers had me believe.
  

• And it's all, as I said earlier, all smoke-bloody-free.....

Is that ok, Chad?

Things could work out just like I wanted them to / If I could have the other part of you

Pa Pa Sa Re Ni Ni Sa Pa Pa Sa Re Ni Ni Sa

Ok....

hello dilli haat
everything is ok just want to inform u ur one mirror of the front wall upstair is broken which is not good for goodluck please repair it soon . when i pass by bus trough ur restarant i always see i dont have ur phone number otherwise i could have called u an informed u
best of luck
Posted by charan, on 01/22/2008 at 19:43

[From Indians in Thailand - Dillii Haat]

No Tricks In '86: The 12" Singles

Back in January 2006, on this blog, I posted a list of my favourite 12" singles. It was picked up by quite a few other sites, not least of which was the godfather of all house and dance music sites, Jahsonic, and it kinda went around the world, which was a buzz. I them followed it with a list of 7" singles and albums.

The list disappeared into the blog archives and when I changed the URL to my own (from a blogger one) it, along with all the earlier posts, lost all their images..and I was too lazy to spend days or weeks fixing it so I decided to pull this list from the archives and put it more permanently on my site. It can be found here.

I fixed a couple of typos and an mistake or two but it's really as it was, with new images. Enjoy or criticise, whichever turns you on...

The albums and singles will follow at some future stage.

But At Least We'll Know That It's True / That I'm Almost Sixteen Again...

If you'd pulled me aside thirty years back and told me that this year I'd be watching the The Buzzcocks in Bangkok, likely I'd be inclined to verbally slap you a bit to bring some sense back into the conversation. Of course I wouldn't have as I'm not a violent person by nature ( the last person I hit was Nicky Hager in the 4th Form, and I've felt guilt since).

But tonight there I was, in the rather agreeable but still fairly rockn'roll surroundings of Club Culture near Victory Monument (which wasn't actually a victory at all) grooving along to The Buzzcocks. The fucking Buzzcocks....

We used to laugh at the 60s acts in the 1980s touring their handful of hits around the workingman's clubs of the UK and periodically making it to NZ. The likes of The Searchers and The Hollies. And I'm still one to sneer at the poor old Human League and ABC, or for that matter most acts from the '77 batch doing the traps three decades on. The only Class of '77 acts I'd cross the road to see would be Paul Weller or Elvis Costello.

And the fucking Buzzcocks.

I mean, they had the tunes, and if the 2009 reissues of the first three albums gave us anything, it was that those are likely the best pop records of their generation, bar none. Tell me a pop anthem from the last half of that decade that tops Ever Fallen In Love or Promises. And they came, they flared, and they burnt out in a fairly gracious way. And, of course Pete Shelley gave us Homosapien which, in it's 12" dub, was both a dancefloor monster and, forgivably, the prototype for everything electroclash, twenty plus years on. Tune indeed (and the album is no slouch).

It was a mixed crowd of 1000 or so, about 50% UK expats, 30% Thai and the rest mixed. I loved the anonymity of it all, that being something I've enjoyed in Bali too. The nature of my history means that it's hard to do these sorts of gigs in Auckland without some, admittedly often pleasant, closing in.

We had drinks downstairs in the open air bar before we went it. It was as much a show as the band was later one. Faded punks thirty years on are an interesting bunch.

And as Brigid said, being surrounded by the English on holiday does wonders for one's physical self esteem.

There was a Thai Elvis impersonator playing to half a dozen people in the restaurant. We gave him a 20B tip and went in.

The support act, I have no idea what they were called, looked like Harry Potter and band but were actually really bloody good in a tight pop punk way. They looked like they had the legs to travel, and I mused that if they were anywhere in the Western world they'd likely be doing MTV & commercially rather well. They had the looks and the tunes.

A brief break, with some quite tastefully informed between band tunes (smatterings of 60's punk, Big Star etc, plus a few 70's and early '80s tunes..there is something quite special hearing 500 increasingly drunken Englishmen, as they mostly seemed to be by that stage, singing Love Will Tear Us Apart as if they were straight off the benches at Old Trafford) and the arrival of the Thai punks and the confused blonde Swedish hairdressers, who, like about 30% of the crowd, would not have been born much before the band's 1989 reunion. Some of the younger crew had their spiffing brand new Singles Going Steady or Sex Pistols shirts on (unlike a few of the more ancient folks who, despite the fact they'd doubled in size, had inadvisably decided to ignore any remaining style instincts left after all those Special Brews had done their work, and squeeze into that Adverts shirt one last time. Cheers for that..)

Then came the headliners. No fuss, no great announcement, they just wandered on stage, tuned up a bit, like the band at the local pub, and then blatted into Boredom which segued effortlessly, hardly surprising after all these years I guess, into the mighty Fast Cars.

I last saw the band in, I think, about 1990, and my first impression this time was that Shelley looked like a happy off duty bus driver (he seems to have shrunk vertically and grown horizontally..haven't we all) and Steve Diggle, in spotted shirt, had something of the Bruce Forsythe about him. Who would've thought that in 1979?

And Brigid and I wondered too, what the very fat guys with cheap striped polo shirts tucked into their walk shorts would've looked like in 1979?

But, y'know, it was The Buzzcocks.....the fucking Buzzcocks, one more time.

And then the first Englishman crashed the stage and knocked over Pete & his amps and staggered up to a victorious meathead arms in the air yeah, before being politely, this being Thailand where even the punks say sorry, tossed off the stage by the bouncers. He deserved something firmer as the rest of the band hobbled vocals-less through the last half of Autonomy, and Shelley had to borrow an amp and swap guitars.

And the scouse wanker who had the poor Thai girl by the throat outside the toilets (people were intervening rather quickly, thank god) needed, and likely was, given the anger of the approaching staff, a swift explanation as to why his behavior was utterly unacceptable, which if he couldn't understand, led to something sterner from the two cops standing outside.

Some people should not travel, or for that matter, leave their shitty council flat.

But, it rolled into What Do I Get and onwards, then Steve Diggle's moment, a longish Harmony In My Head, where he had the same Man U fans singing the chorus en mass. It was well cool. I smiled and sang a lot.

We wandered out after the encore of Oh Shit, Ever Fallen in Love (in which the Swedish girls seemed to finally find a song to know..must be the Shrek effect) and Orgasm Addict, to get a taxi before the masses swamped them.

So, yes, it was nostalgia (which, sadly they didn't play..and no Love Battery...no Love Battery), and it was a bunch of old folks mostly singing along with the tunes one more time.

But It was The Buzzcocks...the fucking Buzzcocks.

Yay.

Those promises..ohhhh...are made for us..ohhh....