Pent.

this night was so epic it warrants its own post.



the first night we met up with al, paul's friend from atlanta, who just happened to be in bangkok. al was with his friend from high school who was thai and happened to live and work in bangkok. his name is also paul. thai-paul, it turns out, is a mildly famous former thai actor (he was in ong bak) and model, and his family is like the 5th richest in thailand or something. anyway, i didn't know that at the time. we were to meet them at a bar - a "members only club" - and we were to wear a collar. as we pulled up to the club, it didn't occur to me that the place looked a lot like a strip club. we walked in and found our guys - this way, sirs. it was pretty loungy - we were directed to some couches. i was immediately handed a glass of chivas:

"thanks."
"take a look around guys. whatever you want is yours, just let me know."
"ok." *paul and simon walk off, come back a few minutes later*
"uh, john, don't go into that back room. you won't come back."
"what? what's back there?"
"uh, just go check it out."
"no, i want to get some drinks in me first."
"dude, there's this room with like 45 girls in it."
"what?"

(cue thai-paul, who explains to us that this is a hostess bar, known in korean culture as a room salon, perhaps unkown in american culture. i'll do my best to explain.)



the deal is someone is a member at this club (in our case, paul). you go there to hang out. there is a bar, a lounge room, and swimming pool (really), and a dance club. there is also a room full of SLAMMING thai girls. they are not strippers or hookers, but hostesses. i'm familiar with this because it's rampant in tokyo, and i can explain that in another post. this was, however, my first visit to a hostess bar. hostesses hang out with you, pour your drinks, talk to you, light your smokes, etc. but you have to pay them. in tokyo you have to pay them a lot. i wasn't sure what the deal was in bangkok.

after a few more chivas-and-waters, thai-paul talked me into going back there. i didn't really want to, but there was a lot of peer pressure and al was already talking to some girl, so i figured it was, you know, kosher. thai-paul went with me, and i was getting the sense that he was kind of a VIP there. in charge of the fleet of hostesses is a "mama-san," who is also outrageously attractive. she ushered me into this "room," and, yeah, there were just like a ton of thai girls sitting on couches smiling waiting to be picked. so, nervously and hurriedly i picked one, and mama-san said something to me, to which i replied "ok" without knowing what she said. so this girl stands up and trots over to me and we go back to the couches.

first things first:

"what's your name."
"first."
"ok."
**blah blah blah**
"how old you are?"
"i'm 24. you?"
"20."

i have to stop now because this is where things started to go downhill. as i looked her over, it became apparent to me that this chick wasn't no 20 years old. she was maybe 18. maybe.

literally 5 minutes into things (after i told her i lived in tokyo) she said:

"i girlfriend?"
"uh, ok."
"i love you."
"uh, ok."
"you my boyfriend."
"uh, ok."
"why you laugh?"
"because i've only known you for 5 minutes."
"i want to marry you."
"ok."
"we engaged. we get married?"
"yeah. when? are you going to move to tokyo with me?"
"yes. we get married in two years."
"why 2 years? i'm leaving monday."
"i have to finish high school."

**record skips like in the movies**

"what?"
"you call me every day and we get married in two years."
"ok."

so i'm thinking to myself "christ, am i stuck with this girl all night?" yes, as it turns out, i was. when we announced our engagement to everyone, al said "but john likes japanese girls." this set her off. assuming that i had a japanese girlfriend or girlfriends, she freaked out and threw a huge fit. i ignored it, but realized that she was taking this whole thing a lot more seriously than i was. even al tried to tell her he was kidding, but she didn't get it. this was to continue off and on for the rest of the night.

the group got relatively large, and through the course of the night i can't even tell you how many bottles of chivas got spilled. i'm thinking like 6. dudes were seriously going out hard.

we eventually moved to the dance club part. the [un]ambiguously gay DJ played the techno version of the theme from "dallas" for me and kept leering at me later on, "first" got too drunk, and "kick" told me "you gotta have hope, even if it's 1:45 and you don't have a girl yet, you always gotta have hope. that's the thai way." i tried to escape while my "date" was in the bathroom, but i couldn't get away and she caught up with me. she gave me her number and i told her i'd call her every day and we'd get married in two years. (summer '08 wedding in bangkok). perhaps i was being inconsiderate given how seriously it seemed like she was taking this shit, but thai girls are fucking loco and you gotta watch out for yourself first. plus, i mean, it's her job to do that shit, so i don't really think she was serious. either she was serious and she's insane or she was just working and i don't feel bad about it.

later that night a member of our group was involved in an accident. he turned in front of a motorcycle, which hit the passenger side of his truck going "like 50 mph." the guy on the bike broke both his legs. although, according to some, the driver was not at fault, the cops, smelling alcohol on his breath, took him to the police station, where he took and failed a breathalizer test. a few thousand baht later he was free to go, no questions asked.

the events of my first night opened my eyes - this was the fucking wild west. this city was, in every respect, the complete opposite of tokyo. it was terrifying and exhilarating, appalling and arousing, and so on. it was that night i fell in love with bangkok.

"what's the capital of thailand?"

"BANGKOK!" **punches friend in the dick really hard**

or, conversely, "hey simon, when does our flight for, um, where are we going again?" having already received a "DP" from paul in tokyo, i was constantly on guard.

because i only speak in superlatives, it can be difficult for me to express my true feelings about things. i once famously proclaimed (upon leaving the theatre) that "the 13th warrior" was a "top 10 movie of all time" because someone got a bag put over their head and then got stabbed in the face (all in one really swift, really awesome move). that said,

bangkok is my new all-time favorite city in the world. actually, los angeles is still my favorite city, but bangkok fucking rules. except, the thing is, bangkok also fucking sucks. so this is where i get into trouble - not only can i not rate/rank my favorite cities (they each offer something unique and awesome), i can't even singularly characterize bangkok.

we arrived at about 5pm on a thursday. in the cab from the airport, i couldn't figure out why it was so dark outside, because it was still kind of sunny. as we pulled onto the gridlocked expressway, i suddenly realized that it was not dark, but "hazy." worse than LA on it's worst day. worse than, i can only hope, mexico fucking city. so smoggy it was cloudy.



as we snaked into town (slowly, but only because of the traffic. on the way back to the airport our taxi driver was pushing 120. mph, that is. not kph. and we were still getting passed by dudes in benzes and shit), i got a decent first look at the landscape. it was like beirut meets tokyo. hard early 70's architecture, fading paint everywhere, crumbling, dead, soulless buildings. aged infrastructure, little to no civic planning or organization. however, out of this quasi-rubble rose all these awesome new tall glass skyscrapers and new, well designed buildings. that was my first glimpse of the complete paradox that is bangkok.



as an aside, i've always read that the collapse of the thai economy in the late 90's precipitated, and significantly contributed to, the worldwide economic traumas of the late 90's and early 00's. i've also always read that things got unbelievably bad in thailand at that time - like people were completely penniless. not having known that, i would have been totally unprepeared for what i saw while i was there. there were plenty of old crumbling empty buildings, but there were also, and i'm still taken aback at this, all these really new, really nice skyscrapers that were falling apart. you could tell that they had been built within the past 20 years, and several of them looked newer than that. they had a bunch of windows broken out, parts were falling off of them, some looked like they had been hit with bombs. it was kind of like the city in "12 monkeys" or in "A.I." i want to buy one and live in it.

i saw an elephant walking down the highway. you might laugh, as i did, until i tell you that i saw this on three separate occasions. and it wasn't the same elephant. there are no cross walks, so you have to dart across the street frogger-style, praying that you don't get nailed by a motorcycle. the whole city smells like an open sewer because they dump their unprocessed sewage into the river (where people bathe and do their laundry).

as i would come to find out, bangkok is a city in flux. it's trying to change itself from an also-ran to an asian capital, and i was impressed and inspired by the progress i saw. the thai people, from what i saw, are incredibly dynamic. by day bangkok is a hot, filthy, smelly, oppressive city. i could barely stand to be out during the day, and i rarely was. armed with a new york times article titled "to be young and hip in bangkok," i hit siam square, the harajuku of bangkok, and a few other hotspots. i did my research online during the day at the hotel and found the hip, tourist-free nightspots. (fuck guidebooks - they are so worthless, unless you're interested in totally hanging out with non-natives).

speaking of "young and hip," i was blown away by thai youth culture. bangkok can be an awful place, but the kids i saw and met were so upbeat. they live in a gross, ugly city, but they find the energy and the inspiration and the will to overcome it. at night these kids came out in droves. they were incredibly attractive, well dressed (more stylish than the japanese, or so i would argue), and jubilant. everyone i met, from the hottest girl in a bar to the most popular dude there, was super nice to me. they were excited to be...i don't even know what they were excited about...but they were excited. and they're building a scene. it was one of the most exciting things i've been witness to in my life. i hope they pull it off.

we hit a few cool spots, but as the trip drew to a close we were all wearing down. paul had food poisoning and was bed ridden. jason was out and about sightseeing mostly, and simon and i were out of gas. we drank A LOT of scotch in the hotel bar while listening to the neil diamond cover band and flirting with the waitresses. it was on the 28th floor or something, and the whole thing was very "lost in translation."



in the end i was tired and broke and ready to come home. i missed the cosmopolitan chic of tokyo. i was tired of the heat and the smell. i was tired of bartering. i was worn down. and that's why i'm so taken with thai youth - because, from all i saw, they aren't worn down. and they live it every day.

in 10 years i think bangkok will be the new hong kong. i think thai girls are the new japanese girls. thai companies are already globally legitimate. things are looking up, and i hope the city continues to develop. maybe one day i'll be back to find out.

for a minute there, i lost myself.

if, as i have argued, the emotional trajectory of one's life can be charted or conceptualized as a sine curve (sin(1)), mine peaked (or troughed) somewhere in thailand. it seemed as if i reached my limit - the desperation, the complete and constant excess, the constant adrenaline finally wore me down, and i feel like i came home with a little bit of a different perspective on things, on my time here, on where i'm going and where i've been.

maybe now i'm ready to come back down to earth again, to reclaim some part of the identity i so effortless cast away. when i got here, i wanted to test the waters, to push the envelope, to be a different person than i had been before. and i did, and i liked it, i liked what i saw. but only to a point. maybe my attitude in asia has been a bit of an overcompensation for all the things i "wasn't" in the past. and now i want to find a balance. i'm not "done," you know, but i'm conscious of it, i'm awake, i'm ready to stop dreaming and start living again.

i think this pretty well sums it up.

phuket, anyway. one last thing:

in thailand, people go by their nicknames, and those nicknames are often english words. sometimes they are awesome. i met: oak, oat, kick, put, and my personal favorite, "beer." although "kick" is pretty awesome too.

simon was "spa," because he got so many massages. jason was "chavez," because he got so sunburned on the first day at the beach. (which turned him from "jason suh" into "jason sioux.") paul's name i can't remember. i was "prawn," for obvious reasons, although on this day everyone kept calling me "r. kelly."

"seriously, don't make a big deal out of my birthday. i don't want any plans or anything."

we celebrated paul's 26th birthday on our penultimate day in phuket. (don't give me shit for using that word - one time, in a fit of rage, someone called me a "caustic asshole" and i couldn't stop laughing, which only made it worse). anyway, we were leaving the next day, which is wholly irrelevant, but we were. we went on a day trip to "koh pee pee," the island where they filmed "the beach." (not that bad, anyone?) i had to borrow these pictures from paul because, of course, the battery on my camera died 30 seconds after the boat left the dock. there will theoretically be "picture sharing" sometime soon, wherein we all trade pics and i can post more for those of you who are interested. theoretically.



koh pee pee (pee pee island) is a forty five minute boat ride from the main island of phuket. the boat took us to several beaches on the island - one of them being "monkey beach," at which i refused to go ashore, opting to stay in the water the whole time. why? because it's populated by rhesus monkeys that come down from the trees to greet the tourists. already skeptical of this nonsense, my mind was wholly made up upon hearing from our tour guide that we should "be careful" because "when there are too many tourists sometimes the monkeys get scared and scratch you." sorry, but i ain't catching no HIV from some aids-riddled thai monkey. i stayed in the water and snorkled - i saw a finding nemo fish and a giant clam and a morray eel. the reef had been pretty well decimated by the tsunami, but the further out i swam the better it got.



this is "the beach." you couldn't go onshore because it was "owned" by some mysterious syndicate that charged you money to step onshore.



you got to go onshore at another part of the island, but it was pretty bombed out thanks to tsunami-san. i bought a bunch of huge changs and bandanas and we were off. paul and i got drunk on the boat ride back and i gave him the "stars and bars" bandana i bought him for his birthday. we met a naive-but-incredibly-attractive young power-couple from chicago on the boat. the dude was wearing one of those awesome "trunk" style swimsuits. anyway, they told us they thought we were "rockstars" because we were pounding beers on the boat and wearing bandanas and lived in tokyo. no, actually we're pale, flabby, white trash college students from the south. we were to run into them again - everyone else ended up becoming friends with them and myspacing them and shit, but i guess i was preoccupied.



jason, considerate as he is, went to the trouble of planning paul's birthday dinner. we ended up at a seriously nice open-air restaurant overlooking the ocean from a rocky cliff. the food was awesome, needless to say. simon got mad at paul and i because we were being too "festive", but i think the staff didn't mind so much. i broke my ass on the way out trying to "powerslide" down the wet wooden walkway. the bruise is only now disappearing. then, for better or worse, it was on to banana. i'll spare you the details.

"worst birthday ever," paul proclaimed.

i ate so many shrimp i got iodine poisoning

because i subsisted almost exclusively on grande chang beers and tiger prawn, i earned myself the nickname "john-prawn." this was a "half key." [is that how drug dealers spell it? or is it "half ki?" key or ki?]


the food was rad - a taxi driver we met on the street, nick, took us to this outdoor restaurant one day. he wasn't really even a taxi driver, he just drove us around in his civic for money. if you look closely, you might be able to see it in the background. he was asleep in shotgun waiting for us.

we started a boy band. nevermind that we're 7 years too late. we're in asia.

the bw ("bee dub"), karon beach

karon beach.

we stayed in karon beach on phuket. i guess, from what i gathered while i was there, it was one of the nicer areas of phuket. it was clean and not too crowded, which was nice. however, it was populated exclusively by european tourists. more specifically, it was jammed with german and swedish tourists. by my count, there are probably around 50,000 people in sweeden right now (the other 9,950,000 are in southern thailand). also, i thought swedes had some class about them. (i was wrong). simon and i criticized paul for inviting his "extended family" on our spring break trip.


karon is like a 10 minute taxi ride from patong beach, which, i guess, is like the main town in phuket. it's also the center of the tourism and nightlife scenes. as such, we found ourselves in patong most nights, frequently at "banana," some sort of euro-inspired thai disco aimed at foreigners.


unlike karon, patong was dirty and smelly and we all hated it. but we kept going back. it was easy i guess.


(in swedish) paul conned two danish girls into taking the picture below. that was supposed to be the "icebreaker." i'll let you guess how successful that was.

hollaback girls

i'm not imaginative or articualte enough, nor is my vocabulary robust enough, to accurately describe my experience here. in a a way my inability to share my experiences personalizes it, but i wish i could better explain my life here.

i was sitting in a cab yesterday afternoon. we were stopped at a redlight. on the sidewalk next to me, in front of a large plate glass window, were 2 nihon-jin girls about my age. they had a boom box set up next to them on the sidewalk. each was wearing classic adidas kicks, baggy camo pants cinched but slung low on their waists, a track jacket, a chain. i don't know if any of you know what a japanese afro looks like, but they had those too. really, their outfits were very well put together and really cute. think of the girls in gwen stefani videos - they looked like that - sporty, cute, half hip-hop half harajuku.

anyway, they were dancing, using the plate glass as a mirror. they weren't dancing in unison, but they were definitely kind of working off of each other, freestyling one at a time, then working together, developing a routine maybe. or maybe it was all just freestyle.

now, my knowledge/interest/expertise/experience/etc of dance is "limited" to say the least, but they had the sickest moves i have ever seen, and i'm not even exaggerating. and the fact that they were so dedicated and focused made this scene one of the most compelling things i've seen since being here. if i were spike jones (and if i had a camera), i would have filmed them and made them famous.

they were good enough to be professional dancers, and perhaps they were. they had the look and the moves. i hope they make it big. i was only able to watch them for a minute or so, until the light changed and i moved on without them ever knowing i was there.

everything about my life here is so fleeting - every glance, every emotion, every image. and i think that's what has made it so beautiful.

within 15 minutes of being in phuket, i...

*got lost from my friends
*got drunk (thanks in no small part to the "shitty, free, roofied shots" that kept appearing out of nowhere)
*cut the shit out of my hand with a butterfly knife (which my friends assured me had been "painted with aids juice")
*played connect four with a thai hooker, although i didn't "get it" until she started asking me for money, at which point i ran away
*caught a ride home on the back of some dude's motorcycle (strangely romantic) (and no, i didn't have my arms around him)

after my first night there i was convinced everyone was a hooker (seriously). after leaving for bangkok, however, i came to understand that (1) everyone in phuket IS a hooker and (2) that this is a function of the tourism. fortunately, bangkok was different.

"wow. fucking...wow."

those were my exact thoughts as i was looking out the window of my plane as it landed in phuket, thailand 11 days ago. now i'm back in tokyo, and no matter how much i liked thailand, it's fucking good to be home. and that's exactly what this feels like - like coming home. and i think it will be the same feeling when i return to texas in may. i hope so at least.

i have more to say about the trip than i have time to say it, but i'll post pictures here a few at a time and write about it as i go along. you know, i don't want to overstate things - it's not like this trip was flat out the most mind-blowing time of my life, but it was fun, and in a way, it opened my eyes.

there were two distinct parts of the trip - 6 days in phuket (southern thailand) and 4 days in bangkok. for several reasons, they require seperate consideration. i'll start with phuket.

i cast myself towards infinity. trust me, i had my reasons.

i lost another umbrella last night. given my behavior patterns, i'm fortunate not to have lost more things here. but the saying is that "no one loses anything in tokyo." [except umbrellas apparently]. when you leave something somewhere, they either chase you down to give it back to you or they hold on to it until the next time you come. last night, a bartender greeted one of my friends with a hat he left at the bar several weeks ago. how he remembered who it belonged to i don't know.

it's been a good week, but i fear for the weekend. i don't know how i'm going to keep up this pace for the rest of the semester. i've become pretty consistently nocturnal, so even when i "take it easy" i can't go to sleep before 6. might as well stay out, right? i'm driven here by a sense of urgency and a fear that i might miss out on something, so i push myself. i think you can characterize that in a number of ways: immature, desperate, near sighted, etc. but i came here to do exactly what i'm doing, and i'm not ready to stop. "it is now or it is never."

if you've never heard destroyer, well, you should. they're majestic. my proudest sxsw discovery (2004).

http://www.mergerecords.com/band.php?band_id=29&.
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/d/destroyer/destroyers-rubies.shtml.

last night we stayed late at a bar that looks like skywalker's place in mos eisley. it has a name, but is known to us as "mos eisley." it's basically in someone's living room (luke skywalker's living room, yeah?). i made friends with the dj and simon chatted up the bartendress. 6:30am, waiting for a cab in tokyo, japan.

kore wa shibuya desu.