Above: Rainy Sunday night in the Pratuwan (watergate) area.  Central World Plaza is on the left, Gaysorn on the right.  Looking north toward Khlong San Saeb and Thanon Phetchaburi.

Sunday evening instead of joining me for the screening of the Battleship Potemkin, Tawn met up with his friends for what might be described as an engagement party.  Sa, one of his friends, is getting married to her long-time boyfriend this December and she needed to distribute the official invitations.  This was reason enough for a dinner.

Over dinner, Tawn mentioned to his friends – he told me later that this was probably way premature – that he and I had been discussing the idea of raising children.  Now, point of clarification for my readers: Tawn and I have just been discussing the idea and the point of making any decisions would still be a few years away, but as we’ve been discussing buying a house and other longer-term arrangements, the discussion of a family came as part of the package.

The reaction of Tawn’s friends was uniformly negative and non-supportive: gay, straight, married and unmarried, each of his friends dismissed the idea out of hand.  Most of them raised the concern that children raised by gay people would face unnecessary teasing and discrimination and wondered why we would want to “subject” a child to that.

Tawn’s gay friends responded more along the lines of their continued disbelief that a gay man would actually want to settle down into a monogamous relationship.  But they’re shallow, so that response didn’t surprise me.

The most measured response, ironically, came from the husband of Tawn’s only friend in the group who is married.  He said that he could see us adopting because, given a choice between an orphanage and having gay parents, a child would ultimately rationalize that they were better off with gay parents than no parents at all.  This coming from a man who left his wife and two young children to marry his mistress.  I get his rationale, but am not sure he would serve as evidence that straight parents provide any better stability or environment for their children.

Anyhow, Tawn came home pretty disappointed, having expected more from his friends. 

Initially, I shared his disappointment.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it is hard to expect people to be any more enlightened than the society in which they are raised and live – at least initially.  If we do eventually decide to raise children, through natural means (birth mother, artificial insemination, etc.) and/or adoption, there will be a long path of educating our friends, family, and others about the issues at hand.

I’ve always taken it on faith that my friends and family would be supportive of us starting our own family, but given the reaction of Tawn’s friends, maybe that faith is unfounded. 

Of course, the whole question of us raising children is a big “if”… there’s a few dozen high hurdles to overcome from adoption laws to different citizenship and immigration rights for the parents.  Just purchasing a home will be a necessary first step.  We can see where it goes from there.

Side note – when I run my spell check on Xanga, “gay” keeps coming up as misspelled.  What, are they nuts?

Below left: Morning sun streams into the living room on one of only about three days when the light hits a narrow corner of a nearby office building and is reflected in.  This will repeat again in about six months.  Below right: Erawan Shrine, often mistakenly called the “Four-Faced Buddha” in front of the Grand Hyatt Erawan Hotel. 

Sugarless

Thai director Patana Jirawong produces an interesting feature film about two very different people who are both looking for love in the big city.  The first is a taxi driver from upcountry who came to the city to look for his girlfriend, who moved there years before.  The second is an illiterate preoperative transsexual who works as a prostitute.  They meet through a newspaper advice column and carry on a correspondence (the transsexual having johns read the letters and transcribe responses in lieu of payment) before deciding to meet on New Year’s Eve.  Despite high personal standards, they end up meeting unknowingly when the taxi driver picks up the prostitute.

The Proposition

Australian director John Hillcoat helms this late 1800s-set picture starring Guy Pearce, written by indie rocker Nick Cave.  Capt. Stanley (Ray Winstone) and his men capture two of the four Burns brothers, Charlie (Pearce) and Mike. Their gang is held responsible for attacking the Hopkins farm, raping the pregnant Mrs. Hopkins and murdering the whole family. Arthur Burns, the eldest brother and the gang’s mastermind, remains at large has and has retreated to a mountain hideout. Capt. Stanley’s proposition to Charlie is to gain pardon and – more importantly – save his beloved younger brother Mike from the gallows by finding and killing Arthur within nine days.

This film is starkly shot and very interesting.  Reminded a great deal of 2003’s Ned Kelly with Heath Ledger. 

The Battleship Potemkin

Sergei Eisenstein’s classic 1925 silent black-and-white revolutionary film about a 1905 mutiny that occurred on the eponymous naval vessel that brought on a massive street protest an subsequent police massacre in the coastal city of Odessa.  Ostensibly, this presentation was going to include an updated score by the Pet Shop Boys, but what I heard sounded to me to be the original score.  The film is considered a classic of the era and the famous Odessa Steps sequence was paid homage to in the climax of Brian De Palma’s 1987 film, The Untouchables. 

Eisenstein’s use of montage technique (putting together separate, individually neutral shots to form an effect greater than the sum of its parts) was grounbreaking.  One can argue that modern music videos with their hyperkinetic frenzy of cuts, owes a debt to Eisenstein.  Very good analysis of the film here.

And so the World Film Festival comes to an end…

On to other news, my Seagate 120gb external hard drive stopped working – it gets power but the disk isn’t running – after just shy of a year.  Very disappointed in a hard drive that craps out after such a short period of time. I returned it to the store and it is still under warranty.  They will send it in to the workshop and are confident they will be able to extract the data (which includes over a year’s worth of pictures!) and will send provide a replacement for me.  I think I’ll have to purchase a second external drive however, to ensure I have a backup of the backup.

Saturday was sort of a movie marathon day with tickets to a trio of screenings.  Fortunately, they were all quite good, the result being that at the end of the day I couldn’t think clearly about any of them.

12:08 East of Bucharest

Set in a small village in Romania, sixteen years after the revolution that saw dictator Ceausescu flee the country at 12:08 pm, the owner of a local television station invites two guests on the air to discuss the question of whether a revolution occurred in their own village or not.  In other words, were people protesting in the town square demanding Ceausescu’s ouster before 12:08 pm, or did they fill the streets after the dictator’s live televised escape by helicopter?

His original guests cancelling out on him, the television personality calls upon two acquaintences, on old retiree and sometimes Santa Claus, and a history teacher who has just devoted his entire salary to paying off his drinking debts.  On screen, they discuss their role in the historic revolution.  But phone-in viewers dispute the claims of these erstwhile heroes: were they really there at all or were they drinking in the corner bar?

The film, the winner of the 2006 Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, is tightly-made, clocking in at just 89 minutes.  Director Corneliu Porumboiu captures the absurdity and humor of the situation while also mining it for poetic beauty, asking whether we all don’t reinvent our pasts to some extent.

My Brother Nikhil

The debut feature of writer/director/editer Onir, this Hindi-language docu-fiction is based on the true story set in Goa of the late 1980s and early 1990s.  The story concerns Nikhil (Sanjay Suri), a swimming champion and the pride and joy of his father, and his close relationship with his sister Anamika (Juhi Chawla). 

One day the team doctor calls him in to discuss the results of a recent blood test and Nihil learns that he is HIV positive.  The doctor’s claims of confidentiality are meaningless and the word spreads quickly through the town.

Shortly thereafter, he is arrested and isolated in a run-down sanitorium, the result of the Goa Public Health Act.  His friends abandon him and his parents move away.  The only people who stand by him are his boyfriend Nigel, his sister Anamika, and her fiancee, Sam.  They fight very hard to educate the public and after several months, earn his freedom.

But freedom from a sanitorium is not the same as true freedom.  He still faces tremendous discrimination and difficulty through a combination of laws (still on the books today) that make homosexuality a criminal offense, and the ignorance and fear of the population.

In the end the movie plays a bit like an Indian version of “Philadelphia” which is to say that it has an A-list cast, lots of stirring songs (actually, that’s more of a nod to Indian audiences than a comparison to the Tom Hanks movie), skillfully crafted tugs on your heartstrings, and no displays of affection by Nikhil and his partner.

That said, given the state of public awareness of the issues surrounding homosexuality and HIV/AIDS on the subcontinent, this movie serves a very good purpose and is quite notable, enjoying a modest commercial and critical domestic success.  Organizations including the United Nations are using it as an educational tool and it is being dubbed in other Indian languages for showing throughout the country in schools and elsewhere.

The director was present for Q&A afterwards and provided some intersting insight into how he got this film made, a five-year process that overcame a lot of obstacles.

The Feast of the Goat

In this UK-Spain co-production, based on the novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabella Rosselini plays Urania Cabral, who returns to her homestown in the Dominican Republic in 1992 after having been away three decades.  Her invalid father is Agustin (Paul Freeman), the President of the Senate and right-hand man of the dictator Trujillo – until he fell into disgrace a long time ago.  Over dinner with her aunts, who chide her for having been away from her father for so long, she discloses the experiences that haunt her as her father gave away his most cherished possession in order to try to regain Trujillo’s trust.

The film also tracks the story of the men who sacraficed their lives to end one of the bloodiest tyrannies of recent Latin American history.  Their story and that of Arania are intertwined in an intense kaleidoscope of love and hate, violence and death.

Under the direction of Luis Llosa, the actors achieve very strong and believable performances, while lensman Javier Salmones captures the bright airiness of the tropical setting and contrasts it with a darkness that echoes the developing story.

Two days, three films left.

A quartet of films yesterday, the first two of which I chose not to attend because of work that needed to be done.  The final two, though, were ones I was unwilling to miss:

I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone

Director Tsai Ming-Liang (Rebels of the Neon God, Viva L’amour, What Time is it There? ) makes incredibly minimalist, visually stunning films.  Dialogue is always virtually non-existent and the narrative, if it can be described as that, is more a series of vignettes moving in one direction rather than a story that goes from A to Z.  His films touch on themes of loneliness, love, and how people in modern life struggle to find a connection with others.  For most viewers, his films move at much too languid a pace – a scene of a woman crying over a failed relationship in Viva L’amour goes on for five minutes – but I find his works to be haunting, lingering in my mind for a long time afterwards.

The story is not too complex, although unlikely: set in the darker, multi-ethnic immigrant side of the director’s native Kuala Lumpur, Hsiao-kang, a homeless Chinese man (Lee Kang-Sheng, the director’s muse) is beaten by some con men, subsequently discovered on the street by a group of illegal Bangladeshi workers who are carrying a flea-bitten mattress they’ve found back to their flat.  They load him onto the mattress and bring him back, too.

One of the workers, Rawang (Norman Bin Atun) nurses Hsiao-kang back to health with a loving attentiveness that never blossoms into anything more.  Perhaps he is content just to have another human being to care for, when his job is working alone at the abandoned construction site of an office building (these shells where building stopped after the economic crisis of 1997 will be familiar to those of you who’ve travelled to Bangkok or KL), supervising the pumps that are slowly removing water from a flooded basement.

As Hsiao-kang regains his strength, he starts to explore the surrounding neighborhood, meeting Chyi, a waitress at a coffee-shop who lives upstairs at her female boss’ house where she is also responsible for carrying for the boss’ paralyized, possibly comatose son (also played by Lee Kang-Sheng, in a bit of confusing casting).

A love triangle forms between Hsiao-kang, Chyi and her boss, and eventually becomes a rectangle also involving Rawang.  As the title implies, no one wants to sleep alone.  But none of this develops very clearly; instead every attempt to find physical connection is halting and, often, halted.  One of the most interesting scenes is when Hsiao-kang and Chyi drag that flea-infested mattress to the construction site and attempt to make love.  Amidst the heavy smoke that has blanketed the city from forest fires in far-away Indonesia, despite their improvised masks, Hsiao-kang and Chyi’s love-making descends into a symphony of hacking coughs that keep them from connecting in their intended way.

Cameraman Liao Pen-Jung has paired with Tsai on his previous works and together they continue to create beautiful images that show a masterful understanding of light.  One of the most gorgeous shots – apart from the scenes in the abandoned shell of a building, which are incredibly beautiful – is when Rawang helps Hsiao-kang to the bathroom to relieve himself when he is too weak to do it himself.  As they stand there, arms around each other, the light falls across them from a nearby window illuminating a dark and barren concrete room.  It is an image that would be considered masterful in any other medium.

While I viewed this movie I considered that the Thai film I saw the other day, Sanctuary Rhapsody, may have been trying to go for the same effect: slow pace, lingering shots, minimal dialogue.  Sadly, while immitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, there is a wide gulf between mimicry and mastery.

Isabella

Hong Kong director Pang Ho-Cheung (Beyond Our Ken, You Shoot, I Shoot) helms this Macao-set film, which takes place in the days before the handover to China.  Shing (Chapman To), a Macao cop on the take who has been suspended for suspected corruption, is the quintessential bachelor – bringing home a string of girlfriends for one night and sometimes longer.  He wakes up one morning to find a young lady, Yan (Isabella Leong) sitting in his living room, presumably his lover from the night before.  She informs him that she is his daughter and that her mother – his first girlfriend – recently died of cancer.

As he panics over the thought of having slept with his daughter, she explains that she actually slipped in as the previous night’s girl left, but not until she has let him sweat about it for a bit.  When he asks what she wants, she asks for 3,000 dollars to pay back rent and for his assistance finding her lost dog, Isabella.

The film is ultimately the story of two people trying to find a family, however incongruous a family it may be.  It takes a fairly convention approach to story-telling, although the director throws in a few misdirections, causing the audience to wonder if a romantic spark is igniting after all.  But it is not the case; instead, Shing warms to having a daughter and Yan finds comfort in finally having a father.

Lest it seem to conventional, there is an additional layer of intrigue as Shing considers what to do with his impending arrest.  He purchases a gun and is set to snuff out the informant who snitched on him, preparing also to flee to Thailand with his new-fond daughter.

Visually, the film looks to owe a lot to HK director Wong Kar-Wai.  Some will assert that this visual style is quite common now among HK filmmakers, but Wong was the grandfather of it all.  Fading Macao makes for a beautiful backdrop, though, with rough colonial textures and hues at once tropical and rusted.  DP Charlie Lam captures it for full effect.  The film also makes strong use of its soundtrack including original music by Peter Kam. 

The World Film Festival has started slow – some days I’m not even watching a single movie – but it is picking up.  Yesterday I caught a Thai independent film called Sanctuary Rhapsody by director Supucksarun Sumonnapraprad.  The description was as follows:

A girl tries to enter the world of men, but it’s a world she doesn’t understand and has little feeling for.

What it ended up being was a poorly-made film from a technical, narrative, and aesthetic regard.  It was essentially long shots of a girl lying around the house, doing laundry and other chores, intercut with various conversations in which one man, or that man and his friend, or just the friend, would sit at a small restaurant and talk – or not talk – as the hand-held camera bobbed around like a home video.  Minimal dialogue, no story line, no point of confrontation nor resolution.  And the whole thing looked like crap.  If you’re going to make a film, even an inexpensive one shot on digital video, first spend some time watching well-made movies and observing how the film is put together.

Anyhow, yesterday’s second movie was much better:

Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros, The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros.

Like a flower growing from a crack in a slum sidewalk, twelve-year old Maximo (played by talented newcomer Nathan Lopez) is very gay in a very not-gay place: the gritty shanty town on the outskirts of Manila.   Hanging out with his friends, producing campy Miss Universe drag shows, and enduring the occassional taunts from bullies, Maxi is more accepted than not, despite his incongruousness.

At home, where a shrine to his mother sits in a corner, Maxi plays doting mother figure to his father and two brothers, all of whom are petty criminals.  Surprisingly, they are not only tolerant but are very loving of him, teasing him from time to time but accepting him for who and what he is.  (Left: Maxi with one of his brothers)

Things change when a handsome new policeman (JR Valentin) rescues Maxi when he is being attacked one night, taking him back to his house.  The cop becomes a love interest who takes Maxi’s attention with tremendous patience, despite some teasing from the boys down at the station. 

As a corrupt police chief is forced to retire and replaced, the cop is eager to help the new chief tackle the local crime problem, having a very clear-cut sense of right and wrong.  Trying to set Maxi on a path away from the crime his family is engaged in, the cop tries to get Maxi to rat on his brother, who commits a murder. 

Ultimately, Maxi is caught in the middle when his family seeks vengence against the squeaky-clean cop and then the police retaliate.

The movie is handled in a loving way, not over-wrought, not over-acted.  Director Auraeus Solito’s debut addresses what might otherwise be a taboo subject – the love of a pre-teen for an adult – in a very sensitive way.  Well-constructed and well-acted, the film grows like that flower in the sidewalk’s crack, becoming so much more than one might expect. 

It is the middle of a nearly month-long school holiday, coinciding with the end of the rainy season and in most parts of the country, with the rice harvest.  In Samut Songkhram there isn’t much rice being grown, but that’s when we take the mid-year break anyhow.

While the students have the time off, the teachers are still working.  Ajarn Yai decided her “family” of teachers needed to go somewhere and do something fun, so she arranged a day trip to Hua Hin, a beach town about another hour south of Samut Songkhram.  Considering us a part of her academic family, she invited Tod and I along.

A rental van and driver was arranged and we were told to be at the school at 7:00 – a good hour (and more) before we usually arrive to teach.  Ajarn Yai called me the night before to make sure I’d be there.  Then she tried calling Tod.  Getting no answer (he was watching a film), she called me back to make sure he’d be there, too.  Monday morning I picked Tod up at 5:30 and finding traffic very light – not a surprise for such an early hour – we made it there right on time.

So that we could appropriately use funds from the Ministry of Education, our first destination was the Wangklaikangwon Industrial and Community Education College.  This vocational school is a special project of His Majesty the King and is in fact located on acerage that is part of the royal palace in Hua Hin.  The King has a summer palace there where in his older age he spends much of his time.

Because of this status as a royal project, the school is provided resources they might not regularly have access to.  The school also places a lot of emphasis on developing the morals and skills of its students, upholding rigorous disciplinary standards that might seem out of place in a college.  In addition to the diploma and certificate programs, the college also offers short-term and special vocational education programs catering both to people who are looking at changing careers as well as at minority hills tribes that live along the Thai-Myanmar border. 

The school’s pride, though, is their television production and satellite training programs.  Linking up with other schools throughout the Kingdom along with schools in other countries, the school produces short courses in areas such as computing, welding, auto mechanics, food and catering, mathematics, and English, filming and editing them at the school and then broadcasting them by satellite uplink to other locations. 

Left: the director of the college shows off one of the two television control rooms with a pair of editing suites in the background.

The director of the school provided us with an overview of the school and its programs and then a tour of its facilities.  The range of television production equipment is impressive, with two master control rooms, a half-dozen editing suites, and two post-production rooms.  Multiple classrooms are wired to serve as studios and cameras are operated in those classrooms, directed remotely from a control room.  Having studied television production at Santa Clara University a dozen years ago, the facilities at Wangklaikangwon College exceed the tools I learned on, many times over.

We concluded the visit by presenting the director with a gift basket containing local treats from Samut Songkhram including palm sugar and other snacks made near the school.  Along with that was a dozen or more coconuts, freshly harvested from trees adjacent to the school.  Ajarn Yai (just for clarification, this is her title, not her name) seemed unsure of whether or not to smile.  When I asked her later, in Thai, why she didn’t smile for the picture she responded in English, “forget, forgot, forgotten.”

After the visit to the school, we headed further into Hua Hin and stopped at a small open-air restaurant that sits across the street from Hua Hin’s new strip mall, home to the department store, supermarket, cinema, and the town’s second (and much larger) Starbucks.  Ah, the quiet beach town is no more.

Now that our business was finished, we headed out to see some sights including a temple with an imposing status of a now-deceased monk who wrote extensive books on Buddhism; a mangrove forest; as well as a stop at the beach in the main town. 

Left: Traditionally intricate detail on a modern glass window at a temple outside Hua Hin. 

The mangrove forest south of Hua Hin is quite amazing.  There is a very well-designed boardwalk that runs a 2-km loop through the forest, giving you an amazing look at the Tim Burton-esque root structure the trees develop.  There is also a nice observation tower that takes you above the canopy.

Left: The thick above-ground (and above-water) roots of the mangrove forest.  Right: Tod and I on the observation platform overlooking the forest.  Just to the right of him you can see one of the severaly out-of-place condominium complexes that have been built around Hua Hin.  No zoning makes for bad land management.

On the way back, we stopped in the town of Phetchaburi, famed for its sweets and desserts.  Of course we stopped to shop – Thais love to buy khanom (snacks) when they go on a trip.

Driving back into Samut Songkhram, Ajarn Yai asked a rather philosophical question that it took a few minutes to understand the gist of when she tried asking it first in English and then in Thai.  Tod unraveled the question as, “What would you attribute the circumstance of us meeting and becoming involved with the school at Bangkhonthiinai?”  Fate?  Chance?  Destiny? 

I decided that it was serendipity – the happy discovery of something I was not in search of.  Tod and I had a very good conversation on the way home about this topic – fate, chance, serendipity, etc – pondering whether there really is an answer to the question “why?” that humans seem to ask incessantly, or is the act of trying to find an answer just a way of creating structure and order in our minds in order to comfort us?

Tod and I made it back quite late, going on 9:00.  A long day, but a good opportunity to bond more with the team of teachers.  After my outing two weeks ago, I was somewhat concerned about how they would act in the future.  However, as Tod wisely pointed out, they are Thai so it is unlikely they’ll ever do or say anything to my face.  What they say behind me back, however, is an entirely different matter.

Markus arrived from Sydney Saturday morning on a 6:45 am flight and, itching to go back out to the new airport – Suvanrabhumi, the “i” is silent – I offered to pick him up.  Figuring I’d have a good hour to look around and see what’s changed since I participated in a test flight at the end of July, I timed it so I arrived at the airport just about 6:30.

As I drove the three kilometers from the expressway to the terminal, I saw a THAI Airways B747-400 in Star Alliance colors touching down.  “I wonder if…” crossed my mind.  Sure enough, two minutes later I receive a text message: “Just touched down.”

Pulling into the 5,000-space short term car park, I was shocked to discover that the fifth level, the one on which you enter, was packed with cars.  In familiar Thai fashion, a la the dearly departed Don Mueang Airport, cars were double parked, parking breaks disengaged for easy rolling.  “This can’t be,” I thought to myself.

So I wound through the maze and located the descent ramp.  As I arrived at the fourth level, my suspicions were confirmed: the Thais are really just creatures of habit.  Bangkokians have so long associated airport car parks with the overcrowded ones at the old airport, that none of them could bring themselves to consider looking at the other levels of the car park.  Which were nearly empty, I might add.

The airport is showing many signs of still not quite being ready for prime time yet.  The stairs, glass, pedestrian walkways, and elevators in the car park are filthy.  Halfway across the bridge to the terminal, some mysterious line of demarcation is crossed and suddenly the spotlessness, or near-spotlessness, that one can enjoy with abundant supplies of hideously inexpensive labor, reappeared.

There are still a shortage of shops and places to eat.  Many storefronts are still closed; many floors tiles are still cracked; many needed signs are missing; many restrooms are still too-small, poorly finished, and dirty; and as I discovered Sunday afternoon when dropping Tawn off for his flight to India, the air conditioning towers are inadequate to the task.  But the real affront is the arrivals area where bleary-eyed travellers exit from the teens of hours on a jet, having just made their way first through passport control and then through customs, push their heavily-laden luggage trolleys out the frosted glass doors and into a sea of chaos.

The room is insufficient in front of this exit.  Touts, tour guides, hoteliers, chauffeurs and the general public are crowded into two small areas with a lack of physical depth.  The idea of meeting anybody is laughable and I’m thinking very carefully about how I’ll handle this with my upcoming guests. 

It is always a bit unnerving when you arrive in another country and you can’t find the face you’re looking for in the crowd.  This will be that much worse, thanks to the poor design of Airports of Thailand and some renowned German architectural firm.

Returning Sunday afternoon, the better part of the three kilometers from the expressway had cars stopped along it.  Sightseeers from the suburbs and nearby provinces, stopped to watch the planes.  This access road is an expressway in its own right, four lanes in each direction, speeds in exces of 80 kmph.  No place for traffic to be stopped with the kids out watching the planes.

Taking the turnoff toward the car park, traffic came to a halt, three rows of cars across in a ramp striped for two.  To cover just a few hundred meters took twenty minutes.  No clear idea of what the problem was – the exit from one of the two halves of the garage feeds directly into the entry lane for the other half, forcing traffic to cross.  Looking at the sandblasted arrows on the ramps this was not the original arrangement: these ramps used to be exclusively entry ramps with all exits on the ground level, a much better arrangement.

So what was the holdup?  Well, of course it was the traffic on level five, everyone circling waiting for a space or trying to squeeze into one of the parallel double-parking spaces.  So when I finally made it through that mess to the ramp I once again descended and once again found many available spaces on level four, many more spaces on level three, and only about three dozen cars on level two. 

Where were the traffic guards, directing traffic.  There were only three, two of them standing by the elevators to make sure that the luggage trolleys were returned to their designated holding areas.  Nobody was actually directing traffic.  It seems to me that the first answer would be to restrict double-parking on level five.  The next answer would be to re-stripe so you can make an immediate right-hand turn after entering and get to the ramps.

Inside the building, there were scads too many people.  Too many large families without baggage.  Too many old couples toddling along, not destined to meet anybody arriving today.  Too many tourists.  People camped out on the floor by the air conditioning towers, picnicing.  I kid you not.

As we ate a sandwich (sit-down restaurants were overflowing), Tawn said, “The question is, are Thais ready for a building like this?”

West Side Story

Saturday afternoon, Markus and Tam joined us for a matinee of Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Soundheim’s West Side Story.  This has been billed as the first-ever Broadway musical with a New York cast in Thailand.  Not sure what that really means. 

Only here for eight performances, it is a pretty lightweight (physically lightweight, in terms of sets) touring company, although it was supplemented by a very good orchestra.  Looks like many of the members may be locals with only a select number of musicians actually sent on with the tour.

The venue was the Thailand Cultural Center, with its beautiful curtain (picture right) depicting classic Buddhist imagery. 

The performance was good, really solid dancing.  Tawn didn’t realize at first West Side Story’s history as one of the first modern American musicals to have extensive ballet sequences.  Midway through the first act he said to me, “it needs more singing.”  The singing itself was good although the miking and sound system lent it a hollowness that was not enjoyable.

It was a fun time, all in all, and of course we always enjoy our time spent with Markus and Tam. 

That evening we met up with them and Pune and drove to the Great American Rib Company on Sukhumvit 36 for some barbeque.  I ate only enough to be satisfied, nothing more.

Monday I’m heading with Tod to Samut Songkhram for a teacher in-service / team-building day.  Field trip to Petchaburi province with the teachers.  Have to pick Tod up at 5:30.  egads.

Friday began with a 3:30 am call with my manager to conduct and record a conference call for later use as a training session.  This was the only time that would work for both our schedules and it needed to be done.  The advantage of starting at 3:30 in the morning is that by lunchtime, I’ve pretty much put in a full day of work!  So I headed out in the afternoon, purchased the remaining tickets for the World Film Festival that I had not yet purchased, and caught an early afternoon documentary, Weg.

Directed by German photographer and film-maker Wolfgang Bellwinkel, this documentary portrays three foreigners whose home has become Bangkok – either through circumstance or choice.

We meet ex-junkie Chris, an American walking the edge between survival and recovery; English teacher Alex who has transformed the exotic into the ordinary; and underground photographer Nick who is fascinated by Bangkok’s nightworld of crime and passion.

The filmmaker sets out to examine the question: “Is home a physical reality or simply a state of mind?”  After viewing the debut directorial effort, I’m not sure that’s the question that needed to be asked as it came across more as an afterthought rather than central to the film.

Whether or not it was actually the case, the film reinforced for me the idea that these three people deliberately held Thai culture at arm’s length, seeking not to understand but rather living against it, like a very large backdrop that could really be any other backdrop but in this case just happened to be Thailand.

The two elements that led me to this conclusion were the director’s extensive use of footage of Khrungthep, shot almost entirely on, in, by, or of the Skytrain which, for the most part, runs only in areas of the city that cater to foreigners.  There’s more to the city than that and I think that a wider variety of footage would have reinforced the depth to which these people have integrated into a city where in two of the three cases, they have lived for more than a dozen years.

The second element was the director’s decision not to subtitle the Thai that was spoken in the film.  While not extensive, the subjects of the film converse with their girlfriends and other people in Thai and there is some additional dialoge by other characters that is in Thai, but we do not get any translation.  The German is translated and one of the characters speaks only English, but the Thai remains a language that, seemingly, is an irrelevant part of their world.

When I inquired about this during the Q&A the director responded that he had made this choice because what was being said didn’t move the story forward.  That may be true, but I think the act of not translating – given that his self-identified target audience (Germans) would not be able to understand what was said – reinforces that the Thai culture is irrelevant and it is unnecessary for us (or, by virtue of our observations as an audience, any foreigners choosing to live in Thailand) to make an attempt to understand the culture we choose to live in.

Is it cultural imperialsim?  Possibly a harsh criticism, but one that may be justified.

Last night Tawn and I saw our first movie of the Bangkok World Film Festival.  Not thinking clearly, I arranged for a conference call with my boss at the same time, to record a training presentation over the phone.  So I rescheduled; the only time available for the rest of the week on her schedule was Thursday afternoon her time, meaning that I was up at 3:00 am Friday for a 3:30 call!  Yawn!

But enough about that.  What about the movie?

Paris je t’aime (I Love Paris)

What is Paris to you?  Each of us have a different memory of the City of Lights, a different sense and feeling of what it means to be in Paris.  In this ambitious film, twenty directors from around the globe are each given just a few minutes to tell a story about a particular arrondissement.  The films range from funny to dramatic to terrifying (in a comic way), and each concludes with the shot or scene that opens the subsequent film.

Far from being a montage of postcard views of Paris, these are the stories of people in Paris – for what gives Paris its life other than its people?  Most of the films are in French, a few are in English and all of them are about love… and Paris.

Here are most of the short films:

Montmartre
Directed, written by Bruno Podalydes.  With: Florence Muller, Podalydes.

An offbeat sense of humor is established from the opening story, in which a frustrated man (writer-director Bruno Podalydes) struggles to find a parking spot only to spend the time parked complaining aloud about why he can’t find a girlfriend.  Then a lovely young woman faints beside his car.  Oui, it is true love!

Quais de Seine
Directed by Gurinder Chadha (“Bend It Like Bekham”). Screenplay, Paul Mayeda Berges, Chadha.  With: Leila Bekhti, Cyril Descours.

With a light touch and an eye for the glories of a sunny day, Gurinder Chadha offers a pitch-perfect commentary on the idiocy of religious and racial stereotyping as a young man learns more from a modest hijab-wearing young woman than from his leering buddies.

Le Marais
Directed, written by Gus Van Sant (“Good Will Hunting”).   With: Marianne Faithfull, Elias McConnell, Gaspard Ulliel.

An atmospheric short in which a fresh young man delivers a frank and yearning monologue – a tapesty of every pick-up line ever used – to a print shop staffer, whose silence has a mysterious cause.

Tuileries
Directed, written by Joel and Ethan Coen (“Fargo”). With: Steve Buscemi A

A hilarious tale of an American tourist at the Tuileries Metro stop who learns just how accurate his guidebook is.  When the guidebook says, “don’t make eye contact,” it really means it!

Loin du 16eme
Directed, written by Walter Salles (“The Motorcycle Diaries”) and Daniela Thomas.  With: Catalina Sandino Moreno.

Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas paint a wrenching portrait of the gulf between a poor immigrant servant’s experience of motherhood and that of her employer. 

Porte de Choisy
Directed, written by Christopher Doyle (DP, “In the Mood For Love”).  With: Barbet Schroeder, Li Xin.

An ambitious musical fantasty and erstwhile commentary on the fetishizing of the Asian female within haute couture is set in Chinatown but is really all over the map as noted director Barbet Schroeder plays a hair care products rep.

Bastille
Directed, written by Isabelle Coixet.  With: Sergio Castellitto, Miranda Richardson.

An intensely bittersweet take on a man about to leave his wife for his mistress, until he learns she is diagnosed with terminal leukemia and, rising to the occassion, learns to love her again.

Place des Victoires
Directed, written by Nobuhiro Suwa.  With: Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Hippolyte Girardot.

Binoche grieves for her dead son in a parable about a cowboy who rides the midnight streets of Paris.  She is finally able to let go, letting the cowboy ferry her son to the next world. 

Tour Eiffel
Directed, written by Sylvain Chomet.  With: Paul Putner, Yolande Moreau.

Sylvain Chomet, the gifted animator of “The Triplettes of Belleville” directs live actors for the first time, imbuing them with much of the off-kilter humor that’s his trademark.  This film answers the question, how do mimes find true love?

Parc Monceau
Directed, written by Alfonso Cuaron (Y Tu Mama Tambien).  With: Nick Nolte, Ludivine Sagnier.

Alfonso Cuaron plays with sound, space and viewer assumptions in a long tracking shot with a mild twist as his camera follows an probable May-December romance.

Pigalle
Directed, written by Richard LaGravanese (Writer, “The Horse Whisperer”).  With: Bob Hoskins, Fanny Ardant. 

Fanny Ardant and Bob Hoskins play a couple unsure just how theatrical their sex lives should be in Richard LaGravanese’s “Pigalle.”

Place des Fetes
Directed, written by Olivier Schmitz.  With: Aissa Maiga, Seydou Boro.

A new paramedic learns the power of even the briefest of human interactions while treating a stab victim who sings a love song to her, asking only to invite her for a cup of coffee.

Faubourg Saint-Denis
Directed by Tom Tykwer (“Run, Lola, Run”).  With: Natalie Portman, Melchior Beslon. 

The tale of an actress trying to break off her affair with a blind linguist holds a surprise in an intensity that overtakes the characters. 

14^th Arrondissement
Directed, written by Alexander Payne.  With: Margo Martindale. 

This narrative of a Denver matron’s week-long and long-awaited visit Paris to improve her halting French begins in sarcasm and ends in sympathy.  This is the film that most spoke to me, personally.

Quartier Latin
Directed by Gerard Depardieu, Frederic Auburtin. Screenplay, Gena Rowlands. With: Rowlands, Ben Gazzara

A cafe appointment with edgy yet affectionate sparring between a long-married couple who are on the verge of a divorce.

Pere-Lachaise
Directed, written by Wes Craven.  With: Emily Mortimer and Rufus Sewell. 

Wes Craven naturally gravitates to a graveyard for his oddball contribution involving Oscar Wilde giving love advice to the living.

Very insightful column from Ron Elving, of National Public Radio’s “Watching Washington” regarding a “dirty secret” about the House of Representatives and its Republican members. 

It now appears there have been three Mark Foley landmines waiting to explode beneath the feet of congressional Republicans.

The first was the aggressive behavior of the six-term veteran Foley, who resigned from Congress Sept. 29 when the raw nature of his interest in congressional pages became public. Foley actually shocked Washington, and that’s not easy to do in our time.

Bad as it was, that was just the first explosion.

The second came when people realized how much had been known about Foley’s attention to pages and pursuit of former pages. It seems that at a minimum, several members of Congress and its staff were aware of the problem.

This second explosion was more damaging than the first. It created the impression that the Republican leaders in the House were more concerned with political damage than with protecting the pages. Polls show most Americans now believe this.

As for the third landmine, it’s still lying un-detonated, just below the surface on Capitol Hill. And it has the potential to cause the most far-reaching damage of all.

This untouched landmine is the fact that quite a few of the people who are essential to running the House are gay, and many of them are keeping it a secret. This includes some members and many staff. And it most definitely includes Republicans.

In fact, because Hill gays who are Democrats are more likely to be out — having less to fear in terms of reprisal — the closeted gays are more likely as a rule to be Republican.

All this is ho-hum to many denizens of Washington. The presence of gays among the congressional members and staff is old news, if rarely discussed in public. In practical terms, most on the Hill have gotten over it, including many of the most conservative Republicans in both chambers.

But can the same be said for some of the Republican Party’s most ardent supporters? …

So as to not entirely pilfer the copyrighted material, I’ll ask that you read the rest of Elving’s article by clicking here.

My prediction is that, eventually, there will be a major clash within the Republican Party between the wing of that party more concerned about social conservativism, and the wing of the party – one might call them the Libertarians – more concerned with economic and foreign policy conservativism.

Especially for my readers outside the US who find that American poiltics leaves them scratching their heads, I’ll share these further observations:

It is extremely popular within US punditry (read: mainstream media) to play up the “great divide” between the Blue States and Red States, Democrats and Republicans, Conservatives and Liberals.  But the reality is much different: The vast majority of Americans are fairly close together on most issues.

• Socially, most Americans generally favor a “live and let live” approach, not liking the idea of discrimination while also being a bit uncomfortable with radical breaks from the past such as giving gay people the right to marry in the exact same way straight people do.
• Morally, most Americans agree that things such as abortion are not desireable and would like to see the number of abortions minimized, while being wary of excessive government control over personal decisions.
• Economically, most Americans would like to see a balanced budget, meetings the needs of today while ensuring financial security for future generations.  Most Americans favor some safety net for those who are down on their luck, but also believe that individuals “pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps” is what made the country great.
• Internationally, most Americans are fearful about the uncertainty of this age of international terrorism and want to take preventative measures, but are concerned about their governement having overreaching powers that limit personal freedoms, as well as not wanting to be involved in military conflicts in other countries.

The challenge we have as a populace is in breaking out of this “either/or”, “us/them”, “blue/red” dichotomy and insisting that our elected officials (and those running for office) begin to speak to the vast center of our population rather than pandering to the extremities.

The University of Michigan has an interesting article on their website showing conventional and more accurate ways to look at this supposed political dichotomy:

The (con tiguous 48) states of the country are colored red or blue to indicate whether a majority of their voters voted for the Republican candidate (George W. Bush) or the Democratic candidate (John F. Kerry) respectively in the 2004 Presidential election.  The map gives the superficial impression that the “red states” dominate the country, since they cover far more area than the blue ones.  This is misleading because it fails to take into account the fact that most of the red states have small populations, whereas most of the blue states have large ones.

If this is corrected for by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states have been rescaled according to their population, we see more of a balance.  However, there is in fact still more red than blue on this map, even after allowing for population sizes. Of course, we know that nationwide the percentages of voters voting for either candidate were almost identical, so what is going on here?

The answer seems to be that the amount of red on the map is skewed because there are a lot of counties in which only a slim majority voted Republican. One possible way to allow for this, suggested by Robert Vanderbei at Princeton University, is to use not just two colors on the map, red and blue, but instead to use red, blue, and shades of purple to indicate percentages of voters. Here is what the normal map looks like if you do this:

And the cartogram, showing that only a rather small area is taken up by true red counties, the rest being mostly shades of purple with patches of blue in the urban areas.

Gosh, and to think that two posts ago I was talking about the spoof of movie posters.