Thai waitresses will ask you if you want more beer

when the bottle’s empty, not the glass you’re drinking from. That’ll help you lose count, for sure. I still can’t figure out what that final cube of ice riding on top of the glass is for, I guess to clean your upper lip so that nothing suspicious drips into the glass. It’s hard to drink with an ice cube up your nostril, though there it is, every time. The East loves conformity and predictability every bit as much as the West loves diversity and individualism. In Thailand audiences clap when a performer begins a song, and usually know every word that comes out of the human jukebox’s mouth. Only in a large show would a performer be expected to do a set of his own choosing. Thai ‘artists’ delight in reproducing a picture in its exact detail as if a human camera, while most non-representational work looks stiff and forced, derivative, that is, copied. To copy from a photograph would evoke abject horror in any art class in the Western world. In the Night Bazaar in Chiang Mai, they take center stage.

ENTERTAINMENT

Entertainment holds me between acts. Entertainment cures all, the light, color, and sound wrapping me up in its long loving arms. Bathe me in images of other faces and other races, fights to the finish with action heroes and multiple chase scenes. Movies always have happy endings. The good guy gets the girl and the bad guys get bars. The girls drive their fast guys and the guys drive fast cars. The good guys get the high-school sweetheart and the split-level complete with breakfast nook. The bad guys get cheap whores, cheap hotels, and battles with battles. It’s funny how the bad guys’ bullets always miss their targets, while the good guys’ bullets always hit. The good guys can even dodge bullets. Anything can happen in the movies; stories are created with effects and editing. Sometimes life imitates art, and the stories have happy endings. I could do without all the chase scenes, though, and all the guns, too. Sometimes the simple boredom of real life is preferable.

Brave New World of Tourism

Tourism is the great modern gold rush, linking past and present, rich and poor, traditional and modern, in a gradual melting pot of cult and culture.  The modern rich get their entertainment by viewing the past as expressed by poor traditional peoples.  The only problem is that it puts itself out of business.  If successful it changes the very thing that drew tourists in the first place.  This is the new colonialism, tourist colonies and sunny beaches, Interzone girls and forty inch screens.  The brave new world is a chicken shit travesty, a burlesque of the real world, dancing girls included.  Entertainment is everything now, the real thing itself, not just what ‘holds us’ between the real things.