Marie Antoinette In Bangkok

Bill wrote surprisingly this morning from Bangkok, on one of his many vacations, no doubt. Although being a programmer he may have a gig there. I was surprised that I found on Google Images, a picture of the McDonalds at the Siam Centre he refers to. But what really surprised me was the skyline in the Highway picture below. It looks like several Manhattan's strung out together. I really need to get out more. Now, here's Bill. (S.Williams)

Dear Stan et al:

Hope you are all OK. Am writing email from the i/net cafe inside the Siam Centre, an enormous supermall which is about as Siamese as George Bush. Among the first things you see on entering are a McDonalds and a Haagen-Daaz ice cream stand. But it is a break from the heat and humidity. Bangkok lives both up and down to its reputations. On one hand, the numerous temples and Royal Palace are stunning. On the other, I was propositioned 5 times in 500 yards on my way to my hotel last night. You can buy everything in Bangkok, including every perversion in the dictionary. Thank God for American cultural imperialism; nearly all important signs are in Thai and English. As
for all other foreigners - in the spirit of Marie Antoinette, Let Them Speak
English.

Best wishes, Bill

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From a later post:

In the amazing Siam Centre in Bangkok, there is a superb bookshop crammed with mostly English language titles. There are also large French and German language sections, which is more than you would get even in good English bookshops. One of the titles in the business section had a surreal ring in that context: "The Starbucks experience" analyses the reasons for this coffee chain 's success (it certainly isn't the quality of their cappucinos). Under the one vast roof of the Siam Centre there are at least three Starbucks on different levels. I failed to find the 1,600 seat opera house which is allegedly on Level 5, the same level as the 14 screen multiplex, the Imax cinema and the bowling alley. So there may be another few Starbucks secreted around the oceanarium in the basement or the Maserati and Aston Martin showrooms on Level 2.

The first thing you see on leaving the Customs hall at Hong Kong airport is another Starbucks. But Hong Kong is otherwise deficient in this respect; I found only two Starbucks inside the Times Square megamall, which is spread over 11 levels and possibly even larger than the Siam Centre. Lacking the time and specialist tools for a professional survey, I am not sure if Times Square is larger on a volume or square footage basis. But it contains just about every designer label known to shopping woman and any which may have been omitted can be found in other malls within a five minute stroll.

The energy and commercial zest of this tiny ex-British colony beggars belief. You would not believe that so many businesses could be crammed into such a tiny space and all somehow contrive to flourish. I am staying in the centre of Kowloon and the surrounding streets are more brightly lit and crowded than London at Christmas. Strangely, the only service it took me some time to find is an internet cafe, which is why I'm typing this in a room at the top of some narrow stairs off one of the main streets in Kowloon.

The weather is slightly cooler and less humid than Bangkok's and the prevailing breeze off the surrounding sea makes walking much easier. The population is far more salubrious; I have not been pursued down the street by a pimp peddling his hookers, as happened in one of the main streets in Bangkok, and I cannot believe that I have not seen a beggar yet, unlike the numerous indigents crowding the streets in Bangkok.

The influence of Western culture seems sad in many places. Go into the bookshops, record shops or video stores and Chinese products are a minority section. In one glossy video store, a state-of the-art home cinema system was playing the DVD of "Celtic Woman" - five Irish women vocalists performing at Slane Castle in Ireland.

It was a bizarre experience sitting in Pacific Coffee on Sunday morning, reading the excellent "South China Morning Post" (entirely in English) and listening to one of Neil Diamond's worst songs droning from the sound system. One of the SCMP's Sunday sections is aimed at the teenage audience. Page 3 recorded the death of James Dean on this date in 1955 and Page 2 quizzed several local teens on their favourite poetry. And what moved these young Chinese souls? Shakespeare, Robert Frost's "The Road less travelled"......

Movies in Reading

Dear Stan,

I loved your perceptive review of "The Illusionist". (see Stan's Movie Blog.) I was enthralled by this unusual movie when I saw it in the cinema and I have just received my DVD from Amazon.co.uk - hot from its much delayed UK release. Neil Burger's informative commentary, the "making-of" featurette and every review I have seen somehow ignore the elephant in the living room - the Eisenheim character's Jewishness. His real name is Abramowitz; the subtext of the alien outsider and his potential subversiveness runs throughout the story. The theme of rebellion against the corrupt and dictatorial regime bubbles to the surface on several occasions: the talk of a "spiritual revolution" inspired by spiritualism, Eisenheim's power over the agitated crowd outside the theatre, the scene where the ghost of the murdered Duchess Sophie apparently appears on stage before the suspicious audience - who explicitly accuse the Crown Prince of her murder. The suspect patriotism of Jewish communities throughout Europe was a sore point; this story is set around the time of the Dreyfus affair in France, and after the rise of socialist and communist movements inspired by the Jew Karl Marx. A few years later, a penniless vagrant in Vienna called Adolph Hitler had his first education in hatred - partly from local anti-semitic politicians and partly from his reaction to the visibly different observant Jews in the city.

Last week I saw a film with a most unexpected spiritual subtheme - "La vie en rose", the biopic about Edith Piaf. As a biography, the film is a masterpiece of evasion. It entirely omits her career in WW2 - an unforgetable period for any French person of her generation. The stories of her singing for senior German officers and entertaining Gestapo officers in her apartment above a bordello obviously wouldn't comfortably fit into the picture of the plucky French icon. But it does put repeated emphasis on her devotion to that most French of saints, St Therese of Lisieux, patron of your local basilica on 12 Mile Road (Shrine of the Little Flower -- see Stan's article on Mass Dimension for a description and pictures of this unique church), and shows her totally confused but sincere spirituality, along with her alcoholism, drug addiction, promiscuity, etc. The movie was shown in one of our local multiplexes, the Showcase on the east side of Reading, a rare honour for any foreign language film. Obviously the managers thought that there are enough English people "d'un certain age" who would want to see a Piaf movie. Or it might be desperation at the sight of another summer of Hollywood sequels - Shrek 3, Die Hard 4, Evan Almighty ( may Bruce Deliver Us!). Perhaps they thought that any remotely different or unusual film might attract filmgoers turned off by mainstream dross.

Unfortunately, the Showcase plainly does not employ the sharpest knives in the drawer. The only reason anyone in the Reading area is out of work is if you don't want a job. So any business which offers unsocial hours and low pay is going to find itself choosing from the near-unemployable of the English workforce ( 20% of our school-leavers are functionally illiterate and innumerate) or from the huge number of recently arrived East European immigrants who have an IQ above room temperature and a terrific work ethic, but limited English. This leads to much entertainment in local eating places. At a wedding reception last October, the Polish waitress came round with plates of ham salad asking "Who ordered pig?".

Which of these groups works in the Showcase projection rooms, I do not know, but the first ten minutes of "La vie en rose" were shown with the wrong lens, so it was horizontally compressed, with half the image and all the subtitles squeezed off. It could be worse. Years ago, I took a Greek friend to see "LA Confidential" at the Showcase and instead we started seeing "Eight heads in a duffelbag". After several minutes the embarassed staff moved the disgruntled audience into another theatre and gave us all free tickets for another show.

Our town centre multiplex, the Vue, has shown two superb European films recently - the peerless "Battle of Algiers" and "The lives of others". Sadly, the audiences when I saw these movies were even thinner than those for Hollywood sequels, so I don't know if they will repeat the experiment. The fact that they would even consider screening "Battle", a 42 year old black and white film in French and Arabic, shows that business must be flagging and they are willing to try anything. Amazingly, given the large Indian population in the Thames Valley and the fact that India has the largest film industry in the world, they have never screened a Bollywood film.