============================================= Some photos from "Navigating the Bangkok Noir" Chris Coles Art Show and Christopher G. Moore Book signing Friday evening, Dec 11th, at Liam's Gallery in Pattaya, Thailand.The show will continue thru December 31st.
She came to Bangkok from Buri Ram when she was eighteen, working in a Patpong Bar, going to school, sending money back home to Mom and Dad. Now twenty and going on fifty, she wonders where she will end up. Back in the house on stilts in Buri Ram, destroyed and dead in a Bangkok slum before she's thirty, or living in suburban Los Angeles and driving her kids around in a Mercedes.
The next book in Christopher G. Moore's wildly successful Calvino series, titled THE CORRUPTIONIST, scheduled to be published in December, will feature a painting from my Bangkok Noir series on the cover.............. ---------------------------------------------- From Heaven Lake Press:
Christopher G. Moore - THE CORRUPTIONIST - Eleventh in the Vincent Calvino P.I. Series
Set during the recent turbulent times in Thailand, the 11th novel in the Calvino series centers around the street demonstrations and occupation of Government House in Bangkok.
Hired by an American businessman, Calvino finds himself caught in the middle of a family conflict over a Chinese corporate takeover. This is no ordinary deal. Calvino and his client are up against powerful forces set to seize much more than a family business. As the bodies accumulate while he navigates Thailand’s business-political landmines, Calvino becomes increasingly entangled in a secret deal made by men who will stop at nothing—and no one—standing in their way. But Calvino refuses to step aside.
The Corruptionist captures with precision the undercurrents enveloping Bangkok, revealing multiple layers of betrayal and deception.
First Edition (2009) Paperback Heaven Lake Press, 490 pp.
Footprint Thailand Handbook 7th Edition by Andrew Spooner
The latest and best ever edition of Footprint Thailand Handbook (7th edition) written by the talented UK journalist and SE Asia traveller Andrew Spooner features a quote from the Bangkok Noir blog on its inside title page per above...................
Ralf Tooten, the award winning photographer, and the writer, Roger Willemsen, have published a book of photographs and commentary about the Bangkok Night Scene titled BANGKOK NOIR.
Will they capture that Bangkok Noir mood? Locked somewhere between menace and mystery, gangsters and angels, where the cigarette smoke is stale, the beer flat and a distant tenor sax plays in the shadows.
Toward the end of 2009 Heaven Lake Press will release a little book titled: The Vincent Calvino Reader’s Guide. It will contain all of the Calvino laws from the 11 books in the series, along with a couple of prefaces, essays, and interview about the Calvino series and a summary of all the books. The book's cover will feature Chris Coles' painting "One Night in Bangkok - Soi Cowboy".
......he buys weapons in Cambodia, sells them in Africa, South America, Sri Lanka and Mindanao, lots of dead people and suffering.......but even a Russian Arms Trafficker needs a little R & R to go along with his sordid business, and Bangkok's the perfect spot, 5 star hotels, great food, excellent air connections, easy banking and communications, lots of ladies and plenty of other Russian gangsters to hang out with..............and if by some misfortune, he's arrested and put on trial, well, there is always a way to deal with it, after all, this is Thailand............
'One Night in Bangkok' exhibit at Forth Art Gallery
Thailand’s pulsing capitol hasn’t been depicted with this much flair and vivacity since the 1980's musical Chess; but in the exhibit One Night in Bangkok at the Forth Gallery this week, artist Chris Coles puts to paper the musical’s famous lyric: ‘One night in Bangkok and the world is your oyster’. Indeed, through vivid colours and loose shapes, Coles’s paintings portray that world, a neon subculture of Bangkok’s notorious nightlife where ‘the bars are temples but the pearls ain’t free’.
Opening Reception: Wednesday 5 August 7PM @ Forth Gallery 69A Pagoda Street Singapore
The blinding neon and shady denizens of the Bangkok night are captured vividly in American painter Chris Coles' watercolor renditions of the lurid and colorful world of the Thai capital's notorious nightlife.
Heavily distorted lines and strong, clashing colors dominate in these paintings which portray a chaotic, edgy noir world of colliding intention and misplaced desire, lives out of balance, male-female compulsion, alienation and disassociation.
They echo the German Expressionist paintings from Berlin in the early 1900’s as well as the Paris nightlife paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas and the early Picasso.
Organized into twinkling street scenes, situational encounters and mesmerizing portraits of the girls, the boys, the kathoeys (ladyboys) and their clients, Chris Coles shows us how the Bangkok night isn’t “only a sordid money-machine servicing the low-end of humanity”, but “an authentic and unique setting in the ongoing cultural history of mankind”.
The Exhibition, which kicks off the 2nd week of Singapore's IndigNation Festival, runs until 16 August 2009.
.....lost in life, lost in Bangkok, wandering through the dark shadows of forgotten hopes and dreams, what previous life led to this one........................
Interview on TNN 2 by Suranand Vejjajiva (broadcast in Thailand April 2009):
Suranand: Hi Mr. Coles. How are you doing? I will call you Chris, Sawasdee krub.
Chris: Swasdee krub, Sabai dee mai?
Suranand: I thought you are not going to speak Thai!
Chris: Nid noi!
Suranand: You’ve been here how many years?
Chris: I first came to Thailand 14 years ago.
Suranand: 14 years ago!
Chris: On a very big Hollywood movie.
Suranand: And you got stuck here.
Chris: I was here for 6 months or so then I have a nice office in Phuket, which is a pretty nice place to have an office.And we had boats going around Phag-nga, Krabi and Koh Phi Phi.I said Wow! pretty nice place.So after the movie, I went back to Los Angeles, and starting to come back here to visit Thai friends because I have made a lot of Thai friends.
Suranand: What did you do in the movie?
Chris: I was a studio executive in that movie, supervising the production.
Suranand:So you are a Hollywood hot shot.
Chris:Oh no, I am just a line guy involving with the physical aspects of the production.I was the production manager on LA Story, for instance, and Charlie Chaplin with Robert Downey.
Suranand:That’s a big transition towards art?
Chris: Well my favorite part of the film business has always been in the art department.My very first job out of film school I was working on the art department of Superman I.I was tagging around with this very high status English designer, and later I got sidetracked into the production side of it.But I always loved the art side of it.And on my family, there are quite a few artists in my family.As a hobby I always was drawing and then about 5 years ago I started doing art full time.
Suranand:So that’s when you start seriously doing art.
Chris:I started doing shows.
Suranand:Are you based here or in LA?
Chris: I kind of go back and forth a lot and go around Asia quite a lot.
Suranand:I see, but you spend most of the time here.
Chris:I would say all of my visual ideas, certainly the more interesting ones, are coming from Bangkok.And some visual ideas come from other places.But the really strong paintings, the ones that get a lot of attention, are the Bangkok paintings.
Suranand:And that’s what we are going to talk about today because you have certainly been expressing yourself on what you see through a farang eyes, if I may say that, of what nightlife or what life in Bangkok is.What do you see?
Chris: Yes, I think there is a tremendous advantage actually for an artist to be an outsider because you are not inside the kind of bubble of received opinion of an education that each country has, including the U.S.So coming into Bangkok, my first week here working on the movie was just total chaos and disorientation.We just have no idea as an outsider what’s going on.Gradually I learned better to see some of the stuff that is behind the scene and very interesting and idiosyncratic stuff which only exist in Thailand.
Suranand:So things you see is not things I see.
Chris:Right, I see when I go to a place in Bangkok, I might stop in front of a spirit house and my Thai friends would say we are trying to get to a restaurant, why are you stopping?I would say this is a very interesting spirit house why would they have Batman, a little plastic Batman over there with a little cup of Coca-Cola in front of them.And they say it’s just a spirit house, there are millions of them.I say no, no, no, why is Batman here, why did someone think he has to put a Batman inside a spirit house.That’s a very interesting idea.
Suranand:But Thais don’t ask why, they just put it there?
Spirit House Japanese Karaoke Bar Sukhumvit Bangkok - Chris Coles
Suranand:When you see that and you interpreted it, do you think Thais, the people who did that painting or that sign, subconsciously or consciously put it in.Is that what you think?Or you are interpreting it in a Western way.
Chris:I think Thais and many things Thai people do in their everyday life they don’t know why they do them actually.They just do them because Thai people do that.There is a very interesting book call “Very Thai” which explains to farang many very small Thai things and why they are done exactly that way.And farang people like myself, who are very interested in getting behind the surface in Thailand, not just looking at the wai and the smiles (and the TAT kind of tourist things.)We love this book “Very Thai” because it explains to us how the motorcycle taxi guys are organized and many other everyday Thai things.
Suranand:What kind of stickers they put on
Chris: Why the taxi dashboards have all that stuff on them.And we find that kind of thing very interesting and very revealing of Thai cultural characteristics and Thai people.
VERY THAI by Philip Cornwel-Smith
Suranand: A lot of people might not be familiar with your work on my show.The paintings here are just examples.I saw your website and on YouTube, you put your work on the screen for people who are interested to look at.But how do your characterize your art?
Chris:Well the art is every much in the expressionist style of paintings.The expressionist style began in Paris around 1890-1900, a lot of artists painting Paris nightlife scenes, like the Moulin Rouge scenes by Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin and some of the Paris artists at that time they started distorting people and colors in Paris nightlife to make them more dramatic and more interesting.Toulouse-Lautrec was a little bit representational but Gauguin and Picasso painted some Paris nightlife started doing unrealistic colors and unrealistic people’s faces.Then the Germans picked up on that around 1910-1920 especially the German artists in WWI saw a lot of killing, destruction and chaos.They came into Berlin after the war and started painting the nightlife of Berlin to use not as nightlife itself but as a dramatic stage for their visual imagery.They wanted to reveal the true nature of mankind in their view which was not “oh, I want to help you, I want to have good intentions, I want to be happy,” but a mankind that has been set loose in WWI which was very destructive, chaotic.
Suranand:I read in your website that when Hitler came to power, he ordered a lot of them destroyed.
Chris:Actually in most authoritarian rulers, Hitler, Stalin, etc., their art of choice is happy art, sunsets, blond people who look very strong who have a wife and a baby that they are very proud of, sun shining over behind them.They get very upset when they see art which shows mankind at a disturbed and a distorted negative way.
Suranand: Your paintings, you think it reflects the real Bangkok or real life?
Bangkok Soi Dog Number One - Chris Coles
Chris:I think so.Especially, one of my favorites is “Soi Dog No. 1” and I think “Soi Dog No. 1” as you can see is a very beat up and battered soi dog.He probably has a one leg broken from a car running him over, he has teeth missing.You are not sure what he actually can see maybe he just can’t see anything any more.
Suranand:I can get this up right, yeah I am sure.
Chris:He has what I call a fighting spirit.You know he lives in the street.He got a favorite food cart that feeds him everyday.He got 3or 4 girl friends he likes to visit everyday.
Suranand:When Thais see this, in Thai “ma kang thanon,” they see stray dogs.
Chris: I noticed Thais are very kind to soi dogs.
Suranand:Of course.
Chris:They feed them and they take care of them, probably because that it gives them good karma.
Suranand:But it’s not an object of art, but for you it is.
Chris:Thai artists when he sees a soi dog he doesn’t think “oh, I should paint that soi dog.”Whereas I see the soi dog, I say, you know, he is kind of a symbol of Thai people tremendous resiliency, their tremendous ability to deal with adversity, and still keep going.And look forward to the next day.And soi dog has no bank account, he has no credit cards.He has no Mercedes.
Suranand:But he gets fed.
Chris:Everyday he eats pretty good food.You know it’s never too cold.His girlfriends look pretty good, at least as far as he is concerned.One in the corner over there is one of his favorites. And he has a pretty good day everyday and he is not too worried about the future.
Suranand:So it’s not all dark, although the image is.
Chris:No, I think what’s interesting in my paintings, although they are sort of dark in one way they are very hopeful in another way because they show people struggling with adversity and somehow find a way to survive.And they also show in an interesting way. For instance, my nightlife paintings never glamorize the nightlife.
Surnanand:Like this one.
Chris:For instance, this is a very famous neon sign among certain people, perhaps not the “hi-so” people, of the “Obsession” bar.It’s probably the most famous ka-toey bar in Bangkok.And this sign which is quite a beautiful sign with the color scheme and the way it blinks also has a lot of implications of the choice of the word “Obsession,” which is also fits with the German expressionist idea of people who are very obsessed with things not in a healthy way.
Obession Bar Nana Plaza Neon Sign - Chris Coles
Suranand:Many Thais are probably familiar with the sunshine artist.Why are you painting neon signs?
Chris:One reason I paint the neon signs because I think Bangkok during the day is kind of a very flat lighting and not a glamorous or a pretty city on a hot day.But as soon as the sun goes down and everything gets dark, millions of signs and millions of lights and probably billions of those small twinkling lights all light up.And suddenly Bangkok became this magical place where you don’t see any cracks in the sidewalks.All you see are these signs, well dressed people going around here and there.You hear a lot of music and it becomes a different kind of city, almost a fantasy night time city, which is quite different from the daytime setting.
Suranand:It’s a different point of view that you are seeing.
Chris:Right.In a lot of the magic of the Bangkok night which creates the magic which exists in the minds of people all over the world that Bangkok is somehow exciting, whether that’s just an illusion or not I don’t know, but they think it is.The neon signage in Bangkok is very interesting.There are millions of neon signs everywhere and artists who made the neon signs although they are anonymous working artists; actually are very clever Thai artists.
Suranand:So you are now taking this to express that there is, I don’t know, another way of life?
Chris:I like to show that the Thai visual imagination is everywhere.It’s in the taxis, it’s in the signs, in how people dress, in how people do their make up, in how they decorate their restaurants, their clubs.You know, the visual imagination in Thailand is probably one of the highest levels of any country in the world.
Suranand: I saw you start taking video clips of neon signs and put on YouTube.
Chris:The neon signs are very good but also the spirit houses are very visually skilled.The royal barges that exist are very interesting visually.You go all the way back to Sukhothai Buddhas, which are in the leading art museums in the world.There are pieces from Sukhothai in museums all over the world.That’s because the visual talent that existed even a thousand years ago was a very advanced visual talent.
Suranand:So it’s coming out
Chris:It comes out in everything.It comes out even when you go to Thai boxing, the colors, the costumes, what they wear around their arms, around their heads.Everywhere you look in Bangkok, E-san music show, for instance.Everywhere you go in Bangkok, especially if you are an outsider, you see very strong visual images everywhere, and they are created by Thai people not because that they are artists in the conscious sense but just because they think that this would be good and they make it that way.
Suranand:We need to take a break now, Chris.And we come back and talk about other paintings of yours.There are portraits and of course the ka-toeys.We will be back.
Suranand:I am with Chris Coles, who is kind enough to come with your paintings to this studio.Can you explain this one?
Bangkok Ladyboy Aree - Chris Coles
Chris:This is a painting of a Thai ka-toey, otherwise known as a lady-boy.And I painted quite a few lady-boys actually.And you noticed that when I paint a lady-boy, there is no or very little erotic or sexual implication.It’s basically painting the visual presentation of the lady-boy as she likes to present herself in the world of Bangkok, which is as a woman.And I got the idea actually from my daughter, Emavieve Coles, who is now a student at MIT university in the U.S., who came home from school one day and said “Oh daddy, did you realize that Leonardo, his studio in Italy was on a street where there were a lot of lady-boy hookers.And sometimes when he needed a model, he would go out on the street and pull one off the street to use as a model.And some people even say that the Mona Lisa was a lady-boy.That is why the Mona Lisa is so ambiguous.”And I said, “Wow, that’s a very interesting idea,” because Bangkok has got thousands and thousands of lady-boys.And the ambiguity is extreme because some times it’s really difficult to perceive whether she is a lady or a lady-boy.Maybe I should start painting some, what I should do with them is try to paint the ambiguity, which I find the most interesting aspect.
Suranand:Are you seeing things different from Thais because you are a farang?
Chris: I think being a farang in Bangkok is as though I got sent in from Mars on an interplanetary space vehicle.And everything I see I see from eyes of a Martian from another planet.
Suranand:But not every farang does
Chris: Some farangs are less alive visually.
Chris: Farang who have been here more than once and have a curiosity for actual Thai friends, how they live and how their culture comes about, like to go deeper into the Thai system and they are able to deal with the reality of Thailand without developing a negative point of view towards Thailand
Suranand:This is not negative.
Chris:I don’t think so.I think it shows Thailand to be a colorful, interesting, complex society where people can deal with ambiguity.They can deal with personal tragedy and triumph and function more or less of the same level as people do in all societies that are large and complex.
Suranand: Do you see the conflict between the day life and night life and whether they can exist together in the long run?
Chris:Well I think every city in the world, London, Paris, New York, Shanghai, or Bangkok; any large complex city has a day life and a night life.And a lot of times, the cities are measured by their night life.People go to Paris for the night life.People go to New York City for the night life.People go to Las Vegas for the night life.And often it’s seen as a sign of a highly developed civilization, to have a very complex and developed night life.By that I mean not just the model night life, but a night life that has a very broad range of activities, restaurants to music places to bars.
Suranand:They are part of our society.
Chris:It is part of the diversity of a society and it’s also a very sophisticated complex outlook of a society’s problems and tensions. It’s a way of dealing with things in a fairly harmless non-violent way as oppose to blowing stuff up, killing people, and the other ways people deal with problems and tensions.
Suranand:When you paint something like this, how is it received in the States, you have a gallery in the U.S.
Chris:I have had shows in New York City, in Los Angeles, in Boston, and people are very attracted to the colors, the very vibrant colors, which are really coming out of the Bangkok color palette.I think Bangkok has a lot of really interesting color usage.They are interested in the idea of a whole world that exist that they don’t actually know themselves which they can come and look in the paintings.
Suranand:Do they ask you whether “Oh! I saw this commercial of Thai society, it’s so different.”You don’t see Thai dancing in your paintings.
Chris:I think, you know, the people who go to art shows are already more highly educated group of people than the normal group of people and when they travel, they prefer to travel in a more complex manner than just the surface.And what they find interesting is getting below the surface so getting back to “Very Thai,” for instance, my friends who come here who are interested in learning about Bangkok, the first book I give them to read is not normal a tourist book but “Very Thai.”
Suranand:When I go to other countries, I don’t read normal tourist books.
Chris:They go in a Bangkok taxi not to go anywhere but to look at the dashboard, and then another taxi to look at another dashboard.And they will go to Chatuchak market in the morning or they will go to an E-san music show in some obscure part of Bangkok because they want to see the stuff that’s revealing of the society.They want to get to know the society a little bit better.
Suranand:There are a lot more art galleries open in Bangkok or Thailand.
Chris:Bangkok has a very lively art scene.It’s not as big as Beijing which has a huge art scene now with a thousand galleries, and very interesting artists.It’s not as big as Hong Kong perhaps I think it’s in a way more interesting than Hong Kong.The Thai imagination, you know the Thai culture and society is a very unique and idiosyncratic society because it combines so many different influences from India, from China, from Europe, from Malaysia, Indonesia.
Suranand:We are like a junction here.
Chris:It’s always absorbed other cultures and transformed some bits into Thai things.So it’s a very unique society, unique culture, and it has the potential to be a leading culture in terms of artistic production, design.I think a lot of the fashion designers here are doing very well.A lot of the interior decorators in Bangkok are famous in Singapore, are famous in Shanghai.
Suranand:What about Thai artists; have you met them?
Chris:Thai artists I meet and I go to shows almost every weekend.There are a few farang artists but there are a lot of Thai artists.I was at a show recently at HOF Art which is down in an industrial building off Ratchada, and there were maybe 20 Thai artists being shown.There was a rock band playing and maybe 400-500 people, a very exciting night for an art show. And there was a lot of interesting stuff there.There are a lot of Thai artists who are not famous.A favorite of mine is Nantana Phonak, I think that’s how to pronounce her name, and she does very similar expressionist style paintings of Bangkok night life.And her paintings reveal the stress and tension in her own life.
Suranand:And the skills?
Chris:Very bright colors, very interesting images she chooses to paint.
Suranand:How long are you going to keep painting?
Chris:I think my goal is to be like Matisse, not that I am as good as Matisse, who painted up to the day he died.There is a picture of him in his bed, he can’t even get up, and someone has put a stick in his hand with a pencil at the end of it.They put a big piece of paper on the wall.And he is sitting there drawing something with his stick up until the day he died. And some of his best work is his last work.
Suranand:Well, I hope to see around
Chris:I hope I am not going to die soon
Suranand:No, no, no you gonna paint more and reflect the Thai life which other people don’t see.Thank you for being on our show.
Josef Fritzl on Holiday in Pattaya, Thailand - Chris Coles
............Josef Fritzl at a beer bar in Pattaya, Thailand, drinking Klosters with his Austrian pals, making jokes about the Thai bargirls, they're all so relaxed, easy and fun, without an iota of appreciation for the joy and pleasure that comes from suffering, guilt, cruelty and pain, the dark elemental stuff that gets the elderly Josef burning with desire..........he can't wait to get back to that little mountain village in Austria, to his bunker, where his daughter and kids/grandkids are all locked up, shivering in fear, awaiting his return, being fed and looked after by his secret circle of friends..........
Moving into the weekend, the capital is tense and the confrontation between the pro and anti-government shows no signs of lessening. Both sides are dug in. No independent third force has emerged which could come forward to end the crisis. The political situation is locked in a stalemate, a strange equilibrium, one that threats to tilt one way or the other by the hours, and once the balance shifts, no one at this writing can predict the consequences.
On Friday, there has been chatter about the intervention by the police, air force and navy (under government directive) to remove the demonstrators from the airport. On 7th October when tear gas was used to disperse demonstrator outside of Parliament, two people were killed and hundreds were injured. The deaths and injuries resulted in criticism of the government’s handling of the situation. Since then the authorities have been extremely cautious in the use of force.
But the politics remain fluid, uncertain, charged with high emotions, threats and accusations. No one seems to be completely in charge of the situation. Reports indicate that the government has gone to Chiang Mai. The implications of such a move are significant in itself.
I talked with a number of stranded tourists midday. They were Polish, English and American who were outside a ticketing office of an international airline. They looked confused, disgruntled and afraid. No place to stay, running low on money, and unable to find out when they can fly out of the country. Some of the tourists seemed numb, unable to process what was happening. Flying to another country, it doesn’t occur to most travelers that the airport might be occupied and shut down and the only way out is by train, bus, car or foot.
Like a good crime novel, there are the basic elements of conflict, plot and character. What is missing is resolution. A curtain of darkness and doubt has descended and on the other side there are whispers and movement, a clamoring as if a struggle is going on just out of sight. When the curtain goes up again, the show may go on with a new cast. Alternatively the events might be like those in a noir novel, which is all menace and the characters discover in some universes there is no way out.
When the rubber meets the road in the dark of the Bangkok Night, when you work your way past all the smiling and bowing, the laughter and fun, the fantastic colors, spicy food, throbbing music, beautiful women, svelte men and ingenious ladyboys, the swarms of tourists from every country on earth, underneath the veneer, the show, the playful toying with modernity and the democratic West, whose invisible hand lies hidden beneath and who is really in control?
A tough Thai Colonel, or that pasty, white-skinned hi-so guy over in the corner?
By mid-morning Bangkok was boiling hot. People had awakened to discover that a state of emergency had been declared. Overnight the inevitable happened: blood has been spilled in the streets of Bangkok. Pro and anti-government clashed. News reports say one upcountry man was killed and forty-four others injured.
This morning and early afternoon driving on Bangkok streets everything appeared, on the surface, normal. People were shopping, eating in restaurants, walking on the streets. But across town in the area around Government House, a different story unfolds. If the story were a noir novel, then it is at the point in the story, where the abject bleakness and despair descends as the main characters seek a final confrontation.
Final solution. Final confrontation. Words shoot overhead like flares. No one knows what happens next. Once a landscape has been bloodied, in the fog of battle, accusations and insults and threats fill the sky like circling birds, looking for prey or a place to land. No one can be sure. All a foreigner can do is hunker down, wait, and watch as deeper instincts, the ones that mark our species as dangerous, take flight. In times such as these, it seems that for all of our knowledge, technology and insights, there is an untamable nature that is raw, enraged, determined, and brutal. Isn’t that the definition of noir? The id breaks free and goes on a rampage. The psychic cauldron erupts destroying the illusion of civility; that under the surface, there is a beast waiting, fangs and claws showing, occupying the no-man’s land, where one man’s right becomes another’s wrong.
In noir books and movies everyone is cast as a victim. They have no way out no matter what they do. They are doomed. The characters glide through the motions of an ordinary life—but it is anything but ordinary as it is shaded the colors of fear and uncertainty. People are served up with the daily bowl of rice not knowing if there will be another bowl in the evening. The waiting continues in early afternoon. A novelist would wish to write a different kind of thriller. One that was hard-boiled Bangkok. A tough place, but at the end there is the possibility of redemption; a thin ray of hope. Just enough to give the characters courage to believe that tomorrow might bring an end to the confrontation and violence. That tomorrow all sides remember that life matters. That’s the book people want to read about Bangkok. Noir between the pages is an entirely different experience than noir in the streets.
Much has been learnt in Thailand since Black May 1992. I lived through that period. I walked the streets at the time and saw the aftermath of violence. I heard the gunfire. That dark period, like 1976, changed the attitude of many people. In 2008 there is far more restraint exercised by the authorities in the way they deal with demonstrations than in the past. The ultimate test to the limits of that restraint is now under way. Whether the outcome is noir or hardboiled turns on resolve to maintain restraints on the use of violence. Once that resolve is lost, the outcome is inevitably noir.
FLDS Prophet Warren Jeffs in Bangkok on his way to Cambodia - Chris Coles
........Warren Jeffs, FLDS Prophet, passing through Bangkok on his way to Cambodia, his ultimate destination the village of Svay Pak, full of little girls, some even too young for Warren........
...........he's in Bangkok for meetings with the guys who run the counterfeit factories, setting up fashion, accessories, sports equipment, auto parts, watches and perfume, every brand, make and mark, some made in Thailand, some subcontracted out to Cambodia, Vietnam and China, to be packed into containers and shipped to Naples, then sent throughout the EEC.............the margin on brand names is so high and the cost to make the labels is very low...............
Below is a fabulous post by KhiKwai.com, one of Bangkok's most edgy and scathingly witty bloggers, on the Noir Side of the Bangkok Night...........................................
Don’t Call Me Daughter
Soi 4, just off Sukhumvit Road, is not quite as smooth as silk. A uniquely Thai blend of fermenting piss, rotting compost, exhaust fumes, and burnt-out cooking oils is rendered only more asphyxiating by the cheap incense smoldering by the ubiquitous makeshift shrine. Steam rises from the roadside foodstalls that cramp the narrow, potholed sidewalk; it is with great difficulty that it finally dissipates into the thick, damp air. A bewildering lineup of dead animals on a stick lie on display on pushcarts, alongside tropical fruit whose freshness has long evaporated on the foggy plexiglass shielding it from the flies and the dust. Whole roasted chickens sit on bare tables next to fake eyelashes and make-up, flanked by rows of size zero tank-tops and lingerie. Typically most transfixing to newcomer and repeat offender alike is the repugnant assortment of deep-fried crickets, roaches, locusts, and other bugs sold here by the bagful. They are a favorite with the go-go dancers, who can at times be spotted crunching lazily on the six-legged critters — occasionally plucking the leg of a grasshopper that has impudently lodged between their front teeth.
A ragtag army of hustlers and beggars is out in full force. The middle-aged females sprawled out on the wet pavement pull at every pant leg within their limited reach, imploring passers-by to look at the filthy, emaciated small children sleeping in their arms. Men with mutilated limbs shove their stumps into startled white faces for maximum theatrical effect. A blind, deranged man in tattered clothes wanders through the crowd, holding a cup half-filled with coins that jangle loudly as he violently bumps shoulders with pedestrians briskly walking past him. Touts selling Viagra, teddy bears, and cheap knock-offs of brand name wrist watches and sunglasses hassle every foreigner they come across, often placing the items in their prospective customer’s hands as if to make the ill-advised purchase a fait accompli. Fat American women have their pictures taken while riding a small elephant. Midgets in Catholic schoolgirl uniforms greet visitors making their way in. And a six-foot tall ladyboy poses before cell-phone cameras with a Middle-Eastern tourist shrouded in a black burqa. On the other side of the street, a crippled and scarred stray dog looks on, as if unsure of his next move, perplexed by the feeding frenzy unfolding before his every eyes. Rummaging through garbage is a tough business in this part of town.
“Haah-rrooow, weeeear-come, where you go sexy man?” The endlessly repeated mantra echoes all around, mixing in a thunderous cacophony with the undistinguished thumping sounds of techno, disco, and hip-hop, the languid falsetto flamed out by a local pop-singer, and the dire opening notes of Gimme Shelter blasted from the crackling loudspeakers of the Morning and Night Bar.
They are everywhere. Free-lancers stand shoulder-to-shoulder on sidewalks and alleyways. Others prepare for another long night of somewhat less than backbreaking work. They pack what little seating is available by the foodstalls and clutter the brightly lit convenience stores in a last-minute search for chewing gums, cigarettes, condoms, vaginal lubricant, lottery tickets, and travel-sized toiletries — the requisite tools of the trade. Others still lovingly pay homage to the Buddha, genuflecting with evident devotion before a shrine questionably adorned with garlands, plastic action heros, butter cookies, and freshly opened bottles of grape-flavored Fanta surrounded by swarms of flies. It is only upon completing the elaborate preparatory ritual that they finally report for duty, making their way into the go-go bars or joining their colleagues atop worn-out stools lining the wooden barroom verandas.
Nana Entertainment Plaza — the word “entertainment” serves as a euphemism for ejaculation in much of the country — is a disheveled three-story bazaar of cascading go-go bars, glaring red neons, and mildewy guestrooms rented out by the romp. Acts of unspeakable depravity are committed or tentatively agreed upon here. Men have seeped through the bowels of every respectable first world society, dripping all the way down here to feast on a veritable largesse of oriental game. Bronze-skinned, post-pubescent metrosexuals join limp septuagenarians carrying lifetime supplies of indispensable hard-on pills. Veteran sex fiends wear as decorations from previous, valiant campaigns t-shirts acquired in places as far flung as Cambodia, the Philippines, Brazil, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic. Most, however, populate the thick sludge of balding middle-aged men, tourist and expatriate alike, flaunting their trademark deformity — guts swollen from a lifetime of the old lady’s home-cooking and an eternity spent lounging in the slothful comfort of a livingroom couch.
Much like their patrons, the working girls come in all shapes and sizes. Most have the brown or burnt orange complexion of the Lao and Khmer people of Isan, the vast wasteland of depressed northeastern provinces surviving on meager rice crops, occasional handouts distributed by local officeholders, and a steady flow of remittences drenched in the bodily fluids of all manners of Western creeps. They are not all young, nor are they all pretty. Nor, for that matter, are they all women. With a few, blinding exceptions easily explained by the bulge in the man’s back pocket, the girls are rather well-matched with their employers du jour. Those whose looks afford them the luxury pride themselves in picking their dates carefully and discerningly, with a keen focus on physical appearance, dress, charm, and any information about net worth they might glean from a man’s consumption, mannerism, and eagerness to part company with money for no reason whatsoever.
The pocket-sized Lonely Planet guidebook that accompanies scores of tourists on their first, wide-eyed trip down here proclaims, with unmistakeable condescension and tone-deaf self-flattery, that “Beautiful [Thai] women will throw themselves at you, all for a modest sum (money or status).” Of course, that women would throw themselves at men for money or status fails to distinguish Thailand from any country on this earth. The operative word here is “modest” — what counts as money and status here buys you a stack of foodstamps and a welfare check back home. But for many Westerners, Bangkok’s legendary magnetism does not lie in its heavily discounted market rates. It’s rather that the services rendered in this town involve a measure of passion and lust that prostitutes elsewhere typically don’t offer.
For the local bargirl, after all, a long term relationship with a farang is prospectively the most secure of early retirement funds. Most are painfully aware that the clock is ticking inexorably against their capacity to earn incomes equivalent to those paid to mid-level corporate management in Thailand’s private sector — and several times the salary of most government workers. To make matters worse, their lifestyle mercilessly accelerates the aging process, making them look thoroughly washed up by age thirty. And when the music stops, in a few short years, a life less glamorous still awaits those left without a foreign husband. Not many among them particularly look forward to working the night shift in a factory, giving $5 handjobs in a seedy massage parlor, or sweating it out in the rice paddies upcountry.
So rather than engage in a single-night shakedown of the worthless pigs, the girls often take a more calculating, long-term approach to dealing with Westerners. They might not have the faintest scintilla of an idea of what they are getting into — most foreigners here posing a varying measure of danger to themselves and others — but many salivate at the chance of taking the devil they don’t know. Indeed, the instant cuddling may be somewhat unauthentic, the words they speak suspiciously sappy, and the loud orgasms just a wee bit contrived, but the attempt to get them to care is sincere enough. Call it “the fierce urgency of now.” And that makes for a damn good time, I guess, should you happen to be so fortunate as to be singled out as a potential one-way ticket out of the cesspool or, at the very minimum, a temporary shelter from its sickening stench.
The anthropologist Eric Cohen has it about right when he notes that there is “often no crisp separation in Thai society between emotional and mercenary sexual relationships.” If anything, it’s possibly even more complicated than that. If, specifically, it is the girls themselves who push individual relationships held together by regular side payments to quickly develop some emotional content — animated bouts of jealousy, prophanity-laced tirades, crying fits, and sometimes physical abuse after just a handful of encounters are far from uncommon — at the same time the girls go to some lengths to compartmentalize the demands of their careers from other aspects of their lives. And while they are quite aware of the stigma with which their profession brands them, they eagerly dispute any characterization of them as loose or promiscuous.
Quite aside from what the girls actively do, more or less consciously, it is the stories they tell that are frequently poignant enough to drive a dagger into the soft spots of even the most jaded, cynical, or sociopathic among us. A common thread runs through just about all such dismal narratives. In the background is a large and/or broken family where parents are always poor, sometimes abusive, and occasionally in the throws of an addiction to alcohol, gambling, or methamphetamine. As soon as she is old enough to make it on her own, if still much too early to do anything useful with her life, the girl drops out of school and moves to the big city.
The poor bitch, no education, marketable skills, or social graces to boot, comes to Bangkok to face quite the conundrum. One option is to work 12 hours a day in a convenience store, scrub the latrines at a hotel or a private home, or serve tables at a restaurant. That only gets her about 6,000 Baht (less than $200) per month. And after paying rent for a 150-square-foot shared hole-in-the-wall, not much is left for herself or her family. The other option is to sleep until mid-afternoon, lounge around for a while, take a leisurely promenade shopping for faux name brand clothes and accessories, and finally make it to the bar at the late hour of her choice. At work, she has a drink or two, suits up in boots and bikini, takes 20-minute turns “dancing” — more like wobbling listlessly around the pole with a conviction and energy evocative of Shakira on Xanax — and finds some foreigner to screw at the fixed rates that exist for short-time and long-time romps. Between the regular salary the bar corresponds, the commissions on “barfines” and “lady drinks,” and a hundred percent of the fees paid by the customer directly to the girl, a fraction of the effort (not to mention the humiliation) generates an income at least five times as large as that guaranteed by SevenEleven. If the girl is pretty, charming, and has a strong enough stomach to fuck multiple strangers a day, her monthly income may exceed 2,000 American dollars — more than a good chunk of her own customers make. More empowering still, the status of a young girl otherwise as authoritative as the water buffalo parked underneath the stilted family home in the provinces soars as she becomes the family’s chief breadwinner.
Beyond this skeletal plot, variations on both theme and cast of characters are legion. Many of the girls have one or more children living with their grandparents in Isan. Their eyes well up when they are pushed to admit that the kids no longer recognize their mothers — much less pay attention to anything they have to say — when they go back for a rare visit once or twice a year. Mom or dad might have initiated the girl to the time-honored trade by selling her virginity to an acquaintance of their choice. Ever present is also a younger sibling whose studies are being subsidized by the big sister turning tricks in the big town. But it’s the dangerous Thai ex-boyfriend who’s invariably the most interesting character. He might enter the storyline as a thug, a drug dealer, or a deadbeat dad. Or he might simply be the girl’s first love, the man who broke her heart when he walked out with someone else, got thrown in jail, or better yet perished in a barroom brawl, a drug overdose, or an all-out shootout with police. One girl I met had the bullet wounds to corroborate the harrowing story. Entry and exit.
To be sure, the debauchery on permanent display at Nana Plaza is somewhat extreme, even by Thai standards, but similar scenes can be witnessed all over town. So for anyone who has ever spent any time in Bangkok, to read the ongoing debates on morality and sex in the editorial pages of Thai newspapers is essentially to venture into a parallel universe — a petty bourgeois black hole whose existence is quite distinct from the everyday reality of Bangkok’s busy streets. Even as the country was being transformed by its rulers into a degenerate open-air bordello — a veritable beggars’ banquet — the Thai press has spent much of the past century nostalgically lamenting the decline of Thai culture reflected in the much too revealing outfits now worn by city girls, the much too suggestive dances they can be observed performing in local discos, and the much too evident loss of propriety exhibited by teenagers who openly date their classmates in the absence of a formally proffered, carefully pondered, and solemnly approved marriage proposal. In those pages, one can find stern condemnations of “Coyote dancing” performed by bartenders in nightclubs as a practice that threatens to irreparably corrupt the city’s youth. Or one can find discussions raging on about the merits of the government-imposed ban on pornographic websites. All websites found to include obscene content, in fact, are blocked by the ever-blundering Ministry of Information and Communication Technology — a fancy name for “Ministry of Propaganda” whose most insidious, Goebbelsian aspirations are undermined by the comical incompetence exhibited by just about every government agency in Thailand. Laughably swept under the rug is the strident dissonance between the government’s ongoing moral crusade and the fact that even the most depraved acts featured on the world wide web are offered by scores of local women, at every hour of the day and night, to anyone in Bangkok with the means to afford an internet connection.
The government’s hypocrisy on matters of sex and prostitution has risen to new, dizzying heights in the past few weeks. Upon learning that cash-strapped, if notoriously consumption-crazed college students in Bangkok have increasingly taken to advertising sexual services on social networking sites, the government feigned alarm, indignation, and grave concern for the threats posed by the practice to the morality of the city’s youth and the integrity of the country’s social fabric. As if to highlight the severity of this gathering danger to Thai society, it was the puppet Prime Minister himself who took the time to personally reassure the country’s bourgeoisie that the government would swiftly intervene — cracking down through the usual admixture of underhanded censorship and wasteful re-education campaigns aimed at teaching students the “right values.” It’s anyone’s guess, really, where teenagers in Bangkok would have learned the “wrong” values. Most probably, it was the growing exposure to Western culture and media that tragically led them astray.
In a country where tens of thousands of young women — possibly as many as several hundreds of thousands — suck, fuck, and swallow for a living, one might ask what the hell is the point of imposing a ban of internet pornography, of lamenting the dangers of pre-marital sex, or of expressing alarm over a handful of students who screw their classmates to finance their weekend shopping. And if modesty, chastity, and innocence are so important to the idea of Thainess, it may baffle some that purists and cultural warriors would spend so much time fending off comparatively small threats to that ideal. What many foreigners do not understand, however, is that the filthy whores who have spent decades fueling the nation’s growth, keeping entire villages afloat, and filling to the brim the coffers of the state don’t count. Nor do the large numbers of provincial women in Bangkok — whatever their day job happens to be — who are well known to be available for liaisons involving some (if perhaps less direct) form of cash payment.
For the smug petty bourgeois, whose broken English is just good enough to read brain-dead editorials in the Bangkok Post or The Nation, provincial girls who live in Bangkok are not really citizens of Thailand. Or, at least, they are not citizens in the same way they are. These women, after all, belong to a social class whose sole prerogative is to grovel, in the heinous cosmology of the poo yai. It’s not merely to be poor — if not so poor as to inconvenience the highest authorities of the state into making token gestures of support — but rather to be content with the prospect of always being poor.
As such, debates in the Thai media focus almost exclusively on the sexual mores of middle/upper class city girls — and, occasionally, the peasant women who are still expected to serve as a symbol of cultural purity for the comfort of the Bangkok elites. The ubiquitousness of the sex industry in Bangkok is not inconsistent with the elites’ image of Thailand as a sexually demure, conservative country. Nor, for that matter, does it undermine their self-appointed role as the upholders of that myth. The army of streetwalkers, go-go dancers, and tentacled masseuses working in Bangkok, then, are not commonly regarded as the long forlorn daughters whom the double-breasted, uniformed, and garishly bejeweled fathers of the nation have sold into prostitution. Far from being gratefully acknowledged for the heroic contribution they have made to the country’s prosperity, they are rather more conveniently ignored — at least when they are not being patronized or scapegoated as the loafing, conniving reprobates single-handedly responsible for giving the country a bad name.
.....in world of the Bangkok Night, the Ratchada Fishbowls seem so ordinary, so everyday, the ladies sitting around chatting, waiting, checking their mobile phones, thinking about their children, their mother and father, ready to get up whenever their number is called, to provide "service" to whoever shows up and takes a fancy to them. But at the same time, it's a scene from another planet with another set of rules and expectations, populated by extraterrestrial beings whose lives can not be understood, at least by us, the inhabitants of this world.......
U.S. Senator Lost in the Bangkok Night - Chris Coles/2008
........visiting Bangkok for an International Conference, the U.S. Senator has wandered out of his five star hotel and privileged, protected world into the chaos and wonder of the Bangkok Night...........where will he end up and what will he do and how will he explain himself.......when it comes to the vastness of space between what is actual and what is pretense, he's always been second to none...............
..........torn from his mother at age two, distraught, disturbed, desperate for affection, warmth and the slow plodding rhythms of his cooler home far to the north, Om Pang, the baby elephant is brought to the entrance of Nana Plaza every night to play on the drunken sentimentality of the tourists from afar, making money for his handlers and the Big Boss of all the Bangkok elephants, a man with no heart, destined to come back in his next life as a dung beetle rolling endlessly in a heap of elephant shit..................
Elliot Spitzer Looking for Hi-End Love at Bed Supperclub in Bangkok - Chris Coles
.......only interested if the cost is so high he knows he's a special guy, Elliot Spitzer wanders through the Bangkok Night looking for hi-end love...................
Client Number 9, Elliot Spitzer's Girlfriend Kristen (aka Ashley Alexandra Dupre) performing with her band Aime Street at Bed Supperclub Bangkok - Chris Coles
Ashley, aka Kristen, is a party girl on speed. Getting down, having fun, doing lines. She sings pretty good too. But is two hours of Ashley's time really worth 130,000 Baht? That's a year and a half's wages in Thailand, eight year's earnings in Cambodia, forty years for those unlucky enough to work in Burma.
And if the two hours aren't worth the price, what do Ashley's men think they are paying for?
Hong Kong Money Guy in Pegasus Club Bangkok - Chris Coles
The city of Bangkok, also known as Krung Thep or City of Angels, is an almost perfect setting for noir fiction, films, music and paintings, an artistic movement known as Bangkok Noir.
Bangkok is a kind of Open City, a chaotic and immense urban center home to millions of people from all over Thailand, Southeast Asia and the world. Due to relatively lax visa requirements, almost anyone with the money and air ticket can show up and stay for at least a month if not a lifetime. As a result, Bangkok attracts various criminals, low lifes, scam artists and fugitives from every country on earth. Sometimes, they lie low, licking their wounds and planning their next foray in their home territory. Sometimes, they invent business in Bangkok itself, trafficking, drug smuggling, arms dealing, securities fraud, counterfeit goods, nightclubs, whatever.
The Nigerians from Lagos specialize in the drug business, mainly heroin coming from Burma and Laos, headed out to the world. Gangsters from Mumbai wash millions thru Bangkok real estate while they plan their next moves back in India. Yakuza from Japan buy meth for shipment to Tokyo as well as recruiting an endless river of Thai and Southeast Asian women for their Japanese brothels.
The Russians and East Europeans ship impoverished but sometimes beautiful women from Uzbekistan, Moldava, Ukraine, and Valdivastok to nightclubs and brothels in Bangkok, Shanghai, Macau and Hong Kong. Burmese generals, Chinese swindlers, Australian bar owners, German drug dealers. Name any country and there is at least one representative of its criminal underworld resident in Bangkok. Not to speak of the Thai police and military as well as Thailand's own homegrown thugs and godfathers.
For fiction writers, filmmakers, musicians and artists based in Bangkok, there has never been a richer source of raw material. Between the gangsters, the beautiful girls, the vibrant nightlife and the gigantic scale of the city itself, full of its diverse millions and their struggles, some penniless, others billionaires, some living in third world slums, others in super luxury penthouse condos, some riding in buses belching raw black smoke, others in sleek S-class Mercedes, it is a setting for a million stories, films, songs and paintings
There is a whole genre of noir fiction already published with the Bangkok crime fiction writer, Christopher G. Moore leading the way along with Jake Needham and more recently, John Burdett and Stephen Leather.
Christopher G. Moore's Calvino books follow an American Private Detective working the atmospheric Bangkok Expat scene. The eight Calvino books are filled with wonderfully cynical and nihilistic insights into Thailand's Expat community as well as the unique and complex Thai Way of looking at life and the world. THE RISK OF INFIDELITY INDEX, PATTAYA 24/7, MINOR WIFE and CUT OUT are some of the best ones.
Jake Needham's stories, BIG MANGO, THE AMBASSADOR's WIFE, KILLING PLATO, TEA MONEY, LAUNDRY MAN, move from one seedy set to another, searching for goodness in a sea of sleaze.
John Burdett got off to a fast start with the best-selling BANGKOK 8, featuring a stylish and cunning Thai ladyboy, then BANGKOK TATTOO and most recently, BANGKOK HAUNTS.
Stephen Leather started with the internet published PRVATE DANCER which became a huge hit. COLD KILL is his latest.
Thai filmmakers churn out a constant stream of gangster films set in Bangkok. The original BANGKOK DANGEROUS by the Pang brothers was gritty, edgy and real. The Hollywood re-make of BANGKOK DANGEROUS starring Nicholas Cage will be more glossy and stylish, featuring some of the modern hi-end side of Bangkok mixed in with the low-end bottom.
Another Thai filmmaker, Smith Timsawit, made PROVINCE 77, starring Jeremy Thana, Pete Tongchua and the ex-Miss Thailand Metinee Kingpayome. The film has a fabulous original soundtrack from Thaitanium, Thailand's Number One Hip Hop band. Set in Bangkok and Thaitown, Los Angeles, the film portrays violent Thai gangsters fighting ruthlessly for territory and status in a nihilistic and cynical world.
In the art area, Chris Coles series of expressionist style paintings titled, THE BANGKOK NIGHT, PORTRAITS FROM PATPONG, BANGKOK NEON, BANGKOK LADYBOY, BANGKOK NOIR, BANGKOK SOI DOG, BANGKOK BOYS TOWN, BANGKOK PORTRAITS and the latest series, ONE NIGHT IN BANGKOK, use as their setting the lurid and colorful world of Bangkok's notorious nightlife. Heavily distorted lines and strong, clashing colors dominate in these paintings which portray a chaotic, edgy noir world of colliding intention and misplaced desire, lives out of balance, male-female compulsion, alienation and disassociation. They echo the German Expressionist paintings from Berlin in the early 1900's as well as the Paris nightlife paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas and the early Picasso.
By midnight on Friday, Patpong's full, twenty thousand tourists from Europe, the U.S., Australia, India, the Middle East and Japan, ten thousand girls, hundreds of ladyboys, plenty of beer, whiskey, endless stalls selling counterfeit goods, thirty or forty disco tracks blasting out of the gogo bars, a world vortex of man woman interaction, a combination sexual theme park, shopping mall and inferno, fiercely consuming an endless stream of humanity and their desire.
LA Art Collector & his Ladyboy Girlfriend at Bangkok Club - Chris Coles
.......in L.A., he's a family man and City Father, he pays out millions of dollars for famous paintings and announces donations to major museums.......but in the Bangkok Night, he's chasing ladyboys, obsessed with their elliptical ambiguity, the feeling of depravity, taking pleasure as he pleases........
One of the great Bangkok Noir films is the original BANGKOK DANGEROUS by the Pang Brothers, very visual, very dark, very raunchy........
The Hollywood remake of BANGKOK DANGEROUS, also by the Pang brothers, this time starring Nicholas Cage, comes out in the summer of 2008 and should be Hollywood's first and, to date, best look at the excitement, chaos and wonder of modern Bangkok and the Bangkok Night.........
Here are two links, the first to the Spanish language version of the trailer and the second to the English language version:
...............just off Surawong, near Patpong, in the soi called Bangkok Boys Town, swarms of gay guys from every country on earth mix and mingle with young Thai men, too old to really be boys but called boys nonetheless, everyone ready to rock and roll..............
Polish Gentleman in Bangkok on his Way to Cambodia - Chris Coles
........fresh from the cold, grey winter in Poland, he's stopped off in Bangkok on his way to Cambodia for a few weeks of adventure with sweet little Khmers...................is he an undercover priest or just an ordinary man.........whichever, for sure he's a sinner..............
......some say that Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa was a transvestite hooker from the streets near his studio, the mysterious smile reflecting both her own and Leonardo's sexual ambiguity......
......in a world of reincarnation, could it be possible Mona Lisa's alive and well in the Bangkok district called Patpong, perhaps as a wired Thai Ladyboy or as a beautiful and tender Isan bargirl named Wan Jai.....
.......who can say for sure..........................
....she works in a beer garden off Soi Nana, the early shift from eleven until nine PM. For two weeks now, every day, a German man has come to see her. He buys a few drinks and they go to a nearby hotel. He gives her more than she asks. He talks to her in broken English, almost the same as hers. He's over fifty and very friendly, also nice to her friends. Tonight he's flying back to Germany and he gave her some flowers when he said goodbye. He's promised to come back, he's not sure when. She smiled and wished him good luck. Inside, she is crying.........
Beverly Hills Crime Boss at Nana Plaza - Chris Coles
..........in Beverly Hills, he's the Boss, the go-to guy for real estate zoning, condo conversion, business permits, all the myriad ways the Beverly Hills crowd feeds at the trough...........
.........he's been married to the same woman for 40 years, she's at his side for Beverly Hills status events, networking with the power wives, deep in conversation about botox, plastic surgery, community property divorce, status cars and diamond jewelry..........
.........but when the Boss is away, on business trips to Bangkok, he heads off to Nana Plaza, chasing the Isan bargirls, slender, youthful, smiling, dark, sensual, wild, ready for the rough sex he craves, a Master of the Universe set free, doing dirty things, shameful things, depraved, rude, violent, satisfying his insatiable lust for ownership, dominance and power, his wallet full of thousand Baht notes and an endless supply of Viagra.............
Italian Sex Tourist Nana Plaza Bangkok - Chris Coles/2008
......he's partied in Estonia, Prague, Havana and Rio, even little Costa Rica..........but he always comes back to Bangkok........Nana Plaza, Soi Cowboy, Patpong, Sukhumvit, the mighty Ratchada. There's something about the ambiance and smiles, the slender girls........the music, the street stalls......the feeling of another planet beyond space and time.................
Located at the center of the vast and sprawling metropolis known as Bangkok, the notorious district known as Patpong is only a couple ofrundown blocks, strewn with garbage and stray dogs, filled with stalls selling tawdry counterfeit goods, a sleazy row of go-go bars staffed by a few thousand girls who didn’t make it into the hi-end of the Bangkok Night and a thousand or so ladyboys wacked out on drugs, hormone injections and too much silicone.
The millions of tourists who each year wonder through Patpong and make it all possible come from all over the world.Not exactly shining examples of First World bliss, they are often grotesquely overweight, dressed in a shabby assortment of sweat stained t-shirts, shorts and flip-flops, and weighted down with knapsacks, cameras and shopping bags filled with worthless knick knacks.Many of them are drunk and jetlagged, their faces showing the pain of unfulfilled and despairing lives.
What these First World Ambassadors are looking for in the primordial mire of Patpong is an indecipherable mystery, even to themselves.
As for the Thais, Patpong’s simply a place to work and make money.No matter how strange and shoddy the endless river of foreign tourists may look, by some set of circumstances very few Thais comprehend, these primitive beings are usually loaded with cash and happy to spend it on items which appear to be completely unnecessary.Counterfeit watches that last only a few months, girls who don’t actually want to have sex, ladyboys who are not even girls but do want to have sex and an endless stream of beer that will pass through their bloated bodies in less than an hour.
At some point, the Patpong District will be torn down to make way for gleaming hi-rise offices and whatever Patpong is presently thought to be or actually was will gradually recede into the realm of mythic recollection, a moment in time between Bangkok’s murky Third World past and its bright First World future.Perhaps one day, the portraits in this blog will be all that’s left……….
Welcome to Thailand Soi Dog Nana Plaza - Chris Coles
...........always smiling, never losing his chi, every night he guards the entrance to Nana Plaza in exchange for scraps from the food carts..............
Arab Sex Tourist Grace Hotel Bangkok - Chris Coles
......the Arab Sex Tourists in and around the Grace Hotel in Bangkok come mainly from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf States, their pockets full of cash, their wives shrouded in black, consumed with shopping while these religiously Fundamentalist men drink whiskey-colas and work on resolving their Desire Deficit by partying down with Thai bargirls...........
Bangkok Ladyboy Obession Bar Nana Plaza - Chris Coles
..........every night, night after night, she sits in Nana Plaza's Obession Bar, waiting for her clients, ongoing and unknown, a master of illusion and desire, ferocious, cunning, hauntingly beautiful, a victim of circumstance and mis-construed re-incarnation, open to the world and totally at risk, doomed, too many drugs and hormones, too much plastic surgery, a predator in the Bangkok Night, ready to accept the projections of others and her own complicated Karma.................
..........often featured on the covers of mainstream business magazines, he's a well-known CEO who bilked his investors in LA out of hundreds of millions and now he's looking for a place to hide, finding the perfect spot in a short time hotel in Patpong, Bangkok's center of sleaze and delusion, where he feels free to live without pretense as to who he actually is and what he actually likes to do.................
.....one of the oldest bars on Soi Cowboy, Midnite is friendly and funky with a raunchy overlay. The beers cost two dollars and the girls, mostly Lao from the part of Thailand called Isan, are easy-going, always looking for an excuse to be outrageous and have some fun. The guys, mostly Expats, some Japanese, think they're back in college, hanging out at a roadhouse bar for sex and rock 'n roll, the problems of their adult lives forgotten...........
.....at the same time kind-hearted and mercenary, he works the gay Farangs who wander through Bangkok Boys Town, night after night, week after week, month after month, year after year, hoping to get lucky before he dies from Aids...........there are so many of them, not hundreds or thousands but hundreds of thousands, passing by for some fun on their way to oblivion..............luckily he is Buddhist and knows that if he treats the Farangs well, gives alms to the Monks and sends money to his family, his next life will be better...............
There 's an intensity in Bangkok ladyboys, a fire burning inside. They are from every region of Thailand, drawn to Bangkok to live invented lives according to how they imagine they are. No matter how wacky they may sometimes seem, they are following their dreams and desires.
Ladyboy Temptation Bar Nana - Chris Coles/2007
No one knows how many ladyboys there are in in Bangkok but there must be at least several hundred thousand. Called Kathoey in Thai, they are everywhere in the world of the Bangkok Night. Sometimes in the overt and flashy ladyboy revues favored by the busloads of Taiwanese and mainland Chinese, dressed up as Las Vegas showgirls, kind of obvious, exaggerated and fun.
Bangkok Ladyboy Pim 2 - Chris Coles/2007
Sometimes they're working in the go-go bars of Nana Plaza and Patpong, both overtly and disguised, aggressive and quiet, muscular and masculine as well as petite, soft and feminine, available for a kinky night out to men and women tourists from Asia, Europe, India, the Arab states and North and South America. They are also in the streets and parks, servicing the lowest and roughest end of the Bangkok Night.
Patpong Ladyboy - Chris Coles/2007
More or less accepted as an in-between or Third Sex by Thais, there is talk of building a special ladyboy prison in order to clear up the confusion as to which prison ladyboy criminals should be sent, depending if they are pre-op or post-op, still equipped or physically altered. The Operation is so common in Bangkok, there are ads with price lists and special discounts in the leading newspapers. Tourists from all over the world who want the Operation come to Bangkok for the expertise of the surgeons as well as the high standard of the hospitals and relatively low price.
Los Angeles Real Estate Lawyer in Bangkok Ladyboy Bar - Chris Coles/2007
But all of that is the iceberg that we see. Beneath the surface, hidden from view, there are ladyboys working in every strata of the Bangkok world, banks, offices, hotels, restaurants, quiet bars and small KTV's, Isan music places, department stores, television, film, music, manufacturing, marketing, fashion and textiles. Some are even married to ordinary Thai men and live mundane suburban lives without their neighbors having a clue.
Two Ladyboys CM2 Club - Chris Coles/2007
The history of ladyboys goes back thousands of years, in every culture and country. Ladyboy gods can be found in India, Ancient Greece, Africa and Asia. The ambiguity of the hermaphrodite being, half-woman, half-man, seems to arouse universal curiosity and interest. Some say that even the Mona Lisa was a ladyboy, one of the many transvestite hookers that Leonardo da Vinci pulled off the streets near his studio to use as models. Perhaps that is the key to her mysterious smile.
Ladyboy at Spasso Bar Bangkok - Chris Coles/2007
Ladyboys have much to teach is about ambiguity and desire, surface appearance and multi-layered realities, the role of illusions and visual signals, the impossibility of certainty and what it is to follow a dream. Trying to paint them is to enter a world full of mirrors, confusing and infinite, sometimes ugly and sometimes full of a strange and poignant beauty.
In the middle of the day, Bangkok is a vast smog-choked metropolis with some of the world’s most horrendous traffic, flat lighting, high humidity, its shoddy infrastructure on full display, sidewalks with gaping holes, streets dug up and paved over way too many times, buildings streaked with rust and mildew, bits of rotting garbage and trash in every direction, thousands of soi dogs wandering, sniffing, pooping and peeing.
Dali Bar Soi 33 Sign - Chris Coles/2006
But as the sun sets, the Bangkok Night comes to life.The air cools, the traffic calms, and Bangkok’s faults disappear into a glossy and seductive darkness.Beautiful girls and stylish guys fill the sidewalks.Music drifts through nighttime breezes scented with jasmine and ten thousand food stalls.And lighting up every boulevard, street and soi, across the entire metropolis, trillions of little fairy lights and millions of signs.
Obession Ladyboy Bar Nana Plaza - Chris Coles/2006
Every kind of sign in every kind of language with every typestyle and color, from gigantic to small, stylish to outlandish, some blinking, some discreet, some ordinary, others wacky.Very few cities anywhere on this planet have the number and variety of signs as are spread across the vastness of the Bangkok Night.With little apparent zoning, control or censorship, the only limit is the imagination and when it comes to applying visual imagination to the business of the Night, Thais are second to no one.
Dollhouse Soi Cowboy - Chris Coles/2006
What follows is a taste of the Bangkok Night’s signs along with some of the mood and feeling they create, enticement, the promise of pleasure, glowing neon colors hissing in Bangkok’s humid air.
The Body Massage Palace Ratchada Bangkok - Chris Coles/2007
Emmanuelle Massage Palace Ratchada Bangkok- Chris Coles/2007
Spirit House Japanese Karaoke Bar Bangkok - Chris Coles
.....not really Buddhist, lots of little spirits hidden away in the nooks and crannies, some friendly some evil, a little bit Hindu, maybe a little bit more from the Ancient Times, there are millions of Spirit Houses in Bangkok, keeping everyone safe and happy, the bad guys along with the good............
Gay U.S. Embassy Guy Cruising Around Bangkok - Chris Coles
..............an Ivy League graduate, he's been in Bangkok five years, on the staff at the U.S. Embassy. They're about to ship him out, maybe to Rwanda, maybe Iceland.......he'd rather stay in Bangkok, cruising around Silom's gay bars and clubs, weekends in Phuket, Pattaya and Koh Samui, hanging out with his Thai boyfriends...........Thai food, Thai fun, a penthouse condo, how will he ever give it up........
.....Pom, the manager of Thigh Bar at the entrance to Patpong, in the heart of tourist sleaze, surrounded by drunken Expats, desperate bargirls and wandering ladyboys, somehow manages to stay friendly and relaxed...........
.....if you've been there at least once in the last ten years, she'll remember your name and what you ordered to drink, even the name of your girl and where she ended up............
.....if you know enough to show respect, you'll be treated well, only hustled a little.......
.....but if you act like an asshole, it will never be forgotten and you will always be an asshole, from the moment you walk in the door until the day you die..........
.........the war in Bosnia and Kosovo's over, no more civilians to round up and kill, but there's plenty more human misery to supply and service, impoverished refugee girls to ship out to the brothels of Bangkok, Macau and Shanghai and a pipeline of drugs to ship back, what karma awaits this man in his next life................
......she watches and waits, filtering every available piece of information through a highly-tuned perception, formed from a lifetime immersed in ambiguity, ambivalence and the illusion of desire..........
Shiite Lebanese Drug Dealer in Bangkok - Chris Coles
..............a Muslim Shiite from Lebanon, he's bridges the gap between Burma and Christian Europe, traveling to Bangkok once a month for meetings with his Thai connections and expeditors, taking his partners out to the clubs, but just for business, never taking his own girl back to the hotel..........very devout and a faithful family man, he gives ten percent of his income to Hezbollah and always follows the exact terms of the deal..............
John Mark Karr at Casanova Bar Nana Plaza - Chris Coles
.......John Mark Karr hanging out at the infamous Casanova Ladyboy Bar in Nana Plaza, Bangkok, shortly before his arrest, false confession and deportation back to the U.S.........
Nicholas Cage at Bed Supperclub Bangkok - Chris Coles
.....luminescent, stylish and cool, Bed Supperclub is an ultra-modern center of Bangkok Trend. A place to be seen, a hangout for Hi-So Thais and high income Farangs, fashion designers, models and movie stars. From Bangkok, Hollywood and Bollywood, Germany, France and UK. Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai. A symbol and playground of modern Asian design and ambiance, when Nicholas Cage was in Bangkok doing the re-make of Bangkok Dangerous, Bed Supperclub was one his hangouts...................
.....he doesn't give a shit about politics, religion or race, he's only interested in how much he can make off whatever there is to make it from.......girls from Moldova, Burmese heroin, weapons from Cambodia, the only things that count are his percentage and the rate of return.....some of his most reliable partners are Hezbollah Shiite Muslims from Lebanon, their word is their bond and they always stick with the deal.........some of his profits are going into a chain of Bangkok Spas and a new golf course in Vietnam...........
...........sent to Bangkok from Isan to earn money for their babies and families, they sit in a Bangkok Beer Bar near Asoke, waiting for lost Farangs from Europe, the U.S. and Australia............
........every morning he wakes up on the street, surrounded by his pack......he's got no clothing, no bank account, no credit cards, no car, motorcycle, no nothing......but he wakes up happy, wagging his tail, wanders over for some scraps from the garbage bin at the back of a Gay Karaoke Bar, drinks a little water from a mud puddle, then looks for sex.........if all the bitches are still asleep, he humps a hole in the street and settles down for a daytime nap in the midst of the traffic, happy to be a Bangkok Soi Dog.....................
......towering over Ratchada, the mighty 500 room Poseidon Club, where wealthy Asian guys from Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, KL, Shanghai, Tokyo and Seoul spend their dough on beautiful ladies from Europe, Asia, Brazil and Thailand itself, for fun, to show off, to seal their deals..........
German Fashion Designer at Bed Supperclub Bangkok - Chris Coles
.........he travels to Asia from Germany every few months to pick up ideas and show off his latest fashions. Bed Supperclub's one of his favorite Asian hang-outs, it's so minimalist, so many stylish Thais, Asians and Farang all mingled together...............
.....despite the signs, there are almost no boys in Bangkok Boys Town, instead young Thai men, some gay, some only pretending......gogo bars with handsome, muscular Thai guys dancing, doing chin-ups and push-ups in BVD's, scattered beer bars full of conversation and verbal seduction, sauna/massage places with jacuzzis and VIP rooms, stylish music clubs playing slow-beat trance, even a swimming pool bar with a big thick window for those who enjoy watching good-looking Thai men swim underwater in micro speedos...........
.........Thaniya Plaza, a vertical array of clubs, KTV's, bars and cozy hangouts, all with colorful signs, for the thousands of Japanese business guys in Bangkok to party, hang out and leave their dough behind.............
Stephen Spielberg at Bed Supperclub Bangkok - Chris Coles
..........a married family guy, faithful to his wife, Stephen's not sure where to look or what to do when he's taken out to Bed Supperclub on his one night in Bangkok. It all feels somehow illegal with so many freely available stylish babes checking out the visiting Alpha Male.............
.....just off Sukhumvit Road is the quiet and cozy Soi 33, also known as the Dead Artists Street......the home of Renoir Club along with many others, Goya, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Monet, Dali, Picasso.....Chris Coles is the only live artist in sight.......
.....about three thousand girls work on Soi 33, many of them in their late 20's and early 30's, most of them stylish and beautiful, either from Central Thailand or the Northeast, called Isan, where people are darker and more Lao......the Expat guys are regulars, old hands in Bangkok, and the ambiance is familiar, warm and conversational............
......unlike most of Nana Plaza's bars, by ten o'clock, Rainbow Bar is full, the hundred or so girls young and active, the guys old hands, lots of beer, looking around, finding the girl they want.......
......sitting beside them, she orders a ladies drink and they check each other out.........
......if everything's OK and both are willing, a few minutes later they're gone.............
Caterpillar Headed to Bangkok Hoping to Become a Butterfly - Chris Coles
.........he's been crawling along for days, on his way to the bright lights of Bangkok, already he can see the gigantic glow in the sky. Once there, among the myriad of beautiful flowers and bright neon signs, he will become a Bangkok butterfly, spending the rest of his short life flitting from one flower to the next........................
........the girls at Spasso Bar in the basement of the five star Hyatt Erawan Hotel are like cruise missiles.Once they’ve locked onto their targets, the man has very little chance.Unless he’s a cheapskate.Then the missile will veer away, its radar having read a shortage of available cash and low net worth with the speed of a supercomputer, and the poor man is saved from the night of his life and the woman of his dreams...........
........there are many German tourists who come to Bangkok to chase the bargirls.Every night, night after night, they never have enough.Until their two weeks are up and they catch their flight.In Germany, they dream about their Bangkok girls, hoping to find a way to come back and never leave. Some say when the German guys are re-incarnated they come back as soi dogs and wander around Soi Cowboy to their heart's content...........
......as the eldest daughter, for two years now, she's been working the high-end of the Bangkok Night. Already she owns a condo and drives her own Toyota. She pays the school fees for her sisters and brothers in Chiang Rai, they're studying computers, business and accounting. She's bought her mother a shop......
............beautiful, stylish and sexy, highly intelligent and very ambitious, within the generations of her ancestors and family, she's the one who will enable them to finally reach their destination, only three generations after her grandfather left Yunnan Province in China with a suitcase and some rags...........
British TV Boss at Bed Supperclub Bangkok - Chris Coles
......he's a busy guy, building a media Empire in England, Europe and the U.S. On his night out in Bangkok, he's at Bed Supperclub, looking for something hi-end and fun, a female energy source that will give him the boost he needs................
......closing time onSoi Cowboy, the only customer’s a friend, the last song is from the northeast part of Thailand called Isan. It’s a tale of endless hard work on dirt-poor farms, the sons and daughters all lost to Bangkok to learn the ways of the City.............
......Q Bar is ultra-chic.Club trance, guys dressed in Armani black, the girls look like fashion models.Along with Bed Supperclub, it’s one of the top Bangkok clubs.But even in Q Bar,the boy-girl action is transactional and fast.No matter how exquisite the girl, how full of beauty, depth and soul, money determines the outcome, a pay as you go system with no obligations outside the time frame agreed.......
....the girls at Tilac Bar are often mothers of one or two young children left back in dusty farming villages with grandparents.They finish school at the end of sixth grade, have their babies before they turn twenty and come to Bangkok after their husbands die or leave, looking for a way out, trying to be stylish, hoping for the best and sending 2000 Baht a month back home......
.....sometimes they get lucky and end up in California, Germany, England or Australia.Sometimes they don’t and disappear off the face of the earth........
