Some Excerpts from "Vincent Calvino's World" by Chad A. Evans.........

Excerpt on Bangkok Noir Artist Chris Coles:

   Chris Coles is a prolific and respected American expressionist painter of Bangkok's noir farang bar scene.  His sideshow of horrors demands visceral attention as we examnine the collective rictus of prostitutes and mongers.  Coles translates the resignation and detachment of sex workers in Buddhist terms in his book, Navigating the Bangkok Noir... 

   "An overall atmosphere of fatalism, acceptance and passivity in the face of adverse circumstances, no matter how unjust, unfair and unpleasant those circumstances might be.  A resignation in the face of unavoidable Karmic burdens acquired in past lives and deeds, burdens from which there is no escape."

   Coles' paintings are haunting, set in neon haunts, where lost faces of bargirls are juxtaposed with grotesque countenances of inflamed male predators.  He presents us with the real Facebook of Bangkok's nightlife, an East-West Moulin Noir of raw human collisions, and he externalizes in visual art the glaring scene that Moore presents internally by venturing behind the masks with Calvino.  Both capture the depth of the horror, Munch's Scream, the fatalistic ennui of trapped outcast sex workers and their displaced patrons.

Excerpt from Thomas Hoy Introduction:

   There are two types of people, Vincent Calvino muses somehwere: those who want to know and those who don't want to know.  As a detective, Calvino is in the business of wanting to know, and his readers want to know what Calvino and his creator, Christopher G. Moore, have found out about Bangkok.  In Vincent Calvino's World: A Noir Guide to Southeast Asia, Chad Evans tries to pull this knowledge together in one place, to find out where it comes from and to see how it has been reconstructed as art.

http://www.amazon.com/Vincent-Calvinos-World-Guide-Southeast-ebook/dp/B0158D1O8K