It was a sliding doors moment, though not so slick, so finely calibrated. Slow motion — but still a matter of timing. I was coming to a decision to leave Thailand — must have been early to mid March I think — and to go back to Europe to look for alternatives to my plan […]
PARIJAH DIARIES 1 It’s not very common in conversation, not in its original sense at least. People stick to ‘weird’, which is a whole other story, coming from Old English wyrð, meaning fate or destiny. You generally only see it when some hack journalist has been detailed to put down the latest outbreak of truth […]
‘Never resist a sentence you like,’ wrote Baudrillard in Cool Memories (1990), and his incandescent style overflows with irresistible sentences. Take, for example, the passage on religious iconography and the death of God, leading up to the stunning epigram: It is through the death of God that religions emerge. A beautiful sentence, dazzling in its […]
STARFIELDS, PARKING LOTS, AND THE SADNESS OF ASTRONAUTS “We set out to explore the moon and instead discovered the Earth.” — William Anders, Apollo 8 astronaut. Television — or at least, the image dissection technology at the core of it —was invented by Philo T Farnsworth II in 1927, but it did not bring him […]
The boys had gone swimming and Red wanted to go too, but her mother wouldn’t let her. She was too young and didn’t know how to swim. So she waited for a while and then sneaked away, following the path to the pond. As she approached through the trees, she could see their backs, five […]
OF CATS AND CONSPIRACIES The Orpheus Pavement (detail) “The idea of leopards still living in Europe is very powerful. Every year a new and ferocious creature turns up in England, one that exists only in newspaper columns, vividly imprecise eyewitness reports, blurry photographs of black pussy cats and our eternal appetite for monsters: the Beast […]
“The tactic of the terrorist model is to provoke a surplus of reality and to make the whole system collapse under it.” — Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (2002). ∆ Baudrillard’s work is coolly psychedelic, giving us the same sense of dizzying replication that we love in doppelgänger stories and much science fiction. He was […]
My first real encounter with the Thought Police. This essay, part of a series applying Jean Baudrillard’s simulation theory to contemporary events, has been suppressed by WordPress. The piece evoked a series of mass-shootings in 2011-12, viewing them in the light of the document usually referred to as The Report from Iron Mountain. It sketched a timeline of […]
When Dawan was born, Great Aunt Kung looked at her and said, ‘She is my successor. She has the gift.’ In her mother’s Cambodian culture, there must always be a ghost-keeper in the family. Blessed or cursed with second sight, the ghost keeper’s role was to perform rituals and exorcisms, appease spirits and tell fortunes […]
Sometime during the Eocene Era, India collided into Asia, hurling the Himalayas high into the sky, lifting up the Tibetan plateau, and giving birth to an unruly spirit called monsoon. Fifty million years later, I arrived exhausted in Bangkok, the City of Angels. I was met at the airport by a muscular white man […]