‘Hear me, I need food.’
Posted: July 19, 2010 Filed under: articles, states of mind 1 CommentFrom the Notebook: Maybe my posting a picture of cats a few days ago brought this memory back.
“Two kinds of dogs on the streets here…one lies flat-out in death-like positions, too tired, hungry or sick to move away from the feet of passersby or the wheels of cars. The second has a wired energy, quick intelligence, their eyes scan people for some aura or transfer of energy. My eyes instinctively avoid contact with these dogs. Yesterday evening, at a bus stop, a dog turned on its heels and trotted toward me––a tattered black coat of matted hair with black-purple patches of flaking skin worn bone thin. He came into pitiful, sharp view and then sat down on its haunches looking up into my eyes. His frightened eyes opened wide, stabbing straight into my heart. His head turned left then right, then jerked upward, once, twice, in a primal body language. I need food. I need food. Yes, hear me, I need food. This is a smart animal, I thought. As if reading my mind, he barked one time. Yes, I’m talking to you right now. Hear me. I need food. I had no food so I turned away quickly, walking away, trying not to look back. When I turned, he was trailing me discretely, plaintively. Take me with you. I’ll come with you. I thought about taking him home and pictured the taxi driver’s face watching me open the door with a sorry city mongrel. When I went outside again the dog had returned to the bus stop. He was prancing in a quick dance, beseeching people getting off the bus with a chorus of discrete barks, high and crisp, talking, not threatening. Then he stopped, knelt back on his haunches like before, and sang his song directly in front of a lady who carried an umbrella and a grocery sack. I’m life too. This is Me-Dog. I need help. Give. He nipped at the woman’s plastic bag. Share something. I was frozen. Another life marker, a slice of life to be buried inside my heart––this dog’s open, plaintive eyes and his language, his need. He was talking directly to people and no one took any action.
The next evening the bus stop was empty, but for that dog curled up into himself, a black mass burrowed into the day’s papers and trash. His head rested on his front paws. His eyes stared straight ahead, and he didn’t look up or speak as I placed food in front of his mouth and walked away.”
Abandonment, ignoring real need, ignoring a chance to do good: That dog haunts me. Still, I stumble out of bed each morning and automatically resurrect psychological walls between me and things that I can help change for the better. I go through each day mostly anesthetized to others’ pain––mothers and children living on the streets, fathers unable to provide, traumatized animals, the war against nature––as if calling myself an adult requires that I accept people and animals in pain and the abuse of the physical world. Ignore it, or risk looking immature, soft hearted, naive or stupid. It’s one thing to worry about things on the other side of the world, and another to walk away from what directly confronts our senses. I’m guilty of voluntarily shutting down my natural responses to do good acts. If our acts are ever totaled up in the ledger of life, we all are. We’re so much smarter than we act. The only minimal response to the pain and abuse in the world is to do as many acts of physical kindness as we can each morning and each evening. That may be too little, but if we keep it in mind and act on it maybe it’s enough to keep us human, to break down the wall.
happy birthday, Hunter Thompson
Posted: July 18, 2010 Filed under: articles, books, people, writing Leave a comment
Born on July 18, 1937; five years dead and still living in the printed word, and in movies, as never before. If you haven’t read HST’s letters, do so, particularly Vol. I which takes him through the beginning of his career to the completion of Hell’s Angels and prior to The Rolling Stone days . I hope the Johnny Depp movie based on The Rum Diary adds a human side to the Gonzo image. Letters Vol. 1 is free of Gonzo babble, and you get a solid picture of Thompson’s energy, anxieties, pleasures and his dream of writing fiction. How that desire to create stories––compelling worlds––and his work in journalism eventually influenced one another is still a story whose pieces are being put together. 
Check out the Hunter S. Thompson Books website for a complete bibliography of the newspaper and magazine stories, information on various editions of his books, links on the Beats, and a very good listing of related sites. Also see the Owl Farm blog by his wife, Anita.
Enjoy the opportunity to say good night
Posted: July 17, 2010 Filed under: articles, books, people, states of mind Leave a comment
wittgenstein
I don’t much like writing the name Ludwig Wittgenstein because he’s so often trotted out for a quote by people who have little feeling for what was behind his philosophy. That’s not true of a core of people who clearly understand what he was up to. See Stanley Cavell and Norman Malcolm, particularly Malcolm’s Wittgenstein: A Religious View. His life hangs over his work accounting for his legend, but what’s really at stake here is his immense sensitivity to the process of life and thinking and how it fueled his work. A deep longing to break through… He had problems expressing feelings. Was he happy––there are few signs. But his sensitivity, or is it sentimentality––tenderness, sadness––comes through occasionally, particularly in writing about or to his former student and sympathetic friend Drury. Here’s some revealing quotes:
“‘I am not a religious man, but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view,’ Drury rightly observes.”
“Of one thing I am certain––we are not here in order to have a good time.”
“Enjoy more the opportunity you have to say ‘good night’ to so many people. This alone is a gift from heaven which many people would envy you.”
In 1941, Drury, a doctor, was posted to the Middle East. Wittgenstein came to Liverpool to say goodbye to him, and presented him with a silver drinking cup.
Wittgenstein: “Water tastes so much nicer out of silver. There is only one condition attached to this gift: you are not to worry if it gets lost.”
Earlier, in a 1938 notebook, he wrote: “Whoever is unwilling to descend into himself, because it is too painful, will of course remain superficial in his writing.”
And the following year: “The truth can be spoken only by one who rests in it; not by one who still rests in falsehood, and who reaches out from falsehood to truth just once.”
The pen is mightier than the general
Posted: June 25, 2010 Filed under: articles, people, writing Leave a comment
Journalism note: The fallout from the Michael Hastings story in Rolling Stone magazine on Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal doesn’t surprise me, considering the picture he gave of the general’s character, lifestyle and the personalities that surrounded him. It all came across like one big ego pile-on with the general miscast in the job he was assigned. He’s a warrior, not a diplomat. What I came away with was surprise over how he was chosen for this particular job. He seemed like he didn’t really understand the complexity of the job he was assigned to do, and he probably lacked the essential skills to pull it off. He certainly didn’t understand how to deal with a reporter like Hastings, and that goes double for his staff.
Hastings simply did what any magazine writer would do: He reported what he heard and saw happening around the general in addition to what was said in response to his questions. McCrystal and his staff know all the rules of reporting regarding off the record, background, etc. Hastings’ editor said those rules were followed and honored when they were discussed. On the larger front, as we know from Vietnam, turning a flawed war policy around is seemingly impossible. It takes a courage that almost no politician has ever possessed. For the politician, in Afghanistan it’s better to chart a course that slowly fails that to lead by ending failure. Ten years in Afghanistan is enough, but it will probably drag on for three to five more years, or perhaps longer. The country must find its own way on its own timeline, because we certainly can’t affect or change their culture in time to make much of a difference. Talk, compromise, support. Stop the fighting.
Michael Hastings’ book about Iraq received glowing reviews. See his recent posts on his Rolling Stone blog and on his personal blog at True/Slant. You can read a brief biography and an interesting questionnaire that he filled out.
Dylan, Bloom, misreading
Posted: June 20, 2010 Filed under: articles, interviews, people, writing Leave a comment
Christmas in the Heart, Dylan's seasonal holiday songs
I’m a fan of Harold Bloom’s literary criticism, and his theory of misreading. It’s a complicated theory, but it hinges on the idea that most critics and the general public misunderstand the work of really new artists upon inception, and it can take generations for the real meaning/stance to be clearly understood and felt. Nowhere is that more true than with singer-poet Bob Dylan, much of whose work is wildly misunderstood. Chronicles, the autobiography he released a few years ago, was greeted by many who said that Dylan’s memoir was a put-on, loaded with irony, and meant to toy with his public image. Applying Bloom’s theory, which is right on target in this case, it’s the opposite. Dylan was just being himself, honestly and sincerely. The strange thing about Dylan is that a big segment of the public mind has never grown up over the years and figured him out. It continues to misread him and his work. Here’s a small bit from an interview Dylan did on the release of an album of Christmas songs last year (I missed its release entirely). The full interview is worth reading because it brings out the on-going misreading. What is at stake here goes back to Dylan’s emergence as an artist with a larger-than-life image. Why that should be so may take another generation to fully understand. My guess is that his least appreciated, so-called “minor” songs now will become the most appreciated, and most of the popular, so-called classic songs will become less important because they will lack the context of the time in which they were created.
BF: Some critics don’t seem to know what to make of this record. Bloomberg news said, “Some of the songs sound ironic. Does he really mean have yourself a Merry Little Christmas?” Is there any ironic content in these songs?
BD: No not at all. Critics like that are on the outside looking in. They are definitely not fans or the audience that I play to. They would have no gut level understanding of me and my work, what I can and can’t do – the scope of it all. Even at this point in time they still don’t know what to make of me.
BF: Derek Barker in the Independent, compared this record with the shock of you going electric. So many artists have released Christmas records, from Bing Crosby to Huey Piano Smith. Why is it a shock if you do it?
BD: You’ll have to ask them.
Thai music: Joe Cummings
Posted: June 17, 2010 Filed under: articles, interviews, people 1 CommentJoe Cummings is one of the best people to talk to about anything Thai. After more than two decades roaming Thailand and Southeast Asia, he sees the scene, high and low, in great detail. In an earlier life, he created the running series of Lonely Planet Thailand guide books. I asked him to talk about the Thai music scene, especially rural music.
Roy Hamric: When farangs first come to Thailand, they eventually hear about look thung music. What is it exactly?
Joe Cummings: The name literally translates as “children of the fields,” but means, in essence, farmers. In many ways, it’s the Thai equivalent of country & western in America in its stories and tightly structured formulae. But just as country western has been moving towards rock and roll, look thung is moving that way from traditional forms. If you’re in a taxi in Bangkok most likely you’ll be listening to look thung. It’s the same kind of lyrics: lost your job, your truck broke down, your wife left you. There are two basic styles, the original suphanburi style, with lyrics in standard Thai, and an Ubon style sung in Issan (northeastern) dialect. Thailand’s most famous look thung singer, Pumpuang Duangjan, rated a royally sponsored cremation when she died in 1992.
joe cummings
Chai Muang Sing and Siriporn Amphaipong have been the most beloved look thung superstars for several years, with lesser lights coming and going. Other stars include former soap opera star Got Chakraband and Monsit Khamsoi, whose trademark silky vocal style has proved enormously popular.
Look thung has lately been adopted and adapted by long-haired Thai bands such as Carabao, the most popular pop group in Thai history, complete with electric guitars and lots of rock posturing. It’s sort of like redneck rock.
Look thung is popularly heard in the Thai café, which is anything but a coffeeshop in the Western sense, but rather a dark nightclub where a succession of scantily clad female singers take the stage to perform watered-down versions of look thung hits. There are some more grand venues for the music, however, such as the legendary Café Rama 9 in Bangkok.
Q. Some people claim Maw Lam trumps Look Thung for authenticity, originality and a look into the Thai soul.
Arguably the most authentically native strain of Thai music is maw lam which developed in northeastern Thailand and Laos around 100 years ago. Fans in the northeast breath, live and die for this music. The main instrument is still the khaen, a traditional Lao-Thai pan pipe. It has a very dynamic beat, usually a quick 3/8 tempo with a strong bass line reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix’s Third Stone from the Sun. The lyrics are more hard core than in look thung, with more politics, more sex and more violence. It’s almost like Mississippi Delta blues with its rougher language and songs about murder and suicide. Jintara Poonlap and Chalermphol Malaikham continue to reign as queen and king of maw lam.
When you see an authentic maw lam performance live in the northeast (as opposed to on TV in Bangkok), you’ll see how intense the bands can get, with lots of sweat and veins popping out on the forehead. The players really get into it.
It’s most commonly performed at festivals and temple fairs. One of the best festivals for maw lam is the Dok Khoon Siang Khaen Flower Festival in Khon Kaen, also Phi Ta Khon festival in Dan Sai, Loei.
Q. Some groups must have updated both Look Thung and Maw Lam?
Just as Bob Dylan took folk, blues and rock and wove them together with a political outlook in his early to mid-1960s songs, the Thai band Caravan grafted Thai rural folk melodies onto Dylan- and Springsteen-influenced song structures to create a genre of protest-oriented songs called phleng pheua cheewit (Songs for Life), beginning in the late 1970s.
Caravan and their music were banned from public performances throughout the Thai military dictatorship of the 70s and 80s. As Thai politics stablized in the late 80s, the genre was picked up by other groups and commercialized. Much as the sounds of politically oriented Buffalo Springfield were later co-opted by Poco and The Eagles in the USA, Caravan’s musical creation was taken to market by Carabao.
You won’t find much live maw lam in Bangkok or in many clubs even in Issan. Songs For Life can be heard in smaller bars typically decorated with water buffalo skulls and buffalo-cart wheels. Chiang Mai has one of the better venues for Songs For Life (although not exclusively), a bar called Sudsanan.
Q. The Pai music scene is attracting a lot of interest musically, right?
For such a small town, Pai (Mae Hong Son Province) does have an amazing music scene. Be-Bop Bar, which has been around since the late 90s, attracts musicians and bands from all over Thailand, and some from other countries as well. The place is packed with live music lovers every night, and the roster of bands change nightly. Aside from Caravan and Carabao, both of whom have performed there, Be-Bop has recently hosted Mason Ruffner (former guitarist for Bob Dylan), Aussie bluesman Mojo Webb, and New Orleans-style pianist Mitch Woods. The owner, Sucharat Panpai, is an excellent blues and jazz guitarist himself, and he plays there regularly with his own band.
Parking Pai, a branch of Bangkok’s Parking Toys, offers a variety of live music, usually local or Chiang Mai acts playing international and Thai music, sometimes something a little different, including indie bands from Bangkok. Edible Jazz does live jazz and blues in a rustic bambbo-and-wood setting.
Q. What about contemporary Thai music?
Most popular on Thai radio is T-Pop, meaning Thai pop, a borrowing from Japan’s J-Pop. I don’t find it very original-sounding, with its general emphasis on Western 80s New Wave production style, with heavily processed guitars and keyboard washes and lyrics about teen love. The language features a lot of faux naïve lyrics, again influenced by J-Pop.
Singers who are look khreung – half-Thai, half-farang– and sport Western names are particularly popular. For example, Tata Young, Nicole Theriault and the original look khreung heartthrob, Thongchai “Bird” MacIntyre.
Thai mainstream rock is more unique. Although obviously influenced by Western bands like Guns and Roses, Thai rockers have a way of taking the genre and giving it a Thai twist. Just where you might end the chord progression in a typical Western rock song, they’ll tag on a little something, often taking a minor key song back into its relative major. Loso is still the biggest traditional Thai rock band.
In the 1990s an alternative pop scene known as klawng sehrii or “free drum” in Thail, also phleng ta\^i din, “underground music”––grew in Bangkok. Hip-hop/ska artist Joey Boy not only explored new musical frontiers but released lyrics that the Department of Culture banned. Thaitanium have taken over that territory and are currently the number-one hip-hop act in Thailand. Ska seems more popular than ever. Of course the veterans on the scene are T-Bone, who groove equally well in Thai and English. They’re internationally recognized, even scored a small stage at Glastonbury a few years ago. But there are a whole bunch of new ska bands that take it much closer to the roots of the genre.
Modern Dog, a Britpop-inspired band of four Chulalongkorn University graduates, brought independent Thai music into the mainstream, and their success prompted an explosion of similar bands and indie recording labels. Among the most significant indie rock acts in Thailand, from my perspective, were Day Tripper, Silly Fools and Futon. I think Silly Fools still plays but the other two groups are gone. Gene Kasadit from Futon now does his own thing, more outrageous than ever, while other members of Futon have formed Goo, who put on a seriously kickass rock show.
There’s a new generation of indie bands who are really state of the art for Thailand, often composing songs in English or in both English and Thai. Among these, my present favourites include Zero Hero, Abuse The Youth, Revenge of the Cybermen, Class A Cigarettes.
Q. When you visit Bangkok, where do you go to hear good music?
The situation has gotten pretty dire over the last couple of years. A few special venues like Rain Dogs, The Tube and Lullaby have disappeared. Saxophone, at the Victory Circle, is an old holdover from the 80s that’s still good for blues, funk and fusion, with occasional acts from overseas like Eddie Baytos and Mason Ruffner. Ad Here the 13th, on Samsen Road near Soi 1, is a personal fave. I love the house blues band, led by owner Pong. Common Ground on Samsen Rd occasionally has a good lineup of indie bands, as does Bangkok Rocks on Sukhumvit Soi 19. Club Culture recently re-located to a spot near the Democracy Monument but has gone mostly DJ, with the occasional live show. DJ culture has just about taken over the city. Parking Toys off Kaset Nawamin Rd has a nightly line-up of bands playing rock, latin and funk, occasionally something more modern. Stu-Fe, near the Nam Kluay Thai intersection of Rama 4, is run by a musicians collective called Monotone, and on the weekends the jams can be pretty good. I’ve become a big fan of Belgian accordionist Matthieu Ha, who has played there. Overtone Music Cave, in the RCA area, has a state-of-the-art sound system and will become a popular spot for fusion and prog rock. I’m living in Bangkok now, but sometimes I have to fly to Chiang Mai to hear good live music at Guitarman.
Q. And what about classical Thai music?
Classical Thai music, known as peepat (the name of the ensemble itself), is based on styles of music imported from the Cambodian royal court during the Ayuthaya era, so it can be argued that it’s not particularly Thai. It’s also not very popular and is for the most part reserved for ceremonial performances, tourist dinner shows and occasional Thai cinema.
Classical Thai music received a huge boost in 2004 when the film Hom Rong (The Overture) was released. Based on the life story of Thai maestro Luang Pradit Phairoh (1881-1954), the film chronicles an era when Thai political leaders were trying to suppress traditional Thai music in favour of Western classical music in order to prove to would-be colonisers that Thais were “civilized.” In the first few months after the film’s opening, new students were practically standing in line to learn ranaat ehk (classical wooden xylophone) at Bangkok music schools.
Q. It seems your music life is picking up and your travel writing life is slowing down. Talk about the music…
I actually started playing in rock bands when I was 15, and by the time I was 20, I was touring with a band called The Fog that opened for the likes of Blue Oyster Cult, Uriah Heep and Edgar Winter’s White Trash. I came to Thailand shortly after that period and have been jamming around Bangkok since dinosaurs roamed Sukhumvit Road.
joe cummings and marie dance in a Chiang Mai recording studio
A few years ago I met Marie Dance, a talented singer-songwriter-guitarist from England. We played together a few times with a band called The Jackalans, based in Pai, and as we got more serious about writing and performing originals, we changed the name to The Tonic Rays. We recorded one album, which miraculously made the Billboard Critics Top 10 Albums of 2008, courtesy of rock critic Chuck Eddy. You can download the tunes at Amazon, Rhapsody, iTunes, and CDBaby. You can also hear a few tracks at www.myspace.com/tonicrays. We were based in Chiang Mai and played a lot there (at Babylon, Drunken Flower and Guitarman) and in Pai (Be-Bop and now-defunct Phu Pai), but we also played in Bangkok, Pattaya and Ko Phi Phi. Marie is out of the picture for now, but I may start another band soon. I’ve been jamming with Cannonball here in Bangkok and also in Saigon last year at a music fest. Mason Ruffner is coming back to Thailand in August, and so I’ll join him for a spell. I was in Berlin recently and really stoked by the scene there.
Q. So is Joe Cummings still in the travel writing business?
I guess you could say I have a dual life. My day job now is writing about art, culture, architecture and people for The Magazine of The Bangkok Post. Also, on my own I do mostly large format books like Lanna Renaisance, Chiang Mai Style and Buddhist Temples of Thailand, rather than guidebooks. At night, I still play music. Sometimes it feels like there’s two of me in one tired body!
Q. Now we fade to silence.
Drum roll…
searching for Orwell
Posted: June 17, 2010 Filed under: articles, people, reviews Leave a commentThis is a revised version of a review published in The Kyoto Journal prior to the 2010 national election which led to the creation of a parliament and the opening up of Burma to democracy.
Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop by Emma Larkin
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”––Nineteen Eighty-Four
By Roy Hamric
Early into Emma Larkin’s extended stay in Burma while she was gathering material for Secret Histories, she visited a Burmese scholar and brought up George Orwell’s name.
“You mean the prophet!” the man exclaimed.
In Burma today, rechristened Myanmar in 1989 by a military junta that has methodically repressed the country and turned it into a pariah state, there is a joke that Orwell wrote not just one book about the country, Burmese Days, but two more: Animal Farm, the tale of a socialist revolution in which pigs overthrow human farmers and set about to destroy the farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, the story of a heartless dystopia. The trilogy depicts a before-and-after picture of Burma-Myanmar.
Emma Larkin is the pseudonym of an American journalist, born in Asia, who has spent long stretches of time living in Burma, a rarity for Western writers these days. Her book has added luster now because Burma is has undergone profound changes since the 2010 elections, in which the junta handed over power to a parliament and began a rapid move to establish a democracy, a normal civil society and open up its closed culture to foreign investment and businesses.
Larkin’s book is now a time capsule on what Burma was like under a bloody totalitarian military regime, which massacred many students and other in demonstrations over a two decade period. She wisely steered clear of the tourist trail, preferring quiet visits with ordinary Burmese in the former capital of Rangoon or in towns and villages in the north and south. The result is unsurprisingly a book that feels Orwellian, a sad testament to the fact that Burma hasn’t progressed much in nearly 90 years, when Orwell was serving unhappily as a policeman for the British crown, in the waning days of its Asian empire. The Burmese eventually threw the British out, but what they got in return has been a dismal chronicle of brutal, incompetent, repressive military dictatorships which have driven the country into the ground.
Reading about life in Burma in the hands of Larkin is a pleasure on many levels. She writes a gentle prose which, largely free of polemical arguments, lets the Burmese people speak for themselves. For those who are unaware of Burma’s recent history, the book is a primer on the woeful battering suffered by its citizens at the hands of cold, ruthless military regimes that first took power in the 1950s, and is known most recently for the 1988 massacre of an estimated 3,000 people–– students, monks, citizens and children––who took to the streets to protest nearly three decades of military rule and neglect. Burma, during the time of Larkin’s book, was the same Burma of long ago. It had undergone little change. The infrastructure is still in shambles, electricity was non-existent or rationed, the press was censored, individual initiative was discouraged, political speech was repressed and pro-democracy activists were routinely rounded up and sentenced to prison on draconian charges grounded on state control. Commodities were scarce, but mostly just non-existent. Jobs were scarcer. Reliable information couldn’t be found. An ever-present fear of informers hovered over all conversations, especially with foreigners, and the fear was captured in the expression pasien yo, literally “the handle of the ax”––signifying the tool used to chop down a tree is made from the wood of the tree itself. The people are kept in line through fear of their fellow citizens.
On another level, the book is a detective story, as Larkin searches out the places where Orwell, as a young man, lived and worked. She visits all the towns where he was posted as an officer in the Imperial police force, starting in 1922: Mandalay in the country’s center; Myaungmya and Twante, in the Delta swamplands; the capital of Rangoon (now called Yangon by the junta); Moulmein, on the eastern peninsular; and Katha, in the foothills of northern Burma, which became the fictional setting for Burmese Days.
In her travels, she finds that many of the dwellings and buildings where Orwell lived and worked are still in use or now lie abandoned to dust and weeds. In each town, the people who befriend Larkin are etched in vivid portraits.
Lastly, the book is a chilling picture of what life is like on the Animal Farm in post-Nineteen Eighty-Four. Inertia, gloom, paranoia and absurdity color the days. The country stagnates, a tangible entropy unwinds downward, progress is systematically retarded: ancient taxis, held together with wire and prayers, rattle around potholes, all print and broadcast media are policed, information from the outside world is sketchy, tourists must register passports at hotels and guesthouses and state their next destination (duly recorded by the desk clerk). The Burmese themselves must inform the local authorities if anyone––Burmese or foreigner––stays overnight in their home. In such an environment, the people are expert at reading and decipher rumors, for they are often the most reliable clues to important events the government tries to suppress. Leaders of opposition groups, all brave souls, are routinely spied on, intimidated or jailed, and on and on. In one town, Larkin was required to visit nine governmental agencies to inform them that she had arrived in the town. In spite of the obstacles, the Burmese people somehow struggled on, carving out pockets of happiness in simple pleasures.
Larkin’s sympathies for the Burmese people stand out, but she offers little hope for a better life anytime soon, and recent events confirm her pessimism. China, Russia and South Africa’s recent vetoes of the U.S. and British resolutions to place Burma’s human rights record on the U.N Security Council agenda confirms that brutal regimes have friends in the world. Asean, the organization of Southeast Asian nations, had a dismal record on Burma, defending its timid stance under its “softly, softly” rubric of Asian values and non-interference in a brother state’s internal affairs.
Meanwhile, millions of Burmese were displaced over five decades by a cold-blooded military machine, whose soldiers routinely rape women and burn villages and homes of ethnic citizens, causing them to flee to the safety of the jungle and border areas.
Burma under the bloody military regime was almost beyond belief, but then again, no. In colonial Burma, George Orwell first glimpsed the dark shadows where greed, lies and governmental repression can lead. Larkin takes us farther down that totalitarian road and deep into Burma’s darkness under the military regimes which turned Orwell’s prophetic nightmare into a frightening, daily reality.
why Stanley Cavell?
Posted: June 5, 2010 Filed under: articles, books, people, states of mind 1 CommentI was first attracted to Stanley Cavell’s study of Thoreau, The Senses of Walden, and his deep probing of Emerson’s ideas in essays throughout his many books. All his books circle around American thought, American originality, while pulling in Wittgenstein, Kirkegarde, J.L. Austin, Heidegger, and others, with a commitment to use ordinary language and works of literature as a common ground of thought through which we all can assess and explore life, not something separate from philosophy but a living part of a philosophy that identifies itself with a deeper sense of experience. I think the passage below from the preface to Must We Mean What We Say?, as well as any, summarizes his intent and purpose:
“I suppose that the idea of the philosopher as guide was formed in me in resistance to the still current idea of the philosopher as guard. So I should perhaps add that at no period in my life has it occurred to me that philosophical problems are unreal, that is, that they could be cured and philosophy thus ended, as if left behind. The problems I was concerned with are better expressed as about the all but unappeasable craving for unreality. Kant’s diagnosis of such perplexities was as “transcendental illusions.
“I had in Must We Mean What We Say? already suggested understanding the philosophical appeal to the ordinary in relation to Kant’s transcendental logic, namely, as the sense of uncovering the necessary conditions of the shared world, but not until the second essay in the book, The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy, was I able to give a certain textuality to this relation to Kant, at the point at which Wittgenstein in Investigations announces that “Our investigation….is directed not toward phenomena, but, as one might say, toward the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena.” And it would not be until the Claim of Reason that I would feel I had secured some significant progress in assessing the difference it makes that Wittgenstein sees illusions of meaning as something to which the finite creature is subject chronically, diurnally, as if in every word beyond the reach of the philosophical system. The idea that there is no absolute escape from (the threat of) illusions and the desires constructed from them says there is no therapy for this, in the sense of a cure for it…[that] was evidently something that captured my fascination halfway through Must We Mean What We Say? with Samuel Beckett’s Engame––in effect a study of the circumstances that say, “You’re on Earth, there is no cure for that.”
meditation retreats in Chiang Mai
Posted: May 28, 2010 Filed under: articles, buddhism, states of mind 2 Comments
wat ram poeng in Chiang Mai
This article originally appeared in The Boston Globe.
By Roy Hamric
Foreigners first began visiting Chiang Mai in the late 19th century when the British opened a mountain station to extract teak and other timber. During the Vietnam War, Americans found it to be the most beautiful and sleepy of Thailand’s mountain cities. Today, it’s ranked among the top of Asia’s most livable cities list and an increasing number of Chiang Mai’s Buddhist wats, or temples, are drawing more and more Westerners seeking meditation retreats.
Many falangs (foreigners) are forsaking the more traditional spas and venues that offer massage, Thai cooking and yoga classes for Buddhist studies classes in English and Thai-style meditation retreats from one to 21-days or longer.
A popular temple among Westerners is Wat Umong, one of Chiang Mai’s 300 wats, located in the foothills of Mount Doi Suthep, which rises 5,478 feet above the 1,000-year-old city. “Wat” is a Thai word from the Pali-Sanskrit word meaning “dwelling for pupils and ascetics.” Wat Umong’s history goes back to the 14th century.
On the densely wooded temple grounds, moss-covered limestone sculptures of the Buddha are scattered over the grounds, some nearly completely covered by climbing vines. Small kutis–– self-sufficient huts that house one monk each––are bathed in yellow sunbeams filtering through the leafy canopy. The deep murmuring sound of monks’ chanting sutras filled the evening air. Blue signs with white lettering offered helpful aphorisms: “Today Is Better Than Two Tomorrows.” “I have not failed––I found ways that don’t work.”
One Sunday afternoon, I joined sixteen foreigners who sat quietly in a red-roofed Chinese Pavilion area near a two-acre pond. Green algae circled the pond’s edge extending out almost to its center, leaving a circle of water where large turtles poked their snouts into the air.
Nirodho Bikkhu, an Australian monk who lives in a nearby kuti, walked into the pavilion and sat down. He adjusted his brown robe and smiled.
“I would rather answer your questions and just talk. Does anyone have a question?” he asked. Moments of silence. Finally, a young girl with bronze skin from days on the road asked: “Is reality real?”
The monk smiled. Speaking slowly, he explained what the Buddha said about objective and subjective views. He talked about meditation as a way to experience the mind, the senses and the body. He talked about a concept in Vipassana Buddhism of small, discreet divisions of mental activity that can take years of meditation to fully distinguish. “They pass by unnoticed by most people,” he said.
More silence. Then an American lady asked: “What about bardos,” the different stages of the death-journey found in Tibetan Buddhism.
“I speak only about what the Buddha said,” Norodho Bikkhu answered. “bardos are concepts found only in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.”
A young American woman, Laura Robbins, listened quietly to the monk, and stayed the full two hours. After everyone left, she had a private conversation with Nirodho Bikkhu.
Later, walking beside the pond, she said she was starting a 21-day meditation retreat in two days at a nearby monastery.
“A little serendipity got me to this point,” she said. While on vacation, she had a conversation with the owner of a Thai restaurant who gave her the name of an American woman who teaches meditation at a wat outside Chiang Mai.
“I choose that temple,” she said, “because of what the woman teacher said, and I liked it that there were a lot of nuns there.”
In the past, it took a lot of effort for Westerners to find a wat where they could receive introductory lectures on Buddhism or go on short or long meditation retreats. Like many temples, Wat Umong is rapidly expanding its offerings to Westerners.
“We will be a friend to anyone who wants to know more about Buddhism,” said Songserm Bikkhu, the teaching monk who directs Wat Umong’s newly opened International Buddhist Education and Meditation Practice Center, which has 17 rooms for foreigners, who can choose from one to four-day retreats. The cost is a personal donation. Many Westerners give $4 to $6 a day.
“If people would like to take a retreat or to ordain as a monk and practice here, they can,” Songserm Bikkhu said. “If they would just like to come, learn and go and practice on their own, they can.”
Most Chiang Mai wats teach Vipasanna meditation, a system based on meditation and attention to the four foundations of mindfulness. Exercises are based on mindfulness of body and movement, mindfulness of feelings, mindfulness of mind and mindfulness of objects. In Pali, Vipasanna means “to see clearly.”
walking meditation at wat ram poeng
The retreat schedule is the same at most wats: rise at 4 a.m. followed by morning chanting and mediation, breakfast, dharma study, followed by lunch, afternoon walking and sitting meditation, a one-on-one talk with the supervising monk, rest time and evening chanting, concluded by more sitting and walking meditation. Students are encouraged to do sitting and walking meditation up to 12 hours a day, but few can or even try.
A short distance down the road from Wat Umong is Wat Ram Poeng, built in 1451, with touches of Burmese Buddhist architecture. A popular meditation center with Asians and foreigners alike, the wat is home to the Northern Insight Vipasanna Mediation Center.
Eric Stirnweis of Fort Collins, Colo., was in his second week of retreat, along with other Americans and people from Sweden, Canada and France. While waiting for his daily interview with the abbot, he said he had already increased his walking and sitting meditation to about 12 hours a day.
“Here you eat, sleep and meditate—that’s it,” Stirnweis said. “They push you.”
At the end of the retreat period, he said, each student goes through “termination” – a three-day period of very little sleep and constant sitting and walking meditation.
The daily interviews are helpful, he said, but the practice is tough with lots of ups and downs.
“It’s different – no telephone, no e-mail, six hours of sleep a day at most, but it’s a healthy focus,” he said. “The abbot is definitely perceptive. I didn’t even say anything one morning, and he said, ‘Ah, there’s much negativity here.’ He seems to know you without talking to you.”
Wat Ram Poeng is in the process of expanding facilities to house up to 30 foreigners.
Frequently, foreigners who want even longer retreats are sent to Wat Dthat Sri, a sister temple. It also is in the process of creating a foreigner-housing area complete with small cottages outside the wat grounds.
An American, Kathryn Chindaporn, who co-directs the meditation center for foreigners with her Thai husband, remembered her phone conversation with Laura Robbins.
“This is a good place for basic or long-term practice, tailored to individuals,” said Chindaporn, who is from Evervett, Wash. “We use the mental labeling technique. The technique is easy. You think, ‘I’m taking a step with my right foot, or I’m feeling content or sad.’ It’s easy to use, but the practice makes it very deep.”
Chindaporn said she was on her way to India in 1986, but found herself staying on in Chiang Mai to practice full-time at Wat Ram Poeng, where she took classes in Buddhist studies, learned Thai and has since translated early Thai meditation texts into English.
Meanwhile, Laura Robbins had started her retreat at the wat and had begun daily interviews with Thanat Chindaporn.
“It’s going fine,” she said, while in her second day of the retreat. Ten days later, she took a two-day break, but planned to return the next day for another 10-day stay.
“It was very difficult,” she said. “I wanted to leave at least three times. I was surprised how hard it was––the simplicity of it was frustrating.
“My mind was running everywhere,” she said. “At the end we tried to practice for 72 hours straight. I had some very set ideas about who I am. I found that by pushing past that I’ve come out being much more gentle with myself.”
You can’t ask for much more than that in life.
______________
Contact Information
Wat Umong, 135 Moo 10, T. Suthep, Chiang Mai, 50200, Thailand; Open lectures in English on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 4 to 6 p.m. and on Saturdays from 2 to 5 p.m. Telephone: 011.66. 53. 810. 965; email: phrasongserm@watumong.org or www.watumong.org.
Wat Ram Poeng, Northern Insight Meditation Center; Tambol Suthep, Amphur Muang, Chiang Mai, 50200, Thailand. Telephone: 011.66.53. 278.620; email: watrampoeng@hotmail.com or www. watrampoenghi5.com
Wat Dhat Sri, Northern Insight Meditation Center, Tambon San Luang, Amphur Chomtong, Chiang Mai, 50160, Thailand. Telephone: 011.66.53.826.180. Email: kathrynchindaporn@yahoo.com
A war story
Posted: May 25, 2010 Filed under: articles, places, reviews 4 CommentsThis review originally appeared in The Journalism Quarterly.
The Cat From Hue: A Vietnam War Story by John Laurence. New York: PublicAffairs, 2002. 851 pages; $30 hbk.
A little War Goes a Long Way
By Roy Hamric
A later cover
John Laurence was among the best, the brightest, and the most unique of all the American war correspondents who reported from Vietnam. He arrived in Vietnam in 1965, in his early ‘20s, and he went on to work as a correspondent for CBS and ABC News. Laurence looked frail, more like a graduate student than a war correspondent, but few journalists took more risks or covered Vietnam longer–Peter Arnett and Horst Fass come to mind. Very few covered as many of the well-known battles, and–just as important–the deadly, daily skirmishes.
Covering so much combat, Vietnam-style (from the jungles to the Continental Hotel), cost Laurence dearly in emotional turmoil. His personal view of the war paralleled many of the troops’ attitudes. He began with absolutely no doubt about America’s role and ability to win. Later, both he and large numbers of troops felt differently–shifting from winning to just surviving and coming home. Few works of nonfiction (or fiction) have so much human drama, pathos, bravery and professional and human lessons embedded into the story. We also get an invaluable lesson manual on how war correspondents should, and should not, cover war.
GIs were regularly astounded that TV and print correspondents would voluntarily come in to battlefields while troops were taking fire. The reports Laurence and his team (particularly cameraman Keith Kay and soundman Jim Clevenger) did for CBS television were staples of Walter Cronkite’s evening news broadcasts, riveting a national audience that was experiencing its own anguish over the war’s meaning and costs.
Strewn with laurels comparing this memoir to the war correspondence of Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway, the book is more artistic and powerful than one would expect. It is likely to become a classic in Vietnam War literature. A seasoned storyteller, Laurence’s story was backed up by hundreds of sound tapes and film reports which he has used to reconstruct vivid prose scenes that carry a descriptive punch that pays homage to what the camera and recorder can capture, and memory and emotions can recreate.
Few memoirs rise to such clarity in conveying the exhilaration, fears and rewards of war reportage, or the uplifting and heartbreaking memories many correspondents carried home, only to deal with privately away from the war. Laurence had his peers’ respect, especially the circle known as the “crazies” as opposed to the “straights.” The decompression base for the “crazies” was British photographer Tim Page’s Saigon apartment, known as “Frankie’s Place.”
The later years of the Vietnam War were equal parts marijuana, rock and roll, irony and cynicism for many in the military and press, along with professionalism, loyalty, devotion and bravery. Laurence’s professional and personal life navigated all those shores.
He includes warm sketches of his fellow colleagues: Page, freelancer Michael Herr, CBS correspondent Hughes Rudd, writer Frances Fitzgerald, a contingent of British journalists, and, especially, Look correspondent Sam Castan (who died in combat), and freelance photographers Dana Stone and Sean Flynn (who were killed in Cambodia). Someone in that crowd, at some point, said, “This is our Paris.” They were right, only it was more dangerous.
Some gleanings from Laurence:
–The full truth of the Vietnam War (or any war) is never reported. Just one area: the carnage regularly inflicted on innocent civilians. In spelling out some reasons, Laurence takes you several notches up on the complexity scale of war coverage.
He was young, but older than most of the troops
–“The language of our daily journalism was insufficient,” Laurence says. “For all the facts we poured out of Vietnam, we might better have served the truth by broadcasting some of the letters the GIs wrote to their families.”
–“Of all the media,” he says, “perhaps still photography came closest to showing the truth.The best photographs captured a precise moment, holding it there for inspection, offering each image as a fragmentary symbol of someone’s reality. By the nature of their ambiguity, those pictures gave viewers the privilege of using their imaginations to interpret the reality.”
–Michael Herr’s masterwork “Dispatches” may have benefitted from sound recordings Laurence sent him that were made during a night battle involving a rowdy Army company at “Firebase Jay,” which–symbolically–could stand for “joint,” as in marijuana. To Laurence’s surprise, large numbers of GIs relaxed at night with dope, booze and blaring rock and roll–it was a template for “Apocalypse Now.”
–In times of danger, war correspondents should follow the sergeants–they know what they’re doing. Officers may or may not.
Laurence digs deepest into his three tours in 1965-66, 1967-68 and 1970, but he takes his story up to his 1982 return to Vietnam and the country’s march to renewed prosperity. Students, war colleges, journalists and news organizations’ management can learn immense lessons from Laurence’s story.
If the newest crop of war correspondents read this book, they–and the public–will be well served.
the roy hamric journal 