First Night in Bangkok
Christopher Hitchens once said that however hard you try to avoid cliché, visiting communist Czechoslovakia forces you to reference Kafka at some point.
Anyways, Bangkok really is a fucking trip, man. I feel like I died two days ago and reincarnated in a William Gibson novel. So very much.
Inhuman cybercapital futurity assembling itself in a thousand gleaming Hong Kong-domiciled gigabanks and digital nomad cafés and dancing girls as it chokes old Buddhist temples and shantytowns and struggling palms in a traumatically transcultural miasma of a myriad reactive nitrous oxide species coughed up by a million two-stroke motors.
After a brief nap in my luxury burbclave hotel, security guard and English-fluent beaming hotel staff staff at post, me trying to do battle against 15 timezone hours' worth of jetlag, I register for the first time that I've been dissociating. I'm hobbling around on the air cast I wear for my foot sprain and a collapsible Walgreens cane, of the kind I imagine two-bit hustlers using to beat drug dealers poaching on their turf. But I'm in my favorite mass-market synthetic ink tie dye shirt, made somewhere in Central America I don't recall off hand, my blue tourist shorts, and my Buddhist beaded mala, engraved with Sanskrit I cannot read, on plastic draw string, so hopefully everyone knows I'm a chill dude.
I am in an eight floor mega shopping mall. There are robots serving white frat boys and dutiful waiters in white masks who could be robots serving local Thai prep school kids in sky blue school uniforms 500 baht sirloin steak dinners.
There are as many languages spoken here it feels like as New York City. And hotels, restaurant, massage parlors, tailors, purpose built to pander to rich Arabs, rich Chinese, rich Americans.
There is a strange amodernity to all the floating signifiers. White spring break kids approximating Thai names and wai hand clasps. Chinese shirts with a Markov chain’s chants of floating English prestige nonsense. Transcontinental fake gold watch arbitrageurs. More virtual market makers than a Jersey City server farm somehow spun up and cast into human form.
Sub-orbital resort vacationers in one corner. The state messages of the network monarch on a giant billboard overlooking a four-story expressway overpass on another. Everyone communicating in signs, gestures, and humble Buddhist bows. Hindu, Christian, Mormon, Jew, Shiite, Sunni, and so many Buddhists, all sitting and eating and shopping and praying and coughing and sputtering and fucking and bowing to one another at the end of the world before the self-aware chatbots reconstitute all the anthropomass on the third rock from the nuclear furnace. And of course, on TV, a narcissistic reality TV star in orange bronzer and an oversized navy blue Brioni suit and red tie is inaugurated president of the United States for a second time.
And my $4 dinner, served by surgically masked waitstaff at the shopping mall of the omega point. The terminal object in the category of mass market commercialism. Another floating signifier: a featured photo on Wikipedia of beautiful Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where I've actually been, here mobilized as a metonym for the kind of steak restaurant this place is supposed to be. Of course, probably no one who works here has been to America. It reminds me of Gilles Deleuze’s characterization of capitalism as an inherently deterritorializing process—one that makes every place into every other place, until no one knows where they are.
And the strangest thing is that somehow, between the tourists trying to immerse themselves in the fakery, and the shop workers trying to perform, something genuine is created, even though the thing the performance refers to is fake—and everyone knows it.
Actually, maybe the craziest moment was when I was walking past the clothing hawkers. Of which there were just so unbelievably many. And they were selling wildly unlicensed branded merch for Luis Vuitton and Ralph Loren and Balenciaga and GUESS, etc. Some of them laughably implausible. But others effectively the real thing. The Asian tourists love those in particular. And I asked myself, “how did these knockoffs get so good?”
And then I remembered: Thailand is the place where all of this crap actually gets made! It’s all outsourced to here. They’re just cutting out the middle men seeking rent on the brand. And so I’m not really sure who’s the fraud here. Is it the unlicensed shirt hawker trying to take me for a ride and fudge their “tax” calculations? Or is it the Italian fashion house trying to charge me 20x what it costs the Thai sweatshop workers to make?
I see a case for each.
Obviously not JUST Thailand makes this. There’s also Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Honduras, Costa Rica, etc. All the groveling satellite states trying to scramble up the value-added ladder that capital and IP and telecom flows have turned into the 21st century's Manchester. All part of that big globalized textile mill.
Anyways, I got a pretty nice white dress shirt for like $15 and a truly label-less white bucket hat for $5. And I’m almost sure I got taken for a ride, but I was waaay too tired to haggle, and anyways, by any standard of justice as globalized as these clothing flows, I'm the one taking them for a ride.
I message my mother, half way around the world. It's 7:30 AM on the Eastern Seaboard of the US. It's 7:30 PM here in Bangkok. My mother says, "Keep your wits about you, man. You have to play the haggle game. It's in your Albanian blood. My grandmother would have taught you plenty, had she been there."
I can't help but think that they’d have been like, “no, please! Just take it! For free!! ” after 3 minutes of that. Those Bangkok street hagglers have never met an Albanian orphan.
Gonna go to a Buddhist temple tomorrow. First, tonight, a cocktail bar overlooking the city. In my $1000 black John Varvatos jacket with the Mandarin collar over the $15 off-brand shirt I just bought.
