Review - James Newman's new book, Bangkok City

When a friend suggested I read James Newman's new book, Bangkok City, I did so with a sense of trepidation. For one thing, despite 15 years in the Kingdom, I'd never heard of him. I'd read the better known expat writers of course, like C. G. Moore, Stephen Leather, Colin Pipperel, and William Page, and I enjoyed their writing immensely.


You can buy the book here - http://www.amazon.com/Bangkok-City-ebook/dp/B00885S150/ref=la_B004XFWCYU_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1341034001&sr=1-3


I'd also assumed that James Newman's genre was a mish mash of the usual sexpat genre that we see on many a book shelf in Kinokuniya or Asia Books: a staple diet of essentially the same tawdry story - overweight, divorced expat, seeks new life in Thailand, meets a bar girl half his age, falls in love, takes care of her family, till finally one day he wakes up realising he's been fleeced of his savings and, with nothing left and having been shorn of the last vestiges of his self esteem, he throws himself off a condo in Pattaya.

I was wrong. James Newman's writing is anything but tawdry or predictable. His characters are full of home spun wisdom and his sense of storytelling, including pace and characterization, is extremely good. His knowledge, not just of the way Thais think and act, but of the places they inhabit, mentally as well as physically, is unique among expat writers currently in the Kingdom. His ear for the subtle nuances of language, both in Thai and English, show a world that few expats ever see. His inside knowledge of Buddhism and Brahmanism, and the way both religions, new and old, weave around the general, day-today Thai superstitions encapsulated in magic and doled out by the maw doos (psychics), is incisive and well researched.

Despite a few typos here and there, and the occasional structural flaw, his ability to construct a sentence and to add clever imagery also suggests he's destined for greater things in the literary sphere. The Bangkok in Bangkok City is reminiscent of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. The very notion of the city is shown for what it is: a repository of broken dreams and unquenched desires; a city populated by people who are not what they seem; corrupt cops, ex-Muay Thai boxers cum gangsters, spiritually and emotionally bankrupt expats, and fatally ambitious Thai hookers ready to sell their souls for the promise of a better tomorrow; a world that, were he still alive, Charles Bukowski would have recognised in all its tacky urban splendor.

With the exception of C. G. Moore and Rattavut Lapcharoensap, few have accurately depicted what it's like to live in Thailand as well as James Newman. I recommend this book to anyone wanting to discover the real underbelly of Thai living: a place where things can be had for a price, but not necessarily one worth paying; a place where you can enter into a Mephistoclean pact just as long as you know that when you reach the proverbial checkout counter, you may have to pay the ultimate price and give up the thing you value most: your very soul.

You can stick your feminine hygiene product ads up your hoo haa, Femfresh

"W omen don't need specific cleaning products for their vaginas – nor Femfresh to come up with a list of bizarre euphemisms." So says Naomi McAuliffe, Guardian journalist in her hilarious diatribe against the manufacturer of the latest female hygiene products that women apparently neither want nor need. I have to agree with Ms. McAuliffe in that the sheer array of female body products out there on the market is simply mind boggling! When I asked my wife for some cream the other day she said "What kind of cream?" Apparently, there's day cream, night cream, sun cream, hand cream, cream to remove make up, hand lotions, whitening creams and a gazillion others! Now I didn't know that! 

 

Here's the article in full as it's quite hilarious in parts!

"So last week we had legislators being banned for saying the word "vagina" in a debate about abortion regulation because it was deemed "offensive". This week, the people who cannot bring themselves to utter that most scandalous of words are those at Femfresh.

Femfresh offers a range of "feminine hygiene" products – liquid soaps, wipes and deodorant – "for down there". But while they have developed and produced products specifically for female genitalia, they cannot bring themselves to utter the words vagina or vulva. Instead in their new ad campaign, Femfresh have opted for: mini (as in the car), twinkle (… little star, how I wonder what you are?), hoo haa (best said in an Al Pacino voice), fancy (like Mr Kipling's), yoni (an American term and makes me think of the dinosaur in Super Mario World), va jay jay, (which should really be one word), kitty (no one calls it this, particularly if you have an Aunt Kitty), nooni (amazing how many of these words sound like nicknames for someone called Naomi), la la (Teletubby), and froo froo (like the 1980s draw-string curtains).

As an avid follower of fanny euphemisms I am amazed that not only have Femfresh neglected to call a vagina a vagina but that they have picked a list of words that absolutely no one uses. They may has well have said "Femfresh is the kindest way to care for your pot plant, brouhaha, wibble, awooga, fnar fnar …". Even getting Miranda Hart to read these out for their radio ad campaign doesn't make it any more comprehensible. Of course as soon as social media got a whiff of this, they descended on Femfresh's Facebook page to impart some feedback. Commenters took issue with everything from the infantilising of lady bits, to a product which makes women feel shame about their bodies, to the fact that vaginal deodorants can cause bacterial vaginosis, to demands for penis deodorants to make your pork sword smell less meaty.

Girls are made to feel self-conscious about their muffloid area from around about puberty. We're told we smell of fish, of period or just of … fanny. This shame can hamper sexual relationships, impact on women's self-worth and has led to a situation where the fandango is getting shaved, waxed, vajazzled, bleached, surgically tampered with, deodorised, smeared with tightening cream, minty tablets shoved up it, and is covered over with a codpiece. I can almost hear that plaintive wookie cry.

However, the response from women and men on Femfresh's Facebook page was glorious, demonstrating yet again that the best way to confront this kind of absurdity is with wit, creativity and a back pocket full of vagina euphemisms. Femfresh felt compelled to respond with the post: "Just a short note to tell all recent posters that we have seen your comments and we will be getting back to you. Whilst we welcome debate, please can we ask that you don't post anything abusive or use bad language as this contravenes our policies and we will have to delete the posts. Thank you." Of course this just added petrol to the fire as commenters asked whether "vagina" constituted bad language. From every angle this is a PR failure, but what is a company to do when people think your product is at best ridiculous and at worst offensive and harmful?

Well, our consumerist society is expert at creating products we don't need and then making us think we need them. Why are women suddenly bloated all the time? Were we bloated in the 1950s? How did past generations survive without ginseng? Why is everyone suddenly using shower gel rather than soap? Because we think we need to. Yes, we make that choice freely but if it wasn't available we wouldn't all be thinking "Goodness, I wish someone would get around to inventing a small bottle of water that I can spray on my face for no discernible reason".

Women don't need specific cleaning products for their front bottom, in fact cleaning up the fun tunnel can be bad for you. And we certainly don't need to be patronised by an advertising campaign that tries to call my quim "lala". Vaginas are not just being airbrushed out of the abortion debate; they are being changed beyond all recognition whether surgically, cosmetically or synonymously.

So maybe "vagina" is actually the hardest word to say for politicians and marketers. Yet for the protesters in Michigan and the Facebook mob on the Femfresh page, it seems to roll off the tongue rather nicely."

I have to say I cannot but agree with her especially when she writes thus - "Well, our consumerist society is expert at creating products we don't need and then making us think we need them." Women are constantly bombarded with images that commidify them and make them feel insecure about them selves and are not a "real woman" unless they do X,Y,Z which is dictated by the advertisers. How refreshing to have a woman stand up and say unequivocally that it's all a bunch of crap!

Original link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/22/femfresh-feminine-hygiene-products

Suffers head injury, becomes musical prodigy

 Suffers head injury, becomes musical prodigy? Wait a minute! How does that happen? One day you're a normal, run of the mill individual, and the next, you're on the way to becoming a musical superstar. This also happened to a lady who woke up one day and found she could speak Russian. Only problem was her job was in sales and Russian appeared to be the only language she could now speak.

Six years ago a Denver, Colorado man hit his head hard after diving into the shallow end of a pool. Days later, he sat down at a piano and discovered he was a musical genius. Derek Amato is one of just 30 “acquired savants” worldwide. Each discovered an inexplicable abilty that was unleashed after an incident. Amato was 40 years old at the time of the accident.

“I remember the impact being really loud. It was like a bomb going off. And I knew I hit my head hard enough that I was hurt. I knew I was hurt badly,” he described in a Science Channel documentary.


He was taken to the hospital with a serious concussion, and suffered some memory loss and hearing loss. A few days after the accident, Amato visited a friend who had a keyboard and felt inexplicably drawn to the instrument, he told TODAY on Thursday. He sat down to play and beautiful, fully structured, original music flowed from his hands. He played until 2 a.m.

“As I shut my eyes, I found these black and white structures moving from left to right, which in fact would represent in my mind, a fluid and continuous stream of musical notation,” Amato said in a blog post on the Wisconsin Medical Society website. “I could not only play and compose, but I would later discover that I could recall a prior played piece of music as if it had been etched in my minds eye.”

Though he had dabbled in the guitar before, he’d never touched a piano, Amato told TODAY.
Rare cases like this open up a whole new realm of scientific exploration, as scientists investigate how this can happen. The big question is: do we all have this superhuman ability built in, if we could just tap into it and release it?

Wisconsin psychiatrist Darold Treffert, who researches savants, told the Atlantic Magazine he believes that after a trauma, other regions of the brain step in to compensate for the loss of function, which rewires the brain in ways we can’t imagine.

Scientists have a few cases to study as they explore the question, the magazine reported. Orlando Serrell was hit in the head with a basketball at age 10 and discovered he could remember the weather for each day after his accident. Alonzo Clemens suffered brain damage after a head injury at age three, but can create incredibly detailed sculptures of animals in just minutes.

Amato told TODAY that though he still gets painful migraines and has lost 35% of his hearing, it’s well worth it. Amato left his corporate job and became a professional musician. He’s released one album of original compositions and is working on another.

So I guess there's hope for all of us if we want to experience brilliance in our lives! Maybe if I hit my head unexpectedly, I may become a top 10 golfer or a Grammy winning singer! Or an English teacher! (Oh, I see that one's already happened!)