Today, the river is green. Clumps of broad-leafed plants stretch from bank to bank, spinning in delicate patterns as they are pulled into eddies that ripple from the centre, where the water runs fast and deep, and the squat barges, heaped high with gravel, spread tresses of silt behind them.

Toward the banks, the plants clog the water, a blanket bunched around the boats manoeuvring between the piers. The surface looks solid and substantial, like the tops of clouds, as the seatbelt sign dings to itself in resignation and you soar upward into the sunlight. I always imagine pulling myself through the window, running down the wing, and swan-diving out into the white.

I want to hop-scotch across these plants. I want to run like a basilisk. I want to be free.

We hit a narrow channel and slow to avoid the curling wake of a passing longtail. A swarm of tiny grasshoppers, green as the plants they’ve leapt off, launch themselves into the air and onto the woman in front of me. There is a wet slap as a catfish hurls itself from under the plants and smacks into the side of the boat, as if in competition with the grasshoppers. The woman doesn’t react at all.

The shrill whistle of the conductor sound from the rear of the boat, as he guides it toward the dock. Endless wolf-whistles to anyone who will listen. We are under the bridge now, in a moment of shade, and in the distance I can see the building that is built but not finished, near-fractal recursions of faux greco-roman balconies stretching 40 floors into the sky, the columns less and less complete the further you crane your neck.

The river is green, and as we whistle our way up against the dock, I remember green Pepsi.

.

“You want green Pepsi?” he says, as the lady with an apron bulging with cutlery leans over to place bowls brimming with thick brown soup in front of us. There are small chunks of meat in here I can identify, and larger ones I can’t.

“Green Pepsi? What?”
“Is special Pepsi. You want, you try?”
“I want. I’ll try.”
“Okay, I go for green Pepsi.”

At this stage, I am imagining one of two things. The first is a special edition bottle, bright green, with energetic Thai script, and with pictures of cavorting, oiled young things, smiling as they frolic over whatever beach or forest setting the men in suits deemed appropriate to “really, like, connect with the demographic.”

The second is a bench, somewhere in this mass of people sat on plastic chairs under the bridge, where sugar syrup and an assortment of tiny bottles are used to concoct whatever bespoke beverage is required for the occasion. I am thinking about green Pepsi. I am thinking about bhang lassie, happy pizza, special cookie and ‘hey mister mister this one just for you special okay?’

Okay.

What I am not expecting is enormous cans of Heineken, and matching green straws. He grins and pushes one across the table. “Green Pepsi!”

The lower balconies of that building behind him are covered in bright green paint. It hurts to take it all in at once, the building, such is the enormity of the spectacle of 40 stories of crumbling opulence, a tall, broken kingdom surrounded by a sea of humanity. It’s not something you expect to see in ascendant Thailand. Instead I think of rural Japan, and of their struggle to retain a sustainable population, as the excess of the bubble years is slowly reclaimed by the trees.

..

I dream of a river with deserted, crumbling schools lining its banks. Where blackbirds swoop between the trees, harassing hawks three times their size. Dragonflies as big as my fist hover above the surface of the river, iridescent and ancient. The train fills with school children and then empties again. Lungs. Like lungs.

I dream of you. I think this is important.

You bound through the glass door, and the house is as it was when I was growing up: orange map of Texas on the back door, potted plants crowding against the glass criss-crossed with fat strips of masking tape, to stop the dogs running through it. The bricks outside are specked with moss.

You throw yourself into my arms and smile, really smile, then nestle your head against my neck.

“How did you know I was back?”
“Your brother called. He said I had to know.”
“He said…”
“We all know.”

I wake and, in the dim light that filters through the curtains, everything is green.

Posted in Mwah on Wed Aug 25, 01:37 am. Shoutouts.

After that confrontation
You left me wringing my cold hands
We shared some information
We might not recover from
And I watch your convictions
Melt like ice cubes in an ocean
You were so poorly cast as a malcontent

You’ve got them all on your side
That just makes more for doubt to slaughter
“I never knew he thought that!”
I heard you say falling out of the van
“Don’t ask for his opinion
They ought to drown him in holy water!”
Will you remember my reply
When your high horse dies?

- Mercer

(Happy voting everyone. Don’t do anything you might later regret.)

Posted in Oz on Fri Aug 20, 06:12 pm. Shoutouts.

I thrash back and forth for an hour in the pre-dawn fuzz before giving up and hauling myself upright. The air-con has clicked off at some time during the night, and it is hot already, as the sun creeps around edges of stippled grey in the sky. A tepid shower, in the haphazardly tiled bathroom, neck angled to avoid hitting my head on the roof, provides none of the refreshment it should. I am sweating as I step out of the water. I will continue to do so for the rest of the day.

I am the first one of the group downstairs. The cavernous dining hall, empty every other day this week, is this morning teeming with people. There must be a conference here today. A line snakes out the door as people queue to sign in, and I notices smiles and head nods between people in the queue; everyone knows everyone, or at least makes a good show of doing so.

I head for the coffee, a tarnished and battered pot that emits the smell of stale Nescafe. Still, it’s caffeine, and dearly needed. As I fumble for the milk jug, a woman, head to toe in peacock green, and with a pin that would make Madeline Albright jealous, leans across me and places a stirring spoon into my coffee with a toothy smile. I manage a grin in return and shuffle back to my table in the corner to watch proceedings.

It smells of the tropics today, the steady rain overnight putting a gloss sheen on everything: rust-stains and dirt streaks in shining relief against the dead grey sky. But it is not polluted, the air, or not noticeably so, and this surprises me. I remember the smothering heat and exhaust-choked air of my last visit, shirt wrapped over my face as we sat on the open-windowed public bus as it idled in traffic. We paused for thirty minutes or so, stuck in a Chinatown side-street, an immobile island in the sea of commerce around us. T remarks that the traffic is worse than KL, and that this is somewhat of an achievement in South East Asia. Nate gets out of the bus to stretch his legs, walks a slow circle around us, then heaves himself aboard again. We have not moved. This is close to ten years ago now.

So yesterday, as we whisked over the traffic in the efficient, clean public transport system, and the clear blue sky showed a city that stretched right to the horizon, it occurred to me that Bangkok has changed, and much more than I had expected it to. In the time large Australian cities have spent bickering over the implementation of smart cards on the struggling, poorly connected public transport system, the Thais have built the public transport, linked it to a smart card network, connected the smart cards to the atms, then linked these to essential services. Taking a leaf from Japan’s book, the atms are the service centre where you, in addition to banking, top up mobile credit, pay bills, clear flight bookings and recharge any of those aforementioned smart cards.

It’s eminently sensible and makes me wonder about the two-dollar-munching obelisks that grace Australian shopping malls, that click and crunch as they struggle to produce a balance statement on request. This is not smart technology, nor a strong use of a network, it is a profit creation device, one akin to speed cameras on deserted weekend freeways, right on that corner where the speed dips to sixty, but only for two hundred metres.

This coffee is horrific.

A group of Thai men, having collected their folders of conference paraphernalia, take the table across from me and the last man to the table realises there isn’t a seat left for him. He glances around at his options, and as he does so, is teased about, just perhaps, having to sit with the foreigner. This causes much amusement amongst the group, and they titter as he pointedly turns his back on them, and moves to sit on a free table on the other side of the room, alone. His colleagues continue to chortle for a while, then turn their attention to plates piled with wilted vegetables, red chilli heaped on top, and the ever present fish sauce glistening like the rain-slick streets outside.

Good Morning Bangkok.

Posted in Asia on Sun Aug 8, 11:16 am. Shoutouts.

I am easy,
easy to keep.
Honey, you please me
even in your sleep.
But my arms want to carry.
My heart wants to hold.
Tell me your worries. I want to be told.

Sit, and see how the fog,
from the port in the bay,
lays like snow
at the foot of the Roanoke;

hear the frog, going courting,
till the day he croaks,
saying, even then,
There is light in the river.
There is a river made of light.

- Newsom

Posted in on Sun Jul 11, 03:25 pm. Shoutouts.

“It says three times.”
“All the way to the boil?”
“Yeah, do I whisk it still? It’s bubbling, look”

The pot stacked with molinillos sits by the window, where it always has, and they quietly gather dust. One day we will pull them down, clean them, and set them to work. Today, we use a simple metal whisk for the rapidly thickening liquid. The smell of burnt cinnamon fills the kitchen. I grin. The smells of a childhood, half a world away, issue from that pot on the stove, and memories dance along the boundary of remembrance.

We are in a jeep, blue, with a ragged canvas back, and I hold tight onto the steel cross bar as we bump through the jungle. My mother holds me tight, and there is a picture of a tiny red man, leaping from a sea-side cliff, that moves across my father’s chest as he changes gears. Everything smells of bananas, and dirt, and sweat, and the light is golden against the deep green of the canopy. My hair is in my eyes. And then I smell the chocolate.

Posted in Shutterbug on Sun Jun 27, 04:34 pm. Shoutouts.

Gnarled and pitted wood rests where it has fallen, shapes transformed by the tiny creeping filaments of the moss that covers everything, in this place so textured with age. It is in everything: in the soil woven thick with fibrous, sinewy roots, in the song of the tiny birds that whip amongst the canopy, and in the Maori prayer that echoes through the trees, a complex baritone chant that surrounds the knuckly boughs and reverberates, liquid and substantial. But most of all, it is in him, as he towers above, timeless and massive. There is an air of certainty here. Of inevitability.

Kauris spend the first hundred years of their life fighting to clear the canopy, and to reach into the sun. There are trees of that age scattered around the edges of the clearing and their slender trunks look fragile in comparison to the massive bulk of Tane Mahuta squatted in front of us. This is the world’s largest known kauri, and it is some two and half thousand years old. His name means the “Lord of the Forest” and he is the one that dug his shoulder into the muddy ground, coiled, heaved, and rent Papatuanuku and Ranginui asunder. In this, he created the earth, and the sky, and brought the huddled god-children, blinking, into the light.

I spin a slow circle and take in the vertical abbreviations in endless green, and try and judge their age. It is sobering to think that before these trees reach the sunlight, we will again be returned to dust in the ground. Still he towers above us.

.

A school of fish are pinned to the wall with nails. They spell the Maori word, Koha. It means a gratuity, a gift. The fish are chocolate, and I take one from the wall and chew on it. Behind me, a mountain of butter or, more specifically, a particular mountain modelled in miniature, in butter, shares centre stage with a radio in the shape of pavlova. I am in New Zealand. I ponder if I can get away with taking a second fish.

..

It took longer than we had planned to clear the sprawl of the city of sails, Auckland’s network of freeways, perpetually under-construction, are lined with witches hats and empty in the pre-dawn light.

In time the blocks of prefab industrial buildings give way to the rolling greenery of the hill country, the road ducking and weaving between hedges of scraggly gorse. On the way we talk of the burden of assumed responsibility, and she says, “It’s getting easier, you know, getting easier every day. At first it was demanding, and difficult, and it put me in a bad place. It still is, of course. It still is difficult. I guess there was an element of guilt there, a sense that somehow, in some way, there was something you could have done differently that would have changed things. You have to let that go, or it’ll tear you open, but once you do, it becomes much easier.”

She had mentioned this in December, briefly, as she stood by the window and looked out over the city. A punctuation, a pause, and a furrowed brow before she turned away and pointed out her school, her college, the path we had traced in the rain as we tramped the back streets beside backpackers on the piss. The lines on the hotel window remind me of those painted on the inside of the cabin that undulate as they trace the curve of the fuselage.

…

I have spent fifteen minutes in an unfocused daze glaring at the walls of the cabin. The lines. This is dendrochronology for the jet-set: a record of the passing of designer signed glasses over dappled grey Formica, white linen, and perfect half triangles of folded navy-blue tissue paper. My head rests against the wall of the cabin, and the gentle vibration of the engines rattles my teeth.

I follow these lines as they buck and curve, cut short by dotted plexiglass, and the blue on blue on blue of the early morning Tasman beyond. The Weather Report mutter in my ears in approbation, bass, strings, and the clicking of my teeth an unintended solo.

I have the volume down enough to hear cabin noise and this half-heard jazz is entirely at odds with the Chilean pop, as interpreted by the immaculately-manicured hostie, that issues from the galley behind me, accompanied by the soft clinking of cutlery.

The seat belt sign above me illuminates, dings, and Senores Pasajeros are asked to secure their seatbelts. I drift out of consciousness.

….

The sign, framed in the green and yellow so favoured by the DOC, informs me that this tree is partnered with another. One whose clumpy, knotted branches stretch into the mountainside mists of a pentagonal island several hundred kilometres off the southernmost tip of the four major islands of Japan. I’ve been there too. It took a pre-dawn departure and seven hours hiking up trails set between the roots before we stood at the top and leant back slowly, marvelling at the spread of branches shaped over four thousand years.

Jōmon has rested there since humans huddled in groups around their fires, set between the barrows, shaping tools of bronze. This squatting giant felt the pull of seasons before people had arrived, before roads, before cars, and before the view from the clearing took in the structures erected on the islands in the blue haze of distance. Cranes and gantries that plot the initial point in the parabolas of white scrawled across the sky, tracing the rockets launched from Tanegashima as they claw their way beyond the pull of the earth. That there is evidence standing in front of us of these kind of time frames leads to a very acute feeling of insignificance, and the realisation that we humans, for all our bluster and self-worth, are but a buzzing noise, half-heard, at the edge of the world’s history.

…..

We collapse onto the grass at Manukau, and my heart soars. The spray-flecked breeze brings with it the smell of chips, and the laughter of the kids playing touch with a rolled-up ball of newspaper beside the fountain. I can just make out a santa-hatted figure at the far end of the beach, reaching forward into a yoga pose I cannot identify, nor replicate. We are engulfed by the familiar sounds of summer: that meaty thwomp of a wet tennis ball being lofted into the ocean by a cricket bat, the squawks of those enormous red-beaked gulls as they fossick amongst the kelp, the snap of unfurling canvas in the breeze.

The essence of the Pursuit of Happyness, she says, lies in seeing mistakes, feeling the shape of them, and then laughing them off for their triviality. That y, for example, it has always bugged me, “and that’s the point,” she says, “that’s the whole point of the movie. Seeing the frivolous for what it is and moving past it.” This resonates, the cracks meld, and I stretch back and take in the sun. One of the kids has scored a try and is thumping his chest, newspaper held aloft.

……

This has been a pilgrimage of sorts, I think, a quest to reach out for something spiritual, if spiritual is the right word for we two godless, empty vessels. But there is spirituality, for me, in the wonder I feel in these two places separated by hemispheres. For all the treated pine boardwalks, the shutters of cameras clicking behind me, and the carefully hidden dark green barbed wire wrapped around the base of the tree, there is something beyond measure in the age of this place.

Our fingers wrap, brown on white against green. She is back then, for a second, and I drink it in.

Then it flickers and fades and she recedes. Disconnects. I fail to chase it because I know something has changed. Something fundamental. And from that comes a powerful desire to grasp the present and to shape it. To leap between the connections and to trace them back to their source, and be kinetic and frantic and alive in the way only humans can. For all the crossed paths, confusion, and duality of the past few days, this is good madness. It is transient in a way that is entirely at odds with this place, but that is human, and it lifts me up and gives me purpose.

We look out over the forest. There is a spider crouched on a broad leaf at eye level, powerful jet-black front legs tapering to a rear of mustard yellow, the outline of a smaller spider in reverse, and its whole function centres around this deception. It jerks a few steps backward then leaps forward and is gone, in the perfect choreography of something that is not what it appears to be.

We are here, both of us, in this place beyond time, and we are both thousands of miles away, seagulls chasing each other into the pines and the smell of salty air as irresistible as the call of friends and family, as they collapse onto the grass ahead of us, laughing. The future unfurls beneath my feet. It ripples and shears, and is beautiful in all its scattered, tangled complexity.

Posted in Mwah on Sun May 30, 09:57 pm. Shoutouts.

A box of technicolour macaroons from Choux Cafe in Swanbourne made the weekend a little bit brighter.

Posted in Gastros on Mon May 24, 10:07 am. .

My posting here has slowed a little recently, as I re-purpose the blog to focus on longer pieces, with less of the “oh my god that’s awesome” things I’ve jumped on in the past. For the day to day stuff, I’m loving Google Buzz for allowing me to spew links into the abyss. If you have GMail account and want a daily deluge of cool shit (like bears, or introverts, or children playing with yakuza) then click the button below to follow me. You’ll love it, I promise.

Follow on Buzz

Posted in Linkage on Fri May 21, 08:24 pm. Shoutouts.

Awesome prince, get your sleep
Lose your heart in history
Make us laugh or nothing will
I set a fire just to see what it kills

Don’t be bitter, Anna
I know how you think
You’re waiting for Radio City to sink
You’ll find commiseration in everyone’s eyes
The storm will suck the pretty girls into the sky

All our lonely kicks are getting harder to find
We’ll play nuns versus priests until somebody cries
All our lonely kicks that make us saintly and thin
We’ll play nuns versus priests until somebody wins

Leave our excellent souls
Head for the coast

- Matt Berninger

Posted in Flatbeat on Sun May 2, 09:48 am. Shoutouts.

A stream of Daft Punk helmeted motorcyclists zip past, the single traffic light reflected as a jagged lipstick red smear in their mirrored visages. They lean hard to avoid the bus. Kick up dust. I give my window a half-hearted tug, but it’s wedged open, and the tiny half curtains ripple in the morning breeze. The dust has shaded the walls of the houses facing us a burnt ochre, and on one huge letters spell, “Welcome” and “LOVE” in lazy broken loops of white spray-paint. We are angled diagonally across the intersection, stuck behind a teetering pile of wooden wardrobes being drawn by a vehicle that resembles the result of a drunken tryst between a ride-on lawnmower and a bullock cart.

Emerging from the stalls that line the road, snack food vendors use the opportunity of a halt in motion to push their way through the swarm of old women negotiating the loading of a stack of chairs, and step up onto the bus. The driver and conductor share a brief exchange as the light changes to green, and manoeuvre the bus past wardrobes, escaped chickens, and stacks of wilting vegetables, before returning to their primary conversations on respective mobiles. The last stack of tightly-bound red plastic chairs is heaved onto the roof with a clatter and the women push forward to climb aboard. Inside the bus, vendors weave their way up and down the aisle, tiny chickens splayed wide across single skewers, glistening with honey and oil. The couple in front of me haggle for chicken livers with a girl who cannot be more than fifteen years old.

On the other side of the road, behind a perfectly level fence that doesn’t quite reach the ground, sits a chipped and colourless temple. It is straddled by an equally chipped and colourless concrete Buddha, with prominent nipples and a beatific gaze that takes in the shabby wooden lodgings scattered around him like discarded children’s toys. An old monk, hand holding his glasses against his nose, and waving frantically to catch the driver’s attention, begins to head in our direction. As he crosses the courtyard in front of the wat, three novitiates, orange-robed and running, converge on the shuffling older man. First a bag is slipped over one shoulder, a water bottle pressed into a waiting hand, and a sheaf of bank notes slipped into a pouch around his neck. At the threshold they stop and stand in a line, grinning.

The monk steps aboard and stops, blinks, and for a moment looks concerned. As if only just learning where he is, he pats the pouch at his side, and begins rifling urgently through its contents. Papers and water are held, chin to chest, as he rummages through the bag. Finally he smiles, nods, and withdraws a crumpled packet of cigarettes and a battered phone. He waves at the trio of shaven-headed, saffron-robed youngsters and begins to shuffle to the back of the bus, before being instructed by the driver to ride shotgun, up front, robes curling around the gearstick.

Ever since we set off, the TV mounted to the front dash has played karaoke, and the video to every song is a slight variation on the same story: a woman, who works in a restaurant, stares wistfully at her mobile, waiting for it to ring. We cut to the love interest who is busy in his inevitably solid and respectable job: smashing rocks into smaller rocks, delivering large bottles of water, or welding something to something else. There are several closeups of his mobile, sitting just out of sight. Perhaps it has slipped out of his pocket, or between the seats of his car. It is ringing, and he cannot hear it. She is lost, unsure what to do, and so she rings again. And again. When it seems all is lost, and our girl is stumbling through the rain-lashed streets, crying, the phone will ring. We see it again, close, and it’s definitely his name and suddenly he’s there with an umbrella, and an easy smile, and they duck into a restaurant so that she can look bashful as she feeds him a spoonful of noodles. Their phones rest against each other on the table, together at last. These bricks of plastic are the stars of this show, and the people surround them mere props, useful only in bringing them together.

The girl with the livers has failed to convince the couple in front that they represent a sensible investment, and so she scrambles to the front to step down and off. Her hands and face are streaked with the red black dirt that covers everything, and there are shining streaks where the fat from the chicken has run down her arms. As she nears the steps her pocket begins to ring, and she hands her skewers to a friend and pulls a phone from her jumper.

With a sigh, the wind kicks up again. The sting of dust particles prickles against my cheek, and clumps of discarded plastic press against the bus, then drop to the ground, lifeless. There will be no rain today, and restaurants in this part of the country are few and far between, but I wonder who is on the other end of the line. Whether she has a water delivery man of her own, and if their mobiles huddle together at night, waiting for their time in the spotlight.

Posted in Travel on Tue Apr 6, 09:00 pm. Shoutouts.