Bangkok Old Hand

by Collin Piprell

  a) They have passed legislation permitting odd-numbered licence plates on the roads only some days, and even- numbered licences on alternate days.

  b) They have increased taxes on private cars, thereby encouraging people to use public transportation instead

  c) They have cut taxes on private cars so that more people can buy them, even though hundreds of new cars, trucks, and motorcycles are already coming onto Bangkok's streets every day.

  13. The car serves which main function in modern Bangkok?

  a) It lets neighbours and passersby know you are somebody.

  b) It gets you from A to B.

  c) It sometimes offers shelter from the rain.

  12 BANGKOK 1997: LAND OF SALES

  What does the future hold in store for Bangkok? Already we have heard Melrose the Andromedan predict that, given the greenhouse effect plus ground subsidence, the whole city will be under water in 35 years or so. If this turns out to be the case, then we can all congratulate ourselves on having at last found a solution to Bangkok's traffic problems.

  And Ham Fiske has had other glimpses of the future.

  1987 was declared Thailand's "Year of Tourism ". (That was also the year which saw illegal department stores mushrooming everywhere, with other emporiums soaring ever higher in defiance of building codes. That was also the year the city governor tried, with predictable lack of success, to rid the streets of vendors — a move roughly equivalent to that of trying to clear Venice of its gondolas.)

  Since 1987, this country has seen much change, not all of it desirable. To what extent did the writer foresee developments in stories such as "Bangkok 1997: Land of Sales"?

  This year — 1997 — we celebrate the close of the first "Decade of Tourism". Inspired by the phenomenal success of 1987's "Year of Tourism", which the government decided to extend indefinitely, and by Prime Minister Chamlong's clean-everything-up campaign, Thailand now fully deserves its new sobriquet: the Land of Sales.

  Yes, Bangkok can truly pride itself on being the Shopping Centre of the Known Universe. A few problems do remain, however.

  Certainly that old eyesore, the street vendor, has long since been eliminated. It's been five years since the last authenticated sighting of a sidewalk vendor was reported in Bangkok. Now, however, there is instead the problem of the "mushroom stores". No sooner does the city demolish a dozen illegal department stores than another 15 spring up somewhere else. It's got so you can't leave a parking lot unattended in the wee hours, for fear of finding a new shopping centre there come daybreak. Main arteries like Rama I Road have, on more than one occasion, been completely blocked off to morning rush-hour traffic by the appearance of a new emporium poking up through the pavement like a toadstool in rich compost.

  The problem of illegal department stores has become a very serious issue, indeed. There's no room left to build banks and hotels. There is hope, mind you: the government has vowed to rid the city of this plague before the first half of the Second Decade of Tourism. But will PM Chamlong be able to make good his promise this time? Many say not. They argue that you can't realistically aim to eradicate the mushroom stores. Questions of both unemployment and political expediency must be considered. After all, the owners of these enterprises by now represent a significant proportion of the electorate.

  Then there is the lesser issue of otherwise legitimate department stores which build beyond those limits on height established by the government. This kind of thing is forbidden by law, but, through some oversight, there appears to be no legislation that specifies how or when this law is to be applied to transgressors. At present, there is some talk of moving Don Muang Airport farther out from the city, since several stores have grown high enough to present a hazard to air traffic. (Another factor encouraging a move is the recent tendency to find illegal stores appearing on the more remote ends of runways, rather complicating take-off and landing approaches.)

  Despite a few little flies in the ointment, however, we can see that these past 10 years have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of those who planned the initial Year of Tourism, back in 1987. We talked to various visitors around the city last week to get their impressions of Bangkok in this most auspicious year. We will let them speak for themselves.

  Mrs. Rose Gangdoppler, a Newark, New Jersey, housewife: "My, you can buy anything here. Take these Wrangler jeans — cheaper than in New York, but just as good. Great souvenirs for my boys back home. A wonderful country!"

  Fred Stote and wife, retired, from Sydney, Australia: "When we first arrived here, we thought 'Hello? Just another Singapore — no difference.' We were wrong, however. Thailand is even better. There are more stores here, and everything is so clean!"

  Janet Boffstader, lawyer, from Columbus, Ohio: "I do believe the Kentucky Fried Chicken is even better here than it is back home! Thailand is everything they said it would be."

  We found one refrain running throughout our interviews: "The Thai people do so much to make the visitor feel welcome." As Mr. Christopher Rice, for example, a car dealer from Canada, told us. "It's so thoughtful — everywhere you go you hear 'Jingle Bells' playing, and it isn't even Christmas! No matter; they want us to feel comfortable and warm, reminding us of our happiest season. Even though it's only February, I've already bought all my gifts for next Christmas."

  Yes, one happy visitor after another. Looking at all the beaming shoppers, one can see why this country used to called the Land of Smiles.

  But there must be more than shopping, we thought. Mrs. Feona Ramsbottom, from Stow-on-Wold, England, set us straight on that count: "Oh, yes. We saw the Grand Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha and everything. My, they were so exotic. The way they sparkled in the sun and all. And you get such a good view of it from the New Cosmos Department Store."

  Didn't they actually go to see these sights? we asked. Of course not, she replied. Indeed, she gave us three very good reasons for not doing so. In the first place, Bangkok being almost seamlessly paved with nice clean air-conditioned department stores, hotels and banks, you'd have to be nuts to go outside in the hot sun and traffic. Anyway, even if you did go out, where could you go? "We were told the current traffic jam in the Banglampoo-Sanam Luang area isn't expected to start breaking up for a couple of weeks yet," she said, "and we actually should be getting back to England soon." Finally, as she told us, it's really a bit expensive. Foreigners have to pay 1000 baht to get into attractions such as these.

  We asked her if she resented paying that kind of admittance fee when Thais got in for free.'"Well, no. If we wanted to go outside, and if we had time to get there, I suppose, we wouldn't mind paying that much. After all, it's only fair — everyone here is so nice to us. It's the least we can do.

  "But there's really no need," Mrs. Ramsbottom continued. "There's such a comfortable observation lounge New Cosmos has built on their 52nd floor. It's so nice and cool; and they have great hamburgers. They've thought of everything! Do you know they have great big video screens going all the time so you can even see what it's like inside the palace and the temples and all. It's just like being there!" she gushed.

  Though we were loath to introduce a negative note into the discussion, we asked what Mrs. Ramsbottom thought of the problem of the illegal department stores. Did she find them unsightly, for example? Or did she believe they were largely responsible for the mega-jams our city is experiencing?

  "Oh, no," she replied. "Not at all. I think it's partly the great joyous jostling confusion of giant commercial enterprises that gives Bangkok its special charm. If you did away with all those stores, your fascinating city would lose much of its colour. I mean, what would be left? Just the banks and hotels, and, really, you can find those anywhere."

  This is not an uncommon argument. But we ask you to cast your mind back 10 years. You may remember that a lot of people resisted the purge of street vendors for much the same reasons. Just think, however, what this city might look like now if those criers of doom had their way.

 
; There will always be naysayers and wet blankets. You may have heard the latest rumour: some people say that Bangkok, under the weight of department stores and foreign visitors, is sinking 25 percent faster than it was 10 years ago.

  But that's another story.

  13 BANGKOK 1997: CITY SKYLINE

  Ham's vision of where Bangkok architecture is headed remains positively clairvoyant.

  This week Bangkok plays host to an international symposium: "Directions in Architecture for the 21st Century". Few would deny that Bangkok is the logical venue for this assembly of experts, what with the trend- setting innovations in architecture this city has displayed over the past decade.

  We talked to Herr Doktor Professor Wolfgang Honkheimer, an architectural reviewer from Hamburg. He gave us his interpretation of the modern Bangkok skyline.

  "First of all." he told us, "this is a good town for dead sacred cows."

  There was no arguing with that pronouncement. We did ask him to elaborate, however.

  "Plenty of them. Everywhere you look — dead sacred cows, so to speak." He removed his glasses and gazed sternly in our general direction. "It all began 10 or 15 years ago, but the completion of the Robot Building in 1986 was a landmark occasion. It was, so to speak, an exorcism — it put a stake through the heart of aesthetic authoritarianism. More, it went beyond the tyranny of taste in a veritable deconstructionist fury of creative joy!''

  Ringing phrases, to be sure, and rich food for thought. But could he give some examples of this new movement sparked by the Robot, we asked?

  Certainly, he said. One only has to look at that part of town which has come to be called the "Toybox", where the inspirational Robot still stands. It is now dwarfed by structures such as the Thing-ka-Toy Centre, however. This gigantic complex of restaurants and observation lounges is modelled on a child's Tinkertoy building set. Here we see a marvellous example of minimalist form following function, while maintaining the traditionally haphazard conjunction of night market eateries.

  But there is more than this to the post-post-modernist- hi-tech revolution. At its core, it has embraced the hi-tech revolution and made it its own, while at the same time it has rejected Western materialism and enshrined traditional concepts. Added to this, of course, is a lavish dollop of playfulness, or sanuk, the innate Thai love of fun.

  "The latter element is nowhere better illustrated," he told us, "than in the Privee Department Store, which is shaped like a huge American-style outhouse. This brilliantly simple design incorporates everything I've said defines the new vision: it pokes fun at Western materialism while harkening back to simpler values. Moreover, to the cognoscenti (and here the good Doctor coughed modestly) there is a humorous, yet respectful allusion to Bangkok's British Council Building, which was conceived in 1969 as an outhouse to the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris.

  "Other fine developments of 1980s ideas are evident everywhere. There is the "totem-pole" style, for instance, which takes off from the earlier penchant for perching antebellum mansions piggyback atop otherwise quite utilitarian, box-like structures. Now we have tows de force such as the Nadir office complex. It begins with a basic utilitarian block, which supports a neoclassical Greek level, which in turn is the foundation for a traditional Thai structure based on the National Theatre. This masterpiece speaks for itself — any gloss I could add would be superfluous."

  And so it would have been. What Bangkokian has not mused fondly on this remarkable building, coming away richer for the experience?

  "No review of modem Bangkok architecture," Professor Honkheimer continued, "would be complete without mention of the Column. This hotel is the final expression and epitome of one stream of late 1980s and early '90s design. A single Doric column finished in simulated Italian white marble, the Column soars to a height of 100 metres, with a playground and park on its top, above the level of the hydrocarbon mists."

  What about the "mushroom stores", we asked — those illegal department stores that spring up everywhere like the Hydra, the many-headed serpent of Greek myth which, when you cut off one head, would grow two more in its place? Didn't he feel that these eyesores detracted from the beauty of Bangkok's skyline?

  "Not at all. As I see it, this stratum of rapid growth and decay is like the fecund humus on the floor of a rain forest — it provides the soil for the evolution and growth of magnificent giants like those we've been discussing. More, we could say that the mushroom stores symbolise the transcendence of material existence: like bubbles on the Great Stream of Being, and so forth. The Column and the Thing-ka-Toy, on the other hand, rise above all this, standing immortal as Pure Ideas, or Essential Forms."

  We could only stand in awe of such perspicuity. As deeply as we appreciated the analysis Dr. Honkheimer had already given us, we asked if he could conclude by naming the one building he thought best expressed all that he'd been telling us.

  "Certainly,'' he said. "But I must begin with some further general remarks.

  "There are two highest manifestations of Thai architecture, one old and one new. First, we have the beautiful traditional architecture of the temples, and then there are the banks. These latter-day temples to Commerce have paved new conceptual pathways to the future." Professor Honkheimer's eyes shone as he went on: "The quintessential expression of all that's happened these past 10 years is now on the drawing boards. Construction of the First Benefactor of Bangkok Bank will begin next month. This will take the form of a 500- metre-high reinforced concrete tourist wearing an Aloha shirt with palm trees on it. From one hand will hang the bank building, itself, in the shape of a simple Gucci suitcase."

  But weren't there objections to this project, we asked the Professor? For example, some have said that the Aloha shirt is in bad taste.

  "There may be something to that, " said Dr Honkheimer, brushing at his conservatively pin-striped suit. "But really, that's just idle carping. The basic conception — the enthusiastic eclecticism, the sheer boisterous brilliance of the project—what is one Aloha shirt measured against all this?"

  What, indeed? We mentioned that still other critics, however, have suggested that the BBB Building will represent the impermanence of all material existence even more effectively than do the mushroom stores. Hanging there a hundred metres off the ground in that overweight

  Western tourist's hand... Opponents of the Second Decade of Tourism would argue that this aptly symbolises the precariousness of Thailand's dependence on the tourist dollar.

  "Nattering negativism," declared Dr Honkheimer, with the succinct economy of an acknowledged expert. "With this building, and with others like the Thing-ka-Toy Centre, local architects have gone beyond playing the Western civilisation game; they've gone beyond the post-hi-tech- architecture which reached its highest expression during the '80s. They have laid the foundation for a new school — one with truly universal sweep. My forthcoming book, The New Classicism, reveals what is in truth a new classicism," Professor Honkheimer concluded. "A new unity of form and idea."

  There was nothing more to add: the learned Doctor had said it all.

  14 SPACE INVADERS

  This story appeared in the Bangkok Post in 1987. As it turned out, France reconsidered, and the "space invaders" never appeared. Not yet they haven't, anyway.

  The other day I was thinking of penning an immortal word or two before breakfast. Birds twittered and chirped as I sat at my study window overlooking the lush green of the temple grounds across the way.

  Suddenly, birdsong and tranquil reverie were blasted into shards by deafeningly amplified exhortations to buy somebody's fresh fruit. In the lane outside, there cruised a little pickup truck piled high with papayas and guavas. How could the vendor afford such a high-powered public address system, if his fruit was going as cheaply as he claimed? And why did none of my neighbours run out to strangle him? These were a couple of the questions that exercised my mind that morning.

  Sure, these people have to make a living. But do they have to use such an obtrusive means of
doing so? Okay, so it only lasted a few minutes, and those words I was thinking of penning would've had even less to offer posterity than those I set to this page now. But a rare mood had been broken. Besides, I might've been a sick baby, wide awake now and entertaining a family of nine. Or I might have had a hangover.

  Other hawkers frequent the lane outside. A tinkle of bells heralds the ice-cream man. There's the klack-klack- klack of the couple with a bicycle cart who sell noodles in the evening, one member of the partnership pedalling, the other riding pillion, rapping out a simple tattoo with two bamboo sticks. There's the funny hee-haw horn of the sweets salesman. Occasionally a knife-and-tool sharpener trundles through, treating us to his sing-song refrain. I can enjoy all of these sounds as part of the ambience of the neighbourhood. These are things even the birds can get down and jam with.

  It's modern technology that's the problem. Here are a few more contrasts collected from the lane outside my house.

  • Cheerful snatches of song as a woman dips rainwater from a big earthenware jar for her morning ablutions. ROCK AND ROLL FROM THE 50-MEGATON STEREO SPEAKERS SOME MUSIC LOVER HAS HAD INSTALLED IN HIS CAR.

  I've always admired the generosity of those who buy expensive stereo equipment and then want to share their music with everyone. On the other hand, sometimes you aren't in the mood for music, especially when you're caught between two minstrel disk jockeys, and enjoying the stereo effect of Damp Banana on one side and the Heavy Metal Mothers on the other.

  • The group in the little house down the way which

  gets together Friday nights to drink Mekhong whiskey and play Thai music on traditional instruments. THE SON OF THE POLICEMAN IN THE BIG HOUSE ACROSS THE LANE WHO HAS REGULAR AND MUCH-NEEDED POP- MUSIC BAND PRACTICE OUTSIDE IN THE COURTYARD.