Tom Vater

Southern Germany is conservative and a bit too far away from the real world for my liking, but while people look pretty stiff and sullen on the street, they are friendly, noticably so after a trip around Europe.

Tried to get a tram from Mannheim to Heidelberg a while back and had no change for the machine. The driver got out of the tram and, after inspecting the ticket machine and ascertaining that we (three people) did indeed not have enough cash, suggested we ride with him for a few stops, until the tram reached a stop where a more sophisticated cash machine would allow us to buy tickets. A few stations on, he helped purchase the tickets. The tram had by this time reached a different ticket zone, which saved us several Euros. The driver probably broke countless rules and laws to get us on board. A few stops later, the shift changed and the driver left the train, smiling like Bruce Willis at the end of Armageddon. An everyday rebel with a cause?

A few stops on, an old man who looked half mad, tried to lift a hopelessly overloaded wheelbarrow-type contraption onto the tram. Well, he would have tried, had he been able to open the doors of the carriage he was standing in front of. Next to the carriage door, a group of young  street kids of Turkish origin, aged between 14 and 16, sat on a bench, dressed in track suits, heads shaved or nearly shaved, sharing a cigarette. When the boys realized the old man wasn´t going to make it, they jumped up, got the door opened, climbed into the carriage, heaving the wheelbarrow in after them, and made sure the old man had time to stumble up the stairs to a seat, before they skipped back onto the platform to return to their loafing.

Funny observations, at a time when a high profile representative of the establishment, one of the heads of the German Bundesbank, Thilo Sarrazin, spews out (unhindered but much lamented for now) racist vitriol against Muslims and Jews on an almost daily basis. While the German chancellor has criticized Sarrazin’s devisive rethroic, he is still out there, running around in a pin stripe suit, making the world a grimier place. Not that the Turkish kids at the tram station would have ever heard of him. They are hardly educated enough to read the paper, a fact that aforementioned bank manager Sarrazin has taken to heart and lists as a reason to stop the immigration of Muslims to Germany. For once, lack of education appears to be of use. Young turks are unlikely to come across the type of hate speech this representative of Germany´s elite is promoting.  More recently Sarrazin claimed that Jews were 15 % more intelligent than other people because of the selective culling of their fellow people in Europe in recent centuries. Far right politicians across Europe are applauding and Germany is hogging international headlines.

So here´s my equally radical but more humane suggestion to deal with unpleasant extroverts like Sarrazin. Why not get all Germans to marry people of color? That would get rid of the bigots within a couple of generations. The same solution might work well in a whole bunch of other countries with community leaders that harbor supremacist delusions. I must admit, I didn’t think of it first. The American fiction writer Peter Mathiessen suggested the same as a solution to America’s racism in his seminal work Killing Mr. Watson.

August 29th, 2010 | Tags: ausländerfeindlich, Bruce Willis, Bundesbank, Deutschland, Deutschland ausländerfeindlich, Deutschland schafft sich ab, friendly, German Bundesbank, German racism, Germany, Germany´s racist establishment, Heidelberg, Judenhass, Killing Mr. Watson, Mannheim, Peter Mathiessen, racism in Germany, Rassismus in Deutschland, Rechtsradikale in Deutschland, right wing in Germany, Sarrazin, SPD und Rassismus, Thilo Sarrazin, Tom Vater, Vorstand der Bundesbank | Category: Germany | Leave a comment

Visited the Les Rencontres monster photo exhibition in Arles. Some 60 exhibitions show a huge variety of photography from reportage to conceptual art and everything in between.

This years highlights, for me at least, included Taryn Simon from New York who shot a serious of stunning images called The Innocents, which document the stories of individuals in the US who served time in prison for violent crimes they did not commit. Also stunning were the garishly colorful tableaux by Argentinian photographer Marcos Lopez who says of his work, “My aesthetic is Baroque Rococo. A cardboard Argentina. The fatherland as absence….”

This years offerings were very RocknRoll centric.  One entire exhibition was devoted to Mick Jagger. I missed it. But another large hall in the Parc des Ateliers was dedicated to Punk Rock. I am A Cliche - Echoes of the Punk Rock Aesthetic featured photo displays of the Andy Warhol with The Velvet Underground at the Factory, The Rolling Stones in the 60s, with Brian Jones, excellent portraits of The Sex Pistols, images and film of Patti Smith, an entire room dedicated to the 1960s politically astute Detroit music scene - psychedelic montages featuring The Stooges and The MC5, and a small hut lined with the most remarkable punk rock vinyl releases of the 60s and 70s. The volume inside was too low of course, this is not Punk Rock after all, but merely it´s echo.

This exhibition of Les Rencontres was introduced by a great quote by recently deceased erstwhile Pistols manager Malcolm Mclaren.

“Rocknroll doesn´t necessarily mean a band, a singer or a lyric, really. It´s that question of trying to be immoral.”

And so it seems immorality has become the charm of the bourgeoisie. Well done, Malcolm.

August 26th, 2010 | Tags: Arles, exhibition, France, I am a Cliche, Les Rencontres, Malcolm Mclaren, Marcos Lopez, MC5, Mick Jagger, Patti Smith, photographer, photography, punk rock, show, Taryn Simon, The Stooges | Category: France | Leave a comment

Mellow street cafes, crammed with grinning old-timers slurping pastis and in the cities, bistros frequented by scores of beautiful young things in skimpy but fashionable outfits, all create a cultural street-life and unique joie de vivre in one of France’s most attractive and homogenous regions – Provence.

Provence means different things to different people and no one can agree on where its exact boundaries lie. One could define the area between Orange, Nimes, Arles, Marseilles, Aix-En-Provence and the Gorges of Verdon as Provence. But perhaps the clear demarcation of geographical borders isn’t so important.

Sun-soaked Greek and Roman ruins, medieval churches, mountain villages, lavender fields and, of course, miles and miles of vineyards, that stretch into infinity under deep blue skies all contribute to the ambience.

One could describe a local market in a small town such as Vaison-La-Romaine as the very definition of Provence: The smell of fresh herbs and juicy tomatoes, of strong cigarettes and lavender, and the loud call of the vendors amidst the crowds of shoppers - old traditionalists in dapper couture who rub shoulders with young Arabs in hip-hop outfits.

Provence is a smell, a political hue, a lifestyle and a riot of color. Most importantly, the region is the nexus of France’s southern lifestyle, as well as one of the world’s best known wine-growing regions. And foreigners – from artists to escapists – have long discovered the region as a great place to live.

Eric Bouletin, a young wine maker from Vacqueyras, has been creating his own brand of high quality wine for the past five years, as did his father, grandfather and great grand father before him, and his red Domaine Roucas-Toumba graces the shelves of specialist wine shops and up-scale restaurants all over the world.

“I feel a very strong connection to the soil. The people here are attached to the earth in a very basic way. We feel the way our ancestors did, but we are also very open to the world – that’s part of our culture.”
Drily he adds, “Sure there are some racists amongst us, but the majority of people in Provence welcome visitors and we have a great way of absorbing newcomers.”

The wine maker, like many of his compatriots, stands with one foot in the past, with the other firmly in the future. In a place as timeless as Provence, it is hard to imagine change, but everyone of course has their worries.

“All sorts of people live in the villages, all classes live side by side. The real problem for us today is that many young people leave for the cities and there’s a danger that only the old will remain one day, or that the cities get so large they swallow up the villages.”

Bouletin is doing his best to counteract local prejudices and land-flight. Three years ago, he met Junko Takase, a Francophile Japanese wine trader and together they have embarked on building a family and a small but significant international wine empire.

For the young wide-eyed culture-shocked Takase, the beginnings were not easy.

“Europeans looked so serious to me,” she laughs, “Their eyes were so blue, I could not believe they would ever think or do anything funny.”

Takase had to overcome not only her own fears, but needed to understand French culture, and quick, if she wanted to survive.

“I used to be invited for dinners, but, in France, if you don’t speak French, you are totally ignored. In Japan, we try to communicate with our foreign guests and involve them into our conversation, but here, it was exactly opposite. After some time I understood that it was not my color or race, but my inability to speak, that kept me out. If you can speak, the walls come down.”

American expatriate artist Eytha Badchen arrived in Provence in 1972, after living in Paris for almost a decade. The 83 year old abstract painter, a well-traveled urbanite originally from Chicago, experienced Bouletin’s romantic connection to the soil and Takase’s fears herself when she first visited the region, “What I remember from my very first visit was the black, incredibly rich soil of the region. The people who lived on and worked this soil were all connected to the culture of the region. In those days, no one cared what one could buy, no one cared what one wore. And the light in Provence was so bright and honest, nothing fabricated, no neon, it was very pure. The light had a great influence on my painting.”

But it was more than just landscape and sunshine that fascinated Badchen.

“Towards the end of the 1960s, Paris became more money-orientated and industrialized. In Provence people enjoyed life in a different way. They enjoyed eating good food, or took a walk up a hillside. They enjoyed simple pleasures and were interested in essential things and values. My neighbor used to go down to the coast, search for crustacians and bring his catches home. He felt no need to go to a store.”

Surprisingly, Badchen did not miss her urban past. “I used to think cities, especially Paris, were the center of everything. But in fact, lots of things happened down here in Provence. Picasso and Braque both worked here. So I moved into an old tower in a small village and started an artists’ circle which worked together for many years.”

Provence continues as an art magnet. There’s the annual theatre festival in Avignon, the former seat of the French popes. In Arles, gigantic photo exhibitions are held each summer at numerous venues all over the city, if only to distract from the magnificent roman ruins.

Above all, Provence is a light. In the early mornings and late afternoons, a golden hue lies over rocky hills and sumptuous vineyards and the red tiles on the farm houses dotted amongst the fields seem to almost hum with warmth and color. It was not only the painters who noticed this.

In fact, Provence is as much an intellectual mind-space as a region, a complex, proud, beautiful and conservative part of La Grande Nation.

Jean Giono (1895-1970), a well known local writer suggested Provence did not really exist as a place and that those who liked it, liked the world. Those who didn’t, didn’t like anything.

Somehow, this rather grand observation still holds firm. Time has stood still and the light retains its golden honesty.

And yet, for those outsiders fascinated by the region, a strange inversion has taken place.

For many, like Badchen and Takese, Provence proved to be a destination it was necessary to reach in order to commence their journeys.

If possible, with a good bottle of wine.

August 21st, 2010 | Tags: expatriate, France, French, Jean Giono, Postcard from Provence, provencal, Provence, Tom Vater, tourism, Vacqueyras, Vaison-La-Romaine, wine | Category: France | Leave a comment

Move over James Bond and let Fantomas terrorize the world’s richest men.

I have been watching the 1960s Fantomas movies with Jean Marais - one of France’s best known leading men and a man who is as camp as camp gets - as the famed face-changing bad man battling it out with France’s supercop, Louis de Funes. In his time, De Funes was one of the country’s best loved comedians and usually played the role of the small, vile, conservative and intolerant authoritarian - a French stereotype which survives in national politics to this day.

Fantomas wears masks impersonating his compatriots and victims, blackmails wealthy industrialists, and always stays at least one step ahead of the French police. A masked crusader against excessive wealth, Fantomas could be the greatest screen villain and best role model France has given the world. Best of all, he gives nothing to the poor and keeps it all to himself. Fantomas does not fight for a better world, he merely does not like this one.

The Fantomas movies, based on French pulp stories by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre and dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, are spectacularly effective exercises in low budget high camp, similar in entertainment and production values to Hammer films in the UK, Edgar Wallace and Karl May productions in West Germany, Spaghetti Westerns in Italy and the Shaw Brothers martial arts flicks from Hong Kong.

What happened to low budget genre cinema? They don’t make them like that anymore.

August 18th, 2010 | Tags: 1960s cinema, B-movie, Edgar Wallace, Fantomas, film, France, French cinema, genre movie, gothic novel, Hammer, Jean Marais, Karl May, Louis de Funes, Marcel Allain, Pierre Souvestre, role model, screen villain, serial killer, Shaw Brothers, Tom Vater | Category: France | Leave a comment

In 2005, I drove from Dallas to Lubbock.

Fleeting impressions of Texan roadside spectacle stick to the mind like the cotton wool buds that sometimes swishes across the highway like tiny clouds. Townes van Zandt, Roky Erickson, ZZ Top, Texas sounds. The smell of oil wafts across the fields. Every burger joint by the highway is plastered with posters of missing people. Country music on the radio. Windwheels in broken fields. Abandoned cars under billboards promising or warning of the outrageous in turns. In the gas station shops, they sell stickers that read Chicks dig Scars. The Iraq War seems closer here than in the Middle East. If you believe the bill boards, then the entire state is on the war path. This is Bush country.

For more images of the Dallas to Lubbock Road Trip, visit my flickr page.

August 15th, 2010 | Tags: Dallas, Lubbock, road trip, Texas, Tom Vater, USA | Category: USA | Leave a comment

Switch on the TV, go to a newsagents or visit a market, and one popular British cultural trait will immediately assault your sensibilities.

As every British person knows from Faulty Towers - Don´t Mention the War.  Yet barely a joke, comedy sketch or low brow publication in contemporary Britain can do without the decades old obsession with articulating all things German and Nazi. While the US has moved ahead with fictional commentaries like Inglourious Basterds, segments of Britain´s cultural pontiffs appear to have real problems with casting the old image of the evil Kraut aside. In fact, nothing could be further from their tiny nationalistic minds.

I just watched a couple of re-runs of the political satire show Have I got News For You, which I consumed religiously when I lived in the UK in the late 1990s. I was somewhat surprised to hear Ian Hislop (the editor of Private Eye) and his fellow pundits deride Germans and French people over and over, usually in the context of WWII. Thr re-runs were from 2008, by the way. I´m not particularly concerned with political correctness, I just find what could almost be called Britain´s Nazi envy comical and terribly self-absorbed. Can´t you come up with better jokes about Nazis? Isn´t the Queen German? And at a time when Britain is fighting a war that is obviously wrong  (and ironically is fought alongside German troops), why glorify old victories, an obsession, which in the light of a half century of European cooperation and integration, appears rather redundant and, as I said, comical.

But the Nazi buck does not stop with the often gloriously vulgar British tabloid media. I first visited Camden Lock Market in 1981. At the time, one of the most popular T-Shirts on sale featured an image of Adolf Hitler subtitled European Tour 1939 - 1945. The same shirt is still on offer in every Camden High Street clothes outlet, alongside a slightly funnier shirt of The Killers, a rock band with the heads of George Bush, Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, superimposed onto the musicians` torsos. Visit any newsagent and World War II is giving pornography a run for its money - dodgy populist historical magazines, apparently designed to educate the British public, amongst other things, about the Holocaust, line the top shelves along side Foreplay and Crash Test Boobies.

August 13th, 2010 | Tags: Adolf Hitler, Britain, British obsession with Germany´s past, Camden market, Education, England, George Bush, Germany, History, ignorance, Inglourious Basterds, London, media, media obsession, Nazi, Osama Bin Laden, Private Eye, racism, racist journalism, racist media, Saddam Hussein, T-Shirt, Tom Vater, UK, World War II | Category: Germany, UK | Leave a comment

I attended a Thai festival at Bexleyheath in South East London last weekend.

Much to my surprise, one of the performers on the festival stage was the fantastic Georgia from Bangkok´s equally fantastic Ad Here Blues Bar. Georgia did some Blues and Jazz standards for a crowd of several hundred Thai and local punters…a great day with Pad Thai, soft ice cream vans,ghost rides, Chang Beer one had to drink in a cage-like fenced off enclosure, Thai music and lots of Thai smiles, spread across a big field below Danson House, a handsome 18th century mansion.

The Thai community in Britain is visibly growing (or perhaps it is emancipating itself). Besides numerous Thai festivals taking place around the country, a plethora of new Thai restaurants in London, I noticed that many of the shops in Camden market, London´s largest weekend market, are run by Thais. Many of the products  on display - clothes and little gadgets - appear to come straight from the trendier corners of Chatuchak Weekend Market in Bangkok and give textiles from Latin countries a run for their money.

August 12th, 2010 | Tags: Ad Here, Bangkok, Banglamphoo, Bexleyheath, Camden market, Chatutchak, London, Thai community in Britain, Thai culture, Thai festival, Thai food, Thailand, Thais abroad, Tom Vater, UK | Category: Thailand, UK | Comments (2)

Rainer Krack and Tom Vater’s Thailand Handbook, published by Reise Know How Verlag in Germany and currently in its 14th edition, has been published by Bezdroza in Poland.

And I just got a copy. The book looks great, photo reproduction is good, and it´s a 100 pages slimmer than the ever-growing German edition.

Tom Vater polowe swego zycia spedzil w Tajlandii. Pierwsza podróz do Azji odbyl w roku 1993, by jako muzykolog dokumentowac i zapisywac muzyke mniejszosci zamieszkujacych Azje Poludniowa dla potrzeb British Library. Od tego czasu w prasie ogólnoswiatowej zaczely pojawiac sie jego artykuly z zakresu: turystyki, srodowiska naturalnego, polityki, kultury oraz mniejszosci Azji poludniowej. W marcu 2008 roku nakladem wydawnictwa Wiesenburg Verlag ukazala sie ksiazka Vatera “Na swietych wzgórzach” - jego sprawozdanie z podrózy do Indii Pólnocnych.

Tom Vater pisuje równiez scenariusze filmów dokumentalnych dla niemieckiej telewizji. Dla wydawnictwa
Reise Know-How Verlag opracowal takie tytuly, jak “Bangkok” oraz “Phuket”. Napisal tez ksiazke, która stala sie prawdziwym szokiem kulturowym “Tajskie plemiona górskie i morscy koczownicy”. Od roku 2006 jest wspólautorem tomów
“Tajlandia” i “Tajlandia Poludniowa”.

Oprócz tego Vater jest wspólautorem trzech tytulów z serii wydawniczej PANORAMA “Tajskie plemiona górskie i morscy koczownicy”, “Palacowe hotele Radzastanu” oraz “Ku zródlom Gangesu”. Artykuly Vatera oraz dalsze informacje na jego temat znalezc mozna na stronie internetowej www.tomvater.com.

A new edition of the Thailand Guide (15th edition) by Rainer Krack and Tom Vater will be out in November 2010.

August 11th, 2010 | Tags: Bezdroza, Impian Divers, kulturowym, kultury oraz mniejszości Azji południowej, Mae Salong, Na świętych wzgórzach, polityki, Rainer Krack, Reise Know How Verlag, Reise-Know-How, Reiseführer Thailand, Save Ko Tao, środowiska naturalnego, Tajlandia, Tajskie plemiona górskie i morscy koczownicy, Thailand, Thailand Handbuch, Tom Vater, turystyki, Wiesenburg Verlag | Category: Thailand | Leave a comment

I tried to buy a weapon in a Wal-Mart supermarket in Lubbock, Texas, a few years back. I wanted the genuine American experience. I´d traveled thousands of miles for this. I almost managed.

These are the two guys that prevented me from becoming a devil´s reject on their parking lot with a semi-automatic cross-bow or some similar object of desire - not by design, mind you. They were up for selling me anything they had (and they had everything from samurai swords to semi-automatic rifles), if I produced a three month old phone bill. Sadly, Lubbock could not hold me long enough to accumulate a paper trail. The town somehow had this ´get your stuff done and move on´vibe, despite the fact that Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Bobby Keyes and quite possibly Merle Haggard had the misfortune of having been born there.

Wal-Mart´s by no means unique. Supermarkets are always cultural experiences, reflections of our inner most somethings, no matter where we are. Supermarkets, shopping centers and malls are the temples of today - not to go and pray in, but to shop and save, to purchase one and get one free, to discount our existence.

Hard for Europeans and Americans to imagine, but in many parts of Asia, supermarkets are a novelty and have a certain mystique. They are the territory of the rich and foreign. In India, Wal-Mart has run into serious resistance from consumers and farmers, who fear that  the company´s unrestrained economic power will allow it to drive down costs in the retail and manufacturing sectors and to enact its own standards with regards to its work force, but it is hard to stop the tumor- like spread of convenience stores. India´s penny-pinching middle-class is already hurling itself down all the available aisles. Thailand appears to have a 7/11 on every street corner, with more than a 2.700 outlets in Bangkok alone. Its main competitor, trying muscle in on the small neighborhood retail market, is Britain´s Tesco. Every time one of these bright air-con temples opens, a bunch of street traders goes bust.

But the process is unstoppable. It is the mystique of the new and bright that brings in the punters. And this leads to downright bizarre social phenomena.  I remember the first supermarket opening in Kathmandu, Nepal. The farmers who came to town to sell their produce flocked there as if it were a Hindu shrine and rode the escalators all day. Up and down. Heaven and hell. But without the effort. In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Lucky Supermarket stocked phenomenal amounts of dog shampoo in the early post-war years.  Enough for all the streets dogs of the Cambodian capital.

In England, ob the other hand, I have been lucky to watch drunken, unemployed men fight each for their dole checks at a local Co-Op outlet in South East London.

Ah, the convenience of our times. Buy and save.

August 8th, 2010 | Tags: 7/11, American, arms, Asia, Britain, Cambodia, consumerism, gun, gun law, India, Lubbock, meditation, modern slavery, right to bear arms, shopping, shopping mall, supermarket, Texas, Thailand, Tom Vater, UK, US, USA, Wal-Mart, weapon | Category: Cambodia, Nepal, Thailand, USA | Leave a comment