Irreverent, informed and downright eclectic crime fiction and reportage from Southeast Asia and beyond
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
A smoker’s lounge at Cairo International turns multi-cultural hang-out as the pale disk of the sun rises above the eternal sands beyond the runways. No matter how I stretch at the bull´s eye windows, I can´t see the pyramids, but know they´re out there. Young women in mini-skirts and tank-tops on the way home from [...]
Canadian singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen is playing a one-off concert in Phnom Penh, Cambodia on November 27th. To introduce Cambodians to Mr. Cohen´s body of work, Bayon TV will show excerpts of Leonard Cohen´s Live in London concert as part of the channel´s Music Box show. This may seem hardly newsworthy, but Mr. Cohen´s [...]