Irreverent, informed and downright eclectic crime fiction and reportage from Southeast Asia and beyond
About two weeks ago, I reported on the satirical website ChinaReallySucks.Com, which until then had evaded the Chinese censors. The website takes pot-shots at Chinese linguistic inadequacies and features hundreds of photographs of inordinately undemocratic public signs, bizarre slogans on T-Shirts, as well as images of corporate rip-offs such as Star Fucks, Pizza Huh and [...]
Great news from the Land of Smiles! PC Air (probably no pun intended), a new Thai airline launching this month, is recruiting transgender and transsexual flight attendants. Thailand has long been a country with a vocal minority of gender benders, and while there is discrimination against the third sex, it is not as nearly bad [...]
The Most Secret Place on Earth premiered in Australia on ABC1 television on January 24th at 9.30pm. Ironically, The Most Secret Place on Earth competed with Generation Kill, showing on ABC2 at the same time, a seven-part war mini-series about a Rolling Stone reporter embedded with US troops in Iraq. About the film: For a [...]
Swedish photographer Gerhard Joren has produced a short documentary on the birth of Bangkok-based band Pussy & The Learjets. The two and a half minute film documents the Rock’n’Roll band’s live debut at The Overstay on January 15th. The four piece, formed in late 2010, is currently playing dates around Bangkok, Thailand and will record [...]
The Trash Palace The crowd surges forward. The singer, a skinny white guy, screams into the microphone, which has been taped to the top of a camera tripod. The room is so hot that water drips from the ceiling. Strips of linoleum are coming off the floor in long torn rolls of dirty plastic. The [...]
Before I get accused of anti-Americanism, I´d like to take the opportunity to inform readers of a very naughty site on China, www.chinareallysucks.com. You´re not going to find any objective analysis here, the makers of this site clearly don´t like China much. Amazingly though, it is claimed, the site is produced, researched, ridiculed and uploaded [...]
Writer, anti-Vietnam War activist and US secrets whistle-blower Fred Branfman, the man who exposed the carpet bombing of Laos in the 1970s, has his own take on Vang Pao, the Hmong general and CIA operative who died last week in Califronia, aged 81. Fred Branfman – My memo on Vang Pao I guess Vang Pao’s [...]
The Cambodian Space Project are currently on tour in Australia, before taking the sounds of Khmer rock to the US, China and Europe in the spring. Listen to a radio show on ABC National Radio Australia featuring a great session and an interview with The Cambodian Space Project. Singer Srey Thy sings several songs from [...]
The website Tripbase offer information for would-be travel writers, on the whole very sensible and useful for prospective scribes. The introduction -The harsh realities laid bare- is both sobering and spot-on: Travel writing is a tough and competitive business, a trade for which one needs to have plenty of persistence and low financial expectations – [...]