Dear Diary: the Ubud Writers Festival was great, but gee it's good to be home

 Near our apartment is the Washy Mashy Laundromat.  Now that the owners have
a brand new electric washy mashy, they no longer need to wash by hand.

 

Returning to Chiangmai is a pleasure every time. Bali was fine, but Chiangmai with its multi-faceted life and cultures, is Home.

Marie is all geared up from the Ubud festival... stories streaming out of all her pores... and I've launched recklessly into a re-write of my latest composition... see the side-bar >>

Click here to get our goss and photos on the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali (this link will open in a new window for your convenience ...when finished, just close it and you'll be right back here).

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, Marie's former study has received a facelift:

 So where is her study now, I hear you ask? Check it out.

 Contrary to rumour, we're NOT having problems with the new computer... OK?

From the 14th floor, we look down on a new 8-storey residential building (Chiangmai Lodge) which has a cute little Sala on top. Recently the Sala acquired coloured floodlights and I thought my worst fears were going to materialize ...it was turning into a bar or nightclub (eek). But no, thank Buddha; silence reigns :-) ...so far.

However, there are some people in Chiangmai I really do wish would be silent - Christian missionaries. Their basic subversive agenda of Conversion hasn't changed since this photo was taken:

...but these days they're having to be much sneakier due to their growing unpopularity. In the photo below, for instance, is Chiangmai's "Hilltribe Handicraft Training Center" (note the American spelling). Nary a steeple nor cross in sight, but hey, don't be fooled. And how very patronizing is it to assume that the local Hilltribes need training in their own culture!! We regularly see dour extremist Christians in floor-length grey pinafores and prim bonnets in charge of very young Hilltribe children. The going price per child in the US is about $30,000. Hmm, the word "pretext" comes to mind...

(Notice the Devil's tail poking up in the foreground)

And to vandalize Thailand's Buddhist culture without thought to the consequences is shameful. The very fabric of Thailand's society is woven from the delicate silk threads of Buddhist philosophy. Unravel those threads, and there will be serious social distortions, even if you've been indoctrinated to believe that you're replacing their System with something that's culturally superior. Now that would be arrogant and eurocentric in the extreme... yes/no? Maybe the hardest but most helpful and caring thing that Christian missionaries could ever do would be to leave Thai solutions to Thai people and rack off back to Texas. Evangelizing in someone else's home is also known as neo-Colonial exploitation. Better to acknowledge the mistakes of History.

 

 Thai Buddhism's artifice and ritual is visually boggling, matching any of the glitz, smoke and mirrors of High Anglicanism, Catholicism, or even Capitalism. On our travels around Chiangmai we saw this white Wat - which is, as it turns out, was much of a tourist-oriented commercial establishment as a real Wat.

But Yea, to be fair, where in any Christian doctrine is there any admonition against alcohol to match this ?

Anywhere else, the whisky bottle would have already been stolen.

Assisting the multi-headed Naga serpent to protect the Buddha.

Stairway leading up to the Chang Dao cave entrance

Marie at the Sri Satchanali ruins, near the 700 year-old old capital Sukhothai.

Limestone formations on the ceiling of the Chang Dao caves.

An abandoned building not far from our condo. Horned Greek satyrs 
dance around the satellite dish. Plato might have approved, methinks.

Yes, the Cult thrives. Daily we must drink the Blood and
eat the Body of our Lord Panda. This is Her Will.
Grease be with you. Abears.

And for all you Foodies, some refreshing new menu items spotted recently around North Thailand and Bali:

...... Fish Dancing with Free-Water

...... Corn Flex with milk

...... Fish's offal salad

...... Salt-Crap Lon

The best 2 of these have been added to my tasty Asian Menus collection, gathered over many years of travel through Asia. The list can be viewed here and will open conveniently in a new window for you. I always record such delicious-sounding menu items exactly as found, with all capitals and punctuation. Sadly, spelling errors are increasingly rare as restaurants all seem to have Spellcheckers these days.
Damn - an era is passing.

---

Here in Thailand, it's time yet again for the Loy Kratong festival  with its banana-leaf candle-boats ("kratongs") crowding the rivers, and picturesque hot-air lanterns filling the sky. But, of course, the glossy tourist brochures don't tell you about the injuries from firecrackers. If you're squeamish, I strongly advise NOT clicking here.

I can only agree. I can't resist peeking through forbidden keyholes either. Shame that computers don't have a key marked "UnSee".

THE NEW PULPIT POLITICS IN AUSTRALIA: FunkyPix2 unpacks what Howard and Rudd said about Christianity

Holy Soundbites! His Holiness Father Howard has found god. If nobody claims her in 30, days, Ducklips Howard can keep her.

Both Rudd and Howard know that a webcast aimed at the Christian minority vote has the potential to backfire electorally. Unlike extremist America, the massive majority of Australians are more likely to mock the madness than to marvel at miracles. And even some Australians who publicly profess to be “Christian” will, in the locked vaults of their secret musings, also recognize the cloaked pretence of these new Pulpit Politics.

So Howard and Rudd choose their words carefully, avoiding too many overtly “religious” terms which could inflame the secular majority. So I’m taking some of their suave propaganda phrases and feed them into the FunkyPix2’s Forensic Crap-Detecting Scanner:

HOWARD: "…there are people of good faith in all political parties"

RUDD: "…the question of personal faith provides a compass point for my life, it also therefore helps shape the values which I hold to be true"

The term “of good faith” will be heard differently by the Christian and by the non-Christian. The non-Christian is accustomed to hearing it in everyday contexts, even in a secular bull-pit like Parliament. The doggedly-believing Christian is more likely to interpret it as Faith = Good, as an affirmation of their Christianity - because that’s precisely the stuff they crave to hear. They'll hear it with capital letters. Howard has cunningly chosen words around which the already-converted can "hear" glowing halos. They grasp hungrily for any confirmation of their beliefs, and the higher the percieved rank of the speaker the better.

But Howard and Rudd are both aware that this selective semantic filtering can work either way, according to the viewpoint of the individual listener. Rudd’s statement is incontestable, but is merely a statement of historical fact. Anyone who lives in Western nations has had their language, thoughts, and habits basically moulded by church traditions, eg, the Work Ethic, moral code, etc. Another example: the basic characteristics of western music from Mozart to Elvis or Madonna have their roots in the music of the church. No-one raised in western culture can escape a heritage heavily under-pinned by Judeo-Christian values.

Listened to objectively, Rudd’s statement is born of a secular-humanist philosophy, but will be selectively filtered as “religious” by whosoever desperately seeketh to interpret it that way. Rudd has side-stepped directly describing his faith as ‘Christian’, but instead made it a "personal faith", a savvy approach which is flexible and inoffensive enough to pacify most Australians.

In Australia's sudden rash of sympathy with Christianity, both Rudd and Howard have clearly taken a cynical leaf from Bush and his vote-starved Republican war-mongers . However, unlike Hillary Clinton’s obviously fake and fuzzy Damascus Road epiphany, Rudd has deliberately not over-stated his case in the effort to squeeze a tiny vote from a minority interest group. In fact, there is more to be lost by being dishonest to himself – he knows it’s a case of Majority Rules, even in the gerry-mandered electorate of Heaven.

...... P O R N O G R A P H Y

Now that I've revived your attention, I'll continue with the next thing our dear leaders said:

HOWARD: …offering free internet porn filter to parents at a cost of AU$189 million

RUDD: …offering Family Impact Statements for every submission to Cabinet

The Flying Position. Let’s see if Howard can muzzle the internet where other countries have all failed. Except Burma, which has only one ISP – controlled rigidly by its nice family-friendly military Dictatorship. Oh, I forgot… Australia’s going that way too, with Howard's Indigenous Intervention.

Howard offers the traditional Right-wing conservative THOU-SHALT-NOT approach. He’s a prime example of the old-fashioned Father-figure, enforcing formulaic and stern parental authority, top-down. He clearly doesn’t understand that the Internet ultimately can’t be controlled – has he never heard of Proxy Servers? Probably not… Howard barely knows how to look up his email, let alone do rooly hard things like cut-and-paste. He's too OLD to be Prime Monster anymore.

Get your HowardCorp Fake Religion Kit today, complete with FREE booklet “Christianity for Dummies” in 3 easy lessons.

John Howard pines for the Good Old Days when you could see porn from the privacy of your car. Why do you think the old Ford Zephyrs had venetian blinds? Drive-ins are how Johnny discovered girls.

By contrast, Kevin Rudd’s centre/left-wing ‘bottom-up’ approach seeks to present information to law-makers so they can come to individual solutions to each new circumstance. It reflects the “nurturing parent” model usually preferred by the Left.
All in all, the Rudd option is more democratic, consultative and concilliatory. And more practical.

……………….......................... Porn in Braille

Politicians’ attempts to flatter Christian voters are likely to be interpreted as suck-holing and could well backfire electorally.

Nicey-poo Christian habits are not always as honourable as they attempt to appear. As in politics, dark agendas can lurk behind façades of ritualistic sincerity.

“Come to me, sweet little boys, and sit on my knees, BWAA HA HA HA HA”. Rumour has it that Pope Hilarious I is arriving in the Northern Territory as Padre Howard’s Secret Weapon in his Invasion of Aboriginal Communities. The pope is also reputedly hell-bent on closing down this FunkyPix2 website. To find out why, look for “Browse by Category” in the sidebar 8 then click on “Religious Issues”.

Dear Diary: a summary of our 2009 so far

It's been a frantic-crazy yo-yo year for us. Here's a series of links to show different activities (in case you missed any :-) followed by a few miscellaneous photos of more recent pranks...
Each link will open in a new window for your convenience:

1. In January we participated in the Galle Literary Festival in Sri Lanka.
Very good experience indeed. It's a pity that the festival may now be subverted as a propaganda weapon by the bullish Rajapakse government. If so, we may not attend in 2010, and go to the Jaipur Literary Festival instead.

2. Tour of Laos in late January.
Went with Nicolette. The Thong Lor cave was the highlight. Vangvieng wasn't.

3. Spent a horrible month in Adelaide, Australia.
This was on account of the death of Marie's father and subsequent sabotaged attempts to tidy up family matters. After that stressful debacle, we rooly needed a break [see 4].

4. Spent 10 days in February in Malaysia, particularly at Perhentian Island off the coast of north-eastern Malaysia.
Didn't go fishing, but hey, you should see what Marie caught.

5. With our strict chaperones Alan and Brenton we drove around exploring to the south-east of Chiangmai, particularly Phrae, Nan, and Pua near the Laotian border.
Discovered hidden weaving treasures in remote villages - but not a single tiramasu.

6. Similarly, we toured the charismatic 700 year-old ruined city of Sukhothai to the south-west of Chiangmai.
We showed the locals the steps to "I'm a Little Teapot". Cultural exchange, you understand.

7. Now we've begun another apartment renovation. Yes, it's the awful truth - a small room next door to our present apartment.
And no, we don't suffer from insanity. We enjoy every minute of it Bwaa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha *Latest photos uploaded on 07 August 2009.

8. All the while I've continued to self-publish various pieces of my “classical” music on the web.
There are (downloadable) mp3 recordings on the MySpace Music website, plus scores in pdf format - so you can listen and also follow the dots if you choose.

---

The new-born panda at Chiangmai zoo has triggered cult-status pandemonium in the region. Huge billboards shouting Hello Little Panda have popped up everywhere, along with a nation-wide naming competition. Little Panda has become the new Hello Kitty. (Only Buddha knows what might happen to the Kingdom of Thailand if the tiny varmint suddenly upped and died.) In the pic below, Little Panda has been cheekily elevated to a prime spot next to a shrine to the Thai King, no less! (the intersection of Nimmanhaemin and Huaykeaw Roads):

Only in Thailand ! (see more Panda fun here.)

Marie and I are considering kick-starting a counter-cult:

Hello Little Crocodile!

Over the past few weeks the atmosphere has been uncommonly clear (the burning of the rice paddies has ceased due to the monsoon season). So for the first time ever, we've been able to see the mountain called Chang Dao to our north. This was the view of the mountain's dramatic profile from our apartment balcony yesterday.

Taking advantage of the even-fabulouser-than-normal weather, we took a car trip to the town of Pai, north-west of Xiengmai. En route, we had to overtake this Buddhist coffin(?):

Pai (pronounced as "buy") has concentrated on Tourism in the same manner as Vang Vieng in Laos, and suffers the same sorts of crass cultural pitfalls as a result. Like all of Thailand at the moment, it only has 20% of the usual numbers of tourists: you can see from this photo just how not-busy the main street is:

Much accommodation in Pai is of the hole-in-the-wall variety, but there are more "resorts" there now too (if in name only, in some instances). In the pic below, the rickety bamboo bridge affords access to the tourist kennels on the other side of the river (in which, apparently, you can go Brown-Water Rafting:

Dear Diary: Adelaide's water supply.Hardly a drop to drink.

The River Murray near Goolwa. I used to row boats
and swim off these jetties as a child in the sixties.
A bloke doesn't have to be a rocket scientist to pick up on the deep mood of despondancy and fear in South Australia. People obviously sense that there are looming threats to their well-being, but can't quite come to grips with the enormity of it all. It's too hard and scary, so they carry on as if everything is normal. But no, everything isn't normal.

Being an outsider looking in is an advantage in seeing things as they really are. Adelaide is clearly unsustainable due to lack of water. Unsustainable. Unless there's substantial winter rain this year, Adel-vegas does not have a guaranteed water supply for next year. The 'authorities' won't be able to solve the problem by simply buying a few more hundred gigalitres because there isn't any left to buy. What there was has been bought up already.

At last there are a few rare voices dismissing the dreaded "D" word - drought. Mr Hanrahan should (long ago)have been the first to work out that shortage of rain is in fact the normal condition of Southern Australian weather. Always has been. Periods of consistent good rain, in fact, are the exception to the norm. Climate Change is merely an induced intensification. Perhaps all this that isn't what people, in their eternal colonial optimism, want to believe... nobody enjoys words like 'crisis'.

People have adequate evidence of the water crisis via the media, but due to habitual patterns of thinking and behaviour, somehow imagine that life will somehow continue like it always has. Here's a front page of the main newspaper which appeared while we were in Adelaide recently:

Priorities are evident: Football and Soapies 1, Essential Infrastructure 0.
Indeed, South Australian Thought Habits militate against noticing the Elephant in the Room. But when they're down to their last bucket, folks will have to leave, as thousands of younger people already have, leaving behind a geriatric population. Property prices will therefore probably perform the dead-cat-bounce even more than the US-led mortgage crisis is suggesting. This is despite the government's $14,000 first-home buyer's grant, a deceptive and purely politically opportunistic short-term stunt, akin to an injection of psychlogical steroids. Simple arithmetic cries out loud that $14,000 is a miniscule sum of money compared to total mortgage repayment (principle + interest) over a 20 year period. Bank Bait for unwary innocent Youth.

But Adelaideians still get up in the morning and routinely water their lawns, councils still prioritize gentrifying the pavements and parks... and it's all a self-deceiving superficial veneer. It's a self-sabotaging "feel-good" form of lifestyle window-dressing which gobbles financial and physical resources that would be better channeled towards urgent red-alert survival strategies. Gee wiz, if you can have nice cars like this, the country must be thriving, mate:

But it's all about Projection, Wishes, Imagined Realities, Avoidance. You see it in people's expressionless gaze, unexplained outbursts of anger and frustration, "me-first" attitudes in shops, and especially in Road Rage and speeding. South Australia is not a happy place.

Moral of the story? Advice to habitual Adelaideians? Sell up now, or sooner. Grab some bottled water and consider the merits of becoming a bona fide climate refugee to anywhere else where there's adequate water - pronto. It might just be 5 minutes to midnight already. Your English forbears settled the wrong end of Austraya.

Lots of love

Two relieved refugees to Thailand X X X

P.S: all of my blog posts on environment can be found under "Browse by Category" in the side-bar8 of your screen. Click on the "Environment" link.

As therapy for the trip, we went here.

Photos from the Galle Literary Festival 2009, in sunny Sri Lanka

What a magic venue to hold a literary festival! First I'll whizz you around on a whirlwind tour of the 17th century Dutch fort to give you a feel for the location. Location matters.

First, the lighthouse and mosque on the southern tip:

...and again, but viewed from the centre of the fort:

Typical Fort streetscapes - with the ubiquitous Bajaj tuk-tuk:

...and old fortified ramparts dating from colonial times:

...but minus cannon emplacements. Note the Bajaj tuk-tuk with surfboard:

Goats wander at will, and a bullock snoozes next to its cart:

Locals go about their fishy business. Galle is nothing if not a fishing town, and a place where old TATA buses go to die:

Kandyan dancers seemed to pop up everywhere we went...

...as did the ubiquitous feral cows, scavenging food scraps from bins and drains:

Our festival activities began with a recreational tour of tiny Taprobane Island, now owned by the festival organiser. It has been the haunt of past writers and luminaries, viz, Paul Bowles, Robin Maugham, Arthur C. Clarke [..."where I escaped the tyranny of the typewriter"], Gore Vidal, and latterly graced by no less than Marie Burrows:

We waded accross at low tide, blissfully unaware that we would later have to return when the water was waist-deep. Tricked... but OK cool ;-) ...no 18-foot tsunamis today. As we entered the house, Marie and I had an extremely weird feeling of deja vu... the design and dimensions, if not the material, was nearly identical with our former octagonal house in North Queensland, but Taprobane was an island, not perched on the summit of a mountain. Another minor difference was that Taprobane Island can be rented for eleven hundred pounds per night. Yup folks, that's 1,100 British quid per night, minimum 3 weeks... oh well, heck, there is a pool...

The first function was the official Festival opening, held at the humble birthplace [photo below] of the venerated late Srilankan writer/scholar Martin Wickramasinge, south of Galle at Koggala:

This was followed by a nosh-up at a massive hotel/resort aptly named 'The Fortress', allegedly built by a well-connected Srilankan politician with an unaccountably huge amount of cash to fling around. Say no more, nudge nudge... or else. There is a palpable atmosphere of politically-generated fear in Srilanka, and non-conforming journalists are at risk of their lives. President Rajapakse's cronies offer policy concerning the LTTE as a "with-us-or-against-us" thing, Weapons of Press Distortion, copy-catted from Amerkin-style poltix, viz:

Then on day 2 began a feast of events which left us literally breathless and stimulated. In the photo below, Marie heads off to lunch after listening to travel-writer Colin Thubron recounting anecdotes of his travels along the Silk Road:

Through this main gate of the Galle Fort are the district legal offices and Courts. Marie could observe the environment in which her great-grandfather, a respected (and feared) Srilankan KC from Colombo, might well have visited. The Great Family Tradition survives in diasporic reincarnation - Marie's sister Catherine has also attained dizzying heights in the Silk trade in outback Orstraya.

(Hmm, in fact, I might hire Catherine to protect us from unwelcome attention from goats begging for food at Hikkaduwa station, en route from Galle to Colombo.)

I have no idea why this goat had "DONATED TO OXFAM" branded on its rump:

Here's the sleepy Galle Magistrates Court, in a dusty lane just inside the gate:

It is ironic in the extreme that we, as Australians with Queen Elizabeth still anachronistically lodged as Head-of-State, have to visit a long independent ex-British colony to hear English spoken as it oughta. The likes of Pico Iyer and M. J. Akbar are politically astute thinkers, both incredidbly articulate with incisive wits. As a humble photo-blogger, I was in awe.

Here's Marie at a workshop, sitting between balding photo-bloggers:

Germaine Greer spoke about writing taboos, sex, and censorship. During this speech she claimed that older men were more media-visible and accepted than older women. She commented that whiskery old men with dodgy prostates are perceived as cuddly and cute. (I confess, I felt a momentary impulse to ask a parallel question about about wizened old post-hysterectomy women... but the urge receded, conveniently). I was sitting next to Thomas Keneally at the time, and Germaine seemed to glare accusingly at us both... eek. Germaine specifically cited the plight of Australia's Aboriginal men as one subject that is taboo in Australian public debate.

A standing ovation for Germaine Greer

After the session, Germaine and Thomas hugged and both shed tears of rage and compassion for Aboriginal Australians. It also happened to be Germaine's 70th birthday... but she didn't seem particularly invisible:

A more humorous, if considerably more prosaic facet of the Srilankan literary tradition can be observed in my photo of a geriatric glue-pot in the Galle post-office. Couldn't resist photographing the generations of stamp perforations, assorted paper fragments, papr-clips, and even biros embedded like flies frozen in amber. Also check out the classy cardboard desk protector:

Inspired, we brought home a metre-high pile of books from the GLF Bookshop, but expertly spread the weight so there were no excess baggage charges. More luck than magic - it pays to arrive late to check-in: airline staff are in a hurry:

For confirmed GLF junkies, there are more photos and atrocities here .