Showing 11 - 20 of 28
Grate expectations
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 01/11/2015
» The defence that cheese “smells funny” never really washed in a land famous for durian. But for a long time it was one of the standard excuses Thais would use when they were avoiding the stuff.
One for the Monet, one for the road
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 02/08/2015
» Picasso, Dali, Renoir, Degas, Monet and Manet — I have gazed in awe at all of them. Reflections of moonlight dappling across a river, mist-like tutus of nubile ballerinas, ants crawling across melting faces held up by sticks — it hardly matters whether the artist was going blind, a bit of a pervert or made elaborate jokes about vaginas with lobsters and telephones, they left behind masterpieces of amazing dexterity.
Eating a path through the golden land
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 26/07/2015
» When Robert Carmack and Morrison Polkinghorne first travelled to Myanmar in 1996, their $5 each got them five kilometres past the bridge at Chiang Rai for five hours. After some persuasion, they agreed to be taken on a tourist van.
The boys are back in town
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 24/05/2015
» Well, he said it was jetlag, but that was clearly a joke. After all, they were five young men in a pop band who had been let loose in Bangkok while on their first major tour. The year was 1994, and Boyzone were still teenagers.
A spice odyssey
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 26/04/2015
» There they were, nobody’s idea of the perfect cocktail ingredients, lined up on the bar in five beautiful little brass bowls: cardamom, cloves, maize, black peppercorns and butterfly pea. A deft hand picked from two, dropped the spices in the bottom of a cocktail shaker and crushed them with a pestle. Out came a bottle of gin, one already infused with Assam black tea. Lemon, passion fruit and honey followed, each measured precisely, shaken and strained into a teapot.
Six degrees of Songkran separation
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 12/04/2015
» Songkran officially starts tomorrow, which means it really started on Friday evening or even a little earlier to beat the traffic. There really is nothing like Thailand’s unique new year water festival, so long as you discount coincidentally similar events and traditions in places like Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. It’s a chance to let off steam in the hottest month of the year by brushing up against a thousand clammy, clay-covered bodies in Silom Road and stumbling from beer station to beer station in hope of a cold can.
Painting out of a corner
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 22/03/2015
» Frame by frame, Mance Thompson ran a cloth across each of the artworks in his first international exhibition. Any trace of a fingerprint was wiped away and all 33 photographs were set in perfect alignment. It was a quiet but muggy Sunday, the sort of afternoon that brings out more mosquitoes than aficionados, but the artist’s enthusiasm was clear.
Expats who made an impact
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 15/03/2015
» The best bits of Americans in Thailand are up the back. And starting there isn’t as dumb as it sounds: There will be people out there picking it up at Asia Books or Kinokuniya and giving it a flick, looking for familiar names in the index. Choose a name, turn to a page, and you will find an interesting story told well. Chances are you will continue reading, and you will probably be intrigued enough to turn back to the previous chapter, and the one before that, to figure out what came before.
51 things you need to know about One Direction
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 08/03/2015
» The world's biggest boy band plays in Bangkok next weekend, so it's time to brush up on your trivia.
Back to the future
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 01/02/2015
» Nostalgia apparently is what it used to be. With new Star Wars and Mad Max films coming, AC/DC and Giorgio Moroder releasing albums, and K-pop hairstyles that look like A Flock of Seagulls, you could be forgiven for feeling like Marty McFly stepping out of the DeLorean in Back to the Future II. There is more than a bit of 1985 about 2015, even though there are no flying cars and only Tony Hawk has managed to get his feet on a hoverboard.