Showing 1 - 10 of 19
Art on a huge scale
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 23/10/2016
» If Thailand was to get a 23-metre easel weighing 12 tonnes, where should it go? And what painting should it support? These are the questions Cameron Cross hopes to answer as he attempts to bring his international public art project to Thailand.
Standing his comic ground
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 28/08/2016
» When Comedy Central needed a Thai comedian for an Asian stand-up series, they had to hunt through the archives. And YouTube.
Image consciousness
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 20/03/2016
» Two weekends, two exhibitions, many weighty issues: Bangkok art lovers are about to see something profound.
‘Nine comedians walk into a bar ...’
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 13/03/2016
» ‘I’m always introduced as a musical genius and a sex symbol, which is fairly accurate,” Earl Okin explains. “Music is what I’m about, I can’t help being a sex symbol. I didn’t choose it, but music I chose.”
Scales of greatness
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 24/01/2016
» Jazz musicians are accustomed to winging it, but Peter Martin really wasn’t sure what he was in for when he turned up at the East Room of the White House for a state dinner in 2011. He and a band had been engaged for a feature performance, “but that means different things to different people” and the details were surprisingly vague for such an event.
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.