Showing 101 - 106 of 106
Remembering the Manifesto
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 09/05/2012
» 'The old film is dead. We believe in the new one."
Madness, badness, sadness
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/04/2012
» Horror was replayed, because all exorcism is a form of inevitable horror. First, one of the prosecutors of the Norwegian court read out the names and details of each of the 77 victims killed by Anders Behring Breivik on July 22, 2011. "She was at the water's edge... Shot dead." "He was in the Big Hall of the cafe. Shot dead." "He fled and fell off a cliff near the island's west point... Died of fall injuries and/or drowning." Then again, and again, and again: "She/He was near the water pump. Shot dead." The frigid, literal, unwavering police prose of the report gives you the feeling that you are walking into a graveyard. Or a morgue. You look away but the screams continue. Then comes the horror of Breivik's claim that he is sane. Of his vow that he "would do it again". Of him announcing that the victims were not "innocent". Of him insisting that he acted out of "goodness" to prevent Islam from becoming a major threat to European civilisation. Of his malevolent bombast that what he did in downtown Oslo and a youth camp on Utoya Island last year was "the most sophisticated and spectacular attack committed in Europe since World War II".
Censors ban 'Shakespeare' film
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/04/2012
» A new Thai film based on a famous William Shakespeare play has been banned by censors on the grounds that its content may cause disunity among the people.
Davos, Tokyo and clueless Tinglish
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 10/03/2012
» 'In general, every country has the language it deserves." So said Jorge Luis Borges, wordsmith, polyglot, a man fascinated by what letters and languages can do. Goethe, with his proto-Romantic genius, was much less kind when it comes to being monolingual: "Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own."
Cambodian classics re-emerge
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/03/2012
» The Khmer Rouge, headlong and senseless, arrived in Phnom Penh and spoiled the party. During the so-called Golden Age of Cambodian cinema, from the 1960s to the early '70s, almost 400 films were released in the country. A number of them travelled across the border and were screened in Thai cinemas, some gaining the status of popular entertainment, and at least one, featuring a chattering snake and his love affair with a beautiful woman, becoming a classic remembered today by Thais as a lost, distant dream.
A covering that bares one's faith
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/01/2012
» For years the mosque in my neighbourhood was registered as "Wat Muang Kae Mosque". The Buddhist temple, Wat Muang Kae, is a cat's meow away from the Islamic house of worship, and the mosque's name, so Thai and so un-Arabic, suggests the presence of interfaith amicability even before the term "interfaith" had any political undertones.