Showing 1 - 10 of 28
Will gentrification respect city's people?
Oped, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/06/2023
» We've lived for over a century in the shadow of grandeur: near the Customs House, known to Thais as rongpasi. "We" means my maternal family and the community of Haroon Mosque. Each day before sunrise, the muezzin's sing-song call rings through the neighbourhood, carried on the river wind towards the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, the French Embassy and Assumption Cathedral.
We need less 'content' and more journalism
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/01/2020
» Content, as media gurus keep preaching, is king. But such PowerPoint pep talk is shallow: "Content" -- an increasingly bastardised term that has come to signify TV newscasts, podcasts, movies, viral videos, Netflix series, memes, news articles, editorial features, real advertising, covert advertising, tweets and Facebook posts, organic or boosted -- is also an anaesthetic. It dulls the senses and kills meaning, then proceeds to belittle essence, promote shallowness and eventually undermine the practice of journalism.
Piyabutr plays House role by the book
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/09/2019
» How thick does a book need to be to stop a bullet? Perhaps, I imagine, Piyabutr Saengkanokkul is asking himself that same question.
Thai TV not yet destined for global love
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/03/2018
» The soap series Bupphaesannivas (Love Destiny) is all the rage these days in Thailand. I enjoy some parts of it, especially one memorable episode a few weeks back when the female lead, a beautiful vixen in 17th century Ayutthaya, displays her vituperative talent by shouting at her servant, "Shut up or I'll smack your mouth with my piss pot." Neither did we see the piss nor the pot, but we get the picture. There's even a YouTube clip of that.
'Mad clown' a mascot for failed govt PR
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 02/12/2017
» In a rough week for the military government, the best response they could come up with was unveiling a nightmarish mascot right out of a horror movie. In a week that called for deft public relations manoeuvring, the government spokesman riled the Muslim South with disgraceful doublespeak. In a week that required a calm port in a storm, the prime minister's infamous blustering blew the top off every lid of decency.
Look ahead after a grand farewell
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/10/2017
» The yarn of history has spun its fine threads. History is the majestic pageantry that took place on Thursday, the likes of which we'll never see again. It is the centuries-old chariots dripping with gold, the festooned processions and severe steps of solemn marchers, the sorrowful magnificence of the royal crematorium. History is the elegiac trumpet salute to the beloved King, the fabulous cosmology of heaven recreated on Earth, the stunning synchronicity of the masked dance performers, and finally, history is the invisible fire and the grey smoke in the night sky, signalling that everything must return to ashes.
Section 112 the elephant in the room
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/10/2017
» The elephant isn't simply in the room; it is in the room and charging tusk-first at an old man with a walking stick.
It's always sunset in our land of exiles
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/09/2017
» Either to Dubai or London, Yingluck Shinawatra has gone West and will likely live the rest of her life in exile. Either in an Emirati villa overlooking the Persian Gulf or a London penthouse by the Thames, she may be contemplating the difference between exile and banishment, or between exile and a holiday, but in the end it doesn't matter: She has fled, and her flight means the old power of Thailand has seen off the element regarded as threat. The ghost has been exorcised, the devil purged -- not once but twice, since there are two Shinawatras -- and now the military will charge ahead on their black horses as they gather us up and gallop us off into sunset (not sunrise).
Headlocking beneath the ivory towers
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 05/08/2017
» A headlock says it all.
King still with us, in photos and memories
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/10/2016
» On the screen we see the King in his Land Rover sluicing through mud in rough terrain. Again on the screen, he is a wiry young man in dark sunglasses and saffron robe, walking barefoot in a royal temple. Next, His Majesty King Bhumibol in dinner jacket -- the footage slightly scratchy -- is deep in a jam session with Western musicians sometime in the last century. Then we see the monarch in full regalia, captured on a Kodak motion picture film, as he proceeds down the street in the opulent pomp of Coronation Day in 1950.