Showing 1 - 4 of 4
Dissecting a nation
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/06/2017
» Pasuk Phongpaichit's and Chris Baker's house is a verdant abode at the end of a maze in an Ekamai sub-soi. The garden at the back has tall trees and a small, tea-coloured pond. The whole area used to be a swamp, said Baker. The couple, both highly respected scholars in Thai studies, have been living there since 1987, or in their lexicon, "just before the boom" -- the high-flying economic expansion whose seismic shifts forever transformed Thailand in the early 1990s. Had they wanted to purchase the plot slightly later than they actually did -- after the boom had set in -- they wouldn't have been able to. "We came just before the high-rises."
The Lottery labyrinth
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/10/2012
» For 230 years Thai people have gambled on the lottery _ legit and underground, paper-based and imagination-prone. Along with every discussion of the lottery comes a whole syllabus of tangled subjects: economic value, political manipulation, tax structure, legal philosophy, morality, superstition, national character, the distribution of wealth and luck.
Life imitates farce as Chuvit steals the show
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/07/2012
» No one, not even Tom Cruise, exploits the media as shrewdly as Chuvit Kamolvisit. Moustache twitching, his neck veins throbbing as he went on TV to relate the stormy episode when he exposed a gambling den on Phetchaburi Road, which entailed callow pushing-and-shoving as photographers snapped and cameramen videoed it all. He led the reporters into the soi and phoned the police. When they were late in arriving, he grumbled, then sat down on a folded chair (how did that materialise?) sipping iced coffee as onlookers, journalists, children and toughs formed a circle around him.
Mean streets
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/06/2012
» Director Kongkiat Khomsiri's professed love for Martin Scorsese's mean-street movies is evident, beyond all doubts, in his new film Anthapan (The Hooligan). Think Goodfellas, with the 1950s Bangkok substituting New York's Little Italy, and an ingenuous Thai rookie replacing Ray Liotta. But then, we also see Chinese triads, brutal knife fights, Western-style shootout, the reference to Field Marshall Sarit's coup d'etat and the rise of the police as the force more wicked than the mafia _ and Kongkiat's film is a melange of influence, style, and politics.