Showing 1-10 of 35 results
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Time is not on anybody's side
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/10/2021
» There's the anatomy -- the bone and the flesh, supple or flaccid. Then there's time, the cruellest judge of all. In Jakrawal Nilthamrong's Anatomy Of Time (the Thai title is simpler, Wela), the first sound we hear is a tick-tock metronome like the soundtrack of the cosmos as we watch an old lady gently tending to her tubed and bedbound husband. Time will be folded back. The old woman will become young and her dying husband will appear as a spirited, dashing military captain fighting communist insurgents for the good of the nation.
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Through the prism of history
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/10/2019
» The book's title is printed on its spine: Prism Of Photography: Dispersion Of Knowledge And Memories Of The 6 October Massacre. Thereafter, from the first page on, we have only photographs with no captions.
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A nation of millions can't hold them back
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 29/10/2018
» Rhymes and misdemeanours. Yo, yo. Rappers are threatened to be thrown in a slammer.
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The pastoral romance returns
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/09/2018
» The star-crossed lovers coo. They ride their buffaloes through a verdant field, splash mud, evade spiteful parents, and make a vow at the shrine of the banyan tree. But their romance, like all memorable romances in books and life, is doomed by the circumstances of fate, tragic and scarred, and their destiny is one of the most heartbreaking in the canon of Siamese literature and film.
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A not-so-mundane history
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/06/2018
» A lampshade, elegant and shiny, bears a distinct image of the Siamese constitution over the map of Thailand. A nielloware cigarette box, in solemn brass and black, also features an engraving of the constitution -- the emblematic figure of a folded scripture on a tray. Next to it are matchbox labels, pins, a glass bottle, a bowl, a water jar, an ashtray, a vinyl record. All of them carry the symbolism of the seismic transformation that took place 86 years ago.
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Sucking the wind out of the elections
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 05/05/2018
» The verb of the week is "to dood".
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A comedy likely to end only in horror
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 03/02/2018
» The junta can read the stars and history and they must know this isn't going to end well. As frustration grows, as protests form, as their support ebbs even their idol Gen Prem Tinsulanonda flat-out said so they amp up censorship and tighten the squeeze, not with gusto but with desperation. With Deputy Prime Minister Gen Prawit Wongsuwon looking increasingly like a plump Chinese deity on the verge of losing his worshippers, the regime reacts with force, gagging tactics and plain old bullying.
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Regime trawl for small fry no joke at all
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/01/2018
» The big fish hardly ever gets caught, not here. Only the small, the trivial, the nonsensical fish, the clownfish especially. As in school, or in prison, the bullies never bully the big kid. They only confirm their sense of power when they go after the small guys, the nerds, even the girls.
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The inciting incident
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/10/2017
» On Sept 24, 1976, two electricians were beaten and hanged to death from the top of a gate somewhere in Nakhon Pathom, victims of an escalating right-wing terror in Thai politics of that heady decade. Two weeks later, as protests against the return to the Kingdom of former dictator Gen Thanom Kittikajorn gathered steam, students at Thammasat University staged a play about the hanging of the two men. Soon the photographs of the play were used by nationalists to whip up anger and fear of communism, which led to the massacre on the morning of Oct 6 as police and militias laid siege to the university, killing, maiming and brutalising scores of people in one of the worst incidents of bloodshed in modern Thai history.
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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).
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