The World of Somchai Wong: Bangkok's great tourism takeaway

Bangkok's impending tourism boom is a bust for the bright sparks behind Hong Kong's Asia's World City campaign. Recent piece for South China Morning Post's Postmagazine ... my old stomping, and scribbling, ground. 

As it spares little expense in telling the entire planet, Hong Kong is Asia's World City. So how come Bangkok gets all the tourists?

Every year MasterCard compiles the Global Destination Cities Index forecast, based on anticipated visitor numbers and their anticipated spend. And for 2013, the Thai capital is its hot tip, beating London, Paris, New York, Hong Kong and Singapore into top spot, the first Asian city to occupy that pinnacle.

According to the credit-card giant's seers, Bangkok will clock up 15.98 million arrivals this year - representing growth of 9.8 per cent on last year's figures. London comes a close second, with 15.96 million visitors.

Hong Kong comes in at No9 - despite spending far more on branding itself than Bangkok, which also happens to be Unesco's World Book Capital for 2013 and benefits from being in "Amazing Thailand", which "Always Amazes you", as the slogan currently has it.

And to further wound Hong Kong's pride, it is listed as onLost in Thailand, was shot.

e of the top five "feeder" cities - along with Singapore, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur and Seoul - from which most visitors to Bangkok come. The mainland provides the largest number of arrivals - almost three million - with many perhaps keen to see where their nation's highest grossing film, 

Bill Barnett, a Phuket-based Asian hospitality expert and head of consultancy C9 Hotelworks, says Bangkok's rise is concurrent with the "global surge" of Asia.

"East is the new West," he says, adding that "the allure of Bangkok goes well beyond the destination; it's all about a meteoric rise in airlift.

"After the global financial crisis a dynamic travel shift changed the market. Asian travellers take short trips but travel much more frequently; unlike Europeans or Americans … people here jump on planes for a weekend or just an overnighter."

As for Hong Kong, Barnett says it has been marginalised by Shanghai and is also perceived as being too closely linked to the mainland. By contrast, Thailand offers "a little bit of everything on the menu".

But Asia's City of Angels is not for resting on its laurels, with Sansern Ngaorungsi of the Tourism Authority of Thailand leading a drive to focus on social media, youth markets and niche sectors such as golf and honeymooning. The overall strategy is referred to as DISCO: digital marketing, image building, sustainability, crystallisation and crisis management, and organisation management.

To adapt MasterCard's own advertising mantra, then …

Asia's World City destination brand campaign: HK$400 million.

Victoria Harbour Symphony of Lights: HK$44 million.

Bangkok's destination bragging rights: priceless.

Loogie Hocking with Rocky Horror and Darth Veda

This piece was recently written for the splendid new Australian glossy Heart Beauty, and its guru-like editor Rosemary Hamilton, who has both in spades. 

"You have too much phlegm,’’ opines Dr Alvin James B.A.M.S., A Class Medical Practitioner and avatar of all things Ayurvedic at Avista Hideaway Resort and Spa Phuket. The resort island’s latest luxury eyrie enjoys a panoptic perch atop the steep green hills between Patong and Karon beaches, a surfeit of the titular vistas, and a spa where then ancient Indian art of well-being is getting a modern-day makeover.

I clear my throat and fight the urge to hock a loogie. Dr Alvin is an affable chap from Kerala with soft doe eyes and a slow motion head bobble that quickly becomes hypnotic. I am slouched in an outsized chair in the consultation room, where he plans to identify my prakriti, or body type, and discern which of three doshas, or humours, is prevalent.

“There is vata, pitha and kapha,’’ he explains, “vata being air, wind, kinetic energy, pitha being fire, or digestion, controlling emotions like anger, fear and bravado, and kapha being phlegm, which is potential energy, resistance to disease, immunity and keeps the joints lubricated.’’

Full Metal Racket: When Maclean met manga

This piece ran recently in the South China Morning Post's 'Rewind' column, which looks back at a film, album and book unified by a common theme. I took on the big guns this time, taking aim at Alistair Maclean's classic WW2 epic The Guns of Navarone and its unexpected second life as the inspiration behind a cult Japanese video game.

METAL GEAR SOLID, IF SLIGHTLY RUSTED

Guns. Big shiny guns. Boys do love their lethal weapons, as anyone who ever buckled up a low-slung holster, fumbled a High Noon quick draw and shot down an imaginary Indian (or Cowboy) can attest.

Boys also love a good war story. War? What is it good for? It’s the measure of a man, the red badge of courage, the triumph of right over might. It’s the stuff of a thousand Commando comics. Gott im himmell. We can be heroes.

Therein lies the genius of The Guns of Navarone, Alistair McLean’s epic tale of infiltration, sabotage, and derring do where eagles dare. McLean conflates the ultimate test of mettle with two unfeasibly large bits of metal. It’s mental, man’s man manna from heaven, the stuff of a thousand stiff upper lips and endless war movie tropes. And it’s more or less true.

The titular guns are massive Nazi canons mounted on top of a vertiginous cliff on an Aegean island overlooking a crucial seaway, beyond which 1,200 Allied troops sit stranded. If they aren't rescued quickly, they die. Keith Mallory, a New Zealand mountain climber, must infiltrate the island, scale a 400 foot cliff, spike the guns and save the day, along with his team of mumbling, mostly moustachioed misfits, anti-heroes and freedom fighters.

The Guns of Navarone is the sine qua non of suicide missions and a page-turner non pareil; a vertical and vertigo-inducing antithesis to its only serious rival for Best-World-War-2-Book-Made-Into-Classic-Movie, Paul Brickhill’s horizontally claustrophobic The Great Escape.

The mission is implausible yet somehow believable. You suspend scepticism as McLean weaves his terse, tense prose, even as his heroes hang from the fraying threads of spinning subplots. (The excellent film starred Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn and David Niven at the peak of their powers).

SO SOLID CREW

“First, you've got that bloody old fortress on top of that bloody cliff. Then you've got the bloody cliff overhang. You can't even see the bloody cave, let alone the bloody guns. And anyway, we haven't got a bloody bomb big enough to smash that bloody rock. And that's the bloody truth, sir,’’ says RAAF Squadron Leader Howard Barnsby, a quote that serves as synopsis.

These impossible odds and insurmountable obstacles were what inspired now-legendary videogame designer Hideo Kojima to create the enduring, quirky and cultish Metal Gear Solid franchise for Playstation, selling over 25 million copies worldwide.

FLASH DEMOB: 'SAFETY DANCE'?

In a review of the book (and later film), Kojima names it as the main influence on Metal Gear Solid. “The sense of satisfaction after completing the mission that is supposed to fail, after overcoming the harsh environment and destroying the invincible fortress … The coolness of making the impossible possible. What influenced me the most is this element of The Guns of Navarone. It is this catharsis you feel after infiltrating a place no-one else can, and completing a mission no-one else can. It is this courage and ecstasy of overcoming
limits and making the impossible possible that I wanted to
experience in a game!’’

Snakes on a Plain: the weird life and foolish death of the 'Snakeman of Sisaket'

If you want wack-jobs wont to live in small spaces with fierce critters, then it's hard to beat amazing Thailand. In the land of the Scorpion Queen and the Centipede King, one would hardly choke on one's cornflakes to learn there is indeed a 'Snakeman', from the dry dusty plains of unlovely Sisaket province in darkest Isaan. This one from the vaults originally ran in the Sunday Telegraph magazine (UK) and South China Morning Post's Postmagazine. It was later picked up by National Geographic channel, who coaxed me back to Sisaket to be part of filming for a piece on the 'Snakeman of Sisaket' for its 'Hunter/Hunted' series (Series 1: Victims of Venom ... see it here http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/wild/videos/victims-of-venom/ ) While filming a segment in the Red Cross snake farm in Bangkok, the gung ho serpent wrangler dropped a fiesty cobra on the floor inches from my feet. It then slithered through my legs before he pinned it with his snake-wrangling rake and restored it to its plastic box piled upon dozens of other snakes in plastic boxes waiting to be milked of their venom. I'm all for getting deep into the story, but a cobra bite to feel what the Snakeman felt before he popped his clogs would have been going too far, even by my usual silly standards ...

PHAO BUACHAN SMILES through a web of wrinkles, spits a jet of bright red betel juice through what's left of her crimson teeth, and regards me with a rheumy eye. 'I can't speak about my son without begging his permission,' she says. 'I'm scared the snakes will come, and they'll be angry.'

ELIZABETH TAYLOR'S UNDERSTUDY ON THE
SET OF 'CLEOPATRA'

She hands me a candle and a stick of smouldering incense, and we pick our way through a building site at the back of her wooden house to a white shrine dappled with shards of coloured glass and tiny mirrors. She nods. I kneel, mumble a few words and deposit the candle and incense in a jar of sand. Her prayer is longer, a rambling entreaty punctuated by slow-motion prostrations. When she's finally finished she stands, smiles again and says, 'Now we may speak.'

Her son, Boonreung Buachan, was the 'Snakeman of Sisaket'. In 1998, he had a fleeting taste of international fame when he appeared in the Guinness Book of World Records for spending seven days in an enclosure with venomous snakes.

Before and after setting the record - which still stands - Boonreung made a living by performing throughout Thailand. In his hour-long shows, he would pluck cobras from wooden boxes and drape them round his neck, stroking and kissing them as he kept up a steady patter of cobra lore. He would milk their venom, letting people get close as the deadly, viscous liquid oozed from scimitar fangs.

The sense of danger was heightened for those who knew him because Boonreung was epileptic and prone to seizures. While his friends say he never had an attack during a show, the risk weighed heavily on the snakeman's mind.

International attention was to come his way just once more. Unfortunately, he wouldn't be around to enjoy it. Three months ago, Boonreung, aged 34, was bitten by one of his pet cobras while putting on a show for three tourists. He collapsed in the dirt beneath his parents' house in Ping Pong village, a parched corner of one of Thailand's poorest provinces. By the time he was taken to hospital, his respiratory system had all but shut down. He never recovered.

STICKS AND STONES WILL BREAK MY BONES
BUT SNAKES WILL NEVER HURT ME

'A lot of people came after he died, but since then, no one,' says Phao, in her village of Ping Pong, 640km northeast of Bangkok. 'I'm glad you've come. I don't want the world to forget about my boy.'

The Buachans, while far from wealthy, became the envy of the poor farming village because of the success of their son. Their humble house is a palace compared with some nearby. Phao says she knew her second son was special from the start. 'When he was born, he had a patch of scales on his waist,' she says. Psoriasis, perhaps? 'No, no,' she insists. 'These were real scales - like a snake.'

Mad Men, Dog Days and Dum-Dums

My latest contribution to the South China Morning Post's 'Rewind' column, which looks back at a movie, book and album that share a common thread ... this week's theme was 'days', and the obvious suspect for film was Dog Day Afternoon.


On a sagging shelf in my dad’s dark and mysterious study, past the fraying macramé, the Ludlums, yoga manuals and The Joy of Sex, perched the tattered twin piles of his MAD magazines.

My dad favoured reading them on the porcelain throne, and so like father, like son. I’d grab a handful of dog-eared issues from the bottom of the pile and slope off to the loo, settling in to read my favourites, Dave Berg’s ‘The Lighter Side Of’’, ‘Spy vs Spy’, ‘Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions’ and which ever movie was being lampooned by Madison Avenue’s most subversive talents.

This put me in the somewhat post-modern position of having read, often dozens of times, the MAD satires of many classic 70s films years before I would be allowed to watch them or be fully capable of understanding them.

Of all these warped masterpieces, one stands out: ‘Dum-Dum Afternoon’. I would pour over its pages, troubled and fascinated by these weird, wise-cracking, self-aware bank robbers, the cross-hatched exaggerations of Al Pacino and Jon Cazale – especially Cazale - and the seething cesspit of a city they inhabited.

PACINO REDEFINES THE STICK-UP,
WITH SOME HELP FROM CHUPA-CHUPS

When I finally saw Dog Day Afternoon for the first time, some time in the 80s, Cazale’s pale, stricken visage as Sal, the dim-witted accomplice of real life bank robber John Wojtowicz, played by Al Pacino, had already been cemented in my brain as the archetypal scary, wild-eyed weirdo.

Wojtowicz and his friend Sal hold up a Chase Manhattan branch in Brooklyn in August 1972, bungle things badly, and in the hostage drama that ensues, New York becomes transfixed when it is revealed Pacino’s character has a second wife, a pre-op transsexual played by Chris Sarandon (in his first movie role).

Pacino gets the plaudits and pimp-suit, steals the scenes, sweats and screams, but Cazale’s pared-back portrayal of a sad, stupid, murderous loser in over his head and about to get a bullet in the brain is a revelation of a performance.

OUT THERE CAZALE

“There’s just something in that face that takes you into an area … that’s very dark. Personally dark … and … heartbroken,’’ said Sidney Lumet, Dog Day’s director. Cazale is the poster boy for New York in the mid-70s; a slouching, cadaverous angel of death in a broken city beset by blackouts, heat waves, muggers, riots, corrupt cops, gridlock, garbage strikes, race hate and decay.

When Dog Day Afternoon is released in 1975, New York City has just been declared broke and in massive debt. Vietnam is still raging, the Attica prison massacre has just happened, and Richard Nixon is seeking a second term.  (Taxi Driver, the other celluloid avatar of this era, is still a year away from its cinematic release.)

LUMET TAKES OVER THE ASYLUM

It’s an immediate hit, hailed as Sidney Lumet’s career high point, with a fine ensemble cast including Charles Durning, Carol Kane, and Lance Henrikson. Writer Frank Pierson (Cool Hand Luke) receives an Academy Award and a Writers Guild Award for his screenplay.

Cazale would die of cancer at 42 while making The Deer Hunter. Dog Day Afternoon is one of only five films he made, along with The Godfather, The Conversation, and The Godfather Part Two.

Lumet, who died in April 2011, was the embodiment of the bruised Big Apple, the anti-Woody Allen, always ready to shine the spotlight on some new dank corner of rotten Gotham. Pierson, who passed away this July, also kept New York close: his last job was as writer and consulting producer on the much-awarded cable series Mad Men.

Dog Day Afternoon stands as a time capsule of New York at its nadir, and a monument to one of the most creative and exhilarating periods in Hollywood’s history.

Midnight in Janette Slack's Garden of Good and Evil

This piece just appeared in the South China Morning Post's Postmagazine ... meet the one and only Janette Slack .... in fact, meet her in person when she makes her triumphal return to Asia this month following the release of her first album, Torture Garden Session



The biggest DJs don’t always live up to their names. Fatboy Slim was neither fat nor particularly slim. Plump DJs are notably svelte. Meat Katie is a bloke who prefers broccoli to beef. Pale weedy Moby is hardly leviathan. John Digweed does not in fact dig weed. DJ Scratch is a so-so scratcher. Beardyman is beardless. And Hong Kong’s prodigal DJ daughter and rising global star Janette Slack is anything but.

Slack is a force of nature in corsets; a genuine steel wheel diva, self-starter and anti-slacker with killer looks and the skills to back them up. She has become the avatar of Torture Garden, London’s premier fetish club which began with cult nights at Opera on the Green before landing its present home at the sprawling Ministry of Sound. Her glam brand of raunchy tech house infused with electro and breakbeats plus a personal interest in fetish fashion found a perfect home where the freaks come out and the gimps are brought out. Torture Garden’s legion of latex and leather-clad fans include Marilyn Manson, Dita Von Tease, Jean Paul Gaultier, Boy George, Courtney Love and Marc Almond (Adam Ant was famously refused entry for not dressing outlandishly enough). Slack has spun before most of them.

OH BEHIVE: JANETTE SLACK PROVES THE THEORY
YOU CAN FIX ANYTHING WITH GAFFER TAPE 

Part Eurasian sex bomb, part one-woman self-promotional juggernaut and part relentless energizer bunny, she has barely paused for breath since leaving Hong Kong and a well-paid teaching job for London on a make-or-break mission to achieve international DJ fame. And now she’s on her way back for a triumphal return, following a two-month tour of Australia, with gigs in Hong Kong and Bangkok to mark the launch of her first album, Torture Garden Session, a mixed journey concieved to capture the spirit of Torture Garden featuring six original Slack tracks and ‘re-rubs’, as she pervily terms her remixes, of the likes of D. Ramirez and Meat Katie.

Slack had to overcome parental disapproval and near starvation to make it in a city with ‘more DJs than bus drivers’, as Slack herself admits in ‘Veer’, one of a short film series sponsored by Dr Martens by cult director Doug ‘Scratch’ Pray on ‘people who embody an independent attitude’. The film’s release four years ago marked the turning point for Slack’s career and she’s been riding a rubber-studded rocket to DJ fantasy land ever since.

Slack’s sonic boom-boom has substance. No Eurasian Paris Hilton or DJ bimbo eruption, she is a professional sound engineer who writes and produces her own tracks, which she describes as “cheeky, chunky, twisted and demented ... a blend of rock riffs, funk, progressive melodies, sexy vocals and cinematic soundscapes with relentless basslines and thick, grooving drums’’. The first single from her album, ‘You Can’t Stop This’, a collaboration with Kickflip and Channel 4’s Phone Shop star Javone Prince, is at number four on Beatport’s electro chart and has been granted ‘must have’ status. Next to be released as a single is ‘Slave to System’ with Tyrrell, producer of Sasha’s Miami hit ‘Lalalalalala’ and 90s band PM dawn, and vocalist Kris Widakay.

She’s a Mixmag future hero, she’s won London’s prestigious Denon DJousts competition and Europe’s 2010 Pink Armada female DJ battle, been nominated for Best Breakthrough DJ, hosted the International Breakbeat Awards twice, and secured residencies at Torture Garden and Air. Her apartment has a sound studio and features an authentic replica of Dr Who’s time-travelling Tardis (an old London phone box) as its entrance, and she scoots around London in fetish regalia on rollerblades. As her biography reports, she ‘has the UK breaks and electro scene by its hairy balls and rides around London in a gold-plated beach lounger pulled by a team of pedigree swans’. This hyperbolic missive was penned by Frank Broughton, Mixmag deputy editor and author of Last Night a DJ Saved my Life. Co-opting influential friends to her cause is useful tool in the Slack skill set: she has been bigged up by everyone from Hybrid to Carl Cox and from Utah Saints to Air.

She has appeared recently on SKY1’s Gadget Geeks and spoofing a Eurotrash DJ on former Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond’s new BBC show ‘Secret Service’. She is regularly called up for photoshoots with London's edgiest independent designers, models for Vauxhall and Pepsi, and collaborates with one of London’s hottest makeup and hair designers, Sammm Agnew, while fetish godfathers Murray and Vern, Lady Lucie Latex and Kaori’s Latex Dreams now custom-make her outfits for gigs.

DAMMIT JANETTE: KISS KISS,
BANG BANG, AND HOLD THE PORNO HOUSE

“Even before I got into DJing, I always enjoyed any excuse to dress a bit differently to the herd,’’ says Slack. “Not in a rebelious way, I just saw stuff I liked and got inspired and intrigued by certain characters I saw in movies, TV or in real life. So when I discovered that bindis look good when even just wearing jeans and a tank top (inspired by Gwen Stefani) i did just that I school.

“When it came to DJing, for the first seven years, I did tone it down, as I was playing breakbeat, which is very male dominated compared to, say, house. So I went back to wearing baggy trousers, over size T-shirts and baseball caps, as I didn't want to appear to be a gimmick if I got all dressed up. I de-sexed myself, rather.

“I was in my mid-20s when I got my first gig at Torture Garden. I knew what I normally wore would make me stand out in the wrong way, as everyone makes an extra effort to dress up. So it was a good excuse to go shopping and buy a load of clothes I've actually always wanted but thought I could never get away with wearing. I thought f*** it, I've been DJing for 7 years now, on vinyl and on 3 decks, so I can wear what the hell I like.’’

CONTROLLER FREAK: TORTURE GARDEN'S 
LIMITED EDITION JANETTE SLACK BLOW UP 
DOLL WITH REAL NIP SLIP

Of her upcoming gigs, Slack says she loves playing in Bangkok but Hong Kong’s kinetic 24-hour clubbing scene will always be home. “Living in London for the past 13 years, it’s easier to take a step back to observe the countries I visit. When I had a chance to explore Bangkok for a month as a DJ a couple years ago, it didn’t take much time at all to settle in. It really reminded of the vibe in Hong Kong, where people are out every night and there’s always something to do.

“Bangkok is bigger and can afford to have stand-alone clubs like Bed Supperclub and Q Bar and the multi-room palaces of Royal City Avenue. In Hong Kong most of the clubs are part of high rises and are smaller. But both cities are equally vibrant and both have clubbers who demand and appreciate underground music.’’


Janette Slack’s Asian science fiction double feature opens at Club Fly in Icehouse Street on December 22, and then moves across the pond to Bangkok, with gigs to be confirmed at ‘one or two clubbing institutions’. With a brutal schedule of globe-trotting gigs in place for the next 12 months to lock in global dominatrix status, it’s a rare chance to catch the hardest working freak in show business on her home turf.

'Lunch is for Wimps', Belgian Thunders

Move over Marc Faber, Thailand's new 'Dr Doom' has arrived. This is a piece just filed for November's edition of Finance Asia on Stephane De Baets, iron-willed investment banker, part time 'Belgian Thunder' triathlete and ironman, prognosticator and seer, and all round good chap. Edited down somewhat for the magazine, I've put the original piece in full here.

WET MARKET: STEPHANE DE BAETS
OPTS FOR A LUNCHTIME SESSION

Investment banker with a difference Stephane De Baets is a breath of fresh air. The towering, boyishly touselled Belgian breezes into the bar in Bangkok’s trendy Soi Ruam Rudee, oozing enthusiasm and energy.

“There are a few things I’d like to talk to you about,’’ he says. “One is a new form of private equity venture which I believe takes a ground-breaking approach to fund management. The second involves reinventing fine dining. And I’d also like to touch upon inside out money flows, if I may.’’

While most investment bankers are content to merge, acquire and move other people’s money about, De Baets is on a different trajectory. When he’s not training for his next gruelling Ironman race, the founder, managing director and star turn at small but impeccably connected Bangkok boutique investment bank OptAsia Capital prefers to spend his time dreaming up new ways of doing things, taking aim at sacred cows and generally thumbing his nose at the establishment.

His no-holds-barred weekly ‘Trading Notes’ has become something of a cult publication in certain Bangkok circles for its bold predictions and colourfully tortured language: he is less of a gloom merchant than Mark ‘Dr Doom’ Faber, but when the mood strikes him, De Baets does a fine turn as contrarian Cassandra, railing against everything from Europe’s ‘slow motion, freeze frame car wreck’ to China’s looming hard landing and the mainland’s overvalued ‘laundry markets’ of Hong Kong and Singapore while referencing everything from the Fibonacci sequence, video games, hip hop to obscure Morrissey lyrics.