It may look like a prison jumpsuit, but anyone who’s been here will instantly recognize my ensemble as that of an authentic Saigon street cleaner. Just don’t ask what I had to do to score this costume.
So I was looking at the logs for this site yesterday and I saw that someone landed here via the search phrase “the nan goldin effect.” I couldn’t remember ever having written something about the famous grungy East Village photographer lady but it turns out that I had captioned the picture above, taken in Thailand, “going for the Nan Goldin effect.”
Obviously I meant that I was mimicking the seedy snapshot aesthetic that makes Goldin’s photos so identifiable. What surprised me, though, was that this is the only google result for that phrase on the entire Internet.
Isn’t that kind of weird? You’d think that someone, somewhere, would have written this before. I mean, you could very plausibly describe a ‘Nan Goldin effect’ on both art & commercial photography. Ryan McGinley, for example. Vice Magazine. The whole Calvin Klein heroin-chic thing.
What was you looking for, original searcher? Are you a scholar, an art historian, a budding photographer? Are you Nan, googling yourself? Are you a kid in your bedroom somewhere, wanting to start a band and checking to see if that name was taken?
It’s not! Look, I even made you the the cover for your first EP (which took me an embarrassingly long time to do, but I think I nailed it.) Or, go ahead, use it for the cover of a coffee-table book of Goldin-inspired photography that I will expect to see in the window of St. Mark’s Bookshop at Christmas.
Is that place even there anymore?
Also, would it have been more correct to write in the first place that I was going for “a Nan Goldin affect”? That phrase doesn’t even exist, I just checked.
I’m not just a writer–I was also this month’s cover model. Why the glasses? I don’t know. I get paid to look good, not ask questions.
Finally have uploaded some new photos, from a couple of quick writing trips to Laos and Hanoi (and a few random Saigon shots.) I really, really like Hanoi and wonder why I don’t live there every time I visit. I did a few stories there, including one about Vietnam’s independent filmmakers, and another on Chu Nom, the ideographic writing system that Vietnam used until the early 20th century but that is now practically extinct. Only a few hundred people in the world can still read it, which is kind of astonishing when you’re talking about 1,000 years of Vietnam’s written history.
In Laos, I did a travel story on some less-touristed areas, like a forest with one of the last breeding populations of tigers in Indochina. I did not see any tigers in the wild, which I am assured was probably a good thing, but I did get to meet some awesome people who are trying to save the tiger–less than 5000 left in all of Asia–and visited one of the most beautiful, unspoiled places I’ve ever been. I also ate frogs and fried worms and got drunk with Lao government officials and played petanque with them on the street late into the night.
It’s been a few months since I wrote, and I’m sure the question on everyone’s mind has been: “But what is Vietnam’s death metal scene like?”
Wonder no more! Here’s a video from Saigon’s own Black Infinity:
[Moved to Videos]
Yesterday I interviewed Hung, the singer (& director of the video), for the magazine I’m writing for here. Writing full time, busy busy busy and odiously neglectful. Up to Hanoi next week to do a few interesting stories. My camera has been broken for the last couple of months but I got it fixed today and am eager to take photos again.
How are you?
Good blogging intentions are the first things to go when you’ve got 4500 kilometers of New Zealand to drive with hundreds of hostels and dozens of towns and cities to visit and write about. The good news is, I’m finished with the book and the editor seems very pleased. The bad news–this applies to the guidebook industry in general–is that the pay=not so good, and the hours=not so good, either. I’m somehow much poorer than when I started this project over two months ago, even though I can barely remember the last time I had a day off from working on it.
But not to complain. It beats turning a giant crank in an oilfield somewhere, I would guess. New Zealand is an unreasonably beautiful country and I’m thankful I got to visit it. “Lots to gape at,” as one Kiwi I met–human, not bird–accurately put it. I did actually see a kiwi bird as well (I mention it here, on the guidebook’s blog.) I saw a lot of New Zealand, although almost all of it was at warp speed. Guidebook-writing is a very strange and compressed way to experience a place. I will upload more photos from NZ (and Sydney, where I spent one hectic day) and catch up with more of an overview of the whole experience.
For now, back, alive, well, in Ho Chi Minh City. I’ve starting doing some freelance copyediting/writing work here for a bank, of all places, and I’m beginning to do some travel podcasts for a small company—will announce the link for this soon.
Also, my friend Bady and I are going to start a magazine about underground culture in Ho Chi Minh City, and kittens. Time travel, as well. Does anyone want to write for it?
Last thing–I was discovered last week in a coffee shop, Lana Turner style, and plucked to be a high-fashion model for a stock photo shoot for Getty Images. Low-fashion model is more like it; I looked like a copy machine salesman. The concept was “westerners and vietnamese doing business while eating on the street, riding in cyclos, etc.” Very funny–will post photos whenever I get to see them. The best thing is, I can now put “Model-slash” in front of anything I ever do for the rest of my life.
From KL back to Singapore, then off to Melbourne. One of the crappier airport experiences I’ve had was at the Tiger Airways “terminal” in Melbourne. Tiger Airways, in case you aren’t aware, is a Singapore-based budget airline that covers much of Australia and various points in SE Asia. “Budget” is the operative word here. Everything feels small and cramped, the stewardess outfits are cheap-looking, and if you were choking on a peanut they wouldn’t give you a drop of water unless you paid for it first. But that won’t happen, because they don’t give you peanuts either.
The Melbourne airport was recently voted one of the world’s top five airports, but the Tiger terminal is not in the Melbourne Airport. It’s in the middle of a parking lot or something, several minutes away from the airport, and is literally composed of unpainted concrete cinder blocks and cyclone fencing. It’s exactly what I imagine the place where the planes land in Guantanamo Bay to look like.
Melbourne was my first taste of the western world in over a year and it was a bit overwhelming initially. I suddenly had a reference point for how long I’ve been away. Posters for bands and movies I haven’t heard of, bookstores with unfamiliar new releases, the way people looked, the clothes they wore. Something about it made me miss everyone and everything so much more acutely. And at the same time, I had the pointed realization that I don’t feel the same way about the world anymore, that I don’t belong to the world in quite the same way anymore.
From Singapore, I took a quick side trip to Kuala Lumpur, where I wandered for a day and a half with no map and no real intention, just hopping on and off the subway/elevated train and going up and down streets that looked interesting. It was pleasantly disorienting, although it was hard to get too lost with the Petronas Twin Towers always looming as a landmark. I eventually made my way to the Towers and spent way too long taking photos and ogling them from different angles. They’re really impressive up close, they have this kind of this sci-fi Islam quality that I found almost unimaginably appealing.
I also made my way to a place called the Colisuem Café & Hotel. It’s a colonial relic with a green bartop and stained wood furniture, fans rotating slowly among naked hanging bulbs. The walls have long turned yellow, and framed articles advise what to do “When Your Servant Has Malaria.” The menu is all old-fashioned cocktails and steaks and chicken cordon bleu, with the Malaysian food tucked into a section called “local specialties.”
I have to give this an incomplete grade, a tease of a city and a country that I’m eager to return to. Like Singapore, it’s a mix of Malay, Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, and more . . . all these different sounds and flavors . . . eating nasi goreng on the street while the muezzin’s call to prayer pierces the night, thinking there’s never enough time.
No place is ever the way you think it’s going to be. (This was especially true for me of Vietnam, where the connotative power of that word to the American mind, Vietnam, was immediately and almost entirely incongruous with the reality of the place. Vietnam was a perpetual surprise: the food, the sweetness of the people I met, the fact that I stayed there and taught literature for six months, which I hadn’t planned to do.)
Anyhow. On my way here to New Zealand, I stopped off in Singapore, which, according to my half-formed, insubstantial notion of the place, should have been a sterile, futuristic city-state of spotless sidewalks and orderly streets. Maybe the kind of place where people rode segways.
Changi Airport doesn’t disappoint on that front, nor does the clean and efficient MRT train you can catch from the airport . And as I glided along the elevated tracks on my way into town, I honestly found myself scanning the streets below for any signs of litter. I was surprised when I saw some fluttering papers, then an empty drink can, then several masses of undifferentiated trash.
Looking around, the glass and steel skyscrapers of my imagination were replaced by acre upon acre of concrete apartment blocks. In truth, most of Singapore looks like a NYC housing project.
I stayed in noisy and chaotic Little India (this is Singapore?), then moved to a cheaper neighborhood called Geylang, which turned out to be a serious red-light district once the lights went down. Who knew Singapore even had a red-light district? There were hookers everywhere. (My hotel was called The Champagne, by the way, and my room featured this poignant inscription on the headboard: “Toon loves you to mus.” The other thing Geylang is known for is its food, particularly the noodles called—I swear—hor fun.)
Of course, Singapore did turn out to have the glass towers and tony shopping streets as well; Orchard Road is pretty much one continuous luxury mall that seems to stretch for hundreds of miles. And it was even more expensive than I imagined; absurdly, heart-stoppingly expensive, especially having come straight from Vietnam.
But when I think of Singapore, I think of my lovely friend Pilar, and of my old friend from New York, Mark Yeo–the first person I have seen from home since before I started traveling–and I think of hearing ghost stories at a haunted hotel that is soon going to be torn down and of the best prata I’ve ever had and all these other things wonderful and personal and now kind of sad. One thing about travel: I’m getting a little sick of saying good-bye.
Despite the lines and checkpoints and shoe removals and food-court atmosphere of many a terminal, I still find the airport a place that alters my sense of reality. I am suddenly thinking about fate and destiny, looking for signs and portents, imagining dying in a very tangible way. Surrendering completely, putting my life in someone else’s hands, about to do something that I still do not completely understand. Feeling, physically, a passage from one point in life to another, funneling through an hourglass; all possibilities, all the maybes fall away as I am carried along on a moving sidewalk towards the singular point, the only remaining fact, the only place I need to be–the departure gate, the jetway, the airplane. The appointment I must keep.
I have been sucking at this lately, so my Year of the Rat resolution is as follows: be a better blogger. If it means anything to you, I am constantly chastising myself for not posting more and am often afflicted with a vague sense of dread and self-loathing for shirking my responsibility. It’s like a steady low-grade fever, which I believe is also a symptom of malaria.
Anyway–doings a-transpirin’. I’m using the free wifi in Singapore’s futuristical Changi Airport right now as I wait to catch a flight to Melbourne. I’m going to meet with my editor there before heading to New Zealand to write for this guidebook. I’ll be covering the entire North Island, which includes, among other things: the cities of Auckland and Wellington; geothermal oddities like geysers, exploding mud pools, and volcanic lakes; and an attraction called Sheepworld.
I left Vietnam ten days ago and have been in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and even Indonesia (for a half day) since. It’s been a fantastic, if wallet-destroying, time & I will write about it all in the next post.
Just one other thing to mention for now: it almost passed without my noticing it, but in the midst of all the Tet/Lunar New Year festivities, February 9th marked my own new year–one year since I left New York and started traveling. It’s not even a trip anymore; I don’t know what exactly to call it, but it’s been real interesting.
Suvarnabhumi Airport, Bangkok, 2007
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