It’s funny what a few weeks at home does for the flag waving. A few days back, feeling vaguely and irrationally offended, I was almost about to rush in and defend New Zealand from Stephen Fry’s attack on our internet connections after he (now famously) tweeted:

“[New Zealand has] has probably the worst broadband I’ve ever encountered. Turns itself off, slows to a crawl. Pathetic,”

Because – and just because – it isn’t always.

Once or twice, over the years, I’ve had decent internet in NZ. And there is a cafe in Ponsonby with free wifi (no I’m not telling you where it is).

There was a time of course when we were up there. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Telecom ASDL first arrived and Ihug offered their satellite download/terrestrial upload thingy, we almost had it sorted. Travelling to parts of Asia and Australia allowed well connected folks (read: people who lived in small zones of Auckland and Wellington) to scoff at many of the places we visited.

We were faster than Singapore – or at least a very, very lucky few of us were.

Of course we paid for it – Telecom’s Xtra was insanely overpriced (I had a bill for a grand once from Telecom when my staff decided that streaming Virgin Radio from the UK was a pretty good time-passing thing to do, and other invoices came close) although I was lucky enough to have been given free Ihug connections right up until the time Vodafone took it over, so I guess that compensated a little.

But mostly it’s shite as the world has passed us digitally by, so defend it I can’t and won’t.

This post makes the case well for our fixed internet being rubbish and doesn’t even deal with the nonsense of NZ’s mobile data (for which I pay approx NZ$25 per month with unlimited data where I now call home), and wifi (Pan-Asia, almost universal wifi – free – in cafes, bars, restaurants, malls, hotels, airports and so on, thus allowing me mostly not to bother with the aforesaid $25pm as my phone flits from hotspot to hotspot).

However, if I write such things I’ll be accused of whinging. We are allowed to say these things if we live in New Zealand but we are not allowed to make comment if we return from abroad – thin skinned doesn’t even begin to describe the fast rising anger that accompanies any returning New Zealander making any comparison with the rest of the planet that isn’t gratiously positive, and without qualification.

So I won’t.

What I will make comment on is the increasing disconnect between the world as she exists and is increasingly existing, by the inevitable use of the redundant phrase: Developed.

And while we’re at it: OECD.

Inevitably the commentary in this case revolved around the position our country’s internet speed and connectivity rated when compared to other ‘developed countries’ or the OECD. And it’s both disingenuous and utterly detached from the 21st Century’s reality. It implies that we are somehow part of a small privileged club that the rest (i.e. the ‘undeveloped’ or ‘developing’ bits) sit outside of.

So lets look at the OECD.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is a grouping formed in 1961. It was, at the time, a fairly reasonable representation of the most advanced nations on the planet, using either tech or economic rulers, and the majority were either in Western Europe or North America. We, with Australia, were tagged on as part the western grouping.

All fine.

However, the world changed. It changed substantially, and the creaky old OECD, whilst it has added a couple of countries to the listing, now looks like a representation of the world as she was long, long ago. One wonders where Singapore is? Malaysia? Thailand? China? Taiwan? Argentina? Brazil? UAE? Kuwait? Saudi Arabia? All of whom have infrastructure, access to education and healthcare, relative poverty levels, employment, IT etc at least equal to several of the OECD countries we so eagerly place ourselves next to as a measure. When it comes to roading, public transport, cost of living relative to wages, and connectivity almost all those counties make us look semi-neolithic.

And the same could be said of the phrase we so adore: the ‘Developed World’ (intentionally capitalised as we would with the titles to all fiction). Bernard Hickey (who actually makes excellent sense economically sometimes I think, and is a realist in the face of the national economic delusion) is forever rabbiting on in Nana Herald about ‘the developed world’, making an assumption we are part of this horse-has-long-bolted club that we love to think we are part of.

There was a time, of course, and it wasn’t that long ago, when arguably we were part of something a little like this. We were part of the industrialised, privileged overclass that, despite almost being thrashed in WW2 until the USA and the Soviets saved our butts (and even then the defeated were quickly re-embraced back into the club), and being a part of the losing team that fought to a draw in Korea, and was beaten soundly in Vietnam & Iraq, was the self anointed meister and comptroller of Planet Earth.

And we still don’t seem to have gone past that.

We, in New Zealand, talk of the Global Economic Crisis without blinking, when the reality is this ‘global’ crisis exists mostly amongst the so called Developed Nations – and even more precisely, amongst that above linked list of the OECD nations.

Much of the rest of the world is doing nicely thank you, with booming economies – although dangerously overheated, if you heed the endless warnings from the prophets in the so called developed nations. The same ones who got 2008 so very wrong.

So we live in a fantasy and we measure ourselves against that.

In the same way we spoke fondly until the last part of the 20th Century of the UK as home, we now instead attach ourselves to a world which has long since passed, and it a way that no other country I’ve visited does – aside perhaps from Australia who even more slavishly regard themselves as a player in a long past Western Alliance that has struggled to deal with a post cold war reality defined by the morass that is America’s endless 9/11 wars. However, even they seem to have grasped that the grouping we think of as our elite members club is largely a delusion.

That bird has long since flown.

Even American Exceptionalism seems to have been battered just a little in recent years post Iraq then 2008.

Before anyone gets irascibly hot and bothered, it’s not that our time has in any way passed, nor that we are a lesser nation or now subservient to another new grouping (although some of the awful ignorance and self-righteously entitled racist commentary that surrounded the Crafar Farms debacle you’d think we had armed child-roasting barbarians bashing at the gates). No, it’s just that the world we like to think we are part of, the “Developed World” no longer exists as an identifiable entity beyond our national collective consciousness.

People in Shanghai live longer than New Yorkers, there are worse slums in the vast housing estates of the UK than any city in Malaysia and the public transport in any city in of the Asian nations I listed above is better, more efficient, cleaner and cheaper than anywhere in Australasia, London or New York City.

Instead of placing ourselves arrogantly as part of some entitled elite that no longer exists it may be time to push that aside and enter the wider world we are now part of – like it or not.

====

I promise the next post will be gloriously positive.

When I was young, Dad used to come home from his journeys around the world with the airforce and we’d sit entranced by the stories he’d tell us of the places and people he’d met and seen.

On Sunday evenings we would, from time to time, gather in the living room with a rug on the floor for we kids and have the dual treat of being able eat dinner away from the table and – more importantly  - sit and watch as Dad went through some of the hundreds of slides he’d taken on his Leica as he travelled. He’d assemble the projector, fill a carousel and we would sit for hours looking at the wondrous still images, some which we had seen dozens of times before but despite that, still retained that initial magic.

There were also many of our young lives in Singapore. A couple of those are here including one I love of my brother wandering in front of the new family Plymouth. Our landlady there was a Mrs. Lee. Her son was to become the first Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew, and my parents kept in touch with her for years afterwards, until the 1970s.

The magic of those slides stayed with me and I think they are a primary reason I found myself in some of the places in those pictures in my later life.

As we grew older these boxes of slides were placed in larger boxes and then stored carefully, but increasingly forgotten. As years turned into decades every now and then I’d mention these to Dad and he and I would agree that they needed scanning. But time being what it is…

Then, in 2010, Dad, who is now in his 80s, decided he’d put aside the time to scan these. Over the next few months – with a borrowed high-end scanner – he processed several hundred of these and put them on disks, copies of which he gave to each of his kids.

This is still a work in progress but slowly I’ve been cleaning these up. There are still many more – perhaps some 300 – which are still waiting, but I thought I’d put the first batch of Dad’s slides – mostly taken when he was either Flight Lieutenant, or later, Squadron Leader Brian Grigg, RNZAF – online. Some capture history, some capture family and some are just plain fabulous.

And I feel like I’m nine years old on the rug eating Sunday dinner again…..

[Show as slideshow]

The route from Bangkok to Hà Noi, across the northeast of Thailand, over Cambodia and then Laos, was – I assume – pretty much the same route US behemoth B-52s took thousands of times during the American War to rain death more or less indiscriminately, despite the claims otherwise, down upon the people of North Vietnam. The main US B-52 base in Thailand was at U-Tapo in Pattaya just southeast of BKK – and is a primary reason for the sleaze in that town even today.

I wondered what the many young Americans on the flight thought – given the layers of Orwellian doublespeak that generates what passes for truth in the United States – but then, we were there too, our government keen, as they are now, to ingratiate themselves with their masters in Washington.

Unquestionly the Holyoake government played cabin boy to Johnson and Nixon’s Captain Pugwash as did the Australians.

My father was there – I recently found the letters he’d written me on the back of his Saigon hotel laundry lists. They talk of machine gun nests and vast American supply dumps full of billions of dollars of everything, most sitting unused as room was made for more being unloaded daily from the endless shuttle of Starlifters and Globemasters from stateside that spilled their guts at Bien Hoa and Da Nang.

Landing at Hà Noi I noted – bizarrely, or so it seemed to me – a huge grey USAF C-17 Globemaster II, the successor to those cargo humpers that took large chunks of their homeland across the Pacific in the 1960s and 1970s as they supplied that torturous and disastrous two decades or so of failed and flawed Domino Theory driven imperialism.

Across the other side of the runways sat 17 Mig-21s, the successors to, or perhaps even the same aircraft that used to take off from this very same airfield and take on – quite successfully at times – US aircraft bombing their homeland.

Walking though Hoa Lò Prison, more infamously tagged the Hanoi Hilton in the west, a few days later I overheard an American woman announce that she simply couldn’t believe that ‘Asians’ could shoot down ‘American aircraft’.

How’s that re-education system going stateside these days?

Indeed American observers and travel publications love to reassure that all this was a long way in the past and most of Vietnam was not even alive then. They’ve forgotten – they want to be just like us – they say.

It’s bullshit. Liking a Western pop star or two, wearing jeans and drinking coke as a part of your world doesn’t strip away who you are or where you come from any more than hip-hop has destroyed the Haka or New Zealand’s absolutely unique national passion for Rugby Union. 1000 years of Vietnam, defeating the USA and France, the story of Ho Chí Minh, Dien Biên Phu and the history that totality embraces, is even to the most casual observer, the national foundation.

It’s very arrogant - racist even – to assume that the whole nation has been subverted by globalism and walked from their history and a primary reason to exist.

Researching our short trip to Vietnam I came across several VN veteran sites all still arguing that if they just pounded the North Vietnamese a little longer/used nukes/sent the army north then the four-million-dead American war would’ve been won. This still horrifies me.

I suppose they need to find a way to justify the wasted years, the bodies they left behind and took away and the horrible pointlessness of what they did – mostly involuntarily but not always. ¹

It seems to me – and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this – that if the US hadn’t extracted themselves in 1972 they would still be fighting today. That they couldn’t see that was central to the quagmire they found themselves in.

But to Hà Noi in late October 2011.

It’s an odd town.

I expected quite a bit more. It feels small – like a central Javanese town – narrow, overcrowded and dirty in its central, very touristy in parts, Old Quarter, with wider French styled boulevards (in Java read: Dutch) as you go beyond that.

And all just a bit run down.

Even with with the ‘burbs it’s hard to work out where the 6 million who live there are.

I’ve become used to the huge bustling Asian cities that rival New York in their modernism, complexity, urbanity and sophistication – Bangkok, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Singapore – even KL. For some reason I assumed Hà Noi would aspire to all or some of that, but it had little of it aside from the confusing and glaring disparity in wealth that all those other places also offer and an obvious complexity that I couldn’t begin to grasp in a few days.

That said, I didn’t need another few days trekking through multi-floor mega-malls gazing into yet another Paul Smith window. In BKK I have an abundance of that option in just about every compass direction if I so desire, and I mostly only do so when there are visitors to entertain or I need a new book.

I was excited about the food though. I like Vietnamese food.

Or at least I think I do. I thought I did.

In Auckland, we used to often go to some very cool cheap Vietnamese places in Otahuhu some years back. I liked those but they started to get a bit pricey. Or we were eating more.

Probably.

There, once upon a time, was a biggish Vietnamese joint on top of the Auckland Civic Theatre Building – about where the IMAX is now – and Phil Warren used to take me there when I was a poor label owner. I loved it. I suspect I’d hate it now. It was called Saigon.

I went to Hanoi in Auckland in the middle of the year. It disappointed. Nice wine. Food was dull.

Restaurants named after big cities in Vietnam seem to have currency in New Zealand. There is more to the country I think.

On the first morning in Hà Noi we went to the place recommended by our hotel for breakfast.

>> as an aside the Hotel was the Hanoi Art Hotel and it was – service-wise at least – perhaps the best boutique hotel we’ve stayed at. Anywhere. Ever.<<

The small place next door had a long wooden table with benches. There was no menu to speak off. They served pho and pho only. You sat and they bought you a bowl of pho. It was hot and it had brown meat in it.

In Vietnam when you are served meat part of the routine is wondering whether it used to bark. We played that game: is this dog we asked each other. Brigid was convinced it was. There was little point in asking the staff. Convincing yourself it is canine and then fretting about it for the rest of your trip is part of the going-to-Vietnam game. I wasn’t convinced but really had no idea.

I added chilli sauce and decided it was delicious.

It was the last delicious meal we ate in Vietnam.

It may have been dog. Brigid thinks so. If so it was caninely delicious.

So then we walked. We walked all day, trying to find the interesting bits and we quickly found the coffee I wanted. The great Australasian myth is that the best coffee in the world is found in Australasia. It’s not true. The best coffee in the world – a strong dark sweet, almost chocolate, syrup – is found in grubby little cafes in Hà Noi – served in a glass over condensed milk.

I manoeuvred Brigid westwards – towards the famous military museum and Lenin Park. When in a former Soviet satellite, head to Lenin Park and anything with guns and flags. They do these things rather well.

The roads they don’t do quite as well – nor the footpaths – and we encountered motorbikes. We were warned about motorbikes by past visitors and various websites. I expected much worse. I’ve crossed roads in Denpasar and Semarang. This was nothing like the apocalyptic rush of metal I’d been warned about.

Crossing the roads was rather easy – you simply set out and they go around you – something that perhaps takes nerve if your references are only western pedestrian crossing rules, but a little less harrowing after any time in Asia or parts of Southern Europe.

The Military Museum celebrates Vietnam’s great victories – France, USA and China – as well as various parts of the pre-Colonial history. It’s fascinating, old and like the city itself, very run down – almost a museum of a museum. I couldn’t help but feel that this was a country sorely in need of another grand victory to keep the lineage going. There was no present or future in these rooms, only a celebration of the national myths and stories. It was their FoxNews.

The big Panasonic and Canon factories on the city outskirts were not going to provide that. There were plenty of Audis and Range Rovers in the streets but the folks in the Old Quarter and in the depressing markets didn’t seem any closer to owning the keys to one.

There was national glory in these halls but the revolution seems to have stalled somewhere between the wide boulevards of the wealthy bits of the city and the rest.

The big bits of big American planes, fashioned into artworks, or just there in their entirety, were very sobering too – people died needlessly inside and under those. It was a museum commemorating an awful lot of misery. Most are.

Young Vietnamese walked around in some numbers in pretty much complete silence, and I really don’t think they’d done the right thing by the American tour advisors and ‘forgotten’ all this.

We drank Bai Hoi – the morning-fresh, preservative free (it needs to be consumed the same day), pilsener introduced by the Czech workers in the sixties and now part of the daily ritual of the city. People drink it for breakfast but we passed on that bit.

The bar was grotty and the first beer glass had a huge crack. We swapped it - which caused confusion: why? – and drank more. At 30c a glasses you do, and it tasted wonderful. We ordered ribs in the grotty bar. They tasted like pork and verged on tasty.

The restaurant next to the bar was full and looked mid-range authentic. It was awful. So we walked some more to get rid of the greasy flavours that refused to leave the back of your throat.

The next day we drank more coffee. It was as good great as before. And then we went to see Uncle Ho.

Sadly the father of the nation wasn’t in. Every October they apparently ship him back to Russia for a month or three to restuff the carcass and blow him up again, so the villagers who the American writers tell us have long forgotten the past and become aspiring and compliant GaGa loving global citizens can arrive in their daily busloads and shuffle past in an endless adoring line as they do for the next 9 months.

So we went to the Ho Chí Minh museum – up long stairs, past Australian and Chinese (many) families being off loaded from hotel minibuses, on a hill in a vast Soviet styled monolith – and it was really surreal in way that only an Asian museum in a Soviet styled concrete monolith dedicated to the founder of a totalitarian state who wanted no memorial could possibly be.

South East Asia doesn’t do totalitarian very well – with the exception of course of Cambodia but that was another heinous level altogether – as the chaos inevitably subverts whatever the state is trying to dominate no matter how they try. The Old Quarter, away from the sub-Kuta-ness of Ma Mai and the lakeside hustlers, is evidence of that in Hà Noi.

They counter that by having these odd – standalone disconnected – celebratory places where the real world is kept away by concrete or other barriers – this case a vast sterile concrete-path crossed, perfectly manicured grass field where I was firmly told off by an armed guard for stepping over some semi visible line. This was one such place and it was odder inside than any other I’ve seen. Everything was extreme and nothing made any sense at all – from oversized fruit platters, semi-masonic pyramids, a glass maze that supposedly represents Paris in the 1920s where Ho honed his revolutionary trade, to the best part – a virtual walk through of Ho Chí Minh’s brain.

I loved it – but just the once I think.

We went to the markets. Thailand does those better. Thailand does markets better than anywhere.

After hunting for hours we bought bad food in a tourist trap and I refused to eat it. We walked out of two other places and I ended up eating French deserts from the cake shop next to the hotel. I needed something after walking all day.

The next day the shoe street didn’t have our sizes or shapes and we took photos of old French Colonial buildings. We found an Italian place in an apparently upmarket part of the French Quarter and ordered pizza. It was awful. Brigid went out the back and came back gagging – we had already eaten so yet another meal stayed in our minds and memories far longer than it should have.

And it rained and rained. Dirty, fume filled rain.

We passed the old French courts – all grimy and nineteenth century-like formerly grand. It is still in use, and given Vietnam’s history of doing bad things to its own people, probably just as unpleasant as when the French were using it to send Vietnamese next door to the prison.

It was almost a relief to finally get to the gates of Hoa Lò and pay our entry dong (is the plural of dong ding, dongs or just dong? The last one I guess, but when you’re dealing with never less than thousands at any one time it becomes academic).

It’s not a happy place – the prison that is. The French were evil and for all the architecture and wonderful light baguettes (I always used to think these universally tore the roof of your mouth off until I left New Zealand and came to understand that that was a particular NZ twist on ‘French bread’) everywhere – yes those were great – you leave the place despising what that nation, and all colonial powers including the British despite the myths we are taught, once was and what it did in the name of Empire.

French tour groups were -when they weren’t repeatedly blocking the only exits smoking – noticeably silent.

I just wish the middle Americans looking at the bomb damage from the carpet bombing of Hà Noi in 1968-72 were a little more gracious and reflective: “This is all bullshit” one loudly exclaimed.

I guess it is when you’re still throwing this ‘bullshit’ at parts of the third world daily and calling it freedom.

It took three days to find the most interesting part of the Old Quarter – the shops, galleries, cafes and streets around the gothic French constructed Cathedral - which seemed to toll the hour about 7 minutes behind schedule. I wondered how long it had done that but in SEA you don’t waste energy wondering these things for too long.

The best food we had in Hà Noi was there – at a cute Spanish tapas joint which made me feel like a traitor to some sort of odd undefinable eat-Asian cause. I was a farang and in Hà Noi – dogs or no dogs – I was made to feel it.

I was glad I went to Hà Noi – glad because it was Vietnam and I’d wanted all my life to go there even though I’d just been to the capital, but like China, all my early life this city had personified my country’s enemy, as ridiculous and pointless as all that was; glad because I was able to put all that together in some sort of mental order; glad because the old buildings were wonderful and I loved the noisy broken streets; glad because I love looking at communist edifices and Vietnam edifices quiet well; and glad because I like going to fascinating places especially ones with mindblowingly good coffee for a few cents.

I was glad to leave too – happy because I think I’ve done Hà Noi as ridiculous as that sounds (and yes I’ll go back at some stage to do the Museum of Ethnology which I’m told is very good, and use Hà Noi as a base to see the country) and had walked and seen all I needed to see in the smallish centre; happy because I missed the food and sophistication of my current home; happy because I don’t like being always on the watch for scams; and, yes, I really don’t like dog. I think.

After we returned to BKK we queried several experienced Hà Noi vets. Where is the famous good food, we asked? The universal chorus was, more or less: ‘nah, the eating is mostly bad there – good coffee and beer but…’

So it was..

A few general bits and pieces:

I wrote a piece for Social Media NZ a short while back. It was published here, and seems to have picked up a pretty positive response, although, given a few of the comments from the US & Europe, I continue to be amused/bemused by the way Western observers misunderstand the new Asia, either simply because they don’t get the scope of what is happening in this part of the world, and how it it effects the global future, or because – almost wilfully – they just don’t want to. A step back and an attempt to look at the world in a timeline that goes beyond the year, decade or even century we are in is helpful.

Or, hell, maybe I’ve just got it wrong and I should simply hang tight for the next U2 album to work out my cultural bearings.

One who did seem to understand what I tried to say was Asian Correspondent’s Jon Russell, here.

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This photo turned up from nowhere thirty-two years after the event – which was a record signing session in Taste Records in Hight Street in Auckland in July ’79, a store owned by a quiet hero of mine, the late and much missed Dave Perkins.

The guy with the glasses behind Ig is Kim Sinclair, a mate of mine who some years later would win not only an Oscar, but a BAFTA. Further back is David Herkt, another good friend through the years, who is now a writer and director of some note, and a spokesman from time to time for the gay community.

The guy behind with the moustache is Terry Hogan, the man who designed the Ak79 and Class of 81 sleeves, plus countless iconic posters. He also signed Toy Love to WEA Records – he was art director there – and thus played a huge part in the evolution of the NZ recording industry.

The woman in front of him is the Auckland actor and playwright Yvette Parsons.

The woman talking to Ig is Anne Louise Martin, then Rip It Up writer and now somewhere in the South Island.

The guy almost out of shot to the right is Jonathan Tidball, one of my best friends at the time and someone who’s images of the Auckland punk scene are now amongst the most iconic. His younger brother, Andrew, is familiar to anyone who knows anything about the music being made in NZ.

A pretty amazing shot, it was taken by the iconic artist and cartoonist Chris Slane and I had no idea he had taken it until yesterday.

Iggy was in the country to promote his New Values album and was friendly, funny and talkative -  and signed all sorts of things including backs, shoes and a couple of handbags. I managed to get my whole Pop/Stooges collection squiggled on – on Raw Power he drew a tree all over the cover and, underneath, wrote ‘Iggy grew here’.

Despite his later notoriety there were surprisingly few people at the afternoon-long instore. Ig bought two cassettes: a Hank Williams collection and Donna Summer’s On The Radio.

We latter spent part of the evening with him but that’s another whole story.

——–

Important UK/NZ music commentator, writer and academic Andrew Dubber ran my blog post, on YouTube,  a couple back here on his Deleting Music pages. The header was humbling but I’m glad it was picked up. There are countless people in the same boat I’m in here and it really needs attention and noise.

This is an odd little story.

The most recent of the never ending list of banking scandals in Indonesia has a rather clever banking officer (or perhaps one with an early-death wish) lifting funds from the reluctant to complain crooked cops who run large parts of the country’s legal – and murkier – infrastructure.

The big question that Jakarta authorities appear to be dancing delicately around in the US$2.3 million Citibank fraud scandal that that has transfixed Indonesia over the past couple of weeks is who got defrauded…..

…There are growing suspicions in Jakarta that some of the swindled customers don’t want their names made public because they might have to explain how they came by enough money to avail of ultra-premium private banking services normally reserved for the very wealthy.

Except it’s really not odd.

It may be a tragi-comic story of nefarious behaviour in Indonesia but it only becomes odd when you look it from any distance. Up close – in South East Asia at least it’s only slightly on the wrong side of normal.

The story goes on to add a humorous story – related – relating when the long ground-breaking and courageous Tempo magazine ran a story on the vast amounts of cash several senior cops had in their various accounts…

The year-old Tempo story, using information from the respected Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), cited a raft of top police officials as having unexplained wealth. They included, in addition to Gunawan, Mathius Salempang, the East Kalimantan Provincial Police Chief; Sylvanus Yulian Wenas, chief of the Mobile Brigade Special Unit; Badrodin Haiti, Head of the Police Law Development Division; Susno Duadji, ex-Chief of the Investigation and Crime Unit, and Bambang Suparno, a lecturer at the Police Academy. All denied the Tempo story. Unknown persons who were believed to represent police officials attempted to buy up the entire monthly edition of the magazine, only to have editors order 30,000 reprints.

Since the mag is also online, I wonder if they tried to buy all copies of the internet.

You may smile but this Indonesia.

It’s funny, cartoonish even, but not surprising. Everyone – and that means everyone – knows that being a policeman in Indonesia is lucrative. As I recounted once before, when the current Governor of Bali, a former police chief, was standing, he admitted that he had 3/4 of a million US $$$$ in assets. Not being independently wealthy it seems, one might wonder why nobody questioned where a man who earned approximately $1200 per month found such a nest egg.

Nobody did.

I have had three compatriot friends say to me in recent months that the one thing that relentlessly does their head in when in New Zealand, is the the endlessly repeated ‘You are not allowed to do that’.

You can’t drive in that lane: You are not allowed to do that.

You can’t put that sign there: You are not allowed to do that.

Why are you walking that dog on the beach: You are not allowed to do that.

And so on.

And so on.

And so on.

One could of course argue reasonably that ‘not being allowed to do that’ and such being enforced might be a very good thing when it comes to cops sluicing off millions of dollars from both private and public purses in Indonesia and elsewhere in Asia, or permitting the sort of substandard shoddy building standards that caused the deaths of thousands in the 2006 Jogja quake and scares the bejesus out of me in Bali, a place where nothing, from one star, to five star, is built properly ¹.

I agree.

That said, I rather enjoy the traffic chaos, the turmoil and the laissez faire haphazardness of this corner of the world. It mostly works – and if the 2-10% growth figures across South East Asia during the distant – here at least – financial fracas of the late 2000 are any pointer, it works economically too (1998 seems a long way past).

It works but it does so by stepping over the clashing contradictions in almost every state.

Singapore is an almost perfect blend of Stalinism and Robber-Baron Capitalism – a benign-ish dictatorship by a small closely held elite who own or control almost everything of worth and are toasted as friends of the west. The line between Castro and Lee Kwan Yew is thin but it has been said by observers that it is best defined as one letting in the US fleet and IBM whereas the other didn’t.

Singapore can be fun but is never exciting.

Indonesia is perhaps the closest thing to a functioning democracy in SEA, and indeed, it mostly is. Or at least it is to the degree that the aforementioned generals and the very small economic and political elite, who are wealthy beyond anything we in small New Zealand or even Australia understand, given the vast disparity with the 80% of the population who are by any real measure, hovering around the poverty line, or far enough above it to avoid measurement, allow it to be.

The current president, widely disparaged at home as hopeless and lacking anything that could be called political vision or courage, has a cabinet filled with the utterly hopeless, and yet has managed to convince the Western world that he is a broker and and man of vision. That is far more odd than the story that began this rant.

They loved Suharto too.

Malaysia is just dull. Of all the nations in the region, it’s the one I can’t fathom. It can’t make up it’s mind whether it wants to be Singapore (most of the time), or an outpost of Saudi Arabia (every now and then until it comes to its senses shocked by how scarily close it slipped). It feels like a timebomb and Malaysia 2040 is a more worrying prospect that any of the other SEA nations.

It shares a language, a racial bond and a sub-SEA bond with Indonesia. They are only different nations because of a line drawn in Whitehall in 1820, solving a scrap between Britain and The Netherlands. The soul of Orang Melayu seems to have ended up on the Dutch/ Indonesian side of the divide.

Brunei makes Malaysia look exciting. The young kids sneak across the border to Sarawak to drink beer, and live in dreary apartment blocks whilst the Sultan, ensconced part of the year in a massive palace with women, parties on. It’s been under martial law since 1962. Nobody is sure why, but the UN says it’s a ‘developed’ nation. I’m not so sure.

Thailand, is a democracy. How do I know that? Well, like Indonesia, the people in power say it is.

It is a confused democracy, with an almost universally – regardless of your shirt colour, beloved king. And to be honest, in the 18 months or so I’ve been here, I’ve grown to like the guy too. As I said once before – he met Elvis!

That aside, I understand why he’s respected – nay loved – unlike the lot in Windsor for us, he’s of the land ² and he’s theirs completely. He personifies Thailand to the Thai people. It sounds fey but it’s about the only way you can describe the relationship. There is no line between the King and the nation.

Oddly, this fractured pseudo-Democracy feels more like a democratic nation on the ground than any of the others despite endless troubles, talk now and then of a coup, and disparity. The happy chaos mixed with technology, design and style reminds me of London and New York in the 1980s, before the edge was honed off. Thailand buzzes with a forward motion in a way none of the others do. It has life.

So, having negatively dissected large parts of the region, where does that leave me?

Nowhere in particular – there wasn’t a point to this post beyond thinking aloud – but I’m reminded of Disraeli’s words to the London Commissioner of Works:

Do away with the congestion at Hyde Park Corner? Why, my dear fellow, you would be destroying one of the sights of London.

Mostly, I’m not sure I’d have it any other way.

Happy New Year, from the cusp.

Any chance we could use this year to save the last of these wonderful cats, so that these ones, made of flowers in Hong Kong this week, are not all we have left when the next Year of the Tiger comes around?

Ok, 2009 was a shitty year financially. The whole world went bust. Or if you were sitting in Iowa or London, that’s what you’d believe if you spent much time looking at the televised media. But, that’s not true: China, India and Indonesia had a pretty good year (and it’s bemusing to look back on the American China doomsayers in late 2008..hopeful thinking indeed) and other parts of the so called third world did as well.

I get some pleasure out of that realignment, even if the Chinese government perhaps are not the most worthy beneficiaries of that, and show few signs of being so in the very near future. The Chinese people are, though, and I’m hopeful given how far they’ve come in 25 years, that the future is positive.

Obama disappointed many. But take a moment to reflect on how much worse McPalin would have been.

Dubai crashed, but ten minutes in the desert state would surely have led most people with their eyes open to the conclusion that it was inevitable. It is / was absolutely vacuous. It quite glaringly has no reason to exist and I rather tend, perhaps irrationally but I think not, to believe that nations only thrive because they are derived from something else tangible that exists before the banks and speculators move in.

The only thing Dubai seems to be derived from is a growing bubble of greed. It looks like the Gold Coast on bad acid.

Being financial seers, both Brigid and I said to each other in January, as we wandered the endless overstocked malls and Porsche filled boulevards of Dubai, and looked up at the ugly, and badly built Atlantis (whilst sipping our $10 coffees), the key building in the equally shoddy Palm, that it would not have a happy ending.

Next door, also in the UAE, Abu Dhabi exists as it does because of it’s natural wealth, which bubbles out of the ground. Dubai had almost none of this and to try and create substance in a vacuum simply doesn’t work. No matter how much water and sand you ship in (yes, even the sand they build from is imported..the desert stuff is no good for construction). So, yes, it was always going to go, and I continue to wonder, after centuries of bust and boom financial crises led on by our financial wunder-wizards, why we continue to buy into their nonsense. Pure avarice, I guess. Want some shares in a Nigerian bank?

And after we buy into the greed, it seems we hungrily buy into the doom, as was obvious when we were in the US in January and the cable news channels were running nightly shows entitled Voices Of Recession, (whilst we continued to be fed mountains of unnecessary food in every diner or cafe and watch the hummers straddle the gridlocked streets of Manhattan).

However, I’m aware that it’s been a very shitty year for some and I’m thoroughly grateful that mostly I’m not one of them.

One of my high points was the survival of my best buddy Tom Sampson, who was hit by a bus at the end of 2008. Not only did he survive after a few rather bad months, but it was a renewal and he thrived.

We didn’t have the best year financially, primarily because the people we derive much of our work from simply stopped. But it was ok. We were cushioned and 2010 has picked up already.

However, on reflection, that aside, we did have a hell of a year. We had a wonderful year.

We moved towns, for the reasons I blogged a few weeks back (and I got thoroughly abused by a sad old expat whose fantasy world was collapsing into a well of denial..I deleted most of it but for the first time ever turned on comment moderation, something that upset me some. It’s a shame some folks are unable to have a rational discourse, but that’s yer webs for you, and underlines the nutter-fest I was trying to get away from by leaving Bali).

But before moving town, we travelled lots, as we did the year before and are likely to do again this year. My eyes are on Vietnam sometime soon, and we already have Hong Kong lined up again this month..wheeee…

Close friends moving from Bali to Guangzhou means that the $200 tickets there may be a go within the next few months, but I’m still drawn to travelling further inland in China. I re-read Peter Hessler’s River Town this year, yes I know it’s mostly (all?) gone, but it’s a lure I’m having troubling getting past.

The defining trip in 2009, though, was the few weeks we spent in NYC almost a year back. I’ve been to the city a lot over the decades and love it almost without reservation, despite its huge flaws and the grime (hell, I’m in Bangkok..the grime in NYC is nothing), but this trip, with Brigid for the first time, was easily supreme. It was the best of times, for us at least. We walked, we laughed, we were upgraded to glorious suites in every hotel we stayed at – apart from the little hole in the wall in Nolita, but, damn, we were in Nolita (and only visited the room to sleep), just around the corner from Habana with it’s overflowing margaritas.

We literally, and physically bumped into an old friend in Broadway we’d not scene for two decades.

The bands we saw in Brooklyn, the nights and days wandering (often without any bearings) the icy and snow filled streets and parks of Manhattan, Greenpoint, Queens and Harlem were something special and the ice just added to the thrill. And then there were the record stores…

And the family who we didn’t know beyond an internet passing, who not only took us to a restaurant, paid for the meal, but also invited us to drink wine at their Upper West Side apartment.

I bought and read Gotham.

In June I co-hosted the biggest family reunion I’ve ever been to when close to a 1,000 former habitués of a couple of smelly rooms came together in Auckland for one night, and, yes, it may have been a massive money loser (you get that when you fly bands and DJs from all over the world, add the best PA in the city, and then offer free drinks to all for the first hour or so) but the joy and the screams, the massed hugging session it became, made it rather worth it.

New Years eve, this week, was a funny one for us.

Young daughter, who is about to head off to boarding school, leaving the nest (which is a huge wrench, not without pain, for me) said she’d rather sit on the internet and hang with her friends in Bali, than wander the streets with us. Ok.

We know virtually nobody in Bangkok, and those we do know were not in-country, so it was our first NYE ever without outside company of some kind. An odd feeling, but I quite like wandering streets.

Despite the fact that it was in the mid thirties, it seemed appropriate. So, yes, we decided to walk. The streets were rather quiet. Odd. We saw that the old lady down the road who lives the street with all the cats had a bottle of beer. Somebody cared, which was cool.

We found our way to a new-ish wine bar down Ekamai, filled with a huge variety of pretty well priced wine, and a very strange collection of faux medieval European art, hung next to some pretty average contemporary portraiture.

We drank a bottle of NZ Sav Blanc, ate some garlic bread, and wandered on, down Ekamai 5, across to Thong Lor. Still quiet. After strolling around the strange bar / restaurant / club complex where you can eat nouveau-Thai in a restaurant that looks down on the floodlit indoor night soccer fields, we bought gelato in a new ice-cream parlour, which Brigid opined would likely have won some design award in Auckland, but here just is.

I had strawberry and chocolate (hardly adventurous, but they had no Chili-Chocolate). They had no cones either and the owner said it was because they’d opened 6 days earlier and were waiting on them. He asked where we were from. Auckland. He said he was a recent arrival from Penang. He’d been working in KL but didn’t like the bustle and chaos of the place so he’d moved to BKK. Really??

We went looking for an Italian eatery we knew of, but turned right instead of left in Thong Lo and lost it. So I hailed a cab and asked to be taken to Soi  23. The driver laughed and headed off in the wrong direction. It was NYE so we gave him the benefit of the doubt. He roared down an almost empty Upper Sukhumvit (its never almost empty..I guess the Farang massive was Khao Sahning or had fled the city) and turned into Soi 24. Mai, mai….23.

The Japanese who frequent 24 seemed to be out in some numbers but we wanted 23. He did a couple of illegal turns then drove straight past 23. We decided to walk the difference, a coupe of dozen metres, so we stopped and headed up the soi. We walked past the neon lit opening to Soi Cowboy, the first of the ping-pong alleys, which dates to the influx of half a million sex starved, opiate riddled, GIs inthe 1960s and ‘70s. It’s seen better days and, seems filled with the very ugly remnants of those same GIs, all having their very own Deerhunter moments and an endless flood of fat European and Australian males looking for some sort of pleasure amongst the hard as nails girls, many of whom, if legend is to be believed, are daughters of that first generation of Yankee freedom fighters.

We went into the very famous, amongst those that write about these things, Le Dalat, a French-Vietnamese restaurant in an old house, which, I’m told has been there for a very long time, likely serving those refugees from Saigon, which perhaps explains it’s location.

It was their last night. They were moving. They had no wine. The owner apologised and offered us a glass of bubbly stuff, which, despite having no idea what it was, and thus what it might do to my head, we drank. We went back into Soi 23, up to Minibar Royale, an almost cool, but a little too much suffering from being situated in a hotel, albeit a boutique one, cafe.

The staff told us to go away. It was full of very young, many far too young, Thai kids, and the thought of a couple of aging foreigners crashing their gig didn’t work.

I might write them a letter.

We walked off, it was 10pm. Tempus fugit. Still no food (garlic bread and gelato aside) and nowhere to drink in the NY. We walked a little. We argued a bit. We hugged. We got in a cab and asked to go back to Thong Lo, far away from the SEA war hangovers and the Thai adolescents on dad’s amex.

So we were back where we started from, two taxi rides (but only 100B [$3], I love the price of public transport here) and there was another wine bar. Three people inside, but hundreds of bottles and inviting wine, a menu and Italian-American gangster movie tunes, but not the obvious ones.

Yes.

We sat in big comfortable chairs and ordered a glass or two of an Italian white, the grape I know not, but it was dry and quite lovely. We ordered Grilled Chicken with Peanut Sauce salad, Pork Chips with Sticky Rice, and a Soft Shelled Crab with Wasabi dressing.

And then two more wines.

Across the room, four women sat down and ordered something with bubbles. At midnight, or just before to be accurate, the staff, who outnumbered the guests (and were sitting outside with a guitar singing Beatles songs) handed out those exploding things with a string and we pulled them. The women grabbed us and we formed a circle as they sang what seemed to be an endless loop of the first four lines of Auld Lang Syne.

It sounds odd, but it was rather neat.

We sat with them. They were sisters, four of nine, from Hong Kong. Three live in Bangkok, where one is, so the others said, a famous pianist.

One lives in Rome, and, they said, one lives in New Zealand. Oh? Where? Auckland in a place called St Heliers. Cliff Road.

My parents live, and my family home was 100 metres from this sister. Heh. So we talked of Auckland’s waterfront, of beers and mussels in Mission Bay and Vulcan Lane, of Takapuna Beach, of Piha and it was rather groovy.

And then the piano teacher’s son arrived. He too talked of Auckland, having been staying in Albany and studying at the school of Audio Engineering in Parnell, tutored by people I know rather well.

One sister said, if you need any help at immigration, I know people and we smiled but demurred.

We shared numbers but I guess we may never see them again.

The older Vietnamese woman who owned Le Dadat, had also taken our number, to invite us to the opening of her new restaurant. On it goes..

I enjoy the connections we make on this journey.