If you’ve been in the vicinity of Facebook over the past few days, you've probably noticed that many people have taken advantage of a little gadget that enables them to overlay their profile images with rainbow stripes, to commemorate the Supreme Court’s decision last week to allow same-sex marriage in all 50 states of the union. Many of my friends, real and virtual, used it.

My immediate reaction was to do the same thing — after all, I support equal marriage, I think the SCOTUS decision is a good thing and I love seeing right-wing Republicans thrashing around in spasms of impotent, moronic fury. But then, as is so often the case, I started overthinking the whole phenomenon. What would I be communicating by tinting my profile? The fact that I’m a decent, egalitarian, non-homophobic, generally liberal, 21st-century sort of person? I’d hope that people already sort of get that already. (There was also the more mundane fact that I was away from my computer when I first noticed the rainbowing, and it would have been a lot of hassle to implement it on my crappy old phone and by the time I got back home I would have felt as if I was playing catch-up.)

But it was interesting seeing some of the reactions to my friends’ assumption of the spectrum. There was an element (jocular, I’m guessing) of “ooh, I thought there was something you weren’t telling us”. That’s harmless in itself but I suppose it’s just the benign end of the assumption that if you support gay rights in any form, that means you’re One Of Them, which sounds barmy but was certainly prevalent 30 years ago. And then I started considering that if people are making assumptions about those who announce their support for the SCOTUS decision in this way, are they also making assumptions about those of us who remain rainbowless? And so I felt like this:


It’s that tipping point where not wearing something – a poppy, a red ribbon, a red nose —can be taken as a statement in and of itself, even if you don’t mean anything by it. Am I by default a homophobe, an ally of the buffoon Scalia and his dimwit Supreme Court rightists? Or did I mean to buy a rainbow from the nice lady outside Waitrose but I only had a fiver and it would have looked weird to ask for change?

At least I don’t now have to contemplate the dilemma described by one of my Facebook friends:  “When is the politically correct time to return to a regular (rainbow-free) profile pic?”

PS: And yes, this is my first blog post in two months. What of it? I’ve been busy, doing stuff like this rundown of the best new restaurants in Bangkok. So there.

I spent a few hours yesterday watching a couple of silent movies made by a young whippersnapper called Alfred Hitchcock. It was part of Bangkok’s first ever festival devoted to the cinema before sound and it was gratifying to see a good turnout. Well, it was good in terms of numbers, but the bulk of punters seemed to fall into one of two groups, namely young, faintly beatniky Thais of both genders; and farang gentlemen d’un certain âge. It was essentially a middle-class event. Which is sad, because both the films (The Pleasure Garden and The Ring) were intended to be commercial crowd-pleasers aimed at all strata of society in their day; they each took as their milieu a form of popular entertainment (music hall and boxing respectively); and since they were silent movies, shown here with bilingual intertitles, the language barrier that can often discourage locals from enjoying a wider range of entertainment was considerably lowered. But no, it was all skinny-jeaned hipsters and old farts who are starting to look more than a little like Hitch himself. The lady selling little packets of tissues outside the ladies wasn’t interested, nor were the people offering all manner of stuff in the foyer. (Is Bangkok the only place where a legitimate cinema can host a stall flogging bootleg DVDs?)

Of course, things are much healthier in the relatively classless West, aren’t they? Aren’t they? I came home to a Facebook post by my (virtual) chum the arts editor of a mid-market tabloid, wondering why people who make much noise about the need to have art that reaches out to the masses can’t be arsed to talk to her paper. And then there was this article by Mark Cousins in The Observer, complaining about the way that so many British arts venues — presumably inadvertently — conspire to make working-class people feel unwelcome. As he puts it: “But so often, their sleek lines, or facades that look like office buildings, their malbecs and chorizo-studded menus are too culturally thin.” Against this, of course, is what happens when art becomes too popular for its own good, as expressed in Rachel Donadio’s piece in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago: “People now swarm the paintings, step on anyone to get to them, push, shove, snap a photo, and move quickly on without looking at the painting,” says a Florence-based travel guide. When I first moved to London it was genuinely exciting to go to the Streatham Odeon and watch something like What’s Love Got To Do With It in the midst of an audience that was for the most part young, working-class and African-Caribbean as they bellowed abuse at Laurence Fishburne in the guise of Ike Turner. Would I have been so delighted if they’d followed me up the hill to the Ritzy and given the same treatment to a Peter Greenaway double bill? Cousins argues for fish finger sarnies alongside the chorizo but it’s not quite that straightforward, is it?

(Class is tied up with money, of course, but they aren’t the same thing. People with unlimited funds can also make the oddest cultural choices — like the Brazilian plutocrat who set about buying up pretty much every record ever released, although he isn’t quite sure why.)

God knows the West has had some daft ideas about Asia over the years. From the prurience of 19th-century Orientalism via the half-arsed borrowing of religion and philosophy that characterises New Age thinking through to every movie that’s been badly and pointlessly remade — although I still maintain that The Magnificent Seven is more fun than Seven Samurai even if it’s not actually a better film — I’m sorry. That said, Asia’s more than capable of missing the point when it comes to Western culture. Call it Occidentalism.

For example, a Thai lingerie firm is currently running a big campaign featuring a well-known model/starlet adopting a selection of Hollywood poses that I’d describe as iconic if that word hadn’t by now been devalued to a point where it’s essentially meaningless. The problem is that the images take what’s most obviously appealing about the originals (famous, stylish, beautiful woman) without really delving into what it represents to people who may actually have seen the film rather than just checking out the DVD cover.

So let’s start with Audrey Hepburn. The whole damn point of Audrey Hepburn was that she could be elegant and sexy without the need for big knockers or an enhanced cleavage and certainly felt no obligation to flash around what little she had. If there’s a single movie legend who looks out of place advertising bras, it’s either Audrey or John Wayne. And, as inevitably happens when people try to sum up her particular charm, it’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, one of her worst movies, that gets picked as a reference point. And in it, Audrey was playing a character who may not have been a hooker exactly but was something pretty close, which I’m not sure is quite the sort of role model the brand wants to present to the Bangkok middle classes. Maybe this is just payback from Asia for Mickey Rooney’s horrific yellowface act in the film? If so, fair enough.

Next, on the left, we have Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Now, it’s a long time since I’ve seen the movie, but as I recall, the whole point of this scene is that Ms Stone’s character isn’t wearing any knickers — which makes it a very odd reference point for a company that makes undergarments. I’m not even sure who the one on the right is meant to be, by the way. Edie Sedgwick? Frankie from The Saturdays? A very young Angela Merkel? Answers, please, on a pair of Sharon Stone’s unworn knickers.

But this is the one that really unnerves me. The reference is presumably to Dominique Swain in the 1997 adaptation of Lolita, which may have been more faithful to Nabokov than Kubrick’s earlier version but was otherwise worse in pretty much every respect. Leaving that aside, child abuse is at the heart of the movie and the seductive, lolly-licking, bra-strap-dropping, skirt-lifting character being portrayed in this picture is meant, in the novel at least, to be just 12 years old. In this case, I really do hope they’ve missed the point.

You may have noticed that Thailand is now under martial law, but that’s not the same as a coup. Older readers of this blog may recall the coup of September 2006 and my baffled responses thereto, which led to a couple of interesting years writing for The Guardian’s Comment is Free site. Anyway, nostalgia and semantic quibbles aside, very little seems to have changed here, there are no bullets pinging off nearby walls and Bangkok traffic is still abysmal. If you were soppy and sentimental enough to be even the slightest bit concerned, please stop or I’ll get all tearful.

Back in 2006, my usual method for writing a blog post would have been to find an article in The Guardian and get slightly annoyed with it for 500 words or so. So in that spirit may I first draw your attention to the thoughts of one Zillah Byng-Maddick, who sounds like an obscure slice of beatnik slang (“man, the way that cat played those bongos was zillabingmatic”) but is in fact the CEO of Future Publishing. She envisages a business model in which the lines between content (what used to be known as editorial) and marketing are blurred to the point of irrelevance so as to reach a point at which

...our expert, trusted content enables us to attract large communities of highly engaged customers who want to buy things, and that’s exceptionally appealing to our clients.

The problem is that those customers (I think she means readers) are only “highly engaged” up to the point at which they feel they’ve stopped reading an article and are instead being cold-called by someone who wants to sell them something. When that happens they tend to turn their attention elsewhere.

Now, some would argue that the average reader doesn’t much care about such niceties, that she or he will happily absorb reams of crass, blatant plugging and hype while strap-hanging on the 7:43 from Rickmansworth so long as there’s a celebrity angle or a horoscope or something about cakes or a decent pair of knockers attached. Well, think again. Readers — some of them, at least — are deeply sensitive souls, to the extent that the slightest deviation from sweetness and light can tip them over the edge into a traumatised, catatonic state. This is the case at least for students from the University of California at Santa Barbara and other institutions who have requested that literary works contain “trigger warnings” lest the unsuspecting reader should chance across references to racism or suicide or, well, pretty much anything that isn’t very nice. The warnings for a work such as American Psycho would probably be longer than the book itself. “It seems to me that that way madness lies,” says John Mullan of UCL, shamefully neglecting to preface his comment with a trigger warning about references to madness, lying and seeming.


Of course, the obvious thing would be to preface all Future publications with a trigger warning that everything contained therein is a bit of marketing copy and readers unduly sensitive to such nastiness should steer clear. How zillabingmatic would that be?

PS: Padraig Reidy very good on triggers at Index on Censorship. 

PPS: And Jay Caspian Kang in the New Yorker.

(This is prompted in part by a blog post by my friend Namwan, about the moment she realised nobody else had a bloody clue either.)

Very, very occasionally, I go to some sort of social gathering – not a party per se, I’m far too old and tired to do that sort of thing any more – and someone will ask me The Question: “So, what do you do?” It’s so dangerously close to “So, who are you?” that every time I encounter it I find myself teetering on the edge of an existential crisis. And of course, rather than actually dealing with the problem, I construct a banal response-cum-coping-mechanism that will satisfy my new acquaintance’s curiosity without encouraging any further probing.

This wasn’t always a problem. Way back in the mid-90s I was a contestant on A Well-Known TV Quiz Show and between my being accepted and actually recording the episode I went through three different job titles. Confusion inevitably set in so I responded to Magnus Magnusson’s (yes, it was That TV Quiz Show) request for my occupation there was a brief pause and he said “That’s not what I’ve got down here.” It wasn’t the first question I got wrong that day.

Later I had a brief spell when I enjoyed a job title that actually prompted people to say, “Wow, that must be really interesting!” which was nice, although it was also the only job from which I’ve been fired, which wasn’t. And since then I’ve done a number of things that are to a greater or lesser extent connected with words, sometimes juggling two or three of them simultaneously and frankly it’s too much effort to explain it all to someone who’s only really making polite conversation so I just say “I’m a journalist.”

Which isn’t exactly a lie, because I do write things that then appear in periodical publications. But it might serve to mislead someone who thinks that journalists are either battle-hardened crusaders for the truth or sleazy dredgers-up of titillating scandal. I’m neither of those. But there’s also been a shift towards the notion that anyone with a smartphone and a Twitter account is a journalist these days. I’m not one of those either and I do still hold true to the notion that there’s a distinction between news on one hand and Buzzfeed quizzes on the other. And I do have sympathy with the stance of those such as Barney Hoskyns who are campaigning against the tendency to take advantage of journalists and other creatives by asking them to work for nothing “because it’ll get you some exposure.” But that does raise the question of what a journalist’s work is. If I write something and then someone wants to interview me on the radio about it, I might say OK, because it will draw attention to my work. And although I’ll be using my verbal skills I’m not actually writing, so I don’t feel so dirty.

But once of or twice over the past few months I’ve been approached by e-mail by people who are writing pieces about the current situation in Thailand, asking me what the hell’s going on. I respond by e-mail, which makes it seem more like work, but at the same time I know the reason they’ve got in touch is less because I used to write things for The Guardian back in the last decade and more because I happen to be in Bangkok. So since I’m not being a journalist, what if I throw in a few factual errors or spelling mistakes? Is it OK not to be paid then?

Maybe I should just blur a few edges and call myself “a writer”. Because that’s what I do and the term doesn’t insist on payment as part of the deal. Quite the opposite, it seems, as this article in today’s Observer by Robert McCrum suggests. And then if I ever do get off my arse and go to a party we can talk about the gap between wanting to be A Writer and actually Writing.

Although, as Truman Capote would doubtless have argued, I’m not really a writer – I’m a typist.

I haven’t written very much about the current brouhaha in Thailand because the whole thing’s at once too deadly serious – a battle for the very soul of an entire nation – and too bloody silly – uh oh, Frankie Valli just cancelled his Bangkok gig sceduled for Wednesday. But I was tickled by this stand-off last week between John Sparks of Channel 4 and Dr Seri Wongmontha, or “the flamboyant Dr Seri” as it’s almost obligatory to describe him, a supporter of the anti-government protests. It’s all entertaining stuff, with a sort of ramshackle panache that would enliven Western political debate immeasurably. But once the duel was over, Seri apparently addressed his adoring fans thus:

Well, that’s unpleasant, although I suspect the good doctor is simply expressing what a lot of people in these parts think. The problem is that his reference to yellow skins (implicitly those of Chinese ancestry, albeit sometimes at a remove of several generations, and overwhelmingly the sort of people who tend to study abroad) bestows this supposed genetic superiority on the Bangkok elites while potentially excluding the far darker-skinned rural Southerners who have provided much of the heavy lifting for this month’s attempted shutdown. And since the organisers are attempting to stamp out the notion that the protests are all about maintaining class privileges – despite some of their most ardent supporters going off-message when there’s a microphone in front of them – that’s a bit awkward.

But hey, it’s not just Thailand that’s got caught up in a bit of hey-aren’t-foreigners-a-bit-rubbish? embarrassment. Thanks to Richard Lloyd Parry for directing me towards this gem from Japan:

PS: And this, by Patrick Winn, is another good take on the class aspects of the struggle for Bangkok’s streets.

PPS: Oh, it’s all coming up now. This, from China, courtesy of James Crabtree. It’s the line drawings that are particularly noteworthy: 

This, I’m afraid, is what usually passes for high-profile modern art in Bangkok these days. Vague nods to Western notions of culture (tired Christian iconography filtered through an airbrushed posse of probably-Russian models) for the express purpose of selling you an expensive lifestyle. This is about food, but it could have been condos or cars or plastic surgery or whatever. Incidentally, the product it’s shifting is part of CentralWorld, the vast shopping mall that was immolated at the climax of the last bout of urban unrest here, in 2010.

So it was more duty than enthusiasm that propelled me to the clunkily titled Art and the Collective in Southeast Asia. The venue, the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, has enjoyed a mixed reputation since it (finally) opened in 2008; it’s an intriguing space, built as a sort of reverse helter-skelter around an atrium with visitors strolling up the spiral slope with pictures on the walls. But the quality of the contents has been patchy at best, its exhibits neither edgy enough to fully win over the city’s small but visible hipster population nor possessing sufficient mainstream appeal to pull in big crowds. Much of the space on the lower levels has been rented out to small retail outlets, so you can pick up an ice cream or a recycled laptop bag or even a mountain bike – Bangkok hipsters love their bikes – which at least gives a vague sense of community to the place. How many of the punters actually trudge their way up the spiral to look at the art isn’t entirely clear.

But I make the effort and am slowly, grudgingly forced to review my prejudices. As the name suggests, this is a group show, including pieces by artists – established and upcoming – from countries across the region. Some of the art is brutally political, such as the Groszesque cartoons of Vietnam’s Nguyen Van Cuong and this even-handed up-yours to the protagonists in Thailand’s current electoral impasse:

Remember, this is a part of the world where, economic and political advances notwithstanding, there’s still a substantial degree of risk in mocking the elites that run the show, even more so in deconstructing the cultural and social taboos that underpin their power. But the real subversion comes not from artists who put their heads above the parapet; it’s the ones who take the spectators with them who are really challenging the status quo. Interactivity is the order of the day, whether analogue (a circular ping pong table on which we’re encouraged to play; the priapic self-portraits of Vasan Sitthiket, bearing placards written by us) or digital – several installations come to life when the viewers stumble in front of cameras, taking a role whether they want to or not.

And you’re actively encouraged to take photos. The reason this is forbidden in many Western art spaces is that the galleries decide what souvenirs you take from them, and monetise that choice; to be fair, the artists do take a meagre cut from sales of the various postcards, tea towels etc, provided they’re still alive to do so. But, despite all the boutiques and cafes at BACC, there is no real gift shop through which we exit. Instead there’s a pin board bearing recommendations for online tracts about the redundancy or otherwise of copyright law when it comes to creative work. And in that spirit, we snap away, our bodies remixing the originals in an act of casual détournement.


Which brings us back to the emaciated poseurs at the top of the page. CentralWorld is a few hundred metres from one of its biggest rivals, the Siam Paragon mall, which was recently dubbed the world’s most shared location for selfies; for any new retail development, the creation of photogenic landmarks that might raise one’s Instagram profile would now appear to be as fundamental as parking spaces and toilets. So it may seem on the face of it that BACC has simply bowed its head to the realities of 21st-century capitalism. But there is a sliver of difference between the two. When people snap themselves gurning within Paragon or CentralWorld, they define themselves as passive consumers; when they do the same at BACC, they immediately become artists, seizing the initiative, another placard that they’ve drawn themselves.

PS: (Jan 15) Rather more focused review that places the art in the context of the current upheavals in Bangkok.

I’m not certain how accurate the recent story was of one Tao Hsiao, who supposedly killed himself after enduring a five-hour shopping marathon with his girlfriend. I mean, I’m sure the poor guy died, but there’s just something too neat in a narrative that has someone’s last words being “don’t you have enough shoes already?” before he leaps to his demise from the seventh floor of a Xuzhou mall. It encapsulates so much that we feel about consumerism and gender and above all the social and economic changes that have overtaken China in the past few decades that it feels more like an urban myth than a random slice of domestic tragedy.

On one level, I suppose Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan, doesn’t warrant such scrutiny, since it admits to being a work of fiction. (Incidentally, I only came across it because of a review by my dear friend Leyla Sanai, who I’ve never actually met, as is the way of friendships lately, and she’s been a bit poorly lately, so please send her all your love and good vibes.) As the title suggests, it’s a satire about a group of fabulously wealthy ethnic Chinese and there’s good fun to be had in the clash between brash ostentation and what we might once have had the confidence to define as good taste, a battle that’s going on throughout the Sinosphere. As I type this, I’ve got in front of me the menu for a Bangkok restaurant that lists scallops done three ways, incorporating the holy trinity of culinary flash – caviar, truffles and foie gras – on one plate. Maybe it works, maybe it tastes great; but ultimately that doesn’t matter as long as you’re eating something most people can’t afford. There’s a certain degree of richness beyond which you’re allowed to get things totally wrong – factual goofs, not just aesthetic solecisms – and nobody’s going to point it out. This is where I roll out my story about seeing a group of high-rolling Thai-Chinese businessmen ordering the most expensive claret on the list and dropping in ice cubes.

Back to the book. Hey, I understand how irony works and I understand that what characters say and do and think may not reflect the attitudes of the author. As you’re probably only too aware, American Psycho is one of my favourite novels, and I know that when Bateman misattributes songs by the Ronettes and the Rolling Stones we’re meant to be in on the joke. But you can’t always assume that. If one of Kwan’s characters says that a hotel is nine blocks from Piccadilly Circus tube, or that someone’s double-majoring at Oxford, should we chuckle because these silly Asians, no matter how rich they are, don’t know how British cities or British universities work, maybe because they’re too rich to have to care? Or should we hope that for his next book he gets himself a better editor?

The latest eruption of moral why-oh-whyery to transfix the interwebs has been prompted by the Tumblr Selfies at Funerals, which does pretty much what it says in the title; young people trying to make a solemn occasion all about them. Could there be a more apt symbol of the corruption of modern society?

Once again, plucky Thailand rises to the challenge. On Monday three bomb disposal officers were killed in the restive south of the country and when the bodies were brought into the hospital, a couple of nurses decided to mark the occasion thus:

PS: The nurses have apologised. So that’s OK then.

A recent article in The Guardian (oh Lord, how many times has he started a blog post like that?) queries the notion that one’s online activity offers an accurate snapshot of the self. The author, the deliciously-named Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, muses:

Well, I don’t know if everyone has those moments, but I certainly do. Despite my outward insouciance, recently I’ve been getting terribly self-conscious about what I post on social media and what others may infer from it.

For example, yesterday I posted the following image on Facebook:

and appended the comment:

Which is all well and good, but depends for its full effect on the reader having seen a few Buñuel films, read both Fitzgerald and Orwell and maybe having spent a bit of time in BKK, thus understanding how big, staring eyes fit into the scheme of things. Can we assume such things these days? Are they in the canon that my average Facebook follower should be expected to know? What about blog readers? Do I have to spell it out or can I rely on you to Google in the gaps? Am I just a great big steaming intellectual snob? Is that such a bad thing anyway?

Then, a few hours later, someone on Twitter was enthusing about how wonderful it was that Peter Higgs had gone away on holiday without a phone so he could avoid the inane questions of journalists when the news of his Nobel Prize was announced. I replied that this was indeed pretty cool, but Doris Lessing’s reaction to winning the literature prize in 2007 was even better:

which got such a good response on Twitter that I cross-posted it to Facebook and several people chortled while all the time I was thinking, “Jesus, exchanging witticisms about Nobel Prize recipients, is that the acme of middle-class intellectual wankery or what?” Or is the acme of middle-class intellectual wankery in fact worrying about whether other people think you’re a middle-class intellectual wanker? I think I’d better work harder on my insouciance.

An advertisement for Dunkin’ Donuts in Thailand has provoked outrage and embarrassment; not in Thailand but in the United States, where accusations of racism have been levelled.

OK, let’s look at this. It’s a picture of a woman with her skin painted black. Clearly in the US and elsewhere in the West, this has connotations of blackface and minstrelsy with which we are now distinctly uncomfortable. But in Thailand it doesn’t. It’s a picture of a woman with her skin painted black, to match the colour of the product being advertised; just as a British TV presenter appeared a few days ago with her skin painted silver. If the DD ad were to run in the States or in Europe, I could see the problem. But it isn’t; it’s running in Thailand. And yet, because it offends the sensibilities of Americans, it gets pulled. It might be overstating matters to say that the withdrawal of the ad is in itself an act of racism, but it’s certainly an act of cultural imperialism, its close cousin. And yes, ultimately the Dunkin’ Donuts brand is owned by a US company; but doesn’t this whole story demonstrate the extent to which the American hegemony is maintained as much by twerking Miley and Affleck as Batman and crappy fast food as it is by threats to bomb Syria?

Of course, racism goes on in Thailand and it’s far closer to the surface; I don’t think there’s a Thai phrase analogous to “I’m not a racist but...”  Thai racism, though, is inextricably bound up with class consciousness, with a distinction between those who work in the fields and those who lounge in air-conditioned luxury. When another doughnut brand, Krispy Kreme, launched in Thailand a few years ago, rich kids sent their maids and drivers to stand in the long queues on their behalf. This is the issue that’s been dividing Thai society over the past decade, provoking those running battles and burning buildings you occasionally see on TV. And if the activities of Dunkin’ Donuts’ Thai franchisee need any moral scrutiny, maybe it’s over the fact that the model in the advert is the daughter of the CEO.

A few days ago I was discussing with a friend why most attempts to depict Bangkok in fiction (novels, films, whatever) seem doomed to failure, whether they’re the work of locals or outsiders. Look at what Wong Kar-Wai did for Hong Kong; he’s created a city that is at the same time authentic to people who knew it and compelling to those who’ve never set foot there. Graham Greene wove together the realities of roads and buildings and dodgy policemen in Saigon or Havana or London with another, imaginary world that became known as Greeneland. But BK always seems to be a backdrop, whether it’s for high-octane shoot-outs (eg Bangkok Dangerous) or drunken mishaps (The Hangover II). I don’t recall ever watching a movie or reading a book that couldn’t plausibly have been set in any other city that’s hot and a bit sleazy.

So I came to Only God Forgives with some trepidation. There were some positive indicators; apparently Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest provoked a real Marmite response at Cannes, with half the audience walking out and the rest giving a standing ovation, which suggests that it at least makes an effort. And although the central character Julian is an American, he’s supposedly lived in the city for a decade, which should place him closer to a Greene anti-hero in terms of his perspective on the city; not a complete newbie like the Hangover II’s amiable idiots but still culturally an outsider. He runs a boxing gym as a front for his successful drug smuggling business; but when his brother is murdered and his appalling mother comes to town (a foul-mouthed Kristin Scott Thomas, channelling Cruella de Vil and Bet Lynch), things begin to go awry.

Unfortunately, Julian is played by Ryan Gosling, who spends most of his time staring into the middle distance with a blank look that could represent spiritual contemplation or extreme boredom or both. The real heart of the movie, and the best acting performance, comes in the form of Vitaya Pansringarm as Chang, a local policeman who bypasses due process by acting as a dispassionate angel of vengeance. The closest analogy with Hollywood is probably Dirty Harry, although really he’s a personification of karmic retribution, coolly deciding who will die and who is merely maimed, based on the gravity of their own misdeeds. While we’re on the subject, orthodox Buddhist doctrine has no need for a personalised God to dish out justice, so I’m not entirely clear where the title comes from.

That aside, does the film encapsulate Bangkok any better than previous efforts have managed? Well, let’s tick off the good points first; Refn doesn’t massage the linguistic reality to make things easier for Anglophone audiences. Most Thais, even in Bangkok, don’t speak much English, if any; the film reflects this, rather than – as most Hollywood takes on the city do – allowing every noodle vendor and transsexual hooker who interacts with a farang a workable grasp of cheerful pidgin, so we don’t need any of those dreaded subtitles. Refn doesn’t make concessions for the post-literate generation of moviegoers.

Moreover, in a very violent movie, it gets the violence right. The muay thai scenes look pretty authentic; and the sword that Chang wields is a proper Thai darb rather than a Japanese blade that would be more familiar to Westerners. These seem like minor points, but high-profile, big-budget movies such as The Man With The Golden Gun (much of which is set in Bangkok) have got these things wrong in the past, mashing multiple traditions together into a mess of pan-oriental bloodlust.

So this is the real Bangkok, right? Well, not really. For a start, the bulk of the action takes place indoors. I have no doubt these were all authentic Krung Thep locations but if there are no windows they may as well be sound stages. When we do venture outside, it’s usually in the dead of night and although the omnipresent chirrup of cicadas rings true, the cacophony of car horns and luk thung music is absent. OK, you can’t expect Refn to conjure up that signature scent of frying chillis and blocked drains but there’s little feeling of how busy the city is, and how many people are crammed into a relatively limited space.

Instead, the world Refn creates is almost exclusively filmic, with multiple nods and winks to other directors. Many of the scenes in brothels and karaoke bars feel like love letters to David Lynch, all dreamy ambiguity in long shot; and the demise of Julian’s brother Billy echoes Alan Parker’s Angel Heart. The blood-spurting violence, some of it pretty anatomically explicit, nods to the inventive nastiness of much recent Korean cinema, with one victim left resembling a side of beef in a butcher’s cold store. Of course it’s possible to take these perceived connections too far; when Chang slices open a man’s eyeballs I’m immediately reminded of a similar scene in Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, but maybe Refn just likes the idea of sliced eyeballs. Chang is equally inventive with steel chopsticks and a pan of hot fat; only when he relies on his police-issue pistol do his deadly skills desert him. He’s pretty cool; but his even-handed righteousness, untainted by favouritism or graft, will provoke raised eyebrows among those who come into regular contact with Bangkok’s boys in brown.

So no, Only God Forgives doesn’t get Bangkok right. Instead, it creates a cinematic theme park that picks out a few elements, something akin to those Chinese simulacra of English village life. But back to that conversation I was having about Refn’s equally inept predecessors. It took place in a restaurant called Hemingway’s, a traditional Thai house fitted up to serve as a tribute to the archetype of gruffly ruminative machismo, drawing a gentle veil over the fact that Hemingway never actually visited the city. But the proprietors have created a reality in which he might have done, an alternative Bangkok to flatter the vanity of many a grizzled expat who can still see himself chasing bulls and climbing Kilimanjaro even if nobody else is in on the joke. It’s not the real Bangkok, and neither is Refn’s and neither is mine or yours. Maybe the real Bangkok doesn’t exist.

Every once in a while, it looks as if conventional politics is going to be turned on its head with the arrival of a clown who makes more sense than the straight actors. I suppose Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage are the closest we’ve got in Britain since the death of Screaming Lord Sutch, but in other countries they really go for it. Jesse Ventura and Al Franken have had their moments in the States; and right now Italy is apparently waiting on every utterance of Beppe Grillo. The problem is of course that we laugh and applaud when they point out how few clothes the emperor is wearing; but by the time said autocrat’s naked, bloodstained body has been tossed out of the window, we realise that jokes don’t get the bins collected.

It’s the election for the governorship of Bangkok today and conventional wisdom says its a two-horse race between the incumbent Democrat Sukhumbhand Paribatra and Pongsapat Pongcharoen of Pheu Thai, the party of the current Prime Minister. The capital has been solidly behind Sukhumbhand’s party in recent years but the man himself has disappointed many supporters; Pheu Thai is still associated by many with the deaths and conflagrations of the 2010 riots. In past clashes the left-field role has been filled by the shady massage-parlour kingpin Chuwit Kamolvisit but this time around we have the rather more amiable figure of stationery-magnate-cum-DJ Suharit Siamwalla who gets my (non-existent) vote if only for his constructivist-influenced posters and unashamedly hairy back. Which is superficial, but ultimately no more superficial than the tribal grudges that seem to motivate many supporters of the main parties and the politicians themselves (in Thailand, Britain and beyond). And his laugh is less annoying than Nigel Farage’s.

When I heard the news that 138,000 people living in England and Wales can’t speak any English, my immediate reaction was “Is that all?” The notion that everybody from Newcastle to Newquay might be expected to understand each other is, in historical terms, relatively new, and a product of mass media and widespread literacy.

In any case, I’d guess that a country where over 99% of the population have some vague grasp of the lingua franca looks like a model of homogeneity compared to some other places. Take Thailand, for example. And I’m not just talking about the various foreigners who order their beers in combinations of sign language and shouting – hey, don’t look at me, I can ask for a plate of som tam as well, and get a taxi home without a phrasebook. There are also illegal Burmese maids and Cambodian construction workers and Russian gangsters, not to mention those stateless, paperless refugees and people from various hill tribes whose links to the modern world, let alone the Thai nation, are tenuous at best.

And I’ve also noticed another group, that on the face of it is by no means on the margins of Thai society. It consists of well-heeled young Thai people, often – but by no means exclusively – luk kreung or mixed-race, whose education has been a mixture of international schools in Thailand and universities in the US and/or UK. They speak Thai when needs be, when communicating with maids or shop assistants, although English is their lingua franca. But it’s a strange, mid-Atlantic English, with idioms all of its own and stresses in all the wrong places; an English that is better used to communicate with other cosmopolitan offspring of jetsetters and diplomats than with anyone who grew up in a conventional English-speaking environment. I suspect this phenomenon exists in other places as well; a highly educated (or, to be more precise, highly qualified) cadre of young people who aren’t actually fluent in any known language.

Which is, I admit, a pretty lame excuse to present this, without comment:

PS: After pressure from the Thai government, it appears that YouTube has agreed to ditch the above clip, although as far as I can see it’s mocking US sex tourists rather than Thai people. But in its brief life it did provoke some delightful invective; my favourite comment was “Your brain is not in the heads. it's in your penis so, that's why it's so tiny and your sketch is just a crap of dogs.” I’ll be using that sometime soon, I know.

PPS: Oh, right – it’s just blocked in Thailand. So people are still mocking Thai culture, but Thai people can’t see it happening. So that’s OK then. I think.

PPPS: And the final word...