Thailand Journal I: Chiang Mai Bargirls

The first thing one notices driving into the Northern Thai city of Chiang Mai from the airport at night are the bargirls. Thailand is famous for bargirls and prostitutes, but this Northern city is particularly dark after sundown, with shuttered storefronts, weathered buildings and desolate factories epitomizing its backwater status. The only thing lighting up the darkness is the girls, hundreds of girls, dressed to the nines but for what? There's nothing particularly unique about a tableau of Thai bar girls, yet the disparity between their appearance and the hopelessness of their predicament is what is most dramatic. Where are the customers? Hardly any are in sight. Women turn to prostitution in countries like Thailand due to poverty and while it’s not legal, it’s plainly more than tolerated by the local authorities. However this is not Las Vegas. Chiang Mai is known for its culture of serious Thai massage, for Lanna architecture and for being the gateway to the temples of the Golden Triangle, It's a far cry from fleshpots like Bangkok and Phuket, with their legendary "soapy massages" where the wandering sybarite can find him or herself turned into the filling of a human sandwich. However there is still the matter of the girls. Why choose a profession for which the supply is so far greater than the demand? When you look at these creatures, whose supernal beauty, creates its own olfactory sensation, a kind of imagined perfume that can ignite a fever of longing, you’re reminded of the painted horses on a children’s carousel, moving up and down, turning round and round and going nowhere.

The Cosmists

           Nicolai Fyodorov (Leonid Pasternak)

C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures essay famously eschewed the separation between science and art and there have been many attempts to bridge the gap between these two epistemological projects. When he coined the term “disenchantment,” Max Weber was referring to the increased scientism that made it impossible to entertain metaphysical conceptions of the world. One of these began around the same time that Snow and Weber addressed these matters. In his review of two books, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nicolai Fyodorov and His Followers and The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions (“Gathering Dust,” TLS, 11/22/13), Eric Naiman describes the work of Nikolai Fyodorov. “According to Tolstoy, Nikolai Fyodorov was a saint, whose programme for the universal resurrection of the dead was ‘not devoid of sense,’” Naiman remarks. If the premise was supernatural, its implementation required some degree of science. The Philosophy of the Common Task was a handbook created by several of Fyodorov’s followers after his death. “ ‘The common task’ was the physical resurrection of the dead,” Naiman remarks. “All mankind, Fyodorov wrote, was under a moral obligation to identify and collect the dust of its ancestors…These discoveries would entail not only bringing the dead back to life, but finding space for them to dwell. The deserts would have to be made fertile; other planets would have to be made habitable, and modes of transport to other worlds developed In effect, Fyodorov was providing a scientific basis for religious myth, the way other nineteenth century scholars traced the historical existence of Jesus Christ.” Sounds more ambitious than Einstein’s project of producing a unified theory and probably underscores the excesses of trying to unite science and imagination that have lead to orgone boxes and scientology. However, Fyodorov’s "common task" did beget imitators in the world of art, at least. George Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead brings his theories to life--if nothing more than as an exemplar of the horror genre on the silver screen.

The New Rijksmuseum

Could Rembrandt have painted the cast of power brokers in Oeke Hoogendijk’s The New Rijksmuseum Parts I and II which just finished a run at Film Forum? After all Rembrandt's great masterpiece, The Night Watch, with its portrayal of the movers and shakers of his day, is one of the museum's most precious possessions. Could Ortega y Gasset, the author of such essays as The Revolt of the Masses have dealt with strife between democracy and the higher calling of art that the film depicts? After all it’s the Dutch tradition of democracy that delays the implementation of an enlightened esthetic concept. “This kind of process in which nobody wants to take a risk is too Dutch for me,” is just one of the many expressions of exasperation that the film records. “It’s not democracy,” the Spanish architect declares about the Dutch Bicyclists Union which becomes a major opposition force. “It’s the perversion of democracy.” Actually the closest comparison to the tapestry which The New Rijksmuseum paints lies in the work of Ibsen. The movie is a kind of An Enemy of the People in reverse, with an visionary esthete fighting the town’s folk (in this case the town is Amsterdam) for change. The museum’s embattled director, Ronald de Leeuw, is also reminiscent of Ibsen’s Master Builder, Solness, in his Sisyphean struggle. In Part 1, we follow him as deals with a mounting list of extrinsic and intrinsic problems, one of which is a budget of 134,000,000 euros for a project whose initial construction cost is estimated over 100,000,000 euros higher. The museum was originally designed by Pierre Cuyper l895 and anyone who visited the earlier incarnation might simply ask why change an already magnificent structure? Why accommodate and attempt to contextualize twentieth century artworks in a repository for one of the greatest collections of the past?  For those who resist the notion of change the architects and the director are Robert Moses like figures, who are out to get their way, no matter what the material or human costs. The New Rijksmusem is about art and architecture, but it’s a great work of art itself, comprehensive, multivalent in its concerns and full of a memorable cast of characters, including its own watchman whose devotion to the museum and its renovation is one of the most moving aspects of the film. Rent this movie.

Time Out

Gravity Probe B Orbiting Earth to Measure Space-Time

No one wears watches anymore. They’ve become as much of an anachronism as cursive handwriting whose death occurred in less than a generation. The next to go will be time itself. In essence who needs it? Time is a little like Newtonian physics, something you hold onto for the sake of practicality. You aren't going to trust your life to relativity theory or quanta, especially since no one has solved the vexing problem of a unified theory between the macro and micro worlds. However, time is, nevertheless, on the verge of obsolescence, nudged gently into oblivion by space. The Roman Numerals on antique clocks will soon be Greek to many people. The pragmatist says of course we need time. Without it, how will I get to my doctor’s appointment? How will I get to the church on time? The answer is that much of life will be lived in the head since the idea of teleportation will become a reality. People who are crippled by ALS are still able to communicate thoughts to computers using BCI or Brain Computer Interface which transcribe with the same tools that are used in voice recognition. It won’t be long before you will only have to think something to make it happen. And, yes, about that toothache? You won’t need to get to your dental appointment on time, since your dentist will be able to fill the cavity remotely using the same process that jurors will employ to come to their verdicts: thought.