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I wore a pressed shirt in order to better engage not only protesters and passersby but also with bankers as they left work and took stock of the chanting crowd. I wanted t get as many voices as possible, from the staunchest defenders of OWS and related movements to its arch-opponents. Not because all of these perspectives are equally valid, but because we get a richer picture of how OWS has affected the psyche and political landscape of our world when we consider the dissent and ambivalence OWS encountered as well as its networks of support. Hearing the voices of bankers and defense contractors who can barely contain their rage at OWS should, in fact, tell us a great deal about how much the movement has achieved. Meanwhile, we also hear certain slippages–privileged people who can’t hide their sympathy.

The audio piece that resulted intersperses voices as well as perspectives. Hear it here:

Protest as Religion

Or here:

http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/call_and_response

Or listen to it right here:

This episode discusses the state of the radio in Bangkok, with a focus on the recent history of Luk Thung stations. Briefly, Luk Thung is a genre with a strange double status, being both very popular and yet classed as old-fashioned. You hear this music all the time and everywhere – on the street, in cabs, in restaurants. Luk Thung is a big-time marker of displaced rural identity, which naturally alienates urbanites who hear its sounds as low-brow. And yet, today, the hundreds of thousands of migrants from the provinces who live and work in Bangkok are urbanites themselves. The tension in this transformation toward a new urban laboring class is never more obvious than when listening to people listen to the radio.

I spent a day interviewing Bangkokians, including street vendors who had their radios switched on while they worked, as well as teenagers in the mall whose lives seem to revolve around what they download onto MP3 players/cell phones. On another day I visited Jenphop Jopgrabuanwan, a former Luk Thung singer who now runs a community radio station (also available online)/CD shop, and generously answers questions about the history of the genre for anyone interested.

For those who know Luk Thung well, I apologize for any explanatory reductions in talking about Luk Thung and Mor Lam. There’s plenty more to say about the huge differences between these styles, but for the sake of clarity they are collapsed a bit in the episode.

Huge thanks to P.D. and J.J. especially, as well as Peter G., James M. and all others who provided input and suggestions.

Klong Toey market is a sprawling way station for something like half of the produce that reaches Bangkok’s restaurants every day, and no small amount of its meat and home goods either. Industrial-sized clear garbage bags full of limes are tossed from the backs of trucks, palettes of morning glory and parsley block the footpath, and whole pigs dangle freshly- swaying gutted at face level. It’s a bit horrific, not to mention a surrealist triumph of sorts.

Klong Toey is not at all for tourists. I saw no others and felt more than a few confused vendors’ eyes on me. The real action happens around four or five in the morning, with a noticeable slowdown by seven. As eight rolls around, the choice stuff is long gone. Some of the vendors, all but sold out, fold up their tables and enjoy a beer after a long night’s work. Come eleven AM, the place is a ghost town.

In addition to being gory and temporally inconvenient, Klong Toey is situated near one of the rougher areas of the city, a slum by the same name. The market is generally under the influence of the mafia and drug dealers who hold power in much of the slum. Every couple years, a bomb goes off late at night in the market, often with fatal results, as a warning shot in a turf war over stall position.

Given this humorlessness, it is undoubtedly a luxury to be able to aestheticize the sights and sounds of the market. And yet those dimensions are compelling. Like any tight and crowded space with a lot at stake, the vendors have refined a system of niche-based shouting to convey meaning amid the noise. What sounds like utter chaos to outsiders actually involves many layers of address – product pitches come one way, warnings to clear the path another, and machines another still. There is a kind of ecosystem at work:

Airline toothbrush seller, Klong Toey Marker. November, 2010. 3:01.

In this, a woman who got her hands on a bunch of airline freebies – toothbrushes, toiletry cases, eye pillows – is selling them for rock-bottom prices near a cooler of cold drinks, aided by a tape-recorded advertisement plugged in to a little bullhorn.

The repetitive, mechanical voice of the recording occupies a unique niche adjacent to the warmth of human chatter. The vendor echoes and so punctuates her own tape.

–

Many vendors also keep pets in the market. Cats and dogs, just like on the side streets in the rest of the city, may or may not have homes, but people look after them as a good deed, a means of what’s often called making merit. (This commitment is motivated, to varying degrees, by Buddhist principles). Thus the market is filled with mangy, un-spayed or -neutered, but nevertheless well-fed animals.

In addition to cats and dogs, people keep songbirds in wooden cages above the front of their stalls. These are kept specifically for the beauty of their voices, as aural trimming:

Songbirds in Klong Toey market. November, 2010. 2:01.

—

The market, having been active for decades, is … seasoned. The people and objects that make it up have spent many years jostling for space (physical, political, sonic) until things have settled into a raging stasis. The result is not pretty in a conventional sense, save for the odd perfect pineapple, but there is grandeur in the coexistence of messy details, in the way that everything manages to work.

A vendor rolls coconuts into a basin:

Rolling coconuts in Klong Toey market. November, 2010. 1:51.

Or listen to it right here:

A slideshow to accompany the piece:

Bangkok is a hot, humid, smelly, flashy, loud city. As with many metropolitan areas, this is a big part of its appeal. Lots of people are doing lots of (very different) things in a small space. The bustle is fun.

But eventually, the stress of the crowd compels people of means to differentiate their experiences from those who have less. They want to shop and work in spaces parallel to those that have been overrun, where sensation has become for them overwhelming. So new channels are carved. The city becomes sedimented, with layers corresponding to something like class. Money, or lack of it, enforces access to these layers, but so do composure and habit. (This theme was also explored in the 1983 documentary, Trading Places). The third episode of Bangkok is Ringing explores what different layers of transportation in Thailand’s capital sound like.

Division is now very much at issue in Thailand. This episode is part of a broader effort to understand division – what it feels like, why it’s happening.

The recording doesn’t sound like much on computer speakers, but with stereo separation (such as on headphones) the lateral motion of the volley is strongly pronounced. And the ball makes a cool noise when it rolls.

Players engage in all manner of flips and bicycle kicks, attacking the net to spike like volleyball players except with their bodies sideways or upside down to give the feet better position. This, of course, makes hitting the ball squarely a matter of greater coordination.

Takraw is a rarity in Thailand for being a very vocal game. Teammates shout to each other to coordinate their kicks, and opponents taunt each other good-naturedly. This particular match was played on a court next to several other courts – some for takraw, others for basketball, still others for regular volleyball. The basketball players, who pass selflessly in a way one doesn’t often see in pick-up games, are practically silent by comparison.

The takraw group wore squeaky, flat-bottomed canvas sneakers – school uniform standard. Two adults played against three students. I have no idea who won.

Isaan songs are usually melancholy – perfect for drinking. A neighborhood man sitting in front of a shophouse the other morning knocked back a few Leos and started singing along.

Song: ช้ำรักจากเมืองชล (“Bruised Love from Chonburi”)
Written and originally performed by: Chatri Sichon
Covered here by: Ekkachai Siwichai

Life is hard for a poor person from Chonburi
Have a little pity for me
Don’t keep me waiting long
Take my love and let’s join hands

Although I’m very poor and needy
I’ll always be rich in some ways
I’ll try to provide for you
Listen to my rambling song and have sympathy

It hurts leaving Chonburi
I’ve gotta press on, endure the fire of sadness
Til the dying breath of love
Meet my new boss
My heart is lovesick

etc.

Thanks to Peter and WS for help with track ID and translation.

This was especially true for the networks of small-scale industrial/manufacturing labor situated on back streets, away from the main traffic arteries. These networks are vast and often informal, but they provide vital services for a big city and employ many people. Some businesses are run out of storefront machine shops, while others use little more than a patch of sidewalk. We’re talking small engine repair, recycling collection, welding, wire-stripping, and the like.

This montage includes five examples of the sounds of urban labor in a tense time. Each is about one minute; follow the annotations below as you listen.

0:00 – 1:07 A recycling facility on a large side street supports many young men in the neighborhood, who gather paper, cardboard, and plastic bottles from nearby buildings and bring them in for 2 baht per kilogram. Here, two men crush cans and stuff them into big clear bags, which they load onto a cart.

1:08 – 2:01 In the United States, ice cream trucks are just about the only mobile sonic advertisements we have. In Thailand, there’s a greater variety, including fruit trucks with speakers tied to the top, so the driver can call out that day’s price for mangosteens and lychees. In this recording, a mobile broom-and-bucket-shop plays its jingle again and again. Sonic ads for all kinds of businesses are more tolerated here, for whatever reason.

2:02 – 3:08 A welder fixes up a door. This neighborhood is a mixture of large, modern houses, international schools, and blue-collar family homes. Many of the blue-collar workers do construction work for their wealthier neighbors.

3:09 – 3:50 A pair of young men hammer thin metal poles into shape for use in construction.

3:51 – 5:45 Some of the more established shops supply parts for larger industries, including automobile manufacturing. Since most of the cars built in Thailand will be exported to other countries, these small shops are closely connected to global trade. As you can hear an example of from about five minutes onward, news reports were often the soundtrack to these shops in April and May.

The UFO-like Chedi (inner memorial hall)

Dhammakaya is a very new movement within Buddhism, and breaks from many of its classical precepts. As a philosophy, it has roots in the early 20th century, with a revered monk named Luang Phor Sodh who purportedly rediscovered a long-lost method of attaining enlightenment. In fact, the current sect is a posthumous interpretation of Luang Phor’s teachings that wasn’t founded until the 1970s, and its leaders are at least as successful as entrepreneurs as they are as philosophers. Their brand of Buddhism could be justly compared to any number of religious movements around the world that seek to make worship relevant to the moods and mores of modern life.

This includes, for example, an overt and intimate connection between material wealth and spirituality. Pictured below is a bag, distributed by the temple for carrying shoes while indoors, adorned with Dhammakaya’s official slogan: “Quickly Rich/Powerfully Rich/Thoroughly Rich”

Relevance also means heaps of technology. And size. The central building of the wat looks a lot like an airplane hangar (note the people at the bottom of the photo for scale), complete with a logo that evokes a disc-shaped aircraft set to launch.

From the inside, see the tall ceilings, open spacing, and minimal design. The woman blurred at the front is on her cell phone.

There didn’t seem to be a single point in the entire complex where one was out of view of a television, or out of earshot of a mounted Bose speaker. Between the morning and afternoon meditation sessions, a panel of young men and women chatted and laughed at a long table, talk show-style, their faces and voices amplifying throughout the vast terminal. Though there must have been hundreds of small televisions, the two largest screens, standing some fifteen feet tall, flanked the main stage, on which a group of novice monks sat in a geometrical array on top of a dais shaped exactly like the other building, the aircraft/Chedi. During the talk show, the presenters appeared on the screens as gigantic talking heads; when formal meditation began, they were replaced by blue orb graphics and fiery orange Buddhas. Whoever orchestrated the program most certainly understood color theory.

My companion described all of this as a great example of the Thai concept of Riyap Raawy, or perfect orderliness. Every element of the space, from load-bearing poles to floor mats to the seating arrangement of worshippers, was made absolutely uniform. And thanks to the even distribution of media, every person in the wat could see and hear clearly from anywhere – this is critical, since the space is touted as being able to accommodate a stunning one million devotees at a time.

There are certainly examples from throughout history of religious structures that, like Wat Dhammakaya, were built to be huge and awesome (in the biblical sense), and to thus give everyone the sense that they were encountering transcendence. This experience is often audible. For example, in the whispering gallery of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the acoustics allow you to hear another person with perfect clarity, even if they’re fifty feet away and whispering. The inner dome of the Taj Mahal has a similar effect. In both cases, the echoes suggest a sublime unity between the speaker, the space, and the cosmos – even the slightest utterance resonates everywhere. Upon speaking, you get the feeling that all things are connected.

However, the technological space of Wat Dhammakaya, although relentlessly amplified, works differently.

Around thirty seconds into the recording, we start to hear two speakers go out of phase, just a few milliseconds off from each other. The slight delay makes the voices (these are the talk show hosts again) sound warbly. Here, we become aware that this isn’t actually a space of unity, but of total atomization. For each area in the temple, there is a separate set of speakers – in accord with the mandate of mass media, each person is addressed in his own world. Although everyone hears the same thing, they never actually hear together, from the same source. In certain moments, such as when the speakers go out of phase, we overhear that others are also hearing, but the possibilities for joining them are limited. The only way to get the message is through your own private equipment. For a sect so focused on personal development, becoming thoroughly rich, and so on, this seems poetic.

To play legally, street musicians in Bangkok must be licensed. The licenses restrict when and where one can play – unlike some cities, the subway is not at all fair game – but they also protect musicians from getting hassled by the cops or anyone else.

The fellow we met was blind – music is a common vocation here for people with disabilities. Like many people from the rural Northeast, he came to Bangkok because he was no longer able to make a living in the provinces.

The field recording above has two parts. First, a song, and then (around 4:00) a short conversation, translated within the audio. The piece he’s playing is Northeastern string music, and he’s accompanied here by recorded drums from a tape deck. You see the instrument, the Phin, pretty often on the street, but the double-necked version is rare. Thanks to B for help with translation.

WV recently came across an impromptu bar set up on the sidewalk of a decently trafficked road in the middle of Bangkok. The proprietor, a 34-year old Bangkok man, has been running the place for about eight months. Against a corrugated metal fence that hides an empty field, he set up one big pink light and one big blue one, and in front of the fence an array of tables and chairs. A small shelving unit holds mixers and a selection of whiskeys and vodkas. He DJs from an ipod plugged into a small but pretty loud pair of speakers.

The bar exploits the same kind of free space as an average street stall – indeed, it might occupy the exact real estate of a daytime noodle stand – but its decor clearly hews to a “hi-so” (short for high society) aesthetic. The music, to a song, could be Hot 97, and there’s a kitschy, if never quite ironic vibe, in everything from the vintage furniture to the small plate of potato chips that comes with each drink.

One of the best things about this lounge is how unexpected it is. Without the festive lighting and pop music cranked up to fill the block, the corner would feel pretty dead, precisely as it had the last several nights when I walked by the exact same empty spot. This street has some foot traffic, but most of the restaurants are quiet, indoor-type spots, with little or no presence on the sidewalk. Cocktail’s Lounge stands out sharply.

As the owner explained to me in the recording above (right after you hear the music mixing with a sputtering tuk-tuk engine), he was able to set up shop without receiving zoning permission from the city because his brother is a police officer. He’s certainly lucky in this respect, as others in his situation would have to pay a bribe.

After closing up for the night, the owner said, he planned to join the evening’s rally.