Dissociated drive from Suvarnabhumi, part 1

Posted by Art man on November 29th, 2007 filed in Bangkok

Suvarnabhumi airport is a rather clinical place, with enough unfinished concrete to be en vogue in post-bubble Japan. A living museum of immovable tenure, housing ephemeral waxy countenance of traveling anonymity set to the beat of a stark time signature. Eclecticism is guaranteed but lacks the immediacy necessary to be of any pungent consequence.

Driving away, confronted with ramp-side mega huge billboards one’s sense of scale faces challenges to its established norm and stretches to accommodate a metropolis after being away from one for a while. In Chiang Mai you’re never far from other people. Tuk-tuks offer a full body view of passengers. Hair and limbs suck wind. The motorcycles are open-air beasts and even the Song Teaw, the ubiquitous red buses afford an unobstructed particle exchange between you and whoever is putting along beside you.

Sat in the sealed pod of an air-con taxi now however, assures the clinical mindset is carried through from the new airport into the city I know as a sweaty stinkhole, yet from here it appears almost polished and quiet. A Vaudevillian hoax. The highway is wide and clean and bland. Once you approach the city, the skyline of darting monolithic chess pieces feign evocative void. The people are all sealed in, and besides the blurry zip of fellow motorists, the isolation factor multiplies. It seems the skyline, devoid of life yawns a gap tooth yawn as nothing but a backdrop staged for your private contemplation as you drive in to town.

There seem to be more and more of these mutant sprouts springing up all over. The concrete jungle is growing, pushing towards the sun. These rivet-sprigs of your stock portfolio heroes push on, housing their denizens and beckoning to the youth: Higher! Higher! W.I.P green mesh ripples in the breeze, knotted posts of bamboo the only natural surface and this is what must pass for life as you search for some animate frame of reference. Are we underwater in a salmon farm? It is both timeless and eternal if only for a few seconds. The green plastic that won’t age. The passage of time is insignificant here.

Is this city abandoned or teeming? You cannot tell. It could be riotous, celebratory or vacant and no one would know driving that raised and tolled strip; the only thing breathing being yourself, and of course the driver, who is about to attempt an obscene price gouge. His skin seems treated with formaldehyde, he’s a wax dummy and this is a dream. The wraiths in other cars press on in a journey with no goal. It’s only after a quick brake-pad snap from your automaton chauffeur, an about face off the Sukhumvit exit that Bangkok becomes immediate and fleshy and claustrophobic.

You are a sticky fixture in the earthly landscape that now seems to seethe and breathe, as you teethe to the fact that moments ago the tops of these same oblongs inspired such cold detachment. The city wears different hats, but its coat is crisply pressed. A white-coated surgeon with a heart of hooker gold, it is…..

part 2 Monday,