WongandMyi ad,t hef i r stat r anscul t ur alr el at i onshi pcounci l or ,t hel at t ersur el y t hepennamef orsomesor tofapopl ect i c,apol i t i cal ,mor alagnost i csoci alsci ent i st ,t eam upt opr ovi deawor l dofi nt er i or swhi cht heydef i neas‘ ThePavi l i onofMi r r or s’ .Thi st er mi st akent o
r epr esentt hel i vedexper i enceofmenandwomenast heycomet oSout hEastAsi af orcar eerorpl easur e.Mor e br oadl y ,i ti showt heyexper i encel i f eand‘ l ovi ng’ wi t hi ni t si nt r i cat enet wor ksandwebsofdecei t s,dr eams, al l usi onandpr oj ect i ons.Tr avelf ort hem i sdef i ni t i vel ywhathappenswi t hi nasmuchaswi t hout ,t hati nor dert o makesenseofevent s,encount er sandpr edi cament si ti snecessar yt odr awuponmor et hanj ustone’ sown t ast esandpr edi l ect i onsbutt oactandr eact .Sout hEastAsi a( SEA)i samyt hi cpl acef ort hem t hatevokes quest i onsoft hesel fandhomeandt he‘ ot her s’ ,andhowt hem andwebehaveTheyt akeusonawhi r l wi ndand encycl opedi cj our neyofhowwet r avelwi t hwhatweknowandhowwebehave,andhowt hi si sonl yt he depar t ur epoi ntf orexper i ences-goodorbad. WongandMyi adacknowl edgeandacceptt hest er eot ypesofAsi anmenandwomenbywest er nmal esand f emal es,andofwest er ner ’ sbyAsi ansi nAsi a.Sensat i onal i str epor t smakegoodpr i ntandevensel lbooksf or t hoset hatseet hesephenomenaasanangl e.Theseaccount sf asci nat et hr ought heappar entdebaucher yofi t al l ,dr awi ngt headvent ur ouswhi l stspi r i tcondemnat i onbywest er nl andl ocked.Butt her eal i t yoft heseencount er si sapr i vat eaf f ai randof t enf r aughtwi t hmuchemot i onalt ur moi l .Thever bs‘ sex’ and‘ l ove’ ,exi stpr i mar i l yi n t heact uall i vedencount erbet weenmenandt hewomen.Al lt her est ,t hei deas,r umor sandmi sgui dedbel i ef s andar t i cl es,t hei rst or i esandmessages,pal eagai nstanyoner ealencount er .Themanandwomenmay di sr egar dorconsci ousl yputasi descr i pt sandr ul es,cat egor i esandl abel sast heyshapechanger ol esal li n or dert of or m mor esympat het i candsust ai ni ngr el at i ons.I ti saf act ,t hati ncr easi ngl y ,andi ni ncr easi ng amount s,menar ecomi ngt oSout hEastAsi aandot herheat seeki ngl ocat i onsi nt het hi r dwor l dsol el yt of i nd mat esandpar t ner s,r el at i onshi ps.Theysear chf orsomewayt ost epout si deofwhathasemer gedf ort hem by anever expandi ngi nf or mat i onsoci et y . Whi l esomewest er ncomment at or sscof fatt hi sbel i evi ngsuchr el at i onshi psar ebaseduponr ealneedsf orsex, egogr at i f i cat i on,ormoney ,t hesamewast r uei nmanyf i r stwor l dcount r i esunt i lr ecent l y .Theur banmyt hof l oveandr el at i onshi psbei ngbaseduponf r eewi l landchoi ce,peopl ef i ndi ngappr opr i at epar t ner swhi cht hey canspendt hei rent i r el i veswi t h,i smor esuggest i veofconsumersoci et i eswher esexi sr el egat edt ocont r i ved nor msder i vedf r om apast i cheofvi ewscol l at edf r om women’ smagazi nes,agonyauntcol umns,hear sayand myt h.Lovei st hatwhi chi swr i t t enaboutorpar adedont heI nt er netorTV,capt ur edi nf i thandsomecel ebr i t i es pl ayi ngoutvi car i ousr el at i onshi psi nt hei r r eal i t yorr eal i t yTV. ‘ ‘ Thewor kspr esent edher ecausedmet ocont i nual l yr ef l ectuponbot hmyownpr esent at i onofsel fi nt hewor l d andquest i onswhatImysel fwanti nmyr el at i ons.Thi svol ume’ scompel l i ngst r eam ofconsci ousnessi s pr eci sel ywhatt henewent r antorol dhandneedst oequi pt hem i ndef i ni ngsel fandr el at i onshi pi nt hi snewand uncer t ai nageofgl obal i sat i on.Ihaver eadnoot herwor kwhi chhassopr onouncedl yaf f ect edme.It hi nkofi t ever ydaynow.Wast el ander sand.Wast el ander sandEast er ner sawaken! ”Dr .SumbatUxDel um,Deptof Ant hr opol ogy ,AseanSt udi esUni ver si t y ,Bahr ai n.
Soci alSci enceFi ct i on Ant r opol ogy Phi l osophy Occul l t Tr avel Comput er USA$24. 95 UK£19. 50 Aus$39. Canada$32. 00
Coverphot ogr aph' Thewor l dofi nt er i or s,f or everandever ' byAr t emi sMedi aMechani cs
Vol umeI –Oper a t i onMa nua l f orS out hE a s tAs i aE x t r a c t
W.H. Wong and Myiad
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors The poetic economy of sex, love and relationships in the globalised world.
Volume I – Operation Manual for South East Asia
Dr Winslow Harris Wong MD, PhD, MRE. is a licensed psychotherapist based in San Francisco’s Bay Area. He also runs an office and clinics in Bangkok and Pattaya, Thailand and travels extensively in the South East Asian region. A Rogerian therapist and practitioner of Eriksonian Hypnotherapy, his speciality is trans-cultural relationships. Dr. Wong handles a broad church of clients which include the US military, various US and European Embassies and international organisations working in the public and private sectors. He is widely published in this field with over 345 refereed articles in international journals. He was also the writer of the networked programme ‘South East Asia: Where they find an alternate reality’ broadcast on television networks worldwide, and he is the author of the self-help book Why me – the roadmap of sensuality and travel? Published in 2003 and translated into 26 languages and a No.1 bestseller in Italy and Russia. This is his first venture into literature. Myiad is a Greco-Romanesque would be pretend warrior-homosexual. He is cast in a Macedonian or Spartan tradition and terrorises online whoremonging forums with his monolithic ludicrous and persistent fantasy. This is that he is ‘back-packing’ vanquished male foes on a forgotten beach located under the midnight moon on the Aegean (was it Rimini?). In the aftermath of such delusory victories he drinks excessively from rancid goatskin wine sacs, and ravishes opposing kings, heads of state, opposing religious factions. While he does so he lends free reign to the very old and dilapidated and the overly young warrior-homo breed to scavenge assholes from the bleeding dead and dying, scattered wantonly on his battlefields. He imagines this, all of this, while he picks up and consumes prostitution services in South East Asian bars and bordellos and whilst mashing little blue triangular pills under his tongue by the bucket loads. Derek William Nicoll carries a Ph.D. in Psychology and Science and Technology Studies from the University of Edinburgh. A former Founder/Editor of itvnews.com an online magazine dedicated to highlighting advances in domestic mediatechnology, he is a consultant and educator with a deep interest in technology transfer in the region. He is an art critic and writes for several online publications. He has published articles in online journal including CTheory, CultureMachine and Cultronix, and Convergence.
Published in the United Kingdom and The Kingdom of Cambodia in 2007 by 24hourworld Associates 4 8 15 16 23 42 Copyright © 24hourworld 2007 The right of 24horuworld to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher. First Edition by 24hourworld Associates part of a limited number of first print run editions of which this is number ________ A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Papers used by 24hourworld Associates are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
Printed and bound in the Kingdom of Cambodia.
ISBN 07493 0503 7
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Volume 1 Operation Manual for South East Asia
Preface to the first edition, the first volume Professor Emeritus Sir William Stirling ‘Let's act like sphinxes, however falsely, until we reach the point of no longer knowing who we are; for we are, in fact, false sphinxes, with no idea of what we are in reality. The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves. Absurdity is divine. Let's develop theories, patiently and honestly thinking them out, in order to promptly act against them- acting and justifying our actions with new theories that condemn them. Let's cut a path in life and then go immediately against that path. Let's adopt all the poses and gestures of something we aren't and don't wish to be, and don't even wish to be taken for being. Let's buy books so as not to read them; let's go to concerts without caring to hear the music or to see who's there; let's take long walks because we're sick of walking; and let's spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us.' Bernardo Soares, The Book of Disquiet , p.27
of fixed elements like the periodic table, but shifting. In every case that which you gaze upon ‘outside’ mingles with that which you observe ‘inside’, and still you watch as this inside and that outside shifts like a glass bead game in front of your eyes, or within your mind’s eye or fantasy. And when you shake your head, take a deep breath in, and the bus or plane arrives, or it’s time to take a shot, you struggle to remember momentarily what is being played or waited for in the first place. Occupy that space right now. That is, if indeed, it can be called a game at all. Imagine now that you do not know the rules, that you cannot tell the cues, read the signs, but instead are being informed remotely. Human brains and minds cannot but make sense of patterns. Trust in this device which we call mind. C. G. Jung tells the story of a colleague who was on a long train journey across Russia:
“Though he did not know the language and could not even decipher the Cyrillic script, he found himself musing over the strange letters in which the railway notices were written, and he fell into a reverie in which he imagined all sorts of meanings for them... One idea led to another, in his relaxed mood he found that this “free association” had stirred up many old memories.”1
Preface The style of this novel is not in the form of affirmation or negation of worldviews but forms a more polyvocal format. This can be observed by considering what is happening when one sinks into an inner reverie. You may be standing, waiting at a bus stop or listening to a boring lecture. You may be gazing from the train window speeding through a foreign land; you may be waiting patiently for a plane at an airport. You may be gazing longingly into the kaleidoscopic universe of a girly bar pool table in Bangkok - a finite but dynamic arrangement
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Jung, C.G. and von Franz, M. (1964) Man and His Symbols New York: Doubleday p.27
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This is the mood in which the following chapters must be read. There will be periods of abstraction, metaphors will drop in, clichés will be used, parables will be told, truths and facts will liberally mix, and theory and applications will be indiscernible. Another metaphor that should guide this attitude to reading the current work is that of the ‘Dreammachine’ a stroboscopic flicker device. Viewed with closed eyes it produces visual stimuli of an internal nature. It was developed by artist Brion Gysin and scientist Ian Sommerville with a view to creating altered states of consciousness and new awareness’ of internal neural processes.
I implore the reader to persevere with the initiation being offered in these volumes, and understand that this text is deliberately constructed to resonate at multiple registers in your mind – from the pre-conscious to the subconscious, from the deep and personal unconscious to the collective and social unconscious – and all the way there and all the way back again. Eventually you will not have to focus upon it at all or even read its structure; you will be subsumed within it, and then you will meander, travel and navigate... Overwhelm and transgression
“Dreamachines open a new era and a new era of vision... interior vision. Dreamachines make visible the fundamental order present in the physiology of the brain." YOU are the artist when you approach a Dreamachine and close your eyes. What the dreamachine incites you to see is yours... your own… The brilliant interior visions you so suddenly see whirling around inside your head are produced by your own brain activity. However you look into a Dreamachine, in a short time you will have acquired greater selfknowledge, extended the limits of your vision, brightened your perception of a treasure you may not have known you own.”2 2
Brion Gysin quotation in the Dreammachine Booklet found at: http://brainwashed.com/h3o/dreamachine/booklet.html#w/o_tears
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An overwhelming part of the Earth's biomass is in the form of unicellular organisms. In three and a half billion years we have miraculously mutated from being unicellular lifeforms to developing capacities to speak about unicellular life forms, and ultimately to manipulate them. Life has so many solutions it’s overwhelming. I find it incredible that so much in life inherently contains that evolutionary principle in communications – scepticism, the principle of abstraction, the desire for comfort, and even more importantly, the reality that things and ideas diffuse into shared, common thought. When people learn a language quickly without being explicitly taught, they develop a pidgin version of it; then, if they need to use this pidgin on an everyday basis, it becomes a real
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language, called a creole. Creoles are language starting again in a fashion - immediately they divide into dialects, mix with other languages, and start building up the decorations that older languages have. Like gold, multicellular organisms as well as intelligence are not an essential ingredient of life and therefore not inevitable or required. However, the more "fitter" an organism is the more gold it has embossed upon itself, the more complex it has to be. All those hopes and fears on a Buddha figurine in Wat Phr Kaeo - disfigured with gold leaf. Hopes, wishes, expectations. Natural selection is very specific to the environment it is occurring in. It also doesn't require that one variant of a species be "weak" as a necessity. It just means that another variant is better suited to the environment, so the proportion of the species exhibiting that trait, over time, increases. This is termed the Hardy-Weinberg Principle. The tipping point of millions of explanations, excuses, accounts, diatribes, debates, arguments, conversations, urban myths and simple stories and lore – they are all stars – comes from the fact that when many ‘fit’ things exist in an environment then complexity reigns. It is estimated that 5,500 of the world’s languages will no longer be spoken in 2100. Things become simpler.
toward one of a few dozen politically dominant languages. Two million bits per second are hitting a raw nervous system in a non-hostile environment of raw neocapitalism, this bit stream is brokered, cascaded by the senses and later, perceptual and ego defence mechanisms, reducing the flow and gestalts created to a manageable 135 bits per second, at least by the time it hits consciousness. Things become simpler with filters. To control the filters, the range and the breadth of what is permissible is control, and freedom is control. Then you react and respond. To and fro, wax and wane, in the survival of the fittest, the more adaptive specie will survive and thrive, adapt and procreate, move on, upwards and outward, or contract, conserve and constrict. The foreigner that adapts to the ways of the other will survive, and those that do not, will not.
Then the mirror of our world distorts, the illusionary world collapses, the paradigm shifts, the tabloid is read, now discarded for the fresh one coming tomorrow. 600 muscles coordinate and dance, you, you move in a single direction, singularity of motive – the environment flows. Globalization and urbanization tend to bring people
On the other hand, we are typically sightless beyond our powers of hindsight, and we are blind beyond recent scientific deduction or our own personal and immediate refutations and distinctions. Nobody knows, and certainly not at all by their ‘in the now’ testing and re-testing, why, why it happens, why we are apart from someone, even though they mean so much, they define our universe, that without them we are nothing and know nothing with any certainty. We are somewhere in time and space reporting from some forgotten island or room. We report as if it matters, that it was an act of an omniscient god, scientist, the U.N. U.S., E.U. or World Bank consultant, the government official or most senior corporate salesperson tutored in manipulation, or the distorted hand of some
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alien overseer. It’s easier when we are told what to do, instead of striking out under our own steam. We are John Doe, the amnesic victim constantly locked within our paradigm, our bubble, and so we cannot see out, we cannot experience reality and all its horror, or in all its abstraction or potential. As Carlos Castaneda’s ‘don Juan’ lends in his account: "Sorcerers say that we are inside a bubble. It is a bubble into which we are placed at the moment of our birth. At first the bubble is open, but then it begins to close until it has sealed us in. That bubble is our perception. We live inside that bubble all of our lives. And what we witness on its round walls is our own reflection... The thing reflected is our own view of the world. That view is first a description, which is given to us at the moment of our birth until all our attention is caught by it and the description becomes a view,"
strains. Not simple but more complex. We shall not see the effect of the slow motion genetic altering, or the creeping half-life rhizome that we bequeath, the trickledown effect of decisions at the high level, at whose hand, even, at whose fickle amusement, it was made and continues to happen. I mean why should things happen without reason, apparent and otherwise? Who can say what reason is exactly, what chance is exactly? What, indeed, affects the cause exactly? Like animals and plants, the world’s languages are surely the result of an elongated “natural history,” beginning with a single first language spoken in Africa. As human carriers migrated to new places on the planet, each group’s version of the language changed in different ways, some subtle some profuse, until there were several languages inhabiting varying geographical space where there was once one. Eventually, there were thousands. Diversity, digressions same, same but different. Diversity, complexity.
To view that which we are familiar with is to make things easier. We will not be that German citizen which ‘witnessed’ they were ‘in’ Nazism, we shall not see we are part of some change or subversion. We hardly notice that we and our thought usurps the status quo, but by doing so, we preserve ourselves and our culture for time immemorial. We make things complex. We imprint upon the social consciousness of the many just by walking down the street with a scantily clad young Asian woman at our side. We shall not see that the antibiotics of our communications only serve to create more resistant
Pool balls colliding irrevocably on a bar table’s universe, gazed upon by an Asian hostess, who needs illusions of love and affection in the midst of her evenings duties, sociability mashing with cartographies, and opinions, utterances, crystallised and linked to locations. Cultures, even the 1st world, are always material and discursive and so there is no silent spring. So why, why is there not much more variations in products and services, more variations in the typography of sexual encounters, more variations in the description of place in relations to map? Since the advent of language, and perhaps, evens the finding of fire and the subjugation of nature it has always
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been so – paintings inside caves, depicting life outside caves – Plato’s foundation of television? There is no reason, this belief in chance and change, so take one, take a chance and make a change now before it is too late and your choices dwindle. Why the question is sought and the umbilical answers are found lies in a succession of accords... all of all life’s mysteries surely, converging, collapsing inwards, homogenising, dedigressing, all relentless communication and life, all identity and individuality, proof thereof that the world as we now choose to know it is some forlorn self-fulfilling prophesy. It is twisting from the here and now like DNA into the horizon and fusions of what used to be called ‘soul’. Now it is here that all oriental and occidental gamblers agree. They know and share this idea: Why does sex have significant cultural collateral for the occidental beyond pontificating? It then surely links to core question no.1 – Why are we here? Then 2. What are we here for? Then 3. How long have we got? Then 4… like the childhood game of the same name… you lose the ability to define the ‘fictionality' of the human experience – you develop humanality. There is the gene called FOXP2 that is connected with the ability to use language. It traces back 100,000 years, long before the 50,000-year landmark that “Big Bang” theorists designate as the birth of language. Humans learn language without being taught, subconsciously or unconsciously.
and long times, the space in-between. This is where what matters lies. Things happen in the interstices of what Kenneth Burke described as the ‘dramatistic pentad’ act, scene, agent, agency and purpose. The bubble entrapment of what’s happening inside some fucking scenario, and includes the old bugbears of ‘where’, ‘by whom’, ‘by which means’, and to ‘what possible ends’. Myth and script play out here. Possible worlds. Things are imagined to happen. Potential worlds. Looming junctures and interstices. Contrived, managed ecoworlds of action, response, preponderance and interrogation locked in perfect symbiosis, all for the purpose of meaning-making. An adult’s Disneyland, utopias fusing like sparkler stars in that forlorn bell horizon entertainment with a sting. Burke’s pentad views generic elements in the basic thought structures of people like me and you, the schemas and scripts, through which we humans experience and play out in the world.
So all communication and actions suspend between questions and irrelevancies, the gap in-between short
The structures that drive us like demons to connect alpha to omega, birth to death, ever unto the ultimate scheme of things or the penultimate grand delusion or hidden promise of resolution and catharsis. The dream and intention that moves from left to right, from right to wrong, something from nothing, each are like smoke from a place of sand. They help us link actions and words so as to create meanings in place of reflection, through feedback and feedforwards, through anticipations. Words and actions, words and actions, words and actions some of these really may be found in the lived world, but so many, many more are to be found in the inner reveries of
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daydreams and fantasies, the yearnings of herdsmen, tradesmen, yardsmen, teenage girls in a room festooned with pop stars to their sparkling delight and their pierced butterfly stomachs, and gunmetal office bound workers making a cut and crust while they do this. The real interest lies only at the juncture, the chance, that arena where fantasy and reality collide and intertwine, fighting it out at the edge where chaos is enriched, compressed and at its most illogical, then meanings shift in to overload and spill out into the audience who passively dispel or applaud, but also the most secret place where they become totally indescribable, this is where tales of the unexpected kick in. Kick in like the baby in its mother’s warm womb impatient with remaining unborn and knowing utter helplessness.
mission – sex, loves, and relationship – potent evergreen commodities tinged at their edge with sumptuous royal blues and opulent gilds, highly sought after and ready to die for desirable for the majority as a taste is and a feeling experienced. But herein is the rub - acceptance of any or all of these opportunities re-introduces the sense of meaninglessness, a hideous corpus of routine and repetition against which we fought so ferociously in the first place. We condemned Orwell’s infamous ‘1984’ boot, stamping machine-like on a human face forever. Only the most outrageous, violent surreal adventures will resist cooption and banal complicity here. The lesser human will lose out in the never-ending Darwinian struggle for identity and ego dominion and with it, a fist fight for intrinsic moral supremacy - the everlasting rub and the never-ending story.
Each society generates tremendous variety and tries to control it in its own way through laws and customs. The unit to which most behavioural responses are available at any given time, commands the entire system. This is the law of requisite variety or the first law of cybernetics. These units are the opposite of the weakest link in the chain. Never before has life offered so many opportunities for first world inhabitants to articulate freshly won individualities. In the exchange, one has the prospect to reinvent yourself and if and when you do so you naturally reinvent all others, this is because we are connected, only six degrees of separation. Ever more trite flights of fancy to ever more global places, ever more cheaply, means that act, scene, agent and agency can be more varied, richer, and more widespread. Purpose,
So who states categorically the words - ‘no that’s bullshit’ ‘sex is boring, private’ – these status quo minions all draw a line in the sand of the beach of their mind’s eye, a definitive divide, a binary in shades of gunmetal grey? Can there be any a priori absolute standards of value at all if mundane meaning is packaged as a product, a sniff, a nose in the air, one of many pretentious but arbitrary relationships and differences or distinctions? Possibly not.
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Why doesn’t my Thai wife cheat on me?
Instead of transforming our world by travelling, what do you think happens if we simply drag the new symbol
system into the one we brought with us? Make the fresh the worn, the novel fit the round hole, the tired and tired, and the hackneyed square penis. Packed in our suitcases with our favourite shirt, is the weapons and defences... obligatory travel insurance, aides-memoirs of the promise of completeness through settling down, snuggling down with a TV dinner and an ethnic and rustique whom accepts you as you really are. All in an attempt at an earlier form of bliss, simple terms, family and pro-creation, cooking for emotional dependents, strong expansive aftershaves, pheromone juice that transcends cultural boundaries, and even stronger ‘industrial strength’ galvanised condoms is our ‘this’ and ‘that’ – our reasoning based upon our immediate needs and interests and fears, our cultural conditioning within our home societies. Will we play with our ‘flatworld’ GPS phone? Will this device strangle love abroad? Will it allow for indifference or inference? Will it affect our propensity for fondness and affection, its serendipity? Surely, it is better when reality slips away like meat off the bone in a choice Phnom Penh French restaurant to a large framed bombastic woman comfortable, stalwart, in her conservative English middle-class ways, her stiff upper certainty, and her mane of peroxide shaded hair, her pretend looking, but real, Gucci bag. But often it doesn’t. Surety simply emerges from complex threads that have them, us, mummy or daddy, indexed to some distant impoverished community and often these distant communities respond in words and actions that seem to support this arrangement and figment fragment of
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simplistic roles. This makes for convenient easy truths. But it’s all fiction; all are figurative, mere pixels of re-represented, re-re-gurgitation, re-recycled identities and grant money proposals. They are all the same under the sun. The Buddha himself pointed out that no object or situation can ever, in and of itself, be a source of pleasure or displeasure. Rather, they are mere constructs of the linear instamatic mind. So, perhaps it does depend on who’s looking and what is being said and so forth. There are things and situations and there is discussion of these things and situations. The descriptions of things in the world, scenarios, objects, motives, conditions always tie matters down; make things finite like the interior of the cave. The storage of food in pots gave protection for food in anticipation of the, a, future, and also laid the foundations of writing and storing what we call ‘knowledge’. Separated ‘knowledge’ (the past) from ‘experience’ (the now), is like what the record did to a live performance. Music can be packed neatly into the explosive holiday case, with a memento or two. Left over condoms speak masses of your libido. Back home they are also impotent, useless, artefacts, mementoes like a South Sea Ukulele or the ubiquitous African mask; they all reside in a place, the place “where you ain’t getting none.” It is not a world without end, and it never is, until you emotionally explode and does something ‘right’ that you
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may learn to regret - the beauty of hindsight. Bargirls know this and are waiting for you, invisible man. You are in the shadows, the bastion of orderly living from where the occidental is delighted deep inside with his fight for this person, his person, her person. They don’t expect sex and love on a plate or beach, even though exotic food and drink and socioeconomic realities are all nearby. Positive and negative emotions, fatigue and embittered loneliness, fuse convincingly and derive from these discussions, and they can be written down, recorded, reported where they prompt even more talk, they may become more abstract, ever more emotive. They condition and drive tastes, passions even murder and rape and their unlikely bedfellows, political and legal policies. Realities therefore build and extend from these fears, in turn changing realties and accepted norms. The world circulates in circuits, goes round and round…on and on until… we drop [from a helicopter over the South China Sea?]. Let me tell you a story I heard in the bar, about a young man, who helped this Japanese guy, which was looking for this older man whose son had met this ‘good’ girl… etc. etc Isn’t it shocking nowadays? Fucking context messing with a simple common and garden cause and effect… Surely, this is down to what the French social theorist Jean Baudrillard referred to ‘we’ he referred to the ‘ecstasy of communication’. It’s like communication for communications’ sake, doing it because we can. Questions and answer, stimulus and response forever
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locked in the dance and rapture of time’s arrow and the limitless expressions of explanation and experience… endless, ceaseless opportunities for learning, compromise, adaptation, developing, building meanings for things and others, their behaviours and sayings. Beyond their mind’s eye, in the seeing of their souls, swords spinning and flailing, construction and deconstruction, demolition of the self by their own weapons. All the glitz turned outwards, all the condemnation and all the sympathy and empathy turned inwards. This is because language shares as it snares as it utters and it stutters, it passes through kith and kin and all of us; its kaleidoscopic options belong to no-one, they seed scatter as the property of the creative commons, some phrases remembered while some slip of the bone at a choice French restaurant, or they remain, other older truths and irrealities slip slide away. We are only assured by one fact - that there is no absolute Platonic ideal "out there" anchoring meaning, keeping it safe, keeping it steady and sure as certain shared the way we westerners like it. Low risk. No truth that cannot be challenged, that is the battle Royale, it is not constructed of human design and therefore flawed, as in the ways that bridges do fall down against the wishes of designers, builders and operators, and security and safety systems always fail, human laws have loopholes and so they should. Let’s rally in support of misfit, breakdown and obduracy. How else are things to be refuted? Humans always build imperfect systems regardless of their science, and there are often scientific post-mortem
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reasons for the fail. Metal tubes full of people fall from the sky. Some, most, catch fire en route. According to this view there is nothing ‘outside’ language. “Love is really learning,” whispers compassionately the mother of one of the protagonists of this volume – the indomitable ‘Japanese man’. But how much of this love, that sex and his and her relationships is just talk? The authors here venture that as much. Talk tied to a desire that one's partner be aroused by the recognition of one's desire that he or she be aroused. Boom! He was so formal when they first met, he hardly said a word, and she teased him accordingly, perfectly indexed to his culture and wallet. A perfect social fit. But this has not always been so, especially at the macro level.
arrived in Tahiti in the mid-18th century, they were sometimes greeted by performances that were aesthetic, ludic, and sexual. There surely exists nothing less than a feast or orgy of communication about sex and relationships and love in our western society and media. It is a word saturated with meaning and offence – taboo, natural, guilt, fear, fulfilling, anxiety, privacy, spontaneity, permissiveness, promiscuity – the list is endless. To take a girl, a Frenchman visiting Tahiti had only to ask permission of the father or husband, and this was readily granted. As in Tahiti the rites of Venus were public displays, the initial embarrassment of the French was a source of wonder to their hosts.
Edward Said emphatically criticised the story of the Orient by scholars’ of the West. His efforts showed how the occidental academics and their disciplines constructed an object of study that had very little to do with ‘the East’ at all. East, of course, is only in relationship to ‘a West’, a binary, a polar opposite, maybe even sexual relationship in which one term has more value than the other. And perhaps this is one of the major issues discussed in these volumes. Men are still missions with the will, self-confidence, determination and even arrogance to civilise those others. A recurrent theme is a kind of dislocation and misinterpretation of ‘self’ and ‘other’ as a process of learning, maybe this is always the process of learning (and thus why the unconscious operates as a resource as it does?). Is this same idea true when applied to gender? When Europeans first
Perhaps Eskimos have those legendary multitudes of descriptions for snow that most of us do not. The idea put forward especially by Benjamin Lee Whorf speculates that differences between languages’ grammars and vocabularies may channel how their speakers think, creating distinct views of the world. The natural history notion would have it that as human populations migrated to new places and new conditions on the planet, each group’s version of the language changed in different ways to accommodate environmental and social variations. Varying languages emerged from where there was once one, like the many dog breeds which came from the prototypical animal. The wolf ancestors of modern dogs diverged from other wolves about 100,000 years ago, and they were domesticated 15,000 years ago, and likewise, now, we have a multitude of descriptions, categories and concepts, subtle, explicit and
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contrived, about sex. Eskimos may not have this extended vocabulary, not unless they have MTV and the Fashion and the Playboy channels and start the inevitable process that sees ‘wares’ as desirable or seductive. We have indulged in conceptual art and conceptual dog breeds, and we have come to gorge ourselves on conceptual sex. Descriptions of behaviours are taught and learned by our Children, and they haunt our children as they grow to sexual beings. It is a slow burn. Slow indeed from my first fumblings and teasings on that park bench in home town to the Macedonian march and hunger of the middle-aged man into medicated and psychological impotency. Fascination is held with the physical body and those animated physiques of others, so much so in the mind, and so much in the gut. Surely it is a major preoccupation of people, a behavioural ‘aside’ a break from the course of everyday tasks and duties to dwell perpetually upon this. To be driven from and by it. As an idea, it forms what Wong and Myiad, the authors of this work, term a significant ‘graffiti of the mind’ – I take this as their blazon idea of Richard Dawkins’ ‘meme’ - a brazen intricate artwork of an idea, a whooper of a neon sign, a powerful sticky, tacky and addictive reification – the sign signalling ‘live nudes’ at the end of the road where you live with your beloved. While it blinkers and proffers its light across the neighbourhood at night, I am in bed; I am a ‘dead nude’. Dawkins has memes as virulent notions and ideas that spread through cultures and minds. Perhaps this does
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relate to this ‘Graffiti’ except in many cases they are indelible, if they are viruses, perhaps, dormant, waiting to develop into full blown diseases like the fears of city fathers of widespread corruption and that more and more graffiti artists will spread more and more messages splashed across the cityscape. Until it is all covered. Then they are like HIV, as it travels to niches across the world like language did, as it pervades cracks and fissures like water erodes, and smoothes stone. Messages are cached, retained, saved, they are as ancient food in pots giving rise to the creation of alphabets and later fine windows file cabinets, they don’t go or wash away or flush out. Ideas of sexuality do not wash away with the shower after shower after sex, perhaps because they were continually talked about, continually thought about, they are residuals, like some favourite porn or ‘beloved’ movie kept tidily in mind or on top of the wardrobe or under beds, a fixation on a ‘special’ star taken to the realms of monotony and abject sex addiction, so much repetition so much an analogy or parody of the f/act. And I can tell you this. It is without question phenomenal that we have learned through time and through literally billions of interactions with surroundings, environments, and other people to learn this way, getting into particular niches, fitting for us, and to do particular things in formatted form. From unicellular life to S + M is a miracle that took all world religions and all philosophies and artistic endeavours to work at full power to mystify and obscure. It lies at a very core of our humanity. From a
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purely materialistic perspective, there is hardly, anymore, reason to question ‘what we are’ but rather ‘why are we here’. Our parents predicated and procreated; hand pricked and prodded, sorted out our lives, but they did so in order that I might write these words to you, right now, and not in any way did your parents also do that so that you may read them? Cause and effect is so slimy, sleazy, tacky, convincing or seductive when it is immediate, so when its close, so when it’s right, baby, it’s all the same, all the same... but when it’s weak it’s broken down, intricate sub-particles and sub-trees and history. And so when it’s close, it comes to us tidy, sanitised into facsimiles of linear abstraction, beads of glass arranged in string. We should not fear it; we should try and understand and consume it, bit by bit. Like prayer beads of Greeks, Tibetans, traditionally used to keep traditions of the repetitions of prayers, chants or devotions. Rudraksha seeds or human skull bone which materials is going into your prayer beads? What better can it occupy our fears and dreams at private times in private rooms? If only David Gotleib had such a hobby he wouldn’t have… (See volume three for the outcome…) The man or woman attempts sexual behaviours that they would never ‘inflict’ upon their partner. He had heard rumours of others beasting, boasting of such activities so that he fantasised of them, he saw them depicted in pornography and found them shocking but stimulating, now, in the bordello situation or cheap functional hotel room, he tries and tests them in reality – with A.N. Other.
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He becomes sexually empirical. He finds them coherent experiences, they are congruent with his fantasy, so that they become a predilection – fantasy meets reality in repetition, it is accomplished or fulfilled. Or our protagonist finds them awkward and disappointing – in which case he never ventures to these realms or depths again. He may also be indifferent – practising the behaviour neither drives nor yields him to its inherent intensity and, moreover, its practise and performance in the future. All this fuels learning and in this case, as it does, it fuels love. A Cambodian Buddhist chap (a collection of laws used in Buddhist teaching) goes: “True Solitude (or Loneliness) ... Is possessing learning, but not teaching others.” Possessing love but not loving others is also solitude. He holds that he has a message to give out. It is not as profound as Jesus on the mount, but it is an important part of the puzzle. Through his peril he learns his purpose. So let’s celebrate, can we charge from the edge, rush out of petty hiding, remove false nose disguise of entropy, ‘out’ ourselves, through the party cakes at each other in total abandon, emerge silently and sublimely from the shadow margins, can we egress from just beyond the brow, from the ditch! The corner of one’s eye, the borders of the internet and the universe, and then dramatically slow close circuit cause and neat effect to some or any novel end, and then finally, exasperatingly, before they realise it is all too late, let’s hold hands and go careering out of a night of PAN!
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Pan, for those of you not familiar, is the deity cast as halfman half goat whom ancient Greeks had playing joyous pipes to rejoice the harvest and fruitful life. Christians modified the simple rustic and pastoral notion of Pan, preferring instead to cast him as the lascivious Devil (which, incidentally, spelled backwards is simply ‘lived’) . Here he is the patron of an unbridled and incessant sex, of wine and song, his antics associated with the idea ‘evil’ (spelled backwards ‘live’). But the original term in Greek for Devil is diaballein - which means to ‘set at variance’ – in other words disrupt. Disrupt order. Disrupt existing order, disrupt any illusion of order, socially represented order or merely order as it exists as it developed in your mind is to highlight some alternative or underlying order at the expense of fate. Disobeying trite or even polite order, being difficult, being hard work, then you learn how you care, how you dare, how you are truly connected to things, how you are ‘attached’ as the Buddhists would have it. Become an artist and scatter wishful departure points for the others, people who like you are prepared to take a risk... then more than it. They are simply waiting for this and so are you. Network and make ever more connections, even more attachments. And that is clearly self-evident today as we live in societies which is clearly preoccupied in supporting and enforcing new world orders, orders concordant with complex and disparate beliefs, some contrived, but they are indeed defined by exactitudes, dictates, rules, laws which constrain certain behaviours and thoughts banished to their ‘rightful’ place, whilst
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amplifying others. This place of mundane affairs and reality, monotonous repetition and lack of improvisation, information and communication technologies foster and increase this. Good behaviour is largely taken for granted, the ‘norm’. Conversely, ‘terrorism’ in its various forms - unexpected, spontaneous violence panic and death question this. So does an uncurbed lust – someone taken abruptly in a toilet, burgled quickly from the rear and then aggressively in the front for $5? Ironically some of the reasons cited in the infliction of terrorism upon others are the overly libertine attitudes and morals of the so-called western democracies. The prurient ways and loose morals offend saintly others. I am holier than thou. I travel, I am, in a light mood, French and effervescent, I shall order champagne before coitus. I am a writer en vecance. So many contradictions and paradoxes, lies, so much empathic boastful use of diction, mine here to you, so many halls and trials of mirrors, trails, so much smoke and mirrors envelope, consume the category ‘sex’. Then is it no wonder some men and women fantasise of a simpler, maybe more naturalised way, a simple naked young women or male in a simple beach hut, a continuous Gaugan painting animated to inhabit and make everyday and mundane, someone, a U.S. president no less, felated in a white house of infinite worldly earthly power. Some 1st world savants, male and female, make it real and personal in the Caribbean, Africa, South America or Asia. They wonder, as we all do, regarding our order, if nature, including the storm, the
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hurricane, the earthquake, the volcano, the meteor ups our ass is not our master. We first world people love to institutionalise careers, habits, relationships and routines, vacations, all of which sustain the appearance of order in our lives, and in some cases, lie beyond the accepted realities as they appear to our shared social belief systems. There is something sinful if a person dies just before their trip. They also resist and like to subvert this order, albeit in controlled and gaily coloured fashions. It suggests continuity and survival in one way or another, a trait oh so much cherished by all living beings. Sex, love and relationships are finite, disruptive, disposable, and at a price, so is life itself and the glories and virtues and, saints preserve us, vices of a thoroughly violent but finite solitary triumphant masturbation session where you decree the decrees left. The dead do not care for nor need sex.
Weeds must be coerced to reside at garden or city limit, or they will be killed and destroyed in a situation leaving only that which is selected, that which is desired to flourish in its ‘rightful’ place. Grass is assigned ‘this’ area and roses ‘that’ area, no more no less. Love is something one gets, when one is ripe, ready, at that stage in life or career or psyche. Or they do not…
We veer towards order over disorder, and proof is never far away. We police our garden borders, compartmentalise the objects and possessions in our homes and constantly weigh and interrogate and label what other people mean to us, oh lord, what they say to us and how they ‘are’ to us. Weeds, even nature, and other people have been assigned at times and under certain condition to the category ‘evil’ and are to be kept at bay. All in order to follow the canon of received values and designated communicable transferable aesthetic. Our behaviours must flow in accordance with these principles.
In today’s disposable society, the dream of the 1960s or the ‘plastic’ revolution, depending upon how compulsive it feels, love can be negated, done away with, disposed of conveniently, relegated to the realms and dreams of platitude, and repressed if there is a slight threat to individual economic and emotional security. It becomes ever more the noun rather than the verb creating a strange pluralism. With ‘eco’ awareness rising, people are dispensable on a whim but material and symbolic goods and nature must be scrutinised conservatively. This is abject labelling and ordering in and around the self. And this ordering is concordant with individual taste and distinction, fashion, and to some received aesthetic, moral or interpretation. The automation and streamlining of relationships through the Internet enforces love the noun rather than love the verb, a ‘thing’ rather than a ‘happening’ a tangible possible possession or identity trait, rather than an experiential process that requires organisation and more than one person. In the cornucopia of goods and services available offline and online, one now searches out others and they can be geographically anywhere. Your search is extended. It prides itself within the consumer society by being linked
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to a tick list of attributes to be found in a partner. Being geographically anywhere, they will travel to meet the right tick list; half the work of bonding has been done. Most are very predictable indeed. But nasty threats and outcomes are always there; only occasionally an affront as visible as a 9/11 attack, an underhand shove in a game of twister, sometimes they come to us disguised, masked, behind the scenes, under the table. They are not magic; they are more than possible worlds. The somnambulism of everyday life is punctuated by catastrophe and disaster, breakdown. It is the threat that that will engulf us from just beyond the periphery of view, tucked out in the very corner of an eye, just round the corner. I spy and it makes us panic. The struggle itself now controls and numbs you. It is also the thing that keeps us going, the numbers that keeps us alive. We secretly hope that ‘they’ – the one we truly desire - the one that we will truly know, will save us from ourselves, the witness to our lives efforts are indeed just round the corner. They are where your dream and possible worlds of your big lottery win locate, at tribulations end, they are there, like the grail, and they are there… But real worlds collide and are messy, both human and natural, between and beyond the tick list is the rest, positive or negative. Mail order bride syndrome is a good example; order one up, no good, order another ... people making the choice between frying to death in a burning building, the devil and deep blue sea of loneliness and exclusion, and finally jumping to death.
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So can you, dear reader, for moments if you will, turn your romantic feelings into a force that interrogates your unconscious mind to harvest the best path forward for you and even you and your chosen partner – even if this means breaking with your traditions? What about alternating shocks and insights? Is there a value in knowing the black and the white, good and evil, the right and wrong, the front and back? Or is it always better that one is placed in superior order to the other with only you as arbiter? Inevitably, to the displeasure and outrage of many people, cracks, fissures and fractures pervade everyday realties and routines, and here also is the energy of Pan. Thank goodness! It is the integral fear of immediate death and disease, and it can be cataclysmic, mood altering and behaviour modifying. Ask any panic attack victim, fear is the perfect survival mechanism. Swap channels. Sexual urges, acting upon them, having the opportunity to act upon them, is this energy as well. Agrestic lust, oh, rustic and uncouth against the sterile clinical designer office or home, anytime, anywhere is this power. From within panic. If facing one’s mortality can change outlooks completely, and grounding sexual tension and energy can leave one’s being and mental prowess to focus upon other obsessions including creative acts, then why don’t we engage more often? Why do we let the mundane eclipse and sublimate our more adrenaline fuelled occurrences? One a day keeps a Freud away…
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Unfortunate happenings in one’s existence may be the bane of insurance companies (if you do carry insurance against x, y and z) and what may be described as the ‘natural’ sustaining, perpetual, order of things. Instinctual will without consciousness pervades. When you open your entire being to serendipity, when you close your eyes and leap (or are pushed) into the dark from the light, when you get drunk with enthusiasm or alcohol you simply begin careering from the night of Pan, not the Pan of panic, but the Pan who remains effortlessly suspended, suspended, floating over the dark, black endless abyss… amused, floating and seductively leading, forever, forever. Be unconventional to yourself. Obsessed and bound, are you, like a thanksgiving turkey by your own greed and lust? You limit your choice and therefore your freedoms. Q: How many sages to change a light bulb? A: Can you see the absurdity and humour in such a fixed perspective in views of life and living? Pompous power games and the cultural systems that produce like a smoking industrial age stacks, hindrances, obduracies and barriers, the terraced workers houses, their alcohols’ working their magic. They prevent you fluidity and mobility, adaptability, in many cases humility. The night of Pan is merely, just, a glimmer of hope over a dull horizon of duty, a disruptive rip and yarn in the fabric of continuity, an futile escape attempt, punished freedom from a self-erected bondage with little or no scaffolding, between ‘here’ and ‘there’, and ‘this’ and ‘that’..
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But can we unleash, untether what Freud termed the “unconscious?” Sampling, learning and possibility in a grand narrative, salubrious Greco-roman heroic metaphors. Can we be anything, anywhere, because we decide to be? Can we do so much without criticism, including that bugbear - self-criticism and remorse? How do you feel and share the fear that comes with excessive drinking, when you finally remember how foolish you were, how you have deluded yourself, and that ‘really’ things are shit. Is why the great artists over time act like madmen, suffer great mental angst, drink and drug and drag, have sex at will? Your bodily and psyche state, it ties and links to you with everyday life, it’s your matrix, wherever you are. You can’t get around it; you can’t over to venture on vacation from your body. For Sigmund Freud ‘unconscious’ was the repressed instinctual drives and desires that can be both revolutionary and cataclysmic. Freud felt that this must at all cost be contained, restrained in order for you to be seen by others as sane, socially present yourself as singing from the same hymnbook as Joe Q Citizen. You are normal. The other, the paranoid schizophrenic may indeed tap into the stuff that fuels great artistic and literary works, but the difference is that the mentally ill have little to no control of the flow and recording of cognitions. Not like you. Whilst the artist, musician or writer dips and in and uses at will unique and unusual associations, unusual associations occur to the paranoid, the psychotic and schizoid spontaneously, unsettlingly and disrupting, performs useful linear duties and activities. The artist reify
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these and make them into something, they focus and mould and shape material or tone to concord with their reality. They are typically not mortified, or persecuted by their musings. The artists’ conscious faculties harbour, giving form to the otherwise senseless illogical feelings and associations – that reputedly pushed down deep inside in to that mythic place of darkness, insanity and invisibility. So, they, the artist or TV plot writer or Sony design practitioner bridge the gap to the unconscious for the others, the affected, the mundane, the unimaginative, some of which are scared by such musings, ‘normal society’, and wait for the light to come on. Unlike the phobic or the psychotic their conscious faculties are not engulfed, or are not to be engulfed, by the anarchistic, plainly freaky and capriciously monstrous unconscious mind. Although as biographies of the creative artists suggest, those whom are path breaking and exploratory, radically breaking with traditions and departing from common sense or received wisdom come to be as viewed as borderline maniacs, uncomfortable within themselves and of the world, words and relationships around them. We are all borderline in our fantasies, if they weren’t borderline, they wouldn’t be fantasies. And so we do, all of us, battle with what we really want, really, really want at every given time, time, time. Flags are flying. Maybe because for the large part, it is socially denied. We hardly express, nor would like to be publicly expressed to us everyday all those dark innermost thoughts and feelings and imaginings about the ‘others’ which we often identify as being our ‘true’ selves
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considered as those things we feel uncomfortable with. OK, but they are unleashed sometimes in dreams where it is OK to rape, murder or be killed, or be spontaneously raped murdered or killed, to steal, wander naked in familiar packed streets [no dream], speak to the dead, as you will wake up in reality, or to experience imminent death, spontaneous disruption. It is continuous and consistent – or so it seems… time’s arrow, the cyclic nature of linear time. This is how clinging to traditions, the received, the handed down, makes us so, so comfortable, integrates us, afford to us complacency. It is been checked and re-checked, lived by others and the logic is that it is well-formed and robust, the ‘right way’ or those many other would have changed it or demanded change of it - sometimes when it refers to the building of dwellings it concords with nature and the availability of local materials. And so house building varies across the world. This is perhaps less so in the globalised world where everybody wants a New England style house or condo and airconditioned malls and restaurants nearby. Change and threat means adaptation and expenditure of energy. From the deepest and most secrets of thoughts, desires and feelings to the most explicit superficial uttering and musings at the supermarket check-out, are registered and yet also emerge from this unconscious, this generative force but also endless recorder. From the most abstract, illegal and warped thoughts, intentions and fears, to the notions of boredom and impatience and
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impertinence, each have coalesced in awareness out of the stuff of the unconscious. The night of Pan. As such this night is a total and absolute threat to ‘order’ at the personal level. In the dark there is no reflections, no mirror images. But it is also the place of amusement and entertainment, the traditional place for nocturnal activities. Creative arts would not mean anything at all to us without the imagination that creates it and the imagination and will that interpret it and unconscious force fuels this as well. The everlasting rub, the Möbius strip double bind, the Catch 22. A situation in which a desired outcome or solution is impossible to attain because of a set of inherently illogical rules. This is how Freud viewed ‘unconscious’ in its relation to mental health. The unconscious’ relation to conscious awareness, the thoughts and cognition in your head and what you act like and do at every given time defines the difference between socially defined sanity and madness, contentment and discomfort, well-being and the veer between the tensions of anxiety and depression and boredom. But in the end, resplended in the carnage and aftermath of manicured lawns and designer kitchens, what remains is that a large part of an ordered society or individual lifestyle seems to concern sexuality and its sublimation and repression into the dark, hidden, latent – and infinitely private and personal - unconscious mind. But it is also there, from within the heart of darkness, where sensuality and sexuality, and every other act of imagination or creativity emerges, or, indeed, any other
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behavioural impulse is born. But it is modelled romantically upon an American dream, only its reality is that much more ‘real’. Revolutionise, break tradition, act uninhibited, and do not fear social censure. You have the ability to arouse, influence and even poison. Pan offers only opportunity, but he strikes panic into those who hesitate, those that stand mortified at the edge. Alfred Kinsey came to recognise this socially repressed reality in 1950s United States when he conducted his researches on the very dark, secretive but fundamental human drive and set of behaviours called sex. Lifting such a rock shocked public expressions of order, scurrying individuals and their beloved lived experience. But this is dressed as science. He tried to bring it to the surface, from the dark recesses of a private guilt to the light of the public domain and objectivity, and questioned why perceptions and theories of sexuality were incongruent with a sexual practice. He was a scientist, a zoologist to boot, and thus chose to express sexuality in an impartial, dispassioned manner. Why not? But, like the ideas of William Reich it was not concordant with dominant and received views of public institutions regarding public practices and privacies. More generally, societal responses to inappropriate manifestations of sexuality vary far more dramatically than the responses to other, comparable violations of good taste or even abuse of power - including the dated Christian hobgoblins of greed, avarice and violence. Conversely, we can witness a vast range of categories of sexual orientations attested to by the millions of websites and magazines
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dedicated to sex’s various hues and flavours. Indeed, it has been ventured that erotica and porn (see the list around p.104 in this volume, or consider those activities meticulously listed by de Sade in 120 Days of Sodom), more than any other form of information, have driven the popularity of new media forms, including the phenomenal diffusion and the rise of the Internet and world wide web. Why this perpetual emphasis on conceptual sex we wonder? Evolutionary theories have it that there are definitive differences between the sexes. They intrinsically manifest in what we are looking for in a mate, and in the means we employ to achieve one. Are we, for instance, looking for ourselves in ‘the other’, are we looking for some reflection of self in a mate? Are they searching for their selves in us, even their ‘perverted’ selves? Or are they looking for contrast such as submissive requiring dominant. A black looking for white, an educated person looking for the unfettered, the middle class looking for working class, East and West, North and South, a man looking for woman, the author is looking for his audience? Is it always yin and yang, a binary opposite? Left of centre…
This is the genesis of projection, the ability to feel and understand ‘the other’ and the basis for all human rights do unto others as you would have done unto you. People in the ancient world thought of the notion of ‘vision’ as both an ethical tool and a tactile sense, something akin to touch. Gazing upon someone - or oneself - was treated as a path to philosophical selfknowledge. However, added to this the question of tactility, touch and feel, introduced an erotic element. Male and female are not mirror images of each other regardless of how politicised views would have it. Are we not more competitive with each other on either side of the sexual divide than we are with members of the opposite sex? And what implication does this carry? What roles does the unconscious play in this condition? And in which ways will modern society and its dictates resist? Ask yourself, I do, and I am mature.
Most developmental psychologists believe that children develop Theory of Mind - the ability to use that information to understand the mental state of others - at about four years of age, they can see that someone is friendly or angry or asking them something. They know ‘angry’, as they know it within themselves, they can ‘see’ or ‘feel’ it within. This is two years after they develop recognition of their physical selves looking in a mirror.
A common attitude prevails in the so-called progressive and advanced societies. It is that those who have erotic urges, even without acting on them, are unfit to be Supreme Court justices, or be President, or even be teachers or doctors, or NGOs and police officers specialising in paedophilia, or ‘social’ scientists researching sex tourism in South East Asia... It is almost a common sense. It is held that they transcend or are ‘above it’, like a Pan residing over a void. In fact, what job would people subject to erotic urges be fit for? Difficult. Maybe it would be okay for them to be coal miners, Or lighthouse keepers or awe-inspiring castrated eunuchs in some child’s make believe Forbidden City?
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If you do have erotic urges there is the likelihood that you will not see yourself reflected in those pillars of the community. And does that not make you feel guilty?
form of cultural production that was radical and rebellious, challenging and dangerous.
And so it is here, reflected in these tales, and as you read them. Literary works that question ruling conventions by shocking their audiences and arousing controversy are frequently dubbed “transgressive.” Published in 1796, Matthew Lewis’ The Monk tells the story of Ambrosio, a monk who is torn between keeping his monastic vows and carrying out certain personal ambitions.
Such texts, very much in the vein of many pieces of modern art, aim in their entirety to jolt and shock the senses of the reader, to drag them, even temporally out of complacency, their sleep, their unrelentless and unabating need to familiarise with how things ‘are’ into how they ‘really’ are, or at least how they ‘may be’. In this sense they are the tin openers of the unconscious. Like the surrealists and the Dadaists such literary works seek to drive viewers and their readers into reflection of why they aren’t ‘that’ way at all, at least not in the ‘taken for granted’ sense. ‘That’ in this case referring to ingrained beliefs about the nature and meanings of things and people and their interrelations. ‘This’ is the notion that sex can be mundane in a political and social sense, rather being mystified by media as being dynamite, wondrous and inaccessible.
As the plot unfolds, our beloved monk succumbs to temptation, which leads him on the path to sin and vice, incest, rape n’ murder – modern themes. Such works seem common and garden now, captured many times in the works of Hollywood at its most radical, brutal and unsentimental, even in its most Kitsch, but also in the once controversial works like Lady Chatterly’s lover or The story of ‘O’, or The Torture Garden or the Burlesque stage. Institutional authorities often regard transgressive works as subversive because they transgress the ‘social’ and/or cultural taboos and prohibitions of the time. They are an account of the forbidden. This can mean some
Transgression contravenes the status quo and collective conscious, our obsession, lust, if you will, for creating distinctions and, then, shamefully, gross indifference, followed by moral panic, shock and ‘disgust’, followed by boredom. And so they are written with distinct risk of persecution or prosecution, of societal condemnation and retribution, and they are entirely guilty for rocking the boat until we all fall out in an unseemly way. Such a work will do this, while simultaneously, explicitly or implicitly, challenging the conscious and unconscious mechanisms used by the interpretative processes of our critical and scathingly vital neo-cortex.
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Do you feel in anyway, isolated, unfulfilled? Little by little, you are drawn into making small, incremental revelations to others or yourself – all of which add up to a great big shocking picture, a gestalt about yourself, your secret, your real lived self in all its manifestations. Your armoury, your attacks and defence mechanisms. What if reading this text honed them? Would it be good for you, for them?
This physical siting of our abilities to understand what people say and do, where they reside neurologically; and it is also where our abilities to read and understand text and narrative are located. At this level, ‘good’ transgressive works challenge the cognitive mechanisms that form and sustain beliefs, attitudes, and opinions. In the barworld awaits a fellow combatant who strives in the battle of banality. This is achieved by the sophisticated and the discreet, the hidden embedded metaphors stretched through the rabbit holes and warrens which stretch between the lines and skip across the paragraphs over entirety of the four volumes presented here. Entry and departure points disperse throughout the work so as to leave no consciously recognisable ‘paper-trail’, no palpable ‘footprint’ that your consciousness mind can utilise to deny the perilous and threatening messages. This is because they operate on a similar level as that which we use to read and interpret written language. Boom. Transgressive works challenge traditional hierarchies and architectures of thought, taste, knowledge and value, and they prefer to do this at the very roots of held beliefs, that is ultimately, where words rise up from silence, the melting pot of the mind always states where things become ‘united’. This is the sense in which Wong and Myiad make use of the notion of ‘trans-cultural’ here. The unconsciousness mind listens to all, hears and it assimilates best when the conscious mind is absorbed in task such as humdrum petty concerns, searching for and recognising patterns, like words and form in a text –
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which the authors incorporate as a sub theme of this work and how conmen and conwomen, cowboys and cowgirls, hypnotists and politicians work their wiles. In everyday life patterns abound, things and orders of things to do, patterns of light and dark, colour, day and night, east and west, good and ‘no-good’ and so forth such ideas kaleidoscope in one’s head settling to become matrixes or an entire scheme of meanings. They form our memorable experiences. They are in one way or another the fragments of a hall of mirror fragments, a maze of rooms walled with mirrored doors, therefore mirrored exits. In this confusion of reflections one notices in such an environment the maze seems infinitely more complex than it actually is, and especially if you try to make sense of it, unpick it, possess it as a fixed design or pattern or experience. Thus the need for an operating system and these volumes. However, viewed from a perspective above, the bug’s eye view, a lofty perspective not permitted to most people, the maze becomes fairly simple to unpick, make sense of, but it is designed that way by fate and default, by human interest including self-interest. They are the sign-posts to the exit and even the entry. They confer to the hidden rules and regulations of chaos, underlying generative orders such that any individual trying to make his or her way through the maze of mirrors, but whom are still within it, and so the path forward is confused and set off balance. This is the process of people living and loving in South East Asia for Wong and Myiad.
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Within the context of the volumes, it can also mean, again, reading and searching for the thread, your thread, the plot and narrative, your plot and narrative on the subway train while going to work, or listening for your flight call, or focussing on the beat of a piece of music opposed to listening to a particular instrument or an overall tune; the so called Cocktail Party effect in psychoacoustics. 3 It is also the way in which, in this information age, networked databases, amass, sort and arrange data deemed as indicative of real world qualities associated with individuals. Social security numbers, credit ratings, etc. they become the ‘word of the law’, unambiguous, cast in stone, without latitude to misinterpret. They are but milestones on this roadmap of consciousness, arbitrary measures marked out in experiences and events horizons… things, places, people, antics. The natural and necessary limits to what one can know and should know to achieve certain aims and objectives, certain eases and comfort. In essence, these limits are the virtual renditions of the cataloguing processes and bureaucracies of empire. It can be something as simple and basic as a man sorting asses out according to subjective terms and criteria [as dictated by tastes and predilections] or objective dictates [as laid down by institutions and polices] ‘fit’. One thinks 3
When we are talking with our friend in a crowded party, we still can listen and understand what a friend says even if the place is very noisy, and can simultaneously ignore what another nearby person is saying. But if someone calls out name we can still pick them out from the maddening crowd and respond to them.
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immediately of the transgressive works of the Marquis De Sade whose 120 days of Sodom formalises and categories conditions whereupon the protagonists indulge in greater and greater debauches until an end in extreme torture and murder. This also brings to mind the Khmer Rouge, renowned for their economical treatment of prisoners [starved and dispatched with clubs to save bullets], but who nevertheless placed considerable emphasis and labour upon aping the Sûreté’s (the French Colonial Secret Police) methods, painstakingly photographing and cataloguing each prisoner, taking fingerprints, writing reports and memos. Prisoners incarcerated in the infamous Khmer Rouge prison of Toul Sleng, S-21. Even supposing their execution was more or less preordained the internees were handled in a longwinded and exasperatingly bureaucratic manner. Perhaps it was the Khmer fascination with administration and bureaucracy, perhaps it was something to focus the attention upon recording detail that partially kept their mind off the atrocities which they had no doubt personally witnessed, and perhaps it represented procedures which endorsed a view that these were actual miscreants. In any case cataloguing and recording events indexed to prisoners leave us with some indications of the means and methods of this regime, and many others that the west will still endure. They likely illustrate the power of ideologies, given identities and radical changing in ‘social’ structures upon the individual. This was shown by the infamous experiments of the ‘social’ psychologist Stanley Milgram
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where subjects were instructed to administer electric shocks to another in a different room. Sixty percent of those instructed to administer electric shocks in order to punish subjects continued to the very end of the 450-volt scale. No subject stopped before reaching 300 volts. It showed the propensity of people to engage in uncommon and anti-’social’ behaviours when given ‘permission’ or inadvertently being coerced by those in authority. 4 The ‘evil’, the cruel and sadistic devil is inside of all us, all we normal people? The way in which we become absorbed by cataloguing and sorting events, writing and reading, watching and listening to TV, touching and feeling and tasting things, making moral judgements, is all that we do and are familiar with? Well it is made familiar and made innocuous since childhood. Given a hat and badge from the institution or bureaucracy imbues us with special privileges and authorities over others. The prison 4
Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted a study focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. In the experiment, so-called "teachers" (who were actually the unknowing subjects of the experiment) were recruited by Milgram. They were asked administer an electric shock of increasing intensity to a "learner" for each mistake he made during the experiment. The fictitious story given to these "teachers" was that the experiment was exploring effects of punishment (for incorrect responses) on learning behavior. The "teacher" was not aware that the "learner" in the study was actually an actor - - merely indicating discomfort as the "teacher" increased the electric shocks. When the "teacher" asked whether increased shocks should be given he/she was verbally encouraged to continue. Sixty percent of the "teachers" obeyed orders to punish the learner to the very end of the 450-volt scale! No subject stopped before reaching 300 volts!
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experiments of Philip Zimbardo where students given uniforms and administrative power over others also show how under the right social conditions we may manifest sadistic tendencies. Along with Milgram, Zimbardo also highlights the importance of the ‘social’ situation in shaping the individual’s responses. We may move with the crowd or at least accord with instructions forms those we trust in authority over us. But there is so much else involved than was noted. In the new art form of this new century, embedding messages into a new sublimated learning level, rather than being a weakness, will be regarded very much as a strength. Conscious and unconscious focus must be trained and then artistically channelled towards certain frequencies, dispositions if you like, and a transgressive work flourishes to dislodge them, even for a fairly short while, because that is all it takes to let free consciousness breathe, to have a glimpse of true open mindfulness. Much knowledge of self and environment is learned in these fragmentary and fleeting windows or mirrors, moments which occur roughly hourly, but enough to leak into the ‘soul’ and change the course of your life forever. They are opportunities going with the extraordinary resonates of the place to learn or ignore as you will at your peril. It is those windows that provide junctures where alternative routes are chosen; ‘will I stay?’ or ‘will I go?’ Often that is all it takes, a beating of the butterfly’s wings creating the maelstrom elsewhere in the ecosystem of the mind, and we get change. We have glimpses of this
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when we travel and engage with fundamentally different lifestyles for a while in a foreign place. It just gets easier and easier. There are two major themes for us to focus on the present work and they are unashamedly not new. Both remain contentious. The first is largely understood by the 1,000,000 or so single unaccompanied men that visit places like Thailand annually. In purely ‘social’ science terms this is not an insignificant sample and there are firm grounds to believe that this number will increase. This population will likely be familiar in some respect with the first major theme in this work, the category ‘prostitution’. Prostitution in many third world locations and certainly in South East Asia often centres on the bar, but not exclusively. There are many layers to this onion; street hookers, bordellos, massage parlours, barbers and even everyday women such as those serving in restaurants or as chamber maids, can become whores for an hour, a day, or even a week or month or years of their life. Men can become ‘johns’ for the same. The ‘barworld’ to an anthropologist may be a descriptor of a physical places where alcohol is served, women [and men] abound, and marked by particular decorations and architectures, even forms of dress, and also by associated thinking, rituals, convention and behaviours (such as the barfine system, and the groping of a man’s sac as he sits and sips). The barworld also has particular
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inhabitants, chiefly the women who serve and attract and play hostess to the men whom frequent the bars. These men, and occasionally western women, most importantly serve as patrons critical to the economic lifeblood of the barworld as they bring the money that pays wages and profits, incentives. Then there are the workers, those who may be or be ‘up for grabs’, on offer, the hostesses or go-go dancers or freelancers playing pool. Together, patron and those who serve within, or otherwise inhabit or own, the barworld can be viewed to constitute a whole locked in equilibrium of supply and demand, of human ‘social’ discourse, where one creates and reproduces the conditions for the other. And within here the English word ‘love’ may be used, uttered and apprehended in very different and distinctive ways, say in comparison to the lovingly whispered word ‘rice’ - and it this shifting of meaning of words that opens the need for analysis upon the title of the present work. The use of the word ‘darling’ for instance is interesting. Take for instance, its employment as a term of endearment, like when it is used formally in love letters. In verbal use the meaning slips a little. In middle class English society it is a platitude, a favourite term of dear old cockneys and despicable ‘media luvies’ and camp gays, those overly dramatic in real life actors who whittle on to each other meaninglessly as ‘darling this and that’. Used in this way it is a nothing. Perhaps it is used even more meaninglessly when used in the barworld especially when the rules and convention for using the Thai idea of te lak [darling] is typically said in traditional Thai society
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as a private whisper between lovers outside of the prying ears of eavesdroppers. This contrasts very strongly with the discourse of ‘hello girls’ – the girls sat outside of barworld venues who aim to entice the men in. Their use of the term plays directly to heartstrings of any of the passing men and prospective customers. Some will take this seriously.
fictional narratives and plots: entire spin-off industries in their own right. Yes, we have developed from unicellular lifeforms to having the ability to speak about unicellular lifeforms. We have gone from whoremogers to having the ability to speak about mongering. From having or performing sex to offering meta-narratives into its socioeconomic positioning (“tricks packing dollar” etc.).
****
In doing so, it contributes to a very distinctive literature. But, here, with hardly the space or inclination to do an extensive trawl of the literature I cite but a sample of the many academic studies which largely concern themselves with the cultural background, particularly religion and societal norms that can be predisposing factors in encouraging or discouraging women to ‘become’ prostitutes. Many of these studies support the cause of, and may be directly sponsored by NGOs, nongovernmental organisations – those who lobby foreign governments and societies in attempts to foster them to create better conditions for their people - and many then are biased and even indicative of poor research application, they are based upon assumptions, and not evidence. In one example written by a Sociologist from Lancaster University based in the United Kingdom and published by EPCAT, British sex tourist attitudes are revealed to show that sex tourism is not only exploitative in an economic sense, but also in a racialist way. Whilst many of these organisations provide for basic needs, you will still find occurrences where the most immediate need of people - running water and food and medicines – are bound or even occulted by teaching them the need to
If the barworld and its inhabitants merely satisfied and gratified each other’s needs, say, the need for a sexual and relationship adventure, and conversely, a need for money, then their would be no reason to write more on the subject. Tons of books are already in circulation offering insights into the ‘reality’ of the barworld. Do we need more? But the barworld itself is not taken for granted as a normal and integrated aspect of reality, except by the most hardened of ex-pats that have wearied of its wiles. However, the barworld is a dream factory which continues to generate discontents from within and without. The proponents recreate it as a moral battleground and so it becomes a wider set of issues than someone paying for sex and someone providing. These actors have also served a more abstracted purpose, as the background not only to patron and working experiences, but as background and foreground to academic studies, to non-governmental organisations who have made the women’s ‘plight’, or, removing it of its emotional sting; their ‘working conditions’ and even
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respect women and children and afford them basic ‘rights’ or they should become Christian. ‘Empirical’ descriptions of the barworld are based on much conjecture and opinions that represent either the personal worldview of the author or that of whom they are writing the paper for. “Given that the vast majority of British (in fact of all European) sex tourists are less than appealing in terms of European cultural norms of male beauty, it is not difficult to see that sex tourism can do something more for these men's self image than simply make them feel all right about using prostitutes… Cultural definitions of beauty turn many people's bodies into prisons, making their sexual desires unattainable, and it is certainly the case that large numbers of sex tourists are either physically repellent by European standards (I have never seen so many enormously overweight men together in one place before), or disfigured or disabled in some way, or too old to be considered sexually attractive.”
modifications. Obsessions with exercise, cholesterol levels, eating low-fat foods are artefacts of first world consumerism. But beyond body images this writer then turns to the psychodynamic in order to lay down a rant: “…sex tourists express a kind of misogynous rage against women who have the power to demand anything at all whether it is the right to have a say over who they have sex with and when or the right to maintenance payments for their children…”
Finally she descends into grotesque caricature: “Perhaps the most unpleasant Mr. Average of all was the one who sat down with me in the hotel lobby one morning, still drunk from the night before, three days growth of stubble on his face, his shirt and trousers stained with food…”
Of course there is no qualifier regarding what ‘European cultural norms of beauty’ are. But maybe I am missing something; perhaps a poll was taken by MTV at some time? But this writer fails to cite this. However there may be substance to her claim that bodies are turned into ‘prisons’. Most of the images of sexuality that we take in day by day are of youthful and ‘good-looking’ elites, those characters and celebrities so favoured by the media machine. This is often cited as putting the fear of death into male or female, young and old alike with respect to self-esteem. It is viewed as laying the grounds for a abundance of peculiarly first world eating disorders and desires for expensive and sometimes risky surgical
One is left wondering if this ‘researcher’ informed her respondents that they would come to be depicted and characterised in such a fashion. I mean does she offer them the opportunity to change or reinvent themselves into what she sees as constituting western good taste and moral behaviour? Does she offer them the opportunity to see themselves as others, like her, see them? No, she writes on behalf of, and for, an organisation that needs scientific, third-party, impartial analysis of what they already know. An organisation, given free hand, would deprive such ‘poor examples’ of the human condition from having sex at all, typically branding them as child molesters, pederasts and paedophiles at the same time as crying ‘foul’ in the interests of good taste..
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One may eventually wonder whom she thinks these respondents and the many others that she disparagingly describes should or could have sex or relations with. Instead of looking and searching overseas, perhaps she’d have them castrated, put in prisons or put down. No, they should just go home and realise what they look like, and live accordingly. Or let’s suppose these men were ‘good looking’, within the canon of European (and her own) standards, would that make it more acceptable, would it cure the problem that these women have chosen to sell themselves in a world of infinitely alternative or deprived opportunities? There is still prostitution in the home countries of these heinous men and these righteous women. Perhaps concern should be on this and themselves rather than cultivating their attitudes and behaviours towards their protection of ethnic women. Western prostitutes sell themselves in a place of vast and varied opportunity, supposedly, but then so often men are seen to be at blame in that place as well (pimps, unemployed junkie boyfriends etc., etc.) Like Sue Tyler’s (Volume two’s main protagonist) stated perspective it is never good if you are male. These reports blatantly form part of the propaganda arsenal for organisations who are already notorious for massaging facts and figures supporting perspective to a generalised western audience, including, western media. They verse their plight in terms that these crimes against humanity are ‘escalating’ ‘reaching epic proportions’ ‘out of control’ and so forth, all in an effort to highlight the need for their selves to be there, to exist. In effect it is a
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significant secondary business based upon the activity of western men procuring sexual services from foreign women. It is an inherent statement that we are pluralistic in the west, good and bad organised across gender lines, with a message for all those countries that economically can’t help themselves. In other words ‘weaker’ less resilient cultures – maybe colonialism and its values live on? It is in their organisational interest, not only to highlight the repellent reality of this practice, but also to create disparaging images of those procuring sexual services. While the title of this piece is ‘Child Prostitution and Sex Tourism’ there is little within it which pertains to evidence of men having or desiring sex with children at all. It is a document that explicitly attempts to conflate the category ‘sex tourist’ with that of ‘paedophile’. Non-governmental organisations and journalistic reports are prolific in publishing reports regarding prostitution. Typically they band both adult and child prostitution under the same banner of ‘trafficking’, a catch all term which suggests exploitation of humans of all ages under socioeconomic and sometimes religious imperatives. Data used is often generated from secondary sources, most frequently from journalism and other, often related nongovernmental organisations, whether these have a campaigning or welfare orientation. This is in the first instance problematic as often secondary source material is garnered from NGO reports which may be based on sensationalist Journalistic article derived from ersatz figures from NGOs, and so on ad nauseam. Mirrors
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reflecting mirrors and people siphoning money and careers out of it. There is a proliferation of reports upon the state of ‘trafficking’. Case studies abound on the Internet, and they lead one, if they are either a member of the public or a journalist looking for a sensationalist ‘scoop’, enough material to build a story, myth or picture of a depraved situation. Reviewing 10 years of trafficking research Derks, Henke and Ly (2006) note that “The research on trafficking reflects the program interests of the organisations working in the field of counter-trafficking.”5 Prostitution, and HIV infection rates for these groups is always 'increasing', usually at 'alarming' or ‘shocking’ rates. Thereby the public must intervene in the only way they can, and quickly, donate money, as much as you can, as often as you can, or don’t buy goods from that country, or dissuade or lambaste anyone you know that chooses to visit that country (like David Gotlieb in Volume 3). **** Turning our heads towards the more popular literature available on the airport stand as you enter the likes of 5
Derks, A., Henke, R, and LY, V. (May, 2006) ‘Review of a Decade of Research On Trafficking in Persons, Cambodia’ The Center for Advanced Study (CAS) published by The Asia Foundation
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Thailand there is a blossoming, but nascent literature that focuses on the rich and highly significant arena of ‘social’ and cultural discourse constituting and sustaining the barworld. This represents, if you want, the ‘voice’ of the customer and the producer, those who purchase sexual services and those who provide these services. It is clear that many questions can be raised regarding the experiences of workers and patrons alike of this world, questions of bars, locations, alcohol, food, Viagra and love and penis-extension pills are also in the offering, as well as reporting upon and constructing facsimiles of the inhabitant’s feelings. And typically they feature the men, whom like many of the clients of Dr. Wong have come to realise that they face some existential crisis prompted by their experience of women in a minuscule bar. Many men are almost incapable of articulating how they feel about their situations and their heart and minds split in different directions. Most acknowledge rationally that falling for a prostitute in a bar is not a good thing, but they do it anyway, and this common predicament has given fuel to several books. Most of these men’s uncertainties did not drop in from mars, as they align consciously or unconsciously to perennial rubs of a peculiarly western nature - existential questions regarding the nature of free will and determination, and the nature of incommensurate and relative moralities and moral frameworks – is ‘this’ or she ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or is this behaviour ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, that sort of thing. More importantly they serve as a commentary to how we think and live in the west today.
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Our moral condition and culture – how we are. Morals play an important role in shaping perception from patron, non-patron and worker points of view. Asking the inhabitants of the barworld these questions forthright or more general questions regarding experiences will no doubt meet with varied replies but no crisp answers, particularly if they are offered up in the deadpan and clinical ‘social’ scientific manner. They are often tears – “I do not like this life” – said to western punters and investigators alike. More than a big reveal, they are the maybe only an expression of the predicament of monotony, sitting there night after night listening to drunk punters, then getting shafted and going home to cook rice. The tears of the monotony of the production line, the backbreaking repetitive labour of the rice paddy. This is a place of contradictory logics, unfathomable emotions, paradoxes and twists. It is a pavilion of mirrors, very difficult to accurately map and depict. What is reported of the barworld often contrasts starkly with the very definite prose of the non-patron, those who have conducted dispassionate research, and especially those who conducted desk research primarily based upon secondary sources and come to the analysis from a particular ideological bent (such as Marxist-feminist approaches). The barworld tends towards the visceral, the tangible, it is land-locked within the lived experience, it is a revelation, cataclysmic and phenomenal. And most certainly, the answers one may elicit will manifest hardly any of the absolute certainty of affairs that are presented in sensationalist media exposes of the seedy ‘underbelly’
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of South East Asia. They are inevitably drafted to shake and shock a readership landlocked and comfortable in mundane reality. It is life-affirming to comment upon the depraved nature of a far-flung place. Also it should be borne in mind that matters of a sexual nature, invariably fall in to the category of contentious private and personal realm subject to distortion through ‘social’ acceptability. And patrons emerge from this reality, believe in it as ground zero, and so even in the midst of their existential crisis love affair with a prostitute may sanitise or make lukewarm their answers, especially in cases where they risk disclosing behaviours or values which from their own society’s views, would be deemed publicly as wrong or morally corrupt. For them, all other patrons are fat, or ugly, or otherwise not worthy of the bought young women on their arms. Only they, in their infinite common sense, their wisdom and polite gentlemanly ways deserves to be treated kindly in this otherwise depraved and hostile environment. Long established as the incendiary stuff of interesting and compelling fictional stories and ‘social’ science theories, consideration of sex, lies and videotape in the relations of east to west teaches us something of our own structures of thought, and our own cultural misgivings and presumptions. In this sense it is reflective, a pavilion of mirrors. As Edward Said suggested, when we speak of the ‘Orient’, it reflects more the state and structures of the western mind and canon. And include here of course is the west’s peculiar imperative to construct visions and models of the realities of ‘others’.
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We ‘know’ we are in Thailand, we know we may be different to Russians, Americans, British or Australians but to the Thai ‘we are all farang [foreigner], this is their binary opposite way of viewing nationality and world and culture, and abstracted knowledge of what these nationalities ‘mean’ are not necessarily experiential, but thoughts. Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines are based upon western perceptions and constructions of a ‘Orient’, or else it is their made manifest in geography, histories, maps and travel guides and TV shows. They in turn are not passive ‘native’ places anymore, but sophisticated globalised mediated lands and they have their views of overseas as well. But they are not clear, and have to date, in my view ever been spelled out. This is why the western view, the thoughts and aspirations of the main male and female protagonists dominate so much of the discussions in the Volume 2 and 3 in the work here. They outline the ingredients in the formulae of constructing the East. It is not helpful to see human relationships out of context even beliefs that one does not subscribe to, or those deeper drives and more basic emotions can undermine. For a book purporting to be about South East Asia it is the western canon which is under analyses here. Something of the western view is explored in Volumes 1 through 3 in this set. It draws out the why and what of the western canon is in this new millennium, when not focused and absorbed of matters of an ‘abacus’ or purely economic nature, as diffuse an idea as it ever was. In the East money removes some of the vagaries and
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ambiguities of relationships, that is all. Perhaps corruption also has its truths, truths much more dependable and definable than matters simply being left to political and ideological interpretation, criticism and debate. Such as is believed to happen in the west. Perhaps paying somebody to test out emotional, sexual and personality ‘fit’ is not a bad idea, as long as it is mutually understood that it is probationary, and that one should relax guards and defences to establish compatibilities and shared interests and goals. Because of the negotiation and unique characteristics and wants and needs here, that prostitution in the South East Asian experience is unique and varies within itself. It is not monolithic, and the johns, tricks and whoremongers and the prostitutes (what they term ‘hse’ here) are not depersonalised, faceless dupes parading for a dispassionate ‘social’ science audience and potential modelling by some neural network software. **** Prostitution in South East Asia, yeah, while it can be dynamite, a rallying point or experience, is not some reified complex, some ‘thing’ such as we have played with and reformed ‘sex’ and ‘love’ in the west, as it has been made according to our cultural dependency upon, mediated experiences over lived experience. Sex is a socio-cultural reality integrated into the flow and practice of everyday life within these societies, whereas we have to attend to magazines and agony aunts, pornographers and professionals to understand what a normal sex life and relationships should be.
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Over the years these ‘gurus’ reify perfectly fulfilled lives free of hurt and need, they are those who have prized sex out from its embeddings as a normal and natural occurrence, to either worship or condemn ‘it’, according to the presumed cannons of western acceptable behaviours and practices, whatever, whenever, where ever, they are and are practised. But as these ideas of what is acceptable move, change, evolve, mutate, wax and wane in public thought in our own countries, are they the ‘right’ way in which to apprehend and condition the ‘other’? In this case one’s ‘self’ or at least what is reefed to as the ‘ego’ always becomes a hurdle, limited as the lens or mirror that will forever taint what it thinks it perceives, tastes, feels and hears. The latter theme has been well covered in the accumulating pop literature which addresses sex and relationships, and more generally, meaning making for foreigners within a South East Asian context. Therefore, if we consider the focus in the fictions of Christopher Moore, a Canadian ex-pat writer resident in Bangkok, we may witness in several of his novels the peculiarly idiosyncratic relationships that can exist between Thai and farang. In God of Darkness it was a middle-class relationship. In Minor Wife, it was a working girl turned artist.
apparently scatological violence endemic in South East Asia anyway. One can hardly pick up a daily in Thailand without seeing on the front page the goriest event of the previous night paraded as a visceral warning not to engage in some ‘loss of face’. Reading his novels I am left wondering if Moore does manage to convey some of the real joy, fascination, frustration, madness, and chaos of Thai life when it intersects with western fascinations and obsessions with order. Farangs have taboos and biographies, culture and history, images of their future security, wealth and lifestyle. And it is at the junctures that the richness, meanings, and incompatibilities in the reasoning stand out and come alive. This burr is surely what counts. Moore’s ex-pats flow way too easily; like they were back home and David Byrne hadn’t ever said “you ask yourself, who is that beautiful wife?” and so on. Maybe akin to how himself posses when he hits the nightspots, so smugly familiar, in-control, and knowledgeable about the ‘barworld’s’ rules and scripts.
Nevertheless, the relationships in Moore’s novels are often contextual, or at best, coincidental, to a plot of good old Sam Spade, detective. Ok, so there is plenty of sex, guns and violence, but his work is hardly transgressive. In fact it could be ventured as decisively tame against the
Moore’s protagonists contrast sharply with Stephan Leather’s account of the tragic relationship between a greenback travel writer and a Bangkok bargirl. Leather’s ‘Stephan’ does not flow so easily through the Greek tragedy that ensues. He is the proverbial ‘newbie’ the new entrant to the barworld who gets consumed within it even though he is an educated man and takes ‘tips’ on how to play the game from wizened mentors. But, according to the tenets of the individually methodological westerner, especially one who has some culture and
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education, Leather’s hero chooses to play his own game and comes unstuck. He believes he is central and has control, but we, as reader understand that he is a bug in a rug unaware of the pattern which is unfolding. His actions and reactions are not dependent on straight cause and effect, but rather the product of the conflicting views, understandings and actions of others. He believes that it is ‘his movie’ and fails to realise that it is either ‘her movie’ or the movie, the script of the ‘Thai barworld’ as it intersects with Thailand. Farangs are ephemeral, as the Chinese have it, they are ghosts, and so a Thai boyfriend or husband on the side is grounding for a working girl. ‘Stephen’ is commissioned by a London editor to write a travel piece on Bangkok. He then gets unwittingly and tightly wound into a set of intricacies, misinterpretations doublethink with a girl in a bar and ultimately the shear mawkishness of the ‘barworld’. Leather attempts and succeeds to provide a picture of the more complex and in-depth confluences that emerge when relationships are formed in the context of the South East Asian barworld. Being compartmentalised, each chapter succinctly presents the often incommensurate worldviews of various protagonists in the ‘social’ continuum contiguous to the relationship. They comment and make observations and criticism to events and unfolding. The relevance of this work lie in its emphasis in drawing attention to moral relativity is not just a philosophy within the barworld, it is a certainty and it is a practice.
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The South East Asian barworld is not only a post-modern phenomena, it is a post-modern experience. There is no certain way, but to go with the flow and it’s easy to get lost in the rabbit hole. This can be disastrous to the ‘newbie’ farang. Besides the works of fiction there are the non-fictional accounts, the often amusing, perhaps dated tongue-incheek stories of Thai ex-pat life by Colin Pimpernell [Bangkok Knights]. There are also more recent contributions, aiming at the low end of the market and promising ‘tips’ on the ‘right’ ways to conduct relations with the women of SEA. Without taking a high brow perspective on the notion of ‘tips’, I understand that at least one of the authors of the present work was keen to let it be known that he considered the work at hand to be an unconscious work-out for the reader on matters of relationships in South East Asia. That, by simply reading the work, the contents would operate upon general subconscious mechanisms which would help the reader in his search for meaning and mindfulness in South East Asia, without a set predetermined end. Two further works of note in the non-fiction category are perhaps the views of the fated ethnography of Cleo Odzer’s Patpong Sisters, and the coalition of love letters forming Dave Walker & Richard S Ehrlich’s Hello, My Big Big Honey! Patpong Sisters attempts to capture something of Barworld beyond the fascia, and in fact was submitted and accepted as a Ph.D. thesis by a U.S. university.
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Odzer, who had spent previous time as a hippy in Goa, India, shacks up with a Thai tout for a Bangkok go-go bar and later with some beach boys on Ko Samet. These relationships occurred whilst she was conducting interviews with bargirls and homosexual barboys and also visiting their provincial homes. Her work pivots upon a kind of gender role reversal to explore relationships in and around the barworld. And on this level it is admirable. She even buys out a male prostitute from the homosexual quarter to explore the parity of female to male sex for sale. But the book suffers in that it seems a little contrived; she was there on a mission, not any less than a journalist looking for a sensational story and someone who was willing to engage and play a little with the rules. This has the result that insights taken from the book are limited, and lend more a picture of Odzer herself than those and that she purports to study. They have a ‘walk on’ role in the proceedings. Interactions with male and female hookers are coloured by her paying their barfines to speak to them, rather than ‘fuck’ them. She also paid for them to take them to their homes - an unusual and artificial occurrence and only one that would come under the circumstances of a foreign ‘social’ scientist stumbling their way through a decidedly foreign culture and environment. If she were a western man, then perhaps an entire different scenario would present. But then this is no problem with the lack of comparative studies it does provide some insight to inner workings of the barworld, and Thai view of relationship are not something which are necessarily contrived to suit
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or fit the farang. So it is a work which may falls under the vague category of a post-modern ethnography, where the focus is largely upon the cognitive and attitudinal changes within the anthropologist, the observer, rather than an accurate depiction of presented life, articulated thoughts and behaviours of those inhabitants of the subculture barworld. In Walker and Ehrlich’s Hello, My Big Big Honey!, following some insightful introductions and prefaces by the authors and a Thai anthropologist, they largely let the bargirls and the punters do the work as they offer to the reader a collation of love letters to and from bargirls to clients and lovers, men from all over the world. These men seem to be in all shapes and manners of foolishness emotionally. The net result, the paramount reality of these communications is that there is clearly no logic in these relationships, certainly from the male perspective. Rather they emphasise everything from a glib sentimentalism to borderline sadism and indifference, all of which seem to highlight low emotional intelligence at best. At least that is what the learned forewords suggest, as does good old western ‘common sense’ when applied to their reading. In many respects this work is interesting, as it typifies an idiosyncrasy of this genre, the scripts of the barworld and foreign man, in all his myriad guises, young, old, rich, poor, fall for the generic conventions of the girl who works in a bar entertaining men. Like Walker and Ehrlich, some commentators on these social phenomena seem to bask in the shear depravity or pathos of it all, its nonsense.
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They make it decisively clear in their editing and introductory passages that they remain unattached, detached, unchanged, journalistic, otherwise logically aloof to consuming prostitution, whereas the people they observe are more or less perverts or weirdoes. The people we want, we need to read about everyday, the people journo’s love! Who are their readers if not the men who will act out and be actors within the scripts suggested in these letters? Are they appealing to ‘newbies’ like Leather’s ‘Stephan’? Men that should tread carefully within this world lest they lose their hard won rational? Or are they simply emphasising their command and elevated understanding of the scene that seduces and dominates, distorts lesser mortals? They are stating that they are above the abyss, staring down into it yet interrogating its distinctive lack of logic and common sense, namely that these are commercial women engaged in sex and relationships and the illusion of love for money, and that intrinsically they engage men that want it. They, the author, do not engage for love, sex and relationships in themselves but for fascination in the perverse on the western public’s behalf. In effect this means maintaining the god’s eye view or the purview of the dispassionate scientific observer. Even the most famous commentator on the unique nightlife of Bangkok, the Bangkok Post’s ‘Niteowl’ Bernard Trink, who had a very popular and ‘controversial’ weekly column for years in the Bangkok World then the Bangkok Post, emphasised his sobriety in covering its subjects. He did not drink when he visited the bars and claimed to have had no extramarital relations with prostitutes.
This perspective is inquiring and unable to, or not quite able to ‘grasp’ why these people are acting or communicating in this way. To reinforce this Walker and Ehrlich enrol the help of a Thai anthropologist, who, laying a ‘scientific’ credence to the accounts depicts the barworld as dominated by indomitable bargirls [Odzer also some of her bargirls ‘dominating’ the scene, one she even called the ‘sex goddess’], somehow in charge, not perhaps in their vocational choice, but more interestingly, by default. The western man in his naiveté is victim here to its creation.
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In some way this is perhaps acknowledged in the present work’s title which is posed as an almost seductive invite, “Darling, yes, Step into…” It reeks of the man being invited by the ‘hello’ girl who stands outside to attract customers to the bar. You only leave the room of mirrors when your pick of the night shows you the exit. When she does you enter the hall of mirrors, and if she captures you and you can be captured then you enter the pavilion. It is all questions of scale and commitment and abilities to cope, financially and emotionally. Once the girls are installed in the barworld new logics kick in, ‘socially learned’, and they may be ruthlessly applied. This ping-pong logic dictates that they are professionals who intrinsically have a much wider ranging experience of the human condition and sexuality than many of the men arriving from atomised alienated societies and experiences. They are like those who perform surgery daily or fix computers and aircraft. They develop through time strong tacit skills in understanding
the clients and their bodies. They are particularly human traits within this trade as it relies as much upon the ‘social’ as the physical. They have seen so many arrive, and so many leave. There are constants; bargirls are lay ‘social’ scientists, lay psycho-sexual experts. They understand close proximity to their subjects and gain insights to the human condition in a way that no formally educated professional human expert could ever know. And many remain detached and objective, knowing that this is a performance which goes beyond sex, and requires flexibility and abilities to equally cope and adapt to ‘good’ clients as well as ‘difficult’ and ‘bad’ ones. Nonpatron observers rarely comment on this aspect of the reality of the Barworld, choosing instead to focus upon ‘sex workers’ abilities to cope with their economically sanctioned ‘rape’ on a continual basis. ‘Men’ are often looking, whether they realise it or not, for authentic experiences, scenarios of relationship, and the women can provide for this, they have been trained by Joe ‘Q’ Public, millions of them, as well as those who did come from loveless marriages, unnameable divorces, and bereavement, and from societies which use their own tax money to feed back to them that they abusing women if they challenge the household accounts. Bargirls have seen men shout and scream in ecstasy and they have seen them in hotel rooms despondent, confused and crying, pointing fingers at them in their faces and laying down strange undecipherable rules and regulations while screaming. All she has to say is “yes, me understand.” They make rules and promises some
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they keep to and some they break themselves. There is disparity of words and actions. They say they believe one thing and then do another. The men define this as indicative of mental illness, a lack of concern for their wellbeing – “they just don’t give a fuck”, or some scam to work more money out of them. Or they find it incomprehensible. In any case they get lost. Lost, staring at the girl and only being able to see their own reflections. In the end they also learn to lie; “I will come back and see you tomorrow…” false promises, false hopes but the hookers experience it all the time. Farangs are always leaving. Thus they are unsettled hungry ghosts. Many of the hard-line feminist’s whoremongers, tricks and johns may be compromised in human and ‘social’ skills, and their lack of ability to prolong the relationship in a temporal sense lends them a felling of foreboding regarding what will happen to their ‘girlfriend’ when they leave and cannot protect them any more. This drives them to the back foot emotionally. They end up crying at airport departure lounges, whilst other vulnerable men arrive with guts and vim week in week out in constant procession. In Hello, My Big Big Honey! This angst is captured and tined here, put on show by the published contents of letters from bargirls’ tricks. Many punters sound lost and pathetic, certainly by their own hand, they even speak in baby talk and they suggest, at least ostensibly, weak and soft men, almost passive dupes who are getting crunched up by their own ersatz, unfounded emotional propensities.
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And this of course is often mirrored by the image of a brutally cold, collected and scheming strategic bargirl. Or is more, by the irreconcilable moralities of Buddhism and Christianity, the former suggesting that indifference is plausible as long as one builds merit? One can commit Christian ‘sins’, such as lie, cheat, felate strangers in a bar ten times a night while still building merit in Buddhism by sending money to honour parents. This singular feature, incomprehensible to our western notion of fairplay is perhaps the most common theme within the varieties and types of accounts of the barworld experience [“I got ripped off,” “she was screwing somebody while I as sending money to keep her off the game.”]. It appears to the observer as moral relativism, or at least that beliefs and values are plastic and mutable, even important and life-punctuating aspects like ‘love’.
they may be some sexless young puritan, invoking western moral order and relationship standards upon their experience of the East. One is left wondering; who is the most fervent post-colonialist? The voracious whoremonger or those who settle in Bangkok to adopt settled lifestyles with wholesome Thai women, whom they emphasise, to the public and no doubt themselves and others they meet are not from the Barworld. There is no finer example of the sexless young puritan position perhaps as Amit Gilboa whose tome Off the Rails in Phnom Penh, should put any sane person, with normal sexual predilections, from ever wanting to visit the home of Angkor Wat, unless they are Jack Kerouac or Hunter S. Thomson.
Writers in this genre are quizzical and avoid, like the plague, becoming debauched themselves. They play the moral up hand, and leave any transgressive behaviour to those they are reporting upon. Maybe then, it is this insistence to write for safe, comfortable, reasonable folks, no doubt sitting sipping an afternoon cup of Earl Grey tea and wishing to tread, for a risqué daring short while, a glimpse of the wild side, for just as long as it takes to ruffle a few pages, or just before dinner, of what it may mean to be transgressive. But detached or not, there is little explanation or sympathy built for either the protagonist or the authors. They are either happily married to a ‘good’ and ‘proper’ Thai lady (Walker and Trink), whatever and they ever this must be heralded, or
The book’s protagonist is the author himself and it is written in almost the style of biography. It reflects upon an almost total lack of decency and morality in-group of individuals staying long term at a guesthouse in Cambodia. The only character missing is Conrad’s Kurtz. They are depicted as depraved to the complete delight and amazement of the detached, yet buoyant author who surely knows he is on a scoop. While he actually comes to be physically and geographically situated, I mean he informs us that he actually goes to brothel areas to witness first hand debauched scenes at play. While ‘out there’ he encounters an opportunity to become a patron himself. He forgoes this experience for some mysterious reason. He has up to this point only heard about these encounters anecdotally, these included mention that great bugbear, the sadistic paedophile (maybe this was
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Kurtz, travelling incognito). But like the war correspondent, he offers these stories up to us at great jeopardy to his own moral turpitude by getting way too close to the action. At one point he finds himself following his protagonists to their brothel and ends up in a room with a stripping Vietnamese woman. While he admits temptation, he thinks twice and remembers his vocation or station in life and denies her advances. Oh the sacrifices one makes in the name of journalistic integrity! He is controlled enough to desist in partaking of the delights preferring instead to adopt a non-patron position which preserves his journalistic integrity [I am sure he was thinking of his career beyond the ‘madness’ he was writing of.] However, by doing so, perhaps he does in effect create for himself, an anodyne and sterile world morally, against which the depraved behaviour of the characters only amplifies and exaggerates. But he is clever enough to hold moral commentary; he leaves that entirely to the reader sipping Earl Grey. He does choose to highlight ‘mundane’ daily events such as an English teacher going for ‘short time’ sex between classes. This does jut out as an unambiguous indication of the nonchalant and lax nature of sexual practices in this environment. The laws of reciprocal behaviour would have a teacher in the US or UK frowned upon, fired or arrested even, for having sex with prostitutes between classes. This is abhorrent behaviour, and the practitioners and the society that promotes and lets this happen should be reprimanded and punished. Cambodia is presented as a Wild West (in
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the East), designed as a site where westerners are permitted to ‘lose the plot’ or go ‘off the rails’, insane, that is, when they become seduced and live there, consumed spiritually and ethically into Kampuchea’s dark and morally agnostic hub all while educating that county’s youth. Bullshit. Such writers may almost fulfil American Sociological Association guidelines for subject research. The purview of their work is that of a balanced normal citizen Joe ‘Q’ Public, the proverbial Earl Grey tea drinker, they surely write for their amazement, their abhorrence, their revulsion. Inherent in this projection is that modern, after all, supposedly civilised men can live like this, and that such a society exists to provide for their disgrace. Such a baseline attitude is emphasised by the reproduction in of a letter in Off the Rails in Phnom Penh that arrives for one of the protagonists from his brother in the west whom he has asked for some money. The reply is curt and clear there will be no support from this hardworking suburbanite family man, certainly nothing that may support his sibling’s mad decadent lifestyle. But it is not only those who are safe and suburbanite reading such work. Not is it only the good reading sensationalist newspaper account of debauchery in South East Asia. If a full fledged miscreant or even an aspiring miscreant reads it, then it will surely read like a travel guide suggesting smorgasbords of endless pleasures and a ‘must visit next’ location. If they dare…
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However, in the end Gilboa leaves some suggestion that this was merely a passing phase, it was situated temporally, and the protagonists moved on, ever searching for that for which they have become accustomed to in another third world shit hole. No doubt there will be those trying to clean up the mess left in their wake… Like a stolen teenage party romp. This author often appears somehow removed as he always is from the emotional onslaught happening to others, or he has adopted a moral high ground, or he is scientifically orientated, or he sees women attempting to explore and critique male and female roles from a nonpatron perspective. But no way is this guy a Pan hovering delicately over an abyss. An abyss is something that can never be known or reported upon, sort of like the category ‘death’. **** These four volumes represent a whirlwind trip round the conundrum of existence that one may experience when enduring the duplicitous realities of South East Asia, particularly at those junctures where west meets east, and of course, vice-versa. They reflect each other is there a twain? And where does it meet exactly? Well it meets in the streets on billboard signs broadcasting messages in a foreign language – English. It meets in the universities where many westerners boasting ersatz qualifications are charged with pretending to teach subjects, again in
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English, that they are unqualified or poorly qualified to teach [alas this does not matter much as the foreign accredited certificates they receive are not worth more than the paper they are written on]. Academics worth their meat may become at best ghostwriters for Thai professori aiming to increase their [English] publication record, or proofreaders [of English] for highly paid aid industry consultants. West meets east rendezvous at government level in the shape of aid payments keeping economies afloat, and with it small print dictating provisions of the grant. West meets east also meets controversially in the humble fairy light bar where prostitutes meet foreign men, tourists, businessmen, ex-pats, Embassy staff, Visa run men, and all others with predilections for young Asian women, and no strings attached pay for play arrangements. West meets east innocuously at tourist spots where westerners wish to take in and consume culture and artefacts and histories which embellish and adorn their own identities as ‘world travellers’ with ‘broadened minds’ when they get ‘back home’. Finally, but not least, west meets east through electronic media, McLuhan’s ‘Global Village’ idea, through satellite TV and Hollywood DVDs, as well as the Internet and ‘social’ networking technology, depicting lives, and lifestyles – promises and/or irrealities - which are only vaguely decipherable based upon the lived experience of the viewer’s everyday reality. And where east meets west and west meets east and the twain meets in the minds of those spinning lies, truths
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and untruths mad meets misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and misrepresentation. Information and media receptivity is not reciprocal in the ‘Global Village’. The Cambodian reading of a paedophile getting arrested in New York does not have the same impact as one of Nicholas D. Kristof chillingly emotive pieces in the New York Times, read over coffee and bagel at the corner coffee shop. The Khmer knows he will do nothing about it; the corner shop reader may be enraged by the article, he may be indifferent to it, or may in fact come to be attracted to visit the location precisely to find realities that he can’t find easily at home. These reports suggest directly that this activity is endemic, pandemic, ‘growing rapidly’, ‘exploding’ and a variety of other quite frightening descriptors. This is the pluralism of the west. Likewise Khmer taxi girls may ‘switch onto’ the idea that western young men are ‘sexy’, and may buy into the libidinous suggestively of western pop videos which have more affect than tongue in cheek western hard core pornography. A Westlife video as iconic of how to be and, more importantly, what to aspire to desire. Consider that such western musicians directly influence the styles and fashions, compositions and choreographies of recent Karaoke videos arising in Cambodia and Vietnam. This is not new; appropriating western styles from Country and Western through to pop and jazz have long been recognised by these audiences. ****
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But converting media material is not failsafe. I remember well a hot afternoon spent in a shack decked out with expensive karaoke and video equipment, the room of a sex worker in Phnom Penh. Her stipend from one client who was interested in marrying her was over $700 a month, even though this man was apparently a postal worker and lived with his parents at age 39. Her days were spent in a similar fashion. Rise late, laze around watching western pornography with her friends (she had in the region of 300 VCDs) interspersed with Beyoncé and Britney and boy band videos. She continually ordered food and cigarettes through her window for herself and her friends. In fact a whole support mechanism was set up by entrepreneurial Khmers to support her lifestyle. She was living in a tumbledown shack whilst commanding the excellent concierge, personal chef, waiters and room service of a top class hotel, and surrounded by half the market’s supply of perfumes, make-up and apparel, and a top of the range karaoke hi-fi home entertainment system. The high-light of the day was dusk. This was when her and her chosen friends would begin to make themselves up. So much discussion was had regarding which make-ups, which outfits to wear. Less fortunate friend were given access to products that they would normally be excluded from using. They were given clothes to wear. There was no lack of generosity with her patron’s money. Beyond forthright jealousy, which the generosity staved off, heir was a consensus built that they must all achieve this status and find their own ‘Jim’. But tonight, as it was most
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nights, the target was young men on Jim’s dollar. Jim instead of paying to release his betrothed from the agonies and depravation of prostitution was lending his love propensities of free choice, and her friends to boot. She would buy rounds of drinks and food for all of them later, sealing the deal that she was not a hooker.
contrast strongly with a recent report commissioned by the Christian Aid outfit Worldvision which made the claim that Cambodians are viewing such material at funerals and that many children consider viewing pornography as ‘normal’. ****
It is fair to say the pornography failed to arouse in them anything but curiosity and amusement, and often where it was particularly kinky, it was incredulity, the pop videos aroused woops of joy, “ooo, young man, handsom too much” “ohh sexy so much”. Whereas it was hardly likely in their experience that somebody would ask for necrophilia that evening, and that they would be prepared to respond favourably based upon the request and viewing these bizarre foreigners doing ‘it’ on camera. But it was likely that they would encounter and seduce young men. Some of which may look like Westlife. These girls were able to fuck for free. And they had their pick of young backpackers who, ignoring the advice of the Lonely Plant guide (misprint meant), and saw fit to fraternise with the local women who could not have been prostitutes as they never asked for money. In fact they bought them beer. Hey behaviour in the discos, their dancing and looks of seduction as they did so mirrored the salaciousness of Beyoncé, Christina and Britney and all the other ‘girlfriends’ of Westlife. The girls had more than enough sex every night of their choosing, to not be impressed by the pornos, and given the age of their typical catch it was unlikely to be kinky and as contrived as what they were viewing in the saucier movies. These
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In these volumes, the authors invite us into this vast entrancing pavilion of mirrors and moreover to get lost somewhat in its halls. Rather than a purely dry rendition of meaningless and possibly ersatz list of categories, statistics and their explanations and implications, they have chosen to focus upon data and information which have formed the worldviews of westerners entering this reflective labyrinth. They cross and link only at minor junctures in anti-rooms and arcades, at times they can see each other’s footprints, but they are united in one sense that they provide either the views of the Pavilion as patrons, or as non-patrons, or non-patrons turned as patrons. The first volume is a preamble in creating and sustaining the pavilion. The second concerns the world as seen from the perspective of a non-patron whose raison d’ etre is to affect change in global policy and local legislation regarding its construction.
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The third concerns the condition of a western man who has entered the pavilion and wishes to re-enter with the intention of destroying it. The fourth will be in the voice of the girl who sustains the pavilion and how she is the only one who embraces and must accept its reality. This cannot be imagined, fantasised, articulated or properly understood by the foreigner. It remains unwritten. Its ethnography and facilitation will be financed through the sales and donations recovered from the first three volumes. In all, it is predominately concerned with the westerner’s involvement in the pavilion of mirrors that seem to be most fragmented by its wondrous reflections and shards of the ‘self’ and by its complex and intricate construction. These architectures of the soul and spirit are only made obvious and available by travel, which is as much a reflection of inner worlds and dimensions made explicit, as they are of implicit external realities and views made implicit. In these volumes we witness several protagonists, amongst them Sue Tyler – Director of a anti-trafficking NGO, Winslow Wong a trans-cultural relationships counsellor, and David Gotlieb an ex-NYPD officer who comes out on a personal crusade to atone for his behaviour on a previous visit. **** Typically, the world which acts as the focus of these four volumes is one which is largely self-organising and selfsustaining; there are often no institutional restrictions, bar
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new unenforceable laws and other kinds of minor interventions. But because it is complex, wholly dependent on human interaction and communication, people have to rely upon projections and reflections which are drawn from another place, other, more familiar relationships. Gender roles, for instance in Vietnam, are changing rapidly, though with different speeds in different ‘social’ layers. There is an argument that in the East ‘social’ conformity is privileged over individualism, individualism being that icon of being, which in the west, and with the demise of communism, becomes reified and prised over collectivity and togetherness. Simultaneously as you have the rise of older generations of western consumers asserting their right to be generations younger in their outlooks and behaviours, ‘normative’ behaviours are rigorously maintained, these are nonpermissive and activity encourage disparaging views of sexual behaviours and some of these are appalling. In places like the UK, men who go looking for sex outside of ‘loving relationships’ can be photographed and named and shamed in their local papers. Their indiscretion to the sanctity of normal relationship is punished in an unacceptable cabal between local authorities and law enforcement and the local media. They work together to keep marriages together and Opponents of this world however do view that it is an institution in an unconventional and localised sense. That the female practitioners [and to a lesser extent male practitioners] are somehow directly or indirectly coerced into participation. They suggest that if it were a level
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playing field socio-economically then it would cease to exist, or metamorphose into its western counterpart - a disenfranchised mass of objectified, regulated, rationalised, desensualised unitary ‘sex workers’ and their legions of ‘clients.’ Rather than these worlds being incommensurate, for them to exist at all, they must have junctures which satisfied mutually shared interests and objectives – some of these concern lifestyle and emotional interests. They are commensurate at certain levels and at certain times for certain durations. They are privy also to particular psychological propensities at the individual level, particular tolerances and emotional and relationships needs based upon past experiences and upbringing. The way in which psychological defences and attack mechanisms have formed and orientate. Sometimes it requires an expansion or correction of my own map of relevance and that is what these four volumes seek to do through teaching tales. We learn through experience of each other, and through other sources such as media. Each, experiential and/or abstract become fables for possible worlds. This four volume set also reflects what is called frame stories (also frame tale, frame narrative, etc.). This is a narrative technique whereby a main story is composed, at least in part, for organising a set of shorter stories, each of which is a story within a story - or for surrounding a single story within a story. “Whenever I try to answer a question, I put myself in the shoes of the actors and I ask myself ‘What would I do if I were in that situation?’” So sympathy
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always relies on the assumption the other is more or less like oneself. He mistakes narcissism for identification. It is like this book. It is written in the tradition of transgressive texts – those writings which are defined as those that aim to challenge and possibly subvert the artistic, ‘social’, or political traditions of a culture, in this case the ‘barworld’ the subculture of Eastern women encountering western men and western female morality. Perhaps the most compelling and ground-breaking study and analysis of transgression as a theoretical concept was undergone by Georges Bataille in Visions of Excess and Erotism: Death and Sensuality. Drawing from Sigmund Freud’s conception of taboo in Totem and Taboo and his reading of the Marquis de Sade, Bataille claims that new, liberating, and transcending states can be achieved by toppling taboos. Once again, drawing from Freud, this time from the notion of the unconscious, Bataille is especially concerned with “excess,” mostly the experiences of sex and death, which he believes; hold “endless possibilities.” In Totem and Taboo, pointing out the word taboo is of Polynesian origin; Freud claims that “for us the meaning of taboo branches off into two opposite directions. On the one hand it means to us, sacred, consecrated: but on the other hand it means, uncanny, dangerous, forbidden, and unclean” (821). Michel Foucault’s reading of Bataille in “A Preface to Transgression” helps establish a framework under which transgressive works can be discussed and analysed, as well as investigate the corollaries between the poetics and politics of transgression and specifically, the ways in
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which the literary characteristic of transgression suggests that works of art can act subversively to contribute to paradigm shifts both in academia and in society. An example is Joyce’s Ulysses a testament piece of literature which aims to define new literary techniques: “[the novel] is a sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind” (xii).
This work appropriately belongs to this category of satire. As explained in detail, Myiad and Wong’s text is gruesomely crude and at times extremely shocking because the various literary strategies deployed in the book reduce the distance between reader and narrator, creating that “zone of crude contact” of which Bakhtin speaks. Where ‘hse’ encounter ‘whales and ronin’. Welcome to a Pavilion of Mirrors, nothing is real and everything is permissible – within reason.
Without claiming canonisation, if not defining some new literary method, Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors rather faithfully corresponds to Bakhtin’s description of ‘Men’ippean satire: “The familiarizing role of laughter is here considerably more powerful, sharper, and coarser. The liberty to crudely degrade, to turn inside out the lofty aspects of the world and world views, might sometimes seem shocking. But to this exclusive and comic familiarity must be added an intense spirit of inquiry and a utopian fantasy … the entire world and everything sacred in it is offered to us without any distancing at all, in a zone of crude contact … In ‘Men’ippean satire the unfettered and fantastic plots and situations all serve one goal—to put to the test and to expose ideas and ideologues.”6
Sir William Stirling, Toronto, 2007
6
Bakhtin, M.M. (1982) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays University of Texas Press
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Disclaimer 1. The pavilion of mirrors is characterised, of course, by problematisation of its centre and circumference: it is purposely designed to trap people inside and never let them find the exit by obscuring edges and doors and cognitive hooks. It accomplishes this by letting people become all centre or nexus which is rare in life. 2. This typically happens only when we mix geographical travel and entry into foreign cultures with more libertine approaches to our sexuality. 3. Inside the ‘other’ is our self or ourselves, ‘others’ are merely broken shell like fragments of what and who we are, or who we were before we met attractive prostitutes, and that which we use to piece ourselves and our experiences, scenarios and situations together after we leave them, for minutes, hours, days and weeks and months and years. These fragments can remain an uninterpretable kaleidoscope, spectacularly beautiful but meaningless, or they may become a gestalt, a whole, more than the sum of its parts – this is the Pavilion of Mirrors. This is surely self-evident as we are all created equal, with complete knowledge of the world inside Intel, and capable of full human potential to do anything, anytime any where we wish. This text will not tell you what to think or do, but what to know. 4. We could never ‘think’ an ‘other’ could be. Where we lack knowledge or empathy or cannot properly understand, then we will make it up, and to varying degrees stand by our presumptions and prescriptions regardless of how uncomfortable they make us feel. If you discuss this writing amongst fellow critics, it will fall to dogma. Thus it cannot be evoked by reading alone, but by engaging in foreign worlds with open thinking, if only you are capable of that which is improbable. This text is a technology, benign on its own, but given life by you. You are battery and operator. You are the energy that makes it animate, only you enliven. So warning one: stop reading if you have an aversion to becoming a psychonaut by engaging in this text and with conducting libidinous operations and missions in heatseeking zones. 5. This crosses the typical boundaries and horizons of a standard human operator’s manual or simple cognitive map that shows not only the exit, but also the entrance. You will get in to get out, arrive in order to depart, get lost in order to be found and so on. Various exit and departure arrival spots will arise, time pending, and yours and my time is limited even though it seems it is not.
6. By reading the following book it is assumed that you are at least 18 years of age or older [preferably over 30 years of age], and that you do in your heart or hearts wish to view live nudes in real life and engage with them in sexuallyoriented activities for your own private and personal enjoyment and learning of yourself, and are not offended by any suggestion of such activities. This includes rimmin’ hse [analingus with whores] and spit-roasting hse [engaging in two on one scenarios or other mathematical conundrums of human ‘social’ability]. 7. It is further assumed that in consuming these volumes that you truly wish to learn more of your own personal predicament whenever, wherever whatever that may be. There may be entitled existential shock, before or after reading this text, or engaging in standard practices in heat seeking and other pay-for-play [P4P] environments. It may not seem rosy and even be the pre-cursor to a nervous breakdown or total madness and disintegration. You will, as a soul, reboot, you acknowledge there is no reason but to do this. You embrace the double bind or wilt and die leaving way for the next evolutionary stage. 8. Any psychic disturbance or discomfort you experience in the firstworld, that is your ‘actual’ or ‘real’ reality is not the responsibility of the Mantle Brothers Clinic, The Darma Initiative, 24hourworld Inc., nor winslowwong.com or Unityview. We care little for the structures and architectures you have built. We will bomb them with stickers and cover them liberally with psychic Graffiti of mind. In reality it’s a game. 9. Any graffiti or relations to characters living or dead is purely coincidental and any suggestion that this is anything but a work of pure fiction draws directly from the pursed lips of the prince of lies, or those who are sworn enemies of a unfettered free and open consciousness. All communication in these pages aim at raising consciousness rather than raise issue to consciousness. As such they should be considered as hypnotic materials capable of reconfiguring unconscious process and adjusting defence mechanism to suit. 10. You agree to the fact that you are privileged to access the theories and cases presented here in these volumes, but are not disposed to discuss the operations, opinions and remain unaware of any such missions, activities or operations - nor would are you disposed to discuss such missions and opinions if they did in fact exist, and someone asked for your wisdom regarding the heat seeking or P4P zones. 11. Moreover, you will not make such activities as detailed here, whether acts of the body or of the mind, action or of reality or thoughts and mere fantasy, available to minors or anyone, like the sexually repressed or old ladies and their
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impotent asexual menfolk supporters, etc. They may be, or likely to be, offended by even the hint of such activities. The three volumes will leave you, at some points, half-decided to abort reading it altogether, but at others, deeply appreciative that you’ve read it. Together we will trump up a dream world dominion of triumphant madness, glorious violence, and nameless moral transgressions too intense for reason to comprehend. A law of reciprocity which will be very difficult to repress. 12. We assume that you are very familiar with your local community standards, and that such activities are within the community standards of acceptance and tolerance for your community. That you are not a law enforcement officer like David Gotlieb (whom you shall be introduced to in these volumes), nor a postal inspector (whom will not), nor operating under an assumed name or in cooperation with any criminal investigation (there will be some of these), nor seeking out evidence which may serve as the basis for any charge of violating federal, state, or local obscenity laws. 13. Read and then mix well with your own experiences and remember often this text if you want to or need to or maybe not, maybe even a few times through will guarantee ‘social’ ability, if you want it or not, you'll be able to approach someone of the opposite sex who interests you ... feel comfortable - and even more thrive - at a stuffy cocktail party ... speak with comfort in intimidating ‘social’ situations ... and create a memorable, positive impression on all whom you meet. There is no such thing as hypnosis and if indeed it did exist ‘i’ not ‘I’ am not presently disposed in these pages to acknowledge this existence. Once you start controlling other people . . . missing text... [The rest will be found online after 5th May 2007- including the missing 4th volume which was lost on a Fuji hard drive which also continued some spicy pics] By ticking this box I agree in principle to the above and will donate to Unityview and their good works when I feel fit. Furthermore when I am finished this book, I permit its message to self-destruct in my mind’s eye. I also pledge that I will not read Michael Moore’s books or films in South East Asia, not check stock market prices on Bloomberg TV.
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Chapter 1. When it’s good it’s really good, and when it’s bad I go to pieces Like organisms evolved in gentle tide pools, who migrate to freezing oceans or steaming jungles by developing metabolisms, mechanisms, and behaviors workable in those harsher and vaster environments, our descendants, able to change their representations @ will, may develop means to venture far from the comfortable realms we consider reality into arbitrarily strange worlds. Their techniques will be as meaningless to us as bicycles are to fish, but perhaps we can stretch our commonsense-hobbled imaginations enough to peer a short distance into this odd territory. Simulation, Consciousness, Existence. Hans Moravec, 19987
B
rilliance, well ok, just yet another sunny day,
infinitesimal relentlessness, concerted effort, stamina, blue skies, direction, over the heatseeker zones - Walking Street, Sukhumvit, Patpong, Angles City, Santos, Phnom Penh, Cebu, Sari Ayu, Bintan… whichever, wherever could have went west and then it would have been Boca Chica, Sao
7
htttp://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1998/SimCon Ex.98.html
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Paulo, or Latina land. It’s also morning daytime TV UK. Winter, warmed by a studio lit by high-powered lights masking the gunmetal sky and cold steel rain outside. Big security is poised in the foreground with back up in the wings.
argue against this juggernaut public opinion of his behaviour, yet it develops the emerging lemma; “Tell us the truth now,” continues the pit bull host; “…be honest at least with yourself mate - do you love her?” The man replies positively, with a silent acknowledging nod: “Yes, you love her, but is it that you just can’t trust her, is that it, is that love?”
I guess you could call him ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’. The scene is set, the imaginative subtitles reveal; “I’m being cheated upon by my Thai wife.” The man, the husband, is being aggressively interrogated; the interviewer is never taking a prisoner and that is why he is watched, his rationale listened to on a regular pounding basis and always agreed with, at the risk you may be as dysfunctional as the guests, he makes a common sense, or the sense common: “Let’s face it, be honest with yourself for once in your miserable life my friend… you’re a decent man but some people would say that you are an older man… packing a fair bit of weight, yeah? And you have gone out east to look for a… hmmmm a fancy bit of stuff, yeah? You looked for love for money and basically got bit in the process… bad… you’ve dug your own grave with your traveller’s cheques… in other words you’ve sown what you reap…” The man’s reply is modest, his head is hung, this is going all wrong, it’s not as it was, not as clear cut as it was in the preshow interviews, he is being taken apart, the host is making it too black and white and he cannot communicate, cannot
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The host broadens his appeal for rationale even moral support to the television and studio audience masses using first world science and technology: “I mean ladies and gentleman, could you live with someone you just couldn’t trust? It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.” The audience shifts and shuffles and responds in kind, is that a cue to clap, cheer or jeer? Before they do the host leads: “Well today we’ll get a handle on the truth as our truth testing techniques, as used by law enforcement agencies worldwide including the American C.I.A. are 93% accurate.” After more than a few questions about why he is suspicious, why in his mind he is uneasy, queasy and anxious, why he has come on this program some usual suspects emerge - her Thai women friends in Toller Porcorum, Dorset tell him that she is working as a prostitute on the side, that she is having sex with several other men behind his back, that she is planning to leave him any day for a younger man on drugs who she has fallen for and whom now pimps her out.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
The host is incredulous. “What bothers me about this more than anything is that regardless of our findings today you are prepared to take her back, why on earth would you do that?” The man opens up “if she tells the truth and admits to wrongdoing, I will forgive her and we can take things forward from there.” “So are we just wasting our time here today” suggests the host concerned he is captain of a non-event. “No, I just want to know the truth…” The man had lived over the past year or two within a constellation of calls, texts, and emails, there have been disclosures, but none of these she would admit face to face. She is pristine, she is chaste. She has taken the lie detector test on the show; the results will be read out when she gets the chance to comer clean, put forward her case. Has she even convinced herself or is she truly innocent according to the tenets of western law enforcement, cultural hegemony and common human liberal decency, according to the paternal role that her husband adopted when they were on their second date from the bar? She is convincing. She emerges from the wings and quickly and adamantly states she wants to leave him, the most radical and crisp statement of intent so far. For her, he is an obsessively jealous man, as irrational as the older, insecure man gets. If he doesn’t change she will leave him, she can’t take any
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
more, any more of his persecution. Even if she was a prostitute when he met her in the bar, can he not let become free of this life? Is that not what he promised her when she left her country? Is that not why she married him, for this chance? Why has she left her country and came so far to have him accuse her day after day? “Madam,” the host interjects; “you are a prize liar… what a pack of absolute lies... to the question ‘Have you ever had sex with another man’ the readings of our machines and experts told strongly suggest that you had. I mean, ladies and gentlemen, is it right that he, ok, ok, ok, ok he’s a nice bloke, he seems genuinely open, even if he is old, bald and fat, even if he can only get it up once or twice a year, even now, this gentleman will take her back now, when all she can do is blatantly lie to us, in front of the camera, the studio and home audiences, but worst of all she lies to man whose only wish in this world was to give her a better life?” She looks on misunderstood, unable to articulate her Thai incredulity. This sad parade ends with her referring to the host by his Christian name, looking at him eye to eye whilst insisting that she had never done anything wrong, and that she had been wrongly accused; “why would I leave my country and come here to be accused of this every night and day, of having sex all the time, by a man who never wants any?” Food for thought.
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It is confusing. But the studio audience disagreed and viewed as a clear cut case of denial, lying and infidelity, maybe even condemning her for betraying her Bronteesque benefactor as a soft fool – a man who wholeheartedly deserved just rewards for meddling with third world prostitutes, elevating them to the status of rightly women of substance and virtuous, even middle-class mall wives. He should have focused upon SKY channels and sneeky Pizza delivery, impetuous new designer kitchens, safe investments and tight insurance and manicured garden centre visits with a partner his own age, look, fashion and weight. He should lose weight and get with the program. He should be taken in, eclipsed by celebrity goings on, given tips on grooming, then he would be prepped to get his ass online and match up and compare assets with someone from his own culture. He paid his money and entered the hall of mirrors. He did so voluntarily. All of us seek in our own unique way that strangely elusive state called happiness. He viewed himself in the first mirror. He was a playful grotesque. Maybe he sought the more peculiar state termed freedom. In the second mirror he noticed a marked improvement. Each of us seeks identity and individuality from fragments, mirrors within ourselves and we also try to identify things
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and states within those others around us. We longingly gaze. But we still make escape attempts, almost all day long. He did, when he returned to the first world. After a while he began to wonder which was the real him reflected in all the others, within all the fragments held inside. Very few of us can describe or define just what we think will deliver us that freedom, that happiness and identity we crave, and we search, and sometimes find, new ways of escape. Sometimes they can seem as arbitrary as the dictionary definition of ‘left’ [Location near or direction toward the left side; i.e. the side to the north when a person or object faces east] or ‘right’ [Location near or direction toward the right side; i.e. the side to the south when a person or object faces east]. It is clear that the entertainment component of this fun hall of mirrors is distortion and confusion. I have gotten lost before, and then woke up. It is as if so long ago this man and me undertook a journey into the rabbit hole without any clear idea of where we were going, or how we were in fact going to get there. A Lewis Carroll delight, maybe, but for us mortals; perplexing. Why do we pay for this, pay with our minds, feelings, money and souls? Legions. David, Otto, Dicky and Sue (you will meet them in later volumes), and others just like them are walking
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
there where this man met his future wife. The ‘faceless’ Japanese man of this volume walked there also did the ‘faceless’ man in the white room. They are real cases, but also archetypes. Archetypes are more employable than real people - Be an archetype! These archetypes met their wives there, the first as a visitor the second because he came from there. Some make their home there; some make it their pet project. They are all in different mental spaces, consuming of Asia, as they always did. Sometimes we think we know too much about this planet, this project called humanity, about each and every starving centre, our life of love and lust for desire all of it in order to feel… whole or worthwhile, or meaningful, to some cause or to another human being, another identity in another person in another place.
Lyden’s equally unflagging lines; “I will not be treated as property.” These lines could be on the tongue of both trick and john and bargirl alike.
I would like to build an alliance with the weakest player, one that has strategic moves. But what happens if that is you, yourself? Can I build an alliance with myself? To
stop fooling myself, that I am ‘this’ and ‘that’. Can I find myself in another? Shit this is like eastern philosophy, or maybe existentialism for dummies. It looks innocuous, love, in Bangkok. Starbucks nestled in, it looks as if its always been there. But this book begins in Public Image’s self-referential single ‘Public Image’. It drivers forth with Jah Wobbles totally indefatigable bass line, that goes on to eternity, and John
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Raids on experience by the weapons of sudden desire. So. When you finally get there draw a line in the sand, in the beach of your mind, draw it near the shore. Tonight you hold the ace of clubs that makes you suddenly King of Hearts, Elvis or Martin Luther King, or Akhnaten, but only nearly in Asia. Only in parts, portions, fragments all of which come together, as they must, in what you feel passionate about. In The Post today it said that history still repeats itself. ‘Sweet lies’ ‘No compromise’ soundbites of headlines, glanced, read like 1940s valve radio music track titles. And as they always do, only if you keep your mind open so early in this book. In such a wandering stream of consciousness and pathetic meaning-making we all know with certainty about new military incursions, they are rammed down our throat as if they matter, although they all seem to merge into one blob of threat, youth market madness, frothy celebrity interests, interests that we can adopt and do away with relish, stock market shock horror and corporate sport sponsor failings dominate. They are not recycled; they are perpetually fed, like landfill and diminishing returns in long economic cycles. They show the banal and cyclic nature of collective contemporary human interests, everyday humdrum and pastimes. The uneasy life
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
of the human body in the infinitesimal city of money and heat. I always thought it more the cyclone of fun picking up the Thai newspaper emblazoned with an atrocity in full surround sound Technicolor. Not the curse of desperately needing to know, but the curse of needing to inquire more. Dominion. While the stock ticker tape plays its incessant and maddening loop, an archetypal Thai girl is getting screwed incessantly by some male and female, husband and wife foreigners, slithered in between choice shopping ventures at MBK mall. Its all ‘off the shelf’ consumerism – “one carton of eggs, two packets of chips, half a dozen beers, a plastic plate of sushi, a packet of condoms, two bar girls, a strange mask and hat courtesy of the province people, a wife and a lesbian afternoon romp – polished off with half a dozen beers etc. etc…
She was the one that had shook up the deep pattern of a single Japanese man’s life, slipped his defences, in his life ever after, and brought every god and every damn thing into question, even the Greek Pan. Wow, the newspaper picture takes on new relevance for me, so graphic, vivid, not something that would ever be allowed to adorn a tabloid back home. It haunts me, the psychology of those who hung them. It proudly shows a close-up of this man’s tongue rudely and rawly cascading from the massive alien style sumo head, far too large for successful cunilingus now, or the sampling of sweet and sour and salty tastes of Nam Pla cascading. Another shot has him, it, flanked by Thai police onlooking coolly, professionally, familiarly with this alien Asian. Hanging there naked with his three-year-old son, the bodies stripped, striped and blackened. They look positively brittled, like something on string hanging in the Asian market. They were blackened by what looks like some vague attempt to set them on fire, but they did not catch fire, they were more smoked. Or else a fire was capriciously lit under them as they were hung badly, neck unbroken to suffer the indignity of fire and the unpredictability or scorching and a partial roasting. I still don’t know what happened, what was the circumstances, the events, and the context that led to this horror? What is at the heart of every generative love but barren fear and death in South East Asia, the same as every orgasm? I wondered if they had experienced orgasm as they died father and son hung up to dry and to be smoked
Massive slap. This Thai newspaper on my lap has a half-page picture of a women or man so bloated that you cannot tell nationality, she, the Japanese man’s ‘wife’ is sitting on the bus to Trat next to me and tells me conclusively disjointed words, no sentence, but loaded with meaning and ambiguity, feeling and bemusement for her: “Japanese” “Drugs”. It seems that Thais like all South East Asians like, love, acknowledge violence and prefer it close, in their face and not hid round the corner.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
together? This is what is rumoured to happen at traumatic death. Fuck this stream consciousness it is veering into the void for westerners, thank fuck we have more ‘taste’ in our media. The depth and death of the death orgasm, the deep, deep orgasm or mama, the dance of death. Is that why a corpse smiles? The context, the details the specifics, their gender, surely that makes me non-specific, agnostic and apolitical. "The only way I can survive this, I shall survive this, is by putting all hope aside in my non-stop white reality. Its pure unbridled horror to read this happened. “No good”, she breaks into my train of thought and utters understated. I wonder: How does she know their nationality? I shudder; my mind is wandering, uncontrollably, as it always does in South East Asia.
But after the jilt of such newspaper horror my consort looks even lovelier. I focus on working her, she can read my thoughts but neither of us is going to proposition, or are we? My thoughts stray from repugnance to erotica and then back again. The French say; les yeux sont le miroir de l'dme (The eyes are the mirror of the soul). So what the fuck am I seeing of my little self in her? What is she seeing in me bar my wallet, do I assume she is broke or is it easy to go for sensation in a sensational ‘social’ place? The visceral idea of Thais, their visual interest, they don’t want political, diatribes on the Gulf wars’, ‘this’ and ‘that’, they want a litany of gory pics, simply that, and lots of them. Must be ‘glass half empty half full’ that such horror makes you grateful to be alive, along with your family and friends. It surely must be yin/yang in action, from Eros to Thanatos like a demon in one foul swoop, and then back again in the shape shifting of mind and simple mental process.
“Then there are no illusions or disappointments." How prudently thought by this Japanese player with his very own, quite individual and pretty Thai ‘wife’. The ring of death around her, her aura, its seductive suggestion makes her only more attractive against the freak show that is life and love in South East Asia. “This is my last fuck…” – the Vietnam conscript and the sex tourist are conjoined at the hip. I sit back and think about becoming friends with her, she is the same women, but I prefer the impersonal bar and the non-denominational bar whore, I am in a dark, brooding Arian mood, I shall drink Guinness tonight.
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There was a popular Sunday newspaper back home that worked like that. It had lots of ghastly personal stories of people who suffered accidents and hideous ‘waiting in the wings’ style terminal conditions like motor neurone disease or multiple sclerosis and their like. They were moral tales, or the type that showed how a chap played music on different instruments according to his diminishing abilities. He, they all, stood as testament to how we should ‘be grateful’. To
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
what or who, for fated ‘acts of god’ in a non-secular society I am not at all sure.
A neutered Asian man may cope and come to terms with this providing his captivity is elongated and he has no choice but to tune his mind to American rationale. Her has all the time in the world, his patience ran out long ago and yet it was years before he learned to retract deep within himself to the place where he was in any way free. You are in a financial quiet zone, no signal. And as it does, overhead, yet another silver chain of aircraft exhaust, the line in the air, the distinction between thinking and thought, the present and the past participle. There, you can stem the tide baby, but not ever the flow. Not ever the flow, that is why one day you will die, and that much is certain, regardless of what you have seen or heard, remembered or laughed at. That is why I don’t feel sorry for that father and hanging, nor the captivity of the man in the white room.
The east, Asia, and indeterminacy and letting it happen, waiting sweetly for something else, and there, there is always something else for those who wait. She will tell you today, remotely, you feel it again, she mentioned today, stuff about the fundamental conceits of the architects of experiences – media and advertising, salespeople, pornographers, politicians, parents, siblings and peers, work friends – all shoulder to shoulder, practice disorientation technique when you start to get used to South East Asia. Foreign beer signs. Excitement just didn’t cool down at all with their sight. In a pause amongst the early morning hubris of Thai city life seen from the slowly moving bus locked in traffic jam, for a moment you look skywards... god; nothing but blue to infinity, forever, god cut by the silver chain of another plane coming and going, arrival and departure, alpha, omega, found and lost departments, screaming quietly in themselves and anyone else that may be mad enough to take interest in the bottemless white noise interiors of aircraft. The endless journey and the bottomless pit. There is no back of beyond
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The one who wants to kill you is waiting in the eves, looking casually over a shoulder from just over there, just over the way, just round the corner. That keeps you on your toes, part of the price to pay for indulging yourself here. They witness you living, bathed resplended in the fluorescent luminescent blues and green and pinks and reds of the all-encompassing all-embracing ideological octopus that whacky barworld that stretches to infinity in the heatseeking zones. They can see you glow and shrink and grow again in and into it.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
You held up the Queen of Clubs in it and so you are the King of Hearts in it. The killer walks right into you face, but you never see them, yes, they are either male and female, husband or wife, they hold their own ace, they wear the blue dress.
from deep within the houses, simulates, others pink fluorescents and mysterious Green Lanterns. The pinks and blues. Signifying ‘get yo hookers here’ – hse. A key is the corner stone of all human erotic intimacy. Escapism? Or simply embracing and engaging in life? The Japanese man, in his concrete bunker home in Bangkok was jotting down memeories in his mind’s eye, as he waited forever:
Your present and your very own biography and their history, customs and views of your culture, your ego defences and attack mechanisms, their reality tunnelling systems, that’s what you brought to the Asian table, to them here with your aftershave and hair dye, expensive airport aftershave and Mr. Dollar, they search your bag in the cheap hotel room, and not quite your shade, decent lube, lime green heavy duty metal condoms, emergency medical, Dollar, Euro and Pound. You cannot give it all away, you have a job spending it, although you don’t need it back home, you can’t access it and analyse it, change it, like a handful of dry sand, it runs away from you, as it is you want and will. WHY WOULD YOU WANT IT ANOTHER WAY? You look for an opening, a gap, hole in the wall… So to speak. You make your move, and so does your killer. You pull your credit card for emergencies, and big, big, purchases like some gold not really on your original oriental shopping list. A Royal blue cut with green tinges in your periphery, the foreign currency, the orient, Red glows dimly
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…When we touched, our lips, we lost the illusion of parental control, then, only then, we felt each other and said goodbye at the airport too soon, we were so near yet so far especially now, here all emotions meet here, at the escalator at the airport, one escalator in among all the rest, we were one. You understand me now, I am you, I made you feel like you were loved amid it all, all that hubris, all that spending, all those heartless people, you helped me find my heart, and you made me King. We crossed the divide, we made the grade. I AM NOT LIKE THAT AT ALL. You are not like them. We are not like them, those others, we are pure, we understand at a higher level, a deeper love, and more sincere, more ‘real’, they should be shot. You were like my mother, god bless her soul. You make me want to cry now, cry myself to sleep, a man never does that, does he? I have never known it, but you were like my mother. You made me feel like it is all worth again, all open, all possible tomorrow.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
I had all but lost hope. Nobody cares for me, not really, what does it mean practically? Nobody but you can ever know. She told me that love was really learning, I never knew what she meant until I met you…
Can we be taught to care? We, we always pretend mother? And if we could, then tell how it would manifest. Can she be taught to care, and if she could what would it look like, what would it sound and feel like? The whole episode, scenario is cast in a kind of Royal blue cut with green tinges, with fluorescent pink overtones with maybe some gold flecks?
You can’t possibly think of the Japanese man’s needs when you think like this, and the intense infinite futility of it all, in a pitch black windowless concrete bunker somewhere in Bangkok 12, the straightforward, simple straight talk from the zip horror of waiting, and yet the normality of his viewing activity horizon, in his delirium he was watching NHK while he slowly, gradually, like evolution, wilted on a leather couch. Kobe beef is what he thought, he craved, but he wanted water. It was a program on C.I.A. torture techniques. They are cunningly subtle but intractable. Holding some man in freezing white room for years, hardly subtle. You don’t think of this at touch down. Why should you? Goodbye Dr. Wong. Geoff ………. *** Dr. Wong,
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Does that make me mad, unfathomable? What if she said she already did ‘it’ and you just weren’t looking… again. She went to the shop while you lazed after coition in your hotel room. Apparently, she was offered short time (ST) as she stepped out of the lift, and she got a buzz from the chance, and she took it, screwed senseless for ten minutes, showered and back with your can of pop. I was her long time (LT) or boyfriend experience (BFE). You never even noticed she’d showered… again. What she meant in a fit of anger was she did it again, as in the Britney song? Britney’s schoolgirl gyrations are trans-cultural, widely understood. She did it with another man, then another and another. I did it again, and again and again. Far over a hill the howl of life is a short time and men coming and going like she was an airport or car park slot. Everything about sex is repetition isn’t it? The special technique of the five rings you taught her to bring you off… The other man found it and used this expertise as well. He found it disgusting, he retracted and left on an early flight the next day, tail
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
between his legs, suffocating max to the extreme, he feels that you have exploited your presence, let down seriously the western canon of taste and distinction, and threatened to kill you if she ever points her ‘husband’ out. He already regretted his premature departure. He took a welter of pics though of your ‘wife’ sucking on ‘his’ dildos, getting screwed by his Plush & Piddlehinton, UK, based roommate who was appalled with his own behaviour but left benchmarks in his behaviour for his next excursion After this one was jacked into his system till next year’s vacation.
………. ***
Our minds are always mixing and moving items we have experience of, and if not quite vivid enough, we take some drugs to help this process along. So we resound and dance with things we know about the world via media, in the same way that if I present to you “10 ‘for sure’” ways to improve your sex life with Thai women,” you will blend or critique your personal biography of sexual encounters and relationships experiences with what I have to say to you. And the result is powerful; it drives men to prostitution and scenarios. It drives them to see things in a different way to afford special allowances. Yours sincerely
Dear David, Read this book. In fact I want to encourage you to take on my services as life story coach and you can write your own adventure. You may not be astonished to learn that our book is not about getting laid, nor is it one which will highlight how depraved South East Asia is, nor is it one which serves as an argument for prostitution, or bringing about political or ideological or philosophical means for its end. In this sense it is firmly about what the radical and celebrated Psychiatrist R.D. Laing termed ‘the politics of experience’.8 If I put it simply, this is how not only what you know is open to consensus opinion of those who laud it over you, but also the sum total of what you can perceive or ‘take in’ as a free thinking individual. You would not be able to purchase sexual access to women unless you had the cash to do so. That it was legal or semi-legal. And there were people in the place who were willing to sell ‘sexual accesses’. There are many more factors, such as your ability to come and go, whether the women are attractive, what your views and attitudes are regarding prostitution are or is, and so forth.
David Gotlieb 8
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Laing, R.D. (1967) The Politics of Experience New York: Balantine.
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Perhaps this should be expanded to speak of the ‘Global Politics of Experience’. The Franz Fannon knifes of the natives are still being sharpened, while puck, wit and charm of the whoremongers goes on and on, over and past me, past you, as your still warm seat and hot hotel room bed is reoccupied and some serious humping begins yet again. Their post-colonial penis wielding is as perked as it ever was. The Chinese echo-echo of the mongering hotel, built with no market research or sensitivity and so you have the entire floor to yourself, the understanding when you’re ripped off in the morning reeking of stale alcohols to a very sober and austere staff that have seen it all, so much times before, there are local beer signs everywhere. Pissed beds, meds, empty wallets, aftershave. This is not to say that you will roll over, hands and feet in the air, a present of your soft underbelly and accept passively what we have to say here, nor does it suggest that material in this book will definitely work for you, @ least not in the short term. My god man, we are merely sharing the fruits of our own, and others’ experiences and the way they have offered the gift of learning for ‘the’ me and us. You will morally judge, you will invoke learning on superficial and deep levels, and while you do, your mind will continue racing as it always does in South East Asia. This is not
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anaesthesia, it is a de-numbing, and it is an awakening, herald! This text, people, is just the pebble dropped from the clifftop way below to the raging engulfing ocean outside Winslow Wong’s seashell room in New England. It’s rough as hell out there in winter, so he tells me on the phone to Cambodia, but the pebble still makes a ripple which we can all feel. Small stimulus big effect. It comes in that space between flashes of lighting, or short times, insights that one can’t help but make when you have to hand too much booze, drugs [recreational and prescription] and sex with young tight clean smooth bodies. Remember, as we go along, that we are looking not only at the story, the thought content, but also taking note of the structure and context of that content, at the very nature of thought itself. Why not, if you have time on your hands… I do. This is ‘social’ learning. Parents, you if you are one, your own parents if you ever had them, teach or train to discriminate intellectually, emotionally and morally from much the same variety of sources – society, the state, ‘social’ly accepted convictions; family and local milieu, even barworld idle chit-chat the hse have to set market price opinions. They do so casually and formally. ‘This’ is ‘this’, and ‘that’ is ‘that. ‘This’ is ‘home’, you are miles from home. You can’t leave this behind.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
impression of moral authority and some explicated sense of That is ‘social’ glue if nothing else.
‘fair-play’.
Best wishes
Hey but shyt, let us not for a moment forget Operation Northwoods, a secret US military plan from the early 1960s, that is every conspiracy theorists bad dream come true. The author James Bamford who documented this travesty describes it as a "secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba."9 The U.S. planned to attack and kill some of their own to win hearts and minds at the public propaganda level - the stuff of all conspiracy theories. And there are those that rage right now concerning whether it was military aircraft which hit the Twin Towers. The relationship between political leaders and intelligence institutions is a great deal like a hall of mirrors.
W.H. Wong ………. *** Dr. Wong’s Notebook entry 230556: Case study 203 – American Police officer Coercion to form this ability, to categorise good from bad, to form moral opinion in children and those experiencing trans-cultural re-education is sometimes impressed violently, with smacking or beating as reinforcement, or the smashing or stealing of your possessions by hookers. But by being overly cautious and secure, you may become a castle to your body that is a prison. “I am open, no blade can penetrate.” How similar this parodies the international stage where the use of force is a cogent attempt to coerce certain behaviours on a trans-national level. But, as most of us know, this largely depends upon someone creating @ least an
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Let us get real here, if superpower, nothing to fear, America is willing to blow up their own to create alternate realities then where is alpha and omega? It is as elusive as the beginning and end of midnight, it is as non-existent. Covert, counterespionage agents from both camps killing 9
Bamford, J. (2001) Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency New York: Doubleday.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
themselves. Intelligence, counter-intelligence, ComSec I Corps. All kinds of permutations of killing. All controlled from on high, moral decisions made there in the perceived interests of the masses.
behaviour belies anything like the existence of any ‘common’ sense. Take for example that displays of women's uncovered ankles count as sexually explicit and offensive in some cultures, but not in most Western cultures nowadays (although they once did: the display of a female ankle in Victorian times was regarded as most risqué).
Consider the well-known statement: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." One may wonder why some truths are selfevident. Not all men and women are created equal. Perhaps @ birth but after that process of teaching has begun and ends they are elevated to the ranks of normal members of society. For bog standard off-the-peg humdrum counter-culture commentators like R.D. Laing read for this the idea and label: ‘insane’. No concept, held as a belief or dogma, is evident in itself without proof or reasoning – that is selfevident. How can you have self-evidence in a world of interpretation, misinterpretation and miscommunication? Evidence, is never a thing or the event itself it is merely an artefact or set of cognitions regarding the fact. Elective. Where do they come from? The scene? It is that which is helpful in forming a conclusion or judgement and it relies upon education and interpretation. After all much human
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What will it be in the cool rational European Union and United Nations and ultra connected 50 years from now when the Chinese have reached their ascendancy? When Africa has a mass of Chinese Restaurants, a glut, an overflow [they are the largest growth industry in that continent just now]. Hong Kong Kung Fu gangsters and their morality and mores? What evidence does she lend your lawyers that she loves you? ………. *** Dear Otto ‘Social’ learning can also be witnessed when men and nations chase fantasies of themselves based upon the presumed fantasies and utopias of others. Surely this is what happens when individuals and nations view porn. For
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
example, an estimated four in 10 British male adults have accessed porn on the Internet.
And so porn funnels millions of pounds in taxes which are used to provide much-needed goodly public services, from schooling, to health care, to policing, and getting messages out about oneself and one’s inhibitions overseas. In 2003, the US pornography industry is estimated to have grossed more than $8 billion, greater than the combined revenue of the US television networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC ($6.2. billion). That is many South East Asian short times and long haul flights. Punk Hippy-style dues with beanie hats in California and what they think is amorality provide for his jacking (these hippy-punks are the male correlate of Britney and Beyoncé). Of course they support women’s rights, and so do their actresses. One hadn’t had ‘’proper’ sex, for five months, she just got out of the habit.
Pornography, and its horrific and terrific gateway: whatdoyouknow! Men’s dedication to their fascination for women; is one of the world's most profitable industries, generating thousands of jobs and contributing hugely to the wider economy. Dozens of studies have verified that men more than women desire a larger number of sex partners over various time intervals, are more likely to consent to sex with an attractive stranger, have twice as many sexual fantasies, are more likely to patronise prostitutes, and relax their standards for a partner more in the short-term context.10 I saw you peeking at me… These findings are universal and transcend societal boundaries. They have now been implicated and replicated across 10 world regions in a study of 52 nations from around the world. In sum, men and women have confronted different adaptive problems over the long course of human evolutionary history and as a consequence have evolved different sexual strategies. Lying that you will hang about is one. He probably lies about the size and nature of his cache.
Yours sincerely W.H.Wong ………. *** II An introduction to the man who came to occupy not the White House, but the white room – is it an annex?
The Hall of Mirrors, was erected to the glory of Louis XIV. It
10
Buss, D. M. (2003). The evolution of desire: Strategies of human mating (Rev. ed.). New York: Basic Books.
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is the chief masterpiece of the Palace of Versailles. Its
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
construction disrupted the order of the salons known as the Apartment of the Planets.
guys and so they forget their category mistake and work her hard till her husband gets home. It’s still going on. She was the granddaughter of the man who would come to occupy the white room. Her mother had suffered privation in the New Economic zones after the war, as it was assumed that her father was a turn coat and had talked to the Americans when he was captured. In fact, he had never spoken again after his capture. His last sounds came as he fell towards the dark South China Sea from 10,000 feet.
The dedication ceremony of a namesake in Saigon in the 1950s, was supervised by a government minister. Boasting women of every hue and persuasion from all corners of the French Colonies, it was a virtual French colony stamp book. The Hall was not for poor men and soldiers, and so it contrasted with the Annamite “Bamboo” brothel shacks for the natives and the lower ‘social’ layers of the colonials. The owners of the brothels and flower boats, which are houseboats in the channels, worked without license, and were free to carry on their trade. Much later Dick and Tommy, two smart assed Harvard MBA grads, jumped down and slithered their Lacrosse asses aboard a similar boat on the perfume lake in Hue to work upon an inviting woman. “This is so fucking great Tom,” They ‘spit roast’ and work the women while banging out high fives twenty to the dozen to each other over her arched back. To be sure they weren’t sure how to perform this, but they’d seen tons of megabytes of pics depicting ‘how to do’. “When in Rome Tom,” Dicky struggled out as he humped energetically. Yes, they had seen it a zillion billion times on the Internet and they had even jacked each other to it in their private rooms. They mistook this for humdrum experience out there. In fact it was the first time this woman had had two men, and to be honest the first time she had engaged in pay for play sex. These are fit
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………. *** One of the first visitors to the Hall of Mirrors in Saigon when it opened in the 1950s was a young man of slight build, from a wealthy land-owning family North of Saigon. He was teaching economics in one of the universities, having previously studied in France. It was there that he developed a penchant for women with long beautiful necks, necks that aligned in aesthetic form with their long legs and large full buttocks, women mainly from the Congo. These nudes pervaded his mind persistently, haunting him in his private rooms. He wanted to marry one of these figures, but he was unsure of the dispositions of these women. He was a non-political young man, who unsuspectingly became yet another character in this plot, some years later as a semi-forgotten prisoner in a banal freezing whitewashed
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
room. A room attested to by default, created and paid for gratuitously by the US taxpayer.
This is creativity, really, @ its human best.
On that balmy night so long ago, the man who would be so lost to the world in a white freezing room with no penis entered the Hall of Mirrors worse for drink. Absinthe. These nudes. It was a house of 1200 women but he had come to recognise from such a Malthusian glut, some that were good for him. It is always comes that some stars twinkle more brightly than others. Beyond his Congolese, whom stood out like beacons, others also recognised him from the glut of men who would come calling all day and all night under the glass crystal chandeliers and elaborate mirrored halls and private rooms and anti-rooms. For waiting opium-smokers, like him, there would be a pipe. Although few of the girls smoked, they were all impeccably instructed in preparing pipes. Asians became incorrigible pipe smokers through colonisation, where once opium it is now yaba. Dick and Tommy’s women struck up a pipe after coitus; they shared it, east and west alike. To Tom’s delight Dick spewed into the perfumed lake. Humans of all hues and persuasions are also incorrigible pattern makers and seekers, and where none exist, they will invent them. They give them names and may revise their category systems. So essential for colonies.
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The man that would later have no penis had a name the women had given him, it was something akin to ‘monkey’ – this did not insult him as it was a term of endearment rather like the English middle classes use ‘Darling’. Not for his money was this man admired, he paid standard price and moderate tipping, and nor for his looks, which were average, but he was admired for his soul. The women knew that this was a man; he was beyond the scourge of repetition. For this man, there were some women that were superb, some were moderate, and some were a poor fit in temperament and by their physicalities including their vaginas. He knew this was guttural, unquestionable objective occurrence beyond his mood or disposition on a particular night. He had worked it out through practice, through sampling, and trying to challenge his findings, say by drinking or smoking too much. It was almost like he was trying to be scientific, an empiricist, a butterfly collector, but in reality, it was never handled this clinically, he was a lover that exceeded by subtlety. He had some je neis se qua, some charisma. It was always handled as matters of great subtly, and he exceeded grandly in this fashion.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
He was never attracted other attractions such as the “Doll House,” over fifty girls, none older than 12, who served clients for sadomasochistic games, or the “House of Pain,” where very young girls got injections of heroin to make them physically and psychologically dependent.
Bataille and Michel Foucault following Freud’s classic treatment of this nexus in Civilization and Its Discontents.11
They were to him, @ best mythical and he knew no one that ventured there. IV These accounts have been criticised as fantasy, pandering to the interests of a western audience in search of eroticising the East, the dream of every perverted fantasy being found in some Old Saigon or Bangkok basement bar. The citation for the ‘Doll house’ and the ‘House of Pain‘ derives from a 1960s pot-boiler book ‘Saigon after Dark’ that reads more like soft porn than a rigorous historic work, and could be fiction and fantasy against the escalating war rather than anything to do with lived experience. Transgressive works glorify and promote immoral or illegal behaviour. And its preferred subject of transgression is sexual violence or more generally, the psychological link between the two instinctual drives of sex and violence; sex and violent death, rape n’ murder, a point, as will be investigated below, that has been specifically stressed by critics such as Georges
Failure to punish or condemn such conduct is itself considered to transgress moral boundaries thus the idea of such brothels. But then this may be also the fantasies and ‘observations’ of a depraved westerner. Just like in the mind, some things come to the forefront of consciousness, whilst others, remain at the wings, in the unconscious mind. It requires someone to bring them out to conscious scrutiny. Art must undermine pieties, challenge torpid institutions, and must be continually, again and again, fresh and disturbing. Paranoia paraded as art is ludicrous. So must be accounts of the East. Accounts of the East have gone on a long time. A Dutchman, Gisbert Heeck, refers to the conditions in which The Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) staff lived at Ayutthaya, the Siamese capital, in 1655, notes that: “Most of them had concubines or mistresses, in order (so they said) to avoid the common whores and they maintained them with all necessities, buying or building houses for them... (though) they 11
Freud, S. (1989) Civilization and Its Discontents New York: W. W. Norton & Company
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rarely refer to them other than as whores, sluts, trollops and the like, up to and including the director, for hardly anybody was free of this failing. Anybody who earned enough to keep such a trollop had to have one, even if it meant they had not a penny to their name afterwards - indeed, some were deep In debts, as I saw for myself.� Sounds familiar to today? The point is not that medieval Siam was to blame for having prostitutes - London, Amsterdam, and indeed any port in Europe were undoubtedly much the same. To bear this out from an early Thai source, we know that in the 1680s a particular Thai official was licensed by the state to run a monopoly of the prostitution business in Ayutthaya, using 600 women bought or enslaved for various offences. Mid-19th century Bangkok had an extensive prostitution industry, and this centred on the Chinese district of Sampeng Lane. Here, green lights instead of the usual red signalled houses of ill repute. In the 20th century, Western soldiers first came to Thailand in serious numbers in the wake of the Japanese surrender at the end of the Second World War. An American, Jorges Orgibet, was a press officer with the US Office of War Information. Later Orgibet went go on to become a
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
distinguished Bangkok-based journalist and co-founder of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand. He remained in Thailand for 37 years and was, @ all times, an exceptionally good friend of this country. He remembers his arrival in Bangkok, one of only 50 Americans in the entire country @ the time. In terms of nightlife, he remembers there were 85 cabarets scattered across the city with names like Great World, Happy World, Venus Club and (shades of Sampeng) Green Lantern. The greatest concentration was on one block of Nares Road, "with something like 2,000 `hostesses' for the asking." Other attractions of the time included "a nine-storey building on Yaowarat Road, reputedly the world's largest whorehouse", plus a plethora of stripclubs, dance halls, tea houses, etc., real competition for the Saigon Hall of Mirrors.12
KINO< KINO Bangkok in the late 40s even had the reputation of being one of the blue movie capitals of the world. More than Hollywood? One top-floor loft on Ban Moh houses a Thai film studio devoted entirely to blue movie production.
12
Prostitution in Thailand: Facing Hard Facts by Donald Wilson and David Henley, in Bangkok Post, 25 December, 1994
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
In explaining the number and range of such establishments in Thailand, Jorges Orgibet comments:
them came to form part of the reason he hacked his precious sex off.
"Cabarets were a direct descendant of the Thai ramwong dances found in almost every town and at every fair. Live shows, blue movies, young virgins were touted by rickshaw pullers and bicycle samlor drivers long before the touts of Patpong and Petchburi came into existence ... It was 300,0000 Japanese troops during World War II ... and the 30,000 British and Indian troops who followed them that helped fill Bangkok's cabarets. Most of the patrons, after all, were Siamese and Chinese.”
He had been ashamed when his wife gave birth to a daughter. She loved him in the most excruciating and traditional Vietnamese way possible. But western processes had killed something in him. He objected, and as he did, he became more and more political. He would not be ruled by his desires. He replaced the monks robe with a fanatical ideology which demanded Vietnamese independence, and the result was that he donated his manhood to his nation and culture. It required as sacrifice in his mind, or Vietnam would never be free. He wanted all other converts to do the same, he expected it of them. At this time there was so much expectation about. But to his disappointment few did. And freedom was everything, even a penis; it was arbitrary instead of mainline.
What a legacy!!!
III
White room boy remembered his nights in Pigalle, Paris, in the midst of a subtlety non-Euclidian space. He used his penis to great effect then. As a departure point. The bugger so much loved the necks of the Congo women. They sat on his face all night. The haunting memories of
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………. *** The young man in Saigon came to understand over the years he didn’t need the bordello; he had a wife and young daughter. His first real lie to himself and his first sacrifice. But he had ridden upon the women with fervour, and with sublime delight, and he had learned to ride properly in France, Paris, and the amoral and decadent faraway imperialist west.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
He recounted that some ladies were difficult to ride certainly @ first, the majestic black princesses with their exaggerated figures, a real challenge for his slim frame, but he could intuitively tell that it as he that needed to adjust his technique and positioning. And they afforded him those rights and honours.
would be on hand. But both would be locked away and denied, and so while not truly understanding themselves, they understood some partial of their sacrifice and needs.
They were not to be relegated into the ‘poor fit’ category as of yet, they would not be banished to far away pavilion rooms as the fodder of other wealthy military men and officers. When entering the Grande Hall of Mirrors, the man felt intensely alive, in fact he felt reborn again, every time. As he emerged into the diffused light from 500 chandeliers, it was like emerging from the womb, suffused with first time light inside his mind’s eye, he could almost hear the voice, the glimmer of voice of his mother and aunties. So it was all right, comfortable.
V
………. *** And so it was with his counterpart the Japanese salary man as he left the metal tube marked ‘JAL’ and entered the great arrival hall of Don Muang. It was unknown. He hardly knew that across time and space he would become a parody, a distorted mirror image of the white room man. Whereas the white room man existed in sensory depravation, the Japanese man would be denied basic needs and wants whilst higher needs, such as that for sex and drugs entertainment
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So much promise, but it was not known as such then.
The author Albert Camus commented that each successive generation must breathe new life into the old myths, rebirth myths, and so on, so let’s think Bruce Lee in the movie Enter the Dragon as he moved through the mirrored room like a Rhizome. Shit, so aware, that is my myth, so sinuously and elegantly looking for, searching out the enemy, to be responsive to the enemy’s presence. First withdraw, and then wait until their ego is satisfied, and then fuck them from the beyond. Like a dragon move here and there. That’s what one of the authors of experience does in his practice and about as linear as he is in theory or on paper. NonEuclidean. You, you!! This is what Vietnamese hse shout as you pas there dowdy shacks. There is something in this; “you, YOU!” beyond it sounding rude. Now, dear reader, can we draw attention to your own self as you sculpt out your own myth, you build it
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
and bind it with what you know and what you have come, through hard earned yards, to know, to knowledge.
glass and who is that that stares back at you, with familiarity he wondered?
We shall today learn to move the same way, philosophically, @ least metaphorically, as we liase and encounter whores (which we shall call ‘hse’) in heatseeking locations (global locations where whoring is rife – including but not only Amsterdam, Edinburgh, New York, Paris Tokyo, Melbourne, London.)
Then it came from behind, from the void, pictures vaguely formed, some come finally to focus, and words arise from silence-.
Bow to your fucking sensei! I assume the responsibility of guide and true king. “you, YOU!” I assume dictorial an authoritarian control. I am the author of my own experience after all, and to paraphrase the famous words of Ivan Karamazov, ‘where God is dead and all is permitted’, then I have more control. ………. *** So back to the Japanese man’s vestal trip to early 1990s Bangkok. Before he had time hardly to book into a hotel and eat a benign sushi dinner, before he faced up to a selection of 100+ women in a large Bangkok massage parlour catering for Japanese tastes. It was very expensive, but select. He braced himself. The Japanese man noticed with some delight how some women reminded him of his childhood sweethearts. He saw in her face, maybe two or three of those that were on offer. In these places, then, you would gaze through the
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Mizumi Kuroswara! This was a partial reflection, a glimpse from the child’s eye. Japan’s media has turned the once innocuous schoolgirl into a sex object, making largely unsubstantiated claims about the availability of under-age sex for cash. The refraction, reflection of reflection, imagination again, a flurry of movement, a shuffling of the hands, in arcane subconscious involuntary movements of erotic anticipations. The girl from down the lane. But even the young ones are acutely aware that because of their youth they are a sought-after 'brand' in a brand-conscious society. The ever prized queen Lolita nude of his heart. A shuffling of the heart, a remembrance of young sweet tender love once forgotten. This man like his companions know it is legal in Tokyo for men to have sex with children over the age of 12, they object to, and experience discomfort with women their own age in part due to the growing sophistication of Japanese women. A nation with one of the world's highest literacy rates so obsessed with cartoons, women are reading and travelling more. The men are continually working and dreaming of
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
unfettered schoolgirls. His last reading of lolikon depicted a schoolgirl being raped by giant alien bear creatures. Then she masturbated and this somehow unwittingly summoned evil aliens who raped all her schoolgirl friends with thick, slimy tentacles. Then there was a cute, talking jelly fish on the schoolgirl's shoulder, and then it morphed into a giant bat that killed a wolf creature that was trying to rape her. Later she was tied up naked and raped by regular wolves who lapped at her crotch.
no prerogative here, no voice, and no authority. Repressed memories of a Japanese man rekindling his youth. “How dare he” says the voice over ‘Aunty June’ – truly reprehensible and that is unfair and downright unjust in this world. He had choice and he did choose – within the limits set for him by establishing his ‘Darling’ massage. Even his nephew loved this genre.
And as they do, you do remember, you just remember and no more, a glimpse from the periphery of vision, the veil, what is it like to desire again like you once did, so long ago, so intense the brochure that is thrust in your hand by the papasan, or originally, the tuk-tuk driver, who no sits parked tallying his catch of the day. This is what Japanese man felt and knew. He had fondled a schoolgirl on a crowded commuter train. But here it was wide open.
“This is truth,” ventured the Japanese man respectably, under his breath, with no other Japanese in earshot. “enjo kosai” roughly translated as “compensation dating.” He had Friends who had already indulged in this form of relationship with two schoolgirls in Tokyo and it was very expensive. One’s wife was noticing from the household finances. A more literal interpretation is “support-exchange,” which also describes the transaction between clients and women who barter sexual favors for financial support in the shape of rent, dinner and presents. His poise was of a Samurai fully formal about to engage his resolute acceptance of death.
His youngest selections are termed “superstars” – they are vividly described in English as the delightful: “these beautiful young ladies will invoke in you true feelings of youthful love, lost love certain now recaptured.” They twinkle brightly, with sharp fresh eyes. These stars take the breath away from the Japanese man, who holds himself so as not to give too much away. He’d change one thing though. He’d prefer them, as many do, in Schoolgirl décor. The western tabloid agony aunt recoils in disgust, vomits, she has
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Yeah, he is on the verge of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. These girls who would work on the man @ the psychological level, and were a little more expensive than the older women who would manualise and masturbate men to senselessness, they knew the internal psychological and
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
physiological anatomy of men, all men, any man, and in special ways with special, equally super, erotic acupuncture techniques where upon you would fantasy regarding your previous encounters, your gaze upon “superstars”. There was no alpha and omega in these intense sessions of masturbation, hardcore ‘making your mark indelible’ Thai masturbation.
This is a desire, an active sense, rather than ‘coping’. In Euro-America most research, most of life, seems to be organised around the intimation there is indeed a reality out there and beyond ourselves, and more often than not this is described as the ‘‘social’’ – the ‘them’ those mundane nonproactive masses that help certain focus groups achieve notoriety and force policies that frankly are often inhumane, and otherwise downright insane, and anti-’social’, unforgiving and fucking ruthless. They are the ‘social’.
Midzone girls gave a balanced bang for the buck. They could screw and massage and were wonderful eye candy as well. They were also mid-range in age. Early twenties. Even so there were some extraordinary beauties evoking psychosexual and optical illusion affects. One of these looked like Mizumi and others, her school friends, and the Japanese man’s mouth went dry. He believed they dreamt at night of meeting complicated men like him. Little did he know that she, ‘Mizumi’, would later become his ‘wife’ and go up and down the slippery slope to blow guys in a skull-fucking bar off Suhkumvit? How obvious is that? Dimwit ventures the western reader. Then she, they, will leave him alone one day sadly to perish, sadly, with no one receiving. ………. ***
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That is all. Nothing more. The rest is simply abyss, the dark, the ignoble and ignorant, “”she was a topper of a ride, know what I mean mate, no panties either, eh what’s that about then?” Utters the grounded, common-sense English punter in the style of early morning TV hosts. j 1,000,000 potential and actual punters, whoremongers and lovers hit Thailand a year. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Consultant, Aid worker - they bring so, so much distributed energy and wealth. Sometimes disturbed energies - so many organisms orgasming and coalescing in a place of Eros, many deaths there too. A silent man and his 3 year old child charred and burned hung from a tree and now front page pic in the Thai newspaper. No page three nudes, on a regular basis. Not good for ma and pa tourism so made quiet. They are there to help, intervene, avoid or participate. So you
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
have waited patiently for this moment, periods of years, months, days, hours, and minutes. Waiting for the day of your omega, your departure forever, waiting to board forever, for a flight that will take forever.
Maybe you like me, want to be like a Greek hero, or @ least think in such epic terms. The Japanese man did, so did the white room Vietnamese man. You; like them, and me would then embark in searching out the Holy Grail of bodies. The single ultimate Thai ass in a tidal wave of barworlds and ass. This would be our Odyssey. Our nevergettingthere – itself a symptom of the lack of patience in age of instant gratification with web and cell phone, oh and microwave. Even after removal of his penis, the white room man continued, unfortunately for him, to find that perfect ass, to realise it, to let it conquer all that we had thought about abstractly and all that we had ever seen and felt. The race in question is the prize. You seemed to wait at the boarding gate forever, Japanese man. Now, you enter empowered. You are king. Ladies and Gentlemen, Elvis has entered the Nana Plaza Entertainment Complex.
So much energy coalescing as orgasms in the multiplicity of heatseeking locations across Bangkok, same same time, then death of man, the birth of a baby girl in Toul Kork, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to a 14 year old Viet girl. The baby is halfblack, the father is also destined to perish. As we all are.
You have waited so very patiently, @ home, like the Greek god Pan hovering above the abyss, and indicating the nature of fear and the unknown as a positive and constructive trait.
………. *** You checked out images online, a few shapely tight female Asians just to peak your interests. Thanks. The Greeks reflected upon themselves as a collective and discovered they had to do some interesting adaptations to the human form, such as distorting it in lawful ways to exaggerate the brain's aesthetic response to that body. You can’t really believe you will see and touch some flesh like that. After waiting forever.
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C. That line drawn in the sand, represents the idea that we’re torn, just as Freud recognised, torn between the poles of a freedom and notions of security. You want to move on, even just to punish her for her indiscretions, but you just don’t want to lose her, just. But you like to be out of range. Out here there is no negotiation, its do or die. Better the devil you know... you are between the deep blue seas...and well, etc. This is social glue. The killer moves right into your
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
face and you do nothing to help yourself. You are baby surrounded by a caring mother and doting aunties.
revitalises people, as it is only partially susceptible to stratagems.
IV
You can stem the flow of serendipity but you can’t stop the tide. But the man next to you in the bar, the Japanese man is not @ all talkative, this hardly surprises you, it seems like a common cultural trait from your point of view.
So you came laden with myths, about the place you were coming from and where you are going to and how and who you are. Where did they come from, words rise up from silence, they tell you what to expect what to want and need, what to pack and what to leave behind. The Internet is an amazing depository of thoughts and experiences captured in words. Everything from medical to where to get the best blowjob, with which women and how much you paid. There are exotic food and drink near-by. You view the JPEG. How can you leave it all behind? Travel as experience in itself, of itself - the unavoidable confrontations with that insurmountable idea called ‘self’ on that voyage, as well as the opportunities to transcend the mundane, familiar kinds of existence you have let yourself to indulge upon. This must be sacrificed; it must perish under the weight of experience.
Travel is an extroverting activity and much more controlled and refined, it
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Travel supplants the smells, feel and sights of everyday life and routine, in doing so it makes the visible the invisible and vice versa. It focuses attention on the minutiae, the granular aspects of wants and needs that of those who live there take for granted, and they are highlighted and take on new focus. Travel; in its problematic, which bus takes us to where and how much could it be, how long will it take, does it matter? In its uncertainties, will there be a guesthouse? In its serendipity, what and whom shall we meet or encounter today, will they mean something, and will we learn something of or from them? Travel trivialises fears and anxieties themselves borne of a cruel isolationism, modern ignorant parents and children, a jackboot routine, stasis, depressions, fixed positioning in ‘social’ or geographical space and place. It frees us from the whitewashed jail room that we cling to like our rag doll or comfort blanket, the mindless unending loop of white noise
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
and silly pop. You can feel entirely like a non-conformist, come anarchist, punk or hippy, with little to hardly any reason to march to a different drummer.
those aunties disappear and die and your wife leaves you and she never loved you, what then?
You ‘go ethnic’ – you abandon your reservations, you get drunk in charge in strange dangerous places. You give in to abandon. You can accomplish all this on the move and more. It is the actuary from Sydney with his fresh tattoos and his laundered our unlaundered ethnic wear that makes the traveller a traveller, the ethnic in turn, now mimics the mimicker. Someone who toys and flirts on the boundaries with the pavilion of mirrors, as long as they can continue to eat cheese and tomato toasties and not pay for, you know, ‘it’.
………. *** Surely, Picasso, that infinite fountain of practical wisdom and cunning craft had it right whilst admiring an exhibition of children's art. He commented: “When I was their age I could draw like Raphael, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like them.” He also noted that: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” When that smiling mother and
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Travelling helps us resurface childlike memories, the ways and means and patterns of thinking which are like being childlike, which are curious, wide-eyed, those that enable a view of the world as a bigger place then ourselves. We can glimpse again a world which is unfathomable, infinite and somehow all encompassing, with everything in its place. It is not a map. It can be rebirth. Who will act as parent or auntie? And so: “... Why don’t you step into the pavilion of mirrors... handsum man?” The curtain is pulled back on yet another fairground attraction and glass mirrors and glimpses, snapshots of female flesh, nice flesh, decent boots, eyes; someone shoots a look, people, some waving smiling, friendly, open “hellos” – “everything for you best happy.” A sticker is placed on your shirt making you part of something quickly: “Magic Theatre: Not for everyone. Club Berlin…Cool as a cucumber.” Its on all the girls inside, its more than marketing, or maybe just a powerful form of it.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
A girl walks towards you in the aisle, looking @ you like you are known, meaningful to her, yeah, man, her long lost Ulysses; on her T-shirt she wears the slogan "Please love me, " and on her back, you can see in the Mirror, "Not you, again, stupid." You hardly bother about the back; a women’s ‘front’ offends, western ‘sisters’ who would p[persecute you for even being there and thinking these thoughts, but it is truly unusual for people suffering from narcissistic personality disorder to seek treatment for their condition. Still you down a Valium; just to keep thoughts in tow. And instead, you ‘object’ to a woman’s ‘front’, the women’s front, and choose ‘back’. Anyway, you like it real and rough, bitter sweet; the truth you don’t like lies and the virtual. “It’s cool hanging with hse, real authentic ethnic experience, and I am not paying for it.” “You used to pay these low life women to fuck them in front of their communities and families.” David Gottleib, a U.S. police officer on a mission comes clean, more so than the conventionally wise. “Now you want the same again but time has moved on, so have the communities and families. So much money has flowed through that you would be paying western prices for something you used to get for a ‘purple’ [500 BAHT]. You want the real thing.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
That means the family are involved and so is the concrete bunker home or wooden shack and the disparaging and jealous neighbour-observers.”
They are called ‘watchers’ in prostitution movements. You perform for them, they sit and observe your rapture and gargles, and you pay them for ‘it’. As ‘it’ is anything and everything in their purview. When you leave your domestic scene in the hotel with your lover, walk the ‘hall of shame’ past other punters and straight-laced hotel receptionist and concierge, and tell her you must go home, she relates you to the ‘thin man’ who had the room next door. He only took short times and was always silently coming and going. She thinks that now you will be just like the thin man when you leave her. You will fall off her precipice. Next. V Lay it on to me baby! You demand the fantasy that was once fulfilled – that of these women being horny 24/7, not getting enough cock, that they are degenerate, that they will do anything for money, that they admire you cos their boyfriends only have small dicks. Nice thoughts, great fantasy.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
‘Them’ not real men. They are a joke thought Gotty, packing heat and gun in his pocket, Officer David Gotlieb, at home a proficient [actually inept] New York beat cop but a new entrant to the world, wealth and glory of South East Asia. He is of the opinion that he generously offers an entire education for the family from behind the thin curtain, from the old to the very young, they can all take it in what way they receive it, they can revel in it, it can disgust or jar them, whatever it takes to get a good hard on and have a unbelievable sustained orgasm, whatever competence you have!
very boundaries he hates and excruciating limits of the senses he loves. America treated him differently. Oh so cruel for years then so deep, deep inside, the layers and re-layers of thought and memory when you don’t have a penis to pull to kill some time, no penis and libido to make you, help you project into the future a dream, a fantasy, an alternate American reality.
Other foreigners would frown on this, but “hey, screw them; this is my vacation, my movie, my dollar, my libido.” It is their initiation, first hand, to just how debauched and fucked up westerns can get. They can cope. ………. *** People like David Gotlieb, a NYPD police officer-in-charge came to be the antithesis of a prisoner held securely in a guarded white room held captive for years, naked with aircon on and white noise hissing and leaking over towards the horizon of eternity (the limits of what he can hear and consider) totally forever and licking like demons over the
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Like a smug married who doesn’t like kids, nor want any, anytime, anywhere. But neither are you a rabid man, dying of dehydration and kidney failure, nothing really to do with America directly (except that his ‘wife’ has several affairs with some wellhealed guys) his coarse Japanese inflamed tongue rendering him incapable of screaming (or screwing), its coarse texture enthralling and intriguing him in some strange swollen way. This is why on the bus to Trat, the Japanese man’s ‘wife’, en route to the Paradee Resort to meet an American, looked at the Thai newspaper picture and suggested that this man was Japanese. She was illiterate and couldn’t read her own language; otherwise she would have seen that this was a Thai gangster and his son who had been hung. She thought that all Japanese died in the way her ‘husband’ did. With massive tongues and bloated blackened bodies.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
The Japanese man had been waiting to be saved by his ‘wife’ again in the same way the many farangs wish to stave her from prostitution. His psyche dictated that he wanted to be a prostitute and was not that far off, not @ all. It was a kind of creative auto-eroticism, like when some men jack-off with a noose round their necks. His thing was being deprived of water, but given free range to TV. Therefore, he was close...
Asian pussy. However, he was used to video conferencing with his profession- corporate law, but this was way, way better fun. Corporate law in Japan was so excruciating. The Japanese man knew he was now better off doing nothing in Bangkok 12.
In doing this he became one of the two unfortunate men used as benchmarks against any negative feelings we ever have when we visit or live in South East Asia. Certainly in this book. He, the indomitable Japanese man remembered his wife performing for some man using broadband in the comfort of their own home, their habitat’s paradox. A 200 BHAT a month concrete shell packed with the latest new technology and Sony security apparatus oh so fresh from Japan. The man enjoyed these mutual masturbation performances with the Japanese man just off camera, but still able to view proceedings secretly with an additional monitor [200500 YEN]. So many middle managerial Americans, decked out in their offices, jacking. These sessions were so authentic looking and intense that this American man booked a flight the next day and came to Thailand for first time for the real thing. He’d never been to Asia, but he was a aficionado of
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For the American, she had to go to a private room in the Paradee Resort, pre-booked via Internet months before. When there, to collect his, the American’s thoughts, while he was jacked, he had his butt hole screwed by expensive shoes he had bought on 5th avenue, by two of his best friends [willing to shout “you fuck my husband god now, OK?”]. All together this consortia recreated their online sessions in real time in real socio-physical circumstances. While this was happening, the Thai whore’s Japanese compulsive-obsessive ‘husband’/pet, was struggling with demons again. These were the demons of real human needs. Hunger and thirst. He tried in vain but no one was receiving. The neighbours frankly disapproved of him, and had come to view him discompassionately and actually wanted him dead as a soi rat. He was in a Japanese period drama in his head, and he loved it. Could he find this depth of agony in old Kyoto?
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
He was now Ronin, a masterless Samuri wander the wasteland of his mind.13
unconscious, even of those who have suffered at the hands of the east meets west conundrum.
His electricity and contact to the outside world was cut. It had been two weeks before, oh shit and coincidentally at the occurrence of the first shoe penetrating the butt of the American executive, John, who smoked an illicit joint and remembered winter at Kellog. He knew nothing of a Japanese man locked in the stinky putrid concrete bunker with his 50” Plasma screen TV and home cinema all in the middle of a massively populated great world city. The smell of his own shit in the heat of the afternoon. A silent TV. A heatseeking zonality.
VI
The Japanese couldn’t charge his mobile phone battery when the electric went off – maybe his last chance… he couldn’t think or visualise his way out of this physical deprivation. Eventually he stared at the TV like a mandala and started seeing pictures and entertainment shows. Documentaries. Must have been of the arkashic records, the collective 13
Many punters and mongers have also termed the first world, mostly the U.S., Europe and Australia as “the wasteland”, after the highly influential 433-line modernist poem by T. S. Eliot. It deals with the decline of civilisation and the impossibility of recovering meaning in life, and is apt to describing the come down after a vacation trip where sex addicts and other miscreants do up to 50 women in a month. Simply by doing this surely lends a strange dynamic to one’s life and psyche, where returning may make ‘home’ seem even more alienating than it was before.
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We simply don’t know anything about the physical outfitting, the technological possibilities, expertise or the motives of strangers. But you know your culture – of sorts.
What do you love about it, and what can you hate - write it down? It depends, I suppose, on where you sit within it, and how you view its values. ‘‘Men’’ in the west have long been faced with feminism and its translation into policies. For decades it's turned the table on them. Not so much a thorn in their side, but made men and women rethink who and what they are. Doublethink has been largely disabling. Only a few decades ago, selection pools for mates were reduced, the only ‘social’ rallying point was the church. Most were very local and linked to aspects like which church you were a member of, where you worked, various clubs and groups you may have been a member of, school and higher education establishments. People, think ‘Little house on the Prairie’. Collective wholes - such as “the
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
family” or “society” - were nothing more than the sum of the individual members who comprised them.
progressive @ the global level, and wholesome form the ‘social justice’ and human perspective. Males are judged, and today often ruthlessly by women and their menfolk supporters in society.
Such wholes were abstractions useful for indicating the dealings of people in a specific context. “Family” indicates one set of interactions, “bridge club” another. ………. *** Militaries and empire often resulted in extended pools, but class and distinction reduced them. We’ve all got a bit of good old Genghis Khan in us, and if we don’t we are drinking water which contains molecules of water that passed through his kidneys. The notion of Imperialists using ethnics for slave labour and for sexual gratification became frowned upon. And so it is today under globalisation. Under the auspices of ever green new policies aiming to prevent the establishment and sustenance of heatseeking zones, it is not good that men travel looking for gratifications. The problem is that this intervention is again @ the hands typically of occidental governments and enshrined in their foreign policies not only for other countries but their own citizens travelling aboard. But because they, the occidental, are ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’ this intervention is deemed as positive,
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At home, the newest version of the new man must try hard to please women and have to perform to impress women. In advertising this is captured in men being groped and tested in a perfect reverse psychology of the sexist male view. We’re meant to giggle at this. David Gotlieb and the Japanese man didn’t. We should laugh @ Desperate Housewives and get it. Some give it; many are intimidated by this gloss, and by other men who achieve with ease within this setting. Crack hse check it and make sense of it. They often say they pay lip service to the received view and still claim ass. But whatever the score is with you, in South East Asia, an underachiever and overachievers, a handsome man and a Quasimodo, an old man and a young man, a healthy bodybuilder and an elderly frail Parkinson’s victim, can still impress and open doors of the heart with dollar. What if you had no penis, what if you cut it off in protest because you were into your nation? This is the antithesis of post-colonial penis-wielding operations. It strikes panic.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
………. ***
regardless if you want it so or not. Whether you perform as well as she looks lets nothing to the imagination, and well...etc.
You think you know where you are @ and why you came to South East Asia, but you are in for surprise, but let’s face you don’t know really. You think you know her, your lover, you connected after all, the chemistry was right, you think you know yourself, but you are always changing, you are always changing her. So this is why you don’t know, really. Whether you like it or not you are like the two proverbial Zen students who were talking as they watched a flag waving in the wind.
The first observed that the flag was moving; the second countered that it was the wind that was moving, not the flag. When their master arrived, they asked him which of them was correct. Neither, the master replied. It is your mind that is moving, racing... as it always is. Hers, your lover’s is locked in the Pavilion of Mirrors; her heart is racing as it always does, especially after a pipe of methamphetamine. But it settles on the fact, coalesces, that she is a performer and she will get paid. Your mind settles on the fact she is acceptable or more than acceptable, she is exciting and inviting or not, she is the object of your desire,
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The mind is always moving, swirling with images, thoughts, perceptions, feelings. Beliefs, anxieties, obsessions and fears wax and wane according to the fortunes of time and maturity. Just like the men self-selecting to go and then arrange themselves in the barworlds of global heatseeking zones. Think of them, think of them all, I dare you. As the mind does it coalesces on words on this page, on the stored eidetic images of your loved one in your mind’s eye, or the object of your desire held in the memory card of your mobile phone. And as the mind moves, it can suffuse us with feelings of delight, passion, love, or curiosity. As the mind moves another metal tube in the sky unloads its cargo of other men, to inhabit your bars and your loved one, your Thailand, your Philippines, your Cambodia, your preferred seat in the bar, your favourite hotel room, your seat in the Internet cafe, your place in the barworld. 14 14
The ‘Barworld’ is a term adopted from ‘Mac Hathaway’ - a writer on Khmer400.com. My interpretation of this is a term that covers the experience or Weltanschauung of the hostess beer bar in heat seeking locations. ‘Weltanschauung’ is a term which refers to the 'wide worldview' or 'wide world perception' of a people, family, or person. In this case it is the world experienced by those working, visiting and playing in these bars. It is a shared consensus reality created by both parties. A person ‘going to their barworld’ means them joining a configuration of waterholes which defines them, or
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
personal online ‘social’ and economic existence, a new colonial empire.
VII Factual in the sense that it is neurologically correct, but what does it mean practically in terms of relationship building - the Graffiti of mind and architecture of human bondings, the comings and goings, the troops and their replacements? Impossible you might think to gloss over it all and give generalisations. Any that were made in the growing literature addressing the subject of prostitution in South East Asia, is piecemeal, fragmentary and dated.
The rampant growth of online avatar communities such as Second Life and World of Warcraft has enabled creating a defines their moods according to will or whim on the day or night. A Phnom Penh freelancer for instance will often tour her Barworld of Sharkeys, Walkabout and Martinis looking for tricks, unless she is barred from them. An ex-pat may also include thee bars and some others including bars which do not possess bargirls, say to engage in wider discussions and discourse which are not concerned with women.
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Designers, and the code they construct, go a long way toward making a virtual world real. They fill it with objects and spaces, properties and behaviors. But they are conceited and contrived. Even the best programming and the fastest computer still only provide a facsimile of real human skin. It is not like the ‘loose design’ of an assortment of bars and their configurations of girls, which organically develop as towns and cities did before town planning – mega planning initiatives. Anything ultra social online suffers, such as when too many people are trying to get their two pence in on a popular online chat. The result of this ordering principle is noise, a Malthusian glut of communications where quality insights, meaningful data, are completely lost. But nevertheless, soon such activities will be the backdrop which gloss over the boundaries which separate ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ in everyway the SEA prostitute experience melds reality and fantasy over a period of a couple of weeks spend @ the Paradee Resort or Walking Street, Sukhumvit, Patpong, Angles City, Santos, Phnom Penh, Cebu, Sari Ayu, Bintan… whichever, wherever. Legions of place experiences and thoughts, mirror fragments, graffiti of mind simultaneously resonate and triggers inherent questions about this existence, as it questions what the consequences
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
will be for first life, or reality. Remote Internet cameras will let punters check their girlfriends and ‘wives’ online. They will then see for themselves beyond the lies or spoken truth that they are chaste when they are gone. 1st world technology used for 3rd world adventures. The merging, melding of two apparent extremes, anonymity and intimacy, which characterises an important part of contemporary ‘social’ traffic within the heatseeker zones.15 The best-paid prostitutes are the ones with whom the client feels as though he is with his girlfriend, or with whom he has a Girlfriend Experience (GFE).
This is being cultivated, extended, augmented by ever more powerful multimedia, sisomo - sight, sound, and motion - experiences online. Your holiday partner can keep in touch via
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
‘social’ software webcams.16
like
Skype
and
But she links to what she knows to make sense of what she doesn’t, and so do you but you are surrounded in South East Asia, sensaroundsound and vision, with symbols, languages, occurrences, events which are unfamiliar. While on vacation you are cocooned with them with only perplexed others to help guide you out of the mess, then someone tells you, “It’s not the Thais you have to be careful of, the ex-pats...” If you travel with your friends then you can use defences set and accepted in your own locale to battle psychically with unfriendly behaviours and attitudes. Your psychological defences give into your visceral debauches. Long live the new flesh! But you may feel trapped if your heart, beyond your friends and locale, tells you to go one way, into unfamiliar territory out of curiosity or the need for more diversity, and your friends advise another. The ‘sure knowledge’ of the others would remain limited even after the contact. You get a little taste of being he prisoner in the white room, or the Japanese enjoying his demise. The sweet taste of having the proverbial Gucci high heel stuffed up your ass while you
15
Heatseeker zones are defined by the avatar El Tigre on the globalgentlemensclub.com as those areas or parts of the global economy which are marked by the availability of pay for play or P4P – where people can pay for sex and relationships.
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16 In an already overwrought lexicon of corporate jargon – Sisomo is the reason why television became such a successful advertising mechanism.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
masturbate. Your travelling companions’ logics, which once seemed so grounded and common-sense may seem to slip, and you begin to step in to the pavilion of mirrors, and are seduced in to its pleasures and tribulations. You run the risk of what may be termed existential shock.17
17
Whereas technological shock levels measure comfort with changes in your concept of the world, existential shock levels measure comfort with changes in your experience of what you are.
•
•
•
•
ESL0: The same as technological SL0. The legendary average person is comfortable with their self concept, identifying with the group into which they were born and with their own personal past. Most people, TV anchors, journalists, politicians. ESL1: Global perspective, not attached to a nationalistic/racial/religious identity. You don't wave the home team's flag because you realize you could have been born anywhere. Most progressive thinkers, singulatarians, transhumanists. ESL2: Lifestyle based on freedom from emotional/body boundary issues. Unrestricted gender identity (bisexual), identity not bound to one partner (open non-jealous relationships), comfortable with public nudity. Liberation counter-culture. ESL3: Self aware as a meme machine, not as one of the memes. Most ‘social’izing seen as ritual in a "church of the personality." One's own personal identity seen as an encountered program. Genuine critical thinkers, practicing contemplatives, people comfortable with deep existential uncertainty.
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•
ESL4: Unrestricted awareness, unbound exploring of mind spaces, totally debugged of the personality program. Lifestyle fully reworked to favor ongoing flexible mind hacking. Open awareness practitioners and not much else.
Existential shock levels 0, 1 and 2 are fairly self-explanatory. ESL3 introduces a shift in moment-to-moment sense of identity. For example, someone @ ESL3 knows that @ this moment a stored memory of meeting a friend yesterday is accessed, but it doesn't feel like "I am the one who was there." The idea that "I" am a continuous being who "went through" all of those experiences is one of the many disregarded confusions. And the lifestyle of someone @ ESL3 reflects this understanding. They have little interest in personal mementos, reminiscing about "my story," egotistically pumping up that story, arranging for future emotional experiences, etc. Many people @ ESL1 and ESL2 proudly claim that they are finished with irrational religious belief. Yet from ESL3, it is clear that they still believe in the reality of the personality identity as intensely as others believe in the reality of a mythical god, and that their lives are steeped in daily rituals with others which serve to maintain this irrational belief - such as romantic fantasy, activities to escape boredom or loneliness and hope hyping. At ESL4, someone not only disidentifies with the flood of personality programs but their mind freely explores the thousands of other programs that the mind can run that have nothing to do with personality reinforcement. The ability to fully explore all the possibilities of the mind is only active when no "hook" is left open for re-invoking a personality program that needs to assert one of its self-protecting identity claims. Someone @ ESL4 has put a great deal of work into gracefully extricating themselves from situations, relationships, and institutions which require them to propagate these memes. A side effect is that they tend to help create a parallel civilization that is friendly to freely exploring all the possibilities of the mind, knowing that people @ lower existential shock levels who
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
This is what can be a profound change in your experience of what you are. And this then has the follow-on effect of questioning what others are, and why they are that way. Both are the same ultimately. As Joseph Campbell sees in A hero with a thousand faces. “The hero must cross the threshold between the world he is familiar with and that which he is not. Often this involves facing a "threshold guardian", an entity that works to keep all within the protective confines of the world but must be encountered to enter the new zone of experience.” A thousand mirrors. You speak pensively to the man next to you in the bar, as he speaks to you knowing the same propaganda. He has his story of this country and its inhabitants, his narrative of what he has done, and how long he has been exposed, what he may do next. Who new has loved and lost and found?
need identity reinforcement won't be comfortable there. [source: http://www.openawareness.org/ExistentialShockLevels.html]
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He has his pride, his psychic defences, as all westerners do, so he doesn’t tell you everything, or at least, not the salient, points, the aspects of his experience we which could help you in your predicament as myth or fable. He pays the girls what he wants; he will prove to them how he is different from the others that were squeezed out of his metal tube. He ‘ain’t’ going to tell you about the wait at the airport and the boring hell and fear of death in-between his drunken short times, no fucking way! But he tells you positively that you must pay market price, no more than $20 for a long time. This is a community standard, you are not required to innovate. But he knows he slaps down a shy $30 even when he doesn’t come. “Well it’s not their fault now is it…really?” Another guy throws them out with nothing when he doesn’t come. Shit! These foreigners are so unpredictable, you can’t tell by how they are dressed of the length of their noses. He is wearing a different mask; enacting a different defence mechanism, he is playing a different game, with a different punter, he tells his wife in Wisconsin something else, and his best bud on the Internet forum, his pastor in his church, his sons, and the guy he met on the Plane, his boss. You and they will never know the real story in the pavilion of mirrors. No matter how many monitors the Japanese man buys and incorporates in to his system, he sees only the Japanese
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
man’s view, his own interests. He knows this is right, the right path in South East Asia. You must become master of your own destiny here, your own death, or perish. Making knowledge open in the common and public domain so your future self will have access to it much later also means others have access too. But they only see what they are willing to see of themselves.
don’t tell him so clearly he will not stop. He may even introduce as his fiancé a whore that he is now marrying, and you may have banged her on your last trip and she remembers, she says so in her smile.
This can never be allowed to happen. If there is a moral here then, early on in this book, it is that relationships with young Asian women are not for everyone, as indeed relationships per se are not for everyone. People make themselves complex and interesting, only others are entitled, encouraged, tutored to define them as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or fascinating or boring. So as he preaches this to you, he knows inside he is not like them, he is not like you, some cheap Charlie looking for $2 and under live rides. He leaves out the careful details of how and why, and how and why he made sense of it. What you are receiving is a sanitised or grandiose view of proceedings, told bombastically or with a sense of ‘have been there, done that’. Face the pavilion, you are the apprentice, and if you have been there more times than can remember, and he has not,
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He recommends that you drop aspirin everyday to avoid stroke, as his friend has just had a stroke while banging some bargirl in his condo. This compromised friend still stays around, as what is it like being @ home, in the waste, in the west, with partial paralysis? Who will love and pretend to care for him there? Hookers come in daily to care for him for money, they spread the load. ………. *** Or the man next to you in the bar cries but he lies. He creates a story of how he doesn’t care – “couldn’t give a flying fuck!” For a few fleeting moments he adopts the tenaciousness and will of character, dignity, the pig ignorance, bloody mindedness of the protester and revolutionary, the insurgent in the private white room. Yeah, but only for a token moment; he is only out there for a laugh… crying like a baby deprived of his mother and kind aunties. VIII
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
For the man to pursue the object of his desire, he must be unaware of the pile of objects in the past that he desired with equal intensity to no satisfaction, and of the cravings waiting in the future. This blocking of awareness creates a comfortable bubble where he is master of the world filled with the object of desire.
this is what is happening to that 1,000,000 every year. She was introduced by her brother/husband, boyfriend/pimp @ a coffee shop one morning] he will encounter as Joseph Campbell understood in A hero with a thousand faces, something like this:
………. *** He performs his daily short time. He has several regular girls dotted around in his map of the city. The rest of the time he is independent and free, he reads books. He likes to sit and talk politics with another ex-pat friend over coffee every morning. This man is ‘social’ and therefore kept his penis. He is into order in a big way, he just can’t see levels of order, the higher level orders that superimpose underneath and over his conscious mind and conscious lifestyle. He is ex-NYPD, his name is David Gotlieb, with a keen sense of investigation into matters. He never made detective though and is on a personal crusade to combat child sex tourists. He has lost all trust and dependency in systems and large-scale enterprises which claim to tackle the issue lawfully. He does not approve of prostitution @ any level [although once while drunk he thought he had met a genuine girl, even though he did partake once, but it was too powerful, he almost lost his mind. He sincerely believes that
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“Once past the threshold, the hero encounters a dream landscape of ambiguous and fluid forms. The hero is challenged to survive a succession of obstacles and, in so doing, amplifies his consciousness. The hero is helped covertly by the supernatural helper or may discover a benign power supporting him in his passage.” The obsessive-compulsive Japanese man can be classified as a hero, so is a prisoner held many years ago in a white air con room by the US taxpayer, so is David Gotlieb, or changes gender to become Sue Tyler NGO director, or so is a black man called Le Roy who jokes to himself at least that he is a Harlem pimp, Dame Anita, Sri Mom, and me and you. A single person's identity embodies multiplicity, so they are mirrored by other people and they all mirror other people, just like their language, their voice belongs to nobody in particular, no-one else. They are only understood by us relating them to others. Yeah?
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
………. *** Unless there is no-one; there is no-one else in a horizon less room, or infinite choice less control.
I, the writer, considers that familiarity, everyday life, doesn’t breed contempt; it breeds invisibility, the voiding or neglect of oneself, the fading away of particular aspects of one’s environment or life. What is left is indelible graffiti.
IX
………. ***
A thousand years of linear history, linear time: the day begins and ends @ the instant called "midnight” – shortly before or after you embark on your return journey. There were always those on the margin, who didn’t make the press or grade or feel their body is a prison out which they cannot escape. We "deconstruct" ourselves online or on a journey, or at least we have the chance. A transitory and ephemeral drop in the flow and this vast ocean of time, you are somewhere in-between. Even staring at the hotel ceiling as you lie awake at night uses a startlingly astounding constellation of mind processes. Dark. Or it ends simply ends, conveniently like a morning orgasm, an imploding star somewhere, in some far off part of a galaxy in the body and mind, an ode to that problem of dualism that heats up with Descartes, but now it ends with a morning ride on a morning tide, to me, ever to me in my everlasting, booked forever hotel honeymoon room in my mind.
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Dear Dr. Wong, Resolving mundane events take on a different feel when one is faced with the prospect of one’s own mortality. Death staring one in the face, or careering out of the night of PAN and descending @ terminal velocity into the dark abyss, is scary –sometimes so much for some people, they manifest physical symptoms of disintegration. Even spontaneous combustion. People come to take things for granted in the dance, ritual and trance of everyday life; even sexlessness, asexuality and a loss of ability to affect the world in some even, humble and modest way.
Largely they are coerced to do so under the pressure of an overly rich and abundant symbolic environment, that they have no fucking voice and under an ideology that perseveres, upholds and
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preserves the idea they must work and consume and invest to preserve order. This may be in whole and part attributed to the Protestant work ethic, which is work as a duty in the world for the benefit of the individual and society as a whole or otherwise some local community fragment. The disparaging looks from behind the sodden grim drape that furnishes the hovel as the new people move in. Hmmmm! What will they bring with them? Pestilence, disease, conspicuous shows of wealth? Are we interested in evidence-based reality, or are we swept along by mass fears of being lost within the others? So only through work does one find salvation in the long term or in the next life, and in the short term, a vacation or an adequately funded retirement? Is this true when I am working on brothel ass? It is a real labour, yeah, indeed it is a labour of love fucking your damn self to death Marx, producing zero. The pure sweat of my labours searching frantically for orgasm for completion, resolution and accomplishment up a splendid butt is hard, hard work dude. What’s my reward? It reflects the hard ass if I have chosen well. The determination involved the mask of pleasure, the stave playfully playing with the flowing hair. The Puritan ethic and Calvinist ideas influenced and accelerated developing capitalism. If that is not ‘yin’ and yang’ then what is?
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Yours etc. David Gotlieb Officer-in-charge ☯☯☯☯ Dear David, Religious devotion has usually been rejection of mundane affairs, including economic pursuit, but as the Economist and ‘social’ commentator Max Weber saw it was not the goal of those religious ideas, to make profit, but rather a byproduct and aside. There you go the inherent logic of those doctrines and the advice based upon them both directly and indirectly encouraged planning and self-denial in the pursuit of economic gain. What was to be the pay-back of hacking off your dick and residing in a white room for years against your will? What is the point of starving yourself and becoming dehydrated? Yours truly, W. Harris Wong ☯☯☯☯ W. Harris Ward –Personal log, March 2, 2006-
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Life took me to London, Berlin, Paris and Melbourne in the fall of 1998, Tokyo and Seoul in the summer of 1999, and to Manila, and Szechwan in 2000, and it seemed obvious to me that these are still distinct places, with their own immutable essence and flavour, even on public transport. This is even with them being centres for global retail.
and predilections of the inhabitants of a city - overall. It is as cultural an artefact as a certain wine label, or a contrasting Christian relic bought in Byzantium or Rome… and cherished…
They also have unique whoring districts, Japan was kinky and pleasing. Their peep shows magnificent. One thing with travelling becomes totally apparent. Common understanding between cultural strangers on earth is based on anthropocentric constants, which enable us to suggest the opposite person have similar physical needs, sensory possibilities, modes of perceiving the world, motivations etc. We all get thirsty, we all like to eat, have a nice place to lay our heads. Then it gets complex, only some like to get drunk, have sex with multiple partners and believe in certain political parties. But ok, all men and women are the same @ some level etc. They need some sexual outlet, and this is reflected in the style and format of their homes and their red light districts. Naturally they take on and accommodate for local and federal laws, but permissions do reflect the needs
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………. *** Visiting these cities and spending feverish time there looking, hunting, scoping for prostitutes lent heightened senses of awareness. They ranged from subtle to extreme. For instance, you find exotic and different food and drink near-by, you meet long stay residents, local and ex-pat, and some who thrill you with their stories. You find landmarks; the ex-pats and Internet others can give you them. You get step-by-step instruction on the best nights to go, and the best seasons, all on the Internet or by word of mouth by those who live there, including where to find the best Internet connections. All this while searching for beautiful whores in the real geographical world [Google Earth] and the virtual sit-@your-desk-@-home world. Planning your next venture into pavilion of mirrors in another neck of the woods. The technology has come to rule like it has just come alive. But we have misunderstood the technology and the companies, and ‘social’ institutions that we've let be built.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
They hardly, if @ all, understand themselves. As a byproduct of building these virtual renditions we have exposed ourselves in a lewd manner. What have we constructed?
decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.â&#x20AC;? 18
T
he Internet and cheap travel to ever more
previously inaccessible and irresistible places is making the world a smorgasbord of sensations and challenges for more people all the time. Across your skin, through your conscience, across the world. But this is not why males and western females are travelling to find sex, love and marriage.
Chapter 2. Sex sells behind green lanterns I
It makes us all adventurers and all on some odyssey of one kind or another. Largely it is escape attempts, escape from the mundane. It will be difficult to pick out how one of these affects the other, as those who travel in the know, get to know about travel. This is the experiential global economy, and it is more than just an economy of $, it is an economy of information and identity, attention, attraction and consumption. Simply, reading about an exotic place like Thailand, Laos or Cambodia, looking @ the online pictures and videos, reading online trip reports, then being there, being in the picture, making a trip report, posting it online. This is enough to whet most appetites. But these are only part of the way in which the virtual, the fantastic and the
â&#x20AC;&#x153;A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a 18
Campbell, J. (1949) The Hero with a Thousand faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 30
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
actual and real are joining forces in creating realities and refiguring interests.
wide open to interpretation and of course misinterpretation. They may open vistas for frivolity and fun, and close them again making for dissolution, alienation and worldweariness. Check out the hung looks on the weary guys not packing any bullets anymore at the bar.
Bits, bytes, neurons and Viagra what a dance...! ………. *** Research indeed shows how far real people are from the rational “utility maximisers” posited by classical economists. Everything is up for grabs, money, hearts, minds, people and relationships, finding your self psychologically and reclaiming your penis and vagina physically - all are being positioned like products, and they positioning themselves as products. The bargirl or the tall ebony beachboy make themselves available as product and service. This is as true for Internet and speed dating as it is for seminaked girls parading on stage in a Bangkok go-go, or beach boys whistling to ‘milk bottles’ [mature western women – or what some call – perhaps unfairly in certain cases – fat white cows - FWC] on a beach in Jamaica. This overarching theme will always thought provoking, but not original. What thickens this plot which is its pivotal theme is the notion of disparate and incommensurate realities and their implications. Prostitution, love, loneliness, perversion, Asia, third-world, bars, alcohol, drugs, music, dancing, men, women they are all relative terms, and to greater or lesser extent they are all potent terms and ambiguous. They are
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………. *** The cases explored in these volumes, the tiny anecdotes and the larger case studies, show how an entire architecture or constellation of perceptions, opinions and fascinations occur through the eyes of several characters that come to this subject from different angles. At the centre of these cognitive affects is belief - trust and confidence in one’s self and one’s abilities, or of some other person or some aim. Emmanuel Kant sees that; "Man is distinguished above all
animals by his self-consciousness, by which he is a 'rational animal'. This is what keeps us above the abyss, this idea and our enlarged frontal lobes, the search for self in another. Thus the unique characteristic of man is the capability for self-understanding and making a pleasant little fire. Imagine of apes could ape that? Abstract (and right conceptual) "thinking" (in the context of profound, and, more and more, thought-transcending, "consideration") and "technology" (displayed as the total form of right and effective practice) are (as such) useful means for directing the progressively
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
ego-transcending process that is the unique potential of man. If the ego is the abyss then everything else is above it. There is nothing less abstract than the force of fire with a good draft of air. Earth contains the sea, and water permeates everywhere. This creates a god. Sex and sun...
real interaction let alone attraction, but man, there are millions, zillions even or Western Union Man and ATM transaction men – who when they left ensured she had her very own card. Lest she ‘get angry’. He must empower her.
………. *** The subject matter of this book is a captivating subject for many. As they say, sex sells, and surely to bludgeoning market of baby boomers, who, back wherever home is, are on the road to neglect and invisibility and dissolution before they pass their sell-by date and expire. Unlike zombies who instil fear in ‘real’ people who run from their bite, the invisible stroll the shopping malls with or alongside people unaffected by them on any emotional level. Check them out next time. Long gone is that sneaky glance and approving smile from the girl out shopping with her mother. Long ago was the day a girl left her friends, and as a dare, walked up to you and daringly gave you a bite of her apple. The serendipitous glance of promise is gone forever; we are merely biding time until we die with talk or ‘independence’ and ‘career’. Now we recreating this, where and while we can - life is too short not too much though, lets not get ‘is the glass half-empty or half-fool’. Nobody is moved by your aspirations. There is no
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In a sexual sense the ultra-rationalised first world is what some men call ‘wasteland’. Wasteland is the first world in its moral sense, ethics and codes of being, its role as being the denizen societies of advanced capitalism, the champagne salutation of modernity and implementers of post-modernity. ………. *** In the origin of order, as we know it; our modern technological armies enforce extendedly its mores and ambiguous sense of fair play. It is a place where the young have first bite in sexual matters, and where the sexual imagery and innuendo of the ever-regnant advertising and media industries focus legitimately upon them. Society places sexuality with them, whereas it is satirical in its humour and criticisms of the ‘dirty old man’ – his stereotype are never far short of paedophilia or rape and murder. That is if he is seen to be proactive. Passively he is an utter joke, asexual, obsolete, and pathetic. He is not the stuff of Greek epics, and unlikely has the body
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of a Greek statue, he but rather a sad documentary on the dispossessed eating another take-out Pizza and drinking to forget his self. He is Homer Simpson or a man running away from such parody. He can’t be both. The dominance of sex as a mediated phenomena suggest the Waste as a place of sexual abstraction, and this plays a key role in alienating and atomising people as well. It reaches it apotheosis in new approaches and jargonesque ideas coming from the young media savvy. Consider that “From Products to Trademarks. From Trademarks to Brands. From Brands to Lovemarks. Lovemarks are the future beyond brands.” •
Lovemarks are built on Love and Respect.
•
Lovemarks are imbued with Mystery, Sensuality and Intimacy. Stories and dreams, icons and inspiration. Super-rich sensuality. Empathy and commitment.
•
Lovemarks inspire Loyalty Beyond Reason.
•
Lovemarks are owned by the people who love them. Consumers not companies.
•
Lovemarks can be anything that people care deeply about. At www.lovemarks.com we’ve attracted about 9,000 stories of consumer emotion. Shoes.
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Shirts. Cities. Bags. Books. Bikes. Love makes the world of business go around. •
Lovemarks move from Irreplaceable to Irresistible.
Yes, the world that spawns Lovemarks is a place where more single people are sold the idea that staying single is cool, that they are ‘playing the field’ and where there is a glut of potential Internet partners and/or Internet porn sites. Lovemarks attests to ‘love’ being reified in the global consumer society. It moves awkwardly from verb to noun, from noun to pronoun. ………. *** Many sites alone are enough to neuter men whose sexuality is almost made redundant as a ‘social’ tool, or merely a spectre with their use. In their minds of minds they await a spouse who combines
The kindness of their kindergarten teacher, the wit of the smartest person you met in grad school, and the looks of someone you dated, or dreamed of dating, when you were sixteen . . . Not only does she clean up after you like your mother, she brushes your teeth in the morning, you get to fuck her
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
younger sister when she stays over, and she makes love to you like it was the first night in the Nana hotel. But you wind up spending middle age by yourself, watching games shows @ 2 a.m. in a studio apartment strewn with pizza boxes.
The monument to a nationalist poet in a pocket park oddly wedged into the wind vortices of Seoul's corporate towers. Progress through obstruction. I tried to mesh these distinct types of urban spaces against those I was familiar with from San Francisco, especially The Tederloin. And so it is when travelling between the various heatseeking zones – each have their own particular bent and flavours.
When travelling you keep seeing objects, whores, buildings and artefacts you couldn’t imagine in the context of another place. We’ve already indicated that may make you feel ‘youthful’ but maybe not as much as hanging with superstars the like of which the Japanese man was paying top dollar for. And not merely historical artefacts, the seductiveness of women: the looming spinal throb of the Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway, the way Manhattan's still trying to neutralise, digest and incorporate the pier @ the end of Christopher Street. Rue St Denis, rue St. Martin and Boulevard Sebastopol are puzzlingly large and fleshy was a let down, unless 60 year old prostitutes are your bag. ………. *** The smell of a border control booth in Thailand is always welcome, and different from that of the Cambodian office, they suggest the street smells of the overall smells of two countries, different. The dead 1970's office cluster accumulating pigeon shit and Rustoleum directly above the gleaming, burrowing lattice of Waterloo Station in London.
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When I read this I took it immediately to refer to how information and communication technologies and global government policies are seen to be enabling democratises @ all levels of sociability. But a deeper analysis may show that they may not be engendering in any essence a view that is necessarily positive or humanistic. For instance, Flash Mobs - people arranging to meet somewhere for some arbitrary reason - are a quirky interesting idea, but will it sustain, will they change anything? When will it rise and when will it fall? Is it just another quirk in the restless and bored empty technological first world? A world bent on substituting multimedia experiences for the touch and feel of another person? Liberty in the classical sense of, “autonomy and dignity against coercion.” It is, @ base, the individual's relationship to the particular group in which he or she lives and functions, and, in turn, the group's attitude toward the individual will ultimately determine the individual's autonomy. That is, his
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
freedom to be him - or herself; to be. The biosphere of an online forum acts like this.
raison d’ etre, depends on finding evidence of malpractice @
A gaggle of hse – sorry, sex workers - bind together to fight against and otherwise react and subvert the indomitable oppressive power of their pimps. They then shift any saved moneys downstream making their services cheaper for clients [doubt it]. II When communities are built, designed intended to focus around particular interests, they coalesce as its totem. They move from issue to ‘thing’. Like part of persons’ life ambitions is to build for their selves a good career, then, and only then, they come to settle. And as they do they project the holistic view, especially of cause and effect or wider systemic effects that will impact upon individual and group consciousness. Clearly members of an online forum aimed as discussing matters of sex tourism will not see ‘this’ subject as immoral, but they may see ‘that’ as being a little risqué. On the contrary they will support a consensus view that this is ‘normal practice’, so it begins to possess an ethical legitimacy - @ least in this quarter if not the world @ large. They will contract messages and dialogues to say as much. Similarly NGO’s whose lifeblood and funding, their entire
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some level and who attending conferences with others with similar interests and predilections risk developing a biased or skewed perceptions of the world. Universally hated paedophile rings are infamous for ‘dressing up’ immoral acts as somehow ‘normal’, but they surely cannot be exclusive. Sometime ‘goodies’ lie as well, anything is possible if the American President is sucked off in the Oval office isn’t it? It must have been sexual harassment, must have been…? The most powerful man in the world having sex is worse than realising your parents do it. Can it be legitimately consensual?
Surely Masons, Boy Scouts, employees of Microsoft, members of joint committees and all other manors of groups do the same. So do mongers… Their underlying mission is to build reality tunnels to quote the late Timothy Leary and often used by the equally interesting and late Robert Anton Wilson. And many are empowered to change policy, and to engender overarching views of other, sometimes distant; realities. Some of these are alienating. The hall of mirrors comes in to play where the activities of anti-trafficking NGO in South East Asia
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
makes a most significant contribution to its image as a paradise, a paradise for paedophiles.
media institutions such as the British BBC lump them with deviants and even terrorists.
The danger of this paradox comes when desperate paedophiles beginning to believe this reality tunnel, flock to South East Asia looking for targets. Or when visitors start viewing every ex-pat in the mall accompanying their biological or adopted children as empirical examples of deviants in action. In either case they turn to these NGOs, or support them with donations, to keep up their good work. The media turn to them for objective factual information based upon the NGOs own ‘social’ scientific polls and ethnographies and surveys – they are invariably remarkable and shocking. Governments turn to these same sources, after all they are ‘in’ the field, for advice and guidance in shaping polices. So much control and say. How could they be mundane?
Rationalisations of prostitution that are available could be bent to accommodate a view that suggests that people are trying something radical in their finite lives. Something new or innovative or alternative, they are re-inventing themselves @ risk, they are thinking outside their box, their cognitive coffins, or designerly homes and gardens. They may not be engaging in something that is inherently bad, harmful or degrading to themselves and others. This is not to say the writing here is an apology for whore mongering and prostitution. But that, in actuality, no such thing exists.
………. *** I have read accounts in forum of ‘righteous’ visitors wanting to attack men ‘experienced’ as paedophiles based purely upon their assumptions. We are always holier than thou. They see someone being friendly to street kids and assume something nasty is going on. Also bizarre accounts of ‘legal age’ orientated sex tourists wanting to kill these men because of them interfering with their own group self-image. This surely is amplified by the fact the US State Department and
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………. *** Can we avoid conclusions the new is bad in pro and con discussions of whores and whoring in South East Asian bars – which are the dialogues of non-patrons? Are there more humane (involved) ways of considering this purely human occurrence, beyond attaching glosses such as exploitation, trafficking, criminality and degradation? Something couched more in the verbiage of sensuality and eroticism than desexualised and clinical discussions of ‘sex workers’ and ‘clients’. Are the shear numbers alarming? Out of about 1.4 million international visitor arrivals to Cambodia in 2005, Japan registered 137,849, ahead of the
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
US, France, UK and China (59,153). Surprisingly, South Korea topped the list @ 216,594 arrivals. A lot of mongers, a significant group of reprobates.
countries. A million whoremongers, a million punters, a million lovers, a million Ronin, a million whales. These men represent 10 per cent of all international arrivals in Thailand. They are not going there for golf. 952,000 more men than women visited Thailand on holiday in 2003, a disparity of 28 per cent...This pattern is unique among major tourist destinations.
Kino, kino. To offer some perspective, the number of Japanese tourists visiting Indonesia peaked in 2000 @ 643,794, eclipsing Australia (459,994) and South Korea (213,762), and far ahead of the US (176,379). In that year foreign visitor arrivals in Indonesia exceeded 5 million. Thailand, which drew more than 11 million tourists a year before the tsunami, now actively targets Chinese tourists (1 million in 2005), second only to Japanese, long the dominant market (and only one of these was the Japanese man). If we consider the Land of Smiles, Thailand, we must ask ourselves a basic question: Do nearly a million men from the first world come to Thailand to buy sex every year? The official line, [the Thai government's office of tourism development] is that it is businessmen being counted as tourists in the statistics. However if they are factored out [and anyway, only 31,000 Britons stated business rather than holiday as the purpose of their visit in 2003, less than 6 per cent of the total], that leaves a whopping 952,000 men that arrive from wealthy
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………. *** And why so many Brits? Young British males, following the traditional trail through Southeast Asia to see mates or relatives in Australasia. But the average British arrival is aged 40, hardly a backpacker in the traditional sense of the word. What about that we have here a modern expression of sexuality akin to invented urban myths such as the rise of the ‘new man’ and his successor the meterosexual. 19 This man is willing to become the subject of ‘sex in the city’ harpies, their trite and fickle likes and dislikes, their assertiveness, their groping (wink, wink) of males.
19 The origin of the term traces to an article titled "Here come the mirror men," dissecting the new urbane man by Mark Simpson, published on November 15, 1994 in The Independent, a major British daily.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Moisturising men pampering themselves. ‘Women’ waiting patiently on them to finish. Waiting for them to send money. ‘Men’ waiting for them to come online so they can see then, and hear them say that they miss them, before they go home to their ‘real’ lovers. One such lover was the Japanese man, but they are typically ethnics of their own race who offer them the gift and security of familiarity. They are not a case of West meets east, or are they?
This is the paradox and contradiction and thus this story’s point – rifts and ruptures in the relation between self and self-image, self and other.
III
In almost all cases of contacts between different human cultures and flesh in the past, the destruction of the culture which considered itself inferior was not the result of a real military or technological superiority of the ‘conquerors’ but a consequence of mass psychological effects to ‘being discovered’. Thus many nations of America and Oceania suffered a collective existential shock after the arrival of the whites. They change or alter that which they see. But what they want to view is difference, whilst cherishing familiarity.
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For the ‘discoverers’ the discovery far from their home proved their superiority, correspondingly for the ‘discovered’ the fact, to be confronted with strangers on their own territory, proved their inferiority. In all historic cases the discrepancy regarding the technical level of transport was interpreted by both sides as a sign of superiority and inferiority respectively. ………. *** While attempting to understand hse, we will transform them into grotesque parodies of ourselves – with all the consequences as far as our reactions to their alleged motives are concerned. Its all so much projection, they have nothing else in their creative palettes... We will always be left wondering what the prisoner in the white room, devoid of stimulus projected onto the favoured negresses of his youth? His memories, the Americans can’t go there. They cannot ever own them. IV
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Yes dear reader, prepare yourself, you were warned that this is no romance novel, it is no bed of roses. These people, mostly men, but also several women working in the NGO sector, and their love of the culture of South East Asia, or of its working women, or a need to do something relevant in their lives; each have hit upon a crisis.
breathing, swallowing—dates way, way back to when we shared history with the crocodiles.
Some have gone looking for love, implicitly or explicitly. They have lied to others and, occasionally to themselves. Such lies coupled to the power the nightlife and the great halls of the pavilion of mirrors which is gender issues in Asia typically has dramatic effects on the lives of those who go there implicitly or explicitly looking for, hoping for love and sex.
Love, like life itself, is whatever you want it to be, whatever you make it be. You are ultimately central, and you have control. But do you want it. Or do you want to relinquish control? If so, come to South East Asia and engage, encounter. ………. *** In evolutionary terms the oldest section of the human brain is a huge fistful of neurons squashed together @ the top of the spinal column. This so-called reptilian brain, which regulates the body’s autonomic functions—heartbeat,
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Next, covering the reptilian brain, like a battle helmet, is the limbic brain. It’s around 100 million years old and comes to us by our mammalian heritage. When evolutionary experimentation arrived @ mammals, a new life strategy was required. Since young mammals are born unprepared to live on their own, their parents, usually the mother, have to protect and nurture them. Up to this evolutionary point adult members of many species regarded the young of their own species as delicious snacks and happily gobbled them up. Like Sue Tyler whom we shall meet in a later volume does with decent foie gras. So along with mammary glands to provide food for their newborns, mammals developed a new brain structure which generated emotions that tied parent and offspring together. Finally, a mere 100 thousand years ago, the third portion of the human brain began to develop; the neocortex. This is the seat of reason and language and complex thought - humanness. It’s also the part of the brain that knows not the reasons of the heart, because heart reasons, feelings that we may act upon, are found in the limbic brain. We have come so far to be as we are. To read and understand. Sometimes like a prisoner you must be patient. Each part of the brain is locked in by the other. That’s why you can’t articulate it properly and why we have to circumnavigate
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
like Magellan around the issue to have a go @ explaining South East Asia and the barworld. If we report, bargirls think ‘X’ when in Thai they think ‘Y’ according to the dictates of language and culture then we get lost. It is like two fighter aircraft having it out @ night time with tracer bullets. A third person, in this case, I, your narrator is photographing the corkscrew trajectories. Einstein and Reiman gave this the name geodesic lines to suggest the curvilinear and most economical lines of interrelationship between two independently moving events. In this case, we are not speaking about objects, but thoughts and feelings that mirror them; it serves as a metaphor for you and your South East Asian object of affection, your darling.
protection, excitement, intellectual stimulation and the joy that gives our lives meaning and purpose. Through the new brain scanning technologies, science has also uncovered the fact the brain is not only enormously plastic and sexy but to some degree retains this plasticity throughout life. So don’t get too hung up in your age and looks, we used to believe the brain was incapable of change once we were adults, it goes on.
………. *** The immaturity of the erotic centre of our brains may simply be because it is more primitive than the parts that control higher level cognitive and emotional functions. But I believe it is also since in our society that part of the brain doesn't get much opportunity to mature. You must invest not only money but also psychic energy; you must invest of yourself in every case and in every sense. You absolve yourself of drab, repetitive labour, but not of the industry involved in making it happen. And while it is easy to pay money, especially if you have it, it is more difficult to pay with your soul, or heart. We seek love relationships for a multitude of reasons - comfort,
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………. *** Unfortunately, for many of us, disappointment and discouragement eventually begin to take the place of happiness and fulfilment. Sex follows suit. With second hand fantasies rife in homes through the power of the Internet, more and more people are engaging in fantasies that they can’t act out with wives and girlfriends. They mix with the lonely as they travel to locations where they indulge and try out experientially, that which were delivered to them on a plate for them by production crew in studios.
A whole industry mirrors reality with a plenitude of sites which showcase ’real adventures’ – just ordinary Joe ‘Q’ Public’s who now are porn stars in hotel room in Manila, Bangkok or Phnom Penh.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
We sit on the bed after showering while waiting for them to make their move. No one will be attached to you or want to be with you if you cannot be truly happy alone. Part of life is being alone so feel comfortable in your own company and then other people will feel comfortable in it, don't rush, what happens, happens, don't force a relationship or love, just be patient, they are as they wait for something or somebody else. If they are a prise catch of the day, goodlooking etc, the wait won’t be long. ‘Women’ can smell desperation, even hse can, and here, in Asia, like any market stall trader knows how to, they take advantage. But it is not all bravura and ‘gung hoe’, some guys get hooked for real, even when they read the surgeons health warning before packing their Trojans and buying their Viagra. The desires of one sex can lead to deceptive exploitation by the other sex, because of the ‘social’ psychology of deception of self and others.
And not just this; we have lived under these conditions for what feels like such a long and sustained time. Towards the end of the 1990s there was a distinctive air which was viewed as symptomatic of some ‘millennium fever’. This was itself born of some deep and inherent need for us as individuals and as ‘social’ animals to express cumulative anxieties, fears and failings of fragile humanity over the preceding thousand years. It was if all the potential energy of these ominous thousand years of fear and innovation had to be explicated in one single money shot, of one single buckshot outpouring. But I often wonder if this was more intense as a background anxiety to that which we lived under in the age of the Vietnam War, that of the rise and anger of counterculture, and that of insidious nuclear annihilation. It would come @ any given moment with only three minutes warning. Only three minutes to contemplate your own end and that of all you know and love including Led Zeppelin and TV?
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So this brings back to our initial thoughts on writing the preface for ‘Mirrors’. We settled upon some preamble about ‘freedom’ and the fluid state of our thoughts and identities in this new millennium of uncertainty. Janus-faced, this seems so right, so tight, and so pertinent when we live in a time marked by change and uncertainty.
Anxiety has continued its relentless march through the millennium celebrations into the more recent developments which have surfaced in the collective unconscious since 11th September, 2001; both @ home and abroad. Millennium fever was a peculiarly western idiom, not helped by the fact that it was AH 1421 according to Muslims and the year 2545 according to the Buddhists.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
The information explosion of the Internet, in fact ’Internet’ probably emphasised it through our most abject fear – that every computer was going to crash worldwide bringing down with themselves, the stock markets and any semblance of order. 9/11 as a reality check just pricked the surface of the potential of the existential anxiety, as did the piercing of the dot.com bubble and tech stock crash. The ‘social’ debate turned quickly to politics, but also to science and technology, it interrogates them for answers to worldwide problems. It was almost if Al Qaeda was making up on the world trade building what world trade had not lost by Y2K. We sit and watch TV while waiting for them to make their move.
So we live in a world marked by globalisation and its artefacts, and these affects come to us in different forms where ever we are. They come to us like cultural diversity in modern societies, some are enriching, and some are threatening. Types of ‘social’ mobilities become common talking points and dominate discussions, immigration and its affects, dilution of cultures, ecological impacts of global trade, trafficking of women and children, the databasing and tagging of all and sundry, surveillance and global positioning of things, ideas and people, changing demo- and psychographics, changing ‘social’ conventions, tolerances and intolerance. Instead we have interaction, unbalance, change or stagnation, balance, homeostasis. It is a fact, a reality that we are all going to more places, more often, more of the time, and @ the same time we are connecting with more people more geographically dispersed. The world is our oyster if we browse, choose and select it so. The way we chose our partners follows emotional schemas formed by the limbic brain back in childhood, so it’s extraordinarily difficult to overcome poor patterns of choice.
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Dear David, The psychologist Carl Jung once said that he: “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” For those who would rather sit and spectate, change will surely come to them. They will change their point of view by watching and not participating. For those who are proactive and perform, then they will proactively make changes in concordance with will (and associated beliefs, attitudes and opinions).
Think about it Best wishes W. Harris Wong ………. ***
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
W. Harris Ward –Personal log, March 29, 2006
And that's when it hit us: there is one sure brake on the totalising sameness of globalisation, and that is local governments. Because they, and they alone, get to determine the genotype of the built environment, by specifying zoning regulations and building codes. But they vary according to economic strengths and incentives.
Is it possible to fire so many resources on a small country to force them to take up bible reading and give up their prostitution? To give them mall and Starbucks to replace bordellos and karaoke and massa? To show the unbridled power of the $ over sex instead of it be used to create it? If you could accomplish this in a small country with a weak economy, surely you could do it anywhere, even America? ………. ***
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Many of us are in process of entering new kinds of world, and interact with people and ourselves online in a game that blends reality and the virtual. What is the sexual revolution 2.0? It is sex and the Internet, sex and science, sex and communication: it’s the sex of technology and the technology of sex.20 And what of the immobile, the disabled, those who are not participating in visits to the markets and the temples kept in an artificial and non-’social’ world where there is only the feral asexual self. V We are all familiar with this story-telling mode of mind. All literature is based on it, even this; it is @ once its glory and its limitation. Each of us, we are told, is a living story. Mother told the obsessive/compulsive Japanese man when he was a cute little boy in his sailor suit; she said, “Love, my son, is really learning.”
20 Lynn, R. (2005) The Sexual Revolution 2.0: Getting Connected, Upgrading Your Sex Life, and Finding True Love — or @ Least a Dinner Date — in the Internet Age Berkeley: Ulysses Press
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
She’d whisper words like that, and words in forms like it, as he drifted over the horizon, and into his deep, deep child’s sleep. So open. At midnight, and as he sleeps thus begins the witching hour, and a plot that involves severe magikal war, fought between two camps diametrically opposed to each other in their lust for life. In the middle some Tolkein-like Kingdom, the Pavilion of Mirrors, the experiential domain of 1st world mature males and an entire matrix of 3rd world organised females. One camp requires love; that is, more precisely, to be admired for all one is and claims to be. For one’s life [and death?] to be witnessed, one’s values and victories and lessons in the dark night’s navigation of the soul. The other camp needs money, that symbolic collateral that means freedom and status, sustenance and continuity for their loved and respected ones. As they are a network, they need insatiable amounts of money. Experience and its witnessing are secondary. The war exists in you - it exists in your relationships and in your relationship with yourself - in conflict, contradiction and confusion. Not a theory or a means to stir the mind, but a blistering reality.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Some search for the battle zone @ home, whilst others choose far-flung locations, such as South East Asian freelancer bars. They enrol the help of others on their journey. Typically, locals on the deck. They may use through mail order agencies and using Internet chat. In doing so, they open the vistas of new kinds of beliefs, anxieties, obsessions and fears that wax and wane according to the fortunes of time and maturity.
When you are young you are not sure, but speak with surety and certitude, but when you are old you are perhaps too certain, you speak with precision and intuition. Both types lie there in the hotel room denying themselves short (ST) or long time (LT)... Their feelings and thoughts of desire, need and lust wax and wane all day and all night, without end, but move from ‘this’ to ‘that’. They are confused, dumbfounded, they still can’t make up their mind to go to the barworld or not - those sites and
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
depths of violence and deep antagonism which mankind has lived with for over a million years, since we were unicellular objects. We are wondering if in the infinite cascading careering voids of the prisoner he is still there waiting?
this memory as stardust. These primordial neural impulses, not at all foreign, or ‘separate’ controlled some very subtle and gentle movements in tiny bodies. But then, from deep within the chaos and darkness, it felt, ‘feel’ came in hazy to focus, patterned, then it then felt thoughts and then needs. Picasso’s or Jackson Pollock’s need to fill, or not, the infinite threatening expanse of blank canvas, and here at the time was a higher risk that they, like many before and after them, would never.
VI Dear Dr. Wong, The newcomer to heatseeker zones is like a baby getting born sometimes. I watched them in the bars today as I sucked on my beers. Can you remember what it was like being locked in your mother’s womb? Was it dark there? Like in your metal tube in the sky with the windows closed, the movie only semiconsciously followed, just a baby lost in the fluid sac forever.
You emerged to the light, the ever explosion that comes but once in one lifespan, the most dramatic sense of separation and solitude there is. Light was the first-born of God - His first manifestation of Himself in the universe. The light we experience in our brains is still glorious. Light is the primordial essence of the universe, and that all life and motion proceeds from it.
Then, we were, all of us, close. Beyond the basic needs of sustenance and warmth, we were like the man in the white room. Deprived sensorially. Then, the brain swirled and yet did not yet coalesce in to tangible galaxies. This is what the man held in the white room wanted. He wanted to go beyond that early memory of childhood, regress back to the womb. But the hissing and vague English speaking voices and occasional shout prevented this every time he attempted. Some of us, though, remember this, can access
Here is Jacob's Ladder by which we ascend to Celestial knowledge. Light pours into the prisoner’s dilemmas, his wife and child, his penis, his country, his people. This united Light he termed "the substance of the intellect," on account of its having been the receptacle of the Divine Will when the God of Jews, Muslims and Christians said: “Let there be Light." And so it is when you arrive, when you emerge when you are born or you step into the pavilion of mirrors for the first time. Sort of like when the Japanese man arrived
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
smiling from his JAL flight, and felt not only the light but the heat of the tropics.
action, reaction, alpha, omega, departure arrival, yes and no, darkness and light. We share this… or do we?
The newcomer leaves the safety of his metal capsule emblazoned with brand logos, with others; he leaves his metal tube from the sky and experiences a different light, a different smell. Unique, indescribable, arrival. “Thai nationals, foreign Nationals, Diplomatic.” Resplendence or Magnificence.
The umbilical cord is cut; you are spat out, vomited by a vagina in a foreign place offering different levels and types of services. Its always messy, it takes ages to begin to appreciate designer kitchens and tidy, well groomed, manicured lawns…
Eventually... arose needs to recreate this experience for someone else, the need to procreate. To share. Pleasure of money and sex will come to dominate from that neutral non-place in the womb. We are conscious of that only which is manufactured in the body and brain. If the “outside” world exists somehow inside my brain, what then, is its reality? Perennial question of western philosophy. That there are no ‘real’ colours out there, but only the distinct impression of colours produced by, and held captive within, our grey matter. So to begin with, even before language, in physics, it is all simulacrum. The dull flashes of light and shape as you emerge from the womb. We, from the start, stimulate our realities in our brains, the stimulation built by us and those we mix and live with, those who we sustain and who sustain us. Cause effect,
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Taxi drivers hustle and other kinds of guide want to ringfence you, perform human husbandry, control and channel your experiences and permissions. “Everything for you, and your happy, mister!” The epigenisis of a neural conspiracy theory, maybe like that depicted in the movie The Matrix or in Alice in Wonderland. Or the rules one accepts when coming to play a game, or make a movie, or play music. Song. ‘Women’ dance. Only by fully accepting that our sexuality is indeed an important part of whom we are and integrating it into our total being that we make sure that it is expressed appropriately and is comfortable in coping with the inappropriate behaviour of others.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Only later in the human child’s life, under the sublime force of association and training, do meanings come to associate and we derive impressions, so when I scream ‘red’ you know what I am talking about. Like if I sat in a ‘heatseeking zone ’or I love ‘hse’ you should know by now in this book what this means. I tricked you with the modest technology of white roomed prisoners. You elicited an emotional response to an assumed real life character, and who was real. Naturally, then, it is by story that Freud and others sought solutions to the problems that troubled people brought to them. Free association allowed patients to regress to the original traumatic experience, say, in childhood, to make it conscious and so be free of it. But are meanings merely illusions? Red or blue pill? This is surely the stuff of the existentialist philosophers and the phenomenologists – those concerned with the stuff and workings of reality and being; much of it too difficult, far too wordy, to integrate into your everyday world of simple tastes and predictable behaviours, expressions and chit chat. “Fooking hell mate, leave it out!, wots happened to the geezer in that prison? “Is he not the same guy that lives with that bird in Bangkok?” The life of the party.
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Otto
VII Dear Dr. day (editors note: meant to be ‘Dr. Wong’) Darling, I will sit on your face until you say ‘blue’ is ‘yellow’... And I insist upon it - as true, as real, as genuine, as it is inherent in my culture to say whatever I think will please you, all the time, forever. I may get it wrong, and I may irritate you, or invite you to join with us in creating a new world, or I may get it right, precisely, and you will pledge support and loyalty to me forever. In our culture to tell a lie is simply wrong, truth is important in relationships, in Asia a white lie can be acceptable, lines get blurred. Darling, you will then send me money on demand, through western union, and you will have me ring fenced and safe until your jubilant return - the return of the infinite white King. I will wait for you Darling, while you go working... But you are not blind, not yet @ least. So I say these words to please you, Darling, I mirror your desires, and reflect your
Yours under will
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
needs, and you create me in your neural pathways and in your mind’s corridors of mirrors.
VIII
It is comfortable to me that you do this; as it is expected in our country, within our manners. I echo the words I mimic, so I teach myself which others have taught me. I mimic them, ape them, those that please you; I see you in my eyes. I see all of me reflected in your genuine Ray Bans. I look good. “Darling, I sure good for you.”
This is how we learn a localised common sense, and how it isn’t universal @ all, @ least not in a cross-cultural or global sense as some banks would have it so or some global food chains. You learn that in South East Asia. Before going into the barworld you wish to consume quality food swiftly, sanitarily, and congenially in familiar locations – such as when men coalesce @ the ‘Golden Arches’ (McDonalds) @ the top of Patpong 1.
Your darling Food of high quality, which is fresh, clean, rapidly prepared and personably retailed, has the form of a gestalt of features, and a welcome one when one is entering the unknown.
Phoung Forever love, I no need your money I need only you Wong throws the letter away before his wife clocks it. ………. *** Everyone in the Japanese man’s in-person world may not know that he is a romantic medieval white knight in a madhatter online role-playing game. A western gloss.
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Such a strange parallel to the available women, where the desire is for sizzling hot, clean, sweet-smelling, sanitary, hard action. And so the mind is always moving, racing, as it always does, swirling with images, thoughts, associations, perceptions, feelings and meanings. Familiar ones are welcome in a
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
cornucopia of unfamiliar ones. Familiar behaviours are welcome in a profusion of unfamiliar ones. So how is it over time we always tether things to boundaries, leaving our hands free while we shop, make them neat packages, the real struggle to make them certain, safe and unambiguous. Through this coalescence, this divine crystallisation, ritual and habits form, tastes develop then they evolve and some of them stick, and some are let loose and given away. Why they are and how they are the domain of interest for the ‘social’ scientist, rarely the consumer. Yes, then, and only then, we begin the process of describing some quality of something to another like ‘red’. Red can be communist, it can be danger, sexual assertiveness, its light can indicate heat-seeking areas zones, or areas conducive to prostitution. It can be red and only that. Red can be the nickname for the girl you slept with last night, the colour of her Vietnamese pyjamas. Red Rouge Deung.
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
In normal perception the barworld we know and are familiar with is clearly characterised by divisions between one thing and another, and in this technical sense one could say that we are immersed in a world of shells. The 'construction of integrating worldviews' begins from fragments of worldviews offered to us by the different disciplines and the various systems of knowledge. A plumber knows the regulations governing ‘X’ while the electrician battles with him with knowledge of requirement ‘y’(plus a force still not really understood by science), you need your designer kitchen built. It is contributed to by different perspectives that exist in the world's different cultures. So it is neither Thailand, nor is it the west or waste, it’s everywhere. But this reality is also a pavilion of mirrors, such as in a ‘social’ sense when you ask advice of all your friends, and instead of splintering, they all cohese and advise you one way, whilst you choose to play devil’s advocate and diametrically go the opposite way. Do you lead or do you follow? Which one did you take? Why don’t you leave her because of her crazy amoral behaviour? What are you investing in for your future?
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
How can we possibly speak about fixity when what we are talking about is experience? That flow of sensations and meaning-making that is challenged by emotions and ritual?
one another in endless procession here, and you plan your future together eating Issan food. Crouched on a tiny chair @ an unsanitary street food stall, you have begun to consume their ice, in your efforts to meld and merge.
That which seems to have no beginning and no end, no alpha nor omega? Can you remember what it was like to be a new born baby or is it just the delusion a mind which works in metaphors? Is it a good metaphor for the naive man who has just arrived in a heatseeker zone? How can this be when we are talking about 'love' experienced within, and with, other cultures? ‘Courtly Love' experienced in, and with South East Asian prostitutes?21 Do you truly love the girl of the whole Gestalt, the smorgasbord of diverse feeling, taste smell and behaviours that assault your senses and mind’s eye demanding resolution and crisp decision in foreign climbs?
South East Asian prostit- tutes wars? Yesterday melds seamlessly into tomorrow there @ midnight, when a grown man stumbles, events flows into 21
It has always been unclear what a poet should do—live a life of perpetual desire channelling his energies to higher ends, or physically consummate?
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She may have other, quite foreign and different plans and values. You must find compromise in the pavilion of mirrors before it seeks you... We learn these items with other statements of ‘fact’, that ‘this is red’ and ‘this is blue’, or ‘this is a tree’ and ‘this is a car’ and ‘this is how you write “love” and this is how you say “money”’. Eventually as more complex schemas develop, we may associate ‘good’ and ‘bad’ with the world of objects, events and situations. How we built distinction and class.
Thus Mercedes E- class car is ‘good’ and this Lada is ‘bad’. This man bought me many lady drinks last night in the bar, he is ‘good’, this one never buys drinks, he is ‘no-good’. Views of what is sexually explicit and what is 'hard-core' varies from culture to culture and over time. It also dictates fine wines from poor vintages. “Nana Plaza circa 1992 was a good year... Largely because of the Khmers coming down from Buriram and the Khmer Rouge refugee
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
camps...” The Japanese man’s battle of himself was so similar to that ranged in the early experience of the man in the white hissing room.
‘other time’, or ‘other place’, they are not. Why viewing a page which details your bank balances is OK, while another page depicting nude pictures of children gets you a jail sentence and a vast associated other negative ‘social’ affects.
IX
Stars are awarded on jotters for differentiating your ‘p’s from your ‘q’s. A badge of honour. Positive and negative reinforcement. Community-led projects for mediation and conflict resolution. Bibles and being held against your will is the punishment for mongers and hse alike. As we grow many ‘facts’ we learn to accept on trust. We have little choice - Occam's razor - is the alternative story more, or less, probable than the mainstream story? Dare you read this book and think differently about yourself and the world? Sometimes it won’t matter, serendipity means you are nailed anyway. Police arrive @ a disturbance and spot a foreigner an American. He is staying there with his girlfriend and child. Her sister lives with a Malaysian Chinese in a tiny room, as he lost his entire property to gambling. He is a powder keg waiting to go off in a tiny room filled with his wife and sisters.
Dear Roger, As a human child develops, some learning is empirical whilst some are very abstract indeed. Everything we know about developmental psychology indicates that our brains require learning to become functional in various ways. This learning occurs by observation, imitation, practice, and conditioning. The child’s fascination with touching the candle typically ends when they get burned. This is straight forward learning. They are a danger to themselves if they repeat this action and they know it. The lessons learned in robbing the forbidden sweet jar is more obtuse, more abstract; it must be associated with chastisement or smacking or some other punishment or hardship, and often reasons are cultivated to why robbing in general sense is bad, and why the sweets are/were forbidden in the first place. One must learn the contradictions inherent in why permissions may be given @ one time to consume, and @ some, apparently arbitrary,
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Best regards to your lovely wife, W. Harris Wong ………. ***
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
mamas who sell smack to buy lovely non-necessities are the biggest mouths in calling for his castration.22
Dear Dr.Wong Foreigners are notorious for being loaded with dollar, so what was a Malaysian Chinese attacking his Vietnamese girlfriend with a meat cleaver, alchemically ends in the foreigner being arrested for paedophilia. Witnesses are brought to testify and substantiate claims regarding his libidinous and lewd, nay, debauched, behaviours. After failing to raise bribe money to pay the ‘victim’ he is deported causing great hardship to his dependants, who cannot leave Cambodia. He will never see them again; his girlfriend is forced to return to prostitution, the baby is taken to the market to go on sale alongside fresh slaughtered pig meat and Star Anise. She takes to a pipe. Little tiny Asian women being preyed upon by big nasty economically superior foreigners is surely a target for those who wish to apply the sticker ‘victim’ thus a pipe bound to U.N. policy. He is arrested and disgraced in his own country, placed on the sexual offenders list, and forbidden to travel aboard. After his jail sentence where other convicts harasses him for being a beast’, he is released and those in his neighbourhood are informed of his presence and vigilantes are out to kick his head on a nightly basis. Obese asexual housing project
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He never really got to plead his innocence or assert any rights to a fair investigation or hearing, and as such, he becomes a scapegoat, the typical ‘made an example of’ fall guy. His hellish experience, is in fact, largely a product of Unityview’s and other anti trafficking NGOs demands, and backed by the EU, the US and Australian governments’ demands for a crackdown on culprits’ abilities to bribe themselves out of prison sentences in the Kingdom. They must have villains and targets and exemplars, even if a few innocents go down in this fierce psychic battle of the penis. But not only men, several Vietnamese women have also fallen here. They have no money @ all and nobody to bring them food as they do their 20 year stretch in Prey Sar. They are a lesson that NGOs mean business, they are more than PR campaigns, and they can destroy your life, in their Spanish inquisition aiming to purge sex in weak corrupt countries.
22
An ongoing tabloid newspaper campaign in the UK resulted in the (incorrectly) reported assault and persecution of a paediatrician by an angry mob (which had confused the two words) in August 2000, and in 2005 a man in Manchester, England was killed by knife after being mistakenly accused of child molestation by an insane man in the neighbourhood.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Deft Van Holander, The Post
X Dear Hendrich,
………. *** Meanwhile the Chinese kills and disposes of his live-in lover, sells his baby alongside the freshly slaughtered pig meat and Star Anise. Nothing, no any thing goes to waste here. It is not contrived ‘green’ lives, it is sacrilege that things go to waste. And, after losing most of the $500 in the no hope no win unregulated Casinos, jumps the country to return to Malaysia still reeking of the Big Boss’s Johnny Walker Black. It was a strange return to that primordial psychological way of early being for the white room man, with no sexuality and no penis, and no discernible sounds or sights, his brain coalesced into a homogenous indescribable infinity, where there was no shore only horizon, @ most a bell would sail along it, and gentle almost discernible voices would softly sing in the white noise of it all, the voices of his mother, his wife and long lost daughter, once they were in pain and they were all crying. There was no one to care for them. In reality they had all been executed by nationalist forces, who did not want them used to pressure him into speaking.
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Everywhere you hear people discussing issues or facts that they gained through secondary sources such as media. Media is supposed to reflect the complex world of man, the complexity, but it also severely reduces the complexity in reporting events. It privileges some over a potential Malthusian glut of others. And so it is with accounts of ‘self’. How many of us in the cacophony of everyday life and other worlds and responsibilities do we know self? Why is it that monks and other aesthetes peel themselves away to dream of that shore less horizon, and themselves as ships sailing over it? No way of doing that watching television and being obsessed with the news. Can it ever get it right...ever? The choices that designers and system and physical architects have made in the last hundred years silently mould us; they secretly direct us, whether through the tunnels of Penn Station or up to the fifty-third floor of the Sears Tower, or into the go-go bar, and in the hotel room. And so do travel agents. But they don’t drive our movements, they merely direct more than our movements. They direct us to notice one object or place and not another, to value one object or place over another, to identify with
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
one object or place rather than with another. So does the Internet. To select, to choose, to decide, so it is with our media, our newspapers bludgeoning normative views and lifestyle tips every 24 hours, TV 27/7/365 forever amen, and Internet endless nomadism, shifting. Credit agencies running on hot, allowing and refusing in a constant procession of meta-capitalism.
spectators and interpreters in identifying with, or questioning what we see and hear? Who owns the medium? How much do the owners profit from showing sexual content? We don’t really need Michael Moore in South East Asia, do we? What would be his stance when, instead of highlighting hypocrisies in mainstream solidity, he is consider what it feels like to be sucked off in skull fucking bar on Patpong? Should a 400 lb millionaire advise us on the
evils of over-consumption? ………. ***
All the best
W. Harris Wong ………. *** Preventing corruption, allowing new forms, where those coming clean are punished. World idea web without end, and controlled free-ranging kaleidoscopic serendipity – forever, with agility and concurrently. The mass media has become an extremely pervasive and omnipresent institution, so mobile in its own right, who has it created in its sexual images? Why did it begin there? Who is engaging in the sexual behaviour? Whose viewpoint is not heard? Whose perspective is marginalised? Does the camera frame the events? How would your parents, girlfriend or boyfriend talk about the story you just saw? What is our role as
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For even after the disbanding of the Bauhaus, shattering the International Style according to a mass of ‘look @ this’ publications, the exhausting of postmodernism, we’re all still chasing the ideal partner, home and apéritif, how much of it is ‘us’ and how much of it is ‘them’, our predecessors and antecedents? How much inclination for learning was left, what was the slack for us to make up our own minds? Was it just a set of buttons saying press ‘red’ or green’ or ‘buy’? And this brings us to the ideal Kitchen. One that looks like nobody cooks there. The Internet, and other new technologies such as mobile phones and texting, provides new ‘social’ landscapes, means of meeting a million people and communicating with them - not to mention the ending of affairs. Clinton got sucked off in the White House, where Bush now sanitises and preys, or so he likes us to
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
think. Who was it that sprinkled holy water? But they also express the conflicts and problems of contemporary landscapes of knowledge and relationships.
that we have been deceived - the knight was no knight, or the princess was no princess - which is often the "safest" recourse since blaming the other partner precludes the need to look @ oneself; "fantasies of perfect harmony and synchrony can be enormously destructive if taken too seriously, as a steady expectation, rather than a transient, episodic connection."
Based on modern divorce rates, author Stephan Mitchell argues modern relationships are "based on fantasies of permanence." 23 Although we seek committed relationships for security, in reality, rather than safe, these relationships are actually dangerous. The key to Mitchell's approach to making love last lies in admitting this danger exists and harnessing its energy to restore desire and passion through spontaneity and romance. Maybe that is how we crave short times sometimes more than long times. He makes a good point when he argues it is curious how separated couples often resolve to recover their "lost youth" through reckless abandon, when in reality, during their youth they longed for commitment and security. Hence, one's youth was not "lost," but wilfully abandoned. It's a fantasy most of us have shared: the-knight-in-shiningarmour boy meets his girl-princess; girl marries boy and they live happily ever after. But in the real world, "back in our imagined castle, both the knight and the damsel, alas, often lose their allure." The most common reaction is to deduce 23
Mitchell, S.A. (2003) Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time New York: W.W. Norton
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â&#x20AC;Śâ&#x20AC;Śâ&#x20AC;Ś. *** Internet dating, and its real world correlate, the scoping of females and their private parts, style and chat rooms allow people to pick and choose, to move from one target to the next, to play @ relationships. Is it guttural, indicative of the mundane masses, and the boring proletariat? Such play allows for relationships emptied of the excreta of real life and living, like how you can be a rape and murder herbsmen gone mad and kill in rape/murder frenzy 1000s of people in a video game. That's why they seem so attractive and designer kitcheny, so garden centre chic - and in the end, so dehumanising. Are you public or private? Nowhere is eroding the distinction between public and the private more obvious than on the Internet. The secret of their success surely lies in the willingness of people to make public their most intimate thoughts. More fool them; everyone is listening and has nothing to say. Eyeballs scored but they are all glazed over,
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
or have the ‘million mile post traumatic stress disorder stare’. For some people, the medium of the Internet encourages them to express themselves better, or so they think, especially men who perhaps don't express themselves so easily in verbal or emotional sense. They sit there and flirt with their prey, they use others as dream prop while waiting for them to make some move. They are already, a gestalt of facts and figures
‘social’isation within their own community, there will be no discussion of prices, money, and sexuality. Western ‘social’ convention and protocols regarding behaviours in restaurants forbid it, until some whoremonger gets sore and drunk one Saturday night... then they threaten other more civil diners, much more than the hookers that have seen and done it all.
………. *** Collective psychological projections are also very significant because most people will not hear anything from the prostitutes but only about them. Even if a Thai woman comes to the wasteland, only few people would be able to directly observe them, and even then it would only be in Thai restaurant where she has defiantly cleaned up her act. All others would be dependant on the reports in the media, which would be necessarily problematic already because of the typical mode of operation of the mass media – preparation of information under time pressure, mixture of facts and fiction, strategies of dramatisation and scandalisation etc. The decisive factor for the comprehensive ‘social’ impact of a first contact would ultimately be the information which the population would receive. That is typically that all Thai women are hse and are gold-diggers. The husband will also be involved in the conspiracy to make the wife reborn as a respectable woman. Outside their own
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Often these are issues and events they could only ever learn about via media, they are highlighted and brought to attention by media. As they represent events and situations in worlds beyond the immediate environment they could potentially be infinite, but it mostly the non-mundane, the exceptional, the greatest, most evil, most victorious. Most networked, most beautiful, most sensible that are brought to this scarce attention. It is rarely the mundane expect in cases when one is using surveillance cameras. But even those still have many blind spots and out of camera action. Consider the footage for the planes hitting the world trade centre. Most citizens can not, do not, learn of events and people empirically. The same is true when we assimilate the thoughts and feelings of others. How far can we go? To which degree does the doctor know and feel the pain of his patient. How many times is the statement: “you do not
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
understand how I feel,” the subject of dissent and discontent in human relationships? The difference between the Japanese man and the white room man’s demise as that one had media feeds until the power was cut and it all faded to black in the windowless concrete bunker and the only transmission in the white room was hiss courtesy of white noise generator and subliminal messages insisting to his unconscious mind that he must come clean in Vietnamese. He imagined a white rose, a semi-permanent image in his mind that he only ever interchange with a blue lotus. But where the blue came from he was never sure. He craved to see that colour again. There were no blue or green things in that space. Green lanterns. Even the food appeared grey and white. He almost craved black. Shadows would amuse and entertain him for hours. Otherwise his family would be raped and murdered. They already were, by nationalist or communist, he had transgressed both by being captured, he was dead whatever happened, but when, what time was it now, and he had no penis to mark out time, to start another family, so he disregarded his unconscious intuitions to tell them who he was and what he did and knew.
XI
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But that which is viewed in these individual and national gazes, originates in the fantasy of the photographer-producer and director. They order and shift the relationships in some way. A middle-aged man, divorced and not financially viable to engage in proper dating kicks back and jacks to an ‘amateur’ skin flick made by young hippy punks. A few hundred dollars down and there is anal and a massive pastiche of antics performed for the camera in a state that hounds prostitutes and their johns and tricks. The only difference is it is dressed as professionalism, and there is organisation around it. And these hippy punks, some of whom are very well endowed, were, in turn, inspired by their predecessors and also the commercial market for such products. Hobbyists become pros, and even in the age of Internet some young ladies have taken advantage of technology to sell their very selves digitally. Legions of men train themselves to accept and focus their sexuality on contrived set-ups posing as hard, spontaneous hard action. They don’t see them as contrived and produced flat two dimensional images, but as mandalas or sigils capable transport them into action beyond their immediate realties. When we say that someone associates a two-
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
dimensional inanimate image with an object, we might mean that he identifies the image with the object or that he sees the image as a representation of the object. That is, he can project or use memories of actual encounters he has had with real people. With probably no word corresponding to 'picture' in their lexicon, remote tribes have difficulties when presented with printed images of familiar animals. It is not clear whether they saw the images as actual animals or as representations. Yet people in our modern world easily equate the photographic image with the object photographed - even though the two resemble each other only in a most abstracted sense.
People animate and place themselves central in the action in true Lacanian style, it ceases to become the property of the production crew and producers, but it becomes their movie and they are the star with the big swinging dick. 24 Only through the conventions of modern life do we see the image in a photograph and only through these same conventions do we realise value and relevance in what is depicted. How it can be made to relate to us. We accommodate all kinds of advertising in this way, linking not only potential roles and lifestyles to us, but also linking sexual fantasy and the sophistication of our pornographic classifications to these images. They sift not only through women, individual human beings, but classifications based upon racial types – Asian, Ebony, Latina – or what about the vaguer ones like ‘hot’ – they typify style and types of action – teen, lesbian, S & M and so forth. As we select and choose, ‘they’ ordain, they whet and hone our interests and typologies. If all
There is also the relatively famous story of Pablo Picasso, who on being recognised in a train compartment was asked why he did not paint people "the way they really are." Picasso asked what was meant by that expression. The man opened his wallet and took out a snapshot of his wife, saying, "That's my wife." To the response of Picasso, "Isn't she rather small and flat?" Einstein said ‘whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed’. I am not sure that we have a theory for deciphering our experience of other places. But it is another reality when you can simply interface in what we would consider the most intimate of ways with someone within a couple of hours of landing. If you or I come armed with the right information.
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24
The idea of the "mirror stage" is an important early component in Lacan’s critical reinterpretation of the work of Freud. Drawing on work in physiology and animal psychology, Lacan proposes that human infants pass through a stage in which an external image of the body (reflected in a mirror, or represented to the infant through the mother or primary caregiver) produces a psychic response that gives rise to the mental representation of an "I". The infant identifies with the image, which serves as a gestalt of the infant's emerging perceptions of selfhood, but because the image of a unified body does not correspond with the underdeveloped infant's physical vulnerability and weakness, this imago is established as an Ideal-I toward which the subject will perpetually strive throughout his or her life.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
actions and reactions were equal, if all behaviours were permissive, then this is what we would crave to enact in reality.
about it, they waste themselves to these images and cam shots and train themselves to do so for pleasure. They pleasure themselves with their help and kind assistance. They develop a sexuality that is based on this format, and predicated towards it. They waste themselves and spread their interests around, flicking through endless processions of pictures, selecting like a scientists would, searching looking for holy grails, forever and ever, looking for the one who is most deserving of his orgasm.
‘Webcams in my girl student accommodation’ fundamentally altered this relationship, and somewhat degendered pornography, but these young ladies still had to imagine or ’read’ or otherwise understand what men are looking for to fixate upon. Not happy with this voyeurism now broadband permits live cams now originating in third world shacks. First world jack-offs accessing the female form located in the Philippines. And if they want to get more adventurous they know they can go there. They book online and read all about it. Places to go, prices to pay, and what some experiences were ‘like’. They gain the knowledge of the experienced expat. Critics also argue that pornography like this is harmful to its (mostly male) consumers: for example, by corrupting their morals or by making them less likely to be able to have longterm, loving sexual relationships @ home. Well, let’s be real
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“Dear Dr. Wong, my path to sex addiction is a therapist's dream. I racked up a huge bill ringing phone sex lines. Then I spent hours on the Internet @ home looking @ pornography. Before too long I was entering chat rooms and meeting women for sex. Then it was travelling, @ risk to life and limb, night and day in a metal tube in the sky with erections thinking about making strong and passionate love to ethnics in shacks and concrete bunkers with mould creeping across the wall. It was very gradual, slow deep ethnic anal, but I still had no idea what I was getting into, or what I was doing to my wife and my life.” Clearly this man’s views and behaviours are reprehensible to instituting marriage, civility and decency, and this suggests the destruction of self. Well, after all ‘self’ is a ‘social’
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
construct isn’t it? But what if you live in the barworld as an ex-pat? What if you have become used to it as normal, you are naturalised? What is a fact is there is nothing left for his fat white cow (FWC – and it applies even if she is slim young and fit – as in his mind’s eye he wanders...). Does she wander from her gaze upon him as a fat white bull rubbing himself on the fence?
sailor of the psyche) – those who can and wish to explore inner as well as outer space - need apply.25
………. ***
Our predilections are created and set to be debased only by the reality of the actual physical human encounter, and generation of sexiness, such as when a man’s fingertips gets to grip with a real female body instead of gazing @ a two dimensional static pictures, two-dimensional video @ a distance of two feet or more. Pics and video mean animating oneself, fitting oneself into to a full-blown 3-d ‘encounter’ in the mind’s eye. Coping with real women in front of you, and not some rock hippy punk’s second and third-hand wet dream, they demystify the relationship that one has to one’s own sexuality. The encounter poses questions of a truly graphic nature. Only the brave and the psychonauts (literally, a
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Prostitution or pay-for-play (P4P) in heat seeking zones allows a more breathtaking aspect of fantasy play, including living your wildest porno fantasies, doing something ‘dirty’, or it is viewed as an act in itself. Human passion and its physical expression are not controlled by an abstract moral code, whether of chivalry or sin, but by aesthetics, by decorum for its own sake. Love is a type of art for art's sake, an exquisite piece of absurd theatre. You explore it as you explore yourself, but only if you acknowledge it as a powerful drive and human interest. You can be passionate. ………. *** The Japanese man obsessed over his ‘wives’ love life. He couldn’t see beyond being a Thai whore. It was life itself, madness. XIII
25
According to Jonathan Ott, the word ‘Psychonaut’ was originally coined by the German author Ernst Jünger. a person who uses trance technologies from any of the world's religions, modern psychology, and other assorted paradigms, to explore the psyche, their own consciousness, and potentially improve real performance of certain psychological tasks.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
It is an interesting conundrum indeed whether duration is a linear continuum of instants like orgasms, in a similar was a movie reel is comprised of a succession of static frames invisible to the perceiving eye. Everything depends on perceiving life as a unitary process of happenings. The duration of a flash of lightning is 0.0002 seconds. What do you think about and feel in that space of time? Nothing? Years and seconds are mere durations, what do you think and feel during them? The spaces in-between short times spent doing normal touristy activities like absorbing nonsexual culture. The Japanese man waits patiently, panting.
laden @ check-in. But they still let us through. It seems and sounds so strange when you hear someone unfamiliar with the conventions of a place, they don’t even appreciate the local people do not speak their language. One section on the left side of our neocortex takes in speech, and another on the left side produces outgoing speech.
………. *** Over the years people pick up what is popularly called ‘baggage’, cognitive and emotional. Those who've been hurt by men in the past and carry psychological damage and unresolved anger into present relationships. In short they develop a set of ‘this’s’ and ‘that’s’ – basically conscious reasons to put themselves and others down, reasons to procrastinate and do nothing, create no change, reasons to be complicit with what seems to be the norm. Reasons to absolve themselves of any sex and any impressions of sexiness or any generation of sexiness. We take much ‘baggage’ with us whether we are aware of it or not when we go to another place. In fact we are over
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But paired with them on the right side of the brain are two separate areas for understanding the emotional content of the incoming speech and modulating the emotional content of outgoing words. I have seen this often on my travels where a looming foreigner is explaining in child-like or mental hospital expressions the rational and logic of their needs and request. The result is that they hammer on irrespective without empathy or sympathy. They may even do so by not acknowledging that when locals accept you for a drink that this is an unusual experience for them not just you. People that do not normally drink may drink to excess, lending you the impression that this is what they do every night. That you have dropped in on a ‘normal’ night in an endless maddening loop of people getting pissed. This is only compounded when the same happens the next night you go there. You do not see nor be aware of your contamination of the scene, or their everyday, even if it is friendly; obviously accommodating and you buy all the drinks. By modelling, their arrogance and ignorance become part of the lesson and
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
perpetuate a limiting, damaging pattern and process. Even from 36,000 feet and after a Campari and soda.
wakefulness, we produce reasons for our actions that are rational, plausible, and guided by the logic of cause and effect, whether these "reasons" accurately portray any of the real motivational forces @ work.
But this is because human beings, irrespective of culture, are incorrigible pattern makers from the time they are born to the time they die. Where no patterns are apparent they will make them, and they will make them according with the influences that have affected them, such as language, protocols, conventionally accepted wisdoms, acceptabilities, tolerances and prejudices. "The cognitive system does not treat each new object or occurrence as distinct from and unrelated to what it has seen before: it classifies new objects through concepts which group the new object together with others which have previously been encountered."26 ………. *** The idea of complexity states that most things - e.g., packs of wolves, immune systems, and human cultures - tend to organise themselves into recurring patterns, even when these patterns are not immediately visible to an external observer. Our minds are also designed to string events into story lines, whether there is any connection between the parts. In dreams, we regularly weave sensations gathered from disparate parts of our lives into narratives. In full 26
Hahn, U. and Chater, N. (1997) “Concepts and Similarity" in Knowledge, Concepts and Categories, edited by Koen Lamberts and David Shanks Cambridge: The MIT Press. p. 43
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I remember many years ago in Bangkok, seeing a distinguished looking scholarly man in his 50s, with his wife, map open, wanting to travel to the Emerald Buddha, and relaying this over to the tuk-tuk driver in Bangkok. The only reply was smiling and “patpong, patpong” bound to presenting the obligatory soapy massage brochure. There is no need really for a map to relieve the complexity of finding a mate. No need for a beautiful Massimo Vignelli's 1972 version of the New York subway system, no need to check its aesthetic with respect to The Graffiti of mind. These are incommensurate realities. The man has a sophisticated and defined idea of what to do in Bangkok with his wife. His Frommer’s guide has tutored him. The tuk-tuk driver is tutored a different way, by experience not a map, his reality tunnel sees only another drunken farang looking for sex with his debauched wife in tow. Later both will be brought to orgasm by lithesome and limbic Thai families with a distinct knowledge of the human anatomy and its reactions. Try as she will, the women will come. ………. ***
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Another friend of mine, an ex-pat of some 20 years standing, and who speaks fluent Thai, still gets stroppy Tuk-Tuk drivers taking him to tailor shops and massage parlours when he is trying to go to work. We perceive only the sensations we are programmed to receive, and our awareness is further restricted by the way that we recognise only those for which we have mental maps or categories.
Prostitution as opposed to marriage or a courting relationship is temporality finite. Short time (typically up to an hour), Long time (all night or till morning), or Girl Friend Experience (GFE where the girl will stay and travel around with you for the weeks you are on vacation) are variations on the type of experience one can encounter in places like South East Asia. Beyond these categories one ventures into the realms of standard relationships – common law wife style, or fiancé and/or married. Many men hit for alimony will wonder what they are paying for, why they are paying. The Japanese man waits patiently, panting, for his water bowl. Meanwhile elsewhere she sits and waits for her next punter.
………. *** Communications in South East Asia are often unclear and vague, which is not necessarily a bad. It leads to fun more than frustration. The plotline covers a wide range of philosophical ideas, which makes it a fine introduction to philosophy and existentialism specifically. When it is white noise then nothing is clear, everything is permissible. XIV
Prostitution seems strongly linked to the idea of duration. It’s been around a long time, but some view it as an unsavoury tradition, it asks too many difficult questions about free will and determination, or economics and of moral and ritual.
In many ways, anything beyond short and long time, earmark the differences in prostitution found in heat seeking third world ethnic zones in a qualitative sense over hooking encountered in the west. As duration increases, towards common-law wife, fiancé and marriage, men come to believe and view the relationship as ‘real’. This real eventually becomes ‘victim’. ‘Men’ are "jerks" and "users," and “losers”. They need help in loving a FWC. “Dr. Wong, The effect on our relationship has been shattering.
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I have lost my self-worth, I no longer see myself as attractive and I feel emotionally and physically rejected. We have had sex three times in the past two years. I had no clue he was a sex addict until he broke down in tears one day and told me. I suspected he was having an affair. But nothing prepared me for what he had to tell me. I just couldn't take the lying and the deceit.” It is not emotionally or psychological possible he could love having it off with South East Asian prostitutes than me, It was so degrading they have small, hairless tight young bodies like children. They should be punished for this.” I will divorce him for his own good, and remove some of his funds that fuel his sex addiction. I am backed by many reasonable men and women in out society. It made me go back to church and seek out therapy. I now have a very supportive young boyfriend, who is a lot slimmer and better in bed than he ever was. It makes his erection jut out. I also have money to go on nicer holidays than before. And to treat my boyfriend and myself. He sits and waits for her lawyer to make her move. ………. ***
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Wouldn’t be divine if you could just sit there and watch the enemy simply implode, collapse their tendencies? Contrast that scenarios above with a ‘social’ reality. Many men retire in their late fifties and there is often thinking amongst couples of this type: “well, I can't, I won’t put up with him or her around the house for the next thirty years, s/he's going to live until his late seventies, early eighties, so let's split up now before any more infirmity enters the arena.” Rational cool or fucking what? Where is the love? If you're ill or if you have to go into hospital for an operation, the after care costs are much greater if you live alone compared with if you're living with somebody where there's the mutual care and support, and the also of course. Relationships have merely become part of the smorgasbord of a consumer society. Both men and women now choose partners, and living arrangements, as they might choose their Mediterranean holiday or the colour scheme for their loft apartment. So against such rational thinking and impermanency why shouldn’t a man who’s just hit the barworld believe his new found partner? Their background and cultural conditioning will suggest that all the behaviours and signs signal that
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
something special is happening that they have found something or somebody of value.
………. ***
This is even when the ethnic girl has a ‘real’ relationship already with a local man, someone who may be living off the money she receives from the foreigner. Complicit agnostics. They then aim to support the girl and her stated desire to stop working @ prostitution, and they wire money periodically, say, once a month. They are not the only philanthropists however; the girl may support babies, immediate and extended family members, even friends from this money. Where men paid to have sex (short time or long time, St or LT) they start to pay more for a relationship (GFE). They may eventually marry and choose to live in SEA or arrange for their fiancées or wives to come to their home countries. They may not return for months @ a time, leaving massive gaps in the prostitute’s life. where once she lived in an environment of pure adrenaline, loud music, flashing lights, a degree of uncertainty, drugs and very hard reaming from fresh keen foreigners (‘farangs’ in Thailand, ‘barangs’ in Cambodia, ‘laowais’ in China, ‘Gaijin’ in Japan). Jim (39) sends $500 a month to his ring fenced ‘wife to be’ – it allows her to engage in ‘fuck for funny’ with young men of her choosing who have an aversion to pay for ‘it’ .
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They are unitary measures, passengers processions, each one a potential world.
coming
in
But each obeys pretty straight patterns. They can be ‘read’. The extrovert and introvert visitor are processed as if they were one and the same. And it matters not that they have juggled multiple roles in their lives leading up to this time – father, church elder, doctor, brother, confidant, customer – the list is endless. Each role developed or restricted the character over time with ‘this’s’ and ‘that’s’. It enabled certain activities and behaviours and it closed others down channelling them towards certain ends. Now; in this country, he is merely a unitary farang with simple needs, needs that can be easily catered for with the minimum of fuss and derision, and who desires simple talk, in a place outside the box that was built for him and by him. Like a coffin. XV The 6’5” muscleman with sculpted model looks and subtle cosmetic surgery who bellows in the street in ecstasy, in celebration, the emaciated ‘weedy’ man who never has touched a women before shirking in the shadows with his homoerotic fantasies; they are either cut down, taken down
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
into themselves, or picked up, brought out of themselves all into the pavilion of mirrors, the twilight world of uncertain relations. The category ‘Homo’ is no threat @ all, nor an anomaly, it is merely channelled into a different go-go in a street catering for this predilection. The question is will they find themselves an Alice in Wonderland world, a chimera. Some say that South East Asia heat seeking zones are an adult Disneyland; others see it as a cheap fairground attraction. Some see it as a monstrous lap dancing ‘tip and touch’ club or even a peep show, or even and Java extension of their web browser. Some get lost down the Rabbit Hole. Some lose their own heads up their own asses...
always the target of the mascara, high heels, and then they will leave. The secret is how to keep them interested, to get them to help, to engage them forever. To get them to come, to pay, to laugh of their own accord - to empower and please them and say “yes” so much that they send money for nothing forever. God forbid they have heart attacks before things are arranged. Everything else is not irrelevant, their reflection is too moody, but in-between, short and long times… fuck them they reflect… they pause and think… is this real? They think too much…
………. ***
This world is only uncertain within tolerances, the tolerances of either culture – the moral west and the conservative east, or when the duration of the encounter is too long. It takes work and money and much flexibility adaptation for the girl to make it happen. It is also predictable that:
The farang will get drunk, lose their inhibitions and want sex, in amongst advance consumption society it’s still
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One man had been married to a Thai for 20 years. They had grown-up teenage sons. She then returned to her first husband who had been ‘waiting’ for her all these years. Had she played a long con? The cynical would say ‘yes’, the realists would say ‘that’s a long time to wait’. But of note was that her farang husband didn’t want her to go. It was no longer his choice. He enabled her independence. Now she had money, and a glorious shiny day 1st world passport, it
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was her choice. He sits and waited for her to make her move and return. The ‘husband’ had no choice.
in a bar? You must have been crazy before you first came to the barworld.
Another mark up for the super-duper ever resilient and multitalented multi talented and flexible Thai women. This story echoes the dystopia of much of the available literature on the barworld, such Dave Walker’s and Richard S. Ehrlich’s Hello my big big honey! In this book they illustrate a collection of letters apparently sent by lovelorn westerners to their Thai bargirl lovers. Much of it is presented tonguein-cheek to show just how pathetic or abstract men can be. Some of the letters are so personal as to make the reader cringe. Why would two mature professional people sometimes talk baby talk to each other over the phone? Why do mature men get off on the baby talk of Thai bar pipepuffing girls?
………. ***
The effect reading this and cringing is that you distance yourself from ever thinking such thoughts, before you appreciate the journalistically detached - non-patron - views of the editors of the book. ‘Men’ do regress here, maybe in a way they could ever do @ home. It makes Thai women again appear like some voyeuristic exploration of aliens from the world of non-patrons. The effect is that they are somehow immune to emotional change and attachment. The moral is how you could even begin to consider falling for a prostitute
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As it was in the story there can be much more, the man’s Thai ‘wife’ had never felt fully comfortable with the west and its ideas and notions, foodstuffs and endless prescriptions on how to look, what is good for you and your family, how to keep being sexy in your marriage, and how to think about others. She found Wastelanders to be the most fake and insincere people she has ever met. During parties she would be introduced and then ignored after being decided that she cannot hold a decent conversation. She would look for, and find, the nearest TV where feature programs for women obsessed about losing weight through new products which were expensive. Expensively packaged but didn’t fill you up. Her husband would get angry, if she did this in public, and instead of paying a lot of money to buy things in the waste, you seemed to be paying a lot of money to not consume things - food and calories in order to lose weight. Products that kept you young were even more expensive but they made sense. She was always overseas finding herself in the presence of Thai prostitutes; they are the one’s who typically become foreign wives, who form and comprise the overseas Thai communities. She could eat with them, but she preferred the Thai ways, they were more
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
certain, less ambiguous, and contradicting. They spoke of money, going out @ the weekends unaccompanied by husbands left @ home looking after any children. They spoke of their love of black men and their large penises, young men, and drugs and card playing. Nothing else.
in mine; and immediately I find it pleasing, immediately I find it amusing, regardless of our inability to agree in assigning a character to it, should I not be a fool to deprive myself of it merely because you condemn it?"
They would leave their farang husbands looking after the babies whilst they cavorted with young men in local western discos. In Thailand they would have left them with mother, or with a married sister. Here they did not need to pay. If the weather got too cold, they would make some excuse to stop work and go to Thailand in high season. They left their husbands for much younger boys, they knew more about local western legal systems and alimony than most family lawyers. After all they were Thai a superior breed of human wherever they go. Meanwhile their ‘men’ join recovery plans which encourage strictly defined boundaries such as 'no pornography or masturbation' or 'no sexual activity out of committed relationships'. Cool.
-Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom
………. *** "There is nothing either fundamentally good, nor anything fundamentally evil; everything is relative, relative to our point of view. This point once established, it is extremely possible that something, perfectly indifferent in itself, may be indeed distasteful in your eyes, but may be most delicious
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Although Aristotelian logic may work great for digital circuits, or simple syllogisms, it fails miserably when trying to understand the human condition or things that work through calculus. Many avenues lead to a satisfactory relationship. Chief among them is being there. Second is crossing some cultural divides in a way where you not only respect and act authoritatively in the cultures in which you are situated, but also with positive respect to the odes of the cultures that you were raised and brought up in. Only you can be the scales of justice here and try for balance, your other half must do this also. It eventually becomes like spinning plates, where you try for balance here but lose it there. It often does not apply to the logics of east and west – as Rudyard Kipling had it “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” Beliefs and faiths do not establish "truths" or facts. Replacing beliefs with predictive thoughts based on experience and evidence provide a means to eliminate intransigence and dangerous superstitious thought.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
But herein is the eternal rub, predictions are often biased, and predictions of one’s feelings are more biased than most. For chaos here we refer to systems which display behaviour that, though it has certain regularities, defies prediction. We have no real idea where our relationship is going, what joys and what calamities will happen. While we can listen to stories over a beer, or read the stories of heaven and hell on the Internet (www.stickman.com and www.mangoauce.com), we don’t know where we’re going in them until we get there. It is always a work in progress, even the most hardened professional, whose been spoiled over the years may compromise with you, if you can do so with her.
indicates balance of two elements in a perpetual dance in interrelation, equity and interaction.
………. *** Have you ever gone into someone's house and rearranged their furniture because you want their house to be the way you want it to be?
…..☯☯☯☯…. Philosophy, unlike the common and garden bar hooker, has long had problems defining 'good' and 'no good' the bugbear of all philosophy. Yeah, many of the binary opposites, like 'truth' and 'falsity', 'fact and 'fiction', 'short time' and 'long time' are not polarisations but merely facets of the same thing. Consider, the classic Yin and Yang pattern so popularised by western affections towards eastern mysticism
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XVI We are thus entering the field of the philosophy of opposites or Yin and Yang, of ‘0’ and ‘1’, the basis of all programming languages. Human nature, life and the universe are an unerringly a collection of opposites. Life, growth, creation is ‘good’ vs. death and destruction is ‘bad’. Derrida's theory of "dangerous supplementarity." Derrida argues that western thought perceives the world by "binary hierarchies" - sets of oppositions like man/woman, culture/nature, real/imaginary - in which one term dominates the other. However, as Derrida writes, the apparently unassailable privilege of the dominant term is surprisingly precarious, an illusion both produced and undermined by its supplement. For Derrida, the relationship between dominant and supplementary terms points to an impossibility within the system of language: on the one hand, the terms are seen as opposites, hence exterior to each other; but @ the same time each term requires the other to signify @ all. Today most people rely heavily on a particular logic, usually some from of Aristotelian logic, where we think in binary terms of black/white, true/false, good/evil, guilty/not-guilty,
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up/down, inside/outside, etc. Many things, indeed, follow this simple logic, however many things are distinguished across, and operate through, a continuum – the proverbial ‘shades of grey’. This seems so true in some encounters where men view the girls in the light of a presumed or given biography. “Has she really only been working for two weeks in this bar?” “Even if she has been working for 5 years on the scene she hasn’t met the likes of me yet?” From the time you and me were very young and our abilities, our capacities to tell a ‘p’ from a ‘q’ were not yet founded, and our parents kept telling us, repeatedly impressing upon us, what is permissible and what is not, what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’. Right from wrong and left. Likewise, the visitor to the foreign land has trouble telling a Viet from a Khmer. A ‘good’ girl from a ‘bad’ one. An თ from a Ю.
They mirror each other, one is not any more important than the other, neither the white nor black dominates. They are sorted and homeostasis, balance is the natural order, if even if this means death of the organism.
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
The man comes to heatseeker location packing mucho dollar, he uses it to sculpt, carve himself a movie. He believes it is his movie, his choice of locations, his casting couch and crotch. She sits and waits for him to make his move. The hooker knows that it is her bait; it is her turf, her natural habitat and familiar workplace, her script and her plot. ………. ***
Mr. Dollar Bill with wings is the bit part actor who will be killed off in the first five minutes as arbitrarily the order was to dispose of the prisoner as was seen fit @ the time. Is this a false flag operation carried out with the intention of stirring up the passions and buying the allegiance of people? This could never happen in human affairs.
XVII Who or what dictates, promotes or controls the balance, the net result, the outcome is what the symbols beggars through its interpretation and assimilation into the mind.
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The actual actual truth is that they create a metaphorical yin yang pattern, they mirror each other, and as they do, and do
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
so in a context of many more relationships like this, they create an entire Pavilion of Mirrors. It arises from a need for homeostasis, for balance and apropos. Truths and meanings and intentions get lost in here. They fragment, they ricochet, they miscommunicate and misinterpretate - all towards entropy. It increases and compresses human ‘social’ relations.
The mutable becomes brittle and hard. The tongue is soft and remains, the teeth are hard and fall out. And so the whoremonger does not bring only dollar, he brings himself, a human being with our lovely Samsonite baggage, with views, beliefs, opinions and he will likely stand by them and defend them - until they are brought to their heal.
Some are like marriages of 20 years, all experienced in the eye blink duration of a wild drunken Descartian, Dionysian or Dickensian 10 day trip. All the highs and lows. All the up and downs, the wins and losses - everything in a single vacation that makes Returning to the west or the village and to the daily grind seem meaningless and monotonous for either of them. Both hooker and their 'clients' love this. They love scenario. They love this fast lane. It is that which makes the pavilion of mirrors seductive. What begin as vague patterns eventually become a universal need for hard boundaries and stubbornly held opinions and beliefs?
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The world of the two year old child will not forgo the potentiality to kill you while you sleep. ………. *** A suicidal obsessive-compulsive Japanese man woke one balmy night to witness one of his ‘wife’s’ babies. He ignored the pile of medicines and creams in the sink and pulled the towels out from behind the toilet. He reminded himself not to let them get back there anymore, since it wasn't very hygienic, which would do little to help the obsessivecompulsive habits he was steadily forming this year. After hanging them up, he decided to get a new towel from the hall closet and bundle the old ones into it, with the idea of removing them from the bathroom without touching them, so that he could clean them later. The ‘baby’ was playing both with a methamphetamine pipe and a massive razor sharp blade oh so close, so close near his head and puncturing and playfully slashing the mattress.
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Children of this age exhibit no violent tendency, no ulterior motive, and no malevolent motivation. Only the basic programming to explore product and nature and bodies bound to the prospect of not being able to identify what another person would or could feel about this behaviour. The otherwise gentle and happy child had previously picked up a stray cat which had wandered in the window one night, He did so painfully by its hind quarters and threw it scything in the dark air of the balmy room, hissing and focussing its eye and balances @ the Japanese while he soundly slept for once after 5 sleepless days on the end of pipe. The Japanese awoke of sorts from a hideous dream the feline ripping @ his face and hissing like a serpent, a fuckedup Asian god creature from chaos, malevolent in any proportion, and inauspicious. There was no empathy, No ‘ABCD’ no cause and effect in a dutiful linear patter extending from here to some uncertain future time. The mother, his ‘wife’ would never permit this. If he had been killed, or lost the sight in the eye under the ripped eyelid, by blade or rabies, then who or what was to blame? "Sumimasen, sumimasen!” I am so scared," he repeats, “sumimasen, sumimasen” and crumples to the floor unconscious.
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When he came to it was still dark, the child was sleeping soundly on the floor. He woke his ‘wife’ who lay thorough this encounter passively, rolled up tightly in knot like foetus position, dreaming and waiting to emerge into the light of day and eat soup, and she kicked about violently and otherwise erupted on him for being ‘no-good’ and not loving her babies, and not paying money, certainly not enough money for their up-keep. ‘Wife’ kicks him, not hard enough to break any ribs, but hard enough to make him yelp. She had, already that night, performed multiple acts of felatio as she did every royal night, sometimes with very fat and very old men who took much manualising to bring off. This night, for the first time ever, her jaw was almost locked as she deep throated a large man. Long duration. Some westerners have an aversion to washing their privates and coming quickly. She had several babies now, to various men’s and hues of nationality, none of them exclusively Japanese, although her main line of work as a younger girl had been in the Japanese sector. Most were naked running about in Issan. He lowers his head. "I am so ashamed. I borrowed a lot of money from one of their loan sharks. I tried to pay it back to them, but I could not come up with enough money.” He was not going
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
back to Japan. Some babies she had nipped in the bud, Buddhist abortions, including two from this Japanese.
swarms, it can suffuse them with vast feelings of delight, passion, love, playfulness or curiosity. Only when they engage in their pipes.
She was a virtual living advert for the clothing company Benetton. One could imagine a billboard with the Japanese getting slashed alive from a Bangkok stray, and her lying in the blood of her afterbirths, abortions and miscarriages which she coped with @ work with a cigarette and her yaba pipe and several beers and a coat hanger and wide spectrum antibiotics. . . Next.
A classic line in the analysis of hookers' goes a little like this: "It is hard for them to get close to you because they cannot show their feelings or emotions." Such a critic would say that she is carrying around the mental and emotional turmoil from her last 5-7 years of work, that it is always work for her. The Japanese man of course, is not working, in a metaphorical or literal sense anymore. He sold his soul to stay there and wait. And as the great winds of the earth and the ocean of neurone firings in the individual brain of each of them
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☯☯☯☯ They coalesce upon the schisms of ‘good’ and ‘no-good’, ‘east’ and ‘west’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘implicit’ and ‘explicit’. So some over the counter Valium to kill the pain for only tonight. This turns into a relationship based upon, and reliant upon, prescription pills and non-prescription pipes. They build chemical bridges between the rupture of good and no good, between cultures, between man and women. Then they can engage in strategy developments, speak a little of their future together. Other pills provide for hard-ons and different sorts of healing, high impact steroid creams for sore vaginas and mouth cold sores. ………. *** Elsewhere, a newcomer to Cambodia is trying to speak pigeon Thai to a Vietnamese hooker and getting furious that he is getting nowhere, “mai kow chai.” [don’t understand in Thai] . He expects any of these girls not only to understand him, but to love him over other punters for his efforts. One madman bought a $9000 ‘Princess Diana’ ring, on TV to do the same. She sold it for 1250 BAHT the day he left and told
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
him that she lost it under in the toilet bowl. She spent some money on the manufacture of digital pictures which embossed his head on a Thai wedding body, and she on a model’s but they were disproportionate, not quite right. But it is the feeling that counts. The feeling one gets is curiosity.
Is this category confusion or just another vain and vague attempt to adjust what you perceive to that which you know best, with what you now feel most comfortable with? These men may also feel the need to improve them, the Cambodian hooker’s by importing the Thai model. That way they hone their hooking skills, twist them, make them more productive, more effective and efficient, like what they, the men like, what fits their ideal of appropriate hooker action and antic.
She closed the daft lost in translation skit with a very direct, classic Viet SoundBits, delivered in a deadpan manner of delivery with a real friendly smile: “you, you, mister, me vietnamee, you likea short time or love long time?” Meanwhile, in a corner bar down the street two visa run Pattyhaha residents have bought all the girls a $3 lady drink and are teaching them Thai style: “Ok girls, after me, one!, two!, three! HELLO HUNSOM MAN!!!” The visa-run men are amusing themselves as did missionaries before them, turning Cambodian bar hostesses into Thai bargirls. They are Thai colonialists impressing their cultural viewpoints, morality and codes of conduct upon the heathen and pre-historic. They may have to due to visa restriction and changes have to recreate their beloved pleasure palace their Xanadu Corporation.
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Are they following a similar frame to western Christian NGOs in their pressures and efforts to reform Cambodia? With big dollar funding these agencies are determined, not to alter the modus operadi of hse, but to stamp out prostitution in this same little backward heathen country. They work like devils with corrupt police to make sure a foreign bar owner is prosecuted for 'forcing' girls to put out. They want to get their own hands on the girls to persuade them, using common sense and quite self-evident truths and proofs, that what they do and how they have been living is 'bad'. It isn’t there fault but the punters, they bring their evil with them in metal tubes and their dollar which is a benign technology being used to evil effect. Dollars like technologies are always neutral, non-partisan and political until their employment and use. Then they highlight and create anomalies.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Then they lock them up for their own good, against their will; give them some comfort food and a bible, teach them to sew.
lovers. It was meaningless in these ‘social’ interactions. They dance like this. He sits and waits for her to make her sexy move.
Once they had learned to open up to and adjust to the drunken foreigners’ apparently incessant need for sex and blowjobs. This is accepted as a simple manualising act, independent of ‘psycho-’social’ effect’ and considered relatively straight-forward, clear-cut. Unambiguous and common-sense. Ah but then they encounter other foreigners who abduct them and tell them it was the barang men’s fault and giving them a book of very abstract and @ times scary fables in their own languages. In amongst the other daily ideas and tensions the behaviours of foreigners was very foreign. It was better taking dollar form them for manualising acts, and saying to them ‘I love you’ – not having any idea, clue, notion, hint in the world what this meant. It was single word utterances embedded within lyrics. They heard it as the only utterances within songs. The Khmer karaoke is incessantly rural idylls or quasi-techno pop whilst the Viet karaoke displays big-band crooners dressed like David Bowie in the 1970s during his American soul period, or homogenised Asian women lasciviously Beyoncé Madonna style dressed in post-punk ‘Michael Jackson’ thriller ripped garb, flanked by 10 prancing lean
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Chapter 3. Asparas and Diasporas I
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THE SMOKING DOG Each act of man is the twist and double of an hare. Love and Death are the greyhounds that coarse him. God bred the hounds and taketh His pleasure in the sport. This is the Comedy of Pan, that man should think he hunteth, while those hounds hunt him. This is the Tragedy of Man when facing Love and Death he turns to bay. He is no more hare, but boar. There are no other comedies or tragedies. Cease then to be a mockery of God; in savagery of love and death live thou and die! Thus shall his laughter be thrilled through with Ecstasy. -Crowley
T
he term diaspora (Ancient Greek διασπορά, or
"a scattering or sowing of seeds") is said (without capitalisation) to refer to any people or ethnic population forced, incentivised or induced to leave their traditional ethnic homelands. In its use it typically refers to their dispersion and distribution throughout other parts of the world, and the ensuing developments in their dispersal and culture. Some say that those cultural artefacts and elements we recognise in the first instance as Thai, like Aspara dancers, are in fact derived form Cambodia. Some others say that Cambodia actually derives the style from Indonesia, and before that India, before that... And so it is also with thoughts in the mind or the firings of neurons in the brain – their patterns cohese and move and eddy and swirl, from what was chaos and meaningless to
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eventually making sense, good or no good, this short time over that one. Humans are incorrigible pattern makers and seekers, hunters and gathersers. And where no patterns seem to exist, or nothing appears to hunt, they will invent them. They give them names and have to reinvent their category systems. This is creativity, really, @ its human best. So we have a diaspora of Jewish people throughout the world and we have a diaspora of Asian peoples throughout the world ………. *** Genghis Khan’s seed is well documented as being well distributed. 16 to 17 million men in Central Asia share a pattern of Y chromosomes within their genetic sequences that indicates probable descent. Great Kahn DNA can be found within many Caucasians. We now have Caucasian punters hitting South East Asia looking for tight, clean small hairless bodies to work and stretch, whilst simultaneously 1st world woman sex tourists hit the Caribbean states and Africa, deeply interested in teak, massively endowed men who are more than willing to stretch their enlarged private parts. American-blacks apparently are hitting on Latinas in South America, they luv all dat azz and they love girls who can handle anal with dignity.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
All these are looking for, searching out a little or much hard action and a decent orgasm, but I hold that they crave some alternative reality, scenarios, and mirrors of their soul and… dare we say it love? Intellectually, people may not like those others going searching to gratify needs, desires and fantasies.
with your temple or church, surf a universe of meaningless blogs and their borrowed and re-hashed nonsense, or sit @ home waiting for home delivery than exercise you libido. ‘Women’ sleep with men to get pregnant; in Australia the state gives them $4000 to do so, if they live alone – without the man. This is equity so wake up and smell the beans!
Emotionally they may have some sympathy. Kinaesthetically, physically, it is strikingly obvious why they do, why they would travel in a metal tube in the sky looking for sex. The tactility of love plays a very important role to cultures who continue to abstract themselves and their sexuality to new, and maybe even unacceptable, levels. We just don’t touch anymore in this digital age. Its all facts and figures and statistics and quantities [5’ 5”, 47 kg. age 28, etc.] on a web page. ………. *** Its easy to see how such societies helplessly obsessed with quantities and ticker tape, overblown working hours, investment and global business news channels do not like nor wish to promote unproductive behaviours like fucking your brains out @ will, Certainly not with something large enough or small enough to make it have some meaning. They’d - the austere and common sense aspect of society and its repetition - politicians, religious industry, academia and media – would all rather you obsessed with your hobby,
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You lay in your Nana Hotel room watching Bloomberg news, checking to see if you can afford short time or long time that evening. That is what the Japanese man used to do. Once he made so much he was able to wet his appetites on something young, very young. That was in Yarrowat and Svay Pak a long time ago, when there were many more permissions, and other Japanese men, with cuddly Pokemon style backpacks, filled with cutesy Japanese kiddie toys and sugar lollipops, pig tails, anime hair clasps, and explicit comics, schoolgirl panties with embroidered figurines, played with children in the street. Who is deracinated to the far side of the globe? Immigrants and asylum seekers of all kinds flock to where the promise of justice and democracy reign. Local conditions of existence and multi-local connections. Notions of diasporas, transnationalism, bordercultures, biocultures, migrancy, nomadism and homelessness push against the limits of established definitions of nation, locality, and tradition.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Questions of what it means to speak of home, community, identity and belonging have been reassessed against the context of the 'age of migration,' that is, the global circulation of culture, capital, and people. Meanwhile we see evidence of westerners going east to seek alternative lifestyles in foreign climbs. This is globalisation and mobilities. After following the system as goodly citizens and amassing some wealth they strike out to live in places which present a challenge or offer up what they can’t have @ home. In some cases this is peace and charming rural scenes, such as a retired couple moving to Tuscany or a middle-age couple seeking to run an Alpine hotel which reflects there taste in leisure. Sometimes it is more exotic, timeshares in Mediterranean begin to become timeshares in Morocco, or Bulgaria, a log cabin in Latvia. For some others it is a timeshare in Pattyaha which some term the brothel of Thailand even though it also boasts its fair share of honeymooners and more adventurous married types?
atmosphere of bars and excesses - “One night in Bangkok makes a grown man humble” the jukebox plays as an everlasting understood pun and fact, and many times I have I played out the cliché walking in as a king after a few beer Sighnas, then crawling out like a slug in true hell-raising style with a hangover and no $ in my wallet. I sit and watch TV in my hotel room while waiting for night to fall, and then I drink beer, and make my move – my love in my way.
Surely wherever we go, each of us brings our own insights and experiences with us, what is oft referred to as ‘our baggage’ and it is an idea that we somehow hang up our ‘this’ and ‘that’ when we jump on a plane. More positively it may be skills, professional experience and insights. It may even be religion. Once the novelty has worn and tiredness and fatigue sets in, maybe even confusion sets in, then it is often time for reflection no matter how extroverted you are, or to whatever extent you become intoxicated in the heady
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………. *** Speaking of intoxication, some persons’ wonder what effect alcohol has on sexual desire. Well, actually, it has no effect. Alcohol simply deadens the inhibitory function of the frontal lobe of the brain. So while the frontal lobe is trying to tell you, “Stop! This isn’t right!” The intoxicating effect of alcohol intercepts that message and substitutes its own subversive message: “Hey, if it feels good, do it.” But I have also witnessed men, broken through the death of a spouse, or a bitter divorce, sit, as alone in their thoughts and heads as if they were staring @ the ceiling @ home alone. In the spirit of Confucius I tend to think optimistically and say that we are divided simply for the sake or chance of union. This meaning that human interaction, whether the young lover gaining access to his or her first love or the divorced or widowed or simply lonely gaining access, even temporally, to another is a privileged event. It matters not the $ value. Dollar is simply one part of the puzzle, getting to and being
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in the right place, both physically and mentally I am also crucial, as is the available of willing partners in the crime of ‘togetherness’. According to the Scots philosopher J.S. Mill, emergent properties are not subject to this law, but instead amount to more than the sums of the properties of their parts. Stay tuned. ………. *** The prisoner heard something one day in the third or fourth year, above and beyond the barrier of white noise. A voice shouting “turn on, tune in, and freak out.” Repeatedly, again and again. He had to translate it from English to French and then to Vietnamese and he still didn’t understand.
II “One has to find out for oneself what it means to die; then there is no fear, therefore every day is a new day — and I really mean this, one can do this — so that your mind and your eyes see life as something totally new. That is eternity. That is the quality of the mind that has come upon this timeless state, because it has known what it means to die every day to everything it has collected during the day. Surely, in there is love.
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Love is something totally new every day, but pleasure is not, pleasure has continuity. Love is always new and therefore it is its own eternity.”27
One magikal movement between Cocytus: the Greek river of lamentation and Acheron: the ancient Greek river of sadness the mysterious, obsessive-compulsive, suicidal Japanese man is living in Bangkok. He takes Valium to engage in arguments with his partner, his ‘wife’ Noi. But he downs pills not only to ‘cope’, but to survive mentally and spiritually. He takes it to sublimate his opinions, his ‘social’isation and conditioning, his culture and his learning. Sometimes he thinks he is Ronin – masterless Samurai - on Valium, or the pipe, sometimes he thinks he is his favourite delicacy – whale meat. A heroic thought. He ate whale meat not to get jealous, he takes pills and alternatively pipe to think like a Thai honcho persistently swinging on his shack's porch in the village waiting for his pipe, incessant short times and beer Singh money. He can sit for hours, his hands grasping his loins, like the Ronin watching a classical song dance delivered by a top Geisha. It lends him the impression of the stillness of the pool. In the barworld awaits a fellow combatant who strives in the battle of banality.
27
http://www.werobot.com/jk/intelligence.htm April 24, 1971, New York. Reprinted from The Awakening of Intelligence
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
His fetishes orgasm in green flower fields with green lanterns all around, and a cool breeze that freshens the air.
over the years implicitly, and she grooms herself explicitly as an evening ritual.
His minimum and maximum standards persecute him less and less than does basic and upfront pipe and pill, as does his 'this' and 'that'. The constant need to consume things to improve his health and image has left him far behind. His teeth are falling out. But age and physical appearance mean nothing for him in those heady soldier and factory man’s short time rooms. Well no more than the scorching incessant heat anymore. He is not morally bankrupt but selfevidently ethically agnostic. He has lost his ‘this’ and ‘that’ long time before, one example being his fear of a bargirl’s cigarettes and pipe.
She even once brushed his teeth. Pipes illustrated the banality in cleaning her home and pet. He no longer dreams of the drawing lines in the sand, or looks @ planes, metal tubes in the sky drawing long silver chains en route to Narita.
………. *** He had lost his own ‘real’ wife and daughter. There were – still - in Japan, and she had a career, not in the human sciences. They barely considered him he thought. And he was no longer, some absent lover. It all means nothing now, nothing here. No halcyon past, no wishful future. His movie is on an ever more maddening loop. He is to blame that it is all the same, all the same. This is the source of his pain, the crucible of his karma. His girlfriend is engaged in severe grooming. She groomed him
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She now knows she needs to look good, respectable, and beautiful as later, she will take yet another stranger’s penis in her mouth and manualise and macerates it skilfully. Why should she believe in the notion of progress beyond that of the next farang’s next orgasm, she can feel duration in her mouth? To convert to linear notions of reality than the circular one’s she accepted and assimilated as a child. They and their careful penises are unitary measures marking out the circularity of existence with arkashic chalks. They come from that metal tube and via Suvarnabhumi, and their Nana Hotel room, they funnel into the bar. They have fierce ice strong erections, then they take medicine to make it strong again, then they leave. Some cry like babies @ an airport. They are going back to a dark, hideous, lonely place, paved with gold.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Santayana offered a good metaphor here: "The essence of nowness runs like fire along the fuse of time." It is chasing them like hounds. Surely this links impermanence, the classic theme in Buddhism, to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which states that a closed system will evolve to be more disordered, its useful energy converting to heat – for the suicidal Japanese man this means heated arguments or occasionally tepid sex.
of sex be sublimated but not repressed. He is her familiar pet in world of transient men and ‘lovers’. He is her panacea to impermanence. A loving and faithful pet farang, like something that a Japanese 20 something would pack in a Pokemon bag to take to Svay Pak brothel area. But now, she is about to go to work. He waits for her to leave and return. He waits, panting like a cartoon figure.
………. *** Such is the experience of time’s arrow here. That which is built will have the tendency to fall away into chaos. If he doesn’t hold it together, she may throw him out @ any juncture, and it will be total. This expresses the Buddhist notion that everything, without exception, is constantly in flux, even planets, stars and gods. Human life embodies this flux in the ageing process, the cycle of birth and rebirth (samsara), and in any experience of loss. So she, the Thai ‘wife’, now never felates the Nipponese. But there was a time, not so very long ago, that he was unitary to her, one in the endless legion procession of selforganising or crying orgasming foreign men, who had pleasured themselves more than any women or other third party, and then she blew him with vim. Ah, but now he is a subject, project, latent, and so must therefore be his sexuality again, it must under natural law within her entire equation
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Sometimes he doesn’t see her for days, once or twice two weeks or even more, she leaves him no money to eat or buy water. It makes it seem like decadence this indeterminacy, scuba diving off Ko Samet and dining in decent decadent restaurants, her present trick is a gentleman who always checks out her ass as goes to the toilet. The strange games people play and lies they tell in marriages is such a favourite topic of modern drama He is one of many who wants to marry her, and can’t understand while she is still on the shelf. For all of them, everywhere dotted round this big wide world, it is a mystery.
Purely, without any competing myths, evidence or narratives, he believes her story. Common sense tells us that a person who does not consider all information may make an unbalanced decision. Filtering the information available or trying to discredit it not based
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
on how true it is, but rather based on how it supports the party line, is a common control method used throughout history.
told her it was auspicious to do so. In the blow job bar she was part of a crew of six. She noticed that he ‘needed’.
That she owns several mobile phone shops. She has little money though as it goes to pay for her sick mother's care. It is expensive. She is an ascetic; she lives on the floor of a shack, and any money he gives to her as a gift she will send to mum. He is delighted with his find. He wants to dress her well, and tutored her on decent perfumes and jewellery. They love the Paradee Resort, it’s their darling 3rd romantic time together there. He sits and waits for her to make her move. He learned this through 26 years of marriage to a corporate vice-president of marketing for an aircraft company. A Harvard graduate with tremendous distinction and taste, and who came from an old family in New England. They lived in the Hampshires. He transfers this learning and grafts it carefully onto his new lover. She role-played as best she could. Complicity. She loved shopping for silks in Bangkok for him. He rang the bell in the Bangkok bar in ecstasy of communication and bought everybody a drink in the bar while she was @ the Rose garden. After he met the Japanese man’s ‘wife’ who worked blow job bars when her astrologer
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The Japanese man’s ‘wife’ returned the gift of learning to Mr. Handsome by blowing him like he'd never had before. Not even that once when drunk and he snucked into that Latina joint on the lower east side after they won through that contract. Fuck man. All those long years of the guttural blow job bar, all those human cocks. Getting fridgit impotent and very old men off, it was easy with the romantic and cultured. She just had to get his mind off the ticker tape. He attributed this powerful orgasm to the fact he loved her and that she loved him. He used his ‘crew’ and ‘coxless pair’ energy on her, to satisfy her, to let her see what a swinging dick he was beyond the trappings of wealth. It was showcasing his virility and health. She was a simple farm girl, and he loved her wholly for it. She was primal, pre-historic and more involved and @ one with sexual practices in nature outside the city. They were naturalised within her existence instead of reified and abstracted as with his well-breed pedigree-elegant American wife, with her law degree and MBA form Harvard.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
The Japanese man’s ‘wife’ told him she'd never had to do such a filthy act before, and when she performed it this delighted him. It was a necessary condition of the relationship and ’social’ glue. She would do it only for him, only for him, because he was the one, he was a good man, she loved him.
………. ***
Her sister who is a manager of a mobile phone branch pretended that she was the owner when Mr. Handsome and her visited a branch one day. He was duly impressed with the operation and even lent some best practice ideas with them to chew over. Then he wanted blown again and booked in to a small hotel in the street just to be spontaneous and a ‘crazy’ macho man. He was short timing his girlfriend/finance, “mister you love me long time.” When this man leaves [he cancelled 3 golf and business trips to stay with her and get blown by her again and again and again like a broken record or production line].
She often finds him, the Japanese man thirsty, once close to death through dehydration. It’s almost curious even though it’s easily understood. She simply forgets when she leaves and locks him in, and he forgets the last time, as he is consumed with grief, and feels he must face a challenge. The neighbours while courteous to her, they are deeply offended by him, or rather his lack of being able to be independently wealthy and adorn his ‘wife’, while being ‘Asian’. His Thai is ruthlessly appalling and ignorant and rude, confined almost to expletives, the expletives of the barworld and bar pipe hse. Her gold comes from boyfriends, good men, not like the Nipponese, who do what she says and buys gold after two days of her skills. She picks these types of farangs up in the Thermae or Nana car park, depends upon her dictates of her pipe. ………. ***
She brings the Japanese man gifts, sometimes the gift of sperm, made into a special Japanese sweet.28
28
This is perhaps a reference to the Daoist practice getting a young man and woman together in order to gather up their sexual secretions and swallow them. This was detailed by Jacobus X. (1898) when he reported that it was still very common @ the end of the 1800s, although he did put it strongly as a “strange freak of eroticism.”
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“The old Celadon is accompanied by a servant or strong coolie, who copulates with a woman in his presence, and then retires ... When once the agent is retired, well and duly paid, the old debauchee is left alone with the woman, who is still resting upon the field of battle. Then the man approaches, and eagerly receives in bucca sua, the liquid which runs ex vulva feminae.”
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
But some nights she goes to a high class place with her friend, Took. But she can go several nights and not have one, then boom boom, one come and he gives her much.
it always does, swirling with images, thoughts, associations, perceptions, feelings. It is like a giant mind. He has no future, no past, only thirst and other immediate needs like hunger, and a need for short times in a soldier’s and working men’s bordello that he takes five five baht busses to reach – when he steals money that she has stolen from a farang from the night before.
This converts to many pipes and mucho madness. She blows for salary and tips and pipes in the bar if times get too hard. She dresses right down for that. She doesn't want recognised as a pipe. She was once caught out. Like a Rene Magritte picture [‘This is not a Pipe’] she tells fibs in and around her pipe. He sits there and she waits for him to make subtle telltale movements. Sort of neurotic itching. III Of the suicidal Japanese man’s base need for water. He has no family here, no friends, and no-one to relate his plight to. He is deep, deep in the game deep in her turf. He sits there waiting with open bathrobe. He has been masturbating until lack of nutrients makes him asexual. He has lost that postcolonial security long ago. It freed him of much of his responsibility to self. He was, to some extent, an unfettered depressive Japanese man, only encumbered by the paradox of not being able to change his circumstance or environment due to dependency, whilst enjoying sensations and decadences that he could never even have fantasised before. Oh! The nightlife in the city, one night in Bangkok and all that jazz, its all going on and he is not part of this moving, as
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Yes, he has only his wants and needs @ the time to tell him he is sentient, that he is still alive. He can only learn that in the bordellos he can’t learn it from her and her men. But he still thinks in the linearity of cause and effect, of efficient production and progress, of a Thousand years of linear history. He can’t leave; he is a prisoner of his own affections and predilections. He craves successive short times in the bordellos; he would prefer them as he had in Cambodia. He has compromised. The girls act as mirrors to his soul and as mirrors to his ‘wife’. He waits for his 'wife' to return from the coast or a night @ the bar. He then has a delicious treat; he scavenges the men smell on her, the must, American, and European and Australian men, their forensically understood aftershaves that reminded him of past times. She laughs @ this, makes him more like a dog, and makes him her pet. She needs to care for somebody. Most farangs just want blown. ………. ***
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Japanese salary man nostalgia, expensive shopping trips in Aoyama, the expensive brand designer area of Tokyo, with the Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior shops. He was a radical, non-complicit non-conformist salary man deep down. None of this she cares about and would simply laugh @.
on his ‘wife’ on occasions, it bored him, but he was well disciplined and mastered @ this craft, and he could taste the rubber of American Trojan condoms versus British Durex. A Californian homosexual’s butt-plug. Indian Viagra substitute. He classified these corporations and businesses, these consortiums and gestalts of pleasure in his diary.
But once he was central, he had control. He treated his Shinjuku Kabukicho pickups and loved to mix sleaze with class, for this man this was exhibiting real power – both to them, to any onlookers, the shop assistants and himself. He'd pay $15 for a whiskey in the bar. Real, unabated genuine and personal and ‘social’ power.
Before you know he is an entire history, biography of indirect nonsense, neatly categorised and recorded as only a manic compulsive/obsessive or a properly tutored and funded ‘social’ scientist could do.
This is the circumstances under which they – he and his ‘wife’ had met. He sits and waits for her to arrive, as if in an art house movie, one night she almost didn’t. He began to sit there and wait for longer and longer and longer durations. It was not having a 15” cock, covered in fur and skin tabs, with a Prince Albert piercing just to rub it in that he was so, so huge, no it was all psychological and emotive and very, very Asian and ‘social’. He performed cunnilingus well and
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For instance, the smell of the men on his Thai whore Mrs. reminded him of airports like his beloved Narita, designerely, and boasting distinctions and class, and other expectations, local representations and global ambivalences, of comfort and dedication to work, vacation and company. These condom aftershave men had power over him, real power, but he was aware that they only rented his pipe loving ‘wife’, they only saw the stage front, her presentation of self as she and her like designed to the whacky world of Eastern whore meets western whoremonger – what he knew as the pavilion of mirrors. He was resident in one of its alcoves waiting to die or have obtuse forms of voyeuristic
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
indirect sex with his ‘wife’. He is like the other inhabitants of this Wonderland world, fibbing, conning, relativist postmodern method actors. But not really...
cocksucking technique before his next visit in six to nine months, this was dependent upon business commitments.
………. *** The pair sat silently and eats stinky Issan food, salty and pungent leaves, burned oils and fats. He knew the aftershave airport bound men would never eat like this for more than a perfunctory day or meal or two. They rented his 'wife' to play a lead role in someone’s second hand fantasy – the pornos that had inspired the trip and sustained the interest of the sex tourist when he had to work in his home country. Another theory is also based on the principles of behavioural imprinting which states that males masturbate frequently and as one develops a frequent pattern, the objects that are frequently nearby @ the time of masturbation become likely objects of arousal in the future. The individual is thus associating the object with sexual orgasm. It is theorised that because the brain is recording all sensory input during masturbation and orgasm including vision, smell, hearing and even taste, this simultaneous information becomes neuronally linked with the pleasure of the activity.
It was one exception to his gentlemanly demeanour, one requirement; it was the one stipulation to his monthly western union stipend was that she allocates some budget for new movies. The cache he gave her was immense. Ginormous!!! She and Japanese viewed this material dispassionately. It was neatly catalogued; he’d spent ages in the room sorting it. One problem however, there seemed little yum-yum in amongst the gamut of terms and behaviours which the movies depicted. I mean fuck’s sake look @ this list!! Warning: a kaleidoscope of distinguished and related sexual practices now follows as an almost meaningless list (please kindly cut out individually - templates available on the website - and attach to refrigerator magnets for reassemblege in new novel combinations):
One man had even given the Japanese man’s ‘wife’ the pornos and boxed DVD player @ the airport when he left. He wanted her to watch them everyday to perfect her
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Abrasion Anal sex Anal plugs (small) Anal plugs (large) Anal plug (public, under clothes) Arm & leg sleeves (armbinders) Aromas Ball stretching Bathroom use control Beating (soft) Beating (hard) Blindfolds Being serviced (sexual) Being bitten Brainwashing Boot worship Bondage (light) Bondage (heavy) Bondage (multi-day) Bondage (public, under clothing) Branding Bruises Cash Cages (locked inside of) Caning Cattle prod (electrical toy) CBT Cells/Closets (locked inside of) Chains Chamber-pot use Chastity belts (short term) Chastity belts (multi-day) Chores (domestic service) Clothespins Cock rings/straps Cock worship Collars (worn in private) Collars (worn in public) Control Corsets (wearing casually) Corsets (trained waist reduction) Cross-dressing Cuckold Cuffs (leather) Cuffs (metal) Diapers Dildoes Double penetration Enemas Enforced chastity Erotic dance (for audience) Examinations (physical) Exercise (forced/required) Exhibitionism (friends) Exhibitionism (strangers) Eye contact restrictions Face slapping Fear (being scared) Financial Food play (cucumbers, sorbet...) Foot worship Forced dressing Forced eating Forced homosexuality Forced heterosexuality Forced masturbation Forced nudity (private) Forced nudity (around others) Forced servitude Forced smoking Full head hoods Gags (cloth) Gags (inflatable) Gags (phallic) Gags (rubber) Gags (tape) Genital sex Given away Hairbrush spankings Hair pulling Hand jobs (giving) Hand jobs (receiving) Harems (serving w/other subs) Harnessing (leather) Harnessing (rope) Having food chosen for you Having clothing chosen for you Head (give fellatio/cunnilingus) Head (recv fellatio/cunnilingus) High heel wearing High heel worship Hot oils (on genitals) Hot waxing Housework (doing) Humiliation (private) Humiliation (public) Hypnotism Hypnosis Ice cubes Interrogations Kneeling Latex Leather clothing Leather restraints Lectures for misbehavior Licking (non-sexual) Lingerie (wearing) Manacles & Irons Manicures (giving) Massage (giving) Massage (receiving) Medical scenes Mind Control Money Modeling for erotic photos Mouth bits Name change (for scene) Name change (legal, permanent) Nipple clamps Nipple rings (piercings) Nipple play/"torture" Nipple weights Oral/anal play (rimming) OTK Over-the-knee spanking Orgasm denial Orgasm control Outdoor scenes Outdoor sex Pain (mild) Pain (medium) Pain (severe) Phone sex Piercing Prison scenes Pony slave Public exposure Punishment Scene Pussy/cock whipping Pussy worship Riding crops Rubber/latex clothing Scratching Serving Serving as art Serving as ashtray Serving as furniture Serving as a maid Serving as waitress/waiter Serving orally (sexual) Serving other doms (supervised) Serving other doms (unsupervised) Sexual deprivation (short term) Sexual deprivation (long term) Shaving (body hair) Shaving (genital hair) Shaving (head hair) Shopping Skinny-dipping Sleep deprivation Slutty clothing (private) Slutty clothing (public) Spandex clothing Spanking Speech restrictions (when, what) Spreader bars Standing in corner Straight jackets Strap-on-dildos Strapping (full body beating) Stomping Swallowing semen Swapping Swinging Tampon Training (in ass) Tattooing Teasing Thumbcuffs (metal) Tickling Trance Triple penetration Trampling Uniforms Including others Vaginal dildo Verbal humiliation Vibrator on genitals Violet Wand (electrical toy) Voyeurism (watching others) Voyeurism (your Dom w/others) Video (watching others) Video (recordings of you) Waxing (hair removal) Wearing symbolic jewelry Weight gain (forced) Weight loss (forced) Whipping Wooden paddles
I mean it's worth going through this list to check what you have done or not done. It is the state of cataloguing sex in an age of males seeking grooming and hand moisturiser. Mind control! According to volume IV of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders, sex addiction involves 'compulsive searching for multiple partners, compulsive fixation on an unattainable partner, compulsive masturbation, compulsive love relationships or compulsive sexuality in a relationship.' Is this you? If so, please come to Dr. Winslow Wong.
IV
They – the Japanese ‘wife’ and man - got lost trying to match the behaviour to the English description or word for it, and were bamboozled with respect to how this was to educate her in the art of felatio. It brings them together; meld them as Asians trying to unpack the west. But they weren’t, many DVDs were in fact, Japanese, who were proliferating Bukame movies. They ticked the list with red pen and still got lost. They gave up. I am hardly surprised. The reality is that she can blow a kiss, 1000 baht and penis a million times better than the
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
women or men depicted on the video; they do it for the camera, and the presumptions of jacking. She does it for real, with the skill of a surgeon, men of all hues and persuasions. Looks and age don’t matter, nor does their ‘this’ and ‘that’. The Japanese become nostalgic with the Bukame action. He wanted to stand to attention.
fluently. The 'wife' loved the dirty dancing of Beyoncé and Britney Spears.
She was simply grateful that westerners were not producing copious amounts, drowning amounts of sperm, in her bar. She could accommodate a single load with ease, but the wads of eight men. Too copious, they were standing to attention, Battle Royale style. So they gave up and gave away the DVDs to the families next door, they in turn viewed 10 minutes worth and also decided they could not make head nor tail of it, and passed them on in whole and part collection, until Le Roy (a character who will come later in this volume) viewed one in one of the Soi 33 Artist’s bar. This was not normal practice, but someone was curious why it had been left there the night before. The bag contained a pack of Viagra, some grass and Valium. They replaced the gifted disks with a much more pleasant Karaoke DVD – now this made sense to both of them. The Japanese would grab a mike and sing 'singing in the rain'. Passing the house you would think he could speak English
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………. *** Dame Anita of the Body Shop fame and corporation criticises stars such as Beyoncé and Britney Spears for simulating sex in their videos. She was also disparaging of the trend among some hip hop artists to make porn films to be marketed alongside the overly graphic lyrics of their songs. But as usual this agony aunt speaks for herself, and the paucity of her right-on politically correct company, the Japanese man and his ‘wife’ understand, interpret this Beyoncé and Britney Spears lasciviousness easily, they enjoy it, they revel in their cavortions. They were enthralled by the garb, the ripped post-punk Michael Jackson Thriller outfits. Older western grey haired men, the type that she blows every night, they dislike it on their TVs @ home, they fear it and they are threatened by it in their homes [even the lascivious blacks dancing up Britney’s sides simulating sex are in love with each other, and find Brits perfume delicious but body and tits repugnant]. Such is life and lies and images - it’s not just for South East Asia after all and its hooking scene. V
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
An event might be defined simply as whatever is temporally before or after anything else. In ordinary discourse, an ‘event’ is a happening lasting a certain duration during which some object changes its properties. Meanwhile, while the Japanese and his ‘wife’ are eating repugnant food from the western palette’s point of view (POV), sharing and being silent together, issuing silent commends and demands upon each other, an unidentified Black man is lying alone, slaughtered in Toul Kork district of Phnom Penh.
of the western mind.29 Immediately activate "Ops Search and Eliminate" uttered a man in the room above where all this took place.
His crashed and mutilated motorcycle has been already stolen, as is his wallet. He had spent some 35 years largely in South East Asia, but also in Iran, and several undisclosed locations in African countries. Or it could all be horseshit. He was slaughtered as if he only arrived yesterday. Herbs, some dollars and Cambodian riel were found in his pocket, with a faded picture of a Vietnamese woman decked out in 1970s garb clutching a baby with a road sign stipulating Tehran in English and Arabic and how many kilometres.
And this is of course not only in South East Asia, consider that during production of the The Wizard of Oz, a coat purchased from a second-hand store for the costume of Professor Marvel was later discovered to have belonged to L. Frank Baum.
………. *** Two people, this time scattered whites, who had also been living as man and wife lay dead in their rooms in a Phnom Penh hotel. They were in separate rooms, in accordance to my scanning of the arkashic record, I see the existence of this thought forms which have been captured by computation, and used, through design in some bizarre twist
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We are in South East Asia and we are considering synchronicity, misrelated events and elements somehow being tied together in meaningful ways if you look and consider deep enough. This could be described as one theme of this writing.
The twist? Baum was the author of the original children's book upon which the film is based! the roots or essence or of coincidence, twilight zone or meaningful webs suggesting a higher plane of interconnectivity of events, people and places, the arkashic record or something like that? A 29
The Akashic Records or "The Book of Life" can be equated to the universe's super computer system. It is this system that acts as the central storehouse of all information for every individual who has ever lived upon the earth. More than just a reservoir of events, the Akashic Records contain every deed, word, feeling, thought, and intent that has ever occurred @ any time in the history of the world. (see http://www.edgarcayce.org/about_ec/cayce_on/akashic/)
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
rhizome of meanings. Certainly, a cosmic or collective consciousness, the beautiful, affluent and the well networked. Then the rest.
categories become so granular and so precise that you will find your perfect rational match, then find out they are not you, or not who you want to screw? Will they not, like the massively parallel program GOrinNOsho, act as your surrogate stand in online and the hard yards of getting to know you’ in the online matching and seduction game?
………. *** Nudity is often thought to be the natural condition when we are most simply ourselves, but it is also the state when we can least well tell the ‘social’, intellectual, and moral condition of the person in front of us. What do we see looking @ ourselves nude in a looking glass? That is what we see when we look in to the dark lovely eyes of another. Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself. Reciprocity – the very foundation of any notion of a universal set of human rights. Ok I want to screw you senseless; I want you to do it to me @ the same time, for as long and for as much pleasure as I will have. The gentlemanly man utters this as he tenderly makes love to the obsessive/compulsive Japanese man’s ‘wife’, @ the Paradee Resort. Looking for ourselves in others, as well as mother and father... We are always looking for patterns in the world around us, in our ‘social’ worlds and that of nature and the built environment of buildings, designs and cars. Today love is not just something you search out, but also control through games like the Sims Hot Date, in the future will not online
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So what of the rest? I use the best. Those who are not attractive, rich and have no networks. This is the Japanese man, and a trillion other superstars and superheroes of banality. The packing, those not central, the extras: what of their feelings and intellect, their motivations and disposition? Media and television teach us that we are central, the overseer. Then we find out we are not, we have following a mirage. The celebrities we followed were homosexuals posing a macho heterosexuals, or they are dead, or they are racist, scientologists, egotists, or they were lacking a million other ways all revealed by media. Meanwhile a man is accessing pictures of real bargirls on a forum dedicated to P4P in South East Asia. He wants to know how he may meet and make loud male violent and aggressive love to those nudes depicted. They become celebrities and superstars.
Guys are jacking to these ordinary common and garden whores, and then they go meet them in the flesh. They
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
become a living canvas or a living avatar.
Ph.D. would partner with an illiterate taciturn farm girl with an athletic build, half his fucking age? ………. ***
The way you join the dots, hse, the way you project meaning and intention on object and other people in the world matters. Freud describes narcissistic love as follows: "A person may love: (1) According to the narcissistic type: (a) What he is himself, (b) What he once was, (c) What he would like to be, (d) Someone who once was part of himself."30 Take for instance the evidence for assortative mating among humans is well established: human's mate assortatively regarding age, IQ, height, weight, nationality, educational and occupational level, physical and personality characters and family relatedness, their predilections for a pipe. In the “self seeking like” hypothesis, individuals unconsciously look for a mirror image of themselves in others, seeking criteria of beauty or reproductive fitness in the context of selfreference.31 It beggars why the anomaly of attraction exits between a portly obsessive/compulsive Japanese man with 30 Freud, Sigmund (1952). The major works of Sigmund Freud. Chicago: William Benton. 31
Alvarez, L. (2005). “Narcissism guides mate selection: Humans mate assortatively, as revealed by facial resemblance, following an algorithm of ‘self seeking like’”. Evolutionary Psychology 2, pp.177-194.
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Every criticism every categorising, every typing and stereotyping speaks more of your own training, learning and culture than it does of ‘the others’. Alice, continuing her slumber's journey, walks through a mirror into the LookingGlass House. Already reality is twisted and nothing is to be trusted. The Japanese man has done well to ape the Thai, so so well that his ‘wife’ will hook to support him. That is the ultimate accolade of love in the pavilion of mirrors - she that he met while she ‘worked’ now ‘works’ to support him. The yin and yang circle goes full turn. This goes unnoticed because you are preoccupied with keeping it together in a strange place with strange manner and mannerisms [this country]? When you meet him in Rainbow 2 in Nana Plaza, you see him as yourself, as a man – any other - with money in his pocket, on vacation, there to consume flesh visually and kinaesthetically. You are not a jock in competition with this man; there is more than enough pussy to go round. Little do you know that one of your fellow vacationers is paying for this night, and the Japanese man stole the money that she stole from one of his friends but the night before?
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Its a small world. Little do you know that the night before this man’s wife was blowing you? He now wants to sit with the aftershave men, to relax and appear as one of them. She, meanwhile, is in another bar, doing what she usually does to men, blows them as part of a trio. Yes, in Lolitas, in Sukhumvit, Soi 8, the monstrous 300 kilo man eased, as best he could, his massive, monstrous hips forward, and as he judged, as has learned to, he tried to move, so his massive belly almost engulfed the suicidal Japanese man’s wife with the cute bobbing bubble bum who was dutifully on her knees working his flaccid urine stinking stub and knob like it was deeply evocative and aesthetically moving. It tasted like her dinner that night before, fish sauce and bugs. The range of tastes and perfumes across the Land of Smiles - how do we make sense of this world, moreover our sexuality, the world outside our homes?
They jostle for place and even critique and cripple each other on how far they venture into idea space with their trite and aggressive but derogatory metaphors which help support and frame policies and laws aimed to protect and separate women and children from men, from any society, anywhere, in any time zone, in any age or period in history and development of civil society, and across the aeons some also wish to educate general men and ethnics on how silly, or ignorant or how anti democratic or just plain brutal they have been, or inherently are, emotionally, intellectually and physically.
………. *** Western female academics and their funding relax in their heated office spaces in the Northern hemisphere in winter time - so excruciatingly dedicated and creative and attentive to detail and full stops. They help when they study prostitution in global sex hubs; they wish to inform society, any society anywhere, in any time zone, in nay age or period in history, and across the aeons that these acts are simply, naturally, reprehensible.
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They use creativity to invent damming metaphors for male heat seeking activity whilst demanding change for changes own inherent sake. It precipitates and becomes policy and law. This way the way they word it is emphatic. And it is worth mentioning the behaviours it causes alchemically are also emphatic. They vitriol translates to a French postcolonial – with weak psychic resistance – who comes to do a 6 year stretch in Prey Sar prison for ‘forcing’ women to prostitute themselves. Good work! Who says this Magikal war is not messy??? You never know whose side you are on until it’s too late – the Japanese man in the damp, sweltering hot, airless dark room or the freezing, Vietnamese man in the pure white room.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
VI
managing ourselves, either as individuals or as groups. This is because we are all separate and different, fragmented and atomised to varying extents, under some conditions, mindsets and in certain circumstances. For centuries people have debated the nature of the human self, and the intimate questions of identity and self-identity. Stolen identities terminating in Russia and India. This includes the question “are we alone?” The guy who has a peek @ illegal pictures in the safety and security and privacy of his own home may think so. This belief is rampant in Western culture. It is derived in part from our stories and our myths, and perhaps for westerners, more precisely, the Biblical creation story in which Adam is explicitly given dominion over the Earth and all of its creatures.
So many lines of thought seem too modest for the topics @ stake. There are some prostitutes from the Eastern Bloc, who are nothing more than slaves. They are not prostitutes earning a living for themselves per se, they are being exploited through enslavement, usually by male pimps. Now many of us do tasks and take on responsibilities we don’t always like for a living, but that doesn’t make us slaves, or necessarily, victims. Am I a whore writing this? Does it not take labour? In fact we could all to a lesser or greater degree be regarded as prostitutes by selling our existence for something we don't necessarily want to do or agree with. We are talking about ‘real’ reality here, beyond the virtual, beyond the reality of sex and death and risk. Reboot, let’s start that again. Humans have long considered themselves to be the dominant species on Earth if not the entire universe. It is a false modesty to state otherwise, surely? We are the most advanced in intelligence in the universe and in our abilities to manage our environment, and the space that lies beyond it. That is, until proven otherwise by that little green ‘man’ landing on earth and indicating to us either verbally or non-verbally, maybe with his ray gun, that this is not so. Until that time then, most, if not all of our problems lie in
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………. *** In this story the person called ‘Adam’, fiction or faction, had no reference system, like that ‘intelligence’ that created him. He was alone, single, singular, individual without reference or index to anyone or anything else. He catered for no-one and nothing was expected of him in return, except to exist, persist and sustain. For whatever reason this balanced state pained him, or that which created him, so ‘compassionately’ he was given the prospect and actuality of mate by the preternatural being which had first created him. He was given a woman. The reasons for this are unclear, but this came to be seen as a normal state of affairs. Like when one
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
visits a mall to window shop, or a garden centre or leaf through the prospects of a new designer fitted kitchen. It also became necessary for procreation of the species, twoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s company, we need crowds to make matters complex. The preternatural being was interested in them going forth and multiplying. It has long been held that self-replication is one of the fundamental processes separating the living from the nonliving. Biological viruses reproduce, but only by commandeering the reproductive machinery of cells through a process of infection. Computer viruses reproduce using the hardware and software already present on computers. Memes reproduce using the human mind and culture as their reproductive machinery. Maybe intelligent robots the likes depicted in the Matrix will become a reality, machines created in our own image of our thought processes and ourselves. The branch of psychology known as cognitive science lends much of its endeavours to inform artificial intelligence research.
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Chapter 3. Revisiting the Chinese room
Following these rules, he is able to come up with a set of what he is told are answers to questions, which are correct and in effect impossible to distinguish from the answers that would have been given by a native Chinese speaker.
I
W
hen I hear or read bargirl communication I
am often reminded of the ‘Chinese Room’ an idea of the American philosopher John Searle. John imagines himself shut up in a room. Apart from a door, there are two slots in the wall, one for incoming data, and one to put through outgoing data. Two or three batches of papers full of writing in the Chinese language enter the room via the ‘in’ slot. Remember, John has no understanding of Chinese @ all. This is akin to a computer's understanding of a problem that it is asked to deal with. However, somebody has provided John with a list of instructions, or rules, which enable him to correlate order and link the different batches of writing, that is, arrange and categorise what comes in to his room. The rules tell him to copy some Chinese characters onto paper and pass the resulting Chinese sentences as a reply to the message he has received. This list equal to a program being run through a computer.
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He puts them through the ‘out’ slot. To follow these rules John need not understand Chinese. He is like the bargirl being told to offer the word ‘love’ @ an appropriate moment, say after a night’s embrace. It is maybe something she has never said, or would ever say in her own language in her own cultural contexts. This was a simple argument designed to show up the limitations of the famous Turing Test devised in the 1950s. Turing's basic argument was that, if a machine could give answers to a problem indistinguishable, to an impartial observer, from those given by a human being to the same problem - and thus 'fool' the observer into thinking it was human - it could therefore be said to be thinking. s Chinese room idea, then, is a version of the Turing Test, and John Searle has passed it - according to the test, he can now be said to understand Chinese, because he can give answers to questions in the language which are indistinguishable from those given by a Chinese speaker. However, he has understood nothing of the answers he has given - he has simply, blindly, followed instructions. ………. ***
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In many respects this is what the game of love is like for many when they get in tow with a bargirl in South East Asia. She is answering all the questions correctly, even behaving, correctly, according to rules learned from antidote that circulate in the sub-culture she inhabits, and through her direct liaisons with western men. But does she understand the effect she is having on the man? Does she feel ‘love’ or is just uttering the word because it appears to make this man happy and she wants to please him and he may pay her more money?
David Livingstone Smith in Why We Lie states that lying is deeply embedded in our subconscious as a result of evolution. 33 Most of the book's stories are linked to this theme. Evolution means simply that those who survive by lying possess among their talents the ability or the features that deceive predators who could harm them, as well as the ability or the features that deceive victims whom they may harm.
So, buttons are pressed and answers are delivered, but perhaps little to no understanding has passed between the involved parties. This is an incommensurate realty. Does the man on the other hand know what kind of effect she is having on him? He may think he does. Many men accept on faith that their bargirl personifies their ideal woman. His attraction to her is irresistible because she is his anima, his archetypal dream lover, personifying the feminine nature in his own unconscious. Jung posited that all men carry an ideal image of woman in their heads and unconsciously project that image onto "the person of the beloved."32
32
Jung wrote: “Every man carries with him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definitive feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious, an hereditary
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The living creatures that did not have the knack to deceive or that had less ability to lie died of starvation or by being eaten. They did not survive to reproduce, more than those who possessed the quality to lie and had a better chance of multiplying. Thus, evolution produced the best liars. In the evolutionary context, living things that lie do not intend to lie, mislead or deceive. In fact, they might not even intend to survive by means of deception. They simply do. Thus, evolution cleanses lying of its pejorative sense. The reason factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or 'archetype' of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman . . . Since this image is unconscious, it is always unconsciously projected on the person of the beloved, and is one of the chief reasons for passionate attraction or aversion. ("The Development of Personality," The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 17, paragraph 338.)” 33 Smith, D.L. ( 2004) Why we lie: The evolutionary roots of deception and the unconscious mind London: St. Martin's Press
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why beings lie does not map to these beings' intent or choice. It relates to their innate abilities and the resultant survival by greater procreation.
There is something about lo-fi intelligence and communications with ethnics that suits us, university trained, media soaked, 550-channel TV, sophisticated knowledge-age individuals with credit and debit cards and 500channel digital interactive TV and 8 Meg broadband connections.
In 1965, Joseph Weizenbaum created the program ELIZA. Based upon the techniques of Rogerian psychotherapy it makes sentences by re-arranging and transforming the words in the input sentence. Thus one version, replies to "My mother hates me?" with "Why do you say mother hates you". It elicits more and more disclosure from the sentient being that is you. According to Weizenbaum ELIZA requires so little computation that it can be carried out by hand. Consider that an experienced computer programmer, the likes of Otto Gerstang or Derek Tyler in Volume II would have field day writing a program which could emulate the email communications of many bargirls “luv u too mush. When u come back Thailand?” The question that remains is such affairs simulations (or worse, "emulations") of a girlfriend in anything like a conventional sense? Or is it simply pure "parody" of mimicry of the responses of a western lover, derived from movies, MTV and cable, comparisons with wizened others in their peer groups, or through actual encounters where they have learned to be responsive in a positive way with men. This includes physical and well as verbal intercourse.
Perhaps it is just too easy for men to feel paternal or to feel compassion when they come from this complex world, or when they come from a world of decent investments, securities, insurance protections and high salaries. One imagines both democrats and republicans having a field day dishing our alms to poverty-stricken damsels whose family has needs. ………. *** This gives lee-way for role playing and civil responsibilities. Some may be dangerous for one’s penis and wallet, and for your liberties. Remember there are hot, dark rooms, and white cold one’s waiting...
II
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This ‘scene’ referred to here is of course the opportunities or responsibilities involved in affairs of the heart. The message of many other books South East Asia and its extraordinary bar scene has been odes to disintegration. At best, accounts of what happens when men meet women there, and especially if the category ‘love’ is mentioned, suggest something akin to our worst possible relationship nightmares. In Dave Walker’s and Richard S. Ehrlich’s HELLO MY BIG BIG HONEY!, the most striking observation beyond the accounts of thoughts and feelings in letters passed between bargirl and their lovers and admires, in just how needs and wants are envisaged. From Ehrlich’s introduction:
urge to conform and blend in with our surroundings. Ehrlich continues:
“...The odds are against love. When she's dancing on her tiny stage, a Thai bar girl might discover a row of men blandly watching, as if jurors @ her trial. Or she'll see a man whose expression is so mangled from years and fears that his face looks like a Rorschach inkblot, which only she can interpret. In the shadows, a quiet drinker might be waiting for human balm to satiate and sooth his antique body.” Within this poetic expression of commiserate and incommensurate views there is no telling when one turns into the other. Human beings are heavily influenced by the
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“The capital of Thailand is not a unique place where men fall for ladies of the night. India caters to deprived romantics who go to Bombay's so-called Cage District on Falkland Road to search among impoverished, beaten women dressed in ragged saris, in a streetside zoo. In New Delhi, as night deepens, dank rooms fill up with stately nomad girls with thick dark circles drawn like black eggs around their eyes. They're camped in tents on the outskirts of the capital and sell themselves to rickshaw drivers, shoe shiners, peons and the male etcetera of the poor near the brick kilns and sandstone mines… In Kenya, dilapidated Sunshine Clubs sometimes produce a black woman wearing a blonde wig to fill a confused, modern need. Manhattan's Times Square mixes sex, dope and homelessness in an illegal version of free market enterprise. Amsterdam tries to pretty things up by placing its prostitutes behind glass windows, so strolling pedestrians can peer into homey little rooms and view them like expensive merchandise.” We identify so tightly with our ego that we don't even realise that it's not our true self when we take in poetic
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
imagery of places that we have not seen, and many not either. And we are oblivious to our shadow self and the inner-conflict between the two that adversely influences our behaviour and our psychological and spiritual health. Psychological and spiritual wholeness then comes from integrating these two disparate parts of our psyches. The shadow personifies everything the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself. There may be some advantages in Freud's picture of multiple selves with barriers between them, as opposed to Sartre's terminology, "bad faith," in trying to explain how a single person can keep a secret from him/herself. But Freud's picture, I think, remains a Socratic one: a person cannot "know him/herself." Sartre, on the other hand, is trying to avoid pinning responsibility on "another self." In Sartre's vocabulary, there is no barrier to
plants and animals, they were created in the image of the preternatural being, and possessed free will, or so it goes in the story, but lived with all the elements of their environment without fear or real separation. There were no shaping forces, it was the uncarved block. Total ecological balance, with no cravings, wants or needs. But through virtue of them both possessing free will, then the room for psychological difference came about. Doesn’t free will make one test and experiment with boundaries, limits, borders? Is not the inaccessible, the forbidden attractive? It is the proverbial forbidden jar of sweets on the cupboard top shelf. To steal and eat one. Makes it taste so much better than if you were inundated with them, inundated with choices, consuming them to you were satisfied and beyond, again and again. You do, because you can, never you can because you do.
knowing oneself. And why shouldn't I know myself? A plant has a past and a future, and we are usually happy to say that we can know a plant. This does not imply that we cannot learn more about the plant. ………. *** As soon as matters become ‘social’ then organisational rules usually are necessitated. In genesis they came into place courtesy of the preternatural being again: “don’t eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” And there were only these two people to begin with, each with complementary differences in their physiologies. They were different to the
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I mean why do we send space probes out and want to put men on the moon? Why did some people want to explore when they thought they’d fall off the end of the earth, or when life back @ home in the 19th century was beginning to boast some of the creature comforts we still enjoy today? Is it curiosity or our inherent wish to be anarchists and punk rockers, counterculture activists or something more than this? One of the animals, the serpent, was also different from the rest, it could speak like them, but it could also articulate
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
alternatives and appeal to the ‘free’ in the ‘free will’ of the woman. It is said that it had some independent agendas, so we know the story of how he tempted and corrupted the man using the woman as agent. The bite of apple unleashed the Aristotelian and Descartian binary divides, and complexity, chaos and pandemonium began its long fruitful career. Choices entered the arena, with vibrant dynamic thoughts, mortality, alienation, ecstasy, heaven and hell, good and bad etc. etc. The pains of a mortal existence and what we know as pathos and the human condition. Sex and death, Eros and Thanatos, Libido and Mortido, Life instinct and the Death instinct: Freud in his discussion of the two classes of instincts states the first class is the sexual instincts or Eros. This is a "...self-preservative instinct,...."
where we are also our mother, and everyone else. In growing up we develop this sense of self that ends @ the skin. The tunnel built for us by our neurological systems, our parents and others comes through teaching us by explanation or example, by rote and by lending us experience. The tunnel is wide or narrow, but it is always there, a tunnel, blinkering most revealing little. Blink, I caught a glimpse from the corner of the eye, and then you gazed, scrutinising, like a poker player playing Ace of Clubs, keeping the King of Hearts. It is ‘social’ly and cultural conventional to give us them. Otherwise we would be bereft of table manners and uncivilised. The difference is that in the infant the ego is, so far, undeveloped, and in a Zen practitioner the ego is transcended.
………. *** On the other hand there is the death instinct whose task it is to, "...lead organic life back into the inanimate state;..." 34 How many times had either Asian men diced with thoughts of death, and yet it was as far away as it ever was... III What we call the "ego" is our conscious self, our sense of identity. As newborn infants, we have no clearly defined boundaries or sense of self. We exist in a dreamlike world 34
Freud, S. (1962). The Ego and the Id. New York: W.W. Norton. P.30
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While these tunnels may focus our attention to select and concentrate upon certain people, objects and places over others, like a periscope aims @ targets out @ sea. They reduce environmental noise; they also conversely make our thinking narrow and mitigate possibilities and choices. While they may limit noise, they start defining certain behaviours, attitude and beliefs as ‘real’ and the ‘only alternative’ whereas they are merely items afloat on the sea of choice. This is why there is a huge industry for consultants of various hues and preferences that aim to help individuals or even whole organisations out of their learned myopia. Edward de Bono’s ‘lateral thinking’ notion and its
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many variants are of this school of thought. So who would be the con artist out of these two thinking types?
society about what a man should appear to be. He takes a name, earns a title, exercises a function, he is this or that . . .”36
We only transcend these aspects of human physicality – you know phlegm, bile, fat etc. - and its base needs for food, water and sex by ascribing to ourselves, our loved ones and all the other alternative traits, such as consciousness, mind and reason. Jung suggests that each of us has a ‘mask’ and a ‘shadow’. The mask being the conscious ego that we present to the world – that is being polite and acting kindly - and the Shadow self-being our unconscious. This is where we repress our entire secret and ‘social’ly-unacceptable desires. This is the home of our selfishness our hidden desire to act in pure self-interest to gratify basic needs for sex, food and water (and probably beer as well). The mask is the persona. Originally the name for the mask worn by a stage performer, the term was used by Jung to describe the face we present to society and even ourselves. “One could say, with a little exaggeration, the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is." 35 He is alluding to the sense that our personalities are ‘social’ constructions. We are what we are told we are. Nothing more makes the mask. “Fundamentally the persona is nothing real: it is a compromise between individual and 35
C.G. Jung "The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious," The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 9, i, par. 122f.
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………. *** Many learned commentators feel the modern culture of materialism leaves little room for reflection. The tendency to focus extropectively, on the outside world, the world of mediated realties and worldly goods dominates the occasions for self-reflection, the opportunity to ponder one's life and its place in the universe. The idea of philosophy being discarded as it runs counter to the pursuit of pleasure is a common theme in certain works of dystopian science fiction, such as George Orwell’s Brave New World or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. But it strengthens individuality and identity. However, it could be argued that a culture of narcissist self obsession leads to more introspection, self-reflection and introversion, since, in the quest for the ideal life, individuals will constantly analyse their characters, faults and ambitions. We judge others by our own values and therefore when judging others we judge ourselves, we have no choice, unless we play devil’s advocate. And we do so for the quest for 36
C.G. Jung ("Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious," The Portable Jung, Penguin Books, 1971, page 105-106.)
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knowledge or for fun. Satire and parody derive from this. The thoughts you read here expressed by these characters are no reflection, necessarily of the authors being… or are they?
godlike. Suprahuman, Überhuman At first glance they resemble normal human beings, but in fact it's not anatomically possible for a person, however athletic, to look like them.
For us who live in the waste, sorry I meant west, the myths of Greece and the thinking it inspired for succeeding ages of the Caucasians can be viewed, along with the bible, as perhaps the operating system of the western mind. Through their universality, their alleged and actual common sense, their ability to explain mundane matters, they travelled and were sustained through time. The good word and news travels today.
Überhuman is an unknown quantity @ this point. Überhuman is offline. Junior Member ... Überhuman is not a member of any public groups [his real name is Otto Ghershang and he will be dealt with in a later volume].
………. *** When the Athenian strolled in the market place, the buildings all around were decorated with grand, statefunded paintings of the warriors and battles of the past. In ancient Delphi, people would sleep on the steps of the temple of Apollo, seeking (incubating) the dream that would allow them access to the oracle inside. Mythically, this access to the truth was a later imposition of Apollo on a preGreek people who practiced dance and rites that were assigned by the Greeks to Dionysus. Pan, a very interesting deity, is one of his entourage and was said to have taught Apollo dream work @ Delphi. The Greeks, like the aspiring monger and punter dreamt of unobtainable bodies, aesthetically exaggerated and infinitely desirable and
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Spartans believed in a life of discipline, self-denial, and simplicity, just like you in the waste, no doubt. Every Spartan, male or female, was required to have a perfect body, not like you in the waste no doubt. Spartan soldiers would come by the house and check the baby. If the baby did not appear healthy and strong, the infant was taken away, and left to die on a hillside, or taken away to be trained as a slave. In their teens, they were paired with an older warrior to act as their mentor and father figure. They would also have sex in many cases. To make things even more interesting, for the first few months of marriage the wife would dress like a man and cut her hair short. She would then wait in a dark room for her husband to come in and "conquer" her. No marvellous works of art or architecture came out of Sparta, but Spartan military force was regarded as terrifying.
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In the Dionysian groups, the questions or problems, if that is what they were, were danced along the hillsides and meadows and involved transformations in ecstasy. This is most famously depicted in its influence in Christian thinking and developing western philosophy and latterly, psychoanalysis. Underpinning our sense of narrative possibilities and ways to support our own myths captured in delivered biographies – “where I come from, what I work with, no I am not married, yes I am handsome...” From time immemorial we have been defined by our story—the story of mankind and our own individual stories—and that is the place where we look for meaning. It may also explain en passant our constant recourse to experience and history as precedents for action now. He sits and waits for her to make her move. ………. *** But what of the African and Asian? The places he had been to purchase prostitutes or what Myiad calls ‘hse’ [short for ‘hoes’ as used in Ebonics to depict ‘whores’ – I am not sure I agree with this term but for the purposes of the book I will call sex workers by this name] as they will be referred to here would rival Jack London (probably born John Griffith Chaney).37 37
Jack London's biological father reputedly was the astrologer William Chaney.
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IV Once the suicidal Japanese man was as we all are – that is, clueless. Once the world was marked out as histories and wonders, and cultures, and overviews. Wonders like Angkor. Habitats like Igloo, tepee, brothel and bordellos and so on. They lacked associations, did this pig farmer from Donegal. Naive innocent, are these real descriptions for members of post-colonial societies experiencing advanced consumer capitalism, the rise of the service industry and the collapse of sound agricultural policies and the demise of any manufacturing base? I mean why will men travel to get serviced, manualised in the third world? They can, and many do, get serviced @ home. There has to be something more, more than economics and the dirty deed... We are all clueless about death, but are we clueless about living? Unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the new environment, he once, as a vacationing salary man, turned to Westerners for references and directions in the street as he felt more kindred with them than the Thais. They scared him. They seemed like Asian anarchists with none to little manners or formalities. He had, on previous trips to New York and Berlin hardly spoke to any Westerners in his trips,
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even though he had felt as lost as was now in the backstreet sois of Bangkok. There in the west, he was too shy and embarrassed to ask when he got lost and scared. He did not wish to lose face. There he remained invisible to save his face. He preferred to remain 1st world and this meant discretion.
mirror offers the prospect of one looking and reflecting on one's inner essence. And this is often complex and sophisticated, like his new communication device and satellite coordinates linked to Google Earth showing the way to the new ‘secret’ brothel areas which have been driven deep, deeper underground since the clampdowns. Introspection as the western phenomenologist referred to it.
Now, in the third world becoming quickly second world with first world elements (like good Internet connections and superb malls and consumer goods) he knows too much, way too much, and thus has nowhere nor anybody to turn to. Alone, he stares @ his Plasma screen, the NHK channel, which is flanked by the disintegrating wall pockmarked with water stains and crumbling render and million dirty handprints and halos of grime round switches. The milieu of the old, poorly built and decrepit and the new streamlined, designed and ultra-modern, this was his Asia. He remembered when he took his first conference call when he was deep, deep in the game, in Svay Pak bordellos, on the job. ………. *** It hasn’t helped ever that he is a follower of Shinto and this is a system which has no fixed dogma, moral precepts, or sacred scriptures. No Tao, no singular way. Well, no right direction anyway. No one way street. The mirror in Shinto
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But what if you are wrong @ the given time of looking into the mirror? What if you bring into the Pavilion of Mirrors unwieldy concepts like ‘this’ and ‘that’? Or what if you hold internally and doggedly persistent wrong or even warped views? Is this possible? Can you really, truly madly kid yourself, believe and bask in your own self-penned propaganda? Or is it just more beliefs coming under the rubric of creativity, something you should be actually saluted for, acknowledged by the many unknown others? Are you in action, whether you want to be, or see yourself to be? All he knew was that he enjoyed orgasm and he was enroute and uncultured enough to have some more. The main battleground for the paedophile was the western sex-tourist pest. The publicity on the billboards in the tourist's paraphernalia, and @ the airports and in the hotel said so. It was a ban on their opportunistic endeavours, not on his, nor the Koreans nor the Chinese Malaysians.
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The pictures told the Khmers as such, suited westerners in handcuffs. Singularly ‘right’.
you, he follows the teachings of Miyamoto Musashi particularly the passages when he tacitly indicates the Ronin - or Masterless Samuri - must adopt a resolute acceptance of death.
“Good”, he thought. It was they and their governments and their NGOs and media who had highlighted this pleasure pavilion as a place of illegality. Good that another New Zealander, Australian, British man or American is caught. Or so he thought. Now he is held captive of his own mind, his own inertia and circumstances which delude him of his own true feelings. Ran out of options where once there were a million women, to cater and parade for his affections, now remains only one facsimile of that vast indefatigable multitude. He was central, it was his movie, and he was director. What a contrast to now, where he feels like the arbitrary bit part guy who is going to get shot without saying a single word, the one who creates no dynamic. He is a prawn waiting to be transported right round the world to get peeled, frozen and returned to market. Like how the Khmer Rouge had it, “alive you are no use to us, dead you are no loss…” This is, @ least on paper, conceptually OK for the Japanese man lost amid his transcendental suicidal tendencies and lack of understanding Thai language and customs. Unlike
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………. *** Most sex tourists have resolute acceptance of sex. That’s why they check insurance. Have you ever felt like that? Have you ever met anyone who has? If you did or have, did you or they lament like he, the Japanese man did, that you or they have no home anymore, no centre? Home is where the heart is, isn’t it, or your sanity, money, or comfort or…? Or where the Diaspora begins? Unfortunately, in Asia, it may prove quite difficult to break this link between sex and commerce, especially in a culture where it is natural. Look @ the shopping and food options. Sue Tyler, and her anti-sex non-secular NGO has done her damn best by dining in the best restaurants Phnom Penh offers. Thailand is no longer a poor country, and its newfound prosperity, combined with a genuine embarrassment @ the country's reputation overseas, has caused the Government to take action. And to date, moves
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
have been made against child prostitution and against police corruption and involvement in the sex trade.
mobile phones suggest affluence and function. A four-wheel drive in the streets of Phnom Penh with a large aerial lends the impression that it is used to go native, that is, to venture forth into the alien and foreign lands far from the cityscape. The emblazoned logo endorses this. The goodly and global infects the local and wanting.
The authorities are also actively trying to discourage the diaspora of Thai women from working in the red light areas of Japan, where some 70,000 are employed in the sexual entertainment business, usually under the heel of Yakuza gangsters. Hidden, secret under the Japanese man’s shirt Thai police found a large tattoo depicting a dragon of the Tokugawa clan. These markings separated him form the gaijin (Japanese for literally means "outside person" or farang), those that may have a Prince Albert piercing. The White room prisoner had no clothes and no penis, he was then Asian and quite unlike many other men, apart from Katois, those men who lived and felt as women and had voluntarily disposed of their manhoods in order to be as women. For them it was liberating, for him it meant sacrifice and distance from his westernised previous existence, his body. V Beyond clothes, the way they are laundered and kept, our vehicles, their age and condition, act as badges to tell us and others something of ourselves. Decent cars, motorbikes,
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The vehicle’s passengers are to dine @ Topaz a lovely French restaurant on Sotheros, and they are impervious to all that around them in-city or out. They consider themselves practical this evening, effervescent, with a real grasp on why things are why. They are not shocked, they aim to impress. They are experienced. They are inwardly focused upon their own agendas and that of their global caring organisations, the big picture. Cosy with wine in their in-group. Like acceptable war casualties they are tackling the issue one grain @ a time.
Stipulated. ………. *** In the sky above the global hub Bangkok you rise, nay,
ascend like a great phoenix bird. In your 747, your world’s technology, a proven technology, that in which you have faith, a statistical chance of survival of the journey, permits you look back and gaze benevolently to earth in a unique way that costs dollar. But you may choose to disregard this view choosing instead to do something else; you
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
nonchalantly read your newspaper which prepares the way to home. They say in this new media age that attention is the scarce resource. What a focus - upon your lover of two weeks in the sumptuous and opulent surroundings of the Paradee resort.
And so they are astonishingly so, method actors par excellence.
They, the girlfriends, straddling a range between clandestine or actual, hse, have looked skywards many times and imagined and watched their barangs and farangs ascend. Many shift focus to what sweetly follows next for them when they shower, get dressed and don make-up in a well practised ritual that brings them good luck and sometimes bad. They are the next attractor, next in lineage of the endless procession of hse, locked in an absurd barn dance and an endless succession of willing men ready to project and delude themselves with their own fantasies and fears. Together they form an entire pavilion of mirrors. The hse are predicated towards the gentlemanly behaviour and bodies of older men, the distinguished, the obese, and the ungainly. They have casual interest in anomalies of human anatomy and ‘social’ psychology. They make and practice for ‘fit’. They learn and adapt rapidly, even within a few sentences.
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They are long con artists, pick up artists, some are piss artists, they are superb hypnotists and you are an excellent hypnotic subject. They play to the golden mean of communication, the ecstasy of communication and compunction. All communication and complicity is hypnosis, there is no such thing as hypnosis. All communication is storytelling. They are complicit with the ‘social’ environment, the one created by typically older expats, ever younger football supporting loud mouthed ‘don’t want to pay for it’ 3-4 day tricks on Viagra and loads of booze, and loads of other hungry, sometimes happy hookers some of which are pipe dreams. Their antics amuse, but more often beguile and bemuse. At least in the long run [over long time]. They have counted their money and reflected on losses and gains; they focus on the immediate future, the next market visit, another scenario delivered to them for processing courtesy of Thai Airways and the other metal tube companies. Think about it. There are plans by a seafood company to send prawns on a 12,000 mile round trip to Thailand to take advantage of low-cost labour to process the shellfish. Friends of the Earth have attacked the move and claim it is absurd that locally caught prawns should be
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
shipped halfway around the world only to be sent back for sale in the United Kingdom. Oh the carbon footprint.
You smile gently to yourself, smugly, like an omnipotent Dionysius, as you think of all the hard, hard action. You contrast this with imagined worlds, the fantasies of ‘first night guys’, those, the ‘just landed’, the new entrants, whom, only tonight, have only just crestfallen, realised they are in love or, or just downed their Viagra substitutes, or who are just, for the first time, perplexed that they can reach out and grab, hold someone close … for a price, in a soapy. Then there are those who have just learned of the infidelity of their darlings – the fat they are not configured as sentient beings only for them. They learn that their darlings have alternative lives and existences. Last week’s customer ahs returned prematurely and is experiencing existential shock that she hadn’t even waited 24 hours before hooking up with another, and that now, after all they went through, after al he provided for, she isn’t exclusively his after all...
Globalisation, equity of sexuality, bonding and dining. The enormous infraspecific variety. ………. *** The (ons, te laks, and ems – consecutively Khmer, Thai and Viet for ‘darling’) came form the sky and they return there. They brought their dollar and now they return for more. An endless procession of casual dollar. After all, that’s what they see and those abstracted and precipitated lives of cable TV, so distorted and metaphorical and mythical and reduced to render them culturally innate. The silver chain over the blue yonder, you in the metal tube. Arriving and departing, incessantly, accession. You, the ascending, see something different. The fairy light and shampoo world of the bar @ the order of next magnitude even @ a meagre 10000 feet. Through choice or through being compelled by heart, wallet, responsibilities or career, you leave it behind. For the time being it is accomplished. But it is never accomplished. Male sexuality is never finished beyond the next scoped ass, the next orgasm. Time is meted out in the next target, a series of events or frames called orgasm.
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VI Those, the introverted, the disenfranchised and lonely, mix with the extrovert, the loud and apparently bombastic, who are actually sacred and scared to leave rented privacy and security of air-con room. Those who are so far from home, miles, being accosted, solicited, raped and murdered, and falling subject to the millions of little bugs and critters out there lurking, glacially, in the ice of drinks. They are iceberg like, so is ‘love’ in such a climate. In the ferocious heat of Toul Kork you come as a dust storm blows up your jacksy
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
making love to a Khmer Mango girl [a girl with amazingly slim waist and large ‘mango’ breasts] whom you temporally consider your wife.
delicious and disempowering 3 days in Pattyhaha and Soi Cowboy. Detachment, non-involvement, serenity, tranquillity... peace.
It must have been the same in Empire. But the price of either action or inaction is as yet uncertain, as is the outcome or this holding on, grasping. You take with you to the sky the memory. It is not accomplished, but unfinished business. Too drunk to orgasm the night before, you take her again, you visit the bordellos oh yet again, and this time, even with the sweat and hangover, you hit the jackpot.
It is an assault on your moral turpitude and senses simultaneously. Not all coincidences are meaningful, not in the single man’s universe.
………. *** Now this incessant leaving, departing, rising in your metal tublet, you also rise as a giant above second and third night guys. They are those who were introverted, cut down and dwarfed, all due to internal affairs, states and conflicts. Hangovers, trying to do their vacations accounts, maintaining security of their possessions in their rooms, tasting existential crisis now that their libidos have quelled after several months of restricting orgasms ahead of their trips. For these ‘heroes’ lies a temporary void. They lie there @ 4 a.m. listening to Marines and Sailors arguing and fist fighting with their Thai hookers in the rooms next door. They are in the heart of the hurricane. It drives them on. Their libidos catch up, but it may take more than your
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Good things can happen as well, remember. Not @ all. They can’t grab and letch and grasp forever, they will never find a perfect platonic fit, not in this country, but they won’t stop trying until they break up their mind and scatter their will and sperms. They all have manners, all have inhibitions, and all are gentlemen. This attitude will surely pay dividends in the long run, when they realise the protagonist’s true nature isn’t dark, surely, or so conscience tells them. Their mothers have dressed their sons long ago in their best clothes just for this party in the future. Or so psychoanalysis would say. So there you are, proudly gazing @ their environs from the sky, rising above it all, above them all, they are distributed and in areas concentrated over the sprawl of Bangkok from 15000 feet and rising still, now sweet patterns, as if they were ants under rocks. Are they thinking of you, up there, reflecting, pondering? I doubt it.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Right now they are preoccupied as they inhabit your bars, massage and karaoke parlours, your raisin de étre as they dot across the cityscape to become the Christmas tree patterns. Your sisomo. You passed it on relay style.
centre of a single man’s universe, their obsession, their excuse for non-rationale and unreasonable and wanton economic and emotional behaviour.
………. *** The potential becomes realised and they will expend their own energies and manifest their own behavioural and economic inertias. Fragments of knowledge brought together in endlessly cascading and shifting kaleidoscopes of visions setting up some form of experience. They will leave whatever they can in the sense of psychic and ‘social’ footprint. There is significant risk to body and soul if they do not. They will obey the unique sub-culture of hse and punters and farangs. They are all part of your movie, your experience, your happening. You are producer, director, they are bit-piece (if we are speaking ‘short-times’- STs) and main actors (of we are speaking long times – all night – or girlfriend experience GFE). You manage them or you are managed. The latter is more likely as it is their patch, their set, they are the producer. In fact, they are no longer yours, to frequent or avoid, to ST or LT or GFE or to marry, and they never really were by your realities standards or by theirs. . As in the colloquial term ‘taxi girl’ is apt as they are only for rent, for passing time with. You supply the fantasies, or if you are lucky you realise them through their presence. But many become the
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And so it will come to pass. To be as perennial as the rice crop, that men return. Sometimes three or four harvests per year. 100,000s of men arrive daily and weekly to claim your seat and your whore as their own. You may try to prevent it, you may succeed, but they will encounter her, they scenario with her in Pattyhaha, in Ko Samui, in the provinces. They replay the role wandering anthropologist in an exotic and perplexing land. Fragments of knowledge brought together in endlessly cascading and shifting kaleidoscopes of visions setting up some form of experience. But believe me, the shear force of a probabilistic science indicates that some of them will fall in love with her, your object of obsession, love her more than you, have sex more times with her than you could or would, buy her more things and give her more money, they will find her a perfect fit for their penis, or they will find her an object of pity and need of care. There are always those greater or lesser than you. You are one of many in this and so is she. Neither of you is reluctant as the glut gives it meaning. But you made her, designed her, and built her to the mirror of your self-love, self-hate, self-hurt and/or self-deception. She is your propaganda instrument incarnate, a random machine which
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
produces affects. You buy her that little black dress and walk into a classy restaurant. You mistake disdain on middle-class Khmer and barang faces, disdain of low-class prostitutes entering their space; you mistake this disdain for jealousy. You order champagne. You invest in these affects, they amuse you. Others will hurt her physically and mentally, spiritually, this is more doubtful, and that mistaken or realistic belief takers precedence in a way unbelievable to those from the non-secular consumer society.
flow of daily life in Bangkok outside the heatseeker zones, so it is with the Japanese monger. He, like the microbes, as a microbe, represents the first group known to depend exclusively on geologically produced hydrogen and sulphur compounds for nourishment, except that in his case if we cut the metaphor use it’s what Americans call ‘pussy’. He is pussy-whipped. Cuckold. Non-dominant as a species.
After all: she is an interpreter lost with a resolute acceptance of death. She is not like you. She is ‘a someone’ a meaningful ‘other’ to call your own. But almost the minute you find her, if you find one, you start looking for one different kind. He sits and waits for what comes on stream. ………. *** It’s Christmas and it’s your birthday, well it is there everyday. It is like it @ least. You have been tutored that a relationship and/or intimacy and sex is the highest order in human affairs. Now it becomes commonplace but not quite, you capacities for it sustain and constitute. In fact in the orgy you can have all your birthdays @ once, or it may seem like it, if you go with the flow. The self-sustaining bacterial community, the sex or ex-pats, which thrive in nutrient-rich groundwater found near a 18 carat gold mine, have been isolated from the Earth’s surface for several million years. And below in-between the fairy lights, sublimated in the
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Where once he was a full-blown ‘salary man’ using the western prohibitively expensive and exclusively Japanese Patpong strip - Thaniya Plaza - between Silom Road and Suriawongse Road - he is now trapped by it, not geographically or physically but psychically and spiritually. He went to set up a home with his hoe. I know many of "Japanese" in Thailand are actually not Japanese but Korean. Now sane Japanese will not visit such as Thailand. Thais worship the White unconditionally if he is a high school dropout Australian, and Thais are contented with being rentawives for farang as you seeing everywhere in Thailand, while they treat any coloured foreigners as inferiors. Then for Thais, Japanese may be nothing more than northern hill tribes that they always despised. Hill tribes should be poor. But Japanese sometimes have money. That is why Thais feel more hatred than jealousy against Japanese and kill them.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Where once he tried to ring fence it make something wild his own. Domesticate it in a Nipponese and orderly fashion. He became the managed instead of the manager, and it was through coping and management he got into this predicament. He is alone. He lost his formalities and his manners. As the image of the North Vietnamese or the Vietcong soldier as representative of humanism and progress was not a correct one, the Japanese began to feel much ambivalence. Not so David Gotlieb, he is on a mission. He is like you, satirical, exploiting the possibility for bacchanalian wildness and excess that is always-ready within masculinity.
Chapter 4 . Twister
………. *** Such abandon, is so much unlike the prospects of the prisoners.
I
L
ike a nasty shove in a game of Twister, lie
attractions to certain concepts, cultures, costumes or other manifestation sexually immoral by today's PC standards? This is where ‘it’ is @. Sex is ‘it’ . . . yeah? The sleazy insidious neon letters, the sordid neon letters SE-X burn so strongly in the western mind’s eye. You letch @ mention of the word, but you are either for it or against it. What is the midzone here? But you are never indifferent, you just act like it. It is the Japanese punters and many other men’s domain. Constantly bubbling on or just beneath the surface is the desire for murder and rape. Not an everyday desire, but there everyday. For punters, mongers and sextourists the category ‘Thailand’ is thrown together with a Thai woman through a tragic chain of events. This is the ‘encounter’ or the ‘scenario’ – it’s just not with people but with entire cultures, with ideologies, with warped poorly construed perceptions and conceptions, designs and plans. Bad mental maps, cognitive and emotional baggage cluttering up simultaneous misrepresentation and misinterpretation, and all the other scary monsters lurking
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
out there in the pavilion of mirrors deep under our beds. Itching to get us when we’re not looking. The neocortical language abilities simply can’t express the force of the feelings the limbic brain generates. When we are in our slumber, when we are absorbed in screwing hse in bordellos, or in that part of our unconscious mind that we choose to call life or reality.
their game, but only her, forever, until his next short time, her, yes only her forever. It is her prerogative, after all she is Thai and this is her country. She is not teaching lessons but asserting her martial right. If it ever takes more than her then the Thai police will be their and young neighbours. The entire vicinity will cascade on his head and murder him, then they will pillage his few possessions and she will discard his GO board and notebooks, his diaries of selfdisintegration and invisibility.
II The Thai woman is everything the Japanese protagonist is not. I mean everything. She laughs, he does not. She is cruel and cynical, he is not. She is disparaging, he is not. They say opposites attract. He would never meet a Japanese lady like her. Not even a hoe. He is a neat freak with a Ph.D. who keeps his dishes washed and his books neatly stacked and categorised. She dresses like a slob, smokes pot and never picks anything up. She is illiterate. She rips his books up and any notes she finds with phone numbers in his vain efforts to find work. She deliberately ‘loses’ his Go pieces so he cannot play with his friends. She poured his whisky out. One night engrossed in a game with one of his few friends she came running from the bedroom and suddenly lifted the board and threw it violently against the wall and screamed @ him. All this potential and kinetic and energy to make him focus intently upon her, always unto her, not unto his friend nor
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Stripped of anything but his skin colour lies Le Roy in the street in Toul Kork, not far from 10000 Riel bordellos. Before when he had money he ‘good man’ ’hansum’ now he ‘no good’ he want to boom-boom too much. he slipped from being a Bar Favourite @ Shanghai to scavenging local price rides in the Khmer hardcore brothel areas. It’s a match that somehow works though, between the Thai women and the Jap, but not according with the culture or either Thailand or Japan. No it is off that twilight zone, that intersection of farang and Thai. It defines its own rules its own logics. Slowly and entertainingly, more is revealed about the Japanese man and why he’s suicidal and living in Bangkok. We will do so in this book obtusely. There is a profusion of literature depicting the scams and the broken hearts and ideals of lovers, so let’s think of the bigger picture if in fact
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
there is one. What fuels and recreates this twilight world beyond money. There will always be those that view these transactions and encounters are mainly or purely visceral experiences. They don’t go for head or heart but decent fit. They don’t go for scenario; they go for a body hit. Let’s do this by thinking about others that frequent such places.
persuader in advertising some say. Advertising hardly highlights the product but the process of advertising, the dream of the producer that is shared in some collective consciousness cabal with the consumer. You both ‘read’ and understand the advertisement – what it presents or says - or you do not. Buy this and join the ranks and file that ride upon babes or dudes like this, or engage in activities like this. Wear this smell and dream these bodies. But this is not only so in Bangkok.
Meanwhile, back in the air and looking down on people and countries, Myiad carefully considers the extreme conditions under which the bacteria live bear a resemblance to those of an early Earth, potentially offering insights into the nature of organisms that lived long before our planet had an oxygen atmosphere. If this does exist then life could exist elsewhere in the universe, somewhere 100% and farang. Thailand before hse, pre-hse, if there were ever such a time, anywhere, ever… everybody on that plane that night was a Shinto hand mirror.
III So sex is reified, made in to a ‘thing’ in the western mind’s eye. We kow tow to it whether we like it or not. It’s bigger than all of us. It’s so tall we can’t get over it; it’s so wide we can’t get around it. Its everywhere in our mind’s eye, it’s good and no good. Is it everything? The dance of sperm and egg, entertain the selfish gene, the pattern. It’s a powerful
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………. *** You can reach out and touch and smell. You cup two asses in your hands in a way forbidden even in a lap dance club back home. Agony aunts would disparage as well. And when you do it seems that all feminism and every bitch command and moan and groan your misogynist mind concocted, evaporates, dies. And when you do so plug-in kinaesthetically and viscerally you may feel, as I did, feel inauthentic. Unreal. However, ‘It’ – that is, sex an sexuality in Bangkok is a fusion of old and new, rich and poor and million other poles and binary oppositions. Not least of all, Eros, the instinct to procreate and copulate, and Thanatos the fear of death and the obsessions with it. We think death and sex as the nefarious polar opposites. In
Erotism: Death and Sensuality, Georges Bataille identifies an even larger paradox present in the human being, which
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
affirms that “the urge towards love, pushed to its limit, is an urge toward death.”38
sex, preferring instead dreams of money, of comforts, health and security? You could never be lonely there now could you? Loneliness as comfort. Independence as death. Not pretty. Being alone as any hermit knows leaves you believing your own propaganda to feel comfortable or disbelieving it and being @ loggerheads with yourselves. If the universe is multiply connected, like a fucking torus, there would be many different possible paths. This means that an observer would see multiple images of each galaxy and could easily misinterpret them as distinct galaxies in an endless space, much as a visitor to a mirrored room has the illusion of seeing a crowd. Could we, in fact, be living in such a cosmic catastrophe pavilion of mirrors?
One event is the essence of living, the other the complete absence. Is there a way, some place or space conceptually where they fuse and are @ one, @ peace? Surely not here, ever? In Bangkok they seem divided for love’s sake, for the slim chance of union. In their pure form they are absurd. The stuff of comedy. The tragedy of man and the comedy of Pan. The existential philosophers knew the value of absurd in explain the difference between what we think of ourselves internally, including what we aspire to, and what we are in a ‘social’ sense, or how people perceive us, our actions and words. Yep, in your movie you are always brother no.1, the guy or gal who calls the shots. But from someone else’s position, their movie you will always remain absurd, @ best a leading character @ worst the extra that is shot in the first five, even if you are respected. IV Did you know that everything physical in your life is just a reflection of everything going on inside you? Do you ever get a quirky thrill out of feeling like a "sex offender" or a rape and murder practitioner? Or are you dead or immune to 38
Bataille, G. (1986). Erotism: Death and Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights
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………. *** The Japanese man is lonely in the crowd even though he speaks pretty good Thai. After all these years he jumps in a tuk-tuk to act out like he still goes to work and gets taken to a tailors or gem shop and dropped when he refuses to go in and protests in Thai. He must factor this unrequited mobility into his daily plans. V So let us never forget what the French artist Georges Braque said: “There are certain mysteries, certain secrets in my own work which even I don’t understand, nor do I try to do so. Mysteries have to be respected.” I have just read Redmond
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O’Hanlon’s newest book, Trawler. So let me tell you that I don’t believe in the occult or supernatural. I believe in the down to earth and natural, common sense if you will, and it is strange enough. Foundations to all kinds of architectures are built in South East Asia. So are possibilities so foreign and estranged that people can’t believe them when hearing of them as fables or tales whilst still in their everyday mundane lives and realities. I mean you can’t picture all the hard core action going on in Bangkok right now – or can you? It is. It is more certain than the sound of one hand clapping in the secluded wood. Where a young backpacker is backpakin’ his tight young shapely freebie for the 5th time that night as he has reached epiphany and will never go back to his room @ home in his soul. VI That warm glow that softens the edges and raises my opinions of anything and everything that comes to mind lying in my bed just before I realise you aren't there anymore. You left your defenceless weak little lady. Your physical life as you read this passage is merely an "expression" or "pressing outward" of an inner landscape. Some people call this process "out-picturing." Let me show how:
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Dear Dr Wong: My husband and I have different views on sex. He says he needs more or "different" sex. This includes anal sex and group/swinging sex. I am not @ all interested in either; frankly I find them reprehensible, as I do porn, although we have tried the former. It was not a pleasant experience for me, it agonised me psychically and emotionally, but he keeps pressuring me to try again. These issues continually come up, and I feel constantly under pressure. He says I should be willing to do anything for him, as he would do for me. It was his voiced thoughts while he was doing it. He shouted; “give me something, give me something I can work with, give me more ass… don’t just lie there taking it up the ass like that, fight back, fight back! Use your ass as a bootstrapped vehicle to protest your innocence…” Dr. Wong, need I say more… Help! I wanted to tell her straight that her insanity was already presumed @ the beginning of her particular movie, @ the start of this book, and commencing her session on the couch. Yeah, but by the time her film ends and the therapy is over, we have witnessed so much bizarre and obviously psychotic behaviour that she seems to be much less insane than simply to be realised that she is in her natural element. Have you
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
never seen yourself as the very personification of the fundamentally deranged or fundamentally savage nature of all mankind @ all times, in all periods? Maybe not, as it matters not what you show in public. Age and looks don’t matter. Dollar is a great ‘social’ leveller. Some leave South East Asia after indulging in carnal relations with over fifty young women in little over a month. Is that too much? In sum are they trying to be like a woman?
armies swept across the continent. Many Caucasians are his breed as well. Rape and murder herbsmen. I reply:
Many women, even unattractive ones can theoretically have, and entertain 50 lovers in one night (one fucker did a porn video where she does something like 350 men with their hard-ons, as she was Singaporean. Living now, making a name for her self in, going down in history in California, she’s from a stable family). . How many are differentiated? How many drink decaff? How many of them left a footprint in anyone’s heart or mind. “When she refused having her picture taken, I invited her to leave.” How many of them came or were capable of coming? Did they just become numbers or men with dicks, what patronising feminists would call women with no tits and dangly bits below? Or was their something more in it, to it? A study in 2003 suggested that up to 16 million people worldwide — and 8 per cent of Asian men — were descended from Genghis Khan. The great Khan lived from about 1162 to 1227 and fathered hundreds or even thousands of children as his
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Dear scarred by Anal: It's time to set clear and sustainable boundaries for yourself in this marriage. You are the owner of your body as well as your mind, and you need to decide whether you wish to be a "sexplorer" or even “psychonaut” along with your husband. Not only your ass, but your entire body and mind are vehicles to express yourself in this world. Think of it as one. Your partner is pressuring you to go beyond the edge; to chaos, it's not just a feeling you are having. Although I want to commend him for his desire to have more and different sexual experiences with you, each of you has the right to set limits about your body and your shared sexual activities - that obviously includes anal sex, including rimmin’ and certainly swinging! But certainly watch x-rated videos together, read sex books, and discover ways that are comfortable for both of you to creatively enhance your sex life W.H.Wong.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
I would never write that! Regardless of how much money she has, or to some extent her looks, she can pick –up someone to ride her or attempt to ride herself to death anytime, any night. But everybody, not just Asians look towards society, the masses if you will for tips on how to be and what to believe in, what to look like and dress like.
VII
Another Japanese man living in north-eastern Cambodia procured 44 wives, some of them as young as 14-years-old. He sired many children with them. It was his lifestyle. A local liaison gives the princely sum of $10,000 to the families for the girls, who also receive a monthly allowance from their benefactor. ………. *** First moral question: Is this wrong? This man is a former tourist who was merely visiting the temples. Somehow he saw and found a niche. He also gives the families gifts such as motorbikes and houses, and has spent $300,000 on his wives since his arrival. Is he distributing harm? Is he perverse? Should he be praised or castrated? In the pavilion of mirrors he would be all of these things. And none of them. Is there a deeper reality to these matters than simple moralisation? Fact.
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As etiquette, elegance and manners begin to return to our lives and fashions, and with this in mind, let us begin. Let me introduce myself. My name is Dr. Winslow Wong. My friends call me ‘Dollabill’. They call me this for some obscure reason, something that I wouldn’t even begin to bore you with here. Suffice to say I have been called this for a long, long, long time, and its origins... are obscure. Perhaps more relevant is that I am a licensed psychotherapist based in the West Coast of the United States, Bay Area San Francisco to be precise. However, I also spend half my working year, depending on client commitments, in offices in Bangkok and Pattaya, Thailand. I have been doing this for the last 20 or so years, that is, since leaving the US Air Force. I travel frequently throughout the South East Asian region handling client referrals and running clinics in Manila, Singapore, Phnom Penh, Saigon, Hanoi, Hong Kong, Seoul and Beijing. I provide counselling and workshops to several transnational corporations. Also for several US military bases, and a few international NGOs and Consulates and Embassies. An appreciative note (you fill in the spaces…)
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Dear Wong: I'm truly sorry that I called....I honestly thought I was calling anything goes, and I would appreciate it if you blocked me; I don't call the "friends" category anyway (at least not on purpose). My gig isn't about forcing unwilling participants, and it was a shock when you started setting boundaries. I must've been careless about categories, and I (again) apologise. May you have thousands of calls from those who enjoy what you offer? And you offer much… Bullshit. (to him). VIII I write here, in this fall of 2006, from my temporary home for three months – a converted lighthouse by the sea in New England. I’m here for inspiration. Idyllic, some may say, others may scream “pretentious,” in an oddball Frazier sort of way. The idea of the reclusive sage gazing @ the expansive ocean for inspiration I know is a well-hackneyed cliché. But I do I wonder if you were here would you look @ the seascape picture on the wall? Would you imagine it @ home? Or as you travel? On the Beach? It seems to have been there for decades, and then again, you might sit down
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in that Shaker style rocking chair facing me, and look out to sea, or look into the corner of the room, or you may think what it like to sit @ my desk and see from my point of view (POV), I see my pencil, doodling aimlessly, or scribbling my prose which I will never, ever, publish: “A lost picture . . . I found. I found by looking, seeing, noticing, as it could’ve been overlooked on so many days, tidying my office or listening to someone else working downstairs, like so many ornaments and, very familiar, unremarkable pieces of furniture that adorn rooms in houses. Your family home, mementoes of your trips away, or heirlooms from great aunts and uncles, some of which maybe lived by the sea. So far away. Their thoughts that when they bought it, the thoughts of the artist whom painted it, or carved it, on many a rainy day as you gaze at the sea from my window. And as I looked, I found myself… lost… deep within it, but for how long… exactly? As I wonder, you can wander, or you can sit there and relax. And there’s the sound of seagulls echoing overhead . . . you may almost feel the immersive surge of breaking casual waves; so elaborate, delicate, infinite patterns and persistent if you look properly and listen carefully, the metrical structure obliterates aurally, but from the deep; low groans to
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almost-deafening great roars of dark, grim waves meld in some bizarre alchemy to become tiny drips and splashes of quicksilver in the forgotten cave, subsonic noises, feelings and distant thunder rumbles, melding signatures, arrhythmic but repeated, echoed, forever in the pip-pop of drips. It’s a smuggler’s haven, bound to a seagull’s cry, the enduring and periodic, the atonal and sporadic, all of them coming together, now, echoing in the forgotten smugglers’ cave, melding in a single moment of shear backdrop majesty, the natural and secretly whispered conspiratorial human undoing, the gaze from veil…” Right now, it is morning, 11 a.m. to be precise. Almost like clockwork, the local fish merchants have just dropped off something from their catch of the day. A rugged man in oilskins, ruddy faced with huge spade hands, so used to nets and knifes, bangs the backdoor: “Knock, knock-knock.” “Knock, knock, and knock.” I shout: “OK! Coming.” All changes and evolves, and move on in our minds eye even opening some door to someone or another or to find something. A booming voice that carries down the dark narrow hall well above the sound of the ocean @ sea right through, penetrating the big oak door painted dark green on the
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inside and red outside: “Morning, Sir, got something fresh for you, today we have.” “Knock, knock-knock.” We are not used to shouting @ one another @ home and so we often can’t hear one another when we talk outside. It is a death defying human energy, shouting. One wonders if there is difference shouting over the sound of nature or in the middle of cityscape? Martial artists and pugilists know this as they exhale and shout whilst advancing a fist, sword or foot for extra effect. Breath focuses their internal energy or spark. In battle screaming and shouting arose fear in one’s enemy, as it is the sound of the vital, the primordial ferocious, the fierce, the living or those of you who are about to die. Babies do it to attract the attention of mothers, to sustain themselves some adults below @ orgasm or when giving birth. Is there some overall pattern to these screams and human noises if they are considered as a whole, as one, if they could be? What would they be? This is what Echelon V.3 wants to know. I will not prevent it. ………. *** The regularity of the fishmongers visits, the familiarity of his chat in such a relatively short time of us knowing each other indicates to me that we are not shut off from the world of man and commerce. The village hub, that networks of perceptions, context and commerce, of needs to be satisfied. Villages like Toller Porcorum, Plush & Piddlehinton.3 Familiar utterances urban devices meld with a genuine
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openness and friendliness. We are not yet left abandoned to the guiles and devices of Poseidon and his nymphs, or any other inventions of myth, clams in the millions or the infinite banshee howling of the wind outside and its destructive erosive effects. The corrosive salts. The fishmonger is really a papasan bringing me tight-bodied young lasses of various hues. It is a fantasy of mine that I a am home loving settled man…
The last remaining Bangkok knights stood in the field, trampled crops lie scattered across the field as far as the eye could see. Smoke billowed forth from the crumpled ashes of the castle, no fire by man could have destroyed the castle in such a manor. The Bangkok knights shook uneasily as they watched the massive storm grows yet bigger and it begin to approach them.
I sink back into my reverie, I sleep on the steps of the temple of Apollo, seeking (incubating) the dream that would allow them access to the oracle inside. I drank and screwed too much last night. ………. *** The crimson sky cried tears of blood, the raindrops glistening off of my Plate Mail. The blood was running down into the runes etched into my armour, almost as if it had a mind of its own. Looking up to the sky, the blood storm was amassing. Red bolts of lightning stretched across the sky, they shot through the clouds with deadly means. The fire that burned the castle to ashes, was fast approaching the last remaining farm house along the outskirts of the kingdom. Many had come here as refuge, to bruised and battered to continue on with their journey. ………. ***
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The knights no longer having much to fight for; begin to flee to the barn where the refuges had all been placed in. Only twenty men could be seen that was left, the others had all been killed. It was a vicious attack, no army, and just a storm that appeared above the castle and begins to rain inferno down upon the castle, destroying it quickly. They closed the barn doors and begin to panic; the tension in the room was sickly disturbing to anyone near its presence. A sickening taste was in the air, it lingered like the smell of rotting biles. The people, and knights-alike begin to cluster to the back of the barn, hoping that they would be safer there. The storm approached the Barn, and paused briefly. Three red lightning bolts came down upon the farmhouse, disintegrating it into ash, and dust. The people screamed inside of the barn as they heard the house explode into oblivion, nerves were on edge. The cloud moved forward slightly, to be partially over the barn, a ray of light appeared over the barn, not appearing to hurt it, yet. A hole in the top of the barn begins to appear, and the people begin to see a
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bright light. They thought they were saved, being the pathetic mortals they are. A ball of blue energy emitted from the cloud and shot down through the hole in the barn, and landed in the ground. Next.
My mission is to write several academic papers, this preface, and to reply to subscribers on my ‘agony blog’. This is an aside on a famous South East Asian news forum that seemingly commands hits in the regions of 350,000 page views a day! There are hits and existential angst from as far afield as Antarctica. The ebb and flow of opinions and advice, or creation and criticism, of dilemma and resolution, outside the cocoon, God has made it as rough as it is loud. And I will be curious to watch and see what they will do when they are offered advice. And you may be curious with me, even as you are aware how many lives have been lost on a day like this? On the sea of competing urges, the ego steers the boat.
………. *** My scribbles, my notes infect my writing and game playing. Living too long sometimes in Asia in the pavilion of mirrors lends me victory disease - afflicting military commanders and armies who, after victories, become weak and susceptible to defeat. Let me return to the real world, the visceral world of Bangkok. The barn in the story above was my forays into the go-go bar. IX I am writing to you, my friends, from my cocoon, a tiny seashell of a room, my ‘project room’ which boasts a wooden window with panes that stare intently @ the tirade of the sea. In front of me a desk, a laptop and a few books, some magazines and papers and pictures. And it boasts a manuscript for this book, whose working title was ‘managing hse’ - a peculiar given the topic. How can you manage prostitutes, don’t they manage you? ………. ***
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………. *** Gunmetal sky, pewter sky, dark grey undulations, nothing visible for miles. Rain beating down, freshwater tried vainly to dilute salty depths without real threat or impact. Later as the giant beacon above us beams its regular, metronomic wink, over that dark undulating blanket, I will prepare a sturdy and robust meal for the living… a crew of six, my family. I love fresh seafood. Surely this is my Asian genes selfishly coming through. The fresher the better, that is widely known in Asia. But alas! A confession; I never feel pain dropping large crustaceans into a boiling pot as I already taste their sweetness. But others, the divine, psychic, animal rights, or ordinary Joe Q Public can’t help but hear
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
them scream, as they re-enter what was their natural environment, but with only one difference, in this case being the heat turned up, an input of energy, the water is boiling. Does that make me a moral relativist – it does to animal rights people! We need a sense of balance between the permissible and the non-permissible.
To rock the homeostasis of system, balance, one variable in an environment, causes it to spiral off into entropy of one sort or another. Chaos theory, butterflies flapping wings here causing hurricanes there etc.
X Yes, that nasty shove in Twister is sometimes all it takes to unbalance a situation in some circumstances to knock down a house of cards built on a world of shells and mirrors.39
39
The duality between the container and the contained is one of the most important in Kabbalistic explanations of the creative moment. In normal perception the world is clearly characterized by divisions between one thing and another, and in this technical sense one could say that we are immersed in a world of shells. The shells, taken by themselves as an abstraction divorced from the original, undivided light (making another separation!) are the dead residue of manifestation, and can be identified with dead skin, hair, bark, sea shells, or shit. They have been referred to as the dregs remaining in a glass of wine, or as the residue left after refining gold. The Zohar interprets evil as "the residue or refuse of the hidden life's organic process"; evil is something which is dead, but comes to life because a spark of God falls on it; by itself it is simply the dead residue of life. The skeleton is the archetypal shell. By itself it is a dead thing, but infuses it with a spark of life and it becomes a numinous and instantly recognisable manifestation of metaphysical evil. The shell is one of the most common horror themes; take a mask, or a doll, or any dead representation of a living thing, shine a light out of its eyes, and
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………. *** The Japanese man laments that he was in love with the Thai women he calls his ‘wife’ once. Then after she robbed him of his wallet, his heart and soul and they spiralled into entropy and disintegration in the conventional relationship sense. He reacted by going out screwing in bars once he replenished his money, she continued to rob him when he was recovering from his excesses, and events would spiral. In the formative period of the relationship he would go work as a consultant back home for some months and make superb incomes, he supported her but she continued to work the bars. Once he found out he was trapped. Why should he live like a monk and save money for his trips while she enjoyed virile penis every night and the thrill of the fisherman, who has just caught her catch of the day. Very fresh as well. 22 yr old Australian and blond, she can ‘fuck for funny’ as Mr. Japanese man is paying top dollar. Even when he bought her three mobile phone shops, she continued to do weekends in the bar.
becomes a thing of evil intent. The powers of evil appear in the shape of the animate dead - skulls, bones, zombies, vampires, phantasms.
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………. ***
matters out. Their attention is linear and prefers content over context, do this and then this will happen. That’s why they get hit from the blue yonder. With your peripheral vision, fix machines and buildings and even relationships if they are broken, preventive measures are viewed as something similar to insurance - optional with add-ons and extras if this happens, then that, and so on.
But she never really did buy the shops. She just said she did. Her sister who was a branch manageress of a small chain posed as staff, when he came. Profits disappeared to dysfunctional family members unable to look after themselves. The 3,000,000 YEN he sent was gambled or more or less given away over some three months. It was all part of the same very functioning con apparatus. EURO and POUND Sterling had also been made to disappear in similar quantities. It starts with a glance, and then the second one, by the second lady drink the short-term immediate future is sealed. You see that on the shoreline below cliffs. You wonder how a cave formed gradually, glacially, enduringly eaten away grain by grain. You wonder how wind – air - could upset a massive boulder from seating so it casts off the cliff into the ground. You wonder when this happened. Was it before humankind, some ludicrously distant time that can’t be anything but abstract relative to the watch and clock? The same in cultivating solidarity and the shifting ‘social’ ideas of what is goodly and desirable. ………. *** Scientists know that, most lay people do not; they are too focused upon what is in front of their noses. They are too occupied with immediate tasks and goals, doing, or working
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And so it is with human affairs. XI I would like to explore the mask idea a little further by changing metaphors to that of computers. Most of us will know that computer hardware - disk drives, microprocessors, circuit boards etc. supports software – operating systems and applications like word processors, Internet browsers and games. Though they are different types of machines, the software represents nothing more than a certain prefigured sets of behavioral controls of the hardware. While it appears that you are buying something that you are adding to your system, you are buying unique patterns of controlling what you already possess. This behaviour, it patterning and its control has a
significance that it is only be appreciated, interpreted and understood in a wider context, such as the use and
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
experience of a game. Nevertheless, whether the behaviour is understood or not by an external observer; it remains, so far as the computer is concerned, programmed activity. The computer hardware neither specifies nor results in any particular software, but is open to external definition. In other words, it can be possessed by any number of demons, processes or programs. Besides, the software is transferable from one computer to another without any loss of identity. Nevertheless, the software has no independent subsistence. It is dependent on the hardware for its existence, which is nothing more than a certain behavioural artefact of the hardware.
modulate our mental processes themselves. I don't think that our conscious minds are a single process (in a Unix sense), but many complementary, competing and interacting processes. Sometimes, as when we fall in love; or suffer from certain (other?) mental disorders, one process comes to dominate our minds, and we become obsessed or captivated by a pathological compulsion or delusion. Well it means that I may wear a mask that hides my true self from you, but this mask does not represent a false image back to me. In short I know that I am kidding you, but I am not kidding myself that I am. Still confused? ………. ***
………. *** My conscious mind is comparable to a piece of "user application" software running on a computer. My subconscious mind is comparable to the "operating system" that supports the application software. The networks of neuron firings – those that are tracked by MRI are comparable to the low-level machine code. Which sits underneath operating systems. A major difference between mind and conventional software is that mental algorithms (both conscious and unconscious) are adaptive and self-modifying. We do not learn just by amassing data, but more significantly by letting experience
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In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman's main contribution to the discussion concerns the analysis of characterisation. His suggestion the performer tries to present an idealised version of the character which reflects the values of society - since the notion of the ideal is one which is derived from society - is reminiscent of the Freudian concept of super-ego.40 This aspect of 'appearance' is part of what Goffman identifies as 'front'; and, in performance terms, it is closely related to 'manner'. The appearance and manner of the performer serve to enrich the 40
Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life New York: Anchor (p. 45)
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quality of performance, and they will normally operate in harmony. 'We often expect, of course, a confirming consistency between appearance and manner'. 41
Correspondent Club because it was too dangerous and dirty. Belief in this, a trust in its veracity has drawn funds to combat the issue, which through its publicity has created a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so a hall of mirrors develops. This book is not aimed @ merely highlighting this paradox. It offers between the lines something rarely offered in this cynical, postmodern era: a message. Others have done a better job than that. No, it shows how real lives and characters are drawn into this ‘social’ly-constructed hellish fairground attraction and how real development and work is mitigated.
XII Cambodia has a long ancient history. Angkor boasted possibly the largest human settlement of all time. Theories suggest that this was in part the undoing of the Khmer Empire. Its integration in to Indochina through colonisation was mundane. The French considered the Khmers lazy and invested little in the country. By independence, it wavered and got caught up in the polarisation of global politics of the times. It suffered much of the post-colonial schisms and searches of self-identity. It led in this case to catastrophe. In the end a friendly neighbour helped, but this again threatened self-identity and independence. Later schisms within the country were plastered over by a paternalistic United Nations intervention. Along with their organisation came hedonism. ………. *** A little while down the road a treatment for this hedonism came in the shape of anti-sex NGOs and female British Pakistani correspondent who depicted the country as a ‘pedo paradise’ without venturing out with the Foreign 41
………. *** Back in my seashell project room, it’s always a tense time before a dive, into the creative deep, into relationships, even if it is only my work and the individual, collective and scattered unconscious. As I drink my umpteenth coffee of the day I wonder how many authors in the future will ask themselves the perennial question, that surfaces in me. Time and time again whenever I sit to write I question: “Will I ever come up again?” Bobbing like a fishing float or Buoy rocked @ sea, that has become caught, snagged on something from the bottom, the deep. I hope I do, I believe I will, @ least in time for dinner. It is always a work in progress...
Ibid. (p.35)
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Chapter 5. Dorset, England + human Graffitithe Graffiti of mind I Although in reality we know all seas and oceans are connected regardless of how they labelled, following this train thought I am reminded of wonderful dinners spent by a different sea. This Sea elsewhere was called a channel, and it was beside Dorset, England. Days and evenings spent in the cosy designer surroundings of my dear friends, the ecoarchitects and retro-renegade-product designers, Lynne and Roger Adams. I remember especially the times where we would unwind after a long walk along the cliffs with the dogs, and embark on voyages of informed chats about the arts while drinking fine burgundy that had been carefully cellered. Theirsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; was what you might call an open house. They often had many interesting guests passing through, staying over, the only provision was that you enjoyed conversation and brought something to the table that you could share.
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Sometimes this was formalised into a seminar style presentation.
That night I was there an improvised tutorial had been prepared. It was held the big room, central in the house. Comfortably furnished with multiple settees which faced inward we were flanked by a massive open view over the cliff tops to the sea. A LCD projector flashed images and video onto a pull down screen, and we sat around with some people smoking aromatic pipes, drinking coffee or wine.
There was a certain matching and ‘social’ engineering that went on courtesy of the hosts, especially Lynne. People were often invited according to some distinction or another, age, looks, money or fame didn’t matter. One time they reputedly had a young Scots homeless guy as a houseguest who had been begging outside Brixton tube station. He came and spoke about his life and scams. Sometimes it was predilicted upon the advice of Astrology, Lynne, like the famous psychologist Carl Gustave Jung, was passionate about it as a means to typing personae and their possible interaction styles. The astrologer seems to be as important for Khmer society as sex therapists, psychologists, and marriage counsellors are for Western societies. She would invite guests according to their ascendants, or which planets that had in the fourth house or whatever. In fact the whole entourage that evening would dictate an overall chart of who the evening should go, these people being together in this same spot for so many hours, themselves born @ particular individual times and different geographical locations. She had a powerful program that crunched al the birth data and spat it out with associated analysis, meanings and predications. If nothing else it served as a rich talking point if there was a lull in the conversation. She swore by it.
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It came under the title ‘The Grafiti of mind art as protest’, a tall gaunt man, late thirties I would guess, strong Germanic lilt to his voice, late thirties. He was Heinrich Gershang. First we watched two ‘classic’ documentaries on the subject. The first was Tony Silver and Henry Chafaunt’s ‘Style Wars’. The second ‘Kings and Toys’ by Oboma which filled most of us in on essential items; the language and the ethos of ‘writing’ and ‘tagging’ and some associated performance arts synonymous with The Grafiti of mind will break dancing and hip-hop. The slides were presented with descriptions of materials and techniques. It reminded me that all specialised knowledge and associative vocabularies are arcane, and until you build familiarity with them, they are almost invisible, as they are neglected. “The sticker craze answers a need for instant coverage with a barely conspicuous action. From the tiniest, most exquisite, hand-coloured or vinyl examples, to giant wheat-pasted murals and finely-
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engineered stencils, marvellous forms of instant coverage.” It was an interesting topic, well presented and gave some good insights to an activity which, frankly, I had given little more to than a passing thought. The items that stuck out were the motivations and the reasons for it. Snapshots and sound bites I sampled from the talk and videos were: “So people can see it, so people can know me.” “It’s knowing I can do it.” “It’s for me I don’ care if anybody else don’ see it . . . I don’t care if anybody can read it or not . . . Its for me Grafitiwriters, if they can read it . . . All those other people they are excluded, they don’t matter to me, it’s for us.” On the screen the interviewee goes on: “It’s in the Grafitiartist’s favour . . . He wants to get in then get out without being even noticed, expect for the work that is going to come out to the public that Monday.” “Its just a name, it’s a word, you see it’s a game, they say here, take this name and do something with it . . . I give you a name and you see how big you can get it, how high?” “Pseudonym, anonymous alter-ego” “a tag is a short, sharp shock that gets you around” “you mark your territory and you are happy to go back and check your scent.” “I wanted
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to be… somebody, not to be a pop star, not a film star, or anything big, just a little somebody”. “You build up a sub-character . . . You make that character, that’s what Grafitidid for people, it gave them confidence.” ………. *** It became strikingly obvious that this was a practice, whose value varied between practitioners and ‘others’. Like when a prostitute gets her photo published on the Internet with a description of the experience of using her. She becomes amplified, and her experience is amplified as men arrive on metal tubes looking only for her – wishing to recreate the other man’s experience with her. A voice-over on Silver and Chafaunt’s ‘Style Wars’ surmised something of this: “To some it is art, to most people it is a plague that never ends a symbol that we have lost control.” Yeah, that bug-bear of moral relativity again, what an everlasting rub! Afterwards there were asked some deep, probing, and philosophical questions about the subject @ hand. “Spurred on by ground-breaking innovation from a coterie of underground artists world-wide the
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industry of The like Sue Tyler and her anti-pedo PR campaignings in Third world billboards, moto-taxi foreheads and the back of tuk-tuks, of mind artists, especially those who work subtly, not those that simply deface, but those who meld and blend, can have pervasive influence and exchange meanings?” Some were aimed @ me, and I tried to answer dutifully and as sagaciously as possible I was suddenly wrenched from my doze and given fireworks for neurone firings. Roger Adam’s announced, referring to Heinrich Gershang’s activities in Berlin: “Thank you Heindrich, your talk echoes for me two major points. The first refers to the subliminal and granular aspects of The Grafitiof mind. It is something that is there, marginal, in our experience of our urban existence, and so its message is subtle as well as obtrusive. The second is that it seems as much a discussion of architectural possibilities, as it is to do with some artistic expression. How does everybody else view the subject?” With all due respect, Roger always spoke as if he were talking to his Students in their final year @ Chelsea School of Art. But he wasn’t intentionally being in anyway patronising, but rather his questions were dead-on mark, polished, and naturally leant towards the critical as well as
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the provocative, even when he simply passed comment. All round the room was silence; the only sound was a strange ambient hiss... sort of like white noise. White noise all frequencies @ once as white light is all colours. After a pause to reflect on what he said, in the spirit of continuity, Lynne asked me: “Well are cities are not a blank canvass are they, are not a whitewashed room. But that the Grafitiof mind is registered by those consumerist zombies wandering about in a shopping daze.... I don’t know. What do you think that they have ‘effects’, Winslow?” Lynne always bought down conversations to the practical, the pragmatic. She was earthy and much the ‘social’ engineer of the couple. I replied: “Well, hmmmm, everything is registered by the brain @ some pre-consciousness or unconscious level. Just because it is not brought to the surface, maybe never brought to consciousness so to speak, does not mean it is not stored or relevant. It would, and does, rely largely upon context.”
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I was ad-libbing here, but the mixture of a full stomach and a decent wine made me sound almost smug, or @ least a little more confident than I felt. Hendrich followed:
Every laughed @ that point, as nobody had a clue what he had just said. David’s partner Geoff Thomson, the Yamaha team motorbike racer, then offered:
“So little things matter, you agree or disagree?” “Indeed” I answered. “Little things can have big affects, if anything Behaviourism, you know, Pavlov’s Dogs, Skinners’s rats, the regnant force in Academic psychology for over half a century has showed us if anything, one thing, small stimulus big effect, but it always depends…” Roger cut in and laughed, sarcastically, in a strange way but not cruelly, as if he had been speaking to himself, rehearsing a lecture, he also sounded drugged: “Does reading this lead to imbued contemplation of the divine not-ever-self” Was he being cynical? I deflected the thought and wondered if farm girls brought up under the Confucian system ever considered that, but I butted in: “Don’t hold me to it, but I would believe it so.”
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“So stuff in your face, objects and messages you can’t ignore, that which grabs and hold your attention, like a hideous gangland defacement on your local grocery shop window, or something glimpsed when your on a bike @ 60 KM an hour can have less effect than something faint, weak, hardly seen or so camouflaged and insidious sticker that it doesn’t even click or register?” I uttered as a metronome, as if trying to preserve a scientific dignity: “Don’t hold me to it, but I would believe it so.” Lynne then voiced some good observations: “So subliminal is ‘all the time’ on the bus, the glimpse of a headline, a logo on a shirt, a passing comment, a snippet of a conversation, the heat from an open door into the street, the sound of jumping in pool several gardens away . . .All of these have some part partial in creating our consciousness or reality?”
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But metronomically, like a lighthouse, I went off again: “Don’t hold me to it, but I believe it so.” I had to pay that particular observation needed more justice, in fact the whole conversation needed more justice, even Roger glanced @ me like I was mechanised, bullshitting, not offering much for my dinner, as it was, the issues raised are key to many of my stances in psychotherapy so I elaborated: “I view the subconscious mind as an amorphous entity or machine... if you will, which is there as merely to help us learn. I do not hold to a view of the unconscious mind as that ‘just round the corner’, like some assassin waiting to get us or torture us with apprehensions developed when we were young. Jung advanced the theories of Freud through the notion there should not be a privileging of your formative years in consciousness. I go down the same route as the Psychologist Karl Lashley, the Neurobiologist Karl Pribram and physicist David Bohm when they spoke of a holonomic brain. That is, that those structures of neurone firings which are associated with thought come from many parts of the brain. And if the brain is damaged then there is prospect that the storage capacity of the damaged part can
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partially, or even in whole, be replaced by the functioning of other parts. This is because each is a hologram which contains a more or less complete representation or blueprint of the other. I view the human mind as something the same. It clearly is a composite of that which is outside melding with sorted memories to not just create a sense of consciousness, but also direct consciousness towards people, places and objects intentionally. The sensoriam of the world, all that is focused upon and all that is neglected constitutes known and knowable reality. And maybe as Zen master would have it, all the answers in the world are in that rock pool by the ocean... they are inside.” ………. *** We continued in this vein for hour upon hour, until the wee hours melded into tiny beams of glimmering light over the distant nautical horizon. Our discussions would surely have made Aristotle and the other Greeks philosophers’ pause, reflect for a while, and then decide to go to bed. Maybe even curl up with their obtuse and wordy Euro-Gaulian descendants Foucalt and Derida and Guy Dubord. Difficult authors, what would they make of the old colonies? II
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
That evening in Dorset, between our near monologues, and definitely so if we are speaking here of Roger, after our mental workouts sparkled and fizzled with a few fulminations and petite diatribes, we watched ships sail rather idly, languidly almost, glacially, over the horizon. We did this without any tension, as if it were natural, as if doing so was like drinking from some oracle fountain and liasing with the pagan Green Man. Or gazing; as an augur into a ball of crystal, interpreting omens to guide public policy in Rome. Or interpreting, even the chaotic and random mishmash of I-Ching Yarrow sticks or the scatological array of tea leaves in the bottom of some Romany’s teacup. Meanwhile we were all here warmed by the Adams’ large stainless steel hearth central to the majestic nautical vista lent to us by a massive panoramic window sourced from a specialist glazier in Kent. It was as warm and as safe as a womb, not so dark, and seemingly more so when the elements are so rough, immediate and visible.
………. ***
It reminded us that good conversations are not the raw combat of egos. Following a usage that traces back to the ancient Greeks, deliberation can be defined as the process of setting up intent and resolve, where a person or group explores different solutions before settling on a specific course of action. This is how it was that night.
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I gazed through Roger’s telescope, which sat aimed @ the sea by the large window, and peeking through it, and getting focus, I could see men working on nondescript tasks on board ship. I pondered awhile on what they were thinking and feeling, leaving shorelines, leaving land, and leaving their families and lovers, and of course, unbeknown to them and for ever more, my spying eyes. The mystery of it all. My interacting aggregates of ideas, which like them, was always moving, swirling with images, thoughts, perceptions, and feelings – working. I am reminded of Joseph Conrad, in The Mirror of the Sea; “Landfall and Departure mark the rhythmical swing of a seafarer’s life and of a ship's career.” III I thank the Adams’ dearly for their hospitality, their splendid Tuscan inspired dinners, the spectacular views, the log fires and their dear, dear friendship and kindred company. I would also thank Hendrich Gershang for his invitation that night to all present to visit him in Berlin. As far as I know I have been the only one to date who has taken him up on his offer. About a month later he lodged me and my wife and eldest two sons on the top floor of his squat on Kreuziger Straße in the former Soviet controlled East Berlin borough of Friedrichshain. He was such a strong presence @
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Adams’ house that night; I knew I just needed to know more, implicitly, he offered the gift of learning.
best because of their own experience. Can you imagine trying to teach someone to ride a bicycle using only pictures and verbal instructions? This is how I interpreted our lessons in our stay in Berlin. It was rewarding. The body remembers what the mind forgets! Oh those rooms in the Bangkok hotel…
He and Gutse’s (his partner) preparation of substantial macrobiotic meals and ‘bombing’ (The Graffiti of mind spraying and pasting of stickers) missions @ 4am in the new districts of Berlin where the wall came down afforded contrast, without denying quality. It gave us valuable lessons in an alternative architecture. This is where you understand the building not only from the architect’s view, or that of the tourist guidebook, but also that of the building contractor who utilises no scaffolding. He told me of others who see urban landscapes in this alternative way. Parkour or ‘freeruning’ guys analyse concrete and built environment as physical assault courses in which they perform a gymnastic dance dot slash rock climbing action, where you navigate and move between the insidious or subliminal offerings of hand hold, platforms and grips in built spaces. It was also a lesson in shifting points of view (POV) or the urban and, also, the human designed and built environment. ………. *** The world’s most famous clinical hypnotherapist Milton Erickson often spoke about physical metaphors as therapeutic aids. This entailed getting his client to do something physical, outside the therapist's office that would have metaphorical implications. Physical metaphors use the principle of Learning by Doing - the idea that people learn
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He prepared in advance from an array of materials and techniques, including appropriated and altered labels, selfadhesive film, stencils, colour-copies and computer printouts, elaborate and distinctive artworks are blanket coverage @ street level. It was like action dada. The one I picked up on, which seemed to be everywhere posted by them read: “Magic Theatre: Not for everyone.” It was emblazoned everywhere like a neon sign. Once you spotted it, it is everywhere. All around you as you travelled on the metro and walked the streets. Your perception of POV had changed to accommodate this as opposed to the ‘in your face’ brand identities of Euro- and globo- chains such as McDonalds’s golden arches. I recognised its ‘message’ instantaneously, and to Hendrich’s delight, as an excerpt from the famous Herman Hesse novel, Damien, itself often cited as the text that spawned the decadence and hedonism of 1960s counterculture. Something like the antithesis of how McDonald’s @ the top of Patpong in Bangkok used to fly the American flag. ………. ***
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
With this in mind, I forwent the kind offer of multiple and massive bong pipes of powerful thirteenth generation hydroponically grown Skunk ‘marianna’. Following the wisdom of one of my heroes, Jung, I hold that drug use countermands the mind’s natural propensities for dreaming and imagination, and by implication learning. Both my sons blew pipes with them though as did my wife who enjoys a puff now and again on vacation. My oldest got into something freaky about being so stoned in the place where Hitler strutted his stuff, and felt he couldn’t properly express his thoughts coherently in the house. This caused him some dissonance. Surely drugs are for the young? Is it just I or is it their use by older generations so bizarre?
IV
“This one of my tools in my psychic armoury.” Heinrich would often say that, paraphrasing one of the last phone conversations he had with his brother Otto. But like all of my age group, post flower power, pre-punk I have had more than enough of drug induced internal dark night navigation of the soul. Gone for me is the interest in the mad, mad extroverted cavortions in fun fairs and discotheques, mud clubs, acid house and the mad raves, and the neurotic sex that it engenders. Think about it, sex snatched from the chemically altered.
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Before we left Berlin to return to the States he indicated his brother, Otto, lived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and he and his family were deeply concerned about him. He had become more and more detached from him over the years, traveller friends of his had failed to hook up with him when they went to Cambodia. They feared extreme drug addiction or maybe some corrupt police set-up and jail or even death, Thanatos. The Austrian embassy had proven useless; they had no resources to search for missing fiends. He wanted him home. They sit there and wait for him sometimes to make a call. But following Freud, he often called family “public enemy number one.” ………. *** Some time later I managed to find Otto with some difficulty (he is a loner), in fact it was through the help of Myiad. I coaxed him subliminally into becoming one of my high networth clients (he pays me triple rates, $270 an hour; he calls our therapy sessions, ‘consultancy’). It was great being able to inform Hendrich, with Otto’s permission, that in his own unique way, Otto was fine and thriving. He had made friends with an ex-New York police officer (who was another client of mine, but only very briefly). He was involved in some ‘great work’ of his, but it had an end and it involved programming and a pipe or two. He would not hear from him…from time to time, but rest assured he had not
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rejoined the orange people cult and it was not operating in Cambodia. He could be lying. One of the last TV entertainment shows the Japanese man was conscious of was a National Geographic presentation on the life of Osho, he didn’t know that one of the background figures was a Hendrich Gershang. There was no reason he should.
V
………. *** The ‘gift of learning’ that Hendrich lent me and my brood was not an explicated shared thought, but a private, sensationally personal one. I was making sense of what I was seeing in the street that night as a ‘lived metaphor’. I was looking for clues to problems in identifying with my own work. The Herman Hesse quote echoed inside me like I was a forgotten cave in New England. My work as a therapist means I breathe, eat and shit flexibility of mind and communication, which is metaphor or lateral thinking over different registers, scales and scopes. It is not reflective, like writing, or thinking and doing and listening as in Music composition, it is reactive, interactive and immediate. It is the cutting edge of humanism, nothing more, and nothing less. What else expresses the high point of ‘where we are’ better? The arts? This is the arts. Science, this is undeniably empirical, experimental and explorative. It is the next paradigm of both these endeavours. And it is the new religion.
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I must go beyond the performances of a method actor, beyond the introspection style of the philosopher and artist/poet/composer, beyond the forensic skills of the police officer and beyond the granular movements and adaptations of the skilled artisan. It relies in being instinctual as a pure strategic skill, so I let myself drift into trance states in sessions; it lets me flow to where clients go. I struggle against current and ebbs and eddies that try to take me to Poseidon, to entropy rather than the client. I am a strong advocate for mobile and agile intelligence @ root of communications, and @ the expense of personal power and dogma. Believe me, if this approach wins, it wins you no friends, in fact it makes people often have an instinct to distrust you, and even focus their anger upon you, their hate and frustrations. ………. *** When you work deeply with a client’s unconsciousness mind, their introspective awareness of change is not always available to them. Many come with a simple problem. Some independent follow up six months later shows the problem either no longer exists or has ceased to be a problem, but it ‘healed’ on its own. It was nothing to do with that waste of time in that Chinese guy’s office! In many ways it is like the charges which conventional approaches to medicine bring to
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
bear on alternative approaches. Most minor maladies come to cure themselves, were they helped by the homeopathic pills or not? Were they just placebo? Alternative practitioners strike back with; “Orthodox science only proves the veracity of orthodox medicine, an alternative approach a medicine of the subjectivity is needed to prove the veracity of alternative approaches.”
Miscreants and deviants are containable and therefore more controllable. It just takes a little slapping, physical if necessary, psychology preferably. This is why some consider the family "public enemy number one", because it keeps individuals from cutting the bonds of conformity.
“Relationships with young Asian women are not for everyone, as indeed relationships per se are not for everyone.” Members of your family won’t like it if they are responsibly settled and in steady employment with a mortgage and dependants. When cornered into discussions of morality, human beings are often disingenuous or, @ best, conveniently confused. For most people, 'morality' means 'sanctimonious disapproval', which is not the same @ all. This assumption is obvious when people argue against drug use or 'aberrant' sexuality. There's almost never a coherent principle to support their position, they just don't like what someone else is doing, and they expect the same olf us. They always prefer people with narrow and easily deciphered aims, restricted expertise and limited associations and interests.
This is a popular view in the ‘social’ psychology of groups and in consumer studies and it is ubiquitously held in the west as the received view, on why men go for Asian women. That if they export them to their homes, and install them in the designer kitchens, manicured gardens and all the trappings of a tasteful middle-class ‘wifey’ suburbanite material existence that they will and should be grateful for this. They are doing so because they are malleable. They will clean and shave the man in the morning because they have made them so materialistically happy. They will not let them work, ‘social’ise or learn to talk the local language. That means trouble as it’s outside the bubble! Why give them the ideological trappings of western women as they present them with the material trappings? Does fitted kitchens and manicured lawns index to getting your teeth brushed in the morning? He sits and waits for her to get the toothbrush.
‘They’ – Joe Q Public – Ma and Pa Kettle can manage them better that way, with or sometimes without the help of authorities and law enforcement. There are those who would whop yo ass if they new what you were up to...
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VI
The reflection of All is Pan: the Night of Pan is the Annihilation of the All.42 I am never in a battle with client’s depression or anxieties or strange thoughts. People cannot do anything but influence each other. It is always so, @ some granular or obvious level. Through this awareness or wisdom if you will, I teach them not to be either. Put simply it is sharing the recognition that we are often not responsible for the thoughts that enter our mind and flow out, they are ‘social’ and arbitrated possibilities. We may refer to them on some emotional level but these feelings ebb and flow like the tide as well, they pass like the weather. What we are responsible for though, is our behaviour. I do not think any psychological situation is ever, ever intractable, it is always a bubble that can be burst, if the clients can be shown the pin, It is best they stick it themselves. However, any behaviour no matter how evil, crazy or bizarre it seems is the best choice available to that person @ that instance. This is empowering. But it is often a needle in the haystack. This is where I or others like me can provide assistance. Even to the point of physical death, Thanatos, I have followed clients and ensured that their 42
Crowley, A. (1978). The Book of Lies. New York: Samuel Weise r p.33
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passage is clean, neither pain nor regrets. That is where my professionalism comes in. That’s why people pay me money. I can help them find that pin number, password and key. None of these faze me in the slightest; they are of slight interest to me as they are the common themes and preoccupations of everyday life. They are banal and do not evoke curiosity, everything that makes life and its infinite options not available. They are common, and I am grateful; for them. They give me purpose and provide a good living. I am an adult; a therapist to boot, and so have heard it all, even in the space of a day. Maybe I am, as other therapists have sometimes critically become known, a priest for the new millennium. ………. *** My wrestle is with the metaphorical symbolism of unconscious minds, in particular, its capacity to offer clients, even if they know they need it or not, a gift of learning. This is the timeless gift of finding themselves enabled to cope and learn to adapt, and the inevitable is always an open door. Sexual arousal involves a different part of the brain than that which controls the normal, rational functioning of everyday life. This part of the brain is very powerful, sometimes compellingly so, and is much less mature than our more rational side, often embarrassingly so, and commonly has
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
very little concern for the values which we have devoted so much of our lives to learning.
them today on a weekly or even daily basis, for business and pleasure. In a general sense there appears more problems with Thais than, say Filipinos probably due to the combination of language and cultural differences.
VII So I am a therapist, my speciality is relationships - work, diplomatic and personal relationships, Especially intercultural relationships, or existing relationships made spellbinding by taking them to exotic settings. Often it is the process of importing one’s lover from the exotic locations, and to quote Myiad, places them “in the context of beautifully finished fitted designer kitchens and teach them to admire perfectly manicured lawns.” Some fantasise more about their prospective lover’s amazed and enthralled reaction to the west more than they did about having an Asian lover in the first place. White chick—yellow guy, black guy—yellow chick, black chick—white guy – all combinations and permutations. In the end, which do you feel is more important for the individual who wants to be free: surrender or self-control? This often predominates, as does the meme of stereotype. It can fuel or hinder mutually satisfying growth. They can be positive or negative. This is the joy of difference and union. But they still throw up problems. My work has had a particular bent on Thai and farang (Thai slang for foreigner) relationships, mostly because of the glut of people entering
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………. *** This also marks the difference been my domestic work, where I work largely with naturalised Asians, Latinas and Africans who date Caucasian or Black men. My work @ home covers a more general mix of ethnic backgrounds, but I continually draw upon my experience in Thailand for reference to how events and relationships can break down. Bay area, San Francisco is a place where interracial relationships happily abound, and they don’t in any way seem extravagant. This is It is also because of the particular dynamic and nature of relationships of the latter type. It is rarely plain sailing. Asian fetishism, ‘Yellow Fever’ or ‘Rice King’ still remains the one most prevalent form of predilection. My sister can immediately sense when someone has an Asian fetish. She spots someone staring @ you from afar and next moment coming to talk to you @ a crowded party. She sees a guy walking down the street, hand-in-hand with another Asian girl, and he still checks her out as she walks by him. ………. ***
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Honeymoons spent on Ko Samui with your beautiful childhood sweetheart can turn in a mere shudder to an existential crisis of ginormous proportions. The honeymoon in an exotic location turns quickly into dumping the blonde ‘best looking girl in your class’ and falling for a cheap pockmarked yaba pipe hooker. You know, the type you find irresistible when on holiday in these parts, and the love has intensity like a bolt in the dark, and whom you find more alarmingly that you ‘really’ love. You cannot forget her once you are back @ home.
explains she must, as her mother is ill and your money was simply not enough but she has not slept as she only thinks of you, only of you. She hates herself, and she hates this life, she only wants you, only you. Is she just a con merchant, the great pretender, a method actress, con merchant, and Ms. Walter Mitty? Is it a conspiracy theory built just for you? Rotten to the core she is a polyglot that kids her family, her self and thoroughly believes her own propaganda. You do to.
She becomes the bee in your bonnet, and you just have to keep in contact with her. He sits and waits for her to make her move. You have to go back, you must return like a believer to Mecca. You must see her again, and again, like the waves crashing against these rocks or the meteronomic flash of the lighthouse, even just for one more time, or even to disprove your feeling. How does one move from observations to laws?
But is she just as low-life like those stories you read on the Internet or heard in the bar or read in the newspaper or seen on TV. They are not you, they are not she. Stories abound of hellish tales of deception and misery, nothing like can ever happen to you. You cannot shield yourself, no firewall, no defences. By being completely open nothing bad can get in as bad is inside of you it is also your make-up. You and your graffiti of mind, your mirrors within reflect that which is around you, you become, you meld with it, and it is you. Therefore it cannot harm you.
This is good scientific method according to the Popperian method. Karl Popper’s approach to proofing scientific ‘facts’ asked that scientists refuted the outcomes of experiments to prove their veracity. Yeah, you need to highlight, check for yourself how nasty she really is, how black her heart is, how much of a hooker she is, to see if she is ‘for real’. How much this theory of love just didn’t hold waters in the end. But then you wonder why? You catch her with another man, she
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………. ***
They never report happy marriages and relationships do they? The assumption is that there is nothing to say, that this is business as usual. But they must exist. And if they do, should I mitigate my chance for true happiness because of myths and hardened views of ex-pats and feminist leaning
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
critics, those who boast of middle-class Thai wives who never worked? Is she different? Is she distinctive? Non-unitary like you, is she a girl that needs someone, like you, and maybe only you, are the one, the only one that ever cared enough to distinguish her from the crowd. You have the power; you give her a break, a chance, an opportunity. Who else will? Have you ever given a gift from your heart to someone who criticised, rejected, or just ignored it? Is she not the one that distinguished you in the crowd? Chose you in the crowd of foreigners passing through ad infinitum? Myiad’s hall of mirrors, the infinite double bind, begins in the psychology of handsom man… A man may want to be enlightened and respect other people for their character, but still find himself turned on by bimbos with big tits, decent ass, dark eyes and jet black silky hair. A woman may want to be true to her feminist beliefs, but still find herself turned on by thoughts of being dominated by some unintelligent Neanderthal ex-NYPD macho male.
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Chapter 6. The strange case of Mr. Honeymoon I One newly-wed client of mine, let’s call him Mr. Honeymoon, failed to even consummate his marriage as he continuously “wasted himself” on his honeymoon. On his and his new wife’s honeymoon they were accompanied by various close family members and friends. He played rugby with his best man, and they worked for the same bank in Melbourne. On his wedding night his marriage remained unconsummated as he was worse for drink, and the next day he spent vomiting, while everyone else went to the beach. He rose and went for a drink, and ended up getting blown by a skull-fucking whore that told him she liked other
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
women, and that she would consummate his marriage. It was all a joke, but after some sizzling 4-on-one realities he realised that he was hooked. He told no-one. The hooker told him that she came from Bangkok but her and her friends had accompanied some old guy who adored his toes eaten while the others rubbed him down and jacked him.
After failing in his attempt to persuade his wedding entourage to go to Pattyaha (they had booked and paid for three weeks) He left the Paradee resort, his friends, family, and new wife and headed off to Pattaya, like a robot, golem or zombie operating for another intelligence that knows god only knows what?
They all worked in a blow-job bar and she disclosed to him that she had a Japanese boyfriend. He was waiting for her but she fucking hated his guts. He was departing today, they were going to Pattaya, they had some friends there and the going was good. Everything they said and did repulsed but fascinated him. They told him the truth with all the guts hanging out. He felt like it was the first time any fucker had come clean to him in his life.
He murdered. slaughtered his libido like it was going out of fashion, he was the proverbial rape and murder herbsman and had his ‘knob strangled’ - on several ‘short times’ a day in blow-job bars and short time rooms in Pattaya, or by the girls in their down time. They were turning tricks like he was pushing ‘z’s and pipes of dope. He was manic, he couldn’t get enough. He dropped Ecstasy and Viagra and did lines of cocaine like it was going out of fashion. He ignored the mobile phone messages.
“I never speak like this before, I tell only you, I don’t know why?” Shit these whores were raw. He made perpetual excuses to his entourage the food was affecting him badly and had to be excused from going on trips and excursions lain on by the Travel Company. He hung with the hse in a bar run by one of the ex-friends who had married an Englishman. She blew him for free, and made him feel like one of the gang.
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Come day four of what should’ve been married bliss, Mr. Honeymoon was not screwing anyone anymore but getting manualised, masturbated or felated, several times a day on Viagra that he procured from a fat middle-aged man that was already doing 500-3000 mg a day. He had problems a-coming. On the fourth day, without sleeping for the last two, he complained of a feeling that his neck was refrigerated, but he
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continued to smoke substances and drink massively. He booked in to the Marina hotel.
not want a doctor or police as he didn’t trust ‘monkey’ doctors and police. They would just rip them off, and claimed he was feeling better, much better, but could his newly-wed wife stay in the room of her sister yet another night. He was clearly mad, and looked rough as shit.
Then he came to be beaten badly by some Thais when he wouldn’t stop nailing some girl who was screaming for help in a massage parlour. He’d been pounding her like a pneumatic drill for 3 hours and she was dry and in agony. She was also gasping for a pipe. This didn’t stack up well in the experiential camp. ………. *** He was blue, eyes bloodshot, with dried froth @ the side of his mouth. Even when the security was beating him and a gun was produced, he pleaded for another fresh girl. He ended up arrested, projectile vomiting and came down for 3 days in a cell. This was clearly beyond pleasure and into mania. He dropped Valium and slept for two days without end. And all this while close members of his family and that of his wife were staying with the apparently happy newlyweds in the same resort on Ko Samet - The Paradee Resort. They were going berserk with worry. When he returned, his tail between his legs, he spun excuses of a burglar attacking him in the room while he was recovering from his food poisoning. He indicated that he did
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The robbery excuse explained the loss of 1000s of AUS$ and Thai Baht. The currency was pouring into the pockets of mamasans, condom companies [although he gave up on them after day four] and bars and chemists. Statelessness. Zero tolerance and gravity and friction. On a less dramatic level the family was deeply disappointed that he would be missing in the photographs of the trips to the snake farm and that wonderful day in the glass bottom boat. The album would remain incomplete. But they took solace in they all got on and this was a communion of the families. This would be recorded for posterity. While they worried about that, and the mental destruction of Mr. Honeymoon, and began what was a long process of seriously hating Asia, ‘honeymoon’ was busy yet again exploring the sensation of having his penis in yet another Asian stranger’s mouth, while he looked @ other men being
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
compromised with these thoughts. He was getting his ass screwed by Katois, and he was giving and receiving by this time.
into and top up his accounts. This was in the hope and faith that he was alive and well, but maybe in hospital or something. They believed the worst they could do was to starve him of cash @ this point. Eventually though, after several months and many meetings between the in-laws and his family, they decided that because of the obvious lack of direct contact, they had no choice but to accept the unacceptable. To cope. That he was in fact dead and that they had been sending cash that was ironically supporting and rewarding his killer. They stopped his cards and informed the bank and the foreign office. For two years, the mention of the words’ ‘Thai’ or ‘Asian’ made the wife vomit, as did a simple and innocuous Chinese take away or even just its smell wafting downtown from Chinatown. Four years on she still cannot look Asians in the eyes, and will walk out of a restaurant of a bar if one comes in. It took two years of mediation and counselling to get over her severe psychic shock.
………. *** A holiday of a lifetime for this ‘should’ve been happy’ group turned into their worst nightmare when grandson, son, brother, brother-in-law, husband and son-in-law, Mr Honeymoon, disappeared in his entirety two days before they were due to return to Melbourne. They were left with no option but to register @ the Embassy in Bangkok that he was ‘missing’. The missing list was not inspiring; it had 436 Australians already on it. They left ‘the land of smiles’ confused, anxious and depressed. The wife was understandably inconsolable, he was such a caring, quiet conscientious guy, and she never had met anyone like him. She wanted his babies and knew he would be a great dad. I was contacted by the Australian Embassy to see what I could do. This is a common call out, and I do my best to enact some brief approaches to relieving some of the shock-horror that people feel when faced with this. II He only resurfaced indirectly, and only then through credit card activity and large bank transfers that straddled Thai Farmer’s bank branches the length and breadth of Thailand. For the first couple of weeks, the families continued to pay
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………. *** She thought many times of taking her life and how she would accomplish this. She has moved on now, happily married with her first kiddie on the way. Her new found love helped restore her faith in men, in mankind, and moreover in herself. She couldn’t help but blame herself for her first husband’s disappearance. She wished that she’d let him have his way before marriage, but it was a mutual
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
decision, he had clamed he had been a virgin as well. But he couldn’t have been. Could he? Going away with prostitutes like that, Thai prostitutes as well. A fucking joke, big sick joke.
managing and tending her networks, collecting money, banking it, buying and selling gold than she did lying on her back taking cock. She was a global finance corporation like HSBC and a global broadcasting corp. like CNN, BBC or Bloomberg news!
III He came to me on the 1st anniversary of his third live-in bar girlfriend, a full four years after his honeymoon. He had been with this one for almost a year. He was clearly on Yaba. He was distraught that he had accessed his current Thai whore girlfriend’s email account. Through it he found out that she was not only married to a 34 year old Austrian, with whom she had had a baby but also to a 62 year old Canadian professor of English Studies. He lived on Vancouver Island. She had been married to the older guy for 10 years – since she was 15! In addition she was engaged to two Brits of unknown age and a Swiss guy who lives in the north of Thailand who was 23. She was drawing a stipend from a grand total of seven men @ the same time. These ranged in amounts, and she juggled her favours. She continually lost some and gained some. It was like a full time occupation managing them using digital communications. She spent much more time writing and
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From $50 in drips and drabs, irregular amounts and payments from a student on welfare in Dussledorf, to the stipend of $2000 a month for her, her sister [the wife of the Japanese man incidentally] and ‘their’ baby to stay in relative comfort of a four star hotel with a nanny, courtesy of her Canadian professor husband. It was the hotel that ‘they’ had stayed in and where they had [he had] fallen in love. The general message to all of them, in most of the email sent back, were largely cut and paste, and of the ‘I luv you too must, when you come back Thailand’ variety plus other qualifiers and real time extras using web cams and ‘social’ networking programs. They were all there in the ‘sent box’ and all had the same general message - she needed more. More, much more, from all of them, all the time, forever. What were most hurtful were the digital photographs, where his own head had been transplanted with that of the German or Canadian, and sent to suggest imaginary trips. The trip to Rayong with her sister’s kid became a perverse family shot, with a large head of a smiling aged professor on his own emaciated body. The proportions weren’t right and
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he could imagine her and the Internet café owner having great fun compositing these marketing materials. He sits and composes propaganda for her to make her move.
On the other hand he never ‘went around’, as he had no money of his own. His only travels were when some visitor who has just landed bought him drinks and hse for a tour or to glean form his knowledge. The visitor was already regretting that he had to leave next week to wherever he came from, but Mr Honeymoon just wanted to know more about this home. He was so distant, so far away, over the horizon, his visa had ran out years before and he was scared to even begin the arduous task of calculating the fine. He was scared the cops ever caught him.
………. *** Mr. Honeymoon, had of course suspected he had been living off immoral earnings for some time. That he was the proverbial ‘Thai boyfriend’ swinging languidly in a hammock waiting for his beer, pipe and brothel money courtesy of western economies and farang wallets. She did indeed largely paid his beer and pipes, he let her go working in the evenings and he had caught gonorrhoea two times off her already that year. She turned it about and blamed him and threw him out. And out was very hard. Very hard. She once left for two weeks but claimed that she had to go quickly to her auntie. He never questioned her; She knew that he knew, that she knew…
He “wanted out” and called my hotline one night in Pattaya, he expected the choppers in the morning and gave us the coordinates for a hot landing zone. It will be some time before he can go home, but he will.43 We don’t leave any of our own behind.
IV When I ask Le Roy what he does if he's not attracted to a woman, he responds in a matter of fact way: 'Close my eyes and pretend it's Beyoncé.' God only knows what these hse are thinking of when the Japanese man is licking their assholes??? ………. ***
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43
“home is essentially a set of values you carry around with you and, like a turtle or a snail or whatever, home has to be something that is part of you and can be equally a part of you wherever you are.” Pico Iyer (2004) Sun after Dark. Flights into the Foreign new York: Knopf
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region to ‘break hse’, and to give them their first experience of a real man, their ‘first time’, a ‘good’ man, a worthy man, a generous and unique man. One in a million, they wait to make their move.
Chapter 8. The diaspora of white middle-aged western men I Thailand and the Philippines witness more and more of the diaspora of western men seeking out partners implicitly or explicitly, on their own admission or just by putting themselves in the right place @ the right time. Many of these men in the early stages kid themselves that they are porn stars out there looking to conquest as many hse as they can muster and afford. That they are they’re out in the
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Nothing for this type would be better than to have the women gagging for their superior huge cocks, exaggerated manhood, large physiques, well-endowed. They come well tutored by a frisson of Asian pornos, and even occasionally hardcore weight training and cock extension medication and hardware. They want nothing more than to mortify pensive tiny girls as they themselves emerge nude from the bathroom door, grinning like a satyr, a semi-hardon swaying unhindered untethered rampant and awkwardly as they come to their little nymph. She greets them with an expression of genuine concern that their lust may kill them @ the height of passion. But most are there to be kind, to relive and recapture something of their youth, but some are there intending to command hse violently and aggressively with their night-sticks. They carry hardcore love toys, such as ‘Rabbits’ whose original aims before porn and sexual emancipation were ‘marital aids’ to spice up sexless marriages after years of cold, severe neglect. They are used within hours of these marriages in hotels. When I ask Leroy what he does if he's not attracted to a woman, he responds matter of factly: 'Close my eyes and pretend it's Beyoncé.'
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………. *** Some other men are more introverted, very soft and easily led. They might say that their predilection for Asian women is a clearly stated rejection of Western women or Western cultural norms when it comes to dating and marriage. Sometimes, some men admit, it has to do with body type an attraction to a more pubescent look or smaller breasts, straighter waist-to-hip lines, and less body hair. Sometimes it has to do with being able to feel masculine or dominant because of the way Asian or Asian-American women act or treat them. They open their hearts and wallets and are invariably disappointed as they become trodden on emotionally until they break. Other men still remain hardcore, cold and cynical to the end. They would never fall in love with a whore. They are entirely realistic bending upon sadistic in their contempt almost, their misogyny. One person who came to me took pleasure in degrading the working girls such as copulating with them in front of their families or making them use dildos there, while a sister jacks their ‘king’ or ‘god’. One even went so far as to pay a girl to shit in her mouth – just to see if she would. She did. They allowed him to do so for dollar. He went on to atone for this. It seriously disrupted his life.
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And sometimes men just don't know why Asians give them more erotic charge than other ethnic types. Like those that ‘go black and don’t go back’ any of these men may follow the path into the jungle of the soul – what we call the ‘Pavilion of Mirrors’ - similar to Joseph Conrad's Kurtz. In Heart of Darkness or Apocalypse Now the protagonist Kurtz can be seen as personifying of the fundamentally deranged or fundamentally savage nature of man. While Conrad’s novella mocks colonialism; the characters become more and more mentally unstable the deeper they go in to the jungle, the theme that served as inspiration to director Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and Werner Herzog in Aguirre: The Wrath of God. These relationships are relationships of contrast. Like Yin and Yang. Older men, younger women, the moneyed men, and the poverty stricken, East and west North and South etc. those pundits of travelling round the world seeking action have self-penned themselves as [whore]-mongers, punters, heatseekers. Older men love the idea of competing with younger men and the notion that they keep the hse up for all night hard action. This is the mettle of porno infused fantasies. ‘Men’ typically burn this out of their souls within three days, after which they look for someone they can spend time with. Arguably this is the healing that goes in a place where sex is made real again, made visceral and immediate. There is the death of the mental apparatus and
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bonds of the isolated and alienated western experience of sex. It is substituted for the touchy-feely kinaesthetic and olfactory experience of holding, touching, smelling and licking another human being again, pay for play (P4P).
country alone, is daft. Now, not all biracial couples have fetishes for specific races but the existence of it is undeniable. The terms, “yellow fever” or “jungle fever,” all describe this elite group of people who can’t get enough ethnic ass. Possible reasons for this phenomenon have been explained by a scientist who has located an area in the brain where it registers a person’s appearance as exotic or mysterious. I, however, believe a more menacing culprit is involved - psychology. ………. ***
These often go way beyond the simple prostitute-client transaction or that of the mail order bride syndrome into the realms of relationships that have real emotional vivaciousness. Are some of these transactions exploitative? Surely; are some of them mutually beneficial? Absolutely; but then again, so are most human relationships, even buying your morning coffee contains this element. Employment markets can be exploitative when less equitable employers are in a strong position. Any sexual relationship can be exploitative dependant on the characters and motivations involved. This is human nature, to sit and wait until it is time to move. Of the minority who entertain moral ideas with any seriousness, most arrive @ 'moral' convictions via a curious short-circuiting of the analytical process. Instead of questioning their actions and pondering the consequences for others, they look for the nearest off-the-peg argument that happens to support how they intended to act anyway. II
As I am an Ameriasian, and I feel that people are somehow comfortable disclosing to me very personal aspects of their personal relationships, that somehow I represent something of, and straddle both worlds, I am amorphous. It would be hard to dispel racial typing when it comes to matters of human sexuality. The myth of the black man with an exaggerated manhood and overpowering libido, even better dress sense and style, threatens the ego of the western white male. But this is overturned when it comes to the Asian male, whose inferior manhood is considered something of a joke. If not joke then non-threatening. At the most demeaning one gets the impressions from some egotist that they feel it is their ‘right’ to come and bludgeon, women, old and young and even men with their superior access to cash and with their attitudes and penises.
I only ever believe in cliché, “America is a melting pot,” in terms of all the biracial babies being produced in this
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One long stay ex-pat whose adult son who was a reserve officer in the US military and yet was still bed-wetting, came to me to see if anything could be done. His son Tom had been studying for a Harvard MBA, and already had a law degree under his belt. He was travelling with a friend of his, Dick, whose family owned the firm that they both worked for and who had been a long time friend of the Kennedy family. The father was referred to me by an old USAF buddy of mine from when I was a military councillor, and who is now retired with a condo in Pattaya. It was indicated that from the onset this was to be handled in a discreet street mania manner. From the onset of the evening this man was curt with me, cynical of ‘shrinks’ he was a self-made bully who harked on and on about his wealth and opinions of all and sundry. He made constant remarks about him ‘fucking my women’ even though I was born and raised in the Fernando Valley, my father was an Airforce Colonel and test pilot and my mother, who was educated @ the Sorbone in Paris, had been a senior member of the South Vietnamese Government responsible for forestry in the Mekong Delta. He constantly went on about his sexual conquests, his disgrace with his son, and my “small dick”, and what would I know about it all? Not only small dick but premature ejaculation was another trait he associated with Asian,
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“It’s all over for you guys in ten . . . That’s when you get all nasty and slap them around.” So not only were Asian men poorly endowed, and subject to premature ejaculations, we were also maintained proclivities to beat our wives and children - all due to our feelings of sexual inadequacy! Phew, and I thought I had a fertile imagination! I picked up that this was a ‘received view’ of some western men, shit they have digested courtesy of the powers that be, but this was the first time I had heard it articulated and offered in such a bombastic up front manner. This guy had obviously lost his sense of manners in the years he had been living in South East Asia. That is gift horse to an indirect therapist like me. The man represented an open door and with the likes of him I can step inside @ any time I wish. I can help him, but his son, well maybe I can use this guy’s unique qualities to open his door @ the same time. I met with him and his son for a meal and a casual chat. He failed to pay me the courtesy of letting me order, and kept calling me “Charlie Chong”. “Lets’ go to Alfredo’s just off Walking street” He winked to his son, they spoke loudly over earshot: “Hope Alfredo don’t mind me taking Charlie Chong in there, but it’s ok, he does ‘flied lice foe one’.
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Anyhows Alfredo will be thinking he’s there lookin’ to work the kitchen, otherwise he’ll think he’s talking to us working a great deal for a night with his sister, a cherry girl or something called ‘Suzie’, ahahah!” “Slanty will really be trying to pan us greenbacks off with his mother, but she’s 32, and we will still work her… hahahahah” “Do you think Charlie Chong can haul his crawly yella wheezing ass down there, or will he need a Rickshaw for the 500 yards?” “Fuck, we better not hit walking street or ‘small dicky’ will shoot his load of the week … mess up his smarty pants. Hey guys, run for cover, fire in the hole!” “But there’s no fire in the hole! He’s a five minute trouser down wonder” “Maybe we can hit a soapy later and old Charlie here can get us local price, huh?” “These fucking inscrutables never miss a trick, they never did in Korea and ‘Nam - how much is this laundry worker wanting anyhows?”
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“These assholes think that these girls are common as dirt, they don’t recognise the problem is their micropensises and them coming on 10 seconds flat.” The son looked pensive with this banter, but smiled obligingly, whilst looking like he wanted to say something, but couldn’t go that last mile. I enjoyed it; I usually pay money for this breed of madness in Cobb's Comedy Club back home. It showed how he was clever and how this would be used to first access, and then work with, his unconscious mind. But first the entrée. When a plate of “flied lice” came, and two plates of sizzling huge T-Bone steaks, and the rice was placed in front of me, I immediately swapped plates grabbed up both T-Bones in either hand (they were hot!!!) And took a massive bite from each, then ordered that they be immediately taken away and the menu brought again… with a finger bowl. While I washed my fingers. I lingered in the bowl just a little bit longer than conventionally accepted and this was more than enough to place the father in full trance and I worked with him in a matter of fact manner after that – on my terms. The son listened and observed very attentively. To illustrate the depth of trance, I pulled out a bunch of hairs from the fathers beard and he didn’t even wince. I cascaded the son into… severe trance condition and I chatted with the son about my ‘retreat’ in New England, while taking the father on a ‘walk through nature under the purple pearl sky, five in
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
and three metaphors out’ then out of trance. Yes, he was more civilised whilst maintaining his sharp sense of humour.
My clients are all nationalities, but most do come from Europe, the States and Australia/NZ in that order. Most are men in the age bracket 30-55, although I have worked with much younger and older men, and I should say quite a few women, especially in the business and corporate aspects of my work. At home I have more than a few clients of what has come to be termed ‘rice king’ variety, men who have a predilection for Asian women. For many this interest turns a darker shade of pale when it becomes obsessive, here it can even be tinged with a pathological or criminal bent.
He asked his son for his opinions after that. After that night, the son’s bed wetting stopped, and the father became an ongoing client, and has recently married and bought a farm in Chonburi Province, Thailand. The focus had always been him. We spit-roasted some fresh farm girls last time he was in town. He sits and waits for them to make their moves. Satisfied and outstanding customers, great trance subjects! III I can play both authoritarian paternalistic and ‘older brotherly’ role using either Thai or Khmer if talking to the girls. I speak both fluidly with the proper inflections to indicate that I am of their class. In this sense I mirror them, and win their confidence easily, and they feel comfortable. So what this says is that I do empathise with the issues and concerns of both worlds especially in affairs of the heart and genitals. I have a feel for what is typically incommensurate @ a deep level. This is because of me being a product and living testament to fusion myself, born to parents who are still together and have never stopped giving each other the love and support that helped them cross the cultural divide initially, I have tactics and opinions. ………. ***
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Most of the cultural conflict in the world occurs when certain individuals or groups try to impose their ‘round’ phenomenological realities or truths on other, ‘square’ people or communities. This is so true @ the interpersonal level as well the wider cultural or national level. Consider the battle of the sexes in an age of political correctness – should there be a battle, or can the square and circle ever reach the apex of the triangle and say that they are simple different but mutually absorbing and compatible? Maybe not while this difference is enshrined in law and where government intervene in what is seen as unfair and unjust ways. But neurological and behavioural ‘truths’ are often hard for policy makers to accept. In my sessions we explore the veracity of simple ‘truths’. Their relevance for current and emerging environments and lifestyles, responses to the cultures we are bought up within
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
and ‘social’ised into, and our response to other cultures including the sub-culture of business and commercial sex and companionship relationships. Some of which are conflicting and are difficult and complex. Today, perhaps more than any other time in history, fluidity and flexibility are key components in balancing and generating emotional and even career success. I aim to develop these qualities with all my clients, as mechanisms and tools that help them cope with the unique demands these relationships often place. There is some core beliefs that I bring forward here, and to the table when dealing with clients. .” And moreover, to encourage ways that they can enjoy them to the max.
Imagine the paradox, one ‘Pavilion of Mirrors’ as Myiad has it, that emerges when one goes looking for a relationship and finds it in the shape of a bargirl which you uncontrollably lose your heart to, and who domineers your vista on life, whilst raping your wallet and resources beyond the brink of any economic safety net. But you are smitten; you cannot break from her. The cacophony of choices paralyses you once you, like Mr. Honeymoon, have found your one true love in this midst of hedonism, sexual gluttony and over stimulation. Would you like to call on the power of your own unconscious mind to make this apparition disappear? Or maybe you would feel better having someone to guide you through steering this unfettered relationship through the stormy seas to a better resolution? On occasions I have also worked with the object of men’s desires themselves, giving them a new mental model of what is, and what could be. I do this in a such a proactive and positive sense that they have rescinded from their manipulative ways, including that of fleecing several men @ once with email scams to support ‘young men’, ‘steady’ farang boyfriends and husbands who have no resources.
Chief amongst these is a belief the more novelty we encounter, the more serendipity, the more conscious involvement is needed for successful learning and problemsolving. In the language of Jean Piaget, the more we must accommodate to new information, the more we need to be consciously involved with it. This is a view of love that is really learning. It is unconditional in the orthodox sense and it can apply to one’s ‘self’ as much as any ‘other’. It is to lessen apparent complexity supports using the rich source of context and the unconscious mind to get to what the Tao Te Ching, terms a return “to the state of the uncarved block.” That is wei wu wei or ‘actionless action’. IV
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………. *** Over the last twenty years I have received thousands of letters thanking me after the fact for saving either themselves or their relationships. This is both in South East Asia and often back home (where they have realised that
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
they wanted all along a relationships with a western women, or to maintain the relationship with wives or girlfriend’s back home). I have also been able to publish hundreds of articles and answer my ‘agony uncle’ blog on winslowwong.com.
It was indeed an honour to be asked to write a foreword to this book. I adore the topic so very much. I subscribe to and write under various pseudonyms on several sites on the subject. By means of a forum called khmer440 that we both members of I received an email from Myiad (who uses a pseudonym on the site) that went like this: From: Myiad@khmer440.com To: Dollabil@seatherapyinc.com Re: book proposal Dollabill
V “In June 1953…we went into the MAAG [Military Assistance Advisory group] housing place for lunch. I saw a big French building next to it. And I asked one of the officers what it was. He said, The French run a whorehouse there, it’s a big one . . . I grabbed the movie camera . . . I could see the French coming in. All the girls running up to black French troops from Africa-they’re bigger guys than the French. I started yelling @ them to look up. And they’re all waving. I said. “Hollywood, Hollywood.” They began acting out and calling to us. The girls were all smiling. The French unzipped their pants to show how big their don. And I was waiting for the general’s group to go back home and show it in the Pentagon… I didn’t think much of the French after having seem then up close that way.”44
44
General Edward Landsdale, ’The Whitehouse mission’ in Santoli, A. (1985) To Bear any burden New York: Ballantine p.29-30
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Are you up to your neck in it. I am up to my neck in hse as usual. I am drinking goatskin winesacs and rimmin’ asses in a fervour that would make Bacchus blush. I need to do something real though, I want to try to capture the Pavilion of mirrors my old friend. Something about the incommensurate realties of ‘here’. Most of the theories taken from the Philosophy of the ‘social’ sciences could be explored, and the Sociology of scientific and polictical thought. Its all here and its all good. But I need some subjects to research. You do just about anybody (like me with hse), do you think that some
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of your esteemed clients would lend themselves to interview. Anonymity agreed. They must testify, though, no PR, bullshit, no Presentation of self in everyday life, no pleasantries or ‘social’ niceties, no methods acting, no con, no political correctness, just their raw experience, phenomenological style, so I can write a book which they can all learn from. It will help me stop my search for the perfect ass, and help me do something more constructive with my life like watch TV and trawl shopping malls, garden centres and fitted kitchen stores for bargains and a new look.
Cheers MYIAD
I wrote back saying that it was unlikely that they would agree to this. His request faced me with a dilemma. I wondered if I was breaking some unofficial rule of client confidentiality, I referred to the rules of client engagement as recommended by the American Psychological Society – APS – and nothing would be broken per se. However, I felt as if there would be an implicit suggestion that somehow
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that I was disclosing confidential admissions to a third party. Surely this is the greatest trust of them all, that what is said between therapist and client stays there. Would this not create distance by betraying the intimacy and trust I share with all of my clients. My whole career could be @ stake and for what end exactly? But Myiad writes he is one of the most stupid men I have even met. He also carries a doctorate in psychology, but he spent most of his time researching high-growth, hightech companies in the valley and in Europe. He is a trained ‘social’ scientist and ethnographer, and has many other skills to boot. He studied the ‘social’ study of technology, and late 20th century composition. His undergraduate degree was from the famous School of Independent Study @ the former North East London Polytechnic. The entire course was a ‘social’ and learning experiment set up by a multidisciplinary team in the 1970s. It was big on the two ‘K/Carl’s’ Karl Popper and Carl Rodgers. The man is a polymath, he composes intricate sonic inventions as a pastime. And I have never met anyone with such a sharp feel and soft empathy for other cultures as him. A dedicated humanist, he writes with a satirical wit online that belies his credentials to lesser men. He is the proverbial ‘superior’ man as written in the IChing book of changes; he is the intelligence that knows, although he is the last to acknowledge this. He sits and
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
waits for them all to make their moves or stake their pieces. What an asshole!
commitment, he pretty much felt like he was exploiting them.
Like an asshole he lives modestly in a shack by the lakeside in Phnom Penh, near Jim, an American yaba fiend and his many ghost like barang visitors. His girlfriend and mother of his son, always breathing down his neck about his excursions. She is not stupid, as she has the sharp perceptions of an ex-working girl. In herself she knows he goes screwing around, she looks for the forensics, smells, shoelaces down in a different way to when he went out, the smell of latex on his penis, flecks of cheap whore perfumes on his shirts. He believe, as do I, that it should be the right of men (and women even) to have short times, long times, girl or boyfriend experiences as well as long term partners and husbands and wives. His confession time: he once briefly worked as a gigolo, for want of a better term. Two hookers approached him when he was pandering ‘insurance policies aimed @ the needs of women’ on the street. It was piecework and he was paid for leads. He was superb and drew thousands of leads and thousands of accompanying letter in the office. He was their star player. The girls wanted him to work the Casinos with them; he never felt that he was being taken advantage of, unless he was messed around for money. But as he began to hear the stories of some of his clients; what had driven them to seek sex in this way, and what had driven them to turn their back on any
………. ***
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This stretches to meterosexuality, as he has let Katois screw him in cheap hotels in Bangkok. But it is not his preference. He never lies though; he just doesn’t feel that it is necessary to say anything about his encounters, they are his domains, his private life, he paid $ for them and that makes them sovereign. Interrogating questions of the inquisition quality are met with “why do you need to know?” Over the years he has become something of the doyen of online writing about prostitution in South East Asia. It puts him up there with the infamous stickman and his antagonist, Bangkok Bob, Baron Bonk, The Joker, and a few others that can make claim to having a valid view of relationships in the region. But unlike some other commentators who wish to present themselves as detached observers he embraces that he is in the thick of the action. So I was surprised when several of my clients, even women, agreed to be interviewed, providing I was also present. They were exhaustively interviewed between February and July 2006. The result of these interviews makes the stuff of this book. Fiction mixes with faction as Myiad puts it, all in an effort to be instructive. Like as with online forums, the audience is those who were interviewed. Who is Online, Our users have posted a total of 51061 articles. We have 289 registered
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
users. 1,000,000 potential and actual punters, whoremongers and lovers hit Thailand a year.
These installations have long been Myiad’s pet hate, he loathes them and wants to slaughter all those who make them and moreover, pay for them to be made and shown. However he adores good documentaries and real films of real biographies in unusual circumstances. He loves hidden cameras. Case studies over surveys and explanations over depictions, tThe more decadent, the more depraved, the more eccentric the characters the better. It is a shame that some of those interviewed do live exceptional and eccentric lives (It would be difficult to find more eccentrics this side of the asylum than Otto Gerhsang). So it is only by default that you are reading this now, as it is that Otto is unusual, even for an ex-pat.
He is cautious, and has been, from the beginning of the project to create a work that was just another ‘freak show’ as he puts it. A Damien Hirst style of presentation, full of implicit angst, fear and loathing – sensationalism and a frisson of horror. That is, another piece of writing which acts like reality TV show or news editing. Go for the biggest hits, the freakiest overblown characters saying the weirdest, most controversial aspects of the wildest subjects, bombastically and with vim and venom. That is what the media audience want, that is what sells. Structure, plot and all the other literacy mechanisms may come into play, but they detract from the focus upon everyday. They are the difference between Hollywood blockbusters and video and film art productions in art galleries, like Andy Warhol’s (1963) monotonous ‘five-hour Sleep. These pieces were in the tradition of the American experimental composer John Cage, who argued the unmanipulated sounds of one’s environment, can make art. Similarly, Warhol tried to replace the compressed dramatic time of film with the more relaxed time of real life. No cars crashing, just someone’s downtime @ the pace and metronome of reality. We are not used to watching something as “slow” as a man sleeping, they are plotless and boring. ………. ***
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VI I was trained in the Rogerian method. This is where the therapist facilitates the client solving his or her own problems. It is often referred to as the client centred approach as it is less to do with constructs originating in the therapist or their training than in how the client experiences the world and how there problems are identified and coped with. The therapist acts as a sounding board or mirror to the client, facilitating them to identifying the nature of problems and finding the best or most satisfactory solution. In my sessions I present little more than non-committal answers as a way of gently guiding the patient to ‘truths’ the
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
client already knew, but ‘chose’ not to see. In essence we help the client to ‘join the dots’ where the big picture inside may become lost, becomes fragmented or becomes so vague to them. I help them make fusions, patterns, shapes and meanings that make sense and are seen to be constructive. The answer is always inside, as the problem originates there and any psychic discomfort, as is our immediate awareness is of "ideas".
these ideas arise or evolve, except that we have ideas, conceptions about how they might do so.
The reality is that only some ideas have been synthesised inside, in what is called the ‘Cartesian Theatre’. Daniel Dennet sees this term applying to the arena of consciousness - the active processing in which concepts interact and thoughts are juggled.45 A particular species of process in this theatre is that of filling-in, the process by which we perceive continuity of the world across regions with no neural response, such as the blind spot of each eye. Some of these ‘filling-ins’ give us joy and pain, some are just abstract and emotional neutral. In the working theatre, focal consciousness acts as a ‘bright spot’ on the stage, directed there by the selective ‘spotlight’ of attention. Consciousness is closely associated with the ‘limited capacity’ aspects of the brain. So as words rise from silence, we are not aware of how
45
Dennett D, (1991) Consciousness Explained Boston, MA: Little, Brown
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Meaning is constructed through difference, particularly through binary pairs (man/woman, good/evil). There is @ a granular level either a neuron firing or not, a stimulus or not. The way they are eventually grouped and categorised is partially through language. This is where the real magikal war is battled and where western women feel most threatened – by their ‘own’ magazines and their folk wisdom common sense and information from foreign climbs where women boast less stretched out privates. Where do they get their relationship tips from? ………. *** According to Ferdinand de Saussure's well-known theory, a sign generates its meaning not by pointing to an entity in the world, but rather by pointing to other words in the language system: the meaning of a sign is thus defined negatively, as different from other signs. 'Reality' is an effect actively generated by language rather than a pre-existing state passively reflected by signs. Consider the idea in a women’s magazine: “10 ways to get rid of or keep your man.” No absolute Platonic ideal exists "out there" to anchor meaning. This means there is no truth that is not constructed, and nothing is constructed, created, no word,
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
no sentence, no book, no constitution, no law, and no name without some ideological, religious, philosophical or political idea driving its naming. He sits and waits for them to name the thing.
only comes about through the efforts of all those in the credits @ the end before it fades to black.
So the ‘social’ plays an important part in internal states, as well as internal states and ostensive behaviours playing crucial roles in the creations of cultures and ‘social’ codes, rituals and [acceptable or unacceptable] ways of being. There is nothing outside language. Nothing @ all, except raw experience, defying categorisation. It may as well be invisible. Humans have a larger repertoire of uses for consciousness over that of other animals - including language and long-term planning, self-monitoring and selfreflection, inner speech, metaphor, symbolic representation of experience and deliberate use of imagery. We are conscious of the fact (have the idea) that "one plus one is two" and that “this is ‘p’ and, hey, what do you know, this is ‘q’,” but we possess no awareness of how we "have ideas" in the first place. No amount of introspection or navel gazing will shed light on their origin. They seem like ours but they originate in the world outside us, the ‘social’ world. And this ‘social’ world is not the same everywhere. And to make things even more complex, any experience is shaped by unconscious contexts, just as people behind the scenes shape events on central stage. You think it is your movie, but it
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“So now that it is just you and I...how long have you been looking @ beautiful Asian women? A long time, huh? Does anyone know about this fascination/kink you have? I'm sure the ladies who you look @, look a lot like me - nice high round asses, pretty titties, nice dsl's. (wink). It's funny for me to see men like you looking @ me out of the corner of my eye. Hahah, You act like you are not looking, but the bulge in your trousers, or just the broadening of your lips, gives you away every time. You want me...and you just don't know how to get me. So you go home after a long hard day of scoping Asian, Latina and Ebony - women like me - lock yourself in your bedroom while your unknowing wife, or girlfriend, or lover or roommate watch TV in the room next door - and conjure up pictures of
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
me in that tight black skirt - or that low cut blouse. You can;t stand it can you?
Most of all, though, I'll keep your dirty little secret all locked up tight. No one will ever know...”
You picture me doing all kinds of nasty things to you. Things that you'd never ask her to do, cuz well, you know I can handle it like that. if you could get me.
VII
And while you frantically beat your meat stupid boy, and waste her [your ‘wife’s] wad, you wonder if there will ever come a day that you will finally just come out and ask me out. Just for me to tell you to piss off. Ha! I don't think so either. You’ll never have the courage. That’s why you have to pick up the phone, book your tickets and make a little "play" date with me for fun, and we can do this all secretively. No one will have to know. You crack your little nut in private whilst singing sweet nothing in my ear. I can be your long distant girlfriend/lover and teach you the ways of loving this tantalizing bitch. I can give you photos to put in your album that you keep under your mattress pad @ nite, and keep you company when you need it the most.
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Ideas are themselves largely self-contained (though contextual) subjective or internal models of objective or external reality. Human self-consciousness is inherently intersubjective consciousness: we experience ourselves as being one subject, one sentient thinking/feeling being, among others. Every conscious experience is shaped by contextual factors, which are not conscious when they do so. The reader’s experience @ this very moment is influenced by prior ideas about the topic @ hand, now out of consciousness. Content and context are twin issues, ultimately inseparable. If you can work with a client’s context to their consciousness, then you can work on therapeutic change. Linking them together in network, stored thoughts form excursions to the mall, or your walk to work. If the rule of law broke down which of them would you rape and murder first? Please don’t say that little Latina minx next door!!!!!!! Or that cute way too young little Chinese girl with the pig tails three blocks down... He sits and waits for her to make her move. ………. ***
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Yeah, ideas are bits of mind, pebbles thrown against the rocks forever, some catch, some move. I mentioned earlier, the mind is nothing other than interacting aggregates of ideas, always moving, swirling with images, thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. And as it moves, it can suffuse us with feelings of delight, passion, love, or curiosity. What we are looking to invoke is an instantaneous perception which can free the mind not only of its content, but also of the basis on which it works. Michel Foucault suggested how discourses regulate what can be said, what can be thought, and what is considered true or correct. ‘Discourse’ is considered to be an institutionalized way of thinking, a ‘social’ boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic. So the pre-modern medical theories based on bodily humors constructed a particular understanding of the body, and within that discourse, certain things were true and false. This is important to understanding other cultures and why some ideas can mean quite different things when translated.
yang, good /no good, front/backdoor etc. This can be said to be true for say, other, discourses, such as the study of sex tourists by feminists. They are always inventing great derogatory metaphors for describing male intentions and behaviours. There is an entire research based industry in such critiques.
They become lost in translation. ………. *** Edward Said analysed Orientalism, the study of the Orient by academics of the West. He showed how the academics and their disciplines constructed an object of study that had very little to do with the East (which is East, of course, only in relationship to the West, a binary relationship in which one terms has more value than the other). You know yin-
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Narrative appears to be as universal and as old as language itself, and enjoys with language the status of a defining characteristic of humanity and its culture. When people, places and objects, and your relationship to them exist or persist it is as science fiction writer Philip K. Dick's statement that "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Dick was fascinated by the notion of alternative realities and worlds. Some structures and architectures of culture, the ‘social’ and the mind sustain and persist, whilst others, like successive empires, companies and ways of crafting pots and other artefacts and architectures fall away. When the Athenian sat @ home to drink wine, his pots and cups were decorated with beautifully painted pictures—an army of perfect bodies. The same is true for hse, there are good vintages and bad, venues come and go as politics and ‘social’ acceptability changes. ………. *** Even with maturity, considerable experience of the world, and an education in one of the finest universities in the
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
world, I am the perpetual student. I would rather train than teach, demonstrate, or write about it. I believe in sharing knowledge and experience, not as right or wrong judgements, not as forced dogma, but a realisation that we are not alone on our journey. Even the white room man is not alone there was a whole infrastructure supporting his incarceration.
focus of orthodox Freudian analysis. For Jung, the unconscious includes desires repressed by our education and ‘social’isation, but there is more "psychic material that lies below the threshold of consciousness." Besides reworking Freud's concept of the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious Jung developed the idea of a collective unconscious in which he claimed all human beings shared a link with their primeval past
VIII
The form of the story permeates every aspect of our cultural life, History, politics, memories, even subjectivity, our sense of identity, are all representations in narrative form, signifiers chained together in temporal, spatial, and causal sequence. We are shaped — and occasionally misshaped — by the stories we tell to others about ourselves. It is only by becoming intimately acquainted with these narratives, as they have been handed down from our families, our cultural backgrounds, our religious beliefs that we can begin to live consciously.
This preamble about consciousness was necessary to introduce that I possess a working knowledge of the approaches of several other schools. These include, naturally, Freudian and Jungian Psychoanalysis and Philosophical Therapy. I am also a master practitioner of indirect hypnosis, the Ericksonian approach. The conscious and unconscious mind is treated differently between these schools of thought. Jung was a one the first psychoanalyst to break with Freud's vision of human instincts as either sexual or self-preservative in nature. The self seems to monitor and control access to conscious events, maintaining continuity across different situations and life circumstances. Jung is most famous for drawing the conclusion that there is more to us than infantile tendencies and formative childhood experiences, which remains the
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This is as the Sufi poet Rumi said, "unfold our own myth." Myths authorise the cultural institutions of a tribe, a city, or a nation by connecting them with universal truths. Myths justify the current occupation of a territory by a people, for instance. The individual world each person occupies is said to be their reality tunnel.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Unless we understand our lives as an autobiography in the making, we're likely to take refuge in other people's stories, in ready-made ideologies, and in unexamined systems of belief. Narrative is a component of those deep structures with which we construct ourselves and the universe around us; true stories through which, in the manner of certain Aboriginal legends, the world is dreamed into existence. The story of myself, the story of my family, of my nation, my religion: the common factor is the me.
metaphorical in nature."46 Page 123 of God's Debris contains a CMM (Consciousness Maturity Model) definition for the soul. It has five levels.
This fits nicely into Milton Erickson’s emphasis and extensive use of therapeutic metaphor and story as hypnosis, reflects the work of others including George Lakoff, the famous opponent of Noam Chomsky, who is most famous for his ideas about the centrality of metaphor to human thinking, political behaviour and society. All communication is storytelling, all communication is hypnosis, storytelling is hypnosis, there is no such thing as hypnosis, and stories are not experience. The creator of the Dilbert cartoon strip, Scott Adams released a called book God's Debris. It is a ‘thought experiment’; it is strongly influenced by Lakoff who said that "Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally
Level1: Consciousness @ birth: pure innocence, selfawareness. Level2: Acceptance of a belief system: blind faith. Level3: Awareness that authority figures may be wrong. Level4: Skepticism and adoption of scientific methods. Level5: Avatar, understanding that the mind is a delusiongenerating machine. There is only one Avatar @ a time. Founded upon the idea that metaphor is central to the human thought process, Milton Erickson maintained that trance is a common, everyday occurrence. Think about when you wait for a bus to arrive, or even when we try to pay attention to what someone is saying if they go on for while, or when reading a book for more than an hour. Each is a common mundane instance of trance state. Erickson echoes others such as Charles Tart who claimed that: 'normal' waking consciousness is just a 'consensus trance'. For example, when waiting for buses and trains, reading or listening, or even being involved in strenuous 46
Lakoff, G., and Mark Johnson., M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
physical exercise, it's normal to become immersed in the activity and go into a trance state, removed from any other irrelevant stimuli. Tart also ventures as far as to class, as a mass hypnotic state, that which we refer to as “culture.” Consensus realties. Reality tunnels. Enter, not in a car, but a maintenance hatch.
aware of this, or you can be oblivious that something is happening. Erickson was an irrepressible practical joker, and it was not uncommon for him to slip indirect suggestions into all kinds of situations, including in his own books, papers, lectures and seminars. His technique is often referred to as ‘indirect hypnosis’.
These states are so common and familiar that most people do not consciously recognise them as hypnotic phenomena. We are not speaking of stage pranks here. Erickson believed the unconscious mind was always listening, and that, whether the patient was in trance, suggestions could be made which would have a hypnotic influence, as long as those suggestions found some resonance @ the unconscious level. Unconscious, habitual or inborn, ‘canned’ responses are highly adaptive in predictable situations. He sits and waits for her to make her move, and then he responds appropriately with the right linguistic metaphor or story to suit the purpose. It is much easier for her in her culture, she is also ‘social’ly supported and she is subliminally surrounded by her norms, language and standards.
………. ***
However, in unpredictable conditions the capacity of consciousness to organise existing knowledge in new ways is indispensable. In sum, consciousness appears to be the main way in which the nervous system adapts to novel, challenging and informative events in the world. You can be
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Rather than get someone to focus on a swinging watch and get them into insomnolence through focus, he would communicate with their unconscious minds, drives, motivations, whilst absorbing the conscious mind in some other puzzle or task. This puzzle or task, deciphering messages follow, that is, contribute to a plot to a story being told, gave Erickson an opportunity to ‘work between the lines’ so to speak, to effect deep change through communicating with unconscious motivations and drives through the language it understands best – metaphor. This is why I read Myiad’s first jots of Darling, step into the Pavilion of Mirrors in different registers. His stream of consciousness. He by-passes conscious and semi-conscious defence mechanisms without realising it every few paragraphs and through the work as a whole. He sits and waits for me to do this. As I follow the pages consciously, following narrative as best I can, unconsciousness learning
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
and mechanisms are invoked. As if automatically, my reality tunnel, beliefs and opinions are subtlety altered and my wisdom developed. This is the artistry required in the future. Attention as a tool to permit unconscious learning and selfdevelopment. Ask the man in the white room.
utilise the power of expectation when working with clients. It is no difference when men get involved with women in Thailand or Manila.
VIIII I work with several different kinds of client, some are very rich, independently wealthy, and some are poor. They are of different age groups, but are mostly men, but I also run sessions with several women, one of them is the director of the notorious South East Asian NGO, Unityview, Sue Tyler.
I wish to declare from the onset that I am a not a shrink but simply one who specialises in clients who have been bitten by the love bug overseas in what was, and/or is, some type of a commercial arrangement. Countless books and articles offer “help and advice” on the subject of love and relationship. Countless couples have gone further, seeking additional “help and advice” from counsellors and therapists for everything from infidelity, sex and money to in-laws, childrearing and lifestyles. I work to
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But some relationship issues are compounded by the added dimension of culture, and not just ‘American’ culture vs. ‘Thai’ culture, there is a third culture – and this is the subset that many westerners exist with girls who have been exposes, and occasionally overexposed to their interest and predilections. I must stress here that this place, this culture is neither Thailand nor is it America; it is part partials of both and has its very unique characteristics. ………. *** Take for instance some men may have little exposure to women back home in America. And in the case of the girls, they have perhaps an overexposure to foreign men who are their customers on an hourly, daily, nightly, weekly or monthly basis. The girl may continue to work, or @ least they will live in an environment where the bars, which drew the man and woman in the first place, may exert continued and sustained pressures in them to indulge themselves more. X
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
I have had cases where the girl, having lived with a man for several months and largely given up working and even seeing her friends, succumbs to a proposition for a short time from a passing stranger. This is opportunistic, while she goes to the market or even downstairs in a lift to the shops whilst on a holiday break with her husband. A cruel aspect, perhaps, is that she may even disclose to the man her impropriety, and this gives him a kick, an ego boost, and perks his libido into giving her another go.
I have been successful in helping clients break out of problems and to sort the boundaries where issues are to do with culture or to do with their own internal processes.
Meanwhile the man may have a drink with some old buddies and as he does, he succumbs to an irresistible desire to explore the bodies of other women. The Pavilion of Mirrors always carries with it its guise as a site for hard action, for both male and female. There is a proliferation of horny men and needy and bored women there. My work is mainly dealing only with a single person rather than couples, and it may focus upon enabling someone to dispose of a relationship, or to focus their attention on making it work. All psychotherapies contain a set of moral judgements about what constitutes life and growth and what constitutes death and destruction. What constitutes health and what constitutes pathology is central to any intervention; even nondirectional approaches such as the one I follow.
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This cannot be â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;givenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to someone; nor can it be then away. It is a process that takes time. Much of the cases in this book were based on case study work I have been involved with and Myiad has, with my clientsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; permission interviewed them @ length. I was surprised @ the candid nature of their disclosure and I can say without compromising our therapeutic contract, which they have been as frank in these interviews as they were in our therapy sessions. Their names have been changes, as have some personal details to prevent their identities to surface, which could be damaging for their current relationships and situations.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Chapter 9. Beginning a conclusion Revisioning I'll make you a deal, like any other candidate, We'll pretend we're walking home 'cause your future's at stake, My set is amazing, it even smells like a street, There's a bar at the end where I can meet you and your Friend, Someone scrawled on the wall "I smell the blood of les tricoteuses" Who wrote up scandals in other bars, I'm having so much fun with the poisonous people, Spreading rumours and lies and stories they made up, Some make you sing and some make you scream, One makes you wish that you'd never been seen, But there's a shop on the corner that's selling papier Mache, Making bullet-proof faces, Charlie Manson, Cassius Clay If you want it, boys, get it here, thing So you scream out of line, "I want you! I need you! Anyone out there? Any time?" Tres butch little number whines "Hey dirty, I want you” When it's good, it's really good, and when it's bad I go to pieces" If you want it, boys, get it here, thing On the street where you live I could not hold up my head For I gave all I have in another bed On another floor, in the back of a car In the cellar like a church with the door ajar Well, I guess we've must be looking for a different kind But we can't stop trying 'till we break up our minds 'Til the sun drips blood on the seedy young knights Who press you on the ground while shaking in fright I guess we could cruise down one more time With you by my side, it should be fine We'll buy some drugs and watch a band Then jump in the river holding hands47 47
David Bowie, Candidate on the album Diamond Dogs
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I Hi! W.H.Wong here again. After reading and scrutinising the manuscript for ‘Darling, yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors’, and by that I do not mean the curt once through, the ‘short time’ predilection of the dispassionate literary agent. Those brief encounters, with a new and complex work. No, not a once, but several times, through, I read this MS, in different registers, under different ‘lights’ so to speak, different ‘lenses’, in differing conditions, moods and environments. I considered carefully how I would or even could do justice to a preface for this work, and what it means to me. Myiad expressed he wanted me to place the work. It crosses the boundaries between a sociological work and a work of ‘social’ science, ethnography, a travel piece, a philosophical text, and novel or a biography of deceptions. In this sense it compliments the multidimensional work of some other, less orthodox travel writers. "Darling, Step in to the Pavilion of Mirrors" reminds me of the majestic travel books of Graham Greene, who sought to explore the terrain of national personality as he exposed his own character.
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Two other names stick out for me in the genre of travel writing, Pico Iyer, whose travel writing is more akin to that of a Bill Bryson or Norman Lewis. They are works of a postmodern sociology and cultural studies than linear travelogues and accounts for people with strange ways, lingos and hats. His writing moves from travel reportage to ‘social’ criticism to philosophical rumination, always with a keen eye for odd juxtapositions. His is a world where the foreign and the familiar always coexist in unexpected ways. Iyer puts forward that he was driven to travel by his ‘rectilinear’ Californian existence. I can understand and sympathise with this. Having travelled much of the physical earth what fascinates him more is internal exploration. He is one of those men who wish to study, observe, sample, the geography and architectures, the strange ways and funny hats, the exotic foods and smells and sexuality of the soul. ………. ***
This is so true for mongers who are advancing masked, hanging their ‘this’ and ‘that’ - their hang-ups gathered through the years and tears, their baggage from home, in that great metal tube in the sky.
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The flows and mouldings of the globe, its cultures and destinations, make it all seem so relevant. We sit and read while waiting for them to make their move. II The emphasis is a revisioning of acting and interacting, and to engage and do so in a much more general sense than ever before. Even if we do not leave our rooms and offices. We can do so in the hard physical geographical world by jumping on a cheap flight somewhere enabled by booking that flight and accompanying hotel and hire car on the Internet. We do so sitting @ home on our ass browsing the worldwide web of knowledge and media elements, and working out itineraries. Armed with them we are a strategist and plan our trips and know what we do and search out when we get there. What we might expect. Sometimes this involves ideas of sexual encounters that previously would have been more in the domain of serendipity, or even to most of us denied. When we get there our GPS gadgets and laptops kick in looking for wi-fi signals and Internet hotel room sockets. Through our technology we make difference essentially the same. Is surfing solitude or a new form of sociability? What impact has the Internet had on men and women travelling the world for sexual gratification? I would venture a considerable impact. Sex and mobility and immobility are
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inexorably linked in this new paradigm which is only just emerging. ………. *** How would people react to suggestions that: “Game playing is essential to normal human growth and development” New information includes discoveries that @ birth the brain is: •
Extremely plastic
•
Relatively unformed, and
•
Highly ‘social’
The script free individual will wither and die over time. We now understand that throughout life, the brain remains a work in progress, renewing itself: •
The brain is always maintains a capacity to change (you know swirling patters of neurons and porno images)
•
Experience can override genetic predisposition (yeah your libido and nuts which thought had atrophied suddenly become fruitful again!!)
•
New experience can create circuitry, new reality tunnels that overrides experience (you can feel a
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million years younger or older, or just accept new challenges) Simply put, this means that even after a lifetime of failed communication in marriage and other intimate relationships, we can make changes that bring us the safety, mutual connection and excitement we need and deserve to experience in our love relationships.
This is why all communication is hypnosis, all storytelling is hypnosis, and there is no such thing as hypnosis. There is only misunderstanding and miscommunication; lost in translation, that is. The ecstasy of communication.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Chapter 1. What time is it Myiad? I Dr. James Dobson: “Do you really feel that hardcore pornography and the doorway to it, softcore pornography, is doing untold damage to other people and causing other women to be abused and killed the way you did? Ted Bundy: “Listen, I'm no ‘social’ scientist, and I haven't done a survey. I don't pretend that I know what John Q. Citizen thinks about this. But I've lived in prison for a long time now. And I've met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence just like me. And without exception, without question, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography.” 48
Volume 1 Part 2
Hi! Myiad here. So many thanks to Dr.Wong for providing me fodder for this work. Prohibitions - and the inclination to violate them - are commonly related to the natural drives of sex and aggression. I had to fight it out with him to get some personal space to write my contribution (I was away to say ‘shit’). It would have been too much work to do it alone. Shame he is so geeky, preferring to trawl the second hand experience of sex than engage in it copious amounts of its sweet reality himself. He’s not really far behind those trillions of Internet porno guys who train their minds eye and their libidos to animate other dudes’ second hand fantasies. All while 48
Ted Bundy in his last controversial interview with Christian supremacist, Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Dobson's pet issue was pornography's corrosive effect on men's psyches. Bundy subscribed entirely to this view, and blamed porn for inciting him to murder.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
manualising themselves and honing their impotence. He is one of the few, very few who are happily married, and he puts its down to his Tantric Yoga and macrobiotic diet, and his largely dysfunctional [and therefore very sane] brood. Mrs Myiad, although a fiery passionate budgie, is OK. She knows compromise.
the ability to connect it all together, to make decisions based on logic rather than gut reaction. Oh yeah you found gut reaction on holiday as well. Must have been the alcohol, eh? You lost yourself in Asia. Is that good or bad? Is that good or bad? Is that good or bad? Is that good or bad? Is that good or bad? You vacillate between the poles, just as she dances, you can’t tell truth from untruth anymore.”
………. *** When I started writing this book I wanted to make it a selfhelp tome for the love lost in South East Asia. I wrote it this way: “You cannot see clearly just now, you imagine the future, and you still feel lost in time and space. You are in the land of Nod, East of Eden. Look and the present feel so found. This is love and the search for it in another culture. Feel proud. You never knew you need it, lost in your thoughts and engrossed in your work and routines, in fictional life ‘back home’. Everything is repetition. There is no need to ad lib, no need to improvise, insurance takes the fear out of death, and routine makes everything seem immortal and even immortality as normal. But when you went on holiday you just had to discover you had a body again, didn’t you? You need to read this book. Why? You never kept a diary; you didn’t jot down your thoughts, or map them out. You lost
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Life is a mystery, probably because we can only know part of the "truth." It was John Stuart Mill, suggested that “Human existence is girt round with mystery: the narrow region of our experience is a small island amid a boundless sea, which @ once awes our feelings and stimulates our imagination by its vastness and its obscurity.”49 Even though it is a mystery that does not preclude our need to search for the truth. We are awake and aware, but realisation comes only in flashes. We feel some responsibility to pass cultural and critical thinking tools on to future generations, we like conflicting ideas like ‘’humanity as homogeneity” (although everyone is an individual). We mistrust institutions/reasons in favour of self examination/criticism.
49
, Mill, J.S. (1998) Three Essays on Religion: Nature, the Utility of Religion, Theism New York: Prometheus Books
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
We feel drawn to practice "positive freedom" (freedom for... not freedom from). We are expected to be responsibly creative, and so on. We expect that not only of ourselves but also of others.
There is hardly an argument that reprobate men could lend to their defence. Rather they must shrug their shoulders, hold their hands up like naughty little boys who have done something nasty, and admit to themselves, as individuals and as a species that they are Neanderthal, that they are uncivilised, they only pretend to be gentlemen (like David Gotlieb in a later volume).
We will leverage the moral majority to support us in these efforts, and place pressure on those who have alternative views. Dr. Wong spoke about the ascending punter, post-trip to a whoring capital, Bangkok, looking down and considering those who followed in his wake. Some moral majority pundits find the whole idea of prostitution reprehensible. It is even worse in countries where defenceless women and their children are directly and indirectly forced into providing for it and the travellers who will spend money to consumer it. It raises considerable debate on why such behaviour exists in a modern rationale world that is ever changing for the better, continuous improvement, Kaizen as the Japanese industrialists say where women and children are protected by law from the irrationality of men. But it begins with men’s attraction to women, that’s it, isn’t it?
They are brutish and liars, they need women, good strong women to tell them this. In our world they have a voice, thank goodness, and they must travel like Sue Tyler and her ilk to make sure that these defenceless women and children not only have a protestor and advocate but something that will give them voice, make their pain heard. Decent people and even those transgressors cannot argue that this is a wholesome aim. But they will be aggrieved if throe outlets are removed from them. “I dream of a world…” Next.
………. ***
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II The here style is what you might describe largely postmodern, and so many items will appear to jump out @ you and change @ will. It’s like jungle warfare. I do this to assert the mutable nature of life and love in an information age and its correlate the East and sub-culture of hse, where whatever you want to do and hear will be said. This is the pavilion of mirrors. It’s like a 1970s bachelor’s fuck pad – waterbed, mirrors everywhere so he can narcissistically checkout his
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bulling, her tits, ass cunt his shafting. So it won’t be to everybody’s taste, and definitely not yours - ma and pa kettle. Not will it probably appeal to those who love to read inspirational soft porn stories for titillation or clinical case histories to gain insights into one’s own predicament, so you can sit back and say, “well I’m not a fucked up as that!” You will not get chance to do that in most of the book. The characters are based on real people. It’s about the world of thoughts and ideas, architectures if you want of identities and minds and hearts when you travel. My value for streams of consciousness can be easily recognised from my profession as ‘social’ scientist. III “In the village where I lived, there was a merchant from city who opened a watch-repair shop. Like every other shop owner he had to put up a sign, "Welcome Trade Tax!" Since he has had a little education, he knew to put an exclamation mark to express enthusiasm. But this was very bad luck for him. In the New Maoist Chinese vocabulary an exclamation sign is a mark of compliant. At a village meeting to denounce "reactionaries," the Communist cadre who acted as chairman told him, "You are very clever, you say 'Welcome' but you
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use a mark of complaint." He was beaten to death. A victim of western grammar.” 50 This nonsense proposes that certain "negative" emotions evolved or have been co-opted by selection, in part, to defend against deception and reduce its negative consequences. 51 Telling a little white lie may on occasion soothe ruffled ‘social’ feathers, but covering up a murder plot or withholding information on terrorist cells can devastate individuals and society @ large. Yet detecting deception often stumps the most experienced police officers, judges, customs officials and other forensic professionals. Although people have been communicating with one another for tens of thousands of years, more than 3 decades of psychological research have found that most individuals are abysmally poor lie detectors. Why I lie to you, why you deceive me, why advertisers encourage illusion, and why we manage daily survival only with big chunks of self-deception. How do we, how can we distinguish secrecy from privacy? It’s like this book, transparent empty words with no plot. 50
Hoang Van Chai ‘Land Reform’ in Santoli, A. (1985) To Bear any burden New York: Ballantine pp. 40 -46 51 Haselton MG, Buss DM, Oubaid V, Angleitner A (2005) ‘Sex, lies, and strategic interference: the psychology of deception between the sexes.’ Pers Soc Psychol Bull. Jan 31(1): pp.3-23.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Consider the effects of lying on the individual, relationships and society. The implications, motivations, justifications and rationalisations that precede or follow deceitful acts or passivity that renders a deceitful result or intention.
reality that you have engaged upon with the pornographer. This is neuropolitique and its enforcement.
Think here of Clinton's grand jury testimony, he did get sucked off in the Oval room, was their really any harm done, oh sorry ma and pa kettle forgot you were visiting. Yeah that was reprehensible. We know love is never a fixed and quantifiable entity, and its interpretations take many guises. Meaning system change, Where once possessing pornographic material depicting felatio could get you a jail sentence, the Internet has introduced the prospect of other materials which are not only copious and free, but which also get you a jail sentence [Shaved Japanese 27 yr olds posing as Schoolgirls could be interpreted by provision western courts as representing genuine underage material]. The jurisdiction and power to brand you as a pervert entirely lies with those who may not be aware those 45kg bodies and shaved pussies are not indicative of biological age. Of course the desired result of those pictures is the suggestibility of something brandished as illegal and harmful, so you may be tried upon that shred
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Any relationship between humans, once it is considered legitimate and, and as it does it becomes something of an Alice in Wonderland Rabbit hole. In an age of Internet dating and increased communications, mobile phones, Scype, eyeballs, 3G, more flights going more places more often the nature of love and romance is changing. People’s wants and needs for it is changing to. Consider the array of Internet cafes now populating South East Asian cities and towns - thousands, tens of thousands of young Asian men and women, engaging in ‘harmless’ online ‘sight and sound’ flirting, with strangers. Strangers that they would never dare meet, nor could ever meet [due to passport and visa restrictions] in the flesh are available for them to court with online. And so we will not focus only on love, but on its changing environments and contexts – the rest of the world as well. So in typical psychoanalytical fashion, let’s start this journey shortly with two powerful metaphors of the traveller and explorer – the Ronin and the Whale. My name is Myiad. It’s a pseudonym aimed @ protecting. But I often wonder what is it protecting, what could it protect, precisely? I mean why would you change some aspect of your identity to protect yourself and your interests?
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
And if you do change some aspects to what extent do they become you, and to what extent are they always a deception or delusion? To what extent do we assume that people are deceptive, not being true, acting, conning us, pulling the wool over our eyes, shitting us? And how does this affect our abilities to help them, or let them help us, or for us to work in proper collaboration or to our mutual benefit? Epistemological presuppositions are deep, and often unstated, beliefs that form the foundation of a particular system of knowledge.
that this is how they look from my end. We stand @ the boundaries of world which is visceral and very real, like a bordello screw, and virtual and vague like a Vit-v [Viagra] penis armed with Internet discussion thread data on place, price and quality.
………. *** Speaking with Winslow Wong sometimes I wonder if we are always hiding not just something but from something? Is it possible to hide from oneself, the self? Is it possible to hide from the implications of one’s actions, the proverbial karma? Humans fill to the brim with tendencies and desires. Can other people pick up on this, others outside our thoughts and our skins? This captures poignantly in the ‘blindfolded men touching an elephant and trying to figure out what it is’ metaphor. There is limit to our personal knowledge, and by implication, our worldviews suggests that we narrow in our views and POVs by reality tunnels. This is a book, one of many, that is strictly about how white male/Asian female romance impulsions are. It is unique in
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Throw in corruption, cultures who try and work out what it is you want to hear when a straight factual yes/no will do and the inner lies men and women, professionally and in their spare time tell to themselves. When they start to believe or can’t distinguish their manufactured propaganda and public personas (from the raw material of Graffiti of the mind) from their private and true selves. Examples, a blunt yet effective experiment of perusing through dating services will invariably bring up men who seek Asian females-more so than any other race. I don’t mean to imply that people of any culture should not try to learn from or approach other cultures @ all. And no matter how all this sounds, I don’t condemn individuals for their sexual proclivities. I sit around in restaurants and read while waiting for them to make their move. But I do mean to question popular trends and motives as I perceive them and they affect me. Not Asian-American, though. For reasons I’ve struggled to understand for years, it seems that men who want Asian women are purists — only women from the old country will do. There's no denying
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
that fetishism for Asians (females) exists, regardless if many of these cultures will say only what they wish or think you want to hear. In South East Asia the people are great @ divorcing themselves from what call reality. They possess abilities to dissociate themselves and claim innocence in a way that allows them to tolerate hardships. But they do know what they should be doing and saying.
that people adopt when hitting the barworld.53 In every case they merely highlight or attenuate aspects of the experience or world. Occasionally this is dated. Views and attitudes as well as places and locations will change, as will the rules governing the world will evolve.
IV
Maybe it does fit in, maybe it doesn’t. To coin a phrase used as liberally as fish sauce in certain quarters of the world: “it’s up to you.” After all you are the point of departure for any or all the events and going ons’.
“So where does this work fit in?” ………. *** “Fit into what exactly? – Available literature in general, available literature addressing South East Asia, available literature addressing the problems of living or more precisely the question of existing in this post-modern age?” in the fledgling literature addressing life in the barworld there are considerable gaps and bias. At best they simply describe what appears ostensibly as sensationally debauched and morally corrupt worlds. 52 Or else they highlight how stupid, unfeeling or pathetic men can be when faced with the indomitable and psychically superior bargirl, or they make attempt to reverse the gendered roles
52
Thinking here of Gilboa's ‘Off the Rails in Phnom Penh’.
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It is a work of epistemological optimism. If you don’t know what that means then look it up, could be useful. In this work there is an implicit belief that the big questions can be answered even if the answers are not currently known. That doesn’t make it science, it doesn’t make it art either, and it is not aimed @ highlighting religion. The answer is within us and can be realised outside us as well if we look and ‘see’ in the Carlos Casteneda sense. Let us remember that Carlos Castaneda was raised by his grandparents in the isolated Brazilian outback. This is a See Odzers, C. Patpong Sisters: An American Woman's View of the Bangkok Sex World. New York; Arcade Publishing
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
country which is today marked not be its spiritualism and extensive media but by its Viagra consumption. There are a growing number of African-American men who are travelling to Brazil and seeking out prostitutes. They love ass. Females hit Ghana and the Caribbean, Caucasians love South East Asia. They crave tight slim bodies. Later Carlos exposed that his grandmother was an anarchist, and his grandfather was sexually obsessed: "You can't fuck all the women in the world," was his teaching, "but you can try!"
philosophy and literature - fictional or real - starting from Plato and Socrates, Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, James Boswell and Dr. Johnson, Freud and Jung, to Stalin and Lenin. If it is a work of fiction then represents a great deal of philosophical introspection and liberal imagination. Indeed this flagged up in the work when Don Juan tells Carlos that he thinks about himself too much and Carlos tries to defend himself with cool detached ‘western’ ‘impartial’ ‘academic’ rationale. One of his first lessons is the difference between "looking" and "seeing" and it is in these two definitions that we have the theme of the book revealed to us. This is an interesting idea when applied to the cross-cultural context. Let’s examine it further.
Castaneda was then placed in a Buenos Aires boarding school. In the summer of 1960 Castaneda was an anthropology student in the U.S. He met Don Juan Matus, an elderly Yaqui Indian and shaman, diablero, a sorcerer, @ a bus station in Nogales, Arizona. Castaneda became his apprentice, which continued In most of early books Casteneda played the role of an anthropologist visiting a strange locations and culture. His apprenticeship and its recording became fuel for his academic work and his third book, Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan (1972) was accepted as his doctoral dissertation by the UCLA Anthropology Department in 1973. But there was doubt cast over the work. Nobody else met Don Juan. Was he a real person or a fictional character? His relationship to Don Juan was in the style of the pupilteacher, parent-child relationship familiar in the history of
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………. *** "Looking" referred to the ordinary way in which we are accustomed to perceive the world, while "seeing" entailed a complex process by virtue of which a man of knowledge allegedly perceives the "essence" of object, people and places in the world. If the works are fiction is his degree in Anthropology a con? Does it merely represent some other great, maybe greater talent? There are epistemological and methodological lessons for anthropologists. They can read it to assert their own stances and positions to looking @ subjects, especially for observing and attempting to uncover how other cultures think.
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V Largely the piece exists as a compendium of antidotes struck through with insights and ideas about experience, inexperience, reality and irreality, collected along the way. So there will aspects of both ‘looking’ and ‘seeing’. Straddling the act of copulation and the conditions and means by which it is made available (bars etc.), and is consumed (front or backdoor) and reflected upon (criticised, catalogued, appreciated and in cases communicated). I think this is typical fashion for this literature. These ideas, like dear old Fred Nietzsche used to insist about his own, are dynamite. They have the power to restore agency and autonomy, if you're willing to do a little work to get @ them. Or the price you paid for this tome, if it’s a copy or a signed original, it will give you the mental and spiritual workout to define and redefine yourself in you whoring practises in other imagined worlds. You will be on the path to becoming a neophyte Otto Gershang (he will appear later), a rhizome of a consciousness in a Pavilion of Mirrors. Discussion helps, a lot – there's no way, for example, I ever would have understood much of the above without Winslow Wong’s gentle and patient suggestions, nor if I hadn’t downloaded experiences to other unknown punters in the
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Bangkok hostess bars. . So go chat online and in the go-go or hostess bar about what a load of crap you read here. If you are brave you may even try and chat about it in your western local. It's real neat to understand rhizomatics. Carl Gustave Jung emphasises the invisible and underground nature of life through the metaphor of the rhizome but it had been popularised more recently as a concept by Gilles Deleuze. It is an organic metaphor for that which sustains a plant underground. While we observe the plant and its flowers and greenery above ground it is connected to a multiple, non-hierarchical entry growth beneath. It can be the multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation such as are on the Internet. ………. *** What's more important, though, IMHO, is being a rhizome my friend: an unexpected connection between two (or more) seemingly disparate ideas. This is not the farang/barang as a metaphor for an ATM cash machine. But presenting hse with something unique and different in an effort to court them. An underground superhighway, with randomish onand off ramps. A seething, amorphous knot of vitality, information and joy-in-life. The crazy notion of searching
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
out and melding with hse as an alternative lifestyle, a rhizomatic way of being and experiencing scenarios. Rhizome structures define the rules and protocols which govern and produce tensions in that sub-culture of east and west which is the world of hse. Where westerners cease to be westerners and themselves in daily life, and so do hse.
insights offered here are offered up not as a bible, or some after Sunday brunch user manual for new and old hands alike, but as a provocative piece which may make us consider just a teeny bit the bigger picture. What, more deeply, is relevant for us when we engage in relations in exotic places?
The way I refer to here is the path of life opposed to the way spoken of in that classic of Chinese literature the Tao Te Ching.
The tendency not to view man as separate from nature.
VI
The semantics of the Tao or the way vary widely depending on the context, and may variously refer to a concept of religion, morality, duty, knowledge, rationality, ultimate truth, path, or taste. Sometimes it does seem like we gamble, throw yarrow sticks or coins to divine what to do next, and then disregard the ambiguous outcomes. Even though we may not do it explicitly, we often stumble not knowing the full implications of turning down an alleyway or entering a Magic Theatre like the one that Herman Hesse describes in his classic Demein. The warning on wall was that it wasn’t for everyone. A veiled promise and threat simultaneously. And so it is with many major decisions we choose. The
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The novel, the innovative, freely mixes reality and fantasy, which is which, is left entirely to the reader, and this is a hot topic among fans. Narrating the action also switches back and forth between the first and third person. If it were up to one of the characters it would also switch to the second person, but that is best left to sex magicians of the order of full-blown magus. When there is a single story, the frame story is used for other purposes - chiefly to position the reader's attitude toward the tale. This is a common trick in indirect hypnosis and one that will be employed liberally throughout this book. One common one is to draw attention to the narrator's unreliability. Are they lying or telling the truth, or telling the truth about their fantasy rather then telling it about something that ‘really’ happened to them? ………. ***
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
The motif of "darkness" a.k.a. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness recurs throughout the book. It is used to reflect the unknown, the concept of the "darkness of barbarism" contrasted with the "light of civilisation", as well as the "spiritual darkness" of several characters. This sense of darkness also lends itself to a related theme of obscurity — again, in various senses, reflecting the ambiguities in the work. Moral issues are not clear-cut; that which ought to be (in various senses) on the side of "light" is mired in darkness, and vice versa. Through the novel, the importance that Conrad stresses is restraint; in his view a person’s "primitive honour" against his or her basic impulses. From the perspective of existentialism, people without restraint will be trapped in the destructive cycle and their lives will be absurd and insane. Into the rabbit whole asshole.54
utterly intertwined. The choice of construction materials affects the look and feel of built form, while inspired design sense injects life into a building's ingredients.
The austerity of a Cistercian monastery or the simplicity of a Zen garden is both emanations of the same urge to reduce, to make clear, and to unburden. In architectural education, the study of materials and the study of design are often treated as separate areas of discourse, when in reality the two are 54
In Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice follows a mysterious white rabbit into a rabbit hole to enter 'Wonderland', an absurd and improbable world inhabited by many strange characters. This usage has helped make the phrase refer more generally to any portal into a different or strange world the term has also come to signify any event which triggers a completely unexpected, bizarre situation or paradigm. Not unlike the South East Asian Barworld for the lovelost.
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VII Words rise up from silence. The mind is always moving, swirling with images, thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and as it moves, ebbs and flows, it can suffuse us with feelings of delight, passion, love, or curiosity. At the shoreline, between the emotion and rational, between your unconscious and conscious minds, have you ever given a gift from your heart to someone who criticised, rejected, or just ignored it? Surveys suggest that in less than a generation 40 per cent of Britons will be living in single-person households. Seven million adults live alone in Britain today - three times as many as 40 years ago. This suggests the ‘social’ continuum in the west today. Fragmentation and alienation are rife. ………. *** According to the statistical tome Social Trends, this figure is set to more than double in the next 20 years. The ramifications of more men and women living alone are enormous. For example, it's projected by 2015, the United Kingdom will need another four and a half million new
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
homes. New pods for masses. Eighty percent of that demand is generated by the increase in single person households. Where are those houses going to be constructed? There are the simple consequences in terms of leisure and recreation. Leisure and recreation in Britain are still structured around the idea of the couple, for example, single people still have to pay a single person supplement.
togetherness.56 It also epitomises grassroots ‘neighbourhood watch’ democracy and awareness with the stress on the local as a bridge to the global, and the notion that we are ‘watching each others backs’, opposed to ‘spying’ on each other and passing judgement from behind a curtain.
This forecast presents little problem for some; in fact it is an affirmation of their worlds; it mirrors lifestyle, as they know it already. For them, this future world of singletons heralds a brave world of empowered individuals, who come armed with new independence, freedoms to enjoy new potentials to organise, group and express themselves in exciting, innovative ways. The core ethos of this view would be: “The politics of concentric circles - find the pebble in every town.”55 Such an expression views individuals as generative nodes in an infinite network of other proactively generating nodes broadcasting and absorbing and negotiating progressive ideas and actions for positive change. Everyone a creative, everyone being valued for their production, no-one neglected and left on the shelf or by the wayside. It is an optimistic view, the real stuff of liberal reform, of entrepreneurial action, of cultivating solidarity, of
No one ‘on high’ to inform us that this is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or some live-in partner that needs maintenance and accommodation to keep their favour. No paternal-like commands from remote big corporation x and y or austere, but compassionate, government department z. Morals and mores become more proximate and immediate, and as they do so they become more bespoke and representative, optimised for those round table members in your neighbourhood or that dispersed online community who subscribe to and live by their shared interests.
Tens of millions of meaningless blogs proliferating suggests separating news producers and news consumers is far less than it used to be. But is it just six degrees of difference between you and me? 56
55
Trippi, J. (2004) The Revolution Will Not Be Televised : Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything Regan Books
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Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
This is maybe what Doris Lessing spoke of in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, when she referred to the internet as seducing ‘a whole generation into its inanities. ’ For this pebble to be heard it still requires abilities to articulate a story or a promulgation as well as knowledge of the technology of making oneself heard, and this is not immediately accessible to everyone. The users of ‘social’ networking technology and services are demographically skewed in favour of the UK’s 16-24 year olds. They are using ‘social’ networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo @ least once a week. These members of the “networked generation” disregard television, radio and newspapers in favour of online communities. They are also more prolific bloggers with 19 per cent claiming their own weblog, compared to about 11 per cent of general Internet users.57 Just like protest was a prolific form of 1960s counterculture youth communication, do blogs and ‘social’ networks have the same political and real world change power today? We sit and read on screens while waiting for them to proposition us with something stimulating.
when they most need it, is surely a good, isn’t it? Something we would pay for? And this is increasingly negotiated online as well as offline, both in virtual and real worlds, suggests that one can draw upon and harness the ‘best’ that both worlds offer. This in effect will creates a third way – a new world impervious to those that would have us believe in the polar extremes of online and offline.
The idea that people make their own financial and ‘social’ arrangements. That they have the freedoms to be with others when they want, and to have publicity and privacy 57
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/f0317cfc-289b-11db-a2c10000779e2340,_i_rssPage=4e612cca-6707-11da-a6500000779e2340.html
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VIII There is always the double bind of money in relationships with third world women. If you care for them then you will want to try and support them, create better conditions for them, show them something of the 'good life', 'normal' life etc, etc. The problem is that you cannot. Even if you want to facilitate them to fend for themselves, another western capitalist free market idea, you will fail 9 times out of 10. This is because they do not understand the context. There is no common sense @ this level.
This does not mean that you cannot share with them, that you cannot build your own unique joint common sense, which I hold is @ the basis of all relationships.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
This operates @ a level that is more essential than money. You can sell yo ass if you really need to, you can get a loan of money from a friend, and there are other ways to generate a buck, a million ways legal and illegal. You can buy time from a service provider, but you can’t buy a dream. You can maybe even buy the prospect of sex, but as the Beatles say "money can't buy me love!" Love or just having someone curious about you, someone that wants to know more, that wants to observe you over time, study you and your needs and ways. Someone to look up to you, praises you, admire you, be with you. To be proud of you in their own company. That's good isn't it? You can't buy it. But a stark reality may place a dampener on such unabated optimism regarding ‘independent’ happy lives. The ‘living alone’ scenario is of the ‘glass half full or empty’ variety. ‘Living alone lifestyles’ may represent freedom and independence for younger people; however it begins to be a major risk factor for loneliness and isolation for those older citizens, and some others who may already feel dispossessed and alone.
And if these predictions are right, this will represent the biggest demographic and cultural change since feudal times. Capitalism has long placed an emphasis on individual possession, effort and competition rather than co-operation. Thus it contributes to, and necessitates, a distancing and separation of one human being from the other. It has heavily stressed choice and independence, and in doing so, has created the demand for more products. I possess my own lawnmower which is used once a week, @ my discretion, when I want to cut my grass, instead of one lawnmower which is shared between neighbours by committee. Its use requires bothersome organisation and cooperation, but it still requires contact and involvement with others. Having my own car, instead of subscribing to car sharing, makes for more convenience, but I may still pick up a hitch-hiker for company on my way, as long as they don’t expect to get dropped off anywhere inconvenient or timeconsuming to get to.
………. *** They sit and read while waiting for all the others to make some move. The number of ‘socially isolated older people will increase by a third to 2.2 million by 2021 if current trends continue.
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The aesthetic is collectivity; the ethic is reciprocity. Think about sitting around in your living room with all others connected to their iPODs or on the plane where you are an atomised individual in your own little cocoon.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
………. ***
town was needed. This was to foresee the future movement of prices and the supply of commodities, thus the need for news media and continual improvements in post and communications.
Access to services on demand is deemed something worth paying a premium for, including sex. There is no greater goal for most than having financial independence and security. They will sacrifice existing relationships and all others to achieve this goal. It is for many a chimera and a Holy Grail that will consume them before any of its benefits can be reached. A bit like the ability to be immortal through letting a vampire suck the life from you. ………. *** After the demise of feudalism, the growth in individual ownership of property paralleled the dominance of the money economy over ‘social’ production. As more and more necessities were produced only for exchange, so society itself became constructed through the technology of money. As the influence of the extended family declined, so the ‘social’ division of labour was created through commodity exchanges. Therefore, with the demise of feudal ‘social’ relations, atomised individuals increasingly satisfied their collective needs through the spontaneous and reciprocal interconnections created by market competition. Land and labour were transformed into market commodities. Their transactions were formatted in law and mediated through market mechanisms. As daily life became organised through the market, information about economic and political changes from outside the enclosed world of the village or
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For the first time, the ordinary people needed to communicate across space and time in their everyday activities. Bringing matters quickly to the present then, some may see individual freedoms and human potential maximised by technology and ‘social’ realities, but they are also rationalised to the full. Born @ the close of the 18th century, the United Kingdom, with its empire, and the United States, with its huge expanse, vast resources and independent spirit, would lead the western world into the intense industrialisation of the 19th century. Thus, the 20th century dawned on a world that had become both master and slave of the great-mechanised society. The gateway to meeting more ‘real’ people, will be provided for, and be mediated by, the organisation of ‘the machine’, through friends.com, Craig’s list or adultfreindfinder.com. ………. *** So polices and agendas and systems will organise and rationalise our choices. Just how transparent these effects will be in the loop between person to person remains to be seen as ‘social’ networking technology and services continue to evolve and diffuse.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
IX
suggests ideas like: "We're going to be murdered," or Jim Jones (Jonesville) utters : ‘kill yourselves’.58
Like William Hogarth before me, I have seen hse progress and regress. From getting banged serendipitously in brothels, then Martinis to selling a platter of cooked crab in the old market in PP, to sitting in a high-speed Internet cafe Skyping her boyfriend. I remember the first time I got an international call while I was sitting in the modest location of a Svay Pak house. How bizarre to have penetrated a lovely Viet hoe while my mother was penetrating my head! Experience tells us is that with technology, it is always sugar and sweet, Ying and Yang, as it is with any reorganisation of human ‘social’ realties. Grassroots ‘neighbourhood watch’ awareness and democracy - people as ‘pebbles’ making ‘concentric waves’ - are poetic metaphors. But disassociated and alienated groups can become disaffected, or worse, infected with the deep paranoia and insecurity which can set them spiralling off into strange and even dangerous trajectories of belief and behaviours. At its most dystopian, such ‘disconnectedness’ is the stuff of cults where they have shut themselves off from a ‘corrupt’ world and they ‘retreat’ physically and ideologically into walled camps. Here they arm themselves against those outside, typically with ordinance, and they live by despotic or ad hoc rules lain down by themselves or their leader. Indeed, living independently and in accord with your own rules and tenets may be fine until Marshall Applewhite (Heaven’s Gate)
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It is suggested that Cults use sophisticated mind control and recruitment techniques that have been refined over time. What makes them a cult is that they use mind control, not what they believe. Commercial cults will promise you that if you join them and follow their special programme for success then you will become very rich. Commercial cults use mind control to get you working for them for free, and to make you pay for an endless stream of motivational tapes, videos, books and seminars all of which are supposedly designed to help you succeed, but in reality are designed to enhance the cult's mind control environment and keep you believing in their almost impossible dream of success. Business people locked away in hotel rooms are subjected to quasi-religious indoctrination as they play strange games, join in-group activities, and share their innermost thoughts 58
"Suicide Tape Transcript" by Mary McCormick Maaga: “How very much I've tried my best to give you a good life. But in spite of all of my trying, a handful of our people, with their lies, have made our lives impossible. There's no way to detach ourselves from what's happened today. . . It's all over. The congressman has been murdered. (Music and singing.) Well, it's all over, all over. What a legacy, what a legacy. What the Red Brigade doin' that once ever made any sense anyway? They invaded our privacy. They came into our home. They followed us six thousand miles away.” (http://employees.oneonta.edu/downinll/mass_suicide.htm)
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
with the group. Once you have completed one course you are told you need to do the more advanced course, which naturally costs more than the last.
Removing them, and their lobbyists, or making them more answerable to the tyranny of the masses, may not lead us to some homogenised version of what is morally and ethically in the best interests of us all. It may see an increased interest in the idea of memes, those ideas and POV which spread like viruses of their own accord regardless of media and advertising manipulations. Kurt Vonnegut, in his story "Who Am I This Time?" From Welcome to the Monkey House, depicts two characters who are "robots" influenced by the media. In the story, Vonnegut depicts the characters acting out a play. They are excellent actors, displaying much emotion; they are best in love scenes. Once the play is over, however, they first avoid each other. They do not know how to love each other in real life. But after having acted in many plays together, they get married – ‘like attracts like’. Does this fit the scripts being played out in South East Asia? Maybe, but media plays only a minor role in the lives of bar girls and others.
………. *** Does being locked always with your GFE classify as a cult? Be suspicious of any group that claims to be better than all the others. When you first go to a cult they will practice "love bombing", where they arrange instant friends for you. What begins with differences in interpretation of basic principles, of freedom, liberty, freedom of speech, and a right to criticise and soon, would eventually entail that moral communities form. As Fareed Zakaria puts it in the introduction to The Future of Freedom, “democracy is flourishing; liberty is not.”59 In an ultraconnected future is it possible to think of instant democracy where everyone that cares to vote starts dictating policy by pressing buttons? Having democratically elected representatives still afford them considerable latitude and free will to put forward what they want and will. And those lobbyists and groups that have the biggest clout on shaping their perceptions may sway them and their articulations of what is best for the nation or their constituents.
59
Zakaria, F. The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy @ Home and Abroad New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
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Thus the pavilion of mirrors @ this level. Would such a model produce fickle responses, where one day the ‘true’ feelings of citizens is to deport all asylum seekers, and then to change back when news programmes show the aftermath and maybe carnage of policy decisions. Checks and balances are important, and we can see this having already been threatened by an unwavering political correctness, whose tenets breakdown @ points and turn in upon themselves due
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
to ego defence mechanisms. This is the case just now where some legislation prevents people in the UK calling someone derogatory name deemed to be a racial slur, but where racial typing and policing on the boundaries of harassment is enacted upon members of the same ethnic community in efforts to prevent terrorism.
Indian Subcontinent, which then included the present-day countries of India and Pakistan. Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code (used in) has become a slang reference for a confidence trickster. The code was also in use in Burma, where even today the term ‘420’ means a con-artist.
………. ***
A popular 1955 Hindi film from India, Shri 420 (in English: Mr. 420) has a central character that, though innocent, is regarded as a con man. In the movie, Mr. 420 poses as a committed Indian nationalist working to shore up the Indian economy; in fact he is typical of a new generation of opportunists seeking to seize control of the exploitative machinery set up by colonialism and turns it to their own advantage. This proves all the more interesting in light of studies which show that many men (upwards of 70%, last time I read) who use personal ads are either already involved or married. So two and two together equals whatever, there is a predominance of western married or attached males fantasising about Asian women. At least those with an Internet enabled computer… Are they a con or even conning themselves? This is a major theme here. It refers frankly to the idea of man as being a fundamentally savage creature hidden under a thin and fragile veneer of civilisation or Thai whore pipe fumes. The film emphasises the ease with which war destroys this veneer and releases man's basic destructive urges.
Sometimes it is not difficult to recognise the premonitions of the psychiatrist R.D Laing when he wrote upon the Schizophrenia as not ‘in’ the persons but rather ‘within’ the society that encapsulates and regulates them. ………. *** Your understanding of human suffering is much richer because you're attracted to a woman who does not look like your mother or sister (even if she reminds you of your mother for intellectual reasons.) It’s not a case of like attracts like. X I was drawn to the theme of this volume by two major sources of inspiration. The first was the ‘Hall of Mirrors’ the largest brothel reputedly in Asia and the Penal Codes of India and Pakistan. The latter are inherited from the Indian Penal Code of 1860 founded by the British rulers of the
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
………. ***
degrees, and to the nth level. They are also Janus-faced regarding the temporal dimension, they flick between past and present and future in a never ending effort to understand context and conditions. But this entail processing detracts from doing or completing schemes, and @ times the choices undermine, making the wielder of such thoughts introverted ‘social’ly and paralysed in a practical sense. This is the difference of David Gotlieb, Police officer, and Otto Gershang, computer credit control wizard and sex magician.
Are you sincere about your appetites and feelings – fantasising Asian women while lying about yourself online? Thanks to this politically righteous prejudice, we get to sample, remotely, what it might have been like to live under U.S. anti-miscegenation laws. However, if these laws aren't enforceable, we have the ability to obey or ignore them - as we do with table manners and tennis. Cultural policing is good for the soul and educational, too. Instead of feeling like the victim of other people's uptight rules perhaps you can think yourself lucky. Little tiny Asian women being preyed upon by big nasty economically superior foreigners is surely a target for those who wish to apply the sticker ‘victim’.
XI The dogged person, who sharply defines what they want and how they are going to get it, ends disparaged when outcomes don’t meet their expectations and they don’t know why. Or would it be the more mutable character, whose agile mind adapts and houses every obstacle in effort to reflect the wants and needs of their customer, client, or partner. They think constantly to the point of breakdown on context and conditions. No invisible hand makes tasks or problems easy or difficult for them. They are aware of cause and effect 360
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So are we are all con-artists @ some level playing the art and science of living. As politicians, actors, society people and celebrities that is sexual active people, and like most of the characters in this book, I intrinsically love to wear a mask. The difference perhaps is that mine is not two-faced. A ‘two-faced mask’ you may ask, “what the hell is that?” The essence of a deception is to mask the truth, a liar must hold the truth they are hiding before he or she can lie. But the truth is always relative? Therein lies the paradox, the double bind or the pavilion of mirrors. However we have all met people who believe or begin to believe their own propaganda.
Since the advent and rise of civilised societies and the developments of set ‘social’ rules, laws, etiquette, and
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
customs and moreover, ‘social’ sensibilities, people have had to develop some persona or mask.
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Like a material fabricated mask, or a clown’s face paint, such as those that adorn homes as ethnic souvenirs or ornaments of an exotic trip, or that applied to kids @ a fun fair or fete, the veneer or outer layer or skin of the mask has particular features recognisable to the onlooker. The mask largely hides or masks the facial expressions, a major source of the nonverbal communication apparatus of the wearer. So a mask that has a face which is recognisably happy, may hide that underneath, the wearer is grossly unhappy or even depressed, aggravated and angry. It is often said that in Thailand the smile is not necessarily indicative of pleasure or happiness but may mean emotional pain or even humiliation. The mask of the witch doctor sex magikian (Otto Gershang), or the sex fool, Clown, puppet or golem (David Gotlieb), or the sex demon (Sue Tyler) advance later in the volumes. William Blake referred to this process as “Melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.” Because thinking, thinkers and feeling, feelers always change the fastest.
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Punitive measures back ‘social’ pressures, morals or mere conventions to create a climate of privatising ideas and drives and notions – people become inward looking. Drinking alcohol, smoking tobacco, and using psychoactive drugs, have all been outlawed by governments @ various times. Mainstream society, @ this time of cultural crisis, views pornography as reprehensible. Preventing behaviour that harms society as a whole. The possession, sale, and purchase of various forms of erotic art and literature have been repeatedly allowed and restricted throughout history. Whilst softcore porn diffuses into society and is legitimised through magazines aimed @ young ‘lads’, and a whole genre of female oriented pornography is on the ascendant, hardcore porn, consumed by an older male, remains in the cultural arena to be indicative of nothing less a sexual perversion. This is why the political right and religious hardliners term it ‘a gateway to hard core porn’. Wow, it a portal like a Mandala shifting you to a different dimension!!! I need some now!!! ………. ***
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
The term ‘moral panic’ broadly defined as an "episode, condition, person or group of persons" that has in recent times been "defined as a threat to societal values and interests.” Panics have several outcomes, the most poignant being the certification to the players within the panic that what they are doing warrant observation by mass media and therefore may push them further into the activities that lead to the original feeling of moral panic. Sometimes it gets way out of hand such as when clergy in the 1920s and 1930s decried zippers as allowing one to take one's clothes off too quickly, thus hastening illicit sexual activity.
certain behaviours is difficult; governments often resort to forbidding all types or aspects of the behaviour, both the harmful and the benign. But even a little imagination is enough to suggest some possible reasons. Some people simply enjoy doing that which is forbidden. Possibly for the thrill of breaking the rules. Others may resent being told what to do, preferring to be asked or persuaded. People may resent living under laws that restrict nonabusers in an attempt to constrain the abusers, so the intrinsic injustice of blanket prohibitions may prompt perverse reactions.
So people retract and consume in secrecy, with guilt, in the supposed privacy of their own homes. Sexual matters have always attracted the interest of the masses, and the wrath of both political right and left, and that of the women’s movement[s].
“The existence of the alleged casual relationship is conclusively refuted by levels of violence and discrimination against women are often inversely related to the availability of sexually explicit materials, including violent sexually explicit materials”.61
XII The presumption is that viewing such material leads to sex crimes. 60 Reducing only the harmful types or aspects of
William Shugart has noted the almost universal judgement, both over time and over a number of goods, that such [prohibition] policies rarely if ever make substantive progress toward achieving either the ancillary goal of
60
The Meese Commission’s report on pornography (1986), commissioned by a Republican administration, Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography: Final Report. 1986. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
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61
Strossen, Nadine. 1995. Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for ‘Women’’s Rights. New York: Scribners
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
reducing consumption or the primary goal of reducing “sinful” behaviour. Ban ‘x’ and ‘x’ gets a real value boost. This failure is cited by opponents, impartial observers, and, importantly, proponents of prohibition themselves.62
There is also an age differential. The women are invariably young and of a certain attraction while the men are older, whilst still preserving an interest in sex, they may be physically unattractive according to the western cannon. This will be explored in Volume two @ exhaustive length.
Closely associated with porn is the notion of prostitution. This is viewed by many as a vehicle for men achieving some uncivilised indulgence. It is decontexuliased. It is often the act divagated of context, and histories, of story, of biography. Taken up a notch, sex tourism also involves uncivilised men who, for reasons of discretion or predilection, are willing to travel to engage in sexual and ‘social’ intercourse with women of different counties and cultures. It carries an extra burden of Marxist stigma since these men are typically from 1st world countries and comparatively well off, whilst the women are often 3rd world and poor. The argument goes that the women are victims, having limited choice in occupation and so therefore they are plainly and implicitly coerced, economically, to sell themselves. They may of their own choosing, enter prostitution by hanging @ bars looking to pick up men who will pay to sleep with them. Or they may be sold, sell themselves or even be tricked into prostitution by family or employers and work in brothels.
62
Shughart, William F., II. 1997. Taxing Choice. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. p.173
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………. *** People, events and places that we usually in times gone by may have talked about with our family and friends, our ‘social’ groups may become repressed, and may even become pathological. Octavio Paz’s in his Nobel lecture In Search of the Present warned: "Ours is the first age that is ready to live without a metahistorical doctrine; whether they be religious or philosophical, moral or aesthetic, our absolutes are not collective but private. It is a dangerous experience. It is also impossible to know whether the tensions and conflicts unleashed in this privatization of ideas, practices and beliefs that belonged traditionally to the public domain will not end up by destroying the ‘social’ fabric."63
63
'In Search of the Present' Nobel Lecture, by Octavio Paz. December 8, 1990. Mexico City, Mexico
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
the highest ministers, editors, media owners, buyers and interviewers. On occasions where a two-faced mask is in play, the protagonist not only projects a mask to the world, which is natural in a civil society, they begin to project a mask to themselves, the ‘inner them’, the ‘homunculus inside’, so to speak. This is the beginning of the hall of mirrors and it is not helped by the fact there are no absolutes, especially when relationships, love and lust enter the picture (especially with liberal amounts of vitamin-v and alcohol and other recreational drugs). Imagine the absurdity of a garbage collector from Düsseldorf, who acting as a wealthy businessman on his vacation, falls for a bargirl who is tutored into being, and poses as a dedicated prospective wife. Now this is fine as long as both understand what they are projecting is a mask, but when they start believing the deception themselves we have then, the pavilion of mirrors.
XIII. Bad faith and the mystery, sure… Most of us with half a brain often wonder why there is often a conspiracy, maybe not so much of silence, but of denial. It stretches right across the dominion of the wasteland, and from top to bottom. It stretches across its media and government from the lowest civil servants and reporters to
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“Do you think president X or Prime minister Y or senator Z or Congressman B believes what they say?” Bribes cost companies $330 million a year; calculate economists @ the Economic Institute of Cambodia. Why must there be endemic dishonesty towards the public? Is it because everyone was/is in denial to each other, and few realised it because their virtual reality had become the widely recognised truth. The principal political technique is an ever present air of good faith. This is also reminiscent of what the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre termed bad faith, by contrast, the truth is hidden from the liar himself: his deception is no longer grounded in a consciously embraced truth. In each case bad faith takes the form of unconsciously lying to oneself. Though a lie posits the duality of deceiver and deceived, bad faith implies the unity of a single consciousness. As Jean-Paul Sartre explains, to be in bad faith I "must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived… Better yet I must know the truth exactly in order to...
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
It is the fraudulent deception of another person; the intentional or malicious refusal to perform some duty or contractual obligation. Bad faith is not the same as prior judgement or negligence. One can make an honest mistake about one's own rights and duties, but when the rights of someone else are intentionally or maliciously infringed upon, such conduct demonstrates bad faith. Broadly speaking, when a person claims to 'believe' in what they say, they rarely mean: “I have checked my reasoning for errors and have verified the facts, in so far as they are verifiable.” What is meant by this is: “I am willing to ignore the gaps in my reasoning and am prepared to discount any facts that do not suit me, or of which I am unaware. I will cling to this position regardless of what happens or is subsequently discovered.” This is, of course, a pathological position, and might more simply be called bigotry.
associates with the person or the nature. I am happy to say that: "I am male" but doubt that this is a constitutive statement about me. I rather suspect that my maleness is not much more significant than the fact that I am ambidextrous. On the other hand, one must listen to the testimony of those who identify as transgendered. I understand such people to say that they distinctly notice themselves to be of one gender emotionally, psychologically and/or mentally while knowing themselves to be physiologically the other gender.
Smoke and mirrors, an entire Grande Pavilion of Mirrors, with the chance the man comes off worse emotionally and financially. So the name of my mask is Myiad. It’s a pseudonym aimed @ protecting a Nom de plume, oh, sorry it’s more precisely a Nom de guerre. Nom de guerre was often adopted by recruits in the French Foreign Legion as part of the break with past lives. It projects my public persona in a strategic and a limited way. It is a moot question as to whether gender
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Chapter 2. Who looking @ whom? Who cares? I "These people would talk quite frankly and openly with me because I was known not to be sympathetic with U.S. policies. And they knew I was some kind of conduit and channel of communication that they desperately wanted . . . They would joke with me that a CIA guy had come in to see them three days before and wanted to know the South Vietnamese's government's position on a particular matter. They'd say - big joke- "Well we told them a bunch of horse shit." And I'd see it in the U.S. cables the next day being reported to Washington. I'd try and persuade the Americans that the information wasn't what the Vietnamese really thought or were going to do. And these people either thought I was insane or they refused to acknowledge that they had been sent the wrong information. The South Vietnamese, in reality, never were obliging little puppets. They would take out money and they were dependent on us, but they would play us for all we were worth. It’s natural in their culture. And in Oriental culture there's a strong tendency to say what people want to hear - not to have controversy or confrontation. So they would say what they thought that the Americans wanted. And if it wasn't what they were really going to do, there's no sense telling the Americans and getting them upset." 64
The FBI, CIA, MI5, KGB, MPLA. IRA, UDA, etc, etc, feels more confident and safer on the Internet. As people migrate more and more online and as all global communication begin to be sited there, security and law enforcement
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
agencies can sit comfortably in a control room surveying without any need to go overseas and act in a James Bond covert manner in exotic locations. Getting access to people’s IP phone calls, their online chats and video calls, there emails is so easy for them and their technologies. All and every form of your digital communications can be tracked by intelligent software designed to elucidate certain events, keywords, codes, patterns, and so on – patterns. The history of computing and artificial intelligence has a pedigree historically linked to code breaking in the Second World War. That was its starting point. The Internet itself as a phenomenon has its very roots as a support for military communications in the event of nuclear attack. With the larger diffusion of PCs worldwide the more opportunity there exists to understand and view the world broken in to demographics of risk. It is much richer a mechanism than even having a surveillance camera in your home. There is still the tendency to believe the PC or mobile phone is your possession, and not only this, your possession in the privacy of your own home, and that to some extent the Internet, the world wide web is yours as you pay for access and the technology to access it.
64
Edward Brady ‘In our Own Image’ in Santoli, A. (1985) To Bear any burden: Ballantine pp.200-207
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
But as ‘social’ network software and automatic updates become further integrated into the operating system, and your relationships with other people and services in the world – your private thoughts and communications, your finances and your predilections, viewing and reading preferences become integrated with your terminal and identity. You become what you consume. Online then so you are becoming virtual and seen by the powers that be – whether that is Microsoft Corporation or the security services of your own or other countries. More than this, because you say and make choices and button pressings online under the impression that they are private and unseen, like a private conversation or a diary journal entry used to be – they – the powers that be- sincerely believe that you are expressing your ‘real’, ’genuine’, or ‘true’ feelings about subjects. It is good evidence regarding your intentions and your motivations. it is an intelligent way to elucidate who someone ‘is’ and what they ‘are’ and what they ‘want’ and what they ‘crave’. If you do something that policy or law dictates is not acceptable, then you will be punished.
terrorists then you move down the list of miscreant behaviours until you hit whoremongers ‘enjoying’ and ‘passing’ intelligence to each other. While this is not yet against the law, you may wish to provide a dossier on this activity to be put towards those that from policy and law, and other interest groups such as those lobbying for the rights of women and children. Whenever such laws are passed that indeed these miscreants continue to act outside of ‘societies’ interests then you already have enough information on them to hang them.
As networking has become more pervasive, and digital storage has increased and as data mining and integration software has developed, the way in which free speech and true democratic potentials of the Internet have decreased in favour of surveillance and evidence gathering. Looking for those things outside of the bell curve. Once you tick off
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………. *** So many male users, those who are naive of this emerging world, believe that they can download just about anything they want, anytime, anyplace, with impunity, and just because they, in good faith, paid for their device and they paid for Internet access, that may hang them. They have paid big brother to install his ‘eye’ in their home and paid for themselves to share their most private affairs. Trillions of gigabytes and teraflops are available to documents and report upon your sexual preferences if you have ever gazed on dubious sites. Those who have obsessed the most accessed the most dubious sites, sites which may be deemed illegal in your location better watch out. They will be coming to get you, as soon as the evidence has coalesced and crystallised.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
So Unityview, Worldvision and the International Justice Mission and many, many others are getting into this act. They can help and now shift resources towards this form of surveillance. Sting operations, sugar traps where sites purporting illegal forms of sex tourism are placed online. Agents boasting membership to several sites and news groups renowned for their interests in this activity means that agents can ‘bait’ other members to view and hopefully partake in its offers. They then nail their ass, or start to build corroborate evidence, which may involve the elucidation of ‘rings’ of men.
atypical modest Asian girl. Three to six months down the line and a cigarette is hanging from the mouth, bar pigeon English is spoken with generous amounts of expletives, and pool cues are wrenched in fun up male backsides. The voice is volumes higher, while the tone is aggressive and ‘come and get it’ ’fun loving style’.
Online it has been said that security agencies find it easier to flirt with their prey, perhaps women find it confidence boosting in another way. We sit and read and look @ pictures while their software waits for them to make their move. Maybe it's much easier for women to take control, to be more assertive, to take the initiative and so on when using the Internet? Much research has gone into showing that introverts can become extroverts online, while remaining introvert in the real world. It’s not long ago that men were expected to do all the chasing and make all the decisions when it comes to dating. I have seen the same with hookers in South East Asia. They come onto the seen all pensive and shy, like the
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For many people, the Internet allows them to get in touch with that side of themselves which is ready for a relationship. It allows them to get in touch with it much more quickly perhaps because they are not worried about being immediately judge. This contrasts with someone you meet on a first date in a cafe or a bar and you're worried about your hair, the lack of it, your look, what you're wearing and/or all or any of these things. Through blogs, personal websites and Flicker and its like, millions of people on the Internet do have photos publicly available. But you can choose your photo and you can choose the photo that best represents you and the signals and messages that you want to give out. But is that not a virtual relationship, isn't part of what you are the way you look, the way are and so on, and in presenting a false image of yourself, or potentially a false image of yourself, aren't you creating a false basis for a relationship? For those who exploit the Internet dishonestly and give out false signals about themselves, I think that would be wrong. But if you
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
consider Love and Friends.com that 99 per cent of the members are genuinely out there looking for a real relationship and they are looking for ‘love’ that personification of that which we are always missing.
to men because of a shortage of single women. There are fewer women because they are aborted or culled in favour of boys. Cause and effect. ………. ***
………. *** If I move towards you, another human being, it may be that I am moving away from someone else. Like when a young lad in the past would leave the mother for the wife. That doesn’t mean repulsion. This is often literally or figuratively. Guys like me like to spend some time together in the bar away from their partners. People split up, make up, crack up, they mature, they get older, nobody seems to care outside the relationship. There’s nothing in it for them. What they study on their TVs, newspapers and in their magazines are definitions of what is right, what is fair, what is normal and abnormal, and what is atypical. Then something happens which is untypical, not fair. Like your partner dying when the plane tickets were booked for that long-awaited holiday that you both deserved, or just as you were just getting hooked on each other, or she or he discloses an affair and they are leaving and they gave no signs. So some men in Gujarat in India rent their wives out
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Are whales and Ronin culled for nature to realise new forms of living and life? Don’t the Japanese just love to eat whale? It looks like the Thai girl’s non-verbal movements as she blows the guy off in Lolitas, you know her hips and legs bobbing underneath the vague privacy of the curtain, yeah it looks like she’s into her job. But is it just another artisan performing unconsciously what they are good @?
II Human devices always move and travel with a purpose, is it that we can do ought else, but do you have somewhere to fly to . . . albatross? It’s become commonplace in the last few years to travel all over the world and as we do so, we travel all over and within ourselves. It gives us a chance to examine ourselves, our lives . . . doesn’t it? Travel broadens the mind and shifts perspectives even if it is out of a Michelin or according to the lonely plant guide. People are falling in and out of what they think is love or lust all the time and they do so on holidays, when they have free time. With diet, drug,
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
health food and knife they want to keep themselves on the market for longer, like irradiated meat on the supermarket cold shelf; they are there for hot love.
proportion l relative simulacra of each other. Diluting locations into a homogenised smoothly-digestible monoculture which would suit a baby’s perspective of local landmarks and characteristics (like making a McDonalds mini baby burger in the shape of an emerald Buddha, or stacking them so they look like that same Buddha).
Represented here are prized examples from cities renowned for their style, including San Francisco, New York, London, Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Tokyo and Amsterdam, alongside choice finds from locations off the beaten track, including Stockholm, Antwerp, Siem Reap, Manchester, Paris, Reykjavik, Melbourne and Vienna. People you would have never imagined travelling more than the bus ride to the nearest city, or from one side of the city to another, become a different breed of traveller, one who travels to more places, more often, cheaper, than ever before. There is the muchvaunted downside to so called ‘globalisation’, especially since the anti-WTO activism globally, and the Bali disco bomb blast. This asserts the world is becoming more and more common and self-similar. It’s the same wherever we go. Euro and American brands appear everywhere in Thailand, as do American fashions. Media and technology, part of a outcome of communication and travel technologies, the glacial but steady movement of brands eclipsing local practices and market goods, to say nothing of the needs of global capital and consumer lust. We hear so much about this rhizome, insidious, viral menace: "globalisation." It’s a monster, a golem that eats difference, rapidly reducing distinction and uniqueness of places to statistical and
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………. *** Maybe so, if you never leave the hyperspace of the international airport grid. Ostensibly about pleasure, jetting off to take part in exotic, erotic smorgasbords for a price of a single drink back home is an activity that will always tap directly into deeply ingrained opinions of gender, race and uncomfortable global sexual and ‘social’ intercourse between First, Second and Third World cultures. ………. *** Tis’ what do you pack in that suitcase of your mind? Whales constantly migrate. They move from the Southern Ocean to their northern breeding grounds. And these are southern to other whales and most importantly, to us humans. But these are males. Female whales remain, always reside, congregate, and make their home around the equator. They are not in the dark, cold seas, navigating, charging glacially, they are in
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
the sun, basking there, and the clear blue waters, are waiting.
record by having to cut out those sausages and be vegan for a year.
You see it’s all-relative and it’s all good and it’s global and very, very mobile indeed. It’s gradual. Its ecological, it doesn’t leak, it’s a food chain, a biosphere of knowledge, contained, not flat, effervescent and sparkling. All can feel it, all can see it. It’s not like my love. Popping out where the grass is greener, and then back when the grass turns brown, or the weather turns for the worse. As humans we’re modular, we link in chain-like molecules, groups’ bonds and are made and broken, reactions, ‘social’ physics. Think about being stuck in the supermarket queue. You are a part of group for a while which scatters and disintegrates when you pass the check out. Back @ supermarket headquarters you are linked gin through your loyalty or ‘club’ card and purchases. We scale up and down and different relevancies occur, our identities dissipate and splinter and become new entities, virtual and actual, decisions are made using them, decisions which impact upon and affect what will be there in the future for you.
………. ***
Think of supermarket loyalty clubcards interrogating love web sites. Instead of your starsign and chart you are matched by food purchases and the destinations you have been to lately on vacation. You may be punished for your health
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Not foody likes and dislikes, but what you bought yesterday may dictate for health reasons and insurance what you can buy today. All in a similar manner to that of the ecotax or environment bonds where manufacturers can buy or sell intended to promote ecologically sustainable activities via economic incentives. Ok it’s maybe indexed to where the moon is. These would be different to good loves and dislikes. But other knowledges and informations contaminate the purity of this loop. The famous media commentator Marshall McLuhan illustrated in his famous Understanding Media how the telephone altered the relationships of hse and their johns.65 Before the telephone men had to hunt out hse in the street or @ their homes. Now hse - as call girls – becomes mobile and distributes herself, and comes to the john’s house. Checks and conveniences that are implicit and open and enshrined in policy.
65
McLuhan, M. (1987) Understanding Media, London: Taylor & Francis pp. 233.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
………. ***
Reality as something that is constructed by human beings as a ‘social’ enterprise is still challenging for many people. Most with poor education would prefer it handed on a plate. The small-world phenomenon: soon after meeting a stranger, we are surprised to discover that we have a mutual friend, or we are connected through a short chain of acquaintances. We are for instance a tableau of many delicate interconnected parts and roles. And part of our differences arises from the fact that people tour cultures, and the cultures and objects themselves are in a constant state of migration. Spending time apart is also an important component of a happy relationship. It is healthy to have some separate interests and activities and to come back to the relationship refreshed and ready to share your experiences.
Sitting alone, in a house with empty rooms, one reads the bills, one feels small, you go online to pay you bills, and do you work and do your banking. ‘social’ interaction in the wasteland reduces even further. But don’t worry you have a long way before you become the man in a white anaesthetic room with no penis, You don’t know when it will happen, but the smell of jacking booth clorex tells you its going to happen... ………. *** No more main street chit-chat, no more offline gossip. You are sitting with all the other strangers going in the same direction on a massive metal tube in the sky, getting served drinks if you dare, makes you feel right. It is a risk worth taking.
III Science tells us that brain, body and world are united in a complex and extended computational activity. We live in a moment of unprecedented complexity, an era in which change occurs faster than our ability to comprehend it.
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………. *** Mobility - flows, movement and migration in ‘social’ life. The last decade or so has seen striking increases in both long-distance travel and in communications through mobile phones, text messaging, emailing, videoconferencing and so on. Such developments in communication, with a similar increase in physical travel and movement of goods around the globe, reconfigure ‘social’ networks by disconnecting and reconnecting people in new ways.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
We preserve the ability to deal with problems of organised complexity, but only just. We only pull through @ the last minute to decide based upon what exactly you may ask? Robert Musil's novel considered, as the title of the novel announced, The Man Without Qualities.66 The protagonist is Ulrich, an ex-mathematician who has failed to engage with the world around him in a manner that would allow him to possess 'qualities'. You don’t know about me until you ask. Then you ask me about myself, you start a loop that may never end, until someone breaks it down into million digestible pieces.
fiction since religion. (Not your religion, dear reader. That one's the unvarnished truth. I'm referring to all the others.) The way in which the Philippines, Thailand or Cambodia knits together is as if there was a plot. But one where the rules keep changing, there is a randomiser somewhere in the centre of the ‘social’ setting. And it may not be safe for you and your wealth and well-being. If Otto Gershang is the magician in this story then I am the proverbial fool. I felt like one sitting in Dr. Wong’s chair that day, getting led into trance state:
………. *** I have used my Nom de guerre online where it is the handle for a Greco-Romanesque would be pretend warrior- homo, who persistently fantasises he is ‘back-packing’ vanquished male foes on a forgotten beach located under the midnight moon on the Aegean (was it Rimini?). It wasn’t drugs that brought me to thinking this way. It is a fertile imagination bound with the possibilities of re-engineering your identity on the Internet. It’s a psychotherapy in a way. And yes, I am slightly nuts or eccentric, but I am awake, I am lucid, I am responsive. I view Myiad (me) as a character in an alternate reality game, or ARG, this is the most immersive form of
66
Musil, R. (1995) The Man Without Qualities New York: Perigee
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“You cannot see clearly just now, you imagine the future, and you still feel lost in time and space. Look and the present feel so found. This is the price of love and the search for it in another culture in an age of transnationalism and globalisation. You never knew you needed it, until you found it, lost in your thoughts and engrossed in your work, your routines, in your life ‘back home’. But you went on holiday and just had to discover you had a body again, didn’t you? You need to read this book. Why? You never kept a diary; you didn’t jot down your thoughts, or map them out. You lost the ability to connect it all together, to decide based on logic rather than gut reaction. Oh yeah you found gut reaction on holiday as well. Must have been the alcohol, eh? You lost yourself in Asia. Is that good or bad? Is that good or bad? Is that good or bad? Is
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that good or bad? Is that good or bad? You vacillate between the poles, just as she dances between them, you can’t tell truth from untruth anymore as she catches you eyes and gives you a longing look, then laughs. She laughs like as if she loves you and it is a shared joke between lovers. You feel comfortable and found, but only for moments…” They casually enter my narcissic trance, the balloon of what I am thinking. Who entered yours today? This statement hangs like new ‘social’ software advertisement. Anybody? Or did you just make them part of the trance? Or you may inquire about me by interrogating others or ‘an other’ or Google me senseless and form impressions from the detritus of information on the infinity web. Musil's man without qualities, having no qualities of his own, whether inherited or acquired, had to compose them himself, using his wits and shrewdness; but none of them were guaranteed to last in a world full of confusing signals, constant change and unpredictability. Impressions are such genuine false ends, false plateaux, false balance false homeostasis, false economies, particularly when they are digitalised and online. You cannot study your hoe girlfriend properly in this format. You have to be there.
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They are not loops, not cyclic, on a never-ending maddening wash cycle they are @ best paused DVD frames. They don’t tell us much about the plot or narrative, they are the nonexistence of the freezeframe photograph with milk drop splash that looks like a crown that we can only ever see in this artificial, technical way. They are deceptions of sorts. They are not vacations where our sexual practices breathe life again, such as where a penis is for more than pissing again. But they are useful for fooling ourselves that people, objects, relationships, places and meanings are constant, that there is no change, that all things are steady, conservative and dependable, no prospect nor possibility of change here I’m afraid. The slow incremental change which comes with getting older, so that you are 60 going on 30 with sciatica and back pain that you will never die. The bargirl makes you think differently about your body where it suddenly reappears after so much neglect. ………. *** Until you do stick a label on me and/or the environment you imagine me living in then I remain a mystery, but you will have me as just a number, a piece of human furniture used as a metric against anything or anybody of interest, or merely a quality gauged by how attractive or honest I look to you
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
subjectively in your mind’s eye. I am not rich; I have no intrinsic biography. Your opinion matters, nay, it dominates. But then being attractive and servile will make me look honest. They men in the white coats have shown us this. So will being female and/or being child of any nationality. It will lend me an air of vulnerability in photographs, tastefully and dutifully shot for a price, that make me look to you like a automatic ‘social’ly encrusted victim in desperate need, not want, of gender mainstreaming or other apparatus of global care and concern. Practices and routines suitable to the design of systems for small groups of people - the groups, in other words, in which most of us spend most of our lives encrusted within. They are simply different, often neglected, bludgeoned from those useful in the design of "enterprisescale" systems like the UN and moreover, political systems. Next.
mightier than the sword. This became accepted as correct, rightly, goodly and civilised. However, one school of thought might say this: Not for nothing did the twentiethcentury horror writer H.P. Lovecraft suggest that certain geometries were so repellent to the human sense of order that to gaze upon them was to lose one’s sanity; not for nothing do feng shui masters abjure curves and cornerlessness (think ‘oval room’ here folks). So what is the shape of things to come? Or are we implying some gel-like infrastructure halfway to utility fog, which continuously reshapes itself in response to the wishes of its inhabitants? But they are useful for fooling ourselves that everything around us is constant, that there is no change except incremental slow-moving change, manageable change, things are steady, conservative and dependable, no prospect nor possibility of change here I’m afraid. The promise or threat of an reactive and immerse technology looms behind the incompetence of present computing. But the need for interoperability between systems bound to the ever-present threat of terrorism remove the needs and arguments for an electronic privacy.
IV After we invented fire so long ago, quickly came about inventing human power, in war science and in the type of fire studied by political science. Alter it was air conditioning. It is a different fire from that of cooking stoves and smelting plants; it began with the ecstasy of communication such as that supposedly felt by Prometheus. When those with knowledge held power over those who were physically strong, then knowledge became to rule. The pen became
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But this one's just a probe, a devil’s advocate, gigo (garbage in-garbage out) for the sake of learning. Its play, it’s a game, in reality it’s a game, in fantasy it is a job, a role, a set of interactions and behaviours that say in the middle “the race is the prize”. I’m a policeman posing as a paedophile, a
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
bargirl whore as a girlfriend, a NGO as someone who cares, a Christian as a pervert, a whoremonger as a benefactor - but every once in a while I'll stumble across a human metaphor that do some explanatory heavy lifting, and this is one such.
Not to be ignored, mongering represents a never-before articulated dichotomy, as technology and lo-fi mark making create an instant revolution in communication; these messages are subversive, imaginative, amusing and oftentimes intriguingly coded.
In biology class, we were taught that each organism is described @ the genetic level by its own unique sequence of DNA - its genotype - that displays @ the physiological level as its phenotype. Simply put: if your genotype contains a sequence that codes for desiring Asians, you will most likely possess desire for Asians. This way of looking @ the underlying logics that govern emerging form rocked my world as a child, let me tell you. Which of these just doesn't belong? V You find exotic food and drink near-by; you can meet long stay residents. Socio-economic realities. You can find landmarks; we can give you them. Step-by-step instructions on how to get there; the best nights to go; and the best seasons. Let us take you there... 67
67
Apocalypse Then 24hourworld Recordings ltd.
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………. *** Having circumnavigated the globe and dug into archives, mongers have amassed some rare finds, both as originals (unpeeled and pristine) and in-situ photographs. Long ignored and belittled for its nearness to comic culture and vandalism, mongering has steadfastly remained in the public view: widespread and with a natural affinity to architecture it has become a fundamental aspect of the modern third world city, influencing public opinion and borrowed by fashion, packaging, graphic designers and architects alike. ………. *** An offspring of this scene, born out of tags and throw-ups, the bargirl scene is modern urban calligraphy. While the classic Times Square New York style of mongering originated in and around the live peep shows of Times Square and 42nd, it in turn has left its mark on almost all visual disciplines: Strictly speaking arranging space by outlines, writing has become an invaluable influence and
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
inspiration, especially in illustration, logo design, motion graphics and architecture. I read the letter from Winslow Wong, it included this sketch and scribbled note:
wore a face like stone while I did this, rather shcoolmamish. It showed that I was there for business, not entirely pleasure.
Quote: me and 3 girls "gang raping" a 4th girl who was blind folded, gaged, and hand cuffed...all their idea! I just said "o.k" and went with it.
cool, lovin'it, teens in any mathematical permutations and conundrums are good. When they close the site down I would love them to remember that I had them (the teens that is, not 'them') riding me with Califronia homo's big black extensible strapons whilst I was in the mix doing one of their brood. Maybe ol' hippe was in the room next door? If so he certainly got me going... My "how do you do" in those halycon days in the bordellos used to be drawing the imported strap-on from my knapsack and throwing it dispasionately on on the bed like a business card in a hostile corporate take-over. That used to get some mublings from the assembled masses of teens, I
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It then followed by a gauntlet of poppers and lube, all presented in a more amicalbe, warm and human fashion. What a bazzar!!!! Hse would pick them up, try to read the American on the label and instructions, examine the contents, and when I illustrated in the fashion of a good market vendor what they were for, they discarded them as if they were on fire shaking their heads disapprovingly as if the table had turned and now they were Miss Schoolteacher. What a show! This was routinely followed by some more graphical indepth demonstrations the like of which you get in the plane for emergency crash landings: "in the event the fat barang squalls, fuck him harder..." sort of thing.... $ was the incentive instead of life-saving. The iron fist must be dealt with the velvet glove. Don't you agree? How could you condone such practices with people, indeed Skyking humans of any age or place? Where is the love, teens??????????????
the
compassion?
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Let
alone
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
'They' - ma and pa kettle and their governmental and religious agencies find everything to do with sex outside marriage reprehensible, especially if it is promoted by 'men'. 'They' including their 'men' would prefer it stopped.
laws of reciprocity - the fundamental and essential basis of human rights. You don't need state intervention here. You don't even need to citre it as a tip or advice. Its not welcome. Mongers might begin to care or stop travelling overseas to ride upon small weak defenceless and broke brown bodies much younger then themselves. They will spend more time @ home amassing $ for garden centres, stock investments and designer kitchens which they can enjoy alone or with a FWC.
'They' are always right without real reason. Anybody that hits the bordellos is unmistakingly deviant, off on a tangent of total self-interest and hedonism with little interest â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;socialâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; welfare, societal and human progress, and the good of the world and economy. Their enemies, insurgents if you will, are heathen mongers who should be lawfully tortured, preferably not in my book (which is incidentally called 'managinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; hse') by clinical western law enforcement agencies. They should not have this right as they clearly do not sing from the same hymn book with respect to their policies. They should not punish these mongers, but rather it would be more logical and just that torture be inflicted by their targets - the glorious hse themselves. Indeed mongers should by rode by drunk infused Viet teen hse @ 3 am in freezing rooms using the agency of California homo's big black extensible strap-ons until the said mongers squall, then and only then for them to be rode much harder. These reprobates will then, and only then, understand the
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Indeed bros, in this utopia there would be no need for a notion of 'purer' individuals, clubs, organisations and powerful elites who pass judgement and sentence and punishment (like letting rape and murder herbsmen step in for the Viet teens in your penitentiary raping you all night) on others. It would also save the tax payer $$$$$ which they could dump in their retirement fund for garden centre visits. That's OK isn't it? MYIAD
Ironic, that entrenched bureaucracies of the type that inhibit novelty everywhere could possibly have their progressive aspect. But - barring the universal adoption of ISO standards
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for construction - these overlords of the specific will continue to call the shots in all sorts of minor but telling ways. Building codes, with their inscribed and differing beliefs about what sets up acceptable risk, continue as far as I can tell to have a deeply local feel. They still respond to local conditions, physical and political conditions both. ………. *** And then there are human and other factors. Barcelona's architects probably won't need to design their structures to withstand a major earthquake, but San Franciscans had better, as a matter of law. These are “environmental factors”. Strip malls will arise in places like Los Angeles, whose zoning provides for them, but not in Paris or other cities whose zoning does not. Ah yes!, the famous "human factors." I'm not sure if it's in Bangkok's building code (hell, I'm not certain Bangkok has a building code), but I remember being taken with the idea of skyscrapers whose every window had a little concrete awning against the brutal overhead sun. Crowd densities @ midnight in half the alley-like streets off Roppongi-dori can rival those only seen in London @ the height of the Notting Hill Carnival, and so on. These considerations always have and always will be imbricated into code - into law. If these laws can be thought of as a place's genotype, the resultant cityscape forms its phenotype. Is this how whore’s develop?
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One result is that even the most visionary design, even the most wilfully Roarkian of architects will continue to be constrained by the local genotype, often to the loss of possibility. The flipside is that, as long as there are permits to be acquired and bureaucracy to navigate, the world's cities will continue to feel like themselves, and not some hemispheric Pasadena. Which is not such a bad thing. I was starting to wonder if I would be able to muster one single comment that would even seem relevant, because this is largely speaking to an experience I have not had. But then I read this scribbled on a copy of the Wall street Journal on the plane to Bangkok: “I'm amazed how little McDonalds or Coke really has to do with my life, unless I invite them to the table. Weird dancing in all-night computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorised pyrotechnic displays. Landart, earth-works as bizarre alien artefacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarise houses and other men’s backsides. But instead of stealing, leave PoeticTerrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy, preferably a police man, David” It was signed “Otto”. Pick someone @ random and convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune - say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an ageing
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realise that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, and will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence. And I realised: “yes that's it exactly!” It’s the one-line embodiment of my own frustration with people who are uncreative and unmotivated to live life beyond their bubble, their reality tunnel, or their megatrance. The escapists become just as bad as any other matchless group in this country, just as set on living only among their own values, just as staunch about not contributing anything but their own views. Sorry to sound like a rat, but it's fucking annoying! Worse than a scything stray feline thrown casually @ your head in Bangkok 10 @ 3.25 am on a very, very balmy night.
thoughts are far beyond overwhelming and it would be a shame if you were shell-shocked and left without guidance about how to make sense of people, objects, relationships, how to assign suitable time to the big world ideas and how to come out of it and focus on yourself and your own life. Are you doing any better now?
VI I think the re-crash is hard on 2 levels. There’s the animal instinct level that is obviously jarred by recalibrating to new surroundings, but there is also the psychic explosion that happens when you try to grasp of all you learned, all the outer-lying reasons for why your life is the way it is, and it's just so big and everlasting. I told you it is mega! I’d suggest therapy for someone feeling the way you feel when you go back home to waste. I imagine the weight of some of these
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“Another night might suggest a new millennium with all the methods and materials that brings in its wake, it subtly needs definitively new forms, that leak round boundaries, borders and makes new ‘social’ molecules, which don’t obey the physic of the ‘social’. Why continue to use practices with roots in the medieval guilds, when we teeter on the verge of an age of nanotechnology? Why build to evoke permanence and stability when our lives are ever more in motion? Grafitti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public monuments-PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions coming down your aerial, wet cement...”
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There aren't any maps or road signs not that are accurate anyway. GPS helps, it does in the car, and it sets a new dimension to driving and moving glacially. It speeds things up and do what machines do best, it prevents mistakes unless there is a mistake on the map and you find yourself in a position that is not delineated as a road or street. But there does come a place where a systematic approach is called for, and that place is the network that connects these local, diverse, wildly and delightfully variable moments with each other and that makes easy movement between and among them. Would you rather live in a city with a hundred different, locally varying practices for the labelling and colouring and shape and placement of street signs, or one that imposed this one standard on its constituent parts? All the interesting, complicated stuff still exists in the things connected to the network, but the network is left to do its job. We sit while waiting for them to make some transactions and uploads/downloads..
I often wonder what came first. Sex or the perversion. Tis a sort of chicken and egg. I think you are impoverished person if you can only get off by degrading people, or handling them with 'contempt'. If you
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check out the writing of some women that's how they see dudes like us. But then the same if you can only get off when you are being whacked senseless (I think of that 'monster' guy in Christiana F who hangs around the Berlin Train Station looking for kids to whip him). Then you are impoverished again. You know me; I tread a middle way . . . When I was a younger man I thought I was in love with jack-off booths on 42nd NYC, North Beach, San Francisco and various European and Australian cities. I wondered if it were the women, my hand, or the booth atmosphere (don you just love the smell of Clorox @ 10 am for yo first jackoff?) ‘Men’’s booths are hosed down with Clorox after each customer - or so they fucken say . . .
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The booths in Frisco are a strippers worker cooperative, so I suppose that is 'consensual' jacking for me. One time a Chinese hom wanted to blow me while he paid and I gazed. I was loaded, not socioeconomically depressed so I told top go fuck himself. Man, he was so persistent. MEN!
cheers MYIAD
VII Cultural equivalence and the moral contortions that result can lead to views of a "lack of integrity." I understand this to mean the inability to face the fact the world is endlessly varied, and the implications of this diversity. ‘social’ly, politically, personally, this mistrust of systematization holds true. Where it breaks down for me is when we begin talking about metadesign, about frameworks and arrangements in which to provide for communication between those smaller-
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scale chunks of meaning and being. That means, dear consumer, dear reader, subscriber, patron and client, all opinions will remain for the time dominated by impressions ad hoc led by yours truly within a limited range and tolerance. Fragments of knowledge brought together in endlessly cascading and shifting kaleidoscopes of visions setting up some form of experience. The gestalt of being the map is not being the territory, the flags are not the pastiches of nation states, and they will never be. It’s your movie, not theirs. The weather's constantly foggy, making it hard to see clearly now, but it’s all just the same old shifting electrons and neurons. There is no colour, no objects, just sensations arranged in patterns by neural modules. If they link from experience to objects, controls and machines in the world then that is empirical and finite. It’s the interpretative aspect of minds tethered by our categories and classifications, our bias and our prejudices. Our hideous or kindly differences. Modules working together in complexes, configuring and reconfiguring ad infinite, acting under the conditions of neuropolitique. ………. *** So how will you make your way mon brave? Can you "see" the ocean floor, spot landmarks along the way and navigate in the proper direction, your proper direction, a seemingly impossible scenario similar to the task that migrating whales
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
face when they make their epic journeys. The Average American watches television. Much sexual innuendo is showed there. This is a neurological fact so ominous in its implications that it cannot be understood in words. In Cambodia they love Karaoke which depicts a rural idyll and subtle innuendo.
genetically, and the ability for all madness an ad hominin attacks to end on the Internet.
VIII The entire perceived world is constructed by the brain. The relationship between the world we perceive and the underlying physical reality is not as close as we might think. Life, living things, organic things like humans, Ronin and chimps and whales: they're messy, they continually flow and leak and fold back on themselves. So do ‘social’ systems if they exist. No, not simply stylish: possessed of the headlong sweep and flair that makes you feel like you just stepped out of Gattaca - A sci-fi thriller set in a dystopian society where perfection is genetically engineered. And maybe the part where Uma Thurman whips through the green-lit tunnel in that zippy Citroen DS convertible - even if you're on your hands and knees in a supermarket aisle, picking up the potatoes you've just knocked over. They want information which is not defined by party politics but by the issues that interest them as individuals, the qualities that define them
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………. *** It takes a certain maturity to accept this, to find beauty in it, especially for those of us who (have been trained to) associate harmony first and foremost with order. It's not easy to let go of the idea - which I associate with eighth-grade biology's unit on Linnean classification - the universe of objects can be comprehensively named, ordered, and understood. VIIII So there are three kinds of hse – white, grey and black Some people profit from keeping us confused about symbols and reality. The shrinks have said that the reasons women go for the bad boys (not that I was a bad boy, I just didn't care) comes from the motherly instinct. It's the same reason they stay in an abusive relationship. It becomes their mortal mission to transform their guy into something ‘social’ly redeeming regardless of the outcomes. We live in an environment shaped and largely created by ... masscirculation newspapers and magazines which are given to reflecting, in a shocking number of cases, the weird
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
prejudices and obsessions of their publishers and owners; (and by) radio and television programs ... almost dominated by commercial motives; (and by) public-relations counsels who are simply highly paid craftsmen in the art of manipulating and reshaping our semantic environment in ways favourable to their clients. Citizens of a modern society need, therefore, to be systematically aware of the powers and limits of symbols, if they are to guard against being driven into complete bewilderment.
search out Doppelgangers, that’s my idea anyway, nemesis that they never find. So they just cruise. They call to one another across the vast expanses of Binah the dark, deep oceans of the cabala. Consider this typology for girls in Cambodia offered by one writer on Khmer440.com. White: Khmer good girls, virgin girls who will be virgins on their wedding nights
………. *** Male whales are all over the world; female whales tend to congregate round the equator, on the beaches in the Caribbean and in certain African nations. They go where the men have reputedly exaggerated manhoods. The male whales go to where the women are slight and tight. I don't think we'll be able to communicate meaningfully with whales, but there's an outside chance we might develop some system of symbols to communicate with dolphins (rather like has been performed with gorillas/chimpanzees and sign language). While travelling a whale does not dive deep, however, while feeding they may rich impressive depths. For example, sperm whales routinely can dive up to 1500 feet but it has been suggested that they can reach more than 10000 feet on occasion. They can get involved with life there, devouring it. They have a complex ‘social’ life. They
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Black: Working girls, Sex workers, ‘prostitutes’,’ hookers’, taxi-girls, bar-girls, et cetera Grey: Girls who have [sometimes through no fault of their own] ‘lost’ their ‘White girl’ status, but do not want to be ‘working girls’ White – These are in fact not hse @ all – they are indescribable in terms of their immaturity and purity. A young male virgin westerner of a similar age would be exponentially more experienced and debauched than this type. if one were to arrange a date, if this were possible with this type, you would have absolutely no common ground. The only chance you have is if she is western educated and has some idea where you re coming from. Once when taking a class of 19-22 year undergraduates one girl burst into tear
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
when we held a class discussion on what you did in your spare time. she replied “Nothing, I have never been outside my home in all my life, my parents send a car to take me to University and the man is there when I finish, they treat me like a baby, they will arrange a marriage for me next year...”
Grey – These girls are amorphous, and gravitate to situations and scenarios rather than be hit upon for sex per se. They typically haunt the hostess bars where paying barfine in Cambodia does not guarantee a long time. They tend to be attractive and many of them working in the bar have ethnic or barang boyfriends already. You must buy them drinks or barfine them as an intrinsic affair, a bit like hiring an escort without personal services. They are searching for a man who will take care of them and their responsibilities [family]. Unless there is a prospect of stipends being paid it is unlikely that they will go short time to a hotel with a customer. They are out to preserve their integrity; they are not a virgin which writes them off in traditional Khmer society.
Black – At worst you are picking them in day time beer bars where they can nip off conveniently for a pipe between servicing their tricks. Sure they will go long time or do GFE, but they will bring along their pipe and they will have to negotiate with mamasan or their ethnic boyfriend. They may not sleep well @ night, as their body clocks are set for all night hard action or pool playing. They will smoke cigarettes like hell and watch ethnic karaoke all night. They will likely be tattooed and pieced western rock chick style. They will care little for grooming. They may lay down laws about what they are prepared to do @ the time [fuck all if they are hungry for the pipe]. Regardless of their shortcomings they still attract more of their fair share of new and old punters alike for some reason. Their loud antics and unabashed way of communicating means that they ‘put out’ – most westerners like this, it’s the way it ‘should be’. They always hang in the freelance bars and can speak good bar English including the words ‘short time’, ‘fuck me’ and ‘baby’.
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But not completely, they can still have status because of their beauty. They can become Karaoke girls and maybe attract a rich Khmer sponsor. They are good for the foreigner as they are not as ‘gone’ as the blacks, who may have incurable pipe habits, but they speak English, understand something of the man and his needs for ‘social’ising in bars, and his interests sexually. It requires time and work to liaise with these girls. There are other grey girls who are working as waitresses and other services position in hotels etc. who also come under this category.
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They are not virgins because they were ‘bad’ girls outside of the bell curve of normal behaviours, typically, they were married, made pregnant and the boy fucked off, or often, they were raped. Some leave the home without telling parents as they know that they would be severely punished for letting such a thing happen.
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
influenced by and dependent on what this person knows about other, related categories." 68 These academics examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. How they have or lack control with it. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment.
X
………. ***
The ocean has long served as a metaphor for the unconscious, the unspoken or articulated. The approach recognises the complexity of the term 'interior' as it describes spatial differentiation of physical place and the psychological space of the unconscious. The approach recognises the complexity of the term 'interior' as it describes spatial differentiation of physical place and the psychological space of the unconscious. We must highlight the role of "invisibility" in the process by which classification orders human interaction. That which is implicit and covert must be made explicit and explicit, said, done, made apparent, and exposed to the light and to the world. "What a person learns about a new category is
Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. ………. *** "Sorting Things Out" has a new moral agenda, for each standard and category valorises some point of view and silences another. Is this progress or just stasis? Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit @ the expense of others. How
68
Heit, E. (1997) "Knowledge and Concept Learning", in Koen Lamberts, David R. Shanks (eds.) Knowledge, Concepts, and Categories Cambridge, Mass; MIT Press p. 7
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
these choices are made and how we think about that process is @ the moral and political core of this work. This is an empirical source for understanding building the information infrastructures of knowledge. How individuals sort perceived characteristics into categories and the consequences of those choices. Classifications like ‘monger’ and ‘whore’, ‘carer’ and ‘victim’ influences human behaviour towards standardising the physical world. We design structures - hierarchical trees, generally - to accommodate those interactions. We discount edge cases. The result is repeatable, consistent, and relatively easy to reconfigure on the fly. In a word: we are modular. XI Classification is the systematic categorisation of entities into meaningful content. "...this tree, and the idea of a single hierarchy of urban cores which is its parent, do not clarify the relations between art and city life. Think of the chair in the room, then the room which contains a chair, then a house in which there is a room, and a street which has a house, and a street in neighbourhood, then the neighbourhood in a district, in a city, county and nation, and region in the world, and… then you will understand context, design and category.
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They are merely born of the mania every simple-minded person has for putting things with the same name into the same basket." Real cites, of course, have evolved a certain amount of overlap between functions, spaces, and people; more small pieces loosely joined. Selecting how the physical world is sorted is a human element dependent upon one's judgement, yet it also allows us to separate undesirable qualities. Will there be a paradigm shift now that individual can control their own classification? Organise web pages in categories the general public will find useful. That classification is embedded in our political, ‘social’, linguistic and cognitive lives there can be no doubt. Nietzsche stated: “I mistrust all systemizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” Difference is what also defines us as similar, with an ability to share. “As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them.” This is a passage drawn from the classic essay on freedom On Liberty (1859) where James Stuart Mill, argued that there
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
could be a public benefit in allowing lifestyle experimentation. His reasoning was that, just as we distinguish truth from falsehood by the clash of opinion, so we might learn how to improve human lives by permitting a contest in lifestyles. A free market in ways of living, with the best way sustaining whilst the others died out. He did not expect such experiments to go on for ever. ‘It would be absurd,’ he said:
Zygmunt Bauman writing in Liquid Love that the quicksilver, skating-on-the-surface, and always-on-themove approach that many people have to both love and life, are like high-tech toys, upgradeable and disposable when they become obsolete.69
“to pretend that people ought to live as if nothing whatever had been known in the world before they came into it; as if experience had as yet done nothing towards showing that one mode of existence, or of conduct, is preferable to another.” Yeah, the things we desire - love, money, wisdom, power have not changed much since the civilised world began. Hse were popular then as now. Also men and women were searching out others with perfect forms, forms that suit them. Somewhere, somehow rationalisation set in, the jurisdiction is to make all equal even if it means violence and self-destruction. Political correctness is rational society gone mad. ………. *** Many men were seeking out women who had perfect butts. But it seems we now want more of them, quicker, and we want a bigger bang for the buck. This is the concern of
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Albert O. Hirschman is another, whom in Shifting Involvements also seeks to introduce “disappointment” into mainstream economic theory. “The world I am trying to understand,” he writes, “is one in which men think they want one thing and then upon getting it, find out to their dismay that they don’t want it nearly as much as they thought or don’t want it @ all and that something else, of which they were hardly aware, is what they really want.” 70 He asks: “Why does society oscillate between intense interests in public issues and almost total concentration on private goals?” People will focus on either private consumption or public action to satisfy needs until the predictable disappointments with the choice become too great, @ which point they will
69
Bauman, Z. (2003) Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds London: Polity 70
Albert O. Hirschman (2002) (20th Edition) Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action Princeton University Press
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
use "voice" or "exit" to move into the other arena. This is how I do it.
Quote: Holy Shit, HDDI! Wasn't that the emphasis of the Minority Report? Arresting the guy before the crime was committed?
Hey Johhnyb: You know wee are comin' to get you, when the legions of Pan rise and all that is legal today becomes illegal and all that is not becomes norm, the quotidian, the banal, everyday, mundane and the damn downright boring . . . . . Quote: Sex certainly came first, and while primal, it lacked contempt, since it was driven by base instinct. That's what I am sayin' tis a chicken or an egg that tis first on a fine mid-summer's night. Was it sex or was it pervertion in terms of how we see things now, today, after we have worked it all out what is best for others? I mean if everything was open, lawless, no restrictions would there be perversions?
If it ever comes to being able to tell what people are thinking then this could be. The contents of a persons hard drive is being equated with this. If a persons hard drive is their memory then P2P sharing networks are the collective conscious or unconscious. I read of one guy who was a serious porn merchant fiend. He harvested gigabytes of pics and vids from Limewire and Bearshare onto removable storage for later cataloguing. His PC was on 24/7 buzzing away full of hot stuff. This is definitely analogous to unconscious assimilation. Similar to how we may pick up subtle hints without conscious processing. Like knowing the answer to things we havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t ever directly studied. Conversely, cataloguing is a conscious structuring activity, yeah, isn't it? It is a task that requires attention, judgement, cataloguing and can be quite sophisticated. It makes library work a speciality. Truth was this guy had so much that he didn't have time to catalogue all his harvest in one night, in reality it would take weeks, months even. But such was his penchant for free available images he kept downloading. It was his hobby and his bounty - it was the promise of an Internet fully realised tons of free stuff just there for the grabbing.
cheers MYIAD
Unfortunately authorities came a-perusing, and whatever sophisticated or unsophisticated surveillance gear they had, they
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found in this big dark forest of stored media some dodgy pics. Kids. Now, the way it's worded is that you don't get nicked for just looking @ the pics and maybe masturbating yoslef into froth before embarking on rape and murder missions like you were a Herbsman. Well not per se. But rather, that you are perpetrating the heinous crime of rape in the comfort and safety, but not the privacy, of your own den.
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
protect kids from seeing it, grooming etc., and men who would froth over it.
cheers MYIAD
This comes through the idea of you subscribing/paying/downloading this material thus creating a demand, a market for this shyt. If you didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do these things it would disappear to wherever it came from before their was an Internet and warped innovators. If you subscribe/pay/download you are then a reason to create this shyt in the first place. If and when you do, you are involved in the crime that was originally perpetrated and is ongoing ad infinitum every time someone looks (even authorities?) But the penalty is the same, regardless of intentionality, jail and on the sex offenders register. I.E. The same as if you had done something to somebody in real life. His defence of "I didn't know what was one there" + "I destroyed anything I considered dodgy when I did catalogue" was certainly not accepted. "Ignorance of the nature of pics" is akin in these cases to "ignorance of the law is no excuse." Pics speak louder than philosophy. 100,000 pics of barralassed South American mulatoes don't negate a selected handful of 27 year old flat assed japs dressed as schoolgirls. I mean who takes the word of an [exposed] masturbator and porn enthusiast seriously? Wife, neighbors with kids, Judge, jury, women, old lady down the street, press? The very notion of pornography is reprehensible to these people, who seek to
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Chapter 3. Chasing the perfect object/subject I In Chasing the Perfect writer/designer Natalia Ilyin delivers her astute, incisive, and humorous observations on design and the world it has moulded. According to Ilyin, Modern design is based on deeply idealist notions, and its inherent perfectionism has dovetailed beautifully with our commodity-based economy's need to keep people itching so that they will buy things and keep the society chugging along. Plato came up with the original idea of perfect forms which exist on a more real basis than perceived forms. Be aware of this collusion, this silent pressure that a language of design based in perfectionism had brought to bear on how I developed as a person. Modernism, the guts of it, the strength of it, the egotistic beauty of it, carries with it effects we did not expect and fosters attitudes about ourselves and others that may have been dandy in a utopia, but do little good in our world. Why have we not changed this idea, moved on with our thinking? Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largely why we suffer, not just in Buddhist thought; we can never be that
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adverting family with their contrived perfect health, their airbrush beauty and white shiny teeth. We will always have burr compared to them, or @ least some bad smell or blemish will prevail. We sit and read while waiting for them to sort it out.
Lets get it clear to all my buds in the FBI, MI5, IJM, MPLA, UDA, IRA, CWCC, and all the other alphabety-spagetti. I am not advocating free kiddy porn to all ex-offenders. Dusty: Quote: sex came before the perversion.
This is what I wonder about. What was sex like when it was largely unregulated and not part of smorgasboard of obsessions and symbols that characterize the consumer culture we live in? Like when it was 'natural'. We can't fuckin answer that. All we can relate to is when we personally discovered it, in ourselves and others. And that is always personal and individual and yet secret and shared. What does sex mean as we develop and grow as intelligences, when sex becomes a debate, becomes part of this whole neuropolitical mishmash. More intelligent guys than me like Nossiw7 indicate that we have hardly evolved in terms of what we are 'like' with respect to our 'needs' in 100,000 years. But somehow we have built constructs and categories which continue to 'evolve'. one of the bug-bears is that we don't like violence and murder. Even though we are all Herbsmen JOhhnyb.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
It is frowned upon in civil society. We don't like rape, it is also frowned upon in civil society', we don't like wars, stealing, but sometimes we have to engage in them to preserve this civil society idea'.
Marcuse spoke of in One Dimensional Man. 71 He argued that "advanced industrial society" created false needs, which integrated individuals into the existing system of production and consumption via mass media, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes of thought. This results in a "one-dimensional" universe of thought and behaviour in which aptitude and ability for critical thought and oppositional behaviour withers away.
The unconscious mind works in ways which are definitely not PC, nor ‘social’ly acceptable to civil society. That's why Freud largely viewed it as an enemy to the 'superior' conscious rationale mind. Today you may flick over that 10 year old dressed her Britney outfit, then check her mom and see mishapen ass. You may consciously move away from the targets your unconscious mind registers. That is your power of will, of self-control and everything you can be proud and happy of. If you are disinterested consciously, and look bored, that does not mean you were or were not unconsciously. If interest did resister consciously you can go home and turn yourself in to the appropriate authorities, a few harmen down the local boozer with kids of their own, or flagellate or masturbate yoself raw. The dude with the hard drives stored somebody else's bad dream and got hammered for it. He never got to the point where he got let his 'superior' conscious mind do anything capable of a brownie point (no pun intended!) I read last week of a 15 year old in a city near me who had indulged in a day of smokin' dope and drinking with an eleven year old girl. They ended up having sex and she got pregnant out of it. Clear as day white trash stuff, but he was charged and put on the sexual offenders register! So what come first the perversion (which is in all of us now period) or sex. Still say the perversion. cheers
Consumption of a decent car, for instance, is more ‘social’ly worthy than consuming fresh young teen bodies in a socioeconomically depressed country. Even though you are still contributing to the home and foreign economy, ‘they’ – the holders and guardians of the ‘received view’ – want you to be ecstatic in consumptions of everything apart from sex.
MYIAD
II What defines our dreams as ‘obsolete’ and in need of upgrade comes from ‘social’ environment where "individualisation" is regiment and regnant. We are constantly bombarded with advertising claims that we should individuals ourselves through our consumption. But then this is not free, some things are held ‘social’ly as more acceptable then other things. This was what Herbert
This invariably means designers goods fashioned courtesy of scientist-like-elites hidden from public view in labs where the latest mad hat garments are produced using the finest materials. They are like much that is disproportionably paraded on media, ethnic minorities and homo. Anything that plays to the ‘others’, anything that winds the pizza eating, coke guzzling public up. This will never go out of fashion since you paid so much for it. But it does. Sex on the other hand, following the notion of hippy ‘free love’ is
71
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Marcus, H. (1964) One Dimensional Man Boston: Beacon
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
infinitely distributed in its creativity, but again homogenised versions are depicted in the ‘instruction manuals’ of hardcore pornos. They give rise to Greek like visions of South East Asia and other heat seeking zones as temples of promise, temples of promiscuity. Why not?
humans, who are capable of double think and playing devil’s advocate.72
When this is so, then ‘found’ relationships are mixed blessings. They can vacillate between being gratifying and horrifying, between dependency and fondness. Partners are viewed as anywhere between clingy and parasitic and detached and/or abusive. Within relationships things become even more complex psycho dynamically, if we take on board that people may project or transfer emotions garnered from our parents and applied within our interactions with partners. Bruno Latour's claim is that the word '‘social’', as used by ‘social’ Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer, maybe “pedo” and “sex-tourist” are the same? The ‘social’ is often leveraged as an excuse to punish one group of human primates by another. Like law enforcement and security agencies are supposed to be whiter than white [whiter than the prisoner in the white room in Saigon] but they invariably have some bad seeds in there, and their fair share of typical, cynical
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"Even informal observation of everyday categorization reveals that many objects fit into a number of categories."73 When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stabilised state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. A person for instance performs multiple roles in life, but on occasion, depending who wants to know his identity and his behaviour and its attributes coalesce on singular meanings, like ‘father’, ‘work friend’, ‘church member’, ‘paedophile’, ‘writer’, customer... and so on. But Latour also finds the word ‘‘social’’ used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as 'wooden' or 'steely'. Why not? Rather than simply 72
Doublethink - the act of holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously, fervently believing both, despite being notionally aware of their incompatibility – rather, being wilfully unaware. (See, Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen EightyFour. London: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd pp 35, 176-177) 73 Murphy, G.L. and Lassaline, M.E. (1997) "Hierarchical Structure in Concepts and the Basic Level of Categorization" Koen Lamberts, David R. Shanks (eds.) Knowledge, Concepts, and Categories Cambridge, Mass; MIT Press p. 93
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
indicating what is already assembled, it is now used in a way that assumes about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling; and a type of material, distinct from others.
While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the ‘social’ sciences mean that they are largely no longer so.
Latour then shows why 'the ‘social’' cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a '‘social’ explanations' of other states of affairs. This is not difficult to grasp, if you stretch your mind which should be if you reached this far already, meanings and intentions and identities only coalesce when someone thinks or does something, it may be learned from others, adopted and mimicked in some way, but it is performed with unique intentions in unique and particular situations and under unique circumstances. WOW! That speaks loads to me. It’s the difference between go-go dancers acting like Madonna, Beyoncé or Britney and them being them and everything that supports them acting in that way. It is the difference between a new hooker being tutored in how to deal with farangs and how she does accomplish it in practice, it is the difference between a new entrant whoremonger taking what he read on the Internet forum and applying it while on the ground’.
At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the ‘social’ domain.
III There is no shortage of private individuals seeking advice from the columns of tired repetitive tabloid agony aunts. Aren’t they hellish? And these hse get paid for it as well. This is surely worse than other hse getting paid in Academic places for dreaming up derogatory metaphors for men who hang with hse. Well its all part of the same conspiracy [if you are paranoid] or miscarriage and misuse of public funds [if you are not] there is. But then you make your own bed... it wouldn’t surprise me that like wars and other shyt that absorbs the public mind and lend us the illusion we need controlled that agony aunts write their own problem letter to themselves. Dear Ann Mavers
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My Husband is, she says, he did, I want, you know, I need you to tell me Dear Scared by demands for Anal Its just butt play, its natural, let you husband, but make it clear, it is not a women’s, he needs to, you can, I hope this is clear to all of you that are reading this, yada yada Winslow Wong is a relatively good one, although why on earth you’d want to come clean to a by-speckled geek who won’t smoke a joint I will never ever know. Meanwhile other human behaviour experts waste no time in putting across their normative views or @ best a logical analysis of the data given and based upon what is best for those feeling down or under pressure. IV While relationships are as individual as those who comprise them, particular fears and concerns seem to precipitate and dominate when the subject is broached.
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This lends ‘relationship’ an impression of abject simplicity; it lends it impressions of reduced set of behaviours, attitudes and emotions. Stereotypes abound, you know them - 2.3. kids, childless couples, each carries with implications of what we might consider normal and what we must build and how we might approach these people with products and services and as potential friends. We follow fashion. Why are the questions sought and the answers found? Education. We become part of cultures of conformity - religious communities, military groups, sports teams - and take on corporate identity... Most of the time, the two cohabit - though @ different levels of consciousness. In Bauman’s ‘liquid modern’ setting of life, relationships are perhaps the most common, acute incarnations of ambivalence. This is, we may argue, why they are firmly placed @ the top of people's life agendas. The currently fashionable expression is surfing, we surf, we are surfing everywhere, we are surfing from one job to another, one bargirl to another, from one, today's geographical place to another, from one set of connections, one network to another, even the idea of network is like that because network, you know, connects the two notions, connecting and disconnecting. You are guaranteed to be able to disconnect @ any moment.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
We live in an emerging culture in which we want to keep all our options open all the time? Humans who find themselves in such circumstances may turn to expert counsellors.
Marriage and partnerships are institutions and, and ways of living that don't have to be the same way they were in the 1950s. The important aspect is the promise to stay together, to work problems through. There are benefits that can be acquired for the individuals in a marriage, for their children and for society as well. This might sound like an oldfashioned plea for the return of traditional ‘social’ mores. But single living raises broader questions about the viability of ‘social’ networks and an institution is surely right. Our ambivalence about relationships is a problem for everybody, whether we are in relationships or not. If we place a high premium on individuals being self contained and independent of other people, we ignore the ‘social’ reality that our lives are intertwined.
What they hope to hear from the counsellors is how to square the circle: to have the cake and eat it, to cream off the sweet delights of relationship while omitting its bitter and tougher bits; how to force relationship to empower without disempowering, enable without disabling, fulfil without burdening. ………. *** The experts battle but are willing to oblige, confident the demand for their advice will never run dry since no amount of counselling could ever turn a circle into a square. Grateful recipients of advice browse through relationship columns of glossy monthlies, weeklies and dailies to hear what they have been wishing to hear from people "in the know", since they were too timid or ashamed to ask about it in their own name; to pry into the doings and goings on of others like them and draw whatever comfort they can from the knowledge (endorsed by experts) that they are not alone in their lonely efforts to cope. V
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The subject is human relationships, and the central characters are men and women - our contemporaries despairing @ being abandoned to their own wits, feeling easily disposable, yearning for the security of togetherness and for a helping hand to count on in a moment of trouble, and so desperate to relate. Yet they are wary of the state of being related, and especially of being related for good, since they fear that such a state may bring burdens they feel neither able nor willing to bear. It could be viewed that this corrosion of personal relationships mirrors the corrosion our ‘social’ relationships. Just as we are building gated communities, so we are
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
developing gated individuals. People might tell dating agencies that they require relationships with greater intimacy. But they also view autonomy as keeping other people @ arm's length.
Often people say the barworld in Thailand is institutionalised, much more than say, Cambodia. In effect it is over 30-40 years old in Thailand. Whereas barworlds, western style barworlds, are only some 17 years old [if that] in Cambodia. This means that certain customs, etiquettes and practices will be different.
Fifty years ago, our fathers, our grandfathers, thought also about happiness, they wanted happiness as much as we do, but they thought that the road to happiness is reached by making society a better, more hospitable place for human beings. Now it is the question on the contrary, 'I want more space', that's the war cry which you hear most. And 'I want more space' means 'you keep away'. One would say that in the old system, there was a lot of security and little freedom. Now we have another system, it means we have a lot of freedom and very little security. We haven't simply swapped security for freedom. Insecurity has led to a greater disengagement from other people, in both our ‘social’ and personal lives. The singleton society expresses the greater possibilities of freedom and individual choice, particularly for women. Barry Schwartz, in his The Paradox of Choice views that “unlimited choice” can “produce genuine suffering.” And this loop can act to demotivate choice, leading to a narrowing of what we mean by freedom, and of the greater fragmentation and atomisation of society. Isn't it time we began to address the consequences? ………. ***
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VI Picasso once said; “people want to find a "meaning" in everything and everyone. That's the disease of our age, an age that is anything but practical but believes itself to be more practical than any other age.” In an information age we don’t want to ‘work’ @ relationships anymore, not on a physical level, we want classified and to classify, list or be listed, matched and mismatched, and ordered by a higher intelligences according to tastes and whims, idiosyncrasies and bad habits that irk. We want to know periodicities and regularities, sustainability, durability all these and more, star signs, good and bad planets and their alignments, psychoand demo- graphics, ambitions, Machiavellian traits, baggage, how many love bites your arse could encompass, tattoos? ………. ***
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Ability to make and keep appointments, to keep your word. Chastity, monogamy, faithfulness, devotion? We want the burr removed from sociability, we want to waste less time on meaningless dates, we want our interactions debugged, and we want the process of courtship and seduction streamlined, agile and lean. We want to ‘fit’ and parse as deeply and as quickly as possible. We don’t want an incremental slow passage of unfolding where we learns to love through shared experience. We want it in your face and right here, right now, on-demand.
we still want the whiff of mystery, the hint of allure, the power of charisma and the chance of intrigue. We want to be excited and engaged and curious. We want to feel this alive.
We want GOrinNOsho – the new intelligent agent technology which can craft alternative realities for ourselves online. Garner partners and keep those we already possess entertained and tended. We want to see what we would be like if we extended aspects of our ego and personality digitally. What we are ‘like’ enhanced, say more relaxed, funnier etc. We want to buy a personality change like we buy a new car or upgrade our RAM, or buy a plane ticket for South East Asia. We also want to easily dispose of these relationships, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, in an environmentally friendly way, leaving no bad feelings and no bad tastes or smells. But those of us who are childless harpies or smug marrieds, yes we still want fit, young hard bodies, tanned or otherwise, we still want difference. Many of us don’t want it anaesthetic and clinical;
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Is this possible home alone and ‘independent’? VII Such changes will clearly have an enormous impact upon both our physical and ‘social’ landscape. The danger of the notion of a society as a singleton society is that we deny ourselves the opportunity to experiment with those relationships and those encounters. And instead are preequipped with a rationale of caution. But perhaps the biggest change will be in the way we think of what constitutes a society or a community. What is driving the singleton society, in other words, is not just the greater personal and economic freedom that many people now enjoy, garden centres, designer kitchens. Home owning and sculpting. No, it is also the greater fragmentation of society and the breaking down of wider ‘social’ networks. This leads to a paradox.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
This might seem sensible advice: don't turn real relationships into fantasies. Leave that to Sue Tyler and her like. But it also fits in with the zeitgeist: Don't expect too much, don't risk too much emotional investment, keep all your options open.
Some people argue that friendships - you know these people who live alone have wonderful networks - but I think the recent, recent research shows that that's not the case in, in most instances. What do you think the consequences are for the ‘social’ fabric? Will it split schizophrenically?
The fantasy of the perfect partner often goes on and on and hand in hand with an instrumental, almost business-like approach to relationships. People expect perfection on a plate. But they don't want to invest too much in a relationship in case they get insufficient returns. It does not take long for the fantasy script of an emerging relationship to be confronted with a differing reality. “You are not acting like my dream lover.” “That is no way to be.” “You prefer football to talking with me?” “You should have asked me to move in with you.” Initially, the desire to remain within the love fantasy may blind one to “reality.”
………. ***
So people look for relationships based on emotional bonding. People seem frightened by emotional attachments, often viewing them as a prison. This paradox is personified by indefatigable Bridget Jones - a woman who is free and independent and yet frustrated that she cannot find the relationship she is looking for. If they're choosing to live alone, every time they break up and live alone, they're breaking networks.
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When I read lifestyle pages in newspaper supplements on the plane I get the impression that some people – the “50somethings are the new 30-somethings” in another generation it will be “60-somethings are the new 20somethings” - think it's cool to be single today and the single lifestyle and all the culture and media stuff that goes with it seems attractive. So do people worry about being single any more? There have always, of course, in every society, in every age, been people living by themselves widowers, divorcees, those whom we used to call spinsters. But they were always a minority. They were in some way odd, not whole, not properly fitted in, to be treated with condescension or pity. Even if they were single by force of circumstance rather than by choice they were viewed in this rigid and often uncharitable way. Yes it is not so long ago there was stigma attached to divorce. Not only Catholics but a wide gamut of religions wondered its reasons and yet couldn’t see beyond selfishness to the altruism of it all.
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………. ***
fulfilling jobs, while men put a higher priority on high wages @ whatever cost.
One of the benefits about progress from a physically labour intensive society to an information-based one is that we now live in a much more pleasure-seeking culture based upon indulgence of the senses and because we don't know what tomorrow's going to bring. We have no choice but to live in the now and accord with what amounts to mere fragments of the plateaux, comfort, securities and images which supported us and our relationships in the yesteryear. In the relatively recent past, a couple would be living together, the man working until he was 65, and then he would be the deceased in two or three years leaving the wife as widower. ‘Men’’s legal retirement age is five years older than women’s, encouraging them to work longer careers, which uplifts their average earnings. ‘Women’ get far more extensive parental leave than men, encouraging career breaks and limiting their lifetime work experience, thus depressing their average wages. On average, each week, men work nearly twice as many hours in paid employment as women, building up more experience in their careers, which in a meritocracy would be reflected in greater pay. In addition, surveys suggest that women opt for more ‘social’ly rewarding or emotionally
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Policies that specifically favour women @ the expense of men are not only unfair, but by undermining meritocracy they undermine the efficiency of the labour market. What's different today is that which was marginal has become mainstream, and this is true for entire lifestyles. Starting as a reaction to the dominant ideology, it has become the dominant ideology. It defines the terms and boundaries of any national debate. Anything that is not PC is automatically controversial. Consider the woman’s perspective. For the first time in history, they can be economically independent and owning properties. As recent as the 1960s a man had to sign a guarantee for a mortgage if you were a woman. Living alone and living with a partner is akin to getting on and off a bus, it's not a permanent status, so the future lifestyle will be characterised by a period where one is living with a partner, then followed by living alone, then followed by living with another partner, and so on, and to me this is an mark of, of a far more liberated culture, a more democratic culture and one which is much more preferable than in the past, when men and women were putting up with each other, living together, but quite literally loathed each other.
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They supplanted love and care and co-operation with contempt. As Pink Floyd has it: “Hot air for the cool breeze.”
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recreational relationships formed and with recreational sex. This project has never worked.
them
Since there is less need for women to enter relationships for economic reasons, many people, especially many women, have greater choice as to how they live. ‘Men’ hit heatseeker zones and are chastised for it. They should chastise themselves and atone. They didn’t cry out earlier.
There is, for instance, grave concern over domestic violence, begging first with physical and moving ever deeper into psychological domains, and perpetrated by men against women. Criticising your wives household expenditure or her apparel now classifies as psychic abuse. Grounds for a breakup, along with a man losing half his income if she isn’t earning more than him.
VIII
Then there is the real heartstring pullers, sexual and the physical, mental and sexual abuse of children, again mainly by males.
What is the form of the perfect 21st century relationship? Typically they make the same points. This is due more to the limits of language and our abilities to combine meanings for many abstract and some concrete object, relationships and places than anything else. After all the meanings of relationships are subjective, whereas the behavioural and economic aspects can be realised and accounted for objectively. They used to be tethered by geography and ‘social’ status. You wander in some beautiful region of province and it is not by chance that local men and women were teamed and paired up. All over old parts of the world like Europe, you find pockets of almost interbreeding. But then urbanisation came about, and new forms of ‘leisurely’
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………. *** Political correctness started as a study of cultural Marxism in Germany in the 1920s, and was adopted by the 1960s counter culture, eager to promote tolerance and alternatives to the conservative values of the time. Starting as a reaction to the dominant ideology, it has become the dominant ideology. It defines the terms and parameters of any national debate. Today, anything that is not PC is automatically controversial. The notion of a perfect partner could be realised in the muliplitious discourse which surrounds the
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vague yet ideal notion of the ‘perfect partner’ – the elusive holy grail of a lifetime’s searching and finding.
values and my outlook, and I'm looking for a permanent relationship.”
The shear numbers of people involved with Internet dating and travelling as single men to South East Asia could be a ‘social’ scientist’s wet dream. The dearth of personal data and information One could imagine data mining such a rich dataset to clarify what the ‘perfect partner’ was. 30 000 members signed up to her site, Love and Friends.com. Other sites boast up to a million members.
In the age of six degrees of separation, everybody's looking for the quality of the emotional connection much more now than they would have done in the old days. Then I think they do look for something that is romantic in the sense of it being about tenderness, emotional tenderness, being a best friend and a lover. Today we want - the best of all possible worlds.
Name Nut Dao Age: 21 years Occupation: Professional Callgirl Likes: Eating, Diamonds & Jewels, Cash Money Dis-Likes: Mean People with Bad Tempers, Cheap People.
That our culture seems fixated by questions of relationships and lifestyles tells a different story. Tell me what you are obsessively thinking about and I will tell you what you are afraid of, what creates the most awesome difficulties in your life and what you need most energy to overcome, or even to face up to.
Is this a humanising or dehumanising experience? They are all lined up in an Internet café as they go through website after website of photos and self descriptions and the whole thing is becoming, I think, rather commoditised, and that is the downside of the Internet dating agency business. Contrast this with: “SWF wants to meet someone who is independent, who's curious, who's playful, who shares all my
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………. *** In this post-modern world of relationships between people, and between people and things, and between people because of communication and extended possibilities of travel. It is a question of a certain deregulation of the environment in which we manage. There are no hard and fast rules; there are no lasting principles of action, and tussling in this net of contradictory precepts.
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On the one hand the need of relationship because I must have some support, I can't be alone, I have to safeguard myself, and I need a lifejacket in this turbulent sea. On the other hand, the fear that once I get it, that I am finished. My freedom is over and I won't be able to properly react to the new opportunities, new chances, and so on. And there's the rub. The same ‘social’ changes that are leading to the singleton society are creating a yearning for durable relationships - but also make us worry that such relationships will undermine the very freedoms we hope single living will bring. There's a strange combination @ the moment of this high ideal of what should be achieved through relationships and the sense of fulfilment that we demand @ any present moment, but @ the same time low expectations of achieving that. And there is also a cautious approach and a fearful approach to getting involved in the work of intimacy. The talk about single living providing new kinds of freedoms misses the point. The problem emerges in the way in which we as society make sense of the increasing number of single people. There's a danger in the way we make sense of it that we redefine what freedom means. Increasingly freedom is understood as freedom from other people. Rather than the freedom to do things which might well mean that we need
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to be involved with other people. I mean does a prisoner in a white room with white noise invading his skull ever think like this. ………. *** Re-defining freedom which had happened through discussing the singleton is something that is a cause of concern. We may be starting to have a sort of assumption that freedom means a freedom from emotional entanglements that necessarily go along with fulfilling relationships.
IX Both men and women in various kinds of relationships have developed ideas about relationships which are becoming increasingly impossible to meet. The qualities that people are looking for are essentially, firstly, the type of intimacy often that children have with their parents and particularly with their mothers, so what
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
we're looking for is a curious thing. We want to return to the kinds of intimate relationships which we had, or we think we had or we would like to have had when we were children, but @ the same time we want to achieve that intimacy within the context of greater autonomy and greater independence. Now there's clearly a conflict here between these two aspects of living, it's very, very difficult to meet their independent needs, but of course we're driven, all of us, by the need for intimacy.
enjoyment and satisfaction, and when they no longer do so, they move on to the next photo in the dating agency folder.
The kinds of intimacy to which we aspire have changed over the last fifty, hundred years. I think we're looking for, for example, much higher degrees of sexual satisfaction than we used to, people aren't content any longer to live in relationships in which they don’t find sexual satisfaction, in which they don't find long term romance. But perhaps the conflict between a need for greater autonomy, on the one hand, and a childlike intimacy, on the other, is more seeming than real. What a child seeks from its parents is total reassurance and comfort - for its every need to be catered to. Children may be naïve or innocent - but they are also selfish and demanding. And that's exactly what our 'hedonistic, enjoy, enjoy' culture seems to be fostering an almost child-like selfishness in our assessment of relationships. Relationships exist to provide people with
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………. *** Intimacy as we think of it in modern western societies is no longer just about sharing physical space or ‘social’ experience with other people, it's about being able to share their inner lives, their thoughts and their feelings, and to do that you need language, and more especially a particular way of using language, where you're continually revealing to other people what your innermost thoughts and feelings are, and that has changed what we value in communication, so if you look @ advice literature, even as recently as the 1950s, you'll find, for instance, that it contains prohibitions on talking about yourself, that's immodest, rude, not of interest to other people. Today in advice books on communication, the focus is all about you, talking about yourself. So relationships today then possess a therapeutic character? I think the talking that you're supposed to engage in possesses a highly therapeutic character. I think that one of the places we got this notion of intimacy as dependent on a particular sort of talking is from popularising what originated as therapeutic techniques that were used in clinics by psychiatrists and psychologists. Where someone says
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
honestly what they are feeling, where they use the techniques of, say, assertiveness training instead of hiding their feelings or stating them indirectly, they'll say to someone 'I feel hurt when you talk to me in that way or when you do this, or that', so it's 'I' statements, emotional self disclosure where you lay bare experiences, thoughts or feelings that in polite society you might be encouraged to hide.
apart from body language, viewed from a hatch, or subtle movements while sleeping or being hosed down with freezing water. People had brought this psychonaut food for many years. They wished to sustain him on his inward journey, his forced exile into uncharted and unobservable territories. They brought disease and illness, bacteria and viruses into this clinical, anaesthetic environment named the holding cell. It is possible to withhold communication with the right training or conviction, or is it?
………. *** That's the talk that is thought of as leading to intimacy. And I do think that's a misguided belief. That relationships break down not because of material problems or incompatibilities of a non-linguistic sort but because people couldn't communicate. The Japanese man and his ‘wife’ rarely ‘talked’.
A whole 'relationship industry' has sprung up to tell us not just that it's good to talk but good to talk about ourselves. Obsessively. Even tough guy Tony Soprano wants to bare his soul. And as our ideas of intimacy have changed, so it has come to mean not just a greater honesty about our emotions but also making public what once might have been thought of as private feelings. ………. ***
X All communication is hypnosis, all communication is ecstasy, all communication is roll play, all words and letters are rehashed symbols that you learned ‘social’ly. All behaviours you discovered ‘social’ly as well. A prisoner held in a bleached white illuminated room devoid of features, become the man without qualities - he didn’t communicate
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Do we want to turn back the clock to a time where there were experiences or feelings that just couldn't be talked about in public debate @ all? Is that why we are in South East Asia? However, the excess of it, the constant urgings to emote in public, may cheapen the private, the more private and personal expressions of emotion. You only have to watch daytime television chat shows to realise that
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
emotional self-disclosure may not necessarily be a good thing. I think they also make people feel anxious and insecure about whether they're doing it right in their private life.
voluntary organisations or even sort of join clubs like they used to.
I think there's vast anxiety. It should not surprise us, then, the latest fad is speed dating. Several hundred strangers meet in a room and have a maximum of three minutes to talk to someone, and decide whether they want to hook up with them. People who live alone, even if they're living alone just a portion of their lives, aren't as integrated into the community and they aren't able to, to survey the neighbourhood as well. There was one study in the US on neighbourhoods where it said just living in a neighbourhood that had a high rate of single people living there, controlling the level of income, even if you control for that, just living among a bunch of single people meant the crime rate was going to be higher, much more likely to become a victim of crime. If you're living alone, it's just a matter of you do have to go out and look for people but unfortunately, these kind of people don't usually, you know, volunteer, they don't usually involve themselves in organisations like churches or
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Nowadays it's all individual; they go on, they go on more holidays, they go away for the weekend and they go to clubs, which is fine for a point in your life, but it doesn't make for a strong community. They're detached from their feelings and their deepest wishes. They lack empathy. They lack self-knowledge. People are vilified if they publicly diverge from accepted beliefs, sacked or even investigated by police for crimes against received wisdom. An Internet post lent most insight here. I don't have a problem with western women and men al la $ deluding themselves that they are having a pleasant romantic time. The locals meanwhile rarely delude themselves, but rather make the barangs 'natural' [natural ATMs?]. The point he flags up here is there is not an industry in defining women in the same way as men. It not just about sex, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s about attitude. For instance 'vagina wielding postocolonalists' sounds about as fucking ridiculous as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;penis wielding postcolonialistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; as descriptors for westerners.
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Groups like Equality Now merely exist to the commercial sexual exploitation of women in its campaign against sex tourism and trafficking. I mean would such an outfit be funded to tackle women. Or are the men on kens cousin’s Island going to be figured as just exploiting in another way?
Few items are more powerful in a public debate than publicly acknowledged victim status, and the rewards for public victimhood are so great there is a large incentive for people to try to portray themselves as victims. Thus the victim class grows bigger as more try to crowd into it, and others copy their tactics. Little tiny Asian women being preyed upon by big nasty economically superior foreigners is surely a target fro those who wish to apply the sticker ‘victim’. But there are so many others. The must stand in line in order of priority. ………. *** At the beginning of twenty-first century in Britain, the obese, Christians, smokers and fox-hunters are campaigning to achieve publicly recognised victimhood, with the hunters trying unsuccessfully to turn PC on its head by declaring they are the real victims of ‘prejudice’. Advances in medical
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diagnosis have meant that boys who would previously have been considered naughty and in need of discipline are now considered victims of Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder in need of support and treatment. XI People believe that which makes them feel virtuous, not that which makes them feel bad. Most people have an intense need to believe they are on the side of virtue, and can do that by espousing beliefs publicly acknowledged as virtuous. Nothing makes multi-millionaire Hollywood actors who live in Beverley Hills feel better about themselves than campaigning against world poverty by demanding more aid from the West (rather than holding African leaders responsible for the plight of their people by demanding better governance). All this ‘exploiting’ all the time. What about nihilism? Well sexual nihilism. I saw a program the other night which aimed to make a women feel more sexy. This 35 year old hadn’t had a boyfriend for 9 years! It made me remember a different side to swinging London. There have always, of course, in every society, in every age, been people living by themselves - widowers, divorcees, spinsters, they were
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always a minority, and most were single by force of circumstance rather than by choice. ………. *** But my experience of London included contact with an excessive amount of single, one could argue, disenfranchised, women and guys that never got any and just habituated themselves into this way. Surely our ambivalence about relationships is a problem for everybody, whether we are in relationships or not. Because anything that encourages us to hold back or to distance ourselves from other people is a problem. Anything that encourages us to take a cautious approach to emotional entanglements and to see emotional entanglements as a threat to our sense of self, will lead to a society that's resolved to isolation. The phenomena of people living alone is rising. Britain is undergoing a dramatic shift towards solitary living perhaps indicative of wider first world trends. The proportion of one-person households almost doubled between 1971 and 2001, rising from 17 per cent of our homes to 31 per cent. By 2010 that proportion is expected to increase to 40 per cent, making the single-person home easily the most common household unit.
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It is often dressed up as ‘choice’ usually by pocket book sociologists with quotes like “my women clients, in particular, enjoy being single, their challenging jobs are more important to them than settling down. It's probably the first time in history that women have been able to buy property and to live alone without needing to bring up a family.” One study found that being able to do what they wanted when they wanted was what singletons (76%) liked most about being single. Wasn’t that the bachelor mantra once? Neutered, selfish, non-interactive, asexual, the 'me, me, me' group. The Oxford Institute of Ageing is optimistic about singleton women who are showing signs of successfully living alone. But they have identified a problem group, in the lone men aged 50-plus. They are more likely to suffer health problems such as alcoholism and depression. Increasingly it's women who are provoking divorce and choosing not to remarry or necessarily to cohabit (they become cougars or fuck off to the Caribbean or Gambia with the $) and, for the men left behind, who find fewer natural opportunities for making new relationships, that can mean less ‘social’ interaction. This is backed up by the UK in the Government's forecast for Britain in 2010. The report's author concluded that single women in their thirties and forties had the well-developed ‘social’ networks and confidence that men lacked.
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‘Men’ defined themselves more by their work, and relaxed with too much unhealthy food and drink, a recipe for isolation and loneliness. A current University of Edinburgh study on "solo living", run by the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, has found that singles drink more, worry more, work longer hours and skip too many meals. Between 25 and 44, men are twice as likely as women to be living alone. The travel company Solo's Holidays enjoyed 15 per cent growth last year by serving 16,000 singles not necessarily looking for partners.
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
must have been a serious drag. In Vignelli's quest for protoStudio 54 hipness, workaday utility is clearly a secondary consideration. The faults of such an exaggeration are obvious, and the geographic map does have some going for it - it gives a read on the reach of the system as a whole, it’s easy to see how the judicious introduction of deliberate distortion can be used to improve legibility - in visual systems, anyway. Not merely the relationships between lines, but a certain sense of the psychological (as opposed to actual) distance between central and outlying stations. ………. ***
‘Men’ and women in various kinds of relationships have developed ideas about relationships that are becoming increasingly impossible to meet.
XII Maps and other immediate trappings separated generals in the First World War and others from the blood and guts and stench, the visceral elements of trench reality. Schematisation can easily be taken too far: compare ‘laws were meant to broken’, so heavily graphically treated that using the Internet to find one's way underneath Fun City
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If maps confused people and distanced them from the territory then so did statistics. Doing my Ph.D. in a Psychology Dept. that prided itself on its experimental credentials gave me an insight into what generates this brand of knowledge. A little design and observation bound to a massive amount of time and mental energy manipulating the numbers to make the data ‘fit’. Generals observed that it was easier to defeat one army of 50,000 men, followed by another army of 50,000 men than it was to beat a single force of 100,000 men. The first principle of any successful military, or diplomatic, mission is to divide and conquer. This is reductionism, breaking down behavioural or mental phenomena into manageable meaningless units. In similar fashion to how news production and news editing
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
compresses and homogenises realties, how it sanitises whilst normalises horror and world conflict through this homogenisation, it simultaneously decontextualises ideologies and people from space and place. Its plots and accounts pale against the richness and densities of reality TV and fictional soaps. Statistics and stock market prices provide ever more insulating layers between government from whom it represents and investors from the dirt and grime of labour – even if it is a trendy IDEO ‘idea laboratory’.74
Always staying open to learn is humility and Shoshin, beginner's mind. One of the basic concepts of Aikido is nonresistance. Rather than meet force with force, accept, enter, and blend with intent and movement. Rigidity and resistance, masked as strength, is always the sign of weakness and fear. A closed mind cannot learn. Shoshin, beginner's mind, is receptive and open to learn. To stop learning, focus on what you already know. To keep perpetually learning, focus on excitement and anticipation of what mysteries you have yet to discover. "Look upon the evening as the death of the day; and upon the morning as the birth of all things. Let every moment renew your vision. The wise man is he who constantly wonders afresh." 75
It’s all about end, end results, lust for result, packaging, orgasm in the right place, right time. It’s checking the football scores without watching the game, reading the stats instead of experiencing the thrill of action. This is in stark difference to the controlled and the controlling world of the adult, where any locus of control taken away, by age or infirmity. Loss of earnings, or status, or changes in cultural mores is seen as nothing less than an abomination, almost an insult. We hunger for sensation, for many there is nothing more oppressive and boring than the thought of going back to the uncarved block. Next.
74
David M. Kelley, 45, IDEO's founder. Kelley describes IDEO as "a living laboratory of the workplace." The company "is in a state of perpetual experimentation," he says. "We're constantly trying new ideas in our projects, our work space, even our culture." [source: http://www.fastcompany.com/online/02/ideosec.html]
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But today the danger is over-complexity and sensory overload. This is especially true in urban areas and perhaps epitomised by the commuter. Their head bowed in a newspaper, framed in a cacophony of people adorned in their various attire for work, or for play, themselves framed by advertising panels, train route maps, and the design of the vehicle, through square windows like TV and computer screens. Outside a blur and a litany of station signs and urban the Grafiti of mind, legal and otherwise, flash by. They blink their meanings, busting through with sisomo: the new term for sight, sound, and motion. 75
Gide, A. (1969) 'Fruits of the Earth' ('Les Nourritures Terrestres'. London: Peter Pauper Press
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………. ***
I have a map of Phnom Penh. It is dotted with locations where I can find hse and good coffee, Viagra and Internet. I can share this map on Google earth with my monger friends. XIII Those who fear ‘social’ atomisation do not view an ultra connected world of equals as equating to the egalitarian morals of a world wide web as an emergent phenomenon, derived from the good will and consensus to create an independent and individualised space. This second, much more pensive group is aware that technologies are built according to pre-existing views of ‘social’ norms and ethics, pre-existing ideological stances which largely serve as the base model, or @ least the departure point, for the perceived human element in systems operations and development. So building a ‘social’ networking platform not only presents something of value to users and subscribers, but also render vast opportunities for surveillance or even simple consumer research. It also carries implications such as making the links and bonds weaker in a human sense. It may render, more ominously and covertly, divided and atomised individuals as subjects of possible indoctrination. Experiencing something,
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and experiencing it with others, has long been a factor of ‘social’isation in a broadcast media age. While this model is changing, an interest in music concerts protests regarding various issues and visits to the beach are not. ………. *** Divide and conquer, divide and conquer invariably means narrowing definitions of the perceived enemy, neutralising or befriending potential enemies, and resolving, or alleviating wherever possible, extraneous conflicts that is lending support or justification to the principal enemy. Thus the wise general would attack with the aim of dividing the enemy army into two forces and then mop up one after the other. They see a fragmented and targeted world of ‘users’, predicated upon particular characteristics over others, and open to attack from hackers and spammers, those nasties who may in fact work for the companies who stand to profit from the sale of anti-spy ware, virus and Trojan software. Media and applications software companies may also have an interest in new forms of debilitating virus that switches one onto the bone fide bought product opposed to one downloaded via peer-to-peer networks.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
XIV
nearby, landmarks, tips from experienced and regular travellers or those who stay there.
Those that come to realise this can use their browsers in a different way, and seeking out partners through the increasing number of Internet sites, they may come to see that other qualities are sought. This is perhaps where numerous conundrums centred around choice rear their heads. According to Barry Schwartz, in The Paradox of Choice choice can be “de-motivating.” Whether this is factual or not is an aside, but one reduces their chances putting up descriptors of themselves as ‘master seeking slave for coarse, hard, aggressive forced anal’. Even though there are legions of women seeking men, this reduces significantly the number of women one may attract and finally get the chance to carry out this fantasy in real life. Hey may be more likely to be those who write to murderers, those who ‘love a thug’ or those masochists that simply love pain. They may feel let down when they discover that you are ‘really’ a kind man, polite and into masturbating more than doing anything with a human being. Databases are sorting them out, their characteristics and descriptions, according to a homogenised, clinical and sterile logic or astrology – “what’s your sign baby?” It is all EU and FDA approved and regulated. This is ‘wasteland’. In comparison we have these chaotic trips to third world countries with unstable governments, socio-economic conditions, and quaint corrupt police, exotic food available
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………. *** Many people may wince @ this statement. This is because the received view has it the [predominantly] middle age diasporas of men from the first to the second and third worlds, travelling round the world seeking encounters with young Asian, Latina or Eastern European prostitutes is an affliction of globalisation. It is a sick cliché to some, disgusting and reprehensible to others. Entire careers are built from it, and it is not only those women who serve as ‘sex workers’, but also those who seek to free them ideologically, politically and under auspices of ‘humanitarianism’. But the overall story of why this is, and what happens within the processes and terms of engagement are far from clear and easily understood. There are rational reasons, political reasons even, why this behaviour should be frowned upon, but there is also something under the bonnet, something to do with the old bugbears of voluntarism and determinism. Key here is that men and women do not have a say in getting older, although those with fame or cash or both in the first world will pay exorbitant amounts of money to preserve their selves somehow. It is not in the genes for most, with some people aging more gracefully than others. And while they may have some choice or control over how
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they maintain themselves in health and grooming, they may find themselves craving younger lovers, but in the waste finding themselves denied. Not everybody has a life which parodies ‘sex in the city’ or ‘Desperate Housewives’ or aged rock stars and celebrities.
good fortune, allows one to frequently discover something good while seeking something else." In an age where you search for things precisely by goggling, there is less chance finding things by chance. I trust you will find serendipity here as you read this book and wherever and whenever you search for meanings in your life.
XV The frames our minds create define — and confine — what we perceive to be possible. Every problem, every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life, only appears non-solvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish, while new opportunities appear. To connect emotionally, you need stories. Storytelling. An irresistible and inexplicable attraction best serves the story, there is nothing like the search for your true love, or the Holy Grail. Serendip is the old Arabic name for Sri Lanka, and The Three Princes of Serendip is an Old Persian fairy tale about three men who went on a mission but always came upon that was irrelevant but needed in reality. It is from this story that we get the word serendipity. Coined by the eighteenthcentury British writer Horace Walpole, he defined it as "that quality of mind which, through awareness, sagacity, and
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My reading of the manuscript suggested there was inherent in the case studies presented, a parable, a teaching tale if you like cut in the fashion of the Sufi or Persian tales of old and the fables of our yesteryears. But the moral here is not clear. Maybe this is because these are times that are marked by the tendency to relativism. Also enforcing democracy and freedom, and one is not only told there are ‘more fish in the sea’ when they break up from relationships, but that they can witness this vast oceans by googling their desires online. This has nothing to do with philosophies or moralities or sexual liberation. Sex tourism, and any other form of individual exploitation, is, by and large, due to economic imbalance and the white-water maelstrom that is the fully free market. The psychological motivations for this exploitation, although real, is insignificant in comparison. Those with money can, and always will, do as they please. Those without money are @ the mercy of those with. It is simply a question of dogma and degree.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Over the last few years we have seen a host of books published and distributed in south east Asia which aim to uncover or reveal some ‘truth’ of the mystery and magic, frustration and ecstasy of men, and to a lesser degree women, when they engage with the people of South East Asia. There is more to the self than the conscious mind, which is ultimately why many men start rejecting elements of their reality and begin to see apparitions of women they have been looking for all their lives.
But instead of reminding us of this fact, it is often brushed aside in one’s passions, one’s burning desire for sex and the illusion of togetherness, intimacy, fidelity and value.
Thailand's bar scene is the easiest way for foreigners to meet and get talking to Thai people, and wherever you come from, there will be nothing like this, so you think you should tell the world about it. Except, of course, the world already knows. They vary in purpose and style, and in the quality of content. In one sense this book reflects and is in keeping with the general message of much of this literature. And this is that there are incommensurate realities when you cross cultures. Saying a simple word like ‘love’, which hardly has fixed meaning within the confines and comforts of our own cultural and linguistic heritage, becomes ambiguous and ‘open source’ when one travels to a strange place in an alien continent. ………. ***
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Conclusion to Volume 1 Part 2 Few books today, are forgivable. Black on the canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper, are perhaps feasible. There is little conjunction of truth and ‘social’ “reality.” Around us are pseudo-events, to which we adjust with a false consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real, even as beautiful. In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our ‘social’ realties are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.76
Having some high-networth clients gives me the chance to spend time with those who do not have so much, but who nevertheless constitute interesting cases for me. They offer me the chance and the seductive gift of leaning. While changing the names of these individuals I can vouch that this is fair representation of their case histories put forward as stories. The aim is clearly to plug a gap in the existing literature, and perhaps offer some fresh insights into what I hold is a significant and powerful event for men subjected to the forces of modern life. What the famous sociologist 76
R.D. Laing (1967) The politics of Experience New York Ballantine.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Zigmund Bauman terms as ‘Liquid’. I am a relationship councillor. I do conduct group therapies between men and their girlfriends or wives. I work only to help them as, in large, society has neglected them whilst it realigns a focus on helping those considered as vulnerable and as victims. This is best captured in the rise of ‘PC culture’.
to make the choice for you? Free-market economies are predicated on the premise, which I think history holds out, and that when people decide for themselves, they decide better fro themselves than when governments may decide for them.
When you bring to mind it's all invented, you remember that it's all a story you tell — not just some of it, but all of it. And remember, too, that every story you tell is founded on a network of hidden assumptions. If you learn to notice and distinguish these stories, you will be able to break through the barriers of any "box" that contains unwanted conditions and create other conditions or narratives that support the life you envision for yourself and those around you. We do not mean that you can just make anything up and have it magically appear. We mean that you can shift the framework to one whose underlying assumptions allow for the conditions you desire. Let your thoughts and actions spring from the new framework and see what happens. ………. *** Researchers of cognitive dissonance in the nineteen-fifties found that consumers would continue to read ads for a new car after they’d bought it. And the question is: Do you want to make the choice for you, or do you want the government
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………. *** There were massive bush fires in the eastern states of Australia. We saw images of huge flames, dead animals and huge areas of cleared burnt out forests, All the reports were of how much devastation had been caused, how much bush had been destroyed. Clearly Thanatos had been @ work and left massive destruction in its wake. However this is incorrect. The bush had not been destroyed it had been changed. The pictures of huge blackened areas all left us with black, sorrowful feelings. These blackened areas should be a stimulus of great feelings of excitement, anticipation and joy not of sorrow. Imagine the growth and creation of insects, rodents, vegetation that are now going to occur in these blackened areas. It will represent an expression of Eros in its undiluted form something that we all say is wonderful. They are simply telling you what they had expected to receive and that what you gave as a gift of advice or instruction did not match. Both individuals are simultaneously giving and receiving. Both can take the opportunity to have hurt feelings or to learn about them
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
selves or the other person. I tend to think it is easier to change myself rather than others, so I often take the feedback and see if I can adjust by matching their receiving and my receiving to match their giving. If others choose not to learn from the situations, that too is their right. You may decide not to give or receive to them again. You may choose not to deal with people who always blame you for their lack of progress, learning, or happiness.
state department that sex tourism is synonymous with child abuse. In fact doing a little research for this preface (which has become a chapter I know) indicates that a search for ‘‘Women’’s sex tourism’ on the BBC site comes up with a litany of items about male paedophiles in South East Asia. If that is not skewed then what is. That is an insane argument driven by the demands of moralism. By the same token unpaid sexual contact must also be child abuse, because most people's sex lives begin before that arbitrary, if increasingly rigidly totemic, mark. One might have thought sex would be one of the few compulsive/addictive behaviours left to tax once the zealots have eliminated drinking, smoking, and obesity.
I felt I am not alone on the journey. Government consultation exercises accord to the standard pattern, thus: • •
•
The State Department or the like of the home office in the UK suggests for changes in public policy... 'Evidence' is taken from interested parties including police in search of promotion, contractors in search of contracts, and researchers seeking posts on the new quango to be created... Home Office considers, announces its plans have 'general support', ticks box marked 'public consulted' and carries on with making legislation for congress or Parliament to approve.
One UK Home Office minister was quoted on the BBC as saying that prostitution "is child abuse" because many prostitutes begin selling sex below the age of consent. This largely echoes a more general view of others such as the
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•
Let's not confuse people (male or female) who are coerced into the sex industry with those who are not. To do so would be ridiculous and, if done deliberately, as disingenuous as one UK Minster’s declaration that all those who pay prostitutes are virtually the same as child abusers.
•
‘Women’ seem to forget exist, providing services customers. Their lack of apparent from the lack
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that male prostitutes for male and female concern about this – of mention of it –
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
suggests that their feelings about the issue are paternalistic. •
Exploitation is mentioned, yet suggesting somehow that sex is more exploitive than, say, washing other people's dirty laundry or putting the right-shaped biscuits into the right shaped containers in a factory. This is not a rational idea and is based simply on personal sexual mores and, as has been mentioned, on first world attitudes toward sex and guilt, female sexuality and gender in terms of working lives and economics etc.
•
Customers can be rude to someone working in a takeaway sandwich bar or they can be polite and respectful to them. The same applies to the sex industry.
•
To suggest that women want romance and men want to fuck is as much of a myth as saying that woman is not turned on by the visual.
………. ***
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This is a book that tries to be brave. It tries to tackle what has been described as the pavilion of mirrors. Essentially this is the condition of western sexuality @ a time when gender and governance, politics and experience mix in fragmented ways. These fragments and our navigation of them and through them constitutes new ways in which we can explore and realise and understand ourselves and our sexuality. Perhaps it is a tall order to recommend to someone to go to South East Asia and engage in relationships, ‘social’, emotional and sexual with prostitutes or hse. Most ‘normal’ people find such behaviour reprehensible, but will put up with it providing it is not in their face. They prefer repression, denial and many more of the psychodynamic defence mechanisms suggested in psychoanalysis for coping with the fact of ‘not getting any’ or ‘not being promoted nor permitted’ to have any. Because of ‘social’ and cultural norms, these desires undergo repression. But how much does the alienated middle-age crisis man learn about himself through divorce or bereavement, through Hollywood teen movies, soaps, the mall, MTV ‘gangstas’ or maybe even a sexless marriage, through his ever awkward place in the ‘social’ marketplace even in a age of enriched communication enabled by the Internet? There is
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
less brothel activity now in Phnom Penh than there are young Viet and Khmer women managing their men by ‘social’ networking technology. Some probably have spreadsheets out working out their finances and cash flows. The Diasporas of disenfranchised western men looking for affection is rising and rising, and they are coming and coming. They meet and pay online. It is safer that way. The men get the impression they are ring fencing their catch of the day, and the women get to haul in their large fishermen all form the comfort of their seashell rooms. The millions of prisoners stay in their whitewashed rooms alone and communicate and masturbate to their phantasmagorical projections of long lost love. They are live and real.
women. Not content with building worlds like this, NGOs and Christian organisations aim to export these views overseas to people who have no real power to resist the pressures they may place on their governments to change society to one of their liking, and reflective of their interests, ideologies and philosophies. Guilty here are NGOs who would go so far as manipulate statistics, bribe police, lobby change, and dine in fine restaurant themselves. Also included are ‘visa-run’ Thai ex-pats who come to Cambodia and find the girls lacking in their abilities to ‘put –out’. They train them to act like Thais, and this is supported by the many tourists who condemn ‘cheap charlies’ and bludgeon their GFE with money.
This is always what happens when good policies on the macro level of society have unprecedented and yet unimagined effects on everyday common practices. The way in which people encounter others within a sexual frame.
All of them have paternalistic views of that space where western man meets Asian hoe.
Sex is central for most people. This is not rocket science but the stuff of socio-biology and evolutionary psychology. ‘Men’ want to mate with many women so crave polygamy, women want to find the perfect mate who will give them good quality children and take care of them. Instead of building societies that account for or cater for these traits, we prefer instead to encourage monogamy, and to cultivate societal views which has ‘nasty’ men as threatening to ‘good’
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Epilogue 1972 Saigon, 2002 Bangkok A Vietnamese prisoner is being held prisoner by the CIA station in Saigon. This is during ‘Nam. While kids are roasting and dying in the rice paddies, covered in mud and blood and shit, he is in a sterile,
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
clinically clean and sparse white room with white floors and white ceilings. A strange parody of the White House. The aircon has been kept @ a freezing 17 degrees, full blast for seven years – from 1965 to 1972. In these conditions psychological durations become very elastic. Or so we think. He lost all sense of time and self. Or so we think. He was uninterpretable. We made him alien. We created him, rebirthed him as an alien creature, he was well beyond western misconceptions of Buddhist monks meditating 'viapassana'. He was some fucking emblem of the East, if only the ‘social’ knew of his existence.
there and so long ago lost any sense of time and place. The constant cold, the incessant light, the only stimulus and communities being the hose and the rice. The white rice from the white house. The white noise pumped gently into the background melded forces with the aircon fan so long ago. Resonant frequency of the room and its dimensions. Resonant command. In the lack of patterns, landmarks, roadmaps, glitches, burrs, humans are incorrigible patternmakers, where none exist, then they will make some. Or so we assume.
Unlike the six exteroception human senses of sight, taste, smell, touch, hearing, and balance, that advise us of the outside world, proprioception is a sense that provides feedback solely on the status of the body internally, but it is this self that arbitrates and cast light upon whether these feelings, sights sounds etc. are pleasurable or not. Or so we imagine. In the lack of external stimuli, the man had been focussed almost exclusively upon internal affairs and states for apparent infinite time.
17 fluorescent lights on the walls and ceilings make this a pavilion of light. A chair, a table, a cot, and a hole in the floor for a toilet. The walls disoriented after an hour or so, given the impression of being limitless. He must sleep in
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That day the aircon broke produced a depth of feeling that almost sent him into shock. He pretended on that day to be as usual. There is music in white noise. You just have to open. We, the CIA felt it would take him days to confess. Or so we thought… Only one thing was known of this man without qualities. He was somebody important, somebody high up. Nobody would confess to who he was or what he did. One thing baffled his captors; he was missing his penis. Little did they know he had sacrificed it to Vietnam? The talk was that he was nationalist, and the communists wanted him dead. This we knew. Hypnosis, brainwashing, putting things on ice. Polar bears see differently the white.
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He has remained silent. He is hosed twice daily and fed rice twice daily. Nobody knows if he is waiting, patiently, in a trance state, or possesses a resolute acceptance of death. It is obvious. All that is known is that he is important, somebody high up, but nobody shown pictures of him recognise him shaven. He is forcefully shaven periodically, and he is force fed like Sue Tyler’s beloved foi gras occasionally. These are the only junctures of protest, as when an anti-sex NGO has a duff meal in an ethnic joint in the provinces. Suddenly, like the big bang, he was one night removed by Korean Tigers from this infinite space without end. He could still control his silence but not at all his heart as it raced and he hyperventilated. He poured of sweat. The humidity was 100%, he could hardly breathe. The water was already here. Gifted from the people of America and their allies. He got but a whiff of the benevolence and hospitality of American voices as he was carried to the courtyard. They were like his midwives, his ‘aunties’ and ‘grandmothers’, their squeals of delight that his mother had birthed a boy, that he was whole, formed and strong. They had been part of the first light, and he felt cold outside his mother’s belly.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Now it was nearly midnight, and the night was hot and balmy, a thousand years of linear history, linear time: the day begins and ends @ the instant called "midnight.” A transitory and ephemeral drop in the flow and this vast ocean of time if you are resident of white rooms and purveyor of white noise. They were male and laughing cynically. He knew this was surely to be his dark end. In a harsh chaotic contradiction of the first light of birth, he was removed unceremoniously outside to the expansive motherly dark. It was unbearably hot. He knew it would end heroically with a crack or two or three of a handgun or rifle. This was his fate, he had made his stance, and he had emphatically expressed his perspective. No ordinary human could do as he had done and yet he had done it and he was ordinary. The Koreans were making fun of his slight, emaciated, penisless, hairless body; it was in a language he couldn’t understand. He was taunted and shamed, again. Then a great whining began, like a chorus of screaming devils, spinning away, this would surely come to pass as the white noise had taken so long to do. Disorientated with the dark he heard this as his impending death. His heart beat wildly, uncontrollably as it never did.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Primeval neural impulses controlled some very strong and powerful movements in adult bodies. The sweat drenched him, his mouth was so very dry, his bowels wanted to release and he wanted to vomit. He didn’t want nor was it possible for him to procreate now or ever. He suddenly realised that he had sacrificed a wife and his penis for nothing, that his beloved country would tear itself to shreds for nothing, that one million of its males would die for nothing, that their women would travel to Cambodia to be prostitutes and even had a premonition from the Arkashic records that Starbucks and Citibank would be in Saigon eventually, regardless of outcome.
their 13 year old daughter were involved and their pictures taken and shown to all – name and shame. The prisoner pushed away such thoughts, in the same pedantic patient way he had learned over the years. He moved them like Casino chips, from here to there. He emerged to the dark, prodded, pushed the ever expanding sound of laughter, and then his own language. They were flying @ 10000 feet, over the coast towards the armada of battle cruisers and warships whose lights lit up the horizon. They were caught up half way. “you, you mother fuckering, dickless piece of shyt”
But then, from deep within the chaos and darkness, it felt, ‘feel’ came in hazy to focus, patterned, then it then felt thoughts and then needs. It was hot, and something was swirling, it was the sound of a helicopter – A bell Model-214 – inside were several Americans sitting quiet and some Vietnamese civilians – hse and hooker wives. His white room was kept frigid @ all times. For some reason he remembered why he had removed his penis. It was when he read in the Saigon Daily the report of a major lesbian “call-girl” operation - catering mainly to wealthy female tourists from the West and to jaded Saigon society women. The organisation was disbanded when there was proof of involvement of girls under 15, his wife and
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Screamed a furious Le Roy, laughter rose from the assembled crowds; even the sound a Vietnamese women were cajoling, mocking, trying to slap him... now black men were angry as well. “you really think we let you live? You blew those guys up house no. 3 on Bach Dang street and house no 11. on Hai Ba Trung Street – these were my buddies, and they had wives asshole, children, you think we going to turn you loose in America so you can move to Queens and start your own deli eh? Well not on the cards for you mother fucker, orders, just a mere formality, last minute change of
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mind, positive one in my mind, bye, have nice day...”
The explosion that comes but once in one lifespan, the most dramatic sense of separation and solitude there is came when he was unceremonially booted out of the open door like a garbage bag still cuffed. He entered dark space careering and such movement through it. He was so still in that room for such duration. But then, the two dominant characteristics of Vietnam’s history are the country’s struggle against foreign occupation and intervention, which has been going on for a good part of the last two thousand years, and the capacity of the Vietnamese people to learn from their occupants and finally overcome the foreign rule. These animals were not penetrating his mind, his mind was Vietnam, and Vietnam was his mind and body. He needed no penis.
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
short time. He became suicidal, manic obsessive-compulsive in these last few moments of reality version 1. The warm air rushed by him, as he accelerated and tumbled to terminal velocity. Then he wasn’t suicidal he was lucid. If light is the primordial essence of the universe, and that all life and motion proceed from it, he was in that terminal point of evacuation, being forsaken, this object of fascination of the security services for so long. Here he was free falling in the dark, with tiny beads of that glorious essence swirling like lost neurons with nowhere to go in a dying brain. The sweat in this air, this torrent of nitrogen, water, oxygen, evaporated, he knew the end was near. The last chance of seeing beauty, his last word, the first in seven years, was “Vietnam.” it was drowned out by the rushing air, which seemed vaguely familiar, the sound of the white noise. And so it is when you arrive.
It was such a long time coming. Yes, mother fucker, dark was the last-born of God - His last manifestation of Himself in the universe. The dark we experience in our brains is still hideous. This would be “ last
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When you emerge, arrive and are delivered from the metal tube in the sky, when you are born.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
In this dark freefall forever, he reached terminal velocity @ 6000 feet. But he had time to think once more, to contrast how different his seven years were to this falling @ 230 miles per hour, to a certain death, a terminus in the deep dark ocean below. He was certainly careering out of a night of PAN – but he was still above the abyss...
such that the ‘wife’ did all the screaming, and she bad mouthed him to all the neighbours who frowned and tuttutted incessantly, they hated him with a vengeance, they would never come to his aid, no matter how much he screamed in pain and agony and pleaded for his life at all hours with them. They hushed their children, they turned up their TVs, but they failed to call police, deliberately. One man who lived alone and hated him for having a ‘wife’ at all wanted to pour petrol in and went so far as to leak some through the door. The Japanese man tried it, tasted it, it looked refreshing and cool. He wanted water, he got fire. They switched it off outside, the water, next to the meter; he had drunk the wretched toilet pan dry days ago. His own urine laced with residual shit. Those who have been lost at sea know this agony. He was lost in TV.
Many years later a Japanese man had a similar lonely death, for so long he had also remained above the abyss, it was less chaotic more drawn out, than his return. He died of thirst when his ‘wife’ locked him in the house while going with a customer to an Island. She did not want him toying with the pharmacy. She thought she had left water, she ‘knew’ she had not. He had become too much of a responsibility, her brother wanted the TV. The neighbours heard him shout but he was the suicidal Japanese man, manic-obsessive. A man who was pretty much worthless in their mind, he was the worst kind, first world gone bad in the third, no gain nor loss to them, first in, last out. His was a protracted painful loneliness. Not like the cacophony of the prisoner, who was experiencing close to psychedelic-like madness in a world of new and forgotten sound and vision. Like the Japanese man was almost forgotten. His failure to master Thai, or even have elemental control of its sounds, made
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Such is the tragedy of man and the comedy of Pan. Next. And so it was with the tumbling handcuffed prisoner. An amusing sight if someone could be his life’s witness. Possible worlds. Worlds collides. Astounding worlds, creepy planets, incomplete worlds. Shells on the beach where you drew the line. Broken shells trampled underfoot, too broad a footprint. Unfinished business. Mission.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
The cacophony of sensations heat, words, people, machines noise, and that of wind since he left his seashell of a room, the white room., he wasn’t sure at all if he was asleep on the steps of the temple of Apollo. It was the dream. He sat and waited and died doing so not @ his own hand as predicated even by himself, but a partial accident. It was long time coming like western and Chinese cruel drawn out executions through torture.
swallow. Short time, even so we sit and read politely waiting for him and ourselves to stop.
It would engulf and consume him in darkness like Icurus was consumed in the flames before falling to the waters. Like that room never did. He heard their laughing differently, in a different register, he was in a seashell room in New England, and he was in room with papasan delights @ the door. He was @ lest everywhere where once he was nowhere. The yin and yang of knowing and knowledge, The back of beyond. Back-the-front and inside-out. Short time and long time. He had a daughter and mother, but no penis to boast of even now, the white room man reborn as the soaring man, descending in to hell. The South China Sea, still handcuffed, he enters that dark ocean of creation known to the Cabalists as Binah, the Great Mother and Great Womb from which all manifestation originates and eventually returns in cyclic time. She wears a crown of real dark perils. She will
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Michel Foucault must have had in mind when he closed The Order of Things with the famous line imagining a future when "man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." This did not apply to the falling man from the white room now in dark space. His last thought was that he thought it was going to stop in the light, but his mother told him gently, with that love that “love is really learning.” At that thought the last feelings registered in his limbic system and hypothalamus – it felt like orgasm in that last flash of male lightning 0.0002 seconds duration. The reason that I couldn’t believe in the end.
END of Volume ONE Foucault.M (1994) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences new York; Vintage (p. 386-387)
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