I went to  Bangkok's LIDO theatre, a 1960s relic I believe, to watch On The Road. It's a Franco-Brazilian production, strangely enough, which meant it was mostly naked people, great music, and some more or less awkward dialog in between.

This isn't a film review, though, it's contextualization.

It brought back to mind something I hadn't thought about in half a decade, that had really flaked to the dusty bottom of the mind. I think it was New York Maria who told me this story, and though it might have been in a letter, I can hear her soft voice perfectly, shaping the words.

A Professor in a writing class was criticizing (probably oblivious to the irony) this new generation of "classroom" or "textbook" writers compared to the older Authors saying something like:

"I mean, think about it. All these writers, they really lived, they did things, they had seen a part of the world most other people hadn't and wanted to share it." I assume Kerouac was the example with which she was illustrating this, but Conrad sailed the Congo river and Melville actually whaled; Theroux took up a cabin by the lake and Dostoyevski was exiled in Siberia; Shelley and Byron waved their little flags ever so romantically. "But people nowadays sit at home on their computers and think they will write a masterpiece." 

Whaling's a little out of fashion nowadays, and most people think hitch-hiking across the States will end up with you dead or worst, but there you have it: an incentive to do something a little crazy this weekend. If not for the novel you're not going to write, do it for your biographer.

Bukowski, by R. Crumb

I was accosted on the streets just now by a man. He was slender, tall, young enough, but there were white stubs to his day-old beard. Green eyes, Indian, very well dressed: no brands but a far shout away from what  passes as smart around here.

"Do you know," he said, "you have a very lucky face?" Now I haven't slept in three nights, haven't had a breath without a sneeze in two days, am too sick to eat anything since last night and woke up today with a killer pain that shoots from my right ear all the way past my shoulder and doesn't let me turn. I was walking stiffly down the street and I wasn't feeling particularly lucky - nor could I imagine how he could have seen anything remotely lucky in my scowl, and this sparked off a little curiosity. "Have you ever been said this before?"

"No, can't say I have."

"You have a very lucky face. I look in your face you know, and I see good things coming. A big change, and three definite things will get a lot better."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. See, I see that you have two bad problems in your life. Did you know? And that's why you've never been successful in your life, because it's true, isn't it? You've never been successful in you life."

"That's a little harsh."

"It's truth. I'll tell you what they are, why because of this you are always only twenty or thirty percent, never a hundred. One, you think too much, friend. You always worry about little things, it gets in the way. Two, you don't know how to separate the good people from the bad people in your life. Sometimes you'll sit at night and tell all your secrets to somebody you think is a friend and then they are not. Do you know this feeling?"

I said that I didn't.

"Well, you have. I can help you friend. I can make life better for you. Do you want to know more? I can give you proof, friend."

"That's more truth than I can handle in one go, friend, but thank you very much."

"I can give you proof," he said, but I thanked him and turned to go. He waved at me courteously and as I walked away I wondered whether I had proved him wrong or right about knowing who to trust.

The lack of appropriate footwear is really the reason why Napoleon's troops didn't carry the day in Waterloo.

(-Why Wellington Won the War)

"It's been a very bad year," the old man told me, in a conversation that was mostly mimed. He pointed to the pair of Havaianas some other farang gave him which were now tied by a string. He pointed to his old, worn shirt and then to his trousers. "Look, look at the state of my clothes. They are not good like yours. Your shoes, your shirt-" then he pointed at my trousers and stopped there, scratching his head.

He was a little bit more impressed when I snatched a cricket out of the air for him.

"And then? What then?" Asked the Great Khan, perched on his great ivory throne amid the hall of seventy-seven pillars. Upon the alabaster floor, Marco Polo sat on a thin cushion made of Chinese silk. "Did you see a clock that could talk in seven tongues? Did you meet a blind man that woke up every morning to find he had painted in his sleep what the angels' dreamt? Did you walk through a city in the desert made of ice and mirrors and all it ever reflected upon was its own destruction? What then? Tell me, Marco!"

"Polo," he replied with a smirk. "And then, Great Khan? My time, as they say, was up. My visa had expired and I had to go."

Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone.
They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go on.
And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.
Oh I hope you run into them, you who've been travelling so long.

Yes you who must leave everything that you cannot control.
It begins with your family, but soon it comes around to your soul.
Well I've been where you're hanging, I think I can see how you're pinned:
When you're not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you've sinned.

Leonard Cohen, Sisters of Mercy

"When I was a young man, they used to call me a gentleman traveller. That's what you are now. A gentleman traveller."

And suddenly I feel like I should have a moustache to twirl, or at least a hat to tip.

(- Kurt, the Delicatessen man)