Soft Water

B Movies Again

2012-02-26T14:44:00.001Z

I recently came across the Big Book of Biker Flicks and it fits in perfectly with my love for the biker/hippy trash films of the 60's. It would appear to be the definitive volume on the subject with page after page of artwork and stills from just about every film in the genre , some of which I covered here last year. Available from the always excellent Sideburn.

The way we were

2012-02-12T21:21:00.007Z

It's easy in our instant World to forget that not so long ago information just wasn't readily available, even finding or hearing music that you'd heard mentioned in hushed whispers in the school yard or read about in weekly music papers could be a mammoth task. New bands would release records and by the time you had heard about it they were sold out in the few shops that would stock them and as a spotty teenager getting to see many of these bands was nigh on impossible for me.

Then, along came Granada TV and Tony Wilson to showcase the latest in new music, a move that was to be the first television outing for the majority of bands featured. Now the footage quality isn't the best but the content more than makes up for it.

I've also added some images of the salubrious venues I was eventually visiting by the late 70's and early 80's to hear what was in most cases a load of crap with the odd moment of magic thrown in ,where some of the bands became massive and others became postmen. Venues like this would never get a licence now which is a shame, dirty and dangerous in many ways, they became a rite of passage.

Warrior

2012-02-08T21:43:00.000Z

Still Winter

2012-02-01T19:26:00.003Z

Plenty of new versions of these knocking about over the last year or two from the likes of Sierra Designs, Rocky Mountain, Oi Polloi and numerous Japanese brands, this recent buy though is a mint North Face 60/40 mountain parka from way back , when they were still made in the good ol' US of A.

Double bill

2012-01-26T22:18:00.001Z

City of God has just had another outing on the DVD player this week, it depicts the lives of a number of inhabitants of Cidade de Deus in Rio de Janeiro and is based on real events surrounding the growth of organised crime in the favelas. The plot centres on two boys growing up in the midst of the madness and their differing viewpoints, it's ace, not least because all the actors bar one were taken from the Rio slums.

Next up is one of my all time favourites , Wes Anderson's "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou", both a piss take and a salute to the great Jacques Cousteau who, if you're of a certain age will of held you transfixed with his deep sea diving exploits in the 60's and 70's.
It stars Bill Murray in one of his best parts as Zissou on a madcap mission to destroy the shark that killed his partner . It was a complete flop on release but that says more about mainstream cinema goers than it does about this film.

Seu Jorge, an unknown musician picked from the slums of Rio for a part in City of God and an established actor / musician by the time he appeared in The Life Aquatic where his Portuguese covers of Bowie songs from the 70's are part of the film and a subsequent album. Of course he only covers Bowie's early work because as we all know he hasn't made a decent record since '77.

1970's

2012-01-24T22:38:00.000Z

Muay Thai

2012-01-16T21:07:00.003Z

Neil Chamberlain left Brooklyn in January 2010 for a three month tour of Muay Thai boxing camps in Thailand .Whilst travelling he kept a diary of his experiences and travels, it's a bit of a read but worthy of your time. In April 2010 , two weeks after returning to Brooklyn Neil was killed by a hit and run driver at the age of twenty eight.

Lessons (February 3, 2010)
My first night in Bangkok I arrive at the gym just in time for dinner, and I sit down across from Euddi, who is huge and very Teutonic and shirtless; everybody at the table is shirtless, except for me. He’s very friendly, in the way that people tend to be when they’re too large to have ever been fucked with. We have a lot in common, at least relative to the other foreigners training at the gym; he has a normal job back in Germany, as a systems administrator, whereas most of the others are professional fighters and MMA coaches or, in the case of Dave, a genial Englishman with a bed adjacent to mine, ex-pro fighters turned perpetual narco-tourists who live in Muay Thai camps but don’t train because of nebulous injuries.
I go to bed early but then can’t fall asleep. I lie in the dark for hours, listening to the traffic and the whir of the three floor fans in the room (one in front of each bed), at some point rediscovering a “Great Books” application on my iPhone, with a large selection of public domain texts. I’ve read about a third of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, before Farmer comes in at 7 and asks if anyone’s up for a run. I totally am.
Farmer is 19 but looks way younger; he’s milk pale and rail thin, with a buzz cut and big eyes with long lashes and a light spray of zits around his mouth; he could be a flashback to lost innocence from a gangster movie. Back in Ireland, he’s the top-ranked Thai boxer in his weight class (which we inexpertly convert from kilos to about 125 pounds) and on Wednesday he has his first fight against a Thai (which he pronounces “Toy”) and on Friday he has his second fight.
The fighters go to one of two parks by the gym to run. Today we go to the smaller one, with a narrow path twisting around a man-made lake through weird landscaping; it feels sort of like a futurist golf course. Farmer tells me about how last week he was chased through this park by security guards because the national anthem had started playing (it plays every morning at 8 over loudspeakers throughout the whole city) but he hadn’t heard it, because he was wearing headphones. Whenever the national anthem comes on here, you are expected to stop what you’re doing; it’s a big deal; there’s a few things like this that you have to keep an eye on.
Farmer talks more or less continuously from the moment we set out to the moment we get back, but he doesn’t come off as hyper or pushy, or even particularly talkative; information just flows from him as naturally as air or sweat, though his brogue is so thick that at least 1/5 of it slips pleasantly by me, uncomprehended. He tells me how he regrets having paid for a full six weeks at the gym up front, because he and Jitti are not getting along, because Farmer has been sleeping with too many local women; one of the first things Jitti had told me when I arrived was not to sleep with any women in the area; he gave a number of reasons. Farmer tells me a complicated story wherein he sleeps with three different women in one night—he stresses that they weren’t prostitutes, or else they were but didn’t make him pay, except maybe in one instance—and another story, or possibly part of this same story, where one woman mistook his subway card for an ATM card, and paid her own “bar fee” (this is one of the ways prostitutes operate here,) and took him back to her apartment, and made him a big breakfast from things bought at the 7-11 downstairs, and now wants him to come away with her to some beach house this weekend. Farmer tells me that women here especially like young, pale foreigners: this is because Thais associate dark skin with farming and manual labor, and pale skin with money; and also because they assume young men traveling abroad will be rich and virginal and easily overwhelmed with sex. “Let em think it,” he advises me.
Some other advice Farmer gave me during the run was not to go out drinking with the trainers, because they will stick you with the bar tab; to stay away from dogs in general, but in particular the gym’s salt and pepper terrier, who is prone to spontaneous violence; and to check your luggage before leaving the gym, in case the trainers have planted drugs in it and tipped off the cops for a commission.

About halfway around the track, the national anthem starts playing over loudspeakers all around us. Farmer does not seem inclined to stop, but then we notice some security guards a little ways off, so we do, and listen. “It sounds like something from a cartoon,” he says. It’s true; it does.

Chewed Up (February 4, 2010)
I don’t sleep much more on my second night than I did on my first, so my second day starts early, at about 1 or 2am. I cycle between Conrad and The Myth of Sysyphus and staring into the fan. By 7 AM I’m too hungry to read—breakfast is served at 10, after morning training—so I put on sandals and walk down the street to the 7-11. I buy a mini-snickers, which comes with a free Tigger stamp. On the way back I notice a bottle of Johnny Walker Red standing amongst the curbside detritus, with two or three inches left in it. I’m in the ring skipping rope at 8 sharp, even though nobody else will be out there for a little while.
My whole body is sort of loopy from lack of sleep; I’ve probably managed less than eight hours in the last 72, though my muscles are less sore than ought to be. But the soles of my feet are raw, because the mats here are rougher than what I’m used to. I do a few tentative kicks and feel the skin crinkle up brittle against the ground. I can see at least three spots where it’s primed to crack and blister. I go back inside and put on socks, even though I know the trainers will think I’m weird. My balance seems off, too, but I don’t give it much thought.
I warm up half-heartedly, and then Sern wraps my hands. He’s one of the trainers, and a giant, as far as Thais go, and he will reveal himself in the coming days and hours and minutes to be a fucking dick. I get into the ring with Alex, a young Filipino guy brought up in Switzerland. Sern puts us in gloves and shin pads and tells us to spar. I feel up to it for about 30 seconds, until I realize I’m not. Alex’s boxing is more or less on a level with mine, but he’s fitter, and in any case my head is just not in it at the moment. I keep it together for the first round, though he’s usually a step ahead and I take a couple of punches to the face, and some kicks to the body. He also gets me in the balls twice, by accident—not particularly hard, but worrying—and when I ask Sern if I can go put on a cup he laughs and shakes his head.
By the end of the second round I’m too exhausted for any pretense of boxing. I fall for every one of his feints, and I can’t manage to keep a guard up. Jitti is watching too now, alongside Sern. They were boisterous at first, howling every time one of us landed a kick, but they aren’t now. After the third round Jitti takes me out of the ring, and berates me for showing up so tired. I feel like I’m about to cry, because I’m too tired not to. He notices my feet are bleeding, and makes me put on my running shoes. Then he has me do some push-ups and wanders off.
I’m feeling better by breakfast, which is chicken and rice and peppers. There’s no question of any afternoon training, though. Jitti makes all of us give him samples of our handwriting; he needs someone to fill in the names and dates on some training certificates he’s making out for someone. But none of them are deemed acceptable, and the certificates go back in the envelope.
Where Do You Live (February 7, 2010)
Right now I am living and training at Jitti Gym, which is in Ratchapidisek, which is a shitty neighborhood in east Bangkok full of slummy two- and three-stories and cheap new mid-rise developments. I haven’t found the neighborhood in any guide book; I think the gym is its only point of interest to farangs, but last night I saw a fat white couple and their kid at the metro so maybe there’s a basket museum that I don’t know about.
The gym is a little compound with granite-brick walls about 12 feet high, and a huge wrought-iron gate that’s painted gold and quite ornate and as such stands at odds with the rigorous unfanciness of everything else. All the cooking and eating and fighting is done in the open air, under corrugated metal roofs that start in about five feet above the walls. Right when you come through the gates you see a few big picnic tables made of dark wood, with logs for legs, and behind that there’s a fridge and folding table and a couple of rough cabinets with dishes and cooking supplies. All the food’s cooked back there, in one pot over a big gas burner. Up on one wall by the tables there’s some photos of fighters who’ve trained at the gym and photos of Jitti at various ages and some weird water-color portraits of boxers. Top row center, pride of place is given to a poster of Natalie Portman dressed as a galactic princess, which reads “One Love. One Quest. Star Wars.”

There are about eight foreign fighters training at a given time, and maybe four Thais, and then six Thai trainers. Everybody sleeps in a small two-story building, set in between the dining space and the boxing ring. I sleep on the ground floor with a couple of Brits named Dave and Ethan. There are two other rooms upstairs, plus Jitti’s room. Some of the trainers sleep in tents on the roof. Outside my room’s another little room, with pillows on the floor, and when they’re not training the Thai boys sprawl out there like big cats and watch television, and sometimes sing karaoke. There’s a wall of lockers in that room, where we keep our passports and sundry valuables. And there’s a shelf with some trophies, and below those is a glass case with a carved figure of the King, seated at a table with his legs crossed, reading a newspaper. At his feet two little ceramic cats play with marbles. There are stuffed elephants and carved elephants everywhere all over the house, and many broken fans.
The training area’s out back; I can see it through my window, if the curtains aren’t shut. At the center of everything is big ring that’s about one and half times regulation size, with some mats and heavy bags arrayed around it. Some of the heavy bags are quite dilapidated, and some of them are little more than skeletons of heavy bags. There’s a pair of wooden sit-up braces that look like something a castaway might build, if he was training for a fight against a bear.
There’s a terrier who has the run of the place—on a side note, in Thailand the silhouetted dog icon used in “no dogs allowed” signs is recognizably a terrier—who can stand on his hind legs more or less indefinitely, when he thinks there’s food in it for him. Sometimes he will steal off with one of your shoes and leave it up on the roof. It happened to me. And he will bite you if you touch him.
We wake up around seven—or we’re supposed to, anyway; jet lag wakes me earlier—and run three or four miles. We run around the city, or in a park, or sometimes through the city to a park and then back again. The other day a dog chased me for a couple of blocks, but I don’t think he expected to catch me, and he didn’t.
After the run we come back to the gym, and train for an hour or two, some combination of padwork and sparring and shadowboxing. What you do and how much depends on who you’re training with that day; an asshole like Sern will be throwing knees at your head halfway though the first round—and this is during padwork; I refuse to spar with Sern, because he’ll just hurt me and I won’t learn anything—and you’ll be fucked after 20 minutes.
Morning training is pretty quiet; people drift in and out, and some people just skip it. The afternoon session, starting in around three o’clock, is much more raucous. Everybody comes, and then a lot of people staying elsewhere on top of that. It’s about three or four hours, loosely regimented: five rounds of pads, then bagwork, then sparring, then clinching. The rounds are five minutes long, rather than the usual three: a fucking eternity. But you can take a round off whenever you feel like it, or even have a shower and come back; the atmosphere is friendly and relaxed and nobody wears a shirt, like a pool part where people are hurting each other.

Brits (February 7, 2010)
I’ve mentioned there are two Englishmen staying at the gym with me, Dave and Ethan. Dave arrived a few days before I did, and Ethan a few days after. They’re both likable, though you have to make a few more compromises if you’re set on liking Ethan.
Dave is thirty, the oldest fighter at the gym and the only one older than me. I’m an inch or two taller than him, though I feel as though I shouldn’t be: he has the presence of a large man, but without any jittery Napoleonic strain to be larger than he is. He’s built stouter than the other fighters here, with thickly muscled arms and legs, and serious, venerable-looking abdominals evident beneath a thin skein of beer fat. And he’s very handsome. I really like Dave. I like his hearty Midlands accent, whose long vowels render nearly everything either funny or compelling. I also like the magnanimous way he’ll repeat the key clause of other people’s remarks, as if savoring it, even when it’s nothing special.
Ethan is twenty-four, but it’s a “hard twenty-four,” as they say. He makes me think of those British mercenaries in North Africa, who drift from civil war to civil war: he has a perpetual squint, as if from a lifetime spent in harsh sunlight, but also skin that’s shut-in pale; his body is as strong and unsexy as a cudgel, and a bit doughy in the way that athletes get when gone to seed. There’s scars all over his body that don’t look boxing related and a raised circular burn in the center of his chest about the size of an Om tattoo.
I learn about most of the other people here in dribs and drabs; I know more about Ethan than all of them put together, probably, because he talks a lot. Farmer does too, but Farmer talks a little like a jazz solo, full of angular turns and flowering tangents. Ethan is more like a piece by Philip Glass: obsessively, hypnotically repetitive, delineating and relineating some small facet of Thai boxing, drugs, or prostitutes. I don’t mean that Ethan’s boring; he’s fun to listen to. He uses a lot of good expressions like “cheap as chips,” and appends a reflexive “innit?” to most of his statements, which is probably my favorite idiosyncrasy of British speech. But a lot of those “innits” feel less rhetorical to me than Ethan probably intends, i.e. “A Paki’s like to lie about the time of day, innit?”
Ethan grew up poor in Leeds, in a council estate, and now he lives with his parents and sells weed and coke. Still, he and I share real common ground; we both love Thai boxing, and if I don’t like drugs as much as he does, I did once, so I can relate, especially vis a vis the difficulty of balancing drugs and Thai boxing. But we really diverge on the subject of prostitutes. When I told him I was not interested in fucking a prostitute, full stop—something I put off making explicit for as long as possible, I admit—he was incredulous. He pinched my arm and asked if I was real and was not being wholly ironic. He asked me how many women I’d slept with, and I gave him a rough number, and then he asked me if I really hadn’t paid for any of them.
Although I object to prostitution for a lot of reasons, I’m not bringing this up to scorn him, not in a moral sense and certainly not in the sense of “what kind of man would need to pay for sex”; it’s not like I’m appreciably more handsome than he is, and I think a lot of girls would find him much more engaging than they would me. And I really do like Ethan, though I would I go to jail before I went out drinking with him. He’s funny and generous and doesn’t condescend to me when we talk about Muay Thai, though as a pro fighter he has every right to. I’m only illustrating the gulf between our sensibilities, and the gulf between my sensibilities and those of a lot of men at the gym, and a lot of the men who come to Bangkok. It’s evident everywhere and it’s in my thoughts a lot of the time, because—hopeless Jew relativist that I am—it does not feel as straightforward as it did before I got to Thailand; I don’t feel like summarily hating half of the men I meet. I’ve been putting off unpacking all this here, though, and I’ll do so a little longer.

Several Days (February 9, 2010)
On the evening of my third day I still haven’t slept anything close to a full night since my penultimate night in New York, and I am starting to feel psychological effects: phantom movements in the peripheries et al. I’m dead on my feet by 7:00 but worried if I turn in too early I’ll be awake again by 1 am. I settle on staying out until 9:30, and so wander a shitty and bracingly frigid mall in Lumphini district; I buy a pair of athletic shorts, which I mislay fifteen minutes later, and then a $30 canister of chocolate-flavored protein powder (for point of reference, my plane ticket to Koh Samui cost maybe three times that), imported from the States with white stickers slapped over the nutritional info; I start down what I take to be a broken escalator but is in fact a motion-activated escalator, apparently something that exists here, and nearly break my neck.
Once I’m finally back and into bed, I sweat out all my sleepiness in about ten minutes. My body’s a horse led to water. I realize if I don’t get to sleep I will lose my fucking mind. I get up and go sit at the dining table with Dave and Dylan and some of the trainers; they offer me a glass of beer and after six months sober I don’t hesitate. I’m back in bed about forty minutes later, and I manage about five or six hours sleep that night. Things start getting better after that.
The next night I go to the movies. I see From Paris With Love, which is a Luc Besson-produced piece of shit, French-financed and full of cynical French-baiting for its dumb American audience and starring John Travolta as a fat ten-year old’s notion of a badass. But the cinema is a velour-upholstered jukebox-cum-cathedral made even more fantastic for being set atop the Siam Paragon Center—a pretentious white-on-white faux Guggenheim with a Hermes outlet and a Lamborghini dealership—like a Ring Pop on a wedding cake. The screens are IMAX huge. They play lite-jazz versions of songs that were pretty fucking lite to begin with: “been around the world and I-I-I …” You pick out your seat when you buy your ticket, which is great for me because I get stressed out if I can’t sit dead center. The national anthem starts up after the previews, and the screen bids the audience to stand and to sing along if it wishes. Then it goes into a karaoke-style montage of Thai citizens enjoying life and being great parents. You can get soda in a big bear-shaped cup.
On Saturday during afternoon training, two hours in, I’m motioned into the ring; I’m to do a couple rounds of stand-up boxing with Alak: no kicks or knees, just punching. Alak’s maybe five foot one and of deeply indeterminate age, with a frosted mullet and abdominals out of a comic book; he rolls up the bottoms of his shorts, which makes the shorts look like a diaper and Alak in turn like a muscular golden baby. I am fucking terrified of him. I try explaining first to him and then to Sern that I would like to keep things light, but Alak can’t understand me and Sern doesn’t want to translate.
I try to set the tone by throwing out a few slow, gentle jabs, but he just looks confused as he slips in and gets me hard under the chin. Even then it feels weird to punch somebody so small full in the face. I move around a lot and throw a ton of jabs to keep him the fuck away, and I even catch him with an uppercut when he works some fancy slip for the third straight time. But in the next round I start to tire, and he starts to get inside, and the second time I get hit hard enough to cross my eyes something serious, and at the end of that round I beg off. Sern is all smiles afterward; in my post-coital relief at being clear of Alak I imagine that he’s pleased with how I handled myself, but in retrospect I think that he just likes seeing farang get hurt.
Today is the second day of my second week. At some point over the weekend my feet started swelling from the heat, and now I have a huge Cronenbergian blister on either pinkie toe, both jaundiced from a weird liniment Jitti keeps applying. I picked up a black eye at some point yesterday, which makes me feel sheepish and trashy when I’m out on the town. Five days from now I’ll get on a plane heading south to Koh Samui, to train at the Lamai camp there. I’m looking forward to a change of scenery; I miss the manic discombobulation of those first few days, without which the regimen here feels a bit like work. Also, I’m getting sick of Bangkok.

Pack It In! (February 10, 2010)
When I wake up this morning my neck is almost too sore to lift; there’s no way I’ll be up for clinching this afternoon, so I decide to train hard in the morning and then take off for the day.
After lunch, I head over to Sukhuvit and have some hairy patches waxed off my upper body, in preparation for the beach next week. If anyone out there is on the fence about this, don’t hesitate: you’ll feel like a new man after.
I take a ferry north from Saphan Taksin to Ko Ratankosin, one of the old parts of Bangkok and home to the Grand Palace and any number of big beautiful temples. What I want to see in particular is an amulet market which I’ve heard several people go on about, but it’s closed by the time I find it. I end up back at the ferry and eat dinner, and I look at a map for awhile.
I decide that since I’m in the area I should go look at Khao San Road, which is the city’s backpacking epicenter. Going from one tourist mecca to another, I don’t bother trying to get a metered cab; I’d have to walk halfway there before I’d even have a shot, and it’s not worth the two dollars I’d save; for the most part I think it’s fine to get swindled, as long as you know it’s happening.
Khao San is a wide street, largely closed to cars, with strips of Thai flags hung across at regular intervals; the flags remind me of New York’s Little Italy, which I suppose is Khao San’s sister in cultural venality. The foot traffic is shoulder to shoulder, and everybody here is either farang or in the business of farang. On either side is a procession of tattoo parlors, noodle shops, “Italian” restaurants, currency exchanges, “Irish” pubs, hostels, cheap tailors, 7-Elevens (three on one block) and internet cafes. It’s easy to see what’s what because every business has a giant sign that lights up. At one end of the street’s a dental clinic, but I wouldn’t go there.
The sidewalks are lined with tables selling sundry eatables and dreadlock hair extensions and bootleg everything; at one stall, you can buy a “rock and roll” T-shirt with a video screen embedded in it. Ladies walk about selling jewelry that looks to me more generally “ethnic” than specifically Thai.
I want to sit down and take things in, but I’d feel guilty drinking beer after skipping out on training; after all, Muay Thai is what lets me feel like I’m better than the people here, and it’s an admittedly fine distinction at the best of times. I order an Italian ice at a sidewalk cafe, and I make myself nurse it so the waiter won’t bother me for awhile.
Sunburns; sunburns everywhere. Protuberances: bellies, backpacks. Cargo shorts are absolutely pervasive among the men here, a hard stream broken only by a few shirtlesses in board shorts and the tasteful lacunas of Japanese. Linen pants are pretty much their female equivalent, though a lot of women wear floral-print sundresses instead, and others wear both; I see a few hippie girls who do this and still manage to be achingly beautiful. Many people here look to be dressed in outfits bought entirely on this street.
A little ways off, a Thai with an open suitcase full of hip flasks in the crook of his arm marks me with his green laser pointer. A one-legged man scoots by him on his ass, shaking a cup of coins; he seems in high spirits. All about me is “Rite Round” by Flo-Rida and the sound of croaking frogs, made by ladies who are selling a wooden instrument which makes a croaking frog sound. But nobody offers me anyyaba(translation: “crazy medicine.”) Don’t people in this town know how to have a good time?!
Every woman here above a certain age has a sunburned, Teutonic look to her, and wears angular eyeglasses. British boys seem to travel in matched sets—same stocky build, same ballcap, same haircuts and goatees—as if bulwarking each other against the strangeness.
There are no good tattoos on this street.
Eventually I have to leave my table, after the fifth visit from a woman grown incensed by my failure to buy her medallions. The ferry’s stopped running by now, and it will be even harder to get a metered cab here than in Ratankosin. I need to go a lot further now, however, so getting swindled is a more expensive proposition. But there’s not much to be done about it.

Home + Away (February 17, 2010)
It’s Saturday afternoon and my last day of training at Jitty Gym; Monday morning I head to the WMC gym on Koh Samui. The session today is lightly attended. I’ve done my five rounds of pads and now I’m on a heavy bag, doing intermittent sets of push kicks but really just trying to look busy. Between rounds I get out my camera and take quick portraits of the trainers. I’m spent, from the pads and the morning session and the whole ordeal behind me. I have a giddy, valedictory feeling about leaving. In the past two weeks, my body’s gotten fit, and I’m stronger; I can throw ten kicks on either side in quick succession, head height, on command, and the tenth kick will be pretty good. And I’ve escaped any serious injury, which was a prospect I’d dwelled on every morning, in the minutes between waking and getting up to train. I’m about to duck out early but then someone tells me I’m sparring with Doni.
Doni is my favorite trainer. He is small and older than the other trainers, somewhere in his forties, with smooth, feline features that look more Japanese than Thai. He has a smile that suggests secrets, largely happy ones, and that literally never wavers; his smile is persistent as my nose. It lends him a magical air, like that of a man who’s also a cat and so is party to a lot of special info. He hugs you after every round.
We suit up and get started. I’m fighting very sloppy; my affection for Doni maybe blunts the nerves I usually get when I’m sparring, and I’m exhausted in any case. His corrections are gentle at first and then less so. My kicks get harder as I tire, because it’s too much effort to modulate them. Doni follows suit. First he winds me badly with a cross to the stomach. He asks beatifically if we’re to go on and I say we are, for whatever reason. A few moments later I throw a body kick that bounces harmless against his forearm, and he throws one into my ribs so hard that it pulls my knees to my chest and my feet off the ground. The gym erupts in laughter. I’m back up a second later but there’s no question of going on. Another trainer tries to get my arms over my head, to help bring my wind back, which I am perfectly capable of doing myself except I’m too winded to tell him so.
A few minutes before, the trainers were clowning for my camera and slapping my back, but none of them will meet my eyes as I leave the ring. Their laughter was not with me, I realize. I don’t feel hurt or humiliated, though, only irritated. I’d been kicked in the ribs by a master boxer, and I fell down, which seems eminently reasonable to me. What did they expect? I ask myself. And then that night I find out, or begin to.
After dinner, they pile about ten of us into the back of a pickup, and we drive a harrowing fifty minutes to a temple fight on the edge of Bangkok. Excepting the temples and the Muay Thai at its center, a temple fight looks a lot like the carnivals that roll through town on Independence Day, though with different fried snacks and rides that are shoddier by an order of magnitude, if you can imagine. But the midways are more or less identical; Farmer, a darts champion back home, wins bear after bear for his girlfriend and then one for Jitti’s wife, Sarah.
The fights take place in a grove behind the carnival area: an elevated ring surrounded by huge old trees with thin strips of white-glowing neon hanging from their boughs. It’s an all-ages crowd, relatively subdued because no alcohol is served on temple grounds. Two old jokers in Hawaiian shirts provide commentary from a table by the ring; their voices are so amplified that certain syllables vibrate inside my head like a length of wire.
The first fight is between two ten-year old girls. The second is between two boys who are considerably younger, seven or eight at the most. One of them is about a head shorter than the other, and he exhibits all the sangfroid you would expect from a tiny boy who is kickboxing before a large crowd. But he—like his opponent, like the two girls before them—is practicing what is recognizably full-on, if clumsy Muay Thai: kicks to the head and to the solar plexus, knee strikes and elbows (the principal aim of an elbow strike, if you do not know, is to open a cut in your opponent’s face bloody enough to make the referee stop the fight.) They fight as Thais always do, in tiny six-ounce gloves and without shin guards or head protection.
There is some confusion between the second and third fight. Earlier in the day, Jitti had been joking to Dylan and Farmer that they would have to fight tonight; now he is suggesting it in earnest. The opponent in question is a young Thai lingering behind us by the loud speakers. It’s hard to say just how old he is. He’s small, but we all know that doesn’t mean anything. He looks back at us without interest.
Dylan ran about five miles this morning, and he trained all afternoon, and now he’s more exhausted than I am. Meanwhile Farmer has barely trained at all since his fight last week, choosing instead to swan about with his new rich girlfriend—five seats down from me at present with a Prada clutch in her lap—who buys him fancy dinners and lets him drive her car. Neither’s in any position to fight if he wanted to, but Jitti keeps at them regardless. He goes cajoling from one to the other, and his mood darkens progressively. He says that they are letting down the gym. He calls them chickens and cowards. He tells them they should get up in the ring and apologize to everybody for not fighting, a suggestion that baffles us all.
Affable sociopath that he is, Farmer is not much bothered by any of this. He sits with his girlfriend and chews gum and half watches the fights. Dylan is a more sensitive soul, however, and he prizes Jitti’s good opinion of him and so is hurt by Jitti’s scorn. He goes over and over his reasons for not fighting, with me and with everyone else; I don’t think he needs a reason not to fight at some Bangkok county fair on a moment’s notice, and I tell him so, but he’s still upset.
Eventually Sarah comes over and talks with him. She’s Australian. She’s been married to Jitti about ten years, though as far as I can tell they don’t see much of one another. I eavesdrop on her conversation with Dylan, but we’re close to the speakers and a lot of what she says is lost to me amongst droning Thai and feedback.
She tells Dylan something about the Thai’s word for “fighter” being derived from their word for “animal,” and how the concepts are linked in the culture. Fighters are expected to be animals, she says; they have to be, or else they’ll be taken advantage of. It’s inconceivable for a fighter not to fight because he doesn’t feel like it, she says, that’s just something they wouldn’t understand.

I’d be pretty stupid not to have picked up on this somewhat already, but I’ve never heard it all laid out explicitly. It explains a lot, as does the sight of a seven-year old boy kneeing another one hard in the chest, before a cheering crowd.
By the time I started fighting my personality was pretty well formed already, and what attracted me was its contrast to who I was and the life I was leading. Since then I’ve become a competent boxer and I hope to be good at Thai boxing as well, but I’m not a fighter and I never wholly will be. I roll my eyes at the backpackers in Kho Sahn but I’m tourist here myself, obviously. When I crumple from a kick to the ribs, or decline to spar a loutish Brit with 30 pounds on me, or decline an order to kick harder when my partner’s not blocking quick enough, it’s as a tourist, who’s come to study Muay Thai. And I think these are reasonable things for a tourist to do.
But now I’m starting to understand how alien that stance must seem to a Thai fighter, and why the trainers at the gym seem so bemused and often hostile towards me. To them, Muay Thai isn’t one interest among many, but an identity; and so in their eyes my actions are perverse, a repudiation of the self. Probably it would be easier for them to understand if I was fat, or an absolute beginner, if I dropped in now and then for an hour. But I’m there every morning and every afternoon, and I know the sport, and if you stand me up in shorts next to a real fighter like Farmer, there’s not much in our builds to tell between us. Except there’s an essential softness to me that’s evident soon enough, and that I don’t think I could ever be totally rid of, or would want to be. I think that makes me something of a distasteful hybrid to them, and though I’m sure they’ve seen plenty just like me that doesn’t lessen the strangeness of it.
As the fights go on, it’s easy for me to feel the blows as they land because it’s evident by now that my ribs are bruised, though I’m not sure how badly. I’ve had bruised ribs before and they tend to linger for awhile, like a bad stomach cramp on one side that lasts a week or so; I meditate gloomily on this. Up in the ring, one fighter throws a head kick that seems to fall short, grazing the other’s face with a bit of foot; this second fighter takes a step forward, then cocks his head to an odd angle and half-pirouettes on his way down.
After the fifth fight, we see to our amazement that Doni’s hands are wrapped, and Jitti is rubbing his limbs with liniment. Like I said, he’s in his forties, which in terms of Thai boxing is positively Methuselean. It isn’t clear if his fighting has anything to do with Dylan and Farmer not fighting; it seems likely to me that there’s some connection, but I don’t speculate out loud.
As Doni climbs up, Jitti ushers us out of our chairs to ringside. The bell rings, and the music starts up: deep, insistent drumming, unsyncopated, and a whining oboe line that twists after itself, ourobouros-like. The first round of a Muay Thai fight is subdued, a series of discrete engagements where the boxers sniff each other out. The other fighter—younger by more than a decade, easy—snaps out a couple of head kicks and Doni parries them nattily, as if wagging a finger at him. I start to suspect I’ll be witnessing some sort of feel-good miracle. The first round ends; back in our corner, the trainers massage Doni’s legs and give him water, and for good measure Jitti gives him a slug from a can of Heineken, and we all laugh.
By the third round, though, the other fighter is starting to dominate, getting the better of Doni in most of the clinches. The trainers exhort us to bellow every time Doni throws a knee, and we do, but most of the knees aren’t landing. Doni’s smile is gone now, replaced with something grim that looks all wrong on his face. In the fourth, he gets thrown hard to the mat, tries to rise, then collapses flat on his stomach. And that’s it. He looks like an old man as the trainers help him down out of the ring.
The last match of the night is Sak’s, another trainer at the gym. Sak—which is Thai for “tattoo”—is twenty seven, a year younger than me. Most of his two-hundred-odd fights are behind him. He’s lean and handsome—one of the girls at the gym told me she won’t train with him because she finds him too attractive—with lively eyes that go flat as a chalkboard when he fights. He can be charmingly insecure about things, though, and is always solicitous of our opinions on his hair and outfits.
His opponent is a fucking giant, maybe not much taller but a whole world thicker, around the legs in particular. His face is a horror show: a hair lip above a mouth where half the teeth are absent, and above that’s a nose so flattened it spans the whole distance between his cheekbones. It soon becomes evident how he got a face like that. He moves only forward, never back and apparently never down; in the second round, Sak spins him round with a right cross to the face, but he stays up, for that punch and any number of others to come.
At first a knockout seems inevitable, but by the fourth the giant has absorbed so much without comment that we have to reexamine our assumptions; Sak is miles ahead in points, but the giant seems to throw harder as the fight goes on, clumsy for the most part but coming very close at times; he’s stronger in the clinches, too, though he doesn’t seem to know how to press his advantage there. We holler along to every blow; I’ve never wished harm on a stranger so intently.
The fight ends with a standstill in the fifth and final, maybe fifteen seconds from the bell; the giant lets his arms drop to his sides, silently conceding. They stand side by side as some official gets up into the ring to present Sak with first a very large trophy and then a small one, which is a separate prize for Fight of the Night. Sak seems as blasé about the win as he was about the fight itself beforehand. Later on that night I hold the big trophy and find it disconcertingly light, because it’s made of hollow plastic.
As we leave the fairground Dylan is remarking on how Sak had only two days of preparation for the fight, on account of a split shin he’d picked up in a match last month. Sarah says that Sak’s been at it long enough to know what he has to do, that he’ll fight regardless of injuries or training. Ethan asks, rhetorically as always, if it doesn’t make you dead hungry to get in the ring, watching a fight like that. I honestly can’t say if it does or not, but he wasn’t talking to me anyway.

In Koh Samui (February 17, 2010)

I arrive in Koh Samui around noon on a Monday. The airport is tiny, a series of interconnected bamboo pavilions. I want to cash in a traveler’s check, but the lady at the exchange window taps a sign saying they don‘t do that here. Someone from the WMC Gym is supposed to meet me here, and I wait for about fifteen minutes with mounting anxiety before I realize I’m in the wrong spot. He’s where he’s supposed to be, and we get into his van.
Back in Bangkok this morning, Jitti warned me that Koh Samui was full of dangerous men. “They’ll cut you for your money,” he told me. I’ve heard from a few sources of the southern islands’ somewhat sinister reputation, anecdotes I only half-remember now, involving predatory expats and drugged drinks and violence on the beaches at night. We drive towards the gym on a winding dirt road, with thick stands of palm trees on either side and big jungled hills rising up all around us in the distance. I try to gauge the character of the landscape, if there’s anything sinister about it, but it adheres so closely to my notion of an island paradise that I feel like it could be any number of places. Then we turn onto the main road, which rings round the entire island, and most of the flora in the foreground gives way to dirt lots, and little strips of one-story buildings, and roadside stands selling gasoline in 40-oz glass bottles. The hills scroll on behind all this in parallax; every now and then I get a glimpse of ocean on the other side. We turn onto the Lamai beach road.
The beach road is very hectic and fairly long, and probably feels longer for being so repetitive. The buildings are all three stories or under, but that’s tall enough to hide entirely the beach on one side and the jungles on the other. I’d guess that fully half are bars and restaurants; most countries you can name are represented here by at least one bar or one restaurant, however loosely, even Sweden. Money changers and laundromats and massage parlors and sandal/t-shirt/towel shops and Indian tailors and tchotchke stalls and travel agencies and hostels make up the balance. Signs for resorts and driveways leading to resorts appear at regular intervals, though the resorts themselves are set back towards the beach, away from the hubbub. There are quite a few 7-11s, and a couple of Family Marts—a local chain, though whether to all of Thailand or just the island I’m not sure—and also an off-brand general store, which has in addition to groceries and beach supplies a selection of shitty toys and weird clothing and which is home to a very obese golden dog and where on my sixth day I finally find a mirror to shave with: a baby-blue compact that reads “Huggy Bear” on the front, underneath a cartoon drawing of a bear.
Despite being relatively narrow and packed with pedestrians, the beach road is host to heavy motor traffic, made up predominately of the scooters rented out by every third business as a sideline, but also metered cabs and red pick-up truck taxis that shuttle between Lamai and the two other principal beaches, and a big van with pictures of boxers on the side, that drones out a tape loop about upcoming Muay Thai fights in Chaweng. Arbitrary sections of the road are marked off as one-way, but this isn’t reliably observed, in my experience. Long stretches have no sidewalk, and where there is one it’s usually blocked up by stalls selling, among other things, the cheapest and most convincing counterfeit sunglasses I’ve ever come across. So it’s important to watch your step.
There are a lot more men than women among the tourists here, and Thai women in turn greatly outnumber Thai men; the restaurants and bars—and the massage parlors too, obviously—are staffed overwhelmingly by women. This becomes even more apparent at night, when the other sorts of businesses shut down and the girly bars start ramping up their game. In fact most of the local men—or at least the most visible sort—are not Thai but Indian, standing sentry outside the many bespoke tailor operations, approaching passerby at all hours with the vigor of Mormon missionaries. It’s hard to imagine buying a suit in this heat.
Unlike most parts of Thailand, the beach communities on Koh Samui are very tolerant of shirtlessness. There is a lot of skin on display in Lamai—beach and beach road both—and for the most part it looks pretty bad. There is a general shamelessness here which probably comes from knowing that however fat you are, there will be someone within spitting distance who is fatter than you. When I do see somebody fit, seven times out of ten they’re a fighter from the gym. Needless to say, bad-tattoo afficionados will find lots to like here; my favorite so far is the “No Fear” logo, curved around the belly button of guy whose gut must hang at least six inches below the tip of his cock.
I also notice everywhere a kind of suntan that I’ve never seen before, distinct from the classic bronze glow or the uniform wine-colored burn that the pale and persistent can achieve, in lieu of an actual tan, or the radio-orange you see on reality TV: it’s skin tanned brown to the point of purple, darker than a Thai’s skin, a shade that’s no longer reminiscent of skin at all, particularly, but more of burnished wood, like a cigar-store Indian, like something that belongs in a dimly-lit sitting room rather than out in the sun. I don’t have any idea how long it takes to get this tan, though you see it sported mainly on people forty and up—a couple, typically, lounging side by side on daybeds with multiple packs of Gauloises on the table in between—which suggests that it’s a serious undertaking. I have to assume that they’re retired, or at least reside year-round in tropical environs, because that is the only acceptable context for this tan. If you saw this tan in New York, it would stop you in your tracks; it would freak you the fuck out.
I don’t blend in so well among the tourists here, on the beach in particular. I’m gaunt and pale, and I’m bearded—having no mirror to shave by for the first five days—and the veins in my arms and neck have started standing out to where I can see them reflected in shop windows from the across the street. More than that, though, I’m by myself; there are plenty of couples here, and families, and here and there a pair of women on their own, and loads of groups of men; there are very few solitary males, and fewer young ones, and they attract attention. Most places, a man on his own could just be written off as lonely, but Lamai wants to attend to your loneliness the same way it would your hunger, or your need for sandals; and if you persist in being alone, it‘s for your own reasons. Which isn’t to say that the families and the couples look fondly on the pudgy Englishman shuffling alongside a nineteen-year old Thai girl, making monosyllabic attempts at conversation, or none at all, but they can understand him at a glance. I don’t have any signifiers of somebody on vacation, at least to them, and as such maybe I’m a potential disruption; I doubt anyone thinks all this through consciously, but I suspect they intuit something like it. Or maybe they’ve just noticed me judging their bodies and their tans and their bad tattoos. Anyway, all this is before I pick up a deep bruise under my left eye and a nasty scrape on the left side of my nose. I feel disreputable, more so than at any point in my adult life, which is tiring: smiles go unreciprocated; chairs that I try to sit in are claimed occupied, though ten minutes later they’re still empty. Loneliness in the midst of perfect weather and fun can create an echo chamber, where the disparity between the world within you and without grows greater and greater and more toxic. I should mention, though, that amongst Thais my fucked-up face has the opposite effect, at least when coupled with a pair of boxing shorts, which I‘ve been using as swim trunks: someone will point to my shorts, typically, and then to my face, and say “Thai boxing!” And he’ll give me a thumbs-up. One night a waiter gives me a free dish of ice cream. “Boxing boxing!” he says.
And there’s the WMC. The gym proper is a big open-air shed: two rings and floor mats and heavy bags, and sundry equipment, and a reception desk, all under steepled sheet metal thirty feet or so overhead. There are no walls, and the training area goes right up to the street, and tourists gather out front during the afternoon sessions to gawk at the spectacle. Behind the gym is an air-conditioned dormitory, and across the street is a row of little bungalows, without AC, one of which is mine at present.
The gym is situated on the beach road, between a bar and a massage parlor, and it fits in there well enough. Jitti Gym, where I was last, catered to foreigners too, but it‘s much more touristy here; the trainers and all of the staff are Thai, but it’s foreign-owned, and all the students are foreigners. There’s a venality to the whole enterprise; it’s a serious gym, not a scam by any means, but I think they see Muay Thai instruction purely as a service for Ferang, no different from the scooter rentals across the street. This is a little depressing but also sort of a relief; sometimes I felt obscurely beholden to Jitti and his trainers, as they puzzled over what to do with me, and if I skipped a day of training I’d have to explain myself. Here, nobody gives a fuck what I do or don‘t.
But it’s tiring to feel constantly hustled. The facilities at the gym are ferociously shitty. The floors of the two rings are stretched with thin, cheap canvas, like you’d see over the back of an army jeep, and which in both cases is torn to shreds in the center, revealing a thin layer of foam underneath. And the ropes of the rings are dangerously slack. There are only three heavy bags, and one of these has no stuffing whatsoever above the halfway mark. Behind the rings is a mirrored area where exercise equipment should be but isn’t, save for an obscure broken Soviet-era weight machine that you can sort of use to do pull-ups. There’s an affiliated gym across the street, with top-of-the-line equipment, that you can use for an additional fee. Towels are not provided. Water is not provided. Both are for sale. Gloves and shin guards are available, but in a sullen and perfunctory fashion; arrayed along the street-facing side of the gym is an Island of Lost Toys assortment of derelict equipment that you’re free to root through frantically mid-class, just before the sparring is about to start; of the thirty or so shin guards, there are maybe three viable pairs. The contrast between these and the glass-walled shop with its shelves of pristine equipment, neatly stacked, is clearly intentional. Also, all of the equipment for sale is branded with some Asian fighting reality show.
I’m being a little naïve in my comparison of WMC with Jitti Gym, I know. Within fifteen minutes of my arrival, Jitti had strong armed me into buying two T-shirts that I never wore, and that subsequently disappeared in the laundry; on my penultimate night, he wanted me to pay a thousand baht for admission to some after-hours brothel, and proffered a random assortment of British soft-core magazines to illustrate the sort of girls I would meet there. But Jitti also wrapped the blisters on my feet with tape every day, and he would give me sugar-fried eggs sometimes before morning training, and I spent about twelve hours a day with him, and whether or not he liked me we were on fairly intimate terms with one another. That counts for a lot, when somebody is hustling you.
WMC is a big gym, by Thai standards, with some thirty students in residence, and lots more who live elsewhere on the island; and so the faces and bodies tend to run together, at least at first. There are any number of powerfully built, crewcut or shaven-headed young men with sleeve tattoos that bleed down over their pectorals, and quite a few more with just a few tattoos, or none at all. Some of these men are British or Russian; quite a few are from Australia; there are at least two Irishmen, hairless above the waist save for their eyebrows, both very pale despite having resided at the camp for several months. It is a very fit group, for the most part; nearly every belly is rigidly partitioned; even my abdominals are starting to show. I’m the only one with any chest hair, though, except for one very tall guy who also sports the only other beard.
Some afternoons a handful of older men show up, relatively out of shape but very capable boxers, whose tans are so dark as to erase any clue to their ethnicity. There’s something Gallic in their swagger, though. There’s a Czech man in his late forties with a noble, haggard face and a military bearing; he always seems to be nursing some injury or other, and many days will not be not training but just observing. And there are three or four tall, raptorly men with short faux-hawks and sporadic clusters of tattoos all over their bodies, neck especially. All of them are aloof in their interactions with me, and this feels appropriate; they seem to belong to some other, more ferocious species and I am frankly relieved not to have their full attention. One of them is Slavic, which also feels appropriate, but the others are disconcertingly Francophone. Nobody here is American, though of course some people look like they could be, and I forget sometimes, and I’m surprised and a little sad when someone replies to me in a Polish accent.
There are three or four women at the gym as well, all very pretty, phalanxed always by at least three crewcuts. I never even think of talking to them. There is a nine- or ten-year old British prodigy who takes private lessons in the late mornings, and has a rat tail. Shadowboxing, he cuts his limbs through the air in pure, twisting lines like the ribbons of those weird Olympic rhythm gymnasts. If his perpetual sneer and lurking, dickhead father are any indication, he’s well on his way to becoming a really monstrous individual.
There are eight or nine trainers here; some of them are very well known fighters and most of them are friendly and capable enough, but with the size of the gym I haven’t gotten know any of them too well, even by my second week; this is aggravated by four of them being brothers, with essentially identical haircuts; someone suggests going by their various tattoos. They all smoke a lot more than seems normal to me, though, and a few of them are definitely shady. One in particular, Kah, has a sunken face and missing teeth and a build that loiters between sinewy and wasted; his tattoos are just a shade darker than his skin, barely discernable, and when he shrugs on his green fatigue jacket after training he looks a lot like a pirate, the scary modern-day kind. Kah has hit me up for money twice: first while I’m on the back of his scooter, after he insists on giving me a ride to dinner, and then again the next night, on the front porch of my bungalow; I manage to beg off both times. Later I hear that he’s pulled the same thing on two other people, with more success, and then someone tells me he’s addicted to crystal meth. I hadn’t suspected this, exactly, but it had occurred to me, looking at that face.
I first arrive at the gym at about one in the afternoon, in plenty of time for the afternoon session, which begins at five. By that time I’ve discovered the beach, though, and I decide to hold off training until the next morning. Mornings start at eight, but I’m told to show up early if I want to skip rope and stretch and what have you, so I head over at 7:30. The gym’s totally deserted. I pad around awhile, looking for a jump rope, and I’ve just found one when I notice a shiny black dog by the front desk, watching me. His head probably comes up to about my nipples. He’s standing very still, with his mouth closed, and he doesn’t seem aggressive, but I have his full attention. We stare at each other for a little while, and then I start to skip rope, tentatively, and he starts moving forward. I put down the rope and walk out of the gym and cross the street. He stands at the edge of the gym, looking me. Then he starts to cross the road as well, and I go back to my bungalow and read for twenty minutes.
At Jitti, the ratio of students to trainers was almost one to one. Here, with so many more students, the classes are more like those at my gym back in NYC; each session you partner up with someone else, and the trainers guide everyone through various exercises. But the students here are generally much more serious than back home—not surprising, given that we’ve all come to Thailand to study—and the classes reflect this; the technique portion takes up maybe forty minutes in a two-hour session, with the rest given over to sparring: first legs only, then technical (arms and legs, but no elbows and no punches to the head) then Western-style boxing, then grappling, or wrestling. The sparring isn’t broken into rounds; each bit runs for about ten minutes straight, which is a fucking eternity, believe me. After all that, you can loiter around and a trainer will eventually do two rounds of pads with you; it tends to be pretty lackluster on their part, but I don’t mind, by that point.
The thing about a routine like this is, you want someone who’s about as experienced as you, and most of the people here are either a lot better than me, or a lot bigger, or both. There’s one guy who’s just about a perfect match; he outweighs me some, but it’s mostly fat, and we both have a good session whenever we’re paired. But he drinks too much, and only comes in every second day at most, so the balance is off, usually, in one direction or the other. Some days I might work with Alexander, a lanky Australian who looks like Saint-Exupéry’s little prince, whose form is fine but who locks up when he’s sparring; it’s like kicking a heavy bag who shuffles around. Other days it’ll be someone like Sergei, about my height but with thirty-something pounds on me, all muscle, and a handsome, implacable face whose eyes never unlock from mine, and a mind so hopelessly quick that it doesn’t matter how slowly he moves, it’s never slow enough for me.
In boxing, like most one-on-one sports, even a relatively small disparity between opponents can make real competition untenable. There’s things to learn from sparring someone who’s much better than you, but it’s fucking exhausting as well, especially in long stretches like these. When I fall for every feint, and everything I try is disdainfully parried or else pulls me into some painful and compromised new position, a learned helplessness will set in at some point, and then I’m just marking time. And worse is that underneath it all I’m aware of what he’s holding back, his capabilities, like a dog on a tether, and I feel sheepish about that being necessary, because he’s come across the world for this, just like me. And also I know that it’ll come untethered at some point, inevitably, if just for a second, and he’ll throw me to the ground, hard, or kick me in the solar plexus, and I won’t begrudge him that, at least in retrospect, because I’ve been on the other side of it, and I know how at some point it just becomes irresistible, like finally scratching an itch. But it still stresses me out, and training is stressful enough at the best of times. So far every class here has ultimately felt worthwhile, but I don’t like the everyday uncertainty. I’m worried I’ll get hurt eventually; I spend my whole first week training through the bruised ribs I got back in Bangkok, so the essential frailty of my body feels close to the surface.
That said, the days here have a lull to them that’s not at all unpleasant. Living so close to the beach, it seems to have imposed its rhythms on me. I wake up, then I train, then I sit on the beach. Then I train, then I sit on the beach, then I sleep. It would be easy to spend a year here, or more, and lots of people seem to. I read voraciously, on the beach; by the second day I’ve finished all the books I’ve brought, but I find a good used book shop. The radio there is always playing word-for-word covers of American rap songs. I’m in there practically every day. First I read Where I Was From, Joan Didion’s history of California cum memoir, then The Quiet American, by Graham Greene, which is a pretty much perfect thing to read in a slightly sinister tropical milieu. Next is Jack Maggs, by Peter Carey; it starts off great but then I leave it in the bathroom of a safari park. That same day I pick up The Colour of Blood, a Cold War political thriller by the Irish author Brian Moore, cited by Graham Greene on the back cover as his “favorite living novelist.” It’s just okay. Then it’s Arthur Dressler, by Steven Millhauser, which is fine but if you have read any of his numerous short stories concerning some series of increasingly ornate and mystical department stores or amusement parks, then it won’t hold many surprises for you. And then On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan: I had read a long excerpt of this already in the New Yorker and so held off buying it at first, because the novel itself is pretty short. But it’s a flat-out miracle and I’d recommend it to anybody. At present I’m reading Longitude, which is a pop history of the marine chronometer. It’s pretty good.
If I go on about the books it’s because the beach with the jungles rising behind it all looks like a postcard; it seems pointless to describe, except that like so much else here it’s scribbled with cluster on cluster of parasoled daybeds and sets of bamboo chairs and tables belonging to various resorts and cafes. But whatever, it’s gorgeous; the water is eerily warm. I eat every meal on the beach, or just about. You have to buy something to sit in the shady chairs, so I drink a lot of Diet Coke. It’s more crowded during the day, but quieter; at night all the restaurants turn on their sound systems, and they overlap. The peddlers put away their ice cream and wind-up birds and trot out barrels full of fireworks: serious fireworks, four or five feet long, like they use on the Fourth of July. People will set them off just fifty feet away from where I’m eating, and they’ll explode right overhead; I’ve never seen fireworks so close before. They also sell “lucky balloons,” which are like miniature hot air balloons made of white cloth, with a can of Sterno or something in the bottom. They float up to about a hundred feet and then linger, glowing in the sky, spirit-like. It’s breath-taking the first time you see it, and like the fireworks, and the ocean and the jungle, you never get entirely inured to it.

Til the End of It (April 8, 2010)

It’s Saturday night, my second week in Phuket, and I’m at the fights in Nai Harn beach, along with most everybody else from Tiger. The card is a mix of Thais and ferang, some of them from our gym and some from Dragon, down the road, and some from Simba Muay Thai, a gym with which we apparently have a rivalry, like in an 80s summer camp comedy. I’m four rows back from the ring, in a knot of other guys from Tiger, with six cans of warm beer in a plastic bag at my feet; it’s Chang, which is the shittiest brand of Thai beer. The ring’s set up in a wooded park a ways off from the beach, and it’s a sticky night with no breeze, and I’m actually wearing jeans for the first time in I don’t know how long, because this felt like a special occasion. I’m sweating.
We’d eaten dinner at a restaurant on the beach, figuring to miss the kid fights at the bottom of the card, but there are still a few to go. The two in the ring as we’re sitting down are about eight years old. It’s a rough fight, and the next one is even rougher, ending in a knockout by elbow. There’s a German-looking guy braced behind one of the corner posts, videotaping the fight. A little blonde boy lolls around at his feet, creamy and tow-headed, spitting distance from the fighters. By this point I’ve seen enough kids boxing that it feels commonplace, even boring, but the German boy rekindles some of the strangeness for me; he’s maybe three years younger than the boys he’s watching but is essentially of a different species. That kid’s not good for anything, I think to myself.
The real fights get underway. A gang of Thais crowd behind the corner of the ring nearest us, practically on top of one another. I start making bets with Bruno, a big hairy French-Canadian sitting behind me. He’s got a growly voice like a cartoon dog. All my picks win, and all of his lose; we keep going double or nothing. I finish up my second Chang and get a cigarette from the guy in front of me. Every drag makes the air press down heavier on my skin, but I soldier through it.
The next fight is a Tiger-Simba matchup. Our man is a stocky black guy, shorter than the Simba fighter by at least six inches. It’s Bruno’s turn to pick; we both agree that Simba is the safer bet, but Bruno doesn’t want to bet against our gym. I don‘t have any problem with it. The fight goes the full five rounds. Simba dominates the first four; the height difference is an issue, and Tiger can’t sort it out. He keeps throwing a flashy spinning kick, like you see in Tae Kwon Do, again and again throughout the fight even though it isn’t working; he’s at loose ends. Simba leverages his extra inches to land a lot of solid-looking overhead elbows; Tiger manages not to bleed, improbably. He rallies in the fifth, but it’s not enough. Now I’m up six hundred baht.
I get up and go over to the food tables. I consider an ice cream but opt instead for a skewer of deep-fried cocktail franks. The meat is lukewarm and practically dissolves in my mouth. I finish it and order another.
The fights keep going. I open another Chang, but it‘s warmer than the night air, and I end up pouring it out. I don’t feel well at all; I get up again and wander in the dark amongst the trees. There are at least five fights left, I figure. The prospect of staying to the end turns quickly from a chore to an ordeal to an impossibility. I hastily say my goodbyes and head out. Serendipitously, a group is heading back to Tiger right then, in a touk-touk. One of them is a Scotsman, insensibly drunk, and the others are escorting him home, so that he won‘t try to ride back on his scooter and die; I have to help a guy with a huge beard wrestle him into the cab. It’s the Scotsman’s last night, and he is very mournful about something, but it isn’t clear what. “He’s so damned pretty,” he says, a couple of times.
On the ride back my extremities feel tingly and brittle. I’m not sweating at all now. Me and the bearded guy discuss the Tiger-Simba fight. There’s a girl with us too, Cerie, a Midwesterner whom I met on my first day; she’s been teaching in English in Korea, like a lot of people here. When I first talked to her, she seemed a little overwhelmed and asked a lot of questions, but since then she’s come to understand her prestigious position as one of the few women at a Muay Thai camp, and grown accordingly more haughty towards me.

The driver drops us off at the Scottsman’s hotel, a little ways down the road from mine. I leave his friends to wrangle him home. Once I’m through my front door, the fever kicks in as if wired to the light switch. There is a thin layer of hot sweat trapped beneath my skin, which interferes with everything. Thirty seconds of a cold shower sends me rocketing in the opposite direction, and I am under the blankets, still wet, stabbing at the fan with its remote control to turn it off.
It goes on like this for a long time, hot and cold, frightening and tedious. At times I get so cold that the tremors of heat are almost pleasurable when they come. I cue up public radio podcasts on my laptop, and then forget about them, and then slip in and out of conversation with them. I feel badgered by presences and periodically uncomfortable with my nudity; over and over I realize that I am by myself, but this doesn’t bring any comfort, or even much lucidity; I struggle all night with a notion of my blankets as some kind of complicated apparatus, with four stages, the third of which keeps eluding me, and which I’ll be tested on at some point before morning.
It’s still dark when the fever finally breaks, but I can hear roosters crowing. I’m so relieved to find the world in order that it takes me awhile to notice how shitty I feel. There is a huge bubble in my stomach whose contours are so manifest that my flat belly in the mirror seems impossible. All I want to do is shit and fart but I can’t do either.
I spend most of Sunday in my room. I make myself eat a couple of times, rice and bananas. I’m not drinking enough water and I know it, but my stomach’s so bloated that I don’t care. In the evening the fever returns and stays for a couple of hours.
The next day is only a little better. By now people have noticed my condition and are eager to help. The brisk lady who runs the hotel presses a couple of lozenges on me; the packaging reads “anti-flatulence,” which would seem to be exactly what I don’t need, but I’m in no condition to argue. And there is Tuschka, a friendly and sinister Bulgarian covered in small, blurry tattoos. He gives me two packets of a powder called Szmekna. “You put in water—a little water,” he explains to me. “Two hours? You take again. And then…” He puts his thumb and forefinger together and nods decisively, as if at that point all this will be behind us.
I take all of it and more, but nothing helps much. My stomach continues to balloon, invisibly. I’ve already missed a day of training, and tomorrow is clearly a wash; the idea that this might be an indefinite condition starts to take hold. I sit at a chair by the pool, reading a dense fantasy novel I found at an internet café and regarding the people around me—capable of training but blithely not training—with a physical bitterness. I take my second packet of Szmekna. When the fever comes on again around sunset, I’m just about at wits end, but I drink six liters of water in ten minutes, and it retreats. The next morning I manage to shit a little, which feels like my first unalloyed triumph since coming to Thailand. In the afternoon I go running for an hour; I have to stop and throw up halfway through, but I’m right alongside an open sewer at the moment—more serendipity—and I feel better afterwards in any case.
The day after that, which is Wednesday, I’m back at the gym, though there isn’t any training in the morning, because they’ve brought in some monks to bless the grounds. We’re all invited to come watch the blessing. On my way over I fall in beside Cerie, who is dressed in short shorts and a top that’s really just a sports bra. Casually as I can, I suggest that if she has a t-shirt or something it might be good to put it on, out of respect for the monks, who have many of the same hangups about women and their bodies as monks of other religions. She looks at me like I’ve told her she has sweet tits. It serves me right, since I guess I said it mostly to make her feel bad. The blessing is interminable, and I’m not in any shape to eat any of the breakfast after. But training that afternoon goes well enough that I can convince myself I’ve recovered 100%.
Both sessions on Fridays at Tiger start with light sparring for twenty minutes straight, then some pads and bagwork before sparring hard for three more rounds; it’s Western boxing in the morning, Thai boxing in the afternoon. A three minute round can feel very long sometimes; twenty minutes of boxing is an eternity under any circumstances. This Friday I’m paired up with an Englishman named Ken. He’s about my size, with four or five professional fights, but he’s gotten a little out of shape since then. Ken and I get along very well as sparring partners, and though we start out light, it escalates, so that by two minutes in we’re going pretty hard; we try to keep the weight out of our straight punches—or I do, at least—but a punch thrown quickly will land with some force, regardless.
Class is sparsely attended that morning, and we zigzag like a couple of drunks over a wide, empty expanse of floormats, dominating one another by intervals, pausing every now and then to grin at how impossibly long this has been going on for. For a few stretches—twenty seconds or so, probably, but they feel longer—I find myself boxing with uncharacteristic inspiration: I pull off a few relatively elaborate feints; I slip down and to the outside of punches I would typically just absorb into my forearms, to pop up somewhere inconvenient; I suss out things he’s up to and preempt them with punches of my own. Towards the end I land a left hook to the body—always my gimpiest punch—that nearly folds him double for a moment. When it’s over, my left eye is already going black, and we’re both a little punch-drunk and pleased with ourselves and each other and that it‘s over.
I limp through the rest of class, but by lunchtime I can barely sit up straight, I‘m so tired. The smart thing would be to skip out on the afternoon session, but it’s my last day of classes at Tiger; I go back to Bangkok on Monday. I take a nap and wake up and drink an off-brand Thai Redbull, and then ten minutes later I drink another, a different kind, with a picture of a shark on it.
The afternoon training gets underway and I feel all right, at least at first. I spend twenty minutes sparring with a gangly British kid who stumbles back endlessly, making me chase him; it makes us both look bad. I start out light as I can, to show him there’s nothing to be afraid of, but it doesn’t make any difference; after a while I start hitting him in the face every chance I get. I’m spaced out and pissy by the end of it.
We shadowbox awhile, and then do three rounds on the heavy bags, and then it’s time to spar again. I pull on my shin guards and start to tape my toes—I’ve bent them sparring at least a half dozen times this trip, and each time hurts worse than the one before—but my feet are too sweaty and so I give it up.
My first partner is another Brit, Jamie, my height but a world more muscled. I can’t land a thing on him, and he gets me hard a couple of times; we’d been an even match on Wednesday, but I don’t think much about it. Next up is a tall, curly-haired guy I haven’t seen before, and we tangle our limbs together to little end. In between the second round and the third I am daydreaming about all the television I’ll watch tonight in bed.
My last partner is Soren. He’s a short, oafish Swede, with a gut, and dull eyes beneath a sloped brow and ravaged hairline. We’ve sparred a couple of times before; he can‘t box for shit, but he’s strong and doesn’t know how to hold anything back. We square up. His whole body is tensed; his hands vibrate in their gloves. As I’m watching them vibrate, he punches me in the face. I circle around him a bit, trying to focus. He kicks; it’s clumsy and slow; I watch it arc upwards, into my ribs, hard. It hurts; I’m irritated. I snap a kick back at him, and my big toe catches his elbow and bends back a ways. An electric shock runs most of the way up my leg. I grit my teeth and stomp around for a few moments before I can compose myself. We square off again, and my whole foot throbs crazily; I’m furious that I’ve hurt my foot, and it’s Soren’s fault, for being such a clumsy fatass; he doesn‘t have any business being here; he kicks me in the ribs again. I roll my eyes. One of the trainers asks if I should stop, maybe, and I sigh and start to strip my gloves off, like a piqued little lordling who’s forfeited a joust.

Saturday I limp around in a funk, eating ice cream and popping anti-inflammatories. At lunch Bruno carries a tiny prostitute across the hotel dining room, trailed by four of her tiny friends, all of them shrieking with laughter. I go to Patong that evening, planning to see a movie, but there’s nothing I want to see. Sunday morning I’m on a flight to Bangkok.
I walk out of the airport and get into the first cab I see. I have a printout with the name and address of the gym—but written out in Roman letters, not Thai—and a mobile number and below that, two square inches of a Google map. I show it to the driver as I’m sitting down, and he glances at it and nods. We’re already getting on the highway once I realize how little English he has, and that he can’t seem to read the address.
He barks at me, “Name hotel?” and I tell him “Kaew Samrit Gym,” pronouncing this as best I can. He comes back with something that begins with “Kow” and ends in a yowl, as if to ask if this was what I meant. I repeat the name again. We have this exchange several times over the next ten minutes.
He tries the mobile number a couple of times but can’t get an answer. After a while he asks how much I want to pay. I point at the meter, which is running, but he’s not having it. “No, no, too far, too far.” I consider pointing out that he doesn’t know where we’re going yet, but I don’t. He wants eight hundred baht, and I get him down to 650.
We continue on at highway speed, apparently blind. Periodically, the driver glances down at the paper again, as if the characters will spontaneously become intelligible, and on the sixth glance they apparently do just that: he points to the word “Talingchan,” and looks back at me and asks, “Talingchan?” I tell him yes yes, Talingchan, and he slaps his forehead and moans. “Talingchan!” I tell him yes, again. “Is far, man! Talingchan! Not Bangkok! Far, far.” He renegotiates the fare up to seven hundred, plus the airport tolls, which I’d already figured on paying.
It does turn out to be pretty far; we stop to transliterate the address and then twice more again to have it clarified, and by the time we get to the gym the meter is close to what we‘d agreed on anyway. Kaew Samrit Gym is not in Bangkok after all, but in a suburb to the north. It’s a strange area. We turn off a dirty four-laned motorway into a hushed, residential maze: the streets are wide and shaded by drooping trees; there is very little traffic; the few dogs around are languid and even the children playing seem not to make much noise, or else the noise is swallowed up by the foliage. There are some of the hard-angled concrete row houses that are everywhere in Bangkok, but many larger, fancier houses as well, each one walled off from the others. These aspire to a western style of architecture but miss the mark somehow, throwing together columns and cupolas and gabled windows without much logic; the effect is like a man wearing a necktie, a sun visor and a watch on either wrist.
We are driving slowly down one of these streets, apparently close, when a woman runs out and flags us down. She helps me out of the car and leads me into the gym. Its layout is similar to Jitti’s, a walled compound with a couple of small one-story buildings, and a ring set up beneath a freestanding roof. The mats and equipment seems a bit nicer than Jitti’s, but not by much. Behind one of the buildings I can see a second, larger ring; cartoonish figures on the wall demonstrate various Muay Thai strikes, with their Thai names written out phonetically beneath them. There doesn’t seem to be anyone else around. It is very quiet, quieter even than the streets.
The woman is very friendly, but does not have much English. She leads me back past the first ring and around a corner, past a bookshelf housing about fifty pairs of running shoes and up a couple of stairs and through a door, into a dim hallway. There are three doors on either side; my room is on the left, all the way at the end. It’s got very high ceilings and two twin beds and two massive armoires against the opposite wall, each at least eight feet tall. The sheets and the pillowcases on both beds are peach-colored satin, and so are the curtains that run the whole length of one wall. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a room done up with so much satin; the effect is somehow funereal. The pillow on the bed that isn’t mine has the words “Romance Mode” stitched out across it. The woman leaves me in this room, and I unpack.
I wander around the gym a little. I meet a couple of Thai men who look to be trainers; they shake my hand but don’t seem to speak much English either. There’s a stack of a magazines on a chair by the front office; I leaf through a French comic book that turns abruptly pornographic. As evening approaches, the absence of other ferang, of any sign of them at all, is getting difficult to ignore. I go back out into the streets, in the direction of a 7-11 I remember passing on the drive in. A group of Thais jogs past me, shirtless, back towards the gym; all but two of them are teenaged or younger; we smile at each other.
Back at the gym, the silence is oppressive. I linger in the hallway, first by one door and then another, listening for movement, but there isn’t any. I stare at the shelves of shoes, as if they might disclose somehow their owners’ nationalities. Then it’s time for dinner, which is held in the asphalt courtyard of a little tin-roofed building across the street. The boys I saw on the street earlier are all there, and few older men. They’re all at one table, and I’m seated off by myself, at a little table the size of a desk. Dinner is white rice and a bowl of dry ground beef that’s spiced to the limits of edibility. There are vegetables at the other table, but nobody offers me any. Everyone keeps smiling at me, though. It takes awhile for me to work up the nerve to ask if I’m the only ferang staying here, and a little while longer to make the question understood, but someone does, finally, and I’m answered in the affirmative: tomorrow, he tells me. They’re all in Pattaya for the weekend. Right then a cheerful tune wafts in from the street, as if my relief has escaped from my head and is vibrating through the air around us. It’s an ice cream cart; we all go out and buy some ice cream.
I wake up at six the next morning and eat a packet of peanuts I’d bought at the 7-11, and then I lie on my peach satin sheets for awhile, staring at the ceiling. At six forty-five I go out into the gym with my running shoes; I know from the website that the morning sessions begin with a 10k run. There’s nobody around though. I drift around the gym, confused. A Thai man comes out of the front office. I ask him, “run?” and he nods and tells me, “little bit, little bit,” and I go uncertainly out into the street. I run about fifteen minutes, backtracking a lot so as to stay close to the gym. I pass a couple of other ferangs, separately, both of whom seem to have been running for awhile already. When I get back to the gym, the class is already assembled in a circle, stretching, maybe fifteen of them, all of them Thai except the two guys I saw on the street. I join the circle.
The first day or two at a gym is always hard. I know I’m being scrutinized and it makes me tense, and tension gets exhausting fast. And there is the litany of small proprietary adjustments they want me to make: to hold my right hand a bit higher, and keep my left hand closer to your cheek, and turn into my kicks more, and into my punches a little less. I’d forgotten, too, how thick and wet the air in Bangkok is, compared to the islands; there’s more junk in every breath, and less oxygen.
Within ten minutes the pain in my toes starts in again, rising up through my leg every time my leg connects, and the anticipation makes it hard to keep my form correct. And my shoulder hurts, and on my right shin, just below the knee, a bulge of fluid has begun to rise as if in protest of all the kicks that have landed there. I’m tired in a way I’m not used to; every movement feels belabored and pointless. Thai teenagers frolic violently all around me, with an ease that feels like a rebuke.
Lunch is white rice and steamed vegetables and a very salty broth with something that looks like stringy chicken but turns out to be some kind of mushroom. I’m seated across from David, one of the four other ferang at the gym presently. He’s a professional MMA fighter from British Columbia. I tell him about how I keep hurting my toes and he nods; his toes hurt all the time, he tells me. “Not so much when I’m over here,” he says. “But when I’m somewhere dry, it’s hard to take sometimes.” He pauses. “I’m gonna hate life when I’m 45.”
The rice fills me up too quickly. I’m used to getting a lot more protein. Also, the food is just sort of gross. I go down to the 7/11 after lunch to buy some peanut butter, but there isn’t any. I buy a couple of mini Snickers bars, then go take a nap; I don’t feel any better on waking up.
The afternoon session has barely started and the back ring is already full of Thais, boxing Western-style with headgear and big 20 oz. gloves. This is the first time I’ve seen anyone wearing head protection in Thailand. One of the trainers approaches and asks if I’ll be sparring. I watch them for a few moments more and then tell him no. Things don’t go any better than they had in the morning. I’m exhausted, and everything hurts; I don’t feel like I belong here.

I’m supposed to spend seven days here; in the end, I manage two and change. Something in me snaps shut, finally, about twenty minutes into the third morning. I muddle rotely through, then limp back to my room and start shoving things into a bag. The woman in the office doesn’t seem surprised that I’m leaving. She offers to call a car, and asks where I’ll be going. I tell her Kho San Road; it’s the only place I can think of where I’m sure to find a room. She laughs a little, before she can stop herself.
Two hours later, I’m seated at an outdoor cafe on a street which bristles with similar cafes, surrounded by Anglophone signage and men in cargo shorts brandishing rifle-like cameras, and momentarily a waitress will bring me a Heineken and a milkshake and curly fries. There will be plenty of time in the next few days for ambivalence and worse, but right now it’s hard to feel anything but relief, at having left behind those opaque streets and that cavernous pink room, at having nobody to fight this afternoon, at being just another sunburned asshole getting drunk.

Crimbo prezzies

2012-01-14T13:36:00.001Z

Been a bit hectic at Soft Towers recently, need to pull my finger out and stick up a few more posts, here's a few well chosen Christmas gifts I received a couple of weeks back now, lucky lad.

1980's US Military general issue watch, understated, cheap and disposable.

Norse Projects x Hestra gloves, a little bit of luxury for the coming months.

Not actually a Christmas gift but it was near enough, vintage Lee Workwear chambray chore shirt over dyed in indigo.

Lastly a speckled pink J Crew work shirt .

Northern Girl

2012-01-09T21:10:00.001Z

via http://antikmodern.blogspot.com/

Vinyl

2012-01-03T21:41:00.000Z

Came across this recently, CD one side and five inch vinyl on the other. Don't know what the sound quality is like but I think the idea is great . American DJ Jeff Mills released some work on one and I'm trying to get my paws on one to check it out.

Crimbo

2011-12-24T16:31:00.001Z

Christmas Eve 1914, British and German troops call an unofficial truce to exchange gifts, food, socialise and even have a game of football in No Mans Land after removing the bodies of their dead comrades.

Travelling Show

2011-12-19T21:41:00.001Z

I've come across The Wall of Death World tour a few of times over the last couple of decades. Initially at the Kent Hells Angels farm that they used to own on Romney Marsh and I gave it a swerve thinking it would be a bit old fashioned and not up to much. A torrential downpour sent me running for cover and that cover was as a spectator on the wall.
To say I was impressed by the noise, smell and the sight of the 1920's Indians tearing around the vertical wall is an understatement. The whole structure moves and vibrates with the momentum of the riders giving you an almost physical connection to the entertainers.

Ken Fox and his family have been riding the wall for over thirty years and are a true travelling show in the old sense, working the length of the UK all year at festivals, rallies and even the height of middle England's summer, Glastonbury.

As a footnote Liam Gallagher and Beadles Hand used the wall as the setting for the video to "The Roller".

Some great images below by Gary Magerum along with a short film by Benedict Campbell.

THE WALL OF DEATH from benedict campbell on Vimeo.

Iced

2011-12-09T19:55:00.000Z

Probably not what you were expecting from the "Straight Outta Compton" man.

Bankrobber

2011-12-04T23:37:00.012Z

Been to a couple of great gigs in the space of a few days this week and I'm feeling more than a bit jaded after a couple of relatively heavy and late nights. First up on Wednesday was Little Barrie at The Deaf Institute where he was taking a break from the day jobs with Edwyn Collins and Primal Scream. We were treated to a blistering 90mph set with glimpses of Chuck Berry, MC5 and maybe even the Pistols.The always smiling Barrie even gave my eldest some impromptu guitar lessons prior to the sound check, top man.

Friday brought the Justice Tonight Hillsborough benefit tour to The Ritz, the nod had been given and this wasn't to be missed. The Farm, Pete Wylie and the ever dapper Mick Jones played a blinding Clash heavy set and the encore brought surprise special guests John Squire and Ian Brown together on stage for the first time in over fifteen years.

Initially I don't think the crowd could quite believe who had just walked onto the dark stage unannounced but when Elizabeth My Dear struck up the roof nearly came off. This was quickly followed by Bankrobber and Armagideon Time with all the nights artists involved, during which Mick and John looked to be in a Deliverance style, Dueling Banjos stand off , an amazing and somewhat emotional night .

The night then quickly got messy and I spent several hours putting the world right with Mr Jones and Peter Hooton before blagging a lift home in time for daybreak. John Robb has a more in depth tour diary at Louder Than War. Still a number of dates on this to go and special guests at most and just in case you've forgotten, Don't Buy The Sun.

A day in the life

2011-11-24T20:40:00.003Z

Armando's scooters in Sheffield was started over 50 years ago by Armando Pastorelli and specialised in Lambretta and Vespa scooters , on his retirement to Italy the business was taken over by his sons Giulio and Guido who are now renowned restorers of both marques. Tim Stamp spent a day with them recently and took some great images whilst there.

Garb

2011-11-17T21:38:00.002Z

Ian Paley at the Garbstore in Notting Hill is a guy who seems to always gets it right , after working for Paul Smith he set up One True Saxon which was ground breaking in both the way it was marketed and in it's products while he was at the helm, he then moved on to form The Garbstore which for me is the best shop in London by a long way. His clothing is a mixture of modern and vintage with touches such as dead stock Talon zips and Japanese fabrics. Indeed when he first opened the store I was interested in some jeans which are made in shrink to fit Japanese denim and he went into great detail for me regards sizing and shrinkage via numerous mithering e-mails , top man and a trick a few others could learn from.

I've had a couple of his shirts my favourite being the four pocket flight shirt of which there has been a number of interpretations over the years. For the third autumn on the trot I'm wearing this mid weight parka made in cotton twill. I have always liked the use of the three hole butttons and particularly like the hood on this which is kept folded using press studs like old Belstaff parkas.

Get yourself down to Portobello market, have a rumage about in the overpriced tourist madness and then get in the Garbstore , If your Mrs or kids are in tow they are equally well catered for upstairs in The Couverture.

http://www.couvertureandthegarbstore.com/

Le Freak

2011-11-14T20:23:00.002Z

Finger on the pulse of the city once again, Chic at The Warehouse Project, never heard a dickie bird about this one until it was too late. I remember Nile Rodgers mainly for his work with Bowie in the 70's though of course there was a bucket load of hits with Chic, Diana Ross and more. By all accounts it was a storming , hit heavy gig which surprisingly finished with Johnny Marr joining the band for Le Freak .

The book of the film

2011-11-13T17:09:00.000Z

I'm in the process of reading the journals of Dick Proenneke, some great footage of his life in Alaska narrated his own words here .The real deal mountain man.

Surprise

2011-11-06T16:23:00.008Z

The postman delivered an unexpected package this week and on opening it didn't explode but contained a gift in the shape of a tee shirt from Kazuki Kuraishi created to mark the opening of his store Heather Grey Wall in Tokyo. Kazuki is a big hitter in the Japanese street wear scene and works with Neighborhood, Adidas , Fenom and Levi's to name just a few. If you get to Tokyo drop in and have a mooch.

The striking image on the front is of "The Don", young Wilson Aspden photographed by Kevin Cummins and if the bucket hat looks familiar well yes , it is the original "Reni" hat from the famous NME cover way back when. That's two Roses mentions in as many weeks.

Yadgar

2011-11-02T23:15:00.005Z

I recently spent a day with Carl from The Original Store and Glenn "The Rig Out" Kitson whilst they organised a photo shoot featuring the latest stock and some of the classic staples that the store carries.

Most of the shoot was carried out in the back streets of Manchester's still gritty Northern Quarter and we broke the day up with a rice and three curry from Fred at the Yadgar, the best £4 lunch in the north. Keep a lookout for the finished pics on the store site and elsewhere in the near future.

20th Century City

2011-10-29T09:50:00.003+01:00

1960's MANCHESTER

"United in seven goal thriller"

2011-10-23T20:32:00.005+01:00

I've purposely stayed away from football here and to be honest it's playing a smaller part in my life as each season goes by but I couldn't let the 6-1 slap that City handed out today at Old Trafford slip by. Sympathy to all my red friends and by the way your phones appear to be broken.

Some will touch cloth

2011-10-19T21:11:00.022+01:00

Big day out in the big city yesterday, got an invite from the now reformed Stone Roses to attend their what was intended to be secret press unveiling at the Soho Hotel. Unfortunately an attention seeking gob shite decided to let the cat out of the bag a couple of days prior (you know who you are) but this only added to sense of anticipation in and around the venue in the run up to the 3pm kick off.
On cue John, Ian, Mani and Reni entered the room to a standing ovation from the assembled music hacks, World press and a pair of Mancunian ne'er-do-wells, everything felt good . I'm gagging for this to start next year and long may it run . The third summer of love.

http://www.thestoneroses.org/

Turn Ups

2011-10-15T21:15:00.008+01:00

There aren't any upsides in being vertically challenged and since reaching my full grown adult size in the late 70's I've had to put up with the ball ache of rarely being able to step into a pair of strides without someone having to take a pair of scissors to them.

When I was a kid my old dear would turn up my jeans in the simplest and also the worst way imaginable. Turn the extra 6" inside and tack them in place by hand so that on washing and ironing (she ironed everything, including socks ) you ended up with a neat line 6" up your leg around your calf.
It was a look that only kids who got picked up in a minibus to go to a special kind of school could carry off properly.

At 5'8" my inseam is a modest 30" and in their wisdom most stockists of fine denim in the western hemisphere stock 32" or worse 34/36" inseam jeans meaning a trip to the tailors or your local alterations specialist and fuck me I've had some disasters in these places. "Can you replicate the finish on the hem" and the reply is always "of course" and you turn up to find something that their six year old blind daughter has altered for you. One place actually cut the hem off some Japanese denim and stitched it back on once the required 6" had been removed, you've never seen anything like it. Another problem with the shortening situation is that if the legs are tapered and they've got a 36" inseam once the excess is removed you've got a pair of jeans that cover your foot, again wrong.

Recently, Mr Studley at OI Polloi put me on to a tailor who had acquired a chain stitch sewing machine so off to the Denim Doctor I trotted to suss him out and see if he could sort out a pair of Cone White Oak denim jeans I had with their ludicrous 37" leg. The workshop is based in a long established tailors in Manchester city centre above the much longer established Mr Thomas's Chop House pub.
Michael, the tailor in question sorted them for me and whilst the machine in question was not the fabled Union Special the end result is much more authentic than your mums sewing machine or your local dry cleaner .

Michael at work on my jeans.

The end result.

Mr Thomas's Chop House.

One for a wet Monday

2011-10-10T22:44:00.012+01:00

Pinched from Jason J , Little Roy smashing Nirvana's Lithium .

Demon

2011-10-09T17:41:00.001+01:00

Getting to that time of year where the heavyweights come out, super thick hickory stripe shirt by Denim Demon of Sweden and not a prison shirt as has been put to me.

The Begining

2011-10-03T20:08:00.000+01:00

If you're of a certain age, with certain tastes in football , music, clothes and beer then you may remember The End fanzine from Liverpool. I've only ever seen a few well thumbed issues way back in time but remember it clearly. It was certainly new in it's outlook and it spoke about some of the interests I had back then .

The twenty xeroxed issues were published sporadically from 1981 till 1988 when editor Peter Hooton left to concentrate on his band The Farm.

The End has been credited with being the template for the original lads mag Loaded so it's quite fitting that James Brown who launched that tome is re-issuing all twenty copies in one volume through his latest venture Sabotage Times .

Of it's time

2011-09-30T21:39:00.000+01:00

N1

2011-09-26T22:29:00.002+01:00

For a few years now I've been on the lookout for a US Navy N1 Deck jacket , pretty much since the day I passed up on a very well worn piece that I spotted at a car boot sale in a Cornwall field about six years back. It was an issued example with stenciling on front and rear to indicate the owners name and the vessel he served on, the zip was bust and it was priced at the princely sum of £2 if I remember correctly. Regrets !

Now I know that Spiewak have always made a decent enough version of this and of course the Japanese are well on the case with reproductions from Buzz Rickson and The Real McCoys priced at £4-600; and fantastic as these are in many cases they are far more expensive than the genuine article on which they are modelled.

Anyway, Jason over at Antikmodern has brought to my attention the latest release from the guys at Albam , a modern take on the classic N1 Deck jacket put together in England , it's lined in Merino wool and features many of the trademark Albam details such as high end Riri zips and hand cut leather pulls and pocket trims. Altogether a nice interpretation of a classic piece of kit .

Me, well I think I'll keep looking for an original and the next time I'm in Cornwall will definitely be visiting a few car boot sales. If you happen to be in the east end of our capital city you can check out Antikmodern at Albam Spitalfields.

Albam

Original

                                                                    Buzz Rickson

Mr Newman and below a 60's biker getting his collar felt.

Super

2011-09-20T21:10:00.001+01:00

Supreme open their first European store in London this week , not sure if this FUCK rug is available there but if not it should be .

Bakelite

2011-09-19T22:06:00.002+01:00

Vintage Bakelite buttons with a hunting theme that I picked up a few years back , still waiting for the right shirt or jacket.

Nigel

2011-09-16T21:43:00.004+01:00

New Nigel Cabourn stock is hitting the shelves and the Arctic Parka is again top the pile, anyone remember the version he did for Debenhams a few years back , Ventile fabric, down filling, wooden buttons and toggles at about £170 if I remember rightly ! Here's acouple of images of said parka.

And here's the latest Made in England incarnation at a mere £2k more, better move quick on these . Lots more info and images available at Superdenim and elsewhere !

In the park

2011-09-10T18:18:00.002+01:00

I've never been to a festival as such , by that I mean I haven't coughed up my £150 for the right to sit in a field at Glasto, V, Isle of White etc next to a load of puke covered gap year students and their trendy vegan parents to listen to Bono or some other prick pontificate. It used to be so much simpler !

Paradiso

2011-09-08T22:01:00.009+01:00

Just returned from an enjoyable trip to Amsterdam, a city I've visited many times over the last three decades only this time it was probably a slightly more cultured visit than many before, I guess I'm getting a little older if not wiser.

As ever, as well as sampling some of the many beer and ale delights on offer, any trip away from home turf gives you an opportunity to size up the offerings on the clothing front. Sadly for a city so seemingly cool Amsterdam clothes shops for the most part fall into the usual high street crap and high end bling madness with for me only a couple of exceptions. Step up Teune de Nimes and sister shop Red Wing Shoes.

Now I've come across the Teune de Nimes name many times in many articles but came across the shop quite by accident, tucked away on a hip little street in the Jordaan district. A lot of the usual suspects were in stock , Acne, Edwin , Grenson, Ralph etc but what made it stand apart for me were the likes of Flathead , Momotaro and Trippleworks from Japan, Mr Freedom from California, the recently mentioned Tender and the Union Special sewing machine for proper chain stitched hems on your jeans for us short arses.

Obviously being a well prepared traveller when I came across the shop and it's friendly staff my camera battery was flat as a Dutch pancake so the in house photos will have to suffice and are far better than any I could produce.

As I mentioned above, TdN have a sister shop just around the corner. Red Wing Shoes Amsterdam stocks what you would expect , a huge selection of Redwing boots and shoes along with Nigel Cabourn , Duluth Pack , Woolrich, Tanner Goods etc, you get the picture.

Once again the shop is visually great and the guy I chatted with was friendly and knew his products well. He also dived out of the way while I tried to squeeze a couple of shots from my lame duck camera but luckily I've got their store video here which once again does a better job than I could of anyway.

After a few days of sightseeing , eating and drinking , what you need is some entertainment and as luck would have it the mighty Primal Scream were playing at the legendary Paradiso and we had an invite. A big thank you once again to Mani , Bobby Gillespie, and Little Barrie for the hospitality and for blowing the roof off that old church. By the start of the gig my camera battery had recovered enough to fire off a few grainy and out of focus shots before giving up the ghost for good.

Babylon

2011-08-31T23:48:00.007+01:00

Babylon was first released in 1980 , at the time the film was lumped with an X certificate to bar it's viewing by the younger part of it's target audience , did the Government of the day think it may contribute to the rising social unrest of the time with it's portrayal of racism and violence in London ?

In the intervening 31 years the film has received a couple of outings on Channel 4 and eventually got a dvd release in 2008 .

The Red Lion

2011-08-24T21:57:00.007+01:00

I don't own anything by Old Town but think I could use one of their jackets instead of the cheap, old French work coats that I had been looking at. All the products are made in house from flannels, linen, twills and denims and usually take between four to six weeks to produce. If you've a hankering for some hand made in the UK vintage inspired clothing you can obviously buy via the web or you could do worse than visiting the HQ in the picturesque town of Holt, Norfolk. The images below were taken in The Red Lion, St Jame's. .

YSP

2011-08-21T18:27:00.001+01:00

Promised to take the clan out for the day this weekend and as the weather was looking better over the hills and into Yorkshire that was the direction chosen. Through the one horse towns of Saddleworth and West Yorkshire in the direction of Wakefield, famous for it's high security prison and Yorkshire Sculpture Park , this was the final destination to see the work of Spanish artist and sculptor Jaume Plensa.
Five hundred acres of park land and woods interspersed with work by the likes of Andy Goldsworthy and Barbara Hepworth make it a good day out, especially if there's hardly a cloud in the sky and and the offspring can run themselves ragged.

Plensa's work is stunning, standouts were the room of eerie alabaster heads which almost look like holograms due to the translucent nature of the stone, the room of giant illuminated heads and the fifty metre poetry curtain made from stainless steel letters. All in an enjoyable day to be finished off with a few of The Marble Brewery's finest soon.

Everyone else does it so here's mine, it's the best foot forward into the Yorkshire badlands shoe shot !

Astronauts

2011-08-16T20:46:00.002+01:00

Astronauts Scott, Sernan and Chaffee looking good in training , Iceland 1965.

Library

2011-08-15T20:50:00.005+01:00

Popped into Manchester's Northern Quarter a few days back, the scene of some distasteful mass looting and thievery during the "riots" of last week , there were still a number of properties boarded up either through damage or for protection against, including Carhartt, Edwin, Vans and Oi Polloi. The guys who run the Vans franchise were hit hard with not a thing left in the shop and the unit itself looking like a something from 1970's Belfast.
Onto Oi Polloi which though boarded up had avoided the interest of the fuckwits of Manchester and was left stock and building intact. Had a brief chat with John about his new barge and hit the pavement with some new additions for the bookshelf.

First up the latest Rig Out, number 4 to be precise, what can I say, it's gone from a basic pamphlet, to magazine to high quality broadsheet in a few easy steps. This issue has the front and rear covers by John Squire the originals of which I saw a couple of months back and articles on Ralph , classic movie soundtracks and Stone Island.

Next up Men's File number 5, another dose of classic/vintage style with the usual high quality stylised photos and articles on hot rods, bikes, surfing and crab fishing !

Lastly Oi Polloi's Pica -Post number 2 , a high quality fanzine for want of a better word with illustration by Ben Lamb and containing articles on Mr Lauren's vehicle collection , John Studley's denim washing guide and the classic four pocket parka.

Tender

2011-08-11T23:38:00.002+01:00

Now and again you come across something where the attention to detail and craftsmanship is nothing short of anal. Tender is a relatively new English brand run by William Kroll, based in Norfolk , he is carrying the flag for hand-made, hand-dyed high quality jeans and shirts.

Kroll cut his teeth as a designer at Evisu before moving to Okayama, Japan to learn the ancient methods used there in traditional indigo dyeing. On his return to the UK Tender was born with the aim to produce high quality jeans and shirts in England. All the jeans are constructed in England from raw unsanforized Japanese denim and then dip dyed by hand in Norfolk using locally grown woad for the final indigo finish.The buttons are cast in brass then filed and polished by hand and attached to garments using rings for easy removal , each pair is also numbered and supplied in its own bag with a letter from William to the owner.

Tender are also producing shirts made with fabric woven in Lancashire which is then dip dyed in either woad for the indigo finish or weld for a subtle yellow finish. Look out also for a range of leather goods made using oak bark dyed leather from Devon and jeans in natural canvas . . Available from Superdenim

Speaker

2011-08-10T23:38:00.002+01:00

Interesting speaker with built in amp by Bob Turek

Reg Harris

2011-08-07T16:20:00.005+01:00

A good number of my pals are into cycling in it's various forms , though I would prefer an engine between the wheels I can't take away the dedication of many of the guys at the top end of cycle racing. One such man is the legendary Reg Harris who in a ten year period from 1944 to 1954 won the World sprint championship five times and also claimed two silver medals at the 1948 Olympics whilst riding with a fractured arm sustained while training .

Reg retired from racing in 1957 to work with with Raleigh and to manage the Fallowfield Velodrome ( later named the Harris Stadium). By the early 70's racing again entered his life and in 1974 he won the British title at the age of 54 and a year later claimed silver in the same competition. He continued to ride until his death at 72 in 1992.

This August the Reg Harris Memorial event takes place at Manchester Velodrome, all manner of cycling related events are taking place and there's a cycle jumble for them hard to find parts for your vintage restoration, looks like a nice afternoon out if your not going to London town for the carnival.

Afghanistan

2011-08-07T14:24:00.001+01:00

Not the usual images of this troubled place, thanks to Mahmood for the pics.

Trouble Man

2011-07-22T22:01:00.001+01:00

By 1981 Marvin Gaye was living in London and on his uppers, the good times had been and gone, addicted to cocaine and without a recording contract he appeared to be heading the same way as so many before him. On the advice of a Belgian concert promoter Freddy Cousaert he took a ferry from Southampton and moved to Ostend to get it straight.

This documentary was made at the time and gives an insight into the life and thoughts of the man who brought us the still relevant "Whats Goin On" and who would be shot dead by his father within two years.

I spent a couple of days in Ostend some years ago whilst following my team on a short lived European campaign and loved it's faded glamour, steak frites and 12% beer brewed by monks , well worth a look if your in Belgium.

Summer

2011-07-16T16:32:00.001+01:00

Rite in the Rain notebook, comes in handy in the summer months here.

Self Edge. Part 3

2011-07-13T21:45:00.006+01:00

The last instalment of my Farah 90th anniversary "1920" find , as before both pieces are one of 90 making it unlikely that the guy next to me at the bar will be in the same clobber . First up the chambray shirt, triple stitched and reinforced at all stress points, blue line selvage (don't know if this is White Oak fabric as before ), side gussets , asymmetrical pockets etc.You get the picture.

Finally, the last piece I picked up was this CPO shirt, made in 22 oz navy wool to the military specs of the 1920's /30's. It's going to be a while before it is cold enough for this one but again a great shirt, and very well made. I'd looked at a Buzz Rickson one some time ago but the price of £225 quickly killed off that idea .

Obviously wearing the CPO will make me look like this

A couple more images from Present London , who were the only independant UK stockist of the line.

This Weeks Favourite Site

2011-07-13T21:41:00.003+01:00

Subconsciously there does seem to be a bit of a vintage military thing going on here at the moment, it must be the memories of all those WW 2 films I watched as a kid kicking in. Many more great images at Jet Pilot Overseas and Navy Pilot Overseas .

B 36 Artic crew in full Cambridge rapist outfit.

Dick Proenneke, Alone in the Wilderness part 2

2011-07-07T23:34:00.007+01:00

Some newly released footage of the late, great Dick Proenneke and his life in Alaska which follows on from my earlier post. Once again this traler is stunning in it's simplicity and once again the whole film is only available on DVD from the copyright owner, unless you know different ?

Long Beach, California 1942

2011-07-05T17:07:00.001+01:00

Thursday Tune

2011-06-30T23:05:00.000+01:00

Self Edge. part 2

2011-06-27T23:16:00.009+01:00

I was recently on a mission to land my eldest some chinos and a pair of Vans Authentics, the latest combo for fourteen year olds I believe, though not a new look in this house by any means. A long and fruitless search ensued ," too big, too small, too baggy, wrong colour", you know the score and just as I was going to call it a day we came across a shop stocking the Farah Vintage line and thinking back a couple of decades I remembered they once did a fine line of chino type pants, in we went and were sorted in a matter of minutes !

On going to pay for the said pants I spotted a number of interesting looking pieces at the back of the shop , the first thing that caught my eye were the raw denim jeans piled up in the corner with the denim head legend "White Oak Selvage Denim" on the label, the oldest denim mill in the US, currently think Tellason and Raleigh jeans and previously Levis from 1915 till they decided cheaper was better and headed east .The shop manager explained that they were a capsule collection called "Farah 1920" celebrating Farah's 90th anniversary and that they had remade a number of other pieces from their work wear and military archive, limited to 90 of each , work shirts, button down shirts and some fantastic CPO shirts in 22 oz wool.

The selvage chambray work shirts were amazing quality and allegedly a copy of the first ever product made in 1920 by Mansour Farah in El Paso, Texas, and as good as many of the reproduction Japanese ones I've seen but as ever I had to have the jeans, number 61/90.

Ok, so Farah hasn't got the kudos of some of the high end Japanese/US denim brands but I now know they were making work wear and dressing the US military a good eight decades before the current heritage fascination .
Anyway , White Oak blue line selvage, no obvious branding , sanforized , chain stitched hems, donut buttons, fully lined back pockets and hidden rivets holding those pockets on (just like early Levis) , what is there not to like.

Now these weren't expensive at all but on going to pay for them it was all items 2 for the price of 1. A right result as they say, think I'll be going back !

Resistance

2011-06-23T23:09:00.002+01:00

A great image of a "free French" resistance fighter taken in Cassis, south of France in 1944. The guy has definitely got it and in the words of Mr Jason Jules would appear to be "never knowingly underdressed".

Self Edge

2011-06-18T18:26:00.001+01:00

Tuesday tune

2011-06-14T22:15:00.006+01:00

Sing Sing Prison, New York 1972. Some great funk guitar and powerful soul harmonies.

Alright Squire

2011-06-10T16:23:00.034+01:00

Had a sneaky day out in London yesterday in painfully hip Shoreditch to be more precise , the occasion being an invite to a preview of the latest exhibition of work by John Squire at Idea Generation gallery. As you can imagine the great and the good of London were in attendance along with a couple of freeloading northern chancers .

John's latest work is all based around the eight pointed star which is seen all over the Islamic world and parts of southern Europe and each piece is named after the new gods, celebrities that is. My faves were Alison Steadman, Woody Allen and JFK which was one that quite literally hypnotised you if looked at for too long , stunning . The exhibition runs from 10/6 -3/7

Obviously having made the effort to get there it would of been rude not to sample some of that famous East End hospitality and a few hostelries were visited along the way. The William IV is owned by a friend of a friend and is situated on a corner plot, as any good London boozer should be. Run of the mill lagers and a few real ales are backed up with what a Sunday supplement would call a "shabby chic" interior and an ace upstairs dining room.Worth a look if you're in the area if only for the mad neighbour across the street dancing and abusing passers by.
Left here to grab a quick nosebag with our man Nick, currently grafting at Present , where he's selling some of the best clothing available at the moment , though I dont think I'll ever get brogues with wedge Vibram soles or Mr Bathing Ape suits .

A large Stussied QPR fan

Finished the day of at Number Six where there was a bit of a "do" on , had a mooch around the products, said a few hello's and farewells grabbed a couple more beers in a Spitalfields bar and caught the late train north. All in all a good day out and it beat working.

The Sweats

2011-06-06T20:25:00.007+01:00

About eighteen months ago a few of the boys were having a beer and the subject of sweatshirts came up and to cut a drunken night short we came up with the idea of making some sweatshirts in Manchester or as local to it as possible. Not just the assembly but also the knitting of the jersey.
Between us we own a large number of UK ,US and Japanese made shirts of varying styles and vintage, and from this collection a vintage sweat I'd had for 10 years or so was going to be the pattern for our shirt , "parallel design" I believe it's called in the clobber industry or plain copying in mine.

"Piece of cake" I hear you say and so I thought, pop down to a local mill, pick up some nice heavyweight jersey and get a friendly nearby seamstress to knock up a small run for friends and acquaintances . Should be a doddle in Cottonopolis.

Well unbeknown to us knitting isn't generally done in the Manchester / Lancashire area, weaving is the thing here , jersey would usually be made in the Nottingham and Leicester areas. A long and fruitless search ensued until I turned up a small firm in Burnley who said they could help, after an age some samples arrived but they weren't of the weight and quality promised so the search continues and the project came to a grinding halt late last year after many hours graft . The one thing I learnt from the experience so far is nobody will give you their suppliers details, cheers.

Meanwhile, in the north west of the US the guys at Archival Clothing turned a similar idea into reality by having some products made locally at the Columbiaknit mill in Portland, Oregon. They've hit the nail on the head for me with the sweatshirt , slim fit , medium weight with flat locked seams for that old school look and a retail of $80, very well priced for a US made product .Looks like it's back to the drawing board .

Pieces of a Man. 1949-2011

2011-05-28T12:25:00.007+01:00

Stoned to death

2011-05-24T22:45:00.003+01:00

Following on from the Timberland memories post below, the image of my man in Amsterdam wearing his Stone Island yachting jacket got me thinking about that brand . Although I've not worn it in over two decades it wasn't so much the product I fell out with but more the actual punter wearing it.

For me it suffered the same problems as Timberland in that it was heavily counterfeited and every kid at every football ground in the UK was brandishing a Chinese copy of it . Much as SI /CP is fantastic it had become a no-go but there is no denying the quality of construction and technical led design.
It now seems to have fallen out of favour with the lads on the terraces so maybe it's time for me to have another look at what Massimo started and show Stone Island some love .

Notting Hill '68

2011-05-18T23:45:00.004+01:00

Some nice footage of Portobello road from the rarely seen spy spoof Otley made in 1968 . I'm a sucker for old English films be they a 60's kitchen sink drama, Carry On Whatever, Hammer Horror or an Ealing comedy.

Long time coming

2011-05-14T21:38:00.000+01:00

All Hands

2011-05-14T00:24:00.011+01:00

I recently read an article by Nigel of Oi Polloi about Timberland shoes and it got me reminiscing about the good old days when deck shoes first became part of our daily wardrobe in the mid 80's. Along with what are now called Clarks Orignals (just plain Clarks back in the day) they have remained a footwear staple for over a quarter of a century , and yes there are now many exotic versions of the hand sewn deck shoe or moccasin available but in 1985 Timberland was the daddy.

I first came across them in '84 when a pal came back from Northern Italy wearing a Stone Island jacket, Timberland deck shoes and rabbiting on about the kids in Milan. They were two eyelet, natural leather with a Vibram sole, unlike anything we could get in Manchester at the time.

Soon after a pair was acquired by myself in the sunny south of France and within a year or two you could buy them in Manchester. Now everyone says Hurley's in Piccadilly was "the" place but I'm damn sure Austin Reed carried them first by a long shot , they also had bucket loads of Lacoste as far back as '80.

About the same time I picked up a pair of made in Italy, Vibram soled , hand sewn deck shoes by a then unknown to me brand , Henri Lloyd. These if anything were better than the Timberlands but back then the badge was king and the unknown lost out , as ever I wish I'd kept them now.

Over the intervening years the brand got a bit of an image problem for myself and many others, too common and too many dickheads wearing it I guess , Britney and Chantelle in snide pink boots and Wayne in his Longsight market black " Timberland " hoody .
I switched to other brands of essentially the same shoe but I'm leaning back to them at the moment and lets face it at £100 or so they're probably cheaper than they were way back when and a third of Yuketen and half of Quoddy etc. The Newmarket Camp Mocc is nice looking shoe and reminds me of an old pair of LL Bean Blucher moccs that I got off Ebay a few years back though they're now made in China of course as opposed to the US.

My good pal Nick , Amsterdam 1985 , Timberland and Stone Island .

Made in USA Timberland deck shoes bought in Los Angeles 1986 , 25 years old and in better shape than the owner.

Newmarket Camp Moccasin

Timberland cobbler at work sewing shoes at NY trade show.

Midlake

2011-05-10T20:18:00.000+01:00

Silent UK

2011-05-06T22:02:00.002+01:00

Some amazing images from the guys over at Silent UK . They describe themselves as urban explorers and end up in places we don't see or if we do, take no notice of , bridges , drainage systems, abandoned buildings or my favourite the disused Royal Mail railway under London.
I'm guessing these images come at great risk to life and limb and are all the more appealing for it.

Williamsburg Bridge, New York

Forth Railway Bridge

9, 10, Out

2011-05-05T20:33:00.000+01:00

Muhammad Ali v Cleveland Williams

Muhammad Ali v Sonny Liston

Library

2011-05-03T23:15:00.001+01:00

A few recent acquisitions on the reading front.

Men's File No 4, this is the best issue so far with great articles on classic/vintage clothing , cars, bikes, houses or whatever takes their fancy it would seem .In this issue there is a nice article on Ivy League style and vintage Lambretta's. I do feel like I'm buying a copy of some leather fetish magazine every time I buy it though.

Next up is a copy of Lightning from 2009 scored off Ebay for a song. Usual Japanese style mag format, great pics of lots of gear you can't afford or can't find as it's dead stock vintage. There must be more American work wear in Japan than there is in the US.

Inventory No 3, this really is a top notch magazine, good subjects, well written, great quality paper, good layout and not page after page of adverts. No 4 has just been released.

Stockport's finest, Proper Magazine No 10 and a proper magazine it is now. More up my street than all the above, slightly irreverent, more street but not streetwear, just about right really.

A few miles north from Stockport and we have Pica-Post from Mancunian old boys OiPolloi , a fanzine /catalogue with some interesting articles, one of which focuses on Buffalo Bill when he came to Manchester. It's nicely illustrated by Ben Lamb

Something a bit heavier now, the true story of Chicago underworld legend Iceberg Slim .King of the pimps in all his rotten glory, Recommended.

Lastly, I've just finished "Cider with Roadies" by Stuart Maconie, a hilarious story of growing up in the seventies and the music styles and tribes that he experienced in Wigan. I bought this in Waterstones Manchester and on leaving the store, book in hand walked straight into Mr Maconie who on seeing the book promptly signed it for me, result !

Under the paving stones, the beach. part 2

2011-04-28T19:57:00.004+01:00

In it's "My Best Shot" series, yesterday's Guardian ran a piece on photographer Philippe Vermès and his favourite image which was captured during the May'68 uprisings. Read the article here and see Soft Waters earlier piece by clicking over here

Afrika

2011-04-28T19:00:00.002+01:00

And the living is easy

2011-04-25T18:30:00.001+01:00

Summer has landed and short sleeves have been the order of the day for a week or more. This Aertex seersucker button down has had a couple of outings. This shirt has all the essential details for a period button down , slim fit, sewn in back pleat , button to the rear of the collar and the all important hang tag at the top of the pleat on the rear.

Something that hasn't been getting much wear but is worthy of a shout is this M65 influenced hunting jacket by Henry Cottons of Italy. It's all cotton and has a very unusual finish, a very tight weave and a slight sheen to the fabric prompting some comments that it may be Ventile like in construction.
I've had this a while and the brand doesn't appear to be available in the UK anymore, other items by this brand that I've spotted over the years have always leaned towards the RL preppy look and been of generally great quality.
The M65 style pops up year after year and nearly everyone has had a go at it, some good , some bad and yes some ugly. One-Up did a great piece on the M65 here.

Godmother of Rock and Roll

2011-04-20T21:10:00.004+01:00

This was filmed in 1964 a few hundred yards from my home in south Manchester, some serious rock posturing indeed.

A Few Fine Things

2011-04-19T21:38:00.003+01:00

In the run up to Christmas 2009 I was on the annual gift hunt for my better half when I came across A Few Fine Things, located on a corner plot in Manchester's Northern Quarter. The window was full of tweed , leather and waxed cotton bags which stood out boldly because they were the antithesis of the usual bling handbags carried by the majority of women in the UK.
On entering the shop I was hooked , swatches of fabrics, samples of leather and numerous types of fastenings and linings laid out to choose from as well as ready made bags , purses and wallets.
All the products are made on site by the two owners Francesca and Stuart , both of whom couldn't of been more helpful as they rushed my order through in time for that years Christmas gift.
The choice of a dark brown waxed cotton bag with a vintage patterned closing flap , finished with brown leather strap and detailing went down a storm. The fabrics were made in Lancashire and the leather used English.
There is also a wide range of mens bags and accessories available and all the products smack of handmade ( and not in the way your mother knitted you clothes) so the prices can reflect this, though what price quality and the chance to own something different to the masses. A new wallet is a must at the moment so I guess I'll be seeing Francesca and Stuart soon.

http://www.afewfinethings.co.uk/

Record Store Day, Saturday 16th April

2011-04-13T21:54:00.004+01:00

This Saturday, 16th April is annual Record Store Day, a global celebration of the independent record store.

Gedo

2011-04-12T22:13:00.003+01:00

How about some mental Japanese rock from the early 70's to liven up your Tuesday evening.

B Movies

2011-04-12T00:24:00.002+01:00

I've been catching up on a few film's of late, they've been lying around the house for a while now and I got stuck into most of them over one weekend. The first lot are definite "B" movies or more correctly "bikerexploitation" a genre that spawned numerous examples and of which only a few are worth mentioning .

Hells Angels 69 was filmed using members of the Oakland chapter of the Angels and the plot revolves around the robbery of a Las Vegas casino by two guys posing as Angels and the ensuing retribution which involves copious amounts of bike racing in the desert and "B" movie violence.

All the "B" movie necessities are in attendance, poor plot, play fighting, cheesy music and lame acting making it perfect Saturday night fodder.
There was also a flick from a few years earlier than this, "The Wild Angels" by Roger Corman with a pre Easy Rider Peter Fonda which is also worth a look.

A swift couple of Belgium's finest and it was feet up for the next film, one that I'd never heard of and can find out very little about. "It's a Revolution Mother" aka "Biker Babylon" was made sometime between '68 and '70 and it is more along the lines of a documentary.

It focuses on rock festivals, anti-war demos and the biker / counter culture all of which is tied together with a hilarious pro-rebellion, anti-establishment rant of a voice over ("where the bugged-out straight world ends and the out of-sight groovy new world begins") plus a period soundtrack.

If you can find a copy of this it's worth grabbing it just for a look at a time when everyone thought they were changing attitudes and the World.

or also known as

Last on the list was "Run Angel Run", a biker tells his story to the press and is now on the run from the rest of the club, pretty much the same old plot, riding, fighting, revenge and the odd "ol' lady" thrown in.

Notable for it's great trailer and voice over and bizarrely Tammy Wynette doing a very inappropriate signature tune.

Look out for The Wild Angels, Stone , Hells Belles, Werewolves on Wheels, Angels Die Hard, Hells Angels on Wheels , Angels from Hell, He's a Cycle Psycho, The Savage Seven, Devils Angels, Angels Hard As They Come, Hellcats, Mini Skirt Mob, Motorcycle Gang, etc etc etc, from passable to bad to shockingly bad, enjoy.

Dollar

2011-04-08T21:44:00.004+01:00

Apr 20 , 2011

Update, just heard Dollar on a local commercial station , the thought that it will now get played to death and be ruined in the process made me want to delete the post. I'll stick with it for now because I love this version .

July 20,
I'm hating Dollar at the moment, fuck it's been murdered by shite dj's on shite stations.Its here if you want but I've put Junior in it's place, one of my all time favourites.

Ben Nevis

2011-04-04T20:57:00.000+01:00

Want. Braun SK6

2011-03-29T23:39:00.001+01:00

Harry Goodwin

2011-03-28T21:57:00.012+01:00

This is Harry, he lives down the road from me, opposite a good friend of mine . Harry was born in 1924 , the son of a Manchester bookie and is now in his late 80's. During the Second World War he joined the RAF and it was while stationed in Kuala Lumpar that his future career took off photographing local girls and selling the pictures on to fellow squaddies .

In the early 1960's he landed a job as a scene shifter at the BBC in Manchester and this is where he was given the opportunity by the producer of a new programme "Top of the Pops" to photograph all the acts appearing. Any acts that weren't appearing live Harry had to get on his toes and get images of them for the chart rundown . As a photographer he was known for always getting the necessary shot.

Over the next ten years Harry photographed every act who appeared on the show, The Beatles to the Stones , Dylan to Hendrix , Floyd to Bowie and Motown to Metal. Music was not the only target for Harry's lens though , he was in demand as a sports photographer and his great love was boxing.

In 2010 The Victoria and Albert Museum published a book in acknowledgement of his work which resulted in plenty of media coverage , professional Mancunian Terry Christian did a nice piece in The Times.
Here is just a taster of some of the vast array of work that he has produced and which is now gaining the recognition it deserves.

Snails legs

2011-03-25T21:54:00.005Z

Some very eloquent east end kids on a sortie to Calais back when everyone was grey, one of whom is a ringer for a young Ray Winstone . Thanks to Michael at ACL for the kind words and picking this up.

Loaded

2011-03-21T20:17:00.003Z

Spent Saturday night/Sunday morning behaving like it was 1991 with the Scream, if only I could knock twenty years off my aching body. Thanks to Mani, Bobby, Little Barrie , Chris the Piss, SJM et al.

Life like, Mueck and Salmon

2011-03-15T22:49:00.010Z

This kind of art freaks me out and intrigues me in equal measures. Ron Mueck is probably the best known artist in this field of work and his pieces are truly breathtaking. Mueck was born in Australia and his career started as a model maker for tv programmes, from here he moved to London in the 1980's to work in film and advertising.

In the mid 90's Mueck crossed into making commissioned pieces as art. One of the earliest and most famous is Dead Dad , a two thirds scale model of his fathers corpse, he actually used his own hair to finish the model, making it a kind of family member I suppose. The attention to detail in all his work is amazing, from hair to beards, pores in the skin to spots on your arse. All the work is truly life like but not life size, either small in scale or huge 4 metre giants.

Mueck had a show at Manchester City Art Gallery last year, and being a finger on the pulse, man about town I missed it by a month (had a similar situation with a Charlatans acoustic gig last week). I won't miss him again.

Another less well known though no less talented guy working in this field is Jamie Salmon, a Vancouver based British artist from a similar model making background as Mueck , again the quality of sculpture is nothing short of amazing.

Is it art or just a 21st century Madame Tussauds , I don't know but I think it's cool .

Mueck above and Salmon below.

Marvin

2011-03-14T21:30:00.003Z

Dick Proenneke, the real deal

2011-03-07T18:10:00.003Z

When I started this I told myself I wouldn't post many film clips as it was too easy, that rule has gone out the window. what can you do when you're falling over stuff like the film below.

Dick Proenneke retired to the Alaskan wilderness in 1968 and spent the next thirty years living mainly in solitude. He filmed a record of his life there which was later edited into the the video below, this is the real deal North American hunting, fishing, woodsman stuff. I did have the whole film to post but the copyright owner has seen his arse about it being Youtubed . The sound ain't the best and the images are grainy, it's brilliant. Cheers to Tim for the nod.

Pies

2011-03-05T12:57:00.007Z

It's City v Wigan today, I'm not going (a very,very long story of disillusionment ) but I'm dressed up like I am as it's freezing. First up is a sweatshirt that I've been wearing on a regular basis for nearly three years now, a Buzz Rickson 1930's/40's replica sweatshirt. These are produced on machinery from 80+ years ago and the manufacturing process is slow and costly compared to modern day standards. All Buzz Rickson garments are painstaking copies of actual vintage garments, be they military, sports or workwear.
As with lots of Japanese clothing it's quite usual for European/US buyers having to size up and the sizing is a definite vintage slim fit with deep cuffs and waistband . Constant washing and wear have had no real impact on the shirt and it could pass for a dead stock 30's/40's sweat. The downside with this brand is the sporadic availability and the fact that sometimes they come with military iconography on the chest,I prefer the plain versions . Available here as and when they get stock.

On top of the sweat is a dark blue waxed jacket somewhat like a Barbour Bedale. I know, waxed jacket like everyone and his dad but this for me has a bit of an edge. Picked up as a slightly used one off sample it was made by R Newbold (Paul Smiths Japan only brand) and has all the usual Barbouresque features plus a few extras, check wool lining, drawstring waist, leather edged cuffs and a lovely big shoplifters pocket in the back. It's just getting to that slightly shiny or grubby as my missus says stage and should be fully worn in soon.

Father and Son

2011-03-01T21:38:00.005Z

Woody Guthrie , early 50's giving style pointers to Joe Strummer.

Arlo Guthrie at Woodstock

Made in England, Cooper and Stollbrand

2011-02-26T13:01:00.011Z

For a few years now anyone with an interest in clothing will have noticed there has been an increasing emphasis on high quality home-grown products and products with (the buzzword) heritage , this applies wherever your home is US, UK, Japan etc. Back in the day the north west of England "clothed the world ", as the saying goes. Take a few minutes to look at one survivor from Salford who are bucking the trend and increasing production for the likes of Paul Smith, Albam, and a host of other brands looking for that "Made in England" tag inside their outerwear.
They've had quite a lot of publicity recently and a bit more wont hurt. Watch the documentary here , sorry about the adverts, bear with it, it's well worth watching.