Cascades Dismembered

*

In Bangkok, you're always right at the borderland of the mundane and the supernatural. I mean, here's a city with fax machines and smog and expressways and buildings shaped like giant robots and the world's highest concentration of shopping malls and all that, but the twentieth century's just skin deep, scratch it and you're in the primeval past. I love it. Keeps my mind working. I was musing on all these things as I gazed at the sleek, sleeping young body of....

S.P. Somtow

The crisis was real enough. The ancient battlefield was dying off now, the fizzing lights cascading into the mud disappearing into another neuronal network. But every waterfall cascading down cliffs was full of faces trying to get out; shrieking, sometimes, swirling in the froth, just trying to escape. We were cemented in our positions. Fragile in intent. Sitting in backstreet sois. Easy companionship. Every corner store, every tiny restaurant, offered easy conviviality. The rain bucketed down and the lightning flashed around the skyscrapers, here where it felt like home now, although nothing was responding as it should. He sat through another meeting, this time at Soi 43 off Sukhumvit, the PIE, Psychological Initiative Enterprise, or whatever it stood for; and people from all over the world told little drabs of their stories or promulgated the gospel according to them; and as always he said nothing, letting them all wash over him. And even now, if they had pointed to him, he would have said: I have nothing to say, now more than ever. The silence is deafening was a cliché of foreign form, yet all that came to their attention, the misery, the laughter in a daughter's eye, truly meant nothing, not now, not ever.

They were coming around. They were telling each other there was a solution. The darkness was encroaching and yet that, too, meant nothing. Sometimes he thought of risking the girlfriend and her gun. Sometimes he was happy with the happy face of the current boy. Hello darlingk, he said, thinking it was a great joke, a parody of Sexy Sar, the woman who broke his friend's heart, as they sat in the back of the taxi on the way to the River Kwai. My darlingk. My darling I want some money went together like wedded gloves. All the time, every time, he was seeing things more and more from their point of view. He was a miserable old man. They could dance in the street without end. They were moving to a beautiful new house. All was shifting, in the fatal sands. Messages received which were never received. Times and conventions and convenience, a television glaring in the distance, voices of those he had loved murmuring down long corridors; aching desire relegated to another dimension; a fist in time, a jerking convenience, and then all went quiet.

There was a disturbance in the force. His kidneys ached. Then he went back to meetings and said nothing. Then he debated whether to have his hair dyed. Some said yes, some said no. The boy said, then you no falang, you Thai. He saw their achingly beautiful forms lined up along the cat walk. He left Ian in a go go bars with girls pole dancing, with everything neat and tidy and ready for the armada. Some things were better left unsaid. The trouble was he left everything unsaid. His kidneys ached and he collapsed on the bed and an hour disappeared. There wasn't any money coming in when it should. You can see the notes. You can do your taxes. You can feel the population stirring, from silence to silence, from evasion to evasion. Him baby. Mai kowh chaih mon Thai. He don't understand Thailand. The falang came and went and the population lapped at the base of the stone stairs, twisted, molding, the Gulf waters full of rubbish; a land of magic and skyscrapers and whispered intents; of times pure and simple. Yet achingly so. Sure of intent. Sure of purpose. Climbing out of a hole. Al Pacino collapsing to the ground. Cicero's Way. We were in a different era again now. He got out of the joint and asked: what happened to the clubs, what happened to all that marijuana? Now it's all glistening platforms and cocaine. Well, now it's something else again. Demented and exultant, crazy and intent. Ice took over where cocaine left off; and shook another generation. If only he could live forever; and suffer no consequence.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/national/gillard-moves-into-the-lodge-20100926-15s2x.html?from=smh_sb

Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her partner, the first bloke Tim Mathieson, have finally moved into their new digs at The Lodge in Canberra.

Ms Gillard deposed her predecessor Kevin Rudd in June but refused to set up camp in the prime minister's official residence until the people formally elected her to the top job.

With Labor having just scraped into power and parliament about to resume, she was chauffeured up the pebble driveway today as The Lodge's first ever female prime ministerial occupant.
There is no news about what will happen to Ms Gillard's Altona property in Melbourne's west or the apartment in Canberra's inner south, but one would imagine her days of civilian living are gone, at least for now.

Despite the sumptuous setting, the prime minister collected her own bag from the boot of the car, before being greeted at The Lodge's front door and welcomed inside by one of the household staff.

Ms Gillard and Mr Mathieson then re-emerged to take a stroll around the lush gardens, popping with spring pansies and camellias.

Hand-in-hand they headed towards the private pond, where Ms Gillard spoke of wanting to find a "big fish" in its waters.

But knowing there were even bigger ones to fry inside, she didn't stop to smell the roses but made a beeline for her home office.

"I'm actually heading towards the study to do some paperwork but it's a great privilege to be here," she told waiting reporters.

However, Mr Mathieson's top priority was finding out whether there was a decent coffee machine on the premises.

"I don't know whether there is one here, so I've got to check it out soon," he said.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/kevin-rudd-tells-united-nations-to-improve/story-e6frf7lf-1225929566613

THE United Nations stands on the brink of irrelevance, Australia's foreign minister Kevin Rudd has warned.

Mr Rudd delivered a scathing assessment of the world body's track record during his formal address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York yesterday, listing a string of recent failures on poverty, climate change and nuclear non-proliferation.

"We do not need another grand plan for UN reform," Rudd told an assembly chamber that was two-thirds empty.

"We need to summon the political will simply to make the UN work."

Only three days ago, Mr Rudd talked up the merit of Australia's multimillion dollar campaign for a seat on the UN Security Council in 2013.

Yesterday, he urged the UN's 192 member states to work harder at fixing the world's biggest problems.

"If we fail to make the UN work, to make its institutions relevant to the great challenges we all now face, the uncomfortable fact is that the UN will become a hollow shell," he said.

About 200 world leaders and their staffers witnessed firsthand Rudd's 20-minute address, which he delivered before boarding a commercial flight back to Australia yesterday afternoon.

Delegates from the US, the UK, China and India were in the room while Rudd spoke but few Pacific and South American nations heard his call to action on climate change and deforestation.

"The unconstrained carbon emissions of one state impact on the long-term survival of all states," he said.

"Climate change is no respecter of national or geographic boundaries.”

The biggest threat to Australia was not organised crime and people smuggling but natural disaster, he told the assembly.

"The most immediate and pressing threat to the physical security of Australia’s wider region lies in the scourge of natural disasters," he said.

Promotional photograph: The River Kwai.