The Neighborhood

This is the neighborhood we've been living in since April. Our house is just right of center, one back from the street in a small group of six houses. Right next door is an Isan restaurant that does amazing grilled chicken.

Casa Nueva, Vida Nueva

Our house hunting is finally over. Here's our snug little new place. Today we cleaned top to bottom. Tomorrow we'll give the oppressively dark bedrooms and kitchen a coat of white paint and tear out some unwanted plywood which is preventing airflow in the kitchen. We have great plans for the place, including a solar water heater over the kitchen, a rocket stove, and maybe even a small wood burning oven if I can scrounge up the firebrick (wish me luck).

Rear. The kitchen is to the right. Living room 2nd floor left, bedroom right.

Front steps and door.

Looking out the front door, you can see the balcony and hallway.

Shot from the back of the living room.

Shot through the balcony door.

J mopping the second bedroom.

A kitchen of sorts.

Downstairs.

Down the Street

These are pictures of a park with a pretty little waterfall down the street from our house, at the base of Doi Suthep. It's a nice place to walk to on Sunday afternoons. The latest batch of dogs, 29-32, always hang out at the entrance to the park.

Neofelis nebulosa

Last weekend we went to the Chiang Mai Night Safari (we had a free ticket) and visited the little walking zoo. They had several animals you don't usually see in zoos in the the US, and we were able to get closer to them, too. Over the next few weeks I'll be posting short videos of some of the animals. The first is the clouded leopard, a critically endangered native cat here in south-east Asia, and a famously good tree climber with an unbearably cute bark/chirp.

San Kamphaeng Hot Springs

On Wednesday after work we drove east out of town towards San Kampaeng, and then north from there to Thailand's egg strewn answer to Yellowstone. There is a small thermally active valley there full of sulfur rich hot springs. Any natural features that once existed have been destroyed, and the 105˚ C water gets piped around to little basins which people use to boil eggs (the egg boiling is such a popular gimmick with the Thai that they have a fountain featuring giant chicken and quail eggs), and two fake geysers. The cooler water has been channelized, so you can soak your feet while you eat your eggs. They also have private cabins with Japanese style baths where you can take a mineral soak for 200 ฿ an hour. After the bath Jami told me I looked younger. When I asked how much younger she said, "Younger than when we met." That was six years ago, so the water really worked some magic on me. I think it's because my back didn't hurt (I've gotten to where I hardly notice the near constant pain). May be I should see a chiropractor.

At Yellowstone we always joke about looking for the pipes. At San Kamphaeng they're out for all to see.

On my way to six years younger.

Little Chang

Just 'round the corner and down the street,
He's looking for a tasty treat.
With waggy tail, and padded feet,
Little Chang is neat, neat, NEAT!

Feliç Any Nou

Happy New Year!

Things Music Makes Us Want to Do

Yesterday Jami walked up to the room from the studio, where she'd been sewing. I was hunched (I'm always hunched as the picture below will attest) over the computer, grumbling about the fact the Google wasn't loading (an earthquake, 7 point sommething, off the coast of Taiwan had ripped through a couple bundles of fiber on the ocean floor, closing markets all over Asia, as well strangling any web traffic from the western US), and I couldn't check sources for an essay I'm writing, and trying to annotate. "Some of this music I'm listening to makes me just want to live simply. You know, without much stuff." She'd been listening to Cavedweller, in all its Lo-Fi gloriousness. So I gave up, listened to our favorite troglodyte, mentally thanked JBB and the Quist girls for introducing us to Dirk and his music, and grilled pork and pineapple on our balcony, which we ate with sticky rice. I then spent the next four hours working on drawings for a project proposal in AutoCAD. Are we living without a lot of stuff if all we actually own here are a computer, a couple of hard drives, a couple of cameras, some clothes and a handful books?

Baskets of fire wood for our tiny Thai BBQ.

Quasimodo cooks.

Piña.

Living without a lot of stuff. On the floor.

Me and My Arrow

I pass this arrow on the way home from work. I like it because it's art-like, but isn't art. It may be really clever grafiti, but I think it's actually supposed to be useful somehow.

Elroy Wolom

9 x 9 x 9 x they say it's a hundred meters;
cotton yarn, Chinese ink, white glue; Reinhold Engberding; 2006

Last night we went to the opening of an exhibition of works by Reinhold Engberding, done during his stay here in Chiang Mai as part of a UNESCO grant. The exhibit, held in the diminutive "Yellow Room" (a side gallery off the main galleries, and source of the anagram tittling this post) of the Chiang Mai University Museum of Fine Art (a monsterous battleship of grey concrete with no permanent collection of its own), hosts two projects. One, entitled 9 x 9 x 9 x they say it's a hundred meters, consists of white fabric tubes, made from wrapped yarn, and graduated by one of Reinhold's personal measuring sticks--the length from his thumb to his forefinger. The marks were placed along the length of the yarn before it then was wrapped around trees of nine different species, and afterwards removed like a cast. Depending on the width of the trees, and regularity thereof, the marks created different patterns, ranging from helices, to scallops, to nearly random scatterings of dots. Accompanying the tubes are nine serigraphs of the leaves of each tree, done in white ink on unbleached saa paper, formated like botanical specimens, and labeled in Thai. Reinhold is a recovering landscape architect, much like I am a recovering gardener, and was pretty overwhelmed to find himself in an alien botanical context. Reaching out to the plants around him was an almost instinctual way of trying to orient himself in an unknown landscape. I find myself doing the same as I through our neighborhood, trying to come up with the genus, or at the very least the family, of the plants I see around me (Arum, Canna, Thalia dealbatana, Colocasia, Tectona grandis, Ficus religiosa, Agave americana, umm, umm, Bignoneaceae?)

The second project is of a series of interviews and reciprocal portraits done with Thai artists. Entitled How Are You?, the name is transliterated from a German idiomism (forgive me for latinizing, "idiomatic expression" is just so long) meaning, "What kind of person are you?" rather than, "How do you do?" Based on the questions asked, I would say that the real point of inquiry is actually, "How are you like me?" Several of the questions concerned the interviewee's knowledge of a foreign language (either English or Thai), their eating habits, their use of pseudonyms or nicknames, or the existence of an opposite gendered version of their name. All of these are of concern to Reinhold, either in his daily life in a foreign culture, or in his own artistic practice (see previous post). The artists then produced some sort of portrait of one another. Thailand seems to be the land of collaborative efforts, so it is interesting that Reinhold would choose here to take the step of enlisting other artists in the creation of his work, rather than just soliciting for material as he has done before in other community-based collaborations. Of course, this collaborative process, while no doubt rewarding, was also a source of frustration, as several artists failed to complete their interviews (in one of them only the first question was answered), or failed to complete their portraits. Though in the last case (that of a traditional woodcarver) the portrait in absentia inspired one of Reinhold's favorite text pieces, as yet untranslated into English, and perhaps untranslatable. That seems, at times, to be the boundary one walks as a foreign artist, the one between the untranslated and the untranslatable.

How Are You?: Reinhold/Adsawin, Weerasak/Narongdet;
"Thai-letters-assisting pictures" cut from foil; Chinese ink on pages from German language periodicals; Narongdet Dokkaew, Reinhold Engberding, and Weerasak Kongderm; 2006

Where Are We?

I don't know why it hadn't occured to me to do this earlier. The photo directly below is the old city of Chiang Mai, surrounded, as you can see, by its moat. Heading west/northwest from the northwest corner of the moat is a major road called Huay Kaew. You follow it west about a mile until you cross a road with a canal running down the middle.


At the first break in the median after the canal road you turn right, and head north until the road dead ends after veering left somewhat. We're in the last town house on the left.

Umm. Please don't stalk us.

Rêves Modernistes

Behind our house is a road that goes up the hill (actually the base of Doi Suthep Mountain) toward a Boy Scout camp. About halfway up the hill to the camp is a living fence of enormous (I'm talking eight feet tall) variegated Agave americana. We'd stopped before to take pictures of the of the agaves, and we also like the cottage just up the road from them which is done up to look like a Swiss or German timber frame house with plaster walls. On Monday we took an afternoon walk up to the falls at the Boyscout camp (one of the Boy Scouts let us climb the tower, which gave us a great view of the university behind our house), and on our way back down, while taking pictures of the goofy Swiss chalet, a gate that looked like it was made of old window sashes caught our eye. We stopped to take a picture, but never even got the camera out when we noticed the house behind it.

(I did go back for a picture of the gate).

It is a tiny little modernist cabin, with a half-basement and a huge (nearly a third of the floor space on the main floor) cantilevered balcony. The kitchen is in the half-basement, with a bank of clerestory windows on the east side which tilts inward above the counter. The upper floor is a large open space with sliding doors on both sides, one opens onto the balcony, the other into the open air above the east wall of the kitchen. It's the only access to the main floor from the outside, and it's about a meter above ground, so there must be some missing stairs. The west side, with the balcony, overlooks the ravine carved by the creek that comes down out of the hills from the Boy Scout camp.

The roof is done in blue glazed ceramic tiles. Unfortunately about a quarter of them appear to be in the yard. There doesn't seem to be any water damage inside, however--at least as far as we could see.


Covering nearly half of the floor space up top is a loft, ideally situated for a bedroom. It has a regular staircase leading up to it, so no falling off a ladder late at night when you're making a dash for the bathroom. Whoever designed the staircase, by the way, was brilliant. All its little nooks and crannies have been reclaimed for storage, with built-in shelves and little cupboards.

Suffice it to say, every night since we saw it we've been falling asleep to modernist reveries. I even went and put a note on the gate begging to rent it.