BANISHING BOREDOM
Bloggery on music, books, films, travel, wildlife and dark matters.
Black Metal Murder in Bangkok: A History of Rock and Satanism
In the aftermath of a black metal murder in the local music scene, Jim Algie looks back at the merger of Satanism and rock that ended up on a collision course in the Thai capital. Ever since rock ‘n’ roll was dubbed the “devil’s music” by some American puritan, and...
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My Brief Career as a Music Video Director
For a guy who banged out his riffs, odes and elegies on a typewriter instead of a musical instrument, Hunter S Thompson composed one of the most accurate descriptions of the music industry I’ve ever heard, calling it “a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic...
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Myanmar Musician and Rocking Revolutionary
Many musicians have adopted guerilla poses and advocated armed insurrection – like The Clash and the MC5 – but none of them ever put down their guitars to take up a machine-gun like the Myanmar musician and rocking revolutionary, Mun Awng. In this profile that began...
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Whale Watching in Thailand
The pier of departure for whale watching in Thailand is only an hour from Bangkok. Text by Jim Algie. Photos by Jirayu Ekkul. Few sights in the animal kingdom are more spellbinding than the sight of a Bryde’s whale breaking the water’s surface to open its cavernous...
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Bangkok Noir: The Tell-Tale Art
Crime and corruption, hookers and hitmen, the new anthology Bangkok Noir makes a case for hardboiled crime fiction in the Thai capital with bullet points. Jim Algie reads you their writes In the middle of 2011, some eight years after the Thai government’s “War on...
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The Great Godparents of the Bangkok Bargirls Memoir
No two books about prostitution in Asia have created so many imitators and detractors as A Woman of Bangkok and The World of Suzie Wong, or inspired so many appalling memoirs about Bangkok bargirls, writes Jim Algie, in a review originally printed in the Bangkok...
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