My Brief Career as a Music Video Director

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...
Myanmar Musician and Rocking Revolutionary

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...
Whale Watching in Thailand

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...
Bangkok Noir: The Tell-Tale Art

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...
Straits Times reviews Bizarre Thailand

Straits Times reviews Bizarre Thailand

Mark Fenn reviewed the nonfiction collection Bizarre Thailand in Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper, giving the book a big thumbs up and singling out some of the funnier lines. Illuminating and irreverent, it offers a taste of Thailand far from Bangkok’s glitzy...