“Bay Area Boyz” in Bangkok: Chinese Americans and their Various Perversions

Working on a very good story about a group of Americans from, surprise, California who are all Asian Americans and who like to assault Caucasian bar owners in Bangkok with their vindictive and bizarre accusations. They are all from San Francisco (why is the Thermae gay scene so surprising, given this context?) We are working on the details. Lek is intrigued when I tell her that Asian men from  San Francisco are most likely of the kathoey variety…she says “leave them alone.” Stay posted.

Bangkok Buddy Returns….Sort of.

Bangkok Buddy, who disappeared from the Thailand brothel blogging world after accusing his yaa baa-addicted friend Chris Madeira of rubbing his groin at Bangkok’s notorious Thermae after-hours freelancer club, has returned!

Well, sort of.

While his new incarnation is called a “Photo a Day from somewhere in Bangkok”, he has used this space to post old photographs of very young Asian women and, in a bizarre turn, little children. Meanwhile, his thoughts, feelings, and daily musings remain private for a select handful of likely dwindling friends.

Alas, Saphan Loy is not one to judge, and Lek believes that the pictures, especially of the women who are at least child-bearing age, are possibly meant to persuade his former readers that he may have been (back in the 1980s and 1990s) a devout heterosexual. Whatever the case, it’s clear that Bangkok Buddy is reevaluating his life by way of these oddly selected photos of young Asian women and children, and that the whole lover’s quarrel with Madeira really has upset his emotional equilibrium. We wish him a speedy return to sanity!

The View from Above

Bangkok Buddy Down for the Count?

Well, it looks like that gentle, penny-pinching recluse of Bangkok has decided to put away the keyboard, vowing to post exclusively for the handful of remaining friends who have been invited to follow his (un) adventures. Shortly before quarantining his blog from the general public, Bangkok Buddy reported that he was being harassed, stalked, and threatened by his former “friend” Chris Madeira. He even posted a photograph of him and claimed he was addicted to drugs, among other things. One thing is for certain: in the Land of Vertical Smiles it pays to be wary of the company you keep in some of the most notorious red light districts in the world. That said, we wish Bangkok Buddy well and raise a lukewarm Singha to his “happy memories” in greener pastures. Or even nastier dive bars. He will be missed.

 

The View from Above

Bangkok Buddy Update

Bangkok Buddy has returned to the airwaves. Apparently, he decided to privatize his blog, the result of which was that his “fans” or “friends” had to send an email to request access. Since this process didn’t work out as planned (his friends claimed they were unable to access the private blog, probably because of poor computer skills), his traffic dropped precipitously. No wonder. At any rate, the Scrounge Lizard is trying it again. Mosey on over for your dose of the shits, showers, and shaves. He has recently written that if he continues to receive grief or abuse from strangers, he will go back to private, with a scattering of “fans” and friends and dwindling hit counts. Our advice to him: get over it. You should feel somewhat honored that people actually care enough to toss around a few harmless comments.

The View from Above

Bangkok Buddy Bugs Out

Bangkok Buddy, Supreme Leader of the Lounge Lizards, aka Jerry Bingsell Chin, has disappeared from the internet. In one fell swoop, his entire site is missing, and even his archives are inaccessible. For those of us following his monotonous life, it’s useful to recall that at one point, the Lounge Lizard was preparing a “bug out bag” for some event or escape he had been meticulously planning. This was basically a survival kit that he had been adding to over time. Has the Bangkok Buddy escaped into the jungles of Thailand? Was he deported? Has he run out of money and returned to his native San Francisco? In a recent post on Pattaya Pal, whom many consider to be the same person as Bangkok Buddy, the author hints at personal troubles, then informs the reader that he is leaving the country (it seems that this is a rather sudden and undesired departure.)

Has Bangkok Buddy Bugged Out?

If anyone has information on this strange turn of events, feel free to share. Lek and I are somewhat desperate for our daily dose of shit, shower, and shave.

The View from Above

California University Sex Professor Apprehended in Mexico

Another university professor from that liberal land of group love-think and morally blind tolerance of all deviant lifestyle choices has been apprehended in Mexico after finding himself on the FBI’s most wanted list. Professor Walter Lee Williams, according to the FBI, would routinely travel the world (he had a soft spot for Southeast Asia) in order to engage in sex acts with children.

Until 2011, the article states, Professor Williams was tenured faculty in “gender studies”, anthropology, and history at the University of Southern California. His modus operandi was to travel to places like the Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia presumably to study the gender of pre-adolescent boys with a rather unorthodox “hands-on” approach involving his engorged penis, then photograph the results. His indictment came as a result of having flown to the Philippines after meeting some boys online, engaging in webcam sex with them, then flying to that fair island nation to further “study” them in sex “experiments.”

Longtime readers will know that Saphan Loy has groused about perversion in higher education before. In fact it has been one of our abiding concerns. When I shared this story with Lek, she said something to the effect that “this would never happen in Thailand!” Whether this is true or not, we cannot know for sure. But one thing is certain about interactions among professors and their students in the Land of Vertical Smiles: there is generally a strange sexual dynamic underlying all classroom activity. With the respect the professor demands in this country, and the naturally docile subservience of the students in saucy uniforms, one cannot deny the sexual tensions that exist between them. And the dynamic changes dramatically if the professor is visiting from a western country: Thais are eager to engage them and learn from their beneficent experience, while in the United States, professors garner about as much respect as over-educated taxi drivers or hotdog clerks at the 7-11.

Thai university students.

If you don’t believe that sexual tension exists in the hothouse classrooms of Thailand, just pay a casual visit to the “classroom” at BarBar in Patpong, where lazy girly Thai students await you in thoroughly convincing schoolgirl outfits along with actual writing desks and a chalkboard. Mosey on over, indeed. And whatever you do, do not demonstrate Keynesian principals of economics on the chalkboard. The girls will likely fall asleep, and the mamasan will caustically berate you in the ugly dialect of Isaan.

Anyway, we should all be glad that another lone male traveler to Asia has had his sinister little sex experiments with foreign children halted by US federal authorities. It is comforting that they are vigilant against such crimes, and that they have directed their gaze more intently on authority figures who routinely abuse their status for personal sexual gratification.

In Other News….Big Mango Bar Blog to Soon Shutter

Soon another luminary of the Thai redlight blogs, the Big Mango Bar Blog, will close as the ownership of the bar of the same name transitions to Thai ownership. For those of us who have followed the blog, many interesting (and borderline criminal) posts were to be found there. Some well-written, some not so. And whatever happened to Young Penfold, the Hunter S. Thompson of the Bangkok bar scene?

In a recent post, the bar owner Graham had a few parting shots for his arch-nemesis, big fat bloated baby Kenny Ng, another California university professor who dabbles in Southeast Asian pay for pussy play. Interestingly, Graham reveals that Ng, who recklessly (and mistakenly) believes that Saphan Loy is somehow connected to the Big Mango, passed along the URL to our humble beacon of free speech and tireless analysis of the Thai redlight blogosphere to the University of California at Northridge’s campus security department! Now, were Saphan Loy suspected of smoking a joint in our dorm room, or conducting a midnight panty raid at one of the sorority houses, then I suppose you would have grounds to report us to campus security. (Lek would like to know what a “panty raid” is, but I’m afraid it’s before her time).

Panty Raid!

But to report Saphan Loy to them for our literary and journalistic efforts? Is this the spirit of intellectual inquiry and free speech championed by a university professor who, ironically, defends his indefensible sex blog as an exercise in free speech? I submit that the only crime that campus security would have found on this blog is the occasional tortured syntax or a purple passage or two, and nothing more. My team of capable lawyers (stunning Thai females who are more than capable in dealing with the assorted libelous assaults and accusations of a frustrated sex tourist, and who also look great in those short skirts and high-heel shoes) will testify to that fact.

Saphan Loy’s trusted team of legal advisors.

Interestingly, Ng has now reconfigured the hosting scheme of his libel-making machine, BigBabyKenny.com. He has separated the hosting company of the main blog (where he posts pictures of Thai whores, ladyboys and restaurant reviews) from the blog comments themselves. This is obviously an effort to lessen his legal liability when his comments include references to pedophilia, homophobia, coprophagia, racism and whatever ugly little troll-thoughts Ng is harboring on that particular day. 

We will leave you with Saphan Loy’s latest feature, the Thai Girl of the Week. This week, the hands-down winner was not difficult to find.

Thai Girl of the Week

Tommy Tone, Economist and World Traveler, Third Rate Public University, California

An ethnic Chinese, she enjoys blogging about Thai ladyboys, eating at buffets, and taking “world class” photographs of impoverished bar girls.

The Thai Girl of the Week!

The View from Above

Saphan Loy Hunts for the Girl of the Week

After an overwhelming response from my readers on how to spice up Saphan Loy, we have decided to add a new feature to the blog called “Girl of the Week.” In this segment my assistant Lek and I will spend an inordinate amount of time looking for that special combination of looks, personality, and absence of sexually transmitted diseases that really gets our motor running. If ya know what we mean.

Our search took us to the most unlikely of places, through the narrow sois and alleys of our fabled city of angels. We peered into every nook and cranny, under every rock, and in every empty toilet stall we could find at the bus station. It also helped that we had some nifty GPS coordinates (courtesy of BigBabyKenny.com) that helped us when we were traveling farther afield into the rice padis and jungle outposts of Thailand.

Without further ado, let’s look at the girls that made the cut this week.

There was something about the way this peach was sitting here all by herself at 10:30 AM, just chilling with a few cold bottles of Bia Chang. Nothing says “come hither” like a cold one first thing in the morning. And her yellow football jersey, gray shorts, and furry brown bracelet really got my old ticker pounding in a way that I couldn’t easily blame on the Kamagra I was chewing all morning for breakfast. She seemed a bit shy when I snapped her pic, but that’s what we especially love about these Thai lovelies. They are demure, modest, and, more importantly, minx-like between the sheets. Not that I would know since Saphan Loy readers know that I don’t partake as I limit myself to masturbating about the ladyboys in Nana Plaza. Another positive about this one was her total lack of tramp stamps. What’s not to love?

Next, we made our way to a little place I have known about for a while. I won’t give it away here, as I like to keep my little honey spots all to my self. It’s not much of a bar. More like a little hut on stilts where the beer is lukewarm, and the stuff that is burning in the little pipe on hand is awfully suspicious. That’s not to say I didn’t try some. Lek was encouraged as well, but hell, she’ll put anything between her lips. And who are we to be such terrible guests? Not much is recalled from this visit. But after a hazy afternoon of beer drinking and pipe smoking, those beautiful brass rings around this little piece of long-necked candy started to wobble and shimmy in the hot sun, luring me to her body like a giraffe in heat.

Okay. Next up on our list of Thai hot-spots: Pattaya. We don’t normally get down to the shore very much, but when we do, all bets are off. It’s usually me and Lek and a bottle of whiskey or two. Sometimes Lek even picks out the lovelies for us. How do you say “ménage à trois” in Thai? Anyway, I wouldn’t really know as I don’t partake.

Now, normally, the farang women in Thailand don’t do anything for us. It’s not that I have completely gone native. It’s difficult to find a nice farang in this country. But just as I was about to give up in Pattaya while working on this assignment, there she was. Like a dream come true. A true paradigm of womanly beauty and virtue. I started scratching my head and wondering what had taken me thousands of kilometers from my home country, and why I gave up the birds like this that I sadly left behind. I don’t know if it was too much drink in me, or the Kamagra talking, but I just needed to get her picture. I even got a wink while I was at it.

True, this one had a tramp stamp. But she almost made it as Saphan Loy’s girl of the week.

So this final one really took the cake. I found her in a Bangkok go-go bar, though it’s not really a go-go bar per se.  A mate of mine owns the place, though there’s no signage, no music, and it’s kind of a sleazy dump. It’s basically one room in an old shop-house and it’s not located anywhere near a tourist destination. It used to be a sewing machine repair shop. Basically, he has a few girls there who are not allowed to leave the premises under threats of physical violence and psychological coercion. My mate told me these girls will go with anyone for the price of a bottle of Singha. I got there just around midnight, and I said, “Okay, who do you want me to do?”

And his eyes lit up and he said, “you mean…?”

Then I said, “Don’t be such a silly boy. So silly. Why are you such a big silly man? Silly brute. I don’t partake! I meant whose picture do you want me to take?” Then I swatted at his big burly shoulder, the way a girl might.

He said, “That’s what I thought. Right, mate. I forgot. ‘You don’t partake.’ Okay, okay. Whatever.”

I spied this little fox all alone in the corner. There she was, the poor thing. But she had that Thai thing going on that really made my night. Cute face, no tramp stamps, shy smile. The perfect combination. At first I thought she was applying makeup, but it was really dark in there. And since I didn’t want to bother her, I shot her from a distance, the way a creepy guy with a zoom lens is apt to do.

Here she is, folks. Saphan Loy’s “Girl of the Week!”

Thanks for all the great suggestions for starting this new segment of the Saphan Loy blog. As long as there are batteries in my digital camera, I’ll keep working at it.

The View from Above

ThaiPeeps Revisited

Saphan Loy’s first foray into the blogging world was back in 2006. It’s hard to believe that we have been at it for seven years, and I suppose we can insert all sorts of cliches about the passage of time here. Much has changed in Thailand and the world in that time, and the red light blogs have eroded in both quality and content during that time as well. With miscreants like Big Baby Kenny Ng appearing on the scene, and the vicious attack on perhaps one of the finest Thailand nightlife blogs, the legendary MangoSauce, things really haven’t been the same since the 2000s.

Lek and I finally decided to revisit ThaiPeeps, which has always been there as a kind of archive of sorts. We cleaned up the way it looks to make it simpler, and removed any links to videos that have since been deleted or withdrawn from YouTube. Although we haven’t added any YouTube videos to ThaiPeeps in a long time, the Blogger platform nonetheless allows for continued uploading without any expense to yours truly. This is certainly one area that WordPress may wish to explore, although to be fair Blogger and YouTube are both owned by Google.

That said, I invite you to have a look around at some of the videos curated there. The one we’ve selected above still interests us, for purely intellectual reasons. And if you come across anything on YouTube that might be of interest, please send the link to be added to ThaiPeeps. For one person (or two if we count Lek), the task is too time consuming (i.e., looking at YouTube all day to separate the wheat from the chaff.)  Only Big Baby Kenny Ng has that kind of free time. But I am always happy to see something interesting, particularly if it offers a glimpse into the Thai worldview that is otherwise difficult to obtain.

Red Light Roundup

Nothing much happening in the Red Light whoreblogs, which partially explains the long absence. This week’s Stickman is worth a look, as he generally seems to do much better when he hands the microphone over to someone else. It could very well be that the people he tends to interview are infinitely more interesting than he is, which is probably not a significant hurdle to begin with. In this week’s column the owner of the former Mississippi Queen discusses the filming of the classic American war film The Deer Hunter (1978) at the bar and what it was like to meet with Robert De Niro in his suite at the Oriental, which is an interesting story indeed.

However, Stick also seems to have literally torn a page from the playlist of Bangkok Eyes, in that the subject this week is a somewhat historical journey into the past to what Patpong was like at a time when Professor Big Baby Kenny Ng was awaking from his very first wet dream. Generally, we prefer to visit Bangkok Eyes when we need our fill of historical pictures and the like, since our friend William R. Morledge has been documenting the history of the red-light districts of Bangkok since the very inception of Bangkok Eyes. It could also very well be that we will see many more such stories, which are likely efforts to stimulate the remaining brain cells of Stickman’s growing demographic of Viagra eaters and ailing pensioners.

In other news, Mobithailand, who is still alive and relatively well and blogging about his experiences in Pattaya, has suffered a few set-backs recently, including a harrowing financial ordeal that is probably more reflective of a disintegrating world economy than anything else. However he has completed his novel A Lust for Life and has made it available to anyone who knows how to make use of a computer, and also read the English language. That essentially eliminates anyone who comments on the Big Fat Baby Kenny Ng site. Anyway, Mobi also has received a mention on the Stickman site recently, which has significantly increased his traffic. Have a mosey on over to read about his continuing saga (and to see photographs of his very lovely Noo sitting on his piano bench).

We have it on good authority that it has been hot in Bangkok. Remain cool, put ice in your beer, and enjoy your water-making activities. Both indoors and out.

The View from Above

California State University at Northridge and the Limits of Freedom of Speech

The media attention around CSUN’s most notorious professor of economics has largely faded over the years, but Professor Kenneth Ng has continued his malevolent work on his personal website, formerly dedicated to his enthusiasm for prostitution in Thailand. Recently, his imagined nemesis, The Big Mango Bar in Bangkok, has announced it will close its doors. It, like all bars in the red light districts of Thailand, was here today, gone tomorrow.  

Perhaps now the vitriol that Professor Ng directed at his enemies (either real or imagined) may possibly be better converted to a return to academic productivity, although this is unlikely given the depths of depravity that Ng continues to exhibit.

Instead, Professor Ng continues to use his blog as a way to test his employer’s (the taxpayer-supported state university system of California) tolerance for free speech. Those bounds are routinely tested by his decision to post comments that are pedophilic, racist, and often very violent. Generally, Professor Ng writes the “comments” himself (his site includes thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of such comments). Or, he relinquishes moderation control entirely and lets his co-author Kent Hammond come up with these gems himself. Hammond and Ng then assign these comments to their imagined enemies in what could only be described as a complete dereliction of online civility. One wonders what his colleagues think of this technique? Do they fear that they too will one day find themselves on the losing end of Ng’s irrational libel campaign? Is this why his superiors never forced him to take this site off the Internet?

Below we have taken the opportunity to share with you exactly what is happening on the good professor’s blog, and wonder how a university student (or faculty member) could feel comfortable in his classroom, or in his presence generally. His is a corrupt and disfigured mind, and the biggest casualty in his bizarre crusade is the academic community at CSUN.

The following “comments” may be found at http://www.bigbabykenny.com. Accessed on March 8, 2013.

In this comment Ng condones extreme pedophilia:

Here, Ng advocates the use of weapons in the killing of a perceived enemy:

Ng fictionally ascribes this comment to another “perceived” enemy. It is notable for its extreme racism that Ng seems to feel is within the bounds of free speech.

Here, Ng writes about violent homosexual rape, betraying his homophobia and his intolerance of sexual difference.

The real tragedy of Ng’s abortion of a website is that the environment that he creates in his warped and twisted little universe has an unfortunate effect on his classroom.

Were I a parent in California, and my daughter or homosexual black child were required to take his course, I would feel as though the state university system owed us, at the very minimum, a place free from this kind of instructor, his poisonous bigotry, and his lascivious “hobbies”.

The View from Above

Chris Coles and Bangkok Noir Redux. And Redux. And Redux….And Redux…

Those indefatigable academic men at work from Down Under over at New Mandala have given Chris Coles pride of place in a February 15th posting in which the paint-maker describes, yet again in the event that you’ve missed his bizarre explanations in the past (or if you failed to purchase the book called Navigating the Bangkok Noir), why his art is exactly like German expressionism, why it is important, why writers like Stephen Leather (Banging Bill’s Wife) and Christopher G. Moore (Pattaya 24/7 and The Wisdom of Beer) are part of this “noir” movement, etc, etc. 

It is somewhat surprising that the learned professors who run New Mandala have allowed Coles to drone on and on about this topic, although perhaps less surprising that Saphan Loy’s response to the post was moderated out of existence. It went something like this:

Chris Coles’ guest post has all the hallmarks of a self-serving, self-congratulatory navel-gazing think-piece clearly intended to revive a moribund interest in his book of the same name, and to generate some sympathy for this idea that his work and the work of others somehow constitutes an expressionist movement unique to Bangkok’s grim underbelly. There are so many things wrong with this from an intellectual perspective that it is difficult to know where to begin. First, there is something inherently artificial in attempting to broadly create an “artistic” movement of expatriate “artists” (mostly down-on-their luck expatriates who also happen to spend inordinate amounts of time in Bangkok’s brothel districts while scribbling implausible stories on bar napkins), where there simply is none. Coles lumps his own painting efforts, the macabre neon results of which are perhaps best-suited for the interior of a carnival funhouse, with the scribbling of typists like Christopher Moore, Stephen Leather, and Jon Burdett, whose collective fictive output is largely unreadable and place an undo strain on wood-pulp processing factories as well as the digital backbone of the Internet. In fact, Stephen Leather has recently taken to giving away digital copies of “erotic” short stories on Amazon with titles like “Banging Bill’s Wife.”  The most commercially popular of this sorry lot is Jon Burdett, but even his Bangkok-based stories do little justice to the nuanced reality and cultural complexity of living in a place like Thailand, and they have little to no bearing on Coles’ imagined “noir” movement. What is equally distressing about this whole misguided effort is that the concept of noir, as an extension of the German expressionism that Coles so admires, is essentially being grafted onto one very narrow aspect of Thai urban culture, namely the red-light districts that cater to white foreign men. There is very little of the native Thai voice to be found in his concept of Bangkok noir (or Southeast Asian noir) or whatever; and when Thais do appear, they are merely prostitutes, drug dealers, or murderers or corrupt public servants. One can hope and think and try to will into existence some grand artistic movement until the water buffalo comes home. But if other scholars, writers, art critics, and historians of Southeast Asia are directing their gaze elsewhere, or fail to see any artistic merit whatever in the examples Coles provides, then the overly ambitious Bangkok noir movement is destined to be consigned to the collective digital shrug of the Internet’s ever-shortening memory.   

Now, Lek and I occasionally read some of the postings over on the New Mandala site, which we had mistakenly believed was a place of lively academic debate and rigorous intellectual exploration. (Lek finds anything with too many words “boring”.) Instead what one has come to expect from New Mandala is a small coterie of like-minded individuals, exhibiting all of the mutually masturbatory inclinations of a left-leaning graduate school seminar, who seem to save the lion’s share of their consternation for the institution of the Thai monarchy and the threadbare cliche of corrupt Southeast Asian politics (the amount of ink that has been spilled tilting after this windmill in the Western academy shows no signs of drying, so long as another PhD can be squeezed profitably from the tired hackwork of political scientists flummoxed by Southeast Asia’s historically-grounded patron-client networks.)

Here is Coles’s take on corruption in Bangkok (or Southeast Asia by extension):

A world where endemic corruption is not only considered to be “normal” and “permanent” but even “essential”.

In most of these artistic works, there always seems to be double helpings of Impunity, disenfranchisement, South East Asia Big Men, a complete lack of any meaningful Rule of Law, almost no actual rights inherently belonging to the individual.

Coles makes clear in the beginning of his post that he is not an intellectual, but an “artist”. He admits this probably to deflect attention from the weakness of his arguments and the implausibility of his observations (generally limited to the area in proximity to Bangkok’s red-light districts). Even so, in a forum like New Mandala, the claims he makes here about the absence of Rule of Law in Southeast Asia, and the lack of “actual rights belonging to the individual” should at least invite some scrutiny or critical circumspection, at the very minimum. Instead, the editors at New Mandala decided that Coles was immune from pointed criticism, and so his post has all of the characteristics of a bully-pulpit, a kind of meandering journey through a painter’s untutored mind.

We will leave this tired story (which shows no signs of going gently into that noirish night) with some parting words from Coles, which have the nasty chemical buzz of paranoia the kind usually associated with psychedelic drug abuse:

Individuals are frequently and arbitrarily subject to state and Big Man violence, selective and biased law enforcement, sometimes even assassination and disappearances. 

The View from Above