Chatuchak surprise

In a corner of Chatuchak Park, this monument recognises two hundred years of friendship between Thailand and Mexico, Chile and Colombia. Below, another surprise (of a very different kind).  Look what I almost tripped over while jogging.

Day 2 9pm Bangkok Screening Room

The Bangkok Screening Room is a chic new pint-sized arthouse cinema, perched above a gallery space a stone’s throw from the sweaty scrum of Sala Daeng. Its one of two spaces – along with the Friese-Green Club on Sukhumvit – offering curated non-mainstream fare in the city on a (semi) big screen in a private club or bar-like environment. I saw Ousmane Sembene’s 1966 Senegalese film, “Black Girl”.

There was also an exhibition by a Thai photographer of Cuba next door (and a splashy corporate party for L’oreal in progress when I arrived.)

 

Mexican men

A short film omnibus by Julian Hernandez and Roberto Fiesco.

You’re no good

One of the big names of young Brazilian music, Mallu Magalhães, is back with a lovely, summery and surprisingly traditional-sounding bossa nova number, Você Não Presta (You’re no good). The song also prompted me to go back to one of my old favourites of hers, Velha e Louca, below:

Fever dream

“Fever Dream” is the woozily disorienting, and quietly terrifying, English language debut by Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin. A five star read.

Summer beat

Miss that tacky Latin pop.

Aline Frazao : Ao Vivo

Cholet!

Travel magazines are a guilty pleasure. Utterly disposable and laughably transparent, they are purely devices to stimulate spending. To this aim, everything always has to be “new!” – all the time. “The new Paris”, “The new New York”, “Hottest new destinations for 2017” (are they really going to be so different from the hottest destinations of 2016?), and so many “extraordinary” new hotel properties, yet all offering overpriced variations on a well-worn theme…a room and a swimming pool. Got it.

And yet, I like them. They are pure escapism and a very cheap way, for an hour or so, to feel rich, idly leafing through the pages and deciding which of these places I would (will?) go to.

Conde Naste Traveller, with its well-executed Instagram-inspired art direction (above) is a particular favourite.

This weekend I read an article in it on “South America’s New Hippest City” which was – to its credit, surprisingly – La Paz. But the article put a strong case and I learned something about the city I had never known before, namely that it has sparked a new architectural trend dubbed “cholet”, a portmanteau of “Chola” (Andean native) and “chalet”. Apparently a sign of greater indigenous affluence under President Evo Morales, the buildings have been commissioned by the indigenous nouveau riche from a riot of influences: art deco, street art, Transformers and traditional Aymara culture among them.

You can read more about the cholet movement here.

  

Johnny Hooker

Recife’s Johnny Hooker has taken Brazil by storm with his re-imagining of the gender-bending 70s and early 80s rock years. In one interview he called David Bowie the Father, Madonna the Mother and Caetano Veloso the Holy Spirit, his personal trinity, although the glam trappings of Ney Matogrosso and Cazuza are also easy to detect.

The art of Belkis Ayon

Afro-Cuban symbolism in the art of Belkis Ayon, who sadly took her own life at the age of 32.

 

Mexican modern

 

 

The striking bold patterns of art from Mexico’s “Estridentista” movement in the 1920 which married Cbuism with Mexican folk art and political leftism.

And below, more Mexican modern, from the Japanese-inspired and DF-based manga fashion company ApparelK.

 

Los Isleño: Canary Island hipster

Supergay: the art of Pedro Centeno Vallenilla

I recently came across the work of the 1930s Venezuelan artist on pinterest, a riot of simmering homo-repression, fascistic nudes, kitsch Catholic imagery and Ibero-American cultural themes. Lush.

Tierra del Fuego’s Lost world

One of the amazing images from a new book called “Hain” about the Selknam people, now sadly lost to the world, who lived on the frigid Chilean and Argentinian island of Tierra del Fuego. Only coming into contact with Europeans in the nineteenth century, the Selknam are now considered to be a vanished people although a tiny number of their mixed-race descendants have survived and still speak their language. The Selknam practiced elaborate male initiation rituals called “Hain” featuring masks and ritualistic body painting, one of which was photographed in 1919.

The Selknam had been mercilessly persecuted by local ranch-owners who paid a sum for each indigenous person killed, and forcibly relocated to prison-like concentration camps, as well as suffering from exposure to alcohol and Western diseases.

 

Street art superpower?

South America is home to some street art heavy-hitters like Sao Paulo and Valparaiso, but now Paraguay’s capital Asuncion has weighed in, staking an impressive claim with its hosting of the pan-Latin American street mural festival Latido Americano.

  

Mixed-up world

District Three, a brief walk from the Reunification Palace, is a neighbourhood of local middle class shopping, street noodle vendors, raucous markets and a big hospital. It is also here, away from the gaze of tourists, that a small local hipster scene is starting to blossom. As well as as an ‘Analog cafe’ and some vintage stores set up in peoples’ living rooms, a small alley hosts one of the city’s prime hipster hangouts, Liem Barbershop.

Modelled after Chicano gangsters, in a craze itself imported from Thailand, the barbers here represent Saigon’s globalised counter culture spirit  – and the place is consistently packed out. Its the kind of place I didn’t know existed in Saigon and perhaps an interesting peek at where the city is heading?

Arca – Sin Rumbo

Mexican Modernism

Gustavo Montoya’s “Two Children, One Playing”was my favourite piece at the “Mexican Modernism” exhibition at Hong Kong University’s museum, a show that I happened to see advertised on a banner as I passed by on a minibus on Bowen Rd.

TheMexican exhibition – also featuring minor works by Diego Rivera and Leonora Carrington – seemed a good excuse to visit the dusty and little-visited museum, housed in a 1930s building that once housed the university’s Chinese language library. Its cluster of small and quiet galleries currently house Ming dynasty furniture, a collection of Nestorian Christian crosses from 14th century Mongolia and Japanese lacquerware as well as the Mexican modernists.

Love on the …brain?

Above, Juan Sebastián Peláez’s Ewaipanoma (Rihanna) on show in Berlin, apparently inspired by pre-colonial Colombian myth and a paparazzi shot of the bathing “goddess”, and below – the singer in action.

Nostalgia: Meu Infinito Particular

I spent a long, rather dull weekend hanging around, waiting for something to happen and dreaming nostalgically of South America: the bright yellow flowers waving in the hillside cemetery of Valparaiso with its colourful tin houses tumbling down the hillsides towards the briny sea, languid days on the streets of Copacabana and Botafogo, breakfasts of medialuna in Buenos Aires McDonalds … great memories…

At last!

After a hefty wait, the third album by Aline Frazao is finally out. It is titled “Insular.” And the rather lovely making-of video, showcasing the Scottish island of Jura where it was produced, has been subtitled for English speakers!