MangoZeen

The airbases fo Issan are relatively quiet now. A few flights a day from bangkok, but during the Viet-Nam War these runways were scorched by US fighters and bombers flying missions over Hanoi and more secretively Laos. This supposed secret war was run out of a small complex on the Udon Thani air strip basically […]

If you read PLATFORM on a beach in Thailand, farang women will regard you the same way they view fat German tourists in bikini briefs waddling down the beach bracketed by two skinny go-go girls. The author narrates a tale of a French functionaire inheriting a fortune and wasting this money on sex trips to […]

Books are much better than DVDs. While used ones cost about 160 baht as opposed to 100 baht per DVD, movies rarely last longer than 2 hours, unless you hit the fast-forward button. The BLACK DAHLIA flashed before my eyes in less than 12 minutes. It sucked.
Reading a book is a journey of days unless […]

I read this interview on http://www.worldpress.org/Asia/3051.cfm from www.2bangkok.com
Ona trip to laos in 1997 I was amazed by the widespread deforestation. The country had been denuded of trees. The loggers were political prisoners like Bounsang Khamkeo. The timber produce chopsticks in Japan and toilet paper for the rest of the world.

The writer survived seven years in the secret jungle prisons of […]

The deceased author Norman Mailer was awarded the Bad Sex in Fiction Award for the most awkward description of an intimate encounter. This dubious accomplishment was for his blue prose in THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST. Passage of this failed eroticia was read to the attending crowd by emotive actresses.

“His mouth lathered with her sap, he […]

Bookzine in Jomtien was having a sale last week and I was lucky to find EM Nathanson’s sequel to his 1965 hit THE DIRTY DOZEN.

A DIRTY DISTANT WAR takes Major John Reisman to SE Asia at the end of WWII. He travels to Burma, China, and Vietnam as an arms supplier to Ho Chi Minh, […]

I have always loved book stores. St. Marks Bookstore in the East Village, City Lights in San Francisco, Shakespeare’s in Paris, and the Pink Pussy XXX Book Store on 42nd Street. Pattaya sadly is bereft of a classic pseudo-intellectual book store. Bookzine carries a nice line of modern fiction but 350-800 baht a book prices me out […]

When I first visited Cambodia in 1998, I arrived at Phnom Penh’s airport on a brutally sunny day. My sunglasses offered little protection against the glare. I stumbled toward the terminal seeking relief from the heat, then stopped upon seeing a small bus deboarding its young passengers. Every child dressed in their best clothes. They were […]

“Wise men fish here.”

This non sequitor graced a sign above Gotham Books of West 47th Street.
New York’s Diamond Alley.
I slaved on that street 13 years slinging ice to fiancées, mistresses, and drug dealers. Izzy SheyGutz. In goyim we trust. 5 days a week. Pastrami sandwiches and italian suits. 7 days during the Xmas holidays after […]

Two years ago a Thai actress intoned that Angkor Wat had been constructed by her ancestral countrymen. The Cambodians responded to this theory by burning the Thai embassy to the ground. No one was hurt according to official reports and the embassy was re-built at the expense of the Chinese community. 
Worldwide people are sensitive about […]