Thai Thai Thailand

what to do about dawn

2011-05-20T05:01:00.000-07:00

One of my heroes, Evita Krislock, once told me, “Any time is timely.” I’ve been thinking a lot about this the past few weeks. I leave Chiang Mai in less than a month. A stopover in Spain, then moving to New York to start my MFA in the fall. I feel like the luckiest kid on the block to be able to spend the next two years focused on writing, and to have the faculty, peers, funding and time that enable that focus. But Lord knows there’re two sides to every coin, and a before and after to every clock.

If you asked me to make a list of the great things about the city, life, relationships of Chiang Mai, I probably wouldn’t be able to finish it before the final boarding call. This abundance—unquantifiable, unarticulated, irreplaceable—is a good thing, is a blessing, is the best-case-scenario. It’s also damn hard to think about leaving.

And, at times, harder yet to imagine myself back in New York. There were months in the beginning this year when I would wake up with memories of brick buildings, the metallic smell of subway poles, the wind on Venice Beach or through orange groves, the silence in a late night cab. I would feel a calling to go to those places, return to their people. Around that time, though, a teacher told me that the first instinct in times of fear is to contract, to turn in on ourselves. The body does the same. I don’t know when I shifted from retreating to the familiar to reaching out some roots instead. But the roots have reached. And they keep growing. I guess that's how you make a home.

Since I finished my job and travels, I’ve been on a Monastic Days, Party Nights plan. Days alone to work on songs and stories, then slipping back into the night to be around tables or on dance floors, on balconies or in bars. In company. If I could write the world a thank you card, it would be for these past weeks. Time to prove to myself I have the discipline for this writing thing, this recording thing. Time to go and grow further in my friendships, my vocabulary, my understanding of values, politics, perspectives, เกรงใจ in Thai culture. Time to shoot the shit and time for heart-to-hearts. I don’t have a calendar on my wall and I don’t want one. Nevertheless, when I date a journal entry, this time just feels like a tease, or a trailer for a movie I won’t get to see. Why so good now, right before I leave? But the goodness would have been there two months earlier. It’s just richer now. I’d take a peak over a lull any day. And days are what I’ve got. It’s timely after all, timely yet.

Another lesson from Evita was that we have the choice to build something up or tear it down. When I feel most apprehensive about leaving, I try to remember that choice. My friend V-Dub said, “Okay, there’s a lot you’ll miss. Why not make a list of what’s good to come back to?” I woke up the next morning and pulled out a piece of paper from my sketchpad and got to work.

It felt good to be positive. Optimism—the faithful fallback despite my occasional lapse. As I try to prepare myself for what’ll probably hurt like hell, at least I know that some lessons don’t change and some foundations you can carry, always, with you. Gratitude. Good friends. Art and impulse.

And poems, like this one from a book a Thai friend (whose nickname’s Art—go figure) loaned me. A collection by 8th century Japanese women who wrote these killer 5-line stanzas for their beloveds. So, since I already wrote a thank you card to the world, I might as well throw in a love poem too. This one's by Ono No Komachi, translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani.

The autumn night
is long only in name—
We’ve done no more
than gaze at each other
and it's already dawn.

new songs!

2011-05-09T23:13:00.000-07:00

Hey there! I finally have some new, free mp3s. You can find them under "downloads" on my site, EllenAdams.net.

Per request of a Thai pal, you can find the lyrics too for these songs and older albums. There's also a Facebook "like" button if you feel like sharing the love. And feel free to share these songs with the ones you love!

adhoc album

2011-04-29T04:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I found a piano shop at the mall that rents little rooms, each with an upright and none of them soundproof, by the hour. I snuck in a backpack full of recording equipment this morning to hammer out an arrangement for a new song. I finished just in time for some guy to rent the room next door, set up his sheet music and get going on the theme from Love Story. Just in the nick of time.

New mp3 coming soon!

"announcing your place / in the family of things"

2011-03-07T01:52:00.000-08:00

I test myself sometimes. Could I stay here forever? Often the question arises to challenge or check myself, and other times it’s a game of devil’s advocate. In the past, when people have asked me how long I’ll stay in Chiang Mai, I don’t answer the question. “I don’t know,” or something with a “maybe.” I found out recently that I’ll be in a writing residency in August out west to work on my book. Although I’d planned on coming back to the states in late spring or summer, to have something set-in-stone feels strange. Especially when it’s tied to sharing good news with friends here. After the explanation for “Holy cow, I got a residency!” there usually comes a variation on, “Great! And when do you come back to Chiang Mai?”

How could I leave? I feel so lucky to have fallen in with the friends I have. Even if I don’t understand most of the language, my life here has been—trying to fight off the past tense: is!—a best-case-scenario in terms of both creativity and community. I didn’t want to be just another expat at an expat bar, and although my Thai still needs some serious TLC, in the past few months I’ve felt like a part of this town, even if a small part. With the exception of a writing group or country music, I feel like I have found everything I would want out of New York City.

One of my literature students once pointed out that I am always comparing texts, characters, tones. Part of it I blame on my schooling, but part of it is my self. Pros and cons. Ifs and thens. From an outsider’s perspective, Thai culture is more emotionally reserved than in the states. Could it sustain this overanalyzing, occasionally broody farang in the long-term? In times of need, the silence can prove frustrating, but in other moments it’s nothing but a relief from the agitation and drama I witnessed (and engaged) in college and the city. I don’t know if it’s a perfect fit; I don’t believe in a perfect place anymore. That said, there are evenings or early mornings when it seems, frankly, stupid to walk away from such a good, good thing.

My friend Riley often brings up the point that we never let ourselves accept happiness or satisfaction if it comes with ease. I already earned my gray hair—do I need more? I know I could organize and afford a life of writing and music here. Why hustle? I remember reading somewhere Grace Paley’s words of wisdom for young writers: cheap rent. Check. Another piece of advice from my nona Ceil: hang with people who know more than you. Although I don’t know writers in Chiang Mai, I am surrounded by 30-somethings who are making ends meet through art, music, design, which provides as much hope as it does an example.

While having soup with a friend a few weeks ago, I asked what made him decide to move from Bangkok to Chiang Mai for good. He said it was an accident. He said, “Life is not a calendar.” As we walked to his car after dinner, we saw it had been boxed in by another sedan. Nothing to do but wait for an opening, and to keep talking through the wait.

I keep coming back to T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday, a poem that—much like this town, this year—I came across by chance:

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

Regardless of what happens in the next few months, I rejoice the following words from a friend, unexpected, over a cup of Nescafé: “I think you come back.”

urban studies

2011-02-21T03:21:00.001-08:00

Northern Thai dreamhomes vs. Bangkok buildings.

Stay tuned for some recordings of this weekend's trip to the city.

teaching

2011-02-21T03:15:00.000-08:00

One week left of trying to start a conversation.

café con leche sunday

2011-01-25T03:41:00.000-08:00

I started off Sunday with some exploring behind Wat U-Mong. I always associate that part of town with good vibes. The minute you reach the road that leads to the forest temple, the temperature drops a few degrees and the farang start to thin out. Past the wat is one of my favorite coffee shops, a two-story wooden house with wide, open windows, good sunlight and a green courtyard. I put in a few hours writing some scenes, working through a book of Mary Karr poems and filling in some linguistic gaps. A slow, five-star day.

another all-star from a payap Norton

2011-01-13T00:59:00.000-08:00

What would I do this year without anthologies? I found the following today, by John Malcolm Brinnin:

I couldn't sleep in that enormous echo--
silence and water music, sickly street lamps
neither on nor off--a night
of islands and forgotten languages.

Yet morning, marvelously frank, comes up
with bells, with loaves, with letters
distributed like gifts.

And from his translation of Jorge Carrera Andrade:

My ranch was space--
a province of azure sown with stars
as thick as wheat across a prairie.
Crook in hand, I tended my white flock.

Birds were my farmhands; my days
great baskets filled with harvestings,
sweet groves of beaming oranges.
Not even the sunset was more mellow ripe.

chiang mai kitsch

2011-01-09T03:11:00.000-08:00

Last year in 2D we threw a party in honor of Elvis' birthday, which was one heck of a shindig, but this year might give it a run for its money.

Where else to celebrate The King's birthday but the dance floor of an Elvis bar in the boonies of Chiang Mai? We headed to The Twin, an impersonator bar, for a little Jailhouse Rock, Blue Suede Shoes, and Love Me Tender. Some Thai old timers gave us all roses, but only after they all out-danced us in the Twist.

The band:

Rose man:

Busting out some Love Me Tender:

Almost as good as Elvis' hair:

cosmic 2k11 / สวัสดีปีใหม่

2011-01-06T04:08:00.000-08:00

I was in Bangkok (more on that later) when I got a call from some dear friends in Chiang Mai to say "Happy Rabbit Year!" I hadn't realized it would be the year of the rabbit, which is an unexpected full-circle for this here wild child--especially since the Thai New Year's falls on my birthday.

Last semester we had a unit on New Year's Resolutions in my conversation courses. A lot of them said "I will cut down on playing video games" or "I will keep working hard in class." (Yes, yes, A+!) As for Ajaan, aside from the usual "exercise" and "respond to email," I added some poetry. But first, how about a recap?

Last year's M.O.:

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
(e.bishop)

This year's is a tie (tied taught) between the following:

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
(t.s.eliot)

The Soul should always stand ajar
(e.dickinson)

tonal

2010-11-30T08:35:00.000-08:00

There are certain songs for certain things. I put on Diane Cluck or Skip James, and I am back on the top floor of a building on Boulevard Raspail. Alela Diane or Dave Rawlings Machine and I’ve got the windows open in the evening, and in comes the whistle of the New Jersey Transit.

We took a road trip up through the mountains last weekend. Fresh air, orchids, bugs, barefoot kids on the side of the road. Emaciated dogs.

The year I lived in Granada, my iPod and computer broke within a few weeks of each other. The only music I had was the CDs friends gave me. All of the sudden, my musical library transformed into Fangoria, flamenco, silly pop songs and Chavela Vargas and the DVD in the living room. On the sidewalk, I listened to traffic, barking dogs, arguments, Camarón’s “Vamanos pá casa” coming from someone’s second story living room.

In the morning in Chiang Mai, I listen to KCRW. I know about the traffic backed up on the 405, or the accident on the Pacific Coast Highway. I knew Black Dub’s album would drop the beginning of November. I click twice and there’s TSF Jazz coming straight from Paris. I put on Elvis, Éthiopiques, Gillian Welch, all the funk albums I got in Brooklyn last August.

Sometimes I get overwhelmed by this much music. On the road trip this weekend, La Paquera de Jerez came up on shuffle. I thought my heart was going to fall out. Sometimes I hear tourists from Spain at the Sunday night market in the Old City, but their accents sound from the North, or maybe Madrid. Sometimes on long drives I recite whatever stanzas of Spanish poetry I still remember. “A veces cuento las horas de diferencia / el asunto de los hemisferios / No te olvides de nosotros / que te queremos tanto.” I think of how long it took me to hear the compás of a bulería. Uno dos tres, uno dos tres, un dos un dos un dos. How long did it take me to hear the tones in Thai?

มา ม้า หมา

I mentioned to a friend at the bar that settling down somewhere didn't sound so bad. He said, "You're too young to be sound like that!" Certain sounds for certain times. That's what I've learned best from flamenco, learned again from Thai: where to put the stress, and when to let it go.

snap shots + sounds

2010-11-01T05:32:00.001-07:00

Here's a photo (c/o Toral Patel) and videos (c/o Torlarp "Hern" Larpjaroensook) from the concert at Gallery See Scape last weekend. It started off with some jazz, and Harmonica Sunrise (a great band based here in Chiang Mai) closed up the evening. Couldn't have asked for a more beautiful venue or a warmer group of people.

hey stranger

2010-10-23T00:25:00.000-07:00

Hello cyberspace. It has been eons since I've written anything here. Long story short, the past few months have been incredible. I love Chiang Mai and I love my life here. Teaching is good--nothing compares to when students come bearing the gifts of cake, donuts and a blue coffee mug at the end of the semester. I was sad to see them go. Writing and music took a backseat to an end-of-term grading spree, but I'm excited to get back in business. Tomorrow night I'm playing a concert at a friend's gallery. Time to bust out some new songs!

I'm learning how to paint. It's strange. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing, but it's always tied to a feeling--more like a trust--that this is taking me somewhere. I went up to the mountains one weekend with some artists, and an old-timey painter told me, "Sign and date everything. Put your paintings on the wall. Put them in order. After a while, you'll see where you're going."

Everything else can pretty much be summed up by the following poem, which I had the great pleasure of receiving in a letter:

Whelks
Mary Oliver

Here are the perfect
fans of the scallops,
quahogs, and weedy mussels
still holding their orange fruit—
and here are the whelks—
whirlwinds,
each the size of a fist,
but always cracked and broken—
clearly they have been traveling
under the sky-blue waves
for a long time.
All my life
I have been restless—
I have felt there is something
more wonderful than gloss—
than wholeness—
than staying at home.
I have not been sure what it is.
But every morning on the wide shore
I pass what is perfect and shining
to look for whelks, whose edges
have rubbed so long against the world
they have snapped and crumbled—
they have almost vanished,
with the last relinquishing
of their unrepeatable energy,
back into everything else.
When I find one,
I hold it in my hand,
I look out over that shaking fire,
I shut my eyes. Not often,
but now and again there's a moment
when the heart cries aloud:
yes, I am willing to be
that wild darkness,
that long blue body of light.

bookworm / can of worms

2010-08-19T04:53:00.000-07:00

I went to the library at the U today for two things.

1. To get some outlining/writing done on a longer fiction project. (Today I taught my students the word “satisfying.” Exhibit A.)

2. To check out some books now that my card is up and running. I just about passed out when I stumbled upon a yellowed 1985 anthology Contemporary American Poetry. Poetry is so hard to come by here. (Given the luggage limits, I only brought over a slim volume of poems, which two months later I have re-read probably twenty times.) I had some time to kill after work, so I buzzed on over to the courtyard of a temple that has a cluster of picnic tables in the shade of these old, gigantic trees. I cracked open my new-found literary lifeline to a random page. The first stanza I came across was from Louis Simpson:

As a man walks he creates the road he walks on.
All of my life in America
I must have been reeling out of myself
this red dirt, gravel road.

Forgiving Louis his omission of the ladies and their roads, I must say these verses hit me like a ton of bricks. This needs to be a painting! (Or maybe the next project in my printmaking class?) A fishing line or the cable of a kite drawn out of him, pulled taut, pulled farther yet by an off-screen fish, wind or fate. My oh my, does that ever sound familiar. The spool keeps turning, linked to a tether whose end I can never quite catch up to. And who knows where in God’s green tree, red clay Earth it’s headed.

He’s writing about Australia. He’s writing about the future, but it made me think of the 1979 red Ford Ranger I first learned to drive, of the thick ruddy mud in the barranca outside Horn Canyon after a flooding, of slowing at the gravel of Loffs Bay Road in Coeur d’Alene. All of my life in America I’ve been tugged along the road that leads to the library this morning, the temple courtyard this afternoon, to the plaguing question the past few months of What To Do With My Life. (NYT, anyone?) After four years of syllabi, I felt ready to unwind, to unreel. I came to Thailand in part to give myself the space to ask these questions, to find these poems, to watch the road. Louis Simpson found his in Australia. I’m still looking, still reeling, still reading.

el mundo es un pañuelo

2010-08-10T08:06:00.000-07:00

Alright, this is not strictly about Thai or Thailand. In my conversation classes we were talking about the Internet and globalization and as an example I said, "So, if in New York I discover 2NE1..." My students flipped out. "Ajarn-made-a-pop-culture-reference!" mayhem ensues. Little do they know...

Korean pop culture is HUGE in Thailand, as is this song. So from my globalized corner of the world to yours, please enjoy this jam (and the Beyoncé-inspired dance moves towards the end):

achievement - n.

2010-07-23T04:44:00.000-07:00

I was out on the porch with some (instant, but still delicious) Thai iced tea, some tunes, a few hours of daylight left and a few piles of grading. After grading a stack of assignments I was slipping into some this-is-endless discouragement, when out of the masses of "Use the new vocabulary in a sentence" exercises emerges the following:

"I want to teacher Ellen pleased with my achievements."

Done and done! A+ in my heart. Now, on to the grammar...

new song

2010-07-17T04:30:00.001-07:00

Last week I set up the old recording equipment and, with the help of my sidekick Oat, got to work on the new CD. Here's the latest song for y'all!

Come On Over

If you'd like an MP3, shoot me an email and I will beam one over to you.

welcome home, Oat!

2010-07-16T05:46:00.000-07:00

When I was thirteen, my grandfather took me to a music shop in Livonia, Michigan to get a guitar. She was big like a cow, so I named her Bessie. In the years that followed, my grandfather would call long-distance to Spokane and say, “Ellie Sue, I’ve been on the porch all day but I still haven’t heard a thing. You got to play louder!”

After much debate, I decided to leave Bessie in the states. I didn’t want to lose her to the humidity. The past four weeks, though, I have been wandering around Chiang Mai with a guitar-shaped hole in my heart, paired with the impatience of new songs wanting to be written. These wanderings led me to one guitar shop after the next, with no luck and a lot of “special, just-for-you” (a.k.a. astronomical) prices. Finally, a random run-in with another farang (who was from NJ but went to college in Spokane—small world!) pointed me in the right direction and I dragged Ajarn Lauren with me to a guitar shop in the north of the Old City.

As is the case with many shops and homes in Thailand, we took off our shoes to go in. I tried out a few guitars, and soon enough had narrowed it down. The price was right, and the pretty two-tone body was a hit. I asked the guy manning the counter about bars in Chiang Mai with a live music scene. Turns out he plays drums in a band here, and he gave me a list of places—and a discount on the guitar. I asked him what his name was. Oat!

As Lauren and I jetted back to our neighborhood, I suddenly had both a guitar and a name for it. In the days since, I have been happy as a clam. It wasn’t until I started writing new songs and recording the old ones that I realized just how much I had missed playing. It’s a relief, a release and a hoot. Every time I walk into my apartment and see Oat, I feel a little more at home. Bessie’s still my one and only, but Oat and I are on our way to something good. And no noise complaints from the neighbors so far…

Speaking of home, here are a few photos of mine, complete with día de los muertos flags:

rain dancing mountain woman

2010-07-02T06:00:00.000-07:00

Truth be told, Chiang Mai’s got some pollution, so I leapt at the chance last weekend give my lungs a break and get out of the city. About ten of us headed up to the mountains of Srilanna National Park to a lake. We spent the night jumping off and cutting a rug on the docks of some floating cabins.

There’s a serious drought in Thailand right now, and the low level of the water line was obvious even in the moonlight as we boated across. It was like the mountains were sliced between greenery and dried out mud. When we woke up the next morning, I could see what looked like an orchard of trees arcing out of the water, their branches sawed down years ago. The sight was an uneasy mix of eerie and gorgeous. The woman who rented the cabins said the lake had not been that low in at least ten years. In the afternoon boat back, someone pointed out that there should be at least ten feet of water above our heads.

As we drove along the highway back to Chiang Mai, the daily rain started. Suddenly, it didn’t seem a nuisance. With the heat, the humidity, the uncontrollable sweating that comes with Thailand’s climate, I constantly feel dehydrated no matter how much water I down. Our trip into the mountains showed the country’s climate in the same predicament: the anxious want for water and its short-lived relief.

Below you’ll find a photo of the lake by day and of yours truly (not a strong swimmer but a lover of lifejackets) by night, taken by Maria.

six foot angel

2010-06-29T05:46:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday I moved into my apartment. (Mi Thai casa es su Thai casa for those of you trekking around or planning to trek around Asia this year…) The following evening as I walked home from my Thai teacher’s house, I asked a blonde girl on the street 1. if she spoke English and 2. if she knew a place nearby where I could buy some sheets. Since she was a tall drink of water, she leant down as she answered, and thank goodness she did! Fifteen minutes of conversation later, we made plans to have dinner once I finished my just-moved-in errands.

By the time I got to the main road, the rainy-season humidity snapped and on came a downpour. A Western guy outside the 7-11 handed me a folded garbage bag and said, “Here, have a rain coat.” I gave up on my errands (and on lugging big shopping bags of household goods through the rain) and, an hour later, me and my makeshift poncho made it through the deluge to the restaurant.

We ate in a hole-in-the-wall, family-run place in a random hallway of her apartment building. The cooks’ adorable four-year-old daughter paraded back and forth on her training-wheeled bicycle, sometimes stopping at our table to rattle off some Thai that I miraculously understood. (Granted, it was a four-year-old’s vocabulary, but still!) As it turns out, my new six-foot-friend was leaving Chiang Mai in two days. She had been living in Thailand for six months, studying ecological politics and working in an incredible sounding non-profit doing humanitarian work in Burma. As we finished up our curry fried rice, we swapped stories (why are you here? what did you leave? what’ll you come home to?) and every time she mentioned an experience with Thai people or the language or the urban insanity that is Chiang Mai, she literally glowed. We paid our bill, bid goodbye to our bicycling sidekick, and she said, “This is random, but do you need pillows?” Then came a different downpour: household goods. We went up to her apartment and she gave me all the cleaning supplies, cutlery, bowls, buckets, glasses and pillows she would leave behind when she left Chiang Mai—and her parting gifts were pretty much my shopping list verbatim.

I was just a few days past my arrival, and she was mere days from departure, and I’m grateful for the slim chance of overlap in our Chiang Mai chronology. The stars aligned with one big, “Hark!” While it’s always nice to go home with a garbage bag rain poncho and an even bigger garbage bag of stuff, it’s even nicer to go home with some impromptu words of wisdom and a damn good omen.

i jaywalk you jaywalk she jaywalks

2010-06-25T04:17:00.000-07:00

To cross a street in Chiang Mai, you wait for a gap in the first lane and run. You stand on the dotted line and watch for a break in the next lane of traffic. On a smaller street this might be streamlined, but when it’s a four-lane road you might find yourself stranded in the middle of motorbikes, sedans and trucks for more than a hot minute. Cross walk? Forget about it.

Aside from the adrenaline that comes from feeling like I’m in a video game, the past two weeks’ worth of sprinted street crossings have been pretty analogous to the rest of my experience. If I want to get anywhere, I better make a run for it. Whether it be taking a stab at a spicier curry, making use of the tap-water made ice cubes, speaking some Thai, or rolling into my first class a mere 11.5 hours after getting into the Chiang Mai airport, I’ve been trying my best to curtail the hesitation. Sometimes it means going with the flow, other times it means stepping into traffic, but so far so good.

hello!

2010-06-13T00:42:00.000-07:00

Two days from now I will be arriving in Thailand and will get this show (and blog) on the road. Don't touch that dial!