streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 4:56 pm on December 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture, history ( 42 ), language ( 144 )   

  By my linguistic and culinary comparisons, 

  I’d estimate that Thais and Viets diverged from a common source probably about three thousand years ago, coincidentally about the time that Han Chinese began emigrating southward in heavy numbers. Austronesian Proto-Malays probably diverged from that same common source about four to five thousand years ago before sailing the seas and settling islands as far away as Madagascar and Hawaii and New Zealand. Very few traces remain of that distant association, if indeed the theory is correct, but as they say, “What goes around comes around,” and Malays and Thais were destined to meet once again in the Isthmus of Kra along their current national borders. Thai curries probably come from this association. Most words in common between Thai and Malay result from the common pre-Muslim flirtation with India and Sanskrit. After their conversion to Islam, Malays even became re-established in Southeast Asia as an inter-bred race with their long-lost Cham brethren in Cambodia, also Austronesian and supposedly the original link between the Tai and Malay languages. This happened after their once-proud culture was nearly annihilated by the land-hungry Vietnamese at about the same time that Columbus was discovering America. Whether they remained on the mainland or came back is uncertain, but their aboriginal cousins are heavily intermixed with aboriginal Khmers in the central Vietnamese highlands, they also presumably a product of that original southern Chinese proto-race.

   

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  hardie karges 1:38 pm on December 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture, history ( 42 )   

  It may be that a people emerging from the shadows of history 

  
  and an aboriginal past adopt the first ‘high culture’ and language they come in contact with, as Thais with India and Sanskrit. Or maybe the last, as with Indonesia and Islam and Arabic, displacing the previous Indian and Sanskrit. Or perhaps a mixture works better, in the case of the Philippines’ Spanish Catholicism, but wide facility with the more recent English language influence. It’s probably no accident that Southeast Asia is the prime example for this phenomenon, given its long history of ‘cultural relativity’ and frequent position as a playing field for the great powers of China, India, Europe, and Arabia. Still they retained their native language in most cases, the notable exceptions being the far-flung and vastly outnumbered Polynesians in Hawaii and Easter Island. Southeast Asia and the South Pacific Islands are good examples of what I consider feminine cultures, ultimately flexible and looking to marry up, making up with makeup what they lack in logic.
   
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  hardie karges 9:11 pm on November 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture, DNA ( 44 ), food ( 8 )   

  Forget DNA and its handmaiden language, 

  rewrite history in terms of cuisine, the trails of tomatoes and the paths of potatoes. The Chinese leave gastronomical tracks wherever they go. All people do. Thais immigrate with kitchen utensils, opening restaurants like plowing fields and claiming land, blurring the edge between origin and immigration. There’s something magic about a name on a map becoming reality in the flesh, complete with tacos and tom yam, spring rolls and pizza, sex and chocolate. The moon sets over a featureless plain as trains pass through the night and border guards check my papers. Names of cities flash by on signs like flash cards to study a language that just keeps changing everywhere you go. Just when you think you’ve about got it figured out, it shifts gears by some Chomskyan rule of transformation and proceeds by another set of standards. Those are the other borders that reside within consciousness, separating not time nor space, but operating systems, thought, virtual consciousness.

   
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  hardie karges 11:04 am on November 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture, DNA ( 44 ), food ( 8 )   

  The cultural DNA of food leaves tracks everywhere. 

  
  The first thing I do in any country, outside of Asia at least, is look for Chinese food. In Venezuela, there are plenty of chifas, but no chaufa, only arroz frito. But there, egg rolls are called lumpia, a prominent Philippine dish, not the rollos or chun kun of elsewhere south of the border. I’ll have to try one to see if they’re actually the same dish. In Peru, soy sauce is known as sillao, similar to the si iw of Thailand and the original shi-yau of Cantonese, from which Japanese shoyu, typical Spanish soya, soy, and all other variations ultimately derive. Venezuelan food itself is typical of the fried greasy fare that defines the Caribbean, poor cuts of meat and an infinite variety of starches cooked in hot melted lard at varying levels of temperatures. The important thing is to soak up as much of that grease as possible to get the most for your money. Women proudly let their bellies hang out in imitation of their British counterparts, no reason to be ashamed of what’s in your genes and jeans. Hell, where I came from, if you didn’t put on fat you’d die, as did all those Roman dilettantes testing their luck in the northern winters.

   
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  hardie karges 3:59 am on November 25, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture, food ( 8 )   

  If language is the cultural DNA of high culture, 

  
  then food is the DNA of the illiterate masses. The fact that Thais eat hot chilies like fiends, but with very few varieties, and that they’re native to Mexico, with many varieties, would tell you something historical whether you read the book or not. Likewise with the potato, which has dozens of varieties in its native South American Andes, though more famous in Ireland, which has only one or two. There they suffered a potato blight and resulting famine so severe that they had to bring in more diverse DNA from the source with which to breed some disease resistance into the ‘Irish’ potato. One of the most typical traditional Tai dishes is kaow soi, found in Thailand, Laos, Burma, China, and sometimes Vietnam. There’s only one problem: it’s not the same dish everywhere. The dish in northern Thailand is properly kaow soi islam, a Burmese-style curry-like soup made with coconut milk and served over wheat noodles, not too surprising since northern Thailand was a Burmese colony for a couple hundred years. Real Tai kaow soi, like they still serve in Laos and Yunnan, China, is like northern Thai nam prik ong chili paste served in rice noodle soup, similar to northern Thai nam ngieow. Got that? Rice noodles themselves seem to have originated in Vietnam or southern China or both, given the two different names universally used for this product, pho and guaytieow, for which there are many variations in size, all taken quite seriously by connoisseurs. Then again, Thailand and Vietnam have different, but similar, products with the same name in nem and canh.

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    Pattaya Hotels 7:55 am on November 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    DNA, Stil the most important to our lifes.

    High culture too.

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  hardie karges 3:46 pm on November 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture, DNA ( 44 ), language ( 144 )   

  The DNA of language can also go awry 

  when ‘smoking’ (pronounced ‘esmoquin’) becomes Spanish for ‘tuxedo’. Even more bizarre is the meaning it takes under the watchful eyes of Bangkok courtesans, probably because the word pronounced ‘soop’ also means ‘to suck’ as well as ‘to smoke’, and the rest is history. I heard white punks use the same term the same way a few days ago in a movie. Don’t think about this while eating your morning gruel. To talk about the DNA of culture is to acknowledge possibly more than just the similarities between the evolutions of Nature and culture, but also the unity, the interlocking connection between the two, culture presumably a plethora of Nature’s little experiments, little whirling eddies, off the main flow. As such, might there not be a common uniting factor, such as memory, which propels both?

   
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  hardie karges 11:03 am on November 23, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture, DNA ( 44 ), food ( 8 )   

  Sometimes names of dishes don’t make sense, 

  
  like ‘airport noodles’ in the chifas of Peru, every one of them, mind you, but that’s half the fun. The first Thai restaurant in Flagstaff named some dish after an evil jungle princess, so now they all do. One only hopes they don’t go to Thailand expecting such, or even a jungle, for that matter. Of course, sometimes the DNA of culture can suffer horrible mutations, such as the case of Alf in Peru. Remember Alf, the walking talking dog-shaped doormat that ruled the airwaves back in 1990 or so? No, I didn’t think so. Anyway, he had a few good years in the ratings, if I remember correctly, though I can hardly imagine what sort of product would invest their hard-earned advertising budget in such nonsense. This was prime time, mind you. He WAS cute, I suppose, kind of a Garfield gone dog gone puppet. Well, anyway, it was strange enough that he was hugely popular in Peru back then, but reruns still running fifteen years later? Somebody needs professional help! A MASH*, Seinfeld, Friends, or Lucy, Alf is not. Still, the other prominent American sit-com currently on the Peruvian schedule is ‘I Dream of Jeannie’, so go figure. Escapist entertainment, anyone?

   
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  hardie karges 10:40 am on November 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture, food ( 8 ), history ( 42 )   

  The Hong Kong Café in Flagstaff was my cook and kitchen 

  
  when I had nothing better. The customers were mostly Navajos and Hopis and a few intergalactic stragglers like myself, looking for succor in a plate of chop suey and a cup of hot tea. Those days are over now. Flagstaff has only one chop suey joint left out of the three I knew twenty years ago, and it’s looking more ‘fusion’ every day. Places like this are so ‘out’ that they might actually be back ‘in’ if they can hold on long enough and sell themselves as kitsch, without having to go the way of diners first. You don’t go to places like this for good Chinese food. You go there for atmosphere, a taste of the old days when people were fleeing the Midwest dust bowl, when people were fleeing the Caste wars, when people were fleeing their own personal demons. You go there for the blue-plate special under $5, with a piece of pie afterward for a buck and change. Little by little, Thai or more-modern Chinese eateries open their doors to the more sophisticated clientele that moves in when cowboy-and-Indian towns have been sufficiently sanitized for mass consumption. The same happens with Mexican places when the Mariachi décor gets traded for a more tropical look and hopefully the food gets a makeover also.

   
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  hardie karges 8:58 am on November 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture, DNA ( 44 ), food ( 8 )   

  The chop suey kitchens of the American west are slowly disappearing, 

  replaced by more modern-styled eateries, whether fast food or more up-scale Chinese. They date to the days of the Old West, when foreign labor was needed, and so were cooks to feed them. One thing Chinese can do is cook, and do it fast. The menus are not only a relic of the past, but are almost identical in every place, from Northwest to Southwest. Most of the remaining original locations are in small towns, particularly those served by railroad. They are even quite numerous in Latin America, with some linguistic crossover. Fried rice in Spanish America is frequently arroz chaufa rather than arroz frito, chaufa itself being a corruption of the Chinese term for ‘fried rice’, so slightly redundant but quaint. In South America, Chinese restaurants are universally known as chifas, a corruption of the Chinese term for ‘eat rice’. Indonesia even gets in on the act. Some well-known ‘Indonesian’ dishes are cap cay (pronounced ‘chop chai’) and fu yung hai, essentially Asian versions of chop suey and egg fu yung, using a sweet and sour sauce instead of the more American-style brown gravy. In all of these places, Chinese people themselves remain essentially unmixed with the original inhabitants. In Thailand, where they are mixed, these phenomena are unknown, as they are in China itself. In Thailand an omelet is called kai jieow, simply a fritata, like a Spanish tortilla, not to be confused with a Mexican tortilla. Got it? Archaeological evidence has led some theorists to conclude that food was first cooked some ten thousand years ago in what is now Southern China. Could be. Those people were likely the progenitors of both modern Tai and Cantonese.

   
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  hardie karges 8:13 am on August 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture, neoteny ( 2 ), Thailand ( 75 )   

  Thailand is in a cultural drift toward neoteny. 

  
  The language is pretty, if vague, and some female TV personalities speak something close to baby talk to make it even prettier. Suffering fools gladly is a way of life here. English is the language of last resorts. Speak slowly and with multiple convictions. English is the language of aggression for use with outsiders. The use of Thai dictates a different level of politeness. Know that silly song you can’t get out of your head? Thais like that silly song, and can mouth most of the words along with the singer. They’ll even clap as the song starts rather than before the song ends to show their approval, since no respectable singer would change the song. Thais worship their kids, especially the males. Their mothers essentially work for them. It goes to their heads, of course, and many never really grow up. Thai male kids are spoiled rotten, indulged to the limit of a family’s resources. As long as the resources are limited, then they turn out okay. When a family’s lot improves and they just shower the extra on their kids, then the kids quickly become accustomed to the new standards and do their best to do as little as possible for most of their lives. Thailand is a nation held together by mutual fears and sticky rice. Fear of ghosts is common, so many Thais sleep with the light on. They are puppies in puppy love, sweet nothings without fire nor fiber, ready to marry up the food chain to further the cause of evolution. Blue-eyed lightning grounds itself in brown-eyed earth, and the rest is history.