Chris Coles: Navigating the Bangkok Noir
“Sexy Bar” by Chris Coles
“I Cover the Waterfront” was Max Miller’s 1932 book about his gritty turn as a docklands reporter for the San Diego Sun. The title told you that nothing but trouble was ahead. Chris Coles covers the Bangkok waterfront, though not (yet) its awful Klong Toei Port. His beat is the expatriate neon triangle — Soi Cowboy, Nana Plaza and Patpong Road — where the wildlife gathers at the waterholes in the cool of the night.
I used to haunt those places, but after awhile it got to be like that scene in “Chinatown” where Jack Nicholson has had pretty much enough of banging his head against walls trying to make sense of things and Joe Mantell tells him, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
“Isan Nightclub Singer”
Coles, originally from Maine, formerly a passenger aboard Swahili trading dhows among Africa’s Bajuni Islands, once of Australia and Greenland, now bounds between Bangkok and LA, and his shield against the psychic ravages that the Big Mango’s nightlife imposes is being able to paint it up in all the lurid colours it deserves. Art as a defence mechanism is not unknown.
Chris got in touch with me about the January Dali House post “Politics and the profanity of disbelief”, regarding Warthit Sembut and Anupong Chanthorn’s run-ins with Thailand’s guardians of the moral fibre.
“There are so many creative people in Thailand and sometimes they just get stifled by the Ministry of Culture types,” Chris wrote. ” Too many pretty paintings of the countryside, passive Buddhas and pale imitations of modern concept art and not enough paintings like the ones of the monks with a real edge and power.”
“Pedophile Priest”
Chris Coles’ paintings are not (usually) pretty. He proudly waves the expressionist flag that first appeared over the mounds of bloody corpses in World War I, when German artists reacted in horror to the efficiency of their own country’s fighting machine and laid their emotions out on canvas. The impressionists could have their damned sunlight and keep on living in a dream. This was realism, scarred and scared and howling.
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