Thank You Thailand!

On my way out of Thailand, I offer up my deepest gratitude to the folks at LB/Bangkok who hosted the 1Q06 GPC this week and went out of their way to make this meeting run smoothly, all while providing consummate Thai hospitality. This was one of the most challenging and rewarding weeks of my professional life, and I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to be here and bask in the warmth of this country, it's people, and all the enviable beauty of its unique culture. Thank you to Tawanrat, Ood, On-Usa, Chris, the dedicated AV guys (i won't attempt to spell your names...), and all the rest of the folks at LB/Bangkok laboring behind the scenes. Your dedication and hard work made this a wonderful experience for all, and the ads you turn out are an inspiration... Cheers! Hope to see you all again soon!

thai chic

-a tourist's take on Thai style-

hemline manipulation & insidious heels
handcrafted accessories & inexpensive deals
all the rich allure of an ancient asian aesthetic
meets the post-modern awareness of sugary plastic synthetics
lush flavors in every alley
crushed tapestries sold on every street
quilts of scent & sight, races & tongues
traces of textured air fill slow-polluted lungs
a crowded city stocked with deep black eyes
every kind of trafficking under hot delta skies
humidity rising as inhibitions fall
unthinkable acts by impossible dolls
the high percentage of freaks ensnared
by the low cost of cheap wares
stall after stall of handcrafted silks
canvassed by broke backpackers and their bohemian ilk
local brews & Chinese herbs
filthy smog looms over congested curbs
crested jazz kingdoms and gilded bronze gods
Bangkok chic is 21st century neo-Buddhist-mod…

Banyan Tree Views & Kangaroo Steaks

Finished up the GPC this morning. The final lists and all the work are available on Planet Leo for the first time, so it seems I won’t be going through the whole DVD construction process we’ve labored over in previous years. It is, after seeing all the work again, quite a diverse collection of work, with Milan making a surprisingly strong showing and taking home a few 8-balls for some of the strongest work we’ve ever seen from Italy. Bangkok and greater China also turned out some gems, and all in all, the meeting highlighted some very strong work from the network. Our new system worked pretty seamlessly as well. Now that the meeting is over, I have 24 hours to kill before another 24 hour travel sequence en route to Chicago… Bettter get it all in…



After one last afternoon spent tanning, drenched in blazing Thai sun by the pool, Rosalie was kind enough to show me a small spa at the mall next door to the hotel that offered full Thai massages for the ridiculous price of $14 for an hour. I booked myself for an hour at this spot, “the Palm’s Spell”, and had the pleasure of having all my knots and aches addressed by a little Thai woman named “Ni.” My girlfriend is a masseuse, so I’m no stranger to Thai massage and therapeutic touch, but it was really nice to get worked on by a stranger. Thai massage is a unique synthesis of bodywork techniques, and has some qualities not found in other traditions, such as the liberal use of standing on people to fix their problems. I emerged from the “Palm’s Spell” an hour later feeling much more aligned and at ease, and gave Ni a few hundred baht tip that she seemed very happy with. 5 bucks goes a long way out here.

Made a detour to Asia Books, my favorite Thai bookstore chain, and spent a hundred bucks on items that are hard to find in the states and would have cost twice as much. I got back to the hotel just in time for me and Rosalie to make a whirlwind trip to Bangkok’s famed Night Market, which opens at 6 pm and closes around midnight. I liked this market much better than the Sunday market, as it wasn’t nearly as hot, and easily had the same variety and diversity of things for sale. I bought a few more gifts for people who probably don’t deserve them, and then we grabbed a cocktail on the way out. We had the pleasure of seeing a live band at the Market’s stage, a strange conglomeration of Thai folks throwing down a mix of the latest worldwide hits. As we were getting our drinks, the lead singer, a gorgeous Thai woman in a mini-skirt, started with the initial strains of Beyonce’s hit single “Crazy In Love”, and all of a sudden three other fly Thai women in miniskirts showed up, and started singing along and dancing a la Destiny’s Child, circa 2003. It was surreal. They even had a guy rapping Jay-Z’s part. It's amazing the way cultures diffuse and manifest in places where you’re not expecting it... the last thing I was expecting to see tonight was a Thai version of Destiny's Child, but I'm not complaining. The band was HOT and the music was bouncing...


Made it back to the hotel burdened down with our purchases, to rendezvous with the Burnett “Latin Mafia” for our 9:30 reservation at the Banyan Tree, one of Bangkok’s most famous restaurants. The spot lies on the top floor of a 60 story building, and its restaurant, Vertigo, is a world-famous gathering spot that overlooks all of Bangkok, with only a handrail preventing a very nasty fall. It was waaaaaaaay high up in the sky, and the city looked glorious. The restaurant had a no-open shoes, long pants dress code. It’s really funny that here all the clubs have dress policies designed to keep the skanks OUT, as opposed to say, the dress codes in US clubs… Anyhow, after a brief wait at the Banyan Tree bar, drinking Vanilla Skies and Vertigo Punches, we were led to our table. I had the pleasure of practicing my Spanish with Miguel’s lovely wife Aurora, who’s an interesting foil to Miguel’s self-deprecating, sly humor, and we ate very well. I had a pepper-crusted Kangaroo steak. No joke. I can cross that particular mammal of my list… After a very lush dinner, Rosalie and I bailed and caught a taxi back to the hotel, to pack our bags, and get ready for our 4 am departure to the airport. All in all, quite the trip. 9 days in paradise. I can’t wait to come back….

bunk-ass ads

Saw some absolutely horrible advertising today. Work that made me ashamed to be in this industry, that represents the worst elements of sensory pollution erected in the name of capitalism. Normally it doesn't really bother me too much, we routinely come across some really cliche garbage at these meetings, but this was not from one or two misguided creative directors, but from several offices spanning an entire region.... grrrrrrr... The fact that clients actually paid for this work and bought media to display it was the hardest part to accept. The committee went through the motions and unanimously voted most of it in the low 4s and high 3s, which was entirely appropriate, but as it turns out, it seems that the particular nature of the business in some of these markets means that these agencies are not compelled to make their advertising any better. They are autonomous enough and self-insulated from the larger advertising community, and to them the low scores they routinely receive from the GPC are arbitrary numbers assigned to them from a distant, faceless group of executives who have no sympathy for their particular challenges. Sad, really… I did see a few redeeming pieces today, in particular, some fantastic, innovative web work from ARC Chicago, for our Diageo client. Diageo is the larger umbrella company for distilled alcohols like Johnnie Walker Scotch, Gordon’s Gin, and a whole slew of other good quality alcohol. ARC created a website called http://www.thebar.com/, which has an entirely personalized web bartender, who knows your name, knows where you come from, and can converse about thousands of subjects while sharing with you the recipes and mixing techniques for all your favorite cocktails.



The site feels a little animatronic at the moment, in the sense that the web bartender speaks with some very strained pauses in his speech, but the technology and the personality ARC has managed to infuse into this brand via thebar.com is fantastic. This is some of the best web work I’ve seen done by Burnett in the last 6 years, and even though it’s not quite 100%, I personally will be checking out this site during my spare time to pick up a few mixologist tips…

Anyhow – I crashed hard today. The group had a dinner planned at Bangkok’s famed Bed Supper Club, but after making it back to the hotel at 6 pm I passed out and slept for 12 hours. Missed a great dinner at a very luxurious spot, I’m sure, but every now and then your body just refuses to participate in the ongoing assault on its regulatory mechanisms. Hadn’t slept more than 4 hours a night this whole week, and the constant evening cocktails and delayed jetlag finally caught up with me. Oh well. There’s always tomorrow….

To Die For

Tonight we had our first Group dinner at To Die For, a classy restaurant and bar founded by Bhanu Inkawat and Pornsiri Rojmeta, two of the former heads of LB/Bangkok. We took a rather large air-conditioned coach over to the restaurant, and then had the pleasure of getting to know some of our colleagues in a context outside of the office. I had a great night, as we ate dinner outside on low couches in a very relaxing terrace interspersed with small illuminated pools and a well-stocked buffet. The food was great, and the company was lovely. I had the pleasure of finally meeting two of the Asian observers to the meeting, Nicola Bolling & Carryl Van Dort, both from LB/Colombo, who conversed with me over dinner and a few rounds of Singapore Slings. Sri Lanka is one of our smaller markets, and is growing at a rate consistent with offices in countries characterized by recent turbulent political histories. I had the pleasure of listening to Nicola and Carryl fill me in on Sri Lanka’s recent happenings, ranging from the influence of Buddhist fundamentalists on media, to the status of the Tamil Tiger separatist movement, to the fallout from last year’s devastating tsunami. Also had the pleasure of telling them about M.I.A., one of my favorite recording artists of 2005, a Sri Lankan/English art school brat who turned out Arular, one of the most compelling albums of last year, which contain a rich hybrid of immigrant diaspora culture rooted in a very Tamil political awareness. World hip hop, in other words. Hopefully I’ll buy a bootleg copy of that album to give them before this meeting ends…

Anyhow, after dinner and drinks, a contingent of guests departed back to the hotel, leaving only a few stalwart boozehounds and a crew of happy folks from the LB/Bangkok creative department. I only got a chance to talk to a few members of their office, including Tawanrat, Ood, and Pam from their PR department, before being introduced to Bhanu, one of the restaurant’s owners, who has a creative reputation as one of driving forces behind Thai advertising in the last few decades. But that was then, and on this night he smiled at me as we chatted, and he looked infinitely more relaxed and more content than many of the ambitious & driven executives that routinely populate GPC meetings. I envy Bhanu a little, and found in him a living example of a career well-conducted. At some point in my life, after I reach a certain point of achievement in whatever field I ultimately end up in, I too would like to back off from the pervasive rat race of the business world and open a restaurant and bar, and feed people with the cultures of cuisines I’ve canvassed. Bhanu and Pornsiri have managed to do that quite well with To Die For, and I was sad when I departed a few hours later with the tipsy remnants of the GPC gang. Although we planned on going out, by the time we got back to the hotel, traffic had eaten up another hour of the evening, and I called it quits and went back to my room to sleep. My loss, I guess. Apparently, about 30 minutes after I left the lobby, the members of the rock band Oasis walked in, having just finished one of their shows in a three-night run here with Franz Ferdinand. They’re staying at our hotel, probably in a lush, guarded suite on one of the more exclusive floors. I’m not a groupie, but I would’ve dug running into Oasis. I could’ve informed them that while they write great songs, they’re honestly just flimsy Beatle wannabes pilfering the fab four’s melodic catalog while posing as talent, and then Liam would’ve punched me and I’d have infamous bruises and a great story to tell my indie-rock friends in Chicago…. But alas, no, I went to sleep, and wasn’t punched by any rock stars. Oh well. Dare to dream….

Jampacked in Jatujak Market

Woke up, had breakfast at the hotel buffet, and boarded a Bangkok Sky Train for the Jatujak Sunday Market, which is perhaps the largest bazaar-styled market I’ve ever been to. As you get closer to the Market, the trains get more crowded, filled with both tourists and Thai folks, all with that expectant-consumer eagerness filling their eyes. While approaching the Sunday Market on the train, you watch it approach, a veritable quilt of flimsy roofing that goes on for what looks like a few city blocks. The Market is such a sprawling challenge that you really could wander for hours on end, and never find your way back to where you started. I spent 3 ½ hours wandering through the maze of shops and stalls, and came away with two large plastic bags full of gifts, handicrafts, clothes, and more. I could’ve stayed a couple more hours, but I was running low on cash, and had pretty much had enough of the heat. Some of what I saw was also hard to deal with, ranging from the stench of the enclosed dried fish stalls (in Bengali we call that kind of dried fish Shutki, and you can smell the open air Shutki bazaar a hundred meters away. Imagine the density of that smell in confined quarters) to the pet market, which was stall after stall of some of the most adorable little puppies I’ve ever seen.

Some of these puppies looked less than a week old. They were sleeping in enclosed pens, waiting for owners to purchase them, and others were in cages. There were also aquariums hawking exotic fish, and little mice, baby squirrels, baby chickens, and all kinds of wildlife available to buy. It was an interesting section to stumble across, but I was glad when I found my way out, because there’s only so many adorable puppies I can have barking at me before I’ll need to buy one…




Anyhow. I heard that most of the GPC delegation was at the Sunday Market, but it just goes to show you how big it is, cause I only ran into two of the folks I came with. I heard later some folks ate at the some of the stalls and low key restaurants littered around the Market, but I chose to head home. My loss, I guess, but I did manage to catch a few hours of prime-time sun while lounging at the pool. Probably missed a few purchases, but whatever. Tropical sun is priceless, and I have two more days to shop around in the consumer paradise of cheap and beautiful goods that is Bangkok…

Boat Rides through Buddha Bling

Quote of the Day:
“If geography is an inadequate criterion with which to define Asia, can religion be seen as playing a unifying role? Animism – a patchwork of beliefs and worships dedicated to the dead, household Gods, and nature spirits – is omnipresent in rural Asia and has permeated the popular form of Taoism also practiced by modern city-dwellers. There exists an awe of the spirit world, and of the soothsayers and shamans who make conact with the beyond. …By and large, this mosaic of pantheistic beliefs has given Asia a high degree of spiritual tolerance, for the monotheistic religions have gained little ground here. The chief characteristic of Asian religious observance is the fact that an assortment of different beliefs can coexist within the mind of each individual, due to the way in which successive strata of religious influence have been superimposed on top of one another, ranging from the many different forms of Hindu Buddhism, through the successive schools of Confucianism, to the more recent arrivals of Islam and Christianity. Governments periodically contributed to this process: imperial China, for example, was instrumental in bringing Confucianism to the Vietnamese farmers by dressing it in what were, for them, the more evocative robes and rituals of Buddhism. Imperial Japan built up the Shinto faith, the personal cult of the Emperor, which also drew on Taoism, creating a system of national observance superimposed upon an assortment of existing beliefs.”
From “The New Asian Renaissance”, by Francois Godement

-Saturday Morning-
I wake to a whole weekend away from work, two entire days where I’m not obliged to be at the office. Call it an early karmic tax return, but I now have 48 hours of free time to kill in Bangkok….

I meet the Colombo crew and Sarah at the hotel’s breakfast buffet and after a brief meal we depart for a morning full of temple viewing and river boat rides. Bangkok is bordered on its west side by the Chao Phraya river, and a slew of luxury hotels line the docks on both banks of the river. The Grand Palace and a number of legendary temples, prominent focal points of Thai culture, are also located along the river, and every day countless boats take thousands of people across the water to these powerful Buddhist pilgrimage places. Sarah, Nicola, Carryl & I caught an elevated train from the hotel to the east bank of the river, and then hopped on a long-tail motor boat that delivered us after a pleasant but choppy 15 minute cruise to Wat Arun Ratchawaram, a Grand Royal Temple built in honor of the Thai King Rama II.


Wat Arun is designed as a stupa, but unlike the Buddhist stupas I’ve seen in India and Nepal, which have been beaten down by centuries of monsoon rains into little more than grass-covered brick mounds, this stupa rises up to spear the sky in a series of what I could only call carved towers or decorated minarets. What makes Wat Arun so stunningly unique is that these towers are inlaid with what seems like a million intricately decorated porcelain plates, which cover every exposed surface, and gives the entire temple an elaborately pieced-together Chinaware surface. Statues of mythical beings from the Buddhist cosmology stare down at you behind big plate-glass eyes, and as you circle through the stupa up a series of dangerously steep stairs, you find yourself tucked into triangular inlets and narrow paths. We ascended, did a circuit or two, and left after just a few minutes.
In retrospect, I imagine Wat Arun to be designed as some sort of 3-dimensional porcelain mandala, that invites pilgrims in, inflicts its thousand glossed reflections upon your eyes, and then pushes you through its corridors as others file in behind you… I’ve been to Mecca, and circled the Kaaba with thousands of Muslim pilgrims, and this structure had a similar kind circuit rhythm inbuilt as to the pace at which people filed in and out…




After departing from the Wat Arun complex, we took a ferry across the river and headed to Wat Po, the Temple of the Reclining Buddha. This temple completely blew my mind. I was expecting a Buddha statue lying horizontally on a podium, his head propped up with a hand, and with his body laid out like a man reading on the floor. I had seen pictures of the statue before but none of them offered any perspective as to its actual dimensions. What we found at the Temple of the Reclining Buddha was a gold Buddha about the size of a house. This statue was HUGE.

The temple was roughly the size of my high school gymnasium, and this statue took up a length about the size of a basketball court. As you filed into the temple, the human traffic guided you in a circuit around the statue, which you only see if you crane your neck upwards to view the Buddha looming above, gazing indirectly at the earth. It’s a surreal place. Surrounding the main statue were small altars erected all around his form, comprised of collection boxes, burning candles, incense sticks, and smaller figures, all gilded offerings paying homage to larger Buddha presence. You make your way towards his feet, which are the size of Queen size beds, and are then ushered around the other side, where you see the back of his legs and spine. Pillars along this temple wall are lined with a series of donation bowls. A money changer offers you coins for any bills you wish to break, and provides you with a bowl, filled to the brim with small-value coins. You deposit a few coins in each donation bowl as you make your way towards the Buddha’s head, and by the time you’ve arrived at the temple opening, you’ve offered up dozens of coins to this Buddha, who is said to bestow prosperity and peace upon devotees who honor him. I could use some prosperity and peace in my life, and I’m not beyond endorsing a little well-intended idolatry if it’ll bring such elusive blessings into my life. We all receive our karmic dues eventually, don’t we?

Gold-leaf Bodhisattvas in rooms of Mother-of Pearl
Transcendental Truths Sealed Inside A Samsara World
Encompassed in these statues exits a universe of historical wealth
The center of gravity of certain societies sits upon their spiritual health…


After Wat Po, we walked a few blocks northward to the sprawling complex of the Grand Palace. We must’ve walked a few hundred meters along the Palace’s high barrier walls before finding the lone entrance dedicated to the thousands of tourists intent on paying homage to the Thai kingdom’s most famous artifact, the legendary Emerald Buddha.



The story of this particular statue dates back to the year 1434, when a Buddhist abbot at a monastery in Chiang Rai discovered that one of the life-size Buddha statues had a few pieces of paint missing from its nose, which revealed a strange green glow from beneath it. After more paint flaked off, the statue was polished, to reveal not a plaster Buddha at all, as it had been thought to be, but an image carved from one solid block of green jade. The origin of this statue was a mystery, and over subsequent centuries, it became a priceless and powerful symbolic talisman of the Thai kingdom. As a consequence of several wars, the statue changed hands a few times, and for a little over 200 years was appropriated to Laos, until a victorious Thai army captured it and returned it to Bangkok in 1778. The Grand Palace was constructed in 1782, in part to create an adequate resting place, the Royal Monastery, to house this profound statue. There is sits today, on an elevated altar, at a central location in the palace complex. To see it you must remove your shoes, and enter into a hall filled with gilded statues and the most elaborate gold altar I’ve ever seen. The Emerald Buddha does not have the same overwhelming size as some of the other statues we saw today, but it does exert a definite gravitational pull, and it looms high above the hordes of people offering authentic prayers to this Buddha in the Royal Monastrey. The scene at the temple was powerfully reminiscent of a visit to a religious building that houses a relic, as such articles of faith are often cornerstones of people’s belief systems. This statue and the complex it lies within are not to be missed when visiting Bangkok, and even though this was my second visit in 4 years, I was still overwhelmed by the grace, elegance, and the refined Mahayana decadence of the Grand Palace.





Buddha Bling – gold plated terraces and white plaster elephants
Mausoleums of dead kings and murals narrating Ramakien elements
Galleries and guest houses for visiting heads of state
Manicured trees amidst armed statuesque protectors laying in wait
Power is only as potent as the structures it erects-
In this complex, spiritual and material energies overlap & intersect…

Floating piers on murky brown water
Odoriferous dried fish and a day that gets progressively hotter
We get lost after the palace, disoriented and distracted –
Portraits of sun-drunk folks who’ve had presumptions refracted
Reframed
Refocused
We seek out a quiet meal
We stumble across a spot and feast for a steal…
After being turned away by the legendary Oriental Hotel for not having appropriate attire (!!!), we ate out our lunch at a small restaurant we found tucked into an alley, sitting at a garden-terrace table beneath an overarching tree and a few slow buzzing electric fans. The restaurant was a quiet little place decorated with tropical vines and hanging flowers, and the food was fantastic. We ate a spectrum of spicy and compelling Thai cuisine, and finished up with a dessert of mango slices and sticky rice, as well as fried bananas over coconut ice cream… ahhh… all in all, a sweet ending to a seemingly stretched morning…

We spent the evening at Khaosan road again. I bought a few trinkets and a t-shirt or two for friends, and drank some MaeKong Whisky, a local distillation that actually stands up well to its overpriced English and American cousins. I pretty much give my stamp of approval to any country that manages to turn out good Whiskey….

We made it home right before midnight after a misguided and rather hectic tuk tuk race instigated by one of my traveling companions. Jesus Mary Joseph Allah & Buddha, thank you for letting me survive that little drag race through Bangkok traffic… I’ve seen too many rickshaw & baby taxi accidents in my day, so riding fast on a three-wheeled motor scooter filled with 4 intoxicated people isn’t really high on my list of cheap thrills. Damn I sound like a wuss, but man, I've got too much to live for… like tomorrow for instance, and a shopping spree at the Sunday Market…