Tags: Bangkok, david carradine, journalism, maxim, Thailand
November 18, 2009 | Rants
He's just read September's issue of Maxim.
Maxim magazine recently published an article in which the writer purports to relive the final days of David Carradine. We really didn’t take much notice of the mag up until now as Maxim is the type of publication that would be found in the waiting room of a dentist who’d compromise you sexually you once the anesthetic kicked in. Besides, when it comes to boobs, we prefer seeing them on a beach and not on a masthead.
In Bangkok there is no shortage of tell-all journalism with a urine sample’s distinct hue, but it is rare that even your most Gary Glitter-obsessed reporter would write a story about Thailand that beggars belief more than Yul Brynner in the role of a Siamese King.
Please read the original article linked above. For added effect, read it aloud as if you were a veteran Bangkok-based reporter shouting it down a staticky phone line to your editor during the Vietnam War era.
Writer Mark Ebner, who “has been covering crime and Hollywood for 20 years” (presumably like smog, only twice as thick), starts out recounting the circumstances of David Carradine’s death and the questions surrounding it. Was it suicide? Murder? Or did he accidentally choke to death while rubbing one out?
ONE NIGHT IN BANGKOK — AT THE VERY MOST
Ebner scratches his chin, contemplatively. “Wasn’t it a little too convenient,” he asks, “that such a sordid suicide should take place in Bangkok, the sex capital of the world? I wanted to know.”
Maxim wisely made him ride coach on one of the cheapest airlines with regular flights from North America to Thailand – Ebner writes he “spent 23 hours in a cramped China Airlines 747”. Perhaps it was the mania-inducing monotony of the long flight (Suggestion: To make time pass on such a flight, bring enough sleeping pills to knock out a race horse and a novelty tie for drool) or passing over all those time zones that did it, but Ebner seemed to somehow disengage from reality as observable by other human beings during those fateful 23 hours on a long haul jet.
His flight was followed he says, “”by a teeth-rattling cab ride through the smog-choked, sweltering squalor of metro Bangkok, dodging rickshaws and limbless sidewalk cripples begging for change.”
What fun! Grand Theft Auto Bangkok! But wait, rickshaws are human powered – commonly associated with heavy colonials weighing down a seat and cursing for a dawdler some poor bugger peddling for all he’s worth, who in turn curses the heavy diet of his bosses – and would be in mortal danger on Bangkok streets. And if a sidewalk cripple were capable of interfering with traffic, he would by definition not be a cripple, or on the sidewalk.
This guy has been known to flip cars over just for shits and giggles.
Harrowing journey complete, teeth rattled so bad that they are probably still chattering now, Ebner arrives at the five-star Swissotel Nai Lert Park Hotel, where the late Kill Bill star died. “I’ve come here to follow in Carradine’s steps and try to reconstruct his final days,” he writes.
After seeing the so-called “penis shrine”, a Bangkok landmark filled with phalluses where people go to pray for fertility and make bawdy jokes, Ebner sizes up the country with one cutting observation: “Clearly, Thailand, like the death of its most recent famous victim, has more to it than meets the eye.”
The insights do not stop there. Bangkok, he writes, is “a teeming hodgepodge where native Thais rub elbows with Chinese and Indian immigrants, as Western sexual tourists explore the city’s seamy underbelly”. Aside from his bizarre decision to specify “native” Thais (surprisingly common in Thailand) and count the Chinese and Indians he sees as immigrants (some probably were, but both have been in strong numbers in Bangkok for generations), he turns to the lazy journalist’s favorite talking point when it comes to Bangkok – perverted Western men, who are to cities’ seamy underbellies what Jacques Cousteau was to the oceans of the world.
Ebner decides, based on his room – standard, unlike the suite that Carradine had – that hanging in the closet would be difficult if not impossible. He goes out in search of answers.
“The first stop on my quest is a lunch with Bangkok Dan, a handsome Swiss expat and wire-service journalist who’s been here 14 years.” He continues: “Much of what appears to Westerners as callousness, Bangkok Dan attributes to the Buddhist belief in reincarnation. ‘Life is worth nothing here,’ he explains.”
It seems a harsh assessment coming from Bangkok Dan, founder and writer of AbsolutelyBangkok.com, one of the better blog sites about the city, and someone who does not give the impression of a man living in constant fear of death out here in discount life land. As the fates would have it, a commenter by the name of “Brolo” on AbsolutelyBangkok sought confirmation from Bangkok Dan that he was indeed the person quoted in the article.
The following is the exchange copied from the blog’s comments section here:
“Brolo”: Dan, please tell me you were not the Bangkok Dan cited in the incredibly idiotic article about David Carradine’s death? I like your site, but it’s guilt by association when it comes to adding fiber to such a monstrous turd of an article.
Bangkok Dan: I am, Brolo, I am, but, politely said, completely taken out of context. Didn’t recognize anything. And handsome and Swiss … go figure. Heavy jet lagged author I guess.
Had a good laugh reading the piece. Seriously. A good lesson. So much about working ethics and methods of some journalists. And was also promised a bottle of something that never arrived.
A journalist might be able to forgive a botched or misrepresented quote, but welshing on promised booze? Little Mencken weeps. Shame on you Maxim.
Ebner then goes on at length about Carradine’s career, his brothers – “the Baldwins of their time” – and his sexual kinks, before going back to give Buddha’s sleazy underbelly one more rub.
“I’ll hear later that Carradine was spotted the day before his death in Bangkok’s red-light district shaking hands with the locals. It’s my next stop.” (What was whispered in Ebner’s ear – that Carradine was out glad-handing the punters at go-go bars the day before he died – has not to our knowledge been reported anywhere else).
IT’s ALL GONE PATPONG
And here Ebner sprovides a description of Patpong that anyone from a seasoned go-go bar veteran to a person capable of operating Google Maps can see is almost entirely wrong. Ebner breaks from journalistic tradition here. Rather than fudging on facts so he can spend more time enjoying his per diem in the way nature intended — in a bar — he instead gets his bar facts wrong.
The quotes that follow here are all from one breathtaking paragraph that is best savored in bite-sized morsels:
“A vast open-air sex market, the Patpong is a 20-minute walk from the hotel, past the U.S. and British embassies; an X-rated bazaar that looks like a psychedelic Bourbon Street.”
A dessert shop in Bangkok. There is little need for invention when it comes to this city.
“Open air sex market”? “X-rated bazaar? I’m picturing goats with stories to tell in their eyes. Fornication at the bus stops. Dildos and Betsy Beaver brand synthetic vaginas piled high like so much fresh produce.
Patpong market is located on and around Soi Patpong, which along with the parallel Patpong 2, is a road with go-go bars and prostitutes as well as transvestites (a group Ebner more than amply covers in his article based on the barstool rumor that Carradine met his end at the hands of one) .
Patpong market is one of the city’s most popular outdoor night markets and it sells overpriced (for Thailand) T-shirts, trinkets, and pirate DVDs, including – as any pirate DVD business worth its name would – porn. But X-rated bazaar? Not really. If Ebner did somehow find himself in a vast open air sex market, one hopes he thought carefully before ordering food.
“This is where they filmed The Deer Hunter to simulate wartime Saigon.”
Suspicions are raised when one of the lone verifiable facts in a lengthy descriptive paragraph is probably the most common piece of trivia about a given place.
“The Patpong is divided into Soi 4, which is predominantly gay; Soi Cowboy, a note-perfect re-creation of pre-Disney Times Square, designed to cater to the Western tourist; and Nana Plaza, which is where they keep the kink.”
This version of “The Patpong”, as the map below illustrates, is a fiction. Soi Cowboy and Nana Plaza are located in another part of the city. Moreover, it’s unlikely that the go-go bar owners and and the local business improvement association on Soi Cowboy gathered prior to opening up their watering holes to ensure that theirs was a “note perfect” re-creation of pre-Disney Times Square.
It is good to know, however, that the kink is kept at Nana Plaza.
Ebner ends up “looking for answers at the dodgy Nana Hotel” which he says is “in the Patpong” (actually located, not surprisingly, near Nana Plaza and, again, in a completely different part of town). It is there that he meets “a striking-looking child bride who calls herself ‘A’. She pours herself into my lap. Like everyone I talk to in the Patpong, she doesn’t know anything about Carradine, but for 10,000 baht (roughly $300 U.S.) she will come back to my hotel, tie me up, choke me, and stay the night. I take a rain check.” Some hotels offer valet parking, others, according to Ebner at least, the services of child brides who will choke you out and keep you company till morning for a few Benjamins. It’s the subtle differences that make international travel worthwhile.
He later interviews famous Thai forensic investigator Khunying Pornthip (more on that interesting lady here) who, he writes, “also announced that Carradine’s room came equipped with its own penis shrine.” Earlier Ebner noted the presence of a penis shrine next to his hotel remarkably accurately given his coverage of the rest of Bangkok, but he nonetheless failed to realize that Pornthip was referring to it, and not a phallic shrine in Carradine’s room. Swissotel room service draws the line at the artful presentation of plates of sausage.
MAXIM-UM OVER-DRIVEL
Some who commented on Ebner’s Maxim piece wondered if Ebner’s Bangkok portrayal was the result of his watching the Nicolas Cage version of Bangkok Dangerous, standing up too fast and then writing this article before the blood that rushed to his brain had a chance to settle. He does, however, close with an authentic touch: interviewing a bar-stool conspiracy theorist — and Bangkok must also be the world capital of these along with sexy time — at the city’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club. He then quotes this unnamed font of wisdom’s unsubstantiated and worthless gossip.
Having traveled thousands of miles, past limbless cripple prostitute beggar rickshaw drivers and glided over the seamy underbelly of the imaginary land of Patpong with its Ferris Wheel of fornication and deadly child brides in search of answers to David Carradine’s death, Ebner closes with the following: “In death, as in life, Carradine’s complex persona offered more questions than answers. However he died—and we may never know—it wasn’t so different from how he lived.” Err, right. Well done.
Noel Boivin, Bangkok
Photos and edited by Christopher Lombardo
fabulous riff……
but the Maxim “reporter” is most likely a fictional entity created by Bangkok Dan and the secretive group behind the satirical Not the Nation website for the sole purpose of taking the piss out of not only the inane publication known as Maxim but also the constant stream of “parachute” print and tv reporters who show up in Bangkok without the benefit of any prior knowledge or experience to report on the shocking revelation that the one block long tourist trap known as Patpong actually exists and is full of shoddy, over-priced counterfeit goods, chubby over-the-hill gogo dancers, hard body hard-edged ladyboys and hundreds of obese and ignorant one-off tourists blindly looking for “adventure and excitement” in the Bangkok Night……..
how this endless stream of parachute reporters manages to completely avoid any contact with such upscale world-class shopping malls as Siam Paragon, Central World, Emporium, the many hi-end and often cozy restaurants, clubs, bars and music venues scattered around Ekamai, Thong Lor, RCA, Sathorn, Langsuan and Ratchada, the lively, stylish and well-presented middle-class Thais who fill the Sky Train, not to speak of the often stunning Hi-So crowd floating around Bangkok in their silky duds and Mercedes and BMW’s is a mystery that, to date, no one has managed to completely solve……
Thanks Chris. For those outside of Thailand, NotTheNation.com is the often hilarious Thailand version of the Onion. It does read like something right off that website, but the creative types at NTN might have had trouble matching the absurdity of certain points in this piece. Plus the writer does exist — he even has a scanned version of this article on his personal website.
Whaddya say we meet at the penis shrine at noon tomorrow? Bangkok Dan fixed my watch, so I’ll be on time. You’ll know it’s me when I tap you on the shoulder.
tuk tuk/not rickshaw,
Ebner
http://www.hollywoodinterrupted.com
That’s it? Tuk-tuks not rickshaws?
OK, you’re on, but only if you promise not to hire the services of a ninja child bride prostitute, who earns pocket money as a sidewalk cripple beggar and can also charm poisonous snakes into doing her bidding. Apparently she’s the talk of “The Patpong”.
I just came back from a late night visit to the Penis Shrine in the garden behind the Nai Lert Park Hotel and guess who I saw on his knees, praying to the assorted penis collection….none other than the French Minister of Culture Frederic Mitterand…….needless to say, I high-tailed it out of there as fast as I could……
http://bangkok-noir.blogspot.com/2009/10/frederic-mitterand-french-minister-of.html
This is a pretty good laugh. I can’t believe the guy was even in Bangkok… Is anyone sure he got back on the right plane when they changed planes in Hong Kong?
There is no way he visited Bangkok, absolutely no way – great follow up piece guys, made the original worth while :)
http://www.notthenation.com/pages/news/getnews.php?id=799
NOtthenation already uncovered the real story on Carradine’s death months before Maxim
I think it does read like something right off that website, but the creative types at NTN might have had trouble matching the absurdity of certain points in this piece.Thanks.
Shark Guys – You’re funny. Please purchase Oliver Fennell a sense of humor…500 baht sounds about right.
The author responds to Bangkok Post sub-editor, Oliver Fennell:
It really is amusing to see the outrage coming at me about the Maxim story, especially when it’s spearheaded by a “colleague.” I come from a place where we in the ink trade try to help each other out rather than tear each other down, but, with you, I’ll bite. Do I think the story is perfect? Hell no. They never are. I was in town for three short days, and did the best I could in a strange city. Sure, there were some factual errors in what made it to the printed page, but nothing more egregious than my editor swapping out “tuk tuks” for “rickshaws.” Hell, I caught that one myself.
The other BIG issue for you seems to be with my sense of local geography. Sorry man, but I walked from the Nai Lert Park Hotel down Telegraph to and around the places described (Patpong, Nana, Cowboy) in an evening – and I passed embassies on the way. I may be off in distances traveled and the time it took to walk from one place to another, but really – so what?
What else? The “penis shrine” in the room. It should be clear that I was quoting your coroner on that one, and that I knew of the actual shrine outside the hotel. I described it straight away in my piece.
I think I’ve addressed the issues leading the outraged posse to claim that I wasn’t even there, and am left with the feeling that you all are just taking an American journalist pissing on your town a little too personally.
Don’t like my prose? I’m honored that you took the time to respond to it. Anger is a valid response to my journalism, but riddle me the irony of the guy trying to sell me the Carradine morgue photos BEING ON STAFF AT YOUR NEWSPAPER. Think hard on that before you start banging me on ethics, friend. And if you see “Bangkok Dan” around town, tell him I think he’s a pussy for trying to back-flip off of his on the record taped quotes, put down in perfect context. I promised him nothing in exchange for the interview (not a bottle – nothing) and actually thought he was a nice guy until I read his bullshit comments.
Anyway Oliver, there’s your response. Feel free to share it with the posse.
I wish you continued success and joy,
Mark Ebner
In case The Shark Guys are wondering, Mr Ebner’s response above is to me drawing his attention to this blog, and my own, plus the comments section on Maxim, which criticise his article.
In turn, I responded:
—
Thank you for responding.
First of all, I have no ill will towards you as “an American journalist pissing on your town a little too personally.” It’s merely as I say: journalists getting FACTS wrong – deliberately or otherwise – gives us all a bad name. I agree in principle that us “colleagues” should help each other, but not to the point of tolerating practises which harm the trade.
A copy editor changing something, I can accept. It can happen to anybody. And also I can believe you walked around town, as uncomfortable as it may have been. That in itself that is to be applauded because the best way to get a feel for a city is at ground level.
However, it remains that you made some huge errors and to simply dismiss them with a “but really – so what” does you no favours. You may argue it’s not important, and to the readers who have never been here, it wouldn’t be. But you can see from the comments attached to the Maxim Online version and The Shark Guys blog (not mine), that others DO consider it important.
The penis shrine and Bangkok Dan were addressed by The Shark Guys, not me, so I have no comment on that. Neither do I know Bangkok Dan, so I’m unavailable to pass on any messages, but certainly if I ever meet him, I will ask. As a “colleague” I do know that differences between interviewer and interviewee can arise, so I won’t automatically assume anything on either side.
Yes, you addressed SOME of the issues, and I appreciate that, but nevertheless the errors were too big to be brushed off, and I did take particular exception to the child prostitution angle. I suppose you can say it did happen, and if so, there’s nothing I can do to prove you wrong. It’s just surprising that someone who lives here has never seen anything even resembling that, yet you found it almost immediately.
Finally, regarding the “ethics” of someone here trying to sell you the photo. First of all, it’s not my department, as I am a mere sub. Secondly, not that I’m excusing it, but it would hardly be the first time such opportunities were pursued in our trade. Finally, if he was attempting to sell fake photos, then I would have just as much indignancy for him as I would for someone selling a story with false reportage, regardless of who his employer is.
Again, thank you for taking the time to reply, and for allowing the debate to be public. As I do not know you, I assure you it’s nothing personal, and while it’s natural you have defended yourself, I do hope you take on board the things that have been said, even if they may have been said in a more acidic fashion than you appreciate.
Regards,
Oliver
if he was attempting to sell fake photos, then I would have just as much indignancy for him as I would for someone selling a story with false reportage.Thanks.
One of David Carradine’s ex-wives, Marina Anderson, has written a book about his death, “David Carradine: The Eye of My Tornado”. In it, I think she disputes the accidental death claim.