COLUMNS
Talk Show 9: with Jami Attenberg, Adam Braver, Nina de Gramont, Ann Hood, and Moon Unit Zappa
/ Jaime Clarke
03.02.08
––What are your preconceptions about this place?
Attenberg: Beautiful beaches, decadence, and wandering souls. There are all those stories about sweet young English women visiting Thailand and getting caught smuggling heroin in their private areas because some hot guy told them to, and then being sent to jail for five hundred years. Also I feel like it’s the kind of place where you would be sitting on a beach having a peaceful moment and then some vaguely European dude named Corazon with white guy dreadlocks and scabs on his arms would come up and want to talk about living off the earth and then try to sell you weed. Basically my fear is that I would end up meeting annoying travelers who are living there because it’s so cheap and I would have to pretend I liked them when I didn’t.
Braver: It seems to me that there will be an almost crazy inherent need to adapt to some model of survival living. For example, in terms of medical emergencies, I have very little interest in the First Aid kit––particularly the wilderness version that has the snake bite kit. Besides having no desire to see a snake (especially a biting snake), I have even less interest in making small incisions into a friend’s leg, and orally vacuuming out venom in tandem with a gray rubber suction cup. My preconception is that one will get caught up in the gestalt of the survival experience, when, for example, a hospital would seem much more practical and wise.
de Gramont: That it's dry and dusty, and filled with the most sacred and magical history. That I would be welcomed as a citizen because my mother is Jewish, and that there would be terrorists around every corner wanting to kill me.
Hood: The aforementioned freezing temperatures, bad food, altitude sickness, stomach problems, and dirty accommodations.
Zappa: That we’ve never really been there and that if we have, all we do is put missiles and spy satellites in space aimed at all the rest of the places on the planet the right wing Republicans want to control and/or make money from. Yunno, Big brother HQ.
Attenberg: Beautiful beaches, decadence, and wandering souls. There are all those stories about sweet young English women visiting Thailand and getting caught smuggling heroin in their private areas because some hot guy told them to, and then being sent to jail for five hundred years. Also I feel like it’s the kind of place where you would be sitting on a beach having a peaceful moment and then some vaguely European dude named Corazon with white guy dreadlocks and scabs on his arms would come up and want to talk about living off the earth and then try to sell you weed. Basically my fear is that I would end up meeting annoying travelers who are living there because it’s so cheap and I would have to pretend I liked them when I didn’t.
Braver: It seems to me that there will be an almost crazy inherent need to adapt to some model of survival living. For example, in terms of medical emergencies, I have very little interest in the First Aid kit––particularly the wilderness version that has the snake bite kit. Besides having no desire to see a snake (especially a biting snake), I have even less interest in making small incisions into a friend’s leg, and orally vacuuming out venom in tandem with a gray rubber suction cup. My preconception is that one will get caught up in the gestalt of the survival experience, when, for example, a hospital would seem much more practical and wise.
de Gramont: That it's dry and dusty, and filled with the most sacred and magical history. That I would be welcomed as a citizen because my mother is Jewish, and that there would be terrorists around every corner wanting to kill me.
Hood: The aforementioned freezing temperatures, bad food, altitude sickness, stomach problems, and dirty accommodations.
Zappa: That we’ve never really been there and that if we have, all we do is put missiles and spy satellites in space aimed at all the rest of the places on the planet the right wing Republicans want to control and/or make money from. Yunno, Big brother HQ.