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Project for a Revolution in Bangkok "Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd tightly together and press hard one upon the other without any pause. This has its importance for any narrative, of which continuity and successiveness are the soul." "Yet what is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided, and allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, homeless and errant?" – 'The Age of Genius,' Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937), Bruno Schulz
By Alfie Lee
In the photograph she is standing arms akimbo. The city street behind her is aflame in the flare of a fiery sun. She is in a white tank top with a photo-print of a tuk-tuk in profile parked over the word BANGKOK in black block letters. She is waiting. The title "Project for a Revolution in Bangkok" is borrowed from Project for a Revolution in New York, a 1970 nouveau roman by Alain Robbe-Grillet whose work, at the risk of oversimplifying a little, is founded upon an obsessive insistence on visual phenomena from the shifting, inconstant point of view of an unreliable authorial presence. Here. Only love.Opening the page, four photographs each approximately four and a half inches wide and three inches tall tile down on screen. They lie edge to edge in four quadrants forming in sum an unbroken rectangle about nine inches across and six inches in height. Dragging the cursor over each individual photograph switches the black arrow icon into a gloved hand with a pointing index finger. This indicates that right clicking the mouse over a selected photograph will link it to another page of either a passage of text similar to what you are currently reading or a page with a choice of four photographs each approximately four and a half inches in width and three inches in height lying adjacent to one another in four quadrants forming together a rectangle roughly nine by six inches. In the photograph she is standing with her arms crossed, brows pinched. There is no more or less than meets the I. A revolution in Bangkok. Photographs. A city. Revolving. A website. Around you. The city of angels, the great city, the eternal jewel city, the impregnable city of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukam. Words worth a thousand pictures. In the photograph she is standing arms akimbo in an open-air market at closing. The detritus of a day of business and bustle litters the narrow walkway. Shutters are down or on their way. She's bought some things. What they are we can't tell as they are contained within the blue plastic bag she's carrying, which though translucent, has just enough opacity to conceal. A positive identification of the items is not helped by the camera shake brought no doubt by the low ambient light and the slow shutter speed. The camera is a little aslant off the horizontal plane and she is not amused. Her arms cross, brows pinch. It starts here. In either case you are encouraged to once more right click your mouse on the text or any of the photographs to proceed. If for whatever reason you choose not to utilise the photographs and text links, you may also click on either of the arrows at the bottom of the screen. The choices you make will determine the path you take. Inarticulations. Love. Redundancies. Life. Non Sequiturs. Death. These severely undermine the integrity of these pictures. In the photograph she is standing arms akimbo. Behind her a uniformed policeman sits in his booth with his helmet on and his back turned to her. Beyond that the street in the fiery flare of a flaming sun. She is waiting. No beginning. No middle. No end. Can you picture it with your own I? Around the corner another. In the photograph an expanse of sky. Below that, a wall. Behind that in the far distance, as one can deduce by the relative scale, stand scattered blocks of apartment buildings. Puffs of mould and time drift lazy across the frame. Can you ignore the rules of composition? Look past the lies? When he steps out of the hotel lobby the heat smashes into him in a solid wave. He can feel sweat beading his brow instantly and trickle under his arms and creep down his pant legs. Sweat is forming in the barest of space between his right palm and the cross-hatch grip. He has hardly made it down two blocks. He is careful not to be seen. To see. Keep a distance. The light falls from above washing off roofs, gushing through the impossible tangles of telephone wires strung on poles and eddying past the sudden nooks of dark under makeshift awnings and running through alleyways and slipping under doors bouncing off the windows of cars and pooling finally on the worn slick streets. It is orange and wherever it converges it quickly congeals. Bangkok is encased in amber. A revolution in Bangkok. A world revolving on its own axis. Lost in thought, Foodcarts fluorescent her arms crossed, brows pinched. on the sidewalk. Traffic In fairy lights, at a standstill. "LONG LIVE THE KING" A snake, tail in mouth, devouring itself. A revolution in Bangkok. There you are. Taking one step after another, making deliberate choices and considered choices and despite your best intentions arriving inexorably at the same point. He must not lose sight of the objective. Objective: 1. being the object or goal of one's efforts or actions 2. of or having to do with a material object 3. having actual existence or reality 4. not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; observable phenomena; unbiased; an objective opinion 5. emphasising or expressing things as perceived without distortion of personal feelings, insertion of fictional matter, or interpretation; objective art 6. being the object of perception or thought; belonging to the object of thought rather than to the thinking subject (opposed to subjective) 7. (in case grammar) pertaining to the semantic role of a noun phrase that denotes something undergoing a change of state or bearing a neutral relation to the verb, as the photograph in The photograph developed or in The man took the photograph 8. the lens or combination of lenses that first receives the rays from the object and forms the image in the focal plane of the camera Around a corner another. It starts here. In the photograph she is standing arms akimbo. The sun tumbles off the top of the low-rise sitting across the way and executes a perfect landing as a narrow wedge of light on the road, empty save for the row of cars parallel parked in the building's shade. A man in a white t-shirt and light blue jeans with a camera in his hand appears from around the corner but i am out of time. QLRS Vol. 24 No. 3 Jul 2025 _____
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