Thai Traditional Massage: It Hurts So Good

  By Oz | December 9, 2011 - 10:09 am | Travel, Writing Portfolio
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Thai Traditional Massage

Thai Massage — photo by mario_rukh

“Thai Traditional Massage: It Hurts So Good” by Oz Mendoza was originally published in Enrich Magazine, Dec 2011

If you should ever visit Bangkok, you are bound to discover that there is a massage parlor on just about every street corner. Many of them advertise by displaying a sign of a foot inscribed with a diagram of intricate makings of mysterious significance. You get the impression that Thais are completely obsessed with massage, and in a way, they are—getting a regular foot massage is as natural to them as napalming their intestines with chicken curry.

I had been in Bangkok for over a week. I had vowed to myself that while I was there, I would experience an authentic Thai traditional massage. But a part of me felt trepidation. I had heard that Thai massage was not exactly a soft and gentle art. I had visions of being contorted into a series of tortuous pretzel shapes. It could turn out to be a painful experience. But after a long bout of dithering I decided that I had to give it a try. It’s not like it was going to be the death of me.

And it wasn’t. It was pretty much the opposite of that.

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Bangkok’s Art Scene: It’s Breaking Out

  By Oz | December 8, 2011 - 9:55 am | Art, Travel, Writing Portfolio
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BACC

Tiger head sculptures in front of BACC — photo by Oz Mendoza

“Bangkok’s Art Scene: It’s Breaking Out” by Oz Mendoza was originally published in Mabuhay Magazine, December 2009

The Skytrain stop at Bangkok’s National Stadium does not look like a promising place to find art. It is a perfectly ordinary transport station and most of the passengers debarking here head directly to the MBK techno-mart, the local mecca for mobile-phone gadgetry. A thudding hip-hop groove fills the air; b-boys break to the beats in front of the passing throng. Tear yourself away from these distractions, take a glance at the other side of the street, and you may find something surprising—like a giant wastebasket, overturned and spilling super-sized wads of colorful paper onto the sidewalk. Or a row of Siamese tiger heads, painted in vibrant Day-Glo colors.

Here in the shopping-crazy heart of shopping-crazy Bangkok, you’ll find a gleaming modern temple devoid of ornate spires and gilded buddhas. Instead, stark white walls and transparent glass converge in an edifice that wears the forms of a container and a canvas—on a massive scale.

This is the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, or BACC. Walking along its sinuous inner spiral, the Centre unfolds before you like an origami flower slowly unfurling. Its hushed halls are a startling contrast to the riotous noise and color of the city outside. Initially, the entire structure feels like an anomaly within Bangkok—not only austere, but also determinedly avant-garde.

While Bangkok has always shown an artistic side, it has largely emphasized the traditional—this is a city where tiny shrines grace the storefronts even of modern mini-marts. But the BACC is strikingly forward-looking, and highlights this with displays of graffiti, motion sculptures, fiberglass figures, and yes, even playfully oversized tiger heads.

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You Call That Art?

  By Oz | December 2, 2011 - 9:14 am | Art, Writing Portfolio
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“You Call That Art?” by Oz Mendoza was originally published online at LegManila.com, 08/29/2001

“My five-year-old son can do better than this!” says one entry in the guestbook of Alvin Zafra’s exhibit, “Destroy Erase Improve.”

Alvin agrees that a five-year-old can probably do something as good as the artworks on display—large canvases of sandpaper that have been rubbed and scraped with various objects, from a one-peso coin to a light bulb, a medallion to a metal pipe.

His work is not the kind of thing that we normally think of as art, such as Renaissance paintings, Rembrandt self-portraits, or Impressionist landscapes. It’s not even Picasso. So what is it? How can one possibly call it art?

Well, what would you think of a white canvas painted with the dripping text, “I never think of the future, it comes soon enough”? Or a nest of scarlet pillows, each one printed with the drawing of a gun?

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A Map to the Afterlife and Other Fine Examples of Body Art

  By Oz | December 2, 2011 - 8:57 am | Art, Writing Portfolio
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“A Map to the Afterlife and Other Fine Examples of Body Art” by Oz Mendoza was originally published online at LegManila.com, 05/02/2001

It’s a map, beautifully marked in lines of black ink on a canvas of skin. It’s crafted like a Chinese landscape scroll, the stark lines tracing patterns of earth, water, mountain, clouds. A path weaves over earth and water, climbs up the mountain and onward to heaven. It is a map to the afterlife.

The pig, on whose skin the map was tattooed, must have found it useful, since it is in the afterlife now. Jonê Lao, the artist who tattooed it, was saddened by the loss of his porcine sidekick, which was his artistic work and his Fine Arts thesis. Unfortunately, his father’s more practical eyes saw only meat. The pig was sold and butchered without Lao’s knowledge.

Still, the pig’s unexpected end was somewhat fitting. After all, Lao chose a pig to tattoo because of its long history as a sacrificial animal. Now, only its tattooed skin is left—shed, as it were.

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South of the Border, West of the Sun (book review)

  By Oz | December 2, 2011 - 7:44 am | Book Reviews, Writing Portfolio
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“South of the Border, West of the Sun (Book Review)” by Oz Mendoza was originally published at LegManila.com, 07/21/2000

[Note: MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD]

A few pages into Haruki Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun, Shimamoto, the main female character, states what is essentially the novel’s central theme: “There are some things in this world that can be done over, and some that can’t. And time passing is one thing that can’t be redone. Come this far, and you can’t go back.”

Ironically, Shimamoto is still a child of fourteen when she says these words. They sound like something that would be said by someone much older, on the reckoning of one’s life. At the time Shimamoto says them, neither she nor her childhood friend, Hajime, have experienced anything like true regret. Only years later, when they meet again after a long separation, will they truly regret how time’s passing cannot be undone.

Murakami is known for novels where the mundane constantly mingles with dreams, fantasies, and ghosts. His protagonists are regular Joes going about the daily business of their lives—things like cooking spaghetti and crunching numbers and writing dull restaurant reviews—until some unforeseen event unmoors them from the real world and starts tugging them to the edge of an unreal one.

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Hello world!

  By Oz | November 30, 2011 - 4:16 am | Uncategorized
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Oh, there you are. It’s been a while.

I basically stopped blogging about my life sometime in 2005. My first blog was on LiveJournal, around 2001, if I remember correctly. My second blog was also on LiveJournal. My third was on Multiply. And then I got booked in the face, or something like that. (A lot of people did.)

And blogging hasn’t felt like something I wanted to do in a long time. But here we are again. And this time it will be different. This time it will be epic. Extraordinary. Life-changing….

Well, it could also turn out to be just a bunch of lolcatz.