The Manga Bible

Helen McCarthy, alongside Frederik L. Schodt and Jonathan Clements, is responsible for some of the very first English-language writing on Japanese manga (comics) and anime (animation). She wrote The Art of Osamu Tezuka, the first book in English on the most acclaimed mangaka (comic illustrator), and with Clements she co-wrote The Anime Encyclopedia, the definitive anime film and TV guide.

McCarthy’s latest book, The Manga Bible, is a comprehensive introduction to manga, not only profiling the key mangaka but also examining the manga industry and the field of manga studies. The book is broadly chronological, and there are also sections on the most popular manga genres. Each chapter is fairly concise, though The Manga Bible lives up to its title and covers manga from every conceivable angle.

Schodt’s book Manga! Manga! first introduced Japanese comics to Western readers, and he translated Toshio Ban’s The Osamu Tezuka Story. Manga Design (revised as 100 Manga Artists), by Amano Masanao and Julius Wiedemann, reprints extracts from significant manga. Recently, manga scholar Eike Exner has written two revisionist histories of the subject, Manga and Comics and the Origins of Manga.

The Atlas of World Embroidery:A Global Exploration of Heritage and Styles

Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood is probably the world’s leading authority on the history of embroidery. She edited the multi-volume Encyclopedia of Embroidery, which is the definitive reference work on the subject. Her new book The Atlas of World Embroidery: A Global Exploration of Heritage and Styles features “a selection of the main forms of embroidery from around the world,” and it’s an international survey of embroidery traditions rather than a comprehensive history.

The Atlas of World Embroidery is beautifully illustrated with historical and contemporary examples. It also has a classified bibliography. In her introduction, Vogelsang-Eastwood writes: “as well as providing a global story of embroidery, I hope this book helps to illustrate the long and diverse history of this craft.” The book certainly achieves this, though as she acknowledges, a single volume can’t cover every type of embroidery worldwide.

The only previous books with global coverage of embroidery history were both written by Mary Gostelow around fifty years ago. Gostelow’s A World of Embroidery was a country-by-country history, followed by the similar Embroidery: Traditional Designs, Techniques and Patterns from All Over the World, which had more colour illustrations. (Embroidery was reprinted in the US as The Complete International Book of Embroidery.)

Needlework Through the Ages, by Mary Symonds and Louisa Preece, was the first comprehensive history of needlework (of which embroidery is one type), published almost a century ago. It was followed fifty years later by Needlework: An Illustrated History, edited by Harriet Bridgeman and Elizabeth Drury.

Outdoor Cinema

Two classic Stanley Kubrick films will be shown in open-air screenings at Cloud 11 in Bangkok next week, as part of the Outdoor Cinema programme. The event is part of MEK Music and Market, which runs from 13th to 15th March, and the screenings are organised by Doc Club and Pub, which will relocate to Cloud 11 later this year. The Shining will be shown on 13th March, followed by 2001 on 15th March.

Previous screenings of The Shining in Thailand:

• general rerelease in 2025
• Scala in 2020
• Siri House in 2019
• Cinema Winehouse in 2018
• Cinema Winehouse in 2015

Previous Thai screenings of 2001:

• Doc Club and Pub in 2024
• Arcadia in 2022
• Scala in 2017
• Thai Film Archive in 2013

Doc Club was previously located at the Woof Pack building in Bangkok, though it was closed after failing to obtain a cinema licence. In 2024, when Doc Club first screened Sarawut Intaraprom’s Pup (สุนัข และ เจ้านาย), rated ‘20’, three staff from the Ministry of Culture were on site to ensure that audience IDs were being checked. They discovered that the venue had never applied for a licence, and a subsequent application was ultimately rejected, as the location did not have sufficient access. (The cinema could only be reached via narrow staircases.)

Dib Bangkok

Dib Bangkok opened on 21st December last year, and its inaugural exhibition, Invisible Presence (ล่องไม่หน), runs until 3rd August. The museum was founded by a Thai businessman with an arts background, though he died in 2023 before construction was completed.

One of the highlights of Invisible Presence is the video installation Emerald (มรกต), in which Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s camera glides elegiacally through a deserted hotel. Emerald was previously shown at Tomyam Pladib (ต้มยำปลาดิบ), Save the Film, Indy Spirit Project, the International Buddhist Film Festival, and the Thailand Biennale.

Dib is billed as Thailand’s first contemporary art museum, though that’s not really accurate, as the Museum of Contemporary Art opened in Bangkok in 2012, and the MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum opened in Chiang Mai in 2016. Like MoCA and MAIIAM, Dib has its strengths and weaknesses.

On the positive side:

• All three museums have stunning architecture. Dib has an impressive courtyard, a conical ‘chapel’ gallery, and a cylindrical tower (James Turrell’s Straight Up). Similarly, MAIIAM has a dazzling mirrored façade, and the MoCA building is a vast granite structure.
• Dib has a genuinely contemporary collection, with an emphasis on installation art from the past thirty years. This is also true of MAIIAM, though MoCA (despite its name) focuses on traditional figurative and religious paintings.
• Dib’s permanent collection is a combination of Thai and international artworks. On the other hand, MAIIAM and MoCA both exhibit work exclusively by Thai artists.

But on the negative side:

• Dib is overstaffed: each of its galleries has several attendants keeping a close watch on visitors. This is similar to MoCA, though MAIIAM allows people to explore its galleries relatively unsupervised.
• Dib is expensive to visit: its admission price is as much as MoCA and MAIIAM’s combined. Also, Dib has a dual-pricing policy, charging foreign visitors extra, whereas MoCA and MAIIAM charge all nationalities equally.
• All three museums depend on the tastes of their founders. Dib was founded by Petch Osathanugrah, and its permanent collection consists of works purchased by him. Similarly, MoCA is based on the private collection of Boonchai Bencharongkul, and MAIIAM’s holdings were collected by its founders Jean Michel Beurdeley and Patrsi Bunnag.

Retrospective!!! by Koraphat Cheeradit

The Us coffee shop in Phatthalung will show a complete retrospective of films by Koraphat Cheeradit on 8th March. The event, organised by Phatthalung Micro Cinema, includes Koraphat’s short films ...Tomorrow I Fuck with Yesterday Now!, Yesterday Is Another Day, Believe a Lust (Croire à un désir), Landscape of Us on Fire, and Hydrangea, amongst others.

Yesterday Is Another Day

In Yesterday Is Another Day, a high school student plays hooky and meets his girlfriend in a woodland. They take a walk, and joke about their future together, seemingly without a care in the world. But there are ominous signs of impending threats: they find a discarded handgun, and Koraphat inserts shots of a JCB digging up the forest.

Eventually, we learn that the student is being charged with lèse-majesté, for sharing Facebook posts. His court hearing is the following day, and he is likely to be jailed. (The film doesn’t state directly that he’s facing royal defamation charges, though it’s clear from the couple’s conversation: he explains that the sentence is three years per offence, which is the minimum jail term for lèse-majesté.)

The prospect of criminal charges for posting on social media is a reality for dozens of people in Thailand today, many of whom are students. As the boy in Koraphat’s film says to his girlfriend, he has to face changing from “being a teenager to being a prisoner.”

Yesterday Is Another Day and ...Tomorrow I Fuck with Yesterday Now! were both shown as part of the Short Film Marathon (หนังสั้นมาราธอน) in 2023. Yesterday Is Another Day was also shown at Wildtype 2023, at The Political Wanderer, and (twice) at the Chiang Mai Film Festival (เทศกาลหนังแห่งเมืองเชียงใหม่).

...Tomorrow I Fuck with Yesterday Now!

...Tomorrow I Fuck with Yesterday Now!, shown at Wildtype 2024, begins with a young man stumbling around in a woodland. The aimless protagonist is filmed in a continuous take, with double-exposures constantly fading in and out. Birdsong and other bucolic, ambient sounds soon give way to a non-diegetic locomotive on the soundtrack, which gradually rises to a crescendo. Visually, this is matched by bursts of rapid-fire shots, each lasting for only a single frame, that are perceived only subliminally.

Some of these inserts are faux-naïf: white doves and heart emojis, symbolising peace and love. Other flash frames are more extreme: Koraphat juxtaposes sex and violence in split-second montages of anatomical drawings, erections, Ukrainian war casualties in Bucha, Nazi troops, and riot police firing water cannon at Thai protesters.

Believe a Lust
Landscape of Us on Fire

Believe a Lust is only a few minutes long, though it’s a powerful and provocative film, as it shows a novice monk masturbating in a toilet cubicle. It was shown as part of the online Short Film Marathon in 2024. Like ...Tomorrow I Fuck with Yesterday Now!, it includes some explicit subliminal imagery. Like Landscape of Us on Fire, is has beautiful black-and-white cinematography. (The poster for the Koraphat retrospective features only images from Believe a Lust and Landscape of Us on Fire.)

Landscape of Us on Fire also challenges the taboo against depicting the sexual desires of monks. In the film, a novice monk hires a prostitute, and a shot of the monk’s hand on the young prostitute’s back recalls a similar moment in Kanittha Kwunyoo’s previously banned film Karma (อาปัติ). (The gesture appears on Landscape of Us on Fire’s poster and in the Karma trailer, to highlight its transgressive nature.) Landscape of Us on Fire was shown at last year’s Isan Creative Festival (เทศกาลอีสานสร้างสรรค์) and Chiang Mai Film Festival, and in the 2024 Short Film Marathon.

The nearest equivalent to Believe a Lust and Landscape of Us on Fire is probably Watcharapol Paksri’s short film All Done in the Opposite of Afternoon [sic] (วัฏสงสาร), which was shown at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya on 8th September 2018. (Thai Cinema Uncensored discusses the representation of monks in Thai films in much more detail.)

Hydrangea

Hydrangea takes place on the seventh anniversary of the 2014 coup. As in Yesterday Is Another Day, beneath its romantic surface lies a political subtext. The film’s credits call directly for an alternative to the ideology of the military government.

Arcadia Rooftop CinemaTears of the Black Tiger

The Rooftop Cinema programme of open-air movie screenings at Bangkok’s Arcadia bar continues next week with Wisit Sasanatieng’s Thai New Wave classic Tears of the Black Tiger (ฟ้าทะลายโจร). The film will be shown on 8th March.

Tears of the Black Tiger, Wisit’s directorial debut, has a uniquely over-saturated colour palette, and combines ‘spaghetti western’-style action with lakorn-style melodrama. Its most recent screening was at last year’s Microwave Film Festival in Sisaket.

As befits one of the greatest Thai films ever made, Tears of the Black Tiger has been shown quite frequently over the years. Past screenings include: Movie Night at One Nimman (เชียงใหม่ กลางแปลง) in 2022, at Alliance Française in 2020, at Bangkok Screening Room in 2017, at Thailand Creative and Design Center in 2016, at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre in 2012, and at the Film Archive in 2025, 2013, and 2009.

The Stringer

Photojournalist Nick Út has filed a defamation lawsuit in France against Netflix and Gary Knight, producer of The Stringer. The documentary, directed by Bao Nguyen, alleged that The Terror of War, a famous photograph of a young girl, naked and screaming in pain after a napalm attack during the Vietnam War, was taken by Nguyen Thanh Nghe and not by Út.

The photo has been credited to Út ever since it was first published in 1972, though the documentary’s evidence to the contrary is compelling. The film relies heavily on the word of a single Associated Press whistleblower, though digital mapping of the landscape at the moment the picture was taken places Út too far away from Kim Phúc, the girl in the photo.

Spirit

Last year, Liberate P released a digital EP titled Spirit. The EP included two new tracks, The State-mandated Smile (เผด็จการที่มีธรรมาภิบาล) and Oppression (เอาให้ตาย), both of which begin with the same lyrics condemning state violence against political protesters. The State-mandated Smile criticises the military for ‘tearing the constitution into shreds’ (“ฉีกรัฐธรรมนูญเป็นขี้ผง”), and Oppression accuses the authorities of treating people’s lives ‘like fish or vegetables’ (“ชีวิตคนไม่ใช่ผักปลา”).

Today, the music video for Oppression was released. Directed by Teeraphan Ngowjeenanan (known as Teeraphanny, who made A Teeraphanny Joint last year), it features a man being beaten up and hit with a folding chair, in an echo of the infamous Neal Ulevich photograph from 6th October 1976.

The Spirit EP also featured two older tracks, สิ่งที่ประเทศกูไม่มี (‘what my country doesn’t have’) and Oc(t)ygen. สิ่งที่ประเทศกูไม่มี comments on the arrests of student protesters for three-finger salutes and other symbolic anti-government actions: “แค่กูชูสามกูแดกแซนวิชก็ติดคุก” (‘holding up three fingers or eating sandwiches can land you in jail’). Oc(t)ygen is a response to 6th October 1976.

I Am Not a Slut:Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet

Leora Tanenbaum first wrote about the misogynistic insult ‘slut’ in 1999, and in her book I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet she argues that, as long as the term is used by men to demean women, it should not be employed by women to describe themselves.

I Am Not a Slut was published in 2015, partly as a response to the feminist SlutWalk movement. Since then, at least three books have called for the reclamation of ‘slut’: This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like, Wordslut, and Sluts.

Tanenbaum, on the other hand, calls for eradication rather than reappropriation: “Reclaiming “slut” as a positive term... nearly always backfires. If we want to truly help young women, we need to get rid of the word entirely.” In I Am Not a Slut, she devotes an entire chapter to the issue, titled Can “Slut” Be Reclaimed?: “Is the time ripe to reclaim “slut”? Forgive me, sisters; I don’t think so.”

Exploring Society: India and Beyond

India’s Supreme Court has acted swiftly to ban a school textbook, as it contains material critical of the country’s judiciary. The eighth grade social sciences book, Exploring Society: India and Beyond (vol. 2), was published by National Council of Educational Research and Training yesterday, and the Supreme Court’s strongly-worded verdict was issued today.

The book includes a chapter titled The Role of the Judiciary in Our Society, which states that “the judicial system in our country has a massive backlog.” It also outlines the potential penalties for corrupt judges, though it makes no assessmemt of the extent of judicial corruption.

The Supreme Court ruled that “a complete blanket ban is hereby imposed on any further publication, reprinting or digital dissemination of the book” with immediate effect. NCERT issued a press release noting that “it has been observed that certain inappropriate textual material and error of judgement have inadvertently crept into” the offending chapter.

Another Indian textbook, Enjoying Cursive Writing, was banned for blasphemy in 2010. The book Godman to Tycoon was banned in India in 2017 after a court injunction.