Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics

Frederik L. Schodt’s book Manga! Manga! first introduced Japanese manga comics to Western readers more than thirty years ago, and since then there have been several coffee-table books on the subject. But Eike Exner’s Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics, published this month, is the first complete narrative history of manga.

Based on archival research in Japan, Exner’s book is a revisionist study that deviates from the standard account of other manga historians, who have characterised manga as the culmination of a thousand-year history of inherently Japanese visual culture. Exner previously challenged this myth in Comics and the Origins of Manga, and his new work is a significant expansion of that earlier book’s scope.

As he writes in the introduction to Manga, “this book seeks to provide a coherent account of how comics were established in Japan, how comics have changed over the decades, and how an entire industry arose around Japanese comics and turned the country into the world’s largest exporter of comics.” The book also includes a manga chronology, detailed endnotes, and an extensive bibliography.

Exner’s book is likely to become the standard history of manga, though there are other useful books on the topic. Manga Design (revised as 100 Manga Artists), by Amano Masanao and Julius Wiedemann, profiles mangaka (manga artists). Schodt translated Toshio Ban’s The Osamu Tezuka Story, a biography of the most influential mangaka. Helen McCarthy’s The Art of Osamu Tezuka is a monograph on Tesuka’s manga and anime.

Face with Tears of Joy:A Natural History of Emoji

Keith Houston’s Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji, published last month, is the first comprehensive history of emoji. As its back cover claims, the book “tells the whole story of emoji for the first time.”

Shigetaka Kurita is credited as the inventor of emoji, as he designed a set of pictograms for the Japanese telecom firm Docomo in 1999. But, as Houston explains, Kurita had several predecessors: similar icons were created for a Sharp PDA in 1988, and for a Pioneer cellphone in 1997.

Face with Tears of Joy is not the first book to cover the history of emoji: The Story of Emoji, by Gavin Lucas, was published almost a decade earlier. (Houston’s book doesn’t mention Lucas at all.) With almost fifty pages of notes, Face with Tears of Joy is more detailed than The Story of Emoji, though The Story of Emoji is significant as it includes an interview with Kurita.

Keir Starmer: The Biography

Tom Baldwin’s biography of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, first published before last year’s election, was based on many hours spent with Starmer, his family, and senior Labour Party colleagues. This remarkable level of access led to a surprisingly intimate portrait of an intensely private politician, and the book has now been updated to include coverage of Starmer’s first year in office. Baldwin profiled Starmer for The Observer in June, and that interview is expanded in the revised paperback of Keir Starmer: The Biography.

Baldwin is a former Times and Telegraph journalist, though he was also head of communications for Labour throughout the coalition government, so his biography is broadly sympathetic to its subject. He acknowledges that he isn’t an impartial observer, and describes Starmer as “a man whom I both like and trust but sometimes find hard to fathom.” And the PM’s colleagues seemingly feel the same way about him: “Those who have worked closely with Starmer mix deep affection with tearing-their-hair-out frustration because they... yearn for a clearly defined project that identifies their purpose. They want a ‘Starmerism’. And he just won’t give them one.”

In his introduction, Baldwin makes clear that “it’s only fair to warn those hoping to find these pages apattered with blood that they will be disappointed.” The other key Starmer book published this year, Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer, seems brutally direct in comparison, and Baldwin accurately describes it as “a blood-stained account of Labour’s transformation over the past five years, in which Starmer himself was largely absent.”

Maguire and Pogrund quote a Starmer advisor saying: “He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.” (The Docklands Light Railway uses driverless trains.) Get In leaves the reader in no doubt that Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney is in the driving seat — and that its authors have the same access to high-level Labour sources as Andrew Rawnsley had in the New Labour era.

Donald Trump v. Bob Woodward

Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Bob Woodward and the publisher Simon and Schuster was dismissed today. Trump had claimed that Woodward’s audiobook The Trump Tapes — featuring Woodward’s recordings of his interviews with Trump — was released without prior authorisation.

Trump’s lawsuit, seeking $50 million in damages, argued that the publication of the tapes violated his copyright. Judge Paul Gardephe of the Southern District of New York ruled that Trump could not be considered a co-author of the audiobook, and that the publication of the interviews constituted fair use under copyright law.

One on One SeriesKisho Kurokawa: Nakagin Capsule Tower

The Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, designed by architect Kisho Kurokawa and completed in 1972, was an icon of the Japanese Metabolism movement. The building was comprised of movable, connectable, and replaceable capsules, and it epitomised Metabolism’s focus on expandability, flexibility, and adaptability. In his new book on the tower, Evangelos Kotsioris calls it “one of the most discussed and written about modern buildings of the 20th century”.

Each capsule was a tiny, self-contained studio apartment, complete with a built-in entertainment console. A single porthole-style window provided natural light — though not fresh air, as the windows didn’t open. The concept was unique and original, and although no more capsule towers were built, Nakagin continues to influence current architectural trends such as capsule hotels and micro apartments.

Sadly, exactly fifty years after its construction, the tower was demolished in 2022. By that point, it had fallen into disrepair — its capsules were never replaced, as had been originally envisioned. (When I visited the building in 2016, it was largely unoccupied.) The Museum of Modern Art in New York purchased one of the project’s 140 capsules, which went on display this month as the centrepiece of a year-long exhibition titled The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower.

Kotsioris curated that exhibition, and his book Kisho Kurokawa: Nakagin Capsule Tower, published next month, is the first English-language publication on the tower. It’s part of MoMA’s One on One Series, monographs on individual works of art from the museum’s permanent collection. (Project Japan by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist, a comprehensive history of Metabolism, is also essential reading.)

It’s about Time:Performing between the Past and Tomorrow in Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s I a Pixel, We the People

Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s exhibition I a Pixel, We the People (ข้าพเจ้าคือพิกเซล, พวกเราคือประชาชน) will close later this month, and the artist took part in a Q&A session with Sam I-shan at BangkokCityCity Gallery yesterday. The event was titled It’s about Time: Performing between the Past and Tomorrow in Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s I a Pixel, We the People, named after an essay on Chulayarnnon’s work published by the gallery.

Chulayarnnon spoke about the two phases of his artistic career. His early short films were more personal, whereas his work became more overtly political following the Ratchaprasong crackdown in 2010: “it quite changed my life when the Thailand political crisis came, about 2010”. This aligns him with the “Post-Ratchaprasong art” movement identified by the journal Read (อ่าน; vol. 3, no. 2), and he made a similar comment in an interview for Thai Cinema Uncensored, explaining when he “turned to be interested in the political situation.”

In the Q&A, Chulayarnnon also discussed the consequences of the political climate for artists: “self-censorship is still existing: for me, sometimes I did that.” He contrasted the student protests of 2020 and 2021 — when Thai artists were more blunt in their political satire — with the current atmosphere: “for now, we need thought-provoking [art], but no need to be hardcore”. He also highlighted the threats that “hardcore” artists face: “I don’t want to be in jail, but I respect them.”

Sam I-shan’s essay booklet is twenty-four pages long, and has been published in a limited edition of twenty-four copies (each with a unique cover photos), reflecting the twenty-four-hour duration of Chulayarnnon’s video installation. The author identifies subtle political metaphors in the exhibition: she notes that the day-long running time “might parallel the cyclical nature of Thai politics,” and she argues that the piles of clothes in the gallery space “stand for all people disenfranchised by... Thailand’s political system, with some of these bodies literally absent, having been imprisoned, exiled, disappeared or killed.”

Pink Flamingos: A Screenplay

“Filth is my politics, filth is my life!”
— Babs Johnson

The script for Pink Flamingos, by John Waters, was published this month as Pink Flamingos: A Screenplay. (It was previously available as part of Trash Trio and Pink Flamingos and Other Filth, collections of three Waters screenplays.) The script begins with a note of self-deprecation, describing “the atrocious voice of the Narrator” — the film was narrated by Waters himself. It ends with a description of the film’s infamous final sequence, involving what was intended to be “a Hungarian sheepdog.”

Pink Flamingos is a masterpiece of bad taste. On its first release in 1972, it was described as obscene and compared to Luis Buñuel’s notoriously shocking silent film Un chien andalou (‘an Andalusian dog’). It remains the ultimate example of transgressive cinema, breaking every cultural taboo, and it’s been shown twice in Thailand: in 2017 at the Bad Taste Café in Bangkok, and in 2023 at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya.

Screenprints: A History

Screenprinting is a relatively recent technique, when compared to other forms of printmaking such as engraving, aquatints, monotypes, and lithography. Even the term ‘screenprint’ itself has not yet been standardised, as it’s used synonymously with ‘serigraph’ and ‘silkscreen’.

There have been several general histories of printmaking, including Six Centuries of Fine Prints (by Carl Zigrosser, who coined the term ‘serigraph’) and Prints (co-written by Richard S. Field, who curated the Silkscreen exhibition in 1971). Also, Fritz Eichenberg’s monumental The Art of the Print has chapters on screenprinting. But it was only this year that the first history of screenprinting as an artistic medium was published.

Screenprints: A History, by Gill Saunders, traces the origins of screenprinting to Japanese katagami and French pochoir stencilling techniques. The book also covers artists such as Andy Warhol, who produced Pop Art screenprints with Chris Prater, the printer who was “almost single-handedly responsible for the metamorphosis of screenprinting into a fine art.” Eduardo Paolozzi collaborated with Prater on a dozen screenprints titled As Is When, described by Saunders as “the medium’s first masterpiece.”

Screenprints is a comprehensive history of its subject. Published by Thames and Hudson, it’s also elegantly designed and typeset. Most, though not all, of its illustrations are from the Victoria and Albert Museum collection, and the book is the first in an annual V&A series covering the histories of individual printmaking techniques. Given the high standard set by this first book, the others — on linocuts, etchings, and woodcuts, forthcoming over the next three years — are now eagerly anticipated.

Bitch: The Journey of a Word

“If bitch is to be reclaimed, only women can reclaim the word. But reclamation isn’t the answer for everyone... we have to concede that bitch hasn’t been entirely rehabilitated. But we have to acknowledge its fluidity. Bitch is a flexible word that can be both good and bad. For centuries, bitch was an insult. In recent decades, some women have adopted bitch as an empowering label. Others reject the word. Bitch is battling a long history of invective use and many simply don’t like the word and don’t want to reclaim it.”
— Bitch

Karen Stollznow’s Bitch: The Journey of a Word, published last year, is a fascinating cultural history of ‘bitch’. The book covers changing social attitudes towards the word, and feminist efforts to reappropriate it: “Taking control of the word and turning the definition on its head, bitch got a feminist facelift, becoming a descriptor for an ambitious, independent, and strong woman.”

It was Jo Freeman, in The Bitch Manifesto, who launched the first campaign to reclaim ‘bitch’: “A woman should be proud to declare she is a Bitch, because Bitch is Beautiful. It should be an act of affirmation by self and not negation by others.” (The Bitch Manifesto first appeared in a 1970 anthology of feminist theory, alongside Kate Millett’s essay Sexual Politics.) The word’s reclamation went mainstream in the 1990s, when Bitch became the title of a long-running feminist magazine and a hit Meredith Brooks single.

Stollznow’s book is well researched and comprehensive, though it does become quite repetitive. For example, she poses the same question at least three times: “Has bitch truly been rehabilitated to mean something wholly positive? Can bitch be reclaimed... should it be?... Has bitch been — can it be — reclaimed?... Can bitch ever be fully reclaimed? The truth is that it probably won’t be.”

Also, when it comes to answering this question, Stollznow tends to sit on the fence: “Of course, there are ongoing attempts to reclaim bitch, to take out its sting. There is also much backlash against this reclamation, which will likely continue too... Some people will continue to try to reclaim the word. But for others, bitch isn’t reclaimed, and can’t be, because of its considerable baggage.” Ultimately, she concludes that the word’s reappropriation must be universal before it can be effective: “Unfortunately, the ways women try to reclaim bitch do not diminish its stigmatizing power in the hands of others, and especially men.”

Sluts: The Truth about Slutshaming and What We Can Do to Fight It

Beth Ashley’s Sluts: The Truth about Slutshaming and What We Can Do to Fight It, published last year, is the latest in a series of feminist books about the misogynistic term ‘slut’. It follows This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like, a 2015 account of the SlutWalk movement, and Wordslut, a 2019 guide to reclaiming sexist language.

Ashley writes about the social and linguistic stigmatisation of promiscuous women, but can ‘slut’ ever be reappropriated as a positive term? She explains that reclamation is not straightforward: “There is immense power in taking ownership of language traditionally used against you. Many people see this as an act of strength, handing it back to the people who’ve been originally hurt by the words. But it’s important to note that not everyone is there yet... ‘Slut’ is a difficult word for a lot of us. That’s no surprise. It has heavy connotations and a painful history; it’s loaded with stigma.”

Ultimately, Ashley concludes that reappropriating ‘slut’ is both desirable and achievable: “Personally, I want to reclaim the word... I believe that if we shout it loud enough, the term could eventually become used in the right way. For me and many others, taking back the word slut is a powerful, rebellious thing to do. It allows people to exercise freedom, release themselves from shame, cope with past trauma and celebrate their sexuality.”

Ashley cites Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna, who wrote ‘SLUT’ on her stomach in the early 1990s, as a trailblazer of reclamation. But there are other women who have also self-identified as sluts. Madonna, for example, named her video company Slutco in the 1980s and, writing in The Sunday Times (24th August 2003), Kate Spicer argued: “A fashionable woman can take those phallocentric terms of abuse like slut and slag and nasty girl and turn them into labels of postfeminist fabulousness”. The issue was even covered by Sex and the City, in an episode titled Are We Sluts? (“Are we simply romantically challenged or are we sluts?”)

Germaine Greer’s pioneering 1971 article I Am a Whore, published in the underground press magazine Suck (no. 6), laid the groundwork for all subsequent feminist writing on ‘slut’ and similar pejoratives. Greer argued that, rather than using ‘whore’ as an insult, “you’ve got to come out the other way around and make whore a sacred word like it used to be and it still can be”. (Her biographer, Christine Wallace, fundamentally misread Greer’s argument, writing that “it takes a truly eccentric and bizarre kind of feminism for one to identify as a prostitute”.)

Stone: Ancient Craft to Modern Mastery

Stone: Ancient Craft to Modern Mastery, by Richard Rhodes, is one of the only publications in English to provide a general history of stone as an architectural material. The book includes an extensive glossary, endnotes, and bibliography, and it has an impressive cover that reproduces the surface texture of stone. In his introduction, Rhodes emphasises the cultural significance of stone buildings: “The ruins of stone and masonry architecture testify to war and destruction, to the rise and fall of cities and civilizations.”

Rhodes is apparently the last surviving apprentice of a medieval Italian guild of stonemasons. He stresses that this organisation is not affiliated with “the secret-handshake Masons”, though he describes it in equally conspiratorial terms. Several chapters of the book are devoted to the guild’s supposedly “Sacred Rules” of stonemasonry, and Rhodes claims that he is “sharing these secrets for the first time.” (This all feels a bit too much like Dan Brown to me.)

Stone is one of several recent books on architectural materials. Others include Concrete, Brick, Stone, and Wood (a series by William Hall); Glass in Architecture (by Michael Wigginton); Brick (by James W.P. Campbell); Architecture in Wood (by Will Pryce); Arish (by Sandra Piesik); Corrugated Iron (by Simon Holloway and Adam Mornement); and The Art of Earth Architecture (by Jean Dethier).

Spray Nation: 1980s NYC Graffiti Photographs

Martha Cooper collaborated with fellow photographer Henry Chalfant on Subway Art, a record of New York subway graffiti that became known as the graffiti bible. Almost forty years later, in 2022, a more substantial selection of Cooper’s photography was published in Spray Nation: 1980s NYC Graffiti Photographs. The book also includes essays on Cooper’s seminal influence on graffiti history, describing her as “the grand dame of street art photography”.

The very first book on street art was The Faith of Graffiti, from 1974. Chalfant co-wrote Spraycan Art with James Prigoff. Trespass covers the history of graffiti. There are also two books on the Bangkok graffiti scene: Bangkok Street Art and Bangkok Street Art and Graffiti (สตรีทอาร์ตกับกราฟฟิตีในกรุงเทพฯ).

Out: How Brexit Got Done and the Tories Were Undone

After All Out War, Fall Out, and No Way Out, Tim Shipman’s final Brexit book, Out: How Brexit Got Done and the Tories Were Undone, was published late last year. His quartet, a definitive account of UK politics since the country voted to leave the EU, tells “the full story of the most explosive period of domestic British politics since the Second World War.”

Out, 900 pages long, is (fortunately) the least Brexity of the four books. Spanning the entire Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak governments, it has the same insider’s access and all-sides coverage that made Shipman’s previous accounts so unique and compelling.

Shipman argues that, for better or worse, Johnson was “the most consequential figure of the period”, having achieved far more than his predecessor: “Theresa May was defined by the things she failed to do, Boris by the things he did — both excellent and execrable.” In an example from the execrable category, Johnson asked the attorney general not to inform ministers that prorogation of parliament may be illegal: “don’t spook the cabinet by talking about the litigation risk.” Shipman calls this “one of the nadirs of Johnson’s premiership.”

Shipman has consistently reported some of the most remarkable pull quotes in recent British politics. In Out, he quotes an unprecedented confrontation between a prime minister (Johnson: “Are you threatening me?”) and a senior advisor (Dominic Cummings: “Yes, I’m fucking threatening you.”) An even more extraordinary quote comes from Elizabeth II, who joked with her staff after Johnson resigned: “at least I won’t have that idiot organising my funeral now.”

Unsurprisingly, Shipman is dismissive of Johnson’s successor: “Liz Truss need not detain us long here.” He cites several Downing Street staff who describe her as “fucking mental”, and one who calls her “psychologically unfit to be prime minister.” (This recalls Alastair Campbell’s description of Gordon Brown’s “psychological flaws”, quoted in Andrew Rawnsley’s Servants of the People.) A secretary “broke down in tears” after Truss rebuked them for bringing her the wrong type of coffee (like Mugatu in Zoolander).

Before introducing Sunak at a 2024 election campaign event, Johnson asked his aides: “Why am I doing this? This guy’s a fucking cunt.” Shipman’s assessment of Sunak is also critical though, of course, more measured: “the lack of a driving political vision gave him no political cover from failures of delivery.”

The Critics

Yesterday, a female news anchor was questioned by police on charges of defamation and violation of the Computer Crime Act, following a legal complaint by a lawyer representing former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Her home was searched by more than a dozen police officers, though she has not yet been arrested.

The online news organisation The Critics published a video on 3rd January reporting on an opinion poll in which Thaksin had been voted the world’s worst leader. (The video is still online, on the Thai Move Institute’s YouTube channel.) The anchor told police that she was not the journalist who wrote the story, and had merely been reading from a script.

The news report (which is essentially clickbait) refers to a survey on the website The Top Tens. Thaksin is indeed currently listed there as the worst leader in the history of the world, with Adolf Hitler in second place, though the voting has been manipulated by Thai netizens. (Thaksin’s entry has more than 6,000 vitriolic comments, from people who apparently believe that he was worse than genocidal dictators such as Hitler.)

There are equally hyperbolic comparisons between Thaksin and Hitler in two documentaries by Ing K. In the fourth episode of her Bangkok Joyride (บางกอกจอยไรด์) series, a protester describes Thaksin as “worse than Hitler”. This echoes a quote from Ing’s Citizen Juling (พลเมืองจูหลิง): “We talk of Hitler... But villagers, all citizens nowadays fear PM Thaksin 10 times more.” (These examples are discussed in Thai Cinema Uncensored.)

During Thaksin’s premiership, he was notorious for his use of lawsuits to intimidate his critics. Pimpaka Towira’s documentary The Truth Be Told (ความจริงพูดได้), for example, examined the charges filed by Thaksin’s Shin Corp. against media campaigner Supinya Klangnarong after she was interviewed by the Thai Post (ไทยโพสต์) newspaper on 16th July 2003. (The Thai Post was also named in the writ. This case is also covered in Thai Cinema Uncensored.)

Supinya had alleged that Shin Corp. benefitted from the policies of Thaksin’s government, and therefore that his ownership of the company represented a conflict of interest. Her book about the lawsuit, พูดความจริง (‘speak the truth’), was published in 2007, after the case was dismissed.

The Day the Sky Trembled

Nutchanon Pairoj, a founder member of the United Front of Thammasat and Demonstration protest group, has been found guilty of lèse-majesté and sentenced to two years in prison. He was originally found not guilty by the Thanyaburi Provincial Court on 8th November 2023, though that verdict was overturned today by the Court of Appeal.

Nutchanon was one of several people in a truck that was stopped by police in Pathum Thani on 19th September 2020. They were en route to Thammasat University, intending to distribute copies of the booklet The Day the Sky Trembled (ปรากฏการณ์สะท้านฟ้า 10 สิงหา) to protesters gathered at the university. Police confiscated 45,080 copies of the booklet, and detained the occupants of the truck, though ultimately only Nutchanon was charged.

The Day the Sky Trembled — so notorious that it has become known simply as ‘the red booklet’ — contains transcripts of speeches given by UFTD protest leaders at Thammasat on 10th August 2020. Nutchanon is not quoted in the booklet, though today’s judgement convicted him of knowingly attempting to distribute material that contravened the lèse-majesté law.

30 Years of ‘Democrazy’

One way that artists satirise Thai politics is by punning on the Thai word for democracy itself. The earliest and most common example is ‘democrazy’, highlighting the craziness of the Thai political system, which dates back thirty years. Since then, there have been more than a dozen other Thai puns on ‘democracy’.

Democrazy

The band Heavy Mod released their album Democrazy on cassette and CD in 1995. (Its Thai title was ประชาธิปไตย, which translates simply as ‘democracy’.) The 25 Stang released an album with the same name in 2006. Democrazy was also the title of a single by another band, Dogwhine, from their EP Dog of God, released on CD in 2019. The animated music video for the song features the folding chair and hanging corpse from an infamous Neal Ulevich photograph. Democrazy (ประชาธิปไทย) is also the title of a 2020 painting by Luck Maisalee.

The fashion brand Russian Roulette designed a Demo-crazy t-shirt in 2023. Bangkok Democrazy was the strapline of the 4th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, which took place in 2004. Democrazy Theatre Studio was founded by Pavinee Samakkabutr and Thanapol Virulhakul in 2008, and the edgy Bangkok performance venue closed down in 2019.

Thunsita Yanuprom and Sarun Channiam directed the short film Democrazy.mov in 2019. In the film, a cellphone signal is jammed by a 44GHz frequency, in reference to article 44 of the interim constitution, which granted absolute power to the leaders of the 2014 coup.

Demockcrazy

Duangporn Pakavirojkul directed the short film Demockrazy (ประชาทิปตาย) in 2007. The film was an immediate reaction to the 2006 coup: set in a classroom, an authoritarian teacher symbolises the coup leaders. Its title is a clever double pun on ‘crazy’ and ‘mockery’.

Demoncrazy

Ready Myth Demoncrazy was a retrospective exhibition of art by Panya Vijinthanasarn, held in 2018. Similarly, the fashion brand Plus One designed a Demo(n)cracy hat in 2023.

Dreamocracy

Parit Wacharasindhu’s book Dreamocracy (ประชาธิปไตยไม่ใช่ฝัน) was published in 2022. Parit is a People’s Party MP, and his book is a personal manifesto proposing solutions to the country’s social and economic problems.

Drunkmocracy

Warat Bureephakdee directed the short film Drunkmocracy (สุราธิปไตย) in 2023. A documentary on Thai alcohol laws, it was released online as part of the ไทยถาม (‘Thailand questions’) series by Thai Rath (ไทยรัฐ).

ประชาฉิปตาย

The song title ประชาฉิปตาย translates as ‘democracy dies’, in a particularly effective Thai-language pun. (‘Democracy’ and ‘die-ocracy’ are near-homophones in Thai.) The track is featured on the Heavy Mod album Democrazy, and it’s similar to Die mo cracy, a slogan on a t-shirt sold by the band Speech Odd last year. Also, students from Naresuan University Demonstration School staged a play titled Diemocracy (ประชาธิปตาย) in 2023; its Thai title was the same as a single from that year by Skipdown, though the song’s English title was Dead Mock Cracy.

Paradoxocracy

Pen-ek Ratanaruang and Pasakorn Pramoolwong’s documentary Paradoxocracy (ประชาธิป'ไทย) was released in 2013. (Pen-ek discussed the film at length in Thai Cinema Uncensored.)

‘Happy-ocracy’

Ing K.’s film Shakespeare Must Die (เชคสเปียร์ต้องตาย) includes a satirical parody of authoritarian propaganda: “Dear Leader brings happy-ocracy!” The line turned out to be a remarkably prescient prediction, as coup leader Prayut Chan-o-cha released a propaganda song titled Returning Happiness to the Thai Kingdom (คืนความสุขให้ประเทศไทย) in 2014. (Ing discussed the film in Thai Cinema Uncensored.)

PrachathipaType

The design studio PrachathipaType (ประชาธิปไทป์) was founded in 2020, and its name translates as ‘democratic typography’. The anonymous designer behind PrachathipaType also created a new typeface, PrachathipaTape (ประชาธิปะเทป), for Rap Against Dictatorship’s music video Homeland (บ้านเกิดเมืองนอน).

‘ประชาธิปตู่’

Yuthlert Sippapak’s film Nednary (อวสานเนตรนารี) features a pun on Prayut’s nickname, Tu. When a boy scout, with the same nickname as Prayut, is asked what type of democracy he wants, he replies: “ประชาธิปตู่” (‘Tu-ocracy’). (Yuthlert discussed the film in Thai Cinema Uncensored.) The period of undemocratic military government led by Prayut between 2014 and 2023 is known as ‘Prayutocracy’.

‘Thaksinocracy’

Thaksinocracy (ทักษิณาธิปไตย) describes the populist politics of Thaksin Shinawatra, prime minister from 2001 to 2006. (A slight variation, สู่ทักษิณาธิปไตย, was translated as Thaksinomics, the title of a book by Rangsan Thanapornpun published in 2005.) The journal Same Sky (ฟ้าเดียวกัน; vol. 13, no. 3) described Thailand as a ‘technocracy’ (ระบอบเทคโนแครต) due to Thaksin’s political influence.

‘Kukritocracy’

Kukritocracy, a term coined by Tamara Loos, describes the cultural role of royalist author Kukrit Pramoj during the Cold War. Loos will give a presentation titled Kukritocracy at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison, on 21st February, as part of their Friday Forum series. (I gave a Friday Forum presentation in 2021.)

‘Premocracy’

Premocracy (เปรมาธิปไตย) describes the period of quasi-democracy from 1980 to 1988, when Prem Tinsulanonda led the government as an appointed prime minister. เปรมาธิปไตย is also the title of a book by Adinan Phromphananjal, published in 2020.

‘Coupocracy’

In her book Dictatorship on Trial, released last year, Tyrell Haberkorn coined the term ‘coupocracy’ to describe the period covering the 2006 and 2014 coups.

‘Militocracy’

Surachart Bamrungsuk’s book Militocracy (เสนาธิปไตย), published in 2015, discussed the regular coups that have cemented the military’s role in Thai politics.

‘Dancemocracy’

The new book Made in Thailand includes Anna Lawattanatrakul’s essay Dancemocracy as Political Expression in the 2020 Thai Pro-democracy Movement, a reference to the Dancemocracy (คณะราษแดนซ์) troupe of pro-democracy dancers and protesters. (Made in Thailand, edited by Viriya Sawangchot, also includes an interview with Pisitakun Kuantalaeng, who discusses his album Absolute Coup.)

“Books containing inciteful material...”

Israeli police raided two branches of the Educational Bookstore in Jerusalem today, seizing books and placing the chain’s two owners under arrest. According to a police statement, “detectives encountered numerous books containing inciteful material with nationalist Palestinian themes”, and the shop was accused of “selling books containing incitement and support for terrorism.”

Specifically, the police cited the children’s book From the River to the Sea: A Colouring Book by Nathi Ngubane, whose title is an antisemitic slogan calling for the removal of the State of Israel, located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The book is a work of propaganda that entirely excludes Jewish history from the story of Palestine.

Flowers in the Rain:The Untold Story of The Move

Jim McCarthy covers the history of the 1960s psychedelic rock band The Move in his new book Flowers in the Rain: The Untold Story of The Move, including the libel case brought against the band by former UK prime minister Harold Wilson in 1967. To promote their single Flowers in the Rain, the band’s manager Tony Secunda commissioned Neil Smith to draw a caricature of Wilson in bed with his secretary, Marcia Williams, implying that they were having an affair. Secunda sent copies of the drawing on 500 postcards to newspapers, magazines, and radio stations, though the stunt quickly backfired when Wilson sued for defamation. Wilson won the case on 11th October 1967, and was awarded all royalties from the single in perpetuity (which he donated to charity).

Significantly, McCarthy’s book — an exhaustive history of the band — includes an illustration of the postcard, which is perhaps the first time it has appeared in print in more than fifty years. (It was previously reproduced on p. 22 of the very first issue of Rolling Stone, on 9th November 1967, and it was shown in the BBC1 programme Inside Out: West Midlands on 2nd October 2017.) McCarthy’s book was published in November 2024, and less than two months later, the postcard was also reproduced in The Oldie magazine’s January issue (no. 447, p. 62).

Collapsing Clouds Form Stars

Som Supaparinya’s exhibition Collapsing Clouds Form Stars (ฝุ่นถล่มเป็นดาว) opened on 30th January at Gallery VER in Bangkok. It was originally scheduled to close on 22nd March, though it has now been extended until 26th April. (A catalogue will be published soon, featuring essays by Philippa Lovatt.) The centrepiece, after which the exhibition is named, is an installation of 279 ribbons, each of which contains a quotation from Thai political history.

These quotes include the notorious monk Kittivuddho Bhikku’s justification for the killing of Communists, a comment that set the stage for the 6th October 1976 massacre. Other ribbons feature lyrics by Rap Against Dictatorship, among many other examples. The quotes have also been translated into Morse code, which is played over a PA system for the duration of the exhibition.

The use of Morse code, which renders the quotations unintelligible, echoes an earlier piece of sound art by the same artist, Speeches of the Unheard. For this project, an episode of the podcast series Die Erde Spricht (‘the earth is speaking’), Som used computer software to turn extracts from political speeches into birdsong. The speeches included one given by red-shirt leader Nattawut Saikua on 30th December 2007, and one by Arnon Nampa on 16th September 2020.

The exhibition also includes Banned Books, an installation consisting of five books, banned by previous Thai governments, tightly wrapped in more ribbons. The books are: แลไปข้างหน้า (‘looking into the future’), ด้วยเลือดและชีวิต (‘the one-eyed elephant and the elephant genie’), The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today (โฉมหน้าศักดินาไทย), นิราศหนองคาย (‘poem of Nong Khai’), and ทรัพย์ศาสตร์ (‘economics’, Thailand’s first textbook on that subject).

The book Dissident Citizen (ราษฎรกำแหง) also used Morse code to conceal a political message. Several previous exhibitions — including The Grandmaster (สนทนากับปรมาจารย์), Derivatives and Integrals (อนุพันธ์ และปริพันธ์), The L/Royal Monument (นิ/ราษฎร์), and Unforgetting History — have also featured banned books. Sarakadee (สำรคดี) magazine (vol. 22, no. 260) published an extensive article on the history of book censorship, and the journal Underground Buleteen (no. 8) printed a list of books banned between 1932 and 1985.

Cracking the Kube: Solving the Mysteries of Stanley Kubrick through Archival Research

The Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts in London opened in 2007, giving unprecedented access to hundreds of boxes of documentation accumulated by Kubrick throughout his career. (A copy of my research into Kubrick’s photography is included in one box, presumably printed out by someone in Kubrick’s office.) The archive has transformed Kubrick scholarship, with a new focus on the primary sources available there. This has led to revisionist accounts of Kubrick’s working methods, most notably Mick Broderick’s Reconstructing Strangelove and James Fenwick’s Stanley Kubrick Produces.

In his new book Cracking the Kube: Solving the Mysteries of Stanley Kubrick through Archival Research, Filippo Ulivieri goes a stage further: he not only corrects the persistent misconceptions about Kubrick’s life and work, he also identifies their origins. And Ulivieri’s findings are groundbreaking: “Kubrick deliberately crafted his own distinctive persona,” he writes. The legends surrounding Kubrick — his obsessive secrecy, his perfectionism, his eccentricities — were the result of strategic self-mythologising by the director: “what we know about him is in fact a mythology of his own design”.

This conclusion, based on a detailed analysis of hundreds of published interviews with Kubrick, is one of numerous revelations in Cracking the Kube. The book also features a uniquely comprehensive survey of Kubrick’s unmade films (of which there were more than eighty), including the first complete account of Kubrick’s pre-production of A.I. (prior to its development by Steven Spielberg). Ulivieri also fully explores Kubrick’s collaborations with the writers Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, and Frederic Raphael for the first time, and writes a nuanced defence of Raphael’s controversial Kubrick memoir Eyes Wide Open.

Cracking the Kube is the product of extensive archival research, and Ulivieri has also interviewed many of Kubrick’s closest collaborators. Aside from its impeccable scholarly credentials, the book is also incredibly well-written. Ulivieri’s first book, Stanley Kubrick e me, was published in English translation as Stanley Kubrick and Me. He is also a co-author of 2001 between Kubrick and Clarke (2001 tra Kubrick e Clarke) which, like Cracking the Kube, was self-published. He writes that there are “over a hundred books” on Kubrick’s films, and at least half of these are on Dateline Bangkok’s bookshelves.