Last night was possibly the most bizarre night of my life. The story about the night of March 29, 2007 is one I will probably never tell and it was condensed into a space of three hours from midnight until around 3 a.m. Suffice to say, it was not a pleasant experience, but it was [...]

What a sad day Thursdays are sometimes. Bill Cosby is dead; apparently he died less than an hour ago. I grew up watching him on TV; my first vinyl was (I think) an LP of him telling stories, and what great stories they were; he was the star of Ghost Dad, a movie that was [...]

Marcus Intalex (UK drum ‘n’ bass producer) is a self-confessed grumpy old git, but he seemed to hit the nail on the head recently when he said that in years gone by we would purchase a CD, listen to it incessantly, and then save up enough money to buy a new one. Now we download [...]

I was walking past Central World Plaza today and saw there was a bit of commotion, a large group of people, a few musical rhythms here and there; but what could it be for? I figured it was a press conference or a mini-concert, and then to my horror I made out the words ‘Fashion [...]

It’s rare that you meet anyone with your name, but I do remember there being three of four people named Steve Smith in my secondary school. With the advent of Google and Yahoo you can now find just about anything, so I thought I’d find out what the other Matt Crooks in the world have [...]

I have had this TV for the best part of a year now. I never use it. I don’t have cable or anything, and I use my laptop for watching DVDs or downloads. It’s a JVC, fairly big, and does all the usual TV things. I’ve only ever turned it on twice: Once when the [...]

This has come as an absolute shock. I’m not really sure where to begin with it all. Basically I’ve been put into a position whereby I feel I need to defend myself. This saddens me because I should never succumb to the pressure of a reader’s outbursts. I get a lot of e-mails; sometimes they [...]

Without the media there would be fewer opportunities to bear witness to the depths that human beings can sink to. A movie or a television show is just an idea, and although we can misrecognise the idea as real, it lacks certain elements of relevance. Perhaps this is why the words “Inspired by true events” [...]

Of all the faces in Thailand, Mum Jokmok’s must surely be the most brilliant. It’s rare that a face can portray so many different emotions, and rarer still that a face can instill those same feelings in an audience. If there was ever to be done a great study of magnificent faces, one would hope [...]

They come, they get naked, they run around the dessert for eight days just for the hell of it, and then they burn a 40 foot effigy of a man. No, it’s not a David Lynch movie. And no, they aren’t insane. This is Burning Man, the annual art festival that most people can neither [...]

Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable. After the drama, the panic, the fear, the indifference, the finger pointing, the accusations, the insinuations, the allusions, the half-truths: after all that, the Bangkok Post this morning broke a story suggesting that Southern separatists were behind the New Year’s Eve bombings.
The police team investigating the New Year bombings in Bangkok and [...]

This comes from Jean Baudrillard. I had to laugh for a few minutes when I read it. He can be very funny with his remarks sometimes.
The carbon gas produced by all the Winter tourist industries is contributing to the warming of the atmosphere, which is bringing milder Winters and, as a result, an absence of [...]

I was on my way home in a taxi tonight when a curious thing happened: I thought about my father. There was a drunk man, in his forties, slightly fat around the waist, staggering along the pavement. The taxi was stationary, waiting for a green light. I watched the man intently. He swayed uneasily, walking [...]

Moon lay asleep, naked on her bed. Her clothes were strewn across the room haphazardly. A sheet loosely covered her legs up to her lower back. I was half asleep on the floor when I noticed that she had started to stir. Her head began to move as if she was preparing to reenter the [...]