Live Rock n Roll Once Again!

As Led Zeppelin famously observed:

“It's been a long time since I Rock and Rolled, . . . 

"It's been a long time, been a long time,
Been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time.
Yes it has.” 

Oh, Yeah!  The Rock Pub is finally open again!  I attended the first opening night gig there on 2 July.  As I was the first customer in the door to this long-delayed re-opening gig, proprietor Luke Tao took my photo and posted it on the Facebook page of The Rock Pub, Bangkok’s House of Rock, for 2 July.  Jimmy Revolt played the song they know I like, “Rock and Roll” (above).  I attended again on 9 July and Mundee played Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”; and because I’ve always felt like an immigrant – an eternal wandering exile – it thrilled me to the core:  “Valhalla, I am coming!” 

In the cinema, I saw Mr. Jones (2019), an outstanding low-budget biopic depicting the true story of journalist Gareth Jones discovering the massive horror of the man-made famine/ genocide of millions of Ukrainians/ Russians in the early 1930s by official policy of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.  Integral to this history is how the genocide was systematically covered up by the New York Times man-in-Moscow, Walter Duranty, the apologist for Stalin.  Duranty’s lies persuaded Western governments (e.g., FDR) to think that Marxian socialism was benign.  To be humane, this film should be more widely known. 

Theaters and pubs have strict social distancing.  Mass transit now is back to normal while masks are still mandatory – yet I found traditional rush hour to be far from the crowded mad crush of the past, maybe because all incoming tourism has long been shut off.  Come to think of it, now I see that I am almost the only farang on the trains, an immigrant, in exile. 

-Zenwind. 

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