Free Arisman!

The Bangkok Post reports that Thai pop star and "anti-government hardcore member" Arisman Pongruangrong has been arrested Wednesday night. Perhaps not coincidentally, the two Arisman music videos linked to in past entries of this blog were removed today, ostensibly for violation of copyright. You may remember Arisman from his comical/daring escape from the third story of a luxury hotel in April when police pursued him in reprisal for the Redshirts attack on parliament.



Arisman's redshirts made an even more stylish exit from Ratchaprasong, Bangkok's downtown shopping district, by burning it to the ground. Predictably, Western media portrayed this tactical retreat as spontaneous mob violence. The New York Times seems to have forgotten the very words it reported:

The [occupied] area is home to Central World, the second largest shopping complex in Southeast Asia, and to the Grand Hyatt, the Four Seasonsand other luxury hotels. “If they use force to disperse us, we will flatten the entire neighborhood,” said Jatuporn Prompan, one of the protest leaders.

"So great was his narcissism, Thai pop star Arisman Pongruanrong played every role in his elaborate narrative music videos."
- A&E Biography

"Redshirts redblood, redshits redcud!" -Joe Biden

"I won't leave Bangkok till the king renounces me!" - Jimmy Carter

1:06 AM me: "don't you fucking cross this line or i'll burn down this huge disgusting mall!"
1:07 AM Pat: hah this is my dream

None of what you have said makes sense because it is all too true

Summer living,
tires a'spinning,
Universal Unreason
rides

to the tune
of that old standard
"Bangkok! Bangkok!
Bangkok on the bongos!
Set the Central World on fire!"

- Arisman Pongruanrong

Six Monsters in Search of a Destroyer

"I will avenge the sans-culottes!" - George Soros

"Mr. Céline, how do you feel about the fact that your three anti-semitic novels haven't been translated into English?"
"Horrible!"

"O Rambo, what is the guiding wisdom of our days?"
"Everything is permissible!"

"Sr. Bolaño, why are you crying?"
"I haven't drunk one of these since '73."

"What about the drugs, Anita?"
"That's just how it went down, Bryant!"
-Anita O'day, Today Show, 1991

"Tanigaki sang like a bird!" - Yukio Hatoyama, covered in blood

"Katherine Heigl: is that what young women want to be today? Is that what men want? I don't get it." - Ruth Joan Bader Ginsburg

"How beautifully the men grieve in this country, weeping openly and without shame!" - Wen Jiabao

"I will fight the panther in the Octagon!" - Barack Obama

"If our form of government carries with it a certain inequality of fortune, this is justifiable in order that as a rule the administration of public affairs may be entrusted to those who are most able to give them their whole time, but not, as some maintain, in order that the rich may always be put first. On the contrary, it is of importance that an opposite choice should occasionally teach the people that the deserts of men offer claims to pre-eminence more important than those of riches." - Arisman Pongruanrong

"I applaud Arisman's leadership of the People, but I have always had a certain distaste for his art. Why, in his music videos, all these women being yanked about by the elbow? So many of his songs are about wanting to save his love, but who is he to be their savior? There is something paternalistic in his sense of Romance, pathos subtended by inequality. I would never treat my Lydia like that."
- Thaksin Shinawatra

"You don't know what it costs to look this cheap." - Warren Buffet