In September and October of last year, I was in Thailand working as an assistant editor on my then-roommate’s film “Journey from the Fall.” As one of the assistant editors, I was responsible for supervising the telecine sessions (the process of transferring the image captured on film negative to videotape). The telecine sessions were taking place in Bangkok while the rest of the production took place in a country-side province - Nakon Nayok . My memory wants to tell that the two places were 2-3 hours away from each other. For two weeks in the beginning of the shoot I was shuttling back and forth between the two places, troubleshooting all the technical issues (NTSC vs PAL) at the telecine house (where only 3 people spoke English) and getting yelled out by both the director and DP becasue the film wasn’t dark enough (eventually it looked like The Godfather pt 2). And the sessions always happened after midnight because the producer didn’t bother to schedule in advance.

The time I spent away from set ultimately alienated me from the rest of the crew but it also casted me as the lucky guy who got to go to Bangkok daily. While the telecine house did serve alcohol (and fresh muffins) during our sessions, there were only a few times when I went ahead of schedule and got to explore the city with one of the translators, a former film student who spoke decent English. I remember now the clubs, the late night meals, the long quiet van ride back to the resort reading Houellebeq’s “Platform,” and how I quietly crawled back into the bed as to not wake my then-girlfriend, who was working as an accountant on the film.

One night I was asked to go Bangkok an extra four hours early as I needed to drop off a can of negative to be developed. I had to go by myself as the translator had other transportation issues to take care of, and for whatever reason the can of negative had to be developed and processed ahead of the scheduled telecine session. I wasn’t going to complain.

After dropping off the negative at the lab, I asked the driver to take me to one of the more popular night markets – Silom. My translator had taken me here a week prior and it was the kind of place where you could get a very nice knock-off Bathing Ape t-shirt for 5 bucks and Jay-Z’s “Black Album” for 3 bucks. The energy of the market was always inspiring, though I kept mostly to myself the whole time I was wandering around, I didn’t bother looking for other English speaking tourists, nor did I bother to indulge in any of the flirtations that were thrown at me (and this happened on many occasions, but this is another blog entry). I wound up walking off the safe track/commerce side of the market into the more seedy side, where club promoters were throwing leaflets at me, asking if I was interested in threesomes or teenage girls. The clubs were pumping American music and the streets were lined with Thai girls and sweaty European men. In one of the more surreal moments of my life I remember grabbing a drink at an outside bar that was blaring REM’s “Daysleeper,” as I watched the pretty parade go by.

Time was winding down and I soon had to go back to the telecine house. On the way back to the cab rank, I stopped by a CD stand. I knew what I was looking for but really doubted that the Thai’s would have it. The cd’s were organized alphabetically but in layers on top of each other, so the Jay-Z album may be hidden underneath the Jamiroquai album, which made browsing even more difficult. On a whim I lifted the John Lennon album to ultimately find what I was looking for - The Libertine’s second-self-titled album, which was released only a week before in the UK.

By the time I was in Thailand the band had been all over the English papers in light of Pete Doherty’s jail time and drug abuse. Supposedly at the time I was in Bangkok, Pete had fled a Thai monastery, Wat Thambrakok, where he was trying to kick his heroin habit. He retreated to a Bangkok hotel where he paid the bellboys to buy him heroin and eventually escaped by sneaking out in a laundry basket. I had burned the Libertines’ first album, Up The Bracket, off of my brother a few months before and it was one of the few albums that I had put on my then girlfriend’s laptop. The online reviews of the new record were very favorable, so I was eager to get my hands on it.

So back at the telecine session I had the producer play the cd in a small stereo system that was independent of the machines we were using. For 3 hours I let it play on a loop while we went through our session. Those 3 hours would become one of those transforming musical experiences – like the time I saw Suede perform “Metal Mickey” on Leno or the time in high school when I rode my bike to the local used cd store to find a promotional advanced copy of Pulp’s “Different Class.” I can remember the goosebumps when the chorus of “Can’t Stand Me Now” kicked in - If you wanna try, if you wanna try, there’s no worse you could do . . . I know you lie, I know you lie, I’m still in love with you . . . .

“Can’t Stand Me Now” would become my single of the year (2004) and thus began my strange celebrity fascination with Pete Doherty (other celeb fascinations include Winona Ryder, Jarvis Cocker and coincidentally Kate Moss, a 2 for 1 deal ha ha ha). It’s easy to slag Doherty off as a junkie who became famous (state-side at least) by dating the world’s most famous supermodel, but listening to those first 2 Libertines albums as well as the excellent “For Lovers” which he did as “Wolfman,” you can definitely sense what Hedi Slimane called “a really exciting time in punk rock.”

Anyways, the point of the story is that I received the new Babyshambles album, “Down in Albion,” in the mail today and after listening to it, I was transported back to one of the happiest times in my life.

Good music does that to you sometimes.

(p.s. we’ll always have Bangkok . . . .)

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Postscript - In the middle of the production we moved our base to Chantaburi, a more industrialized area compared to Nakon Nayok. The hotel where we stayed had a stereo system that broadcasted in the elvators and outside hallways. I had developed quite the repoire with the hotel staff and to make a long story short - if you’re ever at the Caribou Highland Hotel in Chantaburi and you hear “Can’t Stand Me Now” playing in the elevators - you know who to thank.