Festival Opening

The opening of the Festival on Sunday was awesome. After hours of mounting prints, I made my way to Three Kings Monument on the back of a DAA teammate’s motorbike. 

A lot of people showed up.

Champ from DAA was DJing but he took a break to let a bucket drummer to perform. I wandered around and helped with random stuff for a while.

Champ spinning some fresh beats.

Bucket drummer.

I was talking with a few DAA folks when someone came up and asked if any of us played the drums. I admitted that I sort of played the drums and I was invited to play with the bucket drummer, who was now playing the acoustic guitar. I made my way to the area he was playing at which was in front of a bunch of plastic chairs we had set up. The drummer was sitting on a chair next to the most elaborate makeshift drumset I have ever encountered. The hi-hat was made of layers of cut tin cans and there was a somewhat-functional kickdrum beater made of scrap wood, inner tubes, and bottle caps. I sat down at the drumset and he immediately launched into “Hotel California.” I spent the next hour or so playing along with him to such modern hits as “Achy Breaky Heart,” “Imagine,” and the song every Thai live musician I have seen has played: “Country Roads.” We had an audience of over a hundred people dancing and singing along. It was fun but I haven’t drummed for that amount of time for years so it was kind of exhausting.

There are a couple seconds of me drumming in this video by DAA team member Jayna Milan:

After the event ended, we loaded all the gear into a pickup truck and onto the backs of a number of people’s motorbikes and bicycles. I got a ride on someone’s motorbike to the North Gate Jazz Co-op. There was a band there playing pseudo-jazz covers of songs like “Royals” and “Let it Be.” It was fun. After a while, I got a ride back to DAA and walked the ten or so minutes to Non’s apartment.