Here Comes The Night Time: Thailand’s party islands and seven hour soul mates

Koh Phangan. Flavoured sunset.

By Jay Croucher

My dreams of becoming a professional basketball player died on July 30 1992, the day I entered this world destined to be a 6’1 non-African-American male with B-minus athleticism. The party islands in Southern Thailand are the closest I’ve ever come to being a part of the NBA. These damn places are an athletic endeavour. Walking from the hostel to the night’s first bar I feel like Kobe Bryant strolling out onto Staples Center in Los Angeles – emerging from the locker room, adrenalin pumping, lights dimmed, mainstream hip hop music blaring, ready to perform.

The Top 10 Films of 2015

Ryan Gosling in The Big Short. He doesn’t understand the fuss about The Revenant either. (Img via variety.com)

When did everyone start getting such a hard-on for films where the male protagonist refuses to speak? Drive, you created a monster.

The Revenant isn’t a terrible film. It’s too pretty to be terrible. But there’s only so many tracking shots in the snow, so much unintelligible Tom Hardy speak (how many films do we have to get to before someone pulls Hardy aside and says, ‘Mate, love your work, but you speak like a lion growling under water’), and bullshit, laughably ejaculatory Native American symbolism a man can take. A small bird flying out of Leo’s dead wife’s chest? Really, Alejandro? You’re better than that.

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Found in Translation: Two Weeks in Japan

(Img via addisonrecorder.com)

By Jay Croucher

It’s 9am on Sunday morning in Tokyo, I haven’t slept in 24 hours and I don’t really know where I am.

I’m walking out of a strange hotel and when I get to the street all the surroundings are foreign. The sunlight burns my eyes making me feel like a vampire, which is (almost) ironic because I spent a lot of last night trying to convince girls that I was Taylor Lautner’s cousin.

My phone is dead, my wallet has spat out the 40,000 yen it started the night with, and my ears are still ringing from the Kendrick Lamar tracks played at the club. For some reason my jeans are ripped in half, my general clothing smells like a giant cigarette even though I don’t smoke, and my mouth tastes like an unholy cocktail of yakitori, gin and female.

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