I’ve been buying these notebooks for my journals and this has got to be the best one yet:

I Drink I Smoke But I'm Not Fuck Up

I also bought this one:

To Find My Self Interesting Place So Then I Can Fly With You

I went crazy buying notebooks like these when I first got to Chiang Mai, because I thought I’d never see anything like them again.

Turns out they’re everywhere.

There are generic ones that seem to be output by a factory somewhere, and there are ones made by hand, which you can only get from the stall you’ve found on whichever walking-street market you’re at.

There are even entire shops dedicated to selling notebooks. Well, one, but can you imagine an art-notebook shop surviving anywhere else?

That said, this is a town where a Thai guy makes a living selling postcards of himself dressed as Jack Sparrow. Three months of the year he’s in Pai (during the high season: now), and the rest of the year his shop is in Khao San Road, Bangkok.

The economy seems to work differently here, where artists are able to make a living by selling their work in a shop (or at a stall) on a bustling walking street. These walking streets seem to be at the centre of the economy of some cities.

Chiang Mai’s Sunday Night Walking Street Market takes up nearly a quarter of the old city: about five or six blocks, crammed with stalls and buskers and people crowding in between.

Chiang Mai does this so well they are applying to be recognised as a UNESCO Creative City, much like Melbourne is a UNESCO City of Literature. Actually it seems City of Literature is one category in the Creative Cities Network.

Well, I reckon Chiang Mai should be the UNESCO City of Awesome Sauce Notebooks.

In contrast to the markets of Chiang Mai and Pai, consider the markets that try to get up now and then in Adelaide. In the last two years I was there, the Sunday Rundle Street Market was closed down and the stall holders had to regroup in one of the squares, well away from anything passing as foot-traffic. The rent was too high in Rundle Street, though the trade was insufficient.

And don’t say the word ‘bulldozer’ in front of anyone who used to frequent the Orange Lane Markets in Norwood.

What can we do about this? How do we structure an economy around creativity, so that any and all varieties of labourious industry are merely a means to the end of indulging and revelling in art?