My kid brother spat on me the other day. While I briefly contemplated the curious legalities of thwacking a six-year-old sibling, whether it might be considered actual quote ‘child abuse’ or simply my Flying Spaghetti Monster-given right to fraternal roughhousing, the grubby little germ-merchant pleaded his innocence. He was practicing his beatboxing. Really, where do kids learn this shit?
According to my Cambodian counterfeit Britannica, beats were discovered shortly after early hominids invented the stick and combined it with a primitive impulse to hit stuff. Several billion years later, advanced civilisation finally heralded an end to the cruel exploitation of innocent surfaces with the advent of the digitised box – before almost immediately realising we could do that crazy thang with our own gobs all along.
And while ol’ Chomsky would unlikely be impressed with our innate ability to push nonsensical noises past our lips, beatboxing is undoubtedly cool. Just check cadet Larvelle Jones catching crooks with robot-clicks in the Police Academy heptalogy if you have any doubts. Or maybe you caught Khmer beatboxers Chan and Khy bustin’ out the bleeps and boops at the Lightbox in Kampot recently? Yes, Kampot.
Kampot’s a-happenin’. And for those in the know who really want to get noticed getting down with the cool kids in town, the Kampot & Kep Notice Board for Expats and Locals Facebook page is where it’s at. Like those beats that came before it, the forum mimics the rhythms of real life; here, the quaint, binary coded simulacrum of paradisiacal small-town existence where someone has kindly airbrushed out the inconvenient interaction with backpackers.
It’s the perfect tool for keeping in touch with the community during the siesta hours between pub crawls. And with more than 3,000 members, the board has already attracted the attention of digital blow-ins from afar. Don from elsewhere says: ‘When I get on Facebook I rush to the Kampot & Kep Notice Board like people used to flip to the funny pages as soon as the daily paper arrived. Are all you people as mad as this forum suggests?’ Yes, Don. We are.
Mysterious empty Tabasco-bottle call-outs, edifying intercultural discussions on weed-whackers and whipper-snippers, lost hula-hoop reunions and presumably unrelated anti-paedophile petitions, the bewildering distribution of backgammon-porn, and enough tantalising restaurant food-snaps to make an amateur Jamie Oliver cream his cannoli. I let the latter guide my nutritional intake. Fifibraten mit spätzle on special? Sure, my triglyceride-count could probably do with a kaempferol boost.
But it’s not all sunshine and königsberger-klopse on the KAKNFEAL. There was the one heady thread discussing the merits of Vietnamese visa-waivers and Mick Jagger’s post-70 output that got a tad tetchy. And while it mightn’t be the South-Central of Khmer 440, boy-o, beware of a grumpy riposte from our expert rib-peddling unofficial expat-mayor if you plan on sneaking an advertisement flogging ‘business solutions’ past the administrative censors.
If there is the occasional pause in pleasantries, however, I suspect it’s simply a case of mango madness meeting doolally tap, with any notable spikes in communal keyboard angst attributable to the monsoonal wet-season weather lessening the small-town options of already fuck-all to do besides sit around in a pub and talk about the weather. If I cared enough, I could probably cross-reference the data with Stan, the board’s resident meteorologist who posts the daily rainfall stats and saves me from ever having to open the curtains.
And as with any solid close-knit community when things start to go a little awry, we eventually all lovingly band together again by blaming outsiders like Don. That was until I roughly reached this point of the article, ready to wrap it up with some lyrical waxing on why it all works, when the notice board went into complete meltdown and bickered itself out of existence over the course of a couple days. We now talk to each other in person. Turns out we didn’t need a box to do it all along.