Byline: Robert Starkweather

A kinder, funnier Cambodia

Beyond its temples and macabre tourist attractions, Cambodia is unforgettable for one reason: its people.

In Destination Cambodia, Walter Mason’s light-hearted travel memoir, the Australian author reveals a country unlikely familiar to even the most assimilated cultural warriors. From the obvious to the unbelievable, Mason shares intimate and often humorous tales, all with keen insight into the famously inscrutable natives.

At home in Australia, Mason was for a time involved with a cultish Buddhist sect and his penchant for the spiritually peculiar fuels many of his journeys. An intermittent resident of Vietnam since 1994, Mason – whose previous travel books include Destination Saigon – made his first trip to Cambodia in 1996, succumbing to the Kingdom’s charms almost immediately.

Then a 20-something wanderer with a bent for Eastern spirituality, Mason gravitated toward Phnom Penh’s Buddhist sanctuaries. He helped the monks and students at Wat Koh and Wat Botum practice their English and, in exchange, they gave him the kind of tour of Cambodia that only the young and itinerant ever seem to find.

Mason makes the necessary stops along the way. He checks in at Angkor Wat, the killing fields and most of the travel-guide must-sees. But in Mason’s hands the destinations are all but extraneous; it is the people along his journeys who expose the character of the Kingdom.

Early on, one of the monks asked Mason to join “a quick thing” his pagoda had helped organise. “The casual nature of the invitation, and the fact that when I travel I resolve never to say no to any invitation, caused me to accept, though I had grave misgivings. From experience I knew that official Buddhist events in Asia could be ghastly affairs, with long speeches in languages I did not understand. They were also opportunities for me to make multiple social gaffes. But the monk’s charming and offhand invitation lulled me into thinking it would be a casual affair that I could duck into and out of, so I duly noted it down in my calendar.”

The event was anything but informal. Mason arrived at the Buddhist Institute to find hundreds of monks and a television crew waiting for him to give the event’s main address. Live, on television.

The students at Wat Botum seemed to share a similar sense of humour. They introduced him to the local writers’ association, where he met Suong Mak, among the country’s most recognisable authors from the new generation. Mason was desperate to meet a shaman and, when a friend finally fixed a meeting, Mak agreed to tag along. “Why do Cambodian people believe this nonsense?” Mak asks. “I’m only coming to see what fools you are willing to make of yourselves.”

And so Mason goes, pinballing around the country from shaman to Chinese fortune teller to bull-penis restaurant. He travels in a Mercedes with a Very Important Monk, meets Phnom Penh’s oldest hooker and nearly dies in the Buddhist hells of the cultural village.

At each stop he is greeted with genuine Khmer hospitality: often unpredictable, occasionally unbelievable, but always authentic.

Destination Cambodia, by Walter Mason, is available now at Monument Books priced $18.50.

Pictures in change

In Javier’s Day, Singaporean illustrator Joshua Chiang captures the changing nature of family life inside Asia’s most outsized economic powerhouse.

At the time of her independence in 1965, Singapore looked a lot like Cambodia does today, with tree-lined quays, stilt homes and man-powered rickshaws dotting the streets. The wealthy lived in yellow two-storey colonials with brick walls, wooden floors and tiled roofs. The poor survived as day labourers. A third of the population lived in slums, unemployment clocked 14% and GDP per capita registered less than $3,000.

Over the last five decades, Singapore has grown into the world’s fourth-largest financial centre and built one of the busiest seaports on the planet. Such dramatic growth has also meant profound changes to the Singaporean family.

“At the heart of it, Javier’s Day is about the joys of growing up all over again through the eyes of the youngest member of the family,” says Chiang, who lives in Phnom Penh, of his first self-published illustrated children’s book. “It is also about how children are raised in the modern Singaporean context. We may have moved out of our kampungs long ago, but it still takes an entire village – plus the maid – to raise one child.”

While the Cambodian context still remains firmly rooted in the kampungs, or ‘villages’, in today’s globalised world the Kingdom can’t help but drift toward greater urbanisation. As the economy grows, so too does the country’s middle class. If Singapore in 1965 looked a lot like Cambodia does today, then Cambodia could look a lot like Singapore five decades hence, if not sooner.

Yet as Chiang’s book subtly illustrates, entry into the middle class comes with a price tag attached.

Javier’s Day opens with a portrait of the extended family: daddy, mummy, aunt, uncle, grandmother, grandfather, Javier and the nanny. It takes all of them to keep two-year-old Javier occupied while his parents are away at work.

Javier wakes up to the nanny mopping the living-room floor. He runs in the park with Uncle Joshua and scribbles on the walls.

The people around Javier do typical Asian things: feed him rice porridge for breakfast, burn incense and pray at the spirit house, sit on the kitchen floor and clean vegetables.

Such comfortable middle-class living often requires two incomes, however, and Javier’s mummy and daddy are gone most of the day. They return from work just in time for dinner, and the family convenes around a big fish at the dinner table. After eating, the parents are off again, tiptoeing out the door. Javier cries. grandpa consoles.

Such are the demands of life in the middle class.

Javier’s Day, by Joshua Chiang, will be available from Monument Books soon. Price to be confirmed.

Pictures of change

Joshua Chiang’s self-published children’s book Javier’s Day ponders the evolving lifestyles of Asia’s middle class

…..

In Javier’s Day, Singaporean illustrator Joshua Chiang captures the changing nature of family life inside Asia’s most outsized economic powerhouse.

At the time of her independence in 1965, Singapore looked a lot like Cambodia does today, with tree-lined quays, stilt homes and man-powered rickshaws dotting the streets. The wealthy lived in yellow two-storey colonials with brick walls, wooden floors and tiled roofs. The poor survived as day labourers. A third of the population lived in slums, unemployment clocked 14% and GDP per capita registered less than $3,000.

Over the last five decades, Singapore has grown into the world’s fourth-largest financial centre and built one of the busiest seaports on the planet. Such dramatic growth has also meant profound changes to the Singaporean family.

“At the heart of it, Javier’s Day is about the joys of growing up all over again through the eyes of the youngest member of the family,” says Chiang, who lives in Phnom Penh, of his first self-published illustrated children’s book. “It is also about how children are raised in the modern Singaporean context. We may have moved out of our kampungs long ago, but it still takes an entire village – plus the maid – to raise one child.”

While the Cambodian context still remains firmly rooted in the kampungs, or ‘villages’, in today’s globalised world the Kingdom can’t help but drift toward greater urbanisation. As the economy grows, so too does the country’s middle class. If Singapore in 1965 looked a lot like Cambodia does today, then Cambodia could look a lot like Singapore five decades hence, if not sooner.

Yet as Chiang’s book subtly illustrates, entry into the middle class comes with a price tag attached.

Javier’s Day opens with a portrait of the extended family: daddy, mummy, aunt, uncle, grandmother, grandfather, Javier and the nanny. It takes all of them to keep two-year-old Javier occupied while his parents are away at work.

Javier wakes up to the nanny mopping the living-room floor. He runs in the park with Uncle Joshua and scribbles on the walls.

The people around Javier do typical Asian things: feed him rice porridge for breakfast, burn incense and pray at the spirit house, sit on the kitchen floor and clean vegetables.

Such comfortable middle-class living often requires two incomes, however, and Javier’s mummy and daddy are gone most of the day. They return from work just in time for dinner, and the family convenes around a big fish at the dinner table. After eating, the parents are off again, tiptoeing out the door. Javier cries. Grandpa consoles.

Such are the demands of life in the middle class.

Javier’s Day, by Joshua Chiang, will be available from Monument Books soon. Price to be confirmed.

20th century vinyl: the music of Southeast Asia’s 78rpm era

Obscure record collector David Murray spent five years trawling the dustbins of Southeast Asia in search of music’s rarest vinyl species: the 78rpm. His efforts have been compiled into a four CD box set titled Longing for the Past. Boomkat has the details:

‘Longing For The Past’ surveys 90 kaleidoscopic pieces from 78rpm records recorded between 1905-1966 across Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.  As to be expected, they’re practically all swaddled in a rich patina of fuzz, the inevitable pock-marks of time when you consider many were not properly stored, but the fact they’re here and still sounding so bright and otherworldly should be considered a minor miracle. We’re effectively bearing witness to another world through the smeary windows of an archaic time machine, offering privileged, rare glimpse of the region’s indigenous music and culture before they were ravaged and irrevocably altered by all manner of factors, from war and genocide to the pervasive influence of imperialist cultural policy.

In addition to the 90 tracks, the set also contains a substantial book with pictures from the era and meticulous notes on each song and its instruments. Taken together, the combined work is an immense effort by any standard and an unrivaled contribution to the documented history of Southeast Asian music. That it exists at all is nothing short of amazing. And for less than 50 quid, it’s practically a steal.

The unhappy perils of Phnom Penh roadways

PotholeHarnessing the newfangled power of geolocation, crowdsourcing and other interweb technologies we don’t completely understand, Urban Voices has created — I kid you not — a map of Phnom Penh potholes.

Looking at the final map, it is interesting to note that streets in Daun Penh as well as the newly developed Bassac area seem to be in very good condition with few, if any, potholes. In contrast, streets the areas around Toul Sleng as well as Psar Toul Tom Pung (Russian Market) are in worse condition. Overall, only 12% of the streets surveyed fall into the category ‘very good’. The majority – 34% – of fall into the category ‘fair’. Overall, 61% of the streets surveyed were either ‘fair’, ‘poor’, and ‘very poor’. However, only 6% of the streets surveyed were in very poor condition – this may however reflect the fact that most of the reports we received are from central Phnom Penh.

Undoubtedly, the first goal of UV’s map is to alert the capital’s high-rolling, Lexus-driving, iPhone5s-having residents to the perils of Phnom Penh roadways, lest they spill their Brown coffee. The second is almost certainly a desire to motivate the Ministry of Public Works to get off its collective backside and fix these poor, neglected streets. Because at $4 a mug, spilling your coffee is no joke.

Aphrodisiac salad, 450 million years in the making

Seldom does the great Cambodian-Barang divide appear deeper or more difficult to navigate than at the dining table.

Cambodians eat a lot of weird shit and, if you hang around long enough, eventually someone will insist you eat some weird shit, too.

But native English speakers don’t typically eat alligator. Or monkey. Or crickets or pig brain, either. To most foreign tastes, traditional Khmer cuisine is a minefield of naturally occurring plants and animals wholly lacking in first-world culinary advances like Marmite, Cheez Whiz and other nutritionally devoid, hyper-processed, food-like products. This culinary chasm often makes for strained conversation as perplexed foreigners struggle to understand the appeal of prahok, why someone would want to eat a half-cooked duck foetus, or how a 2,000-year-old fishing culture never learned to fillet.

Misunderstandings go both ways, of course. Locals are unlikely to realise that foreigners prefer their fish without a face and their meat without the bones chopped into tiny pieces. They are unlikely to fully understand the reflexive smiles provoked when they explain to customers, as they do at Andart Rorm, that the name means ‘Dancing Tongue’.

The original Andart Rorm on Street 242 is something of a local seafood institution and the restaurant is well-known for its authentic Cambodian tastes. Its newest shop on Streets 51 and 294 is the restaurant’s attempt to carve into the Western restaurant market.

For newcomers or out-of-towners making their initial forays into Khmer cuisine, Andart Rorm makes a good entry point. Seafood is similar throughout the world, so there are plenty of recognisable dishes to choose from (and some strange ones, too). Portions are large compared to the price and come served in oversized, easy-to-share plates designed to feed three to four people.

The Fried Shrimp With Green Pepper ($8.50) is a standout. Prepared with whole peppercorn stalks and a creamy pepper sauce, the distinctive bite of Kampot green complements the vaguely salty taste of shrimp. The Chinese Spinach And Shrimp ($5), with crunchy, healthy pan-fried stalks, is nearly as good.

For the adventurous, Andart Rorm’s house specialty is the Asian delicacy horseshoe crab, revered for it powers as an aphrodisiac. Known as kapas in the local language, horseshoe crab are not crabs at all but marine arthropods more closely related to spiders or scorpions than crustaceans. They are sometimes called (rather misleadingly) ‘living fossils’ because fossil records exist of such animals, but scientists reject the idea that horseshoe crab stopped evolving 450 million years ago. Today’s species, while similar in appearance, are believed to be far different genetically.

Horseshoe crab are wild, alien-looking creatures with 10 eyes and a large, hard carapace. They contain virtually no edible meat, and nearly all recipes use the eggs of a pregnant female as the core ingredient for salads and other mixed dishes. At Andart Rorm, the signature dish is Special Kapas Egg with Mango Salad ($12).

The small, greenish eggs are mixed with shredded mango and a light assortment of greens, including kafir lime leaves, then drizzled with lime juice and served in the gutted shell of the crab. The eggs are firm and chewy, like dried shrimp. They are rather tasteless, however, and the flavours come from the mango, greens and lime juice. Not unpleasant, the salad wasn’t nearly as satisfying as the shrimp (or as weird).

As for its aphrodisiac powers, the female restaurant staff seemed as horrified to have that conversation as I was to explain the innuendoes involved in dancing tongues. So we stayed silent, leaving the great cultural divide firmly intact.

Andart Rorm, #207 Street 51 & 294.

Girls in the Kun Khmer ring

[gdl_gallery title=”Girls in the Kun Khmer ring” width=”120″ height=”120″ galid=”1325″ ]

Sam Tharoth (red) fought her second professional Kun Khmer fight Sunday Sept. 1 at the Bayon TV Stung Meanchey arena. She lost by decision to Nov Srey Pov. A native of Banteay Meanchey province, Tharoth moved to the capital as a youngster, eventually discovering self-proclaimed Bokator Grandmaster San Kim Sean, whom she studied under for years. The 23-year-old made her professional Kun Khmer debut in 2012, winning by 5th-round knockout.

Dancing tongues

The hunt is on to uncover just what, exactly, this creature is. The Cambodians call it a “kapas,” which sounds like a localisation of carapace. The dish is called “Balang Kas,” and the one pictured here is from Andart Rorm (Dancing Tongue) Restaurant. The animal looks a little bit like an Asian paddle crab, but those are not native to the gulf, where all the seafood served at the restaurant comes from.

UPDATE: Veteran Asia hand Ian Taylor has the answer: Horseshoe crab, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O0lqKc7Ob4

 

El gipsy

It’s not supposed to be this way. Phnom Penh is meant to be a gritty, hellish capital where the streets flood, the electricity flickers and the brass-knuckle politics taint everything.

But just beneath the surface, a burgeoning colony of artists and musicians pays little heed to the temperament of the crowds, and such harsh underdevelopment, for all its pitfalls, proves an irresistible outpost for a certain brand of bohemian in search of less-travelled frontiers.

It is how The Groove bar came into existence, and how guitarist Diego Dimarques came to find himself perched on a barrelhouse stool sipping bottles of Angkor and playing Spanish jazz at the finest music room in Phnom Penh.

Clean-shaven with greying, shoulder-length hair, the 50-ish-year-old guitar player could easily pass for a son of Jose Reyes, the world-famous flamenco guitarist whose five sons – Nicolas, Canut, Paul, Patchai and Andre – comprise a majority of the Gipsy Kings.

“There are rumours that I was part of the band, the one with the white hair,” Dimarques says, dispelling any notion that he might be a long-haired Nicolas Reyes in disguise. “I am not part of their family in the sense that we have no common blood.”

But Dimarques is a fellow traveller on the same circuit, a compadre in heart and spirit, and considers Gipsy Kings co-founder Jalloul ‘Chico’ Bouchikhi both a friend and inspiration. “I met Chico when I was playing a hotel in Paris in 2006 or 2007 and he was there to promote his new album Freedom. I was surprised to see him and I went to him to apologise for not playing his songs very well, but he told me: ‘The more they are played, the less we forget the culture.’ We talked together around a Pastis and he told me there was no problem if people thought I was part of the band!”

Apologies were hardly necessary. As Chico affirmed, Dimarques had the chops worthy of the Gipsy Kings name.

The Groove is a befitting venue for such musicianship. Long, narrow and candle-lit, the space was created by fellow jazz crooners Richard Boisson and Philippe Javelle. Framed black-and-white photographs of famous singers hang from padded, cloth-covered walls. Seating is limited. The band is never more than a few metres away. The room itself is tucked out back of Terraza, the new two-storey Italian place on Street 282 with big windows, heavy wooden furniture and imported Italian nourishment.

Dimarques works the crowd between sets, shaking hands, talking shop. Ask and he will hand over his guitar, a solid-body classical with custom electrics and Savarez stings. “It’s heavy,” he laments, “but it sounds really nice.”

Born in Paris, Dimarques grew up quick and discovered the pleasures of vice while still young.

“I grew up at the foot of Montmartre in Paris, hanging out at the racetrack and playing pinball with my dad in the bistros, checking out the painters in Montmartre,” he remembers. “Then I started going to cabarets to listen to music, to see the magicians, the singers, the women. I started going out pretty early.”

He spent his summers in northern Spain, where his mother’s family lived, and where music found him. “I was playing tunes from Manitas de Plata and Paco de Lucia when I was 15 years old.”

The Gipsy Kings came on the scene in the 1980s, and along with the rest of the country, the band captivated Dimarques too. “In the ’80s, when the Gipsy Kings started to tour and Jobi Joba became famous, I took my guitar and started to play the same music too. This is how I got this Gipsy reputation.”

Dimarques’ style is mellower, more rumba than flamenco, and converges into something that might be described as Spanish lounge music. The result is a sound less danceable, but far more amorous.

If the streets outside are flooded, all the better.

WHO: Diego Dimarques
WHAT: Gipsy and Latin music
WHERE: The Groove, Terrazza, Street 282
WHEN: 9pm August 19 & 21
WHY: The capital’s very own Gipsy King

The holiday is over: Pol Pot, Jello Biafra and the legacy of punk rock music

In April 1974, as the Khmer Rouge fortified its positions surrounding Phnom Penh, Saloth Sar unlikely could have known that 9,000 miles away in New York a former mental patient named Jeffry Ross Hyman was about to change rock music forever.

Hyman was the lanky, 6’6″ front man for a band called the Ramones, and along with three other misfits from Forest Hill, the unknown quartet was about to take the stage at CBGB, a newish little club and restaurant at Bowery and Bleecker Street in the East Village.

For the previous decade, hippies in the United States had been singing about smoked-out utopias where peace reigned and people wore flowers in their hair. Musically, the ’60s era had culminated in a maelstrom of extended-play commercial rock. Songs were often marked by complex orchestration, long guitar solos, multiple time signatures and chrome-plated production values. Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven stood at the pinnacle of the genre, but the list included other epic 1970s anthems such as Hotel California, Free Bird, and Dream On.

The Ramones, by contrast, could barely play their instruments. Jeffry, performing under the stage name Joey Ramone, had zero formal music training. But the Ramones cared little of musical proficiency and when they took the stage at CBGB the night of April 16, they turned up the Marshall stacks to 10 and unleashed a torrent of noise and distortion that would alter the course of music history.

Their impact would not leave Cambodia untouched. For without the Ramones, Eric Boucher and East Bay Ray would have never formed the Dead Kennedys, Boucher would have never taken the stage name Jello Biafra, and Biafra would have never written the second-greatest punk song of all time, Holiday in Cambodia, which permanently consigned Pol Pot and his rag-tag band of communist killers to the annals of punk rock legend.

The way of the savage

For all that Cambodia’s horrors unwittingly gave punk music and the world, the country itself got precious little in return. In the West, Pol Pot and his genocidal politics made the Kingdom song-worthy. In the East, however, few places could prove more inhospitable terrain to punk attitudes than the land of Angkor.

Like most Southeast Asian countries, Cambodia is not just deeply religious and socially conservative; it is defined by an overarching need for order. Such need manifests on many levels, often times in ways outsiders struggle to understand.

Social hierarchy is probably the most visible example. At its foundation, members of society are ranked according to their age, sex and religious standing: the young are expected to defer to the old; women are expected to defer to men; laymen are expected to defer to the pious. Clans and alliances are built around the family, and the individual is subordinate to the group. Yet classification goes further than just influencing interpersonal relationships; it serves as the foundation of an ‘ordered’ society.

In his influential 1980 essay Songs At The Edge Of The Forest, David Chandler explores perceptions of order in three Cambodian folktales. In each story, order is contrasted with the wild. Rice fields and families represent order; forests represent the wild.

“In nineteenth-century Cambodia, when people were always in danger and almost always illiterate, examples of orderliness (such as an elegant ceremony, a design in silk, or a properly chanted poem) were few and far between,” Chandler writes, adding that “to many Cambodians, things, ideas, and people – societies, in fact – were thought to be safer and more authentic when they were ranked and in balance, arranged into the same hierarchical pattern (however ineffectual or unhappy) which they had occupied before. Wildness was to be feared, and so was innovation.”

Chandler termed this approach “backward-looking”; not in an intellectual sense, but in its perspective. “Their social conduct was based on ideas, techniques and phrases which had been passed along through time and space like heirlooms, with the result that people were continually reliving, repeating or ‘restoring’ what was past.”

Community and family hierarchies weren’t just curious social artefacts, they were the threads that bound the past to the present. They weren’t just novel vestiges of the social fabric, they defined it. “Being ‘wild’,” Chandler concluded, “meant having no one to respect.”

Down with the establishment

For many, the idea of punk conjures thoughts of fast music and rough-around-the-edges teens in scuffed leather jackets and Stegosaurus-spiked hairdos. But punk is far more than just music or fashion or drug-addled street hoods kicking over trash cans and hurling four-lettered abuse at the squares (but it’s that, too!). Punk is an ethos, a philosophy of which music and clothing are manifestations of the underlying attitude.

At its heart, punk is a rejection of popular culture, of polite society’s accepted social standards and its homogenous expectations. Punk is “just doing what you felt like you had to do,” said Australian Brett Tollis, guitar player for the local grunge/punk quartet Psychotic Reactions and a veteran of the LA music scene.

Almost immediately, punk became the clique of the disaffected everywhere. “It’s people who feel like they don’t fit in,” Tollis explained. “And they see a whole bunch of other people that don’t quite fit in. And you say, ‘If I am not going to fit in, I am going to go totally the other way. There’s no middle. You just tend toward a group of misfits.”

On the tame side, the punk manifesto glorifies the individual, celebrates uniqueness and dismisses the conventions of the masses. In a sardonic monologue, the character Mark Renton in Danny Boyle’s film Trainspotting frames the attitude with enough cynicism to float the British Navy:

Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves.

And it escalates quickly, from an attitude of extolling uniqueness to one of tearing down the status quo. Punk loathes the establishment, and the more radical punk ethos preaches rebellion and anarchy, corrosion of conformity and, if not a wholesale destruction of the state, something approaching it, because the people wielding power are abusing it and what they need is someone or something to jack-slap them out of their power-drunk stupor.

Few personified such wanton disharmony better than Sex Pistols bass player and punk rock icon Sid Vicious. “Undermine their pompous authority,” he said. “Reject their moral standards, make anarchy and disorder your trademarks. Cause as much chaos and disruption as possible but don’t let them take you alive.”

…..

If honour of the family and respect for the past are the cornerstones of Cambodian culture, punk ideals must look like a cackling Satan riding a demon garuda and shooting flamethrowers over Angkor Wat. Nothing, it seems, could be more anathema to the prim social sensitivities of Cambodian culture. So it’s little surprise that now, 33 years after the release of the Dead Kennedys’ Holiday in Cambodia, punk culture in the Kingdom remains almost non-existent.

Almost.

Three years ago, four 20-something musicians came together and created the country’s first punk rock act, The Anti-fate. More upbeat pop-punk than angry London anarchists, the band is not at all political, but in their own quiet way, they are every bit as anti-establishment as The Clash or The Dead Kennedys.

Chhuth Sen Propey, Anti-fate’s frontman, said the name derived from the band’s stance against Buddhist attitudes on fate and destiny, which, to oversimplify, argue that fate cannot be escaped.

The music of Anti-fate inspired others and in the years since more bands have started playing original music. Chhuth guessed that there are “maybe 30 bands that play their own music,” but “mostly they play rock and metal”.

For cultural reasons the rest have shied away from punk, but the metal scene is flourishing. “Teenagers want something new and cool,” Chhuth said, “but punk is anti-social, anti-government, so they don’t want to do it.”

Politics can be dangerous business in Cambodia. Chhuth’s face goes sour at the mention of the word. It might be tempting to say the country’s current leadership has discouraged the youth from getting involved, but protest music in Cambodia is without precedent. Constituents, too, are expected to defer to their representatives.

Nothing, however, is permanent. Elsewhere in the region, punk has found fertile terrain. The largest and most well-known scene exists in Indonesia, where punk sprouted during the late 1990s – its anger aimed at the oppressive Suharto regime. A band named Marjinal started it all. They dedicated their music to the country’s street kids and sang about corruption and the failures of the government. Their songs immediately found resonance among the country’s disenfranchised youth. Even today, street kids busk Marjinal songs on $5 ukuleles while riding the commuter trains, earning a meagre existence off tips.

The punk scene in Myanmar began even earlier, but under threat from a paranoid-tyrannical government, punks were forced to remain quiet until more recent years. Riding a wave of anger and frustration after the Saffron Revolution, a new wave of punk angst erupted in 2007, led by the band Rebel Riot and its media-savvy front man Kyaw Kyaw. Like icons of the movement in the West, punk in Myanmar seemed to have lived fast and died young. Rebel Riot seldom plays anymore and Kyaw Kyaw now makes a living selling punk paraphernalia and interviews to foreign journalists. In a recent article with the South China Morning Post, the lead singer of a band called Kultur Shock, who goes by the name Scum, lamented the decline. “When we were young, punk was rebellion. Now it’s fucking fashion.”

Such a fate seems unlikely to befall Cambodia, at least any time soon. Punk landed in Myanmar in the early 1990s, in Indonesia not long after. Cambodia is just now getting its first tastes. “Maybe in 10 years it’s gonna be good,” said Chhuth.

Taking the longer view, it’s not hard to see parallels with other countries in the region. The Kingdom grapples with many of the same urban problems as her neighbours and while the number of street kids is unlikely to ever match the population in Indonesia, the ever-deepening chasm between rich and poor continues to grow, corruption and the ‘culture of impunity’ continues to flourish and the government’s apparent indifference to the suffering of its own people continues to outrage. The influence of the Internet, which streams in music, culture and ideas from around the world, cannot be dismissed either. The spigot has been opened, and awash in new views, old attitudes are fading.

It might not yet be time to warm up the flame-throwers, but don’t put them away just yet either.

…..

For now at least, and the immediate future, punk music will likely remain the domain of foreigners. The current crop of expat bands will get together at Sharky Bar on June 8 for the third annual Punk & Disorderly show. The attitude is far less one of rebellion, said Dave Rabie, the club’s music manager, and more one of fun. “They’re playing in the spirit of punk, you know. It’s short. It’s fast. Sometimes it can be a little bit chaotic, sometimes it might not be the best musicians in town, but that’s not what punk is about.” Never has been. “The majority of the people that play Punk ‘n’ Disorderly 3 are doing it for the hell of it,” he said.

What could be more punk than that?