Features – Page 10

Mak Therng: And justice for all

Stolen wives, Machiavellian princes and a lesson in morals for the ruling elite

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From the skin of the giant skor drum comes a thunderous tribal beat. Palms slap rhythmically against synthetic hide; now fast, now slow, now staccato. This Morse code of sorts, emanating from the impenetrable darkness of the theatre’s right wing, coaxes into life the crouched figures occupying centre stage. Each has been teased, squeezed and ultimately stitched right into the most elaborate of costumes, their heads bowed before an expectant, near-silent audience.

Prostrate on a midnight-blue carpet, six heavily rouged young women with raven tresses tumbling almost to their waists begin to snake their wrists in time with the pounding of the drums. A chorus of Cambodian voices floats up, over rapt heads and out into the starry night air among the leafy grounds of the National Museum. Tailored swathes of coloured silk rise and fall like a fabric wave, the women’s bodies twisting and turning in front of a crimson backdrop.

Here, on the gold-trimmed all-weather stage built quite accidentally by Cambodian Living Arts to house its Plae Plakaa (‘Fruitful’) performances, ancient history is repeating itself – only this time, with one very notable difference. While the kohl-rimmed eyes peering out from beneath gilded headdresses may belong to characters from a time-honoured operatic form, the central message of this otherwise traditional show has the socially conscious modern viewer very much in its crosshairs.

Mak Therng, one of 20 traditional Khmer operas known collectively as yike (pronounced ‘yee-kay’), sounds at first not unlike the basic plot of many a Western soap opera/Shakespearean play: girl loves boy; girl gets stolen by another boy; original boy attempts to reclaim girl; something goes horribly, horribly wrong. In fact, and particularly in CLA’s interpretation, it’s a brilliant piece of social critique examining a) how power corrupts, and b) Everyman’s oft-tricky pursuit of justice.

The precise history of the yike genre depends entirely on who you ask. Some scholars say the opera, which involves singing, dancing, acting and drumming, originated in the eighth century. Others claim it dates back even further, to the fifth-century Cham Empire. The Cambridge Guide To Theatre, edited by Martin Banham, contains the following entry: ‘Yike developed in response to tours by Malay bangsawan troupes in the late 19th century. The art also parallels likay of Thailand in its mixture of classical and modern features. The introduction of wing-and-drop scenery, the rough approximation of classical dance used for entrances and exits, the humorous burlesques of classical legends and the introduction of new plots coupled with witty improvisation by performers helped yike gain wide popularity among the populace. Performances were even staged at court.’

Ask CLA’s Marion Gommard, perched on a stone bench 20 metres from the stage and struggling to make herself heard above the drums, and she answers thus: “We lost a lot of information about its creation; there are different stories about how yike was created. Some researchers believe it was created by the Cham during the Angkorian period and when they fought against the Khmer, the Khmer took that from them and made their own version. Another version of the story is that a Khmer king from that time made it and another says it comes from an Indonesian art form practiced by people on islands and in boats, speaking what is now a lost language.

“In every yike performance you have an introduction piece. In a lot of traditional Cambodian art forms you have to pay respect to the ancestors so that the spirits don’t cause any problems during the performance and everything goes smoothly. You have that in yike as well; it’s called [says something indecipherable] in that original language – they kept the word, but we’re not quite sure of the exact meaning! So we have these different theories that we can put together to find the history of yike, but it’s still quite unsure. It started in the 12th or 13th century and involves acting, theatre, singing, a lot of drumming. We could actually call it opera, a kind of musical theatre. It’s very traditional, very ancient.

“This one is called Mak Therng, which is the name of the hero. It’s an ancient folk tale. Originally it wasn’t part of the yike repertoire, but in the early 1970s it was adapted. In 2011 we had the idea to remake it again, so we invited American director Robert McQueen – a well known dramaturge – to work with our teacher, Uy Ladavan, and the troupe to make an improved theatre performance.

“It’s a social piece, really. Basically the story is that Mak Therng – the hero – is quite old, but has a younger wife. Very nice! [Laughs] They’re very much in love with each other, but then one day the prince comes in and he finds her very nice so he kidnaps her and brings her to the royal palace. The piece follows Mak Therng’s quest to take her back: it’s a social quest for justice. He goes in front of the king and asks for justice. It’s interesting because the original ending of the story is different than ours. The original end was the king saying ‘No’ and Mak Therng’s wife then kills herself because her reputation has been tarnished: the prince has already had his way with her.”

So why tamper with the end of such a time-honoured tale? At a workshop staged by CLA during the early stages of the artistic process, a conversation was had about what message the troupe – many of whom come from The White Building, the capital’s most famous artistic community – wanted to give people about women in society. Says Marion: “Uy Ladavan, the show’s director, told me she wanted to change the ending because she wanted to make people feel that justice is possible. The king can say ‘Yes.’”

The story as told by Ladavan, noted at the Anachak Dara awards (the Cambodian Oscars) for her script-writing and dramaturgy, is deliberately different than the version taught to her more than 40 years ago. In the original, the king takes no action against his wayward son, with tragic results. In Ladavan’s interpretation of Mak Therng, the ending has been changed: the king acknowledges his son’s crime and duly sentences him, a demonstration to modern audiences that fairness is not out of reach and justice can always be brought, whether in family, at work, or in civil society.

“When I was young, I saw yike performances directed by a very well known yike teacher, Grandfather Khy,” says Ladavan, who began studying the art form in 1972. “The first time I saw the performance, I fell in love! I registered to learn yike opera with the Royal University of Fine Arts under Grandfather Khy. I’m in love with yike because it’s one of the oldest among the 20 kinds of Cambodian opera. In yike, the music sounds very nice and also the way the actors dance is very soft and interesting. The music makes the characters seem not so cruel.”

Ladavan acknowledges theatrical traditions by keeping the set as simple as possible – a throwback to the past, when operas were performed on bare ground. In a video clip on CLA’s website, celebrated yike master Khy Mom, born of a famous pre-war opera family, describes a typical scenario: “My father and my grandfather were yike performers. In the past they performed on the ground. They just put mats down and there was no electricity so they burned wooden torches or lamps to play. I saw them and I loved it. My father was teaching them, so I asked him to teach me too. I love it because it is inherited from our ancestors and I am afraid of losing it. That’s why I am trying to persuade the young generation to try hard to keep it going so that it won’t be lost.”

And what of today’s young cast? “Some of our dancers come to us because their parents want them to and think it would be a good idea for them to be trained in a classical art form,” says Frances, also of CLA. “Some people come because they’ve seen it on TV or they know friends who are doing it and they’re keen to learn too. One of my favourite students grew up in the provinces and while he was tending his water buffalo he would hear people singing yike songs and he learned to love it. There are some terribly romantic stories like that.

“The subtext of this play is really, really accessible to audiences. The first time we went to watch the troupe practice at a school in front of regular classes, they were just blown away. At that point we didn’t have any subtitles and one of our questions had been would foreign audiences who didn’t speak Khmer actually get the performance? It’s so easy, even without subtitles, to follow the plot. A lot of Cambodians cry at it. We had one staff member who I caught running out and I thought what’s happened? She was in floods of tears and just couldn’t watch any more. It’s very powerful.”

Her words are echoed immediately by Ladavan, now occupying Marion’s space on the stone bench. “The story of Mak Therng plays a very important role in Cambodian society because the purpose is to educate people to love justice, to have high morals in society, to be good and to stand up for their rights. A lot of the artists in Cambodia have to be very careful about following political trends because of the pressure applied by high-ranking officials when actors represent the people in society. In traditional stories, the king is wrong, but he punishes innocent people. We changed the ending to show society that, in the story, the prince has to take responsibility for his actions. The king and the prince both represent people in power, the ruling elite. There are two main messages: one is that innocent people should stand strong and fight for justice. The other is that people in positions of power should take responsibility for their actions.”

CLA’s new season, which marks the organisation’s 15th year, is now open 7pm Monday to Saturday at The National Museum. Mak Therng is staged on Tuesdays and Fridays; Children of Bassac dance shows are held on Mondays and Thursdays; Passage Of Life, a journey from birth to death, is staged on Wednesdays and Saturdays (details at cambodianlivingarts.com).

WHO: Cambodian Living Arts
WHAT: Plae Plakaa performances
WHERE: The National Museum, Street 178
WHEN: 7pm Monday to Saturday
WHY: Ancient wisdom for a modern world

Surfing into a new age of sharing

‘We envision a world where everyone can explore and create meaningful connections with the people and places they encounter. Building meaningful connections across cultures enables us to respond to diversity with curiosity, appreciation and respect. The appreciation of diversity spreads tolerance and creates a global community’ – Handwritten sign at Couchsurfing.com headquarters in San Francisco

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Talk to a stranger: put together, perhaps the four most terrifying words on the planet. In a world where Commerce is king, meaningful human connections are going the way of the dodo. Dirty cash and our incessant craving for the stuff have all but snuffed out the spirit of pre-monetary cultures, in which those who gave the most to their fellow man were revered rather than those whose garage housed the largest Lexus. But with capitalist economies collapsing around the world, a brave new model is rising from the rubble – and it’s doing so, right here, among the cushions of your very own sofa (that’s ‘couch’ to our American friends).

Once upon a time, 2001 to be exact, the ever-affable blue-eyed Dutchman behind The Flicks Community Movie Houses in Phnom Penh wasn’t known as the godfather of couch surfing. Global media had yet to brand him ‘The world’s biggest freeloader’ (he still prefers ‘economic refugee’) and the concept of social networking so entrenched in Facebook, Twitter and YouTube hadn’t even been invented. The horror!

Ramon Stoppelenburg, then a journalism student in his mid-20s, wanted to travel the world. There was only one catch: his wallet was so empty it echoed. Enter the blossoming technology we now know as The Almighty Internet. Letmestayforaday.com was Ramon’s domain. His mission: to boldly go where no man (or woman) had gone before and traverse the globe for free, simply by hopping – based on invitations he received online – from sofa to sofa.

Wired.com was the first to pick the story up from the Dutch press. Before you could say ‘Web 2.0’, he was fielding interview requests from media in every language from Portuguese to Hebrew. “BOOM! It exploded! I’m at my house with my friends and my phone rings. ‘Ramon, there’s a Brazilian radio station on the phone.’ OK. Hello? No, my Spanish not so good… People could invite me through the website. ‘Here’s my address. Yes, you can stay.’ I got all these invitations: 4,000 from 72 countries. That was in about two to three months. Half an hour later I got another phone call: Nagoya FM in Tokyo. My friends were looking at me like ‘What the fuck is going on here?!’ That’s the way the internet works! It’s about people connecting.

“I left my student house in the Netherlands, followed by two or three camera crews from Dutch TV. My mum was there: ‘Here’s a packed lunch!’ They zoomed in on my mum until she started to cry and that second was, of course, broadcast. ‘I just hope nothing happens to him because the world is scary and dangerous.’ That was my cue to say: ‘I want to prove that people aren’t scary and dangerous. If you want to think that way, please stay inside and turn on your TV.’”

By December 2001, the Guardian and Sunday Times newspapers in the UK had declared him Internet Personality of the Year. Two years and 10,000 new friends later, Ramon – who features in One Couch At A Time, perhaps the most uplifting documentary you’ll ever see, which is screening at The Flicks this week – had become the poster boy for what academics and lefties now loftily refer to as the ‘sharing economy’. Put bluntly, your money’s no good here. The currency sharing economists exchange is, by comparison, priceless.

One Couch At A Time might, to the uninitiated, sound like 90 minutes of stinking hippies splayed out on strangers’ soft furnishings, but although wild and woolly types do make the odd appearance, the actual premise of the film runs far deeper. It’s above all a philosophical one, examining the practical realities of an alternative ‘pay-it-forward’ economy. Even the documentary itself was crowd-funded: filmmaker Alexandra Liss, self-declared “loudmouth San Franciscan”, pitched the idea on kickstart.com, where 165 backers pledged almost $300 more than her $7,700 goal.

Six continents, 21 countries and dozens of life-changing couch-surfer experiences later, Alexandra has thoroughly dissected the question ‘What would you be willing to share with a stranger?’ The answer, says Ramon, can be surprising (The Flicks was also crowd funded). “I travelled through 18 countries for two years and did not spend a penny. I think I’ve met over 10,000 people. You shake hands with so many people when you’re travelling. I stayed with 800 people in their homes; I had about 800 free breakfasts and dinners. People take you out almost every day. Sometimes it was fun to find myself with a family who said ‘We’re going to stay in and watch DVDs tonight.’ Oh, YES!

“My first destination was a town called Hilversum, the broadcasting capital in the centre of the Netherlands, where a radio DJ had invited me over. He had a night show, so I was sleeping in his studio in return for talking on air about what I was doing. He had a stretcher and mattress and a sleeping bag in his studio. I hardly slept! A week later I was in Belgium and a week after that I was in Paris. I stayed with one French student and they said: ‘So, you’re staying the night?’ Yes, you invited me. ‘I don’t remember; I lost the form I filled in.’ She had no clue what she had to do with me. We’re basically sitting in front of each other. ‘And now?’ Do whatever you want to do. I’m your guest! ‘I’ve never done this before. Let’s go for a drink!’ Perfect!

“In return for the hospitality – it wasn’t just being the Dutch global freeloader, which the media tried to make of me – I wrote daily reports about how I got there; the people I stayed with; their mentality; their way of life; what they fed me and what we did in the evening and maybe political discussions. Three thousand words per day. If I didn’t write a report one day and there was no update, I would get 500 emails: ‘I’m here at my office, travelling along with you. Where’s your update?! Don’t you get lazy!’ When I was in Amsterdam and had my couch available I was getting 50 requests to stay per day. Of course you get the freeloaders who just want a night out, but you also get the ones who are really interested in who you are and how you live in your city. ‘Can I stay for five days? Is that too much to ask?’ Hell yeah! Party on!”

All very well, but to borrow from what Alexandra notes is always the first question she gets asked, what if your host is – GASP! – an axe murderer? CouchSurfing International founder Casey Fenton insists all you need is trust. “When you enter a sharing economy or a pay-it-forward system, you’re able to let your guard down a little bit more. ‘I’m just going to trust that this is all going to work out. I’m going to pay into this system and this system will provide. These people will provide, these people who I believe in and who I believe also believe in me.’”

And in reality? “I never had scary moments; I was more amazed by people,” says Ramon. “In Norway, someone opened the door of the apartment I was due to stay in. Are you my host? ‘No, I’m his assistant. Follow me.’ We go in and there’s this guy in a wheelchair. He can’t move. He has a disease that’s killing his nerves and he talks with a tube in his mouth. He’s on the internet every day. I was his window onto the world. He wants to know my story and he tells me his story and I’m just amazed by the fact I’m invited by all kinds of people. This guy has nothing: he lives on benefits and has an assistant otherwise he would just die. He showed me how he could use the internet using a tube in his mouth and a touch screen. He’s connected.”

Ultimately, isn’t this precisely what this new ‘age of sharing’ is about: meaningful human connections? “Yes! No scary parts. I stayed with gay people, with disabled people, people who have absolutely nothing and are struggling to survive. The next day I’m staying with really rich people. On the other side of their gates are the South African slums, where 1,500 people live in a square kilometre. It gives me insight into so many personalities. About 25 per country are my Facebook friends and about five per country I’m really close with. They tell me their business ventures; they ask me for advice; I ask them for advice. Because I now know lawyers, I know publishers; I have a network. Oh, you need somebody? I know a guy in India who can help you. Connect that person up with someone else who’s a copywriter and two years later I get a message: they’re married!”

But couldn’t this be dismissed as ‘just a bunch of tree-hugging hippy crap’? Time magazine certainly doesn’t think so. In December 2006, it bestowed the esteemed title of Person of the Year not on any world economist, politician or captain of industry. For the first time in the magazine’s now 90-year history, its editors announced that ‘You – Yes, YOU – are Time’s Person of the Year’.

‘Look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men,’ they gushed. ‘It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes. The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It’s not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.’

Sharing economy expert Rachel Botsman, author of What’s Mine Is Yours, concurs. In One Couch At A Time, she says to Alexandra: “I don’t think you can underestimate how big a role the digital revolution has played in accelerating collaborative consumption. Not just in terms of creating the efficiency and trust that make it work, but actually fundamentally changing people’s behaviours around sharing.”

Author/philosopher Charles Eisenstein, also interviewed, takes things a step further: “In a gift economy, you need each other. You can’t just pay somebody else to do it. We live today in a world – in the West at least – where for many people our quantifiable needs and fulfilled and over fulfilled, but we’re still starving for something. And we’re starving for something that can’t be measured. I want something personal. I want to be fed; I want real relationships; I want authenticity; I want intimacy. You can pay someone to fake it, but you can’t pay someone to actually care… In pre-monetary cultures, very often status would go to the person who gave the most to the community, rather than the person who had or controlled the most… Gifts create ties and you can even say community depends on gifts. If there are no gifts then there’s no community.”

“I think we’re heading towards a new generation of people,” says Ramon. “Yes, you can order anything online at the big corporations, but people are going to use the internet for connecting with other people. ‘I need help!’ You put that on Facebook and 50 comments will say: ‘How can I help you?’ There you go! The technology made it possible to instantly connect with someone on the other side of the world. It used to be a phone with a dial. If you didn’t have that person’s phone number, you had to write a letter. The internet made it possible to connect and my project made a lot of people realise that the internet isn’t about creating virtual malls, where you can walk through every store ever conceived. When the bubble burst in 2001, people realised it’s about the customers who walk through these virtual malls. They have opinions; they have information; they talk to each other: a connection. BOOM! That’s how a social network is created.

“With the internet, you’re never alone any more. You can’t just die alone. Putting older people in nursing homes? That won’t be accepted when we’re old. We’ll be taking care of each other more, not demanding that society pays for our healthcare when we need someone to wash our butts twice a week. We will be doing that way different in the future because we connect; we will be there for each other. It’s all about giving. Shared economy? That was a new term for me. It didn’t even have a name when I first set out, but it’s been my lifestyle since 2001 and that’s where we’re headed. People who live a cubicle life, I wish I could shake them awake! Stand up! Look over that cubicle! What do you really want? What makes you happy? It’s about opening your eyes and taking that small step you think is a giant leap. Be honest, be open and respect each other in everything you do – business wise, family wise, personally – and there can’t be any issues.”

One Couch At A Time is screening at The Flicks1, Street 95 and The Flicks2, Street 136 at:
• 6:30pm October 11
• 2pm October 12
• 4pm October 13
• 4:30pm October 14
• 4:30pm October 16

(Photo by Ines Hegedus-Garcia / Photo illustration by The Advisor)

Dancing on air

When more than a dozen khaki-clad dancers air stepped, jitterbugged and boogie woogied their way through a 30-second commercial for global thread-peddlers Gap in 1998, they unintentionally turned a new generation of rug cutters not onto affordable casual-fit pants but a certain something called ‘swing’.

Jazz – a form considered sacred by the world’s most po-faced musicians (even Russian classical composer Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky, of habitually high brow, saw fit to approve) – had by the early 1930s birthed its most errant offspring. The traditional two-beat sound of New Orleans had given way to smoother, four-beat syncopated melodies and a dance craze instantly demonised as [GASP!] ‘light entertainment’. By 1935, despite much huffing and puffing on the part of moralistic types, the Swing Era had officially cometh… and would grip the US for a further decade.

Swing, which abandoned the string-heavy orchestration of the ’20s in favour of edgier horn and wind arrangements, was born of the African-American community (as indeed was its forebear), but swiftly transcended racial boundaries. Called on to define this Harlem sound by Bing Crosby on national radio, Louis Armstrong replied thus: “Ah, swing. Well, we used to call it syncopation then they called it ragtime then blues then jazz. Now it’s swing. White folks, y’all sho’ is a mess.”

It was a view Armstrong shared with author Norman Mailer. In his 1957 pamphlet The White Negro, Mailer charts the emerging philosophy of racial role reversal, describing folk “with a middle-class background (who) attempt to put down their whiteness and adopt what they believe is the carefree, spontaneous, cool lifestyle of Negro hipsters: their manner of speaking and language, their use of milder narcotics, their appreciation of jazz and the blues, and their supposed concern with the good orgasm.”

And who could blame hep cats and hipsters for yearning to go the way of such hedonism? Even before Cab Calloway’s 1939 Hepster Dictionary defined them as one ‘who knows all the answers, understands jive’, swingers were speeding up the waltz, cannibalising classic ballet manoeuvres and jabbing a much-needed shot of adrenalin straight into the heart of the Great American Songbook.

Legend has it that sometime in 1927, a year after the Savoy Ballroom in New York first opened its doors, what is today the world’s most famous swing dance was christened quite by accident. A newspaper reporter watching couples swing dance in the Savoy, which occupied an entire block, asked local enthusiast George ‘Shorty’ Snowden what the dance was called. On the bench next to the two men was a newspaper article about American aviator Charles Lindbergh’s record-breaking flight to Paris, bearing the headline: ‘Lindy hops the Atlantic’. George turned to the reporter, said simply ‘Lindy hop’ and then set about creating the world’s first lindy hop dance troupe.

A fusion of jazz, tap, breakaway and Charleston, the lindy hop shot to prominence in the mid-’30s when a swift-footed chap by the name of Frankie Manning joined the ranks of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, a dance troupe resident at the Savoy. Deploying hitherto unseen ‘air steps’, in which at least one foot departs solid ground in zany acrobatics, Manning raised the dance bar a considerable margin. Perhaps nowhere is this more brilliantly evidenced than in the 1941 film Hellzapoppin’, where Manning and his fellow dancers catapult each other into the air in a series of torso-tossing moves. These Hip to Hip, Side Flip, Over The Back, Back Flip, Over The Head and The Snatch were, at least at the time, the wildest dance manoeuvres ever conceived.

In actual fact, so wild was the lindy hop that Nazi Germany furiously outlawed it, not that this could of course halt the explosion in German swing bands. Eventually the German authorities relented and created their own Nazi swing band, Charlie And His Orchestra. The band recorded entire albums of swing songs with lyrics ridiculing the Allied nations, which the Nazis promptly then parachuted behind ‘enemy’ lines.

It would take a further 40 years and the advent of break-dancing before anything came close to swing in terms of sheer power, strength and energy. In the meantime, arrangers such as Nelson Riddle and pop vocalists Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin, Dean Martin and Nat King Cole made sure it was etched onto the global consciousness. By the late 1990s, when Louis Prima’s 1956 song Jump, Jive An’ Wail became forever wedded to the image of Gapsters in khaki-coloured cargo pants, a revival was long overdue.

Today, swing having been immortalised for the 21st century masses first by JXL in Little Less Conversation then by Robbie Williams’ Swing When You’re Winning and later by Marilyn Manson in Mobscene, it’s even on the rise in the steaming urban jungles of Asia. “It’s massive in Korea and China, especially Beijing,” says Richard, a psychologist and long-dancing member of Phnom Penh’s premier swing dance club formerly known as PPPSwings but now poised to relaunch with a weekend-long extravaganza September 27 – 29, followed by weekly classes, as Swing Penh. “Most major cities have swing events. With salsa, it’s a cultural thing, it’s part of an ethos, but with swing it’s just about the dance and you get to choose from a huge set. I got called as a reluctant stand-in and felt a bit awkward, but then it became like a problem to solve: how do you do this? We don’t do too much of the ‘throwing around’ stuff. We’re middle aged, you know…” [Laughs]

The crotchets and quavers (quarter and eighth notes) associated with African-American music trip lightly out of the speaker, translated into nifty toe-heelery by the assembled swingers as a series of ‘triple steps’ and ‘steps’. Part Elvis, part rockabilly, Berlin neo-swing group The Baseballs, backed by an upright bass, punch out a swing-style cover of Rhianna’s Umbrella, replete in upswept quiffs, upturned collars and rolled-up denims.

“This is the one everyone wants to swing dance to,” says Kat, a fellow Swing Penher, as her dance partner Richard spins her away from him and then snaps her body back to his in a move called ‘the quick stop’. “You can swing dance to all sorts of music, including a lot of modern stuff.” Says Richard: “We use Morcheeba, all sorts. I like that you’re not held to one genre. In one night, you can have the whole range of music from the 20th century, which is really good fun.”

Janice Wilson, Swing Penh’s resident instructor, has performed, choreographed and taught dance in 11 countries, touring with Michael Buble and Wynton Marsalis and opening for Bill Cosby at Disney World. “Swing allows for full immersion. You’re not just listening to the music, you’re living it; breathing it,” she says in what might just be the shortest interview in the history of The Advisor.

But before you launch yourself full pelt into the whip, the push, the Carolina shag or the pony swing, you’d be well advised to watch Groovy Movie, from 1944, a gloriously tongue-in-cheek guide to the lindy hop. Also, try to avoid a ‘swungover’: the mental and physical results of binge jitterbugging, as defined by author Bobby White.

And remember, say the word ‘swinger’ in certain circles and you can expect to be met with a snigger: the phrase can also refer to spouse-swapping. “Someone posted this advert on Expat Advisory Services a while back looking for swingers in town,” says Kat. “This nice little old lady wrote back saying how happy she would be to welcome them to Phnom Penh. It was so sweet! I don’t think she had any idea…”

WHO: Hep cats and hipsters
WHAT: Swing Penh Launch Weekend
WHERE: Phnom Penh
WHEN: From 9pm September 27
WHY: “Swing allows for full immersion. You’re not just listening to the music, you’re living it; breathing it” – Janice Wilson

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Swing Penh
Launch Weekend

Swing with DJ Invisible Agent
9pm September 27 at the Village, #1 Street 360

Swing Brunch
10:30am September 28 at Comme A La Maison, Street 57

Swing Workshops
2:30pm – 6:30pm September 28 at Doors, Street 84 & 47 (beginners) and The Exchange, Street 84 & 47 (intermediate)

Swing With Kin
9pm September 28 at Doors, Street 84 & 47

Poolside Lindy Grub
10:30am September 29 at The Quay Rooftop Bar, Sisowath Quay

The banality of mass murder

A potbellied, ponytailed man in grey suit and tie plops a floppy pink cowboy hat on the head of a much leaner accomplice. “This one’s for the Big Boss.” The slender figure clad in cream suit and brown shirt nods. “Yep, it’s perfect for me.” Gesturing to a wooden picnic table, he describes in detail – a point here, a hand motion there – how he positioned one leg of the table on a man’s throat, bouncing up and down on the table top and singing until the victim’s skull collapsed. As he demonstrates for the camera how he committed first degree murder, pink Stetson perched absurdly on head, this man – who beat to death, strangled or decapitated more than 1,000 Indonesians with his bare hands – claps his hands and laughs.

When veteran director Werner Herzog describes a film as the most “powerful, surreal and frightening in at least a decade”, you know you’d better steel your nerves before the opening credits start to roll. The Act Of Killing, for which Herzog later signed on as executive producer, isn’t the imagined stuff of nightmare peddlers Eli Roth or Quentin Tarantino; it’s actual documented history, which is what makes its horrors that much harder to bear.

First-time director Joshua Oppenheimer, who will be staging a live Q&A session via Skype after his film screens at Bophana Centre this week, deals not in fiction but in fact. Eight years, 25 awards and one very surreal journey ago, he set out to make a documentary about ‘the second greatest crime of the 20th century’: the Indonesian killings of 1965-66, in which gangsters hired by General Suharto’s military dictatorship systematically tortured and murdered more than half a million people.

As with atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge here in Cambodia a decade later, the word ‘genocide’ doesn’t quite cover it. These were human beings bound, gagged and beaten to death – or worse – not on the basis of their race, creed or caste, but for the simple act of failing to support a political institution built on fear. Genocide in the strictest sense it may not have been; mass murder it most certainly was.

And it was to those responsible for these mass murders in northern Sumatra that Oppenheimer went with what some might consider an indecent proposal: re-enact the killings you committed, on camera, in the style of your favourite movie genre. Absurd it may sound, but the resulting 157 minutes of footage – edited down from thousands of hours gathered by Oppenheimer and his crew in situ between 2005 and 2011 – are among the most disturbing you will ever see. They document not only the process of producing said dramatisations, but also the inevitable consequences.

Anwar Congo, he of the pink Stetson, peers intently over the gold rims of his glasses. Now dressed in green Hawaiian shirt, with trousers that match his white hair, he raises one arm in slow motion. He’s standing on a white-walled roof terrace, the kind ubiquitous in Asia, with square mesh windows and barred metal doors. “At first we beat them to death, but there was too much blood. There was so much blood here so when we cleaned up it smelled awful. To avoid the blood I used this system. Can I show you?”

This small-time crook who went on to lead North Sumatra’s most lethal death squad holds aloft for the camera a piece of wood about 50 centimetres long and a few centimetres wide. A long piece of wire trails from its centre, one end of which Anwar ties to a pole. He then orders another man to sit, wrapping the remaining wire around his throat and slowly pulling it taut. The man makes an exaggerated choking sound, grinning. Anwar, wire still in hand, turns to face the camera. “This is how to do it without too much blood… I’ve tried to forget all this with good music, dancing, feeling happy, a little alcohol, a little marijuana, a little… what do you call it? Ecstasy. Once I’d get drunk I’d ‘fly’ and feel happy.” Anwar dances an enthusiastic cha cha on the spot where hundreds died at his hands. His ‘victim’ laughs: “He’s a happy man.”

From hawking dodgy cinema tickets to movie-goers hungry for the latest Hollywood hit in the early ’60s, Anwar rose – via extortion, torture and murder – through the ranks of Indonesia’s gangster elite to occupy what is today a privileged place in the political hierarchy. Despite committing what the Geneva Conventions would define as crimes against humanity (or rather because of that), he’s revered as the founding father of Pemuda Pancasila, the right-wing paramilitary mob spawned by the original death squads.

And what a mob it is, counting among its three million members everyone from henchmen to government ministers. Their bravado knows no bounds: in frame after frame, they boast about their parts in the ‘extermination of communists’; a politically motivated massacre, in short. They laugh and cajole, even as they extort money from Chinese market-stall owners right in front of Oppenheimer’s lens (the director hung back after several such incidents to apologise and assure people he wasn’t filming on the thugs’ behalf). In several particularly excruciating scenes, these bold-as-brass killers bully the families of their victims to take part in their dramatic re-enactments.

‘Why?’ one might very well ask, not least at the sight of bewildered children being bullied to tears by obese serial killers. What could possibly be the point of such a traumatic cinematic exercise? Because, answers Oppenheimer, the regime still ruling Indonesia to this day was founded on crimes against humanity, yet has never been held accountable. “The film is essentially not about what happened in 1965, but rather about a regime in which genocide has, paradoxically, been effaced yet celebrated in order to keep the survivors terrified, the public brainwashed and the perpetrators able to live with themselves… It never pretends to be an exhaustive account of the events of 1965. It seeks to understand the impact of the killing and terror today, on individuals and institutions… When I was entrusted by this community of survivors to film these justifications, to film these boastings, I was trying to expose and interrogate the nature of impunity. Boasting about killing was the right material to do that with because it is a symptom of impunity.”

There is no shortage of such material. In one scene, an Indonesian governor proudly declares: “Communism will never be accepted here because we have so many gangsters, and that’s a good thing. The word gangster comes from English: ‘free men’. Thugs want freedom to do things, even if they are wrong. But if we know how to work with them, all we have to do is direct them.” In another, this time shot on the golf course, more thugs ruminate on the appeal of their unusual career choice: “Gangsters are free men. They want to enjoy life in their style. Relax and Rolex…” One then turns to his pretty, smartly attired female caddy and makes a lewd comment about her genitalia.

And therein lies the rub: these notorious mass murderers, infamous exterminators of their fellow men, appear throughout as alarmingly normal – a phenomenon Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt described in her 1963 book Eichmann In Jerusalem as “the banality of evil”. Oppenheimer’s monsters pester one another for shoulder massages at the bowling alley; can’t remember their lines at political rallies; smoke weed and drink beer to silence their demons. At one point, a frail-looking Anwar chastises a young boy – a nephew, perhaps? Grandson? – for breaking the leg of a duckling. “Say ‘Sorry, duck. It was an accident. I was scared and I hit you.’”

In Eichmann In Jerusalem, Arendt reports on the trial in Israel in 1962 of Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer (‘lieutenant colonel’) Adolf Eichmann, one of the main orchestrators of the Holocaust. During the proceedings, after which he was hanged for crimes against humanity, he showed neither guilt nor hatred. In words eerily reminiscent of those of Kaing Guek Eav or Comrade Duch, the man who oversaw the notorious Khmer Rouge interrogation centre S21, Eichmann stated he was simply ‘doing his job’.

The link between the protagonists in Oppenheimer’s film and Arendt’s theory has been explored by at least one Indonesian academic. Soe Tjen Marching, writing in the Jakarta Globe, questions whether the perpetrators are banal, noting that “These people may merely have been at ease performing their unawareness (or denial) of their crimes in front of a perceived ally. Later, Anwar shows remorse as he becomes aware of Oppenheimer’s true intentions. Was Anwar previously really unaware? Or has Anwar’s awareness of Oppenheimer’s political stance somehow led him to demonstrate his awareness and his remorse concerning the crimes that he has committed? After all, we represent ourselves differently vis-a-vis different people.”

As the film progresses and the re-enactments become increasingly elaborate (think potbellied murderers dressed in full drag), so Oppenheimer’s nightmarish vision intensifies. Indonesia’s banal culture of impunity – the kind of culture to which Cambodia is no stranger – is a haven of horrors in which killers joke about war crimes on TV chat shows and celebrate moral disaster with the ease and grace of a soft-shoe shuffle. In front of thousands, a paramilitary leader announces: “This country needs free men. If we all worked for the government, we’d be a nation of bureaucrats. We’d get nothing done. We need gangsters to get things done. Muscles aren’t for beating people up… although beating people up is sometimes needed.” His visibly enthused audience laughs and cheers.

In a recent interview with Amnesty International, Oppenheimer says: “The justification and even celebration of mass killings seems in the film like a sign that they feel no guilt. I think it’s the opposite: it seems that they’re inhuman; on the contrary, killing is a human act, only human beings do it, we’re the only species that does this and to justify it and celebrate it is also human. Normally when we hear about perpetrators in film, they’ve already been removed from power, so they can’t justify it anymore. These are people who can justify it and so they do justify it, and the justification is actually a symptom of their own conscience and their own humanity. That’s the paradox in the film; it’s what allows the film to develop into what it develops to and leads to that climax. But it’s also the tragedy, because once you’ve corrupted yourself by killing somebody or killing many people and then justify it, the justification allows you to commit further evil, it allows you to kill again, it allows you to extort your victims, to blame them for what happened, intimidate them so that they don’t accuse you and make you feel guilty, and so that they stay silent, and it allows you to extort money from them, to kick them off the land, and it almost demands that you kill again.”

Anwar, of course, is by no means a lone operator. Also prominent in The Act Of Killing is Herman Koto, the aforementioned potbellied/ponytailed henchman, and Adi Zulkadry, the main driving force behind Pancasila Youth. Filmed fishing together, Adi dismisses Anwar’s lingering nightmares as “just a nerve disturbance”.

At one point Adi, ever remorseless, says on record: “Killing is the worst crime you can do. The secret is to find a way to not feel guilty. It’s all about finding the right excuse… All morality is relative.” Later, pressed by an unseen interviewer to explain his war crimes, he replies: “I don’t necessarily agree with those international laws. When Bush was in power, Guantanamo was right… The Geneva Conventions may be today’s morality, but tomorrow we’ll have the Jakarta Conventions and dump the Geneva Conventions. ‘War crimes’ are defined by the winners. I’m a winner, so I can make my own definition.”

The same could surely be said of Evil.

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.

Green tea & man-eating tigers

BBC JOURNALIST, River Cafe chef and wild-bearded eco-warrior Rory Spowers is noted for many things. Among the most thought-provoking are transplanting his family to an abandoned tea estate in Sri Lanka for his book A Year In Tuk Tuks & Green Tea; defying the BBC’s orders not to mention climate change because it was ‘bad for ratings’, and riding across Africa on a three-man tandem once owned by British comedy trio The Goodies. As of last week, this perennial adventurer is the first ‘sustainability ambassador’ at Song Saa, Cambodia’s sole five-star island resort which might just be impressive enough to trigger a global revolution in environmental thinking. The Advisor meets “reconstructed eco-warrior” Rory Spowers and Dr Wayne McCallum, Song Saa’s director of sustainability, to talk green tea, man-eating tigers and why we need to fix ourselves before we can fix the planet. `

How did you discover each other?
Wayne: I found a copy of A Year In Green Tea And Tuk Tuks at the back of a second-hand bookshop just down the road. I thought: ‘three bucks? I’ll take it!’ [Laughs] Then I read it and thought: ‘This looks like an interesting guy; I’ll reach out to him.’ There’s a lot more to the book than the cover suggests. He’s thinking along the same lines that we might take the foundation; I thought the aspirations, goals, motivations and objectives were very similar to what’s inspiring us. At the end of it I thought: ‘Why not reach out?’

Rory, do you often get ambushed by pencil-moustachioed environmentalists?
Rory: [Laughs] The book has hardly made me a rich man: it hasn’t sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but it has definitely struck a chord. I’m still getting emails from people all over the globe who’ve just read it.

Looking at the cover, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s by just another pallid British bloke who’s decided ‘Bugger this. It’s too cold in London. I’m moving somewhere hot.’ What were you thinking when you uprooted your wife and two toddlers to a tea plantation in Sri Lanka in the hope of turning it into an eco-Mecca?
I certainly wasn’t expecting to – certainly had no aspirations to – buy such a huge piece of land. I definitely wanted to buy a bit of land and do something along these lines, but I was thinking two or three acres, not 60. It just sort of evolved. I went back to see this piece of land six or seven times and every time there were more and more local guys in shades breaking up paths and draining wells. It all stacked up to become irresistible. Even when I bought it I didn’t know this was what I was going to do, but there was something very magical about it: a secret garden waiting to be uncovered.

When Wayne first told me you were coming, he described you as ‘a reconstructed eco-warrior’.
[Laughs] I’m not quite sure what that means!
Wayne: I’d say ‘sustainability champion’

I prefer ‘reconstructed eco-warrior’. How did your nascence as whatever we finally decide to call you come about?
Rory: I grew up with very fanatical gardening parents. My father went on to build an arboretum of rare trees just outside London. I grew up landscaping, clearing paths and building lakes. It wasn’t quite jungle, but it started at 16 acres and grew to 160. My father claims it has more species of tree and shrub than Kew Gardens, but I can’t verify that! Then I was lucky enough to travel: India, Asia. Also philosophy, particularly Buddhism, became increasingly interesting; I got into yoga, that sort of thing. Then I went to Africa on The Goodies’ tandem, if that means anything to you.

That means more to me than you can possibly know.
That was my first book, Three Men On A Bike, which had some fairly hilarious one-line reviews from Australians and New Zealanders. One chap goes: ‘Ah, look! It’s a book I can actually read!’

And what did The Goodies make of all this?
They were our patrons. I kept in touch with Bill Oddie for many years. I reunited him with the bike in the early ’90s and made a film with him in India about the Ganges, mostly an environmental film; his best friend had been killed by a tiger in Jim Corbett National Park in the mid-’80s. It was taking Bill back to the spot where his mate got killed. The Goodies thought we were a bit strange, obviously. Then I did a long walk through India in ’96/’97. With that and the big trip to Africa I really started to feel a lot of the eco stuff, seeing first-hand what rather ill-advised, big top-down development had done to environments, ecosystems, habitats. The tour with Bill Oddie in 1990 was my first… I wanted to make films, really. I studied English Literature after a general arts degree; I never studied ecology. It became a passion. I even wrote about the history of ecological thought in Rising Tides.

How has ecological thought changed with the so-called advance of human society?
That’s what’s always fascinated me: what are the things that led to where we are? Why have we, as a species, separated ourselves from the natural world to such a degree?

I watched the interview you gave at the launch of the 999 campaign, where you describe the need for “Real, tangible interaction with the natural world.”
If you think about it, it’s ludicrous: this idea that we can separate ourselves from the natural world. We’re dependent upon it. There are 90 million chemical reactions going on within our bodies every second; we are an integral part of the planet as much is anything else is, but we’re the only species that has separated itself because of this rather dubious gift of the human ego. As far as we can tell, we’re the only species that’s conscious of being conscious. One thing that’s hugely overlooked at the moment is the imperialist agenda of the post-Industrial Revolution, which totally seized on the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest and made it all about competition, but if you go back to Darwin’s original work in The Origin Of Species, he talks about cooperation between species even more than he talks about competition. We’ve only been sold one side of the coin. It was used to prop up expansionist, imperialist politics and economics right through to the present day.

What new biological thinking – particularly Chaos Theory and Capacity Theory – is showing is that all this exciting stuff going on in eco-economics is all inspired by natural systems. Most of the interesting breakthroughs in modern technology are based on scientific mimicry: if you look at the efficiency with which a leaf captures and harnesses solar energy compared to our most advanced photovoltaics, we’re just miles behind; spider webs made by insects who, without needing high energy to do so, can create something that’s eight times stronger than steel. Scientists are now looking at the abalone shell as a way to redesign our ceramics for things like the space shuttle. My brother has spent the last 15 years building a hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicle which isn’t just tremendously inventive in terms of its technology, but also in terms of the governance within his company, which gives society and the environment an equal stake-holding. The car wouldn’t be sold to the consumer; it would be owned by the company and leased to the consumer, making the company responsible for the full life-cycle environmental impact: there’s no built-in obsolescence. While we have an economic system that continues to reward people who pollute and abuse resources, there’s an age-old debate about step change and incrementalism: however much you tweak and fix a system that’s fundamentally broken, you can never cross a chasm with two leaps. Everybody’s getting excited about big car companies producing hydrogen-powered cars, but it’s still woeful, actually, if you look at the average fuel economy of a car produced in the last 10 or 15 years despite everything we know and despite all the technological advances we’ve made, we’re still locked into a paradigm that’s never going to be sustainable.

A lot of the technologies people would like to see happen in order to shift towards a more sustainable pattern are simply not compatible with our current economic system. Until our economics reflect the true cost of society and the environment within the price of things, we’re never going to make it. If a car truly reflected its cost to society and the environment, we’d simply never be able to pay for one. While we continue to assess our economic prosperity based on things like GDP – which goes up every time there’s a disaster, every time there’s an accident, every time there’s a hospital bill, every time there’s a divorce – you’re doing your economics on a calculator that doesn’t have a ‘minus’ sign. You can make it look like we’re flourishing, but in fact an enormous amount of things within that indicate the complete reverse. Going back to the reconstructed eco-warrior bit, I was very strident and outspoken; I used to get on my soapbox and rant and rave about things. Rising Tides is very polemic, but then I realised that I was stabbing myself in the foot: looking back at the book, the environmental agenda is very much split because of making that alarmist, out-of-proportion or unfounded claim.

Every time something doesn’t happen, the world goes: ‘But you said this and you said that!’ ‘You never create change by fighting the existing model; you’ve got to create a new model that makes the old one obsolete’: that’s a quote I come back to often. We see it in fashion: it’s totally implicit. I don’t want to knock people protesting or campaigning, which are valid roles to play, but a lot of people are in this vein now; a lot of that energy is misspent or could be better spent being channelled into making the new model visible to people. That’s what The Web Of Hope [an online database of role models for sustainability, social justice and positive change] was all about: trying to create a global resource of role models for positive change. We don’t get enough column inches and people don’t know these solutions are there; they just throw up their hands and think there’s nothing they can do.

And a lot of those solutions get buried by Big Industry.
Also, most of the media doesn’t want to know. Bruce Parry, who I’ve been working with on Tribe for the last two years, made a series about the Arctic. In the final edit, the BBC removed any reference to climate change because it was ‘bad for ratings’. It was that kind of experience that prompted us to make the films we’re making now: entirely independently financed and a chance for Bruce to go down all the avenues he wasn’t able to previously and really get at these ‘fringe’ alternative, esoteric things which may actually be very important.

As an individual, it’s easy to feel dwarfed.
Absolutely and the whole notion of what psychologists refer to as ‘psychic numbing’, when you get so overwhelmed by the magnitude of these things; there’s a worry that the generation now are so overwhelmed by the magnitude of it that they almost completely cut off, it’s a turn off. Then again awareness of what people can do through intelligent choices – through the Fair Trade movement, the organic movement, and I always thought food would be the issue that would shift things…

Speaking of food, you were once a chef at The River Cafe in London, which famously gave the world Jamie Oliver.
People are really starting to question the toxicity of the food they’re giving their children. This is an incredibly emotive issue: our most direct, tangible relationship with the natural world. Sourcing local produce, organic if you can, that’s really shifting and has become totally absorbed by the cult of the celebrity chef which is now rippling out in other ways. What I wanted to emphasise in the 999 It’s Time campaign was that shift from individual action towards coming together as a group, as a community, as a family or as a bunch of friends. It’s absolutely staggering to see the number of people coming together now.

Slow food, organic baskets delivered to your doorstep. Barnaby Olson, Song Saa’s resident marine biologist, says environmentalism is “like the icing on the cake: the last thing to on, the first thing to come off”. Isn’t it just a product of the one-percenters? You come to a place like this and people have more pressing worries, such as preventing their children from being sold into slavery.
Is it a luxury of the privileged? So much of it also is traditional common sense. You talk about biodynamics and permaculture: if you go to the small farms in Ibiza where I now live, they go: ‘But that’s what we’ve always done.’ The forest gardening stuff I was trying to introduce in Sri Lanka had its roots in very ancient local methods. There’s an aspect of forgetting, which has come about with industrialisation and the whole Industrial Revolution and this culture we’ve created around that, which is antithetical to a lot of traditional common sense, like the basic notion of harvesting rainwater in dry parts of the world. When I first travelled to India in the mid-’80s, you hardly saw a plastic bag. Now you can hardly move without seeing one. Packaging was once made with recycled newspaper and tied up with a piece of twine. That’s now happening again. There are lots of ways in which we stepped out of typical ecological processes as a consequence of industrialisation and it shouldn’t, at least in theory, take too much for us to step back into it. It’s also inherent that within that there’s this centralised direction everything has taken, whether it’s centralised energy production or massive monoculture and agriculture. It’s the same way the renewable energy debate has gone in the UK. We’re so polarised, it’s either this or that, which is typical of our modern mindset: if you’re anti-capitalist, you must be communist; if you’re anti-nuclear, you must be pro-wind. In fact anyone with their head screwed on in the energy debate will recognise that all of these decisions should be made on a regional basis; decision-making as a power should be devolved to the lowest possible level to local communities to decide what actually suits them. What’s applicable in Cornwall isn’t applicable in London or the Midlands or Scotland. We are, as a species, very ‘It’s either this or that,’ which fundamentally fails to look at all the other possibilities in front of us.

Which rather begs the question: ‘Is that why we’re in this mess?’
It is, partly; it’s a transcendence of a deeply dualistic way of looking at absolutely everything and that’s just the way we’ve cultivated ourselves. We’re stuck in this weird little loop.

It could be argued that the West has had its turn. Isn’t it fair that the East now gets its turn?
Absolutely! China and India are coming on-stream with massive burgeoning societies. You can totally understand that their aspirations are the chance for a turn-around. I think one area that’s massively overlooked by environmentalists is population and the fact there is actually a carrying capacity.

The planet can support two billion people is the oft-quoted figure. We’re nearing seven.
As of 2008, it was taking 16 months for the natural world to regenerate what we were consuming in 12 months as a species, so the planet’s net productivity was minus 20 percent – and that’s been going on since the mid-’80s. If we stopped using C02 tomorrow, we’d still be feeling the impact 30 years from now. Realistically, I don’t think we’re in for an easy ride. The solutions I’d like to see happen aren’t going to happen overnight, but I don’t think we’re going to completely wipe ourselves out as a species.

And that’s the more pressing concern: it’s not the planet that’s going to be wiped out, it’s the human race. The planet will be just fine, eventually.
There are all sorts of Gaian processes at work trying to eradicate us. From the Gaian perspective, we’re a cancer on the Earth. I think pandemics are not so far away; significant climate shifts, and again we believe most of these will happen on a gradual linear progression, but the evolutions and computations in nature are rarely a comfortable ride. It’s going to be messy. It’s just a question of when everything kicks in.

What did you make of Song Saa and what its founders are trying to achieve here?
I was hugely impressed; it’s really raising the bar – a new exemplar in this field. What’s interesting is they’ve embedded from the outset: work with the local community predated the evolution of the hotel; they’ve been moving along hand-in-hand. It’s not a bit of retroactive PR spin, which it often is in this case. They’re getting the groundwork in place for a model you could replicate on a much wider scale. It recognises the necessity of it being a two-way exchange; it’s not ‘You guys do this.’ There’s actually a much more intelligent approach.

Paul Watson, captain of the Sea Shepherd, famously garners headlines for ramming whaling boats, occasionally taking things too far and winding up behind bars. More conservative marine conservation agencies say that although they can’t condone his tactics, what ‘extreme environmentalists’ do quite successfully is make it easier for milder organisations to gain political ground. Is there room for the full spectrum of eco-warrior, from the suited and booted to the total anarchist?
Yes, absolutely. It softens the blow for other organisations. He’s a really rather remarkable man.

Who else inspires you?
The most refreshing new voice is a guy called Charles Eisenstein, who’s very involved with the Occupy movement. His magnum opus is A Sense Of Humanity and his most recent book is Sacred Economics. He’s really moved the whole thing along in a number of ways. He’s young and fresh and informed from a very spiritual perspective. Humble, but articulate; he’s not banging a drum and he’s not confrontational. He’s too intelligent for that. I’ve always been a huge fan of Paul Hawken in America, his economic thinking. George Monbiot has just written a new book, Feral, about re-wilding the landscape, which I’m reading at the moment. He’s a powerful voice and a very, very bright man.

Those who bang the drum the loudest are often silenced in horrible ways. When Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth first came out, everyone scrambled to act. Then came the criticism.
Yes. They’re not putting themselves in a very clever position. When Rising Tides first came out and I was given the opportunity to speak, I was angry; I’d get into a bit of a rant and be very strident, but it’s a massive turn-off and it’s not very clever because you’re undermining yourself and exposing yourself to criticism. There’s a quote I use quite a lot and it’s about hope and optimism; there’s something very Buddhist about it as well: ‘Hope is wanting something because you know it’s inherently right, but without any attachment to the actual outcome; optimism implies an attachment to the result.’ I touch on this because of having gone down a certain route in my own spiritual journey, which in many ways seemed very odd. Ultimately I realised it wasn’t odd; all that was off was me having this attachment to the results of what I was doing. As soon as that went, I suddenly found myself being able to speak publicly and take part in debates without anyone being able to get my back up. Immediately, you’re in this much stronger position. Passion’s a great thing, I’m not disputing that, but it gave me an attachment to ‘I’m right and you’re wrong.’ Again, it’s this whole concept of conflict. As soon as you’re engaging on that level, you’re diminishing the power of the whole thing. Ultimately I believe that what’s necessary is coming from – dare I say it – a very spiritual dimension. I spent all those years trying to avoid it, but it is and that’s why the project with Bruce has been so fascinating. Anyone who wants to fix the problems of the world should probably start by fixing themselves. Jiddu Krishnamurti said to me: ‘We’re all very happy to wax on about the problems we see in the world, but very few of us are prepared to change ourselves.’ Quite often the people who are most vociferous in their critique about what’s wrong with the world are people who haven’t been prepared to look at themselves. This has become a big externalisation of their inner turmoil and I see a lot of that within activist circles campaigning for this and that. It’s an externalisation of stuff going on within that maybe they’d do well to address first. If you can find harmony here [touches heart], the actions flowing from it are much more likely to be harmonious with the outer world. It’s a very Buddhist thing.

Best of Phnom Penh 2013

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Stewards of sustainable motion

Tucked near a large, yellow building that houses an accounting college off Mao Tse Tung Boulevard is a modest white house encircled by a blue corrugated-aluminum gate. On the second floor is the Central School of Ballet Phnom Penh. Being a few moments early, I set to task watching the community surrounding the school: it moved with smooth survival, like ants that feel a thunderstorm and take deliberate precautions. An adolescent boy with a solid face fluently manoeuvred a cart full of scrap metal; he had the firm gaze and gait of a man much older. A woman moved fresh laundry inside; her hands snapped the sun-dried sheets like an old soldier retiring a weary standard as the gaps in the clouds above began to fill in slightly.

My consideration of the ritual was broken by my hosts Stephen Bimson, Ballet Rambert alumnus and co-founder/artistic director of the school, and Devi Vanhon, business director, moving on the staircase. They unlocked the door and warmly invited me in. My eyes wandered beyond the reception area to the studio outfitted in shiny chrome railings with sturdy, hard-rubber feet edging the tongue-and-groove floor, the colour of freshly sanded pinewood. A tall ceiling was held up by the stately load-bearing pillar in the middle of the room.

Sitting on red plastic stools, Stephen passionately and vigorously began to speak about all things dance, with Devi interjecting with understated and gracious precision. They both spoke of artistic interpretation, the stewardship of a craft, to the point one could see the love they have for this small school and its possibilities. One possibility is Dance Made In Cambodia, a month-long series of free weekend workshops in which at-risk youth between the ages of nine and 15 will explore the concept of community dance. Egalitarian by design, the focus is not on perfecting formal dances but strengthening communities through shared creations.

“DMIC is the community dance division of our school,” says Devi. “It offers opportunities to underprivileged Cambodian children to experience dance at a professional level. The aim of these workshops is to introduce as wide a possible section of young people to contemporary and creative dance; expose participants to the practices and ideals of a professional dance environment and to begin to generate a community of individuals and organisations who wish to participate in our future projects and performances.”

Dance Made In Cambodia provides all who seek it a haven to discover – through dance – infinite ways to comprehend the locomotive grammar of living. Whether we are at-risk youth, diplobrats or 30-somethings with bad ADD, writer’s block and a phone that won’t be quiet, dance provides balance, not just of the body but of the brain.

Tangled up in the blues

HE’S BEEN NOMINATED FOR nine Grammys; shared Newark Festival’s stage with the Rolling Stones’ Mick Taylor; is signed by legendary bass player Andy Fraser – and, in his native UK, he’s barely old enough to vote. Tobi Earnshaw, just 18 years old and already being critically compared to rock monoliths John Mayer, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Eric Clapton, is rather more boy-next-door than such accolades might imply. Until, that is, his fingertips meet the strings of a guitar. What happens next shouldn’t be possible for someone who produced an unholy cacophony when he cradled one for the very first time aged 12, but the success of his debut album Spirit In Me, recorded just three years later, suggests the improbable is precisely what this young, London-born biker does best. The only artist handpicked by Andy Fraser, of Free fame, for his label Mctrax International, Tobi is poised to release his second album as he sets out in August on his first tour of Asia (expect workshops and performances at ICAN International School and The Youth School in Phnom Penh). The Advisor cornered Tobi in the studio to talk man-crushes, selling his soul to the Devil and being described by dmme.net as the ‘British answer to Justin Bieber’.

Dad was a saxophonist, but you picked up your first instrument relatively late.
We had this guitar which one of Dad’s old band mates had given to him. I found it in his room, picked it up and thought: ‘I’ll try to play it.’ I went downstairs and said to Dad: ‘Is this a chord?’ ‘Um, no…’ I’d made this noise that was absolutely awful, so he showed me a basic A chord and an E chord and then said to me: ‘Do you actually want to learn the guitar?’ At the time my parents owned a theatre school and there was a student whose dad was a session musician called Billy Liesegang – he’s played with Nina Hagen, David Bowie, Red Hot Chili Peppers – and he’d lent me a guitar. I hated singing at the time.

And your mum had to blackmail you into singing at your first open mic?
It was even worse than that! She didn’t expect me to sing; that’s why she said she’d buy me a guitar if I did. I was 14 at this point, which was when I started really getting into the blues. This is when I first found Gary Moore. Mum said: ‘If you learn the Gary Moore song Still Got The Blues and play the solo, I’ll buy you a new guitar.’ So I played it and got my new guitar and I’ve been singing ever since. After that I really got into John Mayer, because I saw him at the Crossroads Guitar Festival with Eric Clapton. That’s when I started songwriting: I looked him up on YouTube and was absolutely amazed with the way he writes his songs. I became obsessed; I call him my man-crush. That’s how deep it goes. You can imagine: I’m sitting at school with my headphones on and my guitar, learning Hotel California, while everyone else is listening to the stereo. Stevie Ray Vaughn, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Winter, Gary Moore, George Benson…

You’ve been compared to some extraordinary musicians already: from folk you’ve cited as influences, such as Mayer and Vaughn, the list goes wildly off the deep end and you’ve been called – and I quote – ‘Britain’s Justin Bieber.’ How do you feel about that? In certain places, that’s considered an insult…
[Laughs] It is! It is! To be perfectly honest, I try to look at it from a positive point of view: he’s definitely done something right. Maybe if it’s also being said that I’m influenced by John Mayer and Stevie Ray Vaughn I can be more of a respected musician. You won’t be hearing any Justin Bieber covers from me, I can tell you that. If you’re going to introduce me to anyone while I’m in Cambodia, the worst thing to say would be: ‘He’s the English version of Justin Bieber.’

Have you been asked to define your own sound yet?
As a musician I’m really critical, so if I was asked to define myself I don’t know; I just sort of sing a melody and try to stay in tune! There are pop magazines who say: ‘We won’t take you because you’re too blues for us.’ Then there are blues magazines that say: ‘We won’t take you because you’re not blues enough.’ I’ve had interviews with MOBO… and there’s something else I was going to say but I’ve completely forgotten what. I’m having a senior moment and I’m only 18! I’ve been doing radio interviews all week and this keeps happening; it’s ridiculous!

Let’s talk more about these interviews. How does it feel being catapulted into the professional rock realm at your age?
Three days after my GCSE exams, I flew over to America to do a three-month tour to promote my first album, which is where that Justin Bieber-ish video, Brighten Up My Day, happened – I was only 15 and signed to Andy Fraser, the bass player with Free. Everyone wanted to talk to Andy and hear what he’d done in his past, maybe bringing me in at the end because I’m his new project. I’d just sit there and be really nervous. Now I’ve been doing interviews for a couple of years, I just roll with it. People ask me: ‘Have you figured out what you’re going to say yet?’ Well, no. Everything comes naturally. When you say it naturally, you mean it.

Do you remember your first meeting with Andy Fraser?
Yes I do! It was actually quite similar to this; you meet all the important people on Skype [Laughs]. I had my guitar in my hand – that was the only difference. He emailed me and we sent over the Brighten Up My Day video before he’d remixed it then Nothing’s Going To Stop Us, from my first album. We talked on Skype and then another email came through with a recording contract and publishing contract. Being 15 at the time, you don’t really understand these things. Even now it doesn’t seem like it’s happening. I don’t know whether it’s that I’m the least excitable person, but I just thought: ‘Yeah, that’s cool.’ The cool thing was when he flew me out to America for the meeting: I get a flight to LAX and I’m there with my dad, who’s my headmaster as well, and we got picked up in a limo. It was a bit strange because I’d never met him before, but I know who he is because one of the first songs I learned was The Stealer, by Free. My guitar teacher’s band was named after that song. So I went up to him, he smiled at me and gave me a hug and goes: ‘Do you want some sushi?’ By the end of the trip, it felt like we’d known each other for years. Andy’s very warm and open.

You’ve said in a previous interview that he spends most of his time locked in the hotel toilet when you’re on tour together because you can’t stop playing guitar.
[Laughs] There are two truths to that: I play guitar loads and he does get fed up with it sometimes, but not as much as my parents because I play during Coronation Street and that’s on every night. The other truth is that Andy does spend most of his time in the toilet: after every meal he’ll go to the toilet, brush his teeth and do his mouthwash. The other day we were sitting outside in the smouldering heat and he spent ages in there. Is he having a shower in there or something?!

Let’s talk about your first album: nine tracks, recorded when you were just 15.
We did it in Andy’s house; he has a studio there. We did the album in three weeks. We’d have a day to do each thing: a day to do the guitar; a day to do the vocals. It was an amazing experience, listening to Andy talk – especially when I was younger, because now I’ve heard the majority of his stories but they never, ever get boring [Laughs]. One of the stories was about when him and Paul Rodgers got together and helped each other out by finishing each other’s songs. They learned a lot about how to write. I’ve met Paul, but because Free split up they don’t really talk much; even Andy says they’re never really on the same page.

There can be more politics in music than there is in actual politics.
Funny you should say that because – and this is another of Andy’s little stories – when Free first got together, Andy said to Paul Kossoff and Paul Rodgers: ‘Right, now, I’m the leader.’ Apparently they just looked at each other and Paul Rodgers was really angry. When I listen to their songs – I listen to Rodgers in Bad Company and the Free stuff – the choruses are so much like each other; very blues based. That’s what I like about working with Andy: he can teach me this stuff. Having someone else look over your song and bring it all back to the centre. I’ll do some R&B and then he’ll somehow bring it back to pop-rock. I don’t know how he does it. It’s great because I have half-written songs: I’ll write a guitar riff down on my phone, start it and then stop it. It’s great to get a different perspective. A lot of people say you should write a song all in one go, but if I do that and then go back to it I think: ‘What was all that about? Why was I whining so much?’

Hang on: don’t you have to be 60 and toothless to write in the great blues tradition?
[Laughs] If it would get me somewhere, maybe we could knock a couple of teeth out and I could shave all my hair off! I remember when I was younger, listening to Robert Johnson and trying to sell my soul to the Devil in my bedroom. I was about 13 and I had this little red guitar I’d chipped away at and sanded down. I was sitting in my room, playing this cheap bit of rubbish, thinking about Johnson and thinking I’d sell my soul if I could be one of the best guitarists in the world. I said it just like that, almost with contempt, but I don’t know if it’s happened yet.

Where were we? Ah yes, the first album.
I do that a lot, sorry. You can imagine what my room looks like, comparing it to my mind! Yeah, first album: one of the first songs I wrote was called There’s Always Hope. As you can see, I go off on tangents. When I was 14 I got robbed: three boys took my phone. They didn’t even want it; they put it on the floor and stamped on it and they took a bite out of my Crunchie bar! You can imagine what happened next. I went home and started playing this groovy sort of blues riff. I’d play it all the time and my parents used to get so annoyed with me. Rather than going: ‘Oh, I got robbed yesterday…’

[Singing] Da nah nah nah nah… Wait, I know this one!
[Laughs] It was more about OK, what was that? One day out of my life, just like many others. It’s about turning it around. People can hurt you and hate you… and what? You keep on going; you keep the right mentality. I don’t really care, to be honest, because I’m going somewhere even if it’s not with music and I’ve always believed that – not in a big-headed way, but I’ve always felt that. It’s like a hint that someone’s given you; it’s there in your mind. You’ve got the drive to want to do something and that’s enough. That’s the way I go about writing most of my songs.

Your second album is due out soon. What’s changed since the first?
I was only 15 when I did the first and I listened to the critics – as a musician, I criticise myself a lot but it means more coming from someone else – and it was all: ‘It’s very good but he’s still very young and naive.’ This next album, I want to make it more like I’ve moved on because that was the main thing that stuck in my head: ‘young and naive’. I’ve always been one of those people who want to be older than they are. Ever since I was 13, I was going on 30 anyway – that’s what my mum used to say. Seeing as how I hang around all the old rock musicians, I sort of adopt their way of speaking – in the good way and the bad way.

How far does the new album go in communicating that you’re no longer ‘young and naive’?
I think I could have done better, but I’m always going to criticise myself. I try to be positive, especially in interviews otherwise it seems like I’m moaning all the time, because that’s what I normally do! But talking about the songs, they’re more about a teenager – I say that and I hate myself for calling myself a teenager – there are songs on there, like Lips Of Sin, that I hope show my maturity. That’s one of the songs I’ve written that’s like a story.

Lips Of Sin? That’s something someone your age should know nothing about! Is your mother there? Can I have a word with her?
[Laughs] That’s why the door’s closed! I don’t want her listening to it, but it’s a story I have to tell. For my 18th birthday we went out to a club. A girl I knew turned up quite randomly and we were in the VIP area. She was dancing about – the lyrics are ‘Played me all night, she was reeling me in’ – but I’m not very good at reading the signals. We were dancing and then she pushed me away. We got a cab back – I paid, of course – and we’re sitting there. She pours a drink, gives it to me and I go in for a little kiss then she pushes me away and says: ‘Right, I’m off. See you later.’ What was that all about? Leading you on and then… I don’t know. So that was my very interesting 30-second summing up of what was at least an eight-hour saga.

WHO: Tobi
WHAT: “Likened to John Mayer and Robin Thicke, TOBI is actually right in the middle of the two, with a smooth sound enriched by perfect guitar sweeps.” – Music-News.com
WHERE: Latin Quarter, Street 178; The Village, #1 Street 360; Memphis Pub, Street 118 and The Quay, Riverside
WHEN: August 16 (Latin Quarter), 17 (The Village), 24 (Memphis) & 27 (The Quay)
WHY: “Having Tobi not only on the Grammy eligibility list but in multiple categories is confirmation of my initial instincts that here is a new, young artist to be reckoned with” – Andy Fraser

In defence of decadence & depravity

REVERED FOR HIS PLAYS but reviled for his private life, flamboyant Irish poet Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde – Oscar Wilde, to the literati – was never one for dull moments. Opium addict; bisexual; anti-establishment aesthete: the labels were many. But although he died destitute at 46, having been sentenced at the height of his fame to two years’ hard labour for ‘the love that dare not speak its name’, Wilde left behind him a legacy that, according to some of the capital’s resident poets, still resonates with the rebellious of soul today.

In 1890, writing his first and only novel, The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Wilde set forth his personal philosophy: how art should represent higher ideals, most notably the pursuit of pleasure and beauty. “It’s an astonishing piece of work; magic realism before its time,” says Tasmanian poet/writer/musician Scott Bywater, part of an Oscar Wilde night featuring film, live music and spoken word at Meta House. “It always makes me think of Jekyll & Hyde, running these same parallels: two sides, the dichotomy of human nature. It’s also the dichotomy of someone who could write the character of that Lady Havisham woman in The Importance Of Being Earnest: ‘A HAAAAANDBAAAAAG?!’ He was able to get in and satirise from the inside; that was the only way to be in the public eye at that time.”

Being in the public eye was indeed problematic, what with Wilde’s insatiable appetite for the taboo. But Antonio Pineda, a San Franciscan neobeat poet, insists there was method in his masochism. “What Wilde was really saying – and this goes for today – is that the white power elite are a bore: they’re boring, bigoted, small-minded, anti-intellectual people. And this so-called ‘miserable’ world of hard sex and hard drugs and hard drink is fascinating. As Aleister Crowley once said: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.’ The fact he was anti-establishment in everything he did is very important today, when the establishment is so strong. I actually think there’s a connection between Thelema – Crowley’s philosophical/religious society – and the magic of the return of Oscar Wilde, which I wrote the poem Winged Bull about. The winged bull is an ancient Sumerian symbol, like Pegasus. For me, the winged bull is sensuality and intellect together. That’s what Oscar was.

The sage-like Scott Bywater nods slowly. “John Lennon is a similar figure: he was a pain in the arse during the 1970s, causing all sorts of disruption and then retreating. He could be criticised and you could be annoyed by him, but he was actually out there, doing some very interesting things, pushing the boundaries. There are those who desensitise themselves by dumbing down and there are those who try to wake themselves up by peeking through to the other side. That’s Dorian Gray, that’s Jekyll & Hyde and this is all pre-Freud; they don’t have the same psychological insights we have today. Here artists are at the front, trying to understand what it is to be human.

“And this, culturally/socially/temporally/geographically, is what artists do. Awash in the social soup, they confront the issues that arise from their developing awareness of who they are bumping against in the world they are in. So we struggle to be artists in the place we are in – just as Wilde did, just as Lennon did – and our self seeps into our work because it’s what drives our perception of it. Wilde is a reminder of the dangers of being an artist, just as he’s a reminder of the dangers of bourgeois society.”

WHO: Oscar Wilde aficionados
WHAT: Dorian Gray screening, with live blues music and spoken word by Antonio Pineda, Scott Bywater and Joe Cummings plus special guests
WHERE: Meta House, Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 6pm July 21
WHY: “If Oscar Wilde had been part of the beat movement, I think he would’ve been a blues and jazz man” – Antonio Pineda

Category: Features