Beat dis

FRIDAY 11 | Formed in 1964 and regrouping exactly 20 years later, Jamaican ska band The Skatalites, of Guns Of Navarone fame – along with Studio One in-house bands the Soul Vendors, Sound Dimension, Soul Defenders and Brentford Road All Stars – laid the foundations for modern reggae. Mixing their danceable rhythms with popular jazz tonight are some of Phnom Penh’s most talented musicians, among them Sebastien Adnot (bass), Greg Lavender (drums), Euan Gray (saxophone) and Alexandre Scarpati (trombone). Known collectively as Jahzad, they promise an evening of “infectious beats and tasty horn lines”.

WHO: Jahzad
WHAT: Jamaican ska meets jazz
WHERE: Slur, Street 172
WHEN: 9:30pm October 11
WHY: Infectious beats and tasty horn lines

 

Who wants to be a tycoon ?

‘You win the How Many People Can You Spot On One Moto competition! Receive R50.’ So declares one samnang lahor (‘good luck’) card in CambOpoly. ‘You get Dengue Fever (it’s not the musical variety!). Go straight to the Medical Clinic,’ warns another. This, as you might have guessed already, is the newly launched Cambodian version of what is quite possibly the world’s most famous board game.

The concept came about two and a half years ago, when friends of a couple about to get hitched hit on the idea of creating an original wedding gift. The bride and groom liked board games and what started as a small independent project can now be played by one and all.

Unwrapping the game, you’re immediately immersed in the Cambodia so many of us know so well. CambOpoly’s logo, a green square with white text, is based on local road signage. The strong vinyl board is decorated with typical Khmer ornaments. The six player tokens, all tiny animals, come from Russian Market. An ample supply of paper money is provided in Cambodian riel. And the properties you can buy vary from Phnom Penh sangkats (‘districts’) to prominent tourist attractions, from well-known cafés to landmark hotels. Got an uncontrollable urge to demonstrate your burgeoning wealth to the Joneses? Simply park a miniature luxury car outside your CamboPoly properties.

The object of what was known in its original 1906 incarnation as The Landlord’s Game – long before the involvement of Parker Brothers, the British Secret Intelligence Service and Hasbro – is to become the wealthiest landlord in the country. But the eagle-eyed will notice land grabbing and forced evictions don’t factor into the rules.

Players take turns rolling the dice and working their elephant or snake token around the board. Real estate wannabes can snap up prime addresses such as Street 240, Hotel Intercontinental and even Angkor Wat. If another player lands on your property, he or she owes you rent. In an amusing nod to local values, the exact amount you’re owed depends not only on the value of your property but also on whether your Lexus or Bentley is parked outside (clue: the more luxury cars, the higher the rent).

One of the best things about CamboPoly is that you can customise the game yourself: the board comes with five blank samnang lahor cards, their directives limited only by your own imagination. As with the reality of real estate in this country, you can even make up the rules yourself. Just try not to bulldoze too many villages in the process, please.

The game is handmade, locally produced and all proceeds go to Support for Children of Incarcerated Parents (SCIP), which funds social worker visits for jailed mothers and fathers.

CamboPoly is available from Smateria, #8 Street 57 (cnr Street 278), priced $55.

 

Up in smoke

FRIDAY 11 | The Fumes, fronted by Karin Schelzig, are perhaps one of Phnom Penh’s longest-serving expat rock bands. This raucous quintet comprising Karin Schelzig (lead vocals, guitar), Gem Habito (lead guitar), Darren Jahn (bass), Jon Banules (keyboards), and Brian Webster (drums) has been together since early 2009. Between them, they cover everything from Nirvana, The Foo Fighters and Courtney Love to The Clash, Soft Cell and The Killers. Expect an up-tempo, energetic sound with plenty of heavy guitar. And don’t even think about not dancing.

WHO: The Fumes
WHAT: Rock covers
WHERE: Equinox, #3a Street 278
WHEN: 9pm October 11
WHY: They’re smokin’ hot

 

What women want

FRIDAY 11 | Start with nine girls from nine countries: Amina (Afghanistan), Yasmin (Egypt), Senna (Peru), Suma (Nepal), Ruksana (India), Mariama (Sierra Leone), Wadly (Haiti) and Cambodia’s very own Sokha. Pair them with writers from their country so the stories are told in their own words. Then top it off the celebrity voice-overs – including Cate Blanchett, Selena Gomez and Alicia Keys – and it’s a film worthy of The International Day of the Girl. Girl Rising, a 101-minute documentary directed by Richard Robbins and part of the 10X10 series, showcases girls who rise above all odds. They start from a beginning of abject poverty. Their various experiences include forced marriage, indentured labour, scavenging and sexual abuse. Then there is a definable moment for each. The stars align, a puff of ju-ju smoke appears, a whispered inshallah is uttered and their lives forever change. The nine heroines of the film emerge as powerful young women, in charge of their own lives, and able to make a contribution. The evening will also include Apsara dances, live music from Frisco Tony & The Beatniks, a photo exhibition and auction. Proceeds go to the NGO A New Day Cambodia.

WHO: The fairer sex
WHAT: Girl Rising screening plus live music, Apsara dances, a photo exhibition and auction
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 6pm October 11
WHY: Given equal treatment, girls will change the world

 

Twisted talking heads

Imagine a legendary missing bootleg of Blondie, or perhaps The Cars, being brought into the studio on a whim by David Bowie in his Scary Monsters period, with Donna Summer’s main man Giorgio Moroder producing, that is then passed to Daft Punk to remix. From time to time the Human League put in their two cents’ worth, and Nick Cave whispered some pointers. It’s like grunge never happened. Your imagination might get you close to Poni Hoax, a Parisian band fronted by a Franco-Cambodian singer, visiting Phnom Penh this week.

Eschewing a bass player in the presence of dual keyboards, they pump out a dark energetic sound hooky enough to remind you of the best early ’80s pop, augmented by the charismatic English language vocals of Nicolas Ker; a line-up reminiscent of The Doors, coincidentally one of the few acts that the whole band listens to.

“All the guys listen to different music styles, [the Doors are] the only band on which we all agree,” explains guitarist Nicolas Villebrin. “Laurent Bardainne, the composer, comes from Coltrane and Albert Ayler and also loves a lot of very commercial French music; the guitar player listens to minimal techno; the drummer loves hip hop and baroque. I come from the Velvet Underground, Bowie and the Stooges, so we sound like a twisted kind of Talking Heads… right there at the cross-over.”

Keyboard players Bardainne and Arnaud Roulin, guitarist Villebrin and drummer Vincent Taeger all met while studying at the Conservatoire Nationale de Musique in Paris. Differing sources recount the standard myths of meeting singer and lyricist Nicolas either in a bar or via a classified ad. The band and their sound sit naturally in the internet age, where underground and mainstream are no longer useful terms.

The lyrical content is suggested by taglines such as ‘This band was found in a trailer park, wandering aimlessly in a zombie-like trance, wearing its mother’s dress’; by song titles like Antibodies, Budapest, Hypercommunication, Down on Serpent Street and Images of Sigrid. The new album, their third, is titled A State Of War.

Nicolas was born in Phnom Penh in 1970 to a Cambodian woman and a Frenchman, and they were evacuated from the French Embassy compound after the fall of the city in 1975. The trauma continues: asked if he has heard anything of the Cambodian rock ‘n’ roll revival, he says: “Laurent Bardainne is really interested in these records. As for myself, I can’t get myself to listen to the Khmer language, which I forgot in one night in 1975.” Laurent discovered the music while exploring Nicolas’ background and has become enchanted by Cambodian culture.

It’s just a show business trip, a one-night visit to the country, without photo opportunities at Angkor Thom or on the Mekong, and Nicolas shadow boxes with the drama of his first return in 38 years. But then there’s a twinkle: “I think that it won’t be our last gig in Cambodia.” Tickets are on sale now (adults $8, students and under-18s $4) at the media library of the Institut français, #218 Street 184.

WHO:Poni Hoax
WHAT: Dark hooky French pop in English
WHERE: NRG89fm, #131B Street 271 (next to Total)
WHEN: 7pm October 10
WHY: This band was found in a trailer-park, wandering aimlessly in a zombie-like trance, wearing its mother’s dress

 

Snapshots of everyday life

For ten years, Daniel Rothenberg has woken up every morning and done exactly the same thing. Camera in hand, he’s walked the streets of Cambodia’s cities photographing everyday life: the picturesque and sometimes not so picturesque. Rothenberg has documented the changing times.

“The last ten years of photographing on the streets here feels a lot like watching a teen struggle through the time of becoming an adult,” muses the American. “The people are constantly learning, growing, changing… I like shooting here more and more as the years pass.”

A taster of the fruits of Rothenberg’s years of photographing the Kingdom is on show at Tepui right now. Taken from the ongoing Life Is series, the exhibition, snappily titled Snapshots, includes images taken between 2003 and 2013 in Phnom Penh, Battambang and Siem Reap. Rothenberg and his camera roved markets and alleys, searching for everyday scenes that crystallised Cambodia’s rapid development and dynamism.

“When I first started this series, although there was deep poverty everywhere, the huge gap between the rich and the poor was not nearly as extreme,” Rothenberg explains. “The people were also more private and shy, and in many places had less contact with foreigners, cameras or social media.” The explosion in technology in recent years has, he says, left some of the Cambodians he encounters jaded, but others who were once shy have become “very engaged participants in the image-making process”.

The close affinity which Rothenberg feels with his subjects is apparent in Snapshots. Determinedly eschewing the ‘exotic idyll’ shots of commercial photographers, Rothenberg’s images, while not exactly gritty, don’t shy away from the less picturesque aspects of existence: two kids ride the Battambang railway with smiles on their faces, but in the wide-angle periphery of the image, trash-piles and makeshift housing frame their picture-postcard joy; a child sits prettily in a hammock, but underneath her father lies flat out on a bare tile floor.

“Not to be rude – there are many great photographers here – but most of the images I see making it into photo books are not really about real life here,” he says. “To me, real everyday life is everything that happens at the markets, it’s about all that’s being done to survive and grow and be happy in a place where so many have so little.”

If Rothenberg’s fascination with the behind-the-scenes reality of Cambodia sounds slightly cinematic, that’s because in a previous life he worked with the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Altman on the camera and production aspects of their movies. “Working in film for so many years taught me many different things. It taught me how to see… how to respect and communicate with my subjects both verbally and non-verbally and it taught me how to capture a particular scene in a way that spoke in my voice.”

In Snapshots there are hints of his movie days in the atmospheric light and shadow, the vivid contextualisation, the wacky shot angles. These techniques make for an exhibition full of fluidity and the sense of change.

“The changes are a broad mix of positive and negative,” he says of Phnom Penh’s last decade. “The increase in corruption, super-concentration of huge wealth, land-grabbing and all that is associated with the nouveau riche class is sad to witness, while at the same time the increase in educated youth, social media and overall awareness of how badly they are being abused by their own government and rich neighbours is heart-warming… the changes are just in their infancy, that’s for sure. I just try to capture reality for a cross-section of the real people who live around me. And I hope I keep getting better at it every day.”

WHO: Daniel Rothenberg
WHAT: Snapshots, a photographic exhibition of everyday life in Cambodia
WHERE: Tepui at Chinese House, #45 Sisowath Quay
WHEN: Now until the end of October
WHY: Ten years of Cambodia’s evolution in photographs

 

Tables turned

FRIDAY 4 | Burma born and UK raised, DJ Angelo – the self-declared father of what he calls ‘feel-good fusion’ – has shared the stage with everyone from Skrillex and Public Enemy to Pete Tong and DJ Yoda, along the way inflaming the passions of Red Bull, which declared: “Finally, a turntablist we can dance to!”

WHO: DJ Angelo
WHAT: The father of ‘feel good fusion’
WHERE: Pontoon, Street 172
WHEN: 11pm October 4
WHY: “World-class turntablist… Angelo takes the roof off with skilful scratching and a crafty set” – DJ Mag

The eyes of my eyes

Worldwide, our culinary and cultural traditions are based on the senses. We see art, hear music, taste and smell our food and so on and so forth. But do we really pay attention to the culture we’re experiencing, or have our touchstones become millstones? If we were to take one of our senses away, would we be further liberated or find another way?

Dine in the Dark, a new addition to the capital’s fine dining scene, requires you to experience your meal in total darkness. I was greeted by two sighted hostesses who presented me with a menu with three mystery options: international, Khmer and vegetarian. You’re then asked to place any light-emitting devices into a beautiful dark-blue lockbox, and introduced to your sightless guide.

My dining companion and I were led up a perilous flight of stairs by Guide Honey, who brought a wonderful openness, excellence and warmth to the whole experience. Abandoned in a pagoda at birth, she was sent to a school for the deaf and blind where she learned how to read and write in both English and Khmer, using Braille. Last year she spent ten months in Japan on a leadership course and expanded her knowledge of languages to include Japanese and Japanese Braille. She now attends a mainstream university in Phnom Penh and is undertaking a course in English literature with sighted peers.

The visually impaired guides are all sharp as tacks, well versed and focused, granting you a reassuring passage from the world of the sighted to a world without light. Although they also assume waiter duties, they’re more like interpreters of the darkness. We often view ‘the dark’ as a place in which terrible things happen. Here, we’re invited to converse and even dine with the darkness; to be soothed by it and make peace, with the help of those who understand its murmurings.

The meal ($18) was timed beautifully and came in three ‘surprise’ courses. Each was wonderfully prepared, rich and delicious. Even though we were not privy to the menu components, the mystery sparks interesting conversation between diners and adds to the fun. The actual eating without the aid of visual cues might be a steep curve for some, but I found that if you listened carefully to your guide you could take a mental picture of the layout of the table and eat with ease. Dine in the Dark also, by design, gives you the freedom to slow down, take stock and enjoy your meal distraction free.

I left with the last lines of an old EE Cummings poem in my head – ‘Now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are open’ – my belly full and my millstone transformed into a touchstone.

Dining in the Dark (6pm to 10:30pm), Botanic Café, #126 Street 19; 077 589458

 

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.

High spirits

THURSDAY-SUNDAY 3-6 | Escape the spectral celebration of Pchum Ben, Cambodia’s festival of the dead, by legging it to Kampot this weekend with some fellow crazies for three nights and four days of “kicking it”, as Plan C Projects puts it. Mystery transport. A bed at Naga House. Simon C Vent and Drop Dead Disco. River cruising. In short: eats, beats and treats. Prices start at $55. Tempted? Pester Josh on 096 3404897 or jpage.work@nullgmail.com.

WHO: Crazies
WHAT: Out Of The Penh And Into The Pot
WHERE: Kampot
WHEN: 1pm October 3 – 4pm October 6
WHY: You’re not dead… yet