Advisor

Oh, Tokyo

When you hear the word ‘Tokyo’, what are the first things that come to mind? For the sake of amusement, we’ll eliminate ‘sumo’, ‘anime’ and ‘sushi’. OK, GO!

…..

I’m willing to bet that ‘super-conservative bureaucracy’, ‘exorbitant costs of living’ and ‘mind-numbing levels of societal pressure’ were not the first things you associated with the Empire of the Rising Sun. In fact, I’m positive this microcosm of a city has more to teach us about the past, present and future of an entire country than we ever could have imagined. Luckily for us mere mortals, these brilliant minds are about to give us an inside view of one of the most multifaceted-yet-still-homogenous societies this world has to offer.

Meet Morteza Ariana, an Iranian-born and revolution-raised visual artist who, by chance of fate, found himself sneaking under the Berlin Wall into West Germany after his tenure as a soldier during the Iran/Iraq war. Unbeknown to Ariana, his adventure was only just beginning. It was in Germany he fell in love with a Japanese woman who would set him on a course of lifelong discovery. Morteza – ‘Mori’, for short – delved into language and history. He learned that essentially all aspects of Japanese society were fundamentally art forms, be it sado (‘the way of tea’) or kendo (‘the way of the sword’). He was enamoured with the ubiquitous concept of harmony with nature; so much so that that the word for ‘art’ doubled as the word for ‘flower’ (kado, in case you were wondering).

One of his fondest discoveries was that ancient Buddhist temples doubled as art schools; one was expected to have an understanding of natural beauty before they could hope to attain Zazen: ‘emptiness of the mind’. Ariana was seduced by the sophistication of Japanese culture; understandably so, considering the fact he was developing his own artistic identity and belief system at the time. “I had given up God and Islam” says Mori, who, by chance of art, inadvertently discovered Buddhism and Confucianism. “Art is the ultimate manifestation of being” and Mori will attest much of this enlightenment to his time spent in the spiritual capital of Kyoto.

Unfortunately, every utopia has an underbelly and Japan is no different. Among the vocabulary he acquired was the word karoshi: the act of working oneself to death, literally. As it stands, Japan on average loses 30,000 people a year to suicide due to an overwhelming drive to succeed in virtually all aspects of life. An additional 30,000+ die from over-exhaustion. Governmentally speaking, Japan has been a functional oligarchy for the last few centuries. One could argue that the imperial family has controlled politics and economy since the end of the feudal Meiji era.

Take a gander at the state of public schooling and it’s pretty easy to believe. Students are well versed in little else than learning by rote, deference to authority and a general submission to groupthink – a far cry from the free-minded artistry of antiquity. The relationship front is not much better, either. For a country so technologically advanced, family hierarchies and gender roles are strikingly antiquated; many relationships are still expected to result in marriage and most marriages are contingent upon social status. Contraceptives are a bit taboo and thus not always used, so many metropolises boast dangerously high abortion rates.

The bulk of these issues are faced by those considered Gaijin, or ‘outsiders’. As it turns out, for a culture so big on universal harmony and artistic inclusiveness, our neighbours to the East are well versed in the art of xenophobia. Says Mori: “Japanese conformity and homogeneity can be seen as the products of conscious and unconscious control of the economic and political system.”

If this is the case, it’s easy to see why so many 20-somethings are kicking the bucket in the woods, especially if you’re not particularly talented, ambitious or attractive. In fact, there is a term for many of these poor, wretched souls: hikikomori (‘one who avoids social contact and confines themself to isolation’). In the triptych TOKYO!, writers Joon Ho, Michael Gondry and Leos Carax attack many of these very issues in a way that only disgruntled Surrealists can, although admittedly these interpretations take a bit more sifting than does Ariana’s photography. Take a look at the brutish, grenade-tossing madman in Leos Carax’s Merde and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. For an up-close and personal view of such gems, check Meta House for Ariana’s exhibit Made In Japan, and the screening of TOKYO! Bring an open mind or at the very least, a mind-altering substance: the banality of this weirdness just may shock you – and that’s sans cosplay.

WHO: Artist Morteza Ariana
WHAT: Made In Japan exhibition opening (6pm) plus TOKYO! screening (8pm)
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: From 6pm August 20
WHY: Everyone’s turning Japanese

Sweet dreams

FRIDAY 16 | Dengue Fever, the Los Angeles-based sextet who take ’60s Cambodian psyche rock and stuff it through a blender, is chiefly responsible for introducing global audiences to a lesser-known Cambodia; the Cambodia long obscured from international eyes by the pall of murderous Maoists. As Mark Jenkins writes in The Washington Post: “Imagine relaxing in a dive in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, circa 1965, brushing elbows with off-duty soldiers, local gangsters and Western diplomats as a hip band plays a mix of rock, soul, jazz, surf music, traditional Cambodian tunes and Henry Mancini and John Barry spy movie motifs.” Powerful stuff, not just on the global stage but where it all began – as evidenced in the documentary Sleepwalking Through The Mekong, which charts Dengue Fever’s first visit to Cambodia as a band back in 2005. During one sequence, filmed in The White Building where the band jammed with residents, a music teacher turns to the camera and says in Khmer: “When I saw them performing with my students I was just in awe. Nothing could compare to it. I knew they were foreigners, but when they played all these Khmer songs there was no class difference. We were all equal.”

WHO: Dengue Fever
WHAT: Sleepwalking Through The Mekong screening
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 4pm August 16
WHY: “Underground people are getting hip to world music, and the world music side is getting hip to how you don’t have to have a dreadlock wig and Guatemalan pants to be cool” – Senon Williams (bass), Dengue Fever

Tangled up in the blues

FRI & SAT 16 & 17 | 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. 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 arrives in Phnom Penh this week for his first tour of Asia. Cornered recently by The Advisor to talk man-crushes, the strange bathroom habits of the man responsible for 1970 hit All Right Now, and being called by dmme.net the ‘British answer to Justin Bieber’, Tobi had this to say: “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!” Bless.

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 (August 16); The Village, #1 Street 360 (August 17)
WHEN: 9pm August 16 (Latin Quarter), 8:30pm August 17 (The Village)
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

Spiritual highs

FRIDAY 16 | In 1886, French composer César Franck composed his famous Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano, considered one of the finest ever written. “Franck is a bit of an anomaly in the history of music,” says Anton Isselhardt, director of the Art Plus Foundation, who has summoned two Norwegian musicians for this evening’s recital. Biographer Léon Vallas puts it like this: “The overpowering climaxes to which he builds are never a frenzy of emotion; they are superbly calm and exalted. The structure of his music is strangely inorganic. His material does not develop. He adds phrase upon phrase, detail upon detail, with astonishing power to knit and weave closely what comes with what went before. It is this strange absence of genuinely dramatic and sensuous elements from Franck’s music which gives it its quite peculiar stamp, the quality which appeals to us as a sort of poetry of religion. It is a music which is apart from life, spiritual and exalted. It does not reflect the life of the body, nor that of the sovereign mind, but the life of the spirit.”

WHO: Hartini Van Rijssel (violin) and Mark Lippe (piano)
WHAT: César Franck’s Sonata in A Major and Franz Schubert’s Sonatinas
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 8pm August 16
WHY: “It is a music which is apart from life, spiritual and exalted” – Léon Vallas

Believe the hype?

FRIDAY 16 | Billed as being to drum and bass what Afrika Bambaata was to the development of hip hop, DJ Hype won the London heat of the Disco Mix Club World DJ Championships way back in 1989 and has since graced the British capital’s Kiss FM and famed super-club Fabric. As one of the original rave DJs, it’s only fitting that his appearance tonight comes shrouded in mystery: it’s being held at a ‘secret location’, details of which will be revealed at codeclubasia.com on the day.

WHO: DJ Hype
WHAT: One of the original rave DJs
WHERE: It’s a secret, innit?
WHEN: 11pm August 16
WHY: What better way to relive the ’90s rave scene?

Blazing saddles

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, so the well-beaten adage goes. Nobody better proves this as a truism than Val Benson, the lead character in Jame DiBiasio’s first novel Gaijin Cowgirl, a thrilling and often violent romp of a story that takes the reader on a fast-paced journey from the hostess bars of Tokyo to Hong Kong to the concrete and natural jungles of Thailand.

The plot revolves around gold stolen by the Japanese during WWII in the form of an enormous solid gold Buddha, and the desperate efforts by the multinational cast of characters (bar hostesses, a former Japanese colonel, vicious businessmen, a gold hunter, Thai and foreign Muay Thai boxers, a Thai journalist, a former CIA man and an American Congressman) to recover the treasure from its hiding place deep in the jungles of Thailand’s Kanchanaburi province – the site of the River Kwai Bridge and the infamous Death Railway.

Val is a chaos attracter. We’ve all known at least one or two in our lives: people who have a knack for finding themselves in out-of-control situations that sweep up everyone around that person in a swirl of destructive force, that often as not leaves the person at the centre of it virtually unscathed, while relatively innocent bystanders, guilty only by association with such a person, pay the price. And in this book, plenty of prices are paid.

The latest blood and guts novel from ‘quality pulp’ publisher Crime Wave Press, Gaijin Cowgirl is a gripping and escalating read from the beginning until the final pages and the perfect companion with which to while away several hours on a long train journey, or a quiet evening at home. It is not ideal toilet reading, however, since you’ll end up staying in the bathroom flipping the pages for so long that your family will wonder what you’re doing in there.

And for those looking for something sexy, there’s not that much sex in it, with any sex scenes ‘fading to black’ and leaving the nitty gritty of things to the reader’s imagination – if they care to distract themselves from the sweep of the story. Titillation is not the aim of this book.

Gaijin Cowgirl, by Jame DiBiasio, is now available in eBook form from Amazon.com for $6.24.

Good vibrations

Some 50 of the capital’s finest musicians are assembling for Vibe, a ten-day music festival starting this week that will feature upwards of 17 bands. It’s carved up into three ‘vibes’: Dancing & Bouncing (August 16, 17, 18 & 23), Cooling & Chilling (18, 19, 20, 21, 22 & 25) and Quiet Listening (24), the only night for which there’s a cover charge ($3, available in advance at Doors on Street 84 & 47 and The Piano Shop on Street 13 & 178). Here’s what not to miss this week:

9pm August 16: Dub Addiction & VJ/DJ Roberto
Dub Addiction summon an epic fusion of reggae and dub with Khmer saravan. Accompanying the wobble bass and distorted e-guitar solos will be a 3D visual feast by VJ/DJ Roberto. Psychedelics not required.

9pm August 17: Vibratone & DJ Bluesabelle
Vibratone is a new all-original reggae band in town; Lady Bluesabelle has played fine jazz for the launch of Ministry of Sound Radio’s chill-out sessions in London and was the first female DJ in Goa. Expect Caribbean, funk, electro swing and Afro beat.

7:30pm August 18: Kin & Swing Kings
Gabi Faja (piano), Sebastien Adnot (double bass) and Toma Willen (drums), known in their own right as the GTS Jazz Trio, recently joined forces with Euan Gray, front man of Australia’s The Rooftops and now a permanent Phnom Penh resident. New forays include pop, rhythm and soul, all bundled into a jazz aficionado-friendly package.

7:30pm August 19: Cambostomp
For centuries, the skor (‘drum’) has been at the very core of Cambodia’s musical traditions, used to emulate the sound of thunder; an important way of connecting to the natural world. Expect rousing tribal beats from Sovanna Phum’s Pin Peat Orchestra, from the percussive rumana to the giant barrel-shaped skor thom.

8pm August 20: Wash
Fronted by Scott ‘kind of a music guy; writes a bit’ Bywater, Wash brings together some of the city’s most inventive souls: DJ/VJ Warren Daly; electronic musician Alex Leonard and ‘English production guy’ Hal FX. Here, exotic soundscapes meet stunning visuals and dreamy spoken word in a collaborative effort that stimulates several senses at once.

8:30pm August 21: Joe Wrigley and the Jumping Jacks
British country singer/songwriter Joe Wrigley meets the Cambodian Space Project’s Scott Bywater (vocals) and Adrien (bass) in this new rockabilly trio. “We’re going for the Sun Records/Gene Vincent kind of sound,” says Joe. “We’re all into our ’50s stuff, so it will be authentic in terms of the rockabilly spirit… I just wish I still had my quiff!”

WHO: Gabi Faja and Friends, Lots of Friends…
WHAT: Vibe Music Festival
WHERE: Doors, #18 Street 84 & 47; 023 986114
WHEN: August 16 – 25
WHY: 10 days, 17 bands, 50 musicians: why the Hell wouldn’t you?!

Silent screams

A small boy cradles his face in his hands, wide eyes aghast at the graphic horrors unfolding before them. Mouth contorted in agony, he calls to mind The Scream, expressionist painter Edvard Munch’s iconic 19th-century depiction of existential angst. The look etched onto his features a mixture of mortal fear and incomprehension.

This tiny figure, dressed in a red shirt with yellow dots – the only colour in an ocean of otherwise muted greens, browns and greys – is a lone spectre caught between two worlds: the heady ‘Golden Era’ of 1960s Phnom Penh, a time of beehive hairdos, miniskirts and psych rock, and the dark, nightmarish netherworld of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime.
One of hundreds of minuscule clay figurines hand-carved by famed local sculptor Sarith Mang for use in the first Cambodian feature ever to win an award at the Cannes Film Festival, this small, chiselled child is a tiny avatar of Rithy Panh. Today the country’s most celebrated filmmaker, he was 13 when ultra-Maoists seized the capital, frogmarching folk from the city out to rice fields that would later serve as their graves.

Panh’s The Missing Picture, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes festival, has been described by hollywoodreporter.com as “a deliberately distanced but often harrowing vision of a living hell”. The image to which the title refers is something that has haunted Panh for decades; photographic evidence to embody the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, or his own endeavours to do so on celluloid.

“For many years, I have been looking for the missing picture: a photograph taken between 1975 and 1979 by the Khmer Rouge when they ruled over Cambodia,” says a disembodied voice as the opening credits roll. “On its own, of course, an image cannot prove mass murder, but it gives us cause for thought, prompts us to meditate, to record history. I searched for it vainly in the archives, in old papers, in the country villages of Cambodia. Today I know: this image must be missing. I was not really looking for it; would it not be obscene and insignificant? So I created it. What I give you today is neither the picture nor the search for a unique image, but the picture of a quest: the quest that cinema allows.”

As the film’s narrator, via a philosophical script credited to Christophe Bataille and voiced matter-of-factly by Randal Douc, Panh’s clay avatar roams through the litany of Khmer Rouge abuses and horrors, positioned in elaborate dollhouse-sized scenes or superimposed using rough-edge visual effects. For 90 minutes these bleak, monochrome scenarios, mixed with grainy black-and-white archive images from the regime’s own propaganda files, are chillingly contrasted with rose-tinted recollections from the filmmaker’s pre-revolutionary childhood.

Asked why he chose to present his quest as a montage of images past and present, Panh says: “It came with the shooting. I bought Chinese acupuncture material and I thought I would start filming with this. Then I interviewed a former Khmer Rouge photographer and cameraman in order to know if there was a missing picture, a picture hidden somewhere. And I ended with clay figurines. In fact, I don’t know why this combination of images. It is like a painter who looks for a special light in his painting; a musician who searches for the blue note, the perfect note. The missing picture is the picture which does not exist and which I was looking for.”

Film spools past on the screen. A young Princess Norodom Devi Buppha, guardian of Cambodia’s Royal Ballet and here swathed in the golden garb of an Apsara, entwines her fingers in physical prayer to the gods. Crowds of 20-somethings twist and stomp to the sound of West Coast rock ‘n’ roll. Pristine cyclos pedal serenely past city markets overflowing with produce.

Panh was born into a world of books, music and laughter, his father a peasant who had risen to become chief undersecretary of education. Theirs was a lively, boisterous family: sisters, a mother. But when Pol Pot set about converting the urban population into pre-industrial ‘noble savages’, there was no place for education. The word ‘study’ took on new meaning. As Panh recounts in his book The Elimination, on which this film is based, Khmer Rouge commanders would tell selected people: ‘The Angkar has chosen you. You’re to be sent away to study. We leave at once.’

The next day, their bodies would be discovered with their skulls smashed in.

In using clay models to depict such atrocities, the speechlessness and immobility of each figurine underscoring the collective helplessness of a people being methodically exterminated, Panh finds a way of representing the unrepresentable – the sort of images that might otherwise be better left unseen. Writes variety.com: “These re-creations are meant to stand in for the unfilmed, unphotographed images that inspired the film’s title: the concrete dikes and rice fields where these former city-dwellers were forced to work; the meagre rice yields they were forced to live on, leading to widespread malnutrition; and the brutal executions that occurred on a matter-of-fact basis. The result is a carefully aestheticised catalogue of atrocities that… generates its own strange, complicated line of ethical inquiry.”

Long live the independent masterful way of Democratic Kampuchea’s Angkar
Long live its extraordinary clairvoyance

Propaganda footage rescued from rusting canisters shows a smiling Pol Pot, or ‘Brother Number One’, waving to the assembled crowds. Black-clad cadres alternately thump their chests then pump their fists in the air, shouting well-rehearsed party slogans. Over each image floats the ever-emotionless voice of the narrator: “Brother Number One was inspired by young humanity. The original people – the Jarai, the Kuoy, the Bunong – a handful of families who shared everything in common. By observing them, he understood. Like Rousseau’s noble savage.”

The clay Panh sits with his head bowed in a muddy field, recounting over mournful strings and clinking cow bells the time a sleepy comrade shared memories of the United States’ Apollo mission – a gesture the storyteller was ultimately made to pay for with his life. “On our moon, there is nothing,” says the thumb-sized sculpture. “Parched earth and dust bury everything. It took me years to learn to walk upon it, bare feet on thorns.” The camera pans to reveal clay water buffalo being herded by a gaunt-looking man wielding a stick. “Muddy water trickles down my throat. Little by little I disappear. I’m nothing any more. It is strange to drink mud. The buffalo watch us. ‘What odd humans to drink our water.’”

Of sculpting the hundreds of cartoon-like figures, a process that took Mang many months to complete, Panh says: “Each facial expression was made according to the requirements of the sequence, and according to my memories, and according to what I had in mind, what I wanted to film. Most important was that the expression had to be a human one. The figurine is the depiction of the soul. It had to be embodied.”

Perhaps one of the most disturbing memories in The Missing Picture is how Panh’s father deliberately chose, with great dignity, to starve himself to death rather than continue living on ‘rations fit for animals’ – a small gesture that nonetheless defied the regime. Yet in suspended animation, despite the crimes to which he was subjected (his sisters and mother also perished), Panh – this eminent chronicler of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship – seeks neither judgement nor revenge, only to understand. “My film aims to ensure that the deep wound caused by the Khmer Rouge belongs to the past and that the new generation builds her future with confidence in herself and in her creativity.”

WHO: Filmmaker Rithy Panh
WHAT: The Missing Picture screening
WHERE: Bophana Centre, #64 Street 200
WHEN: 6:30pm August 3 – 10
WHY: The film, rising from the ashes of a system designed to exterminate intellectual and artistic achievement, is itself a powerful form of resistance

Scream

SATURDAY 10 | Ever since Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple became the first to unleash heavy metal’s monstrously high-volume machismo back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, metalheads, also known as headbangers, have been branded ‘Satan’s spawn’. In truth, many are anything but – particularly within the Buddhist confines of 21st century Cambodia. “We’ll be doing our best to share everything we’ve got: our power, our minds, our feelings.” Sam, 20, is an international relations student and ‘clean’ non-screaming vocalist with post-hardcore and metalcore band, No Forever. “We do this every time we’re on stage; we love what we have and we love to share.” And how do the folks back home take to Sam’s super-loud, super-fast sound? “I have to hide from my parents. They just know I love singing and they love my voice, but they don’t know what I’m doing right now. The market for metal here is so small we can say there’s no market at all, but it’s what we love.” Hers is far from a unique experience, says Zoro. Ask this 18-year-old IT student and No Forever’s resident screamer what his family’s take is and he throws up his hands. “Oh my god! My dad, who plays guitar and keyboard, said: ‘What kind of music is this screaming? You should scream to the cows. They’re the only ones who will listen.’ I said: ‘Dad, you don’t accept the revolution. You’re only listening to hard rock like Carlos Santana, The Eagles, Scorpions.’ Zoro smiles. “Now he says: ‘Keep it up, if that’s what you want.’ Nowadays, I can scream in my house whenever I want.”

WHO: No Forever & AOA
WHAT: Post-hardcore metal
WHERE: Show Box, #11 Street 330
WHEN: 7:30pm August 10
WHY: \m/ \m/ \m/

Reinventing reggae

Dub Addiction summon an epic fusion of reggae and dub with Khmer saravan. ‘Dirty’ and ‘raw’ are adjectives that sit well with their second album Dub Addiction Meets Kampuchea Rockers Uptown, the hallmark of which is a more organic, authentic dub sound than the band’s eponymous first album (a third is now ready – expect to hear new tracks tonight). The band features a veritable Who’s Who of the local scene, but the main ragamuffin toasters are MC Curly and DJ Khla, the latter someone German music producer Professor Kinski compares to Cutty Ranks, Sizla and Anthony B. Sights and sounds familiar to Phnom Penh long-termers ooze through the mixer to create a distinctly Cambodian soundscape. A high point – if you’ll pardon the pun – is The Mighty Plan, on which “the voice of LSD guru Terence McKenna is lecturing about mankind’s first contact with aliens over an ultra-massive slow shuffle dub groove of Lee Perry”. And it can only be right and proper to follow such a track with a song entitled Ganja Dub, although it’s clearly far too fast for anyone genuinely out of their mind on marijuana. “We intend to conquer the universe,” a disembodied voice declares as one track drives its mega-phat electro dub juggernaut into your sternum. Brace yourself.

WHO: Dub Addiction
WHAT: Ragga dub
WHERE: Laundry Bar, Old Market, Siem Reap
WHEN: 9pm August 10
WHY: Somewhere in the Great Dancehall in the sky, King Tubby should be smoking a fat one and smiling

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