Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Don't Think I've Forgotten

John Pirozzi has created a website for his documentary film about the pre-'75 Cambodian rock scene, now entitled "Don't Think I"ve Forgotten". You'll recall John is the filmmaker who shot Dengue Fever's tour here last November. John is looking for financial support to help complete the project. I'm hoping it won't be too long before we get to see John's film, a real labor of love.

ON THE PODCAST: ROS SEREY SOTHEA - "I'M SIXTEEN"

Monday, October 30, 2006

Heat Treatment

Every bar owners' buddy Mr. Heng finished the replacement of our kitchen exhaust duct such that the kitchen will be open for business as usual tomorrow. Our apologies for the downtime. Should make for a cooler Jungle.

Do we like Graham Parker at the Jungle?? Yes we do. I could use some more though. If you brought any of his stuff with you I'd love to swap music with you. His latest album is an internet only release (Itunes and EMusic) and we'll have it shortly.

Friday, October 27, 2006

Internet Use

You'll see some new signage around the Jungle which hopefully will clarify our policies around internet use:

$1.00/HR

FREE WITH $4 PURCHASE

PLEASE:

LIMIT YOUR DESKTOP SESSION TO 15 MINUTES
WITH CUSTOMERS WAITING AND
1 HOUR OTHERWISE

THE COMPUTER IS FOR E-MAIL AND SURFING
NOT DOWNLOADING MUSIC OR VIDEO
WE MUST CHARGE YOU $.08 FOR
DOWNLOADS
WHICH EXCEED 20MB


DO NOT INSTALL PROGRAMS
OF ANY KIND

VOIP CALLS/CD/DVD BURNING AVAILABLE
BY REQUEST

QUESTIONS? PLEASE ASK!

THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION



The laptop links you're free to use (with your $4 purchase) as long as no one else is waiting to use them. Regarding downloads we remain on the honor system. If you have a large download session to do, you tell us and we charge you accordingly simply to cover our costs. If you don't tell us and we catch you downloading King Kong off Bittorrent, you'll be fitted for cement shoes and placed ignominiously in the Tonle Sap. Or at least you'll be eating breafast at the Frog and Parrot from now on. We've had some very very expensive bills of late.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Hole, Sweet Hole
The last weekend of CBGB
By JIM SULLIVAN
L.A. Weekly
Wednesday, October 18, 2006 - 6:00 pm

“Thank you for the great fuckin’ memories,” said Dictators singer Handsome Dick Manitoba, pouring his heart out one last time from the stage of CBGB on the next-to-last night of the New York club’s existence. The Dictators had just concluded their October 14 set with the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop,” Manitoba sharing vocals with the Ramones’ founding drummer, Tommy Ramone. Chills, smiles and tears flooded the most famous rock club in the world.

Among Manitoba’s memories were shooting heroin in the filthy men’s room — he’s been clean 23 years — and dodging the backstage feces deposited by owner Hilly Kristal’s dog, Jonathan. But as Manitoba put it, “It is a wonderful shithole, and it’s our shithole.”

CBGB’s final weekend also included performances by Blondie, Patti Smith and several support bands. Kristal had waged a rent dispute with the subletting Bowery Residents Commission and reached an agreement to vacate the premises 14 months after the lease ran out in August 2005. Kristal said the BRC would’ve tripled his rent had he stayed.

It had been almost 33 years for the narrow rock box, which was intended to be a showcase for country, bluegrass and blues (the letters in the club’s name) rather than the punk and new wave movement of the ’70s. But it quickly became a home for the Ramones, Dead Boys, Television, Talking Heads and many other original bands with no place to play. The decrepit, dangerous Bowery neighborhood was just part of the allure.

“It’s like my childhood,” said singer Deborah Harry of Blondie, who preceded the Dictators with a set that included Ramones and Gun Club songs.

“Part of me is dying,” Dictators guitarist Ross the Boss told Kristal on Friday — Kristal himself is 75 and undergoing chemotherapy.

On Sunday, Patti Smith called CBGB “a state of mind” that will inspire kids all over the world to “find their own shithole.” Smith opened with her first-ever recorded song, “Piss Factory,” about escaping dead-end suburbia for New York City, and played a Ramones medley, a Blondie bit, a couple of Television songs (with TV guitarist Richard Lloyd), a Velvet Underground selection, a Dead Boys number (“too slow,” complained Dead Boy Jeff Magnum from the crowd), the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” the Who’s “My Generation” and the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love.”

“There was a time when lightning struck here,” said Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye.

“A lot of bittersweet memories are coming back,” said Walter Lure (once of Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers) after playing a set with his band, the Waldos. “C’est la vie.”

Kristal recalled the early days. “I remember Patti Smith doing seven shows in a row. The Ramones played for 17 minutes — a wall of energy as loud as they could get. They didn’t play very well in the beginning, most of them. They got better. I felt that playing what is within you is what’s most important.”

The club looked much the same as ever. The white awning with the famous red logo hung over the door. In the skunky downstairs men’s room, the infamous three urinals (one nonfunctional) were still in place. Graffiti on top of graffiti, posters and stickers on top of posters and stickers. But the neighborhood has changed. Gleaming steel-and-glass apartment buildings have shot up on the empty lots, a process that accelerated in the past two years as the Bowery became Manhattan’s latest upscaling project.

Kristal has plans: another New York CBGB, a reopening of his retail outlet — and a Las Vegas location.

“They say old punks never die,” quipped ex–Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth. “They just go to Vegas.”

One of the worst dates I ever had was taking a girl who had no idea what the music was about to see Patti Smith in 1976.

There's now a CBGBs Playlist at the Jungle. Come pay your respects. Dedicated to Laura Casas wherever you are.


ON THE PODCAST: PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER - PATTI SMITH (LIVE)

Hello Goodbye


Cambodia appoints princess as minister

The Associated Press
Published: October 24, 2006

PHNOM PENH Cambodian lawmakers approved the appointment to a ministerial post of the estranged wife of Prince Norodom Ranariddh on Tuesday, a week after he was ousted from his position as head of the royalist Funcinpec Party.

The action served as a political jab at Ranariddh - who resigned as National Assembly president in March and has been abroad most of the time since then - and effectively publicizes the much-rumored split-up of Ranariddh and his wife.

The appointment of Princess Marie Ranariddh as a senior minister in charge of an unspecified "special mission" was requested by Prime Minister Hun Sen and approved by 83 votes out of 105 lawmakers.

Misc. Happenings

We will be closing again this year for the Water Festival. It gets way too crazy on the riverside to try and stay open, so we'll shut down for three days, November 4-6.

We'll be doing two rounds of work at Jungle beginning Friday. We'll be relacing the too small kitchen venting system with a beefier one, which work should take three days (or so). We plan to stay open. Probably after the water festival we'll also paint and redecorate a bit. Probably will close for one day during the repaint.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Loso

Sek Loso has a new album in the stores in Thailand, called Black and White, and tour dates have been announced. The guy makes great music -- rock guitar anthems, ballads, punkish stuff -- all very accessible depsite the Thai lyrics. Stop by Jungle and give the new one a listen. I'm hoping to catch one the concerts in Bangkok when I go back next month, or maybe even make it to the show with Carabao in Aranyaprathet. Can't say I've been looking for a reason to go to the shithole that Poipet is supposed to be, but this would be a good reason to make the trip.

Loso Thailand tour dates October/November 2006:

Tue October 24, Rai gan mae-long man, BANGKOK
Thu October 26, Hollywood Awards, Soi Nathong, Rachadaphisek Rd., BANGKOK
Sat October 28, The Sky, Sri Nakarin, BANGKOK
Tue October 31, Baan Dta-giang, Minburi, BANGKOK
Sat November 4, M-150 Power Concert, open-air, RAYONG
Sun November 5, Loi Kratong Festival, center of town in front of City Hall, CHAIYAPOOM
Fri November 10, Hillary Bar, Sukhumvit, Soi 4, BANGKOK
Sat November 11, ARANYAPRATHET, near the border to Cambodia, the big live-concert SEK LOSO - MICRO - CARABAO
Thu November 16, Moonlight Pub (Saeng jan), Suvarnabhumi, BANGKOK
Sat November 18, open-air in front of City Hall, SURIN
Sun November 26, River Kwai Bridge, KANCHANABURI (not yet confirmed)
Tue November 28, open-air in front of District Office, UBON RATCHATHANI
Thu November 30, open-air, Chula University, BANGKOK (not yet confirmed)

The new CD has a funky copy protection scheme from Grammy, as do the new Bird and Palmy CD's . I guess given the availability of bootlegged CD's in Bangkok it's understandable that artists would want it. There are ways around it of course...

You can watch/listen to 14 อีกครั้ง from the new album at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VDMQJ5k3WE

or here's Panthip from Loso's Concert for Friends:

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Sunday, October 22, 2006

Cambodian strongman Hun Sen emerges clear winner in dispute within royalist camp
The Associated Press
Published: October 20, 2006

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia The head of Cambodia's royalist party, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, was ousted this past week in favor of his less regal brother-in-law, but the dispute's real winner is the country's now undisputed strongman, Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Hun Sen, who has held or shared the prime minister's post since 1985, was the main force behind moves for the Funcinpec party to dump Ranariddh, and used his well-honed political savvy to have his way with the fractured and demoralized royalists.

In addition to sending Ranariddh on the way to what may well be political obscurity, Hun Sen has also boosted the chances of his ruling Cambodian People's Party in upcoming elections, says Hang Puthea, executive director of independent Cambodian election monitoring group Nicfec.

"The CPP already commanded the political advantage even without Funcinpec splitting. So, it is going to remain ahead after Funcinpec is broken into pieces," he said.

In a remarkable political career, Hun Sen rose from a peasant background to a Khmer Rouge military commander and then defected to join a Vietnamese-installed communist government which had ousted the ultra-revolutionaries. He reinvented himself as a brilliant tactician — critics would say ruthless manipulator — in Cambodia's fledgling democratic arena.

On Wednesday, Funcinpec voted to remove Ranariddh as its leader, saying his long absences from the country left him unable to lead the party, the junior partner in Hun Sen's government.

The decision at a special party congress came after Hun Sen, well known for his divide-and-conquer tactics, called on Funcinpec to toss out Ranariddh for alleged incompetence.

Ranariddh, speaking by telephone from France on Thursday, stopped short of accusing Hun Sen of being behind his ouster but said it was "very crystal clear" that his removal was the direct result of Hun Sen's Sept. 17 suggestion.

The prince accused the top officials in the new party leadership of betrayal and claimed that many Funcinpec members were forced to attend the congress that ousted him.

Although considering a legal challenge of his ouster, Ranariddh has acknowledged that he will never regain control of Funcinpec, whose leadership he inherited from his father, retired King Norodom Sihanouk.

He said he plans to set up a new party named the Norodom Ranariddh Party so that no one can hijack it from him.

Having two parties with royalist identities would split the votes of royalist citizens, said Kek Galabru, president of Licadho, a local human rights group.

"Right now they are playing the game of the ruling party. It's really bad for them," Kek Galabru said. "The big winner is the CPP. But of course, Hun Sen is the bigger winner."

Cambodia is to hold local elections next April and general elections in 2008.

Funcinpec was founded as a resistance group against the Vietnamese-installed government more than two decades ago by Sihanouk, whose prestige helped the prince and his party win a 1993 United Nations-sponsored general election held as part of a peacekeeping mission aimed at establishing democracy.

But under Ranariddh, who many believe is more comfortable as a pampered royal than a rough and tumble politician, the party has seen its popularity gradually wane. It lost to the CPP in the last two general elections in 1998 and 2003.

Royalist officials have put the blame on the prince, who has spent at least as much time traveling overseas — he teaches law part-time in France — as he has working to strengthen the party.

It's not the first time Hun Sen has pulled Funcinpec's strings.

In 1993, he used the threat of force — and the unraveling of a hard-won peace — to bully Ranariddh's party, which had won the election, to take his party into the government as an equal partner.

When he became tired of being co-prime minister with Ranariddh, he engineered a bloody coup in 1997 which — in addition to making him the country's sole top leader — physically eliminated some of Funcinpec's more able political operators.

On Wednesday, his party sent its warmest congratulations to Keo Puth Rasmey, Funcinpec's freshly chosen leader.

With Hun Sen's will accomplished yet again, said Kek Galabru, "People see how powerful he is — he said something, then it's done."

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Back in Town

on Sunday. Hope you all have enjoyed my time away from Jungle. Can't say that it's been all fun and games in Bangkok so I'll be glad to be back. See you tomorrow.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Wikitravel - Phnom Penh

The folks at Wikipedia have created Wikitravel, a travel site with the same development approach as Wikipedia, i.e. everyone can post and edit anything (subject to challenge of course). The Phnom Penh page is in its early stages and seems to reflect a somewhat outdated view of the city (not hard with a place changing so rapidly). Check it out and contribute: Wikitravel - Phnom Penh

Friday, October 13, 2006

New at Jungle - Glenfiddich Single Malt + 250g Sirloin Filet

Now available at Jungle, the award-winning Glenfiddich Special Reserve 12-Year-Old is the world’s favourite single malt. It is aged for 12 years in oak casks and is the only Highland single malt to be distilled, matured and bottled at its own distillery.

Also now at Jungle is a beautiful 250g sirloin steak supplied by Dan's Meats. Served medium rare. We can do with the range of sauces but try it sans sauce! It's the match of any local steak served in Phnom Penh. Really delicious.


Introductory price specials!!

Glenfiddich: $2 (2-11pm)
250g Steak with mixed vegetable and choice of potato: $7.50

The New Digs



I love the new apartment and thought I'd post a couple pics. A one-minute commute, nice river view and a much more comfortable living room. And I'm getting used to the five floor walk-up. The view pic is looking from the terrace south toward the Mekong-Bassac meeting point. The terrace is big enough to accomodate a nice bbq like I had in L.A. I'm looking for one.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Astral Weeks

A recent thread on Khmer440 regarding bar playlists and Van Morrison (who gets a lot play here and at Barry's DV8) got me to thinking about a wonderful article written by the late rock critic Lester Bangs about Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. It means as much to me as it did to Lester, though it came to me a bit later. It may be my favorite album ever. Here's Lester Bangs:

From Stranded (1979):

Astral Weeks by Lester Bangs

Van Morrison's Astral Weeks was released ten years, almost to the day, before this was written. It was particularly important to me because the fall of 1968 was such a terrible time: I was a physical and mental wreck, nerves shredded and ghosts and spiders looming and squatting across the mind. My social contacts had dwindled to almost none; the presence of other people made me nervous and paranoid. I spent endless days and nights sunk in an armchair in my bedroom, reading magazines, watching TV, listening to records, staring into space. I had no idea how to improve the situation and probably wouldn't have done anything about it if I had.

Astral Weeks would be the subject of this piece - i.e., the rock record with the most significance in my life so far - no matter how I'd been feeling when it came out. But in the condition I was in, it assumed at the time the quality of a beacon, a light on the far shores of the murk; what's more, it was proof that there was something left to express artistically besides nihilism and destruction. (My other big record of the day was White Light/White Heat.) It sounded like the man who made Astral Weeks was in terrible pain, pain most of Van Morrison's previous works had only suggested; but like the later albums by the Velvet Underground, there was a redemptive element in the blackness, ultimate compassion for the suffering of others, and a swath of pure beauty and mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work

I don't really know how significant it might be that many others have reported variants on my initial encounter with Astral Weeks. I don't think there's anything guiding it to people enduring dark periods. It did come out at a time when a lot of things that a lot of people cared about passionately were beginning to disintegrate, and when the self-destructive undertow that always accompanied the great sixties party had an awful lot of ankles firmly in it's maw and was pulling straight down. so, as timeless as it finally is, perhaps Astral Weeks was also the product of an era. Better think that than ask just what sort of Irish churchwebbed haints Van Morrison might be product of.

Three television shows: A 1970 NET broadcast of a big all-star multiple bill at the Fillmore East. The Byrds, Sha Na Na, and Elvin Bishop have all done their respective things. Now we get to see three of four songs from a set by Van Morrison. He climaxes, as he always did in those days, with "Cyprus Avenue" from Astral Weeks. After going through all the verses, he drives the song, the band, and himself to a finish which has since become one of his trademarks and one of the all-time classic rock 'n' roll set-closers. With consumate dynamics that allow him to snap from indescribably eccentric throwaway phrasing to sheer passion in the very next breath he brings the music surging up through crescendo after crescendo, stopping and starting and stopping and starting the song again and again, imposing long maniacal silences like giant question marks between the stops and starts and ruling the room through sheer tension, building to a shout of "It's too late to stop now!," and just when you think it's all going to surge over the top, he cuts it off stone cold dead, the hollow of a murdered explosion, throws the microphone down and stalks off the stage. It is truly one of the most perverse things I have ever seen a performer do in my life. And, of course, it's sensational: our guts are knotted up, we're crazed and clawing for more, but we damn well know we've seen and felt something.

1974, a late night network TV rock concert: Van and his band come out, strike a few shimmering chords, and for about ten minutes he lingers over the words "Way over yonder in the clear blue sky / Where flamingos fly." No other lyrics. I don't think any instrumental solos. Just those words, repeated slowly again and again, distended, permutated, turned into scat, suspended in space and then scattered to the winds, muttered like a mantra till they turn into nonsense syllables, then back into the same soaring image as time seems to stop entirely. He stands there with eyes closed, singing, transported, while the band poises quivering over great open-tuned deep blue gulfs of their own.

1977, spring-summer, same kind of show: he sings "Cold Wind in August", a song off his recently released album A Period of Transition, which also contains a considerably altered version of the flamingos song. "Cold Wind in August" is a ballad and Van gives it a fine, standard reading. The only trouble is that the whole time he's singing it he paces back and forth in a line on the stage, his eyes tightly shut, his little fireplug body kicking its way upstream against what must be a purgatorial nervousness that perhaps is being transferred to the cameraman.

What this is about is a whole set of verbal tics - although many are bodily as well - which are there for reason enough to go a long way toward defining his style. They're all over Astral Weeks: four rushed repeats of the phrases "you breathe in, you breath out" and "you turn around" in "Beside You"; in "Cyprus Avenue," twelve "way up on"s, "baby" sung out thirteen times in a row sounding like someone running ecstatically downhill toward one's love, and the heartbreaking way he stretches "one by one" in the third verse; most of all in "Madame George" where he sings the word "dry" and then "your eye" twenty times in a twirling melodic arc so beautiful it steals your own breath, and then this occurs: "And the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that loves."

Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost, conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture. To capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch. He repeats certain phrases to extremes that from anybody else would seem ridiculous, because he's waiting for a vision to unfold, trying as unobtrusively as possible to nudge it along. Sometimes he gives it to you through silence, by choking off the song in midflight: "It's too late to stop now!"

It's the great search, fueled by the belief that through these musical and mental processes illumination is attainable. Or may at least be glimpsed.

When he tries for this he usually gets it more in the feeling than in the Revealed Word - perhaps much of the feeling comes from the reaching - but there is also, always, the sense of WHAT if he DID apprehend that Word; there are times when the Word seems to hover very near. And then there are times when we realize the Word was right next to us, when the most mundane overused phrases are transformed: I give you "love," from "Madame George." Out of relative silence, the Word: "Snow in San Anselmo." "That's where it's at," Van will say, and he means it (aren't his interviews fascinating?). What he doesn't say is that he is inside the snowflake, isolated by the song: "And it's almost Independence Day."

you're probably wondering when I'm going to get around to telling you about Astral Weeks. As a matter of fact, there's a whole lot of Astral Weeks I don't even want to tell you about. Both because whether you've heard it or not it wouldn't be fair for me to impose my interpretation of such lapidarily subjective imagery on you, and because in many cases I don't really know what he's talking about. he doesn't either: "I'm not surprised that people get different meanings out of my songs," he told a Rolling Stone interviewer. "But I don't wanna give the impression that I know what everything means 'cause I don't. . . . There are times when I'm mystified. I look at some of the stuff that comes out, y'know. And like, there it is and it feels right, but I can't say for sure what it means."

There you go
Starin' with a look of avarice
Talking to Huddie Leadbetter
Showin' pictures on the walls
And whisperin' in the halls
And pointin' a finger at me

I haven't got the slightest idea what that "means," though on one level I'd like to approach it in a manner as indirect and evocative as the lyrics themselves. Because you're in trouble anyway when you sit yourself down to explicate just exactly what a mystical document, which is exactly what Astral Weeks is, means. For one thing, what it means is Richard Davis's bass playing, which complements the songs and singing all the way with a lyricism that's something more than just great musicianship: there is something about it that more than inspired, something that has been touched, that's in the realm of the miraculous. The whole ensemble - Larry Fallon's string section, Jay Berliner's guitar (he played on Mingus's Black Saint and the Sinner Lady), Connie Kay's drumming - is like that: they and Van sound like they're not just reading but dwelling inside of each other's minds. The facts may be far different. John Cale was making an album of his own in the adjacent studio at the time, and he has said that "Morrison couldn't work with anybody, so finally they just shut him in the studio by himself. He did all the songs with just an acoustic guitar, and later they overdubbed the rest of it around his tapes."

Cale's story might or might not be true - but facts are not going to be of much use here in any case. Fact: Van Morrison was twenty-two - or twenty-three - years old when he made this record; there are lifetimes behind it. What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.

Transfixed between pure rapture and anguish. Wondering if they may not be the same thing, or at least possessed of an intimate relationship. In "T.B. Sheets", his last extended narrative before making this record, Van Morrison watched a girl he loved die of tuberculosis. the song was claustrophobic, suffocating, mostrously powerful: "innuendos, inadequacies, foreign bodies." A lot of people couldn't take it; the editor of this book has said that it's garbage, but I think it made him squeamish. Anyway, the point is that certain parts of Astral Weeks - "Madame George," "Cyprus Avenue" - take the pain in "T.B. Sheets" and root the world in it. Because the pain of watching a loved one die of however dread a disease may be awful, but it is at least something known, in a way understood, in a way measureable and even leading somewhere, because there is a process: sickness, decay, death, mourning, some emotional recovery. But the beautiful horror of "Madame George" and "Cyprus Avenue" is precisely that the people in these songs are not dying: we are looking at life, in its fullest, and what these people are suffering from is not disease but nature, unless nature is a disease.

A man sits in a car on a tree-lined street, watching a fourteen-year-old girl walking home from school, hopelessly in love with her. I've almost come to blows with friends because of my insistence that much of Van Morrison's early work had an obsessively reiterated theme of pedophilia, but here is something that at once may be taken as that and something far beyond it. He loves her. Because of that, he is helpless. Shaking. Paralyzed. Maddened. Hopeless. Nature mocks him. As only nature can mock nature. Or is love natural in the first place? No Matter. By the end of the song he has entered a kind of hallucinatory ecstasy; the music aches and yearns as it rolls on out. This is one supreme pain, that of being imprisoned a spectator. And perhaps no so very far from "T.B. Sheets," except that it must be far more romantically easy to sit and watch someone you love die than to watch them in the bloom of youth and health and know that you can never, ever have them, can never speak to them.

"Madame George" is the album's whirlpool. Possibly one of the most compassionate pieces of music ever made, it asks us, no, arranges that we see the plight of what I'll be brutal and call a lovelorn drag queen with such intense empathy that when the singer hurts him, we do too. (Morrison has said in at least one interview that the song has nothing to do with any kind of transvestite - at least as far as he knows, he is quick to add - but that's bullshit.) The beauty, sensitivity, holiness of the song is that there's nothing at all sensationalistic, exploitative, or tawdry about it; in a way Van is right when he insists it's not about a drag queen, as my friends were right and I was wrong about the "pedophelia" - it's about a person, like all the best songs, all the greatest literature.

The setting is that same as that of the previous song - "Cyprus Avenue", apparently a place where people drift, impelled by desire, into moments of flesh-wracking, sight-curdling confrontation with their destinies. It's an elemental place of pitiless judgement - wind and rain figure in both songs - and, interestingly enough, it's a place of the even crueler judgement of adults by children, in both cases love objects absolutely indifferent to their would-be adult lovers. Madame George's little boys are downright contemptuous - like the street urchins who end up cannibalizing the homosexual cousin in Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer, they're only too happy to come around as long as there's music, party times, free drinks and smokes, and only too gleefully spit on George's affections when all the other stuff runs out, the entombing winter settling in with not only wind and rain but hail, sleet, and snow.

What might seem strangest of all but really isn't is that it's exactly those characteristics which supposedly should make George most pathetic - age, drunkenness, the way the boys take his money and trash his love - that awakens something for George in the heart of the kid whose song this is. Obviously the kid hasn't simply "fallen in love with love," or something like that, but rather - what? Why just exactly that only sunk in the foulest perversions could one human being love another for anything other than their humanness: love him for his weakness, his flaws, finally perhaps his decay. Decay is human - that's one of the ultimate messages here, and I don't by any stretch of the lexicon mean decadence. I mean that in this song or whatever inspired it Van Morrison saw the absolute possibility of loving human beings at the farthest extreme of wretchedness, and that the implications of that are terrible indeed, far more terrible than the mere sight of bodies made ugly by age or the seeming absurdity of a man devoting his life to the wobbly artifice of trying to look like a woman.

You can say to love the questions you have to love the answers which quicken the end of love that's loved to love the awful inequality of human experience that loves to say we tower over these the lost that love to love the love that freedom could have been, the train to freedom, but we never get on, we'd rather wave generously walking away from those who are victims of themselves. But who is to say that someone who victimizes himself or herself is not as worthy of total compassion as the most down and out Third World orphan in a New Yorker magazine ad? Nah, better to step over the bodies, at least that gives them the respect they might have once deserved. where I love, in New York (not to make it more than it is, which is hard), everyone I know often steps over bodies which might well be dead or dying as a matter of course, without pain. and I wonder in what scheme it was originally conceived that such an action is showing human refuse the ultimate respect it deserves.

There is of course a rationale - what else are you going to do - but it holds no more than our fear of our own helplessness in the face of the plain of life as it truly is: a plain which extends into an infinity beyond the horizons we have only invented. Come on, die it. As I write this, I can read in the Village Voice the blurbs of people opening heterosexual S&M clubs in Manhattan, saying things like, "S&M is just another equally valid form of love. Why people can't accept that we'll never know." Makes you want to jump out a fifth floor window rather than even read about it, but it's hardly the end of the world; it's not nearly as bad as the hurts that go on everywhere everyday that are taken to casually by all of us as facts of life. Maybe it boiled down to how much you actually want to subject yourself to. If you accept for even a moment the idea that each human life is as precious and delicate as a snowflake and then you look at a wino in a doorway, you've got to hurt until you feel like a sponge for all those other assholes' problems, until you feel like an asshole yourself, so you draw all the appropriate lines. You stop feeling. But you know that then you begin to die. So you tussle with yourself. how much of this horror can I actually allow myself to think about? Perhaps the numbest mannekin is wiser than somebody who only allows their sensitivity to drive them to destroy everything they touch - but then again, to tilt Madame George's hat a hair, just to recognize that that person exists, just to touch his cheek and then probably expire because the realization that you must share the world with him is ultimately unbearable is to only go the first mile. The realization of living is just about that low and that exalted and that unbearable and that sought-after. Please come back and leave me alone. But when we're along together we can talk all we want about the universality of this abyss: it doesn't make any difference, the highest only meets the lowest for some lying succor, UNICEF to relatives, so you scratch and spit and curse in violent resignation at the strict fact that there is absolutely nothing you can do but finally reject anyone in greater pain than you. At such a moment, another breath is treason. that's why you leave your liberal causes, leave suffering humanity to die in worse squalor than they knew before you happened along. You got their hopes up. Which makes you viler than the most scrofulous carrion. viler than the ignorant boys who would take Madame George for a couple of cigarettes. because you have committed the crime of knowledge, and thereby not only walked past or over someone you knew to be suffering, but also violated their privacy, the last possession of the dispossessed.

Such knowledge is possibly the worst thing that can happen to a person (a lucky person), so it's no wonder that Morrison's protagonist turned away from Madame George, fled to the train station, trying to run as far away from what he'd seen as a lifetime could get him. And no wonder, too, that Van Morrison never came this close to looking life square in the face again, no wonder he turned to Tupelo Honey and even Hard Nose the Highway with it's entire side of songs about falling leaves. In Astral Weeks and "T.B. Sheets" he confronted enough for any man's lifetime. Of course, having been offered this immeasurably stirring and equally frightening gift from Morrison, one can hardly be blamed for not caring terribly much about Old, Old Woodstock and little homilies like "You've got to Make It Through This World On Your Own" and "Take It Where You Find It."

On the other hand, it might also be pointed out that desolation, hurt, and anguish are hardly the only things in life, or in Astral Weeks. They're just the things, perhaps, that we can most easily grasp and explicate, which I suppose shows about what level our souls have evolved to. I said I wouldn't reduce the other songs on this album by trying to explain them, and I won't. But that doesn't mean that, all thing considered, a juxtaposition of poets might not be in order.

If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dreams
Where the mobile steel rims crack
And the ditch and the backroads stop
Could you find me
Would you kiss my eyes
And lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again

Van Morrison

My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars,
to beg Christ the Lord
to give back the soul I had
of old, when I was a child,
ripened with legends,
with a feathered cap
and a wooden sword.

Federico Garcia Lorca



Here's a top ten, in no particular order. Yea, it's all old stuff. There's newer stuff that I like and play a lot but this is the stuff I keep coming back to:

Astral Weeks - Van Morrison
Highway 61 Revisted/Blonde on Blonde - Bob Dylan
Never A Dull Moment - Rod Stewart
Blue - Joni Mitchell
This Years' Model - Elvis Costello
The Wild, the Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle - Bruce Springsteen
The Velvet Underground & Nico
Gram Parsons - Grievous Angel
Layla - Derek & the Dominoes
Richard and Linda Thompson - I Want to See the Bright Lights
Dusty Springfield - Dusty in Memphis
The Clash - London Calling

Well, 10ish. I can't leave any of them off and it's my list. These are pretty much perfect albums in my book, except perhaps the Velvets album which has a couple of weak tracks. Near misses: Beatles - Rubber Soul (American release), Zombies - Odyssey and Oracle, The Move - Shazzam, Van Moondance. Yes, it's all stuff from the '60's and 70's so here's my 10 from the 80's:

Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms
Bruce Springsteen - Tunnel of Love
David and David - Boomtown
The Silos - Cuba (a gem!)
John Hiatt - Slow Turning
John Hiatt - Bring the Family
Los Lobos - How Will the Wolf Survive
Lyle Lovett
Lyle Lovett - Pontiac
U2 - Joshue Tree

And the '90's (ok 12):

Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill
Ben Folds Five - Whatever and Ever Amen
Elliot Smith - XO
Pavement - Slanted and Enchanted
Joe Ely - Love and Danger
Jane Siberry - When I Was A Boy
Johnny Cash - American Recordings
Los Lobos - Kiko
Nirvana - MTV Unplugged
R.E.M. - Automatic for the People
U2 - Achtung Baby
Wilco - Summerteeth

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Friday: Patrice Leconte's "Dogora"

A reprise showing of Patrice Leconte's fine documentary at Jungle on Friday:

Neither fiction nor documentary, DOGORA is a unique musical, impressionistic and humanist journey - an experimental postcard from Cambodia, created by one of France’s most prolific and acclaimed directors, Patrice Leconte (Monsieur Hire, Ridicule, The Girl On The Bridge, The Man On The Train).DOGORA celebrates the landscapes and lives of everyday Cambodian people – eating, sleeping, working, playing and traveling. Images of poverty are there – women working in a sweatshop, people scavenging through a rubbish dump – as are more familiar scenes of Angkor Wat and other tourist centres. Filmed on Panavision HD, with Leconte himself helming the camera, the cinemascope imagery is stunning. The film bursts with colour, life and movement; the telephoto lenses used to great effect. Composer Etienne Perruchon’s powerful oratorio (featuring a choir of hundreds of children) drives the fast-moving montage images. DOGORA is very much in the tradition of the work of Godfrey Reggio and Ron Fricke (Koyaanisqatsi, Baraka), however the rich visual eye, gift for drawing out beauty and intuitive feel for montage is unmistakably Leconte’s own. - FrenchFilmFestival.org

See Dave Finch's review of "Dogora" on Khmer440.

Monday, October 09, 2006

Saturday: Jonathan Demme's "Heart of Gold"

Released earlier this year to stellar reviews, Jonathan Demme's film documenting Neil Young's appearance at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium comes to the Jungle on Saturday.

From the Boston Globe:
Neil Young: Heart of Gold
From the stage, a poignant portrait of Neil Young

At a certain point in the new concert movie "Neil Young: Heart of Gold" -- right after he has performed the 1972 title song that stands as his lone concession to top-10 marketability -- Young looks out at the camera and acknowledges the applause with a simple "Thank you." He's speaking to the audience in Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, but suddenly the line between film and viewer dissolves, and the full weight of both the singer's career and this moment on stage seems spine-tinglingly present. At the screening I attended, a friend sitting next to me quietly said, "Thank you," and he isn't even much of a Neil Young fan.

There's a backstory here. "Heart of Gold" was filmed over two nights in August of 2005, a few months after the 59-year-old Young went into surgery to repair a potentially fatal brain aneurysm, not long after his father died, and shortly before he released "Prairie Wind," an album that aches with resilience and loss. The director was Jonathan Demme, who 22 years ago made what many consider the greatest concert movie ever: "Stop Making Sense," featuring Talking Heads at the height of its powers.

That film remains an electrifying testament to pop music as a communal creative act. "Heart of Gold" -- filmed in much the same manner, with pristine sound and a notable lack of audience shots -- is a deeper and infinitely more touching piece of work. Even when Young is surrounded by an onstage crowd of musicians, old friends all, he seems alone. The songs have been chosen from across his catalog to address matters of death, aging, remembrance.

And yet the thing glows. As someone who has always valued the thrash-Neil of Crazy Horse albums like "Ragged Glory" and "On the Beach" over the hippie-Neil of "Harvest," I went in expecting, at worst, a toothless boomer nostalgia trip. Young's always been the trickster of the singer-songwriter movement, though: Even at his most overreaching (the recent "Greendale") or bizarrely wayward (the vocorder album, the rockabilly album), he has held on to the anarchic pulse of rock 'n' roll -- to the idea that "it's better to burn out than fade away." This gives his quietest songs a toughness that pays off here.

The first half of the film is filled with songs off "Prairie Wind," and the momentum takes a while to build because those tunes are discursive as well as unfamiliar. It's when Young dips into his older work that you begin to divine a career-long obsession with mortality. When he sings "and I'm getting old" in "Heart of Gold," the line's like a bird at last finding its way home. When he kicks into "Old Man" -- written about his ranch foreman, it turns out -- and comes to the stanza "I'm a lot like you were," the irony cuts both ways. By comparison, Paul McCartney will finally be able to sing "When I'm 64" this year and mean it, but, trust me, it won't carry the same sting.

There are a lot of ghosts in this movie. Young's father pops up in one song, there's another dedicated to a long-gone dog, and when the singer brings out a guitar once owned by Hank Williams -- the instrument's first appearance at the Ryman in a half-century -- the stage seems to be crowded with shades of the departed. They include Young's own younger self. "I Am a Child," written in 1968 for the Buffalo Springfield, has never sounded so naive or so eternal.

The band includes such longtime sidemen as pedal-steel guitarist Ben Keith and keyboardist Spooner Oldham, as well as musician-wife Pegi Young and the silver-haired queen of alt-country, Emmylou Harris. The members of Crazy Horse are conspicuously absent, but even at its most elegiac, "Heart of Gold" has a resolute refusal to look away that puts the rest of pop music to shame. "I'm gonna thank that country fiddler, and all those rough boys of rock and roll," Young sings in "One of These Days," and in those words, on this stage, the two sides of the man come together like a grateful farewell.
Heart of Gold screens at Jungle at 7:30pm on Saturday. Admission is free.

On the Jungle Podcast (courtesy Aquarium Drunkard): Neil Young, 1971 - Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Cambodia pressed on convictions

Mother of Born Samnang marked the anniversary of his trial on 1 August 2006

BBC (October 5) Human rights groups have called for the release of two men in Cambodia ahead of their appeal against convictions for murdering a prominent union leader.

Rights groups say Born Samnang and Sok Sam Oeun were framed for the killing of Chea Vichea, in January 2004.

They point to numerous police and judicial irregularities and say a key witness has submitted a new statement saying the men were not the killers.

Chea Vichea was shot dead at a news stand in the capital Phnom Penh.

He was president of Cambodia's Free Trade Union of Workers (FTUWKC), one of the country's most active unions, with about 30,000 members.

He was an outspoken critic of government corruption and human rights abuses.

His union said at the time the killing was politically motivated. At least three other members of the opposition were also killed around the same time.

'Final blow'

After their arrest a week later, Born Samnang confessed to the crime. But he told his trial in August 2005 that the confession had been obtained under torture.

"These men are scapegoats who never should have been arrested, much less imprisoned for three years already," Brad Adams, of Human Rights Watch (HRW), said.

Mourners at union headquarters in January 2004
Chea Vichea was one of Cambodia's best-known campaigners

Both Chea Vichea's family and the former King Norodom Sihanouk have proclaimed the men's innocence. As well as HRW, their case also has the support of Amnesty International and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.

The appeal on Friday will hear a statement from the former owner of the news stand, Va Sothy.

In her first signed statement, written after fleeing to Thailand because she said she feared for her life, Va Sothy says Born Samnang and Sok Sam Oeun are not the men she saw shoot Chea Vichea.

"This new testimony from the prime eyewitness to the murder is the final blow to a prosecution case that was critically flawed from the beginning," Mr Adams said.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Secure Your Browsing

If you ever go to an internet cafe in Cambodia -- which, for your own sanity and protection you shouldn't do in Phnom Penh unless the computer at Jungle is down --and you care about the security of your session, you should utilize a nifty new Firefox-based browser called Torpark. It's a 13mb download you can put on your USB key to run when you get to the internet shop. Running Torpark instead of the standard Firefox or, god forbid Internet Explorer, should allow you to surf and transact anonymously. Find it here.

The Pull of Belgian Fries

Bon Voyage to Guy D2.

We're all going to miss you. Best of luck. We'll see you again.

Insomniacs & Early Risers: Baseball Playoff Sched.

Date Time Sport Channel Event title Duration
04-Oct-06 08:00 Baseball ESPN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL DIVISION SERIES
NEW YORK, NY USA
Detroit Tigers Vs New York Yankees
Alds Game #1 (L)
03:00
05-Oct-06 04:00 Baseball ESPN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL DIVISION SERIES
NEW YORK, NY USA
Los Angeles Dodgers Vs New York Mets
Nlds Game #1 (L)
03:00
05-Oct-06 08:00 Baseball ESPN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL DIVISION SERIES
NEW YORK, NY USA
Detroit Tigers Vs New York Yankees
Alds Game #2 (L)
03:00
06-Oct-06 08:00 Baseball ESPN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL DIVISION SERIES
NEW YORK, NY USA
Los Angeles Dodgers Vs New York Mets
Nlds Game #2 (L)
03:00
07-Oct-06 08:00 Baseball ESPN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL DIVISION SERIES
DETROIT, MI USA
New York Yankees Vs Detroit Tigers
Alds Game #3 (L)
03:00
07-Oct-06 23:30 Baseball ESPN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL DIVISION SERIES
DETROIT, MI USA
New York Yankees Vs Detroit Tigers
Alds Game #3
02:55
08-Oct-06 08:00 Baseball ESPN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL DIVISION SERIES
Nlds Game #3 (L)
03:00
08-Oct-06 23:30 Baseball ESPN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL DIVISION SERIES
Alds Game #4 (If Necc.)
02:55
09-Oct-06 08:00 Baseball ESPN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL DIVISION SERIES
Nlds Game #4 (If Necc.) (L)
03:00
10-Oct-06 04:00 Baseball ESPN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL DIVISION SERIES
Nlds Game #5 (If Necc.) (L)
03:00
10-Oct-06 08:00 Baseball ESPN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL DIVISION SERIES
Alds Game #5 (If Necc.) (L)
03:00
10-Oct-06 16:00 Baseball ESPN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL DIVISION SERIES
Nlds Game #5 (If Necc.)
03:00
11-Oct-06 02:30 Baseball ESPN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL DIVISION SERIES
Alds Game #5 (If Necc.)
03:00
11-Oct-06 08:00 Baseball ESPN MLB CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES
Game #1 (L)
03:00

Monday, October 02, 2006

Honeymoon between Cambodian political chiefs turns sour as polls approach
The Associated Press
Published: September 30, 2006

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia There were smiles, hugs and champagne toasts when Cambodian strongman Hun Sen and his top political rival signed a deal to be partners in a ruling coalition — but few doubted that Hun Sen could torpedo the pact any time he wanted.

Now, two years later, the honeymoon appears over between Hun Sen and his junior coalition partner, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, who last week was reduced to pleading with his own royalist Funcinpec party not to heed the prime minister's advice to oust him as their leader.

The war of words is no coincidence: Hun Sen is trying to maximize his Cambodian People's Party's chances for a clear-cut victory in a local election six months away.

Ranariddh, meanwhile, is scrambling to keep his weak and fractious party together.

The 2004 coalition deal raised fragile hopes for a new era after almost a year of political stalemate, when Hun Sen could not form a government because his party had failed to win the legally required number of parliamentary seats.

Once the pact was struck, Ranariddh's party was pretty much Hun Sen's ideal junior partner — quiet and acquiescent.

But Hun Sen, in a Sept. 17 speech delivered in a rice field, said the royalist party ought to find a new chief to replace Ranariddh.

The ruthless, wily politician blamed Ranariddh's weak leadership for the repeated defeats of the prince's party in local and general elections over the past decade.

"Facing a wise and strong enemy is better than having a naive and weak friend," he said, adding that if he were Ranariddh, he "would have resigned a long time ago already."

"There's no point staying on," he said. "I say it's time for Funcinpec to find a new leader."

Ranariddh responded in a speech broadcast several days ago.

"I've never poked my hands into the CPP's internal matters. So, I ask that he and his party please stop stirring their arms and legs in my party affairs," he implored.

It was not the first clash between the two men, whose political stars come from different galaxies.

Ranariddh is the son of Norodom Sihanouk, the country's retired but still-revered king, who founded Funcinpec and whose name helped the prince's party win a U.N.-organized 1993 election.

The prince has spent much of his life in France, and does not conceal his enjoyment of the finer things in life, dining at Western restaurants whenever he's in Cambodia.

Hun Sen, born to a peasant family, looks comfortable wading barefoot into Cambodia's muddy fields to plant rice beside rural folk.

He is a former Khmer Rouge soldier who spent much of his youth and lost one eye fighting the Cambodian civil war. He has led the country since the mid-1980s, exercising a strongman's prerogatives in a democratic framework while deftly dispatching opponents with a divide-and-conquer strategy.

In 1997, he grabbed full control of the government after toppling Ranariddh as his co-prime minister in a violent coup.

Ranariddh — who is not noted for political acumen, moral fortitude or inspiring leadership — later came back. Except for occasional hard bargaining to divide the spoils of power, he has since been content to be his rival's junior partner.

Their latest partnership is based on their June 2004 agreement to end an 11-month deadlock that followed the 2003 general election.

"I remember that it was like a honeymoon between the two leaders. They promised to share power and interests," said Kek Galabru, president of the human rights group Licadho and one of the country's few independent political observers.

But their current contretemps doesn't surprise her.

In April 2007, Cambodia will hold local elections whose results could determine how the parties fare in a 2008 general election, she said.

The jockeying for advantage began this past March, when Hun Sen's party engineered a voting rule change that lets the parliament pass legislation with a simple majority instead of two-thirds. This meant the CPP no longer needed the support of Ranariddh's lawmakers.

In protest, Ranariddh resigned as National Assembly president, and has since spent most of his time abroad.

Hun Sen meanwhile has been on a bruising drive to remove Funcinpec officials from the government.

Still, Kek Galabru cautioned against taking the two men's quarrel too seriously.

"There is no end and no beginning for the politicians," she said. "They can make all the statements attacking each other, but if their common interests come together, they can go along another time together."

"They can be enemies today, and tomorrow they can kiss and hug each other again."


PHNOM PENH, Cambodia There were smiles, hugs and champagne toasts when Cambodian strongman Hun Sen and his top political rival signed a deal to be partners in a ruling coalition — but few doubted that Hun Sen could torpedo the pact any time he wanted.

Now, two years later, the honeymoon appears over between Hun Sen and his junior coalition partner, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, who last week was reduced to pleading with his own royalist Funcinpec party not to heed the prime minister's advice to oust him as their leader.

The war of words is no coincidence: Hun Sen is trying to maximize his Cambodian People's Party's chances for a clear-cut victory in a local election six months away.

Ranariddh, meanwhile, is scrambling to keep his weak and fractious party together.

The 2004 coalition deal raised fragile hopes for a new era after almost a year of political stalemate, when Hun Sen could not form a government because his party had failed to win the legally required number of parliamentary seats.

Once the pact was struck, Ranariddh's party was pretty much Hun Sen's ideal junior partner — quiet and acquiescent.

But Hun Sen, in a Sept. 17 speech delivered in a rice field, said the royalist party ought to find a new chief to replace Ranariddh.

The ruthless, wily politician blamed Ranariddh's weak leadership for the repeated defeats of the prince's party in local and general elections over the past decade.

"Facing a wise and strong enemy is better than having a naive and weak friend," he said, adding that if he were Ranariddh, he "would have resigned a long time ago already."

"There's no point staying on," he said. "I say it's time for Funcinpec to find a new leader."

Ranariddh responded in a speech broadcast several days ago.

"I've never poked my hands into the CPP's internal matters. So, I ask that he and his party please stop stirring their arms and legs in my party affairs," he implored.

It was not the first clash between the two men, whose political stars come from different galaxies.

Ranariddh is the son of Norodom Sihanouk, the country's retired but still-revered king, who founded Funcinpec and whose name helped the prince's party win a U.N.-organized 1993 election.

The prince has spent much of his life in France, and does not conceal his enjoyment of the finer things in life, dining at Western restaurants whenever he's in Cambodia.

Hun Sen, born to a peasant family, looks comfortable wading barefoot into Cambodia's muddy fields to plant rice beside rural folk.

He is a former Khmer Rouge soldier who spent much of his youth and lost one eye fighting the Cambodian civil war. He has led the country since the mid-1980s, exercising a strongman's prerogatives in a democratic framework while deftly dispatching opponents with a divide-and-conquer strategy.

In 1997, he grabbed full control of the government after toppling Ranariddh as his co-prime minister in a violent coup.

Ranariddh — who is not noted for political acumen, moral fortitude or inspiring leadership — later came back. Except for occasional hard bargaining to divide the spoils of power, he has since been content to be his rival's junior partner.

Their latest partnership is based on their June 2004 agreement to end an 11-month deadlock that followed the 2003 general election.

"I remember that it was like a honeymoon between the two leaders. They promised to share power and interests," said Kek Galabru, president of the human rights group Licadho and one of the country's few independent political observers.

But their current contretemps doesn't surprise her.

In April 2007, Cambodia will hold local elections whose results could determine how the parties fare in a 2008 general election, she said.

The jockeying for advantage began this past March, when Hun Sen's party engineered a voting rule change that lets the parliament pass legislation with a simple majority instead of two-thirds. This meant the CPP no longer needed the support of Ranariddh's lawmakers.

In protest, Ranariddh resigned as National Assembly president, and has since spent most of his time abroad.

Hun Sen meanwhile has been on a bruising drive to remove Funcinpec officials from the government.

Still, Kek Galabru cautioned against taking the two men's quarrel too seriously.

"There is no end and no beginning for the politicians," she said. "They can make all the statements attacking each other, but if their common interests come together, they can go along another time together."

"They can be enemies today, and tomorrow they can kiss and hug each other again."

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Moving Day

Not that I didn't have enough going on this week, but I found a new apartment and moved in yesterday. Beautiful place a block from Jungle, big terrace with river view, nice kitchen and much bigger living area than the old place. Sweet! Ah but the racket started at 7am -- pounding, drilling...hope this isn't a permanent feature. I'll be away for the Water Festival this year, but next year looks like I'll be on the terrace.