Nice article, Erika! I don't even know what a "gingham blouse" is, but I will trust your fashion tastes always.
Bliss Spa gives the best massages in Phnom Penh. This article provides an excellent synopsis of the hardships of expat life in Phnom Penh (tongue firmly planted in cheek).
This is the delight of the Bliss boutique: fabric. Not only does Bliss have clothes you can actually wear in the middle of the day — cascading petal-weight skirts, slouchy linen trousers, cool pink gingham blouses — it is piled high with stunning cottons, silks and linens from across Asia. These are sewn into clothes, pillows, quilts and cute little bags you can bring home to your friends.
Cassandra McMillan, 37, opened Bliss in 1996. Today, the shop, which added a spa four years ago, is at the heart of Phnom Penh’s growing expatriate life on Street 240, where you can also find a new chocolate shop, a wine store and a bar run by two former New Yorkers.
Bliss is a fine, neo-colonial sort of place, housed in a century-old villa that used to belong to a Chinese-Khmer merchant. Today, it has an admirably worn wooden staircase, small tile elephants, rose petals strewn languidly about and a plunge pool surrounded by frangipani trees. The Bliss spa also gives what just could be the best bikini wax in town — an important consideration for those long afternoons by the pool, coconut in hand — thanks in large part to the quality of the wax, which, like Ms. McMillan herself, comes from Australia.
Ms. McMillan, whose mother is a professional quilter, likes to blend. There are chartreuse paisleys from Australia; ravishing Indian bridal quilts hand-stitched from antique saris; silvery silks from Cambodia, Korea and China; and bright geometric floral prints from Japan.
“A lot of these are one-offs,” she said. “Once it’s gone, that’s it.”
The prices, cited in dollars as is common in Cambodia, are fairly ridiculous by the country’s standards — some of those fat pillows cost $72, more than many garment factory workers make in a month — but this is all part of the grand, gin-fueled illusion of expatriate life.
One must also pay to escape the tyranny of Asian sizes. Go to a Cambodian dress shop and try to tug those Size 4 zippers over your ribs and you’ll be told: “But sorry, ma’am, it’s a big size already.” Go to Bliss and you’ll be right back home again, mercifully, in a size small. That’s worth at least one gin and tonic, isn’t it?
Bliss, 29 Street 240, Phnom Penh, Cambodia; (855-23) 215-754; bliss@online.com.kh.
The guys behind The Rap Dialectic, Ghostride My Volvo, and Huge In Asia have just released a new video, showing off their love for San Francisco. Nate and Kai are buddies of mine, and I wait with baited breath for all new videos they create.
To make things more interesting as I introduce their new video, I propose a "Rap Dialectic" Dialectic rumble, pitting one city against another in an international battle to end all international battles.
In one corner, the city of Hanoi, Vietnam, in "Hanoi Hustle":
And in the other corner, the city of San Francisco, California, USA, in the newly-released video, "Give Me Your Heart in San Francisco (I Want to Have Sex With You)". Below is Nate and Kai's introduction to the video for your reading pleasure:
"When we returned home from the Far East a few months ago, our family and friends were quick to remind us that we had failed to become, as they mockingly quoted, "Huge in Asia." In some ways, they were right: we never got on an underwear billboard ad, put out a pop single, or presided over a religious ceremony--opportunities we had thought to be well within our grasp when we began the trip.
"But what these cynics forget is that Huge in Asia is not some game to be won or lost; it's an entire philosophy, a marriage of raw creative energy and shameless self-promotion, that we intend to follow our entire lives if possible. And with that in mind, we'd like to unveil HIA's first post-Orient release."
Here's the new video:
Who wins this first--though hopefully not last--international YouTube music video battle of the cities? You be the judge...
They are an amazing band, 'nuff said. I can't wait to see their documentary, "Sleepwalking Through the Mekong," which will be shown as part of the San Francisco Indie Film Fest. It will screen at the Victoria Theater in San Francisco on Feb 15 at 9:30 pm and on Feb 16 at 12:30 pm.
Check out the band's website: http://www.myspace.com/denguefevermusic
A recent NY Times article about the band and their 60's-Khmer-rock-psychedelic-dance funk awesomeness:
January 20, 2008
Music
They’ve Got Those Mekong Blues Again
By R J SMITH
LOS ANGELES
DENGUE FEVER is a Los Angeles band featuring a Cambodian-born singer and five American alt-rockers who regularly embarrass her onstage. On the cover of its new album, “Venus on Earth” (M80), the guitarist Zac Holtzman, with a long beard and goggles, drives a scooter with the vocalist Chhom Nimol sitting demurely behind him sidesaddle, the way a good Cambodian girl would ride through the streets of Phnom Penh. Dengue Fever, which specializes in an unlikely mix of 1960s Cambodian pop, rock and other genres, is a lot like that image. Propriety and smart aleck indie rock race by, blurring together.
It is a band of rollicking lightness that keeps coming up deep. At a recent show in the Echo Park neighborhood here, the male members were downright goofy, but Ms. Chhom, singing mostly in Khmer and dressed in shimmering Cambodian silk garments she designs herself, looked like old-school royalty, a queen before the hipoisie. No wonder she seemed to roll her eyes from time to time onstage. But after the set, when she lighted a candle onstage to honor those killed by the Khmer Rouge, her voice broke and tears ran down her face.
“I think we balance each other out,” Mr. Holtzman said in a recent interview. “She’ll bring the whole place to a hush, and that would be a long night if it was just that. And then we smash the place up.”
Dengue Fever formed after the Farfisa organ player Ethan Holtzman, Zac’s brother, traveled to Cambodia in 1997, discovered ’60s Cambodian pop and returned with a stack of cassettes. This was not the sort of roots-driven folk sounds ethnomusicologists crave; this was locally produced, gleefully garish trash infused with the surf guitar and soul arrangements that Armed Forces Radio blasted across the region during the Vietnam War. It flourished until the Khmer Rouge came to power in the 1970s and functionally dismantled Cambodian culture.
Dengue Fever’s music is a tribute to that lost pop. But the six members of Dengue Fever form a quintessential Los Angeles crew, with a mix of backgrounds and interests that seems fitting in a region with the largest Cambodian population in the United States (in Long Beach, south of downtown Los Angeles) and a flourishing indie rock scene (in the hills east of Hollywood). The band is the musical equivalent of that ultimate modern Los Angeles marker, the polyglot strip-mall sign. It too offers a cultural mash-up; beyond the obscure Cambodian pop you can hear psychedelia, spaghetti western guitars, the lounge groove of Ethiopian soul and Bollywood soundtracks. “Seeing Hands,” on the new album, has an almost Funkadelic groove, while “Sober Driver” is an all but emo complaint about a guy who drives the cute girl everywhere and gets nowhere.
Now Dengue Fever is starting to make its mark far from its hometown. The band recently returned from the Womex world music festival in Seville, Spain, where it was one of a handful of acts to play showcase performances. British publications have included it in “next big thing” roundups, and Dengue Fever’s songs have been on television and film soundtracks, including Jim Jarmusch’s “Broken Flowers.” A new documentary, “Sleepwalking Through the Mekong,” that follows the group on its first trip as a band to Cambodia, seems likely to gain it further notice. (It plays the Mercury Lounge on the Lower East Side on March 4, and at Southpaw in Brooklyn on March 5.)
“The 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,” said the bassist Senon Williams, sitting in his backyard with Ms. Chhom and Zac Holtzman.
“Now that Nimol is going to start singing more in English,” he added, “it’s making new things possible for us. Nimol really wants to connect with the American audience more now.”
Dmitri Vietze, a publicist and marketer for many global music acts, sees the band as “part of a larger developmental pattern” in world music. “Can you stick them in the world-music bin at brick and mortar retail stores?” Mr. Vietze asked. “I don’t know. But as far as how they fit into world music in a larger philosophical context, they are a part of a huge and promising future.” He noted that the American market had been introduced to world sounds most often by American artists who love and emulate them, like Paul Simon. Now, he said, he sees a movement toward music made and influenced by émigrés: “We’re seeing more and more bands like Dengue Fever.”
Ms. Chhom speaks in broken English that her band mates struggle to first understand and then interpret for a reporter. Born in Battambang, Cambodia, Ms. Chhom moved to Long Beach in 2000, when she was 21. Both her parents were wedding singers, and she followed in the family business. An invitation to sing in Minneapolis brought her to America, and her sister, already living in Long Beach, introduced her to the local dinner-club scene.
Ms. Chhom stressed how important the music that inspired the Holtzman brothers was to her when she was growing up. One favorite is the great Khmer pop singer Sinn Sisamouth, who sang with Ms. Chhom’s father on a movie soundtrack. Sinn Sisamouth was a royal court singer of ballads in the 1950s who by the end of the ’60s was called “the king of Cambodian rock ’n’ roll,” with a queasy garage sound and a mellow nod to Nat King Cole, reinventing the rock wheel on a Pacific rim. Sinn Sisamouth disappeared after the Khmer Rouge took over. An artist close to the old government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, he is said to have died in a labor camp.
Bouncing Mr. Williams’s 1-year-old son on her knee, Ms. Chhom seemed a little bored with the interview process, her deftly drawn eyebrows often forming a skeptical V. She already had a reputation as a singer in Cambodia when she auditioned, along with several other Cambodian women, for Dengue Fever in 2001. When her competitors saw her, Zac Holtzman said, they politely excused themselves, assuming she would automatically get the gig. In 2002, while Dengue Fever was recording its debut album, Ms. Chhom was stopped in a routine check by immigration agents during an orange alert and was detained for having a lapsed green card. She spent 22 days in confinement, and upon her release sang endless nights in a Cambodian dance club in Long Beach called the Dragon House to pay off her legal fees. The band’s second album was titled “Escape From the Dragon House,” a reference to Ms. Chhom having paid off her legal fees and putting her immigration troubles behind her.
As far as connecting with her band mates, that’s still a work in progress. When they first started playing together they had to establish a sense of trust across language and cultural barriers. Now they hang out sometimes after a show, but even socializing can be complicated.
“Sometimes I go out ,and I like to dance because in Cambodia I could never go to clubs and dance like that,” Ms. Chhom said.
Zac Holtzman responded, “There’s always a few nights on tour when we go out and do a few clubs and some dancing ——”
Ms. Chhom interrupted emphatically : “I don’t want to talk, I want to dance. And these guys all like to talk. I know it’s the American style, they like to drink and talk and talk, but to those people I just say, ‘Hi, bye, let’s go dance.’ ”
Older generations of Cambodians in California are sometimes critical. “They don’t want me to show off too much of my dress,” she said. “They always tell me, ‘Don’t forget you’re a Cambodian girl.’ ” But the younger generation responds to Dengue Fever and even breakdances to its reinvention of a mongrel music that is itself a reinvention of a mongrel music from the West.
Folk music it’s not, but in one crucial way Dengue Fever has folk resonances. To Ms. Chhom and other young Cambodians in the States, pop singers like Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea, who died in a labor camp in Cambodia in the 1970s, hit a nerve that blues singers or hillbilly bands do for many Americans: the music takes listeners back home, to a home that doesn’t precisely exist anymore.
“Sleepwalking Through the Mekong,” directed by the Los Angeles filmmaker John Pirozzi, shows what happens when that 1960s pop makes its way back across the Pacific. It follows Dengue Fever on a 2005 trip to Cambodia, and in the penultimate scene the band sets up a stage in a slum full of corrugated shacks and plays a concert. The reaction is festive at times, but there are also some slack-jawed, unreadable expressions. Whether that’s the impact of lost pop music coming back to life or the surreality of American rockers dropping down from postmodern Los Angeles, is a question the band is smart enough to leave unanswered.
This article can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/arts/music/20smit.html
The Gold Tower 42 will be located about 3 blocks from my former apartment in Phnom Penh. It is really good I will not be living there when construction is complete--my apartment would be directly in these skyscrapers shadows every afternoon.
I wish I had taken some photographs of the silly banner that rings the property.
Pizza World and BB World had to be demolished so that these towers could be built (gasp!). Their next-door neighbor (and my former workplace), the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Dermatology, and STIs (NCHADS), will soon be obliterated to make room for the "twin towers." But don't worry, NCHADS will be relocated across the Tonle Sap river.
The Gold Tower 42 will rise as a symbol of South Korea's wealth and investment in Cambodia rather than Cambodia's own prosperity. Though it is a symbol of capitalist urban modernity, it may not be what Cambodia really needs right now. It's debatable whether such massive construction projects will bring greater investment in Cambodia, or whether these investments will be used to diversify the economy.
Contrary to the position of one Phnom Penh resident in the article below, real estate prices are likely to increase dramatically across the board with the creation of more and more luxury towers that exude wealth from their very faux-gold windows. Only the very richest in Cambodia could afford to live in such places. The Gold Tower 42 and other future skyscrapers will likely only prop up the uber-riche and create a very visible manifestation of the enormous divide between rich and poor in the city.
Isn't development great?
Cambodia to get first skyscraper
Cambodian officials have attended the official sales launch of the first-ever skyscraper in the capital, Phnom Penh.
The twin towers are to be 42 storeys high - almost three times higher than the current tallest building.
It is the first of three skyscrapers planned in the capital, where the skyline has been kept low - in part to avoid overshadowing royal palaces.
But the government has encouraged the new buildings as symbols of Cambodia's development after decades of conflict.
Although Gold Tower 42 is some way from completion, the launch of its show apartment and sales office attracted government ministers and overseas ambassadors.
The BBC's Guy De Launey, in Phnom Penh, said the launch gave a taste of the shape of things to come.
He said the solid, imposing, gold-faced structure would stand out from its neighbours on Norodom Boulevard - an area of yellow-washed, wooden-shuttered French colonial-era buildings.
But Phnom Penh is in the middle of a real-estate boom - and some residents hope that building up will bring the price of homes down.
"It's more affordable for people wanting to stay in town, and I think it's good. It's secure and they have all the facilities," one resident said.
But other locals worry about the effect tall buildings will have on the city's character
"The original Phnom Penh city [was developed to] be horizontal, not vertical," one resident said.
South Korean companies are building Gold Tower 42 and another even taller skyscraper near the Mekong River.
Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7207030.stm
Here are two commercial segments for the Gold Tower 42:
; bliss@online.com.kh. 
