A little bit of extra craziness is in the Phnom Penh air at the moment. This Friday through Sunday the Water Festival takes place. Over 400 narrow rowing boats, the Dragon Boats, take part in races which start at the confluence of the three rivers, the Mekong, the Tonle Sap and the Tonle Bassac, and progress along the riverside of Phnom Penh finishing just opposite the Royal Palace. As the boats and contestants come from far and wide across the Kingdom, so to do the spectators – this year an estimated 2-3 million will quadruple the population of the central city and turn the streets in and around the centre into a riot of people, colour, music, food, fireworks, carnivals… that’s enough of that – that last section read like something from a bad travel guide and abjectly failed to convey the excitement of the festival, when throngs of people abandon their rural idyll to wend their colourful way… blah, blah and thrice blah. If you really want know about Water Festival, read or log on to the Lonely Planet Guide, which is MUCH better at that travel writing malarkey. However, it is true that the capital is reclaimed by the people for the week in which the festival falls, and of course we expats are issued with the usual dire warnings about the fate that will befall us if we venture out alone, so many of us head for the hills, or jet off for an expensive weekend in a high-rise luxury hotel or a weekend on the beach somewhere else in Asia. I hereby announce that my family and I (©Brenda Windsor, 2007) will forego that pleasure in order to get down in the ‘hood and hang out with our Khmer bro’s and sis’s. Or watch it on TV. This will be my third Water Festival, and I confess a time I love to mingle with the people and soak up the smells and sights of the provincial masses as they invade the relative calm of the capital (and close the roads to those blooming 4×4’s and Lexuses (Lexi?) that proliferate everywhere – hurrah!), but I will be sure to take care, as crime against foreigners seems to be on the increase in the city.

Let’s pause here for some gravity. Last week a young French woman died when she was struck by a minivan after falling from her moto taxi. Thieves on a speeding motorbike had tried to snatch her bag in the densely packed lunchtime traffic weaving down Monivong Boulevard, one of the main streets in the city. She resisted and apparently fell into the path of the oncoming traffic and was killed instantly. Even the normally measured (certainly in its choice of photo journalism) Phnom Penh Post ran a photo of her body sprawled in the street, with her handbag beside her, and of course no-one helping for fear of being implicated in her death. The perpetrators of the attempted crime, the driver of the minivan and the moto taxi driver who she was riding with had of course long departed the scene before the police arrived. And the police, ever aware of downplaying crime to keep their lives relatively easy, commented in their usual obliquely incredible fashion – ‘…it was obviously just a road traffic accident, not an attempted theft. The thieves did not even stop to grab her bag after she was killed.’ Duh?
So I shall take a bit more care when (if?) I wander out and about during the Festival, I promise.

I went on a bit of a minor DVD/CD splurge last week. I suppose that I have to recognize now that it isn’t just purely the obsessive love of music and movies that motivates me, but partly comfort. When I’m a little down, as I have been, then it’s a nice feeling to splash out a couple of dollars on something new, or something I’ve always meant to get. So, to avoid sinking this missive in more of the gloom and despondency that seems to be hanging around me and my keyboard of late, here is a print-out-and-throw-away guide to the interminably boring world of ‘things I have bought; why I have bought them, what I think of them, and why they could change your world for the better (or not) in my not-so-humble opinion.

• Rolling Stones CD ‘Through the vaults darkly’ – a great wee bootleg CD of rarities (including the very rude ‘Schoolboy Blues’ and a stonking (what a word!) version of ‘Brown Sugar’ featuring Eric Clapton on guitar. Forking out your $1.50 also gets you some bafflingly awful jams and for some inexplicable reason The Animals original single of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ amongst the Jagger/Richards treasure trove.
• ‘Bossa ’n’ Stones Vol 2’ CD – Yes! Bossa nova versions of such greats as ‘Honky Tonk Women’ and ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, perfect for that poolside cocktail party on those balmy evenings. Absolutely bonkers concept, brilliantly executed and performed without any passion or irony whatsoever, and real contender for CD of the year so far.
• Eagles ‘Long Road Out of Eden” CD – I will freely admit to having really liked mid-period Eagles (Desperado, On the Border, One Of These Nights), but pretty much loathed ‘Hotel California’ and ‘The Long Run’. To the loathing list we can now add this vacuous waste of the pirate CD’ers art. A dreadful waste of time all round, and I do believe that Don Henley in particular knows that… ‘Boys of Summer’ indeed…! $1.50 wasted…
• Ryan Adams ‘Easy Tiger’ CD – Ryan is just so darn prolific that his quality control sometimes slips out the window and hangs by it’s fingernails on the diddley-doodley narrow ledge just above bland and boring. This is not a bad album, but not a particularly good one either. Strangely, the track I like the most (Halloweenhead) is the one that most critics disliked the most, dismissing it as ponderous heavy rock by numbers… hmmm.
• Love ‘Forever Changes Live’ – DVD – a real favourite album of my wife and I, here recorded live a few years ago at the Festival Hall. The late Arthur Lee is heartbreakingly good, the band amazing, the songs transcendental. Otis likes to bop to it also. Great extras too. Happy Happy Joy Joy all round.
• REM ‘Perfect Square’ – another great live DVD (Germany), the chaps on top form, best version of ‘Man on the Moon’ EVER, plus a quaint mini-documentary of their visit to Stirling which really does look as if they have landed smack in the middle of ‘The Sunday Post/People’s Friend’ land. ‘Gosh Mrs McGlumphy, there’s that wee Michael Stipe, he disnae look weel, does he?’ ‘Och, dinnae worry, he’s ane o’ them vegetabalarians, is he no? Michty, a wee drap o’ Sweetheart Stout wid dae him the warld o’ good…’
• ‘Easy Rider’ – DVD – ‘set your motor runnin’ – bam-bam-bam-baam-baam!’… please don’t ask why… I used to have that poster on my wall for most of my teenage years… I still have a hankering for the freedom of the speeding sickle on the open road, wind blowing through my hair transplant and the distant rumble of the heavy metal thunder of Steppenwolf…. Probably end up having my bag snatched tho’ ….

Most of the above are in the vein of ‘classic rock’, which seems to be, as my Granny used to say, a ‘phrase’ I am going through at the moment. Or, perhaps more accurately, a ‘paragraph’. Mind you, I have been veering toward the Brazilian these last couple of days (which sounds like an extract from a football commentary or something a bit rude to do with waxing – no, not surfboards), and I now have a sizeable collection of variations on the theme of ‘Girl from Ipanema’. And I am thinking that bossa nova versions of punk songs might be a bit of a crowd puller with the jaded youth of the trendy Phnom Penh nightspots… However, the wind is changing and I think I can feel a bout of free jazz approaching from the West, with maybe a smattering of Bluegrass on it’s way when the weather clears – I’m so glad that I still love all this stuff … still crazy after all these years, eh…

Goodnight, and may your dog go with you.