Chamkarmon district

Phnom Penh is about two hours from the Vietnamese border, a trip broken only by a ubiquitous half-hour lunch stop and a short break at Neak Loung, where cars, buses, motos and pedestrians are borne across the Mekong on rusting ferries. Due to the abundance of foreign aid the highways here are well-sealed and, excepting a bumpy 40km coda of expansion works on the final approach into Phnom Penh, the hulking Sapaco tourist bus made good time. My arrival was smooth but otherwise inglorious. After a week-long spell in one of the city’s ubiquitous backpacker ghettos, I’ve finally found a permanent address, a second-floor apartment set in a quiet street close to the riverfront and the old National Assembly building.

The new edition of the Phnom Penh Post hit the streets on Friday, and we celebrated with tequila shots and beers at Cantina, a Mexican restaurant and dedicated Post watering-hole on the riverfront. For this first issue, I contributed stories about the release of a new court monitoring report — which paints a predictably dire picture of the country’s judiciary — and the arrival of a new 3G mobile network in Cambodia, for which I interviewed Christian pop-star Stacie Orrico (!) in the feathered expanses of Hotel Le Royal. I also received VIP tickets to the launch of the new network last Saturday, a free concert at the Olympic Stadium featuring Orrico and a line-up of local artists.

In the event, I spent more time taking photos of the stadium itself than I did of the performers. I’ve always been interested in the school of Khmer modernism that flourished briefly under Prince Sihanouk in the 1950s and 1960s before it was terminated by the civil war and the depredations of the Pol Pot era. Phnom Penh’s Olympic Stadium, built in 1964 and designed by Vann Molyvann, is one of the best remaining examples of this new style of Khmer modernism. Molyvann, a local architect who studied with Le Corbusier in France, was the leader of this architectural school whose close personal friendship with Sihanouk ensured him a series of major state commissions, including the Independence Monument, Preah Suramarit National Theatre (recently destroyed by fire) and several private villas for the Prince in Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville. (In the same style, though probably not designed by Molyvann, are the apartments — once white, now a sepulchral grey — that line the streets around O Russei Market in the centre of town).

Spectators at Phnom Penh’s Olympic Stadium, March 15.

Although Phnom Penh never hosted the Olympic Games — to Sihanouk’s consternation — the stadium was inaugurated when the city hosted its non-aligned equivalent, the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO) in 1966. The village for the visiting athletes was built by Molyvann in the same angular style, a box-like line of apartments along the Tonle Bassac foreshore about 1km south of my apartment. ‘Le Front du Bassac’, as the housing development was then called, is today in a decrepit state, but a skeleton of high modernism can still be discerned beneath the peeling paintwork and twisted railings of the apartment blocks, now wreathed in electric cables and covered in the detritus of their inhabitants. My colleague Brendan is researching the heritage issues associated with these old buildings for the upcoming edition of the Post and I am keen to explore their history further. I’ll definitely write more on this during my stay, once I have a chance to visit some of the remaining buildings around the city.

With my mind occupied with Cambodian issues at work, I’ve been pursuing my other interests in my downtime. I already have a favourite book store nearby in Street 240 (a branch of Bangkok’s D’s Books) where I’ve procured vintage 1960s/1970s paperback copies of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gore Vidal’s Duluth, Von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and The Spice-Box of Earth, a 1961 collection of poetry by Leonard Cohen. There are also a couple of articles up on Arts & Letters Daily that I recommend: one by David Mamet in The Village Voice, disavowing what he calls ‘brain-dead liberalism’ (although like most Americans he misuses the term*) and an excellent essay by Christina Hoff Sommers, one of my favourite American intellectuals, on why universities can’t, and shouldn’t, pursue gender equality in the physical sciences. I’ve also acquired a copy of The Anti-Industrial Revolution, an obscure Ayn Rand polemic against the New Left, which is ruthless in its denunciation of the student ‘revolution’ of the 1960s. Although it matches radical left-wing theories with its own brand of heaven-sent certainty, the book is worth the price of admission ($3.50) for the following quote alone. Here is Rand on hippies:

Observe the hippies’ choice of clothing. It is not intended to make them look attractive, but to make them look grotesque. It is not intended to evoke admiration, but to evoke mockery and pity. One does not make oneself look like a caricature unless one intends one’s appearance to plead: Please don’t take me seriously.

I’m not sure I agree with Rand on every, or even most, issues; but man, she sure knows how to skewer an innocent.

* I am always perplexed by the American use of the term ‘liberal’. Liberalism, in its nineteenth-century sense, stands for free markets and individual rights. Americans use the word to denote almost the exact opposite: namely, strong government intervention in the economy. American ‘liberals’ are only liberal in the social — civil rights, pro-choice — sense of the term. Economically, their philosophy comes closer to statism or social democracy. This confusion of the history of political ideas — this tendency to call a spade a lettuce — only muddies an already complicated debate.