HECTOR'S BALI TIMES DIARY [for Oct. 16]

QUICK EXIT: Wole Soyinka BIG ENTRY: Barack Obama




Yes, We Have No Bananas (Well, Not at Your Price)

BALINESE culture, religious practice and tradition emphasises shared responsibility anchored in the concept that someone else’s pain is your pain and someone else’s joy is your joy. It’s a lovely idea, and for the most part – this is what sets Bali apart from much of the rapacious world – it works.
How then should we view the rampant profiteering at local markets that went on in the lead-up to Galungan (Oct. 14 with holidays the days either side)? Were market-goers in search of bananas – crucial for ceremonies – bamboo (ditto) and other necessary votive products supposed to be happy to share the joy of sellers in their significant grab for extra money at their expense?
It’s not something that impacts on expatriates or indeed on the non-Hindu population of the island. Neither is it unusual in a global setting. Prices always go up, everywhere, whenever merchants spot a captive market in search of must-buy items. Anand Krishna’s thoughtful piece in last week’s edition of The Bali Times discussed that issue rather well, in the context of a communal culture.
But the bottom line is that profiteering is just another way of seeking advantage. It does not sit well with the image of Bali as a place of harmony and good thinking. Conscience is such a malleable creature, isn’t it?

Peace Off

THE decision of the Nobel Peace Prize organisers to award it this year to Barack Obama demonstrates with stark – and disturbing – clarity the vacuous state of European politics and the increasing irrelevance of the remote north-western peninsula of Eurasia.
It was a clearly political decision, made for reasons that would only make sense to a crowd plainly pained by relevance deprivation syndrome. The poverty of the Nobel committee’s position is revealed in the fact that nominations for this year’s peace prize closed just two weeks after the Inauguration on January 20. It’s not a question of whether Barack’s a good guy, or even whether he’s not. He has caused no peace – yet. He is embroiled in American politics and – the “good thinkers” of the American left notwithstanding – is compelled by circumstances to proceed and behave much as he has.
He is not St Barry (something his barrackers in Indonesia would do well to remember, incidentally). It is profoundly unclear whether he has any answers to America’s deep problems, far less those of the world. He won the good press he did, prior to his election in 2008, largely because he was not George W. Bush. That in itself is a demonstration of the vacuity with which global politics is conducted these days. And now he is in office, with actual decisions to make rather than political messages to spin, things are rather different from those heady days on the campaign trail.
None of this is Obama’s fault. He was running for office. People do that in democracies. Idiots – we use the term deliberately – who convinced themselves that the Obama Age would instantly usher in an era of peace and social understanding are poor fools besotted by the messiah complex.
Sadly, it seems, we must count the Nobel committee among them. Equally sadly, they have embarrassed not only themselves but also President Obama, whose shoes have hardly had time to scuff the carpet under the desk in the Oval Office.

In a Lather

THE 2009 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival has come and gone. Now we have the delights of communing with actress Julia Roberts to deal with, while she’s here cycling through the Monkey Forest at Ubud for her new movie Eat, Pray, Love. Shooting was scheduled to start this week.
We hear some other shooting may be called for in Walter Spies’ lovely little hill town – metaphorically of course – in the wash-up of the Festival. We loved the photographed cancellations to the programme posted on the UWRF Facebook. Perhaps one of the events was cancelled because no one could find the venue: it was said to be in Hanoman Road.
Organising people is never easy, especially those whose untidy lives are lived in the arts area. Snafus happen. But they do need to be minimised. When great minds gather, we gather, the object is to be seen as well as heard. Star attraction Wole Soyinka, who nearly turned round at Singapore on his way in, self-perplexed over the time it was taking the Indonesians to stamp his visa on an incomplete application, then left last Saturday night instead of on Monday morning because the flight arrangements had been messed up.
That said, UWRF is an essential entry on Bali’s international calendar. This year’s festival brought together some great talent. And a lot of fun was had by a lot of people. That’s good.

All Go

DOWN Nusa Dua way, things are clicking. And it’s not just the light switches when PLN occasionally remembers that its job is to provide electricity. The Diary was there the other day – for a Balinese wedding reception which was immense fun – and spotted a new Japanese restaurant on Jl Raya Nusa Dua Selatan, just by the entrance to the manicured BTDC hotels and golf club precinct.
It is built in a style reminiscent of a Japanese country inn. When we called in, attracted by its ironwood timberwork and low lighting, it was having its “soft opening”. The grand one had been set for some time after Galungan, we gather. It looks a picture; and the menu is attractive.
Mushasi is now on The Diary’s lengthening list of Dining Places to Be Visited.

Eat Up

BALI has two entries in the list of Asia's top 10 restaurants in the latest issue of The Miele Guide, another of those interminable cycles of self-congratulation with which the glossy sector of the international and local media so concerns itself.
Mozaic and Ku De Ta ranked sixth and ninth in the second edition of The Miele Guide, which was launched recently – with all the desired bells and whistles and in the presence, assumed to be desirable, of the A List names deemed suitable for the plush ambience of The Fullerton Hotel in Singapore.
According to The Miele Guide, Asia’s two best restaurants are still L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon in Hong Kong and Iggy's in Singapore. This year, though, in another circular movement, they swapped places, with L'Atelier claiming pole position for the bragging race.
It would be nice to ignore these sorts of awards. But marketing being what it is, you can’t.

Gotta Giggle

WE all need a little laugh now and again. Newspaper readers are no different in that respect. Neither, for that matter, are newspaper diarists. The perils of becoming humourless, fixated on seriousness, of turning into yet another foot soldier in the regiments of Ernests and Ernestines who blight their lives and those of others by fixating on issues because this makes them feel important, are plain enough. Life gives you lines on your face. It’s better to make them laugh lines.
For this reason The Diary was happy to see a little tale the other day – it surfaced in the local Indonesian language media – about the septuagenarian grandpa caught in flagrante (well, nearly) in an Amlapura brothel. Gosh, The Diary has been to Amlapura many times – it’s a lovely little town – and has never yet seen a house of ill repute.
It seems the police decided on this particular day to pay a visit to a certain establishment. As you might imagine, persons on the premises for the activities offered therein fled helter-skelter. But one old chap stayed put. He was finally persuaded to emerge from behind a locked door, along with his companion in victimless crime. He had with him a condom, apparently coloured orange (for added zest, no doubt). It was, he told the law enforcers gathered at the lintel, unused.

Donkey Vote

IN poor, benighted Gaza, where Arab politics and Israeli bastardry have combined to create hell on earth, the zoos are doing it tough too. Many of the exotic animals have died – the result either of the violence associated with acts of war or of the general deprivation Israel’s blockade has produced – and among them, the zebras.
But one zoo, we hear, has come up with a novel way to present local school children with the famously striped horse-like creature of the African veldt. They’ve painted donkeys in zebra stripes – very well too, it seems – and trot these out when visitors come to experience the wild creatures of Elsewhere. Apparently not only the children are fooled. Some of their teachers make asses of themselves as well.

Hector's Diary appears, as Scratchings From the Cage Floor - The Bali Times Diary, in the print edition of the newspaper every Friday. The Bali Times is at www.thebalitimes.com

HECTOR'S BALI TIMES DIARY [for Oct. 9]

DO DROP IN: Janet DeNeefe pitches for business




Celebrating a Sturdy Pick-me-Up

A SMALL and suitably decorous affray took place in the sheltered (and über-svelte) ambience of the St Regis Resort at Nusa Dua last Monday. It was by way of being a birthday party for a sometimes loud and rambunctious lady – the sort common enough in certain circles in Bali, or at least in Seminyak, we grant you, and therefore not necessarily something to do more than run away from.
But this was for a very special lady, who was turning 75. Well, these days that’s the new 15 or something. But seriously (well, sort of) this lady goes by the name of Bloody Mary, and she is a friend of a great many people, your Diarist included.
St Regis claims a genitive link with Mary. It is said, as one of several legends about the origin of this significantly kick-your-butt drink, that it was named for the lady friend of a bartender in the originating establishment in New York. She was habitually late for dates. He is said to have assuaged his pain about this by concocting the vodka and tomato juice slammer in her honour, and to have named it thus.
In those faraway days, before politeness was outlawed as discriminatory and uncouth became the new couth, it was not done to swear at your date. Far better to disguise your profanity in a tall salt-rimmed glass with plenty of ice, a double shot of Russia’s pride, drown it in potassium, season it with Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper it to taste, and then shake the bejesus out of it before decanting it into a glass with a stick of celery, a lemon twist on the side, a drinking straw – de rigueur in most upmarket establishments nowadays – and a swizzle stick if that’s your bag.
Bloody Marys are not, generally speaking, evening drinks. They are the hair of the bloody dog that bit you, far better employed as an instant hangover cure on the morning after the night before – been there; don’t want to do that again – or, at the far extreme of opportunity, as an accompaniment for brunch. No matter. If the lovely Geetha Warrier of the St Regis, where the Bloody Mary is the signature drink, commands your presence at sundown for a media-focused Bloody Mary extravagance, who are we, ordinary mortals all, to demur?
Thus, last Monday, your Diarist achieved a creditable sixth place in the Bloody Mary-making competition that was part of the show. We shan’t mention that this was out of nine competitors. As Sophie Digby, of the YakBud – the pushmipulyu girl – sagely observed, Bloody Marys are a personal thing. First place went to Now Bali, by the way, propelled by the hitherto undiscovered skills in the pick-me-up department of Dewi Kartika Suardana from that rather scarce publication.
Unusually, Jack Daniels of Bali Update was a late arrival. He may have been interviewing himself again. But he certainly missed the competition. He made up for this lapse by advising that his own recipe for a Very Bloody Mary involved drowning several highly lethal Mexican herbs in the vodka and keeping their cadavers there, like poor little princes in vats of wine, to flavour the poison for later use.
Dinner afterwards was a delight.

Warning Bark

SUE WARREN, of the Bali Street Dogs Fund in Australia, got into Hector’s ear this week about their annual appeal night in Melbourne – and quite rightly, too. At this time, when rabies is being combated by the Bali government and local regency action, it’s important to note that the fate of Bali’s uncared for animals is a matter of some little concern to many in Australia – our top source of tourists.
Last year’s Melbourne benefit night raised nearly $A50,000 (that’s more than Rp423 million at today’s exchange rate). The Bali Street Dog Fund supports the Bali Animal Welfare Association’s desexing programme and this year its members have been vaccinating street dogs against rabies wherever possible.
But this year too, Sue says, it’s proving much tougher to generate interest and attract publicity for the annual benefit event. That’s understandable. Melbourne is dealing with a number of problems, the horrendous Victorian bushfires of February this year drained a lot from the pool of private donations, and St Kilda, Hector’s favourite Melbourne suburb (and footy team) lost its best chance at the ALF premiership in 43 years ... but we digress.
This is the fifth year the fund has held Bali Nights. Last year it was a sell-out. As a small group, they put all their energy into this one shot at a win (pity St Kilda didn’t do the same, hrrmph). But this year ticket sale for the event – held at the historic Rialto building – are very low.
Hosts this year include Pete Smith (a local hero from Australia’s Nine Network TV) and Carla Bonner of the TV soapie (that’s Australian for sinetron) Neighbours.
It should be a good night. Hec can’t be there himself, but he’s going to work the phones, in a manner of speaking, in a reprise of the life of advocacy he abandoned four years to come to Bali for a rest. Let’s hope it goes well and brings in some much needed support for the overlooked victims of the rabies outbreak here.
It really shouldn’t be a dog’s life in Bali, after all.

Supine Position

SOME of you may have noticed that the 2009 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival is under way. This year it has even spread its favours to the Kuta-Seminyak foreign ghetto.
It was therefore no surprise to see Janet DeNeefe, Ubud notable and originator of the festival, gracing the virtual pages of the online Kabar magazine recently, promoting the annual celebration of things literary and less, that has, we are told, focused global attention on the little spot that Walter Spies and other chaps first put on the map so well in the misty distance of the early 20th century.
What was a surprise was the style of photographic image chosen to illustrate how great minds come up with great ideas. We reproduce it here without apology (our photo this week).
Let’s just say it’s not Jane Eyre. Instead, it seems to be more in the mode of the rather outré play readings that are a feature of the 2009 festival – or the x-rated poetry on offer for anyone who wouldn’t rather listen to their martini.

They’re Aussies

GOVERNOR I Made Mangku Pastika is not keen on the Komodo dragon. He doesn’t want the smaller Flores variety housed in Bali – even in secure zoo conditions – as part of an emergency plan to ensure the species survives.
Now it seems he may have a point: by some accounts Bali is already overrun with Australians and scientists say the Komodo – a monitor lizard – actually has an Aussie background.
New research by the team of palaeontologists and archaeologists, who studied fossil evidence from Australia, Timor, Flores, Java and India, shows that Komodo dragons most likely evolved in Australia and dispersed westward to Indonesia.
Scott Hocknull, Senior Curator of Geosciences at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, on Australia’s north-east coast, said Australia is a hub for lizard evolution. “The fossil record shows that over the last four million years Australia has been home to the world’s largest lizards, including a five meter giant called Megalania. Now we can say Australia was also the birthplace of the Komodo dragon,” he said this week.
It’s also the home of the truly poisonous bluetongue lizard. This is not named for the all but ubiquitous practice of the inhabitants of The Great South Land to insert the copulatory adjective into every sentence.

Not Deceased

IT HARDLY seems possible that it was 40 years ago this week that the madcap Monty Python comedy crew in Britain dusted off an awfully ancient Athenian joke – about a dead slave, whose seller refused to compensate the buyer on the grounds that the unfortunate object of the sale was alive when the transaction was made – and invented the skit about the dead parrot.
Hector, as you might imagine, exhibits a measure of ambivalence about the tale. He’s not into the concept of parrots that are no more, or which have dropped off the perch, or ... well, you remember the joke, or you should.
Python humour took British comedy to another level. It is alive and well and significantly rejuvenated as a result. For that we should always be grateful.

Hector's Diary is published, as Scratchings From The Cage Floor - The Bali Times Diary, in the print edition of The Bali Times every Friday. The Bali Times is also on the web at http://www.thebalitimes.com/.

HECTOR'S BALI TIMES DIARY [for Oct. 2]

RICH TRADITION: In Ayana’s signature batik, red, black and white/yellow are the dominant colours, drawn from the ancient natural artistry of the batik-makers at Tenganan in Karangasem, East Bali. In this photo, the smile is free. But – unless the liquid is a ”Welcome Drink” – that stuff in the little glass will cost you a rupiah or two.



A Day for Sartorial Splendour

TODAY is Batik Day, following the United Nations’ decision to recognise Indonesian batik as one of the world’s most important cultural traditions.
And among the many hotels in Bali and throughout the country making a sartorial statement is the Ayana Resort and Spa. Staff will support the appeal by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono for all citizens to wear batik to commemorate the news that it would be added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. (Only a world-class bureaucracy could have come up with a colourless name like that.)
Ayana has its own batik – see our photo – but today, according to sales and marketing director Haryadi Satriono, all 950 employees are planning to don their own finest batik instead.
Says Haryadi: “Our uniforms already feature a signature batik print, but we are encouraging our staff to wear their own batik garments to celebrate this occasion. It’s not every day that a centuries-old tradition is recognised by the United Nations, so it is something we want the world to know about.”
The Indonesian government lobbied for several years for the United Nations to recognise Indonesian batik’s cultural heritage.
Ayana’s signature print, the work of renowned fashion designer Ghea Panggabean and introduced to mark the resort’s rebranding on April 1 this year, is featured on buckles, sashes, sarongs and shirts, and was inspired by an ancient weaving technique from the village of Tenganan, near Candi Dasa in Karangasem.
The ritzy cliff-top property at Jimbaran is making a statement in other ways too. Its new Rock Bar is now featuring live music on many more days than Sunday.
Meanwhile, across the other side of the Bukit, the glitzy St Regis is getting set to celebrate the 75th birthday of the Bloody Mary (so delightfully rendered on many Balinese restaurant menus as Bloddy Marry). This wonderful pick-me-up was named after Mary Astor, who was fond of a drop. And the claimant in chief to the honour of being the first place to serve the vodka and tomato juice spine-stiffener is the original Astor-owned St Regis Hotel in New York City.

What the Schapelle?

YOU’RE never safe. One moment you’re sitting quietly in your lounge room watching the evening news – thereby proving you’re a glutton for punishment of course – and the next, some ditzy woman wanders in, plonks herself down on your settee, and abuses you over the incomprehensible continuing incarceration of former boogie-board carrier Schapelle Corby.
That’s if you’re Alexander Downer, of course, who retired as Australia’s longest serving foreign minister when the Howard government was defeated at elections in November 2007 and has since left politics altogether.
Out at Kook Central, though, relativities such as the facts (of anything) are rarely considered. They get in the way of a good psychosis.
Downer told the media he was perplexed by this astonishing home invasion.
He said he was watching the news when the unlocked front door of his secluded Adelaide Hills home swung open. “I thought it was the dog,” he said, “then suddenly, an elderly woman walked straight into the living room and sat down on the couch next to me. It was nobody I recognised, so I said: ‘Excuse me, who are you?’ She started attacking me verbally over Schapelle Corby, blaming me for her being in jail, saying that I had to get her out and that God will damn me, if I don't get her out of jail.”
Downer asked the woman to leave and when she didn’t, he called the police. But – as he puts it – she had wandered out into the garden by the time the local plods raced round to his Des Res and a search-by-torchlight failed to find her.
It sounds like something from that wonderful 1960s sci-fi series The Twilight Zone. She certainly missed the fact that for nearly two years, Stephen Smith has been Australia’s foreign minister. But he lives in Perth, a little way from Adelaide. Perhaps it’s just that she missed the bus.

Eat, Prey, Love

ELIZABETH Gilbert’s book Eat, Pray, Love, the account of her search for meaning and good nasi goreng, is understandably something of a focus of attention at present. After all, actress Julia Roberts will shortly be here – fresh from India where, among other things, she foreclosed on temple worship at one location shoot and visited the wettest place on earth (Cherrapunji) so she could get filmed in the rain – to portray Gilbert in the Balinese phase of her odyssey.
So it was amusing to read, this week, two comments on the book from which the movie is being made. First, this one from businessman, entrepreneur and social activist Sanat Kumara:
“All right, I finally finished reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s book … Almost everywhere I turned, people were reading this book, and a good friend of mine, literally, ordered me to read. So, I did it! I must say I still don’t get the reason for its HUGE success. It is a well written book and in fact funny and thoughtful. But it amazes me the degree that it has resonated with so many people. Does this mean that many are searching for their spiritual path or many are unhappy in their marriages and looking for a way out gracefully? Hmmm.”
And this Facebook post, from the Australian academic, writer and long-term Indonesia hand, Adrian Vickers:
“Wondering whether I should make a fuss about the misattribution to my book in Eat, Pray, Love (it's heavily referred to, but as Paradise Invented'! argh); or is it too embarrassing to be associated with such a book?”
Option Two’s the go, Adrian.

Chinese Takeaway

TWO Australian sailors – those of the private yacht variety, the guys who prefer not to just stand in the shower tearing up $50 notes – have just got back from the trip of a lifetime. On a slow boat to China, no less.
Jim Grierson and Col Wilesmith were heading back to Australia in July after winning handicap honours in this year’s Darwin to Ambon race when fate intervened. Their catamaran began to break up in rough seas and they were rescued by a bulk carrier.
“We said something like 'hey mate, thanks for picking us up, you want to drop us off at Singapore', and he goes 'no mate, we're going to China',” said Grierson, a friendly fellow from the linguistically challenged Northern Territory.
Grierson and Wilesmith spent 12 days on board their rescue ship and say the Chinese authorities were a bit confused when they turned up. “They were bemused that we didn't have a visa,” says Grierson.
“We showed them our ship's papers saying we stamped out of Australia, stamped into Indonesia, stamped out of Ambon bound for Australia. So our paperwork was up [to date], our passports were clear. And when they found that we were rescued, they were just great.”

O Canada

DIARY readers will recall the item we ran a while ago on the Ubud performance of the Evan Ziporyn dance-opera A House in Bali. We can report that it had its American premiere at the University of California at Berkley last weekend. Presumably without the endless chattering and photo-flashes that so rudely disturbed the show in Ubud.
We know this because we spotted a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, by the newspaper’s music critic, Joshua Kosman, previewing the performance.
Kosman gets full marks (from us at least) for his summation of the global impact of gamelan – “The music of the Indonesian gamelan, with its clangourous sonorities and intricate, smoothly interlocking rhythms, has exerted its allure on countless composers and listeners over the past century,” he writes.
But then, like most Lower 48 Americans when faced with a geography challenge, or the strange notion that someone other than an American might have done something useful, he goes off the rails. He writes: “One – perhaps the most influential - was the American composer Colin McPhee, who did more than anyone to introduce gamelan music to Westerners.”
Well, McPhee certainly did that. But he was a Canadian. One of those chaps from that place above the world’s longest undefended border of which Chicago gangster-bootlegger Al Capone, who got most of his prohibition era liquor supplies there, famously said: “I don't even know what street Canada is on.”

HECTOR'S DIARY appears, as Scratchings, in The Bali Times print edition every Friday and on the newspaper's website at www.thebalitimes.com where the latest edition is posted every Monday.

HECTOR'S BALI TIMES DIARY [for Sept. 25]

IT’S IN THE BAG: Australian Consul General Lex Bartlem gets set to get his hands dirty along with the deputy mayor of Denpasar, I Gusti Ngurah Jaya Negara, Sanur village head Ida Agus Alit Surya Antara, Banjar Semawang chief Ida Gusti Made Suarna and hundreds of local school students, at a Sanur Beach clean-up last Saturday.


Strike a Light. They’ve Done it Again

PLN, euphemistically known as the public power utility, blacked out Bali in spectacular fashion on Sept. 16. Island-wide blackness lasted only 25 minutes – they say – but many places were in the dark for up to five hours, including most of the bits of southern Bali where international tourists come to contribute significant dollars to the economy.
As usual, it was impossible to get a straight answer from the chirpy chappies who want to put your electricity bills up by 30 percent (and will do so as soon as possible - count on it). They did allude to the fact that it had been raining at Gilimanuk at the time and that perhaps the undersea cable had been struck by lightning. They use the right logo, then (see it here).

That may have been a translation error – they do that with as much panache as transmission errors, their key incompetency – and we can probably safely say they meant that the cable had been struck at some point either side of the Bali Strait.
It may have been raining, of course. This dry season it seems to have been doing that a lot. But we don’t think any thunderstorms were showing up on the weather radar at the time.
One good friend of The Diary – a Balinese businessman from Nusa Dua, with whom we dined that very evening (in the dark) – said of the event: “One Nyepi a year is enough.”
PLN must have been trying to make a point, however. They pulled the plug on a lot of Bali the very next night too – but only for three-plus hours this time.

In the Bag

IT ISN’T very often you see one of Her (Aussie) Maj’s consul-generals getting down and dirty for beach clean-up. They call such things an emu bob in her Great South Land (for obvious reasons). But that’s what Lex Bartlem, consul-general in Bali, did last Saturday morning when the consulate sponsored a clean-up session at Sanur Beach.
The Australian Government is a strong supporter of the annual Clean Up the World campaign. This year the Consulate-General in Bali played its part in combating the worldwide problem of pollution by organising a Clean Up Sanur Beach event. Local civic leaders and a Sanur crowd, among them lots of school students, took part, while Eco Bali and Yayasan GUS demonstrated recycling methods and gave pointers to how everyone can help the environment in their daily lives.
Similar clean-up efforts were held elsewhere, including at Nusa Dua.
Clean Up the World grew from an initiative in 1989 by an Australian,
Ian Kiernan, who, motivated by the growing pollution of the city’s world famous waterway, organised a Clean Up Sydney Harbour event. The following year it became an annual Clean Up Australia Day. And in 1993 the initiative gained the support of the United Nations Environment Programme and became the Clean Up the World campaign.
Last Saturday’s Sanur event kicked off at 9am. That was Earthquake + 2 hours, as it turned out. That (and the prophylactic sounding of the tsunami klaxons) would have cleared the beach of people, if not the litter.

All A-Twitter

THE local twittersphere was all atremble last weekend, on Earthquake Day. It was such fun learning who among one’s friends and acquaintances had dashed in undies – or less – for the safety of open ground when the temblor struck at 7.06am. And fun too to work out from that volunteered intelligence, offered on Twitter and Facebook, who among them is by custom a late riser.
Hec was at his computer of course (memo to self, he says: Get a life). But Mrs Hec got a rude jolt out of slumberland, though she was dissuaded from joining the multitudes in a deshabille dash. Hec refuses to panic – well, visibly at least – and affects a sangfroid in the face of looming disaster that has long exasperated a great many people. They say it is thickheadedness. He says he hates headless chookery.
That said, Saturday’s jolt was an unpleasant reminder of the hair’s breadth that often separates self from destruction; and of the ephemeral and uncertain qualities of real life. In disasters, though, often the greatest risk to individual life and limb is panic.

Were They Switched On?

NOW that Idul Fitri and the Lebaran holiday are behind us, we wonder whether President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono will ask for an audit of mobile phone use over the break by all those officials he told not to switch off.
He said they should keep their mobiles switched on at all times so that service to the community did not take a break as well. The presidential edict was issued in Jakarta when, looking at some locomotives, he told the media he had told key officials: “Do not let difficulties happen if there is a need to contact the official in charge when there are issues that must be overcome. Mobiles should remain enabled, in order to remain coordinated.”

Cheers!

RICO, from the Martini Appreciation Society, sent Hector a cheerio on his blog during the week, a result of last week’s item on the martinis and x-rated readings to take place at Naughty Nuri’s in Ubud during the Writers and Readers Festival, which starts on October 7.
He wanted the lazy buzzard to know that the society had nothing to do with the organising of the evening, which was all the work of the extra-mile crew at the UWRF. Well, we knew that, of course.
But just in case there’s anyone out there who would think for a moment that martini aficionados would waste valuable drinking time listening to smut instead of the gentle swizz of their wizened olive, let’s make it crystal clear: Naughty Nuri’s provides the venue. Martini appreciators will be there to drink martinis. And whatever else goes on is ... well, something else.
Rico did ask Hec if he’d like to join the society. Now there’s a thought.

For Two Pins

HECTOR had a call from an old Aussie mate the other day, a chap who – unlike Hec – has secured a financial inducement to return home to Queensland after a lengthy sojourn beyond the borders of Australia’s best state. He had a tale to tell, which is worth repeating.
It concerns the Queensland Club, an institution in Brisbane, the capital (and not without coincidence also Hector’s former refuge from the uncouth and the loudmouthed, and the former pipe-layers who seem to have taken over the world).
He popped in there the other day, he tells us, and breasted the bar. There were surprised looks all round. Someone eventually broke the silence to ask: “Where have you been?” Our chum replied: “I’ve been in jail.”
This is not the sort of rejoinder with which institutions such as the Queensland Club, or indeed its members, are either accustomed or can deal with very well. You could, our mate says, have heard a pin drop. There was a sudden shuffling of feet and instant body language which said plainly: “Let’s get away from him as quickly as we can.”
So he put them out of their misery. “Actually I’ve been living in Adelaide,” he said. “But I’m so ashamed of that, I thought I’d rather say I’d been to prison.”
Apparently everyone wanted to get him a drink on their bar chits then. Lucky fellow.

Dance of the Dills

THE unedifying recent row over stupidity, as in the attempted theft by some ignorant Singaporeans of Bali’s sacred Pendet dance as part of a promotion for “Malay” Malaysia, has produced an echo.
The Malaysia Star, which thankfully is not a newspaper of record, published this on its blog (apparently from a paid hack and headlined Dancing to the tune of Bali): “The dance in question was the ancient Balinese Pendet Dance of a Hindu community of Bali in the Indonesian state of Java.”

Empire Spreads

THE Laguna restaurant chain, a neat little operation with two outlets in Nusa Dua (in Jl Pantai Mengiat at Bualu and at Bali Collection) has started a third arm of the empire. Hector and friends dined there on Tuesday, the official opening night.
It’s at Tanjung Benoa, across the road from the time-sharers at the Peninsula.
In a tourism environment where critical mass often eludes local operators, for all sorts of reasons, not all of them connected with the power of imported big bucks to overrun competition, it is pleasing to record a truly local success.
The food’s good too. And it comes at a reasonable price.

Diary Date

MONDAY is World Rabies Day. It’s an annual event dedicated to eradicating rabies, a zoootic disease, in humans. At this time, in Bali, it is an apposite date on which officials most closely concerned with controlling the outbreak here could usefully reflect on what they really need to do to achieve that objective.

HECTOR'S DIARY appears, as Scratchings, in print edition of The Bali Times every Friday and on the newspaper's website at www.thebalitimes.com on Mondays.

HECTOR'S BALI TIMES DIARY [for Sept. 18]

MORAL TALE: Playwright Marco Calvani IMMORAL TAIL: Socialite Paris Hilton




No Pizzas for the Upper Crust

IT SEEMS that all may not be well out there in Dreams of Empire Land, aka the Canggu Club. The newly opened Trattoria pizzeria there has closed. Its prominent sign has gone from in front of the club, in a significant break with Bali tradition: the island is littered with direction signs to many deceased outlets of the White Elephant franchise network.
Trattoria does well enough in Jl Oberoi in Seminyak and elsewhere in Indonesia. It is also in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. But perhaps pizza is not the munch de jour of the favoured limelighters who frequent – though in decreasing numbers it seems – the exclusive grounds of the club.
It remains a mystery why the club was established in the first place. It offers Bali-based expatriates the opportunity to pay thousands of dollars to drink or dine – which they pay for anyway – with other expats.
Most foreigners here sensibly prefer to make friends among the local population. Bali is never going to be “New Empire” Rodeo Drive (thank goodness) and night deservedly fell on the old empires a little while ago now.
The club has a swimming pool and a fitness centre. But most of the plusher expats already have swimming pools at their own pads and the workout market is not overly strong here, given that a walk or the beach – or a jog if you must – is easily available.
It is, of course, co-located with the Canggu Community School, whose students use the club and playing field. Perhaps being overrun by unruly juniors is deemed deleterious to the sensibilities of the equally badly behaved grown-ups who are supposed to foregather in the vicinity for fun and frivolity of adult design.
The Canggu area is being rapidly built out. Oddly, therefore, the Canggu Deli, which opened around a year ago and with a restaurant (The Loop) beside it, is hardly ever overrun with patrons.
Can it be that people who live in the area prefer the more eclectic delights of Seminyak, just a short drive away?


Wizened Olive, Anyone?

IT’S AN odd thought that the martini should need an ode to it. It’s a pleasant enough kick in the butt, if that’s what you need, but vastly overplayed as an attraction. James Bond is to blame. He horribly misused that cocktail – and drowned far too many wizened olives on sticks – in pursuit of blondes, brunettes and Russian spies.
But never mind. A martini can make for a good party – just ask James – and good parties are desirable, even if the blondes and brunettes can be less so and the Russian spies nowadays are completely absent, having been replaced by the Russian mafia.
One particular martini party coming up soon – appropriately it is hosted by the Martini Appreciation Society – is the Ode to a Martini at Naughty Nuri’s in Ubud on October 9. The gig is associated with the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival and is free (apart from the martinis). Organisers promise a lethal line-up of poets and authors with late-night readings of the x-rated kind to honour one of Nuri’s iconic and most potent cocktails.
The Diary is still deciding whether it would be wise to go. The event’s Facebook page already lists some of Bali’s most febrile party-persons as attending.
Of course, if you can’t stand martinis (or turn a nastily contrasting pink at x-rated readings) you definitely shouldn’t go. But if that’s the case, you could instead try one of the three free play-readings on offer, or really break out and make it to all three of them. The Diary’s pick of the trio would be the October 10 reading of Marco Calvani’s The City Beneath, which examines the collapse of morality in the west – that itself is enough to drive you to drink – and is directed by the playwright himself.
That fellow who has nailed himself to the floor of the Bali scene (he’s such a fixture, you see), Jack Daniels, is on the reading panel too.
You can find all the details on UWRF 2009 (Oct. 7-11) at http://www.ubudwritersfestival.com/.

It’s Party Time

GOSH, a year goes by quickly when you set your clock by the Kuta Karnival. The next one is upon us already. It starts tomorrow (Sept. 19) and offers a variety of colourful and noisy occasions until Sept. 27.
Led by the Kuta Small Business Association, the communities of Kuta, Legian and Seminyak, and Bali and Indonesia in general, have again come together to show they care and to contribute to world peace. This is the seventh such event, which began as a response to the 2002 bombings.
Activities are centred on Kuta Beach and include tomorrow’s opening ceremony, a kites festival (also tomorrow), the traditional sunset dance nightly, a bartender competition organised by the Bali Hotels Association on Sept. 23, “Arja Muani” presented by Surfer Girl on Sept. 24, the Bali Food Festival on Sept. 25-27, and much else besides.
The traditional closing ceremony and parade on Sept. 27 will clog the streets as usual.

An Embuggerance

THE fact that the vacuous Paris Hilton is said to be a socialite, reality TV star and a retailing phenomenon says a lot less about her – appropriately enough; the less said the better – than it does about the poverty of mind that now afflicts western civilisation.
The related fact, that her twittering has gained entry to the latest edition of the Oxford Book of Quotations, says a lot else. It chiefly says that the commercial imprints still permitted to use the moniker of what was once perhaps the Anglosphere’s greatest university – sorry Cambridge – have themselves become vacuities.
Ms Hilton may be a socialite – this classification of space-wasters has always been self-elected anyway – but she is not a reality TV star (the term is an oxymoron). And if she a retailing phenomenon, that’s because the consumer society, that western bane, is based on the principle that idiots will buy anything if winked at by something blonde and monosyllabic, and in a short enough skirt.
Her winning quote, now given the reward of association with printer’s ink in a publication that should know better, is: “Dress cute wherever you go – life is too short to blend in.” That’s it in a nutshell (or possibly a G-string). It’s ungrammatical, trite, wanton in the real sense of the term, and ... well, pathetic.
The British author Terry Pratchett also makes the new edition, with a useful word he uses to describe Alzheimer’s disease, from which he suffers. It is “embuggerance”. Now there’s word with great utility. It should be applied to Ms Hilton and many other empty vessels.

Giggle Monster

THE Australian actor Eric Bana started off in comedy before moving off to create mayhem in a series of firmly forgettable Hollywood action films – but now he has returned to his roots in Funny People, the latest movie by director Judd Apatow (The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up). It opened nationally in Australian cinemas last weekend.
It’s about a group of stand-up comedians. And apparently Bana found it such a laugh on the set that he earned a nickname: the Giggle Monster.
Bana is a favourite of The Diary. But less for his acting – although he’s good – than for his lifelong barracking for St Kilda in the Australian Football League. It’s nice to share the hope – they say it springs eternal – that despite the record of the past 43 years, the Saints will win a premiership. This could be the year. They play the Western Bulldogs tonight in the first preliminary final.

Snuggle Up

BRITISH researchers, well known to be killjoys, have come up with the suggestion that to get a good night’s sleep you should slumber in your own bed. They say that the sharing thing can be bad for you because of snoring, kicking and cover-hogging.
That might be the case in beds designed for one (we all remember our student days), but as that tuneful observer of social mores, Billy Joel, once noted in song, sooner or later you sleep in your own space anyway.
In Bali, one benefit of villa living – even in a modest villa – is that the beds tend to be really big. So you can snuggle up and sleep alone: truly the best of both worlds.

HECTOR'S DIARY appears, as Scratchings, in the print edition of The Bali Times every Friday and on the newspaper's website at www.thebalitimes.com each Monday.

HECTOR'S BALI TIMES DIARY [for Sept. 11]

PEEK-A-BOO: Janet DeNeefe and friend

Nightie-night! What a Great Party

JANET DeNeefe, a fixture in the Ubud firmament, had a birthday bash last Saturday night. The Diary was not among the jests present, being well served for laughs elsewhere that evening and sans invitation to boot, but we’re sure it was a success.
In fact we know it was, because we asked DeNeefe’s indefatigable executive assistant, Elizabeth Henzell, to spill the beans on the Great Affray. She tells us DeNeefe was duly surprised by her surprise party, which was catered by Dewi, her eldest daughter, in substantial finger-food mode, plus birthday cake. More than 100 guests were left licking their fingers, we hear.
And we’re also informed that there may be a number of people around Ubud sporting bruised ribs and kicked shins from nearly letting the cat out of the bag. That’s a surprise because Henzell, as readers of her Instinct column in The Bali Times know very well, is an animal liberationist. Normally she would insist that all cats be let out of bags.
People should be seen to have good birthdays – and fun parties to go with them. So that may be why DeNeefe placed a post-prandial note on her Facebook advising thus: “Life is full of surprises ... if you know what I mean.” Well, not exactly, no. We’re quite happy here on the third rock from the sun.
DeNeefe does a little travelling in her complex and multifaceted role as restaurateur to the stars, hotelier to the hordes, and literary agent-provocateur. On one of her peregrinations this year she visited Noosa, an Australian east coast resort town that is also a legend in its own al fresco lunchtime.
She went with a friend who was clearly cut out for just such an adventure, as our picture shows. It’s from her Facebook too. We’ll look for the party pix later.

Well Stay Home Then

FEW things are more irritating than people who arrive unannounced in your immediate vicinity and then get right in your face with a claim that because of their circumstances, including their presence, which of course they presume to be desirable, you must accommodate their special requirements. These are varied, but all of them involve you giving up any element or elements of your own elective behaviour that they find objectionable.
It is a phenomenon that has become all but ubiquitous among effete and over-serviced first-world people. We are nowadays assumed, by the recently empowered halt and lame, to have a duty towards them that enshrines their (presumptuous) “rights” at the cost of one’s own. We would do well to remember that each of us is halt and lame in some respect, perfection being found only in inventive advertising for cosmetics, and that special pleading is tedious.
But special pleading is in fact nowadays the main game. Premier performers in this intrusive and fundamentally rude way of behaving are those who assert, pejoratively, that they are non-smokers (as if anyone cares) and those with largely elective choices of chronic conditions, particularly asthma. In western societies – and it must be said, particularly in Australia – this latter ailment has become a veritable epidemic. In the old days you got hay fever and got on with life.
On that front, and noting that letters to the editor are always welcome, on whatever topic, those that begin “As a non-smoker and someone who suffers from asthma ...” sound alarm bells immediately they are spotted lurking in a page that may otherwise be a joy – or if not a joy, at least a pleasure – to peruse.
There was one in last week’s paper, from a gentleman in Semaphore, South Australia, who thought it his duty to signal to the world that he was very disappointed to experience people smoking cigarettes at adjacent restaurant tables when he visited Bali recently.
Worse, he opined, it appeared (to him) that some smokers who were visiting from overseas “are taking advantage of Bali’s lax laws and flouting their habit to the detriment of others.” He surely meant “flaunting”, but bad English comprehension is a separate matter of considerable concern.
There are many kinds of elective behaviour that potentially injure one’s health. Smoking is among them. Drinking excessively is too. Breathing in the poisonous emissions of badly maintained motor vehicles and motorbikes is another. To which, according to our correspondent who for some inexplicable reason decided to dice with death and temporarily vacate the über-safe and over-regulated environment of Semaphore, South Australia, one must now add travelling to Bali.
But there is another deleterious health depressant: constant belly-aching about things that are not to your personal taste, and the behaviour of other people. It creates stress, which cannot be a good thing.
The key, as always, is found in good manners. It is bad manners to smoke if you are with people (at your table) who dislike it. Equally, it is bad manners to insist that other people, total strangers, cannot enjoy themselves, or behave (lawfully) as they wish, just because you’ve got a bee in your bonnet.

A Swell Show

THERE was a lovely little soiree the other day, an informal affair hosted by Australian Consul-General Lex Bartlem for 75 Indonesian Australian Development Scholarship students who had been studying English in Bali before taking up post-graduate courses at Australian universities.
A highlight of the evening, on August 28, was the performances put on by each of the class groups from the language school. It reinforced how similar are the Australian and Indonesian sense of humour and delight in having a joke on yourself and your mates.
Bartlem invited a small number of locally resident Australians along for the evening. They had a heap of fun too.
The goal of the ADS programme is to assist in reducing poverty and achieving sustainable development through human resource development. It currently offers more than 300 scholarships a year at the post-graduate level to Indonesians in both the public and private sector, offered in fields of development priority for Indonesia, as agreed annually by the Australian and Indonesian governments. The fields of current choice are economic management, democratic institutions and practice, basic social services, and security and stability.
A very useful aspect of the scheme is that it draws students from outside the focus on Jakarta and other major centres that informs (or misinforms) much of the international effort to build links with Indonesia.
Another highlight of the evening: Bartlem – who as we have noted here before speaks Spanish and is thus a good bloke to have with you at the string of tapas establishments that have sprung up in the glitter zone – has been studying Bahasa. He did say a few words, but then said he was glad everyone there spoke English because it meant they wouldn’t have to listen to him mangling Indonesian.
Lex, you’re too hard on yourself, old son.

CAHILL: Time to unblock

In a Word

WRITER’S block is a painful ailment and one that unfortunately does not respond readily to laxatives. Not even to All-Bran. So the interesting Ubud Writers and Readers Festival workshop by the must-read Australian scribbler Michelle Cahill, “Writing as a Journey: How to Unblock,” caught The Diary’s eye.
It’s a half-day penance, on October 7 – the first day of the festival but before the official opening the following day sponsored by the Australia-Indonesia Institute.
Cahill, who clearly has fun doing what she does (so well), itself a great prophylactic against the dreaded block, says the process of writing is a journey. This can be one of memory; or through the body; it might be found in our ancestry; or could be a search to uncover the true voice or narrative shape.
The aim of the workshop is to take participants through techniques for deepening perspective and sense of location, show how to recognise psychological barriers – it helps to be able to bare the soul – and heighten sense of location. This helps banish block, says Cahill.
Participants are invited to bring along some of their own work: up to three pages of fiction, poetry or a non-fiction essay that they might be unsure about. Hey, good idea. There may be a few diary items Cahill could give advice on.
Details at www.ubudwritersfestival.com.

Eight Years On

WE ALL know where we are today (well, hopefully), but where were you eight years ago today when the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York were demolished by a pack of homicidal maniacs? The Diary was just driving out of Luton airport in the UK, but that’s a long story and beside the point.
The outrage that launched a thousand (unfulfilled) plans is now in the history books, where it should remain as a painful lesson about the basic inability of a great many people to comprehend that other people think differently from themselves, and have a perfect right to do so.
The terrible tragedy of September 11, 2001, must not be forgotten. But it shouldn’t get in the way of seeking a better and more inclusive future, either.

SCRATCHINGS appears as The Bali Times Diary in the print edition of the newspaper every Friday and on the newspaper's website at www.thebalitimes.com on Mondays.

HECTOR'S BALI TIMES DIARY [for Sep. 4]

ON TRACK: Julia Roberts is training in Rome for her Bali experience (see Hollywood Smile Alert, below).

PHOTO: Los Angeles Times


What a Silly Song and Dance

THOSE who have spent a lifetime closely observing politics – and your Diarist is one such poor creature – are surprised by very little. What is generally looked for is some tiny little shaft of light from the heavens, or at least a break in the horizon-to-horizon gloom.
Alas, such benefits are rare. So it is with the emerging row over Malaysia’s national anthem, a fixture at drum-beating parades and formal occasions since 1963, when the Brits took God Save the Queen back to Blighty and handed over power in their former south-east Asian colony.
Hot on the heels of the entirely reasonable Indonesian dyspepsia over some foolish promo-producing firm in Singapore using Bali’s sacred Pendet dance to promote Malaysia, we are now told the Malaysian anthem is suspiciously similar to a popular song created in Indonesia in 1957.
There is more than a whiff of opportunism in this manufactured “issue”. If it was a problem, why hadn’t someone said something about it before – like, for example, 46 years before? This is the thoroughly reasonable point put forward by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs – in sensible countries, the most sense is often spoken by foreign ministries, who dislike having to deal with the fallout of political or social clumsiness; or worse, opportunism – and it is one everyone should take on board.
Anthems are the signature tunes of national entities. Many have been borrowed from somewhere else – the United Kingdom’s God Save the Queen is a German dirge, after all – and the words that accompany them range from the hopeful to the frankly speculative. The East is Red springs to mind. Some are excessively long (Argentina’s goes on forever, with some very embarrassing breaks for the unwary).
Some have very funny words; and others geography lessons. At least one we know of combines these two amusing factors. Aussies – those who know the words at least – apparently feel the need to remind themselves, as the occupants of the world’s largest island (or smallest continent; take your pick) that they are girt by sea.

High-Pitch Wine

THREE Bali properties have won Wine Spectator awards of excellence – The Legian at Seminyak for the second consecutive year. That has pleased its efficiently decorative GM, Carla Petzold-Beck (photo), and deservedly so.
The other winner we know about is the new St Regis Bali Resort at Nusa Dua, which is proud to have won such an award in its first year of operation. It is indeed a feather in its cap.

The Legian’s signature restaurant – to avoid confusion, it’s called The Restaurant – won for its selection of 185 international wines, with a particular focus on the vineyards of Australia and France.
At the St Regis, signature restaurant Kayuputi (it means white wood in Indonesian) and its two-storey wine cellar have clearly benefited from the attention of resident sommelier Harald Wiesmann, a chap who has two previous awards to his credit at other establishments in Bali.
So well done all round, lads and lassies. We’ll let you know who the third Bali winner in the 2009 awards was, just as soon as they tell us that they wrote themselves a citation, have sufficient wine in the cellar, spelled all the names correctly, and got their application in on time, which seem to be the criteria.

Hollywood Smile Alert

WE hear that the comely Julia Roberts has commenced her long journey to Bali in pursuit of acting out the part of Elizabeth Gilbert in the movie of the book Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia.
The book has become a sort of primer for ladies of a certain age and predisposition on what you can do to lift your life beyond the banal, those who, like Gilbert, have to go away to find themselves. It’s also a great promotion of Bali, which is a good thing.
Roberts – who has built an acting career on being a sort of sage naïf who offers the prospect of sexual benefits for nice guys who treat her with respect – was in Rome this week, where Gilbert’s real-life journey began. It was hot in the Italian capital, we are told. This is not unusual in August and early September, but apparently noteworthy nonetheless.
In Italy (naturally) the focus of affairs is on the first part of the trilogy of delights offered in Gilbert’s book. Well, who would pass up the chance to savour the delights of spaghetti alla carbonara with a little pistachio gelato on the side, after all?
She co-stars with Javier Bardem and Billy Crudup in the movie. It is scheduled for release in 2011. Next stop for Roberts and crew is India – and then of course, Bali, where we expect the Bling Brigade will be out in force to welcome the pretty woman.
In her book, Gilbert said this about Rome, by the way: “I am inspired by the regal self-assurance of this town, so grounded and rounded, so amused and monumental, knowing that she is held securely in the palm of history. I would like to be like Rome when I am an old lady.”
Yes, yes, that’s all very fine; but so much for love, then – and nasi goreng.

Look, They’re Serious

IN South Australia, the state at the bottom of Australia’s largest river system, the Murray-Darling basin, they’ve been complaining for years that “upstream states” have been pinching all their water.
But some of the pinching takes place closer to home. In South Australia, corporations will soon face fines of up to Aus$2.2 million ($1.8 million) for water theft from the Murray. Fines of Aus$700,000 ($590,000) for individuals will be 20 times higher than before. The maximum fine for corporations until now was Aus$70,000 ($59,000).
Numbers of this magnitude would drain the blood from the faces of our own local water thieves.

Hey, Great Gear!

HERE’S a likely tale. It’s from America, of course, where strange things happen with astonishing frequency. Police in Detroit, Michigan, where they actually make cars – or did before the reality of economics caught up with American corporations – say a fellow on a first date with a local lady skipped out of the restaurant they had chosen for their tryst, leaving the bill unpaid, and then stole her car.

The Master at Work

ELIA Kazan, who died in 2003, remains a vast influence in American theatre and film. His life story too – aside from a peccadillo or two where women and their bedroom qualifications were concerned: he was a compulsive womaniser – is in many ways the American Dream. His parents were Anatolian Greeks who emigrated to America in 1915 with the four-year-old Elia in tow.
New York literary agent Robert Cornfield has now produced a book, Kazan on Directing, by editing the notebooks and other writings of the man who was at the centre of American theatre and film in the mid-20th century to give us a portrait of the artist in his own words as he planned and plotted – he was a natural conspirator - how best to bring a play or film to life.
It will surely be a must-read for the more cerebral of theatre and movie buffs. Kazan’s contribution to the world of American drama was immense. He was a principal of the Group Theatre and then the Actors Studio, which adapted Konstantin Stanislavsky’s “Method” notion that an actor will most naturally portray a character if he first has a psychological identification with the role.
The list of actors trained in this discipline would fill a block of marquees. Among them: Marlon Brando, James Dean, Lee J. Cobb, Robert De Niro, Jo Van Fleet, Julie Harris, Karl Malden, Paul Newman, Geraldine Page and Eva Marie Saint. (“You have to start from the actor, and you have to find out where the part is alive for him. Somewhere within them the part must exist,” Kazan wrote.)
The films he directed include A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945); Gentleman’s Agreement (1947); A Streetcar Named Desire (1951); On the Waterfront (1954); East of Eden (1955); Baby Doll (1956); A Face in the Crowd (1957); Wild River (1960); Splendour in the Grass (1961); and the autobiographical America America (1963).
He received five Oscar nominations for his directing, won twice (for On the Waterfront and Gentleman’s Agreement) and received an honorary award in 1999 for his “long, distinguished and unparalleled career during which he has influenced the very nature of filmmaking through his creation of cinematic masterpieces.”

Another Roar Deal

LION Air has stopped flying from Bali to Singapore. Or at least, it seems so. That’s what a woman at the airline’s ticket office at Ngurah Rai told a Diary spy the other day. She couldn’t tell him why. Not because she might be violating commercial confidence. It’s just that she didn’t know.
The route was launched in June last year. And Bali-Singapore is still listed on the company’s website (www.lionair.co.id), or was earlier this week. At a great price too: Rp0. But you cannot complete a full booking.
Perhaps like many things Lion – like schedules, compliance, and so forth, for example – Bali-Singapore is “having a rest.”

SCRATCHINGS appears as The Bali Times Diary in the print edition of the newspaper every week (Fridays) and on the newspaper's website at www.thebalitimes.com.