THE BALI TIMES DIARY Oct. 15, 2010

An Archibald

Prize Would

Have Done

The Night

Proud

The thoroughly un-thespian Diary, having been black-listed by the organisers for failing to ring the bell on their weight-o-meter or to perform the required grade of kow-tow, made it to only one Ubud Writers and Readers Festival function this year. It was a reception for Australian writers last Saturday evening and the invitation came from the acting deputy head of mission at the Australian embassy in Jakarta, Michael Bliss, and the acting Australian consul-general in Bali, Brent Hall.

    It was an interesting occasion on more than one count. We said hello to Aussie electronic pamphleteer Antony Lowenstein, who blogs furiously on many matters, including on why he blogs; to Australian QC Colin McDonald, late of the Scott Rush case and – in this case – an Ubud local; to Miranda Brown, the festival’s Melbourne-based international publicist, who asked if we thought the UWRF was a good idea (we do); to lawyer and journalist Bob Gosford, who contributes (from Alice Springs generally) to that deliciously scandal-mongering Australian e-paper Crikey!; and (of course; we wuz brung up proper) to Janet de Neefe and her executive assistant Liz Henzell. We spied former Australian ambassador Bill Farmer and his wife Elaine in the crowd (they were here on holiday); but we saw neither hide nor hair of festival associate director Sarah Tooth, so the footballers’-style mouth guard we wore for the occasion was not required. We’d taken it along just in case; you can’t be too careful.

    There was one chap who perhaps should have been wearing a mouth guard, or a restraint of some kind. Festival performer Omar Musa, an Aussie hip-hopper with a post-rap penchant for scatology and the copulatory adjective, was put on display as the evening’s stand-up entertainment. In Omar’s defence, he is from Queanbeyan (it’s just outside Canberra; say no more) and gets rave reviews from youthful – and not so youthful – admirers who have been suborned by rap’s defective meter and seem to believe you just have to be coarse to be an intellectual force.

    Bliss had his moment, too, in saying his words of welcome. He observed that diplomats were in their own way rather like writers, since they spent their lives scribbling marginal notes for their own readership (their departmental superiors and, in exalted circumstances, their ministers).

    The Diary, in a former life, saw a little of this sort of correspondence. Thus, the thought occurred during Saturday evening’s blissful moment that it’s a shame no one nowadays has the cojones (or the humour) to attempt something as to the point as a famously brief but wondrous report from Moscow in 1943, by the British ambassador of the day, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr. (This is entirely beside the point, but Clark Kerr was born in Australia.) In his note, Clark Kerr advised his old chum Lord Pembroke, then head of the British foreign office, of the arrival in the wartime Soviet capital of a new Turkish envoy with an eye-catching name card. A tip: It’s worth Googling Archibald Clark Kerr.

    We have a copy of Clark Kerr’s original note, grabbed with glee years ago when it was finally released from 50 years of close detention in the files at the FO. It invariably thrusts a very firm chortle into the greyest of days.

    Sadly, it prompts reminiscence of humour past and reminds you that, where popular comedy is concerned, the caravan long ago moved on and all we’re left with is the dogs, barking.

She’s a Fan

Writer Deepika Shetty believes that literary festivals don't have to be big to be beautiful. Well, we’d agree with that. It’s not the size of the serving that’s important, whether in a restaurant or at a book meet; it’s whether it’s digestible.

    Shetty, one among the large collective of authors at UWRF 2010, posted a note on her Facebook last Friday saying: “Head to the Ubud Writers Festival in Bali this weekend to find out for yourself. If the words aren't enough, the settings will seduce you. That's my guarantee.”

    There’s no doubt Ubud is a seductive setting; especially if the mountains come out to join in the fun.

Clean Them Out

It seems that words are to be followed by action in the little matter of cleaning up the nightspot scene in Kuta and Legian. This novelty, ordered by Bali Police chief Hadiatmoko, is thoroughly commendable. If it achieves its stated object, which is to produce something resembling order after dark in the biff ‘n’ bother precinct, then Hadiatmoko will have performed a significant public service.

    He proposes to do so by organising a locally enforced permit system designed to weed out the fly-by-nights and the hard men, and create an environment in which (again a novelty) operators will have to abide by a code of conduct and also keep their ill-tempered toughs who masquerade as security men under control.

    It may be a tall order, given the predisposition of many in the nightspot sector to act like unskilled extras in a bad Mob movie. But we shall see. And we can certainly take heart, on the evidence to hand thus far, from the fact that Hadiatmoko says what he means – and means what he says.

Under Wraps

The detention in Bali last week of Erwin Arnanda, editor of Indonesian Playboy (the world’s only version of the smutty mag for sad old adolescents that you actually have to buy for the articles, there being no photographs to speak of) is a sorry comment on many things, including the risible – and unfortunately also dangerously divisive - anti-pornography law.

    Not only does it represent a victory (pray that it shall be Pyrrhic) for the meddlesome minority of Wahhabi-fuelled Islamists who want to put all of Indonesia in Purdah and who number in their ranks antediluvian men who apparently believe women are not actually fully functioning people. It is also a victory (ditto) for creaking and fearfully acquiescent police-state bureaucracy.

    Playboy (in any of its versions) is not a magazine The Diary would ever bother buying. But that’s not the point. Columnist Novar Caine has more to say on the Perspective page, Pg 9.

Such a Treat

A very dear friend brought The Diary a lovely gift when she came to stay at The Cage last week as a school holiday refugee from Perth. (The escape was entirely understandable: she’s a school principal.) It was a CD of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu’s 2008 solo album.

   The Diary had been after a copy for ages, but sadly acquisition had always proved elusive. Gurrumul’s music might be pigeonholed as folk in the false convenience of today’s one-size-fits-all computer-driven archive, but it’s much more than that. When he sings – in his own Yolngu language or in English, which he barely understands – he evokes the spiritual substance of Australia. This has almost physical form, as if an ectoplasm, and is not often captured even by the most attuned of visitors; shamefully it is still denied, or ignored, by most Australians.

   It’s the sort of thing that pulls powerfully at the heart of any sentient exile, even one who lives away by choice. Listening to Gurrumul transports you instantly to the warm, flavoursome and slightly scary essence of the Australian bush; it sends you searing, imagined olfactory waves of hot eucalyptus and baked red earth; it evokes the intensely mystic nature of the land; and it makes you cry.

   Gurrumul, who was born on Galiwin’ku Island (it’s on the maps as Elcho Island) off the Arnhem Land coast in the Northern Territory and has been blind since birth, used to perform with the fabulous Yothu Yindi. The name means Mother and Child in the Yolngu language. The band included balanda players.

   That word might pique the interest of Bahasa speakers. Balanda in Yolngu means non-Aboriginal. Its origin in a likely adaptation of Belanda (Dutch) from Indonesian languages long after Europeans reached the archipelago and long before any of them “found” Australia has always been a fascination, at least to your Diarist.

   There’s a Facebook campaign to get Gurrumul on Oprah when she’s in Australia in December. Hope it happens: That’s one YouTube item The Diary would definitely download.

A House in Brooklyn

Colin McPhee’s homage to Bali, now created as an opera by the American clarinettist and composer Evan Ziporyn, has just had an outing in New York City – well, Brooklyn, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. It played in Boston earlier this month.

   McPhee’s 1946 memoir A House in Bali helped put the island on the post-war map, drawing as it did on a rich melange of experiences, artistic and otherwise, that befell McPhee, a Canadian, on the island in pre-war years.

   New York Times writer Matthew Gurewitsch, reviewing the Ziporyn opera (which “premiered” in Ubud in June last year and then went to California), repeats the argument that without McPhee it is possible the world would have forever lost the Balinese gamelan. Perhaps the Balinese would argue with that. But it cannot be denied that its wonderfully discordant harmony – fundamentally inimical to “western” composition – is now a major force in world music.

   Dancers Kadek Dewi Aryani and Desak Made Suarti Laksmi have the leading roles in A House in Bali, produced by Jay Scheib.

diary@thebalitimes.com

Hector's Blog appears as The Diary in The Bali Times print edition, out Fridays, and on the newspaper's website www.thebalitimes.com. Print edition copies are available worldwide through NewspapersDirect.

THE BALI TIMES DIARY October 8, 2010

Oh Dear! It’s

a Shame

Sacatides is

no Socrates

Anyone who might wonder why the Australians have such a substantial consular presence in Bali need look no further than the media – the bit of it that reports news that is, like The Bali Times in English and a wide range of daily newspapers in Bahasa – for the reasons. One of them is the constant drizzle of dumbos who fall out of the sky with illegal drugs in their baggage or on their persons and consequently fall foul of Indonesia’s well publicised (and we think, though this is peripheral to the case, overly draconian) anti-narcotics laws.

    It’s getting to the point where, as already noted by our new columnist Novar Caine (he’s in Perspective today, on Page 9), the prison authorities will surely have to consider building a special Pelaku Australia wing at Kerobokan: there are so many Australians confined therein, some of them with highly fanciful defence arguments withering away to yellowed dust in their “nice try, fail” legal portfolios, that ordinary Indonesian criminals are clearly being unfairly squeezed.

    The latest Aussie to have his photo taken in his new Bali t-shirt – the one with “Pelaku” (“Actor”) emblazoned across the front – is a chap originally from Sydney called Michael Sacatides, who is 43 and apparently a kick-boxing instructor in Bangkok. Perhaps he specialises in particularly clumsy students and they’ve kicked him in the head too often.

    He was detained last Friday when he arrived on an AirAsia flight from the Thai capital for a short holiday – three days, now indefinitely extended – toting a bag he says an Indian man in Bangkok lent him for the trip. Surprise! It had 1.7 kilos of crystal meth – we know it as shabu-shabu here – which is, um, well, illegal.

    We won’t canvass the case beyond that point, in deference to a preference for justice administered by reasoned argument and the fine principle that an accused is innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. That’s not the Indonesian system, or indeed that of any country with an accusatory legal system based on Roman law, but it’s fair.

    But we do note Sacatides is reported to have retained Schapelle Corby’s lawyer, Erwin Siregar, to make his defence that he knew nothing about what was in his luggage. Those yellowing case notes might come in handy yet.

He No Likee

Michael White, who long ago, famously, jumped ship and changed his name, thereby inventing himself as a locally prominent person and setting a trend for others inside Bali’s blowhard expat bubble, doesn’t like The Diary. No one should be surprised. It isn’t written for people who are convinced they are indispensible to Bali and absolutely vital to the local ambience, culture and economy. Such creatures write their own diaries, where they can murder their own syntax and waste their own time.

    So it was no surprise the other day to find him saying – via a little email Michael (Made) White (Wijaya) sent to his secretary and his circle and thoughtfully blind-copied to your Diarist - “HECTOR musuh nusa dan rakyat”: “HECTOR enemy of the island and the people.” Were he to have been grammatical – apparently this is a challenge for him in all his languages – he might have written “musuh Bali dan rakyatnya”: “enemy of Bali and its people.” He’d still have been wrong, but that’s his right. You never argue with memproklamirkan diri ahli (a self-proclaimed expert) though, let alone a chap who is convinced he’s the biggest blowfish in the pool.

    The cause of this petulant flurry from Sanur was an inquiry as to which of the Bali peace park proposals Wijaya now regarded as carrying his imprimatur, given that his concept sketches for same appear on two rival websites that promote construction of such a park. We thought that in these circumstances the Man in the Udeng would answer. Sadly, we were wrong. Apparently the public interest is only of concern when coincident with his.

    The Diary, however, is pleased as punch. We’ve made it onto two prominent blacklists within days: clearly we’re doing something right. We noted last week that Janet de Neefe – who this week will be busy chopping up the tofu for her Rp3 million-a-head nosh with the finest writers at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival – has blacklisted us too.

Poor Susi

White Wijaya spreads his disfavours around, you have to hand him that. There was an anguished squeak last weekend from collector and purveyor about town Susi Johnson – a squawk in jest, of course, and The Diary knows about it because in another life we’re Facebook friends with the delightful Ms Johnson – who had been “unfriended” by the Udenged One.

    We’re not really sure why. Maybe Michael Made isn’t either. But take heart, Susi. You’re in good company (see next item).

They’re Barking

Liz Henzell, formerly a columnist in The Bali Times and one of fiercest proponents of the Bali Animal Welfare Association’s grand strategy of vaccinating every dog in sight – which won’t be close to BAWA’s “international target” of 70 percent of them, count on it – as an alternative to reducing numbers first as a means of controlling rabies, “unfriended” someone very well known to The Diary this week.

    That’s a pity, he tells us. He’d been enjoying Liz’s recently posted come-on photo on her Facebook page. The unfriending took place shortly after he engaged Liz, who lives in the Wudbees (aka Ubud) and barks at people who have ideas she considers strange, on the issue of the most effective strategy to combat rabies.

    Our friend (the unfriended one) had noted that BAWA’s pilot vaccination-only programme in Gianyar, the one that’s apparently piloted the provincial government towards taking foreigners’ money and letting them take over the island’s number one public health crisis, hadn’t saved the life of poor Wayan Leges of Tegallalang, who contracted rabies and recently died, in the same horribly cruel and unnecessary way that, on the official count, 93 of his fellow Balinese had previously.

    Her last riposte, before slamming down the shutters and shouting the Facebook equivalent of something we won’t print here, was to write: “You don’t give a toss about poor Pak Wayan.”

    In that crass and idiotic response, we know, she is very, very wrong.

     

Three Up

The Wall Street Journal has mentioned Bali. Don't get too excited. It's nothing to do with the sort of big business that goes on here in the nightspot sector or the emergence of a Ku De Ta in Singapore (we're still trying to get to the bottom of that story). It's all about spas: the big, plush, expensive one where the rich - or the merely spendthrift - can indulge themselves and lie back, close their eyes and think they're having a spiritual experience.

   The newspaper's Life & Style section, in a potted summation of Asia's best spas in its October 1 edition, named Alila Villas Uluwatu, Bulgari and Como Shambala at Ubud in their Top Spas list. 

Sound Move

We've always known there had to be something good about the Big Durian, a hidden compensation that makes life in Jakarta bearable; a little breeze that from time to time, even if only metaphorically, clears away some of the hot air and carcinogenic smog that are the city's chief products.

    All great cities provide residents and visitors alike with prizes, especially in access to performing arts. These are less easily available in Bali – although the jazz at Ryoshi in Seminyak, among other places, makes it worth putting up with the horrendous traffic and parking problems you get in the KLS strip - and one recent Jakarta treat (which The Diary missed, being in Bali) was the visit there by the Australian quintet Topology. They were at the city's Salihara Festival as part of the month-long OzFest 2010 presented by the Australian embassy.

    Topology, which has been making fine contemporary music since 1996 and is renowned for its energetic and full-bodied sound, presented two programmes (Lucid Dreaming and Corridors of Power) on October 3 and 4 and workshops for Indonesian musicians and students.

    Wish we could have been there.

In the Pink

Adam Lambert would like everyone to know he has been reborn in Bali. (The Diary had to check, on hearing this piece of essential intelligence last weekend, as to exactly who Lambert was, his presence among us Earthlings having formerly gone unnoticed.) He’s a singer, it seems, who warbles for the world, or at least for Generation Why, whose untutored musical tastes are not The Diary’s, who wouldn’t know a minim or a quaver, far less an adagio, even if by some miracle one did manage to tickle their fancy, and who probably think a viola is something a traffic cop might half threaten to cite you for.

    Lambert is also an American Idol, or nearly was or something, and has recently – between engagements – indulged himself at the Four Seasons Jimbaran. It is there, we gather, that he was reborn. That’s what his Twitter said, anyway. Well, we love Bali, and Jimbaran, and Four Seasons as well; especially the eclectic art that goes on show at the Ganesha gallery there. Perhaps we’ve been reborn too? Maybe we should tweet about it.

    In June 2009 Lambert felt the need to inform the world that he’s gay. Why this is important eludes us – a lot of people bat for the other team and always have; and so what – but perhaps, since he’s in showbiz, it has promotional value.

   

diary@thebalitimes.com

Hector's Blog is published as The Diary in The Bali Times weekly print edition, out Fridays, and on the newspaper's website www.thebalitimes.com. The print edition of the newspaper is available worldwide through NewspaperDirect.

THE BALI TIMES DIARY Oct. 1, 2010

They Want to

Be Friends

(With Your

Wallet)

It used to be said, before we all got namby-pamby and opted out of making public observations of others’ idiocy, lest we hurt their feelings, that there’s a fool born every minute. Such appears to be the case among some of the unwary who visit Kuta and fall foul of what, in the delightful transformation of language one finds here, are “hypnotist” gangs.

    Sundry poor sufferers have been thus, criminally, suborned and their wallets significantly lightened, by this curious alchemy. They fall in with people they’ve never seen before (and never will again), have a chat and a laugh and a drink, become lifelong pals, and then become – again in delightful transformation – “confused.”

    Their new chums have spiked their drink, the better to access funds to which in everyday, ordinary circumstances they would be denied access.

    It is a fundamental truth that you cannot protect people from their own stupidity (it is possible to educate them out of ignorance and more should be done there) and unfortunately tourists are among the groups most likely to lose all sense of reality when they land in a strange place.

    The cautionary tale for policemen whose job it is to catch criminals if they cannot first deter them, as we know from Bali Police chief Hadiatmoko’s abrupt recent declaration on same, is that lack of performance can lead to the sack. Yes, really. Apparently even in Bali.

    The similar alert for foolish tourists (if “alert” is a functional status within their capabilities) is that strangers who accost you in the street are most likely not your long-lost family and could just possibly be looking out for their own (nefarious) interests rather than those of the hapless mug they’ve just managed to leg-rope.

Oops

“The Bali peace park project was foundered by Australian, Dallas Finn...”

    Well, things are a little rocky, it seems, not to mention even more confused than ever, where the future status of the Sari Club bomb site is concerned. But we do hope the statement above, from the “fact file” on the website of the “balipeacepark”, a rival organisation lately invented by Finn, apparently without funds or any plans to raise them and with an invisible membership, is just a mistake and not a prescient remark.

    Meanwhile the “official” Bali Peace Park Association will release details of its “benefits analysis” of a Sari Club site peace park at a function in Bali on October 11. That should be an interesting document.

Objection!

In a range of cases before Bali’s courts lately prosecutors – in demanding fire and brimstone, which arguably is their job – and more worryingly judges, for some of whom the prudence part of jurisprudence apparently takes unscheduled days off, have made much play of a defendant’s crimes being injurious to Bali’s international standing.

    They may be. But that should have no bearing on the severity of a sentence. There are prescribed penalties – within a range which gives judges plenty of scope to award extra demerits for moral turpitude or whatever – and these are codified. Not one of them includes a clause specifying a penalty for embarrassing Bali or, in that precise set of circumstances, potentially harming its economy.

    They shouldn’t, of course. But it is particularly despicable to hear – as we did this week from the prosecutor in the appeal hearing of Scott Rush, the little oaf who at 19 (he’s now 24) apparently didn’t have the brains to realise smuggling heroin was morally wrong, let alone that it was dangerous and a crime – that Rush should die because drug smuggling was a serious threat to the image of Bali.

    Prosecutor Ida Bagus Made Argitha Chandra should find a mirror and take a long, hard look at himself: and he should ask, is that an image worth dying for?  

Another Mote

We thought long and hard about this before deciding to commit it to a communion with printer’s ink. And we shan’t name the hospital, even though on the facts as known it richly deserves the opprobrium, because the circumstances of its dereliction of duty are sadly common nowadays, everywhere, not just here.

    Readers will remember an item we ran on September 10 about a tragic road accident near Uluwatu, when a vehicle-load of Brazilian party boyos returning from an all-nighter in the fleshpots of Kuta wiped out a motorbike ridden by a young mum from Uluwatu, Made was her name, and injured her daughter Cindy.

    Information at the time was that Made was killed instantly. Later information is that she wasn’t. She may have been fatally injured but that point is now moot. She and her daughter were rushed to Denpasar where the intended destination was Sanglah Hospital. En route Made’s condition deteriorated (she had a deep neck wound) and they diverted to another – “international standard” - hospital as that was closer.

    The hospital would not lift a finger to help until someone fronted with Rp7 million (US$782). That took some time, as you would expect in a place where Rp7 represents multiple months’ salary for most people and that’s if you’ve got a job.

    Eventually someone found the money. The hospital was then happy to afford treatment to Made and Cindy. Its first job was to declare Made DOA (dead on arrival).

    No doubt the hospital has financial control rules. No doubt it does not regard itself as a charity (nor should it). No doubt the health legislation in Bali is severely deficient in that – apparently – there is no provision for the state to pick up the unavoidable costs of emergency treatment in life or death situations.

    But what of the doctors and the Hippocratic Oath? Was that in the litter bin too, along with humanity and simple compassion?

Watch the Chooks

The visit here this week of elements of Australia’s Special Air Service Regiment to train with Kopassus in an anti-terrorism exercise afforded few opportunities to observe Her Australian Majesty’s Chicken Stranglers at play. This is understandable. The lads would have been a bit busy.

    It did remind The Diary of a wonderful tale from the early days of George W. Bush’s war on terror, when Dubya and the coalition of the willing targeted Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was a chemical warrior and not just a chap who’d have difficulty managing a henhouse.

    The world’s press was vitally interested in a rumour that the Australian SAS was involved. They couldn’t find them. Until some bright spark noticed a few chaps running around in shorts. Only an Aussie would do that in the desert between the Jordanian border and the Euphrates.     

Titanic Error

Our eye was caught by the little come-on the Jakarta Globe had in its page one plugs last Thursday, asking if a simple steering error sank the Titanic. We think the answer’s obvious (and obviously yes). The unsinkable ship steamed full-pelt into the consequently unavoidable iceberg on April 15, 1912.

    The same edition carried a story about a very heavy Golkar personage becoming chairman of the Lippo Group, which bankrolls the Globe. Metaphorical unsinkable ships and icebergs are surely just as risky.

Soft Bash

Another of Janet de Neefe’s little ventures – no, not A Certain Bank’s Scribblers and Gabblers 2010, that’s next week – had a soft opening this week, up in the hills at Ubud where hopefully the not-so-soft rain was taking a break.

    This one was at De Neefe’s new Bar Luna, in Jl Gootama, which celebrated softly on Tuesday with a sampling of its new menu including tapas and sangria for invited guests from 6-7.30pm. A full dinner menu was apparently available from 7pm. Wonder if it had soft-shell crab for the occasion?

    The affray – Janet does those so well, as we know – was also a celebration of the shared birthdays of two lads who are apparently so widely known that they only needed to be identified as Andy and Michael, connections we assume of Janet de Neefe Enterprises, Inc.

    We’re sure it was a good night. The Diary didn’t get an invitation, or indeed a response to a query about the names of the birthday boys. Well, we’ve always known we’re not in Janet’s little black book. Never mind. There are significant compensations: Apparently we’ve made it onto Janet’s little black list.

Kupang Slap

There was a pleasant occasion last Friday, at the Australian Consulate-General in Renon: the annual barbecue for this year’s crop of scholarship students from Bali and points east going (next year) to study in Australia.

    New consul-general Brent Hall – no, that’s not true: he’s the old consul-general (he’s been here before) and he’s only acting in the position until a new permanent appointee is in place; he’s on loan from the Australia-Indonesia Institute – was an affable host and also had the job, along with others, of marking the post-dinner entertainment provided by the two groups of students attending.

    Our personal choice – though this was academic, since The Diary, very sensibly, was not on the voting panel – was a stirring performance by one group of By The Rivers of Babylon, that wonderful Boney M song. It would have won our vote for the fine grasp of the syncretism that links the three great religions that sprang from the Middle East, exhibited by the dancing party, some of it wearing the jilbab.

    But the other group was the winner, with a folkloric little number that features what acting consul-general Hall advises The Diary is known as a Kupang Slap. It’s a sharply playful tap on the bum administered by a passing partner.

diary@thebalitimes.com


Hector's Blog appears as The Diary in The Bali Times print edition, out weekly (on Fridays) and on the newspaper's website www.thebalitimes.com. The print edition is available worldwide via NewspaperDirect.

THE BALI TIMES DIARY September 24, 2010

Aussies at

Play are a

Fearsome

Sight

It’s not something The Diary generally does, but last Friday a two-hour session at the Stadium Café in Kuta paid a dividend. The Diary was there with an Australian friend, who was on his way back to the cares and woes of life in Sin City on one of those overnight red-eye specials Garuda and other airlines run so they can all lob into Sydney’s overcrowded airport at once, in the very early morning.

    There were thus some hours to kill. Plus, he’s a Collingwood supporter. It was therefore a doubly good outing for him since the Pies, who haven’t won an Australian Football League premiership since 1990, beat last year’s champions Geelong in their elimination final in Melbourne and advanced to the grand final (it’s on tomorrow, Saturday, September 25).

    All this may be mysterious to those who are not Australian. It may even seem boring. But Aussies love their sport. This comes from the past, when nothing that mattered happened in Australia or, if occurring elsewhere, affected it very much; and when the primary focus of what in those days passed for foreign policy was preventing powerful allies forgetting that the place even existed.

    Some say that this is still the case, but that’s a symptom of another phenomenon, the post-colonial-cringe cringe. Historically the footy (it was never really the cricket) was the high drama of the week. It was the local antidote to RDS, Relevance Deprivation Syndrome. It’s an unfortunate fact that media tycoons and big businesses looking for PR have made the footy a circus and turned it into a commercial enterprise – why anyone would want to barrack for the biggest sponsor is a puzzle – but that is now the global way.     

    Sometimes the Australian flavour of Kuta at play is all-pervading. This is not necessarily a good thing but it too is clearly a fact of life. The crowd in front of the satellite TV screens in our part of the Stadium bar last Friday was loud and partisan. None more so than The Diary’s friend, who away from football exudes a quiet, professorial air. It was like being in an Australian pub or even in the real stadium at the match, except that no one actually threw any empties. There were even people in their team’s colours. The Diary hasn’t done that since kindergarten.

    But it was fun, in a curious, tribal way. And this was despite the fact that the Stadium Café was unable to supply any peanuts – essential Aussie match-munching food – to go with the tonic waters (not at all a traditional Aussie beverage) we were drinking.

    The Diary’s friend went home happy. But we shan’t be talking this weekend. The Diary’s team, St Kilda, won the other elimination final last weekend and will play the Pies for the flag. And we – the possessive sense is crucial – haven’t won a grand final since 1966.

Russian Gifts

Another friend, this one from Russia, returned from there recently with lovely gifts for The Cage, domicile of The Diary and Distaff: A beautifully crafted Russian doll – the sort that you open up and find another one in, and so ad infinitum – along with a beautifully hand-painted serving spoon, and some music.

    Edo Botkunov, who now calls himself Made Edo Botkunov (The Diary and Distaff are both Wayans, but we won’t go there) and runs a collective of businesses that seeks to serve the Russian tourist market here, is a fine fellow. He also insisted we drink his real Russian vodka when we saw him at our shared Thursday night music spot in Ungasan last week.

    The Diary is fond of Russians, who generally speaking have always had a bad press. They’re not all crude, lewd boors. And none of them are KGB any more. These days the ones that look as if they might be turn out to be working for the other mob.

    Long ago The Diary’s poker skills were vastly improved by a chance encounter with a cheerful Soviet operative who was passing otherwise tedious hours of embarrassing confinement in less than clement conditions (his temporary digs were in a pestiferous patch of Africa) by playing cards. He it was, not a later popular country and western song, that taught your diarist that you must know when to hold them; know when to fold them; know when to walk away; know when to run. These hours of instruction were immensely profitable (and not in worthless Soviet-era roubles) for that same unwilling guest.

Sono Offesa

Well, they would be. The book was bad enough but the film version of Eat Pray Love (Mangiare Pregare Ama if you’re an out-of-sorts Italian) with Julia Roberts as memo-to-me: must-find-myself author Elizabeth Gilbert has offended the Italian commentariat, possibly mortally. Although Italians do tend to wave their arms around a lot, so it may not be as bad as it seems.

    The movie, which opened in North America on August 13 and will be seen in Bali – can’t wait to miss it – at this year’s otherwise excellent BALINALE next month, has just opened in Italy and has been widely panned. The daily La Repubblica sonorously intoned: “The only thing missing in Julia’s Rome is the mandolin.”

    The movie’s Italian moment (it’s the eat bit, naturally) has local critics fuming over Julia-as-Elizabeth-as-Julia savouring gelato, pizza and the warm Italian way of life. La Repubblica critic Curzio Maltese wrote: “It rains spaghetti; the Italians are always gesticulating and following foreign girls shouting vulgarities, but then getting engaged to a nice housewife to please their domineering mothers.”

    Another newspaper, Il Messagero, said it didn’t really mind the clichéd portrayal of invasive mothers, nosy landladies and pleasure-loving Italians, but was offended by Roberts’ Spanish co-star Javier Bardem. “Watching the glorious Bardem playing the Latin lover in a film like this really hurts,” it said.

    Vieni fuori di esso. Basta mangiare il gelato più. (Come off it. Just eat more ice cream.)

Slow As...

Rain is nature’s beneficence. It keeps things green. It allows things to grow. It gives naughty little boys puddles to play in. Sometimes, if it’s heavy enough, it can even clean your street (nothing else will around here). But like all benefits, you can have too much of a good thing.

    Climate is such a cyclical thing. Only people who play vastly expensive computer games at public cost think they can control it, influence it in any way, or even understand it. La Niňa and her brother El Niňo have millions of years of experience in ruling the roost in our part of the world.

    Thus it has – again – been predominantly a wet week. Wet weeks go slowly, as a rule, though locally with a benefit. The rudimentary understanding of personal preservation that seems to exist in some elements of Bali’s motorbike riding and vehicle driving community helps slow the traffic too; and reduces its volume marginally as well, since no one really relishes getting drenched.

    Much of Indonesia – and all of Bali and the archipelago east of us – has a monsoon climate. It’s wet for part of the year, then dry for the rest of it. Well, that’s the theory. When we have a year like this one with a “late” wet season – what’s late in the billions of years’ timescale on which Earth’s climate operates, we wonder – it rains at the wrong time: right through the peak tourist season, for example.

    But we should spare a greater thought for the monsoon vegetation. Tourists whose trips to various attractions have been rained off can read a book, fool around with their comely travelling companions if young, or eat a lot if not ... or something. The jati (teak) trees have no such luxury. They are supposed to drop their huge leaves when it stops raining, so that new ones can form properly and their own cycle of life can proceed according to plan, along with that of the squirrels which inhabit them and, we’re sure, are very confused at present about why their annual big-view opportunity has been denied them.

    But it will have to stop raining soon. The next wet season starts in a week or so.

Yeah, Yeah

YeYe’s, the warung above Padang Padang beach on the Bukit, is a popular spot and so it should be: it’s in a prime location whether for late, lazy lunches (it only opens at 1pm so don’t try it for breakfast) or evening dining. It’s also in a place that gets cool breezes straight off the Indian Ocean, before they’ve crossed the trash line, which can be nice on a muggy day.

    Last Sunday evening the breeze was a little willing, however: a touch bracing for those of us fortunate enough to live here with the luxury of thinking that 25C is where wind chill and hypothermia kick in.

    That wasn’t all that was chill. Some of the staff affected the air of those who believe – foolish people – that they’re doing the paying customers a favour just by being there. And the establishment committed a cardinal sin, too. It had a sign up saying it had apple pie. People we know kill for that.

    Unfortunately, like much else that night, it was off.

diary@thebalitimes.com

Hector's Blog appears as The Diary in print edition of The Bali Times, out Fridays, and at www.thebalitimes.com. The printed paper is available worldwide through NewspaperDirect.

THE BALI TIMES DIARY September 17, 2010

Don’t Run
Amok: That’s
Reserved for
the Locals

On our neighbouring island, Lombok, two silly expatriates have wound up in jail over foolish and quite unnecessarily out-of-control arguments with the locals. There is a warning in their fate for every foreigner in Indonesia who forgets – even for one heated moment – that their real legal status is best defined as merely “tolerated,” that their actual rights are notional, and that they live here on sufferance.

    That doesn’t mean it is foolish to live here (quite the reverse: especially in Bali where the people have a far finer grasp of the mutuality of neighbourliness). But it does mean you can’t blow your top, even under extreme provocation.

    We might all agree that it’s unlikely anyone’s god, or their ancient prophets, had raucously loud sound systems in mind when they defined the rites in regard to when and where to make obeisance. And Indonesia is the world capital of cacophony, now we are plagued by wonky wiring, bootleg loudspeakers and pirated (and nearly dead) CDs and tapes.

    Many years ago, living in the Middle East, The Diary looked forward to the regular calls of the muezzin, mellifluously sung from atop the neighbouring mosque. These were beautiful; they both defined the hour and encouraged reflection. They were also rendered in manageable decibels and heard above background level only by those nearby whose mosque it was, and any infidels among them.

    It is therefore possible to feel a measure of sympathy for the silly American gentleman living (apparently without benefit of visa, also daft) at Kuta on Lombok’s south coast. It is perhaps understandable that he should have finally cracked, under the strain of untrained voices and execrable Arabic, over continual nocturnal blasts of unnecessarily amplified supplication from the neighbouring Islamic house of prayer. But clearly he should not have been living where he was. There is no excuse for breaking the rules of others’ religions (such as bursting into a mosque wearing shoes where all are meant to go barefoot in the sight of God) or plain bad manners, such as unplugging a devotional moment, however discordant it may have been. A good rule of life is that two wrongs do not make a right.

    The other instance of foolishness across the Wallace Line was that of a German gentleman in Senggigi, reported in last week’s paper, who, enraged that someone had vandalised the statuary at his villa and apparently in a state of spontaneous combustion, swept into his neighbouring village just as Ramadhan prayers were ending and asked – as one does, if thick-headed or incautious – a rhetorical question of those present. Common sense, as well as good manners, should have told him not to ask: “What sort of Muslims are you?”

    The archipelago is the place that brought the word amok into the English language. This was not by chance. It came from observation of the quick temper and propensity to – well, run amok – of the inhabitants of these islands.

    In both recent Lombok instances, unsurprisingly, they did. The villas of the stupid American and the foolish German were vandalised. But it is no surprise, given that both the people and the law effectively regard foreigners merely as necessary excrescences, of utility chiefly as mobile ATMs, that none among the ransacking mobs is apparently in jail for criminal damage.          

Poor Marx

While talking about what was in last week’s paper – a lot of good reading for a start, and some real reportage such as can be found nowhere else in Bali’s English-language media – the risible Kevin Carson rates a mention. He popped up in the Opinion page asserting, from the strange perspective he places on life and the human condition, that competition is theft.

    Authors are allowed to put forward questionable propositions; even ones that are so far away in fairyland that all they really rate is a hollow laugh. There are many who – surprisingly, given the abject failure of his political creed and the uneconomic outcomes at his door – would like to reinterpret Marx in an anarchist bent and invent a moneyless society. In one sense that’s fair enough: Marx was writing from a mid-19th century German standpoint, just as laissez-faire liberals and gross capitalists did from theirs, long ago. Their separate outcomes have proved equally ineffective: the experiment goes on.

    This is not the place for a lecture on politics or economics, far less for a dissertation on the human capacity for inventive and irrational argument. The settler collectives of Ubud and Seminyak have already cornered those markets. But we can say with certainty that, unless our name is Kevin Carson or another among the legions of creative New Age tome-writers who nowadays litter the landscape with batty ideas and are rewarded for their scholarship with undergraduate acclaim, abolishing money and wealth acquisition won’t work.

    Individual monetary reward has proved the most potent energiser yet. Serfs, whatever the genesis or hare-brained justification of their enforced status, and whatever the variety of this condition, are not happy people.

Road Overload

Anyone who wants an introduction to the arcane art of not organising an infrastructure project could usefully examine the Dewa Ruci theory, lately invented by a collective of politicians, local administrators and exclusive bureaucracies. Applying this theory to practice shows that whatever is proposed as a solution to an unmanageable traffic snarl - in this case the developing blot on the landscape known as South Bali - will immediately attract rival proposals and lead nowhere except to endless delay and ever more inventive suggestions about where that slide rule should properly be put.

    The provincial government wants to apply some elements of free-flow to the traffic before the ASEAN summiteers turn up in 2013 and discover that the only things that get anywhere in Bali are pipedreams. Its solution, on which everyone signed off after great exertions by Governor Pastika, is an overpass at Simpang Siur and associated road works at the airport turnoff three kilometres (or one hour at jalan macet time) to the south.

    This will involve shifting the statue of Dewa Ruci – a character from the Mahabharata, not a sacred figure – to new digs nearby, unless the overpass is to be vastly more expensive by virtue of the need to buy back commercial property and dangerous because kinking the overpass around the statue would break every rule of trafficable road construction.

    Now Badung regency which, under Indonesia’s existing policy of devolution and because no one rating more on the political Richter scale wants to publicly cavil at the asinine idiocy exhibited lower down, believes (like every other local administrative entity) that it is empowered to do whatever it wants, wants to re-plan the whole thing. It wants an underpass in a place where the water table is 1.5 metres below ground level. And this is in a country where every tap leaks because no one bothers to install them properly.

Stay Away

The idea of banning enormous charabancs from the middle of Ubud, where the town can’t properly handle either the vehicles or the travel-weary contents they drop off for a wander round the sights, has definite appeal. That’s why, at the behest of the super Sophie Digby (whose latest Yak is just out) your diarist has just joined the cause. It’s one of those Facebook things; harmless fun and, who knows, it might make someone think.

    There was one moment of mild alarm before clicking “join,” however. Whoever it was set up this civic-minded group is inviting people to ban the busses. That’s not a good idea. Many a good cause has been sealed with a kiss. And in the right company (or even the wrong company) they can be fun, too.

Rok On

Regular readers will know that The Diary feels a measure of ambivalence towards that Victorian reinvention, the kilt, in former times a garment worn by Scotsmen who couldn’t afford trousers. This is a view held by surprisingly large numbers of people of Scottish provenance, as well as many (in Scotland and elsewhere) who do not fully subscribe to the view that the late Victorian era was the summit either of British achievement or inspired interpretation of Highland clobber. One alternative view is that it was merely the ascendancy of the Widow Queen’s favourite ghillie as fireside companion.

    Apropos of this, a delve into a Bahasa Indonesia dictionary the other day, in pursuit of a manageable translation of a quite separate English language idiocy, revealed a wonderful “explanatory noun” about the plaid rok (rok is skirt in Bahasa) that Mad Prince Charles, other unemployable British royals and ersatz Scotsmen from everywhere like to affect.

    Here it is: Pakaian nasional berupa rok pendek yang dipakai laki-laki Scotlandia. Should you have a tartan in mind, you’ll have to say: Pola belah ketupat. We are fortunate indeed that there are no kilt shops in Sulawesi Street.

    But the madness is spreading with the renaissance (though that should really read “invention”) of the Celtic world. The islanders of Ushant, the most westerly bit of France and, like the neighbouring mainland, part of Bretagne (Brittany), have just invented their own plaid. Don’t know how you say that in Breton, sorry. In their daytime language, French, it might best be summarised thus: “Un peu de folie, peut-être?”

diary@thebalitimes.com

Hector's Blog appears as The Diary in the weekly print edition of The Bali Times www.thebalitimes.com, out Fridays. The Bali Times is available as a print product worldwide through NewspaperDirect.