Bashing
Our Core
Business
Just to
Make a Point
It’s by no means clear that conservationists in search of a headline have any capacity for lateral thinking; or that they care about collateral damage; or that they understand that the term non sequitor (it means: it doesn’t follow) applies to logic as well as grammar.
We raise this thorny issue because, in pursuit of the thoroughly laudable goal of saving the orangutan from extinction, the feisty folk at Nature Alert, a UK-based confabulation of environmental worrywarts, and others, elsewhere in Indonesia, have had a bash at Bali. Well, at its core business sector, the international hotels, at least.
Sean Whyte, who heads Nature Alert, quite reasonably makes the point that having yet another gabfest won’t save the orangutan. You can read his sensible comments in the news pages in this edition. But at the same time, if there have to be gabfests – and we all know that politicians and bureaucrats, not to mention environmentalists and others in the burgeoning non-government sector, all love them to death – why not hold them in Bali?
It’s a great island with plenty of high-rated hotels and a lot of people dependant on people staying in them for their salaries.
Princely feast: Janet de Neefe with her star pupil.
In My News Again
Cereal provider (her restaurants do breakfasts) and serial limelighter Janet de Neefe certainly makes good use of her Facebook. It’s free of course, and unedited. Golly, you can post whatever you like.
As this year’s Ubud Writers and Readers Festival approaches - October 6-10 in the eponymous hill town famous as the last resort of that lost tribe, the Wudbees (the related Wannabees pitch their plush tepees at Seminyak) - it is therefore cheering to see that De Neefe still finds time to help out in the kitchen and post photos to prove it.
Well, that’s not quite the story. A Javanese prince had dropped by her cooking school and some TV people filmed it all. In our photo – acquired from the said Facebook – it appears De Neefe is being blinded by the light. Or perhaps it was all those cameras. Yet another Warhol moment; gosh, a girl can be so lucky.
It was her birthday last Saturday by the way (happy birthday Janet) and she did also tell the world – again via Facebook – that the thought of celebrating with bubbles for a week, out of a bottle, not in the bath, had crossed her mind. Perhaps the squint was for practice.
Spain’s Revenge
It’s been years coming. Well, centuries really. Spain’s revenge on the Dutch for being really nasty to them in the sixteenth century and tossing them out of the Netherlands. That really hurt them. It also – eventually – gave us Belgium as a singular demonstration of the deleterious effects of the law of unintended consequences. Historians still ponder whether imperial Spain’s retreat in the face of militant Protestantism in the land of dykes and windmills was a cause or an effect of its decline as a world power.
So we can understand the delirium that occurred when the soccer world cup finally made it to Madrid. It was also fun – in a sort of disconnected way – to see television coverage of the subsequent affrays in the Spanish capital.
One TV news caption we saw from telecasts of the celebrations especially amused, as evidence that the world has definitely dumbed down over the past 400 years. It was two lines. The first said: “King Juan Carlos.” The second informed: “Spanish King.”
There’s one other benefit of the end of the soccer world cup. Those frightful vuvuzelas can all be burnt.
Hello, John
You meet like-minded people in the most surprising places. The Diary, on its welcome relocation back to Bali’s warmth last weekend, dropped by the duty free stores at Perth airport – as you do, unless a squillionaire, if returning to Bule Price Land – for a modest bottle of premium Jack Daniel’s whisky (the 43 percent proof is the one to go for) and ran into Ann, at one of them, who was happy to serve a paying Sunday customer.
On hearing that The Diary was Bali-bound she asked if we could say Hi for her to John Fawcett, a lovely man. Well of course we could. We share Ann’s sentiments.
So, John, hello from Ann at Perth duty free. And Hi from us too; keep up the good work.
Volunteer Promoter
Also at Perth airport, we heard a chatty Australian immigration officer telling some departing Bali-bound travellers where to go: in a nice way, with lots of good information for first-time visitors. It was such a pleasant surprise that The Diary even forswore the customary distemper when held up in an unnecessary queue.
The delay was a useful warm-up for the situation at the other end of the plane ride where one harassed (but stoically pleasant) passport-stamper was manning the sole Temp Res desk.
Delicious Frisson
Aunty ABC, the Australian broadcaster, got into a tizzy this week when its new Facebook comment page was consumed by a vacuous “debate” about the fortunes – misfortunes, rather – of celebrity Kerobokan prisoner Schapelle Corby.
This delicious frisson of fracas led - naturally, given the provenance of much of that particular commentariat - to accusations of censorship. The ABC barred one of the fiercest contestants in that particular wrestling match; and a good thing too.
Corby and her voracious family and hangers on have done themselves no service over the past six years, by crying “No Fair” and selling their fictionalised accounts of disaster and derring-do to a credulous Australian media. Corby is in jail, having been convicted of a drug offence. It’s sad – we should all feel some empathy with those incarcerated, even if they don’t deserve it – but it’s a fact that will not be altered until those who can alter it do so. Those people are not the Corby lobby, which collectively doesn’t seem to have woken up to the fact that if they stopped mewling it’s more likely that something might happen.
Corby would have had much better results from this week’s visit to Kerobokan by the Bali International Women’s Association, led by Melly St Ange, on one of its regular essential supply runs. Now there’s a cause that’s actually worth supporting.
No, Don’t
Browsing through the Jakarta Globe is a mixed pleasure. It’s great to be informed on a daily basis, in a print product that can be read without getting round-shouldered and squinty-eyed over your computer screen. It’s not quite so great when you come across columnists who are looking forward to getting back to being bored now the soccer’s over.
But what caught The Diary’s eye this week was a front-page promo (it was in Monday’s paper) for someone’s über-today male fashion designs. It proclaimed: “Daring to Bare.”
Oh dear. It was so much better when only the ladies, and not the laddies, went out and about décolleté.
diary@thebalitimes.com
Hector's Blog appears, as The Diary in The Bali Times, in the weekly print edition, out Fridays, and on the newspaper's website at www.thebalitimes.com. The Bali Times, Bali's only English language newspaper, is also available worldwide via NewspaperDirect.
UWRF 2010:
Just the
Venue,
Not the
Ambience?
It might seem a reasonable question to put to the organisers of this year’s Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. They seem to be in Melbourne, where the publicists reside, and Umalas, from where the energetic Bali-based but otherwise chiefly elsewhere-focused social media outfit water&stone operates. (It does so very well, incidentally.)
UWRF 2010 is themed Bhinneka Tunggal Ika: Harmony in Diversity, a quotation from an ancient Javanese poem (and not without coincidence, Indonesia’s national motto). Its sponsors are off-island, including all its media sponsors. Just after last year’s festival The Bali Times put a 2010 sponsorship proposal to Janet de Neefe, founder and chief functionary, after last year’s festival. She said she’d get back to us.
UWRF’s 15 “emerging Indonesian writers” selected for appearance at the festival include no Balinese. We asked to see the list of 105 applicants – we wanted to see if any Balinese had applied - but this was not possible; applicants, apart from those who make the cut, are confidential.
There are some reasonable established authors listed as participants, but not a major headline among them. And the star attraction appears to be Kate Adie, the yesteryear BBC specialist in look-at-me-I’m-in-the-line-of-fire reportage. News as voyeuristic entertainment, presented as the ultimate reality TV show, has no real function and little appeal to the sentient.
We think an annual literary festival for Bali is a great idea. But maybe the UWRF is getting a little off track, off message, and off the point.
It’s enough to make one want to go to a bar and cause an affray.
And No Mandolins
There was a tale around a little while ago that British writer Louis de Bernières would be a presence at this year’s UWRF. It was either that – a tale – or perhaps what those in the publicity trade know as a balloon, something that is sent aloft to attract notice when there’s nothing else to say, because the list of participants now circulated does not include him.
That’s a shame, because otherwise he might have been quite interesting on his 2008 novel A Partisan’s Daughter. It’s more introspective than much of his work – and certainly more dour than his signature piece, Corelli’s Mandolin (also published as Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, as which it was also made into a movie) – but more thought provoking as a result.
Just the trick for a navel-gazing exercise, we’d have thought.
Stand By for Chaos
There was a little news item in last week’s print edition of The Bali Times that would have brought a grimace to many faces. It said that work on the proposed flyover at Simpang Siur would commence next year so that it would be complete in time for the APEC jamboree at Nusa Dua in 2013.
The work is essential, of course. But it’s the two years of total chaos and additional traffic delays that comes first that will be the immediate problem.
Allow an additional two hours to get from anywhere south of the airport to anywhere north of the airport in the interim.
Caring Nation
Tourism doyenne Tuti Sunario, who puts out the useful and interesting Indonesia Digest update, had some interesting data in her latest digest about what makes Indonesians tick. Among Asia Pacific countries surveyed by the Neilsen organisation, Indonesian consumers stand out for caring most about the education of their children and the well being and happiness of parents. Neilsen’s consumer research executive director in Indonesia, Catherine Eddy, said the survey showed 14 percent of Indonesian consumers surveyed for the latest study cited their children’s education and wellbeing as their chief concern over the next six months, significantly higher than the average of 9 percent among Asia Pacific consumers as a whole.
Similarly ahead of the pack, 13 percent said their chief concern was the wellbeing and happiness of their parents. This compares with the 4 percent average among all Asia Pacific consumers, most of whom cited the economy as their chief concern. The first concern among most Indonesians is to find a balance between work and daily living.
The Survey also found that in the first quarter of 2010, 70 percent of Indonesians surveyed – on the internet – were very positive about their jobs, much higher than the average Asia-Pacific consumers which registered 57 percent.
Original Imagery
Australian indigenous culture is being celebrated in Jakarta to mark the annual NAIDOC (National Aboriginal and Islanders’ Day Observance Committee) Week from July 4-11. The Australian embassy is staging a photographic exhibition by one of Australia’s most prominent Aboriginal photographic artists, Wayne Quilliam, among other artistic expressions of the rich indigenous culture of the country.
Every year Australia celebrates NAIDOC Week as a way of promoting greater understanding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their culture. It is also a celebration of their people’s contributions to modern Australia. This year celebrates the theme of Unsung Heroes, acknowledging those who have made a significant but humble contribution to their community behind the scenes.
Contact between Australian Indigenous people and Indonesians dates back at least to the sixteenth century when Makassan traders and fishermen first visited northern Australia. They traded frequently and this interaction is still recorded and celebrated today in the music and dance of the Indigenous northern language groups.
The Quilliam exhibition runs at Galeri Foto Jurnalistik Antara until July 18 (it opened on July 5). Films and other presentations are also on the programme.
Lateral Thinking
Strategic Airlines, the new Australian player on the Perth-Bali route, has some big plans that prove the power of lateral thinking. From August 3, subject to regulatory approval, it will be flying to Bali from Port Hedland in Western Australia, bringing our island within two hours’ reach of the rich mining and resource industry workforce in the north of WA.
And it will tie this in with the first full-service transcontinental flights from Brisbane on Australia’s east coast to Port Hedland, providing people from the populous south-east Queensland area with a same-day, one stop service to Bali. Initially it will be a weekly service, on Tuesdays, but the airline says it plans to introduce a second flight, on Saturdays, from September.
Until now the money-to-spend workforce in WA’s north-west has had to fly south to Perth before heading north to Bali for some well-earned R&R. And Brisbane, while nowadays serviced by both Jetstar (via Darwin) and Virgin’s Pacific Blue direct, has been devoid of Garuda service since the notional airline had to “restructure” (cut) its network some time ago, after finding its plan to forget about making aircraft lease payments didn’t work. Some rather more productive lateral thinking on the part of our notional airline would also be in order.
Let There be Light
One of your diarist’s favourite memories is of his initial repositioning flight – from London but originating, via a short break, from Africa – to Australia in 1971. What amazed on that occasion was that no lights were seen between leaving Singapore and arriving in Perth; and precious few then. It was surreal. It was also 2am in Perth, so of course most of the good burghers of that ville were abed. Presumably the bad burghers were nefariously up to things without benefit of visible light.
This memorable and slightly discomfiting occasion was recalled last week when The Diary flew southwards to Perth aboard a Strategic Airbus A320, leaving Bali in the dark. This time, however, there were lights, not only in Perth but also, brightly, around the big oil and gas conurbations that have sprung up en route in the intervening 39 years. It’s amazing what a bit of time can do.
Simply Chilling
One of the best reasons for living in Bali is that you don’t get cold, unless – like The Diary – the faux chill of a June or July evening daringly spent in the bale (gazebo) out by the pool gives you the shivers. It’s pretty radical when the mercury dips below 25C.
One theory long held by your diarist, drawn from several wasted decades of weather sampling around the globe, is that unusual climatic occasions are designed to follow him. Thus with a trip to Perth (and even further south towards all that horrible Antarctic ice): on arrival on June 30 it was to a city that had just marked its longest cold spell in 13 years.
Of course, all these things are relative. Some people we know would swoon in the heat of a 3C winter night. But they don’t live in Bali, poor things.
Your diarist will be back in Bali, and warm again, this weekend.
diary@thebalitimes.com
Hector' Blog appears weekly, as The Bali Times Diary, in the the print edition of the newspaper, out Fridays, and on the newspaper's website at www.thebalitimes.com. The Bali Times, Bali's only English language newspaper, is also available worldwide through NewspaperDirect.
Memo to All:
Newspapers
Aren’t Here
Just to Print
What You Like
There are, it is said, none as blind as those who will not see. To which one might add: And none so immune to the possibility of another point of view than one-eyed campaigners for high-profile causes. The cause of Schapelle Corby is one such minefield for any who suggest – reasonably – that whether one likes it or not, Indonesia’s justice system is something for Indonesia to control.
That there are problems with it is not the issue. That there are fractious and profoundly ill-informed critics of it in other countries is unsurprising. But it is also vexing. Laura Hart, who posted a comment on The Bali Times’ website on June 23, relating to the self-serving criticism advanced by that political scatty-cat Pauline Hanson, whose fish-and-chip dinners one hopes were better than her next venture as the misanthropic leader of the One Nation party in Australia, is perfectly at liberty to say, as she did:
No-one cares about Schapelle? Yeh, right. How about this women’s group which didn’t exist three months ago: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=268362329195. The world is sick of this poor woman being tortured to death. Sick of monsters posting their support in places like this. Sick of governments hiding from this abuse. And yes, sick of The Bali Times printing hostile propaganda and damaging stories against her. (Our emphasis.)
Laura is free to think that. And she’s free to post her thoughts on our website. Feedback pages are designed for people wanting to let off a little steam, after all. But like so many others in these days of “social media,” she completely misunderstands the role of the newspaper in the field of communications. It is not to print only material with which she agrees.
Super Symbol
When India opened up its economy in the 1990s people elsewhere began to realise that the rupee was not just some historical monetary unit in a rollicking Kipling adventure set in the Raj, but an actual currency that had (increasing) value. And since bureaucrats and politicians like to look busy and engaged, lots of work has been done lately on creating a symbol for India’s money that can stand with national pride alongside the $, ¥, £ and (more recently) the € as instantly recognisable symbols rather than the pick-a-box Rs, Re and INR used up to now.
Five possibilities for a stylised R have been shortlisted and will go to ministers for consideration.
This little flight of fancy prompted musing at The Diary, where the number of zeroes required to convert the Indonesian rupiah into anything you can actually buy stuff with is viewed with eye-glazing disfavour. It’s also confusing – perhaps this is deliberate, to assist money-changers in the business of turning a profit – because the Rp10,000 and Rp100,000 notes are so indelibly similar in hue.
Perhaps the next time Indonesian financial bureaucrats and their ministers have nothing better to do, they might look at redesigning bank notes to emphasise the thousand as the primary number and de-emphasise the string of useless noughts that follow, as many retailers already do in marking point-of-sale prices. That way we could have Rp100.000 and Rp10.000 notes that would not confuse, not to mention lovely new Rp1.000, Rp2.000, Rp5.000, Rp20.000 and Rp50.000 notes as well. It might even make it possible to have a Rp500.000 note to save carrying around a heap of paper change in your wallet.
Boom With a View
Happy travellers who might want to sample the fare at Klapa, the restaurant atop the despoiled remains of the cliff at the environmental excrescence once known as Dreamland Beach, should go well armed with significant readies. And not just for lunch.
Parking there costs Rp15K, surely among the highest boom-gate entry prices in Bali and possibly the country.
Tautology Rules
There’s a place for old curmudgeons. Well, this old curmudgeon thinks so, anyway. And even curmudgeons accept that language changes, and that this is often for the best. Most of us have long recovered from the disappointment of discovering that dilemna had overnight become dilemma, and much more logically so.
The modern delight in tautology, however, is another matter. An anniversary is just that – it’s an annual thing, you know, like a year has passed since you last marked whatever it is you’re celebrating, commemorating, commiserating, etc. Simple, really. Today, though, you don’t just mark, say, something’s tenth anniversary. It has become, in these times when the unlettered rule, a 10-year anniversary.
One such excrescence appeared in a headline in The Bali Times last week. It proclaimed the 10-year anniversary of the human genome. Well, it wasn’t of course, in any sense. It was the tenth anniversary of some very clever boffins first sequencing it.
Drink Up
The Diary had to pass up one otherwise difficult to refuse invitation this week, as a result of another engagement: temporary absence in wintry Western Australia. The missed otherwise unmissable was a dinner at the Ayana at Jimbaran on Thursday evening – it ended at the Rock Bar with post-prandial cocktails; it’s a good thing the Ayana’s Inclinator is there to return Rock Baristas to the cliff-top – at which thoroughly remarkable Chilean wine from Casa Lapostolle was explained by winemaker Diego Urra.
Even the benefit of being (temporarily) in a place with drinkable wine at affordable prices pales somewhat when it means missing out on a night at the Ayana (always fun, particularly in the cerebrally decorative presence of hotel publicist Marian Hinchliffe) at which the redoubtable products of one of Chile’s finest vineyards are on offer. Salud.
Elephant in Room
That selfless campaigner for Bali as it should be (according to him and sundry other got-here-first-so-go-suck whickerers), the Jakarta-resident kilt-tilter Alistair Speirs, must surely have a conflict of interest in his promotion of Bali’s hotel sector. And we don’t just mean the inadvisability of appearing in an udeng, as he and others did in a photo circulated after the Bali Hotels Association’s recent golf charity dinner.
International hotels, after all, like any other investments, including the villas he so hates, are built on Land Formerly Used for Much More Suitable Purposes. But while he rails against land grabs – and tells anyone within earshot that his little glitter-mag, NOW! Bali, won’t accept real estate advertising because it is a Bad Thing – he is one of the leading cerebrals behind the Bali Hotels Association’s flat non-come-on, Bali Is My Life.
Property development in Bali should of course be subject to controls and to proper planning procedures. We look forward to the national and provincial governments producing some and then ensuring they actually work and cannot be bribed away. But the Spear Carriers for Gaia and others (who seem also to want a no-jobs Bali), many of whom seem to be arguing for restraint now they’ve made their own pile, can’t have it both ways. By all means, let’s campaign for responsible development, sensitive architecture, even for Balinese gardens if Strangers like them, and all the rest.
We could start by finding some way for Balinese to capitalise on their only real asset (land) other than by selling it en masse to Jakarta plutocrats, other Indonesian robber barons, and disgracefully moneyed Bules. Perhaps Speirs could give his little Exclamation Mark a serious workout and ponder responsible answers to that conundrum.
Exclamatory Note: We see that another little canine appendage of a publication, FRV Travel, is now appearing without that idiotic ! between FRV and Travel.
Killer Chook
The Australian journalist Annabel Crabb, who used to scribble for the Fairfax newspaper group but flew the coop to national broadcaster the ABC last year, where she appears in The Drum, the ABC’s online political blog, and is a regular on the mustn’t-be-missed Sunday political show The Insiders, screened on Australia Network TV, has a delightful put-down style.
Her dissections of Australia’s political leaders, such as the (politically) late Kevin Rudd and his surprise immediate replacement, the magnificently Titian-headed Julia Gillard, are always required reading or viewing.
She’s great with a quick quip, too. Last year she told ABC radio in Adelaide her Dad had a chook called Julia. It had red feathers, attitude, bossed all the other chooks around and wouldn’t lay eggs.
We know now that it also possesses the killer instinct. Last week it assassinated the local rooster.
What a Treat
While we await the breathless cinema shortly to be presented by Hollywood’s interpretation of American self-discoverer Elizabeth Gilbert’s scribbling, Eat, Love, Pray (trumpets trill and strumpets swoon on August 13, we hear) The Diary has been viewing other movie fare, already available, drawn from screen interpretations.
These rarely work. Robert Kaplow’s 2003 novel Me and Orson Welles is a captivating word picture of New York in 1937 – how strange that that time now constitutes a “period piece” – and transports you, as all good writing should, to both the venue and the time. The 109-minute movie of the same is a true rarity in that it does work. Director Richard Linklater’s film, made in 2008, is very good indeed. And there were no superstars playing themselves, just actors (Claire Danes among them) who are a true tribute to their craft.
The Kuta-acquired DVD actually managed to run all the way without a hitch, too.
diary@thebalitimes.com
Hector's Blog is published, as The Diary, in the weekly print edition of The Bali Times, out Fridays, and at http://www.thebalitimes.com/. The Bali Times, Bali's only English-language newspaper, is available as a print product worldwide through NewspaperDirect.
So How Do
Immature
Idiots
Threaten
the Nation?
One might argue that a lot of things are a risk to Indonesia. The vacuity of much of modern politics would be high on The Diary’s list. Then there are the robber barons, who remain active and minimally taxed even though the country is now a fully fledged democracy. The hopelessness of Indonesian bureaucracy is an enervating and fundamentally dangerous condition that needs urgent remedy. The special pleadings of placemen, not to mention the disgraceful rush to accommodate them, similarly demand exculpation. Ditto, too, on the barriers hastily erected by the apparatus whenever it seems the common people might get a real break.
In the face of these clear and present dangers to the health – political and social – of the Indonesian state, both President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his minister for communications, Tifatul Sembiring – he of the Muslim-based Prosperous Justice Party – have a plan. Naturally enough, it has nothing to do with those actualities. Instead, they want to censor the Internet because some tastelessly immature idiots filmed themselves having sex and – this is the YouTube Generation after all – scenes of this commonplace occurrence have reached the World Wide Web. This is apparently a threat to the nation. The President and his Minister have vowed to unplug the genitally-focused parts of the Internet because of this.
This is worrying, for several reasons. We can only guess at why Indonesia should veil itself from the modern world by unplugging technology or why this would be a benefit. But both Yudhoyono and Sembiring have shown a commendable grasp of modern politics by seizing on a non-issue – the immature idiocy of juvenile entertainers and others who should be ignored as irrelevant until they grow up – to progress whatever the present populist agenda is.
It is not the Internet that is the threat. Censoring it – like China does, for its own controlling purposes – won’t stop mental midgets turning the cameras on when they have sex. It will not lead inexorably to a quantum leap in morality; far less in moral fibre, unarguably the more important commodity. The authors of the regressive anti-pornography law, passed in 2008, should similarly consider their proper options: repealing the legislation would be a good starting point.
There’s also the immutable law that every legislator and morals campaigner should never forget: the law of unintended consequences. And there’s another: never assume, arrogantly, that you have the only answer. The best way to avoid smut, if it is not to your personal taste, though there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be if that’s your bag, is not to watch it. That doesn’t require a presidential decree or a ministerial directive (which given human nature would have a directly opposite effect in any case). It requires the exercise of independent judgment informed by common sense.
Well I Never
Regular readers of The Diary will understand that between your diarist and Bali’s leading provider of gratuitous advice, Jack Daniels, a mutually exclusive space exists. But in relation to the critically important issue of internet censorship, we have a symbiosis that might astonish.
Daniels, who spends an awful lot of time twittering (business must be down) was running a febrile Twitter campaign the other day on that very topic. In one (laudably to the point) tweet he wrote: “The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.” It’s not an original thought, which by contrast should not surprise. It is most commonly cited as having sprung from Tommy Smothers, best known as half of the American musical comedy team the Smothers Brothers. The other half was his younger brother Dick. Smothers should be listened to, however. He’s older and much wiser than your diarist.
But The Diary’s pick for best quote on censorship is this, from Mark Twain: “Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.”
Yak, Yak, Yak
Well, that’s not all they do. They also do parties. And this year’s Yak Awards – promoted by the magazine as the Yak Awards VI – are set for the Cocoon Beach Club in Legian, scene of many such affrays, on July 23.
Chief Yakmagger Sophie Digby is such a dear, and her quarterly publication (with its now re-separated stable-mate The Bud) such a standout for quality among the dross of the glossies hereabouts, that The Diary is tempted to attend and has listed its representative as a “possible” on the event’s Facebook page. Well, we had an idle moment while browsing the web – you know how it is – and it all looked such fun.
There are two slightly off-putting aspects to the show, however. One is the Rp400K entry cost (goodness, that’s more than four great 90-minute massages with Ana at The Diary’s favourite spa). The other is the dress theme, which is apparently Shanghai Chic. Whether any such thing exists, given the tastelessness for which modern China is renowned when it comes to spinning off the Western motif, is questionable. Gentlemen attending are recommended to impress the ladies in Chang Shan. Somehow that reminds us of a very rude (and very old) joke about Smirnoff vodka, but we won’t go there.
The Yak Awards are a treat. Such circular occasions for mutual back-slapping always are. But if cocktails, bubbles (bring out the Bolly!), beer, Bloody Mary oysters – now you’re yakking, Sophie – and canapés presented by Bali’s best chefs are your bag, along with what your modern DJ considers to be music, and you’ve got a spare chang shang (if you’re a bloke or a reasonable facsimile of same) or qi pao (if not), it might be a date.
When last we checked, there were 201 definite guests. We’re sure this odd number will be many times bigger by bash-time.
A Bit Batured
We hear a sad tale from a young Jakarta friend who has just spent two weeks holidaying in Bali. She was here with her boyfriend and they had a lovely time in Kuta; on a motorcycle tour of southern portions of Bali (including Uluwatu temple, a must for any first-time visitors); on a hiking trip; and then with a hire car to Amed (they loved it).
They also drove themselves up to Batur, where the locals say they want to encourage visitors to see a cool, highland part of Bali that is very different from most of what tourists see and experience on the island. Unfortunately, for our visitors, the Batur experience wasn’t cool at all (except for the ambient temperature). In fact, they didn’t love Batur in the least. The locals scared them, our friend told us, and they left after a day. That’s really sad – for tourists and Batur locals alike.
There was however another highlight of the trip that has apparently left a positive lasting impression. They spent some time on Nusa Lembongan. Now that is a magical place to take a break. And it comes with a lovely (virtually guaranteed) view of Mt Agung as a bonus.
Wait a Minute, Man
It seems America’s favourite party, the Fourth of July, won’t take place in Bali after all. Apparently the private organisers of this year’s proposed bash have had to call it off because there was a problem with the venue. What? In Bali, where venues are two a penny?
Ah well, so much for history. It’s amusing to think that if the lads back in 1775 hadn’t managed to get their venue – Bunker Hill – for a face-off with the Redcoats, there might never have been an American revolution to celebrate. So much for tea parties and Minutemen, then; not to mention poor old Paul Revere, who would (had he managed to book a horse) have ridden in vain.
Monkey Business
Something’s afoot. The Diary’s domicile, The Cage, was recently visited by a serpent of some sort (it was chased away by your intrepid Diarist armed with a short broom) and a day or so later by a local macaque that was evidently angry enough with its lot in life to climb atop the roof and throw down a corner tile. It crashed into a fortunately vacant outside shower.
No help on identification of the snake – precisely described to them in plain Indo-English – was forthcoming from the staff, when later approached for advice.
It was just an ular. The level of disquiet about this hopefully now departed presence can always be judged by the number of r’s trilled onto the end of the Bahasa word for snake.
He Got the Needle
Last week The Diary wrote, in the context of the little local difficulty Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd was in over opinion polling ahead of this year’s national elections, that there were no tumbrels within earshot and Madame Defarge was not ready to knit.
A week, however, is a long time in politics – an aphorism your diarist, a practitioner (as an adviser) for years, should surely have remembered – as yesterday’s sudden leadership ballot in Canberra amply demonstrated.
The tumbrel was indeed rolling and Madame Defarge – aka Julia Gillard, the new PM, the first female PM in Australia’s history, a double rarity in that she rolled a first-term prime minister in a party room coup, and evidently not someone you’d want to play poker with – was not only knitting; she was getting new patterns printed too.
diary@thebalitimes.com
The Bali Times, Bali's leading English-language publication, appears weekly in print (on Fridays) and at www.thebalitimes.com. The print edition of the newspaper is available worldwide via NewspaperDirect.
Blots on the
Landscape:
Noise is Not
A Cultural
Tradition
From Ungasan to Canggu, and from Kuta to Sanur, via much of Denpasar and scattered blots about Ubud, the Blight of Bali grows ever worse. That’s noise we’re talking about. It’s an issue of absolutely central concern. It comes from dogs – you’d think they’d keep a bit quiet at the moment, given the risk of a quick rabies-scare cull – as well as from aberrant motorbikes and other man-made outrages. A letter from correspondent Carl Valiquet in this week’s paper (see page 8) relates a tale of woe about his sleeplessness and a loud (and undoubtedly vulgar) karaoke establishment apparently intent on making everyone’s life a misery in pursuit of big bucks (well, rupiahs with zillions of zeroes, at least).
Valiquet’s problem lies in a Sanur precinct – from where, understandably, he and his wife are moving – and his letter is an essential primer for anyone considering relocation: to anywhere; but especially to anywhere in South Bali.
It’s not just the complete absence of noise abatement laws, or the lofty lack of interest among those who govern us about the wellbeing of the aural environment. It’s also the similar absence of any meaningful regulation of businesses whose business is to get lots of people through their doors by making loud noises.
Complaints are dismissed with distain and arrogant disinterest. And not just in Sanur. Where this rude behaviour fits into the liturgy of Bali’s delightful culture is rather unclear.
It’s also strange. We mightn’t particularly like the reprise of the Bali Is My Life slogan, just relaunched by tourism minister Jero Wacik. But it has one benefit: it is unlikely ever to make any noise. Bali Where’s My Earplugs has quite the wrong ring to it.
Bali Revealed (Again)
There’s a new book out – Secrets of Bali: it’s reviewed in today’s Life section by Roy Thompson – that re-reveals the real Bali. That’s the bit that hasn’t been bolly’d out by the bling brigade or reduced to risibility by writers of pap.
It’s written by Jonathan Copeland with the collaboration of Ubud identity Ni Wayan Murni. According to Thompson, it’s the best book about Bali since Fred Eiseman’s 1990 classic. It might need to be, at Rp370K a copy at Times Bookshops, but never mind.
What is a little odd, however, is that one of the authorities cited in its pages is Andrew Charles, who was briefly editor of Hello Bali (better known as Hello Bolly) and who used to pen editorial notices wondering why readers never sent him any mail. He was also, famously, irritated by Bali being described as the Island of the Gods. Another citation comes from Rob Goodfellow, an Australian writer of invisible talent.
Perhaps a better read, especially for anyone fixated on Aussie royalty residing in Ubud, would be journalist Deborah Cassrels’ lovely feature in The Weekend Australian magazine out last Saturday. See if you can get hold of a copy. Cassrels is a good lateralist. Few would think to reference the impact of fado – Portuguese folk music – on Indonesian musical tradition. She delightfully retells the story of Jero Asri Kerthyasa, once Jane Gillespie, the Sydney preschool teacher who became Ubud’s premier princess by marriage.
The princess also runs Biku, the lovely Seminyak eatery.
Strategic Move
Your diarist will shortly be taking off for Australia. Hold those cheers, luminous and/or phosphorescent ones, and any among the chatterers who still define argument as having only one point of view: I’ll be back. It’s just a quick trip to look after some necessary business in the Great South Land.
It will be quick because Bali’s the place to be; and also because it’s winter in Terra Incognita and chill winds around the nether regions anywhere really should not be on anyone’s agenda.
This trip, Diary and Distaff are flying with Strategic Airlines, which has recently commenced Perth-Bali services. New players deserve support, and Strategic was also quite a bit cheaper than the other low-cost carriers on Bali’s primary tourist route. We also found them a delight to deal with on bookings. They had no trouble with separate names or with different return dates on one booking.
Sting in the Tale
It’s always notable when Australian politics get interesting, which they do from time to time, on a cycle not too dissimilar to the elliptical adventures of Halley’s Comet.
In this instance it has become interesting because Prime Minister Kevin Rudd – who, we are advised by another super-endowed brain, the Sydney journalist David Marr, invariably regards himself as the smartest guy in the room (a conversation between Rudd and Marr would be an interesting standoff, then) – has signed off on a Treasury sting that proposes to collect a 40 percent premium in tax from miners judged to have made super profits.
This has led to extraordinary sights: Twiggy Forrest, for example, a very rich man indeed, turning up at a Perth press club meeting looking like one of the workers and annoying the prime minister with a question or two. The shrieks of the big miners, Forrest among them but including the South African head of Rio Tinto, Marius Kloppers, that they’ll all be ruined by this move and may indeed move – and take their money with them – need to be taken with a pinch of salt. We all know they’d really like to be paying no tax at all. That’s why, among other things, the feisty Australian online journal The Punch has invented the Rich Bastards Club for them.
But Rudd is not a popular chap. This is not just because he’s prime minister. It’s a historic fact. His Labor Party, which must go to the polls this year and is discomfited by the sudden presence of an actual opposition, is said to be worried that Kevin 24/7 may turn in a bad result. That’s not the sort of bottom line any collective of parliamentary seat-warmers looks to with equanimity. Suggestions that a tumbrel may soon be sent to take Rudd off to the guillotine can be dismissed, however. Madame Defarge is not quite ready to knit.
There was, though, in this context, a delightful echo a few days ago from Rudd’s famous rise to fame period (in Queensland in the 1990s). The state treasurer (finance minister) of that era, Keith De Lacy, a pleasant dinner companion and fellow bon vivant well known to your diarist, gave out that Rudd was not a good prime minister.
Given that Rudd, when he thought he was running Queensland as head of the state cabinet office, was continually at loggerheads with ministers, Treasurer De Lacy among them, that’s a delicious pay-back that’s been a long time coming.
Sing-a-Long
The St Regis Bali, that upmarket retreat of the etymologically challenged where until recent times the butlers were Bob or Bertie rather that Wayan or Made, is branching out in another unusual cultural direction. On Monday (June 21) the Yale Whiffenpoofs will be singing for their supper in the Astor Ballroom there.
Certain collegiate proclivities of old-world, east coast America have always amazed. There’s a sort of undergraduate enthusiasm for curious hobbies. No wonder it remains prime recruitment territory for the CIA. The Skull & Bones club, also a Yale entity, comes to mind. It thought nothing of making an illegal souvenir of Geronimo’s remains after he died bereft and sad in US Army detention in Oklahoma, miles away from his Arizona homeland and 20 years after he capitulated to Washington in the late 1880s, ending the Apache Wars. He was duped (also by old-world, east coast America) and was detained instead of being repatriated to his people as promised.
The Whiffenpoofs, however, though also curious, only sing a cappella. They do that very well, by the way. On Monday at the St Regis – where they’re not only singing for their own suppers, but for others’ – they’ll be filling the restricted confines of the Astor Ballroom with two 30-minute sessions of non-discount descant in favour of Guna Tuna Rungu (for deaf and mute children) and Udyana Wiguna. These are two charities recently adopted by St Regis which both require money for schooling and general living needs of children aged between six and 16.
The Whiffenpoofs will warble after cocktails at 6pm and before something described as a cocktail dinner buffet at 8.15pm. You can drop in for Rp950K net. Of course, you have to book. It’s that sort of place.
diary@thebalitimes.com
Hector's Blog appears in the weekly print edition of The Bali Times, Bali's leading English language publication, published on Fridays, and on the newspaper's website at www.thebalitimes.com. The Bali Times is also available as a print product worldwide via NewspaperDirect.
Here’s Why
Most Bali
Cabs are
Rightly
Outranked
It is not exactly clear why the deficient and frankly sometimes criminally inclined Not Blue Bird Group taxi companies and cooperatives in Bali think they have a licence to wreck the island’s only user-friendly service. It would be unfair to tar all the non-Blue Birds with the same brush, since they are not strictly speaking birds of a feather – the Kowinu cooperative at Nusa Dua does a good job – but as a generality, if you can’t get a Blue Bird (Bali Taxi) cab that comes with a meter and an honest driver, you’re better off walking. And not just on the streets, either. It’s such a shame you can’t easily walk out of Ngurah Rai airport and away from the grasping collective that has the taxi monopoly there.
The gist of the complaints from the other companies appears to be that Blue Bird Group cabs get all the business. See paragraph one for why this is so. This is not a view formed only by The Diary. We noticed columnist Vyt Karazija was tweeting during the week along much the same lines. And he has written about that very problem before, anyway.
Strange as the concept may be, customers generally want a clean taxi, a visible and verifiable meter, a driver who knows where the clutch is and when to take his foot off the accelerator, and no irritating and enervating arguments at the destination over why you should now magnificently support the driver’s personal retirement fund, or risk assault for non-compliance.
To combat their inability to attract custom other than by running fares down in the street or going out in torrential downpours when people are inclined, sans parapluie so to speak, to throw normal caution to the wind and take a chance on entering a Dodgem cab, Blue Bird’s rivals seem to have decided to wreck as many clean and decent (Blue Bird) taxis as possible and set fire to rubbish outside the governor’s offices in Renon, Denpasar.
We gather from reading reports in the local Indonesian-language press that the police are closely monitoring the situation. One report we read seemed to be saying they were acting as interested bystanders. Oh, and they’re collecting the damaged vehicles as well, which is probably very kind of them. But it was not until Tuesday, the day after the “riot,” that police were directed to arrest people. This needed an order from Police Chief Sutisno apparently. It not clear why. Wilful criminal damage is just that (wilful damage); it’s not some kind of unauthorised street protest. Perhaps the police prefer not to attend to multiple scratchings and windscreen breakings? Not really their job? Well, it must get in the way of striding out into the traffic with your whistle at gridlocked intersections and causing even greater chaos; or even pursuing sword-wielding criminals and intrepid cable-stealing gangs, 50 percent of whose members apparently have no trouble outrunning the plods who, it seems, are apt to ambush their own ambushes.
So here’s the gen: Criminal damage is criminal damage whether or not there is a commercial dispute about licensing or anything else; Blue Bird taxis are the safest bet for passengers (by a country mile); and if Blue Bird’s sorry collection of “competitors” for business want to get ahead, they could do worse than look up “service,” “customer value” and “vehicle maintenance” in any good dictionary.
How Delicious
We noted two weeks ago that this year’s Ubud Writers and Readers Festival was a little less than four months away and nothing much apart from out-of-date advices had appeared on the festival website. Well, nothing has changed, except that the big show is now two weeks closer.
Even closer than that, deliciously, is a proposed writers’ school to be run by Barbara Turner-Vessalago, who is both an author and an academic and who has been running these things for ages. This is the first time she has put Bali on her programme. Her course – which comes at a cost, though less if you’re a Bali resident – is on from September 29 to October 5. UWRF 2010 commences on October 6.
Jade Richardson, a friend of Ubud (and now, delightfully, of The Diary) but somewhat distant from the stellar cluster that has convinced itself it runs the place, tells us she’s been on the waiting list to get on one of the courses for two years. Lending a hand to the embryonic Ubud writing experience seemed to her to be a good way of getting off the waiting list and back to Fun Central.
She notes, in a lovely little billet-doux that came our way from Sydney – thoughtfully defined as “boring as...” – that Ubud is defined by many as a place of fragrant rice. There are other alliterative variants of this moniker and certainly The Diary has always thought of it as more a place that is all about mie, mie, mie. Never mind. A writing course might address the imbalance. It could also assist many who are strangers to syntax. Perhaps Turner-Vessalago could include a session on the inadvisability (indeed inadmissibility) of exclamation marks in plague proportions.
The Diary has a date with Richardson, who communicates with the world from a website which engagingly calls itself girlsontop, when she gets here in a little while. We’re always up for a decent glass of wine, especially in pleasant company and if this indulgence is consumed in decorous quantity and with no police in attendance.
Anyone interested in the course can find out more at www.freefallwriting.com.
Oh, I See
There has been merriment at The Cage, domicile of The Diary atop the Bukit at Ungasan. It’s not because it has finally stopped raining (evidently it hasn’t). It’s not because two massages at our Favourite Spa were on the schedule this week, instead of the usual measly one allowed by the household budget controller (bless her heart).
It is because we were treated to the Indonesian version of painting yourself into a corner. Our resident handyman – well, he’s not actually resident but he seems to spend an awful lot of time around the place – has lately been employed on “renovasi kayu.” Refurbishing timber products and window and door frames is no easy task, especially for the trade-challenged, which is why our resident handyman is such a frequent visitor.
Our man was going very well until he started on the bale (gazebo). It was, he assured us, a one-day job. And so it would have been if he had not assiduously attended to the railings and the floor before remembering that he had also to do the interior of the roof.
And that the roof would remain out of bounds until the floor had dried.
Chattel Class
We feel for Pollyanna, an Australian woman who wrote to one of those expat on-line forums the other day relating her experience in trying to get household goods through customs.
She reported thus:
“We thought we had our situation under control. Our Australian movers are responsible on the Oz side and guarantee door-to-door delivery service of our goods at the Bali side in conjunction with Santa Fe Movers in Indonesia. But then Santa Fe wanted a copy of our work permit. We don't have a work permit and aren't allowed to have one because we're coming to Bali on a retirement visa, which prohibits working.
“The Indonesian authorities insist our goods cannot enter the country without the work permit. Apparently there is no legal way around this absurd situation. Santa Fe says it is a problem of two bureaucratic departments not coordinating with each other.”
Ah yes. How sad. But Pollyanna – who we look forward to welcoming as a reader of The Bali Times when she (and hopefully her goods and chattels) gets here to enjoy retirement and discovers it’s best to read the real news in a proper newspaper – is still on a steep learning curve.
It’s not just that two bureaucratic departments do not coordinate with each other, Polly. No one in Indonesia’s creaking bureaucracies, at any level, coordinates anything with anyone.
Nice Try; Fail
The low-fare options now available to overseas visitors who might want to give Bali a try are great. From places close at hand – specifically we’re thinking Singapore, Perth and Darwin, where discretionary spending is the norm and getaway weekends the go – these make a long weekend break here an attractive option.
Some chums did that (from Perth) last weekend. They noted it was actually cheaper than weekending at Margaret River, in the wine country a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Perth. They hopped on a plane (AirAsia in their case) for 3.5 hours instead.
Shame that on arrival they spent something approaching two hours getting through arrivals and customs at Ngurah Rai.
THE DIARY diary@thebalitimes.com is published in The Bali Times, Bali's only English language newspaper, every Friday. The Bali Times www.thebalitimes.com is also available as a print product worldwide through NewspaperDirect.
Some Advice
For Jailbird
McJannett:
Go Bag
Your Head
Our many web readers, like The Diary, no doubt breathed a sigh of relief on reading earlier this week that the drugs-in-socks man, Robert Paul McJannett, had ceased being a drain on local resources and had gone home. We have the story in this week’s print edition too, for readers who prefer newsprint. It was a shame, though no surprise, that when he got home to Perth McJannett then set about immediately bagging Indonesia and its justice system, claiming basically that we’re all a bunch of crooks.
Pathetic individuals such as he so often seek the limelight in a vacuous attempt to justify, or at least excuse, their own bad behaviour. It’s always someone else’s fault if they’re caught – whether with their hands in the lolly jar or in risible Robert’s case, marijuana in his socks – and of course they never get the sort of real justice they’d get at home, do they? Let me off with a caution, M’lud.
McJannett also leaped on that other perennially running bandwagon, the Schapelle circus, by calling for the little Aussie battler to be sent home immediately and saying Australia’s elected leaders should see to this before the country went to the polls later this year. Such is McJannett’s fine grasp of diplomacy, international politics and the need for balance in intergovernmental relations, and such is his intellect, that he saw no problem with achieving this, on his just-off-the-plane (“look, no handcuffs”) timetable.
We have some advice for McJannett, who when he left Bali last Friday did so on a passport stamped with a year’s ban (reviewable in terms of extension) on re-entry to Indonesia.
Our advice is a colourful bit of Australian colloquial terminology: Go bag your head. It should be clear to anyone what this means, but in case it isn’t, it means shut up and go away. He may actually have done us all a favour and taken this advice on board pre-emptively. When he was finally let out of Kerobokan last Friday he caused immense mirth to his jailers by pulling a cotton shopping bag over his head to avoid any lurking paparazzi.
We didn’t want to bother with a final holiday happy-snap anyway.
She Was a Riot
The Diary assiduously reads the Strewth column in The Australian newspaper. It’s always worth a look and there’s generally a giggle in it somewhere. There certainly was last week, when diarist Caroline Overington served up a very special dish as part of her Sydney Writers Festival coverage.
We have our own writers’ (well, writers’ and readers’) festival here in Bali, of course, the annual extravaganza laid on by Ubud luminary Janet De Neefe with a little help from official Australia, which customarily doles out some readies to worthy literary causes at home and abroad.(The 2010 dates are October 6-10.)
And that’s the delicious part of this week’s tale. De Neefe was attending the Sydney show – perhaps she was trying to pick up some tips, or a participant or two – and at the hugely popular Sebel Pier One an affray of some sort ensued. It can be so difficult getting a drink at a busy bar, especially if the barkeep has no idea you’re the queen of Ubud – and the hotel called the police. Five of New South Wales’s finest duly appeared.
De Neefe was reported by Strewth as saying she “was made to feel awful. I have restaurants, and my whole thing is about treating people beautifully. I love to enjoy a festival and I was so excited on the night, and then it happened, and it tainted the whole festival for me.”
She told The Diary this week she was tired, her flight to Sydney having been delayed, that she had already attended the Sydney Writers Festival opening party, and the barmaid at the Sebel was far too far up herself. But it must have been quite a floorshow. Getting five New South Wales policemen to turn out all at once usually takes at least a Cronulla riot.
Riady, Set, Go
We weren’t at the do – the machinations of high finance and the property market are zed territory for diarists – but an old chum was, and he tells us James Riady, businessman extraordinaire, was a big hit at a Q&A session at the 61st world congress of the International Real Estate Federation at the Bali Grand Hyatt last Thursday. He was meant to give a short presentation and then – with a panel including our chum – answer questions from the assembled multitude.
He spoke off the cuff, we’re told, and for some little while beyond the time limit organisers had set. But he was the star of the show. They don’t actually do foot-stomping at such decorous affairs, but if they did, we hear, the crowd might well have outperformed Michael Flatley.
Perhaps the audience was feeling slightly deflated and needed a lift after Vice President Boediono turned up and gave an opening speech that said very little indeed, and specifically nothing of any substance about foreign property ownership. On that issue, he basically said don’t wait up.
We’ll take his advice.
A Robust Little Bill
Lunch at Breeze, The Samaya’s pleasant beachside restaurant at Seminyak, is generally a treat. It was especially so last Friday when an old chum (see the previous item) we hadn’t seen for 20 years was in Bali between appointments and thought we should catch up. It’s amazing how people you haven’t seen for ages seem nonetheless to have worn the intervening years at around the same sort of depreciation rate as yourself. A jest, of course: the party universally looked like the spring lambs they’ve always been.
We talked of many things, as old chums do when fate arranges a brief conjoining of life paths, most of them pleasant. There were two clouds on the horizon, however (and it being a rainy Friday, masses of them overhead, though that’s another matter); they were the inadvisability of doing business in Indonesia, since no one ever does what they say they’re going to do; and the horrendous price of wine.
The party enjoyed a nice little Chilean pinot noir (with the fish and chips, in the Diary’s case) which was a snip at only an arm and a leg. We amused ourselves while selecting the vintage by reading the lovely little note at the front of the wine list, placed there by the courageous management of the establishment, which is rather plainly forthcoming on the perfidy and idiocy of Indonesia’s luxury tax and other daylight robbery laws, and the usurious cost thereof to patrons who order wine.
Brave New World
Clearly, Bali is Conference Island. There was another one on this week, to do with reinventing the consumer society, or something equally navel-gazing. Oh dear, how ho-hum; though perhaps it provides something to do for those among us who would otherwise be flat out erecting a Lego set.
One of the speakers apparently has something to do with ice cream. Wonder if that drips all over your social media?
No Easy Ride
It’s always sad when someone who was seminal to one’s youth shuffles off this mortal coil. Your diarist had barely breasted a quarter century when Dennis Hopper made Easy Rider in 1969. It is said that Hopper was a dreadful man to work for. Well, a lot are. The intervening four decades have certainly made that clear to your diarist. And for that matter, quite a few women have proved less than easy, too.
Easy Rider is a wonderful movie. Like Hopper’s talent, it stood the test of time. Hopper rose to fame – rather rapidly in fact – after directing and starring in the cult dropout film. He was defined as a hell-raiser, renowned for his hard living and drug-taking. He had five wives, one of whom, poor dear, lasted eight days and described the experience as profoundly unfriendly. He was, in that sense, a man of his times. Today’s world is – thankfully – rather more open to the sensible concepts of non-western lifestyles and communal responsibilities.
Hopper began acting in the 1950s and starred alongside James Dean in the classic teenage movie Rebel Without a Cause and Giant. His co-stars in Easy Rider were Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson. Fonda, until then a friend, broke with Hopper under the strain of making the movie under his direction, and described him as “a little fascist freak.”
A tad tart, perhaps. But being insulted by Peter Fonda is surely an honour rather than a demerit.
diary@thebalitimes.com
Hector's Blog appears, as The Diary, in the weekly print edition of The Bali Times, out Fridays, and online at www.thebalitimes.com. The Bali Times is also available worldwide via NewspaperDirect.
