A Wonderful World We Live In

Elizabeth "Grandma Red" Campisi, 1914-2007

27 seconds.

The Gnarliest Guy in Traffic

Right there in the thickest honk & roar of Jakarta traffic, scalding tailpipe to burnished bumper, smack in the haze of unfiltered engines & tropical heat, pedaling apace with taxis, bajai, SUVs, 2, 3 & 4-person motorcycles that waddle, dart & swarm like beetles is a BICYCLIST.

This bule is gnarly. He is not kidding around: this is how he travels in Jakarta & I'll bet he's never slower than the cars & motorcycles. From head to tread, he's fully outfitted with high tech gear: a nice bike & compact pack, expensive biking shorts & short sleeved top, gloves & shoes, the works. All of it black.

More: where other rich men have tinted windows on their Mercedes, this guy wears wrap-around black sunglasses, a formidable black helmet, & a full-on GAS MASK. Even that looked kind of swank.

By the look of his thighs & his gear he's been at this shtick a long time, all of it coated in a film of gray.

Glimpsing Life Outside the Bubble

This week we attended a conference of Fulbrighters at the sumptuous Alila hotel, where we met a lot of people I wish I’d met many months ago. In particular, we met a handful of American scholars who have been living very different lives than the ones E & I have found in Jakarta.

I’ll tell you about some of them in more detail in separate posts. What the 3 who told me the most stories had in common was a tremendous gratitude for running water & that they are living in tiny, rural & predominantly Christian towns on different islands of the archipelago. Some were a little dazzled at finding, after months in the bush, that a majority of American Fulbrighters here are studying Islam in various ways.

Islam? They don’t know from Islam. Some had never even been in a mosque or heard the calls to prayer. Where they’re staying, the Indonesians they know largely & loudly project: Muslims = terrorists, & it’s the Americans who argue for shades of gray.

The fight against terrorism here, after all—almost always reported, even when it IS a terrorist, as a nameless, faceless, motive-less “terrorist” guilty of vague acts or plans for “terrorism”, (today’s very best terms by which to condone disappearing objectionable people)—is front page news every week. But those 3 are the minority.

Among the American Fulbrighters, E is the only historian, looking at Indonesia from 1928 onward, but also & frequently consulting historical documents from the first written records of the land, centuries back. Every one else, be they political scientists, earth scientists, economists, musicians, students of high fashion (really), religious scholars, businessmen or artists, is looking at the very exciting development of Indonesia as a democratic nation in the last 2-10 years.

I’m running out of time here & I must finish my last chapter & pack. Before I head off to Singapore, I want tell you about 2 people in particular—the brave woman studying palm oil plantations in 2 Dyak villages in Kalimantan. And the only other “dependent” from the American program, the only other istri (wife), who may be at the end of her rope in Southern Sulawesi.

!And about sitting in on a live broadcast of Jak-TV’s version of “The Daily Show” (so claims the producer & host), a political satire on the dangerous forefront of testing Indonesia’s freedom of the press. And the Ringling Bros clown cum Fulbright scholar writing about it.

!And about watching a sea turtle laying eggs on “Heavenly Nymph” Island, which used to be called “Sickness Island” when it was a leper colony.

!And about witnessing a friend cheerfully pulled up onto the outdoor stage with a popular political, Islamic artist-guru figure, then seeing her handed a microphone before the huge crowd & asked if, as an American, she might tell us all her thoughts on religion & democracy in Indonesia, as compared with America, & then comment on why the US, for all its superior technology, spends so little time considering the afterlife.

!And about how I’ve met people named: Titi, Tata, Toto, Yoyo, Nana, NiNi, Zhizhi, & Fifi. And how Tata, a man charged with the monumental task of monitoring pollution emanating from Indonesian smokestacks, blew off his due-today report to shepherd MF & I all the way up the Taman Safari in the Bogor hills on public transportation. And how teenaged ZhiZhi & Nini know my voice on the phone & laugh, Hello, Miss Ana, when I call down for breakfast at 11 or lunch at 3, already knowing my order.

!And the Burkini! And Izzi’s Pizza! And Gratitude. And You Say Bigamy, I Say Polygamy. And the Economy Class Train & the Ukulele Boys. And the Swallow Nests men will kill for. And being asked to head a panel on How to Behave Like An American. And the brick ruin of Martello Tower fort, not much smaller than the island itself, torn apart in hunks like a gingerbread cake by waves following the eruption of Krakatoa.

So many good stories.
Stay tuned.

Avocado Coffee

Over here, the avocado is a fruit one associates with chocolate.

You can order tall fountain-drink glasses filled with green & brown swirled smoothies: avocado, ice cream & chocolate sauce. Sweetened avocado juice is a common item on drink menus. Avocado coffee, too, which is too sickly sweet & creamy for my tastes. Sweet, white, avocado soup is a standard at dessert bars.

What do you drizzle on your avocado half? Chocolate sauce!
When I suggest soy sauce instead, some people scrunch up their face in that universal expression of Yuck!

Hazards of Translation

Awhile back, I sat outside with the Arabic words to the five daily calls to prayer in hand & followed along as a single muezzin called the 3:15 PM Asr. It was the first time I’d heard the words clearly. It opened it up to me at little, at last, & this was exciting.

All around the globe the calls to prayer are almost always in Arabic. The sermons, Friday khotbat (galvanizing, fiery speeches) & local announcements are typically made in Indonesian, or the local language. But even that choice has its detractors.

The reason the prayers are in Arabic—& this not the vernacular but a high, classical Arabic—is one of purity. The Qur’an (Koran) was originally written in classical Arabic, according to scripture: directly from God to Muhammad. (Most believe it was compiled, like the Bible, over time by many authors) But to translate it would subject it to interpretation. As anyone who has ever compared Bible translations knows, this can make for some significant changes in meaning.

As one online article puts it: “…the Bible is Bible, no matter what language it may be written in. For Muslims, the divine Word assumed a specific, Arabic form, and that form is as essential as the meaning that the words convey. Hence only the Arabic Koran is the Koran, and translations are simply interpretations.”

The purity of this ambition appeals to me in many ways. I find a rare beauty in the original language & form still preserved within today's global, schismatic, polyglot worship.

But there are some obvious disadvantages, too.

There are roughly 1 billion Muslims in the world, but only about 200 thousand Arabic speakers, not all of whom are Muslims. More, today's Arabic in its many dialects is to classical Arabic is sort of like Californian English is to Shakespearian English: not all that many people get it on the first pass. Some never do.

Though the reasons are different, one effect is that Arabic sermons & prayers in non-Arabic-speaking countries are a lot like Latin mass. There’s a quality of ritual, meditation, beauty & tradition in it, but almost no one understands it. That has its downsides. Already, I’m told, many Indonesians pray (privately) in their own language. To do so in public, however, has its dangers.

In December 2005, in the east Java town of Mulang, a charismatic cleric, Yusman “Gus” Roy taught his students & congregation to do the prayers in Indonesian. Radical groups (who exactly that is here is unclear to me) objected, declaring his translation—ie: interpretation—to be blasphemous. They threatened his life, destroyed his home & school. The government, called in to help, labeled Roy the provocateur. He was named the creator of the unrest & so was arrested. He was found not guilty of blasphemy, but convicted for “despoiling” or insulting Islam.

Maintaining an original 'purity' of form forever--especially of language--requires us to strive against the forward nature of things, & so comes at a price.
He was imprisoned for 18 months.

Cleric Roy has recently been released & came out at once, radically, declaring his intention to continue praying & leading prayers in Indonesian.

My appreciation of its aesthetics aside, let's ask the question: Has the preservation of language shielded the Koran & Islamic prayers from the hazards & vagaries of human interpretation, & despoiling maniacs like cleric Roy? Of course it has: how could 1,217 years & 1 billion people find any textual grounds for disagreement when it's all written, quite clearly, in classical Arabic?

Jilbab Strip Tease

At a table of young Indonesian Fulbrighters, readying themselves for a few years in America, I met 25 year old, German-born RS, a very bright woman bound for 2 years in Queens, who to most appearances is already a New Yorker.

Unlike most of her fellow Indonesians, certainly unlike virtually all of her fellow female classmates, RS is fast-paced, loquacious & brashly confident, shoulders-back, face-forward, round cheeks smiling, & a buoyant, sharp sense of humor at the tip of her tongue, & not afraid to ask a million questions. She genuinely seems ready for anything.

The fact that she wears jilbab—a pale pink that day—does make her a little nervous. She’s concerned for how people will treat her in America, because that is something she can't control. But I can’t imagine anyone better prepared to face US stares or questions with a confident laugh & a direct, productive retort than RS.

At this table of otherwise fairly meek, very bright, & varyingly frightened young women (some headed for community colleges in Butte, MT; Houston, TX; Des Moines, IA; Amherst, MA), RS told a story about the jilbab striptease.

A Taiwanese theatre director approached her in a school in Singapore with plans to stage a play called NYMPHOMANIA. He wanted her to play the “Muslim Nympho”. It took her a comically long time to figure out what this word meant & when she did discover its meaning, was not sure this was actually a play or that he was serious. It was & he was. She was intrigued—not enough to act in it, but enough to hear him out.

Here was the director’s idea:
She would saunter on stage in hijab, with only her hands & face showing. Then she’d coyly, with a little dance, remove her jilbab…under which would be another jilbab. She’d do this over & over, each time revealing another jilbab beneath it, onion-skinning down until finally the music would end & she—still in jilbab—would bow & exit. RS declined.

I think this concept is hilarious. For my part, it’s exactly the kind of humor the world needs more of right now. But it’s not remotely clear to me how Muslims would take it. So we polled the table, about 6 people in all. RS herself also thought this was hilarious & a great idea, & said so strongly. She admitted to having seen a lot of theatre, however, & having traveled the world a bit. It surprised but did not offend her.

No one else thought it was hilarious. Even hearing the story openly told shocked the other girls (the country’s highest scoring high school grads, half in jilbab, some with braces). In an obvious state of shock already, they said as much, too: “it would shock me”, but went on to suggest that this was because, they felt, they had never been exposed to such humor before. They had little experience seeing plays. They’d never seen hijab parodied; the very idea unnerved them.

The one obviously Christian girl—dressed, as Christian girls are said to dress, in tight, fashionable clothes, makeup & styled hair—was too weirded-out to comment. Diplomatically, she demurred with the apology that she had never seen a play before.

Thinking of E’s production of the Syrian comedy, The Jester—performed almost entirely by Americans, most white, some Jewish, some Asian, some Indian, & one Muslim—I asked the girls if it would make a difference to them if the actor performing the jilbab strip tease was a non-Muslim, even a white American?

They all said No at once: it would make no difference to them who performed it. The thing itself was too shocking to care for such details.

They all concluded—no doubt feeling obligated in their pre-departure mentality, as a form of self-preservation, to exercise a deliberate openness to new experiences, comfort zones & cultural quiddities, even jilbab strip teases—that they would probably get used to such things, & not be offended, eventually. If only they were more exposed to foreign or new cultures & forms of humor.

That goes for all of us, I think. But if there’s one thing conservative Islam could use to everyone’s benefit, it’s a more developed sense of humor

The Too Many Houses of God

When I lived in Exeter, NH, in 2001, there were 6 churches within 3 blocks of my apartment on Main Street: Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Congregational, Catholic, & non-denominational, which was part of Phillips Exeter Academy. A few blocks out from there you’d find a Episcopalian church, too. Probably more.

Over the course of my year there I visited services at almost all of them once, including the Islamic services held by Muslim students at Phillips Exeter Academy, in the weeks following 9/11.

Except for this last group, whose handful of worshippers, all teenage boys, seemed to go through their ablutions & prayers independently of spiritual (or adult) leadership, newly charged with a great, uncertain self-consciousness, these were mostly homey, neighborhood services with long-standing core members & gentle, boring, family-oriented sermons. Nearly everyone in the Baptist church had gray hair, except for me & a single, Chinese, high school freshman girl who sat in the back, looking dutiful & miserable.

They all rang their bells every Sunday & on holidays & special occasions. I liked the sound of them, though they woke me up. I probably laid imaginary plans to wax their clappers, in the way I currently fantasize about minaret-silencing EMPs, but I don’t recall. In time, I stopped hearing them.

I don’t mean any particular disrespect to the Christian churches in suggesting that most religious sermons are entirely uninspired; I find most sermons of any religion—as I find most books, plays, lectures, movies, political discussions, etc, my own contributions included—to be C-average boring, & rarely or actually about God. Not so much out of snobbery, but because these are works of ordinary people, not of God.

It may be self-evident but not always obvious: that it’s universally extraordinary to be extraordinary in any way, at anything.

In a town as tiny as Exeter, a foreign visitor (or Californian) might be alarmed at the sheer density of churches, some of them mere feet from one another, & might conclude that the town must be thick with fanatics.

I never knowingly met a fanatic in New Hampshire, either in the churches or on the street, but I read about them in the papers & given what emerged in the last two presidential elections, & the international reputation of “the grotesque theocracy of today’s America” (Robert Hughes, Things I Didn’t Know, p. 144) (equal & opposite to our international reputation of being a superpower of Godless infidels), there must be some Exeter fanatics out there.

New Hampshire's epithet, “Live Free or Die” (which its convicts stamp on the state's license plates) sounds pretty fanatic to me.

When I interviewed the daughter of an Islamic cleric here in Jakarta, a Muslim educated in Catholic schools who now works in a political office, she lamented the growing density of mosques in Ache [ah’ chay]. Ache is a particularly religious & conservative town on the northern tip of Sumatra, hit worst by the tsunami 2 years ago, now living under Sharia (Muslim) law, where all Muslim women are required by law to wear jilbab.

Also Banjarmasin, the capital of South Kalimantan (the island of Borneo). The cleric’s daughter hyperbolized that there are places where “every square inch has a mosque…It is a city with thousands of mosques & so many poor people….If any fraction of the money that goes into building mosques went to social programs to deal with poverty,” she said, the entire country would be tangibly improved.

True, perhaps, though easier said with a decentralized (Democratic) government & a fierce eye warding off government legislation of religion. Still, I take her point. When I witness government so inept or corrupt or feeble that the streets are thick with garbage & disease, people impoverished, the building of yet another alleged house of God, outside of which a democratic citizen can be stoned to death, can be a squander beyond all tolerance.

When I stand on my 30th story balcony with binoculars here in hazy Jakarta, I count 34 mosques & 1 enormous one under construction. From the window of the lavish Alila hotel in central Jakarta, I counted four mosques in a single square block all being walking distance from Istiqlal, the largest mosque in southeast Asia.

From the perspective of a foreigner, the sheer density of mosques can be alarming, some of them mere feet from one another, & one might conclude that the town is thick with fanatics. It’s not a perfect comparison for many reasons, but I haven’t knowingly met a fanatic in Jakarta, either in the mosques or in the street.

I read about them in the papers, though, & given what emerges every day in the news, & Islam’s international reputation as the cradle of terrorism (equal & opposite to the reputation I grew up with & saw represented on TV movies, & hear plead by Muslims everywhere on the street: that Islam is a religion of peace) (though I think everyone since the Incas calls theirs a 'religion of peace'), there are certainly Jakarta fanatics out there.

And there are. There is no denying this. But I suspect the density of mosques is not the measure of that danger, but rather one measure of C-average human inefficiency. Among other things.

I mean no disrespect to Islam in saying this: everyone who has ever walked the earth, to say nothing of those stridently paving it with houses of God, is lacking a certain degree of efficiency. Do we imagine that, like the Balinese animists, if we build a worthy edifice, the divine spirit will sense & grace it? Are we all not, ourselves, houses of God, inspired & chilled with awe, or only uninhabited?

I only suspect it a human failing: that finding God indoors, much less at all, is more extraordinary than we claim. We just keep building houses.

Gongsmith Video

Here's the 50 second video I'd meant to insert months back, from my trip to the Bogor gongsmiths.
Click here for the original post--> The Gong Factory

House Wine

Without tens of thousands of dollars, securing an apartment for a month in Sydney from Jakarta is a challenge. The reasons are unimportant (a walk-through is usually necessary; most require a 6 month commitment...). Suffice it to say, I was lucky to find one.

Over a cross-hemispheric phone line, the housing officer speaks with a Australian-Russian accent. Assuming my natural terror of the season, she assured me at length that WINTER in Sydney (June) is actually quite mild, even beautiful, "Like the Baltics," she suggests, as if I would know exactly what winter in the Baltics is like.

"Ah, wonderful," I say with great, feigned relief, having already wintered once in Australia. "Well that sounds perfect, then." The studio is technically available, but she has not yet agreed to rent it to me.

At which she asks, with an expensive pause, if it would be all right if a complimentary bottle of Australian wine were waiting for me in the studio?

It would. Except for one week as a guest at the 5-star hotel lounge next door, it's been a dry 4 months. But this question has the clear ring of a test to it. I sense distinctly that things will go much better for me if I pass.

At this point, I am out of other housing options & my credit card has not yet cleared. More, I'm paying $2.50 / minute to phone Sydney from Indonesia, to reminisce about winter in the Baltics: I had to ace this one & quick. What if the answer is NO? Was she screening for 'vices'? Is 'complimentary bottle of wine' a secret Aussie code for something...good? Perverse? Illegal?

'Why yes!' I cry, now with some Russian lustiness, "I would LOVE some wine!" which sails me through, delighting her & disgruntling me with my own knee-jerk willingness to shill for a stranger's irrational tests, so long as it's funny. By the end of such exchanges, I often feel like I've just played a walk-on role in someone else's play, a fictional character: like one who's just spent a long, warm winter drinking wine in Latvia.

Now that we're friends, I venture: "Do, uh, do many people say no?" Yes: homeless people.

"Some," she answers, falling into a more confiding tone. "Muslims. And,"--with an obligatory respect-- "certain people who do not drink. But not Russians--" a reflective, nostalgic pause-- "The Russians, we know how to drink, you know? You might say we are very good at it."

"I've heard that of Russians," I say knowingly, hoping this is polite.

"Yes!" she cries, we are getting along famously now. "WE don't object to wine, do we?"

"No!" Now I'm Russian, too. Good.

"Or to vodka?"

"Hurray for vodka!" I cheer, hoping no one can hear me through the walls, & RIGHT as the noon calls to prayer fire up.

Suddenly the bond charge goes through & the studio is mine. I hang up & resume my entirely sober month, but maybe sold on a vacation to Estonia. I'm sure we'll speak again.

I've had a number of exchanges here that would, at home, be considered tactless stereotypes & unacceptably direct observations of race, nationality, religion & gender that I've grown more accustomed to hearing & saying abroad.

But generalizations (in general) are popular things, rapidly providing traveling strangers with a common Us that can be better--if only in our fleeting imaginations--than our suddenly, randomly, common Them. Even if it is all fictional.

Costs of Living

Some numbers, to compare (all figures in US dollars).

• 45 minute Taxi ride: about $5
• A 3 hour train to Bandung, executive class: $5
• Angkutan Kota public van, train station to Safari: $0.34 (+ ukulele boy tip: $0.56)
• Taxi back, Safari to train station: $40
• The Bogor Express train (1 hour): $2
• The Bogor Economy class train (1 hour 15 mins): $0.28
• Liter of gasoline: $1.66 / gallon
•
• Monthly 2BR apt rent exceeds our monthly 4BR MN house mortgage.
• Monthly energy, water, sewer, garbage, gym, tennis court bill: ~ $160
• High speed internet connection: $40 / mo

• 2-hour apartment cleaning $15
• 1.5 hour “crème bath”, shoulder massage & hair style- $15
• Hour Massage: $5-$40
• A single paperback book: $15-35
• Postage for postcard / letter to US: $0.45

• Lunch / Dinner, delivered to my door from the Verandah Café: $2.50
• Coffee: $2.50 -$4.50 (drinks frequently cost more than main courses)
• A nice sushi dinner for 2: $20-30, with drinks
• A sederhana (simple fare) dinner for 2 at a warung: $3-5
• 12 Eggs: $1.35 (more for a carton, vs. loose in a bag)
• Liter box of milk: $1.92
• Ramen: $0.11
• Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box: $2
• pack of cigarettes: $0.66, or $0.05 / cigarette

Charismatic Leaders in the Hitler Cafe

The Timeout cafe at the mall around the corner makes a decent cup of ginger coffee. It's got a huge screen in the back that plays soccer games, & the baristas wouldn't care if you hung out all day.

The only striking thing about this cafe is its poster selection. One in particular. Along one wall: sports heroes. Lots of them, mostly Americans. Along the other: heroes of a different sort. From left to right, observe: Albert Einstein, Che Guevara, Bob Marley, 2 of Soekarno (first Indonesian president / founding father), & one of Mussolini & Hitler.

This time the swastika isn't Hindu or Buddhist, it's an actual Nazi swastika. At least the owner had a the good taste of putting Einstein at the opposite end.

The owner wasn't there when we asked & the barista so accustomed to the posters that they'd become invisible to him. He opined that these were a set of great leaders. Bob Marley? He shrugged. They weren’t his. Hitler? He shrugged again.

Youth shrugging off Hitler. The whole future tumbles forward so.
Indonesia spent WWII occupied by Japan. What does Hitler mean to the average kid here? We are left to play the armchair anthropologist, to speculate about motives: Hitler & Mussolini finishing a public line-up of admirable men.

Is it because the owner actually liked Hitler’s ideals?
Could be, but I doubt it. Though last month we saw an entire front shelf devoted to Mein Kampf in translation, in an Indonesian bookstore. Hard to know what that’s about without more information, but there it was.

There’s a case to be made here for a dire future of Indonesian-Chinese, not entirely incomparable to how Jews were regarded in Europe. The Chinese, only 3% of Indonesia but controlling a disproportionate wealth, have never had a fully secure existence here. Given the bloody precedent of the 1998 riots following the money crisis, there are real things to fear. Even this week we heard allegations that the papers in Surabaya, Indonesia’s 2nd largest city, tend to report good things about Chinese citizens using their Indonesian names, but scandals & crimes involving Chinese-Indonesians using their Chinese names.

Or is the owner just doing some provocative kid thing, posting a monster like some teens put up pictures of Marilyn Manson? I don’t think so. The place is too clean & earnest, the posters much too matter-of-fact.

One thing I do know: Several times at least, Soekarno (2 posters of him), who was “a modern Indonesian leader most generally regarded in the West as a prototypical charismatic Third World luminary” [Benedict Anderson, Language & Power], famously invoked Hitler in his speeches on charismatic leadership.

Soekarno defined charisma as “an extraordinary quality of a person, regardless of whether this quality is actual, alleged or presumed. ‘Charismatic authority’, hence shall refer to rule over men…to which the governed submit because of their belief in the extraordinary quality of the specific person. The magical sorcerer, the prophet, the leader of hunting & booty expeditions, the warrior chieftain,…the “Caesarist’ ruler….the legitimacy of charismatic rule thus rests upon the belief in magical powers, revelations, and hero worship….Charismatic rule is not managed according to general norms, either traditional or rational…& in this sense is ‘irrational.’. It is ‘revolutionary’ in the sense of not being bound to the existing order.” [translation from H. Stuard Hughes, Consciousness & Society: the Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930.]

Soekarno also publicly lauded Hitler as “extraordinarily clever” in his successful depictions of Third Reich idealism to his people, but also as an example of charismatic leadership that he wanted to avoid. Not because of Hitler’s actions, though. Those don’t even come up in the speech. Rather than accepting him as a Hero or Infallible, a Charismatic Leader in the mold of Hitler, Soekarno wanted the students listening to his speech to accept his leadership by affirming “to Indonesian society the need for leadership in the Revolution, in the State,…simply as an enunciation of a principle of history.”

That is, in contrast to Hitler’s supernatural authority, Soekarno styled himself more as a man of the People.

This is my current hypothesis on why that poster of Hitler is on the wall of a homely cafe: I suspect that President Soekarno brought Hitler into the public consciousness as a forceful, effective leadership figure completely removed from his actual actions or policies. The operating regard for Hilter, in this case, doesn’t have anything to do with Jews or Germany or genocide or ethnicities. There's a different conception of History at work here, different than we're accustomed to allowing for the likes of Hitler.

Instead, well-respected Soekarno invoked & in doing so validated Hitler to the general public, not as the instigator of the holocaust, but merely as an example of a leadership Type (charismatic), a leadership Style (forceful & effective), & a Mythic Figure belonging not to the 1930s & 40s but to the abstract Past, to History In General. One man in a large, political pantheon.

In some ways it frightens me to see how easily that's done. I have to wonder if this won't, one generation soon, happen in the US & even in Europe. With enough remove & just the right slant, one might coolly compliment the devil himself for his admirably effective tactics. With even more remove & just the right slant, the young audience to that speech could nod & even admire him.

By & by, here’s one more fact:

Driving along a strip of roadside shack-shops, some of them selling baskets, other shoes, badminton & tennis rackets, wheel-chairs & crutches, luggage, juice, we saw a tiny, framed poster shack. Right there on the sidewalk were all the exact same black & white posters. All of them: Einstein, Che Guevara, Bob Marley, Soekarno, Hitler & Mussolini. A couple different ones of each.

The Timeout café owner? What are the chance he just went out & bought the whole set, merely the closest posters to the road. Did he even look at them? It doesn’t answer the question of why Hitler posters are for sale at all, or why of all the sets he could have gotten, the café owner bought that one, but it does make the question a much bigger one.

I still favor my hypothesis about Soekarno making it possible to regard Hitler as a neutral Leader. Still, you think you've cleverly figured the answer to something, until you just happen to notice this little thing by the side of the road, this tiny detail in a shack that you so easily might have missed, & all over again the whole inquiry turns on its head.

Don't Say I Never Took You Anywhere NICE

What with the leper colonies, waria, dockyard swastikas, death-defying Frogger traffic dashes, graveyards, ukulele boys & crippled, blind karaoke singers on the economy class train, I feel we showed cousin MF the best of Jakarta.

MF is an intrepid traveler. All this week, even just for the heat & smog, I felt cause to reflect that many people I know would have gotten cranky & fainted long ago, while MF remained (outwardly) cheerful. Well into the second hour cramped in a sweltering angkutan kota “just like the locals do” van heading up into the Bogor hills, I felt a little mystified at why I myself have not yet fainted.
And why I keep doing things like this.

When other people come here, they go to the Bali beach & relax with an adult beverage. The only time I’ve been to an Indonesian coast, we saw THIS:



Look at this picture: Here we have a typical multi-use space. Photographed from the Dutch East India Company’s centuries old Syahbandar lookout tower on the north coast, a corner of what Captain Cook once called the most hospitable port in the world: now (or still) a dump & chicken ground, a highly disgusting edge of green sewage water, & an old man drying fish on a tarp right in the middle of it all.

Before I launch into all the things we did do this week, let me list for you some of the very few things that cousin M “I Will Try Anything…Almost” F would NOT do:

• Eat that fish.
• Order fried spleen, fried lung, or fried intestine.
• Hold a baby orangutan.

But that’s about it. We also snuck into the national museum. That’s what ruffian academics like E do: brazenly sneak us into closed museums to observe unlit, unlabeled artifacts for free. And enjoy it. The man can’t be stopped.

Wedding Rings

Concluding an exhaustive survey of teenage mall baristas, I have finally discovered the truth behind the missing wedding rings here.

For the last week, curious at the customs, MF & I have been looking for wedding rings on the hands of married couples, but finding none. Almost none. The ‘almost’ is what threw me, because it’s not just the Christians or just the Muslims, or just the Chinese…who wears them seems random.

Random it is. It’s personal, not religious.

According to my representative sample of teenage mall baristas (n=2), in whom I place an absolute confidence & authority on the subject of marriage practices in Indonesia, wedding rings are integral parts of (most people’s) wedding CEREMONY, but wearing them afterwards is an arbitrary, personal choice. It sounded as if actually wearing the rings on a daily basis was considered quaint.
We held up ours; they giggled.

I’d never thought about the ring ceremony & the actual wearing of the rings as completely separate customs, but of course they are.

I Also Know Many Pertinent Facts

Living here, it can often seem as if Evan knows everything.

This is a good thing. Certainly he knows everything relevant to living here as a scholar, though I do not. His knowledge of Indonesia is encyclopedic. He isn’t quite fluent, but he’s more than adequate. He’s got that commanding beard. Much as I’ve liked it here, I’m not in my element & probably never will be. It’s an odd asymmetry of power & knowledge to have going on for months & months. I am the dependent.

Today he looked up from the paper & asked me, “Where’s your ulma?” And I felt this minor elation that I could answer this, that the ULNA, with an N, is a bone in your forearm. Ha!

But this didn’t seem very important. When I asked him about the communist massacre in the 1960s here, he talked for about 45 minutes & it was so interesting—seriously—that I took notes. It is never a good idea to compare one’s knowledge with a professional scholar’s in their territory.

But this is okay. This is his specialty, not mine, & I’m used to it. Until the balance flips again on May 24th, when I leave for Singapore & Sydney, I just sort of cede control & let myself get towed along on the dinghy behind the ship, exclaiming & pointing out interesting stuff along the ride.

The finest point of this imbalance, however, happened to me last week when we were inside the arts complex’s Documentation Center. With its crème colored linoleum tile floor & crème walls, years-old magazines & clunky art, this looks like a 1960s public school library room, but with all the books in a musty room behind the counter. It occupies a humble second story & has an actual card catalog filled with crispy, typed cards, documenting Indonesian literature in its various forms from the late 1960s (naturally excluding anything done by artists with Communist affiliations).

That is: it’s filled with print records of modern Indonesian theatre.
Evan has spent hours here.
I have some suspicion that he is duplicating this entire archive & bringing it home with us.



While we waited for E to order his latest Xeroxes of…everything…cousin MF & moseyed around this room, trying to muster interest in the little acting & art awards, homely portraits & plaques set up along the undusted card catalog. I was able to identify a few faces of Indonesian theatre artists & authors on the wall—“This here is W.S. Rendra, Evan spent time at his artist’s compound in 1996…this is Asrul Sani, we saw a really dull play of his, his wife cast herself in the lead role…this is Pramoedya, he was imprisoned for 15 years & a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature…” & I even knew that this one dusty trophy for acting was fashioned in the shape of a bamboo angklung—the onomatopoetic name for the musical instrument.

This was like being able to name the flowers in an English garden. Neither useful nor interesting, but quaintly satisfying in that my command of one taxonomic group (in this case: Indonesian artists’ names & faces) was faintly improving.

The thing that got to me, though, the thing that really put a fine point on my level of knowledge here, was seeing the rodent droppings in the box propping up a trophy & instantly accessing the word for mouse poop.

Mouse poop. That’s what I can say in Indonesian. I included it in my 5 cent tour, “Here’s a finger painting of Jose Rizal Manua, the guy who runs the book store down there & directs everything on that stage, while in THERE you’ll see what the Javanese commonly refer to as kotoran tikus....”

Oh yeah, boy, I know all kinds of good stuff.

Cleanliness is Next to Godliness

Television commercials selling laundry detergent share a kind of Loving-Mother, Happy-Home snuggliness world-wide. Apparently that’s how we like to think of laundry: of Mom taking care of us.
And of it.

If you’re laundress-Mom yourself—the target audience—we’re looking at that extra-bright laundry as a kind of totalizing maternal success. Clearly, we are meant to understand that children (& society) most love mothers who get their whites really white.

No one sells laundry detergent with images of half-naked, smoking longshoremen scrubbing their ragged undies in the polluted harbor waters & hanging them on the sail lines to dry. Though having seen this at the Sunda Kelapa pier in Jakarta, I think ad execs really ought to consider it. Who needs laundry detergent more?

Better yet, I’m willing to be convinced that adding bleach to this harbor would make it cleaner.

Today I saw a TV ad for bleach that has the wonderful quality of being at once absolutely familiar & totally alien to the American sensibility. True to form, the commercial is populated with mothers & frolicking little girls all in white, all of them excessively happy, loving & well-scrubbed, enjoying their cleanliness in & of itself. The background music, as it does in US ads, assures me they have Good Values.

In this commercial, however, all the happy women & girls are in hijab, head to toe, with ruffled white jilbabs draping down over their shoulders, perfectly framing their angelic faces, & ruffled white dresses flowing down to the floor. The ad ends—& it’s a beautiful, striking image—with dozens of smiling women & girls all in white, assembling & kneeling in a bright mosque for prayers.

It might not convert me, but that would sell me bleach.

Now harken back to the dockyards for a moment, where we saw a great plastic banner swagged over the containers of coal, motorcycles, squat toilets, & cement (one of several signs we’ve seen around the city) admonishing workers (largely in vain) to clean up after themselves reading: “Cleanliness is part of Faith.”

Demons at the Gate

11 April


Here are a few differences in what is otherwise a completely western, familiar hotel in the city of Bandung, 3 hours south of here.

• DEMONS, like our friend up there, guard the entrance & lobby. Some people say this is to keep out other Evil Demons—takes one to beat one, I guess. But where is our demon in the hierarchy of demons? How did we get this demon working for us? Why does this demon not also frighten off Good Spirits, or, say, obnoxious tourists, or the rest of us? Is there a lobby-demon dance floor in the basement, where all the local lobby-demons gather on their off hours to dance?

No one can answer these troubling questions. These are just facts the of life: the demon keeps out the evil spirits. As I am frequently admonished, you don’t get to have every detail of the universe all spelled out in some exciting, consistent, complete story, the way I like it. More often, I suspect the demon is in the lobby just because it’s cool looking & arguably native. Like a totem pole. Or because, like vases of lilies, that’s just what you put in lobbies. There are quite a lot of them guarding entrances to buildings.

• FORBIDDEN ITEMS. There is one item on the List of Forbidden Items written up in the hotel directory & rules: “The Durian Fruit is strictly prohibited on the premises.” Everything else gets a pass.

• QIBLAT (or Kibblat) on the ceiling. This is the small marker stenciled onto the ceiling in many public spaces that indicates the direction of prayer. When Muslims pray five times a day, they pray facing Mecca. Usually we think of that as being to the east. Here, in Indonesia, Mecca is to the west.

There are also prayer rugs for sale—these are 2x3 foot rugs—that have compasses imbedded in them.

• SOUVENIRS. Available for purchase are bath mats, Bibles, Topi (Muslim hats for men), Koran, & post cards.

• GECKOS . At dawn & dusk, & often all the night through, there are geckos here. These are gentle, lucky creatures who inhabit the rafters & bathrooms of the tropics, eating mosquitoes & singing you to sleep with little Geck-Geck chirping. They can climb anything, literally. I've seen them in our 30th floor apartment in Jakarta, in our 4 star hotel in Bandung, & everywhere in Bali. The babies are easy to catch, perfect little imprints of GECKO-ness, & weigh absolutely nothing.

Here's a fat one on a sign:

Here’s another difference, in general: The night we went to the theatre—the whole reason we were in Bandung—E left his backpack in the taxi. In it was a very expensive video camera & tripod, with which he’d intended to tape the performance. He gave his name & information to the parking attendant, but knew it was hopeless. A few minutes into the play, the attendant came into the theater to fetch E from the audience: the taxi driver had returned & brought the backpack, with everything in it.

Blah, Blah, BASTARD, Blah

Monologues performed in languages I do not speak can make me feel like a Peanuts character listening to adults.

By now, I have seen a quite lot of plays in languages I do not speak. Often it just doesn’t work for obvious reasons. When it’s a talented troupe, however, & a play that I know (or a play with a clear story) this can be just fine. Knowing the story, I focus on the directing, the set design, the costuming, the acting styles. My favorite example of this working well was when we saw two excellent & very different productions of Brecht’s “The Resistible Rise of Artuo Ui” in one year, first in Australia, then in Berlin (in German). Later, we saw it again in the US.

Typical of print advertising here, the Jakarta Post didn’t announce Teatre Payung Hitam’s play until the day AFTER it left Jakarta. So we chased it to Bandung.

This was a performance of 4 poems by WS Rendra, somehow involving a Javanese tyrant & the 120 anniversary of the death of Multatuli (pen name of the Dutch author Douwes Dekker), co-sponsored by the Dutch embassy. I’m still not sure what one has to do with the other. But it promised to be action & story light & prose heavy: bad news for me. It didn’t sound good.

And yet, it was! It was good for three reasons. First, because the acting was strong & there were long stretches of silence in which it was mostly movement, dramatic & highly narrative. It didn’t take language to explain the relationship between the lovers, the abuse of the tyrant, etc.

Second, because it was imaginatively staged: the clever euphemism of a rape, implied with a sarong held & shaken just so, without literally enacting it; the angklung playing music (bamboo shakers that sound like their name); the visual beauty of stone bowls filled with water & petals, used bathing each other’s faces or pouring it over heads. Parts of it were so moving that I almost cried.

Finally, because of the monologue! Normally a foreign monologue is deadly. And indeed: I started drifting off because didn’t understand the tyrant’s long rant at all. Then, suddenly, the Bad Guy shouted "BRENGSEK!" & I sat up again thinking, Hey, I know that word! That means Bastard!

Now I’m really paying attention. In fact, now I like it, not because I understand but because he’s articulating really well, shouting everything, & it gives me the surprising opportunity to notice how many words I actually DO understand. To my ears the tyrant’s maniacal monologue ran something like this:

…Blah, blah, blah TODAY! blah, blah, blah WITHOUT! blah, blah, BASTARD! blah, blah, blah, SATAN! blah, blah, EXCUSE ME! blah, blah, BASTARD! blah, blah, CHEROOT! blah, WITHOUT blah! WITHOUT blah! WITHOUT blah! Blah, blah, NO! NO! blah, blah WOMAN! blah, blah, blah, IT DOESN’T MATTER! blah, blah, STRAIGHT AHEAD! blah, blah, MULTATULI! [Dutch author] blah, blah, MULTATULI! blah, blah, MULTATULI! blah, blah, THANK YOU.

I turned to E: “That was great.”

By & large, I’m no longer attending plays with E here.
I thought I’d leave it at a high note.

Photos

For those following the trip by photograph, I've just loaded 3 more sets onto Flickr from our excellent week with cousin Mark (click More of the Citradel's Photos, right):

• Thousand Islands (a trip to 4 of the islands of ruins off the coast of Jakarta)
• Taman Mini (Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature theme park)
• Taman Safari (the economy class journey to Bogor's safari & zoo), with a bunch more pictures in the
• Jakarta, April set (the Sunda Kelapa pier, etc) & one more in Food.

For me, the MOST interesting images tend not to get caught on film, as it's usually the wrong time to lift a camera. We've been busy, though. I'll post some stories after I've had a little nap.