Don’t Cry for Me Indonesia

Today, on the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia, two Sumatran men were sentenced to public whipping with a cane. Their crime? Consensual gay sex in private. The victims had been apprehended by a gang of vigilantes who broke into their private room to catch them “in the act”. Its a chilling development in an alarming trend: Indonesia’s slide into the ranks of countries ruled by religious extremism.

The judgement follows on from the appalling, racist and transparently political incarceration of Jakarta’s governor ( a double minority, being Christian and Chinese) for “blasphemy”) an offense that a) it is clear he did not commit and b) should not be illegal anyway in any modern country. The courts have sent a clear message – they will side with the loud voices of religious conservatives.

The same law has been used to persecute the Gafatar minority, whose unorthodox and syncretic blend of Islam – arguably much more representative of Indonesia’s own culture – was deemed to be sacriligious for, among other things, allowing Muslims the choice to pray rather than labelling it as compulsory.

It is a scary time. Despite Jakarta’s new modern art museum and Hooter’s outlet (!) there can be no doubt that one of Asia’s most famously tolerant societies is slipping into a religious dark age. Wake up Indonesia, before its too late!

Southeast Asia Weird

In just about the least horrifying news out of Indonesia this week (scroll up) , the decomposing body of a “sea monster” washed up on one of its beaches. It is, most likely, the carcass of a whale.

Meanwhile Bangkok experienced a new food fad, with a bakery in Pathum Thani gaining online fame for this adorable/creepy dog-shaped coconut puddings. Can’t wait to eat on of these puppies…literally.

And finally in Singapore, a new “vending machine” for luxury cars opened in the form of an arrestingly designed showroom where with the flick of a switch you can “select” the car you want to test.

Tales of the city

Last week the Guardian newspaper launched an interesting experiment – a one week feature on one of the world’s great under-reported cities, Jakarta. The paper ran a series of articles on everything from the Indonesian capital’s breakout hip hop star Rich Chigga to its problems with football hooliganism, notorious traffic, redevelopment plans and the (to me, surprising) fact that the city has actually suffered a net population loss since 1990. Like many third world megacities it is apparently now losing more people than it attracts, a startling reversal of fortunes.

Read all about it here or my own impressions of the “big Durian” here.

Summertime, the living is easy…

As my long Summer break ambles on, I’ve been enjoying balmy evenings and blazing days around town, sampling some of the city’s new hot spots. It’s a hard life. 😉

Omotesando Koffee, the first outpost of the super-hip (and now defunct in Harajuku) Tokyo brand was disappointing . Despite massive queues at its sleek Wanchi store when it first opened, the coffee I had there was just OK for the hefty 50 HKD ( $8.60 AUD) pricetag. I’d say: give it a miss.

I also went for a late afternoon dip at Deep Water Bay and returned to one of my favourite hangouts of last summer, the Thai restaurant atop the changing rooms next to the beach. It seems to have changed management and gone a little bit “fancier” but you can still order a coconut and a som tam and sit outside watching the sun on the water and feeling the salt breeze.

By far my best new discovery though was the recently opened Potato Head, a branch of the famous Bali bar and restaurant, now set up in Sai Ying Pun. Whereas HK’s other Balinese import Mamasan was disappointing in its local incarnation, Potato Head seemed to get everything right. I ate at the restaurant there called Kaum (there is also a small homewares/fashion store, bar and events space) and loved it: funky and forward-looking tropical design, friendly service, great music and delicious nasi goreng made a place I’m looking forward to getting back to.

Perfect for Summer.

Rich…

Rich Chigga is a 16 year-old in Jakarta who learnt both English and hip hop via the internet and describes his main thing as “twitter” with music as a side project, a true creation of our times. Despite this, his song has caught fire online and attracted seven million views. Many of the viewers came to the song as a joke (that name, the pink polo shirt and fanny pack) but then suddenly realised that it was pretty….good. Now Chigga has been picked up by a management team who also have Keith Ape on the roster, leading to speculation of a new Asian trap-rap movement.

By Eko Nugruho.

All around the world

Above, poster for WordUp bar in Tokyo. Below, Adria A in Brazil.

 

 

Okunte Kinte in Uganda.

  

And Eko Nugroho in Indonesia.

  

Asia Weird

This week around Asia:

BANGKOK’s very own Batman got busted for speeding his batmobile along the city’s always crowded freeways – a somehow perfectly surreal turn of events for the world’s most comicbook-like city.

JAKARTA sewer cleaners unearthered a shroud-like cloth containing monkey bones, leading to fears that a “Pocong”, a much-feared Indonesian spirit that takes the form a shroud-bound corpse, was on the loose.

HONG KONG celebrities ate Kentucky Fried Chicken at an awards ceremony.

And in MANILA, a call for volunteers to help restore the city’s most beautiful building.

OUTER SPACE: A distant star and its orbiting planets received names from Thai folklore. Now all that remains is to find life in the “crocodile tears” constellation to set into motion a Ramkien space-opera!

 

And from Bali

I was stomping around Causeway Bay blasting gamelan music in my headphones over the weekend. Blissful….

The old banyan tree

Photo by LL.

Hindu-bogan-chic

Mysterious muse

One of my favourite evenings in Bali was spent at the Nur Massage salon in Ubud, in an open topped cubicle of a plant-and-statuary filled Balinese courtyard, being massaged with a yogurt scrub under the stars.

As we left, I noticed this glamorous portrait over the reception desk and asked who it was. I had thought perhaps that it would be the founder of this establishment in younger, glamorous days but it turned out not to be the case.

The receptionist said vaguely that she was an Indonesian hero “like Kartini”.

(Kartini, the most high-profile heroine in Indonesia’s patriotic pantheon, was a Javanese noblewoman in the nineteenth century who pioneered girls’ education. I know this because while studying Indonesian in high school I wrote an essay on her, in Bahasa. I had wanted to say that she was the daughter of a concubine, which is true, but lacking nuanced language skills, ended up with something closer in tone to: ‘Kartini, Indonesia’s great national hero, was the daughter of a slut.’)

The identity of the mysterious between-the-wars glamazon in this portrait meanwhile, remains a mystery…

Bali, by Noelene Douglas

The Act of Killing

The Act of Killing is an innovative and chilling documentary that provides a very different perspective on Indonesia, and by extension, Bali. It examines the impunity which the perpetrators of the 1965 massacres still enjoy in Indonesia, as the ruthless upper tier of a man-eat-man food chain. The documentary shows how they clawed their way bloodily to the top forty years ago – and have stayed there ever since.

The military overthrow of the Sukarno government in 1965 unleashed a wave of anti-Communist violence, which saw up to a million people slaughtered under the guise of politics, but often for the true reason of settling petty grudges or manouvering to control assets and resources. It was a trauma which Indonesia has never dealt with openly.  Suharto, the man ultimately responsible, didn’t leave power until 1998 and never faced the music. It is also perhaps the root of much of Australia’s traditional mistrust of Indonesia, a country which turned violently mad within living memory and has never dealt with the consequences.

Bali, for all its beauty, was the bloodiest region. Some five percent of the population was killed, often at the incitement of religious figures claiming the need to protect Bali’s culture from perceived threats. Chinese merchants were killed and robbed (today there are few on the island) and some villages lost half their population.

In one village near Ubud, a colony of white herons arrived to nest in the rice fields soon after a  massacres. They still fly in to nest at sunset every evening today. Unsurprisingly, locals believe them to be the reincarnated souls of the murdered.

But to the outsider, the casual visitor, the bloody history of 1965 is almost invisible on the island today – just as its perpetrators would wish.

Canggu: the brave new Bali

The greatest attraction of Bali, of course, is the beauty of its verdant countryside and its unique and ancient culture. Given that, it is tempting to skip the Southeastern resort strip where Kuta runs into Seminyak then imperceptibly blends with Canggu, forming one long strip of scooter-clogged roads, hotels and tourist bars on land that was recently just villages and ricefields.

But on this trip, staying with my friend in Canggu, I got to know the area better and I was surprised to find how much I liked it. Cangu is a fast-developing district, almost suburban, and home to an expat set of desperate housewives, beach bums and dot com millionaires. Yes, getting around is a bitch – Indonesian wifi is slow and if you don’t have a scooter you are at the mercy of Uber. There is NO public transportation. Yes, its artificial and divorced from the reality of Indonesian life. But Canggu and the rest of the tourist strip is  developing its own distinct personality as it turns – almost by default – into a city in its own right: an oddly discordant city of shirtless surfer boys on mopeds, chic eateries next to surprise urban ricefields, airplanes turned randomly into suburban bars (see Exhibit A, below), stoned Javanese taxi drivers, broad Australian accents and blonde heads, Hindu prayers, pounding waves and coarse grey sand, surprising style, intermittent vulgarity and considerable charm.

The pleasure dome: Bali chic from day to night

The whole sprawling Kuta-Seminyak-Kerobokan-Canggu conurbation forms an urban corridor – more or less a de facto city- devoted to pleasure.  I was taken aback by its sophistication. Of course the beery Aussie bars are still there, the dispiriting fast food joints and Quicksilver outlets still dominate Kuta, but around Seminyak a new locus of sophistication has been blossoming, and at its best it gives any other city in Asia a run for its money for its own brand of breezy but confident island chic. Further north in Canggu, the tangled roads present an intriguing cityscape of hipster restaurants and boutiques sprinkled among local shops and rice fields. There is also a proliferation of charming street art, bright and whimsical outline drawings, which appear on walls and cover the whole sides of some houses.

Slickly designed Australian-owned cafes have proliferated with good coffee, food ranging from tasty to outstanding, and chic interiors.

The Junction, at the heart of Seminyak, is one such establishment, stylishly constructed out of weathered faux-driftwood, with a scattering of other stylish cafes a stone’s throw away.

Sea Circus around the corner also employs a similar sun filtering facade to great effect.

Betelnut, further out in Canggu, has a hippyish vibe and a great breakfast menu – I had the scrambled tofu with tabasco and this delicious dragon fruit puree with toasted coconut. There were many others we didn’t have time to sample also: Revolver, Hungry Bird, Sisterfields, Grind and Grocer…

My favourite shopping spot was undoubtedly, Skull, a chic and quirky gallery space and clothing store devoted entirely to representations of the human cranium. Yes. It stocks all kinds of embellished disco skulls, shell skulls and other skill ornaments, skull-related paintings and skull-shaped furniture. Truly awe-inspiring.

For eating out  we also had a clear favourite. The (again Australian-owned) and pan-Asian inspired Mamasan was so superb that we went there twice. In an elegant loungy environment in a brick warehouse-style conversion, it serves superlative versions of many Asian favourites – the roti chanai was a knockout, and braised pork was sensational. After sampling the menu twice we were yet to stumble on a poor option.

Seminyak’s nightlife scene centres around its famous beachfront bars of Ku De Ta (recently franchised to Bangkok, Hong Kong and Singapore and involved in a legal wrangle over naming rights), and the oddly-monikered Potato Head. There is also the surfer bar/ vintage store/bookshop/music venue Deus Ex Machina, the strikingly designed bar-as-amphitheatre Char Char (you have to see it), Dead Celeb and La Favela, where tourists from the first world enjoy opulent drinks in a stylishly-designed den named after a third world slum.  Despite the meta-nature of this, and the questionable taste level, it is apparently great  – but we didn’t go.

I did however drop into the venue that embodies Bali’s newfound style, albeit during the day. Motel Mexicola is a stunning tequila bar/restaurant with lounges, terraces and dancefloors, decorated in the style of Baz Luhrman’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Think: Luis Barragan colours, Frida Kahlo-style naive art, neon crucifixes, coloured candles and a framed portrait of Carmen Miranda at the entrance.

Bountiful