One of the joys of being in this little corner of paradise is that people come and people go. We have visitors in other words.

Some of course you’d rather not see…there was the former friend, invited over a couple of years back, to stay in our spare room, who announced the day she arrived that her sister was also coming, uninvited, to stay. And arrive she did, and was mighty demanding. The two of them sat in our garden demanding drinks, fruit and coffee until we politely suggested that the bus to Ubud was leaving rather shortly. A free room does all sorts of things to people. That smiling face in Auckland town becomes the freeloader from hell in Bali.

Goodbye and good riddance.

It’s a common complaint amongst we inhabitants of the outer fringes of Expatria (we are happily on the outer fringes and only visit the often crasser inner sanctum when we need a meal or a drink, feel the need to show said visitor around…you need to go there but only once)…the visitor who turns up, vaguely invited in a giving moment, who then won’t go away. We know of people who’ve had guests for three months (the change in the tourist visas to 30 days might have been a classic Indonesian trying to bureaucratically bite the hand that feeds move, like the VOA fee, but it has its upside).

Fortunately we seem to be past all that…we can only hope. In the past two years the visitors have been all dandy, although we don’t offer the spare room as readily. Its selective.

Yep, in June-July we had the annual parental, which is all good, and the last two months have had Renee and Phil through on their delayed honeymoon (although staying in Kuta), and now our Noosa contingent (ok they’re New Zealanders), Blake and Sandra, here for B’s big 40^th……

Which meant fun, laughing, trips to Nusa Lembongan and Ubud, far too much drinking, eating and the rest, for the best part of two good weeks.

And then it all went horribly pear shaped.

First, young Sandra, after a couple of Bintangs at lunch, decided to head-butt an elderly Indonesian man at Makro, the hypermarket where we buy our coffee, milk and, uh…, Bintangs, amongst other things. Around the corner she goes and then BAM!, head on, into the poor old bloke, minding his own business looking for the soap or shaving cream or something I imagine…and it was the blood drawing sort of head-butt, like a billy goat, not just the nasty headache kind.

Blake, being a caring sort, rushed over to attend to the guy, inadvertently adding insult to injury by rubbing the man on his forehead, an absolute cultural no-no in Indonesia, and a grave insult. He groaned loudly then stagged away down the isle in the direction of the breakfast cereals, clearly very shaken. I’m sure I recognised his face a day or so later on the front page of a local Indonesian paper waved thru our car window…with a neck brace.

It gets worse though.

A day later we go to Denpasar to buy some of the ridiculously cheap Nikes, Converse and the like at the factory outlet there. After buying three pairs, Blake decides he needs cash and wanders off to the ATM in the car-park. We wait in the silver-grey Avanza. The silver-grey Avanza is not a unique vehicle, quite the opposite…there are literally thousands of the bloody things throughout the archipelago, all with darkened windows too.

We attempted, rather pathetically it seems, to personalise and define ours a little by putting a white and red “I Love Bali Dogs” (because we do) sticker on the rear window, and made it obvious to Blake that this was the thing that made our faceless silver-grey box different.

So, what does he do but get into the first silver-grey Avanza he sees, placing himself rear passenger’s seat of a car filled with a perfectly innocent Balinese family out doing their shopping at the mall. Who was more surprised? I guess it’s hard to say, but as Blake tells the story there was shocked silence until he made the decision to leave the car, whereupon the volume of noise in the car increased as he moved swiftly towards the next silver-grey box, which, luckily was ours.

We made the decision to move quickly before any thought was given to a potential car-jacking, or any other fuss could be made. But we could imagine the substantial shock for the family…this was in central Indonesian Denpasar…there are very few Bules….and then one pushes into the rather private space in your rather small car, then leaves without a word of explanation when he finds it inhabited by the wrong people…

Car-jacking, grievous bodily harm and cultural insult, all in three days; it keeps you on your toes, and we made the decision to tread carefully, avoid any men in brown uniforms and keep very much to ourselves, which we did by hiding at Moziac, although once again Blake managed to severely rock the boat, even up there in the mountains so far from the sea, with his written comments to the chef including an aside about the physical state of the bird that provided the fois gras. But I must say I concur on that, and refuse to eat the stuff….

So to the airport yesterday…we love these people, but had the decided feeling we’d been walking something of a tight rope, and we were able to let out a huge sigh* as they had successfully avoided the authorities (and Blake blended perfectly with the ockers at the airport when he took his shirt off, however briefly…it was a very smart move on his part) and we were able to deny any knowledge of earlier events if questioned in the future (although the restaurant was booked in my name…..)

The mayhem retreats……

*the above is not true at all, we’ll miss them terribly…

I seem to be picking on Australia a little and I don’t actually mean to but…found on The Guardian’s Comment is Free:

True story:
A tourist lands at the airport in Sydney. The customs agent reviews his passport and asks whether he has a criminal record. The tourist replies, ‘no, do you still need one to get in?’ The customs agent blows a gasket and refuses him entry. Consider yourselves warned!

Technorati Tags: Australia, humour

As he so often is, Glenn Greenwald is bang on the money here:

The Number One Rule of the bi-partisan Foreign Policy Community is that America has the right to invade and attack other countries at will because American power is inherently good and our role in the world is to rule it though the use of superior military force. Paying homage to that imperialistic orthodoxy is a non-negotiable pre-requisite to maintaining Good Standing and Seriousness Credentials within the Foreign Policy Community.

Conversely, one who denies that premise reveals oneself to be deeply unserious and unworthy of meaningful discourse.

I guess, like so many of us outside the USA, I look and wonder at what I see is a problem that stems from the most basic flaw in the American political psyche…a self belief in a righteous global destiny that it is inevitably on the side of good.

That belief, and the way it drove the USA may have benefited the world for large parts of the last century, but has became increasingly corrupted from the 1960s onwards, reaching it’s nadir today when, despite that continuing self belief, its rarely shared by the populace of we perceived vassal states.

I guess the Romans thought the same thing, I know the French, Spanish and British did in their imperial periods.

175 people were blown up in Iraq yesterday…..

It was twenty years ago today…well not exactly today…but it was 20 years more less. It was sometime in August 1987 the musical world moved quite substantially on it’s axis, never to quite return to the same spot.

These anniversaries seem to come around with an increasing frequency, it being my age I guess, and some of them are, for me at least, quite terrifying in their implications. Take the photo and brief story in the Mojo Magazine from, I think, April, stating that Sid Vicious, bless him, would have turned fifty in February of this year. Putting aside the fact that in our minds, well mine at least, Sid will always be that snotty, tragically talentless, but iconic, figure, aged about 20. But that’s essentially a thirty year anniversary…clearly, despite the way I feel, I’m still not 18. The twenty year ones are bad enough…and yes, it was twenty years ago this month that Paul Oakenfold, Nicky Holloway, Danny Rampling and a couple of others went to Ibiza and bought back, not immediately mind, but just soon enough, the second summer of love and Acid House. And it was never the same. Well for most of us…but I’ll get to that.

I don’t like Acid House you may say, but that’s largely beside the point. What Oakenfold, et al, bought us was not just a four on the floor pill popping party but a door smashing, throat grabbing change of psyche. House music didn’t arrive in 87, it was a year or so old, but when acid swept across the UK in 1988 and the rest of the western world, the USA excepted, in the next year or two, it said, like 57, 67 and 77, musically you can do anything again. It picked up the thing that punk, and post punk, had begun and ran with it…the flurry of we-can-do-it activity after it was incredible…all those labels, and experimenters, and its that we have to thank for smothering the awful post Wham MTV friendly pop that the UK was obsessed with in 84 / 85 /86. Go West anyone?

Without Ibiza 87, no Massive Attack in the mainstream, no Bjork, no Acid Jazz, no Oasis and Britpop, no Daft Punk, no club culture, no bloody Zoo TV Tour or Zooropa (I dislike U2 with a vengeance but it’s had to argue that this was not their zenith, when they became more than just a big rock band), and no middle class embrace of Public Enemy and Dr Dre. Hence Fat Freddy’s Drop are as much the child of Ibiza as any shitty wave yer hands in the air and fling yer glowstick around trance DJ.

No America never really quite got it. It still hasn’t. All of a sudden the staid pre-adventurism of the pre-Beatles days returned to the USA. It closed its doors (outside of perhaps NYC and the odd spark here and there which just emphasis my point) to the future, hailing instead Nirvana and grunge as the future. Now, they may have sold in West Auckland, and panel-beater dress became chic for a week or two, but to most of us outside the US, Cobain and co sounded so ridiculously old fashioned in 1989…like an updated Grand Funk Railroad…and nothing has happening in mainstream rock’n’roll in America since, except that by and large, now, it’s stopped selling.

That’s a surprise.

The irony in all this of course is that Black American music, be it hip-hop, house or techno, and the way the rest of the world related to it and used it’s concepts (which was the difference Ibiza and it’s aftermath gave us), was driving the rest of the world, it’s just that mainstream (and by that I mean white sadly in the still segregated US mass) America missed that chapter and every one since.

And ain’t it ironic that Mr Wilson picks this particular month to shuffle away….

I think this is funny…..one can almost imagine the contents of the letter

Dear Mr al-Maliki,

Can I call you Al? You may not know me Al, but like you I work for George W Bush and he’s told me to write to you. I run a place called Australia, it’s like a part of America with a different flag, but everyone knows it’s a part of America. We are quite good at cricket..do you like cricket? Because we are a part of America we have a few soldiers over there as a part of George’s big Coalition thingy, doing the odd jobs, cleaning the bogs and the like, leaving the important, dangerous, stuff though to the GIs and the hundreds of thousands of mercenaries George is paying in order to hide exactly how many soldiers he really has has there.

Anyway Al, George doesn’t really tell me too much but says its a bit of a mess and, since he really likes the way we handle our black fellas here in Australia, well, he thought I should have a word…..

…..

good on ya mate

John Howard

RIP Tony Wilson….you were an inspiration to so many of us…that middle finger raised so high…it could be done