Last night Brigid and I enjoyed a bottle rather good New Zealand Pinot Gris, over dinner in Antique, one of our top 5 restaurants on this island over-run with rather good restaurants.

And that is rather unusual.

Not the eating part, we tend to eat out about 4 or 5 times a week and we’ve been to Antique so often over the past decade that we order things that Josuha took off the menu four years back, and they happily make them them as regular one off (although I guess a one off can’t, by definition, be a regular thing).

Nope the unusual part was the wine.

Sure, we have wine in this tourist mecca, lots of it, but sadly little that’s either drinkable, or, just as importantly, affordable and as much as I’d like to to tag this as simply bizarre, I can’t. Nope, it’s rather smart on the part of the powers that be, the elite that run Indonesia. Not smart as in part of a positive movet on the part of Indonesia to improve the country, neither is it smart as way to ensure that tourism provides dollars and employment to Indonesians, and, in particular Balinese.

Nope, but it’s a mighty smart way to extract a fairly large amounts of cash from this island, and the expat and not insubstantial numbers of local Indonesian drinkers (despite what you may be told many Indonesians, yes Muslims, drink rather heavily, and unofficial consumption is over a litre per head per year of pure alcohol, which if you exclude the large number who don’t drink, means that those who do, drink very, very heavily, much apparently during Ramadan).

Taking a step backwards, two years back there was a fairly wide range of all sorts of wine, beer and spirits on this island, and in the increasingly wine-sophisticated mega-tropolis of Jakarta. There were wine columns in newspapers, well stocked wine speciality stores,extraordinarily good wine lists in most of the country’s often incredible restaurants, and Indonesia, or at least the parts of it which wanted it to be a part of the very urban and cosmopolitan culture now found in all the big cities of Asia, including Indonesia’s near neighbours, was developing quite a wine culture.

Then, bam, the edicts came down. The tax on what was already rather heftily priced booze, was effectively raised to 500%, and, worse, severe restrictions were placed on who could import alcohol into Indonesia, with one company being given the monopoly to import and then distribute via a small number of ‘selected’ companies. Overnight the prices tripled, and the stock of most of the better wines and all imported beer dried up, as did saki and many spirits.

The excuse given was that there was so much untaxed alcohol coming in to the nation that this was urgently needed to tighten up on all that. Of course, that was likely true…the stuff about the black market imports, and as with most things here like this, it was likely that the illicit importers also had government jobs. But that really didn’t explain the massive tax hike or the fact that you could not, in a Belgian Beer bar, find Belgian Beer anymore, or Saki in a Japanese restaurant. Now the end result is that the cashflow from the imported booze has simply moved from corrupt customs officials to these “selected” (and connected) distributors.

And the import tax, or at least it’s impact on the problems it was supposed to address, seems to have been deemed a failure by those who have studied it. And a deadly one.

Since then we’ve had over zealous officials raiding bars and restaurants,often in front of patrons and confiscating almost every bottle of drinkable wine and beer on the island (they’re never seen again of course).

No, the the real story, as with most things that seem to happen here when it comes to imports, is to protect a small number of self serving monopolies, in this case the monopoly importer, it’s privately owned distributors, and the two or three beer brewers, with little regard to the bigger picture: the tourism that returns billions of dollars and thousands of jobs to Indonesia, or the entry of this nation into a wider developed Asia. Nope, it’s about lining a very small number of well connected pockets.

So, here we are late in 2009, and, yes we can buy wine. But the wine on offer in Bali is to many palates, mine included, mostly terrifying. The wine you can find, even at the best restaurants, is mostly cheap European, Chilean and Australian vinegar at about US$35 a bottle, with little that would end up on a table in much of the world retailing for much under $50, and casks of Australian A$10 paint-stripper going for up to US$80. The local wine is, lets be generous, rough and mostly undrinkable swill…. I used to get a headache just driving past the winery when we lived around the corner. You often see a happily naive couple, recently arrived, enjoying a bottle of the local rosé at a café unaware that they are going to enjoying a massive mindbender for the next day or two as a welcome to paradise.

Then there is the beer. We have Bintang of course, famous as Indonesia’s brew, but after suffering it for a while, I simply can’t anymore, even on a 35 degree day. It reminds me too much of the heavily chemical infused Steinlager Blue we used to drink because it was cheap and we were very poor, in the 1970s. I gag. Australians don’t seem to mind it, but then I guess, regardless of how bad it is, it’s substantially better than Fosters, XXXX or VB.

And then we have the Heineken. Brewed locally (they own Bintang too, or part of it) it provides prima-facie evidence that it is possible to make a mess of the world’s most popular beer, even if nobody else in the world can.

So, yes, we had a bottle of wine, we bought it in to Bali ourselves and it was a very rare pleasure.

Will, this change? No, I doubt it, a couple of very well connected companies are making a fortune and no doubt a few of their well connected friends in high places are doing extraordinarily well too. And The government gets the tax.

So here we are in the ludicrously bizarre situation where an island that regularly gets the nod in many of those Best Island In The World thingys (I kinda wonder what they actually mean by that, I mean it’s a nonsense thing to say, really, drivel…..), whatever they really mean in the real world, is a place where, for one reason or another you can no longer buy what is considered to be one of the barometers of a modern lifestyle by the folks that pay attention to those sorts of silly things unless, or often, even if, you want to spend obscene amounts of money doing so.

Myself, I’d just settle for a decent beer, bugger any other consideration….please.

The things you find in old boxes:

July, 1977

This week I’ve uploaded (or to be exact, asked to have uploaded) a 2009 remaster of the, if I say so myself, classic 1982 Screaming Meemees album, If This Is Paradise, I’ll Take The Bag . We’ve added a few extra tracks, the singles and one off bits that helped define one of the biggest New Zealand bands of the 1980s, including See Me Go, the first NZ single to go to number one.

It’s available on Amplifier, and shortly on iTunes and eMusic. And maybe in a physical format at some stage, but that’s increasingly unlikely.

There is a bit of a history of the band and my involvement with them here.

When I first looked at remastering this album some three years back (and talked to a couple of band members about doing it, with a very positive response) I considered that this album would come out in some sort of rather attractive CD package, with a secondary role for the digital release on iTunes, Amplifier and eMusic. Even, I, a reasonably, I hope, informed observer of the recording industry naturally assumed a physical format would be the primary format.

How things change. Today, the CD format is really only loosely required on a package like this..ask anyone who’s done one a reissue of recent..even the beautiful and highly desirable ones like the New Order or Buzzcocks re-masters if they sold any appreciable quantity (and the reissue market is the one niche where CDs might still have legs) and the answer will likely be predictably depressing. You are more likely to see a return from a reverently packaged and pressed vinyl edition in 2009 than a CD.

In the US this week EMI announced that the new Robbie Williams album will only be available in digital formats. There will be no physical format release at all, which, even if Robbie is not the star in the US he is everywhere else, is quite a thing. No physical. No requirement.

Indeed the forthcoming Beatles remasters are widely being spoken of as the format’s last gasp, it’s last major release, in the US at least, and even if that’s overstating things a little, the fact that it’s increasingly hard to even buy a CD in many big American cities means that it’s relevance to the marketplace is shrinking at a faster rate than even the hard-format optimists predicted.

It’s almost over, or at least you can see over the horizon to a land beyond it, and with it goes the album and thus the last vestiges of any hope the major record companies have of surviving as they are. Without the dollar value of the album, the record companies are, to put it politely, rather fucked.

Which brings us to the CMX, the new wunder-format that the record companies have spent god knows how much money inventing over the recent years. Not only is this supposed to be the saviour of the format the record labels, or at least the big ones with their bloated infrastructures and rather hungry shareholders, need to survive, it’s also, and one must assume rather arrogantly (who, the majors? arrogant?) and unwisely, taking on of the few growth areas the recording industry has left for it’s recorded masters, the digital store owned by Apple, which we all know as iTunes, as Apple have their own proprietary format in the wings and are unlikely to roll over in response to what is clearly a power re-grab from the big four.

Yep, everybody is trying to reinvent the album.

And you can’t help feeling that’s like trying to give CPR to a stuffed Dodo. It’s another don’t you bloody well get it moment? Like Napster, like the law suits, like the rise of iTunes.

Well clearly no, they still don’t.

They album rather rapidly died this decade, primarily because that’s the way the buying public wants it. They want tracks, they want songs, they want the digital equivalent of the old 45rpm single, but instead of being told that ‘this is the single’ they like the ability to choose which personal single they want. Which is why, despite the much touted gloom, which really just translates to ‘our dollar sales are down’, unit sales of tracks and, yes, CD albums..i.e. The sale of one unit, as desired by the customer, are up last year driven by mostly non-album sales.

And the UK music industry was up 4.7% in 2008. Which is probably a more important, and vastly more credible, figure than the billions of lost sales touted by industry bodies year in and year out.

So back to the CMX. Boy does this feel last ditch and desperate, almost like a suicide note from a broken and largely unfixable business model whose only answer is to try and quickly reinvent the past. Banging a bit of artwork and a whole album in a single file is really not going to fix anything, nor, I think is it going to prove exceedingly attractive to a generation who is now accustomed to getting their add-ons to the music they are listening too from a web site, or via their wired held-held device as they may choose, without having to listen to the extraneous tracks they really don’t want.

Of course people of my generation, myself included, still crave long players, and bemoan the loss of the enjoyment of delving into an album to find that lost gem, but I feel our time is almost passed. And now you find those gems on blogs, on a myriad of sites or from word of mouth. Which is where I mostly get my music from now and I very rarely want or need to play an album despite the need of the record companies for us all do do so.

Tom Yorke agrees.

In the meantime, The Screaming Meemees sound rather wonderful again right now. Any track you want, or the whole damned album…

I’m quite enjoying this wacko Birther nonsense. Now it seems they’ve mocked up a fake Kenyan Birth Certificate chock full of mistakes that your average poodle would pick up:

Dr C reports that Orly has filed a motion claiming that she has discovered another Birth Certificate for President Obama, this one from the Republic of Kenya

[From Third Obama birth certificate appears in court « Native and Natural Born Citizenship Explored]

When one considers millions and millions of kids the Catholic Church has mentally (and physically) tortured and left traumatised over the centuries, thinking that they’re going to burn in (imaginary) hellfires for eternity if they don’t play by the rules or have offended some make believe old man, this is rather rich:

Social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace encourage teenagers to build “transient relationships” that can leave them traumatised and even suicidal when they collapse, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales warned today.

[From Archbishop issues Facebook warning - Home News, UK - The Independent]

Swine Flu mania seems to continue unabated with the unavoidable conclusion that it’s just, uhhhhh, the flu or a variation thereof, and the millions expected to die are still just getting a sniffle and then mostly coming right, while Tamiflu is doing rather well indeed, being conveniently overlooked in the rush to panic, panic, panic. I suspect we are all going to look back on this with some bemusement in a few years.

Here in Indonesia the paranoia took a while to hit, mostly because a) nobody was really getting sick aside from a few tourists, and b) they have rather more pressing health issues to deal with, not least of which is the gross over population of parts of Java, mostly the more poverty stricken parts of the nation, (although any attempt to deal with this huge issue has to work against the protestations of the religious braindead who see birth control as a western conspiracy…western nations like China I guess..and are, along with the dominance of the self serving power elite, Indonesia’s number one barrier to the a better future).

But the panic’s here now…

So, coming into Denpasar last week, through, what is charitably described as an airport, we were all handed a yellow form to fill out. We’d missed out on the plane because they’d run out (or at least, one air-person said that, another admitted they’d lost them ….dontcha love Jetstar) and we had to grab a couple to fill out on the way in, and were witness to an incredible scene.

The two folks who charged with collecting said yellow forms were gathering these and tossing into a pile on a trestle table, with at least 50% missing the pile and simply falling on the floor. The hundreds of arrrivees, about three plane-loads I’d guess, simply pushed these form collectors out of the way and trampled the remaining pile of forms across the floor of the immigration hall. A couple of official looking people half-heartedly whimpered ‘no, no’ before being pushed aside. There were two temperature detection machines on hand…..one was not being operated by anyone but looked to be plugged in. The other seemed not to be even plugged in, and the guy in charge of it seemed to care little, his eyes were closed, as the herd swarmed over the area, tipping over the trestle table and all on it.

It was a rather funny exercise in utter disorganization and complete chaos, a little like the roads that awaited the visitors outside the door.

If I thought there was any reason to panic, I would.

But I don’t….