a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Saturday, July 31, 2004 George II vs. Henry VLast week's stage review, about trendy parallels between George W. and Shakespeare's most popular prince (Harry, who becomes Henry V) struck a chord with Scott Newstrom, an assistant professor of English who e-mailed me a link to his detailed piece about why the parallel flunks. "Shakespeare always has been, and will continue to be, misread and misquoted in support of any and every position," he writes. True, true.Proof? My piece picks on left-leaning directors for bashing the president with the parallel; Newstrom picks on right-leaning spinmasters for promoting it. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:05 AM (0) comments Thursday, July 29, 2004 Dude, that's so ausgezeichnetI seem to be famous in Germany. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 5:33 PM (0) commentsWednesday, July 28, 2004 Barf Bag BluesThis terrorist scare in Australia reminds me of my accidental trip to Iceland.Also, Abu Bakar Ba'asyir won't be charged for the Bali bombings because Indonesia's high court just called the retroactive use of post-Bali anti-terrorism laws unconstitutional. He'll be charged with other stuff instead, like the Jakarta Marriott bombing. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 4:49 PM (0) comments JibberJabberThe fuckwits who own rights to Woody Guthrie's anthem-worthy song, "This Land is Your Land," want to sue JibJab for their Bush-Kerry cartoon. Kevin Roderick at L.A. Observed quotes from Guthrie's own standard copyright notice:"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." Larry Lessig explains why the song publishers might actually win, and adds: Does a law that makes a political parody such as Jibjab illegal (even if it is not a “parody” in the copyright view of the world) make sense? (Note to citizens: We’re permitted to change the law.) posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:21 AM (0) comments Monday, July 26, 2004 Mega-Bambang Boom!The results are in, finally, from the Indonesian presidential election last July 5th. They should surprise exactly no one:Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono 33.5% Megawati Sukarnoputri 26.6% General (Ret.) Wiranto 22.2% Amien Rais 14.7% Hamzah Haz 3% Bambang and Mega go to a runoff in September. They're both lukewarm candidates who won't change a damn thing in Indonesia, but at least they won't ruin the place, like that eel Wiranto. UPDATE: This post begins a week of not referring to the Democratic convention here at Radio Free Mike. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:40 PM (0) comments Sunday, July 25, 2004 The Quotable Eric"Guilt is the lowest feeling in the emotional toilet; it rips into self-esteem, and therefore has to be denied."-- The hero of Too Much of Nothing makes somebody's quote list. (Scroll down or search for "Eric Sperling.") posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:28 PM (0) comments Wednesday, July 21, 2004 Pramoedya Ananta Toer
In Jakarta I met Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia's great dissident novelist. Pram was arrested in 1965 during the anti-Communist hysteria that swept Suharto to power. In those days Pram was a left-wing agitator, not a Communist -- a populist who championed farmers against rich colonialists and translated Steinbeck and Tolstoy. He spent 14 years on the prison island of Buru. His life is so wrapped up in the history of modern Indonesia that you can't even detail his biography without explaining how the independence movement became Suharto's New Order. (You could almost do it backwards -- re-tell the history without mentioning Pram -- but that would be boring.) On Buru he composed a cycle of novels about a writer named Minke, who stands at the center of his own time, about a generation earlier. Minke promotes the idea of Indonesia as an independent (and democratic!) nation by writing and organizing against the Dutch. He's based on a journalist, Tirto Adi Suryo, who would be obscure except for Pram's novels. The same pattern: You could re-tell the history without mentioning Tirto, but you can't tell about Tirto without explaining the history. Like Solzhenitsyn, Pram had nothing to write with in jail. He memorized most of his material by telling stories to other prisoners. "Usually, during a break in forced labor," he told me, "the inmates and I were gathered and they would listen to my stories. When they worked somewhere else, they retold the stories to their friends. One day, there was an inmate who escaped. The guards looked after him all over the place. A week later, they found him in the forest [on Buru]. The guard asked him why did he run away? He said, 'I want to be Minke!'" I took this snapshot of him with my translator, Aji Ramyakim. As you can see she got along with with Pram. She called him "Bapak," an honorific like "sir" which happens to mean, and sound like, "papa." The affection she had for him as a forefather of the new Indonesia is pretty widespread. In spite of his serious novels and harrowing past he's a hilarious, mischievous guy. He has no religion; he's a stubborn individualist; he chain-smokes clove cigarettes. He's still waiting for a Nobel Prize. "It seems that I might get it," he said. "Now, I have no competitor. I'm 80 years old, there aren't so many people my age around." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 5:16 PM (0) comments Sunday, July 18, 2004 Majelis MujahidinLast month in Yogyakarta I dropped in on a radical movement called Majelis Mujahidin, or the Council of Mujahidin, who are not democrats; they want sharia law in Indonesia. Their headquarters on a quiet street was a low bare building with a concrete overhang to shade a green-floored porch. The porch served as a reception office. There was a desk, where a few Majelis members interrogated me. The ranking member, or the one who took charge, was Hasyim Abdullah, a thin small intense man with a light fringe of a beard, like a lace curtain. I was there to interview them, but he started off with the questions.I had said democracy was "new" in Indonesia since Suharto's fall. Hasyim asked, Did I think Indonesia was undemocratic under Suharto? Of course: Suharto was a general, who couldn't be voted out. That's not democratic. So as a rule, he said, there was no democracy where the military was in charge? I couldn't think of a democratic military state. Aha, said Hasyim -- so was the U.S. undemocratic under Eisenhower? That was how the conversation went: mostly Socratic entrapment. I tried to argue that Indonesia under Suharto -- even though it was called a "republic" -- had all its local bureaucracies under military command, which was different from the U.S. in any decade. Hasyim changed the subject. He declared that Muslims viewed God as the only source of truth and therefore law. Democracy since the French Revolution had made "majority rule" into God, he said. But Islam provided a perfect way to order society. God offered an unimpeachable set of laws through the Koran and hadiths, which would solve all human problems. What about parking and traffic laws? I said. I wanted to know what was wrong with majority rule in setting up unimportant, moral-free regulation. This began to piss them off. With bleak sarcasm one member asked if I could think of a traffic law that might violate Islam. No, I couldn't. Then what use was my democracy? And so on. There was more to the conversation, and a lot of it was tense; even my guides were nervous. But in the end Hasyim invited me to come back and speak to the head of Majelis Mujahidin. Later I learned that the Council rarely talks to journalists, so I should have done it. But guides were expensive, and we'd had a good interview. The next day I stuck to my schedule and boarded a train for Jakarta. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:07 PM (0) comments Tuesday, July 13, 2004 Indonesian Democrats 2
Here's the ladies' section of the same rally for Megawati Sukarnoputri last month in Jombang, Java. It was a small, low-key event — just a declaration of support for Megawati and her running mate by a group of students from local pesantrens, or Islamic schools. There's an idea in the west that all pesantrens are radical. Not true. Only a handful are. The schools in Jombang teach a tolerant, traditionally-Indonesian brand of Islam that mixes well with democracy. At the end of this rally someone even chanted a bizarre song of prayer for Megawati's success at the polls. A lot of Indonesian Muslims think Megawati can't lead the nation simply because she's a woman. These students obviously don't agree. But one day after the rally, another faction of the same tolerant Muslim organization — everyone in these photos is aligned with NU, or Nadlatul Ulama — issued a "fatwa" saying it went against Islam to vote for a female leader. So the tolerance is, um, relative. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:28 PM (0) comments Monday, July 12, 2004 Blogging DrunkI've never done this before. But here's a story from the local rag about a young woman named Laura Medina who caught her boyfriend with another woman, Michelle Dickerson, at a Dairy Queen or some fast-food place. She got howling mad, chased them in a car across the Bay Bridge, rammed the boyfriend's car on the freeway, and kept ramming it until Michelle Dickerson was dead.An Oakland woman was arraigned on murder and assault charges Friday for allegedly killing her boyfriend's new romantic interest by ramming the car they were riding in at the end of a 10-mile, high-speed chase in the East Bay. Laura Medina, 21, of Oakland fought back tears, and several people in the Hayward courtroom gallery broke down in tears as Alameda County Superior Court Judge Alfred Delucchi read the charges against the receptionist and mother of a 6-year-old boy. Medina was charged Friday with murder in the killing of 18-year-old Michelle Dickerson of Manteca, who was riding in a Chevrolet Cavalier that authorities say was rammed repeatedly as Medina chased it in her Buick at speeds up to 120 mph along Interstate 580 from Oakland to Castro Valley on Tuesday evening. I confess I find this touching. My mood has been weird lately, and readers of the novel know I have a thing for operatic melodrama in a mundane urban mode. But I feel sorry for Laura Medina. She should and hopefully will spend a good long time in jail; but she acted out a universal fury that everyone suffers, no matter how sophisticated, tolerant, or mature. The touching part is that the fury seemed to take her by surprise. Most of us have learned to channel these murderous impulses into constructive hobbies, like woodworking or quilting (or blogging). Laura Medina simply flipped. And she seems to have no idea why, judging by the photos. I'm drunk on wine, by the way. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:31 AM (8) comments Sunday, July 11, 2004 Muslim Democrats
Megawati supporters at a mellow political rally in Jombang, East Java. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 3:08 AM (0) comments Friday, July 09, 2004 Bowie WatchFirst big pink bunnies, then a lollipop in the eye. Now a "pinched nerve" that forced David Bowie to cancel his European tour is not a pinched nerve at all, but heart trouble. He had emergency angioplasty late last month. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 5:21 PM (0) commentsWednesday, July 07, 2004 "Dick Cheney Can Be President"The LA Times and everyone else today reports the White House response to John Edwards' flashing smile: BUSH FINDS EDWARDS LACKING Asked to contrast the running mates, Bush replies, "Dick Cheney can be president." What a crock. Edwards-vs.-Cheney isn't even the right parallel. When Bush ran in 2000 he was such a Washington greenhorn he needed someone with a lot of experience to balance the ticket. (In fact Edwards has one more year of Washington experience than Bush does, even now.) George W. Bush, in that sense, was Dick Cheney's John Edwards — southernish, with a common touch, to balance the more experienced man's torpor. But George W. Bush has been president for almost four years. Sure, "Dick Cheney Can Be President." But he's not! That's part of the problem! It's no defense of your ticket to emphasize that it's upside-down. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:31 PM (0) comments Tuesday, July 06, 2004 In Other Election News,Gen. (retired) Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is trouncing his rivals for the Indonesian presidency, but he needs at least 50 percent of the vote to win outright. He's not getting it. Pulling up solidly in number 2 is the incumbent, Megawati Sukarnoputri, so they might face each other in a runoff next September. This is pretty good news. No one I talked to in Indonesia wanted to vote for Mega, either because she's a woman, and women by some Islamic notions are not supposed to lead a country, or because she's proved herself dumb and ineffectual. But she was one of the less-bad candidates on offer. Yudhoyono was the other. (And almost everyone wanted to vote for him, in spite of his military career.) The real horror-show candidate, former General Wiranto, is pulling up a satisfyingly distant third. UPDATE: The votes are still being counted — counting goes on for days and weeks in Indonesia — and Wiranto is not a distant third. He's a close third. But his chances of a pop-singing career are stronger, at this point, than his prospects for the presidency. (In America we may think singing politicians are weird, but they're normal in Indonesia.) posted by Michael Scott Moore | 4:20 PM (0) comments Saturday, July 03, 2004 School for Legong Dancers
Who start young. At left is their teacher, Emiko, born in LA but raised in Hawaii and married to a gamelan teacher named Dewa. This class in Pengosekan, Bali, is at Dewa's family compound. I'll blog more about Indonesia when I get a chance. Bali itself isn't idyllic — it's impoverished, especially since the bombings, and infested with hideous dogs — but the time with Emiko and Dewa was terrific. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:47 AM (0) comments | |
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