Posts by Simon Grigg
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Is anyone else loving the steady drip-drip-drip of revelations about how totally frickin' off the wall Palin actually is?
Yeah but the fun part is watching the crazies out froth each other as the pro and anti Palin camps go after each other. I've spent a day rummaging through it all. It truly rocks.
But the other big story out there in wacko land is that Obama is gonna replace Biden with one of his terrorist buddies just after Jan 20. I reckon I'll pass over to James who seems to have the low down on this sort of stuff for that one...
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So when catastrophe comes, it comes as a surprise. How many were baffled by the Bali bombings because they thought that radical Islam was an Arab problem?
Bali came as a suprise to many, including those quite close to it and the Indonesian government and agencies, who chose to ignore the few warnings that they did get, a month or two out. Sidney Jones in 2002.
Its worth noting that radical Islam has long had a toe-hold in the Philippines, and the flavour in many SEA nations is quite different to that found in the ME. In Indonesia you need to mix in a post colonial resentment and a more contemporary resentment of bule (literally: albino, loosely westerners) tourist bars with signs saying "No locals" in an area in Kuta which Australian tourists had / have turned into one of the hellholes of Asia. There is also a divide between Bali and Java that's hard to overstate (the Javanese talk derisively of Balinese as hicks, and the Balinese, quite unfairly, blame Javanese for all crime on the island).
But unlike many middle eastern nations I don't think there was a big SEA flow to either the Mujahadeen or Al Qaeda, although I may be wrong on that. The ties between JI and AQ are at best tenuous. This are distant events to most Indonesians.
This is a fabulous book which straddles the pre and post 10/2002 blasts. It's both irreverent and terrifying, and three years after it's publication still pretty much bang on.
But hell, 5 years after..try and get a flight in and out of here to Europe or Australia or rent a villa. This place is booming in a rather more positive way now.
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And of course, there is nothing new on jazz, is there?
Indeed, but watching the Ian Curtis bio-pic last night I was thinking to myself over and over again that nothing had ever sounded like this before that...sure there were signposts, like the Velvets and Bowie but what they did with those signposts was overwhelmingly original.
But, then that was the performance. The building blocks of those performances, i.e. the songs were not quite as individual without the performance to make them so.
And so it is with the likes of Coltrane's My Favourite Things.
Musically, I thoroughly approve of, and going further, wallow in the ethic that borrows from a creative past to make the present, and would like to see properly defined a fair use proviso (although such has been handily given a helping hand by the Lennon ruling of recent). I'm just nervous about where the demarcation comes.
The problem for Page / Plant of course was not the borrowing per se but the failure to credit..to claim what was not theirs to claim.
Not sure where I am going with this but i think it's back to that space I was in before I opted out of the last copyright thread so I should shut up.
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I wish the "creators" of popular music would sometimes acknowledge their sources.
Oh..they do at times but it isn't always voluntary
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whoops, now I'm Sacha's echo chamber
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Here we go again..
My thoughts exactly....I wonder exactly how many threads we've had about this over the past couple of years. I'm out of this one.
Nice post though Matthew.
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Now...I hit preview then and it posted...odd
that would be able to largely stand on it's own
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Ben, Bali is rather (but not totally) unique outside Java in that it has an economy that would be be ale to largely stand on it's own (and there is much grumbling that the funds it does earn tend to be stripped by central government rather than re-invested, but that's not new) if it were to secede. But Timor Leste and Aceh are fairly firm evidence that Jakarta would never accept even limited autonomy without a fight.
Instead, now, Made Pastika, the newly elected governor who is hugely popular, has told Jakarta that the law will not be enforced here and the same is coming from elsewhere in the archipelago. And since his last job was Indonesia's top cop, he may have some sway at that level.
But the biggest challenge to the law comes from the a series of cases about to go to the Constitutional Court as the law, as written, is a pretty clear breach of several parts of the 1945 Constitution. That it even made it onto the floor of the legislature, let alone through it, shows a fairly strong disconnect and disregard between that body and the law under which it exists.
One spends a lot of time in Indonesia scratching ones head at it all. It's an oddly dysfunctional parallel universe. And a lot of Indonesians would agree.
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Imagine if McCain had had a connection, however tenuous, with Eric Rudolf, the abortion clinic bomber. People would have gone spastic about it and quite correctly.
And yet the people spoke and said that they found McCain's far more substantial associations with the current incumbent, who may also be incompetent but actually does have blood on his hands, far more unsavory.
James, the darkness, hate and vitriol that came with McCain,
defined his campaign and you seem unable to put it behind you. This stuff, these 'associations' were put to the people over and over again, but they raised a finger to not only it but the messengers. It's one of the core reasons you lost. People said 'enough'...It's over, move on.
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Are you sure about that, Giovanni?
It wasn't that far back, about 80 years, that the state chose the two senators, in theory by selected by the state legislature, in practice often by the governor. The 17th Amendment changed that but the governor still has the power to chose a replacement for a vacant seat. Go and rent a copy of Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington....actually regardless of that, rent it anyway if you've not seen it as it's rather appropriate today