Tag: Indonesia

It’s Not An All Night Fair by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Translated by C.W. Watson

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It’s Not An All Night Fair is a short novel–indeed, more of a short novella–by probably the most famous Indonesian novelist, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Though I haven’t finished the other Toer book I started (All That Is Gone) that’s becaise it’s a collection of short stories, and I often pick my way through those slowly — nothing wrong with the collection, but nothing compels me to read it in one fell swoop. On the other hand, if I couldn’t finish It’s Not An All Night Fair in one go, it’d reflect badly either on the author, or on me. Happily, …

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Glitch: Tersesat Dalam Waktu (My First Indonesian SF Film)

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So, I’ve just finished watching Glitch: Tersesat Dalam Waktu (English: Glitch: Getting Lost In Time) as I write this. (It will end up being posted later, but I’m writing it now, so I’ll just write it in the present time.) It’s one of the DVDs I managed to pick up while in Jakarta that is actually an SF movie, as opposed to mainstream drama or horror. (SF seems rare there, but horror is practically mainstream cinema in Indonesia, from what I can tell.) Anyway, the premise is that some sort of time loops have been set up for some unknown reason, …

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Indonesians Avenge the Mangling of English on Korean Notebooks by Mangling Hangeul on 대어 오ㅜㄴ 노트보ㅗㅋ

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Often, expats in Korea like to share some of the crazy English that they see on things like the covers of notebooks, on T-shirts, and so on. I myself included one example–taken from a T-shirt I got at the Jeonju International Film Festival several years ago–in a story titled “Country of the Young,” where a carry-bag has the enigmatic phrase, “And Of Course Carrot!” which, if you know enough Korean, is not at all enigmatic. Basically, it’s a transliteration of a pun. As far as I understand it, in Korean, 당연 (dang-yeon) means “naturally, of course, certainly”, and a similar-sounding–but …

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Remix Ubiquitous & on the Jakartan Mall

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Of all the songs that one might have expected to hear remixed in an almost endless variety of forms — swing jazz, strings & voice, glittery upbeat techno –this is the last song I thought would start following me around Indonesia. By the way, what the hell was with the original mix video? It sucks in a large variety of ways, so much so that I daren’t get started on it: (Update: Okay, if there’s any more proof that anyone can do anything, one of the main members of Black Box was a classically trained clarinet teacher., says Wikipedia. Sure, …

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Soraya Intercine Films’ UFO

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Yup, this is what was on TV tonight: A prime time comedy SF TV show in Indonesian about a UFO and some people who retrieved it and made friends with the aliens inside. Miss Jiwaku also picked out what seems to be (maybe!) some kind of plot thread involving some kind of device (a drug, maybe?) that makes people smart, and which was malfunctioning, or misrouted, or something, and the “dealer” of that tech who seemed to be in some sort of trouble. I found it bewildering, to be honest. It seems to be a 2010 production, from the one …

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There Goes the Neighborhood

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In the Starbucks where Miss Jiwaku and I hang out in Depok — she studies, I work on stuff — demographics have finally hit, like shit on a fan. The demographics I’m talking about are micropopulation dynamics: the national demographics of enrollment in her Bahasa Indonesian language program at University of Jakarta have shifted, such that there’s a lot more Koreans at the university, in the neighborhood, and… at our Starbucks. (Which prompted this advice from Miss Jiwaku to a new Korean student who enrolled this semester, a friend of a friend already enrolled last semester: “DON’T hang out with …

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Fever, What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Trip to the Local Immigration Office, and a Final Positive Turn

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I’ve been quite ill this week — not quite just food poisoning, but something a little more vindictive and involved, though not in a sentient sense. The same intestinal upset as last time, but with an added element: a burning fever on Thursday night, and fever (slightly less severe, but much sweatier) again on Friday evening. It was the kind of fever where you say things you don’t recall saying the next day, and dream of Japanese Solutionatronic devices shaped like giant wok lids except that they aren’t physical objects but rather abstract mathematical structures which, given any question, can …

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Random Observations

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While I really would prefer to be blogging something a touch more substantial, I’m overloaded with The Freelance Project That Refused to F*cking Die. So, while I’m a little tied up with that — and unable to dive into the fiction-writing project I thought I’d be well into by now — all I have time to post for today are a couple of random observations about stuff in Indonesia, in the vein of my earlier mention of rock star styles here.

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Metal Softies

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Indonesian rock bands have a seriously weird aesthetic for self-representation, from the point of view of a Westerner, that is. You see these guys who look for all the world like a death-metal band — weird hair-tattoos (like, where they shave intricate patterns into their hair), leather and spikes, braids in their beards, and tough-guy expressions — but then you hear the music and they’re singing soft-rock, ballads, lovesong-sounding stuff. By the way, I’m not ignoring the comments that are being made here… but after half an hour at the Starbucks, discovering that everything (including Gmail) except my website was …

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When ATMs Attack, or, How Things are Going in Depok/Jakarta

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I’ll be going back to Jakarta tomorrow because a certain ATM has decided to swallow my Samsung Card (a credit card) and not spit it  out again. Put the card in the machine, watch it  crash, watching Windows reboot (with the Diebold brand name proudly displayed, of course!)… quite a sad sight. The first time it happened was a week ago, and I thought it was a freak accident. Turns out, no, not at all. Samsung Cards crash BNC ATM machines in Jakarta, it seems. Or at least, at the mall I was at. Other than that, things are going …

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