Latest on Fri, 09:25 am
Chant of Lotus…a film from Kalyana Shira
In past two years there are two production house in Indonesia that get my fully attention everytime they announce their new films. It doesn’t mean their film always the best among the rest. Just like every other human being sometimes they made mistakes (bad bad film). But just like every other regular admirer, we always give them second chance or third chance or fourth and so on and so on….
This time, at least in our amateuristic opinion, Kalyana Shira did a good job with their relatively new production: Chant of Lotus (Perempuan Punya Cerita). An anthology film from four Indonesian female directors about regular Indonesia women from four different background that has such irregular stories. All the stories has something to do with female rights, mind-body-soul of woman. Read More
Distinctively Dutch
Christie’s, London, had another auction last week. This one dedicated to Dutch photographers. They were lucky that the financial and economical crises seemed not to have reached the super rich art collectors. Five thousand up to twenty thousands euro’s was not unusual. Most was paid for “the ice cream parlour” from the series “Rain” by Erwin Olaf ( over € 22.000). But Ruud van Empel (“World”), Desirée Dolron (“Xteriors”) and Celine van Balen (Muslim girls) were very much in demand also.
Why?
Newsflash: Indonesian Parliament passes anti pornography bill
Great.
The Parliament of Indonesia did abolish pornography. Congratulations to these guards of our libido’s.
Forget about the financial and economical meltdown, about deforestation, about hunger and poverty, about healthcare and infra structure: these MP’s know their priorities. They heroically saved all Indonesians from moral and social deterioration. It’s a shining example to all the world what conservative patronizing and meddling in the name of the Lord can do.
While we, non Indonesians, are jealously watching, the grateful civilians of the archipelago are looking forward to new courageous steps by their government. These vigorous Ministers, MP’s, governors and other men and women of honour, should now abolish by law: air pollution, earthquakes, viruses and ugly fat middle aged men. And they should not forget to forbid, under the penal code, the eruption of volcano’s.
March on, brave soldiers, to a sexless society.
The Njai
The njai is one of the heroines in a pretty famous novel. She, njai Ontosoroh, concubine of a Dutchman, and their daughter Annelies, represent a complex and dangerous world to Minke, the leading character in Pramoedia Ananta Toer’s novel “Bumi Manusis”. Ontosoroh proves to be an extraordinary strong and independent woman. Yet as an Indonesian in a colonial society she stays a second rate citizen who even is denied custody of her own daughter after her man dies.
That was fiction.
Now Reggie Baay has published a non fiction book about the njai. It turns out to be a fascinating and moving, but also a very disconcerting account. It confirms the quintessence of Ontosoroh’s condition: the poignant sorrow of the huge inequality, in relationships which were absolutely unbalanced and which implied the women were almost without rights. Plus the immense social isolation they had to endure. Because often they were looked upon with contempt by the people of their village and excluded from the white community in which the man lived.
Baay’s book is a historical study of these usually temporary and sometimes lifetime partners of Dutch officials, planters and military men in Indonesia’s colonial times. The author himself is the grandson of a njai, about whom he knew next to nothing until very recently. Even his father had no reminiscences of this mother and grandmother, who had been send away before her son was four. And who was not allowed to even have any contact with him for the rest of her life. Her existence was kind of erased from the family history. Which started at the moment she was replaced by a Caucasian woman with whom the man legitimately married. Read More
Newsflash: Asians live longer.
In case you don’t expect to get fed up with it all and kill yourself when you are forty, fifty or sixty, but would love to grow really, really old, you better be Asian.
At least this is what I read in The Guardian today:
“The average Asian woman, for example, lives for almost 89 years, while African-American women live until 76. For men of the same groups, the difference is 14 years”.
I should add this is valid for Asians living in the US. But you could do even better than that. You just have to watch out where you are gonna live:
“Japanese, for example, can expect to outlive Americans, on average, by more than four years. In fact, citizens of Israel, Greece, Singapore, Costa Rica, South Korea and every western European and Nordic country save one can expect to live longer than Americans”.
So, make your pick. But let me tell you that in 2078 my daughters in law probably will be a hundred years old widows and still be hale and hearty grannies.
PS: The picture by the way is of Albert Hofmann – 1906 – 2008. The man who was the first to synthesize LSD-25. Ironic isn’t it?