Indonesia: Ubud (Day 7 Super-cont'd, Sunday, 080209)

Eric wants dessert, so we make a stop at ART "kafe/bar" for his tiramisu and my fudgy (fudgey?) brownie a la mode and a giant young coconut. The thing is actually quite monstrous, but not what I imagined.

I know young coconut is a clear liquid, but I'd imagined it to taste a little more...coconuty. Not the electrolyte-rich, WWII emergency...plasma...substitute (???), hot, hipster accoutrement spotlighted in yesterday's NYTimes. (I quite agree with the description of Young Coco, in the aforementioned article, as "slightly musty." Not in a bad way, though. As paradoxical as that may sound.)

(Wouldn't Young Coco be a great stage name? Almost as great as my burlesque name, the one that I shall not share for fear someone will take it. In case I ever want to be a burlesque dancer.)

Eric and I have misapprehended the distance to our evening show, so we power-walk through the streets, on an island where "Bali time" is fluid and subject to great individual interpretation. We must look a sight, bookin' it to get to our kecak show at Pura Batu Karu.

The program describes kecak like so:

...a special dance that's accompanied by human music voice, called the gamelan suara. In this dance, the story develops through a choir of more then [sic] one hundred men. These men shit in a concentric circle. (Italics obviously mine.)

Imagining this, E and I collapse into a gale of giggles, one appropriate to our senses of humor as 13 year old boys.

I've seen kecak in three other contexts: teasers for Baraka, in Tarsem Singh's lovely little film The Fall, and on the Travel Channel.

It is, as it's always described, haunting. The polyrhythmic, belted out yelping, the near darkness except for the fiery structure at the center of the (shitting) circle. [grin]

The men are all wearing black and white checked sarongs, and they sway back and forth, the sound of their hands slapping skin when they alternate arm positions making a collective thwack.

The dance, despite depicting part of the Ramayana, however, was only created during the 1930s, by a German by the name of Spies, in order to appeal to tourists.

[head desk]

Somehow, this makes the blessing at the beginning of the performance a little less legitimate-seeming, the tourists' hushed respectfulness now reeking of naivete, but...

Oh, well.

It was still nice.

We make a number of detours into photo shops to find me another memory card, as mine only holds a gig, while Eric's holds 12. My antediluvian, and apparently obsolete, camera won't hold a 12, 8, or even 4 gig memory card, and I have to settle for a piddling 2 gigs.