Powwow Posts - greetings from North Dakota

EAT, LOVE and PRAY TO GET OUT OF THE TRAFFIC

I saw something that I really wished I hadn’t seen as I walked the beach of Kuta yesterday.

Yes it was a woman lying in the sun reading Eat, Love, Pray.

As everybody in the world knows the book and film of the same name was partly set in Bali.

And floods of divorced and single women have rushed to Ubud, the “cultured” and “spiritual” town in the mountains, ever since to have their fortunes told and their problems solved by the toothless healer also depicted in the book and film.

They are probably hoping to meet a Balinese prince who will dress them in a sarong and kebaya and marry them in his local temple. Why is it that every second foreign woman you meet here is married to a prince? There’s so many princes there’s no room for the commoners.

Julia Roberts might have ridden around on a bicycle in the movie but I wouldn’t recommend it in the bumper to bumper traffic that now besets the island of the Gods.

Sitting on a bike drinking in truck fumes is not my idea of Paradise. And how many Maccas, circle Ks and Starbucks does Bali really need? Let alone giant hotels and shopping malls.

Yet only a few metres away you can enjoy the late afternoon sun at a warung right on the beach, drinking Bintangs and eating tipat cantok while watching the fishermen come in from the sea loaded with fish they throw straight on the coals.

We’re heading to the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival tomorrow. Hope we don’t run into too many princes, healers or women looking for luuuuve there. But I’m looking forward to the babi gulung.

Bali is a land of contrasts – and that’s the beauty of it.

Whatever happened to theatre etiquette?

Once when going to the theatre in San Francisco I read a booklet that had a guide to theatre etiquette.

It was full of sound advice, such as suggesting patrons not wear heavy perfume or beehive hairstyles.

I wish I had a copy of this booklet as I believe it should be given out as compulsory reading to all theatre and concert-goers.

You often get the impression when you go to the theatre these days that most of the audience have never been before.

Why would they talk to each other throughout a performance if they knew that it was extremely rude and unthoughtful?

I went to a dance performance recently and the couple in front of me blocked the view the whole time as they kept moving their heads towards each other to whisper sweet nothings or something.

Another night at the opera a man near me was commenting and talking the whole way through. Now opera goers do not like to be disturbed. They’ve paid up to $200 or more for their ticket and they want to hear the damn music. So this man was very loudly and forcefully asked: “Are you going to talk the whole way through this opera?”

That shut him up for awhile. But then he got the noisy lolly wrappers out and continued to non stop unravel lollies and eat them.

Others may not mean to disturb their fellow audience members – but why do they have to clap whenever they think they should and so ruin the aria for somebody else?

Leave the applause to the end. It goes on for long enough then anyway.

A friend told me that she once sat behind a woman with extremely thick hair that was left out and therefore also blocked her view. She eventually had to ask this person to tie her hair up, which obligingly she did.

What are your pet hates? And what should be done to improve the situation?

Pass laws for a paseo

The world should follow the Spanish paseo.

This is what is defined as a slow, easy stroll or walk outdoors. It’s also the street, series of streets, or walkway along which such a walk is taken.

I believe it’s the same word for the bullfighting expression: the formal procession into the ring of the players, including the matadors, banderilleros, and horses, that occurs just before the first bull is fought.

And people out walking on a summer’s evening in Barcelona or Malaga or Madrid can take on the look of a bullfighter. A walker checking out which bar to sit at and take an aperitif can be a little like a matador looking over the bull. Is it good enough? Is it worth his time? Will the enjoyment of the kill (or the drink and tapas) be worth the wait at the bar or table? Will the conversation be as good as the blood-letting?

Perhaps I’m taking the metaphor too far.

Issues are probably as innocent as, should we stop for an ice-cream this time?

But to walk out in a European town and join the hundreds of others – from babies to grandmothers – is refreshing and fun and makes you feel glad to be alive.

I come from a country where the paseo is not a national pastime. Even in good weather people lock themselves behind doors and watch TV and conversation is a dying art, apart from “where’s the remote?” and “what’s for dinner?”. It might expand to, “when will dinner be ready?” but rarely to the politics of the day or the logistics of the next protest march.

We’re dying in the southern, apathetic climes, especially in winter.

Even in winter in Europe the paseo is not neglected – window shopping, stopping for hot coffee,

watching buskers, sipping on wine. All ages enjoy getting out of the house and into the life of the town. Bars are full and tapas are still, in many, included in the price, although sadly that is changing.

The next government who brings in a compulsory paseo should win. I vote for an international paseo.

Somewhere over the rainbow

                                                          Photo by: Michelle Day

Somewhere over the Rainbow was the joke of the night on Saturday at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival.

A very popular Mark Nadler was doing his thing in the Piano Bar at the Festival Centre, "menacing the keyboards" in Broadway Hootenanny and introducing special guests. He explained that the night before after the "gala performance" one of his guests had sung Somewhere over the Rainbow and then maybe not aware of this 2012 artistic director Kate Ceberano dressed up to look like Princess Leia or maybe a Grecian goddess sang the same classic number from The Wizard of Oz.

So on Saturday night Nadler begged his guests to pick another tune.

"Even Olivia sang it during her show tonight," he said, referring of course to Our Livvie (or Olivia Newton John) and pointing out that being a pop singer she only sang the chorus and not the verses.

Nadler's guests were formidable - for example Simon Burke in town for a show and a bevy of women singers including a lesbian (as he put it) he'd seen in a Fringe Cabaret act called  Libby O'Donovan. Sporting a white Mohawk she threw off her mock fur coat to reveal a tightly-fitting plastic nurse's uniform and sang about being on a slut walk for love.

And then came the Magnets, a British boy band, who are a six-man sound machine - making all their music with their mouths alone. After a couple of songs they burst forth with a jammed uptempo version, with the outrageous Nadler on the piano, of you guessed it - that rainbow song.

Meanwhile a very sparkly Olivia performed all the old favourites to an adoring audience- standing and clapping away with her and her American backing band and the Adelaide Art Orchestra. She can still "get physical" and shake her beautiful body better than people half her age. Must be all that tea she drinks on stage - no bourbon and coke for her.

The night  before at the gala she'd done the final number - Xanadu - surrounded by drag queens covered in yellow feathers.

After the show it was a bit hard to tell who were the drags and who were Adelaide matrons decked out in their 70s sparkly numbers they obviously keep in the back of the cupboard for such occasions. The fashion was not the high point of the night. At one stage, I wondered if a wedding party had got lost and wandered into the bar. Some people seemed to be dressed in their bridesmaids outfits.

Changing the mood somewhat, for an hour on Saturday afternoon I was mesmerised by the performance of Ansuya Nathan, in her show Long Live the King, telling the story of her Indian parents' arrival in Adelaide on the day of the death of Elvis, her mother's idol. Weaving in and out of their past and 70s present, she told a moving tale that linked Elvis intimately with her mother. Both Ansuya's mother and Elvis's lost one of their twins at birth. And she can sing Elvis songs too. Beautiful.

For David Campbell this is his last cabaret festival as artistic director - he made the most of it by getting up on stage and singing You're the One that I Want with a leather-jacketed Olivia in her show.

Ceberano was asked on opening night what she plans to do for next year and she said she would just make sure she had good acts. Doesn't look like it will be hard.

Adelaide can be rather dreary at times - I know I have lived there and also spent two long weeks there last year - but during cabaret festival time it shines.

     

Masai Warriors and Goosebump Trails

They say those who know do and those who don’t teach. But I can’t see why you can’t do both.

I love travelling, I love travel writing, I love journalism but I also love to teach. It’s fun to impart what little knowledge you might have come across to other people. And it’s even more fun to see what they come up with. And with this in mind I have started teaching travel writing.


In the past few years, I’ve been to around 20 international destinations and scores in Australia and New Zealand.. I’ve interviewed everybody from Masai warriors to Republican voters in the US to Irish genealogists to Albanian professors to Indonesian villagers. And I’ve written hundreds of travel stories.


But I didn’t start out as a travel writer. I did a pretty traditional journalism cadetship on a newspaper and worked in the Press Gallery in Canberra before heading to the Kimberley in Western Australia and then the Northern Territory to cover the burgeoning land rights movements there.


It wasn’t really until I worked in Central America in the mid 80s that I started writing travel stories. It was a way of getting stories published that you couldn’t get into the world news or features pages. One I remember was about the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua and what an evocative destination that was, even with a war going on there at the time.


We went over to cover the autonomy movement and elections. We sailed up the coast on a cargo ship and climbed into canoes which crashed over waves before landing on the beach. Everybody was green with seasickness but that didn't stop one girl carrying a birthday cake for her family the whole way. On the beach we were met by long-haired, wild-looking soldiers. I thought I’d arrived for the filming of Apocalypse Now.


The female Nicaraguan journalist and I slept head to toe in a mosquito-netted hammock, down with the soldiers. We thought we were safer there. It seems strange now reading about Nicaragua as the newest tourist destination. 


When I was there they used to blow up the ferry to Bluefields on the Atlantic Coast every second Friday.


Times change and so do politics and people. What was a war zone regularly becomes a tourist destination and vice versa.


That’s what makes it so fascinating to write about.


Come to one of my courses held in my Sydney home where you can also enjoy beautiful Balinese food cooked by my husband, Budi Arsana, and get some travel writing tips.


I also teach regional and family history writing. Nearly every story is enriched by historical background, I believe. And some of my favourites have been about tracing my family history in Scotland and Ireland, what’s known as the “goosebump trail”.


Email me on plater@optusnet.com.au for course dates, times and prices.

Lionel and Elvis

Sadly, great Australian boxer Lionel Rose died this week.

At the age of 19 Rose became the first Aboriginal person to win a world title – when he defeated Masahiko “Fighting” Harada in Tokyo in 1968 to win the world bantamweight belt.

Rose grew up in a bark shed at Jackson’s Track, a poor settlement near the Gippsland town of Drouin in Victoria but became a champion.

Rose represented a positive figure for Australian indigenous people. He was a part of my childhood, in a way as he was the first famous Aboriginal person I'd heard of as a teenager.

As a Victorian friend said to me, "he was a superb sportsman and someone that I looked up to at the time, and still do. Plus, he was very cute".

I was intrigued to read in his obituary by Gerry Carman that Rose gathered a glittering array of admirers around Australia and overseas and his biggest American fan was Elvis Presley. Rose and his trainer Jack Rennie apparently were the only outsiders allowed on to the set of a Presley film (Roustabout) and spent three hours with the king of rock’n’roll, who insisted on a brief “spar” with him.

“Elvis never forgot his raisin’” is one of the many tributes to Elvis Presley on a story wall at the shotgun shack he was born in at Tupelo, Mississippi, now a museum, which I visited in 2006. It was thus named because a shotgun bullet could pass from the front to the back.

The tribute was written by Annie Presley, a cousin by marriage and a dear friend of Elvis’s mother, Gladys.

Another tribute tells of Elvis sneaking away to the local black Baptist church to listen to gospel music.

The shack is not that different to back in 1934 when Elvis’s dad Vernon borrowed $180 for materials to build it with Elvis’s grandfather and uncle on land he sharecropped.

In 1948, Vernon moved the family to Memphis, about 160km north, to look for work. What they couldn’t load in their 1939 Plymouth, they left behind. But it was Graceland, the home he moved into after he became a star, when he was 22, that most people associate with Elvis.

On the way to the recent Byron Bay Bluesfest I listened in the car to Paul Simon’s Graceland:

"The Mississippi Delta was shining
Like a National guitar
I am following the river
Down the highway
Through the cradle of the civil war

I'm going to Graceland
Graceland
In Memphis Tennessee..."

With the civil war always as the backdrop, the U S of A is the land that created rock’n’roll – and before that gospel, jazz, soul, rhythm and blues, bluegrass and country. Elvis and later the Beatles and the Rolling Stones unashamedly turned black music into white music for a wider audience.

Rose, on the other hand, recorded country/pop music singles such as I Thank You.

I wonder if during those three hours together Elvis and Rose jammed or just talked about coming from the wrong side of the tracks – something they shared although from different countries and backgrounds.

They were both stars.