BEING BALI… Post one

This very long experimental sentence began as a train-of-thought impulse attempting to capture some creative sense around our leasing the Bali Beach House for the full month of February...

We are just returning home after five weeks dissolving into the rather coarse, darkly colored volcanic sands still being pulverized finer on a beach with constant surf sheltering exotic tropical fish displaying against a bed of coral enticing divers mostly using scuba gear, but some hauling air tanks... often brought  in on one of the multitude of fishing boats, all white deep hulls for hauling the catch, but which thus are too vertical to hold steady without the two bamboo outriggers which allow good speed & fleet maneuverability while mimicking graceful water spiders... becoming the part of the visual romance of this scene with constant surf in front of the house's orientation to the Bali Sea, its tile-roofed entrance is closed with a purple gate, which color is repeated on the two large bi-fold doors opening the interior spaces of the house, designed and built 27 years ago, with a sweetly dated charm by details of patterned grid incorporating hints of the ancient swastika abused by a more recent aberration, but unique to the area now being inbuilt with guest houses, restaurants & shops along the busy road in Amed with a precipitous sidewalk being often also parking space for the motorcycles which are the most useful mode of transportation, add the fewer automobiles & trucks, makes for the chaotic necessities of living along this economic strip, essential to life & play here... it is what makes Bali so irritatingly exotic!

Punctuate that to your pleasure however you want while knowing I am playing with AI to design those words into an artful piece of calligraphy... while most of all I want to better share, with complete sentences, more bits & details of our recent adventure. Which proved to often become profound in its simplicity... while not precluding the myriad complexities preceding our traveling there & returning home. Ultimately becoming a truly full & fulsome retreat...

I should logically begin with explaining that we first met this intriguing house, 15 months ago when our friend Joel Singer & his husband Nana Muldana, brought us to this fishing village on the east coast of Bali named Amed.  

This after the road trip around Si Lanka five of us shared with them & another friend (who flew directly home from Colombo to his home in California to be with his ailing canine) driving around Sri Lanka (where Joel had lived with his husband James Broughton in 1976) in 2024...which I blogged about here.

The house rather quickly & strongly caught our imaginations, so we reserved then, over a year in advance, for this year's time... not yet knowing how really needy & ready to create this retreat we would find ourselves now. It was a great gift to ourselves! A rare very quiet & totally unstructured month. 

A rather-too-huge couch invited & caught & sometimes seemed to intimidate generous space in the living room. Stephen sprawled happily there. We watched several movies on his computer there. While I used one of the hassocks... closer to a lamp... to support my journal... although, I really preferred writing outside. 

There was a tile roofed balle [pronounced ballay] which sheltered in rain or sun a huge mattress with a batch of pillows for reading, napping, writing in journal all while gazing at the surf & beach life over the short defining sea wall.  'Twas most perfect for collecting us to share the conversations we'd been cogitating & husbanding in this unique quality of time we'd construed for ourselves. 

 

Retreat it became, as Stephen... in his more organizational manner... championed a memory from his early years of working with the Minnesota Experimental City Project... which used the acronym DOR for Disorient-Orient-Reorient, as three sections of intention. Even I, who generally approaches stuff in a more relaxed manner, found myself using that notion & acronym in our conversations and rhythms of the month. 

We had made the intentional choice to spend this holiday not moving around geographically, but staying put, without a car... at lazy foot speed. All very different from our two other big trips last year (British Isles & Africa, which we'd judged to be too frantic & busy. 

This house suited our purpose admirably, being generous in size, open & full of air & light. Two floors, with three bedrooms each with baths, each with different furnishings & moods... The third bedroom had a pair of single beds & was less well oriented to the sea, so we only used it to store our empty luggage. That room also faced the busy road, with more loud cycles than autos. A wall with a reserved parking space & purple gate marked arrival from the main Amed road to Bali Beach House. Inside the gate & down a flight of steps, we passed the owner's abode along several lush passages leading toward the pool, then dog-legging into an over-hung entry courtyard with a waterfall into a pond with fish & frog song.

 The front door was elaborately carved...

... & opened to the stairway hall, kitchen & the living room, with a formal dining table not much used. The open veranda toward the ocean held a large very functional table where we ate & worked our various projects ...

 

The lofty living room rose into the traditional tall pitched roof gifting much air above a naturally patterned lively sandstone floor. The stairway up was hidden behind a wall with top scallops sculpting the space around the open walkway to the second floor bedrooms. Similar smaller open niches continued the open space of the back hall to the kitchen... all designed as a simple ingenuous screen defining open flow in four directions..   

Stephen make good use of the watercolors I'd given him, at his request, as his birthday present last year...

He did read it well-- some chapters while we sunned by the pool, or others while we'd retreated  from too sunny or rainy times to lounge under the shelter of that tile roof of the balle, with its view of the surf & changing weather.  I became daily more entranced with the stories in the novel & was ever eager to hear more... through to its complicated, difficult ending. Altogether, a story with a joyful, crazy soul. 

We made good use of our sweet swimming pool with its fanciful fish sculptures spouting water, where we soaked up sun & watched the dramatic rain clouds form storms sometimes developing into thundering electrical shows over the ocean.

 Indeed, the house lease included a staff of five; two women & three young men, who cooked breakfast & who tended the pool & swept up the debris of constant storm-fall of rain & wind... then would join to clean, make up our bed, clean toilets & sweep the floors of this house on a sandy beach we used daily, easily tracked-in during the rainy season... 

All these young folk were reliably smiling & obviously happy. This cultural characteristic of joy is pervasive in Balinese culture & has much to do with an integration of life work with soul work. A demonstration of a functional underlayer of family style with respectful presence... honoring humor & fun... Remarkable, even as I realize I'm only seeing glimpses of any whole story.

Bali is part of Indonesia, with the world's largest Muslim population, but has obviously retained a naturally deep... quite palpably felt... innately animistic Hindu cultural base. 

 

The house came with Breakfast included, offering a nicely varied menu to choose from: Black Rice Pudding... which I enjoyed several mornings; Banana Pancakes with Palm Sugar syrup... Stephen's favorite... or eggs made to order... plus Jaffle... my ultimate favorite. 

A Jaffle is a grilled sandwich of softly cooked eggs, topped with a cheese slice and tomato, assembled on slices of crustless white sandwich bread,  pressed between the hot plates of an electric waffle iron type device, creating two toasty triangular pouches, holding goodies inside, easily cut like tea sandwiches. When all's done right one can... as I did... pick it up with fingers to nibble out of hand. I ordered a Jaffle Iron since coming home! I love to to explore & play with food... Often a slice of homemade cake was offered... the jack-fruit cake was fantastic!; the banana bread more banana than bread. 

Black Rice Pudding

Jaffle...

The 3 guys were each named Wayan... the word for the Balinese first-born... the custom being to name children with four names in sequence; our Wayans were each the first born, or as the "Middle Wayan" said, #1- Number-One. Then variations & nicknames become common, each with his or her own more specific identity.  It becomes a new form of lattices forming community.

We each had a favorite.  We both enjoyed our "Dancing Wayan," playing with his obvious love of dancing to our music... we sometimes joined in as well, while he went about his work.

They left us to our privacy, so we could shuck our clothes to tan in the frequently clear midday, but of course the weather has its own mind...

  

We used subtle contemplation after our own marriage... imagining how married life can be different... while also celebrating our relationship of thirty years intentionally resisting that institution.

We chose this upstairs bedroom for sleeping in light & fresh air from sliding doors we left open to the breezes & view of the surf beyond a small deck...

But I preferred using the bath downstairs for its shower in a private stone courtyard open to reflection of the weather...

  

We've returned to our eighth floor home in our own "village" at Point Ruston, Tacoma, Washington... in a USA which continues to devolve politically into a questionable version of the nation I love. I also sometimes feel tempted to remain in the more "civilized" parts of the world we travel... if that malaise were not seemingly contagiously pervasive in so many other parts of the shrinking globe. I must continue to ultimately accept being human in an inhumane world. I am a minuscule piece of the hope of history.  

What we needed was time of a quality to mimic & practice more of what retirement is, since the goal of having Momo capably taking over & running the bell business, while a worthy goal, I understand the probability that it will  take longer to transition it as well as we all want. This is an ingrown part of my mental & creative life's work to responsibly transfer... not just the counts of an inventory of goods & pages of bookkeeping. 

We all (Monica, Stephen & I) want to make this wonderful improbability actually work... & continue to stay creative, to stay working & growing in different, & more successful ways. It's never actually been a business & certainly not one to support me or anyone else. 

It is not even a useful "gift," having always required substantial subsidizing, both artistic & financial. What I have been most successful at is finding loving help to continue living as an artist pretending to be a businessman. I have managed to love my art & also my comfortable life... with a lot of luck & even more of help & patronage. 

Retirement for me requires a lot more of work than is usual for its notion! I needed a retreat in order to constructively continue celebrating a delightful married retirement!

Troldhaugen - Edvard Grieg's Home...

 Edvard Grieg has been one of my favorite composers since high school & Troldhaugen is the intriguing name of his home, meaning "Troll Hill" 

We managed to avoid any trolls on our hour's bus tour out of Bergen to visit that home... discovering a lovely Nordic home, favoring the Victorian age in which it was built.  It is being refurbished, so unfortunately we were not able to view its interior.

Romantic trellising at the side door at first suggested to me there might once have been a porte-cochier entrance... but the old photos show the family & guests enjoying the sun there instead. This was a summer home, no doubt, to one who worked winters in concert halls.
 

I'm trusting that other visitors in later times might be able to see its simple grace better restored.

 

But, his studio is indeed well painted against the elements... quite a resounding red! 

... It was the most interesting part of the home to me...  

 

The disappointing part was that its windows hadn't been cleaned in far too long, rendering a dreary light on his piano & the view through that light out the further window from which he took inspiration. I trust the house renovation will soon continue down the slope to the studio... if only with a window washer!

One walks to the studio down a fair slope, some parts of which offered split-rail hand holds.

hardly noticing that they are passing a green roof... which covers the concert hall, with an entrance  foyer up the hill where we began.

A stunning concert hall - The Troldshall

 

The far more more polished piece of the tour's program was a concert in the truly effective Troldsale... the concert venue built into the hill along which we'd walked down to the studio where the music we were going to hear was composed. The stage was backed by a wall of glass open to the view. A grand piano waited. The pianist  appeared from the steps below to play. The Peer Gynt Suite at home in the Hall of the Mountain King!

 We lingered, admiring the venue's ambience before emerging from such a brilliantly spacial underground experience, into a yet more brilliantly sunny day. Ordering lattes at the cafe we sat to enjoy the sun, while realizing that the performer had done the same, so we chatted, to learn that he too was only there for the  first time that day, so he accepted our invitation to join while we explored to find the vault where the couple rested... another small walk along the rocky shoreline of the lake, finding the simple slab closing, with little marking its reason for sheltering so much significance so insignificantly in that cliff... a profound closure to the day. 

This drawing of Madame Grieg, Nina,which I found in the museum, is so happily impish that I want to suppose she was a ready anodyne to any negative troll energy in their life!

Africa: Post # 5... Victoria Falls...

 

 As we planned this trip we decided to take advantage of being closer to Victoria Falls than we were likely to be anytime soon in future... besides it turned out to become a Zimbabwe honeymoon & these Falls are larger than those of Niagara. Even while now running with much less than when full. The phenomenon of the Zambezi River dropping spectacularly over an edge formed by a tectonic shift in the planet's crust  into a canyon becomes a dramatic series of frothing water churned into vaporous clouds at its base. The native name for the falls means a beautifully evocative phrase "the smoke that roars"...

We were visiting when the river was running low, but still making a dramatic show.

 

It is quite wide so even at this dry season it leaves a "print" of its course when full... 

 

 

We found a good guide, if a bit soulful, particularly when I mentioned the college education he seemed to have, but Carlton explained he hadn't been able to afford that. 

 

 

 

 

The hotel where we stayed was built with lots of open-air spaces... beginning at the reception...

 

With side tables lathed from slabs, which I found particularly handsome...

We were booked with a dinner cruise on the Zambezi... very nicely done. We enjoyed our table at the front of the upper deck, giving us unimpeded sunset views...

The landscape became an exotic series of silhouetted riverine [riparine] views...
The drinks & several well made courses were served by a pleasantly efficient staff... who formed a chorus to sing us off the boat after we docked to go home! Lovely!

  

Then there was the additional offering for a redux, next morning before dawn. I was ambivalent at first, but we decided to get up at 4am & meet a driver in the dark to join. We proved to be the only people who felt called...  thus gifting us a private event with Captain Bryan... who once again demonstrated the quality & character of the guides we met in South Africa... although we were actually floating along the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe... just before the river quickened to drop over Victoria Falls. 

 

 

 

The boat was set-up with breakfast for a dozen or more, so we felt totally pampered, cruising with coffee & nibbles in hand, roving 'round the boat for the best views... often which were pointed-out by Captain Bryan. As Stephen began asking questions they soon were chatting... as the Captain warmed to his capabilities, sensing our genuine interests in communication... sharing differences as well as the more usual commonalities. This is how travel feeds us...

 

 

 

 

I'm glad he offered his encouragement toward this excursion!

 

 

Another bit of knowledge toward my kitchen was to be taken to see a tree which is the source for baking powder is the Baobab tree... who knew?!?

[I will now... every time I bake a cake!]

Africa: Post #8...Cape Town... Art & Architecture After Aparthied...

 

Cape Town is Serious...  Cape Town is Fun... 

 

I could not resist noting this vehicle as Shakier was driving us to the airport. Its colorful bit of sass, even in a working rig (a painter?), seems to describe the mood we were holding in appreciation for this renewing country.

 

We were carrying back a piece of art to remind us of Cape Town's magic during the winter into which we are returning . We are continuing the celebration of color to what might be considered a symbolic mutual wedding gift to ourselves! Yes, it is odd & quirky, so we are mounting & framing it accordingly, with more color... so, of course there is a story...

 

As we were walking back to our hotel along the waterfront after dinner, we were arrested in the dim lighting by curiously fantastic line drawings, not unlike cartoons... piquing my imagination from a number of my interests. Also displayed was a QR code inviting an app revealing tastes of the the drawings evolving into animation of them evolving into bit of a larger story line, indeed part of a much larger work... & the Art At Africa gallery just above would tell & show us more. We came back to visit the next day, which was our last! 

The artist's name is David Griessel & he is working to create a major composition of which the two pieces we bought are sketches for the original drawings which are now incorporated digitally into the animations of the story... roughly like the "cels" of past animation techniques. 

 Fantasy, animation, draftsmanship, story... then there is a musical composition as soundtrack! We are pleased to be enjoying & following this artist & his project!

See more here: artatafrica.art

    

 

An overview to help understand the unique geography of the place... more than a city... developed around tall, flat Table Mountain from which one looks south at the tip of the continent with the Atlantic Ocean on the right side & the Indian Ocean on the left. To the south lies Antarctica...

We stayed at the Victoria & Alfred Hotel on the waterfront... I'm still learning about Alfred, The Queen's second son, who has an interesting history getting him to South Africa... the waterfront is the original harbor where the Dutch East Indies trade was centered, & has been recently renewed into new life... a happening spot. We especially enjoyed having fine breakfasts on the sunny front walk of the hotel.

The SILO is the new art museum... Zeitz MOCAA (Museum of Contemporary Art Africa) you can see in the center of this image. It totally intrigued me, being an abandoned concrete grain elevator, like the ones I grew up with in Kansas... having been re-imagined with a huge saw, biting & cutting into the tall cylinders to gracefully re-sculpt them into open into new spaces, as shown in this model... brilliant! [I was heartened to re-imagine Kansas as a future art mecca!]

 

 

 

Of course, there are transparent elevators as well as a dramatically huge spiral staircase!

 

The floors of the elevators are also frosted glass... 

 

 

 The splayed-open base becomes its own dramatic

floor 

 

 This shot of Stephen exploring its terrain shows the large scale of the space.

 

 

 At the top there has been built a new multi-story event space with a coffee-shop & hotel.

 

The cylinders are capped with heavy glass with curious iconography resembling some re-invention on Chinese/Japanese characters.

 

I won't resist further celebration of the color-scheme in the men's room, as an example of the consideration given to seemingly every  detail of design!  

  

Down further in the bowels of the structure, more exhibit spaces have been created with the mechanique of chutes once opening to move the grain, exposed. We enjoyed seeing student work from the educational department of the museum.

 

 

 

ART AFTER APARTHEID...

That statement is bit of invention on my part, noting my actual ignorance about that historic social situation, even as I was rather frequently reminded that I need to keep trying to learn for myself. 

The SILO was exhibiting various such lessons...

 

I read the persistent red color on the walls speaking to the deadly regime now past... 

Some images are nearly universal... Others are more abstract propositions & explorations. This is the museum at work in a new era...

 

A carefully invented display about a group of authors exhibited books & papers in a blossom of plexiglass cases.

 

 

This statement about time can summarize much about this extraordinary country... about any country. All are constantly in states of flux & change... going forward or stumbling attempting to resist inevitable change...

Exiting through the good gift shop, there were more of such parts of equipment becoming a casual display of such stuff as I might dub "art of actuality".

 More of the gears of this large size which are such a turn-on for me!

 While Stephen enjoyed playful rock'n'roll seating!