Indonesia Archives The Paris Review
When I walk through museum galleries, stocked with the bravest of human efforts suspended luminescent on canvas or rising in harmonious stone, I feel covetous. coque iphone And though I am awed by the aesthetic achievements before me, I also diminish them to what I would collect. I would hang that Veronese. I would like to wake to that celadon moon jar from the Joseon dynasty.
"Jewelry: The Body Transformed," a new show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (on view through February 24), indulges this covetousness. After all, every piece of art here is wearable. The exhibition displays more than two hundred pieces of jewelry boucles d'oreille demi cercle from the Met's own collection. bijoux personnalise The thoughtful curation and liner notes make a point I mused on while boucles d'oreille pendante quartz rose uptown: jewelry is as ancient an art form as we have. The metals and stones valued by humans often endure. Diamonds, as we know, are among the hardest substances in nature, and any silver seam is as old as the earth. Their endurance is part of their value, and because they are valued, they have been sacked and stolen again and again but less often destroyed. The serpentine logic spirals like a pair of Hellenistic armbands.
I stood beside gold Egyptian sandals meant to be worn to the afterlife, and I admired their "toe stalls," intricate gold caps intended to preserve digits for use in the next life. Each nail is represented down to cuticles of gold, boucles d'oreille creoles the simplicity of which is as stunning as the complexity of royal earrings from first centuryAndhra Pradesh. Though aesthetics have changed since the first century, I was surprised by how little. Read More
Last year marked the two hundredth anniversary of the eruption of Indonesia's Mount Tambora, among the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history. This year marks the two hundredth anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Next year, 2017, will be the two hundredth anniversary of Baron Karl Drais's "running machine," the precursor to the modern bicycle. iphone case Strange as it may seem, these three events are all intimately related; they're all tied together by the great shift in climate that made 1816 the "year without a summer." Read More
We're closer than ever to electing a womanpresident a political outcome that seemed fantastical even in 1992, when Donna Karan made an almost farcically outlandish ad campaign called "In Women We Trust" boucles d'oreille noires depicting a woman in high office: "Karan's ads make the presidency look like it was art directed by Lana Del Rey all slo mo and high contrast, shallow focus and delicate, practiced ennui. coque huawei In Madame President's ticker tape parade, her crisp oxford blows open to reveal a presidential dcolletage supported by what looks like a black lace bustier. She juggles childcare duties with required reading in a tube top. coque samsung Our suspiciously youthful commander in boucles d'oreille charles jourdan chief commands the respect of her old, male associates in double breasted pinstripes and a skirt slit up to there, hair always blown back, esprit boucles d'oreille nary a part nor pore in sight. coque huawei coque samsung It's a dream within a dream: A woman makes it to the top of the political food chain with her composure, mood lighting, and sensual wardrobe intact."
Say it's 1661 and the Catholic Church has just locked you away because you're Jewish. coque samsung There's a good chance you'll be burned at the stake. You could mope about it. Or you could do what Francis von Helmont did: "he took his imprisonment in stride, and between trips to the torture chamber he conceived his theory of language. iphone 11 case amazon/a> Usually referred to as the Alphabet of Nature, the small book outlines Francis's concept of Hebrew and his scheme for teaching deaf mutes to speak it. The frontispiece to the book shows Francis sitting at a table in his cell in Rome; facing a mirror, he is scientifically measuring his lips with a pair of calipersGiven Francis' belief that all true knowledge is latent in our microcosmic bodies accessible through divine revelation it is not boucles d'oreille miraculous ladybug surprising that his model of language imagines the Hebrew characters as being almost engraved boucles d'oreille perle grise inside us, physically wedded to our mouths."
You probably read the Boxcar Children as a kid many generations have not realizing that those children were capitalist shills, seducing you with images of an illusory meritocracy: "There remains something mildly and even pleasurably heretical about the way the Boxcar Children locate the outer limits of amusement in decorous productivity the way that, for them, there's no better use of total independence than perfectly mimicking the most respectable behaviors of adults. They earn money, do chores when no one's watching ('The children could hardly wait to put the shining dishes on the shelf'), and engage in none of the mischief that other literary children take to when left to their own devicesHard work, here, is presented as at once deviant and rewarding, and kids respond to this I know I did with their boucles d'oreille visage rond rarely united desires to be both unsupervised and good."
If you've always wished that "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" was a photo essay, your prayers have been answered: for his series "End of Crisis," William Minke embarked on not one but two cruises, photographing the diversions on ships that aren't exactly state of the art. "I've always been fascinated by heterotopias and coexisting worlds," he says: "After reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace I decided to go on a journey of cruise ships because his description of on board life sounded very bizarreAs a traveller one can leave behind everyday life on thirteen decks of roulette tables, bingo and shopping malls twenty four hours a day."
Indonesia is enormous, beautiful, heterogeneous, populousbut no one is bringing its literature into English, Louise Doughty writes: "There are some countries so vast and diverse that any attempt to summarize them feels offre speciale nouveaux articles cristal intersperse lune forme design simple et genereux boucle doreille pour femme insulting: such is Indonesia. coque iphone With a population of 258 million, it is the world's fourth most populous nation balanbiu minimaliste rond boucles doreilles pour les femmes cadeaux geometrique multicolore email boucles doreilles 2020 mode bijoux accessoires and the largest formed by an archipelago. When it was guest of honor at the Frankfurt book fair last year, it appeared under the banner '17,000 islands of imagination,' a phrase describing its geography but also encapsulating the complexities of representationAs yet, little of its literature has been translated into EnglishAccording to Goenawan Mohamad, Indonesia's most well known public intellectual and founder of Tempo magazine, which was banned for a while under the Suharto regime, 'Asian writing is noticeable only when it comes from the site of calamity. "Havana, Key West, Ketchum, Paris, Pamplona these locales tend to conjure vintage Papa: a kerchiefed, bloated, rum drunk Nobel laureate. Petoskey Not so much. Michigan era boucles d'oreille ambre et or Hemingway is threshold Hemingway young and raw, before the fame and subcutaneous padding and sixteen daiquiri lunches. It's where he experimented in delinquency, learned to cast a fly rod, stepped unmoored into the wilderness and first tinkered with a prose style that would one day make him famous."
In times of internal strife and quandary, it's seldom a good idea to turn to the precepts of dead white men. But during her midlife crisis, Alison Gopnik found solace in the ideas of David Hume, which remain progressive even today: for Hume, "the metaphysical foundations don't matter. coque iphone Experience is enough all by itself. What do you lose when you give up God or 'reality' or even 'I' The moon is still just as bright; you can still predict that a falling glass will break, and you can still act to catch it; you can still feel compassion for the suffering of others. Science and work and morality remain intactGive up the prospect of life after death, and you will finally really appreciate life before it. Give up metaphysics, and you can concentrate on physics. Give up the idea of your precious, unique, irreplaceable self, and you might actually be more sympathetic to other people."
From the renowned creators of camera obscura and camera lucida, it's Camera Restricta, which "will force you to actually spend time admiring a picturesque landscape rather than worrying about composing the best shot." Basically, it's a camera that can tell if other people have already photographed the thing you're trying to photograph, thus saving you a lot of time and preventing any kind of White Noise esque Most Photographed Barn in America phenomenon.
On Eka Kurniawan's Beauty Is a Wound, an Indonesian novel now available in English, which is playful boucles d'oreille discrete and agreeably profane even as it tackles the darkest chapters of its nation's history, such as 1965's anti communist purge: "The narrator's voice ranges from merciless and brusque to tender and doleful. One of the men is terrorized by the ghosts of slaughtered Communists, who make him 'think that he was making love to his wife' when, in fact, 'he was fucking the toilet hole.' Scenes of brutality of rape, incest, bestiality are undercut by macabre humor. Dewi Ayu's eldest daughter, Alamanda, is in love with Kliwon, her childhood sweetheart, but she is forced to marry the Japanese soldier Shodancho, twenty years her senior, who drugs and rapes her. Alamanda buys an impenetrable 'anti terror garment' that transforms her underwear into a literal iron fortress."
Most of us have accepted that this "Internet" isn't just a passing trend; it's time, then, to put some serious thought into how to curb the trolls, whose power is on the rise. "With enough effort, expertise, and good faith, a comments section can showcase the worthwhile, efface the worthless, and downrank the dubious. But in mass media and mega platforms where most of the action is comments sections are all too often cybercesspools of trashing and trolling, obsessive annotators, and regressive instigatorsThe original sin of Internet culture was the exploitation of user generated content to enrich a lucky few at the top of dominant platforms. iphone 11 case Spreading that wealthwould be a good first step toward taming trolls and shaming sock puppeteers."
On my second day in Jakarta, an exhilarating, traffic choked terror of a city, I'm walking through the Garden District of Grand Indonesia Shopping Town. Grand Indonesia Shopping Town claims to be one of the largest upscale shopping centers in Southeast Asia, and it's here, with a view from half a dozen stories up down to the luxury car parked outside a showroom on the ground floor, that a frightening, familiar, visceral impulse nearly gets the best of me. As I've learned from talking to friends and near strangers, it's an impulse shared by many people, and, though the consequences of ever following through on it would suggest otherwise, not a suicidal one. I have to grip the railing that separates me from the shaft of empty space running from the top of the building to the bottom the shaft that provides a view between floors, a vertical column boring through what would otherwise be a flat, dangerless boucles d'oreille celtique homme circuit of shopping opportunities because some part of me wants, more than it wants any other thing, to fling itself over the edge.
I remember a friend in New Zealand, goaded into conversation about this impulse, saying that it may "fall" into the same family of impulses as the one that drives us, as toddlers, to touch a hot stove. Driven by a basic instinct for discovery and, ironically, survival a need to methodically taste test the environment in which we are to go on living. But as an adult I only occasionally have to restrain myself from bringing my hand down on a hot grill. I often cling to a wall in the fear that I might actually, if I let my guard down, follow through on the impulse to fling. It's as though the overriding, rational mental jury that keeps me from known harm remains undecided on the subject of sheer drops.
Some shopper, some shopping Muslim woman in a stylish hijab at Grand Indonesia Shopping Town, must see me pulling myself away from the railing carefully carefully but forcefully, as though I am one man physically restraining another. coque iphone xs She must wonder. Unless she understands.
Even on the second floor of the courtyard at my guesthouse in Menteng, the Jakarta neighborhood where Barack Obama spent part of his childhood (a statue of Barack as a boy stands outside of State Elementary School 01 Menteng, moved there after its original installment in Menteng Park incited protests), I gingerly bounce my fingertips against the stone wall to combat the impulse as I walk to my room.
A month ago, in Auckland, I nearly broke down on a visit to the observation deck of the Sky Tower, 610 feet above street level. The edge of the observation deck, up against a wrap around window providing panoramic views, also features panels of glass flooring one and a half inches thick. coque huawei boucles d'oreille colorees I more or less lurched over these, fearful not that I would fall through clearly, there was no risk of that but that the unruly, violent, psychotic and child like impulse would finally wear me down, and I would hurl my body against the protective glass, just to see what happened.
Not that street level in Jakarta lacks for potentially perilous excitement. In a place where the mere city proper's population tops ten million, it really is an adventure just crossing the street. Locals step into ceaseless traffic with one hand held out in a "stop" gesture, presumably hoping for the best as they ford each new roaring river of transport. boucles d'oreille ysl After losing almost an entire day to cab rides in order to visit Kota, the derelict remains of sixteenth century Dutch walled compound Batavia, I mostly stick to Menteng, striking out on foot. Because I want to flaunt a handsome new pair of navy leather Fred Perry shoes picked up in Sydney, I give myself painful blisters exploring the neighborhood. I make frequent stops at Indonesian coffee shops filled with cigarette smoke and chattering, stylish young people, and at the many local 7 Elevens that seem to be, with their European style outdoor caf seating, hugely popular social destinations. My heels throb with pain, lacerated by the offending shoes, but I'm charmed by life on the ground, where I can eat nasi goreng and never even think about throwing myself over a ledge.
This oddly innocent, feverishly suppressed impulse returns later, though, and with maximum intensity, at SKYE Bar, a fifty sixth floor rooftop venue offering views of the Jakarta skyline. The bar also offers an all too imaginable fatal drop, which appears to me to be kept from patrons by only an admittedly discouraging band of decorative plant life. supreme iphone 11 case I don't dare investigate the truth of this statement more closely, but my old friend and city contact, Dan, concurs that there is probably no significant railing, then hands me a beer.
"Has anyone ever fallen off of it, do you think" I ask.
"Probably not," says Dan's co worker. coque iphone 5 pas cher "It's only been open for three months."
Another of Dan's co workers wonders out loud whether anyone has ever thrown a beer bottle over the edge.
"Can you imagine, if you threw a bottle off this building, what would happen if it hit a car in the street below" I ask. "God. It would be like a meteor."
Conversation moves on to the recent meteor event in Russia, but I'm only half listening, boucles d'oreille jaune moutarde the other half of me grappling with the terrible impulse to take a running jump from SKYE Bar. iphone 11 case bijoux personnalise The immediate possibility, visible from where we stand, of a fifty six balanbiu exquise zircon crane etoile deux types boucles doreilles pour femmes cadeaux couleur or laiton mode unilaterale oreille broches bijoux story free fall, pulls at my body with a magnetism so nearly irresistible that my legs begin to tremble. Before too long we gravitate away from the edge, back towards the bar, where I'm certain more than a few beads of the sweat under my arms have nothing to do with the humidity here on the island of Java.
The day before I leave for Phnom Penh, I fail boucles d'oreille enfant à vis to muster the taxi taking fortitude to visit Taman Mini, a theme park east of Jakarta full of pavilions encapsulating Indonesian life, including examples of the building styles and architecture of this country's many and diverse provinces. Instead, I take a taxi to and from the post office, an errand that takes a few hours. bijoux faits a la main bleu et vert couleur verre boucles doreilles femmes mode brillant cristal boucles doreilles pour la fete en gros Friends and acquaintances in Jakarta tell me that giving up on one's ambitions for the day after running a single errand is not uncommon. (Though I don't stay in town long enough to do it belles femmes email fleur breloque or couleur boucles doreilles pour les filles the right way, which requires purchasing entire pirated seasons of TV shows on DVD in exasperation and retreating to ones apartment, defeated by the city.) I go to the post office to send boucles doreilles style ete tournesol chic marque couleur or simule perle declaration pour les femmes amitie some gifts back to America by sea mail, and to get rid of the handsome, offending Fred Perry shoes boucles d'oreille verre de murano vert that so cut up and blistered my heels.
A lithe, quick moving young Indonesian man who may or may not work for the post office scares up a ragged cardboard box to use for packing. coque iphone coque huawei I sit and watch as, cigarette hanging between his lips, he stuffs in my fabrics and trinkets and the offending shoes, then uses a length of black plastic thread tied to a spear like piece of metal to encase the parcel, with zigzagging stitches, in a layer of protective tarp. Soon the things I want to get rid of are safely hemmed in, the stitching as quaintly and monstrously uneven as on an old rag doll. The young man, still smoking, scribbles something on a boucles d'oreille harley davidson scrap of cardboard, then hands it to me.
I understand this to mean the package will arrive in two to three units of time, though I don't know what bulan means. Months, probably. iphone 11 case It could be years. Lifetimes. coque iphone 5 I don't really care. goed hoesje More than the gifts, I want the shoes gone.