The Katchek Monkey Chants are a transcendent experience to see/hear. It’s one of the main reasons we keep going back to Bali. Marcia and I are madly in love with balinese culture and the Katchek is an important part of that culture. Check out the Katchek scene from Baraka. and then start planning your next trip, to Bali, stat.
While we’re in Bali, I thought I’d leave you with some Bali-inspired posts. I cranked out as many as I could, while keeping the content at least semi-interesting. So this is the first in a series:
Video taken at Padang Padang and Dreamland. gets my heart racing and the music is entrancing. I wish the waves would be this size while I’m there. note to self: don’t book another trip to Bali, unless it’s July-Aug.
Last night in Los Angeles, we met up with the homiez for some killer thai food. Hung out with my good friends before we take off later tonight. Red Curry, Spicy Basil Noodles and a few Changs later, I woke up this morning to a nasty throat itch and throbbing sinuses. Marcia with a temperature and fuzzy white tonsils. A morning trip to the clinic and a penicillin prescription later, one full day in LA and we’ve managed to catch one of them nasty northern crappy gringo colds. Now we’re taking it easy, watching Galaxy Quest, and we can’t wait to spend 24 hours on a plane, with a nasty head cold and sour throat. oh, the fun.
… But everything in LA ain’t always what it seems.
Well, we rolled in to Lost Angels last night at around 7:dirty. Only one encounter with Joe-Law along the way (in jacked up Riverside country, no less). Seems my registration was in “non-operable” mode. big oops. We spent basically the entire days today, visiting various different branches of the California DMV to get my registration and license in order. A fine, sunny california day wasted on horribly designed interiors of bloated state government agencies.
All was forgotten with the first few slurps of some damn good Pho, from our favorite little vietnamese pho joint on Sunset and Silver Lake Blvd. Pho is perhaps my favorite thing to eat, ever, and today’s soupy, herbie action was the bomb.
Nothing else was really accomplished and I managed to screw up the zip code on two different packages that were to be delivered tomorrow, in time for our flight, tomorrow night at midnight. I suck. I managed to iron things out with UPS, but we’ll see if the packages come in, as the customer support says.
Unrelatedly, my new H2 fins got here and I can hardly control myself. these things weigh mere onces, where my normal fins way pounds. they’re freakin sick and I can’t wait to fuck ‘em up on some hard ass balinese reef. i’m such a kook.
We’re midway through our drive up to Los Angeles, holed up in a killer little hotel called Hotel San Sebastian in Hermosillo (it’s the perfect hotel for a midway point between Vallarta and LA). We took off at 6am and managed to cover half the total driving distance. roughly 13 hours of driving. This, after one crazy-ass night.
Our friends Fer and Yanen got married on the beach in Nuevo Vallarta, last night. While getting ready, I slammed my foot in to the base of our bed and crunched my pinky toe. I screamed my brains out for five minutes, finished getting ready and I hobbled to the car and we were off to the wedding. During the ceremony, I could see the toe turning purple as it blew up and started turning over sideway. After the mass and vows, but before communion (classic catholic beach wedding), Marcia and I “done r.u.n.o.f.t” and went to a private emergency room in nearby Mezcales. One Xray later and the on-duty doctor was saying I had broken my toe and needed a full foot cast. I was less then confident and pissed about the prospect of having to cancel our trip to Bali, on the advice of doctor who has no real experience with foot trauma. We high-tailed it outta there and a few phone calls later, we were off to San Javier, a well regarded private hospital, to meet a trauma and foot specialist recommended by my good homie Pato. Second opinion doc said the toe wasn’t broken and taped it to the next toe and all was well again in the world.
By 9:30pm we were back at the wedding. We grabbed some food, hung with our tribe, gave the groom and bride our best wishes and were back home in bed by 11pm. On the way home, Marcia started to get some kind of allergic reaction, assumably from the pesto she had eaten at the wedding, so we stopped for foot wrappings and anti-allergy med. Mexico is great like that. Nothing like self-diagnosis and being able to buy meds without a prescription.
After two ominous omens, from last night, we got a good early start today and covered a crap-load of miles in good time with little stress. Tomorrow, we’re off at 6am again and we should be in Los Angeles by 8pm.
So we’re taking off for Los Angeles tomorrow and then on to Bali, on wednesday. Things are getting down to the wire and we’re packing up as we speak. For the past month I’ve been researching off-season surfing in Bali (october to april). I’ve compiled my research into a quick guide that could possibly start as a jumping off point for people following in the same foot steps.
From my research so far, I’ve learned that Nusa Dua, Sanur and Keramas are the three main off-season surf spots. Canggu, Legian and Medewi also get some swell and Bingins is the place to go if there’s any swell at all on the right side of the bukit (southeast Bali). Bingin and Dreamland are good bases for off-season surfing, as they are located close enough to Nusa Dua to make quick trips to the break, without having to pay ridiculously expensive hotel fees for staying in Nusa.
If there’s no waves at Bingin, you’re hotel / guest stay will usually get you a lift over to nusa dua.
Canggu is near Seminyak, north of Legain and it gets real expensive up there, you can usually catch a bemo up to canggu from kuta/legian. superb right break over lava rocks. bring the booties.
They say that swell is unreliable in Sanur. 2 breaks, bring booties.
Hotels are too expensive. So stay in Tanjung Benoa or Bingin/Dreamland/Balangan.
The best advice I can give to anyone who is researching surf in Bali off-season (or on-season) is to buy the Indo Surf + Lingo book. It’s worth its wait in gold. bullion. It’ll tell you where all the breaks are, how to get to them, how to navigate them, where to stay, what to do and what not to do. Don’t waste too much of your time online. Surprisingly, I’ve found very little valuable online resources. Obviously this may change, but realistically, Bali is a very popular place. So information is guarded well, as it should be. The folks behind Indo Surf + Lingo book do a great job of educating first-timers and protecting locals. Buy it, trust me.
Well, I was gonna say this entry til the middle of our trip to Bali, but I got to thinkin’ that it didn’t have too much to do with Bali (well, nothing to do with) and I was trying to keep a theme to the entries that are auto-posted during our trip. Plus, these movies are pretty old anyway, so it doesn’t make much sense to wait. So, I’m publishing this now, a shortnsweet list of the films I saw in the past week or so. Here goes…
Unfortunately, here in mexico, we get crap movies in the theaters and even crappier movies on dvd. So in essence, this list is an approximation of the better movies that pass through our two horse town. We won’t be getting The Darjeeling Limited, There Will Be Blood, Control, No Country For Old Men anytime soon and we most certainly won’t get Juno.
I am the sound of Ed’s inner film buff, crying tears of shame.
Jon at Standard Motion is doing some really nice photog sites. He’s the guy behind the Redux Pictures site. good work.
< -- Begin rant -->
An online hotel booking agency sent me a form to fill in and send back. I tried to do the whole thing digitally with Adobe Acrobat and my scanned signature. The whole process was so frustrating, I had to resort to printing out the form, filling it in, with my chicken-scratch handwriting, scanning it back in and sending it off.
Acrobat’s ‘digital signature’ features were definitely designed for some heavy and secure business usage. The only problem is that the software is so hard to use, I can’t imagine a business oriented user having the time to figure this application out. Most business people just don’t have the time to read manuals, like it or not. Simplicity is not on display in Acrobat. There’s so much useless bloated feature creep, it’s ridiculous.
I’d consider myself a power user and this application totally had me doing limbo moves. Once I finally made it through the torturous maze of figuring out how to fill out the form and adding my signature I had five different versions floating around my desktop. Adding insult to injury, I checked the finally pdf in Apple’s Preview app and the signature isn’t even on the form?! You mean to tell me, whoever recieves this form, has to have Acrobat just to even view the signature? How lame.
If I could give the Acrobat dev team my two cents, here’s what that would be: their current ‘digital signature’ feature should be called ’secure/verified digital signature’ and they should add a new feature called ’simple signature’ that just allows you to add an image file to the form that has your scanned signature. Wanna be a little bit more secure? Have the editing capabilities of the doc locked by password, upon saving. This ’simple signature’ functionality would suffice for 90% of most users’ needs. The ability to add 3D models to a pdf doc? I found it hard enough just to add a plain old image.
Some indie mac developer needs to come out with a pixelmator-style app for pdfs. Design a pdf editing application for 70% of users that has 30% of the functionality of Adobe Acrobat. I’d buy that for 10 or 20 bones.
< -- end rant -->
Sean Finocchio produces gorgeous city-life inspired digital photos on canvas. The above image from his liquor store collection on Supermarket. nice.
Supermarket is pretty cool. a well-designed website for buying well-designed things from people just like you and me. apparel, jewelry, furniture, photos, paintings, etc… sorta like etsy. [via SM]
Gaspar was an undocumented worker in Seattle. He had just returned to Bucerias a few days before this picture was taken.
Hybrids Project is a new photography book by Klaus Thymann. The book is filled with interesting images covering “…micro-pockets of hybrid cultures…” including snow polo, gay rodeo, underwater striptease, hip hop in china, an indoor beach, rave as religion and many more. The website for the book is equally interesting, with a unique thumbnail and preview system. thumbs up. oh and book design by Love Creative. [via Avisualsociety]
Amazon totally b0rks the launch of their new ebook reader jackassingly called Kindle, by tying it to draconian 1984-inspired DRM and Terms-of-Service: The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) by Mark Pilgrim. Brilliant and horrifying. And exactly the reason why Kindle will and should ultimately fail. John Gruber also breaks off some whup-ass for Kindle.
Three cursory things:
Sony: When timing is everything. commercial photography rule #2031: please use photos taken with your own equipment in ads for your products. In this case, Sony uses an analog photo from 1965, most certainly taken with a Nikon, to promote its DSLR line. big oops. [via the excellent link dumps of A Photo Editor]
Brian Piana has some gorgeous ‘net inspired color bar art over at SpillSomePaint.com. Great concepts and aesthetics. My favorite: The Rise to Power of Tom Delay. [via kottke]
Live, super grainy, shaky, bad audio, unedited concert footage taken on a little Canon point-n-shoot, from The Whitest Boy Alive playing “Don’t Give Up” at F.Bolke (bar / art gallery / concert venue) in Guadalajara on Nov.10th, 2007. back story here.
The Marlboro Marine is an excellent web/flash based mini-documentary produced by Media Storm and The LA Times on a soldier who went to Iraq, instantly became famous in a ‘war defining’ photo and came back only to find his life fall apart from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Heart-breaking story and really beautiful photography. [via Micah Walter]
We finally got around to renting Ratatouille this past weekend. Two words: f*cking wonderful.
Ok, so we’re going to Bali in a week and change. Got an email earlier today about a United Nations Climate Change Conference which is scheduled for 3-14 December in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia. Yes, that Nusa Dua, the one that is one of the three regularly breaking surf spots in off-season Bali. Dua is like a public version of Punta Mita. All the hotels are dumb expensive, so I wouldn’t wanna stay there anyway. But Dua is gonna be a mad house. The entire bukit might be a mad house (southern tip of Bali). Basically, it’s like having a UN conference at the hotel that’s near Burros, if Burros was the only place that had breaking waves. Getting anywhere near it is gonna be a chore.
I’m ok with axing Nusa Dua from our trip, I just hope it doesn’t affect the other places we had planned on staying. It’s really hard to tell how big of a show it’s gonna be, if this will affect other areas like Dreamland, Bingins, Sanur and Legian. I really don’t think so, since most of the places we had planned on staying at are surf-related anyway. The problem is that Bali isn’t really all that big of a place. I’ll have to get in contact with some of the local gringos and see what people are expecting. Oh well, if worse comes to worse and all of lower Bali is a mad house, we’ll just hop on a ferry over to Lombok.
OK, I’m off to go pre-book our hotels, bummer, I was hoping to just roll up…
My old Camp Sloane buddy, Darius, runs a non-profit soccer initiative for kids. He’s starting a new collaborative network for organizations similar to his and he needed a new logo, I gave him four options. Let’s see whish one he digs.
Scuffle at the L.A. Auto Show: environmentalists vs. Toyota. Toyota’s Bob Carter gets punked by a guy from the Rainforest Alliance Network, calling him out on the ridiculous hypocrisy of the Toyota green campaign (greenwash) while suing California for trying to raise Co2 emission standards. Bob Carter actually grabs the camera, I woulda kicked his ass right on the spot, but that’s just how I roll. [via TH]
wickedly good proposal for improving Spaces in Leopard. I love Spaces, but it’s got serious issues. This would be a painless solve for a large portion of Spaces’ issues. Someone else needs to address the dual monitor to one monitor issues (spaces doesn’t like it when you go from two monitors to one and at the same time switching your primary display preference). [via DF]
RCRD LBL just opened today. It’s a great idea. part record label, part mp3 blog with exclusive tracks for free and legal download from a bunch of killer indie bands and djs. Downloads are kept off the main rss feed though, so in order to get fresh mp3 tracks to your rss reader you have to subscribe to each of the “sub-label” feeds. Totally lame, let’s hope enough people complain loudly. [via DS]
Battlestar Galactica (2004) writer/producer/creator Ron Moore speaks out about the WGA strike and why you should care:
I had a situation last year on Battlestar Galactica where we were asked by Universal to do webisodes [Note: Moore is referring to The Resistance webisodes which ran before Season 3 premiered], which at that point were very new and ‘Oooh, webisodes! What does that mean?’ It was all very new stuff. And it was very eye opening, because the studio’s position was ‘Oh, we’re not going to pay anybody to do this. You have to do this, because you work on the show. And we’re not going to pay you to write it. We’re not going to pay the director, and we’re not going to pay the actors.’ At which point we said ‘No thanks, we won’t do it.
We got in this long, protracted thing and eventually they agreed to pay everybody involved. But then, as we got deeper into it, they said ‘But we’re not going to put any credits on it. You’re not going to be credited for this work. And we can use it later, in any fashion that we want.’ At which point I said ‘Well, then we’re done and I’m not going to deliver the webisodes to you.’ And they came and they took them out of the editing room anyway — which they have every right to do. They own the material — But it was that experience that really showed me that that’s what this is all about. If there’s not an agreement with the studios about the internet, that specifically says ‘This is covered material, you have to pay us a formula - whatever that formula turns out to be - for use of the material and how it’s all done,’ the studios will simply rape and pillage.
pretty f*cking good argument. Let’s hope the studios take their collective heads out of their asses and give the writers a decent shake. On a darker note, if the strike keeps up Battlestar Galactica and Lost won’t have new episodes in the spring.
Oooooh fuuuudge. (but it wasn’t ‘fudge’ it was the mother of all curse words…)
[via crooksnliars via FireDogLake]
Bob O’Connor has some gorgeous photography. and a really top notch minimalist web/flash/portfolio presentation (with all the little details i like to see). Take a look at his “iceland” set, wonderful, gives me lots of ideas for Mexico. [via aphotoeditor/rank]
Scott Dickerson has some rediculously amazing shots of surfers in Alaska. Taking cold water sliding to a new level, wow. [via aphotoeditor/rank]
The Swell folks have a blog! I just wondered on to it. good stuff there, non-product related. very cool. caught this video they posted: Rinsed Cycle, from Lost TV (youtubage). beerlarious!
Hi, my name is Ed Fladung, I'm a recovering web-designer who moved to Mexico about 4 years ago. Learned to surf, got married and bought a nice camera. This is my weblog/photoblog. It covers broad subjects like becoming an ex-pat, surfing, photography, graphic design, music, art, architecture, living in mexico, all things Apple and WordPress related, etc... You can find more about me here. I hope you enjoy.
