Muhammad Cohen

Category: Ubud Writers and Readers Festival

  • New Indonesia president faces legislative deadlock

    Monday’s inauguration of Joko Widowo as Indonesia’s seventh president is a transformational moment for the world’s third largest democracy. Known as Jokowi, Widodo is Indonesia’s first retail politician and will be the first freely elected leader who wasn’t part of the power structure during Suharto’s 40 years of authoritarian rule. At Indonesia’s Ubud Writers Festival., experts warned the remnants of those bad old days threat to stop Jokowi’s reformist agenda, bad news for Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the nation with the world’s largest Muslim population.

    Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a blogger for Forbes and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

  • Eat, Stay, Write: Bali for Fodors.com

    New entries are dribbling online for the expanded Fodors.com guide to Bali that I worked on earlier this year. It’s always a delight to visit Bali, and this trip I went to the north coast for the first time in more than a decade. As with so much else on this rightly popular and renowned island, a lot had changed but the essential character that makes Bali so alluring hasn’t.

    I stayed at the Lovina Beach Hotel, which turned 60 this year. Lovina has basically been built around the hotel. The Lovina Beach is definitely old school, but the rooms are fresh, the pool is appealing, everyone’s friendly, and it’s dirt cheap for what you get. At the other end of the scale, I ate a memorable dinner under the stars at Damai, “peace” in Bahasa Indonesia, a boutique resort in the hills above Lovina with views all the way to Java. Plush Puri Bagus Lovina is the winning choice if you want your luxury retreat and manicured lawns on the beach.

    Just up the road from Damai, Surya and Fritz Barme showcase the spectacular view at their Ponjok Indah (Beautiful Corner) restaurant by appointment and treat you to sumptuous European food with a German accent. If you’re lucky, this Balinese-German couple may let you sample the wines they make from local fruits. Call them from Lovina on 0362 41571 for your appointment.

    Kopi Shyup (+6285737179056), which didn’t make the cut for Fodors.com, is a comfortable coffee shop affiliated with a coffee and clove plantation located between Lovina and scenic Munduk on the road to Banyuatis village in the heart of Bali’s coffee country. It’s worth getting lost to stop by and have a walk around their mini-plantation and kitchen garden.

    Further south, I added another restaurant from a best in Asia list. Although French food isn’t my thing, it’s easy to understand the appeal of Metis in Seminyak, with its elegant open air dining room overlooking vast lotus ponds.

    Ma Joly on the beach south of Kuta stands out for high level cuisine in an extraordinarily relaxed atmosphere that keeps it from getting fussy or pretentious. If the white sand isn’t soothing enough, Ma Joly’s tropical sangria can help get you in the mood.

    Hands down, the best meal I had was at Bridges in Ubud with founder Claude Chouinard. Bridges combines an original international menu with a classic Bali setting, perched on a lush hillside above a river. But every place I stayed, ate and explored was terrific, otherwise I wouldn’t have listed it.

    I’ll be heading back to Bali next week for the tenth edition of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. (Watch this space for mews and views.) The only thing I don’t look forward to is the traffic. But even driving there can have its moments.

    One compensation is the decoration on trucks. While not as elaborate as jeepneys in the Philippines, some fantasy landscapes or dream girls on the side panels are pretty spectacular. Some times it’s just the mud flaps.

    Early in the trip, not far from Sanur, I saw a mud flap labeled “Dr Bombay.” That’s Bali, perfectly bewitching. Just don’t take any wooden Darrens.

    Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

  • Surgeon-Poet Hall doubles in LA book awards

    Dr Neal Hall, a hit at last year’s Ubud Writers Festival, has scooped up more awards. The eye surgeon’s poetry collection Nigger for Life has won both the poetry prize and grand prize at the Los Angeles Book Festival. Hall will collect his honors at Hollywood’s legendary Roosevelt Hotel on Friday.

    Hall also won the poetry prize at last year’s New York Book Festival and New England Book Festival, as well as the Ubud Festival’s poetry slam. He extends the tradition of acclaimed poets with day jobs that includes Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and fellow physician William Carlos Williams.

    Title notwithstanding, Hall asserts Nigger for Life isn’t about race, but about freedom, told from the only perspective he’s got. Hall’s poems are both lyrical and extraordinarily powerful, well worth reading and richly deserving of their accolades.

    Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

  • Surgeon-Poet Hall doubles in LA book awards

    Dr Neal Hall, a hit at last year’s Ubud Writers Festival, has scooped up more awards. The eye surgeon’s poetry collection Nigger for Life has won both the poetry prize and grand prize at the Los Angeles Book Festival. Hall will collect his honors at Hollywood’s legendary Roosevelt Hotel on Friday.

    Hall also won the poetry prize at last year’s New York Book Festival and New England Book Festival, as well as the Ubud Festival’s poetry slam. He extends the tradition of acclaimed poets with day jobs that includes Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and fellow physician William Carlos Williams.

    Title notwithstanding, Hall asserts Nigger for Life isn’t about race, but about freedom, told from the only perspective he’s got. Hall’s poems are both lyrical and extraordinarily powerful, well worth reading and richly deserving of their accolades.

    Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

  • Ubud encounters: Louise Doughty lets fly

    Besides meeting authors you idolize, one of the great pleasures of coming to an event like the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali, is discovering authors you don’t know but should.

    Louise Doughty is the author of six novels that tackle head-on vast emotional, political, social and historical ground. Her most recent novel, Whatever You Love, deals with the death of a child, bringing the mother into direct contact and conflict with Europe’s burgeoning immigration controversy. Whatever You Love was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Orange Prize.

    Doughty’s first three novels – Crazy Paving, Dance With Me, and Honey-Dew – put different twists on contemporary Britain, from the supernatural to dating to murder in a proper village.

    Two of Doughty’s later novels, Fires in the Dark and Stone Cradle, deal with the Romany experience in Europe, a part of Doughty’s own heritage.

    I sat up and noticed when Doughty, also a playwright and critic, spoke about the reaction in some quarters to Fires in the Dark, which takes place during World War II in Central Europe, a period when Nazis murdered up to 500,000 Romany. “A lot of people said to me that they would never read a book that dealt with the Holocaust, as if that somehow made them morally superior.”

    After visiting Cambodia’s genocide sites this year, I realized firsthand the importance, and the difficulty, of engaging these extraordinary instances of human brutality. We have a great debt to people who force us to confront what we’d rather avoid. We owe something special to artists like Louise Doughty that find new ways to help keep these issues in front of us, on the page and in person.

    Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.