Bali

BALI, Indonesia - The backdrop in the movie trailer looked vaguely familiar: Somebody pedaling a cruiser bike down a narrow alley; the magnificently contoured terraces of the rice field. Wait, that's Bali - and it hit me that I was leaving for the Indonesian paradise the next day. One of three travel areas in Eat Pray Love , the newly released Julia Roberts movie, the island is probably about to be overrun. It's likely the flick will do for Bali what The DaVinci Code did for Paris: cram it with more tourists.

Jake Young, an all-American football center at Nebraska in 1988 and 1989, is missing in the area of the bomb blasts in Bali, Indonesia. At least 188 people were killed and hundreds more injured in the blasts Saturday in a nightclub district packed with tourists. The attack was thought to be the work of terrorists. Young, 34, was in Bali to play a final tournament with his rugby team from Hong Kong before joining his wife, Laura, and their 2-year-old son in the Kansas City area, said his father, Jacob Young.

A parade down Main Street with marching musicians and eye-popping pyrotechnics - sounds like the Fourth of July, right? Well, that's not far off the mark. As we discovered, a Bali cremation is like Independence Day for the dead. Cremation, this most personal of Hindu religious events, begins with a mid-morning meet-and-greet at the home of the deceased. In our visit to a rural village outside Ubud, the deceased is a Brahman priest, and the family compound teems with family and friends enjoying food, drink and lively conversation.

There are few things less elegant and more efficient than a bemo ride: less elegant because there might be 10 of you squished into a space for five, along with one fighting cock and a basket of unfathomably awful-smelling durian fruit; more efficient because the five-mile ride was there when you needed it, cost only 15 cents and dropped you off at your hotel door. Indonesia is the world's fifth most populous country. Most of its people are poor and can't afford cars. But nobody likes to walk.

If the McDonald's corporate headquarters in Illinois suddenly vanished, burgers and fries would still get served in Philadelphia, Rome or Kuwait City. That's how a franchise enterprise works. The center may collapse, causing some operational kinks, but the satellites keep doing business. That's also how a franchise terrorist organization works. At least, that's one of the lessons to emerge from the run of recent attacks that killed a U.S. Marine in Kuwait, damaged a French supertanker off the Yemen coast and, in the deadliest attack since the World Trade Center, slaughtered scores of people at a nightclub district in Bali, Indonesia, last weekend.

Carol Barrows introduces a dance she learned in Bali while on sabbatical from teaching at Tamanend Park in Upper Southampton. Her husband, Ira Barrows, provides the music. The dancers are (from left) Claudia Berger, Pearl Barrows, Jacqueline L. Liney (in devil suit), Virginia Shelley and Jean Berger.

Sterling, a 2-year-old Bali mynah, sits on a branch in a large wire cage in Brenda Geesey's basement. He ruffles his crest of snowy feathers and hops to another branch, watching Geesey intently as she prepares a fresh bowl of water for him. "He loves water," Geesey said, placing the bowl in the bottom of the cage. "He bathes in it and bathes in it and bathes in it and never looks wet. His feathers are that clean. He'd take all the water you wanted to give him, wouldn't you, Sterling?"

Only a musician enchanted by the seductive chiming of the Indonesian gamelan could imagine forming such an ensemble from among students, friends and casual acquaintances, but Swarthmore College composer Thomas Whitman has done just that. His Gamelan Semara Santi, the percussion players in full costume and squatting behind their gilded xylophonelike instruments, played Sunday at the school. With the ensemble was the Los Angeles troupe Bali and Beyond, which performed a part of a traditional shadow play, The Royal Coronation.

'Soccer mom' radical socked with more time California's Board of Prison Terms voted yesterday to extend the prison sentence for former Symbionese Liberation Army radical Sara Jane Olson, saying her part in a 1975 conspiracy to blow up Los Angeles police cars warranted more time behind bars. Olson, who had been sentenced to five years and four months, was given a new sentence of 14 years - although she could be out in seven to nine years, officials said. Olson was on the run more than 20 years before being captured in 1999.

In Oliver Stone's movie World Trade Center, the people who know least about the Sept. 11 horror are the two Port Authority cops closest to it. Asian peasants follow the awful events on television, but the men buried under smashed iron and concrete don't know the "who" or the "why," or even that the towers have collapsed. Through their own courage and that of their rescuers, the officers live to learn what happened. But five years later, neither they, nor anyone else, fully understand "why.

Starting a program with Pierre Boulez, that paragon of cerebral modernism, and ending it with Balinese ensembles and dancers is your basic day at the office for Orchestra 2001, the Swarthmore-based modern-music ensemble that shrinks from little. The unexpected part of Saturday's concert at the Philadelphia Ethical Society was when these disparate elements melded, seemingly by accident, and then, amid better-laid plans, did not. Boulez was represented with 1984's Derive I, a 10-minute chamber piece for winds, strings, and percussion that, we can see in hindsight, is an instance of seemingly repressive systematization yielding something that sounds like complete musical freedom.

TONIGHT, South Philadelphia's Grindcore House is going a little batty. The coffee shop known for its vegan menu and political engagement — it carries cookbooks and political literature — shows some love for an animal that doesn't usually get much with "Empty Night Skies. " More than 50 local, national and international artists will celebrate bats in sculpture, jewelry and prints to raise awareness about dangers facing the insect-devourers. White-nose syndrome has killed more than 5.7 million bats since it was discovered in 2006.

U.S. envoy to talk with N. Koreans WASHINGTON - A U.S. envoy will hold talks with North Korea on its nuclear program in Beijing next week, the first such negotiations since the death of longtime leader Kim Jong Il. Glyn Davies, the U.S. envoy to North Korea, will meet Feb. 23 with North Korean First Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Monday. It will be the third round of such bilateral talks since the summer, aimed at restarting multination aid-for-disarmament negotiations on North Korea's nuclear program.

JAKARTA, Indonesia - The Indonesian Muslim cleric known as spiritual leader of the extremists who carried out the deadly 2002 Bali bombings was sentenced Thursday to 15 years in prison for his support of a terror training camp uncovered last year. Abu Bakar Bashir's conviction for incitement of terrorism followed two unsuccessful attempts by prosecutors in the last eight years to link him to terror activities, including a conviction that was later overturned in the Bali attacks that killed 202 people.

WASHINGTON - A senior Indonesian al-Qaeda operative wanted in the deadly 2002 Bali bombings has been arrested in Pakistan, a rare high-profile capture in the war on terrorism that could yield valuable intelligence about possible new plots. Umar Patek, a suspected member of the al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah, was arrested earlier this year in Pakistan, foreign intelligence sources said Tuesday. It was not clear if Pakistan stumbled on Patek or his capture was the result of a tip. Why he was in Pakistan also remained murky, raising questions about whether he was there to plan an attack with al-Qaeda's top operational leaders to coincide with the 10-year anniversary of the Sept.

BALI, Indonesia - The backdrop in the movie trailer looked vaguely familiar: Somebody pedaling a cruiser bike down a narrow alley; the magnificently contoured terraces of the rice field. Wait, that's Bali - and it hit me that I was leaving for the Indonesian paradise the next day. One of three travel areas in Eat Pray Love , the newly released Julia Roberts movie, the island is probably about to be overrun. It's likely the flick will do for Bali what The DaVinci Code did for Paris: cram it with more tourists.

I WAS IN the seventh grade when I first heard of Anne Frank. Like most schools, ours included in our required reading the moving diary of the tragic teenager who lost her life at Bergen-Belsen. Frank's account of her imprisonment is a fine example of autobiography: The exquisite simplicity of her words masks the profound nature of their significance. Anne's life, though brief, was important, and the hours spent immersed in her world aren't wasted. Unfortunately, that can't be said about most of what passes for autobiography these days.

A parade down Main Street with marching musicians and eye-popping pyrotechnics - sounds like the Fourth of July, right? Well, that's not far off the mark. As we discovered, a Bali cremation is like Independence Day for the dead. Cremation, this most personal of Hindu religious events, begins with a mid-morning meet-and-greet at the home of the deceased. In our visit to a rural village outside Ubud, the deceased is a Brahman priest, and the family compound teems with family and friends enjoying food, drink and lively conversation.

Balinese gamelan music has inspired visiting Western composers for decades, resulting in some magical compositions fusing that hypnotic sound with our own aesthetic. Gamelan (roughly "hammer" in Javanese) has come to mean a band of metal xylophones, drums and gongs. In some Balinese villages strings, flutes and even vocalists are sometimes added. The throbbing cross-rhythms of this captivating music were first heard by Western ears in 1940s works by Colin McPhee, and for many years by pioneering composer Lou Harrison.

In Oliver Stone's movie World Trade Center, the people who know least about the Sept. 11 horror are the two Port Authority cops closest to it. Asian peasants follow the awful events on television, but the men buried under smashed iron and concrete don't know the "who" or the "why," or even that the towers have collapsed. Through their own courage and that of their rescuers, the officers live to learn what happened. But five years later, neither they, nor anyone else, fully understand "why.