Blok M update, October 2003

Status report

‘Steady as she goes’ might be the catchword for the Blok this month. Business has been fairly brisk over the last few weeks, and continues to look good - at least for the more popular bars. The others have a lot of ground to make up. The most interesting tidbit of gossip is that Oscars has at last scrapped its ludicrous entrance charge for the girls - but is it enough to attract them back? Or is it the start of Oscars’ death throes, the management panicking and floundering in a financial mire entirely of its own making?

Good news about D’s Place music. There’s been a noticeable improvement in the early evening selections - much more tuneful stuff, and the decibels are down. On reflection, the Reveller reckons that music can make or break a bar. Certainly, in the good ol’ days when Oscars had a nice mix of bands and vocalists, it thrived - the atonal rubbish that they churn out nowadays has driven off a lot of their regular customers, including yours truly. In the words of the song, ‘when will they ever learn?’.

It may just be a bit of spin-off from the ’sexiest dressed girl’ competitions, but more of the little darlings are abandoning their time-honoured jeans and tops for real dresses. Admittedly many of them display a somewhat inchoate dress sense, and there are some truly disastrous sartorial infelicities, but a growing number of them are now togged out in dishy dresses that have increased their stun-factor by an order of magnitude.

Feeling a bit guilty about not having wandered far beyond the confines of D’s Place and Lintas Melawai for a while, the Reveller asks his informants how things are going in the other places. ‘Top Gun? Don’t even think about it!’, is the cri de coeur from several revellers, and no-one I ask has even been into Oscars for a long time. Sportsman is worth the effort, as is Everest, the guys tell me, so these hostelries are slated for future visits when the Reveller recovers from his latest mishap.

‘Time wounds all heels’ [Groucho Marx]

“My motorbike has fallen on my foot” doesn’t quite have the Pythonesque ring of “my postillion has been struck by lightning”, but it certainly merits inclusion in any Bahasa Indonesia phrase-book with pretensions to completeness. For here is the Reveller, pinioned under his trusty Tiger next to the traffic lights on the Jalan Sudirman underpass, speechless and helpless. Fortunately two noble-hearted and quick thinking fellow bikers dismount and haul the Honda and yours truly upright, and we all have a good laugh about it.

Alas, the next day the leg and foot turn a rather tasteful lobster-red colour - everything swells up, and the ankle area goes into what looks and feels like premature rigor mortis. The Reveller takes to his sick-bed, sadly aware that mobility may not be optimal for a couple of weeks or so.

After a few days of pure agony (not from the foot, but an overdose of quiz shows, dangdut and sinetrons on the local TV), the colour has mellowed from livid red to that delicate range of tones so typical of a Turner sunset.

Sugar and spice…

…and all things nice - that’s what girls are made of, according to the nursery rhyme. But times change, and the old words perhaps need updating.

I’m sitting in the upstairs bar in D’s Place early one evening, and strike up a conversation with a guy that I’ve not seen on the Blok before, but who obviously knows the place and is looking around with the expression of someone who’s just found an oasis after being lost for days in the desert. It turns out he’s a reveller who’s been in exile for ten years, but has finally wangled his way back to Jakarta.

‘Yeah, the old place hasn’t changed that much’, he reflects, after a deep and satisfying draught of ale. ‘Pity about the Tambora, though.’ He ruminates for a moment. ‘But there’s one thing that sure is different’, he reflects. The Reveller is immediately galvanized, sensing that something momentous is about to be imparted - maybe a razor-sharp observation, perhaps a piece of pithy homespun wisdom. ‘The girls have all got bigger tits’, he declares.

As the guy waves farewell and wanders off to explore other corners of his erstwhile stomping ground, the Reveller gets to thinking about his observation. Yes, a few of the girls are impossibly well endowed in the balcony area, but it’s quite true - even in the time the Reveller has been around, the general tendency has been a sustained increase in size.

The first thought is, it must be market forces. The demand is for girls with more cleavage, so the Word goes round the nation and more fully-endowed girls gravitate to Jakarta. But no, a spell watching local TV and wandering around the shopping malls shows that the tendency is wider than just the Blok M orbit.

Next thought: can it be an evolutionary process? The Reveller is a confirmed Darwinist, so his initial hypothesis is that natural selection is at work. Girls with big tits have a greater survival value, and produce offspring who carry the genes that trigger maximum mammary growth. But the phenomenon has happened over such a short time that this theory is discounted.

So enter Lamarck, the 18th century French biologist who proposed that acquired traits are inheritable. This means that girls endowed with larger breasts are more successful in attracting and retaining mates, and so girls with smaller breasts will strive to compete by increasing their size using medication, manipulation and whatever else is on offer. The increase they produce is then directly inherited by their female offspring. This is out, because Lamarck has been discredited by modern science, and anyway it’s too simplistic a solution.

As the Reveller has darkly hinted in other reports from the Blok, more Indonesian girls - and not just in the swamps of Blok M - are resorting to implants to enhance their natural endowments. There’s probably more silicon in Jakarta than in the whole of California’s computer industry. So perhaps the nursery rhyme should be changed: “Sugar and spice, and silicon splice, that’s what girls are made of”. Now this may explain the impossibly exaggerated specimens that one comes across in the Blok and on TV, but cannot answer for the great majority of perfectly normal girls who don’t do silicon.

The most likely answer, as in many matters of profound debate and conjecture, is surprisingly mundane. Look round any dress shop (don’t worry about the funny looks you’ll get from the staff and other customers), and have a peek at the bras. They’re marvels of miniature engineering, padded and plumped so skilfully that they look salivatingly natural when worn. The Reveller reflects that their purpose may best be described as ‘making mountains out of molehills’. In other words, when stripped down for action the average girl here has probably much the same proportions as her mother’s and grandmother’s generations.

Cloud-cuckoo land

As Shakespeare says, “All the world’s a stage”, and nowhere is this more true than in Blok M. One reason the Reveller likes to hit the upstairs bar in D’s Place before the stampede starts is that there’s so much fun and amusement in watching peoples’ entrances and exits, their postures and gestures as they get into their roles.

A bar is just like a theatre stage or a movie set. It’s got exactly the same things - sound and lighting, entrances and exits, the acting area, backdrops and sets, props and accessories, costumes and make-up. Even when it’s empty, a bar has still got that half-magical quality, that aura, of a place where things come to life and dramas are played out.

In his early years the Reveller spent most of his time directing, acting in, designing and managing drama productions, so for him there’s more than a tad of nostalgia in the whole experience.

But what makes drama - and the life of every bar - is the actors and actresses. And that means all of us - when we go into a bar, we change, we adopt a slightly different persona, we do and say things that we most probably wouldn’t in the ‘real’ world. It’s a place to shed inhibitions, to let rip, to cleanse the system of all the crap we have to put up with in daily life. The ancient Greeks, of course, had a wonderful word for this - catharsis. And as dear old Shakespeare so poignantly puts it, “How full of briars is this workaday world”.

And what a drama we get in Blok M! On the best nights, the entire bar becomes a surreal event, with its own momentum and madness - a phantasmagoria of deliciously improbable, frequently farcical, sometimes tragic, scenarios. For a few all-too brief hours, the bar becomes a real world all of its own. The expression ‘cloud-cuckoo land’ is the name created by the ancient Greek satirical dramatist, Aristophanes, for a make-believe city built in the air. And it sums up the bars perfectly.