Blok M update, May 2004

Status report

The first Friday of the month is an absolute humdinger down Blok M. The bars on Jalan Pelatehan are packed - even Top Gun and Oscars - only Everest, the perennial Cinderella of the Blok, misses out on the feeding-frenzy. It’s standing room only in D’s Place upstairs bar, redolent of London Underground in the early evening rush hour. The mood is upbeat and festive, everybody revelling their hearts out and having a great time. The street is packed with cars, bikes and bajays, and echoes to cries of "terus, terus, kanan, kanan, kiri, terus" from the parking lads, and peals of laughter from the gaggles of girls as they trot from bar to bar. Yes, it’s a truly bacchanalian night - vintage Blok M.

Ineffable effing folly

It’s not often that the Reveller is at a loss for words - quite the opposite, as his cronies will all too readily testify - but late last Friday he is stunned, gobsmacked and rendered speechless. What brings about this apocalyptic trauma? What else but the latest lunacy from the bête noire of Blok M, Lintas Melawai, which has now earned the sobriquet of ‘Lemming Melawai’ from the Reveller.

You oldsters out there might remember a lightweight comedy back in the swinging sixties with the catchy title "How to succeed in business without really trying". The Reveller is seriously contemplating penning a sequel, with the equally catchy title "How to ruin a business without really trying", based on the antics of the Lintas Melawai management.

Having trolled round the bars on Jalan Pelatehan, mellowing nicely in the process, the Reveller wonders what’s happening on the margins of the empire - so he flags down a passing bajay and stutters off to Melawai. The road outside LM is empty, there’s no-one hanging around on the pavement, and the place has a generally forlorn and neglected look. Ah well, nothing ventured nothing gained, thinks the Reveller, and strolls in through the open door. On the right, just inside the doorway but obscured from the street, there’s a tatty old desk that looks as though it’s been mangled in a hit-and-run accident and then inexpertly reassembled. On this desk is an equally tatty cardboard box, tacked on to which is a sheet of scruffy paper bearing the scrawled words "Tickets Rp 50,000".

Transfixed, the Reveller stops dead in his tracks and boggles. This isn’t just stupidity, he ponders, it’s far more - sublime craziness, the ne plus ultra of lunacy. Turning on his heels he marches out, and without a backward glance lurches into the road to flag down a taxi. Now late night Jakarta taxi drivers are a special breed of devil-may-care, gung-ho dyslexics who mutter a running imprecation against the woes of the world punctuated by requests for directions. As he careens down Jalan Fatmawati at breakneck speed, the Reveller reflects that his taxi ride is the fitting end to another surreal night on the Blok.

My Bar

Among its many offerings to entice in the Blok M revellers, My Bar has an ambitious menu of snacks, dips and munchables. Feeling a bit peckish one evening the Reveller decides to forgo the liquid calories and get some solid food inside him, so he pulls up a stool at the bar and orders his favourite sop buntut. For those who don’t know this delicious Indonesian speciality, it’s a local variety of oxtail soup - traditionally eaten with boiled rice and a mouth-cauterizing sauce made from ground chillies. "Quite good, but they’ve overdone the cloves a wee bit", opines the Reveller as he swigs a long draught of ale to stamp out the furnace raging around his taste-buds.

Well, the place is packed and still they’re pouring in. And  - surprise, surprise - lots of the erstwhile LM girls now seem to have made My Bar their base camp, and there’s many a coy wave from the sweet things as they trot past. There’s a buzz and a pulse in the air as the music hots up and the dancing swings into midnight, and as the Reveller leaves the late-late crowd to strut their stuff till dawn he reflects that My Bar really is the Lintas-killer.

What My Bar has got that the others don’t is space - lots of it - which makes the narrow gap between the dance floor and the bar all the more of an inexplicable flaw in the design, and one which many of the guys are complaining about. It does make moving around the bar slow and difficult, and the widely-expressed opinion is that the management really should get its act together and do something about it.

D’s VIP bar

Eyebrows are raised and brows furrowed when the D’s Place owners announce that they’re going to make a VIP members-only bar on the floor above the upstairs disco. The Wise say it will never catch on, that you can hear the sound of marbles dropping - but it looks as though the D’s supremos have got it right, yet again. Invited to the soft opening the other night, the Reveller and le tout D’s Place clamber up the staircase that’s been built at the far end of the upstairs bar to see what it’s all about.

Well, there’s a touch of class and luxury about the place. As you go through the door you enter a small open lounge with a TV in an annexe, and a space in which there’ll be a computer with an internet connection for all those sad souls who crave their digital fix, and can’t live without their email. Going down a few steps you enter the bar - a cozy, intimate little place with just the right amount of space to sit and chat in comfort.

Sipping his first Ricard in the new bar and chatting with his cronies, the Reveller agrees that the place makes a marvelous bolt-hole from the hullabaloo below decks. You can enjoy the thrills and spills of the disco bar until you need a breather - then it’s up the stairs, and into a sanctum of peace and tranquility. So now D’s Place has a three-in-one solution - the social bar and pool table downstairs, the disco and cattle-market upstairs, and the upper-floor haven for relaxing, chatting and recharging the batteries.

Epilogue

Yes, it’s our birthday - exactly a year since the Reveller put his head above the digital parapet and posted the first news, comments and pictures of everyday life down the Blok on his newly-created Blok M web site. And like Topsy, it’s just grown and grown. The Reveller, originally a simple nom de plume, has evolved into a persona that encapsulates the spirit of the place and has become part of the Blok M folklore.

How ‘real’ is the Reveller? One night, as he’s smoking an early-evening cigar, he strikes up a conversation with an attractive girl who’s just come to Jakarta, and knows the Blok M web site. "You really do smoke cigars and drink Pernod!" she exclaims, when she learns that her companion is the Reveller himself. In truth, everything about the Reveller is factual - there’s no fiction, no exaggeration in the character. There he is, warts and all, reporting on events that really happened. And all the characters he describes are real people, their quoted words pretty accurately recorded.

The Blok M Chronicles are what the poet T S Eliot describes as "a moment in and out of time", an attempt to capture for posterity the transient moment and mood of a wonderful, unique place.