July Diary
Blok M diary, July 2004
Round the houses
To round off a pretty nondescript month the Reveller decides to spend one night just drifting from bar to bar as the fancy takes him, a completely unplanned and random approach to the gentle art of getting blotto.
It’s very quiet this early in the evening, so the Reveller primes himself with a couple of tequilas and plays pool for a leisurely half hour. Looking round the downstairs bar he notes that the walls are becoming increasingly festooned with football and rugby club pennants, which make a nice colourful collage but mean absolutely nothing to him - they’re all medium, and no message. "So much for Marshall McLuhan", mutters the Reveller.
As he returns his gaze to eye level he espies a handful of new barmaids on the horizon, eagerly acquainting themselves with the regular customers and learning the essential skills of their trade - such as how to duck down behind the bar when no-one’s looking to have a quick snack and a chat with a couple of like-minded colleagues.
Feeling in need of more solid sustenance, the Reveller ups and meanders down to My Bar for a bite and a beer.
My Bar is also quiet at this hour, so the Reveller has a tasty plateful of his favourite sop buntut and a lively chat with an equally tasty barmaid. The music is quiet and tuneful, and for those of a moronic disposition there’s Fashion TV on the box overhanging the bar. Now why anyone should want to watch a bunch of emaciated mannequins preening themselves and strutting around sporting weird skimpy clothing that no normal person would be seen dead in, beats the Reveller. But there must be a market for this mindless pap or it wouldn’t have a whole cable channel to itself, he muses. To paraphrase the cynical dictum of that renowned Australian intellectual Rupert Murdoch, "never overestimate the intelligence of the viewing public".
After a couple of cordial glasses of draught beer and a further chat with the bar staff, the Reveller decides it’s time to move back to D’s to see what’s cooking in the upstairs bar and wait for the disco to get under way.
One of the Reveller’s cronies is already installed in his favourite spot at the top of the stairs, downing Carlsbergs like they were going out of fashion and surveying the girls as they arrive. Now this guy has an endless fund of the most obscene, perverted and tasteless jokes imaginable, and he proceeds to regale the Reveller with a constant stream of mind-boggling stuff. And so a pleasant hour is passed, a constant flow of beer punctuated by raucous guffaws and gut-wrenching groans.
Things start to warm up about 11pm, a steady stream of girls tripping into the bar and getting themselves strategically established. And it’s a vintage turnout - lots of girls, young and old, milling around with sparkling vivacity and chattering away twenty to the dozen.
After an hour of watching the sporadic dancing in the disco and desperately trying to ignore the salacious sidelong glances from a gaggle of Sweet Young Things sitting nearby, the Reveller decides to stroll down to Oscars and see if anything’s happening there.
As he gingerly sidesteps the pavement detritus, holes in the road and the off-duty beggars, the sound of thudding music pounds into the street. Ah, they’ve got one of the louder bands, thinks the Reveller, all set to continue walking and give Oscars a miss. But suddenly the music changes, the band strikes up a fairly tuneful pop song, so he does a sharp right turn and strides into the bar.
It’s not very busy, but there’s a fair number of guys and some of the more mature girls making the most of it. Sitting down at his favourite spot facing the fish tank, a drink is summoned, a cigar lit, and the Reveller settles down for a pleasant half hour or so. But all is not well. It’s the fish. There are only two left in the tank, and one of these is gyrating rather erratically at a disturbingly lopsided angle.
Draining his drink and stubbing out his cigar, the Reveller decides to wander back up the road and peek into Everest - having been panned for criticizing the place last month, it’s only fair to see if it’s as black as he painted it, or doing better.
Well, things don’t look too bad at first glance. There’s a band playing and the lead singer is really quite good, but the audience is fairly thin - about a dozen guys and assorted girls are sitting round the bar, chatting amiably and listening to the music. The bar staff - always Everest’s greatest asset - are as friendly and attentive as ever, and make the Reveller welcome as he settles down at the far end of the bar.
Over the half an hour that he’s in the place the Reveller sees a steady stream of the late-night brigade coming in and going out, which is quite a healthy sign - they don’t stay long because they probably crave the fleshly delights of D’s Place and My Bar, but their very appearance is a muted vote of confidence in the place.
The problem with Everest has always been its size - it’s cavernous, and while a dozen punters can make Top Gun look fairly bustling, they’re lost in the vastness of Everest. A couple of the guys remark that the place would be much better if it was remodeled and made a bit cosier, and probably attract a lot more customers.
As the clock hits one the Reveller decides to drift back into D’s Place and see what’s happening, as there’s not much action in Everest.
The upstairs bar is crowded and the disco is in full swing, so the Reveller rejoins his mates and gets stuck in to more beer. But it’s too loud to hold any sort of conversation, so he wanders round the bar to see who’s around. Most of the late-night regulars are there, in various degrees of sobriety. The girls are beginning to drift away and the place has obviously peaked for the night, so the Reveller decides to move out too.
Out in the street it’s very pleasant - the girls are coming and going, guys are chatting on the pavement deciding where to go next, and the Reveller feels that warm glow of bonhomie that comes with a slowly absorbed skinful of beer and Pernod. In this beatific state he (perhaps unwisely) decides to nip round and see what’s happening in Lintas Melawai.
In their never-ending quest to find new ways in which to totally screw things up, the Lintas Melawai management has lobotomised the disco. In front of the dance-floor mirror there’s now a stack of boxes, two of which are the loudspeaker units and the remainder a tatty collection of rostra - presumably put there for the girls to dance on. The narrow bar-top that framed the dance floor has been partly removed from the mirror side of the area, leaving a most peculiar blurring of the dance floor with the surrounding bar area.
Not that any of this matters very much, as there’s no-one there - the Reveller sits in splendid isolation trying to comprehend what’s happened, and why. The occlusion of the mirror is just plain stupid, as the girls love to dance in front of it and it gives the bar depth and character. Now the place has all the charm and character of a long-deserted warehouse.
So finishing his last cigar of the night and upending his bottle to drain the last few drops of beer, the Reveller pays his bill and leaves the place to make his way home. It’s a sad end to an otherwise great night out. It was, in retrospect, a somewhat unwise decision to venture down the Blok into Lintas Melawai.
Epilogue
So the month ends, and the Reveller wraps up another diary entry. As his bajay put-puts its jaunty way southwards, he reflects that the Blok is changing. My Bar is the way forward - bright and brash, throbbing and humming, it’s a commercial machine that has marketing, management and money behind it. Lintas Melawai, for all its character and sleazy charm, is in effect a dinosaur, a relic of its time. Sic transit gloria mundi.