Blok M update, July 2004

Status report

July has been a fairly good month down the Blok. There are quite a lot of new faces among the guys, and though many turn out to be transients just passing through on short-term visits it makes for a goodly crowd. The economic barometer seems to be swinging from stormy to fair in the wake of the recent presidential elections, and this bodes well for the expat business community in general. The bar owners are quietly confident that, all things being equal and with a fair wind behind them, business could be on a roll later in the year.

Drifters

One thing that has increasingly struck the Reveller over recent months is a change in the type of girl coming into the bars. When he first hit Blok M there was a community of regulars in every bar, and they gave each place its unique character. Pickings were good in those days, and most of the girls did very well without wandering far from their turf.

But things have changed. There are fewer guys, with less money in their pockets, and times are hard for many of the Sweet Young Things. After the cataclysmic impact of 1998 and the Monetary Crisis, the rot set in even further when that venerable institution, the Garden Motel, closed down - followed by the local hotels ramping up their rates. This seriously affected the bangs-per-buck ratio, and even the most sozzled reveller began to think twice before wheeling his current floozie off for a quick Naughty at the end of an evening’s carousal.

One consequence of the dwindling market is that, like nomads in the desert, many of the girls have become drifters. They migrate from bar to bar, sizing up the terrain before either settling in to make a kill or moving on to try somewhere else. Of course, there are still the stalwarts in each place, but it’s somehow not the same. These girls have the predatory demeanour of wolves circling their prey, and all the warmth and charm of a hungry grizzly bear.

The drifters don’t have the time, or the inclination, to settle down cosily at a table and chatter the hours away. They are Girls With A Mission, and if they don’t hit pay dirt very quickly up they get and move on without so much as a farewell smile. The feedback from Deep Throat, the Reveller’s inside informant, is that these girls in fact fare significantly less well than the ones who stand their ground and hang in there.

Heisenberg

No, this isn’t a little-known bottled beer made by the Carlsberg people - it’s the name of the guy who revolutionised early twentieth-century physics with his famous Indeterminacy Principle, which holds that the very act of observing a sub-atomic event subtly changes it, making accurate measurement of a particle’s position and velocity quite impossible. What on earth, the Reveller hears you asking, has this got to do with Blok M? Well, quite a bit, actually.

In the most extreme case, it’s been put to the Reveller by one of the dourer Blok M regulars that talking down a bar and criticising it will cause customers to stay away from the place en masse, hastening its demise and forcing the tearful employees out onto the cold hard street, jobless and destitute. Which of course is arrant nonsense, as becomes clear when you apply even a modicum of common sense to that doomsday prediction.

For a start, it implies that the Reveller is revered as an infallible oracle by his readers, an authority-figure whose merest Whisper will have the guys forsaking a place in droves. In fact, all of the Reveller’s adverse comments are simply good-natured jibes - and taken by his readers as such - aimed at raising a laugh, rather than trying to influence serious opinion. For as Shakespeare himself put it most succinctly, "There is no slander in an allowed fool, though he do nothing but rave".

But it crosses the Reveller’s mind that the Indeterminacy Principle certainly does apply in his observations of the girls. As he sits watching them, observing their moods and their little ways, many of them know now that they’re under scrutiny - and either play to the gallery, or become slightly muted in their behaviour. They wonder if they’ll be snapped in action, caught in the Reveller’s digital net and posted to the web for posterity, or their little tricks recorded in the Blok M Chronicles. So the Reveller retreats even further into his disco corner seat, gently observing whilst trying to blend into the background.

Music hath charms…

… to sooth the troubled breast, goes the old saying - but not, alas, in Blok M. One night in D’s Place the Reveller is enjoying a quiet jar with an old friend when the air is suddenly rent with a cacophony that sounds as though a heavy lorry with a broken exhaust has just run over and and badly wounded a wild animal. "Weird shit!", mutters his companion, and he strolls across the disco floor to ask the DJ to lower the volume. But to no avail - the lad’s been told to turn the volume up and keep it up, regardless of how many people are in the bar and whatever their personal preferences might be. There are only two paying customers in the place, but there’s soon only one as the Reveller settles his bill and heads for My Bar - where it’s possible to hold a conversation and enjoy the more tuneful music they’re playing.

Now the Reveller likes his classics, and anything composed after about 1900 is beyond his ken - though he does enjoy modern stuff in the bars and discos as it’s part and parcel of the Blok M experience, and sets the mood. But a lot of what they play is just plain bad, and heartily detested by many of the punters. And the girls don’t like it, either - it’s so atonal and rhythmless that they can’t dance to it. The owners trot out the tired mantra that it’s great stuff, absolutely bang in fashion, and that if they reverted to playing pop oldies they’d lose most of their trade as the girls and the guys left in droves to find more up-to-date, lively stuff. The technical term for this line of argument is, of course, bullshit.

Well, the owners had better remember the old adage, "the customer is always right". And most of the customers simply don’t like the music they’re forced to listen to. Talk to any of the old hands around the Blok and ask them why Oscars almost went down the tubes a few years ago, and they’ll tell you that one reason was the lousy bands and their tuneless screeching. The Reveller is now on a "zero tolerance" kick, and when the music annoys him he simply ups and goes elsewhere.

Another of the Reveller’s heroes, the orchestral conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, was once asked if he’d ever conducted any Stockhausen. "No, but I once trod in some", quipped that master of the damning riposte. And that wonderful comment neatly sums up the Reveller’s attitude to much of the modern stuff that is churned out in the Blok M bars.

Of blogs and blags

A blog, for the good folk who wouldn’t know one if it came up and bit them, is a personal spot on the web where you can stand up and say whatever you like - in effect, a digital soapbox. Blogging has achieved an amazing and rapid popularity, and there are now thousands upon thousands of ordinary folk out there posting their penn’orth for the world to read. Their ramblings range from shopping lists to Schopenhauer, from diaries to diatribe - anything and everything that takes their fancy.

And people are reading them, surfing from blog to blog and culling the gems from the dross. My very good friend Jakartass set up a little blog some time ago, dedicated to everyday living in Jakarta and Charlton football club. He’s a little puzzled, and highly delighted, that it’s become such a popular spot and is attracting a growing band of regular readers. So if you want to get another expat perspective on Jakarta, the link is jakartass.blogspot.com.

Now blagging, for the benefit of our non-British friends, means obtaining things less than honestly by clever talk or lying. One day, whilst perusing the web site logs, the Reveller spots a blog site that’s visiting fairly regularly - so he repays the compliment by calling in to have a shufti. To his bemused amazement the Reveller discovers that great chunks of his observations on the Blok M guys and girls have been lifted, verbatim, transmuted to the Kuala Lumpur bar scene, and posted under the blogger’s own pseudonym! Happily, a friendly note to the blighter gets the plagiarised stuff off his blog page, and the artistic integrity of Blok M is upheld.

Epilogue

As July draws to a close, there’s a feeling of change in the air. The regulars are returning from colder climes, ready to get the sprogs back into school and plunge into the Alice in Wonderland world of Jakarta business once again. And the Reveller, too, awaits quite major changes in his own workplace, as some of the old hands depart and new blood is ushered in. But above the quiet roar of this great city, the gods look down benignly on Blok M and bless its denizens with one of the finest places in the world in which to recuperate from the frantic whirl of commerce, and enjoy the simple pleasures of life.