Blok M update, September 2004

Status report

Contrary to rumour and the Blok M whispering machine, the Reveller is neither deceased, departed nor defunct - he’s just had the Month From Hell, and his regular write-ups for the web site have been well and truly shoved onto the back burner for a few weeks. As Shakespeare put it so pointedly, "When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions" - it’s been a relentless series of whammies for your beleaguered host. But all is now well, life has returned to an even keel, and he’s back in his regular haunts.

And so to September. One of the Reveller’s favourite tunes is ‘September Song’, composed by the inimitable Kurt Weill. It captures the bitter-sweet quality of the month - the end of summer, the slide into autumn, the melancholy period (click here to play the tune). In Jakarta, of course, we don’t have the same seasonal change - instead there’s a torpid lull between the end of the dry season and the onset of the rains, when the air is heavy and dry and dusty and everyone looks forward to the freshness that comes with the first showers. It’s a time when the bars and discos offer an even more welcome haven than ever, and cold beer and warm girls make life bearable for the frazzled reveller.

Bits and PCs

The Reveller is in deep mourning. An old and dear friend passed away two weeks ago, leaving him pretty well gutted. Yes, his computer is no more; bereft of life, it rests in pieces, completely fubar. So it’s off to the computer shops at Ratu Plaza, just up the road from the Blok, to haggle for replacement parts and rebuild the moribund machine before it finally pegs out. As he toils away at the viscera of his beloved computer, yanking boards, twisting wires, groping for dropped screws, his language becomes a little less than felicitous. And when everything is more or less in place and he throws the on-off switch, he cackles in a maniacal voice "More power, Igor!", those immortal words from Frankenstein.

Two days later, and the Reveller is suffering from nervous exhaustion. As he reinstalls Windows for the third time in a frantic effort to get a stable system up and running, he reflects that Bill Gates must have done more to push the sales of Valium than any other person on the planet. Happy to say, the whole caboodle is now working just fine and the keyboard is clicking away twenty to the dozen as the Reveller ploughs into a backlog of scribbles and jottings on the backs of beer mats, inside the lids of cigar boxes and on casual scraps of paper, to forge the crowned masterpieces of eloquence for which the site is justly infamous.

No holds barred

It’s a fair time since the Reveller’s last really serious, all-inclusive, in-depth probe of the watering holes of Blok M, so after the Herculean struggle with his computer he decides to devote an entire night to selfless research. Starting out at the Club, he enjoys a few really cold jars of beer and soaks in the atmosphere. There’s no music, just the pleasant buzz of sociable conversation interspersed with laughs, groans and chortles as the dozen or so regulars chat at the bar. What a delightful respite from the D’s din.

Strolling round the corner and into Oscars, it’s fairly quiet but very pleasant. The night’s band is having a rest between numbers, and everyone seems to be in a mellow mood. The Reveller lights up a cigar and settles down next to the fish tank, and is pleased to see that his friends are looking as cheerful as large fish in a small tank can reasonably be expected to be. After chatting to a few of the girls he’s known for a long time and exchanging news, scandal and gossip, he ups sticks and heads for Top Gun.

And who should he see through the smoky haze, sitting at the back of the bar, but a couple of his cronies, fellow deserters from D’s Place. Joining them for a pleasant beer and a chat, he looks round at the girls to see if there’s any new talent. And yes, there are a few new girls, obviously migrants from Indramayu, charming their way round the groups of guys at their tables. In fact, for a few moments Top Gun recaptures its old atmosphere - but then the girls head out en masse for D’s Place, to see if there’s a Ladies Lucky Draw on tonight.

The Reveller follows hard on the heels of the girls, but instead of heading for D’s Place makes a beeline across the road to Sportsmans. It’s a quiet night there, pleasant and relaxed as ever, so the Reveller has a drink, buys a pack of cigars, and wanders out again to seek a bit more action. Ever the optimist he wanders into Everest, but the place is forlornly empty so he does an about-turn and moves on down to My Bar.

Ah, life at last! There’s a good crowd, good music, a nice selection of cheerful girls circulating round the bar, so the Reveller settles down to a cold beer and lights up a cigar. A few old friends drop in, so we have a good chat and catch up on the news - a luxury, we all agree, that’s been damn-nigh impossible for the past month or so in D’s Place, such is the loudness of the music in there.

It’s getting late, so the Reveller drops into D’s for a late night drink. Upstairs is much better now that the music is attenuated, but it’s still a wee bit too loud for the Reveller’s taste. The disco is going well, but it’s not as packed as it used to be and there’s plenty of seating round the dance floor - time was when it was like musical chairs in there, muses the Reveller.

And time for bed. Wandering down the street the Reveller ignores the siren call of the recumbent taxi drivers lolling across the bonnets of their cabs, carefully navigates the late-shift beggars and the chattering little kids who seem to dash out from nowhere, and strolls across to the Ambhara Hotel where his faithful regular bajaj drivers hang out. "Mister, Mister, Jalan Kirai, ya?" they call out, and with no more ado than smiling an evening’s greeting the Reveller folds himself into his chosen bajaj and sits back to savour the ride home.

Two into one won’t go

The eminent atomic physicist Wolfgang Pauli is another of those geniuses who, like Sir Isaac Newton with his infamous apple, built a world-shattering theory out of what - in Python parlance - is the ‘bleedin’ obvious’. In Pauli’s case, it’s the simple fact that two physical entities may not occupy the same place at the same time. Obvious, perhaps, to you and me, but not, alas, to that happy breed of suicidal retards, Jakarta bus and taxi drivers. As his bajaj pilot heaves on the stick and lurches into the Blok from the main road one night, two other Blok-bound drivers obliviously converge on the same spot. Just as an impact seems nigh-on inevitable each frantically swerves away, miraculously missing the others in the process. On this occasion luck and sheer chance prevail, but the battered, gouged and crumpled sides of most buses and taxis in Jakarta bear mute testimony to the rareness of such close misses.

As he pays off the bajaj driver and strolls down the street the Reveller reflects that most of the girls, too, haven’t a clue about the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Many a time he’s seen two (or even three) of them trying to occupy the same bar stool at the same time next to an amatory target, or occupy the same point on the disco dance floor in front of a guy who misguidedly sees himself as a latter-day John Travolta. But when two of the guys are too drunk and besotted to know whether it’s the post office or Tuesday, and home in simultaneously on one of the sweet young things, it usually ends in a colourful exchange of insults - and occasionally a more physical display of territorial imperative.

The Sound and the Fury

There’s no truer adage than ‘when the cat’s away, the mice will play’. The mouse in question is the D’s disco DJ , a hirsute Neanderthal for whom there are but two settings on an amplifier volume control - off, and maximum. So while the bosses are spending all their time and energy nurturing the fledgling new D’s Place in Kemang, there’s no-one on hand to monitor and control the decibels at mission control. In consequence of this dereliction of duty the Reveller and half a dozen of his comrades desert D’s Place in protest, setting up a new base camp in Top Gun. The word is that others - guys and girls alike - have also abandoned the place because of the ear-shuddering tuneless racket that’s pounding out relentlessly from eight or so every evening.

After a particularly acrimonious Close Encounter with this monomaniac DJ, one of the Reveller’s buddies hatches a dastardly plot to give the guy a fitting comeuppance. As he’s shuffling down the street towards Oscars one night a car pulls up and a shadowy figure hails the Reveller. With an evil grin his friend carefully opens a brown paper bag to reveal an industrial-strength compressed-air foghorn. Patting it lovingly he slips it back into the bag, winks, and slinks menacingly into D’s Place.

After a pleasant interlude in Oscars the Reveller returns to D’s for a late evening carouse - but too late, alas for the drama. Apparently during his absence the foghorn is blown in response to the disco din, which leads to a very miffed DJ coming within a hair’s breadth of belting the protestor. Word of this battleship diplomacy obviously filters back to the D’s bosses, because within a couple of days the sound levels are back at a reasonable level. But the customers who deserted D’s are staying away for a while, as this form of protest seems to be the only one that the management understands.

Epilogue

What a month! The only good thing about it is that it had a happy - if expensive - ending. Ah well, as a wag once said, in Jakarta you have to ride the blows and take the rough with the very rough. Life on the Blok goes on as ever, about which there will be more in the September Diary. Watch this space!