January Diary
Blok M diary, January 2005
Goldilocks goes to Blok M. First, she slips into the Club. "My, but it’s terribly quiet in here," she whispers to herself. "I think I’ll try somewhere else." So off she skips up the street to D’s Place. "Jesus wept!" cries little Goldilocks as she tiptoes up the stairs to the disco bar. "This place is just too, too loud. I think I’ll try somewhere else." So off she trots again, and this time goes into My Bar. "This is more like it," she lisps excitedly."It’s not too quiet, it’s not too loud, in fact it’s just right!" So she lights a kretek, lines up a row of B52s, and gets totally legless before being hauled off to the Melawai Hotel by Daddy Bear.
In fact, the music is so loud in D’s disco these days that it’s difficult even to get a drink. When you have to bawl at the top of your voice to get your order heard, and you can’t even exchange a cordial greeting with your mates without rupturing your larynx, you may be forgiven for wondering if the management is stone deaf - or worse, imagines that its customers are. Fine, some folk delight in decibels, and for them this rupturous pounding is an essential part of the Great Night Out in Blok M. Now the Reveller likes a raunchy, raucous beat as much as the next guy - but not so loud that you have to seriously consider learning sign language in order to chat up the girls.
As the Reveller has said on more than one occasion to his good friends the D’s Place owners, it’s up to them how they run the show - they pay the piper, so they call the tune. If they’ve chosen to go for the hard rock disco trade, then the Reveller wishes them well. But the new-look disco bar and its music have driven him - and a fair number of other guys and girls - out of D’s as their favourite night-time haunt. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Last Friday evening, while the Reveller is enjoying a swinging time in Top Gun with as great a bunch of lecherous layabouts as you’ll find anywhere in South Jakarta, one of his mates says "Just look around you. How many of these guys would you normally expect to see in D’s Place at this time of an evening?". A quick head count, then the Reveller replies; "Ten definites, two or three possibles". "Precisely," returns his friend. "And the girls, too. At this time of night they’d normally be flocking in D’s Place, waiting for the Ladies’ Lucky Draw". And that, gentle reader, says it all.
So now, if you want to meet the Reveller in the flesh before eleven or so, just drop in to Top Gun where he may be found lurking under a cloud of cigar smoke and sipping his beloved Pernod in what’s rapidly becoming one of the best early-evening spots on the Blok.
One evening as he’s licking his wounds from as bad a pasting at the pool table as he’s had in a long time, a guy joins the Reveller at the bar and greets him effusively. He’s new in town, but had the commendable foresight to do his homework before travelling to Jakarta. "Saw the web site and took your advice about Top Gun being a good place early in the evening, and it’s spot on", he enthuses. Later that evening, a guy sitting next to him in My Bar turns and shakes the Reveller warmly by the hand in appreciation of his verbal ramblings on the web site, which - as a Blok M regular of several years standing - he finds perceptive and amusing.
It’s moments like these that make running a busy web site worth all the effort that goes into producing it. The Blok M site is a labour of love, a heartfelt homage to the place and its denizens. The Reveller’s crusade is to help the Blok to flourish and change with the times, but without losing its character or its unique appeal. He’s not against change in itself, but is a vociferous opponent of the follies and foibles of those who have the power to make or break the place by their blinkered focus on easy profit and instant payback. As the Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith put it so well, "Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ill a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay."
Having just had the Week From Hell at work, the Reveller not unnaturally decides to drown his sorrows and wash the memories of the past five days out of his system. So come Friday night it’s into Top Gun and out with the tequila, and within minutes the Reveller feels like a new man. He also feels like a new girl, so he spends a delicious five minutes eyeing up the evening’s talent. Yes, there’s all the usual suspects, but quite a few new girls among them who are turning out to be real characters. They’ve all got style, some have got class, and most have drop-dead bodies you could kill for.
"Time to get our seats in My Bar before the stampede", says one of the guys after a very pleasant couple of hours of boozing and chatting. So it’s straight across the street, carefully avoiding the pot holes and cracked paving slabs and looking out for rogue taxis or ojeks shooting down the street at breakneck speed.
Since it’s taken over the late-night mantle from Lintas Melawai, My Bar has by some mysterious osmotic process absorbed much of the atmosphere of its predecessor. For after midnight, with the lights low and the music throbbing, it captures something of the inimitable sleaziness that was the hallmark of LM. It’s the girls, of course. Many of the Sweet Young Things have migrated to My Bar, along with some of the maturer beauties and the mamasan mafia. It doesn’t yet capture the cattle-market quality of Lintas, but it’s getting there.
Now this is great news for everybody. Until about midnight, My Bar is its usual class act with disco and dance music - then, like Cinderella, the mood and the tone shift quite palpably into another gear and hey presto, it’s got a whole new rhythm. A Jekyll and Hyde transmogrification takes place, and the Reveller and his mates whoop it up into the early hours.
Saturday night threatens, as so often after a ding-dong Friday night, to be something of an anticlimax, and it’s slow to pick up speed. Top Gun is pleasant enough, but there’s something missing. Fortunately things improve after about ten thirty, and the place is full enough to generate a pleasant (if low-key) atmosphere.
So after a relaxing couple of hours in Top Gun the Reveller decides to pop in to D’s Place and see how things are shaping up. Groping his way up the stairs to the disco bar, he stumbles into a heaving mass of sozzled carousers. One of his cronies spies him coming in and grabs him by the arm. "Have you seen Captain Birds Eye this evening?" bellows the guy, referring rather irreverently to our mutual friend who sports a snowy white mane and beard redolent of that eponymous hero of TV fish finger commercials. "Not seen the old bastard - I bet he’s shacked up with some gorgeous creature and hasn’t got the energy to make an appearance tonight", yells back the Reveller.
After a drink and a few greetings to old friends, it’s time to get serious - which means nipping down to My Bar for the late night revelry. And wow! The place is pulsing. Again, as his eyes adjust to the gloom, for a second or so the Reveller imagines himself back in Lintas Melawai. So it’s into the fray and in with the girls, chatting and flirting the night away. As he tears himself away from My Bar there are still people pouring in, the dedicated carousers who’ll see the dawn in before heading homewards. Yes, the Blok is on top form, and My Bar has come of age.
At last the voting is over and the results are in. There are no great surprises - the voting trend has been fairly consistent over the month’s polling, with no last-minute dark horses coming up from the rear. The Reveller hopes that the bar owners will take heed of the results, as to date none of them has undertaken even the most rudimentary survey of their customer’s opinions. Most of the Blok M marketing - with the notable exception of My Bar - has been of the "lick your finger and stick it in the air to see which way the wind’s blowing" school. Click here to see the results of the poll in detail.
The overall winner is My Bar, and it’s a decisive victory. Interestingly, Everest pips D’s for second place in this category, which is an unexpected result and indicates that the place may be on the mend and picking up speed.
When it comes to Best Bar for Girls, My Bar is streets ahead of the competition. D’s Place - which until very recently was the undisputed leader on the Blok for girls - has slumped to a very weak second place with a paltry 16% of the votes cast.
As for the Best Bar for Music category, again My Bar is tops with Everest and Oscars limping way behind. D’s Place gets only 3% of the vote, which is further evidence (if any were needed) that the punters don’t like the music in there.
Again, there are no surprises in the Best Bar for Pool category. Everest has the best table on the Blok, and Sportsmans’ position probably reflects the fact that its pool tables are well-located and fit nicely into the bar space. Top Gun comes an easy third, with D’s Place nowhere in the running.
No surprises here - Sportsmans hits the spot with 44% of the votes, with Everest making a solid second and My Bar lagging behind in third place. This poor showing almost certainly reflects the fact that the undisputed quality of the food simply isn’t matched by the eating facilities.
Yes, with the demise of Lintas Melawai it’s just got to be My Bar. What is perhaps surprising is the extent of its lead over the other main disco on the street, D’s Place - it pulls in more than twice as many votes.
The Reveller’s acerbic comments on the Expat Pool League’s antics appear to have struck home, and some good may yet come out of the fine mess they’ve gotten themselves into. First, though, there’s a slight misunderstanding to clear up. The article in the Blok M January Update could be read as castigating the breakaway Pelatehan League for behaving badly - whereas in fact it’s a poke at the "official" Expat Pool League, and not the good folk in Jalan Pelatehan.
One of the Pelatehan managers has gone out of his way to reassure the Reveller - and through him, the other players who’ve been pissed off by the sorry saga of the Expat Pool League - that the reason for the creation of a breakaway league is dissatisfaction with the official League’s high-handed (and sometimes inefficient) way of running things. So the promise is this: a local Pelatehan league with simple game rules and no schlepping off to distant pubs at inconvenient times, open to all the regular players (be they guys or girls, locals or expats), and a commitment that there’ll be no bringing in pro sharks and ringers.
The Reveller hopes that the Pelatehan League will stick to its guns, and in particular deep-six the absurd rule that players must wear team shirts plastered with sponsors’ advertising. Drop the shirts, and the Reveller will be first in the queue to back the new league and join one of the teams. Now here’s an offer the bar owners can’t refuse - get the Reveller back on board, and he’ll set up a Pelatehan Pool League web site for free!
Epilogue
The month has flown by, and it’s been a classic. If January in Blok M were a bottle of wine it’d be a vintage Château Margaux; if a cigar, a Romeo Y Julietta from Cuba. The keynote has been revelry. Folk have been having a plain old-fashioned good time down the Blok, letting themselves go and really enjoying the whirl. There’s been energy flowing again, the spark that gives the sparkle to the bars. As he folds himself into a bajaj after his last frolic of the month and settles back to enjoy the sites, sounds and smells of early morning in South Jakarta, the Reveller counts his blessings.