February Diary
Blok M diary, February 2005
The social highlight of the month is without doubt the celebration of My Bar’s first birthday – and what an event it is! Its meteoric rise to stardom has been a phenomenon, and the street as a whole is a winner for its success.
The evening is meticulously planned. A superb Indian buffet provides tasty sustenance for the guests, and it’s held in the next-door upstairs extension – My Bar’s new bar/restaurant (which is scheduled to be officially opened later in March). The food is exquisite, the quantity lavish, and the service spot on.
Back in the bar downstairs things soon get into their swing, with a really good live band providing the music. There’s a festive party atmosphere – hardly surprising, as the management has declared drinks on the house for the whole night – and the poor bar staff are rushed off their feet trying to keep up with the flood of orders. "They’d have been better dumping the bottles on the bar and just letting everyone get on with it", one of the Reveller’s well-oiled mates grinningly opines as he slumps forward clutching his umpteenth whisky-soda.
The lights fade, the coloured spots flash and writhe, smoke gushes from the ceiling. The music changes, and in come the exotic dancers ready to perform a specially-choreographed Kama Sutra number. The dancing is a feast for the eyes. A mixture of modern and classical, the movement and gestures are a true delight to watch.
Then, as the dancers sway off into the mist, it’s time for speeches and thank-you’s. Hitesh, who is the brains and the inspiration behind My Bar, welcomes his guests in a short (and very moving) speech in which he thanks everyone for making the bar such a success, the realisation of a long-held dream.
Next, the cake. It’s a massive, luscious, mouthwatering strawberry cream sponge, which is rapidly sliced up and handed out to the waiting throng. And champagne. Lots of it. So pretty soon, everyone is struggling to balance their cake in one hand and their glass of bubbly in the other, as Hitesh proposes a toast.
Just as things are quietening down there’s suddenly more dancing to watch. And what dancing. The Kama Sutra theme continues, but this time a couple of lads join in the action and link up with the girls. The audience gathers even closer, and jaws drop in wonder as they flex themselves into a mind-blowing sequence of contortions. The show certainly captures the spirit and the mood of the Kama Sutra, which the Reveller recalls reading as a young sprog of thirteen or fourteen.
The dancing ends, the musicians reappear, and the party launches off into the early hours of the morning. Everyone present agrees that it’s been a wonderful night, typical of the flair and style that’s become the hallmark of My Bar. The Reveller is deeply impressed by the generosity and sincerity of the management in saying "thank you" to its regular customers, and wishes the place another year of prosperity and success.
If you’d like to see a record of the event there’s a set of commemorative pictures for you – click here for the Anniversary Album.
It could only happen in Blok M, and only to the luckless Reveller. Now lust and alcohol have always been a dangerous mixture, but here’s a new twist to the old story. So get out the tissues, sit back, and listen to his tale of woe.
Towards the end of a vintage evening in My Bar, having arranged an assignation with a particularly Sweet Young Thing the Reveller works out the logistics of the situation and decides that for reasons of discretion he’ll get a taxi and wait for her outside the bar. So far so good – he haggles mercilessly with one of the rust-bucket taxi drivers and knocks him down from a you’ve-got-to-be-joking Rp 50,000 to a more realistic Rp 10,000 for the trip to the Melawai Hotel. Sliding into the rather unsanitary back seat of the cab, he waits patiently while the driver coaxes his antique Toyota into stuttering life, and scans the street for his consort.
Alas, she’s nowhere to be seen. Now as many a guy will testify, it’s all too easy to lose a girl on the way out of the bar. On one famous occasion a friend of the Reveller’s pops into the loo to recycle his beer, but by the time he emerges she’s vamoosed with another guy who’s gazumped him. On another occasion one of his mates has the lass all lined up, but on the way out she decides she’s peckish and slips behind a street food stall to grab a bite to eat. The moral is, keep her in line of sight at all times.
Just as desperation is setting in the Reveller espies the Sweet Young Thing in the distance, wandering down the middle of the street. Prodding the somnambulistic taxi driver into a spasm of consciousness, the Reveller heads off in hot pursuit. Pulling level with her he throws the door open and yanks her inside and off they all go, down the road and round the block towards the hotel.
But as the cab enters a well-lit stretch of road the Reveller senses that all is not quite what it seems. The girl turns towards the him, and it occurs to him that she looks a bit unfamiliar. Closer inspection, and a check on the name, reveals to a distraught Reveller that it’s not the right girl. Yes, she’s the same height and has the same hair style, yes, she’s wearing the same style of red top and faded blue jeans – but the face is completely different.
A rapid explanation and flurry of effusive apologies follows, but by this time the narcoleptic taxi driver has swung westward into the one-way system around the bus station and we can’t retrace our steps. So we drop the girl off on the main road with a handsome compensation for the cock-up, and hightail it back to Jalan Pelatehan with the driver chortling to himself all the way.
Just as the Reveller is about to disembark outside My Bar, what should he see but the right girl standing forlornly on the pavement. Scooping her into the taxi and setting off once more for the hotel he pointedly ignores the loud guffaws from the taxi driver, who is busy totting up what the round trip is going to be worth.
From our front-line correspondent
Bartez, a Blok M stalwart, has penned a graphic eyewitness account of incompetence, greed and terror. His saga starts in Everest (where there’s a cock-up over event scheduling), moves via Sportsmans into D’s Place (where there’s a police raid), and terminates in My Bar (where the dreadful truth about their licensing hours is uncovered).
Read the full story in Bartez’ gripping account of early-morning horror in Blok M. Click here for the link to his article.
Early one evening as the Reveller is knocking back the first cold beer of the night in Top Gun and enjoying a pleasant chat, the music volume is suddenly ramped up. One of the guys makes a lemon-sucking face and remarks above the din that they’re losing the plot in some of the bars. We others agree, and the talk turns to the kamikaze school of management that led to the demise of Pentagon and Lintas Melawai, almost scuppered Oscars, and is now knocking D’s Place off its pedestal.
Pentagon introduced a Friday-night entry charge for everybody – girls and guys – that killed the place stone dead within a couple of months, Oscars made the girls buy a drink token before being admitted (and took a long time to recover from the fall-off in custom), and the last act of a desperate management at Lintas Melawai was introducing a Rp 50,000 cover charge for weekend entry.
Some of the Blok M managers think they know best and turn a deaf ear to well-intentioned feedback from their customers. Well, they’re just plain wrong. It’s ironical that just as Top Gun gets a serendipitous boost to its early evening trade from guys who’ve abandoned D’s Place because of the racket, it starts doing exactly the same thing itself. Even My Bar, which has the best customer-orientation on the Blok, has on a couple of occasions recently jacked the volume up early in the evening when the only punters are a handful of guys enjoying their evening snack, a quiet drink and a chat, or a sociable game of pool. A whisper to the management quickly does the trick, but it’s worrying that this should be necessary in the first place.
It never fails to amuse the Reveller that an anniversary which is inextricably linked in the western mind with a particularly nasty gangland slaying in America should be such a big romantic thing here in Indonesia. As he tells his Indonesian friends and acquaintances, in the west Valentine’s Day ranks very low and is marked (if at all) with the sending of a card and maybe a few flowers or a token box of chocolates.
My Bar decides to hold a special romantic Valentine’s Night, so along trots the Reveller to see how it all pans out. Nothing much looks like happening until later than he wants to stay, so along with a slew of other salary-slaves he ups and leaves before midnight as he’s got to start work at the unearthly hour of 7am next day. It’s a pity, as the word filters back that a good time was had by all the lucky sods who could hang in there until the wee small hours.
Now it’s a worrying trend down the Blok, whereby events only get into their swing far later than advertised. The famous case of the ever-receding Ladies’ Luck Draw in D’s Place started the rot, which rapidly spread to other bars. The owners ought to spare a thought for all those poor sods who’d like to get a bit of action before drifting homewards about midnight.
In the same vein, many events keep on going far beyond their allotted time-span, such as the finale of the My Bar Calendar Girls Competition. It may be good for business, but there’s a danger of crying wolf and losing punters in the long run because they know they can’t trust the advertised event times.
Words are tricky little buggers. No matter how precisely you choose them, no matter how carefully you arrange them, they’re full of mischief and insidiously open to unintended interpretation. And so it is that one of the Reveller’s observations about the Jakarta pool league’s past modus operandi was perceived by members of the league committee as implying that there might have been dishonesty in the disposing of, or accounting for, sponsorship income. To set the record straight, in no way was the Reveller stating, suggesting or even remotely implying that there had been any misappropriation of funds or irregularity in the committee’s handling of the pool league’s accounts. He was referring not to how income was spent, but to what it was spent on.
It’s greatly to the credit of the committee that they voice their concern about this perceived allegation of possible wrong-doing in a direct and forthright way in the site’s chat rooms, giving the Reveller a chance to respond promptly to their grievance. In the course of the ensuing correspondence it becomes clear that the league committee has got its act together this time round, and has a well-thought out strategy for the forthcoming league competition – which has attracted a record number of entry applications, nearly 400 at the last count. The proof of the pudding is in their nicely-produced web site, which sets out all aspects of the league’s activities in a clear and easily accessible way. Click here to visit the Jakarta pool league web site.
Now the Reveller is not, and has never pretended to be, a journalist – his scribblings about Blok M merely strive to capture the tone and content of bar gossip and disco chatter, to recreate in words something of the atmosphere of the place. As he’s said on many occasions, he reports as accurately as memory permits what the guys and girls actually say. And there has been a lot of gossip about how the pool league was perceived to operate after its inception, how much commercial sponsorship (in money or in kind) was raised for the first Jakarta pool league competition, and what it was spent on. These are questions that were raised with some of the bar owners at the time, have been raised on several occasions since in the pages of the Blok M web site, and in response to which there has been a deafening silence.
Epilogue
An eventful month, and a pretty full diary – the stuff of which legend is made. The dear old place has had a bumper celebration, business is booming in all the bars, even the fish in Oscars seem to be riding a wave. The street is a-changing, and everyone seems to be fairly bullish about the new look that’s on the way. As the Reveller wends his way homewards in his trusty late-night bajaj, he reflects that the Blok is a tough old bird – it’s a survivor, like so many of its regular denizens, both guys and girls.
