Metro Mad Jakarta

Peaches

2011-05-12T00:30:00.001+07:00

This week, I actually found myself in town for once and wasn’t crucifying myself on some masochistic quest to scale a near-vertical, mud-caked mountain peak. Mind you, Jakarta's toxic boulevards sport their own natural and not-so-natural hazards, and so it was with some caution that I found myself heading out to enjoy a Saturday night of Anker fuelled debauchery and hopefully the kind of behaviour that, were it to be filmed and downloaded onto a legislator’s iPad, should only be viewed in the privacy of the Parliamentary restrooms.

Well, that was my intention at any rate. Indonesia is a nation of contradictions of course, not least of which is the often yawning chasm that exists between professed morality and actual behaviour where matters of making the beast with two backs and enjoying a bit of slap and tickle are concerned. Research was called for, and a friend of dubious morals and I soon found ourselves at a new club on Jalan Gajah Mada in the Kota sleaze zone (I won't say which one, but it shares a name with Yogyakarta's best known tourist street).

We had heard about the club via word of mouth, and when we eventually got inside, it became immediately clear that this was hot cha-cha central. The joint was filled with ethnic Chinese gentleman and Indonesian damsels in various states of distress, who were walking around wearing nothing but their underwear. It seemed rather unsportsmanlike that the chaps weren’t also in their underwear, and I considered stripping down to my boxer shorts as an act of good faith and cross gender solidarity with the brave sisters present. But then I had second thoughts and conjectured that perhaps such a selfless act of empathy might be misconstrued by the club’s Cro-Magnon security detail, who all looked capable of pulling one of my legs off and beating me with the wet end without breaking a sweat.

I guess we're all told that it's wrong to turn a person into a sex object. Feminists over the last half-century have complained bitterly about pornography and the male gaze, but there is a sense in which sexuality fundamentally reduces the other to a sex object. Sex involves, as the great Sartre notes, joy being found in the least human and most fleshy parts of the body, such as breasts, buttocks, thighs and so on. Moreover, it has been said that sexual desire itself is the desire to be objectified and used by the other. Strip such fantasy away and sexuality itself disappears.

In any case, we retired to an upper floor to observe proceedings in greater detail. We soon found ourselves sitting on the couch next to some Middle Eastern gentleman and their frilly knickered companions. "I have just arrived in Jakarta, but my friend said I must go to this disco, amazing yes?"

"Yes indeed."

"Where do you come from?"

"The UK."

"Yes?! I am from Abu Dhabi and I was a student in Leeds for four years!"

It's a cosmopolitan world alright; here I was in a club full of salivating ethnic Chinese chaps, half naked Javanese nymphs and Middle Eastern thrill seekers who’d spent some of their formative years in Leeds (the Monte Carlo of the Midlands, as it's called by nobody at all). It was all too much for our fragile sensibilities and we soon found ourselves leaving the club without so much as a D-cup as a souvenir.

Perhaps I should really be settling down at my age (17 and a half) especially as I can now get Indonesian citizenship once I become hitched to the Papuan tribeswoman of my dreams and she squeezes out a couple of mongrel puppies. I resolved to begin searching immediately, and soon found myself perusing an Asian Internet dating site in my desperate quest for Jakarta-based babes.

One has to be a little careful on these sites I should add, and before one goes steaming off on excruciatingly painful (semi) blind dates, a thorough Facebook photo album check is required. If you rely solely on the dating site profile picture, you can certainly come a cropper as a sweet, closed-mouth smile morphs into dentition like a burnt-out village at a first dinner date meeting.

As I scrolled down the seemingly endless list of young ladies, it quickly became clear that there was an awful lot of available skirt out there. Alas however, many of the Internet lonely hearts club brigade had ticked the, "Very attractive" box in their profiles, despite clear photographic evidence to the contrary. Presumably the good looking femme fatales have little need of Internet dating.

It's all about, "Inner beauty" in these profile descriptions though, and the greetings card platitudes seemed to help as I continued to sift my way through the various character summaries, keenly feeling the alienating dislocation of our increasingly Internet mediated social reality.

Hopefully the romance will come later, although the dating site has left me feeling a little cold. I mean, modern discotheques of a certain shade are often described as meat markets, but online, the free market in flesh becomes disembodied into a human entree menu. Click, “No”, click, “Arrrgh!”, click, “Hmmm”, click, “There isn’t enough beer in the world”. I guess I’m assured of endless depressing dates with girls able to eat their pizzas through a tennis racket in the near future. Wish me luck, I'm going in.

Car Jamming

2011-04-20T13:35:00.000+07:00

Last weekend afforded me the opportunity to undertake another of my Indonesian politician style comparative study tours. AirAsia once again supplied me with a great value flight and some simply appalling in-flight coffee, as I hopped over the briny to Kuala Lumpur in order to take in this year's Malaysian Grand Prix. My trip to last year’s Singapore Grand Prix gave me a chance to compare the island state's sweeping boulevards and cyber-conformist hygiene with Jakarta’s pungently aromatic demographic implosion, and I was hoping that KL would offer up some similarly enlightening contrasts.

KL has been described to me as being midway between Jakarta and Singapore, although the fact that both Malaysia and Singapore host Grands Prix, whilst Jakarta doesn't, perhaps tells you all that you need to know about the three cities' relative urban credentials. Indonesia's largest sporting event is the Commonwealth Masters Tennis tournament, which is held in Bali every year. This does indeed attract a few big names but it certainly isn't a big international event, although certain rogue tax officials have been so keen to attend in the past that they've been known to spring themselves from jail and don ludicrous Beatles wigs as a disguise.

In any case, down at the AirAsia terminal of Kuala Lumpur International Airport, everything was a Formula 1 frenzy, presumably because AirAsia supremo and Malaysian mogul extraordinaire, Tony Fernandes, now owns his very own Formula 1 team (in fact, he's revived the iconic Lotus brand). An expensive hobby perhaps, but presumably Mr F. isn't short of a few ringgit.

Kuala Lumpur's airport is roughly twice as far from the centre of town as Jakarta's Sukarno-Hatta is, however it lies a mere ten minute bus ride away from the Sepang Circuit. And so I soon found myself sitting on a lush, green hillside, necking Tiger beer and watching all of the Saturday qualifying action. Sepang is a great place in fact and affords spectators some simply superb views of all those high-speed dogfights.

After qualification was over, I had a stroll around the overpriced merchandise stalls (although there was a 50% discount on Michael Schumacher T-shirts -ha ha and furthermore, ha). I then headed into KL Central to hook up with a couple of my F1 loving chums who had also made the hop over from the Big Durian for the race, and we all headed out for a little Saturday night fever.

The centre of KL is perhaps closer in essence to Singapore than it is to Jakarta, and a few things stand out immediately to any visiting long-term Batavia warriors. Firstly, the traffic doesn't seem to be nearly as bad as the purgatorial gridlock that we all know and love. The lack of motorcycles in particular makes for a pleasant change. The second thing that struck me as we walked around KL is perhaps not entirely unrelated to the first. While Jakarta engages in endless debates about the city's actual and fantasized Gordian transportation knot of cars, busways, monorails, new flyovers and even bicycle lanes, the most fundamental mode of human transportation, namely Shanks's pony (or getting up of one's rear end and walking), has been sadly neglected.

"Normal" developed urban environments usually feature those amazing technological innovations known as pavements and, as a knock-on effect, there are bustling streets filled with shops and the like. Jakarta's fancy shops are all safely buried within the closeted, safe, technocratic womb of the shopping mall, whilst outside a post-apocalyptic urban assault course of crumbling concrete, 30-year-old buses, raw sewage and underclass serfs serves to deter any integrated urban renaissance (although a few brave venues have now opted to try a more alfresco approach to city life).

Coincidentally enough, I have just read that 500 trillion rupiah has been earmarked by the government for infrastructure development across the country. I reckon though that by the time a multitude of greedy politicos has dipped its avaricious mitts into the honeypot, there’ll be just about enough dough remaining for a couple of keep left signs.

Meanwhile, back in KL, Sunday came around and we all headed back to Sepang for a highly enjoyable race that actually featured a fair amount of overtaking. Wonders will never cease. The next day, it was time to the inevitable lemming like tourist traipse around Kuala Lumpur Tower and the Petronas Twin Towers. As iconic as the Twin Towers have now become, they are basically just two large slabs of steel and concrete. Whatever happened to architectural creativity in our modern world? The entire thrust of modern architectural hubris seems to be to raise your non-idea of a building 15 storeys higher than the neighbouring country's non-idea of a building.

Personally, I'd like to see Indonesia's putative and scandalously extravagant new parliamentary office building being constructed as a Gothic pastiche and filled with pointed arches and flying buttresses. Such a design would more fittingly reflect the mediaeval, Machiavellian mindset of those who will be ensconced inside it, enjoying a grease-down and a shiatsu whilst they scan the year's budget allocations to see what can be craftily diverted into their Citibank accounts. Gothic Jakarta, now that really would be infrastructure to be proud of.

Go Wild in the Country

2011-04-12T20:10:00.001+07:00

Last weekend, it was time for your intrepid hero to make another foray into Indonesia's bucolic boondocks with my obsessive-compulsive mountain climbing chum, Mr. Dan, and a few other curious takers fooled into parting with their hard earned cash by the slick graphics of Mr. Dan's Gunung Bagging website.

Mr. Dan, in the flesh, has been known to exude the authority of a seasoned and knowledgeable hiker. On one occasion however, whilst leading a small group of keen and crisply booted, fresh-faced walkers on an early start through the Highlands of Bandung, Mr. Dan had felt a little worse for wear after a taxing night scaling Gunung Bintang and had ended up projectile chundering onto the road in front of his hiking disciples just before the off. This may have taken some of the lustre off the good Mr. Dan’s professional standing in the fiercely competitive world of amateur hiking, however it will take more than a mound of early-morning ale spew to put me off, and I soon found myself taking in the fresh air and outboard motor petrol fumes with Mr. Dan and the gang as our speedboat skimmed its way from Carita Beach on Java's west coast to the island of Panaintan, which sits next to the Ujung Kulon national park on Java southwestern tip.

I do like to indulge in the occasional return to nature in order to remind myself of my own mortality. Such near terminally exhausting trips are always memorable and interesting, although 'fun' perhaps wouldn't be the right adjective to use. Alas though, I can't accompany that irrepressible bounder of adventure Mr. Dan quite as often as I’d like to, as sitting on my fat arse watching DVDs and eating chocolate makes a lot of pressing demands on my time you understand.

Panaitan is the largest island in the Sunda Strait and is uninhabited by humans, save for a skeleton staff of caretakers. There's plenty of native fauna to be seen here however, including populations of deer, monkeys, pythons, monitor lizards, eagles, crabs, colourful fish, buffalo and even, apparently, crocodiles. I was slightly uneasy about the latter species to tell the truth. Animals are fascinating of course but I'm not an, "animal lover" as such, and rather regard those who lay claim to this title as perhaps compensating for a lack of more human bonhomie in their lives.

The prospect of being chewed up by a bloody great crocodile should always inform one’s views of the natural world, lest one end up as dead as Australian naturalist and mental case Steve Irwin. Before last weekend's trip, I had, moreover, just watched a Werner Herzog documentary called, "Grizzly Man" in which another chuckle-brained individual, one Timothy Treadwell, attempts to befriend and live with a population of bears in the wilderness of Alaska, with predictable dietary consequences for the local ursine population.

Personally, I doubted that a light spraying in Autan mosquito repellent would do much to deter a hungry croc from chowing down on my lily white legs, and I thus walked ashore at Panaitan with some trepidation. Thankfully though, while monkeys and deer could be spotted surrounding our campsite, crocodile-wise, things seemed peaceful and nature remained unbloodied in tooth and claw.

After cooking up a spot of lunch it was time for the main event. We reboarded our boat and headed up the coast for 15 minutes for an assault on Gunung Raksa, Panaitan's main peak. Only 329m tall it may be, but our ascent of Raksa proved to be pretty much the most masochistic thing I've ever attempted. Next to this, the hike up the 4,000 m high Gunung Kinabalu in Malaysia that half killed me last year was a walk in the park.

Dense jungle, steep, wet, muddy slopes and ludicrously inappropriate footwear conspired to have me looking as if I'd just crawled out of a particularly noxious swamp within a matter of minutes. Moreover, spring-loaded brambles liberally peppered with thorns gleefully grabbed at my hands and arms as I tried unsuccessfully for the 20th time not to fall over like a silent comedian on a banana skin.

We eventually reached the summit, atop which sits the oldest statue in Java. Unfortunately however, it’s a statue of the Hindu deity Ganesha, which means that, in light of recent developments in Sumatra, "offended" Muslims will no doubt soon be campaigning for its removal, despite the fact that it stands in one of the most isolated spots in the whole country. Looking at the statue, I had a vision of fundamentalist types cursing as their virgin white robes turned to muddy brown and their beards got caught on brambles, while they attempted to scale Raksa in order to blow up the statue, and this immediately cheered me up.

After a brief rain shower, which only served to make the muddy slopes even more slippery, it was time for the harrowing descent. I soon found myself bringing up the rear of our party of eight as I tried to negotiate the terrain carefully without breaking my neck. Alas though, this proved less than salutary place to be, as the seven infidels in front of me had worn the "path" down to the consistency of the slippery mud chute.

After about 10 minutes of near fatal skids and tumbles, I gave up walking and opted to simply slide down the slopes on my behind, as if it were some kind of tropical luge run. This proved to be a just about workable technique, although I accelerated frighteningly out of control on a couple of occasions before slamming to a halt against tree trunks. Moreover, on the final 200m walk along the flat to our waiting boat, I tripped over a root and fell flat on my face. You really should leave Jakarta more often at the weekend folks, you don't know what you're missing.

Dancing in the Dark

2011-04-05T11:40:00.001+07:00

Well, Earth Hour came and went last weekend with many seemingly oblivious to its very existence. There are 8760 hours in a single year and thus cutting the power for one of these hours (punches numbers triumphantly into calculator) could result in a massive 0.0114 per cent reduction in our annual electricity consumption. Possibly this won't make a huge dent in global warming and the increasing likelihood that we’ll all be sipping Icelandic Shiraz before the century is out.

Earth Hour is however, in the yoghurt-weaving, glibly eco parlance of our times, supposed to be more of a so-called "Consciousness raising" exercise. More of which later, for now though I'll just note that plenty of businesses around the city seemed to be using the event as an opportunity to promote their own agendas. "Come and enjoy Earth Hour with us by candlelight, there will be a 25 per cent discount on margaritas all night!" kind of thing. Rather cynical really, although perhaps the idea was to get the punters so drunk that they couldn't drive, thus reducing their carbon footprints to zero at a stroke.

For my part, I decided to get on my bicycle and join an Earth Hour ride from fX Plaza up Jl. Sudirman to Monas with some of the city's keen amateur cyclists. As I'm sure most of you have noticed, there's something of a cycling revolution going on around town just at the moment. Young chaps have taken to twiddling around the city on the latest must have fashion accessory, namely the so-called ‘fixie’ bicycle. These are basically track bikes without gears and, quite worryingly, often without brakes too. Hipster kids are snapping up these rather impractical aluminium steeds like hot cakes however, usually in rather effeminate shades of lilac and turquoise and the like. They then spend their evenings pedalling between Circle K and 7Eleven in search of Red Bull fuelled good times (usually at extremely slow speeds due to the aforementioned lack of stopping power).

And so my cycling brethren and I twiddled our way gently up the traffic choked Jl. Sudirman, possibly looking as incongruous as someone bouncing a pogo stick around a Formula One track. As we neared the famous Hotel Indonesia roundabout, the road became so chock solid that I was forced into my usual foolhardy tactic of wheeling my iron horse into the Busway lane and then pumping the old thighs hard enough to avoid being steamrollered into the asphalt by a pursuing TransJakarta behemoth. None of my fellow cyclists proved to be up to the Busway challenge however. The big Jessies.

Up at Monas, the lights went out, plunging the flame tipped phallus into darkness, well, semidarkness anyway. A real Earth Hour, in my view, would kill street lights, traffic lights, hospital defibrillators, respirators and dialysis machines, the lot. Let's see how committed people actually are to this premise. For my part, I gave up after half an hour and went to soak up the native charm down on nearby Jl. Jaksa at a friend's birthday drinkathon.

Earth Hour ay? I can't help feeling that this charity for the environment isn’t raising consciousness to the critical level of visceral, physical reality needed to break the capitalist-consumerist fantasies of our lives, lives that increasingly float unshackled by mere Earthly, environmental gravity, lives that are buoyed up by images on screens and the disembodying effects of surfing the net. Rather the whole environmental, Earth Hour shtick seems to have been assimilated into our materialistic culture as just another ad campaign. As the novelist Christopher Isherwood once said, the rich world has, "retired to live inside our own advertisements. Like hermits going into caves to contemplate."

Earth Hour is just another excuse to break out the bumper stickers and have a feel good Kodak moment, whilst the underlying mismatch of a capitalist system predicated on infinite expandability existing in a world of finite resources is never addressed.

Like the shark that needs to keep swimming to prevent itself from sinking to the bottom, our capital centric world has to keep growing to work properly. Thus new desires and needs have to be constantly manufactured. You can look in the wardrobe and think to yourself, “Right I’ve got eight shirts, one for everyday of the week, and one more for luck” but who does? Nobody in the developed world does this because that’s no good for the system. The system has to get you to keep buying more and more shirts in order for the whole game to work, and thus a whole mindset, an ethos of consumerism, has to be instilled in the subject. Such an ethos cannot simply be shrugged off by turning off the lights for an hour, lighting a few candles and singing a few choruses of MJ’s “Heal the World”.

Drunken musings aside, after a good old session with my friends, I found myself strolling outside of our bar of choice. "Oh bugger, I brought the bike didn't I?" I mused to myself. Now, I cycle to work every day, which is only 15 minutes from my house, but I'm certainly not used to cycling to the boozer of an evening. Moreover, earlier in the night, a friend had confessed to cycling into a metal pole in the middle of the street after a particularly discombobulating night out in Bali. "I mean, what was the pole doing there?" He implored. "Don't blame the pole," I reasoned, "it's only one short step from that to 'These are my airline seats, I'm a very important man, I'm friends with the boss of your company, I could have you fired!'" In any case, it was time to man up and wobble off home. Thankfully my bicycle has brakes, otherwise I'd have really been trouble.

Girls on Film

2011-03-29T15:04:00.001+07:00

As well as having to deal with the multi-headed hydra of all the country’s other woes, Indonesians now face the very real possibility of being deprived of Hollywood and other imported movies, as the nation's cinemas battle with new tax regulations. It's all highly complex and convoluted, as these things invariably are, however, in a nutshell, the film industry is squaring off against the government regarding a threatened import tax increase.

This would be a major blow to the cinema going public of course. Personally, I rely on the gentle flickering of the silver screen to prevent me from ever experiencing any genuine emotion and fear a total psychic meltdown should the psychological crutch of the Hollywood cliché be removed from my life. In any case, the speciously nationalistic argument being offered is that the government is trying to support the national film industry, not that it has ever given much of a stuff about it before, but there you go.

A few shining beacons of excellence aside, the Indonesian film industry is primarily known for its gratuitously titillating, lowest common denominator fare, which is usually liberally peppered with toilet roll wrapped zombies, buxom wenches straight from the central casting couch, and balloon-bursting-noise-face-punch sound effects.

However, as we could all be forced to watch this stuff in the future, I thought that it would be best to check out a few local offerings. With this in mind, I picked up three local DVDs last week. They were all originals too, and priced between Rp.29,000 and Rp.49,000 (the fact that the vendors I visited didn't stock any pirated local films was not of the slightest interest to me, let me assure you).

I selected the three movies in question, which have all been screened at the country's Studio 21 cinemas over the last year or so, from the racks entirely at random. Even the one that sported a front cover image of local siren Julia Perez in her underwear was a random selection. Pure pot luck in fact, amazing really.

So let's get down to brass tacks then. First up was, "Nakalnya Anak Muda" (Naughty Youngsters), a murder thriller set in a spooky villa (yawn). In this effort, a group of chaps pick up a couple of sloe-eyed slatterns at a disco and they all head out to the countryside for a nice holiday, where the guy operating the dry ice machine really lets rip with some pea souper ambience.

Plot written by a hamster with its brain wired up to a pocket calculator aside, Indonesian movie production values definitely seem to have improved of late and the action sequences had an almost Cape Fear-esque moodiness to them.

Alas, the only two surviving members of the murdered gang head down to the local police station, where the local arm of the law proves to be a model of professional concern. This bit required a suspension of disbelief above and beyond the capabilities of my perhaps meager imagination however. So I rebooted the DVD player and inserted our next Golden Garuda nominated effort, "Wakil Rakyat" (People's Representatives), which promised to be a political satire slash romantic comedy.

In this flick, we find ourselves at the conference of a fictional political party, the PSK (Partai Social Kerakyatan, which translates as the Social Democratic Party). The movie's hero, a janitor at the conference, let's a cat loose backstage to take care of the buildings rat problem. Alas however, the wily feline instead attacks the vermin like political elites, a nice play on a popular political metaphor.

The love story in this one is, as usual, as slushy as the bottom of a warung cool box, however there were a few nice touches of political satire to enjoy, which is something that should definitely be encouraged here in my view. God knows that if the country's script writers really sharpened up their knives, then there’s enough material for thousands of movies for them to get stuck into.

Alas, the satire in this effort seemed to get slightly smothered by all of the doe-eyed fawning. Presumably though, what with this country's political culture, directors and producers here still run the risk of ending up embedded in a central pillar support in one of the city’s currently under construction flyovers if they overstep the mark.

The final show was Julia Perez's "Istri Bo'ongan" (Pretend Wife). Hand shaking in anticipation of 90 minutes of truculent, quivering Perez, I loaded the disc into the machine, had a cold shower and pressed play. Julia's busty substances had certainly been given a starring role and in the film's opening scene we see our heroine, the perfidious Perez, picking up a guy in a bar, taking him home and then being roughly taken from behind against a plate glass window.

After a five-minute break to take my blood pressure meds and to apply a few icy flannels to my forehead, I pressed play again and pressed on with the movie. A tale of love, jealousy and deception unfolded before my eyes and built to a not entirely satisfying denouement, but who cares when young Julia’s there to save the day. It was just as well I was watching this one at home because smoking isn’t allowed in Studio 21 cinemas and my retinas were definitely starting to smolder.

So, will the Indonesian movie scene flourish? Well, as French art-house ponce Jean-Luc Godard once said, "All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl." By this account, Oscar nominations surely beckon.

Are Friends Electric?

2011-03-23T14:27:00.003+07:00

Last weekend, I thought that I'd finally bow to the dictates of fashion and the demands of cyber chic and buy a new mobile phone. My old model is looking decidedly clunky and more worryingly seems to have developed a fault whereby the device sometimes heats up while the battery drains at tremendous speed. I'm somewhat reluctant to get it fixed however, as popping it in my pocket affords me a cheap thrill and keeps the family jewels nice and toasty.

In any case, I soon found myself trying to cross the road in front of Mal Ambassador in order to gain access to the multimedia bun fight/cyber refugee camp contained within this retail pleasure palace. Crossing the road here, previously a nightmare, has been made easier by the addition of a proper pedestrian crossing, complete with bleeping and flashing walk/don't walk signals, possibly the first of their kind in town.

One always crosses the road at one's own risk in Jakarta of course, however this new Metropolitan innovation (only about 50 years after the things were first invented, but there you go) are surely a welcome introduction. Perhaps this will spur the city into some larger infrastructure projects. As it stands however, if a Japan style 10 metre high tsunami were to crash through Jakarta Bay at the moment, it would probably cause around Rp.50,000 of damage.

In fact, Governor Fauzi Bowo claimed this week that Jakarta's buildings would survive a major earthquake. Personally, I'd be more inclined to believe him if he’d put his money where his mouth is and gave us all a demonstration. I'd certainly enjoy seeing his moustache swaying from side to side and his panic stricken face poking out of the top floor window of an abandoned tower block as workmen worried away at the building's foundations with JCBs and the Indonesian military set off a few controlled detonations in the underground car park.

Anyway my little Wikileakers, after wading through monkeys on leashes and a phalanx of ojeg drivers buzzing hard on Red Bull, I finally made it into the plaza. Fantastically cheap devices have now put the wired world within nearly every Indonesian’s grasp, and I guess we have China and its discounted digital products to thank for this. Certainly Indonesia hasn't reached the same level of Sino semiconductor Savvy just yet. In fact, as I strolled through the rows of shops all selling Rp.500,000 Chinese Nexians, I had a vision of a similarly priced Indonesian device the size of a dictionary, bound in a teak and batik casing and coming with a hands-free device resembling the headphones from a B-52 bomber.

No matter. They may not make 'em here but they certainly know how to use ‘em (sometimes to the exclusion of more pressing concerns, such as not driving into a canal). The Plaza was crowded with Sunday shoppers and the mobile phone stores in particular were awash with handset pumping customers and salesmen. In fact it proved impossible to tell one from the other. Where will all this button pushing end I wonder? Will we achieve a utopian, technological so-called "singularity" or is our touchscreen, silicon world just so much mental morphine taking our minds off the imminent collapse of the planet. Is there nothing of substance behind the technological smoke and mirrors? Or will we pull open the curtains on the whole dazzling spectacle, like Dorothy in the “Wizard of Oz”, only to be confronted with some senile old fart sitting there pulling a few levers?

Ah well, if you can't beat them. I eventually plumped for one of those new Android phones so that I could enjoy a wealth of apps, without being an Apple sap. There was one application in particular that I was most keen to get my hands on. RunPee Mobile shows just how deeply one can immerse oneself in the mobile life these days. Basically, if you are watching a movie in the cinema and get caught short, this application will give you a time linked synopsis of any plot developments taking place on the screen whilst you're draining your spuds in the cinema toilets. Bloody ridiculous. Although, if Hollywood films really do disappear from local theatres, as has been threatened, then I guess that you could just sit at home with your mobile and read the entire synopsis feed as an alternative to actually watching the damn thing. You'd be saving yourself Rp.25,000 and you could take a piss whenever you wanted into the bargain.

And so I bought my Android phone and, over the next few days, became engrossed in its infinite ocean of possibilities playing out across circuits more powerful than an 80s supercomputer. I've now crossed the critical threshold folks, like so many Jakartans before me have. A line of digital delineation has been traversed, beyond which it is impossible to switch the damn thing off. In fact, our computers will more than likely end up switching us off.

Applications that I am currently searching for online include a call-to-prayer hands-free noise cancellation processing app and a GPS linked Jakarta taxi meter app that'll tell me if the driver's digital display is galloping faster than necessary. Ultimately, I'm hoping to track down an application that will enable me to wire my mobile up to my office computer and telephone and do my job for me while I slide off down the pub. Come on Google and all you app developers. I've thrown down the gauntlet.

Paperback Raita

2011-03-16T19:46:00.003+07:00

Education is the key to becoming a fully rounded human being, or so they say. For your Indonesian Bambang or Dewi Average however, the education that they are liable to receive at a common or garden state school is unlikely to be particularly enlightening, or encourage much in the way of free thinking either for that matter.

So what does that leave us with? Television? As noble as the ideals of those working at the start of the great goggle box era may have been, I think that it's safe to say that the mental slurry that the tube shovels into our grey matter via eyes and ears for six hours a day isn't particularly edifying either, although there are notable exceptions.

So that leaves us with reading I guess, and the educational potential of the DIY approach. Not that this isn’t also fraught with problems. Hitler and Stalin were pretty much autodidacts and products of public libraries. It’s sobering to think of Adolf and Joe getting to grips with the Dewey decimal system. I wonder how big an unconscious effect the isolating silence of the traditional public library had on these two great dictators in the making, as they cobbled together their solipsistic ethical systems.

These days, there’s always the Internet too of course, however the closed communities, instant feedback loops and global reach that the web allows for seems to be even worse at breeding a whole generation of conspiracy theory fruit bat loon balls, all pumped up on their own mouse clicking paranoia.

But enough of this effete badinage. I decided to go old school this week and check out Jakarta's public library system. In fact, I was quite looking forward to a brief return to dog-eared pages and shelves of musty print, as I recently purchased an e-reader and have been hard at work depriving the world authors of royalties via dodgy downloads ever since.

Just to digress for a moment, I heartily recommend these new gizmos. They store a ton of books and, most importantly as far as I'm concerned, sport the new e-ink technology. Basically, your average e-reader is a whole lot less sexy than an iPad, but its screen is not backlit, meaning no more eyestrain than a real book. And I say this as someone whose excessive computer usage has bored holes in his occipital lobes. Friends of mine remain cynical about the time-honored technology of the book being usurped by these devices however. "I don't believe in these e-readers, Simon," one sighed at me.

"I can assure you that they really do exist," I countered.

Down at Library@Senayan in the Ministry of Education building at the bottom end of Jl. Sudirman though, it was a solid return to deforestation as the primary method of information transfer. My first attempt at some hardcore bookworm action was based on various archive pieces that I found on the Internet claiming that the library was now open until 8 p.m. and hailing a new era for Jakarta's libraries, which would now still be open for access by office workers when they knocked off for the evening.

I thus eagerly turned up at about 6 p.m. and alas had only tumbleweeds blowing around my ankles for company. Closed. Harumph. I wonder how long the 8 p.m. closing initiative lasted. Possibly as long as Busway lanes free of cars, smoking prohibitions in all public buildings and motorcycles being forced to ride on the left...about two weeks perhaps.

My second attempt to gain access to this hallowed hall of learning proved more successful however. I headed upstairs and found that the library houses a sizeable English language book, audio and DVD library, which was largely inherited from the British Council. Presumably my British homeland doesn't have the cash to run the thing any more, what with the current financial squeeze, Conservative Prime Minister and rapidly drying up Libyan arms money. Double harumph. In fact, I read recently that a number of British public libraries are set to close, a move that has spawned a wave of bespectacled librarian riots across the country.

Library@Senayan is still open for business however, and its members start off in the Basic category, before graduating to Regular membership after one year and Premium membership after two years. Alas, Basic membership allows readers to borrow a miserly one book only. Triple harumph.

I thus declined the opportunity to join, still in a thrall to my e-reader, and instead went on a mini-tour of the bookshelves on a quest for the most tedious book titles that I could find. Among the gems I chanced across were, "Pesticides 1999", "Crofton and Douglas's Respiratory Diseases Volume 2" and "Security and Crime Prevention in Libraries." Someone clearly has a sense of humour with that last one. An honorary mention should also go to, "Tackling Alcohol Together", a weighty tome that perhaps doesn't tackle the subject from the angle that the somewhat ambiguous title seemed to suggest at first glance.

All of these seminal works and more can be yours for the borrowing, taking home, reading and forgetting about until you receive an overdue notice, down at Library@Senayan. Ignore several of these notices at your peril, as you will eventually find your house surrounded by an elite squad of heavily armed Indonesian police librarians demanding through megaphones that you emerge from the front door with your hands on your head kicking the book in question in front of you. Good luck out there bookworms.

Monkey Gone to Heaven

2011-03-03T09:46:00.000+07:00

This week, I attempted to escape the gravitational pull of Jakarta's population singularity by road. If you've ever attempted such a Homeric feat yourself, you'll know that it requires the patience of Job. The desperation currently being engendered by Jakarta's internal combustion engine purgatory is currently leading to a correspondingly desperate slew of ideas aimed at alleviating the problem. We are talking ideas so half baked that if they were potatoes, you’d be checking the warranty on your microwave.

Firstly, I've been keeping an eye on the progress of the new elevated road flyover, that will run south for nine kilometers from Blok M. Huge pile drivers and excavators have now turned Jl. Antasari into a post-industrial no man's land, however the exact progress of this new flyover remains hidden behind tasteful hoardings depicting green forests and jungle vistas. This is somewhat ironic, as this long stretch of semi-suburbia has now been almost completely denuded of trees in order to make way for the new gasoline guzzling funfair ride.

Previously, Jl. Antasari may have been perpetually jammed, but at least it had a few leafy boughs for frustrated taxi drivers to gaze upon and drift off into bucolic reveries about their home villages over, as they crawled along at an average speed of 0.1 km/h. This area is now alas seemingly destined to be yet another alienating sea of concrete. Will it be less jammed though? Well that’s debatable. For a start, the flyover is not going to increase the overall amount of public transportation, as being suspended six metres above the road would surely make disembarking from buses a problem. Mind you, this being Indonesia, I would fully expect some dollar-a-day chancer to install a series of rope ladders at 100 meter intervals along the flyover and charge bus passengers Rp.500 a time in order to drop down onto the traffic below.

Even more fun awaits Busway users however. Governor Fauzi recently had a brainwave as he was shampooing his still bristlingly handsome moustache in the shower, and has decided that he may reverse the direction of the city’s Busway lanes, creating a TransJakarta contraflow system that he claims will, "discourage" other motorists from cheekily slipping into said lanes.

Let's hope that every single car driver is indeed discouraged, as I have visions of some poor young lady absentmindedly sliding her Honda Jazz into one of the new contraflow lanes, before slamming into a gas powered behemoth at a combined relative velocity of 100 km/h. Still, should the Jazz disgorge its contents and the young lady in question be slammed head first through two windshields before coming to rest on the bus driver’s steering wheel, then at least the quickest route to medical attention would be to simply remain on the bus until it passed the nearest hospital.

But I digress. My own drive down to the charming stretch of coast at Pelabuhan Ratu was its own hell on wheels. After leaving the luxurious, tarmac covered expanses of the Jakarta toll road at Ciawi, one is instantly funnelled into a potholed, minivan choked bottleneck and onto a road surface apparently consisting of squashed tofu and rice. Still, at least there was an unbroken line of minimarts stretching into the distance to help me out on my West Javanese odyssey. People are currently complaining of minimart overkill, but when you're crawling along at 50 meters per hour, they can be a godsend. In fact, it’s somewhat ironic, given the orthodox Mohammedan fervor currently whipping certain elements in Java into a frenzy, that there's never been a larger amount of tasty refrigerated beer available on the average West Javanese high street.

My journey to the beach eventually took six hours (it's possible to do it in three). Still, I managed to use the lost three hours productively by reminiscing about comedy shows and music with my companion for the journey, the inestimable Mr. Dan. Multitasking, as I believe it's called in the parlance of our times.

The following morning, I joined around 40 other hikers and we embarked on a 20 km long jaunt down the coast. Along the way we encountered deserted virgin beaches and beautiful thick jungle. It was hard to believe that I was on the same Malthusian vision of island life as I had been the previous evening.

Walking down through a jungle filled headland towards a timelessly unspoiled stretch of sand, I drifted off into a hallucination of one million years of life on Java compressed into several minutes. I imagined a semi-evolved simian following me down onto the beach after descending from the headland trees. He would gradually straighten up on his two legs as we headed towards the sand and would then wade into the sea. Finding himself able to swim, he would then return to dry land, now fully hairless, having ascended several thousand years up the phylogenetic scale during his dip. He would then walk to the nearest road and find a Toyota parked there. After jumping all over it in confusion like a ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ primate dancing around a monolith, he'd have a eureka moment, open the door, stick the key in the ignition and zoom off down the street to the nearest minimart. Which I believe is where we came in…

Breakin' Rocks in the Hot Sun

2011-02-24T09:57:00.000+07:00

Well it's been a somewhat less than enlightening time in Indonesia over the last couple of weeks. The Youtube video of the Ahmadiyah killings certainly gave me a few nightmares and made me wonder about the new religious orthodoxy sweeping the nation in a scrum of white robes, wispy beards and incandescent rage ready to boil over and be directed against anyone who has the audacity to hold different beliefs.

The philosophical argument that orthodox religion makes people less, rather than more moral is one that I, as a card-carrying infidel, fully subscribe to. Given that our morality, like our physical bodies, has evolved and is innate, we should have the courage to rely on our own convictions and judgements.

In contrast, dogmatic beliefs demand that the faithful follow rules strictly, like automatons, without thinking or questioning why they are taking certain courses of action, or why certain acts are either moral or immoral. Fundamentalists lack moral finesse and depth as a result. Their morality is merely reactive. What Nietzsche dubbed a slave morality.

Well that's enough from Atheism 101 for another week. The president is quite rightly copping plenty of flak over the incident. As the philosopher Hegel pointed out, the most dangerous ideology to any government is its own. For example, despite the still stubbornly persisting anti-communist rhetoric, I think it is fair to say that communism is not a major threat to Indonesia these days. There certainly aren't any on the political scene, as there still are in other countries.

No, the real threat to Indonesia’s elites is the ideology that they actually pledge their allegiances to, namely secular democracy. It’s a threat because people might have the audacity to expect their leaders to live up to these ideals, and actually do what they say they're going to do.

So will the Indonesian public at large rise up once again and walk like Egyptians? Well they are certainly down with the whole social media thing that's supposed to be so potentially insurrectionary these days, although I'm not sure that for the most part it actually stretches much beyond taking a picture of the ‘soto ayam’ that they had for lunch on their Blackberries and then posting it up on Facebook under a status update that says, "This is what I had for lunch, yummy!"

And what of the actual forces of law and order, the police, what were they doing during all this mayhem? Well they were standing by in their ill fitting brown shirts, with epaulettes the size of Korans, and watching it all happen it would seem. Possibly they have sympathies with the rioters, I mean there are plenty of circumstances under which an Indonesian policeman won’t think twice about kicking seven shades of crap out of somebody, you just ask Amnesty International.

Ultimately though, what the apoplectic critics of the police force that have filled the media over the last week have failed to grasp, is that the actual law is largely irrelevant to most things that happen in this country. The police force has been essentially privatised here, and the public can avail themselves of a full range of law enforcement services, which can be bought for an easily payable, interest free fee. Simply pop into your local police station and pick up a price list. I believe there's a 30% discount this month on having a bothersome business partner arrested on the flimsiest of pretexts and then banged up in the slammer.

Thankfully, I've never enjoyed the edifying experience of having an Indonesian policeman’s size 9 wrapped around my ear hole. Although, over the years, I have been stopped more times than I care to recall in those classic, late night ID checks. If the policeman rejects your photocopy, the only way out is, as the British euphemism goes, to "Buy a ticket to the policeman's ball." God knows when this Indonesian policeman's ball is actually going to take place, but they’ll need to hire Gelora Bung Karno stadium on the big night in order to accommodate the crowds.

The main reason for such late-night tappings on the driver's side window in any normal country would be to administer a breathalyser test. However Indonesian law enforcers generally seem unusually unconcerned about being confronted with a motorist driving with one eye open, who greets them with a hiccup punctuated, "Malamat Salam." Strange really, as our brave boys in brown could surely rake in a fortune if they attempted to actually enforce drink-driving laws here.

My most recent run-in with the cops here came after I executed a U-turn I apparently shouldn't have.

"Mister, look at the sign, no U-turn."

"Ah, I see now, yes there is a sign there, not the most visible of signs it has to be said, what with it being unlit and at night time, and I also see that it's been deliberately bent behind the tree in front of it so that no one can see it."

"You can help me Mister?"

"No."

"You pay now."

"No."

"Just enough for one packet of cigarettes, come on Mister!"

"Lord almighty, have some dignity man."

Thus it ever was and ever shall be. Amen.

Phil Me Up

2011-02-15T18:20:00.005+07:00

More comparative study touring this week folks, this time to the Philippines, somewhere I'd never been before. Alas though, Tony Fernandes' AirAsia doesn't fly to the country for some reason (you'd think he'd be a shoe in with a name like that) so I had to bag a non-budget Air Philippines flight to Manila. Four hours later I touched down at Ninoy Aquino airport and took a taxi that was every bit as dodgy as the ones down at Soekarno-Hatta into town.

It turns out that Manila is similar to Jakarta in many respects, only with more pork, booze and firearms on the menu. The capital of the Philippines is both crowded, traffic jammed, polluted and possessed of a rich/poor chasm that would turn Dick Cheney into a socialist. The people also look exactly like Indonesians, although frustratingly, and rather inconsiderately in my view, they don't speak any Indonesian.

I soon found myself taking in all the classic tourist sites, including a walk through the huge and action packed Rizal Park to the waterfront (which, I have to say, looks considerably cleaner and less likely to be incubating horrendous skin diseases than the turgid stuff sloshing around in Jakarta Bay does). Eventually it was time for a feed. I passed on a local fast food chain called Chic Boy but I felt unwilling to delve into the whole transgender can of worms that the name seemed to imply. Instead, I headed to an infamous bar called the Hobbit House and ordered up an Elvis flooring amount of pork.

The Hobbit House bar is rather unique in that its serving staff are all of diminutive stature. Basically they’re midgets and dwarves, as the not so politically correct terms for these delightful creatures have it. It was slightly unnerving to have one's beer poured by someone not much taller than the tabletop and I wondered if it was all a subtle psychological ploy to make the food portions seem larger in comparison with their tiny frames. I also speculated that naughtier Asian bars could exploit the low-on-the-ground-ness of the female waiting staff to offer customers various other services whilst they supped on their beers.

The classic rock covers band was soon shaking their locks though and, despite my usual misgivings about such bands, I had to admit that they were pretty good. The Philippines is famed for its musicians and, to be honest, the band that I saw at least, micturated all over their Indonesian counterparts from a great height.

The next morning it was time to jump on a bus bound for the beach. As I waited outside the hotel, I noticed a sign next to the security guard in the lobby saying, "Please deposit your firearms here." This is certainly not something you see in Jakarta thank God, as the place would be a bloodbath if your Budi Average was allowed to pack a piece.

The Philippines' recent history is somewhat intertwined with Uncle Sam of course, although I'm not sure that this desire to bang away like a porn star on speed is indigenous to the country or has been largely influenced by the old Charlton Heston brigade. In any case, I'm sure that Filipinos don't quite stretch to insisting, like Chuck, that they will only be separated from their weapons when they’re prized from their cold dead hands. Mind you, when Douglas MacArthur (in many respects perhaps a Heston antecedent) strode ashore and declared to the people of the Philippines that, "I have returned," presumably he was packing a few shooters in his belt.

Three hours from Manila, lays the tourist island of Mindoro and I thought that this would offer a genuine comparative study tour opportunity. It would thus afford me the chance test my firmly held belief that the people in charge of tourism in Indonesia, far from being experts in their own country’s geography and culture, would in fact find it hard to locate their own private parts without the aid of GPS system and are about as marketing savvy as a man who's just come up with a, "Honk if you're Ahmadiyah" bumper sticker.

Mindoro is a gorgeous place in fact and offers top diving, waterfalls, beaches, snorkelling, hot springs and mountains, much like any Indonesian island worth its salt in fact. Where it differed though was in its tourist numbers, which seemed to be at that Goldilocks, "just right," level. Neither creaking under the weight of sheer numbers with an infrastructure pushed to bursting point, like the comparably sized Bali is, but at the same time enjoying enough visitors give the place a bit of fun and life, unlike pretty much everywhere else in Indonesia outside of Bali, Mindoro is everything that islands like Lombok or Belitung could be, but aren't.

Alas, it was all too soon time to return to the Big Durian. I hadn't had nearly enough time to work on my pork belly, but it had been a thoroughly decent break from the psychic distress that Jakarta inflicts on me on a daily basis. Well worth a look.

Friday, I'm in Prayer

2011-02-01T14:56:00.000+07:00

This week, I attempted something that, I have to admit, filled me with a certain amount of foreboding and trepidation. Specifically, I strolled to a mosque across the road from my office for a good old Friday prayer session. Five times per day is de rigueur for Mohammedans everywhere and Friday prayers, known as Jumu'ah in Arabic (presumably the root of the Indonesian word 'Jumat' meaning Friday, etymology fans) are considered a special part of the week and apparently attendance is compulsory for all the chaps.

Women can also attend if they want but must remain in their own section at the back (in prayer as in life, one might conclude). There is a passage in the Koran which states that, "O ye who believe! When the call is proclaimed prayer on Friday (the Day of Assembly), hasten earnestly to the remembrance of Allah, and leave off business (and traffic): that is best for you if ye but knew."

Now, I think we can all testify to the business being left off every Friday lunchtime, and the perennial shrug of the shoulders followed by the age-old refrain of, “Sorry, it's Friday prayers, cannot... no ambulances until at least one o'clock I’m afraid Sir."

The traffic part in the above quotation is perhaps not observed with quite the same fervour however and I'm assuming that double parking in front of mosques, creating huge snarl ups, is not considered a mortal sin. Mind you, I'm guessing that camel jams were infrequent in Medina two millennia ago, and so perhaps religious guidance on this matter could be considered sketchy.

And so, I joined the guys as they spilled across the road with their hats and prayer mats last Friday and attempted to remain as inconspicuous at possible. I didn't have either a hat or a prayer mat myself alas, however I doubt that the possession of said items would have helped me in my quest for a low-key presence. I was in the, "Hello Mr" zone that's for sure and soon relaxed. It certainly beats worshippers spilling out of mosques pumped up on fiery anti-infidel demagoguery, ready to burn a few flags, throw a few stones, do a lot of shouting and set fire to my trousers, as is wont to happen elsewhere in the Islamic world.

Christopher Hitchens, the world-famous polemical atheist (who is now in the throes of terminal cancer, much to the delight of his religious critics) was once told by a devout Christian that he would surely feel safer knowing that a group of hypothetical met that were walking down the street towards him had just come out of a prayer meeting. Hitchens replied that far from being a hypothetical situation, he had had this experience in Belfast, Bethlehem, Bombay, Belgrade, Beirut and Baghdad, and when you see groups of men coming out of prayer meetings in these places, you know exactly how fast you have to run in the opposite direction. And that's just the Bs!

Obviously Indonesia has yet to reach this stage, although worrying signs of religious intolerance have been creeping into the country's body politic in recent years. Radicalism seemed far from the agenda at my local mosque though, and I removed my shoes and socks and quietly made my way around the back of the congregation to observe proceedings.

There was no fiery rhetoric this time, only imprecations to do God's will, whatever that might be on any given day. After the sermon and prayers, the faithful spilled out onto the street and, instead of burning effigies of Binyamin Netanyahu, instead hit the mini-marts and local warungs for a decent wedge of divinely blessed drinks, smokes and rice.

As I chomped on my beef rendang, I asked one of the guys how he’d feel if a church was built opposite the mosque. "Well, it's okay if the locals agree," he replied, as if this position delineated the absolute pinnacle of enlightened religious tolerance. Unfortunately though, this is the law now in Indonesia and religious freedom for minority faiths is dependent on the whims of the majority. The government has set an appalling example here by demanding signatures of local communities before and by allowing members of the public to enforce this law, thus legitimizing the lynch mobs that have started to run riot.

"I saw you at the mosque Mr. want to become a Muslim?" I politely declined, prostrating myself five times a day under the auspices of a religion whose name translates into English as, "submission" runs somewhat counter to the independence of mind and thought that I cherish so dearly. No, if I had to choose a faith, I guess that I’d be strolling around the base of Mount Olympus. At least the gods up there didn't really care too much about the affairs of men, at least not in the sense of giving him a list of rules to be adhered to strictly without question. This left the Greek mortals down below free to philosophically enquire into the nature of life and reality, unmolested by religious dogma, a project that proved moderately successful by all accounts. Now where's my toga? That should turn a few heads down Mampang way next Friday.

It's Like a Jungle Sometimes...

2011-01-27T11:49:00.000+07:00

This week, I thought that I'd return to my roots, so to speak, and I ended up taking a spin through the very first place that I ever stayed in Jakarta, namely the rough and ready district of Tanah Abang, which can be found very close to Monas. I'm not really sure what spurred this walk down a rather dusty memory lane, although perhaps it was a photo, now well over a decade old, that a friend posted up on Facebook recently. It depicted the old gang, full of smiles, innocence and joie de vivre and it fair brought a tear to my eye so it did.

Anyway, down in Tanah Abang, I strolled through my old ‘hood, namely the complex of four story high apartment blocks known as Rumah Susun in Indonesian. We used to call them, ‘The Projects’ though as it sounded more streetwise and New York hip-hop than their real name. It really wasn't such a bad place to live in however, certainly better than their equivalent in my own home of the UK. There, drugs, gun crime and evil kids shovelling dog excrement and fireworks through pensioners’ letterboxes are the norm. The Indonesian projects though, perhaps like their Singaporean counterparts, are pretty friendly places on the whole.

It's a wonder more accommodation like this isn't built around Jakarta, as it is in Singapore. God knows that this city of 1000 'kampungs' could do with it. I for one certainly didn't regret my year spent in my third floor, small but not absolutely rabbit hutch like flat. In fact the only down side of the whole experience was the morning bread seller who used to ride his bicycle around the towers at five o'clock every morning gleefully honking his horn. I used to entertain fantasies of performing electroshock torture on this poor unfortunate, who would disturb my sleep every single morning. Honk, honk honk, honk, “Roti, roti, roti” honk honk honk. Jesus.

The next part of my voyage through all of my yesterdays took me up the road into the still quite dodgy Tanah Abang market area. This all-time gangsta zone was once the stomping ground of an Indonesian hoodlum and his gang, who, rather humorously, went by the name of Hercules. I believe that Hercules is now out of business and I always used to imagine him as looking like that beefy guy in the Phantom of the Opera mask who’s on that Indonesian crime show every morning, trying to keep people on the straight and narrow and out of clink. I wonder what Hercules is doing these days? Writing his memoirs perhaps, and tending to his begonias.

Tanah Abang market has always been a huge lower class retail scrum, with a specific focus upon the textile industry. The original market burned down a few years ago in somewhat suspicious circumstances, as so many buildings do in this country when plans for new construction are afoot. In its place there now stands an absolutely gargantuan edifice containing a maze of literally thousands of clothes shops. It's all very organised, well, considerably more so than it used to be. Outside however, the area still more closely resembles the refugee camp type ambience of old and there are crippled beggars, piles of garbage and public minivan jams galore to enjoy before you finally reach the hallowed entrance to the market proper.

I headed inside and quickly became lost in the labyrinthine passages filled with bra shops and T-shirt vendors. Prices are amazingly cheap in the new market and I came away with a genuine leather belt which, remarkably enough, genuinely seemed to be made from leather.

I took my leave of the market and headed back out into the heaving, sweating atmosphere of downtown Tanah Abang, an area of the capital that builders of luxury apartments have so far, perhaps wisely, chosen to sidestep. Once this area of Jakarta becomes gentrified then you’ll know that things are really changing. For now though, Tanah Abang remains not so different from how it looked over a decade ago. Just another one of those dusty, timeless Indonesian urban streets blissfully alienated from the mad rush for condominiums and iPhones.

I couldn't really imagine living up in Tanah Abang again these days though. As one gets older one becomes increasingly desirous of a little peace and quiet and to leave the most hectic of urban areas to the younger blades. Mind you, if I really applied the logic of this statement fully, then I most surely wouldn't be living in Jakarta at all. Perhaps it's time for me to go and live halfway up a mountain in Sulawesi then. I could do it, so long as there was a Circle K on the lower slopes.

Get off Your Milk and Drink Your Horse

2011-01-18T18:21:00.002+07:00

Jakarta is home to a lively selection of foreign cultural institutes such as the CCF, Erasmus Huis and the Goethe Institute, which all put on classical music concerts, lectures, exhibitions, film festivals and the like. Now though, Uncle Sam has also got in on the act and has come out all guns blazing by setting up the incredibly high-tech @america centre, the first of its kind in the world, down in the suitably high-tech surroundings of Pacific Place mall. The propagandist platitudes of Voice of America are no longer deemed adequate in these ideologically charged times, and so a glitzy, tech wonderland has been constructed, which more closely resembles the Epcot Centre or even the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, than any of the city’s other cultural centres.

@america's mission is to boldly go where no US embassy has gone before and disseminate an ideology of truth, justice and the American way to eager visiting school kids (before Obama is ignominiously booted from office two years hence and the centre is closed and replaced by a more traditional new world cultural artefact, such as a branch of Starbucks).

First things first though, in order to penetrate into the digitally wired inner sanctum of Pax Americana central, I first had to breach the Fort Knox-esque security detail, which included an x-ray scanner, a full body frisk (my socks came under particular scrutiny for some reason) and the storage of my bag in a clear, Perspex locker. One could perhaps forgive the Guantánamo style vigilance however, as there are no doubt many in Indonesia who would wish to see @america blown into rubble.

I entered the main @america auditorium and was simply staggered by the technological wonderland that had been constructed. There were screens everywhere, multicoloured lighting, an iPad lending centre, interactive touchscreens on stands, a DJ and a huge six screen surround Google Earth to try. I felt like an ant that had accidentally crawled through the USB port of high end smartphone.

All very impressive, but was there actually any substance behind the semiconductor pizzazz? Or would @america proved to be more Shania than Mark, Twain wise that is? I strolled over to one of the jumbo, three foot wide iPad style touch tablets and fired up a quiz about the US. "What's the name of the American national anthem?" the screen said. I was presented with four options, "The Star Banner, The Star Spangled Banner, Stars and Stripes Forever or The Pledge of Allegiance." Smarty-pants that I am, I correctly stabbed the second answer and was mildly disappointed that Jimi Hendrix's stratospheric rendition of this iconic piece of music didn't fire up over the speakers in celebration.

Time for another question: "Which of the following US presidents never visited Indonesia: George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter." Well, I knew that the first three had all washed up on these shores during their time in office. On his 1986 visit to Indonesia, Ronald Reagan famously described Suharto as a, "longtime friend of the US," and talked of how, "the winds of freedom are blowing," through the region, which I think it speaks volumes about the US’s purported goal of spreading democracy overseas.

I touched the last name on the list, Jimmy Carter, the one-time peanut farmer who ironically never found time to make it over to the land of satay sauce during his single term in office. However I remember him being here in 1999 as part of a delegation sent to check the impartiality of the country's first post President "Winds of Freedom" Suharto election.

After browsing some groovy interactive science and eco-consciousness raising software, I headed into @america's other main room and chanced upon my favourite part of the whole place, namely a version of Google Earth rendered on six large surround screens. (The screens themselves were made by that most celebrated of US tech brands...erm... Samsung). I'm sure that most of you reading this have enjoyed a good click around on Google Earth before, and the new 3D street level views are particularly amazing and allow you to zoom right up to your old geography teacher's front door and fantasise about lobbing a grenade through the letterbox.

The six screen surround version was simply jawdropping though and I could have spent all day clicking around, burning through the Grand Canyon and wondering exactly why Google's London buses had all been rendered hovering two feet above the road.

I finished off my @america afternoon in front of a web cam, which took four pictures of me covered in digitally rendered snow and then sent them automatically to yours truly via e-mail (although at the time of writing they still haven’t arrived in my inbox. Julian Assange may have got to them first perhaps).

@america may not be the most intellectual of environments but it perhaps offers some insight into the school of the future. There is an increasing mismatch between the traditional, analogue classroom, in which the teacher stands at the front and drones on and on, and the new tech savvy, touchscreen jabbing younger generation, who are having their central nervous systems rewired and accelerated by interactive digital technologies. In this regard, perhaps @america is a glimpse into the future. Definitely Shania though.

It's a Holiday in Cambodia...

2011-01-11T18:50:00.004+07:00

This festive season I thought that I’d leave the somewhat dispiriting anti-Santa vibe being promulgated around Indonesia and go on an ASEAN voyage of discovery. My comparative study tour to Cambodia went without a hitch, although it wasn't at the taxpayers’ expense, as such jaunts so often are here (when politicians undertake them at least).

Shame that, but no matter because the Rp.1,000,000 fiscal exit tax has now been abolished (as of January 1st) which, along with the continued expansion of regional carriers, particularly the ever ambitious AirAsia, should open the region up to Indonesian travellers like never before. I wonder what they'll make of cities such as Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Minh in comparison with their own urban centres?

Certainly Phnom Penh was quite delightful and I'm sure that at least two or three of my six and a half regular readers must have been there before. The city makes for a pleasant change from Jakarta's demographic black hole that's for sure. However Phnom Penh and the country of Cambodia beyond has a dark recent history, one in which demographics also played their part (25% of the population were offed, that's two million people).

I thought that I would get the dark side out the way first and check out the Khmer Rouge's genocidal Killing Fields. Perhaps in retrospect though, this was a rather un-life affirming way of spending a jolly Christmas Boxing Day (December 26th). “Ho Ho Ho, happy Christmas Mister Cambodian 'tuk-tuk' driver, and how are you this fine day Sir?”

“Genocide Mister? You waan see genocide?”

“Erm...will there be turkey?”

I soon found myself checking out the many skulls on display at the Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre (a memorial and museum), which lies some 15km from town. Most disturbing of all was the tree behind the memorial, upon which thousands upon thousands had their brains smashed out (why waste bullets, ay?). The victims included kids who were swung by their feet headfirst into the trunk. Nice.

On a neighbouring tree hung a sign written in stuttering English which said, "Magic tree: the tree was used as a tool to hang a loudspeaker which make sound louder to avoid the moan of victims while they were being executed." Words fail me. During periods of wet weather in this now peacefully bucolic part of the world, teeth and fragments of bone still find their way to the surface of the mud from the now exhumed mass graves below. Appalling as such scenes are, events like this and the Nazi Holocaust still manage to exert a ghastly fascination in the face of humanity pushed to its extremes.

The Khmer Rouge’s reign was almost certainly, despite some pretty stiff competition, the world's worst stab at communism to date. These guys promulgated an ideology so pure that even redemption was ruled out and the slate had to be wiped completely clean in order for a fresh start. Religion may well be an opiate but at least you get to reach paradise after a lifetime of obedience. By the Khmer Rouge's account, you have to die in order to realise a paradise in which you will play no part.

Mind you, at exactly the same time as all this was going on, Indonesia was, percentage wise at least, offing similar numbers of East Timorese, and certainly not in the name of communism. I think it's fair to say that Marx's critique of capitalism didn't include a discussion of how not enough kids were having their brains smashed out against trees. Where Marx differed from those other turn-of-the-century arch atheist provocateurs, Freud and Nietzsche, however was that he ultimately believed that humans were fundamentally rational creatures, and could therefore achieve a peaceful and egalitarian brotherhood of man on Earth. Boy did the Khmer Rouge prove him wrong on that score.

Cambodia is now a country reborn however and a fantastic place for a holiday. Tourism and the economy are booming and the capital is a fun place to spend a few days, checking out the amazing temples and enjoying the riverside bars and restaurants. In fact, the sunny, easy going and historically rich Phnom Penh vibe is far closer to Yogyakarta than Jakarta.

I also followed the well worn tourist trek up to Siem Reap in order to check out the breathtaking Angkor Wat complex. Like Java's iconic Borobudur, the temples here sit in a beautiful area of countryside, however the sheer scale of the complex itself is something else entirely. That people managed to build things such as the pyramids and the temples of Angkor without forklifts, pneumatic drills, huge trucks and hard hatted workmen with their bum cracks showing over the top of their jeans drinking tea out of flasks, always seems completely implausible to me. The temples can be cycled around in a couple of days via lovely, shaded, leafy lanes and well deserve their so called “Eighth Wonder of the World” status.

And so the skies continue to open up over the ASEAN region, the fiscal tax is gone and there's never been a better time for Indonesians to check out their near neighbours. Will this adversely affect domestic tourism though? Your move RI.

Mistletoe and Whine

2010-12-31T11:37:00.000+07:00

Deck the Halls with boughs of holly, fa la la la la la la la and further more la. I have no gift to bring, parumpa pum pum. Let's hope (but not pray, as that can get you into all kinds of trouble in this blessed country at the moment) that things remain peaceful this festive season. To be frank, it's not been a very good year for the country's religious minorities and a few months ago, I even found myself joining a group of demonstrating Christians up at Monas as they protested their increasing persecution.

I should stress that I myself am a non-believer, but that I believe it's important for people to be able to sustain their delusions of heavenly redemption unmolested by the tragically confused, stick wielding members of a rival religion (surely a worse experience than waking up on Christmas morning to find that Santa has clambered onto your roof, dropped his handsome, red felt trousers, sat on the chimney and let loose a volley of miniature Christmas puddings down onto the living room below.

Non-Muslim worship is indeed getting trickier here. For believers, plan A is obviously to build your own church (or temple, or synagogue... actually, scratch that last one, that's not going to happen). Current Indonesian law enforces a tyranny of the religious majority though and so that's not working out. So frustrated faith heads turn to plan B, namely inviting a few people over to their homes for a prayer session. Attempts at this have also resulted in a lot of purple faced shouting by various types claiming that the practice is both illegal (saying prayers at home, illegal?) and noisy (this complaint is certainly a case of, "Physician heal thyself.").

And so we moved swiftly along to plan C, i.e. trudge into a muddy field, hope it doesn't piss down with rain, and say a few prayers there. Alas though a couple of weeks after the aforementioned Christian demonstration that I attended, the vicar who had led the demo was stabbed in the stomach as he led his flock in muddy worship. So I think it’s fair to say that plan C hasn’t panned out too well either. Proselytizing to decent, Allah fearing earthworms is clearly not to be countenanced.

This leaves, most chillingly of all, plan D, which has been offered to the much persecuted Islamic Ahmadiyah sect over in Lombok. The local governor there can't understand why the Ahmadiyah community hasn't embraced with open arms an offer to relocate them all to a nearby island. Apartheid? Jewish ghettos? The Gulag? Concentration camps? Well, you can select your own ghastly historical parallel. I guess though that really committed orthodox militant types could still boat over to the island and have a go at them. Although a more striking image of a suicide bomber wearing a green helmet with a crescent moon and star symbol on it climbing into a cannon and being shot onto the island from the mainland as a human cannonball has just poked its way into my head.

I guess that moves us on to plan E, whatever that is. Several disused submarines anchored together on the ocean floor perhaps? This is all getting a bit negative though. Tis the season of goodwill towards all men after all (which is this Christmas to be secured by 87,000 police officers and security personnel. Warning: actual amount of goodwill towards all men may vary according to local factors, and the management and shareholders of Christmas PLC can't be held responsible for any disappointment caused by any of its products).

Last week however, I had the pleasure of attending a charity Christmas dinner, complete with a perhaps rather unconvincing Indonesian Santa Claus sporting a comedy beard that seemed to engulf his entire face. It may have been 30°c outside but I had no problem at all in scoffing several colon stretching plates of midwinter grub, and then came the entertainment. A group of kids from a local orphanage who were the beneficiaries of the charity dinner came up on stage to serenade us all with some jolly Christmas Carols.

It was a touching moment made all the more impressive by the fact that the kids couldn't speak a word of English and had clearly learned the carols phonetically, much like many of the rock covers bands that play in bars around town (not to mention people reading holy texts all over the country). What with Indonesia, and indeed many other places, currently flushing Enlightenment philosophy down the toilet, I half expected some FPI stormtroopers to barge in and trash the tables of turkey. Getting these presumably Muslim orphans to sing Christmas carols surely can’t be something they’d approve of.

It's depressing isn't it folks? And silly. As John Locke once noted, if human beings really are going to be judged by a god when they die, then you have to grant them the use of their own free will, so that they may choose a path through life from which such a judgement about them can then be made. Thus the very nature of religious faith itself is contradicted by compulsion. There you go, apply a bit of logic to the situation and the problem is solved. Anyway, happy midwinter solstice one and all. And pray hard for a peaceful New Year my children. Very hard indeed. Amen.

Terminal Beach

2010-12-19T21:04:00.001+07:00

I had the rare foresight to take last Monday off, giving me a solid four day weekend of good vibrations and sun kissed mosquito bites to enjoy. And so, at some ungodly hour on Saturday morning, I headed to the airport by taxi (I elected not to walk it this time) and the inevitable unannounced one-hour delay courtesy of Sriwijaya Airlines. I guess they were really trying to pique our appetites for the in-flight square of flaccid green cake, which looked like a moss covered slice of Battenberg.

I was headed around 300 km due north of Jakarta to the island of Belitung, which lies off the east coast of Sumatra, just next to the island of Bangka. Belitung is around the same size as Bali, although with considerably fewer Circle Ks and gentlemen clutching briefcases full of discount watches to enjoy. The island has traditionally been a big mining area. More recently however, Belitung has been trying to attract tourists to its calm, turquoise seas, bule white beaches and idyllic offshore islands.

Well, I'd never been in any case and four days of relative peace, off the information matrix, in order to try and reintegrate myself as a human subject seemed like just the ticket. Although having said that, I did found out that flies can operate mobile phone touchscreens on my travels. Those buggers have clearly out evolved me on that score.

A mere 40 minutes after takeoff, we touched down in the town of Tanjung Pandan and I got a local driver to ferry me up the coast for an hour to the main beach area. As my man tooled along the road, chain chuffing LA Lights, cranking the Dangdut up to teeth rattling volume and banging on about English Premier League football, I took in the endless Sawit plantations and empty roads and knew that I was in for a supremely and buttock unclenchingly stress free weekend.

Belitung has become well-known in Indonesia recently as the setting for the movie, 'Laskar Pelangi' ('Rainbow Troops' or 'Rainbow Warriors') which has certainly fared somewhat better than the Greenpeace ship of the same name. 'Laskar Pelangi' is, in fact, now the highest grossing flick in Indonesian box office history and is a well made, feel good tale of a group of impoverished schoolchildren and their teachers, as they struggle with poverty and their hopes for a better future. Arguably the prognosis for this better future is not very good if rapscallions like me have started frequenting the place, but there you go.

The movie has apparently helped to fuel a mini tourism boom on Belitung. And in fact, a musical of the film will be playing at the brand-new and rather swanky Teater Jakarta up at the TIM arts centre from the 17th of this month onwards, culture vultures.

I rented a scooter and headed up the coast. Belitung is surrounded by huge, monolithic boulders, which give it a moody and rugged feel and I soon found myself strolling through a maze of enormous rocks that lay behind a sign saying, "Lokasi Syuting Laskar Pelangi" (I just love that Indonesian English bastardisation, 'syuting').

Maybe more tourists will come, but as of now, the unspoiled beaches are immaculate, in contrast to more recent trips that I've made to Jakarta's nearest desert island getaway, the Pulau Seribu (Thousand Islands). When I first hit the Thousand Islands [coughs] years ago, they were only lightly covered in crap, and in just a few places. Now however, ominous swathes of plastic refuse have made wading along some of the nearer shorelines to the capital like that scene in 'Star Wars' where they all fall into the trash room with moving walls and grasping alien tentacles.

Belitung remains a veritable Garden of Eden however (albeit one populated by Muslims) and the perfect destination if you're looking for a few quiet days away from it all. I should qualify all of this though by saying that if you're a pale face, then you should be aware that the, "Hello Mister! Where you come from?" factor here is off the scale.

Usually when I'm on tour, I have to confess that after the first few, Hello Mister! Where you come froms of the day, I am wont to go on a trans-global run around and start claiming I'm from Iceland or the Ugandan Minister of Trade, just for a bit of variety. In Belitung however, I managed to escape the surly bonds of the Earth's gravity altogether and, when one gobsmacked fishing family clocked my lanky, sweating, big nosed frame hiking along the coast through the tangle of mangrove roots, I claimed that I was from a neighbouring Galaxy.

"I'm from the planet Vlkarx in the Postlethwaite Nine system."

"I see, cigarette Mister?"

"I have no need for your puny earth cigarettes, as we Vlkarxians each have a nicotine membrane across our oesophagi."

Etc etc. 0h, I get so bored, I get so bloody bored.

A day-long boat trip to the surrounding small islands proved to be a winner though and included a slog to the top of a Dutch lighthouse that dates back to 1882. After this, I had a little sunbathe alone on my own stretch of private beach, like a lily-livered Robinson Crusoe waiting for a group of female Lilliputians to emerge from the undergrowth and soothe my furrowed brow with tropical oils. Alas though, this solo holiday proved to be short of loving (and praying, although the eating was quite decent).

I'd thoroughly recommend Belitung for your next long weekend if you're really looking to get away from it all. Check in at the Bukit Berahu, Kelayang Cottages, or the more expensive Lor In and kick back. Beep beep... incoming text message... throws mobile in the sea.

Ebeneezer Baike

2010-12-08T07:45:00.003+07:00

This week, I thought that I'd take a spin up to where hungry hedonists of all social classes gorge themselves on pills every weekend like mosquitoes around a sockless ankle. I donned my best 'Saturday Night Fever' shirt, the one with collars large enough to allow me to hang-glide off the top of the BNI building, and headed up to Kota and that well-known temple of bacchanalian debauchery known as Stadium. This was all purely in the name of research you understand.

Stadium has been in operation for well over a decade now and basically seems to act as a kind of social pressure release valve that allows the city's youth to let off some steam and generally show a little sympathy for the Devil, something we all need to do occasionally in order to temporarily slip the bounds of our socially programmed sedation.

Heading inside my eyes tried to adjust to the near pitch black interior and failed miserably. The darkness of Indonesian discos is legendary and still a source of mystery to me. The only reason I can think of for the near total blackout is to protect the anonymity of various high rolling patrons who may be lurking in the gloom with their paramours. Surely one of the primary functions of the modern discotheque is to aid people in their quest for sexual gratification however, and in this context it might be nice to see what you're actually getting (and even if they are of the right gender at all).

I stumbled through the darkness, a process not helped by most of the patrons being as high as dirigibles and tottering somewhat unsteadily on their pins, and headed for the bar. There was a little light here, which was a good thing to as the drinks list was not printed in Braille. As I supped on my Long Island, a furtive young man came up to me and offered me a tablet for Rp.200,000. Now Indonesian drug laws are very strict and if the cops can bang you up in the slammer for a few months and shake you down for every penny you've got, then they most certainly will. The war on drugs has taken a serious ceasefire in Stadium however and so presumably the forces of law and order shakedown the club's management instead of its patrons in order that the carnival continues unabated.

Dance music and drugs have long had a symbiotic relationship of course, ever since the coked up days of 70s disco. Ecstasy really changed the game back in the late 80s however, spurring several musical revolutions, tabloid hysteria and spawning what Irvine Welsh dubbed, "The chemical generation." The dance-drug interface hardly represents new sociological paradigm however, and the Stadium heads swayed on their feet on the dance floor, nodding to the rhythms like participants in some ancient shamanic rite.

Dance music and E perhaps offer a ritual of social integration of a type largely lacking in modern life. Many Jakarta kids certainly seem to need to loosen the surly strings that tether them to the daily drudgery of this often cruel city and float free for a few hours in chemical communion. I swear to you however that I stuck valiantly to alcohol and am willing to undergo a polygraph test if you remain sceptical.

Memories of the evening remain hazy, however things that stick out include a chat with a German tourist in shorts, whom I spilt beer on, running into an old flame on the dance floor and wishing that I hadn't, and being asked several times by the Madame around the club's entrance whether I'd be interested in renting the services of one of her young ladies. She didn't say what for, but I'm thinking it wasn't connected with the valet parking service.

I guess I have a quite libertarian view of drug taking. John Stuart Mill in his famous, 'On Liberty' developed a concept of the harmful, i.e. what is not harmful to others is no business of a paternalistic state and it is ultimately an individual's free choice what he or she chooses to consume and ingest into his or her system.

Eventually though I decided to call it a night and headed outside into the cold light of day. Beggars crowded the approach to Stadium clutching babies and looking for a handout. Quite unsettling when you're feeling a bit tender. Looking at these poor folk I remembered that freedom from unjustified restrictions, a negative freedom, is only one half of the full Utopian picture. Hand in hand with this should go a more positive conception of freedom.

As Voltaire said, both rich and poor are free to sleep under the bridges at night. Likewise, the beggars that fine morning were all technically free to head upstairs and buy themselves a chemical trip to the moon but were somewhat lacking in the necessary enabling conditions, namely having enough cold hard cash for the fare. It's all very well to have free speech for example, but if you haven't enjoyed the necessary enabling condition of an education and are illiterate, then this freedom doesn't usually amount to a whole hill of beans. I tell you, it’s enough to make one turn to drugs…

The Desert of the Reel

2010-11-30T19:54:00.005+07:00

It's another visit Indonesia year and once again time to attempt to up the mediocre number of tourists visiting the country. Alas however Garuda seems to have hit something of a rough patch over the past week or so, with flights being cancelled left, right and centre. Apparently software gremlins are to blame, although this probably means that the airline’s ground staff crashed its servers through excessive Facebook usage.

On the plus side however, Indonesia may be the recipient of an unexpected tourism bonus on the back of the Hollywood adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, a novel for a brave, new world forged under the jackbooted dictatorship of Oprah Winfrey.

The movie stars the estimable talents of Julia Roberts of course. No doubt she was sent the script, read the title and just flipped. A friend of mine, who actually lives in Bali where the story was partly based and shot, was dragged by his Indonesian Mrs. along to see Eat, Pray, Love recently and described it as a, "Catatonically dull two and a half hour long tampon commercial." A quick capsule review that certainly pulls no punches to be sure.

Back here in Jakarta, I've noticed a few rather half-hearted attempts by businesses to cash in on the movie, as Hollywood's retina singeing arc light dazzle is trained upon Indonesia. One pizza restaurant that I passed recently was offering, Eat, Pray, Lunch. Doh.

Anyway, Eat, Pray, Love is about one woman's search for God alone knows what, and we soon see Julia indulging in some seriously Epicurean pigging out in Italy, attempting to unclog her Western existential constipation through Indian mysticism, and finally achieving a synthesis of the two in the form of a kind of vapid spiritual materialism over in Bali’s spa Nirvana (whilst enjoying plenty of sexy romps with a rather studly Javier Bardem).

This restless trying on of different hats feels like the classic post modern malaise. All surface and little substance. My three months as a bon viveur in Italy (whilst still emerging svelte at the end of it), my three months praying at an ashram in India (and ultimately absorbing a similar lack of spiritual calories). None of it felt, none of it part of affect, all of it a game, a fad.

We live in a hyperreal world though and are now so used to having our personalities synthesised and destabilised through viewing life as images projected via the infinite dream machine of the omnipresent camera lens that, in this case at least, we've reached a spooky level of second order identity displacement. Specifically, we have reached the realm of Jakarta restaurants offering Eat, Pray, Lunch and Indonesian housewives trying to be Julia Roberts as she tries to be Indonesian. Now that's just weird.

However, in a no doubt vain attempt to deprive the possibly quite rich Julia Roberts of some money, I bought a locally pirated copy of Eat, Pray, Love for Rp.7000 recently, a purchase that involved a similar level of embarrassed furtiveness as a teenager buying his first packet of condoms. It was time to get myself chick flicked up.

The movie opens in Bali in fact, where Julia meets fortune teller Ketut Liyer, whom she later describes as looking like Yoda (the little green man from Star Wars). Personally I didn't think this boded well for the film's multicultural pretensions, but I pressed on. After an hour and a half detour through New York, Italy and India, we eventually wash up on the shores of Bali again. Although I was having to prop my eyelids open with matchsticks at this point and made a mental note to put the disc aside later for possible use as a homoeopathic, drug-free remedy for my infrequent bouts of insomnia. Roberts' Nietzschian reinvention of the self was losing something in the translation that was for sure.

Anyway, our Julia is soon necking jamu, re-encountering Yoda and hooking up with the talented Indonesian acting legend, Christine Hakim (who could probably act Julia under the table to be honest, and I'd highly recommend her Daun di Atas Bantal as a great example of what Indonesian cinema can be when it puts his mind to the task). Bardem turns in a quite jolly performance as an Air Supply and Phil Collins loving Lothario, and in fact his Brazilian moves and samba mix tapes make it seem as if we've flown to Rio instead of the Island of the Gods.

Alas however, Bardem gives our Julia a dose of Sao Paolo fever after two weeks of the couple banging away like a gamelan player after too many cups of Java. Hakim clears up Julia's bladder infection with more Jamu and Roberts then repays the favour by having a whip round of her cashed up chums in New York via e-mail. She eventually raises enough to buy Hakim's character a new house. Nice.

The couple then split up, Yoda dispenses a few Buddhist bumper sticker type aphorisms, Julia and Bardem reunite, everyone reaches for the Oprah Winfrey signature Kleenex, stumbles out the exit door, has a quick piss followed by fillet of fish and then heads for home. The end.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

2010-11-23T13:56:00.000+07:00

As ash and smoke continue to rain down upon the poor communities surrounding the still erupting Merapi in Central Java, turning their villages into one vast pub carpet, I thought that it might be a good idea to get a look at one of these smokers up close. In fact, last weekend I joined up with the ever outbound boys and girls from Java Lava, Jakarta's premier expatriate hiking club (check them out on the Interwebs) in order to tramp through the highlands north of Bandung, finishing up at the smoking volcano crater of the legendary Tangkuban Perahu.

Indonesia is chock full of volcanoes of course, around 200 of which are still active, which is more than can be found in any other country on earth. Indonesia is a land of smoke for reasons other than magma flows and plate tectonics however. Superannuated vehicles traverse its highways belching out eye stinging clouds of all hues; slash and burn agricultural practices get out of hand and destroy huge swathes of forests, creating thick smogs which blanket not just Indonesia but also neighbouring countries; and of course most of the general population (or the men anyway) smoke packet after packet of the kind of industrial strength clove cigarettes that would have the Marlboro man expiring on his horse before he reached the comfort of his ranch. Spark up and then spark out would seem to be the general way of things here, and the humid weather only serves to exacerbate the general smokiness.

In this context, Merapi for me symbolises a giant Indonesian lung, coughing up phlegm balls of lava, rocks and ash from its emphysema stricken magma chambers, as it tries to clear its airways of tropical pollution. Anyway, waking up at a delightful 5 AM last Saturday morning, we rented some angkots (public transportation minivans) which took us up to the North of town for the start of our hike.

My Indonesia/smoke thesis was proved right from the off however as the minivan that I was sitting in had had one of those 130 dB boy racer exhaust systems fitted to it. Alas however, it didn't seem to have been fitted very well as the passenger compartment soon filled with exhaust fumes and presumably no small amount of carbon monoxide. In fact, by the time we reached the start of the hike, I was starting to feel rather drowsy. Another few kilometres and they would have been stretchering us out and into an ambulance (hopefully one without a racing exhaust).

The walk itself proved to be stirring stuff however, and we tramped through the cool, fresh air of the West Javanese highlands. We walked through kilometres of tea plantations and even stopped at a tea factory to see how they processed the stuff. Java is primarily known around the world for its coffee of course, however the tea grown here is also supposed to be of a very high quality.

Eventually, we started trudging up the moody slopes of Tangkuban Perahu itself, eventually reaching the smouldering crater, which is about a kilometre across and has a brackish lake sloshing about in its depths. It’s quite beautiful in fact and we breathed in the sulphurous air whilst taking memory cards full of snaps (and in my case having a well earned Bintang).

This is a land of smoke and air pollution for sure though, despite a recent report in the Globe which said that the Philippine-based Clear Air Initiative Asia Center have given Jakarta's air a clean bill of health. One wonders if they actually even came here. Unfortunately for the smokers among us though, it's usually them that seem to bear the brunt of any urban air pollution initiatives, despite the fact that motor vehicles, power stations, industrial pollution and the burning of garbage totally eclipses their feeble smoke signals by several orders of magnitude.

Thankfully for the butt suckers though, things aren't as bad here as they are in squeaky-clean Singapore. In fact, the last time I stayed at a hotel there, the information sheet in my room said something like, "Dear guest, to guarantee that you will fully enjoy your stay with us, this hotel is totally smoke-free. For any infringement of this regulation, you will be charged $200." If you take this statement literally, then it seems that one is to be punished for refusing to fully enjoy one’s stay. Kind of sums up modern life for me in my darkest moments, banging our heads on the wall insisting that we are happy whilst popping anti-depressants by the cartload. Give me a Marlboro Light any day.

Also, this country seems to be free of the horrible pictures of birth defects and destroyed lungs that can be now found on cigarette packets elsewhere in the world. Such health warnings are becoming just a little bit over the top in my view. Actually, I can remember the author Kurt Vonnegut, in an interview towards the end of his life, saying that he was planning on suing Philip Morris. "They promised to kill me, it clearly says on the health warnings on their packets. Well, I'm 83 years old and they haven't done it." Hopefully, Merapi's victims will soon be able to return home and enjoy a nice cool packet of Gudang Garams. Here's to a long life and rude health.

Down the Dark Streets, the Houses Looked the Same

2010-11-16T18:38:00.011+07:00

In a slightly more outré move for Metro Madness, a friend and I endeavoured to walk to the city of Palankaraya on the island of Borneo from Jakarta last weekend. This obviously posed one rather intractable problem for us, namely the sea. So before you diagnose me as being in the pathological grip of some delusional, messianic walk-on-water complex, perhaps I’d better back up a little and explain the origin of this perhaps rather harebrained scheme.

The concept of psychogeography was first developed in the fifties by the theorist Guy Debord as, "The study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals." Another definition of psychogeography is, "A whole toy box full of playful inventive strategies for exploring cities. Just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape."

More recently, one of my favourite writers, Will Self, a darkly comic spinner of surreal urban dramas, revived the concept (and you can find him explaining the whole thing on Authors@Google on Youtube). Self notes how modern, urban life increasingly isolates us on small islands of existence surrounding home, office, pub, etc. And thus we don't have a feel for our urban geography at a visceral, gut (and leg) level, as travel between these isolated urban islands is facilitated passively by means of motorized transportation only invented over the last century or so. Thus no sense of geography or scale are imprinted as mental maps in our brains by our bodies via processes evolved over millions of years.

Self therefore resolved to walk from London to New York, i.e. he walked from his house in south London to Heathrow airport, flew to New York, and then continued his walk from JFK airport to a downtown hotel. The physically tiring effects of the walk, coupled with the passive, geographically isolated downtime spent on the plane, apparently tricked his brain into believing that he had traversed a continuous landmass.

With me so far? So, always a sucker for essentially ludicrous ideas that have been dressed up in a patina of intellectual theorizing, my chum Dan and I set out from Jakarta's street of broken dreams, Jalan Jaksa, just south of Monas, at 2 AM last Friday night and began walking to Soekarno-Hatta airport in order to catch a midday flight. We had elected not to tramp down the airport toll road but instead headed through town towards Jl. Daan Mogot, which we followed until Kelideres bus station before hanging a sharp right onto a smaller road leading to the airport.

The early part of the slog was essentially a night hike, always a strangely haunting experience, punctuated by stops in petrol stations to buy bottles of ale (it was Friday night after all) and by females of dubious character spilling out of Daan Mogot's even more disreputable karaoke joints at about 4 AM. Alas, we had a flight to catch and so couldn't really stop for a curb side knee trembler.

Dawn was soon upon us and we two geographical psychos took full measure of our surroundings. This area of town had something of a post-apocalyptic ambience to it at 5 AM. The adjacent canal hurled ammonia into our eyes and nostrils, piles of rubbish smoked carcinogenically, underclass kids with interesting skin conditions playing among the ruins of civilization and satanic 50 tonne juggernauts shook the asphalt.

Looking south across the canal however, we managed to catch sight of Gunungs Gede and Pangrango shimmering majestically in the sunrise over 50 km away. Just think, if we hadn't decided to hike to the airport at 2 AM in the bloody morning then we'd never seen this spectacular vista. As the sun beat down we eventually neared the airport. We stopped again next to the perimeter fence, some 50m from the start of the runway, and craned our head upwards to watch the landing beasts from about as close as the human eye gets to see them in flight. Just think, if I hadn't hiked for six hours through a desolate series of concrete shanty towns after first having my brain removed with a drinking straw, then I’d have never, etc, etc.

The road eventually joined the end of the airport toll, and the verdant area of lakes and roadside trees that I usually only see through a taxi window. We trudged the final painful hour into Terminal One. It had taken us seven and a half hours and, according to Dan's primitive, steam powered GPS system, we had walked 26 km. We felt a sense of achievement at having reached a level of stupidity and futility that few people ever manage to rise to. Certainly incoming Facebook comments were unforgivingly harsh in their assessment of our mental condition. We could perhaps be in the running for any putative, "Jakarta's Silliest Buggers" award, although in my view we'd be up against some pretty stiff competition there.

After the flight, the Palangkaraya leg of the hike from the airport into town was a three km breeze through bucolic fields and sleepy villages. Any sensible person would have started a hike from here instead. It had been an unforgettable 14 or so hours though, if nothing else, and my blisters testified to an Indonesian experience as far removed from Eat, Pray, Love's, feature length pasta sauce commercial as it's possible to get. Reward in itself I think.

Let the Pagan Spill Theirs O'er Mountain, Hill, and Plain.

2010-11-09T13:41:00.000+07:00

Last weekend, upon leaving my favourite sub continental eatery after troughing down enough curry to sink a small barge, I wobbled out of Pasar Festival and chanced upon a rather boisterous event that was taking place in the car park. A couple of hundred people were gathered and were enjoying musical performances and speeches. Moreover, everyone was wearing identical T-shirts emblazoned with the acronym BKKBN, which stands for Badan Kordinasi Keluarga Berencana Nasional, which roughly translates as the National Coordinating Body for Family Planning.

Many of the assembled teenyboppers present looked far too young to be thinking about condoms, coils and pessaries. In fact, their nascent sexualities were probably more at the Peter Porn video on the mobile phone, embarrassed giggling and packets of tissues stage. Family planning education from a young age is clearly very important however, especially as many here seem to get married about three weeks after finishing high school.

Java is massively populated of course and, if you exclude far smaller islands with populations of less than ten million, it is by far the most densely packed island in the world. Around 130 million people are crammed onto Java's 132,089 km square, giving an average population density of 1026 per kilometre square. This is even more remarkable given how mountainous and actively volcanic the island is.

Back to the BKKBN 82^nd birthday bash though. The costume parades and the music continued apace and slogans extolling the virtues of family planning could be seen everywhere. Former President and current National Hero candidate, Suharto, famously waged a, "Dua Anak Cukup," (Two Children are Enough) campaign during his three decade-long reign. In my view, this is one of the very few decent things that can be attributed to him, although this laudable attempt at public education was surely undercut by the general anti-intellectual herd mentality and impoverishing cultural docility that the dictator largely succeeded in inculcating in the general population in order to protect his personal empire, but hey that's just my view.

Perusing the BKKBN literature on hand, I found a few points of interest. One survey had questioned people about the best number of years to leave between a first and second child. Respondents could choose between one and five years. Gratifyingly, most chose five years but perhaps the BKKBN is preaching to the converted. I also learned that men are increasingly involving themselves in the issue of family planning because, "Men played a part in every birth that occurred," which I think hits the nail squarely on the head.

Alas, condom promotion, both for family planning and AIDS prevention purposes, has often hit the brick wall of intransigent Islamic piety here. Admittedly Muslims don't have the whole, to quote Monty Python, "Every sperm is sacred," Catholic approach to conception (and when you consider that a man can produce 100 million sperm in a single ejaculation, then masturbation is clearly close to genocide in the whole papist scheme of things).

What Islamists do have a downer on however, are sex and sexuality in general, and seeing as the subject of family planning inevitably involves the use of words such as, “penis” and “orgasm”, the whole contraception debate has often proved to fraught with religious sensitivities at a nuts and bolts level (and I stress the word bolts). In the Islamist's mind, condoms encourage promiscuity, which I think is rather putting the cart before the horse, but there you go.

The Malthusian nightmare of billions chewing up the planet for fun and profit is surely an increasing reality though and the clock’s running. Gaian theorist, James Lovelock, warns that if things don't change radically, we had better stash all essential human knowledge at the Earth's poles in a medium that doesn't require electricity. As it stands, the population of the world grows by one million every four days, a number that personally I find quite hard to get my head around.

What might a successful family planning campaign that actually reduces the country's, and indeed the world's, population look like? If everyone followed the now all but abandoned Chinese policy of one child per family, then by 2100, the population of the planet would be around 1.6 billion, a level last seen in the 19^th Century before advances in medicine, food production and energy created a demographic time bomb. The world would daily become a better place and the results of this wouldn't just be in abstract statistical form, they would be outside everybody's window in the form of fresher air and a recovering planet.

A noble cause for sure! And so with my head held high and inspired by the BKKBN bun fight, I headed round the corner to Pasar Festival's huge new branch of 7 Eleven in search of some latex civilisation savers. Fighting my way through the retina scorching strip lighting, which is equivalent to about ten OId Traffords worth of floodlights, I selected a packet of three Durex Performa, as I need all the help that I can get in that department. Reading the packet, I was also gratified to note that a special cream keeps the wolf from the door when you're nearing what in British slang are known as the vinegar strokes. Just the ticket. Have a well planned week one and all.

When the Levee Breaks

2010-11-01T14:44:00.002+07:00

As I sit here and scribble this in a roadside warung after a burplicious lunch of grilled chicken and bottled tea, the heavens have opened once again. Water has started to drip onto my head through the gourmet restaurant’s leaky makeshift plastic roof and, as the eatery is situated in a mini valley that straddles one of the Kemang area's muddy creeks, the tide is already reaching sock dampening levels.

Several hours earlier, on my way to work, I was forced to remove my shoes and socks at the end of my flood prone road, hitch up the old trousers and cycle through the knee-high water that still remained undrained from the previous evening’s fun and games. The water itself didn't look too appealing, much of it having no doubt recently passed through the alimentary canals of a phalanx of mustachioed Javanese gentlemen, all seeking relief by voiding their bowels into Jakarta's chemical soup as they read the car adverts in Pos Kota. Still, my pain is their gain I guess. Last Monday night was the real deal though and perhaps a harbinger of things to come over the next few months, and indeed years.

The story of Noah's Ark is a biblical classic of course, however non-Muslims among you may not be aware that Noah also features in the Muslim faith and is one of the religions five main prophets. According to the story, Noah preached to his people but apparently only a few of them converted to Islam (a number traditionally thought to be 70). God thus told Noah to knock up the Ark and commanded him to climb aboard before he smote the infidels with a big wave of water (which was presumably a tad cleaner than the rats’ urine and abandoned soft drink effluent that sloshes around Jakarta after a heavy storm).

In this context, I guess that this great deluge myth could possibly be interpreted by those pious lads down at FPI (Islamic Defenders Front) headquarters as an encouragement for them to get stuck into a few more churches. “Convert or drown!” Let's hope that they haven't read their holy book too closely.

At least Noah and his Ark full of animals wouldn't have fallen foul of Jakarta's 3-in-1 policy though. Such a huge numbers of vehicles were jammed solid last Monday night that, purely statistically speaking, there must have been some deaths on the road, or even the odd birth in the back of a taxi whilst the meter clicked round counting off the contractions.

You will all have your own tales of travel woe from last week, I'm sure. A friend of mine took six hours to get from Slipi to Kemang, a journey that took him only 20 minutes the following day. Cars were unable to pass waist high floods where I now sit and were thus completely immobile for several hours. If you’re stuck behind the wheel of your own car, you basically have to go off for dinner at this point.

On the other hand, why people sit for six hours in taxis for journeys that would take them two hours to walk is a little harder to explain. This shows a commitment to fat arsed indolence of which I am unaware. Many is the time that I've abandoned cabs going nowhere fast on the city's teeming streets, as I come close to chewing my own arm off in frustration.

Swinging open the door of a sweaty taxi doesn't necessarily offer much relief though. In fact, it often seems as if one has simply stepped out of the taxi and into the interior of some vast city sized cab, with Jakarta's fetid, humid air, winking lights and oppressive, overcast skies resembling the inside of some giant cosmic car…and not a Bluebird either, but one of those dodgy, battered ones with the busted suspension, doctored meter and driver who looks like he just got out of jail that morning.

Is Jakarta now so hopelessly mired in its own overpopulation and creaking infrastructure that there is no way back? Are we quite literally sinking under our own weight? Perhaps so, although maybe at some crazy unconscious level we actually quite enjoy it when the city floods like this. I mean, Jakarta now resembles an endlessly looping disaster movie and people like disaster movies. Why? Not because they are scary, I'd assert. No, people like disaster movies because, at some unconscious level, they secretly crave extreme, apocalyptic events.

We desire events that can distract us from the tired daily trudge of our routine, world-weary lives, and anything that shatters the humdrum, digital isolation of our last-man, couch potato, air-conditioned existence in some sense energizes us. Some part of us actually wishes to see the well mapped out terrain of our low interest, low-calorie, 21^st-century, psychically anaesthetized journeys from cradle to grave destroyed utterly in watery flood waves of unpredictability, waves that prefigure the perhaps imminent collapse our sense dulling civilization itself.

Well, I can see I've disappeared up my own philosophical fundament again, it must be the tsunamis and volcanic eruptions that are currently raining down hammer blows of divine displeasure upon us.

Well it is now Wednesday and the mother of all deluges is expected this afternoon. No doubt I'll be stuffing my shoes full of newspaper once again this evening whilst I listen to Mahler's Death in Venice theme and wait for cholera to close in on the capital. It’s a rum do alright, still, there's always TV and beer.

Euan Mie

2010-10-26T18:17:00.006+07:00

Indonesia has once again had its integrity outrageously questioned as the harsh, unforgiving spotlight of international standards and regulatory systems is mercilessly shone upon this great nation. This time around, one of the country's most nutritious staple foods, namely instant noodles, has been viciously slandered by the Taiwanese authorities, who have banned the product on the grounds that it contains excessive amounts of the preservative, benzoic acid.

I've long suspected that the plastic wrapper that the classic slab of Indomie comes packaged in contains more nutrients than the noodles themselves do, although I don't have the scientific data in front of me to back that claim up. This latest health scare comes on the back and various other horrors, including Indonesian market traders who douse their fish with formaldehyde in order to keep it looking fresh and free from flies. Personally, I'm not convinced that embalming one's customers is going to bring you a lot of repeat business although perhaps these traders also offer a sideline taxidermy services.

Indomie is an iconic, almost fetishized food here of course, and I have long despaired of ever understanding why it is that some of the country's worst foods, namely instant noodles and the grey balls of inorganic compounds and petrochemical pipeline tailings known as 'bakso' have the public hooked like junkies, when this is surely a land of fresh fruit, vegetables and general nutritional bounty.

Moreover, whenever there's a charity drive here, the food that almost invariably seems to get donated to the poor unfortunates in huge amounts is our old friend, the instant noodle, usually in enormous boxes filled with hundreds of packets. Just lost your house in an earthquake? Then add rickets to your woes by feeding your family on Indomie for a month.

I find it particularly ironic that Taiwan has rejected that toothsome Indomie blend of industrial solvents and unpronounceable chemicals spelt with lots of exes and zeds though, seeing as they invented the bloody stuff in the first place, but you've got to have standards I suppose. Apparently, consuming benzoic acid in large quantities can result in nausea, deterioration in kidney function and possibly metabolic acidosis, a potentially fatal condition.

The Indonesian BPOM (Food and Drug Monitoring Agency) has now declared that Indomie contains safe levels of both benzoic acid and a chemical called p-hydroxybenzoate (which sounds like something that you'd find in superglue). So that's okay then. Well I don't know about the BPOM, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that they had a rather cozy relationship with the noodle industry.

As a parallel, America's FDA (Food and Drug Administration) are not necessarily a body that I'd entrust my body to. Well under the thumb of its corporate masters, the FDA recently declared walnuts to be drugs and Doritos to be, "Heart healthy." Food and Drug Administration you see. Pig out on McDonalds for 20 years and then get yourself on some pills to try and mitigate the consequences. Double sale! But I digress.

Returning to those errant noodles, let's have a run through some of the ingredients to be found in a typical packet that I bought at a branch of Circle K this week. I stared intently at the shelves on my visit perusing the various varieties on offer: Rubber and Sand flavor, Pencil Shavings and Axle Grease flavor, Nothing flavor. Eventually however, I plumped for a yellow packet of Kari Ayam flavor. So how did the ingredients break down?

Tartrazine: this yellow food dye has been linked with hyperactive disorders in children and has now been phased out in a number of European Union countries. In the 1990s, a myth began circulating that excessive tartrazine consumption could affect male potency and penis size, however there are no documented cases confirming this hysterical rumor. In fact, on the contrary, I'd say that East Asian gentlemen are positively hard for tartrazine laced noodles.

Tartrazine

TBHQ: this is a preservative used for unsaturated vegetable oils and is also found in varnishes, lacquers and resins (whoa!). Some studies have suggested that the substance might be mildly carcinogenic, but who cares when your insides look as shiny as a freshly polished Chesterfield.


TBHQ

MSG: everyone knows this one of course. This nuclear powered flavor enhancer (something like sodium chloride mixed with uranium) is an East Asian staple. MSG is seen as the bogeyman of instant cuisine and modern dietary habits, although strict double-blind medical trials have yet to show conclusively that the stuff can cause obesity or worsen symptoms of asthma, and MSG has now been pretty much declared medically safe. Also of course, without a healthy whack of MSG, Indomie would taste like, well, nothing at all I guess.

MSG

Benzoic Acid: this stuff actually occurs naturally in cranberries and bilberries, however too much of it is bad for the liver and kidneys.


Benzoic Acid

So there we have it folks, a few health issues to a mull over, although perhaps the time-honoured tradition of breaking an egg into the noodles and tipping half a bottle of chilli sauce into the mix serves to neutralize these latent dangers. In any case, I'm starting to feel peckish...

Thieves Like Us

2010-10-19T09:31:00.002+07:00

Passing through my friendly neighbourhood shopping mall on my way to buy a few kilos of tempeh and some party hats from the cavernous hypermarket in the basement last week, I chanced upon a rather unusual stand. In amongst the rather twee tables full of ethnic requisites and aromatherapy burners, I came across a girl standing behind a small counter that had a banner over it saying ICW.

ICW stands for Indonesian Corruption Watch, an organisation that aims to publicise the dastardly sleaze and kleptomaniacal cant that goes on in this great nation. Upon enquiring, I was shown a brochure and given some car stickers. ICW were soliciting donations of course and I gave the young lady my e-mail address so that I could be sent whatever information or donation forms that she had (although as I write this, I’ve still received diddly squat).

Hopefully of course, the ICW don't rip their donations off, that would really take the biscuit. Nothing, however, would surprise me about this country any more. This is the kind of place in which you need an Indonesian Corruption Watch Watch to keep an eye on the ICW. And then of course you'd need an Indonesian Corruption Watch Watch Watch to watch them and so on and so on ad absurdum, until you reach the final link in the chain, the jailed editor of Playboy Indonesia, sitting behind a computer spreadsheet program.

ICW however, as their name suggests, can merely watch as the country gets robbed blind and defendants are given lenient sentences for being, "Polite and helpful," in court. However keeping these issues in the media is vital work in our information driven age.

The Indonesian economy is apparently booming but socially and politically, the skies are as full of clouds as black as those that scudded over Jakarta in recent weeks. This week, we learned that a bill was passed in the house allowing police to use live ammunition on the streets. As someone who was here during the Trisakti shootings and riots over a decade ago, this sent a chill down my spine. And wouldn't you know it, the current candidate for police chief, Comr. Gen. Timur Pradopo, has been intimately linked with these very shootings.

The new armed police law reminds me of a previous glorious leader from my own country, Margaret "Milk Snatcher" Thatcher who, before embarking on a programme of union smashing an unfettered laissez-faire capitalism, first made sure to increase police salaries and invest in new skull cracking equipment. She knew exactly what was coming of course, and perhaps there are now similar portents here. Will the violence currently simmering under the surface here boil over in the future?

This is still a pretty authoritarian society. Nothing changed hugely when Suharto pushed off. Gus Dur was a danger and was thus dispensed with quite quickly (and of course, it's okay to crown him a national hero now that he's dead and can't cause any more bother for those in the gravy). Then, after a moderately courageous start, SBY devolved into an invertebrate. So here we are, guns on the streets facing down protests. James Madison, one of the framers of the American Constitution, described modern democracy as a system that, "Protects the minority of the opulent from the majority," and this is perhaps truer of Indonesia than it is of many countries in the world.

Indonesia

is still largely ruled by the Javanese of course, and the Javanese mindset and culture, with its class deference and politeness is perhaps not conducive to popular struggles that challenge the legitimacy of power. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia's greatest ever author, talked of, "Javanism," which he perceived as a kind of, "Javanese fascism," that , "keeps the country enslaved." For Pram, Indonesia was just a pseudonym for, "Java Bangsa," (Javanese Nation); a place without, "Rule of law, justice or truth."

It's fascism with a smiling face of course, which only makes it even more insidiously chilling. Java Bangsa? Well, we have regional autonomy now, and the new regional Suhartos have learned well from their Javanese masters perhaps. As for the little people though, the only thing that really unites this country is its language.

A bit serious this week! Dear dear dear. I really need to get out of town. Oh well, at least those miners managed to get out alive. Although I was hoping that the media at the top would dress up like Planet of the Apes when they came out. That would have been a great prank.

So let's look on the bright side, Christmas will soon be here and Santa will be merrily shoehorning his corpulent frame through our air conditioning vent to the accompaniment of the early morning call to prayer. Hopefully he’ll be bearing a sack full of Tera Patrick DVDs and a few bottles of duty-free booze. And then next year, God will rain down gifts of subway systems, flood alleviation, poverty relief and inter-sectarian harmony upon us and steer us away from the socio-cultural landfill site that we are all heading towards with gathering speed. The future is ours!

Tainted Love

2010-10-11T20:10:00.002+07:00

IIt's been a queer couple of weeks one way and another. It was all too depressingly predictable that the next target for jackbooted monotheistic types, after minority faiths, women and liberals, would be homosexuals. Our old chum, Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring (which is an anagram of 'A Blistering Mufti' by the way) was once again in the vanguard with some highly enlightened Tweets about sin, gays and AIDS.

This tired old American born-again, AIDS-as-God's-curse idea doesn't even work at the basic level of logic, owing to the fact that the rates of AIDS amongst female gays is virtually zero, much less than it is among heterosexuals in fact, owing to the nature of that particular beast with two backs. But since when have the world's religious dogmatists ever been troubled by the bothersome need to be logically coherent?

Then of course, the 2010 Q Film Festival was picketed by FPI types who are perhaps just a little bit too suspiciously enraged in their firebrand fervour. One suspects, in Freudian terms, unconscious motivations. Here’s an analogy for you. The medical researcher slicing up animals and the antivivisectionist picketing outside his clinic stand, at the level of conscious ideology, in opposing camps. At an unconscious level however, both may be fascinated by the same acts. I leave you to draw the parallels dear reader.

In fact, I was invited to the closing of this year's Q Film Festival down at Fx Plaza last weekend. Alas though, possessing, as I do, a clockwork mouse instead of a brain, I turned up at Ex Plaza by mistake. Determined to thoroughly queer myself up though, I went one better by getting an alternatively inclined friend of mine to drag me along to a local gay bar for the evening.

And so, last Saturday night, I donned my best leather chaps and found myself stepping across the threshold and into the stygian darkness of Kota's most notorious gay club. I immediately headed for the safety of the bar and, as I ordered up a manly bottle of Bintang, my eyes adjusted to the gloom and I surveyed all before me.

The club was not, in essence, any different from any other nightclub that plies its trade around that neck of the woods. The same teenybopper-on-speed 190 beats per minute Dangdut-techno fusion sounds were shredding the PA system and the dance floor was packed with sweaty young blades all smoking like the Marlboro man in front of a firing squad. Elsewhere, the AC systems dripped water on my nose and barely dented the suffocating humidity, whilst swinging a cat (or even a saucy Richard Gere gerbil) would have presented a major challenge.

It was hardly an outrageous tableau of bacchanalian decadence and debauchery though. In fact, it all seemed to me to be considerably less racy than many of Kota's straight discos, as there were no private karaoke rooms available on site for people to get up to any clandestine mischief making or construction of human ‘daisy chains’.

Two stereotypes of the gay man persist in society. The first is the blouse wearing, Cher listening, limp wristed but essentially harmless caricature, checking surfaces for dust with his index finger. One dimensional for sure but not as bad as the second, more ideologically and religiously driven stereotype, namely the louche, depraved pervert who preys on the young and corrupts the innocent. In this conception, homosexuality is a disease to be cured or eradicated. Well, if being gay was a disease, then I for one would be using it as an excuse to get some sick days off work. “Are you coming in today Simon?” “No, sorry, I’m still feeling queer.”

Could an increasingly religious mindset tip

Indonesia

into this second stereotype? I'd hate such a future to befall the guy that my friend and I chatted to last Saturday at the club. This polite young chap confessed that despite being gay, he hoped to get married and have children one day. Clearly guys such as this are as much a product of Indonesian society as they are gay culture.

My Western chum was slightly incensed however. "Even the gays here want to have ten kids! My God, isn't Java over populated enough without gays chipping in as well!" Fair point I thought and I'm also not sure that attempts by homosexuals to live the heterosexual nuclear family dream often pan out that well.

I finished my beer and sloped off to the rest room to drain my spuds. I have to admit to feeling a slight sense of trepidation at this point and I stared rigidly at my mobile phone, pretending to be deeply absorbed in a text message as nature took its course.

It happened though folks, it happened. In one frozen moment a rogue paw had reached around and had given my family jewels a friendly squeeze. I looked around and thankfully our over familiar bon viveur had already vanished. No name, no phone number and only a rather unusual introductory handshake to remember him by. I'm telling you folks, romance is most definitely dead.

Here in My Car

2010-10-05T19:09:00.006+07:00

Last weekend, I managed to hop over the pond and take in the rather spectacular Singapore Grand Prix. As well as leaving my eardrums as perforated as a postage stamp, the sojourn also afforded me the opportunity to put Singapore and Jakarta head-to-head in a little compare and contrast contest. Not a fair match perhaps, but since when was fairness ever an integral element of life in the Big Durian?

Arriving in the interstellar space station of Changi Airport is certainly a good place to start, seeing as the hub is regarded by many as the best airport in the whole world. All of Singapore's ruthless efficiency and technocratic conformity comes together at Changi and one feels as if one has been let loose inside the sterile sci-fi world of George Lucas’s seminal THX1138. Soekarno-Hatta, by contrast, is alas more Bronze Age than space age.

I proceeded to take the subway into the city centre, which is obviously not an option in good old Batavia. In fact, I learnt this week that Jakarta is the largest city in the world to be deprived of a metro system. Metro madness indeed. Emerging on Orchard Road, underwear clamminess soon became an issue and I think it's fair to say that Singapore is even more humid than the Indonesian capital.

Despite the soaring temperatures though, everything runs like clockwork in Singapore and the dropping of a single cigarette butt on the street results in an alarm going off down at the nearest police precinct and sees the offending miscreant hauled off for a heavy session of electric shock therapy until the requisite balance of narcotized late capitalist docility and conformity has been re-instilled in the subject.

As you may have guessed, I'm not totally sold on the whole island state weltanschauung and rather feel that they've gone a tad far in their technologically mediated mind control. In fact, I tend to see the place as something of a canary in a coal mine for the increasingly regimented, CCTV regulated 'last man' joylessness of my own homeland.

Still, not being confronted with luckless, dollar-a-day, hand-to-mouth, head lice infested plebeians on every street corner could be considered a plus point in Singapore's favour. In any case, I soon headed down to the Grand Prix qualifying session and found a space trackside in the Marina Bay area.

As the sun set, a truly breathtaking night vista took shape. The towering skyscrapers, the sprawling Esplanade art complex, the waterfront bars and restaurants stretching all the way up to Clarke Quay, the huge Singapore Flyer viewing wheel, the towering new Marina Bay Sands complex just across the water with its three huge towers and enormous surfboard style deck stretching across the top of all three shooting laser beam arcs across the heavens, the famous Merlion fountain. It was a vision of urban utopia second to none, and I almost wet my pants with excitement, which would have no doubt netted me a $1000 fine from one of the Southeast Asian stormtroopers on duty.

Anyway, I inserted my Formula One earplugs and the cars were soon on track hitting 200 plus mph and generally giving me a cricked neck as I tried to swivel my head fast enough to see them go by. There are a few other street circuits on the Formula One calendar, including the legendary Monaco Grand Prix of course, and they are all a tremendous advertisement for the various cities that host them. Alas, the race itself the following evening saw my boy Hamilton crashing out after being shunted up the butt to by an Australian (not a fate I’d wish on anybody). This has probably ended his chances of taking this year's title, but such is sport.

It was a truly enjoyable evening of speed though, which was helped along enormously by the couple of tins of 7-Eleven Amsterdam Maximator super-strength lager that I had smuggled into Track Zone Four (perhaps Jakarta's new 7-Elevens should start stocking this 11.4% strength mind wiper, although I should stress that it’s not the most palatable beverage out there).

Could Jakarta ever host an F1 street race though I wonder? It'd certainly put the Indonesian capital on the map. A couple of years back, an A1 race was scheduled to be held on the streets of Lippo Karawaci, but was alas cancelled at the last minute after concerns over track safety were raised. What another truly surprising Indonesian anti-climax.

Lippo Karawaci's no good however, you've got to have the cars steaming down Jl. Sudirman at full pelt whilst banging over potholes that cause them to flip over spectacularly. Navigating this city's cratered roads would undoubtedly be a technical challenge for the competitors akin to making them all get stuck into the winner's champagne before, instead of after, the race. The inevitable deaths of several hundred spectators would surely be a small price to pay though for a bit of national pride, and the busway provides a ready-made pit lane of course. There's Indonesia's bid for the FIFA World Cup to get out of the way first however. One ludicrously unrealistic fantasy at a time please.

Group Therapy

2010-09-27T22:58:00.002+07:00

Religion never seems to be far from the news headlines these days alas. You've got Koran burnings, Ground Zero Islamic community center scandals, the Pope visiting Anglican Britain and being confronted with huge demonstrations, Vicars in Jakarta being stabbed and the image of the Virgin Mary that miraculously appeared on a slice of toast that I was buttering last week (although this last story has yet to be picked up by the press). Peace be upon us indeed.

Last weekend though, I threw caution to the four winds and headed off to a meeting of the new group called IA, (it stands for Indonesian Atheists). Many of you I'm sure will find the concept of an Indonesian atheist an oxymoron on a par with adult male, military intelligence or business ethics, but IA are a real group who use the power of the Internet to offer support to each other in a country that, to say the least, isn't too big on irreligious free thinking...or free thinking of any kind really.

In any case, I donned my finest infidel hair shirt and headed down to... well, I promised that I wouldn't tell as these are, to put it mildly, religiously delicate times in the good old R of I. It was basically a completely normal Jakartan house though and people were hanging out and talking earnestly about their various trials and tribulations as godless freaks of nature in this land of unity in diversity.

Religion may indeed be the opium of the masses (along with actual opium of course), however the IA gathering felt like nothing so much as an AA meeting. Perhaps being an atheist in Indonesia is akin to being an alcoholic in the West, a deviation from social norms requiring the mutual support and affirmation of the similarly afflicted. "Hi, my name is Bambang and I'm an atheist. I last had a pray two years ago."

I overheard a few snatches of conversation, one ethnic Chinese chap was saying that, "My family said I was misquoting Jesus.” I guess his family must have had access to the original transcripts. I noted though that there were both Christian atheists and Muslim atheists present (to adapt an old joke about the Irishman who is stopped by some thugs of unknown denomination on the street one night. "Are you Protestant or Catholic?" The thugs demand. "I'm an atheist" he replies shrewdly. "But are you Protestant atheist or Catholic atheist?" They demand).

We were then all treated to a rather nifty PowerPoint presentation by our host. IA has a rather neat logo in fact, although I doubt that you'll be seeing it on advertising hoardings at public events across Indonesia anytime soon alongside the imprecations to contract lung cancer. Our host briefly adumbrated his hopes for IA and was at pains to stress that IA is just an idea and a group in which people can share their stories and support each other. He explained that the group had no central dogmas but was rather, "A free marketplace of ideas."

Obviously atheism is a lack of belief in something rather than a belief, and as such, getting atheists to agree on an issue has been likened to attempting to herd cats. Conversely though, everyone present seemed to occupy the top end of the Indonesian educational spectrum and I've always felt that atheists, more often than not, do in fact share a lot of values in common, including a belief in freedom, reason and pluralism.

IA apparently has 400 members, not a great dent in a population of 230 million admittedly, but it's a start and hopefully others will find their way to the group via the Internet, as they become disillusioned with this country's demagoguery, barely concealed politics of exclusion and often numbingly conformist social hegemony. This is provided, of course, that Communications and Information Technology Minister Sembiring doesn't decide to start filtering the group’s web presence, although he's not having much joy with the blocking of pictures of nude ladies so far. Perhaps IA should make sure their Internet site features plenty of nipples.

Religion, as has been distressingly demonstrated recently, is an extremely high stakes game in this country but if there's hope, it is that a new generation will use the Internet to educate itself about the wider world. As our IA imam explained, the Internet is, "A free world inside the real world." Long may it stay that way.

I tarried a while before eventually leaving. There was no holy water on hand to steady my nerves, but I chatted to a few fellow godless types and enjoyed the extremely novel sensation of being in a room full of Indonesian unbelievers (although personally I've always have a soft spot for Thor and his jolly impressive hammer).

Hopefully the group won’t be infiltrated by Jihadist types wielding big sticks and will continue to meet and offer people the opportunity to discuss their lack of superstition with people who understand. The country surely needs clear thinkers and humanists such as this if it is to prosper. Now let us all rise and sing hymn number 54, “I'm Goin' to a Hole in the Ground.” Amen brothers and sisters.

Smash It Up

2010-09-22T14:20:00.003+07:00

Hot on the heels of no lesser figure than SBY himself, I jetted over to Kinabalu on Borneo’s northernmost tip for this year’s Lebaran holiday. I was hoping for a pleasant break, although I also wanted to check if hard-line Indonesian nationalists had made good on their promise to, “Smash Malaysia.”

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the place seemed to be fully intact as I bagged a taxi into town. Kota Kinabalu is rather a pleasant city in fact and sports a lovely long waterfront which overlooks five pristine tropical islands, each of which can be accessed cheaply by day trippers via a 20 minute boat ride. The province of Sabah that KK sits in is also full of natural wonders.

I guess I’m already beginning to sound like the anodyne croon of a ‘Malaysia Truly Asia’ ad. Hopefully however, the experience of visiting this sunny and vibrant seaside city acted as a soothing balm on the inflamed prostate of the president’s national pride and a major conflagration was averted at the recent Kota Kinabalu peace conference between Indonesia and Malaysia. After all SBY has more pressing matters to attend to at home, such as building a luxurious five star fun shack for the country’s indolent legislators and sweeping stabbed vicars under the carpet.

For my part, I was glad to tarry a while in Malaysia and enjoy my Lebaran break somewhere just a touch more organized and together than most of Indonesia is (although I’d better tread carefully here, lest the putative Malaysia smashers redirect their attentions towards the more easily accessible target of Metro Madness Towers).

My main mission however this fine Lebaran was to, in hindsight rather masochistically, scale the mighty Mount Kinabalu and live to tell the tale. Gunung Kinabalu is apparently the tallest mountain between the Himalayas and Papua and stands a daunting 4095m above sea level. Modest by global standards perhaps but quite tall enough for my aging pins to be getting on with.

The entrance to the mountain trail sits in a beautifully verdant national park a couple of hours from town. I set off midmorning with a guide and a frighteningly healthy group of muesli chomping European backpackers and yomped up an increasingly steep 6km long path to the overnight base camp where we rested before the final 3km push to the summit. Along the way I chatted to some of the local guides in their own language (which is almost identical to Indonesian after all) and they told me that they were not particularly interested in going to war with Indonesia as they were great fans of Luna Maya and Ariel’s educational video. Good lads.

After a fitful sleep at base camp, we awoke at 1.30am for the moment of truth. This would sort out the men from the prematurely geriatric newspaper columnists. It was pitch black, raining and pea soup foggy, which is just as well because at times the climb involved clinging onto ropes and gingerly shuffling across precipices and drops that may have had a big wuss like me turning back if I could have seen down for further than about two meters.

Near the top, the terrain was barren, rocky and vertiginously steep and I could only manage around five minutes standing still on the summit before my delicate nipples started to freeze over. And so I began the long trudge down as daylight started to soften the engulfing blackness. After around half an hour I briefly looked up from my frozen hands as they clung for dear life to the guide ropes and was confronted with the most amazingly vast and panoramic view I have ever seen. A huge sweep of rugged geography stretching all the way to the ocean around 90km away.

I still had about 8km of descending to do though and began shoveling chocolate into my face to fuel the ensuing marathon. I’m reasonably fit, however ascending and descending mountains works those muscles like a sadistic, amphetamine fuelled aerobics instructor who’s just lost her car keys. When I finally staggered over the finish line I passed a board proclaiming the results of the ‘2009 Kinabalu Climabathon’. Apparently the winner had made it to the summit and all the way back down again in 2 hours and 40 minutes. He must have been using a stunt double in my opinion.

The following day my calf muscles felt as if they had been surgically removed, hammered with a meat tenderizer for an hour and then delicately sutured back into place. I had used a walking stick on the descent in an attempt to save the old knees a bit, however this meant that my arms were almost as spavined as my legs were. I covered my entire body in mentholated sticking plasters but to no immediate relief.

Don’t let me discourage you though. There are plenty of less strenuous activities on offer in Sabah: jungle treks, beaches, white water rafting, it’s all there and Malays do do the whole tourism thing rather well. Consider it doing your bit for bilateral relations. Promise me that you won’t smash anything while you’re there though.

Holidays in the Sun

2010-09-14T22:34:00.000+07:00

Hopefully, all of you are currently on holiday, windsurfing, hiking, having candlelit dinners, getting ripped to the tits on Shiraz and generally giving thanks to Allah for this break from having your souls crushed to dust beneath the relentless pounding of life's hammers.

I have also managed to skip town and head off into the wide blue yonder for some much needed rest and relaxation, more of which next week I shouldn't wonder. If you're still in Jakarta, then enjoy the relative peace. I stress the word 'relative' however as it's not as if tumbleweeds start blowing down Jl. Sudirman during Idul Fitri. Some respite from the 10 million plus souls that sardine can themselves into the capital every day is most welcome I’m sure though.

Thank the lord that the spell of work has been broken for a while and I can crawl off to reflect upon my own mortality and really get to work on those hangovers. Many of you may be thinking about turning over a new leaf after the holiday, however I somehow doubt that Indonesia as a whole, or indeed the rest of the world will manage to pull itself back from the brink.

It’s perhaps a myth that we all buy into, to a greater or lesser extent, that somewhere there’s a group of bureaucrats ultimately in charge of things and that the world is following a well thought out master plan. SBY, for example, is currently being berated for letting the country slip out of his control, but does anyone really believe the media sound bites and unctuous concerns of the world's politicians anymore? Do we really believe that they have any meaningful long term plans for us beyond five year economic cycles?

It's like the classic Santa Claus scenario. The parents don't believe in Father Christmas but do it for the kids, the kids don't really believe in Father Christmas after a certain age but keep the ritual going because they're afraid to say something and enjoy the presents. A whole belief system is sustained, without anyone actually believing in it.

This is how I feel about modern governments and democracies, but possibly many of you are a good deal more optimistic than myself. Alas, personally, I find it hard to square the sickly, Hollywood, feel-good ethic of wistful, crypto-Zen environmentalism and caring, global village philanthropy that we're all force-fed and told to aspire to through the media and movies, with the corporate machine currently chewing up our world for fun and profit. I’ve lost all faith.

It seems to me that you can't be a politician in these tricky, propaganda filled times and combine conviction (in official ideology), intelligence and honesty together in one package. If you believe and are intelligent, then you're not honest. If you are intelligent and honest, you're not a believer. If you're a believer and honest, you're not intelligent. Such is the malaise of our age and I doubt that SBY will be able to do much to reverse this sorry state of affairs with the political tools he has at his disposal. This is perhaps strange though, considering that the Indonesian parliament is simply full of political tools, as far as I can tell.

But never mind, this holiday has at least propelled me outside Jakarta’s preposterous urban frenzy and given me a good look at the rainforests of Southeast Asia, whilst there are still some of them left. Getting a ticket proved to be tricky however. The mass exodus out of Jakarta includes all flights and supposedly Bali is rammed with Idul Fitri holidaymakers this week, who are no doubt currently turning the Island of the Gods into the Island of the Sods.

In fact, the only flight I could manage to find out of Jakarta to the Southeast Asia area, that wasn't triple or even quadruple the normal fare, was an AirAsia jaunt over to Kota Kinabalu up in Borneo's northernmost Malaysian province of Sabah. I snapped up the ticket and then learned a couple of days later that the Indonesian and Malaysian governments would be having a peace conference in this very same city before my arrival. Hopefully the conference went well and ended with an agreement to cap faecal embassy lobbings and fishermen arrests at an acceptable level.

For my part, I aim to report back from KK for next week's column, and perhaps offer a comparative study of the Indonesian and Malaysian tourism industries. All being well, I'll also be climbing the famous Gunung Kinabalu, which is supposedly Southeast Asia's highest peak (if you discount the island of Papua, which is cheating a little I know).

As of now however, it's Wednesday afternoon and the rain is bucketing down on Jakarta once again, dampening my holiday spirits and generally annoying the hell out of me as I'm wanting to pop round to my local mini mart for a few cleansing beverages. Chin chin everyone, and don't pray to hard, you may just get what you wish for, and nothing’s worse than that.

Mama Weer All Crazee Now

2010-09-07T09:28:00.002+07:00

Well this year's Ramadan has been a surprisingly trouble free affair, given the increasingly high profile of religious paramilitary urban guerrilla types in the country. I've been expecting to have my Prohibition era teacup dashed from my lips as I enjoy a little holy month holy water in some of the city's less salubrious watering holes, but thankfully nothing has transpired. It's long been a pet theory of mine that Bintang and Anker both have their own groups of thugs who don religious garb before tooling around town in flatbed trucks, smashing up each other's bars.

Most of Jakarta's boorish yobbery is currently being channeled into nationalism as opposed to religious radicalism in fact. Protesters have got all excremental on the Malaysian Embassy, seemingly oblivious to the fact that if you start throwing your own stools around like some of Ragunan Zoo's more simian charges, then the joke's kind of on you. Moreover, presumably it was Indonesians, rather than Malaysians, who had to clear the whole sorry mess up.

Religion wise, all seems to be calm however. There have hardly been any drums pounding at 3am or relentless fireworks keeping me awake all night. A couple of times however I found myself being woken up, having forgotten to insert my anti-sectarian, godless communist expanding foam earplugs (available from all good drugstores, land-of-nod fans).

The call to sahur (i.e. wake up and do some cooking) has been going off at a ludicrously early 2.30am around my neck of the woods this year. This occasionally gives me a rude awakening and finds me stumbling to the toilet through the stygian gloom of my bedroom in order to purge my bowels of Ramadan "tea" before all falls silent...for another 90 minutes and then it all kicks off again of course.

As a baby eating atheist, religious observance and the dedication and commitment that the faithful show towards religious rituals never ceases to amaze me. In fact, I almost wish I could feel some of that spirituality myself, although, as a true trencherman, I wouldn't be so keen on the actual fasting side of things. It's a scientific fact though that the religiously committed on this planet suffer significantly lower levels of stress and depression than Darwinian infidels such as myself, who know that the existential void lurks malevolently out there beyond human culture, like a freshly soiled embassy compound.

I've been reading some fascinatingly contentious academic theories about religion of late and about the mental processes and irrational behaviors that may have bought them about in the first place. We still live in an ostensibly irrational world, that's for sure. A recent opinion poll revealed that 25% of Americans believe in ghosts, that 35% of them believe in mental telepathy and that more than 50% believe that Satan influences events on Earth. These are people who can vote, serve on juries, make decisions about medical interventions and so on and one can only imagine what the figures would be like for this country. We live in a highly irrational world for sure but where does it all come from?

A psychologist called Devereux in the 1940s posited religion as organized schizophrenia and theorized that shamans and prophets were neurotic and "schizotypal" (basically, mildly schizophrenic). In other words, conditions that the secular world classifies as mental illness may have played a crucial role in the propagation of religions.

The meta-magical thinking involved in coming up with stories about talking snakes, flying horses and virgin births is commensurate with the kind of disconnection from reality seen in schizotypal patients. It's important however that this shamanic-schizotypal behavior not be too extreme for it to work as a religious catalyst.

If you’re hearing voices all the time then things won't work, however if you hear voices in the right context, at the right moments, then you can be perceived as a holy man. If you babble and speak in tongues continually then you'll be ostracized, but babble during your tribe's holiest ceremony and you've been touched by God. In other words, get it wrong and you're labeled a dangerous, freakish cult. Exhibit the schizotypal behavior in the right context however and just maybe, for the next few millennia, people won't have to go to work on your birthday.

Similarly, it's been theorized that many religious rituals may have origins in another kind of mental disturbance, mainly OCD or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Most of the world's major religious rituals involve such OCD type behavior as repeated washing, entering and leaving buildings in certain special ways and obsessive numerology. It is therefore not difficult to imagine OCD sufferers millennia ago saying to their tribes, "This is how I've been honoring the Almighty all these years, you should join me."

It's all fascinating stuff and if you wish to engage in a debate, then all letter bombs and envelopes full of anthrax should be mailed to me with a return address on the back. In the meantime, enjoy next week's holiday and I hope you have a blessed rest. Have a thoroughly rational Lebaran one and all.

Allah's Snack Bar

2010-08-31T16:43:00.002+07:00

Last week, I was privileged enough to attend a PR fast breaking event, media slut that I am. And seeing that nothing, not even a single garlic roasted peanut or a grain of kerosene and sand fried rice had passed my lips for a full five hours or so, I was eager to get stuck into the buffet.

One has to respect one's hosts however and so I sat at the back of the hall patiently whilst a Muslim preacher banged on about the finer points of morality to a barely audible accompaniment of his audience’s gurgling gastric juices. Possibly the finer points of the holy man's discourse on religious ethics were lost on the congregation, who frankly looked at that point as if they'd have been happier worshipping at the first Episcopalian Church of Colonel Sanders.

Eventually however, the prayers drew to a close and it was every man for himself as the silver buffet tureens were opened and strip-mined of their contents by the faithful in attendance, who proceeded to give that Japanese guy who can eat 195 hotdogs in 10 minutes a serious run for his money.

Ramadan and Idul Fitri are the Indonesian equivalents of a Western Christmas of course. And, as with Christmas, religious observance often seems to lose out to more corporeal imperatives and the reassuring joys of over consumption. The price of staple foods rockets, the roads are even more jammed than usual and plaza food courts come to resemble UN feeding camps.

In other words, instead of meditation and introspection, this is a time of year when social and material tensions are instead exacerbated and the general hurly-burly gradually swells over the month to a deafening crescendo of firecrackers thrown at me by street urchins and Robotronic mosque PA systems who refuse to press the pause button for half an hour so I can hear myself think. Ultimately, this whole Ramadan shebang culminates in the unspeakable horror of everybody attempting to leave town simultaneously. Meditation and peace indeed. Pfft.

Perhaps though it would be enlightening if I divulged the whereabouts of this particular fast breaking gathering. For this pious little media soirée was in fact going off down in Bakrieland, just under the disturbingly monolithic new Bakrie Tower which now looms over the Kuningan area like some Kafka-esque ministry of justice.

Mr. Bakrie and his family own a huge corporate empire of course and Mr. B himself sits right at the top of the political ladder as the leader of the yellow peril, namely the Golkar party. Conflict of interest? Well possibly the victims of the Lapindo mud disaster still awaiting compensation, or those accusing the great man and his companies of massive tax evasion may think so. Alas though such conflicts of interest seem pretty common everywhere in the world. In this context, Mister B is just Dick Cheney without the John Wayne, gun slinging bravado, or a slightly less shag happy Silvio Berlusconi.

This Indonesian colossus should not be misunderestimated though, and so I decided to slip out the back door of the Ramadan rice orgy in order to investigate the Rasuna Epicentrum complex, the jewel in the Bakrie crown. When it’s eventually finished, there'll be five towers, a concert hall, an elite club, a block of exclusive suites, a shopping mall and a river walk (breathing apparatus optional).

The magnetic pull of Bakrie Tower itself proved too hard to resist and so I slip through the main entrance and made straight for the elevators. The Bakrie Tower lifts are extremely high-tech and one has to type one's destination floor into a keypad before being greeted by an anodyne, digitally over-sampled female voice upon entering the elevator itself.

I thought that I may as well go for broke and punched in 47, the top floor. After a high-speed, ear popping Star Trek ride I stepped out into the totally barren pinnacle of the Bakrie Empire. The windows had been put in but that's about it. The builders are clearly working their way up from the bottom. The views that the 47th floor affords over the city's urban cauldron are indeed spectacular though and made me theorize that perhaps something very special is being planned for the upper deck.

Maybe I was standing in the future Death Star nerve centre of the great patriarch's bid to snatch the country from the grasp of Parliament. Maybe Mr. B, the apotheosis of Indonesia’s sleaze ridden political culture, will seize control and run operations from a gleaming, high-tech, top floor base. Here, Mr. B and his henchmen will glare down on the city from its panoptic heights, ready to unleash platoons of storm troopers and laser gun death from the tower's car parks on any dissenters at the barricades.

And if the worst comes to the worst, he’ll have an escape podule plumbed into the roof, ready to blast him into orbit so that he can rendezvous with the Bakrie Industries space station before rocketing down to his secret hollowed out volcano lair in the Pacific. Better push for that third SBY term perhaps.

Opium Wars

2010-08-23T23:54:00.004+07:00

33 attacks on worshipping Christians in Indonesia during the first six months of this year. Quite a depressing statistic and I'm sure you've all been following the story with a mounting sense of outrage and disbelief.

Well, last Sunday I resolved to join the worshippers from Bekasi's HKBP church and their sympathisers as they raised their voices in protest up at Monas. HKBP is the church that has been turfed out of its place of worship and forced into a local field, which must make a kneeling in prayer a rather soggy affair. Not content with this humiliation however, those lovable rogues from the FPI (Islamic Defenders Front) launched an all-out attack on these poor Christians three weeks ago, hospitalising a number of them in the process.

Up at Monas, several hundred worshippers had gathered. Alas, they were hemmed into a small area on the south side of the park by the police and were not allowed to head north to the Presidential Palace, where earlier I had seen rehearsals for Independence Day in full militaristic swing, neat rows of polished epaulettes goose-stepping to some funky brass band boogie.

No, the worshippers had to content themselves with gathering around a small truck on which a Christian youth was launching into a classically Indonesian amplified diatribe, bewailing the plight of happy clappers in the good old R of I. The young orator was flanked by two members of an organisation called the PMKRI, a catholic student group apparently. These two chaps sported purple berets with yellow pom-poms on the top making them look, to my eyes at least, like a cross between Black Panther style militants and a couple of camp sippers of crème de menthe.

"Where are you SBY?!” our Christian Malcolm X censured his president. The silence has indeed been deafening as Indonesians, both Christian and Muslim, wait for some moral leadership from the kleptomaniacal carpetbaggers that rule the roost. The wheels have most definitely fallen off the Yudhoyono bandwagon over the last 12 months that's for sure.

I parleyed with some of the demonstrators, who were all sporting red ribbons around their arms as a show of solidarity. "We used to have Gus Dur and Nurcolish, but now there seems to be nobody committed to religious peace. It wasn't like this when I was a child," one woman told me. An elderly gentleman, perhaps getting nearer to the truth, explained to me that, "This tension has been under the surface for 40 years in Indonesia, but now it's out in the open."

There then followed a rousing a really quite emotional chorus of the Indonesian National anthem, as the protesters reaffirmed their Indonesian identities and the spirit of pluralism that this diverse, archipelagic nation was founded upon. The singing was passionate and committed, although not so much at the back where I was standing, but perhaps I was in the Jewish section.

I glanced over my shoulder and noted with a snigger that, viewed from this part of the park, the bulging dome of the Istiqlal mosque sits at the bottom of the main Monas phallus in exactly the position that you would expect to find something similarly spherical. I wondered if this smutty little tableau was a forewarning of Indonesia's future, a future in which minority religions are given the shaft as a new Islamic nationalist paradigm establishes itself and goes on a testosterone fuelled rampage.

I noticed a girl in a jilbab wearing a rucksack towards the rear of the demo. “Perhaps she's getting ready to press the detonator button,” I thought to myself, and then felt shocked that such an idea would pop into my head. How could I think such a thing about friendly old Indonesia? But it was too late to chastise myself, the thought had been there.

Where will the country’s descent into religious demagoguery lead if left unchecked? To its ultimate break-up and Balkanisation? Islamic orthodoxy (orthos: right, doxa: opinions) is an approach to the great religion that seeks to end debate and replace it with a set of rules and prescriptions to be followed. Debate and argument are, in this formulation of religion, now seen as an insult to the faith itself and close to heresy. To the extent that the modern ayatollahs and mullahs are informing the world that the last word is in on how the Koran should be understood, I would submit that they are being treasonous to the good book itself.

What the great religions require of their followers are intelligent engagement and interpretive agility. The teachings are inevitably in the form of metaphors, symbols, analogies and parables. You can't get at transcendent truth by pointing at things and issuing Fatwas. You do it by telling stories and by engaging people in the dance and drama of the dialogue.

Islam came after Christianity and thus guaranteed that this long debate would be revived. There was now more than one book, more than one set of prophecies, more than one prophet. Now, however, many of faith would seek to end debate rather than encourage it and we've turned full circle once again. Where is the spirit of merdeka?

Wi' Jam In

2010-08-16T00:47:00.004+07:00

And lo the Lord spake and he said, "I will send rain on the earth for 40 days and nights," and Noah did build an Ark for every creature in the world, including a big room for poo. Very important that. Well last Saturday afternoon it didn't actually rain for 40 days and 40 nights. In fact, it only rained heavily for about 40 minutes as far as I could tell. Unfortunately though the scenes around the busy roads of South Jakarta were truly awe-inspiring in their massively traffic jammed evocation of some futuristic biblical apocalypse.

Perhaps though it is to the ancient Greeks that I have to turn in order to evoke the full, majestic, cinematic, Charlton Heston sweep of my journey from the Blok M area to my house in Mampang. It's a journey of under 4km as the crow flies however, in an epic voyage that would have broken the spirit of Odysseus himself, I fired up my vintage vehicle at 4:30 PM and finally reached my commune at 10:30 PM, a nerve shredding six hours later.

Now I never take the old girl out for a spin on weekdays, unless it's already gone 10 PM and I cycle to work every day. Alas though, weekend supermarket runs leave me vulnerable to traffic foul ups and acts of God. Last Saturday's jam was so colossal however that I believe my six-hour jaunt home has broken the Indonesian allcomers record for the ratio of distance travelled to time spent on the road.

In fact, the last time that I drove back from the beach at Pelabuhan Ratu, some 150 km away, I managed the journey in just three hours. So, effectively, I could have driven to the south coast of Java in back in the time that it took me to get home last Saturday. Was this a bloodcurdling glimpse of Jakarta's future? Will it soon be like this even when it's not raining? It's a thought that should send shivers down the spine of any city resident.

Allow me though to recount a few salient highlights of this epic voyage to you. I feel the need to unburden myself you understand, to finally let the horror of it all go and move on with my life. I first hit trouble when I turned into Kemang. The flood water was only about 2 feet deep, however I decided not to risk it and made a U-turn, aiming to try another route. Foolishly though I hadn't counted on the swollen rivers that run through the Kemang area, bearing gifts of water from the hills of Bogor.

It took me about an hour to crawl down to Pejaten, including another failed attempt to cross over into Kemang, where I was again confronted with another knee-high water world. I eventually reached the big intersection at Pejaten where a policeman warned me that there was a big flood on the road I was planning to turn up. He then proceeded to wave me in the direction of said flood. I'll honestly never understand this country, not if I live to be 300.

Anyhow, after around 20 minutes of painfully slow crawling back north, me and my fellow traffic jam renegades ground to a total stop. There was indeed an impassable flood ahead, however a U-turn was also out of the question this time as the Busway dividers had us completely penned in. Engines began to switch off and I simply got out of the car and left it in the middle of the jam before heading off to a nearby Padang restaurant for a feed.

Relief finally arrived two hours later when some local lads removed a section of the Busway dividers, allowing me and my fellow ‘jamees’ to finally escape the confines of our three laned prison. Yes, my olive twig carrying dove had finally arrived but my ark wasn't out of the woods yet.

As everywhere to my immediate west had seemingly gone Venetian, I strategized that I could reach home by doubling back through the East via Pasar Minggu and Kalibata. Bad move. The ensuing two and a half hour crawl through endless sets of jammed traffic lights gave me the impression that I'd been cursed in a manner similar to Bill Murray in the movie 'Groundhog Day'.

In the film, Murray is forced to live the same day over and over again. Eventually, reaching his nadir of despair, he commits suicide over and over again in increasingly bizarre ways, only to wake up on the same morning in the same bed after each attempt at buying the harp farm.

I also felt that a time loop was returning me to the same set of lights on the same stretch of jammed road over and over and over again. If my journey had gone on much longer I would have also probably tried to kill myself a thousand times with whatever I could find at hand inside my metal hulled hell.

As the journey wore on I imagined myself forcing the screwdriver in my glove compartment through my eye socket into my cerebellum or drinking litres of radiator fluid, only to be continually reincarnated and returned to the same set of lights on the vision of Hades that was Pasar Minggu Raya.

I was indeed starting to lose the plot a little during the final half hour of my epic voyage. At one point I seriously considered ploughing a fried rice vendor and his trolley into the asphalt for blocking my passage through a set of lights. Eventually I reached home at 10:30 PM and only stopped shaking after I'd consumed about half a bottle of gin. Never again dear readers.

Chain Reaction

2010-08-10T10:56:00.000+07:00

Jakarta's transportation purgatory is seemingly never out of the news these days and straw clutching solutions are increasingly being tabled. Solutions such as banning motorcycles from certain roads or park and ride initiatives designed to spur people into taking the plunge on the ever more dog-eared Busway system are the latest brainstorm efforts.

As I’ve said before though, I don't believe that there is actually a solution to the increasingly desperate gridlock at this point, barring the invention of a teleportation system which, were it to be run by TransJakarta, would no doubt be rematerializing people at their destinations with their heads on back to front and the like.

The humble bicycle continues to make headway in Jakarta however and Indonesia's Bike2Work community goes from strength to strength, encouraging more and more mentally unstable individuals such as myself to head to the office under their own pedal power. Looking further a field, I was also encouraged to read last week that my home city of London has just introduced a new scheme whereby 5000 bicycles will be made available at a number of special stations around town for anyone who wants to borrow them for a short trip and a very modest fee. Perhaps London's just trying to burnish its image with the IOC ready for the 2012 Olympic Games, however a genuine bicycling revolution seems to have been underway in the UK over the last few years.

Well, not to be outdone by my homeland, I saddled up last Sunday and headed down to Bike2Work's new headquarters on Jl. KH Achmad Dahlan, which lies between Blok M and Radio Dalam in South Jakarta. The group currently has over 10,000 members in Indonesia, although this is a long way from the one million cyclists that Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo insists will be needed before he starts building dedicated bicycle lanes in town.

If he did show a bit of vision on this issue though there'd certainly be less pollution. In fact, if you compare calories of human energy expenditure whilst cycling with the energy present in gasoline, then the bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created and can get the equivalent of about 3000 miles per gallon. As iconic author Iris Murdoch once said, "The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart." Pure in heart perhaps although in shirt and trousers one can get awfully sweaty in this climate and that could be a serious disincentive to the considering the further bicyclification of Jakarta.

As it is, many of Jakarta's motorists, to my endless consternation, double park and cause bottlenecks just to avoid walking an extra 100m to their ultimate destinations, so what chance is there of getting them wobbling through town on two wheels? Perhaps an evening Bike2Bar scheme, when it's a little cooler, would be better? Erm…on second thoughts perhaps not, I don’t think the casualty departments could cope.

Anyway, down at the new Bike2Work HQ, a rack of top-flight machines was parked outside. I dismounted and chatted to some of the friendly gang of cyclists who were visiting the center. Friendly they may have been, however they take their cycling very seriously, a lot more seriously than I do at any rate. They even had helmets, the big softies.

One married deaf couple that I met were just stopping by in Jakarta as part of a tour around Indonesia. Then, as I was weighing up the pros and cons of being a deaf cyclist in Jakarta, a guy called Edwin came up and introduced himself to me. "Where have you just ridden from then Sir?" I enquired. "All the way from Tangerang," he replied, "but that's nothing" he continued, "me and some friends recently did a fun ride from Tangerang all the way to Bandung, that's 170 km. It took us 16 hours."

"Fun" ride ay? I guess that the vast majority of Jakartans would sooner eat a portion of rat fried rice at a roadside warung whilst being loudly serenaded by a tambourine bashing lady boy with laryngitis and an Adam's apple the size of a grapefruit than put themselves through this amount of "fun".

Fit, amateur club cyclists can indeed cover enormous distances though. In my formative years, I used to enjoy the annual London to Brighton cycle ride, during which literally tens of thousands of riders would spend the day covering the 80 odd kilometers between the capital and England's south coast.

Maybe a similar ride here would help to publicize the whole biking shebang. Jakarta to Cirebon perhaps, along the north coast road? Then back by special train? Possibly such an event would end in carnage and hundreds of juggernaut related fatalities by the end of the ride so some kind of mass burial site in Cirebon itself may have to be employed.

After half an hour, the esteemed Mister Edwin set off back to Tangerang on his metal horse while I took my leave of these strapping, tree trunk thighed kings among men and headed off to the nearest Circle K in order to fill my panniers up with Bintang. Life on the open road is a thirsty business you understand.

Down in the Park

2010-08-04T12:32:00.000+07:00

I went in search of a little green Jakarta this week, a task that required my full attention. The chance to enjoy a few blades of grass and trees, whilst enjoying the pleasures of riding my bicycle through the odd rustic brown dog turd or two takes dedication to the cause but I like a challenge. Apparently Jakarta has a total area of green space that adds up to 9.6% of its total area. The city administration however is determined to increase this figure to 13.9% by the end of this year. I'm not quite sure how they are going to achieve this ambitious figure, possibly by demolishing a few cardboard and corrugated iron shanty towns and then using their former occupants’ dead bodies as compost, but we'll see.

And so I set out on a Sunday morning hangover shaking cycle (every pothole felt like someone trying to jam satay skewers into my eye sockets) and rolled down to the recently renovated park just behind the Jl. Barito flower and bird market near Blok M. Now this particular green area is actually of an almost decent size and features tall trees, cool shade, some rather distressed looking chickens, a few rather phallic looking sculptures (perhaps they hold Dionysian fertility rites down here after evening prayers) and a stream choked with a level of inorganic phosphate and ammonia that positively makes the eyes water. It's not a bad step towards greening Jakarta though and one can even just about get out of earshot of the city traffic (although the familiar bajaj chainsaw orchestra can still be heard through the gentle rustling of the leaves).

Next, I headed up to Lapangan Banteng, a large field just north of Monas for a stroll around Flora and Fauna Jakarta 2010, an annual plant and pet show that always makes for a pleasant afternoon. There may not be a lot of green space around the city but at least you can make your home a touch greener with a few plants and perhaps a nice fish pond, which will no doubt end up being a breeding ground for mosquitoes that will subsequently infect you and your family with dengue fever.

Nature is never easy, although it proved hard to believe that the natural world is so unremittingly bloody in tooth and claw when I came across a stall selling fluffy bunny rabbits in cages. Alas there were no tigers in cages for rich businessmen and regional government heads to buy, as many have done in the past, although I doubt I would have been able to afford one anyway. In any event, not possessing genitalia the size of a cashew nut, I'd have little use for such a dangerous psychological crutch (crutch?) rattling its cage outside my bedroom window every morning.

There was even a chicken corner down at F&F 2010, despite the fact that letting poultry run loose in the city is supposed to be illegal due to the continuing threat of bird flu. I guess this is just another one of those laws that is difficult to enforce, and thus nobody really bothers trying to anyway.

Plant wise, there were plenty of herbs on offer for one to take home and cultivate, including rosemary, lavender and ginger, although nothing that you'd want to stick inside a Rizla, more’s the pity. One stall in particular caught my eye. It was called the Vega Vertical Garden System and included a whole raft of creative ways for covering bland concrete walls with cool greenery, vines, creepers and trellises. Imagine every office block along Jl.Sudirman looking like the clubhouse at Wimbledon, marvellous.

Finally, I headed back downtown to the now empty and abandoned Taman Ria. This huge complex and lake now lies dormant, even the legendary Bugils had to vacate its original home here a couple of years back. The site would make for a superb park and a bit of urban breathing space.

Alas though we learnt recently what plans are actually in store for dear old Taman Ria. Yes, you guessed it, another bloody shopping mall will soon be firing up its gaudy neon logos for an ever consumption hungry public. No doubt they will also fill the lake in with concrete in order to provide parking space for a thousand SUVs and their McDonald's chomping occupants, or perhaps erect some kind of all in one WiFi-roller-disco-net-burger-driving-range.

It's a shame really, just at the moment it's very peaceful down there. Ultimately though, parks and green areas are about more than just having a nice lie down on a bit of grass in the sun, they also create an ecological awareness in city slickers. As people live more and more in artificial, man-made surroundings, they live in an increasing ignorance of natural processes, processes that ultimately we owe our very survival to.

Thus, I propose a new form of reverse eco-terrorism. We should infiltrate the forthcoming new Taman Ria mall's sterile concourses with seeds, soil and fungal spores in our pockets and drop them in out of the way places: down lift shafts, in car parks and ceiling partitions, and wait for a new store filled Hanging Gardens of Babylon to emerge.

The Filth and the Fury

2010-07-24T16:21:00.001+07:00

Well lot of people seem to be getting so hot under the collar about life's more erotic side at the moment in Indonesia that it is perhaps a good thing that we've been having such a lot of unseasonable rain this year in order to cool the general population's amorous ardor or purple faced religious indignation, whichever side of the fence they reside on. We've had the home made porn of the stars recently, along with a rash of Busway gropings (if that is indeed the right collective noun), statues of women being torn down by Muslims and teachers checking students phones for smut.

And above this whole moral morass of fleshly lust sits the Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Tifatul Sembiring. A member of the conservative Islamic Prosperous Justice Party, Mr. Sembiring reckons he can stem the tsunami of Internet filth that has swept the world in a mere two months. In this, I believe, he has set himself an impossible task and will end up looking like King Canute himself (or some near anagram of that name at any rate).

Far be it from me to suggest though that all of this through the keyhole, curtain twitching, thigh wobbling titillation dressed up in the burka of outrage and scandal is a diversionary tactic to try and distract the public from continued rampant corruption. No Siree Bob, not me, there's no connection there at all, and you'd be a subversive and an atheist to even suggest such a thing.

Nevertheless, I thought I'd try and take Jakarta's erotic temperature this week though and so first headed out on the TransJakarta Busway in the hope that someone would give me damned good groping, or a gentle fondling at the very least. A plan to segregate the genders on the buses and in the bus stops has failed already, however uniformed anti-grope officers are apparently being deployed on the system.

I boarded a bus traveling the Kuningan-Ragunan Busway corridor and was immediately almost groped roughly by the badly designed automated rear door, which has the ability to flatten one against the glass partitions on the bus like a mosquito against a car windscreen. I surveyed my fellow passengers. Who were the most likely gropers? It was hard to tell by just looking. I mean it's always the quiet ones isn't it?

Rubbing and frotting are not the only problems though. Mobile phone cameras have spawned a new global phenomenon, namely the cheeky up skirt shot. Apparently, in Japan, the problem is so bad that all new mobile phones are required to make a sound when a photo is taken and the sound cannot be switched off, thus acting as a warning to potential up skirt victims. Well, what do you expect from a country that has vending machines selling used knickers?

The Busway stops now feature signs indicating separate waiting areas for both men and women, although everyone seemed to be ignoring them. A poster proclaimed, "I like Jakarta clean" however this was a literal, rather than a moral, affirmation.

I disembarked from the TransJakarta and went in search of some DVDs and what do you know? Before too long, I was being proffered plastic bags full of quintuple X-strength movies, accompanied by a sly wink from the vendor. Old Mr. Sembiring may be trying to clamp down on the Internet naughties but Jakartans are vociferous consumers of pirated DVD pornography. Stemming the sleaze tsunami is seemingly impossible. We live in the postmodern, hyper real world of infinitely reproducible images, the ecstasy of communication, a million gadgets and computational devices accelerating our central nervous system towards an unknowable future. Real reality as we knew it ended years ago.

DVD-Rs, flash drives, Bluetooth, e-mails, the only way to stop the stuff these days would be for Indonesia to pull the plug and forcibly regress back to a bucolic, pre-industrial existence. I can see it now, the Islamic Amish of Southeast Asia. Cyberspace warrior Sembiring is perhaps barking up the wrong fishnet stocking, as most Indonesians have Internet connections so slow, if they have them at all, that DVDs are by far the best option for those looking to enjoy a quick session of family jewels polishing.

In fact, one very easy way to recreate the Indonesian dial-up Internet X-rated experience is to take the cover of one of these 'jazzy' pirate DVDs, cover it with a sheet of white paper and then gradually move the paper across the cover image at a rate of 1cm every five minutes. In fact, instead of filtering out porn sites, I’d prefer that local servers post images upside-down, so that we can see the most interesting parts first.

In a sense, it’s been argued, human sexuality is inherently pornographic. Human beings, uniquely of all animals, exist within the symbolic order of language and possess memories and the ability to fantasize, and so our sexualities are always inscribed by the images in our heads. Strip away the fantasy and sexuality disappears with it, and that’s not just some specious argument to account for the fact that I go through a box of tissues every two days.

Saminamina Eh Eh Waka Waka Eh Eh

2010-07-12T17:24:00.000+07:00

Well I'm back in town once more after my World Cup dalliance over in South Africa and busy reconnecting myself with Indonesia's current issues of the day. Alas, the country seems to be in a bit of a pickle doesn't it? Police corruption, political corruption, religious fundamentalism running rife, exploding gas canisters killing people and porn scandals.

Perhaps it’s just the increasingly tenacious probing of the media that are affording me this depressing perception of the country. I mean, there's always been something of a stink surrounding Indonesia’s political, social, financial and religious institutions. Now however it seems as if the toilet lid has been lifted and the torch has been shone into the murky depths of the pan, revealing the odious floaters happily bobbing in a bath of their own sleaze and cant.

It's a rum do all right. Still, in comparison with the other countries around the region, perhaps things are par for the course. Singapore: still a crypto-fascist Orwellian nanny state. Malaysia: an autocratic 'Rainbow Coalition' supporting institutionalised racism and disturbing theocratic tendencies. Thailand: a monarch obsessed democratic failure. The Philippines: a classic US sponsored feudalist banana republic basket case. Myanmar: a jackbooted Nazi dictatorship. Welcome to ASEAN folks! The future is ours!

There, that should get the knee jerk letters flowing in. And Indonesian democracy itself? Inspired by the late, great Richard Feynman, I'm tempted to call this country a cargo cult democracy. The Pacific Island cargo cults built air traffic control landing towers out of wood and runways out of stone in order to tempt down the plane of the great prophet, John Frum. Similarly, this country has the superficial appearance of a real democracy: elections, parliaments, political parties and campaigns and so on. However, on closer inspection, it is clear that nothing really works and everything is just a lot of old pretend.

Things seem to be so bad that the Suharto era is now often touted as the good old days. You should always be suspicious of people harking back to, "The good old days." Nobody ever thought they were good at the time.

My, I am in a bad mood today. Well, the football is still on at least and so I grabbed my souvenir Vuvuzela (plastic World Cup din making trumpet) and took it out and about on the streets last weekend before the German machine kicked Diego Maradona's impeccably tailored butt all the way back to Buenos Aires.

Alas, last Saturday night it was so busy, around the Kemang area at least, that I had to abandon the car and walk to the pub. Still, at least this gave me the opportunity to scare a few people with the old Vuvu.

I persuaded various Saturday night revellers on the street to try a quick par on the 'zela, however very few of them had the jazz chops and Miles Davis embouchure necessary to squeeze more than a damp fart out of the thing. It does take a bit of practice to get a full stadium rattling blast out of a Vuvuzela to be fair. Although God help us all if they start mass-producing the things here and selling them with the Ramadan fireworks next month.

It was busy alright last Saturday night though. The combination of World Cup quarter-final fever and a torrential downpour produced a pell-mell chaos on the streets so severe that I started to think that I was in some end of the world disaster movie. I theorized that people were blocking out the dire political prognosis for the country with the mindless escapism that spectator sport offers.

Not that I'm immune of course. "Why am I watching so much footy?" I wondered. Why is it promoted wherever one turns? Are modern spectator sports part of a system of illusion, deception and indoctrination whose function is to distract people from the things that might actually matter to their lives? Does sitting in front of a screen watching the World Cup, as opposed to actually attempting to play the bloody game of football oneself, merely induce passivity and jingoistic, anti-intellectual group cohesion?

Not that a lot of brain power and passion isn't devoted to sport of course. I've been in conversations with people, including Indonesians, who possess the most amazingly arcane knowledge of football and its intricacies and tactics. I usually feel inadequate in such exchanges and head to the bar for a round of rugged ales, lest my masculinity be called into question.

Imagine though if all of this energy was channelled into popular struggle, rather than being diverted in this way. The world would perhaps be a very different place. Or perhaps this is all just sour grapes. A post-South Africa comedown brought on by being back in Jakarta and the fact that England were knocked out after playing like a team of arthritic old ladies on their way to the supermarket for a few tins of cat food and some hair nets.

I eventually crawled home after the second match had finished at 3:30 AM, several sheets to the wind and barely able to manage a blast on the old 'zela by that point. Sport can be positively ruinous to one's health. Enjoy the final everyone.

Stay Tuned...

2010-07-03T11:37:00.000+07:00

Just back from the World Cup so am having a rare week off. More ill informed drivel next week grapple fans...

Muddied Oafs at the Goal

2010-06-26T16:00:00.001+07:00

Well my little durians, I’m now in Cape Town enjoying the World Cup and the whole South African experience. It certainly makes a nice change from Jakarta’s terminal urban purgatory. The South African winter is fresh but often sunny and bright and the city itself is quite spectacular.

The flight down was uneventful aside from a transfer in Dubai, which is more like an interstellar spacestation than an airport, its vast network of hi-tech concourses, shopping levels and departure lounges succeeding admirably in confusing the hell out of me.

Then it was a nine hours to Cape Town, a hook up with my friends at the airport, straight out for a drive through the beautiful city to the stunning stadium and then straight into the match... mainlining pure adrenaline I was.

Alas the match in question was England versus Algeria, which ended in a 0-0 draw and which was a match so utterly lacking in what makes football fun to watch that it already seems to have passed into footballing folklore as one of the most bowel shatteringly tedious in history. The adrenaline levels took a slight dip at this point.

I was damned, however, if I was going to let England manager and chief organ grinder, Fabio Capello, and his simian charges ruin my holiday, and so the next day we headed down through beautiful countryside, coast and mountains, to the Cape of Good Hope to straddle the Atlantic and Indian oceans. And who did we see down at the Cape enjoying the sights with all of the other tourists? It was none other than Fabio himself, out for a spot of sightseeing! Alas, we were too surprised at seeing him in the flesh to push the dear fellow over the edge of the path to a watery death.

A couple of days later it was time to go and watch Portugal demolish North Korea 7-0. This was a lot more fun than the England game. I'll take seven goals over zero any day of the week, although it was not perhaps the most evenly matched contest. There's a huge ethnic Portuguese community in Cape Town and they were out in numbers.

Our attempts to get hold of a North Korean scarf or flag around the stadium proved in vain alas. We were really keen though to show our solidarity with the Democratic People's Republic and throw our support behind the small block of 100 or so supporters who, according to some reports, were actually Chinese actors who were being paid a couple of thousand dollars a day.

I wonder how the match will be reported back in the Democratic People's Republic itself. Possibly they'll broadcast that their brave boys won 7-0, instead of losing by the same scoreline. That should confuse matters sufficiently. This is, after all, a country whose Supreme Leader was once reported in the North Korean media to have played a round of golf in 18 shots (which was followed by the birds on the course singing the national anthem in Korean).

The following day, my colleagues and I headed to the centre of town and the famous Fan Park in order to watch what turned out to be South Africa's final game against a French side who had so far proved every bit as dismal as the English. In fact, there had been rumours that the French side was on strike and I had visions of them walking around the pitch reading newspapers whilst Bafana Bafana won the game 200-0.

In the event, Bafana Bafana whipped the French 2-1 and the Fan Park went wild. It was a bittersweet victory however as it the team was out of the tournament having failed to garner enough points during this group stage. It was party time in Cape Town though and the Windhoek lager flowed freely.

The next day, after a glorious sunny walk around the coast, we retired to another local hostelry for another England performance. Yes, masochistic glutton for punishment that I am, it was time to watch the boys again. Watching my national team was becoming like rubbernecking at a car accident.

It was time for action after all the endless press conferences, soul-searching and general rending of garments. After the USA game, the time for talking was over. After the Algeria game, the time for talking about how the time for talking was over, was over. This time however, the lads actually managed to pull off a 1-0 victory, securing a place in the last 16 against arch nemesis Germany. Oh God.

I'll be back in the Big Durian next week folks for more tales of Indonesian urban woe and I hope I haven't missed too much in my absence. A few quick logons to the Globe website would suggest not as we’re clearly at the media saturation apex of the great Peter Porn curve. Hopefully, the gentlemen and the two ladies in question will be immersed in vat of boiling tar on national TV during the RCTI World Cup final halftime show and Indonesia can then fully devote its energies towards hosting the 2022 tournament, or failing that, the 2822 tournament.