The Carnival is Over

After the leafy, expensive restaurant lined gaiety of the Kemang festival two weeks ago, but I thought a bit of compare and contrast would be in order. So, in order to demonstrate my social mobility, I exchanged by designer label boxer shorts for moth eaten Y-fronts last weekend and headed to this year's Jalan Jaksa Festival, officially known as the Festival Seni dan Budaya 2008 (Art and Culture Festival 2008).

Ironically located uptown of the bourgeois bolthole of Kemang, Jalan Jaksa is ostensibly Jakarta's backpacker central. Backpacker numbers have dropped off in Indonesia over the past decade, this is possibly due to global perceptions of the country but also no doubt because so many young people are far too busy with their Face Book accounts these days to bung a few pairs of socks in a rucksack and head out on a global gallivant.

Jaksa is also frequented by many more permanent foreign residents of Jakarta as well of course who head to the strip (located just south of the national monument, Monas) in search of cheap booze, cheap food and even cheaper conversation.

I personally love the place and can enjoy chatting to my comrades there over a cheap Bintang without the expense, deafening sub woofers and achingly hip poseurs of the city's trendier clubs spoiling my evening. In darker moods however I tend to see Jaksa as a dangerously inflammatory mix of alcoholic whiteys, unconvincing female impersonators, female-female impersonators, dodgy local gangster types and the kind of Africans who are often arrested for illegal, "Horse," trading (if you catch my drift).

Nevertheless, the street will always hold a special place in my affections and has just recently been enlivened by some new businesses. Cocktail and Friends is a pleasant and relaxing outdoor cocktail bar, the popular KL Village serve some great Malaysian food and just round the corner on Jl. Wahid Hasyim, Melly's Bar is proving popular with both locals and expatriates alike. The future of Jaksa remains uncertain though as rumors of impending Carrefour supermarket developments and some much dreaded gentrification continue to circulate.

But what of this year's festival itself? Well, despite being considerably smaller than the recent Kemang festival in terms of scale, the energy levels seemed equally high. The street was thronging when I rocked up in my classic, orange, emphysema inducing Bajaj. A large stage had been erected and several local bands were battling it out. Some expatriate acquaintances of mine were also playing a set under the charming moniker of Bob Viagra and the Terrorists. Hmmm.

Moving right along there were plenty of small stalls selling clothes, jewellery, knick-knacks and food which served to add a bit of color to the inevitable impersonal cigarette and mobile phone network promotions. Muslim apparel was on offer for more pious Jaksa heads and there were some lovely displays of traditional costumes.

It was the rock star T-shirts that really caught my eye however. Jalan Jaksa has long housed an infamous hairdresser called Piss Salon complete with a neon lit sign planted proudly outside. The salon's owners remain seemingly unaware that they cannot spell the word, "Peace," correctly, either that or they can’t be arsed to change it. Alas this unfortunate phonetic misspelling seems to be spreading. At the festival I came across a stall selling T-shirts promoting the iconic Indonesian rock band Slank. The garments in question proudly bore the legends, "Slank Say Piss," and, "Slank Baby Piss". The latter T-shirt also featured a picture of a seemingly dry infant. Perhaps this is all deliberate though and the group are in fact moving away from their former hippie idealism and pursuing a more anarchic, "Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols," type direction.

The festival did indeed rock hard and even the street's famous bearded Cambodian parking attendant seemed to awaken from his familiar standing slumber stance.

Halfway down the strip I came across a young local guide offering tourist information and daily trips around Jakarta and Java. He implored me to give him a plug to my 10 readers. He informed me that his name was, rather implausibly, Rocky Montana although on his leaflets I found out that it was in fact, Adi Pagessa. Interesting green horns should e-mail adi.pagessa@gmail.com.

After a hearty local Batavian snack of Kerak Telor (perennially weird egg type thing) I dived into one of the street bars and slaked my thirst until the wee small hours. The carnival season continues next week's folks with my report on the city's Independence Day festivities. Hopefully Bob Viagra and his Terrorists will be back for another set of Crystal Gale covers then.

The Smell of the Crowd, the Roar of the Greasepaint.

No Jakarta Post this Sunday as it's Independence Day. Here's something from the archives though:

The ritual humiliation of the Bule on Indonesian TV has proved to be an entertaining diversion for the local populace. I have friends who have appeared in both Sinetron soap operas and advertisements and the new show Bu. Gil. (Bule Gila or crazy Westerner) has just upped the anti by getting local expats to make complete tits of themselves being Bajaj drivers and cigarette vendors for a day.

However, the chance to get my fizog onto the big screen in a proper movie (albeit as a humble extra) was something I just couldn't pass up. The romance of celluloid was a powerful enticement to my participation in the project although not everyone felt the same way. The friends that my buddy Peter and I promised to bring to the shooting to make up the numbers, failed to materialize, and there then followed a two-hour intermission whilst some of the production crew burned down to Jalan Jaksa to pick up a few more itinerant Bules. The extra whiteys duly arrived, although some of them were clearly a bit the worse for wear after an afternoon of high living on the street of broken dreams.

The movie was called Ca Bau Kan, a period drama set in old Batavia during the Dutch colonial era, hence the need for us lilly-white thespians. The star of the film was Ferry Salim, a famous Indonesian actor who seems to be presenting just about every tacky quiz show on TV these days.

In order to confer the movie an authentic colonial ambience, some of the scenes were being shot in the lovely old Gedung Arsip building in Kota. After being made up by some charming young ladies, it was off to the wardrobe department to don some authentic 19th-century togs. I shoehorned myself into an ill fitting but extremely smart long tailed jacket and formal chemise and waited for our scene to start shooting.

There then followed the inevitable delay. The combination of all the usual technical hitches and disruptions found on a film set with Indonesian Jam Karet (rubber time) meant that we didn't get to strut our stuff until gone 9 PM. However, myself and the other extras quite enjoyed strolling around the old, colonial building in period costume as if we had been projected backwards in time. We even got to meet the leading man, Mr. Salim himself, who seemed to be an affable kind of a guy and not at all haughty or megalomaniacal. It was also fascinating to watch a movie set in action.

Eventually our time came and we were ushered onto the set. My fellow extras and I were playing the jury in a courtroom scene. Our one dramatic task was to applaud Ferry's character's speech before being silenced by the recalcitrant judge's gavel. After 4 or 5 takes it was in the can and we all gathered round one of the cameras to view the rushes.

We were each given a token Rp.250,000 for our trouble before changing back into our modern clothes and heading out into Kota's smog. It had been a memorable experience on the whole. It may not have paid as well as a Pepsodent commercial that it was certainly a more culturally rewarding brush with fame.

After all that, it was off to the cinema six months later in order to spot my five second contribution to a 90 minute movie. Ah well, even Robert De Niro had to start somewhere.

Green Streets

This week I toddled off to the Kemang Festival which was being held just around the corner from MM Towers (I’m always willing to go that extra mile for the column you understand). The Kemang Festival is a classic summer celebration of street life in the manner of other famous world city fests such as West London's iconic Notting Hill Carnival, albeit on not quite the same scale and with considerably fewer sub woofers shaking the foundations of nearby buildings.

During the festival, Jl. Kemang Raya was closed off to traffic from McDonalds all the way down to Pizza Hut a couple of kilometers down the road. Despite being book ended by these two US corporate behemoths, the festival itself was a celebration of small-scale businesses from the kind of cheap clothing that can be found in any shopping plaza at the less interesting end of the spectrum to some rather more fun handicrafts, curios and ethnic objets d'art.

I ambled down the street checking out various stalls of wickerwork knickknacks before coming across my old friend Mr John, probably the only pale face to be running his own stall. Mr John has an interesting little sideline knocking out smartly framed classic albums and their sleeves to Jakarta's rock 'n' roll cognoscenti. Interested punters should search for Vinyl obsessions on their browser and check out Mr John's lovely homepage which he assured me took him many patient hours wrestling with Dreamweaver and hundreds of cups of coffee to produce.



I rested awhile and watched a smartly dressed marching band pass by. Unfortunately, Kemang isn't nearly wide enough to accommodate a real carnival complete with floats parading down its length. A friend of mine suggested that they might be able to manage it by clearing a few stalls out of the way. They could call it, "Karnival Kemang Nusantara" or KKN for Short (Ho Ho).

Despite the narrow road and the seething multitudes I nevertheless saw five gas powered Bajaj slowly parading their way down the street. Along with specially designated rubbish bins for organic and inorganic trash, these five mean machines were a manifestation of this year's green themed festival. Alas the five vehicles that I saw probably represented the entire fleet of gas Bajaj. I very rarely seem to see these odor free green cuties around and Jakarta’s streets still seem to be dominated by the original orange three wheeled garbage incinerators. I wish the city administration would invest a little bit more money in these environmentally friendly alternatives.

I strolled on a little more and came across the music stage. At that moment a Death Metal band were bellowing obscenities and achieving the impressive 10 snare drum hits per second required of the genre. I'm not sure how green this music is as it's the sort of din that could seemingly make your lawn curl up and die.

Just next to this apocalyptic roar I spied the Westerners' enclave. Several otiose whiteys were living up to Indonesian preconceptions about us infidels and ripping into plastic beakers of ale outside the groaningly named Apaka Bar. I popped in for an hour or so; well it would be rude not to have said hello and it was damnably hot down there in Kemang.



As the evening set in a few drops of rain fell but luckily it did little to spoil what had been a day of great cheer and jollity. Jakarta is a city of much street level smiling despite the often appalling conditions of poverty that exist amid its suburban sprawl.

This city can be the stuff of nightmares and, as every horror movie buff knows, you need an element of the familiar and friendly to make a real nightmare. It has to be your best friend barbecuing cats over the stove, it has to be your mother being sliced up by hooded ninjas.

In Indonesia this element of the friendly and familiar is the Indonesian people themselves, unwaveringly nice folk: cheerful, hospitable, polite. Even the police are nice to you when they are not extorting or beating someone up. The begging kids forced onto the street by hoodlums will beam at you at the traffic lights. Poor wretches sifting through mounds of garbage looking for plastic bottles will give you a cheery, "Hello Mister."

It's an insane world alright. Readers wishing to enjoy more street level fun and squalor should pop along to the Jalan Jaksa festival which should be running today (8th and 9th of August).

Lazy Sod

I've been on holiday and have consequently been too busy tanning my arse and drinking Pina Coladas to write a column this week. Rest assured I'll be back next week with more querulous and potentially libelous material. In the mean time here is a BBC test card:

Maninjau-tis

A slight depression has been afflicting me for the past few weeks. I initially wondered what was going on, I mean, my finances weren’t in any more parlous a condition than they usually are and my lady friend and I weren’t getting along any more dreadfully than we do in general.

After a while I realized that I needed a proper week long holiday and not just a weekend in Bali like I had recently had (a mere act of self abuse next to the loving caress of a proper getaway in the country).

And so it’s another non-Jakartan column just to further enrage all of you busway surfing smog breathers. The holiday season it most definitely is and this week I’ve been enjoying the tranquility of Lake Maninjau which is situated near Padang in West Sumatra.

After a charming Air Asia flight to Padang, the most memorable feature of which was a half hour period of underwear soiling turbulence, I checked into a flop house for the evening.

Described in everyone’s favorite cheapskate guide book The Lonely Planet as being, “As sweet as a tall glass of Fanta,” the guesthouse in question alas didn’t quite live up to this billing. Hopefully by the next edition they’ll have added the phrase, “…that has been left out in the sun for several days,” to this description.

The next day I had a quick stroll through town which turned out not to be the, “Krakow of Indonesia,” as a friend of mine had acerbically described it. On the other hand it didn’t seem to be a tremendously exciting place either. However, as with many other places in Indonesia, the hot, shabby and dusty city is more than compensated for by the stunning surrounding countryside.

I hopped on a bus which took me on a three hour journey up through the hills to Bukittinggi. After a hearty lunch of Nasi Padang (surprise surprise) I had a quick spin around the town before bagging another two hour bus ride to Lake Maninjau.

The descent to the lakeside is quite awesome. Fantastic views over the water are afforded as the bus winds downwards through the lake’s surrounding mountains via 44 extremely sharp hairpin bends.

Finally, having managed to avoid plunging off the edge of the road to certain death, we arrived at the small lakeside town of Maninjau itself. The lake is smaller than North Sumatra’s famous Toba, South East Asia’s largest. Nevertheless, at 17km long and 8km wide, Maninjau is an awe inspiring sight.

There are no motor boats on the lake at all, only hand paddled kayaks and the local inhabitants farm fish as well as the lush surrounding hillsides.

There are a few places to stay in Maninjau town although it’s better to head four or five kilometers north, following the lake’s perimeter road until the Bayur area. Here, several beachside cottage complexes provide backpackers with basic facilities and fabulous lakeside views for a whopping Rp.40,000-50,000 per night.

I checked in and dived straight into the lake for a refreshing dip. The water is warmer than that of Lake Toba and is mirror calm.

The next day, after more spicy Padang food (sufferers of irritable bowel syndrome beware on those Sumatran jaunts) I rented a bicycle and set out to circumnavigate the lake, a journey of some 40km.

The ride took me though forest and small villages and there were superb views of the lake to be had at every turn. The mountains towered vertiginously above and the water shone like pure alabaster. On every street, kids shouted hellos; and what a lot of kids there were! Mr. Bambang, the proprietor of the fine hostel that I was staying at had told me the previous night that his offspring numbered a healthy five.

Such fecundity is typical of Indonesia’s boondocks (and cities for that matter) and I wondered how these swelling ranks of Sumatrans would impact on the Maninjau eco-system in the future.

I stopped for a bite to eat and had a pleasant conversation in Bahasa with an elderly lady who then proceeded to serve me the most appalling Soto Ayam I’ve ever eaten. Afterwards, I continued peddling around the lake in the burning sun and was thankfully only a kilometer from my hostel before my ancient bicycle’s dodgy gearing system finally chewed itself to bits.

It had been a splendid day though. Get yourself up to Padang pop pickers…

Kidsoberer

Last weekend I slid along to a swanky new shopping plaza called Pacific Place which is located in the Semanggi area. The plaza itself is an opulent yet half empty citadel of designer brands and fancy restaurants, much like the new Grande Plaza opposite Plaza Indonesia that I ended up scribbling about for MM last month.

My real reason for re-entering the bourgeois zone though was to visit a place called Kidzania. Located on the top floor of Pacific Place, Kidzania is a child sized replica of a real city. Parents pay Rp.150,000, shove their snack engorged offspring through the entrance and then trot off shopping, unencumbered by whining for three hours or so.

Meanwhile, their kids get to enjoy the whole Kidzania Weltanshauung for a whole afternoon. At Kidzania, children apparently, "Learn the value of money and work." Basically, the little nippers earn Kidzania dollars by working for various companies (familiar Indonesian corporate logos are splashed everywhere). The KIidzanians can then remove their ersatz junior cash from special mini BCA ATMs and spend it at the department store or at the Kidzania bakers, among other demands for the little ones’ hard earned wages.

Nearing the Kidzania lobby, I disembarked from the escalator and marveled at the Air Asia nose cone sticking out over the cashiers. Some serious money has been sunk into this place. I stepped through the Kidzania entrance and was immediately almost run over by a mini fire truck full of kids in firefighter uniforms with moustaches penciled in on their top lips (and that was just the girls). Clearly, the Kidzania simulacra of the adult world has been meticulously planned. I was starting to feel like Gulliver in Lilliput.



I strolled around the diminutive city square that constitutes Kidzania and was impressed by the attention to detail. There's a radio station in which kids can broadcast interviews out over the city, a theatre running acting classes, a Media Indonesia newspaper production office and a Pond's Sunsilk salon. There's a car track on which kids can drive mini Honda Jazzes, unencumbered by traffic jams, a mini PLN electricity office (no blackouts at Kidzania) and a BCA bank. There's a dentist at which kids poke around in a mannequin's mouth, a Holcim construction site for budding builders, an Air Asia flight simulator and even a mini courthouse, police station and jail complete with swarthy occupant that the kids have to bring to justice every hour.

The whole community has been rendered in miniature, deodorized, spruced up with the monolithic neo-feudal corporate logos of the neo-liberal adult world outside and fed to Kidzania's inhabitants under the guise of play.

Regular readers may have already correctly postulated that Kidzania raised a few bolshie MM heckles. There can be no denying though that the children were enjoying themselves. In my day the best we could manage was to push each other down a hill in a park in a disused shopping trolley while skidding on dog dirt.

After walking around this micro-economic miracle for a while I came across a plinth upon which the Kidzania mission statement, heavily borrowed from the US Constitution, was engraved. "Get ready for a better world," it starts portentously, "We the kids of the world's cities, countries and continents proclaim out independence from adults. We hereby hold the following truths to be obvious, that all kids are created equal and that we are endowed with certain irrevocable rights to be, know, care and play in the pursuit of our happiness of the world."

All very idealistic for sure and in Kidzania this fantasy of a meritocratic liberal free-market Utopia actually holds true, something that certainly can't be said of the real world outside. There are no kids begging at traffic lights on Kidzania's streets. All sense of the accumulating inequalities that come from the pursuit of wealth forgetting all but self have been airbrushed out of Kidzania and only the clean lines of simulated corporate capital and junior ATMs remain.

I'm sure that all of this social indoctrination is fun for the kids but they'd be having fun anyway. It's fun to play at being an adult when you're eight, and within Kidzania's inverted Peter Pan, hologram fantasy world of mini banks and boulevards the little ones were having a wail of a time trying to pursue the implicit Kidzania ideology, borrowed from the world outside: grow up, work, earn, spend, consume, rinse and repeat.

There will be plenty of time for the consumer neurosis hangover to develop later in their teenage years of course. The sense of inadequacy that comes from having an inferior mobile phone or MP3 player, the pressure to grow up and be sexy is currently intensifying within schools throughout the developed world and inculcating a sense of psychic dislocation and apathy in our teenagers.

Kidzania though, is perhaps just as much a flight of the imagination for the parents as it is for the kids. It's the classic parental fantasy that their offspring will all work hard, become lawyers and doctors and make their piles whilst making mum and dad very proud. This noble desire, however, is fighting against our narcotizing new world of Play Stations, web-networking and corporate entertainment media. Increasingly, kids seem to dream of ascending, effort free, into the ranks of celebritydom.

Any sense of social solidarity or political resistance to society's control program (as replicated at Kidzania) is nullified as we suck on the nipple of our new digital globe. Atomized and isolated within the Oed-i-Pod solitude of the entertainment consumer.

Brave New World? Give me a park and a shopping trolley any day.

Fossil Fuel Folly

Recently, I resolved rather masochistically to take some driving lessons. Now I know that I've been a great advocate for the humble but green bicycle in previous MMs but rest assured that I will continue to pedal to work in the future as there's nothing better than arriving at the office wringing wet with perspiration. Now that my motorcycle days are behind me though I thought I would at least try to belatedly acquire a skill that most normal Westerners learn before they are 20 (I'm 21 now you understand). On the other hand, learning to drive just as global oil prices head for the carbon dioxide filled stratosphere is just the kind of perverse, if not downright imbecilic idea that has made be a household name the length and breadth of Mampang.


This was to be a test of mettle, an assault course on my psyche and mental resilience. If I can drive a car in Jakarta, I theorized, then I can drive one anywhere. After scouring the Internet I eventually procured the address of a local driving school in East Jakarta, the cheesy side of town. I bagged a Bluebird taxi to the hallowed Institute of learning in question and soon found myself in the 2 meter by 3 meter room that constituted the driving school's office. After assuring the slightly taken aback lady in charge that I would be able to follow their instructor’s Indonesian commands I handed over a reasonably small amount of hard earned Rupiah and quickly found myself behind the wheel of a modified and rather dilapidated Kijang.

"Okay Sir, just pull out into the traffic," my guru intoned chirpily. "Err... right," I nervously answered, staring at the bumper to bumper chaos seething outside the car park. Then I crawled slowly onto the main road at the kind of pace that would have seen me burned off by Stephen Hawking in his motorized wheelchair. As our trusty Kijang was swallowed by the traffic and we pottered along in second gear, I fought down a wave of rising panic and nausea. "I'm going to crash! I'm going to hit something!" I thought. I had a strong premonition that I would presently hit the back of a Metro Mini bus and that the driver would then jump out and remonstrate with me with his fists.

The motorbikes swarmed around me as if operated by riders dosed up on the kind of pills that have a warning about not operating heavy machinery printed on the packet. My biking days are over though. Now I was on the other side of the windscreen. In fact I had entered the realm in which my worst enemy would be motorbikes. When I had had a bike myself, in contrast, my worst enemy was...er hang on... it was other motorbikes now that I come to think of it.

Yes the bikes swarm around the unsuspecting car driver like drowsy wasps at a barbecue. The ostensibly simple task of turning left proved to be the hardest trick to master as the bikers, apparently oblivious to my indicator signals, continued to stream past me on my curbside like machine-gun bullets.

Then we hit the back streets. These are the real test of one's driving chops. Most of the city's backstreets aren't actually wide enough for two lanes of traffic and thus all kinds of maneuverings, swervings and stampings on brakes are continually required. Add in the open sewers at the side of the road waiting to snare unsuspecting drivers, the pedestrians impeding one's car due to the lack of pavements and the often lunar type road surface and you have yourself one extreme sport type experience. Nintendo should release a game called Jakarta Driver.




Infinite reserves of Zen like patience are required if you are to negotiate the city streets in an automobile without running over an old lady balancing a basket of bottles on her head or a group of soccer loving school kids. Occasionally, I felt my serenity wearing thin and I suspect that there must also be other drivers in Jakarta whose innermost cathartic desire is to steam through a Soto Ayam (chicken soup) roadside Warung with their arses on fire at 90 km an hour , screaming like Zulu warriors as diners scatter or are crushed mercilessly beneath Bridgestone tyres.

And there we must end psychotherapy for this week. As for the driving, well I'm not doing too badly now, however with oil prices soaring the world over this little scheme of mine may well have been doomed from the off. Apparently beer is now cheaper than petrol in many Western countries and consequently the iconic slogan, "Don't drink and drive," should perhaps be changed to the ironic, "Drink... don't drive." Nevertheless, I hope to take a spin out in the country soon, once I've mastered the art of trundling around the city's atrophying arteries. Its 2008 though, whatever happened to the future? They really should have invented spaceships by now.