Hear My Train a Comin'

There’s an agonizing 45-seconds of something that sounds like Jimi fed through a steel drum, opening riffs setting up a “YEAH” and a…. “yeah..” before steering away from something that sounds suspiciously like Voodoo Child… I

t’s 910 and I’m hard right & immediately left by the kali lima and roadside tire surgeon, accelerating past the 3-in-1 suckers biding their time behind smoked glass.

Well, I wait around the train station / Waitin' for that train / Waitin' for the train, yeah / Take me home, yeah /From this lonesome place
Drop a gear and throttle seamlessly left onto an empty six-lane strip, ignoring the pack of cops’ spidery mirrored eyes, aware the DOT half-helm, Hendrix on the ear-buds and speed are all very haram: bite me, boys. Accelerating hard into the rise above the grungy Blora strip, past Sudirman Station, and now we’re four, running hard in formation, gatecrashing the Landmark Tower bottleneck.

Dig / The tears burnin' / Tears burnin' me / Tears burnin' me / Way down… in my heart

Scooter girl’s lime green jilbab is streaming beneath her Hello Pussycat dome as she forces the wedge between the Metro Mini idling across two lanes and the army green TLC who’s hard against it’s bumper, and we compress to follow her, one-two-three-four, zip-zip-zip-zip… swarm theory in action.

Well, you know it's too bad, little girl / it's too bad / Too bad we have to part (have to part)

The posse splinters as the KTM climbs into 3^rd and 4^th. A middle-aged moto bekek wingman pulls into my blindside in busted flip-flops and GoJek green as we hit the dangerous patch of busted cement and gravel by Plaza Marein where a Kopaja shark’s magic hand signals the rusted green beast is gonna take us out and I run outta room and testicular fortitude trying to break right and watch the GoJek force the bus to a shuddering stall & sail on through to the other side. Dahm…boy can ride; must be something about the whole ‘surrender’ thing…

Dig / Gonna leave this town, yeah / Gonna leave this town / Gonna make a whole lotta money

Past the stalled bus, the road opens and I click up fast through the gears, 0-60 in three seconds “…hear my train a’comin/ hear my train a’comin” carving sweet lines through the puttering 125s and aging Road Kings. Wismet and WTC coming up fast on the left, an ugly, angry 100m strip where bankers inch into the parking lot, Beemers inch-out into bike & bus traffic and try to break right to enter the fast lane.

Gonna be big, yeah / Gonna be big, yeah / I'm gonna buy this town / I'm gonna buy this town /An' put it all in my shoe

A cherry red CBR250 whistles past on the right, the rider’s palms are hard on the bars to keep ‘er steady as the front end catches and wobbles, caught in a nasty seam in the road; “Get yer eyes up, man,” I’m thinking, as he locks up the rear and starts to slide. “Look where ya wanna go or you’ll end up smeared on the back of that cube truck”.

Counter-steer into a fast left up the hill behind the Sampoerna tower mosque just as twin Sukhoi, wing-to-wing, split the sky above, working out the kinks ahead of tujubelasan, Independence Day fly-over next Monday. Past warung city a side-street falls away beneath a neighboring tower into a dimly lit corrugated cement parkade choked with lines of parked bikes. The KTM finds her berth in a far corner; she’s lean & ticking, shaking off the heat as I pull off the dome & shades and head for the elevators.

Might even give a piece to you / That's what I'm gonna do / what I'm gonna do / what I'm gonna do

Metallica @ Bungkarno Statium, Jakarta

Metallica returned to Jakarta for the first time in 20 years on the last night of their Asian tour. The governor of Jakarta is a huge fan and the riots that marked their last visit a blip in the past. Sixty thousand well behaved rockers of every variety sang every word from every song for two hours: the boys on stage seemed genuinely impressed though frankly, having that many irony-illiterate people punching the air and chanting "OBEY YOUR MASTER... MASTER" gave me the creeps.

I've been to a few large concerts here and while folks are very appreciative of the artists and knowledgeable about their work, here's a desperate need for some training in "rock and roll concert literacy". And so, the Grinch's Rules for Jakarta concert-goers (and organizers): 1. If the lead singer brings the song to a crescendo and raises his hand to the sound of a lone wailing guitar, it is time to make some %!@&#?!!ing noise. 2. If you want encores, make some %!@&#?!!ing noise. 3. Beach balls and Frisbees, yes; Roman candles, no. 4. Girls rock; bring them. Anyone gives them trouble, trouble them back (with interest). 5. Festival “seating” off the floor is a deadly idea; sell seats, not access. 6. Go home if you wanna play video games on your phone. 7. Under no circumstances do you applaud the arrival a politician. 8. If you buy bootleg music/t-shirts/swag etc. then go spend some money on the real thing. 9. Don’t make James Hetfield (or anyone else who’s putting it out there) beg; See Rules 1 & 2. 10. Chant “IN-DO-NE-SIA” at football matches, not heavy metal shows.

Enough Demo(cracy): Time to Split Some Heads

Jakartans are daily witnessing the application of the old adage about too much democracy being a bad thing.
At the risk of lining up behind Mahathir Mohammed and Lee Kuan Yew whose distain for the practical application of democratic principles is eloquent and well documented, I long for the days when a phalanx of club-wielding Brimob stormtroopers could be relied up to clear rabble from the streets of the capitol.
Alas, with the very rare exception, the days of the legitimate act of mass demonstration or the use of street power to effect change in Indonesia are past. The last true manifestation of this was the elections of 1999 when the main thoroughfares of the country’s population centers vanished beneath a sea of red and black t-shirted supporters of HRH Megawati Sukarnoputri.
Beyond the on-going reformation of modern day Indonesia, there were two street-level consequences of these demos.
The first is that the security forces were forced to step back from the traditional iron fist/smoking barrel approach to crowd control. The clearest manifestation has been in police response to demonstrations in Jakarta. Lead-cored batons, shields and tear gas have been replaced by rows of unarmed shovel-faced female cops (PolWan) in fuchsia lipstick linking arms in front of the rows of the riot cops. It defuses the situation remarkably well, though whether it’s because the mob fears these PolWan as much as I do (gimme a fat cracker Javanese cop anyday), or the humor value, is a mystery to me.
The second consequence is that the shadowy forces that bankrolled and coordinated the demonstrations the ultimately forced Suharto to resign in 1998 – imagine the logistics of supplying food, drink, transportation and cigarettes to 250,000 people on the streets of the capitol for days on end – learned they could affect change by harnessing street power. Many individuals were beaten; some died. But the political calculus of the day declared this an acceptable butcher’s bill.
No longer fearing the cops and intelligence agencies, the nation’s business and political elite have been allowed to refine the use of paid demonstrations to push narrow partisan political causes. Demonstrations now are purely cynical affairs. Powerful people pay for organizers to disgorge the ignorant poor from buses in front of the target of the day. Lead by bullhorns and carrying banners they can’t read, they regularly bring the city to a standstill for the equivalent of $2/head and a boxed lunch.
So in-grained is this demo-in-a-box approach that when Aceh-born media magnate Surya Paloh and the poor, deluded, Sultan of Yogya decided they were going to launch a ‘mass organization’ last month they put 25,000 paid butts in the seats of Bung Karno stadium to provide the applause.
As much as it galls me to admit, the rare exception to the current rule comes from fundamentalist elements of Islamic society who have rallied their members to the street around a specific issue. Through 2008 and 2009, thousands of white-clad wannabes in Taliban short-pants and scraggly beards aligned with the vile Indonesian arm of Hizbut Tahrir, joined the gangster bagmen-turned-preachers of the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) and other hateful, church-and mosque burning constituencies associated with the Indonesian Ulema’s Council in well choreographed shows of force before the presidential palace to demand the clocks be turned back the 6th century.
You may not like it, and their access should be restricted to minimize the impact on city residents, but at least they come with a set of principles, racist, misogynist and violent as they may be. Nothing illegal in having an opinion. If they break the law, then the police should drive those Droogies into the pavement. Otherwise let ‘em holler and “allahuakbar” at an indifferent population and empty buildinga till the cows come home.
More typical are the bogus demonstrations that have been going on in front of the KPK offices for the past six weeks. Like tens of thousands of others, I’ve suffered through the interminable traffic delays caused when 45 gormless kampung nut-scratchers in masks bring eight lanes of traffic to a halt for hours at a time. They’ve no idea why they’re there except that something called “Bank Century” is “corrupt” and some woman (a politically naïve finance minister who dares to stare down powerful business interests) is “Satan”.
Well, enough is enough. It is time for Jakarta Governor Fuzzy Bobo to take off the gloves, crush these cockroaches, publicly name and prosecute the organizers, and demand they remunerate everyone inconvenienced by their actions. He can start by rejecting any application for a demonstration permit with the slightest hint of being a paid-for event. Civil society has already attacked him for suggesting changes to the current free-for-all, blathering on about “freedom of expression” and “human rights” etc. Bull. Democracy and human rights do not trump the rights of tens of thousands of commuters, office workers and ordinary folks who just wanna get to work on time or home at the end of a long day. This is street theatre, not 'democracy', and should be confined to the stage (or as Bobo suggested, the park surrounding the National Monument, Monas).
Meantime, ladies, wipe off the lipstick, pick up a truncheon and start beating out a path.

Postscript:
On March 4, the Jakarta Globe published the following story about rent-a-demo:
http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/national/jakarta-protesters-unite-show-us-the-money-and-food/361715

The Grinch Behind the Wheel

The first time I drove a car in Jakarta, I buried the front end of Phil's Kijang under the rear bumper of a clapped out Metro Mini half a km from her driveway. It took 30 minutes and six guys bouncing on the hood to pop 'er free. That was June 1999 and I've basically not driven a four-wheeler in the city since.
Until now.
After much hemming and hawing, I've rented a 2006 Innova - a ubiquitous mid-sized Toyota MPV - and driver on a month-by-month basis: the days of her-pregnant-self sucking on bus fumes while trying to flag cabs in the rain @ 7pm are over. The ride come bundled with a driver - Pak Hakim - who appears to be a lovely unassuming 50something from Bekasi who giggles like a Japanese schoolgirl. We'll see how long it takes to break him of that habit as he adjusts to the world's worst backseat driver riding shotgun in a city of 1.5 million vehicles, most operated by unlicensed mouth-breathers who have sorted out clutch, brake and gas pedals and little else.
I've had 'er out a couple of times now, getting acclimatized & all that, and while it's early days I have picked p a few things in a decade of ojek and taxi travel here. Negotiating the streets of New Jak City is different than the highways and byways of Whoville where a social compact exists and certain clear conventions are taught (driving school/graduated licenses etc), enforced (traffic laws, armed co-commuters) and rewarded (relative safety of the journey, dawn coffee @ 140kmh etc).

(pic lifted from: http://allworldcars.com/wordpress/?p=11866)
The Jakarta driving experience requires a rewiring of Western neuro pathways, conventions and protocols. Like shoals of smelt, flights of swallows and a myriad other naturally occurring phenomena, traffic flow here is a classic reshaping of what psychologists call 'Emergence', a surrendering of the will of the individual to the wisdom and survival instincts of the collective, which allows novel and coherent structures to emerge as patterns and properties in complex systems re-organize themselves. In other words, the emergent system is much more than the sum of it parts.

In practical terms it means the Jakarta traffic Jedi can dispense with checking rear- or side mirrors, blindside etc, accommodating merging vehicles or considering any impediment more than two car lengths ahead on the understanding that the collective will see him through.

Braking to allow a fellow motorist to cross your bow provokes a symphony of horns as the lane behind accordions: better to roll ahead, ignore the interloper till he or she secures the suitable sine wave and squeezes through.
The problem with the emergence is that it is predicated upon something beyond obedience, something more like surrender: the life of a single anchovy means less than nothing in a school of tens of billions. Its loss to a humpback whale or blue shark equals nothing.
Such is not the case, and even the most masochistic, deferential Javanese driver is still hardwired for survival. And, stupidity. He will not pull over for an ambulance or fire truck, but will brake - indeed often does - for no apparent reason whatsoever. He will pull over and park in the slow lane in order to sit and pluck single hairs from his chin oblivious to the massive jam it causes - part of the larger national blind-spot about the principle of cause and effect. S/he will drive 30 kph in the fast lane of the toll road, and 130 kph in the breakdown lane. The bar sticking out of the steering column that activates the windshield wipers is handy, but the other one... well it makes something tick and a light flash on the dashboard but for a case of kratendeng he couldn't tell you why and what for.
Nature didn't plan for idiocy or self-preservation so Jakarta's emergent system, nice as it is for fish and birds, doesn't work very well. How the Grinch will fit a square peg hammered into maturity on the mean streets of Montreal into this round hole remains to be seen. I can report that the wheel lock tucked under the driver's seat is a bit light, but it's one of those comfortable shorties that are quick to deploy and great for use in tight places... like traffic jams.

'Immoral' TV Causing RI Disasters, Tsunamis - Tech Minister

Pulling a page from a playbook more often associated with the American evangelical nutter class, Indonesia's Communications and Info Technology Minister used Friday’s Idul Adha prayers to blame 'immorality’ for the country's recent spate of deadly natural disasters.
Fresh from getting excoriated in the blogosphere and by some of his Twittering brethren for unilaterally blocking access to blogger.com last week, Tifatul Sembiring was quoted by the national wire service Antara saying:
"Television broadcasts that destroy morals are plentiful in this country and therefore disasters will continue to occur."
He later singled out naughty DVDs produced in Indonesia as particularly blameworthy.
AP quoted an Acehnese tsunami survivor, who lost 10 members of her family to the Dec. 26 disaster as replying:
“I prefer to believe that natural disasters occur because of the destructive force of nature that cannot be avoided by humans.”
Over the past few years Indonesia has experienced a series of natural calamities including the tsunami, multiple deadly earthquakes and more landslides, ferry-sinkings and plane crashes than I care to remember.
To much rejoicing from his acolytes at the Taliban-lite Prosperous Justice Party he fronted until last month, the Minster said he expects to complete (another) piece of anti-pornography legislation in the next six months that will block access to site deemed blasphemous or offensive to ethnic and religious groups… (in other words 70 percent of the content on the Internet).
Though he has only been in office since October, the guy who heads up DepKomInfo is rapidly emerging as one of the leading knuckleheads of SBY’s gormless new cabinet. What, oh what, will he say next?
They might not agree on much else, but the Minister finds himself walking lock-step with some of the more reptilian delegates of the American lunatic fringe.
Over the past decade most of America’s leading evangelical lights have blamed fags, women and porn for a variety of natural disasters, terrorist attacks and diseases: it squares with their reading of the same final chapters of the Old Testament that receive wide reverence from Islamic scholars.
Some notable samples:
"We take no joy in the death of innocent people," Michael Marcavage, the head of Repent America and a former Clinton White House intern said following hurricane Katrina "But we believe that God is in control of the weather. The day Bourbon Street and the French Quarter was flooded was the day that 125,000 homosexuals were going to be celebrating sin in the streets. We're calling it an act of God."
In 1998, televangelist Pat Robertson warned the city of Orlando, Fla., that a gay celebration there bring the wrath of God in the form of a hurricane or other disaster. Celebrating homosexuality "will bring about terrorist bombs, it'll bring earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor," he suggested.
In 2001, Wee Jerry Falwell blamed gays and lesbians (along with feminists, abortionists and the American Civil Liberties Union) for the terrorist attacks in New York City. "I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen," he said
In 2007, the Brits piped up to prove Yanks don’t have the corner on the idiocy market. Following widespread flooding in the UK, a group of senior Church of England bishops opined that the grred and immorality of modern society – rather than a lot of rain – was to blame.

Another One Bites The Dust

The Grinch's 42nd birthday winked by over the weekend, conveniently and perpetually stapled onto the St. Patrick’s Day excesses so no one can claim I’m grandstanding when I call up asking about their plans for the 17th.
Managed to lasso several people into meeting for commemorative post-magrib Irish Coffees at the Waterfall Bar in the Hyatt in central Jakarta. Commemorative in as much as St. Pats will always be the object of deliberate situational irony: I converted to Islam on the same date in 2004 – it is illegal to perform inter-religious weddings in Indonesia – and made a bee-line from the mosque to the Hyatt (2005 photo above) to mark the holiday. As I’ve been bottled up in Aceh the past two years it seemed appropriate to mark the first post-tsunami Jakarta anniversary of – as one close family member described it “my apostasy” – in similarly irreverent fashion.
Later we retired to the salubrious confines of a dime-a-dozen “Irish” pub in a second Western hotel for multiple refreshing Guinni and fish n chips, where I won a draw for a Rupiah 150,000 (Can $20) voucher to yet another hotel bar – famed for the youth and relative health of its female patrons (known locally as ‘ayam’ or ‘chicken’) – which is sufficient funds to get a fine glow-on.
I had one of “those” conversations about aging with some hanger-on though predictably the perspectives are quite different on account of this Grinch’s legendary constitution, anticipated late punch-out date and numerous inebriated promises not to die before people several decades his junior.
I believe we broke much new ground, concluding among other things that:
1. Youth is wasted on the young.
2. The worst performance of Led Zeppelin’s career still totally kicks the ass of any rock band currently in existence.
3. The female of the species only truly starts to bloom at 40. (Editors Note: Article 4 revised up from 35, 30, 25, 20 and 18 over past two and a half decades. See Grinch Archives).
4. Drivers licenses should only be issued to people over 30 (with exceptions made for under-30s driving agricultural vehicles providing they are restricted to tertiary roads and farms.)
5. Anyone between the ages of 18 and 40 with a barbed wire tattoo who has not served time in a federal penitentiary should be immediately incarcerated.
6. Brittany Spears and her ilk are a bad influence.
7. Life becomes more valuable as you get older because young people are stupid.
8. Its hard to understand why yoots don’t ask their parents for advice about things like sex, alcohol and peer-pressure. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that they were in the same position, right?
9. Is it just me or is the music in here too loud?
10. Larry King’s interviews with Red Buttons and Angie Dickenson really crackle.