Thursday, February 27, 2003
Wednesday, February 26, 2003
Down on the farm in Central Jakarta
It’s been almost four years now since I took this show on the road from Canada’s Wet Coast to steaming Java and what’s curious and refreshing is that despite the amount of time I’ve spent wandering the streets of New Jak City there’s always something new and interesting just ‘round the next bend.
Take the other day.
One of the few luxuries my budget allowed a couple of years back was buying a (daylight) membership to Quantum, a swank Kuningan gym seven stories above the clock that marks time – often correctly – above the gleaming lobby of the space age Menara Imperium tower. Its one of those towers with a revolving bar/resto above, three floors of valet parking beneath, and a workforce of hundreds of $40/month young men and women whose only job is to buff and shine the scuffmarks and greasy fingerprints on the chrome and mirrored elevators.
I’ve a hate-hate relationship with gyms. I’ll hit the weight stack hard for four months and then sit back and eat donuts and drink Bintang lager until my Calvins start leaving red bands of ring-around-the-gut and I try to find reasons to avoid wearing lace-up shoes, at which point I roll of the sofa long enough to waddle down to settle my mounting, long-overdue monthly bill and drag my sorry ass back to Quantum.
What I like best about the joint – besides the awesome, paint-stripping hot showers - is that there’s usually no one there but a couple of hatchet-faced Indonesian trophy wives and myself, so I don’t get all neurotic about stuff and feel like I have to count sit-ups out loud for the benefit of the anabolic warrior grumbling about the Universal set only going to 360 pounds: Y’know: “One – two – three – four – sixty eight – sixty nine etc etc”. I’m psychically fragile enough to do something like that.
So I’m back at it no more than a month now, motivated by the need to knock off at least one pant size and be able to hustle my way across five kms of Iraqi desert with a 20 kg pack on my back (laptop, sat-phone, camera, ½ dozen MREs, water and a carton of smokes: war-zone necessities) should it become necessary. Here’s news: if the war started tomorrow and I had to “run” anywhere, I might be able to make it to the buffet line at the Amman Sheraton without expiring. No excuses but the double malaria whammy back in Nov. continues to poison me and even a middling 12 minute jog leaves me heaving.
One of the features of the view from the rowing machines on the north side of Quantum, in addition to a cityscape that unfolds towards the Java Sea somewhere beyond the stacks of the electrical plants, is the water-filled building site next door, the collection of sheet metal and cardboard that passes for home for perhaps a dozen families along the earthen berm formed by the concrete forms of the construction site and the gaggle of kids and adults FISHING inside the building. The first time I saw it I did a quicky news feature about the fate of Jakarta’s poor and learned there’s a local cop who comes by and stocks the ‘pond’ – which is actually like seven stories deep – and charges the equivalent of five cents to fish. Sadly, three kids under the age of nine drowned there one day a couple of weeks ago.
This week, my workout routine happens to take me to the south side of the building and what do I see spread out below my feet and directly across from the tower and its chi-chi revolving restaurant but several acres of hand-plowed fields of vegetables on lands I assume were slated for development but have been left unattended since the currency tanked a few years back. And, I’m not talking about your cheesy little urban gardens ‘reclaimed’ from inner-city moonscapes such as were all the rage among neighborhood activists in N. America a few years back.
Funny thing is that I know those fields were not there a couple of months ago but they’ve a lived in, well worked look about ‘em that suggests whoever is responsible for them is planning to be there for while.
Thing is, here you’ve got folks fishing in a building site next door to red soil fields of carrots and corn literally 100 paces off one of the principal five-lane-in-each-direction thoroughfares lined with 15-storey office complexes, dead center in an Asian city of 10 million. I thought that was pretty cool.
Better yet, when later I walked south down Jl. Rasuna Said – that main drag mentioned above – I found a building I recall was dumped a couple of years ago after the owners defaulted on their loans and fled for their Singapore penthouses, which is slowly being reclaimed by nature. While its neighbors – including PriceWaterhouse Coopers by the way, part of the same gang of Armani-clad thieves and colluders who signed off on all those audited financial statements for all those bankrupt companies and lending institutions back in the day – continue to thrive behind armies of security guards, the gardens in front of this particular property are as dense and overgrown as Erika Badu’s afro. Vines the thickness of your wrist snake their way through the steel and plastic corporate logo while the first floor of the once-white eight-storey affair slowly disappear behind what like mutant Jurassic marsh grasses and shaggy palms.
Gotta love it. Just when you think that maybe all the life has been sucked out of the city, that its masses have finally been swept away by the mounting sewage-fed floodwaters, paved over or driven out by developers for whom arson is a popular means to an end, you stumble upon these wonderful life-affirming moments and perhaps cautionary tales of the impermanence of it all deep in the smelly heart of the Big Durian.
Oh, and Grinchtour’s newest feature, the Green Guy’s personally approved Internet Pic o the Day brought to you but the most disturbed and twisted aspects of human nature, there in all their glory, virtually free, available to children everywhere with the click of a mouse
Today’s “vanilla” offering unloads all the dirt you ever wanted about the Bush clan, everything from Dad’s circle-jerking frat days to his inebriated daughters’ brushes with the law, info about Dubya’s business holdings, and brother Jeb’s repeated cover-ups of family members running afoul of the law down in Florida etc etc. Check it out:
It’s been almost four years now since I took this show on the road from Canada’s Wet Coast to steaming Java and what’s curious and refreshing is that despite the amount of time I’ve spent wandering the streets of New Jak City there’s always something new and interesting just ‘round the next bend.
Take the other day.
One of the few luxuries my budget allowed a couple of years back was buying a (daylight) membership to Quantum, a swank Kuningan gym seven stories above the clock that marks time – often correctly – above the gleaming lobby of the space age Menara Imperium tower. Its one of those towers with a revolving bar/resto above, three floors of valet parking beneath, and a workforce of hundreds of $40/month young men and women whose only job is to buff and shine the scuffmarks and greasy fingerprints on the chrome and mirrored elevators.
I’ve a hate-hate relationship with gyms. I’ll hit the weight stack hard for four months and then sit back and eat donuts and drink Bintang lager until my Calvins start leaving red bands of ring-around-the-gut and I try to find reasons to avoid wearing lace-up shoes, at which point I roll of the sofa long enough to waddle down to settle my mounting, long-overdue monthly bill and drag my sorry ass back to Quantum.
What I like best about the joint – besides the awesome, paint-stripping hot showers - is that there’s usually no one there but a couple of hatchet-faced Indonesian trophy wives and myself, so I don’t get all neurotic about stuff and feel like I have to count sit-ups out loud for the benefit of the anabolic warrior grumbling about the Universal set only going to 360 pounds: Y’know: “One – two – three – four – sixty eight – sixty nine etc etc”. I’m psychically fragile enough to do something like that.
So I’m back at it no more than a month now, motivated by the need to knock off at least one pant size and be able to hustle my way across five kms of Iraqi desert with a 20 kg pack on my back (laptop, sat-phone, camera, ½ dozen MREs, water and a carton of smokes: war-zone necessities) should it become necessary. Here’s news: if the war started tomorrow and I had to “run” anywhere, I might be able to make it to the buffet line at the Amman Sheraton without expiring. No excuses but the double malaria whammy back in Nov. continues to poison me and even a middling 12 minute jog leaves me heaving.
One of the features of the view from the rowing machines on the north side of Quantum, in addition to a cityscape that unfolds towards the Java Sea somewhere beyond the stacks of the electrical plants, is the water-filled building site next door, the collection of sheet metal and cardboard that passes for home for perhaps a dozen families along the earthen berm formed by the concrete forms of the construction site and the gaggle of kids and adults FISHING inside the building. The first time I saw it I did a quicky news feature about the fate of Jakarta’s poor and learned there’s a local cop who comes by and stocks the ‘pond’ – which is actually like seven stories deep – and charges the equivalent of five cents to fish. Sadly, three kids under the age of nine drowned there one day a couple of weeks ago.
This week, my workout routine happens to take me to the south side of the building and what do I see spread out below my feet and directly across from the tower and its chi-chi revolving restaurant but several acres of hand-plowed fields of vegetables on lands I assume were slated for development but have been left unattended since the currency tanked a few years back. And, I’m not talking about your cheesy little urban gardens ‘reclaimed’ from inner-city moonscapes such as were all the rage among neighborhood activists in N. America a few years back.
Funny thing is that I know those fields were not there a couple of months ago but they’ve a lived in, well worked look about ‘em that suggests whoever is responsible for them is planning to be there for while.
Thing is, here you’ve got folks fishing in a building site next door to red soil fields of carrots and corn literally 100 paces off one of the principal five-lane-in-each-direction thoroughfares lined with 15-storey office complexes, dead center in an Asian city of 10 million. I thought that was pretty cool.
Better yet, when later I walked south down Jl. Rasuna Said – that main drag mentioned above – I found a building I recall was dumped a couple of years ago after the owners defaulted on their loans and fled for their Singapore penthouses, which is slowly being reclaimed by nature. While its neighbors – including PriceWaterhouse Coopers by the way, part of the same gang of Armani-clad thieves and colluders who signed off on all those audited financial statements for all those bankrupt companies and lending institutions back in the day – continue to thrive behind armies of security guards, the gardens in front of this particular property are as dense and overgrown as Erika Badu’s afro. Vines the thickness of your wrist snake their way through the steel and plastic corporate logo while the first floor of the once-white eight-storey affair slowly disappear behind what like mutant Jurassic marsh grasses and shaggy palms.
Gotta love it. Just when you think that maybe all the life has been sucked out of the city, that its masses have finally been swept away by the mounting sewage-fed floodwaters, paved over or driven out by developers for whom arson is a popular means to an end, you stumble upon these wonderful life-affirming moments and perhaps cautionary tales of the impermanence of it all deep in the smelly heart of the Big Durian.
Oh, and Grinchtour’s newest feature, the Green Guy’s personally approved Internet Pic o the Day brought to you but the most disturbed and twisted aspects of human nature, there in all their glory, virtually free, available to children everywhere with the click of a mouse
Today’s “vanilla” offering unloads all the dirt you ever wanted about the Bush clan, everything from Dad’s circle-jerking frat days to his inebriated daughters’ brushes with the law, info about Dubya’s business holdings, and brother Jeb’s repeated cover-ups of family members running afoul of the law down in Florida etc etc. Check it out:
Tuesday, February 25, 2003
Grannies hijack music award show, turn Detroit rapper into ‘punk ho’
Unless they’re specifically for me, I’m not much one for award shows. Avoid ‘em like those Argentinean soap operas dubbed into Indonesian on SCTV.
Tony, Oscar, Grammy: add a cop, soldier and construction worker and you’ve got a seminal Disco band.
But TV viewing habits here in the Cat House have changed and I’m all for that – s if I have any say, lone male in a house with six females – and so now instead of Rugby League championships we’ve got the Grammys.
Fascinating celebration of mediocrity. I mean, this flaccid Norah Jones chick with her eight awards? Word to the fans: just suck the pipe now and do us all a favor. Last year it was that potty-mouthed dumpster diver from Detroit. This year, Ravishankar’s illegitimate daughter? What’s next, one of Bob Marley’s mob doing a reggae/bluegrass makeover of Supertramp classics?
And speaking of washed up bands of yore, what is up with the pop – don’t whinge, if it makes it to award season, trust me, it’s all pop music - demographic? I loved The Clash back in the day and Springsteen, Costello, Van Zant, and that dude from Foo Fighters kicked their version of London Calling. But the past couple of years have seen Bruce, the friggin Steely Dan, The Eagles and a dozen other toothless wonders trooping up to pick up their awards.
And what about Peter Gabriel, looking like he walked off the set of Golden Girls? Cindy Lauper? Simon n Garfunkle? Paul Shaffer? Have they no shame? Keep the Grannies out of the Grammys, I say, even if it means handing the reins over to Fred Durst, God’s gift to articulation, and that vanilla rapper with the Band-aid on his face.
Dumbass stuff.
Word here the past week has been about this sexy new dangdut singer who has taken the country by storm. (The genre, for the uninitiated, is screeching Indian-pop layered with Arabic rhythms sung in Bahasa, Hindi, Javanese or Arabic. Imagine the sound of a litter of feral cats in a cloth bag set to Norah Jones’ dad’s choice of dance music.)
Typically a swivel-hipped nubile of indeterminate age fronts the ensemble but chickypoos “drilling” dance technique – and a widely distributed pic n vid of her being groped by our very own Jabba The Hutt, Taufik Keimas, the husband of the Mighty Meganaut, Queen of Java – has got tongues wagging. I’ve yet to see her, though given the amount of ink she’s been getting in the gutter press and the fact her appearance on a local variety show last Thursday sent viewer numbers into the stratosphere, suggests we’re only into the first 30 seconds of her 15 minutes.
Assuring even higher profile in the short term, the national Ulema’s (Mossie Preacher) association has turned their hooded gaze upon her and suggested she tone it down a bit as her gyrations threaten to drive the male population of Indonesia into a rape frenzy. And here I thought it was only East Timorese and Acehnese farmers’ wives that could provoke that kind of reaction.
Peace
Unless they’re specifically for me, I’m not much one for award shows. Avoid ‘em like those Argentinean soap operas dubbed into Indonesian on SCTV.
Tony, Oscar, Grammy: add a cop, soldier and construction worker and you’ve got a seminal Disco band.
But TV viewing habits here in the Cat House have changed and I’m all for that – s if I have any say, lone male in a house with six females – and so now instead of Rugby League championships we’ve got the Grammys.
Fascinating celebration of mediocrity. I mean, this flaccid Norah Jones chick with her eight awards? Word to the fans: just suck the pipe now and do us all a favor. Last year it was that potty-mouthed dumpster diver from Detroit. This year, Ravishankar’s illegitimate daughter? What’s next, one of Bob Marley’s mob doing a reggae/bluegrass makeover of Supertramp classics?
And speaking of washed up bands of yore, what is up with the pop – don’t whinge, if it makes it to award season, trust me, it’s all pop music - demographic? I loved The Clash back in the day and Springsteen, Costello, Van Zant, and that dude from Foo Fighters kicked their version of London Calling. But the past couple of years have seen Bruce, the friggin Steely Dan, The Eagles and a dozen other toothless wonders trooping up to pick up their awards.
And what about Peter Gabriel, looking like he walked off the set of Golden Girls? Cindy Lauper? Simon n Garfunkle? Paul Shaffer? Have they no shame? Keep the Grannies out of the Grammys, I say, even if it means handing the reins over to Fred Durst, God’s gift to articulation, and that vanilla rapper with the Band-aid on his face.
Dumbass stuff.
Word here the past week has been about this sexy new dangdut singer who has taken the country by storm. (The genre, for the uninitiated, is screeching Indian-pop layered with Arabic rhythms sung in Bahasa, Hindi, Javanese or Arabic. Imagine the sound of a litter of feral cats in a cloth bag set to Norah Jones’ dad’s choice of dance music.)
Typically a swivel-hipped nubile of indeterminate age fronts the ensemble but chickypoos “drilling” dance technique – and a widely distributed pic n vid of her being groped by our very own Jabba The Hutt, Taufik Keimas, the husband of the Mighty Meganaut, Queen of Java – has got tongues wagging. I’ve yet to see her, though given the amount of ink she’s been getting in the gutter press and the fact her appearance on a local variety show last Thursday sent viewer numbers into the stratosphere, suggests we’re only into the first 30 seconds of her 15 minutes.
Assuring even higher profile in the short term, the national Ulema’s (Mossie Preacher) association has turned their hooded gaze upon her and suggested she tone it down a bit as her gyrations threaten to drive the male population of Indonesia into a rape frenzy. And here I thought it was only East Timorese and Acehnese farmers’ wives that could provoke that kind of reaction.
Peace
Monday, February 24, 2003
.... one small step right?
I heard once that Armstrong actually botched his moment in the sun - on the moon - and intended to say something rather different. No, not a "Shout Out to my Dawgs back on the Third Rock" or anything lke that, but words more nuanced than those we're familiar with.
Most appropriate and cautionary tale methinks as I attempt to launch this new venture blogside. Haven't even seen what the site looks like but that's the next babystep.
Peace
I heard once that Armstrong actually botched his moment in the sun - on the moon - and intended to say something rather different. No, not a "Shout Out to my Dawgs back on the Third Rock" or anything lke that, but words more nuanced than those we're familiar with.
Most appropriate and cautionary tale methinks as I attempt to launch this new venture blogside. Haven't even seen what the site looks like but that's the next babystep.
Peace
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