Jakartass Home thoughts from abroad. Alien thoughts from home.

Some three years ago, I mentioned Rectory Gardens in Clapham, London SW4, where I lived as, some might say, a hippie squatter.

I wasn’t then, and have never been.

What we did do was improve the houses we were squatting in both structurally and decoratively and lived peaceful lives slightly outside the ‘mainstream’ of societal expectations. I built up a collection of plaster dogs because flying ducks were in short supply and when I left with the expectant mother of Son No.1 for a community worker job in West Cumbria I’d just started fitting a kitchen.

A year or two earlier, I’d found a garden gnome on the vacant plot on the main road, took it home, painted it in nice colours, probably called it Roger, and put it behind the bar of the boot scraper outside the house I first lived in, not seen but along the longer stretch of the L to the left, and left it to dry.

Next morning it had gone!

He should have told me he wanted to move because I reported him missing to the local police! Not wishing to seem to be over-frivolous, I had gone primarily to report the loss of a bunch of keys, but the station sarge was more interested in the fate of Roger.

“Do you know, sir,” he told me, “that’s the commonest crime in Clapham.”

Later that day, a police search squad actually spent an hour looking for it/him.

This is not Roger

I only mention this because I do have an affinity with garden gnomes and I’d love to have a family move into the front garden of Jakartass Towers Redux.

And if I were back in London I’d almost certainly pop along to the annual Chelsea Flower Show which is on this week because, this being the centenary of the Royal Horticultural Show, RHS has lifted their ban on the category of ‘brightly coloured mythical creatures’.

Gnomes have personalities – view this gallery.

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.
– Anaïs Nin

We were comfortable with each other, discussing ants and leeches, which we were informed have thirteen brains, and other aspects of life and everything. We’d already eaten and quaffed enough Bintangs and red wine at Ya ‘Udah, so I told friends that we ought to make sure that we’d arrive reasonably early for the Indonesian launch of simakDialog’s sixth album, The 6th Story.

I was really looking forward to this as I already heard some of the album last year, albeit still at the production stage, when I spent an evening with group leader Riza Arshad and Leonardo Pavkovic who will release the album internationally in August on his MoonJune Records.

I thought that this being Friday night, the end of the working week, that the gig at Goethe Haus would be sold out. After all, with the price of admission being just Rp.50,000, which included a copy of the CD, and that the rain storm had passed fairly quickly, making the effort to arrive in sufficient time to grab seats was important.

Nearly five years ago, two of us had been to the launch of simakDialog’s last album, Demi Masa, and the 301 seater hall at Goethe Haus was packed.

We’d also all recently been to a gig there featuring the leader of simakDialog (sD), Riza Arshad, the group’s percussion section of Endang Ramdan and Erlan Suwardana playing kendang and Cucu Kurnia with his ‘metal toys’, with German guitarist Kai Brückner  and his compatriot Paul Kleber on bass. There had been quite a reasonable atttendance for a Thursday evening, so my hopes were high.

It seemed that my foresight was confirmed when we found a full car park and limited space on the road outside. However, sadly, I was wrong: the cars were there for students attending German lessons and, if we’d wished, we could all have sat alone in a row apiece.

Which I did.

Following a short introductory speech, which included as the reasons for the low turnout the usual excuses for not being anywhere in Jakarta – rain and traffic, we settled down to what, in my view, became the best simakDialog gig I’ve been to.

In an interview for Culture Shock! Jakarta, Leonardo described Riza as “an amazing pianist with a great touch and an ECM sensibility [and] I know the best of him is still to come.”

The majority of the tracks on the last three sD albums released on MoonJune, and indeed the new one, feature Riza mainly playing a Fender Rhodes with but a few snatches of acoustic piano. I hadn’t felt, yet had wanted, that sensibility, the transcendental flow and feel which epitomises ECM recordings and concerts.

The first tunes played were Stepping In and Lain Parantina, the first two tracks on the new CD, and I noticed three key differences from before; firstly, Riza was playing an acoustic grand piano, with no sign of electric keyboards. Although he sat almost with his back to us, he wasn’t taking a back seat: he was able to observe, conduct almost, the rest of the group. And he wasn’t barefoot; he had eschewed what he told me some time ago was “a traditional dress code. I do this to try to catch the ‘spirit’ of the music. I can’t imagine what would be my performance if I should dress any other way.”

“More confident” would be my answer because last Friday in that I couldn’t say that I heard echoes of his cited early influences, such as Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett. His playing was ‘his’ in that ‘solo’ passages were sufficiently strong and fluent to make me wonder what a solo piano album recorded with few takes would be like. He had that sought for transcendental flow, and I marvelled at what I was hearing.

A key word on the sleeve notes of simakDialog’s albums is ‘soundscapes’. Riza added these, quite subtly, to the intro of the third piece, One Has To Be, from both Baur (’96) and Patahan. Other pieces played from previous albums were Worth Seeing, also from Patahan, and All In A Day from Trance Mission (2002), the album in which Riza began to incorporate ‘ethno-percussion’.

It was a different Tohpati too. This time round, the ace guitarist, with his own releases on MoonJune, didn’t leave me “sublimely, gorblimey gobsmacking” as before. He sat still, generally looking down as he focussed on his ‘sounds’ which were rarely stand alone solos. When he did let rip, I had to wonder just where he’d dragged his inspiration from; there was little trace of his power trio, Bertiga. This was something else, a demonstration of absolute mastery of his instrument and its effects and a confirmation that, as Leonardo says, he has a “rightful place among the highest echelon of today’s guitar giants.”

To his right stood perennial cohort, the bassist Adhitya Pratama, who quietly and virtually immobile underpinned the grooves.

On the other side of them sat the three percussionists, crosslegged on floor mats. Endang Ramdan played on sD’s Patahan in 2007 and Erlan Suwardana joined for Demi Masa (2008). Both play kendang, Sundanese drums struck melodically and rhythmically with both hands and a foot. A new recruit is Cucu Kurnia who has ‘metal toys’, one of which is a cymbal.

When the three ‘competed’, they were the crowd pleasers. Perhaps because there was such a low audience turnout, the group wasn’t out to impress us. It was obvious that this is a group of friends who enjoy each other’s company and have fun sharing musical games, the sharing of challenges. The obvious joy the whole group had in being in tune with each other was infectious.

And so this was a night to remember. Catch them if you can.

Apparently, reports the Guardian, “hand-drawn maps are enjoying a renaissance as contemporary artists use their imagination, creativity and humour to breathe new life into the traditional craft of cartography.”

Artists – both famous and amateur – [are] seeking to put the romance back into this centuries-old art form.

The map above, drawn by Liam Roberts, shows my last stomping ground in the UK.

He says that “the tree is drawing water from London’s great giver of life, the Thames, depicted here as part of the underground watertable. Some of my favourite unique and characterful pubs and cafes are represented here either as hanging fruit, or as nests: I thought this made sense as these places can be sources of sweet sustenance, as well as temporary dwellings.”

Anyone looking for old maps of Jakarta, some of which were presumably hand-drawn, check out Bartele Santema’s Gallery.  

Mind you, apart from the one of the Transjakarta Busway network, even up-to-date maps are hard to find!

(Click map for larger image.)

When asked, 30%-39.9% of Indonesians said that they wouldn't want to live next to someone of another race.

So, how do you get on with your neighbours?

Incidentally, according to this map — Indonesia is one of the most ethnically diverse.

Go figure!

Stan Lhota has written to say that he is "currently writing a book chapter on ecotourism in primate swamp habitats in Borneo (Kalimantan, Sabah, Sarawak and Brunei), with a special focus on proboscis monkeys.
 

"There is very little evaluation research published on this topic, so I am therefore searching for personal experiences of people involved in ecotourism – as conservationists, entrepreneurs or tourists.

Do you think you can help commenting on the book chapter from your own experience in Borneo? If so, please email him.

A crime committed in the name of religion is the greatest crime against religion.
– Banner of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation website

Most years since 1997 the foundation has presented a World Statesman Award to “heads of state who have exemplified their commitment to freedom, human rights, peace and respect for religious and ethnic diversity, and endeavor to advance these essential democratic values on the international scene.”

In 2004, the recipient was Sir John Bond, the Group Chairman of HSBC Holdings. Last year (2012) HSBC agreed to pay a $1.9 billion fine in a case “for allowing itself to be used to launder a river of drug money flowing out of Mexico, and other banking lapses.”

HSBC Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver said, “We accept responsibility for our past mistakes. We have said we are profoundly sorry for them, and we do so again. The HSBC of today is a fundamentally different organization from the one that made those mistakes.“ 

Last year’s choice of Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada, was sharply criticised there because of his “long and well documented record of abuse and assault on democracy and rights.”

And now it is SBY who is the chosen one.

He may well “endeavor to advance … essential democratic values on the international scene”, but he is not known for this on the domestic scene.

Indonesia’s Human Rights Working Group, a coalition of NGOs, has stated that SBY is “undeserving” of the award “because the failure of law enforcement, and [that] he has far too often remained silent on the rights abuses suffered by members of minority faiths in Indonesia, and the lack of efforts to nurture tolerance, have contributed greatly to the current climate of intolerance in Indonesia.”

In March, SBY’s spokesman Julian Adrian Pasha criticised the authors of a new Human Rights Watch report, In Religion’s Name: Abuses against Religious Minorities in Indonesia  (.pdf download) saying it was “provocative” and lacking objectivity. Pasha dismissed the concerns as “naïve” and insisted that incidents of intolerance and violence by militant Islamist thugs against Indonesia’s religious minorities were merely expressions of “friction between groups”.

Those comments by Pasha – who admitted he had not read [the] report in any detail – are disturbing, but unsurprising, given the Indonesian government’s glaring failure to adequately respond to how Indonesia’s religious minorities, including several Protestant groups, Shia Muslims, and the Ahmadiyah, are targets of increasing intimidation, threats and, too often, violence. Just ask the Ahmadiyah community in Cikeusik, Banten province, in western Java. *

And now, in the past week, comes news of what I would term the most blatant example of the “greatest crime”.

A six-month investigation by Michael Bachelard for Good Weekend, a magazine insert of the Sydney Morning Herald, has exposed a ten year programme to remove West Papua’s youth, some as young as five, to Islamic religious schools in Java for “re-education”.

A report (.pdf) published by the International Crisis Group in 2008 suggested that new religious forces in Papua (with links to past inter-religious strife in the Moluccas and Poso in Central Sulawesi) have brought with them a doctrinal intolerance that complicates communal relations.

Bachelard writes: One of those religious forces was Al Fatih Kafah Nusantara (AFKN), which makes no bones about its intention to convert, and to use religion for political ends. Leader Fadzlan Garamatan says AFKN has brought 2200 children out of Papua as part of his program of nationalistic “Islamicisation”. “

Papuan boys at the Daarur Rasul pesantran, outside Jakarta. Photo: Michael Bachelard

What Fadzlan Garamatan says is an overt statement of AFKN’s contravention of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Indonesia is a party, which says that children should not be separated from their families for whatever reason, even poverty.

Furthermore, Article 20 states categorically that: “Children who cannot be looked after by their own family have a right to special care and must be looked after properly by people who respect their ethnic group, religion, culture and language.”

This is reinforced by Indonesia’s Child Protection Act 2002 which includes a five-year jail penalty for those who convert a child to a religion different from their family’s.

The USA’s Dept. of Labor’s Bureau of International Affairs issued a report  last year which stated that Indonesia is primarily a source country for child trafficking. Children, mostly girls, are trafficked to Malaysia, Taiwan and the Middle East; they are subject to forced prostitution and forced labor in domestic servitude. Children are also trafficked internally for the purpose of domestic servitude, commercial sexual exploitation (including sex tourism in Bali and Riau Island) and fishing.

Child trafficking for forced labour, commercial sexual exploitation, religious conversion … and all taking place under SBY’s watch!

We all know that he will do nothing, and I doubt that the Appeal of Conscience Foundation will offer the Award to someone who actually deserves it.

So much for reformasi, eh?
……………………………………..
* Video

 

…. are mountains of urban trash generated by the growth of Jakarta's middle classes who live for the day with their credit cards. For some (most?) of them, garbage disposal is a game with little thought given to the process.
 

As Meidyatama Suryodiningrat, chief editor of the Jakarta Post, wrote recently in a truly excellent opinion article, "People in the middle class no longer see political activism and social reform as an ethical obligation, but as an intellectual hobby for the few. If those who can propel change refuse to – and if the bureaucracy proves unwilling to – then what hope is there for the underclass, other than wallowing in decay as others grow wealthy?"

Pemulung (scavengers) are a common sight in Jakarta …

… some with a sack on the back 
 

… and others with a cart  … 
 

… which provides a 'home'

Some of the middle classes live in gated communities and overtly forbid entrance to pemulung, threatening mutilation – a hole in the head – or even death!

These blinkered parasites would surely benefit from watching and/or downloading the BBC programme Toughest Place to be a Bin Man.

A couple of Saturdays ago, along with Dan Quinn, Our Kid and a mutual friend, we were given a tour of the Sumur Batu landfill site where one of Jakarta's satellite cities, Bekasi, has its garbage dumped. It lies next to Bantar Gebang which landscapes Jakarta's waste and can be seen in the background of the top picture..

Dan has written of our visit: "The witnessing of this kind of environment requires a considerable time for its effects to be fully felt. Or perhaps nothing can touch your heart when you’ve grown accustomed to daily scenes of poverty in Jakarta. Despite the stench, filth, danger and extreme poverty, I find myself lacking the levels of feelings of empathy or horror that I had been anticipating."

Maybe this is why I haven't posted my thoughts earlier.* Most of are aware, if only from snippets of news and the occasional documentaries on TV, what Asia's garbage dumps look like, but experiencing the vastness of the quiet alien landscape from afar and within is surreal. It is strangely quiet; the vast army of pemulung, perhaps 10,000 strong over the two dumps, have little to say as they work rapidly, gathering loads of plastic bags which they can resell at between Rp.300 and Rp.500 per kilo.

And it comes by the ton, every day.

Dan has said much of what I'd like to say, and much better than I could, so please make the effort to read his account. And remember how lucky we are not to have been born or have to live among our garbage.

This is not an instruction!