Jakartass Home thoughts from abroad. Alien thoughts from home.

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.
Robert Benchley’s Law of Distinction*

This post was occasioned by an interesting article by Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking, which suggests that "the world needs introverts."

We live with a value system that I call the Extrovert Ideal – the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha and comfortable in the spotlight. The archetypal extrovert prefers action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He or she favours quick decisions, even at the risk of being wrong; works well in teams and socialises in groups.

Thus online social networks – Mugshots, Twatter, et al?

Yet, as Susan Cain suggests, we make a grave mistake to embrace the Extrovert Ideal so unthinkingly. Some of our greatest ideas, art, and inventions – from the theory of evolution to Van Gogh's sunflowers to the personal computer – came from quiet and cerebral people who knew how to tune in to their inner worlds and the treasures to be found there.

And the science journalist Winifred Gallagher concurs: "The glory of the disposition that stops to consider stimuli rather than rushing to engage with them is its long association with intellectual and artistic achievement. Neither E=mc2 nor Paradise Lost was dashed off by a party animal."

There is something called an introvert-extrovert spectrum and "our place on this continuum influences our choice of friends and mates, and how we make conversation, resolve differences, and show love. It governs how likely we are to exercise (a habit found in extroverts), commit adultery (extroverts), function well without sleep (introverts), learn from our mistakes (introverts), place big bets in the stock market (extroverts), delay gratification (introverts), be a good leader (depends on the type of leadership called for), and ask "what if" (introverts).

Jakartass is a personal expression of what grabs my interest, an innate curiosity about what makes the world and humanity in particular tick. I am forever curious. So that is why I took time to answer the questions in this quiz to ascertain my position on the introvert-extrovert spectrum.

As Jakartass, I regularly ask "what if", so regular readers can probably anticipate what I was told.

You have a tendency towards being introvert. The higher your score, the more introvert you probably are. The nearer to 10 (out of 20) your score is, the nearer to being an ambivert you are – yes, there really is such a word.

As Jung felicitously put it, “There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum."

Mind you, at times I reckon that living in Jakarta has made nutcases of us all.
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*There are more than two variations of that theme and you can browse them here.

My first brush with fame came in the final years of my secondary school. Three of my classmates were in a group called Karl King and the Vendettas who covered rock and roll songs.

Other beat groups in south London covered urban blues: think Rolling Stones and Manfred Mann. There were other music genres covered elsewhere in England’s urban centres. Northern groups preferred soul music and some, think the Animals in Newcastle, the blues. Manchester groups, such as the Hollies, were more ‘pop’, covering songs produced, say, in the Brill Building in New York. The fab Beatles in Liverpool covered all three genres before beginning to write their own.

I believe that Chris Plumb (second left), the rhythm guitarist, is now in Australia but I have no knowledge of the other two – Al Butten (left), bass, and Nick Weston (right), lead guitar. I never knew Tony Day the drummer. Karl (centre) is now based in Denmark.

Some memorabilia and a recording of my old school mates playing in June 1964 at the Waterman’s Arms in Deptford, south London, can be found here.

This March sees Poole-based artist Derek Bacon’s first solo exhibition of work. Selected from his extensive portfolio, the exhibition showcases Derek’s vibrant illustration work, as well as more traditional painting, drawing and photography.

Entirely self-taught, Derek is an accomplished illustrator well-known for his many worldwide covers for The Economist, as well as for UK publications such as The Times, The Guardian, Maxim, and Wired, and too for other publications around the world.

The exhibition is a great chance to see his highly-detailed work in close-up, and to see his skills across a range of disciplines: from more traditional pen-and-ink work, to digital paintings made entirely in Photoshop. Also on show will be a series of acrylic-based portraits painted last summer.

Born in Staines, Derek has lived in Madrid and Jakarta¹, and for the longest, in Poole. He likes Carry-On films, fish and chips, Giles cartoons, The Beatles, and is a collector of found-sounds ². You have been warned.

So come along for a look at the private viewing at 7pm, Friday March 16th at The Artworks in Poole, where Derek will be pleased to have a chat, a drink and a laugh.

Selamat Jalan Suharto

¹Derek is my co-author of Culture Shock! Jakarta.
² Listen to "random candid bits of everyday sounds from Indonesia."
He says: Feel free to enjoy and use what's here. If a sound comes in handy in a creative way, let me know. I'm all ears.

… into a new age of boredom, one which has parallels with life under the Soviet regime, where cultural richness is replaced by cold, technocratic logic.
Adam Curtis  – quoted (misquoted?) at the Boring Conference 2011

It started with a dig around into reports of 15 trillion dollars (reportedly backed by 750,000 tonnes of gold), originating with a Mr Riyadi, transferred to various banks. Whether, as Aangirfan intimates, the “Mr. Riyadi” mentioned in the speeches of Lord James of Blackheath , is actually James Riady, the Chinese-Indonesian who is the evangelical felon noted as a corrupt contributor to the Clintons and a member of the Chinese Intelligence community, is a matter of conjecture.

Such is the strange world of financial skullduggery that my researches are going to take a bit longer. I therefore found my way to a favourite blog, Diamond Geezer who gave a link to James Ward’s blog. James likes boring things, “a series of obscurities inspected in fascinatingly unnecessary detail.”

A tweet James received piqued my interest: @DNAtkinson: Imagine a national map of broken cash machines.
@Jakartass: Yeh, I can *LOL*

Naturally, it being a boring kind of day, I delved deeper into James’ musings and discovered that he organises the Boring Conference. My opening quote is taking from last November’s proceedings.

->Pause here to play Spider Solitaire while searching my archives to find out if this is a rediscovery.
No, it isn’t and I won.

James is also noted for the introduction of the sport of Bonving to the UK, about which the less said the better, and is a co-founder of the Stationery Club “for fans of such as paperclips, Post-it notes and marker pens.” I looked in vain for the solution to the age old mystery of how paperclips get in such a tangle when left alone in a desk drawer. 

Of course, the whole point of this article is to point out that ‘smart’ phones are not just for dummies like this one.

Even.technocratic types can be creative because life is full of opportunities to engage with reality,

Then here are a few bloggable suggestions for Jakartans.

Whatever you decide, do note that the Library Of Congress is storing your Twitter chatter for all eternity.

Is that how you want to be remembered?

Was today a typical Monday?

Hardly. which is why I’m recording it here.

Waiting for a mikrolet, a Suzuki Carry which serves as local transport, to take me to the main road where I can get a taxi, I was well pleased to spot a Koperasi, which is generally reliable as they are owner-driven. What’s more, he knew the route to my destination so my Monday morning stress level, which is fairly low just after 6am, was kept ticking over.

On the way, I spotted a dark cloud to the north, except, as I soon realised, it was black smoke from a fierce fire. According to this short article in the Post, four household plastic factories in Kapuk, West Jakarta, were gutted, and firefighters from 32 fire engines extinguished the fire at 6 a.m. From a high vantage point at 10, I could still see this plume of black smoke.

Fires are regular events in Jakarta, as are traffic jams, but not like the one I got trapped in a few minutes later.

Having left the toll road at Kebon Jeruk, we turned left and at the junction we expected to turn right in order to access the bridge which carries traffic to the other side of the toll road. There is usually a traffic policeman here who stops oncoming traffic from the right, but not today. Thus, instead of two lanes of traffic heading into town, there were three. We couldn’t move, no-one could, not even the hells’s cherubs who’d squeezed into every available gap.

Of course, no-one was going to give way, to back off; that isn’t the Indonesian way.

After a full five minutes, I’d had enough and got out of my taxi well aware that the driver was unable to drive off with my belongings. There were four cars causing the chaos and there wasn’t space enough for them to reverse, so it was a matter of clearing the logjam at the front of my queue whilst standing in front of the two lanes who weren’t at fault. It may have taken me five minutes to put things right, but at least there was movement. Naturally I waited for my taxi to arrive.

As I watched the umpteen motorcycles and perhaps thirty cars to pass me, one driver wound down his window, held out his hand and said, with a smile,” Thank you, mister.”

Now, I didn’t do it for the thanks, but I do wonder why no-one else could express their appreciation.

Surely, that should be, must be, the Indonesian way. It saddens me deeply that the vast majority really couldn’t give a shit about anyone other than themselves and their immediate social circle.

And only three people later wished me happy birthday.

Ho hum.

Because our parents and teachers had “fought the war for the likes of us”, in the 50′s and 60s we were raised to be conformists. Many of our teachers had seen service in World War 2 and had subsequently learned how to teach in a one year course at one of the 55 emergency training collegs hastily established to meet the demand.

Naturally discipline was strict, almost military at times. In state-run schools, and also in private schools where at least part of the funding came from government, corporal punishment was not outlawed by Parliament until 1987.

The 1944 Education Act introduced the Tripartite System of secondary education which consisted of three different types of secondary school: grammar, secondary technical schools and secondary modern. It allowed for the creation of comprehensive schools which would combine these strands. As to who went where, the 11+ exam was introduced. The grammar schools were intended for children who would later be expected to go onto to tertiary education and gain a university degree before entering the workplace.

It was my misfortune to be the only boy from my primary school to go to a grammar school founded in 1652 with the Worshipful Company of Leathersellers, a guild granted a royal charter in 1444 by King Henry VI with the power to import, regulate and control the manufacture and sale of leather throughout London, as its Board of Trustees. I was lonely and ill-suited to the learning of Latin by rote, or mathematics come to think of it, and I was generally streamed in the lowest class each year. My reports always had the comment that I had ability “but could do better”.

Because I was extremely short-sighted, as my owl-like glasses proved, my sporting endeavours were confined to running the line for rugby matches, or going on cross-country runs. As the school playing field was in suburbia, this meant running through streets with little to view. Unfortunately, I was rather good at that and got picked to be one of the twelve in the school’s cross-country team against Shooter’s Hill Grammar. I made sure that I came in 23rd (not 24th and last) so that I wouldn’t be picked again!

I was not such a loner that I considered suicide, which poor Terry Stitson did by hanging himself from a clothes peg in the changing room. All the same, the only friends I had were similar misfits.

(If you really want to know which school this was, and still is although it is now co-educational, then you may like to know that noted jazz-rock musician Tony Reeves left two or three years before I did. A couple of other ‘Old Boys’, now deceased, were Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter and a member of the British Union of Fascists, and Edward Nelson, whose “moving portrait of his wife won the prize for the best portrait in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1947.”)

I eventually moved on to a three year course at a Teacher Training College. Because I was not under any compulsion to take part in sporting activities, I took to them with alacrity and represented the college in the following sports: football, field hockey, badminton, tennis, and stoolball. I even on occasion played cricket and seven-a-side rugby (without my glasses), generally because there was a desperation to make up the numbers.  .

Obviously, being given the freedom to grow into adulthood, to be individually responsible for one’s actions, was liberating.

School was inhibiting and I had few outlets for individual expression, so greatly admired the few who broke the mould. There was a school band among my contemporaries, Karl King and the Vendettas. Karl was not at our school, but the others were. Thanks to the power of the internet, you can see some memorabilia and hear their demo single here.

One outlet we did have was the fantasy world of comics with the Bash Street Kids and the Nigel Molesworth books written by Geoffrey Willans, with cartoon illustrations by Ronald Searle, which ridiculed skool rools and dissiplin and pompus teechers at St. Custard’s.

It is the death at the weekend of Ronald Searle, at the ripe age of 91, which has occasioned this post. Apart from Molesworth, as “as any fule kno”, Searle also created St. Trinian’s, a fictional girls’ boarding school that later became the subject of a popular series of comedy films which were regularly shown on our (b&w) TV. (Ignore the 2007 remake.)

Searle’s publisher, Simon Winder said, “He created an alternative to the conformity of Harold Macmillan’s Britain. He gave Britain in the 1950s particularly a sense of anarchy. He was extraordinarily sceptical about all forms of authority and there’s something just astonishingly anarchic about Molesworth and St Trinian’s.”

Ah, anarchy. I’m not sure I knew what the word meant then, but I’ve learnt my lessons well since.
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Check out Perpetua – a Ronald Searle tribute blog.
Follow Nigel Molesworth on Twitter (@reethen)

"Impersonal forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses.”
- Aldous Huxley fr. 1958 Preface to Brave New World

Ten years later the baby boom generation, or bulge babies as we were termed in the UK, reached adulthood. The American baby boomers found themselves embroiled in a doomed war in Indo-China, and in much of the western world, students discovered street power.

We had a voice, but also needed information, preferably not that brought to us by the mass media. One source I relished in London was the American-based Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, whose Guiding Tenet was as follows:

"We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far remotely done power and glory – as via government, big business, formal education, church – has succeeded to the point where the gross defects obscure actual gain. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, person power is developing – power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog."

As long ago as their Spring 1984 edition they were foreseeing the future role of personal computer networking.

"…. the flexible nature of telecommunications inspires everyone who tries it to do something different. I've seen people play games, order products, start small businesses that span continents on nationwide conferencing networks, retrieve public domain software or seek romance from free bulletin boards, investigate background material about specific news stories, get stock quotations, and work at home, sending their reports to the office by electronic mail."

What they didn't foresee was that large corporations with pet politicos, or as with Aburizal Bakrie, politicians with large corporations, would continue to manipulate "the thoughts and feelings of the masses." (As the latest batch of Wikileaks suggests, the American administration, which is in hock to corporate power, think Bakrie is "a potential US favorite to run for president in 2014."

Leopards do not change their spots so when "the masses" do rise up, as they did here in '97 and '98 and as we're witnessing with the "Arab Spring", the elite forces change sides for the moment, then revert to their corridors of power when it is considered safe to do so. (The military remains in control in Egypt.)

A British version of the Whole Earth Catalog was The Index of Possiblities whose "aim was to try and encompass the breadth of what [was seen] at the time as a new revolution in thinking in a series of five volumes that took broad general themes – Energy & Power, Structures & Systems, Communications, Down-To-Earth Life and Survival Facts, and Inventions, Discoveries, Explorations, Games containing cross-referenced information from not only many areas of science but also mysticism and religion – to form a new kind of encyclopedia for a new age."

That wonderfully provocative publication fundamentally firmed up my approach to life, one of continually asking "Why not?" rather than just "Why?"

Another publication, which I subscribed to until I left the UK, was Omni Magazine which eschewed consumerism and according to its publisher, Bob Guccione, offered a "controversial mixture of science fact, fiction, fantasy and the paranormal."

The mind is a wonderful machine: unlike a computer it can create a private fantasy world and can ask "what if" rather than "What?"

The kids who are growing up surrounded by cyber technology will have better hand-eye co-ordination than their parents, but shorter attention spans. They will be better at holding many things in their heads at once, but worse at remembering them afterwards.
fr.Review of Cyburbia – The Dangerous Idea That's Changing How We Live And Who We Are by James Harkin. pub. Little, Brown 2009.

Although I wonder.why students need a pencil for computer marked tests, it can be a weapon of choice, a chance to opt out of cyberspace. A better use for a pencil is doodling. Not only can this sharpen and enhance eye-mind-hand co-ordination, but  what some view as idleness is the sub-conscious manifesting itself; just as a night's sleep can resolve a previous day's problems, so doodling can give one pause for thought, thus offering solutions or understanding, or much needed relief from a stressful situation. This is to be encouraged.

Pencils can also be used for sculptures, as accessories for idle film actors, or for self-defence.

Doodlage is a site for folk with a lot of time on their hands – like this guy who dismantles watches to make models of motorbikes.

Thus proving the central thesis of the post: with imagination it is possible to opt out of the rat race. Amaze yourself and try to be what you want to be.