Jakarta (urban stereoscopy)

Lobby: Gran Melia Jakarta

Stereoscopy: Stereoscopy consists of two simultaneous space-based observations.

Or:

“The simultaneity of virtual and real environments” (from “Perpetuating Cities: Excepting Globalization and the Southeast Asia Supplement”, Bishop, Phillips, and Yeo, in : Post Colonialism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes, Routledge, London, 2003.)

The Magical Misery Tour is waiting to take you away, waiting to take you away, take you away…

Photo: The Jakarta Post 7/22/09

Your bus awaits. All aboard.

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Today our tour takes us to Kunciran subdistrict, Tangerang municipality where our senses will be ignited by the horrific scene of a second wife burning.

As seen here by The Jakarta Post:

First wife burns second wife in front of husband

Multa Fidrus , The Jakarta Post , Tangerang | Wed, 07/29/2009 9:13 PM | Jakarta

“Jenni, 35, a resident of Kunciran subdistrict, Tangerang municipality, has burned Euis, 25, her husband’s second wife, after their husband Sahroni, 40, asked them to live together with him in peace and share the house.

Tangerang Police chief Sr. Comr. Hamidin said Wednesday the incident started with Euis promising she would divorce Sahroni after entrusting her baby to Jenni.

“But later Euis came to Jenny and asked for her baby back,” Hamidin said.

The two argued and Jenni took a jerrycan of gasoline, poured it onto Euis’s body and set her on fire.

Jenni then rushed to the police station with the baby to turn herself in. Euis was taken to hospital with 90 percent of her body burnt.”

Then we are off to The Gran Melia Jakarta for an early lunch.

Timeless Luxury with an Avant-Garde Flair

Discover the Bold New Shade of Luxury.

As you must know the

“Gran Meliá Jakarta hotel is a stimulus of exoticism and mystery; imbued by the warmth and passion of South East Asia. A dramatic structure, towering over the community of Kuningan, looking out to Jakarta’s elaborate skyline.

The luxury hotel’s unique, swerving architecture is coated in a distinct azure that seemingly drifts into the clouds. Within, Gran Meliá Jakarta hotel broadcasts a similar and enchanting aesthetic, communicating the spirit and vitality of Indonesian culture with grand, cascading ceilings, and evocative décor.

Situated at the heart of Jakarta’s exclusive diplomatic and business district, the hotel is in exact vicinity to the city’s premier shopping malls, attractions, and the Soekarno-Hatta International Airport.

Gran Meliá Jakarta’s world-renowned restaurants and bars, event facilities, spa, and tiered accommodations are fashioned by a discriminating auteur and showcased as a bold new expression of luxury.”

Lunch is served. We certainly hope that you bring a hearty appetite. You will need it.

We will then continue our tour to the site of the St. Moritz. A self-contained city within a city.

Come to Jakarta and not see it at all.

In fact come and never leave as all your wishes, desires, and needs can be serviced in one cradle to the grave stop.

St. Moritz will become to a global city in Asia

” Mochtar’s first grand son, Michael Riyadi will leading the projet of St. Moritz Penthouse and Residences in this year projects, a multi billion dollar projects to establish a new business district in Puri Kembangan, West Jakarta.

St. Moritz will have 17 buildings that will provide 11 centers in one area, including office buildings, apartments, schools, a hotel, a hospital and a mall.

This project will be a blast in the future and will help people to cut commuting time in Jakarta. The office building has 65 floors and will be the tallest in Indonesia.

The 135-hectare land plot is designed to be a self-sustaining business district with a block concept. We also want the new business district to be a global city, competing not with other developers, but with other cities in Southeast Asia.

This projects will become to a global city in Asia and also have a competitive advantage. Property prices in Jakarta are among the cheapest in the world.

According to Global Property Guide 2008, the average apartment price in Jakarta is US$1,068 per square meter while in Manila it is $1,969. In Kuala Lumpur, it’s $1,400.”

Well, I bet you have never seen anything like it!

Oh, we’re not done yet! Not by a long shot.

Prepare yourselves now to see THE REAL JAKARTA!

As reported by CNN:

Slum tourism: Visitors see the ‘real’ Jakarta

JAKARTA, Indonesia (CNN) — Hidden in the alleyways behind Jakarta’s fancy malls and in between the high-rise apartment buildings is what Ronny Poluan, a former film maker, calls the “real Jakarta.”

It is not far from the glitz and glam that dominates the capital’s skyline, yet it is a side of the city that few foreigners ever see.

“I want them to (have an) authentic view,” Poluan, who runs “Jakarta Hidden Tours,” said as he took a group of Australians through the winding maze of a central Jakarta slum.

“I’m running out of rice,” an old lady mumbles in the doorway of her tiny dark home as the group passes by.

Further along, little girls push their faces into wire fencing, while another group of children draw 36-year-old Daniel Knott into a game of cards. Knott, a volunteer for various NGOs, and his wife, who works for AUSAID, live in Jakarta and have been to the slums before. But it is the first time their friends, Kerri Bell and her husband Phil Paschke, have been to Indonesia.

Knott said he felt it was important to bring the visiting couple here.

“I think Jakarta is a city of contrasts,” he said. “There’s a lot of shopping malls and kitschy stuff, but it’s also a lot of normal people. And, it’s fun to come and hang out with the locals, actually.”

“It’s fantastic,” Kerri Bell said. “I’ve been in Asia once before and we didn’t want to just gloss over the surface and see all the things you can see in a western country. It feels to me much more like the real Jakarta, to see what drives it. To see that is so much more valuable than coming and lying on the beach.”

The tour first took them into a couple of cramped and sweltering soy bean cake and tofu factories — both staples in the Indonesian diet. Video Watch Arwa Damon tour through the slum »

The group remarked that there were few other cities where foreigners can wander around the slums, and not just feel safe but welcomed — and that is what Poluan said these tours were all about.

“I want to see people meet people,” he said. “The other culture meet the other culture.”

“It’s a pretty big eye opener,” Paschke said. “It’s the first time I have left Australia, so yes, it’s completely different.”

Poluan ushered the group into a covered market where you can find just about anything. For the group, it was a bombardment of the senses.

“I love seeing them,” fish seller Rokayah said, laughing. “They are handsome and they are rich. It is rare for me to see foreigners here at the traditional market, and I like talking to them, but I don’t understand English.”

The tour costs around $34 per person. Poluan keeps about half of the money for himself and his NGO, INTERKULTUR. The other half goes to the community.

Critics, however, said that this type of direct cash aid was counter-productive. They said the tours were demeaning, exploited the poor, and taught them to be dependent on the handouts of others.

“These poor people, we have to educate them,” said Wardah Hafidz, coordinator of the Urban Poor Consortium. “We have to tell them that it’s not God’s will that they are poor, that they also have to fight for themselves. They can’t depend on other people forever.”

This type of criticism angers and frustrates Poluan, who said his tours were about raising awareness on both sides. In the last month, he has also started a microfinance scheme.

More importantly though, he said, were the initiatives that he hoped his tours would jumpstart.

“They (the foreigners) usually think about how to help, to educate,” he said. “They come back again, bring books. I try to make a pushcart library for the children.”

He said his tours were also about educating foreigners on real issues facing the country.

The group weaved its way to the city’s train tracks, only barely visible amid the garbage and squalor.

It is the site of a constant battle between the track dwellers and the government, which says that living there is illegal and dangerous. Government evictions and the destruction of the feeble structures, usually just bits of plastic tarp and wood, are fairly commonplace.

“I am used to it,” shrugged 80-year-old Indarjo.

He has lived like this for five decades, making his living as a scavenger. He said he has been forced to move over 200 times.

He invited the group into his home, and explained that when it rains, he just pulls the flap over.

“I feel that I am equal to them. I treat them as my guests,” he said. “I believe that they would do the same for me.”

The visitors were dumbstruck, the impact of what they were seeing, they say, was hard to put into words.

It was a sobering but educational look at Indonesia, where some 40 million people live below the poverty line.

“It’s pretty confronting,” Paschke said. “The things you complain about at home don’t seem too significant.”

“It’s hard to see something like this and just go home to normal life,” his wife, Bell, added as the couple stood in the middle of the tracks. “It makes me motivated to look at the local community and things that we can help out with at home.”

Yes, see Jakarta now in its unreal realness. Really.

At the end of the day we will whisk you back aboard our open air bus to the JW Marriott or Ritz Carlton. As you prefer.

They’ve just reopened. It’s business as usual.

Next up, high tea at Jakartass Towers where we will converse  at length on the subject of what is real and what is not.

Jakarta (The King of Pop, Idle threats,Tehran, the Indonesian Police)

This is IT.

Well…  in case you have not heard the news Michael Jackson is dead. All the news channels are covering the event ad nausuem. I am certain, in short order, the news will filter to as far as Kalabahi on Alor island or to Wetar island where the Wetar Ground-dove coos way down the chain of the Malay Archipelago.

Fox News reported that:

“News of Michael Jackson’s death yesterday caused the largest spike in SMS traffic in our network history,” AT&T Wireless spokeswoman Jeannie Hornung told FoxNews.com. “Nearly 65,000 texts per second were sent as fans reached out to each other to share the sad news.”

And…

“Yahoo! News set a record in unique visitors with 16.4 million UV’s in a day,” Yahoo spokeswoman Carolyn Clark told FoxNews.com. “Our previous record was on Election Day when we had 15.1 million visitors. Yahoo! News had 4 million visitors come to the site between 3-4 p.m. [PDT Thursday], setting an hourly record.”

For sure, by this time tomorrow the news will have circled the globe hundreds of times over.

As I watched the ever continuing news coverage I was reminded by one commentator of how we are all just like Michael Jackson- from the richest potentate to the poorest kampung dweller we will all it up covered in a white sheet hauled off the whatever our final resting place is.  A comforting thought indeed.

Still, while our necks which are attached to our heads are turned to look at the passing wreck in other news North Korea threatens to wipe the United States off the face of the earth in a “shower of fire”.

Do they really believe this? This come while a U.S. Navy destroyer shadows an NK cargo ship carrying small arms to the democratic loving regime of Myanmar. No doubt the NKs are dangerous but it seems an awful lot like putting a few rocks in a tin can and trying to make as much noise as possible all the time screaming  out “hey, look here, we’re dangerous.”

Then there is Tehran. Ahmadinejad today compared Obama to Bush.  Laughable. The man and his regime are clearly mentally ill. The world has seen the video of the tragic death of Neda Soltan. The Iranian government alternately has accused the CIA of killing her and of the British Broadcasting Company of having arranged her death so that they could film it. Currently her family is not to be found.

What is clearly remarkable about the Iranian situation is how clear the Internet and cell phones are contributing to the truth rising above the madness of the lies Iranian government is telling.

This is, apparently, where an Islamic Republic will get you. An oligarch of grey beards who value money and power above the Holy Quran.

The Internet and cell phones played an important role in the 1998 student demonstrations in Jakarta but it has been over ten years since this took place and the technology is cheaper and much more wide spread now.

As this opinion piece which appeared in the Jakarta Post recently indicates…

Iran elections, Prita Mulyasari and Internet freedom

Bonni Rambatan , Malang | Fri, 06/26/2009 1:10 PM | Opinion

On May 13 this year, Prita Mulyasari was sued by Omni International Hospital for defamation and was sent to prison for expressing her opinions online, an action many would consider stifling free speech.

Thousands of people, largely Internet-literate youth, took to Facebook and the blogosphere and rallied for her freedom, after which she was released from prison and placed instead under city arrest to await her trial.

Exactly one month later on June 13, the Islamic nation of Iran entered what has largely been called its worse period of civil unrest in over a decade following the release of election results.

Communication within the country was crippled, with phone lines and many IP addresses blocked. People worldwide signed petitions and voiced support for the protesting Iranians via cyberspace.

The protest movement in Iran have been widely dubbed a “cyberwar” as people offer support to the Iran opposition by providing new venues of free speech, including new proxies for the protesters, baiting fake Iranian identities to government authorities, leaking documents, setting up anonymous forums, and so on.

Regular updates of the situation on the ground that would never have made it to media outlets such as CNN instead emerged through grassroots sources such as Twitter.

Through this technology, people worldwide could follow the unrest virtually in real-time while on YouTube, amateur videos of the protests, complete with the shaky camera angles and sounds of violence, reached our computers.

While it is true that the significance of the Iranian election protests far dwarfs the case of Prita, one should never be so easy to dismiss one case in favor of another, as each provide insight into the current state of society.” go to article…>

Iran is a very  computer literate nation. Seventy percent of the population is below the age of thirty. Iran is also a nation of bloggers, there are 60,000 in Tehran alone.

In Tehran there truly is a Twitter and a Facebook revolution. While there are those who do disparage social networks and “don’t have time for them” Iran has shown how very useful they can be. Apparently they are hard to shut down short of total electrical blackouts.

Here the immediate brutality of the police and government have been reported not in days or hours or minutes but in seconds.

Which brings me to the slow motion of the brutality of the Indonesian Police. No YouTube or Twitter moments here. Yet.

The AFP reports:

Torture ‘widespread’ in Indonesia: Amnesty

By Stephen Coates – 1 day ago

“JAKARTA (AFP) — Indonesian police commonly beat and torture people in custody and offer better treatment in exchange for money and sex, Amnesty International said in a report released.

The human rights organisation demanded the Indonesian government acknowledge the problem and end the culture of impunity that allows police to act as if they are above the law in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country.

The report, “Unfinished Business: Police Accountability in Indonesia”, found that the police were particularly brutal to the most vulnerable and marginalised people, such as drug addicts and women.

“Amnesty International’s report shows how widespread the culture of abuse is among the Indonesian police force,” the organisation’s Asia Pacific deputy director, Donna Guest, said.

“The police’s primary role is to enforce the law and protect human rights, yet all too often many police officers behave as if they are above the law.”

The report cited the case of 21-year-old sex worker Dita, who was arrested in 2006 and described being sexually abused on the way to the police station.

“I was arrested with five or six other prostitutes. On the way to (the station) they were grabbing me and touching me saying, ‘You’re so young, why aren’t you in school?’,” she was quoted as saying.

At the station the women were told they could buy their freedom with 100 dollars or with sex.

“Three of the girls agreed to have sex with them. I point blank refused to do either. Our pimps have paid them enough already,” she said.

Abuses meted out included shootings, electric shocks and beatings, sometimes for days on end, the report said.

“The suspects often received inadequate medical care for the injuries they received as a result of torture and other ill treatment,” Amnesty said.

“In some cases detainees had to pay for treatment after police abused them, and received inadequate medical care from police medical institutions.”

The report, based on interviews in Indonesia over two years, said police frequently sought bribes from detainees in return for better treatment or lighter sentences.

“At a time when the Indonesian government and senior police figures have made the commitment to enhance trust between the police and the community, the message is not being translated into practical steps,” Guest said.

“Too many victims are left without access to real justice and reparations, thus fuelling a climate of mistrust towards the police.”

Most police do not even know of, let alone follow, the force’s code of conduct which forbids abuse, she said.

Victims’ complaints were not impartially investigated and opened the plaintiff to further abuse, especially if they were still in police custody.

Amnesty recommended the government acknowledge and condemn the problem but no police or government officials attended the launch of the 84-page report.

It is the second report from a major international rights group to condemn torture in Indonesia this month.

US-based Human Rights Watch said on June 5 that torture and abuse of prisoners in a jail in Indonesia’s sensitive Papua region is “rampant.”

The United Nations has reported that Indonesian police routinely torture and beat suspects in custody.

Indonesia is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture but it has no corresponding law against the practice.

The UN special rapporteur for torture visited Indonesia in 2007 and found that police used torture as a “routine practice in Jakarta and other metropolitan areas of Java”.

A decade of political and institutional reform after the fall of the military-backed Suharto regime in 1998 has not left its mark on the police and prison system, analysts say.”

I would argue that the violence on the streets of Tehran is not so much different that the violence on the streets of Jakarta.

We are caught between sensational pop news,  the lies of violent governments whose only intent it to perpetuate their grip on power, and histories which we do not care to address in polite company.

Time to fire up the cell phone camera.

Shine a light.

Jakarta (kicking ass on the mean streets of Jakarta)

Merantau…  coming to a movie screen near you…

The story goes something like this:

“In Minangkabau, West Sumatera, Yuda a skilled practitioner of Silat Harimau is in the final preparations to begin his “Merantau” a century’s old rites-of-passage to be carried out by the community’s young men that will see him leave the comforts of his idyllic farming village and make a name for himself in the bustling city of Jakarta. After a series of setbacks leave Yuda homeless and uncertain about his new future, a chance encounter results in him defending the orphaned Astri from becoming the latest victim of a European human trafficking ring led by the wildly psychotic, Ratger and his right-hand man Luc. With Ratger injured in the melee and seeking both his “merchandise” and bloody retribution, Yuda’s introduction to the city is a baptism of fire as he is forced to go on the run with Astri and her younger brother Adit as all the pimps and gangsters that inhabit the night hound the streets chasing their every step. With escape seemingly beyond their grasp, Yuda has no choice but to face his attackers in an adrenaline charged, jaw-dropping finale.”

Or, as Twitch has it: “Nearly Three Minutes Of Extreme Ass-Whuppery!”

Just what Jakarta needs, ya?

But can he save Manohara from the evil Malaysian Prince? Will he help SMI become VP? Can he poke Probowo in the eye? Or whip Wiranto for his misdeeds? Have tea and cookies with Megawati? Kick Kalla all the way to Kediri?

I suddenly see the Jakarta streets alive with the followers of Silat Harimau.

Merantau is both written and directed by Welsh born filmmaker Gareth Evans. The film is presented by Pt. Merantau Films and opens in theaters in Jakarta, Indonesia in August later this year.

The official Merantau web page is here  go to site…>

A short cultural primer…

Minangkabau

“The Minangkabau–who predominate along the coasts of Sumatera Utara and Sumatera Barat, interior Riau, and northern Bengkulu provinces–in the early 1990s numbered more than 3.5 million. Like the Batak, they have large corporate descent groups, but unlike the Batak, the Minangkabau traditionally reckon descent matrilineally. In this system, a child is regarded as descended from his mother, not his father. A young boy, for instance, has his primary responsibility to his mother’s and sisters’ clans. In practice, in most villages a young man will visit his wife in the evenings but spend the days with his sister and her children. It is usual for married sisters to remain in their parental home. According to a 1980 study by anthropologist Joel S. Kahn, there is a general pattern of residence among the Minangkabau in which sisters and unmarried lineage members try to live close to one another, or even in the same house.

Landholding is one of the crucial functions of the female lineage unit called suku. Since the Minangkabau men, like the Acehnese men, often merantau (go abroad) to seek experience, wealth, and commercial success, the women’s kin group is responsible for maintaining the continuity of the family and the distribution and cultivation of the land. These groups are led by a penghulu (headman). The leaders are elected by groups of lineage leaders. As the suku declines in importance relative to the outwardly directed male sphere of commerce, however, the position of penghulu is not always filled after the death of the incumbent, particularly if lineage members are not willing to bear the expense of the ceremony required to install a new penghulu.

The traditions of sharia and indigenous female-oriented adat are often depicted as conflicting forces in Minangkabau society. The male-oriented sharia appears to offer young men something of a balance against the dominance of adat law in local villages, which forces a young man to wait passively for a marriage proposal from some young woman’s family. By acquiring property and education through merantau experience, a young man can attempt to influence his own destiny in positive ways.

Increasingly, when married couples merantau, the women’s roles tend to change. When married couples reside in urban areas or outside the Minangkabau region, women lose some of their social and economic rights in property, their social and economic position becomes less favorable, and their divorce rate rises.

Minangkabau were prominent among the intellectual figures in the independence movement of Indonesia. Not only were they strongly Islamic, they spoke a language closely related to Bahasa Indonesia, which was considerably freer of hierarchical connotations than Javanese. Partly because of their tradition of merantau, Minangkabau developed a cosmopolitan bourgeoisie that readily adopted and promoted the ideas of an emerging nation state.”

 

Jakarta (images better than reality)

Photo posted in Curious Photos (Note: my wife insists I state that this photo not taken in Jakarta or any other place in Indonesia which goes without saying really but nevertheless…)

 

IMAGES BETTER THAN REALITY: Fashion Styling Here and There is the name of a blog I recently came across. The last posting date is December 5, 2006, so it appears it author has discontinued further contributions. However, the idea that “images are better than reality” is quite a potent contribution in and of itself as it goes to the very heart of what, in part,  defines modern Jakarta, and indeed, the mass global “cultural scene”.

 

From DesignTaxi.com

EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

Pacific Place, Sudirman Business District
Jakarta

20 August – 24 August 2008

Festival Mode Indonesia – Jakarta Fashion Week 2008 is approaching. Do not miss the biggest fashion event the year with 47 local and international designers participating in this massive show of creativity. The biggest names from the Indonesian Fashion Designers Association and the Indonesian Fashion Designer Council such as Stefanus Hamy, Taruna Kusmayadi, Valentino Napitupulu, Defrico Audy, Chossy Latu, Hengki Kawilarang, Rusli Tjohnardi, Harry Ibrahim, Syahreza Muslim and Jeanny Ang will be displaying their most striking collections.

Another event highlight is the parade of designers selected by Dewi magazine along with the array of garments by Australian designer, Akira Isogawa.

Join the variety of creative activities catered for segments of the fashion market, presented by the magazines of Femina Group such as talk shows, competitions and workshops as well as fashion shows.

This event was conceived by the Femina Group in conjunction with the Tourism Department of Jakarta and Pacific Place, the most opulent and modern shopping centre in Jakarta.

With the introduction of Sunsilk Style Collection, we at Sunsilk aim to ensure the success of this event through our participation. Sunsilk is proud to be a part of this inspirational fashion event. The well-groomed and stylish hair that provides the finishing touch to the appearance of named designer garments and accessories can only enhance the beauty of each woman. …> go to article

 

There will never ever again be one ‘the place’.

From The Independent Fashion

Note: I was going to edit this article to save some space here but after reading through it I decided it was best to cite it as it was published. 

Thursday, August 14, 2008.

Meet the global scenester: He’s hip. He’s cool. He’s everywhere.

Cutting-edge street style is no longer exclusive to London or Tokyo. Today, a generation of hipsters from Helsinki to Hull wears the same brand of T-shirt, downloads the same music, and rides the same bike. Is this the end of individuality, asks Tim Walker, or the start of global cooling?…

“There always used to be a particular city that was the centre of cool at a particular point in time,” says Ted Polhemus, style anthropologist and author of Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk. “But now there’s no longer a place where it’s ‘at’; there’s no longer any centre of the world’s popular cultural universe. For a time it seemed it would be a simple matter of shifting from London to Tokyo. But instead, street style is everywhere and in places you’d never have guessed it would be.”

The Truman Brewery is a microcosm of an international phenomenon. Across the alley from the bar, Rough Trade East – London’s coolest independent record store – is celebrating its first birthday with a limited edition run of Rough Trade-branded Converse All Stars, the global scenester’s shoe of choice. Next door, there’s a hairdresser cutting the “do” of the day, its clients reclining in Japanese Belmont Cadilla styling chairs “for ultra-comfort and design”.

There’s the local scooter dealership with a rank of Mod-ish Italian Vespas lined up on the pavement outside. And at the end of the row is a clothing store that specialises in stitching together two old pieces of clothing to make something new. Want your pinstripe suit grafted to a hoodie? This is the place for you. And this is what global scenester culture has come to in the Noughties – a succession of styles from the past half-century, patched together to form a single, strangely familiar whole. There’s a bit of Eurotrash here, some British punk there, a swatch of Asian minimalism, and a sizeable off-cut of blue-collar chic from both sides of the Atlantic. So how, exactly, did hip get globalised?

Like every other American Apparel clothing store worldwide, the East End branch – a stone’s throw from the Truman Brewery – stocks Spandex hotpants and sequined tube dresses, white Eighties gym socks and DayGlo sports sweats, maroon corduroys worthy of Woodstock, even the latest album by French electro-auteur Sébastien Tellier. The shop is so popular it’s moving to bigger premises.

American Apparel is an archetype for the globalisation of “cool”. The retail chain was founded in California in 1997 with an outsider ethic. Most of its clothes are produced in an 800,000-square foot factory in Los Angeles, and its Canadian founder, Dov Charney, actively associates his brand with the city’s multicultural melting pot.

Today, American Apparel is the largest domestic clothing manufacturer in the US, and boasts around 200 stores worldwide – in Canada, Mexico, Israel, Japan, Korea and most of Western Europe. There are outlets in Glasgow, Brighton and Liverpool, and the locations of its London branches read like a historical tour of capital cool: Portobello Road, Carnaby Street, Covent Garden, Camden. The further its global reach stretches, the more easily the company can study and copy street style, before repackaging it and selling it back to the originators of that style, with an American Apparel label attached.

Uniqlo, the Japanese clothing giant, is another outfitter of the global scenester. Until 2004, the chain was known as a cheap and nasty Asian C&A equivalent. Its first move into the UK, in the early Noughties, met with little success. So Uniqlo executives went back to the drawing board and hired top creative director Kashiwa Sato to transform its fortunes.

Sato’s strategy was to make Uniqlo a global brand, but one unafraid of flaunting its modern Japanese origins. Now the company’s website is world class, its store interiors sleek and minimalist, its global logo (in both Roman and Japanese script) ubiquitous, and its clothing cutting edge and inclusive. Today, Uniqlo has almost 800 stores worldwide, including outlets in the UK, US and France. What Sato was looking to replicate, he recently told Creative Review, was “the ultra-contemporary cool aspect of Japan, its pop culture rather than something traditional and Japanese-y.” He’d tapped into the global scene.

Down the street from American Apparel, past the London College of Fashion, is The Old Blue Last, a shabby-chic pub where Vice magazine, style bible to the global scenester, hosts regular parties. Outside, a blackboard advertises “fuzzed garage, punk, post-punk, freakbeat and more in an anything goes night of really GOOD music”.

Once, style tribes defined themselves by their music. There were disco divas, electro heads, hippy West Coast rockers…. But in the age of the MP3, anything really does go: Parisian lounge jazz bands can cover the Ramones (as did Nouvelle Vague); Belgian producers can make a Kylie Minogue song sound like The Prodigy (as did Soulwax); and DJs can drop The White Stripes into a hip-hop set – Mark Ronson made his name on the New York club circuit doing just that.

Today’s music scene is a global swapshop. One of the coming bands of this year, for instance, are Johannesburg’s Blk Jks, whose style choices include the global scenester’s familiar Elvis Costello “dork” glasses, 1970s ski vests, vintage Nikes and, yes, skinny jeans.

The band that defined the US branch of the global scene was The Strokes, a quintet of monied Manhattanites posing as Lower East Side hipsters. Lead singer Julian Casablancas’s vocal persona is insouciant, unimpressed, too cool to try harder. His latest project is the song “My Drive Thru”, commissioned for a Converse advertisement; the ad is the centrepiece of Converse Century, a celebration of the company’s first 100 years, and a smart marketing campaign that condenses decades of global youth subculture and rebrands it for the mainstream.

The print element of the Converse Century campaign features a row of international, intergenerational scenesters, each wearing their pair of Chuck Taylor All Star trainers – among them are Hunter S Thompson, James Dean and Sid Vicious. The UK version of the print ad features Joy Division’s Ian Curtis; the French version, actress and singer Jane Birkin; the Chinese version, singer-songwriter Cui Jian. Converse means cool in more than 20 languages.

When the first edition of the glossy freesheet Vice came out in Montreal in 1994, its founders could hardly have believed that, 14 years on, it would be sought out by 900,000 readers on five continents. Now, the Vice empire includes a clothing chain, a record label and an online TV channel.

The Vice aesthetic has had an abiding influence on global scenester style. The magazine’s photographers popularised a street-verité photographic vernacular, with touches of soft porn and a sense of menace. The Vice Photo Book, a collection published earlier this year, boasts images of guns, sex, drug-taking, blood and vomit.

It’s no coincidence that American Apparel’s often controversial advertising campaigns imitate the Vice look, nor that Vice photographer Terry Richardson is the principal photographer for Uniqlo’s in-house magazine, Paper. His style has countless amateur copycats worldwide, whose photos have found a home on fast-growing photo-sharing websites such as Flickr and MySpace. Snapping away at a party in Portland, Oregon, or in Harajuku, Tokyo, a global scenester can disseminate their local style worldwide before sunrise.

“People like Ryan McGinley and Terry Richardson just took pictures of their friends on basic cameras,” explains Andy Capper, the UK editor of Vice. “American Apparel and Uniqlo are doing what Vice did, which is to stop using expensive models and Photoshop. They use point-and-shoot photography, which is more honest and exciting. Cheap digital cameras and the internet popularised that.”

Outside a bar in Shoreditch, near the Vice offices, there’s a guy handing out flyers for a club night called Shoreditch is Shit: The Worst Night of Your Life. On the flipside are instructions for how to play “cock, muff, bumhole”, the variation on paper, scissors, stone created for Nathan Barley, a satire of scenester life aired on Channel 4. Making fun of the global scenesters is futile, for they love nothing more than to mock themselves. Everything a scenester does is rendered in air quotes: ironic moustaches, ironic trucker caps, faux-offensive Urban Outfitters T-shirts, white guys with afros, or musical acts with names like Does It Offend You, Yeah?

Nathan Barley himself ran a scenester website – or “urban culture despatch” – called Trashbat.co.ck, and the internet has been a key factor in the globalisation of hip. Through mailouts and blogs, the tropes of eclectic style tribes the world over are quickly integrated into a single street style. The keffiyeh, once a signifier of solidarity with Palestine, now signifies nothing but cool. The fixed-wheel bike is now the global scenester’s favourite ride. China’s cheap Holga camera, once a well-kept secret among professional photographers hoping to achieve that lo-fi look, is now an essential urban accessory, and the results of its use are plastered all over Flickr. Albert Hammond Jr, The Strokes’ guitarist and boyfriend of Agyness Deyn, had one hanging round his neck at the T4 on the Beach party.

“Trends aren’t transmitted hierarchically, as they used to be,” explains Martin Raymond, co-founder of The Future Laboratory, a trend forecasting company. “They’re now transmitted laterally and collaboratively via the internet. You once had a series of gatekeepers in the adoption of a trend: the innovator, the early adopter, the late adopter, the early mainstream, the late mainstream, and finally the conservative. But now it goes straight from the innovator to the mainstream.”

The global scenester stays on top of what’s cool worldwide by reading such urban culture despatches as The Cool Hunter, a blog begun in Sydney four years ago by Bill Tikos, which reports on the hippest fashion, furniture, and design culture. The Cool Hunter has more than 600,000 unique visitors per month, who pore over the contents of its licensed offshoots in the US, UK, Turkey, Italy, China, and Japan. Its global audience allows Tikos to homogenise cool worldwide.

The Vice weekly e-mailout, with images from the global scene, and listings for Vice events in each city, is not unique. Le Cool, also emailed, calls itself “a free weekly cultural agenda and alternative city guide” for European capitals. Flavorpill does the same job for London and the US. It also makes sure scenesters are on the same page with weekly music, art, fashion, and literary mailouts, and Activate: “world news filtered by flavorpill”.

Not even geopolitics is beyond the boundaries of cool for a global scenester: there’s a vague pro-organic, anti-Bush sentiment uniting them all. For more precise examples, look at American Apparel’s pro-immigration political activities, or Vice’s “Iraq Issue” of 2004, which covered the conflict from a new, Vice-centric angle – following, for instance, the travails of an Iraqi heavy metal band. The magazine’s pet topics may be controversial, but they aren’t self-regarding.

“We’re more of a news magazine than a fashion magazine,” says Capper. “Even if we’re writing about a band we try to put some social context in it. We’re The Economist meets Rolling Stone – but back when Rolling Stone was good.”

In the 7 August edition of the JC Report, Flavorpill’s weekly fashion mailout, Erin Magner reported on ‘The Death of Trends’ on the catwalk. “In 2008, the only prevailing trend is that there are no prevailing trends,” she wrote. “It’s not just designers who are contributing to the end of boldface trends … consumers, too, are rejecting the commandments of the editorial elite, taking inspiration from peers around the world to craft their own interpretations of style. Rather than buy into one trend from head-to-toe, like the ‘preppy’ or ‘punk’ movements of decades past, consumers are appropriating eclectic influences and remixing them like a DJ does with music.”

“Fashion is a borrowed medium,” says Martin Raymond. “It’s pick-and-mix, it’s retroactive and it’s nostalgic. So you get a chronological misfit of products and references, mashed together to create something completely different. Think about nu-rave: it’s a product of Eighties romanticism, a product of punk, a product of straight edge and of old rave. The growth in cool-hunting websites and businesses has led to the decay of the traditional time scheme between an emerging group doing something, and it being spotted, embraced and codified. It used to be a year, then it was six months. Now it’s about six days. We have 3,500 trend-spotters stationed around the world. I sit down with them four times a year, and we’ll find that the same trend has cropped up in about 25 different cities.”

As this “borrowing and referencing” takes place not in capitals of cool like London but on an international scale, via the internet, the result is that same brand of individuality is sold, worn and celebrated the world over, simultaneously. If a global scenester starts wearing their underpants around their neck in Sao Paolo tomorrow, by next week boxer shorts would be sold out in Berlin. Ted Polhemus explains, “If you Google ’street style’, you can see street fashion photography from all over the world. What’s interesting is not just the images from London or Tokyo, but those from places like Helsinki, Zagreb, Mexico City, Jakarta, even Tehran. People always ask me, ‘What’s the next big thing?’ but there will never again be a next big thing. The future of fashion is that all of these places will participate. There will never ever again be one ‘the place’.”

 

The reason why, I think, “images are better than reality” is because “the money”  obscures the view of the sweat shops, the street kids, the urban poor.  The “global cultural scene” is a veneer as thin as an eggshell covering realities we cannot dream or wish away or buy ourselves out of. 

 

Photo: Jakarta by Vitchek

 

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Jakarta (heaven, hell, the street, and pylox)

Hysteria Collection, Gucci,  Ala Moana Mall, Honolulu, 2008

” No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn “

 -Jim Morrison

“The world is crawling with teenagers, especially in the southern countries, where the UN estimates that 507 million adults will die before they turn forty. Two-thirds of Asia’s population is under thirty…”

-Naomi Klein from No Logo

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s International Data Base in Indonesia roughly 190 million people out of a population of 235 million, or 80% of the population, is under the age of thirty. This demographic will persist until the year 2050.

And this age bracket is the perfect consumer demographic.

Jakarta is a one of the great emporiums of Southeast Asia. Everything and anything is for sale. Besides traffic jams and floods buying and selling are THE consuming activities.

The public spaces of Jakarta are jammed with advertising. “Surcharged with immense and incoherent imagery, with exaggerated descriptions and strange creations”, as Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote about America. While de Tocqueville feared that all of this would “make us regret the world of reality”, in Jakarta to forget reality seems to be the very point.

In her book No Logo, Naomi Klein commented that, “We are surrounded now by the realization of de Tocqueville’s predictions: gleaming, bulbous golden arches; impossibly smooth backlit billboards; squishy cartoon characters roaming fantastically fake theme parks…”

This certainly is true of Jakarta. All one has to do is walk into one of the many malls scattered across the city and there it is.

Heaven

On one of my trips into Jakarta with my friend Budi, I decided I wanted to see the Taman Anggrek Mall. I remember that the day was hot, hazy, and muggy. Jakarta seemed to be exhibiting a particular kind of nasty grittiness which comes after several days of lack rain. I was convinced that the hot tropical sun was cooking the air pollution into something extravagantly toxic.

We stepped out the car, turned it over to the valet, and walked through the large glass doors. I won’t forget my first words to Budi. They were, “Did we just die and go to heaven?”

Everyone knows heaven is vertical. The air here is a peculiar kind of clean cold air-conditioned air that only hugely energy consuming machines can produce. The lighting scheme is otherworldly, rivaling anything you would see under Jakarta skies. The foyer is paved with the best Italian marble, there is a large fountain bubbling cool water surrounded by pleasing tropical plants, and the whole thing towers up to seven floors of Liz Claiborne, Chanel, Bulgari, and Gucci. There are long hallways of hair and makeup salons, wedding boutiques, and rows of banks with glistening ATMs. On the top floor there are the old familiars: A&W, Pizza Hut, and KFC or if your taste runs more exotic there are the sushi bars and the imported New Zealand steaks. All of this is topped by an ice skating rink with a cherry on top. Ok, I made up the thing about the cherry, but still…

This “heaven as mall as theme park” motif is not entirely a Jakarta phenomenon. It is replicated endlessly and with precision (with slight variations on the tune) in every major urban center on the planet.

Still, Jakarta is a rather special case (which is why I love Jakarta so much) as there is more reality one might wish to run away from and so far less to regret regarding not being anchored to it. The heaven of Taman Anggrek is far preferable.

That is, if you have the money.

Hell

Of course if heaven is vertical then hell must be horizontal and if it is horizontal in Jakarta it must mean you are in the street (metaphorically  and literally speaking). But here in the street hell is not altogether such a nasty place though it does lack the air-conditioning.

Hell is after all, and especially in Jakarta, where most of the people are. That can be interesting because there is a lot going on out there in hell.

 Total Terror The Red Wall (click to enlarge)

apriliacantik

 

The Rebus Team in action (sort of)  photo appears on their site

 

 

TRAIN…..!!! from AshTwo

Miel 88  apriliacantik  ashtwo  break13  dothewhatnot  getthewall  tututupai 

 escaprefromsleep  totalterror footurama  mordenism  rebusteam  mole  

klimaks  thePOPO  SheTwoBJC!  LABERsquad  oinkcru  pigart notahero 

pylox world 

and on and on toward the spray painted horizon it goes…

The mother of them all is Tembokbomber

It is reported that Tembokbomber gets more traffic than Yahoo! So, occasionally you get this message “The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.”

 Here on the street there is a kind of push back against the unreality of the reality of Taman Anggrek. All one needs, it seems, is a plate of rice to eat and a few cans a krylon or pylox spray paint.

Tembok in bahasa Indonesia means wall. People have been painting on walls since time began. There are the fantastic cave paintings of Lascaux and the aboriginal art walls of Austrailia. In the small town I grew up in we had the “Painted Rocks”. No one knew what it meant other than some people in some time past stopped long enough with their hand made paints to declare “we were here, we passed this way”. Writing on urban walls is not so different or only different in that it is contemporary, urban, and a widespread global phenomenon.

As I was thinking on this I came up with a term to describe this modern urban art: metrography or urban writing. Just to check if the word was in use I googled it and found it to be a synonym of hysterography which is: 1. Radiographic examination of the uterine cavity filled with a contrast medium. 2. Graphic procedure used to record uterine contractions.  Well, why not… metro meaning city and graphy meaning to write.

Metrography is all about image, form, style, design. This particular kind of urban art is probably as old as the existence of the city. Anyone with a bucket of paint, a message, any message (even if the message is only the medium), and a concrete canvas can be a metrographer.

The modern urban art movement clearly has roots in the Latino neighborhoods of San Diego and Los Angeles (the US city which most reminds me of Jakarta) where there has been a long tradition of urban mural painting. Or even earlier in the works of Diego Rivera. But beyond that it descends from and emerges out of urban gang culture as did rap, hip-hop, and break dancing. All were born of the street.

Street gangs tagging of territory with spray paint and stylized initials has now been conflated into a global art movement. It is way beyond the graffiti vandalism of kids in the night with cans of spray paint. This is serious urban cultural business. This is Technicolor wall bombing.

The links posted above are but a few clipped from one web site or another as I browsed my way around to get an idea of what is going on. Most sites have links lists. Open one box and there is a box inside of that and a box inside of that and a box inside of that. You can go deep here.

The sites represent varying levels of skill in both site presentation and quality of the art displayed. Some of the sites display a high degree of technical ability in style and form, perhaps the best I have seen on the internet. I have tried to represent artists working in Indonesia: Jakarta, Bandung, and Denpasar. But it is obvious that the movement goes beyond borders and spills out to Australia, Singapore, and Malaysia and beyond. The photos I have posted simply do not do justice to the vast array of the art that is out there and nor do they do justice to the scene that is going on.

It is WAY beyond this post to attempt a detailed analysis of this art movement. My purpose here is point it out, although if you live in Jakarta it is hard to miss, as nearly the underside of every flyover and every large and not so large concrete wall in every kampung has something going on which involves spray paint, everything from meaningless squiggles to astonishing works of art.

A few urban artists have moved off the street and into galleries where their art is for sale. They market hats, sneakers, and t-shirts and have created brands and logos and lifestyles that you can buy into. Tied to this are urban art festivals where artists and their work can be seen on display at Fatahilla Square or Ancol under the corporate sponsorship of Djarum Black or HSBC. It is not clear if these artists have sold out the street but they appear to have bought into the economy of fashion most closely associated with the heavenly spaces of the mall. It is a pose of sorts.

What intrigues me is the social politics of this movement. The web sites I visited reflected a spectrum of politics from nihilism to anarchy to apolitical. There was an absence of advocating a particular political or religious view. Are there Islamic wall bombers? Whatever the politics, all but those who have turned their art into a full time business remain outside of the mainstream, where, on the street, they are culture jammers, hanging with their friends in the scene, generally telling society to fuck off, and displaying their talent as artists on the concrete canvas. This is a pose of sorts as well.

Once, in Indonesia, to take your brush and paint the hammer and sickle or the word merdeka on a wall was to mean to take your life in your own hands. It was deadly dangerous. If these urban artists should turn to a message with a clear political motive they could well move the order of things as they are.

 

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Jakarta (fear of the street, part 3)

 Trisakti Monument, Trisakti University, Jakarta

Turun ke Jalan!

This is the third part of my review of Chapter 4, The Violence of Categories, in Abidin Kusino’s book Behind the Post Colonial Architecture, urban space and political cultures.

I end where Kusno begins: the economic crisis of 1997-1998, the student demonstrations, and the fall of Soeharto. In this coming month of May the tenth anniversary of those events which took place in Jakarta will pass.

Ten years ago Jakarta was in the midst of sever economic crisis resulting from property speculation and overvaluation, systemic corruption of the banking sector, systemic corruption in the government, devaluation of the rupiah, and the weariness of 32 years of Soeharto rule. It has been said that during this economic crisis the poverty rate increased by 300%. Thousands of people were without work. Political discourse descended to the street.

Ten years ago the university students were in the streets protesting for human rights and economic justice, for what they called “reformasi”.

What crackled in the background were violent riots and the deaths of perhaps as many as fifteen hundred people.

Ten years ago Jakarta was burning.

Kusno emphasizes two violent incidences in Jakarta at this time, the first was the student protests culminating in the shooting deaths by the Indonesian army of four students from Trisakti University and second the violent riots which followed and which emerged from the street.

Kusno: “Soon after the shooting, major rioting broke out in about 50 places in metropolitan Jakarta. The main targets were Indonesians of Chinese descent. For more than 35 hours, the “underclass” of Jakarta, from which the student distanced themselves, ran amok, burning and looting places that apparently belonged to Chinese Indonesians. This took place regardless of the presence of the police and military who apparently allowed the riots to occur”.

The downfall of the regime was close at hand and because this is Java there was some mystery in this violence as well. People took advantage of the violence to settle old scores. Some have reported direct government involvement in inciting to riot. The violence was such that no one knew what was going on, who was behind it, where it was coming from, and where it was going. For a real good firsthand account of this and other events in Indonesia that were taking place during this time I highly recommend Richard Lloyd Perry’s book In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos.

Two categories emerge out of these events, “student protestors” and “underclass rioters”.

Kusno: “These two overlapping instances immediately appeared as the unspoken frame work of events in the Indonesian media, thereby reinforcing the categories of violence that were already in place”.

Kusno’s questions are these.

“Why are two difference bodies of protest constituted in one city: the “student ” (and behind them the national media) and the “massa” (considered by the national media as “perusuh”, a term for those who “lost their self control and sense of morality” as a result of the “immediate situation” of the riot)? How are these categories produced? And more particularly, what is the relation of these categories to the ways in which the space of the city is constructed?”

Answers to those questions are discussed in part one and part two of Jakarta (streets of fear).

Perhaps those events at Trisakti are remembered most clearly while is the violence of the street has been lost to a collective amnesia, as Peter Nas suggests.

Still, after the initial protests at Trisakti University and the street riots the scene shifted to Jalan Sudirman, Semanggi, Senayan, and the Parliament Building.

This is the subject of Taking the Streets: Activism and Memory Work in Jakarta, Doreen Lee, Indonesian Studies Working Papers, No. 3, September 2007, University of Sydney.

From Lee:

“The discourse of public space in Indonesia contains both the anxieties and the hopes of the social classes affected by this idea of ‘public space’ and what it promises.

The first idea of public space takes place in the interior zone of a shopping mall, shaped by middle-class ideas of comfort and safety, an idea which operates against the fear of the hot, dusty, and dangerous streets. The second and more recent development, the revival of street politics, uses these dislocations to its advantage, as activists use the street to gain proximity to the rakyat (the People) and to disseminate their political rhetoric in a most spectacular fashion. The city is the setting for these contestations for public space by different groups, made up of multiple and heterogeneous components, which nonetheless approach the street with a shared sense of its wild possibilities. One could say that a metonymy is being established, where increasingly the conditions of the street have come to represent the city.

Sudirman, as well as the destination points of the Semanggi Cloverleaf bridge and the Parliamentary Building at Senayan, became sites of physical outbreaks of violence, with rubber bullets, teargas, water cannons, and batons deployed by the state security forces, and molotovs and rocks thrown back by student demonstrators. This paper takes up one of these addresses and the events marked by its name: Semanggi, the gathering point of the Student Movement during the mass demonstrations of 1998 and 1999. 13 November 1998: The First Semanggi Tragedy. At the gates of Atma Jaya Catholic University, a crowd of student demonstrators and ordinary people protesting the Parliamentary Special Assembly (Sidang Istimewa) were fired upon by state troops. Fifteen reported killed,6 and more than 100 demonstrators hospitalised.

The Second Semanggi Incident, 23 September 1999: protesting the ratification of a new emergency act giving the military unprecedented power, 6 people were killed. In both cases, the military denied issuing live bullets to their soldiers (van Dijk 2001: 453). By now, 8 years on, the violence of the events of Semanggi I and II have attained a finished quality. Finished but unresolved. What happened on that major thoroughfare, Semanggi?

In 1998 Indonesia felt these political reverberations; the feet of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators hitting the street in different cities throughout the archipelago. The call was ‘Turun ke Jalan!’, ‘Descend to the Streets!’. The most dramatic and well-documented of these demonstrations culminated in the violent encounters between state armed forces and student-led demonstrators in Semanggi”…

Nas and Pratiwo argue in The Streets of Jakarta: fear, trust, and amnesia in urban development. University of Leiden. Leiden, that “This concept of fear, as we have described it, has shaped the social and physical environment of Jakarta. It dominates the streets and the mental maps of the streets people construct in their heads. The old gated communities that came into existence during the colonial era and the Soeharto period have been complemented by new ones of a simpler type: the abundance of steel gates that close off the many small roads to the kampongs, such as at Jalan Gadjah Mada. These gates have recently been added to the large gated communities, such as the new towns in the periphery of Jakarta, and the condominiums of the super rich, for example Taman Anggrek. Moreover, the new architecture of malls almost without front windows, or just very thick glass blocks, can be considered a new trend which will probably lead to experiments with malls completely walled on the outside, with windows on the inside in order to receive natural light from an inner courtyard. Spanish architecture could be taken as an example for this new architecture. However, apart from the ‘architecture of fear’ and the ‘planning of trust’, the desire for amnesia is also very strong. People try to forget what happened in 1965 and 1998 and during the many other riots in between. They do not want to talk about the victims and their fate. However, their mental maps still include information on where to go and where not to go, as well as where to contact each other in case of danger. The mental maps of the streets of Jakarta are burdened by both fear and trust, but in order to continue daily street life this is balanced by a strong drive toward amnesia”.

Lee: “The uncertainty of the streets, they claim, has become a part of daily life, as Jakartans retain a mental map of escape routes. People connect with each other to obtain information via remote technologies (cell-phones, radio, and for a time, high-frequency walkie-talkies) out of a sense of flight from danger. Rumors of mass riots and theft feed these uncertainties, creating urban myths and material changes to the architecture of the city, with gates and walls demarcating ever more sharply the lines between the street and non-street spaces.

If, as Nas and Pratiwo argue in The Streets of Jakarta that “ordinary (middle class) Jakartans are compelled to talk about the 1998 riots and to point out the ruins of that violence, their mental maps are of a variety driven by rumour and distance from the event. The middle class subjects of Nas and Pratiwo’s article are devoid of encounters with the street and the productive spaces of alternative politics contained in the activist accounts of that same time period. But this disparity in understanding arises as an effect of the street itself, where rumors of crime and violence bring with them a recognition and rejection of the otherness of those who belong on the streets: namely, the mad, the destitute, and the criminal. Contra to the singularity of ‘I was there’, the repetition of the riot stories say, ‘it could have been me -because I am middle class’. Such avoidance of the street plays out in the urban development of malls, as the upwardly-mobile educated and political classes build fortresses of ‘public space’ that the rakyat cannot afford, even if they might enter to look…

…Shopping malls are ‘like prescriptive institutions such as civil service training institutes’ (Young 1999: 69), where urban sophistication is learned and practised. In Young’s observation, malls in Jakarta are being described as public parks, and serve the function of public space, drawing both the rich and the poor. Note his description of the burgeoning of luxury malls in Jakarta in the late 1990s: In the most opulent malls of central Jakarta (such as Plaza Indonesia, Plaza Menteng, Sarinah Store), or in prestige locations like Pondok Indah, Pasaraya Blok M or Citraland Mall, one can spend hours walking past a seemingly endless array of specialist boutique shops, large national and international department stores, supermarkets, banks, franchised food outlets and the like…Yet, even here, there is an admixture of teenagers in school uniform, sightseers, couples on dates in the restaurants and fast-food outlets…What is being studied most assiduously are the elements of middle-class style”.

And after ten years from “reformasi”?

Lee concludes that, “Malls create a sense-repertoire that can be replicated across the archipelago. While these ‘academies’ of class socialization enable the rakyat class of people to experience the lifestyle of the upwardly mobile, the experience of the mall itself encourages a specific uniformity. Well-dressed youth are the target audience of these malls. It is a uniformity that points to a standard experience and a standard fear; the expansion of air-conditioned sanctuaries is ‘closely connected to middle-class anxieties over the worsening street crimes in Jakarta’.

Coterminous with the development of gated communities, the malling of Jakarta provides a safe haven for the retreat of the middle class, away from the perceived dangers of the street…

…In Kusumawijaya’s words, the mall attracts the middle class by drawing them away from the street, so that the street becomes something to be experienced only from the window of a car”.

The mall may seem a digression in this discussion, but it has emerged discursively as part of measures taken by urban planners and the middle class (consumers) in reaction to the dangers of the streets. The Mall as anti-street presents new challenges to the memorializing of radical politics associated with Semanggi”.

Here again is Abeyasekere’s words. They echo down the long history of Jakarta.

“…from colonial times onwards, governments have sought to impose an inappropriate façade on Jakarta, a façade which was unable to conceal the sprawl of the city.

Is Jakarta the awful culmination of the nation’s past or does it in fact mirror Indonesia’s future? Throughout its history its rulers have certainly intended the latter, but the real city has always taken its own perversely different path, making it to some extent a microcosm of the country at large- a forum for government policies at odds with people struggling to make a life of their own.

The central fallacy which has persisted from 1619 to the present is that it is possible to create a city for the privledged few, cut off from the countryside of the majority poor”.

The evidence, of which I have very direct experience, is that this fallacy is still alive and well and thriving in Jakarta at this very moment.

Jakarta (fear of the street, part 2)

Taman Anggrek, Jakarta 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

West Jakarta

 

I have left Jakarta. Three weeks of eating the Jakarta air and being saturated with advertising (promising much but delivering little) has been interesting to say the least.  But just in time anyway for MENTAL DETOX WEEK.

At my family’s house, just outside of Depok, TelKom Indonesia, has been out of order for the last six days. I had internet access on one of those six days.  But as my family says (almost in a chorus) “well, you know, that’s Indonesia”.

I have come away with over 500 photographs and 17 short videos.  Some of those, after I process it all (both mentally and physically) will filter down into the future postings of Jakarta Urban Blog. That in itself is worth returning for, yes?

In the meantime I have a layover in Seoul, Korea. Here there is high speed internet 24/7. It is free. But, alas it is not Jakarta.  

In any event to keep myself occupied I am posting the second part of my review of Chapter Four: The Violence of Categories: Urban Space and the Making of the National Subject in Abidin Kusno’s book Behind the Post-Colonial: Architecture, urban space and political cultures in Indonesia.

THE PROTECTING EYES OF THE FATHER, THE DEATH OF THE STREET, AND THE BIRTH OF THE NATIONAL FAMILY

Kusno: “The New Order of Suharto, however, did not legitimize its presence by merely fabricating the threat of “internal” others, initiating the danger of the street and providing security measures. Instead, a second point of tensions associated with a desire to form a new collective subject that represented “modernity” complicated these techniques of social control through the heavy-handed display of power and the spectacle of punishment”.

In 1974 the first student protests, demonstration, and urban youth riots occurred. The regime was beset not only with attempting to bridge the rapidly widening gap between the rich and the poor but also to satisfy demands for upward mobility.

Here again Jakarta would be used as a “symbol of the nation” but not to instill a national or revolutionary spirit as that of the Sukarno generation. This time it would be used to form, as Kusno states “national subjects who were both obedient and “modern”. Suharto’s style was to “guide from behind” like an ever-watchful parent. He is the “smiling general” representing the ideology of “development”. This idea as Kusno states “had its sense of authentic Javanese wisdom in which the children of the family are guided from behind to their destined place. The lesson has been that they know their place, do not get lost, or go astray”.

And here is what happens.

Kusno: “This task, of preventing national subjects from going astray, was perhaps first practiced by the famous Governor of Jakarta, Ali Sadikin, a Sukarno protégé who also worked under Suharto from 1966-1977. From the beginning of his administration, Sadikin found himself dealing with what he came to perceive as the problem of “urban excess”, namely, the migration of people who lacked “urban rationality” to the capital city. Under his tenure, Jakarta was given the title of “metropolitan” and “modernity” was defined in relation to the spaces occupied by the urban poor who were then subjected to the strong arm of the law”.

Here is Sadikin’s twisted logic, “The execution of law enforcement is homage to the poor people (‘rakyat kecil’). They are those with no skill, who are lacking consciousness of the law, who build their houses along riverbanks, along railways, under electric poles, along the green belt, those who sleep under bridges or in the park, or use pedestrian ways and streets for vending, those who ride ‘becak‘ (pedicab).”

The urban problems Sadikin lists are still present today in Jakarta but his war on the becak was a success. Becak, nearly synonymous with Jakarta and Indonesia, were confiscated under force, gathered up, and dumped into the ocean.

Kusno cites Sadikin, “This form of transportation, used by the poor, was too slow for “the economy (which) should move faster” and furthermore, “it is hard to administer, and the leadership simply does not want rustic-looking people pushing bikes around in their capital city”.

Kusno: “Here the memories of the populist politics of the previous regimes and the social environment of the poor became interchangeable. Both became “non-modern” elements in the city. For Sadikin, the capital of the nation must be represented as modern so that “potential troubles” embedded on the streets and in environments constructed as “non-modern”, could be suppressed, eliminated, and transformed”.

FLYING OVER THE KAMPUNG: CLASSIFYING NATIONAL SUBJECTS

Kusno: “Central to the state’s concern about discipline and order in the city, therefore, are the overlapping interests between the government’s promotion of its ideology of “development” on the one hand and the increasing numbers of the new generation of New Order “middle class”, for want of a better word, concerned with their identity, on the other. Here elevated highways occupy a special position, not least because of their “visibility”, like a giant roller coaster stretching over the capital city. The elevated highways are not just a means for de-congesting metropolitan Jakarta; they are also a sign of progress for developmentalist regime that measures its achievement through the way the city is represented…

Driving through the elevated highways suggests an experience of flying over the top of the city, escaping from its congested roads and leaving behind the “lower” classes who are routed through the crowded street at ground level. From this suspended driveway, the details of the urban fabric of Jakarta’s streets and kampung, the poor urban neighborhoods, are transformed into a series of blurred images, giving a sense of detachment from the “worldly” place below. The elevated highway is thus a system of representation that allows some forms and spaces to be visualized and others to be concealed. It is a kind of fluency provided by the city to create a dream-state of upward mobility in order to overcome the contradictions of “development”…

…this infrastructure is not merely a representation of the dominant class. It also helps to constitute the general populace by way of city buses that occasionally travel on the elevated highways. On these occasions, the relatively poor urbanites are also provided with a similar new experience of the city, but with different political implications. Here urban space is constructed to define and regulate both the privileged and the poor. They are both celebrated and constituted by the urban infrastructure, constructed to assemble crowds for uplifting purposes…

…This emphasis on the centrality of vision in architecture and urban space constitutes a phantasmagoria of display of the achievement of the New Order in embracing commodity capitalism. Along with the highway net work, it reaches its apogee in the design of department stores, high-rise office towers and real estate housing, all of which are seen to provide a field of vision available for the well-to-do. On the other side, the majority of the poor that live behind this façade, surrounded by images of a metropolis, are conditioned by the visible proof of “historical progress”. From pleasure, alienation and wonder that are derived from spectacle alone a society of consumption is produced (emphasis mine)”.

 

There is a punch line to this which I will attempt to deliver in Jakarta (fear of the street, part 3)…

 

 

 

 

Jakarta (fear of the street, part 1)

President Sukarno Addressing May Day Rally 5/7/1965-Djakarta, Indonesia- President Sukarno of Indonesia addresses a mass May Day rally in the Sports Hall Building. Sukarno announced his decision not to attend a peace conference with Malaysian Prime Minister Rahman in Tokyo. The announcement was viewed as a victory for Indonesia’s powerful Communist Party. Posters above the silent crowd stress the unity of the working classes in their struggle to overcome “imperialism.”
Image: © Bettmann/CORBIS
Date Photographed: May 7, 1965

see: kaskus

Reading further into Abidon Kusno’s book Behind the Postcolonial: Arctitecture, urban space and political cultures in Indonesia is both interesting and enlightening.

All cities have their aspects of violence. American cities have long been associated with violence. Gang warfare, the drug trade, and poverty, domestic violence, random shootings fills the news here in a regular cycle. But Jakarta being Jakarta fear of the street has its own particular aspect.

What follows is a review, of sorts, from Chapter Four, which Kusno has titled:

 The Violence of Categories: Urban Space and the Making of the National Subject

Let us again begin with Sukarno. The sub-chapter headings are from Kusno.

THE CITY, THE SUPREME LEADER AND THE EMBODIMENT OF THE NATIONAL SUBJECT

“My friends and my children, I am no Communist… I am not prejudiced. I am no dictator. I am no holy man or reincarnation of God. I am just an ordinary human being like you and you and you… Why is it that people ask me to give a speech to them, even when the sun is at its hottest? The answer is this: What Bung (brother) Karno says is actually written in the hearts of the Indonesian people. The people want to hear their own voice but… they cannot speak eloquently for themselves… (Therefore) when I die… do not write on the tombstone: ‘Here rests His Most Exalted Excellency Dr. Ir. Raden Sukarno, the first President of the Republic of Indonesia’ … [but] write… ‘Here rests Bung Karno, the Tongue of the Indonesian People”.

-Sukarno, 1959

“In every Seventeenth of August meeting [Independence Day] … it is as though I held a dialogue. A dialogue with the people of Indonesia. A two-way conversation with Sukarno-the-man and Sukarno-the people, a two-way conversation between comrade in arms and comrade in arms. A two-way conversation between two comrades who in reality are one. That is why, every time I prepare a Seventeenth of August address I become like a person possessed”.

-Sukarno, 1963

Kusno suggests that the results of political experimentation in the decade of the 1950s ultimately ended in social and political unrest threatening Indonesia’s national unity and national economy. Sukarno’s response was to initiate “guided democracy” based on the leadership of his personal authority. Sukarno’s reasoning was that the troubles which beset Indonesia were the outcome of the politics of the “looseness” of the center. Indonesia “should become whole again, that the state become whole again”, as Sukarno stated.

Kusno argues that in order for Sukarno to achieve this end that, “…it appeared important for Sukarno to find a way to communicate with the whole population, and to convince them that he, the leader, is not merely representing “them” as the head of state, but he actually is them…” and that, “Sukarno, as the “extension of the tongue of the people” is also “Sukarno the people.” This political representation demanded that Sukarno embody the people himself as a way to communicate with them. As a result, “populist politics” was initiated, a policy which demanded the constant mobilization of the crowds on the principal streets of the capital city (emphasis mine). In this period of populist politics, in the first quarter of the 1960s, the city of Jakarta became a symbolic representation of state power”.

As illustrated in the Sukarno quotes in the previous posting Sukarno then began his program to rebuild the central part of Jakarta with monuments, a department store, a convention center, a stadium, and grand boulevards. Jakarta, certainly the idea of Jakarta, was linked to nation building. Jakarta was the stage of populist politics and high performances. Acted out by Sukarno this was the appeal to “the street”.

Kusno again: “In this train of subjective thought, the Parliament House, the people’s Republic of Indonesia, and Sukarno, the megalomanic architect, are all interchangeable, each one representing the other. The imagined Parliament House was to be a building that would capture the voices of the 105 million people in the country in which he could better hear them and also speak with them. Sukarno represents the people, and the people are represented by the buildings and the city he created. Through the city, a singular collective national body was created. It is from this early official affinity between the city and the nation that as Toer wrote in 1955, one begins to feel that “one cannot be fully Indonesian until one has seen Jakarta”. Once one identifies with the nation’s capital, one is an Indonesian.”

1965 would be the breaking point. The bother (bung) was overthrown and the father (pak) would take his place.

THE SCENE OF THE STREET: THE STATE OF NEW ORDER AND THE PATHOLOGICAL COLLECTIVE SUBJECT

“Before” appears as a time of chaos, with men and women angrily gesticulating and debating. Then Suharto takes control – the symbol of reason and harmony. “After” shows people quietly going about their business, under the protective eye of the military.

(Abeyasekere 1987)

Kusno begins, “Perhaps it was in relation to this extraordinary attempt to produce a single abstract body of the nation that, when Suharto took power from Sukarno in 1966, he ended this era of populist politics. His regime, officially named as the New Order, legitimized itself by “decapitating” the supreme leader, disembodying the single collective body of Sukarno and turning the revolutionary street into a space of discipline and fear”.

This New Order begins with the massacre of perhaps as many as half a million Indonesians. The New Order characterizes politics of the Sukarno era as one of chaos, communism, and a danger to the stability of the state. As a result, Kusno notes, “the space of the street, the locus of Sukarno’s revolution, has been turned into the site of “disturbance”. It became a “dangerous” place which, in the name of national security, demanded constant anticipation from the government. With the end of populist politics, Sukarno’s revolutionary subject was decapitated and the street, where they used to parade, was criminalized”.

The example Kusno gives of the New Order’s politics of the street comes from acts of state terrorism which took place in the early 1980s.

By the early 1980s the New Order was busying itself with “producing a new generation of “modern” Indonesian”: elevated highways, office towers, “dream homes” in the suburbs. But what was to come came as a shock and so it was intended.

Kusno: “During this period, urbanites began to find the corpses of tattooed men known as “gali” on the streets. “Gali” were mostly petty criminals and members of gangs. To ensure the winning of the 1982 election, the government hired many of these people. When they were no longer needed, the shooting began. The “gali” were killed and their bodies left in the streets as public spectacle. This state-sponsored operation became known as the case of “Petrus-Penembak Misterius” (mysterious shooter) and “Matius-Mayat Misterius” (mysterious corpse)”.

The names, as Kusno points out are the names of Catholic Saints, Saint Peter (“Petrus”) and Saint Matthew (“Matius”) and refer to the “powerful presence of Catholic officers and civilians in Indonesia’s security apparatus that were sent to “discipline” the Catholic province of East Timor”.  The techniques of terror and social control used in the Indonesian war against East Timor after it was “pacified” were transposed other localities through Indonesia including Jakarta.

Kusno: “…this technique of violence was soon integrated into the national pedagogy. To the incident of “Petrus” and “Matius”, it was reported that President Suharto, after the operation, was proudly fascinated by the technique that “…the corpses were left where they were, just like that“. For him “this was for ’shock therapy’ (in English). This therapy, as James Siegel points out, is meant to shock in order to cure, and is directed not at criminals but at the general populace. The corpses were left in the streets, Suharto continues, “so that the crowds (‘organg banyak’) would understand that, faced with criminals, there [are] (sic) still some who would act and would control them“.

“What is extraordinary in this statement is the way the state makes its appearance on the street through the dead bodies of those considered as “criminal”. Through the display of the murder victims, viewers see the state, and acknowledge its presence. This “theatrical representation of pain” in which the power of the state was inscribed in the visible flesh of the condemned serve to discipline and normalize the well-being of the general populace. However, the corpses, instead of scaring people away, as Siegel reports, “became attractions not only to newspapers readers but to people on the streets where the bodies were distributed”. Through this display of violence towards the underclass, collective identities were constituted (empasis mine). The dead body is the message sent by the state to the “underclass”, who are seen as potential criminals, as a way of communicating with them. The message, however, also addresses the upper class, which fear that they are not distinguishable from “criminals”. This method of “criminalizing” the street makes the corpses on the street a sign of menace provoking, as a result, as Siegel indicates, a fear among the general populace not merely towards the “gali”, but the possibility of them to be like the “gali”. This displacement of the street creates a collective body of the populace whose identity is contructed through a retreat from it (emphasis mine).”

 As my wife would say, “Just wow”.  I had been mulling these ideas over for some time. When I finally got to Kusno’s book I was blown away. There is more to come…

I have quoted Kusno at length here in this post.  His analysis is spot on and serves to set up the second part of this review (which I hope to post soon) which will address the economic crisis and the Jakarta riots of 1997-1998 in context of the urban poor, the urban intellectuals, the urban middle class and the state elite to further explore the idea of  ”fear of the street”.

 

Jakarta (megalopolis)

 Photo by mizsz

 Review

Jakarta Megalopolis: Horizontal and Vertical Observations

Arjan van Helmond and Stani Michiels, Valiz Publishers, 2007, 179 pages.

What were we doing? Now I remember, we were headed to Gambir Station to buy tickets to Perwokerto and then after that just burning time before we had to take the new Toyota van my wife’s brother had just purchased back to his house in Depok and meet him there after he was finished working for the day.

It must be a tradition in Indonesia that when you purchase a new vehicle the first thing you do is loan it out to family member.

So then, it was Budi, the husband of my wife’ sister, and I, with the new van, heading out from Citayam on an early sunny morning and headed into Jakarta for the day. We drove out of the neighborhood and onto the main street winding past shops, stores, and businesses packed to the very edge of both sides of the road and which seemed to stretch away like an endless film loop, then on past the Citayam train depot bottleneck, on through Depok, and then finally taking the back roads all the way into Jakarta.

By this time I had been to Jakarta so many times that I had lost count but with out doubt on every occasion there seemed to be a new way to go and new things to see. This day was no different. Budi was taking me on the maximum tour. Down streets I never knew existed, past apartment complexes, malls, embassies, cemeteries, monuments, and a lake where he said he had once seen monkeys. “But maybe no more“, he added. I really liked the notion that there was a lake with monkeys. I filed that away in my head where the idea has rooted into a life of its own to this day.

Jakarta – Lake – Monkeys

Just like that.

Budi clearly knew what he was doing and where he was going. He only mentioned once or twice, out of sincere humility, that he was lost as a result of on the spur of the moment experimenting with a new shortcut. Still, we were back in good order in a snap.

I was there for the ride and the pleasure of watching Jakarta float by my window. But I wondered how he knew where he was going and where we were.

“Budi, how do you know where we are and where we are going?”

“When I first moved to Jakarta I just drove around and around the city day after day”.

Budi had, through time, experience, and experiment created in his head a mental map of Jakarta. He could not survive there with out it. He had made place out of Jakarta’s urban space. He had worked up his own internal geography.

Whether I realized it or not this is what I was also doing. Through most of our day I had no landmark I could anchor myself to in the warren of Jakarta’s densely complex streets punctuated by crazy intersections where no pedestrian would dare to tread, until I saw, in the long distance, hovering in the sky like a signal, the National Monument. I knew then Gambir Station was not far off.

I think it was at that time that Jakarta started to click in my mind

There is an occasional moment or two during the day when all this comes back to me. Out of the murk it comes to the surface like a fish in a pond and rolls its back once or twice. There I am magically arriving at Gambir Station or stuck in the jammed traffic around Blok M or picking out the landmarks heading back Citayam, home, the mosque across the street, the beautiful faces of the children returning from school.

How do you know Jakarta?

 the review is continued here …> go to page