I went the gym yesterday. Nothing unusual in that (and since I’ve mentioned the gym twice in two days I should emphasis that a) I’m quite proud of that; and b) I don’t think it’s working).

There were 5 Japanese businessmen coming in at the same time. And nothing unusual in that.

After changing into their expensive gym gear (I always feel self-conscious in my AK79 T-Shirt) they all lined up in a row on adjacent treadmills, each with their own cable TV.

Each was tuned to Cinemax and each businessman put on headphones to catch the film about to begin.

Five minutes later they, without a word to each other, all took of their headsets and went downstairs to the weights.

The film was The Battle Of Midway.

Somebody quite recently referred to this blog somewhere and called me a ‘tastemaker’. I was rather taken aback…for a few reasons. Firstly I think tucked away in the wilds of rather isolated Sanur, Bali, my days to being a tastemaker are long behind me (although I’m not unaware, and appreciative of the fairly dedicated listenership I had in my years on 95bFm and George FM….I’m quite proud of 19 years on Auckland radio, but that’s kinda ancient history now); secondly it puts a burden on my shoulders that I don’t necessarily want to have..hell I’ve just played the music I like..nothing more, nothing less; and finally, as you get older you do tend to find yourself reaching backwards more and more, and it’s a tough call to be a tastemaker when you are looking backward…. but I see that as the luck, or joy of having had forty years of musical exploration to delve back into.

With that thought, especially the last bit, in the back of my mind I’m always wary of writing too much about ‘old’ records, or ‘old’ artists.

That of course is stupid and the thought only crosses my mind for a brief insecure moment, but it was accentuated by a comment I read somewhere about those aging Public Address commentators who try and pretend they are still hip!. Perhaps that is me, as I’ve been known to comment on PA from time to time…but once again common sense rears it’s protective head and raises a big finger.

So with that in mind (or cast out of my mind) let me say something about three records that I’m liking quite a lot right now.

My friend Danielle emailed me and said she’d not really much liked the new-ish (we old folk remember when a record was still new 6 months after release, now you have a week’s grace before it’s passé) Elvis Costello album, the oddly named Momofuku (something to do with instant noodles I think). I replied and agreed, but noted that I really liked the first and last tracks, so that at least was something. Then something happened..at the gym of all places. Elvis clicked on the cross-trainer and I feel in love with Momofuku.

I’ve had a strange decade with Elvis Costello. I’ve always been a huge fan, ever since I’d heard Less Than Zero on a Stiff Records sampler many years ago, but since the mid nineties it’s not been easy as he careers around genres, sometimes embarrassingly pretentiously, and sometimes with mixed, rather wooden results. Throughout all that I’ve been quite loyal and there have been moments, such as the alt-countryish The Delivery Man, his last ‘proper’ album, from 2004. But the road for an Costello-phile has not been smooth.

Which is why this album is such a pleasant surprise and even more so when it hit me without warning that morning on that bloody cross-trainer.

As an aging punk, it’s a pleasure to say Momofuku is his most punk album since…well since This Years Model, if you will. What does that mean?…not much to most I guess as the term ‘punk’ was usurped years ago and he was never totally accepted by the unwashed gobbing masses, but to many of us he encapsulated the ethos of the times more than most latter day three chord wonders. Punk was supposed to raise a finger and be smart at the same time and Elvis was just that.

So unpretentiously for the first time in many years, he snarls and vents his way around songs like the searing American Gangster Time and the mighty opener No Hiding Place.

I’ll handing somebody a box of matches / and carrying the can of kerosene

He hasn’t sounded this brutally convincing or this venomously melodic for decades. And he tosses in cute little throwaways like Harry Worth which work because they hold together the album as a whole

Unlike the Toussaint collaboration or his last ‘rock’ outing, When I was Cruel. His vocals don’t sound strained, they don’t sound uncomfortably placed in strange surroundings.

And unlike those earlier albums, this is the sound of a guy who has nothing to prove. On When I Was Cruel, and The Delivery Man he felt like was desperately trying to prove he still mattered, and on The River In Reverse he was trying to prove he could stand next to Allen Toussaint (missing the point: he can, but only on his own terms, as Elvis Costello, not Toussaint, and he shouldn’t need to try but I guess part of what he is, is that he does).

More please.

And more Paul Weller not trying to sound like a workman rocker and getting his sense of humour, & sense of adventure back again as he seems to have done with 22 Dreams. Whereas Elvis needs to be less pretentious, Paul needs more of it. He was always at his best when being an obnoxious pretentious magpie..like the forever perplexing but always engaging Style Council or the best Jam albums where his influences were obvious but mutated through Paul’s self obsessed lense.

Happily the ever so slightly pretentious Paul Weller is back and the glum rocker of recent years cast aside, and even if he misses ever so often (God is a huge miss) at least he has some edge again.

No-one could ever accuse Dennis Wilson of not having edge but his problem was, like brother Brian, he simply walked too close to it. I bought Pacific Ocean Blue in 1977 when it was first issued. I think I was one of perhaps a dozen who bothered in New Zealand as it sat on the shelf opposite the till in the shop I was working in as i tried to sell it, without luck, to countless folk. The Beach Boys had long since stopped selling beyond the hits collections (even the gig I attended on a sunny afternoon in Auckland’s Western Springs around the same time was only sparsely attended..although the day’s aftermath is well documented as a Dennis Wilson burn out, and Brian was so wasted he walked off the stage mid song and didn’t return). The last thing that was going to set New Zealand’s charts on fire was an introverted selection of songs from the drummer, even if his name was Wilson.

I fell in love with POB on release. And eventually quite a few boys did…girls never warm to The Beach Boys post surf, and rarely before, they are mostly a male thing….enough to push it into the lower reaches of the US album chart and guarantee its reputation as a lost masterpiece (since then it’s been largely unavailable for decades with one brief CD issue in 1991, although plentiful bootlegs). But now it’s back, in a beautiful double package (the second album is an unreleased, and also much bootlegged, second solo album..it was unreleased for a reason, so I’m gonna stick to CD1) and thirty years on it still sounds as dark, confused, ragged, hopeful and beautiful as it did back then. And the mood of course is tinted further by the events of the years after and Dennis Wilson’s death…but then The Beach Boys’ history is one of the more tragic in the rock’n’roll story-book.

It’s not all wonderful…there are grimace moments, like the ‘save my rock’roll’-isms of What’s Wrong. However that’s The Beach Boys..every album has those moments. But mostly Pacific Ocean Blue stands up as one of the few highpoints in the post 1976 Beach Boys catalogue (non of which appear under the BB name). And it’s reputation is justified….if you’re a boy.

I know a carpenter who had a dream / Killed the man but you couldn’t kill the dream / Who said it was easy

We went to The Dark Knight tonight..wowee, a movie that actually lives up to it’s hype. We’ve been trying to get tickets for days but it was worth it…I loved pretty much every cheek-slitting moment of it, but a couple of thoughts

• I was well pleased to see Maggie Gyllenhaal get blown into a million fragments. If there is one actress who makes, me cringe it’s her..I don’t know why, maybe it’s the Sunday Hallmark Channelness of her smarmy smile. The one miscasting.
• I do enjoy being able to take the family of three to the movies and spend a grand total of US$7 for tickets, drinks, popcorn and parking. It’s one of the pleasures of Indonesia.
• I love the way the film continually caught you off guard, the slightly predicable conclusion to the bombs on the boat aside, and the 2 1/2 hours went without a single moment when I looked at my watch.
• On the way home Brigid asked why Batman was no longer called Bruce Wayne…uhh he was we said. Her excuse: we were sitting too close to the screen. I’ve since insisted she have an early night.
• I loved Jack Nicholson’s slightly comic Joker in the last series but Heath Ledger, bless him, just kills it. He was incredible and mesmerising, it’s just a shame he will never know it. Hollywood desperately needs male acting talent. You know the talent pool is not healthy when Leonardo Di Caprio gets cast in what should be credible roles. Bets on an Oscar?
• Where the hell was Robin? I’m a traditionalist..I like Robin..gothic and a work of cinematic art it may be but I like Robin.

From the book "20 Common Questions About Islam" by a Dr. Zakir Abdul Karim Naik, which we were given in Penang:

I guess I missed out… all those morning after big breakfasts seemed to have been in vain………..

Of our two weeks on the road (almost), Jakarta was the highlight..simply because that was where the tethers were loosened…where I was allowed to indulge my desire to do what the others had been doing, and buy something for myself…Brigid sent me off to buy a travel iron.

Not that I want a travel iron, mind, although they are handy wee things when on the road (Indonesian hotels get funny about supplying these in room even from room service), but I guess she felt that I would be happily satiated by its purchase…I’d want no more from the trip and stop complaining about the shoes or the very cool Chinese starred cap I’d wanted in Kuala Lumpur but been dissuaded from buying (you have a hat already…but you have a skirt already…that’s different..).

No, Jakarta had that extra something. *

*(the above of course is grossly unfair and I’d like to point out I got three shirts in Penang…and a road map in Kuala Lumpur)

And thus it was appropriate that we arrived in Jakarta the day the big sales started and if any city is about malls and shopping, I guess Jakarta is it. And our first hotel was actually attached to a mall.

Yes, malls…we did a few. Not just in Jakarta but everywhere, but the Big Durian is the city of malls..some eighty they say. However, after you’ve wandered past half a dozen Gucci or Hugo Boss or Versace stores it’s hard to get too excited.

Jakarta always feels a little like a wasted opportunity. I’ve always felt that each time I’ve left, after I’ve shopped and eaten, and I’ve done that more than a few times sadly. So this time, I determined to do something more with my time.

I’d always wanted to check out the old port to the north so I pushed the idea over the huge breakfast at the Mulia (whence we had moved too…more Versace), and we hopped in a cab and said Sunda Kelapa please…the Maritime Museum. The driver hesitated. Are you sure? Yep…it is, after all, a museum and one of Jakarta’s oldest buildings. It’s an area, which some three hundred years ago, was one of the most important bits of real estate in the world, from where the all powerful VOC ruled the vast wealth of the East Indies, and where the Portuguese traded with the Hindu kingdom of Pajajaran before that.

And thus I wanted very much to see it. Blake was keen but the others a little less so and as we rode north from Kota, they suggested we turn back from the slightly mean streets we were going through. But I was determined, and pretended I’d not heard, and onwards we went until we came to a stop in a fairly run down market square.

The driver asked a guy the directions and he smiled, gestured around and said that this was it. We looked around…sure there was an old cannon or two…but this was it?

It seems it was indeed. The guy we asked introduced himself…he was Trenggono and he was the custodian. Little, round and very cheerful, he was also a Professor in Indonesian History and offered to guide us. As in all things Indonesian there was no doubt a price involved somewhere but, hell, this was a real life Indonesian academic to take us through the oldest buildings in the oldest part of the biggest city in the 4^th biggest nation in the world.

The Maritime Museum, or Museum Bahari to use its correct name, dates back to about 1650. Coincidently the book I was reading at the time contains a drawing of the area around the turn of the eighteenth century and the building is clearly evident as it is in this map of old Batavia. Used as both a warehouse over the years (including by the Japanese during WW2) and a fort, clearly this building has some historic importance, not only for the Indonesians, but also for the Dutch..and indeed the letters VOC are branded everywhere..on doors, on the wall and on the cannon. So it was fairly disappointing to see the state of disrepair it was in. Windows were falling off, walls crumbling and drains full of garbage. It may have lasted some 350 years but it’s time is short if something isn’t done, and the two governments are guilty of the gross neglect..surely the Dutch people are able to move past their guilt for their past sins in Indonesia and work with the Indonesian government to do something?

But for all that, it’s an incredible thing to stand in the triangular courtyard of a building that once operated as an axis for much of the world’s wealth some centuries back..and there was something about the fact that it’s restoration and transformation into a polished tourist centre had yet to happen that added to that feeling. And Trenggono was the perfect guide, funny, full of trivia and gruesome detail…the VOC were not only brutal but the roots of the corruption that plagues Indonesia today can be traced back to their reign and to the Dutch era.

Inside boats from around the Archipelago, old maps & drawings, various exhibits that had no or illegibly faded signage, and a series of storyboards telling the history of the area, filled the badly lit halls (partially because many of the bulbs had blown and not been replaced), and a bunch of young kids wandered around giggling at the crazy bulé visitors.

Outside in the street, locals slept next to more old cannons, one dated 1718. We walked with Trenggono north through the streets and shops that edged the fort and I asked him if these people were original Jakarta-ites. No, he said, these were not Betawi, but mostly immigrants from the outer islands who had come to Jakarta to seek their fortune, like generations before them who had moved here then moved on.

We wandered towards the harbour itself, through narrow alleyways built on wood over the VOC era canal to the sea. Kids came out to say hello and giggle again, and every now and then we’d glimpse a bunch more sitting in a dark furniture free room watching soccer on  a small TV.

As we wound around the alley towards the open harbour, which was increasingly filled with garbage and trash, a series of bridges struck off over the canal. On one there was a hut with two guys collecting a Rp1000 toll. We asked and were told that the water supply was over there and the guys collecting the toll were the police. Nice.

Two Frenchmen passed us heading over the bridge..after something but I’m guessing it wasn’t water.

Trenggono offered us a boat trip around the harbour, but this historic waterway was so full of filth we demurred…. although kids could be seen swimming in it in the distance.

We then moved inland along the canal, past an old Dutch drawbridge, on to Fatahillah Square, the centre of old Kota..old Batavia, where the VOC Governor’s Mansion, also  from the early 1700s, is now the Jakarta Museum. The cells underneath, used by both the Dutch and the Japanese, and not tall enough to stand in, and the execution post in the centre of the square, where the VOC and their successors used to, amongst other things, use horses to pull dissidents and insurgents apart, gave us more reason to think that given recent events in the Middle East, not much has changed in several hundred years.

But the highlight of the old museum was far more contemporary. In one of the old buildings off the side of it’s courtyard Jakarta City had a Reformasi exhibition…two rooms which graphically and honestly portrayed the last ten years of Indonesian history, the ten years since the people of Indonesia, with no foreign assistance, cast off their own fairly brutal and murderous dictator. There were queues of people of all ages but particularly well representative of that large and growing very well educated post-98 grouping that is increasingly evident in Jakarta.

Trenggono’s point was that it was appropriate to have such an exhibition in a place like this as the dark years go back fairly continuously from 1998 back to the Dutch arrival and July 1998 was the first real glimmer of light, but the momentum since then has been largely unstoppable.

His point was well made.

The next day (ok we did a mall or two in between) Blake and I decided to extend our cultural excursion and visit the Suharto Museum which gathered together his gifts from around the world. Down by Taman Mini, its existence is due to the efforts of his wife who I guess thinks it sits as a tribute to the man’s greatness. However, to many of us I’d hazard that it’s more ugly than that and a statement of evidence as to those who turned an opportunistic blind eye to murder and corruption.

But, we, having checked the website (open every day) and trekked through the traffic for an hour or so discovered that it was Tutup setiap Hari Senin (closed every Monday). Oh..so we moved back north to our next destination…Monas. As Suharto’s Museum was a self constructed monument to his own greatness, so Monas was a self constructed monument to his failed predecessor, Sukarno, who promised so much but in the end delivered so little. The locals call it, in reference to his legendary bedroom antics, Sukarno’s Last Erection.

Wandering through the gates of Medan Merdeka Park, stepping over the ever-present litter that the park attendants seemed not to notice we walked, for what seemed like an hour in the glaring sun and probably was (we worked out what that little passenger train thing we ignored was for when we finally got there) until we found the entrance.

With typical illogical logic, you enter underground via a tunnel from a poorly signposted gate quite some distance away. Busloads of people, I imagine, from the provinces were flowing through to take the lift to the top of the 137 metre obelisk, to the gold, for want of a better word..knob.

We decided against that particular queue but went to go down to the Independence Museum underneath the thing. A National Park Guide approached us and offered to take us down. Warily, I asked him if there was a fee. No, he said, in very fractured English, it’s all gratis, and he led us down to the first room, a cavernous place, poorly lit, with huge murals and crests on the walls.

For the next ten minutes or so he explained the crest of Indonesia…17 feathers on the bottom to indicate 17^th of August; white for purity etc…we nodded and had our photos taken. He then reached into his pocket and tried to sell us some cheap looking pin versions of said crest for far too much. I demurred and he then asked if we wanted to be taken to the actual museum. Since we’d understood little of what he’d said to date, I decided to pass and out came his hand…for a tip please. I passed him Rp3000 and he sneered and left.

This government employed rogue, in his green Parks Dept uniform, seemed to be indicative of the gulf between this place, rooted firmly in the past, and the Reformasi exhibition looking hopefully ahead up there in old Kota. The point was made even clearer when we went down the stairs to basement level Indonesian history panoramas. They began a thousand years or so ago and continued around six walls, pausing only for a display on the monorail that Jakarta has been waiting on for most of the decade.

Apart from the, again, poorly lit dinginess of the place we found ourselves wandering around scratching our heads. The story shown here in the little windows ended in July 1998 and its half a dozen little story vignettes relating to the thirty two years prior to that bore no relation to recorded history. This was Indonesia’s own Orwellian era, when a totalitarian regime simply invented myths which were presented to the nation as facts (and indeed are still believed by many of the pre-Reformasi generations and I guess many of the Kampong folks we watched arriving here on their tour buses from some far flung part of Jawa or Sumatera). Pure fantasy invented to control and justify and it still exists, presented as historic fact, below Sukarno’s Last Erection.

The next day I scored my travel iron, found another mall or two, ate quite delicious Taiwanese Dim Sim in Senayan and got on a plane to Bali.