If you’d pulled me aside thirty years back and told me that this year I’d be watching the The Buzzcocks in Bangkok, likely I’d be inclined to verbally slap you a bit to bring some sense back into the conversation. Of course I wouldn’t have as I’m not a violent person by nature ( the last person I hit was Nicky Hager in the 4th Form, and I’ve felt guilt since).

But tonight there I was, in the rather agreeable but still fairly rockn’roll surroundings of Club Culture near Victory Monument (which wasn’t actually a victory at all) grooving along to The Buzzcocks. The fucking Buzzcocks….

We used to laugh at the 60s acts in the 1980s touring their handful of hits around the workingman’s clubs of the UK and periodically making it to NZ. The likes of The Searchers and The Hollies. And I’m still one to sneer at the poor old Human League and ABC, or for that matter most acts from the ’77 batch doing the traps three decades on. The only Class of ’77 acts I’d cross the road to see would be Paul Weller or Elvis Costello.

And the fucking Buzzcocks.

I mean, they had the tunes, and if the 2009 reissues of the first three albums gave us anything, it was that those are likely the best pop records of their generation, bar none. Tell me a pop anthem from the last half of that decade that tops Ever Fallen In Love or Promises. And they came, they flared, and they burnt out in a fairly gracious way. And, of course Pete Shelley gave us Homosapien which, in it’s 12″ dub, was both a dancefloor monster and, forgivably, the prototype for everything electroclash, twenty plus years on. Tune indeed (and the album is no slouch).

It was a mixed crowd of 1000 or so, about 50% UK expats, 30% Thai and the rest mixed. I loved the anonymity of it all, that being something I’ve enjoyed in Bali too. The nature of my history means that it’s hard to do these sorts of gigs in Auckland without some, admittedly often pleasant, closing in.

We had drinks downstairs in the open air bar before we went it. It was as much a show as the band was later one. Faded punks thirty years on are an interesting bunch.

And as Brigid said, being surrounded by the English on holiday does wonders for one’s physical self esteem.

There was a Thai Elvis impersonator playing to half a dozen people in the restaurant. We gave him a 20B tip and went in.

The support act, I have no idea what they were called, looked like Harry Potter and band but were actually really bloody good in a tight pop punk way. They looked like they had the legs to travel, and I mused that if they were anywhere in the Western world they’d likely be doing MTV & commercially rather well. They had the looks and the tunes.

A brief break, with some quite tastefully informed between band tunes (smatterings of 60′s punk, Big Star etc, plus a few 70′s and early ’80s tunes..there is something quite special hearing 500 increasingly drunken Englishmen, as they mostly seemed to be by that stage, singing Love Will Tear Us Apart as if they were straight off the benches at Old Trafford) and the arrival of the Thai punks and the confused blonde Swedish hairdressers, who, like about 30% of the crowd, would not have been born much before the band’s 1989 reunion. Some of the younger crew had their spiffing brand new Singles Going Steady or Sex Pistols shirts on (unlike a few of the more ancient folks who, despite the fact they’d doubled in size, had inadvisably decided to ignore any remaining style instincts left after all those Special Brews had done their work, and squeeze into that Adverts shirt one last time. Cheers for that..)

Then came the headliners. No fuss, no great announcement, they just wandered on stage, tuned up a bit, like the band at the local pub, and then blatted into Boredom which segued effortlessly, hardly surprising after all these years I guess, into the mighty Fast Cars.

I last saw the band in, I think, about 1990, and my first impression this time was that Shelley looked like a happy off duty bus driver (he seems to have shrunk vertically and grown horizontally..haven’t we all) and Steve Diggle, in spotted shirt, had something of the Bruce Forsythe about him. Who would’ve thought that in 1979?

And Brigid and I wondered too, what the very fat guys with cheap striped polo shirts tucked into their walk shorts would’ve looked like in 1979?

But, y’know, it was The Buzzcocks…..the fucking Buzzcocks, one more time.

And then the first Englishman crashed the stage and knocked over Pete & his amps and staggered up to a victorious meathead arms in the air yeah, before being politely, this being Thailand where even the punks say sorry, tossed off the stage by the bouncers. He deserved something firmer as the rest of the band hobbled vocals-less through the last half of Autonomy, and Shelley had to borrow an amp and swap guitars.

And the scouse wanker who had the poor Thai girl by the throat outside the toilets (people were intervening rather quickly, thank god) needed, and likely was, given the anger of the approaching staff, a swift explanation as to why his behavior was utterly unacceptable, which if he couldn’t understand, led to something sterner from the two cops standing outside.

Some people should not travel, or for that matter, leave their shitty council flat.

But, it rolled into What Do I Get and onwards, then Steve Diggle’s moment, a longish Harmony In My Head, where he had the same Man U fans singing the chorus en mass. It was well cool. I smiled and sang a lot.

We wandered out after the encore of Oh Shit, Ever Fallen in Love (in which the Swedish girls seemed to finally find a song to know..must be the Shrek effect) and Orgasm Addict, to get a taxi before the masses swamped them.

So, yes, it was nostalgia (which, sadly they didn’t play..and no Love Battery...no Love Battery), and it was a bunch of old folks mostly singing along with the tunes one more time.

But It was The Buzzcocks…the fucking Buzzcocks.

Yay.

Those promises..ohhhh…are made for us..ohhh….

For those of us a long way away…

Time for a list.

I hate lists mostly..reading them that is. But rather enjoy putting the things together, so if lists are your thing, please read on.

Okay, as usual I can divide my new music this year into a fairly clear divide between the new and the reissued. But the divide is even stronger this time around as there is a very clear delineation between the physical and the digital. And the line is fairly much the same. My old music is mostly physical and the new music was almost exclusively digital. In other words, I bought old music on CD or vinyl and new music on mp3. If I own a CD of a new record, it’s mostly because I was given a copy by the label or for review purposes.

And here’s another clear divide: the new music is almost, with one or two exceptions, all on indie labels, big and small, and the old stuff is on majors. Which underlines the commonly held perception that the big record companies have long since lost touch with what their potential customers want to buy, assuming that I’m not completely divorced from the mainstream.

I’m not listing singles or one off tracks from acts as they are both too numerous and I’ve lost track in what I consider a throughly vintage year for pop music in all it’s mainstream and, mostly, alternative forms.

But it’s worth mentioning that missing in action at the end of 2009 are the two formats devised and briefly touted by both Apple and the labels to revive the album as a format…this year’s DCC.

Indeed, the way things are heading, the album as a format may be more and more marginalized as we generations who grew up on the 40 minute LP and 70 minute compact disc become increasingly irrelevant to the recording industry. My teenage daughter shows little interest the format.

However all that sits somewhere in the next decade and in the interim, I’ll toss together, if anyone cares, my favourite records this year, starting with the new stuff, or the compiling of the new stuff (and some may be from 2008 or before..yes a sin in these instant times, but I’m simply not that on to it…)

Diplo : Decent Work For Decent Pay

A sound track to the first few months of 2009. This was in the car stereo throughout big parts of February and March and seemed very Bali road-chaos appropriate with it’s block party humour and singalong hand slapping the steering wheel-ness. Purists hated it. Fuck ‘em, I loved it and had a ball when I saw him banging it out in similar style at 808 in September. I hate purists…

Architeq : Green + Gold

All wonderfully dubby, noisy and swooning like. The spiritual child of Roy Budd mashed with Bristol styled wonkiness. Speaking of which…

RSD : Good Energy

…the godfather of the Bristol scene (pertinent question surely after all these years: water / ingredients / Bristol? There must be a reason?) collects his cinematic dub singles from recent times with some majesty. I never tire of Koto, Kingfisher, or those god-given basslines that’ve rumbled through his work since the much loved (and rightly so..where is my Carlton album when I need it?) Smith & Mighty days

Martyn : Great Lengths

Everyone knows this right? You’d have to be have been living under a big immovable block of reinforced concrete (or in Bali where things like this really didn’t creep through unless you you made a real effort…I guess I did) to have missed the most all-pervasive release of the first part of 2009. Do I need to hear it again? My last.fm stats say yes..this is the third most played album in my totals ever (or at least since I signed up a couple of years back). The best pop album of 2009, or more realistically, as dark and melodically adventurous as I’d like pop to sound like, but rarely does.

DJ Hell : Teufelswerk

Old fashioned big room house music, or is it techno? I guess it really is, but the boundaries have always been so blurred it’s a silly argument. Magnificent whatever you may wish to call it, despite the, I think, cheesy opener with Bryan Ferry. See, now I’m kicking myself for calling it old fashioned, as the second half slips effortlessly into a wide ranging modernistic cinematic sprawl that Fritz Lang would have crawled across broken shards to use. Epic and, using the word that should never be used, genius.

Bad Lieutenant: Never Cry Another Tear

Yeah, I know, it’s hardly an adventurous choice (see my reissues too) but after four decades of music acquisition at a silly rate, I’m allowed a moment of happy reflection and indulgent nostalgia. The new New Order album without some of the bits that made New Order, New Order, if you will, but it’s rather fine and safely spine tingling for all that (and I did, after all, love the last two, much slighted, guitar based New Order albums so much, so there).

Andrew Weatherall : A Pox on The Pioneers

Yeah, and Andy, no slouch in the pioneer stakes himself, is indulging somewhat himself in an album that references the early post-punk 1980s, and, if I had to point a finger even more, Mick Jones‘ magnificent Big Audio Dynamite (who are worthy of a bit of reverential referencing), and in the process takes a few equally reverential jabs, if that’s the correct word, maybe not but it’s better than saying poxes, at King Tubby, Terry Hall, his own Sabres of Paradise and so much more. And includes what may be 2009′s best lyrical lines, when when talking about responses to his music: “‘As a teenage girl, your music made me bad’”. A glorious document of a career as a musical deviant, and, yes, one of the very great pioneers. Oh, and quickly grab yourself a copy of his Fact Mix. It says it’s only up for 3 weeks (it dates from September) but at the time of typing, it’s still available; and, if you’ve not had the pleasure….

Fuck Buttons: Tarot Sport

Produced by Mr. Weatherall, for our listening pleasure, and to my likely conservative ears, quite an improvement over their debut. The idea of wall of aural textures for pleasurable listening is a tough one to pull off. Mostly it fails after it passes the clever hurdle, and tries to jump the pleasure hurdle. The Battles were very much like that for me…yes throughly clever, but horrible to spend any time with. And so it was with Fuck Buttons‘ debut. I played it and loved what they were trying to pull off, but hated the end result. So, thank you Mister Rotter, you’ve taken the ideas, sanded off the the ugly bits and added a splash of uber-epic. And it may well be, this week at least, my favourite album of 2009. If only I could let rid of the underlying, and uneasy feeling that I may have inadvertently succumbed to a mutant child of prog-rock…

Terry Lynn: KingstonLogic 2.0

I dunno where I found this…an email from someone I think. A touch of 80′s Gussie Clarke digital stylings, albeit much toughened, a smattering of hard staccato ragga pop, a swing towards MIA here and there, and an album that veers towards the harrowing lyrically but with a sugar coating. Kingston via Canada. Love it.

New (non album) video:

Damian Lazarus : Smoke The Monster Out

Thoroughly blissful electronic soundscape that sounds like the sort of thing that Lennon may well have made if he’d been around today (assuming of course that he’d had the benefit of himself a generation or two earlier, breaking down the walls that makes albums like this possible). If you’d asked me in June what my favourite album of 2009 was, I’d have pointed to this without a moment’s pause. I love the humour of this record, and the unpredicable swings that still, after months, take me by surprise. A wonderful, wonderful mish-mash taken from twisted journeys through the mind of one of this decade’s most adventurous creators.

2562 : Unbalance

God, this is glorious. It a record to make you writhe with the beauty of it all. Throbbing drums, tugging basslines and majestic swirls of synth. And that’s just Escape Velocity, the last track. The rest of this album leaves you weak long before you get to it, so much so, that the wash of the track is almost too much to deal with after al that. That may all sound thoroughly verbose and pretentious, and yes, I guess it is, but really, try putting an album like this into words. I can’t.

Jamie Jones : Don’t You Remember The Future

A rather fetching meeting point between old school electro (Egyptian Lover guests on the album for heavens sake), and club friendly tech-house, which really slipped through the cracks this year but kinda hit a nerve with my, oft self-denied 80s electro fetish…oh and the sort of Prince record that Prince might be making if he wasn’t so dull now, in the minor club hit, Summertime.

Elvis Costello : Secret, Profane and Sugarcane

Yeah, I love Elvis Costello, and I’m one of a shrinking number who buy everything he does. And I love it when he goes all plastic like…and this is his plastic bluegrass album. He tries to be authentic, as he does when he does the silly classical thing, and back in the day when he first went to Nashville and made the completely plastic and completely engaging Almost Blue. And yes, his voice on these tracks, especially the slow ones, is absolutely gorgeous. The last track, a sitting-on-the-front-porch remake of Lou Reed‘s Femme Fatale, is just a wonder.

Sally Shapiro : My Guilty Pleasure

Oh, this is lovely. I’m a sucker for this sort of slight indie euro-pop, so called italo-disco in some sort of odd nostalgia for a sound that never really existed, at least as it’s pined for in the 21st Century. That doesn’t make this record any less appealing, and the fact that Sally (Swedish I believe..hence the engaging sterility that is such a trademark of every Swedish band from ABBA onwards) is so detached from both a public persona and the underlying pretty synths that make up the musical bed of this album makes me like it even more. What does all that mean? Not very much I guess, but if you really want an eighties reference point for this record I’d point you in the direction of the pre-KLF genius that was Lori and The Chameleons .

Carl Craig & Moritz Von Oswald : Recomposed Vol. 3

This, which got mixed reviews ranging from confused to ecstatic, was both gorgeous and exhausting. Two pioneers of electronic composition reworking, and remaking using both analogue and digital machines, orchestral performances of Maurice Ravel and Modest Mussorgsky, taken from the Deutsche Grammophon catalogue (Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra to be exact), without ever feeling the need to resort to the obvious or the cliched. The end result was hypnotic. Killer remixes from Ricardo Villalobos and Craig came shortly later as a single.

Omar-S : Fabric 45: Detroit

The guy who works at the Ford Motor Company by day (putting marks on things with a felt pen I believe) and turns out this sort of deep urban techno by night. I guess things must go around and around that head all day, demanding expression after hours. Whatever, this was one mighty Fabric mix, featuring all original tracks, some new, some not so new, but all ruggedly meshed together in a raw and individual way that extends the soul of his city (Florence Ballard is his aunt, after all).

Various: Stroke – Songs For Chris Knox Well, yes, of course it’s on the list, even if it’s less than a week old. I’ve known Chris since 1978, we’re mates, but not really close. I released the first Tall Dwarfs‘ record in 1981, before his natural home, Flying Nun (and the day Chris left, it really stopped being Flying Nun) existed. Whilst the true pain is his and his family’s, his stroke hit me, as it did many others, pretty hard. I had a swathe of messages and emails from people, including ex-Toy Love members, who felt like they too were helpless to help, being nowhere near. It was a day or two before the news became clearer, and it was an unsettling few days or more.

So, this record matters to me. Chris was a big part of my life and I felt rather hollow the night of the gig in Auckland. You kinda sit in Bangkok thinking that you really need to be somewhere else, but are unable to be. So I played this over and over.

It’s quite a record, and the heartfelt love and sincere affection comes through on so many of the tracks. Myself, I have a little trouble with two or three of the tracks, but when it hits, it just floors you. My friend Russell Brown said that one track on here, Will Oldhams‘ cover of My Only Friend, bought him to tears, and others here have almost done that to me, including The Crying Wolfs take on All My Hollowness to You. Indeed I was rather taken that all three songs from that original TD EP from 1981 all made it on to the album and all sound quite marvelous.

You are gonna buy it, right?

and so to the reissues:

I liked the Dimitri Nightdubbin’ collection of 80s B-sides a lot. The B-sides of so many funk and proto-house 12″s across that decade contained the real gold on the release, and most have never been compiled. I have about 80% of these, and many many more from the era, but it’s nice to see so many of them in one place digitally. Just a question: why do the likes of Dimitri and Dave Lee so often feel the need to ‘edit’ what was often perfection? I had this conversation mid year with Norman Jay and we both agreed it was simply ego. Shame, as it tarnishes something that was better left alone.

The first 3 Buzzcocks albums have seen reissue several times, but none as well as the two pack EMI issues earlier this year, which sound almost as good as the vinyl did the first time around. 30 years on, they still sound like the pop masterpieces they did the first time around.

Oh, and then there was the limited (yes I’m bloody biased) digital re-release of the remastered (by Alan Jansson) album from The Screaming Meemees , with bonus tracks. I’m hoping that 2010 will see the double CD complete with 20 minutes of unseen live material that’s sitting on my desk.

The Beastie Boys ‘ masterpiece, Paul’s Boutique found its way back onto my playlist this year. The package was superb, with the original album gatefold beautifully recreated. It’s just a shame that the rampant copyright infringement that is this album, and the subsequent settlement of claims, meant that no bonus tracks made it on to the reissue..the associated 12″ tracks for example, many of which have never made CD.

But, 2009′s reissues / remasters were dominated by The Beatles, of course, and in mono, stereo, 8 track, quad, or any other format you can think of they still sound fantastic, and the new boxed sets / remaster (and most especially the mono box) take them to another level. And of course, without these records the first time around, likely nothing in this post would’ve existed anyway…

Still waiting on the Kraftwerk, but this’ll do for now…

Late addon:

A December arrival, but a week in the King Midas Sound album, Waiting For You, has been stuck on my stereo and iPod. The bastard child of Massive Attack and decades of pirate radio, like so many of the records on this post, it could only be British. The bizarre thing is, the British are fairly useless at making just about anything..with the glaring exceptions of television and popular music, in which, in both cases they not only lead but drag an often unwitting (or the in case of the US, unaware) planet after them. Wonderful, sensual, gorgeous and utterly of its time.

I guess I hit a brick wall in Bali. After years, it was hard to see it going anywhere. And I needed some urban. So, we packed the bags and moved to Bangkok, where, insanely, we know almost nobody. But, we reassure ourselves, it’s rather close to a lot of people I do know, and rather more, for want of a better phrase, in the world.  

For the reasons I touched on in my last post, and for the ongoing and increasing frustrations of doing business and the creeping pollution (garbage everywhere and ongoing raw sewage into the swimming beaches) and traffic gridlock, I’d really had enough. And I increasingly felt that driving on the roads of the island was an ongoing lottery with only one unhappy end result likely..through no fault of mine I was likely to end up in an accident which would kill or maim someone sooner or later. Everyday I got behind the wheel of my car it weighed on me, that the insanity and mayhem on the jalans would likely one day mean that I was held responsible for an injury caused by the irrational, deathwish driving of almost everyone on the island.

Or it was the batshit crazy expats..you’d start talking to reasonably rational people and then they’d wander off into some treatise about their recent journey through their past lives, or you’d meet some wonderful soul who, it turns out, has made a small fortune by paying far flung villages a pittance for their ancient artifacts, often ancestral gravestones or the like, which they’ve either shipped off to abroad for an obscenely inflated markup. Or there are the shysters and devolopers who are selling hugely overpriced property on dodgy landtitles or with fake guarantees of freehold (Indonesian law, regardless of whatever trick of the eye (or proxy) you may pull, is very clear: unless you are Indonesian you can not and likely never will be able to own land). Many of these are celebrated in the grimace inducing paean to insubstantiality, The Yak.

Yes it’s gruesome.

But oh so fabulous…

So we left.

For that, the one thing that the years in Bali, and the many other excursions in recent years into other parts of Indonesia, and across Asia have given me is an increased sense of understanding. Or I hope so.

I understand now that I was never really a foreigner in the UK, or Europe, nor in most of the US. I thought I was, but simply put, we were just variations on the same rules. In Asia however the rules are completely different. Confidence shakingly so. Nothing I’d learned, been told, or understood worked anymore as it was supposed to. You take nothing for granted, especially when living day to day outside the comfortable tourist routines. You want to set up a utilities account? Start learning… You want to pay that bill? Start learning…. and so on, and on.

I go back to New Zealand and the things I now, without a blink, regard as normal, may as well be from another galaxy. And I realise how much I’ve changed and, maybe, learned.

And Thailand is a slightly (make that substantially) more developed and sophisticated nation than Indonesia, thus the culture shock is radically less than that encountered by the naive New Zealanders arriving in paradise a few years back.

We thought about jumping back to New Zealand, but to be honest, after some years in Asia, we decided the culture shock for us would likely be worse on that return than when we arrived in Asia, plus the sense of isolation we sometimes feel there on our trips back would perhaps be suffocating for us right now, although it doesn’t stop me missing the place. I may retire, if and when, to some beach in NZ, but then, likely too, I may end my years in some part of China or South East Asia, but right now the ease of travel and the crush of millions of other souls pushes the right buttons. Did I mention the food…..

I guess irrational impulsiveness is both a personal strength and weakness, but without it I’d never have made a record or done large parts of what I’ve done and got such joy from doing over the past decades. The trip continues…

So that was Indonesia.

I wasn’t going to write anything on my leaving for fear that I might offend or come across as the perennial grumpy ex-Indo expat (and the usual response to such is for others to say, vacuously, ‘if you don’t like it..leave’..uhh, I have) but this piece (which has disappeared on the original site as it’s domain seems to have expired, but is at this link and caused quite a noise in Indonesian online circles), on the imploding, but potentially very mighty, city of Jakarta changed my mind. It pushed open the doors a little, thus, giving me some courage to vent.

I actually rather like Jakarta, have enjoyed it greatly at times and looked forward to my many trips into, what may best be described as a Satanic Urban Swamp (caps intentional). I’m very aware though that’s because of the level I enter it, the level I enjoy it at, and because I have a ticket out. So yes, there is is much of truth in that overview. It is a bulging, collapsing sprawl that suffers greatly from unchecked greed, shitty governance, collapsing, almost non existent infrastructure, and the almost complete absence of the rule of law as understood across most of the world, East & West (Indonesians love saying “You can’t expect it be like it is in the west here”, but the truth is it’s not like it is in Malaysia, Thailand or Singapore either). And these this truths can, more or less, be transposed onto the nation as a whole.

I lived in Indonesia for close to five years, and found myself mentally immersed (as much as an observer can be immersed) and fascinated by the political life of the nation, and it’s struggle to pull itself out of the gaping black-hole that centuries of Dutch misrule, followed by, arguably, much worse, pillaging and misrule by Indonesian leaders who took financial and human rights abuses and crimes against the people of Indonesia to a level that the Dutch colonialists could only but dream of. And in the process created a self serving and self perpetuating, incredibly arrogant, elite that both controls the body politick and economy, and ruthlessly defends itself regardless of the harm it may do to the overwhelming bulk of Indonesia’s population, against any threat to its wellbeing, wealth and absolute control.

That elite controls (and includes the senior ranks of) the military, the police and the judiciary, and coldly, absolutely, and unashamedly wields those weapons to bring down any who may threaten it. As I type these institutions are battling to nobble the, too aggressive for their own good, anti-korupsi body, the KPK, seemingly with the connivance of the President, a former general, who, like Bali’s governor, a former police chief, as everyone knows but few dare say, could not conceivably have found himself where he is now without substantially paying the piper and having some history, however well hidden and ignored.

This truly is a very odd country, and depressingly dysfunctional in so many ways. It has natural beauty unlike any I’ve seen anywhere, it has massive resources, both natural and human, and sits across the most important stretch of water on the planet. It’s history, complex culture, arts and writings are formidable and awe inspiring. And yet it’s population, by any reasonable measure (far beyond the arbitrary line drawn by Jakarta) is overwhelmingly poverty stricken. Many of those who allegedly are living above the poverty line, live lives far below what would be termed abject poverty in neigbouring nations like Thailand or Malaysia. It’s education spend is beyond abysmal and even when taught, what is taught does little to help most young Indonesians develop thinking, questioning minds, and teaches a version of history that is at odds with reality. Indonesia claims a literacy rate in the 90%s but for many, perhaps the majority, such literacy is merely token with reading and writing levels rarely existing beyond the cursory (JKT’s library system has less than 10,000 books, in a city of some ten million..most people simply do not and can not read – it’s rare to find an Indonesian who can read a map for example). Mathematical literacy is little better, with shop staff often needing a calculator to subtract five from ten. You have insane imams barking out barbaric rulings on morality whilst turning a blind eye to one of their own marrying (and having sex with) a 12 year old girl (and eyeing up her 9 year old sister). These same people blame the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their own flock on the failure of the morality of those who perished, as a punishment from their twisted god, and such opinions, rather than sitting in the wacko periphery as they do elsewhere, sit uncomfortably close to mainstream thinking. And that, being Islam, is a massive reason why Indonesia remains forever on the edge of being a failed state. The religion, or narrow, self righteous in it’s ignorance, largely humourless, dogma, as may be more accurate (as it is with much religion), stymies much progressive thought, and spends much of it’s time trying to flatten the soul of the nation. It remains the primary reason why the nation remains an intellectual desert..it never fails to astound me how few printed pages the only real broadsheet newspaper, Kompas, has each day. Indeed (and I’m hoping that lost in translation accounts for much of this) there is rarely a morning when one opens a national (English language) newspaper not to see either SBY or one of his odd Cabinet Ministers make some statement which if not simply inane, borders on the moronic. SBY, in his 2009 post election victory speech, offered a list of desired achievements this term which would make a Miss World contestant stammer with it’s inane banality, and ended with his prediction that Indonesia would be one of the world’s most advanced nations by 2025. Nobody blinked at the absurdity of this. This in a nation where almost everything you can think of is, to put it in it’s most base terms, is irredeemably broken. I defy someone to tell me some part of Indonesian life that isn’t broken, from the transport system, health system, manufacturing industries, government at any level, the military, the environment and on and on. And for that matter, something that is less broken after 5 years of SBY than before. Which is the real point. After years of supposed investment and economic stability and growth, little, for most Indonesians, has changed at all.

It’s extraordinarily sad.

Unless of course one is a member of the 1 or 2 percent who own and control Indonesia, and all it’s wealth. They are doing quite well and their wealth grows and grows with little trickle down beyond the mega malls and Swiss finishing schools. For the rest, Indonesia’s success story remains but a mirage, in the electricity-less expanses of Kalimantan or Sulawesi, or the poverty stricken ghettos of Jakarta or Surabaya with no running water, despite what’s printed on the pages of The Wall Street Journal or The Financial Times, in which fleeting reporters hail Indonesia’s financial miracle. It’s as much a mirage as Reagan’s trickle down economics were to the inner cities of Detroit in the late 1980s.

And then we have the endemic corruption and theft. Until you’ve actually lived in the midst of it, it’s so hard to really get a handle on how all all encompassing and utterly putrid the corruption is in Indonesia. I’ve tried to explain it to folks outside the country, even to those in the other SEA nations, but it’s virtually impossible to understand the pervasiveness of it unless one is there. Yes there is corruption in Thailand, yes there is corruption in the USA, but the massive point of difference is that in just about every other nation I can think of, such is regarded as wrong. In Indonesia graft and dishonesty are the social norm and, mostly, treated as such by whatever justice system the nation has, with the odd token high level arrest to satisfy the NGOs. This year an organized ring of immigration officials at Bali’s airport, were discovered to have stolen US$300,000 from visa fees. They were allowed to keep their jobs and lost a year’s promotion. Nobody asked where the money was. That, I thought, spoke ugly volumes.

It covers every facet of everyday life and adds billions of dollars to the cost of the economy every year. It’s not just about giving a cop a few rupiah on the side of the road (although they have a quota to collect for their bosses and upwards). Its about state school children not getting a seat at a local school unless they pay the seat and desk ‘fee’ to the teacher (who passes a cut up stream to the headmaster), or not giving a child their exam results unless they pay a bribe; or tertiary institutes selling professional degrees including medical and engineering; or port and customs officials demanding a cut of any incoming containers and leveraging extra ‘special fees” on outgoing freight; or the military and police demanding protection money from industry, shops & business; or female drug dealers being kept in stations for days and repeatedly raped by cops, who are immune; or the sale of visas by immigration; or millions of dollars of poverty support monies being stolen by regional governors; or monies pilfered by the nation’s diplomats; or millions of dollars in Haj savings being stolen by the Minister for Religious Affairs. Indeed it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there seems to be some sort of equation between the most devout in one of the most devout nations in the world and the extreme dishonesty in what is likely the nation with the most institutionally entrenched dishonesty at every level. And Bali takes it further, with shortchanging and routine overcharging of tourists and foreigners being not only the daily norm but accepted policy in some retail chains. Taxis rig their meters, petrol stations have their pumps set to add Rp50,000 to the cost (with the pump preset to begin at that figure), the petrol bought at roadside shops is watered down with anything that won’t show, pirate DVD shops remove DVDs after you have paid for them and on and on….

And the government, that of SBY, is strangely unwilling to tackle any of this beyond the most superficial level. No-one asks how senior policemen can live in mansions, drive multiple imported luxury vehicles and send their families abroad on salaries of $1000 a month, or how the current Bali governor managed to find assets of half a million US$ to declare in the recent election, on his salary. And all of this, too, is mostly untaxed as virtually no-one in the nation has a (compulsory) tax number, with only ten of the 500+ members of the new legislature having such.

And there is so much more. At just about every level Indonesia, even in third world terms, is largely broken and you simply scratch your head at the magnitude of the problem and whether anyone, after six decades of rather broken independence, will ever be able to put the pieces back together again. Certainly not the current incumbent power structure, which is too far entrenched and derived from the very ugly status quo, who really don’t see that much wrong with maintaining things as they are, and largely are doing so. The issue at hand is largely that the government structure in Indonesia, from the village level upwards, still hasn’t worked out that democracy is a government of the people, for the benefit of the people, not a government of the people to benefit an elite.

You can only hope that somewhere on the far horizon one of the small but growing number of educated and extremely aware urban intelligentsia, who very much understand the problems, has the drive and political nouse to battle his or her way through the massive obstacles faced by anyone who wants to change the system. Or that given enough people making a noise, essentially once again in the big urban centres, some sort of true reformasi happens to pick up where the largely stalled and disappointing 1998 revolution pointed.

Which brings me to the most astounding part of where we are at as I type. The KPK scandal I linked to above seems to have roused the nation. And not just the middle class or the educated elite, but rather, the masses, the millions, in their kampongs and in the streets and smaller towns across, at least Java and Bali in a rather encouraging way. Despite shitty internet being the norm, Indonesia, at least in the major urban centres, and with the under 30s, is an increasingly wired nation. It’s one of the fastest growing Twitter nations on the planet, and cheap nationwide 3G networks have empowered and given a voice to so many that simply would never have been heard in years gone by, or, if they raised a voice, would be ignored. The first rumblings were heard earlier this year when a woman in the outskirts of Jakarta critcised her local hospital by email and was sued by the company for defamation. In days gone by they would have simply sledgehammered her without a murmur. After all it was the national hero, Sukarno, who said Indonesia was a coolie nation, and needed to lift itself out of that mentality. Sadly Indonesian leaders thereafter have treated the nation exactly that way, and SBY’s powerbase, at least until this last election, was centered around those who saw it in their interest to maintain that twisted status quo, with Suharto turning nation extortion (and murder of his people) into an art-form.

But this woman somehow rallied the nation behind her, using the internet, and, especially Facebook, where she had a million supporters overnight. It forced the hospital to back down. The case is still going through the courts, who seem unable to work out that the world that allowed them to twist and pollute and act viciously for the benefit of the biggest checkbook (or, rather, bag of Rp100,000 notes..our lawyer told us stories of judges’ clerks daily sitting outside courts openly negotiating the fee for verdicts) has gone, or may be on it’s way out.

And so to the current case, where the police, popularly regarded as the most dishonest body in this most corrupt of nations, thought they were simply able to lie, make things up, threaten a few people to make false statements, and so on, to bring down the Anti Corruption body that, simply put, was getting too big for their boots and beginning to do their job rather too well. It’s a long convoluted story but they, apparently with little good reason, arrested the two senior deputies in the KPK for corrupt practices. The public uproar was immediate. SBY, who is still a product of, and, for all the rather naive international praise, still a part of the bad old days, initially did little but was badly buffeted by the storm, which has done massive damage to his personal reputation as a man of the people. A Facebook page has, after just a few days, well over a million names attached to it, and the nation has, trading from phone to phone via Bluetooth, an almost universal new ringtone, which is widely regarded as a nationwide protest ring. The deputies are out of jail and SBY threw together a few hurriedly gathered experts to work this all out. They seem as confused by the furor, and the potential fallout, as the self obsessed of the elite establishment are. After all, this is their country..not the people who cast votes or work in the factories, offices and fields.

You could easily argue that Indonesia is a hopeless case. On the current evidence I’d think perhaps not yet….