December 2011
4 posts
The Ghosts of Tebet Part 2
When I tried to argue that it seemed that the neighborhood shut down prematurely at night for no apparent good reason, and thus seemed to shout out its simplicity rather than complication, the group of guards insisted that people these days had to increasingly retreat to their dreams in order to come up with new ways of doing things; that Jakarta had already become more complicated—constant...
The Ghosts of Tebet...part one
I live in a lower middle class neighborhood centrally located in Jakarta. Tebet is a warren of small streets with mostly single family pavilions tightly packed together. It was originally developed some fifty years ago as neighborhoods in Senayoran were displaced to make room for a new sporting complex and governmental district. The area is popularly known as seasoned, street wise “combatant”...
was blind and still not see
Butchie acts blind to what he sees, but he sees anyway. He is not the repository of an archival wisdom; he is not a hold-over from another generation; he does not issue cautionary tales or deliver cogent oral histories.
Rather, Butchie sees how the changes in the game, the “passing” of the old orders are not really that at all. He sees the ways in which self-destruction simply does not...
