Dry Argument (at Semesta)

Hotel California. Earlier Hey Jude. (Originals rather than re-mastered, as more often than not in Singapore.) All rather strange drifting off into unfixed time and location without much awareness. One or two other familiar tunes were not able to be named by a non-aficionado; and the occasional bahasa of the same genre interspersed. Easy, tolerable and a little touching.
         This fare is solid bona fide kool in Jogja among these soft retro hippie kids, students in the main. This particular middle class need the lyric, the smoothness and yearning. Oh yeah! (The class element took some while to appreciate: lap-tops, smart-phones, labeled athletic shoes, stylized drabness—unequivocal middle-class.)
         Black predominates as if it were grunge on the sound system, again a little disorienting. (As yet the author has not worn his new batik tee to the place. A real rebel, that is upcoming. For these kids highly unkool; only dowdy old guys don such gear.)
        No tattoos, piercing, or beards. The tudong quite common, though the lesser proportion. (And much the most alluring.)
         Hand-crafted furniture. In Oz all the dark jati would be worth a small fortune. Laminex tops dotted here and there for the mix just right. Overhead exposed roof-tiling and atap in a number of places; stone pavers and worn concrete paths curving through the seating. The greenery of the tropics is unbeatable: a number of twisted tree trunks, over-hanging branches, creepers and vines restoring some of the forest and jungle. It is a great pity the birds have been excluded—the caged birds belong to the first generation out of the kampungs; not the hipsters following. (Mornings in the back corner a muffled rooster can be heard behind the fencing and what must be further barriers of some kind.)
         A younger son mans the till evenings and the matriarch day-time. The designer however has still not been sighted. Guess is an elder child away in Jakarta, if not another more prominent architectural capital out in the world. Neither the mother nor the young lad could have commissioned such design and arrangement. (Possibly the pair are more remote relatives entrusted with management.)
         Waiters mostly in tees bearing the logo—various colours—deliver the teas, coffees, juices, shakes and spiders. (Food is the lesser part of the trade; budgets tight for students. The prices are generally thought to be mahal: about double compared to the warung teas and the fried nasi triple and more.) Absence of female waiters hinting at conservative Islam.
         Point being completely dry. Not a drop of alcohol anywhere. Soda pop, shakes and cokes like in Gidget and The Patty Duke Show almost sixty years ago. (Reminds one that Prohibition and the Rechabite movement was only thirty odd years before that.)
         When Alice was in town earlier in the year after a quarter hour at the Semesta table she had remarked on the phenomenon. If there is nothing else of value in Islam, the stricture against alcohol has to be marked as of inestimable benefit. (If only the same injunction could hold against smoking. Deadly of course, but not devastating to a culture and community like alcohol.)
         Could the same geniality, the same ease and calm hold with alcohol introduced among this youth?
         Faris the Arizonan convert was perfectly correct: Western viewpoint often slips into the presumption that the absence of alcohol is a limiting curb and restraint upon a community. The old freedom gambit manipulated by capitalist consumerism.

         In Kota Bahru, Old Town near the Catholic encampment on the rise from the river where the becak drivers need to dismount.