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I also collect more than 1,000 videos of animation movies. Examples of my kind are Nick Park's Wallace & Gromit, Pixar's Geri's Game, and Steven Spielberg's Freakazoid! Japanese anime is half of my collection (the picture above shows the anime Rurouni Kenshin, based on Nobuhiro Watsuki's manga, inside the frames).

Anime has just made it in the Western hemisphere -- Disney and Warner and their kith were too mundial to beat in their own playground. But actually anime is old enough today. It probably was commercially born in 1947 when Osamu Tezuka released his first creation. The medium itself, i.e. the Japanimation with the proto-characteristics that hatched what we see today, is arguably said to have been around since 1917.

To me, anime is enchanting when it's good and utterly disgusting when it's bad -- and there is a paradox of unbelievable genius and unpardonable folly in those Japanese creators. This often drives me nuts. And I wish they could exorcise the urge to use English words to name anything; with all due respect, the way English is pronounced there is a massive audio torment! (Imagine having a main character named 'Blue Morris' for instance, which, all through the 64 episodes x 45 minutes each, is referred to as 'Brue Maurisay'!).

Anyway, the anime I love most are, among others, Trigun (a gun-toting outlaw on the lam, based on the manga by Yasuhiro Nightow) and Rurouni Kenshin (tastelessly transformed into Samurai X outside Japan), modelled after Nobuhiro Watsuki's manga. I can say I also like Slayers (a pair of women warriors who are swords and magic for hire), Sol Bianca (a bunch of women pirates), Matsumoto's Harlock Saga (another sort of pirates with darker pics and reasons, and, alas, the storyline is inspired by Richard Wagner), and Excel Saga, which calls itself 'Weird Anime' (reasonably so). Another anime I like is Wolf's Rain, about -- well, of course, wolves. Compared to the previously mentioned titles, Wolf's Rain is heartbreakingly poetic; or you (or I in another mood) might prefer to call it mushy.

Slayers	Excel Saga
Sol Bianca	Ninja Resurrection

There's one specially gory anime that I can say I like -- Ninja Resurrection: Revenge of Jubei (the English-subtitled version © 1998 A.D. Vision Inc., Japan, original story by Yamada Futaroh, directed by Urata Yasunori, character design by Sato Keiichi & Hayama Kenji). First of all I tend to fall for swordspersons, secondly I could never resist my primitive lust after Japan in the churning era of warlordism -- around 1500's to the first half of 1600's. So the literally bloody anime is good in this sense. The main character is Yagyu Jubei, from an actual family of samurais that lived and helped to shape the country in their time. The set is after the decisive war between Tokugawa Ieyasu and the remains of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's loyal troops; the dawn of the shogunate that would last for centuries until Rurouni Kenshin's time. One thing that sets this anime apart from others is its music. Created by Amano Masamichi, the theme songs are really good -- even beyond the stratospheric description of 'good' if you have been, are, and will be watching more anime like I. So rare in the neighborhood of neglect of the musical aspect of the anime.

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For ink jobs, my pick for all time would be Welcome To The Monkey House (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.) and Dead Souls (Nikolai Gogol). Both could be categorized as satires; Gogol's is of an epic scale. Nothing I've read so far exceeds what the two books have dragged themselves to.

Nikolai Gogol	Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Others are this or/and that fictional tome by Oscar Wilde, J.D. Salinger, and Anton Chekov. Wilde is superficial, and the pop iconization has made saying his name ridiculous if we're being serious, but his light works in the closet set out a distinctive genre. Salinger needs no explanation; he's just smartly good. And I enlist Chekov because of the humane approach he always used -- nobody loves this human race more than he, in writing, did. I don't; that's why I love him!

J.D. Salinger	Anton Chekov

The rest of the fiction writers I like are the so-called 'classical' Japanese: Tanizaki Junichiro, Kawabata Yasunari, Akutagawa Ryunosuke. Good Japanese stories are even able to retain their flavor when Anglicized. They are so light and transparent, effortlessly flowing within, never forcing themselves up to us but like perching on the window sill and only get in when we say welcome.

It's always hard to say what, exactly, is it that I like to read. Partly because I read virtually anything with the same sort and degree of interest -- including (some eye-witnesses could be summoned for this) paper wrappers that come in with my daily grocery.

Tanizaki Junichiro	Bertrand Russell

But in general perhaps I should say I'm more for non-fiction. History and philosophy are probably the subjects I'm interested in the most. The philosopher I love most is Bertrand Russell -- because he's fantastically unphilosophical. If the term 'philosophy' is stretched to encompass some guys like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, then he's in my list, too. Among historians, I pick Daniel Boorstin and Felipe Fernandez Armesto. Armesto is stiffer than what I'd love him to be, but his eagle-eye view is great -- a vast terra of long calendrical time seems to get all contained, missing not a single drop, in one punch of his keyboard. Boorstin, on the other hand, is magnificent like I could only dream of. Just browse any of his American History tomes -- history is people and lives and attitudes and stuff; he amazingly got it right. Among essayists I still go for the cause of the birth of the term 'essay' itself: Michel de Montaigne.

Saki	Dave Barry

Yet, my favorite authors are mostly humor writers, either one-hundred-percently so or of whom you can say 'almost humorist', like Dorothy Parker, Saki, Jerome Klapka Jerome, Dave Barry, Fran Lebowitz, Woody Allen (only his essays). This happened as it first, and only later on coincidentally brushed shoulders with my job -- some people put me into the same box of 'humor writers', regardless of how incurably romantic or unrepentantly abrasive or homicidal or manic-depressive my pieces were at a time.

I don't like poetry. Really. But under gunpoint I would have to name J.V. Cunningham, Dorothy Parker, Matshuo Basho and several dozens of older Japanese haiku-weavers if asked about my favorites.

Putu Wijaya	Goenawan Mohamad

The Indonesian authors I like are Putu Wijaya (his novels and short-stories before the dawn of the '90's), Budi Darma (his novels), and Beni Setia (his stories and poems in the eighties). For non-fiction I'd have to name Goenawan Mohamad (his essays). The first three authors use words the way I could never do, in their best pieces: concise and brief and effectively so. Meanwhile, hundreds of Indonesians write essays the way Mohamad does -- that shows the range of his appeal to plagiators and followers and cut-and-pasters. His works in the eighties and early nineties were really art.

Click here for history of Indonesian literature
(with pictures).

I got almost 3,000 movie videos (in VCD & DVD formats) at home, though mostly just any film, snatched when I still felt like so even though none of my sorts was around -- such as Wag the Dog, Suicide Kings, Fargo, A Fish Called Wanda, 2 Days In the Valley, La Vita E Bella, The Usual Suspects, Six Degrees of Separation, and so on. Besides personal attachment, this routine of video-collecting was initially a job -- I reviewed movies for cheques back when there were actors in the industry, and just a few moviestars.

Jackson	Spacey	Azaria
Kline	Macy	Leary
Thornton	Posey	Jason-Leigh

I'd probably try to get a film if the actors are, for example, Denis Leary, Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Spacey, Hank Azaria, Kevin Kline, William H. Macy, Billy Bob Thornton, Nathan Lane, Richard Dreyfuss, Stanley Tucci, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Parker Posey, John Corbett and Johnny Depp. Several steps down and I'd name Kiefer Sutherland (an entirely primal reason for this) and Emilio Estevez -- the latter is mostly because I love his name!

My aversion comprises of movies that contain Tom Hanks, Sean Penn, Leonardo diCaprio, Nicholas Cage, and the sort of Jennifer Lopez. I wouldn't say I like them unless I were sedated and under the KGB inquisition.

Like in books, my taste in films also tend to follow satires. This genre doesn't comprise slapsticks and clownish movies, such as all and any of Mike Myers' films. Why so many people always fail to understand this simple categorization, I really have no idea. "You must love this," someone insisted of There's Something About Mary once; and another person I know believed that I like Wayne's World -- worse, he bought me the soundtrack of Austin Powers: International Man Of Misery. That was a deliberate typo.

I don't like horror movies, romantic dramas and romantic comedies, family-oriented films, science-fiction, and the species of the lamentably living genre I just mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Click here for history of Indonesian movies
(with pictures).

Rurouni Kenshin

Wallace & Gromit

Freakazoid!

In this area I don't go for animation movies overwhelmed by mecha (mechanical stuff like robots and aircrafts and such), I don't like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and the Japanese version of (Northern) classical children's tales.

About Japan, besides of so and so that got me dreaming of perfect bliss (Ito Hideaki), massive gigabytes of erotic nightmares (Sorimachi Takashi), and reveries of inspiring greatness (Sanada Hiroyuki and Watanabe Ken), I have an everlasting interest in its culture in general, plus there is some sort of historical relation between us [see my impression of Grave of the Fireflies].

I collect children's books, so there are writers in this playground that I can name as my favorites, too, such as Astrid Lindgren, Erich Kastner, Roald Dahl, and Tsubasa Nunoura. Maybe to some Laura Ingalls Wilder belongs to this category, for her biographical books like Little House In The Prairie. But, NO, I don't like Harry Potter. Not a bit.

Astrid Lindgren	Roald Dahl

If there is some time to waste, I'd love to waste it better with good stories. In this category I'd often opt for whodunits. It's likely to be G.K. Chesterton and Agatha Christie. Almost everything Chesterton did is good; with Christie it's not the case. But there are real pearls there among her long string of plastic beads. And in different sorts and degrees, both writers of crime-stories possessed some sane sense of humor. For what I call 'nonsense reading', my champ is the glitterati Michael Chabon. He really knows the rope, you can hardly notice the studied timing and placing of humor in his bulky tomes -- it appears as if naturally springing up just on the right paragraph.

G.K. Chesterton	Agatha Christie

What I don't enjoy reading are books on Math, Physics, Chemistry, and such; science-fiction; religious tomes; 'self-help' stuff like the Chicken Soup series; Psychology; biographies; dramas; Anthropology; most of poetry and the majority of novels; collections of jokes; things that involve what their devotees call 'critters' (dragons and goblins and Tolkien and the like); and a long winding list of others.

Usually whatever is said as best-selling doesn't fit into my description of good reading.

One more thing: my perhaps unhealthy attention to newspapers makes me love cartoons, comic strips and caricatures in general. The artists I value most are Charles Schulz, James Thurber, Herbert Block, and the Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig. This is the hardest job in the world. Just to think that you must be smart, up-to-date, funny, and be able to draw, is enough to force you to respect the rare mammals who work as these guys do.

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