Text © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 Nin

Emilio Estevez
(front, red tee, brown jacket)
with the cast of The War At Home (produced by his own production house, Avatar, 1996), his dad Martin Sheen and Oscar winner Kathy Bates

Estevez is an American actor of second-rate movies, b. 1962. Son of Martin Sheen, elder brother of Charlie Sheen. Peak of achievement: turning down the offer to play in Oliver Stone's Platoon. Filmography includes The Outsiders, The Young Guns, a vast array of forgettables, and the splashing summer movies for kids The Mighty Ducks. I probably had a crush on him in The Outsiders, 1982.

Paula Abdul: Former Mrs. Estevez. American dancer.

"Isn't yet free from Disney":
Estevez' Mighty Ducks are Disney's. He said he took the job only to finance a movie of his own, The War At Home (1996). He directed himself, his dad, and Kathy Bates there. It didn't sell nor was more than critically glanced at.

It was probable that my affection for Emilio Estevez had steadily driven itself on extra miles. But I surely resent other people's attention to this, while none paid any attention to him. Quite deservedly, I'd say, but still -

"You," R said last night, "are," he inhaled the God knows what there between his fingers, "nuts." But whose business is it that I love his name? To think that he had once given it to Paula Abdul! It didn't help that actually Estevez' fame comes chiefly from the fact that he almost got married to Demi Moore in the late 1980's.

Oh, I know how embarassing this is. He's not good-looking in a good-looking way (not even according to my definition of it - he doesn't look like a thug; and not in his own world's - he's no more than 5' 6"), he got a very bad voice (the whole clan of Estevezes do; the sort of voice Luciano Pavarotti had left ages ago in coming of age), he's too old to get futuristic, and the only person who gives him a job nowadays is Jon Bon Jovi - a payback for taking him into celluloid once.

So ain't I good by sacrificing my face to admit him in as somewhat a favorite presence onscreen? I might even go to heaven solely for this.

But it is impossible to argue against R, and even harder to have a debate with the harmful substance he kept inhaling. This guy is an insane socialist. He believes that the world wouldn't get salvation as long as it isn't free yet from Disney.

I don't have to defend myself for liking Emilio Estevez. Yet there's a little something I have to say about it -- or more precisely about him: these are borrowed lines from a character named Mama Younger, from one of Lorraine Hansberry's plays:

"When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is....."

Email, 1999.

The Spurs one night

Remembering you when watching a football match is even more bizarre than the U.S. Election this year. But I did.

It was Aston Villa against Tottenham Hotspur.

At the beginning of this feverish stage of the English Premier League championship, George Graham, the Spurs manager, have done something as unthinkable as nominating George Bush, Jr. -- he sold the French playmaker of his club, David Ginola.

Ginola is to the Spurs of the '90's like blunders to Bush Jr. -- inseparable, inborn, inbreed, "natural".

The good, though never great, Ginola is 33 this year. A veteran age for a footballer. But Aston Villa wanted him so bad and was willing to pay a sum bigger than any 33 year-old in this business could dream of -- this showed how high Ginola is valued, since Villa isn't just a stumbling, relegation-prone little club -- it is as big or as small as the Spurs itself.

On the very first bid George Graham signed the papers that transferred Ginola to Aston Villa.

Loyalty might be nowhere around professional football. But Ginola had it. He felt humiliated, jilted, betrayed, that after the ups-and-downs he had been undergoing with and for Tottenham Hotspurs the manager just kicked him out like that. He didn't care about the bigger bulk of money he got after the transfer. Publicly voicing this, his relationship with Graham, that has never been great to begin with, got worse and worse. And Villa's people of course felt un-good about it too, even though they knew no pro would play any less spirited for that reason. In short, there was tension and ill-taste under everybody's mental tongue.

Then came the very first time David Ginola played for Aston Villa against his former club, Tottenham Hotspur, last night.

When the Villa men entered the field while the announcer said their names one by one and it was Ginola's turn, the Spurs' fans rose from their seats and gave him a long, thunderous, standing ovation.

This kind of thing very seldom happened in planet football.

Almost never. What a player could expect from his ex-club's fans is tons of catcalls and loud boos whenever his new club plays against that former club.

Ginola himself played as good or as bad as ever, with his new mauve shirt for Villa. But this didn't matter. The beer-gushing voices in the stadium last night appreciated his "un-professional" passion.

What a beautiful sight even for a die-hard Red Devil that has nothing to do with any of the elements of this story.

Haiku

I love the Japanese haiku for an obvious reason: I talk too much.

Haiku is the anti-me in this area, and I really admire whoever ancient person who created it for the very first time and those who made it a distinct literary genre.

So little of words, so great a picture -- nothing but classical haiku can give you that.

I dislike the so-called 'modern haiku' -- in my mind this uncouth species includes anything that represents industrialization, jamming the space with things like jet planes and factories and skyscrappers and tedious white-collar jobs and so on, starting with the emergence of train and trams in the Japanese haiku after Meiji Restoration.

I only like older haiku. They are full of life in the best perspective; they take you to travel a long distance away from the day, and yet the moment and action condensed there is something you could behold any time at all; unlike the industrial world, nature is never outdated. A few examples:

Arakida Moritake (1473-1549):

Fallen flower I see
Returning to its branch --
Ah! A butterfly.

Mukai Kyorai (1651-1704):

My native town
And in a borrowed bed:
Migrating birds.

And from the immortal Matsuo Basho (1644-1694):

Spring:
A hill without a name
Veiled in morning mist.

Clouds now and then
Giving me relief
From moon-viewing.

But I have never, ever, attempted to write even a single piece of haiku myself.

Not just because of my natural dispossession of using words in the most economical fashion; there are other reasons for this. One of them is, a non-master in this area would invariably get busy minding the word count and such and easily losing track of the fleeting moment he or she initially wanted to smother and display via haiku; all traditional forms of poetical utterances provide the same danger to entrap adventurers. Javanese traditional poetry, for instance the Macapat song lyrics, is readier for me if I were to endure heaps of ancient rules in wordweaving. I'm not made for such straightjackets.

Then there is my personal aversion to virtually any method the Northern civilization employed in importing and appropriating anything Southern and then threw the digested stuff up to be re-exported to the rest of the world -- including to the land of origin itself. When hashish was hip, in the foul-smelling, infrequent-bathing, androgynous era of 1960's and 1970's, the Californian exponents of verbal art made haiku something known to perhaps everybody -- a good service in this sense, if haiku welcomed free public relation officers -- but as happens in every commodification, from then on haiku outside Japan became nothing but a flavorless snack. I simply can't tolerate that. Just like tanka writing, haiku suffers to this very day.

English is partially to shoulder the blame. The most exquisite Japanese and Chinese writings would nonetheless look unreasonably pale, unbearably winding and outrageously stupid -- too simple as if any Kindergarten student of New York could yield the same pieces. Japanese and Chinese richness cannot stand translations. Classical Japanese with its shady lexicon and words employed mainly for beauty always gains a flat, shrinking look after being retold in English.

Then there is another problem; if it is a translation, the writer is compelled to explain what he or she means by every haiku -- this is a humiliating, silly, useless task, and more than that it effectively cancels out the haiku itself -- the lines might have never been written at all, it would make no difference whatever.

Take, for example, some 'modern haiku' by Yamaguchi Seishi, as translated by Kodaira Takashi and Alfred H. Marks:

A triangular
milk-vetch field that doesn't mind
the triangular.

[Composed 1971. It is a triangular field, beautiful because of the milk-vetch growing in it. Being a three-cornered field may seem to give it bad luck, but just as it was once a three-cornered rice field, it is now a three-cornered milk-vetch field.]

For Christmas dinner,
soup is brought to the table
on a level plane.

[Composed 1972. Christmas dinner. Soup was brought to the table first. The waiter exercised care to keep the soup bowls level. A worshipful Christmas dinner.]

And that was only the explanatory lines given by the poet himself; there are actually hordes of additional words as explanation given by the translators on every single haiku in the collection. The haikus themselves are reduced into mere pathetic three-line whatevers -- no soul can stand the large baggage of explanation. No matter how great a writer you might be, upon such task you'd end up looking silly.

The unbearability of course also comes from the fact that at first glance haiku looks so easy to compose.

Any involuntarily-leisured guy in San Francisco who bumped into haiku immediately set out to announce "I can write, too!" and so it's no wonder the internet later is crammed with haiku cybercommunities, haiku societies, haiku weavers' clubs, and so forth -- everybody -- every nobody -- firmly believes he and she can take this thing up to distinguish themselves from the other 1,000,000,999 sedentary co-workers in the Disney Corp. cubicles.

I am vain in more than many things, but my vanity isn't sufficient to delude myself about haiku. The ongoing degradation -- the, some say, inevitable consequence of mass-distribution -- keeps reminding me to stay away from the field of haiku-anything except haiku-appreciating.

This solo cause of unforgettable uproar was born as Mary Wilcocks, Englishperson, far away back in 1791. This is the woman who fooled everyone in 1817 by claiming that she was a princess from a fictional land. She had had some good time in the English upper-class and after the real identity was accidentally discovered she was reported to leave England for the USA, dropping by in St. Helena and met Napoleon Bonaparte as a 'fellow monarch in exile'.

Wilcocks is acknowledged as one of the greatest pretenders of all time. Coincidentally the foreign land she said was her homeland (as Princess Caraboo) was 'Javasu', and parts of the Wilcocksspeak she adopted as her 'native language' was Malayan - an older version of modern Indonesian language.

This little piece of historical brouhaha stays in my mind probably because I always resent the tendency of some Northerners to take anything Asian as 'exotic'.

Ritchie Blackmore

So he played with his soul, not the strings, they were not alive if he has not given his, we listen thousands of miles away and many years have lapsed, never fail to cry as if it is the very first time. You do not have to like him and who likes breathing anyway? You only have to let your soul roam, do not ask it to mind the dishes and the computer melt-down and the unpaid bills and whatever else yet. They call this rock and rock has no soul, there is soul for that kind of stuff that does not rock, and if you digest all these and water them and they grow old within, oh my, how many zillion years you have been astray.

I believe in a very few things and music is unlucky enough to be one of the dishes. Because it never does stop, it is a neverending journey, it is never finished, it is what gives infinity something worth the name.

All heals in time, all has the cure, only this ache for the sound stays in bloom. The windowpane, the tears, the candle and the broken heart, Soldier of Fortune, long after all those are no more, only the song still leaves an everlasting echo.

Kimi Raikkönen

Mostly fast & often furious:
Kimi the McLaren driver

I never cared about any other sport but football, let alone car racing, which is, to me, not sport -- all that you do is, you sit there driving as fast as you can without breaking your (or anybody else's) neck; what's so spiffy about that? Interstate drivers always do this and need no TV to cover their routine acts, and no sponsor stickers all over the otherwise cool SUV's.

But, Formula 1 doesn't use cars. The NASCAR does. What Formula 1 drivers do is speeding on some four-wheeled uncomfortable seats -- the vehicle is designed to be the extension of their bodies, and nothing to give yourself a ride in. Yet, for longer than eternity I found nothing to like there -- the circuits are always too hot, the drivers are always overdressed and the profusely sweating spectators under-dressed -- the drivers really look like astronauts after getting dressed-up, while the fans would have been exactly like any Woodstock concert-goers with beer-stained extra flesh everywhere -- and if the drivers have finished the last of the sickeningly long laps they then wear things I never like -- caps. Then champagne is rained on everybody under the stage by that day's champs. And that's all.

I got no choice but to watch a Formula 1 race once just last year, only because the TV was someone else's and I was trapped there by an incessant rain. I can't remember where it was -- Germany? -- and Michael Schumacher, Ferrari driver, always won it, this isn't only boring but also wrecking nerves -- but when my host asked me to bet for the runner-up and third place I unconsciously had gotten a favorite among the cars. "That one," I threw something to the TV screen. It was a black shiny vehicle with the word 'West' on it. "That one or that one?" he asked again. Shucks, there were two of them on the track. "That," my relentlessly pushy though sympathetic host lectured me, "is Coulthard. A Brit. You got the right man." But I didn't mean that one. I asked who drove the other car of the same team. "Raikkonen," he said. "McLaren's second driver. You see how they got the turns into the pit stop? Coulthard is the man, so Raikkonen couldn't decide for himself the way he does. Rule is, first driver's first. That's how Schumacher wins all the time over his sidekick Rubens Barrichello. You pick Coulthard?"

I didn't. Not even after a long lecture of what the future of F1 racing would be; in which the candidate to be the world champ after Schumacher was, said my host and both of the British commentators on TV, the Kolombian Juan Pablo Montoya.

I put my bet on Kimi Raikkonen without knowing anything about how he'd been doing; and he finished the race, if I remember it right, on fifth place behind his senior David Coulthard. He was only 21 or 22 year old.

After that day I watched several other F1 occasions, which Indonesian TV stations always treat as if they happen here -- the same about football, but I wouldn't complain of that. Skipping the nonsensical relays of crowds in Jakartanese cafes playing games before the race, when I got Raikkonen again he finished almost on the same place as he did before -- 5th, 4th, 3rd -- Schumacher and Barrichello and once in a while another Schumacher (little brother Ralf) usually snatched the trophies at the end of the day.

But I like Raikkonen more as I came to know him more; for instance, the color of his eyes. I got to confess my vulnerability against (male) Scandinavian typical looks, but really this is just a sideline stuff. Kimi Raikkonen, even if without the hair and the eyes, is a promising star.

His age might be one of his greatest obstacles at the moment; Juan Montoya is around the same age, and also hotheaded, but Kimi Raikkonen tends to lose his cool more disastrously than Montoya does, plus sometimes he couldn't focus when he got sort of mad or distracted. Nicknamed The Iceman by everyone in the business, his personality might not even be a hero's -- so thrifty with amicability, so cold like a nice-looking Stavanger porcelain doll that never smiles voluntarily out of something that isn't funny. But this never prevents anyone to shine if he really has what it takes in him to emit light. I have faith in him.

And a lot of factors are involved in this game of speed -- mechanics simply must win half of the battle to get the driver a place on the stage. Bad cars are bad cars no matter who drives them (that's why I'm still reluctant to call this a 'sport').

Yet, again, I like Kimi Raikkonen. His attitude reminds me of Paul Scholes, Manchester United's footballer, 5 or 6 years ago; so easy to lose it, but time wouldn't hide the talent no matter what. Scholes had made it. Kimi, too, would, I think. And I hope when the time comes he wouldn't find it so difficult to crack a smile; these days he rarely does at all, just like the young Scholes when he ran his first Premier League miles.

The Iceman Cometh © 2002 Nin

Autumn

I don't know if you have ever stumbled upon some TV kungfu series. In them, you'd see the process of dinner maddeningly faithful to real life - from the time they spent to run after the chicken in the yard until it is safely deceased on a saucer and who did the dishes afterwards and how, would be shoved meticulously down the tube for you to at least glance at.

In such series, a lot of gathering leaves is shown that way. For medicinal purposes, for culinary aims, for interior decoration goals, they kept going into the woods with a bamboo basket and picked herbs up.

But dead leaves were never anyone's subject or work - except the extras, who played the lowest-ranked apprentice in Buddhist monasteries - these people are usually shown as cleaning up the yard far away in the background while the leading man or woman was getting an all-important outdoor kungfu lesson.

"But a crop is a crop," Robert Frost said [in the poem Gathering Leaves, 1949], "And who's to say the harvest must stop?"

I am thinking about all this nonsense and it gets creepier as minutes tick by.

You can learn from anything, anywhere, anytime - I believe in this with all my heart. But maybe even learning can go too far - you know what I mean? Sounds like a fundamentalist religious wacko's creed, but that's not what I have in mind. I only think about what if knowledge or the act of gathering it goes beyond the need to possess it. Even though I always believe the word 'to possess' itself can't be applied to knowledge, something known surely can get kept -- and to keep something that is alive, like knowledge, you got to have it embalmed and therefore it's dead. To amass such a thing then is possible, and it is bad. I don't know. Maybe even a harvest must, somewhere, stop.

Or maybe it need not.

Autumn is, among the quartette of seasons foreign to my roots, my season. I love it most.

Right, it brings all the sad monsters out of your closet; it elicits endless melancholy; it drags in the reminders nobody wants to hear -- it's a perfect scene for passionate murders and unforgiven suicides.

But autumn is also a promise of renewal, of changes in time; it is a testimony of the circle of life that we can't banish from this realm simply by misplacing our consciousness about its existence.

The leaves die -- the leaves live. All through this the trees keep on being. There's nothing ghastly in this postcard picture; it's Life. A crop is a crop. Weight and usefulness aren't the point.

Email, 1999.

Excel & Menchi, Excel Saga

© 2000 J.C. Staff, TV Tokyo
Script by Jigoku Kumi & Kuroda Yosuke, designer Ishino Satoshi, music by Masuda Toshio, directors Watanabe Shinichi, Nishiyama Akihiko, Fukuda Jun, Hoshikawa Takafumi, Ando Ken, Murata Masahiko.

Excel, Menchi & Hyatt

CLICK THE ICON FOR

IMAGE GALLERIES &
HISTORY OF ANIME

Even with the fair warning (the full title is Weird Anime Excel Saga), this tome still comes electrocuting your senses. Structured as a chaotic salad of several storylines at once (that's why the longest list is of the directors), which bump or merge or crosscut or overlap with each other at some points, Excel Saga does itself justice in that matter.

Once upon a time in a Japanese metropolis there lives a young woman whose entire character runs amok, named Excel. In the very first episode of this series, Excel was introduced to us as she was walking across the street towards a school where she might or might not have been a student of, and....got run over by a car.

In this very first appearance Excel died.

A fuss followed, as a matter of course; finally it was publicly decided by the creators that Excel must be brought to life again, a job done by the Will of the Universe -- visualised as the Black Hole with two arms. She (this Will of the Universe) is always too busy with her own problems, by the way; she falls for a Brazilian construction worker named Pedro, who is married and having a kid, so this is a complicated business.

Then Excel was recruited as the sole member of an organisation named Across, headed by a long-haired good-looking sedentary guy named Il Palazzo, whose aim is to conquer the world. One day a stray delivery from outer space caused Across to board another member, named Hyatt, a tubercular young woman who tends to die at any given moment. Their first assignment was to assasinate the creator of the series itself -- Koshi Rikudo -- his sin being 'creating a bad manga'. The scriptwriter, directors, producers, and such also play their own parts in every episode, with their own storyline to follow. Meanwhile, the ones concerned with the fate of the world also recruited their own team to fight Across in time -- a long, painful process for each one of them because the total intelligence there might never beat a hamster's.

Because conquering the world is a job that rewards the workers with spiritual fulfillment, Excel and Hyatt have to make their living elsewhere -- including fishing leftover coins at vending machines. With a thoughtful consideration of future rainy days, they keep a dog named Menchi, nicknamed 'Emergency Food'. Menchi's own saga in trying to get away from the constantly hungry Excel makes another storyline.

So far so deliciously maddening. Detailed survey would yield even crazier picture of the whole series -- like, the opening theme song is sung by fans of Excel and Hyatt, in a cosplay (Japlish for dressing up like your favorite costume-movies' characters), and they sing it at a bus stop and a public bath (men only). Or rather it was the Excel-cosplayer who sings. The one dresses as Hyatt only coughs her tubercular way to the coda. The ending theme song is sung by Menchi, while someone reads the translation of the dogtalk Menchi as a matter of fate sings it in.

I love this series because it brakes for nobody. Yet, there is something that always bugs parodies; Excel Saga is not immune from this risk. You might produce the most hilarious parody ever thought of on earth -- but it means absolutely no laugh to those who have no idea what the original things are like.