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

Rainforestwind

	Ame Rain
	Mori Forest
	Kaze Wind

['RainForestWind' in Japanese]

	Hujan Rain
	Hutan Forest
	Angin Wind

['RainForestWind' in Indonesian, written in Javanese alphabet]

The online I.D. rainforestwind really has nothing whatsoever to do with ecological notions, though I could hardly put the blame on those who have misread it as such. I declined explaining it for so long, until today when the exact same question was, for the zillionth time, came darting across the vast cyberspace into my mailbox: "Are you interested in hiking, and involved in ecotourism?"

Plain and simple that my answer is a colossal bold "NO".

Ecology and I rarely get along well together, and if we get too close to each other there has to be the presence of a Search and Rescue team.

I love mountains, rivers and seas; I love mist and leaves and un-clunky oxygen -- but I am disposed toward avoiding large sums of nature. Nature, as far as I can see (if I'm standing at my front porch), better stay where it is while I also keep a respectable distance from its whereabout [click here to see what kind of environment is around my house]. My household management would have been disrupted severely if nature violates this pact, since nature consists of mainly dirt.

In Java, I live in a nature-intensive district, infested by cows and water-buffaloes and rice fields and all, and the closest I ever got to them spiritually was when I was hit by this thought: why doesn't the government paint the fields in the right shade of green to make them look more natural?

But since the reason for clamming up whenever the question came my way was that it exquisitely irritates me, in a desperate attempt to avoid it from repeating itself I think I have to write this piece.

I got the rainforestwind into being when registering with the free email service Yahoo! USA offered in 1995 or 1996. I used to have multiple online identities, half a platoon on Yahoo! alone, back then. But since the beginning this rainforestwind has always been the one I most frequently use -- somehow it, so I think, represents me the best.

Why?

• I'm a lifelong fan of the musical salad bunch Earth, Wind & Fire. The similar breeze coming off the cyberidentity, then, sounds cool to me.
• I love the rain, and not just to watch it -- when I was, like, 5 to 9, I used to play football in the rain, and unspeakable other things when I got older. There is no such a thing, as far as I am concerned, as umbrellas and raincoats.
• I love forests, but not to get too close to it because it doesn't smoke or alternately is nothing but smoke (Indonesian rainforests keep on getting themselves grilled to ashes almost every dry season).
• I love the wind, and (as so is the case with rain and forests) all poetic or melancholic or romantic notions it carries and spreads.
• The name rainforestwind itself materialized under the grip certain musical scores had on me, and the songs I never knew during its birth strengthened it later on: Todd Cochran's A Voice In the Forest, Deep Forest's Deep Forest, Fourplay's Rain Forest, Randy Crawford's Let It Rain, Roxette's Queen of Rain, Indecent Obsession's Lady Rain, Bonnie Pink's It's Gonna Rain, and Vanessa Williams' Colors of the Wind.
• In the literary jungle, I also got stuff like Kenneth Patchen's Biography of Southern Rain, Robert Frost's Gathering Leaves, Robert Creeley's Song, and Ueda Akinari's book Ugetsu Monogatari: Tales of Moonlight and Rain. They, as far as rainforestwind is concerned, served the same function as the songs.

And I love animation movies. The skill of an animator is measured by the visible evidence whether he or she could draw the rain and wind or not, and though this doesn't have anything to do with me, it fits into my thought that rainforestwind is the right thing I could identify myself by. Plus it somehow matches with the online I.D. of the only man I love on this ecology-laden planet.

(Part of an email, reply to Wrespati, 2002. For the whole thing I must thank one entity that called himself seasummersnow, circa 1996 -- the trigger.)

Totti

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PICTURE GALLERIES

This young cat born a year ago (February 18, 2002) was named Tortilla, but K insisted on calling him Totti because others of the younger generation have been named mostly by footballers'.This is Francesco Totti. There are a set of Turks there across the alleyway at my sister's place: Umit (Davala), Emre (Belezoglu), Ilhan (Manzis). Fritz was fritzed out of the prevalent anti-Germany attitude around here, since he's so given to misdeeds -- last year he scratched the hell out of me, dooming my leg immovable for two weeks; he's the Catzilla around the neighborhood. Kimi, my sister's mascot, is named after Raikkonen (Formula 1 racer), David and Vicki are the Beckhams.

Totti is Fritz Junior #2, born in February this year from Popi, originally the elder of two boys but his little brother was killed by Bundel - contender of the neighborhood champ, i.e. Totti's dad the Catzilla (usual practice, for these tomcats, to leash out against a rival's male offspring).

He was, I thought, afraid of humans. For the first three months of his life he had never got into any contact from a distance of less than two yards. Now nine months after Popi took him across the concrete blocks into my house and gave him to me personally (even my cats are dramatic; it's contagious), I found Totti a different young cat. He's not only friendly towards other cats - I can say he's the most loving cat I've ever had. His late brother Nuno was cold, never cared about anyone but himself. Totti is the opposite. He loves Kimi the most, but others he also cares about. And to make me writing this, he looks like loving me, too.

I still miss Nuno, nonetheless. Totti has the characteristic legacy - short legs, round, soft thick short fur, fat tail as long as his body's length (a mystery how Popi's kids managed to do with such a baggage when walking), face the shape of a small triangle, amber eyes -- but not so handsome as the RIP Nuno. Nuno deceived people with his generally bright personal air - he looked happy and smiling all the time. Totti, while being just as playful as Nuno was, always looks serious.

But Totti is good. I'm happy to have him near me. In the worst year of my life he's always there, the only one that made me happy. It's the truth no matter how childishly crappy.

And he still runs away from any other human; that makes getting his love a real achievement. I earn it, you know. I treat him exactly like I did Nuno. I wouldn't think I deserve it if he's good to me just because I love him.

If I could, I wood

Pic: My cat Totti (white) and girlfriend Milan (ginger), March 2003

All furniture in my house are made of wood -- teak, mahogany, and nondescript cheaper wood. Not just because I don't want to put fancy soft sofas on my cats' disposal, but it happens because I love wooden stuff, and my relationship with nature is such that I prefer nature to be, if around me, in the past-tense.

Java is, thank God, teeming with wood even at this hour of day when deforestation gets more and more intensive and fire gets rampant in dry season. Towns like Yogya, Klaten and Jepara are still identical with wooden handicrafts. So it has been kind of effortless, my aversion to Ikea and the likes.

One day in the year 3000 upon an excavation it's probably impossible for whoever digs our years to find any trace of civilization -- if the recycling industry succeeds. Ancient people left trash in abundance, but we increasingly yield less and less -- only plastic is durable enough for future archeological findings, and yet it is so 20th-century, and although it really does represent our lives (including mental makeup and worldview) a lot of us shudder at the possibility of being historically measured by Tupperware.

Around my house, this might still happen, but only a tiny weeny fraction; most things I surround myself with would perish tracelessly in time.

My household is managed by -- generally -- fate; so wooden stuff is perfect for it -- easy to clean, able to endure neglect to some degree unbearable by fabric and metal. Wooden stuff is tough enough and graceful enough -- unlike the Japanese cosmology that's attached to temporariness, Javanese minds usually sway toward things that stay around for a long time yet not escaping frailty that beauty is characterized by. In this I might be one heck of a conservative.

Wolf's Rain

Leading characters (all male):
Kiba [fang],
Tsume [claw],
Hige [whiskers],
Toboe [howl].

Released in January 2003 by Bones and Bandai Visual studios, Japan
Story by Nobumoto Keiko, character designer Kawamoto Toshihiro, mecha designer Aramaki Shinji, art directors Morikawa Atsushi & Mizuta Nobuko, music by Kanno Yoko, sound engineer Wakabayashi Kazuhiro, director Okamura Tensai.

Tsume

This is an anime about wolves, whose opening credits are scrolled down over a panoramic picture of the characters under the rain. The young wolven Kiba (this Japanese word means 'fang') is possessed by a desire to seek something called Paradise, which can be gotten by following the trails of another thing named Moonflower. This Moonflower turns out to be an underage female entity engineered from some sort of herbivorae, and she becomes the cause of all the wolves' joy and misery all the film through.

The typical and maddening characteristics of most anime are present in this series -- a beautiful, romantic male as the leading character (Kiba), a nasty and tough sidekick-rival (Tsume/'claw'), a kindhearted windbag whose main capability is to conjure up imageries of foody stuff and whose occupation is to get himself and all others into trouble (Hige/'whiskers'), and an effeminate lovely mushy boy whose job description says 'cry whenever the guys quarrel (Toboe/'howl'). But to the creators' credits I must also add that the characters are drawn exquisitely, none resembling another, and both the leading character and his sidekick are quiet guys. Those qualities differ Wolf's Rain by several miles from other movies of the same genre (and/or storyline).

There is nothing impressive in the story itself. Wolves that could metamorph into men are decidedly ancient inventions. The Holy Grail Syndrome is a 'classic' in the universe of storylines -- your characters must be on a purposeful journey of acquiring something, or 'appearing to wander aimlessly because he's searching for himself'. Teamwork is also a timeless scheme, especially on the planet of Japanimation. The delegation of temperaments follows the well-worn cliche as well, although with some twists. None of the characters could survive wandering by himself. Kiba the Passionate needs Tsume's realism, Hige's cheerfulness needs both older men's need of it, and Toboe's mushy worldview needs all of the above. So, in a paradox, while the famed Kanno Yoko and Tim Jensen call the theme song 'Stray', the wolves stray together here in this movie; they stray as an unstructured pack. Much like some marriages that I know of.

Anyway, now the greatness of Wolf's Rain; it is a series of poetic visual entries. There are pictures of Kiba the white wolf running on the borderless snowland, the contempt Tsume holds against humankind, Toboe's melancholic dreams. Although I really have no idea why Tsume is not the white wolf in this movie (he, in human form, has platinum blond hair -- that's why he's my favorite; while Kiba the Man is dark-haired), the pictures of the pack running together to Paradise is a superb fantasy. The visualization is even worth more than that; unlike most anime, Wolf's Rain is only based on a story, not comics or manga series.

I forget if anyone below 13 is advised to watch this movie or not, but I guess the (literally) bloody saga of the pack has the 'moral content' educators always fuss about. Like, how much of friendship is considered a healthy dose, how much of individuality must be kept and asserted, and how to run miles at a snowy dawn on bare foot -- this one shouldn't be tried at home.

PICTURE GALLERIES