Sith Child O’ Mine

The story hasn’t been a secret even long before written. There will be a massive number of deaths (espescially on the Jedi side), Padme will give birth to twins, and Anakin will enrage and turn Sith. But the question is not what would happen, but how would it happen. Judging from the two previous episodes, people will still get in line to witness this part of the legendary saga. And according to Time Magazine two weeks ago, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is obviously the darkest Star Wars episode.

On my way home after the movie,
I thought of these and realized
how possessive I am about Star Wars.

A Sweeth Memory
There was a grand nostalgia from the very first second the movie started: pilots helping one another in crowded space battlefields, few Jedi Knights on a mission fighting comical droids and animal-like aliens. Everything is pretty much the same. Even after five movies, the dialogues were equally stiffy, how the actors performed are still not worth analyzing, and the jokes are still not worth laughing [1]. However, this Revenge added some new scents. Some succeeded, some failed.

Revenge is surprisingly packed with love scences between Anakin and Padme. Lucas had to show the audience how much Anakin loved Padme. Anakin’s love is what justified his conversion in the first place. But all these mellow scenes looked bad. Similar to the blooming love between Solo and Leia, Anakin-Padme’s couplings were rather comical than heartfelt. His verbal expression souded like a playboy’s words rather than a knight desperately in love. I wished Lucas picked different dictions, or better yet, asked Nora Ephron [2] to write them over. Lucas was always good at painting passion onto a giant screen, but I guess when writing romance, The Force isn’t with him.

The fights were also felt like new. The fighting coreography boasted overwhelming speed and involved many high jumps. I lost count of the super fast saber fights scenes. More importantly, this time Lucas didn’t forget the whole idea of a fight: emotion —anger, hate, fear, pity, (maybe even love). All these are blended in the final fights between Anakin and Obi-Wan. It is sad to see two friends turned enemies. Over other movies, I know I would shed a bit of tears, but not over Star Wars. But I was wrong. After beating Anakin, Obi-Wan shouted crying, “You were my brother, Anakin.” Somehow it felt real, and I felt sad. I thought, This is the real love scene!

There is something special about Star Wars. The movies are different than others that you cannot make any comparison. Therefore, final judgment cannot fall between good and bad. Although there weren’t any surprise —almost disappointing, even— I’ll bet it won’t be long untill I see it for the second time. Because general rule doesn’t apply on Star Wars.


Not a Sweeth Memory nor Revenge
The confusion it inflicted me was also familiar. When I first saw Empire [3] in 1981, I expected Luke to show some heroic stunts as he did in New Hope [4]. What I found was shocking. The Rebel and Jedi were flat defeated. Not only Luke was beaten bad by Vader, he even fled to exile. The Emperor —that means: Sith— was victorious. I was only a kindergarten kid and already I had to watch my hero lost, failed, and ran away. A kid my age can only think of one name for someone who flees: coward. I lost faith in one of my hero and there were no one to explain it to me.

In Revenge, many things also happen to Anakin. He was furious for feeling not being trusted by the Jedi Council he respected. He’s been having nightmares about his beloved wife Padme died giving birth. To make things worst, it is only Sith power that can save her. He was so conflicted and mad, he became aggressive. For Padme’s sake, he plegded himself to the dark side, and accepted his first duty: to kill all the Jedi. He went back to the Jedi Temple to slay them, even the very young ones.

I cannot imagine how stressfull it is for kids to watch their hero became the unthinkable —a savage. At the theatres, I saw many kids machine-gun asking their dad. And I overheard that many of those dads gave disappointing aswers. One of them even said, “Yes, he became evil, son, but the hero is Luke all along.” I thought, boy, even the fathers couldn’t understand what Jedi Council meant by balance to the force. It simply means that Anakin is the a necessity ‘instrument’ to end the war, not necessarily to help win the war. Anakin will again, continue his Jedi lesson through his descendant, Luke.

Fathers don’t need to have that answers. They don’t even have to see and like Star Wars. And their answers weren’t totally wrong either. But I do think a father needs to work harder in answering questions about love, hate, death posed by children [5].

That possessive I am
The title, hence

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[1] The only funny thing about Star Wars is Harrison Ford.
[2] Nora Ephron is a writer-director. Among of her famous flicks are Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail.
[3] Episode V: Empire Strikes Back
[4] Episode IV: A New Hope
[5] The same thing happen to Lion King. Many kids asked why Mufasa (Simba’s father) had to die. I read somewhere that many parents failed to answer it properly. I also read somewher that many schools and parents blamed Disney.

Interpreting The Sign

Last week a friend of mine, Ti, called inviting me to her class to talk about sign language. There was a slight urge to drop the offer, because I’m not a prominent person on the subject and I don’t think I know how to talk to a bunch of 8-year-old. I gave her the I’ll-check-my-schedule-and-get-back-to-you-later excuse, but the day after I insanely said yes.

I didn’t regret my decision, though. It turned out I did well, or rather my friends have prepared these kids amazingly well that I can relate with them easily. We talked about history, deaf people, practised alphabets, and small amount of vocabulary. These kids asked me many signs and sentences —like you’re beautiful, you’re tall, you’re naughty, you’re my friend, I like you, I like singing. The second they got the answers —and this is the amazing part—, they promptly signed them to their friends. They didn’t want the class to end (and I didn’t either), but I did have to go. They yelled thank you all the way I was leaving untill I disappeared behind the school walls. Thank God I forgot my magazine that I had to go back to the class for a quick last look at them. I kept that picture of them having lunch in my head safe and well.

I couldn’t get that class day off of my head. I kept thinking about that class and starting to trace back how on earth I ended up with this signing thing in the first place.

An Encounter of the Third Kind
My dad told me to be mindful of language. He taught me to love my language and to use others’ with respect. At the time I thought that by ‘language’, he meant speech —Indonesian, English, Japanese, Chinese, etc. Later on, still on my early age, I found that also a language is pictures. Sir Tino Sidin taught me that. He always said that picture speaks of stories.

Later on I found a friend with a language I didn’t realize exist —signs. It hits me that all this time people understand each other because people speak fact and utter feelings through body language. This separate system makes a message whole and understandable. But the great thing about sign language is that facts and feelings are encoded into one system! No separation! Imagine the strength. That would probably by far measure elimate our difficulties of saying what we feel.

A Book to Sign and a Sign of Doubt
Not long after, I lost contact with my deaf friend and signing is the only thing I can do to respect her memories. I looked for a signing dictionary, but never found any. The best I could come up with is body language in flirting —that’s nowhere near my subject of interest. For weeks I stopped by any different bookstore, hoping to find one —just one, please.

Failed, I made a Plan B. I began to hunt and collect every movie I know related to sign language. I would watched the characters signing and tried to make out what it meant. I made a small list of vocabulary I’ve collected. I drew little pictures of fingers, hands, sometimes faces included. I made myself a dictionary of my own.

Around 1993, there was a TV series called Reasonable Doubt. It tells a story about a deaf public district attorney who has faith in the justice and its system (played by Marlee Matlin) and a lost-faith-in-justice detective who happens to know his way around signing, thus assigned to help her. The series was my heaven of learning. It was my dictionary. Every week I taped them, and play them through and through. I had to watch super closely to match the signs to the words. There was no (movie) editing software at the time and no way to slow the tapes down. The series made the largest vocabulary contribution to my dictionary. I still kept the book, possibly for some sentimental reasons.

When my dad took me to US for a week plus in 1997, I spent every day hunting sign language dictionary. It turned out that, there, it wasn’t a popular subject either. One bookstore to which I came to every day finally found one copy. The manager even gave me one for free, probably because he pitied me. That, or because I came and bought one book each day [1]. I was so surprised and excited that my respond was too embarassing to tell. I read it walking all the way my hotel [2]. Arrived at home, I cross-checked every vocabulary in my own dictionary and found most of them correct. I still remember the name of the author: Elaine Costello. It was primacy effect.

In 1998 Amazon succeeded as one of the most famous online bookstore. Hell, it made it as the most famous website! Its search engine found me more than sixty titles on ‘sign language’ subject. 60! Needing for my university final paper, I bought some. One of them is the delicious giant dictionary of American Sign Language. I even managed to have myself some books on psychology of deafness and the linguistic view of sign language! Internet is heaven. If you look closely, the sign is everywhere.

Noble Ibu Gia
It was hard to master a language when you don’t have a sparring partner. I was somewhat fluent giving signs, but my reading skill gave deaf community a bad name. Every several years I manage to find someone whom I poisoned into liking it. I would teach him/her the basic and started conversation in signs regularly. My first partner was Rid, from 1993. Rid helped me a lot with my first dictionary. When we graduated high school in 1994, Rid moved to Bandung. There were several partners after him, but not one of them lasted more than several weeks. I would then again be the lonely apprentice.

I never stopped learning signs. I love ‘communication’ (both oral and sign) even more and collected numerous journals on deaf culture, too. Through a very dear friend of mine, Tante Ann, I came across the noble Ibu Gia.

Tante Ann said that Ibu Gia had a deaf 10-year-old son, Christopher. Chris went to a mainstream school, not the school for “special kids.” That’s where he wanted to stay, and Ibu Gia fought the school for him to stay. Chris didn’t have any problem with school materials, but did have problems making friends. Not because he’s introvert, but because no one would understand what he tried to say —what he signed. This mother asked the school to provide a sign language class, and since no signing teacher was available, she volunteered.

Tante Ann talked to the headmaster and won the permission for me joining the class. I was afraid that Ibu Gia would feel reluctant about me, but on the contrary, she was excited about having me as her student. For three months, I studied sign with 15 kids from 5 to 12 years old. She conducted a fantastic class, and was a great teacher. She made friends with the kids and, most importantly, made Chris had many friends. There were games, quizzes, foods, laughs for each session. Every morning before class, she would brief me the day’s activity via phone. Sometimes when she’s stucked some place else, she would ask me to be in charge of the class. I knew then that the classroom scenes in Kindergarten Cop [3] wasn’t exaggerating.

Surprisingly, I made it through the class okay. The kids liked me and I liked them more. They love asking my age and I began to like my age. Some of the questions they posed were quite difficult to answer, like: why is your name adih?

A Sign of Dedication
When I was playing guest for Ti’s class, I thought a lot about Ibu Gia; The day we were introduced, the games we played in classroom, the cookies she baked us, the stories she told me about Chris, the feeling she had about being a mom of a deaf boy. I even recalled the sound of her high-pitched voice and how nice it sounded. I thought in Ti’s class, ‘This must have been what Ibu Gia felt.’ I was looking for a sparring partner so long, I actually found a teacher. I wish I hadn’t lost my cellphone so that I could still call her.

I need to say:
For the books you gave me, class you provided me, friends you introduced me: Thank You.

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[1] mostly Calvin and Hobbes, which is also rare back home.
[2] bad habit I still do until this day
[3] Kindergarten Cop tells a story of a kid-hater cop (Arnold Schwartzenegger) going undercover at a kindergarten where a possible kidnapping might happen.

In Gabriel’s Eyes

One day, either it was just an out-of-the-ordinary day or Starbucks changed its music playlist (or more, its music director), the place didn’t play jazz tunes as it usually does. Instead, it played some great songs of the 80s. Even David Bowie’s Heroes [1] made the playlist. The punchline, for me, was when they played Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes. It was a surprise —good one— since never before a public hangout place played any of his tunes, at least not that I know of. And I never suspect that such place would be the ‘jazzy’ Starbucks.

As the song went, my mind gazed to my Ponti days. Around 1996, there was a period when every early morning for several weeks we played Peter Gabriel’s Secret World Tour Live laser disc. When played, it would wake up the rest of us, and joined whoever pushed play. We would make admiration remarks on the band, the music, the stage sets, the lights, the cameras—anything! We would danced along (yes, I danced!) doing those funny footwork with the band, especially the one on Shaking the Trees.

They ended the show with In Your Eyes. I think the song fits perfectly as a closing as it started with ease and ended with glee, from empty to full instruments, from only one vocal to many. A solemn start with joyous end would definitely left the show lingering in everyone’s head for days. That stage act was not only musical, but theatrical. It always puzzled my friends that I —a dance and theatre hater— would actually enjoy Mr. Gabriel.

I think In Your Eyes tells a man’s [2] adoration toward his love [3]. Gabriel described him as a genuine life fighter —which I think he meant workaholic. The peace and the comfort he lacked, he could only find in her. And there is where he wanted to stay. I notice Gabriel put a contradictory personality on the girl. Though it’s peace and comfort she yielded, it didn’t necessarily make her a calm person, but lively instead. Thus the man said, “I see the light, the heat, in your eyes.”

Gabriel left Genesis after a long mouth fight in 1976 and replaced by Phil Collins. Both Gabriel and Genesis (and Collins) are famous in separate fashion. It may be correct that Collins didn’t make Genesis’ song theme any different than Gabriel’s, but Genesis did changed and people noticed. Though both are very much emotional at heart, Gabriel’s more emotional traits made him spiritual. Where Collins describes love mostly as playful (Two Hearts, Can’t Hurry Love, etc), Gabriel digs it deeper (Secret World, Kiss The Frog, —surprise!— In Your Eyes). His choice of words shows it clear (instinct, burn, doorway, fruitless, etc) and his sentences even more (I will touch this tender wall [4], I’m a man whose faith has long deserted [5]). Why do you think the band was named Genesis [6] in the first place?

Gabriel doesn’t only projects his spiritual side through words, but also tunes and sounds. I don’t think he’s satisfied with the vibe acoustic instruments make that he amplified it by playing electric keyboard and computer. Mostly he makes sounds of nature more magical. He would make birds sound chirpier, low frequency sounds sharper, or combines keyboard sounds with human voice. At first, this made sounds feels fabricated rather than spiritual, but later on he managed to suit things more to the way he wanted them felt.

Gabriel illustrated In Your Eyes in rich various ways. On this tour, he collaborated with vocalist Paula Cole, bassist Tony Levin, violinist Paul Shankar, guitarist David Rhodes, and drummer Manu Katche— all of which are famous for the very value Gabriel is famous of: spirits. It is easy to find that Cole as the most immature one. While others has reached stable and calm phase, she still sing with somewhat rage[7]. Even so, Gabriel still managed to calm Cole down. Also as an additional player, Manu Katche was a perfect catch. He played In Your Eyes as if notes came out of his toms and cymbals: from light to deep, soft to little hard, and empty to rapid. This may sound strange, but Gabriel even managed to make Katche, a sitting drummer—I’m emphasizing—, dancing on his seat along with the rest of the band.

In early 90s, Gabriel’s love to African music began to show more acutely. I suspect the spirits of both African beats and vocal accommodate him perfectly. As if he found his lost love, Gabriel collaborated with a number of African musicians: vocalist, percussionist —you name it[8]! In Secret World Tour, he played —the way a child does— with these musicians. One of them is Papa Wemba[9]. All the African souls on stage strengthen what the Gabriel’s ‘man’ saw in ‘her’ eyes.

Gabriel is a musician whom I know is very much aware that various forms of symbols in communication are available to tweak— visual, audio, touch and speech. He orchestrated every band member to play not only with tunes, but also sounds. He conducted all the people on stage to dance in the most honest sense —to move naturally. All these elements on stage are what he tried to convey as ‘the light and heat’ —the lively atmosphere. He made me and my Ponti friends aware of that atmosphere. He made us dance. He made me dance.


PS:

• It is interesting that Gabriel is named after an angel whose job is to convey God’s messages to its prophets —an angel of communication, in a way.
• I decided that Starbucks would probably be a good choice of place to write at. When writing, they’re playing jazz tunes :-)

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[1] Later made popular again by Jacob Dylan’s band (Bob Dylan’s son) —The Wallflowers.
[2] This would apply to women, too, I guess.
[3] Considering the lyrics, the word ‘love’ suits more than ‘woman’ or ‘girlfriend’
[4] Excerpted from In Your Eyes
[5] Excerpted from Don’t Give Up
[6] Read: Book Of Genesis.
[7] In 1997 Paula Cole released her second album This Fire. Some rage she has.
[8] He made the term ‘world music’ famous.
[9] If memory serves, he’s the guy singing the overwhelming African chant in the opening song of Disney’s Lion King.

You Can Have My Fire, Please

Last week a friend of mine lost his friend. This, I later found out, was a friend with whom he fought side by side beating their addiction. I wasn’t around when the news broke, but our mutual friend was there. She said his face went pale and his low tone of voice —much lower than his usual low— signified he was sadder than saddest. It took him only few minutes to “pull himself together” and be his usual self, one who cracks comedy and humour as a mean to save himself from being grey (a color of state of which I sadly suspect is his true usual self).

Of all the total differences between us[1], there was a tiny bit of similarity. We are both learning to write, only his is mostly poetry (something I have no idea how to compose). Finding out his comic side requires no genius. He picked simple words, simple themes, wrapped them with muse and carefully hid his deep contemplations. Sometimes I sense that he hides from contemplation itself. When around him, joke is all around and love is all vapour (few would realize that he is waiting for one). The joke part is what clicks him and me in the first place.

The poems he uploaded are always automatically forwarded to my email. His poem, one of which last night landed on my email account, was a praise and farewell wish for his just-last-week belated friend. He wrote his pride, sadness, and fear all in unbelievably short 22 lines. It’s the first time I read him being honest to himself. It’s the first time I read he wrote something with a complete ending (his poems usually stops as he begins wandering around).

It’s funny how the death of a meaningful person can complete your full thoughts. I remember showing the ‘our mutual friend’ the only writing I love, the one about my dead ‘cousin’. I love it because it ended as my thought ended, unlike all others that ended while my thoughts still seemed to scatter. She said it was because I’ve thought about it for long and the death made it easier for me to skip my speculations of what would happen to us, so that I could go straight to summarizing what and how she meant for me. I think the same happened to Go. He finally finished his thought of the matter. I don’t know whether it’s because he is finally able to do it, or he finally let himself do it. Either way, as I once felt relief of the mind-release, I’m truly glad he did.

As I said earlier, there seems to be a scaleful of sadness in him. Our mutual friend even expressed it as fire-less. The death of his friend seemed to make it worse. Ironically, every sign charts says I’m all fire —fire Arian (is it not enough that Aries is represented by Mars —The God of War?), and a fire dragon (it’s enough I am a dragon. I have to be a fiery one, too?). I don’t know if such chart is true. If so, I don’t know if it’s logo fire (a shining light) or hell fire. I don’t wish to burn him, but if it is logo, please have much of mine.
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[1] We’re both shower freak: that means he takes shower frequently while mostly I avoid any. He’s a fashion bank while my daily costumes is as good as uniforms. He speaks eloquantly calm and short, while I do it like a train —long running and loud. Eating bread, he loves the white-middle part and leaves the delicious crust to me.