Back in his native San Jose, 21-year-old Jimmy Aquino is a nobody. But at UC Santa Cruz, the college journalist and public-radio deejay is like the King of All Media. "Howard Stern, you’re going down, white boy," he jokes. "Corey Takahashi, who’s now the associate editor for the hiphop magazine Blaze, once called me the King of All Media. So has Geoffrey Dunn, who runs Santa Cruz’s Community Television."
During his first year at the University, Aquino was a film reviewer for the San Jose Mercury News, and that led to a colorful two-year stint with the award-winning UCSC-based alternative newspaper City on a Hill Press. From 1997 to 1998, Aquino served as both City on a Hill’s managing editor and arts/entertainment editor and wrote articles that were controversial with both the editorial staff and readers.
Aquino still writes for City on a Hill, but he only does capsule movie reviews for them now. Both burnout from writing for the paper and a desire to finish his studies made him decide to become less involved in City on a Hill ("It’s like Mandy Patinkin after he left Chicago Hope, but he still appears on the show in guest spots. But no matter how many times you see him, he’s basically considered gone," Aquino says). He is also currently the host of two shows on the Santa Cruz public-radio station KZSC-FM: A Fistful of Soundtracks, a film-music show now in its second year on the air, and Sookie Sookie, an acid jazz, hiphop and comedy program. Aquino, who is majoring in American Studies, interviewed himself recently at his studio apartment in the downtown section of the sleepy little California town known as "Surf City."
Aquino: Tell me about your radio shows.
Aquino: Now that I’m no longer actively involved in City on a Hill Press, I’ve been concentrating on radio. A Fistful of Soundtracks is a weekly salute to film scores, which I think are an underappreciated art form. Some people probably think I’m the unlikeliest host for a film-music radio show because I listen to hiphop. But I also like listening to the music of Ennio Morricone, Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, Quincy Jones and Danny Elfman, as well as John Barry’s scores for the James Bond movies. The Bond soundtracks are great to do push-ups to. I think some of the deejays of color at KZSC think I’m weird because I don’t do a hiphop show.
I do Fistful differently from everybody else. It’s prerecorded because, sometimes, I can get nervous live on the microphone. If people do prerecorded shows on TV, then why not on radio? I make the show sound as professional as possible. I didn’t want to do a typical show where I just come in, spin records, take requests and babble like all college radio deejays do. I don’t even allow listeners to make requests because some callers can be irritating sometimes. Most of them want to hear music that has nothing to do with the theme of the show that week or Fistful’s film-music format itself. That’s another reason why I prerecord the show. Pop in a tape of the show, and they won’t call you to hear something that’s probably ludicrous.
Often, I mix the film scores with interviews about the films or interviews with people involved in the films because I like hearing interviews, and I used to listen to Fresh Air all the time. Fresh Air is this arts-and-culture-interview program on National Public Radio, and that show’s host, Terry Gross, is considered one of the best interviewers on the planet.
I’ve been hearing good things about the soundtrack show. I see big things for Fistful. Someday, I want it to be syndicated on two or three stations, maybe even more.
I also see big things for Sookie Sookie, a show where I play acid jazz, jazzy hiphop and comedians of color like Chris Rock and Margaret Cho. There aren’t many radio programs like Sookie Sookie or even Fistful — although the number of film-music radio shows across the country is growing. The deejays at KZSC don’t like it when there’s someone who hosts two programs, so I’m gonna have to pass Sookie Sookie down to another deejay, who probably won’t intersperse music with comedy like I’ve been doing. But a few years from now, I want to take the current incarnation of Sookie Sookie and make it like Harry Shearer’s nationally syndicated public-radio program Le Show, but for people of color. Shearer rambles on the air about the news, writes and performs skits about politics and plays eclectic and obscure music, whereas I’ll do skits too, but I won’t ramble so much, and I’ll play routines by stand-up comics of color and lots of acid jazz and hiphop tunes.
Aquino: Why did you want to get into journalism?
Aquino: It started as a bit of an accident. During my sophomore year at Oak Grove High School in San Jose, a teacher who knew about my love for movies told me that the San Jose Mercury News put out an ad in their entertainment section saying they were searching for teenage movie reviewers, and he suggested that I send them a movie review and give it a shot. They wanted teens to go write a review of Jurassic Park and mail or fax their reviews to the paper. I didn’t expect on getting picked by the newspaper, but I guess they liked what they saw. Maybe they picked me because of how I talked about Spielberg in my review. Maybe they were surprised by my knowledge of his films or something. I was one of three teens they picked out of 300 applicants. I realized that film reviewing is such an easy job, which is why I’ve continued doing it since 1993. And the reviewing drew me into City on a Hill, and my two years with that paper have made we want to pursue writing about arts and entertainment for newspapers and magazines after I graduate. But I didn’t really plan on becoming a journalist in the first place.
Aquino: Why? What do you really want to be?
Aquino: I always wanted to be a filmmaker. There aren’t many Filipino American filmmakers, and I think the Fil-Am experience would be interesting to see in American cinema. That’s a wonderful, colorful community right there that deserves to have films be made about it. But it’s a group that’s ignored; it’s the largest group of Asians in California, yet I can go into a crowd and grab from that crowd one white guy who hasn’t the slightest idea who a Filipino is or where a Filipino is from. So I guess I’m on a mission to give Filipinos a voice in American filmmaking and fight media stereotypes of Asians as a whole by making my own films about us, but I don’t want to be the only one to do that. I hope there’s others. But that’s not the only reason why I want to become a film director. It also just always looked fun to me. I realize now it’s not as easy as it looks, especially if you’re an independent director, but it still looks like the coolest job in the world.
Aquino: Which filmmakers do you admire?
Aquino: Let’s see. Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Spike Lee, Sidney Lumet, John Woo and Sergio Leone. Those are the directors I admire the most. Akira Kurosawa just passed away. I like his movies. There are probably others, but I can’t think of them right now. I hope someday that when some aspiring Filipino or Asian filmmaker is asked to name his or her influences, I’m one of those names. That’s how serious of an auteur I want to become.
Aquino: You sound like you’re a film major. Was that the major you originally wanted to declare in?
Aquino: No. Even though UCSC’s film program is growing, I wasn’t really interested in it. If I want to go study filmmaking, I’ll go to New York University, which trained Scorsese, Spike Lee, Ang Lee and Jim Jarmusch. With alumni like that, NYU is the best film school in America. NYU pertains more to my tastes. At UCLA and USC, two schools that were recommended to me, they teach film students how to make films the Hollywood-studio way, which isn’t what I want to do really.
Aquino: Can you tell me a little bit about writing movie reviews?
Aquino: I want to continue film reviewing and do that for a while, before I study filmmaking later on in life — I want to be that rare example of somebody who writes about films and then goes on and makes them. But as I do my film reviewing, I don’t want to write the same old reviews. I want to also write detailed articles about film that offer a deeper analysis than most of the articles you see in entertainment magazines and the mainstream press. While I love a lot of film, I’m also skeptical of it, and I resent the stereotyping of Asian Americans in American cinema. I wanna be a better, more thoughtful writer than many of these half-wits that make up the mainstream press. If I’m gonna gush and fawn over every movie I see, I might as well take over Joel Siegel’s job on Good Morning America. That guy’s about as deep as an episode of Baywatch. That’s not the type of film reviewer I want to become. I’ve seen some great, thought-provoking articles about films and media stereotypes of people of color in the readers for UCSC American Studies classes like Asian Americans in Film and Video. The entire book Moving the Image: Independent Asian Pacific American Media Arts is full of such articles. Somewhere along the line in my writing career, I want to write articles like those. Siskel and Ebert are so busy expressing things with their thumbs that they don’t notice these issues.
Aquino: Why did you cut back on your writing for City on a Hill? People liked your writing.
Aquino: Guess what — the coolest piece of fan mail I received was in response to my swan song for my High Street Blues arts/entertainment column. I wrote about the best and the worst in arts and entertainment during the ’97-’98 school year. I said longtime UCSC American Studies professor John Dizikes was "Favorite Teacher." A few weeks later, I get a letter, and it’s from Dizikes! He liked the article, even though he probably didn’t know more than half the things I wrote about, and he thanked me for naming him "Favorite Teacher." I really admire the guy because he does great lectures. Also, he was a journalist like I am now.
People have told me they’re gonna miss seeing my writing. But I had to quit. I was looking forward to it for a long time. It’s time to move on. To be honest, City on a Hill has a style of writing that gets dry and tiresome. I wanted to get away from that. Also, last year, a lot of the feature articles written by newcomers tended to get press-releasey. One week, you’d see this one-sided article about that performance-enhancing drug for athletes, Creatine, and the next week, you’d see this 2000-word love letter to a politician.
In my years with City on a Hill, especially the first year, I was controversial with both editors and readers. The senior editors would confront me because they didn’t really like how I wrote my arts/entertainment pieces. They wanted the paper to be The Nation, for Christ’s sakes. One girl didn’t like my sense of humor, and editors wanted me be to more politically charged. At the same time, some readers didn’t like me because of my views on race in my columns. They probably thought, "Who does this chink think he is, talking s--- about us white folks?" I loved pissing off everybody and shaking things up. People in Santa Cruz get too hypersensitive sometimes. No, let me take that back. They get hypersensitive too much.
Aquino: Any articles that you’re proudest of?
Aquino: I wrote this humor piece about a subject that’s really personal and serious for me, and I’m really sensitive about it: knowing only English. There are Filipinos who consider that a sin, and there was this moment in high school that I never want to relive, where I was ridiculed by a group of Filipino kids for not knowing how to speak any native dialects. I wish I could go back in time and punch out those sons-of-bitches. Maybe I’ll do that at the reunion.
Anyway, in this column, I talked about not knowing how to speak Tagalog, the absurdities of English and being jealous of this white female customer at a Salvadorean restaurant who could speak Spanish. I said, "I’ve had it with all these different languages. I’m gonna stop speaking English and make up my own language and call it Aquino-ese, where I speak in nothing but pop-cultural metaphors." If you say to me, "Whassup, how are you?" and I’m really happy, I’d say, "Shaft, after he gets laid." If I’m angry and I go leave the room, I’d say, "Dan Rather, when he walked out on the CBS Evening News." It’s like that language in that Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where these aliens speak in literary metaphors. The "Aquino-ese" piece was also an in-joke for the City on a Hill writers because I was always making obscure references to movies and pop culture in conversations.
This one really racist guy didn’t get the humor of the piece and thought I was insulting white people. He wrote a sick and immature letter; he said, "This is America. If you don’t like to speak English, get the hell out," he wrote all sorts of obscene crap and he wanted to find me and kick my ass. The letter really bothered me, and I went to Conn Hallinan, the UCSC journalism adviser, for advice on how to deal with this punk. I don’t know how to thank Conn for what he told me to do. He told me to expose this letter-writer for the a--hole that he is. So I printed the letter, and people would tell me, "I loved it when you stuck it to that jerk." I got my revenge. I felt better, and it did a lot of good.
I’m proudest of the more humorous articles I did. I wrote a song about Viagra to the tune of "Volare." For a Halloween issue, I wrote a short story about a retirement home for slasher-movie characters. When the Lost in Space movie came out, I wrote a spoof where the Clintons were the ones lost in space. Conn or some of the former editors probably think my best articles were my serious ones, but I’m more proud of the humor pieces. When people would tell me that I should become editor-in-chief of City on a Hill someday, I’d tell them, "No, I couldn’t do it. If I became editor-in-chief, I would turn City on a Hill into the National Lampoon and publish ‘Ya mama...’ jokes every week. People would have my ass on a platter." I’m too much of a rebel.