Again, I was pretty sure I was done with Episode 5 when I sent it in. Then I just got an email from John saying that not only could he not open the file, his Mac doesn’t show the file as even existing.

Of course.

I am at a complete loss as to how this happened. The DVD was burned on the superdrive of a Mac Powerbook G4, and it worked on that computer. The spare copy we made works fine on my computer as well. There’s no reason it shouldn’t work, except for one: Murphy’s Law. Because it’s important, it has to be fucked up. That’s just the way things work, as surely as it does in Better than Life and you’re Arnold Rimmer. If you’re looking for something you need, you know you’re not going to find it because it has fled to another spatial dimension, and there it will stay until you don’t need it any longer, whereupon it will be there, staring you in the face in every drawer you open, every time you look under the bed, on every shelf getting in your way as you search frantically for some other object which has transported itself to the other dimension. Science can’t prove this yet, but someday it will. It will have to, because there’s no other explanation. One day a century from now scientists will discover this dimension, which will then become like a cosmic desktop trashcan, the place where we know we can find what we’re looking for. Of course, once we know that, off they’ll go to somewhere else where they can’t be found.

But for now, there’s nothing I can do about the situation, save for sending in the spare copy tomorrow, which is too late, but it’s all I can do. There’s no reason the spare copy will work, since it was made with the exact same machine on the same kind of DVD, and contains the exact same information. Any copy I made would be the same. Of course.

I had a good time at Maoman’s pool party on Sunday up at The Village. The pool was nice and blue and cool, albeit full of splashing kids, and the weather was just hot enough but with enough cloud cover to keep from incinerating everyone. There were, as always, quite a few foreigners at the pool, most sitting in loungechairs reading John Grisham-esque novels. Afterwards we tried to have dinner at Kiki, a Sichuan restaurant I walk past to and from work every day, but the line was so long we ended up at IR China at the Estrogen Mall across the street. The food was good, but expensive, and watching our order being taken on a PDA just isn’t worth the extra hundred dollars on the bill, especially considering the small size of the portions.

When I went to Milifilm today after work to pick up the spare DVD, I ended up talking with the director in charge of their little group, a long-haired, bespectackled fellow called “Ah-gao”. He plays Digeridoos and comes up with dancing animations to accompany the music. Just outside the old-style wooden windows cicadas were making their trademark summer sound. They really have a nice setup there. I talked with Vincent about perhaps working together on a project in the future. They certainly have a lot of useful resources. I’m thinking about doing something with a bit more local flavor this time, something technically less flamboyant but more solid in terms of simple story. Of course, this means I don’t know what I’m going to do next, besides lay off for a bit and recuperate before diving into making the DVD version. I was thinking of taking a couple of days off and going south, perhaps to Orchid Island with Kirk, but Kirk can’t go any time soon as he’s busy looking for work. Also, I can’t honestly say I can even afford to go anywhere, since I still have quite a bit of debt to pay off. What price sanity?

I took the MRT and walked down to the casting agency near the corner of Dunhua and Heping. It was in the basement of an empty looking building, and consisted of one small room with lights set up. The one employee took some pictures and video of me looking grim and arrogant (not a stretch, I have to say), and that was it. They’ll let me know in a few days if they want me to do the gig I guess.

I did so much walking around on Friday that my feet were sore today, so I spent most of the rest of the day at home and doing laundry at the laundromat on Civic Blvd. The Dancing Mango Fruit Festival is going on downstairs, however, so I had to keep music on all day as a distraction. I’ve let my room go for the past couple of months due to filming and other things, so I took the time today to pick up a bit. The festival is going on tomorrow as well, no doubt accompanied by the drum people. Fortunately Maoman has invited me to the Copa Cabana Xizhi for a pool party tomorrow afternoon, so I can at least get away from the cacophony for a bit. I have to admit I’ve been longing for a dip for the past few days, especially when I pass the pool at the Howard Plaza Hotel on my way to or from Milifilm. Reminds me of lazy poolside days when my family was living out of the Langford Hotel in Winter Park, Florida while we looked for houses before moving to the area. Mmmmm. Unfortunately Googling the Langford brings news that it has closed, fallen into disrepair, and is scheduled to be torn down. Oh, well.

I’ve also been working on the webpage for Episode 5, including a new poster. It’s a work in progress I guess. I’ll put the page up on July 1st, when the episode is available for downloading. After that, I think I need a break, maybe a trip south or something, since I can’t afford much else as far as getaways go. After that, I will need to get to work producing the “Lady X Does the Renegade Province” DVD as well as some long overdue updates for this site.

While I’m glad that SARS is receding, its departure means many annoying people are back in business downstairs, including the drum people, the idiots with megaphones at Bossini (I switch them off whenever I pass by) and various loud festivals featuring enormous speakers. Things are returning to normal; in Taiwan that means it’s getting loud. Summer is well and truly here, blistering yet sauna-like heat, constant cicadas, and half-nekkid guys driving little blue trucks. I had a plate of mango ice cream topped with mango slices and doused with chilled mango sauce the other day for dinner.

I was transferring Episode 5 to DVD-ROM yesterday at Milifilm when I noticed that two of the guys who work there were trying on orange jumpsuits downstairs. I asked them what was up, and it turns out that they’re doing a silly instant noodles commercial featuring astronauts. They had some stills from the movie Armageddon of Bruce Willis, Ben Afflect, et al, and suddenly one of the guys asked me if I wanted to play one of the astronauts. He claimed I look vaguely like Bruce Willis, something people here tell me on occasion although I don’t see it at all. The guy pointed at the picture of Willis, who was scowling in that particular shot (and, come to think of it, every other shot as well), and said, “Can you look even meaner?”

“Are you kidding?” I replied. “Do you have any idea how many people I’ve alienated just by looking at them wrong? Why, I’ve caused more people to have vague, inexplicable doubts about my motives in one day than you do in a year, gosh-dern it!” He made a call to the casting agency, and I said I’d pay a visit to let them have a look at me. Who knows, it might be fun. Anyway, the guys at Milifilm are nice, and they’ve helped me out a few times with DVD-burning.

Blogger’s new system can’t seem to deal with my Chinese blog, which is consequently hosed. Hopefully I’ll find a way to deal with it, or even move it to another service. Incompatibility seems to be a common yet irritating development with “upgraded” systems. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is my philosophy for web design, as you can see from this site, which hasn’t changed it’s design in over two years. Oh, I could add pretty blue circles to my background, but that would mean that only people in Anadarko, Oklahoma could read the site. Still, it would be New and Improved!

That said, I still really, really want a new G5.

Blogger’s been moving this account over to their new and improved system, so I haven’t been able to post until now. I wouldn’t have had time the past few days in any case, as I’ve been too busy getting Episode 5 ready to send off to the exec producers in time for the premiere on July 1. I spent the entire day yesterday at Darrell’s going through the music he had come up with, rearranging some, adjusting timing, and in some cases coming up with new music for certain sections. I got over there at around 11am, but we didn’t finish until almost 2 in the morning. I think it was time well spent, though. There’s a bit more action in this bit, and editing was even more difficult, but all in all I think it’s going to be good. All I need to do now is get the portable hard drive from Milifilm, download the episode from my computer, take it back and have them burn it onto a DVD for me to send off to Japan. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it out by tomorrow afternoon.

Episode 4 has been pretty well received, all in all, especially within the context of the Lady X project. When I got in to work today I found that some of my co-workers had seen the episode, logging in from the URL on the poster in my cubicle. The only problem most people have with it is the fight scene, but that was of course the biggest risk we took in the entire episode. I had hoped to avoid having to resort to the oft-used “Our actors don’t know martial arts so I’ll just shake the camera around and cut a lot” school of fight-scene editing, but it looks as if I was a bit too optimistic. I’ll re-work everything for the DVD version in any case. I think I might need some time off before I dive into that, though. Things have been rather stressful lately, on several fronts. My father was in the hospital and everyone in my family was nervous for awhile as they didn’t seem to know exactly what was wrong with him, including the amazingly incompetent doctor. He seems to be doing better now, though.

Episode 4 is now up on the Lady X website. Go check it out. Of course it’s work-safe, though everyone seems to assume that it’s pr0n of some kind (Ernie thinks “Dolly Deng” is the absolute best name for a Chinese woman EVAR, btw). In the meantime, I need to get Episode 5 finished, which means the final editing touches, working with Darrell on music, sounds, etc., and one more special effect that Dean is working on at the moment. Dean, Dolly, Maurice and I took some publicity shots at Dean’s place on Saturday, and then we went down to Darrell’s place to do some looping, made necessary by high wind noise out in Sanchong. The looping, which I’ve never done before, went very smoothly, and we were done after about an hour.

I met up with Rowan and Dean at Juke on Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, it seems that the scene we shot with Rowan and Norman won’t be in the Internet version of Lady X, as their scene, although a good, solid scene, is around four minutes long. We’ll put it in the DVD version instead. This is apparently not the first time either Rowan or Norman has had footage left on the cutting room floor, but there’s nothing I can do about the time limits. After a long, coffee-laden lunch, Dean went home and I chatted with Rowan for a couple of hours on the sidewalk before walking home.

The manager in charge of our office at work has decided that he likes it better with the window open than with the air conditioning on. During the whole SARS thing, he had an excuse for doing this, but now the workers are rebelling. One woman who sits near the door complained to him today that all of the other offices are using their A/C, why can’t we? The manager, who happens to sit right next to the window, insisted on keeping it open and the air off. Fortunately I have a little electric fan left over from my days at the News I can prop up on my desk, but it only cools one side of me at a time. And the forcast, of course, is for high temperatures this week. Maybe I should go in to work in shorts and a wife-beater, you know, as a subtle hint. Something tells me, however, that nobody would make the connection. “Oh, that crazy foreigner!” is probably the only thing that would come to their minds.

Speaking of crazy, does anyone know how to truly get rid of Download Accelerator? I uninstalled the thing as it was screwing up my computer, but it’s like trying to break up with a clingy ex, and now both of my browsers still give me “Couldn’t load Download Accelerator, please click ‘back’” messages all the time. Grrr.

Well, I thought Episode 4 was done, but I got several emails from the EPs today saying the encoding wasn’t working. They’re using Macs, and Apple doesn’t recognize the Canopus codec without a special setup I guess. Of course, once I had walked over to Vincent’s company with a sample, borrowed their portable hard drive, re-encoded the show with the new codec, and transferred it onto the drive, I got an email from the EP’s that they had solved the problem on their end. So much for working on Episode 5 today, with the exception of updating some effects shots during lunch. I have to get that in by the 26th, or five days before it premieres on July 1st. Darrell already has a copy, but I need to get him an updated one, though we’re still working on the split, i.e. the opening scene for this episode since we’ve split it in half.

It’s been muggy again lately. I stayed up until after 3am last night tweaking footage and doing the poster. Then I went to bed, and got up about an hour or so later to go film the sunrise. The weather looked like it was going to cooperate, but at the last minute a cloud bank obscured the sun. I went downstairs and was chatting with the guard when a big BMW drove up. An incredibly thin, scantily dressed girl got out and greeted the guard as she walked inside. Once the elevator doors had closed, I wanted to ask the guard the girl’s story, but I didn’t know quite how to put it. “So she’s a….” I started.

“Yeah, she is,” he replied. “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

“Are there many girls like that living in this building?” I’d noticed several here and there but I didn’t know how many.

“Quite a few,” the guard said, confirming my suspicions. “They always say hello to us guards so that we can’t ask what they’re up to. Like we’re going to ask them that!” he chuckled.

I chatted with him a bit more, mostly about the noisy dancing women, before coming back up and trying to get some sleep, but I didn’t feel much like sleeping after a particularly bad nightmare. It wasn’t the kind that is so scary it shocks you awake; it was worse in that it was the kind of thing that is just disturbing enough, not in a shocking way but rather manifesting itself in a deep, penetrating fear that keeps you inside of it.

So I got about an hour of sleep. And now it’s after 1am, and I still have more to do. I’m tired, but I’m not overly eager to go to sleep again. Perhaps a bit more tweaking is in order…

Boogie called me up last night as I was editing. We talked for a long time, as we have tended to do ever since we met in college. He told me that he has finally decided to leave Taiwan and live in the states for a year or so, just to see what happens. He’s been here nearly as long as I have, but his Taiwanese wife Amanda is living in the US now, and I think she probably wants to make her life there. I used to be waiting for Boogie to move out of his room over off Ren-ai Road so I could move in, but now I think it’s probably too small. Also, Boogie told me that he often sees nurses fleeing the Cathay Hospital’s SARS ward late at night for surrepticious trips to 7-Eleven. Probably not the best choice. For the same amount of money I could probably get a much nicer place a little ways out of the city anyway.

I put the soundtrack and subtitles on Episode 4 last night, and this morning I went over to the production company of Vincent, who appears in Episode 5 as a thug. The place is located in an old two-story house, part of a row of houses in an alley behind the Howard Plaza Hotel on Ren-ai near Fu-xing South Road. There’s a nifty garden in front, and the interior’s been re-done. They’re rent is NT$70k a month, so each producer has to make at least NT$10k a month to break even. It’s a really nice, comfortable place; I certainly wouldn’t mind working there. They mostly do post-production work on films. Vincent got one of his co-workers to let me borrow their equipment to copy the file onto a DVD-ROM, as it’s too big to fit on a CD-ROM. I was thinking of buying a DVD burner, but they are really expensive. I’ll probably have to buy one eventually, though, especially if we want to do a DVD, complete edition of the Lady X episodes put together, which, with all the extra footage, could be as long as 20 minutes, or the length of a half-hour TV show if you factor in commercials, etc. We could also have subtitle choices and some simple features. I still don’t know exactly what we would do with it, but it would be a cool thing to have, anyway.

After I got the DVDs I took one over to the closet 7-Eleven to send in to the executive producer in Japan. It turns out, however, that the DHL service at 7-Eleven only sends documents; they told me to go to the DHL office on Jianguo North Road, so, pissing and moaning in the pouring rain, I hailed a cab to take me there. Just after I had paid the almost NT$1600 to send a package to Japan as quickly as possible (”It will be even quicker in July,” they told me, “and also even more expensive.”), I turned around to see a friend of mine walk in. I vaguely recalled that he worked for DHL in Zhonghe; he just happened to be passing through the main office. He told the lady at the counter to give me the employee price, which was under NT$400. Funny how things work out sometimes.

So, Episode 4 is done. I came up with a poster that exhibits less-than-elegant design, but I like it. Feel free to take it and use it (no, not for a Fark photoshop contest! I mean use it in a good way). Now I have to concentrate on Episode 5, which is even more complicated than Episode 4, but should turn out to be a real beauty of an episode when we finally get it all done up.

Editing, editing….I like to pace between edits, but my room is too small for any real pacing. I got Episode 4 done and took a copy over to Darrell’s place in Chingmei. He pays the same rent as I do, but down there you can get an entire apartment. His place features lovely stucco walls, high arched ceilings, polished stone floors, two obedient, pettable dogs and a steel grating. Later, it featured extremely rich chocolate cheesecake, thanks to Darrell’s wife.

We sat down and went through the soundtrack, which was very good. I hope to hear the final product some time today so that I can get the final (Internet) product off to Japan, where the executive producers will begin preparations for the premiere on the 23rd. I’m afraid that due to time restrictions some of the footage, including one very good scene featuring Rowan, won’t make it into the online version. You’ll just have to watch the director’s cut for that one.

After nearly constant rain the past few days, the weather was suspiciously nice this morning. Sure enough, there’s a typhoon in the vicinity (You’ll notice from the CWB site that the little earthquakes are continuing; a small one hit early this morning at around 3 a.m., one I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I had been asleep and not busy editing Episode 5). Typhoons have a way of sweeping most of the polluted city air out of the Taipei basin and reminding us for a day or two what real air smells like. And then we promptly re-pollute it with 2-stroke scooters and burning ghost money lest we get too used to the good stuff.

We arrived at the theater next to the old science museum on Friday night to find a large crowd of adults and children milling restlessly around the porch and stairs where we had planned to film. Apparently the theater was full and the staff had shut the doors, but the people outside wouldn’t accept this and kept knocking on the doors. Children were wailing because they couldn’t see the show, and more people kept running up even though it was nearly 8pm; the show had started at 7:30. Da Shan was there with a young woman who turned out to be his daughter. We waited for the crowd to disperse, but they were reluctant to do so. Finally I went up to the door and tried to get them to open the door so that we could shoot, but they insisted through the peephole that if they opened the door a flood of parents and children would try to get inside. Even opening the peephole prompted several families to rush the entrance, cutting Dean and I off from our conversation as they begged to be let inside. The stairs, however, were still usable, so we set up a part of the scene and lit it quickly, since the rollerblading pads Dean was wearing under his tuxedo were starting to chafe. “I’m rolling,” I called up to Dean at the top of the stairs.

“So am I,” he replied, and proceeded to throw himself down the stairs for the benefit of the camera. It was perfect. Now we needed someone to be shown doing the actual throwing. Since we couldn’t find anyone, we took a cab to a Chinese restaurant on Siwei Rd, where we convinced the valet to throw Dean out their doorway several times. By this time it had started raining, mainly because I hadn’t brought my umbrella along, so we wrapped after one good take and went out separate ways. I stayed up until after 3am putting a rough cut of Episode 4 together so that Darrell can get to work on the soundtrack. We showed it to him this afternoon as well as some scenes from Episode 5, and he seemed to like it. I’m really happy the way things are turning out. I think it’s going to be a fine piece of work. Amazing really, as Dean commented to me in a cab today, how we managed to put this thing together in only a couple of months at a minimal expense. We had lunch at Grandma Nitti’s after our meeting with Darrell, and it’s been pouring down rain outside ever since. I love a good summer rain, with thunder and that lush rainy smell. I wish I had a porch to sit out on to watch it all as I whittle things and yell at kids to get off my lawn.

Tomorrow, more editing as I try to get Episode 5 together. Hopefully Darrell will have come up with something to listen to as well; what he’s done so far has been impressive. I need to look into the feasability of purchasing a DVD-R drive so I can record this thing onto one disc to send in. So much for minimal expenses.

Here’s a Babelfish translation of a German publicity article on Lady X:

“lady X” - A global Indie Series of blip 13:14 Di, 18.Maerz 2003 [ e ]

Short film directors watched out: Those sucked. Globalization reaches the Independent film (and that is good like that). “lady X” is still the name of one in developing understood 16th-hasty short film series, whose consequences in different cities play, and of mentioned lady to vaguely act are. The producers look for now Data processing Filmer from all world, which would like to write and turn own episodes with consideration of some dramaturgischer rules (length approx.. 5 min.; Participants get fame and honour, but no money). The films will be shown in the course of the yearly in the InterNet. More information to this exciting project and registration under above left.

On a completely unrelated note, there was a spate of earthquakes last week, some of them quite sizable. The experts say it’s nothing to worry about, but since when to seismologists know when a major quake is going to happen? They might as well be consulting bone etchings.

I’ve been chatting with my friend Pablo about the film school and festival he is now managing in Morelia, Mexico. It’s amazing, all the stuff he’s done since we studied film together in ‘99, I feel like a slug in comparison. The only down side is that he is too busy to do his own films, and I really enjoyed the stuff he did in NYC. As always, I wish I had the time and money to go visit him and perhaps work on a film project there, but after all this time I am still too poor. One can always hope, though.

After spending many hours editing last night, I went out for dinner at Q Bar. Well, not only for dinner; I admit I was curious to see what a Forumosa Happy Hour was like as well, otherwise I probably wouldn’t go to Q Bar for dinner. I walked in to find a group of apparent strangers sitting at a table chatting politely. It was rather surreal since I have been reading the backs and forths of these very individuals for years on the website, but I had no idea they were in real life. I sat down next to Iris, who told me how wonderful her cat Tuesday, previously known as Trial Kitten, is doing, which was good to hear. I also met several other completely unfamiliar people with very familiar usernames. Later Maoman and V showed up, but it was still quite unnerving to see all of these contentious individuals who so enjoy a good scrap online being so polite to each other.

In any case, I had more editing to do, so I took my leave and went home after my meal. I need to finish the rough cut of Episode 4 this afternoon so that I can get it to Darrell and we can work on the soundtrack this weekend. And then there’s the shoot tonight, which is as much threatened by rain as it is many, many other factors. But such is filmmaking.

The mugginess continues, so not only have I shaved my goatee and chinstrap, but I also went down and got my hair cut very short again. I am now 100% 50’s-era Clean-cut Poagao. Yeah, like that’ll last.