One more shoot! I need to find someone to throw Dean down a short flight of stairs tomorrow night. I’d do it myself but I’m going to be busy filming it, and I don’t look the part. Any bouncers out there?

I can’t believe we still have to shoot a scene at this late date. I edited one scene from Episode 5 that needed special effects work done on it so I could give it to Dean last night. I needed a break after editing all day, so I went to sword practice for the first time in what seems like months. There were a few new people there, notably one teenage boy who was really annoying as he thought Tai-chi was supposed to be like Shaolin style martial arts, and his little brother, who went around torturing insects and jumping off things. Still, it was good to get some exercise in. After I got home I made an omcake and ate it while watching Double Vision, which is an abysmal film, depressing and pointless even if the cinematography isn’t bad. David Morse was the only other good thing about it. The movie starts off badly and gets much, much worse, and is in fact quite damning of Taiwan in general. What a waste of money.

As I was walking past the Estrogen Mall on my way to work this afternoon, it occurred to me that the reason why such places are so popular is that 99% of Taiwan is very un-feminine, or has been up to a few years ago. Malls like this are the only places where women can go walk along pure white marble interiors and look at nice things while inhaling air-conditioned, perfumed air. I’ve always thought that the behavioral gap between the sexes was wider here than in the west, but it never occurred to me before to connect this with phenomena like the Estrogen Mall. Now if we only had more men interested in mall radio shacks, we’d be improving things considerably.

It’s really muggy outside these days, instant-sweat-cover levels of humidity. I can only imagine what things were like before air conditioning…well, I can, because I went without air conditioning for several years, and your body just adjusts. The downside of that, of course, is that walking into an air-conditioned room is rather traumatic, especially the freezers people operate here.

I know I promised some sort of update after my 100,000th hit, but that has come and gone, and I’m still too busy with the movie to do anything about it. You’re just going to have to wait, but don’t worry; I’ve got plenty of new Renegade Province news stories lined up for the next issue. And the archives should work now, at least.

I really should have been editing the film last night, but Tall Paul was filming the last scene in his Dignity production with Dean, so I went along. We took the electric train that stops at most of the little stations along the way. Although air travel is mask-free these days, they still require masks on trains. Most of the people on the train had masks on, with the exception of a fellow sitting across from us who seemed to think that a mouthful of “Hi-chew” gum excused him from having to wear one.

A huge cruise ship was docked at Keelung harbor when we exited the train station. It was the Superstar Gemini, bigger and nicer than the ship we took a couple of years back on the infamous “Cruise to Nowhere”. We caught a cab out to Ocean University, where Paul was waiting at the gate. It was just after sunset, but you could still see the outline of Turtle Island out past the sea wall. The Dignity scene wasn’t all that dignified, actually, as it required Dean to recite some Hamlet while dressed in rather interesting garb in front of a faux stage. He did a good job, though, especially on the William Shatner version. We stopped when the aluminum foil we were using as barn doors for the lights started falling off. We struck camp and took all the equipment back to Paul’s office in the area of the university where, judging by the smell, they study the effects of burning insects with lasers. There we took a look at the impressive credit sequence as well as some of the initial editing. Very nice, I must say.

Afterwards we took a cab back downtown to meet Paul’s wife Jane for dinner at a Teppanyaki place. It was located on the corner of an intersection, and was so small that some of the raw vegatables had to be stored in the bathroom/kitchen area in the back. We had barely begun to eat when a family came in and sat down next to us, and I was distracted from the conversation due to the wild flailing arms and spittle of the little boy perhaps four years of age sitting next to me. He looked exactly like a miniature taxi driver, complete with surliness as well as an eerily familiar spiky hairstyle.

After dinner, which was good, Paul and Jane took us on a tour of Keelung, or at least the Miaokou Night Market across the river. The river sported interesting bridges with pedestrian paths that soared about ten feet higher than the actual roadway, put there for the view I supposed as I watched a romantic couple’s attempts at kissing thwarted by the masks they were wearing.

The night market was nice. It’s a pretty ordinary night market, but due to the day and SARS, it wasn’t too crowded even though the weather was nice. We stopped by a temple, the Zhengji temple I think, and then made our way back to the waterfront, where the Superstar Gemini was heading out to sea on her next cruise, perhaps to Okinawa, perhaps to Southeast Asia, or even just to diddle around before coming back into port the next afternoon.

We passed an impressively decrepit building along the harbor right next to the elevated highway. Jane said it was so haunted they couldn’t tear it down, and were waiting for gravity, an earthquake, typhoon, or a combination of all three to do the job for them. The harbor area has improved a lot lately, with new pedestrian walks and an eatery complex. Now they just need to do something about the smell. I’ve heard that Kaohsiung has made great strides in the respect, but I haven’t been down there in a long time so I can’t say if it’s true.

The ride back was uneventful, but I was glad that the train station connects directly to the MRT system because I was too tired by that point to walk very far. When I got home I still couldn’t go to bed until I had sent at least part of the promotion materials to the Lady X Series Executive Producers.

Today did not start off well; Getting up was hard to do, and when I finally managed it was with a sore back, possibly due to the train seats last night and/or a lack of exercise lately due to various reasons. Today’s my last full day of work for a while, at least until I find another second job, but I could use the extra time for editing, etc.

The Lady X series is now up to Episode 2, in which Lady X travels to Germany aboard a nuclear submarine. First helicopters and now submarines? What’s next, Lady X stepping out of the Shuttle Atlantis? Fark should do a Photoshop contest of bizarre things Lady X can step out of.

Though we may not have space vehicles or even a mole at NASA, we do have a kick-ass story, wonderful actors and an interesting setting. I just need to finish the massive job of putting it all together. We filmed the office scene on Saturday without too many hitches. It was so hot on the set, aka Dean’s apartment, that we had to take a five-minute break in between each take so we could open up the windows and turn on the fan. Da Shan provided lighting as usual, and Tall Paul wrangled the boom. Dean’s friend Norman played the Heavy for the office scene, but since he couldn’t make it on Sunday to film the rest of the scene, which features The Heavy’s hands, we dragged Maoman up to the alley in question to do that scene. I’m on my way to Keelung tonight after work along with Dean to help Paul finish up his latest film, “Project Dignity”. We’re planning on doing the one remaining scene this Friday near the old Science Museum. After that it’s editing, editing, and more editing. Plus music, special effects, and promotion… So far so good, but time is getting short. Perhaps losing one of my jobs doesn’t totally suck; at least now I’ll have more time for editing. My wallet, however, doesn’t agree with this line of thinking.

The weather continues to be oddly cool and cloudy outside, though it’s almost unbearably muggy indoors since our office has the air conditioners off due to SARS fears. The cicadas aren’t even singing down in the city like they are up in the mountains. Perhaps they’re waiting for real summer heat. Maybe they’re still on vacation in Bali.

When I got in to work today I found a thermometer lying on my desk. It was supposed to be issued to me a couple of weeks ago, but it only got here today. Not that it matters as I have an electronic one at home; it just goes to show how molassas-like government action here is.

It’s been suggested recently to me that the TC that writes in this journal is so totally and completely unlike the Real-life TC that suspicions have arisen that this account is really written by a member of the Iraqi Elite. This is news to me, of course, but it does make a bit of sense when I think of all the people who only met me after reading this account, people who seemed to expect someone else completely, people who kept calling me “Raed” and winking in a knowing manner.

Obviously, any given person’s behavior varies with his audience, and I have a different personality when I am with different people, but 99% of the musings I jot down in this account come straight from the top of my head. I never set out to create a completely different persona, and it is somewhat surprising to learn how different I come across in writing.

I have met a few bloggers myself after only knowing them through their websites. Randall seems pretty much as he comes across on his site, though his voice is a bit higher pitched than I had expected. Shauna is almost exactly as she seems in WNP, though her hair is a bit lighter in color. And anyway, how would you know what was more accurate? Do you judge someone from their personal appearance or from their words? For those who know me IRL, just how exactly do I come across on here? Other than as a rather vapid, angry snob, I mean. And how is this different from the vapid, angry snob you all know and occasionally tolerate?

I’ve gotten a lot done lately. I fixed my bike, did my laundry and did my taxes. Turning in the tax forms this year turned out to be a lot easier than I had expected. All I had to do was go to the office, show them my ID card, and they printed out a list of all my income and exactly what I owed. Or, rather, what I didn’t owe, as I’m getting a small refund this year it seems. Every little bit helps. It was quite a relief as I really don’t have the funds to pay extra in taxes this year.

And yet there’s still so much to do. Yesterday, which was nominally Dragonboat Festival Day although all of the races were cancelled due to SARS, I took a trip up to New Beitou to scope out the Can-yuan, a teahouse that would be perfect for our interim scene. I took the MRT to Beitou, changed to the short New Beitou train, then got off and started walking up the mountain. It’s been years since Kirk took me up there, but I vaguely remembered the direction. My throat infection hasn’t quite cleared up yet, and I was going rather slowly, but it was a nice day and it was good to be out in the sun and hearing the sound of rushing water. The cicadas are finally starting to sing as well, one of my favorite sounds. You can tell it’s early summer because they’re pretty even and strong. Later, in mid-summer, they’ll start going in cycles.

The Can-yuan, however, was closed for rennovations, and has been for over a year now. There were other teahouses nearby, so I stopped in and had some tea at one of them, sitting out on the balcony overlooking Beitou valley. It was pleasant, and I was exhausted from the walk. One drink cost NT$260, but one drink plus two pieces of cake and a pudding cost NT$180. They must have really wanted to get rid of that cake.

None of the teahouses I visited on the way back down were any good, though, and another I had had in mind was also closed. It looks like we’re going to have to think of something else. I still can’t believe I can’t find a frickin’ office to borrow in Taiwan. I haven’t received any help whatsoever from my posts on Forumosa, which leads me to believe that most of the people on that board are stuck in boring, uneventful, and relatively low-paying jobs, a situation with which I can thoroughly empathize.

Part of the office problem is, of course, that we need it at a specific time as one of our actors, Rowan, is only available at one time. In any case, we’ll do what we can do. I captured the third tape of footage and it looks pretty good. We should have some more stills up soon. I think one of the hardest things about the editing might be choosing from all of the good stuff we have. The maxim of editing is, however, “kill your darlings”, and I plan to stick to it. If it serves the whole of the project, it goes in; otherwise, it’s gone. I see movies differently when I’m actually in the process of making one; I wonder about framing, direction, lighting, sound, looping, etc. Sometimes it even interferes with my enjoyment of the story, and I have to tell myself to stop thinking and just enjoy the flick.

Taiwan reported no new SARS cases or deaths today for the first time, well, since it started. I suspect this has more to do with the hotter weather than the government’s measures, but whatever works, works. Now we have to make sure it’s eradicated before the weather turns cooler again, and keep clueless government officials from crowing about it. We should keep our guard up, restrict travel to and from China, and keep enforcing quarantines. If they are actually being enforced, that is. Which I doubt.

I’ve been wondering lately about exactly how much artists know about their own artistic abilities, or how much they can, or even should know. When a really good painter decides to paint something, do his internal urges arise from instincts he himself does not understand? Or does he follow the logic of his own understanding of the art, built from both talent and experience? Would art based on the latter be more limited by so-called understanding, i.e., would artificial boundaries between the understood and the instinctual create a barrier for the artist? Some of these thoughts stem from reading about art in various forms lately. To me, writing about music, i.e. reviewing albums and movies and the like, is pretty much useless because there’s no way to recreate the experience of one medium in such a different context, indeed a completely different medium. Of course we need to at least superficially understand what’s going on in art, otherwise you get the bullshit-in-a-frame mentality of post-modernism, which is based on the tenet that anything outside of its usual context is art. But there are so many ways of representing things in a fashion that is understandable on the superficial level that art, and I mean this as the instinctual kind, must necessarily play a part in the choice of expression. Yet I wonder how many artists don’t have the actual understanding of what they do that they claim to. Perhaps some artists are just better at bullshitting than others, while the ones who admit they don’t know how they do what they do just can’t be bothered to come up with a bullshit explanation.

This isn’t just for artists and creators, however. How many of us actually understand why we like something? This, I believe, is one of the reasons the second Matrix movie was substandard. The reasons most people gave for liking the first, e.g. effects, fight scenes, etc., had nothing to do with why the movie actually appealed to people; they were the only things people could put into words to justify why they liked it, and the producers heard this and decided to follow this trend, while ignoring the reasons the first movie really appealed to people. Was this just blind worship of marketing trends? Or do the Wachowski Brothers really know why they did what they did in the first movie. My guess is that their instincts, which are good, were overwhelmed by peoples opinions of the first film, and thus they were unable to develop the second film in the same public-relations vaccuum in which they developed the first. They listened to the fans, who didn’t know themselves why they really liked the film. And neither did the brothers, it seems.

This is, of course, a good argument for developing one’s understanding of one’s artistic abilities so that they stand up to such situations and cannot be easily overwhelmed by public opinion and marketing trends. If the artist knows why he is doing something, he’s less likely to be influenced by such things. On the other hand, how much can one know about such a nebulous and virtually unlimited aspect of the mind? And does such conscious knowlege of one’s abilities destroy or lessen them? That would be one tenet of many eastern philosophies and even religions such as Daoism and Zen, where you do things because they’re supposed to be done, not out of any intellectual understanding of the reasons behind them, which would establish boundaries and lessen their impact.

For myself, I often find that when I am, say, making a film, I make decisions for reasons I don’t immediately understand, but they usually seem to work out. Sometimes I eventually realize why I made that decision, sometimes I don’t, other than that it feels right. I have found in my limited experience that most of the people watching me actually make the film don’t understand why I’m doing things the way I do them, and yet are suprised to see the end result. “That’s much better than I thought it would be,” is something I’ve heard a lot. I heard it in New York when my crew had no idea why I was doing what I was doing (a fault of communication of course, but then how can I explain it if I don’t really understand it myself?) and then saw what I had come up with in the editing room. Even a piece of crap like Alphadogah came out better than anyone expected. I’ve become used to people telling me that certain ideas won’t work for various reasons, and while input is always valuable, especially from people whose judgement you trust, sometimes you have to try it out the way you feel it should be, even if you don’t know why. This is easier to do nowadays with the ascent of digital video tools, but time and money are still wasted if everyone’s standing around on the set waiting for the director to decide how to shoot a scene. I wonder how often a mental battle between what the director knows the producers want and what he feels to be right is the cause of such indecision. With most art forms you can do it in private, caving in to your innermost desires. Films are made by groups of people, however, in a public forum, which changes the pressures involved during the process. No doubt I’ll learn more about the practical side of the creative process as I go, but it’s certainly something I think about more now than I ever have before.

Yeah, I’ve been reading Metafilter. Can ya tell?

Can’t believe it’s June already. It doesn’t feel like June. There’s a cool breeze all day long, it’s long-sleeves weather in the evenings, and I haven’t heard the cicadas yet. Very strange. Even the typhoons seem to be avoiding us. Perhaps they’re afraid of SARS.

The shoot on Saturday went pretty well, though I haven’t captured the footage yet, due to a lack of disc space. I took my computer over to T-zone on Sunday thinking I could get a new, larger hard drive, but they didn’t have any of the larger sizes. “Nobody asks for them so we don’t have anything larger than 60Gb,” the clerk told me, explaining quite succinctly exactly why T-zone has lost most everyone’s respect as far as computer-related services goes. So I hauled it over to Ba-de Rd section 1, the Guang-hua Market area, and went to little shop after little shop until I found someone who had 120Gb hard drives with 8Mb caches in stock. While I was there I maxed out my RAM to the 512Mb my antiquated motherboard will allow. That’s about all the upgrading I can afford, I’m afraid. I hope it’s enough. At least I was able to defragment my original drive after moving the footage over to the new one. Let’s hope it captures as well.

Sunday afternoon was spent at Dean’s going over some soundtrack music with Darrell, who is a friend of Tall Paul’s. He had some interesting stuff that I think has real potential. Took me by surprise, actually. Then Rowan came over to talk about his role in the new scene, but inevitably things degenerated into us all sitting around trying to watch old Michael Caine DVDs. We tried to watch The Man Who Would Be King, but the DVD was crap, so we put in Zulu to see a suprisingly effete Michael say “old boy” approximately 700 times while the preacher gets drunk and his daughter with an inexplicable German accent does a great deal of staggering about. There were also Zulus. Great flick.

The Lady X Series has kicked off! Go to the website to see Episode I, by John Locke in Japan. There’s going to be roughly an episode a week all the way until December if all goes according to schedule. In the meantime, we’ve got our jobs cut out for us here in Taipei with two episodes to cover. Right now we’re looking for an opulent private office for the last scene we need to film. If you know of one in or around Taipei, let me know. I’m talking about the sequined leather high-backed chairs, wood panelling, brass-highlights sort of place, a place where you wouldn’t be surprised to hear the patrons referring to each other by single letters of the alphabet. I can’t wait to get all the footage in the can so I can concentrate on the massive task of putting this thing together.