I had a craving for Hot Dog on A Stick today after work, so I went and got a couple of corn dogs. Only, when I bit into them, I realized with a shock that they had gone and replaced the ordinary corn-dog material with sweet, soft Taiwanese dough. Gah. Last time I eat there. Their cherry lemonade is still good, though.

There seemed no need for an umbrella when I left; despite the scurrying black clouds, the blue sky was plainly visible as I entered the City Hall MRT station to go meet Maoman and Vanessa for the concert. By the time I followed a guy with wonderful calves up the stairs of the CKS Hall Station, however, the skies had opened up, and all I had was the little umbrella I always keep in my backpack. It was good enough to keep my upper half dry, but I was soaked from the thighs down by the time I reached the concert hall.

Maoman and Vanessa were waiting for me, looking surprisingly dry. We went and found our seats in the cavernous hall, which is decorated with huge swaths of rosewood and white marble. A gigantic pipe organ dominated the stage. The audience remembered to applaude when each and every person either came or went from the stage. That included the choir, the small orchestra, and the guys that moved the chairs around.

They also clapped between every movement. The theme of the evening was Baroque music, and while the choir did a bang-up job, the harpsichord player just sounded banged up. The string section couldn’t be bothered to tune properly, and the soloists were lackluster at best. There were glimpses of great music here and there, but if one listened too carefully, one was all too likely to be jerked back to the reality that these performers lacked the polish of professional players. Please.

Vanessa wasn’t feeling well, so we left at the intermission and caught a cab to Mykonos Cafe, to get some hot soup into us. The Christmas lights strung along the ceiling, added to the Greek music playing on the stereo, gave the place a nice, comfy feeling. We pigged out and chatted about film and travel, two of my favorite subjects, while rain gushed down outside. I called a number I had found on Oriented about a room available near the Ta-an MRT station, and after several tries finally got in touch with the current tennant, a French woman named Ann. We arranged to meet at the station at 10:30.

The room, it turns out, is a small apartment located in an old, old building, probably originally built by the government by the looks of it, many, many decades ago. Ann led me up the dark, wide, unkempt stairway to the 5th floor, where she lived. With the dimmness, the smells from the markets on the first couple of floors, the sounds of iron gates slamming shut, the general air of raw usage, of entire families living in cramped quarters, I could have been in Kowloon’s Chungking Mansions.

The apartment itself was well-kempt. Ann was obviously a clean person, and she had bought quite a lot of stuff for the place, mostly from Ikea. Here’s the way it’s laid out: You walk in the door and immediately on the right there’s the bathroom, complete with dirty-looking tub and iffy electric water heater. Then there’s a space, beyond which is the kitchen, old-fashioned but servicable. Keep going straight and you’ll be in the large bedroom/living room/whatever, the main part of the flat. There are two windows in one wall, with old, old non-see-through glass of the kind the Taiwanese know and love.

I liked it. I didn’t like the stair-climbing bit, and I didn’t like the rest of the building, but I liked the flat, I liked the location and just having a place to myself, and I liked the price. So I told Ann I would take it. She has yet to tell her landlord that she’s leaving, however, and she doesn’t know if said landlord will freak out and try to find someone else or not. We’ll see. I dread the move if things do work out so that I can live there, but I look forward to fixing the place up into a pad Greg Brady would be proud of.

Rammasun the Typhoon has not yet given a clear indication whether or not it is planning to attend tonight’s choral concert. Everyone expects it to turn north and leave us with nothing more than a bit o’ rain, or at least an RSVP. I am meeting Maoman, Vanessa and Berta at the National Concert Hall tonight around 7. I suppose it’s just as well I don’t have a helmet, since I wouldn’t enjoy riding around in this ‘typhoon-but-not-really’ weather. I was all set to go down and purchase an Arai or Shoei helmet for roughly 30 times the cost of my motorcycle until I was reminded that Dean still has some helmets leftover from our trip to Yanshui a few months ago. Ah-ha. Cheap but servicable, for the moment.

The woman from Locus Publishing called me last night, and we had a heart-to-heart about the damn book. They still need a couple of days to figure out what, if anything, they can offer me, but they definitely seem interested. I would hate to turn down the Asian Culture people after seeming to lead them on for so long, but I suppose it comes down to who will do the best job, as well as who puts together the best offer. I had hoped to make a decision this week, but it looks like I’ll have to wait until next week.

One thing that can’t wait until next week is the film, i.e. I need to get it done and send it and any kind of press kit I can come up with to Toronto ASAP. Jacques’ system, I established after a lengthy and thumb-tiring SMS session on the ole phone, is tied up until Saturday afternoon, but Ah-qiang might have a lead on a studio I could use tomorrow night. He told me to bring in my materials to work just in case we had to make a quick incursion-type mission at some point tomorrow. If we do it right, I might even be able to avoid paying for it, which would be cool as several major purchases are looming, including a new monitor, probably a 17″ LCD, a Sony VX2000 or Canon GL1, plus various accompanying production equipment, and possibly a Mac to edit on.

I have no idea how I am going to pay for all of that; all I can hope for is a good offer for the damn book and an even better one for the English version in the near future. Or I could just knock over a bank dressed in a pinstripe suit and carrying a tommygun, then escaping in a large black Dusenberg and getting precisely seven feet down the road before I am trapped in a sea of scooters and arrested for tax evasion.

The pictures from the Oriented Happy Fun Time Hour are up, but I didn’t get any close-ups. This time around I appear more as the shadowy background figure to the side, the kind you find circled on the cover of Next Magazine or the National Enquirer: Does Poagao Exist? New Photos Say Yes!

The sun was shining brightly through my curtains this morning, so brightly that I woke up early in spite of the fact that I was up until three a.m. last night trying to get that damn lightsaber from underneath the cage on Yavin IV.

I pulled the curtains open and saw blue skies, the mountains surrounding Taipei clearly visible. Must be a typhoon coming, I thought. Our first, badly needed typhoon. Sure enought, Typhoon Rammasun is out there and could even bring in some rain to ease our parched island’s empty water coffers. It should arrive just in time for the choral concert. Perhaps Patti, in her desperation, sold it tickets. I can see her now, chatting up Rammasun, saying things like “I had no idea weather systems like you were so interested in Baroque music!”

I met with the gang from Asian Culture Publishing for lunch today at a Japanese noodle/ice cream restaurant at Neo 19, next door to our office. They had sent me a copy of the contract I would be signing for the Chinese version of the damn book. I had noticed that the terms in the contract were noticably better than the ones they had outlined beforehand. I wondered if I should bring it up, but regretted it when I did; it turns out that the better terms were the result of a typo. Oh, well.

Jacques’ editing system is tied up at the moment editing Dragonboat footage, so I might have to rent an editing suite to put the new soundtrack on the film and add the new credits. This could cost me, but I don’t seem to have any choice at this point. If I wait too long I will have to fedex the damn film and press kit (I have no idea what is supposed to go into one of those, actually. I should just send photos of me swimming nude off the coast of Green Island or something like that) to Toronto to get it there in time.

There’s some sort of fair going on in the square across the street from my office. I don’t know what it is, but there’s a picture of Skippy peanut butter on one of the signs visible from here. I realize that you can find Skippy peanut butter just about anywhere in Taiwan, but I’m curious what it’s doing as the main attraction at an outdoor fair.

I went downstairs this afternoon to find the entire area around the Bridge to Nowhere filled with people and largish motorcyles and scooters with embarrassingly honest names, things like “Grand Dink” and “My Ego”. There were two 250cc Venoxes there as well, one black one and one red one. People were taking pictures left and right. The abundance of chrome made it a Mirror Project lover’s paradise (here’s my latest contribution, by the way). I sat down on one of them and people started taking pictures of me on the bike, so I flipped up the kickstand, turned the key, started her up and revved the engine a bit (I’m probably on the news as I write this; I should go check). It sounded exactly like a pair of smaller Taiwanese farmer bikes, which made sense when you consider that the engine is a V-twin, each part is basically a 125cc farmer bike engine. Put them together, and you’ve got a cruiser that sounds like a couple of farmer bikes.

I yielded my seat to a comically-dressed model so he could ride the thing up and down the sidewalk for the cameras, except the press people, in their desire to get a good shot, kept blocking the rider from proceeding at anything over a snail’s pace. They even followed the bikes out on the road, completely blocking traffic. Idiots. The Venox totally stole the show from the scooters, though. Other models were riding around on the Grand Dink and the Ego, but nobody was paying any attention to them.

Eventually things died down, the press left, and a bit of rain began to fall. I was grilling one of the Kymco reps about the difference in the price of the Venox between Taiwan and abroad, and then I asked him if I could take a spin. He agreed, probably just to get rid of me, so I took the red Venox for a spin around the area. It felt heavy and not at all fast, although I couldn’t really open it up right there on the sidewalk. The gearshift worked smoothly enough, though, and the giant front disc did it’s job well. It’s too bad that Kymco chose our company to do the advertising, since the bulk of our management is female, the people in charge of marketing these bikes had no clue how to advertise them, nor do they care. The result is a slipshod, half-assed attempt that isn’t going to sell any bikes at all. It’s a damn shame, but most of the people at my company are so full of themselves that they think any idea that pops into the ether between their ears has got to be utter genius.

Even if I had enough money to buy a Venox, I don’t think I would, not right away anyway. The market is about to be flooded with various imports, and something tells me that Kymco will be forced to rethink its pricing strategy within the next few months. Also, I don’t have anywhere to park a bike that large and theftworthy.

Womble has completed the new soundtrack at last, after going through several revisions based on my nit-picking over the past few days. It sounds great, and I’m quite happy with it. The problem now is getting the sound onto the film, the film onto a DV tape, and the DV tape to Toronto before the 15th. My friend Jacques has an editing suite set up on his computer at home, but he isn’t answering his phone for some reason. I might see if Ah-qiang and Fatty, friends of mine in the production department at work, can help me with it.

I am going to meet with the publishers from Asian Culture tomorrow about the Damn Book. They’ve sent me the contract, and all I need now is a definite answer from Locus Publishing. And that New York Times interview, of course.