It’s after one in the morning. From downstairs comes the sounds of construction: welding, hacksaws, steamshovels, hammers and nails, that sort of thing. A loud concert necessitated my absence today, and the concert last night had the same effect. Groups of old women crank up Tai-chi accompaniment music at 6 am every day and in the evenings when there isn’t some sort of concert downstairs. And my landlord isn’t planning to upgrade my windows with glass any thicker than saran wrap for another year.

What should amaze me the most is the fact that, even after agonizing over finding a good place to live and even spending more money, I still screwed this one up. This requires about six kinds of stupidity, all of which I apparently possess in spades. Alas, there’s nothing I can do about the situation, since I went and signed a year-long contract, and what’s to keep me from simply moving into another fatally flawed residence? Nothing, certainly not any good judgement skills on my part. Yes, this is Taiwan, you say, and it’s just a loud place, but you should know that most of the alleyways are quiet most of the time, especially at night.

I escaped the noise today by going over to the Zoology Department at National Taiwan University, where my friend Paul Barlow, aka Norman Szabo, was filming his latest project with a Sony PD150 he borrowed from his wife’s employer out in Keelung. I held the boom mike and made snarky comments in exchange for credit and a mention at the inevitable awards ceremonies in this film’s future. Dean is playing a major role, along with other friends Maurice and Peter from the play we did last year, and the plot involves the use of interesting gadgetry and lots of mousse. That’s all I can say at this point. The last day of shooting is tomorrow, and I might bring my own camera to try and get some shots for my latest little project.

It was raining when we got done filming tonight, and Dean, Peter and I went to the New Orleans cajun restaurant on Xinsheng and Roosevelt Rds for some mediocre food and cigar smoke. I should have had the red beans and rice. It’s been years since I’ve had that. I wonder if they have Hop ‘n John.

I’ve uploaded this week’s film clip, one even bigger and more cumbersome than last week’s. This one is the view one gets emerging from the subway in front of Sogo Department Store, behind which is the noise-ridden area where I live. It’s something like 3.8mb, so if you don’t have broadband, you might want to cancel your evening plans if you want to download it.

I took the MRT up to Yuanshan Station last night and began walking across the new and rather empty park towards the Arts Center, where I was told I would find my new Taiji sword teacher. Since the Songshan Airport is just east of the area, all the buildings are low, and every few minutes a jet airliner would float noisily overhead. The Grand Hotel, brilliantly lit to show off its golden roof, presided over the scene from the edge of the hills to the north.

When I got to the courtyard in front of the Arts Center, bad dance music blasted from boomboxes, accompanying a group of teenage would-be Travoltas as they practiced their moves. In the far corner a group of people sat practicing guitar, oblivious to the noise. One of the guitar players, an older man with a hat, waved at me. It turned out to be Mr. Xu, whom I’d met a few days ago at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. He was instructing a younger man how to play basic melodies on the instrument, although he himself wasn’t exactly a virtuoso. After I walked over to watch, he offered his guitar to me. “Want to play it?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No, I don’t know guitar, just piano and trumpet,” I winced inwardly as this garnered a few ohs from the group. “Is there anything you don’t teach?” I tried to change the subject, but Mr. Xu just smiled and returned to his lesson.

Since the guitar lesson was winding down, Mr. Xu told me to go through a little of the sword forms I already knew. I was warming up when a little wiry fellow on rode up on a bicycle. “Who’s scabbard is this?” he asked in Taiwanese, looking around. I told him it was mine and moved the scabbard so he could park against the wall. He introduced himself as Mr. Li. He was there to study Tuishou, a kind of planted-feet wrestling. He invited me to go a couple of rounds with him. He turned out to be Taiwan’s version of Plasticman. No matter how I pushed, he would just bend and spring back. I only dislodged him a couple of times, and that was sheer luck. Then Mr. Xu came over and gave us a bit of advice, showing me how Plasticman could be thrown quite easily. I just nodded.

The instruction went on for two hours, mostly basic stuff, which was good because I haven’t worked out in a couple of months. I think Mr. Xu has some really good ideas, and he seems happy to impart his knowledge in an easily understandable way. He only has a few students, but the ones he does have seem to know what they’re doing, as opposed to the morning Taiji people I’ve seen who just seem to be going through the motions, resulting in a kind of vague dancing.

After class I took the train back down to the Taipower Building Station in the Shida area to meet Kirk. We went to a traditional Chinese place off Shida Rd that was open until 2am for snacks, and Kirk told me how taxing his new job at American Express is. He also told me all the interesting things he had learned about the credit card industry as we munched on fried sweet potato balls, radish paste squares and lightly fried tofu with soy sauce.

It was almost 1am when we finished chatting, and I decided to walk home from there. On the way I passed my old digs on Da-an Park; I wasn’t surprised to see that another election headquarters had opened downstairs, and shadowy figures lurking in the park just across from the place made me wonder if they had some sort of security after the recent shooting murder of a city councilor in Shilin. The Taipei Grand Mosque was lit up quite beautifully despite the late hour. Signs in English requested passers-by to refrain from smoking on the sidewalk in front of the mosque.

I always enjoy walking through alleyways I’ve never been down, especially late at night when nobody’s around. Appropriately, it began to rain as I threaded my way across the forested section of Renai Rd and back home.

The Oriented thing is tonight, and Berta invited me to a nearly NT$900 (gah!) Thanksgiving meal at United Mix on Friday, but there’s no way I can afford that. I don’t even know if I can go to the Oriented thing, as I have to meet my landlord to hand over my outrageous-in-a-French-accent rent tonight.

Scene 1, shot 1, take 1

I met up with Dean, Mindcrime and Maoman at the so-called Tranny Starbucks on Zhongxiao E. Road at noon today. Our aim was to shoot principal photography on Mindcrime’s script, which details what happens when two foreigners meet in Taipei. As we were still sitting out on the back porch there, a guy rode by on a horse. Since this isn’t something you see every day in Taipei, we all gawked as it was revealed that the rider was 1) a singer who was famous in a big-fish/little-pond sort of way, and 2) obviously not used to riding a horse, which pretty much went where it wanted to, often trotting sideways over to nearby bushes and eating them. Another, obviously less-famous guy with a video camera similar to mine was running around behind the rider and his mount. The animal was skittish due to the one or two screaming groupies near the small stage.

We got about half of the shooting done before it began to rain, so we retired to the coffee shop porch to wait it out. A young woman who was sitting at the next table asked Mindcrime to watch her stuff, and he agreed. When she got back, she was so impressed that her things were still intact that she gave him a little wrapped box that turned out to hold a single Viagra pill. Overcome by such an obviously romantic gesture, Mindcrime invited her to sit with us. Much to our disappointment, however, no more Viagra was forthcoming.

The rain began to let up, so we went out and filmed until the light began to fail, and then Dean and I went to see the latest Harry Potter movie. It was a bit of a disappointment. I liked the first one because I wasn’t expecting to like it, and I disliked the second one because I had liked the first one. Being in the second row on the left side didn’t help things. It skewed the perspective enough that I had to point out things happening on the other side of the screen to Dean from time to time. In retrospect, they were probably pretty similar. The third-through-seventh films might be relegated to video-rental status, I think.

Tomorrow I plan to go out to get some background and lead shots in. Then it’s to the cutting board to see if I can make sense of all this footage. It’s been far too long since I’ve either been a cameraman or directed anything, so I’m a bit rusty at it (read: I’m far too nice to everyone on the set). Don’t worry, though, I’ll get over that soon enough.

I’ve taken down the Shilin Night Market video and replaced it with a clip of a vendor near where I live berating a crowd of shopping disciples for not immediately snapping up his fine array of clothing. It’s a bit dark, and also rather large, about the same size as the last one. Have fun.

All is not perfect in paradise: I’ve got a new neighbor now that the room next door has rented out. Unfortunately, it was rented to a rather annoying individual who enjoys blasting sappy Taiwanese TV programs at top volume with the hallway door wide open at one o’clock in the a.m. The walls of my building seems to be fairly good at absorbing sound, but with their door open the TV sounds like it’s in the same room if you’re in the hallway. So much for peace and quiet. I really wasn’t in the mood for that shit last night, especially since I was looking forward to a good night’s rest after receiving yet another round of rejections of the Damn Book. This is nothing unusual, of course, but it smarts a little more when these are those rare publishers who have expressed an actual desire to see the manuscript, read it, and then rejected it. In the meantime, I watch my friends publish more and more books and wonder if either the garbage bag/vanity press is the only place for my obviously uninteresting tale.

Ah, well, just another reminder that the world doesn’t give a shit about anything that happens in Taiwan. “Oh, you live in Taiwan? I love Thai food!”

Methinks it’s time to change the video of the week, since the current one’s been up for over a week. Better download it now if you want to see it. Also, if there’s anything in particular in Taiwan you want to see and you think I’ll be stupid enough to film it for you, let me know and I’ll either laugh in your face or actually be stupid enough to film it for you. Ya never know.

I’m back at Ogilvy, for a full day today as I don’t usually work on Wednesdays. It’s odd to be back here; I hadn’t expected to ever be here again, but here I am, doing the same job for the same pittance. At least they don’t mind listlessness, as long as the job gets done.

I had the happy fortune to happen across not only Star Wars: Episode II last night at the DVD shop, but the Coen Bros.’ The Man Who Wasn’t There as well, so Mindcrime and I met up at Dean’s for a Good Movie Night to make up for our recent Bad Movie Night, which ended up a bit too literally. The Man Who Wasn’t There consisted of continuously well-crafted scenes, filmed in lucious black and white that almost seemed like it had been filmed in the 40’s. The framing was perfect, but the film was obviously of a higher grade than was available 60 years ago. The composition seemed a bit off, for some reason. Perhaps it was because they filmed it in color before converting it to black-and-white. My friends of course commented on the uncanny similarity between my social character and that of Ed Crane, the main character. Still, for such a slow-paced film, it held me rapt until the gratefully non-twist ending. In this era of the “must see” twist ending popularized by M. Night himself, a relatively normal ending is something of a twist ending, in that nobody expects one anymore.

Episode II still rocks, even on the little screen. Mindcrime had an epileptic fit when R2 flew, of course, and Count Dooku still looks silly riding his “Manboy Jeep-bike” scooter across the desert, but Jango and Obi-wan still kick ass in all the right places.

I went to the local Subway for lunch today and chatted with the Chinese-american dude who works there. I asked him if he’d ever done his month-long military service (he’s too fat for the two-year gig, apparently), and he just took off his cap and showed me the remains of an army buzzcut. He’d spent his month cleaning rifles in Hualian apparently, and now he was back making sandwiches. He seems to like the sandwiches a bit more than he used to. Perhaps he’s got a bit more perspective now. A stint in the army’s good for that.

As I walked back to the office after lunch, I was suprised at how tall the Taipei101 building had gotten since I last worked here a few months ago. The cranes at the top were flickering in and out of the low rainclouds, just like nearby Elephant Mountain. The building is scheduled to reach its world-record-breaking height around this time next year, but the gigantic mall downstairs is supposed to be open earlier, to assuage the shopping needs of the millions of women in this city with too much disposable income (according to all the latest surveys). I’d say it’s going to be an Estrogen Mall on Steroids, but that doesn’t quite work.

A year ago this time I was wandering around Australia, having a wonderful time retrieving bits of my sanity lost over the course of too much time spent in souless offices. Now it’s time for my one-man “Filmmaking for Sanity” drive, lest I slip back into a deep malaise. I’ve already spent the money, so now it’s time to insert a colorful metaphor here to make myself seem interesting in a gritty yet homey way.

We wanted to rent some bad movies. It was just that kind of night. So Mindcrime and I stopped at a video store and got Scooby Doo and The Brotherhood of the Wolf on our way to Dean’s place for an evening of cinematic awfulness.

Scooby Doo was actually entertaining, much to our surprise. That is, we thought so until the awful ending. I don’t care how much you hated Scrappy Doo as a kid, there’s just no excuse for including him in the movie version, even for special torture purposes. Shaggy was, if possible, even better than the cartoon version, but all of the other characters except Velma in bits were completely flat. Freddie Prinze, Jr. should have been barred by court order from appearing in this film or any other.

Then we watched Brotherhood of the Wolf. And watched. And watched. I think I may have fallen asleep at one point. At least I hope that’s the case, because the less I actually saw the better. A good two hours could have been cut from that movie, and the rest sped up to 4x, and then it might have been watchable. It was the kind of flick that makes you want to rush the ticket office and demand not just your money but also your three hours back. After that movie Scooby Doo seemed much, much better.

It’s gray and cold out these days. I went to fill in at my old job at Ogilvy this morning and found, much to my surprise, Maoman striding about in front of the building among a group of other foreigners in front of a large camera on an even larger crane assembly. It turns out that he and a few others had made the time to participate in the filming of a music video portraying a scene with seasons changing in some location abroad, since we don’t have proper seasons here. And apparently the rest of the world is inhabited by six sharply dressed non-Chinese persons, at least according to this video. Still, I’m sure the money’s good for that kind of gig. Hell, I’d do it if I wasn’t sure that they’d throw me off the set for bringing a rather inhospitable feeling to the whole set. Couldn’t have that.

Speaking of feeling inhospitable, there was some kind of market/fare downstairs all weekend, and the karaoke going on really brought out the ole’ sniper itch there for a while. I successfully resisted and went to lunch instead. Not having a sniper rifle helped somewhat as well.

There’s been a good Irish band playing at the Shannon the past few nights. Although I’ve sworn off eating at the Shannon ever again, I’ve enjoyed their music a couple of times whilst nursing a long glass of cranberry juice. The band consists of a Scottish guy and an Irish guy, and they both sing and play various instruments. Quite fun. Although due to this damn lingering illness I’ve been in a crappy mood ever since I got sick, almost a month ago now. I’m sick of feeling sick, I am. Not only does it sap my energy and interest in doing anything constructive, I’m even less fun than I usually am, which is pretty dire if you know me. I feel like I’m stuck in a slower-moving time stream, and all my friends seem like excited, energetic Jane-Fonda-on-Uppers types to me in comparison. One moment I’ll be feeling tired but ok, and the next I’ll fall into a nauseous malaise and feel generally sick. It comes and goes, and any improvement is so slow I just can’t see it.

I don’t mean to rant on about such things; I usually reserve this kind of whinging for my private journal, but I’d just like to explain why I haven’t been posting nearly as much recently. Steve came up to Taipei this weekend and is speaking at the Toastmasters Club up in Tianmu. I have to work two jobs next week as my successor at my old job has to make a visa run to Hong Kong or something. I could use the money, such as it is, but I’m not looking forward to losing my free time, most of which I spend Being Listless these days. I suppose I can Be Listless there as well, though.

The weather is dreary, cold and rainy, and I’m just lazing about at home, so there’s not much to write about, really. Hopefully I’ll get back into the swing of things soon.

“Do you think I’ll get beat up if I wear this?” I asked the taxi driver today, holding up a blue do-rag with a funky iteration of the ROC flag embroidered on the top. He glanced at it and said no, he didn’t think so. I pressed on, saying “Even by rabid DPP types?”

“Look, I’m a pretty rabid DPP supporter, and I think it’s just patriotic to have the flag on your hat,” he said, ignoring the green light to convince me of his sincerity. Once we were moving again, we began talking about the upcoming mayoral election. “I really should vote for Lee Ying-yuan (the DPP candidate), but all he did during the debates was hem and haw and change the subject, while Ma Ying-jeou (the incumbent KMT candidate) answered all of the questions very clearly and in a straightforward fashion. I don’t know what to do, really,” he said, scratching his head. “Can you vote?”

I told him that I could vote but not in these elections as my residency is in Sanchung. “Well, anyway, you won’t get beat up,” he said. I told him I’d call him if I did.

I uploaded my first video clip for those with broadband connections and an interest in seeing a bit more of what I see in Taiwan. Basically a walk through the old Shilin Night Market, which has since been torn down, the clip is 2.6mb in size. I know, it’s a tad large. I’ll try to make shorter ones in the future. I like it, though. Listen to the sounds of the hawkers shouting at passers-by.

And, as if that weren’t enough, I’ve also uploaded a little tour of my new abode, for those with just too much time on their hands (you know who you are).

How much would YOU pay for all of this? But wait! There’s more! I’ve also got more Mirror Project pictures up. Act now and we’ll even throw in a new shower curtain to sweeten the deal!

Oh wait, it’s all free. Never mind.

I went out to B&Q in Shilin today with Dean during his lunch break. He wanted to pick up some paint and I wanted to look at red-or-blue toilet seats, since my bathroom is blue and the present toilet seat is a most disturbing shade of Comet-green. On the way from Jiantan Station we passed the site of the old Shilin Night Market, which is now just an empty field of rubble being picked over by earth movers. The store had nothing but variations on tan and white seats, however, so we took the second-attempt paint and departed. We were about to get in a taxi back downtown when I hit my head on a bus stop sign and realized that I didn’t want to spend such a beautiful day downtown. Here I was already halfway to Danshui, so I bade farewell to Dean and walked towards the Shilin MRT station, stopping on the way to pick up a blue toilet seat from a little store that seemed better stocked than B&Q, at least in the toilet department.

The newly-constructed riverside walkways at Danshui were almost deserted compared to the wreathing masses suffocating it on weekends. Here and there construction continued, but it’s mostly finished and quite nice. After about an hour of walking I found myself at Fisherman’s Wharf, where I sat on the dock and watched boatfuls of tourists motor to and fro. A large bridge over the man-made harbor is under construction at the moment, and I also watched the workers hoisting large pieces of steel into place over the water. The sun set at almost exactly 5pm, and I watched that as well before hopping on a bus back to downtown Danshui. Feeling the need to eat, I walked into the Sunrise Caf’e and up to the rooftop level so I could see the river and Mount Guanyin across the river. As I approached a table by the edge, however, a group of Very Important People erupted in sounds of vigorous protest. Apparently I was blocking their view. “Is there a problem?” I asked, but they errupted into laughter, as Taiwanese are obliged by law to do whenever any non-Chinese person opens their mouth and emits sounds. “Obviously there is a problem, at least with the operation of your brains,” I concluded out loud, and moved to another table. The Very Important People promptly continued their discussion, which involved how troublesome it was throwing away socks when they got dirty and then buying new ones. Celebrity names were dropped and exhorbitant prices scoffed (“78 million? Oh, that’s just too much!” *pouts*). It occurred to me that this was what the Scooby Doo gang would have ended up like if they hadn’t had Scooby and Shaggy to keep them grounded and even mussed up once in a while. Can you imagine Fred, with his ascot and sailor suit, Daphne with her high heels, and even Velma, sitting around in a restaurant bragging about the last celebrity to star on their show? (“Oh, that Paul Lynne, he’s such a card.” “Yeah, but he did like my ascot!”) That’s what these people were like. One of the girls was even short and dumpy, one of them thin and obsessed with her hair, and the one guy was dressed sort of like Fred, but with late-90’s black instead of 60’s colors. If I cared, I would introduce someone like Mindcrime to them, to balance out their little group with gross butt jokes and an utter lack of fashion sense, but I couldn’t care less if they spiral into vapidity and self destruct in a massive ego implosion, creating little black holes of self pity.

I’ve been toying with the idea of putting up little video clips at low resolution on here for people to look at. We’ll see how it works and if I have enough space to spare. Mindcrime has written an interesting little script involving the meeting of two foreigners in Taipei, for filming with the new camera, and I’ve already got the scenes mapped out. Now we just need to get everyone together to actually film it. Hopefully we can do several of these short pieces before tackling something longer.

In other news, my xuedi from college, Moose, is now Commissioner Moose, having won an election in his district in Washington, DC. Cool. I wonder if this means he’ll have greater access to regional superheroes. If so, even cooler.

When I woke up this morning, the first thing I saw was an unfamiliar white book lying on the desk next to my bed. It was the instruction manual for a Canon GL2 DV camera. That’s strange, I thought, and looked around for something to justify this strange discovery. Then I saw the new black camera case on the end table, the freshly charged batteries, and I remembered.

“Hey, you want to go out for curry?” Mindcrime asked me on the phone last night. I had just seen Ghost Ship with Kirk, and still had visions of blood-soaked wire trembling in my mind.

“Uh, I don’t know,” I said, thinking of the awful moment in the movie when the people realized what had happened and things began to fall off. It was a pretty solid B-flick, not bad, but that one scene was replaying itself over and over in my mind. Kirk said he’d seen worse. I believed him; Kirk is really into horror movies, so this was nothing for him.

“It’s a Japanese restaurant, very clean, and the food will blow you away,” Mindcrime was saying. I gave in and said I’d meet him at the MRT station downstairs. The curry place was located in the section of Taipei that was originally surrounded by four walls and five gates, the old city. We met Dean in front of the Asiaworld Department Store and walked through the narrow neon-lit lanes, then descended into the basement of one of the buildings.

The place looked like a section from a 50’s Sci-Fi novel concerning Eating in The Future. It was not only spotless, it was nearly featureless as well, with blank white walls, glass partitions and excessively polite waitresses with so much makeup they could have easily been Elevator Ladies, or animatronic robots just off work. In the back was a section of semi-transparent wall where amorphous shapes appeared to be performing vaguely cooking-related activities. The food, when it came, was delicious and plentiful, erasing any bias I had about curry restaurants. This was the antithesis of all the curry shops I’d ever been to.

After dinner, we walked up the street looking for a coffee shop. The closest Starbucks was filled to the brim with yuppies, so we selected the cheaper, less popular Coffee Latte across the street, from which we could sit and mock the Starbucks people in our non-Starbucks induced jealousy (Dean actually has Issues with Starbucks, but we’ll save that for his therapy sessions). When we were seated we began, as always, talking about movies and the like, and my friends once again started in on me for my lack of a camera that actually works (I have an old VHS camera that died a good while ago, but I still can’t bring myself to get rid of it).

“Oh, and isn’t Camera Street just down the road?” Mindcrime suggested ever so innocently. It was then I began to suspect something was up.

“Great, let’s go down and b-….uh, take a look,” Dean added. “I’d like to see the one you’ve, ah, picked out. Yeah.”

Reluctantly I agreed. I knew something was up, but I was resolved not to do anything rash, although such resolution has seldom held any water for me in the past. We walked down to the handful of camera stores I frequented, each of the staff knew me by sight, and some no doubt hated me for coming in and playing with their precious cameras for long periods of time without actually buying anything. I went up to the window display and pointed out the camera I was interested in, a Canon GL2. Suddenly the entire situation felt contrived, and I spun around to face my companions, my finger held up in accusation.

Of course, that was when they made their move. “Hold his legs!” Dean cried as Mindcrime frisked me, relieving me of my credit card and ID. Before I knew it, I’d become the owner of a new camera, capture card, and several pieces of videomaking detrius.

“Oh, and I’ll be needing a tripod – Doh!” I blurted out, but Mindcrime was already inside correcting this oversight. I got a call from Citibank asking if I really, really meant to be suddenly spending all of this money, because according to their records I didn’t make nearly enough to cover it all at once as I usually do. I said yeah, I really meant to be doing this, although I’d been holding out for a long time and was having doubts, but the matter was literally out of my hands. When the dust settled, we had stored all of the equipment away in my SOGO locker and gone to the Ploughman Inn for celebratory drinks.

“My god, Bones, what have I done?” I said to Dean, who of course gave the only appropriate answer: “What you had to do, what you alway eventually do when forced by friends to do what you’ve been whining about for literally years. Literally. Years.”

Kirk chose that moment to call and invite me out to the Taiwan Bear Club. He starts next week at his new job at American Express and wanted to celebrate his new employment/mourn the loss of his carefree unemployed lifestyle, so I met him over there later, and by this time it was quite late. We sat and drank, him Taiwan Beer and me red wine, as various burly, bearded rugby-shirt wearing men sang Taiwanese love ballads under a disco ball that created the impression of several dozen multicolored rats flitting across the miniscule dance floor in time with the music.

We left at around 3 or 4 am, Kirk wanting assurance from me that I didn’t in fact want to take one of the greeters, an aborigine fellow from Hualian named Qiang, home with me. WIth heavy stubble and a crew cut, Qiang looked tough from a distance, but when he sat down to talk with us, emitted am air of foppiness exactly 180 degrees from his appearance. Even the wine wasn’t helping in this respect, so I declined to pursue any further developments that night. It was after 4am when I staggered home and fell into bed.

And now I have this camera calling out to me (as well as massive debt). Perhaps it is my chance to turn massive apathy into a fighting chance to actually do something productive.