Absolutely Not Your Monkey
我越來越討厭hotmail的服務. 真的很想買一台mac g5蘋果電腦. 問題是我目前經濟非常有限. 也許年初會看到一點來自賣書版稅之收入, 再說吧.
新店滿好住的地方, 跟台北市中心差好多. 我最近感覺比較有精神. 後面山坡還有好多山路可以上去走走看. 家裡還沒有完全整理好, 還要找窗簾, 地毯, 海
I went across the Bitan bridge to visit the Sandcastle yesterday. The weather was as fine as you could ask for, and though my new place is quite pleasant, I wanted to get out a bit. After eating at a vegetarian place we retired to the Sandcastle and chatted a bit. Sandman and his wife Jojo decided to donate a couple of elaborate green-and-purple chairs for my new place. Before I repainted, the green-and-purple scheme would have fit right in, but I think more repainting is the only way to rescue these chairs, which are surprisingly comfy and look like little sub-thrones, from the clutches of dubious taste.
After we got the thrones back to my place, we decided to go out to a nearby restaurant for dinner. Sandman and Jojo swore it was a good place, but after we got there and were served our food, the woman attending us said there was no rice. This was followed by a few moments of disbelief. No rice? In a Chinese restaurant? We looked around, saw other people eating rice. “We’ll make some more, though. It will be a while.” We looked at the dishes rapidly cooling on the table. She could have said something, or timed the dishes to arrive with the rice. You just can’t have Chinese dishes without rice; it’s like a hamburger without the bun.
A good while later, after we had all agreed that this was pretty shoddy service, I noticed the serving woman hand-delivering a bowl of hot, steaming rice to an old man at another table. Curious, I got up and went over to the rice cooker. The woman warned me not to open it, but I did anyway. Not surprisingly, it was filled with steaming, well-cooked rice. “Why didn’t you give us our rice?” I asked.
“It’s not ready yet,” she replied, even though they had just served some to another table from that very rice cooker.
“Well, give us this ‘not-ready’ rice, then.” It took them a while to realize just what I meant by this, and we got our rice, only then taking our food back to the kitchen to be re-heated while our rice got cold. It was an amazing experience. Apparently the boss was away that night, and none of the current servers were regulars. Maybe they just grabbed random people off the street and gave them a thousand NT to play waitstaff for a night. The food, when we got it, was decent enough, but I’ve seen starved crocodiles with better attitudes. It was like a game of charades where they had to impart the concept of telling us to fuck off without actually saying it. Sandman seemed on the verge of going over to the fishtanks, grabbing a particularly large grouper, and hitting the serving woman with it, but we managed to leave without incident. Outside the restaurant was a kitten in a cage, the color of its fur obsured by the dark and several layers of filth. The waiter didn’t know what gender it was, or how old it was, but it seemed friendly enough and meowed an answer to its name, “Mimi”.
On Saturday Mindcrime and I went to see Underworld, in which a group of poor, innocent werewolves are discriminated against by arrogant vampires who laze about in an elaborate living room staring at whomever has the gall to walk by. I know this because the completely emotionless main character does it several times, and they all act as if noone’s ever walked through a room before. Hints of what must have been a romance in the original script are hammered in here and there, and though day is referenced in the film, it’s never shown to exist. The dialogue was painful enough on its own, and even more so when muddled through by the actors. Wonderful camerawork and good editing made it watchable, but not easily. On the plus side, though, we did get to see a kick-ass trailer for Return of the King before the feature.
That night, after dinner, I was walking back to the subway station when I spotted Maurice, Dolly, Peter and Rowan sitting out in front of Cosi a Cosi. Rowan and Maurice, having drunk quite a bit at that point, were singing what I took to be some kind of Broadway medley. I sat down and we talked a bit. I was glad to hear that they are all eager to start work on another project now that Lady X is finished, since they’re all good actors as well as good people. I accompanied them to Q Bar, where we met Dean, Alien and Fuad, but I didn’t stay long since I had to take the train home, and to be honest, I’m not very comfortable in such situations for very long.
I have some more short movies to put up, as well as a brand-spanking new spymac account to put them in, plus various pictures of idiots on the MRT. I’ve been getting more and more frustrated with the Windows Way over the last few weeks. My computing needs are fairly simple. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect an OS to actually work. Having to perform the mechanical equivalent of brain surgery just to perform the simplest tasks is not, in my opinion, a winning business strategy. I am being pushed further and further towards getting a Mac, if indeed they are all they seem to be. I don’t want miracles from my computer; I just want it to work, and do the things it is supposed to do. Limited finances keep me PC-bound for the moment, but at this point I think that if I somehow came into a large amount of money I would definitely choose a new G5 over upgrading my PC anymore.
I was invited to a barbeque in Taoyuan on Saturday night by someone I met at a party. I didn’t know the guy at all, but some people I knew were going, and I do need to get out more, so I decided to go. A carful of guys I didn’t know picked me up in front of California Gym (of course) and we headed towards the highway. This is how news stories start out, I was thinking.
I said I needed to get out more, and this place was pretty far out. It was an ordinary house on a small lane off an isolated road, and surrounded by empty grassland. Normally this setting would make an unsettling place to be taken at night with a carload of strange men, but they had set up a nice party area on the rooftop, with trance music and plastic chairs. Occasionally it would rain a little bit and then stop. Jets taking off from CKS airport flew overhead every so often. One of the guys I knew, Jonathan, seemed know where each one was going. “That’s the one to Singapore,” he would say. “The one to LA will be coming over in a few minutes.”
I talked with a few guys, ignored some others and was ignored by still more. I would say it felt a lot like Fresh had been transported out into the middle of nowhere, but that would be damning indeed, and it really wasn’t that bad. I still need to get out more.
On Sunday I met Harry and Mark at B&Q while I was looking at rugs. I had thought they might help me decide what to get, but I should have recalled what Harry’s house looks like. We ended up going back to Xindian. Harry, none too happy with the state of my doorway’s Fengshui (he’s probably inventing an elaborate system of eight-sided curved mirrors as we speak), wanted to take me over to a Daoist Temple just across the river. It’s not really even a proper temple, it’s a lingtai, an alter surrounded in front by a semicircle of glass panes. To the side several people sat at a table, one of them singing another’s fortune in Taiwanese. In the back a man was reciting a prayer while going through some pretty athletic motions in front of the rear alter.
We almost didn’t get over there, but luckily the boatman noticed us standing on the Xindian side and paddled over to pick us up. On the way back I asked him how long he’d been ferrying people across the river, since he looked like he’d been doing it forever, but he said he’d been doing it for three years. There are two ferrymen, and they take turns, one day ferrying, one day off. The boat, however, was several decades old. I took some video of Harry and Mark on the boat, but I’ve been having trouble compressing these videos enough to put them up on here. I might just need to either get another website or add space to this one.
I’ve begun to suspect that a large group of ants has managed to successfully impersonate a large ant poison corporation over the Internet, thus manipulating the production of ant delicacies marketed as ant poison. I say this because, after buying little containers of ant poison and placing them in various corners of my kitchen, the ants now seem to be having an unending banquet at my expense. They congregate inside the little plastic containers, supposedly full of poison, and have little ant beach parties. I can almost hear music from tiny boomboxes.
I was in the Warner Village area one day last week to see about some money Ogilvy still owes me. The entire company was on vacation, however, so I went and saw S.W.A.T, which I enjoyed immensely, and not just because LL Cool J and Page Kennedy are gods. It was also just a simple, fun movie.
From an article in the China Post today:
“Cabinet spokesman Lin Chia-lung ridiculed Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou for accusing the local media of “missing the point” of his remarks and of nitpicking, saying the media knows what is newsworthy and that Ma should respect this. He also accused Ma of trying to collude with Beijing to block Taiwan’s democratic development.”
This has got to be one of the funniest things I’ve heard in months…has the good Spokesman ever seen the media here? They miss points and nitpick on a daily basis, and I doubt most of the media in Taiwan would know what was newsworthy if it came up and sat on their face. Remember the Taiwan News’ top story the day Beijing won the 2008 Olympics bid? “Human Head Transplant a Success” or something like that, wasn’t it?
The Taipei Times, of course, didn’t even attribute in its headline on the Ma thing, merely writing “Ma likens plebiscites to Cultural Revolution” in its headline. Then again, not only does the Times hate Ma and the KMT in general, it rarely feels the need to attribute anything in its stories.
The driver of a taxi I was in yesterday was complaining about the whole political situation. “These politicians are squabbling about stupid things like “Taiwan’s real name” and whether little towns should be able to mandate whether they get freeway exits or not, while people are losing jobs and the economy’s going to shit.” He recounted the Bayer disaster of a few years ago, when a group of residents in Shalu, near Taichung, successfully blocked the construction of a Bayer plant nearby because they feared pollution. If you’ve ever been to Shalu, you’d wonder why the same residents didn’t have a problem with the huge clouds of foul smoke emerging from nearby local factories who burn plastics on a regular basis. “It’s no wonder everyone’s going to China these days,” the cabbie said. “Everyone’s protesting everything, and nothing’s getting done. It’s crazy.” Yeah, I thought. Democrazy. I suppose it’s natural for an emerging democracy with a relatively uneducated populace to go through such troubles, but Taiwan’s situation is a bit more precarious than most.
Of course, the snippet of Ma’s discussion in which he was relaying that Taiwanese businessmen in China had compared the DPP’s referendum drive with a cultural revolution was a bit strange, but it seems like every time the DPP attacks an opponent they just dig themselves a little bit deeper. I personally don’t find the idea of a public referendum very useful. We could hold a referendums, say, in favor of raising everyone’s wages 20%; I’m sure everyone would support it. That doesn’t mean it would be a smart thing to do.
Whenever anyone in Taiwan doesn’t get their way these days, it seems inevitable that they will start shouting that someone is trying to take away their basic human democratic rights. Yeah, buddy, sorry about depriving you of your basic human democratic right to triple park park your benz in front of the Shark Fin restaurant for three hours there. Democracy means letting the people’s voice be heard, but basing all government decisions on popular vote is nothing better than anarchy, especially since democracy requires a reasonably enlightened populace. Not that anarchy is without its charms, but supposedly someone has to call the shots.
Speaking of shots, the more I use Windows, the more surprised someone hasn’t tried to hit Bill Gates with something more substantial than a lemon pie. The steps I took to get my computer to recognize USB 2.0, mainly installing a service pack, invalidated Premiere, which means I have to reinstall it and hope it still works. I swear, Macs are looking better and better, especially those lucious G5s I’ve seen at Apple stores here. Of course, buying one would mean going another couple of years without a vacation or saving any money, and I could really use a vacation.
I saw Pirates of the Carribean last night. Best line:
Will: You cheated!
Jack: Uh, pirate!
Due to a full bladder and a Bruckheimer shakycam-inspired headache I missed the final scenes stuck on after the credits. Ah, well. That’s what DVDs are for.
I took a longish ride on my motorcycle yesterday. First I headed north up into the mountains where I seem to recall an old friend of mine, Qian Wei-min, lived when I first came to Taipei looking for a job. I was staying with him at his family’s villa for a time, and he’d give me a ride on his scooter all the way into Taipei every morning to look for work.
I continued on down the other side to Route 9, which runs towards Pinglin in one direction and Wulai in the other. I headed towards Wulai, stopping on the way to look at the damn in the Xindian River, then crossing the bridge, which was flanked on the other side by scores of tourist lodging and dining places. I then headed up a narrow valley through which a stream ran. Some guys were fishing where a small dam had created a bit of a pool. It was a hot day, so I stopped and sat on a rock in the stream for a while watching as a family prepared for lunch on the banks of the stream. The mother got a little fire going while the baby daughter threw pebbles into the water, and the father, equipped with a scuba mask, net and blue flipflops, wandered around in the deeper bits fo the stream looking for fish they could fry and eat. Occasionally he would stop to make a call on his cell phone. I asked one of the fishing guys if the water was safe. “To swim in? I guess so,” he told me. “But I wouldn’t drink it. I throw all the fish I catch back in, and so does he.” He pointed at another fisherman.
I passed several empty villas on my up the valley, followed by several Tu Ji Cheng places where large groups of revellers could have banquets along the stream. The road was twisty but in good condition, and soon there weren’t any buildings around at all. I stopped at an intersection, uncertain which way to go, when I spotted a small shack advertising food and drink, so I went over to ask directions and have a bite to eat.
The owner was an elderly woman. She was chatting with an older guy that might have been her husband, and an aborigine worker who was repairing the tin roof. When I asked her why she decided to put up a restaurant up in such an isolated location, she told me that she was born and raised just across the road, and after many years persuing a career in Taipei, she decided to retire back at her old home. The Tu Ji Cheng places often turned down solitary customers, and many travellers just wanted a simple meal. I asked about the empty villas. “It’s not ‘quiet’ enough for them,” she said.
“Huh?” I said, stupidly.
“Ghosts,” another customer, a guy who had just driven up in a car, interjected. “Haunted.”
“That’s bullshit,” the old woman retorted. “They’re just city folk who aren’t used to the sounds of the mountains. One time I worked for a pig farm up on the mountain. The fog was really thick, and nobody would work there because the walls shook and people found blood spots in the mornings. I knew that it was just cats hunting rats in the crawlspaces, and the blood was rat blood.” She shook her head, smiling.
I had a hard time finishing my noodles, as they weren’t very good, but I could hardly complain since any food out there is hard to come by. I elected to take another route back to the city, the road that led up over Lion Head Mountain. At first it was quite nice. I passed a couple of seemingly abandoned Taoist temples, and at the summit the whole of Taipei basin was spread out, Taipei 101 sticking out rather incongruously from the rest of the city, its still-unfinished spire every bit as high as the mountain on which I stood.
On the way down the other side, however, the road was under constuction, with big dump trucks lurching around the narrow corners followed by dense clouds of dust. The decline was so steep I was afraid my brakes might overheat even though I was using engine breaking as well to ease the burden on them.
I was tired and sore from the ride by the time I got back home, so I napped until it was time for sword practice, which has become half sword practice and half Tui-shou practice. Oddly enough, I arrived exhausted and left refreshed.
I went to RT Mart this morning and found that they have a sale on basic bicycles, so I picked one up for NT$1500. My living room/dining room still echoes every sound, so watching TV in there is a bit weird. I should get a rug or something, but the only rug place I knew, the one on Zhongxiao East Road near the Jianguo overpass, has been torn down, and I’m loathe to rely solely on Ikea crap for my carpeting needs. Some posters would be nice as well; too many empty white walls.
In other news, the first spot we did for Via is up on their media website now. No word yet on when the second spot we did is going to be up, as it’s still in post production.
I’ll put up some pictures from my ride later on, if any turn out to be any good, that is.
Tall Paul’s bicycle, which he straps to the back of his car and rides around Taipei, is an old, beat-up thing. But I could still make out the familiar font on the frame: RALEIGH.
When I was growing up in the early 70’s, I learned to ride a bike using a bright yellow Schwinn. My brother Kevin, eight years my senior, was riding one of those low-rider 3-speeds, a green thing with a black banana seat and a clunky gear shift mounted on the center bar. After we moved to Texas from Florida I got a “bandit” bike from Sears that was all orange plastic and black metal at first, then just black metal as the plastic bits fell off. Around that time, though, my brother got the most beautiful bike I’d ever seen, a metallic red Raleigh Grand Prix 10-speed. It was gorgeous, and he always kept it in pristine condition. When I was ready to graduate to a ten-speed, my parents found an old yellow bike held together with black duct tape at a garage sale, but after we moved back to Florida (you’ve probably guessed that we moved around a lot), I got a new brown Huffy Santa Fe 10-speed with a rack on the back I could use to carry my trumpet, strapped on with bungie cords, to band practice. Back then we all identified with our bikes, and you knew exactly what everyone rode. The Huffy was ok, but my brother’s Raleigh was still, to me, the pinnacle of bicycledom. After he went off to college he left the bike for a time, and when I “borrowed” it I felt like nothing could touch me. It was light, much lighter than my bike, and luciously smooth. My Santa Fe was deteriorating rapidly from daily trips to school and around the neighborhood, but the Raleigh still looked and felt brand new.
Kevin took the bike with him when he was stationed at a Naval base in Charleston, South Carolina, and it was stolen soon after that. I’d forgotten all about it until I saw the etching on Paul’s bike. Now that I’m living at the edge of town, I’m thinking of getting a (cheap) bike to ride around the paths down by the river.
In case you’re wondering, I’m quite happy with my new place. It’s not quite in order yet, but it’s getting there. I love being able to open up my doors and windows to see and hear the mountains, and I love having the space. The sudden quiet of the alley always surprises me after the noise of the main road that runs in front of the MRT station. The people in the area are different, too. When I lived behind Sogo Department Store simply walking out my door felt like walking onto a catwalk, but in Xindian it’s more just ordinary folk, on their way to or from work, vendors hanging around shooting the shit, gaggles of students, etc. On weekends there’s a lot of tourists, sure, but they all head down to the river and the swan-shaped paddle boats. There’s paths leading up into the mountains I’m itching to try out, and of course there’s Wulai, which I’m not familiar with at all since most of my previous exploration was directed north of the city.
The neighborhood where I live is definitely not monastery-quiet. Someone in the building is learning to play piano. They’re digging up the yard in the place behind me. The school on the hill is always ringing its bells, playing music and making announcements over the loudspeakers. But somehow I don’t mind any of it. Maybe I will someday, but they just seem like reasonable neighborhood sounds to me now, whereas the music and noise behind Sogo seemed irritating in the extreme.
So, for all of you who are insane enough to look forward to me complaining about my apartment: Sorry, you’ll have to go elsewhere for that kind of thing now.
The other day on the subway I was approached by an older Chinese man. “Excuse me, ” he said. “Can you tell me the English name of these?” He was referring to the bouquet of nondescript flowers he held in his hand.
I looked them over, but couldn’t identify them. They were white, that was all I could tell. “Orchids? Lilies?” I told him. “Sorry, I don’t know anything about flowers.”
“Or-chid?” he looked at me for confirmation, but I couldn’t tell an orchid from a concrete wall.
“I really don’t know, I’m sorry.”
He turned around, dejected at his failure to elicit the mysterious name of the flowers from me, and I suddenly felt ashamed of my ignorance. I envisioned the old guy presenting the flowers to a woman he was sweet on, or perhaps his wife, wishing he could impress her with the English name of the flowers. Or perhaps the woman he was sweet on was a foreigner, maybe even his English teacher. In any case, he was obviously on his way there, and the chances he would meet another foreigner, much less one who knew the kind of flowers he held, were slim to none.
I felt bad about letting the old guy down, even though I still find people who see all white people in their immediate vicinity as mobile English-teaching units placed there for their convenience. And Lord knows I’ve offended more than my fair share of people on the subway by doing things like blocking opportunists who endeavor to dash on to the train and grab a seat before anyone gets off, but I was actually kind of hoping to set an example with that one. In any case, disappointing old guys with flowers wasn’t part of the plan.
Typhoon Maemi has been steadily drifting towards our fair island for the past day or so. All of the predictions said it would turn north towards Japan, but so far it doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. The Central Weather Bureau hasn’t issued any warnings, and other typhoon sites predict a 90-degree turn soon. Of course, they were predicting it would turn north yesterday and the day before, but it didn’t. It’s been pissing down rain all day here in Taipei, but I’m not sure if that has anything to do with the typhoon. The only reason I can think of for Maemi to be so obstinate is that it somehow knows that tomorrow is Moon Festival Day, a public holiday, so nobody’s going to get an extra day off.
The commercial shoot went well, better than I had expected based on our lack of preparedness. We started at 2:30, took a dinner break for pizza and coke around 6, and wrapped up at about 10pm. We had a track for this shoot, thanks to Da Shan’s connections. I sat on the little cart with the camera and a little Taiwanese guy called Gi-doa pushed me along the tracks as we shot. It was cool and quite effective. At one point a TV news crew came in and wanted to film people exercising, so we stood around for 15 minutes while they got their stuff. Later we saw the piece on the news. Quick work for a slow news day.
I have stuff to eat in my new place, but no place to eat it, so I haven’t been cooking much lately. There’s not much around here to eat except for some roadside stands, noodle places and KFC. It’s all cheap eating, which is good, but now that I have a full kitchen I might as well put it to use.
