At noon today, when everyone was on their way to lunch, people kept crowding into the elevator on the way down, more and more at each floor, mostly office ladies and a couple of manager types. On one floor a woman actually tried to stage-dive inside but aborted her attempt when she realized there was no more vertical space left. At each floor the elevator lurched in an alarming fashion, eliciting oohs and aahs from the crowd inside. Then it stopped somewhere between the first and second floors, and refused to budge.

The office ladies immediately started complaining about the poor quality of the elevator. “I don’t suppose the fact that it’s overloaded has anything to do with it,” I said, wondering if there were any hard statistics on the relationship between pointy shoes and stuck elevators.

“We should find the stage-diving woman and stick her head in the door,” someone said. Struck by this idea, I started to rummage around in my backpack for something to open the doors with.

“Hey, what do you have in your bag?” one of the two manager types asked me in an accusatory tone.

“You think we’re stuck because of something in my bag?” I asked, incredulous. “I don’t know, could be this hunk of collapsed-star matter I brought for an afternoon snack…it’s kinda dense.” I refrained from comparing it to his head.

“But we’re all so thin!” one of the office ladies was lamenting. “How could we possibly be over the weight limit?”

This was too much. “I think the sign refers to real weight, not delusional self-image weight,” I said, pointing to the capacity warning. I was a bit miffed at the situation, but I managed to keep myself from making any more jokes about, say, the obvious fallacy of the famed mathematical abilities of Taiwanese People in General. (Story Problem: “The elevator can hold only 15 people. How many people can the elevator hold?”)

Outside a muffled voice told us that they had called the elevator people, but they were out to lunch, so we just had to wait a little while, as if we could go anywhere. It was getting stuffy, and although I was pretty sure the elevator wasn’t air-tight, some of the women were complaining of not being able to breathe.

Now, I realize that being stuck in an elevator full of whining, pointy-shoed office ladies might sound appealing to some, but it is a prospect I personally do not relish, so I pulled out my utility knife, wedged the elevator doors open, and then did the same with the bottom of the 2nd-floor outer doors. The floor was about even with my chest. The building attendents were outside; they shut off the elevator power and handed a chair down so everyone could climb out. I waited until everyone was out except for one woman in a long brown skirt. “Go on,” I told her, but she shook her head and hugged the rear wall.

“I’m wearing a skirt, so I’ll go last,” she said.

“You think I’m going to look up your skirt?” She didn’t answer, but her look said enough so I didn’t wait. By the time I got out all of the other passengers had rushed off to their respective lunches, leaving the building maintenence guys to deal with the ornery elevator.

“We called the elevator people, but they’re still at lunch,” one of them said. But by the time I got back from my own lunch, the elevator was running again. Did the elevator people ever come? I don’t know, but I think I’ll avoid rush-hour elevator rides in the future.

I spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday working on the Blue Moon spot. This involved getting up way too early in the mornings and missing several meals. One day was spent shooting interview stuff in my much-rearranged living room, another riding around Yangmingshan with a camera strapped to my motorcycle’s handlebars, and the third day filming me crawling around in the dirt in an army uniform with an automatic rifle. The crew was really good to work with; everyone was really into their work, and I think I’ve made some valuable contacts in the industry here with the experience. They had a lot more equipment than I’m used to working with, which made me feel kind of proud that we accomplished as much as we did with what we had on our last project. I took a couple of small videos with my little Canon and will have a small vidlet of the experience up here as soon as I have enough time to put something together.

Dean’s birthday party is this Friday at the usual Indian restaurant, and he is working on a Dean’s Birthday Edition DVD of Clay Soldiers to hand out. Some features are going to have to wait until we get more material together and learn how to do certain things with the DVD authoring programs, but it should be a lot nicer than the very basic DVD I put together with Darrell a few weeks ago. I also need to get the film to the Urban Nomad people in time for the festival next month. And we need to start work on the series finale.

昨天去一家製作公司叫藍月影視製作公司, 找一些想找我幫忙拍片的朋友. 那邊感覺不錯, 大家都很友善. 他們拍過得片子包括我最喜歡的阿q統一麵廣告. 原來那位男主角是他們去中南部找的, 而且他現在在高鐵做工程師. 好厲害吧. 有機會的話我會跟他們要一些廣告的圖案來訪上面.

昨晚也去一家新開的酒吧叫’沒問題’. 那邊雖然小, 但是裡面裝潢滿舒服, 而且他們有提供免費的快速無線上網的服務. 以後如果方便的話我會再去那邊吃飯,

A production company called Blue Moon (no, it’s not what you think) got in touch with me recently about doing a spot for them, something vaguely related to the election but not too political, so yesterday after work I went down to check out their setup, which is located near Civic Blvd and Yanji Street. It was a bustling place, full of people rushing around and staring at monitors. I was introduced around and we talked about the spot. I was impressed that they view it as a collaboration rather than just telling me what to do. I saw some of their previous work and leaned that they’re the people behind some of my favorite commercials here. I look forward to seeing how they work.

After that and a scary visit to the big green DPP election headquarters on Minsheng E. Road to tell them no, I wouldn’t go up on stage at an election rally and “chat” with thousands of screaming teenagers about How Much I Adore Taiwan, I got a call from Shirzi, who was heading over to a new bar near the Liuzhangli traffic circle called Bobwundaye. I’d heard a lot of good things about this place, but it took a couple of phone calls to sort out exactly where it was. When I did find it, I also found Dean sitting at a table in the oddly-hushed bar. I got the feeling that someone had just said something awkward, but Dean said it had been like that since he arrived. Later they put on some music, and then some other friends showed up, including Maoman, V, Shirzi, Jez and a man from Texas called Uncle.

Since I had helped Shirzi out at the police station, he was buying, so I had the delecious chicken pie, soggy fish sticks, chips, and an unending supply of rum and cokes lasting until they threw us out at some time after 2am. I seem to recall learning a card game from a couple of British women called Ookie Nookie or something like that (The game was called Ookie Nookie, not the women, though I could be mistaken.) Needless to say, getting up for work this morning was a chore.

I’m now officially back at work, or whatever I do that passes for work. The weather’s been great these days, but according to the papers a sandstorm from mainland China is wreaking havoc. I’m glad I read the newspaper sites; otherwise I might not have noticed the havoc-wreaking going on around here. Maybe we should have a referendum about sandstorms and whether we like them or not.

I went down to Hsinchu yesterday to meet up with some old friends, including Chen Ze-kang, with whom I was an assistant cameraman back at KPS many years ago. Ah-kang, as he is known to his friends, just got officially married and is on his way back to his home in San Jose today. I visited him once in the early 90’s there and found I could get by speaking only Chinese for weeks at a time in San Jose and San Francisco, as all the restaurants and most of the shops we went to were Chinese-operated.

After I got back to Taipei I went out for dinner with Peter Ma, who introduced me to his friend Kloie, a Canadian woman who just finished filming a documentary about the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. We watched some of her footage on Peter’s computer; really amazing stuff. She wants to enter Urban Nomad, and I agree, but I also think she should be setting her sights much, much higher. We were in Cafe Oso near Shi-da, so I decided to take advantage of their free wireless Internet access to try out the Airport card I have in my Powerbook; it was rather strange being able to acccess the Internet without wires outside my home; I’m not sure more Internet access is really what I need, though, as I spend too much time online already.

糟糕了…我的房東前天打電話給我說她已經跟房屋公司安排給客人看我的家. 她有看到一些新聞說台灣的房屋市

My friends and former co-workers Peter Ma and Dave Smith came down to visit me and discuss video stuff the other day. They both have 12-inch G4 Powerbooks and made a show of blatantly sharing files RIGHT IN MY LIVING ROOM. We were having lunch when I got a call from Shirzi, who informed me that he had just been robbed of over a thousand dollars (US) by a group of vicious children, and now he needed my assistance translating as he dealt with the police at the station, which was located in a small place on the road to Wulai.

I took a taxi out and found Shirzi, a lone police officer and a couple of kids sitting with their heads down sitting in the station. I translated the story to the police as well as questions going back and forth for a while, and then the father of one of the kids came over and slapped the kids around a bit. Eventually a bunch of thuggish-looking men strode into the station, all blustery and hard-nosed. It turned out that they were plainclothes officers, and they interrogated the kids in a ruthless fashion for a while, taking pictures of them with signs, etc., before heading off to see if they could find any of the remaining money. I shot a few pictures of my own, and then we were free to go. One of the officers, they guy who was there originally, gave us a ride part of the way down the mountain in his police cruiser, lights and all.

Later that night the police called me and Shirzi to another station to identify the other members of the Vicious Child Gang, so I got to stay up until 1:30am translating stuff for the report. Turns out the stolen money had all been spent in the space of a few days. Although the father offered to repay Shirzi, he doubts he’ll ever see that money again.

The weather’s actually been nice these past few days, gloriously bright mornings with welcome blue skies stretching all the way to the afternoon, when things get cloudy. I took my newly repaired and repainted (read: I bought a can of spray paint) motorcycle for a spin a few days ago and found it running better than ever thanks to NT$9,000 spent at the Bike Farm. I mostly ride it into the countryside these days, as taking the MRT into the city is much more convenient in most cases.

In other news, I got a call from my landlord in Canada, who told me that a realtor would begin showing my apartment to potential buyers on weekends. “But I still have six months on my lease; it’s a bit early to be showing it, isn’t it?” I asked, dismayed at the thought of having to leave this wonderful place.

“If they really want to buy it, I’m sure they won’t mind paying you an extra month’s rent. Who knows, maybe they’ll even rent it back to you.”

Nice, huh? Ok, I know it’s not nice. In fact it’s pretty fucked up.

This, now, is nice. I just got it. You knew it was only a matter of time.

Guess what?

Yes, that’s right, I’m sure everyone involved in our effort will be happy to learn that we did quite well at the Exxies, taking the Best Episode, Best Writing and Best Location awards. My personal thanks to the entire cast and crew for their efforts. We’ll get DVDs out everyone asap, and the final cut of the film will be shown on the big screen at Urban Nomad this year.

Now, of course, we need to begin work on producing the final episode capping off the entire series. First thing that will happen is that the main characters of all the other episodes all die sudden, violent deaths! Haha, just kidding…I think.

昨天晚上出版社的人打電話給我說一週刊想要訪問我. 第一個反應是 “小心!” 但是他們說只是一個個人訪問, 並不象他們的

What’s wrong with this picture?

Taipei second phase water restrictions to begin today



The Greater Taipei area enters the second-phase water restriction program with a 20 percent cutback in water supply to heavy users beginning today. The move has been adopted by the national anti-drought task force and the Taipei Water Co. to prevent a further deterioration in water supplies to the general public in northern Taiwan.

Now, what I want to know is, where the hell is all the water going? We’ve have more-or-less constant rainfall so far this year, so constant I think we’re going to go collectively insane from the sound of raindrops on tin rooftops. My guess is that some evil tychoon somewhere has come up with a plan to turn discarded egg-tarts and bad newspaper articles into pure titanium via a process that consumes tons and tons of water. Because I simply haven’t seen that many squeaky-clean cars (or people) around.

In other news, my publisher called me last night and said Next Magazine wants to interview me. I asked him if it sounded fishy, considering Next’s reputation, especially in view of the heightened level of sensationalism brought about by the Apple Daily. He said it wouldn’t be for a front-page story, just an interview of “interesting” (read: Bizarre) individuals. I also wonder if it has anything to do with the upcoming presidential elections, etc.

I suppose it couldn’t hurt too much to give it a shot; even if, in the worst-case scenario, they turn it into a nasty sensationalist disaster of a story, at least I’ll get a lot of rubbernecker sales.