Nam got my computer working again, now with two extra fans and a new case. It’s not noisier than it was before, but then it’s always been pretty loud. It did shut down and restart on its own this afternoon while I was capturing footage, but hopefully that won’t be a common occurance. Knock on wood.

The Muddy Basin Ramblers are back! We did a gig at our ancestral home of Peshawar on Saturday night and it rocked. No advertising, so the place wasn’t as packed as usual, but it was a full house nonetheless. The owner cautioned us about being too loud, and we only got in a couple of sets, but the stuff we were able to do was good. I was afraid we were rusty after so long a hiatus, but it turns out we were just getting antsy. I got asked a lot about the washtub bass, as usual, and one guy, a real bassist, even tried to play it. It’s hard, though, and I get a kick out of watching other people play the thing. David can, and Dana could when she was here, but everyone else does little more than a general thumping. We didn’t mic it this time, so in order to hear it I was bearing down pretty hard. So hard, in fact, that I wore through half a mic stand and almost a whole ballpoint pen. I’m going to have to get a titanium pic or something for nights like those.

We were halfway through a song when a huge cockroach ran towards me. Without stopping or (hopefully) missing notes, I stomped on it and spent the rest of the song wondering if it was stuck to the bottom of my duck shoes. Turned out it was. Ew.

That’s ok, though, as I’m not a prominent member of the band. Sandman had women calling out that they wanted him to father their babies, underwear is frequently thrown at the likes of Conor and Slim, David is simply too cute for many people, and Thumper, well, Thumper wears sequins, and besides, he’s married. But I stay in the back for the most part and play my tub and the horns without too much attention, so the whole roach thing wasn’t that big a deal.

We stayed until about 2 or 3 before catching cabs back to Bitan, where Sandman and Slim were accosted by a pack of dogs in front of 7-Eleven. Adoring fans, no doubt.

Update: Paul’s done a little photo-essay of the day’s shoot here.

I was going to entitle this entry “Battered”, because that’s how I felt in many ways afterwards. But I thought better of it, and you’re probably more interested in the horses anyway.

I met Dean and Paul at Darrell’s house on Sunday morning, after only having gotten a few hours’ sleep the night before due to a band gig. We’ve been having nightly rainshowers lately, but the weather is always fine by morning. Dean had driven the rather odiferous van we rented over so that Darrell could get all his stuff in without having to lug it all to the MRT. Our plan was to film the horses quickly and then do another scene that involved some complicated setups. As usual, we bit off a bit more than we could chew.

Anyway, we drove over to Dean’s house, where we met the actors and Shirzi, and after some annoying parking complications, we headed out to Guandu, where the horse farm was located. We found it with little trouble, although I’m pretty sure we managed to cross a pedestrian footbridge in the van at one point.

The place was basically a few shacks, a stables and a corral. A couple of Shetland ponies were tied up nearby, and a beautiful white horse with a broken leg walked around a grassy wetland bordered by the bird santuary. It smelled, but after the van it smelled pretty good.

We went down to get the lay of the land. It turned out that the horses only went certain places, and the area I wanted, of the three main actors riding off into the distance, was in an area the horses had never been too. There was a lot of consternation about the two inches of water, which didn’t make sense to me as I’m pretty sure I’ve seen horses ford rivers before.

Darrell and I set up our cameras while the actors rode around the corral getting used to their mounts. I kept looking at my watch and asking Dean if he’d asked them about our time, but they said not to worry about it. Obviously they were planning to charge us for every minute and probably more, but there was nothing I could do at that point. I found a piece of corrugated plastic to cover my camera from the sun and waited.

We got the riding-into-the-distance shot in two takes without much of a problem. Well, April’s horse decided to start lunch first and refused to move for a bit, but otherwise, it went ok. We then moved into the more familiar grassy area to do the other shots. Mounting went smoothly, but the shot where Maurice is leading the other two horses ended up in his own mount galloping away with him a couple of times. He did eventually gain masterful control of his horse, towards the end. Although I had to keep my camera away from that particular horse’s green saliva, which it could fling surprising distances.

Once we were done with the horses, we filmed the actors in shots with no horses needed. Dean informed me that the place was charging us NT$8000, many times the original amount, for the horses, which was of course no surprise.

It was about 4pm by the time we got back to Dean’s neighborhood for the other scenes with the van, and the light was failing fast. At one point, while Dean and Shirzi had gone to get some bagels, a policeman came up and asked, “Are you part of an international film crew assigned here from a studio?”

“Uh, no,” I answered. “We’re just a bunch of friends, uh, filming stuff. You know, for fun.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, ok, then. See you.”

Ok, then.

We didn’t get too much done before it was too dark to film, but we got a couple of things before I had to call it a day. It was an insane schedule in any case; it wasn’t likely that we would have gotten everything we planned done. It just means we’ll have to rent the van again next weekend. More money.

We were packing up, and I handed the camera over to Darrell before hopping over the hedge. As I did so, I completely missed the curb on the other side and fell flat on my face. Well, I fell flat on my knee, shin, and wrist, actually. Ouch. Only a little blood, though, and a sore wrist and knee.

I was really tired, but I had to eat, so i went with Paul and Darrell to Bongos for dinner. As we ate, the sky opened up and gave us our nightly deluge. It didn’t show any signs of stopping, so we walked quickly towards the nearest MRT. As we crossed in front of the temple on Xinsheng S. Road, I slipped on the wet tiles and fell on my ass. Thankfully, the camera didn’t break, but by the time I got home I’d just about had it. After that day’s shoot, the schedule, my wallet and I had all taken a real beating. That was when I thought up “Battered” as a title for this post. But after some snacks, a hot shower and some Firefly, I felt a lot better, thanks.

Now, about Ang Lee‘s little brother (you thought I’d forgotten, didn’t you?): A friend of mine, a French fellow named Jean-louis, was introducing a friend of his who works at the French Institute here to Ang Lee’s little brother, Khan, so he invited me along to the dinner. I showed up at the Round Table Teppanyaki Restaurant on Dunhua South Road, across from the Far Eastern Hotel, at 6:30, and sat while being fussed over by waitstaff who had no clue to which party I belonged to. Jean-louis showed up rather later, and we dined on outrageous dishes like goose liver, truffles, squid that actually tasted good (a first for me), and extremely good steak. There was also champagne and red wine.

Khan Lee looks a lot like his brother. We chatted about a lot of things, including moviemaking, fight scenes, the army, why Chinese people have round heads, and golf. He seems very quiet and unpreposessing. I said I might have some questions for him when it came time to seek distribution for our film, and he gave me his card. He seemed genuinely shocked when I told him about how much we’d spent on the film.

“You mean NT$5,000,000, right? Or NT$500,000. maybe?”

“No, about NT$50,000, so far. That’s a very rough guess, of course.”

“But what about renting lights?” he asked in the car as he gave me a ride home. “Other equipment? Any name stars? Any name anything?”

“Nope.”

“Amazing!”

We shot the train station sequence, a short but important scene, at Taipei Train Station’s underground platforms. There was the distinct possibility of being chased away, so we went in relatively small-scale: no boom, no tracks, just actors, crew, camera and tripod. Shirzi came along to scare people we didn’t want in shot away. At least it was cool and dry down there, unlike many of our shoots. Paul and Darrell took a lot of set pictures.

The main problem turned out to be the fact that each train stopped at a different portion of the platform. We’d line ourselves up for a shot with one train, but the next would stop way at the other end of the platform. At one point during a shot the voice of an insane child filled the station with some kind of psychotic poetry. Disturbing.

We finally realized that we’d just have to wing it, shooting all we could for each train and hoping to get the whole scene during one of the attempts. I think we did alright, considering.

In other news, I’ve been in communication with a government film promotion department concerning possible distribution or even investment for the film. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to realize that we are actually making a film, or if they do, they don’t seem to see what it has to do with them. Yet. They did give me some “free tickets” to the premiere of “The Heirloom”, a local ghost movie I believe done by the child prodigy behind Formula 17. The tickets, however, turned out to be contingent on there being actual seats, and by the time we got there the place was roped off. I can only hope we have such a premiere, so can rope off people just for the hell of it.

This coming weekend we’re going to be filming a few challenging scenes. One portion will be challenging because it involves horses, and the other will be difficult because it consists of little bits of action that will later be cut to other action, which we haven’t done yet and don’t yet really know how or where much of it will be done.

The other night after I got home, turned on my lights, turned on my computer and settled down to make some dinner, I noticed that my computer wasn’t doing anything. Oh, it was whirring and buzzing and blinking, but it wasn’t actually doing anything, like starting up.

Worrying that I might have blown my hard drive (sounds like a geek pr0n flick, don’t it?), the next day I called up Namic, a friend of Maoman’s, who does computer repair house calls. I hate having to unplug everything and haul my big silver box to Guanghua to find out what’s wrong with it.

Nam said he’d come over that night to take a look. He’s a Canadian of Azerbaijani descent who looks and acts much like the techie character Marshall on Alias, which I found immensely reassuring. Turns out I’ve blown my Asus motherboard; the drives are fine. Whew. It also turns out I need a lot more fans to keep other things from burning out, which means a new casing as well.

So I’ve been computer-less for the past couple of days at home. It’s been strange, a forced return to the pre-Internet age for me. I’ve cleaned up a bit and watched a lot of Firefly episodes (damn, that’s a good show, even if the Chinese is a bit much), but it’s odd to not always be online. Makes me wonder what all I did back then.

The weather broke yesterday as well. Our long streak of flawless atmospheric conditions and ideal light failed, and now we’re under the thumb of a tropical storm pulling across the Philippines. Had to happen sooner or later, I guess. Last night I hung out on the suspension bridge with neighbors Greg and Chris, among others. It was pleasant; I can see why so many folks around there do it; it’s fun to sit and chat, enjoying the breeze and the scenery. Just take care that you don’t drop anything that can roll off the bridge into the river below.

Nam brough my computer back last night but it wasn’t quite right, so he took it off again. We’ll try it again tonight. I’ve nearly filled my camera’s 1gb of memory with RAW-format pictures I want to download and get onto Flickr, and I feel out of touch if I can’t google any damn fool notion that comes into my head at any given moment.

The weather’s been stunningly clear all week. The light is gorgeous and every day, just before the sun sets, the city ripe for gigabytes worth of amazing photography. Ordinary bland scenes and locations are sidelit with golden rays at just the right angle, and the light scatters around, bouncing off every shiny object and creating unique shadows. As fall is my favorite season, the time just before dusk is my favorite time of day.

And every day at this time I am in my little office, looking out the window occasionally, watching the photos pop up on Flickr, photos taken by people less occupied than I am, apparently, or who have the will to take off from work to take advantage of the light. Sometimes I bring my camera with me, in the vague hope that I’ll get everything done in record time and be out the door before sunset, but it hasn’t happened yet. Most days I don’t bring my big camera, relying on my little one if I happen to come across a good shot. But usually all I have when I get on the subway home in the dark is a headache from staring at the computer screen too intensely, trying to get everything all done. But it’s a new system and it always takes longer than expected to finish.

It’s not helping, or maybe it is, that I’m reading another travel book by Paul Theroux, the one about his journey among the various islands of the Pacific Ocean. I read these books in place of actual travel, tied down as I am at the moment (the moment! Who am I kidding? “tied down for these few years” is more like it) with the film I’m working on. I read Theroux, or Bryson, or some other travel writer to get my fix, but it’s like substituting Internet pr0n for actual sex; you can get by on it, but it doesn’t really satisfy. But it’s what I can do now, so it’s what I do. I carry a book in my backpack to read on the subway, if I can find a seat at rush hour, which isn’t terribly likely. The names of the various stations, the announcements concerning where to get off for that and that line, have become annoyingly, terribly familiar. I plug my ears with earphones even though my iRiver is silent, just to block out what seems like a song stuck on repeat.

One night recently, on my way into the subway, a girl walking by asked me to do translation for her. Out of the blue, she just held up a report in English and said, “Will you translate this for me?” Needless to say, her cute smile and efforts to look 14 when she was clearly in her 20s didn’t exactly bowl me over as she was expecting. I thought of making a big deal of it, but I was too tired and disappointed at the days’ lack of good pictures.

“I’m not a translator,” I said, and started to walk away.

“But it’s just a short report!” she called out after me. I kept walking, my head filled with weather reports.

At the last moment, the typhoon that was threatening to hit us head-on turned north, just brushing past us. I think people are getting a bit jaded about typhoons after so many have visited us this year. Sandy called me up on Saturday night and invited me to a jam. I assumed it was at his house, but he said a whole bunch of people wanted to go huddle on the stands overlooking the small exercise park near me, supposedly to “experience” the typhoon. We ended up compromising by going to the substantially larger basketball courts nearby instead. Although the courts are covered, the only walls consist of trees planted around the edge and some chain-link fence. Sandy, Will, Tim, Brent and I were the first to arrive, but people kept showing up with more instruments and drinks, and pretty soon we had a fair little party going on. The rain was streaming down over the sides of the tin roof, and every so often a gust of wind would blow the rain at us, but it didn’t really bother anyone.

The sky was lightening at about 5am when Sandy, Tim and I decided to surrender the courts to the early-morning joggers. Besides, I had to get up for filming a few hours later.

The Muddy Basin Ramblers are gearing up again. We’ve got a handful of performances scheduled, and we decided to rehearse down by the river last weekend. It started out as a rehearsal, but after a short time we’d attracted quite a large crowd. David was facing away from most of our audience and didn’t realize they were there for quite a while. One of the listeners had brought and insane dog. It was one of those dogs women carry around in their purse and make you wonder if they (the dogs) really have legs or are they the dog version of paraplegics and have to be kept in purses. No wonder it lost its tiny mind. It barked and ran around as if dodging imaginary meteorites, its eyes rolled back in its little head.

In any case, we’re looking forward to doing another riverside…rehearsal? performance? Whatever. I personally think we should rent one of the larger boats and take our act on the water. Sound really carries over water, and we wouldn’t have to worry about psychotic canines.

It was nice a cool, breezy and wonderful before the typhoon. Now mid-summer is back with all of its muggy heat and still air, constant air-conditioning and longing glances at any body of water in sight. Perhaps it was some kind of opposite indian summer thing, a foray of winter into summer’s traditional territory as indian summer is summer’s way to inserting its influence far away from home base.

Back on November 18th, 2003, I wrote about my experiences (scroll down to the date) with Lonely Planet’s Globetrekker program when they came to Taiwan to do a show. Although I don’t have cable, I’ve heard that the show’s been aired, finally. Or it could be a rerun. It would seem, unsurprisingly, that the producers’ claims of being tired and not wanting to do that segment were bullshit; they just wanted to use an attractive local girl instead. I wonder if they got her to spout political slogans as well; it seemed to be one of the requirements for the spot. Then again, I don’t have her figure.

The weather these days is gorgeous, cool and breezy and a nice alternative to the constantly jarring mix of energy-sapping heat and bone-chilling air conditioning that defines mid-summer here. Yet another typhoon, however, seems to be on its way to ruin the weekend, timed just so that we don’t get any more days off work.

I was over at the neighborhood temple the other day talking with one of the caretakers about the curious mix of religions in Taiwan. In China and other places, Buddhism and Taoism are kept seperate, although you can go to either to worship. Taiwan was originally like that as well, with mainly Taoist temples. When the Japanese took over in 1895, however, the Taoist temples had to choose between converting to the more acceptable Buddhist gods or being closed. Most chose the former, and the old Taoist gods were stuffed in a closet somewhere away from official Japanese view.

In 1945, when the Japanese left and the island was returned to Chinese rule, the old gods were taken out and returned to the alter. Problem was, people had been worshipping Buddhist gods for decades and had kind of taken a shine to them, so they left them up to share the alters, and so the temples became the odd mishmash of religions that they are today.

The caretaker, a guy named Xie, also runs a Chinese medicine shop over by the suspension bridge; sometimes I stop in an chat. He says there are two kinds of qi-gong (a kind of energy-management system for the body; “the Force” from the Star Wars movies is the closet analogy I can think of at the moment), hard and soft. The hard style takes many years to perfect and cultivates energy within the body in a closed system through various exercises, while the soft style is easier as in its view the body is open to the energy flowing through every living thing in the environment, thus making cultivation simply a matter of gathering energy from any available source in the vicinity. It’s quite interesting; I should get my sword teacher’s take on it. I suspect the hard-style proponents see the soft style as a cop-out, sort of like “real” photographers scoff at such things as Photoshop.

Last weekend Dean, Maurice and I met up at Dean’s place to get green-screen shots of Maurice for some of the special effects to be added to the last scene. We also went to Da-an Park to get some pickups from the last shoot that I missed due to the onslaught of the storm.

We had yet another typhoon visit us during the week, and still another lumbered north past us on its way to Japan, sucking out all the grime from the air, so the weather was better than normal this last weekend. I’d been storyboarding with a grey, rainy environment in mind, but it turned out the opposite. So much the better, as on Saturday Dean, Joshua, Azuma, Paul and I were filming at Taiping Temple, a Buddhist/Taoist temple in my neighborhood. Over 200 years old now, the temple is very colorful and extravagant, and the color stood out nicely in the afternoon sun. I often go there during walks to take pictures.

Paul and I set up the dolly tracks just outside the outer gate, which was also the site of a scooter training grounds, so we had to remove it quickly, or just leaving it there as another “obstacle” for the learners (and don’t believe the thought hadn’t occurred to me). We did dolly shots of Josh and Dean walking onto the site. The afternoon sun was causing long shadows to sweep across the courtyard, so we went into the shadow to do dialogue with Josh, Dean and Azuma, who grudgingly allowed himself to put on a police uniform (we discovered that fake cop uniforms have the stars upside down, or maybe it was just the one we rented). Azuma did a great job acting the eager young cop who wants to join the team, far better than I expected. That boy has chops.

Once the shadows were suitable, we went back out into the courtyard for another tracking shot. Then I climbed up on the temple wall, which was topped with slippery sloped tiles and, trusting in the grip of my nikes, balanced on the wall with my camera to get a high shot of Dean walking across the courtyard, panning and tilting up to reveal the whole, four-story temple above. It looked great, very grand. I’m always looking for ways to add a sense of scale and grandeur to our shoots, and I’m happy when I find ways to do it.

On Sunday, however, we had a lot more to do, as well as a lot less pleasant environment in which to do it. The whole crew, including all the “good guy” actors, including Josh, April, Maurice, Dean and Azuma, along with Paul, Darrell and myself, met up at Dean’s place for a small party of drinking coffee and watching “Family Guy” episodes. After a while we piled into cabs and headed over to the building of our friend Tony, aka “General Song” in the film. We were using a high-ceilinged unfinished room on the roof for our “Beijing conference” scene. Many pages of script to be done, all boring exposition and briefing that needed to be made interesting on screen.

We trudged up to the roof to find that the room, already musty and hot, had somehow acquired a nasty urine odor since we’d last seen it. Most of the cast and crew elected to stay outside when they weren’t needed, but I had to stay there the whole time, since time was short due to the extended nature of our little party that morning.

We got a nice tracking shot of the whole room first. Maurice’s character comes in through a “clean room” security thing that we’ll film later, so I let the exterior just blow out and exposed for the dingy interior. Easy enough to do with digital video.

The scene called for a presentation to be done on a projector screen. Dean had bought a sheet, and we tried to tape it too the wall, but the crumbly concrete wouldn’t hold, the sheet wasn’t white enough, and it was a fitted sheet so the wrinkles ruined the effect. In the end we just tore it down and projected the stuff on the wall directly. It worked fine.

We slogged through the pages of dialogue as the afternoon wore on. The room was all concrete and full of echoes, so we didn’t bother with the mic, just getting a base track for looping later on (we’re going to have to do a hell of a lot of looping on this baby; it will be like re-living the movie all over again, I think). A coupe of vents were spinning off to the side of the room, and I managed to get them in shot a couple of times, just because they’re neat and hopefully not too distracting. The smell and the dust seemed to be affecting everyone’s ability to remember their lines, and so it took a lot of time and a couple of tapes to get through. In the end, though, I got some really nice stuff, both visually and performance-wise.

We wrapped just as the sun was beginning to come in, ruining lighting continuity. I’d been steadily opening up the aperature all afternoon to maintain it, but the sunlight would have made it impossible, so although we cut it close, we managed to get everything done in time.

Although there wasn’t much climbing involved this time, I was really tired after this shoot. I think everyone was. We were all carrying everything ourselves, for one thing (if I get any more equipment I’m going to need to buy a car to carrying it around in), and then there was the bad air on set. It’s a huge chunk of script done with, though, and we’re that much closer to finishing prinicipal photography on this thing.