Last weekend was Lorens’ birthday, so he, Mark, Harry, Mario, some other people and I went up to Shilin to celebrate at a Mongolian restaurant just up the road from the MRT station. The reason we ended up there, I think, was that Harry’s second sister works there. She introduced all of the dishes on the menu and went on and on about how good the hot pot broth was. I have to admit, it was pretty good. The meal featured all kinds of meat and cute bisquits that were made of unravelable coils and looked like breaded baby jellyfish, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t as Mongolia is a bit short on oceanfront property. At one point we had ostrich meat, which wasn’t too bad.

After the meal we walked down to the Shilin Night Market and joined the shuffling throng of people crowded into the network of narrow alleys, stopping only to buy shoes and drinks. I took some pictures along the way, but nothing turned out all that well. I need to go someplace fresh, I think. I need a vacation to somewhere I’ve never been.

On Sunday we had practice at the Sandcastle for the first time in a while as David was in the states on holiday as was Slim. We have a few gigs coming up in the next couple of months, and we’re still trying to get an album together by the end of the year. I think we made quite a lot of progress for one session.

In the continuing Balkanization of this site, I’ve begun another blog, just for my study of Taiji-related arts, including Taijiquan, Taijijian and Tuishou. It beats scrawling stuff down in a ragged little notebook, I guess.

I’ve been concentrating on the first section of the 64-step form I’ve been learning lately. Teacher Xu says I should get it down 100% perfectly before I learn the rest of the form, as most of it is repeating the basics in the first part. I’m dubious about being able to learn it that well, he says I’ve improved a lot.

This form is supposed to be very suitable for those practicing Tuishou, but it’s a challenge to transpose movements learned in forms over to actual spontaneous interaction between sparring partners. In my notes I usually write “opponent”, but Xu says that’s self-defeating, since as long as you think of your sparring partner as your opponent, you’ll only be concerned with the face of winning and miss out on all the learning losing can provide. Sounds like hippy talk, I know, but it makes sense in practice. Every time I am pushed over I learn another way to avoid being pushed over. The more partners the better, too, as everyone has a different style.

Not that I’m going to envision a thug I meet in a dark alley as my worthy partner; that would just be silly.

We learned that our hands should be 70% open. In other words, take your hand and open it flat then relax it by 30%. Also, our elbows should move as if weighted down. In the past, I wonder if they actually weighed down students’ elbows instead of just telling them that.

This last time I did Tuishou with Teacher Xu’s son, a tall, lanky teenager (though he might be in his 20s, his sullen demeanor screams “teenager”). I was expecting him to be tough, being the teacher’s son and all, but it seemed he was focused on trying to push my arms and hands instead of pushing me. It was strange. He wasn’t easily toppled, though. I pushed him over at a 90-degree angle and he just came right back up again, like a weeble-wobble toy. All I had to do was change direction, though, and down he went. As I said, different people, different styles.

I’ve been studying martial arts on and off since I was in high school in the US, where I studied Shotokan Karate. Upon my arrival in Taiwan I immediately began studying Shaolin-style Kung Fu, and when I moved to Taipei after graduation I studied Changhong Style forms and stick forms up until I injured my knee pretty badly. I had to have two operations in Hong Kong and was in the hospital for months. As a result, my knee has never been quite the same.

For this reason, plus in my advancing age not being able to jump around like a monkey on coke any more, I began studying softer arts, including Taijiquan, the empty-handed forms, sword forms, Taiji Daoying, and Tui-shou, or pushing hands. I attend class every Wednesday night at the No. 4 park in Yonghe, and my teacher’s name is Xu Wu-long of XYZ Tai-chi/Pushhands. Teacher Xu a short, bald man in his mid 60’s, very friendly with a predilection for “Gilligan” style hats. Not only is he very good at Taijiquan and Tuishou, he seems to be able to explain the art in a way I can readily understand.

The reason I’ve started this journal is not only to keep a tab on what I’m learning and maybe even introduce a little of it to others, but mainly so that the only record of what I’ve learned isn’t in the form of incoherent scribblings in my pocket notebook.

I’ve been feeling listless and down the past week. I suspect it’s because, due to my ankle injury, I haven’t been exercising at all and just lying around the house all day. Or maybe it’s just me being me. In any case, I went back to badminton practice tonight; it felt pretty good.

I play badminton twice a week, once with pug-nosed women and once with a group of software engineers. The engineers are far better and the most interesting to play with as they present a real challenge. The first time I played with them I had been there for about an hour watching their moves and getting trounced when an enormously fat man wearing a dress shirt and tie came in with his family. They were all munching on various KFC products. Finally, I thought, maybe this is someone who won’t completely embarrass me on the court. The fellow sat down and finished his meal, and then joined in a game.

One of the first plays involved a “killer ball” move, wherein one shoots a birdie from on high at high speed directly towards one’s opponent’s face. It’s very hard to counter, to say the least. To my amazement, the fat guy, dress shirt, tie, dress shoes and all, sprang up in the air, looking for all the world like freakin’ Totoro on his spinning top, pivoted in an instant and whacked the birdie right back at his attacker with such force that the guy cowered in fear.

It was a thing of beauty.

Most of those guys are just about as good, too. It’s a bit embarrassing to play with them, as I feel they’d like to go faster and even more viciously but for my presence, but I get a big kick out of trying to keep up. I spend most of my time on the court trying to see the next two seconds before they happen. It makes me wish I’d discovered the sport when I was younger and had faster reflexes. I bet I’d have kicked ass when I was in, say, high school. Ah, well. Wishes/horses and all that.

In order to clear out some space on my little camera’s memory card, I downloaded all the videos and found I had enough for another vidlet, this one comprised of various clips I took when romping around the island with the Muddy Basin Ramblers over the past…hmm, wow, it’s hard to believe it’s been two years since I joined the band in late summer of 2004. Anyway, enjoy the clip (about 12Mb, .wmv file…here’s the Youtube link). We’ll be getting back together for a jam at the Sandcastle this Sunday since David’s back from his trip abroad. With luck we might even get some more recording done.

My ankle’s much better after several visits to the local Chinese medicine clinic, visits that involve massage, first cold packs and then steam heat and fragrant black pastes, but I’m not sure if the powder they gave me to take after meals is making me tired, or maybe the lack of exercise, or perhaps just the strange hours I’ve been keeping. I find I tend to be more productive at night, and hardly want to do anything during the day. Perhaps I’m just working in another time zone. The more-or-less constant rain recently hasn’t really helped, either.

Prince Roy was wondering what my old apartments looked like, so I did some Wayback Machinery to find some old pictures and put them on my Places I’ve Lived set on Flickr. Hopefully I will be able to squeeze some more from the archives in the future.

And this is what I stay up til 1:30am doing. Sheesh.

I didn’t go in to work today. Why? Because last night I got a little too into badminton and got a little ankle-spraining going on. It didn’t hurt too badly right afterwards, but this morning it was pretty stiff and painful, so I walked, very slowly, in the rain, over to the Beiyi Chinese clinic. Unfortunately, they were closed for lunch. So I made my way back home, did my job online from home, and then inched back over later in the afternoon. The guy at the clinic said it looked like a lot of strain for a short time caused the injury. Should be better soon, but no sports this week.

Last weekend Prince Roy and Spicygirl honored Bitan with their royal presences. I took them up to the Dafo Buddhist Temple and then over to the Taiping Temple, a.k.a. the scene of many of my pictures since I’ve been living here. The light was really nice, and we both took quite a few photographs. Spicygirl seems to have a good eye; I think she should get a camera of her own.

Later we ended up back at the Wistaria teahouse to see off Dan, who was getting ready to leave Taiwan. We went to the German restaurant, Goerte or something, near Bongos for dinner, as Bongos was (of course) booked solid with an hour wait. I was reassured by the bread. It took me until I was halfway through my chicken cordon bleu to realize that all the meat was red. I mean, you expect the ham to be red, but the chicken, too? I called the waitress over, and they said they’d cook me another one. When I declined, they gave me a loaf of bread, made me pay for my meal, and called it even. Don’t think I’ll be going back there, no matter how long I have to wait for Bongos.

We went back to Wistaria for some tea, but I got a call from Daniel that he was meeting some friends at Scorpio, a little place just off the Xinsheng overpass. I’d been there once years ago, and I was in no mood to go to a place like Fresh again. Fresh just gives me a bad vibe.

“Don’t be surprised if there aren’t any foreigners there,” Daniel warned me before we went inside, but he couldn’t have been more wrong: I saw three Westerners and many Japanese in the crowded bar. In fact, most of the songs on the Karaoke machine were Japanese songs. I sat between an older Japanese guy from Tokyo and a Taiwanese guy about my age and about my hairstyle called Ah-bu. We chatted over the din of the Japanese songs; it was refreshing. I need to get out more.

PR and SG wanted to go to Maokong for tea and sightseeing the next day, so I joined them on the subway headed out to Muzha. The weather was hot and steamy, but not so bad in the mountains. We caught a bus up to Maokong, got off and were immediately directed to a small path leading down to a stream in the valley below by a guy who was passing by. The man told us he had lived in Maokong his whole life, and that the path was their only way down to the city before the road was built.

The stream was nicer, especially because we had it to ourselves for at least half and hour. PR and I waded around trying to capture the little waterfall with our cameras and swatting at mosquitoes, while Spicygirl sat on a rock. Little fish nibbled at my legs in the cool water.

Other people showed up, however, so we hiked back up to the road and then over to what had been described to us as the oldest teahouse in Maokong, the Yao Yue. The place is comprised of many shady paths and tables spread out on the mountainside, with nice views of the valley below. We drank our tea, munched on nuts and tried to take pictures of a baby praying mantis that was jumping all over the table. It was quite pleasant. Some people at the next table were playing Chinese chess, and we saw that many had brought their own food.

The food at Yao Yue looked delicious, but we wanted to see the lights of the city, not visible from that point, so we walked back up the road to find a better spot, passing a remarkably clean Buddhist temple on the way. Even the staff wore uniforms, like some kind of bus company, and the feeling was distinctly unsettling.

I kept hoping to see a teahouse I’d been to before, but I much have missed it, so we settled on a random restaurant that looked as if it had nice views. It did, but it was also managed by idiots. It must have been some kind of halfway house for bad waiters, because, try as we might, we simply weren’t able to convey the fact that we wanted non-meat dishes. Apparently, on their planet, “fish” and “shrimp” are agricultural crops.

Even the meat dishes were awful, and my stomach began complaining ever more insistantly as the sun set. We got our pictures and nice views, but I would have rather stayed at the Yao Yue. We walked back to the fork in the road and waited for about half an hour for the twisting, turning, digestion-challenging ride back to Muzha.

PR and SG got off at Technology Building Station, and though all I really wanted was to get home, I couldn’t resist and snapped a picture of Xinyi Road from Da-an Station on the way back. It turned out nicely in black-and-white, I thought.

I’ve been thinking of adding a page just for Tui-shou- and Tai-chi-related content, but I haven’t quite figured out just if and how I want to do that. I’m no expert by any measure, but it might be interesting to post my observations, at least when I get back into it after my ankle gets better.

Dean left for Canada a couple of days ago. He’ll be there for about a month, going to weddings and tending to family affairs. I’m so jealous of him, always going off somewhere while I’m stuck here, that I might just take advantage of our not being able to film and make a trip somewhere myself. Nothing huge, just a long weekend (I have to feed his cat, after all) in China or Japan perhaps.

Theoretically, there is one scene we could film without Dean, but it requires a location we don’t have yet: an office or study type room, preferably without too many windows. Maurice has a tip about an elementary school principal’s office that might do; we’ll see if that works out. We also need a torture room (lots of tiles would be nice; you’d think that at least would be easy to find here, but no) and, of course, the rather improbable zeppelin interior. Not to mention an airplane, but at least we can hope to film on the high-speed rail system when it opens in October.

A while ago I had some ideas to change the third act a bit, to make it more emotionally resonant as well as tie various elements of the movie together at the end. Dean seemed to like the idea, though it would mean adding some flashbacks earlier in the film as well as another actor to find. Hopefully that will work out.

In the meantime, I was recently interviewed by Kate Thomas, a reporter from ACT, a film magazine based in Shanghai. Kate heard about me through Prince Roy and thought our little indie project might interest their readers.

We arranged to meet at the Haggendaz shop at the corner of Roosevelt and Hoping Roads, but when I got there the place hadn’t opened yet. We ended up meeting at the coffee shop next door. Kate is from Shanghai, and we talked about the (I think) curious phenomenon of Beijing being the current film capital of China, despite Shanghai’s history, relative proximity to Hong Kong, a climate better suited to filming year round, as well as its more international image. I’ve never been to either city (I really should go take a look), so I’m not really qualified to say. I lived in Qingdao for about half a year, and when talking with Kate, who is from the mainland, I’m afraid my accent got a bit confused, as I didn’t know whether I should speak normally or try to recall the Qingdao accent for better communication. It turns out that she had no trouble understanding me, though, so I shouldn’t have worried.

Apart from that, the interview went well. Kate asked questions that made me think more about objectively about filmmaking. I look forward to seeing the article. I wish she’d been able to come to one of the shoots, but the timing just didn’t work out since Dean just left. He gets back in late September. I’d hoped to get principle photography done before year’s end…I still do, in fact, but it’s not going to be easy.

Peter’s wake was Saturday. They’d given up hope of finding him alive a while ago, so it was time, I guess. Dean and I took a taxi over to Jingmei after picking up some pseudo-Mexican food from Friday’s (pretty much as close as Taipei gets), climbed the steps through the old one-story houses and barking dogs to Peter’s apartment overlooking the city. It was hot but pleasant enough, a two-story structure with a bit of a lean to it. Apparently Peter had done a lot to improve the place, painting and putting up shelves, and had plans for more, his brother Dan said. Dan flew in a few days ago from the states, and was dressed in long sleeves and a tie, unlike most of us in shorts and T-shirts (Dean was wearing a black button-down and was obviously suffering from the heat).

More and more people showed up as the sun went down. Peter had a lot of friends. More food appeared, as well as alcohol. We sat and stood, chatting. I looked at the books on the shelves: a lot of philosophy and language books, as well as a postcard to Peter from a friend in Central America, where he apparently had traveled before.

After dark Duncan, Dan, and a few others gave speeches. Everyone was quiet except for a couple of children who were too young to know what was going on. They played out on the porch as we inside raised our drinks again and again to Peter’s memory.

Afterwards, as the crowd trickled back down the hillside, I found myself reluctant to go back to my empty apartment. I decided to take the subway downtown and walk around taking night shots, getting off at Zhongxiao-Fuxing and walked along Civic Boulevard, under the overpass. By the time I reached the train station in time for the last train back to Xindian, I was tired, but still not in the mood to go home. I didn’t feel like going anywhere in particular, however, or being around people, so home I went.

The next morning I was awakened by a call from my friend Ray, who wanted to know if I was up for a trip to the beach. I had to decline, however, as I was planning to meet Prince Roy, David on Formosa, and PR’s Taiwanese teacher that afternoon in Beitou. I also wanted to shave my head and have a nice leisurely breakfast while watching The Long Way Round, which had been entertaining me and depressing me ever since I borrowed it from Sandman. Entertaining because, well, it is, and depressing because, ah, I really need a vacation. Not that ordinary people could just up and do something like that, but still.

I met PR and David at Taipei Main Station, and we took the crowded train full of people destined for Danshui up to Chungyi Station and walked down the hot sidewalk over to the Xingtian Temple, where PR’s teacher was supposed to be waiting for us. Apparently he used to live in the area and likes to return there on weekends.

As soon as we entered the temple courtyard, PR disappeared. We looked around for several minutes, but he was nowhere to be found. I was beginning to think he’d experienced sudden, rapture-esque enlightenment, only in a Buddhist sense, when he reappeared with his teacher Mr. Yao, who had brought his daughter as well.

Across the temple, in the back, ladies in blue gowns were reading religious books, arranging tables, and blessing anyone who wanted it. PR and I both got the blessing treatment, and afterwards I talked with Mr. Yao about how I could improve my Taiwanese, which is ok for basic conversation but not much else. It turns out our schedules don’t quite match, but he is a very nice man, very energetic and engaging. I can see why he likes to teach.

After the temple we walked up the mountain a bit, Mr. Yao naming the plants as we passed, sometimes breaking off a bit of leaf to pass around for chewing purposes. After passing a rather large spider, we came upon a row of houses under a large metal roof and stopped to talk with the people who farmed the land for healthy vegetables, a man and a woman. After walking around some more, we sat down for some Xiancao tea and chatted for a bit. The woman, upon hearing that Mr. Yao taught Taiwanese, grilled him on regional dialects. He answered simply that he taught the Taipei accent.

We walked back down the mountain and caught the MRT to Xin Beitou, where all the old hot springs are. I hadn’t been there in a while. It was nice. We browsed a shop full of extremely expensive traditional clothing and teapots, and then walked around the park. Mr. Yao pointed out where the cable cars up the mountain are going to depart from when they finish the system.

As we walked, we became aware of the sound of chanting, and soon we came across a large group of Buddhists chanting scriptures along with a priest on the stage. Usually that space is loud for other reasons; a rock/drum group practices in one of the nearby buildings.

Mr. Yao said we should bath our feet in the stream, which was warm from the hot spring run off, so we did. PR had to depart almost immediately after the mosquitoes attacked him, but David and I stayed on, talking with an older guy from Kinmen. He asked me what I did, but I had a hard time making myself understood. It seemed he didn’t know the word “editor”.

It was dark by the time we got back to the MRT. Mr. Yao saw us off. David had to go home, but PR and I decided to go drink tea for the remainder of the evening. As we did so, sitting in the back tatami room, we ran into Dan, who frequents that particular teahouse. It was crowded but pleasant. We got the Iron Bodhisattva tea again. We really should try a new tea, but that one is so nice we keep ordering it.

So ends yet another “what I did on my weekend” post. Seems that that’s all I write these days. Probably better than sitting around making snarky comments about my co-workers.

I regret to have to announce that our friend Peter Vlach, who played one of our henchmen in the hallways of the now-defunct Naval Language Institute, was lost at sea off Japan late last month. Besides helping us out with our film, Peter was also a fine musician, a great traveller and, despite being one of our “bad guys” in the film, one of the true good guys. Even when he was pretending to shoot the other actors, he just couldn’t stop smiling.

Rest in Peace, Peter.

昨天是鬼月燃燒金紙最多的一天, 照原樣鬼月的中間, 當鬼想漫遊尋找土豆片和果子飲料。有毒煙雲彩從街道上升，如同臺灣人再次派出一聲 “去