上次在碧潭這附近拍片時, 我在那間舊派出所找到本來設在山上的幸福樂園目錄, 還看起來跟新的一某一樣.

As I was filming a scene for the movie in the old abandoned police station just off Bitan Road a few weeks ago, I noticed among the old mysteriously abandoned photo albums and other paperwork stacks of what looked like money on the sagging shelves inside. It turned out to be stacks of old brochures for the old Xingfu Amusement Park that was located on top of the hill. Indeed, the complex had replaced the top of the hill, carving it completely into terraces to support the rides, the monorail and the giant ferris wheel that was visible from anywhere in Taipei.

The park’s heyday was back in the 80’s as far as I can tell. I remember seeing the ferris wheel on my first trip to Bitan, back when the suspension bridge was still the two-lane version. But the place was shut down in the 90’s. Sandman tells me that he and Thumper witnessed the workers breaking it down, and one crane operator was killed when the ferris wheel fell on him. Since then, the place has acquired a reputation as being haunted (????). Young men apparently like to take their easily-scared girlfriends to the old place and watch them get all weak in the knees, if you know what I mean.

There’s not much left of the place to haunt these days, though. They tore down the pavilions about a year ago, and the only building left is the one on which the ferris wheel stood, plus a monorail tunnel just above it. I have no recollection of what the place was like at the time, so the brochures, seemingly brand-new and heavily adorned in Disneyesque characters, were a real find. I decided to take my camera up there along with a brochure and see if I could figure out just where the brochure pictures were taken and then take present-day versions, if possible.

The gate looks pretty much like it did in the brochure, though a tree has grown in front of the park sign, which is pretty dilapidated. Trees have grown up in front of the temple in the background as well.

The brochure included a bird’s-eye view of the park, obviously taken from the ferris wheel. I tried to replicate it by climbing up the mountain beyond the old site. From this photo it was a lot easier to see where things were, originally.

This was the building on which the ferris wheel was based. The outer rooms are gone, and the interior is full of graffiti. Trash is piled in front, including the remains of a few old go-karts and whirling teacups from the old rides.

The go-kart track is still traceable. From the picture, I needed to find a section of the track where it looped around on itself and was surrounded on both sides by tires. There was only one such section, so it wasn’t hard too hard to find.

The terminal of the go-kart track was just underneath the monorail, and I located it using the cupid statue I could just make out in the brochure. The cupid statue, though now legless and bent, still presides over a mosquito-ridden pool.

The rocket and helicopter rides are long gone, but I was able to triangulate where the brochure picture was taken, and superimpose it on the present-day site. Note the spaceships read “Apllo”.

The merry-go-round is also gone, but I managed to pull parts of the old horses from the thick grass. An older man in a farmer’s hat was cutting the grass in the area as I poked around, and when I showed him the brochure he was delighted. I gave it to him, as I’d run out of pictures to find, and in any case there were thousands more lying in the old police station.

While I find it fascinating to see the history of the park, I’m glad it’s not here today. The jungle has pretty much reclaimed the mountaintop, and it’s much more pleasant now. I’m also happy that we don’t have to deal with throngs of customers streaming through Bitan every weekend; I’m positive that the place was intolerably noisy as well. I much prefer the peace and quiet the abandonment has left us.

It’s been raining every Wednesday night for three weeks running. I felt really out of practice, however, so I went out to Yonghe last night in spite of the rain to try and get back into the swing of things.

I was the first to arrive, of course. Mr. You showed up soon after, and we went right into tuishou as there wasn’t enough room under the war memorial roof to do a proper sword form.

As I pushed, I felt I’d made progress. It seems that lately I’ve been able to “listen” and see opportunities more clearly than before. In other words, as I’m pushing, if I see a weakness and am in more or less the right position to exploit it, a little light goes off in my head, and if I act on it quickly enough, I can almost always gain the advantage.

That might seem very basic and obvious, but it’s been a long time coming for me. For the longest time I was virtually blind to this essential part of tuishou, so now even a little glimpse here and there is welcome.

I switched to Mr. V and found even more openings, pushing him over literally every time. Despite this, the little new guy who started studying a few weeks ago commented, “They look very evenly matched.” Maybe he was talking about our height.

Teacher Xu tried to teach me when it was time to make your arms inert parts of your body and thus virtually un-pushable, but I didn’t quite get the hang of it. I pushed with his son, who seems to be learning quickly, although pushing him is still pretty much like pushing over a piece of paper.

A short, squat bespectacled fellow, perhaps a bit older than I, was there as well. He’s attended classes on and off ever since we moved to Yonghe three years ago. I remembered him as a particular challenge and wondered if I’d narrowed the gap, so I offered to push with him.

Well.

Pushing with this guy was just as successful as it was three years ago. In other words, it wasn’t. He would settle into a stance that looked soft but was anything but. He’d move in like a snake, completely unyielding, his grip contracting inexorably until he forced me to topple over.

In this situation, ideally I should have loosened up even more and tried to find out where his weak spot was. My ego, bolstered up from visions of progress and all the other pushing I’d done that night, refused to accept this, and I ended up simply using force to topple him over. In other words, I lost. Not to him, but to myself. In tuishou, whenever you fight an opponent with raw force, you’re losing an opportunity to learn how to deal with an enemy stronger than yourself. I’d just lost an opportunity to learn because I was being petty and small-minded.

I really have to work on that.

Clay Soldiers

Finally, Clay Soldiers, which swept the international online “Lady X” competition in 2003, is online for general viewing on YouTube. The feature we’re working on is a sequel to this and a finale to the entire Lady X series.

Check it out.

Clay Soldiers

我終於把我們2003年拍的 “X夫人”(www.ladyxfilms.com) 影片上傳到youtube. 我們現在在拍這部片子的續集, 希望年底可以拍完.

Clay Soldiers

Finally, Clay Soldiers, which swept the international online “Lady X” competition in 2003, is online for general viewing on YouTube. The feature we’re working on is a sequel to this and a finale to the entire Lady X series.

Check it out.

As I take the subway to and from work every day and rarely have time for care-free weekend jaunts into the mountains these days, Gendouyun has been sitting sadly, covered in a blue-and-white tarp, on the street behind my building, usually for weeks at a time. Another reason is that corroded front forks have ripped the shock seals, causing fluid to leak all over the front disk brake and making stopping a mere occasional occurance. A while back some asshat knocked it over, demolishing one of the rear-view mirrors and bending the fairing frame. Although the engine is still in fine shape, I was seriously considering selling it and going bike-less for the first time since I first arrived in Taiwan.

Jeremy of Bikefarm fame told me he’d take a look at it and tell me how much it would cost to fix up and how much I could get for it, so this last Saturday I went down, stowed the dirty tarp, and got ready for a long battle to start the engine. Unexpectedly, it started up on the first kick. My good fortune did not, however, extend to the throttle, which wouldn’t budge, or the front brake handle, which did not seem to be connected to anything.

Luckily, a bike shop was just down the hill, so I coasted down and left Gendouyun there for several hours while the various replacement parts were sent for and installed. That’s it, I thought. I’m selling this thing. I’m getting out.

When I got back on and twisted the smooth new throttle out into traffic, however, I realized just how much I missed riding a motorcycle. Though I’ve been seduced by the simplicity and convenience of the subway, there’s nothing like the feeling of blasting across a bridge or swooping into a mountain curve on a motorcycle, even (or especially, depending on where you’re coming from) a little crotch rocket like Gendouyun.

I’ve known that bike since 1990, when my friend Xiao Bing bought it from his friend, and I’ve owned it for nearly as long, as Xiao Bing soon realized he was too short to ride it and sold it to me. I’d wanted a 2-stroke racing bike since I had the opportunity to shoot down Taichung’s Zhonggang Road from Tunghai University to the sea on a 135cc Honda “Wangpai”. Eventually I would buy one, but it was rather gutless and tired. Xiao Bing’s model had a lot more pep, however. I remember proudly pointing out Yamaha RZR’s I saw on the streets of Hsinchu to Mindcrime, whom I’d just met, and saying, “That’s my ride!”

By the time I reached Bikefarm I was firmly hooked once again on the idea of continued bike-ownership. Jeremy was out running errands, but when he returned the shop and told me that not only could he fix the bike up with new forks, but he could also have it painted a luscious dark red for a few thousand NT, I couldn’t say no. Besides my sentimental attachment to the old bike (it’s a 1988 model, though with less than 50km on it), it’s also better than any other bike I could afford right now.

Now all I need is a better place to park it.

最近有一位外國朋友, 韋小馬,

Friday was Dean’s last day at work, so we met some friends at JB’s to celebrate his rejoining the ranks of the unemployed. Afterwards, I went down to the Riverside bar just off Roosevelt on Friday night to see a Taiwanese big band called GTO (I think). As usual, hardly anyone was there when I arrived; the band members, all dressed in black tuxedos, milled around the stage area, which was entirely too small for their numbers. Somehow, they crammed themselves, their instruments and stands up there. I counted four trumpets, four trombones, three saxes, guitar and bass guitar, piano and drums. So a medium band, really.

They started up with some Glen Miller stuff, playing everything fairly straight. Even the solos were straight out of the original recordings. Individually, most of the musicians had real talent. Together, they didn’t quite mesh. Part of this was due to poor intonation, and perhaps part was nerves. The lead trumpeter, who played a left-handed trumpet with a dull brass finish, was referred to as “teacher” so I assume that’s what he does during the day. The lead trombone was pretty good as well. The leader said the average age of the band is 28 years old.

The place filled up during the first set so that I was surrounded by a large, smoky, chatty local crowd for the second set. The group got more into the swing of it all, but the tuning was still off. The band’s spokesman said they were supposed to have a singer in, but he or she was stuck in traffic. The trombonist filled in for the vocal parts.

It’s always a pleasure to hear a big band, or even a medium band. I look forward to hearing more from these guys when they’ve dealt with some of their issues.

You might have noticed this site looks a little different. That’s because I went over to Prince Roy‘s fourth-floor castle last night and got Mark to have a look at my code, which hasn’t really been dusted off since 2001, just added to and tinkered with whenever I found a bit of HTML to cut and paste in there. As a result, Mark was saying a lot of things like “Nobody uses DARPA settings anymore” and “I think I saw this tag once in 1997” when looking at my template. As Prince Roy had an early morning the next day, we didn’t have enough time to do a complete overhaul or, as I’m increasingly inclined, to migrate the whole thing to WordPress, as everyone seems to be doing these days. But I know that if I do, a year or so down the road someone will come up with something else that everyone will migrate to from WordPress.

Mark did manage to find the reason I haven’t been to implement a site feed, and now that he’s fixed it, I have real site feeds for all my blogs up and working. Of course, now I am expecting a huge spike in my readership and possibly a pony and/or limo, even though I’m constantly assured that that will happen when and only when I move to WordPress. In view of today’s wider monitors, I adjusted the width of the text so that it doesn’t go all the way across the page. It still doesn’t look quite right; I’d like the sidebar on the right to be close to the edge of the screen, for example, but it should do for now, or at least until I play around with it some more and see what looks good.