As I sat in the office yesterday I came across a report of fireflies massing in the forests of Bitan. As my usual Tuesday-night activities have been canceled, after work I went directly home, picked up my camera, and headed to the river-crossing to Wantan, hoping that the ferry was still running. Most of the riverside restaurants were closed, giving the area a spooky, haunted feeling. Most people were inside, no doubt in part because the air was filled with dust from a storm sweeping the island. It left a gritty taste in my mouth.

I saw the ferry moored on the other side of the river, but as I approached the makeshift dock a woman’s voice called across the water, asking me whether or not I wanted to take the boat. I waved, and a tiny figure climbed into the boat and began paddling slowly over. A few fishermen braved the dust, sitting on the bank next to tied-up poles, watched by children and cats.

The Southeast Asian girl punting the ferry spoke with an accent, though she spoke both Mandarin and Minnan pretty well. She said she’d been here for five years and wondered why anyone would want to take pictures of fireflies.

As I walked into the wooded areas of Wantan, I was encouraged to see a few fireflies flickering about by the road, but as I progressed, they grew fewer and fewer. The spot Sandman had pointed out to me last year was devoid of the insects. I walked on, hoping to come across some small hillock or glen covered in their light, but I saw none.

The normally lonely, empty temple on the side of the hill was swathed in canvas and lit from within, as if it were full of revelers eating sumptuous meals. It reminded me of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, where an abandoned country town comes to life at night with various ghosts and spirits.

My presence in the small village further down the road alerted the local Barking Unit, and people left their soap operas, coming to their windows to see what all the fuss was about. I was reassured that the dogs did not actually bite, but they followed me suspiciously anyway, until I was out of their territory on the other side. Occasionally I would come across a frog waiting on the road. I tried to move the first one off, but he wasn’t having of it, so I ignored the rest.

Still no sign of fireflies. I took some solace in the fact that, even if I did come across a field full of lightning bugs, I couldn’t really photograph them properly without a tripod.

As I walked, the dogs of each little house would wake up, bark, and follow me for a bit. This got pretty old pretty fast, and I imagined that all of the fireflies were probably at a meeting somewhere, or at a bar drinking Japanese energy drinks. The dust was making my throat sore, and the last ferry was at 9pm, so I turned back, passing all of the indignant dogs again, and back to the ferry. I took some pictures of Bitan from the riverbank, as well as around the area of the Dimu Temple, where a few latecomers were praying and meditating among the candles, before going to the makeshift restaurant to seek the ferry operators.

The Southeast Asian girl was summoned to take me back across the river, along with an elderly couple. I tried to take some pictures from the boat, but it was moving too much for a clear shot. The elderly couple chatted with the girl in Minnan, praising her language skills, which is basically code for “We picked up on your accent.”

On the other side, I walked down the deep, dark canyon of Xindian Street, noting the addition of a couple of elegant new apartment buildings along the way, as well as a new sushi bar I’ll have to try out sometime. At the end I bought rotis for dinner and made my way home across the bridge, which still held the scent of hot wood after a day in the dust-weakened sun.

Later that night it stormed. Summer’s here.

I’m coming up on the 6th anniversary of this website, which began in early 2001 as a way to show people my photography without kidnapping them, tossing them in the back of a large van and hauling them up to my apartment, possibly with construction equipment, and subjecting them to a stack of dusty albums with overly cute Engrish titles like “Happy Primate Want to Elegant Cornucopia.”

That was almost the site’s title, actually.

Anyway, I added a blog just for the hell of it, and before I knew it I’d written several novels’ worth of questionable prose in the thing. Then Flickr came along and eliminated any need for a Photos site of my own. Blogrolls and other sidebar elements surpassed the usefulness of the Links, Contact and About pages, and the Writing page was made obsolete simply by the pure volume of drivel I write here (and would be better used as a “favorite posts” option on the blog). The Films page became Renegade Province Productions when I got poagao.com. The only thing left is News From the Renegade Province, which I still have a soft spot for even though I haven’t updated it in a while.

Then my blogs began to multiply in a manner not unlike that of the Baldwin family, introducing a plethora of substandard, half-formed accounts on various aspects of my life that I felt would attract a different audience. I added a Chinese-language blog. A film production blog. A Tai-chi/Tuishou blog. I even have another blog where I write whatever the hell I like regardless of propriety (yes, I do hold some of my thoughts back, most notably the darker and scarier ones, from seeing the light of day on this, my public online presence). The other blog is not private and is protected by the simple anonymity of being one of several brazillion blogs out there. If you find it, good on you, but keep in mind that I have plausible deniability.

Time went on, and Blogger began to show its age. Other, more intuitive blogging options became available. On today’s popular resolutions, my icons, once disparaged as inordinately huge, seem tiny and lacking of any cohesive theme. I still like the black background and Liao Tianding running across the rooftops of this account, camera in hand, but I think the time has come for a major reworking of this site. I’m not the same monkey I was in 2001; I’m older, fatter and hairier. This site should reflect that somehow.

I’ve been encouraged by Mark and Prince Roy in this regard, both of whom would like to see me migrate to WordPress. My host Doteasy, however, reminded me that they would have to transfer me to their US$7.95″Ultra” package to enable PHP/MySQL options that WordPress requires. On another server. Which means re-uploading…everything.

Did I mention that my directories are a complete mess? Or that I actually don’t have any directories? Yeah.

But it’s that or continue on Blogger with limited options. In any case, I would like to do a re-design, not just of this account but of the entire site. And here’s where you come in: let me know what you like about the site, as well as what you find completely useless and depressing. I’m thinking of a new splash page featuring the blogs and not much else, but I haven’t really come up with a useful design, or indeed if I even want a splash page (actually, I probably do). But I have no clue as to what kind of accessibility people desire beyond this page. Do visitors here want to go read my other blogs? Look at thousands of my photos? Read fake news? I have no idea. Technorati indicates that you don’t, but I feel I should link to them anyway.

Anyway, Recent Internet Trends indicate that I should keep my posts short and sweet. Too late for that, but I’ll stop here anyway. Let me know what you think I should do with this place.

今天中午

前一陣子看到自由時

I was recently interviewed via email by a racy local art/design magazine called “X-CUP” (no, I don’t know what the name means). For some reason, they were interested in my High Speed Rail photography. It seems to me that I am involved in far more interesting things than HSR pictures, but that was what they were interested in. The topic was part of a series of interviews with foreign artists in Taiwan. I pointed out to them that, technically, I wasn’t actually a foreigner, but that didn’t seem to bother them. I think they found it quaint.

In any case, I was happy that among 16 individuals they only found me worthy of the much-coveted black background. Also, I managed to work in the Muddy Basin Ramblers as well as a reference to “The Age of Crap.” If you want to read the interview and my inane, random answers, you can download the .pdf of the interview here.

Actually, I’m glad I did the interview, because I am interested in getting to know more artists, even though I don’t think train photos are exactly the apex of my artistic abilities (or maybe they are. Lord what a depressing thought). The weekend after next I’ll be attending a film festival that will be showing Clay Soldiers. Hopefully other people will attend as well.

We had a four-day holiday last weekend, three and a half days I spent at home editing. It’s good weather for it, in any case: more-or-less constant rain. On Saturday I went up to a teahouse in the mountains above New Garden City where my friend Ray lives, along with Sandman and his relatives who are visiting from Scotland. We had a nice meal, took a lot of macro photographs of wet plants, and watched in horror as Sandman’s nephew took a nasty spill down the wet steps. Actually, I didn’t see it, but I did listen in horror to the thud as he hit the ground. He was ok, though. One of the benefits of being 17.

Mark has recently stirred a hornet’s nest by daring to express his preference for content quality over deliberately massaging a site’s code to garner the most hits. I can see where he’s coming from; obviously this site, which hasn’t really updated its design since 2001 and doesn’t have any of the traffic-gathering features that are de rigueur in these days of Google searches, is a testament to the low priority I place on getting millions of people to read my site. My trackbacks don’t work, I don’t know what pingbacks are, and I can’t even figure out how to get post titles to appear.

Still, I can see the benefit in getting a larger audience for your content, as long as such actions don’t supersede the content itself. For example, on flickr.com, submitting your photo to six million voting groups comes across as a bit desperate, but at least the content hasn’t been adversely affected by the effort, unlike, say, deliberately taking photos of nothing but scantily clad young women for photo hits. Of course, I respect most those who produce good content in an elegant fashion without feeling the need to compromise it in the name of making it popular. This, of course, is why I’ve made exactly $9.18 from my experiment with Google’s adsense over the past several years.

Ok, so the site needs a makeover. I’ll meet up with Mark sometime and we’ll see what we can do. I’m surprised the design has held up this long, actually.

前一陣子有一個跟藝術有關的月刊X-CUP用e-mail訪問我。 他們在寫一片有關老外在臺灣搞藝術的文

It’s been cold lately, and a light mist was falling when I got to the park last night. I thought I was the first there, but one guy was going through forms underneath the Kinmen battle memorial. It wasn’t that wet, so I went through the sword form and empty-handed form out on the square. For some reason I felt my energy flowing more than usual, and afterwards I just stood there, eyes closed, just feeling it.

Pushing went better this time than the last few times. Actually I shouldn’t use the word “pushing” as Teacher Xu says that’s a pretty bad description of what we should be doing. Anyway, I was closer to my “old” style than the past few weeks, but I think going a month without using any force had a bit of use. Now I’m discovering that, in order to put up a front of “false resistance,” I need to separate it from my own energy with a layer of emptiness. Otherwise the false layer is pushed up against my own energy, and the two become the same, which makes the whole technique useless. Doing this, of course, requires that I extend the range of my potential movement. Well, I need to do that anyway.

My tuishou partners seem to have a hard time distinguishing between the false resistance and real resistance. I’ll put up a wall behind which I leave reserves of energy and flexibility, and when they hit it they’ll tell me in a knowing manner: “Ah, you’re much too tight. I can push you easily now.” Then, of course, they break through it, and, if the layers aren’t smushed together, I’ll have left a nice little trap for them. Done well, it confuses them mightily.

As we practiced, a thought came to me: Whenever someone exerts force towards me, it opens three doors. Picture a room with four walls, a door in each one. When someone pushes me, it shuts the door facing the push, but the other three doors fly open, because the power is only in one direction. I am free to move in any other direction.

Of course, this is just a symbol, and not very accurate. I should have a round room covered with a million doors, but it doesn’t work as well in my head. And according to Teacher Xu, that’s what counts, your intent, what you’re thinking, more than going over and over a certain technique or set pattern. By using this mindset as well as defining tuishou as an exploration of your opponent’s energy and being a spinning ball, I found I was better able to participate, even with the “tree-root” guys. It’s all about being able to see. Some days I can see well; other days are fuzzy.

Teacher Xu warned against telegraphing too much information to your partner with your hands. “They should be like empty water pipes,” he said. “Only fill them when you’ve found an opportunity. Other times, pull back your intent into your spine.” I also found that I was pushing my partner’s body rather then the empty shell of their energy structure, a mistake I often make. It’s hard to keep so many things in mind at the same time without “thinking too much.” But I suppose it’s a matter of training your mind to consider things in a certain way rather than training your body. Teacher Xu said that we should use Tai-chi for everything. “Even drinking tea,” he said, making a pouring motion with his hands. In his opinion, weightlifting is the antithesis of Tai-chi. “It trains your muscles and your body to do exactly the wrong thing. Stay away from it.”

Prince Roy, exiled from Spicy Girl’s SOGO shopping odyssey, came down to Bitan on Sunday along with Mark to enjoy the summer-like weekend weather. We met up on the bridge, as usual, and walked along the relatively mouthbreather-free upper sidewalk to the ferry crossing. There we boarded the brand spanking-new ferryboat, larger, cleaner and made of fiberglass, replacing the creaky old wooden boat they had before. The sparkling new white-and-blue boat’s metal railings even sported four bright orange life jackets (capacity was eight people), which, oddly enough, were made in the People’s Republic of China, complete with instructions written in simplified characters.

Accompanying us on the new ferry were two of the punter’s friends. They stayed on the boat, relaxing and chatting with the ferryman. One of them was sucking on a plum lollipop.

We disembarked on the other side and bought some drinks at a local watering hole set up in what looked like a container car, and proceeded to walk across the plain through the bamboo fields. A yellow dog followed us up to the border of its territory, where it spotted another dog, whined a bit and retreated. The air was fragrant with the scent of spring blossoms. It always amazed me that I can find such a rural atmosphere minutes away from my front door, yet downtown Taipei is 20 minutes away on the MRT.*

We walked to the Haihui Temple, where we looked out over the river at Zhitan and its strange Americanesque street layout. Mark wondered at the inscriptions on the balcony wall, which had “donated by” and the name of the donor written in red letters on each section. We puzzled over one character, which turned out to be simplified. I suppose the author didn’t have a thin enough knife to carve the traditional character.

We walked on, PR and Mark talking about investments, and all three of us dissing various dissable bloggers, including ourselves. The road wound through cargo containers made up as homes, with little gardens and barking dogs, as well as an open-air karaoke session. I was surprised to see a brand-new house; I’d been told that construction was illegal there. No doubt someone has sufficient connections in the area.

The mosquitos were beginning to bite by the time we made it back to the ferry. The two friends were still in the boat, still sucking on lollipops and chatting merrily with the punter. He’d told me before that the two ferrymen usually divide the day into two shifts, but I’m not sure exactly when his shift began. This time more people crowded onto the boat, surpassing the stated carrying capacity, but nobody paid that any mind. We had life jackets, after all!

PR’s ultimate goal that day was to have a meal at Rendezvous, so that was our next destination. We got a high table with a nice view of the river and spent the rest of the evening eating, drinking and chatting. I had the risotto this time rather than stuff myself with pizza, and it was delicious.

As the evening was getting on, PR and Mark decided it was time to go, so I said farewell to them at the foot of the bridge. After they left to catch the train back to town, I stood looking out across the river at the lighted buildings on the other side and watching the people coming and going across the bridge, trying to remember what it felt like when I was still living in the city. Eventually I walked back home, on the way taking a picture of one of the local strays lying in front of the gangster KTV palace, surrounded by the detritus of the street in such a way that it looked as if the sleeping dog was being watched over by an array of scooters, plants and traffic cones.

*For all of you considering moving down here, this does not mean that Bitan is a great place to live! It is in fact a nasty, crowded, smelly place with awful traffic, blaring karaoke, packs of stray dogs, a high crime rate, mouthbreathing tourists, noisy construction, scooter gangs and racing ricers, gangsters, random fireworks and no sidewalks. It is also mostly pan-blue, and few people speak English. There’s no Wellcome, no Blockbuster or Asia1 or any DVD rental places at all, and it’s a NT$300 cab ride from the city if you miss the last train. Plus we’re chock full at the moment. No vacancies! Sorry!

I tried out the strategy of maintaining a kind of “false impression of resistance” last time, with limited results. Half the time it very quickly became real resistance, which of course I’m trying to avoid. Other times I was able to “put up a shield” in place of my real self, from which I could retreat if I wanted to without letting my opponent know what was going on. The guys seemed to be more willing to push with me in this fashion, as it seems I am pushing more and giving them something to resist.

I made the mistake of trying to enunciate this to a fellow student, but it only resulted in a more-or-less complete failure in communication. In the future I plan to stop all such attempts and just nod in agreement when lectured on the subject by someone who has been practicing for a month. Who knows, maybe they know more than I do. Time spent practicing doesn’t really seem to have that much effect on how well someone can push. Some people just have an intuitive knack for it, whereas others, like myself, have a hard time getting their minds around certain concepts even after years of practice.

Lately I’ve been noticing a phenomenon developing at class; it seems that one of the more senior students is, on purpose or otherwise, forming a small subgroup within the larger group of students, another school of thought to tuishou. I like to think of their approach as the “tree root” approach, in contrast with the “intelligent water” approach I attribute Teacher Xu and students like Mr. You. The tree root approach is usually carried out by clasping your opponent in a grasp and slowly, inexorably forcing them off balance without moving very much yourself. I say forcing because it seems to take a lot of effort. Whereas the intelligent water approach is, obviously, more fluid. I suppose both approaches have something going for them, but I’d rather stick with the water-based concepts.