I was late to a lunch date today. As I rode the subway into town, I thought about how this day would go if it were a couple of years down the road, and technology had kept up its current rate of development. My guess is my friends would look my position up on their GPS phones, see that I was still in Bitan, in my apartment, at noon. They’d see me leave, walk down the street, and then turn back to my apartment. My Twitter 2.0 service would flash “forgot my damn umbrella” and a real-time weather bureau layer would confirm that it was now pissing rain in my neighborhood. They’d watch me cross the bridge, just miss one train and wait for another, and then see me go one stop too far. T2.0 message: I’m tired of getting off at Taipei Main Station all the time. Then the little dot labeled “Poagao” on their screens, should they check it during their already-proceeding meal, would wander through some alleys in the vague direction of the restaurant, and (I’d like to think) they would make space for me at the table just before I walked in the door.

The rain in Bitan was incredible, I should add. I could see the heavy rain approaching and leaving, the white froth advancing in a line across the bridge at a good clip. My feet and legs were soaked, and it was a good test of my semi-waterproof shoes (verdict: kinda). To the north, the city was bathed in sunlight. The rain missed it completely.

But what I’m curious about is this: If everyone has access to our whereabouts, paths, even our hitherto-private musings typed into a wide-distribution services, will it make us more allowing for human nature? Before, we’d just come up with an excuse: “Traffic was bad” or “There was a sale on gold bullion” or “I was attacked by monkeys” or something that may or may not have happened. When it gets to the point where everyone can see what’s happening, and we all witness the chicanery that we all do and don’t tell anyone, will such shenanigans cease to be the social faux-pas that they currently are? Or will everyone just know, and not even bother mentioning them?

I guess we’re about to find out.

I was late to a lunch date today. As I rode the subway into town, I thought about how this day would go if it were a couple of years down the road, and technology had kept up its current rate of development. My guess is my friends would look my position up on their GPS phones, see that I was still in Bitan, in my apartment, at noon. They’d see me leave, walk down the street, and then turn back to my apartment. My Twitter 2.0 service would flash “forgot my damn umbrella” and a real-time weather bureau layer would confirm that it was now pissing rain in my neighborhood. They’d watch me cross the bridge, just miss one train and wait for another, and then see me go one stop too far. T2.0 message: I’m tired of getting off at Taipei Main Station all the time. Then the little dot labeled “Poagao” on their screens, should they check it during their already-proceeding meal, would wander through some alleys in the vague direction of the restaurant, and (I’d like to think) they would make space for me at the table just before I walked in the door.

The rain in Bitan was incredible, I should add. I could see the heavy rain approaching and leaving, the white froth advancing in a line across the bridge at a good clip. My feet and legs were soaked, and it was a good test of my semi-waterproof shoes (verdict: kinda). To the north, the city was bathed in sunlight. The rain missed it completely.

But what I’m curious about is this: If everyone has access to our whereabouts, paths, even our hitherto-private musings typed into a wide-distribution services, will it make us more allowing for human nature? Before, we’d just come up with an excuse: “Traffic was bad” or “There was a sale on gold bullion” or “I was attacked by monkeys” or something that may or may not have happened. When it gets to the point where everyone can see what’s happening, and we all witness the chicanery that we all do and don’t tell anyone, will such shenanigans cease to be the social faux-pas that they currently are? Or will everyone just know, and not even bother mentioning them?

I guess we’re about to find out.

Hot, muggy days. The cicadas are starting up with their one-note song, which will become the familiar cyclical chugging sound as the summer progresses. I got up around 8am and took a nice hike up the mountain to the Meizhicheng Community. I enjoy walking around there because it’s quiet; everyone’s off at work in the office, and it lets me relish the fact that I’m not. This afternoon we came close to having our first clockwork summer thunderstorm, but it didn’t quite happen.

Saturday night we played at the Animals Taiwan benefit held on a rooftop near Zhishan Station. It’s a nice neighborhood with older houses along the river that leads up to the palace museum. As I walked up the strange double staircase I noted signs asking me not to talk or make any other noise in the stairwell, as the neighbors were sensitive to noise. Not a good sign.

The roof was teeming with people, mostly foreigners, and several pavilions had been set up against the possibility of rain. The “restrooms” were a couple of bins behind the stairwell door. At one point our host, David, spotted an old Taiwanese fellow standing at the stairwell door, and hastily called on a local friend to reassure him that we weren’t going to cause any havoc.

A troup of Taiwanese girls did a dance routine to recorded music. I didn’t really pay that much attention, as I was chatting with Rowan about the movie. Then it was our turn to play. We did several songs and got the audience dancing. It was great, until the police showed up. Predictably, the neighbors had called them, though it wasn’t even 10pm yet. David rushed to find another interpreter to talk with the police, and the group of them stood by the door going back and forth. “This is so embarrassing,” I said to Brian Foden, who was standing next to me. “How can someone live here so long and still not speak the language?” I immediately regretted it, as I always do when I express such a sentiment in a crowd of people who are likely to take great umbrage at it. Mr. People Person, that’s me.

A deal was negotiated with the police to let us play until 11pm, so we started playing again. We got a couple of songs in before the boys in blue made another appearance, this time demanding that the whole party be shut down. The cops herded us off the roof, their walkie-talkies squelching out orders. I wanted to tell them to turn them down, as the neighbors didn’t like noise, but I refrained, as it wasn’t really my party. “We’re getting rid of the foreigners…they’re almost gone,” one of the cops said into his radio. Apparently the complaint had been against “those foreigners.” Hopefully next time they hold an event they’ll find a more suitable place.

We started doing the ADR (asynchronous dialog replacement, or looping) on Sunday at Darrell’s, with Jacques and Dean. Jacques’ session went quickly as he has relatively few lines. Dean’s lines, more than anyone else in the movie, took us late into the night. Halfway through we feasted on Judy’s d�ners, which are meat wraps dripping with a white sauce sweet enough to be donut frosting. The first few bites were delicious, but they were so filling I struggled to finish just one.

Looping the audio can be risky on one hand, as you’re jeopardizing the best performances of actors who are into the situation and the dynamics of the scene by replacing that dialog with stuff you record alone inside a small room, all in one go. On the other hand, it’s also a chance to improve some of the more lackluster performances. The challenge is to come out ahead, not just with pristine audio, but with improved dynamics that add to the scenes.

Darrell prepares for ADR by taking all the dialog and chopping it up into easily managed bits, playing them for the actor, and then having the actor repeat it as closely as possible, minus any special instruction. Once we got going it went fairly smoothly, though Dean’s Chinese lines were a bit bumpy. He would hear his line from the rough cut, and then I would pronounce it more correctly for him, and he would try to match it all up. While we didn’t make him native-speaker fluent, I think we improved his pronunciation over the original. He also improved his Scottish accent.

I checked off the lines as we went through, offering ideas whenever I had them. We also recorded some alternative lines for edits that we’re considering. It’s good to have Dean’s stuff finished, because his was the largest part, and everyone else has less than that. Next weekend we’re planning t0 do Rowan and April’s ADR. There are a lot of people in the film, so the whole ADR thing is going to drag out quite a while, I think. Dean’s going to do some of the extra voices, like that of Shirzi, who has disappeared, as will Darrell. From what I heard, the sound on this movie is going to be pretty amazing.

Dean and I have shown the rough cut to a few people to get an idea of what needs fixing. Paul, Darrell, Dean and I had a long discussion on the subject as well. So far, the reactions have been positive and the input helpful. Rowan said he was shocked at how good it was. Some of the advice is contradictory, and we’ll need to work out what to do about those areas. One definite problem, however, is that the rough cut is well over two and a half hours long. That means that some characters and even entire scenes are going to have to be cut. I hate to do it, but it’s got to be done. In this age of “Deleted Scenes” sections on DVDs, however, it’s not as devastating as it could have been.

Due to editing deadlines, I wasn’t able to practice last week. Possibly due to lack of exercise and the pressure, I’ve been feeling sluggish lately, like my blood’s too thick. My qi isn’t flowing, and I can feel it lumping up inside me. Not good.

I was free on Tuesday night, though, so I went down to the Sun Yat-sen Memorial and, after a beef dumpling dinner at the Harbin place, I practiced the forms on the veranda. It’s always kind of awkward as there are so many other groups up there practicing dances or other martial arts or even, as was the case that night, honor guards practicing their rifle tossing. But I eventually found a space. I also found that I need to work on my stretching. I’ve never been very pliable; even when I was a kid I had trouble trying to touch my toes. Maybe yoga would be a good idea.

Wednesday found me back at the park. Teacher Xu didn’t arrive until much later, and before he came most of the students congregated on the square’s curb over under the street lamp. One guy even went to buy fried chicken. Chaos!

I started out with the Guy Who is Not from Hong Kong, and did reasonably well. At least it didn’t devolve into wrestling, as often happens. Then I pushed with one of the guys who is not from the mainland, which didn’t go so well. He didn’t seem to want to connect somehow, and kept himself out of reach until he was ready to make his Big Shove. The Big Shove came out of nowhere and was quick and powerful and hard to resist. We only did a few rounds before he begged out, saying he was tired. No wonder, I thought, though it’s possible he thought he was wasting his time practicing with me.

The guy from a few weeks back, the student of the other school who periodically comes to “test” us, showed up. He was wearing a white shirt so it was easy to keep track of his whereabouts. He apparently comes from the “Push as Hard as You Can” school, and after he left we all talked about the differences in our styles, with a heavy bias towards our own, of course. “TC wouldn’t have a problem with that guy!” Teacher Xu joked. Ha ha!

Teacher Xu showed us some examples of how relaxing at the right moment could result in the release of energy. He went at us one by one, showing us each what it felt like. It’s always difficult to get my head around a lot of these principals as they are mostly internal, but being shown does help. I need to add more softness and flexibility to my repertoire.

I was exhausted from editing by the time David, Sandman and Conor showed up at my door at 4pm on Saturday. While it was good to have company, I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to make it through a show that started at 10:30pm and lasted into the wee hours of the morning, as is our wont. Slim called and said he couldn’t make the pre-gig practice, and Thumper was in Kaohsiung, so we ran through a few of the horn pieces until we were more or less satisfied everyone remembered how they went.

After packing up and heading over to Athula’s for a rotti dinner, it began to sprinkle. I went to the local shop and picked up a new washtub, and Athula helped me poke a hole in the bottom with a piece of metal heated on his grill. In addition to the rotti, I also got a beef kebab and tossed all the gritty bits at one of the local dogs. David and I then caught a cab to Sappho while Sandman and Conor waited for Jojo to drive them.

Sappho is, simply put, 1977. Or rather, what I imagined that year and we drove past lounge bars with the word “DISCO” in lights above the door on rainy Houstonian nights. The crystal motif permeated the place, and all the surfaces were shiny with a distinct lack of right angles. Even the music was appropriate to the era. I tried and failed to capture the brown tones and funky barstools with my camera.

We threw our stuff in a side lounge and started setting up as the other Ramblers began showing up. Slim took a while tying Sandman’s gold bow tie, resulting in the picture above. We got two free drinks. My first was the worst rum and coke I’ve ever had. The second was the worst ginger ale and whiskey, but slightly better than the rum and coke. But they did the job. Plus the Panadol I took for the oncoming migraine I was feeling, or rather, seeing in the form of bright lights flashing across half my field of vision.

There was only a small crowd when we began playing, and only one of them had a suitable hairstyle. From what I understand the bands there usually only start after 11pm. Playing 20’s and 30’s music in a 70’s lounge bar was a little strange, a feeling enhanced by the fact that the sound was muddled and far away sounding. We couldn’t hear ourselves very well. The sound guy took our name literally, I’m thinking. The bass was muffled and faint most of the time, yet managing to emit loud booms now and then. The small crowd was growing, and everyone was trying to talk over us. It wasn’t a very good set.

The second set was much better, however. The sound guy figured out what he was doing, and the crowd got into the music, even dancing on the lighted octagonal floor tiles. We played for quite a while. It was about 2am when we stopped. I was still conscious, but my feet were dragging. Fortunately Sandman and Jojo gave me a ride back to Bitan so I wouldn’t have to deal with a cab ride.

After an exhausting weekend, I was so close to finishing the rough cut that I decided to not go in to work and just stay at home editing. Also, Dean came over and we downloaded a basic DVD authoring program so I could make copies for the core crew members to review. Then he left, and I began working on the last scenes as the sun went down.

Countless times during this process I’ve run into what appeared to be insurmountable walls. Mostly my fault, of course, for not realizing that something I’d planned wouldn’t work, or just the result of a rushed production schedule. Each time I had to come up with a fix, and if I did a good job, nobody would ever know there had been a problem. If I did a poor job, people might notice that there was a bit of clever editing, the reason for which critics would eventually assign to some childhood psychosis of mine if they were ever set loose on the film. In any case, I was stopped cold many times, but eventually pushed through. Lack of exercise and poor sleep lately have made me sluggish and cranky, and the pressure of getting the rough cut done has been looming over me for months. Rodriquez had four hours of footage to work with on El Mariachi. We had over 50.

The last scene seemed very long, though it’s not, really. But it’s especially important to me, as it’s what you give to your audience to take with them out of the theater. As I’ve mentioned before, I cut to online music to keep me in the mood. I had just pasted the final bit of footage, which centers on an element rising from the bottom of the screen to the top, into the editing line and was watching it when Last FM kicked in with a song from Ernie’s radio list, and in my mind I saw a list of credits following the element up the screen and a fade to black as the music shifted gears from the broad swells of the ending to the pumping techno of the end credits. A thrill went up my spine and I jumped out of my chair. For the past five months I’ve been watching this movie, and now, finally, I’ve seen the whole thing. It lives!

Not quite, however. Much remains for me, Dean, Darrell and Paul to do, to put it under the cold light of reason and figure out where the many problems are and think of what we can do to solve them at this point. The running time is over two and a half hours, something we hope to get down to 90 minutes. Regardless of the runtime, making it the best, most entertaining movie it can be is the top priority.

After setting up the program to burn the DVD copies, I went down to JB’s, where Dean was waiting for the good news. I found him there, sitting at the bar in between an older fellow who somehow mistook me for Gavin and a foreigner who was practicing his Chinese with the bartenders, and he proceeded to treat me to a series of whiskey ginger ales. We talked with the boss and arranged to hold a cast/crew/wrap party at JB’s on June 9th at around 8pm.

As usual, my mind is still getting around going from one phase to another in this production. There’s always something to be doing, though. Next up on the plate is ADR work, which I hope to use to improve some of the performances.

After a long day of slogging through the refrigerated molasses that is our Internet connection, my week’s work is finally done. It’s started raining, and I’ve just opened the window. The wet smell wafts into my solitary office, which is lit only by one old table lamp nobody else wanted, where I’ve been working to renaissance tunes courtesy of the Harmonia archives. Since the alternative service fellows were discharged, it’s just been me in here. Only occasionally do other people come in, usually by mistake. I’m thinking of printing out a big arrow, with no explanation, to post on my door: Whatever you’re looking for, it’s not here.

I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been editing night and day. Every time I feel like posting something, I tell myself I should be editing instead. But here I can’t edit, so I thought I’d drop a line to let you know that I’m still around.

This weekend will feature more editing, but our band has a gig on Saturday night at Sappho, a lounge bar in a basement off Anhe Road. I’ve never been there before, but David, who has jammed there before, says it’s nice. I’ll post the gig poster, but WordPress makes posting a picture really difficult. With Blogger, you click the picture button, browse up a photo, and click, it’s there, resized, clickable and wrapped nicely in text at the position of your choice. I’ve been looking for a WordPress plug-in that does the same thing, but no such luck as yet. It’s the only thing I miss about Blogger so far.

The rain’s really coming down now. I can barely hear the sound of rush-hour traffic and imagine the hum of wet neon signs through it. I wish I’d worn my rain shoes and brought along a decent-sized umbrella instead of the origamic wisp currently residing in my backpack. These are the annual Plum Rains, so I can’t say I wasn’t fairly warned. Indeed, the cloud of flying termites swarming around the city the past couple of nights was a dead giveaway.

Dean’s back in the Renegade Province to help with post production. He’ll be meeting up with us at the Beer Factory later on, after paying homage to his beloved JB’s. He seems happy to be back; I know I always am when I return from abroad.

Expect wet feet tonight.

I am no longer stuck on page 143. It’s a metaphor. It happens now and then in the editing process. Sometimes it’s an avalanche of unscripted action that I need to plug through in order to get to the next page. Sometimes I can’t find just the right shot, or am flummoxed by an apparently unsolvable continuity error.

I’ve been trying to finish the rough cut for months now. I’d wanted to have the rough cut done by the time Dean came back, but I’ve still got several pages of script to go. Rushing doesn’t help, as I find I’m always editing, even when I’m not. That is, I’ll do actual editing for a bit, and then find I need to do something else while my mind works something out. I admit that a lot of the editing decisions I make are based on feeling rather than logic, though when you step back the two are actually one in the same. I’m trying to shape an emotional arc, and while there are logical means to do so, feelings have to enter into it at some point.

Although I can’t “rush” editing, I have put it at the top of my priority list. Dirty clothes spill from my laundry hamper. Dishes are stacked in the sink, and have been for days. I’m out of shape after not getting much exercise because I’ve been skipping badminton and Tai-chi classes. I stare at the screen at work and then come home and stare at it some more. I tell friends I can’t go out with them because I’m busy editing, morning and night. I haven’t been blogging because every time I think about it I think I should be editing instead. Got to get this done. Right now, at this stage, there’s no one else doing this; it’s all me. Listening to film scores helps me stay in the mood as I go.
There are other effects: Being in an editing frame of mind, when I do stop to watch a DVD, while I’m eating for example, all of the continuity errors jump out at me. How can they not match up the positions and facial expressions of each and every actor in the scene? But of course, I realize that normal people aren’t looking at that kind of thing. They’re caught up in the emotion of the moment and simply don’t see that things don’t match up. How obvious can you be with continuity errors? I’ve come across a few, but nothing major. With the sword fight I might end up with more due to quick cuts, but sometimes I find it difficult to be objective about how hard I can push the envelope.

Finding good performances has been easier than I expected, but sometimes it can be a bit trying. I had been under the impression that I had actually done very little directing because I was always busy with the camera, but looking at the footage I see myself actually doing more than I’d thought. Still not enough, probably, but then again we simply didn’t have time for it even if I had been able to concentrate solely on directing. While I love finding little bits and moments here and there to string together into the narrative, there can be precious little to work with sometimes. ADR might help in some cases. We’ll see.

When people say to me, “Boy, I bet you’re sick of editing this thing by now, eh?” I have to say no. I still find it fascinating and fun. I often laugh out loud or shout in pleasure at a particular shot I’d forgotten about works particularly well or when a scene comes together in a certain way. I also curse violently when I can’t figure out how to resolve a problem I should have seen coming a mile away.

Somehow, I’ve managed to figure them all out, though, to varying degrees of success. After the rough cut is done I’ll hand it over to Darrell and Dean for music/sound work and special effects.

And then I’ll start editing again. Tweaking. Cutting the movie down to a reasonable length. Killing the proverbial babies. It will be a whole different kind of hard, but I’m looking forward to it.

By the way, you’ll notice that the layout of this blog has changed. I’ve moved all my public blogs from Blogger over to WordPress, and added a new graphic, taken from a shot from the film, as the banner. For your reference, the new URL is poagao.com/blog. Thanks for reading.

I was mentioning to Mark the other day how I needed large chunks of time to edit the film or exercise, and couldn’t just do little bits at a time, he set me on to Paul Graham’s essay on procrastination. I’d been meaning to read it for a while, and the other night, in lieu of doing something else, I decided to see what he had to say.

It turned out to be an interesting little article. Basically, Graham is saying that, given the fact that you could be doing any one of a hundred different things, you’re going to procrastinate no matter what you do; the only question is how. Are you putting off working on big things in order to do little things, or the reverse? But life can’t be that simple, can it?

Sure, it’s a good thing to keep in mind. I doubt anyone would put “looked up 17 different 80’s cartoon characters online” in an article about me (though they might). I have the choice to make sure what I’m doing is approaching a larger goal that is important to me rather than making sure my apartment’s clean or that all my laundry’s done.

Of course, we’re not all Vulcans and must work through our emotions; working on one thing straight through could adversely affect the outcome of a project, so allowances must be made according to our mental states. But all in all it’s a good idea to keep at the back of our minds, i.e., are we doing big things or just running errands? Is this website an errand? No, I see it as a valuable outlet and communication tool. Making sure every little bit of it is compliant and neat on the page, however, is kind of an errand, in that there are more important things in my life right now to be working on. Many errands, like jobs, for instance, are means to let us work on the larger efforts, unless you’re lucky enough to have a job that is a Big Thing.

In the same fashion, many small things that may seem like errands can actually be little bits of big things. Looking up a strange character I see on a sign is a small thing, but it’s part of a larger learning process, working towards a bigger goal. Doing Tai-chi forms. Taking pictures. Even just walking around to clear my head. Perhaps our subconsciouses can identify the big things in our lives better than our conscious thoughts can.

But making sure all my Flickr tags and sets are Just So? Arguing in the political forums of Forumosa.com? Comparing camera video quality of Youtube clips? Complete wastes of time.

I have bigger things to do.