First of all, before I start blathering on about my weekend, watch this video. Now, I used to tell people that everyone should visit New York City at least once, but I’m beginning to think I should change my advice. That person being arrested? It’s you.

After Tai-chi practice on Saturday, I joined Daniel and Prince Roy for a nice lunch at the Yongkang Sababa. The weather was perfect for lounging and eating pitas on the veranda. We then went to check out the progress of our favorite teahouse, Wistaria. Unfortunately, not only was the old structure still closed for renovation, the opening was delayed until June. We walked up Xinsheng to its other location, in a quiet alley, and sat next to the front window, which looks out onto the small garden.

Unfortunately for us, peace and quiet was not to be had, due to a woman loudly “educating” a couple of foreigners at a table on the other side of the room. The foreigners were apparently still jetlagged from their trip. “THE TEA CEREMONY IS A CENTRAL PART OF OUR SPIRITUAL LIVES,” the woman orated. “IT IS SOMETHING WE PARTAKE OF EVERY DAY.” I fought the urge to shout, “ANCIENT CHINESE SECRET, HUH?” at her.

Despite the noise, the tea was very good. We got our favorite Iron Bodhisattva tea and some snacks and spent the next couple of hours chatting above the din. After night fell, we walked over to Chicago Pizza off Jianguo and took a couple of pizzas over to the Da-an Park amphitheater to eat as we watched workmen take down scaffolding from that night’s show. In the distance we could hear a constant drumming. I wondered how they could keep going without tiring out. After the pizza was gone, we walked over to take a look, and found a group of people doing Brazilian dance-fighting to a drumbeat.

The next day, Sunday, I decided to dust off the Crazy Bike, which had laid dormant in the bowels of my building all winter, and take a ride. I told myself it would be just a short ride, as I’d planned to get the Tokyo video done that day. The weather was just too nice, and it had been too long since I’d ridden. When I reached the confluence of the Xindian and Dahan Rivers, I turned west up the latter stream and crossed to the other side on the Xinhai Bridge. Then I began to wonder if they can extended the path. I told myself that I had come that far, and I might as well find out. The path ran between the train tracks and the river as I passed through Shulin, where I found that it had indeed been extended. I continued along the riverside, and found myself in downtown Yingge, across from the ceramics center. I’d set out at 1pm, and it was only 4pm, so I felt I could be back in Bitan by 7pm.

I was wrong. On the way back I began to get tired, and my knees began to ache. I stopped to chat with some drunken aborigines who having a party under a bridge, sharing a drink with them and plying them for hat-related information. I stopped on the bridge back to take pictures, and then at the site of the construction of a bridge across the meeting of the three rivers for still more pictures. At Gongguan I parked on the wooden walkway and laid on a bench to watch the stars for a bit.

It was well after 9pm by the time I got home, and after some spaghetti for dinner, all I wanted was a shower and bed. So much for productivity. Later I measured the distance I’d ridden with a map interface, which is probably not entirely accurate due to it’s straight-line distances, but it said I’d gone about 70 kilometers. It was a good ride, but I probably should have taken it a bit easier the first time out. Still, I now know that the path goes all the way to Yingge, so maybe next time I little exploring of that area would take the edge off the journey there and back.

The weather was perfect for practice this morning at CKS Hall. Teacher Xu and several regulars were there already when I arrived, plus the usual groups of dancing teenagers. I practiced the empty-handed form and got some good reminders from Teacher Xu. There’s so much to learn about every move, especially the slower you go, it seems like looking closer at a high-resolution picture and seeing more and more detail the closer you get. It just never ends. When I told Teacher Xu this, he said, “But you also have to remember to step back to see it as a whole, or you forget just what it is you’re looking at.”

I was going to do more formwork, but Teacher Xu said Mr. V and I should practice tuishou, so we did. I found him fairly easy to practice with today. I was concentrating mostly on staying flexible and soft, and keeping track of his spine. Both help a lot, I find. Usually when I am pushed into what seems like a hopeless position, relaxing and loosening up gives me a way out, and I’m slowly learning to do that sooner into the game instead of only realizing it when it’s too late. Hopefully with time it will become more of an instinct, rather than the default tenseness we are all born with in such situations. Often when I’m wondering which way I should apply a direction, visualizing my opponent’s spine reveals a direction that wouldn’t have occurred to me if I were just looking at him as a whole, so that helps as well, at least with some people. Pushing everyone is different. Last Wednesday Weeble kept trying to ask me who I though was the best student, and I couldn’t answer, and not just because it’s a meaningless question. Even if A is “better” than B, and B is “better” than C, half the time C is “better” than A. It’s just not that simple. But Weeble’s still at the stage, I guess.

After Mr. V, the little guy with whom I had a lot of trouble the first time I met him at Sun Yat-sen Hall so long ago wanted to practice with me. He’s a lot smaller than Mr. V, who is about my size and shape, and at first it felt like practicing with a large, inordinately powerful doll. I have to wonder if there’s a bit of Napoleonic Complex in there, but even though this time went a lot more smoothly than last time, he still cannot face “losing” a bout. Even after I’ve caused him to step back, he’ll keep on grappling and pulling instead of stopping like most students do. This, I thought to myself, is one of the consequences of acquiring a reputation. Tuishou and Taiji are, the more you get into them, more about the person you are than the techniques you study. At least it’s seeming more like that to me. You can memorize forms out the kazoo until you’re 90 years old, and still not understand Taiji. Not that I do, either, but I’m trying to approach it in what I hope is the right way.

Teacher Xu left, and an outsider joined us, an older man who grappled furiously with the No-lose guy while I tried to practice sword. We were being pushed, ironically in a most tui-shou manner, into a corner by the dancing students, who slowly moved into our area. One of them even came over and asked us how much longer we were going to be there. The person they assumed was in charge, however, was the older outside guy, who of course had no idea. Little Qin is the closest thing we have to a second-in-command, I guess, but he wasn’t there either, so Little Mountain Pig dealt with them the best he could. Soon, however, it became clear that if I kept practicing, sooner or later I was going to stab someone, probably by accident, so gave up. The old outsider guy said he liked the practice sword I was using, admiring the heft that makes it better than most practice swords. Little Mountain Pig chimed in as well. He always practices barefoot, for some reason. I should ask him why that is. I’d rather practice in shoes, as I’m usually wearing shoes in my daily life. I should wear more flexible pants to practice, however.

All in all, despite the annoying students and the lack of sword practice, it was a good session. Later, in the evening, I watched a group of people do some jogo de capoeira at Da-an Park, which was interesting. I’ve only seen videos of it, so this was the first time I’d seen it in real life. Lots of feet and leg movement, spinning and dancing, always hopping around to music surrounded by people, like a dance party, but the movements reminded me a bit of the monkey style.

I just got back from seeing The Forbidden Kingdom. My main reason for going to see it, besides liking martial arts films, was to see the historic first on-screen pairing of Jet Li and Jackie Chan. If the fight scene between the two is all you’re there for, you won’t be disappointed; I just about cried out in joy. In fact, most of the fight choreography in the film is good, thanks to Yuen Wo-ping, but Li and Chan’s stuff is just brilliant, especially for those of us who have seen countless movies by them both throughout their careers and wondering what they would look like fighting together.

Of course it’s all carefully orchestrated not to show a clear winner between the two. Even the the opening credits, their names appear at the same time, linked together by sharing the “J” at the beginning of their names on the screen. It’s obvious that the producers of the film took great pains to make sure the two got equal billing and screen time. In fact, it seems that the purported protagonist of the film, Jason Tripitikas, played by Michael Angarano, was pretty much ignored throughout. The result is that the story is not told from any particular point of view, and not even the director seems to care what the protagonist of the film is thinking in more than a cursory fashion.

Aside from the choreography, the music, cinematography, editing and art direction of the film are all excellent. The writing, however, is pretty awful, and the story told as an afterthought. If the people making the film had given Jason not only more lines, but better lines, even some character development that didn’t depend on other people making remarks about what we should have seen, it could have been a compelling story. Jason speaks gratingly poor Chinese throughout the movie, seemingly unrelated to the motions of his lips. Either Angarano’s Chinese was too fluent for him to be a “believable foreigner” or it was simply unintelligible and had to be looped, (but looped badly? Is there any reason for that? Maybe it’s just the Taiwan version that’s like that?). A few sardonic remarks. maybe in English, a couple of witty asides as he goes through his miraculous training, could have gone a long way in fleshing out his character. As it is, there’s simply nothing in the character to latch onto.

Chan and Li are the real stars of the film, and they both do a good job. Li makes a surprisingly good Monkey, I have to say. But in the end it feels more like an American Hollywood production with a pseudo-Chinese veneer than anything else. It could have been a great film, alas. Reports say that Jet Li and Jackie Chan enjoyed working together so much they’re thinking of doing more. I hope they get a chance to work with better writers and directors when they do so. Perhaps the US involvement in this project was considered “neutral ground” for the two stars to cooperate on, but I’d like to see what they can do under a Chinese director.

A few days ago this account marked seven years of mindless blather since my first post on April 22, 2001. I completely forgot, of course, but now at least I have an excuse to make an individual post about it instead of lumping it in with all the other boring minutae of my life.

Seven years! Even then, I was wondering where all the time went. Back then, I was living in a room in someone else’s apartment on Xinsheng South Road and working at Ogilvy & Mather. The world of my early 30s seems like a different world from today in my late 30s. I moved an average of once a year since then, though I’ve only worked at two other jobs during the same time….but I’m not in the mood for a nostalgia-fest at the moment. Things were good then; they’re even better now.

I am kind of curious if anyone had been reading this thing continuously from the beginning. As I managed to completely alienate the one friend who inspired me to create this site (ironically, the site was a major factor in said alienation), I doubt it. Actually, I’m pretty sure I lost most of my followers when O&M moved offices and took away my proximity to Whiny Woman. Sure, it saved my sanity, but it also killed my ratings. Ah, well.

I was the first to arrive in the park, by a long shot, at 8:30. Teacher Xu got there a bit later, followed by Weeble and Mr. V, who started practicing. I went through the empty-handed form a couple of times while they taught each other wrestling moves.

Teacher Xu interrupted their session with some advice. “Use about a third of the power you’re using now,” he said. “If you find you need more than that, relax and change the direction.” This had a visible effect on their practicing. Later, I pushed with Mr. V for a while. Mr. V’s style has evolved into a sort of quick, nervous patting as he tries to find pushing points. Once he thinks he has something, he clamps down like a robot. He’s a lot quicker than he used to be, but not much more subtle.

Then I practiced with Weeble, who was full of advice. Weeble spends more time teaching than being taught. He told me that he wanted to learn all styles and all levels, and he said I should join a competition. I couldn’t convince him that that was the last thing I wanted to do. The 1/3 advice from Teacher Xu had an effect on him as well; his quick shoves were less frequent than normal. We went on after Mr. V, Teacher Xu and his son had left, until Weeble got tired. He spends a lot of energy practicing. I didn’t spend much, and wasn’t even breathing hard. The night, for me, was all about being insubstantial. It sort of worked, I guess. At least it’s something. Lately I’ve been feeling that my practice lacks focus, but it’s probably because I’m distracted by so many other things these days.

I was watching Futurama on the subway last night when I felt someone tug at my shirt. I looked up to see a couple of woman staring at me; one of them held up a magazine, which turned out to be this month’s Taipei Pictorial, turned to the article about me. “Is this you?” they asked.

We chatted a bit, but it was clear that they had just picked up the magazine for light reading material and were just amazed by the coincidence of seeing someone from inside standing next to them. I’m still waiting for my copy in the mail, but I will look for some extra copies later today. The .pdf file can be downloaded here, if you can read Chinese. It’s kind of a puff piece, but nice.

Construction in my building has begun again; it’s forcing me to go to bed early, because there will be no sleep to be had after 8am. I’ve been working from home recently due to even more construction at the office. Between construction at work, construction at home, construction around the MRT, construction on the Bitan riverside, it feels like the whole world is being rebuilt. ‘Tis the season, I suppose.

I went down to Camera Street last night after work to check out the new Sigma DP1 I’ve been hearing so much about. The images I’ve seen online from the camera have been quite impressive, but many users were pointing out usability problems. After handling it and snapping a few shots, I have to say it does feel like an older camera, mostly in a good way, but not so much in step with the modern digital era. Some of the things people want in point-and-shoot cameras these days I would rather do without, things like face detection and color schemes. The DP1 is more like an old manual camera than a modern point-and-shoot. The worst thing about it, I thought, was the low-quality screen on the back. Focusing must be a bitch on that thing. Sigma has been updating the firmware, but I wonder how much they can do that way.

I’ve also been hoping for an announcement from Canon on the next generation of the 5D, but nothing so far but rumors. The 5D itself has dropped below NT$60,000 here now, dirt-cheap for such an amazing piece of equipment. Lenses, however, tend to keep their value. No doubt they are working on new ones to accompany newer models these days. Both should be announced no later than Photokina in the Fall. It just reinforces the feeling that everything is under construction, including cameras and even phones, with the 3G iPhone supposedly coming out soon as well as a new Panny HD video camera. Although I bet they don’t use jackhammers.

I finished posting the Matsu photos, 165 out of 609 that I took during the three-day trip. I’ve inserted some of them into the blog posts on the subject if you want to scroll down a bit to take a look. A friend of mine who works at a magazine said they might be interested in using some of them for a related travel article.

Last Wednesday didn’t go well. I spent most of the night being shoved around by Weeble and Mr. Guo, who explained to me that it was due to their awesome skillz and experience and not quick, heavy shoving worthy of a schoolyard playground. It made me even more resolute to remain the worst student in the class, because it seems that once anyone gains any kind of respect for tuishou in the group, suddenly they “can’t lose” and their style becomes all force and no subtlety, so concerned they are with their reputation. But it also made me wonder at my lack of progress over the years. I never took it very seriously, in any case, and am not sure where I am going to go from here. I don’t look forward to classes as much as I used to, and I’ve often been too busy these few months to go. Maybe I’m trying to do too much. I dunno. We’ll see.

歡迎各位來自臺北畫刊四月份里面關于我寫的文

Flickr has either generously introduced a wonderful new useful feature or shoved an unwelcome, distracting irritant down the throats of its paying users, depending on your point of view. Like it or not, however, videos are slowly making their way into the photo-sharing site so beloved by a huge number of people.

My first reaction to this development was one of dismay. I knew that Yahoo! was out to compete with Google’s Youtube by introducing the videos into the photo community that it bought a while back, and it didn’t seem like a good idea to throw another medium into the mix. And the whole “long photo” thing is just inane. I considered immediately deleting any contacts who put video into their streams, but then I wondered if I was overreacting. I am a filmmaker as well as a photographer, after all. Is video such a bad thing to include into the flickr experience?

I think it could be, but for reasons that are difficult to explain. Most of the negative reactions on flickr itself have been basic, simple and repetitive entreaties against the move, without much explanation involved. What really surprised me was the vitriol, ridicule and animosity with which these objections were met. “Quit yer whining,” “Just deal with it,” “snobs!” “crybabies,” “Knee-jerk reactionaries,” etc. Flickr staff were, of course, siding with the pro-video groups and removed and remonstrated the more radical anti-video elements, while allowing the pro-video insults and YouTube-level confrontations to continue for the most part. It was a far cry from the civilized, friendly debate that used to characterize flickr’s forums, as if the entire site had gone into “DeleteMe Group” mode.

Another thing that bothers me is how Flickr has implemented video, simply dumping it in among the pictures. It’s like a library had DVDs interspersed randomly among the books on the shelves. The videos are represented by small squares the same size as the photo icons, but with a tiny “play” triangle” in the bottom corner. They show up in Contacts’ Photos, Explore and Searches. Only by going into the settings can you make it so that they don’t all play automatically when you go to the page. Instead of photos, we now all have “content,” “things” and “items,” and the top of my page reads “Photos & video from Poagao” despite the absence of video. Also, the videos all have sound, which changes the Flickr experience quite a bit by itself. Long pictures with sound, perhaps the blurb on the intro page should read.

“Stop whining; All you have to do is not play the videos,” is a comment repeated often in the related threads. I suppose it may still be possible to maintain a semblance of the original flickr experience if you weed out all of your contacts who have video, but they’ll still pop up elsewhere. But what’s the real difference? Ah, this is where it becomes very difficult to put into words. When I browse a page of photos, I am in a certain mindset. My eyes see the small photo and instantly take it in, and I know immediately whether I want to click on the larger version. It’s a frame of mind that allows me to instantly process what I’m seeing and lets me browse through many photographs to find that one that gives me shivers down my spine, that emotional “oomph” that some photos kick you with you first lay eyes on them.

If video clips are interspersed throughout the page, however, I have to work harder just to differentiate and weed out the videos. Why? It’s not that I don’t want to watch the videos. They may be very good. But the little thumbnail simply can’t represent it; I have no idea what they are. It’s just one small frame, and I will have to click on it, wait for it to load, and watch it most of the way through before I even know what it is. It’s a whole different media and requires a different frame of mind. An equivalent would be mixing up Chinese and English words. I know both languages, but going back and forth from one to another all the time is difficult for me because I tend to have a Chinese-language mindset and an English-language mindset. Video pulls me out of my photography mindset.

This mindset is important to me; it’s the mode I use when I’m out taking pictures, seeing pictures and potential shots out in the ordinary world. It’s different from my film mindset, which I use when I’m directing a movie. In directing mode, I see motions, changes, progressive angles and many other things that are different from my photography mindset, which just sees composition and lighting, shadow and space. Before, Flickr was a place where I could envelope myself in this world, where I could safely stay in this mindset and appreciate the little surprises I came across within it. All of those wonderful photographs are still there, of course. I just can’t appreciate them from the point of view that I could before.

Now, to the vast majority of flickr users, the above is simply absurd, unintelligible at best and likely offensive to many, in that they feel that some lofty “mindspace” of mine shouldn’t get in between them and their ability to have videos of their children playing soccer next to their photos of their children playing soccer. This is probably the reason for the strange nature of the ongoing debate. Those of us who feel videos are taking something away are not only unable to express what it is we’re losing, even if we could, it’s an utterly alien concept to most of the people who use the site, one they’re not in the least interested in preserving, as they weren’t even aware of its existence in the first place.

As an experiment, I went to the streams of those who were pro-video and those who were anti-video, and while there were varying degrees of quality on both sides, it seemed that those most interested in video took pictures that could have been video stills, while the anti-video crowd seemed to take more all-encompassing works, photos that seemed better able to tell a story on their own.

When you come down to it, video is here to stay; Flickr is aiming to please most of its customers by adding it. For Yahoo! it’s actually a mildly encouraging sign after they raped and left for dead promising sites like Geocities and eGroups. What people say they want and what they really want, however, are often two different things. I wonder if anyone who clamored for video capabilities on Flickr will pause one day and think to themselves that, somehow, there’s something missing, something they just can’t put their finger on. Then again, probably not. It’s here to stay, and we might as well see what we can do with it.

The guy who ran the hostel knocked on my door at 8 a.m. with a bag of fried things and soymilk for breakfast. I was gathering my stuff together and stuffing it into my backpack, which fortunately can be expanded to accommodate the…wait a minute, I didn’t buy anything. Hmm….accommodate the instant noodles I was taking on the boat, then. Prince Roy was busy watching a black-and-white, blurry version of a baseball game in his room. The world outside was white with fog even thicker than the day before, and we heard the Taima ferry’s foghorn repeatedly as it tried to make its way into the area.

After settling our bills, we were driven down to the port, where a fairly large group of people, mostly soldiers, waited for the ferry, still making its presence known via foghorn. PR and I sat on the waterfront and watched it appear out of the fog and sidle up to the dock. Back inside, a short, bespectacled MP checked the soldiers’ papers as we lined up. MP’s are allowed to arrest up to three ranks above their own, so everyone from sergeant on down was at the mercy of the little private.

Once on board, we put our things away in our cabin, the very cabin we’d had on the trip out (this time sans interlopers), and went up top to watch the departure. I struck up a conversation with a soldier who turned out to be one of the few volunteers in the new experimental program. He told me that he makes NT$37,000 a month, and gets nine days’ leave in Taiwan every three months. He is in for five years and will be discharged at the rank of sergeant-major. Now, a year and a half in, he is a corporal. He was also born the year I arrived in Taiwan.

Fuao Port disappeared into the mist, and we slid along the surprisingly smooth seas with only a slight rocking. Perfect sleeping weather, so that’s what we did, getting up for a lunch of gooey microwaved curry rice in the restaurant. Then we went out and stood just below the bridge watching the ocean and wondering where all the garbage we saw on the water came from. PR thought there might be a wreck somewhere ahead.

The sun came out; we were making good time. Keelung came into view before 4 p.m., though it took us a while to weed our way through the harbor and dock. For a while, PR and I stood stupidly by the upper-deck exit, wondering when they were going to extend the gangway, before we realized that everyone was headed below to the car gate at the rear of the ship.

Keelung, and Taiwan, were pretty much as we’d left them, albeit about 15 degrees warmer. Summer came while we were away. Keelung, of course, is a depressing place to arrive, even from as undeveloped a place as Matsu, but my spirits were lifted somewhat by the atmosphere of the soldiers just starting their 9-day leave. We walked to the train station and caught a train back to Taipei. At each stop more and more students would crowd onto the train, and it struck me how different they seemed from the soldiers only a few years’ older.

An hour of cell-phone-related chatter later, PR and I parted ways in the MRT station, him to sort through the 478 photos he took, and me to sift through the 609 pictures I ended up with after deleting the obvious duds every night to save CF card space. Not that we were competing, but it will be interesting not only to read his version of the events I’ve described here, but to see the pictures he took as well.

And now, over 6,000 words later, we return to life as we know it. Just 15 degrees warmer.