For once, the weather coordinated perfectly with the weekend; dismal gray rain all week, followed by a brilliant, cloudless Saturday. Sunday was the same as I set out for the first meeting of the Taiwan Photo Club at noon at Forker’s Restaurant near the intersection of Yanji St. and Zhongxiao East Road. The place was crowded, but the group had established domination over the rear section, including two tables. I saw a bunch of people there I knew as well as even more whom I didn’t know. Though I’d invited a couple of people, I felt a bit discombobulated, as tends to be the case in a massively multiplayer real world environment. Someone said I looked smaller in real life than I seem online.

Lunch was a pretty good hamburger and fries. Darren Melrose, whose idea it was to meet, gave a speech, during which I impolitely scoffed down my meal, which had come later than anyone else’s due to the aforementioned weirdness. He gave out a rules for a photo scavenger hunt, but I have to say I was more interested in the hefty fellow next to me’s bag full of old rangefinders and lenses. Someone else had a Leica M6, which felt good but not like the M3.

It turned out that a lot of people there didn’t know much or care much about Flickr, so perhaps one of the next meeting’s topics will be about using the site. There were bits of things that interested me and bits that didn’t; we’ll just have to see where it goes.

When we emerged from the back of the restaurant after the meal, we found a change of season had taken place while we were inside; it was now cool and cloudy. Some of the film people expressed dismay as they had packed sunny-weather film in their cameras.

We took the subway to Longshan Temple. On the train I felt like I was surrounded by people with loaded guns as I surveyed all of the expensive black machinery adorning the various group members as they looked around for targets.

At the temple, the group stalled in a morass of indecision before David Reid and I rolled our eyes and just walked out into the considerable crowd of the temple. I took a few shots, but quickly grew bored and a little irritated. To me, photography is the solitary act of uncovering the remarkable among the ordinary; I wasn’t really in the mood for it that afternoon, though. I walked back and forth taking pictures of various annoyed-looking people. I’d only been to the temple last week, though that was at night. I did enjoy chatting with the other photo group people there, but I wasn’t really in the mood to take pictures.

I had another appointment later, so I left around 4:30pm, feeling bereft of ideas. Sometimes I get really tired of the pictures I take and feel the need to do something different. I should have brought the M3 I guess, so just taken pictures with my phone all day.

Many years ago I sustained a fairly serious injury to my left knee, and as a result it’s a little weaker than my right knee. Therefore, I’ve been practicing more with my left foot back when doing tuishou than with my right foot back, to compensate. Lately I’ve found that I actually do better with my left foot back than the right. Does this mean it’s recovered? No, I think it just means I get more practice in that position.

“Merge your energy with that of your opponent,” Teacher X told us as I practiced with the UPS guy. I guess it’s the only way to manipulate them.

Last Saturday at 2/28 park was brilliant. The weather was perfect. A really old guy sat watching us practice, the same guy from last time. I keep meaning to ask Teacher X who he is, and then forgetting. I was practicing with UPS Guy yet again, and doing pretty badly, when Teacher X told me to forget about what was going on in front and concentrate on pushing “the skin of his back” instead.

It was like night and day. Using this mindset, I didn’t get all bothered about what was going on with all the hands and elbows and shoulders; it didn’t matter. All I had to worry about was the skin of his back, just that, and suddenly it all became so simple and easy. Of course, visualizing oneself in the same way is harder, and I didn’t do so well with that. But I was pretty happy to have gotten at least that one idea down.

UPS Guy also had some advice. Actually, it wasn’t new advice. People are always telling me to “relax” and pushing will become easier. However, we were talking about just what that word meant, and I realized that it wasn’t just to relax your muscles, though it also does mean that. However, in this context it primarily means to put your body into a more comfortable, stable position, even if that means tightening and moving through less comfortable positions on the way there. For example, if I am being twisted and pushed by someone, I could either relax like a rag doll, but ideally just returning to a stable “default” position instead of resisting or just relaxing works much better.

I will have to look into this idea more carefully in the future.

A book was just published here called “1-100 Dreams” including small articles about 100 people, one for each age from 1 year old to 100 years old. I was selected for 39. I’d been under the impression that they had simply chosen 100 random people, but when I found the book at the big Eslite by city hall last night (the copy they mailed to me went to the wrong address), I was surprised to find quite a few actual celebrities inside. I suppose they had to sell it somehow.

In other news, Blues Bash V went pretty well. As the Dream Community (the manager is Dream #46 in the above list, btw) has a nice new building with two performance spaces, we did two shows, one outside and unplugged, and another inside a boomy bar space. There were several bands from Japan and Korea, though the Korean rock band had no actual blues to display. Former DPP Legislator Lin Chuo-shui showed up, stony faced in a crowd of happy faces, or at least until we started playing. Then he smiled: a real accomplishment, that.

Good music, good food, no police calls, no violence or complaints, and good weather. I’d still rather have BBVI in Bitan.

Now that real Winter has arrived, and my work on the film is wrapping up, my thoughts are turning to travel. I’ve taken so little time off this year that, even after subtracting the vacation I can exchange for money as well as the vacation I can transfer to next year’s total, I still have seven days I have to use before the end of the year, else I lose it. I’m thinking of a trip to southern Spain over the Chinese New Year break to see where Sergio Leone filmed his spaghetti westerns, but anything before that will have to be closer to home, Japan most likely, though preferably a part of that country I’ve never seen. I’ll post details once I’ve figured out what I’m doing exactly.

三采文化最近出了一本書叫做 ‘1-100歲的夢’， 而裡面有我在下這一隻小猴子代表39歲的角色。我還沒有收到書，

Since construction has completely enveloped the opera hall veranda, and the staff didn’t much like our tromping on the grass in the park at CKS Hall, Teacher X decided to move our weekend practice sessions to 2/28 Park, formerly Taipei New Park. The park is a traditional arena for pushhands and other martial arts groups to train, in the shade under the trees on nice, flat (if dusty) ground.

Our group was easily identifiable by our purple uniforms. Later, Little Mountain Pig told me he doesn’t think we should wear uniforms, as he says it causes other people to be hesitant about engaging us. Pig almost never wears his own uniform, though. He says he’s “not the uniform type” and simply let his wear out. I suspect he places a certain amount of value in the fact that he’s been studying so long he’s worn his uniforms out, and doesn’t want to be seen as a newbie student. I could be wrong, but he seems keen on assuming a teacher-brother” role in the group, especially since he fell out with Little Qin.

Teacher X was talking about a guy wearing a red shirt leading a nearby group. “He loves to brag,” he said, telling us how the guy boasted that he was then-President Clinton’s Tai-chi advisor when all he really did was make a weekend trip to the US. I wondered if there was some history there, as the guy was almost near enough to hear what Teacher X was saying. It’s not really my business, though, so I didn’t ask any further.

Nearby drink machines ate my money like the stock market, so, unlike the average US house buyer, I decided not to give them any more and went out of the park to a 7-Eleven for water. Pig said the water fountains in the park were safe to drink from, but I decided to play it safe for now.

I pushed with the UPS guy and Yang Qing-feng, who hasn’t shown up in a while. NL Guy and Mr. V were there as well, grappling around with each other. Although the ground is level and smooth, every gust of wind blew up a miniature sandstorm that left us coughing.

I felt a lot more on display at the park than I usually do at other practice locations. Although I didn’t catch anyone staring openly, I got the feeling that people were curious about us. I’ve heard many stories about outrageous challenges and fights going down in the park between rival groups. “Some of those guys will stop at nothing to make sure you lose a bout,” Teacher X told me, which explained a little how Weeble was so interested in practicing there. Still, practicing with other groups could be educational.

Teacher X is climbing Yushan this weekend, though, so no class. He wasn’t at Sun Yat-sen Hall last night, either. I’m sure the other students will go, but I probably won’t. The weather’s supposed to be crappy, anyway.

前幾天坐捷運時接到一通馬祖來的電話， 說我的作品得了那邊比賽的銀牌還有一張佳作。

The fact that I’m currently uploading pictures I took the day Sandman’s son was born over two weeks ago got me to thinking about different levels of photography. The birth, by the way, was amazing; I’d never seen anything like it, though the closest I got to the actual event was the waiting room. But the happiness and celebration afterwards was very moving and an honor to be a part of.

But as I was saying, due to various factors it took me over two weeks to get around to downloading, processing and uploading the pictures. For events like that, I take my big DSLR and lenses with me, as I’m sure that I’ll be wanting to take pictures. That’s the top level, at least for me.

Most of the time, however, I just keep my compact Sigma DP1 on me, as it’s easy to store in my backpack and has excellent image quality, if not great low-light capabilities or more than one focal length. That’s the next level.

Today, though, I discovered another level, a slightly disconcertingly attractive one, in fact: using my mobile phone camera, which really isn’t a very good camera at all, I can take a picture, label it, geotag it and upload it to one or several services like Flickr or Twitter within seconds right from my phone.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. One the one hand, the phone’s camera takes low-res, blurry shots with blown-out highlights and murky shadows. There’s no autofocus or zoom available. On the other hand, it’s there, in my hand, and I feel like the shots I get with it feel more immediate, even if they’re not, mostly likely because people looking at my photostream are seeing what I saw just a moment ago, rather than weeks in the past. Of course, with the passage of time, this immediacy is lost, isn’t it? Or does some of it cling to the picture over the years? I have no idea, but I’m interested in playing around with the idea and seeing what happens.