With my afternoons free of gainful employment these days, I’ve been spending more time wandering about, which is wonderful and yet a bit scary as I’m so unused to it. I feel as if I should be doing something boring and, well, blatantly gainful, as opposed to something that is interesting yet somewhat more subtly gainful. It’s like a steering wheel has been suddenly thrust in my hands, and my response thus far has been less “I will guide this vehicle to the best route!” and more like “Ooh, let’s see where this road goes…this is a road, isn’t it? Or path?”

In recent days the weather has sometimes been a bit uninspiring, and those afternoons I’ve been spending at the Artland bookshop on Renai Road, in the basement of a formerly ritzy residence across from the former Air Force HQ. Eslite has some nice photographic books, but most bookshops here tend to focus on “How to Get the Most Out of Your Panasonic FX-3810-B’s Autofocus Algorithms (with Codes for Free Customization Profiles!)” rather than actual photography. And what Eslite does have I’ve seen a million times already, so Artland was a refreshing change. So far I’ve sat on a sofa whiling away many afternoons devouring such interesting work as Uncommon Places, Road Trip, Minutes to Midnight, the Photographers Sketchbook, etc. I haven’t found Eggleston’s Chromes there, alas, though I did get a look at them at the Pompidou in Paris. The light at Artland is nice and there is a speaker just over the sofa so that the music is just distracting enough that I don’t feel the need to keep glancing surreptitiously at the cashier, who can’t but have helped notice that I haven’t bought anything yet and must be tired of the little gasping sounds I make when I come across a particularly lovely print. I am thinking about buying something, though, possibly one of Webb’s books.

It was drizzling out when I emerged back onto the street after a long stint on the sofa this afternoon, and I noticed that most of Taipei has replaced its streetlights with bright white LEDs instead of the ugly yellow lights they used to have. I walked back up Renai and through the knotted maze of a neighborhood in the general direction of Dongmen Station, passing one of the most impressive trees I’ve seen in the city, and a great deal of cats. I love this town.

We took a bus to Taichung on Saturday. Well, most of us did. Sandman got lost and couldn’t find the station in time, so he caught the next bus. But David, Slim, Eddie, Conor and I managed to board at the new Taipei Bus Station, hidden in the lofty heights of the Q-Square building, in time to get down to Taichung by mid-afternoon. Every time I travel to Taichung I wonder what it would be like to live there, and note how much it has changed since I went to college there. And every time I conclude that without a metro system I would probably find it quite inconvenient. Hopefully the first new mayor the city has had in well over a decade will do something about this situation. We’ll see.

We were playing at an underground live house, the Sound Garden, where the performance space seemed to be hidden behind a door in the “regular” performance space. I had to ask where the fire exits were, as the place seemed ready-made for disaster with one long tunnel to the exit. After our sound check I noticed that nobody was around, but when I went outside I found a long line of people waiting to get in.

The show was great, even though we were without Thumper, our percussionist. Mojo, who had been waiting for us there, was helping us keep time with some small cymbals, but I had to concentrate rather harder than usual on keeping the bass-line steady, as I could feel everyone leaning a bit more heavily on it than they would have if Thumper were there. The audience reaction was ecstatic throughout the show and encores. The mood was great, and we sat around signing CDs for a long time after the show. This was followed by a sumptuous dinner at a restaurant across the street, which ran long because we were all still high from the show and full of bright talk. It was after 1 a.m. before we caught a bus back to Taipei, and after 4 when I tumbled into the Water Curtain Cave, grateful for my bed.

Our post-gig dinner

On Sunday I practiced violin. You didn’t know I played the violin? That’s because I don’t, really. I signed up for community college classes that start in March, but I haven’t studied since I was a five-year-old Suzuki student with a quarter-sized instrument in Maitland, Florida. But Chenbl convinced me to give it a shot, and now I feel really sorry for my neighbors. Sure, I play trumpet at home at reasonable hours, but I know how to play the trumpet. A beginner violin student really should be exiled to a soundproof room for several months at least. But the violin is borrowed and the classes are cheap, so if it doesn’t take…well, no harm, no foul.

I saw “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” recently. I kind of had to, as every single friend of mine had asked me if I’d seen it, and, as a photographer, if the movie really resonated with me. It was a strange film, with great camera work, but it didn’t really resonate with me, probably because I was wondering throughout whether it should. Another reason was the way photography was portrayed in the film, and the nerd in me got in the way when I saw Sean Penn trying to act like a photographer. “I just want to be here, seeing it for myself,” Penn says at one point in the film.

“No, you’re not seeing it for yourself, that’s a frickin’ 400mm lens!” I say to the TV and any neighbors who are listening in. “And Ben Stiller just screwed up your focus anyway!”

I went down to the company headquarters in Hsinchu for the first time on the last day of the year to sign the papers; one of the projects I’ve been working on for many years has been cancelled, and so I find myself with a schedule I haven’t had in years. They’ve promised to treat me fairly. We parted on good terms. Afterward, as my train back to Taipei was hours away, I wandered around the high-speed rail station, among the huge apartment blocks and new construction. The day was clear and cold, and hardly anyone was around as I walked on the big grass field behind the station, the wind whipping at me from various directions. I felt great, free, even though my income will take a hit. After over a decade in one position, one secure, steady position, part of me is excited at the change, though another part of me has become unused to such things. Right now I’m preparing for a photography talk I’m giving later this month. Then there’s always writing and photography and just general wandering that all call to me. I’ve also signed up for violin classes for some reason. I went to the community college near the Death Star Mall last night to listen to the teacher, and she seemed to know what she was doing. Chenbl has a spare violin that his niece discarded after losing interest in music, so it won’t be much of an expense. I find myself wanting to sell the Water Curtain Cave and move back into the city, maybe sell off all my things and live in a tiny room downtown, maybe get an electric scooter. To be honest, that’s not a very practical plan, financially speaking. And I have to admit that, even after all these years, I still love walking over that bridge, though the load of worries I toss over the side each day seems to grow all the time.

Simplify should be the word of the year. I should get rid of a lot of stuff, even if I don’t end up moving into a micro-apartment above Q-Square or something. I should put all my old DVDs onto a hard drive, all my books (well, most of them, aside from my photobooks) onto a Kindle, and ship everything off to second-hand shops. Travel will probably be a bit sparser in 2015 than it was in 2014; I made four trips last year, which is about twice as many as I usually take, but the photo festival paid for my trip to Hangzhou in the spring, and the trip to Tokyo in the fall was purely to regain a portion of my sanity, so I consider it a fair trade.

Right now I have photography instruction, the print version of my book, the final DVD/blu-ray package for the movie, recording a third album with the Muddy Basin Ramblers (plus playing shows), revamping this entire site, and a photography book or two on my plate. Will things get a bit more “normal” this year for me? I don’t know; there are powerful forces at work to prevent such development, but you never know. I want to live a life that I can write about, and that hasn’t been the case for a while now, resulting in very sparse posting, but I just may claw my way back into something resembling such a state eventually. Go me.

Dean and I met up with Tobie Openshaw at the gate of the Taipei American School in Tianmu yesterday afternoon. Tobie was helping us record the commentary track for the DVD/Blu-ray package. We went up to Tobie’s office/classroom, where he teaches videomaking, and we spent the next few hours making snarky, somewhat lucid remarks as we watched the film. I got the single pair of headphones, so Dean talked a lot more while I was busy watching the movie, making an occasional grunting noise here and there. Every half hour or so we would take a break downstairs. It was odd being in a high school again after so many years, though TAS is far nicer than my own high school. And it should be for what it costs to go there.

Dean is moving to Hungary later this months, where he will be working on the final packaging of the DVD/Blu-ray/download of the film. We will then mail/send links out to everyone we promised to send it to, as well as perhaps making it available on download services.