A few years ago I was transferring some old VHS tapes to DVDs when I came across footage that I had made during my time as a conscript soldier in Taiwan. I’d nearly forgotten about that video, but watching it again, I was amazed at what I’d managed to capture.

I was nearing the end of my military service in late 1997. Thanks to the entrenched seniority system tradition I had relatively few duties apart from regular training and managing our base’s Karaoke bar, or KTV as we called it. Some of the officers had become aware that in my pre-military days I had been a camera operator at a major cable network; they called on me to film some official functions and promotional videos, so I was allowed to bring my camcorder, a JVC GF500 that was already eight years old at that point, onto base for a short time.

But it seemed a shame to miss such an opportunity to record the strange, unknown world of military conscript life in 1990’s Taiwan, hidden as it was behind walls and guards, away from civilian life, so one weekend afternoon when the base was at its emptiest, I took out the bulky JVC and walked cautiously around filming things. When I did encounter other soldiers, I’d offer explanations such as “Just making sure this thing works ok” or “Recording stuff to remember this by,” etc. Many thought it was some kind of photographic device as they’d seen me taking still pictures before, something I’d been doing since my arrival at the base two years before. When I was a rookie I’d had to hide disposable film cameras, then available at convenience stores, in my uniform, but eventually I was designated the official base photographer and could take photos a little more openly.

The other soldiers, even the officers, seemed ok with me taking video on base, and I grew more confident, although still only daring to film during leisure times. I recorded the mundane minutiae of military life from a conscript’s point of view, from washing dinner trays and playing sports to guard duty, office work, equipment maintenance and even managing the various cats and dogs that found their way onto base. The KTV was featured prominently as that was my domain, and soldiers could feel a bit more free and open there.

The most interesting aspect of the video was when soldiers opened up to me about how they felt about military service, being made to sacrifice years of their lives in order to counter the threat of attack and invasion that had lasted decades at that point (and continues to this day) due to the PRC’s territorial ambitions. The sons of politicians, high-level gangsters and other rich families could often finagle their way out of service, but most young men saw it as an inevitable part of life at that point, something that could only be endured and put behind them as quickly as possible.

Years ago, when I transferred the footage to DVDs, I thought, “This would be a really interesting video.” And then I put it aside as I was busy with other projects. But recently I dug them out again and decided it was time to make something of them. My first “old VHS” videos were from college and fairly well received, but this one felt different. Surely there is no other such footage out there, I thought. First of all, there were no readily available recording devices at the time that would have been accessible to an ordinary conscript soldier. Even as recently as 2013, a soldier was incarcerated and basically killed by the punishment that caused him to experience heatstroke, all for the supposed “crime” of just having a mobile phone on base, though by that time mobile phones were already common and included cameras. Personal vendettas were suspected in that case; it resulted in a huge public outcry and criminal charges for many of the perpetrators.

Another factor in my decision to publish the video, aside from the fact that everyone in the video has likely since left the military in one way or another, is the fact that the base itself no longer exists. The division relocated at some point in the 2000’s, and the base structures lay derelict for several years, gradually being retaken by nature. I revisited it at that point, entering through a hole in the back wall and spending a few hours exploring and photographing the overgrown ruins. But then in the 2010’s the place was completely razed; nothing is left, and while there is talk of some new development, it remains too far away from Miaoli’s city center for easy access, even though a new wider highway has replaced the old winding two-lane mountain road that existed when I served there.

So earlier this year I spent a month or two going through the old footage, editing it into some kind of order, splicing in photos I’d taken on my last visit before the place was razed. Surely this is one-of-a-kind material, I thought with some amount of trepidation. My previous video about my time as a student at Tunghai University had garnered a bit of attention from the nostalgia crowd as it too is a window to another world, albeit a more accessible one. And some of my photography of military service has been criticized as being a bit too “honest” and showing a side of military life some didn’t feel “appropriate.”

I needn’t have spared the matter that much thought, however. After I uploaded the video to YouTube, there has basically been no response. Which, to be honest, is to be expected; what means a great deal to me doesn’t necessarily mean anything to others. Non-Taiwanese people most likely don’t care and can’t understand most of the language in the video, and Taiwanese viewers might just want to forget those days. Fortunately, I am not a “serious” YouTuber with flashy titles, jump cuts, soundtracks, millions of subs or the whole WHATSUP GUYS SMASH THOSE BUTTONS! shtick. That would be a lot of pressure, and even those folks are getting more desperate as their YT-derived income gravitates increasingly towards AI-generated garbage.

In fact, the more Internet companies move away from real content, and by “real” I don’t just mean non-AI-generated content but honest, candid, empathetic connections with any level of subtlety, the more I miss those days, back when I would lay on my bunk in the barracks reading articles in WIRED magazine about a dreamy, net-connected future of equality and thoughtful discourse that, almost three decades later, has disappeared into the encroaching overgrowth as inexorably as the old base itself.

A while ago I transferred some of my old collection of VHS videos onto DVDs, and probably not in the best way considering I’d need as much resolution as possible to make them watchable (that would require a more serious setup than I have access to). I let them sit for years, thinking I’d get around to the rest of them someday, but lately I came across them and figured I might as well make something of them now.

The first time I ever appeared on video was in 5th grade in Ms. Vanartsdalen’s English class at Ed White Elementary in El Lago, Texas. I was horribly shy and muttered a few words of introduction into the camera, and that’s all I remember. I already posted our high-school video projects we made for Mrs. Bell’s history class. The next time I had access to a video camera was during my first year of college at Washington & Lee University. I borrowed the school’s camera during one of the breaks I spent on an empty campus in lieu of returning to Florida, filming myself practicing in my room in the now-demolished Gilliam Dorm, or my friends at the now-demolished International House (Are you sensing a trend here? Yeah, W&L is all about maintaining the history it deems worthy, everything else can GFO). I hauled the camera up to the room of one of my few good friends at the time, Will Avery, who had a room to himself due to the fact that his original roommate refused to share a room with a Black student. Another W&L “tradition” I guess.

For some reason I can’t find any tapes from my sophomore year, when I filmed a silly movie for Professor deMaria’s media course I was taking at the time. It was called “Minks” and roasted the frat system, to nobody’s delight at the time. Then I came to Taiwan, only returning to Lexington to finished my senior year, but now with my own big-ass JVC camcorder in hand. I’d picked it up in Hong Kong over the Lunar New Year break in 1990, and subsequent videos I made with it at Tunghai University and when I was doing my army service in Miaoli should be forthcoming if I ever get around to putting those together.

In any case, my senior year at W&L was rather lonely. I missed Taiwan, and most everyone I’d befriended before I’d left had graduated, though Will was thankfully still around, as well as the other Black students living at Chavis House, and one of my suite-mates, Gary Hugh Green III, was cool and fun to talk to (He went on to get his law degree from Harvard; I stayed at Gary’s empty Redondo Beach house at the turn of the millennium after finishing film school in NYC, but we’ve since lost touch). I exchanged letters (yes, letters! Remember those?) with my friend Clar, who was a student at a nearby college, came to visit and made tabbouleh in our bathroom. I had my own room in a suite in the then-new Gaines Hall, due to the fact that a white student didn’t care to be sharing a suite with someone who was a quarter Black (tradition!). The Welcome sign I stuck on our outside door, written in Chinese, was ripped off, covered in racial epithets, and thrown on the hallway floor. But I’d made friends with the Taiwanese cadets at the neighboring Virginia Military Institute, where I was taking trumpet lessons from then-Captain Brodie.

It’s not a long video, just over 15 minutes, but it is a window into my time at that unfortunately (and perhaps aptly)-named institution some three and a half decades ago. Perhaps in the future AI will be able to recreate them in better resolution, but this will have to do for now.

The thing about this subscription system is that I feel pressure to make each and every post somehow “worthy” of actually notifying someone about, rather than just blathering about on here and hey, if you happen to read it, great. You’d think that the quality of my posting on here would consequently get better. You’d also be wrong, because the actual result is just me thinking: Hey, I feel like writing about whatever random thought I had and just seeing where it goes, but then I’d remember that actual people have subscribed to this account, and what if they feel cheated, having not gotten anything worth their time? And I’d think: I’ll just wait until I have something worth writing about.

You can see how that’s going (not great). So the question is: Should I just abandon the subscription system and just continue to write half-assed ditherage on here? Or just let it continue with the followers I have and stop telling anyone about it? The obvious answer, some of you might be thinking, would be actually putting more effort into making better posts, but all I can tell you about that is HAHAHA…no.

I have slowly been making incremental improvements to my photography site, within the bounds of that Google Sites can provide of course. Google seems to be slowly adding capabilities to it, so I will be working on that as improvements to the design become available. It’s sufficient for now, in any case, and perfectly fine for a free service. I also spent much of January working on an actual assignment, which I’ll talk about when it’s actually published.

The Ramblers have also been busy; we’re now working on putting together our latest album, which is technically our fifth (I think). The band formed 20 years ago in 2003, though I joined the next year, in 2004 (you can read about that particular night here) around the time we began filming the Lady X movie. Last night we played on a huge stage at Taipei 101, a crowd a dancers swinging away to our music in the shadow of the former world’s tallest building, now adorned with Blade Runner-esque video ads, lasers shooting into the sky as the temperature dropped and wind threatened to topple the music stands. Chenbl came by and we went to see the PXMart exhibition on the other side of Xinyi Road, which was basically a huge maze of vivid displays. They also had snacks. I was more interested in photographing the people taking photos of the displays, but 1) they did not like me ruining their photos of the displays, and 2) we had to get back to the stage for the show.

Afterwards, after we’d all said our goodbyes and gone our separate ways, I walked back across the bridge, carrying the Bach Stradivarius trumpet that has been my constant companion for over 40 years, and thought: This is nice, this life. I have a good job, a nice Water Curtain Cave (that should be paid off soon-ish) to live in, someone who loves me and whom I love, good friends, and I live in a dynamic, democratic nation with decent affordable healthcare, generally liberal values, good public safety and infrastructure, and just a place in which I’m interested in playing a part. That part has varied greatly over the years, but they have all been meaningful, and that’s something for which I am extraordinarily grateful.

我本來就很喜歡看太陽下山, 享受那種特別顏色的光線. 長大的時候最喜歡從太陽剛剛不見到完全黑暗的夜晚那段時間, 可能是