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 world was about to end, and here we were.

I was chatting with my friend Cassius, a music producer in the U.S. whom I’d met 41 months earlier according to the window above his head, beyond which I could see the river and mountains that surrounded the campfire, set on a grassy cliff on a bright sunny day. I’d met many of the people I’d come to call friends there, including documentary photographer Abdul Aziz and saxophonist Steven Strouble, both of whom introduced me to even more interesting places, galleries and studios where creative people could gather and talk about all the art and music being created and on display around them. So I figured the campfire would be a good place to watch the world end, as that was where I’d first experienced Altspace, a virtual reality social world that had been bought by Microsoft in 2017, saving it from dissolution. 

Now the company had decided to condemn the community to that very fate, on March 10th, 2023. We’d been told 10 p.m. would be the deadline, but then it was announced that everything would end at 2 a.m.

Naturally, everyone had showed up to watch, catch up, and just be present for what we all felt was the premature conclusion of a historic accomplishment in online social interaction. There are other VR social spaces now, such as VRChat, Horizon, Spatial, etc., but Altspace had that peculiar blend of just enough freedom combined with decent moderation and connection tools that let community events blossom. When I first encountered it in the late teens, using what now seems like a laughably primitive Samsung GearVR headset, Altspace only allowed for robots and basic Lego people-esque avatars, but these were then replaced with much more expressive representations that were cartoonish enough to avoid the uncanny valley while still providing a wide choice of attire and features that static screenshots mostly fail to convey. Mouths moved with our speech, and our eyes flicked and blinked in a realistic fashion based on the algorithm some coder at Microsoft probably worked for months perfecting. Now, of course, headsets are beginning to offer face and eye tracking to increase immersion and expressiveness in avatars. 

Alas, that was the last significant update, and as Microsoft shifted its attention elsewhere and adopted a more hands-off approach, moderators were withdrawn, leaving us more or less to our own devices. Thankfully the communities in which I was active were largely self-moderating. While I often felt uneasy in other spaces, always on alert against being surrounded by mocking children or toxic “adults”, Altspace would show me where my friends were, often all in the same space, and off I’d go to hang out and chat and learn and just feel a part of a supportive group of cool people. It was enormously satisfying to just kick back and listen, talking sometimes but often just chilling, drifting from conversation to conversation, amid a group of talented, interested, intelligent and empathetic individuals with all kinds of backgrounds and origin stories. 

It wasn’t always wonderful, of course. People still engaged in the inevitable petty beefs with the accompanying drama. Some people would get drunk and/or high during events such as the Freestyle Power Hour, where anyone could go up to the mic and rap or play or whatever they wanted. That venue was in a basement space at the opposite end of a nighttime alley from the shell of a white 1970’s Cadillac coupe nestled behind a chain link fence. I played a few times there myself, accompanying others to the netlagged beats, and while there were times the content of certain inebriated freestyling ventured into questionable waters, those in attendance were also free to call others out on their BS, and we could all talk about it. In the end, everything was cool.

Other spaces I loved: The Harlem Film House, a complex located in the middle of a street of brownstones. It featured not only a full theater, lobby and immense gallery, but also, if you knew which black wall to walk through, the Boom Boom Room, a golden, glimmering 30-era Art Deco space with piano and drums on a small stage, stately cigar bots, and chicken and waffles served at every booth. World-builder Kipp York made other vast, exotic space-based worlds that gave swank space-age vibes, planetoids floating majestically overhead. Someone made a virtual Waffle House, which had been the scene of riotously hilarious exchanges when everyone got together there. Other people ran talk shows and standup comedy events with lavishly appointed sets and audience spaces. Much more serene but no less delightful was a comfy Scandinavian house rendered in exquisite detail, its muted white and gray decor accented by the pattering of rain outside, perfect for just sitting alone and contemplating. 

I’d visited my own Altspace home, a bright loft apartment overlooking an oceanfront city, one last time earlier that final day to save some shots to remember it by after it too was gone. I’d hung up my photos there, printed large on the walls so that others could see my work properly, the only place in the world where that was possible outside of expensive and time- and space-limited gallery shows. 

After the world failed to end at 10, I traveled to one of the many apocalypse-themed events, most of them crowded to capacity. I found myself in a field of waving grass filled with sound of crickets and birds, the other people surrounded by auras of various colors. As the clock ticked down, the host warned that he would be muting everyone so they could meditate up until the end. “Whatever you have to say, say it now,” he said. 

I decided there would be more than enough silence after tonight. I tried to get back into the campfire, but it was full, and in any case I didn’t feel like ending the world in the midday sun, so I went instead to a dance club where many of my other friends had gathered for the final moments. It was a boisterous affair. I was glad to see my old friends Ty, Key, Moshef, Sasha, Blue, and Micah, all familiar faces, voices and attire, from Moshef’s wool cap and dreds and Key’s electric turquoise hoodie to Micah’s usual orange patterned shirt and trilby hat, and I was just enjoying being in their company, chatting and pretending that the world wasn’t about to end. The DJ played “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday” as the clock ticked down to the last few minutes; people were trading contact information to make sure we could find each other again.

Two o’clock struck, and…we were still there. “Are things slowing down?” Micah asked. I thought the frame rate might be dropping, but I couldn’t say for sure. Three minutes passed, then four. The DJ had launched another playlist. The walls and ceiling flickered briefly. We kept chatting.

Then, at precisely 2:07, everyone stopped moving, and silence fell as the music abruptly ceased. I found myself looking around a room full of mannequins. Several seconds later, the room vanished, replaced by a text box floating in an empty space, reading: “Connecting, first attempt of 10.” Nine attempts later, the program closed. Around the real, actual world, hundreds, perhaps thousands of actual people took off their headsets, severed from their friends, their spaces, their community. 

It was over.

I put my headset away and went to bed, feeling empty but thankful that I’d at least been there until the end. The next morning I got up looking forward to joining my friends in Altspace before remembering that it was gone. The people I knew were out there, but scattered among other platforms, spaces that didn’t feel as safe or inclusive or welcoming. We might find that again, but the future of VR is perennially in doubt.

Why is that, though? Why has this form of communication always been so ridiculed? In the early days the hardware was cumbersome and the experiences less than pleasant, but those days are long gone for most purposes. The mood today for VR enthusiasts feels like being laughed at for being a nerd, being into video games and anime back in the day…now that those things are cool and mainstream, VR has taken their place. In any case, the objection would seem to be the same: “You are rejecting our presence, taking yourself out of our realm of control and interacting with people other than us, people you have chosen over us, people we can’t see, and that makes us hurt and angry.” People who want to put the pandemic behind them might have exacerbated that sentiment, VR perhaps coming to represent another vestige of those years of masks and social distancing. Or maybe they’re just still mad at those kids who elected to play D&D instead of playing with them. And as more public spaces disappear and more people move from neighborhoods designed for personal interaction to the isolation of gated communities and high-rises, I feel while text-based social media, which has proven time and again to be simply disastrous when it comes to fulfilling our social needs, is not the answer, VR very well could be.

There’s a simple reason for this: You don’t tend to find the mass hysteria encouraged by enraged text-based social media in VR; by its very nature, conversations only happen among limited groups of people, just like real life. Unlike in the physical world, however, nobody is on their phones; if you’re there, you’re engaged. If someone is bent on making trouble, things go pretty much as they do in “meatspace” minus the possibility of physical violence. And that aspect is huge – the feeling of physical presence without the threat of physical danger, something that most articles about VR completely ignore in favor of shallow discussions about resolution and polygons, but it creates the potential for more honest and compelling interaction in some ways even than physical reality, where the omnipresent specter of potential physical harm, ingrained into us over thousands of years, can cast an ugly shadow over any interaction. 

That said, while people unfamiliar with virtual reality may fear that it will replace physical reality, its true value lies in overcoming the limits of text-based interaction. VR interaction is miles away from the torrent of rage-inducing proclamations that make up Twitter/Facebook/etc. Think about it: When you see a problematic tweet, the tendency is to respond on the same impersonal level to those lines of text. If you’re talking with someone standing in front of you who wants to communicate basically the same thing, 1) they most likely won’t state it in such absolutist terms but more in the context of the conversation, and 2) your reaction is most likely also going to be different, couched in conversational terms designed to communicate with that person rather than respond merely to the statement. In other words, VR interaction represents actual people communicating with each other on a level that text-based platforms do not and cannot match. 

Unfortunately, this massive benefit most likely is what is turning off major CEOs throughout the tech industry, as the inducement of rage, i.e. what the social media companies deem “engagement” is what drives their business model; the bigwigs have decided that VR is not in their best interest. After all, their “enshittification” model has always been to dangle the tantalizing idea of meaningful interaction as bait to get us into a space and then whip it away so we can buy their shit instead. While you can see how they have been trying to use VR to that end, it doesn’t seem to be working as well as they’d predicted; people are insisting on being people with each other, not text-producing rage bots, and where’s the profit in that?

In the days after Altspace ended, I sought out other members of our now-displaced community elsewhere. Replicas of the campfire had been created in the other worlds, some better than others. Horizon’s limited world-building tools produced the poorest results, but the VRChat version was almost identical, down to each tree and log. 

Both were empty.

I traveled to a mountain retreat in Spatial to find Kipp sitting alone on a couch watching a movie on a giant screen that kept glitching its way up the mountain until he had to go fetch it back. Blue came in and we chatted a bit, but it wasn’t the same. I came across Cassius, full of his usual grand plans, in a club environment he’d created in Horizon, but the vibe was different; our sense of community had become a sense of exile. I joined some world tours in VRChat designed especially for former Altspacers, but the avatars there are either entirely unrealistic or so realistic that the lack of animation is just creepy, and people change their avatars so frequently there that there’s no consistent look to anyone, resulting in a reduced sense of presence. While Horizon is making great strides with their avatars, the worlds being created there are so far quite basic, and of course Meta’s censorship practices are problematic. 

So far no one has been able to match what Altspace had done, and now that Altspace is gone, it’s even more likely that they won’t even try.

I’m not arguing that Altspace was the pinnacle of VR social interaction; obviously we can and should do better. It just represented not only a special time and place, but a vibe that I’ll always remember fondly, a place where a group of people could come together and communicate, create and dream. What’s next should be up to us, but I fear that a future where are able to interact with each other online as people rather than through bursts of impersonal/inflammatory texts will only be fought tooth and nail by corporations that are only able to see value in our purchasing ability rather than our humanity.  

My cynicism could be misplaced, though. I hope it is, and that, in the end, everything will once again be cool.

Many photographers struggle with this question: How do you know if your photos are good or not? 

Perhaps you “just know” or claim not to care what other people think, but judging one’s own work can be problematic due to one’s closeness to the process and experiences involved in the production of the work. Sure, you were there and know how precious and magical that moment seemed, or how hard you worked to get it, but viewers have no clue about any of that unless it’s communicated through the photograph itself. I’ve found that not looking at photographs I’ve made for at least a month or so helps in obtaining some objectivity in assessing the work’s meaning and value, putting enough distance between the emotion and conditions of making the work that it doesn’t exert an undue influence on how I see it (also I’m lazy and do not relish the idea of spending every night downloading and transferring files). But especially in this era of cheap memory and fast frame rates, the question of which shots to pay attention to and which to ignore has become an even greater challenge.

Back in the days before social media (which if you can recall makes you old as hell), this was honestly a difficult question. Your friends and family couldn’t be expected to criticize your work honestly. Your mother would think your work was brilliant regardless, the exception being my mother, who thinks the people in my photos aren’t smiling nearly enough and wouldn’t it be nice if they were? Your friends would probably shrug and say yeah, it’s ok, uh-huh and then continue to talk about what they wanted to really talk about because damn. 

And that was usually that, unless you happened to know someone like John Szarkowski, with whom you could have lunch and chat about your upcoming exhibition at MOMA. Sadly, it just wasn’t physically possible for most photographers to be on lunch-having terms with Szarkowski, and they could only hope that, after they died, someone who knew a future version of Szarkowski would happen to attend the auction of all those shoeboxes full of your old prints and take a liking to them. They would then have lunch.

When the Internet began to be A Thing, huge amounts of photos began to become viewable by just about everyone, with no need to die and leave one’s shoeboxes to the vague possibility of a potential lunch date with a random MOMA director. The problem with this was that the ability of the general public to care about photography simply couldn’t match the amount of photos to be seen, as most photographers assumed it would. People love to post their own photos but often spend little time looking at those of others, and this began to breed a certain resentment. Phrases like “tsunami of photos” began being bantered about, as well as the now-tired “Everyone’s a photographer now.” Meaning that people, while blissfully uploading photos all day/every day, just couldn’t be bothered to look at all of these photos that somehow were just everywhere now, much less interact with them in any meaningful fashion. 

The social media companies, brilliantly, devised a way to take the onus of meaningful interaction off of viewers, with the now-ubiquitous Like/Fav/Heart/whatever button. Suddenly it was easy to scroll through a small section of the endless photos, press a button to send the photographer a simulacrum of your interest in their work, and get on with your busy day. Problem solved! Now we all knew if our photos were good or not, and we then started seeing exponential growth in the number of compelling, quality work from diverse communities in the form of series, books and exhibitions from all around the world.

Except no, that didn’t quite happen. Photographers began simply judging their work on the amount of Likes they got on social media, even though they had no idea who was pressing the button or why. Their own motivations, impulses, thoughts and ideas all went out the window in favor of the mighty red symbol. The question of “Is this a compelling image/series?” was replaced by “Will this get teh Likes?” Image feeds were mercilessly culled on this basis, and curators started demanding Like/Follower counts when considering exhibitions and publications. Can’t bring your mass of Like-smashing Followers to gofundme your project? Sucks to be you. One well-known San Francisco street photographer told me, “If a shot doesn’t immediately get at least 120 Likes on the gram, it’s gone.” And this was in 2016, so that’s like 200 Likes in today’s currency.

The system was ripe for gaming, and gamed it was, not just by gleefully cackling individuals but also their vast armies of flying monkeybots. The result was more or less a guarantee that any accounts with outrageous follower/Like counts could be reliably dismissed as pretentious claptrap, and the numbers eventually became meaningless in terms of judging the quality of the work. That didn’t matter, of course, as studies have shown that people who cheat or game systems almost invariably come to believe that they deserve their success merely because of the attention they’re getting, so with little or no consequences to deal with, they just continue doing the same thing. Quite a few books and exhibitions were produced, but a disappointingly large proportion of them were bafflingly mediocre until one realized that projects were being approved on a Like-based economy, as it were.

When you discount all the detritus left over from the damage the Like button has done to photography, not to mention other arts, we seem to have taken more steps back than forward since all this began. The value of Likes is fading as more people recoil at the rage-fueled money-making machine that social media has become, a fact exacerbated by those companies introducing pay-to-play policies such as paid “verification” schemes. 

In other words, after all of this, it’s still nearly impossible to know if your photos are any good or not. Yes, you can pay money to one of the 26 people who seem to be judging the various annual competitions to not select your work; you can also pay a “master photographer” to tell you that your work sucks, and if you pay even more, why it sucks. Otherwise, various critique groups have come and gone over the years, but most have died out as those offering critique were 1) often not very good at it, or 2) not willing to spend too much time engaged an effort with little or no reward, mainly due to 3) being raked over the coals for having the audacity to offer a critique to someone who said “C&C welcome” because that doesn’t mean you can just, like, say bad things about my photos, dude. Not cool.

So in the coming post-Like photoverse, to use a phrase I think we can all agree is every kind of awful, are there any ways to glean any information on how people (actual people, not bots) see your work? Not a lot, I’m afraid. One thing you can do is pay attention to the source of the Likes you do get, or, if you’re lucky, actual human-generated comments that don’t consist entirely of exclamation marks and/or heart emojis. If you’re still on Flickr (and if you’re truly interested in photography rather than clout, you should be), the number of Likes should be fairly manageable because so few people are still on Flickr, due to its clearly inferior Like-accumulating capabilities. Attention from photographers and other artists whom you respect should perhaps be given more weight, whereas Likes from bots and/or random people with questionable taste who happen to be in a charitable mood when they came across your photo…perhaps not so much.

It might even be a moot point as AI-generated content is being used to a greater extent, free of those pesky ethical concerns of authorship or intellectual property rights that cost companies actual money that they could be using to send their CEOs cute little gifts (“Another yacht? Well, thanks I guess”) in between buying political officials. Media sites and advertising have already taken to using such content, and AI-generated images are even winning photography contests. Eventually, human-generated content could only be notable for its relative “imperfections” that AI cannot or will not mimic. Beyond the question of whether our art is any good or not, what will art even mean in a world where you have to prove not only that you are human, but that being human has any value?

I genuinely have no idea what lies ahead; I just hope I see some neat stuff along the way.

So, want to get some lunch? 

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.

From Google Streetview I gleaned that the house where I spent most of my formative years, a two-story house built in 1960 in El Lago, Texas, has been extensively remodeled, most likely due to flooding damage as the area is pretty much at sea level and sinking. I realize I’ve written about it before, but I recently found a tour of the inside of the old house on a realty site, and hoo boy did they do a number on it.

Outside, the old cracked driveway where our 1969 Buick Electra and 1972 Pinto were parked is now newly laid white concrete. All the tudor-esque 1960’s windows have been replaced with more storm-resistant but rather boring frames. Most of the old trees in front are gone, and many of the backyard ones as well. A patch of bare grass is the only sign of the old shed and pear tree that used to stand there. The concrete semicircle that was once our vegetable garden is now full of trees; one of the photos is taken from where my old fort was located, a place where many delicious afternoons were spent reading and snacking on peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches after school. The house is now painted blue, as it has been since not long after we moved away in 1981; no doubt the new owners didn’t appreciate me writing things like “Please take care of Grey Kitty” on the sides of the house, nor the mustard yellow color we painted it (believe it not, that was an improvement on the original dark brown, complete with orange front door, resulting in a very Halloween-esque vibe). Grey Kitty was a local cat who made her home with us when we lived there, and I was quite fond of her. My parents decided she wouldn’t be coming with us to Florida, but the elderly couple who bought the house from us assured us they would take care of her, and as far as I know they did. But I was a sentimental child and wanted to make sure.

Inside, as is seemingly mandatory with houses these days, any potentially offensive colors have been removed, and a few walls have been knocked down for that “open” look that is currently all the rage. Flying in the face of fengshui, the front door is now visible from the back of the house through an opening where the coat closet used to be, and the stairs, which once turned 90 degrees into the kitchen where a coffee bar is now located, now lead right into the back door, which is bad news for anyone pummeling down the stairs in the morning. The dining room, with its romanesque murals and fancy silverware, where so many people looked up at me towards the end of Christmas dinner to exclaim, “Oh that’s right, today’s your birthday, isn’t it?” is gone, turned into a home office and laundry room, which is reasonable as we mostly ate by the kitchen in what is now the “dining area” anyway. The puke-green carpet of the living room is now wood floor, no doubt an improvement visibly but much worse to sit on when opening Christmas presents, and a door to the garage has been added, which makes sense as we always had to go outside to get to the garage. All that remains besides the basic floor plan is the brick fireplace in the corner of the family room, where I used to play with my Matchbox cars, and the place where our huge Zenith TV stood how boasts a large flat screen that takes up not only that space but the space where our desk full of old National Geographic magazines and board games stood.

Upstairs, my room (formerly my sister’s room before she left for college) looks basically the same, though it’s grey now instead of bright blue. I don’t recall if the doors were cut to fit the ceiling’s crop; I wasn’t tall enough to notice then. I suspect the back of my old closet still has a secret entrance to the space over the garage. I’m a bit surprised no one has put an extra room in there. My brother’s room is also largely the same, except of course grey. There is one photo taken from my room with the door open and looking down the hall to my brother’s room, and I recall that view and listening to whatever he was playing on his stereo, which could have been anything from classical music to the latest rock. When he was practicing the flute, or I was practicing the trumpet, however, the doors would of course be closed.

It was kind of a shock to see that most everything had been cleared from the house, no reminders of the place that it once was, but then again, if it remained in the 1970’s it would be more of a museum piece than a place anyone would want to live in the 2020’s. The world is so different today! I understand why the old round-ended kitchen bar with the ceramic cookie jar that was filled with treats is gone, why the fake brick linoleum has been removed, as well as the thick rope rug where I used lay watching the Muppet Show, MASH and WKRP in the evenings and cartoons on Saturday mornings. I know why the shed is gone, that little corner of shady horror full of rusting metal lawn instruments ready to inflict tetanus on any unsuspecting intruder. I can see why the mullioned bathroom window of my parent’s bathroom is now a featureless glass square. I understand all of this; it makes all the sense in the world. But I am a sentimental man and kind of wish it wasn’t all gone.

I had an interesting conversation with a construction site manager yesterday. At least it went better than some of the previous interactions I’ve had with them.

It was a nice, warm, sunny day, and I was wandering along Zhongxiao West Road after a pleasant lunch near Camera Street and then hanging around the North Gate watching a wedding photographer chase the retreating light around the square. “Pretend like you’re running!” he called to the prospective groom, while his bride fiddled with makeup in a tiny tent.

“Like this?” the groom lifted a leg up hesitantly. Clearly he hadn’t been expecting this, especially after putting on a fancy white-and-purple suit.

“No, you look like a dog peeing!” the photographer said, but in a nice way. “Run like a bus is about to hit you!”  This was helpful advice, as buses were indeed zooming by inches behind him.

I walked east and got yelled at by a crazy Chinese monk for taking a photo of the Mitsukoshi Building. “Don’t fuck with me! I am long exiled from Foshan!” he shouted.

I kept walking, ending up on the famous pedestrian bridge at the intersection of Zhongxiao and Zhongshan. A busy construction site where the old round City Council building used to be caught my eye, and I took a few shots from the bridge before heading down to see if the light was nicer from street level.

“You can’t take photographs here,” a site manager walked over to tell me.

“Why’s that?”

“Company rules.” I sighed. This again.

“I don’t work for your company. Your site in is public view from the public road I’m standing on, and I’m not violating any safety rules here.” The manager considered this.

“All true, but we could get in trouble if you post these photos and our boss sees them, especially if he sees our company logo.”

“Why would your boss be unhappy at that? It seems like a well-run site. This project has even been shown in the media before.”

“He might yell at us for allowing someone to take photos.”

It was a pleasant, cordial exchange, and while I did not envy this man’s conundrum, I had to tell him: “You might not have noticed, but your site is bathed in reflected light from all these glass buildings next door in the afternoon. That’s going to attract photographers. Also, you’re not only right by a pedestrian bridge that is a famous photography spot, you’re also near hotels, the Executive Yuan and the train station. That means curious tourists walking by. Photography is going to happen. If you make a big deal about hiding the site from them, there’s a chance some of them will be IG influencers, journalists or even members of foreign diplomatic groups.” Someone might even blog about it, I added mentally.

He seemed amenable to this point of view, but he was still in manager mode. “Ok, I’ll let you keep the photos you’ve already taken, including the ones from the pedestrian bridge, but please don’t take any more.”

“There’s nothing you can do about the photos I’ve already taken,” I reminded him, noting that they’d tracked me all the way from the bridge. “But I appreciate your point of view and thanks for being courteous about it.”

As I walked on, I couldn’t help but wonder why people automatically go to some imagined worst-case scenario when they see they are being photographed. Is everyone afraid that their nefarious behavior will get them in trouble? But that can’t be the case, as being recorded by the government and corporations 24/7 has become a matter of course; nobody ever even thinks about it. Then again, government and corporate surveillance is expressly put in place to catch wrongdoing, so is it that far a stretch to imagine that, as such recording becomes more ubiquitous and ever present, the general population just assumes that any kind of photography is accusatory and predatory in nature? People crave attention, but just the safe kind of attention, I suppose. Whatever that is.

To wit: I recently got back in touch with a street photographer I used to chat with back in the early days of Flickr, Joe Wigfall. He no longer even takes photos; he says it had become too much of a hassle, so he paints and writes instead. It’s a shame; he made some very good work when he was active. He noted that when he was out shooting, Black people would give him more shit for photographing them than people from other groups would, and he noticed the same for white and Asian photographers he’d go shooting with. We can give them a pass, but you’re one of us; you should know better seems to be the message they were sending.

I took the subway over to Taipei 101 and walked across Wuxing Street towards the mountains, noticing the imprints of old military villages amid the empty fields as well as the occasional illegal villas with partially demolished balconies. Brightly colored election trucks, cars, motorcycles and bicycles crisscrossed the streets with their various candidates promising various things from mounted loudspeakers. But the sun was setting, so I walked back over to the Tonghua Night Market to meet up with Chenbl for a delicious meal of noodles at a wood-paneled restaurant where the competent young staff played old and pseudo-old jazz. They knew about the Ramblers, and put on some of our music.

Chenbl had got his hands on some hotel coupons, so we decided to spend a couple of days in Tainan, along with his elderly parents. Chenbl’s father is from Tainan, so he enjoys the nostalgia of trips back there.

We took the bullet train, Chenbl’s parents enjoying the plush purple business class seats with complimentary coffee and champagne or whatever it is they serve there, while we watched the brilliant green of the rice fields flash by as we consumed our brown-bag breakfast in the still-spacious blue standard seats. Tainan’s high-speed rail station is rather out in the middle of nowhere, as several of the stations between Taipei and Kaohsiung seem to be, no doubt thanks to land speculation, but no matter: We were going to experiment with the i-Rent online car rental system to save Chenbl’s parents, who are in their 80s, a bit of walking. I used my phone to locate the car, took some photos to show it wasn’t damaged, and then we were off.

It’s been quite a few years since I drove a car, but it didn’t take long to get used to piloting the white Toyota Yaris down the rural roads. The trick, I’ve learned, is not to get emotional while driving. Other drivers will do stupid things all the time, but if you leave enough space and think ahead, things generally work out. Not being able to see the front edges of the car was annoying, however. Never had that problem with 80’s cars, he grumbled oldly.

Chenbl had constructed an intricate itinerary with Google Maps, noting all of our potential destinations, and he used the service to issue navigation orders from the passenger’s seat, occasionally telling his parents to be quiet when they started suggesting oblique routes from half a century ago that may or may not still exist. Our first stop was at a market in an old row of buildings; we parked behind a factory near what was either a motorcycle that had been nearly consumed by weeds or a motorcycle-shaped bush. Chenbl bought snacks while I explored the strange blue-tinted light of the nearby alleys, and when I returned he was talking with one of the shop owners, who gave us free samples of their sausages. Tasty.

Next was the huge, elaborate Buddhist Daitian Temple complex at Madou. The place was very “sensitive”, Chenbl explained, as he is attuned to these kinds of things. The gods were kept behind ornate iron gates to keep them from being damaged by the huge crowds that visit during religious holidays. Behind the main temple is a huge structure in the shape of a dragon, full of scenes of whatever the temple’s founder envisioned heaven looked like in 1979. Chenbl’s father was going to go take a look inside until he found that the entrance fee was NT$40. We went instead, and the experience was indeed probably not worth NT$40, being a series of “It’s a Small World”-esque motorized figures depicting various deities having tea parties on lawns. There was a Monkey statue, however, so of course I had to get a picture with The Poagao, whom I’m fairly sure didn’t pay NT$40 to get in and probably had some tea party paraphernalia in his pockets.

Next to the exit of the Heaven experience was a gate to the Hell experience, which was also NT$40 and probably didn’t include air conditioning. We declined the Hell experience and went back to the main temple. Chenbl pointed at a palanquin parked outside, surrounded with surly young men in temple garb. “Someone is visiting,” he said. We went back inside to see a couple of elderly mediums shaking and shouting and pounding the table, while other devotees standing by interpreted all of this. After this we went to another structure, a large round edifice with very nice statues of the four Directional Deities inside, each one a different color. I hadn’t known about the Directional Deities; Chenbl’s father was filling me in when Chenbl suggested we take our leave due to my photo-taking causing a few mutterings from the staff.

Our next destination was Laotanghu, an “art space” out in the middle of empty fields. Apparently some enterprising painter had gotten the land for cheap and assembled the place out of stuff he’d found in an old village. Large buses disgorged tourists into the complex, where you could have your picture taken dressed up in cartoonish “traditional” garb, and a musician played guitar by the banks of the “lake”, which was most likely an old rice field. We got on a small boat to go out to a peninsula on the other side of the water, manned by one of the staff. When we’d all gotten on, the young man called out to the tourists at the front of the boat, “Hey! Start pulling the rope! This boat won’t move itself!” It was a neat trick; Tom Sawyer would be proud.

On the other side we encountered a group of Real Photographers surrounding a model in one of the traditional costumes. They saw me with my camera and beckoned. “Now you try!”

“Thanks, I’m good,” I replied, as I’d already been taking pictures of the scene, and I didn’t want to get in their way. They laughed.

The sun was edging towards the horizon, so we headed out to the coast to see some piles of salt. This is apparently a huge photography spot, and the area was swarmed with people hauling some serious gear around getting shots of an array of small piles of salt as sunset approached. The actual sunset was rather disappointing, as a passing typhoon was making Tainan’s usually sunny skies overcast and grey. We walked out to the windbreak, where a young woman posed for selfies and an older man shot invisible birds with his slingshot by a small earth god temple.

We set out again for a Michelin-rated restaurant Chenbl had read about, the Dongxiang. It was also in the middle of nowhere. We arrived just in time, though, as almost immediately a large tour bus pulled up, flooding the place with dozens of Women of a Certain Age, all chatting loudly. When the food came, I could see why they were so highly rated. The oyster noodles in particular were so good that Chenbl ordered another after we’d finished the first plate.

Driving back to the hotel at night was smooth, though again it had been a long time since I’d driven at night, so I was especially cautious, leaving plenty of space for the inevitable scooters weaving in and out of my lane. We were staying at The Place, which had been connected to a mall pre-Covid, and the severed connections had yet to be re-established, so we took an elevator to the basement, walked a few feet to another elevator, and then went up to the mall. There we did mall things until we tired, and went to back to our room to sleep.

The Place has an expansive breakfast that we took full advantage of the next morning. Outside, unfortunately, pouring rain had thrown a monkey wrench into the day’s plans. We set out, me driving even more cautiously in the rain, and found a small temple that Chenbl’s father had known when he was a young man. The table top in front of the altar was scarred from generations of mediums’ pounding. Chenbl’s father said that the temple had barely changed over the last 60 years. Almost every place we stopped required me to dig out my old parallel parking skills from high school. Thank you, Coach Munson, for teaching me an actually useful skill.

As we drove on, Chenbl’s father would sometimes point out spots he remembered. “That’s the stream we forded when we were fleeing the Americans’ bombs during the war!” We stopped at another old neighborhood to find the first house he had purchased, the last one in a row of two-story structures. After walking a short distance, Chenbl’s mother knocked on a door in an alley. A middle-aged woman answered, and she turned out to be Chenbl’s cousin, and one of his father’s family members with whom Chenbl’s mother had gotten along with the best. She even remembered Chenbl, even though he left Tainan when he was a small child. The group had a nice long chat in the alley, asking about this relative and that.

We then stopped by the house they’d lived in next before moving up to Taipei, finding the old well they used back in the day. “That used to be a machine shop,” Chenbl’s mother pointed at an old Japanese-era wooden house nearby. “I had to borrow their telephone to call the hospital when the kids came down with fevers. We didn’t have one of our own.”

The original plan had been to drive out to walk around several seaside villages, but due to the rain we limited our choice to just one. Chenbl’s mother stayed in the car after we looked at the inevitable temple facing the harbor. A bunch of local people hung out at a shop next door, chatting and laughing, and a group of students practiced violin nearby. We wandered the adjacent alleys in the rain, finding old wells that apparently represented Dragon’s eyes according to the fengshui masters, and chatting with some of the people we met, me testing the limits of my Taiwanese language abilities. There weren’t many people around; the area seemed largely deserted, with the foundations of long-demolished houses here and there. At one house we passed a large black dog, its age showing in its grey muzzle, barked furiously at us from through the mail slot. Its owner, a middle-aged man, told me not to take photographs after I took a few shots of the dog. “I’ll bet he uses that dog to intimidate people,” Chenbl muttered as we walked back to the car.

We drove around a few other interesting villages, but the rain showed no signs of letting up, so we gave up and drove back to the high-speed rail station, returning the Yaris early and trading our original return train tickets for earlier ones. The whole i-Rent experience was smooth and reasonably priced, and I can see using it more in the future, especially if they further expand their network.

The trip back was spent dozing. I’ve always enjoyed driving, but spending all day keeping my attention on the road was tiring as I’m not used to it. We’ll have to go back in better weather to get a better look at some of those old villages, or even, dare I say, one of the larger piles of salt. One can hope.

When I began writing online journal entries in early 2001, I simply wanted to share stories from my daily life with whomever might be interested. Stories of my life as an ex-American Taiwanese, of playing in a jug band, making films and engaging in photography, etc. Things a few family and friends might enjoy, perhaps. The blog, as such accounts came to be known, grew to encompass several topics as blogs became popular, and then, with the advent of Facebook/IG/et al, waned in popularity, returning to the realm of people who just enjoyed writing rather than using them to garner attention (photography seems to be following a similar track). In any case, this is my experiment with TinyLetter, part of my attempt to escape the confines of the social media algorithm and regain a semblance of pre-Facebook sanity, and a return to the simple, rambling stories I’ve always produced.

Another part of my escape plan includes another piece of retrofitting, i.e. a personal website just for my photography. This has been somewhat of a saga, as I had originally concluded that Squarespace would be the best way to present my work more or less as I desired it to be seen, rather than the hit-and-miss, mysterious popularity machines. I tried out other trials such as Wix and Format, but the interfaces didn’t appeal to me. After subscribing to a Squarespace 7.1 template, however, I found that once you choose a template, you are basically stuck with it. I was told I would have to cancel my entire subscription if I wanted to choose a 7.0 template that I could change. I tried one I’d been recommended but it wasn’t doing everything I wanted to, so I wondered exactly why I was spending all this money again?

Some friends had been suggesting Google Sites, which is free and apparently nicer than it was after some upgrades, so I played around with that out of curiosity, and, well. I made a site. Here it is. I’m still working on it, and hopefully Google is working on further upgrades to the service, but it’s free and it sort of works, though it looks a lot better on desktop than on mobile, but I figure viewing photography on a phone is sub-optimal at best in any case, so this is what I’m going to use for now.

So the issue now is weaning myself away from the dopamine hits of Likes and Comments and Follows that social media has me addicted to, clawing my way back to some kind of real-world existence (oddly enough, VR experiences are more akin to IRL interactions than social media ones, but that’s another topic for another day).

So yeah, a newsletter.

I’ve been writing this journal for well over two decades, making it one of the longest-lasting blogs out there, But lately I’ve been tiring of the FB/IG algorithm, and I suspect I am not alone. I’m still working on all of this, but I hope to achieve some amount of autonomy, even though my mind has likely been rewired by so many years of dopamine hits in the form of little red dots signifying “engagement”. Congratulations! You’re part of the tribe! You matter! Now do it again! And again! Faster!

Except my time would be far better spent creating for myself and those I care about rather than some greedy algorithm that ultimately doesn’t produce anything of value. Recent inspirations have come from Craig Mod and Andy Adams of Flak photo, both of whom are way better at this sort of thing than I am. But they, Craig in particular, have beaten a path towards what I would rather be doing than posting on FB/IG (or, heaven help me, twitter), which is mainly writing, photographing, video, and editing the result of the whole thing.

So there is no set topic for this account. Those who have faithfully read my journals for the last 20-odd years know what to expect: random posts about wandering the alleys and byways of Taipei, musings on photography, writing, cinema and virtual reality, the odd music gig or photo excursion or exhibition, trips abroad…that kind of thing.

As with just about everything else I do, this is an experiment, a space to see what happens. And as always, you’re welcome to come along.

So the Ramblers played a show in Kaohsiung on Double Ten day, at the Weiwuying Arts Center, taking the bullet train down from Taipei at noon for an afternoon soundcheck. David had shown us photos, but nothing prepared me for the actual sight of the place we were to play. “That’s no stage…that’s a space station,” I couldn’t help but whisper as we were ushered into a giant atrium that looked like we were hovering underneath an upside-down starship. Hard, curved surfaces everywhere. Surely the acoustics were impossible? But somehow they made it work for the soundcheck. And they provided bento meals, which we took back to our hotel, which was about a half hour’s walk away. Once outside, I pulled down my mask for a moment to inhale the mix of small- and medium-sized industry fumes and scooter exhaust with just a hint of coal and thought, yes, this is Kaohsiung alright. Each city has its peculiar scent. Take out the coal and humidity, and then add a bit of incinerator smoke and you’ve got Taichung. All of these take me back to the days of my youth, inevitably.

I sampled the free hotel ice cream and took a nap as night fell, before heading back to the arts center for the actual show. I took a circuitous route through the park and around the large outdoor stage with its pop show and screaming fans. The show went well enough, but, possibly because some of us had consumed way too much caffeine, we played nearly ever song about 20% faster than usual, resulting in a rather frantic pace. Afterward some fans came up and told us what they thought of the show, and it was mostly nice things. Then back to the hotel, putting instruments away, plugging in whatever needed charging, relieved at wrapping up another gig. Some of our foreign fans had come to see the show, and everyone ended up in front of the nearest 7-Eleven, drinking, chatting and sampling questionable convenience-store versions of fancy cuisine. I didn’t stay; I was tired and not feeling talkative, so I went to bed, actually sleeping better than I do at the Water Curtain Cave.

Of course that might just be a function of traveling, of being in a different city with the prospects of the kind of discoveries that only aimless, solitary wandering can achieve. Even just a few hours of this can do wonders for my mood. Would it be so hard to just take a train south for the weekend, just to decompress and unwind, spending a night or two in a cheap business hotel? I used to do it; perhaps covid has thrown a wrench into such things, but I miss doing that kind of thing. Chenbl loves to plan everything Just So, with itineraries and restaurants and things to see all at certain times, but my ideal day is just open and unplanned. Perhaps this is why I have failed to accomplish so many things I otherwise might have, but I can’t help but brighten at the thought of what might happen if I just allow the space for it. But yes, that does usually involve some amount of planning.

The next day dawned bright and warm, and I went out for a walk around the area, crossing across parks and alleys in the areas and exploring the interesting Guandi Temple with, for some reason, statues of large-eyed Europeans in crusade drip at the foot of its stairs. Inside were huge, marvelous god statues, though. But I had to get back, have some hotel breakfast and a shower before we caught a mosquito-ridden cab back to the High-speed rail station at Zuoying where our train departed just before 11 a.m., speeding north through brilliant rice fields, towns and, eventually, mountains. An hour and a half later and several degrees colder we were parting ways in the grey, indefinite climate of Taipei Main Station, them to who knows where, and me back to the office. We’ve got lots of shows coming up; it seems that many of the gigs that were put off during covid are coming back now, and October is always a busy month regardless. At least I’m playing so much that practice is virtually guaranteed.

As per my last post, I did sign up for TinyLetter for a newsletter-type setup, but for some reason this has made me extremely hesitant to post. It all still feels pretentious to me; I feel that if people are waiting for me to write things, with Expectations and all that, they will most likely be disappointed in the random rambling accounts that have dominated this journal for the past two-plus decades. Then again, everyone has a Substack account these days, so is it really all that different from the original blog era? Perhaps, but in any case, screw it; I write what I write.

I’m seeing more people these days, particularly photographers and writers, eschewing the chaos of mainstream social media and returning to the quiet world of personal blogs and websites. Perhaps they feel, like many of us, that the algorithms pushing conflict, sensationalism and drama over meaning, empathy and subtlety have made their efforts inconsequential in the face of the “influencers” and “creatives” who crave and cultivate the former over the latter. It’s simply a battle that cannot be won, and not even worth engaging.

My theory is that with ever-growing access to social media as well as ever-growing dependence on it driven by recent events such as the pandemic and general paranoia, our online tribes have simply gotten too large; we’ve opened our doors to nearly everyone, and there’s a reason tribes topped out at a certain number; beyond that they just became mobs (This is one reason I feel that VR-based engagement, limited to more human-scale interaction, is inherently superior to the mass-text-based chaos that dominates FB and Twitter, but that’s another article). As it stands now, greed-fueled social media corporations are throwing these mobs at each other and calling it “engagement”, raking in the resulting profits. I can see the attraction of returning to the previous paradigm, disposing of the myth of instant, real-time internet fame and focusing only on one’s relatively small group of peers. It feels like a return to sanity.

However, years of those dopamine-fueled hits have left their mark, it would seem, as those artists who are seeking to lessen their dependence on the Likes of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram are leaving a door open from one MO to the other in the form of newsletter mailing lists like Substack, Buttondown, Memberful and TinyLetter. The idea is to utilize the following one has cultivated on social media by posting links to one’s mailing list, gathering subscribers, and then going on from there. Readers will be informed of upcoming projects, articles, etc. via that antiquated form of communication we Gen-Xers call email, and then proceed to the website in question to peruse whatever it is. It’s all rather quaintly endearing, like letters arriving in the post.

I am, as usual, late to the game, only having recently followed a few interesting photographers/writers in this fashion lately, including Craig Mod, Sean Lotman and Andy Adams (Craig described his views on newsletters quite succinctly here in 2019(!).

So far I’ve only come across these newsletters on social media, so the reliance is still there, but I assume the goal of this trend is to lessen such dependence and time spent on social media where one is simply not in control of anything. The cost of this is, on the surface, less interaction with the authors in question, but that would seem to be a fallacy in that what little actual interaction occurs on social media tends to be toxic and ill-informed. In one striking example, I signed up for Heather Cox Richardson’s political analysis mailing list, and continue to enjoy her missives. But on her Facebook page, when I left a comment objecting to her use of “self-ruled island” to describe Taiwan, I was flamed and eventually banned from the page. The same (or worse) would most likely have happened on Twitter.

Not having cultivated a large group of followers in any particular space, I can only envy those gentle, enterprising souls who have managed to do so. It’s my own damn fault as I can often be rather blunt in expressing my opinions, and I am bad at hiding my feelings, so it’s kind of WYSIWYG. So, thanks to both of my readers who have stuck with me across the decades (and now that I think about it, “both” might be on the optimistic side).

Nonetheless, with the trend of photographers abandoning Flickr for Instagram and then realizing that Instagram isn’t for photography, I’ve been looking into making a website just for displaying my photography in a fashion I can somewhat control (which ironically is the very reason I made this site back in 2001, before this damn blog took it over). I could use WordPress to add a photography page to this site (right now it points to my IG), but the WP website interface is rather daunting, so I’ve been looking at paid services like Squarespace as well as free services such as Google Sites, both of which would seem to be capable of helping me make a simple photography site with varying degrees of classiness. Squarespace can serve up a suave site, but it’s pricey, and I’ve been experimenting with test sites both there and on Google Sites to see what I can make.

Would making an actual newsletter be pointless? Would anyone want to get actual email notifications from me about whatever I’m blathering on about lately? I doubt it. But I’ll at least be sure to let you know when I get my photography site up and running. Both of you, even.