I'll be using this as a repository of passing thoughts, photos, sketches, etc. during my summer in Taipei. Read if you care. Here are some passing thoughts that I've gathered so far-
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[JUNE 14, 2007]
Home again. Hello home.
I fail to be much too awed by my transitions anymore. The technological unsublime.
So move-out day was the most physically exhausting day I've ever had (32 hours of sleeplessness finishing my 25-page essay, then packing up my room, then hauling 10 huge boxes down 4 flights of stairs and loading them into Leo's car and rushing to a far-off storage space). I'd probably be dead without Leo's help. Shortly after flying to California, I came down with a horrible cold. And now I'm here.
Yo La Tengo's having a concert in Taipei so I'll see what I can do to catch it. Most of my high school buddies are back and I met them up at our old haunt in Tien Mu this afternoon. It's a slow-moving town with a slow-moving summer air. Don't know what else to say.
[JUNE 18, 2007]
WAYS OF HATING YOURSELF
It's not that metropolises are inherently faster-paced (though they run on compressed units of time). It's just that the opportunity cost of everything you do is so high -- the time you spend reading or gossiping or jacking off can be theoretically invested in nobler metropolitan deeds such as getting drunk, going to concerts and/or buying books.
Speaking of books, Taipei has the sexiest bookstores ever. Here is an irrelevant poster I found at Eslite's 24-hour bookstore (誠品敦南店), which TIME Magazine voted as the best bookstore in Asia. Just thought it looked cool.
So my cold is getting better and I'm slowly relearning how to enjoy Taipei. Since my old pair of Reeboks is stained with half a year's worth of fraternity basement gunk, I figured I'd invest in a new pair of shoes. And what obnoxious shoes they are!
Delicious. Again, I am showing you my purchase because we all know that I define myself by the shoes I wear. 夠欠扁吧.
The salesmen/women that I come in contact with tend to notice immediately that I'm fresh from the States. They say I have a noticeable (douchebag?) accent, and I'm noticing that I tend to be treated with a polite, patronizing distance, like I'm "not a local" anymore. This is kind of (very) sad.
I've been reading Don DeLillo's White Noise on my subway rides. I thought that was pretty appropriate reading choice for the kinds of things I've been doing lately. For all of DeLillo's overbearing PoMo-messiah excess, he nails the grease of shopping experiences like no other: "We smelled chocolate, popcorn, cologne; we smelled rugs and furs, hanging salamis and deathly vinyl. My family gloried in the event. I was one of them, shopping, at last. They gave me advice, badgered clerks on my behalf. I kept seeing myself unexpectedly in some reflecting surface. We moved from store to store, rejecting not only items in certain departments, not only entire departments but whole stores, mammoth corporations that did not strike our fancy for one reason or another..."
One of my closest buddies from high school just arrived in town. To celebrate our homecoming, we went to a tea bar at Shilin and chugged some green tea, because we're hardcore and manly like that.
And that concludes my frivilous whoredom for the weekend.
[JUNE 19, 2007]
Today was Dragon Boat Festival (端午節) and like every good Asian kid, I went to my grandparents' place and ate rice cakes (<:B). I used to spend every Saturday at my grandparents' when I was in elementary school, but I haven't been back much after high school. Whatever's happened to me since then has given me fresh perspective on the place. For example, there's a Buddhist temple next door to my grandparents', and seriously, it looks more like a Resident Evil cultist den than a site of spiritual nirvana. We used to hear monks chant and hit things that make icy peals like dinggg! every morning, but we never saw anyone in the building, only red lights glowing from the smokey windows. Also, apparently monks need satellite dishes.
I wonder what kind of TV programs they watch. MTV??
I got to chat with my grandfather about Taipei during the Japanese and Kuomingtang occupations, his experience as a law student at Waseda University in Tokyo (Haruki Murakami's alma mater) during WWII, and what kinds of crazy shit went down at the house. There's an air raid shelter at the basement of the house, which, ironically, was instead used to hide from marauding Nationalist Chinese troops. Also, I always wondered about the stained glass window in the library. Apparently it's supposed to be the character of the family name (Chang) but I don't really see it, even if I flip it horizontally:
Kinda cool, anyway. Apparently the cracks on the window are the result of WWII American air raids (Taipei was an industrial Japanese colony back then).
My second cousin is visiting Taipei to study Chinese. She's 3/4 French and 1/4 Taiwanese, but she just kinda looks completely French. She thought it was cool that my grandmother was wrapping rice dumplings for the festival and asked if she could help wrap some of them. They made a funny sight.
So the flaneur bit. My favorite Dickensian concept, if I got anything out of my Dickens seminar at all. I find that I love walking aimlessly through the city. I can really do it all week. I somehow ended up at National Taiwan University by the end of my two hour trek, checked out some bookstores, found a bunch of hipster-looking kids reading Derrida (in the original French :O) at a nearby cafe, was asked if I was foreign, told them I wasn't really, that I actually grew up in Taipei goddamit, that I've spent 16 years of my life here though I currently study at an American college in the woods of a forgettable State. But I sorta played along with their expectations and had a grand time. I'm a complete tourist in my own town. People are not supposed to be flaneurs in their home cities.
Cryptic guerilla advertisement stickers near the university.
[JUNE 27, 2007]
I've started my internship as a magazine travel writer, and it's given me a lot of excuse to wander around, snap photos, read up on Taipei and talk to people I would've never had the chance to talk to.
People in the office are varied. One of the other interns is very classic West Coast American-Born Chinese -- gelled and spiked up hair, party-ready silk pin-striped shirt, two of the top bottons unbuttonned, etc. Overall sociable and affable guy, but my high school had plenty of this kinda ABC clubbing culture and I'm trying to see a different part of Taiwan. I tend to get along really well with the more 'local' contingent of the coworkers. Quirky Taiwanese college kids. One of my colleagues was a literature/theater major from National Taiwan University, the most prestigious institution of higher education in Taiwan (and you know that means something when the competition is 23 million Nerdy Asian Students). I told her that I'm very interested in exploring what artistically-inclined Taiwanese college kids do, so she suggested that I hang out at 河岸留言 (Riverside Cafe), along with many other cool hangouts, to catch a gig by one of the small local indie bands. I brought along 2 of my buddies to catch a show after work, and it was the best time I've had this summer so far. The cafe's smoky, cavernous and intimate, housing only 70 people max. First band (OK Bomb) was a jumpy girl band straight from a pages of some 90's manga. All three of us bought their EP after their gig. The next band (憂樂園) can be best described as Weezer + Luna Sea + 五月天 -- nerdy J-Rock-influenced Taiwanese folk/punk/pop. They had a great sense of (somewhat off-color and otaku) 'Tai' humor too.
憂樂主唱:"今天下午有一群加拿大人聽說我是玩樂團的主唱以後，開始跟我搭訕，後來很熱心的答應我說會來河岸看我們
