Part-Time Flâneur

Plato vs. Grand Theft Auto

2009-09-19T18:16:00.000-07:00

Delightful! Someone wrote Hellenic philosophy fan-fiction of Plato and Aristotle discussing Grand Theft Auto: here.

Summary of the article -- art and theather (video games included) have allegorical responsibility to represent the Platonic ideal of Moral Good, since humanity learns via mimesis, imitation -- sometimes even, yes, imitating art rather than life. So distributing games that allow the public to inhabit the roles of Claude The Bank Robber, CJ The LA Gangster and Tommy Hitman Coke Dealer is no good. Keep in mind that the Ancient Greeks were a backward people who did not have postmodernity nor our refined American taste for deriding and ironizing the art/theater/TV/games we consume, so maybe they did indeed believe and learn from all the art they watched, including the Hellenic version of GTA starring Paris the Serial Womanizer Who Brought Dishonor & War to His Kingdom. In that case, that's hilarious.

"Our Literary Climate"

2009-09-19T17:59:00.001-07:00

We drunkenly debated the rivalry between N+1 and McSweeney's (two of the most prominent new literary magazines) this weekend. We were at a bar and my bud started dissing N+1, not knowing that one of N+1's junior editors was present, and so the argument went-

This sounds arcane and silly on paper but if you give a shit about the present literary world there's actually a trail of fascinating-as-fuck articles on the rivalry. A.O. Scott's NYT article on n+1/mcsweeney's controversy is a good starting point. Basically, N+1 is the new Partisan Review and Frankfurt School critics -- full of stern essays, harsh criticism, scathing reviews. They thanked Susan Sontag for dying. They called McSweeney's a magazine for overgrown toddlers. Basically, they're brash, smart and unlovable assholes. Its entire first issue was devoted to pointing out the failings of other established intellectual magazines -- and out of it emerges this curious quote that seems to disclaim its position as hater-in-chief. For example, from N+1's review of The New Republic:

"You can go through the defense of taste and come out the other side, as if you jumped out the kitchen window into the alley dumpster. There is a kind of fake refinement that turns into a vulgarity baser than any other . . . It's a very damaging mistake: the idea that sniffing out the tasteless is the same as taste itself. It confuses censoriousness with a faculty of judgment that links the aesthetic to the moral sense . . . The moral responsibility is not to be intelligent. It's to think."

Hmmm.

On the other end: McSweeney's, Dave Egger's magazine. People tend to get offended by his ostentatious smartassery in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but folks often don't see that beyond the annoying barrage of pop cultural references is someone who's deathly sincere and not at all snarky about his belief that the world and its inhabitants are beautiful and awesome and many things are fucking interesting. McSweeney's very much reflects this sensibility of generosity and quirk, which can be annoying, yeah, but also coming from a position of adoration, not disgust -- positivity, not negativity. Their mission is to be "anti-snark" since snark is pretty much the lowest common denominator in current media. The criticism, of course, is that McSweeney's gets pretty damn infantile.

So a gross generalization would be: N+1 is the creepy, ugly-but-brilliant kid who came to high school in a suit and bowler hat everyday and smoked a pipe in the playground reading Flaubert. And McSweeney's is the high-pitched giggly theater kid who wore rainbow socks and considered himself friends with everyone and doesn't ever shut the fuck up, but was also adorable and smarter than he let on.

They're both vigorous and wonderful and important and ugly in their own ways, but the literary discourse is made more vibrant with the both of them coexisting.

Then of course there are the snide fuckers who hate both camps, and that's a little baffling. There are books/movies/music that I like more than others, but as a general rule I don't really hate any work of art all that vehemently. But there are definitely readers out there whose capacity to be offended/disgust by a work far exceeds their ability to praise/appreciate with nuance.

This is a rambly and disjointed entry but I just wanted to jot down some fragments of thoughts.

Shimending CMYK

2009-06-12T08:38:00.000-07:00

I'm finally getting over jet lag here in Taiwan. Some photos from my sojourns around the city, yall-

Old fortuneteller in Shimending with a banner that says "President Ma will serve another term in office. Mayor Hau will be re-elected as Taipei Mayor. Taiwan's economy will be saved in 2 years." All props to Taiwan's econ being saved, good sir, but I still find your fanboyishness a little creepy.

Anyway, further into the Shimending district -- I noticed that everyone's dressed in ridiculous CMYK-colored graphic tees, a sorta nu-disco-meets-Kanye-West fashion a la Japan's BAPE clothing line. I bet they're way into BLOGHAUS music too. What the hell, Taiwan, what did you do to yourself in my absence.

MOTHER FUCKER -- an Oedipal boutique shopping experience for the young, trendy and Freudian.

This T-shirt design is why I am glad to be a member of my species.

MOST DELIGHTFUL THING I'VE SEEN IN A WHILE

Via Japan's Graniph designs. Oh dear. Houston, we have pomofail.

Afterwards I met up my mom at a fishmarket near my grandparents' house to shop for dinner for them old folks. Below is the vile sea monster proffered to us as the catch of the day:

Even my grandparents weren't game for such pellagic confectionaries.

2009-03-24T22:22:00.000-07:00

Move over, whimsically hand-drawn embossed Juno font:

2009-02-20T08:18:00.000-08:00

"我們再怎麼也想不到，獨裁又無能的政權有一天會再回來，民主與自由可能憑空消失。我的國家從來不像個國家，我曾經憎恨我的朋友，沒有實現我們的理想；諷刺的是，在牢獄外的我們也一樣被完全拋棄，像是被拋棄在一個沒有盡頭的世界裡，所有的記憶都會被抹去，這不光是現實的磨難，更是對未來的空虛。"
-Freddy Lim, on his visit to former President Chen Shui-bian in the prisons.

Imprisonment without fair trial.
Banning of rival political rallies.
Even waving the Taiwanese flag is banned in President Ma's Taipei, while Chinese flags are protected by the police. Not to mention that the Taiwanese economy he pledged to make it his lifetime goal to rescue is in worse shape that it ever has been in recent history, and has in fact outstripped every single country in the world in deteriorating.

Democracy is dead in Taiwan.
Thank you, President Ma, for dropping the soap in the international prison showers and selling us out.

Munny

2009-02-17T21:25:00.000-08:00

I bought a blank Munny for my sister over Christmas. She told me to design/paint it for her. It's finally done:

Also, my last short story for my college thesis collection almost won me some money. But I tend to fold in these kinda competitions anyway. Another time, perhaps.

2009-01-04T08:27:00.000-08:00

It was a cloudy afternoon and I took my camera to the old streets around Shida University. Had a few cups of coffee at Mo!Re cafe, which was much like the infamously hip Norwegian Wood cafe near National Taiwan University, only friendlier -- cigarette haze, books stacked everywhere, green library desk lamps, superb Italian coffee. I sat at the bar and chatted with the barista about 黃凡's newest short story collection. Sounds colossally pretentious I know but it was actually very genial and fun.

This is the view of the cafe from the front.

I've read much about the Taishun Alleys in short stories and travel diaries and it seems like where a lot of neat old stuff could be found. Too bad it was a rainy day so none of my daylight photos turned out well :(. Basically, a lot of cool plant pots lining the streets, old trees, Japanese colonial-style wooden houses...

Shida nightmarket caters mostly to college students. A lot of little young hole-in-the-wall eateries with huge glass windows. Feels very much like the Hondae district of Seoul.

Random shot of purdy spices and glass cups at a restaurant. Testing the macro function of my cam.

I somehow ended up at the Red House Theater at Ximending. In my absence, Riverside Cafe opened another live music venue behind the theater and a bunch of skater boutiques and bar & grills opened up in its alleys. There were also a shit ton of new indie design venders. Overall, it seems like the old teenybopper mainstay is gaining some cultural complexity.

Flip-Flop Manifesto

2008-09-29T23:49:00.000-07:00

The Onion has been penning a streak of hilarious and surprisingly humane articles (rather than the puerile/bullying/intensely mean-spirited snark that they sometimes indulged in). Recent headlines: "Obama Runs Constructive Criticism Ad Against McCain," "Wealthy Teen Nearly Experiences Consequence", and "Report: 60 Million People You'd Never Talk To Voting For Other Guy". A quote from the latest article:

"The report maintained that, during your purely hypothetical discussion, both of you would come off as smug, narrow-minded, or downright ignorant if you tried to criticize the other candidate's positions on key issues such as abortion and gay rights. The ensuing argument would only further cement both of your feelings of disgust toward the other candidate.

[SUPER WALLACEIAN STATEMENT ALERT] And yet incredibly, sources said, neither one of you would technically be wrong.

Because—and this is reportedly the most maddening part—even though these people's unwavering support for their candidate completely dumbfounds you, you cannot even get angry at them, since they are not voting for him because they are idiots or because they want to spite you, but rather because they actually believe that he is the better choice to run our nation."

[Sorry to plug this in yet again but for the love of god do read DFW's speech -- okay I'm done talking about him I swear.]

----------------------------------------------------------

Among those Onion stories, the last one is not very ha-ha funny, but it's quote-unquote "interesting to consider." I just had a bar conversation about how New Yorkers always make fun of the supposed Red State Proletariats who "believe everything Fox News reports" and yet the funny thing is we personally do not know a single person for whom this is true. So this seems like a pretty lame supposed-person to rant about. The RSP, at least as an abstract object of conversation in New York, is more effigy than valid opponent.

Of course, statistically speaking, there are many people out there who believe Fox New to a tee, as there are those who hold The New York Times and Village Voice as their bible, but this is not theoretically interesting to talk about. Most of the time, talking about an exaggerated extreme just generates conditional and vacuous statements. Like the last sentence I just typed out.

I guess a reason why I could never take seriously a rant about effigized Evil/Ignorant/Dumb Opponents, even when penned by myself for cathartic effect, is because it's absolutely calcified and narrow and rife with id-driven emotional disgust rather than superego-checked acknowledgment of fallibility. It's an opinion that is felt first, then rationalized, rather than vice-versa. There's a reason Sherwood Anderson called people who led their lives according to narrow absolute opinions 'Grotesques'. There's also a reason why Ralph Waldo Emerson said "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Or consider John Gardener: "One trouble with having read nothing worth reading is that one never fully understands the other side of one's argument, never understands that the argument is an old one, never understands the dignity and worth of people one has cast as enemies." And finally, for the same reason, it's no coincidence that young people are called 'impressionable,' for their often unconditional endorsement of single worldviews, rather than remixing many at once.

My mom's opinions on the moral failings of Taiwan's Kuomingtang colonizers are mostly spot-on, but her dogma is in assuming that every Nationalist is culpable or brainwashed until proven otherwise.

At a literary seminar in Berkeley, some students wanted the professor to just goddamn give his final conclusion on what Pynchon's novels meant and why they're important. To the prof's credit, he replied: "if you want tidy conclusions about everything, ask religious fundamentalists or liberal extremists -- they have all the answers in the world."

I think one of the most admirable things about *good* scientific thinking is that it constantly criticizes, modifies and improves its thesis. It does not jump to conclusions without doubting itself a million times.

The good scientist -- and thinker, and writer -- should be mouth-foamingly eager to know if it's wrong, how it can correct itself, etc.

Pretty cliched stuff, I know. And the funny thing about cliches is that you can understand them when you're 15 and you'll understand it into your 40s too, but the older you get the more nuanced your understanding. We have all been taught in middle school (or earlier) that there are "two sides to every argument and both sides are kinda valid." We sorta agree to that at an early age, but it's easy to forget, and it's actually very difficult to understand fully.

I certainly don't understand it yet. See, my dogma is in believing that entrenched opinions are automatically in danger of being terribly flawed, and thus in danger of committing terrible wrong.

So sue me, I have a love affair with not taking absolutist stances. Call me a soft-minded fence-sitter and accuse me of Postmodernity if you please. But I hope this not just a lazy garden variety of relativism, but rather a sincere effort at explaining my general aversion to taking sides on any given issue. For me, as well as for many writers, observations are far more interesting than conclusions.

*SUGGESTED WAYS TO CRITICIZE ME*

For Yuppies: point out that only an unworldly slacker with a sheltered upbringing can ever afford to scorn the Real Life necessity to make conclusions & take action. Ad hominem criticism for the win!

For Marxists: point out that only a well-off bourgeois with a pampered upbringing can ever afford to scorn the Real Life necessity to make conclusions & take action. Because oppression is everywhere and you need to fight the good fight and don't ever extend sympathy to the Devil. Ad hominem DOUBLE KILL!

For Republicans: call me a flip-flop. An Obama-like elitist. Call me not man enough to defend an absolute position.

For Artists: Pomo group hug! Want a toke of that J?

For Scientists: "As a matter of fact, you misunderstood the scientific principal and the humanities are for dumb inferior people anyway!"

Gallery of Self-Call

2008-09-29T12:16:00.000-07:00

Just sorted through my hard-drive and organized some of my graphic design stuff from college.

Hello, employers-

2008-09-28T13:26:00.000-07:00

The ~~slum lord~~ management of our apartment wants to rent the floor below me to a Belgian wine bar.
I vetoed the hell out of it (LIKE THE HOUSE DID TO THE PAULSON BAILOUT PLAN -- zing??) since the noise level around here is already high enough to require earplugs during sleep.

In other news, I was hanging out with Danker + Waldron on Saturday night and we accidentally ran into a hidden bar. We were in East Village, literally a block south of where I live, snacking at some hot dog stand when we noticed that people kept on disappearing into a tiny phone booth in the diner.

"So uh... I hear there's a secret bar around this area where you have to ring a phone in a hot dog diner to go in," Danker said.
"So I heard too."
"This might be it, then."

Then a line started to form in front of the phone booth. Obviously we had to give it a try. We went into the phone booth, dialed the phone, and some snooty waitress opened a crack at the door.

"Name?" she asked.
"The Baron," Danker said.
She arched an annoyed eyebrow, obviously not amused. "And reservation number?"
"None."
"Let's see... that will be an hour wait."
"Oh, screw that," my older bro said.
"Have a good night," she said and slammed the door.

Franzen @ BK Book Fest

2008-09-14T23:29:00.000-07:00

I attended the Brooklyn Book Festival to say hi to my former editors. The atmosphere among the writers was (to quote an NYT obit) like a wake. After my editor introduced Jonathan Franzen to the audience, Franzen got onstage and said "I really don't want to be here right now; one of my best friends passed this Friday."

The director of Helvetica walked out later and said Franzen was being a primadonna.

On the subway towards Brooklyn, I was reading DFW's essays. A couple came up beside me and said quietly "what happened this weekend was really sad," and I nodded. They asked me if I was reading in tribute.

(I'm still trying to understand, in a weirdly Wallaceian way, why this hits me so hard and I think it's because DFW reminds me of Ms. McDowell, my high school mentor, who passed away after I went off to college. Both of them had an intense and often un-hip humanist moral seriousness that made you feel distinctly that someone very compassionate, thoughtful and incredibly smart wants to see you become the best damn human being you can be, and what drives you is knowing that someone out there would rather you be a decent, thoughtful, meaningful person rather than a rich/powerful/famous one.)

Franzen is an amazingly witty author as expected. He later apologized for saying that he didn't want to be here. It was just... fuck.

After Franzen, Russel Banks read like Colonel Sanders narrating the intro of Transformers or Planet Earth. "In the beginning, there was a cube....

Farewell David Foster Wallace

2008-09-14T00:42:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite essayists
David Foster Wallace passed tonight.
He was found dead in his home by his wife. Hanged himself. I really don't know what to say.

His own words:

"[L]earning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger."

Flashy postmodern smartass writers are dime a dozen, but he's a rare contemporary author with heart to temper sophistication. The world lost a beautiful mind.

Radiohead @ APW Festival

2008-08-11T19:34:00.000-07:00

Thom Yorke, after inheriting the Blue Comet stage from Kings of Leon: "the next song is for Kings of Leon. We'd be friends with them if we were that good looking."

Clau remarked that Yorke was "surprisingly douchey," as befitting Scott Tenorman's favorite band. No Surprises there -- this is the original '90s British sick cats, masters of aestheticized ressentiment who said bitterly that "no one likes a smartass but we all like stars" (incidentally this was also my high school yearbook quote because I was -- I'm not proud to admit -- one of those abhorrently, pathologically sarky kids). He also fronts a band that every magazine has conspired to make canonical beyond reproach. Though I think Yorke himself realizes the absurdity of there being a Rock Music Canon agreed upon by smarmy pedantic white music nerds.

(To be honest I think a certain English prof at my alma mater looks like a pudgy suburban version of Thomas Yorke; same accent, same facial expressions, same acidic sense of humor.)

The concert was all In Rainbows alright. The stage setup was a citadel of acid-electric phantasmagoria, a vertible crystal castle of refracting glass spikes. They played most of the songs I was looking to hear (15 Step, Reckoner, There There, No Surprises, Bodysnatchers). Everyone juggled instruments, Jonny on guitar, Thom Yorke on drums, etc. and every once in a while Yorke broke out into his best writhing dance interpretation of a headless chicken. Truly bizarre.

By all means this is the most high-profile act I've seen. The festival itself was poorly organized and manned by the most anal retentive staff ever, but all the same. I think this will be one of those bands that when our children romanticize about the super retro-cool era of the 2000's, they'd wonder what Radiohead was like live and I could say oh they were pretty mindblowing alright.

Close up video of The Bends.

Next was Bodysnatchers I think. They basically played the entire songlist of In Rainbows. The red bar above the stage worried me a little. It looked like the eye of the disco ray monster machines from War of the Worlds come to vaporize us all. I was not in a mood to be harvested.

As to expected at a major festival, the whole crowd was pretty much bubbling with geysers of smoke. From afar, it looks geothermic.

Also, Animal Collective was MINDBLOWINGLY WEIRD. I think I would need Martian logic to process what I heard from them yesterday. I'm just gonna go ahead and pretend I didn't hear anything.

Kingda Ka

2008-08-03T12:37:00.000-07:00

Beware when tigers try to sell you anything.
Sometimes they sell you cereal.

Other times they sell oil.

And on rare occasions they even sell you overpriced colleges.

We were at the NJ Six Flags for Du's birthday and a tiger sold me a ride on the Kingda Ka, the world's tallest and fastest rollercoaster. It stands at 456 feet (45 stories -- tall enough to be an aviation safety concern) and accelerates from 0-128 miles per hour in less than four seconds. Du and I were at the front row seat. Here's what it looks like:

Amusement parks and rollercoasters are pretty bizarre ideas when you think about them. They package our fear of injury/death and sell it back to us as happyfunptime joy rides. You know we as a species have evolved to be a pretty fucked up breed of monkeys when we build huge town-sized settlements in New Jersey devoted to making the fear of dying a fun experience.

No exaggeration. It was like simulated death. I opened my mouth during the coaster and swallowed gallons of air, couldn't even hear myself scream. My heart considered abandoning my ribcage and eloping with my lungs. At one point over the ride's peak, the view was just me, the curved horizon and the dirt below. Then the whole giant angry apparatus slammed us towards the ground.

There were stages of recovery from the ride. We played it cool immediately after the ride (1st Stage: Denial), but I think at some point later in the afternoon we all gradually acknowledged that it was what we'd categorize as a traumatic experience (2nd Stage: Recognition). We were violated and I will have nightmares about rollercoasters forever. And then of course the whole experience gets recuperated as a funny story the next day (3rd Stage: Denial again). But serious, I'd actually recommend an hour-long repeated ride session as a sort of lite alternative to Guantanamo.

Afterward I was pretty much depleted of a week's worth of adrenaline, so we moved on to gentler slopes. Namely Du's favorite rollercoaster -- Nitro, which (when viewed in profile) resembles the hospitable curves of the A/C/E subway map. I think I was too drained to enjoy it properly.

Regime Change

2008-07-26T09:06:00.000-07:00

This year will mark the last Formoz Music Festival as well as the last Campo Art Party in Taipei, both due to the pulling of government funding and "new zoning regulations" at Yuanshan. I wonder what the new government has to do with this.

"Whiny Guitar Music"

2008-07-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

No credits to Danker for summing up everything I ever listen to in three words.

Went to a $8 open bar + Ninjasonik concert in South Williamsburg on Friday night. Travis started a mosh pit in front of the stage. Couple that with a malfunctioning AC, temperature in the 90's and you get the idea. For one night, I was a swamp beast.

All in all, these were not the best ways to prep for a huge music festival.

Travis and his roomies were planning to barbecue on his roof around noon and head to the Village Voice Siren Music Festival together. When I called them at 5PM they had just woken up. As with many things I do in the city, I went alone.

The crowds were not too bad. I've seen much were at the Hohaiyan festival in Taiwan. I went in time to see Helio Sequence, who's a better live act than I'd expected, especially for a two-piece band.

Then Broken Social Scene took the stage. Highlights:

-I was at the pisser when they played Fire Eye'd Boy. Tremendously mistimed.

-Stephen Malkmus' performance was scheduled for the same hour at another stage. Kevin Drew was pissed off too.

-They didn't play Superconnected, Swimmer, Almost Crime or Lover's Spit, which were the songs I looked forward to the most... does this count as a highlight? I guess I'm not entitled to complaints since it was a free concert.

-Some random girl in the audience went onstage and sang Feist's part in 7/4 (Shoreline) because those she was (as usual) absent from the tour lineup. The girl did a dece rendition, though she sounded way nervous.

-Kevin Drew hearts Obama, of course.

-Someone rocked a little too hard and had to be ambulanced away.

The Brackish Atlantic

2008-07-13T21:29:00.000-07:00

I was talking to some buddies about why all of us agreed to move to New York City instead of, say, somewhere clean, friendly and beautiful. Like an island in the Pacific where we can all be marine biologists, doing field research in the day and hanging out at a beach-side bar at night. But of course we all know that English majors don't live near beaches. That's what southern Californians do, duuude.

One favorite adages from elementary school in Taiwan was 仁者樂山，智者樂水 -- which roughly translates into "the virtuous enjoy the mountains; the wise delight in the water/sea." I'm not sure if that makes any sense, but I always preferred the sea when growing up, so that's as good of an excuse for self-flattery as any. It helped that we were a stone's throw away from South East Asian beach countries like Malaysia, Thailand, Palau, etc.

So after spending a lot of Friday night floundering in Midtown and blowing serious cash, I needed some sunshine to clear my mind. So I brought along The Savage Detective and my sketchbook and hopped the A train to the Rockaway beaches. It did me immense good, I think.

Solitude is easy to find in even the most crowded places of New York, but true privacy is miles away. Even at the beach, I had to walk a solid couple of miles to get away from the volleyball crowds, hot dog grills, boom boxes and neon plastic toys. I was looking for a windswept dune where I can lie in the sand, read and nap alone. Should've known that beaches during summertime were garish places. Anyway, the above view is the closest I got to that. I think I'm gonna check out Robert Moses island/state park next time.

I also listened to a lot of beach-appropriate music (Oasis, 929樂團), which made me unreasonably happy.

Yeah, anyway, I miss the sea. Maybe I should go live in Australia or something.
AWWWSTRAYLIAH! Dingows ayte mai baybeees!

David Foster Wallace's Commencement Speech

2008-07-07T22:39:00.000-07:00

“This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship –- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally lower you into your grave. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear talked about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. . .”

-This is what we needed to hear for commencement (entire speech).

Entitled Mediocrity

2008-06-25T00:58:00.000-07:00

"There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics."

I know you've all read variants of this article before (at least if you regularly read stuff from Arts & Letters Daily) but read it anyway, especially if you're wondering why college was just easier, more careerist, more socially confirmist and self-congratulatory and less of a mindtrip than your high school self expected it to be. After all, aren't superb college educations supposed to be nothing short of worldview-shattering?

The best article of its kind I've read so far: The Disadvantanges of an Elite Education.

I mean sure, if your college's alumni magazine shoved a microphone in your face, you're gonna do your best to be pro-social and summon up a quotable laundry list of ways in which your college taught you how to think. Which might be very true, but less true than we're willing to admit publicly. We're all very good at rationalizing. And obsessing over the distinction between mediocrity and true excellence is for only for unsexy and freakish people like Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, right?

Sometimes it seems like the Ivy League definition of excellence is this: desire what every normal/average/mediocre person desires (money/power/fame/social clout), only be faster and more efficient at acquiring them. Be excellent and efficacious sheep.

I've always told my friends that as happy as I was on campus, and as much as college has patched me up socially to become a more presentable, "real world"-savvy person, I feel like I've abandoned some spark of raw talent/intellectual thirst/solitary thought/creative weirdness in high school. Instead, I've traded them for resume-ready "skill sets" like networking skills and enhanced ability for small talk.

Hadn't Ms. McDowell warned us about this all along?

Thanks to Aimee Moon for bringing this link to my attention.

KGB

2008-06-17T15:18:00.000-07:00

Had my first meeting with Suzanne at KGB Bar Lit in the Lower East Side on Sunday. Monica Powell read excerpts from her debut novel, The Answer is Always Yes, while Andrew Foster Altschul read from Lady Lazarus. They're both young urban "rockstar" writers who display just the right degree of pomo to be hilarious and entertaining to the twentysomething crowd. I dig the vibe. There seems to be a set of regulars who go in for readings. A lot of the people there are authors on the cusp of their first published novels. Some serious Savage Detectives sense of literary camaraderie, sans prostitutes. I feel kinda like Garcia Madero, the young naive guy hanging at its periphery.

To the Dartmouth CW folks: Joshua Furst was among the audience. He's the author that read Sabotage Cafe and then argued with the poetry folks afterwards, if you remember. I said hi to him and told him that people at Dartmouth either hated his guts or thought he was 12 types of awesome, and he seemed massively pleased to have such a polarizing effect on our department and cracked up in remembering "some playwright girl" who looked like she wanted to stab him in his sleep.

So it looks like I'll be doing web design and writing book reviews for them during the week and reporting into KGB on the weekends. Part-time work, basically. My other internship with A Public Space lit mag doesn't start until Thurs, but I picked up their latest issue at St. Mark's Bookstore and almost crapped my pants from sheer overdose of awesome. They ran a series of photographs of graffiti written in U.S. marine barrack bathroom stalls in Afghanistan.

Pal-pi-ta-TIONSSS

2008-06-15T12:19:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in a cramped Holiday Express room in Park Slope, Brooklyn, NYC, trying to figure out how the fuck I'm gonna find my way in this city. My parents are packing up stuff around me. They're returning to Taiwan tomorrow.

So I've handled the past week or so with more poise than I ever remember myself having. About time I got my shit together. I don't even have the right to call myself a college kid anymore, which has been my main identifier for the past four years. What am I now?

The above featured room has been gutted and packed by my own hands, which (as is true in all move-outs) was a downer process.

Not gonna get too sentimental here -- the time has passed for that -- but here are some highlights from the past week:

-Saw the sunrise on commencement day with a bunch of buddies. Smoked cigars and swigged scotch as the sun rose over the green. Hemingway would be proud.

-Clau is a Shiesty Cum Laude in the style of Tomi Jun, except more drunk. Congrats, man.

-When people really started to leave, I was too tired to muster anything more than a "Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ this is not happening." Again, I don't want to be sloppy sentimental here, though get a drink or two in me and I'll be just that.

-Brought my parents hiking in New Hampshire. We climbed a fire tower, which offered a view of the campus from afar. It really hit me to see it from that distance.

-Listened to DOC music/frosh year favs on the drive down to NYC: The Darkness, Sublime, Modest Mouse, The Strokes, The Killers, Weezer, Ben Folds 5, etc., which found me irrationally happy and hopeful for the move down. Then I checked into my dorm in Brooklyn, which seems like another college orientation all over again. To preserve my dignity, I considered lying about being a high school grad/college frosh to people just for kicks ("Omigawd I'm like soooo psyched for college!"), but I couldn't keep a straight face, so I gave up on the charade pretty early on. While I was getting my dorm key, I ran into Ayla, who's apparently living 7 floors below me for the summer. Then we went to check out my room with Ayla and the most awkward roomie intro took place. See, I forgot to knock on the door before unlocking and moving in. My roomie (a UMichigan film major/aspiring filmmaker) happened to be lying in bed and watching Fast Food Nation on one TV screen, and really hardcore porn on the other. He was in no particular hurry in shutting off the porn either.

Been hanging out in the room and he seems like a chill dude though. We had our post-awk walk-in chat about how annoyingly young and giddily drunk most of our dorm neighbors are. "I'm not here to do that," he said. Amen.

-Spent a few days walking around NYC with my family and eating nice (Zagat rating 25+) food while they're here to finance it. Kanoyama turned out to be awesome. This photo was taken at SoHo.

-Went to see The Airborne Toxic Event with Adam. Not only does ATE's name reference Don DeLillo's White Noise pretty hardcore, but they're also highly danceable new band that I've reading about on blogs for a while. I'm convinced they're gonna make it pretty big, since they're literate enough to be "indie," but their sound is mainstream enough for radio play... sometimes a little too normal/SoCal/90's alt rock, in fact, but I can forgive these flaws because they don't taken themselves too seriously either. They also have an Asian guitarist (major points for that), and I absolutely love the lyrics to the song I recorded above. It's has a very night-out-in-the-city kinda vibe, which I'm always a sucker for.

I was walking down Fifth Avenue with my parents when I saw my college's crest on a random building. Apparently it's an invite-only club for alums. I didn't even try to get in because one peek into its mahogany-lined halls told me it was a den of snooty white-haired ibankery.

Whew.

That's it for now folks. Thank you all for waiting so patiently for me to grow up for the past four years. I can't say I'm a completely put-together person just yet, nor do I think I ever will be, but I think I'm a different person than I was coming to the States. Who knows what this city will bring for me--

NYT in Taipei

2008-04-08T22:50:00.001-07:00

I'm both heartened and ashamed to say that Douglas McGray's New York Times travel article on Taipei is more beautiful, accurate, expansive and observant about the city than anything I've written for my summer magazine. Though he tends to drum up the doom-and-gloom of Chinese competition a bit too much.

2008-02-03T20:25:00.001-08:00

Interesting article about the diasporic mentality of Taiwanese people:
心情分享：我所同情與敬佩的移民心態

2008-01-06T08:06:00.001-08:00

I learned from last year's camera battery failure and went to this year's Taipei 101 fireworks well-prepared.

I didn't really feel up to elbowing people for breathing space this year, so I watched the T101 fireworks from the Living Mall. A separate firework was going on above me while I was watching the Taipei 101 countdown, which pretty much resulted in a walnut-sized chunk of ash meteoring onto my forehead while my friend and I were trying to evacuate from the park.

It was a good time even though only Eric could meet me (Sherry was trapped in traffic when the countdown went off (!)). Evacuating was even more fun since we were climbing over walls to cut through foot traffic, and the weird comments/attention we got for doing that was hilarious ("What are these high schoolers doing? Are they doing that Russian wall-jump thing?").

2008
never thought this year would come-
Happy new year!

Norwegian Woods

2008-01-06T07:53:00.001-08:00

One of my goals for my brief winter homecoming is to stock up on existing literature on Taipei street culture. My thesis project will be a Winesburg Ohio/Dubliners/台北人-esque "novel" of urban short stories set in Taipei, so I thought it wise to read up on (and interact with) what other Taiwanese writers have already written about the city.

I'm reading 黃凡 now and he's absolutely amazing. One of the problems I saw in Chinese literature in general is that, up till the '80s, it was almost an exclusively rural, political and/or diasporic genre. In other words, "serious" Chinese writers seem to distinguish themselves by rejecting urban modernity as bourgeois, petty. There are notable exceptions of course (圍城/Fortress Besieged and pre-communist Shanghai lit) but this was my damaging and slightly ignorant impression of Chinese lit in high school, that Chinese-language lit had nothing to say about the "petty bourgeois" daily realities of urban life in modern Asia. It did not help that my high school had a dated reading curriculum that included irrelevant texts like Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth.

Anyway, 黃凡 pretty much pioneered the urban/pomo novel in Taiwan. Instead of writing about 民族性 ("Chinese ethnic temperament"), the angst of East-meets-West hybridity, etc. (all those hallowed and laughably self-serious metanarratives of old school Chinese writers) he writes about Taipei's DIY craze in the '80s, architects with Napoleon complexes, the History of Sewage Pipes, etc. Petty shit, but written in hilarious prose.

What the hell, I didn't set out to write some ode to 黃凡. Where was I?

---------------------(back on topic)

The picture you see above is the (in)famous Norwegian Woods cafe in the Gongguan/ NTUniversity district of South Taipei. I've read it mentioned in Pots Weekly and 舒國治's "Taipei Wanderer" essays (among many other places) as a sort of cornerstone in Taipei's arts scene, so I decided to pay it a visit yesterday afternoon. It was easily the most intimidating cafe I've ever been to.

The cafe owner's a renown town personality. He's a book/music critic and huge coffee nerd, and if he doesn't like you he'll pretty much tell you that they "don't serve the kind of coffee you're looking for" and he'll show you the door.

When I walked in, the clients stared and pretty much decided immediately that I was not a familiar customer. The barista took her time serving me coffee (though the coffee was really good). The people in there were kind of absurd, cigarettes dangling between their fingers and piles of philosophy text/translated novels sitting next to their laptops. Most importantly, they were all typing furiously on their laptop computers. When I surveyed the room, everyone was writing on their blogs (!). I knew the blogging and online 散文/prose writing culture was huge in Taipei, but what the hell.

Also, this is what I deduced about the man who sat behind me:

Jokes aside, people there seem to be seriously working rather than trying to be hip/charming. So it was more a case of artists in hipster's clothes rather than vice versa?

I don't know. I'll have to check again next year to decide.

Misc Homecoming

2007-12-21T06:32:00.000-08:00

[DAY 1]
Home again.
NO SNOW FOR 3 WEEKS MOTHERFUCKERS

After I landed and caught up with my mom for 3 months worth of town gossip, I had 牛肉麵 (beef noodle soup) for lunch and went hunting for DVDs/albums. They finally released the DVD for Exit No. 6 // 六號出口. Kind of a MTV-Taiwan streetpunk comedy/romance, but it's the film that I have a lot of affection for. I'm willing to forgive its contrived plot, corny lines and blatant romanticizations of adolescent rebellion because it understands -- like no other movie -- how Taiwanese kids wish they could live. I first saw it over the summer at the Taipei Film festival and even got to take a slice of the original film reel from the director (it's taped into my sketchbook now). Watching the behind-the-scene interviews kinda brought back my best summer memories.

The guitarist from Sugar Plum Ferry also released a concept album/post-rock soundtrack for a locally-produced (hot?) lesbian-themed movie that won the Teddy Award at Berlin Film Festival. Listening to it right now; really chill, glad I got it.

---------------------------------------

[DAY 2]

『如果青春註定要不斷地向前跑，
他‧媽‧的我的出口到底在哪裡？』

Went to the "West Gate"/Shimen district today at around dusk to explore the back alleys. I used to hang out around the main strip in high school because that's what high schoolers tend to do in Taipei. Plenty of arcades, karaoke bars, Japanese knicknacks, restaurants and cafes to bring dates to. Kind of like Shibuya district in Tokyo. But then I rewatched Exit No. 6 (六號出口), which focuses more on the afterdark youth subcultures of Shimen. I've been thinking about it for days and decided to revisit the place again.

Like Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue and St. Mark's Square in East Village, Shimen's one of those supersized, over-exposed pop culture meccas. And like those two other places, it's sometimes hard to like precisely because it's so hypocritical and aggressively young. When a Taipei yuppie wants to show how corporate/ martini-and-striped-silk-shirt he is, the first thing he'll do is bash the district in front of his friends. "I don't go to Shimen -- it's for high schoolers."

Anyway, walking around watching all the cosplayers, hip-hop geeks and pseudo-punks kinda allowed me indulge in wondering what kinda aestheticized lives local high schoolers and college kids lead on these streets. But of course it's a hoax: no one actually lives like that. And I'm sure you're all sick of my redundant identity crises, but I started thinking about what it'd be like to grow up in a local high school/college and hang around this part of town everyday after school.

I guess that's also why I liked Exit 6 so much. It's all projection on my part. I'm observing from a quiet distance, watching these impossibly idiotic, good-humored and charming Taiwanese street punks embrace the best years of their lives.

I think I'm gonna be one of those dorky (J.D. Salinger-ish?) adults -- if I ever become one; I still get mistaken for a high schooler a lot -- who never outgrows his fascination with youth culture.

---------------------------------------------

[DAY 5]

It was dark (6PM) by the time I'd finished watching National Treasure with Sherry. On the subway ride home, I stood near a window and stared out down at the streets as they zoomed past the rail track. The train made a long stop at one of the stations, and near the station was a park where a group of uniform-wearing high school girls were hanging out. I guess I looked emo enough standing near the window in the subway train, staring out into the night, so one of the girls stood up and waved at me. I fiddled with my earphones and kinda looked away, but the girl didn't give up. She got all her friends to stand up too and they all jumped up and down waving at me, trying to get my attention.

I think Will Eisner said something to the effect of: never trust anyone who smiles at you on city streets. This is perhaps true to Eisner's NYC, but totally not true here. Random kindness is still alive.

新流浪運動

2007-12-11T13:42:00.000-08:00

Heading home to Taipei again!
Concerts I want to see over winter break:

甜梅號:
2007.12.14 (五) 20:00 - 21:00 信義誠品音樂館 ◎
2007.12.22 @ Underworld
2007.12.24 (一) 20:00 - 21:00 敦南誠品戶外廣場 (甜梅號with代打鼓手or昆蟲白)◎
2007.12.28 (五) 21:00 - 23:00 植樂空間
2007.12.31 (一) 跨年場次@The Wall

張懸 12月行程
12/15 (六) 台北東吳大學校園演唱
12/19 (三) 台北醫學大學校園演唱

Tizzy Bac:
12/19 政大

1976
@ Riverside 12/15

The Wall New/Old Program:
12/15(六) 旺福
12/16(日) The Concretes
12/28 橙草 / 薄荷葉 / 張懸
12/29熊寶貝 / 回聲 / Tizzy Bac
12/30 電話亭 / Nylas / 絲襪小姐
12/31 甜梅 / 滅火器

2007-09-30T11:03:00.000-07:00

Figured I'd continue my photo habits to this side of the world. Autumn is beautiful, though I haven't been able to find much time to just sit around (I need at least 2 hours of quiet reading/napping in my room everyday). For better or worse, this is looking to be my busiest year yet.

Wilder Hall covered in ivy.

Absinth! Hooray??

Adam posing for a bottled water commercial?? We had 8 people climbing Moose Mountain yesterday. The leaves were not exactly afire with Fall colors just yet, but the weather was absolutely phenomenal.

This clearing on Moose Mountain was supposedly created by a plane crash. Creepy.

Finally, my sweet new dorm room! This is the central living room area. It's a little cramped for 3 people + guests, but otherwise it's the coolest dorm room I've gotten so far. A little old and dusty, but it just feels so damn collegiate.

Months go down like shots of soju

2007-09-15T11:21:00.000-07:00

good

bye

taipei

And the people whom I will miss.
It's been the best time knowing you again.

Hello America.
I think I'm ready.

This one's for Moike

2007-09-13T08:38:00.000-07:00

Just came back from a concert by The Thirteens (拾參樂團) where Deserts (張懸) was a special guest. She performed a cover of one of their songs:

拾參 was a blast as always, but this is the first time I've seen 張懸 live -- kinda surprising, since I've been chasing shows all summer. The thing is she's gathered so much mainstream popularity that her concerts sell out within 10 minutes they're announced.

She's very talkative onstage as people say. When she made her surprise appearance onstage today, she said it was one of the most relaxing and happy events she's done all summer. "拾參樂團 is a band that I respect with all my heart. Besides their talent in music, they also paint their own album covers and animate their own music videos. If you ever want to be an artist, learn from them and package yourself. Don't be like me and allow yourself to be packaged by other people. Don't lose."

At this she took a swig from her beer and tried to ha-ha laugh at herself but it's kind of a sad joke to laugh at. Started out as a high school drop-out, an autodidact who ran away from her mother to live on her own (she wrote 寶貝 when she was 13, after a huge fallout in the family), doing gigs between odd jobs. Now she's signed by Song BMG. You laugh with her and you wonder why you're laughing.

"Anyone else just got here after a long day's work? I know I have-"
A few people raise their hands.
"It's a Thursday. There are more of you here, I know."
Laughs. More hands.
"Gan, how are you guys not drinking? Where are your drinks your bottles your glasses? Raise em high. Fuck it, we deserve this toast. gan bei!"

On 拾參樂團's last song she passes around the tambourine and tells everyone to dance. "I know it's a little selfish of me -- I just want to see what kinda funny moves you come up with. But I can't dance either and I'm having a great time and you're more free than we are here. No reason not to loosen up a bit."

The Wall is usually a very polite and serious venue but somehow it felt like a friend's reunion tonight. I know what people mean when they say that hearing her is like catching up with a long lost friend.

New Article is Out!

2007-09-11T20:27:00.000-07:00

"Notes from Taipei's Underground"

I would seriously go back and rephrase a lot of things, but eh, as long as the news is conveyed.

唉

2007-09-11T08:57:00.000-07:00

臨走前果然辦不了什麼大事
思緒連續的被打斷
只能處理一些索碎的麻煩差事
坐立難安啊...

早上起床整理了一下房間
不禁無聊了起來
索性的搭了半小時的捷運到公館區
也很索性的買了一本小說 -- 九把刀的<<哈棒傳奇>>
翻了一下,白爛的蠢笑一番
又回到家裡為自己設了一些有的沒的目標
過了半夜了...繪本還是一片空白

orz
一天就這樣很無用的漂過了
睡覺吧

THIS IS DELICIOUS!!

2007-08-24T09:32:00.000-07:00

IN KOREA

WE DINE IN- heck.

2007-08-15T09:36:00.000-07:00

This is my last week of internship, so much laziness

See. I can't even be bothered to complete that sentence properly.

Here are a few thoughts:
1. It sucks to be consistently mistaken for a high schooler

Dentist: "You studying at Taipei American School?"
Me: "Yeah I used to. Is it my accent?"
Dentist: "It's your accent. Are you nervous about the States?"
Me: "The States? Nah it's alr... wait what?"
Dentist: "You know, moving there. College. First year."
Me: "Whoa. Whoa there, man. I've... I mean how do I- listen, I'm not-."
[At this point he prods a little mirror behind my molars]
Dentist: "It must be scary moving from your parents' home to a foreign land."
Me: [Froths at the mouth and gurgles helplessly]
Dentist: "Remember to do your laundry."
Me: [Starts bleeding at the gums in pure rage]
Dentist: "And brush your teeth. Like a good boy."
...And this is when I slaughtered him.

2. I gained 10 pounds. I'm as heavy as I've ever been. Hooray!

3. Shit, I forgot what I was gonna say, but 3 was gonna be the highlight of this post. Oh well. Later.

[Edit] Oh yeah, 3. A category 5 "super typhoon" is headed our way and estimated to make landfall on Friday, the night of a concert. Balls.

Wanhua Crossing

2007-08-08T23:34:00.000-07:00

Weeks of hair-tugging toil and all I have to show for it is this airless piece of travel writing: enter Kevin's laughably ineffectual attempt at being a valuable intern! At least it got published, though. I also got to take my own photos. And the article gets (ever so slightly) more readable towards the middle. Honestly.

I just finished the final draft of my next article and it looks to be way cooler than this one. But for now, enjoy. Or suffer. Whatever floats your boat, really.

Above photo is Lungshan Temple (龍山寺), and below is a random Qing Dynasty street and the Red Theater at Ximending.

Cold Turkey

2007-08-04T01:27:00.000-07:00

Yo guess who cold-called the manager of The Wall (Taipei's largest live-music bar) and coordinator of this year's Formoz Festival and wound up with an amazing interview??

He offered some interesting perspective on Taiwan's music scene -- how something as basic as narrow living spaces (i.e. the lack of garages and basements in most people's homes) hinders Taipei's band culture, how indie music has been the domain of students of elite colleges despite its classless aspirations, how bohemianism in its true pre-yupster form doesn't exist in Taiwan, how the recent institution of the 2-day weekend (it used to be just Sundays in Taiwan) allows young professionals to pursue their own hobbies on a new level, etc.

As the manager of Formoz, he was also so busy behind the scenes that he didn't get to see Mercury Rev perform. What a shame. I told him it was the best ever and he wanted to cry black tears of regret and emo and self-loathing.

He was a really chill dude too and said to call and share a few beers when I go over to catch the next band.

Also, I've been toying with the idea of writing a senior thesis on the politics of popular music.

Dispatch from Formoz Day III - I Think I'm Goodkind

2007-08-01T10:20:00.000-07:00

So it ends. I don't know how to write about the last day of Formoz, but I'll just say that it's been the best 30 hours of performance I've ever experienced, hands down. I'm thoroughly spent.

Again, there are plenty of 3-day music festivals around the world, but I think the laid-back crowd, the classy venue and the honesty of the local bands is what made it so awesome. Not too many teenyboppers, very low-key corporate sponsorship by Taiwan Beer, a full moon, a lot of small places to just hang out and sip beer. I don't think I'd enjoy a music fest that's just one huge packed and standing stadium. I'd just get annoyed and tired.

I finally tore off my Formoz wristband yesterday. It took a strong pair of scissors to cut that thing. Now it feels a little weird without it, like my wrist is missing something.

Continued from Day II: piano rock trio Tizzy Bac decided mid-concert that, hey, wouldn't it be cool to bounce 50 huge balloons among the audience?? "Giving you guys something to play with while our PA fixes things up," the lead singer said. What the fuck?? Then she rolled a bunch of them downstage and one bounced off my head. The people behind me snickered since I finally paid a price for my height (I've been blocking people's views all weekend. Sorry!). But we were a very ADD crowd so -- OOH HEY, BALLOON!! -- everyone started drunkenly waving their arms when a balloon came their way.

Afterwards, Japan's techno whizzes Buffalo Daughter offered up some of the strangest noises ever. I want to see a collaboration between them and Mercury Rev, because they would totally tear Jon Donahue's dreamy melodies into shit.

My knowledge of electronica doesn't cover much beyond Aphex Twin's 'Windowlicker' or the occasional Frou Frou. From what I hear, Buffalo Daughter counts the Beastie Boys among their fans. They have a perversely catchy noise. I've been listening to them at work and they're thoroughly disruptive, but I can't seem to stop. It's like licking a sore at the roof of your mouth.

------------------------------------

Day III: went to see Quruli first thing in the afternoon, as per my sister's recommendation. Their first words on stage were: "[Taiwanese]大擱好, we are Quruli. Chou tofu at nightmarket last night -- so fa-kingu tastey yeah!!!" They win huge points from me for speaking Taiwanese.

Some Kyoto indie-pop was a chill way to start the last night. Then we slipped out of the stadium in the middle of their set to catch Taipei's cafe-rock staple 八厘米天空 (8mm Sky). I've been listening to them for a while, was gonna catch them over Christmas but they got too expensive. Now I finally got to see them! They were okay live. Not as impressive as Sugar Plum, though certainly more chatty.

It was a full moon again.

RIZE was the headbang act of the night. Their energy reminds me of a rock version of Far East Movement, though their sound's too nu-metal and power chordy. At the end the lead singer climbed the stage's scaffolding, then dived down to run with the fans.

I missed OK GO, but apparently they spoke a few lines of Taiwanese fluently. The lead singer was a linguistics major at Brown.

On my way to Yo La Tengo, I spotted 張懸, 蘇打綠 and Mayday's drummer 瑪沙 in the audience. Dean & Britta were also having a Q&A thing after the screening for Tell Me Do You Miss Me, a documentary on Luna's last tour.

Audience: "What's your suggestion to aspiring artists?"
Dean: "Go to law school."
Britta: [kicks Dean under the table] "I'd say just stay true and be honest to yourself."
[Applause]
Audience: "Which other bands have you seen at Formoz and who's your favorite?"
Dean: "Testament, definitely."
[Audience cracks up]

Smartass.

Their translator was absolutely atrocious. He wanted to pose a few questions of his own, but communicated them in such a way as to be slightly offensive. There were long silences where D&B didn't know how to answer. I reflexively blurted "UHHHH... AWK.WERRRDD..." louder than I thought, my face more contorted than I'd realized. Then Dean turned around and stared at me with one of those bitch-you-wanna-take-this-outside?? faces in as ghetto a fashion as a gaunt graying Harvard-educated man is capable of, so I ran away!!

Never say "awkwerrdddd" out loud during long silences.

Yo La performing "Sugarcube." My recording quality is horrible since I was close-ish to the stage and my cam can't handle such loud distortions.

Yo La Tengo on the breezy mountaintop was a good way to end the weekend. They looked like the scruffy nerds that they are and Ira Kaplan was melting sweat the whole way through his shipwrecked guitar solo in the 10-minute "Pass the Hatchet, I think I'm Goodkind" . Listening to the reverb ring for 5 minutes at the end was sort of a religious experience. He also played "Speeding Motorcycle" on account of the dozen or so vintage-tee-wearing fans who raised banners for song requests (not a regular song on their setlist, if dead fictional record store clerks from The Onion are to be trusted).

So their set ended on a 20-minute noisefest that had Ira smashing his guitar, rolling on the floor and generally being possessed. I did not peg him as a guitar smasher. Wicked sick. They signed autographs and answered questions afterwards, but seeing as how Ira and Georgia looked like they were about to pass out, I didn't bother.

So ends Formoz. Next time I'm back for the summer, I'm going again!

Kindama Boyz?

2007-07-31T10:10:00.000-07:00

"'After the concert, we took him to the police bureau,' police officer Tang Se-huai said. 'He appeared scared and nervous, saying he did not know he was not supposed to do this in Taiwan.'

Chartered ROFLcopter right there. Thanks to bobosa for bringing this IHT article to my attention.

-"Japanese rock band singer caught dropping shorts in Taiwan concert," International Herald Tribune.

I noticed that within hours of uploading my short video clip of the Ging Nang Boyz's performance onto YouTube, the view count spiked to the thousands, for a short time earning honors as the #50th most viewed video of the day. Whoa what?? Fortunately, my video wasn't too incriminating for the band. Apparently some tabloid reporters were looking to create news where it really shouldn't be a big deal. There were rumors of people who sighted a woman in a trucker hat and sunglasses cellphoning immediately after the show and whispering, "Yep, I got the footage." The police don't care to waste four hours on this 'case' either, unless people filed complaint about how traumatized they were.

Booo. Taiwan's media continues to suck.

That said, eat up the scandal! Here is another short clip of Ging Nang being generally intense onstage:

Dispatch from Formoz Day II: "Are You a Hologram?"

2007-07-28T09:53:00.001-07:00

Sweet Jesus on rollerblades!! Day II has been so phenomenal that I'm beginning to feel a little guilty, like I've glutted my ears beyond my reasonable right to such aural awesome.

Seriously stop it guys. Just please disappoint me a little. You're creeping me out.

I'm too tired to write too much, and I still have a climactic Day III to rev up for (the schedule is so packed and solid that I don't know how I'm gonna grab dinner/drinks in between shows), so here's a quick summary:

I had absinthe, with flaming sugar cubes and absinthe spoons and all. I'm told the absinthe in Taipei, while legal, is rather low on the wormwood content. It made a cool drink anyway, and it still had a special kick that set the mood for the concert.

蘇打綠 (SodaGreen) was the pitch-perfect, saccharine folk outfit that they're supposed to be. The keyboardist was also flamingly homosexual.

We went to watch 絲襪小姐 (Ms. Stockings), whose drummer is Sonny's guitar instructor (!). It was a chill stage where everyone sat on the pavilion's red tile ground and around trees, sipping beer. They had a girl violinist and I've never seen the violin rock so hard. Also, Sugar Plum Ferry's guitarist was in their formation and it was his birthday! They gave him presents onstage. It was a d'awwww moment.

Mercury Rev: I was expecting them to be modestly, blandly good. Some low energy dream pop. Folded armed head-nodders floating into the night. Flaming Lips without the flaming.

Mother of god, absinthe shots before Mercury Rev was definitely a good call. They were the highlight of the night.

"Are you a hologram?" was one of the many weird things they had displayed on the screen behind them.

I would so inundate you with a lot more videos. It's so hard to choose between the clips.

Japan's punk pranksters 銀杏Boys literally rocked their hearts out, putting FLCL's finale to shame. I picked a clip from their last song, post-rockout: the lead vocalist is left with his boxers only, having smashed a number of things and kicked himself over. He has an absurdly huge mascara bank smeared under his eyes so he could sweat and scream and have his black tears running all over his face by the end of his gig, laughing hysterically, spent and naked, his heart offered to you in outstretched platters, what Dave Eggers claims to be by the end of his book -- the sheer mad joy of Beats. The cheers tore apart everyone's throats. This is what a reckless party at the end of the world would sound like.

Dispatch from Formoz: Day I - 爽．到．暴!!!

2007-07-27T09:33:00.000-07:00

4PM @ Formoz Rock Festival 2007, Taipei, Taiwan

Opening act -- Dean & Britta, former lead singer and members of seminal '80s shoegaze bands Galaxie 500 and Luna. Few people can catch the opening act at such hours and under such a tropical sun. The stadium is dusty and only half-filled, but a lot of the people who fill the half are sporting vintage Galaxie and Luna shirts. Some of them whisper to each other about how they can't believe D&B are finally here.

Britta: "Should we just start?"
Dean: "I think so, Britta."
Britta: "Uhm."
Audience: [silent, sweating, unresponsive and shy with their English]
Sonny, who's standing beside me and sweating like a sponge: "[Goddammit] YES!!!"
Britta: "...Was that a yes? Do I hear a yes?"
Audience: [still comatose; some of them turn around to stare at Sonny while they fan themselves with concert pamphlets]
Britta: "I guess that's a yes?? Okay, 1. 2. 3-ah-one-two-threee-four--"

The crowd of loyal indie fans go crazy. I joke to Sonny that he officially kick started the 2007 Formoz Festival.

The time finally came when I traded my three-day Formoz Festival ticket for a flimsy wristband that allows me to enter concert grounds. I am strictly warned not to take this wristband off for the next few days, or else it's trouble. It's supposedly water-proof, but sweat and manhandling has already made it wrinkly.

Oh my god was it a good day.

So I arrived at the festival with Sonny around noon. For Taiwan's most high-profile indie music festival, it seemed awfully untrafficked. Nothing like the sweltering shoulder-rubbing crowd at Hohaiyan Festival. But then you look around and everyone's wearing their fav band shirts. You feel your lack of music nerd-cred. No red-faced and shirtless revelers around you, either. The crowd is different.

Dean & Britta were kinda irked for their performance since (A) it was hot as BALLS and their New York balls cannot take such hot; and (B) soundcheck took FOREVER. It's unfortunate that D&B had to fly dozens of hours to Taipei just to be soundcheck guinea pigs. So even for New York indie smartasses, they were acting kinda cold. But they were good anyway. They played their Galaxie 500 and Luna songs obligingly, though they obviously seem tired of being asked to play the classics all the time.

Now D&B performed in a relatively shabby and empty stadium. But Formoz has 7 stages and hundreds of bands, and the other stages are located in an adjoining cultural park, which, as you can see below-

-is the classiest outdoor concert venue I've seen in quite some time. It's all built on a leafy, labrynthine hill too. The architecture is traditional Taiwanese -- lots of tiled walls and staircases to sit on and courtyards to crowd. Too bad the bigger international acts (Yo La Tengo, Testament, QURULI, Anna Tsychiya, TERIYAKI BOYZ) will not have the pleasure of playing at the cooler stages. OK GO will get to play on the "Mountain Stage", though, and that's one of the neater ones as I'll show you in a bit.

We let D&B go without an encore and headed to the other stages to see Sugar Plum Ferry, one of Taiwan's most famous post-rock bands. And holyshit were they the best thing to happen in the already-awesome day. I've seen them play at The Wall, but the claustrophobic bar setting doesn't do them justice since they (being the post-rock weirdoes that they are) don't waste words chatting with the audience in between songs. The bassist is even famous for playing with his back facing the audience. Truly eccentric people they are, but wow did they dominate today.

We sat down in the traditionally-built courtyard at around sunset. Their music crescendoed while airplanes zoomed by (we're close enough to the military airport) and a brilliant sunset exploded overhead. Then the full moon rose over the ornate tiled roof right over their heads as they played. How any concert can be so painfully perfect escapes my mind.

Then we headed to the Mountain Stage to check out The Shine & Shine & Shine & Shine, crossing traditional Chinese castle walls on the way. They had a big table in the middle of the band formation which the lead female vocalist was dancing on top of in between keyboard solos and turntable manipulations. She's just about as sane as Helena Bonham-Carter on crack-laced shrooms -- and that made them entirely deliciously enjoyable.

The lead vocalist would randomly scream "爽!!!" in the middle of her songs, then pick up a wand from the table and twirl it around before pelting it at the guitarist and banging her microphone on the drummer's cymbals. Then she'd take swigs of whiskey and molest the guitarist some more. It was epic. Her strategy for selling their EP was: "I have 6 EPs on my table. They cost too much and we only recorded one song on each. On some of them we didn't record at all! Ho-hah -- 爽!!!"

The stage itself was at the top of the hill and had a full view of Taipei 101 and Shinkong Tower as well as the full moon. The tiled walls around the stage were entangled in old tree roots.

After The Shines x4, we went to check out Testament, a supposedly proto-Metallica San Francisco band. I'm not a metalhead by any stretch of imagination, but they were one of today's headline acts, so I figured why not. Sonny has seen Tool and other metal bands perform, but I didn't know what to expect from a metal concert.

Mike, I think you'd totally dig them.

So we headed back to the big stadium. By this time it was no longer sun-drenched and dustry, but quiet and completely dark. We wondered what the hell was up, where the band was, etc. A tightly packed group had already gathered in front of the stage, holding their breaths. Then the stage lit up and the audience turned into a full-fledged cult. People were not so much crowd surfing as they were being tossed around.

True to the genre's reputation, Testament made a hugely theatrical stage entrance and seemed genuinely excited to be on stage. I found that I enjoyed them a lot more than I'd expected.

Pretty good song (token metal-band ballad, I'm told):

Well, shit, it's 3AM now. I need to catch tomorrow's shows! We also caught this band of art students/indie animators who screened their trippy animated MVs while they performed. One of them involved re-animating Van Gogh's portraits and sunflower paintings. On their last song, people with deer masks and antlers charged onstage and attacked the lead vocalist with firecrackers.

Anyway, just wanted to say that all the bands I've seen so far have been pleasantly surprising in some way. I'll keep yall updated for day 2!

"Area College Kid Who's Just Discovered Yo La Tengo Annoys Friends"

2007-07-22T10:48:00.000-07:00

So I was just at work and digging through old photos, and I dug up some photos of a random game developer's party I crashed in Oakland.

It's pretty bizarre how I was pulled into such a geekster carnival. It was Halloween weekend. My sister works as events manager for a game developer's magazine, so she got invited to this party at an Oakland warehouse where a couple of the concept artists call home. I mean an in-the-middle-of-nowhere-crime-scene-body-dumpsite kinda place. Anthony Hopkins would gladly feast on your kidneys in such a warehouse. Angelina Jolie would have naked rainy lesbian knife fights here. But there were huge gratuitous and doubtless very illegal fires on the premise so that was enough to make me stay. As my sister ran her gauntlet of networking conversations, I somehow ended up being kegman for a bit and talking to game developers who want to roam the American roads and one day become pre-Fear And Loathing Hunter S. Thompson. Pretty awesome stuff. Though it was totally unrelated to Berkeley, it was strangely enough one of the most 'Berkeley' experiences I had there.

My sister's coworkers. I had to help them kick apart a wooden scaffolding to help fuel the bonfires. Besides sipping Pabst Blue Ribbons, they were really good at tearing apart wooden crates. Pretty cool people (PBR notwithstanding).

2007-07-17T22:29:00.000-07:00

If you've ever wondered why the popular American imagination (i.e. Hollywood movies) insists on seeing scholars as impotent and bitter alcoholic misanthropes, this is an awesome article. Thanks again to Arts & Letters Daily for linking to this.

While you're enjoying the article and last week's awkward turtle, please also have a traffic mantis:

Found on the outer window of my internship office. Traffic mantis says hi, and he promises to fuck you up if you don't read my blog.

So I'm still jostling with my editor on my second travel/culture article topic. I want to write about the Taipei indie scene -- or alternatively, on the "Best Places to Pretend That You're Not the Yupster That You Really Are." I'm a glib little shit, I know. I even booked my overpriced 3-day concert pass to Taipei's 2007 Formoz Rock Festival, which will feature New Yorkers Yo La Tengo and OK GO, Japanese acts QURULI and RIZE, and awesome Taiwanese bands Tizzy Bac, 1976, 8mm Sky (八厘米天空), Sugar Plum Ferry (甜梅號) and of course the ever-androgynous SodaGreen (蘇打綠). These are the bands I'm most psyched about seeing, anyway. For my own good, I want to keep my expectations low, but GODDAMIT WILL IT BE THE BEST 3 DAYS OF SUMMER EVER.

I mean, Taipei's not the most happening place in terms of the arts, but the scene is small and cozy. It doesn't have the frizzy-edged obsessiveness and posturing that seems to characterize the San Francisco scene (a Sufjan Steven and Kaiser Chiefs concert sold out at Berkeley within 24 hours of its announcement; a Yoko Ono exhibition also attracted a huge ironic-Beatnik-revivalist crowd). When I dropped by San Francisco on my way back to Taipei, my sister brought me to this new sushi trendster bar in Haight-Ashbury. I kid you not, the whole restaurant was populated by hornrimmed emo glasses-wearing, trendily bald DJ-lookalikes who wear nothing but the messiest of pin-striped shirts and tornest of jeans. Their girlfriends were either sake-sipping Asian queens or the Kate Winslets of Eternal Sunshine. Maybe SanFran is catching up to NYC in its overriped-ness. I'm glad I don't have to deal with that at concerts here.

Onto more wholesome family things that don't carry the possible risks of deafness and hipsters: I went fishing with my uncle, my mom and my cousins at Keelung, just an hour's drive from Taipei-

Have An Awkward Turtle

2007-07-15T22:28:00.000-07:00

Well errrr hur-hur that was awkward... <:B
(drawn while waiting for my sister to arrive at the airport)

The Vanishing Taipei Boho

2007-07-13T21:35:00.000-07:00

Taipei's ghetto version of the Floating Gardens of Babylon. A PoMo mess, like the rest of the city.

I was struggling to come up with a topic to write my second travel article on, so my very bohemian coworker suggested that I check out 寶藏巖 (or Treasure Hill), a hidden and run-down artist colony next to the 新店 River and National Taiwan University. She warned me that I wouldn't be able to write a tourist recommendation that 50-year-old CEOs can safely bring their weekend wife and kids on (I am writing for a business magazine, after all) but that sounded too awesome to pass up. I read up on the little hill-side community and found out that the village has been the locus of a heated debate on city planning and gentrification. Mayor Ma brought in bulldozers to tear the place down on several occasions since the architecture is shabby and old and mostly unauthorized by the city government. The artists, students and professors of course pelted the demolition team with whatever shit they could find. The city then cut their electricity and water, but the residents were already used to that anyway. This is terribly romantic stuff.

But the conflict brought unprecedented attention onto the once-hidden village and eventually led the travel section of New York Times to recommend it as a touristy hang out, even going so far as to recommend specific cafes. The Treasure Hive cafe eventually closed because the owner got pissed off by the tourists who came to snap photos and pester him about life in the artist colony.

The college student's blog ring about Treasure Hill hasn't seen an update since 2006, so I decided to check out the place on my own.

The trail to Treasure Hill was hidden behind a water processing plant. I wouldn't have found it without these graffiti hints. Also, note that the lower one in the above picture looks very similar to the one I snapped before. I've been seeing this artist (who goes by the name 'Reach') all around town (along with Ano and Bounce, who seem to collaborate with him a lot).

So I followed the trail of scattered graffiti and eventually found a definitive sign on a crumbling wall and next to a plastic red sculpture.

Awesomeness! I went a little further down the narrow trail and came upon a small buddhist temple bearing the same name. No one was in the temple. A little park next to it had the biggest proliferation of graffiti art that I've seen in Taipei. Some pretty cool ones:

Then I finally found the village itself (!!) and there were aluminum barricades around the entire hilly building cluster.

It was closed.

A heavily-photoshopped plaque with smiling villagers and happy children promised that the city government (on behalf of the Treasure Hill community) was eager to see me again when it re-opens in 2008. The words were progressive and confident in technology and promised a better hill under government management. It will become a designated culture district.

I was reminded of a Qing-Dynasty street that I stumbled upon on my last article assignment to Taipei's oldest district. Same green barricades, same cheery words. The Qing Dynasty storefronts were to be strategically torn down and rebuilt as a Disneyfied simulacrum of itself under the city's banner of cultural management.

Not sure what to say.

[Edit] More photos of Treasure Hill.

Hohaiyan 海洋音樂祭

2007-07-12T08:40:00.000-07:00

So the Hohaiyan Rock Festival last weekend was more about the carnivalesque atmosphere than the music. Not that I didn't see this coming, but wow was it a crowd. The one-and-a-half hour train ride to Fulong Beach was so sweaty and sardine-packed that my fingers began to wrinkle from the moist air. Sauna, anyone?

Just as Pots Weekly and Freddy Lin (organizer of the more independent Formoz Rock Festival) predicted, Hohaiyan has become jarringly over-commercialized since 7-11 picked up sponsorship (and 7-11 here is not the suburban podunk shambles as it is in the States; it's obiquitous to the degree of elevating Taiwan's convenience store concentration to the world's highest). I love 7-11 and all, but I really don't need them blaring S.H.E. music videos and commercial jingles at my supposedly-grassroot music festivals.

So my high school buddies and I were so happy to be liberated from the sardine train that we ran straight for the beaches and jumped into the ocean (clothes and all) right after we got there. We would've died otherwise. Though walking around in wet, sandy boxers for the remainder of the day was not such a pleasant experience.

As the sun began to set, we started heading towards the stage and choosing camp-out spots on the beach. We dug little trenches in the sand and made makeshift couches and fell asleep in them reading, chatting and drinking beer until the night began to set. Honestly made the whole ordeal entirely worthwhile.

Conclusion: Hohaiyan is good as a once-in-a-lifetime thing, even just as a study in Taiwan's burgeoning youth counter-culture (they call the current generation 七年級生s -- born into the 80s, averse to soul-killing office work, lovers of graphic design and ridiculously torn jeans, and most of all disgusted by their parents' living-is-for-working philosophy). In the end, though, I still much prefer the hangout atmosphere of live-house bar performances.

I'm close to finishing my first travel story for the internship. It looks like the final magazine version will be kinda depersonalized and truncated, but I'll upload it anyway when it's ready.

Also

2007-07-02T11:02:00.000-07:00

While we're on the topic of dicking around, I thought that I should report a drunken impulse that I hatched and carried out at the Underworld music bar (what an emo bar name). As you can see from the previous post, the bathroom walls were plastered with all sorts of graffiti-cartoon faces. So I pulled out a thick drawing pencil from my backpack and made one of them blurt out, in cartoon speech bubble: "T.S. ELIOT HAS NOTHING ON ME."

Are you proud of me?

I just read Allen Ginsberg's Howl and I wish there were 36 hours in a day.

地下社會

2007-06-30T11:46:00.000-07:00

Graffiti around Taipei's Shimen District and in the bathroom of Underworld (地下社會) music bar.
----------------------------------------

I went to a music cafe again on Thursday, and another one today. I'm so hooked on Taipei's 'live house' scene that I'll probably skip work on Friday to head to the 3-day Hohaiyan Indie Rock Festival by the beach. Best thing about the scene here is that there are no hipsters or swaggeringly grandiloquent indie outfits as you would find at similar venues in other cities; just small 20something post-college bands who love what they do, and that's tremendously inspiring. None of my buddies were available to hang out tonight, so I actually grabbed my sketchbook and went to see the band alone. Of course I didn't get any sketching done at the bar (sketching as in drawing; get your mind out of the gutter), but it felt good having an excuse to set out downtown by yourself at 10pm. This is what I miss about cities. I'm starting to develop really solitary urban habits, but it gives me time to think.

The live-house bar I went to tonight was near Shi-Da Normal (as opposed to Rando?) University, and the streets were steaming and teeming with street food and international students and second-hand bookstores. Quite a bumping neighborhood. The band itself -- TUBE//地下鐵樂團 -- sounded unmistakably British, and their biography confirmed it. The lead singer is British-Taiwanese I think.

Friday was Sonny's birthday, so we celebrated it in high 台客 (Taiwanese ghetto) fashion by buying a bottle of Kinmen Rice Wine at a convenience store and chugging it at a nearby park. As the buzz started to set in, we began to look for some more dignified place to continue our general fucking-around loitering. We eventually walked to the 24-hour Eslite Bookstore on Dunhua and read Pot's Literary Weekly (破報) at the cafe. I'm beginning to turn so local that I'm not sure if I'll be ready for Hanover when September comes around.

Move over TS Eliot! Oh wait, you're dead...

2007-06-30T10:07:00.001-07:00

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-

---------------------------------------

[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

的演出.結果現在現場沒有他們那票人.我所學到的教訓是:說會捧場的老外要特別小心，因為他們八成是國際詐欺集團，而且是專挑獨立樂團下手的."

大家都有笑到 XD. Even my British friend.

主唱:"除了bassist的T-shirt，我們今天的衣服全是高級Fnac服裝店借來的.所以可以看的出來今晚貝斯手的打扮．．．囧意顯得特別深，落差也很大."
貝斯手:"嗯，沒辦法，我們就是這樣子的時尚團體."　（遠望～

囧!!