Pal-pi-ta-TIONSSS

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

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.

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

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

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

[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

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