I’ve been playing around with our DSLR, with some of the cool kids in the university to help me out. And the amazing Mike Berk did the sound design.

A woman. A man. A clarinet.

Actors – Daphne, Zarc, Doggie.

Sound Design- Michael Berk

Assistance – Kevin Chen

And yes, I realize I have the mentality of a fifteen year old. But that is exactly how entitled male artists make me feel.

My quest to use my mobile phone as a creative tool continues.  I am surrounded by mountains and very lush subtropical vegetation.  Its futile to try and reproduce it’s complexity and beauty. The following is an attempt to express what it is like to live with this abundance.

It has been a while since I painted or drew. It is nice to get back to it.

I spent an afternoon at the Taipei train station with my i-phone. It was a slow, leisurely afternoon for me, but not for the people who had places to go. I love having the luxury of being stationary in a place where everyone else is compelled to move.

This is a little animation I made using my i-phone, a gag software called Hipstamatic and FCP. The music is by Kevin McLeod of Incompetech.com.

Scenes from an immigrant’s workers rights I went to yesterday in Taipei.  The theme this year was domestic workers, who want the right to a day off.  David on Formosa has a blog post about the march and immigrant workers in Taiwan.

Every time I see labor contractors in the Foreign Affairs office, they give me the heebie jeebies, they seem like a cross between pimps and petty landlords scared to death of losing their petty privileges, so it was great to attend something where immigrant workers could articulate their concerns.

The visual theme for the protest was slippers, since the Chinese word for slippers 拖鞋, shares its first character to mean ‘delay,’ as in ‘dragging your feet.’  The event ended with the Council of Labor Affairs being pelted with slippers. Me and my friends were in the front of the crowd, the wrong place to be if a crowd is going to be throwing slippers!

This is the first video I shot using the Flip. It was a pain editing it on FCP, and I pretty much had to do it blind, unless I wanted to spend hours rendering it to preview things. I marked in and out points on the audio track and picked an in point on the video and let the chips fall where they may.  Its not the greatest video ever, but it did get done in a couple of hours.

Here is biker Santa greeting visitors in front of a Hualien City government office:

Biker Santa

Here are some photos of my favorite breakfast place in town.

Traditional Taiwanese Breakfast Place

They make almost everything from scratch, which is why it tastes so good.

Eggs!

Lots of oil is going into these eggs. And note the fried bread sticks on the side.

Their flat bread is the best in the city

These are a cross between a nan and mughlai paratha, and very very tasty.

Most of the masseuses in Taiwan are blind, and the hospitals, especially those run by a religious group will often set aside a space for them to practice their profession. The other day, I was waiting to see the doctor at the local hospital, and decided to get a massage.

The masseuse realized my English was better than my Chinese and asked me where I was coming from. I replied, “United States of America.” He turned to a seeing woman next to him and asked her what I looked like. Specifically what the color of my skin was (I could comprehend that much despite my poor language skills), then he turned to me and said, “Are you White?” what reply was he expecting me to give? Yes that I was White, so should be treated better. But he already knew the answer, so was he testing the “truthiness” of a non-White person? I told him no, I was browner than the brownest Taiwanese, and that the US had many people of different races and colors, and America should not be equated with being White, it was a big diverse country. I was suddenly in possession of language skills that normally elude me.

These days I have made it a point to say ‘Meiguo’ when I get the ‘where are you from’ question, not because of any perversion of patriotism, but rather to do my small bit in undermining the idea of a monocultural world (Taiwan has immigrant workers who are largely invisible and a huge number of foreign brides from China, Vietnam and Indonesia). I can remember the time when I first saw “Do The Right Thing” at the USIS in New Delhi. It was a revelation, I had never seen a movie where Black people were the main characters, and not servants or completely invisible. This was in 1989, which is not that far in the past.

I was trying to courier something off to my sister in India at the Family Mart, and it proved impossible to do. The clerk kept taking me to the aisle and pointing at envelopes, and I kept saying I wanted DHL, UPS or Federal Express in a mixture of English and Chinese. Finally she produced a form. After about five minutes of trying different phrases, I was able to communicate that I needed to send something off to India and not the US, Australia or Japan. It turned out that they did not serve India, which made no sense to me, but I was too worn out to negotiate any further. I ended up going to the Post Office, where I think I sent the thing off. Time will tell.

I had to get a bunch of pictures framed.  I went to the guy I usually go to, but he was away. After pacing up and down for half an hour, waiting for him to come back, I walked into another framing shop and asked if anyone spoke English, it turned out the lady in charge did not, but somehow she was able to make herself understood. And between us we were able to accomplish the fairly complicated task of picking colors, frames, dimensions and placement. It got to be so, that she was able to ask me how come I had no children, what my spouse did, and if I was coming from the US, how come I was so short. She even took her tape measure and remarked at my amazing height – all 150cms of it, which she had very diligently measured. A gesture, I confess, I did not find offensive in the least. The un self-consciousness of most people in Taiwan regarding physical characteristics is rather refreshing.

I wondered why it was easier to deal with the art store lady and not the clerk at Family Mart. Kerim thinks that its easier to communicate with those who have more cultural capital. I think he is right.  In this case, it almost worked in a motivational way.  If you can ask someone their opinion, about something they are trained for, and care about, chances are they will try and make themselves understood. And both of you will have an equal investment in being patient since you respect  the other’s opinion. Ofcourse it helps that the lady probably owned her own business and I wasn’t going to haggle with her about the price. Something that does not quite work the same way when you are dealing with an overworked clerk at a boring job.

This photo was in the Taipei Times today:

BRAKE DANCING
Volunteer traffic police integrate traffic direction gestures into a dance while performing in the “traffic dance” segment of the first national competition for applied police skills at Taiwan Police College in Taipei yesterday. (Photo by GEORGE TSORNG)

I don’t even know where to begin trying to parse this one.

The police in Thailand has decided to punish officers for minor offenses by making them wear a “Hello Kitty” armband:

“Simple warnings no longer work. This new twist is expected to make them feel guilt and shame and prevent them from repeating the offence, no matter how minor,” he (Police Colonel Pongpat Chayaphan) said.

“[Hello] Kitty is a cute icon for young girls. It’s not something macho police officers want covering their biceps.”

Out here in Taiwan, with its love for all things ‘ke-ai’ this would probably not be considered a punishment. I think all the 25,000 plus items that the Sanrio company sells do pretty well here, and have been since 1974 when they started. Personally I intend to get the pink Hello Kitty scooter myself. And in case you were wondering why Hello Kitty does not have a mouth, the company website says:

Hello Kitty speaks from her heart. She’s Sanrio’s ambassador to the world and isn’t bound to any particular language.