tonight i got this terrible phone call from the school i work for telling me that my application for my new visa has been rejected. apparently there isn't enough time to process it. this is the school's fault because the person in charge of applying has never done it before, and has caused quite a few delays by not having all the paper work prepared in time. needless to say i am very unhappy about it all. so on monday we have to go to the foreign affairs police station to see if we can get an extension on my current visa so that i can apply for the renewal. if i'm unable to get this extension i think i'll have to leave taiwan and go on a visa run. normally such a visa run would be to hk, but now that is not possible because of sars. so i'm thinking it will probably be to japan. if all else fails i'll be forced to return to the states which i really don't want to do.
a nice little site here about strange fruit, the billie holiday song. i never knew it was based on a poem by a radical school teacher.
at one time my friend paul had a blog. but he grew tired of it and gave up on blogging. well, apparently, he couldn't stay away. he's back with a new blog, the cheshire cat correspondence.
today i usually teach several classes in an insurance company. when i got to the building, they were checking everyone's temperature and making everyone wear a mask. i of course had no mask, but they let me in this time but told me to get one. the whole mask thing is sort of ridiculous, because people would wear them as they entered take an escalator up to the elevators and take them off. so why wear them at all? my students told me they thought the whole thing was rather silly.
when i got to the office of the insurance company, i was told one of my classes was cancelled and that one of the students in that class has been quarantined. my first question was do i need to be quarantined? but apparently i do not as her co-workers don't need to be. basically it's a case of someone this student's mother knows, so unless my student gets sick it won't be neccesary for me to be quarantined. i knew it was only a matter of time until one of my students was quarantined, but still its a bit surprising.
from reading j-walk i learned that the major labels think messing up your computer for downloading songs is a good thing. when i read things like that it just makes me want to see them hacked into oblivion. i know quite a few people just plainly aren't buying music from the major labels at all. i'm not quite to that point, but i'm getting there. there's been a big buzz about apple's new download service, but why would someone pay a buck a song? that's much too expensive in my book, and apparently some people agree. suspiciously in all the articles i've read about this none have mentioned emusic. i'm thinking about giving their service a try, they seem by far the best even if their selection may not have as many new releases, but at least it isn't some stupid pay per song system.
awhile back i blogged that i was planning to order some dvds. today i got an email from deep discount dvd telling me my order had shipped. i'm getting:
across the street from the school i was teaching at today reporters were all camped out. apparently, a student at the best all boys high school in taipei decided it'd be ok to break quarantine to attend classes at his cram school(not the school i work at though). needless to say everyone in his class is now quarantined. for a student smart enough to get into the best high school here, he seems to be pretty stupid. i haven't been able to find any reports on this in english though(found one here). then when i got home my roomates were telling me they'd heard that if you get sars they will kill your pets as a precaution. i haven't been able to find any news reports on this yet, so i'm not sure if it's true or just a rumour. i have heard of similiar things happening in beijing though.
today is labor day in taiwan. the school i work for isn't closed today, but since my only class for today is at a company and they were off today i got it off too. since both peter and i had today off we decided to go to see x-men two, which opened here yesterday. the theater was pretty empty, but then it's a rainy day and the theater we went to is in the same area as one of the quarantined hospitals. i enjoyed the movie, though there didn't seem to be as much character development as in the first film, and some of the characters didn't seem to have a lot to do. before we went into the theater they checked our temperatures but we didn't have to wear masks, which i heard some theaters were making people do.
before the film started they showed the trailer for matrix reloaded which looks pretty good, and the trailer for hulk, which looks, well, bad. hulk looks too much like a cartoon and too big, and too strong. i'm not familiar with the comic, so maybe that is the way he is portrayed in the comic, but i much prefer the way they had hulk in the old tv series. plus here the actor playing bruce banner looks too strong even before he turns into the hulk. i may still end up seeing it at the cheap theater out of curiousity, but i doubt i'll be paying full price for it.
the world as a blog. i really like this idea, it's a map of the world that shows where blogs are being updated around the world as it happens. you need geo tags, an rss feed and to ping weblogs.com for it to work. i understand geo tags ok, but rss feeds confuse me, i'm not exactly sure how they work(and up until now i didn't understand why you would want them) - is it just a simple tag, or more than that? time to do some more thorough research...via idle type.
the sars blog. this was actually much more interesting than i expected. though it doesn't seem to contain much up to date information on taiwan, still nice to have lots of information on the spread of the disease in one place.via brushstroke tv.
jean mentioned on his blog this essay by momus about blogging. it's an interesting read, especially his call for more photoblogs. i've been wanting to do a related blog to robot action boy that will be just of the various photos i've used on robot action boy, or snapshots i've taken that i just never got around to using on robot action boy. my concern is that the images are located on a server that will shut down if more than ten people view the images at the same time. of course, this begs the question will there ever be more than ten people viewing those images when i finally get around to setting up that photoblog? probably not, but i like to consider these things before getting started.
but to get back to the momus essay, while reading it, it reminded me that there was a time when i would see people and think to myself s/he should be my friend. it was just a feeling i got from certain people. but these days i rarely register such a thought. i'm not sure if that is just because i am older, or i just can't be bothered with other people as much or just a case of living in taiwan. the last time i even slightly thought this was maybe a year ago(or longer) when i saw these guys on the mrt(subway) carrying some yo la tango vinyl. i've never been a big fan of yo la tango, but seeing people with vinyl always brings a smile to my face. i didn't talk to them, but it was nice to see people that didn't appear to be quite as homogenous as everyone else.
yesterday i got a postcard in the mail from the foreign affairs police station reminding me that my arc(alien resident certificate) and visa will be expiring next month. of course i already knew this and went in for my health test last week. i got the results back today and am happy to report i do not have leprosy, aids, or syphilis. the woman at my school who is processing my visa renewal has not done it before. this will be her first time doing it, so i hope it all gets done on time and quickly so i don't have to get an emergency extension on my visa or worse yet, leave the country! i'm sure it'll all work out in the end, but i'll be happier once i have the new visa and won't have paranoid thoughts whispering around in the back of my head.
a man comitted suicide because he thought his wife might have sars. in the end she didn't have the disease, but the husbund is dead. are people just paranoid or stupid? my vote is with stupid.
i've also heard that people are threatening to move out of areas where sars patients are to be treated. it's not like if you get sars you will die. it is a possibility, but you could die from the flu just as well. so why all this panic? is it the media that is causing people to be so ridiculous? i don't know if they are causing it but the media here does have a lot to answer for. often times it's hard to tell the difference between legitimate press and a tabloid. though i think the government is responsible for some of this. i've been told that the police will often use or threaten to sick the press on certain suspects if they don't confess to certain crimes. when there is some sort of accident here(plane crash, auto collision) the press are often there blocking the way for medics to get in and treat the injured. freedom of the press is one thing, but delaying medical staff is not a good thing.
speaking of medical staff, i thought medical staff were there to help people, then how can they complain about being quarantined, you work in a hospital but never knew you might run the risk of being exposed to something? or of being quarantined so now you call it unfair when it happens? granted, there are definately things that should of been handled better, but the attitude of some of these nurses makes me wonder why they became nurses to begin with.
if no one is being allowed to leave the hospital how is it that the mayor can inspect the hospital and be allowed to leave? shouldn't he be quarantined as well? i suppose he was using protective gear while these others were not. but still it seems a bit inconsistent.
they've quarantined a whole hospital here due to sars. i wonder if this will end up putting taiwan back on the WHO list of places to avoid? it's been all over the news with some people rather angry at being quarantined. i've heard that some people had just been in the hospital for ten minutes(visiting someone) and are now stuck there. it sounds like maybe the way they closed the hospital wasn't the best way. i mean if they knew they were going to close it or might be why did they allow people to still come in? but still everyone should know by this time that you may have to be quarantined at some point. still it sounds like they are handling the situation here much better than the situation in toronto. up until this latest outbreak, it seemed like people here were just living their lives like normal, and most people aren't wearing masks(though the wearing of masks seems questionable anyway, as i've been told by students that most of the masks sold will not really protect you).
april 27th will be world pinhole day. only a few more days to get those pinhole cameras out and participate. the gallery from past world pinhole days is quite inspiring. if i had access to a dark room i'd be building my own for sure. i may still try to modify a disposable camera one day. via indigo blog.
students protest a rather scary piece of proposed legislation. i especially found this bit frightening:
Under the proposed revisions, those who reproduce, sell or rent pirated products will face a maximum prison sentence of five years and a hefty fine up to NT$8 million.
For example, people who copy CDs for friends, or purchase books from abroad for friends, or students who save information downloaded from the Internet on the their computers, will be prosecuted even if no complaint or lawsuit is filed, the group said, adding that the new law would only serve to "incriminate everybody in the country."
hopefully the legislation will die or not be introduced at all, but considering how the government here likes to bend over to please washington i'm not holding out much hope. whether it will be enforceable at all is another thing. i've been told by quite a few of my students if you can't copy it, it won't be popular in taiwan. and when experts often can't be certain something is fake how can the general public be expected to know? well, if i suddenly stop blogging you can assume i've been arrested for breaking part(or most) of this proposed law.
delicado has blogged that dorothy ashby's afro harping album has been reissued on cd by verve in a mini-vinyl cardboard sleeve. i love this sort of packaging, and i'll be hitting the shops in search of that for sure.
i'm planning on putting in an order for some dvds, i know for sure i want captain scarlet and mad monster party. but i sort of want to get a cheapo b-movie. anyone out there have any suggestions? scrubbles mentioned(on his blog) that it was recently charlotte rae's birthday. this is funny as i was just checking if hello down there had been released on dvd yet. sadly, it hasn't. but i'm still hoping that one day...
somone recently asked me about the chinese singer wong faye. i haven't listened to her in a long time. so today i put on one of her cds and to my surprise i'm liking it much more than i remember. some of it even reminds me a little of portishead. maybe i'll have to hunt down more of her cds i'm missing.
this last weekend has been a movie weekend, or more accurately a dvd weekend. i picked up blue velvet as it's finally been released here in taiwan on dvd. it's been a long time since i've seen this film, but it still has the ability to freak me out. dennis hopper is so psycho in it, how can you not love it? unfortunately, the disc had a problem, so towards the end of the movie it became literally unwatchable. so we had to return it. the boss seemed to think all the discs of the first run may have this problem. i'm going to buy it somewhere else and see if i have better luck.
on top of picking up blue velvet i hit a discount store and picked up more dvds. they have dvds for 69 nt(about 2 u.s. dollars). most of these are of dubious quality, most being full frame and often dubbed from videotape. however, i don't think they are illegal bootlegs but fall into the public domain here. i picked up the mouse that roared, laura, the ghost and mrs. muir, and sayonara.
so far i've watched the mouse that roared and the ghost and mrs. muir. the mouse that roared is a peter sellers comedy in which he plays multiple roles. i can't imagine a film like this being made today that made fun of americans in this way or even with the anti-nuclear/war message of the film. especially considering how paranoid hollywood is of any film that might have an opinion on politics these days. of course a british produciton can probably get away with these things easier.
the ghost and mrs. muir is what i think of as a rainy day film. it's the kind of film i like to lay on the couch and watch on dreary rainy day. some days there is nothing more satisfying than laying on the couch and taking in a film from before you were born. and after all, don't we all wish to live in a cottage on the seashore with a ghost?
sayonara i picked up because this is where that song comes from and also miyoshi umeki is in it. she was a japanese lounge singer in the 50s, but she's probably most well known in the west for her role as the maid on the courtship of eddie's father.
oh my. the penis blog:
We bloggers spend so much time, energy, and emotional effort revealing the most intimate details of our lives on our websites ... and yet most of us balk at showing a few square inches of skin.
letting it all hang out is one thing, but is it braver to show your flaccid penis or your erect penis? you can see different shapes and sizes as you try to match the penis to the blogger. via idiote.
late last night i went to family mart(convenience store) to buy some water. while i was in there they were listening to the radio. this in itself is not so unusual, but usually it is bad pop music, but this night they were playing when i fall in love. it was an old 50s or 60s version. like the ray conniff singers or the people that sung on some of the henry mancini releases. i was suprised that they were playing this at all, but to top it off after each line in the song, the dj would come in and translate the words into chinese. i'd be in heaven if they'd play more stuff like this when i'm shopping.
woman cuts off penis. what is this a growing trend? twice in one week. i also seem to recall reading recently about a man who volunteered to be castrated to prove to his wife and her family that he wouldn't cheat on her anymore. i think a friend of the family did the procedure(on the kitchen table if i remember correctly - which i probably don't) and then was arrested for practicing medicine without a license once the story got out.
tv stars who insist on singing. a great site of mp3s of celebrities singing as well as other musical oddities. songs about chickens? stairway to heaven covers? fabio speaking? it's all here.
apparently the recording industry thinks suing their customers will endear them to their customers. just because someone downloads a song or an album doesn't mean they would of bought that album. when i download an album there are usually two reasons for this. one is to hear what it sounds like and see if it is indeed worth buying or because it is out of print or never re-issued on cd to begin with and it's the only way to really get it. so far i've been able to avoid buying any copy protected cds, and here's another horror story about someone buying what is called a cd but won't play in a cd player(or in this case an xbox) via j-walk.
today is tomb sweeping day so i didn't have to work. since i didn't have to work i decided to go to the museum of contemporary art. they are having a show of australian aborigine art. this was the first time i'd been to this museum, and i only discovered its existence recently. the show was really nice, and the museum wasn't crowded and no screaming kids(which is a regular occurance at the taipei fine arts museum unfortunately).
today i went to the second-run theater across the street from where i live to see the new zhang yimou film hero. i'm still not sure what i think of it. the general consensus among the people i know that have seen it here is that it is mediocre. i think it was ok, but not great. and at the beginning i was thinking it was going to think it was mediocre too, but it got better. there are scenes that are nice visually, but some of the fight scenes seem to pale if you compare them to the hey day of hk chop socky. i've heard they've changed history quite a bit for the film, and i've also heard that zhang yimou needs money and he did this movie more for money than anything else. not sure how much of that is true. some of the scenes in the film are really loud(most noticeably the arrow scenes) mainly due to the sound efffects. the soundtrack was really nice and i will probably hunt it down one of these days.
hk actor and canto-pop star leslie cheung has jumped to his death. somehow i'm more suprised by this than when kurt kobain died. of all the hk pop stars to turn actor(and there are a lot of them) leslie was by far one of the most(if not the most) talented.
apparently driving two vans and a white panel truck is enough to get you pulled over as suspected terrorists as god speed you black emperor recently found out. via die puny humans.
paul has decided to give up his blog. sad as i really enjoyed his book reviews. since his blog is no more, i've decided to update my blog links. adding delicado and quiddity. delicado is a dangerous blog for me because his record reviews always make me want to go spend my entire paycheck at dusty groove.
in one of my classes we were discussing old customs and superstitions and my students told me the following:
if you whistle after dark it will attract ghosts.
you should never take a picture of three girls/women.
you shouldn't whistle because the ghosts will bring you bad luck and you'll have to go to a temple to get a charm so they'll leave you alone. you shouldn't take a picture of three girls because it looks like the chinese character for rape(this character is made up of three woman characters). most of my students said that no one really follows or believes these things anymore, but then another of my students spoke up and said a friend of hers had the ghost problem, and recently had to get a charm so it would leave him alone. i guess it's a good thing i'm not in the habit of whistling after dark.
kevin sites blog from inside iraq has been forced to stop publishing. from his blog:
I've been asked to suspend my war blogging for awhile.
But I don't want let you down -- I'm chronicling the events of my war experiences,
the same as I always have, and hope to come to agreement with CNN in the near
future to make them available to you in some shape or form, perhaps on this site.
sounds like the mighty CNN has spoken. well, here's another reason why i distrust CNN. via die puny humans.
last night peter and i watched the vcd for serial mom. i wish we had this on dvd, but it's only available here on low quality vcd. it was great to see this again. i always forget how much i love this movie. it may not be as outrageous as john waters early films, but it's still out there compared to most tame hollywood movies.
years ago when i was still in seattle i had a portion of the crank call from this film on my answering machine. one day i came home to find 30 messages on my machine. most were people hanging up, one was someone cussing back at my phone, and one was from a hotel. two people had called to listen to the messge and discuss what to do with "the problem", you see my number was identicle to the number of a hotel, except to get the hotel you had to dial 800 first. some would not do that and would get all offended at my message. after they listened to my message, they forgot to hang up their phone so i got to hear their conversation about what to do about the situation(ie me). one of them laughed after they heard the message because they knew where it came from, but the other person was more serious. but really what could they do? it wasn't my fault that their customers were stupid enough to call the wrong number and think they'd gotten a hotel. i half expected them to send me a letter asking me to change my message, but i never heard from them.
why are americans so afraid of sex? i'm sure we'll see more scary things like this now that the war has started. i just hope other countries don't follow the u.s. example. via follow me here.
recently die puny humans mentioned that there was a new captain scarlet program in the works, but this time using computer animation. so i headed over to fanderson to check out the details and it is indeed true. i also discovered they are working on a live action film version of thunderbirds. why is it that instead of being excited by this, i'm well, disappointed or disgusted? there was a time when i would of thought such news was cool, fine and dandy. with captain scarlet, why don't they use the new technology with a new story instead of just rehashing the old one? it may turn out being really cool in the end i'll have to wait and see, but my misgivings are still there. updating of old tv shows just seems like a way to attract an audience based on a familiar name even when the end product has very little to do with the original idea. hopefully that won't be the case here, but i'm not so sure.
the playsoundz discs i ordered awhile back have come in and i've been having a good time listening to them. how could i not love something that has occassional bloopy electronics and songs about being a tooth, having a milk mustache, or skeletons? they do remind me of perrey and kingsley and bruce haack, but they also remind me of some early 80s electronic music. but i haven't quite figured out who. i don't just mean the kraftwerk influence, which of course is there, but someone else.
last night was the last episode of the bad son(or the crystal boys). the series was 20 episodes long, so in the middle i stopped watching it. i hate feeling forced to watch something every night. they are now going to repeat the series every saturday night from 12-2am showing two episodes a week.
apparenlty the show has been really popular. peter said the website recieved 200,000 hits. i'm not sure how many people actually watched the tv show, but it's rare that any asian tv show like this will even deal with gay topics(a lot of what is on television these days comes from japan or korea, neither of those being particularly queer friendly - korea in particular where i was told that a star there came out and was fired from his televsion show because of this).
the times that you see anything gay on tv(excluding western shows), it tends to be the old flaming stereotype. this is one thing i liked about this series, it showed all kinds of people as being gay, not one particular type. during this episode words went up the edge of the screen that said "wen wen(terry) contact your auntie or mom and dad, we don't blame you." it sounds like someone's parents had seen the show and realized being gay is no crime and want their son to come home who they probably couldn't accept before. i don't know if it's true, but i'd like to believe such a thing is possible.
recently, in one of my classes we were discussing different kinds of news(international news, local news, sports ...) and one of my students said she liked to watch international news. and when i asked her why, she said because they(other countries) are more open about things like homosexuality. it's an odd thing, the news will often report about gay pride events around the world or gossip on what foreign stars are gay or allegedly so, but won't report on such stories locally. or not very often at least.
well, i'm still here. but that lovely atypical pneumonia has been discovered here in taiwan as well. i knew it was just a matter of time considering how many people routinely travel to hk, or china from here. now just as long as my cold doesn't turn into pneumonia...
if i should suddenly disappear you can assume this lovely disease has crossed over from hong kong to taiwan.
once upon a time there was a blog named neohomo. sadly, one day it went away. good news is it is back with a new name, rambunctious.org.
experimental filmaker stan brakhage is dead at 70. criterion will be releasing a dvd of some of his work in may. brakhage may not be a household name to most people, but no doubt most people have seen something that has been influenced by his work.
there's a poem by william s. burroughs where at the beginning he says for john dillinger, in the hope he's still alive. i never really thought about that dedication before, but the other day i decided to find out who exactly john dillinger was. apparently he was a notorious bank robber. funnily enough, john and his gang weren't neccesarily seen as the bad guys by the american public, as bank robbers often times would destroy the mortgage reciepts at the banks. so if people were about to lose their house(a common thing in the depression) the bank wouldn't be able to take it back without the proper reciepts. they were in some ways a darker version of robin hood.
someone on the exoticalist posted about this. the ibm 1403 printer, that plays music! they even have songs you can download such as raindrops keep falling on my head, born free, blue danube waltz all played on the printer.
the other day i was talking with one of my students about the situation in the states and she mentioned some interesting things.
one of these things was that the price of a visa to the states has gone up. it used to be around 40 u.s. dollars, but now it's well over a 100 u.s. dollars. i suspect if they deny your visa you will still be out the money. her company will be attending a conference in hawaii soon. she said the travel agent handling the visas told the company if there was anyone under 30 attending they might consider getting a group visa instead of an individual visa. she said she had a client recently who is 23 and he was to attend some sort of conference and the visa office denied him on the grounds he was too young! 23 is too young to attend a conference?! apparently that won't be as noticeable if you are part of a group, but if you are denied an individual visa you won't be able to apply for the group visa.
my student then went on to say how she used to think the u.s. were the good guys, but she certainly doesn't feel that way anymore, especially with the way the u.s. is insisting on a war with iraq, and the way it's treating both foriengers and its citizens within its borders these days.
i was never a huge comic book fan. but lately i've found myself getting interested in them, especially after reading some on line like super idol and nowhere girl(both found via die puny humans). i'm not sure if super idol is a complete work in itself or if what is available on line is merely a preview of a longer piece. i hope it's just a preview, cause i'd like to see more.
today was peter's birthday. so we ate cake and he opened the gift i gave him. i gave him a box set(5 dvds) of the gatchaman animated series. one of his favourite cartoons. we've watched a little of that tonight and now we're all going around the apartment singing bits from the theme.
an online java version of the powers of ten, inspired by the film by charles and ray eames(via deep fun things).
tom glazer is dead. he may be important for writing songs sung by perry como, frank sinatra, and the kingston trio, but in my eyes nothing could be more important than the fact that he wrote on top of old spaghetti.
an interesting article here on how the cmj has been misreporting college radio stations' playlists(via off on a tangent). it doesn't paint a pretty picture. of course there is no college radio in taiwan, at least not like it exists in north america. i know there are some good college radio stations out there, but why do these playlists or the indie radio top 40 look so boring with just the same old bands? whenever i look at lists like these i just think of all the good releases that have gone unnoticed. are sonic youth still relevant or are they just popping up on these lists because they have been around forever?
