Joshua Samuel Brown's Blog, page 3
September 23, 2017
Blood And Condiment
Blood And Condiment
It was November, and I had the gout again.
For 72 hours I'd been skirmishing with the blood-demons of my own bad genes. Watching the Beijing sky change from black to gray through the frost-covered window of my tenth floor flat, I continued applying pressure to the swollen knuckle joint of my right big toe.
They'd arrived uninvited following an ill-advised gorging on Shanghai-style clay pot crabs, bringing with them various instruments of torture.
The pain was worst in the cold hours before dawn, waking me to a dark, sour world of sharp crystal blood scraping past swollen joints as the imps jammed their white-hot knitting needles through bone. Time and codeine pills brought transitory relief. I'd chew the pills to speed the process and pinch my swollen foot between thumb and forefinger, hoping the drugs would dull the pain before I passed out and released my foot. It was the third morning of the attack, and I'd decided to break my long-standing prohibition against visiting hospitals voluntarily. Wrapping myself in layers of sweatpants and sweatshirts, I limped wearing flip-flops - the only footwear my afflicted foot could bear - over frost-covered sidewalks to a hospital a few blocks away.
Inside the hospital I was one of many suffering chunks of flotsam in a river of illness, relentlessly pushing and being pushed towards one of two open counters to fill out requisite forms before another line, a brief prodding by a government doctor, and a third line for medication.The system was good to me that day, and by the afternoon I'd been given a bottle of an anti-gout agent called Colchicine and a shot in the ass from a pretty nurse.
"You'll feel less pain by this evening," she told me, and I thanked her profusely before dragging myself back to my cut-rate tenement flat, where I was numb enough from shot and pills to pass out.
Sometime around dusk I woke to find the pain a dull, tolerable ache. The gods smiling on me at last, I wanted some tea. I limped into the kitchen and stood on the tiptoes of my good foot to reach a box of tea on top of an unsteady shelving unit. I grabbed the shelf for balance, and gravity did the rest.
A bottle of restaurant grade soy sauce wobbled on the top shelf for an eternity before turning kamikaze towards the cold tile floor. In my mind's eye I could see the bottle in each phase of its journey, a journey so slow that I should have been able to catch it anywhere along the way.
As the bottle approached the tile floor, time resumed its normal cadence. The bottle exploded, sending first razor-sharp triangles of varied sizes through the kitchen, then a viscous black swamplet oozing across the dirty blue floor. The miniature swamp pulled translucent shrapnel in its wake.
For a long moment I stared down into the mucky, shard filled minefield of a kitchen floor before being awoken from my stupor by the rapid doubling of my blood pressure. My body throbbed, and a rusty metal spike of pain shot through my foot.
I screamed at all the household gods. When my question went unanswered I decided to punish them by throwing everything within reach against the kitchen walls. By the time I'd regained control, ceramic bowl shards, broken juice glasses and bits of several clay tea cups mingled with the broken bottle inside the black muck on my floor.
The madness departed, leaving in its place a dazed, eerie calm. Slipping plastic flip flops over gout-swollen feet, I began shoveling the treacherous mess into a plastic bucket embossed with a cheerful cartoon cat. Soon my hands were covered in cuts, and spots of blood dotted the filthy teriyaki sauce on the tile floor.
Dazed, I hobbled down the cold cement hallway to the elevator, dragging behind me my pink bucket filled with shards and scum. On the slow descent down from the tenth floor the usually chatty auntie whose job it was to press the elevator buttons took one look at me and continued her knitting in silence.
It was nearly dark at ground level, and with the day almost over I assumed things could get no worse. Perhaps it was that small streak of bleak optimism that stripped me of all defense. What other explanation could there have been for my failure to notice the pack of uniformed Public Security Bureau guards huddling for warmth in the lobby of my building?
They noticed me, however. A dazed Caucasian wearing flip flops in winter, blood dripping from numerous gashes, dragging a bucket filled with scum, blood and glass was not an everyday sight in Beijing. The uninformed observer could be forgiven for suspecting ominous goings-on.
There were three of them, all wearing green jumpsuits with red armbands. A middle aged man with a harelip, a hunchbacked older woman and a girl in her early twenties whose youth and lack of obvious physical deformities made her the strangest of the three.
Why are a squad of mildly deformed Beijing Public Safety thugs congregating in the lobby of my building? My mind flashed back to that awful morning in August two years ago when the Beijing Police had paid me and all the other foreigner residents living without permit in Beijing's Maizedian neighborhood a surprise visit.
It was just before the big anniversary, and police were sanitizing the city in preparation of the festivities to mark the day fifty years before when Chairman Mao had stood atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace and declared to the world that China had stood up. After seizing control of the country, the party had set about reversing the shame of a century's foreign dominance by re-asserting domestic control and ejecting most foreigners living on Chinese soil.
Even a decade after China had re-opened to the west, foreigners in Beijing were forbidden from living among law-abiding Chinese, shunted instead to fancy hotels or high rises with price tags listed in dollars rather than Yuan. For cash-strapped freelancers and journalists working for dubious publications, the only options were hostels or surreptitious living on borrowed time.
The Bureau had had me dead to rights that day, and served me my walking papers. It had been summer then, and I'd been physically fit. Now it was winter and I was barely ambulatory.
"What's the meaning of this mess?" The hunchback pointed at my pink bucket. In my dazed state I was reduced to pidgin linguistics.
"This? No problem. This blood you see is my own. Not another person's!"
But how would I explain the trail of soy sauce flip-flop prints on the stairs?
My brain had frozen up. I was not expressing myself eloquently. The guards stared at me as I limped back towards the building.
"I have to leave now."
"Tell us where you live!" commanded the hunchback.
"Apartment 1002! But today is a very bad day for guests. I have gout."
"We have to come up," said the youngest of the three. "It's for everyone's safety."
I dragged my empty bucket up the stairs and limped back to my apartment. Unable to bear looking at the mess in my kitchen, I headed into my bedroom and contemplated leaping from my window before realizing that I had done nothing wrong. Not legally speaking, at least. The days of foreigner approved housing were a relic of Beijing's recent past, along with Muslim ghettos, rivers of bicycle traffic and breathable air. I gathered my paperwork, and awaiting the Bureau's inevitable arrival, I searched my little red Chinese dictionary for the words to explain my dishevelment. I'd gotten as far as "soy sauce bottle plummeted during unlucky epileptic fit" when my doorbell rang. Two of the three Public Safety Officers stood in my hallway, the hunchback having mercifully gone elsewhere.
"We're only here taking a neighborhood census," the older of the two said in a thick Beijing accent made nigh-impenetrable by a pronounced lisp. "We did not know that a foreign resident was living in this building."
"It is for everyone's safety," the younger guard said again.
With my bloody index finger I pointed to my swollen foot, hoping this might somehow clarify things, or at least excuse any breach of decorum. The pair seemed to acknowledge that yes, my precarious mental state ought to be taken into account, though how sympathetic they would be remained to be seen.
I produced my household registration card, a tiny, invaluable slip of paper for any Beijing dweller. As the man copied my particulars the woman began standard questioning.
"How long have you lived here?"
"Six months," I answered.
"What is your monthly rent?
"2000 RMB."
"And your landlord's name?"
"Mrs. Chang. She lives in another building. I only see her when she collects the rent."
"That is all the information we need," said the woman. "Thank you for your cooperation." The woman jotted a few notes into a book while the man continued studying my paperwork, and the pair turned to leave. My hands and feet were still throbbing.
I needed closure.
"Am I in any trouble?" I whispered.
"You are not," the woman replied. "Your landlady is. She is cheating on her taxes, overcharging you while claiming her nephew lives here rent free."
"Do you have any advice?"
"Avoid organ meats," lisped the man as he handed my paperwork back. "They are bad for your gout."
As I closed the door behind the pair the pulsating in my extremities abated, replaced by a strange, giddy tranquility. The great Chinese bureaucracy had held me in its claws before putting me down to go after my rent-gouging landlord. In the eyes of the machine, I was just another law-abiding worker. Despite the gout, I knew tomorrow would be a better day.
~~~
Enjoy this story? Read it again and again, along 18 other exotic, illustrated tales of travel madness from Belize to Singapore, Taipei to Shangri-la. (Illustrations by Dark Horse Comics Illustrator David Lee Ingersoll)
How Not To Avoid Jet Lag and other tales of travel madness available with a mere click for Kindle at Amazon and all other E-book formats at Smashwords.
Here's what just a few people are saying about How Not To Avoid Jet Lag and other tales of travel madness
Read these, and a bunch of other mostly-excellent reviews (except for one guy who said I was trying "too hard to be funny" but also misspelled "too" as "to") at the Amazon page for How Not to Avoid Jet Lag and other tales of travel madness.
...And then buy the book. It's a must-read for any traveler, hallucinogen user or gout sufferer (and a must-must read for anyone planning to be all three simultaneously).
It was November, and I had the gout again. For 72 hours I'd been skirmishing with the blood-demons of my own bad genes. Watching the Beijing sky change from black to gray through the frost-covered window of my tenth floor flat, I continued applying pressure to the swollen knuckle joint of my right big toe.
They'd arrived uninvited following an ill-advised gorging on Shanghai-style clay pot crabs, bringing with them various instruments of torture.
The pain was worst in the cold hours before dawn, waking me to a dark, sour world of sharp crystal blood scraping past swollen joints as the imps jammed their white-hot knitting needles through bone. Time and codeine pills brought transitory relief. I'd chew the pills to speed the process and pinch my swollen foot between thumb and forefinger, hoping the drugs would dull the pain before I passed out and released my foot. It was the third morning of the attack, and I'd decided to break my long-standing prohibition against visiting hospitals voluntarily. Wrapping myself in layers of sweatpants and sweatshirts, I limped wearing flip-flops - the only footwear my afflicted foot could bear - over frost-covered sidewalks to a hospital a few blocks away.
Inside the hospital I was one of many suffering chunks of flotsam in a river of illness, relentlessly pushing and being pushed towards one of two open counters to fill out requisite forms before another line, a brief prodding by a government doctor, and a third line for medication.The system was good to me that day, and by the afternoon I'd been given a bottle of an anti-gout agent called Colchicine and a shot in the ass from a pretty nurse.
"You'll feel less pain by this evening," she told me, and I thanked her profusely before dragging myself back to my cut-rate tenement flat, where I was numb enough from shot and pills to pass out.
Sometime around dusk I woke to find the pain a dull, tolerable ache. The gods smiling on me at last, I wanted some tea. I limped into the kitchen and stood on the tiptoes of my good foot to reach a box of tea on top of an unsteady shelving unit. I grabbed the shelf for balance, and gravity did the rest.
A bottle of restaurant grade soy sauce wobbled on the top shelf for an eternity before turning kamikaze towards the cold tile floor. In my mind's eye I could see the bottle in each phase of its journey, a journey so slow that I should have been able to catch it anywhere along the way.
As the bottle approached the tile floor, time resumed its normal cadence. The bottle exploded, sending first razor-sharp triangles of varied sizes through the kitchen, then a viscous black swamplet oozing across the dirty blue floor. The miniature swamp pulled translucent shrapnel in its wake.
For a long moment I stared down into the mucky, shard filled minefield of a kitchen floor before being awoken from my stupor by the rapid doubling of my blood pressure. My body throbbed, and a rusty metal spike of pain shot through my foot.
"What do you FUCKING want from me?"
I screamed at all the household gods. When my question went unanswered I decided to punish them by throwing everything within reach against the kitchen walls. By the time I'd regained control, ceramic bowl shards, broken juice glasses and bits of several clay tea cups mingled with the broken bottle inside the black muck on my floor.
The madness departed, leaving in its place a dazed, eerie calm. Slipping plastic flip flops over gout-swollen feet, I began shoveling the treacherous mess into a plastic bucket embossed with a cheerful cartoon cat. Soon my hands were covered in cuts, and spots of blood dotted the filthy teriyaki sauce on the tile floor.
Dazed, I hobbled down the cold cement hallway to the elevator, dragging behind me my pink bucket filled with shards and scum. On the slow descent down from the tenth floor the usually chatty auntie whose job it was to press the elevator buttons took one look at me and continued her knitting in silence.
It was nearly dark at ground level, and with the day almost over I assumed things could get no worse. Perhaps it was that small streak of bleak optimism that stripped me of all defense. What other explanation could there have been for my failure to notice the pack of uniformed Public Security Bureau guards huddling for warmth in the lobby of my building?
They noticed me, however. A dazed Caucasian wearing flip flops in winter, blood dripping from numerous gashes, dragging a bucket filled with scum, blood and glass was not an everyday sight in Beijing. The uninformed observer could be forgiven for suspecting ominous goings-on.
"You there! Foreigner! What are you doing?" I heard as I tipped the bucket into a long black dumpster in front of the building.
There were three of them, all wearing green jumpsuits with red armbands. A middle aged man with a harelip, a hunchbacked older woman and a girl in her early twenties whose youth and lack of obvious physical deformities made her the strangest of the three.
Why are a squad of mildly deformed Beijing Public Safety thugs congregating in the lobby of my building? My mind flashed back to that awful morning in August two years ago when the Beijing Police had paid me and all the other foreigner residents living without permit in Beijing's Maizedian neighborhood a surprise visit.
It was just before the big anniversary, and police were sanitizing the city in preparation of the festivities to mark the day fifty years before when Chairman Mao had stood atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace and declared to the world that China had stood up. After seizing control of the country, the party had set about reversing the shame of a century's foreign dominance by re-asserting domestic control and ejecting most foreigners living on Chinese soil.
Even a decade after China had re-opened to the west, foreigners in Beijing were forbidden from living among law-abiding Chinese, shunted instead to fancy hotels or high rises with price tags listed in dollars rather than Yuan. For cash-strapped freelancers and journalists working for dubious publications, the only options were hostels or surreptitious living on borrowed time.
The Bureau had had me dead to rights that day, and served me my walking papers. It had been summer then, and I'd been physically fit. Now it was winter and I was barely ambulatory.
"What's the meaning of this mess?" The hunchback pointed at my pink bucket. In my dazed state I was reduced to pidgin linguistics.
"This? No problem. This blood you see is my own. Not another person's!"
But how would I explain the trail of soy sauce flip-flop prints on the stairs?
My brain had frozen up. I was not expressing myself eloquently. The guards stared at me as I limped back towards the building.
"I have to leave now."
"Tell us where you live!" commanded the hunchback.
"Apartment 1002! But today is a very bad day for guests. I have gout."
"We have to come up," said the youngest of the three. "It's for everyone's safety."
I dragged my empty bucket up the stairs and limped back to my apartment. Unable to bear looking at the mess in my kitchen, I headed into my bedroom and contemplated leaping from my window before realizing that I had done nothing wrong. Not legally speaking, at least. The days of foreigner approved housing were a relic of Beijing's recent past, along with Muslim ghettos, rivers of bicycle traffic and breathable air. I gathered my paperwork, and awaiting the Bureau's inevitable arrival, I searched my little red Chinese dictionary for the words to explain my dishevelment. I'd gotten as far as "soy sauce bottle plummeted during unlucky epileptic fit" when my doorbell rang. Two of the three Public Safety Officers stood in my hallway, the hunchback having mercifully gone elsewhere.
"We're only here taking a neighborhood census," the older of the two said in a thick Beijing accent made nigh-impenetrable by a pronounced lisp. "We did not know that a foreign resident was living in this building."
"It is for everyone's safety," the younger guard said again.
With my bloody index finger I pointed to my swollen foot, hoping this might somehow clarify things, or at least excuse any breach of decorum. The pair seemed to acknowledge that yes, my precarious mental state ought to be taken into account, though how sympathetic they would be remained to be seen.
I produced my household registration card, a tiny, invaluable slip of paper for any Beijing dweller. As the man copied my particulars the woman began standard questioning.
"How long have you lived here?"
"Six months," I answered.
"What is your monthly rent?
"2000 RMB."
"And your landlord's name?"
"Mrs. Chang. She lives in another building. I only see her when she collects the rent."
"That is all the information we need," said the woman. "Thank you for your cooperation." The woman jotted a few notes into a book while the man continued studying my paperwork, and the pair turned to leave. My hands and feet were still throbbing.
I needed closure.
"Am I in any trouble?" I whispered.
"You are not," the woman replied. "Your landlady is. She is cheating on her taxes, overcharging you while claiming her nephew lives here rent free."
"Do you have any advice?"
"Avoid organ meats," lisped the man as he handed my paperwork back. "They are bad for your gout."
As I closed the door behind the pair the pulsating in my extremities abated, replaced by a strange, giddy tranquility. The great Chinese bureaucracy had held me in its claws before putting me down to go after my rent-gouging landlord. In the eyes of the machine, I was just another law-abiding worker. Despite the gout, I knew tomorrow would be a better day.
~~~
Enjoy this story? Read it again and again, along 18 other exotic, illustrated tales of travel madness from Belize to Singapore, Taipei to Shangri-la. (Illustrations by Dark Horse Comics Illustrator David Lee Ingersoll)
How Not To Avoid Jet Lag and other tales of travel madness available with a mere click for Kindle at Amazon and all other E-book formats at Smashwords.
Here's what just a few people are saying about How Not To Avoid Jet Lag and other tales of travel madness
"I've often thought that guidebook writing attracts the mad, the bad and the slightly crazed. If he didn't start that way - perhaps a pre-writing career as a bike messenger helped - his years on the road have certainly contributed to Joshua's off-kilter take on the world."
-- Tony Wheeler, Lonely Planet co-founder
.0 out of 5 starsBuy this book. It is a quick and funny read.ByWORDPAINTERon November 5, 2014Format: Kindle Edition|Verified PurchaseHysterical and in some ways informative, if you go for that kind of information. Personally, I loved the last two pieces. When a good book ends with really powerful last words, it is now a terrific read. The artwork also tickled my funny bone. Great book to read on a short plane trip. But not while you are the navigator.
4.0 out of 5 starsLike your own travel stories, but betterByZora O'Neillon December 17, 2014Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
.0 out of 5 starsUnique, Psychedelic & Laugh-out-Loud Story CollectionByHayley Swinsonon January 12, 2015Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
5.0 out of 5 starsIt is funny and touching by turnsByPoetry Fanon November 4, 2014Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
Read these, and a bunch of other mostly-excellent reviews (except for one guy who said I was trying "too hard to be funny" but also misspelled "too" as "to") at the Amazon page for How Not to Avoid Jet Lag and other tales of travel madness.
...And then buy the book. It's a must-read for any traveler, hallucinogen user or gout sufferer (and a must-must read for anyone planning to be all three simultaneously).
September 9, 2017
Zealots I’ve loved and lost
The encroaching release of Hillary Clinton’s book What Happened is bringing out the expected amount of chatter from the Bernie or Bust crowd, and I’ve deliberately avoided getting involved in conversations over social media from the few remaining friends I have in that camp. After the election, I pretty much gave up all hope, and almost nothing that’s happened in 2017 has given me any indication that this wasn’t the wisest course of action.
Once upon a time, I wrote about politics regularly…on this blog, in print here and there, through a couple of other left-leaning publications. But 2016…2016 was the year that made me go Roberto Durán on political writing.
It was the left wing that did me in, my own (roughly speaking) ideological brethren that made me say no más…no más.
This then is a tentative step back in. And it may get personal.
Let’s start in the halcyon summer of 2016 when a young Bernie Sanders filled American progressives with hope, enthusiasm & a renewed sense of purpose. I’d been a fan of Sanders since he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont and was as swept up in the movement as anybody. I voted for him in the Oregon primary, and just a few days later, I met him on the streets of San Francisco. He hugged me. I wrote about it on this very blog.
But I wasn’t anti-Hillary, any more than I’d been anti-Obama for the previous eight years. Bernie more closely represented my own political leanings, but I was under no illusion of the fact that Hillary was more closely aligned with the powers that be.
Was the fix in against Bernie? Of course it was. Politics in America is a rigged game and the fix is always in.
After Hillary was anointed by the DNC, I mourned a bit with my progressive brethren, then prepared for what seemed to many (outside of Michael Moore and the guy who created Dilbert) to be the obvious outcome of a race between a competent, experienced and thoroughly qualified candidate and and an angry, unqualified nut-job who didn’t really seem to want to win.
Many of my Bernie supporting friends were apoplectic over what was presumed at the time to be an inevitable Clinton victory; nearly all said in one way or another that, given her perfidy, a Trump victory would be preferable. Sensing this inevitable Clinton victory was not as inevitable as Nate Silver would have us think, I spent the month before the election working to get out the vote.
And then things got ugly in a very personal way.
Several friends started countering anything I wrote that they construed as being pro-Hillary with virulent, angry anti-Hillary rantings. This, of course, was happening across the social media landscape. I challenged a few of these, and the attacks got viciously personal. “You’re a fucking Hillbot!” “Stop drinking the DNC Kool-Aid…” That sort of thing.
At one point, one of my oldest friends posted on my Facebook page (in response to a fairly tepid post along the lines of “She’ll be an OK president, all things considered”) with “Fuck you you fucking sell-out. If Hunter Thompson were alive he’d fucking piss down your throat for supporting Hillary”-this was a pretty disturbing image, not to mention a nasty sentiment from someone who’d been a friend for three decades.
I wound up just deleting his posts and figuring we’d put it behind us after the election when Clinton was president and Sanders was the most powerful Senator in the country. (What a fool I was, eh?)
Though many were the Bernie supporters among my circle who spent the final months before the election advancing the narrative that Hillary Clinton was evil incarnate, one old friend really went out of his way in trying to convince me of this, sending me several articles and recommending books about Clinton’s links to the nefarious Bilderberg Group, her overall war-mongering ways, and advancing the narrative that chaos would be better than the current state of neoliberalism.
That last word came up a lot in our conversations; while defined roughly as “a modified form of liberalism tending to favor free-market capitalism,” to my friend it was always connected to some deeper conspiracy involving United Nations sponsored plans to reduce the population, a corporate conspiracy to control the population using the hoax of global warming, and also, somehow, the Bilderberg Group was involved.
Anyway, this particular friend was always decent about it, so I read the articles he’d recommended, and found them to mostly contain a varying degree of verifiable fact to paranoid conspiracy theory with about the same ratio as that of marshmallow to cereal in a box of Lucky Charms.
For the record, I wasn’t madly in love with Hillary Clinton’s politics. (Though I did have a deeply erotic dream involving her and Bill in the mid-nineties…I’d been invited to the White House and stumbled upon Bill and Hillary in the middle of a BDSM scene. Hillary was dressed in leather, and holding a whip. But I digress.) Without getting into too much detail, she struck me as a continuation of the neoliberalism (as defined above) of the Obama administration, which I found a mixed bag at best.
But I did feel strongly that she'd be a competent president, and that once the dust settled, a lot of what Bernie was fighting for would be implemented in a Clinton administration.
Whether this would have happened or not is a question being answered in a parallel universe, but in this one, we know all too well what happened, and what's continuing to happen.
To bring it full circle, my circle of friends has shrunk since the election. At least friends with whom I’ll discuss politics. People whom I’d known and respected for years allowed themselves to get ginned up far beyond what I’d experienced before, and that the viciousness was turned on their moderate friends (with “moderate” becoming a dirty word) who’d supported left wing causes and endeavors for their whole lives was too much to deal with.
Would Bernie have won the general election? No way of knowing. Maybe. Maybe not.
Would the world be in better shape had Hillary won? I'll leave that up to the reader to decide From where I stand, Trump's election has made good people sad and shitty people happy.
Of my Bernie-or-Bust friends (I’m only still on speaking terms with a small handful), not one has even made the merest glimmer of admission that they maybe…just maybe…allowed themselves to be used as pawns in a scheme to bring Trump to power.
Used by who? Trump? Putin? The Bilderbergs?
I’ll leave that to someone more energetic to debate. The loss of friends on the left has left a personal mark on me, making the obvious heartbreak of watching America slide into fascist theocracy all the more bitter.
“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.” ― Hunter S. Thompson
Once upon a time, I wrote about politics regularly…on this blog, in print here and there, through a couple of other left-leaning publications. But 2016…2016 was the year that made me go Roberto Durán on political writing.
It was the left wing that did me in, my own (roughly speaking) ideological brethren that made me say no más…no más.
This then is a tentative step back in. And it may get personal.
Let’s start in the halcyon summer of 2016 when a young Bernie Sanders filled American progressives with hope, enthusiasm & a renewed sense of purpose. I’d been a fan of Sanders since he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont and was as swept up in the movement as anybody. I voted for him in the Oregon primary, and just a few days later, I met him on the streets of San Francisco. He hugged me. I wrote about it on this very blog.
But I wasn’t anti-Hillary, any more than I’d been anti-Obama for the previous eight years. Bernie more closely represented my own political leanings, but I was under no illusion of the fact that Hillary was more closely aligned with the powers that be.
Was the fix in against Bernie? Of course it was. Politics in America is a rigged game and the fix is always in.
After Hillary was anointed by the DNC, I mourned a bit with my progressive brethren, then prepared for what seemed to many (outside of Michael Moore and the guy who created Dilbert) to be the obvious outcome of a race between a competent, experienced and thoroughly qualified candidate and and an angry, unqualified nut-job who didn’t really seem to want to win.
Many of my Bernie supporting friends were apoplectic over what was presumed at the time to be an inevitable Clinton victory; nearly all said in one way or another that, given her perfidy, a Trump victory would be preferable. Sensing this inevitable Clinton victory was not as inevitable as Nate Silver would have us think, I spent the month before the election working to get out the vote.
And then things got ugly in a very personal way.
Several friends started countering anything I wrote that they construed as being pro-Hillary with virulent, angry anti-Hillary rantings. This, of course, was happening across the social media landscape. I challenged a few of these, and the attacks got viciously personal. “You’re a fucking Hillbot!” “Stop drinking the DNC Kool-Aid…” That sort of thing.
At one point, one of my oldest friends posted on my Facebook page (in response to a fairly tepid post along the lines of “She’ll be an OK president, all things considered”) with “Fuck you you fucking sell-out. If Hunter Thompson were alive he’d fucking piss down your throat for supporting Hillary”-this was a pretty disturbing image, not to mention a nasty sentiment from someone who’d been a friend for three decades.
I wound up just deleting his posts and figuring we’d put it behind us after the election when Clinton was president and Sanders was the most powerful Senator in the country. (What a fool I was, eh?)
Though many were the Bernie supporters among my circle who spent the final months before the election advancing the narrative that Hillary Clinton was evil incarnate, one old friend really went out of his way in trying to convince me of this, sending me several articles and recommending books about Clinton’s links to the nefarious Bilderberg Group, her overall war-mongering ways, and advancing the narrative that chaos would be better than the current state of neoliberalism.
That last word came up a lot in our conversations; while defined roughly as “a modified form of liberalism tending to favor free-market capitalism,” to my friend it was always connected to some deeper conspiracy involving United Nations sponsored plans to reduce the population, a corporate conspiracy to control the population using the hoax of global warming, and also, somehow, the Bilderberg Group was involved.
Anyway, this particular friend was always decent about it, so I read the articles he’d recommended, and found them to mostly contain a varying degree of verifiable fact to paranoid conspiracy theory with about the same ratio as that of marshmallow to cereal in a box of Lucky Charms.
For the record, I wasn’t madly in love with Hillary Clinton’s politics. (Though I did have a deeply erotic dream involving her and Bill in the mid-nineties…I’d been invited to the White House and stumbled upon Bill and Hillary in the middle of a BDSM scene. Hillary was dressed in leather, and holding a whip. But I digress.) Without getting into too much detail, she struck me as a continuation of the neoliberalism (as defined above) of the Obama administration, which I found a mixed bag at best.
But I did feel strongly that she'd be a competent president, and that once the dust settled, a lot of what Bernie was fighting for would be implemented in a Clinton administration.
Whether this would have happened or not is a question being answered in a parallel universe, but in this one, we know all too well what happened, and what's continuing to happen.
To bring it full circle, my circle of friends has shrunk since the election. At least friends with whom I’ll discuss politics. People whom I’d known and respected for years allowed themselves to get ginned up far beyond what I’d experienced before, and that the viciousness was turned on their moderate friends (with “moderate” becoming a dirty word) who’d supported left wing causes and endeavors for their whole lives was too much to deal with.
Would Bernie have won the general election? No way of knowing. Maybe. Maybe not.
Would the world be in better shape had Hillary won? I'll leave that up to the reader to decide From where I stand, Trump's election has made good people sad and shitty people happy.
Of my Bernie-or-Bust friends (I’m only still on speaking terms with a small handful), not one has even made the merest glimmer of admission that they maybe…just maybe…allowed themselves to be used as pawns in a scheme to bring Trump to power.
Used by who? Trump? Putin? The Bilderbergs?
I’ll leave that to someone more energetic to debate. The loss of friends on the left has left a personal mark on me, making the obvious heartbreak of watching America slide into fascist theocracy all the more bitter.
“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.” ― Hunter S. Thompson
August 27, 2017
Snarky Tofu Returns
The book is done...the book is done...the book is done.
I feel like I could fill this entire post with this sentence like Jack Nicholson in The Shining and it still wouldn't feel real to me, but yeah, Formosa Moon is now in the printing process, and barring some back and forth between Stephanie, I and our various editors and the publisher at Things Asian Press, at this point its just a matter of waiting for it to be printed. So for this and a few other reasons, I've taken back the name Snarky Tofu for the blog, with things related to Formosa Moon being moved off to the website @ http://josambro.com/books/formosa_moon/. More news on that when it's more newsworthy.
In any event, it's been a long and eventful 2017. On January first, I returned to Taiwan with my partner, Stephanie Huffman (AKA Twilight Kallisti) to begin work on a the aforementioned title for Things Asian Press, Formosa Moon. Research for the book took us around Taiwan several times, and led to (among other things) Stephanie's acceptance into a Master's Program at Taiwan's National Chengchi University and my landing a full time job as Chief Content Strategist with a company here in Taiwan called MyTaiwanTour, where among other things I'm learning tons about SEO, google analytics and other techniques that make the Ghost of Henry Miller (who still lives in my head) wince every time I think about employing them in my personal work.
Oh, and the world is on the precipice of absolute bat-shit madness, with every manner of unpleasant fuckery that I've spent the majority of my political writing railing against now coming into full flower in America, with a side order of shit-storm forming ceaselessly everywhere else.
But let's save that for the next post, shall we? Stephanie and I are heading out to socialize with various artists and filmmakers in Taipei. No reason to anger up the blood. In any event, I'm all out of nicotine gum.
Regular posts to follow, I promise.
JSB AKA Snarky Tofu
I feel like I could fill this entire post with this sentence like Jack Nicholson in The Shining and it still wouldn't feel real to me, but yeah, Formosa Moon is now in the printing process, and barring some back and forth between Stephanie, I and our various editors and the publisher at Things Asian Press, at this point its just a matter of waiting for it to be printed. So for this and a few other reasons, I've taken back the name Snarky Tofu for the blog, with things related to Formosa Moon being moved off to the website @ http://josambro.com/books/formosa_moon/. More news on that when it's more newsworthy.
In any event, it's been a long and eventful 2017. On January first, I returned to Taiwan with my partner, Stephanie Huffman (AKA Twilight Kallisti) to begin work on a the aforementioned title for Things Asian Press, Formosa Moon. Research for the book took us around Taiwan several times, and led to (among other things) Stephanie's acceptance into a Master's Program at Taiwan's National Chengchi University and my landing a full time job as Chief Content Strategist with a company here in Taiwan called MyTaiwanTour, where among other things I'm learning tons about SEO, google analytics and other techniques that make the Ghost of Henry Miller (who still lives in my head) wince every time I think about employing them in my personal work.
Oh, and the world is on the precipice of absolute bat-shit madness, with every manner of unpleasant fuckery that I've spent the majority of my political writing railing against now coming into full flower in America, with a side order of shit-storm forming ceaselessly everywhere else.
But let's save that for the next post, shall we? Stephanie and I are heading out to socialize with various artists and filmmakers in Taipei. No reason to anger up the blood. In any event, I'm all out of nicotine gum.
Regular posts to follow, I promise.
JSB AKA Snarky Tofu
May 14, 2017
Passing of a Taiwan Comedy Legend
Working diligently on the book, so very little time to blog, but I'd be remiss in my duty as a guy who writes funny stuff about Taiwan to not pay tribute to the passing of Taiwanese comic legend 豬哥亮 (Chu Ke-liang, also spelled Zhu Ge-liang) I remembering watching him on TV with my host family when I first came to Taiwan in 1994. Even though I didn't understand a word he said, I found myself laughing nonetheless. My memories of him will forever be intertwined with those of drinking tea, cracking sunflower seeds and trying to understand Taiwanese humor. As I continue to write and edit Formosa Moon, I consider how various lines and chapters will translate into Chinese, asking myself would Chu Ke-liang laugh it this?
I'd like to think yes, but now I'll never know. Taiwan is a small place, and once the Chinese edition is printed I'll deliver one to his grave. I'm sure his ghost will find the image alone quite amusing.
May his funeral be loud and boisterous, filled with song, dance and electric flower cars filled with beautiful strippers.
Below is one of many videos online of his long-running TV show.
April 14, 2017
Your Least Fun Hour
Illustration: David Lee IngersollThink about your most fun hour. Nothing sordid, please. Perhaps it was an afternoon at an amusement park where the rides were awesome and you didn't have to wait in any lines. Maybe it was a puppet show where you had a front-row seat and spent the hour in pure, child-like ecstasy.Hold onto that hour. Let it be your anchor!Now reverse it. Turn it onto its head. Using this definition of fun, steel yourself for an hour of fun's opposite.You are now ready to arrange for an international transfer at the customer service desk of a Taiwanese bank.The less said about your reason for requiring the transfer, the better. The idea that the simplicity of your request might somehow translate into a simple execution is best left at the door. Perhaps you need to re-route a deposit made in error to your Taiwanese account by an overworked Lonely Planet accountant in Oakland for pending work in Central America. Or maybe you're looking to exchange the balance of your new Taiwan dollar account into a combination of long-defunct East German marks and trillion-dollar Zimbabwe notes for clandestine funneling over to a bank in Kenya with only one branch and no phone, ostensibly to fund a zebra ranch.It doesn't matter, because the amount of surprise that Mrs. Cheng, the banker on duty, will express at the nature of the transaction — and the corresponding paperwork and stamping-will be exactly the same. She will stare at you for a long, unblinking minute as her mind slowly begins to travel down the vast labyrinth of complexity that fulfilling your request might entail.It is during this unblinking moment that you attempt to explain to Mrs. Cheng, in your most polished Mandarin, the exact nature of your request. An error has been made, you tell her with utmost patience. There is money in your Taiwanese account that will be inaccessible to you overseas, where you are headed on a flight in just twelve hours. You are hoping to have it transferred into your Hong Kong account, from where it will be accessible, and from where international transfers can be done online and without a note signed by your next of kin, your high school principal, the doctor who delivered you, and the rabbi who performed your circumcision.Mrs. Cheng will listen to you with knitted brow, sipping tea all the while from a white porcelain mug on which the Chinese characters ren shou ("endure") are etched. You must continue smiling as you explain yourself. It is imperative that you never, ever stop smiling. Remember this one rule, or your chances of leaving this bank with your transfer done are nil."So...you wish to return this money to the sender?" Mrs. Cheng says after a long pause. She does not quite understand you."No. I just want to transfer it into my overseas account.""Ah." Mrs. Cheng will now have another sip of tea. "There will be a fee.""Of course.""We will have to change the money from US dollars into Taiwan dollars, and then back again into US dollars.""Is that necessary?" you ask, regretting the question immediately. The look on Mrs. Cheng's face indicates that she too regrets your question, as it has opened up a whole new avenue of troublesome research down which she now must tread."Please wait."Mrs. Cheng will now stand up and walk to a small library, perusing stacks of binders for ten minutes before removing a large blue tome the size of a metropolitan phone book. She will return to her desk with this and skim through it for a further ten minutes.You must keep smiling as she does this."Ah. According to the newest bank regulations, we do not need to transfer the money from US to Taiwan currency and then back to US dollars again. But you will have to authorize our not doing this.""Of course."Mrs. Cheng will now disappear for another ten minutes. When she returns, she will be carrying a stack of paper nearly equal in size to the phone-book tome of regulations."Can you write in Chinese?"You admit that you cannot, at least not well enough for the task at hand."I will fill out the forms for you."Mrs. Cheng will then proceed to fill out a lengthy series of legal documents which you can only assume are germane to the transaction at hand, but might, for all you know, grant the bank sole ownership of all of your assets, intellectual property and internal organs in the event of your death, or indeed, any time before."Sign here."Mrs. Cheng hands you the first of what promises to be many documents and points at a small box at the bottom big enough only for a typical 2"x2" Taiwanese name stamp.After you sign, Mrs. Cheng will study your signature closely, her face compressing as if in deep thought. She will then let out a quiet, troubling sigh.She will take the document and walk it over to a desk in the back of the office where sits a fellow bank worker. Mrs. Cheng will tap a few keystrokes on a computer as the pair studies both screen and document while pointing at the screen and making low hmmmnoises.After a few moments of this, Mrs. Cheng will return and sit down. After another sip of tea, she leans over and gives you some bad news."Your signature on this paper is slightly different from the signature you first used when opening your account."Mrs. Cheng is holding your passport in front of her. You've also brought your previous passport, a copy of which rests in the bank files that she's currently perusing. The name on the account to which you'd like to transfer money is the same as the one on the account in Taiwan at which Mrs. Cheng is currently employed. It is, in fact, the same name as the one on the three credit cards, the ATM card, the American driver's license, the birth certificate, the library card, and several other official documents you've brought along to prevent just such a misunderstanding like this.You may be tempted by the presence of this overwhelming mountain of evidence to point out that your identity cannot reasonably be called into question. Under no circumstances should you actually do this. Say nothing and continue smiling.Mrs. Cheng will remove the ceramic lid of her two-piece tea mug and have a quick sip of tea. She will then look to her left, then to her right, to make sure that the two of you are not being observed. Mrs. Cheng wants to help you. She wants to see this thing work for you. But there are regulations that need to be followed. Operational procedure must be obeyed.With the index finger of her left hand, Mrs. Cheng surreptitiously swivels the flat screen monitor on her desk just enough so that you, without having to crane your neck too obviously, can see the digital reproduction of your own signature, the original signature that you signed a dozen years back in this very building.Mrs. Cheng is correct. As a younger person, you looped the first "S" of your middle name. Yet somewhere along the road of life, that cheerful loop has become a sharp peak. You smile at Mrs. Cheng. She nods at you knowingly, and slides a second sheet of paper across the table.This you will sign on the spot indicated, reproducing as faithfully as possible the cheery S-loop of your youth.Mrs. Cheng examines the paper thoughtfully before reaching over to a cluttered corner of her desk for a box of wooden seals. She dabs the seal in red ink before stamping a box next to your signature. She then returns the seal to whence it came before retrieving a second one. This one is placed at the top of the page, the wooden seal returned to its slot in the box. Mrs. Cheng now slides another paper towards you.You repeat your end of the process, remembering the S-loop.Mrs. Cheng examines the paper thoughtfully before reaching over to a cluttered corner of her desk for a box of wooden seals. She dabs the seal in red ink before stamping a box next to your signature. She then returns the seal to whence it came before retrieving a second one. This one is placed at the top of the page, the wooden seal returned to its slot in the box. Mrs. Cheng now slides another paper towards you.You repeat your end of the process, remembering the S-loop.Mrs. Cheng examines the paper thoughtfully before reaching over to a cluttered corner of her desk for a box of wooden seals. She dabs the seal in red ink before stamping a box next to your signature. She then returns the seal to whence it came before retrieving a second one. This one is placed at the top of the page, the wooden seal returned to its slot in the box. Mrs. Cheng now slides another paper towards you. You repeat your end of the process, remembering the S-loop.This will go on six more times.Finally, Mrs. Cheng seems satisfied with the thickness of the stack that separates you from her. She places the papers in a small folder and bids you to wait for a few minutes before disappearing, with folder in hand, into a back room.If you are carrying tranquilizers, the time to take them has passed. While the actual waiting will only be between ten and twenty minutes, it will feel like the longest ten to twenty minutes of your life.You may be tempted to fill your time by reading a magazine or by playing the Tetris knock-off that came with your mobile phone. Do not do this! This will be interpreted as a sign that you are not taking the process seriously, and even at this stage in the game could spell doom, or at least seriously delay the transfer.Mrs. Cheng is taking the process seriously. She is in the back room right now, very possibly using oracle bones and an abacus to communicate with a Ming-dynasty banking sage to discern the exact and correct method for facilitating this very complex banking procedure, the electronic transferring of a sum of money between two banks, one of which has the poor fortune of not being in Taiwan.The reverse of this process — the transfer of money from a bank not in Taiwan to this bank in Taiwan, the bank in which you now find yourself sitting, forced smile frozen-likely took 90 seconds and was accomplished with two mouse clicks.Contemplate not this irrelevancy. Continue maintaining reverence. Continue smiling.Mrs. Cheng will return. It will seem like it's been an eternity, but in fact it's only been fifteen minutes. She will no longer have the stack of papers in her hand. Instead, she will have only three thin sheets, which she will present to you."These are your receipts. The transfer will take between one and three business days."You sit there, unable to believe that the process is at an end. Mrs. Cheng removes the lid from her two-piece tea mug and takes a sip."Is there anything else I can help you with?"There isn't. You thank her profusely for her efforts on your behalf, standing up to discover your legs have fallen asleep. Ambling towards the front door, your eyes blink in the bright sunshine. Another adventure in Taiwanese banking is at an end. You have now but to wait for the message to come from the bank on the other end that the transfer has gone through.This message actually arrives less than 24 hours later, via email, and with total efficiency and clarity. You may now stop smiling. Nobody is watching.
"Your Least Fun Hour" is one of nineteen Tales of Travel Madness from How Not to Avoid Jet Lag, illustrated by David Lee Ingersoll and available for Kindle at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P3BWGYY) and all other E-formats at Smashwords (https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...). Go buy it!
Follow the author everywhere @Josambro
April 10, 2017
A Taiwanese Glove Puppet Game of Thrones
It's rare that a puppet show earns a mature audiences recommended rating, but there is precedent. Peter Jackson's infamous (pre-Lord of the Rings) puppet classic Meet the Feebles springs to mind.
Like Game of Thrones. But in Taiwan. With Puppets.
When we got the invitation to see a Taiwanese Glove Puppet show called Mystery of The Great Mind Ocean (Chinese: 心海迷蹤), we had no idea what to expect. We'd been invited months ago, when we were last in Tainan, and as Taiwanese Potehi, or glove puppets, have become a fairly big chunk of what Stephanie loves about Taiwan (as well as the subject she's hoping to study in Graduate school), we were looking forward to the performance enough to schedule a leg of our book research around the performance dates.
Though we'd already explored Tainan, we were on our way to Kaohsiung, so thought we'd take a pit stop. Over the last two months we've seen other Potehi performances, including a fairly elaborate children's story in March at the Yunlin Glove Puppet Museum.
None of these puppet based activities prepared us for Mystery of The Great Mind Ocean, which was amazingly multilayered, complex, laden with history, beautifully performed, and surprisingly mature for a puppet show.
I'll let Stephanie describe the action. (Interjections in black are mine)
We entered the temple and were treated to front row seats. The audience had to sit on small plastic stools. Since we were sitting in front of a temple the sky was over our heads. The show had video screens on either side of the stage with Chinese and English subtitles. The show was performed in Taiwanese with a smattering of English.
A human narrator introduced us to the play's subject matter. A young man He Bin was the protagonist, and the opening sequence introduces him, his love interest (a comely young puppet woman), his grandmother and kid brother, a boy named Buddy. But the bucolic scene is short lived, as a tax collector comes to collect payment. A fight ensued, in which the grandmother is shot, and in order to pay the debt, He Bin's love interest was hauled away to a brothel. ( A puppet brothel ...on an unrelated note "Puppet Brothel" is a good band name, don't you think?)
Swearing revenge, He Bin decides that power is the best revenge, and leaves to seek his fortune, obeying his grandmother's dying wishes to protect his brother. The two set out on an ocean voyage, and are soon set upon by a pirate who offers He Bin the opportunity to join the crew, after passing a loyalty test.
The test? Murdering his own kid brother. This proves surprisingly easy for He Bin, who literally throws the kid into the raging sea. (If you've never seen a big puppet hurl a smaller puppet downstage into a rolling ocean of paper waves, it's quite unique.)
So He Bin, having murdered his brother, becomes a pirate for awhile, joining a group of Dutch puppets with very cool hair. Over the course of time he becomes fluent in Dutch, allowing him to climb the ranks of colonialist enforcer for the next ten years.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Southern Taiwan a group of Tribal puppets, sick of being bossed around and otherwise maltreated by the Dutch (puppets) decide to murder a few of their hated foreign puppet overlords. ("Foreign Puppet Overlords" - another great band name!)
Having been hired to carry a group of Dutch explorers across a raging river piggyback, they instead beat and drown them at the halfway point, stealing their weapons in the process. The Dutch then murder an entire tribe in retribution.
(For those keeping score, we've now got implied sex slavery, one on stage child-murder, a few drownings and a mini-genocide happening. And we're not even at intermission.)
One family goes into hiding, disguising themselves as farmers not aligned with the tribal group who'd been murdered. The father is wracked with guilt. Eventually He Bin shows up, now working as translator for the Dutch, who have now returned to collect tax payments. An argument over taxation and land rights ensues.
(OK, this part got confusing...nuances may have been lost in translation.)
While translating for the Dutch, He Bin convinces the family that he's on their side, and wants to work out an arrangement that will allow them to continue living on their land unmolested. Using his knowledge of Dutch colonial law, he has a contract drawn up that allows him to take over the family's debt in exchange for their acting as sort of temporary indentured servants. The family signs gladly, thanking He Bin profusely.
It was at this point that both Josh and I were thinking, "ah, that He Bin isn't such a bad guy after all."
(Yup. But wait for it.)
Surprise! Actually, He Bin had tricked them into signing over their house and land to him entirely. The dad puts up a fight, and gets shot. So does the mother. Then, just for fun, he has the house burned down in front of the rest of the family before having them thrown into slavery, because, why not?
(I was confused at this plot point, which again, may have been a translation issue, since He Bin, now being owner of the house, just burned his own house down. That said, if you've never seen a puppet house go up in flames, its quite the sight! The troupe used a series of colored streamers on the set, as well as smoke machines. It was AWESOME!)
He Bin's position as a genuinely not nice person now cemented, he continues amassing wealth and power as an agent for the Dutch. This was all before the intermission, and I won't go much further because to do so would require spoiler alerts, and Josh has already announced his firm intention to do whatever he can to help bring Mystery of The Great Mind Ocean to a wider audience. (Once we've turned Formosa Moon into the publisher).
There was more business in the puppet whorehouse, a surprisingly frank talk about the practice of foot-binding, a more than cameo appearance by the great Ming Dynasty admiral Koxinga, a revenge plot worthy of Shakespeare, and, as if this play couldn't be any more unique, a distinctly meta episode in which beautifully costumed human actors fought on either side of the audience while the play's characters (again, these are puppets we're talking about) just sat watching the show, effectively watching the audience watching the side play. (Rosencranz and Puppetstern are dead?)
Suffice to say, a great time was had by all, except maybe the kid sitting next to us, who may have been a tad young to fully grasp the implications of the awesomeness that is Mystery of The Great Mind Ocean. We'll be encouraging Huang Guan-wei (founder of the Goodoo Puppet Troupe) to bring the show to Taipei, and will be including both a write-up of the show and the troupe in our book.
In the meantime, you can get more details about Goodoo Puppet Theater on Facebook and at their website, http://www.goodoo.studio
Like Game of Thrones. But in Taiwan. With Puppets.When we got the invitation to see a Taiwanese Glove Puppet show called Mystery of The Great Mind Ocean (Chinese: 心海迷蹤), we had no idea what to expect. We'd been invited months ago, when we were last in Tainan, and as Taiwanese Potehi, or glove puppets, have become a fairly big chunk of what Stephanie loves about Taiwan (as well as the subject she's hoping to study in Graduate school), we were looking forward to the performance enough to schedule a leg of our book research around the performance dates.
Though we'd already explored Tainan, we were on our way to Kaohsiung, so thought we'd take a pit stop. Over the last two months we've seen other Potehi performances, including a fairly elaborate children's story in March at the Yunlin Glove Puppet Museum.
None of these puppet based activities prepared us for Mystery of The Great Mind Ocean, which was amazingly multilayered, complex, laden with history, beautifully performed, and surprisingly mature for a puppet show.
I'll let Stephanie describe the action. (Interjections in black are mine)
We entered the temple and were treated to front row seats. The audience had to sit on small plastic stools. Since we were sitting in front of a temple the sky was over our heads. The show had video screens on either side of the stage with Chinese and English subtitles. The show was performed in Taiwanese with a smattering of English.
A human narrator introduced us to the play's subject matter. A young man He Bin was the protagonist, and the opening sequence introduces him, his love interest (a comely young puppet woman), his grandmother and kid brother, a boy named Buddy. But the bucolic scene is short lived, as a tax collector comes to collect payment. A fight ensued, in which the grandmother is shot, and in order to pay the debt, He Bin's love interest was hauled away to a brothel. ( A puppet brothel ...on an unrelated note "Puppet Brothel" is a good band name, don't you think?)
Swearing revenge, He Bin decides that power is the best revenge, and leaves to seek his fortune, obeying his grandmother's dying wishes to protect his brother. The two set out on an ocean voyage, and are soon set upon by a pirate who offers He Bin the opportunity to join the crew, after passing a loyalty test.
The test? Murdering his own kid brother. This proves surprisingly easy for He Bin, who literally throws the kid into the raging sea. (If you've never seen a big puppet hurl a smaller puppet downstage into a rolling ocean of paper waves, it's quite unique.)
So He Bin, having murdered his brother, becomes a pirate for awhile, joining a group of Dutch puppets with very cool hair. Over the course of time he becomes fluent in Dutch, allowing him to climb the ranks of colonialist enforcer for the next ten years.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Southern Taiwan a group of Tribal puppets, sick of being bossed around and otherwise maltreated by the Dutch (puppets) decide to murder a few of their hated foreign puppet overlords. ("Foreign Puppet Overlords" - another great band name!)
Having been hired to carry a group of Dutch explorers across a raging river piggyback, they instead beat and drown them at the halfway point, stealing their weapons in the process. The Dutch then murder an entire tribe in retribution.
(For those keeping score, we've now got implied sex slavery, one on stage child-murder, a few drownings and a mini-genocide happening. And we're not even at intermission.)
One family goes into hiding, disguising themselves as farmers not aligned with the tribal group who'd been murdered. The father is wracked with guilt. Eventually He Bin shows up, now working as translator for the Dutch, who have now returned to collect tax payments. An argument over taxation and land rights ensues.
(OK, this part got confusing...nuances may have been lost in translation.)
While translating for the Dutch, He Bin convinces the family that he's on their side, and wants to work out an arrangement that will allow them to continue living on their land unmolested. Using his knowledge of Dutch colonial law, he has a contract drawn up that allows him to take over the family's debt in exchange for their acting as sort of temporary indentured servants. The family signs gladly, thanking He Bin profusely.
It was at this point that both Josh and I were thinking, "ah, that He Bin isn't such a bad guy after all."
(Yup. But wait for it.)
Surprise! Actually, He Bin had tricked them into signing over their house and land to him entirely. The dad puts up a fight, and gets shot. So does the mother. Then, just for fun, he has the house burned down in front of the rest of the family before having them thrown into slavery, because, why not?
(I was confused at this plot point, which again, may have been a translation issue, since He Bin, now being owner of the house, just burned his own house down. That said, if you've never seen a puppet house go up in flames, its quite the sight! The troupe used a series of colored streamers on the set, as well as smoke machines. It was AWESOME!)
He Bin's position as a genuinely not nice person now cemented, he continues amassing wealth and power as an agent for the Dutch. This was all before the intermission, and I won't go much further because to do so would require spoiler alerts, and Josh has already announced his firm intention to do whatever he can to help bring Mystery of The Great Mind Ocean to a wider audience. (Once we've turned Formosa Moon into the publisher).
There was more business in the puppet whorehouse, a surprisingly frank talk about the practice of foot-binding, a more than cameo appearance by the great Ming Dynasty admiral Koxinga, a revenge plot worthy of Shakespeare, and, as if this play couldn't be any more unique, a distinctly meta episode in which beautifully costumed human actors fought on either side of the audience while the play's characters (again, these are puppets we're talking about) just sat watching the show, effectively watching the audience watching the side play. (Rosencranz and Puppetstern are dead?)
Suffice to say, a great time was had by all, except maybe the kid sitting next to us, who may have been a tad young to fully grasp the implications of the awesomeness that is Mystery of The Great Mind Ocean. We'll be encouraging Huang Guan-wei (founder of the Goodoo Puppet Troupe) to bring the show to Taipei, and will be including both a write-up of the show and the troupe in our book.
In the meantime, you can get more details about Goodoo Puppet Theater on Facebook and at their website, http://www.goodoo.studio
March 14, 2017
A Nihilist's Guide to Sun Moon Lake
Our trip through Taiwan took us to Sun Moon Lake last month, one of the few places in Taiwan that I'd never actually visited. While mostly due to circumstance, I think there may have been in my lengthy reluctance to visit the place an element of my own contrarian nature - every Taiwanese who'd every mentioned the place did so in fairly gushing terms, so I worried it wouldn't live up to the hype. Furthermore, I'd often heard long-time western expats disparage the place as being overdeveloped, touristic, or simply damned with faint praise.
Several members of the latter group took the time to opine on my Facebook page about Sun Moon Lake, complaining of their own visits having been unsatisfactory due to over-development (which I found to be the case in some places, but overall easily escaped), questioning the tribal bona-fides of area merchants (said bona-fides seemed, well, bona fide in Ita Thao where we spent three nights), and talking the place down in general.
I suppose this was for the best, as it triggered my aforementioned contrarian nature in two ways:
First, I decided that I was going to absolutely love the place. This proved to be anything but a challenge, as Sun Moon Lake turned out to be the epitome of loveliness. Stephanie and I both wound up writing lengthy chapters about what we loved - and what we learned - during our stay in Sun Moon Lake, which we extended by an extra day. These chapters are currently being edited for our book, Formosa Moon.
Second, being a comedy writer, I decided to use the juxtaposition of being in an absolutely lovely setting and seeing comments disparaging the place on my fairly innocuous social media posts about the area to write some comedy.
I doubt the resulting essay - A Nihilist's Guide to Sun Moon Lake - will make it into Formosa Moon. We're already way over word count for Nantou, and anyway, the essay doesn't quite fit the overall theme of the book. If it does, I'm going to do everything in my power to have the story read in the audio book version by Werner Herzog. Which is how I suggest you read it.
Without further ado…
A Nihilist's Guide to Sun Moon Lake
Sun Moon Lake: Dreary and Inevitable
Driving through the mountains and valleys of Nantou County, we pass through towns and villages scarred by natural catastrophe, stopping to visit a plaza containing two ornate houses of worship. The first had been destroyed in an earthquake, and the second was built afterwards to house idols rescued from the first. Both are without meaning.
In a nearby market, villagers sell local fruits, teas and tonics for health, unaware of the futility of their industry for buyer and seller alike. After brief repast, we drive to the lake itself.
Thought by some to be among the most beautiful spots in Taiwan, Sun Moon Lake was formed by a cataclysmic strike coming without warning from the endless and indifferent void of space. The blow likely as not destroyed most of the island's life at the moment of impact, itself a mercy.
Over millennia, the crater filled with water and slowly trees and plants grew around the damp hole. At some point, humans arrived and thought the place pretty. Then as now, this was merely a mental self-preservation construct designed as distraction from existence's ultimate futility for whatever time it takes to ensure copulation, thus ensuring biological continuation of the ghastly charade. These days, there are many hotels diminishing the lake's beauty while simultaneously providing a place for human sexual encounters. Contemporary social mores require such encounters be conducted indoors.
Why is this?
We stop to visit the Wenwu temple overlooking the lake, inside of which ornate statues represent various folk deities. Local people pray to these idols, but their prayers go unheard. God is dead. On the third level is a temple constructed to honor the sage Confucius, who died alone as do all men. In the attached gift shop, foodstuffs can be purchased.
On opposite sides of the lake lie two collections of buildings, clustered in futility, seeking solace in number. We head to the smaller of these for shelter from the rapidly approaching night, pausing to watch from the pier extending timidly over the water the setting of the sun. The same star that gives our planet life will inevitably destroy it. This is inescapable fact.
Now it is time for evening sustenance.
There are many restaurants, but we choose instead to eat smaller items of foodstuffs from vendors who have set up small stalls in the alleys and streets of the villages. Village vendors wear clothing signifying belonging to the local tribal group, whose ancestors came to the area before those of the island's current-dominant culture arrived in response to a multitude of political and social pressures in their own homeland, quickly exchanging the mantle of oppressed for oppressor. If the vendors are aware of various theories stating that their ancestors played a similar role with a previous indigenous group, the very existence of which is now lost forever, they make no mention of it. We who enjoy sticks of pork grilled over flame despite our own awareness of the sentience of pigs can hardly judge.
For desert, we eat shaved ice served with crushed fruit, served to us in a shop in which a young girl happens to be sitting stroking a pet cat. In the natural course of things, both cat and girl will die, yet if the cat outlives the girl it will be considered tragic.
Why?
We return to our hotel room to bathe and though procreation is not our goal, we copulate.
Despite the presence of road and futility of man's every endeavor, tomorrow we will take a boat across the lake.
~ Fin ~
Several members of the latter group took the time to opine on my Facebook page about Sun Moon Lake, complaining of their own visits having been unsatisfactory due to over-development (which I found to be the case in some places, but overall easily escaped), questioning the tribal bona-fides of area merchants (said bona-fides seemed, well, bona fide in Ita Thao where we spent three nights), and talking the place down in general.
I suppose this was for the best, as it triggered my aforementioned contrarian nature in two ways:
First, I decided that I was going to absolutely love the place. This proved to be anything but a challenge, as Sun Moon Lake turned out to be the epitome of loveliness. Stephanie and I both wound up writing lengthy chapters about what we loved - and what we learned - during our stay in Sun Moon Lake, which we extended by an extra day. These chapters are currently being edited for our book, Formosa Moon.
Second, being a comedy writer, I decided to use the juxtaposition of being in an absolutely lovely setting and seeing comments disparaging the place on my fairly innocuous social media posts about the area to write some comedy.
I doubt the resulting essay - A Nihilist's Guide to Sun Moon Lake - will make it into Formosa Moon. We're already way over word count for Nantou, and anyway, the essay doesn't quite fit the overall theme of the book. If it does, I'm going to do everything in my power to have the story read in the audio book version by Werner Herzog. Which is how I suggest you read it.
Without further ado…
A Nihilist's Guide to Sun Moon Lake
Sun Moon Lake: Dreary and InevitableDriving through the mountains and valleys of Nantou County, we pass through towns and villages scarred by natural catastrophe, stopping to visit a plaza containing two ornate houses of worship. The first had been destroyed in an earthquake, and the second was built afterwards to house idols rescued from the first. Both are without meaning.
In a nearby market, villagers sell local fruits, teas and tonics for health, unaware of the futility of their industry for buyer and seller alike. After brief repast, we drive to the lake itself.
Thought by some to be among the most beautiful spots in Taiwan, Sun Moon Lake was formed by a cataclysmic strike coming without warning from the endless and indifferent void of space. The blow likely as not destroyed most of the island's life at the moment of impact, itself a mercy.
Over millennia, the crater filled with water and slowly trees and plants grew around the damp hole. At some point, humans arrived and thought the place pretty. Then as now, this was merely a mental self-preservation construct designed as distraction from existence's ultimate futility for whatever time it takes to ensure copulation, thus ensuring biological continuation of the ghastly charade. These days, there are many hotels diminishing the lake's beauty while simultaneously providing a place for human sexual encounters. Contemporary social mores require such encounters be conducted indoors.
Why is this?
We stop to visit the Wenwu temple overlooking the lake, inside of which ornate statues represent various folk deities. Local people pray to these idols, but their prayers go unheard. God is dead. On the third level is a temple constructed to honor the sage Confucius, who died alone as do all men. In the attached gift shop, foodstuffs can be purchased.
On opposite sides of the lake lie two collections of buildings, clustered in futility, seeking solace in number. We head to the smaller of these for shelter from the rapidly approaching night, pausing to watch from the pier extending timidly over the water the setting of the sun. The same star that gives our planet life will inevitably destroy it. This is inescapable fact.
Now it is time for evening sustenance.
There are many restaurants, but we choose instead to eat smaller items of foodstuffs from vendors who have set up small stalls in the alleys and streets of the villages. Village vendors wear clothing signifying belonging to the local tribal group, whose ancestors came to the area before those of the island's current-dominant culture arrived in response to a multitude of political and social pressures in their own homeland, quickly exchanging the mantle of oppressed for oppressor. If the vendors are aware of various theories stating that their ancestors played a similar role with a previous indigenous group, the very existence of which is now lost forever, they make no mention of it. We who enjoy sticks of pork grilled over flame despite our own awareness of the sentience of pigs can hardly judge.
For desert, we eat shaved ice served with crushed fruit, served to us in a shop in which a young girl happens to be sitting stroking a pet cat. In the natural course of things, both cat and girl will die, yet if the cat outlives the girl it will be considered tragic.
Why?
We return to our hotel room to bathe and though procreation is not our goal, we copulate.
Despite the presence of road and futility of man's every endeavor, tomorrow we will take a boat across the lake.
~ Fin ~
March 8, 2017
Now I owe Core Pacific Mall an apology!
Core Pacific MallAfter five days housebound and writing, we decided to take Tuesday to head out to have some fun in the Songshan district (not to be confused with the Zhongshan district...heaven forbid), heading first to the Core Pacific Mall, AKA "The Living Mall.I have something of a long-standing connection with the place. In the mid-1990s, I worked for Core Pacific, and I had to edit and proofread an early description of the project. In 2002 I visited the newly built mall and wrote a tongue-in-cheek (dismissive even) story called "a visit to the great mall" making fun of the place. (The article is still online in its snarky glory here at Things Asian Press.)
The last time that I visited in 2009, despite my having made fun of the place years earlier, I was saddened to note that business didn't seem to be doing well. Though all the stores were open, the mall was mostly empty, especially when compared to the Taipei 101 mall just a few blocks away.
Yesterday's visit led me to believe that the mall is on an upswing for a couple of reasons. First, there's now an MRT station close by, which wasn't the case a few years back. One of the reasons the Core Pacific Mall has long been overshadowed (literally and as a shopping venue) by Taipei 101 is that the latter is easier to reach. Hopefully this levels the playing field a bit.
Core Pacific MallAnd second, by having a ton of kid friendly activities in the mall, it seems to have positioned itself as a great venue for parents / grandparents to take their kids to spend the day. One of the first things Stephanie and I heard on going inside The Living Mall was the sounds of kids - lots of kids - playing. Sounded like a kindergarten at recess, a sound I know well, being a former kindergarten teacher.
(And here another Core Pacific Link - when I worked for them in the mid 90s I taught at their bilingual kindergarten in the morning and then donned a tie and edited in the office in the afternoon. Such arrangements are not uncommon in Taiwan.)
This came from one of the middle floors, which largely belonged to a child-care facility called "Baby Boss" (Great name for a family friendly crime comedy. Note to self: Write script for "Baby Boss", give it the John Truby treatment and send to HOLLYWOOD, baby!). But Baby Boss (which you can see in this film Stephanie and I shot from the upper floor) wasn't the only kid-specific venue. The first floor had an amazing jungle gym set up for kids to practice climbing, rappelling and other spider-kid like feats. Directly across from the jungle-gym is a coffee shop with seats facing said gym, great place for grandparents, aunties and uncles to spend quality time while the kids play.
The lower levels of the mall contained other kid-friendly spots.
Food court? Check.
Roller skating place? Check.
Arcade games, movie theater? Check.
Most impressive to me was something I'd not noticed on previous visits, and it's here that I ought to explain to the reader what makes Core Pacific Mall so unique.
So the most dominant feature of the Core Pacific Mall is the 11 story high Granite sphere. But the sphere itself is only part of the mall, being surrounded partially by a more traditional style city-block long building which partially encloses the sphere. Some of the malls venues are inside the sphere, while others are inside of the more traditional complex. Exploring the entire thing means going from one to the other via a series of escalators and walkways, many of which give pretty awesome views of the complex as a whole.
But the basement food court - and this is the thing I only noticed on yesterday's visit - actually goes underneath the sphere itself. Meaning that you can grab a coffee and sit underneath this:
Under the Orb, Core Pacific MallSo basically, the Living Mall has a food court that allows you to look up and inside the four glowing lights of the Orb itself, reliving (if you like) scenes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
And if that aint cool I don't know what is.
(Also note to self: Upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy sequel features character EGO: THE LIVING PLANET. Possible tie-in for THE LIVING MALL?)
We spent a couple of hours at Core Pacific Living Mall before heading next door to the Taipei Puppetry Arts Center. More on this in Formosa Moon. In the meantime, this film will give you a good idea of what the Mall looks like. (Note: Viewing film is no substitute for actual visit.)
March 2, 2017
48 Hours of Luxury at the Grand Hyatt Taipei
Photo Credit: Tobie OpenshawStephanie and I wrote an article for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan about our recent stay at the Grand Hyatt Taipei. Our stay was sponsored by the hotel itself, and included a three hour massage package which Stephanie loved. (I found it a bit overwhelming - Outside of Vipassana practice I have a difficult time remaining still for more than 30 minutes.)
The article was fun to write. Stephanie and I are working on a dual-narrative style, perfecting it as we continue to write our respective parts of Formosa Moon. I think the style works well with this article. Feel free to chime in.
As usual, I'll post the first few paragraphs below with a link to the full article at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce's website.
For a long time I scoffed at luxury hotels, but this was largely because luxury hotels were way out of my reach. (“A Bachelor’s Degree in Creative Writing is your ticket to the finer things in life” said no undergraduate advisor ever.)Then I began my illustrious career as a guidebook writer, and not only could I still not afford to stay in luxury hotels but I was obliged to visit them regularly to review them on the sly, conducting clandestine inspections of some of Asia’s best known five-stars by day bedding down in hostels by night. This oft-used technique is employed by many an honest travel writer – for a full report on the potential pitfalls of this method, click over to My Parents are Little People.But Taipei’s hostels are no place to bring a lady, especially a jet-lagged first time visitor who’s come to Taiwan sight unseen as part of a strangely-hatched literary mission / life transition. So when Paul Ou, Marketing Communications Manager at the Grand Hyatt Taipei, offered Stephanie and I a soft landing place at the start of our Formosa Moon Research Trip, we accepted with great gratitude. The two-day stay would give us a place to relax in style and to plan out the next three months of travel and writing around Taiwan, a trip during which luxury would definitely not be the planned focus.Continue reading at https://www.canchamtw.com/48-hours-of-luxury-at-the-grand-hyatt-taipei/
February 27, 2017
Journalists tomorrow, Nerds tonight
Tomorrow is the 70th anniversary of the February 28th Incident, which began 38 years of martial law in Taiwan. Since our book Formosa Moon largely follows sequentially our shared voyage around Taiwan (both physically and culturally), it feels natural that the event should serve as one through which Stephanie, and by proxy, readers of Formosa Moon, are introduced to an event in Taiwanese history that continues to be as formative as it was tragic.
So we'll be spending much of the day tomorrow in 228 Peace Park, both to commemorate the event and speak to survivors and their relatives.
Tonight, we decided to do something more lighthearted, having learned this morning that Patrick Stewart would be appearing at Taipei 101 with Hugh Jackman to promote the film Logan. We're looking forward to the film, but our real reason for going to Taipei 101 was that Stephanie and I are major Star Trek geeks. So to us, the Wolverine thing is secondary. We were going to see Captain Picard in Taipei and figured that, being major Trekkies we stood a good chance of being able to actually meet the man himself.
And it's unfortunate that this is how we saw it, because Taipei 101 is a far cry from the Duluth Holiday Inn, and the 100,000 or so people who'd crammed themselves into the fountain plaza were definitely not there for Trek-con '97. There would be no hearing Patrick Stewart wax poetic about his days playing Jean-Luc Picard. Indeed, by the time we got there surrounded by what felt like half of Taipei it was clear that we'd not be seeing or hearing either Stewart or Jackman from our vantage point deep in the crowd.
Instead, we spent 20 minutes or so there taking a goofy Facebook live Video (you can see it here if the idea of watching 100,000 people in Taiwan waiting for two celebrities to show up eventually devolve into two grown adults walking around a mall playing with puppets is your thing).
Suffice to say, there was no photo-op with Patrick Stewart. But Floyd did score an interview with Hugh Jackman...sort of.
More serious stuff on th' morrow.
So we'll be spending much of the day tomorrow in 228 Peace Park, both to commemorate the event and speak to survivors and their relatives.
Tonight, we decided to do something more lighthearted, having learned this morning that Patrick Stewart would be appearing at Taipei 101 with Hugh Jackman to promote the film Logan. We're looking forward to the film, but our real reason for going to Taipei 101 was that Stephanie and I are major Star Trek geeks. So to us, the Wolverine thing is secondary. We were going to see Captain Picard in Taipei and figured that, being major Trekkies we stood a good chance of being able to actually meet the man himself.
And it's unfortunate that this is how we saw it, because Taipei 101 is a far cry from the Duluth Holiday Inn, and the 100,000 or so people who'd crammed themselves into the fountain plaza were definitely not there for Trek-con '97. There would be no hearing Patrick Stewart wax poetic about his days playing Jean-Luc Picard. Indeed, by the time we got there surrounded by what felt like half of Taipei it was clear that we'd not be seeing or hearing either Stewart or Jackman from our vantage point deep in the crowd.
Instead, we spent 20 minutes or so there taking a goofy Facebook live Video (you can see it here if the idea of watching 100,000 people in Taiwan waiting for two celebrities to show up eventually devolve into two grown adults walking around a mall playing with puppets is your thing).
Suffice to say, there was no photo-op with Patrick Stewart. But Floyd did score an interview with Hugh Jackman...sort of.
More serious stuff on th' morrow.
