October snapshots

I know I said I wasn't going back to doing anything like this, but I'm a liiiiiaaarrr but I'm not really. It's just toting a point-and-shoot camera around. Anyway, in the words of Alfred Stieglitz, according to Ansel Adams, "I have the desire to photograph. I go out with my camera. I come across something that excites me emotionally, spiritually, aesthetically. I see the photograph in my mind's eye and I compose and expose the negative. I give you the print as the equivalent of what I saw and felt". He was a giant and pioneer of modern photography, but what he says is so simply human that it applies to anyone, even a dork with a digital point-and-shoot, no?

October 17, 2:53 p.m. - Keelung River and Maishuai Bridge #2, shooting north from Maishuai Bridge #1. There are not many public places named for western figures. Roosevelt Rd. is one, and these two bridges are named after that handsome devil MacArthur (麥帥).

4:38 p.m. - Xinyi District's burgeoning skyline from Neihu. When I first got here, it was just the Taipei 101 tower sticking out and giving me the finger. Now we have the complete set!

October 21, 4:08 p.m. - Huashan 1914 Creative Park.

4:19 p.m. - Public sculpture probably made from local found detritus from what was here before, a sake brewery rings a bell. And including the rail ties!:

4:30-4:39 p.m. - Right behind me in the previous pic, but not in plain sight I discovered these abandoned railroad tracks on the northern edge of the park, barb wired and fenced and covered with overgrowth (I'm sticking my arm way out through the fence and shooting blind taking the first shot, one of many until I got one level). I imagine these would have emerged from the underground Taipei Main Station less than a mile west, and heading to points east and down the coast. Even in my time in Taiwan there were surface trains and level crossings in eastern Taipei, but they've all been moved underground since.

4:43 p.m. - This walkway follows the still-visible remnants of a small industrial railroad which was used by what was here before. Would a sake brewery need a railroad or a smokestack? Why not? The reason I was here, though, was because the Guanghua Digital Plaza is a block away and I was getting a new battery for my Canon IXUS 860 IS. All of the above were shot with my Ricoh Caplio R4. 

October 23, 3:16 p.m. - Taipei Fine Arts Museum Park. The rest are shot with the IXUS 860 IS.

October 28, 4:49 p.m. - Songshan Airport.

5:00 p.m. - Songshan Airport observation deck.

5:05 p.m. - Shooting north with clouds rolling over the Yangmingshan range.

October 29, 4:35 p.m. - I was wondering why the hell I was taking a picture of a wall, but after I got home I noticed the reflections in the windows of the wall behind me of the Eslite Spectrum building creating interesting patterns.

4:38 p.m. - Said Eslite Spectrum building and said wall on the right side.

If I had to choose a favorite of the month, it'd probably be the airport observation deck.

I've been experiencing depression lately! I don't get depressed in general, believe it or not, so although it's unpleasant and perplexing, it's also a bit interesting in ways. If I may be so bold, my brand of mindfulness practice precludes mental health issues. Or perhaps, rather, what might be conventionally seen as mental health issues are filtered through a prism of mindfulness practice, broken apart and considered in constituent parcels.

When the feeling arose, the first thing I did was identify it and not deny it. It felt bad, it was dark and persistent, it was a thing as real as it could be without being solid and it didn't have an identifiable cause. It wasn't a passing mood or just feeling down. Hello darkness my old friend, you've come to bend me over once again. As soon as the identification was made, mindfulness practice kicks in to investigate it; examine the contours, what is it doing to my thoughts and feelings? Pick it apart intellectually at first and then dispel it logically by realizing its illusory nature and using my brand of mindfulness practice that doesn't allow for it because I have too many other mental afflictions to investigate. Don't get attached to it, don't give it any substance or traction, don't react to it and just let it be and wait it out as if it were a physical ailment. That's what mindfulness practice teaches in this situation, that's what makes it useful.

The manifestation is real and can't be downplayed, only placed into perspective. It arises at times when there's a lull in my mental continuum, between things I was doing that kept me distracted, and it would be exacerbated by the simulated urban hermit situation I've created for myself; the isolation, the lack of connection and relationships, no where and no one to turn to. Tunnel vision, tunnel consciousness, closing in on all sides, tinges of desperation. The season and the sun going down sooner each day not helping; even my age and degraded eyesight contribute. It's hard to describe when I'm not feeling it, and when I'm feeling it, trying to describe it isn't high on my priorities (actually no, that's exactly what mindfulness practice does, blogging about it is what's not high priority).

I thought it may be related to Sulli's suicide. Not just hers, but a month earlier another female singer, Woo Hyemi or Miwoo, was reported having died at age 31, but she was much less known and reportage was sparse and ambiguous regarding the circumstances with little follow-up. That's code in Korea's cagey media that foreigners learn to decipher that it was most likely a suicide. If a young death is not suicide, they readily report the cause, so if they don't report what happened for whatever reason, that's pretty much their way of reporting it was a suicide. And it turns out I know who she was, her debut song as Miwoo made it onto my 2015 mix CDs. A month before her death she released a song under her name Woo Hyemi which I didn't recognize, but I subsequently looked it up after I realized who she was and it's poignantly sad, but quite beautiful.

I have kept both women in mind, including during morning sitting, focusing energies, trying to get my head around at least Sulli's depression and mental illness that led so finally and deafeningly to her suicide. I'm supposedly suicidal, although having failed at it for so long might preclude the claim. I don't have depression, although believing I'm suicidal but failing at it for so long might preclude the claim. But I know I wouldn't commit suicide because of depression, and even during these bouts with it I've re-affirmed that. And oddly, regarding alcohol, drinking doesn't make it worse as one might believe it would. It's actually a comfort, something familiar. Here's that feeling again. I think I'll have a drink. Ah, much better.

But I was having trouble empathizing and understanding what happened to Sulli, and I want to. Shinee's Jonghyun I got. Robin Williams I got. Even Anthony Bourdain I got, just a lot didn't make sense and was counter to what I supposedly got. With Sulli it was why'd you hafta go and do something like that? So the universe, if not Sulli's energy itself, sends this to me to try on for size.

I guess the next step in mindfulness practice is connecting the depression with Sulli herself to try to understand it and generate compassion for her and truly empathize. This feeling I'm experiencing but multiplied by 10 or some greater factor had become her reality. Whoosh! I can only scratch it, but that may be enough. I don't need the full force of what she felt nor how all-encompassing and consuming it must have become. May she reincarnate in peace.

I had to go back and look at what I wrote after K-pop boy group Shinee's Jonghyun committed suicide in December 2017 at the age of 27, and why I wrote so much when I wasn't a fan and didn't know a whole lot about him. I do remember wondering what I would feel if such a tragedy hit closer to home.

Ex-f(x) member Sulli committing suicide last week at the age of 25 was closer to home, but curiously I don't have a lot to say about it. The feelings have been very subtle, persistent, resonating, existential tailspins whenever I considered what I had read and tried to fill in the blanks. Everything was wrong and tragic about it. Everyone in and into the K-pop scene should be angry and outraged about it. Basically, she killed herself after years of enduring hateful and malicious comments on her social media when she was just being herself and expressing her views, and it affected her mental health to the extent that she finally ended her own life.

It shouldn't have happened. She wasn't predisposed to suicide. It bothers me that she's no longer here. But I don't have a whole lot to say beyond that.

Fancam from one of the last times Sulli performed with f(x) in 2014:



I admit I was disappointed when she left the group in 2014, but when she returned to music earlier this year and released a surprise three-song single, I was blown away by how good quality and what a fully-formed concept (i.e., not throwaway or half-assed cookie-cutter) it was.

Not much going on with the change of seasons. The change of a season's enough of a reason to want to get away. It's still hot, but pleasantly hot now and continues to get cooler. My previous post about iPhones and cameras has not led to any re-interest in shooting, thankfully. Some looking to see if I see anything, but alas no "seeing", which was what photography was about. Actually, I vaguely recall the reason I stopped shooting was because I stopped seeing, and had been struggling with it for some time. So much so that I think it was an easy decision to stop. And then, as I mentioned, I was glad to have stopped when smartphones made me irrelevant.

I did go back into my archives to the last rolls I shot in 2011 to get a sense of why I stopped (months actually, not rolls as the last few months were with my brother's Nikon D80 DSLR). It actually wasn't all that lacking, a lot of re-treading subject matter as I'd already shot so much in my years here there wasn't a lot new. But it's the feeling that's important and I won't doubt what I was feeling at the time, which is that it was getting harder to see. Ah, it all comes back to me now. The idea was that the shots are out there, around us all the time, and it's a matter of being able to see them. They're not all gold, a lot are duds, but a good amount are workable. But there's nothing to work on when I'm not shooting anything, and I'm not shooting anything because I'm not, at the very least, seeing something. I'm perfectly happy not going back to all that.

But that led to looking farther back into my archives and remembering that fotolog was pretty much dead and had been for some time – a good thing really since their quality and functionality as a website ended up sucking quite a wad. But that means my photos are no where online. So shameless, narcissistic, serial archivist that I am, I'm contemplating the possibilities. I'm considering uploading them to this blog retroactively since almost all my photos are meticulously dated, a practice I started immediately upon taking beginning black & white classes. And since Blogger is now owned by Google, one (rare) advantage is I think the memory storage limit is very high. I actually don't know. If they're still stored in Picasa, I have no idea what the limit is. But if they're stored on Google Drive, I still have 7GB of storage. The problem remains that it would be a project that would take a very, very long time and I might get bored or sick of it. Photography pre-dates this blog, so at least there's that limit I can impose on myself. The purpose would be purely archival, mind you, as I'm under no delusion that the photos would ever actually be seen. It's just what serial archivists do.

"Why thank you"
July 28, 2010, Taipei. From my last roll of Lomo Fisheye 2, none of which has been posted anywhere. Generic color 400 film.