If music be the food of love...

Third day with the musicians. Six of them: keyboard, guitar, violin, bass, percussion and drum. Cheerful and jovial as they were, it took some time to know each other musically. I would play them the songs then get them to write down the structure and the chords, and rehearse part by part. It is always a challenge to transpose a studio recording for the stage, and to make the musicians move from ‘doing a lot’ to ‘doing the necessary’ for the music. Musicians in general love to jam and get wild on their instrument. Rock, jazz, funk, latin… There’s something primal and orgasmic in being the musical alpha male. In that sense, I function more like a classical musician when I compose my songs. Once their frustration of doing too little is behind, they realise how each of the notes they play greatly contribute to the architecture of the music. We have reached that stage now. The keyboardist was very moved when I showed him the piano part of Star in the Sun and the way the chords were to be arranged. An outgoing man with a mane of grey curly locks, his fingers would itch and feel compelled to fill each bar with as many notes as possible. Little by little, the spirit of the song descended on him and the look in his eyes showed me that he understood. When right after, the musicians played the whole song, there was a beautiful atmosphere in the room. Finally, we were making music!

In the land of the Gods

I was dozing in the car when my eyes opened and I turned my head on the right. “That’s Mount Olympus” Kosta the driver said. The name didn’t fail to create a strong impression in me. My parents had a couple of books about Greek myths. It didn’t take long before I was completely taken by those legends. Driving past the sojourn of the gods moved me deeply. Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Hermes, Poseidon, Athena, Hephaistos, Hades, Demeter, Persephone, Artemis, Ares, Dionysos, Hebe…

It was not Thessaloniki. There was a two hour drive to reach the little village where Amadeo had renovated an old ruin five years ago and turned it into a little haven for himself. Between mountains and sea, not far from the Macedonian border. “Alexander the Great passed this region before going South to conquer Greece.” Amadeo told me. When mountains meet the sea, when history meets our reality.

“Today, you will just recharge and relax.” Karen told said. I was still very weakened by the recent fever and the long hours on the plane. The weather was strangely much cooler than I thought. I expected some 40C to jump at my face and was pleasantly surprised and relieved to feel the cool, sunny and dry air as I walked out of the plane. The high fever and summer temperature in Taipei had somehow traumatised me physically.

The ride to the small village of Kokkino Nero had a cleansing effect on me. The sight of the mountains and the sea acted up on me like forgotten words of wisdom and the tension accumulated during the past weeks slowly dissipated from my city-boy mind.

Thin Ice

Thin Ice, the music video I shot for one of Jan last January is finally finished! Zed and I couldn’t believe we managed to do it both editing and colour correction in just two sessions.

“Colour correction can be done in just one hour when handled by professionals” Zed told me. “But they charge accordingly!”

Professional or not, I was pleased to see the finished MV. Since we did the shooting in January, I did only have a vague recollection of what we did. And as usual, ‘accidents’ happened: Zed’s laptop crashed and three images kept playing in a loop. Sick as I was, I instantly recognized it as something we had to use in the video. Zed tried in vain to recreate the loop without. But why try to recreate when it was there under our eyes? I took my camera and filmed the loop on the monitor. The loop became a leitmotiv and a key element in the MV.

The final result is quite close to what I had envisioned. I hope Jan will like it!

Reunion with AnPu

The highlight of the day was my joyful reunion with AnPu after four years. I am not sure how I would have managed to get in touch with her again after all these years. Common friends whom I asked to send her my greetings would forget to pass on the message. The email address she gave me years ago didn’t seem to work. Phone messages were not answered… More years would have gone by if it hadn’t been for Adrian who, before he left for the U.S. threw a little dinner party at my place and introduced me to a couple of musicians of his acquaintance, Coen, a young folk singer who had just been signed by Sony Music and Dino his musical director. As the conversation progressed, it appeared that the latter had been AnPu’s keyboardist on her four albums. There isn’t such a thing as fortuitous coincidence.

Words had reached me that AnPu had decided to retire. That sounded as plausible as hearing that a bird was no longer willing to fly.

“I wanted to retire from that pop icon business and start anew under my real name” AnPu explained.

Zed attended the same high school as she did and remembers a lively and very opinionated girl who wasn’t afraid to stand out, be weird and different. Though older and wiser, she has retained those qualities and being political is to her what a good makeup and hair are to most of her female peers.

There was so much we wanted to share and talk about. But somehow, there was no need to fill the voids or the silences.  

We both have plenty of projects we wished to do together. I told her about my idea of having her star in the Shiny Heart / Dirty Mind music video. Shooting would take place in September or October…

un Espace Vert

Bubbles of joy and excitement when after months on a project, I can say “It’s done”. I have secured a few days with Zed to only focus on the editing of Un Espace Vert. It was my first time shooting everything by myself. Zed had been extremely busy, shooting MV’s for Mayday, doing commercials for various companies… But he had lent me his camera when I went to Paris so that I could I shoot scenes there with Bévinda, Isabelle and Vanessa. I seem to have done fairly well since his friends praised Un Espace Vert for its cinematography!

I could have made 5 different versions of the MV with all that I have shot. I originally wanted to go to Niigata to film scenes with Sawako, as well as London, to do film Kirstie and extend the project with more scenes of Justin. I told Zed that the whole project could become a video installation, where the audience would enter a big room, and a video with each of the performer would have been projected on the walls, or appear on monitors of various sizes… Maybe that will happen one day… I haven’t forsaken the idea…

Fortunately – or not, I didn’t have the time to go to Niigata and London. We had so much, it was almost painful when came the time to select the shots I wanted. “This one is so good… And that one too… But the other is so beautiful…”

A couple of days before we started the editing, Aurélien and his boyfriend Navi came to help me shoot the last scenes, mostly projections on the footages I had already shot. Dream within the dream… Navi, who I was introduced to me as a dancer, had his camera all along and discreetly shot behind-the-scene images. One final scene had me lie on the bed with a projected image of Isabelle on my back. When Navi gave me all the files, I found that he was also an extremely talented photographer and that he had also captured a few moments of the shooting session, one of them a long traveling shot of me on the bed. I was so surprised by the way he caught me on camera and the used the light of the projector. Excited and entranced, I made those fugitive images the concluding scene of the MV.

Watch:
Un Espace Vert (click on title to open)

Home

As I said to friend the other day, the more I travel, the less I know where I am. I woke up in the middle of the night yesterday and it took me a long time before I could remember that I was back in Taipei, sleeping in my bed, in my very own room. My mind knows for a fact where I am, what I do, but it feels like the connection between my mind and myself is lost sometime. What if what I know and see is just an illusion and that the other dimension is slowly starting to make itself known to me?

Perhaps I am getting tired of playing that human game, just like when a child realises that the game he’s been taking part is just too silly and leaves.

Much as I love Paris, I had reached my limits: one and a half month. My father said told me on the phone that my mother wept after my brother and I left. We had spent a lovely afternoon, the four of us again reunited, just like it used to be, and certainly that must have reawakened some deep memories of golden time in my mother.

“Please tell her that you’re not going anywhere” my father pleaded. That was a bad idea. If I did, then she would think that although I am in Paris, I don’t bother to visit her. She had said so once already before this last trip. I was sitting outside on a bench near the Confucius Temple with my laptop, making one last call before taking the plane the following day. What she said startled me. If sometime she gets confused about where I live (Hong Kong? Tokyo? Taipei?), she usually knows that I am not in France. The disease must be progressing slowly and now her changeable emotional state of mind is dangerously playing with her memory.

“In three months” I told her. “I will be back in three months, that’s not a long time”. Will that be of any comfort when she has no sense of time? “One day is like any other day” she often likes to say.

Once in the plane, all sense of longing vanished, as if I had finished playing a scene in a play and getting ready for the next one. The emotional reality of Paris disappears as soon as I find myself up in the sky. 

The Ton That family

The last family reunion before my return to Taipei. Unusually this time, it was just the four of us, the two parents with the two sons. That had not happened in a long time, as my mother remarked.

The plan was to use the Kärcher machine and clean up the front yard as well as the concrete staircase leading to the front door. My parents enjoyed having their two sons taking care of the house together. The task lasted for a few hours. My mother kept us company, watching us from the on the perron, making comments as we worked – “All this moss and mold look like a spinach puree”. Maybe did she feel for a moment that it was like thirty years ago, when my brother and I were still living with them, teenage boys as we were.

After more than three hours, the front yard was immaculate, just as it was… thirty years ago when the house had been newly renovated.

My father had prepared some sweet lotus seed soup which we ate with great pleasure. It was a simple afternoon. Simple things bring the greatest joys, and my heart is aching a little.