Today, Saturday. A searing hot afternoon, and we went off to the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art. There was an exhibition on, called City Life, with the low entrance fee that is usual in this country, a pleasant change from London museums and galleries. It turned out to be one of the best contemporary art […]
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Twist in the tale
If humanity comes to an end because two nuclear-armed adversaries started hitting each other on the head with rocks on the roof of the world, well, it only seems fitting. I was being educated, somewhat unwillingly on my side, the other day, about meta-modernism, but these absurd times seem rather hyper-postmodernist to me.
Flash of irritation
Today is a day when my nerves are always a bit raw, though less so this year than in previous years. Felt a flash of irritation when I saw someone has posted on Facebook the most irritating circumlocution for “died” that I’ve seen in a while: “Today is the day when xxx moved to a […]
Real deal
The protest we could have attended, if a show was what we wanted, no more.
Protest in the park
This morning, the GF and I went to 228 Park to join the Black Lives Matter protest there. It was a curious affair. Every foreigner in Taiwan (excluding migrant workers) seemed to be there – the crowd was about 90% non-Taiwanese, and I suspect many of those who appeared Taiwanese were Americans of Taiwanese origin. […]
Ultras
The article for today is this short piece about Moroccan ultras. Football fans are hardly the most inspiring of people, but I do wonder why there is not more effort in modern societies to create such spaces for solidarity, carefully overseen, except by armies and fascists. And Scouts, I suppose, though it is hard to […]
Back to Beitou
Today’s Chinese lesson went better than Monday’s, when both the GF and I felt rather stupid and beaten down. It made me very thankful that I was always quite good at school, as it was a taster of how deadly it is to be made to feel like an idiot and given no time or […]
Black rocks
This article made me a little teary. Last night was the first meeting of the board of a publication I am involved in. It’s a semi-academic publication and all the others involved are academics of one sort or another. A pleasant bunch, but it definitely ran on university time and the meeting extended for 90 […]
Watery Sunday
The clouds burst around mid-morning and raindrops plummetted down as though from the barrel of a gun. In a climate like Taiwan’s it would be foolish to let that get in the way of an outing so we strolled down to Gongguan for an Israeli lunch at a small restaurant where there was one table […]
Looking back
I was reading through some of the older posts on this blog, as one does. How quaint the earliest ones on the coronavirus now seem. I think the first is from the end of January, at which time I was well aware of the virus’s existence and was concerned chiefly about the irritation of wearing […]