Wednesday, February 16, 2022
7:17 a.m. Room 1102, Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
My room here at the Phannu is less appealing with every passing day, I must admit. My neighbor continues with his trifecta of annoying behavior: retching, smoking, and slamming doors. I wake up in the morning with a sore throat and sore eyes because of all the cigarette smoke I breathe all the time. I’m fairly sure more people than just him are smoking, but I never see them. When I smell new smoke, I’ve occasionally snuck a peek out of my windows to try to see who is smoking, but I never see anyone. They don’t sit outside my room on the benches as my old neighbor used to do. I’m wondering if the rooms above me on the second floor are occupied. Maybe people up there are sitting on their balcony and smoking and the smoke wafts down to my room.
Another problem I’m encountering is that the air conditioner is quite old and somewhat ineffective. We are leaving the cold winter months behind, and it is getting hotter every day. With that, I’ve occasionally fired up the air conditioner, and I can see from monitoring the electricity meter that running this air conditioner is going to be on the expensive side. Yet, it does very little. It makes a lot of noise and works very hard, but nothing much happens in the way of cooling down the room. I remember being very happy when a new air conditioner was installed in my room at the Green Guest House. Being brand new, it was quite efficient and strong, and I could see, hear, and feel the difference between it and the old one. This room would benefit greatly from a new, efficient, and quiet unit. Turning this one on is like suddenly being on a construction site. It’s so loud. And then it hardly does anything except blow warm air around.
And I have to decide soon if I am going to continue to live here for another month. Time is moving much faster than I expected. In the back of my mind, I was thinking that I might move to Pai. I wouldn’t mind doing that, but it might be too much trouble considering the circumstances. Perhaps I will follow through on my impulse to move to a different room. I can take a chance on it being an improvement.
And I still don’t have any stories to tell. All I’ve been doing is working on videos. My latest video is very time consuming. It’s all about a trip I took to the famous Pai Canyon. And I turned that into a bit of an epic video. Too epic. When I had assembled the rough cut of all the video I had shot, it amounted to two hours. And that was with leaving a bunch of stuff out already. I started shooting the video early in the morning. I even filmed myself leaving my room and getting the scooter ready and riding out of town. And then I filmed a bunch of stuff as I rode my scooter down the highway to the Pai Canyon. I filmed my arrival and then my walk to the canyon. And then I filmed my entire walk around the various paths in the canyon, and I did this with two cameras from several perspectives. I wanted to film myself from a distance, and that meant doing everything several times. When I reached a bit of rocky cliff that I needed to scramble up or down, I’d talk about it on camera, and then I’d make my way down the cliff and film it from a GoPro mounted on my chest and a second GoPro in my hand. And then I would attach one of the GoPros to a tree at the bottom of the cliff to film myself making the climb. Once the GoPro was in place, I would climb back up the cliff to the top and then go down it a second time. For various reasons, I would often end up doing this a third and even a fourth time. And I had to be very careful to make all the elements match so that I could cut all those different perspectives together.
And now I am working my way through all of that video and trying to piece it together into a sequence that makes sense. It is very complex. And it is made more challenging because one of my GoPros is a Hero 7 and the other is a Hero 9, and the lighting of the video from each turned out quite different. One is brighter than the other, and it looks weird to switch from one to the other. I also was recording audio in the GoPros themselves, and I have to constantly switch from the audio recording in one camera to the audio from the other in the editing process. And the audio sounds different. It’s a lot of work to try to adjust all of this to make it work together. Way too much work, to be very honest. I’ve spent two days on this video already, and I’ve only managed to work my way through twenty-five minutes of final video. And that’s without adding any music or graphic elements. All of that work is still ahead of me. I’m basically completing twelve minutes of video a day. At this rate, the final video will require a week of editing. And that’s full-time work every day. I’ll need five days to edit the rough cut of the video, one day to add the music and other elements and clean it up and proof it, and one day to export it and upload it and then post it while making the thumbnail and writing the video description and tags.
From a YouTube point of view, none of this work is necessary. Ever since I adopted this more fancy style of shooting and editing video, the popularity of my videos has plummeted. Far fewer people watch my videos than before. People actually like my videos better when I’m just walking around, going nowhere, and talking. But this more complex style is what I did on this Mae Hong Son Loop trip, and I don’t have much of a choice but to follow through and edit the videos as I shot them. I have at least two more video projects just like this one to complete. In both of them, I used the same technique of filming myself from a distance using two cameras at the same time. And then I have the raw material for eight more videos, if I decide I want to complete them. This could easily take another month of full-time work. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to do this, but I’ll probably end up doing it. And I still have several videos from my trip to Sukhothai that I never found time to complete.
In pop culture news, I watched a British 5-part series called It’s a Sin. It was extremely good with lots of food for thought. It tells the story of a group of gay men in London during the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the eighties. It was one of the better shows that I’ve seen in a very long time. It’s something of a familiar story, I suppose, but it had a kind of modern relevance because of the parallels with the current covid-19 epidemic. The story and the characters also felt very real. It feels clear to me that the writer knows that world personally. There are so many specific details in the show that could only come from someone who lived it himself or had direct personal experience.
The show is a LOT though. It’s a lot to watch and take in. It’s very emotionally charged and draining. And I can see how it wouldn’t be for everyone. One thing that stuck with me is a kind of personal quirk of mine when it comes to television and movies. I’ve noticed that TV shows and movies can make us like characters that, in fact, aren’t actually good people. These characters can be the heroes of the show, and they are presented to us as the good guys. It’s a Sin follows a pretty obvious playbook for this kind of story. The group of young gay men are our heroes in this story. They are the good guys that we root for. And their parents and society and the medical community and the police and their employers and the government are the bad guys. Gay men in the eighties were largely ostracized and closeted, of course. And when parents found out their sons were gay, they didn’t exactly respond well. And in this TV show, they took this to an extreme. One character came from a Nigerian immigrant family, and he faced a situation where he could even be kidnapped and forced to return to Nigeria where they’d make him undergo some kind of crazy conversion therapy, and if it didn’t work, they would kill him.
Through many situations and scenes like that, we are led to root for these gay men and despise their parents and the police and hospital administrators and various authority figures. Yet, sometimes, it isn’t all that clear who the good guys and bad guys are when you take a step back and just look at behavior. There is one character in particular that kind of takes center stage in the story as the true tragic hero. What happens to him is intensely emotional and the show wants to make the audience weep for him and feel sad for him. And we do. But at the same time, this character in the show knew he was HIV positive, and he deliberately and with full knowledge set out to spread the virus to as many men as possible – even hundreds of them. He did this on purpose. He essentially killed countless other gay men on purpose. That’s hardly the behavior of someone to admire, and yet the show asks us to admire him and see him as a hero and a victim. And it works. He really does come across as a tragic figure. We like him. The show just glosses over this very evil thing he did and comes up with reasons to excuse it. But you could easily film the events of this show from a different perspective, and this guy would not come across well at all. You could just as easily frame him as a villain based on what he did. I just find it interesting that TV shows can manipulate us so easily.
I keep thinking about one very short and even inconsequential scene that relates to this. One of our heroes was out on the street outside their home. And a woman that runs a small business there says something to him that was negative. I can’t remember what she said anymore. But it was something derogatory. And this man picked up a big metal garbage can and smashed it through the front display window of this woman’s store. And the way it was filmed, we are clearly supposed to cheer for him. This is supposed to be something good that he did. He was punishing this evil woman for her anti-gay slur. But was this really something to admire? A good man doesn’t go around smashing expensive storefront windows just because someone said something mean to him.
I remember writing about this same idea regarding a movie about the skateboard community in New York. The skateboarding girls were the heroes of that story and we were asked to admire them and root for them. And we do. Yet, in the show, they were constantly shoplifting, vandalizing, behaving in very obnoxious ways in public, damaging public property, jumping the gates at subway stations and not paying, breaking into private property, being loud and rude, throwing garbage around. And they could do all this because they were the heroic rebels. They were free and living as they wanted to live. All of us normal people around them were boring and ordinary and just going to work every day. And because of that, normal society was the villain, and it was okay for these skateboard girls to steal and cause trouble.
Personally, I despise any type of vandalism or littering or damage to public property or shoplifting or rude public behavior. I value courtesy and helpful behavior. Yet, this TV show manipulated me emotionally to really admire these skateboard girls and forgive them for their behavior. I remember one scene in particular when these girls stole some kind of delivery bike or delivery cart. And the scene was played for laughs. We are supposed to admire this carefree lifestyle of theirs. And it’s okay to steal this delivery cart because in this world, the delivery guy, doing his job and working hard and living his life, was presented as boring and stupid. He was following the rules of society. He wasn’t a rebel skateboarder, so it’s okay to steal his delivery cart. Yet, I’m sure I would like the delivery guy, and in real life, I wouldn’t like these skateboard girls at all. Yet, the TV show made me admire them and root for them.