Clip of the Day 08

ClipOfDay08 from Dayn Arnold on Vimeo.

The drama unfolds as I explain why we are stuck out in the middle of nowhere, part of a drama-filled day. By the way, thanks to Andrew for asking me if he could drink the last of the water that a passing motorist gave us. It was very polite considering our being stranded. Also, my EX1 is a little heavy to be holding at arm's-length for any period of time. I don't recommend it for self-portraits unless you have a tripod.

14995

Clip of the Day 07

ClipOfDay07 from Dayn Arnold on Vimeo.

A group of us were waiting on some friends to fix flat tire on one of our group's scooters. We stopped at this road-side shop, and waited alongside the family who ran the shop. A truck pulled up with several adults and a few children in the bed of the pickup. Despite the 95+ degree heat, these women were wearing full covering. It could be that they were covered for religious beliefs, but my suspicion is that they're trying not to get that working-class dark skin. It's amazing how many people in Thailand cover up and use whitening creams to keep from getting dark. The grass is always greener, I suppose.

14932

Clip of the Day 06

ClipOfDay06 from Dayn Arnold on Vimeo.

A bunch of monks in training at a monastery not far from where I was staying. So great to see a bunch of boys just being boys.

14884

Clip of the Day 05

ClipOfDay05 from Dayn Arnold on Vimeo.

There are a handful of tall buildings in ChaAm, and the one from which I shot this timelapse may be the tallest. At dusk a group of us strolled past the sleeping guard, entered the hotel from the beach, took an elevator as high as we could, and another couple flights of stairs until we were on the roof of the building's highest section. It was incredibly windy and in order to get a good timelapse, I had to hold my tripod down to it wouldn't vibrate so much. My favorite part of the shot is the guys with flashlights wandering around down by the water.

14812

Clip of the Day 04

ClipOfDay04 from Dayn Arnold on Vimeo.

Thai man cleans out his fishing nets.

14761

Clip of the Day 03

ClipOfDay03 from Dayn Arnold on Vimeo.

A young boy plays in the surf on the beach in ChaAm.

14714

Clip of the Day 02

Again, I'm posting unedited clips every day for the next while so that my footage doesn't just sit on my harddrive not doing anything.

ClipOfDay02 from Dayn Arnold on Vimeo.

We heard music in the distance and accidentally stumbled upon this acrobatic act apparently being done for the young monks in training. Still not sure why they were doing it.

14638

Clip of the Day 01

So right now I'm very busy with a lot of things, and my footage from Thailand will just sit fallow on its harddrive for nobody to see. So I've decided to upload one clip per day for the next while. There will be no editing or correction. Just an entire clip from the 550+ clips I took over the last couple weeks in Thailand, mistakes and all. Stay tuned.

ClipOfDay01 from Dayn Arnold on Vimeo.

Young boy playing on the beach in ChaAm, Thailand.

14580

How Dayn, Who Thought He Was Prepared, Got More Than He Bargained For

So I took a while yesterday morning to make this great water shield for my camera. It actually worked perfectly with only one little scare right at the beginning. This happened in 1/8 of a second, and I didn't have enough time to see it, let alone react to it. Immediately took care of it, and no damage done, thank the Lord.

#1

#2

#3

14439

Jason Eats Another Strange Food

Jason Eats Another Strange Food from Dayn Arnold on Vimeo.

This time Jason's eating an entire chicken's foot. It's not bad tasting, but the thought of eating the entire foot, bones and all, was a bit much for me. Didn't finish mine.

14399

Girls

There's something unsettling about children performing. To some degree, in America we encourage children to be performers. Kids these days grow up watching American Idol or America's Got Talent, the get the idea that entertainment is the pinnacle of society. While growing up in that kind of environment isn't exactly the healthiest thing for a child, it seems fairly normal. Maybe I don't understand the culture here well enough, but watching child performers in Chiang Mai feels different. Feels a little sad and wrong.

At the Sunday Night Walking Street market, you can find anything Thai. If you want a t-shirt that says "Chiang Mai" on it, that's the place to go. If you want to buy a giant bug under glass, you're in luck. If you want to eat fried grasshoppers, the market is where you need to be. There is also entertainment to be had as far as the eye can see. Singing and dancing seem to be the performance-styles of choice. From large stage productions with ear-piercing music to the groups of blind men singing and playing instruments, there is a near-overwhelming amount of entertainment to be had. However, amidst the cacophony of sound, the performers that made the biggest impact on me were the two little girls performing in the center of the walkway. I'm certain these girls have been performing at the market for a while, as they seemed very polished from their spotless tribal garb to their mastery of their craft. So poised, so collected, and so much older in demeanor than their years on earth would belie. Jason and I parked ourselves in front of the girl playing some sort of hammer dulcimer, I with my large video camera and enormous tripod, and Jason with his huge camera and giant lens. We created quite a spectacle, causing people who wouldn't otherwise have noticed this girl to stop and listen. With that much attention, she had to try very hard not to smirk, but kept right on playing throughout. I can only assume the woman sitting nearby was her mother, the one dictating when she could take a break. While the show was enjoyable, it made me think about what we were doing, filming and photographing a little girl for show. Granted, we plan to use our footage for noble purposes, but it made me think a lot about the exploitation of little girls like this, pushed to perform in one way or another when they should be just kids.

Behind the girl playing the hammer dulcimer, another girl, possibly a relative of the first girl, was dancing for passers by. She really was quite graceful, showing incredibly poise and maturity. She had a CD player behind her and was dancing to the music dressed to the nines in tribal garb like they wear in nearby Hmong villages. Fringe and tassels flew as she spun and moved to the music. She was very good. A little too good, perhaps. Some of her dance moves bordered on the provocative, perhaps moves she had learned watching western television. And while I have no evidence that she was involved in an abusive family environment, it certainly made me think about the implications in my own culture of dancing for money. I mentioned to Jason that filming this little girl was a little creepy, a bit unsettling. As we drew crowds, it helped these girls make more money than they would have, and we both donated generously to each of the girls as we had parked ourselves in front of each of them for much longer than we felt we could have for free. We talked about the fact that we have the opportunity to help others in the world fall in love with the Thai people, and to bring Jesus to a lost and hurting nation. But that kind of help is potentially far off, not nearly as immediate as throwing Thai Baht into her bowl. We want to support people, not necessarily their activities. It was a difficult moment knowing we were getting powerful footage, but that we were in essence supporting something we didn't entirely agree with. All in all it was a sobering moment, the kind of moment I suspect Jason and I will have many of in the coming years. We want to help others help these girls on a longer-term basis than we can in the moment, and we have to believe God will be faithful in people's hearts to move.

(All of these pictures are from the video footage I took that night. It's powerful stuff when there's motion, but internet being what it is here, this'll have to do.)

14359

The Monklets

Afternoon in Cha-am is a sticky affair. I know there are a million other places in the world that are hotter and/or more humid, but right now it feels very warm here. Very warm. Maybe when I'm old I'll obsess over weather, but for now I'll move on. There are far more interesting things to think about than the warm weather.

A couple days ago, a few of us here in Cha-am headed out on scooters in search of story. We took a short ride back to the monastery we had visited a couple days previously, and the area was nearly empty, with the distant sounds of little monklets in school emanating from a nearby building. We began wandering the grounds, slowly and respectfully moving around buildings and statues rich with carvings and color. I wandered out of the filtered light of tree-cover to shoot a twenty-foot-tall statue of Buddah covering his eyes and ears, and quickly began sweating out every ounce of water I had ingested in the previous twelve hours. From a distance I heard the powerful strains of Eastern music played by a Thai brass band. I sought out the source of the music, finding the drummers and brass players under a covered area, bare-footed sitting next to a table heavy with typically gaudy Buddhist symbols and icons. These men were practicing for a later performance, but seemed to be playing as if there were no tomorrow, with all the gusto and and brassy harshness you would expect from a group five times its size. It was powerful.

We had spent the better part of an hour shooting and musing around the grounds of the monastery, and were slowly heading back to our scooters when our monk friend from our previous visit to the grounds approached us, a giant yellow umbrella protecting him from the harsh Thai sun. He was all smiles at the sight of Jason, and the two of them instantly began sharing Jason's camera, taking turns being photograph-er and photograph-ed. As Jason was engaged with our monk friend, some of the little monk kids began spilling out of their nearby building, on break for lunch. I started shooting the kids a little from a distance, unsure whether it was completely acceptable for me to shoot either monks or children, and especially unsure when they were sort of both. The kids didn't seem to mind, and I approached a couple of them, turning my camera's screen toward them so they could see what and who I was shooting. One of the nearby adults began gesturing to me, and I quickly realized he was encouraging me to interact with the kids. I jumped at the opportunity, and approached a dozen or so of the young monks, most around the age of ten. They were such boys! I guess I had never thought much about the humanity of monk-hood, about the fact that these holy men are really just men. These boys were shoving each other, smiling and laughing, teasing and joking with each other and the camera. I got a real glimpse past the orange robes and shaved heads, into the individual personalities and characters of the kids. I thought about the monk Jason had befriended, how he was very much fascinated by photography, and began piecing together a fictional story for how his life may have resulted in him being a monk. Maybe he had always been interested in photography. Maybe he had always enjoyed the capturing of images, telling stories. Maybe his family, in an effort to receive blessing, had given him over to becoming a holy man as a young boy, like the boys surrounding me. Maybe all he wanted was to be a photographer, but had no choice as a man of the cloth. A lot of maybes, but greater than that, in my heart I began to understand the humanity of the Thai people.

Cultural separation can create divides in my ability to see people as people, but I've come one step closer to understanding and loving my Thai brothers and sisters. And all through a group of orange-clad head-shaved children.

14270

A Few Days in Cha-am

Sometimes I have to pinch myself about where I am right this minute. I'm sitting in an internet cafe in a coastal Thai town called Cha-am. Almost everything is different that it would be back home. Even logging into Blogger, I have to remember where the log-in link is on the page because the normal Blogger text has been replaced with Thai script. It's probably ninety to ninety-five degrees and quite humid outside with just enough breeze to make sitting in the shade tolerable. I smell local street food mixing with the salty sea air and fumes from the cars, trucks, busses, and scooters lazily motoring by. Nobody is in a hurry. The light turns slowly golden-yellow, making even the nastiest of sights

beautiful. It's pretty great.

The last few days have been some of the most satisfying I've ever had with regard to shooting video. Last Sunday, future teammate Jason, a new acquaintance Joel, and I went out on a photo field trip, slowly walking down the beach, shooting anything that caught our eyes. After a while we came upon a small fishing community. The men were cleaning out their nets, pulling out the tiny remnants of crustaceans and fish they had caught throughout the day. Jason took the initiative and clambered out onto the bamboo structure and though he didn't know the language, he was able to get permission to shoot candid photos of the men and women working. I piggybacked on his initiative and got some incredible footage of the weathered hands and faces of the men sitting around cleaning their nets. So real. So unpretentious. As we moved on, we heard rhythms in the distance. We discovered the music was coming from a Buddhist monastery full of children studying to by monks. There was a group performing for them. They had a dragon like you would see at a Chinese New Year celebration, and they made a human tower in the span of a minute. As we were covertly shooting, one of the monks, perhaps in his late twenties, early thirties, approached us. I thought for sure he was going to ask us to leave, or that we had committed some sort of faux pas, but it turned out he was really interested in Jason's camera equipment. Jason let the monk use his camera, and our new friend proceeded to give Jason incredible flexibility to pose or shoot photos this monk. It was amazing how quickly something like photography was able to strike up a conversation, begin a relationship in a way I had never imagined. It was amazing.

The next day, in the evening, Jason, Joel and I went with our new friends Andrew and Jim on a dusky scooter drive along the coastal road our hotel is on. We dismounted our scooters, and

went on foot down the beach a ways to one of the tallest hotels in town, around 37 stories to the top of the roof. After walking right by the sleeping security guard, we made our way to the top of the building to catch the tail end of dusk, wind whipping us like crazy. From the top you

can see the whole town, for miles in every direction. You couldn't help but pray for the people

living there. Powerful stuff to see man's creation and God's creation overshadowing it in

the sea and mountains and night sky. On the way back, I climbed on the back of Jason's scooter and shot video as we zoomed down Cha-am's major streets. I took some of the most satisfyingly cool video I've ever taken, gripping Jason with my knees so I could have both hands free to shoot. Brilliant.

Today Jason, Joel and I went on a lit

tle trip on a couple scooters to see what can be seen. We ended up back at the same monastery as the other day, but had a much greater degree of comfortability going in. Our monk friend from the other day met up with us again, and I was practically invited to take video of the young monks in training. At least some of the kids were around ten years old, and were definitely boys, shoving and messing with each other. Never before have I assigned such a high degree of reality, of humanity to the Buddhist holy men. They've always seemed so austere, so distant, but these boys were boys. My heart began swelling with joy for these young monks, and yet gripped with sorrow at the way their time and lives are so far from knowing Christ. But if a simple visit with a camera can begin fostering a true relationship, there is hope abundant!

I have begun to learn to love the Thai people. They are beautiful and warm (at least outside of the big cities) and full of possibility. I can hardly wait to share more with you all, and want so badly for you all to love them as I am learning to do.

(All the photos here are screenshots from the video I took.)

Back in Thailand with Time to Kill

My computer’s clock tells me it’s 4:10pm, but my body can tell it’s lying. Jumping fourteen hours into the future is not easily accomplished without some sort of physical punishment. I’m slowly beginning to realize that I don’t love travel, like I’ve previously claimed. I love being new places, but generally don’t enjoy the journey if it’s primarily flying airlines that somehow seem to miraculously cram more people into a plane at the expense of the tall man’s leg-room. I swear, those planes are getting more and more like those circus cars that somehow house a hundred clowns in a space that should fit four. Though I oft lament my consistent inability to sleep in sardine-cramped quarters, it’s certainly worth the discomfort to get where I’m going. Like so many things in life, the more you suffer through it, the greater the reward. Also, I’m feeling very dramatic this morning, so I hope you’re feeling comfortable with hyperbole.

I have five hours to kill while I wait for a few more Pioneers people to arrive at the airport so we can vanpool to the coast. I’m tired out from sleeping about four hours in the last 36, which seems to be step one in my usual adjustment to a drastically-new timezone. Step one: sleep less than two hours during sixteen to seventeen hours of flying. Step one can also include any sleep I may get in the airport waiting for my next connection, hence my total of four hours of sleep. Step two: crash. When I get where I’m going, I lay down for an indeterminate number of hours for some of the hardest sleep I get in any given year. When I visited my sister Daylan in Kenya, we drove home from the airport, I laid down in her bed and was immediately out into a rock-like dreamless sleep for the next eight hours. Today I don’t want to sleep THAT much because I’ll continue sleeping from mid-day to pre-dusk morning for the duration of my trip, and that would be a big waste of time, now wouldn’t it? I’m pretty good at adjusting when I fly West. Coming back home seems to take longer to adjust.

I’m really not sure why I’m telling you guys this, aside from the fact that I have time to kill and haven’t written something truly wordy in months, if not more than a year. I suppose writing this is better than continuing to wander the part of the airport outside the gates where there really is nothing to do. In case you didn’t already know, I’m a bit of an idiot. I come all the way to Thailand, and decided to camp out in a Starbucks, which is a bit more of a lateral step than a step up from aimless wandering. Writing really is one of my true releases, where I can get my thoughts, as scattered as they may be, out onto the page. I don’t much care whether anyone reads it. Kind of a public diary, I suppose. A place where the multitude of fragments of ideas in my mind find a place to get together and figure out how they all fit together. Or don’t fit together. Like how strange it seems that I’m listening to Allison Krauss and Union Station play for all to hear in Thailand of all places.

I tend to get down on American culture for the way it idolizes beauty and consumerism. The more places I visit, the more I realize America is far from alone in that idolization. I’m struck again at the enormous ads in the Tokyo and Bangkok airports, touting beauty products that cost and make a fortune worldwide by plastering larger than life women and men who have been airbrushed into oblivion (anyone remember that Arrested Development where Gob had to check albino on his mother’s fake drivers license because he “airbrushed her into oblivion?”) to make all of us want what they have. I know this is hardly a new area of discussion, but I was struck by it early this morning. There’s something about those European ads that instantly make me feel inferior. Pretty amazing that print media can draw out such a strong reaction.

It’s hard not to judge people in the Bangkok airport. Especially since I know a little about the shady things that can go on between Westerners and Thai women. Every time I see a white guy walking hand in hand with a young human stick-figure of a Thai woman, I instantly jump to a conclusion. I think that sort of judgmental attitude is a result of working on a short documentary with my good buddy Fritz. He shot a bunch of footage in Cambodia, and we put together a doc about a teenaged girl who was tricked into sex-slavery. The story has a happy ending as she is ultimately rescued from that world and given a new chance at life through a handful of amazing Godly people. Editing and composing the music for that project was an amazing and eye-opening experience. Non-profit Transitions Global uses it in their materials. I can show you the film sometime if you’re interested.

I had a realization at about 2:00 this morning. The video gear I brought with me on this trip is worth a lot of money. A lot. I think the quality you get from good gear is easily worth its cost, but sometimes it makes you wonder. I expect in the next couple days to be shouldering my spendy cam out in public and have someone ask for money. I’ll probably say I don’t have any money or just ignore them. And even if I don’t have the money and I’m not lying, I’m still carrying around a piece of equipment that could be worth more than a years salary for any number of locals here. It’s a bizarre and uncomfortable dichotomy that so often the people telling the stories could be eliminating the very stories they’re telling just by investing in those people. I suppose that would probably be a short-lived solution to a much greater problem, one that could certainly benefit from a bit of exposure. But still, it makes you think.

This is my first trip in the last year and a half that I’ve taken without Mandi by my side. The one benefit I get from this (lack of) arrangement is that I have more time to take my time with footage because I don’t have to think about how I’m wasting her time by stopping every ten seconds to shoot. Ultimately, however, I already miss her a lot. I don’t have anybody to be grumpy (or occasionally deliriously giddy) around from lack of sleep. I don’t have a hand to hold out in public. I don’t have that voice of reason with me at all times, the one that snaps me out of a funk or makes me laugh really hard. In part, I have too much time to cogitate on such things while I wait for the other members of my vanpool, and when things pick up a bit the pangs of longing will subside to a dull ache. But right now, while I have time to just BE for the first time in a long long while, my only wish is that she were here with me. Next time she will be. That will be a good day.

So thanks for sharing in my ramblings. I’ve not had verbal (not verbal, though, as it’s written) diarrhea in a good long while. Perhaps free time is Dayn’s perfect verbal stool softener. Gross. I’m so sorry for that last statement, though apparently not sorry enough to delete it. Next time I probably won’t have so much to say, though who really knows?

Daynold out.

14136