Kindama Boyz?

"'After the concert, we took him to the police bureau,' police officer Tang Se-huai said. 'He appeared scared and nervous, saying he did not know he was not supposed to do this in Taiwan.'

Chartered ROFLcopter right there. Thanks to bobosa for bringing this IHT article to my attention.

-"Japanese rock band singer caught dropping shorts in Taiwan concert," International Herald Tribune.

I noticed that within hours of uploading my short video clip of the Ging Nang Boyz's performance onto YouTube, the view count spiked to the thousands, for a short time earning honors as the #50th most viewed video of the day. Whoa what?? Fortunately, my video wasn't too incriminating for the band. Apparently some tabloid reporters were looking to create news where it really shouldn't be a big deal. There were rumors of people who sighted a woman in a trucker hat and sunglasses cellphoning immediately after the show and whispering, "Yep, I got the footage." The police don't care to waste four hours on this 'case' either, unless people filed complaint about how traumatized they were.

Booo. Taiwan's media continues to suck.

That said, eat up the scandal! Here is another short clip of Ging Nang being generally intense onstage:

Dispatch from Formoz Day II: "Are You a Hologram?"

Sweet Jesus on rollerblades!! Day II has been so phenomenal that I'm beginning to feel a little guilty, like I've glutted my ears beyond my reasonable right to such aural awesome.

Seriously stop it guys. Just please disappoint me a little. You're creeping me out.

I'm too tired to write too much, and I still have a climactic Day III to rev up for (the schedule is so packed and solid that I don't know how I'm gonna grab dinner/drinks in between shows), so here's a quick summary:



I had absinthe, with flaming sugar cubes and absinthe spoons and all. I'm told the absinthe in Taipei, while legal, is rather low on the wormwood content. It made a cool drink anyway, and it still had a special kick that set the mood for the concert.

蘇打綠 (SodaGreen) was the pitch-perfect, saccharine folk outfit that they're supposed to be. The keyboardist was also flamingly homosexual.

We went to watch 絲襪小姐 (Ms. Stockings), whose drummer is Sonny's guitar instructor (!). It was a chill stage where everyone sat on the pavilion's red tile ground and around trees, sipping beer. They had a girl violinist and I've never seen the violin rock so hard. Also, Sugar Plum Ferry's guitarist was in their formation and it was his birthday! They gave him presents onstage. It was a d'awwww moment.

Mercury Rev: I was expecting them to be modestly, blandly good. Some low energy dream pop. Folded armed head-nodders floating into the night. Flaming Lips without the flaming.

Mother of god, absinthe shots before Mercury Rev was definitely a good call. They were the highlight of the night.



"Are you a hologram?" was one of the many weird things they had displayed on the screen behind them.



I would so inundate you with a lot more videos. It's so hard to choose between the clips.

Japan's punk pranksters 銀杏Boys literally rocked their hearts out, putting FLCL's finale to shame. I picked a clip from their last song, post-rockout: the lead vocalist is left with his boxers only, having smashed a number of things and kicked himself over. He has an absurdly huge mascara bank smeared under his eyes so he could sweat and scream and have his black tears running all over his face by the end of his gig, laughing hysterically, spent and naked, his heart offered to you in outstretched platters, what Dave Eggers claims to be by the end of his book -- the sheer mad joy of Beats. The cheers tore apart everyone's throats. This is what a reckless party at the end of the world would sound like.

Dispatch from Formoz: Day I - 爽．到．暴!!!

4PM @ Formoz Rock Festival 2007, Taipei, Taiwan

Opening act -- Dean & Britta, former lead singer and members of seminal '80s shoegaze bands Galaxie 500 and Luna. Few people can catch the opening act at such hours and under such a tropical sun. The stadium is dusty and only half-filled, but a lot of the people who fill the half are sporting vintage Galaxie and Luna shirts. Some of them whisper to each other about how they can't believe D&B are finally here.

Britta: "Should we just start?"
Dean: "I think so, Britta."
Britta: "Uhm."
Audience: [silent, sweating, unresponsive and shy with their English]
Sonny, who's standing beside me and sweating like a sponge: "[Goddammit] YES!!!"
Britta: "...Was that a yes? Do I hear a yes?"
Audience: [still comatose; some of them turn around to stare at Sonny while they fan themselves with concert pamphlets]
Britta: "I guess that's a yes?? Okay, 1. 2. 3-ah-one-two-threee-four--"

The crowd of loyal indie fans go crazy. I joke to Sonny that he officially kick started the 2007 Formoz Festival.



The time finally came when I traded my three-day Formoz Festival ticket for a flimsy wristband that allows me to enter concert grounds. I am strictly warned not to take this wristband off for the next few days, or else it's trouble. It's supposedly water-proof, but sweat and manhandling has already made it wrinkly.

Oh my god was it a good day.

So I arrived at the festival with Sonny around noon. For Taiwan's most high-profile indie music festival, it seemed awfully untrafficked. Nothing like the sweltering shoulder-rubbing crowd at Hohaiyan Festival. But then you look around and everyone's wearing their fav band shirts. You feel your lack of music nerd-cred. No red-faced and shirtless revelers around you, either. The crowd is different.

Dean & Britta were kinda irked for their performance since (A) it was hot as BALLS and their New York balls cannot take such hot; and (B) soundcheck took FOREVER. It's unfortunate that D&B had to fly dozens of hours to Taipei just to be soundcheck guinea pigs. So even for New York indie smartasses, they were acting kinda cold. But they were good anyway. They played their Galaxie 500 and Luna songs obligingly, though they obviously seem tired of being asked to play the classics all the time.

Now D&B performed in a relatively shabby and empty stadium. But Formoz has 7 stages and hundreds of bands, and the other stages are located in an adjoining cultural park, which, as you can see below-



-is the classiest outdoor concert venue I've seen in quite some time. It's all built on a leafy, labrynthine hill too. The architecture is traditional Taiwanese -- lots of tiled walls and staircases to sit on and courtyards to crowd. Too bad the bigger international acts (Yo La Tengo, Testament, QURULI, Anna Tsychiya, TERIYAKI BOYZ) will not have the pleasure of playing at the cooler stages. OK GO will get to play on the "Mountain Stage", though, and that's one of the neater ones as I'll show you in a bit.



We let D&B go without an encore and headed to the other stages to see Sugar Plum Ferry, one of Taiwan's most famous post-rock bands. And holyshit were they the best thing to happen in the already-awesome day. I've seen them play at The Wall, but the claustrophobic bar setting doesn't do them justice since they (being the post-rock weirdoes that they are) don't waste words chatting with the audience in between songs. The bassist is even famous for playing with his back facing the audience. Truly eccentric people they are, but wow did they dominate today.



We sat down in the traditionally-built courtyard at around sunset. Their music crescendoed while airplanes zoomed by (we're close enough to the military airport) and a brilliant sunset exploded overhead. Then the full moon rose over the ornate tiled roof right over their heads as they played. How any concert can be so painfully perfect escapes my mind.

Then we headed to the Mountain Stage to check out The Shine & Shine & Shine & Shine, crossing traditional Chinese castle walls on the way. They had a big table in the middle of the band formation which the lead female vocalist was dancing on top of in between keyboard solos and turntable manipulations. She's just about as sane as Helena Bonham-Carter on crack-laced shrooms -- and that made them entirely deliciously enjoyable.



The lead vocalist would randomly scream "爽!!!" in the middle of her songs, then pick up a wand from the table and twirl it around before pelting it at the guitarist and banging her microphone on the drummer's cymbals. Then she'd take swigs of whiskey and molest the guitarist some more. It was epic. Her strategy for selling their EP was: "I have 6 EPs on my table. They cost too much and we only recorded one song on each. On some of them we didn't record at all! Ho-hah -- 爽!!!"

The stage itself was at the top of the hill and had a full view of Taipei 101 and Shinkong Tower as well as the full moon. The tiled walls around the stage were entangled in old tree roots.

After The Shines x4, we went to check out Testament, a supposedly proto-Metallica San Francisco band. I'm not a metalhead by any stretch of imagination, but they were one of today's headline acts, so I figured why not. Sonny has seen Tool and other metal bands perform, but I didn't know what to expect from a metal concert.

Mike, I think you'd totally dig them.

So we headed back to the big stadium. By this time it was no longer sun-drenched and dustry, but quiet and completely dark. We wondered what the hell was up, where the band was, etc. A tightly packed group had already gathered in front of the stage, holding their breaths. Then the stage lit up and the audience turned into a full-fledged cult. People were not so much crowd surfing as they were being tossed around.



True to the genre's reputation, Testament made a hugely theatrical stage entrance and seemed genuinely excited to be on stage. I found that I enjoyed them a lot more than I'd expected.



Pretty good song (token metal-band ballad, I'm told):



Well, shit, it's 3AM now. I need to catch tomorrow's shows! We also caught this band of art students/indie animators who screened their trippy animated MVs while they performed. One of them involved re-animating Van Gogh's portraits and sunflower paintings. On their last song, people with deer masks and antlers charged onstage and attacked the lead vocalist with firecrackers.

Anyway, just wanted to say that all the bands I've seen so far have been pleasantly surprising in some way. I'll keep yall updated for day 2!

"Area College Kid Who's Just Discovered Yo La Tengo Annoys Friends"

So I was just at work and digging through old photos, and I dug up some photos of a random game developer's party I crashed in Oakland.



It's pretty bizarre how I was pulled into such a geekster carnival. It was Halloween weekend. My sister works as events manager for a game developer's magazine, so she got invited to this party at an Oakland warehouse where a couple of the concept artists call home. I mean an in-the-middle-of-nowhere-crime-scene-body-dumpsite kinda place. Anthony Hopkins would gladly feast on your kidneys in such a warehouse. Angelina Jolie would have naked rainy lesbian knife fights here. But there were huge gratuitous and doubtless very illegal fires on the premise so that was enough to make me stay. As my sister ran her gauntlet of networking conversations, I somehow ended up being kegman for a bit and talking to game developers who want to roam the American roads and one day become pre-Fear And Loathing Hunter S. Thompson. Pretty awesome stuff. Though it was totally unrelated to Berkeley, it was strangely enough one of the most 'Berkeley' experiences I had there.



My sister's coworkers. I had to help them kick apart a wooden scaffolding to help fuel the bonfires. Besides sipping Pabst Blue Ribbons, they were really good at tearing apart wooden crates. Pretty cool people (PBR notwithstanding).

If you've ever wondered why the popular American imagination (i.e. Hollywood movies) insists on seeing scholars as impotent and bitter alcoholic misanthropes, this is an awesome article. Thanks again to Arts & Letters Daily for linking to this.

While you're enjoying the article and last week's awkward turtle, please also have a traffic mantis:



Found on the outer window of my internship office. Traffic mantis says hi, and he promises to fuck you up if you don't read my blog.

So I'm still jostling with my editor on my second travel/culture article topic. I want to write about the Taipei indie scene -- or alternatively, on the "Best Places to Pretend That You're Not the Yupster That You Really Are." I'm a glib little shit, I know. I even booked my overpriced 3-day concert pass to Taipei's 2007 Formoz Rock Festival, which will feature New Yorkers Yo La Tengo and OK GO, Japanese acts QURULI and RIZE, and awesome Taiwanese bands Tizzy Bac, 1976, 8mm Sky (八厘米天空), Sugar Plum Ferry (甜梅號) and of course the ever-androgynous SodaGreen (蘇打綠). These are the bands I'm most psyched about seeing, anyway. For my own good, I want to keep my expectations low, but GODDAMIT WILL IT BE THE BEST 3 DAYS OF SUMMER EVER.

I mean, Taipei's not the most happening place in terms of the arts, but the scene is small and cozy. It doesn't have the frizzy-edged obsessiveness and posturing that seems to characterize the San Francisco scene (a Sufjan Steven and Kaiser Chiefs concert sold out at Berkeley within 24 hours of its announcement; a Yoko Ono exhibition also attracted a huge ironic-Beatnik-revivalist crowd). When I dropped by San Francisco on my way back to Taipei, my sister brought me to this new sushi trendster bar in Haight-Ashbury. I kid you not, the whole restaurant was populated by hornrimmed emo glasses-wearing, trendily bald DJ-lookalikes who wear nothing but the messiest of pin-striped shirts and tornest of jeans. Their girlfriends were either sake-sipping Asian queens or the Kate Winslets of Eternal Sunshine. Maybe SanFran is catching up to NYC in its overriped-ness. I'm glad I don't have to deal with that at concerts here.

Onto more wholesome family things that don't carry the possible risks of deafness and hipsters: I went fishing with my uncle, my mom and my cousins at Keelung, just an hour's drive from Taipei-

Have An Awkward Turtle

Well errrr hur-hur that was awkward... <:B
(drawn while waiting for my sister to arrive at the airport)

The Vanishing Taipei Boho

Taipei's ghetto version of the Floating Gardens of Babylon. A PoMo mess, like the rest of the city.

I was struggling to come up with a topic to write my second travel article on, so my very bohemian coworker suggested that I check out 寶藏巖 (or Treasure Hill), a hidden and run-down artist colony next to the 新店 River and National Taiwan University. She warned me that I wouldn't be able to write a tourist recommendation that 50-year-old CEOs can safely bring their weekend wife and kids on (I am writing for a business magazine, after all) but that sounded too awesome to pass up. I read up on the little hill-side community and found out that the village has been the locus of a heated debate on city planning and gentrification. Mayor Ma brought in bulldozers to tear the place down on several occasions since the architecture is shabby and old and mostly unauthorized by the city government. The artists, students and professors of course pelted the demolition team with whatever shit they could find. The city then cut their electricity and water, but the residents were already used to that anyway. This is terribly romantic stuff.

But the conflict brought unprecedented attention onto the once-hidden village and eventually led the travel section of New York Times to recommend it as a touristy hang out, even going so far as to recommend specific cafes. The Treasure Hive cafe eventually closed because the owner got pissed off by the tourists who came to snap photos and pester him about life in the artist colony.

The college student's blog ring about Treasure Hill hasn't seen an update since 2006, so I decided to check out the place on my own.



The trail to Treasure Hill was hidden behind a water processing plant. I wouldn't have found it without these graffiti hints. Also, note that the lower one in the above picture looks very similar to the one I snapped before. I've been seeing this artist (who goes by the name 'Reach') all around town (along with Ano and Bounce, who seem to collaborate with him a lot).

So I followed the trail of scattered graffiti and eventually found a definitive sign on a crumbling wall and next to a plastic red sculpture.



Awesomeness! I went a little further down the narrow trail and came upon a small buddhist temple bearing the same name. No one was in the temple. A little park next to it had the biggest proliferation of graffiti art that I've seen in Taipei. Some pretty cool ones:



Then I finally found the village itself (!!) and there were aluminum barricades around the entire hilly building cluster.

It was closed.

A heavily-photoshopped plaque with smiling villagers and happy children promised that the city government (on behalf of the Treasure Hill community) was eager to see me again when it re-opens in 2008. The words were progressive and confident in technology and promised a better hill under government management. It will become a designated culture district.

I was reminded of a Qing-Dynasty street that I stumbled upon on my last article assignment to Taipei's oldest district. Same green barricades, same cheery words. The Qing Dynasty storefronts were to be strategically torn down and rebuilt as a Disneyfied simulacrum of itself under the city's banner of cultural management.

Not sure what to say.

[Edit] More photos of Treasure Hill.

Hohaiyan 海洋音樂祭

So the Hohaiyan Rock Festival last weekend was more about the carnivalesque atmosphere than the music. Not that I didn't see this coming, but wow was it a crowd. The one-and-a-half hour train ride to Fulong Beach was so sweaty and sardine-packed that my fingers began to wrinkle from the moist air. Sauna, anyone?

Just as Pots Weekly and Freddy Lin (organizer of the more independent Formoz Rock Festival) predicted, Hohaiyan has become jarringly over-commercialized since 7-11 picked up sponsorship (and 7-11 here is not the suburban podunk shambles as it is in the States; it's obiquitous to the degree of elevating Taiwan's convenience store concentration to the world's highest). I love 7-11 and all, but I really don't need them blaring S.H.E. music videos and commercial jingles at my supposedly-grassroot music festivals.

So my high school buddies and I were so happy to be liberated from the sardine train that we ran straight for the beaches and jumped into the ocean (clothes and all) right after we got there. We would've died otherwise. Though walking around in wet, sandy boxers for the remainder of the day was not such a pleasant experience.

As the sun began to set, we started heading towards the stage and choosing camp-out spots on the beach. We dug little trenches in the sand and made makeshift couches and fell asleep in them reading, chatting and drinking beer until the night began to set. Honestly made the whole ordeal entirely worthwhile.

Conclusion: Hohaiyan is good as a once-in-a-lifetime thing, even just as a study in Taiwan's burgeoning youth counter-culture (they call the current generation 七年級生s -- born into the 80s, averse to soul-killing office work, lovers of graphic design and ridiculously torn jeans, and most of all disgusted by their parents' living-is-for-working philosophy). In the end, though, I still much prefer the hangout atmosphere of live-house bar performances.

I'm close to finishing my first travel story for the internship. It looks like the final magazine version will be kinda depersonalized and truncated, but I'll upload it anyway when it's ready.

Also

While we're on the topic of dicking around, I thought that I should report a drunken impulse that I hatched and carried out at the Underworld music bar (what an emo bar name). As you can see from the previous post, the bathroom walls were plastered with all sorts of graffiti-cartoon faces. So I pulled out a thick drawing pencil from my backpack and made one of them blurt out, in cartoon speech bubble: "T.S. ELIOT HAS NOTHING ON ME."

Are you proud of me?

I just read Allen Ginsberg's Howl and I wish there were 36 hours in a day.