Sunday, December 18, 2005

Notable Quotes

TC has already given the outline of the trip to Mei-nung, so I can skip right past the sequential bits. Here are some memories and musings.


~~If he had a church, I would have joined it tonight.
Me after experiencing Thank You, by Takashi on Saturday night.

Thank You started off with Takashi and Kenji playing on stage together. Takashi explained that the song was a statement of thankfulness. "Thank you, mountains. Thank you, trees. Thank you, sky. Thank you, Mei-nung. Thank you. Thank me." Then he moved off the stage and onto the grass in front of the audience while continuing to play and sing. Then he started dancing, moving in a graceful manner similar to taichi, swinging his arms slowly out and then bringing his hands together in the Asian way of blessing someone, facing first one direction, and then another, over and over, repeating the lyrics to the song like a chant. Witnessing it was simply mesmerizing, and dare I say, palpable, something like being washed with chi. Everyone in the audience was in rapture. None of us had ever seen or heard anything like it before. Words fail to express the vibe that song created.

~~He’s still breathing.

The head of the Hakka Museum in Mei-nung after testing to see that Connor still had breath after performing on harp on Red River.

One difference between playing at a nightclub and at a festival is that a festival stage usually comes with an emcee or two. The Voice of the People emcee, the head of the Hakka Museum, was not as disturbing as the guy in a skirt at BB2, but he was definitely a character. Not only was it his job to introduce the acts, etc., he was also responsible for quizzing the various Ramblers on various topics while we waited to get started. Typically, he asked me what the washboard was called, and generally bothered everyone else with the usual comments. He was a friendly guy. He came back stage before we went on and got introduced to everyone. Then it turned out that we wanted to be able to say something in Hakka. What we ended up learning was “This is good,” in Hakka, of course. It sounds something like Da gay ho. Before we went on, I think the emcee got five minutes on that bit alone.

~~It was nibbling the hair on my arms, and then it reached up and yanked on my lower lip with its beak.

Sandy explaining how a goose had kissed him violently.

I never actually saw the goose, or geese. Of course, I and everyone else heard them all weekend, usually when we were trying to sleep. In fact, the goose may have been getting back at all of us through its attack on Sandy. We did stay up till nearly dawn drinking and talking in the garden both nights we stayed at the Range Bed and Breakfast (careful, that’s ren-ge, not Home on the Range).

~~This is a tourist hotel operated by Teacher Chen. It’s a beautiful house with a very natural garden.

A local tour guide introducing the Range B & B via his megaphone to a tour group at 8:30 Saturday morning.

Amazingly, no other Rambler admitted to having heard the tour guide blasting away on the megaphone a few hours after we retired on Saturday morning. I didn’t dream it, though. I got up, went to the window, looked outside, and saw the whole group of tourists standing in the garden looking at the pond. Fortunately, I then saw Teacher Chen quickly come out of the dining room and ask the guide to keep it down because she had VIPs sleeping it off. Ninety minutes later when I finally got up to eat my breakfast, I saw the tour group weeding a nearby field in the hot sun. Country justice.

~~It would have been right over there behind those trees, stretching between that mountain over there on the right and this other one here on the left.

Mr. Chung explaining where the controversial Mei-nung Dam would have been built had the people of Mei-nung not stopped it by protesting.

Sunday’s performance was at a museum honoring Chung Li-he, a noted writer in Mei-nung. His sons run the place, and they were on hand during our performance. Before one of the brothers got up to introduce the museum, Christina and I were chatting with him about the dam. I’ve been through Mei-nung several times, but I had never learned where the dam was to have been built. Mr. Chung gestured to two nearby hills and cleared up any question I had about the dam’s location. The valley that would have been covered in water appeared to be undeveloped, and filled with the lush vegetation that covers hillsides in that part of Taiwan. It would be interesting to venture a ways up that valley and see what has been saved. The protests to stop the dam were apparently led by the Mr. Chungs, and were supported by local musicians, notably Lin Shen-xiang and his cohorts. I am certainly no expert on this movement. One thing is clear in my mind, though. The people have not give up their opposition. Mr. Chung said that the dam had never been permanently cancelled, and that if the Executive Yuan ever reactivated the proposal, the people would rise up again to defeat it again.

~~See how they put the tobacco leaves on the ground around the base of the plants? Nicotine is a powerful insecticide.

A Rambler (I think this must have been Will) discussing the state of tobacco farming as we took one of our strolls between Hakka Museum and our hotel.

I grew up around farms, but I had never seen tobacco being grown before. It was interesting to see what cigarettes look like before they get rolled up. The plants are about 1.5 to 2 meters tall, and the leaves are larger than I imagined, perhaps 18 inches by 12 inches across. Across from the tobacco fields, nary a farmer to be seen among the rows, by the way, lay ponds where water plants were being grown. A sign near one of the ponds identified the plant as kudzu. Kudzu is a major problems in waterways in the southern United States. It grows so fast that it chokes up narrow rivers and canals, and the governement has to come in and rip it out. It is one of those pesky foreign invasive species that you hear so much about. Here in Taiwan, they were farming it. Like I said, the tobacco fields were empty of farmers, but the kudzu ponds were being worked by farmers wearing wet suits and standing in chest deep water. They had floating baskets and they were picking something off the kudzu and putting it into the baskets. I am reminded at times like these that teaching is an excellent job. It certainly beats standing in a pond all day and picking succulents off of water plants.

~~The county magistrate asked me if I had been to Chung Cheng Lake. I said I had, and then I asked him when they were going to get around to changing its name.

Bizzness Kennedy reporting on his tete-a-tete with the Kaohsiung County Magistrate.

To understand the significance of Brian’s quote, it would help if you knew several facts. Chung cheng is one of the names (that he chose himself, according to some sources) of Chiang Kai-shek. There are Chung-cheng roads, buildings, schools, towns, bridges, and obviously lakes, all over Taiwan. They are a reminder of the old days under the Kuomintang (the KMT) when Chiang seemed to foster a hero cult. Kaohsiung County, in which Mei-nung is located, is a bastion of Taiwanese identity and firmly green, meaning its inhabitants are largely supporters of the Democratic Progressive Party (the DPP). What Brian was getting at was “Why hasn’t the DPP changed the names of all the places named after Chiang Kai-shek?” A damn good question. Brian apparently also congratulated the magistrate on his recent victory in the elections (held the weekend before the festival), and pointedly asked what had happened to the rest of the DPP’s candidates. The DPP suffered one of its worst election defeats in years, losing a majority of the county government seats to members of the KMT, but keeping Kaohsiung County, Tainan County, and Pingtung County in southern Taiwan. Brian’s forthrightness at the B & B garden summit earned him a box of tea and an invite to come to the county magistrates office and drink tea again some day.

~~Nope, it’s still there.

Christof talking to Dave about the distortion coming from one of Dave’s digital effects.

Christof “the Observer” is a mountain among sound men, not for his size, but for his laser ear and innovative mixing ability (separate output channels for individual frequency bands, who’d have thought?). Dave had a couple of boxes that he wanted to run the signal of his guitar through before trucking it off to Christof at the mixing deck. After Christoff initially announced that there was a distortion on the line, he and Dave had this conversation. Dave: “How about now?” Christoff: “Nope, it’s still there. (Dave twiddles with the knobs on one or the other of the boxes.) Dave: “How about now?” Christoff: “Nope, it’s still there. (more twiddling) Dave: “How about now?” Christoff: “Nope, it’s still there. And on. Finally, Dave had to unplug one of the boxes. And then Christof finally said that the distortion was gone. Throughout this exchange, the Ramblers looked at each other, suppressing smiles. We knew what the outcome would be. Christof wanted a clean sound hitting his deck, and it did not seem likely that he would give in. Of course, none of the rest of could hear the distortion. Nor could Dave, I believe. And that added to the merriment of the whole thing. Christof could hear us better than we could hear ourselves. We were not going to finish our sound check until he got what he wanted.

~~Joseph, Caroline, get over here! Put those kazoos back.

Paul to his children.

There was a smallish audience at the Sunday performance, but one of the best parts of the day was seeing Joseph and his little sis Caroline running around like banshees while we played. They got up on stage, they ran around in front of the stage, they took the kazoos, they fought over them, they played them, and then when Joseph was finished playing the one that his father still hadn’t convinced him to give up, he jammed it into the end of the microphone stand. Priceless.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

The MBRs in Meinong

The weather in the Muddy Basin was cold, windy and wet when I arrived at the main station on Friday night to meet up with the other Ramblers, get on a bus, and head south for sunnier skies. Slim, Thumper, Dave and Sandman were already there, huddled out by the bus and waiting for me and Conor. The organizers were there as well as some kids with video cameras, already "documenting" our historic voyage I guess. Conor showed up, bathrooms were visited (there was one on the bus, but they claimed it would stink if anyone used it), and we set off.

We pretty much had the bus to ourselves. We congregated in the back, just like the "bad" kids at school and sat back, looking at the scenery, all the while congratulating ourselves on finally having a "real tour bus". Of course, it wasn't long before David got his guitar out and started playing. One by one, we all got instruments out and played along. The camera people grabbed their equipment and rushed back to catch us in the act, but there was no rush; we played pretty much the whole way down, in between bathroom breaks at strange deserted rest areas that felt like they were shipped in straight from the midwestern U.S. I had a sore throat and a sore back and wasn't feeling too great, but just getting out of town made it all worthwhile.

The ride passed quickly, and we got to Meinong in the wee hours of the next morning. The weather was clear and dry, and warmer than Taipei had been. We were staying at the "Range Bed & Breakfast", a pseudo-western-style hotel amidst farmland and near a group of mountains with a giant swath of stone in the shape of the character for the Chinese word "ren" or person. Due to the late hour, we had to wake the owner, who arranged all of our rooms right there.

After about four hours of sleep, minus the wakefulness induced by a particularly loud goose in a pen downstairs, we dragged ourselves out of bed for a hearty breakfast of egg, ham and peanut-butter toast. Coffee was passed around but I don't drink the stuff unless I absolutely have to. Our soundcheck was supposed to be at 11:30, so we walked through the fields and along a lakeside to the culture center where we were playing later. It was sunny and hot, perfect weather after cold, dreary Taipei. I stopped many times along the way to take pictures of the lily ponds next to the lake. What looked like tobacco was planted in other fields, big leafy plants about two meters high.

The center looked pretty new, and even a bit out of place among all the little farms. A bus had been parked across the main road for use as a little stage, but our event was being held in front of the center itself. We met Christoff, the German sound guy, as well as some of the other musicians such as Takashi and Ken from Japan. They were just finishing their sound check as we arrived. Children were playing around an old tree by the stage that held a large mortar in its outspread branches. A coffee truck guy coughed into his microphone across the street in front of the bus, competing with Christoff's soundchecking.

The center provided a good, solid lunch for us afterwards, and we headed back to the Range to get dressed. I couldn't believe how nice the weather was, though haze obscured the more distant mountains. After we got back to the B&B Brian and Paul, two friends of ours, arrived, as well as Sandman's wife Jojo and some other friends of theirs.

Later, decked out in our Ramber regalia, we again crossed the fields to the cultural center, where dinner was waiting. We played as the sun went down, and did a pretty decent job. Christoff did a great job of the sound and was really on the ball during the show. The crowd, mostly local people, seemed to like the music, though half the time they were staring at Brian, who was making his presence known through hoots and calls throughout the show. It was great. Afterwards, Takashi and Ken did their show, as well as Shengxiang, Yufeng and his group. At the end, we all got up on stage and did two or three of Shengxiang's songs, passing solo parts around among the musicians.

After adjourning to the Range again, spirits were bought and consumed while sitting around in the courtyard of the hotel. I would have liked to have stayed up longer, but some impromptu qi-gong sessions somehow made me sleepy, so I turned in relatively early, around one. Thus I was up pretty early the next day for sandwiches and a nice bicycle ride around the lake the next day before our next gig, which was miles away at a memorial library/museum in honor of the Hakka author Zhong Li-he.

The museum turned out to be a recently renovated two-story building filled with the pictures and writings of the late author. Down a little path lay another building that was a private residence of the author's son, now himself an old man. Further on was a large grove of palm trees. It was very pleasant. The weather was so hot that many of us, including myself, bought Zhong Li-he T-shirts to cool off in.

A stage was set up, complete with a sound guy, monitors and speakers, but the organizers seemed to have forgotten the audience, so we played to our own people and anyone who happened to be there visiting the museum at the time. I think we did a bang-up job, though, and the camera people seemed happy, at least. I was standing in a spot where I couldn't hear the bass, so I kept trying to get the sound guy to turn it up, when the rest of the band wanted to turn it down. Well, live and learn.

We took the hotel van back to the Range and waited around in the courtyard, talking and enjoying the weather as dusk fell, until getting back on the bus to Taipei. This time it was only me, Conor, David and Slim, but Dave and Conor kept us entertained on the way back by practicing for their duet performances. We kept having to put on more and more layers of clothing as we traveled north in the night, and by the time we reached Taipei again, we were all muffled up again as we had been when we set out. We went our separate ways, Slim and I sharing a taxi after failing to find a working escalator down to the MRT, and stairs with all our stuff were simply not an option.

I'm really happy that I went on our little tour; it was exactly what I needed after being stuck in Taipei for so long. Sunny, warm skies, little lanes criss-crossing farmland, happy audiences and great music...we need to do more things like this.

Wednesday, December 07, 2005



Hat Band

The power of the hat goes without saying. (If that were actually so, I would probably end this post right here.).

I've had a lot of hats in my time. The hat I wear most often now is a black fedora. It's a blues man hat. It says something about the way I feel about playing the blues, showing a respect for tradition, but also acknowledging the effect that it has on the audience when I play. An announcement to all assembled: here are the blues.

Like a lot of kids, I grew up wearing baseball caps. I once played the blues in a workshop setting while wearing a baseball cap. It was one of my favorite caps, one of the two that I bought in Hong Yeh village in Taidong. It had a cool red "maple" leaf on the front, and the words "Baseball birthplace in Taiwan" printed around the leaf. It was at the same time patriotic and subversive.

Another favorite hat of mine is a tam in the colors of the Jamaican flag. I would never wear it playing the blues. It just wouldn't feel right. I wear the tam when I'm recording something with a dub feel on my computer. I used to have long hair, and then at least I could fill the tam with my hair. Now, I wear my hair so short, a beret would probably be more appropriate. Cable car operators in San Francisco wear black berets, something like special forces berets, with all sorts of pins on them. I could see a blues man wearing that, especially in a smoky club on Divisadero, after hours.

Somewhere in my mother's attic is an old army helmet from World War II that I played in when I was a kid. It is hard to imagine playing the blues in such a hat, but I suppose if I were in an air raid, and there just happened to be some instruments handy in the bunker, a steel helmet might be just the thing. If I were playing a steel National, I'd want to be wearing one of those shiny steel helmets that color guards wear.

I've had quite a few ski hats. If were in Churchill, Manitoba, on the shores of Hudson Bay, playing my washboard, I might think that such a hat would be quite suitable, especially if it were snowing. I don't think I would want to wear one with dangly balls, though. It would be quite distracting to the audience, I think, if while I were grooving to the beat, the dangly balls on my hat were bouncing along as well.

I had a straw Panama hat years ago. I think it was made in Ecuador. I'd play the blues in a Panama hat, and I would probably want to be smoking a big Cuban cigar. I've never had a straw boater. I'd like to play the blues in such a hat, and if I had the chance, I'd do it wearing a striped sport coat in bright summer colors, and white patent leathes shoes. But not in Churchill, unless it were in the middle of the two weeks of summer.

Our blues hats announce to the audience that we are performers playing roles. Like actors on the ancient Greek stage, we put on masks, but not of tragedy and comedy; our hats signify the blues. The hats put the audience in the mood for music that speaks of the drama of life. The blues is both tragedy and comedy, and our blues hats help us to communicate that with our music.

Sunday, December 04, 2005

That sinking and shaking Muddy Basin

This article from the Guardian reports on a theory that Taipei 101 may have caused an ancient earthquake fault to reopen.

Saturday, December 03, 2005


I been down so long...



"I been down so long, down don't worry me..."


When I woke up this mornin' the Muddy Basin was gettin' me down, and that song came to me.

I sang it out loud as I walked to the MRT, and the day got better and better as the day went along. Expected grief turned into unexpected happiness. It started when I stepped onto the MRT in the morning and the "xiao pengyous" smiled and laughed. Not at me. They were just playing around with each other. And on the MRT home, sittin' there with Thumper, the "xiao pengyous" were playing with their mom, having fun. And this mom had eyebrows that could move around with amazing animation. They were like caterpillars crawling around over her eyes. I had never seen anything like it. The rest of the day between the MRT rides to and from the great city of Tiptown on this day were also filled with equally strange moments that made me stop and smile. I'll try to remember this day, and enjoy the memory.

Been down so long, down don't worry me...

(Photo is titled "Sally is Upside Down." I found it by doing a google image search of the word "down". It came from http://www.laceysenderovitzfamily.dk/Photo%20gallery%20pages/Spring_2004.htm." I have no idea who she is, and I hope she and her family are well, and don't mind me using her image on this weblog, but she seems to be upside down, which is a form of being down. I wonder how long she has been that way.)