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.
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