At first the Formoz Festival looked like it was going to be the slightly poor Japanese cousin of next week's Ho-Hai-Yan Rock Festival with the lineup's heavy tilt toward Japanese bands that you wouldn't know unless you were somehow really into Japanese rock. But that was before the organizers -- Taiwan Rock Alliance (TRA) -- finalized their roster and made a surprise confirmation that American folk-rock legend Michelle Shocked will be playing the festival's first night on Friday, July 30.
"Michelle Shocked actually approached us to be part of the Say Yes to Taiwan concerts, but it didn't work out. But we managed to secure the budget and work out the schedules for Formoz," said Freddy Lin (
There have also been additional last-minute confirmations that have filled up the roster considerably, with more local and foreign bands and even DJ Aki, the Japanese drum `n' bass master who will join local electronica artists like DJ Noodle, Lim Kiung
PHOTO COURTESY OF TRA
TRA further announced this week that Mr Funky, one of Korea's most popular pop rock acts, will be playing the festival as well. In total, 20 foreign bands are scheduled to play the festival, most of them from Japan, Korea and Hong Kong.
The addition of Michelle Shocked, though, brings some unprecedented star power to the annual festival that has been held in progressively larger forms for 10 years.
Michelle Shocked surprised even herself when she first appeared on the rock scene in the mid-1980s with her blend of gritty east Texas folk tunes and radical politics nurtured in squatter settlements in the US and western Europe.
She's been a credible voice of left-wing political rock for almost two decades now and thanks to her having bargained to keep the rights to her releases on Mercury Records, a lot of her music is being re-released. Her albums have jumped erratically in style with each release, so it's hard to predict what she'll play in Taiwan, but she'll probably use the occasion for a little poltical commentary, which should be interesting.
Lin said three-day passes for the festival will cost about NT$1,000, which is less than most one-off shows for major international bands that pass through Taipei. The entire lineup of the festival, including the dozens of local bands that will play, can be seen at the festival's Web site: http://www.formoz.com.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s