After Wall Street reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and executed by Islamic extremists in Pakistan six years ago, his parents, Ruth and Judea Pearl, chose to use thier family's tragedy to help promote cultural understanding. As a result, the Daniel Pearl Music Day event was begun in 2002 and has been held worldwide every year since.
Hosted by the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents Club, the sixth annual Taiwan Daniel Pearl Music Day (TDPMD) is set to take place on Sunday with sponsored beer, food and drinks. It will be a day of music to spread the message of unity across cultural divides.
"Music is one of the few things people can share. It doesn't matter who we are or what our cultural and ethnic backgrounds are, we can all appreciate and be moved by music equally," said event organizer Sean Scanlan, whose sister helped Daniel Pearl's parents organize the first music event in Los Angeles.
The TDPMD event features nine local bands including event regulars Public Radio and David Chen and the Muddy Basin Ramblers. Taiwanese rock band Black Summer Days and music festival favorite Coach will join the music marathon along with the 10-piece Al's Hothouse Chicago Jazz Band and the country trio Two Acres Plowed.
This year, the event will move from Treasure Hill (寶藏巖聚落) to Xinyi Public Assembly Hall (公民會館), a new art space at 44 South Village (四四南村), a military dependents' village in Xinyi District. Performances will take place on the main plaza where participants can enjoy the late-summer breeze in the preserved historical housing compound.
Visitors are encouraged to make donations of NT$200. The money will be used to pay the bands. "Though it's really not much, we want to show respect for the musicians and not take advantage of them," said Scanlan, adding that profits will be donated to the Daniel Pearl Foundation (www.danielpearl.org), which has taken an active role in raising public awareness of conflict.
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF THE DANIEL PEARL FOUNDATION
The Xinyi Public Assembly Hall is located at 50 Songqin St, Taipei (台北市松勤街50號). The event will start at 1pm and end at 10pm. For more information, contact seanscanlan@gmail.com.
With one week left until election day, the drama is high in the race for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chair. The race is still potentially wide open between the three frontrunners. The most accurate poll is done by Apollo Survey & Research Co (艾普羅民調公司), which was conducted a week and a half ago with two-thirds of the respondents party members, who are the only ones eligible to vote. For details on the candidates, check the Oct. 4 edition of this column, “A look at the KMT chair candidates” on page 12. The popular frontrunner was 56-year-old Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文)
“How China Threatens to Force Taiwan Into a Total Blackout” screamed a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) headline last week, yet another of the endless clickbait examples of the energy threat via blockade that doesn’t exist. Since the headline is recycled, I will recycle the rebuttal: once industrial power demand collapses (there’s a blockade so trade is gone, remember?) “a handful of shops and factories could run for months on coal and renewables, as Ko Yun-ling (柯昀伶) and Chao Chia-wei (趙家緯) pointed out in a piece at Taiwan Insight earlier this year.” Sadly, the existence of these facts will not stop the
Oct. 13 to Oct. 19 When ordered to resign from her teaching position in June 1928 due to her husband’s anti-colonial activities, Lin Shih-hao (林氏好) refused to back down. The next day, she still showed up at Tainan Second Preschool, where she was warned that she would be fired if she didn’t comply. Lin continued to ignore the orders and was eventually let go without severance — even losing her pay for that month. Rather than despairing, she found a non-government job and even joined her husband Lu Ping-ting’s (盧丙丁) non-violent resistance and labor rights movements. When the government’s 1931 crackdown
The first Monopoly set I ever owned was the one everyone had — the classic edition with Mr Monopoly on the box. I bought it as a souvenir on holiday in my 30s. Twenty-five years later, I’ve got thousands of boxes stacked away in a warehouse, four Guinness World Records and have made several TV appearances. When Guinness visited my warehouse last year, they spent a whole day counting my collection. By the end, they confirmed I had 4,379 different sets. That was the fourth time I’d broken the record. There are many variants of Monopoly, and countries and businesses are constantly
RSS