Life is a carnival of the bizarre. There are probably better, more erudite ways of describing it, but few more appropriate. When you really think about the various ways we kill time between entry and exit, the awful strangeness of it dawns in ways few are fit to see, fewer still to fully embrace.
But there are those precious few gems of humanity who bear witness and see fit to take hold of this grim procession. They see existence for what it really is — which is what you make of it. And what they make of it is something equal parts ludicrous, grotesque and fantastic.
So when you see a man in a jumpsuit and full-face helmet rigged up with a telephone receiver come barreling down the honky-tonk stairs in a lifeboat while beating away on a hollow-body guitar, don’t get out of the way. Jump right in there with him. And as long as you live, you’ll never forget what he taught you.
Photo courtesy of Bob Log III
If that last bit seems a bit out of left field, well, maybe your not ready for the one-man Delta blues gonzo slide guitar extravaganza that is Bob Log III.
Born in Tucson, Arizona and now based out of Australia, he’s played just about every backwater and bustle from here to there and back again over the past 20-plus years. Ask him for tour stories and you’ll get a sampling of the day-to-day madness that is his life for six months out of the year.
“A girl peed on my leg mid-song in Belgium. A man tried to chew my knee in Wollongong. Somebody dressed as a rabbit had a conniption in Auckland. In Omaha a girl tackled me so hard I was limping for days. But it was okay. I think it was her birthday,” Log told the Taipei Times.
On the surface Log’s music might seem like barely-controlled chaos, and there’s some truth in that. But he’s one of those rare individuals who grasps the brain-numbing banality of beauty and plays with the grit of imperfection under his fingernails. This weekend the Bob Log whirlwind blows back into Taipei for the Tiger Mountain Ramble.
There are a million acts out there who can put you to sleep with pretty. It’s not often one comes along that can set your soul on fire with a double-distored dose of ugly.
“I love to play the perfect mistake,” he says of his signature style and general approach.
“Put it this way, if you read any rock book, any tour book, any band, what are the stories? The only good stories are when something goes wrong. There is not a chapter that says, ‘We played in Tulsa, everything went great, we went to bed.’ No! Boring! The interesting fun parts of any musical adventure story are the mistakes. When things go wrong, that’s the story. That’s the fun. I am chasing the happy wrong,” he says.
The happy wrong. For most people it’s something abstract, worse still something antithetical to existence itself. For them there is no happy wrong. Only glorious right.
The problem with “right” is that all too often there is only one, whereas there are an infinite different varieties of wrong. Therein lies the real exploration — the true introspection. The accurate reflection of what we are.
So if and when things do go ‘wrong’, such as a recent show in which his inflatable dinghy was stolen (hence the earlier boat reference), that just means Log is doing things right. That is to say, doing things wrong. Doing things his way.
“If someone steals my boat, or unplugs my stuff, or trips over my drums, or crawls inside my drum or grabs the kick drum mic and runs around making animal noises in it, I can only feel that I have been doing my job correctly.
“I am attempting to make a room of people go apeshit with the power of my guitar. That is my purpose. Sometimes people go too apeshit and me or my stuff gets broken. But that just means I’m doing the guitar right.”
Expect a heavy dose of the expected/unexpected from the man who knows only one way to play it, that is fast and loose, and keeps an open mind to the whims of the crowd.
“If, say, someone lights their nipples on fire, or decides to climb or eat the curtain, or say someone dressed as a pirate decides to start licking the mic cables, I do believe those might be spur of the moment decisions on their part,” Log said.
Bring it on.
■ Tiger Mountain Ramble Outdoor Music Festival (2015虎山音樂祭) tomorrow from 2pm to 10pm at Miculture Foundation Tiger Mountain (微遠虎山), 186-1, Lane 221, Fude Street, Taipei City (台北市福德街221巷186-1號). Tickets are NT$500 in advance and NT$600 at the door, available at Vinyl Decision, KGB Kiwi Gourmet Burgers and Toasteria Cafe.
In 2020, a labor attache from the Philippines in Taipei sent a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding that a Filipina worker accused of “cyber-libel” against then-president Rodrigo Duterte be deported. A press release from the Philippines office from the attache accused the woman of “using several social media accounts” to “discredit and malign the President and destabilize the government.” The attache also claimed that the woman had broken Taiwan’s laws. The government responded that she had broken no laws, and that all foreign workers were treated the same as Taiwan citizens and that “their rights are protected,
A white horse stark against a black beach. A family pushes a car through floodwaters in Chiayi County. People play on a beach in Pingtung County, as a nuclear power plant looms in the background. These are just some of the powerful images on display as part of Shen Chao-liang’s (沈昭良) Drifting (Overture) exhibition, currently on display at AKI Gallery in Taipei. For the first time in Shen’s decorated career, his photography seeks to speak to broader, multi-layered issues within the fabric of Taiwanese society. The photographs look towards history, national identity, ecological changes and more to create a collection of images
The recent decline in average room rates is undoubtedly bad news for Taiwan’s hoteliers and homestay operators, but this downturn shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. According to statistics published by the Tourism Administration (TA) on March 3, the average cost of a one-night stay in a hotel last year was NT$2,960, down 1.17 percent compared to 2023. (At more than three quarters of Taiwan’s hotels, the average room rate is even lower, because high-end properties charging NT$10,000-plus skew the data.) Homestay guests paid an average of NT$2,405, a 4.15-percent drop year on year. The countrywide hotel occupancy rate fell from
March 16 to March 22 In just a year, Liu Ching-hsiang (劉清香) went from Taiwanese opera performer to arguably Taiwan’s first pop superstar, pumping out hits that captivated the Japanese colony under the moniker Chun-chun (純純). Last week’s Taiwan in Time explored how the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) theme song for the Chinese silent movie The Peach Girl (桃花泣血記) unexpectedly became the first smash hit after the film’s Taipei premiere in March 1932, in part due to aggressive promotion on the streets. Seeing an opportunity, Columbia Records’ (affiliated with the US entity) Taiwan director Shojiro Kashino asked Liu, who had
RSS