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.
From an anonymous office in a New Delhi mall, matrimonial detective Bhavna Paliwal runs the rule over prospective husbands and wives — a booming industry in India, where younger generations are increasingly choosing love matches over arranged marriage. The tradition of partners being carefully selected by the two families remains hugely popular, but in a country where social customs are changing rapidly, more and more couples are making their own matches. So for some families, the first step when young lovers want to get married is not to call a priest or party planner but a sleuth like Paliwal with high-tech spy
The latest military exercises conducted by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) last week did not follow the standard Chinese Communist Party (CCP) formula. The US and Taiwan also had different explanations for the war games. Previously the CCP would plan out their large-scale military exercises and wait for an opportunity to dupe the gullible into pinning the blame on someone else for “provoking” Beijing, the most famous being former house speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022. Those military exercises could not possibly have been organized in the short lead time that it was known she was coming.
With raging waters moving as fast as 3 meters per second, it’s said that the Roaring Gate Channel (吼門水道) evokes the sound of a thousand troop-bound horses galloping. Situated between Penghu’s Xiyu (西嶼) and Baisha (白沙) islands, early inhabitants ranked the channel as the second most perilous waterway in the archipelago; the top was the seas around the shoals to the far north. The Roaring Gate also concealed sunken reefs, and was especially nasty when the northeasterly winds blew during the autumn and winter months. Ships heading to the archipelago’s main settlement of Magong (馬公) had to go around the west side
When Portugal returned its colony Macao to China in 1999, coffee shop owner Daniel Chao was a first grader living in a different world. Since then his sleepy hometown has transformed into a bustling gaming hub lined with glittering casinos. Its once quiet streets are now jammed with tourist buses. But the growing wealth of the city dubbed the “Las Vegas of the East” has not brought qualities of sustainable development such as economic diversity and high civic participation. “What was once a relaxed, free place in my childhood has become a place that is crowded and highly commercialized,” said Chao. Macao yesterday
RSS