“Hey, what is 228 anyway?” My ears perked up when I overheard two young people sitting next to me discussing the upcoming holiday. I was eating a late dinner after spending all afternoon at the library researching and writing about some of the more obscure victims of the 228 Incident, the infamous anti-Chinese Nationalist Party uprising in 1947 that was brutally suppressed. “I have no idea,” the other replied. They proceeded to look it up online and appeared astonished at the new information, especially over the number of alleged victims. Virtually censored and seldom discussed until the late 1980s, it seems that many younger locals still see Feb. 28 as just another day off, not a day of remembrance to the thousands who lost their lives. I only had a cursory understanding of the incident before I started writing the history column Taiwan in Time five years ago, and throughout the years I’ve stumbled my way into some of the seldom-visited, cobweb-filled corners of the tragedy. But there’s still so much to explore, and I gained an even deeper understanding yesterday at the National 228 Museum’s new exhibition Scars on the Land (土地傷痕), which is the first of a three-part series on historic sites related to the 228 Incident in northern Taiwan, starting in Taipei and Keelung. The show opened this past Sunday and runs until May 16, and generally covers events leading up to the uprising and the immediate aftermath. The second part, which opens May 20, will cover New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Hsinchu and Miaoli and deal with the attempts to negotiate with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government before troops arrived from China for the final bloodbath, which is detailed in the last chapter, set for Aug. 19. The exhibition is organized chronologically. The first few sites set the scene
Taiwan’s oldest surviving Christian house of worship stands in a village at the base of the Central Mountain Range. Upgraded to a basilica minore by Pope John Paul II in 1984, Wanjin Basilica (萬金聖母聖殿) was established in what’s now Pingtung County’s Wanluan Township (萬巒) in 1863. The church’s founder, Dominican priest Father Fernando Sainz (郭德剛), was one of the first missionaries to enter Taiwan after the signing in mid-1858 of treaties between Qing China (which ruled the island between 1684 and 1895), France, Great Britain, Russia and the US. These agreements, collectively known as the Treaty of Tianjin (天津條約), compelled the Qing Dynasty to lift all restrictions on the practice of Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christianity. However, it seems this clause wasn’t clearly communicated to every level of the Qing bureaucracy. After Sainz, his fellow Dominican preacher Father Angel Bofurull and four Chinese converts arrived at Takow (today’s Kaohsiung) from the Philippines on May 15, 1859, they were detained by the local magistrate for two days. Once they were freed, things didn’t get much easier. Before the end of the year, illness forced Bofurull to quit the mission, and it’s not clear if the Chinese converts stayed on. At one point Sainz was alone, homeless and having to sleep on a beach. The Spaniard persisted, and with the help of Matthew Rooney — a Takow-based Irish-American who traded in camphor and opium — he eventually found a place to stay. Sainz established a church in 1861 in what’s now downtown Kaohsiung. That chapel is long gone, and it’s for his church-planting efforts in the interior that the priest is best remembered. Ordered to search for descendants of Aboriginal people who’d become Christians in the 17th century, when the Protestant Dutch dominated south Taiwan, Sainz ventured across the lowlands where Han settlers were continuing
In August last year, Matt Lawson, a Melbourne-based conspiracy theorist and anti-5G activist linked to the group that helped organize the city’s anti-lockdown protests last year, held one of his regular YouTube gabfests. The guests were mostly the usual crowd. The former celebrity chef Pete Evans was there, wondering aloud why the only politician talking about the immune system during Covid-19 was the US president Donald Trump: “He’s talked about zinc, he’s talked about sunlight and he’s been ridiculed for it.” So too was Serene Teffaha, a Melbourne lawyer who became a darling of the anti-lockdown movement after raising at least US$500,000 to launch a class-action lawsuit during the city’s lockdown, and Zev Freeman, a skydiving instructor and anti-5G activist who regularly pushes theories linked to the sovereign citizen conspiracy theory on a range of fringe Australian podcasts and YouTube channels. But there was also an unexpected guest on the call. Shrouded in black, wearing a hooded jumper and going by the name X, she described herself as an actor and “professional feeler”. She talked about attending the Met Gala and appearing in “Hollywood blockbusters.” According to a tweet from Lawson, the actor was Isabel Lucas, the former Home and Away and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen star. The Guardian has not been able to independently confirm whether the actor was Lucas. “I don’t want to be anonymous but I am about to start filming a film and I do need to be careful about being outspoken because you can get dropped by charities, you can lose campaigns with car companies,” the actor on the video said, which has been viewed by more than 10,000 people since August. “But I feel 100 percent called to speak to this topic because ... it’s about speaking the truth and shining a light on the reality of what’s really
Whether or not the Formosan clouded leopard still exists in some hidden mountain fastness somewhere in Taiwan is a question that has fascinated the scientific community for many years. Taiwanese researchers attempted to put the question to rest a decade ago by scouring the Dawushan Nature Reserve (大武山) in Taitung County, but came back empty-handed. The survey ran from 1997-2012 and used over a thousand camera traps, but did not turn up a single cat, and the species was declared extinct in 2013. Renowned Taiwanese conservationists Chiang Po-jen (姜博仁) and Kurtis Pei (裴家騏) conducted the field work and published a definitive paper on the failed hunt. In short, clouded leopards were not found, but prey species abound and, surprisingly, many Taiwanese are supportive of reintroduction. Yet it may still lurk out there, just not where scientists think, and finding it might require a different approach. SEARCHING FOR A LEOPARD Chiang and his team used standard and rigorous scientific methodology, laying out their camera stations in a grid style, which is widely used in conservation today. However, finding a rare and cryptic species might be more of an art than a science. Chiang, Pei and their colleagues are — unlike myself — trained scientists. Nonetheless, I’ve organized and led wildlife camera trap surveys in Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia, and we found clouded leopards in all of our study sites, one of which (in Sumatra) is not even a protected area but a leftover land of isolated mountains and gorges. In the challenging terrain of Southeast Asia, and with a very limited number of camera traps, intuition trumped science when choosing camera stations. A study of maps and reconnaissance trips into the deep interior to get a feeling for the place was our basic approach. We went in search of haunted headwaters where
Anastasia Kurlenia recoils in mock horror. Her daughter Sophie has broached the unthinkable. “Those are the Russian colors,” says the six-year-old, pointing at the red and white of the flags and traditional attire on the walls of Liuminzhan Bar & Bed, a cosy cafe on a backstreet in New Taipei’s Yonghe District (永和). “Just kidding,” she responds to her mother’s goggle-eyed gape. “I know it’s Belarus.” For an event focusing on a rigged election and violent crackdown against dissent, things are off to a light-hearted start. But this is the Belarusian way. Despite the gravity of the topic, the presentation delivered by Kurlenia and her compatriot Artem Subotka over the next three hours frequently embraces gallows humor. The event, which was held on Feb. 6 and titled Razam, meaning “together,” was designed to show solidarity with Belarusians protesting the re-election of Alexander Lukashenko as president on Aug. 9 last year. The result was almost universally derided as a sham. At one point, Subotka recounts a joke about a Russian, a Ukrainian and a Belarusian who are to be hanged during World War II. The format and set-up are similar to an old “Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman,” gag, the diverging punchline emphasizing the Belarusian’s stoicism. “The Russian is hanged first and fights against the rope for 10 seconds,” says Artem. “The Ukrainian fights for 30 seconds,” he adds. “Finally, the Belarusian is hanged, but he just hangs and hangs. ‘Why aren’t you dying?’ they ask. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I was just hanging here and finally it became all right.’” Another wisecrack from Artem involves the colors of the current flag, a wide horizontal bar of red above a narrower bar of green, essentially the Soviet era design minus the sickle. The flag was adopted by “Europe’s last dictator” Lukashenko in
Have you ever sent a nude selfie? The question draws a thick red line between generations, throwing one side into a panic while the other just laughs. And yet, as far back as 2009, that fount of moral wisdom, Kanye West, was advising how to stay safe. “When you take the picture cut off your face / And cover up the tattoo by the waist,” he rapped in Jamie Foxx’s song Digital Girl. As the pandemic forces relationships to be conducted remotely, more people than ever are resorting to the virtual exchange of intimacies. Last autumn, a poll of 7,000 UK schoolchildren by the youth sexual health charity Brook put the figure at nearly one in five who said they would send a naked selfie to a partner during a lockdown. But for all the worries about the vulnerability of underage senders, it would be wrong to condemn the practice out of hand, according to New York Times columnist Diana Spechler, who argued that, in lockdown, nude selfies had become a symbol of resilience, “a refusal to let social distancing render us sexless.” The selfies she and her friends were exchanging, she wrote, weren’t “garish below-the-belt shots” but pictures that were “carefully posed, cast in shadows, expertly filtered.” In short, they were works of art and deserved to be considered as such. Now publishing is getting in on the act, with Sending Nudes, a new anthology of nonfiction, short stories and poems reflecting on the pleasures and perils of baring all for the camera. Editor Julianne Ingles, who is also an artist, assembled the collection after putting out an open call for entries. “Some were merely erotica and some were just about nudity. But we were looking for people who had something thoughtful and intelligent to say,” Ingles says. Part of her reason for compiling
The word “insectageddon,” which has been around since at least 2017, describes what seems to be an alarming and ongoing collapse in the number and variety of insects on Earth. Anecdotal and empirical evidence supports this narrative of decline. “People often ask: Why can’t we hear crickets chirping in our yards or among roadside vegetation? The soundscape of the countryside has changed because farming landscapes have changed,” says Yang Jeng-tze (楊正澤), a professor in the Department of Entomology, National Chung Hsing University (NCHU). A meta-analysis of 166 long-term surveys across 1,668 globally distributed sites (including four in Taiwan) published in Science last April found that rates of decline vary from one place to another, but overall there appears to be an almost one percent loss of terrestrial insect biomass every year. “That’s less than what other researchers have reported, but it’s based on a wider collection of data and stricter requirements for what constitutes good data. It’s still a huge loss,” says Matan Shelomi, an assistant professor in the Department of Entomology, National Taiwan University. “One should note that the data from the 2020 meta-analysis mostly comes from protected areas, meaning the areas with the weakest declines. The actual global decline in insect abundance is probably worse than one percent,” he adds. “The losses seem to be worse in North America, but, again, there’s much more data from there. The strength of the trends may change as we do more research in other nations. The effect also seems to be stronger in temperate climates and deserts,” Shelomi adds. Years before “insectageddon” entered the lexicon, Taiwanese scientists noticed a striking decline in carrion beetle numbers inside one protected area with a semi-temperate climate. In Hapen Nature Reserve (哈盆自然保留區), which straddles the New Taipei City-Yilan border, researchers used both baited and non-baited pitfall traps in
With such a disastrous 2020, many are hoping that the “ox would turn the heavens and earth” (牛轉乾坤, a pun on a Chinese idiom signifying a reversal of fortunes used as a Lunar New Year of the Ox greeting). According to Taiwan’s soothsayers, however, don’t bank on it. The 2021 Good Luck Bible (2021開運聖經) predicts another calamitous year for the world, full of natural and human disasters ranging from bad harvests to political crises and surging unemployment. Meanwhile, the prognosticator Wisdom Tsai (蔡上機) foretells large-scale international scandals, increased bullying by stronger countries and a continued shift toward authoritarianism. Major financial emergencies may be in store, while COVID-19 will mutate even further and devastate humanity. If that’s not depressing enough, Tsai writes that even the pandemic refuge of Taiwan may no longer keep the virus at bay, which may take on a new form and attack the heart, liver, brain or nervous system. “It might feel as if there’s nowhere safe to hide in the world,” he writes. According to Tsai, those born in the Year of the Rat, Dragon and Horse may take solace in the fact they fall in the top three, respectively, in overall fortune and will still be able to enjoy abundant personal gains and happiness. These lists usually vary by fortune teller, but Yu Yang (雨揚) also has Rats and Horses in her top three, along with Roosters. Hsieh Yuan-chin (謝沅瑾) points to Rats born in 1996, who will meet a benefactor that will take them far in life. Now for the bad news: According to Tsai’s list, Sheep are the unluckiest, followed by Pigs and Rabbits. Alas, Yu agrees about the Sheep, while Hsieh says Sheep born in 1955 should be especially careful. Of course, all three diviners provide tips to improve one’s fortunes, otherwise these books wouldn’t be so immensely
Last week the news broke that Time magazine selected Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) as one of the global top 100 emerging leaders, “individuals who are shaping the future.” Chiang, who will be 48 in a couple of weeks, heads a dying former authoritarian party that opposes independence for Taiwan and advocates annexing it to China, and is not so much shaping the future as trying to prevent it from happening. Johnny Chiang? Can the reader name any of the half-dozen or so interim chairs the KMT has had since Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) resigned in 2005? Comically, the Time explanation touts Chiang’s drive to make the party attractive to youth, a perennial demand of the rank and file. Anyone remember SKII? “Members of Super KMT II, which takes its name from SKII, a kind of cosmetic which claims to help maintain an appearance of youthfulness, vowed to become key reformers in the quest to bring young people back to the KMT.” Yeah, that’s from… 2005. As Courtney Donovan Smith calculated in a recent piece at Report.tw, Chiang’s youth drive has raised the under-40 contingent of KMT membership from three percent of overall party membership all the way to 3.5 percent. Apparently, young people would rather live in a free, democratic Taiwanese state, and support parties that advocate such outcomes. Ironically, this “shaper of the future” does not perform well in the polls, and within his own party is less popular than several other figures, including recent hard-right returnee Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康). A poll this month from SET has KMT supporters preferring Jaw to any other candidate for chairman in the upcoming election. At the moment, it seems he has a hard fight ahead just to retain the chairmanship, let alone “shape the future.” Chiang’s selection automatically begs the
Feb. 22 to Feb. 28 For 73 years, an imposing gateway leading to the eastern shore of Makung (馬公) praised the people of Penghu for remaining peaceful during the 228 Incident According to a plaque on the structure, when Taiwan’s population rose up against the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Feb. 28, 1947, “only Penghu remained calm.” After brutally suppressing the incident, the KMT forbade people from discussing the uprising for decades. As a result, it was the only monument throughout Taiwan that mentioned the 228 Incident until activists put one up in Chiayi in 1989 to commemorate the victims. “Chairman Chiang [Kai-shek (蔣介石)] of the Nationalist Government deeply thanks the people of Penghu for keeping order during the rebellion,” the plaque on the gateway continues, adding that the government rewarded the archipelago with a significant amount of cash in appreciation. Half of it was given to the residents, while the other half was used for various public works, including the gateway. Native son Mingdi (鳴鏑, real name Sheng Yi-che 冼義哲), is one of many who will immediately point out that the “peaceful” narrative is false. His historical novel, Xiying Paradise: The Penghu Youth Who Resisted During the 228 Incident (西瀛勝境:那群在22八事件抗爭的澎湖青年), was published in June last year, dramatically uncovering the unrest that was buried for decades. LAND OF NO UPRISINGS Historian Hsu Hsueh-chi’s (許雪姬) 1996 paper “228 Incident in Penghu” (22八事件在澎湖) is one of the earliest documents to point out that the plaque’s claims were not entirely true. Historically, Penghu had rarely seen uprisings even during the Qing Dynasty, when there was “one small rebellion every three years, and one large rebellion every five years” in Taiwan. Penghu people rarely participated because it was heavily guarded as a military stronghold, and also because it was too poor and too far from Taiwan to
I was in a warehouse in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, anxiously scribbling in my reporter’s notebook while waiting for a porn shoot to begin. Charles Dera, a performer with jet-black hair and a well-groomed beard to match, crouched in front of me, stretching his calves. Tommy Gunn, a performer named after his biceps, sat on the floor flipping through a release form. He hopped to a stand and asked to borrow my pen. As a journalist, I had been on porn sets more times than I can count, but this shoot was making me uncharacteristically nervous. I started looking at porn as a teenager in the late 1990s, using a spotty dial-up connection. It seemed a vibrant human sexuality textbook next to lackluster sex-ed classes featuring black-and-white anatomy diagrams and condoms rolled on to bananas. When I started actually having sex, porn became my aspirational guide to seductive moans and technique. One person I watched in those days was Tommy Gunn, who was now standing next to me, handing back my pen. That explains the anxious scribbles: I was starstruck. Then I heard something that yanked me from my distracted state: “Girls these days.” Girls. These. Days. Three such innocuous words, until they are strung together in that particular order. “Girls watch our porn, because it’s free everywhere, and then they grow up thinking that’s what sex is,” said Dera. “They go and have sex with a normal dude,” Dera continued, “and he’s like — he screwed up his face in mock horror — the kind of face, actually, that women give in those tube site ads where they’re surprised by a home intruder or snooping stepdad. Gunn nodded knowingly. “When I have my private sex, I’m not trying to be like, ‘Huh-huh-huh,’” he said, theatrically grunting while aggressively humping the air. It was a
For most residents of Taiwan, the word “Kenting” conjures up images of white sandy beaches, turquoise waters, jet skis and maybe a crowded night market. Among all the commotion, it’s easy to forget that Kenting is in fact a national park, with a mission to protect the natural environment. For those looking to escape the crowds, learn more about southern Taiwan’s ecology, or simply add some variety to a beach holiday, the Ecological Protection Areas of Kenting National Park are an excellent addition to any trip. The four Ecological Protection Areas open to the public are all located on the less developed eastern side of the park. Three of them — Sizihkou (溪仔口), Longkeng (龍坑) and Bitou Grassland (鼻頭草原) — sit next to the Pacific Ocean, while Nanren Mountain (南仁山) sits further inland. All operate with a maximum daily visitor quota and can only be accessed by prior application and payment. Tourists are accompanied by a park guide (Mandarin only), who are highly knowledgeable and are often locals with an intimate understanding of not only the animal and plant life in the area, but also the history of its human inhabitants, allowing them to interweave stories of the local people’s use of the land with an introduction to the ecology of the protected area. LONGKENG: WONDERFUL WINDSWEPT CORAL Located just around the corner from the Oluanpi Lighthouse (鵝鑾鼻燈塔) and the southernmost point of Taiwan proper, Longkeng takes visitors on a three-kilometer walk through secondary forest out to a windswept coral landscape and back again. Our guide pointed out subtle signs of changes to the vegetation likely due to the low rainfall Taiwan experienced last year. More obvious was the devastation further down the trail caused by a recent fire in the area. Screw pine trunks stand leafless and charred as they begin their
Five years prior to the events portrayed in this film, Chin-chin (Eve Ai, 愛怡良) blocked two people on Facebook: Shu-wei (Fu Meng-po, 傅孟柏), her former work crush, and Chih-yang (Chris Wu, 吳慷仁), a self-proclaimed “love expert” and master of breaking up with women. Since then Chin-chin has buried herself in work, earning the nickname “facial paralysis sister” (面癱姐) by her subordinates for her cold and serious demeanor. But when she is tasked with developing a love-based mobile game, she starts reevaluating her life and relationships. Meanwhile, the eccentric, happy-go-lucky Chih-yang forces himself back into her life. As the story progresses, Chih-yang starts coming to terms with his life choices as well. It’s a simple, everyday story about facing regrets over missed opportunities, told in a quirky, somewhat disorderly manner. It especially speaks to single office workers in their 30s and 40s who have enough love and career experience but still wonder where life is going without an established path to follow, and perhaps the plot runs all over the place because that’s how it feels to be in that situation. A more focused, nuanced story would definitely have made the film stronger, but I Missed You still does its job as a feel-good, tear-jerking Lunar New Year plus Valentine’s day holiday flick. The favorable box office sales reflect that. Despite the intentionally fast-paced and choppy storytelling with parts left to imagination, it’s not too difficult to understand and put the pieces together as the film goes on. The directing duo of Mag Hsu (許譽庭) and Hsu Chih-yen (許智彥), who were nominated for a Golden Horse in 2018 for Dear Ex (誰先愛上他), are wise to not keep this frenetic style up for the entire movie. The style changes pace and becomes more grounded toward the second half. Although the two leads seem to be complete
Cooped up like many of us, movie stars, politicians and reality show types eager to hold onto their fans are turning to podcasts to get through the pandemic, converting their homes — even a bathroom in one case — into makeshift recording studios. There is something out there for everyone: While Demi Moore, with her trademark raspy voice, headlines an erotic podcast called Dirty Diana, Jamie Lee Curtis and Matthew McConaughey read stories for kids. Former first lady Michelle Obama talks about personal issues in a podcast called simply The Michelle Obama Podcast, while actors Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett interview other celebrities on one called SmartLess. Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, has been waging a crusade against him since September in a podcast called Mea Culpa. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have one, too. The first episode featured contributions from prominent people talking about how they are coping with the pandemic and what they are learning from it. Reality show stars are also in on the craze. Paris Hilton is scheduled to launch a podcast at the end of this month through radio giant iHeartMedia and Kim Kardashian will sign a deal this summer with Spotify to develop a show on criminal justice reform, a cause in which she has been active. While podcasts with stars are nothing new, their sudden abundance is a natural consequence of the COVID-19 crisis, said Nicholas Quah, creator of a blog called Hot Pod. With Hollywood largely shut down because of the pandemic “so many of these celebrities are unable to get television or film productions going,” he said “This is an opportunity for these people to still reach fans and reach people.” NO NEED FOR A SET Many are drawn by the flexibility of podcasts because there is no need for a set or camera or
The Jack Britt high school girls’ soccer team was playing on a muggy evening in Fayetteville, North Carolina, when the sky grew dark. It was Sept. 30, 2015. Shana Williams Turner, a 46-year-old teacher in the school’s special education department, was supervising. She watched as the weather started to turn. Thunder rumbled above, each clap bringing lightning closer. Shana saw a lightning bolt hit a grocery store across the street. Scared, she and the choir teacher, Richard Butler, ran to a nearby ticket booth to find shelter. Lightning struck again with a deafening crack. A transformer 30 feet away exploded and burst into flames. Shana felt excruciating pain, as if her shoulders had been reduced to burning jelly, and she was thrown to the concrete. Richard helped pick her up as other colleagues rushed over and asked what had happened. “I don’t know exactly. I think I got struck by lightning,” Shana replied. “What do you need?” they asked repeatedly. “I don’t know what I need. But my arm is on fire, my feet are tingling and my chest hurts,” she moaned. Shana’s 15-year-old son, Dillon, the youngest of her four children, had seen everything. A student at the school, he had been waiting for a ride home. “Mom,” he cried. “You swore!” Shana got up. By outward appearances, she seemed fine, if a little dazed. No one called an ambulance. Shana was stunned: “Did I really just get struck?” She got into her car with Dillon and set off for home. As she pulled out of the parking lot, she called her sister. “Hey Ronda, can you look up on the computer what you do when you get struck by lightning?” There was a pause followed by some swearing. “You go to the hospital!” Ronda shot back. Shana had been to the local hospital before, but her mind
For John Domingue, director of the Open University’s pioneering research and development lab, the Knowledge Media Institute (KMI), the “online genie” is out of the bottle and won’t go back in. “It’s slightly galling to see some universities trying to replicate online almost exactly what they delivered face-to-face before COVID. Standing before a camera and broadcasting is not online teaching. You need to do things differently,” he says. So what can universities undertake to make online learning more than just a heavy focus on streaming and recording technology? Domingue points to artificial intelligence (AI) and the concept of an online library for educators based on a Google search engine dedicated to education, and a Netflix-style recommendation tool that tracks down content to suit a lecturer’s own field, based on previous searches. KMI is currently developing a personalized AI assistant or chatbot, an AI career coach and other tools that can analyse essays for marking and set up quizzes on revision topics. Personalization is also key to giving students and lecturers a better online experience. In 2017, Oxford’s Said Business School installed the first immersive virtual classroom of its kind in the UK: a bank of 27 HD screens able to simultaneously support up to 84 students from across the globe, called the Oxford Hub for International Virtual Education. An in-room camera follows lecturers moving around the room, who can respond — as in real life — to visual cues from and talk directly to individual students. While such technology could be prohibitively expensive for many institutions, Duncan Peberdy, a consultant specializing in tech-enabled learning spaces and former adviser at the educational IT body, Jisc, says a much cheaper alternative in the form of a three to four meter wide screen offering a different dynamic based on simplified specifications has been developed by ViewSonic. “We are
In recent years there has been a barrage of self-help books by former Navy Seals, applying their hard-fought techniques of leadership, discipline, problem-solving and survival to the lives of us everyday civilians. Even though she served in the trenches of rock, Tana Douglas’s memoir, LOUD: A Life in Rock’n’Roll by the World’s First Female Roadie, could easily serve the same purpose — a kind of Gaffer Tape Your Life. As a young woman barely out of boarding school in Toowoomba when she landed her first crew gigs, Douglas stuck steadfastly to the rule: “Never let them see a sign of weakness.” She even gave that one for free to a crying Sharon Osbourne, having a moment in a hotel lobby bathroom during Ozzy Osbourne’s 1980 Blizzard of Ozz tour. “She seems to have taken it to heart,” Douglas laughs, of the woman who would become a notoriously hard-nosed manager. “Oops!” When I speak to Douglas, she’s at home in Los Angeles, her hair fashioned into long white dreadlocks. These days she’s pretty settled: a consultant for the production industry, sometimes working in artist development. It’s a far cry from her “feral” start as a teenage hitchhiker who felt unwanted by her family. Her preferred song of that era was the Animals’ We Gotta Get Out of This Place, and she needed to become a hustler and a grafter to do the same. Douglas’s career started in 1973 when she was 15. A chance meeting with Philippe Petit at the Nimbin Aquarius festival turned into her first gig on his crew when he executed a guerrilla tightrope walk between the towers of Sydney Harbour Bridge. The first band Douglas crewed for came about by accident. Her friend had wanted to catch a lift home with members of Fox, but the roadies were being slow packing the
Due to the Lunar New Year holiday, from Wednesday, Feb. 10, through Wednesday, Feb. 17, there will be no features pages. The paper returns to its usual format on Thursday, Feb. 18, when features will also be resumed. Kung Hsi Fa Tsai!
After making their debut in Ximending on Jan. 20, the Protectors of the Algal Reef Goddess (藻礁女神護衛隊) struck again with their risque placards and slogans. Holding signs reading “The algal reef goddess sincerely seeks a sugar daddy,” “I’m a Taiwanese white dolphin looking for friends with benefits” and voicing the needs of an endangered coral species for a “place to shag,” the activists appeared on Sunday in front of National Taiwan University’s main gate. This group is one of many around the nation trying to collect 350,000 signatures before the Feb. 28 deadline to have the question, “Do you agree that CPC Corp (台灣中油) should relocate the third liquefied natural gas terminal away from Taoyuan’s Datan (大潭) algal reefs and its surrounding waters?” included in the upcoming national referendums in August. Organizer Nancy Wang (王南昕) says that the signs are not just meant to grab attention, but to provoke thought on human development against the environment. “We wanted to present the viewpoint from the creatures’ perspectives,” Wang says. “We constantly talk about human needs, how much electricity we need and how it should be delivered faster and more conveniently, but don’t even allow these creatures to reproduce — we say ‘shag’ here — and survive.” They’ve only gathered about 50,000 signatures with less than three weeks to go. After a decades-long struggle, this may be the last bid for environmental activists to stop the project, which experts state would lead to a “complete breakdown” of the ecosystem of the algal reef, which is over 7,600 years old and supports many rare and possibly yet-to-be discovered species. “We are trying to protect Taiwan’s 7,600-year old diary of its coastline,” says veteran activist and cofounder of the now-defunct Tree Party (樹黨) Pan Han-shen (潘翰聲), who was on scene Sunday. “There’s so much recorded
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