Posts Tagged ‘live’

lindi’s bad himo ::

Monday, June 8th, 2009

:: last week, Lindi (林笛), the lead singer and pipa player for the well-known Shanghainese band Cold Fairyland, shared with me some videos from a recent performance by her new band Bad Himo at Shanghai’s Yuyintang music club. Bad Himo is a two-person band (Lindi and her husband) whose songs are written entirely about the couple’s cat, Himo. In chatting with Lindi about Bad Himo, she said they formed the band because she has always wanted to play more straight forward rock and punk-styled music, but is too shy to actually write overly aggressive / provocative lyrics with curse words, etc. According to Lindi, the next best thing was to write songs that complain about her naughty cat, Himo.

The songs are silly, playful, definitely not punk, and sung in Mandarin, Shanghainese, and English, as those are the three languages Lindi and her husband speak to the cat at home. However, Lindi admits that during the show she forgot most of lyrics and just sorta made them up as she went along. Lindi is unsure how often, or even if, the band will play again, but they are looking for a drummer if anyone knows anyone.

Below I’ve shared a video from the performance last week. The song in the video, titled Little White Horse (小白马), is mostly sung in Shanghainese. For videos of all the songs from the Yuyintang performance, link here. Related, I recently produced a short video with Lindi performing solo / acoustic out of her home studio, link here to check it out. // AjS

r.i.p. | twitter & flickr blocked in china? ::

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

:: I blame Ai Weiwei, of course. In addition to the ongoing inaccessibility of Blogspot.com and Youtube.com, Twitter.com and Flickr.com now both appear to have been blocked in mainland China. At the time of writing, Twitter was still (sorta) accessible via desktop clients such as Tweetdeck, Twirl, etc., but I think that was because the API URL hadn’t been fully harmonized yet. That being said, these clients were definitely not acting normal – very spotty and unstable. The desktop clients will likely be rendered useless soon enough if this is a real blockage and not just a massive coincidental glitch in the Chinese Internet – highly unlikely. None of the major local Chinese microblogging platforms have been affected: Fanfou.com, Jiwai.de, Zuosa.com, etc., but that’s probably because of internal content monitoring systems that have long been in place. If you are in China, please feel free to comment below about accessibility to these sites (and others) in your locales. Thanks.  // AjS

Also, as always, Danwei.org is following this closely – head over there in case I have missed anything.

[UPDATE 1: Microsoft properties Live.com and Bing.com are also inaccessible in China. MSN instant messenger to follow?]

[UPDATE 2: It appears Twitter is not working via desktop clients, rendering it completely blocked.]

[UPDATE 3: It appears Hotmail.com is also inaccessible. That makes three major Microsoft property down in China.]

[UPDATE 4: It may just be cached files in my browser or something, but it appears 56minus1 is displaying Flickr-embedded images – the site wasn't doing that earlier. Can anyone else in China confirm this? The Flickr domain itself is still inaccessible.]

[UPDATE 5: Chinese microblog service Fanfou.com and P2P download service VeryCD.com will be performing "technical maintenance" until June 6th. H/T Jason Zhan Jia]

[UPDATE 6: Yawn.... Can we move on?]