This was the slogan I saw splashed across the side of a bus on the way home from work today. Apparently, it’s being used to promote Taiwan to the world as a tourist destination, and this rendering of it was accompanied by images of cute kids in traditional costume, a temple, and mist-shrouded mountains – exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to see in a tourist campaign plugging a north-east Asian country... If the Taiwan Tourist Commission (or whatever they’re called) was really serious about confounding our expectations, maybe they might consider enlisting domestic shock-rockers Loh Tsui Kweh Commune into their campaign.
Apparently, they have one of the wildest stage acts on the Taiwanese indie scene and, if this video (39 Mb QT) is anything to go by, then I’m inclined to believe it. It consists of a series of slickly produced live action versions of imaginary newspaper ads, which start off with the band members engaged in stage-diving, instrument smashing, and martial arts inspired keyboard stroking, then quickly moves on to demonstrations of rectal chainsaw penetration, rejuvenating testicles grabs, cowboy bondage, foot powder bong hits, male lactation, and straight-out gay sex (with appropriately pixilated “parts”)… And if all of this sounds unbelievably sordid, the way its presented is anything but. The clip manages to make this rampant grab-bag of perversity seem (almost) like good clean fun… (It is nonetheless unequivocally NOT SAFE FOR WORK.)
I remember being rather perplexed the first time I heard about ice-cream-van-music-playing garbage trucks in Taipei. Henceforth, I will be surprised by nothing that comes out of Taiwan...
(via the WFMU blog)