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Douban round-up

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Untitled1.jpgA few bits and bobs floating around on the Douban:

Monkey Shine have a couple of new demos. Dodgy band name, but still, the songs are here and are emo-tastic.

Runaway Snail have had a line-up shuffle. They're now joined by Mei Er from Top Floor Circus, which seems a good move. The band should be gigging again next month once they've had a chance to rehearse together.

A bit of Beijing band news: in addition to Bigger Bang! coming back here armed with a new song for The Longest Nite show (12 hour party thing at the Mercedes-Benz Arena with 7 local bands) on the 19th, Queen Sea Big Shark are also returning, playing MAO Livehouse in April. Also back in April are Subs, whose Kang Mao and Wu Hao have recently formed a new, seemingly acoustic, band called 拜拜,多谢你们的鱼! No plans for them to play down our way yet, but they'll be at Yugong Yishan with the aforementioned Bigger Bang! next Tuesday.

Hedgehog, who are also in Shanghai on the 19th to promote their new album, have uploaded four new tracks to their minisite here. They've also announced that there'll be a separate CD of demos available at the gig, details here.  

Finally, a couple of days ago a little message appeared in the bottom right corner of Douban pages with a few polite reminders from your friendly Communist Party. In particular they'd like to let you know that according to Constitution of the People's Republic of China, the following things are banned:
'Organising to incite resistance'
'Fabrication of information or distortion of the facts, spreading of rumours in relation to the social administration'
'The inciting of illegal assemblies, marches, demonstrations and general disturbing of the public order'
'Engaging in violations of state, society and collective interests'
Please note these are rough/truncated translations of the points made in the notice (see the picture above for the full versions), but the message is pretty clear. Just in case you were wondering what that box was....

The Yes Men Fix the World

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yesmensuperman_with_crap_web.jpgIt's not often I'll post on something non-music related here. In fact, I just had to create an 'Other' category for this post. But I found out the other day that The Yes Men Fix the World is going to be shown in Shanghai soon and it's a film I'm excited about seeing. Just thought I'd share it with you. 

The Yes Men are Mike Bonnano and Andy Michelbaum and are nothing to do with that Danny Wallace book or that Jim Carrey film, although everyone always thinks that when I wear my Yes Men t-shirt. The Yes Men (not Yes Man) specialise in identity correction. What does that mean?  

"Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Our targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else"

Previous examples of this include producing a fake New York Times a while back declaring that the Iraq war was over; appearing on the BBC as representatives of Dow to declare that the company would suddenly accept all responsibility for the Bhopal tragedy; and appearing as WTO officials to declare an end to the organisation. This is a good one as well, check out this photo

I saw their first film and met them when I was at university back in the UK, but I still haven't managed to see their latest one. It's going to be screened twice in Shanghai next month though as part of the MIDA documentary festival in the city:on June 12th and 15th. There's more details on the screenings here, I recommend you go see it.