4.17.2007

New Tea festival

So I went to this festival on Saturday called the "Neo Cha Neo Con festival" ... anyway there were no neo conservatives so it was very fun. www.neocha.com is the website for this event and if anyone reading this can read chinese, you're more than welcome to give it a look, but i'll summarize it here. It was held in an old abandoned industrial factory along the SuZhou creek in Shanghai's ZhongShan Park area. It was a really cool looking place, it was falling apart and dirty and definitely grunge-chic. The place has 3 floors and they were all filled with various festival activities.
The first floor was an exhibition area. Anyone could apply for a booth to display whatever they wanted, but it was mostly artsy type stores and artists peddling their goods. It had some interesting stuff and alot of people who made mini movie theatres out of their booths and showed short movies. There were some crazy underground chinese independent films, it was interesting.
The second floor was a lounge area mixed with an area for an art display. The art display was multiple clotheslines with polaroid pictures hanging off of them. These polaroids were taken of people as they walked around the festival, with or without their knowledge, it was interesting to look at.
The third floor was the music venue and had room for atleast 1000 people ... and although I would say more than that came to the festival, most spent their time wandering around not staying in one place, but it was ok since the music could heard from from anywhere within 3 blocks. I hung out with one band in particular, they were called the Banana Monkeys. Actually they were very very good. I think they're some sort of chinese superband made up of people that have been around for awhile, because they arent young, and everyone seems to knoe punkw them, even though they have only recorded two songs and their cd doesnt come out until nov. Anyway they played spirited sex pistols meets VU type rock/punk. It was good, and he is definitely a screamer.

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