The Veritable Horde

I'm told that the interstitial space between the calendar new year and the Chinese (lunar) New Year is often characterized by a lull of business productivity here.  The expression "we'll revisit this after Chinese New Year" is a common utterance; it's almost as if the country starts grinding to a dull rumble around Christmas, resting up during the holiday season and its January aftermath in preparation for the hoopla that ensues during the week (or three) of celebration during Spring Festival, as the Chinese New Year is called.

The optimist in me believes this may help to explain why I have had so relatively little to do at work recently (the pessimist -- the part of me many of you may be more familiar with -- realizes that it's more due to my ill-defined role at my company.  The rest of the office, after all, has been relatively abuzz with activity these past few weeks, oblivious to my virtually nonexistent workload.  But I digress).  The happy consequence of all of this is that I've had the time to dedicate to my new gig as the manager of The Horde, the best underground original folk band this side of the Yangtze River (what can I say, I'm a company man).  The band's producing our (I've started using the first person to describe the band) first album, so I spent the week negotiating with a CD producer in Shenzhen to get our album burned and printed.  With a little luck, we'll have copies delivered in a few weeks, in time for our album release party in early March.

The Horde family is a wide range of musicians, sound engineers, significant others, fans, and, of course, managers.  The harmonica player, George, organized a dinner last night at a Dongbei restaurant (sort of like Chinese comfort food) as a mini farewell party -- George and his girlfriend are leaving for a month to visit her family in Chile.  Between everyone in the Horde fold, and their various guests, the dinner turned into a thirteen person affair full of festive cheer.  "Better make a reservation ahead of time," Tom, the guitarist, wrote in an email a few days ago when George proposed the plan.  "We'll be a veritable horde at a dinner."

It's nice - sharing a meal with people from all corners of the world (almost literally: we had representatives from the US, Canada, England, China, Chile, and Scotland at dinner), with the common bond being their mutual support for this ragtag band.  Dinner flowed seamlessly -- but for a long cab ride through the concrete jungle of Shanghai, epitomizing the sheer size of the city -- into a gig at a Chinese bar.  In the middle of the gig, the somewhat inebriated Chinese patrons (who always seem to love  The Horde despite not being able to understand most of the lyrics) started Gangnam-Style dancing to the music, shouting "Gangnam Style!  Gangnam Style!" at song breaks.  The Horde does covers, but it'd be fairly difficult for a guitar, mandolin, seat drum, harmonica, and accordion to pull off the dulcet melody of the Korean mega hit.

A successful night for The Horde (1200 RMB into the band fund, which I'm now responsible for, thank you very much), capped off by the discovery of this sign on the door of the bathroom at the bar -- the single best sign I've seen thus far in China:

Apologies to the faint of heart.  Or the underage.  The Chinese just says "Prohibited bathroom behavior."