The following 10 days will sort the men from the boys; it’s Gay Pride Festival and that means plenty of people who are proud to party will be in town. There is a dizzying array of bashes to chose from, including five parties that begin next Friday for the Mega Weekend 2006 Taipei (visit www. gaydays-taipei.com for information in English and Chinese).
This weekend the official Pride after party features go-go boys, has Blueman, David S., Jimmy Chen, Victor Cheng, Sawa from AgeHa, Stone and Tiger on the bill and will be held at AXD starting at 11pm tomorrow and finishing at 7am. Tickets are NT$800 in advance, visit ticket.topfong.com or call 0980-202-363.
Many venues are jumping on the bandwagon, ready to ring up pink dollars on their cash registers and do their bit in the fight against discrimination.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MOS
Champagne Thr3e is hosting an I Love Les party tomorrow featuring Noodle, F*Daniel, Kay, Vega, Nina and VJs Elmo, Noriko and Tracy. The bash begins at 10pm and ends at 5am. Visit www.champagne3.com.tw.
Advance tickets are available which include entrance to the Rainbow Music Festival to be held at Huashan Cultural Park (華山文化園區) from 5pm till 10pm tomorrow. Visit twpride.net for a list of ticketing outlets.
Closed for some five months, MoS Taipei is back in business tonight with ReBirth. An open bar from 8pm to 10pm and UK techno innovator Jim Masters kick off the venue’s re-entry to the capital’s nightlife scene.
A soft-opening was held yesterday night. Tomorrow night, the 2005 ITF and DMC World Champion, Pro Zeiko, is scheduled to show off his prodigious beat juggling skills.
Skeptics doubt whether the new MoS will be a success. Behind-the-scenes problems, legal wrangling, poor programming and an out-of-the-way location adversely affected the club’s previous guise, but Johnny Lin, MoS’ program director and resident DJ Blue, see a bright future ahead for the mega-club. For one, the back-room turmoil is history, as only one investor, a local real-estate businessman whose name was withheld by request, is reportedly backing the new project.
Organizers say the venue has a new approach to DJs and club design, after all quality and a fair price, rather than flashy names and major marketing, is what makes a club successful. As such, MoS’ world-class resident DJs, including Sheep (two-time Australian DMC Champion) and Danny Taylor (Canada), will be the focus. Backing them up will be a dazzling array of projection screens, lighting, and dance stages. The door tax has been reduced, too: NT$500 before 11pm, NT$700 afterwards on Fridays and NT$600 before 11pm and NT$800 afterwards on Saturday nights. These new policies will provide the start of a “slow build” for the club, until it starts holding major gigs in the New Year. With high-profile artists Sean Paul and Fatman Scoop already lined up, things are indeed looking good for the born-again MoS. The heat is on.
If the mega-clubbing experience gives you the heebie-jeebies, tomorrow there’s an opportunity to step back in time, to the era of big hair, shoulder pads, mismatching fluorescent socks and leather ties. Atomic, featuring Junior and Megan, Marcus Aurelius and Bustanut is taking a trip back to the 1980s at Barrio. Door damage is NT$400. Visit www.barrio.com.tw or call (02) 2318-9955.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your