It’s nothing new to have scantily-dressed men and women strutting their stuff on stages at nightclubs in Taiwan, but last weekend Spin, in Greater Taichung, set a new bar with a blast from the past. The nightclub hosted a party that celebrated the 1975 British musical, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the patrons accordingly rocked out. Regular guests who weren’t aware of the evenings’ specialized party were in awe as they were treated to numerous men dressed as women, as well as women wearing very little but corsets, garter belts and fishnet stockings. The highlight of the night came when DJ Pyro (Michael Homer) played the biggest dance number from the movie and everyone clad in Rocky Horror outfits (including a guy in a wheelchair) got on stage and did The Time Warp.
With the amount of daily press coverage he and his fiancee get, it seems like Kanye West has been around forever. Even though he has been making beats for Jay-Z and others for years, this week marks the 10-year anniversary of his highly influential debut album, The College Dropout. To celebrate, SmithAgentSmith (Darren J. Smith) spent two months putting together a one-hour video mix of West’s greatest hits, rare interviews and live performances called 10 Years a New Slave.
“I’m so tired of hearing people talk about Kanye West like he’s this character on reality TV, when in fact he is the man responsible for the best music from my generation hands down!” SmithAgentSmith said in an e-mail interview.
Photo Courtesy of Eliot Lee Hazel
“Honestly, the main reason I have made most of the things I’ve made is because I want to listen to them,” he continued. “Since finishing the video mix, I have listened to it probably 30 times. It gets me emotional, inspired, angry and excited.”
■ SmithAgentSmith plays tomorrow night from 10pm to 4am at Paris Dance Club, 73, Jiguang Street, Greater Taichung (中區繼光街73號). Admission is NT$300 for ladies and NT$500 for men and comes with four drinks. SmithAgentSmith’s 10 Years a New Slave can been seen at: tiny.cc/sms10
Next Friday is a holiday so Ultra Dance Society decided that Thursday would be a perfect night to bring in Adam Freeland and Evil Nine (real names Pat Pardy and Tom Beaufoy) to play at Korner. Freeland is the legendary producer who has stopped by Taiwan a few times during his 20-year career. Freeland was one of the first people to take breakbeat drums and add them to rock records, which resulted in popular mash-ups like Smells Like Freeland and Seven Nation Freeland, influencing countless others.
Recently, Freeland took a much-needed two-year, self-imposed hiatus from the record business. He is back now with a sound that is surprisingly deep, but his DJ sets promise to be a bit of the past, present and the future.
Evil Nine have been touring the globe for the past 14 years. They have been making a lot of waves recently for their heavy Boiler Room set as well as producing a song, The Black Brad Pit, for way-out-there rapper, Danny Brown.
■ Ultra Dance Society presents Return to the Marine Parade featuring Adam Freeland, Evil Nine, Mykal, Diskokidz and James Ho on Thursday from 11:30pm to 5am at Korner, B1, 200, Roosevelt Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路四段200號B1). Advance tickets are NT$900 and can be purchased from INDIEVOX and iBons at all 7-Elevens. Tickets at the door are NT$1,000 and include one drink.
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
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
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would