David Frazier and Sean Scanlan, two long-term expats and journalists, were a bit miffed when Huashan 1914 Creative Park (華山1914) excluded Urban Nomad, the indie film festival they started, as part of this year’s programming. The co-founders say they have good reason to be annoyed because they’ve held the festival at Huashan for 10 of the past 12 years that it’s been running.
“We have brought thousands of people to Huashan and are maybe the only event that has made the transition from the squatter artist exhibitions of Huashan’s early days to its new cultural industries era,” Frazier said.
He added that though it seems the festival is no longer a priority, “getting angry at bureaucracies is counter-productive.”
Photo courtesy of Urban Nomad
“This is mainly just indicative of Taiwan’s cultural industries push, which is mainly supporting events marketing groups that know how to get government money and gobble up resources. Not many people in the system really care about quality events or programming,” he said.
Whenever there is darkness in a tunnel, though, there is always a ray of hope, and this year, Urban Nomad’s shining beacon was Lux Cinemas in Ximending, one of Taipei’s poshest theaters.
“The weirdness of the whole thing is that two years ago we were showing indie documentaries in a warehouse, and now we are in one of Taipei’s premier commercial cinemas, vying for screen space with Spider Man and Godzilla. Maybe it’s an exercise in guerilla commercialism,” Frazier quipped.
Photo courtesy of Urban Nomad
Stones throw records
One of the movies getting a lot of global attention is Jeff Broadway’s latest feature, Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton (showing Sunday at 9:15pm and May 15 at 6pm), a documentary about the underground hip-hop label, Stones Throw Records.
In Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton, hip-hoppers and celebrities such as Mike D from the Beastie Boys, Questlove, Snoop Dogg, Common and Kanye West pay tribute to Peanut Butter Wolf and the work he has done to make Stones Throw Records one of the most original labels on the music scene.
Photo courtesy of Urban Nomad
“My experience with Kanye was totally normal. He was very polite, turned off his phone, didn’t take any e-mails and didn’t have any assistants hanging around him. He was fully dedicated to the interview,” Broadway said in an e-mail interview.
“When the interview finished he asked me and my guys if we wanted to hear any of his new music, and we went and sat in his dining room as he performed almost all of Yeezus to us,” he said.
Broadway has ties to Taiwan that date back to his university days, when he was living with two Taiwanese who piqued his interest in the “political peculiarity that is Taiwan.” It was an interest that led him to film the documentary about the country called Godspeed Taiwan.
Photo courtesy of Urban Nomad
“I love Taiwan, I really enjoyed my time there, and am disappointed that I couldn’t come back with Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton,” he said.
Opening party
Urban Nomad always starts with a big blowout and this year is no different. Group A from Japan will be headlining and their performance is sure to remind the audience of the mind and genre-bending show that Trippple Nippples gave two years ago, where paint, partial nudity and general eccentricity left people scratching their heads.
This year’s party will be held at Fenghuang Night Club (鳳凰大歌廳) and hosted by Xiao-ying (real name Ying Wei-min, 應蔚民), lead singer of The Clippers (夾子電動大樂隊). He will be joined by Funky Brothers, DJ @llen, Kid Millionaire, DJ Sonia from the Bounce Girlz and (full disclosure) Marcus Aurelius.
Urban Nomad Opening party is Saturday night from 8pm to 4am at Fenghuang Night Club (鳳凰大歌廳) 5F, 159 Xining S Rd, Taipei City (台北市西寧南路159號5樓). Presale tickets are NT$700 and can be purchased at www.indievox.com. Admission at the door is NT$900. All tickets come with one drink.
This month the government ordered a one-year block of Xiaohongshu (小紅書) or Rednote, a Chinese social media platform with more than 3 million users in Taiwan. The government pointed to widespread fraud activity on the platform, along with cybersecurity failures. Officials said that they had reached out to the company and asked it to change. However, they received no response. The pro-China parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), immediately swung into action, denouncing the ban as an attack on free speech. This “free speech” claim was then echoed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC),
Exceptions to the rule are sometimes revealing. For a brief few years, there was an emerging ideological split between the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that appeared to be pushing the DPP in a direction that would be considered more liberal, and the KMT more conservative. In the previous column, “The KMT-DPP’s bureaucrat-led developmental state” (Dec. 11, page 12), we examined how Taiwan’s democratic system developed, and how both the two main parties largely accepted a similar consensus on how Taiwan should be run domestically and did not split along the left-right lines more familiar in
Specialty sandwiches loaded with the contents of an entire charcuterie board, overflowing with sauces, creams and all manner of creative add-ons, is perhaps one of the biggest global food trends of this year. From London to New York, lines form down the block for mortadella, burrata, pistachio and more stuffed between slices of fresh sourdough, rye or focaccia. To try the trend in Taipei, Munchies Mafia is for sure the spot — could this be the best sandwich in town? Carlos from Spain and Sergio from Mexico opened this spot just seven months ago. The two met working in the
Many people in Taiwan first learned about universal basic income (UBI) — the idea that the government should provide regular, no-strings-attached payments to each citizen — in 2019. While seeking the Democratic nomination for the 2020 US presidential election, Andrew Yang, a politician of Taiwanese descent, said that, if elected, he’d institute a UBI of US$1,000 per month to “get the economic boot off of people’s throats, allowing them to lift their heads up, breathe, and get excited for the future.” His campaign petered out, but the concept of UBI hasn’t gone away. Throughout the industrialized world, there are fears that
RSS