Last Saturday at the Havana pool party, vinyl was the word as DJ Vicar Yang (楊奇章), Taiwan’s king of digging for records, played an exceptional set of underground hip-hop that got the dance floor properly warmed up for funkmaster Freeqwency. For two hours, plus a 30-minute encore, Freeqwency refused to travel on the beaten path by playing hits from Stevie Wonder, George Clinton and the Soul Brothers Number One, James Brown. Instead, he played a selection of old school instrumental boogie jams and modern funk tracks that can only be described as ahead of their time, both then and now. The crowd was up for anything and ate it all up. Freeqwency was fairly happy, too, as he was in Kaohsiung during the gas pipe explosions and still played his gig down there the day after because, as the old saying goes, the show must go on.
Room 18 reopens
Photo courtesy of the Brass Monkey
Room 18 in Taipei is one of Taiwan’s longest running and most successful clubs. It spawned Barcode, the swanky lounge bar five floors up, Baby 18, a club aimed at a younger crowd nearby in the Xinyi area, as well as 18TC, a club in Greater Taichung.
For nearly a month, Room 18 was closed for a facelift. Now, it is open for business again and the reviews are in. The big room was enlarged and is now easier to navigate, while the house room has shrunk in size and added a few more tables.
Pink Monkey
The Brass Monkey owns its very own corner of the Taipei nightlife scene. It is primarily a restaurant and sports bar, but has the city’s busiest ladies night on Thursday with DJ Andrew Ford playing marathon sets. When there is not a big sporting event on the weekend, Brass Monkey has themed parties including a beach party in June, a back-to-school party in September, and a pink party tomorrow night.
At first, I assumed that the pink party was a joke on the huge White Party that happens annually in Taipei in the spring or the yearly Black Party in Greater Kaohsiung at the end of summer.
Once I got in contact with Max Murphy, owner of Brass Monkey and lover of dressing up in costumes, he informed me that it was much simpler than that.
“I noticed that a wife of one of my friends was having a Pink Party for her birthday, so I copied her,” Murphy said in an e-mail interview with the Taipei Times.
“It is the one day of the year where guys won’t be teased for wearing pink. The Pink Party was originally our anniversary party, but it grew big enough to become it’s own event. So we now do our actual anniversary on Feb. 27 and the Pink Party in August.”
■ Brass Monkey’s Pink Party is tomorrow from 9pm to 4am at 166 Fuxing N Rd, Taipei City (台北市復興北路166號). Free entry and drinks from 8pm to 10pm for people wearing pink.
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March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern