The holiday season starts off big this weekend with two big hip-hop parties as well as two anniversaries. Things are only going to get crazier as the end of the year approaches. Expect your favorite bars, pubs and clubs to be having Christmas and New Year’s Eve parties, as well as pre and post-Christmas parties and more.
Tonight, Roxy owner Ling Wei (凌威) opens his latest creation, Roxy TOS (The Other Side), to hip-hop with Keepin’ It G. This party features underground hip-hop, R&B and trap and twerk jams that don’t get played in any of the other pop clubs around town. The dress code is G, too. People that wear camouflage, bandanas, backwards hats or any other type of hip-hop gear gets a NT$100 discount on the door price.
■ Keepin’ It G, featuring NeKBRACE, Nawlid, Kai and Cross Cutz, is tonight from 10pm to 4am at Roxy TOS, B2, 27, Fuxing S Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市復興南路2段27號B2). Admission is NT$400 and comes with a drink (NT$300 dressed in gangsta gear).
Photo courtesy of U11
Smoke Machine has quietly become a force to reckon with in Taipei. These publicity-shy techno parties have been going for six years and tonight they celebrate their anniversary at Korner with German headliners Kangdang Ray and Kobosil.
Smoke Machine has done the unthinkable and outlawed picture taking at the parties. Instead of worrying about people’s phones, they prefer that people live in the moment.
■ Six Years of Smoke Machine is tonight from 11:59pm to 7am at Korner inside the Wall (這牆), 200, Roosevelt Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路四段200號B1). Admission is NT$750 at the door and includes one drink before 1am and NT$800 after, which still includes one drink.
Tomorrow night, Brickyard celebrates its sixth anniversary, too, but there will be thousands of pictures taken. Like most venues and parties,
Brickyard relies on pictures of customers having the times of their lives, sexy girls and handsome men, and crazy DJs to get people coming back every week. Six years is a few lifetimes in club years, so the crew in Kaohsiung is really doing something right.
■ Brickyard 6th Anniversary party is tomorrow from 10pm to 4am at Brickyard, B1, 507 Jhongshan 2nd Rd, Kaohsiung City (高雄市中山二路507號B1). Admission is NT$300 for men and NT$150 for women, which includes a drink.
TAINAN WITH ATTITUDE
For many years, people in the southern part of the nation have claimed that Tainan is the home to hip-hop, and this weekend may prove that. On Sunday night, one of the original members of NWA, DJ Yella (real name Antoine Carraby), will be spinning old and new school tunes at U11.
Brian Tsai (蔡家偉), the owner of U11, booked Yella because of the restrictions of who he can have play when putting on these huge music events.
“It really has to fit what the masses want rather than the artists I really want to see. U11 provides a venue to host the artists that I want,” Tsai said.
■NWA’s DJ Yella Straight Outta Compton Party is on Sunday from 8pm to 2am at U11 (拾壹庫), 30, Beimen Rd Sec 2, Tainan City, (台南市北門路二段30號). Admission is NT$600 at the door and includes one beer.
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
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
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