In the basement of KMall in the decidedly not rockin' district around Taipei Main station, Velvet Underground's faux-industrial reception area is filled with loud music and a floor-to-ceiling print of the famously disturbing cover of King Crimson's album In the Court of Crimson. One wall of the room is open to a low-budget arcade named Cartoony World.
"This one time a little girl saw our King Crimson poster and just starting crying. It was really awkward," said the restaurant's day manager, a slender, clean-cut drummer in his late thirties who instructs me to refer to him as King Kong.
I submit that Velvet Underground, despite its poor track record with small children, is Taipei's most philanthropic combination live-rock club and rock-and-roll-themed Tai-Mex restaurant.
PHOTO: CHRIS PECHSTEDT
Its civic mindedness finds expression in its hosting of live music -- any live music -- every Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, beginning at 9pm. The stage comes equipped with everything a garage band could need, and the bands get 60 percent of the cover. (If you've ever wanted to hear jazz played on an erhu, stop by tomorrow night around 10pm.)
That food is an unabashed upscale Taiwanese reengineering of American-style Mexican food. "Asians don't like the spices," says Kong. "I've been to the US and had authentic Mexican food, but I couldn't get used to it."
Perhaps because the blend is so deliberate, the result is not incongruous. If you don't go into it expecting authenticity, you may even find it rewarding, although Kong admits that "some of our customers give us a hard time."
At Kong's recommendation, I tried the tostada and the fried mushrooms, which came in portions that were a bit small for the price. But they both blended -- successfully, I think -- Taiwanese flavors with unmistakably Mexican or American-Mexican forms and techniques.
True to its namesake, Velvet Underground, both as a restaurant and as a rock club, is cooler than it is popular. "We haven't really promoted it much," Kong said with an unconcerned expression.
The canonical shot of an East Asian city is a night skyline studded with towering apartment and office buildings, bright with neon and plastic signage, a landscape of energy and modernity. Another classic image is the same city seen from above, in which identical apartment towers march across the city, spilling out over nearby geography, like stylized soldiers colonizing new territory in a board game. Densely populated dynamic conurbations of money, technological innovation and convenience, it is hard to see the cities of East Asia as what they truly are: necropolises. Why is this? The East Asian development model, with
June 16 to June 22 The following flyer appeared on the streets of Hsinchu on June 12, 1895: “Taipei has already fallen to the Japanese barbarians, who have brought great misery to our land and people. We heard that the Japanese occupiers will tax our gardens, our houses, our bodies, and even our chickens, dogs, cows and pigs. They wear their hair wild, carve their teeth, tattoo their foreheads, wear strange clothes and speak a strange language. How can we be ruled by such people?” Posted by civilian militia leader Wu Tang-hsing (吳湯興), it was a call to arms to retake
This is a deeply unsettling period in Taiwan. Uncertainties are everywhere while everyone waits for a small army of other shoes to drop on nearly every front. During challenging times, interesting political changes can happen, yet all three major political parties are beset with scandals, strife and self-inflicted wounds. As the ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is held accountable for not only the challenges to the party, but also the nation. Taiwan is geopolitically and economically under threat. Domestically, the administration is under siege by the opposition-controlled legislature and growing discontent with what opponents characterize as arrogant, autocratic
When Lisa, 20, laces into her ultra-high heels for her shift at a strip club in Ukraine’s Kharkiv, she knows that aside from dancing, she will have to comfort traumatized soldiers. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, exhausted troops are the main clientele of the Flash Dancers club in the center of the northeastern city, just 20 kilometers from Russian forces. For some customers, it provides an “escape” from the war, said Valerya Zavatska — a 25-year-old law graduate who runs the club with her mother, an ex-dancer. But many are not there just for the show. They “want to talk about what hurts,” she
RSS