On Saturday next week, Urban Nomad Film Festival begins proceedings with a party. The lineup includes Taiwanese American DJ Mochipet on his first visit to Taiwan. Hailing from San Francisco, the glitch-hop and dubstep artist is heavily into bass and dresses like a purple dinosaur.
He’ll be joined by Taiwan’s own Funky Brothers (who perform with between eight to 10 members on stage at any given time), DJ Marcus Aurelius, and the electro-diva grrrls of Go Chic, which has toured extensively and is producing an album in Berlin with the help of Canada’s foremost electro artist Peaches.
Headlining the night is Japanese art-dance-fashionista-freaks Trippple Nippples. Think Lady Gaga triplets crossed with gross-out band Gwar, and you still aren’t even close.
Photo courtesy of Takeru Kihara
The three lead singers of the band make their own costumes, which have included rotten spaghetti and latex dresses, and rice encrusted headgear and body armor, by hand.
“The process we take while we are making the costume, etc, is the most uncolorful, sweatshop-ish part,” said band member Orea Nippple. “It’s like Third World, but we love it so I guess we can’t complain.”
The group’s wild stage antics and messy costumes have had them kicked out of various venues. “You should think about how you could mess us up rather than worrying about how you can get away from getting messed up,” warned Yuka Nippple, who describes the group’s music as “headache and stomachache and strawberry ice cream.”
Dec. 16 to Dec. 22 Growing up in the 1930s, Huang Lin Yu-feng (黃林玉鳳) often used the “fragrance machine” at Ximen Market (西門市場) so that she could go shopping while smelling nice. The contraption, about the size of a photo booth, sprayed perfume for a coin or two and was one of the trendy bazaar’s cutting-edge features. Known today as the Red House (西門紅樓), the market also boasted the coldest fridges, and offered delivery service late into the night during peak summer hours. The most fashionable goods from Japan, Europe and the US were found here, and it buzzed with activity
During the Japanese colonial era, remote mountain villages were almost exclusively populated by indigenous residents. Deep in the mountains of Chiayi County, however, was a settlement of Hakka families who braved the harsh living conditions and relative isolation to eke out a living processing camphor. As the industry declined, the village’s homes and offices were abandoned one by one, leaving us with a glimpse of a lifestyle that no longer exists. Even today, it takes between four and six hours to walk in to Baisyue Village (白雪村), and the village is so far up in the Chiayi mountains that it’s actually
These days, CJ Chen (陳崇仁) can be found driving a taxi in and around Hualien. As a way to earn a living, it’s not his first choice. He’d rather be taking tourists to the region’s attractions, but after a 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck the region on April 3, demand for driver-guides collapsed. In the eight months since the quake, the number of overseas tourists visiting Hualien has declined by “at least 90 percent, because most of them come for Taroko Gorge, not for the east coast or the East Longitudinal Valley,” he says. Chen estimates the drop in domestic sightseers after the
US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo, speaking at the Reagan Defense Forum last week, said the US is confident it can defeat the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the Pacific, though its advantage is shrinking. Paparo warned that the PRC might launch a “war of necessity” even if it thinks it could not win, a wise observation. As I write, the PRC is carrying out naval and air exercises off its coast that are aimed at Taiwan and other nations threatened by PRC expansionism. A local defense official said that China’s military activity on Monday formed two “walls” east
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