I (Still) Love SciFi.

White Wabbit - Taipei, Taiwan

So David B. went to Taiwan about 3 years ago for a conference on the way to a fancy PhD in ocean physics and searched online for record stores. He found White Wabbit where he met Simon who was working there at the time. Simon took David around town and shopping for older used records. David ends up making a mixtape of his finds.

When David found out I was in Taiwan he immediately got me in contact with Simon because Canadians are the best people in the world.

While Waiting Room has mostly punk/hardcore/metal, White Wabbit mostly stocked Indie Rock type stuff. There is no way in hell I would have found my way to this shop without Simon’s help. THE SUBWAY IN TAIWAN? SO EASY. THE STREETS? SO HARD.

Another smaller record store. A bit bigger than Waiting Room. Pretty neat that White Wabbit had a wall of music from Taiwan/China (second to last picture is the wall). Waiting Room also had a section of Taiwanese punk/hardcore/metal that I can’t wait to go back this weekend and buy the shit out of.

I picked up a few of Simon’s recommendations and will post stuff as I get a chance to listen to it.

The receipt had a lottery number too.

Here is a better article on White Wabbit that isn’t filled with my bullshit nonsense rambling. It’s written by Catherine Shu who writes one of the blogs Dorothy loves and highly recommended to me when I was originally planing on coming to Taiwan (before I cancelled my plans only to leave last second anyways because my life was/is a wreck).

I’m going to end here because it’s past midnight and I’m talking in staccato.

P.S. If someone from Taiwan related to White Wabbit or Waiting Room reads this through google translate, when I said the store’s were small I didn’t mean it in a derogatory way. The fact that there are not one but TWO independent record stores in Taiwan is amazing.

Stray observations for 02.22.2012

1. From my understanding of what Simon told me, motherfuckers love their shoegaze around here. 
2. The Chinese name Simon gave David B. to sign up for RenRen (Chinese Facebook, because goddamnit David) roughly translates to “calm interior, angry exterior, half-horse-half-dragon-mythical-creature-surrounded-by-fire”. Not joking.
3. My Chinese might not have been as terrible as I thought. Simon and I managed to have a conversation about SST/Dischord records, Black Flag, Agnostic Front, Husker Du and Swami Sound System. It took us about 10 minutes to figure out what Circle Pit was in Chinese and English, though. Still surreal.
4. My phone is supposed to be activated sometime today. This should lead to 97% less dying on my part.
5. I’ll write more tomorrow when I’m more awake and not completely scatterbrained, or at least less scatterbrained than usual.

No Order - Track 2

One of the clerks at Waiting Room gave me No Order’s demo yesterday while I was at the store after I asked in my terrible bullshit Chinese about shows. Even though they clearly understood what I meant, I may or may not have tried to pantomime the word “concert”. Yeah… I don’t even know. I think I… made a triangle with my hands or did jazz fingers. You know what? Forget I even said this, I am totally not being socially awkward in Taiwan. Whoever told you that is a liar.

Back to my point. THERE IS A HARDCORE BAND IN TAIWAN WITH A PRETTY GOOD GRASP OF THE AESTHETIC.

DUDES! DUDES!? DUDES.

The reason I’m freaking out is that while Japan has a well established (and glorious) punk/hardcore/metal scene, the rest of Asia for the most part has/had nothing. My limited contact with Taiwan during childhood visits painted it as the white picket fence suburbia of Asia.^*

SO I SAY AGAIN: DUDES, HARDCORE IN TAIWAN.

THAT FELT GOOD TO TYPE.

^* This is almost certainly untrue and possibly some sort Taiwanese-American on Taiwan racism/stereotyping.

Yo so life took a turn for the weird and now I’m in Taiwan and will most likely be here for a year. I vaguely remember a Taiwanese record store/blog/label linking to one of my videos a while back.

Was this you? Get in contact with me, ESPECIALLY if you have info on the punk/hardcore scene here or know of any good vegan places.

I know next to nothing about Taiwan and could always use more friends.