Amanda Visell's "The Living City" @ Paradise in Taipei

In recent years, Paradise has hosted some of Taiwan's best exhibitions. Last year, they put on a great show featuring works by Tim Biskup and T9G. This year, Amanda Visell, one of the 2010 TTF's guests of honor, is holding a solo show at the newly renovated shop.

Today's opening party attracted a great crowd. Great hosts, great people, and great toys...not a bad way to spend a Friday evening!

The exhibition, entitled The Living City, features resin and vinyl toys by Amanda, as well as artwork and art books.

The toys:
I really like this figure!
Prints and books:
Amanda hanging out and drawing for folks:
Die peuple:
Paradise, which shouldn't be missed by any Taipei toy tourists, is a two-story shop that sells toys, clothes, bags, and lots of other cool stuff. More pics of the shop:

Well, that's all for now. Stay tuned for my writeup of the 2010 TTF!

2010 TTF Mimobot preview

I'm always excited to see what the good folks at Mimobot will bring to the Taipei Toy Festival. These guys make THE BEST USB flash drives I've ever used.

Not only are they flat out awesome drives (super sturdy and reliable + fast transfer rate) but they make data transfer fun (how often can you say that LOL) and are awesome conversation starters. Plus they come bundled with cool multimedia content.

Over the last couple of years, the Mimobot masters have put out some of the best Star Wars related merchandise since Amanaman reared his bespeckled yellow head in 1985 (geek out!). Here's what they're bringing to this year's TTF:



Han and Luke Stormie reveal!!

Kaiju Korner @ 2010 Taipei Toy Festival!

Hard to believe it's already that time of year again! This year's TTF kicks off next Thursday, July 8. Should be a fantastic time, with a great list of guests including Amanda Visell and Rocking Jelly Bean! Booths by Secret Base, Mimobot, Paradise, the Brothersfree crew (each has his own booth), 8 Style (these guys are always a blast!), and tons more.

I'll be there to cover the action and bring back pics for ya.

In the meantime, check out the links to the right for past coverage of the 2007-2009 TTFs. :O)

Back to Shikaruna!

Edit: Click here for my latest (Jan 2012) visit to the Shikaruna shop/studio.
 

Sorry this took me a while to get to! I was lucky to have a chance to re-visit the magical mystery Shikaruna studio a few weeks ago. Funny story - when I rolled up, printed Google map in hand, they were closed. Shame that, but fortunately Koiwa is a bounty of goodness, so I carried on up the lane, hung a right, and made my way to Third Uncle.

Really great shop that one, and a very friendly and knowledgeable owner. Despite my halting Japanese, I was able to get across that I had tried to visit Shikaruna, but it was closed. He smiled, took out his cell phone, called one of the Shik crew, and said "OK, you can go there now." How totally cool is that! So, I bought a Takara Microman Jaguar, which I had been after for 6-7 years, and retraced my steps back to the studio.

Very nice to see the gang, as always. Such a welcoming and good spirited bunch! We had a chat about recent characters, upcoming releases, and the future of monster toys at the studio. I might not be as hip to all the recent news as some people, so I was surprised to learn that Shikaruna has been pouring a lot of time into a new line of anime character toys. I believe some of them will debut very soon, perhaps as early as tomorrow's Supefestival.

Here are a couple of proto pics:


If anime doesn't float your One Piece pirate ship, worry ye not, kaiju fans! There's enough unreleased and ready to go goodness in that shop to keep us drooling for a loooong time. Here's one (currently unnamed) fellow that is slotted for production soon:

More shots of old and new friends:

Hsin-Wei Hsu solo show in Taipei

Solo art show entitled "What the fart: 10 days in Taipei" runs through 6/26. The show is being held on the first floor of the building where Hot Dog Toyz is located. Address and phone number are on the above postcard image.

More info on Hsin-Wei Hsu here:

http://www.hsinweihsu.com/

Beautiful things I saw today...

From the day's wanderings in NYC...

Umberto Boccioni @ the MOMA:

The Cooper Union building:

Mamoun's Falafel:

Some of the best food in the city (falafels, hummus., baba ganoush....), and it will cost you less than 5 bucks. This location (they have two in the city) is in the East Village on St Mark's Place, near the Astor Place station. It's also across the road from St Mark's Comics (great shop) just down the road from Giant Robot (classic goodness) and around the corner from Toy Tokyo (whose new shop is epic). We stumbled upon Mamoun's a few months ago and were shocked to eat like kings while paying like paupers!

Seriously recommended place to chow, and great for veggies.

Nag Nag Nag @ Mishka NYC

Today at Mishka NYC, an event of unlikely proportions and pubic preponderance exposed itself to an unsuspecting public. Mr. Nag (present in spirit if not in person), Lamour Supreme, Coop, and Mishka formed a holy quartet for the unholy event.

Shots of Mishka's very cool Brooklyn digs:

Lamour's sketches and headers:

So nice!!!

Coop's work:

Der awesome!

Some of the T-shirts:

The Nag crew:




But did he wash his hands afterwards???

Nag schwag

Deep Purple in Taipei

The caliber of concerts in Taipei is going up month by month, it seems. A few months ago, GnR kicked off their worldwide tour in the city. Dylan was here a couple of months back. Two weeks ago, while walking past a 7-11, I saw a poster for a Deep Purple concert. WTF! I phoned my GF immediately, and we had tickets ordered a few hours later.

The concert was held at the Nangang Exhibition Hall, a sprawling building that's trying to take some of the World Trade Center's thunder, I guess. It's kind of out there, but the building is spanking new, and the facilities really modern. Anyway, kind of a snaffu with the tickets (our seats were separated by a huge platform set up to record the show, control the lights, or something). Anyway, this wouldn't do, so we told the ticket takers, and they swapped our seats. Low and behold, the new ticks were 30 rows closer to the stage and dead center...sweet!

The band was rocking. I guess nobody told these guys they were in their 60's.

Ian Gillian's voice is still booming, though he backs off on some of the more intense high pitch wails. I was kind of disappointed they didn't do Child in Time, but after thinking it over, I guess it's because of the vocal challenge. They didn't do Burn either. Not sure why.

Steven Morse was awesome. His solo was fantastic.

I really dug Don Airey too. Though he isn't one of the original members, the live show really brings home how important Jon Lord's keyboard compositions are in gelling DP's songs together.

Most of the crowd was into it, especially during Smoke on the Water.

So, good times in Taipei. Funny thing is, Tears for Fears played in the city last night too. I think we made the right choice. ;-)

Beetlar post updated with new pics!

Check out the original Beetlar post with a bunch more pics here.

New section: Travels through Japan

Blog posts tend to sink into the bog after a while, so I'm starting up a new section (off to the right) with write ups of some of the places I've visited in Japan.