Nightlife attends an Arm-Wrestling Soirée at Mamoz

In about two hours, at around 5:50am, I’ll be at the airport to take a chartered flight for Taitung. That’s Eastern Taiwan, for you ignoranuses who’ve never been off the beaten track. But I have yet to pack my style, or finish this goddamn column. Do you feel my fucking stress?

Usually, when I am off on holiday or a press trip, I’m usually lounging around in a suite at a Four Seasons—or some other five-star resort—and as a result, I have the leisurely opportunity to take great satisfaction and immense ego gratification in composing this weekly column of mine.

However, the gracious Alliance Cultural Foundation of Taiwan has this press trip’s daily itinerary heaving with cultural and physical activities: off to a picnic by a pristine lake, visit an organic farm, climb a tree at a forest museum… With me constantly on the road, I simply shan’t have the time to sit down and compose a column when it’s due on Monday. So I have to do it now, early on Easter Sunday, before the plane takes off at 7am and I arrive in Taitung at 8:35am, after having just drunk ten delicious cocktails at Mamoz.

Party people in the know will have heard of the fabulous new CWB hotspot that sits on the top two levels of the Cubus building (the rooftop terrace is still in the process of being fabulized). It’s a swellegant 5,000 square foot space of sleek black marble floors, with walls swathed in damask-patterned leather, full-length mirrors and a beautiful eight-meter long bar top made out of a single tree from Bali. The place reminds me of a swanky Tokyo bar.

Well, it exudes that Japanese finesse as Mamoz is the baby of Mamoru Hayashi, a third generation Japanese-Chinese. I’d never had the chance to check out Mamoz, until tonight when it held its first soirée: “Muscle Power,” an arm-wrestling charity party for Japan with Luraka Events. DJ Luraka got down with his guns and wrestled; ladies with bling on their fingers wrestled; and DJ Kenny from the Swagga Team and Matt Best—who used to play at parties in Tokyo—were on the decks. Best was rocking it with Soichi Terada’s “Sun Shower,” an early house track with big basslines and soulful kawaii vocals via Vocoder from 80s J-pop idol Shimada Nami, and later, “Mind Travel,” one of my favorite dance tracks from BIRD.

Kenny started playing some macho disco as the alcohol lubricated more boys and got the testosterone festering. It’s interesting that most of the manly men who volunteered for arm-wrestling were all scared shitless of the clear-bottomed glass landing at the bottom of the staircase. It’s a see-through dropdown 27th floor to the ground view. I was suffering slightly from vertigo whilst descending, but then I saw the scintillating three-story-tall façade of Louis Vuitton through the floor below me, and was instantly assured that all was fine. I guess those macho men don’t share my faith in high-end luxury fashion. Wimps.