As promised, last week's Golden Bell Awards was yet another opportunity for the stars to come busting out of of their dresses. Revealing attire might be nothing new to Taiwan's red carpets lately, but the ladies last Friday took it to another level, such that 2004, it seems, will now be remembered in Taiwan's pop industry as the year of the ballooning and chilly chest. Pretty soon they may have to ditch the whole pretense of issuing awards for mediocre TV and radio shows and just start issuing the Golden Padded Wire-Rimmed Push-up Bra Award. The contenders this year would have been actresses and models Chen Ming-chen (陳明真), Cheng Ching-chun (郭靜純), Tien Hsin (天心), Tian Li (田麗), Chang Ben-yu (張本渝) and, of course, Little S (小S). Classy!
Zhang Fei (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Jay Chou (周杰倫) should be feeling pretty good about himself after the release of the results of a survey conducted by MTV and The Great Daily News (大成報) that showed him topping a list of stars with whom women would be willing to cheat on their significant others. Jay got almost 42 percent of the responses, with Stanley Huang (黃立行) trailing second at 29 percent. Jerry Yan (言承旭) of F4 clocked in at third with 16.5 percent followed by Takeshi Kaneshiro (7 percent) and Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒, 5.5 percent).
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Kimura Takuya, however, can't be feeling too cool, after famed director Yoichi Higashi, who is in town as a judge for tomorrow's Golden Horse Awards, trashed his performance in 2046 as unworthy of a
nomination. After arriving in Taipei, when asked by media why Kimura wasn't on the nomination list, Higashi simply replied: "Under what category would he qualify?" Neither Kimura nor the rest of the crew from 2046 will be on hand at the awards, despite its being heavily favored in more than half a dozen categories, allegedly because director Wong Kar Wai (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
In pop music, last Saturday, Faye Wong (王菲) greeted throngs of her adoring fans to the much-anticipated Taipei leg of her Baleno Concert series. Sure, the special effects weren't particularly special and a choreographer might have helped move her past merely wandering around the stage, but with pipes like hers, who needs fancy dance steps or gratuitous light shows? And although she almost suffered a wardrobe malfunction a-la Janet Jackson trying to rip out of a hideous tweed dress during her opening number, she made sure not to disappoint her male fans later by strutting along the stage in black stretch pants or a pink tutu paired with a metallic tank-top. Even when she characteristically stumbled over her words while greeting the audience, or forgot them altogether during her cover of Blondie's Heart of Glass, her fans seemed to love her more, because with her skin, legs, and a voice like that, who needs a good memory or even coherence?
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist