Napanee, Ontario's biggest export -- Avril Lavigne -- will be blazing through Taipei Tuesday for a stop on her world tour in support of her second album Under My Skin.
The pint-sized, spunky 19-year-old has become the voice of adolescent female rage in the two years since releasing her debut Let Go, which sold over 14 million copies around the world on the popularity of guitar-driven tracks like Sk8er Boi and I'm with you.
Now, in her second appearance in Taiwan in less than a year after a mini-concert organized by Taipei City, Avril will be headlining a full-sized show at Taipei's Municipal Stadium, a monster venue that can pack up to 40,000, though whether that size crowd can be mustered on a Tuesday will have to be seen.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SONY-BMG
She's expected to play mostly the tracks from the new album, which pick up quite clearly from the manic rock of the first album where she established her reputation singing about some of rock's perennial themes: dysfunctional relationships, disgust with authority, discrimination, etc.
She does so, though, through the slight figure of a fresh-faced, blonde-haired, blue-eyed teenager, which stops her well short of Courtney Love analogies and makes her far more accessible -- 14-million-albums accessible.
Her in-your-face attitude has only partially mellowed with age on the new album and the themes remain mostly the same, assuring her a continued role in the pop world as the anti-Britney girl pop icon.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SONY-BMG
Avril will and Vanessa may:
What: Avril Lavigne
When: Tuesday, 7:30pm
Where: Taipei Municipal Stadium, intersection of Bade Road and Dunhua North Road (
Tickets: NT$1,500 - NT$2,500, available through Era ticketing at www.ticket.com.tw or at venue.
On Thursday and Friday, another blazing lady will whip through Taipei on a regional tour in support of a new album. Vanessa-Mae (
The native Singaporean first had a violin thrust into her gifted hands at age five and by 10 was performing in orchestras. She released her first album at 11, but it was The Violin Player, released when she was 16, that launched her career and her reputation into the stratosphere. Her albums have sold over eight million copies and established the template for the innumerable crossover copycats that have followed.
An inveterate multi-tasker, she's been a model, soundtrack composer, charity activist and personal performer to the British royal family. She's also reputed to be an explosive performer onstage, releasing all that energy that led her to fuse pop with classical in the first place.
The new album Choreography follows her tried-and-true formula, this time mining the various traditions of dance rhythms from places like Africa, Spain, Argentina, Ireland and India. Always tending toward the grandiose, the songs aim for theatricality in a way that brings to mind Ennio Morricone.
Avril will and Vanessa may:
What: Vanessa-Mae
When: Thursday and April 1, 7:30pm
Where: Taipei International Convention Center, 1 Xinyi Rd, Sec 5, Taipei (
Tickets: NT$1,200 - NT$6,000, available through Era ticketing at www.ticket.com.tw or at the venue
In the mainstream view, the Philippines should be worried that a conflict over Taiwan between the superpowers will drag in Manila. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr observed in an interview in The Wall Street Journal last year, “I learned an African saying: When elephants fight, the only one that loses is the grass. We are the grass in this situation. We don’t want to get trampled.” Such sentiments are widespread. Few seem to have imagined the opposite: that a gray zone incursion of People’s Republic of China (PRC) ships into the Philippines’ waters could trigger a conflict that drags in Taiwan. Fewer
March 18 to March 24 Yasushi Noro knew that it was not the right time to scale Hehuan Mountain (合歡). It was March 1913 and the weather was still bitingly cold at high altitudes. But he knew he couldn’t afford to wait, either. Launched in 1910, the Japanese colonial government’s “five year plan to govern the savages” was going well. After numerous bloody battles, they had subdued almost all of the indigenous peoples in northeastern Taiwan, save for the Truku who held strong to their territory around the Liwu River (立霧溪) and Mugua River (木瓜溪) basins in today’s Hualien County (花蓮). The Japanese
Pei-Ru Ko (柯沛如) says her Taipei upbringing was a little different from her peers. “We lived near the National Palace Museum [north of Taipei] and our neighbors had rice paddies. They were growing food right next to us. There was a mountain and a river so people would say, ‘you live in the mountains,’ and my friends wouldn’t want to come and visit.” While her school friends remained a bus ride away, Ko’s semi-rural upbringing schooled her in other things, including where food comes from. “Most people living in Taipei wouldn’t have a neighbor that was growing food,” she says. “So
Whether you’re interested in the history of ceramics, the production process itself, creating your own pottery, shopping for ceramic vessels, or simply admiring beautiful handmade items, the Zhunan Snake Kiln (竹南蛇窯) in Jhunan Township (竹南), Miaoli County, is definitely worth a visit. For centuries, kiln products were an integral part of daily life in Taiwan: bricks for walls, tiles for roofs, pottery for the kitchen, jugs for fermenting alcoholic drinks, as well as decorative elements on temples, all came from kilns, and Miaoli was a major hub for the production of these items. The Zhunan Snake Kiln has a large area dedicated