The MTV chart concert (MTV封神榜萬人演唱會), a rich resource for gossip rags, jogged through its annual five-hour music marathon at the Zhongshan Soccer Stadium (中山足球場) last Saturday featuring 25 glittery pop idols and bands that were guaranteed an audience of tens of thousands of screaming teens.
Revelers left behind tonnes of garbage that cost NT$300,000 to clean up and a few red faces among the stars.
While perennial cutie Vivian Hsu (徐若瑄) sang off-key, girl band S.H.E barely kept up with the beat and Mando-pop king Jay Chou (周杰倫) hastily wrapped up his act and walked off stage without greeting his fans, local rock outfit Mayday (五月天) won concertgoers' hearts.
Performing with equal strength, three-piece boy band W-inds. from Japan elicited high-decibel screams from fans while sweating out in their black suits in the sultry summer night. The heat proved too much for some overexcited fans in the audience who suffered heatstroke and were ferried by ambulance to hospital. At the airport a mini riot broke out among 500 fans who had gathered to see the band off at the airport.
On the other side of the globe, Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) is in Italy this week to attend the 63th Venice International Film Festival as his latest work I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (黑眼圈) has been selected to compete for the festival's highest prize, the Golden Lion. A frequent guest of the event, Tsai seems to perfectly blend into local life as he was spotted playing with pigeons at squares and grocery shopping at supermarkets.
Yet first-time visitor Cheng Yu-chieh (鄭有傑) doesn't seem to take the flamboyant world of cinema in his stride as his compatriot does. With his debut feature Do Over (一年之初) selected to screen at the festival's International Critic's Week Section, the artless lad is flabbergasted by the five-star treatment he has received, such as flying business class and living among Hollywood stars at a grand hotel.
“I should have brought my swimming trunks,” Cheng lamented to the Chinese-language press. A word to the wise: swimming trunks of all kinds can be purchased at stores in the world-famous summer resort. And, of course, there's always the skinny-dipping option.
Local pop singer Melody Chiang (江美琪) stunned her fans and local media at a press conference for her latest album Crying Baby (愛哭鬼) last week. The reason for the commotion was not the quality of the album but her conspicuously smaller face and pointy chin, both the work of a plastic surgeon it is suspected.
Brushing off questions about her apparently artificial looks, Chiang attributed her new newfound beauty to a cosmetic dental makeover. The star's record label backed up the singer by saying she had enjoyed the services of a very competent makeup artist.
Ironically, Chiang's supportive fans all seemed to embrace the idea that her new face is the achievement of modern medical science and said it was natural that the singer followed her good friend Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) in transforming herself from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan (醜小鴨變天鵝).
Ending a five-year hiatus, Coco Lee (李玟), another star suspected of going under the surgeon's knife to augment her looks, is set to release a Mandarin album at the end of this month. The has-been Mando-pop queen reportedly asked her alleged one-time lover Wang Lee-hom (王力宏) to write for her album as a well-intentioned gesture of reconciliation.
As Wang's name is no where to be seen on the album cover, it appears that the international-movie-star-would-be who is so busy doing Ang Lee's (李安) Lust Caution is determined to put all his past flings behind him and look forward to a promising future.
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