The taike (台客) brigade was out in force at last weekend's TK Rock Concert (2007台客搖滾嘉年華) in Taichung as local popsters, rappers and rockers vied for a piece of grassroots vogue. Despite intermittent showers, a crowd of around 30,000 bopped to Aboriginal diva A-mei (阿妹) who demonstrated a taike square dance (方塊舞), Bobby Chen (陳昇), who wore a boy-scout outfit and The Chairman (董事長樂團) who were accompanied by the divine dancing Eight Generals (八家將).
Hailed as taike ambassadors, foul-mouth rapper duo MC Hotdog and Chang Chen-yue (張震嶽) won rounds of applause with their obscene version of Chairman Chou's (周董) lyrics. Indie outfit Soda Green (蘇打綠) were on top form after having garnered seven nominations for this year's Golden Melody Awards (金曲獎), scheduled to take place next month.
Outside the main stage, poll-dancing girls fired up the dampened taike crowd with their exposed buttocks and tricks that included rubbing their mammalian protuberances on a male audience member's face. Not before long, the slightly X-rated show caught the attention of local police who issued a warning against the indecent public acts. The resourceful girls upped the ante with a three-way wrestling bout. A happy ending for everyone, except, perhaps, taimei feminists, if that's not an oxymoron, and taike gays.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Whereas the festival embraced a Taiwanese identity loudly and proudly, local girl outfit S.H.E and their record company HIM (華研唱片) were labeled turncoats by our sister paper Liberty Times (自由時報) as their new song Mandarin (中國話) lavishes praise on the Chinese. The company struck back by denying the paper's reporters access to the band's press conferences.
A media war soon broke out when the Apple Daily (蘋果日報) trumpeted its pro-Mandarin opinions while the Liberty Times circulated an online adaptation of the song called Taiwanese (台灣話).
Nationalism was the last thing on VIP shoppers' minds last Friday at the Breeze Center's (微風廣場) exclusive shop-till-you-drop evening that excludes ordinary members of the public. Thousands of honored clients and their platinum credit cards were invited. Starlets and models strutted through the mall and within six hours, NT$260 million had been spent. How the other half lives.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Chinese-language media have been speculating on the possibility of a rekindled romance between old flames Maggie Cheung (張曼玉) and her rumored former lover Tony Leung (梁朝偉) as the pair was spotted dinning together in Hong Kong last week. Obviously having dinner together, in the eyes of the Chinese-language media can never be an innocent affair. Returning to her hometown to attend a local bank's celebration feast as an honored guest, the star tried to dodge questions about the supposed love square between Leung, Carina Lau (劉嘉玲), Terry Gou (郭台銘) and Leung. She decided to play dumb when asked about the dinner date by reporters.
US President Donald Trump may have hoped for an impromptu talk with his old friend Kim Jong-un during a recent trip to Asia, but analysts say the increasingly emboldened North Korean despot had few good reasons to join the photo-op. Trump sent repeated overtures to Kim during his barnstorming tour of Asia, saying he was “100 percent” open to a meeting and even bucking decades of US policy by conceding that North Korea was “sort of a nuclear power.” But Pyongyang kept mum on the invitation, instead firing off missiles and sending its foreign minister to Russia and Belarus, with whom it
When Taiwan was battered by storms this summer, the only crumb of comfort I could take was knowing that some advice I’d drafted several weeks earlier had been correct. Regarding the Southern Cross-Island Highway (南橫公路), a spectacular high-elevation route connecting Taiwan’s southwest with the country’s southeast, I’d written: “The precarious existence of this road cannot be overstated; those hoping to drive or ride all the way across should have a backup plan.” As this article was going to press, the middle section of the highway, between Meishankou (梅山口) in Kaohsiung and Siangyang (向陽) in Taitung County, was still closed to outsiders
Many people noticed the flood of pro-China propaganda across a number of venues in recent weeks that looks like a coordinated assault on US Taiwan policy. It does look like an effort intended to influence the US before the meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) over the weekend. Jennifer Kavanagh’s piece in the New York Times in September appears to be the opening strike of the current campaign. She followed up last week in the Lowy Interpreter, blaming the US for causing the PRC to escalate in the Philippines and Taiwan, saying that as
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a dystopian, radical and dangerous conception of itself. Few are aware of this very fundamental difference between how they view power and how the rest of the world does. Even those of us who have lived in China sometimes fall back into the trap of viewing it through the lens of the power relationships common throughout the rest of the world, instead of understanding the CCP as it conceives of itself. Broadly speaking, the concepts of the people, race, culture, civilization, nation, government and religion are separate, though often overlapping and intertwined. A government
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