Faye Wong’s (王菲) recent visit to Taipei caused a stir among fans and the entertainment media, but that was to be expected.
The pop diva performed a run of highly anticipated shows at Taipei Arena (台北小巨蛋) last weekend as part of a comeback tour. Wong dropped out of the limelight in 2004, hinting at a retirement from singing.
The announcement of her return to the stage late last year was greeted in Taiwan with frenzied ticket sales: When tickets for last week’s shows went on sale in October, buyers caused ERA’s online ticketing system to crash within minutes. Once ERA fixed the problem, 90 percent of the tickets for her three shows were sold within two hours.
Photo: Taipei Times
While in Taipei last week, the Beijing-born 41-year-old singer’s every move and utterance was closely scrutinized.
Wong is famous for her cool demeanor in public, and TVBS illustrated her reticence by counting the total number of words she spoke to the audience during the three shows: 26.
And as the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) put it, Wong often found herself getting “stuck” (卡卡) wherever she went. Paparazzi and fans mobbed her as soon as she stepped off the plane last week. They mobbed her again at a post-concert party at the Taipei nightspot Barcode (where she had to plead with the photographers to be careful and not push each other), and saw her off at the airport when she left.
But Wong didn’t seem to mind the attention while waiting for her return flight, at least judging from video posted online by the Apple Daily. When asked by reporters to judge her own performances, she replied, “It’s in the past, I don’t care about giving myself a score. Anyhow I did my best.”
She also addressed a minor drama that occurred during her final concert on Sunday. During one segment, Wong sang a number while sitting on a “flying chair” that was lifted three stories high above the audience. The chair got stuck for a few seconds on the way down, which left Wong visibly startled.
“I was a little nervous, but it was OK,” she said. “I thought that the audience was calmer.”
Overnight sensation singer Lin Yu-chun (林育群), also known as “Little Fatty” (小胖), had better look out, because there’s a new YouTube star in town.
Forty-one-year-old comedienne and singer Lotus Wang (王彩樺) has scored more than two million hits for her video and electro-house hit Bobee (保庇, www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gWu5Y6yY4E), a cover of a song by South Korean girl band T-ara.
The video recently received a nod from CNN as the “best viral video of the week,” and the “Bobee” dance has become a veritable craze, spawning a rash of copycat videos. The Macarena goes taike (台客), if you will.
Bobee, a catchy tune sung in Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) about asking deities for protection and luck, is on Wang’s first album, Bo Peep Bo Peep (有唱有保庇), which reached the number one spot on G-Music’s charts twice since being released last month.
Wang described herself in a recent interview with the Central News Agency as a mere “B-lister” in the entertainment world.
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Francis William White, an Englishman who late in the 1860s served as Commissioner of the Imperial Customs Service in Tainan, published the tale of a jaunt he took one winter in 1868: A visit to the interior of south Formosa (1870). White’s journey took him into the mountains, where he mused on the difficult terrain and the ease with which his little group could be ambushed in the crags and dense vegetation. At one point he stays at the house of a local near a stream on the border of indigenous territory: “Their matchlocks, which were kept in excellent order,
Jan. 19 to Jan. 25 In 1933, an all-star team of musicians and lyricists began shaping a new sound. The person who brought them together was Chen Chun-yu (陳君玉), head of Columbia Records’ arts department. Tasked with creating Taiwanese “pop music,” they released hit after hit that year, with Chen contributing lyrics to several of the songs himself. Many figures from that group, including composer Teng Yu-hsien (鄧雨賢), vocalist Chun-chun (純純, Sun-sun in Taiwanese) and lyricist Lee Lin-chiu (李臨秋) remain well-known today, particularly for the famous classic Longing for the Spring Breeze (望春風). Chen, however, is not a name
There is no question that Tyrannosaurus rex got big. In fact, this fearsome dinosaur may have been Earth’s most massive land predator of all time. But the question of how quickly T. rex achieved its maximum size has been a matter of debate. A new study examining bone tissue microstructure in the leg bones of 17 fossil specimens concludes that Tyrannosaurus took about 40 years to reach its maximum size of roughly 8 tons, some 15 years more than previously estimated. As part of the study, the researchers identified previously unknown growth marks in these bones that could be seen only
RSS