By Ian Bartholomew
In Taiwan, there are beef noodle stores everywhere you look, some serving unremarkable concoctions of tough beef and limp noodles, others offering dishes tender and flavored to perfection. Finding the perfect bowl is what the 2007 Taipei International Newrow Mian Festival (2007臺北國際牛肉麵節) is all about.

[ FULL STORY ]

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
This is the story of how a silly-sounding word reached the ear of a powerful television producer, and in only seconds of airtime, expanded the vocabularies of legions of women.

[ FULL STORY ]

By Tim Adams
It's been 39 years since Jane Birkin fell in love with Serge Gainsbourg, 27 years since they split up and 16 years since Gainsbourg died, but you'd never guess. Paris has never let its most iconic couple separate - you can, Birkin says, still not get through a day in this city without hearing the immortal intimacies of Je t'Aime... Moi Non Plus from somewhere - and anyway Birkin herself, at 60, has chosen to be living proof that love can survive divorce and death. She still spends most nights with Gainsbourg, singing his songs on an endless cabaret tour, breathing life into words he wrote with her, his muse, in mind. Birkin's apartment, just off the Boulevard St Germain, decked in crimson silk, cast in permanent twilight, crammed with old photographs and a collection of stuffed animals, is made for this perpetual seance. She shares it with a corpulent bulldog, Dora, who lounges on a chaise.

[ FULL STORY ]

By Noah Buchan
The Museum of Contemporary Art's (MOCA, 台北當代藝術館) newest installment, Duologue: Exhibition by Lee Mingwei and Tse Su-mei (複音：李明維、謝素梅雙個展), shows 16 works of art created by two internationally renowned artists.

[ FULL STORY ]

AUVERS-SUR-OISE
As Vincent van Gogh lay dying in a dingy room at a French inn, the painting above his cast-iron bed was The Fields, a scene of the undulating wheat plains where the artist had contemplated life and death.

[ FULL STORY ]

By Ian Bartholomew
The Pingtung Peninsula Arts Festival (屏東半島藝術季), which has been held annually for the last seven years, has branched out into hotels this year. In an effort to move the event from the county into the city, organizers have arranged solo exhibitions at Pingtung branches of the Caesar Park Hotel, Howard Beach Resort, Leofoo Resort and many others.

[ FULL STORY ]

NY Times news service
T he Dance, Dance Revolution series, which challenges energetic dancers to tap their toes on a dance mat to the beat of popular music, has been solid gold for Konami. Numerous DDR titles exist and a new one with a different array of tunes seems to come out every few months.

[ FULL STORY ]