Charles Baudelaire, whose 200th birthday yesterday was celebrated with stamp issues, new editions of his poetry and virtual events, is arguably more famous for his concept of the flaneur — an aimless stroller or ambler — than for his writing. That’s partly because reading his volumes Les Fleurs du Mal or Le Spleen de Paris requires a degree of application, but also because the idea of an individual moving through the city streets and finding aesthetic pleasure in the teeming crowds, appeals to us and continues to chime. At least, it did until spring last year, when the crowds were told to stay at home. But even in a ghost city, it’s possible to think and walk like a flaneur. Rainer Hanshe has translated several of Baudelaire’s books into English — including Belgium Stripped Bare, about the French author’s visit to Brussels just before it was struck by a cholera epidemic. He notes: “The flaneur is a figure who, while immersed in the urban throng, is simultaneously separate from it. If more empty than not, our streets are still to some degree populated, and we can engage in the form of communion that Baudelaire referred to as a mysterious intoxication.” This involves trying to get inside the heads of others — an act of ecstatic empathy that “peoples” the solitary walker’s imagination. It’s a radical idea that envisions the mind as a sponge or, perhaps, a social media channel. Baudelaire’s most memorable phrase for the flaneur was “a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness.” Some of his ideas need updating. The flaneur might be “a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes,” but what about the princesses? Janet Wolff of the University of Manchester has written of the “invisible flaneuse,” of “respectable” women’s absence from public arenas in modern cities. In her 2016 book Flaneuse:
Over a million years in the making, the outdoor playground that is Kaohsiung’s Shoushan (壽山), commonly known as “Monkey Mountain,” is a rich geological and ecological resource that visitors to the city should be sure not to miss. Many are familiar with the area’s hiking trails and resident monkey population, but even locals may be surprised to learn of the extensive system of caves here, full of classic examples of speleothems like stalactites, stalagmites, draperies and flowstones, as well as cave-dwelling fauna. These caves are the result of hundreds of thousands of years of erosion slowly dissolving the mountain’s limestone. There are hundreds of such cavities, some extending dozens of meters into the mountain. To this day, no complete survey has ever been done. The stone itself was laid down by corals in nascent Taiwan’s shallow coastal waters over a million years ago, before being driven upwards by tectonic action. Indeed, marine fossils are common all over the mountain. NATIONAL PARK In 2011, Monkey Mountain, along with a few other nearby hills, became protected as Shoushan National Nature Park. With the establishment of the Park, the “Wild West” days of Monkey Mountain came to an end, and the vast system of limestone caves on the mountain, formerly a spelunking free-for-all, became mostly off limits. Currently, public access is officially limited to four caves, only between the months of November and April, and only when accompanied by a park-certified guide (details below). The other hundred-odd caves are not gated in any way to prevent access, but according to the law such access is now forbidden. Our group was led through all four caves last month by cave guide Chin Nan. WALKING UNDERGROUND Our first stop was Orangutan Cave (猩猩洞), named after several ape-shaped rocks found inside. The high ceiling and flat floor make this the safest
A French documentary has cast fresh doubts over the world’s most expensive painting, the Salvator Mundi credited to Leonardo da Vinci, revealing a resulting diplomatic tussle between France and its Saudi owner. The painting of Jesus Christ, nicknamed the “male Mona Lisa,” was sold at a 2017 Christies auction in New York for a record US$450 million. Its secret buyer was later revealed to be Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, though this is still denied in Riyadh. But there have long been questions over whether it was entirely the work of da Vinci. The issue resurfaced when the painting failed to appear as planned at the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum in 2018, and then at a blockbuster da Vinci show by the Louvre in Paris the following year. Now a documentary, The Savior for Sale by filmmaker Antoine Vitkine, to be premiered on French TV next week, sets out to reveal what was going on behind the scenes. In the film, senior officials from President Emmanuel Macron’s government, appearing under pseudonyms, confirm that the Louvre’s scientific analysis of the painting concluded that while it was produced in da Vinci’s workshop, the master himself only “contributed” to the painting. This apparently went down badly with the Saudis. ROW OVER AUTHENTICITY “Things turned incomprehensible,” says one of the French officials in the film. “The request by “MBS” [bin Salman] was very clear: show the Salvator Mundi next to the Mona Lisa, and present it as 100 percent a da Vinci.” The Saudis offered various deals, the official says, but his recommendation to the Elysee was that this would amount to “laundering a US$450 million artwork.” The documentary alleges that some members of the French government, including Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, lobbied on behalf of bin Salman’s request. They were concerned about the impact on France’s wide-ranging strategic
The Brave Girls were losing courage just weeks ago, on the verge of breaking up and abandoning their dreams of K-pop stardom after years of going nowhere. Then a pseudonymous YouTuber called Viditor uploaded a compilation of them performing on South Korean army bases — and saved their careers. Rollin’ rollin’ rollin’ rollin’/I am waiting for you/Babe just only you, they chant, as wildly enthusiastic uniformed conscripts dance and wave glow-sticks. It went viral and struck millions of chords across the country. Less than a month later the song reached number one in South Korea and topped the Billboard K-pop 100 in the US, four years after it was originally released — with their popularity reinforced by their story of struggle against the odds. The fan-led ascent is a reversal of the usual K-pop model, where bands are usually assembled, trained intensively and launched by record companies, whose marketing and promotion is crucial to their success. “At the start of this year I thought it was time for us to call an end to it,” lead singer Kim Min-young said. “Reaction to our songs had always been cold... It seemed like no one wanted to see us on stage,” she added tearfully. The Brave Girls started out as a five-piece a decade ago, but fell largely on deaf ears. They were relaunched as a septet in 2016, but the reshuffle did nothing to boost their popularity. Their five singles and two mini-albums were misses rather than hits, and departures over the next few years whittled them down to four members. They were reduced to performing on army bases, the South Korean equivalent of a daytime appearance on a side stage at a music festival. “Our members all felt an emotional burden,” said Kim, 30. “I wasn’t brave enough to give up on my career or start something new.
Even though Taiwan is surrounded by the ocean, its people have turned their backs on the sea for too long, writer and marine advocate Liao Hung-chi (廖鴻基) says in the documentary Whale Island (男人與他的海). Liao laments that due to a multitude of social and political factors, most Taiwanese don’t understand the ocean, which is often walled off by concrete tetrapods or coastal industrial zones. Through his life’s work, he hopes that Taiwanese can face the waves head on — both literally and figuratively. Beautifully shot by documentary filmmaker Huang Chia-chun (黃嘉俊), this tender and majestic ode to the sea follows Liao and Taiwan’s first underwater whale photographer Ray Chin (金磊) on their respective adventures, diving deep alongside them not just into the waters but into their souls, which yearn for freedom. Huang’s footage of the sea and its creatures is absolutely stunning, especially on the big screen, but this isn’t one of those films that just shows pretty pictures for two hours. It is Liao and Chin’s burning passion, their thoughtful musings and their relationships with the families they leave behind on land that present a compelling story. A literal translation of the Chinese, “Man and His Ocean,” may be more apt here as that’s what it’s really about. The two men don’t own the ocean or try to tame it, of course, but it belongs to them in an immensely personal way that drives their entire existence. The two come from different generations and their stories don’t actually intersect in the film. Liao is on a months-long drifting voyage through the Kuroshio current, while Chin is photographing whales in the Kingdom of Tonga. The narrative is a bit disconnected at first since they’re doing unrelated things, but soon the parallels emerge. As a writer, Liao’s narration is much more philosophical,
The auction of a series of sketches purportedly drawn by an artist at the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar was canceled Tuesday after groups protested it was offensive and immoral to profit off the misery of incarcerated people. The auction was halted by eBay hours before it was to conclude after company executives met with Japanese American groups who called the sale “hurtful, and a degrading reminder of the mass roundup and incarceration.” “It’s seems unethical and immoral to put this artwork up on eBay to the highest bidder,” said Shirley Higuchi, author of Setsuko’s Secret: Heart Mountain and the Legacy of the Japanese American Incarceration. “When you sell artwork created during an oppressive time for money ... that’s against what our society feels is moral.” The groups were led by the Japanese American National Museum and Japanese American Citizens League, which also led a successful effort in 2015 to block the auction of a much larger collection of items of internment art in New Jersey. In that case, hundreds of pieces were turned over to museums that commemorate the US internment of more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent for more than three years on the dubious claim they might betray America in the war. The artwork for sale on eBay were 20 pencil sketches from 1942-43 with the name Matsumura written at the bottom, along with the word Manzanar. The drawings depict mostly what appear to be Japanese landscapes, including one of Mount Fuji. The groups suggested the artist could be Giichi Matsumura, the subject of a series of stories first reported by The Associated Press about a Manzanar incarceree who died in a storm while sketching and painting in the high Sierra in the final days of the war. Several Matsumura families were held at the camp 290 kilometers north of
In October last year, a who’s who of the the anti-vaccine movement gathered for a virtual conference. Speaker after speaker hit on the same point: The pandemic provided the perfect opportunity to grow the movement — and they didn’t plan to waste it. In the eighth month of the global pandemic, it was clear the activists had a found their moment: The world had never been more receptive to their message. So how does the anti-vaccine extremists use the pandemic to grow their base? For years, those opposing vaccines had argued that safety issues with vaccines are too often ignored by manufacturers and government regulators who they believed were in league to rush out vaccines for their own gain. Then, suddenly, mainstream scientists were among those arguing a Trump-sponsored vaccine was getting hurried out the door, perhaps too quickly, in time for election day. That month, then vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris expressed her own skepticism of a Trump-ordered vaccine. Suddenly, confidence in the vaccine dropped significantly among Democrats. “All of the truths we’ve been trying to broadcast for many, many years— there are people hearing it and the impact and all the seeds are landing on very fertile ground,” Robert F Kennedy Jr, one of the leaders of the anti-vaccine movement, said at the conference. Kennedy ended his talk with a battle cry. “Let’s go to war,” he said. A report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, or CCDH, says that the roughly 150 leading anti-vaxx social media accounts gained more than 10 million followers, mostly on Instagram and YouTube, between 2019 and December 2020. Since then, platforms have taken steps to curb misinformation including removing some of the movements biggest names. Kennedy was kicked off Instagram in February. Kennedy responded on his organization’s website that, “Facebook, the pharmaceutical industry and its captive regulators use the term ‘vaccine misinformation’
In 1968, the year Hey Jude hit the charts, Richard Thompson turned down an invitation to Paul McCartney’s birthday party. On other occasions over the years, Thompson shared the stage with Jimi Hendrix. He also pranked Buck Owens. Those are among the fun facts found in Thompson’s new memoir, Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975. The British guitarist and singer-songwriter, who has long had a small but devout following, revisits his role as observer and participant in a consequential era of rock music. “I’d been wondering whether I was capable of writing something other than a three-minute song for some time,” he said from his home in Montclair, New Jersey. Thompson, 72, says he enjoyed writing his first book, which took three years. He chose to focus on the early part of his career in part because he’s often asked about the 1960s and ‘70s. “It does seem to have been an influential decade of music, and you’re still feeling the reverberations of that now,” he says. People are still reverential about some of the legendary music figures from that time. Many of those names pop up in Beeswing — also the title of a Thompson song that encapsulates the era. He was a member of the groundbreaking group Fairport Convention, which brought rock to the British folk tradition, and British folk to rock. His subsequent musical partnership with his first wife, Linda, produced the sublime songs that have served as the foundation of Thompson’s solo career, including Shoot Out the Lights and Wall of Death. Thompson laughs when asked why he said no to the McCartney invitation. “I saw the Beatles and the Stones as being an older generation — all of five or six years older than we were — and not being particularly relevant to the kind of music
It’s official: Trees are good for the mental health of city dwellers. According to a study published in Scientific Reports at the end of last year, individuals living within 100m of a high density of street trees in Leipzig, Germany, were prescribed antidepressant prescriptions at a lower rate than those who didn’t have many trees in their neighborhood. The study noted that more distant clusters of street trees didn’t appear to have any impact on antidepressant use, and that, even at 100m, the correlation was merely “marginally significant.” However, the researchers found, for individuals with low socio-economic status, trees no more than 100m from their homes “significantly reduced the probability of being prescribed antidepressants.” As the study puts it, “unintentional daily contact to nature through street trees close to the home may reduce the risk of depression, especially for individuals in deprived groups.” The Leipzig researchers speculate that the key benefit of roadside trees isn’t that they inspire people to be more physically active. Instead, “Previous research has found that people whose homes had views of high amounts of diverse vegetation had lower stress and greater [psychological] restoration.” None of this comes as a big surprise. Who doesn’t like trees? A 2011 study by Ihab Elzeyadi of the University of Oregon found that office workers able to see trees and nature from their desks took less sick leave than colleagues who couldn’t enjoy any view whatsoever. Trees and parks are especially important for people who live in Taiwan’s cities, because so few households have gardens. Unfortunately, the trees that do shade our sidewalks and roads aren’t well cared for, say local specialists. SOIL COMPACTION A July 30, 2017 post on the Facebook account of the Taiwan Greening Technology Association (wetrees.org) explains why urban trees are at particular risk in summertime: “When the soil
The starry cast of Aaron Sorkin’s 1960s courtroom drama The Trial of the Chicago 7 took the top prize Sunday at a virtual Screen Actors Guild Awards where actors of color, for the first time, swept the individual film awards. The 27th SAG Awards, presented by the Hollywood actors’ guild SAG-Aftra, were a muted affair — and not just because the red carpet-less ceremony was condensed to a pre-recorded, Zoom-heavy, one-hour broadcast on TBS and TNT. The perceived Academy Awards frontrunner — Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland — wasn’t nominated for best ensemble, making this year’s postponed SAG Awards less of an Oscar preview than it is most years. Still, the win for Netflix’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 marked the first time a film from any streaming service won the guild’s ensemble award. Written and directed by Sorkin, The Trial of the Chicago 7 had been set for theatrical release by Paramount Pictures before the pandemic hit, leading to its sale to Netflix. The streamer is still after its first best-picture win at the Oscars. Frank Langella, who plays the judge who presided over the 1969 prosecution of activists arrested during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, drew parallels between that era’s unrest and today’s while accepting the award on behalf of the cast. “’God give us leaders,’ said the Reverend Martin Luther King before he was shot down in cold blood on this very date in 1968 — a profound injustice,” said Langella, citing events leading up to those dramatized in The Trial of the Chicago 7. “The Reverend King was right. We need leaders to guide us toward hating each other less.” The win came over two other Netflix releases — Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Da 5 Bloods — as well as Amazon’s One Night in Miami and A24’s Minari. Had
Chinese tech giants are expanding in Singapore as they face a crackdown at home and growing pressure in other key markets — but they may struggle to find talent in the city-state. Messaging-and-gaming behemoth Tencent is opening a hub and TikTok owner ByteDance is on a hiring spree after establishing a regional HQ, while e-commerce giant Alibaba is investing in property and recruiting. The tech firms are shifting their focus to booming Southeast Asian markets as authorities tighten the screws at home amid concerns about the platforms’ growing power. Regulators have launched a blitz on the sector, hitting several firms with heavy fines, and threatening to slice up massive companies whose reach now extends deep into the daily lives of ordinary Chinese. Meanwhile, festering tensions between Washington and Beijing after an assault on Chinese tech titans during Donald Trump’s presidency make the United States an unattractive prospect, and problems abound elsewhere. “Chinese tech companies are facing regulatory pressures and sanctions from governments in other countries, notably the US but also other nations such as India,” Rajiv Biswas, Asia Pacific chief economist at IHS Markit, said. India has banned a swathe of Chinese apps since a border clash last year, while the European Union and other Western powers recently imposed sanctions over China’s treatment of the Muslim Uyghur minority, prompting retaliatory sanctions. But Singapore, a prosperous financial hub, maintains good ties with Beijing and the West, and tech firms have come to view it as a safe bet to expand their operations without upsetting either side. In the current climate of geopolitical uncertainty “Singapore is considered as a more neutral country”, Chen Guoli, professor of strategy at the Singapore campus of business school INSEAD, said. HIRING SPREE In addition, long-running turmoil in traditional rival Hong Kong may have dimmed its appeal, although observers stress other factors are likely more
This week, the government announced that electricity prices would not be raised for the next six months. Taipower had proposed raising the rates a mere 0.07 percent. The reason given for the rejection of the new rate was that the tiny increase would not cover the administrative costs of making the adjustment. Moreover, Taipower is finally making money again after five years of no profits. Those of us who from time to time pay attention to the government’s decisions to subsidize utility prices were a bit bemused by this strange logic. Surely, it’s reasonable to suggest that if the rate hike were too low, it can be increased. Higher electricity prices would likely be very good for the nation, though consumers (read: voters) would howl. However, the committee in charge decided to wait until September to see the effects of adjustments to Taiwan’s power generation structure. Roughly 300 firms, comprising nearly half the nation’s electricity demand, are under government mandates to increase their renewable power generation. SUBSIDY BUBBLE And so, once again, the government declined to let Taiwan’s consumers leave their bubble of low prices. Decades of subsidized prices, together with a total lack of government leadership on conservation — Wait. Suddenly I’m so confused. What public good am I talking about? Low water prices? Too many housing units? Low assessed tax value of homes? Too many roads? Too many universities? Low prices for staple agricultural goods? Too little spending on the military? Low overall tax collection from the economy? Low taxes on the rich? It seems like everywhere you look there’s a subsidy bubble, with its own population of bubble boys, all in-moolah compromised, all interlinked, a mutually reinforcing circle of retrogressive handouts. The electricity bubble is sustained by an “electricity iron triangle” of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Taipower’s labor unions, and environmental
April 5 to April 11 During the final months of his life, Kuo Hsueh-hu (郭雪湖) repeatedly asked his children to bring him down the mountain back to Fanzaigou (蕃仔溝), where he was born on April 10, 1908. The centenarian had been living near San Francisco for decades, but as his condition worsened he began to think that he was on Guanyinshan (觀音山), which overlooks his childhood stomping grounds along the Tamsui river. Kuo is one of Taiwan’s best-known painters, bursting onto the scene in at the age of 19 as one of the “Three Youths of the Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition” (台展三少年) along with Chen Chin (陳進, Taiwan’s first female commercial painter) and Lin Yu-shan (林玉山). Difficulties under both the Japanese and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regimes led Kuo to spend much of his adult life overseas, first heading to China in 1941 after World War II made it hard for him to make a living as an artist in Taiwan. He returned to Taiwan after the war, but left again in 1964 for Japan and finally the US, which became his primary residence until his death in 2012. In 1987, Kuo returned to Taiwan for the first time in 23 years, reuniting with Chen and Lin to commemorate the 60th anniversary of their Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition debuts with an exhibition at Taipei’s East Gallery (東之畫廊). He spent the next 10 years flying back and forth the Pacific Ocean until Chen died in 1998 and he himself couldn’t withstand long-distance flights anymore. Despite Kuo’s fame, not much was known about his later personal life until his son Kuo Song-nian (郭松年) published his biography, Home Gazing (望鄉) in 2018. “Like our father, the rest of the Kuo family is also fated to live a life of separation and wandering,” the younger Kuo
Cradling her newborn son in a thick white blanket on the patio of her Gaza home, Iman al-Qudra knows it will be years before her baby boy, Mujahid, meets his father. Her husband Mohammad al-Qudra has been imprisoned in Israel since 2014, and for Iman to get pregnant his sperm had to be smuggled out of jail to be used in an in-vitro fertilization (IVF) program. Iman is one of several Palestinian women in the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank who in recent years have turned to IVF using sperm from an imprisoned husband. It is a complex endeavour — Israeli prison officials voiced doubt it was even possible — and success is not guaranteed. For the Qudras, another Palestinian, who was being freed from the same prison in southern Israel where Mohammad is held, had to first agree to smuggle out the semen on the day of his release. He then had to swiftly get it past the Gaza Strip crossing, tightly controlled by Israel. Next came Iman’s IVF treatment, and then an anxious wait to see if it had worked. A specialist in reproductive health at the University Hospital of Toulouse (CHU), Louis Bujan, said it was “plausible” for sperm to remain viable during such a journey, regardless of refrigeration conditions. “It all depends on the quality of the sperm from the start,” said Bujan, adding semen can be held in a container for more than 24 hours and remain viable. ‘I WANTED A BOY’ After three attempts, Iman conceived last year, five years after last being given permission to see her husband during a prison visit. “I was afraid of being too old for another pregnancy by the time my husband was released,” she said, surrounded by her three daughters, all conceived before Mohammad’s imprisonment. “I wanted a boy,” she said,
Paper masks and hand sanitizers are among offerings that ethnic Chinese in Malaysia will burn to mark Tomb Sweeping Day, hoping their ancestors can use them to fight the COVID-19 pandemic in the afterlife. Qingming is one of the most important dates for Chinese communities, and is observed across East and Southeast Asia. During the festival, which this year falls on Sunday, it is customary for Chinese to offer prayers, sweep their loved ones’ graves and burn paper models of items that could be useful in the afterlife. These can range from money and shoes to yachts and planes — but the pandemic has led to the addition of virus-themed offerings. A shop in the town of Rawang, just outside the capital Kuala Lumpur, is selling a set of paper masks with small boxes carrying pictures of goggles, a bottle of hand sanitizer and a thermometer. “We want our ancestors to realize the importance of wearing a mask during the pandemic, so we introduced this,” store owner Jacky Hoi said, holding a packet containing the items. He believes the set will prove popular in Muslim-majority Malaysia, where about a quarter of the country’s 32 million inhabitants are ethnic Chinese, as it “will let our ancestors have a chance to fight the pandemic.” Hoi is missing one important thing — a paper vaccine — something he says that he is yet to come across when ordering the items from China. Chinese in Malaysia will be observing Tomb Sweeping Day for the first time since 2019, as activities related to the festival were canceled last year due to a virus lockdown. Rules will be implemented to prevent infections, including a cap on the number of people allowed to take part and a time limit on prayers. Malaysia was hit by a new COVID-19 wave in recent months. The number of cases
The groundwork for this article was exactly that: Time and shoe leather, invested in a hunt for old yet charmful residences in the winding back alleys of Tainan. While confirming the locations of certain buildings I’d previously blundered across, I found a few more gems. There are others out there, I’m sure. AROUND THE DIOCESE I started near the southern end of Changrong Road (長榮路), which is named for Chang Jung High School (長榮中學), founded by Presbyterian missionaries in the late 1880s. However, there’s no link between the structure I wanted to look at and that Protestant institution. The elegant two-story mansion at 15 Changrong Road Section 2, officially known as the Tainan Diocese Office (台南教區辦事處), belongs to the Catholic Church. Since 1961, it’s been the administrative base of the Bishop of Tainan, whose area of responsibility includes Penghu County. No one seems to be sure of its year of construction, but this building has been marked on street plans since 1941. In terms of appearance, it certainly looks as if it could’ve been built during the 1895 to 1945 period of Japanese occupation. The walls are reportedly reinforced concrete. Just below the second-floor windows, two horizontal streamlines punctuated by six identical embossments break up the brown pebbledash. Some bloggers claim the embossed motifs are harps (a symbol of Catholicism), but I couldn’t get close enough to be sure. On the left, there’s a smaller and slightly shorter house in the same style, with octagonal windows and a balcony. About 100m west of the Tainan Diocese Office, a dark green clapboard house caught my eye as soon as I glanced down Lane 19, Shengli Road (勝利路19巷). According to the friendly lady who lives there, it’s about 60 years old, and is a rare survivor of a once-common type of middle-class residence. It can get uncomfortably cold indoors during
Godzilla vs Kong begins, fittingly, with the big guy asleep. There is King Kong, colossus of the big screen, slowly waking on a mountainside. He rouses slowly in the morning sun from slumber before showering in a nearby waterfall. It’s, maybe, a little bit the same for the kind of movies King Kong symbolizes and still holds some dominion over: big spectacles of mass destruction made to be seen on equally towering screens. That kind of moviegoing has been been in hibernation for much of the past pandemic year. Godzilla vs Kong, the only creature feature to dare wide release in some time, is a rock ‘em-sock ‘em monster-movie revival with all the requisite explosions, inane plot twists and skyscraper smashing to satisfy most lovers of gigantic amphibians. Vive le cinema! Godzilla vs Kong, directed by Adam Wingard, follows in the very big but quickly forgotten footsteps of the 2014 reboot Godzilla, 2017’s Vietnam-set, Apocalypse Now-tinged sequel Kong: Skull Island and 2019’s Godzilla: King of Monsters. But, of course, the lineage is much longer than that. Godzilla and Kong first squared off in 1962’s King Kong vs Godzilla (Kong got first billing back then), the Toho Studios film that mashed together monsters both East and West. (Before the Japanese studio got involved, the original template had Kong meeting Frankenstein.) This time, the ultra-heavyweight prize fight between the Coke and Pepsi of the MonsterVerse doesn’t break any new ground. That might be its salvation. Wingard (You’re Next, The Guest) gives us some solid supporting characters (Brian Tyree Henry as a podcasting conspiracy theorist on the right track is the best of the humans) and some slick sound design. But mostly Godzilla vs Kong supplies appropriately silly sci-fi escapades and a few good rounds of monster mayhem, including, in their first meeting, a ballet of
Visitor numbers at the world’s top 100 museums and art galleries plunged by 77 percent last year, down from 230 million in 2019 to just 54 million as the COVID-19 pandemic forced closure on an unprecedented scale. The survey carried out annually by the Art Newspaper for more than 20 years is normally an upbeat one, highlighting which museums had good years and what the most popular exhibitions were, whether in London, New York or Sao Paulo. The figures for last year, published on Tuesday, were sobering, with museums and galleries ravaged by enforced closure, plummeting visitor numbers and enormous falls in revenue. The Louvre in Paris maintained its position as the world’s most visited museum thanks largely to the tail end of its Leonardo exhibition, which drew more than 10,000 visitors a day before closing in February last year. Over the year, the museum had 2.7 million visits, down 72 percent from 2019 with an estimated income loss of 90 million euros (US$105.6 million). Alison Cole, the editor of the Art Newspaper, said it was worth remembering that “in a normal year more than 9 million people would jostle to see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre.” Tate Modern in London, which staged exhibitions including Andy Warhol and Bruce Nauman, was second in the popularity table with 1.4 million visits, down 77 percent. It was closed for 173 days and said it lost 56 million pounds (US$77 million) in revenue. It pipped the British Museum as the most visited UK museum or art gallery, which can be explained by Tate Modern having remained open for more days in the year. The British Museum, which has held the UK top spot for nine out of the last 10 years, was fourth in the global list. It was closed for 208 days — roughly seven months —
It may seem daunting to those who haven’t tried, but getting out on a bike for a few days can be a welcome break from the pollution and hustle of the city. With the Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA) train service that circles the island, combining a train journey to access rural areas is both convenient and inexpensive. With this year designated as Year of Cycling Tourism (自行車旅遊年), government agencies are accommodating the venture and there are more bike lanes and areas suitable for families to get out on two wheels than ever. PRE-TRIP PLANNING On a recent Friday afternoon, I set out for a multiday bike touring trip to the east coast. Go to the train station in person to check on train times and the availability of bike carriages. Some trains have split carriages where your bike can be wheeled on. The carriage has bike racks and the fee for the bike is half a passenger fare. However, these trains only depart in the morning and things get tricky if you leave in the afternoon or evening. My only option was a Ziqiang (自強號) express train, so the bike had to be bagged and carried on, front wheel off and strapped to the side. According to the TRA, these trains are not designed to carry a bike or the rules concerning bicycles are dictated by passenger traffic. But don’t let this deter you. If bagging the bike is too much hassle, just take a local train that you can wheel the bike on to; the downside is that it stops at every station. ON THE ROAD It was a two-hour train ride from Kaoshiung to Taitung County’s Taimali Township (太麻里) and a 10km ride to Jinfong Hot Springs (金峰溫泉) on County Road 64. All along the east coast there is a high concentration
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