In October 1981, 23-year-old Prince received an invitation to support the Rolling Stones at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Given that he wanted his own band to be “a black version of the Rolling Stones,” this was quite the coup. He boldly appeared in his regular stage gear of a trench coat and black underwear. The crowd booed and threw bottles. When his own tour began just weeks later, he abruptly switched to a purple coat, black trousers, white shirt and bow tie.
This tells you two things about the upstart genius from Minneapolis. First, that he had enough maverick confidence to greet a Stones crowd in a trench coat and underwear when, just after the “disco sucks” backlash, rock fans had never looked less kindly on polymorphous perversity. Second, that he was willing to turn on a dime if something wasn’t working. He wanted complete creative freedom but he also wanted success and he constantly sweated to reconcile the two goals. Fans relish the gravity-defying moments when it worked, as when the likes of Kiss and When Doves Cry turned an oxymoron — funk without bass — into miraculous pop. But often it didn’t. Even in his 1980s pomp, Prince’s career was studded with follies and flops. Only in 1984, with Purple Rain, when he simultaneously had the No. 1 single, album and movie in the US, did he appear bulletproof. But he couldn’t even savor that triumph. “We looked around and I knew we were lost,” he said. “There was no place to go but down.”
Unfortunately for biographers, Prince rarely giftwrapped a quote so neatly. The man whom Purple Rain screenwriter William Blinn dryly described as “not conversationally accessible” is a reluctant interviewee who inserts gag clauses in his employees’ contracts and leaves writers to puzzle over his contradictions from afar. On the one hand he was, in the 1980s, a controlling, insomniac workaholic who drove away countless friends and collaborators; he reportedly told backing musicians Wendy and Lisa that they would go to hell for being gay. On the other hand, he was an enthusiastic talent-spotter who credited his band, the Revolution, on his biggest albums and gave them each a surprise US$1 million bonus to thank them for Purple Rain.
But isolation won out. He caused outrage by visiting a Mexican restaurant instead of joining pop’s great and good at the recording of the charity single We Are the World. He failed to enlist Madonna’s involvement in his disastrous movie Graffiti Bridge. (In a rare instance of sound cinematic judgment, she described his bewildering screenplay as “a piece of shit.”) His fierce rivalry with Michael Jackson reached a comic apogee during a table tennis match in which Prince hit Jackson in the crotch with a power shot and crowed: “Did you see that? He played like Helen Keller!”
There’s plenty of juice here, in other words, for a psychologically curious biographer, but Ronin Ro isn’t it. Nor is he much of a critic. There’s more insight into Prince’s music in one chapter of Michaelangelo Matos’ slim 2004 volume Sign ‘O’ the Times than in 356 pages of Ro. And he is blithely uninterested in social context or Prince’s own beliefs. “Most American critics felt ... [the 1985 song] America contained demagogic red-baiting,” he reports. Well did it? And if so, why? He does not elaborate. He is interested in data, not speculation.
Ro’s obsession with budgets and sales figures is maddeningly dry when he’s dealing with Prince’s creative glory days, but it proves better suited to the 1990s, when Prince’s one-man war against the record industry almost ruined him. Famously, he changed his name to a symbol just as his songwriting discipline was waning, leading Jay Leno to quip that he should call himself “the artist who formerly sold albums.” He wasted millions of US dollars on unstaged tours and unreleased videos; squandered yet more on an erotic stage version of Homer’s Odyssey and a “poly-gender fragrance” called Get Wild. One weary fan compared Prince’s career to “a gigantic game that only he seems to know the rules to.” Ro painstakingly tots up the balance sheet and is tangibly relieved when his hero returns to cultural relevance and financial health with the blockbuster tours of recent years.
You emerge from the final chapter knowing a great deal about Prince’s business. But as for the man — challenging, secretive, incorrigible, gifted to a fault — Ro doesn’t add much to the 1985 Los Angeles Times report that pondered the artist’s peculiar media blackout post-Purple Rain and concluded: “Either he’s crazy or he’s Prince — or both.”
The Lee (李) family migrated to Taiwan in trickles many decades ago. Born in Myanmar, they are ethnically Chinese and their first language is Yunnanese, from China’s Yunnan Province. Today, they run a cozy little restaurant in Taipei’s student stomping ground, near National Taiwan University (NTU), serving up a daily pre-selected menu that pays homage to their blended Yunnan-Burmese heritage, where lemongrass and curry leaves sit beside century egg and pickled woodear mushrooms. Wu Yun (巫雲) is more akin to a family home that has set up tables and chairs and welcomed strangers to cozy up and share a meal
President William Lai (賴清德) has proposed a NT$1.25 trillion (US$40 billion) special eight-year budget that intends to bolster Taiwan’s national defense, with a “T-Dome” plan to create “an unassailable Taiwan, safeguarded by innovation and technology” as its centerpiece. This is an interesting test for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), and how they handle it will likely provide some answers as to where the party currently stands. Naturally, the Lai administration and his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) are for it, as are the Americans. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not. The interests and agendas of those three are clear, but
Dec. 8 to Dec. 14 Chang-Lee Te-ho (張李德和) had her father’s words etched into stone as her personal motto: “Even as a woman, you should master at least one art.” She went on to excel in seven — classical poetry, lyrical poetry, calligraphy, painting, music, chess and embroidery — and was also a respected educator, charity organizer and provincial assemblywoman. Among her many monikers was “Poetry Mother” (詩媽). While her father Lee Chao-yuan’s (李昭元) phrasing reflected the social norms of the 1890s, it was relatively progressive for the time. He personally taught Chang-Lee the Chinese classics until she entered public
How the politics surrounding President William Lai’s (賴清德) proposed NT$1.25 trillion (US$40 billion) supplementary special defense budget plays out is going to be very revealing. It will also be nerve-wracking, with political, geopolitical and even existential stakes in play that could change the course of history. Lai broke the news of the eight-year, multilevel national security plan in the Washington Post, describing the centerpiece of it this way: “I am also accelerating the development of ‘T-Dome,’ a multilayered, integrated defense system designed to protect Taiwan from [People’s Republic of China (PRC)] missiles, rockets, drones and combat aircraft.” For more details and
RSS