Jay Chou World Tour 2008
Singapore Indoor Stadium
Last Friday
So this is star power.
Excitement for and expectations of Taiwanese pop sensation Jay Chou’s concert had reached a fever pitch. Tickets for the two sold-out shows, his first here since 2004, were going for several times their value on the Internet.
The audience was keyed up and ready. Just the sight of the red-hot entertainer on the huge screens was enough to launch waves of cheering.
Chou delivered by owning the stage that night. He was in his element and he knew it, drawing Mexican-wave-like roars from the full-house crowd of almost10,000 as he strode from one end of the stage to the other.
He brimmed with the confidence that comes with knowing that the audience would know the lyrics to his songs, even without the help of karaoke-style prompting on the screens. And they did.
It did not hurt that this was a production with a capital P. Thought had gone into every element of the show, from the costume changes to the back-up dancing.
Chou emerged for the opening number, Golden Armour, sporting a fat ponytail and dressed in a dramatic mauve, warrior-like trench coat complete with long feathers at the back.
Over the nearly three-hour-long show, he had a costume change every two to three songs. These potentially momentum-breaking pauses were smoothly handled,with arresting dance interludes or smart musical transitions.
The singer fed off the crowd’s enthusiasm and kept the energy level high throughout.
He also served up hits from his eight albums with little visual and aural twists, giving familiar favourites a fresh spin.
Thousand Miles Away, a duet with evergreen crooner Fei Yu-ching, was performed solo to the accompaniment of a coterie of male dancers in white, wielding large feathered fans.
The multi-talented showman kept the surprises coming and showed off his chops in playing the piano, the drums, the Chinese zither and even displayed his acrobatic skills.
An early highlight was the infectious song-and-dance rendition of the fast-paced The Cowboy Is Busy from his latest album, On The Run.
At the end of the number, Chou quipped: “Why get so knackered on my birthday?” His fans responded with delighted laughter.
The singer, who turned 29 on Friday, kept the banter light and humorous, asking at one point: “Today’s my birthday, will you give me a song? Not Landy Wen’s lonely version I hope.”
The entire hall answered with a bracing delivery of the traditional Happy Birthday song in Mandarin, then English, and he soaked it all up on stage.
Chou might have had to work on his birthday, but he had a ball of a time, and so did the audience.
(ST)
Sunday, January 06, 2008
In Defence Of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating
Michael Pollan
How did something as fundamental as the food we eat turn into such a hopelessly muddled issue? And what we can do about it?
Professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, Michael Pollan cuts through the jargon and balderdash in this lucid and sensible tract on eating healthily.
The book is divided into three parts.
The first deals with how reductionist science has pervaded and perverted our thinking about food. We look at foods as the sum of their nutritional components and ignore the long-standing cultural relationships we have had with food.
Pollan points out that before we listened to the scientists, we used to listen to Mum, who, according to him, is the repository of our cultural knowledge of what to eat and how to eat.
In the second section, he tackles the Western diet of “lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything except fruits, vegetables and whole grains”.
The relevance here is that societies who have adopted the Western diet display “higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and obesity” compared to those who have kept to traditional diets.
He also points his finger at the industrialisation of food. While this has brought about easy access to greater amounts of food, the trade-off was a fall in the quality of what we consume.
For example, refined flour is “nutritionally worthless, or nearly so” as the germ of the grain, which contains oils rich in nutrients, is removed to produce a “gorgeous white powder” that is both durable and portable.
In the third part, Pollan dispenses advice on how to eat healthily. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
He goes on to unpack these three statements and offers rules such as “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food” in order for one to avoid health-claim inflated, processed pseudo-foods.
While the message of the book is empowering and might persuade you to change the way you eat, perhaps the equally important lessons to be digested here are the fact that science is very much fallible and that a healthy dose of scepticism towards the prevailing orthodoxy, culinary or otherwise, never hurts.
If you like this, read: My Year Of Meats by Ruth Ozeki
A novel that digs up the dirty secrets of the American meat industry. More evidence, if needed, on why we should go green and eat more veggies.
(ST)
Michael Pollan
How did something as fundamental as the food we eat turn into such a hopelessly muddled issue? And what we can do about it?
Professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, Michael Pollan cuts through the jargon and balderdash in this lucid and sensible tract on eating healthily.
The book is divided into three parts.
The first deals with how reductionist science has pervaded and perverted our thinking about food. We look at foods as the sum of their nutritional components and ignore the long-standing cultural relationships we have had with food.
Pollan points out that before we listened to the scientists, we used to listen to Mum, who, according to him, is the repository of our cultural knowledge of what to eat and how to eat.
In the second section, he tackles the Western diet of “lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything except fruits, vegetables and whole grains”.
The relevance here is that societies who have adopted the Western diet display “higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and obesity” compared to those who have kept to traditional diets.
He also points his finger at the industrialisation of food. While this has brought about easy access to greater amounts of food, the trade-off was a fall in the quality of what we consume.
For example, refined flour is “nutritionally worthless, or nearly so” as the germ of the grain, which contains oils rich in nutrients, is removed to produce a “gorgeous white powder” that is both durable and portable.
In the third part, Pollan dispenses advice on how to eat healthily. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
He goes on to unpack these three statements and offers rules such as “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food” in order for one to avoid health-claim inflated, processed pseudo-foods.
While the message of the book is empowering and might persuade you to change the way you eat, perhaps the equally important lessons to be digested here are the fact that science is very much fallible and that a healthy dose of scepticism towards the prevailing orthodoxy, culinary or otherwise, never hurts.
If you like this, read: My Year Of Meats by Ruth Ozeki
A novel that digs up the dirty secrets of the American meat industry. More evidence, if needed, on why we should go green and eat more veggies.
(ST)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)