Live from Shanghai, it's Saturday Night!

On Saturday, L. and I decided to take in some of Shanghai's culture. Our first stop was the Zendai Museum of Modern Art to catch some short films from the Shanghai International Film Festival. The Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art refers to itself as the "MoMA" but I will here refer to as "Zendai" to avoid confusion with that other MoMA. It is located deep inside of Pudong, the new half of Shanghai built on the east side of the Huangpu River beginning in the early 1990's. My exposure to Pudong was limited to a couple of trips near the waterfront and the Oriental Pearl Tower and a a couple of flights into or out of Pudong International Airport. So this was a chance to see a new part of the city. We ventured there by subway, ending up at the Shanghai Museum of Science and Technology stop, as directed by the Zendai website. From there, the direction to go was not entirely clear. Zendai's website suggested taking a bus to Thumb Plaza, but the subway dumped us smack in the middle of century park and there were not any bus stops within visibility (we did take the bus back later that evening). Fortunately, a motorcycle driver was there hanging around and offered to take us to Fangdian Road for a total fare of 6 yuan... quite a bargain considering taxi fares in Shanghai start at 11 yuan. He dropped us off there and I recognized Thumb Plaza by the street address. It was an odd place to find an art museum... a basic suburban mall, with a Carrefour, Starbucks, Subway, etc. In the middle of the plaza a juggler in a clown outfit was doing a promotion for Mercedes. L. Asked me if this is what America looked like. I looked around and aside for a heavy pallor of smog over the sky, the area did indeed look like it could have been dropped out of California. I think L. liked the mall but I've always felt as if suburbia was one of the latter stages of hell. We strolled into the plaza and found the Zendai without much difficulty.

We arrived a bit late and the first film, a Slovakian bit about a boy with an imaginary dog, was almost over, finishing with an image of a kid watching a robot lovemaking scene from a Bjork music video. From the minute we saw, "Abel's Black Dog," looked promising, but we didn't see much of it. The next movie, a Chinese bit from Donghua University, was terrible. "Sister" was about a purse-snatcher who stole money in order to buy street drugs to tranquilize his crazy sister who had been abused by her boyfriend. When he runs out of money, he resorts to stealing the drugs themselves, and in doing so kills his sister by shooting her up with undiluted medication. Along the way, he has the crap beaten out of him by the drug dealers for his trouble. The movie's tempo seemed to follow somewhat along the lines of the artfully done Chinese independent movie Suzhou River, but without any of the art, complexity, acting skill or fine cinematography that makes Suzhou River one of the true masterpieces of Chinese film. In this case, my advice is head for the DVD market, pick up the real thing, and skip the student short filmed on the cheap handycam.

The last film, "Reality Show" from Mexico, was a bit better. A bored man watches television and sees himself getting killed by the pizza delivery guy. Assuming this is predictive of the future, when the actual delivery guy arrives, he beats him with a baseball bat, only to discover that the pizza guy is not armed. Then the movie skips and back and we see the pizza delivery guy watching himself on TV being beaten with a bat. He reaches for a knife to bring in the pizza box. The movie has a simple Kafkaesque subtext, leaving the viewer with a bit of a twisted puzzle to mull over.

After the film, we made the mistake of stopping buy Cafe du Monde, a New Orleans theme restaurant, for dinner. I say mistake because despite the cheery ambience and varied menu, I'd have to say the place was a rip-off. 60 yuan for jambalaya is hardly a bargain... I'd recommend stopping buy a local joint and getting some sausage fried rice for 5 yuan instead. And the waitress annoyed me quite a bit when she refused to bring L. a complementary coffee with her 45 RMB omelette, even though it said clearly on the menu that free coffee was included. After our order had already been placed and the food was being cooked, the waitress said that she spoke to her boss and free coffee was only on offer before 11 a.m. It took three conversations and a request to speak to her boss before the coffee was finally boiled–and I have to say, the stuff tasted rancid. Wasn't Cafe Du Monde founded as a coffeeshop? It tasted like battery acid.

From there, we ended up at Starbucks. I was coffeed out but I wanted a place to sit down so I bought a cup of English breakfast tea–for the equivalent of $2.50. Someone is making money in this world, but it probably wasn't the lady behind the counter.

Our final destination for the evening was the Live Bar, a venue I had never been to before and one of a dwindling number of live rock joints in Shanghai. 4Life closed in January and Windows Undeground seems boggled in some sort of management dispute and the Ark Live House in Xintiandi went belly up and the Shelter is closed for the 'Olympic holiday'... which pretty much leaves Yuyintang and Live Bar as the last boys standing (the morbid among my readership may wish to check out a full list of Shanghai nightlife closures here).