Excavating China's Collective Unconscious: Some Good Contemporary Chinese Art Shows at Shanghai's Moganshan Art District

JJ's show opened on Sept 6 and I was there to witness his performance piece called "water".  This involved the projection of several historical photos of famous Chinese political figures, including of course Chairman Mao, on a blank wall while JJ used water and a large brush to paint images on the wall.  These images faded along with the projections and were then written over or juxtaposed with each other to form a watery impression of recent Chinese history.  He used water as a motif throughout the performance, painting waves and also projecting images of waves on the wall along with the historic figures.  

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Old Shanghai Revisited: Touring the Bund and the Shanghai History Museum with my NYU Shanghai History Class

Last Friday I took my Modern Chinese History students on their first field trip in Shanghai.  Originally I meant to start at the Astor House Hotel just north of the Garden Bridge.  Yet when we reached the Bund, I made a sudden change in plans and took them to the new Waldorf Astoria instead.  We ended up going on an unplanned tour of the Waldorf Astoria, Shanghai's newest elite hotel.  Guided by a young 20-year old Chinese hotel clerk, we toured the hotel, taking in the ballroom, library, several fancy restaurants, and the famous Long Bar.  Sometimes the best part of these field trips is what happens outside your plans.

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Jazzing Chinese Folk: The Solitary Bird CD Release Party @ TwoCities Gallery

On Friday night I attended the release party of the Solitary Bird CD, recorded earlier this year by three musicians in Shanghai, Steve Sweeting, Jeremy Moyer, and Coco Zhao.  I've known Coco since the late 1990s when he emerged as one of Shanghai's first Chinese jazz singers.  In fact, Coco and his band played at my wedding here in 1999.  Since then he has dedicated himself to jazz singing and lyrical composition and has greatly expanded both his repertoire and his skill set as a singer.  Jeremy Moyer plays several percussion instruments as well as bowed instruments such as the erhu, and he plays them all very well.  In this concert he was playing a coconut fiddle from Taiwan.  Steve Sweeting is an American jazz pianist who has been living here in Shanghai for the past five years or so along with his family.  

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Two Plays Now Showing in Shanghai: God of Carnage and Deer Cauldron Tale

The rainy season is upon us. For the past two weeks the skies over Shanghai have been grey and drizzly, with occasional downpours like angry outbursts of a mad god. This is a good time to escape the rainy day depression by exploring the world of theatrical entertainment that Shanghai offers. Over the past week I have seen two staged plays at Shanghai's Dramatic Arts Center (上海话剧艺术中心) on Anfu Lu. The first was an adaptation into Chinese of the play God of Carnage written by Yasmina Reza, which was performed in Zurich, London, on Broadway, and now here in Shanghai. The second which I saw last night was Lu Ding Ji 鹿鼎记, which I translate here as "Deer Cauldron Tale." This play started out at the Shanghai Drama Theater in 2008 and has since been shown all over China. It is back in Shanghai now and soon moving on to Taiwan. What a contrast between a contemporary story involving two upper middle class urbanite couples, and a historical drama involving a Chinese secret society, a happy-go-lucky son of a whore, and the Manchu Emperor Kangxi.
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Resurrecting the Ghosts of Old Shanghai: The Execution of Mayor Chen

As readers of this blog and my book know, I have dedicated a good part of my career to resurrecting the ghosts of Old Shanghai. I'm a grave digger of sorts, an archeologist of urban history, whose job is to recover and reconstruct stories and times that have passed into collective oblivion. One story that I have chosen to focus on in future research is the tale of 陳公博 Chen Gongbo. Anybody who knows Republican Era history well ought to be familiar with this ghost of Shanghai's past. Chen Gongbo started his political career as a founding member of the CCP and was at the First Congress honored by the museum located ironically in the heart of Xintiandi, the city's leading entertainment and nightlife complex. Who better to embrace this contradiction than Chen Gongbo himself? Patriot, playboy, poet, romantic, revolutionary, and ultimately arch traitor, Chen personally embodied the many contradictory and conflicting impulses of Republican Era China.
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Mao on Maoming Road: A Tour of the Chairman's Old Shanghai Haunts

Yesterday I brought two groups of NYU students out on separate field trips which converged at the famous Old Jianjiang Hotel. This hotel is famous for hosting high level parties and delegations of officials from China and abroad. Mao used to stay there during his visits to Shanghai. It is also the place where Nixon and Kissinger and their team met with Zhou Enlai and other top officials to sign the Shanghai Communique. The hotel is located on Maoming South Road. A few blocks north of the hotel is a historic house and museum dedicated to the memory of Chairman Mao.
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Shanghai has Sprung: Walking through Historic Parks, Remembering Lu Xun and Waltzing with Mao

I thought Saturday was a busy day, and it was (see my previous blog for details), but Tuesday was just as big.  Fortunately I was feeling much better, and the weather was fantastic.  Spring has finally come to Shanghai and it was time to get out and see the flowers blooming in the parks and gardens of this great city.  

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Touring the French Concession and Screening Down: Indie Rock in the PRC

What a Saturday!  I awoke around 7 am, still groggy from the Bob Dylan concert of the previous night and a night of tossing and turning to some sort of intestinal infection, and readied myself for my alternate job as tour guide.  I had a 9 am appointment at the new Peninsula Hotel on the Bund for a tour group called the International Collectors Forum organized by a locally based tour guide agency called Shanghai Far East Expeditions.  I caught a taxi to the Bund and had the driver stop at Suzhou Creek where I took this morning shot of the iconic Garden Bridge (外百渡桥) overlooking the Pudong Skyline.

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上海纽约大学奠基仪式 NYU Shanghai Campus Groundbreaking Ceremony

Today I attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the new NYU campus in the Pudong district of Shanghai.  The campus will consist of a building erected in the middle of a cluster of other skyscrapers and office towers off of Century Avenue in Pudong.  John Sexton, NYU's president, was there to give a speech.  The Shanghai Mayor Han Zheng was there as well along with many other dignitaries from the Shanghai government and from East China Normal University, which has partnered with NYU in setting up this new campus.  

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Shanghai's Dancing World favorably reviewed in the American Historical Review

I was very pleased to receive a message today from my publisher with a PDF file of a highly favorable and attentive review of Shanghai's Dancing World.  The review was published in the most recent issue of the American Historical Review.  Please click here to download the PDF file of the review.  The reviewer is Xiaoqun Xu of Christopher Newport University.  

有朋自遠方來 不亦樂乎： Receiving honored guests from Tokyo and Harvard, resurrecting the ghost of Zhang Ailing, and exploring rooftops on the Shanghai Bund

Confucius says, "Isn't it wonderful to receive old friends from afar?" The past few days have been filled with visits from old friends and colleagues from abroad.  First James Farrer, my colleague and dear friend, and my co-conspirator in the writing of our new book Shanghai Nightscapes, who teaches sociology at Sophia University, and his wife Gracia, who also teaches sociology at Waseda University, and their daughter Sage flew over here from Tokyo where they live and work.

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穆時英 上海的狐步舞， “Shanghai Fox-trot”

This story first appeared in the journal Xiandai (“Modern”) Vol. 4 no. 2 1934.  It has been reprinted many times, for example in Wu Huanzhang, ed. Haipai xiaoshuo jingpin (“The best of Shanghai-stylestories”)  (Shanghai:  Fudan Daxue chuban she, 1996) 525-535.  Translation from Chinese into English by Andrew Field—words in bold appear in English in the original text.

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Shanghai’s Nighttime Phantasmagoria: Haunting Nightlife Spaces Old and New

The other night (Thursday March 17) I took my Global Nightlife students and a few of their friends from the NYU Shanghai program on their second tour of Shanghai’s nightscapes.  This time we started at the famed Paramount Ballroom, the finest and most celebrated ballroom of the Golden Age of Shanghai nightlife, the 1930s.  The ballroom is the only one from the 1930s that today is still operating as a commercial dance establishment.

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Dancing at the Majestic Hotel to "Nightime in Old Shanghai" by Whitey Smith

Yesterday I noticed a blog that referenced my book Shanghai's Dancing World along with some other clips and images of 1920s-30s Shanghai (the blogger also had some nice things to say about an  interview podcast I participated in for the Shanghai Lit Fest in March 2010, which I greatly appreciated).  Among them was a British Movietone Newsreel from 1929 showing elegantly dressed Chinese couples in a garden cafe dancing to a Western jazz orchestra.  I immediately recognized it as the Majestic Hotel outdoor garden (I am not quite 100 percent sure of this, but sure enough to make that claim) and the orchestra would be Whitey Smith's, even though the conductor's head is cut off in the clip (you can see his body and up to his neck, but I couldn't identify him as Smith).  Whitey features prominently in my book, and most of the information I found about him comes from his own memoir, I Didn't Make a Million.  

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