summer.

Summer descends like a thick, wet fog. Monsoon season extended through late June, providing daily acid rain relief from the heat. Everything was filthy, but relatively cool. On this, the first day of July, it's blindingly bright, hazy, and humid. The women here, perpetually concerned with their skin, da (what's the English verb that means 'to use an umbrella'? Is there one?) parasols and don sundresses and espadrilles. It's a charming sight. The parks are abandoned - my handsome skateboarders no longer skid along the curbs outside work - and even the streets seem emptier.

I'm thinking about how much of American culture revolves around the summer months. We populate beaches and swimming pools, slim down or tone up for bikini season, play sports, attend concerts, and picnic in the sun. I came home from work each day to cold beer and ice cream, and collected a sun tan that would last me well into late autumn.

The Chinese, with their aversion to sunlight and cold beverages, probably don't get the same kick out of summer. I'd like to move my weekly badminton outdoors, although I doubt that Flora (in effort to become the fairest bride in China) will agree. The heat takes away my appetite for heavy, greasy local foods, but salads and sandwiches are rare and expensive. It's a good thing I'll be heavily distracted this month with visitors and trips (Tibet, Lijiang, Xi An and Qing Dao are in the line-up), else I'd miss the sun and the sea too much. . .!

come again?

Tianmu and I went to pick up takeout for the team on Wednesday afternoon. our lunch spot of choice is always a frenzy of activity. the kitchen and the dining areas are packed with busboys and patrons, and everybody is shouting orders and it's all very fast and efficient. we watch as our six set lunches are delivered almost immediately from the kitchen to the young man working the counter. he appraises the food for a moment, carefully selects a plastic bag, and, one by one, begins to relocate the meals from the counter into the bag very slowly and with great consideration. about halfway through, he appears to realize that the bag is too small, chooses a new bag, and carefully repeats the process.
for reasons unknown -TM and i are observing very closely and curiously- he decides that the second bag is inadequate, and repeats the process again. when he presents us with our order, i very seriously ask him if i could trouble him for a new bag; this one isn't comfortable for me. he, with no irony, apologizes, retracts the food, and begins to slowly dissemble and reassemble our package before presenting it again for my inspection. TM's in stitches by this point, because, because, she gasps, while everybody else's name tag is in Chinese, his reads Nicole.

cocktail culture.

I attended the opening of BarHuLu on the Bund on Saturday night. It was, as almost everything in Shanghai is, gorgeously outfitted, glimmering with mirrors and opulent to outrageous degrees. I sipped on the free-flow champagne for a couple of hours, schmoozed with locals, browsed the cocktail menu (nothing too innovative) and (more than) sampled the salmon rolls and took in the luminescent Pudong views and exquisite decor. It was a nice night.

I'm pretty certain I've been to more bars in the past six months than in the last six years combined. I nothing bars, generally speaking. In New York, the frugal homebody in me hated the idea of paying supermarket-bottle-price for one glass of red wine, and bemoaned the near, inevitable future: holding back the reemergence of buffalo-flavored finger food in the back seat of a cab while groping for loose bills in my purse. I hated how crowded everything was - a stupid complaint for one who opts to reside in Manhattan, and then China - but, really, does anyone enjoy waiting in lines for the bathroom? Elbowing one's way to the bar? Being denied the option to sit? There was a time in my life - I think I was nineteen - when I really enjoyed screaming drink orders over a sea of strangers and tripping, laden with high-ball vases, back to some dank corner to rejoin my group of idle, silent sippers, arms sticky with overflowed liquor and soda. (Must have been the novelty. Or something.)

That being said, I do like cocktails, and being served one under the right circumstances (which, for me is almost always a matter of ambiance), can be quite relaxing and luxurious. I like in a bar what I like in a cafe, ultimately - qualities that are readily available in Shanghai bars, but seem to be painfully elusive in New York. I like reclining, in a nice chair. I like lots of room and interesting decor and enough noise to fill uncomfortable silences (bars are, after all, primarily meeting places for strangers and new acquaintances), but not so much that it makes conversation an endeavor.

The unsavory pubs on one particular strip of JuLu Lu are bookended by two excellent bars by these standards - the retro boudoir Velvet Lounge and the cyclopean concrete fortress People 7. The latter, supposedly two seasons passe, still appeals to me more than Face (regrettably, of 'Shanghai Baby' fame), whose contrived Orientalism (brocade, red, silkscreen) evokes the that NYU hipster hub in Alphabet City where I fell asleep sitting up that time. People 7 is cold by contrast - a vast, ghostly greyscale lined with sterile silver votives and a mile-long, mirrored bar. I liked it immediately; I take everybody to People 7.

I checked in with worldsbestbars.com to take a look at their Shanghai listings. A few I agree with (People 7), a few I don't (Face!), but some others worth noting are described below.

Cloud 9 holds the title of the world's tallest bar. Situated on the 87th and 88th floor of the Jin Mao Tower in PuDong (which, from the 55th floor up, hosts the grandest Grand Hyatt imaginable), it feels a bit like an airplane. The ceilings are awfully low, and the drinks are awfully expensive, but when you're surrounded by the panoramic floodlights of the Bund skyline, you will forget that you're hunched over in your booth, and that the carpet smells suspiciously of shrink-wrapped wool.

I'll indulge in any chance to plug the singular, terrific Yongfu Elite, to which the web site wisely gave a nod. Just. . . check it out in you're ever in Shanghai. It might be the best food / beverage venue I've ever stepped food in. Period.

WBB also heralds Aqua, the sexy addendum to that posh waterfront Japanese restaurant Sun (with Aqua), TMSK XTD, which I popped my head into the last time I was out that way (no patrons, at ten on a Thursday), Attica, which is really a club (and a filthy, sinister one at that), Sugar, at which women may almost always drink, eat cake and receive ad-hoc facials for free, and The California Club, which I, upon visiting during my first night out in Shanghai, vowed never again to step foot in.

cafe couture, or, nice places to sit with books.

I've, regrettably, become quite dependent upon coffee. An addiction born out of loneliness, chiefly - I'd front-end my workday with an hour at the adjacent Starbuck's, and frequently top it off with a book and a carafe of good, hot, black bean-blood. I will unabashedly plug cafes in Shanghai. They simply have everything one in search of a cafe could possibly want. Free wireless internet is a given at most places, as are ample, cozy seating, and hours of uninterrupted reading and writing and sipping and smoking. (My favorite Manhattan cafe, DTUT, required a minimum hourly purchase, and was always, noisily packed to the brim.)
The most recent favorite flavor is the Shanghai branch of the Filipino chain Figaro's. Formerly, I'd been rather content with the gigantic XTD Starbuck's, which features two floors, a sprawling outdoor patio, and several living rooms' worth of plush upholstered seating.
I discovered Figaro's while ambling down the XTD east-side promenade, window shopping for bathrobes and bassinets. It's got two stories, the second of which is home to BookCrossings, an international English language "library" of sorts, governed by the honor system. This warm space is host to several floor-to-ceiling shelves novels and my favorite reading room aesthetic - antique-styled, mahogany-colored trunks and rich brown and dark green leather sofas.
For some astonishing reason (my only guess is that it's overshadowed by its boasting, branded neighbor) Figaro's is almost always entirely empty. I may singly occupy a nook of the upstairs all evening. The coffee, too, is actually delicious (though I really can't say the same for the limp paninis and bland pastry selection.)
The French Concession darling Vienna Cafe is nice, to my mind, for two reasons only - its free Thursday night movie screenings, and its chocolate-banana-rum-raspberry-puree-torte. Coffee is pricey in China, but the 28rmb Americano here more closely resembled an espresso shot. I suppose I should redact - it's also worth a look-see for its proximity to the Old China Hand Reading Room, which is down the block on Shaoxing Road. It's got a quaint museum aesthetic, many, many books in many, many languages, armchairs, smoking tables, sofas, and a view of Fuxing Park.
Worth a mention is Citizen Cafe, also set unassumingly in an alley in the French Concession. This place reminds me of the bar The Dove in New York City. . . sort of an old-world, almost Gothic decor. The highlight is the terrace, of course, although the impending summer weather makes it less pleasant.
LaBella, which moonlights as a live music venue / bar in the late nights, makes up with comfort food what it lacks in ambiance. It's not so pricey, and has a nice college coffee-shop sort of feel to it, a set of wealthy bohemian regulars to occupy its booths and a pretty little terrace.

la vie boheme

Five Fantastic French Concession Foods Spots:
For preemptive hangover cure: Charmant
For -Jesus- all-you-can-eat-teppanyaki: The Donghu Hotel
For form over function: The Youngfu Elite
For English pub slop: Oscar's
For chocolate-rum-banana-raspberry torte: Vienna Cafe

The tree-lined French Concession is my favorite district of Shanghai. The cafes are unassuming, sprawling, elegant; the stylish galleries, bars and restaurants (set in grand French former consulate mansions) have the added allure of being tucked on dark and quiet tributaries of the steroidal boulevard Huaihai Zhong Lu.
Late last night I wandered down through some of the choicest little blocks in the area, and finally settled in at lovely LaBella Cafe. Friday evenings feature a live jazz trio. I lounged around with vanilla cake and gin until near closing whereupon I found myself in the eclectic company of the Australian bassist and Austrian vocalist, two French photographers, a few assorted leisure writers and models, the cafe's charming owner, Isabella, and a tattooed mixologist. We moved out onto the terrace, and I spent the early morning listening to occasional jazz riffs, dragging from cigarettes, sipping a brand new smoky sweet cognac brew (courtesy of Mister Mixologist) and listening to this band of motley artists converse in prettily accented English peppered with French and German about art, life, freedom, New York City, Paris, California, Vienna, Tokyo. Pretension aside, I felt as though I'd zipped back to some bygone beatnik era. I thought of my friends in America - lifelong Americans who weren't chiefly concerned with expression or creating subcultures or paving the way for new generations of self-proclaimed 'artists'. They seemed to be universes away from this crowd on the terrace of LaBella.

family values.

I have this completely untenable theory that China's relations with and perception of the West would be far improved on a micro-social scale if Shanghai's male expat population didn't have 'FETISH' engraved on their leering countenances.
The trend - of overweight, aging French, German, Spanish and American geriatrics- setting up shop in China - has spawned a market for unsavory and beautiful young female companions who conflate sipping on Bar Rouge cocktails and toting Italian handbags and expensive coifs - Western-conceived material wealth, in other words, for status.
These couplings (ubiquitous!) draw secret sneers from everybody not involved in this strange little economy, which is contained almost entirely within nightclubs and Western eateries. It's sad and funny to watch the women force-adjust their Chinese palates to salads and sandwiches, which don't go down easily for a variety of cultural reasons. The not-uncommon sight of bony, overdressed, overpermed Chinese twenty-somethings and fat, happy retired bankers parading one another around encapsulates far too many sad stories and Western and Eastern stereotypes for the educated mind.

Reinforce, reinforce, perpetuate, perpetuate / makes it hard to find a date. . .

In other news, met a retired UMass Amherst poetry professor at Vienna Cafe last night. Ran all aforementioned risks by accompanying him to a(n actually delightful) sushi dinner, where we reminisced fondly about the Pioneer Valley, the PVTA, etc.

holdover.

For now, an interesting article on Chinese politics.

To be sure, we have no choice but to continue to engage with China in the hope that continued economic reforms and rising prosperity there will eventually lead to political reform. But we should reject the blind and deterministic logic that a rising China will inevitably become a democratic one. Even if we believe that authoritarian China is on the wrong side of history, so far it is doing a good job of defying it.