Take a sneak peak at Shanghaiist.com
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
We haven’t officially launched yet — we are currently in what they call “soft launch” or “beta” mode — but I think Shanghaiist.com is starting to look pretty damn good. So, go ahead, take a look. This is your invitation.
We’re still working out some kinks, and all of our features haven’t been added yet and most of our contributors still haven’t contributed anything. But there’s enough there for you to click around in. Let us know what you think. And feel free to leave some comments on the site.
Also, don’t forget to sign up for Consumating and 43 Things. And you Flickr users can start tagging your photos “shanghaiist” — when our photo page is live, you’ll see your photos there.
Finally, Shanghaiist is still looking for some dedicated posters who know Shanghai well. If you’d like to join our team, send us a non-boring email.
Now, get on over to Shanghaiist.
06.22.2005, 1:23 PM · Site News · Comments (4)
And then the man climbed out my window
I heard a noise the other day as I worked on my computer. It came from over near my window. I looked and saw a man outside. This startled me — I live on the 13th floor.
The man was dangling from some kind of rudimentary window washer’s apparatus and appeared to be interested in the tube attached to our wall-mounted air conditioning unit. The tube, from which condensation drips, hangs out our window. (Actually, as you can see in this photo, the tube along with a bundle of wires from the AC are bound together and forced through a hole that was rather hastily cut through one of our windows. It’s “sealed” with masking tape — no wonder our apartment is frigid in the winter — and looks really nice. Ah, Chinese craftsmenship.)
Soon, the man outside my window disappeared from view. A couple hours later, however, he was ringing my doorbell. He looked rather young and wore a blue work suit and carried a bundle of new plastic tubing. I led him to my office and he went to work. He was very friendly, and asked if I had any newspaper he could lay down on the shelves beneath my window because he didn’t want to get them dirty. I gave him some newspaper, and he still made the area dirty. But it’s the thought that counts.
I had no idea who asked this guy to do the job he was doing. I wondered if it had anything to do with the old ladies who woke me up rather rudely at 7 a.m. one Saturday morning — the Chinese never ring a doorbell just once, or even twice, it’s again and again and again until you arrive at the door. They lived downstairs and wanted to ask me if I had a habit of throwing water out my window.
I let this guy do his work, assuming it would be quick and that he could do what needed to be done by simply reaching outside the window. I glanced over at him and the wide open window and wondered if he was small enough to fall right out. I started to get a little nervous.
And then the man climbed out the window — and we don’t have a balcony, either. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He straddled the air conditioner, betting his life on the fact that another worker he didn’t know had done his job properly and fastened the unit securely some indefinite number of years ago. This is never a safe bet in China.
He obviously had done this before and showed no signs of fear. But just watching him, my stomach tightened. I started to sweat. It was as though I was out on that ledge. I was rather worried — but not too worried to forget about my digital camera sitting nearby. Here’s a Flickr set of the whole ordeal, with captions and everything.
I told a Shanghainese friend what had happened, and he wasn’t surprised at all. “Those guys die all the time doing that,” he said. I asked how much he thought this guy got paid to risk his life like that.
His answer? Less than 120 bucks a month.
06.18.2005, 12:37 PM · Observations · Comments (8)
Hurry! Three more days to catch Alien vs. Predator!
I wrote this for Shanghaiist, but since we’re not live yet over there, I figured I’d post it here, too.
If you’re like Shanghaiist, you like going to the movies. And if you’re like Shanghaiist, you rarely go to the movies in Shanghai — because, well, most of the movies that show here are crap. (And because you can buy 10 DVDs on the street for the price of one ticket to the theater.) Thank God then for the Shanghai International Film Festival, which concludes this weekend. Finally, we get some indie and art house fare on the big screen. Right? Right?
Well, you tell me. This year’s SIFF, the eighth annual event, includes high-brow offerings such as The Pacifier, Alien vs. Predator, Ice Princess, 13 Going On 30, Van Helsing, Meet the Fockers and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. That’s an average Metacritic score of 42, people.
OK, with that off our chest, we should note that the festival also includes plenty of films that are worth seeing: Sideways, Vera Drake, Big Fish, Sin City, Hotel Rwanda, We Don’t Live Here Anymore to name a handful. But many of them are kind of old, films that would have shown on the real festival circuit years ago. Still, some of them would be nice to see on the big screen instead of a pirated screener with “For Review Purposes Only” flashing on the bottom of the screen.
Speaking of old, Fei Mu’s classic 1948 chamber drama Spring in a Small Town is also showing. The Hong Kong Film Awards Association named that the best Chinese-language film of all time.
The SIFF also includes many films that Shanghaiist admittedly has never heard of. So for those, we defer to That’s Shanghai reviewer Wayne Hsu’s recommendations. Some of them look pretty interesting, especially the Hitler pic Downfall, which is getting excellent reviews. Shanghaiist has had beers with Wayne and you have our word that he is a good guy (and deceivingly young looking). Another friend of Shanghaiist recommends two Chinese films: buzzworthy director Jia Zhangke’s The World and Lu Yue’s The Foliage.
Hurry up, though. The festival closes on Sunday and some of these films don’t show after tonight. Here is the somewhat cumbersome festival schedule.
Pictured: A scene from The Foliage.
06.17.2005, 2:00 PM · Movies
Jackie Chan: Take our women … please!
I wrote this for Shanghaiist, but since we’re not live yet over there, I figured I’d post it here, too.
If you are a foreign man on the prowl for a Shanghainese bride, we’ve got good news for you: kung fu star Jackie Chan isn’t going to stand in your way. In fact, if you send him your contact info — and a photo, we assume — he might even hook you up himself. It’s all part of his diabolical plan to dropkick the globe with Chinese culture. (His attempt to accomplish this through mediocre movies has apparently failed.) Global wire services are running stories based on comments Chan made during the Shanghai International Film Festival. This is from the AP:
“We can encourage more foreigners to marry Shanghai ladies so their children will be able to speak Chinese,” Chan said at the Shanghai International Film Festival, the South China Morning Post reported on its front page.“It will help spread Chinese culture far and wide,” he reportedly said.
The paper reported that Chan didn’t say why his proposal singled out Shanghai women, and he offered no suggestions about how to implement his plan.
While we’re not sure if a single comment made at a film festival constitues an offical “plan,” Chan’s statement did strike us as a bit odd. And we’re not sure who will be offended most: foreigners, Chinese or women in general. At least Chan doesn’t come off quite as bad as Russian nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who recently drafted a bill that would write into law severe penalties for Russian girls or women who “unpatriotically” choose to marry a foreigner.
What men does Zhirinovsky fear the most? Why Chinese men, of course. This is from Scotland’s Sunday Herald: “He sees the biggest threat coming from Chinese men, many of whom have settled in Russia’s far east with Russian brides who appreciate the fact that their foreign husbands tend not to drink alcohol. ‘If we don’t react now, in 50 or 100 years, the Chinese and the other Asian nations will be masters in our house and the Russians will become service staff.’”
The horror.
06.17.2005, 1:46 PM · Observations
‘Consummate’ your relationship with the internet
‘0 people would do ShanghaiDan.’ Awwwww.
“ShanghaiDan is a 31-year old boy located in Shanghai, who is taken and looking for boys and girls for friends, online buddies, and consumating fun!”
So begins my profile on the social/dating website Consumating, which according to its tagline is targeting the “Hot nerdy girls and indie rock boys! With glasses!” crowd. You might be wondering why someone who labels himself “taken” would sign up for an online dating site (or maybe you’re not … some chicks dig “unavailable” guys). I signed up for Consumating because it’s the site Shanghaiist is going to partner with for personals — and right now there are a total of two Consumating users living in Shanghai. It’s me and Micah, and he only signed up because I asked him to. I’m trying to build up a base of Shanghai users before Shanghaiist officially goes live in a couple weeks. So, head on over to Consumating and sign up!
You don’t have to be single. You don’t have to be looking for a date. It’s a social site, not just a dating site. And it’s 2005 — I think the stigma associated with meeting people online has gone the way of the Yunnan Box Turtle. Especially in a sometimes intimidating city of 20 million, it’s often easier to meet people with similar interests online than inside a shabbily appointed, smoky bar playing a Celine Dion/Kenny G/Whitney Houston/Mariah Carey mix CD. Of course, if you’re from Shanghai and your interests aren’t similar to mine or Micah’s, you are pretty much screwed right now. That’s why you need to get all your friends to sign up for Consumating! Or else you’ll spend all your time at the site flirting with hipsters in Seattle. And, I guess there are worse things in the world to do than that.
Consumating uses the oh-so-hip tagging technology, which is like crack for computer geeks. Oh, the site is free, too. That’s also pretty cool. (And, one of Consumating’s creators is the editor of Austinist.)
Finally, Shanghaiist will also be running a feed from 43 Things, a goal-sharing social site. This is what 43 Things’ Shanghai users want to do with their lives.
So, check these sites out. (And would someone please give me a thumbs-up at Consumating? This is getting embarrassing.)
06.15.2005, 4:43 PM · Internet, Site News · Comments (3)
Do you want to write for Shanghaiist.com?
Site will be better than Star Wars III. I promise.
While in New York a few weeks ago, I had lunch with Jake Dobkin, publisher of the highly-successful Gothamist family of city blogs. We met at a bagel joint on 20th and 3rd. I had a very tasty Reuben and a Diet Coke. I can’t remember what Jake had, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that Jake and I decided to team up and launch Shanghaiist. It will be the first -ist site in Asia — and I’m confident it won’t be long before Shanghaiist is considered the best website about Shanghai on the internet.
I am in the process of of putting together the Shanghaiist team. Interested?
06.06.2005, 1:50 PM · Culture, Site News · Comments (13)
Cleaning out the attic
And other things I did instead of updating this website during the past few weeks
* Ate barbecue in New York City with Tony, Shanghai native, avid reader of this website and donor to The Trip fund.
* Learned at the SoHo Apple Store that my recent hard drive crash could have been caused by using Poisoned, a file sharing application similar to Limewire. “What about BitTorrent applications?” I asked simply out of curiosity. “Any problems with those?” “We haven’t seen any technical issues with BitTorrent,” my Genius replied. “Only karma issues.” Ouch.
* Attended a charity auction in which someone seated at my table spent around $4,000 for the chance to appear in an episode of Without a Trace. That was minutes after the same guy spent around the same amount of money for Yankees tickets and a baseball autographed by Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and Randy Johnson. I thought about bidding on that — and then I remembered that I am a 31-year-old with a four-figure salary.
* Met David, designer of this site’s logo. (Proof)
* Walked past Bob Balaban near Union Square.
* Ate a curiously large slice of pizza in Washington, D.C.
* Attended a Washington Nationals game and wondered why the hell, almost four years after September 11, 2001, we still sing “God Bless America” during the seventh inning stretch.
* Ordered barbecue through bullet proof glass.
06.04.2005, 3:56 PM · Observations, Travel · Comments (1)