Shanghai Potpurri II: Potpurri Strikes Back

The enormous traffic circle and pedestrian bridge in Lujiazui (陆家嘴), on a muggy wet day. The current stretch of thunderstorms has gone on for a week now, and admittedly it's bringing me down a little.

---

Shanghai's first Apple Store, in Pudong. Wide-eyed and deep-pocketed pilgrims enter via a spiral staircase under a hollow glass column, which looks cool but is actually kind of a pain in the ass to navigate, and are then greeted by a full spread of expensive Apple gimmickry, like the evil android version of Willy Wonka's chocolate room. The wares are marked up by 20% over US prices, despite the fact that most of it is manufactured by low-wage labor just a few hundred miles away in Shenzhen.

I have a difficult time coming up with a supply-side reason why most luxury goods, from food to clothing to electronics, are more expensive in Shanghai than in the US. But if consumer demand can support no less than three Tiffany's outlets within shouting distance of one another, then it can probably afford MacBooks at an extra premium.

This is the same town where you can buy a full breakfast for two RMB, or about 30 US cents. It's hard to imagine any other place on the planet where there is such a huge difference between the cheapest things and the most expensive things.

---

Upon arriving in Shanghai, I unpacked my guitar pedals and plugged the 110-volt AC adapter for my MicroPOG into a 220-volt Chinese wall outlet. This was a classic expat noob maneuver and inexcusable for someone who has lived abroad for as much time as I have. Fortunately, this usually just destroys the power supply, and spares the device itself. And so I found myself on the market for a new AC adapter.

Plan A was to head off to East Jingling Road (金零东路) near downtown, which has a quarter-mile stretch consisting exclusively of instrument stores. Most of these stores sell pianos, knock-off guitars, and traditional Chinese instruments. The ones that sell rock equipment were useless for my purposes--they either didn't know what I was talking about, or sold very particular and bizarre equipment, such as an AC adapter that accepted a minimum of 180 volts of input (according to the internet, the only places that appear to offer such a weird voltage out of a standard wall outlet are Equitorial Guinea and certain parts of Afghanistan).

Thus I turned to the exciting world of Chinese online retail, and began a herculean, week-long effort to figure out how to pay for something on Taobao, China's massive and bewildering answer to eBay and Amazon.

For a semi-literate Mac/Chrome user, about 70-80% of the Chinese internet appears to be broken, oftentimes in such an arcane and exotic manner that it appears to imply not so much incompetence on the part of the web developer as it does openly malicious intent. For example, many Chinese websites employ a Flash- or JavaScript-enabled virtual keyboard that you operate with your mouse, presumably as a means to thwart keyboard sniffing malware that could steal, say, your credit card information. Taobao routes Visa and MasterCard payments through the Agricultural Bank of China's website, and the latter's virtual keyboard system doesn't work in any browser available to OSX. So I went as far as calling my cousin in Taiwan via Skype so he could use Internet Explorer on his work PC to punch in the order. When that got too cumbersome, I finally wrangled some PC time from a guy I just met in Shanghai, and then I discovered that using international credit cards just wasn't going to fly--I tried several different cards, and the result of every attempt was a cryptic DENIED message. I'd used my credit card all the time in regular stores, but here I could only shrug and contemplate the Chinese national mantra, mei banfa (没办法): nothing you can do.

Finally, after squinting at Taobao's menu system for some time, I learned that you can pay COD for an extra 10-15RMB. This discovery was a stunning coup. After much struggle and exertion, I had slain the minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth of Taobao's payment system. The only problem here was that I received no confirmation email or notification, and no specific information about when the delivery and payment were actually supposed to take place. I finally got a phone call an hour before delivery asking if I would be home to receive a package, which by this time was a totally unexpected and welcome courtesy. The guy was still 10 minutes late, but I guess nothing's perfect.

---

Petty Reason #421 why life in China is annoying: I woke up this morning and realized I'd eaten all of my yogurt, so I rode my bike down the street to the local supermarket. As of a few years ago, most stores in most major Chinese cities charge extra for bags, as a way to disincentivize plastic consumption and littering. Since I didn't bring my messenger bag, I had to pay RMB0.2 for a plastic bag at the checkout counter.

On the way back home, the bag burst open along the bottom seam and spilled my yogurt containers into the street. I had to stop in an intersection to pick them up, and then I rode back home with one hand steering the bike and the other hand tenuously gripping the yogurt. This was an interesting but not very enjoyable bike ride.

You could say, hey man, bags just break sometimes, but I find myself having a hard time giving China the benefit of the doubt. Sure, this ain't exactly melamine-tained milk here, but only in China do you pay for a plastic bag, only to have it inexplicably break on you while you're riding down a busy street.

---

Hamlet existentialism, 21st-century Shanghai Edition.

---

The best steamed soup dumplings (小笼包) in the world, at Jiajia Tangbao (佳家汤包) near People's Square. This uncompromising feast is the best meal I've had in Shanghai and cost all of 36RMB (US$5.34). In its own way, though, it's a high-maintenance meal, since you have to show up at 11AM if you don't want to wait in line, and you can't arrive too late in the afternoon, or else they'll run out of food. Also, the waitress there is a kind of a bitch.

Shanghai Potpurri

The world's largest Uniqlo outlet, on West Nanjing Road. Uniqlo is a Japanese clothing brand roughly equivalent to Gap, although here in China it's more or less a luxury brand and seems to command a 50% markup over domestic Japanese prices.

A new shopping center in Xintiandi (新天地), which insists that DRESSING IS A WAY OF LIFE. Shanghai is the nouveau riche writ large, in glass and concrete; it has yet to evolve any kind of high-brow tact vis-a-vis the obscene amount of money that flows into this city. Instead what you see is an unironic and unqualified celebration of wealth and consumption. Nearby, there is a community of high-rise apartments named "Richgate", and a little over the way, a brand-new development called Sinan Mansions promises such extravagances as 40,000RMB-per-night hotel villas (nearly US$6000 if you are keeping score).

---

Old Chinese etiquette prevails on the streets of Shanghai, where traffic lights and painted lane dividers are exposed as the impotent theoretical constructs that they are.

A routine tactic of the Shanghai urban cyclist is to ride willfully into an intersection as the light turns red, and then to renege slightly and stop, such that the full length of the cyclist's vehicle is encroached within the intersection. After a week of braving the mean streets of Shanghai, a grim survival instinct has largely supplanted my LA-bred commuter road rage, but the latter will still boil over on occasion. I sometimes think: why did you just stop in the middle of the intersection? why did you even enter the intersection? if you had to insist on entering the intersection, why did you not then simply proceed through the intersection, so as not to thoroughly impede the large wave of unrushing traffic? is it that you were completely unaware of the large wave of onrushing traffic? etc. etc. I then think: I am so going to blog about this unbelievable and absurd practice. That will show you, you assholes.

---

During my search for a rehearsal studio, I stumbled upon various internet articles about 0093, a rock collective that has supposedly incubated many of Shanghai's up-and-coming indie rock bands. Their online forum had advertised rentable practice space, so I decided to go there and investigate.

The listed address was 1228 Quxi Road, which brought me to a Sichuan hotpot restaurant. Upon inquiring within, I was scolded by the house matron and hastily waved off to the unmarked metal door next to the restaurant.

The sign above the door says nothing about a rehearsal studio or rock music. It is actually an advertisement for mooncake, the Chinese pastry traditionally eaten during the Midautumn Festival.

The metal doors led to a kitchen of suspect hygene. In the back was a large pile of discarded construction material. A kitchen boy holding what looked to be a large chunk of raw chicken meat assured me that I could continue over and past the junk pile.

This brought me to a stairwell and down into an old bomb shelter.

At the bottom of the stairwell, there was a dark room with an old couch that I probably would not sit on. Nobody seemed to be around. The ground was covered in soot and drain water. Down the hall, there were several locked doors, which I assumed were lockout studios that had been rented out long-term. I found one unlocked studio where a fellow was practicing a drum beat. He was wearing headphones plugged into a metronome, and didn't notice me when I poked my head in. I decided not to bother him and left.

---

In attendance at Yuyintang (育音堂), one of Shanghai's "oldest" indie rock venues. I employ scare-quotes because of the nascent and slightly colonial nature of the Shanghai music scene. Yuyintang has only been around since 2004, and despite the fact this show was advertised as a "local band" showcase, the majority of the band members and audience members alike were foreign-born. Suffice it to say the pedigree of progressive pop music in China isn't exactly sterling.

Case in point: the best band of the evening were The Beat Bandits, who are composed of a British drummer, a Japanese bass player who looks kind of like Elvis, a Japanese keyboard player who I sort of wished was a better dancer, and a really awesome guitar player who I coulda sworn was a dorky Chinese guy on account of his facial hair and coiffure and sartorial habits, but who I now actually suspect is Japanese as well. These guys could really wail.

---

The World Financial Center and the Jinmao Tower, twin phallic icons of the eastern Shanghai skyline.

The 100th-floor observation deck on the World Financial Center, still misleadingly advertised in the brochure as the "world's highest observation deck". I presume that the Burj Khalifa now has it beat pretty handily.

The view toward the Pearl Oriental Tower and northwestern Shanghai.

Century Avenue, and endless development extending eastward, over what was farmland and countryside just a decade or two ago.

Ah, but is it art?

It's difficult to understate the influence of video games on the day-to-day culture in East Asia, where a dude might feasibly bring his date out for a romantic night at the arcade, and where one may spend the majority of one's waking (or even non-waking) life in a reclining plush seat at the local internet cafe. In Korea, Starcraft is a fixture in the cultural firmament, with all of the televisual and commercial trappings of professional sport. Word has it that after spending 12 stultifying hours in World of Warcraft earning XP and gold for lazy Western gamers, workers at Chinese gold-farming firms will routinely stagger home to fire up WoW with their own avatars. Some poor bastard even died of exhaustion in a Taiwanese internet cafe, after god knows how many hours and weeks and months of prioritizing games over his health.

So it was probably only a matter of time before games got some kind of nod from the high-brow establishment, such as Taipei MOCA's exhibit of concept artwork from the archives of Blizzard, indeed the very Blizzard of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo fame. Mind you, these aren't exactly the art games or experimental stuff coming out of the indie developer scene, or even the type of semi-pretentious middle-brow fare, the Bioshocks or Red Dead Redemptions or Icos, that mainstream game criticism loves to allude to every five or so paragraphs. They are just really well-made pop confections, not so much Mozart or jazz as they are the Beatles, and even then they're not so much the Beatles as they are basically high-grade digital cocaine.

At the start of the MOCA exhibit, there was a large cardboard poster-type thing that described in rough terms the ongoing debate over whether video games ought to be considered art. Quite predictably, it took a beeline straight toward the old saw about how the semantics of the word "art" are historically and/or culturally bound and thus subject to reinterpretation, blah blah blah. This was all horseshit. I've long been annoyed by how quickly how critics and commentators from all quarters are willing to throw down the Floating Signifier card, as if art was merely whatever we wanted it to be. This line of argument leaves us without any criteria to distinguish between games that have artistic merit, and games that do not, and as such it basically torpedoes any meaningful theorizing about games as a creative medium.

At any rate, the MOCA exhibit was an attempt to answer the "Are games art?" question in what's probably the stupidest possible manner, which was to throw a frame around some concept drawings and call it a day. Admittedly, Blizzard hires extremely talented craftspersons who know how to draw a badass-looking robot with guns and tits, but the fact that games contain cool static images is pretty far removed from what actually makes games interesting qua art, which is to say the interactivity or narrative or metaphorical gameplay or even if you will a vague kind of multimedia mis-en-scene.

It was thus that I strolled through the MOCA hallways with a smugly-raised eyebrow, taking pictures of people taking pictures of the art.

In its own weird way, though, the Blizzard exhibit served pretty nicely as a satire of modern museum culture. Consider the familiar curatorial tricks in play:

• Expensive frames around the artwork
• Moody lighting
• Darkened rooms with rotating projectors displaying the idle animations of life-sized game characters
• Galleries with piped-in video, background music, and audio taken from the actual games
• Wall-mounted essays filled with bullshit artspeak exposition

You could say the whole thing was a well-executed, high-concept trailer for Starcraft II and Diablo III. The advertising aspect of it was hard to ignore. And yet I found myself constantly reminded of a question straight out of Postmodernism 101: is a building regarded as a "museum" because it houses works of art, or are certain objects regarded as works of "art" because they are housed in a museum? I'm talking Duchamps's urinal here.

The question becomes especially compelling when you consider that the other exhibit on display at the MOCA, a collection of works involving thermometers by a Japanese fellow with decidedly more traditional aesthetic bonafides, was presented in much the same way as the Blizzard concept art, with all the trick lighting etc. etc., and was arguably just as bullshitty, albeit without the obvious profit motive.

The one aspect of the Blizzard exhibit that struck me as truly artistic was the gallery of fan-created art, which besides being far less stylistically monotone than Blizzard's own archival stuff, actually seemed to be about something human. In those drawings were interpretation and parody and humor and, indeed, love; to observe the fan art was to learn something about someone, even if that something was the fact that some dude out there really, really loved Warcraft.

---

Out with Zhaoqin at the Wall, the one identifiably hipsterish hangout that I have encountered in Taipei. I've never seen anything quite like it: there's a long hallway with a coffee bar, record store, tattoo parlor, and sofas, and then at the end, there's a big door that leads to a stage and a dance floor. Now, if only the tickets for shows weren't so overpriced, they'd really have something special going on.

I dragged a handful of my cousins out to see a show featuring a few Japanese bands, including Shonen Knife as the headliner. It was a pricey ticket, around NT$1300, and none of my cousins had much of an idea of what a rock show was like. Regardless of how much of a music dweeb you are, your impression of the first few shows you attend are going to be dominated by physical sensations, not all particularly pleasant, e.g., how tired you were from all that standing, how you were afraid of getting sucked into the mosh pit, and how unbelievably fucking loud a band sounds over a PA. But after years of dragging cautious neophytes to rock shows, I realize that I've become inured to the sense of guilt and concern over whether the people I've brought along are actually having a good time.

We didn't end up staying for Shonen Knife; in fact it was me who suggested that we leave two songs into the fourth band's set. By that time I felt like I'd more or less gotten the point. The third band to play, Mass of the Fermenting Dregs, was an immensely bizarre combination of incredible stage presence (really, the best I've ever seen, and that's saying something), awesome riffs, somewhat dodgy song structure, and a horrible, awful, cheapening, regrettable, we-are-all-now-dumber-for-it band name. The latter served to renew my despair over Asian culture's infatuation with the English language, which is no more intense and despair-inducing than when it is applied to pop music.

The real gem of the evening ended up being the first band, a local shoegazey post-rock group called Boyz & Girl. They sounded like Sonic Youth, if Sonic Youth made songs with only three chords and had the singer from Deerhoof. The songwriting and the arrangements were impeccably tasteful. I really had no idea that Taipei could generate bands this good, because, I mean, in the first place, where do they play? It's hard for me to imagine how a city with only a couple of viable small-scale venues can sustain an indie rock scene, but it somehow manages.

In which the Taiwan believes I am too skinny, and then tries to kill me with culinary indulgence

A day before heading out of LA, I went to Monterey Park to have breakfast with my grandmother, who chided me, as she always does, about being too thin. Since quitting my job two weeks prior I'd been working out every day and eating semi-vegetarian, but I was 100% sure I hadn't lost any weight. So I kind of just shrugged. But when I met my Taiwanese aunt and uncle at the airport, they mentioned that they thought I looked a bit skinnier than I was when they visited over the holidays. The next day I met my cousin Zhaoqin on a subway platform and she said that my Chinese was still pretty good, but that I had gotten skinnier.

Later on that week she and I went to have lunch with the rest of my dad's side of the family, who spent an hour telling me that I was being silly for quitting a good job with an obscene-by-Taiwanese-standards paycheck. They were right--there was some silliness to it. But I had reasons that I didn't quite feel like they'd understand, so I kept quiet. They then went on to dwell on how I was just way too thin, and kept trying to get me to eat the last mouthfuls of every dish on the table.

Also, I forget when it was, but while taking the elevator on the way out of my aunt's apartment, I encountered a stranger in a yellow wifebeater who spent 10 floors shifting listlessly and clearing his throat. At around the 6th floor or so he said that he thought I'd gotten a lot skinnier than he'd remembered. I didn't even bother trying to explain that we'd never met before.

---

Adages about bad pizza and bad sex apply to beef noodles--even a middling serving such as the above is still a pretty decent experience. Here, as a kind of angry shot across the bow of the good ship Continence, I insisted on ordering a bowl of hot/spicy noodles. I have greeted the waning of my tolerance for spicy food with all the bitterness, hostility, and self-delusion of a man in complete denial. No, this does not bode well for a five-week stint in the Mainland with the street food stalls a block away.

The famous tomato beef noodles of Gongguan. Beneath the placid surface of the broth lay a massive pile of springy knife-cut noodles, which have been engineered by 5000 years of Chinese ingenuity to fly out of your plastic chopsticks and splash into the tomato-laden broth and generally make a huge mess of everything. As tasty as it was, this meal was more about the journey than the destination, having taken three attempts on three separate days before I could catch the proprietor while he was still serving food.

---

A view from the bus, riding down Roosevelt Road into Xindian.

---

Getting my fancypants tea on in 紫藤廬 (Zitenglu), where one may indulge such pretensions as the following:

• Decanting tea into a beaker so it doesn't continue to soak the leaves in the pot
• Pouring the tea from the decanting beaker into a cup designed for smelling (but not drinking) the tea, which cup is to be smelled both while it contains tea, and after the tea has been poured out into yet another cup which is designed for drinking (but not smelling)
• Pre-rinsing all of the aforementioned water-bearing containers with hot water before use, lest they spoil the tea with physical contact at room temperature
• Enjoying all of the above on tatami and pillows

Anyway, the mochi cubes in the snacks menu are to die for.

---

So in case you were wondering, for the semi-decent price of NT$250 per hour (~US$10), you can get a studio in central Taipei with a keyboard, PA, drum kit, some shitty Hughes & Kettner guitar amps, and blizzard-capacity A/C.

---

The incredibly bizarre postmodern yuppie pavilion outside of Page One Books in Taipei 101. Eat your heart out, Fred Jameson.

---

A cup of admittedly fine Kona coffee, which I purchased across the street from NTU for the astonishing sum of NT$220. Curiously, the cafe didn't have any fresh milk or cream in stock, which I had to assume was a slight to the philistines a la those French bistros that don't carry ketchup for your pommes frites.

You will find no city as coffee-mad as Taipei. The odd overpriced cup of Kona notwithstanding, the vast majority of the coffee served in this city is drinkably shitty, but it doesn't seem to bother the locals one iota. Furtively shoot the snot rocket that you've been holding back for the last 5 city blocks and you'll reliably hit the front glass of a Starbucks or Barista or Dante or Seattle's Best.

The current darling of the Taiwanese coffee franchise universe is 85度C, which specializes in affordable hypersweet iced coffee and cellophane-wrapped wedges of Asian-style cake (the sort which is mostly frosting and air and is eaten with those irritating two-prong plastic spears that defy all utility and common sense). I had not been in Taipei for two hours before being whisked away by luxury sedan to enjoy a 85度C iced Americano. Each day that I am here, I am hanging out with one cousin or another who will invariably get a hankering for iced coffee, and BAM! we will find another 85度C lurking right around the corner, practically hovering and licking its chops, like some kind of Mephisto of adult milkshakes.

Taipei

In the interest of keeping the updates semi-regular, I'm going to depart from my usual blogging habits and attempt to keep each entry under two thousand words.

---

Am I just crazy, or did LAX get rid of the departure immigration check entirely? Counting ticketing, security, immigration, and boarding, I waited a total of five minutes the whole time, which is some kind of record.

---

It wasn't a full flight. Since I would be arriving around 8PM local time, the goal was to stay awake for most of the 13-hour flight so I'd be ready to sleep when I arrived. You probably wouldn't believe how many times I listened to the same five or six Hall & Oates songs.

---

In-flight movie 1: Call me a square, but I couldn't really enjoy Kick-Ass. I kept getting weirded out by how, uh, fascist the whole premise seemed, what with all the frustrated young men taking matters into their own hands, the little blonde kids murdering people, and all the in-movie spectators watching the whole deal on TV and cheering it on.

In-flight movie 2: Au Revoir Taipei (一頁台北) was a nifty little love letter to the city, and would've made me incredibly nostalgic except that I was actually just about to arrive in Taipei. The feckless and chumpy male lead kind of irritated me, but I think it was because the portrayal might have hit a little close to home.

In-flight movie 3: The lady sitting across the isle was slogging through the entirety of Dr. Zhivago and I tried hard to avert my eyes. But I saw enough to get really depressed anyway; I even caught the end scene where Omar Sharif gets off the bus and keels over from grief and/or cardiac arrest. As a special bonus, I also ended up feeling really cold.

---

Outside of pissing away my time at cafes surfing Facebook and sipping weak Asian coffee, I do actually have minor ambitions to do something productive on this trip. While on the plane, I took my very first crack at throwing together some one-off game ideas that might be feasible on a short time frame. It was under just such a pretense that I convinced myself to acquire a new MacBook Pro a couple months ago; a key productivity motivator will thus be to avoid being just another hipster douche with a thousand bucks to blow on overpriced hardware.

---

Post-Employment Tour Goal #2 was to play shitloads of music. I made several pre-deparature jokes about how my suitcase would be half-filled with guitar gear. What was shitty was that my suitcase actually did turn out to be half-filled with guitar gear.

---

Pro tip: if you're pondering your meal choice on a China Airlines trans-Pacific flight, just stick to the following set of preference relations and you're golden:

• Chicken ≻ Beef
• Rice ≿ Noodles

---

At the airport waiting to greet me were Kevin, Yinghwa, Shuxian, and some random dude whom I don't know but who is evidently good at hiding behind orchids and fucking up my photos.

Yeah, being back in Taipei feels better than I thought it would. This used to be my town.