1/6/2024 0 Comments Muse bar xiangyangI shan’t spoil it any more in case anybody wants to see the film. There are a couple of sympathetic individuals from the war-torn country who help the Chinese, only to meet a bad fate at the hands of the revolutionaries. China is drawing on the Hollywood blockbuster thriller model for its own propaganda purposes, and while the film has a strong political message (unlike some other countries, ahem, China doesn’t interfere with domestic politics in other countries and used no weapons, China is a safe place in contrast to the developing world, etc.) it does seem to work on the dramatic level, even if the film focuses on its Chinese characters while treating most others as a backdrop (again, echoes of Hollywood there). The hero is an officer who uses his linguistic skills as well as a mixture of diplomacy, guile, and grit to get his people across the border and back to China as guns blaze and bombs blast across the inhospitable desert landscape. Based in reality with some dramatic license, the film tells the story of an intrepid yet beleaguered group of Chinese foreign service officers in 2015, who go all out to get Chinese work crews out of a war-torn country in North Africa, which is in the throes of a revolution. On Friday evening, I went to the Xintiandi complex with my wife and daughter to see the Chinese holiday film, 万里归土 which could be translated as “The Long Road Home.” This was the first film we’d seen in theater since the lockdown began in March. We were joined that night by Ginger, a well-known singer here in Shanghai who used to sing at the Cotton Club with Greg Smith and band. He runs a larger café on Kangding Road where we have also spent some time, but nowadays we seem to be gravitating more to this small venue. Jackie is a good musician, and he often plays guitar and trumpet in his café. The owner Jackie and his wife, who runs the café, seem to appreciate our act. We’ve been going to the new Magpie quite a lot lately, and usually we end up on mikes with our guitars plugged into the amp, regaling the small and mostly Chinese crowd with a mixture of English and Mandarin pop-rock songs. Then our singer Tammy, who recently joined up with us, sang “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by Fergie while I accompanied her on guitar.Īfter that event, we rode bikes over to the new Magpie, a small café bar on Xiangyang Road, which has become a nightlife hotspot over the past couple years. We played the Led Zep song “Hey Hey What Can I Do” which has become a staple of ours over the past few months. Lesson learned: always pack a cable or two in your guitar case, as well as spare strings and a device for changing them at a moment’s notice. When it was our turn to mount the stage, we encountered some technical issues, namely that there wasn’t a cable to connect Jud’s acoustic guitar. My bandmate Jud and I pay attention to this, since we’ve been striving to go “off book” in our playing. Some of the singers had their songs down while others relied on their phones to conjure up the lyrics. They backed up a range of artists, including some talented musicians as well as quite a few singers. The house band consists of a drummer, a keyboard player, and a bass player. Apparently, this was being promoted as an acoustic or unplugged music night, but the musicians were amped up as usual. That night, the club was opening its stage to “amateur” musicians and singers. Later that night, I attended an event at the Chair, a live music club in the Tonglefang neighborhood, a converted factory district that features bars, restaurants, and clubs (it used to be home to the original Muse 1).
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