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.
Read MoreAn A-Muse-ing Weekend in Shanghai or Sexing the Foreigner in the Nightlife Scene
Astute readers of my blog (if there are any) may recall an entry I posted a few years ago about a visit to the Muse Nightclub in Shanghai. That was back in 2007. Today there are three Muses operating in the city. In our book Shanghai Nightscapes: Nightlife, Globalization, and Sexuality in the Chinese Metropolis 1920-2010 (currently under review by a major university press) James Farrer and I write about the city's nightlife over the past century and how nightlife has come to play a central and defining role in the cosmopolitan identity of the city. While we don't have time or space to cover all the multifarious twists and turns that nightlife has made over the past few years of explosive growth, nor all the clubs that have ebbed and flowed over the city's nighttime landscape, Muse is definitely central to our story of nightlife's revival since the 1990s. In the book we discuss the Muse epic in some detail--I'll leave it at that for now, not wanting to spoil a good story.
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