Shanghaiist Reads: SH and City Weekend

This week’s editions of SH and City Weekend, summerviewed. (That’s a combination of summary and review. Look it up.)

SH

• Where’s the love for our senior citizens?, asks SH, taking a double-edge stance in their coverage of Double Ninth day. Charity organizations and other philanthropic projects attempt to raise awareness among the city’s youth, but it’s not exactly clear from the article’s guardedly optimistic tone how productive these efforts are. Says octogenarian Shen Renjin: “There is always a lot of propaganda for the Festival, but what we want is more action and less lip service.” Yikes. [Cover story]
• “Thriller Night” takes us through the usual stops to planning a ghoulish Halloween evening: Park 97, Mural, Attica, bonbon, and, of course—cheap plug alert—Shanghai Studio, home of the Shanghaiist bash. We also get a few costume tips, though no cheap cocktails for those who come as playboy bunnies and Superman. [Feature two, p. 10]
• The timing for a hairy crab story couldn’t be better—and we couldn’t stop our mouths from salivating after seeing illustrations of the blood-red crab feast at Wang Bao He. We’re pretty certain, though, that the “incessant snapping and clutching at tiny threads of meat” comes with the territory; do gourmet chefs know something that we don’t? [Dining feature]
• A round-up of Shanghai Fashion Week is a good start—now how about putting a little more meat on the bones, and telling us which events are actually worth attending? [Community]
• Art schools, close shaves, and teaching old folk how to use computers (among other things)—that’s about an exhaustive education supplement as we’ve seen in awhile. Which can only mean one thing: that upcoming financial supplement we’ve been hearing about better be off the hook. [Education supplement, p. 12]
• Listings, listings, listings. We can’t emphasize this enough, but when you’re a weekly, we need more than just a calendar of upcoming events. Fellas (and fellarinas), a restaurant and nightlife directory is long overdue.

City Weekend

• Look, we understand the urge to put Tiger Woods on the cover. Really, we do. He’s an out-of-this-world athlete, a charming young man, and lest we all forget, part Chinese. But here’s where things get iffy: the article in question (meaning, the one advertised on the cover) is not really about Tiger at all, but about how golf may soon become the sport of choice for China’s middle class. OK, so there’s a separate interview with Tiger, where he does touch upon the rising status of golf in China, but in the grander scheme of the article, it amounts to little more than a sidebar. You can’t have it both ways, guys. Even if it means more people snagging your magazine off the racks. [p. 16]
• CW has the scoop on the Creative Bazaar, which, conceptually, to our ears at least, sounds like a jackpot: local designers and artisans at long last having a public (and free, we might add) forum to display their craftsmanship. What’s not so obvious is whether its novelty is synonymous with sustainability. We hope so, and would like to add a scoop of our own: there’s going to be a three-course lunch showcasing Shanghai’s burgeoning organic food movement. And yes, the O Store will be prominently involved. [p. E51]
• When we saw “Dining deals for 10 kuai and under” on the cover, we were justifiably stoked. (Wouldn’t you be?) So imagine our disappointment when we flipped to said article, and observed that apparently, scones and fruit juice also qualify as dining deals. Three words, guys: Knife. Cut. Noodles. (You could call it: "Dining deals for five quai and under.") [p. E51]
• And now, for an entertaining twist on Halloween: a tale of terror in the South China Sea. We could always use more ghost stories like these, and less in the way of costume recommendations. [p. 20]

Photos by 8 Days and City Weekend