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Tiger girls and shot glasses at the Long Bar
When asked why he prefers the desperate down-and-outness of Shanghai's Long Bar, erstwhile Internet entrepreneur and sometime barfly Andrew McKinnon admits, "It just isn't cool." Still, he loves the bar's elegant seediness, evocative of Shanghai in the 1930s when a cosmopolitan society of Jardine Matheson bankers, zoot-suited gangsters, White Russian bodyguards, and European movie stars, all danced and drank to the strains of jazz music. "I enjoy the low-bottom drunk, last stop experience," he confesses.
On Tuesday and Thursday nights at the Long Bar, one is treated to a "Fashion Show," an hour-long performance not unlike the cabaret scene at the close of La Dolce Vita. As in Fellini's film, the Fashion Show's highlight is a file of bathingsuit-clad women marching to and fro holding enormous beach balls aloft. Equally surreal are the ranks of Western businessmen and middle-aged expats, often drunk, horny, and full of colonial bravado. Added to the mix is a sliver group of McKinnon and his ilk—a cadre of Internet entrepreneurs, reflective of the new Shanghai, where the word "Internet" tumbles from the lips of international bankers and sampan pilots alike. Located adjacent to the Ritz Carlton in the modern Shanghai Centre, the ten-yard long, dark wood bar is a convenient—and because of the Fashion Show—attractive watering hole.
McKinnon is one of many Americans in their late twenties with dot com fever in the Far East. This crop of ambitious, well-scrubbed Americans stands in stark relief to most Long Bar patrons. "You have the engineer type. He works for GM or Boeing, and doesn't give a shit about China. He likes the Long Bar because he can drink his beer, eat his hamburger, talk loud with other engineers, and maybe even get lucky with one of the local 'professional girls,'" says McKinnon.
The semi-weekly Fashion Show is unique to Shanghai. It consists of between six and eight Chinese women modeling clothes to the frenetic beat of outdated American pop music; Madonna remains very popular. The women parade through the long and narrow space between the bar and a row of tables, performing synchronized dance steps and tearing away one outfit after another. Prototypical Ugly Americans, often sporting bad comb-overs and short-sleeved dress shirts, spank together their palms and call out "Yeah, baby, yeah," as the models at last strip down to modest one-piece bathing suits.
"Absolutely surreal" is how Lawrence Kole, another Internet entrepreneur, describes the show. "It's a reminder of the 1930s when Shanghai was the whore of the Orient, when things were pretty racy."
McKinnon and Kole admit that because of its mostly middle-aged, corporate crowd, the venue is an unlikely drinking spot for young American entrepreneurs. "The hip young foreigners don't like hanging out at places like the Long Bar," says McKinnon, characterizing the boy meets girl interaction there as mostly commerce. "The professional girls are usually over the hill by the time they get to the Long Bar. It's a kind of last-stop-before-they-hang-it-up type of place. The engineer is in his forties, overweight and twenty-five years into a serious drinking problem. This is the kind of singles environment you find at the Long Bar."
As the Internet ushers in broad economic possibilities for China, Shanghai's new class of entrepreneurs may render the bar and its grizzled patrons obsolete. Westerners in their late twenties prefer the city's live music and nightclubs. And for the more sophisticated set, sipping martinis at famed 1930s nightspots like the Metropole has greater cachet. The straightforward pleasures offered by the Long Bar may soon fade like a "yeah, baby, yeah" catcall, cried out on the last beat of a dated Fashion Show song.
A triumph for PR at the Rainbow Room
by Denise Wolfe
Public relations professionals in the Internet industry are an unenvied lot. Collectively—and pejoratively—referred to as "flacks," their role in the techno-landscape is to convince the technology business media that the latest news from their client’s company is, indeed, the greatest. Unfortunately for the PR community, in an age when every technology company promises "The Next Great Thing," it is becoming increasingly impossible to command the attention of sardonic and oversaturated journalists.
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