DMC's and shit...
so it has been awhile. therefore i will be gracing you with yet another addition to the mini-novel series of my life. this one is just going to talk about the DJ competition I went to, I'll post another shortly about just the random conversations I've been having with people.
MEDIA SECTION:
-------------------------
since i love all of you, i'm going to provide you all with audio and visual goodness.
the first is a house freestyle since most people don't know what house is and i wanted to give people a taste of it since i imagine my description "lots of footwork and floaty" may conjure up many different images. if you want to listen to a song, here's a house remix of an old destiny's child song that i've been jamming to.
locking is also a hard dance to describe, though i know some of you learned a bit of it in the hip-hop class a year ago. everyone says it consists of about only 25 moves total, so its theoretically a very easy dance to learn. but its one of those dances where you really "gotta have soul". here's a locking battle with one of my heroes, p-lock: p-lock vs. loic
i also uploaded a random clip of a popper doing some
crazy footwork while he was just messing around... just for fun :)
i have also uploaded a bunch of various pictures to my flickr account and hopefully many more will be coming.
and finally some audio clips of a group i met, deearna (chan)
---------------------------
i just ordered a miniDV camcorder from the states, so i should be getting it sometime this week which is very exciting. i've been carrying around my digital camera everywhere trying to capture as much video as i can, but i'm limited to the size of my memory card and its not exactly the best quality. so now i hope to actually conduct some informal interviews with the people i've met so far.. and perhaps at the end of it all i'll make some sort of video documentary-ish thing for the fun of it. i've been thinking about some things i should be asking, if you happen to have anything you're dying to know about the hip-hop in asia, let me know and i'll be glad to ask the people i interview the questions :).
its funny how i'm just now meeting my contacts since they have been m.i.a. in other countries. one guy is from detroit who apparently came over 6 years ago to teach english, then he ended up helping start the whole shanghai hip-hop scene. he surprisingly actually knew what the watson was, and was going on about how i should be a scholar and how i should be writing things. i never thought of myself as a scholar, but i think i should probably produce something even if its just for me and all of you. so maybe he'll provide me with some motivation to do so. he seems like a strange guy though and seems a bit too busy, so i dunno. i've asked some people about him and they kinda don't say much, so i don't know what that means. one guy was like.. i hung out with him a lot when i first came here and then.... and he kinda just trailed off. so yeah. haha. who knows.
the other guy is DJ V-Nutz (which stands for vinyl nutz... there are very few vinyl djs here). He won the 2002 DMC (DJ Mixing Competition) in China. This year's DMC's just happened on Sept. 4th which I'll get into later. It was interesting to talk to him and how the whole DMC event is actually run (he organized it this year) which is kinda messed up. You have to pay Tony Price (the owner of the DMC's which is based in London) 2000 pounds just to use the name. You have to find all your own sponsors to pay for the guest performers (which in this case happen to be people from all over China (Grafitti writers, dancers, etc.), their transportation, and their lodging. Then you have to pay the airfare and hotel of the organizer and the country's DMC winner to attend the world DMC's which happen about two weeks after the country DMC's so you basically are forced to buy business class tickets since its cutting so close. So basically Tony Price makes a ton of money doing very little each year, especially after selling tickets, shirts, DVDs, etc. BUT its good for the hip-hop scene worldwide. You really can put yourself on the map by winning the DMCs and it really inspires people to get more creative and do something new with their battle DJ-ing.
So the DMCs. the worldwide competition will be happening on the 25th in London. but the one here was held in a nice venue called ARK in Xintiandi (a classy, upscale-ish place with lots of restaurants and stuff). V-Nutz (Gary) was gracious enough to give me a staff pass so I had all access and could just mill around and talk to people as I pleased while they were setting up and stuff. which was really great. I happened to recognize two really trendy people, who i read an interview about in "Theme" magazine (a magazine that covers Asian people's influence on culture, art, music, etc.). Eddi and Julia are the owners of adFunture which is a company that produces street toys and pushes street art. (check my xanadu album or www.kidrobot.com to get an idea of what street toys are). they both were extremely friendly and invited me to catch dinner with them before the show started. so i had dinner with them and the grafitti artist they brought from guangzhou to do a live painting, she goes by "sice" or "sic" for short (see the sice album). i think i'll probably go down to guangzhou and hang out for awhile since there seems to be a lot of people down there... but yeah. over dinner i talked with eddi about grafitti and street art in china. he said likes shanghai because you can do a lot of new things here because most people haven't experienced any of it yet. he's from hong kong where he said that everything seems to have been done there and there's nothing new. regarding chinese graf writers, he said its really hard market chinese graf writers, because they are not character based. (characters being cartoon characters usually incorporated into a grafitti "piece") julia was saying that in china there are not a lot of graf writers partly because of the popularity of comics- they all just draw comic book characters and no one really does graf wants to get into graf. they somestimes just incorporate grafitti style letters but mostly do anime/comic book characters and end up confusing some graf with comic books (to add to the confusion, there's some comics with hip-hop/graf-ish stuff in them)... but yeah, eddi was saying people don't care about street art because they don't notice it or feel anything when they see it. they don't pay attention to it at all. china is covered with telephone numbers written all over the walls for discounted flight tickets, selling medicine, etc. so there are people that buff them constantly. so i think it'd be pretty hard to stay up in china, but that's a problem you face in most places anyway. but i think because this advertising "graffiti" has been used for so long people start to ignore any type of grafitti.. also since grafitti is 99% of the time in english, most people probably can't even read it, especially since its in stylized characters.
i also met a group from beijing, that goes by the name of yin tsang (i actually bought their cd last year, didn't think much of them at the time), which is a group composed of a local beijing mc, mc webber, a beijing dj, dj wordy, and some kids from canada and the states. mc webber has won every national freestyle competition in china and dj wordy just won this year's DMCs. I also met a hip-hop group from guangzhou, deearna (chan) which has a hip-hop jazz sort of vibe (suprising huh?). the production was pretty good, hopefully i'll be able to upload some of the music cds that people gave to me.
The DMCs themselves were pretty good. The DJs here have a bit to go, but i was quite pleased because i've only seen one guy scratch here and he wasn't one of the better ones. But they have quite a few barriers, there's no record store here, so you have to mailorder all of your records and pay the customs tax.. which makes them pretty prohibitively expensive. There's no radio stations that play good music, there's a very small community, etc. but i think in a few years China will be able to hold its own on a global level. the beat juggles weren't too technical and everyone was having skipping needle problems. there was one real standout in the crowd, a guy by the name of dragon v (beijing) who i unfortunately didn't have the chance to meet (and NO one knows this guy it seems). He came in a set with a lot of crazy beats with a heavy metal tip (used some old school metallica in his set), unfortunately he wasn't all that clean and he bit (copied) a portion of a set of some other dj which he didn't do a very good job of. it was nice though to have someone come out of the woodworks and come up with something that didn't rely entirely on battle breaks (the common beats used to scratch or battle to).
afterwards a bunch of us went to eat hotpot together (for those that don't know, hotpot is a wonderful creation. basically its a big pot in the middle of your table with soups of various flavors- usually its a pot split down the middle with a normal soup and an extremely spicy soup. then you order raw vegetables and meats that you put in the pot to cook as you please). over dinner there was a lot of conversation about the quality of djs and the state of chinese hip-hop and about why they do the things they do, the role of money, and all this stuff. i'm mad i didn't get the entire conversation on tape, because i've forgotten a lot of it.
anyway i a contribution to the scene by providing the england consulate with evidence that dj wordy won the DMC competition. He applied for a visa and got rejected, so gary was freaking out about him not being able to go, so i gave him a copy of the videos i took of Wordy performing and winning the title, so everything should be ok since they can get a supporting letter from the chinese consulate with that. :)
oh another point of interest is that one of the sponsors of the DMC is a company looking to make a documentary on Chinese Hip-hop. also, one of the dancers from the studio is a guy from xinjiang. he's came to shanghai so he could learn from the dragon dance studio and then take back what he learned to his crew back in xinjiang. he's also here working with a film company who he pitched an idea to.. to document some people's stories about how they got into hip-hop in china (i think mostly dance), one of which was his own. so i guess hip-hop here caught a few people's attention... oh i also ran into a girl from stanford who was studying the hip-hop culture in beijing. her name is angela steele and she's a senior this year. apparently stanford gave her some money to spend the summer in beijing there. it was funny because i contacted a b-boy from chicago that said he was in beijing, but he had already went back to the states. he told me about this girl he ran into- so i googled her and found a picture of her. the next day at the DMC's i see her and i'm like hey.. you're angela right? haha. she apparently attended China's Battle of the Year (a huge b-boy competition, held all throughout the world), so maybe she'll hook me up with some footage of that. she also quickly gave me the lowdown of who is who in Beijing, so when i go back i can make some quick rounds and maybe interview a bunch of people that i haven't met yet. :)
randomness section:
---------------------
things i love about shanghai:
the transportation card. this thing is incredible. you just load money onto this card and you can use it to pay for basically any form of transportation.. the subway, the buses, the cabs, and the skytrain. its nifty because you can just leave it in your bag or in your wallet and there's just a sensor that you put your bag/wallet up to and it automatically takes out the amount without even having to take it out. no more fiddling for loose change to pay for the bus or to get a one-time trip card on the subway, no more worries about whether or not the taxi driver has change for your 100, i think every city should have something like this!
BUT they just raised the subway fare 1 kuai across the board. maybe they're trying to be a bit TOO much like new york. :( and it sucks when your card is so old it breaks. which happened to me, they have to take it away for 10 days so they can figure out how much money was on it or something and give you a new one. grrr.
convenience stores. convenience stores that are actually convenient! there are about 3 or 4 different chains of convienece stores, so basically they are ubiquitous and they are all open 24 hours. they're also located close to almost every club, so if you're in a club dying of thirst and don't want to pay the exorbitant prices at the bar, you can just walk out and stop at a convenience store to get a water/beer/whatever at a quarter of the price. other bonuses are you can pay virtually every bill at the store, your phone bill, your electric bill, your gas bill, etc. and you can recharge the aforementioned transportation card at most of them too. oh and all of them sell tea eggs, which are basically eggs boiled in soy sauce and other spices. a great quick snack before you go dance for a few hours. haha.
24 hour food. when you step out of clubs there is almost always a guy with a makeshift barbeque stand selling meat kabobs (chuanr). so you can satiate your after-clubbing hunger right on the spot. then of course you can make your way to the convenience store for a drink and other goodies. or you can hit up one of the many 24 hour wonton joints scattered around the city. AND these 24 hour wonton joints deliver to you for free! so if you're ever hungry at 4am and you are all in your pajamas and crap, you can just call them to bike you some wontons over.
cd peddlers. so there's different kinds of cds here. there's your bootleg cds that are the most prevalent. you can find these in almost any dvd store or on the street in big suitcases, these run you about 5 kuai (63 cents). then there's your original cd sellers, who sell real cds with packaging and all that apparently come from hong kong according to one of the sellers. then there's the promotion cds that i mentioned earlier with either a cut in the packaging or a hole in the cd for some reason there are a lot of jazz cds released by french labels over here. so i've been spending some money on building up a modest jazz cd collection. these run anywhere from 8-30rmb depending on where you are shopping. much better than trying to download stuff on dialup!
the coffee bean and tea leaf. yes this is the famous coffee shop that's in hollywood or wherever it is on the west coast. why do i like it so much? no i don't drink coffee. they have free wireless! and sometimes you can just sit down and not even buy anything. for example, i have been sitting here for 2 hours and no one has bothered me even though i never bought anything. maybe they're just too nice and i'm taking advantage of them. haha. but nothing beats F-R-E-E! if they had bubble tea here i'd be even happier, but the other bubble tea place (rbt, rabbit bubble tea) doesn't have free wireless.. but it's some of the BEST bubble tea i've ever had. super super yummy. wish i could have both in one place.
biking. my bike has served me well. i love biking home from the clubs, its a great end to the night. by the time its 2-3-4am the streets are really quiet, the taxi cab drivers are all waiting in queues at different clubs or just cruising about. only sometimes will i bike past a construction site with lots of migrant workers working through the night. but its a nice contrast to be biking cute tree lined streets right after coming out of a loud, hot, and sweaty club. shanghai also isn't all that big, if you really wanted to you probably could bike around most of it (except if you want to cross the river to pudong (new city)).
a quick shout out to multi! i've been meeting a bunch of multi people everwhere, especially in clubs. but they aren't as cool as you guys of course ;), lilian finally watched the multi video when she came to visit and she loved it (of course). i hope you guys are still having mixers.....
all you african dancers.. so there's a lot of house music that uses african drums. one time in class they were playing one with a great african rhythm... i wanted to bust out with the nigerian stomp or the hongwe. it made me miss all y'all in african ;)
-------------------------------
Recap and random info:
- The China DMCs (DJ Mixing Competition) just happened. I met a LOT of people.
- DJ V-nutz (Gary) is super nice. He's hooked me up with lots of stuff and has been really chill. He's a true b-boy.
- Eddi and Julia of adFunture (street toy manufacturers) are also great people and are slowly trying to get street art out in shanghai
- Sice (female grafitti writer) is one of China's few grafitti writers, she's a funny, quite girl.
- Lilian came to visit. We ate a lot of food.
- D-styles, one of the greatest scratch DJs in the world, was supposed to be here on Sept. 17th.. but his visa got fucked up. there went my chance to chill with him.
- Common (Sense) performed Beijing on the same day :( but i missed it
- There is a Red Bull B-boy battle in Hong Kong on Sept. 30th. I hopefully will be there.
- Shanghai got their second Nike Dunk (still my favorite shoe, despite the hype. too bad i didn't know anything about it when it got released). Nike Dunk Shanghai "Xiaolong Bao", this time its inspired by those steaming baskets that you make "xiaolong bao" (soup dumplings) in.
MEDIA SECTION:
-------------------------
since i love all of you, i'm going to provide you all with audio and visual goodness.
the first is a house freestyle since most people don't know what house is and i wanted to give people a taste of it since i imagine my description "lots of footwork and floaty" may conjure up many different images. if you want to listen to a song, here's a house remix of an old destiny's child song that i've been jamming to.
locking is also a hard dance to describe, though i know some of you learned a bit of it in the hip-hop class a year ago. everyone says it consists of about only 25 moves total, so its theoretically a very easy dance to learn. but its one of those dances where you really "gotta have soul". here's a locking battle with one of my heroes, p-lock: p-lock vs. loic
i also uploaded a random clip of a popper doing some
crazy footwork while he was just messing around... just for fun :)
i have also uploaded a bunch of various pictures to my flickr account and hopefully many more will be coming.
and finally some audio clips of a group i met, deearna (chan)
---------------------------
i just ordered a miniDV camcorder from the states, so i should be getting it sometime this week which is very exciting. i've been carrying around my digital camera everywhere trying to capture as much video as i can, but i'm limited to the size of my memory card and its not exactly the best quality. so now i hope to actually conduct some informal interviews with the people i've met so far.. and perhaps at the end of it all i'll make some sort of video documentary-ish thing for the fun of it. i've been thinking about some things i should be asking, if you happen to have anything you're dying to know about the hip-hop in asia, let me know and i'll be glad to ask the people i interview the questions :).
its funny how i'm just now meeting my contacts since they have been m.i.a. in other countries. one guy is from detroit who apparently came over 6 years ago to teach english, then he ended up helping start the whole shanghai hip-hop scene. he surprisingly actually knew what the watson was, and was going on about how i should be a scholar and how i should be writing things. i never thought of myself as a scholar, but i think i should probably produce something even if its just for me and all of you. so maybe he'll provide me with some motivation to do so. he seems like a strange guy though and seems a bit too busy, so i dunno. i've asked some people about him and they kinda don't say much, so i don't know what that means. one guy was like.. i hung out with him a lot when i first came here and then.... and he kinda just trailed off. so yeah. haha. who knows.
the other guy is DJ V-Nutz (which stands for vinyl nutz... there are very few vinyl djs here). He won the 2002 DMC (DJ Mixing Competition) in China. This year's DMC's just happened on Sept. 4th which I'll get into later. It was interesting to talk to him and how the whole DMC event is actually run (he organized it this year) which is kinda messed up. You have to pay Tony Price (the owner of the DMC's which is based in London) 2000 pounds just to use the name. You have to find all your own sponsors to pay for the guest performers (which in this case happen to be people from all over China (Grafitti writers, dancers, etc.), their transportation, and their lodging. Then you have to pay the airfare and hotel of the organizer and the country's DMC winner to attend the world DMC's which happen about two weeks after the country DMC's so you basically are forced to buy business class tickets since its cutting so close. So basically Tony Price makes a ton of money doing very little each year, especially after selling tickets, shirts, DVDs, etc. BUT its good for the hip-hop scene worldwide. You really can put yourself on the map by winning the DMCs and it really inspires people to get more creative and do something new with their battle DJ-ing.
So the DMCs. the worldwide competition will be happening on the 25th in London. but the one here was held in a nice venue called ARK in Xintiandi (a classy, upscale-ish place with lots of restaurants and stuff). V-Nutz (Gary) was gracious enough to give me a staff pass so I had all access and could just mill around and talk to people as I pleased while they were setting up and stuff. which was really great. I happened to recognize two really trendy people, who i read an interview about in "Theme" magazine (a magazine that covers Asian people's influence on culture, art, music, etc.). Eddi and Julia are the owners of adFunture which is a company that produces street toys and pushes street art. (check my xanadu album or www.kidrobot.com to get an idea of what street toys are). they both were extremely friendly and invited me to catch dinner with them before the show started. so i had dinner with them and the grafitti artist they brought from guangzhou to do a live painting, she goes by "sice" or "sic" for short (see the sice album). i think i'll probably go down to guangzhou and hang out for awhile since there seems to be a lot of people down there... but yeah. over dinner i talked with eddi about grafitti and street art in china. he said likes shanghai because you can do a lot of new things here because most people haven't experienced any of it yet. he's from hong kong where he said that everything seems to have been done there and there's nothing new. regarding chinese graf writers, he said its really hard market chinese graf writers, because they are not character based. (characters being cartoon characters usually incorporated into a grafitti "piece") julia was saying that in china there are not a lot of graf writers partly because of the popularity of comics- they all just draw comic book characters and no one really does graf wants to get into graf. they somestimes just incorporate grafitti style letters but mostly do anime/comic book characters and end up confusing some graf with comic books (to add to the confusion, there's some comics with hip-hop/graf-ish stuff in them)... but yeah, eddi was saying people don't care about street art because they don't notice it or feel anything when they see it. they don't pay attention to it at all. china is covered with telephone numbers written all over the walls for discounted flight tickets, selling medicine, etc. so there are people that buff them constantly. so i think it'd be pretty hard to stay up in china, but that's a problem you face in most places anyway. but i think because this advertising "graffiti" has been used for so long people start to ignore any type of grafitti.. also since grafitti is 99% of the time in english, most people probably can't even read it, especially since its in stylized characters.
i also met a group from beijing, that goes by the name of yin tsang (i actually bought their cd last year, didn't think much of them at the time), which is a group composed of a local beijing mc, mc webber, a beijing dj, dj wordy, and some kids from canada and the states. mc webber has won every national freestyle competition in china and dj wordy just won this year's DMCs. I also met a hip-hop group from guangzhou, deearna (chan) which has a hip-hop jazz sort of vibe (suprising huh?). the production was pretty good, hopefully i'll be able to upload some of the music cds that people gave to me.
The DMCs themselves were pretty good. The DJs here have a bit to go, but i was quite pleased because i've only seen one guy scratch here and he wasn't one of the better ones. But they have quite a few barriers, there's no record store here, so you have to mailorder all of your records and pay the customs tax.. which makes them pretty prohibitively expensive. There's no radio stations that play good music, there's a very small community, etc. but i think in a few years China will be able to hold its own on a global level. the beat juggles weren't too technical and everyone was having skipping needle problems. there was one real standout in the crowd, a guy by the name of dragon v (beijing) who i unfortunately didn't have the chance to meet (and NO one knows this guy it seems). He came in a set with a lot of crazy beats with a heavy metal tip (used some old school metallica in his set), unfortunately he wasn't all that clean and he bit (copied) a portion of a set of some other dj which he didn't do a very good job of. it was nice though to have someone come out of the woodworks and come up with something that didn't rely entirely on battle breaks (the common beats used to scratch or battle to).
afterwards a bunch of us went to eat hotpot together (for those that don't know, hotpot is a wonderful creation. basically its a big pot in the middle of your table with soups of various flavors- usually its a pot split down the middle with a normal soup and an extremely spicy soup. then you order raw vegetables and meats that you put in the pot to cook as you please). over dinner there was a lot of conversation about the quality of djs and the state of chinese hip-hop and about why they do the things they do, the role of money, and all this stuff. i'm mad i didn't get the entire conversation on tape, because i've forgotten a lot of it.
anyway i a contribution to the scene by providing the england consulate with evidence that dj wordy won the DMC competition. He applied for a visa and got rejected, so gary was freaking out about him not being able to go, so i gave him a copy of the videos i took of Wordy performing and winning the title, so everything should be ok since they can get a supporting letter from the chinese consulate with that. :)
oh another point of interest is that one of the sponsors of the DMC is a company looking to make a documentary on Chinese Hip-hop. also, one of the dancers from the studio is a guy from xinjiang. he's came to shanghai so he could learn from the dragon dance studio and then take back what he learned to his crew back in xinjiang. he's also here working with a film company who he pitched an idea to.. to document some people's stories about how they got into hip-hop in china (i think mostly dance), one of which was his own. so i guess hip-hop here caught a few people's attention... oh i also ran into a girl from stanford who was studying the hip-hop culture in beijing. her name is angela steele and she's a senior this year. apparently stanford gave her some money to spend the summer in beijing there. it was funny because i contacted a b-boy from chicago that said he was in beijing, but he had already went back to the states. he told me about this girl he ran into- so i googled her and found a picture of her. the next day at the DMC's i see her and i'm like hey.. you're angela right? haha. she apparently attended China's Battle of the Year (a huge b-boy competition, held all throughout the world), so maybe she'll hook me up with some footage of that. she also quickly gave me the lowdown of who is who in Beijing, so when i go back i can make some quick rounds and maybe interview a bunch of people that i haven't met yet. :)
randomness section:
---------------------
things i love about shanghai:
the transportation card. this thing is incredible. you just load money onto this card and you can use it to pay for basically any form of transportation.. the subway, the buses, the cabs, and the skytrain. its nifty because you can just leave it in your bag or in your wallet and there's just a sensor that you put your bag/wallet up to and it automatically takes out the amount without even having to take it out. no more fiddling for loose change to pay for the bus or to get a one-time trip card on the subway, no more worries about whether or not the taxi driver has change for your 100, i think every city should have something like this!
BUT they just raised the subway fare 1 kuai across the board. maybe they're trying to be a bit TOO much like new york. :( and it sucks when your card is so old it breaks. which happened to me, they have to take it away for 10 days so they can figure out how much money was on it or something and give you a new one. grrr.
convenience stores. convenience stores that are actually convenient! there are about 3 or 4 different chains of convienece stores, so basically they are ubiquitous and they are all open 24 hours. they're also located close to almost every club, so if you're in a club dying of thirst and don't want to pay the exorbitant prices at the bar, you can just walk out and stop at a convenience store to get a water/beer/whatever at a quarter of the price. other bonuses are you can pay virtually every bill at the store, your phone bill, your electric bill, your gas bill, etc. and you can recharge the aforementioned transportation card at most of them too. oh and all of them sell tea eggs, which are basically eggs boiled in soy sauce and other spices. a great quick snack before you go dance for a few hours. haha.
24 hour food. when you step out of clubs there is almost always a guy with a makeshift barbeque stand selling meat kabobs (chuanr). so you can satiate your after-clubbing hunger right on the spot. then of course you can make your way to the convenience store for a drink and other goodies. or you can hit up one of the many 24 hour wonton joints scattered around the city. AND these 24 hour wonton joints deliver to you for free! so if you're ever hungry at 4am and you are all in your pajamas and crap, you can just call them to bike you some wontons over.
cd peddlers. so there's different kinds of cds here. there's your bootleg cds that are the most prevalent. you can find these in almost any dvd store or on the street in big suitcases, these run you about 5 kuai (63 cents). then there's your original cd sellers, who sell real cds with packaging and all that apparently come from hong kong according to one of the sellers. then there's the promotion cds that i mentioned earlier with either a cut in the packaging or a hole in the cd for some reason there are a lot of jazz cds released by french labels over here. so i've been spending some money on building up a modest jazz cd collection. these run anywhere from 8-30rmb depending on where you are shopping. much better than trying to download stuff on dialup!
the coffee bean and tea leaf. yes this is the famous coffee shop that's in hollywood or wherever it is on the west coast. why do i like it so much? no i don't drink coffee. they have free wireless! and sometimes you can just sit down and not even buy anything. for example, i have been sitting here for 2 hours and no one has bothered me even though i never bought anything. maybe they're just too nice and i'm taking advantage of them. haha. but nothing beats F-R-E-E! if they had bubble tea here i'd be even happier, but the other bubble tea place (rbt, rabbit bubble tea) doesn't have free wireless.. but it's some of the BEST bubble tea i've ever had. super super yummy. wish i could have both in one place.
biking. my bike has served me well. i love biking home from the clubs, its a great end to the night. by the time its 2-3-4am the streets are really quiet, the taxi cab drivers are all waiting in queues at different clubs or just cruising about. only sometimes will i bike past a construction site with lots of migrant workers working through the night. but its a nice contrast to be biking cute tree lined streets right after coming out of a loud, hot, and sweaty club. shanghai also isn't all that big, if you really wanted to you probably could bike around most of it (except if you want to cross the river to pudong (new city)).
a quick shout out to multi! i've been meeting a bunch of multi people everwhere, especially in clubs. but they aren't as cool as you guys of course ;), lilian finally watched the multi video when she came to visit and she loved it (of course). i hope you guys are still having mixers.....
all you african dancers.. so there's a lot of house music that uses african drums. one time in class they were playing one with a great african rhythm... i wanted to bust out with the nigerian stomp or the hongwe. it made me miss all y'all in african ;)
-------------------------------
Recap and random info:
- The China DMCs (DJ Mixing Competition) just happened. I met a LOT of people.
- DJ V-nutz (Gary) is super nice. He's hooked me up with lots of stuff and has been really chill. He's a true b-boy.
- Eddi and Julia of adFunture (street toy manufacturers) are also great people and are slowly trying to get street art out in shanghai
- Sice (female grafitti writer) is one of China's few grafitti writers, she's a funny, quite girl.
- Lilian came to visit. We ate a lot of food.
- D-styles, one of the greatest scratch DJs in the world, was supposed to be here on Sept. 17th.. but his visa got fucked up. there went my chance to chill with him.
- Common (Sense) performed Beijing on the same day :( but i missed it
- There is a Red Bull B-boy battle in Hong Kong on Sept. 30th. I hopefully will be there.
- Shanghai got their second Nike Dunk (still my favorite shoe, despite the hype. too bad i didn't know anything about it when it got released). Nike Dunk Shanghai "Xiaolong Bao", this time its inspired by those steaming baskets that you make "xiaolong bao" (soup dumplings) in.
posted by Derrick at 12:58 PM
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