ramblings.

well, i guess i can blame china for not allowing me to make a proper blog until now (blogs are blocked by the "great firewall of china")- but in actuality it's been my laziness and the loss of a 10 page email rambling about what i was up to in guangzhou. so i took a few months sabbatical.

a quick and dirty introduction. i'm in hong kong now, on my thomas j. watson fellowship adventure, exploring hiphop cultures in cities across east asia. i've been travelling through china for the majority of the first half of the fellowship- going through beijing, shanghai, guangzhou, shenzhen, wuhan, and chongqing. by the end of all that i needed to get out of china, so now i'm here- pseudo-china hong kong. it really isn't anything like china... aside from the availability of chinese food, chinese people, and people speaking some dialect that i don't understand.

i always wanted to come here.. i think mainly because i used to like sneakers so much and you can find almost any limited edition, collaboration, overpriced whatever sneaker here. haha. in fact, i currently live right next to the sneaker street (fa yuan street) in mongkok which is right next to the touristy street market, the “ladies market”. fortunately and unfortunately I do not have the funds to keep up this sneaker addiction and I think I have shifted my addiction to other random things so i’m safe for now.

hong kong is interesting on many levels though. The hyperconsumerist culture is pretty intense. i would consider myself to be shamelessly consumerist, especially a year ago. but the six months i spent in china, living on my own and doing the independent thing calmed me down quite a bit. i usually ended up just walking around and hardly ever buying anything because i could pay for 5 meals if i didn’t buy that $5 t-shirt. lately though, i’ve realized that just being here for a month has pushed me back to my old self- maybe because food is expensive here haha… no but everyone is so caught up in money here, you really can’t avoid it. then there are the trendy magazines that come out every other week, showing the latest trendy clothes, crossovers, etc. showing you all the things that you can’t afford. not to mention all the kids walking around head-to-toe in bape gear, porter bags, vivienne westwood accessories, etc. even people that aren’t usually interested in material things change a bit when they get here. On a side note, hong kong street fashion is extremely disappointing to me. i expected people to be dressed a lot better than this. No one is really original- everyone seems to just wear a lot of bape.. and the puffy vests (bonus points if it’s a bape camo puffy vest). oh well, i guess i’ll have to wait for japan to be inspired. (i think korea will just be clean cut, burberry style fashion- or so i hear).

but i regress. fashion isn’t the focus of my year, its hiphop. but yeah, hiphop fashion doesn’t seem too popular here- i think the trend already passed because i’ll see a person in “urban” gear maybe one or twice a week. this may be used to indicate that the hiphop trend has already passed and the people involved now are going to be the true heads… and so far, based on the people i’ve met and talked to, that has been true. sure they’re still the “posers” around, but probably a lot less than before… but yeah, i found it nice to see that the people pushing the hiphop scene aren’t necessarily caught up in the fashion.

went to dip last night, where hierophat (a group of djs, mcs, dancers, promoters pushing the hiphop scene in hong kong) holds their weekly friday party. lambert, the co-founder of hierophat, gave me a brief history lesson and told me that dip was the original hiphop club in hong kong. dip is apparently the only club that plays “true hiphop” and doesn’t care what the dj is playing. In fact, last night there was a bunch of stuff like medina green, pharcyde, and the like thrown in the mix (compliments of DJ JP, a hong kong born dj/producer who lived in australia for quite awhile and came back). back to the history…after seeing the success of dip, other clubs followed suit which birthed heihei club (which i have yet to go to…) and a few others. currently at the top of the hiphop club food chain is sugar, which happens to be co-owned by the owner of dip. sugar is ultra-posh, with a $20 cover, $10 drinks, and no sneaker dress code. dip is still pretty nice, but the poshness factor is toned down (maybe because its so old, and by old i mean like 3-4 years?... the average longevity of clubs in hong kong is anywhere from a few months to a year i hear). oh and clubs aren’t very big here, every club I have been to has been in a commercial building complex, on one of the upper floors- so clubs are a bit more intimate/cramped than most of the places i’ve been to in china. an interesting trend you see here is the fact that there are party mc’s- like how emceeing started- a guy to get the crowd hype, spit a freestyle every once in awhile… the only other place I’ve seen that is in guangzhou, but that’s only because they stole the idea from hei hei club (the hiphop night there was advertised as a heihei party even though it was in guangzhou.. go figure). but props for keeping it old school… shit do clubs in america do this?

enough of the history. so last night at dip was interesting. i invited ryan (the other watson fellow guy that’s doing the same topic as me) and jen (ryan’s girlfriend’s friend) to go out to dip. jen’s friend’s friend, emma, who is passing through HK and who we went out with the night before to a club called edge (yet another “hiphop” club.. which turned out to be pretty wack)… er ok. so emma invited a bunch of the american study abroad students at CUHK to come, so it ended up being a club full of americans… american college juniors. talking to them made me feel all old, everyone would ask me if i was a junior and i had to explain to them that i graduated, doing this fellowship, talk about swarthmore, blahblah. shit I’m not that old, what the hell. anyway, they turned out to be really annoying, trying to make me dance when i didn’t feel like it.. yelling at the dj to play cheesey music (the dj directly complained to me that my “friends” were annoying as fuck… even more than local girls… which says a lot). it was too bad, because the music was good and the since 70s crew (5 electric boogaloo style dancers) showed up. but it was too much to deal with so i left early around 3am. ah well. sometimes i feel like i’m not cut out to club anymore… i should just stay home and watch movies… like what I’m going to do right now after i archive my posts from that other blog i sort of had.. on a saturday night. haha.