Prepared for the Tour
I leave for Chonqing in 3 hours, and I'm going through the last minute routine of checking the location of all my tunes and assuring the computer software is in order. Spent last night with the Kim's at Buddah Bar, drank too much, watched Kim spin his flaming poi in front of a huge crowd of onlookers. Saw and said goodbye to some friends who I won't see for a long time, if ever again at all.
Star Wars Episode 3 Premiere
Tomorrow is my last full day in Chengdu.. Saturday at noon I leave for Chonqing for one final gig off-contract, then return to Chengdu on the 22nd, then leave for Guilin on the 23rd to begin three months of travelling. I'm excited to travel, although I'm enjoying where I am at the moment as well. The weather has been nearly flawless the last month; perfect temperatures, the pools are open, everyone's in a great mood. In true Chengdu spirit, everyone is walking slowly.
I don't know exactly where I'll be, or when (the itenerary is in all Chinese - what the fuck), but I know that I'll be travelling from Southwest China, as far South as Lijiang and Kunming, to the absolute Northwest in Harbin, near Mongolia. I have no idea what kind of clothes to pack, so I just won't bring many and I'll buy what I need when I need it.
We've received all of our equipment in the last week and I've been helping them assemble it. We're leaving in two groups of 4 people, each group has one DJ, one VJ, and two dancers. We have some mobile DJ equipment including a new laptop, but most of the investment was in VJ equipment, including four projectors to be divided between two groups. Along with projectors are mounting brackets, 30 meter VGA cables, etc.
I just got back from the premiere of the new Star Wars in Chengdu. It took 10 days, but I found a theatre playing it in English on opening night. After a midnight showing and an hour of hanging out at Sachas, it's now 3:30am. Tomorrow I have to get more passport photos taken for a new visa, and Tony will teach me some ins and outs of Arkaos, the VJ software which he uses. He's going to teach me to VJ and I'm going to teach him how to DJ. Video editing has been something which I've always had interest in but have never pursued, but I didn't expect to break into it with live video editing. Should be a good challenge.
I've been using Serato Scratch with my laptop for the last 2 weeks. It's ridiculously great; I can't imagine being without it or my records now. I must have one or the other; CD's are hardly tolerable anymore unless I have the luxury of CDJ-1000's which aren't common enough here. Arranging tunes into crates for easy organization is a formidable task for me, though. I remember years ago when I first switched from half-assed to total organization of my records. They went from sitting in giant piles on the floor to being in labelled crates with plastic record shop dividers; everything organized by label. I hope to reach that level of organization with my digital files, and in a sense, program features make it much easier for me this time around, but the quantity of songs is also exponentially greater and more varied.
Tony has loaned me a projector for the last week which I've been using in my room. I project 10 foot movie images onto my wall - it's like a movie theater at home! I don't want to give it up. 
I'll watch some of Office Space now and fall asleep. The re-awakened Peter Gibbons is a heroic figure worthy of scrutiny.
Currently listening to: UNKLE - Psyence Fiction
Coors Tour?
Exciting new developments. Tenzin is trying to get me on a contract with him and one other DJ to tour around China for three months. It'd be a three-month contract with the pay at 15,000 yuan a month, almost three times what I'm getting now at Wonderland. I leave for Xi'an tomorrow morning at 8am and I still haven't told them that I won't be here for three days, but I'll give them a call when I'm in Xi'an tomorrow. I'm making 4,000 in one weekend when Wonderland pays 6,000 a month, so there's no way that I can miss this to dance around and sing in front of four year olds. I'm looking forward to checking out Xi'an also, supposedly it's a beautiful ancient city. Apparently it's still surrounded by a 30 foot-high wall and is the home of the terracotta soldiers which are famous. I'll bring my camera and hopefully get more shots in three days in Xi'an than I got in 11 days in Shanghai. I'm going with Tony, who's a just-trained VJ. He's an older British guy, looks to be in his late 30's or so. I met him just a few days ago hanging out with Tenzin at his place. Tenzin is a mid-20's half American half Tibetan muscle-bound kung fu MC, so he's naturally drawn to hip hop. His friend Sasha is a late-20's bearded native of Minneapolis who talks like he's black. He routinely says shit like "I tol' that nigga to leave me 'lone", and so on. Pretty hard to take any caucasian who speaks like that seriously, but the fact that he's as old as he is further complicates it. He lives in one of the most luxurious apartments in Chengdu, though. Sascha told me his rent is 5,000 a month, which is fucking astronomically high for this area of China. Apparently he's financed by managing an import/export company which exports tea and Chinese artifacts and imports high-end large-scale printing machines. Life is so interesting.