| text | joel | ||
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day: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 epilogue 19 May 2007 to Tibet - Day One: Landing and Rocking in Beijing A picture is not worth a thousand words. Even a picture accompanied with text. Even if that text is a series of Chinese characters based on pictoral representations of ideas. The taxi driver took us from the airport to the wrong hotel after showing him the computer print out from the travel agency with a picture of the hotel and a brief description of something. It was a nice hotel. Fortunately it worked out that the correct hotel was even finer. The whole family was checked in and making dinner plans. Dad was off to an emperor's feast and mom, bro and i defaulted to the downstairs buffet for lack of creativity. The pay off was huge. Eating was looking up on this trip. The patchy sleep over the last week leading up to this trip pushed us into beds. I took a two hour nap then scrambled for help at reception for directions to the Wu Dao Ko district train station. One hour later i met up with my friend Jenn to sample some Beijing night life. Club Zub or some such name was pumping some drum and bass in its small basement fashioned with typical moody lighting and "chill" vibe of modern interior complete with expensive drinks. We were there long enough to tell her friends that we were leaving. Around the corner the first band of the night at D-22 were playing their first show. They had already played Johnny Be Good before we arrived to appease the fifties night theme. Kind of wish i caught that. D-22 is a smoky narrow and short hall with a balcony. Black walls with dark colour accents lit by intermitent shafts of light. This is where the shit is supposed to happen, which i am told i missed the night before. A few doors down we dipped into Club 13 for some metal mania. It's what 21 Jump Street would interpret a rock club to look like. Except for maybe the foos ball table. Graffiti walls, fabric hanging and coloured lights. Like that episode where Johnny Depp goes undercover at an Agent Orange show or something. This was perhaps the quietest metal band i have ever seen or will ever see again. While one guitar pumped thinly through a Laney 4X12 the second guitar at the hands of a more flamboyant player struggled to squeeze notes through a whimpy Peavy combo. There was definitely a bass player, that much i am sure of, but i couldn't hear him. Somewhere behind long black straight hair and massively spiked wrist bands and brooding faces touched up with corpse paint a la GI Joe Zoltan a drummer tapped away on drums. Their zeal in the face of their obvious defeat of the platforms of the validity of black metal was worth an endearing chuckle. They lacked razor precision in their execution and their sound was not face blisteringly aggressive. That technical edge and chill you to your bones satanism could not be saved by any menacing posturings of a repressed Chinese man accentuating a demonic underbite. It was a short time before coming to a conclusion that China must lack a history of rock and roll to draw from, an accusation that i would like to further research. Most evident in under developed drumming styles that oft fall on either side of the pocket. We caught one more "fifties" band after missing the middle act fronted by a pompadoured prick who i was told socked some girl in the face last week at a show. Judging by his limp i'm gauging that she promptly kicked his poseur ass. The bar and last band who sported a bit of a surf feel were kind enough to lend me guitar and amp to see if i could do better. Granted while everything was against me from screwy intonation, tuning, unfamiliar gear, a pissed off soundman who left two songs in and my inability to communicate and convince the folks that "no, actually you do like this" ...well, beyond that i reckon disaster was to be had no matter which way you sliced it. It almost worked until i turned up the burner screaming about the end of the world and other such paranoid nonsense. Who am i kidding? This is a communist utopia where people enjoy playing basketball.
joel |
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