Doesn’t it look like that kid in the bottom left is running from clouds of pollution and Haibao* overload?

*That blue character - the official mascot of the 2010 World Expo.

Solid, solid hip hop party last night at Shelter. Played five hours of classics, “No Diggity,” “Push It,” “Going Back To Cali,” “Milkshake,” “Pass The Dutch,” “Brooklyn Zoo,” and so on.

Highlights:

Girls from the American midwest shakin’ tail to hip hop. So much love for that.

Subtly hip Asian kids requesting Debbie D.

Japanese kids just plain gettin’ down.

Italians requesting “Italian music” in the middle of an italo disco set. Then requesting “electro” during an Egyptian Lover song. Then asking for Justice.

Such a huge difference in quality between vinyl and MP3 when played side by side. MP3 sounds like garbage. Vinyl just has this warm, richess that digital can’t match. About as cool as diving in an above-ground pool. Found some classics today, including the original “Me So Horny” 12″ from 1989, albeit with a destroyed cover. Saw a thirteen year old girl casually drinking a can of Budweiser on the crowded subway tonight.

Running to get Indonesian food now.  Couple tracks up today.

I used to get a ride from my friend Ben in eleventh grade to this center for media classes in the afternoon where ex-hippies taught us about installations and how interpret David Lynch films. We used to bump Project Pat’s “Ghetty Green,” the one with the Pat robbing a Korean convenience store on the album cover, in my friend’s Honda Accord on the way to attack the Pizza Hut lunch buffet.

Not the best track on that album (that’s “North Memphis”) but still fresh.

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Project Pat - Niggas Got Me Fucked Up

And another Three 6 Mafia track for good measure….

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Three 6 Mafia - Neighborhood Hoe

So many Koreans in Krispy Kreme! One time in Seoul, this girl let me borrow her dog for the day and I took it all around the city. We met all kinds of wacky Evangelicals by the river banks, rode the subway, and finally, it shit in the Krispy Kreme.

Whenever I go home, my grandpa/other people ask me “You ever eat dog over there in Asia?” Koreans do eat dog, and that’s not a stereotype. My worst restaurant experience ever in Shanghai happened at a Korean restaurant. While browsing the menu, my roommate, who at that time had just started studying Chinese characters, said “that looks like the character for dog…so does that…and this…” Then we looked at the restaurant name, which translated to “Dog Meat Restaurant.”

Though I’ve eaten dog before, at another Korean restaurant, we opted-out that afternoon. Instead we tried to eat a wretched, Chinese approximation of Korean food. Halfway through the meal, cockroaches emerged from the electrical outlets and washed over the tables. I yelled out “cockroach!” in Chinese and the staff just shrugged. Some other customers looked genuinely disturbed when I began throwing objects (bottle of coke, tissue box…) at the insects.

Italians do it better.

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Glass Candy - Feeling Without Touching

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Shanghai by early afternoon in the park, Zhongshan Park to be precise. One of Changning district’s charms, as opposed to say Xujiahui or Jing An is that people still run businesses on the street, hawking everything from rabbits and turtles (generally one person undertakes  the job of selling both rabbits and turtles), to cotton candy, sugar cane juice, Uno decks, toy crossbows, and popcorn. The popcorn sucks. Lofty exceptions of salty, buttery satisfaction quickly lose way to sickly-sweet disappointment.

Not sure how much longer this will last. When I bought an umbrella from a woman the other night, she mentioned that as the Expo approaches, she might “not be here,” and thus I should buy an umbrella now.

Big up to Obama for getting health care passed through in some form. Not the public option I’d like to see, but given the climate of dysfunction in Washington, I’m pleased.

Other good news is that DrakNet, the company who hosts this blog (they’re pretty ill; this blog gets hosted by solar energy exclusively and they personally respond to emails within a few hours), sent me an email asking if I’d like some more space for free, as the costs of storage have plummeted over the last few years. So now I’m working with five times the space, which means way more music and a weekly podcast. Before this, I had started to delete some songs from early posts as my open space dropped to single digits.

Bad news is, because it’s Shanghai, the Internet still sucks. Maybe it’s because Google decided to stop censoring search results and now the mainland site redirects to the Hong Kong site. Hope this doesn’t mean the demise of Gmail…

Deep track today from a dude I tragically missed when he came to Shanghai last year. He’s an Oxford math PhD who releases some new classics on the side.

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Floating Points - Vacuum Boogie

Busy preparing music for tomorrow night. Will be an EPIC show at Yuyintang then a Baijiu Robot afterparty at The Shelter. For two years, it’s been my dream to play at Shelter on a weekend and it’s finally going down tomorrow. Heaps of fresh tracks plus vinyl…sexy final in the late, late hours. We start around 2:00 a.m. after Optimo.

Went wandering around an abandoned, soon-to-be demolished (i.e. tomorrow), apartment/business complex today. Only got a few photos before some folk came warned me of the danger. Seemed pretty sturdy though.

Since I’m not formally in Chinese school anymore (though I do attend lectures from time to time), I found a bunch of private tutors, which works out better/cheaper than paying for classes with mediocre instructors. One of my tutors has a PhD in underwater robotics so we talked about robots for a while. Apparently, contrary to my long-held belief, American robots are way ahead of their Japanese counterparts.

Just a quick post today, featuring one of my favorite remixers - Pictureplane. Will play this at one of the shows tomorrow. Undecided on the beginning or end of the night.

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Pictureplane - Beyond Fantasy

So the last time I posted, I was about to embark on a journey on a Greyhound bus, one of the world’s sketchier forms of public transportation. That was three weeks ago, maybe a little more.

Well I didn’t die. I’m back in Shanghai, trying so hard to keep my cool with the most frustrating internet since the days of waiting literally twenty-five minutes to download a single song in 128kbs on the original Napster.

I’m stealing Internet from Krispy Kreme. I want to eat a doughnut but don’t wanna go downstairs to buy it. Also, there’s an unusually large number of Japanese people here. “Aeyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!?”

I bought a ton of vinyl on my trip back to the States. Lots of funk. Found an amazing track by one of my favorite producers, Larry Levan, that I’m posting today. Proof that dance music doesn’t need a high BPM to move the floor.

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Taana Gardner - Heartbeat