Cruising around

Corbett | May 8, 2006 11:02 PM

I met up with DJ Ijapa Chen (Ijapa apparently mean "Turtle" in Swahili) at a rehearsal studio to check out his new reggae band. He's a dj actually but also a concert clarinetist, and I promised to show him some tricks on playing reggae. It was a trip getting there, in the middle of some hutong down an industrial back alley of a road somewhere between who knows and where am I. I was jealous because they had a 4x10 Sunn cabinet in there, which I really wanted to cart back, and two Ampeg 8x10s (I guess in Beijing they take their bass very seriously). We jammed for a while, with the two MCs, and it was a cross cultural experience of sorts. I felt kind of like an old college student but I enjoyed the whole thing.

Later I hooked up with my friend Em (another DJ) from Taiwan who is studying at the Beijing Film Academy, and we had three heaping plates of killer dumplings about the size of a hamster, a beer, three cold dishes, and some other stuff for a total of RMB40. Now that's cheap. He took me to the best pirate DVD shop I have ever been to. Imagine a DVD shop in a dark alley behind a famous film school that caters to arty film students....everything from Battleship Potemkin to Nanuk the Eskimo was there - all for RMB6/each. Then we hung out in the studio of some guitar player who used to be the face of Benetton a few years back. Now he plays an ES-335 and is a bossa nova freak.

On a different note, I stumbled onto this awesome video:

Category: Mr. Asia

Comments (1)

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sunny

May 9, 2006 12:17 PM

waah. i can't see the video. is there another link? have a great day, C.

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