Pretzels for Breakfast

It’s 5:09pm in Montreal and I am sitting in my blackout-curtained room, having eaten leftover pretzels from the flight. Oh right. I passed out at 9:30 and was up at 4:45 in the morning.

The Sugar Jar set was cool yesterday. Simon opened up with multi-layered samples from R.D. Burman, an Indian composer who did a lot of old style Bollywood stuff. He probably had great glasses and a mean comb-over. It was a pretty much non-stop set, which was impressive (except when a shitty cable broke and caused a few minutes of silence).

Liu Kai, the guy who watches over the store, is one of the sweetest guys I know in Beijing. We hung out and sipped green tea while Simon set up. I showed him the joys of Pitchfork TV (he’s obsessed with “the loudest band in New York,” A Place to Bury Strangers, and they have a full set online). He showed me how to bid on $20 Cheap Mondays on the Chinese equivalent of eBay, which I think is called Taobao.

His English is quite good, but he’s still more comfortable in Chinese, which is nice because when I actually have the right vocabulary, we can converse. But I don’t know how to comfortably say “I see how you like the Big Muff pedal more than my Danelectro one because the distortion is a bit warmer.” He’s big on the shoegaze/post-rock thing.

Shouwang/Jeff came from almost an hour away to see Simon’s set. We went around the 798 art area afterwards, looking for the sort of microphone that Sulumi was using the other night. No dice though: the shop was closed.

Last night we ran into these crazy guys from Azerbaijan at a Xinjiang (Muslim) restaurant. The three of them were on their way through a second bottle of Vodka by the time we got our food. Apparently, drunk driving “doesn’t matter!” in Beijing because it’s crazy enough sober.

Today is also Go-back-to-the-police-station-after-being-turned-back-yesterday Day.