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