child-eyed contortionists & belting rock divas

Went to see a traditional Chinese Acrobat show @ a theater near the Portman Ritz Carlton. Must've been a couple hundred people there, watching a series of choreographed performances that completely enchanted everyone present...

A gorgeous partner silk routine, all heightened grace & unrequited romance
a well articulated and elegant suspended aerial dance
Nonchalant contortionists & adolescents bending in demented ways
dancers stacked in pyramids under gel spotlight rays
a woman balances an umbrella in impossible angles on her nimble toes
with each hard to fathom feat my astonishment grows
a girl curved backwards balances 5 towers of glass on each limb & chin
a hilarious man runs around maniacally tending to a dozen plates he spins
a volunteer becomes a stage prop for some casually tossed knives
these folks must have really fatalistic attitudes towards lives
little women basing women in human stacks inverted
over the course of 90 minutes we watch gravity get perverted
into something possibly malleable, or a matter of choice
these folks use their bodies to express a defiant voice
a righteous protest against elementary physics
these acrobats are some kind of sedentary tribe of sadistic mystics
morphing into shapeshifters and angles
it takes a half dozen to let one person dangle
using a magic see saw, two drop from above to make one ascend:
I run with righteous yogis and I still can’t comprehend how these people bend…



….had a beer after the show with a handful of the perpetually hungover crew and went looking for better times after a quick meal. After some careful consultations with a travel guide, my buddy Whit directed us to a bar called Luna and into the waiting arms of a badass cover band, fronted by two hot Chinese women with mad pipes belting out AC/DC covers like “You Shook Me All Night Long” and “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.” They played covers all night long, and me and my crew of drinking buddies sat through a couple fabulous sets filled with GnR, “Taking Care of Business,” Metallica, Nickelback, an old Skid Row classic, and assorted hard rock staples… They were awesome…


After the band played its last set we wandered into a nearby club to check out the scene. G12, i believe it was called... Had about as much lighting as the bat cave, with red fluorescent accents and a milky way design of various sized disco balls laid out on the ceiling. Looped laser projections covered the walls. It wasn't a bad scene, per se, nor was the music particularly bad. It was just a little wierd. Wasn't crowded, and the tech house and vocal trance seemed a bit pretentious. Your usual underfilled club for yuppies and drugged-out borgeousie types slumming in the city's hedonist underbelly. It wasn't too different from any other club, aside from the newness of the fixtures... I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to scenes like this, cause although they may play electronic dance music, they're a far cry from the original rave culture of the 90's that brought these sounds to the mainstream... the sounds from the underground were and remain far better than the stuff in places like g12...