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Published: August 22nd 2005
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ZHU
Waiting for the plane in Nanjing all cracked out Background: Dreams do come true, and they can come true in China too. It's been a three and a half trip in China minus the psychadelic visuals. The visuals have been intense though, scenes of life left out of my experience that were badly needed to develop a worldview as inclusive as I have now yet still starving.
I've been living in Southwest China for over 3 and a half years now and I've been doing a lot...sometimes a lot of nothing. Finally, after a stroke of severe bad luck raining down and reigning down on my parade I've actually been brushed with the paint of life. Feeling rejuvinated and strong again I'm on a new playing field doing something, a passion, that is extravagant in every aspect.
Current: I'm a VJ on tour in China. I arrived in Beijing today after a long delayed flight from NanJing. I'm here to VJ in a different club every night, 6 days a week. I am working for the Coors Brewing Company but believe me I am working them. Besides the 80 dollars a night for an hour to two hour set, I am using killer equipment (besides my own jerry-rigged
ZHU DIAN LAO
The Masterpiece stuff) and having a blast giving live visual performance to crowds who have never seen anything so abstract.
On top of that I'm chilling with some really cool people. One is Kim, from Norway. The other is Nina, from Slovenia. Having high times and cool chillout sessions is a perk to this job that I think, if i did it for long enought could get dreary and negative fast in a downward spiral motion.
Kim and Nina are doing dancing and Kim also does fire stuff that is wickedly cool, off the charts. I'm doing this for two weeks and will be returing to the Southwest primed with touring skill and experience, invaluable and an ace up my sleeve over any other VJs getting into the scene.
Besides me there is another guy doing this where I live and it's so new that it's really hard to get a gig. We all rely on one guy to book us but it's getting old. Dependency can kill a carreer in the performance business, or so I assume.
Challenge: Anyways the really interesting part to me about all this is that I am so doing it on the fly so to say. When I got into VJing I didn't know anything or have anything (this being about 2 and a half months ago). I 've been getting into it with passion, the fact it can pay money is only a beneift and a godsend!
I've transformed a simple desktop into a vj machine. I'm using some computer (PCI) cards that plug in and let me do different things. First and foremost would be my graphics card with 256 megabytes of memory. The second would be my capture card that allows me to capture media (TV/S-video/Composite), there's also my IEEE 1394 or DV camera capture card, a Midi card and a wireless network card. My CPU is a P4 2.4 Ghz. I have 600+ Megabytes of RAM and all of this together makes one wicked machine. You need to see it though. It's held together with tape, super glue, zip ties and wood screws in a wierd aluminum case.
No regrets: If I had the money I would want to use a Laptop but this computer has so much style and flavor with the flashing lights and I forgot to mention the fans. It's all about the fans, not the ones in the crowd but the 2 red LED lighted fans and the super duper blower that sounds so loud I can't believe it. So I won't ever use a laptop. I take pride in the ability I have to jerry-rig stuff and will keep that with me up until the day I come in with computers that are housed inside plastic toys or whatever...
Problems: I have a custom flight case for this computer. I thought this would be enough to shield it from the evil grip of airline baggage handlers. For my first flight to Nanjing nothing serious happened. I did have to take the computer all apart...ALL apart and reinstall drivers to get it all working again. Nothing compared to today. I had removed the CPU Processor fan from the computer because I have but the super duper blower over it. I used zip ties to keep the CPU Processors heat sink over the CPU Processor but that wasn't good enought. All the banging caused the CPU Processor to come out of its socket. On the bottom of these things are over 100, maybe 128 copper pins. They were all laying in crooked directions and wouldn't go back into the socket. The CPU Processor is probably the most important and expensive part of my comptuer. That's the Pentium thing. With all the pins lying crooked my computer was in a sham. I had to use tweezers to bend all the pins back carefully in position to fit back in the socket. After that it worked well again. Another tour threatening catastrophe avoided!!
It Begins:Anyways, this is the first of a series of journal entries and I'm in the captiol of China and plan on blowing up the party scene with wicked graphics that people have never experienced before...stay tuned
::To be Continued::
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