Full cup cafe on the third floor of wangfujin. Best coffee in any restaurant and they individually inspect each bean for quality. The managers definitely know what they are doing.

I am going to use them to hang some paintings. put one at the top and one at the bottom. even some really thin bamboo would work.

I also plan on using one of those stick to the wall hangers to hang it so anything too heavy won't work.

Thanks a lot!!!

Has anyone seen any thin wooden dowels around km? I have been looking everywhere for them and i cant find what im looking for. I need them to be about the width of an index finger.

I know someones got a dowel shop near their house!

Marc, i really think you should go on whatever the chinese version of gokunming and give the same rant to all the chinese musicians.

The best chinese musicians in kunming play the chinese version of monkey shows, playing pop music behind a singer in a bar. They do this 7 nights a week. I have tried to play with some of these guys before but no one ever can or wants to. Playing music is their job, just like some laowai try and make it. They do 0 to help the music scene in kunming and id guess 75% of them can play circles around every laowai musician.

Motivating kunmingesse people is tough and i dont really think trying to motivate them is our responsibility. They themselves need to be eager to learn and express interest.

The best example of this i can give is from my band. I worked my ass off trying to form my band. I asked chinese players that were completely capable of playing with us but they were too busy. Eventually i found Our bass player, who was hands down the most polite, smooth, and knowledgable bass player in kunming. The guy could play and he really helped our band create a great sound. Sadly this guy had to leave after 1 year (typical in kunming) and i was left without a bass player. I had no idea who could replace him because no one had the skills of this guy. Then i remembered there was a chinese person that played bass that came to everyone of our shows and watched us right next to the stage. He loved our band and always wanted us to play more. Since i was out of options for a bassist that was appropriate for my band, I asked him if he was interested in playing with us. He was shocked when we asked him bc honestly his skill level was much lower than the previous bassist and he had no idea how to do what we created on stage. I told him if he practiced and tried his best he could play with us. He was eccstatic and could not believe it. He practiced every day and did what we told him, but he still knew there was potential to get the boot and practiced even harder.

Now he is a much better bassist and its all due to the fact he was very motivated to do better. Would this have worked if i had just gone out and given a bass to a random chinese person and told them to learn? No way!

Its all about motivation and it should not be up to us to create this motivation. Who knows where my current bassist would be skill level wise had we not motivated him. He should have motivated himself to do better but we needed to put the fire under his ass. He just never thought there was a chance he could play with us so he never practiced until i told him to.

Besides open mics you are usually going to get paid for gigs.

I know I have played government sponsored monkey shows before. Better call beijing, its really out of control!!!!

The music scene is missing a few things. The first is sufficient enough musicians to get things going. I dont know how many times have I been to an open mic and there has been no bass player. I know the kind of scene you want marc, but its going to be impossible with this many people. I have lived in cities where they had scenes like that, but there were 5x the amount of musicians. 3 bands would play in one night at one bar.

The next issue is venues. Besides mask and wenlin jiyi there arent many decent venues to play for a full band. Even mask is tough because the stage is too small, and any other place wont have grounding and whoever is singing risks getting electrocuted.

My last issue with open mics is this: too many bands come and try to make a performance out of it, not share the stage. Open mic isnt a place for bands to practice or perform, its a place to jam with other people. no one should be on the stage for more than 20 or 30 minutes at a time if there are other people there waiting to play. I have been to many open mics and left early because the band wont get off the stage and wont even ask if anyone else wants to jam.