The people behind what we called the worst China party of the year posted a statement to Facebook around midnight today about the debacle that was November 1’s Electric Castle Party at the Dynasty Chateau in Tianjin. Here it is in full:
"The environment seemed to make everyone adopt this crazed animalistic nature" --Tianjin Electric Castle Party attendee
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Did hundreds, possibly thousands of expats — including promoters Street Hustle Promotions, ticketing agency Send Me Tickets, and local magazines — get swindled by organizers of the worst China party of the year?
We at Beijing Cream do not actively condone buffoonery, excessive alcohol intake, or buffoonery as the result of excessive alcohol intake, but understand we are surrounded by all of the above anyway -- and that it can be fun. And so it's with no small amount of ambivalence that we announce: this Friday, November 1, revelers in Halloween costumes will be gathering around 9 pm (+30 minutes or so) at Dongzhimen Subway Station and riding south on Line 2 for this year's official Halloween Subway Party. BYOB.
This week's podcast was recorded at the Bookworm on Wednesday for the Literary Death Match, hosted by Adrian Todd Zuniga, featuring the four readers/competitors Leslie Ann Murray, Tom Carter, Stanley Chan, and Anthony Tao, and the judges Alice Xin Liu, Vicky Mohieddeen, and Sherwin Jiang.
The hottest ticket in town will be the one to see Dr. Dre and LeBron James at Spark this Saturday. How do you get tickets? No idea. They're probably not going to be publicly available. (Maybe. Who knows.) But there are giveaways and such on the table, beginning with the one advertised by That's Beijing, who's got itself quite the bona fide expat-mag scoop...
Occasionally in showbusiness or sports, the odds against a performer's success are so stacked that the audience chooses, out of the goodness of human compassion, to root against probability. It's why we pull for Celtic FC when they face Barcelona, or Susan Boyle. I hadn't planned to cheer for the pageant contestants of Miss World China on Sunday at Galaxy SOHO -- hadn't not planned to cheer, as planning these things one way or another would be odd -- but a realization dawned upon me sometime between the rain and the fake applause piped in through the sound system: these girls are all underdogs in their own spotlight. They deserve better.
The inaugural Color Punch party, organized by Street Kids and Let There Be House, happened on June 15 at Dos Kolegas, and we're still trying to fathom all that drunken gaiety amidst organized lechery. What profligate uncoiling, the body's gasconade against the screwed-up walls of youth. And afterwards, how many more spilled additional colors in a final exhortation of spirit?
I spent my last 30 minutes at the 2nd annual Beijing Craft Beer Festival sitting behind a desk under the LGBT Resource Center tent handing out fliers and chatting with curious Chinese onlookers and expats happy to see the table. (How drunk was I? You decide.) Ni hao, women shi Beijing TongZhi ZhongXin, we announced to a curious child and his semi-interested mother. Her eyes snapped to a rainbow-patterned poster, then to the two smiling foreigners sitting in front of her. With the speed and grace of a defensive tackle scooping up a fumble, lady disappeared with child.
Not a minute later, a separate young mother had her two daughters each put 10 kuai into the donations box. Scurrying and donating -- it was like that all evening, and the organizers were just fine with that.
