Hello Gorgeous devotees,

http://www.spinearth.tv/report/sweet-snacks-in-china

Hello Sweet FANS!

Tuesday, April 28th '09

We left on Monday afternoon from San Francisco airport on a huge double decker jumbo jet, the biggest any of us has ever been on.  While we were gaining speed on the runway we could see the entire plane wiggle like a toy catapillar and were afraid that this flying apparatus would not be able to take off the ground let alone get us safely through the "portal of tomorrow", the great time shift one must endure when traveling 15 hours into the future.  Luckily, pilots are superior beings and ensured us that flexibility is necessary at high speeds, like trees in a hurricane, or like when an  international pop band explodes on a scene so quickly that people are left in a shock of confusion, those people, those super stars, must be flexible too.

We landed safely and found a taxi to the motel where our reservations were.  We don't know why they called it a motel because it was all marble and glass with high speed elevators, fountains and caged birds.   This would be considered a first class hotel back in the US but we didn't tell anyone this.  Our first day in China was spent in Shanghai eating strange curried creatures from street vendors and learning basic phrases in mandarin so we could have intelligent conversations with strangers.  Shanghai is a booming, bustling international city with a forest of neon skyscrapers that make you feel like you're in an awesome video game.  That afternoon we met up with our host and cutting edge punkrocker booking agent, Abe Deyo, who was also happens to be hosting his entire family at this particular time.  He's a is a marvelous human being who moved to China a decade ago to study with his Wing Chung master.  Abe is a man never loses his cool, he thinks and moves as a warrior and always knows what to do, he is a master of flexibility.    With his incredible mind power he conducted a band, a video crew and his own blood family as a mere jedi mind exercise, stopping three taxi's with a raise of his pinky, giving directions and getting all parties to various destinations.... 

Thursday, April 30th '09

Our first show was in Wuhan, a 13 hour train ride away.  We were in the sleeper car and had a marvelous sleep in fine linen. But it was Horse Head Destiny who had the greatest zzz's of his equine life.  He was gazing out the window, quietly contemplating the countryside scene of quaint villages and rice patties at dusk when a train conductor found him and excitedly rushed him into his bunk.  The conductor took off Horse Head's shoes, fluffed his pillow, instructed him to lay down, whisked the blanket over him and tucked him in very tightly.  Once he was sure H.H. was safe and sound, he left with a triumphant smile.  

Once we got to Wuhan we had all day to cruise around and check out the scene. We made a trek across the great bridge that crosses the Yangtze river, actually built by the Russians in the 1950's as a favor or something...  Anyway, very impressive structure.  The air pollution was far worse in Wuhan, even with the governments efforts to cut down on driving, the car emissions alone are overwhelming.  Abe took us the section where locals set up everyday to perform traditional Chinese opera.  There were about five different groups set up all next to each other near the base of the bridge for very appreciative local audiences, competing for attention by turning up their sound systems to ear splitting volumes.   Each singer had a basket in front of him/her and when people went up to put a tip in, a friendly man would thank you by giving you a cigarette.  Did we mention smoking is very popular here?  We like the Double Happiness brand, it makes us feel twice as good about the activity.

Our show at VOX "Voice of Freedom Voice of Youth"  was insane on our membranes.  A packed house in the hippest club this side of the pacific, Wuhan is known to have a great local music scene. We shared the night with breakwave sensations Av Okubo, who are the most well known band in Wuhan---check out their music it is fresh and crazy and very catchy.

Friday, May 1st '09

Right after our show we had to rush to the train station to catch a 6 hour over night train Nanjing.  We stayed up all night in a packed train full of people going home for the holiday weekend.  We arrived at 6am totally whacked out from lack of sleep but refreshed and energized by the incredible beauty of Nanjing.  Our contact, a dj named Jack (who, we soon realized, was born a master of flexibility.  He rides the wave of the now moment, he is the DJ Buddah incarnate)  met us at the station.  He'd been up all night dj'ing and hadn't slept either, so we were perfect company for each other. He took us by the super clean fast subway to his part of town where we went to his favorite hole in the wall for a grand pork dumpling breakfast.  It was and and quite possibly may remain the best meal on our tour.  Jack taught us how to eat the dumpling in the traditional way, it's seriously difficult to write about for our mouths are watering so much at the thought of those dumplings.  Insane flavor, a mouth orgasm  none of us have ever experienced before.  We took pictures of them but they didn't taste the same when we licked them.  Memories are all we have now. That night we played a very ...um..interesting show at Castle Bar.  

Here's an excerpt from Horse Head's diary:
Dear Diary:  That nights gig was at a pretty impressive nightclub, which reputedly stayed open until the wee hours and was supposedly quite a party. We knew something was up though when we found out we went on at 9pm, and the promoter said that he doubted that the crowd would be "used to our kind of performance." This turned out to be quite an understatement. 
 MC Twinkie decided to debut his new freestyling unicorn hand puppet. Hey laid down the law, freestyling about what I have no idea, but absolutely fearlessly screaming it into the void, moving his unicorn hand puppet along perfectly with his awesome raps. Well that shift I think was within us, as per usual when we finished that song, as the ones before, there was total and utter silence. No clapping. No movement. No leftover conversation. Just unblinking stares of fear and total uncomprehension. "Thank you Nan Jing!", said Twinkie, to the kind of quiet you expect to hear at 3am in the mountains of Wyoming.  But we had fight left, and we soldiered on. Our big breakthrough moment with the crowd was "Take off your pants lets go to Japan." This song consists of us screaming "Take off your pants lets go to Japan" over and over for 30 seconds, then dropping our shorts, by this time having changed into our default outfit of pink shorts and white muscle shirts with "Sweet Snacks" scrawled in crayon. Its usually guaranteed to bring the house down, and this time was kind of like that. 3 people did clap once or twice and I think a girl gasped. The usual silence afterwards, but we knew we were home free for Sai Ma, our closer... We expected to be run out, but oddly enough, walking around the club after, many people smiled shyly at us and asked for a free cd. Or motioned rather, as no one spoke english. Maybe it was relief that we'd stopped performing, but we took this tenative affection as validation that we were on the right track. 

Talk to you soon, love, Horse Head


Saturday, May 2nd '09

Shanghai ROCKS!  People here like to dance and party, we had an brilliant time last night.  Our friend Reggie's band Youth and the Destroyer opened--They are a fast rising shanghai favorite sexy urban rock band with great songs.  The club was already going off by the time we hit the stage and we swam in a sea of sweaty flesh for our entire set and performed our newest hit  Kiss the Golden Lips of Silence that we wrote on the fast in our brain train from Nanjing yesterday afternoon and that's when people started jumping as if they were kites in the air and this made us very happy.  Thank you Shanghai!  Many excellent dj's went on after us and we danced all night in the shiny pearl with a very becoming cast of international and local hipsters and music freaks. Here's another excerpt from Horse Head's diary:

Dear Self: The show was a blur of sound, lights, screaming people, jumping people, dancing people, shocked people, the works. They were on board from the first note, as we tore into our opening number, "Shanghai", which is not only about Shanghai but features some chinese samples about how awesome Shanghai is. Playing this song to a crowd going totally nuts for the first time while actually in Shanghai was really really wonderful. We put everything in, and left gallons of sweat on the stage, and the crowd gave it back, it was a total blast. In front of me was a row of 5 chinese girls dancing and screaming like we were Madonna, it was amazing. We hyped the crowd they hyped us, singalongs, chants, nuttiness, rapping unicorns, choreographed umbrellas, songs about ping pong champions from Hong King,  MC Ladyfinger laying down raps and vocals like a woman posessed with awesomeness. I jumped around so much I actually screamed at the the climax of the show into the mic as loud as i could that i was going to puke cause i thought that might shock my body into not puking, made sense at the time. "Take off your Pants" went over a storm, but true madness lay in store for "Horsehead Destiny". Twinkie stepped off the stage and forward a couple feet, and as I was preparing to make the leap onto his back for our piggyback destruction mission, I inexplicably decided to climb on top of an amp behind me, gaining an extra several feet of height over the already formidable distance. I raised my arms to the sky, threw back my head and screamed at the crowd, who answered with one great unified war cry. Closing my eyes, I crouched low, then exploded into the night sky, fully preparing to level Dave with the impact of a safe dropped from 3 stories up. I flew through the air like a delusional kangaroo, completely spread eagled, as all became quiet. Silence reigned, with only the soft whistling of the hot nightclub air caressing my ears to mark the passage of time which had slowed to a crawl. Looks of horror were frozen on peoples faces as I both soared and plummeted in Matrix time towards Twinkies unwitting back. As I flew through the air my head hit the mic which a tremendous thwack amplified 50 fold through the PA. As the mix stand flew in the air towards the crowd, I landed upon poor MC Twinkie.

How he survived and kept his feet will remain a mystery to me for the rest of my life. I can only understand it as one of those supernatural surges of adrenaline that mothers experience when their children find themselves trapped under cars and they lift a ton of steel with one hand. He was knocked forward a good 8 feet in .002 seconds at a 45 degree angle, plunging into the crowd as the still falling mic stand completed its arc to slam into the ground with the hugest boom imaginable erupting through the PA. No one was safe as we carved a swath of destruction through the maddened crowd and spun like dervishes who have an hour to live. The swatting of my ass while riding piggyback was like the constant drum of rain - I was probably spanked 1000 times.  We ran back to the stage to finish with the debut of a song we had written 4 hours before on the train, a 170 bpm Gabba-Trance Euro freakout called the "Golden Lips of Silence", named after a billboard we saw earlier in the day of giant golden lips. The place went bananas. I almost puked. We hugged and threw cds into the crowd and then got trashed and danced the night away, stopping only to eat the occasional dumplings at the restaurant next door..

Talk to you later, kisses, Horse Head Destiny



Sunday, May 3rd '09
Recovery....  We have a couple days off.  Shanghai is so big, so packed so full of people, yet it flows like a zen waterstream of dancing fairies.  We are learning the ancient way of the way amidst the ever faster future fanatisism of the flying funhouse of freedom.   We;ll just have to write a song about and then you'll instantly understand.  We have been cruising around with Kurt and Tye, our fabulous  two-man video crew the filming the music videos for our newest songs Shanghai and Hello River Yellow River. We bought a boom box and have been doing spontaneous performances on the walkway along the Huangpu River, which has been a big hit with the hundreds of onlookers.   We love it here, and now we must move on to investigate the terracotta warriors in Xian...

Sweet Snacks is excited to play at NASA Ames Research Center on Saturday April 12th and celebrate with our heros and heroines of space exploration!!! We love to flying and getting into the air, we hope to go into space too one day. Thank you!