Crazy, Rich Asians Are Generous Too | The Fierce Fight to be a 'Ballperson' | DJing With Walkmans

This Spanish DJ performs with ’80s portable audio machines and cassettes. Why? Because he says the sound is better.

Look closely at this DJ playing music at a friend’s wedding party in Huesca, in Spain’s Aragon region, and you’ll see something curious. He has all the moves of a music-mixing machine: hunched with headphones, finding the next track to play to the dancing crowd. But something is missing: There are no turntables, no vinyl in sight. Because Lorenzo Charlez (aka TJ Autoreverse) is using two portable cassette players instead.

Yes, personal audio players — or the genericized “Walkman” — which brought portable music to the 1980s.

Charlez, who also refers to himself as the Tape Jockey (or TJ), performs only with Walkmans. His collection began with his father’s TPS-L2 from 1980. Then, in 2013, he found a rare Sony Boodo Khan (a device he was looking for some years ago) by chance in a local flea market. And now TJ’s house in Zaragoza is home to more than 1,020 devices and 700 cassettes.

CEO Alla Klimenko’s Mad Devs is helping lead Kyrgyzstan’s emergence as a development hub for Asia’s tech scene.

The blinds are pulled in all the windows of the fifth-floor office. Computer screens and cracks of daylight cast a gray-blue glow, complementing the dark grays and dark purples of mismatched furniture, seemingly thrown together yet too cool to be accidental. The only accents of color are lime greens and bright pinks that dance across screens in lines of computer code. This place has style.

One of several artsy-looking signs on the wall reads “Dance like no one is watching. Encrypt like everyone is.” If I were a location scout for HBO’s Silicon Valley, I’d film the whole damn thing here. But we’re 7,000 miles from California. We’re in Bishkek, the capital of landlocked Kyrgyzstan, at a back-end development hub behind some of Asia’s top apps and tech platforms. Another streak of color? The shock of bright-pink hair on the CEO at the center of the room: Alla Klimenko. Her company, Mad Devs, is a leader in Kyrgyzstan’s burgeoning tech scene, which is increasingly pitching itself as a cheaper alternative to Ukraine, yet more upmarket than India, in the battle to be the brains behind tech titans in Russia, Singapore, Thailand and beyond.

The glitzy film has everyone talking about Asian wealth. But they’re not focusing on the region’s charity.

Several notable strands of commentary have emerged from the hit film Crazy Rich Asians, which has been taking cinemas by storm for several weeks. Many have taken pride in the film’s all-Asian cast, while others have marveled at the dazzling confidence radiated by the modern setting of Singapore. Facebook star Nuseir Yassin, known for his thoughtful one-minute Nas Daily videos, recently visited Singapore, making a splash with one episode titled “Why I Hate Singapore.” The answer? Because he’s jealous that it’s practically perfect. But there’s sharp inequality embedded in cities like Singapore — cities of staggering wealth built by temporarily imported low-wage immigrant labor.

A common theme that emerges is one of Asia’s millennials being in a state of hyper-rich materialist overdrive with their Jimmy Choos, Ferraris and $40 million weddings. Yet masked by glitzy Hollywood portraits and corporate reports gushing about Asia’s newly minted billionaires is the reality that Asian culture prizes community over individual and has deep traditions of the generous sharing of wealth.