Shuffled! Terry Park
Shuffled! is a weekly column appearing every Thursday here on BPRLive. Each week, we welcome a person from the APA community to share some thoughts about the music they listen to. Check out the Shuffled! archive for past articles.
Today’s Shuffler: Terry Park
Terry Park is the coolest, and only, Korean from Utah you’ll ever meet. As with most Utahns, he loves the Jazz, snowboarding, and camping. Unlike most Utahns, he’s not Mormon, but he loves him some green jello.
He’s currently a PhD student in the Cultural Studies program at UC Davis and a TA in the Asian American Studies program. For today, his research project looks at the ways in which the Korean DMZ, the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, and Tule Lake Internment Camp combine both Cold War and War on Terror discourses to produce the Korean/Asian American as an “enemy alien.” Before this academic nonsense, he was a performance artist. At Vassar College, he co-founded Unbound, a progressive, multi-racial performance group. In New York, he studied under Anna Deavere Smith, co-founded the Sulu Series, a monthly Asian American talent showcase, and performed his semi-autobiographical, multimedia solo show “38th Parallels” with the Pan Asian Repertory Theater. As an activist, he was the international coordinator of BASE21.org, the first English-language online progressive media network in Korea, and visited North Korea last summer as part of a Korean-American peace delegation.
More info at www.geocities.com/juche68
Read on for the shuffle…
“Baby Can I Hold You”
Tracy Chapman
I have a funny story for this one. So I accidentally hooked up with the first director of my solo show. It was a huge mistake, for many reasons, one of them being the success of the show. I ended things, but because of that, our personal and working relationship quickly deteriorated. Then one night, while talking to my friend, I started to feel bad about ending things with her. Like a fool, I wrote a hand-written letter apologizing for ending things with her, and that I was willing to try to have a relationship with her. I also seriously thought of burning “Baby Can I Hold You,” onto a CD, to punctuate how “sorry” I felt, but thankfully, I changed my mind. I then took the subway from Queens to Manhattan, bought a rose at a deli, waited for someone to open the door to her apartment building, placed the letter and the rose in front of her door, and quickly left. Unfortunately, my attempts at reconciliation didn’t work, and a few days after, she left the show, and I never spoke to her again. Maybe if I had given her “Baby Can I Hold You,” things could’ve worked out. Probably not. Moral of the story—don’t hook up with your director.
“Me and Jesus the Pimp in a ’79 Granada Last Night”
The Coup
The only hip hop song to make me cry. Blackstar’s “Respiration” almost made me cry because of its poetic magnitude, but Boots made me cry with an autobiographical story of an Oakland child, his loving, sex worker mother, and the vicious pimp who traumatized them both. There’s a reason why someone made a documentary based on the lyrics. A moving song that beautifully intertwines race, gender, and class (oppression) through the eyes of a child, and the memories of a man bent on revenge. This song showed me that hip hop can tell stories, stories that are personal and political.
“Nothing Compares to U”
Sinead O’Connor
I’m more partial to the Sinead version than the Prince version (sorry Giles), but I love both versions. My favorite line is “I can eat my dinner at a fancy restaurant.” I imagine someone (me, for instance), sitting alone at a table with cloth napkins and nice silverware, tearing through a filet mignon or whatever people eat at fancy restaurants, and shouting, “Take that, asswipe! I don’t need your love!” And then slowly it would dawn on me that I do, in fact, need your love, that nothing, not even a filet mignon, compares to U, and I would then cry like Lucy Ricardo, order some Chandon, and throw up in a bathtub (what up Hsindy).
“Release”
Pearl Jam
I gotta have an alternative song to represent my plaid flannel-wearing days, and this is probably my favorite of that genre. I heard Eddie Vedder wrote this song while surfing, and I can see why. There’s something oceanic about it; the song gently bobs up and down, like a surfer lying on a surfboard, waiting for that perfect wave, and then when the song crescendo’s with “release me!” the wave finally arrives. It’s also about a son and his father: “Oh dear dad/Can you see me now/I am myself/Like you somehow/I’ll wait up in the dark/For you to speak to me,” and I have similar lines in my solo show, which is about my relationship with my father. I would also like to note that I saw Pearl Jam live in rural Ohio, and people were really racist.
“Like Spinning Plates” (live version)
Radiohead
I love Radiohead. Lots of people love Radiohead. This is my favorite Radiohead song, but especially the live version that features Thom Yorke playing the piano. And if there were any doubts about its anti-war character (“While you make pretty speeches/I’m being cut to shreds”), they were dispelled when Thom, at a concert in Montreal, begin the song by dedicating it to those “glorious leaders” who “killed thousands, if not tens of thousands of innocent people…” It’s a beautiful, emotional song that isn’t just an anti-war song, but a song that, in eight succinct lines, captures the absurdity, fragility, and the “delicate balance” between hope and hopelessness in contemporary life marked by the War on Terror and consumer capitalism. Someone PLEASE buy me Radiohead concert tickets.
“Is This Love?”
Taiyo Na
I love a lot of songs on my boy Taiyo’s album, so it’s hard to pick just one. But I think Taiyo’s cover of Bob Marley is brilliant. He slows it down a bit, squeezing even more beauty from an already beautiful song, and adds a touch of New York growl that’s distinctively Taiyo. It also sounds like it was sung in a bathroom. For that reason, Taiyo’s rendition reminds me of a hamam, or a Turkish bath—a little steamy, sun shining through and bouncing off white tiles, spiritual, pure. Kinda like Taiyo.
Last 5 posts by shuffled
- Shuffled! Eugenius - August 21st, 2008
- Shuffled! Delia - August 14th, 2008
- Shuffled! Giles Li - August 7th, 2008
- Shuffled! Alexander Chee - July 31st, 2008
- Shuffled! Theresa Vu of Magnetic North - July 17th, 2008
Tags: Shuffled!.
I’m more partial to the Sinead version than the Prince version
I’m pretty torn. While this is an extremely well-written and entertaining edition of Shuffled!, Terry is also dead to me.
I guess Terry didn’t read the Prince primer for Shuffled!
But I still like you Terry!!
sh*t, my bad giles, i didn’t read the Prince primer. i’ll get you some puro mormon green jello to make up for it. it’ll go great with the celtics championship belt that you guys bought i mean won. HAHA.
(btw, no more posey=no more rings. u know it’s true).
I am sure Terry is actually well acquainted the interiors of Turkish baths
oh sorry terry; i don’t play for the celtics, maybe you have me confused with eddie house. we’re both energy guys.
yeah you may be right about posey, he was a big piece of it. then again, it’s not like posey won a ring with every team he played for…teams have won championships with out james posey. amazing but true. for example, the utah jazz…
oh wait, that never happened.
Hilarious.
To Koba: Your mom.
To the Chinese Eddie House: Posey was the black leprecaun that held all your lucky charms. And, I guarantee the Utah Jazz will win the championship next year. Because I will be running the point. You will know me as Rain. I will be nicknamed the “Rain Man,” much like Shawn Kemp of the 90s (and not Dustin Hoffman of the 80s).
To Delia: I still like you too!
i think shawn kemp was called Reign Man. so you will in fact be more like Dustin Hoffman than Shwan Kemp, which is aite because Dustin Hoffman won an Oscar for that, and Shawn Kemp has never won an Oscar, although I believe his teammate Xavier McDaniel was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for “Singles.”
wait how did we get here?
I’m not sure. But I swear I saw the X-Man do a cameo in “Gone Baby Gone.” All I know is, considering the 90s team colors of the Jazz, a better nickname for me would be Purple Rain. Which brings us back to Prince. The End.
applause