Mike Park Played Everything He Knew
The weekend started Friday with the usual violence: Super Smash Bros. Melee, Simpsons Road Rage, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, and enough Beck’s to make the losses sting less. Ali was the best at SSBM as always. Simpsons Road Rage made me genuinely angry in ways a game based on a cartoon has no right to. Eniz was supposed to show up and never did. I’m still waiting.
Saturday was quieter. Ali and André disappeared to Melly and Lisa’s, leaving John and Kalli to play World of Warcraft for the entire afternoon while I sat in front of the TV or picked up the GameCube. We finished the leftover Beck’s and ordered Chinese. Perfectly fine afternoon by any reasonable standard.
That evening, tickets in hand, the three of us headed to Hirsch—me, André, and Ana, who’d just gotten back from her class trip. I hadn’t been to that venue in about three years. The last time was back when we still hung around with the Lindenberg girls—every weekend drinking in Anja’s cabin, messing around with the vanished Nane, camping in the woods with Robert and Sophie. But I’m getting lost in the past.
A band called Rank warmed things up, and then Mike Park took the stage with his friend and technician Hiro. The two of them were midway through a German tour and had apparently shot over 40,000 photos between them, which is why I never got the specific shot I’d been hoping to track down from that night. Mike noted on his blog afterward that the crowd was a bit too loud for his taste, which tracks. Still, he played every song he knew, and by the end of it everyone in the room was convinced. He closed with From Korea, then spent another hour selling Plea for Peace merch, signing CDs, and taking photos with anyone who asked. Small show, enormous goodwill. Mike Park is welcome back anytime.
Worth mentioning: his label, Asian Man Records, has a substantial library of free downloads—rock, reggae, ballads, whatever—from artists obscure enough that you’ve almost certainly never heard most of them. That’s a feature, not a bug.