I just called my dad and had a nice chat. Supposedly dad and mom went up to Francis’s place on Wednesday to plant some flowers in his backyard. This is “news” in our family.

Here are some ironic Father’s Day classics:

You’re Not My Father

You Are Not the Father 1

You Are Not the Father 2

BONUS DANCE DANCE DANCE: Back in high school I was a devout reader of SELECT Magazine (defunct Brit-pop monthly) and one issue came with a mixtape called Secret Tracks. This tape would greatly influence my musical tastes (among the tracks was one of the first recordings by Oasis, an unreleased version of Fade Away). I dubbed the following track onto a ton of mixtapes that I left in the family car and every time the song came on the stereo, Dad would turn up the volume and say “I like this one.” My dad’s really into music, mostly Vietnamese saxophone jams, Creedance Clearwater Revival and anything on Paris By Night, so it’s quite special when we agree on something.

I never got around to digitizing the track from the original cassette tape, but luckily one of the music blogs I frequent digitized the whole tape and I grabbed the mp3 and posted it below for your listening pleasure. I usually don’t enjoy live versions in comparison to the studio versions, but this is an exception.

Muchos Muchos Gracias to Dalston Oxfam Shop.

Primal Scream - Don’t Fight It, Feel It (Alive in Tokyo)

BONUS BONUS YOU CAN’T STOP THE ROCK:

Speaking of Paris By Night, here’s a banger from the show that I listened to constantly for a few months in the summer of 2005. I once volunteered at a Tet Festival in Little Saigon promoting Journey From the Fall and during one of my breaks I went to the performance stage to watch a friend’s Wushu demonstration. I stuck around the performance area and caught the Mt. SAC Vietnamese Student Association’s talent show and a girl named Thao Nguyen (not that one) performed this song with some background dancers.

I was blown away by the performance and ended up emailing the Mt. SAC VSA in hopes of getting a copy of the song. For some reason or another I never got the performance, but I did find out the name of the song and info on its origins (Paris By Night volume 57).

Don’t ask me why I listened to this song daily for months as I have no rational answer.

Bon Mau Ao (4 Colors of Dress [or something like that])

Non Sequitur: When La Cita used to do Karaoke Nights on Monday, this regular girl got up to the mic and mumbled something like “alright, Paris By Night, here we go.” I think about that often and I wonder if she was Vietnamese or half-Vietnamese like Tila Tequila or just into stupid weird stuff like me.