I've never seen Short Night of Glass Dolls, but I know Ennio Morricone's atonal "Sospiri Di Morte" will give you the heebie-jeebies

It's not music. It's Ennio.

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: "Thriller" by Allison Torneros

This is the final "Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day" post.

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: 1990 graffiti art by Mike "Dream" Francisco

(Photo source: Art Crimes)

"Rich on personality": 11 songs by fictional musicians from movies and TV that are surprisingly not terrible

1. "This Is a Low" by Swipe (Tamara Drewe)
In High Fidelity director Stephen Frears' entertaining 2010 adaptation of Posy Simmonds' Far from the Madding Crowd-inspired comic strip-turned-graphic novel, childish drummer Ben Sergeant (Dominic Cooper) romances Gemma Arterton's title character, a London newspaper columnist and rock music journalist who, unlike most rock music journalists, looks smokin' in a red tanktop and a pair of Daisy Dukes. Ben may be what's known in the U.K. as a git, but the tunes by him and his Britpop band Swipe are pretty damn catchy, especially "This Is a Low," perhaps the catchiest song about a guy getting his ass kicked by his temperamental girlfriend ever written ("This is a call for a domestic dispute/She's got me by the collar and she's going to shoot"), which is why I've added it to the "Assorted Fistful" and "New Cue Revue" blocks on A Fistful of Soundtracks.

Not to be confused with the Blur tune of the same name, "This Is a Low" has an interesting pedigree. In the movie, the song is a source of tension between Swipe and the disgruntled Ben, who wrote "This Is a Low" and is steaming mad that the rest of the band doesn't give him enough credit for his work, but offscreen, it was actually written by Cooper's younger brother Nathan. (In another interesting tidbit, the female vocalist during "This Is a Low" is Sexy Beast star Ray Winstone's daughter Lois, who has a wordless bit part in Tamara Drewe as Ben's female bandmate and ex-girlfriend.)

Cooper's appearance as the younger version of Tony Stark's industrialist father Howard in Captain America: The First Avenger was an amusing bit of casting because in his Tamara Drewe emo garb, Cooper is a dead ringer for the effeminate partyman characters his cinematic son Robert Downey Jr. played in Weird Science and Back to School.

2. "Black Sheep" by The Clash at Demonhead (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World)
One of the best jokes in HBO's Flight of the Conchords TV series was that Bret and Jemaine were nothing like the Bret and Jemaine they imagined themselves to be in the show's fantasy sequences/musical numbers. In those sequences, Bret and Jemaine were expressive, self-confident and brimming with musical ability, while outside those sequences, Bret and Jemaine were inexpressive, socially awkward and sucky as musicians (they were always seen performing the same song, some terrible acoustic clone of Moby's "Bodyrock," and only one person liked their music, Kristen Schaal's child-like stalker Mel). That decision to make Bret and Jemaine untalented musicians that hardly anybody likes is what distinguishes Flight of the Conchords from other shows about fictional wannabe musicians that are filled with elaborate musical numbers but are worshipful of those characters, like The Monkees, Fame and Glee.

A similar joke recurs throughout Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim graphic novels and Edgar Wright's film version of Pilgrim: Scott (Michael Cera) may be someone we're supposed to root for, despite his dickishness, but the Toronto band he plays bass for, Sex Bob-omb, sounds mediocre (and their Mel is Knives Chau). One of the charms of the original music in Wright's film is the way that Beck, who wrote Sex Bob-omb's material (while Metric, an actual band from Toronto, represented Sex Bob-omb's rival, The Clash at Demonhead, whose wardrobes O'Malley patterned after Metric's), purposely downgraded the quality of his own sound to capture how an amateurish band in the Toronto indie scene would sound like (that is until the climax, when Sex Bob-omb starts to gel at about the same time as Scott gains the power of self-respect).

Scott and his Sex Bob-omb bandmates view the glitzy Clash at Demonhead--led by Scott's ex-girlfriend Envy Adams (Brie Larson)--to be evil corporate sellouts, but the ironic truth is The Clash at Demonhead don't sound as mediocre as Sex Bob-omb do, as we discover during "Black Sheep," sung quite nicely by Larson in the film (while sung by Metric frontwoman Emily Haines in the album version).

"I think that it probably is poking fun at pop music and a band that's just so completely commercialized," said Larson about "Black Sheep" to Collider, "but at the same time, you can't deny that the song is the most infectious song."

No wonder "Black Sheep" was the first tune off the Pilgrim song soundtrack that was introduced to the public. And no wonder Heather Morris likes to do what I imagine are butt crunches to "Black Sheep" while she hears it on her iPod.

3. "Odyssey" by Andromeda (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, "Space Rockers")
If Buck Rogers in the 25th Century is as accurate about the 25th century as I expect it to be, then in the future, we'll all be dancing with some giant rubber band/hula hoop/glowstick thing wrapped around us like we're some cross between a raver and Tony Randall and Jack Klugman awkwardly doing the Maypole dance in Central Park in the opening credits of The Odd Couple.

(Photo source: Gary Dunaier)

The dancing during the Buck Rogers "Space Rockers" episode may be on the lame side, but the music isn't. Scottish composer Johnny Harris, whose other dope contribution to film and TV music is the funktastic score to the 1970 British psychological thriller Fragment of Fear, came up with the proto-Daft Punk synth-pop instrumental sound of Andromeda, the 25th century's most popular rock band.

Twelve years before actor/song-and-dance man Jerry Orbach took on his most famous and final role, Law & Order's Detective Lennie Briscoe (sort of a kinder, gentler version of his crooked cop character in Prince of the City), he was on the opposite side of the law as Andromeda's evil manager Lars Mangros, who plots to use the synth-pop trio's music as a form of mind control on its teen fans.

Besides its guest stars (in addition to Orbach, the episode also features a Landers sister and Bull Shannon, or as I prefer to remember Richard Moll because I'm a Batman: The Animated Series fan, Two-Face), "Space Rockers" is my favorite non-Princess Ardala Buck Rogers episode because of the catchy "Odyssey." The Harris instrumental experienced a bit of a resurgence in 2004 when it appeared on the playlist of the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas funk radio station Bounce FM.

"Odyssey" is surprisingly good synth-pop that's aged well. (The opposite of "Odyssey"--a.k.a. the worst synth-pop ever--has to be that wack "I Am America" song in Herman Cain's weird and creepy cigarette-smoking campaign ad, recorded by some right-wing version of Lady Gaga.) The instrumental is ideal popping-and-locking music. Speaking of which, the Andromeda footage in "Space Rockers" would be much more badass if the Jabbawockeez were on the dance floor instead of those whitebread-looking rubber band/hula hoop/glowstick ravers because the Jabbawockeez are what 25th-century dancing will look more like.

4. "I Would Die 4 U/Baby I'm a Star" by The Kid (Purple Rain)
Actually, every song by Prince's onscreen alter ego The Kid is not terrible. But the one-two punch of "I Would Die 4 U" and "Baby I'm a Star" has to be my favorite part of both the movie's performance footage and the Purple Rain album. As Jeremy Ohmes notes in PopMatters, "If 'I Would Die 4 U' was Purple Rain's spiritually anguished yin, then 'Baby I'm a Star' was its cocky, narcissistic yang... More than any other song on Purple Rain, 'Baby I'm a Star' documents the unbridled energy and graceful sleaziness that was Prince live."

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: "Dancing Couple" by Pacita Abad

(Photo source: The late Pacita Abad's official site)

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: "Gintong Kasaysayan, Gintong Pamana (Filipino Americans: A Glorious History, A Golden Legacy)" by Eliseo Art Silva

(Photo source: BakitWhy)

At 145 feet x 25 feet, muralist Eliseo Art Silva's 1995 piece "Gintong Kasaysayan, Gintong Pamana" in L.A.'s Historic Filipinotown is the largest Filipino American mural in the United States. Author Carlos Bulosan, California farm workers movement leaders Philip Vera Cruz and Larry Itliong, 11th Philippines President Corazon Aquino, her assassinated husband Senator Ninoy Aquino, Renaissance man and political activist José Rizal and Lapu-Lapu--the cat who whupped some colonialist ass in 1521--are among the figures whom Silva depicted in "Gintong Kasaysayan, Gintong Pamana."

(Photo source: Filipino American Artists Network)

(Photo source: Filipino American Artists Network)

Hidden Hi Fi: Gintong Kasaysayan, Gintong Pamana Mural ("Filipino Americans: A Glorious History, A Golden Legacy" Mural) from Out the Window on Vimeo.

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: "Hello Like Before" by Leo Valledor

(Photo source: Vangobot)

Chewsday

Random Chew page of the week (from Chew #12)

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: "Lou Reed" by Manuel Ocampo

(Photo source: fARTiculate)

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: "The Conception of Bliss" by Allison Torneros

(Photo source: Allison Torneros)

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: "Four Seasons" by Leo Valledor

(Photo source: Rehistoricizing.org)

Occupy anti-Halloween conservatism with A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Buckets of Score"

Do you have a conservative neighbor or two who are part of the anti-Halloween camp and are trying to recruit people to their cause? On October 31, show those opponents of Halloween how much you feel about their hatred of fun by paying them a visit and then taking out your phone and blasting A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Buckets of Score" block in their faces.

From 5pm to 11pm on Halloween, AFOS will be streaming for the second Halloween in a row original music written for the horror, thriller and paranormal genres. The playlist--which is full of Goblin tracks, cues from Elmer Bernstein's out-of-print score to Ghostbusters and original music from either non-glittery vampire flicks (The Omega Man, From Dusk Till Dawn) or supernatural genre shows (Buffy, Angel)--will be joined this year by selections from Alan Howarth and Larry Hopkins' new re-recording of the mostly synthesized cues Ennio Morricone and John Carpenter separately composed for the 1982 version of The Thing.

Howarth, who collaborated with the filmmaker/composer on the scores to such classic Carpenter flicks as Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China and They Live, recreated with Hopkins the tracks from the long-out-of-print Thing soundtrack album (with some help from the Digital Orchestra Toolbox) and re-sequenced them so that they're in the chronological order of the 1982 film. The re-recording is being released by the record label wing of BuySoundtrax (a site I once had such a lousy mail-order experience with--and I'm relieved to see I'm not alone--that every time I receive an e-mail from BuySoundtrax, I angrily delete it without reading it).

(Photo source: Alex Pardee)

Also added to "Buckets of Score" this year are selections from Steven Price and Basement Jaxx's terrific, if-Carpenter-were-a-dubstepper score to the recent inner city-vs.-outer space thriller Attack the Block, a film that's now on Blu-ray (I disagree with the opinion that Attack the Block loses much of its entertainment value on the small screen and is a less interesting film if you don't watch it with an amped-up crowd in the theater--I saw Attack the Block in an empty theater and still enjoyed it).

"If you like your beats on the monstrous side, you've come to the right place," wrote Attack the Block writer/director Joe Cornish in the Attack the Block soundtrack liner notes. "We wanted the Attack the Block score to do the things that film scores used to do. To be as exciting and escapist as a John Williams adventure, and as gritty and percussive as the great John Carpenter's electronic scores."

Price and the Jaxx duo's score lives up to Cornish's intentions. As the hoodies in Attack the Block would say, believe it, bruv.

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: "Red Dress" by Cristopher Nolasco

(Photo source: Cristopher Nolasco)

BBC's Luther may be as close as we can get to that TV version of Gotham Central some of us GC readers always wanted to see

The BBC One cops-vs.-serial killers procedural Luther, which concludes its second season on BBC America tonight, isn't a perfect show, but it's more enjoyable than most procedurals, due to an imposing and lively but never hammy turn by former Wire star Idris Elba (an actual lead of color who still has his show!) and a distinctive, not-so-generic look.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The '60s Batman had the Dutch angles and Homicide: Life on the Street had the jump cuts and washed-out color scheme (something Homicide phased out in its later and less interesting seasons). Luther likes to take its actors and place them at the bottom left and right corners of the screen so that they're surrounded by lots of negative space. If I recall correctly, a Luther crew member said the crew favored this framing effect because it makes it appear as if comic book-style thought bubbles are about to surface above the actors' heads.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The framing effect, which was more prominent in Luther's first season (did some Beeb higher-up put NBC exec-vs.-Homicide-style pressure on the Luther crew to do less of it?), also enhances the show's sense of dread and unease. It dwarfs the actors and manages to make the tall Elba look as small as the runty white psychos he's been chasing this season (at times, Luther feels like a serious version of Chris Rock's post-Columbine stand-up routine about crazy white kids who scare the shit out of him, like the goofily named Trenchcoat Mafia).

Luther evokes dread and unease more effectively than most shows. The mute, hammer-wielding LARP-er who terrorized working folk in the penultimate episode of Luther's second season is scarier and more menacing than anything during Luther's American ratings competition, FX's trying-way-too-hard-to-be-scary American Horror Story. The LARP-er's muteness and the episode's preference for filming his killings from a distance or having them take place off-screen--we're subjected only to gruesome hammer-to-skull sound effects--both make his acts of violence more disturbing. And though it's resorted to the tired and annoying device of children in peril that's been used by torture-porn procedurals like Criminal Minds, Luther rarely feels as sadistic as that show (below an A.V. Club piece about Criminal Minds and its short-lived spinoff Suspect Behavior, a commenter astutely noted that "Middle America eat [sic] this crap up with a spoon. It genuinely baffles me that middle aged and conservative Americans have made this show such a mainstream hit.").

That quality of being unnerving without getting sadistic or graphic recalls Gotham Central, the much-missed DC Comics crime title that writers Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka told from the point of view of Gotham City homicide detectives who resent Batman (Gotham Central was a bleak book, but it wasn't as sadistic as most of DC's puerile attempts at edginess, perhaps because Brubaker and Rucka write like grown-ups instead of horny and torture-porn-obsessed adolescents). From "the operatic theatricality" that crime novelist and Luther creator Neil Cross once said he's brought to DCI John Luther's adversaries to that aforementioned framing effect that creates the illusion of thought bubbles, the larger-than-life Luther is basically a comic book--or as John's teenage charge Jenny Jones (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) would prefer, graphic novel--but it's a very good one, which Gotham Central was.

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: "Five Ways to Exit a Window (Defenestrate)" by Allison Torneros

(Photo source: Allison Torneros)

Chewsday

Random Chew page of the week (from Chew #5)

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: "Echo" by Leo Valledor

(Photo source: Rehistoricizing.org)

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: "The City" by Allison Torneros

(Photo source: Allison Torneros)

Every day I'm shufflin'

Even though trying to keep track of the nearly 64 hours of music that are stored in A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Assorted Fistful" playlist (plus the two hours of music that make up AFOS' "Rock Box" playlist) can occasionally be a hassle, running AFOS(*) is a pretty simple task. I just hit "Shuffle" and Live365.com does the rest.

(*) It's AFOS. No bloody FOS or FFOS. It's always been AFOS. I've always wanted to shorten it to just AFOS because the acronym AFOS can stand for many different phrases besides A Fistful of Soundtracks, and I once jotted down a list of 12 of them (examples: "Ample Focus on Scores" and my personal favorite, "Asians Fucking Owning Shit"). The current iTunes Radio description of "Fistful of Soundtracks" is nine years old (it's taken from a summary of AFOS that I typed into Live365.com when I first launched AFOS over there in 2002, back when Live365 wouldn't let radio stations have names longer than 22 letters for some stupid reason). iTunes has never bothered to replace the old description with a present-day one.

Sometimes, weird things I have no control over start to happen on AFOS when it's in shuffle mode.

Mel Gibson, who's so famously fond of Jews, gets followed by a Jew.

Yeah, I like "Eye of the Tiger" too, Live365, but I don't like it as much as you do apparently.

Same thing with the movie Wild Things...

... or the end credits music from Thor.

Two different incarnations of Batman getting streamed back-to-back always amuses me...

... as does Angel, Batman and Zorro getting streamed in the same hour. (Angel is like the Batman of the Whedonverse. Batman was modeled partly after Zorro. Also, in DC's pre-"New 52" continuity--I'm not sure if it's been changed in the current continuity--Bruce Wayne lost his parents to a mugger after they attended a Mark of Zorro screening. If it were a Legend of Zorro screening, all three Waynes would have lost the will to live and killed themselves afterward.)

Live365 occasionally does screwy things to the Bollywood-centric "Chai Noon" block. Das racist!

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: "How Mali Lost Her Accent" by Pacita Abad

Women Artists of Color: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook to 20th Century Artists in the Americas summarizes this 1991 painting by Pacita Abad (1946-2004):

Abad notes: "When Mali came here she didn't speak English, but when I saw her recently I said, 'Mali, how come you lost your accent?' She replied. This is how the kids talk in school.' She has to do it because she has to blend in." Here Mali, a young Laotian and Vietnamese girl wearing a Benetton purse, is depicted in the center of the work; surrounding her are computers and the banners and facades of renowned American universities such as Harvard, University of California at Berkeley, and Yale. Mali clearly has "made it" in America; nevertheless, Abad underscores that the educational opportunities offered her have a steep price: Mali's loss of her language and culture.

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: "Shannyn Sossamon" by Cristopher Nolasco

From a recent blog post by San Francisco-based film critic Jeffrey M. Anderson about the woman in the above painting, part-Filipino actress Shannyn Sossamon, who started out as a club DJ (peep her memorable 2001 Gap ad with legendary scratch DJs Rob Swift and Shortkut below):

Sossamon is back in a new movie by Monte Hellman -- a genuine cult auteur -- and it's arguably her best work and a must-see. In Road to Nowhere, she plays a mysterious actress, hired due to her indefinable allure, and damned if she doesn't pull it off. She's striking, and startling, so much so that her every move has the power to hypnotize and enchant. And yet she's adorable... and human. If it were in a big, mainstream movie, this role would make her a big star.

Today I'd swap her career for Jolie's any old day. Jolie has tread such a stagnant, safe path that she has practically become frozen, while Sossamon remains warm and elastic. She's a beautiful mutt with an amazing grab-bag of heritages. I have never met her, but she strikes me as a genuine oddball, a girl who doesn't mind getting a bad haircut just to see how it looks, and keeps some low-top Converse in the closet. She probably mixes and matches expensive designer tops with vintage, rummage-sale bottoms (and vice versa). I see her as low-maintenance on Sundays and, on every other day, she's trouble. But it's the best kind.

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: 1990 graffiti art by Mike "Dream" Francisco

(Photo source: Art Crimes)

Chewsday

Random Chew page of the week (the Area 51 scene from Chew #19)

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: "Why I Hate Europeans" by Manuel Ocampo

Skinny Puppy used the anti-imperialist "Why I Hate Europeans" as the cover for its 2007 album Mythmaker.

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: "Beachcomber" by Alfonso Ossorio

Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990) was an abstract expressionist and a protege of Jackson Pollock's (as well as an early championer of Pollock's works).

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: "Skeedo" by Leo Valledor

(Photo source: Rio Rocket Valledor)

Leo Valledor (1936–1989) was a pioneer of what was known as "geometric abstraction."

"So I really envy Leo Valledor for growing up in the Fillmore District of San Francisco in the 1940's and 50's, where jazz was as alive and kicking as it ever would be," wrote Lawrence Rinder at Rehistoricizing.org. "Leo had a hard time as a kid, with parents who disappeared and God knows what kinds of racism to deal with. Jazz must have sounded like pure possibility to him. And abstract painting much the same... Geometry was his style and color was his tone."

Filipino American History Month Painting(s) of the Day: "Lotus Blossom" and "Dragon Lady" by Allison Torneros

L.A. artist Allison Torneros, designer of the Nom Nom Truck logo and founder of the graphic design studio CircleDot, explains this two-part painting that she created for a Women's History Month art exhibit in 2008:

There are two main stereotypes of Asian women in America. One is of the 'Dragon Lady', an Asian woman of exotic beauty, who is scheming, calculating, catty, sneaky, hypersexual, back-stabbing, and untrustworthy. Next you've got 'the Lotus Blossom', the quiet, silent, submissive Asian girl, passive, eager to please, and prudent. Over time this stereotype evolved into that of the 'Model Minority'... the straight A overachiever, obedient to the wishes of her parents...both types are silent in different ways. I used my own face for these paintings because I've been personally subject to both of these stereotypes. And of course, neither stereotype fits who I really am.

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: "Manny 'Pacman' Pacquiao, Fighting Pride of the Philippines" by Cristopher Nolasco

(Photo source: Cristopher Nolasco)

Chewsday

Beginning today, I'll be posting every Tuesday a random--and of course, wonderfully drawn--page from my current favorite comic book, writer John Layman and artist Rob Guillory's Image Comics procedural Chew. Today also happens to be the day when Image's Chew, Vol. 4 trade paperback drops.

As an Asian Pacific American reader who's enjoyed non-superhero comics way more than superhero comics because the superhero genre is often too right-wing, puerile and "Yay, white people!"-ish for my tastes (and as Patton Oswalt once noted in a 2003 interview, "Superheroes are so much about despair. Wanting someone to come out of the sky and fix things for me."), Chew is the kind of non-superhero comic I've always wanted to see: a crime title with an APA protagonist. But instead of being Captain Squarejaw or Super Asian Man, Agent Tony Chu is a much more relatable and down-to-earth figure: a good-humored detective (and perhaps not-so-great parent, which is indicated by the recent surprising revelation that he has an estranged teenage daughter) who's sometimes disgusted with what his extraordinary ability subjects him to.

An agent of the Special Crimes Division of the FDA (yes, that FDA), Chu is a cibopath, which means he gets psychic impressions from any item he eats, even when the item's not intended for consumption. If the item is crime scene evidence like a murder victim's severed limb, Chu will bite into it for the sake of the case, even though it kind of gives him the heebie-jeebies. We'd get the heebie-jeebies too if we were in Chu's shoes, which makes him an easily relatable hero.

It might sound like Chew is an overly dour series about a guy who finds his power to be a burden a la Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movies or the execrably written TV series Heroes, but Chew is far from dour. It's funny as hell, and its rich writing, clever visuals and choice of an Asian American protagonist who's neither stereotypical nor one-dimensional are always worth trumpeting, whether it's in this series of weekly posts that I'm kicking off today or in a recent tweet of mine that ended up becoming one of my most popular tweets because Guillory retweeted it.

Here's the first random Chew page of the week. It's from Chew #14.