A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog

I pour one out for the late Dick Tufeld, the voice of the Lost in Space Robot

2012-01-25T14:30:00.000-08:00

Lost in Space at 5pm weekdays on KBHK TV 44 in the early '80s was the first non-Sesame Street TV show I got hooked on. I didn't have The Wire, Breaking Bad, Community, The Boondocks, Louie or Justified back then. I had Ed Wood in outer space.

I was too young to understand Lost in Space, but I always liked having it on in the house at that age. Robots, ray guns and spaceships are irresistible to a four-year-old. The best character on this Irwin Allen Joint wasn't any of the Robinsons or creepy Dr. Smith (whose constant presence around Will Robinson made him look like he enjoyed being around young people a la Jerry Sandusky). It was the imaginatively named Robot.

(Photo source: B9Creations)

Were Dr. Smith and the Robot lovers? Dr. Smith sure did speak to that "bubble-headed booby" as if he were his longtime lover. Hey, Logo channel, there's this old show from the '60s you might want to pick up...

Gay or not, the wisecracking Robot's voice by stentorian announcer Dick Tufeld was such a memorable part of my early childhood. I also remember hearing his voice during the opening titles of the animated shows Thundarr the Barbarian, Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and Spider-Woman and much later, the opening titles of Son of the Beach and the Escape from the Planet of the Apes trailer on some pre-YouTube movie trailer archive online.

Speaking of Lost in Space's impact on kids, I know the explanation on last week's Happy Endings for Dave's love of V-necks was because as a kid who constantly ran into bullies who would lift him up by his collar, the V-necks he wore made it easier for him to bounce, but did seeing all those V-necks on Lost in Space reruns on USA also influence his fashion choices?

Anyway, back to the Robot. One of the best things about the visually stunning but so-so 1998 Lost in Space movie was the sleek design of the upgraded Robot (peep the cup I'm holding above) before it got destroyed and then re-emerged in a much more familiar-looking, bubble-headed form. Why didn't the Robot ever look this badass on the old show? Another highlight was hearing Tufeld's great voice again, this time in resonant digital stereo.

(Photo source: Daily Mail)

I wonder if his epitaph will say, "Warning! Dead bodies everywhere!"

After San Francisco 49ers fans cordially feud with New York Giants fans, KQED's Todd Inoue sounds off on a lesser-known feud between San Francisco and another city

2012-01-24T10:05:00.000-08:00

While recently sitting in the audience at Mezzanine in San Francisco for Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein's live tour to promote their hit IFC sketch comedy show Portlandia, music critic and iTunes producer Todd Inoue got enraged, not because Armisen and Brownstein didn't recite the "Put a Bird on It" sketch word-for-word, but because when Armisen asked the crowd if San Jose is part of the Bay Area, tons of audience members booed San Jose.

Todd, a former co-worker of mine, proudly hails from the 408. (He's also a guy who once graciously lent me several of his comedy albums from his CD collection to cull clips from for the now-defunct 15-minute Fistful of Soundtracks stand-up comedy clip show Morning Becomes Dyspeptic.) In an amusing piece he wrote and recorded for KQED-FM, Todd defends the possible future home turf of the Niners and bashes the bougie way San Franciscans like the haters at Mezzanine belittle San Ho as if the capital of Silicon Valley, which he says wallops San Francisco in the ramen and taco departments, were their runty little brother. (Even people outside the Bay have taken notice of San Franciscan snobbiness. Donal Logue, the former star of my favorite cancelled 2010 show Terriers, once tweeted that San Francisco is "A beautiful, erudite, dirty and yet phenomenally snobby city in a provincial way--maybe mostly people who just moved there.")

Ironically, the snobby anti-SJ vitriol took place at the road show tie-in to a TV series that mocks that kind of snobby attitude through the smug foodies, merchants, intellectuals (see below), technophiles, trend-seekers and hipsters Armisen and Brownstein portray each week.

"So all you hipster dorks who dump on the 408. I'm talking to you," Todd says. "Yes, you, sitting in your wi-fi-enabled shuttle commuting from Hayes Valley to your Silicon Valley tech job. The same job that pays your bills, that allows you to listen to this program, ironically, on your Cupertino-invented laptop or iPod."

Unlike Todd, I've had an often miserable time living in the South Bay, and I'm sometimes itching to leave, but I don't like all this smug hating on SJ either (heh, "your Cupertino-invented laptop"). SJ is like a family member whom you've had beefs with, but when you see outsiders start to gang up on Jose, you get pissed off and feel like leaping right to Jose's defense. It's like "Hey, you don't get to hate on Jose. Yeah, he's always stealing my cash and he always gives the shittiest Christmas gifts, but only people who have known Jose for a long time get to put him in his place, so fuck off."

Sometimes, I feel like neither city is superior to the other, and I like them both equally. To borrow an expression I once learned from Todd, all this elitism and beefing is so Fremont.

Chewsday

2012-01-24T10:00:00.000-08:00

Random Chew page of the week (from Chew #18)

The biggest Shaft of all in the illest retro CD packaging of all

2012-01-23T13:30:00.000-08:00

Honey, someone shrunk the Shaft LP.

Because I changed the title of A Fistful of Soundtracks' default block from "Assorted Fistful" to "AFOS Prime" last week, I've had to painstakingly search through the "AFOS Prime" mp3 library for every single track that contains an "Assorted Fistful" sweeper and delete each of them from "AFOS Prime." Then I've had to go back into my CD collection, re-rip many of the tracks I deleted from "AFOS Prime," replace the parts of the tracks that were previously occupied by "Assorted Fistful" sweepers with new intros (most of them are just movie or TV trailer audio clips) and re-upload those tracks to "AFOS Prime."

And I'm having a blast! Seriously, no, I'm not.

So far, the only thing about the above tasks that's been nice is revisiting Hip-O Select/Geffen's now-out-of-print Shaft in Africa soundtrack CD because I dig its retro packaging (Hip-O Select/Geffen packaged their 2004 reissue of the Willie Dynamite soundtrack in the same fashion as well). I had to pull out the Shaft in Africa CD from the cabinets where I store my soundtrack CDs because the tracks that I ripped a few years ago from that disc, including Johnny Pate's "Shaft in Africa (Addis)," which was most memorably sampled by Just Blaze in Jay-Z's "Show Me What You Got," contain now-outdated sweepers.

In 2005, the 1973 LP for the threequel that MGM declared "The biggest Shaft of all in the hottest place of all" made its debut on CD as part of the limited-edition Hip-O Select series of Universal Music Group-owned album reissues that are available only through Hip-O's site. The CD packaging was simple and not-so-flashy but inspired. Instead of sticking the CD in a jewel case, Hip-O recreated the LP packaging--they didn't mess with the Shaft in Africa cover's original typefaces or its ABC Records emblems or its washed-out-looking color scheme and they even brought back the inner sleeve--and shrunk the cardboard sleeve and inner sleeve to CD size. It looks like something I unearthed during a crate-digging session at the used LP section of a CD store, except it somehow wound up in a washer and dryer that were being used incorrectly like in some bad sitcom or an old cartoon, and it shrunk along with all the other clothes.

The "CD-Sized Album Replica" packaging appears to be eco-friendly too. Why don't more labels package their reissues on CD like this?

Vinyl is awesome, but I hate how much space vinyl takes up (my music collection currently consists of only CDs, mp3s or AACs). I'm like an anti-hoarder. I try to make my carbon footprint as small as possible, so I rejoiced when albums became downloadable. I love how music, movie and TV show formats have gotten smaller and smaller so that the content on those formats can be carried around in your pockets now.

I've been thinking lately about venturing into club or lounge DJing. Ever since I got myself my first MacBook last month, I've been adding onto its iTunes so many mixes, including Paul Nice's Do You Pick Your Feet in Poughkeepsie? mixtape and DJ sets from props, SFNY and Sweater Funk. Listening to those mixes nonstop on my MacBook Pro has made me want to someday become a DJ like Nice, props, his SFNY cohorts and the Sweater Funk members. If I end up doing that kind of DJing, I'm so going to enjoy carrying around all those damn records.

Chewsday

2012-01-17T11:30:00.000-08:00

Random Chew page of the week (from Chew #4--too bad the only Russian word I understand is "Nyet!" because I have no idea what these Russian characters are saying)

The AFOS block "Assorted Fistful" will be renamed "AFOS Prime" on Monday

2012-01-13T13:00:00.000-08:00

It's time to make another block title change. What better month is there to make such changes than month #1, January?

"AFOS Prime" (random film and TV score tracks) airs at all times on A Fistful of Soundtracks, except during the slots that are occupied by "Chai Noon" (Bollywood joints), "New Cue Revue" (cuts from newer score albums), "Rock Box" (existing songs), "Rome, Italian Style" (music inspired by late '60s and early '70s scores), "Soda and Pie" ('80s themes) and the newly rechristened "Beat Box" (funk, synth and hip-hop scores).

Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi's "Two Against One" gets made into a killer--and of course, gory--animated music video

2012-01-10T15:00:00.000-08:00

Music video director Chris Milk has crafted an imaginative video for "Two Against One," a Jack White-sung track off last year's Rome album. "Two Against One" is one of several selections from the Danger Mouse/Daniele Luppi tribute to '60s and '70s Italian film music that you can hear during the hour-long block "Rome, Italian Style" on A Fistful of Soundtracks (Mondays through Thursdays at 11am).

Rome is reportedly going from imaginary soundtrack to actual feature film. Milk, whose body of work has included videos for Kanye West and another Danger Mouse project, Gnarls Barkley, is attached to the film.

Well, enjoy if you like blood!

[The Playlist]

Chewsday

2012-01-10T11:15:00.000-08:00

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

The AFOS block "The Street" will be renamed "Beat Box" this Wednesday

2012-01-09T12:15:00.000-08:00

(Photo source: Deadlydelmundo)

I got tired of calling it "The Street."

The playlist is staying the same. The only thing that's changing is the block title. The weekday block's time slots are Mondays at 6-9am and noon-3pm, Tuesdays through Thursdays at 6-9am and 1-4pm and Fridays at 7-9am and 1-3pm.

I really should have done this on January 2. Five days after New Year's Day, I realized I didn't like "The Street" as a block title anymore, so I chose January 11 to implement the title change because date-wise, January 11 kind of looks like January 1.

The playlist contains selections from '60s, '70s and '80s film scores with funk, synth or jazz sounds that have been sampled or referenced by beatmakers in their music, as well as cuts from more recent scores with funk, synth or hip-hop sounds--like the Attack the Block score (dig the ATB fan art above)--that were composed by those same beatmakers or their peers. One of these newer composers who are featured during the block that's soon to be formerly known as "The Street" is Adrian Younge, who wrote and performed the original music for both the hilarious Black Dynamite and the upcoming animated series of the same name.

Last month, Younge, who's also a resident DJ at the Verdugo Bar's monthly "Rendezvous!" night in L.A., was behind the ones and twos for a spectacular "Rendezvous!" DJ set. DJ Alfonso, who runs "Rendezvous!" and shares with Younge the same tastes in '60s and '70s Italian and French film scores, posted the results from that night.

Younge threw in "It's Me" from his own album Something About April, a track that I assume is a Joe Bataan joint, a cover of The Dramatics' "In the Rain" I've never heard before and instantly dug, bits of giallo-era Morricone (hello again, The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion [at 40:13, to be exact]), a 007 triple-shot, some Moog-y cover of Nino Rota's "The Godfather Waltz" and an even Moog-ier instrumental cover of "Walk on By" that sounds like something straight out of the out-of-print Cinemaphonic: Electro Soul library music collection that was compiled by Black Dynamite and Megas XLR music supervisor David Hollander.

ADRIAN YOUNGE DJ SET by djalfonso

Chewsday

2012-01-03T07:00:00.000-08:00

Random Chew page of the week (from Chew #4)

Time to ID another existing song that comedy nerds must be curious about (this time, it's the Portlandia theme)

2012-01-02T12:15:00.000-08:00

Portlandia is the amusing and mostly improvised IFC sketch comedy show created by drummer-turned-SNL star Fred Armisen and former Sleater-Kinney frontwoman Carrie Brownstein and starring the duo as various characters in Brownstein's current hometown of Portland, Oregon, the tweeness capital of the world. The show returns this Friday for a second season full of more jabs at hipsters, more of Armisen and Brownstein's fellow musicians appearing in sketches a la first-season guest star Aimee Mann and more interesting-looking footage of Portland, where the show is filmed on location.

A gorgeously shot montage of the sights and real faces of Portland (none of those faces are Armisen's or Brownstein's during this part of the show), the Portlandia opening title sequence is one of TV's most evocative titles. That's not surprising--Portlandia is a Broadway Video joint, and Lorne Michaels' production company has a nasty habit of giving its sketch shows (from SNL to Kids in the Hall) the most stylish shot-in-the-streets opening titles. But what's that hypnotic tune during the Portlandia titles?

The Portlandia theme that viewers have been pestering IFC about since the show's first season is the 2009 track "Feel It All Around" by chillwave genre pioneer Washed Out, a.k.a. Ernest Greene.

One of several unofficial "Feel It All Around" music videos:

"Feel It All Around" as it appears in the Portlandia titles:

One of my favorite Portlandia sketches, inspired by--and set at--an actual Portland ad agency Brownstein once worked for:

Another favorite Portlandia sketch, in which guest star Aubrey Plaza must put up with the passive-aggressive owners of a feminist bookstore:

The second episode of Portlandia's new season tackles the hot-button issue of Battlestar Galactica addiction:

Chewsday

2011-12-27T11:15:00.000-08:00

Random Chew page of the week (from Chew #11)

The Academy's snub of the Attack the Block score is such bollocks, innit?

2011-12-27T11:00:00.000-08:00

HitFix's Kristopher Tapley considers the Attack the Block score by Steven Price and Basement Jaxx to be the year's best original film score and is bummed that it's not one of the 97 scores that are eligible for consideration in this year's Best Original Score category. I'm bummed too--the cutting-edge score from British comedian/filmmaker Joe Cornish's enjoyable inner-city-vs.-outer-space thriller is one of my favorites of 2011--but I'm not surprised that the Academy would exclude it.

The Academy rarely nominates the scores I like the most (not one bloody nod for any of Irish DJ/composer David Holmes' Ocean's scores during the '00s?). Plus, Price and Basement Jaxx's (and Holmes') sounds aren't middlebrow and tweedy enough for the Academy. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross aside, cutting-edge things tend to frighten and confuse them.

There's one upside to the snub: I don't have to be subjected to a lame interpretive dance to "The Ends" from Attack the Block.

Basement Jaxx - "The Ends" from "Attack The Block" by Basement Jaxx

Chewsday

2011-12-20T06:00:00.000-08:00

Random Chew page of the week (from Chew #19)

You're such a blockhead, Charlie Brown Christmas liner notes guy: Robert Wilonsky clears up (in 1998) some misconceptions about the classic special's soundtrack

2011-12-19T09:00:00.000-08:00

In 2009, I unearthed from my Fistful of Soundtracks archives a cassette of a 1998 phone interview about the beloved music from A Charlie Brown Christmas that I recorded with the Dallas Observer's Robert Wilonsky, and I transcribed the best parts of the discussion, which aired on the college radio incarnation of AFOS.

On TV, Wilonsky is best known for hosting the HDNet shows Higher Definition and The Ultimate Trailer Show and for being one of many guest film critics who subbed for a recuperating Roger Ebert when he was unable to resume his co-hosting duties on At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper. In 1998, Wilonsky wrote an Observer article that revealed some little-known background info about the Bay Area-based Vince Guaraldi Trio's pitch-perfect music from A Charlie Brown Christmas (for instance, he said "the album isn't the soundtrack to the special. Actually, it's the other way around: The record was cut before the cartoon was made"). So shortly after his article was published, I called Wilonsky up and had him discuss on AFOS why he loves the Guaraldi tunes from the classic 1965 CBS animated special, which has aired exclusively on ABC since 2001.

Five years after our interview, Wilonsky recorded an NPR piece about both Guaraldi's album (Concord Records remastered and reissued it in 2006, but with--good grief!--a couple of remastering mistakes later corrected by Concord after complaints from fans) and the special itself, which Wilonsky described in his segment as "the perfect Christmas gift, a show that is part Bible lesson, part jazz solo, part psychotherapy."

Here again is that interview from 1998.

Robert Wilonsky: For 30 years, they've listed the wrong personnel on the records for A Boy Named Charlie Brown, A Charlie Brown Christmas and the Vince Guaraldi Greatest Hits records... Fred Marshall was very unhappy to find 30 years after he made this record that he never got credit for actually playing on the thing... His daughter, whom I've put in my piece, went to a record store to buy the record A Charlie Brown Christmas that her dad played on. She had always had the vinyl version, which never had the listing of personnel. She bought the CD, which said "Colin Bailey: drums, Monty Budwig: bass, Vince Guaraldi: piano," couldn't believe her dad wasn't on the record, took the record back to the record store, said "I'm not gonna buy these records till you fix the credits." He told her dad he wasn't on the record. Dad called Fantasy Records, said "Why the hell am I not on the record?" The label guy got kind of upset because he wondered where he'd been for 30 years if he was upset about the incorrect personnel listing and went about to figure out if they were wrong all these years.

Jimmy J. Aquino: You also say in your article that the soundtrack album is not really a soundtrack.

RW: Right. Both A Boy Named Charlie Brown and A Charlie Brown Christmas were actually recorded before the Charlie Brown Christmas special was even filmed. What happened was Vince Guaraldi had been approached by Lee Mendelson... He had asked Vince about doing this music for a documentary that was going to be sold to a network--maybe CBS--about Charles Schulz and Peanuts. So they went in the studio and did this music. Something happened, and the documentary never aired. I'm not quite sure what happened. I don't think anybody really knows at this point. Time has erased a lot of memories. But they had this great record, so Vince released it as Jazz Impressions of a Boy Named Charlie Brown, which was what it was called originally.

Around the same time in 1962-63, they also went in to do the Christmas record because Vince had kids that were around the age of Charlie Brown and the characters in Peanuts, and he thought it'd be nice to do a jazz record because he liked the music so much and he liked what he had done and he liked the sound the trio had. He also thought there weren't any Christmas records out there for kids and adults. They were all a little cheesy, a little melodramatic for him, and him being a cool jazz pianist and having played with Cal Tjader and all these guys, that was his metier to do a cool jazz Christmas record. So he did it, and Mendelson liked it so much that he figured they'd maybe go out and get a sponsor like Coca-Cola, which I believe is who ended up sponsoring the show...

When they actually decided to do the Christmas special, Vince Guaraldi had to go to Los Angeles to record cues or shorter versions of the songs he was intending to use on the Christmas special, so he rounded up Monty Budwig and Colin Bailey, who were in his band in the early 1960s and had since moved to Los Angeles, and had them re-record shorter versions of what Jerry Granelli the drummer and Fred Marshall the bass player had done earlier around the time of A Charlie Brown Christmas. But for some reason, Fantasy just thought it was Colin and Monty playing on both those records and not Jerry and Fred...

JJA: How come A Charlie Brown Christmas is so special to you?

RW: I remember as a kid all those Claymation episodes--Rudolph and The Year Santa Didn't Come or whatever it was called. I remember thinking, "God, these are kind of silly, but Charlie Brown was a kid, he's your age..." I didn't realize that later in life, I would become a large-headed bald man myself, much like Charlie Brown, so perhaps there were some subliminal messages in there...

One thing I always loved about it as well was the fact that I didn't realize this until later, but I got to be a jazz fan when I was real young, like 12 or 13, which in Texas, is not an easy thing to do. You're either a country or Southern rock fan. You're not a jazz fan. There was a public radio station here that played jazz at night. I used to love it. One day, Vince's music came on, and I'll never forget it. It was A Charlie Brown Christmas... I was a teenager, and it made me just fall in love with it all over again. I fell in love with it this time around for the music because it was so pretty, it was so melancholy and kind of restive. I listen to it 24 or 25 times a day during the holidays sometimes because it just permeates the air like a good smell... It's just this great thing to have around, whether it's for nostalgic purposes sometimes or whether it's for musical purposes because it's just a beautiful, perfect record. It's not overwrought like all these other Christmas records. It's not sentimental. It's just perfect.

This is a Charlie Brown Christmas/Doctor Who mash-up by Larry Wentzel that's included here for no reason other than it's awesome.

Chewsday

2011-12-13T12:15:00.000-08:00

Random Chew page of the week (from Chew #8)

"Mr. Sunshine, yay": The five best original TV themes of 2011

2011-12-12T13:05:00.000-08:00

(Photo source: The Art of the Title Sequence)

5. Mr. Sunshine (Rob Cairns? Matthew Perry's musician dad? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?)
The broadcast networks' elimination of theme songs from most of their programming is a trend that depresses veteran TV theme composers like Happy Days and Wonder Woman theme maestro Charles Fox, who briefly expressed his displeasure during a recent interview on the podcast TV Confidential. But when a quick and minimalist theme like the one that opened Matthew Perry's short-lived single-camera comedy Mr. Sunshine makes every one of its five seconds count--it sublimely nailed the sardonic tone of the title character in just three words--maybe these skimpy themes on the broadcast networks aren't so awful (plus non-commercial HBO, which doesn't have to worry about the advertisers that are partially to blame for theme songs becoming an endangered species, is keeping the art form alive, as you'll see later).

4. Lights Out (Thwak! Music)
I'm glad the crew behind this short-lived FX boxing drama didn't go with "Lights Out" by Santigold (a sweet tune, by the way, but it would have been too on-the-nose) and opted for something original and appropriately brash and brassy a la The J.B.'s to open their show.

3. American Horror Story (César Dávila-Irizarry and Charlie Clouser)
If creepy old-timey photos of long-dead babies and creepier split-second images of pickled remains of dead babies or fetuses are your thing, then you're going to get a kick out of the American Horror Story opening title sequence by famed Se7en title designer Kyle Cooper. The rest of us find the titles unsettling to watch. I actually often turn my head away from the screen when the titles begin. They're accompanied by an eerie and effective industrial theme by sound designer César Dávila-Irizarry and Saw series composer and former Nine Inch Nails member Charlie Clouser. Together, the titles and the Dávila-Irizarry/Clouser theme are the only genuinely scary part of American Horror Story.

Is it me or do the titles look more disturbing with inverted text (inverting the video is a trick that YouTube users pull to keep video rights holders from forcing them to delete their uploads)?

2. Game of Thrones (Ramin Djawadi)
No other current opening title sequence on TV screams epic like the opening titles of Game of Thrones, the screen version of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels. Dig that animated map that changes every week and helps bring newbies who were previously unfamiliar with Martin's labyrinthine creation up to speed.

On Twitter, I said I'd like to see another equally ambitious show get the Game of Thrones opening titles map treatment.

It's hard to imagine the Game of Thrones titles without Prison Break composer Ramin Djawadi's imposing and catchy theme, but had Shakespeare in Love and '90s Prime Suspect composer Stephen Warbeck, who was originally hired to score Game of Thrones, not quit the show about 10 weeks before it premiered, we'd be hearing Warbeck's score during the titles instead. Would Warbeck's composition have spawned a gazillion different cover versions on YouTube like Djawadi's instrumental has?

Of course, this nearly two-minute theme comes from a show that's on non-commercial HBO, where showrunners are given more creative freedom and TV themes are allowed to breathe. Besides its length, one other thing I like about the main title theme is how it's used by Djawadi throughout the first season to represent the character of preteen tomboy Arya Stark (Maisie Williams).

One of my favorite first-season moments, Arya's first fencing lesson with tough, Debbie Allen-on-Fame-ish instructor Syrio Forel (Milos Yeromelou), prominently features Arya's theme, which sounds like a fetal version of the main title theme (on Varèse Sarabande's Game of Thrones score album, Arya's theme pops up during track 23, "The Pointy End," which can be heard during "Assorted Fistful" on A Fistful of Soundtracks). It reminds me of how David Arnold rearranged Monty Norman's "James Bond Theme" in Casino Royale so that what we heard was a fetal version of the theme as the inexperienced Bond began his first double-0 assignment, and then in bits and pieces, Arnold developed this "He's Bond, But He's Not Quite There Yet" theme into something more familiar-sounding as Bond evolved into the untrusting and more disciplined double-0 who coldly tells M that "the bitch is dead" and confidently introduces himself for the first time as "Bond, James Bond" at the end of the film.

Does the link between Arya and the main title theme indicate that Arya will grow up to become a heroic soldier like her now-dead father Ned? (I've never read any of the Song of Ice and Fire novels and don't plan to do so. I don't want to know what happens in the novels. Insert MADtv Vancome Lady-style "La la la la la la…" and covering of ears here.)

1. Hell on Wheels (Gustavo Santaolalla)
The Game of Thrones theme is terrific, but it doesn't cause my hands to drum along to the percussion like Argentine musician Gustavo Santaolalla's standout main title theme for the AMC western Hell on Wheels does. The Brokeback Mountain composer's sole musical contribution to Hell on Wheels (the rest of the show is scored by Kevin Kiner) makes me wish the Mexican instrumental rock duo Rodrigo y Gabriela would also take a stab at the western genre after they helped score the most recent Pirates of the Caribbean sequel.

It was nice to hear the Santaolalla theme given a full statement during Cheyenne warrior Pawnee Killer's race on horseback against railroad magnate Thomas Durant's train in this week's "Pride, Pomp and Circumstance" episode. But otherwise, Hell on Wheels is still kind of a slog (like the annoying glut of Republican debate footage that's currently on TV, portions of the Hell on Wheels pilot put me to sleep). That's too bad because I'm interested in how the show depicts Joseph Black Moon (Eddie Spears), a Cheyenne member who defied his father Chief Many Horses (Wes Studi) and converted to Christianity. Speaking of which, I want to see someone make a western series told from an Indian point of view for a change. Is Ry Cooder busy?

The Roots' final four Undun tracks suggest that ?uestlove has a future as a film composer

2011-12-07T11:35:00.000-08:00

The Roots' excellent 13th album Undun, which dropped yesterday, is the band's first concept album. The somber Undun is a cautionary--and fortunately, not-so-preachy-and-Afterschool Special-ish--tale that centers on a teen named Redford Stephens (his name is lifted from the Sufjan Stevens song "Redford") who falls into the drug game.

?uestlove has conquered the worlds of drumming, arranging, late-night bandleading and tweeting. Could film scoring be next for ?uesto to tackle? On the cinematic instrumentals that comprise the four-part "Redford Suite" that concludes Undun, ?uesto, who has said he might go completely orchestral on the next Roots album, displays some serious Bernard Herrmann-esque chops.

I second the following graf, despite a couple of annoyingly lofty-sounding and obtuse phrases that are so NPR ("fictionalized into hip-hop"?--what the hell does that mean?):

?uestlove treats "Redford" almost like a piece of movie music, accompanying the action rather than recapitulating it. The result is a cinematic moment waiting to be processed, fictionalized into hip-hop. It's as if the listener zoomed in beyond the safe narrative distance of the song and actually ended up in the movie. This movement of the suite is like a rap track under a microscope, the sample blown up so large that the beats that keep hip-hop as the frame of reference are a horizon enshrouded in fog… Finally, credits roll over a sublime string quartet, mercifully for Black Thought's black thoughts — at least for a moment, before ?uestlove's meticulously arranged strings are silenced by the chilling, deathly growl of a struck piano.

[NPR]

Chewsday

2011-12-06T11:30:00.000-08:00

Random Chew page of the week (from Chew #3)

Hell yeah

2011-12-05T11:05:00.000-08:00

(Photo source: Música Detrás de Cámaras)

The best part of AMC's new western series Hell on Wheels has to be the way-too-short opening title theme by Brokeback Mountain composer Gustavo Santaolalla (santa-o-larya).

Santaolalla's theme is my favorite original theme for a Sunday night show since rapper Asheru's declaration that "I'mma remain a soldier till the war is won" during the opening titles of The Boondocks (God, I miss that show).

Chewsday

2011-11-29T11:30:00.000-08:00

Random Chew page of the week (from Chew #8)

A track-by-track rundown of the current "New Cue Revue" playlist on A Fistful of Soundtracks

2011-11-29T11:05:00.000-08:00

Every Wednesday at 10am and 4pm and every Friday at 11am, A Fistful of Soundtracks streams the most recent additions to the station's "Assorted Fistful" library (or in the case of Akon & Hamskia Iyer's "Chammak Challo," the "Chai Noon" library) for an hour-long block entitled "New Cue Revue." Here's what's currently on the "New Cue Revue" playlist.

1. Akon & Hamsika Iyer, "Chammak Challo" (from Ra.One)
Ever since it was announced in 2010 that R&B artist Akon, best known for "Smack That," "I Wanna Love You" and the hilarious Lonely Island/SNL digital short "I Just Had Sex," was lending his pipes to an original song for a Bollywood film (like another non-Indian singer, Kylie Minogue, had done for the imaginatively titled 2009 Into the Blue clone Blue), I've been dying to hear the Akon track. The end result, "Chammak Challo" from Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan's recently released superhero movie Ra.One, finally dropped in September and is a smash hit in India. (In this latest round of one of my favorite games, Guess the American Movie or TV Show That This Bollywood Film Is a Bizarre Clone Of, Ra.One, which features Khan in the dual role of a dorky video game designer and a heroic character from his game who enters the real world, appears to be a clone of the largely forgotten '80s superhero show Automan.)

Akon acquits himself nicely as he alternates between English and Hindi during "Chammak Challo" (the song title is basically "nice-looking shawty" in Hindi slang). The catchy "Chammak Challo" proves that it's much better when Bollywood soundtrack composers enlist actual R&B or rap artists from America to do their thing on their soundtracks than when they attempt to rap or ape current American R&B trends on their own. The latter has led to several theme tunes that are as painful-sounding as the time when Prince stopped being a hater of hip-hop and attempted to incorporate rap into his Diamonds and Pearls album--for instance, go YouTube "Desi Boyz." Or maybe you're better off if you don't.

2. Howard Shore, "The Thief" (from Hugo)
The former SNL bandleader and Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy composer nicely apes the rhythms of a clock for Martin Scorsese's clock imagery-filled tribute to silent-era filmmakers like Georges Méliès (played during Hugo by Ben Kingsley).

3. Alberto Iglesias, "George Smiley" (from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)
The lonely trumpet during Alberto Iglesias' effective score for the latest screen adaptation of John le Carré's 1974 spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy announces that "This ain't Bond. This is le Carré. No bloody invisible cars or steel-toothed thugs here."

4. Mike Skinner, "Fernando's Theme" (from The Inbetweeners Movie)
British rapper Mike Skinner has retired his stage name The Streets and entered the world of film scoring with his original music for the film version of The Inbetweeners, the Britcom about a group of Superbad-style dorky teens whose anthem would be the aforementioned "I Just Had Sex." The clubby "Fernando's Theme" is the best example of "Wow, I never knew this pasty white guy had a Latin side and maybe he should express it more often" since Michael Giacchino wrote the awesome "Spanish Heist" for the TV series Alias.

5. Alan Silvestri, "Howling Commando's Montage" (from Captain America: The First Avenger)
This cue accompanies a sequence in Captain America: The First Avenger that's a bit too short: a montage of Cap on his missions with the Howling Commandos. Will the Captain America sequel be a flashback to one of those missions with the Howling Commandos that The First Avenger glossed over? As someone who wanted to see more Howling Commando scenes in the film, I hope so.

6. Quincy Jones featuring Little Richard, "Money Runner/Money Is (Medley)" (from $ [Dollars])
As I've said before, say the following five words--"caper movie score by Q"--and I'm there, baby. This funky theme from the 1971 Warren Beatty/Goldie Hawn heist flick $ (Dollars) would fit right in with the Occupy era, except "Inflation in the nation don't bother me" would have to be changed to "Recession in the nation don't bother me."

7. Ludovic Bource, "1927 A Russian Affair" (from The Artist)
After the arrivals of The Artist and Hugo, is silent cinema making a comeback? This better not mean a return to white people stealing Asian roles from Asian perform... d'oh!

8. Alan Howarth and Larry Hopkins, "Main Theme - Desolation" (from The Thing)
Alan Howarth, who collaborated with filmmaker/composer John Carpenter on the scores to such classic Carpenter flicks as Big Trouble in Little China and They Live, recently recreated the mostly synthesized (and out-of-print) score Ennio Morricone composed for Carpenter's 1982 version of The Thing, with some help from the Digital Orchestra Toolbox. Howarth's Thing tracks sound just like the originals (much like how you can't tell Jan Hammer's 2002 release Miami Vice: The Complete Collection is a re-recording because Hammer performed his score tracks on the exact same synthesizers he used during Vice), resulting in one of the few film score re-recordings that aren't underwhelming like most symphonic re-recordings of film scores.

9. Craig Armstrong, "Rooftop Chase" (from In Time)
I'm not sure if "Rooftop Chase" or any of Craig Armstrong's other In Time score cues will become a film and TV trailer staple like Armstrong's "Escape" from Plunkett & Macleane, but few film and TV composers pull off grandiose, trip-hop-and-techno-influenced action cues as well as Armstrong does in cues like "Rooftop Chase" and "Escape."

10. Cliff Martinez, "Bride of Deluxe" (from Drive)
Cliff Martinez's synthy score for Drive is less grandiose than Armstrong's film music work. It's more reserved and Zen-like, much like Ryan Gosling's laconic Driver character.

11. Brian Tyler, "Tego and Rico" (from Fast Five)
Fast Five's Rio setting helped reinvigorate the Fast and the Furious franchise and added more Latin flavor to Brian Tyler's score music, especially during Fast Five's theme for bickering thieves ~~Casey Affleck and Scott Caan~~ Tego Calderón and Don Omar.

12. Swipe, "This Is a Low" (from Tamara Drewe)
Guylinered drummer Ben Sergeant (Dominic Cooper) may be what's known in the U.K. as a git, but the tunes by him and Tamara Drewe's fictional Britpop band Swipe are pretty damn catchy, especially "This Is a Low," a track about a guy getting his ass whupped by his temperamental girlfriend (the frontman is singing, "This is a call for a domestic dispute," not "This is a corporate domestic dispute," like several blog or forum posts have erroneously said). Not to be confused with the Blur track of the same name, "This Is a Low" (stream it here) has an interesting pedigree. In the movie, the song is a source of tension between Swipe and Ben, who wrote "This Is a Low" and is pissed that his bandmates don't give him enough credit for his work, but offscreen, it was actually written by Cooper's younger brother Nathan.

(Photo source: In the boho closet)

13. David Lynch, "Blue Frank" (from Twin Peaks)
A rare Twin Peaks composition written not by Angelo Badalamenti but by David Lynch himself, "Blue Frank" is taken from the show's second season score album. One listen to the bump and grind of "Blue Frank" will reignite your hankering for both pie and Audrey Horne's slinky dancing.

14. Steven Price, Felix Buxton & Simon Ratcliffe, "The Block" (from Attack the Block)
Set in a rough South London council estate attacked by "gorilla wolf muthafuckas" from outer space and featuring a cast of characters of color who are somehow more frightening to conservative dipshits than the gorilla wolf aliens, the British cult favorite Attack the Block is last summer's best popcorn movie. Beleedat. One of the movie's most enjoyable elements is the original score, the first ever written by the British dance act Basement Jaxx (a.k.a. Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe), with assistance by Scott Pilgrim vs. the World music editor Steven Price. Their cue "The Block" suggests John Carpenter if his body were taken over Thing-style by a dubstepper.

15. Henry Jackman, "Frankenstein's Monster" (from X-Men: First Class)
Henry Jackman's menacing and twangy theme for X-Men villain Magneto is easily the most memorable of the four themes that four different composers wrote for the character in the X-Men films, much like how Hunger star Michael Fassbender's breakout performance as Magneto in X-Men: First Class has trumped Sir Ian McKellen's previous (and lamely outfitted) take on Erik Lensherr. "Frankenstein's Monster" is already being used as trailer music. It can be heard in the clip from the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy trailer that precedes Alberto Iglesias' aforementioned "George Smiley" during "New Cue Revue" and "Assorted Fistful." By the way, Jackman isn't related to Hugh, but I'm sure he's better than Wolverine at sliding down a zipline.

Chewsday

2011-11-22T11:40:00.000-08:00

Random Chew page of the week (from Chew #15)

Amen to "Asian American Jesus"

2011-11-22T11:35:00.000-08:00

I've never heard of either playwright/comedian Samantha Chanse or filmmaker Yasmine Gomez before. But now I'm interested in whatever other short films either of them will make after filmmaker and You Offend Me You Offend My Family blogger Quentin Lee posted Chanse and Gomez's amusing mockumentary short "Asian American Jesus," about the making of an Ethnic Studies class project on "Asian Americans and the Arts."

I was Googling any blog posts I could find about comedic Bay Area-based shorts made by Asian Americans--because I'm considering writing and maybe directing my own comedic short, even though my only experience with camerawork and video editing has been through vlogging--when I stumbled into "Asian American Jesus" while reading Lee's post about the theory that YouTube may be more beneficial for Asian American-made shorts like "Jesus" than the film festival circuit.

"From Yasmine, I've also learned that the short, as brilliant as I thought it was, faced some rejections from Asian American film festivals," wrote Lee. "Is Youtube our future? Perhaps Yasmine has done the right thing by putting her short on Youtube whose most bankable personality is nonetheless the Asian American Ryan Higa of Niga Higa fame."

As someone who's had to sit through a lot of Asian American poetry that's so bad Leonard Pinth-Garnell would love those poems, I got a kick out of the Gomez short's dead-on parody of crappy Asian American spoken-word artists through its pretentious slam poet character Truth Is Real, one of six characters Chanse plays in "Jesus." But my favorite of Chanse's characters is Suzette, the artsy Bay Area student who interviews Truth Is Real. Maybe it's because the lisping Suzette sounds like Drew Barrymore.

The Batman vs. Wackula

2011-11-17T10:40:00.000-08:00

(Photo source: Dean Trippe)

I don't care for Twilight. Neither does the Twitterer known as The Goddamn Batman. And now, here are the best of The Batman's 140-character tirades against a vampire who's so goddamn banal he makes The Count from Sesame Street look intimidating.

UPDATE: November 17, 2011 (this tweet appeared a couple of hours after I first published the post)

Chewsday

2011-11-15T08:40:00.000-08:00

Random Chew page of the week (from Chew #17)

Eee-O 11/11/11

2011-11-11T14:00:00.000-08:00

As someone who's unemployed and has been part of the 99 Percent for a long-ass time, Sammy Davis Jr.'s "Eee-O Eleven" from the original Ocean's Eleven is like the story of my life ("I nearly had me that chauffeur/And that block-long limousine/Eee-O Eleven...").

What does that song title mean? Some people think the phrase is a reference to the game of craps. Hey, Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, the lyricists behind "Eee-O Eleven," would know. Too bad they're dead. Reeeal dead.

Tastes like Fresno

2011-11-09T15:30:00.000-08:00

(Photo source: TV Time Capsule)

The craziest damn thing on TV right now is not American Horror Story. It's the funny six-part miniseries The Heart, She Holler, which is airing for six straight nights on Adult Swim until Friday. The Heart, She Holler is the Southern Gothic story of Hurlan Heartshe (Patton Oswalt, looking like a stand-in for Nick Swardson in Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star), a feral man-child who must battle with his poor-white-trash sisters, the devious Hurshe (Kristen Schaal) and the telekinetic Hambrosia (Heather Lawless), for control of Heartshe Holler, the small town that Hurlan inherited from their deceased cult leader father. The inbred yokels who populate Heartshe Holler are so filthy even Cletus from The Simpsons would tell them, "Git yerself a washcloth!"

Because it's from the minds of Wonder Showzen creators Vernon Chatman and John Lee, The Heart, She Holler gets its laughs from nightmarish and meth-y imagery that would cause most of the viewers who made a hit out of Modern Family (a show Schaal once guest-starred on) to puke into their tubs of Häagen-Dazs. A man pulls from an electric outlet intestines that go on forever. Another man French-kisses a glory hole that was carved into the cover of a Bible. If this show had a Baby Lily in its cast, she'd probably be walking around with a rotting piece of roadkill as her dolly.

The Heart, She Holler's nightly miniseries format and Schaal's soapy villainess both remind me of another comedy miniseries that aired over the course of one week 25 Novembers ago: Newhart creator Barry Kemp's not-as-meth-y Fresno. From November 16 to November 20, 1986 on CBS, this spoof of wealth-obsessed '80s CBS nighttime soaps like Falcon Crest and the soon-to-be-revived-on-TNT Dallas followed the nasty power struggle between the Kensington raisin empire, led by matriarch Charlotte Kensington (Carol Burnett), and rival raisin baron Tyler Cane (Dabney Coleman). Caught up in the feud are Charlotte's dickish eldest son Cane (Charles Grodin), his unhappy nympho wife Talon (Teri Garr), Charlotte's demure adopted daughter Tiffany (Valerie Mahaffey), the always shirtless ranch hand Torch (Trapper John, M.D. star Gregory Harrison, poking fun at his '80s himbo persona), gardener-turned-corporate spy Juan (Luis Avalos), country singer Bobbi Jo Bobb (Teresa Ganzel) and her convict husband Billy Joe (Bill Paxton!).

Shot on a bigger budget than The Heart, She Holler (for example, the gowns were designed by a name I became familiar with because I'd see it pop up during so many '70s or '80s opening or closing credits: Bob Mackie of Burnett's Gone with the Wind sketch gown fame), Fresno isn't quite a classic, but it's a fun comedic soap made for viewers like me who avoid actual nighttime soaps like the plague. Maybe if each episode had been 11 minutes long like each installment of The Heart, She Holler or other live-action Adult Swim shows like Childrens Hospital, the current live-action crown jewel of the Adult Swim lineup, and its spinoff NTSF:SD:SUV, Fresno would have been a classic. When I first caught it in reruns on Comedy Central in the '90s--fortunately without the laugh track that CBS reportedly tacked on to the miniseries when it rebroadcast it--Fresno felt like it was several minutes too long at an hour per episode (with commercials).

There are so many reasons to be pissed off at Fox--besides one of its cable channels' unusual definitions of the words "fair," "balanced" and "news"--like the fact that Fox owns the MTM Enterprises library and either butchers MTM properties on DVD or Hulu (worst example: the WKRP music clearance fiasco) or doesn't take advantage of reintroducing via DVD hours and hours of great or good MTM shows like Fresno (does Fox own Fresno?--I'm not quite sure) to younger viewers who'd get a kick out of these shows that were around either before they were born or when they were too young to understand why Dr. Johnny Fever always looks so exhausted. So because of that, YouTube is all we can rely on for little glimpses of Fresno.

As you can see from the YouTube clips of Fresno (hey, it's Kramer), one of the highlights of the miniseries is Mel Brooks film score composer John Morris' original music, from Bobbi Jo's fake country songs ("Just because you're a migrant worker don't mean we got a migrant love") to the main title theme, one of the best obscure TV themes of the '80s. Morris' theme morphs from bullfighting music to Big Country score-style Americana. It's amusingly over-the-top and awesome.

Chewsday

2011-11-08T08:15:00.000-08:00

Random Chew page of the week (from Chew #20)

This is not a sequel to "11 songs by fictional musicians from movies and TV that are surprisingly not terrible"

2011-11-01T09:45:00.000-07:00

After reading my post in which I listed standout tunes by fake bands like "Find It" by The Kelly Affair, a.k.a. The Carrie Nations, from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (catch "Find It" during "Assorted Fistful" on A Fistful of Soundtracks), retroRechercher tweeted to me the title of another standout original Stu Phillips-penned song from the 1970 Russ Meyer flick. It's been a while since I saw Beyond the Valley of the Dolls on the Fox Movie Channel, so I forgot about "In the Long Run."

I'm relieved that the Fox cable channels that aren't Faux News--FX, Fox Movie Channel and Fuel, to name a few--have settled their beef with DirecTV, which I currently subscribe to (and have lately considered ditching for Xfinity). I would have hated being forced to watch the latest episodes of Justified, Louie and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia a year after everybody else would first see them on FX. Also, if I'm not mistaken, Fox Movie Channel is the only channel that airs Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The "In the Long Run" montage makes great use of the wide frame as it details Carrie Nations manager Harris Allsworth's wordless resentment of record producer Z-Man's control over the band. In pan-and-scan, the montage is the victim of a massacre that's as awful as the one during the movie's climax.

A live cover of "In the Long Run" by the Pittsburgh band The Garment District:

Chewsday

2011-11-01T09:40:00.000-07:00

Random Chew page of the week (from Chew #10)

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day archive

2011-11-01T09:35:00.000-07:00

(Photo source: Filipino American Artists Network)

October 3, 2011: "Tax Dollars Kill" by Mike "Dream" Francisco
October 4, 2011: "Manny 'Pacman' Pacquiao, Fighting Pride of the Philippines" by Cristopher Nolasco
October 5, 2011: "Lotus Blossom" and "Dragon Lady" by Allison Torneros
October 6, 2011: "Skeedo" by Leo Valledor
October 7, 2011: "Beachcomber" by Alfonso Ossorio
October 10, 2011: "Why I Hate Europeans" by Manuel Ocampo
October 11, 2011: 1990 graffiti art by Mike "Dream" Francisco
October 12, 2011: "Shannyn Sossamon" by Cristopher Nolasco
October 13, 2011: "How Mali Lost Her Accent" by Pacita Abad
October 14, 2011: "The City" by Allison Torneros
October 17, 2011: "Echo" by Leo Valledor
October 18, 2011: "Five Ways to Exit a Window (Defenestrate)" by Allison Torneros
October 19, 2011: "Red Dress" by Cristopher Nolasco
October 20, 2011: "Four Seasons" by Leo Valledor
October 21, 2011: "The Conception of Bliss" by Allison Torneros
October 24, 2011: "Lou Reed" by Manuel Ocampo
October 25, 2011: "Hello Like Before" by Leo Valledor
October 26, 2011: "Gintong Kasaysayan, Gintong Pamana (Filipino Americans: A Glorious History, A Golden Legacy)" by Eliseo Art Silva
October 27, 2011: "Dancing Couple" by Pacita Abad
October 28, 2011: 1990 graffiti art by Mike "Dream" Francisco
October 31, 2011: "Thriller" by Allison Torneros

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

2011-10-31T10:35:00.000-07:00

It's not music. It's Ennio.

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

2011-10-31T10:30:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-28T11:30:00.000-07:00

(Photo source: Art Crimes)

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

2011-10-28T10:30:00.000-07:00

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" (stream it here) 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 (stream the Larson version here). 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 turned up 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" (stream it here) 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."

5. "Let's Duet" by Dewey Cox and Darlene Madison (Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story)
Director Jake Kasdan's Walk Hard has forever ruined musician biopics for me. It points out how clichéd all musician biopics are by taking aim at every single cliché, from the Oscar-bait moments where the star portrays the subject's emotional meltdown (not since the Sexy Beast underwater heist sequence has a film done so much damage to bathroom sinks) to the dialogue that has all the subtlety of a jackhammer ("That was freaking transcendental, Paul McCartney. Don't you agree, John Lennon?").

What separates Walk Hard from the Epic Movies and Meet the Spartanses of the film parody genre are the intelligence that Kasdan and co-writer Judd Apatow poured into every gag in Walk Hard, whether highbrow or lowbrow, and the Walk Hard songwriters' ability to make Dewey Cox's fake songs, particularly the Johnny and June Carter Cash-inspired double-entendre-fest "Let's Duet," not just authentic and hilarious but also good songs outside the context of the movie. As The A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin notes in his "My Year of Flops" entry on Walk Hard, "Like 'Let's Duet,' Walk Hard is blessed with a fundamental sweetness and a loving attention to detail." Walk Hard is so funny I convulse with laughter even when I'm reading dialogue from it on IMDb's Walk Hard quotes page.

6. "Something He Can Feel" by Sister and the Sisters (Sparkle)
Loosely based on the turbulent history of The Supremes, Sparkle, the story of the rise and fall of the fictional girl group Sister and the Sisters, is exactly the kind of overwrought and poorly written movie about troubled and drug-addicted musicians that Walk Hard rips apart mercilessly.

"[Sparkle singer character Delores] tells her mother that there's more to life than being a maid (which is true) but her speech is some White guy's idea of Black power. She says she's leaving because she's tired of taking the White man's shit. Fine, but where the fuck is she going when she leaves? It's 1958," wrote blogger Odienator in his funny 2008 takedown of the Joel Schumacher-scripted, currently-being-remade 1976 melodrama. "I have no fucking idea why Sparkle is beloved by us [African American viewers]. It's a terrible film, despite the acting and the soundtrack."

Yes, that Curtis Mayfield-produced soundtrack is--like all of the late Mayfield's other film music work--amazing and an example of how much of an outstanding and insightful lyricist Mayfield was. "Something He Can Feel" was a big 1976 hit for Aretha Franklin, who, with the Kitty Haywood Singers on backup, sung all the tracks on the Sparkle soundtrack album instead of Sparkle stars Lonette McKee, Irene Cara and Dwan Smith (many fans of the film feel that the actresses got gypped big-time when their vocals were ditched for Franklin's).

My first exposure to "Something He Can Feel" wasn't through Sparkle or Aretha. It was through En Vogue's sultry video for "Giving Him Something He Can Feel," one of two cover versions of Sparkle numbers that the girl group recorded for their hit 1992 album Funky Divas. The video features cameos by Sparkle cast member Dorian Harewood, Johnny Gill and El DeBarge and an appearance by a pre-Oz-and-Lost Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. Harewood, Gill, DeBarge and Akinnuoye-Agbaje are among the nightclub audience members in the video who are enthralled (or in some cases, reduced to a sweaty and trembly mess) by Cindy, Dawn, Terry and Maxine in their slinky red dresses. The video dropped when I was in my teens, so the way Cindy, Dawn, Terry and Maxine looked during "Giving Him Something He Can Feel" had a similar effect on me: that video was probably the one that made my voice turn from falsetto to baritone.

7. "I Can Dream About You" by The Sorels (Streets of Fire)
Walter Hill's rock n' roll musical tanked big-time in the summer of 1984, but the movie's R&B number "I Can Dream About You" was a smash, and it's not hard to see why. I hate the word "transcendent" because it's so pompous-sounding and James Lipton-y, but that's the best adjective that could describe the late Dan Hartman's slice of blue-eyed soul.

Both versions of "I Can Dream About You" are terrific. Hartman performed the single version, while the film version was sung by the late Winston Ford (and lip-synched by a moonwalking Stoney Jackson) and was the version that MCA Records used in the "I Can Dream About You" video that aired frequently on MTV in the summer of 1984. The latter version is particularly noteworthy because two of the members of the film's fake doo-wop group The Sorels (pronounced "SIR-ells"--thanks, Rocklopedia Fakebandica!) are a pre-Hollywood Shuffle Robert Townsend and a pre-Forrest Gump Mykelti Williamson.

8. "Find It" by The Kelly Affair (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls)
Was '70s Battlestar Galactica composer Stu Phillips aware that he came up with an early version of punk when he composed "Find It" for Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert's 1970 comedic masterpiece?

9. "Say No More (Mon Amour)" by Rex Manning (Empire Records)
We've all had a "Say No More (Mon Amour)" in our lives: a dumb and overplayed pop song we refuse to admit liking, even though we might dig its rhythm section or choice of samples, whether it's "Rump Shaker" by Wreckx-N-Effect, "I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)" by Pitbull or any song by The Fratellis. One of the best and most dead-on touches in the otherwise inconsistently and sloppily written Empire Records (besides how brilliant a parody of vapid late '80s/early '90s pop music "Say No More" is) is how the title store's employees continually diss Adam Ant-esque, puffy shirt-clad pop star Rex Manning (Maxwell Caulfield) and view him as a toolish sellout but are utterly powerless when exposed to the sounds of Rex's biggest and cheesiest hit and can't help but dance to it.

Aspiring graphic designer A.J. (Johnny Whitworth) is an emo dumbass who refers to the very Japanese Mr. Miyagi as "the Chinese guy from The Karate Kid" and is someone we'd wish would slip off the Empire Records rooftop and fall to his death whenever we have to hear him attempt to tell his co-worker Corey (Liv Tyler) he loves her. But A.J. has one likable moment where he tries to cheer up the suicidal Deb (Robin Tunney in shaven-headed riot grrrl mode) by dancing like an idiot to "Say No More" and getting her to join him (everyone else in the store who's not Anthony LaPaglia ends up joining A.J. and Deb in their dance too). Aside from the The The "This Is the Day" dance (stutter-lanche!) on the rooftop in the film's finale, it's the happiest we see A.J. or Deb look in the film.

10. "I'm Just a Human" by New Human Formantics (Fear of a Black Hat)
Influenced by This Is Spinal Tap, star/director Rusty Cundieff's 1993 mockumentary poked fun at the excesses of gangsta rap and even imbued the members of N.W.H. (Niggaz with Hats) with a Spinal Tap-like trait: a tendency to try on and then quickly discard musical trends as if those trends were groupies. At one point, an N.W.H. member dabbles in pseudo-political, C&C Music Factory-style dance pop with "Come Pet the P.U.S.S.Y." (the acronym stands for "Political Unrest Stabilizes Society, Yes").

But the funniest of Fear of a Black Hat's fake tunes has to be ex-N.W.H. member Tone Def's solo effort "I'm Just a Human," a parody of the New Age rap duo P.M. Dawn's 1991 hit "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" (that's Mark Christopher Lawrence, a.k.a. Big Mike from Chuck, as Tone Def, espousing his Stephen Colbert-style "I don't see color" philosophy to the documentarian character played by future Talk to Me director Kasi Lemmons). A plea for racial tolerance ("You are just like me/I'm just a human") morphs into one of the most delightfully disgusting songs ever written ("'Cause black, white, yellow, red, brown or gold/Our shit all comes from the same little hole"). And as a bonus, the album version of "I'm Just a Human" gets even more delightfully disgusting ("Sometimes I smell the lint from my belly button/How could something so small make a stench so rotten?").

11. B-Rabbit's freestyle against Papa Doc, the top battle rapper in Detroit (8 Mile)
Troubled and unconfident Detroit battle rapper B-Rabbit (Eminem) is ashamed of his white-trashiness. But at the end of 8 Mile, B-Rabbit gains the power of self-respect like another fictional musician, the aforementioned Scott Pilgrim, and learns to wear his trailer-park background with pride--with the help of the instrumental version of Mobb Deep's tough-as-nails, Quincy Jones Dollars soundtrack-sampling "Shook Ones (Part II)"--in one of the greatest using-your-weakness-as-a-strength moments on film since, I don't know, John Cusack skied on one ski in Better Off Dead.

Okay, on second thought, that was more awesome than the Cusack-skiing-on-one-ski scene in Better Off Dead.

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

2011-10-27T10:30:00.000-07:00

(Photo source: The late Pacita Abad's webmaster)

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

2011-10-26T11:20:00.000-07:00

(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)

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

2011-10-25T10:05:00.000-07:00

(Photo source: Vangobot)

Chewsday

2011-10-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

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

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

2011-10-24T10:35:00.000-07:00

(Photo source: fARTiculate)

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

2011-10-21T07:10:00.000-07:00

(Photo source: Allison Torneros)

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

2011-10-20T08:05:00.000-07:00

(Photo source: Rehistoricizing.org)

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

2011-10-20T07:45:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-19T13:00:00.000-07:00

(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

2011-10-19T12:45:00.000-07:00

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.

There was once talk of turning Gotham Central into a TV series, which would have been nice to see, although I don't think there are any showrunners who would have been able to master the tricky balance of supervillain theatrics with much more grounded police detective business that even Rucka occasionally had trouble pulling off in the comic (for instance, the gaudily dressed heroes from the Teen Titans stuck out like a sore thumb when they were awkwardly integrated into the not-so-gaudy Gotham Central).

But after watching how Luther handles John's bordering-on-superhuman investigative skills or the theatricality of both John's adversaries and his sociopathic adversary-turned-ally Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson) without looking goofy and lame, I think Cross would be the perfect showrunner for a TV version of Gotham Central if it ever becomes a possibility again.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

If that TV adaptation never surfaces, then think of Luther as a pretty good Gotham Central spinoff in which Elba is terrific as deceased Gotham detective Crispus Allen, who's reimagined himself as a David Bowie-loving(*) British supercop in some sort of crime-ridden afterlife that's a cross between the original Life on Mars and Lost's much-maligned sideways universe.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

(*) You gotta love a procedural that has a lead who idolizes Bowie and, as it's implied in one episode, uses his music to help him think, although why Luther didn't choose a Bowie track as its theme music--it went with Massive Attack's "Paradise Circus," which actually isn't too shabby--is as puzzling as any of John's cases.

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

2011-10-18T10:15:00.000-07:00

(Photo source: Allison Torneros)

Chewsday

2011-10-18T10:10:00.000-07:00

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

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

2011-10-17T10:30:00.000-07:00

(Photo source: Rehistoricizing.org)

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

2011-10-14T10:15:00.000-07:00

(Photo source: Allison Torneros)

Every day I'm shufflin'

2011-10-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

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!

Shuffle mode sometimes results in nifty unintentional double shots or triple shots like:

Brian Tyler Fast and the Furious sequel theme double shots.

Pam Grier movie theme double shots.

Jim Kelly movie theme double shots.

Themes from movies about Bruce Lee movies getting streamed in the same hour.

Battlestar Galactica/Star Trek double shots.

Galaxy Quest/Star Trek double shots.

Trek/Galactica/Galaxy Quest triple shots.

J.J. Abrams/Michael Giacchino collabo triple shots.

Christopher Nolan/Hans Zimmer collabo double shots.

End credits music quadruple shots.

"Movies with Run in the title" double shots.

"Unexpectedly gory L.A. movies" double shots.

Live365 once caused a weird pattern in which a theme from a Spike Lee Joint ended up getting followed by a Cowboy Bebop track--twice in a row. I hope someone on Deviantart was listening to AFOS during that hour and thought about drawing a Spike Lee/Spike Spiegel mash-up someday. Make it happen, Internet!

Wilfred the Matt Damon-loving dog must have tried to sabotage Live365 during this hour.

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

2011-10-13T09:25:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-12T10:00:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-11T12:05:00.000-07:00

(Photo source: Art Crimes)

Chewsday

2011-10-11T12:00:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-10T09:45:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-07T08:10:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-06T09:45:00.000-07:00

(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

2011-10-05T10:45:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-04T10:30:00.000-07:00

(Photo source: Cristopher Nolasco)

Chewsday

2011-10-04T10:15:00.000-07:00

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.

Filipino American History Month Painting of the Day: "Tax Dollars Kill" by Mike "Dream" Francisco

2011-10-03T11:00:00.000-07:00

October is Filipino American History Month, so starting today, I'll be posting a different painting by a Filipino American artist each weekday until Halloween (Monday, October 31).

Mike "Dream" Francisco (1969-2000) was a respected figure in the Bay Area graffiti art scene. Marty Aranaydo, a member of Dream's TDK Crew, summed up his mentor's impact on that scene in a Complex article about Dream:

Dream was the head, heart, and soul of Bay Area graffiti. Dream took the lead stylistically, and pre-internet, he had the Town, and soon the whole Bay Area buzzing. Without being too new agey, Dream's pieces made people feel something, and along with his crews, he innovated what people came to identify as the Oakland and SF style of "Funk." Dream had a deep respect for the East Coast tradition of writing, and he led by example and set the bar with hella ups, dope handstyles, throwups, blockbusters, pieces, and huge, style-forward "productions" that really set the entire West Coast on its ear. In a short period of time, Dream put the Bay Area on his back and established Oakland as a world class graffiti city. 23rd was the epicenter, and 23rd was Dream's court. Anyone can be a king, but everyone LOVED this man. His personality was larger than large.

"It's the only way he can feel": 10 tidbits about the excellent Drive soundtrack

2011-10-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

Drive is a film I initially dismissed as Faster: Caucasian Edition (the main characters in both Faster and Drive share the same minimalist name as the Ryan O'Neal character in Walter Hill's The Driver: "Driver"). I also kept thinking, "What's up with that hot-pink '80s font on the Drive posters and soundtrack album cover? Is this a Hill-style action film or a spinoff of Alice with Linda Lavin?" That was all before I discovered Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's artsy action flick--a European outsider's vision of L.A., much like John Boorman's surreal 1967 classic Point Blank--is one of the most finely crafted pieces of cinema in 2011.

Many critics and bloggers have been crazy about Drive, which Refn adapted from the 2005 James Sallis noir novel of the same name, ever since it earned at Cannes both a 15-minute standing ovation and a Best Director prize for Refn (I wonder what Parker, Taylor Hackford's upcoming adaptation of Donald E. Westlake's The Hunter, the same novel that Boorman made into Point Blank, would have been like under the direction of Refn, whose latest thriller has all the leanness and meanness of a Parker caper).

But to moviegoers who are neither critics nor film geeks who are well-versed in the cinematic and visuals-driven language of Hill, Boorman and Michael Mann, the offbeat and ultraviolent-when-you-least-expect-it Drive--which was influenced by the works of those three directors and many others, yet it doesn't feel derivative and hackneyed--is a love-it-or-hate-it film. It received a C- at CinemaScore, even though it features Albert Brooks in a surprisingly convincing villain role and stars Ryan Gosling in one of his most appealing roles, as an introverted Hollywood stuntman-by-day/getaway driver-by-night who's as contradictory a figure as Steve McQueen in Bullitt or Takeshi Kitano in Fireworks (buried under the laconic, calm and non-threatening-looking exteriors of Gosling, McQueen and Kitano are some really violent dudes) and is as mysterious and somehow beloved by kids as Alan Ladd in Shane.

The C- is most likely due to moviegoers who expected Drive to be what was known in the '90s as a "TBS Movie for Guys Who Like Movies" and were unprepared for a film that's a little less conventional than that and is "fearless about being corny," as Elvis Mitchell said about Drive while interviewing Refn on The Treatment. At the Drive matinee screening I attended, a group of teenage Latinas didn't understand the film or why Gosling's Driver barely spoke to his MacArthur Park neighbor/love interest Irene (Carey Mulligan) and felt it was their responsibility to let everyone in the theater know that they didn't understand--loudly. It resulted in a moviegoing experience that was so lousy--it's one of the lousiest I've ever had--I ranted about it on Twitter, but Drive is so intriguing not even the smug attention whores who snickered in the theater during every scene could taint my enjoyment of the film or its soundtrack.

Speaking of the Drive soundtrack, which consists of '80s-sounding but surprisingly recent Euro-synth tunes that Refn once described as "like Joy Division with a beat" and an ambient original score by Narc composer Cliff Martinez, both the songs and score are pitch-perfect for the film's decadent '80s Thief/To Live and Die in L.A. vibe and are totally addictive outside the context of the film. A few of the selections from the Drive soundtrack can be heard on A Fistful of Soundtracks, but if you're too impatient to wait to catch one of the Drive tracks on AFOS, the Lakeshore Records release, which is selling like gangbusters on iTunes, is worth downloading or picking up.

Here are 10 facts about the music of Drive:

1. In the film, Gosling's wheelman character likes to turn on the radio while waiting for his criminal accomplices to finish their heists. That character detail stemmed from the first time Gosling truly bonded with Refn. Gosling, who wanted to make a superhero movie and thought of Drive as his superhero project, hand-picked Refn to direct the film because he was a fan of the director's previous works, but as Gosling has noted in several interviews, he initially had a difficult time communicating with a standoffish, under-the-weather and high-on-flu-medicine Refn about how they should approach the project until...

"I turn on the radio to quiet the silence and REO Speedwagon's 'Can't Fight This Feeling' comes on," said Gosling, recalling to New York Times writer Dennis Lim his first car ride with Refn (whom Gosling would frequently chauffeur around SoCal because Refn doesn't drive and stopped working on getting his driver's license after failing his driving test eight times). "And I see [Refn] start to cry and he looks at me with tears in his eyes and he starts singing at the top of his lungs and hitting his knees, and he says, 'I know what this movie is, it's a movie about a guy who drives around listening to pop music because it's the only way he can feel.'"

The sounds of a 1985 high school prom bring out the waterworks in Refn? Wow. Remind me not to play Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is" around Refn or else someone's snot will start flowing.

2. On The Treatment, Refn told Mitchell, who likened Drive to a musical, that whenever he starts work on each of his films, he chooses a specific band or artist to constantly listen to as inspiration. During Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands, Refn put on Iron Maiden and then went with Neil Diamond for Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death and Pet Shop Boys for his 2008 cult favorite Bronson. "Music heightens emotions," said Refn to Mitchell. "It gives you images in your head." For Drive, Refn listened to Kraftwerk, hence the Euro-synthy songs and score.

3. Before Refn picked Martinez to score Drive, he approached Portland indie synth-pop producer and Italians Do It Better label co-founder Johnny Jewel about writing the score. In Bronson, Refn prominently featured "Digital Versicolor," a track by Jewel's band Glass Candy (one of a bunch of bands that include Jewel as a member). Jewel jumped at the opportunity to score Drive and completed three hours' worth of score music, but due to deadline issues and some miscommunication, Jewel's score ended up being unused. Jewel wasn't bitter over his Drive score cues getting rejected and is planning to release the unused material on his upcoming imaginary soundtrack project Symmetry.

4. To get inspiration while working on the score cues, Jewel and his Chromatics bandmate Adam Miller drew pictures of scenes from Drive. Jewel also got his musical ideas from posters he made of excerpted text from the novel version of Drive and phrases from the movie. He described his creative process to Box Office magazine, and the artwork that resulted from this process (like the above illustration of Drive femme fatale Christina Hendricks) can be glimpsed on the blog for Desire, one of two of Jewel's bands that get airplay in Drive:

One of the first things I did was I took the book and I highlighted all of the phrases, things like "last day," "sanctuary," all of these different phrases from the movie that stimulated my brain, and I'd print those words really big and put them on the wall. Or while I'm writing--this was sort of like a mantra--we were drawing pictures while watching the movie every day. Because everything I do is like going into this camp mode where we would cut ourselves off. I was watching the movie while taking a bath, I was watching the movie while eating, like every day. Because there was only so much time and I wanted to know the movie inside and out, and I can't be watching the movie while I'm actually writing. While I was actually trying to figure out melodies and things like that, I had to watch the movie as much as possible. We drew almost like every scene--there's like 150 of them--so we drew so much, and then I forgot about them and then stumbled across them a couple of weeks ago.

5. Jewel's 2007 instrumental "Tick of the Clock," performed by The Chromatics, is used during the magnificently directed sequence that opens the film and precedes the hot-pink Mistral font credits: Driver's tense and wordless cat-and-mouse game with the police through the avenues and alleyways of L.A. "Tick of the Clock" is 15 minutes long, so Jewel and Chromatics bandmate Nat Walker cut it down heavily for the film.

CHROMATICS / TICK OF THE CLOCK by ITALIANS DO IT BETTER

6. The other Jewel-produced track in Drive is "Under Your Spell," Desire's 2009 tune about romantic longing. It starts out as source music at the homecoming party that Irene throws for her recently freed ex-con husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) and morphs into non-diegetic music as Driver broods over the fact that Standard's return to Irene and their son Benicio (Kaden Leos) has now turned Driver into a third wheel, no pun intended.

DESIRE / UNDER YOUR SPELL by ITALIANS DO IT BETTER

7. French electro-house musician Kavinsky's 2010 track "Nightcall," Drive's hypnotic opening title theme, was recommended to Refn by Drive editor Mat Newman. The song previously appeared in The Lincoln Lawyer. (Martinez, Drive music supervisors Eric Craig and Brian McNelis and Drive costume designer Erin Benach, who built Driver's superhero-style white satin jacket with the Kenneth Anger-inspired scorpion logo on the back, all also worked on The Lincoln Lawyer.)

"Nightcall," which pairs up Kavinsky, a.k.a. Vincent Belorgey, with Lovefoxxx, a.k.a. Luísa Hanae Matsushita, lead singer of the Brazilian band Cansei de Ser Sexy, was co-written and co-produced by Daft Punk's Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. Kavinsky, who's toured with Daft Punk and looks like he takes his fashion cues from Teen Wolf, has cited among his influences Giorgio Moroder, Ennio Morricone and '80s R&B bands that the French refer to in their language as "moccasin funk": Midnight Star, The Whispers and Shalamar.

Nightcall (feat. Lovefoxxx) by Kavinsky

8. Before he wrote scores for Steven Soderbergh films like The Limey and Contagion and provided an effective and low-key score for Drive, Martinez was a drummer for Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Dickies. (One of Martinez's earliest scoring credits was a second-season episode of the classic '80s show Pee-wee's Playhouse, which Danny Elfman and Mark Mothersbaugh--two other rock musicians-turned-film and TV composers--also wrote music for early on in their film and TV scoring careers.)

9. "A Real Hero" is the song that plays during Drive's L.A. River sequence. Before Standard re-enters the lives of Irene (whom Martinez's propulsive end title theme refers to as "Bride of Deluxe," a reference to "Where's the deluxe version?," a joke Irene made about Standard's first name when she first met him) and Benicio, Driver takes his neighbor and her son for a relaxing afternoon drive through the L.A. River, a site Driver is perhaps familiar with from his stunt driving shoots. The L.A. River was made famous by the racing sequence in Grease and car chases in Repo Man, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and countless other films, shows and music videos.

The most fairy tale-like of Drive's existing songs (Refn envisioned Drive as a fairy tale with Gosling as the knight and Mulligan as the maiden he sets out to rescue), "A Real Hero" is a 2009 collabo between French producer and remixer David Grellier, a.k.a. College, and the Toronto synth-pop duo Electric Youth (named after the Debbie Gibson album of the same name). The tune is reprised at the end of Drive. In a tweet about "A Real Hero," Brad O'Farrell, "starter of the Keyboard Cat meme," said, "Man I like how the 'theme song' of Drive only plays twice, and both times he really earns it."

The vocalist during "A Real Hero" is Electric Youth member Bronwyn Griffin, whose voice has been described by tracasseur.com as "one of the most beautiful in the world of blog electro, it fits so perfectly with [her musical partner Austin Garrick's] happy, bubbly sounds." Grellier, Griffin and Garrick are part of the Valerie Collective. According to the Guardian, the acts that make up this international collective all "blog, create lush, catchy synthpop and generally raise the act of homage to epic, fanatical proportions."

College feat. Electric Youth - A Real Hero [music from the Motion Picture, Drive] by Electric Youth (Official)

Here's another College/Electric Youth song. "She Never Came Back" wouldn't feel out of place in Drive:

10. Heard during the death of a key character, legendary Italian film composer Riz Ortolani's sorrowful "Oh My Love," which features vocals by Katyna Ranieri, is a song from a film that was as notorious for its extreme violence as Drive currently is, Farewell, Uncle Tom. "Either one of the most racist films ever made or a potent condemnation of racism, this 1971 feature from the directors of Mondo Cane is nothing if not brutal," wrote Philadelphia City Paper film critic Sam Adams in 2003, "with gruesome pseudo-documentary footage of slaves being beaten, raped, force-fed with metal funnels and about every other horror you could imagine (and some you hopefully can't)."

When the Italian-made docudrama about the history of American slavery was first shown in America in 1972, Roger Ebert was far less kind to the film than Adams was and found it to be too exploitative.

"Unfortunately, [Gualtiero] Jacopetti and [Franco] Prosperi have been able to find people willing to undergo the humiliation inflicted on them... most of the blacks in the film are apparently Africans forced by poverty and need to do these things for a few days' pitiful wages," wrote Ebert. "Make no mistake. This movie itself humiliates its actors in the way the slaves were humiliated 200 years ago... The fact that this film could find a booking in a legitimate motion-picture theater is depressing."

You might be repulsed by Jacopetti and Prosperi's Mondo movies, either because of their staged footage or the disturbing nature of much of that footage, or you might not find them repulsive, but there's no denying that Ortolani's music for them sounds gorgeous. Ortolani's lush 1962 Mondo Cane theme "Ti guarderò nel cuore," a.k.a. "More," became a frequently covered international hit.

The somber Farewell, Uncle Tom theme is an equally lush composition. It's also the only tune on the Drive soundtrack that's out of place. I skip it whenever I play the entire album because it disrupts the propulsive '80s groove established by "Nightcall," "Under Your Spell" and "A Real Hero" and maintained by Martinez's cues. "Oh My Love" is the speed bump in the otherwise smooth ride that is the Drive soundtrack.

"Grandpa, tell us the story again about the man whose life got flipped, turned upside down": 10 amusing tweets related to TV theme music

2011-09-26T10:45:00.000-07:00

--recent New York Times Magazine profile subject and Office star/writer Mindy Kaling

--Patton Oswalt and A.V. Club writer Noel Murray on TCM's TV ratings graphics music

--Patton Oswalt and John Fugelsang on CSI and The Who

--God_Damn_Batman

--fake lyrics for the instrumental theme from The Good Life, a.k.a. Good Neighbors, the subject of one of The Young Ones' funniest Vyvyan scenes:

--Jonah Hill, looking into the future

--New York Daily News writer Josh Greenman on the July 31, 2011 debt debate

--HitFix's SNL and Fringe recapper Ryan McGee

That is weird, that is bi-Sklar

2011-09-06T11:05:00.000-07:00

(Photo source: The Sklar Brothers)

On one of my favorite podcasts, the Sklar Brothers' Sklarbro Country from the incredibly prolific Earwolf comedy podcast production company, the sports-loving twin brothers poke fun at the batty behavior of sports celebrities and their often equally deranged fans with the same biting and wonderfully rapid-fire delivery they brought to their much-missed ESPN Classic sports clip show Cheap Seats. Randy and Jason Sklar are also huge boosters of indie bands like The Morning Benders and The Henry Clay People, so the beds and mid-show musical interludes in between the Sklarbitrations, Quick Hits, visits from Racist Vin Scully and Sklarson impressions (a.k.a. the Sklars' Johnny Carson impressions) are often indie rock tracks. An occasional hip-hop joint gets thrown into the mix because fortunately, the brothers' musical tastes aren't limited to the "flaccid, smarmy, girl-pant, bearded, fixie bike rock" that one Sklarbro Country fan amusingly complained about in the Earwolf site's comments section (he's right about the stupidity of guys wearing girl pants though).

You know how TV shows like The Sopranos, Grey's Anatomy and more recently, Breaking Bad have replaced terrestrial radio and MTV as a place to discover sounds by new artists whenever the shows utilize existing songs as either source music or "needle drops" for montages or action sequences (which led to several newspaper and music magazine articles declaring that "scripted TV is the new radio")? The beds and musical interludes on comedy podcasts are turning into another great place to unearth new sounds. Sklarbro Country was where I was first exposed to terrific tunes like The Morning Benders' "Cold War (Nice Clean Fight)" and Those Darlins' "Screws Get Loose."

When an ill track I've never heard before like Ana Tijoux's "1977" gets airplay on a series like Breaking Bad, I have to play detective and hunt for it online (that is if Alan Sepinwall doesn't ID the track on his blog, but he usually does so). Fortunately, the Sklar Brothers ID each tune for the listeners (and the guest comedians who are sometimes curious about a tune's title) as it's being played by their sound engineer, so I don't have to play detective, although I wish the brothers posted the track titles on the Earwolf site. Many Sklarbro Country listeners like myself have wondered where they could find playlist information. A few days ago, I discovered the Sklars have been posting playlist info, but on their WhoSay site (and in Twitpic form instead of as text for some bi-Sklar reason).

In addition to being a standout installment (I love the Sklars' takedown of Japan-bashing WNBA guard Cappie Poindexter, as well as special guest Kumail Nanjiani's takedown of "Crappy Henderson... what's her name?," whom he'd take more seriously "if the WNBA used regular-colored basketballs"), Sklarbro Country episode 34 is a good example of the show's inspired choices for existing songs. What other show goes from J Mascis to Warren G and the late Nate Dogg?

"If I wanted Chekhov, I'd have worn my polo neck": The best existing songs that are theme music for shows you've probably never heard of

2011-08-29T10:30:00.000-07:00

1. "Somebody Start a Fight or Something" by TISM (The Green Room with Paul Provenza)
This rousing 2004 track by the Aussie alt-rock band TISM delivers a message of "Drop your pretentious airs and start keeping it real" ("Listen, motherfucker, let me make this clear/I've had your fucking poetry up to here... If I wanted Chekhov, I'd have worn my polo neck"), so it's the perfect theme music for a frank and uncensored Showtime stand-up comic panel show that's the anti-Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen.

In other words, the stand-ups are required to have an actual conversation with each other, instead of pretending they're having a conversation when what they're really doing is just reciting their routines. Moderator Paul Provenza's anti-Comics Unleashed format has resulted in lively and thought-provoking discussions like the one Provenza, Bill Burr, Lizz Winstead, Russell Peters, Colin Quinn, Caroline Rhea and Tony Clifton (!) had about Tracy Morgan's apologies for his homophobic jokes during a recent episode that took place at Montreal's Just for Laughs festival. (Also in that same episode, Peters, an Indian Canadian comic, gives the funniest description of what porn flicks are like in a country where its movie stars can't even kiss onscreen. I can't do Peters' Indian porn joke any justice if I attempt to repeat it, so I won't attempt to.)

During an interview to promote The Green Room, Provenza said one of the purposes of his show is to get stand-ups who are always "on" to leave behind their one-liner comfort zones or stage personas and just be themselves. The frequent archness of the present-day stand-up world is a trend he dislikes:

Many comedians these days "take on characters. It's a lot of winking and nodding. Some comedians almost even apologize for the fact that they're working in the form of comedy, and they make fun of the form as they're doing it. That's the overriding trend. So what you get is people who are not actually talking from the heart. They're always putting some layer of detachment from their real, you know, emotional and intellectual passions."

In other words, he wants them to pull no punches, whether it's onstage or on The Green Room. Somebody start a fight or something.

2. "Yalili Ya Aini" by Jah Wobble's Invaders of the Heart (The Smartest Man in the World)
I first heard this hypnotic 1994 track by former Public Image Ltd bassist Jah Wobble, his band Invaders of the Heart and singer Natacha Atlas (Allmusic calls it "one of the best bits of sexy, North African lurch that Wobble and [guitarist Justin] Adams have ever set to tape") while tuning in to SomaFM's Secret Agent, which has it on constant rotation. So when it wound up as the theme music for comedian Greg Proops' stream-of-consciousness podcast The Smartest Man in the World, I thought, "Sweet! It's that Arabian-sounding chillout joint from Secret Agent with the title that always escapes me."

"Yalili Ya Aini" perfectly establishes the nocturnal and international feel of The Smartest Man, which is recorded in front of a live audience, either at The Smartest Man's homebase, West Hollywood's Bar Lubitsch, or whatever venue Proops is performing at that night, whether it's in his old home turf of San Francisco or Melbourne. Unlike most comedy podcasts, The Smartest Man doesn't follow an interview format.

"I knew I didn't want to do that [interview format] because other people were doing it and doing better. Marc [Maron] and Jimmy [Pardo] and everybody just murdering it," said Proops to Laughspin.

What listeners are getting in each Proopcast is essentially an extra 60-to-70-minute stand-up set by Proops. But instead of joke-after-joke-after-joke, Proops delivers not-always-jokey but always interesting ruminations on current events, music, film history, baseball history (he's particularly fond of the San Francisco Giants and the achievements of the Negro Leagues, so he's joked that no Proopcast is complete without him mentioning Satchel Paige) and politics (he's progressive, so President Obama, who has been to progressives what the Green Lantern movie is to nerds, irks him as much as the Tea Party does).

The Smartest Man is where I got my first exposure to British punk poet John Cooper Clarke's "Evidently Chickentown," which Proops once recited to thunderous applause. I've become a new fan of "Evidently Chickentown"--and I don't even like spoken word (here's how much I understand the appeal of spoken word: whenever there's a slam poet on TV, I'm like, "Okay, when's the DJ gonna show up and drop the beat?").

Basically, The Smartest Man is like Craig Ferguson's freewheeling monologue but much more political and not as Scottish. And a little trancey, thanks to "Yalili Ya Aini."

3. "Elysian Fields" by Minus 8 (Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence)
Elvis Mitchell had the suavest opening titles of any interview show. On a loungy-looking NEP Studios set decorated with dangling lightbulbs, Mitchell walked out dressed to the nines, to the tune of the swanky 2000 downtempo track "Elysian Fields" by Minus 8, a.k.a. Swiss DJ/producer Robert Jan Meyer. This wasn't Conan in a suit gawkily riding his bicycle through Manhattan in the opening credits, that's for damn sure.

Under the Influence, in which the host of KCRW's The Treatment would chat with actors and directors about movies and movie stars they admire, was produced for only one season on TCM in 2008, but TCM still airs it from time to time. The Bill Murray episode is worth DVRing (the Laurence Fishburne ep is pretty good too). Mitchell was able to get Murray, who's notoriously guarded (except when he's on Letterman), to open up during his show and give candid discussions about movie acting and comediennes he either enjoyed watching ("Elaine May is like the most attractive woman in the world... If I had come up when Elaine May was coming up, I would have chained her to a typewriter and made love to her like every four hours just to keep her going. She's the funniest.") or couldn't understand the appeal of ("[Lucille Ball] never really made me laugh for some reason. I don't know why. Lucy was never my girl.").

"Elysian Fields" was a great choice to open and close a TCM interview show because of Minus 8's samples of dialogue from old movies (in the original version of "Elysian Fields," the samples are from the first Bogart/Bacall scene in one of my favorite movies, The Big Sleep, but the 2007 version that was used during Under the Influence replaced the Big Sleep audio with dialogue from some old movie I've never seen and is most likely not as awesome as The Big Sleep). I wonder how the Under the Influence intro would have looked with "Yakety Sax" instead of "Elysian Fields." Alex, I think I'll go with "What is not-as-suave?"

4. "Reckoner" by Radiohead (Vanguard)
Any investigative journalism series that would open with Radiohead is tops in my book. For those who weren't aware of Current TV before Keith Olbermann joined the channel, it was best known for the compelling and sometimes difficult-to-watch documentary series Vanguard. Correspondents like Laura Ling, Mariana van Zeller and Adam Yamaguchi often put their lives at risk for the sake of the story. One such story, human trafficking in North Korea, brought international attention to Vanguard in 2009 when the North Korean government arrested Ling and her footage editor Euna Lee for trespassing while they were doing research for their piece. Ling and Lee were sentenced to a labor camp for 12 years--until Bill and Hillary Clinton intervened and ex-President Clinton successfully negotiated with Kim Jong Il for their release.

Though Vanguard no longer uses Radiohead's enigmatic and contemplative 2008 track "Reckoner," it's still an incredible program. The recent Vanguard installment "Sex, Lies & Cigarettes" is an intriguing examination of the tobacco industry's insidious marketing tactics in Third World countries like the Smoking Baby's home turf of Indonesia, although there's an angle that Vanguard overlooked: the connection between the tobacco industry's tactics and environmental racism.

Gnarls Barkley's equally terrific live cover of "Reckoner":

5. "Pheromone" by Prince (Video LP)
I remember coming home from school and turning on The Avengers on A&E and flipping over to BET's music video/interview program Video LP whenever Steed and Peel were interrupted by a commercial break. I went back and forth between enjoying young Diana Rigg's catsuited body and judo chops and enjoying Video LP host Madelyne Woods' legs, as well as the way she maintained her resolve in the face of inarticulate rappers and new jack musicians whom I realized I never wanted to hear speak in interviews.

I know some rappers fare well in an interview setting, but most of them don't, and as someone who digs their music, it's torturous to watch or hear. If you want to hear their opinions, just listen to their lyrics. Don't drag them to do a lengthy interview. They're lost without a breakbeat or a beatbox (or a bong). It's like when HBO tries to interview boxers after their fights. What do they expect them to say after 12 rounds? "The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain"? What's more likely to come out of their mouths is "Myeyzcudopngrb."

Back to Woods and Video LP. Woods left BET a long time ago but is still a reporter (and is actually on Twitter), and Video LP is largely forgotten, aside from a few YouTube clips and A Tribe Called Quest's "Electric Relaxation," in which Phife Dawg--one of those MCs who thrives in an interview setting--name-checked Woods ("Hon, you got the goods, like Madelyne Woods").

Video LP also bears the distinction of being the only TV show that contained theme music by Prince (he contributed to Video LP an instrumental version of "Pheromone," a song that later surfaced on his 1994 album Come). I bet Prince frowns upon scripted TV (even though he once made a guest appearance on Muppets Tonight), but I wish he'd contribute another TV theme because he's such a musical genius. It would probably sound like this (FF to 3:29):

That's the Attack the Block score that you're hearing on A Fistful of Soundtracks, bruv, believe it

2011-08-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

(Photo source: Alex Pardee)

Back in March, I said, "Add The Chemical Brothers' richly written and often dance floor-friendly original score from the teenage assassin thriller Hanna to the list of awesome scores by electronica or rock musicians who never scored for film before." It's time to add another one.

Set in a rough South London neighborhood attacked by "gorilla wolf muthafuckas" from outer space, the British cult favorite Attack the Block is the best popcorn movie this summer. Beleedat. (Most American moviegoers still haven't heard of Attack the Block, but Screen Gems has been hoping to change that by expanding Attack the Block's release to six more cities last week.) One of the movie's most enjoyable elements is the original score, the first ever written by the British dance act Basement Jaxx, whose tunes have often popped up in advertising (my first exposure to Basement Jaxx was an early '00s Coke ad that featured a group of svelte campfire partiers and an isolated and not-as-svelte nerd dancing in the woods to the catchy "Red Alert," while "Do Your Thing" was all over Disney's ads for Ratatouille).

Basement Jaxx (a.k.a. Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe) co-composed the score with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World music editor Steven Price, and their score accomplishes well what it set out to do, which, according to Attack the Block writer/director Joe Cornish in the score album's liner notes, was "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."

Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 theme is so beloved by beatmakers that its influence can be felt in many of their instrumentals, including Buxton, Ratcliffe and Price's cues in Attack the Block. Starting this week, my favorite Attack the Block cues attack three blocks on A Fistful of Soundtracks: "Assorted Fistful," "New Cue Revue" and "The Street." One of these selections that I've added to rotation is the bagpipes-filled, dubstep-style end title theme "The Ends."

Basement Jaxx - "The Ends" from "Attack The Block" by Basement Jaxx

Attack the Block is inventive sci-fi with a youth of color as the lead for a change, as well as an inspired critique of the demonization of the working class in the U.K. A one-time mugging victim who wanted to better understand his muggers and their lives instead of being resentful and fearful of them, Cornish takes working-class kids like Moses (John Boyega) and the bespectacled and brainy Jerome (Leeon Jones) (their mugging of Jodie Whittaker's nurse/neighbor character Sam at the start of the film was based on the incident Cornish experienced) and fleshes out those characters to prove the irrationality of demonizing the underclass.

"At the beginning of the film these kids are masked, they're hooded, you don't know how old they are, you have no sense of their humanity or identity and indeed, with their language, you're confused, you're alienated from them," said Cornish to RopeofSilicon. "Then the purpose of the story is to strip away all those barriers and to make you understand they're human beings. Not perfectly good, squeaky clean human beings, flawed human beings like all of us."

On Twitter, I've seen people say they refuse to give Attack the Block the time of day because its ads' imagery of South London "hoodies" violently defending their council estate from alien invaders either reminds them too much of the U.K. riots (which erupted a few weeks after the movie hit American theaters) or appears to condone those riots. They're inanely passing judgment on a movie they haven't seen. Attack the Block is hardly as one-dimensional as they think. It's a story about the consequences of thuggish behavior, whether it's the hoodies' mugging of Sam and Moses' killing of the alien at the start of the film or the looting that went down in the U.K. riots.

"People really suggested the riots in my home town were linked to the movie? Unbelievable," tweeted BBC journalist Ben Fell to an Attack the Block fan after he saw Twitterers denounce the movie before watching it.

To borrow the title and chorus of one of Basement Jaxx's biggest hits, I'd like to say to the haters, "Where's your head at?!"

Related links:
• "Too Much Madness to Explain in One Text: On the U.K. Riots and Attack the Block" [The Playlist]
• "'We're Not All Vile Thugs'" (an Attack the Block cast member blasts both the looters and the London police) [Daily Star]
• "Rap responds to the riots: 'They have to take us seriously'" [Guardian]

(Photo source: RopeofSilicon)

The style guide for A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog

2011-08-22T10:30:00.000-07:00

(Photo source: BACKYard Woods Explorer)

• Titles of songs, album tracks, short stories, TV series episodes, DVD or Blu-ray featurettes and cable channel or radio station programming blocks are always contained within quotation marks. Example from July 29, 2011: The "Rome, Italian Style" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks airs Mondays through Thursdays from 11am to noon. (However, even though Adult Swim is still technically a Cartoon Network programming block, the name isn't contained within quotes because Adult Swim evolved from a single-night block to a larger entity that Nielsen officially recognized as distinct from Cartoon Network in 2005, much like what happened to Nickelodeon's Nick at Nite.)

• Occupations or descriptive adjectives and nouns that appear before people's names are never capitalized. Example: constant self-recycler James Horner.

• Terms like "Filipino American," "Asian American" or "African American," which some writers prefer to hyphenate, are not hyphenated.

• The interpunct that used to be part of the Frito-Lay product name "Chee·tos" is absent whenever Cheetos is mentioned because of Frito-Lay's current official spelling, which removed the interpunct. Example: Why the hell does John Malkovich look like a human Cheeto during Transformers: Dark of the Moon?

• Numbers from one to nine are spelled out. Numbers above nine are written as figures (10, 11, 12, etc.) but are spelled out whenever they're the first words in sentences.

• The movie title Se7en and the procedural title Numb3rs maintain their unique spelling even though it looks stup1d.

• If a person is a Jr. or Sr., there is no comma between the name and Jr. or Sr. Example from January 13, 2009: Downey Jr. never drops character until the commentary is over.

• An ellipsis indicates a hammy pause. Example: "Dammit, Bones... this girdle you gave me for... my birthday... is too... constricting."

• Titles of movies, TV series, radio programs, podcasts, books, comic book series, magazines and newspapers are always italicized.

• Cardassians are whores for fascism. Kardashians are whores for attention.

(Photo source: Overthinking It)

• Names of online magazines like Salon and Slate are italicized. Names of blogs like DISGRASIAN, Burnt Lumpia and MovieMorlocks are not italicized.

• A Corolla is a car I damaged while driving it when I was a teen. A Carolla is a racist douchebag whose ass will get damaged by a gang of Pinoy teens if he ever sets foot in Daly City.

• Names of races and nationalities like African, Latino and Filipino are capitalized, but racial adjectives like "black," "white" and "brown" are not.

• "Sit for Baines" is a Back to the Future prequel fanfic about teenage George McFly's bumbling attempts to get to better know his crush Lorraine Baines by babysitting her younger brothers. "Shit for brains" is Fox News whenever it refers to Common as a gangsta rapper.

• Though this is an American blog and the word "license" is always spelled with just one "c," the British spelling of the 007 movie title Licence to Kill is left unchanged.

• "Michele Bachmann" is spelled with just one glassy "i."

Yo, Gab a-gabbin': Rodrigo y Gabriela gab with DirecTV's Guitar Center Sessions about their busking days and Pirates of the Caribbean

2011-08-10T10:30:00.000-07:00

DirecTV subscribers who are fans of either the Mexican instrumental rock duo Rodrigo y Gabriela or their music in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides will get a kick out of the Rod y Gab episode of DirecTV's Audience Network music talk show Guitar Center Sessions. I wasn't aware until I first watched the episode last week on the Audience Network (DirecTV channels 101, 239, 334 or 500) that it's been airing since July 9.

On this edition of Guitar Center Sessions, which is being re-aired constantly throughout the summer, Rod y Gab tell host Nic Harcourt what it was like to work with Hans Zimmer on their first film music project Pirates (they enjoyed the film scoring process even though it was really challenging), as well as how they shaped their instrumental rock sound while busking on the streets of Dublin (the one in Ireland, that is, not the Dublin I'm more familiar with).

The Guitar Center Sessions ep is helping promote the Mexican metalheads' live album Live in France, which dropped July 19 and is excellent. So is their Pirates music, which is my favorite element of the On Stranger Tides movie. The On Stranger Tides album track "The Pirate That Should Not Be," which features the acoustic metal duo's cover of the Captain Jack Sparrow theme, doesn't appear in the movie, but like the Guitar Center Sessions ep, the "Pirate That Should Not Be" video gives a good idea of what Rod y Gab are like on stage for those who aren't familiar with this amazing duo.