"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

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."

Goh Nakamura records a tune based on the movie White on Rice

My older brother's a fan of witty Bay Area singer/songwriter Goh Nakamura, "who writes ditties about parking tickets, impossible crushes and faraway dreamlands." One of those impossible crushes is on Natalie Portman, the subject of my favorite Nakamura track, "N.P." ("And you can retain your maiden name/And I'll be 'Goh Portman'/till my dying day/And I'll be 'Mr. Portman'--it'll be written on my epitaph/I'll be 'Mr. Portman' just like your dad").

Nakamura wrote and recorded a nice tune inspired by director Dave Boyle's indie comedy White on Rice. Like "N.P.," both the song and Boyle's film are about a dreamer with an impossible crush, an immature 40-year-old Japanese immigrant (Hiroshi Watanabe) who competes with a younger, suaver and much more Americanized Korean co-worker (Heroes' James Kyson Lee) for the affections of his brother-in-law's beautiful niece (Saving Face star and Secret Identities contributor Lynn Chen).

White on Rice has been hyped all over the Asian American blogosphere. angry asian man said "Watanabe is brilliant as one of the most annoying and unlikeable heroes you'll ever find yourself rooting for," and Ningin praised how the film "doesn't rely on the usual stereotypes," while non-Asian reviewers seem to be less enthusiastic about White on Rice. Cinepassion's Fernando F. Croce gave it one out of four stars and called it an "asphyxiating ethnic sitcom." PopMatters' Cynthia Fuchs found the "outrageous-silly-boyness" of White on Rice (and similarly toned previous comedies like Napoleon Dynamite and Eagle vs. Shark) to be repetitive and monotonous, which means Rotten Tomatoes Show hosts Ellen Fox and Brett Erlich, who pointed out how formulaic indie comedies have become in a savage spoof of Juno's "Anyone Else But You" number, will probably hate it.

I don't watch the music video channels anymore. Do labels still make atrocious videos of movie themes or songs inspired by movies in which clips from the film are haphazardly edited together with footage of the stars pretending to jam with the singer? The "White on Rice" video features Watanabe and Lee doing exactly that together, except not on the same rooftop with Nakamura (were Watanabe and Lee unable to meet Nakamura?--it looks like they're not even in the same city). It reminds me of those '80s and '90s tie-in videos, except it's less cheesy, and Nakamura's tune doesn't suck.

Laura Ling and Euna Lee freed: A day I didn't expect to happen so soon

Bill Clinton, who successfully negotiated for the release of Current TV staffers-turned-prisoners of North Korea Laura Ling and Euna Lee, greets Lee on their plane back to L.A. in this unusually uplifting AP photo.

How did Clinton get it done? How did he persuade the famously implacable, Star Trek starbase jumpsuit-loving Kim Jong Il? Did he threaten Kimbo with pictures of the dictator with a goat?

Whatever Clinton did, I'm jazzed to see that Ling and Lee's ordeal is over and they can finally be reunited with their respective families.

Today's that rare day when Craig Ferguson's monologue catchphrase, "It's a great day for America," is something I can concur with.

"The Best of Jimmy J. Aquino on Twitter," Part 3

My archive of earlier tweets from my Twitter page continues.

Previously on A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog: Parts 1 and 2.

In a set of tweets from April, I liveblogged 1991's The Rocketeer.

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I've been rewatching Rocketeer as research for uh... something. Last time I saw it was when it aired on Disney Channel in the early '90s.
4:31 PM Apr 25th from web

3 Disney employees need to be pimp-slapped: Miley the racist ho, the equally racist Joe Jonas and whoever handled Rocketeer's DVD transfer.
>4:33 PM Apr 25th from web

It's nice to finally see Rocketeer in WS, but Disney's transfer is so janky I had the same expression I get when I hear Miley Cyrus sing.
4:34 PM Apr 25th from web


The Rocketeer DVD's non-anamorphic, grainy transfer doesn't do justice to Hiro Narita's cinematography and Jennifer Connelly's cleavage.
4:36 PM Apr 25th from web

Why do many of my favorite actioners (Rocketeer, the original Taking of Pelham, Johnnie To's The Mission) get the crappiest DVD transfers?
4:37 PM Apr 25th from web


Billy Campbell--TV's go-to guy for middle-aged scumbags when Eric Roberts is busy acting in rap videos--looks like he's 12 in The Rocketeer.
4:39 PM Apr 25th from web

I forgot that Locke was in The Rocketeer. Because it's a Disney film, Terry O'Quinn's Howard Hughes doesn't collect jars of his own piss.
4:42 PM Apr 25th from web

Though I think Timothy Dalton is underrated as 007, @nathanrabin is right on about him being more compelling as Neville Sinclair than as JB.
4:47 PM Apr 25th from web


One of the funniest scenes in Rocketeer is when Neville tries to spit game at Jenny, and she notices all his lines are from his movies.
4:51 PM Apr 25th from web

Jennifer Connelly's Jenny Blake: hottest-looking film geek ever.
4:52 PM Apr 25th from web

A lot of H!ITG!'s in The Rocketeer: Margo Martindale, Jan from The Office singing at a '30s club, Midnight Run "Hopalong Cassidiche" guy...
4:59 PM Apr 25th from web


Am I the only one who thinks Rocketeer--which tanked in '91--has aged better than the more popular actioners from that summer (T2, RH:POT)?
5:01 PM Apr 25th from web

In Living Color did a then-amusing Latino version of Rocketeer after the film came out. I remember his leafblower doubled as his jet pack.
5:03 PM Apr 25th from web

@pfunn If there'll ever be a Rocketeer double-dip, it needs an extra pointing out each of the film's countless references to Old Hollywood.
5:12 PM Apr 25th from web in reply to pfunn



A couple of clickworthy pieces on The Rocketeer, by @nathanrabin (http://tinyurl.com/d35dvz) and Scott Tipton (http://tinyurl.com/dah5o6).
5:14 PM Apr 25th from web

In his obit for Dave Stevens, @evanier said that after Rocketeer tanked, DS lost interest in doing more Rktr comics, which was unfortunate.
5:16 PM Apr 25th from web


The Rocketeer got me pumped over IDW's Rocketeer reprints, which I'm dying to read b/c I want to research more about Dave Stevens' creation.
5:18 PM Apr 25th from web

From April '08: A FISTFUL OF SOUNDTRACKS: THE BLOG: What if Rick Berman continued making #StarTrek movies?: http://tinyurl.com/cznosm
2:38 AM May 6th from web

I was searching my parents' garage for some old Starlog issues that contained articles about The Rocketeer and Gerald Fried and...
10:16 AM May 8th from web

...in my parents' garage, I stumbled into some '80s G.I. Joe comics by Larry Hama, whose work all of us Secret Identities creators admire.
10:17 AM May 8th from web

A fistful of classic Larry Hama G.I. Joe comics = some kickass bathroom reading. (Tweet number 300. This! Is! Cobra-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!)
10:19 AM May 8th from web

Among the G.I. Joe comics I unearthed from the garage: G.I. Joe #61 (July 1987), which has a dope Mike Zeck cover: http://tinyurl.com/p8nkqq
10:21 AM May 8th from web

G.I. Joe #61 is about the rescue of a U.S. reporter accused of espionage, an eerie precursor to the imprisonment of Laura Ling and Euna Lee.
10:22 AM May 8th from web

G.I. Joe #61 makes me wish for a special ops unit to sneak into North Korea and get Laura Ling and Euna Lee the hell out of there.
10:22 AM May 8th from web

Though I enjoyed Abrams' #StarTrek, I'm sick and tired of time travel and madmen trying to destroy Earth a la Khan, Kruge, Soran & Shinzon.
10:14 AM May 12th from web

Trek VI & Casino Royale proved you can have villains who aren't concerned w/ global domination & yet it still feels like plenty's at stake.
10:16 AM May 12th from web

An article from my past as a journo: De Niro and Brando sleepwalk through The Score: http://tinyurl.com/ocp3yv
10:24 AM May 12th from web

Favorite #StarTrek in-joke: Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" during prepube Kirk's joyride is a nod to Shatner's TAS "sabotage" pronunciation rant.
3:26 PM May 12th from web

Why so few Filipinos during JJA's #StarTrek? "Must have been a Pacquiao fight going on that day," jokes @moonielantion: http://bit.ly/xKLUv
3:28 PM May 12th from web

To be continued.

"The Best of Jimmy J. Aquino on Twitter," Part 1

In March, I gave up resisting Twitter and launched a page there to write any blog posts that are only two or three sentences long. I didn't like Twitter at first, but I've adjusted to it, and now I think it's a more enjoyable and appealing microblogging/social networking site than the cluttered and less stripped-down Facebook.

I've found Twitter's 140-character limit to be a great way to test out my humor writing and be better at brevity. On Facebook, members have somehow discovered ways to bypass the character limit on their status updates, which has resulted in two things: 1) a lot of users writing updates that are longer than the Iliad, which kills the point of a microblog, and 2) me glancing briefly at those long-winded updates and wanting to log out of Facebook as fast as I can.

However, Twitter has a few downsides as well. Too many Twitterers have used the site to write some of the most vapid and boring microblogs I've ever come across (which resulted in Lewis Black uttering on Attack of the Show one of my favorite quotes about vapid-sounding Twitterers, "I'm not that interested in my life! What kind of ego do you have to have to think other people are interested?... If you're walking around telling people what you're doing, then guess what, you're not really doing it, are you? You're describing it!"). Instead of tweeting nonstop about every single activity in my life, I've preferred to focus most of my tweets on either the Fistful of Soundtracks radio station, movies and shows I've watched, links I want people to check out or links to the posts I write here at afistfulofsoundtracks.blogspot.com.

But the biggest downside of Twitter for me is that unlike Blogger or WordPress, Twitter doesn't automatically create archives of your older tweets, making it difficult to access older tweets that either you or someone else posted. If you want to access an older tweet without repeatedly clicking on the "more" link at the bottom of the page, you have to have previously copied and pasted the tweet's URL somewhere on your computer (like on Notepad) so that you can copy and paste that URL into your browser.

Because of the lack of an archive section on my Twitter page, here's a compilation of the tweets from my page that have received replies or have been retweeted (Twitter slang for being quoted), starting with my very first tweet.

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Dammit. I give up. I'm on Twitter now though I'm not feelin' the concept. I'm joining only b/c writing 140-ch. posts on Blogger seems lame.
12:59 PM Mar 14th from web

Awesome. My first word on Twitter was "Dammit," which, in the Cosby household, means "Russell."
12:59 PM Mar 14th from web

You know who does the best dammits on TV? Kiefer. Not since DeForest Kelley has someone taken dammiting to a whole 'nother level.
1:00 PM Mar 14th from web


@pfunn I see that dumb new name and I think, "Shouldn't it be pronounced 'sy-fee,' as in the Syufy [sy-yoo-fee] movie theater chain?"
1:31 PM Mar 16th from web in reply to pfunn

Rotten Tomatoes Show on @current is the anti-Movie Mob. Their webcam reviews come from intelligent folks, not annoying attention whores.
11:15 AM Mar 20th from web

I prefer Savage Steve Holland (Better Off Dead) over John Hughes b/c SSH's '80s comedies aren't as racist as Hughes'--and they're weirder.
11:37 AM Mar 20th from web

Savage Steve Holland's How I Got Into College is on Fox Movie Channel right now. Damn, tanktop-clad Tom Kenny is paler than @jimgaffigan.
11:38 AM Mar 20th from web

Is it me or do some Twitterers sound like Norm MacDonald as Larry King reading his USA Today News & Views column? http://tinyurl.com/d2m79h
4:08 PM Mar 21st from web

How nice. An earthquake just woke me up.
10:46 AM Mar 30th from web

Dammit, I can't get that silly Lady Gaga "this beat is sick" refrain out of my head ever since I first heard it on #Chuck last week.
1:30 AM Apr 11th from web


@gcdb She's the creation of a gay mad scientist who needed a new icon to worship b/c Madonna and Dona Versace are getting too old & creepy.
8:34 AM Apr 11th from web in reply to gcdb


@gcdb I bet every Canadian right now wants to bitchslap Billy Bob Thornton just like how Kurt Russell slaps around BBT in that movie.
7:56 PM Apr 11th from web in reply to gcdb

There needs to be an Asian American comedians' version of MST3K or Cinematic Titanic or #twitflixing (like the HGers' skewering of Crank 2).
4:08 AM Apr 17th from web

Why are Asian Americans always so serious and humorless and tweedy when they write essays or posts about racist pieces of shit like Crank 2?
4:13 AM Apr 17th from web

We Asian Americans need to take a cue from MST or HG or Paul Mooney and try a comic approach to ripping to shreds the Crank 2s of the world.
4:18 AM Apr 17th from web

@ALBaroza I want to do a live show in which an AA comic & I do snarky running com. on a racist flick. A RiffTrax-ish site might be dope too.
11:28 AM Apr 17th from web in reply to ALBaroza

"Why don't you make like a bass player and be inaudible?"--Metalocalypse. I've posted my all-time favorite basslines on @LivingSocial.
9:15 AM Apr 20th from web

Dopest basslines: 5. Jamiroquai, "Space Cowboy (Stoned Again Mix)"--the ultimate #420 anthem. Bassist: Stuart Zender.
9:18 AM Apr 20th from web


Basslines: 4. Jack Elliott and Allyn Ferguson's Barney Miller theme. Bassist: Jim Hughart. Rarely does a Jew on TV get a theme this funky.
9:20 AM Apr 20th from web

Basslines: 3. Freddie Hubbard, "Red Clay." Bassist: Ron Carter. ATCQ fans know this bassline from "Sucka N," which sampled a cover of "RC."
9:24 AM Apr 20th from web

Dopest basslines: 2. Slave, "Just a Touch of Love." Bassist: Mark Adams. Sampled by De La Soul ("Keepin' the Faith") and Das EFX ("Shine").
9:27 AM Apr 20th from web

Dopest basslines: 1. The Smiths, "This Charming Man." Bassist: Andy Rourke. His bass work is the coolest part of the chune.
9:30 AM Apr 20th from web


I can never hear "Ready to Go" by Republica again without thinking of Dr. Girlfriend.
4:33 PM Apr 20th from web

To be continued.

Transformers: Revenge of The Onion

Here's the best one-paragraph summary of Michael Bay's Transformers I've ever come across (while reading the A.V. Club):

Everyone complaining that Michael Bay's 2007 blockbuster Transformers had inappropriate sexual contact with their childhoods is forgetting one thing: The original '80s cartoon had an awful lot of problems too, starting with wildly inconsistent animation and some pretty basic '80s cartoon plots, in which the bad guys engaged in generally harebrained schemes unworthy of titanic alien-robot forces of destruction. That said, Bay's movie should have been a slam-dunk in the "scary robots" department, simply by virtue of introducing giant, homicidal, heavily armed metal men to Earth. Instead, much like Lucas in Phantom Menace, Bay went for goofy designs and goofier behavior. His Autobots and Decepticons look like unassembled, building-sized Erector sets, and their use of already-dated human slang and contemporary references, plus the generally insipid, adolescent tone of the movie, robbed them of all majesty and menace. And hey, more of them are on the way this summer.

It's as if the A.V. Club read my mind. The '80s Transformers cartoon's animation was choppier than whatever the ShamWow guy does to his nuts.

An old G.I. Joe comic has eerie parallels to Laura Ling's ordeal

I posted about this recently on my Twitter page. While searching my storage boxes in my parents' dusty garage for some old Starlog issues because I wanted to look at a couple of Starlog articles about Gerald Fried and the making of The Rocketeer, I stumbled into a stack of '80s Marvel G.I. Joe comics written by Asian American comics author Larry Hama, whose work is admired by all of us creators from Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology. (Quick Kick--one of the few Asian American heroes in '80s comics and voiced on the original G.I. Joe animated show by none other than Dr. Pierre Chang--was Hama's creation. A chat between Hama and Secret Asian Man creator Tak Toyoshima appears in Secret Identities as an interstitial feature drawn by Tak.)

At the top of the stack of G.I. Joe comics I unearthed from the garage was one of the first comics I bought for myself, G.I. Joe #61 from July 1987, which is notable for two things: a badass Mike Zeck cover depicting Snow Job, a wounded Quick Kick and a mad-as-hell Stalker in the middle of a shootout (one of my all-time favorite comics covers) and some early Todd McFarlane artwork that Marvel rejected because it didn't meet their standards. Marvel replaced the future Amazing Spider-Man and Spawn illustrator with Marshall Rogers, whose late '70s Batman comics I've always dug (one of Rogers' Batman stories was later adapted by Batman: The Animated Series into "The Laughing Fish").

But McFarlane's scrapped art actually isn't the most interesting thing about issue #61, which, like many of Hama's other G.I. Joe comics, is grittier than the bloodless, Star Wars-like '80s animated series and Paramount's upcoming G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. (Uh, Stephen Sommers, I think you've gotten your '80s cartoons mixed up. The shiny skintight power suits aren't G.I. Joe. That's Silverhawks, pal. And that long-winded Rise of Cobra title is terrible. It's not going to attract non-fans who think it's a documentary about health insurance for the unemployed.)

Hama's story in #61 centers on the Joe unit's attempted rescue of an American reporter who's arrested on trumped-up espionage charges in the fictional country of Borovia.

While re-reading #61, I couldn't help but think of recent headlines involving captured journalists, like the North Korean detainment of Current TV staffers Laura Ling--a correspondent for Current's Vanguard and the younger sister of reporter and ex-View co-host Lisa Ling--and Euna Lee.

Hama's comic makes me wish that a special ops unit would sneak into North Korea and bust them the hell out of there.

Those of us former or current journos who are worried about Ling and Lee's impending trial (and hope they are released like captured Iranian American journo Roxana Saberi recently was) should read the LiberateLaura Twitter page, which has been posting both updates on Ling and Lee's case and links to candlelight vigil announcements and press coverage. I first learned about the page when its tweeter replied to my tweets about the 1987 G.I. Joe issue.

A lot of bloggers are blasting the Al Gore-owned channel for not publicly acknowledging the ordeal. Current continues to air Ling's past Vanguard segments as if nothing awful has happened to her. For instance, the channel has lately put Ling's segment about Vietnamese bird flu into heavy rotation because of its relevance to the swine flu problem, but Current Tonight host Rawley Valverde didn't mention his colleague's present situation at all during a recently recorded intro that preceded the bird flu segment. The channel's silence must be due to legal reasons--as angry asian man notes, not even Ling's family members can publicly "go into detail regarding her ordeal due to the sensitive nature of the case"--and what I assume is the Current staff's discomfort with having two of its reporters become the story.

By the way, when will newspapers and blogs stop posting the same two blurry DMV driver's license photo-quality pictures of Ling and Lee? Are these papers and blogs lazy or what? Ling wasn't exactly reclusive in her line of work, so how can that be the only picture these papers and blogs have of her?