John Carpenter's Lost Themes makes anything sound exciting, whether it's paint drying or a plot summary of an unfinished horror short story of mine

P.J. Soles from John Carpenter's Halloween (Photo source: Popcorn Cinema)

The following is a repost of one of my most well-received pieces from earlier this year, originally posted on March 20, 2015. In between the time I wrote the piece and now, John Carpenter composed the main title theme for the CBS summer show Zoo.

The most significant and impressive piece of work John Carpenter has made in the last 15 years is neither a feature film nor a TV-movie. It's John Carpenter's Lost Themes, a new collection of original Carpenter instrumentals that, in the Albertus font-loving filmmaker/composer's own words, are "meant to score the movies in your head." The Sacred Bones Records album is Carpenter's entry into the imaginary soundtracks genre, where the likes of Black Dynamite composer Adrian Younge (2000's Venice Dawn) and the duo of Danger Mouse and Magic City composer Daniele Luppi (2011's Rome) have created score cues or theme tunes for movies that don't exist.

Lost Themes tracks like "Vortex" and "Abyss" resemble outtakes from Carpenter's scores to the 1988 cult favorite They Live and the mad-underrated In the Mouth of Madness, and except for the really cheesy Big Trouble in Little China end title theme sung by Carpenter himself, that Carpenter synth sound Lost Themes reacquaints us with has aged remarkably well. It's aged so well that Carpenter's pulsating and frequently sampled 1976 Assault on Precinct 13 main title theme--which Carpenter has said was influenced by Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" and is in rotation during both the AFOS morning block "Beat Box" and "AFOS Prime"--sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday, while the likes of Steven Price, frequent Steven Soderbergh collaborator David Holmes and It Follows composer Rich Vreeland, a.k.a. Disasterpeace, dig the Carpenter sound so much that they borrow from Carpenter in their respective film scores.



I'd add some of the Lost Themes instrumentals to AFOS rotation, but the station format focuses only on score music written for movies and TV shows that aren't imaginary, and I don't have enough station hard drive space to launch a new imaginary soundtrack music block just to stream Lost Themes selections. For about a year, the station schedule included "Rome, Italian Style," an imaginary soundtrack music block I named after one of my favorite SCTV sketches (and a rare SCTV sketch that's not marred by an annoying laugh track). Younge's Venice Dawn tracks and Luppi's Rome tracks were part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist, and if the block still existed, those tracks would have shared space with the Lost Themes pieces. The Carpenter sound, which is basically '70s and '80s Italian film music, would have been a nice fit with the '60s Italian film vibe of the Venice Dawn and Rome tracks.

Junta Juleil's Culture Shock and Consequence of Sound both have gotten creative and used the Lost Themes instrumentals to fancast fictional Carpenter movies featuring those tracks. For example, in their movie idea built out of the Lost Themes track "Purgatory," Consequence of Sound imagined a 1988 murder mystery starring Kevin Dillon, Ernie Hudson and Daryl Hannah in her At Play in the Fields of the Lord skinny-dipping scene heyday, while "Purgatory" got Junta Juleil author Sean Gill to envision a completely implausible but much more enticing movie: a Big Trouble in Little China mini-reunion between Dennis Dun and Kurt Russell, who reprises his non-Carpenter role as Captain Ron.

John Carpenter directs Victor Wong and Donald Pleasence on the set of Prince of Darkness, one of seven big-screen Carpenter movies I haven't seen yet. All those remaining seven movies do not star Kurt Russell, Carpenter's muse.

I'd indulge in some Lost Themes-inspired fancasting too, but I don't want to bite Junta Juleil and Consequence of Sound's style, so I'm going to do a completely different approach to playing around with Lost Themes and demonstrating how Carpenter's new instrumentals can make anything sound exciting and atmospheric. I'm going to unearth a plot synopsis I wrote three years ago for a never-finished horror short story and spice it up--or rather, Carpenter it up--with Lost Themes selections.

"The Pet" was my attempt to create a new Filipino monster that would have joined the creepy likes of the aswang and the manananggal. The story would have mixed Filipino monster folklore with one of the most unsettling horror tropes, eye trauma. Here's a good example of how unsettling that trope can be: I was so bothered by a Lasik operation-gone-wrong episode of the short-lived early '00s supernatural show The Others (no relation to the Nicole Kidman haunted house flick of the same name) that I've refused to undergo Lasik surgery to improve my eyesight. At the time I was trying to write "The Pet" as a submission to a Filipino YA horror anthology (it was called HORROR, with the title in all caps, as if it were a book by Meek Mill), I thought, "Eye trauma is terrifying, so how do I work that into the creation of a new monster?"

The result was a story where I only got as far as completing four pages. I ended up missing the anthology submission deadline because I was never satisfied with both the dialogue I wrote and the legal hurdles the story's characters would have overcome in order to acquire the titular creature. Also, I think "The Pet" would be better off as either an episode of a horror comedy anthology show or a short film rather than as a short story in print. I always imagined it as a Joe Dante suburban comedy/thriller with a John Carpenter score--and a Filipino American backdrop.

John Carpenter's Lost Themes makes anything sound exciting, whether it's paint drying or a plot summary of an unfinished horror short story of mine

John Carpenter, shooting exterior footage for Escape from New York

The most significant and impressive piece of work John Carpenter has made in the last 15 years is neither a feature film nor a TV-movie. It's John Carpenter's Lost Themes, a new collection of original Carpenter instrumentals that, in the Albertus font-loving filmmaker/composer's own words, are "meant to score the movies in your head." The Sacred Bones Records album is Carpenter's entry into the imaginary soundtracks genre, where the likes of Black Dynamite composer Adrian Younge (2000's Venice Dawn) and the duo of Danger Mouse and Magic City composer Daniele Luppi (2011's Rome) have created score cues or theme tunes for movies that don't exist.

Lost Themes tracks like "Vortex" and "Abyss" resemble outtakes from Carpenter's scores to the 1988 cult favorite They Live and the mad-underrated In the Mouth of Madness, and except for the really cheesy Big Trouble in Little China end title theme sung by Carpenter himself, that Carpenter synth sound Lost Themes reacquaints us with has aged remarkably well. It's aged so well that Carpenter's pulsating and frequently sampled 1976 Assault on Precinct 13 main title theme--which Carpenter has said was influenced by Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" and is in rotation during both the AFOS morning block "Beat Box" and "AFOS Prime"--sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday, while the likes of Steven Price, frequent Steven Soderbergh collaborator David Holmes and It Follows composer Rich Vreeland, a.k.a. Disasterpeace, dig the Carpenter sound so much that they borrow from Carpenter in their respective film scores.

I'd add some of the Lost Themes instrumentals to AFOS rotation, but the station format focuses only on score music written for movies and TV shows that aren't imaginary, and I don't have enough station hard drive space to launch a new imaginary soundtrack music block just to stream Lost Themes selections. For about a year, the station schedule included "Rome, Italian Style," an imaginary soundtrack music block I named after one of my favorite SCTV sketches (and a rare SCTV sketch that's not marred by an annoying laugh track). Younge's Venice Dawn tracks and Luppi's Rome tracks were part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist, and if the block still existed, those tracks would have shared space with the Lost Themes pieces. The Carpenter sound, which is basically '70s and '80s Italian film music, would have been a nice fit with the '60s Italian film vibe of the Venice Dawn and Rome tracks.

Junta Juleil's Culture Shock and Consequence of Sound both have gotten creative and used the Lost Themes instrumentals to fancast fictional Carpenter movies featuring those tracks. For example, in their movie idea built out of the Lost Themes track "Purgatory," Consequence of Sound imagined a 1988 murder mystery starring Kevin Dillon, Ernie Hudson and Daryl Hannah in her At Play in the Fields of the Lord skinny-dipping scene heyday, while "Purgatory" got Junta Juleil author Sean Gill to envision a completely implausible but much more enticing movie: a Big Trouble in Little China mini-reunion between Dennis Dun and Kurt Russell, who reprises his non-Carpenter role as Captain Ron.

I'd indulge in some Lost Themes-inspired fancasting too, but I don't want to bite Junta Juleil and Consequence of Sound's style, so I'm going to do a completely different approach to playing around with Lost Themes and demonstrating how Carpenter's new instrumentals can make anything sound exciting and atmospheric. I'm going to unearth a plot synopsis I wrote three years ago for a never-finished horror short story and spice it up--or rather, Carpenter it up--with Lost Themes selections.

"The Pet" was my attempt to create a new Filipino monster that would have joined the creepy likes of the aswang and the manananggal. The story would have mixed Filipino monster folklore with one of the most unsettling horror tropes, eye trauma. Here's a good example of how unsettling that trope can be: I was so bothered by a Lasik operation-gone-wrong episode of the short-lived early '00s supernatural show The Others (no relation to the Nicole Kidman haunted house flick of the same name) that I've refused to undergo Lasik surgery to improve my eyesight. At the time I was trying to write "The Pet" as a submission to a Filipino YA horror anthology (it was called HORROR, with the title in all caps, as if it were a book by Meek Mill), I thought, "Eye trauma is terrifying, so how do I work that into the creation of a new monster?"

The result was a story where I only got as far as completing four pages. I ended up missing the anthology submission deadline because I was never satisfied with both the dialogue I wrote and the legal hurdles the story's characters would have overcome in order to acquire the titular creature. Also, I think "The Pet" would be better off as either an episode of a horror comedy anthology show or a short film rather than as a short story in print. I always imagined it as a Joe Dante suburban comedy/thriller with a John Carpenter score--and a Filipino American backdrop.

Favorite curse word substitutes that aren't "frak"

The other morning, the surprisingly not-so-awful 1993 made-for-cable action comedy Taking the Heat surfaced on my TV in the background. It starred the very attractive Lynn Whitfield as a slit-skirted rookie NYPD detective assigned to escort wimpy murder witness and love interest Tony Goldwyn to court while mobsters attempt to bump him off on the hottest day of the summer. (It's too bad Whitfield never became the action movie star that she should have been because in Taking the Heat, she's as fierce as Pam Grier, running around sweltering New York and Toronto locations in heels--and on horseback at one point--and never once taking those heels off.)

The late New York radio DJ Frankie Crocker acts as a Greek chorus during Taking the Heat. I didn't grow up listening to Crocker on the radio, so whenever I hear his voice, I think of "Crocker!"--Prince Paul's way of half-assedly bleeping out the obscenities during the sketches(*) on one of my favorite albums, De La Soul Is Dead.

(*) In an earlier post, I said a skit is "some lame, amateurish thing kids perform at a summer camp or church." It's also a usually unfunny and thankfully short comedy bit that's the most common example of filler on a hip-hop album. The difference between the skits on most hip-hop albums and the skits on De La Soul Is Dead is that the DLSID bits are slightly longer, which makes them qualify as sketches, and genuinely funny.

I hate censorship in any form. (According to Cursebird, I swear like a Scottish comedian.) But when you can't fight the censors, sometimes you have to come up with ingenious ways to depict rough language without attracting the attention of those uptight [Crocker!]s. You can make up your own curse words a la Mork & Mindy, the 1978 Battlestar Galactica, Hill Street Blues, Red Dwarf and motherfrelling Farscape, or you can conceal the curse words in foreign languages like on Firefly and Caprica. For my money, South Park, Archer and TNT's Southland opt for the best method, which is to have the actors utter the obscenities and then bleep out all of them, except for "shit," "goddamn" and "pussy." (Before he died, George Carlin was probably relieved to see that some of the words he once famously put on a pedestal are now safe for basic cable.)

Who's the person who tweeted that nerds should stop adding the rather clunky-sounding "frak" to normal everyday conversations? Buy that person a drink. The masterminds behind the following five euphemisms also deserve a drink because they perfected the art of sneaking in expletives.

"Crocker!" (De La Soul Is Dead)
For some inexplicable reason, the tracks on De La Soul's insult humor-filled second album are uncensored, while most of the sketches are not. They feature Black Sheep member Mista Lawnge as the voice of "Hemroid," a playground bully who steals a cassette copy of DLSID from one of his victims and becomes frustrated by the album's lack of violent lyrics while listening to it ("Van Damme! What happened? What happened to the pimps? What happened to the guns? What happened to the curse words? [Crocker!] That's what rap music is all about, right?"). Prince Paul's intentionally half-assed censorship of the swear words in the sketches is part of what makes them funny. He covered up most of the cursing with a soundbite of someone saying "Crocker!"--a reference to the legendary DJ. "Crocker!" isn't the only curse word substitute during the sketches. There's also the memorable "Put the tape back in, natal wart!"

"melonfarmer" (the syndicated TV version of Repo Man)
Like me and millions of others who hate watching feature films on channels that aren't TCM, IFC or Sundance, Alex Cox considers the practice of redubbing profanity in movies to be ridiculous, so he had some fun with it by taking what could have been a completely unwatchable commercial TV butchering of his cult classic Repo Man and making it somewhat entertaining. The TV cut contained intentionally lame new dialogue like "Flip you, melonfarmer!"

"smeg" (Red Dwarf)
One of the few elements Ronald D. Moore's Galactica unfortunately retained from the inferior 1978 original was the fake swearing, which sounds like a Mormon's idea of how people curse (in fact, that's what it was--Glen A. Larson is a Mormon, so I blame them for the creation of "frak," which the '70s version spelled as "frack," and "felgercarb"). Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, the creators of the sci-fi Britcom Red Dwarf, coined a slightly more inventive swear word 10 years after "frack" by replacing "shit" and "fuck" with a word they claimed they didn't know already existed. (Do not click on the link in the previous sentence if you're enjoying your lunch, smeghead.)

"Ooh la la!" (The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson)
I like how The Late Late Show's way of dealing with Ferguson's French has been to cover it up with a well-placed French flag and his cheesy imitation of a frog. Because of Ferguson's year-long goal to learn Spanish, the flag was recently changed to a Spanish one, and "Ooh la la!" is now "¡Ay caramba!"

"lint-licker" (Orbit Gum ad)
Treme staff writer and Undercover Black Man blogger David Mills is spot-on about the homewrecker lady from his current favorite commercial, whom he refers to as "a cross between Karen Carpenter and a cheap French oil painting." Her way with a euphemism makes the Galactica and Caprica cast members sound like lints.

George Carlin (1937-2008)

I was so busy trying to come up with intentionally lousy cop movie dialogue (for a fake movie trailer that's part of a graphic novel script I'm working on) that I didn't learn about the following sad news until late at night.

"George Carlin Dead at 71."

The first thing I thought to myself after reading the news were seven certain words.

I'm more of a fan of Carlin's later, angrier albums like You Are All Diseased and Complaints and Grievances than the breakthrough routines from his earlier hippie period. Some longtime Carlin fans find his later period to be one-note or problematic, but several of my personal favorite Carlin routines, like the anti-House of Blues rant, emerged from this later era ("If white people are gonna burn down black churches, then black people oughta burn down the House of Blues"). (I hate to admit it, but prior to his '90s and '00s stand-up albums, my first exposure to Carlin was his thankless role as a Time Lord a time traveler from the future in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.)

As a tribute to this brilliant comedian, all Morning Becomes Dyspeptic episodes that feature excerpts from Carlin's albums will be streamed all week long (except on Friday, for complicated reasons that have to do with the MBD announcer's prerecorded outro on Friday editions). MBD airs every weekday at 1am and 8am on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel.

And unlike my old college radio show where I played excerpts from my favorite comedy albums in between hip-hop breaks--but the station's daytime airplay rules required me to edit out all the comics' profanity--all of Carlin's routines during MBD are uncensored. Just as Carlin would have wanted.