I'm back for one post only to plug my first book, If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You

So much shit has happened since the time I wrote my final blog post here in 2017. A pandemic that's killed so many. The current and upsetting rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans. An unfortunate wave of anti-Black police violence. The worst American president in my lifetime. (His final three years in Washington were responsible for tons of terrible shit, including the mishandling of the pandemic, the aforementioned rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, concentration camps full of immigrant kids, and a white supremacist insurrection at the Capitol.) The climate crisis. My mother's stroke symptoms. (Her condition led to me gradually moving back to my parents' house to help my father take care of her, as well as to stay safe from the dual dangers of COVID and MAGAt dumbfucks who want to kill me because they think I'm Chinese. I still haven't even finished the process of moving yet, mostly due to a wintertime lockdown in the Bay Area.)

The new book is why I've briefly returned to this blog, despite saying farewell to the blog in 2017, to promote it. (Even though I don't write posts anymore for this blog, I still come back to Blogspot from time to time to remove from my blog any dead links or dead embeds for videos that were deleted from YouTube.) If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You: The Movies and TV Shows Some of Us Regretted Not Catching Until Later ($14.99 in B&W paperback form or $9.99 in e-book form and available only on Amazon) came about because, after I was fired from a coding job I grew to hate, I was unable to find another job for eight years, so I gave up on the job search and kept myself busy by writing content for both this Blogspot blog and the Tumblr blog Accidental Star Trek Cosplay (a blog I continue to update and post content for because it has always been a much less time-consuming and stress-inducing blog, and it also has way more readers than this one did). But I got sick and tired of writing long-form blog posts and online articles for free, so in 2017, I quit this Blogspot blog and vowed to myself that I would never again write for free anything that's long-form. (This long-form post to plug If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You is an exception.) I wasn't ready to start a Patreon or a Ko-fi to earn some money, so I decided instead to write and self-publish a book. (I was also tired of getting rejected every time I pitched a short story idea to an editor or tried to get a writing job. That's why I've gone the self-publishing route.) At first, the book was supposed to be a comedic sci-fi novel, but then a little something called writer's block got in the way.

After three failed attempts at writing novels, I chose to do a non-fiction book instead. I began working in May 2018 on the book that evolved into If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You. I took a few of my blog posts about watching older movies for the first time and did updated or expanded versions of those posts while surrounding them with tons of completely new material. The new stuff in If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You includes essays on Lawrence of Arabia, Playtime, Blue Thunder, Near Dark, The Heroic Trio, MTV's Daria, Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy movies, and Schitt's Creek.

Here's me in 2009, signing copies of a book I contributed material to, but I developed mixed emotions about the book 10 years after its publication. Sunny Kim was totally right about her frustrations with the book and its colorism, and that's all I'm going to say here about that book. The one great thing about the book though was that it led to me becoming friends with Janice Chiang, a former Marvel Comics letterer whose work I liked when I was a kid who read issues of Alpha Flight and The Transformers.

If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You took me two years to write and self-proofread. From November 2019 to October 2020, I was either proofreading the book by myself or making lots of minor tweaks to the book's longest chapters, like a chapter in which I discussed watching seven of the eight Harry Potter movies for the first time. (Yeah, that became a particularly interesting chapter to rewrite during J.K. Rowling's transphobic meltdown.) November 2019 to October 2020 will go down as a really unusual year for me (just as how it was an unusual year for everyone who survived it): In addition to finishing work on my first book, I was dealing with life during COVID while acting as a caregiver to a parent and learning more about how my deep hatred of certain sounds like leaf blower noises is the neurological condition known as misophonia.

Despite having a lot on my plate in 2020, If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You is finally out, and it's the type of book a Filipino American film nerd like myself has always wanted to see out there: a book written from a point of view that just does not get a lot of representation in journalism or publishing simply because there aren't a ton of Filipino American writers who write about film or TV. I was a fan of the YouTube channel National Film Society, which Patrick Epino and Stephen Dypiangco founded to give voice to Filipino American film nerds like themselves (the channel went inactive for a couple of years, but it came back in 2018 without Stephen as a co-host), and I always thought Patrick and Stephen should have put out a book about film. I would have bought such a book in a heartbeat.

This is a peek at If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You's chapter on The Spook Who Sat by the Door, one of the late Nipsey Hussle's favorite flicks, as well as a forgotten film about Black liberation that became especially resonant in 2020.

So why should you buy If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You, even though the "I was late to the party regarding this popular movie or TV show, and here's what I think of what I finally watched..." thing has been done to death by film discussion podcasts and pop culture blogs? First of all, the book gives a spotlight to the same type of underrepresented voice that makes National Film Society's videos stand out on YouTube. Second, despite the book's length (462 pages), it's irreverent and full of humor, and during a time when COVID has confined you to staying home and watching lots of streaming services with so much fucking content, you need a guide like my book to simplify your search for content and direct you to movies and shows you missed out on before COVID and now have probably become curious about while in lockdown.

Fuckity-bye

Too many blogs I've enjoyed reading have been abandoned by authors who abruptly quit posting new content, and too many of those blogs have never even bothered to say farewell to their readers. That's not going to happen here.

I decided in 2016 to quit posting new content for this Blogspot blog, which started out as a tie-in to a radio station I used to run, at the end of 2017. I'm throwing in the towel after 10 years of both writing blog posts barely anybody reads (except for a couple of posts that were read by more than a few after they were retweeted by Edgar Wright and Paul Feig) and getting erroneously referred to as "DK AFOS" or "Jimmy Aquino" without the crucial middle initial in my name by other blogs. The urge to throw in the towel is mostly due to wanting to concentrate on both a prose novel manuscript and Accidental Star Trek Cosplay--a far less time-consuming Tumblr blog with a list of followers that continues to grow (its amount of followers greatly outnumbers the number of people who follow my Twitter feed and the number of people who have hit "Like" on the AFOS Facebook page)--and I made this decision a year before I would stop posting new content, so that I could give myself some extra time to compose a proper farewell.

And the farewell message is this: nobody reads this fucking blog anymore. Thanks for nothing, fuckfaces.

The art of long-form blogging is no longer as enjoyable as it used to be. It's an art that's dying out. Godawful Twitter, equally godawful Facebook and the "pivot to video" trend in digital media are choking the life out of it.

Though it's in its death throes, long-form blogging has continued to be responsible for some outstanding writing. One of my favorite article headlines of 2017--and right now, I can't think of another headline that better sums up 2017--came out of the world of long-form blogging:

But otherwise, it's a dying art. And it's an art whose terminology nobody ever uses correctly. I've lost count of the amount of times someone has written to me, "I saw your blog about that movie," or "I saw your blog about the new Rick and Morty," and I want so badly to correct them and say, "What you mean to say is that you saw my blog post about the movie," but I don't want to sound like a Ted Mosby-ish douche.

The tiny audience I used to have over here has completely vanished. So why fucking bother anymore? I don't know if it's because of people's short attention spans these days and because each generation of readers has a shorter attention span than the last (it reminds me of one of my favorite Elvis Costello verses: "A teenage girl is crying because she don't look like a million dollars/So help her if you can/Because she don't seem to have the attention span"), but I think I'll blame the vanishing readership on that.

Also, the writer's blocks I sometimes would suffer from while trying to write posts during the blog's first few years have actually worsened in the last couple of years. Insert "Don Music banging his head on the keyboard" .GIF here.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Rick and Morty, "The Rickshank Rickdemption"

This is the fourth of 12 or 13 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017. Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now.



If the last few years saw the rise of the surprise album release--the likes of Beyoncé and Drake have rewritten the rules of the music industry by dropping albums right and left without any warning--then Adult Swim is apparently taking a cue from Queen Bey and Drizzy by trying to bring about the rise of the surprise TV show episode premiere. They did it before when, without much fanfare, they debuted on Instagram the complete "Rixty Minutes" episode of Rick and Morty a few days before its broadcast premiere.

This April Fools Day, Adult Swim did it again. Without posting some sort of press release or promotional tweet in advance, Adult Swim's staff pretended to do their annual April Fools prank (three of those past pranks were simply broadcasts of The Room), but they used the appearance of a prank as a Trojan horse to show all of "The Rickshank Rickdemption"--the Rick and Morty third-season premiere in which an incarcerated Rick comes up with a very sci-fi way to both outsmart an alien interrogator (special guest star Nathan Fillion) and escape from intergalactic prison--in a loop for only a few hours on both the network and its site. Well-played, Adult Swim, well-played.

Adult Swim hasn't even set a date yet for the unveiling of the rest of Rick and Morty's new season. So far, they've said the season will resume some time in the summer, so the most impatient of Rick and Morty fans, who have been waiting since October 2015 for new episodes from Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, will just have to shut the fuck up like Jemaine Clement whenever he sings about moonmen and wait a little longer.

The April Fools loop was a nice little surprise stunt, but how does the episode--which I was lucky to stream in its entirety after returning home late from a party, right before Adult Swim deleted it from their site--fare as the return of an eagerly awaited animated show that hasn't been first-run in almost two years? "The Rickshank Rickdemption," which is credited to Rick and Morty staff writer Mike McMahan, is a much more focused and tautly written (as well as much more action-heavy) season premiere than last season's "A Rickle in Time," a season opener that Roiland and Harmon were reportedly unhappy with because, according to the duo in Rolling Stone, "We were so close to something amazing and we never really got there from a structural standpoint," and "It went off the deep end conceptually and got really over-complicated." The third-season premiere is satisfying and funny enough to get me to bring back this blog's "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week" feature after a long hiatus.

The AFOS blog is switching from weekly to monthly in 2017 and will come to an end in December 2017

Ken Levine, the former Cheers and Frasier writer who was also an announcer for the Mariners and the Padres, once wrote that he does a blog about comedy writing, showbiz, the radio industry and baseball because he thinks of his blog as the writing equivalent of a stretching exercise. He added, "I don't want to write all day and you sure don't want to read all day. But it keeps my mind active... Still, it is time consuming, and I'll be honest, there are times it's a burden. Coming up with interesting enough topics is sometimes very difficult. I can''t [sic] tee off on 2 BROKE GIRLS every day."

Levine wrote those sentences in 2014, when his still-active blog reached the nine-year mark. I've been doing this blog for nine years now (mainly as a way to tell the world, "I'm unemployed and I may not be active on social media because it has all the pleasantness of a Springfield tire yard, but I still fucking exist, dammit"), and I, like Levine, used to view the blog as the writing equivalent of a stretching exercise, but, well, now it has become a burden. It's not as enjoyable as it used to be. The stretching is starting to make me sore. The blog is taking too much time away from a book I'm trying to write (while constantly suffering from writer's block). There have been a lot of "AFOS Blog Rewind" reposts this year because I wanted to adhere to a weekly posting schedule during 2016, but there are weeks where I simply don't have jack shit to say.

Sure, I could easily rattle off in one day a bunch of posts that simply say "Look at this funny video!" or "Peep this link," but I'm not going to do that shit. This blog stopped doing click-bait ages ago. So I've decided that in 2017, the blog will switch to a monthly schedule and then come to a close at the end of the year.

The novel I've been writing is set in a Drumpfian world of science under attack, which will be closer to reality now that Clinton conceded to the orange Babadook

Protesters in Seattle on the day after Election Day (Photo source: The Atlantic)

Protesters in San Francisco on the night after Election Day

Since August, I've been working on a manuscript for a sci-fi comedy novel that I first outlined in 2012. I've described it elsewhere as a cross between The Big O and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, without giving too much of it away because it's a work-in-progress, and this work-in-progress has taken up so much of my time that it's been difficult to write new posts for this Blogspot blog. It's all I can talk about to anybody. My brief mentions of the manuscript always seem to put people on Facebook to sleep (except one person who has similar interests in comedic sci-fi), and their lack of interest has become one of 4,080 reasons why I hate Facebook.

The manuscript is why this blog has consisted of nothing but reposts of previously published shit in the last few months. I've got nothing. I'm all out of new content for this blog. Meanwhile, I'm having a ball running Accidental Star Trek Cosplay over on Tumblr, because 1) ASTC isn't as time-consuming as a.k.a. DJ AFOS has always been and 2) ASTC gets more responses from readers. Both the new Tumblr and the manuscript are why I've been considering putting an end to this blog in the future and writing a farewell-to-Blogspot post.

Variety shows aren't my thing, but Jiminy Glick terribly interviewing celebrities definitely is

I don't care for variety shows, except for Muppet Show clips (or the occasional Carol Burnett Show sketch clip) and sometimes SNL, which, if you think about it, is really just a '70s-style variety show, but without a scantily clad resident dance troupe, and that makes you wonder about an SNL in a parallel universe where, since 1975, a goateed Lorne Michaels implemented a group of Fly Girls on his show, and all those Fly Girls are white. Variety shows are such an outdated and creaky form of TV. I always feel like I need to be 78 years old and fond of prune juice in order to enjoy a variety show from start to finish.

When the Miami-based Sábado Gigante said "¡Adiós!" after 53 years of old-fashioned TV, it was a sign that even non-English-speaking variety shows are doomed. Yet that hasn't stopped NBC from pushing for the variety show to come back to American TV, first with the now-defunct Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris and now with the summertime replacement show Maya & Marty. The Tuesday night show pairs up two great comedians from completely different eras of SNL: Martin Short and '00s SNL regular Maya Rudolph. She's a Prince song-covering, TCM-watching pre-'90s-showbiz nerd type who genuinely enjoys the cheesiness of variety shows (Maya & Marty is her second attempt at a variety show, after the one-off Maya Rudolph Show special). Meanwhile, Short's best shtick, prior to his one season on Dick Ebersol-era SNL, took place on SCTV, the classic sketch show that constantly ripped apart the cheesiness of variety shows, whether it was through Short's Jackie Rogers Jr. character or Eugene Levy as Gene Shalit incongruously doing musical numbers with Catherine O'Hara as Rona Barrett and Joe Flaherty as Gene Siskel. Despite the pairing of Short and Rudolph, which sounds nice on paper, Maya & Marty does not look enticing to me, except for one element, and it's the only part of Maya & Marty I've been watching online: the return of celebrity interviewer Jiminy Glick.

Way before Ali G trolled politicians or Zach Galifianakis embodied fake awkwardness between two ferns or Eric Andre caused a genuinely uncomfortable Lauren Conrad to walk out on him or Stephen Colbert pretended to know nothing about hip-hop while interviewing an in-on-the-joke Eminem, there was Glick, Short's funniest character and an interestingly late addition to Short's repertoire. Glick and his weird, Merv Griffin-ish voice didn't appear first on either SCTV or mid-'80s SNL and instead emerged from a much later and completely forgotten venue: Short's 1999 daytime talk show. I tuned in to The Martin Short Show for only one reason: to see Short badly interview the likes of Ted Danson and a Dharma & Greg-era Jenna Elfman as Glick. It was far more entertaining than Short doing polite interviews for real as his normal self.

You can now like A Fistful of Soundtracks on Facebook

The first Spider-Man movie's closing credits deserved better too.

Although Facebook has its moments (like the girl's reaction to her mom's adult-contemporary ambush on the troops in the above snapshot), it can also be an aggravating place to be, as Kimberly from Cinebeats and TCM has astutely noted a few times on her Twitter. I think Jeannie Gaffigan, the wife of comedian Jim Gaffigan, put it best when she tweeted, "Facebook is like a big high school yearbook that never stops being signed."

I may find Facebook to be annoying for various reasons, but I know there are a few people on that site who listen to A Fistful of Soundtracks, so after about a year of hesitating, I launched a Facebook page for AFOS on July 1.

Drop by the new page and hit the "Like" button and maybe say hola. But don't go to the wall just to tell me I should remove a track you hate from an AFOS playlist. I'm not a fan of requests for me to delete a piece of music and I always ignore those requests. It's part of the playlist because I goddamn like it. I'm not going to yank it from rotation just because only poor little you can't stand it.

Speaking of disliking things, why doesn't Facebook have a "Dislike" button? Am I not allowed to dislike things over there? It's like a site run by The Care Bears, for fook's sake.

Around the world in 520 words

I don't keep track of the size of the Fistful of Soundtracks channel's international audience, but I know I get a lot of listeners from Europe. Some of them have mentioned AFOS in their tweets or newspaper pieces. A writer from England's Observer paper described my station's format as "tunes from films and TV, surprisingly listenable."

Over in the Netherlands, someone plugged AFOS in a Facebook post.

In Dutch, the post says: "Jimmy Aquino draait al sinds 2002 Film- en TV muziek op zijn eigen radiostation, altijd in themas. Omdat het voornamelijk een one-man-show is, worden de programma's slechts wekelijks geupdate. Naast de wekelijkse show wordt het station gevuld door een jukebox vol trailers en de bijbehorende muziek. Aquino weet niet alleen ongelofelijk veel van filmmuziek, hij tekend ook strips en schrijft korte verhalen."

Google Translate's slightly malapropistic version in English says: "Jimmy Aquino has been around since 2002 Film and TV music on his own radio station, always themes. Because it is mainly a one-man show, then the program is only updated weekly. Besides the weekly show, the station filled by a jukebox full of trailers and the accompanying music. Aquinas not only knows an incredible amount of film music, he also signed comics and writes short stories."

I appreciate the praise, but like most blog posts that mention AFOS, it's not 100 percent correct about the details ("Because it is mainly a one-man show, the program is only updated weekly"). The Dutch listener is right about the Fistful of Soundtracks channel's one-man staff but somewhat incorrect about the weekly updating of episodes of the one-hour program that originated on college radio (which was also called A Fistful of Soundtracks). I do update the Wednesday reruns of that program each week, but I haven't recorded a new ep since "Dance Into the Fire" in 2008 because I've been underemployed for a while, and it's become too expensive for me to continue producing the program or to pay Bruce the announcer again to re-record the program intro in the reruns and introduce me as "Jimmy J. Aquino" instead of the now-outdated "Jimmy Aquino."

However, I haven't stopped updating the Fistful of Soundtracks channel's daytime playlists. A couple of weeks ago, I added to the "Chai Noon" playlist some Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge numbers from a new Shahrukh Khan soundtrack compilation and some tracks from the new Abhishek Bachchan/Aishwarya Rai movie Raavan, and then I added the Beastie Boys instrumental "Shambala" to the "F Zone" playlist after the Breaking Bad season finale devoted an entire sequence to "Shambala." This week's additions to "Assorted Fistful" are selections from Varèse Sarabande's expanded version of Michael Giacchino's Star Trek score album.

The above Dutch phrase "hij tekend ook strips" means "he has also drawn comics." Google Translate thinks the post says "he also signed comics." Yeah, I don't write comics. I just autograph them. The "Sampler" script and The Palace were actually the work of South Korean laborers.

Metric is streaming a sneak preview of their Scott Pilgrim music

Universal's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the adaptation of Bryan Lee O'Malley's popular comics by one of my favorite newer filmmakers, Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright, doesn't come out until August. But you can get a sneak peek of the star-studded soundtrack, thanks to the Toronto band Metric, which posted on Facebook this weekend one of several original songs they contributed to Pilgrim.


Metric provided the sounds for The Clash at Demonhead, one of the title bassist hero's fictional musical rivals, while Beck will represent Scott's own band Sex Bob-omb, and Broken Social Scene will represent another fictional band, Crash and the Boys.

Like everything else I've heard from Metric, "Black Sheep" sounds terrific. Hit the "Become a Fan" button on their Facebook page to hear "Black Sheep."

[Via Wright and Robot 6]

"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.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

List habit

Matthew from the Culture Kills blog says he would like me to post what my 10 favorite film scores are.

That's too much pressure, Matt! I dig so many of them. Scores come in many different categories or genres (film, TV, synthesizer, 80-to-100-piece-orchestra, blaxploitation, espionage, poliziotto, lederhosen porn...). It's too broad a question, and it'd be difficult to narrow them down to 10.

I don't spend much time on Facebook(*) anymore (mostly because I now prefer the more stripped-down Twitter), but there's one thing I enjoy doing on Facebook: making lists(**) of my favorite pieces of music on Facebook's LivingSocial and iLike apps.

(*) Damn, even Facebook's CFO doesn't like the new Facebook either. He hates it so much he quit!

(**) The title of this post refers to the "List Habit" tag that Kim Morgan uses for her list-crazy posts.

In LivingSocial's case, the app has you post Top 5 lists of your favorite things. So instead of a "Top 10 favorite scores" list, I'll repost the Top 5 lists of favorite score cues (or scores) under certain categories that I've been posting on LivingSocial and Twitter.

Five favorite marches from original film or TV scores
5. John Williams, "The Imperial March (Darth Vader's Theme)," The Empire Strikes Back
4. John Williams, "March from 1941"
3. Jerry Goldsmith, "Main Title," Star Trek: The Motion Picture
2. John Williams, "Main Title," Superman: The Movie
1. Terence Blanchard, "Fruit of Islam," Malcolm X

God, the Oscars are a joke. How could they not nominate Terence Blanchard for his 1992 Malcolm X score, which is filled with awesome themes like "Fruit of Islam," the cue he wrote for the film's Harlem march sequence? What was the score that won in 1993? Oh right, Aladdin. Give me a break.

Gene Roddenberry dug the Star Trek: The Motion Picture march so much that he recycled it for Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987. TV composer Dennis McCarthy wrote an updated arrangement of the march, and it was performed by an orchestra that was smaller than the 90-piece orchestra that performed it back in 1979. That explains why the TNG version lacks oomph. I prefer the original 1979 rendition. I like how the brass sounds jazzier.

Five other favorite marches
5. Ennio Morricone, "March of the Beggars," Duck, You Sucker
4. Jerry Goldsmith, "Attack," Patton
3. Elmer Bernstein, "Main Title," The Great Escape
2. Elmer Bernstein, "Stripes March"
1. John Williams, "End Credits," Raiders of the Lost Ark

Five favorite film scores frequently sampled by beatmakers
5. The Mack (Willie Hutch)
4. Superfly (Curtis Mayfield)
3. Trouble Man (Marvin Gaye)
2. Enter the Dragon (Lalo Schifrin)
1. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (David Shire)

Five favorite Danny Elfman film scores
5. Dead Presidents
4. Pee-wee's Big Adventure
3. Mission: Impossible
2. Batman
1. Midnight Run

Five favorite original TV themes
5. It Takes a Thief (third season version) (Dave Grusin)
4. I Spy (Earle Hagen)
3. Barney Miller (Jack Elliott and Allyn Ferguson)
2. The Persuaders! (John Barry)
1. Cowboy Bebop (Yoko Kanno)

Listeners like Portland film critic and CulturePulp artist Mike Russell have told me they became Yoko Kanno fans after hearing her Cowboy Bebop score tracks on my station.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, what's the crappiest original TV theme of all time? I was going to say Enterprise, but then I remembered the Diane Warren-penned "Where My Heart Will Take Me" wasn't an original work. It was recycled from Patch Adams, of all movies. (In a sketch I wrote for A Fistful of Soundtracks' 2002 Halloween special, gangbangers torture a hostage by subjecting him to the Enterprise theme.)

The worst original TV theme is Joanie Loves Chachi, hands down. Click at your own peril.

Obama's inauguration: America reboots itself

For readers who aren't my Facebook friends, I've compiled and reposted the status updates that I wrote on the Facebook/CNN Inauguration Day coverage site on this uplifting day of history and balls.

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Jimmy just booed the arrival of Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life.
via CNN.com Live - 8:39am

Wow, the surviving Tuskegee Airmen are at the inauguration.
via CNN.com Live - 9:24am

Amen!
via CNN.com Live - 9:37am

Jimmy is wondering how the other cable channels are covering the inauguration. I hear the Sci Fi Channel sent Mansquito to interview the crowd.
via CNN.com Live - 9:47am

Favorite part of Obama's inaugural speech: "The world is changing and we have to change with it."
via CNN.com Live - 9:51am

Jimmy enjoyed that recent Slate.com article that basically said, "What's Bush gonna do now? No one will hire his ass."
via CNN.com Live - 9:59am

The President and the First Lady's parade walk was badass. South Side, walk it out!
via CNN.com Live - 1:19pm

TV One is doing the best coverage right now: Anchor #1: "Joe the Plumber is enjoying his 15 minutes of fame." Anchor #2: "And it's 14 minutes too long."
via CNN.com Live - 2:35pm

Jimmy is trying to figure out what the Howard U. Marching Band has been playing. Whatever it is, it's slammin'. Sounded like "I Need a Freak" by Sexual Harassment.
via CNN.com Live - 3:29pm