Why I left BuzzFe... er, I mean, why I got the fuck away from terrestrial radio

Baby Driver

This is the eighth 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.

Named after a Simon & Garfunkel tune that's like a turtlenecked-and-khaki-pantsed precursor to Prince's "Little Red Corvette" ("I hit the road and I'm gone"), Baby Driver is Edgar Wright's wonderful antidote to superhero movie fatigue (the recent thrills of Wonder Woman aside), as well as a subtle rebuke to the often-afraid-of-idiosyncrasy superhero movie studio system that chewed the idiosyncratic Wright up and spat him out (back in 2014). Wright's caper flick is the inventively told, occasionally Kid Koala-scored story of a 20-something getaway driver known simply as Baby, whose method of drowning out the tinnitus he's suffered from since childhood is to continually play the likes of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Bob & Earl in his omnipresent iPod earbuds, even during high-speed car chases. While mowing through truffle parmesan butter popcorn at a Baby Driver screening at the Alamo Drafthouse, I realized Wright basically made a movie about me.

Sure, I'm not a getaway driver and I can't parkour my way out of a tight spot like Baby astoundingly can at one point during Baby Driver, but at all hours in my apartment building, I always wear headphones full of music from my phone or my Mac, not to drown out tinnitus, but to drown out annoying footstep noises from my apartment's paper-thin ceiling. Atop the ceiling, it always sounds like two elephants fucking.

Baby Driver

Part of the challenge of writing these blog posts in the past nine years--and now, in addition to the posts, a prose novel manuscript--has been trying to concentrate while all these infuriating noises from my ceiling ensue. If it weren't for my headphones drowning those noises out, I don't think I could ever get any shit done in my apartment, and I don't think I could ever sleep at night either (for that, I switch off the music and put on in my headphones a copy of one of those eight-hour YouTube audio clips of starship white noise from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and then I'm out cold like Riker after having to listen to Data's poetry slam).

KDFC is pronouncing "Varèse Sarabande" three different ways, and only one of them is right

A current storyline on CW's The Flash centers on Jay Garrick moping--and then doing some more moping--over the loss of his ability to run at superhuman speeds. Jay fought crime under the name of the Flash in a parallel universe where their version of Barry Allen, the show's main character, doesn't have any superpowers, so Barry's not the Flash over there. Unless he's actually been the Tony Todd-voiced supervillain known as Zoom this whole time, Jay is too much of a goody-goody to regain his speed with the help of cocaine, so the only way Jay can get his speed back temporarily is to inject himself with an experimental drug called Velocity-6.

I suffer from writer's block all the time, which was never a good thing when I worked in the newspaper biz, and it's the last thing you want to deal with when you're running a blog and you're trying to come up with one or two posts per week. But I don't need Velocity-6 or blow to type out a post at a superhuman speed. All I need is the Bay Area classical music station KDFC.

I recently discovered that having KDFC in my headphones has helped me to finish writing posts. DJ mixes sometimes do the trick, but they can occasionally be distracting, especially when the DJ throws on a beat like the one from Pete Rock and CL Smooth's "The Creator" or the one from Kendrick Lamar's "Alright," and then all I want to do is nod my head repeatedly or do the Robot instead of finish writing. Film and TV score music, the Internet radio format I dabbled in from 2002 to last month, is even more distracting. Like I wrote a few weeks ago, score music comes with too much baggage.

"That kind of music often wrecks my attempt to concentrate on filling a blank space with a paragraph and causes me to start thinking about the action sequence the cue was written for, followed by all the camerawork that went into it... And then my brain starts to shout, 'Yeaaaah, go, Iko Uwais!,' or 'Yeaaaah, throw that shovel hook, Michael B.!,' and my concentration is completely destroyed," I wrote on January 26.

Neither classical music nor instrumental hip-hop come with that kind of baggage, so when I need music to help me to concentrate, only those two genres can get me to start typing (classical music has also helped me to sleep well late at night). So right when I've started turning to KDFC as a reliable place for instrumentals that cure my writer's block instead of distracting or annoying me, the station, which tosses in a few movie themes on its playlists here and there, has been increasing the airplay of film score music.

KDFC chose last June's Varèse Sarabande album Back in Time... 1985 at the Movies, Galaxy Quest composer David Newman's re-recording of film score cues from 1985, as its "CD of the Week." All this week, the station has been spotlighting selections from 1985 at the Movies, which is a solid album from Newman, although I would have swapped out the love theme from St. Elmo's Fire for either a selection from the John Morris score to Clue or a Lee Holdridge instrumental from Moonlighting, and I would have packaged the six-disc edition of 1985 at the Movies exactly like a McDLT, so that "The hot stays hot and the cool stays cool!"

Then all next week, KDFC will join in the countdown to Oscar night and play one theme composed by John Williams per hour as a salute to Williams. He's one of this year's Best Original Score Oscar nominees for his work in Star Wars: The Force Awakens ("Rey's Theme" is especially terrific).

After trying to avoid film score music because it doesn't help as an accompaniment for writing, I should be irritated that KDFC is playing more film score music this month. But I'm not. I'm actually kind of delighted to see film score compositions like "Rey's Theme" receiving airplay on terrestrial radio outside of a college station, although KDFC tends to prefer concert arrangements of film score music over the actual score cues that were used in the films. So that means you won't hear "The Scavenger," the cue that nicely introduces Rey in The Force Awakens, but you will hear "Rey's Theme," the concert arrangement of the Daisy Ridley character's motif. But it doesn't matter; it's just sofa king good to hear such cues on a non-college terrestrial station.

Not everyone agrees.

Anonymous needs to go walk into traffic. That's just stupid talk. As someone who streamed film and TV score music for 13 years, I can't stand people like that.

And as a film score music DJ who would then encounter racist, neo-con film music nerds who think hip-hop, one of my favorite genres, is evil or unworthy to be considered music, I can't stand those people either. They need to go walk into traffic too.

KDFC's Dianne Nicolini and KDFC president Bill Lueth (Photo source: SFCV)

I don't have time to deal with narrow minds. I don't miss the part of being a film score music DJ where I'd be subjected to "Hip-hop causes violence!" or "C'mon, really? Who wants to listen to just the instrumentals? Am I right?" I also don't miss the part of it that involved trying to pronounce baffling-looking names of composers, filmmakers (I would love to hear someone say "Krzysztof Kieslowski" while they're on Novocaine) and record labels. But whenever I encountered such a name, I would always Google its pronunciation. I didn't mind doing that. I never wanted to sound like an imbecile or Alec Baldwin in that SNL "Soap Opera Digest" sketch where he's playing a doctor and he keeps mangling medical terms and university names, like when he says, "There's no class at Yeah-leh Medical School that can prepare you for this!"

But how did I find out about mysterious pronunciations before Google? I simply asked around. One particular name that used to make me scratch my head in the '90s was "Varèse Sarabande." That one was cleared up for me by Jeff Bond, the author of The Music of Star Trek and a film score music expert who has written score album liner notes for everyone from Varèse to La-La Land Records. I simply asked him how to pronounce the inkblot-logoed record label's name while recording with him a phoner for my college radio program.

So that's why it's amusing to hear KDFC DJs attempt to tackle "Varèse" during the week of Varèse's 1985 at the Movies in the spotlight, without even checking its pronunciation. Morning host Hoyt Smith pronounced it as "vuh-reez." Early afternoon host Dianne Nicolini said "vuh-rez" (rhymes with Pez). Afternoon drive-time host Ray White went with "vuh-ray-say."

Only Nicolini is correct. It's "vuh-rez."



I'm glad to see 1985 at the Movies--and film and TV score music in general--receiving this much exposure from the KDFC DJs, but they ought to follow Nicolini's lead. The key to pronouncing "Varèse" isn't hard to remember. It would simply be "It rhymes with Pez."

If movie theaters need bouncers, then classical stations need pronunciation consultants. Who wants to end up looking like Alec Baldwin in the SNL "Soap Opera Digest" sketch? No name is too intimidating for a pronunciation consultant. Such a consultant would always be ready and on call to tackle the predicament of trying to figure out how to say a puzzling-looking musician's name on an album cover. There's no class at Yeah-leh that can prepare you for "Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina."

***

Other film and TV score compositions played by KDFC (from snapshots I took of score music appearing on the KDFC site's playlists)

The end of an era: Live365's demise means the demise of AFOS as a radio station after 13 intriguing years on the air

My very first blog post of 2016 was originally going to be either a piece about Electric Boogaloo, the Cannon Films documentary that's now streaming on Netflix, or a piece about Creed and why I like Ludwig Göransson's original score from that film so much that I'm adding the score to AFOS rotation. It was going to be a typically quiet and uneventful slide into the new year here at this blog, right? [Dana Carvey's John McLaughlin voice] Wrong! Live365, the Bay Area Internet radio hosting platform I've gotten along well with--it's the company that's powered AFOS for 13 years--ended 2015 with a huge announcement.

Recent changes in music licensing regulations and the end of the Webcaster Settlement Act, which allowed for low-revenue Internet radio stations to pay lower royalties to record labels than those paid by the likes of Pandora, have resulted in Live365's investors leaving the company and Live365 laying off nearly its entire staff. The company has already moved out of its longtime Foster City office space.

The future doesn't look good for Live365. The company informed its Pro broadcasters that it will allow them to continue running their radio stations until January 31. I'm one of Live365's Pro broadcasters, so that means, yes, unless Live365 is somehow saved by a new group of investors or it gets some other kind of 11th-hour rescue, AFOS is going off the air on January 31.

My response to that is this: good. It's time to call it quits as an Internet radio broadcaster.

I've seen a few Live365 Pro or non-Pro broadcasters tell their listeners that they either have started to look for other streaming platform options or have shut down their Live365 streams to begin streaming independently. I won't be doing the same for AFOS. Some of the enthusiasm I had during the first few years of running the station has simply disappeared. The audience for AFOS has also disappeared, although there are still one or two listeners who holler at me on Facebook or Twitter. Why listen to a 24-hour station when other platforms allow you to curate your own playlists with ease or when you can simply YouTube any piece of music you like? (I don't even listen to Internet stations anymore. I prefer to listen to DJ mixes. The Internet has changed so much since 2003 and 2004. Those years were when my listeners were at their most responsive and vocal, so I used to do hour-long shows where I would read aloud their e-mails to me. And then one day, the e-mails suddenly stopped coming, so without those e-mails, I stopped doing mailbag shows.)

I still listen to the film and TV score albums that my station's programming is comprised of, so I've continued to update the station playlists once or twice a month to attempt to keep the station from sounding stale. But I haven't talked into a microphone and recorded original content for AFOS since 2009. I got tired of not getting paid for speaking on the mic.

I never earned a dime from AFOS, much like how college radio DJs who currently host score music radio programs (just like I did when I was a university student) or any other kind of program don't get paid by their stations for spinning music. But I never intended to earn a dime from AFOS anyway. I did all this only because I like to stream score music and I'm passionate about the work of a few film composers, many of whom are prolific (Ennio Morricone), while others aren't as prolific and really ought to be prolific (like David Holmes or, from the rugged lands of Shaolin, RZA, who's better at film scoring than acting).

I hate reunions, while I love how a little application called Adobe Premiere changed AFOS forever in 1999

(Photo source: A Burger a Day)

I don't like looking back at the past. I'd rather think about the present and the future, which is why a recent subject in this blog's Throwback Thursday series, The World's End--a cautionary film about the dangers of nostalgia and remaining in the past--resonates so much with me. Edgar Wright's film agrees a lot with me about staying focused on the future and never looking back. If I look at the blog archive at the bottom of my blog and the last few posts I wrote are all about subjects that took place before the '00s, I get really worried. "Uh-oh, I better not spend too much time in the past. Stay in the now," I think to myself. That's why I did for a couple of years a weekly series of posts about new TV (but focused on animation). Newer TV is always more fascinating to me than older TV. I don't even like film or TV blogs where the authors write only about old films or old TV, a.k.a. what Arthur Chu would call the pre-Selfie, pre-Fresh Off the Boat world. It's like those authors are basically saying, "Film and TV were better when it was all white folks." Uh, no, it wasn't, Teabagger.

This year, UC Santa Cruz--the university whose alums include Maya Rudolph, Cary Fukunaga and more recently, DJ Dahi--is celebrating its 50th anniversary. As part of the festivities, UCSC's campus radio station is inviting all former DJs, from Bullseye host Jesse Thorn to a classmate who occasionally keeps in touch with me, Yukiya Jerry Waki, to return to the station later this month and reminisce about their time there. I hate reunions and prefer to avoid them like the plague. So on some mornings in the past few weeks, I'll wake up thinking to myself, "Nah, I'll skip this Santa Cruz one." But then on other mornings, I'll wake up thinking, "Okay, maybe I'll drop by, probably tell someone a wacky story about that terrible time I did my radio show immediately after a sweaty, all-white drum circle performed live at the studio--so the studio smelled like the inside of an outhouse at a summer music festival for the rest of that afternoon--and after only a couple of hours of reminiscing, I bounce, and then it's straight to grabbing both a burger at Jack's and the next bus back north."

I'll always be grateful for what the station taught me about radio, broadcasting, chart reporting, interacting with the labels and so on--it was where AFOS began, as a two-hour show where I got the chance to interview on the phone Mark Hamill, '60s Star Trek composer Gerald Fried and my personal favorite interviewee on the phone during those UCSC years, a now-retired TV critic named Joyce Millman--but my time at the station also consisted of a few things I'm not proud of or that were just plain stupid. A reunion will just make me relive those cringeworthy moments I'd rather not revisit.

Thanks to AFOS shuffle mode, I wonder what a Batman sandwich or a Star Trek sandwich would taste like

Even though it can occasionally be a hassle to try to keep track of 17 hours and 28 minutes of music, which is the average amount of music I calculated from the current total track lengths of the eight different playlists I keep in rotation for the "AFOS Prime" block (plus the extra hours of music that make up the five other blocks on the AFOS station schedule), running AFOS is a pretty simple task. I just hit "Shuffle" and Live365.com does the rest.

Often, weird things I have no control over take place during the shuffle mode I've set for AFOS, which is how I've regularly referred to the station since 2007. It's AFOS. No bloody FOS or FFOS. It's always been AFOS. I've always wanted to shorten the station name to just AFOS because the acronym evokes the four-call-letter names of the terrestrial radio stations I grew up listening to: KFRC, KMEL and so on. But instead of a K as the first letter, it's an A. Also, the acronym can stand for many different phrases besides A Fistful of Soundtracks, and I once jotted down a list of 12 of them. Examples include "Ample Focus on Scores," "All Fantastic Original Scores" and my personal favorite, "Asians Fucking Owning Shit."

Anyway, shuffle mode causes all these fantastic original scores to form either unintentional sets of two or three tracks by the same composer or "sandwiches," which is how I refer to cases where two tracks written by the same composer or emanating from the same movie or TV franchise appear to be sandwiching a completely unrelated track in the "last played" section of the AFOS Live365 site. I often take screen shots of these accidental sets or sandwiches.

Star Trek sandwiches happen frequently on AFOS. Mmm, Star Trek sandwich. I wonder how a Star Trek sandwich would taste. Maybe it would be like Chief O'Brien's "Altair sandwich" with no mustard from Deep Space Nine. Some Star Trek head who can't spell has defined an Altair sandwich as "three kinds of meet [sic], two cheeses, and any number of other additions." Whattup, future Super Bowl Sunday dish.

Batman sandwiches also happen a lot on AFOS. I wonder what a Batman sandwich would taste like. I figure it would be like the Batman Diner Double Beef at McDonald's in Hong Kong.

(Photo source: Geekologie)

Hold up. An egg in a burger?! I hate eggs if they're not scrambled, and even though it's scrambled in this case, eggs don't belong in burgers. I'll pass.

Occasionally, there are spaghetti western sandwiches on "AFOS Prime." Is there such a thing as a spaghetti western sandwich? Apparently, there is. Somebody blogged about a spaghetti western sandwich shop in Rome. Some of its sandwiches are named after characters from Terence Hill and Bud Spencer's Trinity movies.

(Photo source: Afar)

Here are more screen shots of shuffle mode weirdness I previously collected in 2011, joined by some new and never-before-posted screen shots of more weird music sandwiches and combinations.

There have been unintentional time travel movie theme double shots.

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 the first Thor flick.

Composer name pronunciation key (as revised by 2014 Emmy presenter Gwen Stefani)

At the 2014 Emmys, The Colbert Report won Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Series, and Emmy presenter Gwen Stefani came up with an interesting pronunciation for "coal-bear": "coal-bort." Because of the 87-year-old No Doubt frontwoman's memorable pronunciation of Stephen Colbert's name, it's a good time for me to present an update of the AFOS blog's film and TV composer name pronunciation key, which I compiled for myself (back when I used to back-announce tracks on the AFOS channel) and then posted in 2009.

Ramin Djawadi

Bruno Coulais (Coraline composer): [cool-aid]
Craig Safan (Cheers composer): [norm]
Elmer Bernstein: [burn-no-tiss]
Ennio Morricone: [mwaaaaaaah]
Gustavo Santaolalla: [san-ta-cluh-ree-tuh]
Jan Hammer: [jan-bray-dee]
Leonard Bernstein: [lee-oh-nid-bresh-nev-leh-knee-broos-and-les-tur-bayngs]
Maurice Jarre: [jah-rih-dihm]
Michael Giacchino: [jah-pee-pol]
Mikis Theodorakis (Zorba the Greek composer): [oh-pa]
Miklós Rózsa: [mee-kohs kass-uh-dine]
Ramin Djawadi (Game of Thrones composer): [ho-dor]
Randy Edelman: [muhk-guy-ver]
Tom Tykwer: [tie-koh]
Trevor Rabin: [oh-nur-ov-uh-loan-lee-hart]
Wojciech Kilar: [voy-check ya-self-bee-for-yoo-rih-gih-tee-rek-ya-self]
Zbigniew Preisner (The Double Life of Véronique composer): [itz-uh-big-yoo-nih-vers-and-weer-not]

Costume drama comes to "The Whitest Block Ever" and "AFOS Prime" in the corseted form of selections from Rachel Portman's Belle score

I haven't seen Belle yet, but I intend to do so either soon or via Netflix when it hits Blu-ray because it received mostly positive reviews. Jane Austen-type material usually makes my eyes glaze over. But my lack of interest in Austen-type costume dramas suddenly disappears when the star of the film is beautiful Gugu Mbatha-Raw (her first name is, by the way, short for "Gugulethu," which means "our pride" in Zulu), who was the main reason why the failed spy show Undercovers was briefly worth watching, and when the subject matter--the abolitionist movement--is told from a black woman's perspective for a change and is written and directed by black filmmakers.

Belle also happens to be the type of film I like to spotlight during "The Whitest Block Ever" on AFOS: a quality work (or in the cases of Justin Lin's Fast and the Furious sequels or Rusty Cundieff's Tales from the Hood, an enjoyable B-movie) made by a director of color. In Belle's case, the director of color is female: Amma Asante, a former child actor from British TV who made the transition to filmmaking. Belle is Asante's second feature film, and it's the story of a real-life figure, 18th-century British aristocrat Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate daughter of a British admiral and an African slave.

Amma Asante

"Last year saw a flurry of high-profile films with (male) black protagonists (12 Years a Slave, Mandela, Fruitvale Station, The Butler and 42), and the wonderful thing about Asante's carefully constructed film is that it's not a story grounded in black suffering," wrote film critic Inkoo Kang.

Rachel Portman

I've listened to Rachel Portman's Belle score before seeing the film. It's Portman at her Sirens/Cider House Rules-ish best, so I'm adding selections from her Belle score to rotation for "The Whitest Block Ever," "AFOS Prime" and "New Cue Revue." I occasionally like to check in on "The Whitest Block Ever" or "AFOS Prime" and hear what the Live365 server is shuffling during those blocks. It'll be a trip to suddenly hear what's basically PBS Masterpiece in the middle of all those block-rocking action flick cues and swaggering, contemporary theme tunes during "The Whitest Block Ever."

Belle is Asante's attempt to prove that filmmakers of color can pull off the corset dramas too. As the BAFTA Award-winning Austen fan told Kang, "The idea of restricting us--'OK, you guys are great at urban movies. You guys are great at comedies'--I wanted to show how shallow that view is."

Radio that's far more entertaining than my pathetic excuse for an Internet radio station

AMN Radio

And now, a rundown of the "Radio radio" link roll that's located on the right side of this blog.

AMN Radio

L.A.'s Radio Korea, or as stand-up and Walter & PK Show co-host Walter Hong twangily pronounces it, "Radio KOH-rea," has been experimenting with a nightly block of English-language programming for Asian American 18-to-34-year-olds, which is unprecedented in terrestrial radio. Why the hell hasn't this type of programming happened sooner?

I don't live in L.A., so I wasn't aware of the existence of the AMN (Asian Media Network) Radio block until Korean American indie rapper/stand-up Dumbfoundead got his own weekly AMN program, a show that's slightly reminiscent of a podcast he's guested on, Shots Fired, the Earwolf hip-hop industry talk podcast hosted by Nocando and Jeff Weiss. SCRAM Radio, which, like other AMN programs, is archived in podcast form on the AMN site, is a pretty good industry talk show about the indie hustle (take a drink every time either one of Dumbfoundead's guests or one of the mostly teenage guest callers nearly curses on-air), with occasional interludes of ill scratching by DJ Zo.

"Zo is half-Filipino, half-Italian," says the K-Town king of battle rap at the start of SCRAM Radio's premiere episode from June, "which equals..."

"Mexican," jokes Zo.

SCRAM Radio, which gets its title from a track off Dumbfoundead's 2012 EP Take the Stares, has gotten me listening to a couple of other AMN programs, like The Walter & PK Show, which Hong hosts with another stand-up, Paul "PK" Kim (I haven't checked out AMN's K-pop program yet, but I'll get there). Walter and PK's whole entire hour about the abundance of white male/Asian female couples, a chat that also includes input from female hosts of other AMN programs, is one of the funniest and most entertaining discussions I've heard regarding a subject that can be such a heated and humorless one for Asian guys (many of whom resent being desexualized by everyone, whether it's the mainstream media or Asian women who prefer white men over Asian men). Nobody's safe during this frank discussion of WM/AF couples--not even Asian guys. Both guest caller Dumbfoundead and Irene Hsu, co-host of the ESL Show (by the way, the recent ESL Show episode where co-host Yvonne Lu recalls an awkward moment when Oliver Stone, who's known for having an Asian fetish, creepily hit on her is funny as well), refer to Asian guys as sloppier and dumber than white guys when it comes to attempting to hide their infidelity from their wives or girlfriends.

"All the Asian girls I know that date white dudes--[the white dudes] all look wack. They look like Mark Zuckerberg," notes Dumb hilariously at another point in the WM/AF couples episode. "All the white dudes that Asian girls date wear TOMS Shoes."

TOMS Shoes are nowhere to be seen during Dumb's clever video for "New Chick."



The Dork Forest

I've grown bored with WTF with Marc Maron-inspired comedy podcasts where the guests discuss at length the L.A. stand-up scene and how they got started and the thing God would say to them when they arrive at the pearly gates if heaven exists and so on. I've found myself drifting towards comedy podcasts with a different and slightly tighter focus. One such podcast is stand-up Jackie Kashian's The Dork Forest, where, instead of yakking about their career trajectories, her guests, who range from other stand-ups like Aisha Tyler to non-stand-ups like Fatale creator Ed Brubaker and Portlandia star Carrie Brownstein, yak about arcane subjects they have a buttload of expertise in. For example, Dana Gould is a Planet of the Apes nerd, so there's lots of talk about Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall and Apes memorabilia during his first guest appearance on The Dork Forest.



Although I went through a brief phase of collecting baseball cards as a kid because I thought the cards I bought at the time would be valuable someday (they most likely aren't), I really don't give a shit about baseball (because I'm from the Bay Area, I care about baseball only when the San Francisco Giants or the A's are in the World Series). When you're a kid, baseball can be fun to play, but it's such a slow goddamn sport to watch. I've seen C-SPAN telecasts that are more energetic. But when Greg Proops, a Giants fan and a Negro League history buff, talks at length about a favorite old-timey player of his (like Satchel Paige or Dock Ellis, who astoundingly once pitched a no-hitter while on LSD) or when he drops science about a really obscure bit of baseball history, baseball suddenly becomes fascinating.

Proops has his own podcast, The Smartest Man in the World, but his most entertaining bit of podcasting took place not on his own show but on The Dork Forest. Kashian got Proops to school her and the listeners on old-timey baseball history (for instance, did you know Babe Ruth called everyone "kid," or as the Babe strangely pronounced it, "keed"?). Proops rarely cracked jokes during his Dork Forest baseball episode, but the episode is enormously enjoyable, as is Proops' later Dork Forest guest appearance regarding the Roman Empire and other periods of ancient history. Like Howard Zinn, Proops is the history teacher you always wanted.





Garth Trinidad

You know you're listening to a decent DJ when he or she plays a track or two that makes you say "Who dat?" A terrific DJ causes you to say "Who dat?" during every single track he or she plays. Trinidad is frequently the latter. I like how a typical Trinidad playlist on KCRW is made up of lots of new, not-so-well-known neo-soul joints or deep cuts that catch my ear, and only two or three tracks are ones I'm familiar with, like "No Thing on Me (Cocaine Song)" off Curtis Mayfield's Superfly soundtrack.

If it weren't for Trinidad, I wouldn't have fallen in love with:

The hard-to-find Towa Tei remix of En Vogue's "Whatever."

"Consequences" by Bugz in the Attic.

"Sincerely, Jane" by Janelle Monáe.

"Jerk Ribs," the new Kelis single produced by TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek.



Mission Log

Rod Roddenberry, son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, hatched a podcast idea that's hardly new: a series of discussions between a pair of Star Trek heads about a different episode of his late father's classic show each week. But there's a twist to this format: hosts Ken Ray and John Champion intend to cover every episode of every screen incarnation of the franchise in chronological order, including even the least-loved spinoff shows (the horribly animated Star Trek: The Animated Series from the '70s and the didn't-hit-its-stride-until-late-in-its-run Enterprise). So far, Ray and Champion have finished reviewing the first two seasons of the original Trek. They won't reach Enterprise, the last TV series that was set in the Trekverse before J.J. Abrams rebooted the franchise, until about 11 years from now.

Produced by both Roddenberry Entertainment and Nerdist Industries, Mission Log isn't as boring as it sounds on paper, thanks to a pair of hosts who aren't too off-putting personality-wise and are able to say way more than just "Dude, that phaser array is awesome" or "Dude, Spock's such a rock star." (Have you ever listened to Zack Snyder talk? All he says during interviews or commentary tracks is "Awesome" or "So-and-so's such a rock star.") Ray and Champion take their episode discussions into interesting directions by spending more time on the characters' ethics and moral dilemmas than on gushing over the show's ships and gadgets.

Ray and Champion also tackle a question that's been asked about the '60s show from time to time: do the show's first two seasons live up to their vaunted reputation or are there episodes before "Spock's Brain" (widely considered the '60s show's nadir) that actually don't stand the test of time? "The Alternative Factor," the "anti-matter universe" episode about a mad scientist with hipster facial hair who slips and falls down a lot, is, for example, one such pre-season 3 episode that's a pain to sit through without downing a fifth of Romulan ale.

They're also willing to criticize some of the '60s Trek's outdated approaches to handling gender and race, a criticism that I appreciate hearing (yes, the show gave us Sulu, but it also chose to slap brownface and Fu Manchu staches on the Klingons to establish them as evil). I'm so looking forward to when Mission Log reaches the Deep Space Nine highlight "Far Beyond the Stars," where Captain Sisko experiences life as a black sci-fi author in the '50s and by the time of that 1998 episode's airing, the franchise had progressed to the point where it could look back and say, "Yes, that early Next Generation episode about that all-black planet was dumb and racist, and it never should have been filmed."

Ray's observations about the '60s show's outdated elements have led to some negative feedback from fanboys who think Trek should be immune from that kind of criticism. I wish Ray would tell those neocons to fuck off, but he's probably too polite to do so. Die-hard Trek heads aren't known for "colorful metaphors."

Secret Agent on SomaFM

San Francisco's SomaFM devotes an entire station to tunes that are either selections from '60s spy genre music cover albums or electronica and acid jazz tracks that channel the '60s spy genre sound. These tracks are interspersed with quick soundbites from 007 movies (and occasionally, Barbarella and Roman Coppola's CQ). Despite these 007 soundbites, SomaFM founder and Secret Agent music director Rusty Hodge rarely puts the themes from 007 movies into rotation. Film score music-wise, Hodge prefers more obscure Italian giallo or poliziotto score cues like Stelvio Cipriani's "Papaya" from 1975's La polizia ha le mani legate (The Police Have Their Hands Tied). Despite not being from the spy genre, these score cues are part of the station playlist because, as Hodge wrote in the station bio, they, like all the non-score tracks on the playlist, are all music that would fit a scene in any spy film.

In the mid-to-late '00s, I would frequently log on to Secret Agent, but I don't do it as much anymore. That's because the playlist doesn't seem to get updated that much, so I've heard everything that's on it. (The soundbites don't seem to be updated either--when I hear those soundbites, it's as if the 007 movie franchise never moved past Pierce Brosnan.) But there are lots of nifty obscurities on the playlist, like this one particular little-known track about Paris I lost the name of after my most recent PC died and took with it all the info I typed about that track on WordPad. I got worried about never being able to find the track again because ever since I first heard it on Secret Agent five years ago, I've been crushing on the breathy voice of the American spoken-word artist who chuckles over her memories of Paris. I wasn't able to Shazam it because I currently don't have a smartphone. I have what I call a dumbphone. The phone is an older Samsung that's not sophisticated enough to carry Shazam, so it took me a whole week to Google it.

The track turned out to be 1996's "Paris" by the German jazz group Trance Groove.

Damn, I feel like I'm in bed with this lady.

Who's that voice on AFOS?

(Portions of the following were culled from a series of "Who's That Voice on AFOS?" posts from July 13-17, 2010.)

The new indie film In a World... is distinctive for being the first comedy set against the voiceover industry. I took a bunch of voice acting classes back when I was considering breaking into the voiceover industry, so the subject of In a World... is of great interest to me. In a World... is the feature-length directorial debut of actress Lake Bell, one of the stars of the most hilarious 11-minute show on cable, Childrens Hospital, as well as an occasional director of Childrens Hospital episodes. Bell stars in In a World... as a vocal coach who attempts to break into the male-dominated movie trailer side of the industry and ends up competing with her announcer father for the lucrative gig of reading copy for an ad campaign for The Amazon Games, a much-hyped tentpole franchise based on a popular series of YA page-turners with similarities to a certain Suzanne Collins YA franchise.

In a World... opens with footage of the late Don LaFontaine--the copywriter-turned-legendary voiceover artist who's credited with coming up with the ubiquitous '80s and '90s trailer phrase "In a world where..."--cold killing it as a trailer narrator. In a post-LaFontaine world where everyone's still in awe of DLF's baritone and incredible work ethic, only two or three voiceover artists have carried on LaFontaine's raspy, imposing and frequently parodied style--most notably Ashton Smith, whose baritone was all over the TV spots for the first three Bourne movies (Smith once said, "When you die, the voice you hear in heaven is not Don's. It's God trying to sound like Don.").

But as Bell, a self-described trailer fanatic, noted when she and actor/voiceover artist Fred Melamed, who plays her dad in In a World..., both plugged the film on Fresh Air last week, trailer houses are increasingly veering away from voiceovers and letting the footage speak for itself. While that's great for trailer houses that want their product to look more sophisticated and stylish and sound not as dated as the '80s and '90s "In a world..." days of advertising, I'm a little concerned about that because it adds some difficulty to my task of tracking down more recent trailer audio clips I could use for AFOS, in which announcers like Smith portentously utter the taglines and titles of recent movies or TV shows.

I attach these clips of trailers or radio/TV spots to score tracks from the movies or shows that are promoted in these trailers or spots because I don't want to go through the tedium of switching on both my mic and Audacity and recording a back-announcement for every single track that's in rotation on AFOS. These intros I cull from trailers or TV spots are, to me, an entertaining way to let the listeners know what they'll be hearing next, as well as a way to keep them from asking me what they're hearing. (Only rarely will I receive a message from a really dumb and lazy listener who doesn't bother to either pay attention to the intro or read the track info on the radio station widget, so he'll ask me to identify the already-ID'd track that was streamed at yadda-yadda-yadda in the afternoon. Yo, Einstein, it's impossible for me to go back and check because I don't exactly keep a running tab on when shit was streamed during the day. I wish these dumb shits were more like illustrator Kevin Greene, who's much more helpful when asking me about a track he was having some trouble IDing.)

In 2005, I experimented with attaching the vintage radio spots for Black Caesar and Foxy Brown to the themes from those movies, and I liked how the old ads sounded as intros (any old ad or trailer that features the late Adolph Caesar's voice is always fun to listen to). Then shortly thereafter, Warner Bros.' home video division dropped the Batman Begins soundtrack album, and I was looking for an effective and ominous way to announce "This next track is from the Batman Begins score" without having to say those words. I found it in the form of an audio clip of the Batman Begins TV spot that consisted solely of the bat swarm graphics from the film's opening titles. I thought that was an even niftier intro than the blaxploitation radio ads, so from then on, I tacked on trailer or promo clips to almost every single track during the block that's now known as "AFOS Prime." (On AFOS, LaFontaine's voice can be heard during clips of trailers or TV spots that were produced for Purple Rain, The Untouchables, The Living Daylights, Mo' Better Blues, A Rage in Harlem, Passenger 57, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Hoodlum, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Ratatouille, The Simpsons Movie and Midnight Run.)



As In a World... gets audiences to better appreciate the art of trailer voiceovers and the talents who partake in such a faceless profession, here's a guide to some of the distinctive non-LaFontaine voices that surface during the movie or TV trailer clips that function as intros to the tunes during "AFOS Prime," "Beat Box," "The Whitest Block Ever" and "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round."

Adolph Caesar
Who's he?: A New York stage actor whose classy baritone was all over trailers and ads for blaxploitation flicks, Caesar earned acclaim late in his career for some of his acting work both on stage and screen before dying from a heart attack in 1986.
Most memorable on-screen role: A role he reprised from the stage: the self-hating light-skinned black sergeant in A Soldier's Story who, in the above pic, is preparing to whup the ass of some future double Oscar winner.
Most memorable voiceover work: The trailers and TV/radio spots for the original Dawn of the Dead ("When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth").
When can you hear him on AFOS?: The radio spots for Trouble Man, Foxy Brown and Claudine and the trailers for Three Tough Guys and Superfly.

AFOS converts to stereo this Saturday, December 1--if there are no technical difficulties

After 10 years of AFOS being in mono (22050 Hz, 32 kbps, "Good audio quality for talk radio. Not great for music," according to Live365, which powers AFOS), I'm upgrading AFOS to stereo (22050 Hz, 56 kbps, "Audio quality is the illest," according to me). Since October 1, I've been going through the AFOS music library and re-converting five or 10 "AFOS Prime" playlist tracks per day, this time into stereo mp3s instead of saving them down as mono mp3s like I used to do for 10 straight years.

The conversion to stereo was originally going to take place on January 1, but because I now have enough mp3s that won't result in too much repetition, I'm moving the upgrade up to Saturday. That means I have to temporarily shut down the station tomorrow to upload all those redone files to the station locker. Hopefully, there won't be any technical snafus in the next two days because I don't have the patience for that shit right now.

The slightly bigger file sizes will result in less music in the locker, but far superior sound quality. In other words, AFOS won't sound like an AM station anymore. I streamed content in mono only because mono file sizes are smaller, and that allowed me to stream a lot more music (according to Live365, four times more music than I'll be capable of streaming in stereo, to be exact).

I was playing back the new stereo mp3 I just made out of "Malcolm and Martin" from the Do the Right Thing score album, and the difference is huge. I like being able to hear Terence Blanchard's trumpet during "Malcolm and Martin" with the same clarity and resonance it has on the album.

The downsized amount of music in the locker also means huge schedule changes. The "AFOS Prime" block will remain on the schedule, but the other blocks--"Beat Box," "Rock Box," "Rome, Italian Style," "Chai Noon," "New Cue Revue" and "Soda and Pie"--will not be back. However, some tracks from the "Chai Noon" playlist will be transferred to "AFOS Prime," and I might bring back "Beat Box" and "Rock Box" to the schedule at some point next year as I gradually rebuild those two playlists. I took another look at the revamped "AFOS Prime" playlist, and it turns out I do have enough not-so-John-Williams-y tracks to rebuild "Beat Box," so "Beat Box" is back on the schedule with a new time slot: Mondays through Fridays at 7-9am.

Frankly, I always hated mono, from the way it makes music sound so tinny to its very name. Audio formats shouldn't have the same exact names as diseases you get from kissing.

Hold your breath and count to 10 as Skyfall covers "AFOS Prime"

Beginning today, A Fistful of Soundtracks is streaming selections from Thomas Newman's score to the new Bond movie Skyfall--as well as the Skyfall theme song performed by Adele and produced by her "Rolling in the Deep" collaborator Paul Epworth--during the "AFOS Prime" and "New Cue Revue" blocks. The score album doesn't drop until November 6. The film doesn't come out until November 9 here in America (England, of course, gets dibs on the film this Friday before we do--those limey bastards).

I'm more of a fan of the 007 music than the movies themselves, although I love the more grounded and gritty direction the series has taken ever since Daniel Craig's Bond had that messy, nearly Dan-vs.-the-Captain-like fight with his first kill in the men's room. As someone who digs that John Barry/David Arnold Bond sound, I knew Adele's "Skyfall" would be a good Bond song right when I started hearing a guitarist strum the first four notes of the Monty Norman-penned (and Barry-arranged) "James Bond Theme" at exactly one minute into Adele's single. That's something that's hugely lacking from Madonna's "Die Another Day" (or a much worse track, Rita Coolidge's yacht-rock-y "All Time High" from Octopussy, not exactly one of Barry's finest musical moments) but is present in Adele's tune: an appreciation for the Bond series' storied musical past.

As for the score by Newman, who has regularly worked with Skyfall director Sam Mendes since American Beauty (except for Away We Go) and isn't the first person who comes to mind when I think "action movie composer," it's exactly how I imagined a 007 score by Newman to be: not as flashy-sounding as Arnold's 007 scores and more heavy on percussion than brass, which Arnold's scores were awash in. Newman came up with clever ways to work in bits and pieces of Norman's "James Bond Theme" throughout his score. "She's Mine," one of the Skyfall tracks I've added to rotation, expands upon the old Norman melody with stunning results.

Meanwhile, I'm hard at work on upgrading AFOS from mono to stereo after 10 years of the station being in mono, a format I chose over stereo in order to be able to carry more than 50 hours of music. Since October 1, I've been going through the AFOS music library and re-converting five station playlist tracks per day, this time into stereo mp3s instead of into mono mp3s. The slightly bigger file sizes will mean less music in the library, but far better sound quality. It's time for an upgrade. I've penciled in January 1 as the date of the station's conversion from mono to stereo because by then, I'll have enough tracks to fill several hours, but I wish the upgrade would begin tomorrow, so that tunes like "Skyfall" don't have to sound kind of tinny anymore.