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)

Thinking outside the Fox: A speculation over how The Force Awakens will open without the Fox fanfare (accompanied by my older brother's doodles in the 1978 Star Wars Storybook from when he was six)

When Star Wars: The Force Awakens premieres in just two weeks, it will be the first live-action Star Wars film to open without composer Alfred Newman's majestic 20th Century Fox fanfare, due to Disney's 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm and the transfer of the role of distributor of the Star Wars films from Fox to Disney. The last Star Wars film that played in theaters actually didn't open with the Fox fanfare either: 2008's CG-animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars, a prelude to the CG-animated TV show of the same name, was distributed by Warner Bros. instead of Fox.

Yet some Star Wars fans are still experiencing separation anxiety in regards to Newman's fanfare, a familiar staple of previous live-action Star Wars installments, even after learning to live without it when they saw the Clone Wars film.

But I mean really, how do you NOT open a Star Wars movie without the FOX fanfare audio over the Lucasfilm title screen??

— Carmichael Dave (@CarmichaelDave) October 22, 2015

This is what Star Wars will sound like without the Fox Fanfare. Sounds kinda clunky and gross. http://t.co/ZyX0VjHF2c

— Cue The Music (@CueTheMusic) April 10, 2015

If a Star Wars fanboy you know or tolerate is saying something along the lines of "It just ain't Star Wars without the Fox logo music," it's time to get him to rip that Band-Aid off. It's time to tell him to get over the absence of the Fox fanfare and grow up, fuzzball. To borrow the words of Jacob Hall over at ScreenCrush, are we really going to get sentimental and worked up about a movie studio's theme music being removed from a film franchise the studio no longer owns? "We shouldn't," said Hall. "That would be silly. But we are!"

Well, I'm not. There are other things I'm much more concerned about than the disappearance of a corporation's fanfare. Those things include the original score music within the new film, provided once again by the beloved John Williams (meanwhile, Hamilton mastermind Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the film's new cantina music?: that's what I call a coup), and the ways the George Lucas-less Force Awakens will handle the much-needed return of the kind of character who was missing for too long from the Star Wars films and whose absence was the biggest reason why I despise the Lucas-directed prequel trilogy. That would be the character who takes a gander at all the mysticism and craziness surrounding him and says, "Yeah, this is bullshit. But I'll just go along with it. For now." In other words: Han Solo.

My older brother was a calligraphy nerd in grade school, and his 1978 copy of The Star Wars Storybook, which I unearthed from our parents' garage a couple of years ago, was clearly the beginning of that.

The prequels badly needed a foil to gruffly react to "hokey religions and ancient weapons." In the classic trilogy, Han--the reluctant hero who will be played once again in The Force Awakens by similarly reluctant Star Wars star Harrison Ford, who once famously grumbled to Lucas that "You can write this shit, but you can't say it"--served that purpose entertainingly, and to a certain extent, so did Princess Leia, whose barbs were directed at walking carpets and nerf herders rather than hokey religions and ancient weapons.

A character like Han (and occasionally, Leia) is integral to breaking up the monotony of the ultra-solemn Jedi characters (the prequels clearly intended Ewan McGregor's slightly cranky version of Obi-Wan to be the new Han figure, but it just wasn't the same), the similarly solemn politician characters and the mostly dour Sith characters. Han's presence also supplies to the proceedings a certain dose of grown-up comedic energy (as opposed to the brand of humor that was written for six-year-olds like Jar Jar's puerile and Fetchit-y bits of comic relief during The Phantom Menace). Without a character like Han, the Star Wars films unfortunately turned into a stuffy BBC costume drama in space. Or as Screen Junkies announcer Jon Bailey astutely summed up Attack of the Clones during the Honest Trailer for that prequel, "People sitting and talking, standing and talking, walking and talking, one person standing and talking while another is sitting and talking, people standing and talking, then taking a seat for more talking."



Back to things that aren't as lethargic. Look, I agree that Newman's rousing 1954 arrangement of his own 1933 Fox fanfare--an extended update that was designed to herald Fox's CinemaScope logo for films shot in the CinemaScope widescreen format Fox introduced in the '50s to compete with square-shaped TV--is a great little piece of music. It's so great it inspired Williams to write the Star Wars opening title theme in the same key. In fact, the studio suits so enjoyed hearing again the 1954 version at the start of a Fox film when Star Wars brought it back to accompany the "A Lucasfilm Limited Production" card--by the way, the demise of the CinemaScope label caused the studio to revert to the shorter 1933 fanfare for most of the '70s, while the studio's Planet of the Apes franchise opted to completely ditch studio artist Emil Kosa Jr.'s animated Fox logo--that the 1954 version became the permanent arrangement of the fanfare after Star Wars. (That move by Fox resulted in two of my favorite takes on the 1954 fanfare: musician Bennie Wallace's Dixieland funk version at the start of White Men Can't Jump and Ralph Wiggum's rendition of the last few notes of the 1954 fanfare at the start of The Simpsons Movie.) But it's time to move on, man. Star Wars is not going to fall apart without that 1954 fanfare (and if you really can't let go of that fanfare, bring your phone or mp3 player along with you to the theater like they suggested over at the A.V. Club, put on your earbuds and cue up either the fanfare or "20th Century Foxney" when The Force Awakens begins). However, I'm curious about how The Force Awakens will open without it.

When Disney reissued the previous six live-action Star Wars films on digital platforms earlier this year and replaced the Fox fanfare with Lucasfilm's fanfare on five of those films (but with no Disney castle logo, much like how movies produced by Marvel Studios, another arm of Disney, never open with the Disney logo), that Lucasfilm fanfare wasn't favorably received. "The new score will now accompany all Star Wars films going forward, with the only exception being the original film, which 20th Century Fox still hold [sic] distribution rights for," wrote Kwame Opam about the Lucasfilm fanfare over at The Verge. Opam is kind of incorrect. The Lucasfilm fanfare isn't a newly written piece. It's merely some Skywalker Ranch grunt's Pro Tools re-edit of the last few notes of Williams' end title music from The Empire Strikes Back.

Illustration by six-year-old Jonas Aquino

Illustration by Aquino

Illustration by Aquino

Many fanboys assume The Force Awakens will open with the same fanfare that's been tacked on to The Empire Strikes Back and the four subsequent Star Wars films for their digital releases. I have a feeling The Force Awakens won't use that chopped-up fanfare. I think the new film should open with complete silence before the classic Williams theme kicks in--it's more powerful that way and it's preferable over some old Williams fanfare from 1980 or even a new Williams fanfare--and I think it will.

Disney's Force Awakens marketing campaign has been effective at building suspense and excitement and not giving too much of the film away. I have a feeling the film itself will continue in that vein by opting for silence right before the return of the classic Williams theme. But whatever Disney, Lucasfilm and Bad Robot decide to do at the start of The Force Awakens, like my older brother cornily scrawled in pencil about the Rebels inside the Death Star when he was six, the Force will be with them.

And whatever they do will be far better than "People sitting and talking, standing and talking, walking and talking, one person standing and talking while another is sitting and talking, people standing and talking, then taking a seat for more talking."

The music of Star Wars is part of "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H" on AFOS. Star Wars is represented in both those blocks by the Empire Strikes Back score cues "The Battle of Hoth" and "The Rebel Fleet/End Title," which was, as mentioned earlier, later compressed and re-edited into the Lucasfilm fanfare at the start of the digital releases of the Star Wars films.

Is Christina Hendricks a "trouper" or "trooper"?

A few days ago, I was looking for the YouTube link to that old viral video of a KTLA morning TV interviewer transforming into a total dweeb after Christina Hendricks, star of the recently-concluded-for-good, unlikely-to-do-reunion-movies-guest-starring-the-Harlem-Globetrotters AMC hit Mad Men, mentions how she received news of her first-ever Emmy acting nomination while she was preparing to take a bath. The image of her bathing is all the interviewer can talk about for the rest of the interview. Way to keep it professional, KTLA guy! "He sits there silently for a whole minute, and by the time he gets back into the conversation, he's a stuttering mess. Although to his credit, he still has his pants on," wrote Uproxx in 2010.

This wasn't Conan turning his awkwardness around hot women into the kind of comedy bit Inside Amy Schumer hilariously parodied in its recent sketch about the clichés that always take place during late-night talk show interviews with flirty female guests (I love how Schumer's sketch references that 2009 Conan-era Tonight Show interview where Gwyneth Paltrow's legs somehow got greasier and greasier after each commercial break). This was a journalist who, in front of an all-female news desk, was unable to prevent himself from regressing into a nervous 14-year-old school dance attendee in the middle of one of the least suitable places for doing that, a mostly non-comedic morning news show, with Hendricks throwing in a couple of amusing "Down, boy!"-type responses, like "That [bath story] was like two conversations ago, but thank you for remembering," which were both why the clip went viral. Why do the most awkward and NewsBeFunny YouTube channel-friendly things always happen on morning shows, whether it's The Today Show, The View or Fox & Friends?



Then I finally found the KTLA clip and copied and pasted into TextEdit both the URL and embed code, which is something I always need to do with YouTube videos I might want to include someday in posts such as this. I gave the TextEdit file the name of "Christina Hendricks Handles Brian McFayden's Drooling Like a Trooper."

But as I was typing out the file name, I became unsure about the spelling of "trooper." I kept changing it back and forth between "trooper" and "trouper."

I hear the expression "handling it like a trooper" all the time. But I've never stopped to think, "Where the hell does that expression come from?"

I opened the dictionary in my MacBook. A trooper is either "a state police officer" or "a private soldier in a cavalry, armored or airborne unit." I knew that. I didn't know a trooper can also be "a cavalry horse" or British jibber-jabber for "a ship used for transporting troops." So in the U.K., I guess that means the novel and movie title Starship Troopers sounds to them like Starship Starships. The title Starship Starships would be as absurd as whitewashing the Filipino hero of a sci-fi novel, which Hollywood would never do, right? Oh, wait...

Meanwhile, a trouper is "an actor or other entertainer, typically one with long experience" or "a reliable and uncomplaining person." I always thought it was "handling it like a trooper" because they're handling it like a brave soldier or a slick and smooth member of the '90s R&B group Troop.



I guess "a reliable and uncomplaining person" makes sense too. So which sides have professional writers taken in the war between "trouper" and "trooper"? While mentioning Sopranos star Nancy Marchand back in his Newark Star-Ledger, pre-HitFix days (the year 2000, to be exact), TV critic Alan Sepinwall said, "Marchand, who has cancer, proved herself to be a real trouper." Over at MTV News, where a Nicki Minaj backup dancer who received a snake bite qualifies as news, they said that the bitten dancer "handled it like a trooper." Meanwhile, what do etymologists outside of Dr. Webster, Dr. Merriam, Dr. Wagnalls and Dr. Uptown Funk have to say about all this?

The Grammarphobia Blog says "trouper," which also means "a member of a performing company (theatrical, singing or dancing)," also known as a troupe, has evolved in the 20th century so that the term can be used to refer to "a hard worker, a good sport, a reliable person, a mensch." Their stand on "Trouper or trooper?" is "trouper" over "trooper" because it's been spelled "trouper" since the 19th century, but due to Google searches showing "like a trooper" to be more commonly used than "like a trouper," "trooper" is alright with them too.

I also checked with a site called Daily Writing Tips. The site, which notes that "troop" and "troupe" both originated from the same French word ("troupeau," a variation of "troppus," the Latin word for "flock," according to my MacBook's dictionary), takes the following stand: "If the context has to do with courage, trooper is appropriate. If the context has to do with cooperation, dependability and the show business attitude of 'the show must go on,' then trouper is the word to use."

Joan from Mad Men was both a bit courageous (to be awake and sharp-witted that early in the day) and very unflappable in the face of live-on-L.A.-morning-TV drooling. So either spelling is correct--unless you're in the galaxy where a band of rebels has been fighting an oppressive intergalactic empire for decades and "handling it like a trooper" means you're handling it like a genocidal space Nazi in a shiny white helmet.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens teaser trailer breakdown

The green screen FX for this scene are extraordinary. Andy Serkis put on an unusual-looking motion-capture suit to do this, and he's really convincing in the role of The Following Preview Has Been Approved To Accompany This Feature By The Motion Picture Association Of America, Inc.

Here we see John Boyega on the toilet after a very bad order of fish and chips.

This is what came out of John Boyega's ass while he took that painful shit.

Whoa, SWAT team, aren't you a little overdressed for the peaceful protest of the Ferguson verdict?

Daisy Ridley rides off on what every teenage Star Wars fangirl will want for Christmas in 2015: a big-ass USB drive.

Oscar Isaac took the part of a cat-loving folk singer in Inside Llewyn Davis even though he dislikes cats. He also took the part of a helmeted Rebel Alliance fighter pilot even though he dislikes helmets because they give him Albert Einstein hair.

Adam Driver presents the latest technology in cutting down trees.

The puke-stained T-shirt of the cameraman who ralphed while filming this battle scene up in the sky is now going for $1,200 on eBay.

From a six-year nightmare of shitty dialogue, wooden acting, racial stereotypes and turgid storytelling.

Tip-Top Quotables: "Some couples have a song. Ours is the theme from Jaws," plus a few other great lines this week

My favorite monthly section in old Source magazine issues was "Hip-Hop Quotables," in which the Source editors printed out their favorite new rap verse of the month, from the first bar to the last. "Tip-Top Quotables," which I've named after that Source section, is a collection of my favorite quotes of the week from anywhere, whether it's a recent TV show or a new rap verse. "TTQ" won't appear on this blog every week. It'll appear whenever the fuck I feel like it.

* "Tell him that snoring is usually a sign of a condition called sleep apnea, which causes a lot of people to die in their sleep. Be like, 'Here, Google it.' And then he'll be so scared he'll never be able to sleep again."--Kumail Nanjiani, giving advice to an Esquire reader about how to deal with a roommate's boyfriend who snores too loud

* "We've got some very attractive rewards at every level. For instance, $10,000 lands you in a signature CNN mass-shooting coverage six-box. For $25,000, you get to take molly with Fareed Zakaria. What what! For $5 million, CNN will air a 24-hour, two-week hunt for your lost car keys."--Jon Stewart, announcing his Kickstarter to buy CNN

(Photo source: Wendy Liebman)

* "Tony played it like a failed Scientologist."--Sam Rockwell, recalling to MTV News his Galaxy Quest co-star Tony Shalhoub's hilarious performance as a constantly stoned, non-Asian TV actor playing an Asian character, which Shalhoub based on constantly stoned Kung Fu star David Carradine, '70s TV's most infamous example of a non-Asian playing an Asian

(Photo source: Pia Glenn, the writer behind the #TimeTitles hashtag, which is a mockery of this)

(Photo source: Hari Kondabolu)

* "That is not good. The only time when you are happy to hear the words 'Maggots were found' is when you are a maggot whose family was lost at sea."--Last Week Tonight's John Oliver, joking about a news report of maggots being found in prison food supplied by a shady subcontractor



* "Garner was an expert at pulling the viewer into the action and acknowledging the ridiculousness of most television storytelling without quite breaking the fourth wall. He was the guy who crawled out of the screen and sat beside you munching popcorn on the couch."--Todd VanDerWerff, Vox, "James Garner has died; these five roles will remind you of his greatness"

* "If Netanyahu is so bothered by how dead Palestinians look on television then he should stop killing so many of them."--Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York, "'Telegenically Dead Palestinians': Why Israel Is Losing the American Media War"