After San Francisco 49ers fans cordially feud with New York Giants fans, KQED's Todd Inoue sounds off on a lesser-known feud between San Francisco and another city

While recently sitting in the audience at Mezzanine in San Francisco for Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein's live tour to promote their hit IFC sketch comedy show Portlandia, music critic and iTunes producer Todd Inoue got enraged, not because Armisen and Brownstein didn't recite the "Put a Bird on It" sketch word-for-word, but because when Armisen asked the crowd if San Jose is part of the Bay Area, tons of audience members booed San Jose.

Todd, a former co-worker of mine, proudly hails from the 408. (He's also a guy who once graciously lent me several of his comedy albums from his CD collection to cull clips from for the now-defunct 15-minute Fistful of Soundtracks stand-up comedy clip show Morning Becomes Dyspeptic.) In an amusing piece he wrote and recorded for KQED-FM, Todd defends the possible future home turf of the Niners and bashes the bougie way San Franciscans like the haters at Mezzanine belittle San Ho as if the capital of Silicon Valley, which he says wallops San Francisco in the ramen and taco departments, were their runty little brother. (Even people outside the Bay have taken notice of San Franciscan snobbiness. Donal Logue, the former star of my favorite cancelled 2010 show Terriers, once tweeted that San Francisco is "A beautiful, erudite, dirty and yet phenomenally snobby city in a provincial way--maybe mostly people who just moved there.")

Ironically, the snobby anti-SJ vitriol took place at the road show tie-in to a TV series that mocks that kind of snobby attitude through the smug foodies, merchants, intellectuals, technophiles, trend-seekers and hipsters Armisen and Brownstein portray each week.

"So all you hipster dorks who dump on the 408. I'm talking to you," Todd says. "Yes, you, sitting in your wi-fi-enabled shuttle commuting from Hayes Valley to your Silicon Valley tech job. The same job that pays your bills, that allows you to listen to this program, ironically, on your Cupertino-invented laptop or iPod."

Unlike Todd, I've had an often miserable time living in the South Bay, and I'm sometimes itching to leave, but I don't like all this smug hating on SJ either (heh, "your Cupertino-invented laptop"). SJ is like a family member whom you've had beefs with, but when you see outsiders start to gang up on Jose, you get pissed off and feel like leaping right to Jose's defense. It's like "Hey, you don't get to hate on Jose. Yeah, he's always stealing my cash and he always gives the shittiest Christmas gifts, but only people who have known Jose for a long time get to put him in his place, so fuck off."

Sometimes, I feel like neither city is superior to the other, and I like them both equally. To borrow an expression I once learned from Todd, all this elitism and beefing is so Fremont.

The Fistful of Soundtracks station schedule--both past and present

Here's a detailed guide to the current Fistful of Soundtracks station schedule for listeners who aren't sure when certain programming blocks air or what kind of music is streamed during each block. I've also included descriptions of series I used to air on AFOS to show you the programming history of the station, which I launched in 2002. I pieced together parts of this post from program synopses I wrote for the now-defunct jim.aquino.com site, and I've updated those passages.

Current programming blocks

JANUARY 16, 2011 UPDATE: "Assorted Fistful" "AFOS Prime"

During this block, which occupies most of the day's programming, the channel streams random film and TV score cues. At noon on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, "Assorted Fistful" "AFOS Prime" switches to "Soda and Pie" mode and focuses on '80s tracks from the library.

"Chai Noon"

Every Tuesday and Thursday at noon and every early Wednesday and early Friday at 4am, AFOS airs an hour-long block of assorted tracks from Bollywood movies like the Amitabh Bachchan classic Don and the Dhoom films. None of the other film music radio stations on the Web are doing something like this, which is pretty damn absurd. How can they not recognize the moviemaking capital of the world?

In a 2006 blog post that's no longer online, I talked about why I created this block:

"Chai Noon" came about after I glanced at ImaginAsian Radio's program lineup one day and noticed it consisted mostly of bhangra and Bollywood shows. Then it hit me: why aren't any of the film music radio stations on the Web streaming any Bollywood music shows or blocks like ImaginAsian and the desi radio stations do? And why didn't I have a Bollywood block on my station's lineup?

It was something I felt my station needed, even though I'm no expert on Bollywood soundtracks, and I've never sat through an entire Bollywood musical. (I wish DirecTV carried AZN Television, which my older brother is able to receive, thanks to his Berkeley cable company. When I was at my bruh's place one time, I caught an AZN broadcast of Fiza. I wasn't able to watch the whole flick, but the parts I saw were interesting. Only in Bollywood could you have song-and-dance numbers during a politically charged drama about terrorism.)

That Asha Bhosle song that's better known to your 15-year-old sister as the Black Eyed Peas' "Don't Phunk with My Heart" will be on the "Chai Noon" playlist. That Hindi tune that got Smithers shakin' at the end of a recent Simpsons ep will be there too (it's from Johny Mera Naam). And of course, I didn't forget "Chaiya Chaiya" from both Dil Se and Inside Man.

FEBRUARY 27, 2010 UPDATE: "Chai Noon" also airs Wednesday at noon and early Thursday at 4am.

JANUARY 1, 2011 UPDATE: "New Cue Revue"

This hour-long block streams selections from new releases (or albums that aren't exactly new but are new to the "Assorted Fistful" "AFOS Prime" playlist). It airs Wednesdays at 10-11am and 4-5pm and Fridays at 11am-noon.

JANUARY 1, 2011 UPDATE: "The F Zone" "Rock Box"

Existing songs from movies and shows like GoodFellas, The Wire, The Boondocks, Better Luck Tomorrow and Pineapple Express are streamed during this daytime shuffle-mode block that's in the style of "Chai Noon" and "Soda and Pie." It airs Mondays at 4am, 9am and 3pm, Wednesdays at noon and Fridays at 5am, 9am and 3pm.

WEB100 will be the last AFOS episode in the current format

I've decided to end A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series after producing and hosting 100 episodes for the AFOS channel since January 2003.

Yep, I'm cancelling my own show rather than letting the bastards who run... Oh, wait a minute, I'm the bastard who runs the channel. All by myself. Never mind.

This doesn't mean I'm going away for good. It just means I'll no longer be doing shows under the AFOS: The Series title and format. My voice will still be heard on the channel and I'll continue to be "announcing song titles and making cracks, even if [it] is pre-recorded!," as one listener said to me about my voice in an e-mail a few years ago. (I'll still stream the earlier eps too. Ep WEB63, which is called "Feel the City Breakin'," is the earliest ep that doesn't make me cringe when I play it back.)

The time has come to switch to a new format for my on-air self, like the less constricting and more new releases-oriented "AFOS A-Go-Go" format I experimented with in September and November. I should have given the program a name change a long time ago. Having both the program and the channel share the same A Fistful of Soundtracks name confuses listeners who appear to be under the assumption that AFOS is a 24-hour program as opposed to a 24-hour channel. (I originally conceived AFOS as an audio archive of continuously looped episodes from my program's terrestrial radio years. But I found myself going in another direction, and that was to diversify the programming--without veering too far off from the channel's film/TV music format--and make AFOS sound more like an actual radio station, hence my interspersing of themed blocks like "The F Zone" and "Soda and Pie" with newly recorded eps of AFOS: The Series.)

In each AFOS ep, all the film or TV score tracks are connected by a certain theme, like most recently, Batman villains or monster movies. I've gotten tired of doing that one-theme-per-ep format. Writing the copy for each of these themed eps takes me forever to do. I often get hit with writer's block. Writing copy for a show in which the tracks don't have a unifying theme--like during "A-Go-Go"--is much easier for me.

Plus I'm not a creature of habit. I get bored with routine after awhile. I became bored with my last job after a couple of years (but I stayed with it for a few more years because the money was good). As for my job before that one, I got bored with it after about half a year (plus having to type your newspaper articles inside an office building that lacks air conditioning kind of puts a damper on your morale).

In the case of AFOS: The Series, which was a way for me to continue doing the same program I used to do on terrestrial radio in the late '90s and early '00s, you could tell when my interest in it started to taper off--when the program went from weekly to monthly to bimonthly to whenever-the-hell-I-feel-like-it-ly.

I've lately been listening to the kickass Scion Radio channels programmed by L.A.'s Root Down club and KCRW's Garth Trinidad. For his channel, GT records about two and a half hours of content and then has them looped over and over again for the entire month.

I'm thinking of switching to a format like the Root Down crew's or GT's, except instead of recording new segments once every month like they do, I'll do it probably every other week or whenever I can find time to get on the mic or whenever I have any space left on my hard drive. Morning Becomes Dyspeptic and the DJ-less "Assorted Fistful," "Soda and Pie," "Chai Noon" and "F Zone" blocks will remain on the AFOS schedule so that listeners won't have to hear so much of my annoying voice (listeners have told me they don't mind my voice, like the person in that aforementioned e-mail, who said, "I've *gasp* ventured into other soundtrack stations. They aren't as fun to listen to as Fistful though... There's something nice about having someone announcing song titles...").

Here's what coming up on AFOS: The Series: Ep WEB99 will flash back to the year 1999 and stream selections from scores to the most memorable films that were released during that standout year for cinema. And then like 100 Bullets, I'm ending it at 100. The final ep under the AFOS: The Series title and format will be a doozy: all 22 official Bond opening title themes in chronological order.

If you frequently listen to the channel, thanks for choosing AFOS.

Nerd Prom Humor Week on Morning Becomes Dyspeptic

Damn, it's a helluva week to be a nerd. The Dark Knight finally arrives in theaters (and opens to acclaim and packed houses), Joss Whedon's clever and surprisingly bittersweet Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog premieres on the Web (and gets flooded with so many visitors that it crashes), and nerds who were lucky to get themselves a membership and a San Diego hotel room are trekking to the wretched hive of scum and questionable hygiene known as the Comic-Con.

I'm skipping this year's Nerd Prom (for reasons that are partly monetary and don't have anything to do with that dumb term "staycation"), but I'm marking the occasion by streaming five somewhat Comic-Con-related episodes of Morning Becomes Dyspeptic this week. Each MBD episode during Nerd Prom Week features at least one clip of nerd-friendly comedy, from either a comic who's an unapologetic nerd (Patton Oswalt, Brian Posehn) or a comic who wouldn't be caught dead at Comic-Con (Norm MacDonald, Bobcat Goldthwait).

Here's the schedule for MBD this week:

Mon., Jul. 21: Episode MBDA13 (Dana Gould, "In Praise of Vincent Price")
Tue., Jul. 22: Episode MBDA08 (Norm MacDonald, "The Fantastic Four")
Wed., Jul. 23: Episode MBDA01 (Brian Posehn, "The Unholy Trilogy")
Thu., Jul. 24: Episode MBDA49 (Bobcat Goldthwait, "Star Wars Fans Are Uber Nerds")
Fri., Jul. 25: Episode MBDA50 (Patton Oswalt, "At Midnight I Will Kill George Lucas with a Shovel")

MBD airs every weekday at 1am and 8am on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel.

George Carlin (1937-2008)

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

"George Carlin Dead at 71."

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

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

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

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

I've moved my blog from the chaos of MySpace...

... to Blogspot because MySpace doesn't allow you to post YouTube embeds. Also, nobody reads my blog. The only MySpacers who have lately left comments on my blog are annoying spammers. The kind of readers I want to attract are not found on MySpace, that's for sure.

If you're unfamiliar with A Fistful of Soundtracks, it's a Live365 channel that streams music from movies and TV and airs episodes of the long-running movie music radio program of the same name, which is hosted by me. The eps air Tuesdays and Thursdays at midnight, 2am, 4am, 6am, 10am, 1pm, 3pm, 5pm, 7pm and 9pm and Wednesdays and Fridays at 7am, 11am, 2pm, 5pm and 9pm.

The channel also airs eps of Morning Becomes Dyspeptic, a 15-minute comedy album clip show that's been called "the morning show for people who are not morning people." MBD airs weekdays at 1am and 8am.

Most of my listeners access the station through the iTunes radio dial, where it's found under "Eclectic."

I hate to use the cliché "We live in uncertain times," but it applies to us Web radio broadcasters these days. I'm trying to come up with a plan B (audioblogging maybe?) in case the Internet radio crisis leaves Fistful without a home. As I've said on my official site, I've witnessed Internet radio's growth over the years, and now it's disheartening to see that this alternative form of radio that allowed Fistful to find its audience may die out, thanks to corporate greed.