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.

The problem with The Problem with Apu is that not enough people are going to see Hari Kondabolu's terrific documentary

This is the last all-new blog post before this blog's absolute final post in December 2017.

Fuck all these (predominantly white) superheroes fighting motion-capture-enhanced (and often boring) supervillains on the big screen. The movies I'm way more eager to see are documentaries about ordinary Asian Americans fighting stereotypes. It's a fight I've been a part of in some capacity. Nearly everything I do (even something as insignificant as writing a barely-being-read-by-anybody post for this insignificant and soon-to-go-completely-inactive blog) is some sort of clapback against Asian stereotypes, which have been a pain in my ass since junior high. Filmmaker Salima Koroma's Bad Rap, a doc about Asian American rappers, was the movie I wanted to see the most last year, and now The Problem with Apu, a 49-minute doc directed by Michael Melamedoff and hosted and produced by comedian and Politically Re-Active podcast co-host Hari Kondabolu, is the 2017 film that, despite its skimpy length and non-theatrical status, I've been anticipating the most, much more so than Wonder Woman, Thor: Ragnarok and even Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

The Problem with Apu chronicles the Indian American comedian's love/hate relationship with a little-known Tracey Ullman Show spinoff called The Simpsons. Kondabolu's a Simpsons fan who loves everything about the animated franchise that was brought to life by Matt Groening, James L. Brooks and the late Sam Simon, except for one character. That would be Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the Indian convenience store owner who, since the show's premiere in 1990 (not counting a 1989 Christmas special that was actually the eighth episode in the first season's production order, "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire"), has been voiced by a white guy, longtime Simpsons voice actor Hank Azaria. The character is, as Kondabolu describes him in the doc, "servile, devious and goofy." Apu's shtick on the show is, as Kondabolu memorably said in an extremely funny 2012 Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell segment about his delight over the rise of Indian American representation on TV, basically "a white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father!"

The most interesting tidbit about Kondabolu's Totally Biased rant about Apu, which went viral and ended up being shown in high school and college classrooms, is that Kondabolu was initially reluctant to write and perform the segment because he was so tired of complaining about Apu. I like how Bell--the now-defunct FX late night show's titular host and Kondabolu's boss in the Totally Biased writers' room--had to talk Kondabolu into doing it, as if Kondabolu were Logan being dragged out of his dead-end limo driver job to unsheathe his adamantium claws one last time and protect some runaway mutant kid.

What Game of Thrones needs more than dragonglass is Henry Louis Gates Jr., so that he could stop Jon from banging his Auntie Dany

This is the 10th of 13 or 14 all-new blog posts that are being posted until this blog's final post in December 2017.

Game of Thrones, the most popular TV show in the world right now, is a show I've been ride-or-die for since the eerie White Walker attack that opened its 2011 pilot episode. It's a rare small-screen soap opera in which the action filmmaking on display during certain set pieces--marshaled by directors like Miguel Sapochnik and Breaking Bad veteran Michelle MacLaren, a.k.a. the original director of Wonder Woman before she quit over creative differences with Warner Bros.--is intriguingly on a par with the work of master craftsmen in the action genre like the "Johns": the late John Frankenheimer, John Woo and Johnnie To, Woo's much more grounded (as in there are no fucking doves in his movies) but similarly skilled Hong Kong compatriot.

That time when Angry Asian Man made enough noise to keep the live-action Mulan producers from ruining Mulan's reflection

Phil Yu of Angry Asian Man

This is the fifth 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 (the Ghost Protocol repost does not count as all-new).

This will be the final time I acknowledge Asian Pacific American Heritage Month on this blog, a few months before I will stop writing posts over here at the end of this year. So this final APA Heritage Month-related post is about a pioneering blog in the Asian American blogosphere and what has to be one of the blog's most impressive pieces of writing ever. It was impressive because of the minor but still-significant impact the blog post had during the ongoing struggle, especially from the Asian American side of things, to fight for more representation, diversity and inclusiveness in Hollywood and to get Tinseltown to be less ignorant and racist.

I don't visit Angry Asian Man as frequently as I used to (my favorite thing about Angry Asian Man has always been that its posts have introduced me to a lot of good novels by Asian American authors, and they've included Leonard Chang's Allen Choice crime trilogy and Sarah Kuhn's Heroine Complex, a novel I'm currently trying to finish reading while working on my own novel), but once in a while, Phil Yu, Angry Asian Man's founder, posts something enlightening and non-click-baity (and by non-click-baity, I mean a post that's not some viral video of an Asian American kid doing something adorable). By the way, Angry Asian Man has changed a lot since its start in the early 2000s. It began as a blog where Phil, whom I've talked to over e-mail a couple of times and have hung out with once, eloquently criticized the media and celebrities of all races for their racist attitudes towards Asians or their clueless usages of Asian stereotypes. That means Angry Asian Man can also be a depressing and stress-inducing read, especially whenever Phil posts excerpts of news items about hate crimes where the victims are Asian, which is mainly why I don't read it regularly anymore.

My visits to Angry Asian Man are not as frequent as they were in the early-to-mid-2000s also because, even though Phil still finds time to run the site in between speaking engagements and host or guest stints on online talk shows, his personal voice has been less present on the site (it's more present on Twitter and during Sound and Fury, the Angry Asian Man tie-in podcast where he interviews famous Asian Americans). He's been relying on guest writers for tons of content, and he found a clever way to do that on a weekly basis by coming up with a feature called "Angry Readers of the Week," where he lets an Asian American reader, whether that reader is non-famous or famous, give his or her life story via a Proust-type questionnaire.

Guest writers have also grabbed Phil's mic outside of the site's "Angry Readers" feature. One such guest writer wrote quite a corker for Angry Asian Man in October 2016, and that's the "something enlightening and non-click-baity" I'm referring to.

Acclaimed Whale Rider director Niki Caro is currently directing Disney's live-action remake of its own animated 1998 hit, the lighthearted, David Lean-style battle epic Mulan (she promises that her take on Mulan will be "a big, girly martial arts epic. It will be extremely muscular and thrilling and entertaining and moving"). But back when Caro wasn't attached to the remake yet, a spec script Disney bought for the remake (this early draft was credited to Lauren Hynek and Elizabeth Martin) had awkwardly inserted a white savior character/love interest into a Chinese story that never contained any white savior characters.

Mulan didn't need someone to come save her. SHE is the one who saved her friends, her father, and the whole damn country. #MakeMulanRight pic.twitter.com/DJLUqNnzOn

— Kim Horcher (@kimscorcher) October 10, 2016

The leaked spec script angered the 1998 film's fans, especially Asian American fans who, in 1998, felt empowered by both Ming-Na Wen's vocal star turn and the film's story of a female warrior who saves China and defies patriarchy (Mulan is also one of the few animated Disney films to not have its heroine pursuing a romance with the male lead, who, in this case, was a young Chinese army captain voiced by B.D. Wong). Phil gave the floor to one such Asian American Mulan fan, an Angry Asian Man reader who identified herself (or himself?) only as "an Asian American person in the industry," and the anonymous writer, who posted under the nom de plume "ConcernedForMulan," nicely read the live-action project's producers the riot act.

"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.

AFOS Blog Rewind: Margaret is a very mid-'00s movie about post-9/11 irrationality, but it remains relevant, thanks to the irrationality of both #CancelColbert and angry people on Twitter

This famously angry person on Twitter should never be allowed near either Twitter or the nuclear codes.

The following is a repost of my May 30, 2014 discussion of the director's cut of Margaret.

Because so many film critics have been in awe of it as if it's that secret Wu-Tang album with the guest feature by Cher, I recently borrowed from a library in San Francisco the three-hour extended cut of playwright/filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret. It was filmed back in 2005--which is so long ago that John Gallagher Jr. (from Short Term 12 and HBO's The Newsroom) looks like an eight-year-old boy in the film--but it wasn't released until 2011 in a slightly shorter cut due to legal squabbling.

As former RogerEbert.com editor Jim Emerson astutely noted in 2012, "Sure, [Margaret's] focus is entirely on a certain demographic slice of human beings--mostly middle- to upper-class, educated, New York-dwelling, Judeo-Christian-atheist white people--but these people are alive and ragged and messy in ways few movie characters are allowed to be."

The best performance in Margaret comes from neither the frequently shouty Anna Paquin nor her co-star J. Smith-Cameron, Lonergan's wife. It comes from Jeannie Berlin, who nicely underplays her role as the brash best friend of a pedestrian (Allison Janney) who was killed in a tragic Manhattan bus accident caused by the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo), because he was distracted by a high-schooler (Paquin) who was trying to ask him for directions while he was driving.

Other than whitewashed Asian characters, my least favorite thing lately is people omitting my middle initial even though I've included my middle initial in my name 88,000 times

Natalie Morales and Natalie Morales, who would both probably have a less aggravating time on social media if one of them just added her middle initial to her name

In 2014, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof made a big deal about removing the "D." from his byline. He explained that "I don't think it buys any clarity. As far as I know there isn't a single other Nicholas Kristof anywhere in the world, so I'm unlikely to be confused with Nicholas G. Kristof or Nicholas S. Kristof III." Kristof then added, "I think in the Internet age, the middle initial conveys a formality that is a bit of a barrier to our audience. It feels a bit ostentatious, even priggish."

Sure, a middle initial is a bit stuffy-looking and Thurston Howell-esque, but while Kristof scrapped his, and another Gray Lady writer, Bruce Feiler, concurred with Kristof and implored John Q. Public to "K.O. the Q.," I went in the opposite direction and chose to add my middle initial right after my first and, so far, only published work of fiction, the short story "Sampler," came out in 2009 within the pages of the New Press graphic novel Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology. I knew, shortly before the short story was published, that the story was going to bring some extra attention to my byline, which it did do briefly in 2009, and that readers would confuse me with other Filipinos or Italians named "Jimmy Aquino," so I took a cue from William H. Macy and Michael J. Fox, who included their middle initials to differentiate themselves from other Screen Actors Guild members with the same names (in the case of the Canadian-born Fox, SAG already had an actor in America named Michael Fox). But it was too late for me to get the New Press to tack on my middle initial, so I slapped it onto my byline everywhere else when the graphic novel came out.

And I'll have to continue to include my middle initial everywhere, even in Twitter header images (but not in conversation because that would be douchey), because "Jimmy Aquino" continues to be a common Filipino name and people occasionally confuse me online with other people with the same name. People (after 2009) who always omit my middle initial whenever you mention me online, you're not fucking helping. I feel like you folks who are weirdly allergic to middle initials think I'm trying to be bougie.

My addition of my middle initial is not a bougie thing like the "J." Donald Drumpf includes in his name because he's a cartoon character like Wile E. Coyote. I need the middle initial to differentiate myself in Google searches from other folks with the same name. Unlike Kristof, I need it because it does increase clarity.

Adding a middle initial would likely reduce the amount of bizarre tweets that Natalie Morales from The Grinder encounters on Twitter because people over there confuse her all the time with soon-to-be-former Today Show host Natalie Morales. But the Grinder cast member and former Middleman star has actually been having too much fun on Twitter mocking idiots who write mean (or pervy) tweets to her and think she's Natalie Morales from NBC News.

Because a lot of you were asking where my "I'm not on the Today show" tweets have gone, here's today's moron: pic.twitter.com/ykGTqFvEog

— Natalie Morales (@nataliemorales) January 20, 2014

So because too many people never stop to mind their surroundings like Liam Neeson was often fond of saying in Batman Begins and do some research about whoever they're trying to talk to, I also go by my DJing name of DJ AFOS if "Jimmy J. Aquino" is too much of a head-scratcher for their weird-ass brains. But in pieces of long-form writing like my most popular article on Twitter, a piece about Edgar Wright's The World's End, my byline isn't "DJ AFOS" because no one's going to take seriously a film and TV writer when he's named "DJ AFOS."

I once thought about changing my first name to "Carter," as both a reference to my parents naming me after Jimmy Carter (because he was the president when I was born), and a shout-out to Jay Z. At the time, I was going through a phase where Hov was one of my favorite MCs, but that was before he made Kingdom Come and Magna Carta Holy Grail, and, well, I haven't liked Shawn Carter as much since those two albums (and when Carter is the first name of the most boring DC Comics superhero who's not Aquaman, I'll just stick to being Jim for now).

No more Jay Z albums unless it's WTT 2

— Vann R. Newkirk II (@fivefifths) May 4, 2016

So please, don't sleep on my middle initial. Or I will have to change my first name to Carter, and nobody wants that.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Venture Bros., "Tanks for Nuthin'"

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!



Venture Bros. creator Jackson Publick's statement that "this season, like Season Five, lacks a satisfactory finale, because we didn't write one" is an interesting lament because Publick does an outstanding job intertwining this season's storylines and building those storylines towards that unsatisfactory finale in his consistently funny script for "Tanks for Nuthin'." Sometimes I think maybe Publick is trolling his fans and he likes to dupe them into thinking the finale will be a letdown like "The Devil's Grip" was to a segment of the fans (newsflash: "The Devil's Grip" is actually better than those fans think).

Or maybe Publick's just being honest. I don't know. It's all a mystery--like whether or not Dr. Venture and the Monarch are actually a second pair of titular brothers.

The sexual mishaps that have led to Dr. Venture having a brother he doesn't know about (and possibly an additional child out there who was mentioned once in the second season and has never been mentioned again), the narcissism of the wealthy and the failure of a space age that promised us jetpacks and hasn't yet delivered aren't the only recurring themes on The Venture Bros. There's also the recurring idea that many of the second-in-commands or underlings in the Ventureverse are far more deserving to be running things than the idiots who somehow ended up with the keys to the car, whether that idiot is the Monarch or Dr. Venture.

This season, Dr. Mrs. the Monarch--the wifey who's always been too smart to be playing second fiddle to supervillains but is also too principled and levelheaded to be in the business of arching--gets to run things. The Sovereign's death has resulted in her trying to keep both the Guild of Calamitous Intent and the Council of 13 from falling apart, in addition to her new tasks as Councilwoman 1. But "Tanks for Nuthin'" implies that Dr. Mrs. the Monarch is turning into yet another idiot in power. She's apparently developed Lois Lane-itis in the eyes and ears and is unable to look more closely at the evidence of the Blue Morpho's return to recognize that the man in the Morpho's old mask is actually her husband, not Dr. Venture. But unlike the Monarch and Dr. Venture, that's not because she's a lifelong imbecile. It's because she's becoming distracted by both the marital problems that are being caused by her new job and the stress of that very job.

"Tanks for Nuthin'" follows Dr. Mrs. the Monarch (I know it'd be easier to simply call her Sheila, but Dr. Mrs. the Monarch is just a funny name to repeatedly say in its entirety) on a part of that job nobody would enjoy doing: informing the spouse of a Guild member that her husband's dead. Accidentally killed by Gary when he tossed him into a pit in Ventech Tower's under-construction lobby at the end of "Rapacity in Blue" last week, Haranguetan left behind a wife who also happens to be a supervillain: Battleaxe (Barbara Rosenblat from Orange Is the New Black), a Celtic warrior woman who, by day, runs an Irish pub full of costumed villains who drown their misery over the drudgery of arching in booze (one of those villains is Brick Frog, the loser in the frog costume whose whole deal is the throwing of bricks, and a great little touch during one of the pub scenes is the off-screen jukebox blasting some depressing Irish song). While investigating the whereabouts of Haranguetan's unseen killer, whom everyone assumes is the Morpho, Dr. Mrs. the Monarch has to go break the news of his demise to Battleaxe, who turns out to be inconsolable, even though she clearly bickered a lot with Haranguetan and "his breath was crap and he beat me."

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).

That viral pic from Tumblr of Christina Ricci as Morticia Addams isn't real, but it proves why Morticia is the part she was born to play, baby

Christina Ricci in Lizzie Borden Took an Ax

I've stayed away from Asian Twitter ever since two different camps within Asian Twitter came to blows over #CancelColbert--the dumbest-looking campaign against a fictional TV character since Dan Quayle's outrage over Murphy Brown's choice to become a single mom--and all that arguing between Asian Americans over #CancelColbert made me want to stick my head in the oven, so I've spent most of my lurking time on Twitter over on Black Twitter. Does the fourth half of that last sentence make any sense? Shit, it probably doesn't.

Black Twitter is sometimes a more enjoyable place to be than any other part of Twitter, mainly because of Desus Nice's consistently funny tweets about either hip-hop, sports, white people's bullshit or an America where "President Trump starts WW3 with Mexico and China." Desus has parlayed his 140-characters-and-less wit into both a career of writing for comedy shows on MTV2 and a popular, now-defunct comedic webseries with "all-caps rap reviewer" The Kid Mero that returned to the Internet earlier this month in the form of the newly launched podcast Bodega Boys. Emmy night and the following day are interesting examples of the differences in trending topics between Black Twitter and White Twitter, or as I like to call it, Facebook.

So Black Twitter has been all about the new Drake/Future mixtape, the enthusiasm over Uzo Aduba, Regina King and Viola Davis all winning Emmys for acting and black viewers' frustrations over a Twitter rant about Davis' candid and rousing Emmy acceptance speech that was posted and quickly deleted by a drunken white actress from General Hospital. Black Twitter shouldn't be surprised that the lady from General Hospital would post racist opinions about Davis' Emmy win for her role on How to Get Away with Murder: she's a Cassadine. Of course she would say such things.

How do I know all this shit about the Cassadines? I used to watch General Hospital in between UC Santa Cruz classes. I lived in a nice off-campus apartment building where none of the neighbors on my floor were weed dealers or were into sharing their weed, so I never really was heavily into weed like most other UCSC students. That also meant that when I wanted a good laugh at about 2pm before I'd slink back to class or the campus paper, I was too lazy to go score some weed downtown. Instead I would get a couple of good laughs at 2pm by just switching on General Hospital to chuckle over either three things: the show's G-rated and overly romanticized portrayal of the Mafia, two or three years before The Sopranos premiered and its popularity caused General Hospital to be completely changed into Sopranos lite; the fact that every outdoor conversation at night would take place on the same exact foggy Port Charles dock set; or one of Anthony Geary's genuinely funny and often unscripted one-liners during the feud between the evil Cassadines and the slightly less evil Spencers. That's how I know who the Cassadines are.

Anyway, while those are the trending topics on Black Twitter, White Twitter is preoccupied with much weirder things: viral footage of a subway rat carrying a slice of pizza (apparently he's got a few ninja turtles he needs to feed), gossip over David Cameron once inserting his dick into a dead pig as if he were in an episode of Black Mirror and a photo of Christina Ricci dressed up as Morticia Addams, the mother of Wednesday, the character Ricci charmingly brought to life in the two Addams Family movies. Yeah, that's white people in a nutshell.

Wait a minute. [KRS-One voice.] Rewind. Someone posted a pic of Ricci as Morticia? Has that person been reading my mind lately and glimpsing a hot fantasy I once had about present-day Ricci in a Morticia outfit? I'm no Goth, but I would love to see Ricci play Morticia in an Addams Family reboot. Also, why is the Photoshopping job on that Tumblr pic kind of shitty, and why does it remind me of Lena Headey's face getting poorly grafted onto her body double during Cersei's walk of shame? How's it possible that there are people who were actually convinced the photo is real?

(Photo source: Mystical Enchantment)

(Photo source: Uproxx)

Ricci most recently starred as Lizzie Borden in both a Lifetime movie and a short-lived Lifetime show. An ideal future role for her would have to be Morticia or a grown-up Wednesday. The Addams Family, the show that was based on the only New Yorker cartoons that are worth a damn, has already been rebooted three different times in live action and once in animation (as well as turned into a Broadway musical starring Bebe Neuwirth as Morticia and Nathan Lane as Gomez). I hate most reboots, and the unwatchability and suckitude of the last two live-action Addams projects are a good reason why I dislike most of them (the Addamses are too big to be in something as small as a chintzy direct-to-video movie). But it's not surprising why a certain segment of Hollywood keeps wanting to resuscitate the Addams fam.







The Charles Addams characters' brand of dark humor--they're misfits mocking the lily-white and squeaky-clean suburbia of '50s and '60s sitcoms like The Donna Reed Show and then later on during the era of the Barry Sonnenfeld movies, America as envisioned by those who worshiped the Bush Sr. Administration--is timeless and always appealing, especially to misfits and outcasts who don't care for how dull, unpleasant and, well, hateful that kind of suburbia or America can be. At a time when a hatemonger like Donald Trump is trying to stoke the racist anger of that kind of America, maybe we need the Addamses on the screen again to take that America down and shoot arrows at it a la Wednesday and Pugsley during that Thanksgiving play they rewrote in Addams Family Values.

All an Addams reboot needs besides Ricci are a director who's incredibly focused--and doesn't let the art direction become the only good thing about the movie but still manages to infuse a strong visual sense--and a writer who's as sharp as Paul Rudnick, a script doctor on the first Addams Family flick and the sole credited writer of Addams Family Values, the sequel that was a perfect marriage of quip writer and teen performer delivering those quips (Rudnick/Ricci). Shit, on second thought, they should just bring Rudnick back, unless he'd rather stick to ghostwriting the film reviews of Libby Gelman-Waxner.

(Photo source: Go Fug Yourself)

(Photo source: Go Fug Yourself)

I want more than just Ricci channeling Morticia on the red carpet, man. I'd like another Rudnick-penned Addams movie, and I'd like her to be an Addams again. Ricci may have scared away Lifetime viewers while wielding Lizzie Borden's ax, but as an Addams wielding an ax, she'd definitely get our attention again.

Marc Shaiman's "The Tango," the instrumental highlight of Addams Family Values, isn't currently in rotation on AFOS (it was removed from rotation in 2012 due to limited station hard drive space), but it ought to be.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Vixen, "Episode 1"

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. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

At only five minutes per weekly episode, the six-part CW Seed miniseries Vixen, an animated reintroduction of a black DC Comics heroine who previously appeared in animated, Gina Torres-voiced form on Bruce Timm's beloved Justice League Unlimited, is hilariously short. I expected Chris Rock to channel his old SNL character Nat X and joke about how a black superhero can only get a five-minute webtoon because the Man won't give her a two-hour movie. So I was surprised to discover that Rock has been raving about Vixen.

The best superhero I've seen all summer is #vixen http://t.co/MV9C7fmgAu @megalyn pic.twitter.com/8MMqJKJAKJ

— Chris Rock (@chrisrock) August 25, 2015

In a summer that's consisted of Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant-Man on the big screen (we'll just forget the whole Fantastic Four fiasco, and, oh, by the way, the only Fantastic Four that matters is these guys), that's huge praise for a superhero webtoon. So is Vixen--which takes place in the Arrow/The Flash/Legends of Tomorrow shared universe and will feature the voices of Arrow stars Stephen Amell and Emily Bett Rickards and Flash stars Grant Gustin and Carlos Valdes in upcoming episodes--as terrific as Rock implies? Animation-wise: yes. Storytelling-wise: it's too early--and too short--to tell. So far, I'm not in love with the presence of the ubiquitous in medias res device--an old storytelling favorite of the Arrow writers, who also scripted Vixen--and the clunky-sounding exposition during a diner conversation between aspiring Detroit fashion designer Mari McCabe (Megalyn Echikunwoke), who's about to discover that a family heirloom she's been wearing can grant her the power to mimic the abilities of animals, and her white foster dad Chuck (Neil Flynn, a.k.a. the dad on The Middle) in this first episode.

My least favorite aspect of Greg Weisman and Brandon Vietti's now-defunct DC Animation show Young Justice comes back to haunt this new DC Animation project. Early on in one episode of Young Justice, Miss Martian was seen explaining to a skeptical and typically monosyllabic Superboy why she used her shape-shifting powers to disguise themselves as her uncle J'onn J'onnz and Superman at a press conference that just took place, more for the sake of bringing the audience up to speed than for her ex-boyfriend's sake. "Conner, you know we have to maintain the illusion that Superman, Manhunter and the other Leaguers who went into space are still on Earth. We can't let our enemies know how short-handed the Justice League is right now," she said to Superboy, who, in addition to being miserable about his life as a teenage clone of both Superman and Lex Luthor, has to go to work each day with a pro-torture ex-girlfriend who's fond of speaking in IMDb plot summary-ese.

Arrow veterans Wendy Mericle, Keto Shimizu and Brian Ford Sullivan (all paired up with Lauren Certo, who co-wrote another Arrow-related webseries, the live-action Blood Rush) are a little more skilled at handling exposition than Weisman and Vietti because of the experience they've had writing dialogue for a live-action prime-time show that can't really get away with that type of Saturday morning cartoon exposition too often. So Vixen is slightly more cognizant than Young Justice about how people who know each other well actually talk to each other and is a little less ridiculous and awkward about the exposition--we learn Mari is looking for her birth parents, the difficulties of finding the fashion design job she wants have left her with an understandable temper and she's closer to Patty, an absent and most likely ailing member of Mari's foster family who's presumably Chuck's wife (and will be voiced by Kari Wuhrer), than she is to Chuck--but much of it is still unnatural-sounding expository dialogue. The opening action sequence is much closer to what I want out of an animated sister show to Arrow, The Flash and the forthcoming Legends of Tomorrow, and that would be nicely staged action that's full of visuals an animated show can pull off with more panache than a live-action one, with minimal dialogue during the action. But that rooftop sequence in which Mari outwits the Arrow (Amell) and outraces the Flash (Gustin)--only to accidentally slip and fall--actually goes one better by containing no dialogue at all. It's a wise stylistic choice by both the Arrow writers and miniseries director James Tucker, who previously directed the 2013 DC Animation movie Superman Unbound and showran Batman: The Brave and the Bold, the surprisingly good DC Animation show that proved a light-hearted take on modern-day Batman doesn't have to suck like a Joel Schumacher Batman movie.

The effective animation for Mari's escape from Oliver Queen and Barry Allen, a sequence in which miniseries co-composer Blake Neely gets to restate his main themes from Arrow and The Flash, is mainly what earns the Vixen premiere episode the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week title. But there are a couple of extra touches that elevate Vixen and will make it worth following on CW Seed in the next few weeks.

The show's dialogue recording team is clearly made up of fans of Fantastic Mr. Fox, which was distinctive for having its vocal cast record their dialogue outside the recording booth and outdoors in order to make their stop-motion-animated movie sound naturalistic. I'm not sure if the Vixen sound team actually did venture outside the booth to record Mari's reverby scene in jail, her diner scene with Chuck and an upcoming S.T.A.R. Labs scene between Barry and Valdes' lab tech character Cisco that was included in the series premiere trailer, but the Fantastic Mr. Fox approach to getting Mari and the other characters to sound like they're actually in reverby and chilly rooms gives this DC Animation project an interestingly grounded feel and makes it a seamless part of the live-action Arrow/Flashverse.

Oh yeah, and there's the simple fact that Mari is the first female superpowered hero of color in the Arrow/Flashverse (Katana, a heroic swordswoman played on Arrow last season by Rila Fukushima, doesn't have any powers). The character is an appealing middle ground between the fantasy-based heroism of the supers on The Flash and the more flawed (and non-superpowered) heroism of the street-level crimefighters on Arrow (the time frame of the miniseries begins with Mari in jail for self-defense, and the episode implies that the man she attacked was such a disgusting perv that she didn't deserve to be put behind bars).

I'm curious to see how Echikunwoke--whom I remember from her eye-candy roles on The 4400 and House of Lies and is an ideal choice to play Mari if she becomes a live-action character--will tackle both voice acting, especially in a setting that's way more family-friendly than House of Lies (but still salty in the dialogue department, in a CW kind of way, of course), and a heroic character who, like Static from DC's Milestone imprint, clearly means a lot to African American DC readers. So far, the premiere episode has shown that Echikunwoke is a great screamer. I never read the Justice League Detroit comics. I don't think Vixen screams like Mel from Doctor Who in those comics.

I'm also curious to see how Vixen will handle what's essentially a story about a black adoptee raised by white parents (she appears to be embarrassed about it)--and in search of both her heritage and her purpose in life--that happens to be dressed up in superhero genre garb. Will it handle that kind of story with the same kind of aplomb Penny Dreadful has demonstrated as a story about identity that's dressed up as a Gothic horror drama? Or will it drop the ball like 2011's Green Lantern, which Arrow creators and Vixen co-executive producers Marc Guggenheim and Greg Berlanti both co-wrote, and turn into another unimaginative--and emotionally flat--daddy issues-driven origin story?

Chris Rock's praise of this webtoon's premiere episode, as well as Flash cast member Candice Patton's similar endorsement of it--even though she's not in Vixen and she didn't get to reprise her role as Iris West--and black viewers' interest in it on Twitter, all remind me of when I was involved in the creation of a similar female superhero of color for an indie graphic novel about Asian American superheroes. I noticed a glint of excitement in the eyes of both male and female Asian American readers who were fans of that novel back in 2009. It was a glint that said, "I've been hungry for this my whole life."

I'm unable to glimpse that same glint on people from Black Twitter for obvious reasons, but judging from Vixen viewers' #DatTotem hashtag and enthusiastic tweets from the likes of BlackGirlNerds and the hosts of The Fan Bros Show, that glint is definitely there in their writing. Everyone's getting tired of superhero movies starring white guys named Chris. There needs to be more Chrisiquas and Cristinas up in this piece.

Times are changing, and the increasingly inclusive Arrow/Flashverse appears to be responding to the frustrations younger viewers have expressed about the presence of underrepresented groups on the screen, but it's responding in mostly sensible--and now with the arrival of Vixen, fascinating--ways. For instance, on The Flash, the police captain isn't an old, pasty Irish guy like it always used to be on cop shows and superhero shows before the '90s (neither is the captain some African American authority figure with no inner life). He's a younger and openly gay Indian Canadian guy. And now the Arrow/Flashverse is boldly placing a black woman at the center of the action instead of behind the action like spymaster Amanda Waller or on the sidelines like Iris. The five-minute webtoon format may make Vixen seem like a small step towards progress, but this step's a big one.