Writer's block is a problem I've been afflicted with since the days when I had to churn out college term papers, and it took me 17 years to realize that film and TV score albums--the kind of album I sometimes listened to as term paper writing music, as well as the kind of radio format I dabbled in for the past 18 years--are ineffective as a solution to writer's block. They're far from a solution. They're the cause of the problem.
Score albums are really shitty as music that helps me to concentrate on writing. In 2013, I wrote, "As study music, score albums were especially effective because... they often don't contain words, so they don't distract you too much from whatever you're reading." But when I'm not reading and I'm trying to write a blog post, score albums distract me, especially when a grandiose-sounding action movie score cue starts blasting in my headphones. 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 how excellent the action sequence choreography was. 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.
Classical music and instrumental hip-hop don't come with that kind of baggage, which is why a few years ago, I switched to listening to those two genres while trying to write, and they've helped immensely. Having the Bay Area classical music station KDFC in my headphones helped me to finish writing a long post about David Bowie and Labyrinth and a longer post about The Grinder. But the classical music hasn't been working for me while I've been trying to get started on a post I've been wanting to write since December about Creed, Ludwig Goransson's catchy score from that film and Ryan Coogler's sublime use of 2Pac's "Hail Mary" as Donnie Creed's ring entrance music. I don't know why KDFC has failed to prevent writer's block in that instance, and it's made me notice one thing about KDFC: why is Hoyt Smith weirdly obsessed with germs? Every time I've awoken to Smith's program being broadcast in my headphones, it seems like his idea of morning-show levity is to intersperse the classical music suites with either disgusting studies about pillows that contain bacteria or studies about hand-washing. When did Adrian Monk find the time to become a classical music DJ? Because Monk as a classical music DJ is oddly awesome.
Smith mentioned something about hand-washing I was never aware of: people use "Happy Birthday to You" to time their hand-washing. So I Googled "Happy Birthday to You" together with "hand-washing" to see if this is actually a thing, and I found out from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that you should "scrub your hands for at least 20 seconds," and if you need to time yourself, "hum the 'Happy Birthday' song from beginning to end twice."
Uh, "Happy Birthday to You"? I have enough trouble trying to power through that ditty when I have to join in singing it to a person I dislike, and now I'm being told I ought to hum that song to nobody, while I'm washing my hands? Nah, B, I'll pass. "Happy Birthday to You" should only be hummed or sung above a birthday cake. Above a bathroom sink is just weird. Also, "Happy Birthday to You" is expensive to clear, and I might get sued.
There are much more effective--and much less awkwardness-inducing--20-to-40-second pieces of music than "Happy Birthday to You" to time your hand-washing with, and in keeping with my ban on listicles because the AFOS blog is a listicle-free zone, I'm going to replace the CDC's choice of "Happy Birthday to You" with any one of those pieces of music, without inanely organizing them into a list. A KDFC listener suggested to Smith that a snippet of Mozart's take on "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" would work like gangbusters as a hand-washing timer from the classical music world, but if you're a film score music nerd, you don't want to hear "Twinkle, Twinkle" or "Happy Birthday to You" while you're bathing your hands. You want your hand-washing to be soundtracked by the 1997 Men in Black trailer music, a.k.a. Elliot Goldenthal's 32-second "Confronting the Chief" from Demolition Man, the bizarre 1993 sci-fi flick that's either a reflection of Sylvester Stallone's right-leaning politics (many interpret the film as a conservative parody of Clinton's America) or a liberal's satirical nightmare about a conservative's idea of utopia (Sandra Bullock lives in a future where people get fined for swearing and anti-abortionists won out in the abortion debate) or is possibly intended to be both things at the same time.
I use my phone mainly as a music player, and I fill it with hip-hop mixes or singles. I don't have it inside my phone right now, but if it were inside my phone and my headphones were plugged in to my phone while washing my hands, I would put on as a hand-washing timer DJ Shadow's 41-second "Why Hip-Hop Sucks in '96."
Why wash my hands like a brain-dead zombie when I can both wash my hands and think about the greed of the copyright industry and its crippling effect on creativity in hip-hop at the same time? People hate on Sacramento all the time, but if it weren't for Sacramento, we wouldn't have Shadow or the succinct genius of "Why Hip-Hop Sucks in '96."
But if you're a white person with OCD, go with "Kashmir."
And if you're a person of color with OCD? Kanye's "Last Call."
See, CDC? That's what happens while you're busy trying to protect the world from Chipotle. Your Spotify playlist comes off as if it's frozen in 1893. There's a whole world of beautiful music out there besides the song that keeps the pockets of Warner/Chappell's copyright lawyers fat and makes world-weary waiters and waitresses want to shove some cake into the faces of annoying customers who demand that they sing it to them.
The Creed score, the score that will make you frequently say, "Yeaaaah, hit him with the quickness, Michael B.," is the penultimate score to be added to the AFOS playlists. The final score that's been added to the playlists is John Williams' Star Wars: The Force Awakens score. Both scores are currently being streamed on AFOS until the station goes off the air for good on January 31.
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).
AFOS has a Tumblr--an infrequently updated one, to be more accurate. I joined Tumblr in 2012 mostly to see if I could attract Tumblr users to either AFOS or the AFOS blog.
Since 2012, I've discovered that I don't care much for Tumblr as a platform or a place to compose original content (also after 2012, it was bought by Yahoo). If you want to write a long-form post on Tumblr or get that post to look exactly like how you want it to look, you can't rely on Tumblr for any of that. Any attempt to code on Tumblr a piece of writing of any size ought to be accompanied by nothing but Price Is Right failure horns.
How the fuck did Dan Harmon manage to accomplish paragraph breaks in the long-form posts he used to write on Tumblr? Over on that platform, a simple, normal-looking paragraph break is damn near impossible to code into existence. Tumblr makes it so impossible for you to create paragraph breaks because they want to make your writing look like that of a rambling and mentally unstable 14-year-old who doesn't know what a paragraph break is.
I like my paragraph breaks, Tumblr. Fuck you. I like being able to pause between ideas while reading through something and mentally catch a breath. If you can't give me that, Tumblr, catch a fade.
I looked around the Internet to see if I was alone in finding Tumblr to be the shittiest platform for composing long-form writing, and I stumbled into a 2014 listicle by a blogger named Liz Galvao. Yes, I know I've said I despise the listicle format so much that if I ever run into any hed that begins with a numeral, I refuse to read anything below that hed. But it was a critique of Tumblr's many fails as a platform, which became so frustrating for Galvao that she switched from Tumblr to WordPress for composing posts ("Most of the templates don't even let you pick your own font! This is supposed to be MY space on the Internet as a writer, and I can't even pick the font? That's fucked"), and I couldn't resist reading through her rant.
"In-post editing is SUPER limited on Tumblr. I can't italicize a word in the title of a post, for example, which drove me crazy every time I wrote about a TV show. I can't change the size or color of a word in the body of a text post, something that should be incredibly easy to do with basic HTML," wrote Galvao.
Meanwhile, all those things can be achieved on either WordPress, the service Word Is Bond contributors like myself and Hardeep Aujla use for composing Word Is Bond posts, or Blogger, which is why I've stuck to Blogger for composing long-form writing. All Tumblr is good for is reblogging .GIFs. Tumblr, you're as reliable as a Yahoo content editor who can't tell Damon Wayans Sr. and Damon Wayans Jr. apart. Tumblr and Yahoo, you deserve each other.
Jason and the Argonauts (Photo source: DVD Beaver)
I had no idea the Oakland film score album label Intrada is actually 30 years old until reading about the label's 30th anniversary reception, which took place at L.A.'s Walt Disney Concert Hall over Labor Day Weekend. Besides being one of my favorite score album labels--selections from four of Intrada's expanded score album reissues are currently in rotation on AFOS--Intrada is one of the most professional score album labels/businesses when it comes to either handling production mistakes (when the label realized an expanded reissue of Alan Silvestri's Judge Dredd score contained a previously released re-recording of Jerry Goldsmith's beloved Dredd trailer music rather than the original recording as listed, it immediately stopped shipping copies and went back to correct the error) or simply being a music retail store.
Intrada is also a store that specializes in soundtrack albums. In fact, before Intrada started venturing into producing and releasing score albums in 1985 (its first release was the Basil Poledouris score from the original Red Dawn), it originated as a brick-and-mortar soundtrack store on Vallejo Street in San Francisco. When Amazon ran out of physical copies of Daniel Pemberton's excellent score to the new Man from U.N.C.L.E. two weeks ago, and I needed a physical copy of the U.N.C.L.E. score album for AFOS airplay (my laptop hard drive never has enough space to carry full albums in digital form), the first store I clicked to was Intrada. That's simply because of the Intrada online store's reliability in the past (whereas I had a lousy experience with some other soundtrack label/store, and unless I've thrown shade at it before, that store shall remain nameless). In just a few days rather than one week or more recently, three weeks, there it was in my mailbox, ready to be U.N.C.O.R.K.E.D.
Intrada's beginnings as a brick-and-mortar record shop in San Francisco (Photo source: Max Bellochio)
(Photo source: Bellochio)
Earlier this year, I vowed to never write a listicle again because 1) listicles at their worst are such lazy and vacuous writing; 2) the only list I want to read from anybody these days is the list of groceries I just scrawled down and stuffed into my shirt pocket a few minutes ago; 3) every time I see an article hed that consists of a numeral followed by a plural noun followed by "That You Didn't Know Were This," I feel like elbowing a millennial hed writer in the face; and 4) if your film music blog or pop culture site has posted tons of listicles where the hed begins with a numeral, and it continues to subject people to such lists, your blog or site sucks. So without ever succumbing to the listicle format, I will cite my favorite Intrada releases, just in time for the label's 30th anniversary. It's an intrada to Intrada, if you will. The first of these favorite Intrada releases of mine is the first Intrada release I ever snapped up for AFOS airplay, and this was back when AFOS was a college radio show and it wasn't an Internet radio station yet. Tombstone composer Bruce Broughton's 1998 re-recording of Bernard Herrmann's grand-sounding score from 1963's Jason and the Argonauts is no longer part of AFOS rotation due to station hard drive space, but if I did restore it to rotation, it would be the only film score re-recording that's part of any of the AFOS playlists.
I usually don't care for film score re-recordings because a lot of them don't sound like the film scores as I remember them--they sometimes don't even bother to replicate the same tempo--but Broughton's 1999 Jason and the Argonauts album is one of the better ones. Broughton and the Sinfonia of London's faithful and sonically pleasing reconstruction of Herrmann's score gives his Argonauts score the proper album release it never had. For many score album collectors, the 1999 Argonauts album is one of the first things that come to mind in regards to how Intrada label head Douglass Fake "pioneered re-recordings of scores unavailable on CD," as Film Score Monthly soundtrack CD artwork designer Joe Sikoryak once wrote on FSM's message boards.
Jerry Fielding's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia score album and the expanded score reissues for The Wind and the Lion (a rare collaboration between Goldsmith and director John Milius) and Kurt Russell's 1993 Wyatt Earp western Tombstone are three other Intrada releases that used to be part of AFOS rotation but currently aren't, and those three scores are indispensable parts of the action flicks they were written for. But of those three albums, the expanded Tombstone album is the most special for containing unused versions of Broughton's score cues and even Goldsmith's studio logo music for Cinergi (the '90s production company behind Tombstone), a logo jingle that could take on "Looking at Heaven," Broughton's imposing and swaggering Tombstone end title theme, in a duel of "¿Cuyos cuernos son más machos? ¿Bruno Broughton o Geraldo Goldsmith?"
The Intrada releases that do currently have selections that are part of AFOS rotation are, like the expanded Tombstone album, good examples of the high quality Intrada demonstrates in both extra content and packaging. The label's expanded reissues of the late James Horner's score from Clear and Present Danger--the score where a shakuhachi, a Japanese flute, became an effective way to make a suddenly empty printer paper tray sound like the end of the world--and Craig Safan's spirited Last Starfighter score are huge improvements over previous editions, as are the label's expanded reissues of the late Leonard Rosenman's score from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Cliff Eidelman's score from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. It's fitting that Intrada wound up reissuing these Trek movie scores because of the label office's Bay Area location and Trek's use of San Francisco as a central Earthbound setting. Intrada's series of Trek score reissues from IV to VI continues the series of Trek score reissues that FSM began with Horner's scores to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and uses the same artwork and remastering crew members from the FSM editions (Sikoryak, reissue producer Lukas Kendall and digital mastering engineer Mike Matessino). The reissues carry comprehensive track-by-track liner notes and give Trek heads the option of enjoying both the albums as they first heard them on vinyl (or cassette) when they were younger and the score cues in their original and complete form.
The bonus tracks on the expanded Trek IV and Trek VI albums are as golden as the fleece from Jason and the Argonauts. Though Wrath of Khan is the perfect Trek film (sorry, Star Trek: The Motion Picture defenders, but a three-way between a robot lady, a NASA satellite and a child-molesting star of 7th Heaven isn't as affecting an ending as you think it is), it contains some last-minute reshoots, particularly a final shot of Spock's casket on the Genesis planet that Wrath of Khan producer Harve Bennett added to soften the blow of Spock's death after some negative test screening reactions, and Horner had to insert some new music in order to accommodate the reshot footage. FSM's Wrath of Khan score reissue includes as a bonus track the version of the end title cue before Bennett asked Horner to squeeze in additional music, and the original version gives us a glimpse into an intriguing alternate reality where Spock never came back and nobody kept trying to remake Wrath of Khan by half-assedly killing off major characters during starship battle scenes. Intrada's Trek score reissues are filled with equally fascinating extras. Rosenman's mostly light-hearted Trek IV score is the most divisive of the scores from the first six Trek movies, and one of my favorite parts of Rosenman's score is a cue that didn't make the final cut. It's Rosenman's update of the late Alexander Courage's opening title theme from the '60s Trek, a cue that was intended to accompany the film's opening titles and was meant to, as described by the Trek IV screenplay, announce that "We're in for a classic, good old Star Trek time."
But when the late Leonard Nimoy, who directed Trek IV, heard the new arrangement of Courage's full theme, he thought the cue failed to properly introduce Trek IV as a jubilant and tonally lighter change of pace in the big-screen adventures of Kirk and his crew, so he asked Rosenman to take the cue he already completed for Trek IV's end titles, which was full of the sense of fun and adventure Nimoy wanted for the opening titles, and reshape that for the opening. Intrada's expanded Trek IV album saves Rosenman's unused arrangement like it's an endangered whale, and that's the version of the Trek IV main title theme that's currently in rotation on the AFOS blocks "Hall H" and "AFOS Prime."
One other bonus track that makes Intrada's Trek IV score reissue worthwhile is the complete version of the previously unreleased "I Hate You," the source cue during Kirk and Spock's encounter on a San Francisco bus with an '80s punk played by Kirk Thatcher, Nimoy's assistant and an associate producer on the sequel (his name is a familiar one if you read the puppeteer credits at the end of Muppet projects). The source cue Thatcher wrote and recorded for his scene is basically a typical '80s sitcom version of punk rock, even after Thatcher objected to all the songs MCA Records, the label that first released the Trek IV score album, recommended for the boombox in his scene because he didn't think they were punk enough--which makes me wonder if MCA absent-mindedly forgot to suggest to the Trek IV filmmakers a bunch of cuts off its terrific Repo Man soundtrack (a classic punk album that also contains selections that are in rotation on "AFOS Prime"). Although that punk rock scene is the most sitcommy and Republican-dolt-reacting-to-10-year-old-changes-in-music-ish moment in Trek IV, the presence of "I Hate You" on the expanded album reminds you how funny Thatcher actually is in his mute bit part.
As interesting as those two Trek IV bonus tracks are, even they're outgunned and outwarped in terms of specialness by the two most noteworthy bonus tracks on Intrada's Trek VI score reissue: two versions of the exhilarating Trek VI trailer music, which marked the first time a Trek movie had original music written for its advertising campaign by the movie's composer, who was Cliff Eidelman in this case. Back in fall 1991, Eidelman's trailer music tantalizingly hinted at the more serious and dramatic direction Wrath of Khan director Nicholas Meyer wanted for both the 1991 sequel and Eidelman's score (Meyer envisioned quoting Holst's The Planets throughout the sequel, but The Planets was too expensive for his blood, so he settled for a Planets-style score), and it did so in only less than two and a half minutes.
Fully loaded score album reissues and lavishly produced re-recordings are among Intrada's finest moments as a label (the same goes for Varèse Sarabande). But when Intrada presents a previously unreleased film or TV score in its entirety for the first time, more than 25 years after the film or show debuted, that's special too, especially when that world premiere release allows listeners to pay closer attention to subtleties in the music that could easily be overlooked due to action sequence sound FX or other circumstances.
Director Peter Hyams' 1977 NASA conspiracy thriller Capricorn One is one of the weirdest conspiracy thrillers from the '70s: O.J. Simpson plays one of the good guys; Telly Savalas shows up for a comedic cameo where he's basically playing Ernest Borgnine; Sam Waterston tells a lengthy joke to himself that turns into a monologue that's as crazy as the one his actress daughter Katherine delivers completely nude 37 years later during Inherent Vice; the reporter characters, who are often either expendable or simply evil in other films, actually get to live through the whole film and triumph; and the film is more concerned with pleasing the audience than with becoming as bleak as The Parallax View or Chinatown. It's a crowd-pleasing and enthralling conspiracy thriller in a lot of the same weird ways that the late Tony Scott's Enemy of the State is a crowd-pleasing and enthralling conspiracy thriller (speaking of Enemy of the State, what's with all the shots of people's pets, and why is the scene where Frasier regular Dan Butler barely says a word to Jon Voight and looks like he's about to jump out of his seat and fuck Voight up in front of the NSA my favorite scene in that flick?). Capricorn One wouldn't have held up as a thriller without either Hyams' action filmmaking skills, particularly during a still-remarkable-looking helicopter chase Hyams wisely left unscored, or Jerry Goldsmith's thunderous and menacing score, which was only available in the form of a less avant-garde-sounding Warner Bros. Records re-recording before Intrada got its hands on the score recording sessions and released in 2005 the score cues as they were featured in the film.
"The actual soundtrack has more to say [than the re-recording]. It still leaps out of the starting gate but then heads off to explore. It's more complex," wrote Douglass Fake in the liner notes of the Capricorn One score album, which went out of print and was recently reissued by Intrada with remastered sound. The album allows Capricorn One fans to discern those aural complexities, particularly in the film version of the end title theme, which is currently in rotation on "AFOS Prime."
Instead of the triumphant composition Goldsmith chose as the final track in his Capricorn One re-recording, Fake restores to the conclusion the end titles' restatement of the menacing motif Goldsmith created for the helicopters that chase the terrified astronauts who refuse to play ball and pretend their faked mission to Mars was real, a cue that's "neither triumphant nor in major" and is, as Fake adds, "powerful and thought provoking." My first encounter with that helicopter theme wasn't in Capricorn One itself. The helicopter theme was a fixture of '90s KMEL afternoon drive-time host Rick Chase's show, and whenever I'd hear that instrumental bed during Chase's show, I'd be like, "I wanna see the movie that instrumental's from because the movie's probably bonkers." When I did finally watch Capricorn One, I was right about its bonkersness.
We have Intrada to thank for allowing the audience to enjoy all these exemplary scores in their purest form and in the best possible audio quality. Listening to these scores in that caliber of audio quality and in their entirety really makes you feel like you're either an Argonaut, an Earp, a heroic Starfleet officer or a crusading reporter. Here's to 30 more years of bonus surprises and passionate reassessments of old but outstanding scores from Intrada.
Selections from Intrada's releases of the scores from Clear and Present Danger, The Last Starfighter, Star Trek IV, Star Trek VI, Capricorn One and Marvel's The Avengers can currently be heard on AFOS.
Back in May, Pitchfork.tv posted a well-made animated short adapted from an anti-PG-13 essay published by the Pitchfork Media-owned film review site The Dissolve, and I wrote, "I'd like to see [Pitchfork.tv animator Mack] Williams do more animated tie-ins with The Dissolve. The site's discussions of Midnight Run with Adam Scott and Running Scared with Paul Scheer are crying out for the animated treatment, as is Noel Murray's essay 'Why great comics don't always make great movies.'" Sadly, there won't be any more animated Pitchfork.tv/Dissolve team-ups because during a three-week break I took from posting AFOS blog material (but I wasn't able to take a complete break from writing that material), The Dissolveclosed up shop after two years of publication, simply because the economics haven't been kind to The Dissolve.
Although The Dissolve's reviews of new releases were well-written, they weren't the reason why The Dissolve was my favorite destination for discussions of film--other than The Onion Film Standard with Peter K. Rosenthal, of course. In an age when click-bait--particularly superhero movie costume news updates and listicles that are so lazily written and mindless they've caused me to stop writing listicles for good--has dominated film writing and made it less appealing to me, the content that made The Dissolve special and unique was all the articles that clearly weren't generating as many hits as the kind of empty and forgettable click-bait The Dissolve stubbornly refused to succumb to publishing in order to stay alive. I'm talking lengthy but never-boring and never-pretentious articles like the essays about the challenges of adapting graphic novels for the screen or the fascinating changes in recent film score music and the "Movie of the Week" roundtable discussions of older films like Repo Man and John Carpenter's Snake Plissken flicks and more recent cult favorites like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and MacGruber, discussions that often made you look at an old film in a new light. The reassessments of Spike Lee's work as a music video director or the reassessments of the filmographies of directors like Frank Tashlin and Ernst Lubitsch were also among the things former Dissolve staffer Scott Tobias and his colleagues "knew few people would read" when Tobias and Keith Phipps discussed the demise of their site, but The Dissolve was admirable for not caring that only a few film geeks would read those pieces.
The Dissolve's articles were often as impeccably edited as the movies the Dissolve writers adored and celebrated in their "Movie of the Week" discussions. Typos or misspellings were such a rarity over at The Dissolve. The only typos I spotted were in articles by--ooh, big surprise--Nathan Rabin, who, as an easily bored and barely awake TV recapper for the Onion-owned A.V. Club, once memorably wrote that Jack Donaghy "sneaks pills into Tracey's [sic] jelly beans and transforms him from a space case to an Adderal [sic] achiever" when Jack was so clearly not drugging Tracy Jordan, so Rabin would repeatedly get mocked for his pills mistake in the A.V. Club's comments section. Ooh, look, here's another one of those Rabin typos now.
Typos aside, Rabin's pop-culture writing is actually often worth reading. Like so many of the other former Dissolve writers, Rabin (who perhaps saw the writing on the wall and actually left The Dissolve a couple of months before the site's demise) came from the A.V. Club, which championed and fostered the same kind of smartly written and witty pop-culture writing that was found on The Dissolve and continues to do so, although the A.V. Club, along with Indiewire and Uproxx, has lately become much less of a favorite destination for me because of how often its gazillion ads (fuck you, Flowplayer) cause my browser to freeze up. Meanwhile, The Dissolve refused to clutter its articles with ads, which I assume is what also brought about the end of The Dissolve. But it's better that The Dissolve went out fighting with the integrity in its writing intact instead of dying out as yet another slow and laggy site full of articles that are either littered with or disrupted by ads that slow down my browser and can't be turned off.
If you write or blog about film or pop culture, you might get asked by someone the following: "The Internet's as overwhelming as Comic-Con. There are too many sites to choose from when I want to read stuff on the Internet. How can I tell apart the sites that are worth visiting from the sites that aren't worth visiting?" It's simple. Any publication that frequently makes typos like the following isn't worth the time of day.
Neither is any publication that posts "20 Things You Didn't Know About the Catering for Ant-Man."
Remarkably, The Dissolve was neither of those things, although it did publish a listicle, but only occasionally, like when it discussed "The 50 most daring film roles for women since Ripley" or was presumably ordered by Pitchfork to assemble "The movies' 50 greatest pop music moments." Listicles aren't the only form of digital publishing that bores me. Blog posts that are simply hastily written regurgitations of press releases bore me as well. Sure, The Dissolve had a news section that consisted of hastily written regurgitations of press releases too, but otherwise, 90 percent of its content was the thoughtful and lengthy pieces about movies like Heat, a movie I was obsessed with in college, or Midnight Run, a movie I'm still obsessed with and was a favorite subject of the Dissolve writers because of its countless highlights, like Danny Elfman's "Try to Believe" theme, and because, as Noel Murray said, "This is a movie about adults, made for adults."
When I recently watched McCabe and Mrs. Miller for the first time ever (I checked it out from the San Francisco Public Library, a great alternative for whenever Netflix's DVD rental service comes up short), the first place I clicked to after watching the Robert Altman western was The Dissolve because the site had once pickedMcCabe as a "Movie of the Week." I wanted to read what the Dissolve staff had to say at length about Altman's offbeat western about the struggles of independent businesses against Big Business, struggles that were similar to The Dissolve's own financial struggles. Not even the late Altman's McCabe audio commentary was satisfactory enough for me. The "Movie of the Week" section is the thing I'll miss the most about The Dissolve. I'm worried that Pitchfork Media will someday remove all these Dissolve articles from the Web because there are so many other older movies I haven't seen yet and were given the "Movie of the Week" treatment by The Dissolve, and I still want to read what its writers had to say about those movies.
I will admit that one of my recent blog posts was written in the style of a Dissolve piece. That post was "The Game of Thrones 'Hardhome' massacre and Mad Max prove that near-silence is golden, so why hasn't anyone stepped up to make the first great modern-day silent action movie?" It's a depressing, "Hardhome"-ish time for film writing: The Dissolve has been shut down, and nobody can make a living from film writing like the late Roger Ebert used to be able to do because the tech world is run by corrupt assholes who don't pay their writers. At the risk of sounding like William Fichtner's "Criminals in this town used to believe in things" line from The Dark Knight, when I was a stringer for a major newspaper in the '90s, I wasn't paid a lot for the movie reviews I wrote, but at least I was actually paid back then. Listicle click-bait like "The 5 Best-Looking Buttcracks in Minions" may have won this round, but let's continue fighting against that type of writing. Let's keep The Dissolve--and what it stood for--alive in our approaches to writing about film or pop culture. It will make the sting of its demise less painful. We can do better than listicles about yellow buttcracks.
The AFOS blog has a schedule each week: just two (or sometimes three) new posts, and one of the posts is a Throwback Thursday post where I draw from a desk cabinet a movie ticket I saved and discuss at length the movie on the ticket (occasionally, if I draw a ticket for a movie I won't find to be stimulating to write about--like, say, Transformers: The Torture of Hearing Shia LaBeouf Scream "No!" 50,000 Times--I'll change it to a different movie). I chose a two-per-week schedule so that this blog has something new every week and it doesn't wind up looking like tumbleweed drifting across a vacant lot, which is what has happened to so many blogs I used to enjoy reading before their authors simply lost interest and abandoned them without even saying a proper "I'm Swayze."
Finding a topic to write about other than the Throwback Thursday movie-of-the-week has sometimes been difficult. In the last couple of weeks, I've wanted to write about how I wish the late, great movie trailer announcer Percy Rodrigues were alive to read promo copy for Penny Dreadful or trailer copy for 2011's Attack the Block because they look so much like things Rodrigues--whose favorite trailer campaign of mine has got to be the one he recorded for 1995's Tales from the Hood--would have been hired to read copy for when he was alive.
But the problem I've been having with that topic is that it's difficult to write about in a structure that's not a listicle. Earlier this year, I vowed to never write a listicle again because 1) listicles at their worst are such lazy and vapid writing; 2) every time I see an article hed that consists of a numeral followed by a plural noun followed by "That You Didn't Know Were This," I feel like punching a millennial hed writer in the face; and 3) if your film music blog or pop culture site has posted tons of listicles where the hed starts with a numeral, and it continues to post such lists, your blog or site sucks.
So while I was experiencing starts and stops with the topic of trailer campaigns Rodrigues would have been perfect for, I saw "Varèse Sarabande Launches LP to CD Series" in my e-mail. Then I said, "Interesting. I've found my non-TBT topic for next week." And good thing it's the kind of topic that can't be shaped into a fucking listicle.
"Varèse Sarabande has delved deep into our vinyl soundtrack vaults to locate fan favorites and hard-to-find gems that have never been released on CD to date!," announced the inkblot-logoed soundtrack label on its site last week. "The LP to CD subscription series will feature one CD soundtrack per month culled from Varèse Sarabande's archives and available only to subscribers."
The label plans to debut 12 long-out-of-print score albums in CD form instead of in mp3 download form. Subscribers who pre-order for "LP to CD" membership ($10 per month, plus shipping) before June 14 will receive from Varèse (pronounced "vuh-rez") a CD carrying case in the shape of a vintage vinyl carrying case. After June 14, people can join the subscription series on a month-to-month basis. The first out-of-print score in the "LP to CD" series is Charles Bernstein's score to the '80s horror comedy April Fool's Day.
Eh, I've never seen April Fool's Day (even though I kind of remember the tongue-in-cheek April Fool's Day TV spots from when I was a kid, and judging from those TV spots, it looks like the type of horror comedy I'd be into renting these days), so the score doesn't interest me. But bringing 12 score albums from Varèse's pre-CD past back into print is both a nice thing for Varèse to do--it's reminiscent of the MOD (manufactured-on-demand) business model Warner Archive has created to give film geeks access to previously unreleased or out-of-print catalog titles from the Warner Bros. and Turner libraries--and a subscription series I'd get on board with if I had more money.
Actually, I thought it was a subscription series I'd get on board with--until I found out the other 11 score albums in the series haven't been announced by Varèse yet. So anyone who subscribes before June 14 won't have any idea what they'll be filling their red carrying cases with after the April Fool's Day score and maybe whatever score is scheduled to follow that one, which I think is crazy. To be put into that kind of guessing game is the kind of thing I wouldn't sign up for. A guessing game might be great for a pie-of-the-month club, but it wouldn't be so great for a score-album-of-the-month club. To give other score album collectors an approximate idea of what else Varèse might reissue for the "LP to CD" series, someone on the Film Score Monthly message board posted a list of Varèse titles that never made the jump to CD. There are more than 12.
Yeah, that's not exactly an enticing list. Meanwhile, the world's only two or three fans of Blame It on Rio or From the Hip just creamed their pants.
I've always liked Varèse, and I put selections from tons of Varèse albums into rotation on AFOS all the time. My favorite release of theirs has to be the six-CD 2010 release of both Alex North's 1960 Spartacus score and the various cover versions of North's Spartacus love theme, a tune that became a jazz standard and one of the late Nujabes' favorite things to sample. The handsomely packaged, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink Spartacus box set is a release that, on paper, sounds like the old "We've put 50 songs on 50 CDs!" joke from the "Greatest Hits" game on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, but it's no joke, and that box set is the impressive pinnacle of Varèse's work in both giving beloved film and TV scores proper releases and honoring the art of film and TV scoring.
But despite my liking of Varèse, I've never been a Varèse soundtrack release completist like the completists who would subscribe to the "LP to CD" series. Who out there makes it their life's mission to collect every single release put out by a record label--rather than a musician or band they might love--even if an album made by the label contains a score from a movie or TV show they're not familiar with and even if a score released by that label was written by a composer they never liked? That's like if a hip-hop head bought every single release from Def Jam just because it's from Def Jam, including everything from the failed Roc La Familia imprint and even Kingdom Come, which Jay Z considers his worst album. It's just so bizarre. I call it bizarre, while A&E has a different word for it. Maybe you've heard of that word. The word is Hoarders.
Paul Chihara
Only one out-of-print Varèse score on the above list interests me. It's Paul Chihara's score to 1981's Prince of the City, one of my favorite Sidney Lumet films and a film that inspired Dick Wolf to create for Prince of the City star Jerry Orbach a wiseass Law & Order detective character slightly modeled after Orbach's corrupt and racist NYPD narc character (hey, Law & Order afternoon marathon-obsessed moms and stand-up comics who don't work during the day, remember when Briscoe was introduced as the formerly crooked, estranged-from-his-grown-up-daughters and twice-divorced antithesis of Paul Sorvino's fatherly and happily married Sgt. Cerreta?). Prince of the City is also a film that must have influenced Shawn Ryan in his TV work. The Shield, The Chicago Code and even the non-police-related Last Resort owe a lot to Prince of the City, which the late Lumet signed up for after Brian De Palma left the film (man, take me to the parallel universe where De Palma made Prince of the City!) because Lumet wanted to tackle a portrayal of the police that was more complex and morally ambiguous than his own 1973 smash hit Serpico. Prince of the City is the kind of audacious and grown-up cinematic fare that, like I said in my discussion of Horrible Bosses, major Hollywood studios used to be good at crafting in the days before the stink of PG-13, and it's the kind of fare that's found only as original shows on cable TV or streaming services these days.
The melancholy Prince of the City score--which was recorded in Paris with Jules and Jim and Contempt composer Georges Delerue as conductor instead of Chihara, due to an American musicians' strike at the time--is an important score to me and a noteworthy achievement because it's a solid score written by one of the few Asian American composers in the still-not-so-diverse world of film and TV music. Chihara, who collaborated frequently with Lumet and Farewell to Manzanar director John Korty, may not be as active in that world anymore (his last significant screen scoring credit was additional music for the John Turturro-directed 2005 musical Romance & Cigarettes), but the Japanese American composer remains active in the classical music world.
Outside the context of the film, the Prince of the City score isn't exactly a rollicking good time like, say, "I Don't Know" by Slum Village or "A Roller Skating Jam Named 'Saturdays'" by De La Soul, but it nicely reflects the isolation and angst of Treat Williams' character Daniel Ciello, a corrupt-cop-turned-whistleblower-taking-down-other-corrupt-cops. "Conceptually, Danny Ciello was to be treated always as one instrument: saxophone. Over the body of the picture, his sound was to become more and more isolated, until finally three notes of the original theme, played on sax, was all that remained of the music," wrote Lumet in his 1995 book Making Movies.
Chihara's score is an effective score from a film that's still underappreciated, and if Varèse's "LP to CD" series does rescue the Prince of the City score from the out-of-print doldrums, then we're getting somewhere. For now though, the series' "hey there, completists, for $10 a month, you won't know what you're getting!" concept just gives me bad--not to mention Hoarders-y, crazy cat lady-ish--vibes.
Every time I see a numeral followed by a plural noun followed by "That You Didn't Know Were This" in an article hed, I feel like punching a millennial hed writer in the face.
It didn't used to be this way. In fact, about a year ago, I used to write some of my blog post heds like this. But then over time, my tune changed. It started changing when I saw the following depressing snapshot in somebody's tweet.
Why have there been so many articles in the past few years where people list things? Is this all part of the rise of the borderline-autistic nerd? So his need to count things or list them and be fastidious and organized about what he likes or hates has to dominate the format of everything I read on the Internet now? "The listicle concept lends itself to digital media more so than any other medium. With ubiquitous clouds of content to select from, choosing something to read or information to digest can be downright cumbersome"? Fuck that noise. I want cumbersome. I want to read full-bodied paragraphs. I don't want to read grocery lists anymore. I want to see thought put into lists, just like I how I want to see thought put into anything that's not a list. I don't want disposable, less-than-150-words shit that's made for smartphone zombies to easily digest because they're too damn lazy and feeble-minded to scroll through an article with both substantial and substantive content on their phones.
Even Chris Rock's new film Top Five isn't immune to this habit of listing things--the characters in the film rattle off lists of their five favorite rappers or comedians--hence the title Top Five. The only listicles I like reading these days are any of the ones Rock himself was asked to assemble, the ego trip interviews with beatmakers about their favorite sample flips or the A.V. Club "Inventory" pieces. The "Inventory" listicles have always been smartly written. Everything else is mindless and lazily written click-bait.
Jack McCoy used to theorize during Law & Order about how the first Menendez brothers trial's hung juries put an end to "the Oprahfication of America," the first and last place where I heard the word "Oprahfication." I wish the original Law & Order were still in production so that the murder of some douchey Silicon Alley news site CEO that EADA Cutter has to prosecute would cause McCoy to complain about the BuzzFeedification of writing. (Not all of BuzzFeed is awful, by the way. A few good pieces about Asian Americans in hip-hop have been posted by BuzzFeed, which, for a while, I didn't know is being run by Jonah Peretti, the brother of the very funny Brooklyn Nine-Nine star Chelsea Peretti, a fact of trivia that intrigued this Brooklyn Nine-Nine fan when he found out they're siblings because it makes me wonder what dinner with the Peretti kids was like. Maybe it was lots of "Mom, Jonah's bothering me in .GIF form again!" Anyway, BuzzFeed's also got Alison Willmore, who's an excellent film writer, and Kate Aurthur has written for them several terrific hard news pieces about all the homophobia, misogyny and racism that's still prevalent in showbiz. It's the rest of BuzzFeed--the .GIF-heavy listicles about pointless shit--that makes me want to punch out a millennial editor.)
The BuzzFeedification of writing has caused me to decide to never write another listicle again, whether I'm writing for my own blog or Word Is Bond or any place else. A few months ago, I wanted to write a Word Is Bond post that would have been a rundown of hip-hop videos that are filmed in one long take. But then I noticed other hip-hop sites are succumbing to the listicle format too, and that's also made me regret dragging Word Is Bond down with me during the two listicles I wrote.
Hip-hop videos that are filmed in a single take are a fun topic, and I still feel like writing about it, but there's got to be other ways to structure that topic and make the hed look attractive and tantalizing without making it all appear to be yet another pointless listicle or a parody of terrible listicle writing that would show up on the Onion's clever BuzzFeed and Upworthy parody site ClickHole. As I try to figure out those other ways, I'm swearing listicles off forever. You'll Never Believe The 9 Reasons Why I'm Swearing Them Off Forever.
