Thoughts of the month and
A Fistful of Soundtracks episode
previews for April 2002.
Jim
Aquino hosts and produces A Fistful
of Soundtracks (Sundays 2-4PM on KZSC
88.1 FM in Santa Cruz and anytime at
Live365.com), writes for Silicon
Valley Community Newspapers and Metro Newspapers in San Jose and just recently heard that
dramatic Grammy speech Michael Greene gave about the evils of
downloading MP3s (And how did I hear that speech? I downloaded
an MP3).
All day music
Last month, I got A Fistful of Soundtracks
up and running at Live365, and I'm hoping more people will tune
into the 24-hour Webcast. (Listenership looks very low at the
moment, so I've been getting kind of pissy.) The idea of Fistful
being broadcast 24 hours nonstop sometimes blows my nearly computer-illiterate
mind. I don't think doing such a thing would have been possible
a decade ago. I guess several advances have been made with Internet
radio since then. Now if they could just work on that sound quality
thing.
There are a lot of movie music stations
at Live365: examples include Cinemascape, CinemaScores,
Permanent Waves, which takes a "quiet storm"
approach to the format and is an "editor's pick," and
my personal favorite, Crime Time, which focuses on crime
jazz. The Fistful episodes that I've archived at Live365
are shows that I feel best represent what I'm trying to do with
Fistful, which is to make it unique, even for a movie music
program. I prefer to find a balance between the present-day pieces
(David Holmes, Yoko "Cowboy Bebop" Kanno) and
the older material (Jerry Goldsmith, Lalo Schifrin) as opposed
to focusing on one or the other. I also like to occasionally toss
into the mix interview segments and skits/sketches (many of which
were originally used for the 2001 Halloween and Christmas Specials).
Doing occasional sketch comedy is my
way of trying to get closer to one of my dreams, which is writing
comedy. I always wanted to write for The
Onion or a similar humor publication/site.
Writing the fake news can be often more fun than writing about
the boring real world. I don't think I'll ever quite fit in with
serious or semi-serious journalism. For example, I once had Todd
Inoue of the Metro listen to the Fistful Christmas
Special and he said something along the lines of "I don't
think I could do what you do, which is be creative week after
week." I do this radio program to keep myself sane. Occasionally,
my day job gets so humdrum: too much hum and not enough drum.
I know some of my colleagues in community journalism wouldn't
like to hear me say this, but I gotta be frank: community journalism
is occasionally boring.
Anyway, streaming the program is something
I've wanted for a long time, and I'm glad I found a service like
Live365. So now, if you miss the most recent edition of Fistful,
you have the option of catching it at Live365. The looped "marathon"
of Fistful episodes at Live365 will be a mix of old and
new editions and will be constantly updated. I'll probably keep
the Halloween and Christmas Specials in rotation for a while because
I worked hard on putting together those shows and I don't think
enough people heard them.
Suffering April Fools gladly
I wouldn't like being an April Fools
prank victim, which is why I always try to be one step ahead by
being an April Fools prank victimizer/mastermind.
Here's the April Fools prank I pulled
this year. I write a column about restaurants in San Jose's Willow Glen
section for a Willow Glen community newspaper. Every few weeks,
I find myself getting bored with the column. The last week of
March/first week of April was one of those weeks. I happened to
be working on my column on April Fools Day, so for my April Fools
prank, I quickly wrote a fake
column about a washed-up porn star who
opens an erotic cake shop in Willow Glen — that's about as
likely as a sex toy shop opening in Branson, Missouri — and
I sent the article to my editor. I submitted it in the same manner
I always do with my other dining columns, with no headline (because
someone else provides it) and in the form of a Microsoft Word
document. I also sent the fake column to the head photographer
and some friends. They all fell for it or at least were convinced
for a few paragraphs that the erotic bakery existed. That's why
April Fools has always been my second favorite holiday after Halloween.
No Room for 222?
During the KZSC broadcast of the "It's
Spring Again" episode, a fan of the program called me up
and was jazzed about hearing Jerry Goldsmith's recorder and trumpet
theme from Room
222 during the show. "I had
a crush on Karen Valentine when I was 13," he said. Didn't
everybody?
Three different versions of the Room
222 theme, plus some cues Goldsmith wrote for the series,
can be found on Film Score Monthly magazine's Ace
Eli and Rodger of the Skies soundtrack.
The CD's liner notes mention that Room
222 is rarely shown in reruns. The
writer implies that's an odd thing because of all the rampant
nostalgia for shows from the '60s and '70s (and it's always lame
stuff that gets rerun to death on cable, like The Brady Bunch
or Chachi-era Happy Days). When I was a kid, I saw some
episodes of Room
222 on channel
36, which is where old sitcoms go to
die in San Jose. Besides Karen Valentine, the other thing I remember
most about Room 222 is that white boy with the gigantic
red afro. His son must be that redheaded kid who gets taunted
by Mike Myers' Scottish dad in So I Married an Axe Murderer:
"He looks like an orange on a toooothpick!"
I'd like it if Fox, which produced the
show, would put out episodes on DVD like they're doing with all
their hot TV properties or if some channel like TV Land, ABC Family
or Trio — the Laugh-In channel — would pick up
the reruns. The Disney Channel ran a Room 222 marathon
a couple of years ago, but it was a "one night only"
type thing. I'd like to see that show again for curiosity's sake.
It would make a nice alternative from the mannered preposterousness
of Boston Public, which always gets compared to Room
222.
Wasn't Room 222 James L. Brooks'
first big show? What's keeping the networks from airing it? Is
it the "dated" social-issue subject matter? Yet that
hasn't stopped Nick at Nite and TV Land from bringing back All
in the Family or Trio from showing Laugh-In three times
a day. (Now I like All in the Family, which has just been
released on DVD by the way, but I also think it's overrated. It's
unwatchable during the later seasons, when Norman Lear started
to forget it was a comedy. If there's any show that should be
blamed for all those "Very Special Episodes" of sitcoms,
it's All in the Family. Laugh-In is much worse.
Now that's a show that hasn't aged well.)
If you miss Room 222 like I do,
you'll just have to make do with Film Score Monthly's Ace
Eli soundtrack or Silva Screen's rerelease of the 1989 recording
Goldsmith Conducts Goldsmith. The latter includes a Goldsmith
TV theme medley that contains an orchestral version of the Room
222 theme arranged by Hawaii Five-O theme composer
Morton Stevens. The full-blown version is funny because it sounds
like an excerpt from Room 222: The Movie.
Chuck amuck
For listeners who weren't able to catch
the Feb. 24 edition of Fistful — a Quincy Jones salute
— and they won't be able to catch that particular show at
Live365 because the all-Jones playlist would violate Webcasting
laws, the show ended with a clip from the 1946 Bugs Bunny cartoon
"Hair-Raising Hare." It was my brief tribute to the
toon's director, the late Chuck Jones of "Duck Amuck"
and "One Froggy Evening" fame, who isn't my favorite
Warner Bros. cartoon director (that would be Bob Clampett, by
the way) but was a comic genius. Losing him is the comedy filmmaking
equivalent of losing Kurosawa or Kubrick. Richard von Busack did
a great write-up about Jones for MetroActive. I told Richard
one of my favorite Jones toons is one that he forgot to mention,
"The Rabbit of Seville"
(1950), a perfect marriage of musical score and slapstick. There
are gags in "Seville" that never fail to make me snicker
or smile, like when Bugs proposes to Elmer. It's a much funnier
toon than Jones' later short, the elaborate and much-celebrated
but overrated "What's Opera, Doc?" I told Richard, "My
problem with 'Doc' is that Jones forgot to make it funny."
"Seville" used to get the
shabbiest treatment on network TV. The censors would always cut
out the moment in which Bugs, dressed up like Elmer's "little
señori-ter," turns his back to the camera and it looks
like he's mooning the audience. Almost all the gunfire shtick
would also be atrociously snipped away. As a kid, I felt like
the theatergoers who always got robbed of the chance to see people
kiss in Cinema Paradiso.
If Richard had more word space, he would
have mentioned Jones' Bugs/Daffy/Elmer "hunting trilogy,"
with its classic Daffy gunshot wound gags (another casualty by
network censors) and elevated dialogue ("Aw. Pronoun trouble").
What a bad last few months it's been
in terms of iconic Hollywood filmmakers. We lose Chuck Jones and
then Billy Wilder.
My favorite Billy Wilder quote? His
pick-up line to his future wife: "I'd worship the ground
you walk on if you lived in a better neighborhood."
Jim Aquino
April 6, 2002
© 2002 Jim Aquino
Playing on Fistful in April:
Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's
Door - O.S.T. Future Blues (Victor)
Cowboy Bebop (Victor)
Monsoon Wedding (Milan)
Goldsmith Conducts Goldsmith (Silva Screen)
Cinema Concerto - Ennio Morricone at Santa Cecilia (Sony Classical)
Black Hawk Down (Decca)
Blade II (Immortal)
Gosford Park (Decca)
Six Feet Under (Universal)
Ali: Original Soundtrack II (Decca)
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Reprise)
See previous "Intros"
March 2002:
On Lalo Schifrin at Cinequest and Fistful getting streamed
February 2002:
On excerpts from a reporter's notebook-style diary
December 2001:
On the 2001 Fistful Christmas Special
November 2001:
On the 2001 Fistful Halloween Special
October 2001:
On Sept. 11, Asian American Comedy Night and the Enterprise
theme song
September 2001:
On the deaths of Pauline Kael, Manuel Ticsay (an uncle) and Aaliyah
August 2001:
On the Fistful episode "Fistful on the Run"
July 2001:
On new Fistful IDs and the Fistful episode "Up,
Up and Away"
June 2001:
On Fistful's fourth anniversary