Thoughts of the month and
A Fistful of Soundtracks episode
previews for March 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 is kind of glad they fired
Dennis Miller from Monday Night Football because now we
don't have to hear another TV critic say "I don't want to
get off on a rant here, but Dennis Miller sucks." Uh, you
suck too, you cliché-crazy hypocritic.
Cool hand Lalo
March is a huge month for Bay Area cineastes
because of the San
Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (I highly recommend the festival's opening night
selection, the superb and controversial Better
Luck Tomorrow; by the way, festival
director Chi-Hui
Yang is a guest on the program this
month). There's also San Jose's Cinequest, which was where I got to briefly meet Lalo Schifrin
and his wife and manager Donna. Schifrin was being honored for
a Maverick Spirit Award and was humbled by the gesture. The festival
screened a new and decent-looking print of the Schifrin-scored
Cool Hand Luke. I had never seen the entire film before,
although when I was flipping through channels a while ago, I stopped
at a channel that was showing that sequence with the car wash
chick. Who could forget that?
After the screening, Schifrin gave a
talk and then fielded some audience questions. (Some of them were
kind of dumb, like "Will you ever get to work with John Williams?"
Uh, hello? Film composers never really collaborate on scores?
Unless you're working for Robert Rodriguez.) Nothing earth-shattering
took place during the talk, although Schifrin had some interesting
things to say about his score for The Hellstrom Chronicle
and his memories of collaborating with Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy
Jones. The audience laughed when he said the following about Jones:
"He was a working musician back then. In fact, he still is."
There was one way you could tell there were hardly any film-music
geeks in the audience: nobody brought up that Schifrin played
the piano during Jones's classic recording of "Soul Bossa
Nova," the tune that's better known to comedy fans as the
Austin Powers theme.
I introduced myself to the Schifrins
and told them about the radio program. Donna runs the Aleph
label, which has been doing a fine job releasing Schifrin's jazz
and classical projects, as well as rerecordings of long-unavailable
Schifrin scores like Bullitt and Mannix. Purists
who prefer the original performances of the scores might not like
these rerecordings, but they're better than nothing. The Schifrins
said that after Cinequest, they're flying to Germany to work on
another rerecording, and then after they complete the project,
I'm going to see if we can set something up for the radio program.
Like an interview maybe?
Site for sore eyes
I'm constantly tweaking my Web site
to make it easier to navigate and better-looking. So recently,
I've taken the most text-heavy sections of the site, like my City
on a Hill articles and the Intros, and made them more printer-friendly.
Instead of white text against a black background, I flipped it
so that it's easier for people who wanted to print out an article
from my site, but were having trouble because their printers don't
print out dark pages very well. For a while, I thought an all-black
Web site would look badass — and it kinda still does —
but it's a pain in the arse when you want to print something.
Plus all-black... that's so 1995.
The impossible stream
When KZSC started streaming its programming
in 1999, I rejoiced because that meant Fistful would be
heard by people outside the Central Coast. But the Balki Bartokomous
Dance of Joy was short-lived. The streaming often didn't work,
and I was so frustrated that I made references to the station's
sucky streaming in a sketch for Fistful's 2000
Halloween Special. The station eventually
dumped the Webcasting and has remained offline ever since.
I've gotten a couple of e-mails asking
if Fistful will ever be heard online again. I've been getting
frustrated because the program doesn't reach listeners beyond
Santa Cruz, and it should.
Rather than wait for KZSC to deal with
boosting its online presence, I decided to take matters into my
own hands and have started working on archiving past episodes
of Fistful for future use on the Web. I signed up for a
page at Live365 and converted some episodes into MP3 form to
upload to Live365 (I hope this works). For upcoming first-run
editions of Fistful, I've even started assembling the playlists
in ways that won't violate any Webcasting laws (for instance,
no more than two songs in a row by the same artist) when I broadcast
these newer shows on the Web.
By the way, I first wrote all this on
my reporter's notebook in a hotel lobby instead of typing it all
out on a laptop, which is the standard here in Silicon Valley.
Oh no... I'm turning into David E. Kelley now. He's famous for
writing his scripts in longhand on yellow legal pads. I wonder
if any of his co-producers have ever come up to him and said Snake-style, "Use a laptop, Sideshow Dave!"
Jim Aquino
March 2, 2002
© 2002 Jim Aquino
Playing on Fistful in March:
Ocean's Eleven
(Warner Sunset/Warner Bros.)
Q: The Musical Biography of Quincy Jones (Rhino)
Ali: Original Soundtrack II (Decca)
Gosford Park (Decca)
Tron (Walt Disney)
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Reprise)
The Royal Tenenbaums (Hollywood)
Sexy Beast (Beyond)
Ace Eli and Rodger of the Skies (Film Score Monthly)
Black Hawk Down (Decca)
Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door — O.S.T. Future
Blues (Victor)
Six Feet Under (Universal)
Mulholland Drive (Milan)
The Others (Sony Classical/Sony Music Soundtrax)
See previous "Intros"
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