Thoughts of the month and
A Fistful of Soundtracks episode
previews for September 2001.
Jim
Aquino hosts and produces A Fistful
of Soundtracks (Sundays 2-4PM on KZSC
88.1 FM in Santa Cruz), writes for Silicon
Valley Community Newspapers and Metro
Newspapers in San Jose and sometimes,
while surfing through radio stations in the morning, he stumbles
into this strange Spanish morning show that has a laugh track.
Do comedy radio shows still do that? And it's the cheesiest canned
laughter. Where did they dig up this creaky-sounding laugh track?
From episodes of Fibber McGee and Molly? The laugh track's
funnier than the jokes. Kind of like in every single lame NBC
sitcom that has aired Thursday at 8:30 after Friends.
Schoolhouse rock
It's funny — in all my years at
school, I never really did a Fistful "back to school"
special, which is what I'll be putting together this fall, two
years after I graduated from UC Santa Cruz. This show will simply
be called "Back to School," and it'll air September
30. It'll feature classroom-related music from soundtracks to
films like Back to School, To Sir, With Love, South
Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, The Virgin Suicides,
School Daze and even those naughty Schoolgirl Report
German porno flicks. The theme from Welcome Back, Kotter
might even turn up as well. "Back to School" should
be amusing. Can you guess which number from Bigger, Longer
& Uncut will be played?
She lost it at the movies
I didn't really appreciate the writing
of Pauline Kael (who died September 3 at the age of 82) until
I was involved in college journalism. My journalism adviser Conn
Hallinan always spoke highly of her, and I understood why he admired
her, even though I never considered myself a Paulette — I'm
more of a Joe Bob Briggs-ian. The first Kael piece that caught
my eye was an amazing and lengthy review of The Godfather Part
II that was posted by the moderator of the Godfather
mailing list back when I used to participate in the list's e-mail
postings. Go to your nearest library and try to find that Godfather
Part II review in one of her suggestively titled compilation
books — these collections, which include I Lost It at
the Movies, Deeper Into Movies, 5001 Nights at the
Movies and For Keeps, are all, unfortunately, out of
print — and you'll notice not very many reviewers these days
write with the same insight, enthusiasm or verbal skills that
she displayed in that review, as well as so many others.
I'm ashamed to be a film reviewer. I'm
always telling people I want to quit doing it, partly because
of the current state of film criticism (but how else can I see
movies for free, weeks before they come out?). Kael came from
an era before film criticism was polluted by quote whores, dorky
TV critics like Bill Harris and Michael Medved (Kael once said
that if you trust them, "you have a hole in your head")
and Internet reviewers who, to borrow the words of Us Weekly
critic Andrew Johnston, "don't realize that knowing how to
write and actually having something to say are not the same thing."
But that's not to say her era was devoid
of writers who were disgracing the job. Kael was always vocal
about her frustration with pretentious reviewers. If you ever
glimpse reviews by most of Kael's peers during the '60s and '70s,
be prepared to cringe. Their writing is impenetrable, stodgy and
shallow. Kael helped bring art to the writing (even though, as
someone wittily notes at Media
News, anyone who uses the word "zizzy"
more than once in print needs a new editor from time to time)
and cut through all the bullshit. I wish her voice was around
when everyone was lavishing praises on the overly New Agey American
Beauty, which she reportedly hated. Or when everyone got all
wet over Titanic and its "romanticism."
Ty
Burr, Richard von Busack, John Powers, Lukas
Kendall and the regulars at Media News have written some fond
yet enjoyably unsentimental observations of Kael — which
is fitting because she abhorred sentimentality in movies and in
reviewing. As Lukas notes: "Sure, she could be petty or inconsistent,
but who cared when the writing was so good?
Besides Kael's passing, there have been
some other really big-time losses in the past few weeks, including
a death in my own family — my siblings and cousins and I
lost our painter uncle Manuel. I'll never forget when he described
to me one of his earliest trips to America, in which he got his
first glimpse of breakdancers dancing in the street. The way he
told it was so amusing to me. That's one of the things I like
about being part of an immigrant family and having relatives who
come from outside America: you get to see how they view things
in this country that are ordinary to those of us who originated
here. I also won't forget the time I visited my uncle's house
in the Philippines and I played for him one of my hiphop tapes,
and he started doing this really silly dance that made me laugh.
Jack Elliott, the composer who co-wrote
one of my all-time favorite TV themes, the Barney Miller
theme, died August 18. I didn't know The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
was based on Elliott's family and their relationship with Fresh
Prince's creator, record label exec Benny Medina. Elliott
also composed the themes from Night Court and Charlie's
Angels, which he wrote with his frequent collaborator Allyn
Ferguson (speaking of which, I've lately been giving Apollo
Four Forty's "Charlie's Angels 2000" remake some airplay
on my program). But the Barney Miller theme is the coolest.
I remember reading an interview with that stand-up comic Tom Rhodes
in which he recalled when he was little and his family would watch
Barney Miller. He and his siblings would jump up and down
and dance all over the living room whenever Elliott and Ferguson's
theme music came on. Who wouldn't?
And then there's the August 25 plane-crash
death of Aaliyah, which stunned me when I first read about it.
What's up with all these obits written by old white people who
never heard of her before her death? I'll give them some credit
for admitting they never knew about her or heard her music, but
why the hell are they even writing about her in the first place?
Why didn't newspaper editors seek out more in-the-know writers
like San Francisco Bay Guardian music columnist Johnny
Ray Huston (who considered her latest CD one of the most underrated
R&B albums of the summer) and have those folks write the obits?
Instead, I have to wade through clueless columns like Gina Arnold's
waste of column space in the Metro
and Rod Dreher's tacky New York Post rant. (Wait a minute — "tacky" and
"New York Post" — isn't that redundant?)
Dreher's column, in which he blasts the "traffic-snarling,
horse-drawn cortege in honor of... an undistinguished singer of
forgettable pop songs," has made him the target of death
threats. Now who the hell made Dreher the judge of how people
should mourn and which person deserves a grand funeral and which
person doesn't? I hope Dreher goes down in a plane crash too.
Alright, so Aaliyah wasn't really the
greatest in her field. But she did an excellent cover of the Isley
Brothers' "At Your Best (You Are Love)" years ago, and
her songs with producer Timbaland were cutting-edge R&B, especially
"Are You That Somebody," which cleverly looped the gurgling
of an infant. And I'd have to agree with Johnny Ray: songs like
her first single from the new album, "We Need a Resolution,"
were so overlooked. Can you say the same things about songs by
the Britneys and Christinas of the world? Hell no.
"Case Closed"
Tom Brzozowski recently e-mailed me
about a 1998 column in which I talked about the Homicide: Life
on the Street character Frank Pembleton:
Jim,
Call me a "Johnny come lately"
but I just read your article "Case Closed" and enjoyed
it very much. Pembleton was, and remains, my favorite HLOTS character
for many of the reasons you mention. A Jesuit-educated, thinking
Catholic who, like us all, struggles day to day trying to discern
between right on wrong.
After reviewing your website it appears
you now heading in a new directions. Best of luck.
Jim Aquino
September 9, 2001
© 2001 Jim Aquino
See previous "Intros"
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