Back-announcement: A terrestrial radio term for the moment when the DJ identifies a song's title and performer.
Boutique division: The art-house movie division of a Hollywood studio, like Universal's Focus Features subsidiary or Fox Searchlight Pictures. In The Palace, a character complains about "lame releases that the studios or their boutique divisions always think will attract female moviegoers during opening weekends like TDK's."
Chune: A tune that's amazing. Pronounced "choon." Has nothing to do with the Latina nurse on ER. Her name is pronounced "choo-nee."
Diegetic: An adjective that describes any piece of music that characters in a film or TV show are performing live or blasting from a radio. Score music is non-diegetic.
Janky: An adjective from the streets that Michael Steele hasn't co-opted yet in his cringe-inducing attempts to relate to hip-hop heads like myself and recruit African Americans into the GOP. Steele is like that dad on Modern Family whose idea of hip is High School Musical.
Komiks: Comic books from the Philippines.
Ligyrophobic: Afraid of loud sounds like balloon pops. See Munn, Olivia.
Motif: A fancy way of saying "theme."
Podcast: A downloadable pre-recorded radio show, intended for playback on an iPod or an mp3 player, although it can also be played on a computer. The Fistful of Soundtracks channel has been erroneously referred to as a podcast by some bloggers. AFOS isn't downloadable, so it's not a podcast.
Terrestrial radio: 1. The opposite of Internet radio. 2. A dying medium that's caused listeners to flee, thanks to corporate control, annoying and racist morning personalities and umpteenth airings of "Freebird."
I've taken several voice acting classes where we were taught to avoid lapsing into the kinds of performances these immensely talented people gave, which is why I love this montage:
In March, I gave up resisting Twitter and launched a page there to write any blog posts that are only two or three sentences long. I didn't like Twitter at first, but I've adjusted to it, and now I think it's a more enjoyable and appealing microblogging/social networking site than the cluttered and less stripped-down Facebook.
I've found Twitter's 140-character limit to be a great way to test out my humor writing and be better at brevity. On Facebook, members have somehow discovered ways to bypass the character limit on their status updates, which has resulted in two things: 1) a lot of users writing updates that are longer than the Iliad, which kills the point of a microblog, and 2) me glancing briefly at those long-winded updates and wanting to log out of Facebook as fast as I can.
However, Twitter has a few downsides as well. Too many Twitterers have used the site to write some of the most vapid and boring microblogs I've ever come across (which resulted in Lewis Black uttering on Attack of the Show one of my favorite quotes about vapid-sounding Twitterers, "I'm not that interested in my life! What kind of ego do you have to have to think other people are interested?... If you're walking around telling people what you're doing, then guess what, you're not really doing it, are you? You're describing it!"). Instead of tweeting nonstop about every single activity in my life, I've preferred to focus most of my tweets on either the Fistful of Soundtracks radio station, movies and shows I've watched, links I want people to check out or links to the posts I write here at afistfulofsoundtracks.blogspot.com.
But the biggest downside of Twitter for me is that unlike Blogger or WordPress, Twitter doesn't automatically create archives of your older tweets, making it difficult to access older tweets that either you or someone else posted. If you want to access an older tweet without repeatedly clicking on the "more" link at the bottom of the page, you have to have previously copied and pasted the tweet's URL somewhere on your computer (like on Notepad) so that you can copy and paste that URL into your browser.
Because of the lack of an archive section on my Twitter page, here's a compilation of the tweets from my page that have received replies or have been retweeted (Twitter slang for being quoted), starting with my very first tweet.
Dammit. I give up. I'm on Twitter now though I'm not feelin' the concept. I'm joining only b/c writing 140-ch. posts on Blogger seems lame. 12:59 PM Mar 14th from web
Awesome. My first word on Twitter was "Dammit," which, in the Cosby household, means "Russell." 12:59 PM Mar 14th from web
You know who does the best dammits on TV? Kiefer. Not since DeForest Kelley has someone taken dammiting to a whole 'nother level. 1:00 PM Mar 14th from web
@pfunn I see that dumb new name and I think, "Shouldn't it be pronounced 'sy-fee,' as in the Syufy [sy-yoo-fee] movie theater chain?" 1:31 PM Mar 16th from web in reply to pfunn
Rotten Tomatoes Show on @current is the anti-Movie Mob. Their webcam reviews come from intelligent folks, not annoying attention whores. 11:15 AM Mar 20th from web
I prefer Savage Steve Holland (Better Off Dead) over John Hughes b/c SSH's '80s comedies aren't as racist as Hughes'--and they're weirder. 11:37 AM Mar 20th from web
Savage Steve Holland's How I Got Into College is on Fox Movie Channel right now. Damn, tanktop-clad Tom Kenny is paler than @jimgaffigan. 11:38 AM Mar 20th from web
Is it me or do some Twitterers sound like Norm MacDonald as Larry King reading his USA Today News & Views column? http://tinyurl.com/d2m79h 4:08 PM Mar 21st from web
Dammit, I can't get that silly Lady Gaga "this beat is sick" refrain out of my head ever since I first heard it on #Chuck last week. 1:30 AM Apr 11th from web
@gcdb She's the creation of a gay mad scientist who needed a new icon to worship b/c Madonna and Dona Versace are getting too old & creepy. 8:34 AM Apr 11th from web in reply to gcdb
@gcdb I bet every Canadian right now wants to bitchslap Billy Bob Thornton just like how Kurt Russell slaps around BBT in that movie. 7:56 PM Apr 11th from web in reply to gcdb
There needs to be an Asian American comedians' version of MST3K or Cinematic Titanic or #twitflixing (like the HGers' skewering of Crank 2). 4:08 AM Apr 17th from web
Why are Asian Americans always so serious and humorless and tweedy when they write essays or posts about racist pieces of shit like Crank 2? 4:13 AM Apr 17th from web
We Asian Americans need to take a cue from MST or HG or Paul Mooney and try a comic approach to ripping to shreds the Crank 2s of the world. 4:18 AM Apr 17th from web
@ALBaroza I want to do a live show in which an AA comic & I do snarky running com. on a racist flick. A RiffTrax-ish site might be dope too. 11:28 AM Apr 17th from web in reply to ALBaroza
"Why don't you make like a bass player and be inaudible?"--Metalocalypse. I've posted my all-time favorite basslines on @LivingSocial. 9:15 AM Apr 20th from web
Dopest basslines: 5. Jamiroquai, "Space Cowboy (Stoned Again Mix)"--the ultimate #420 anthem. Bassist: Stuart Zender. 9:18 AM Apr 20th from web
Basslines: 4. Jack Elliott and Allyn Ferguson's Barney Miller theme. Bassist: Jim Hughart. Rarely does a Jew on TV get a theme this funky. 9:20 AM Apr 20th from web
Basslines: 3. Freddie Hubbard, "Red Clay." Bassist: Ron Carter. ATCQ fans know this bassline from "Sucka N," which sampled a cover of "RC." 9:24 AM Apr 20th from web
Dopest basslines: 2. Slave, "Just a Touch of Love." Bassist: Mark Adams. Sampled by De La Soul ("Keepin' the Faith") and Das EFX ("Shine"). 9:27 AM Apr 20th from web
Dopest basslines: 1. The Smiths, "This Charming Man." Bassist: Andy Rourke. His bass work is the coolest part of the chune. 9:30 AM Apr 20th from web
I can never hear "Ready to Go" by Republica again without thinking of Dr. Girlfriend. 4:33 PM Apr 20th from web
Out of all the comic book cons I've been to, I prefer San Francisco's WonderCon because it's more laid-back than the other cons and Moscone Center South isn't so packed. And yes, there are TV show and movie panels like the Chuck panel with cast members Zachary Levi, Yvonne Strahovski (above), Adam Baldwin and Joshua Gomez and series co-creators Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak, but there aren't so many TV and movie panels that they cause the programming schedule to be overcrowded, so that gives me more time to talk shop with people and check out their comics. Plus, WonderCon is right across the street from Jollibee and Red Ribbon. Automatic win.
At WonderCon, I ran into an ex-co-worker, an on-and-off Fistful of Soundtracks listener (more on him in the graf after the next one) and Film Score Monthly soundtrack label founder/honcho Lukas Kendall, whom I never met face-to-face before. Lukas used to record a few phoners with me in the earlier years of the college radio version of A Fistful of Soundtracks.
Also, I got to meet some bloggers whose blogs I regularly read, I talked shop with IDW letterer Chris Mowry, I took some career advice from Keith Knight and Stephen Notley (he raised a good point about why Topher Grace would have been a better Spider-Man than Tobey Maguire, whom Stephen finds to be too humorless to play a wisecracking New Yorker like Spidey), and Chris, Keith, Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, Darick Robertson, Erik Larsen, Keith R.A. DeCandido and Michael Aushenker signed comics or promo materials for me.
The AFOS listener I met was graphic designer Joe Sikoryak, who's responsible for the look of Film Score Monthly and its spiffy CD packaging and booklets. FSM's Superman: The Music box set (above) is one of Joe's coolest achievements. I went to see Joe at a panel he was moderating (it was for Super Capers, an indie superhero flick in which Adam West pokes fun at his Batman persona) because before the panel started, I needed him to answer a question that had been nagging me ever since I ran into him on the previous day: Was Joe the cartoonist behind The Daily Show's brilliant "Decider" segments, which reimagined Bush as a caped superhero? (Joe told me his brother R. Sikoryak was the one who produced "The Decider.") It was surreal to be talking to Joe for several minutes while both Adam West--a.k.a. '60s Batman, a.k.a. Lookwell(*), a.k.a. the Gray Ghost--and Sam Lloyd, one of my favorite supporting players on Scrubs, are sitting a few inches from you.
(*)Lookwell, a great unsold 1991 sitcom pilot written by Conan O'Brien and Robert Smigel, features my all-time favorite West performance. West's title character is a pretentious, washed-up star of a '70s detective show who attempts to become an actual P.I.
Here I am at WonderCon's G4 booth with Attack of the Show's Blair Butler, who reviews comics and graphic novels during AOTS' Fresh Ink segment. She's guested in the past on Joe Gonzalez and Jimmy Aquino's Comic News Insider podcast (where I recently plugged Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology), so I told her both my first and last names to see what her reaction would be. Blair was initially confused because I look nothing like the CNI co-host. I explained to her that I'm Jimmy Aquino the scriptwriter and there are now two Jimmy Aquinos in the comics world.
Blair lit up when I asked her to autograph her own rave review of All-Star Superman in an issue of Geek Monthly magazine. I'm not really a fan of the Superman character or the superhero genre, but like Blair, I've enjoyed Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's clever Supes revamp, which ran from 2005 to 2008 and was the recent focus of an A.V. Club "Gateways to Geekery" post. As Blair wrote in her review, All-Star Supes is "a master class on how to mesh great plotting and great pencils."
Blair said that when Olivia goes off-script or takes shtick like the Eskimo kiss or an impromptu shaving of part of Kevin Pereira's hair into unexpected directions, you can't stop her from whatever she's doing and you have no choice but to roll with it. The Eskimo kiss went way longer than Blair expected, which of course, resulted in great live TV.
Nice. Miramax had a booth for Adventureland, an upcoming comedy about amusement park workers from Superbad director Greg Mottola.
I wasn't at the Adventureland booth when Freaks and Geeks alum Martin Starr, who has a role in the film, showed up to sign Adventureland posters and tees. I would have liked to have seen how Starr interacts with fans of his old show. The former Bill Haverchuck needs to do more TV or movies. He was terrific on Freaks and Geeks.
Next time, instead of the Star Wars droids, I'd like to see the Daleks roam around the Moscone hallways, so that I'd have some fun watching the giant salt-shakers with toilet plungers harass any of the British WonderCon visitors who used to hide behind the couch during a Daleks episode of Doctor Who. (I mean, c'mon, England. Giant salt-shakers made you shit your trousers when you were kids? Really?)
Here's an Asian American Catwoman. I always get a kick out of seeing Asian American cosplayers suit up as non-Asian DC or Marvel characters.
Unfortunately, the rest of the photos I took--like a snapshot of a female Robin (the Boy Wonder, not the Witch Hunter) cosplayer--are even blurrier than the ones I've posted. There are a bunch of pretty dope Flickr photo galleries that feature WonderCon snapshots that are better than the ones I snapped.
Here's a word of advice to anyone who attends WonderCon and is actually reading this: Skip the expensive, underwhelming convention food (you're going to have to in this recession) and eat outside. Take your money to Jollibee or any one of the local cheap eateries (or better yet, non-fast food joints). Chickenjoy trumps overpriced Costco-quality pizza any day of the week.
Now that's more like it. That's exactly what I saw (and failed to photograph) outside the NYCC Exhibit Hall right after I posed for photos at the Secret Identities panel. After we've seen the quarter-Japanese Dean Cain play Superman for four seasons of Lois & Clark and the half-Chinese Olivia Munn suit up as Wonder Whoa-man! in one of her most memorable Attack of the Show sketches, I love that we finally get a full-blooded Asian Superman and a full-blooded Asian WW.
Damn, Asian WW is fine. And the Supe is rocking a cool replica of Cain's shiny version of the iconic suit. The armpit sweat stains must be a shout-out to Christopher Reeve's pit stains during his Superman: The Movie screen tests.
(Speaking of WW, last Friday, I caught an early NYCC screening of the Bruce Timm-produced Wonder Woman, which reunites Keri Russell with her Waitress co-star Nathan Fillion. Thanks to sharp and witty dialogue reminiscent of the writing on Justice League Unlimited, the involvement of current WW comics scriptwriter Gail Simone and rousing battle sequences that really look impressive on a big screen, director Lauren Montgomery's WW is easily the strongest of the four straight-to-DVD DC Universe animated movies so far. This new WW did the impossible: it actually made Steve Trevor interesting.)
Chune: A tune that's amazing. Pronounced "choon." Has nothing to do with the Latina nurse on ER. Her name is pronounced "choo-nee."
