"Rock Box" Track of the Day: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Crosstown Traffic"

Song: "Crosstown Traffic" by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Released: 1968
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's featured in the broadcast version of Keen Eddie's "Keeping Up Appearances" episode. Paramount Home Entertainment didn't bother to clear "Crosstown Traffic" for the DVD version, which I refuse to watch.

Which moment in "Keeping Up Appearances" does it appear?: The sequence where Detective Eddie Arlette (Mark Valley) goes for a ride in a Bentley that once was owned by Jimi Hendrix.



Keen Eddie is a lost comedic gem from creator J.H. Wyman, who's currently a writer/producer for Fringe, which returns in a new and not-exactly-great time slot tonight and briefly had Valley as a regular before he starred in Human Target, where he's basically playing Eddie Arlette again, but with mad fighting skills. Wyman's London-based cop show was too foreign, anarchic and offbeat for mainstream America (it wasn't dour and moralistic enough for them--the original CSI, the #1 prime-time hit that year, was more up their conservative-leaning, bodybag-filled alley). But Keen Eddie won over TV critics (National Review, of all publications, actually liked it) and whoever were the three or four viewers who caught it on Fox. I was one of them, and I instantly dug "Crosstown Traffic," the tune where Hendrix MacGyvered a kazoo out of a comb and a piece of cellophane, when I first heard it on Keen Eddie.

All the other "Rock Box" Tracks of the Day from this week:
Matt & Kim, "Good Ol' Fashion Nightmare"
Tom Jones, "Sex Bomb (Peppermint Disco Mix)"
The Motherhood, "Soul Town"
Edo G feat. Masta Ace, "Wishing"

This is literally my "Rock Box"

I like to use shoeboxes to store the complete runs of three of my favorite comic book series--Y: The Last Man, Gotham Central and the Vertigo version of Human Target (Y ran for 60 issues, Gotham Central lasted for 40 and Human Target had 21, so the complete run of each title can easily fit in a shoebox). I also sometimes use shoeboxes as portable filing cabinets for CDs that have to be utilized for AFOS. One of these boxes contains the CDs that carry all the non-score music tracks (a.k.a. existing songs) I have to presently re-edit and re-upload to my Live365.com music library without the old AFOS "F Zone" sweepers they used to open with--all in time for the "F Zone" programming block's name change to "Rock Box" on January 3.

The time slots for "Rock Box" on AFOS are 4-6am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Mondays and 5-7am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Fridays.

"Always funky fresh, could never be stale"--Run, "Rock Box"

A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Assorted Fistful" sets its sights on Bear McCreary's Human Target soundtrack

Former Battlestar Galactica composer Bear McCreary's beautifully crafted score cues for Human Target were a highlight of the first season of the Mark Valley series, an enjoyable Burn Notice-like throwback to '80s action shows despite co-star Jackie Earle Haley's weekly overuse of the word "dude" and the fact that Human Target bears little resemblance to the angsty, not-so-lighthearted Vertigo comic book that inspired it.

Most first-season Human Target episodes featured music performed by a 60-piece orchestra (McCreary upped it to 94 for the "Christopher Chance" season finale that guest-starred Armand Assante, Amy Acker and Lee Majors as a predecessor to Valley's title hero, an assassin-turned-bodyguard). This made McCreary's orchestra the largest group of musicians assembled for a TV series in years, a huge leap from the 30-piece orchestra McCreary often conducted on Galactica, the 29-to-34-piece orchestra Shirley Walker and her team of composers led during another made-for-TV DC Comics adaptation, Batman: The Animated Series, and the 37-piece one Michael Giacchino assembled for Lost.

"At the first production meeting we had, even before the pilot, I said we must have an orchestra," said Human Target's first-season showrunner Jonathan E. Steinberg in the press release for this month's Human Target soundtrack release. "This show is about an action hero, it's built out of the DNA of the movies I grew up on, Star Wars and Raiders and Star Trek. Those movies don't work without that orchestra."

Human Target, which debuted on Fox as a mid-season replacement last January, will return to the Fox lineup in mid-November (the season premiere was originally scheduled to air earlier this month--that's why the soundtrack release was slated for October--but the network postponed the premiere). However, Steinberg and McCreary didn't return for the second season. Matthew Miller, a writer/producer from Chuck, replaced Steinberg as showrunner, brought along Chuck composer Tim Jones and plans to insert into Human Target more Chuck-style "needle drops" (slang for existing songs), to the delight of a Human Target fan who said in HitFix.com's comments section that "I absolutely hate needle drops. I also love Bear McCreary's music. Human Target in its first season was a great callback to the silly shows of my childhood--The Fall Guy, The A-Team, etc. I don't like Chuck, and I don't like any of these proposed changes. I won't be tuning in for Season 2."

On his blog, McCreary explained his exit by saying "the series is now under new creative leadership, and as a result I have not been asked to return... We are likely to hear a very different musical approach to Human Target season 2, but I hope and trust the series will remain a fun adventure."


McCreary's departure is a disappointing development for fans of the show's Emmy-nominated first-season music like myself, but luckily, McCreary, who's currently busy juggling AMC's The Walking Dead and the Syfy shows Caprica and Eureka, has assembled a whopper of a Human Target soundtrack release. WaterTower Music's digital release of the Human Target soundtrack consists of 160 minutes of McCreary's music from the show, while La-La Land's physical version of the soundtrack on October 19 will contain even more music and encompass three discs.


I've added my favorite tracks from the Human Target album to daily "Assorted Fistful" rotation on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel. During one of these standout tracks, "The New Christopher Chance" from last season's cliffhanger, you can hear what Steinberg had in mind when he said his version of Human Target was built out of the DNA of Star Wars and Raiders. "The New Christopher Chance" contains "Katherine's Theme," a romantic motif McCreary wrote for Acker's character. The sweeping theme brings to mind both Han and Leia's Empire Strikes Back love theme and "Marion's Theme" from Raiders.

Tune into A Fistful of Soundtracks to get your Human Target music fix while you wait another few weeks for Jackie Earle Haley to come back and abuse the word "dude."

Shows I Miss: Keen Eddie

Tonight, prime-time takes another stab at adapting the DC comic Human Target when Fox premieres a much-hyped, Bear McCreary-scored series loosely based on Peter Milligan's Vertigo version, one of my favorite comics during its too-brief run. In a previous TV version of Human Target that was produced by Flash TV series showrunners Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo, Rick Springfield starred as bodyguard Christopher Chance, who disguised himself as his victimized clients to throw off the bad guys and flew around in a pimpin' stealth bomber/bachelor pad that's the only thing I remember about the show. This time, Jericho co-creator Jon Steinberg is the showrunner, the master-of-disguise gimmick has been ditched, the stealth bomber has been left to rot in a hangar somewhere and Chance is played by Mark Valley, who will always be Keen Eddie to me.

Human Target reunites Valley with Con Air director Simon West, who also worked on the much-missed, Guy Ritchie-esque Keen Eddie, which first aired on Fox in the summer of 2003. Early reviews have said Human Target is less like the gritty Vertigo comic--which put Chance through one hell of a psychological wringer by having him suffer from an identity crisis--and more along the lines of lighter fare like The A-Team, MacGyver and Keen Eddie.

I doubt the new show will be as offbeat or raunchy as Keen Eddie, which premiered (and then died) a few months before Janet Jackson's Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime wardrobe malfunction caused the major networks to overreact and kill some of the fun out of prime-time by overpolicing their raunchier shows. There are certain storylines and bits of dialogue during Keen Eddie that teleplay writers probably can't get away with in today's post-Janetgate prime-time landscape--they're more likely to be able to get away with them on FX. Cable was where Keen Eddie belonged.

In fact, cable was where most of Keen Eddie's cult following first discovered the series. After Fox's top exec at the time--who was as impatient with Keen Eddie as the shit-for-brains NBC execs have been with The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien--defied the wishes of other Fox execs who loved Keen Eddie and abruptly cancelled it, Bravo picked it up and debuted its unaired episodes.

The series, which last popped up on Sleuth a couple of years ago, is a lost comedic gem from creator J.H. Wyman, who currently co-produces Fringe, where Valley was briefly a regular before he moved on to Human Target. The Desert Storm vet-turned-actor was terrific as NYPD detective Eddie Arlette, who travels to London to track down an elusive drug dealer and winds up joining Scotland Yard. Eddie doesn't quite find his drug dealer (Crockett and Tubbs had far better luck with their nemesis Calderon on Miami Vice), but the fish-out-of-water falls in love with the city and takes a liking to both the British crooks he locks up (they're more like the not-so-dangerous oddball criminals from Barney Miller than the mustachio-twirling villains from Miami Vice) and his hot but snooty and argumentative flatmate Fiona Bickerton (a then-unknown Sienna Miller). The series was a love letter to London, where it was filmed on location on what was clearly a ginormous budget. Wyman's creation was too foreign, anarchic and weird for mainstream America (it wasn't dour and moralistic enough for them--the original CSI, the #1 prime-time hit that year, was more up their conservative-leaning, bodybag-filled alley). But it won the hearts of some TV critics (Marvin Kitman called it "a show that could have started something new, like how Miami Vice took police shows out of L.A.") and whoever were the three or four viewers who watched it on Fox. I was one of them.


Eddie is a roguish, down-on-his-luck crime show hero in the mold of Jim Rockford and Black Tie Affair's Dave Brodsky. If Rockford's Achilles heel was having knuckles made of Kleenex, Eddie's Achilles heel is thinking with his boner too much--one reason why this show wouldn't fly on prime-time today. Eddie's crush on his gorgeous informant, the mysterious gangster's moll who tricks him and the NYPD into busting down the wrong door, is the whole reason for his banishment to London. The series' most enjoyable running joke involves Carol (Rachael Buckley, who's even hotter than Miller but seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth), a Scotland Yard secretary Eddie nicknames "Miss Moneypenny," and the never-answered mystery over whether her flirtatious exchanges with Eddie about her tastes for crotchless panties or being on all fours are real or the figment of Eddie's oversexed imagination. But Eddie's a prude in comparison to his floppy-haired partner Monty Pippin (Julian Rhind-Tutt), whose off-duty sexcapades make Jimmy McNulty from The Wire look like a monk (even though because this isn't HBO, we never see Monty in the middle of one of his swingers club orgies).


Another highlight of Keen Eddie is its awesome, pitch-perfect soundtrack. The pilot episode underscored a drug bust sequence with the Archies' "Sugar Sugar"--an early indication that Keen Eddie was no ordinary cop show. For the carelessly compiled DVD release, which should be avoided at all costs, Paramount Home Entertainment removed many of the songs that helped make Keen Eddie such a memorable show, due to clearance fees Paramount refused to pony up for ("Keeping Up Appearances," an episode in which Eddie inherits Jimi Hendrix's Bentley, is utter shit without "Crosstown Traffic"). But the studio didn't lay a finger on the songs in the reruns, so whenever Keen Eddie turns up on cable, fire up the DVR.

Because of the arrival of Valley's first star vehicle since Keen Eddie, I'll soon be adding to the Fistful of Soundtracks channel's "F Zone" playlist some of the tunes that were cut out of the Keen Eddie DVDs: Madness' "One Step Beyond," New Order's "Crystal" and of course, "Crosstown Traffic."

The First Annual Asian American ComiCon (AACC) was also my first book signing

Yep, I got my book signing cherry popped at the AACC.


From left to right: Cliff Chiang (with Keith Chow kneeling down at Cliff's left side), Parry Shen and I sign copies of Secret Identities at the AACC at the Museum of Chinese in America in Manhattan's Chinatown on Saturday, July 11 (photo by Rahadyan Sastrowardoyo). At the center of the table, you can see a bottle of hand sanitizer, which an unknown person left for us. I guess he or she was inspired by the following photo, which is from the "I Touched You with My Nerd Cooties, Beth Cooper" collection...


... and wanted to make sure we got as much protection from the unwashed masses as possible.

At the next ComiCon, the congoers will have to step through a decontamination shower before they enter, although I think the contestants of Rock of Love: Criminal Intent would need it more.


From left to right: Cliff, Ken Wong, me, Jef Castro and Jeremy Arambulo entertain--or are entertained by--the witty and surprisingly decent-smelling fans at our signing session (photo by Kate Agathon).

In addition to being an exciting and refreshingly low-key con, the laid-back AACC, which was co-presented by the museum and Secret Identities Universe Media, was also a chance for me to meet other Secret Identities contributors I never met before face-to-face, including Parry, Jeremy and Cliff, who signed my favorite issues of Vertigo's much-missed Human Target reboot, which he helped draw for writer Peter Milligan. The thought-provoking Vertigo incarnation was one of my favorite comics, and it appears to be an influence on the upcoming Fox TV series version starring Mark Valley, a.k.a. Keen Eddie, as master of disguise Christopher Chance (Comic Book Resources did an interesting recap of the Vertigo series here).


At the AACC Artists Alley, I shared a table with Secret Asian Man creator Tak Toyoshima, whom I was honored to meet at the New York Comic Con's Secret Identities panel earlier this year. In the few minutes we hung out at the NYCC, we chatted about comic strips and our experiences working for alt-weeklies (the paper I used to work for introduced me to Tak's strip and has carried it since its pre-United Features Syndicate days).


If you ever have to share a table at a comic con, make sure you share it with Tak. He's the definition of chill. Nothing seems to faze the always deadline-minded yet easygoing Tak--not even another deadline on the weekend (someone had commissioned him to create an on-the-fly strip about the AACC). He was one of the most approachable guests at the con and found time to talk with fans and sign items for them even while pencilling his strip at our table (photo by Kate). One of my favorite moments of the con was seeing Tak's mom quickly drop off a bag of siopao for him.

Runaways colorist Christina Strain also had a table at the Artists Alley and signed my copies of the digest-sized Runaways TPBs Escape to New York and Parental Guidance. She told me she'd prefer to see unknown teen actors in the Runaways feature film instead of name actors, and she'd like an unknown child actress to be cast as Molly, the youngest member of the series' unnamed band of teen heroes.


No, former Lost staff writer-turned-new best friend of Olivia Munn Brian K. Vaughan wasn't at the AACC. He actually signed Parental Guidance for me a few years ago at WonderCon.


AACC co-chairs Jeff Yang and Greg Pak honored Larry Hama with the first-ever Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama Award for his outstanding writing for the G.I. Joe and Wolverine titles and the Devil's Due satire Barack the Barbarian (photo by Jeremy). Jeff and Greg named the award after the self-published Japanese immigrant cartoonist who created Manga Yonin Shosei (The Four Students Manga), America's first original graphic novel, in 1931.


Hama signed for me all the G.I. Joe comics I bought as a kid, including the issue that I said on this blog was an eerie precursor to the imprisonment of Laura Ling and Euna Lee. Like everyone else at the con, I admire Hama, but I was actually more enthusiastic about a couple of other veteran Asian American talents who showed up to the con, sci-fi author and guest panelist William F. Wu and longtime Marvel and DC letterer Janice Chiang.

I don't think William gets enough props for his creation "Wong's Lost and Found Emporium," which writer Alan Brennert adapted into a standout episode of the '80s Twilight Zone. I enjoyed William's recollections of the making of the episode. In the comments section of a big WOWO blog post about the original Twilight Zone, I mentioned "Wong's" and said:

When I first caught "Wong's" on DVD, I was stunned to find an actual show from the '80s with non-stereotypical Asian American characters. I was also stunned to learn that the episode was a backdoor pilot for a "Wong's" TV series, which didn't get picked up, of course, because those were the days when networks would only greenlight shows with Asian leads if they involved martial arts or starred Pat Morita.

I was even more surprised to find out from William--who wore to the AACC an '80s Twilight Zone jacket that was a gift from the showrunners--that several years after the Twilight Zone adaptation aired, there was a second attempt to launch a "Wong's" series over at the Sci Fi Channel, now inanely respelled Syfy. Unfortunately, a channel higher-up didn't like the series idea and got his way. SyonUvaBytch.

Janice, who brought her aspiring video game designer son to the con, wanted me to sign her copy of Secret Identities, and when she introduced herself to me, I told her, "You're a lettering legend. You lettered half the comics I bought as a kid! You deserve a table of your own here."

Hell, I think she deserves a panel of her own at the second AACC. I told Janice I always wanted to be a letterer like her. She lettered my favorite issue of Alpha Flight, in which Madison Jeffries, a mutant who can reshape metal with his mind and merge with a flying robot called Box, realizes he's no match for his mutated evil brother Omega, so he reconfigures Box, which looks like a homosexual Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robot, and upgrades its design from a dorky-looking one to a sleeker-looking, more badass one.


Janice gave me some pointers about lettering and taught me about kerning, or adjusting the spacing between letters. I was relieved to know she dislikes how the letter D looks in the fugly and much-maligned Comic Sans font, which was used during our novel's preface by Jeff and Jef (doh!).


Here I am with the first two fans I ever signed books for, Purdue University graduate students/lecturers Kate Agathon and Lisa Hanasono, both passionate supporters of Secret Identities and the AACC (photo courtesy of Kate).


I love this picture of Kate and Lisa posing in the Secret Identities masks that the New Press slipped into complimentary copies of our novel.


Here's me discovering the memory on each of the batteries for my camcorder/still camera is full (photo by Kate), which meant I was unable to use the camcorder during the AACC. The look on my face says "Interesting," but the thought in my head is "Aw, fuck me."

Luckily, I brought a spare camera, a disposable Kodak, which I find easier to use than a digital camera. If the snapshots from the disposable camera look alright, I'll include them on a future post.

Also at the AACC, we Secret Identities contributors signed each others' copies of the anthology.


A couple of artists poked fun at their friends' sketches in my copy of the novel.

Cliff, Ken, Jeremy, Tak, Jef, Bernard Chang, Sean Chen, Alex Tarampi, Paul Wei and Sarah Sapang are far more skilled artists than I am. (I told Alex my hand would sometimes get tired from drawing my webcomic The Palace because I would grip my pen too tightly whenever I wouldn't feel confident about my art.) One fan mistook me for an artist during the signing session, but I drew something inside his copy of Secret Identities anyway: the only comic strip character I can draw, Dick Tracy.


On Jeremy's sketchbook, I drew Dick and Homer for him.

In addition to my first signing session, this trip also marked the first time I ever used the New York subway. I decided to listen to my older brother's recommendation that I save money and forego the cabs I always rode in previous trips to New York. Of course, I got lost on the subway (after a nice night of hanging out with Chelsea-based A Fistful of Soundtracks listener Ben Erwin, his wife Helen and his nephew David) and didn't get back to my hotel in Chinatown until six hours before the AACC's opening at 10am.

Lack of sleep often makes me cranky, but I was so jazzed about meeting the novel's fans and getting the chance to spend some more time with the Secret Identities crew--as well as being part of a history-making day and what Hama referred to in his acceptance speech as the AACC's celebration of community--that the crankiness slipped away. I'm looking forward to the second AACC.