Hiya, kids! This week’s mix is brought to you by Jeff Johnson, who’s been a friend of mine since high school. Ever since I’ve known him, Jeff’s tastes in music have skewed toward the soundtrack side, specifically orchestral soundtracks. We attended film school together (I changed majors at the end of my junior year), and he went on to write and direct a feature film called Holly vs. Hollywood. Nowadays Jeff is happily ensconced as the online store manager at the ever-popular soundtrack store (and record label) Intrada in Oakland, California. Intrada is one of those rare record stores where they not only exclusively stock movie soundtracks, they also restore and reissue them. Jeff also cohosts the podcast Filmed, Not Stirred with his gal pal Lisa. It’s unique because they review a new movie and compare it with an older movie in a similar genre or director. So you see? There is life after film school! —Ted
You’re about to discover six pieces of music you’re not even really supposed to notice. So what is it about film-music geeks that makes it virtually impossible for them to watch a film without noticing its music? And even more curious, why would they want to listen to it on its own?
In coming up with this list of my favorite soundtrack cues, two things are obvious: 1) all the pieces are composed by either Jerry Goldsmith or John Williams, and 2) they were all composed between 1976 and 1982. I don’t know what that means, except to say that I discovered all of them when I was between the ages of 11 and 17. I had them all on vinyl and played them so many times as a kid that I wore out the records. These aren’t necessarily the best pieces of film music, but they are some of my favorites.
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In the past month I’ve been rooting through the boxes in my attic, looking at the stuff I’ve squirreled away up there over the years. I came upon a small cache of drawings, paintings, and such, gave them a once-over, and decided maybe it was a good idea to bring them downstairs and get some quality scans together, just to have a decent record of their existence. I doodle from time to time, but my dreams of being in the business of comics are long gone. This is partly due to the quality of what’s out there, specifically the writing. In the past two decades Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Frank Miller have made that once unimaginable leap from the “funny books” to honest-to-God literature, and they didn’t even have to change their addresses. With the often funny but deeply felt 
. Each example not only deserves space on the snootiest of bookshelves, but some deserve to kick a few warhorses off those shelves just for breathing room.