Patrick Runkle .com

John Gorenfeld and I have revived Ink Syndicate, a humor website that we started in Oakland in 2000, as a general-purpose blog. Some things that appear here will also appear there, but there will be original content there also. First up are a number of postings about our DEN.NET story "Fast Company," which was recently featured on BoingBoing, USA Today's blog, and other sites, and has been getting lots of notice.

On an unrelated topic, the present appears to be a boffo time for Ridley Scott. Film music fans, however, and anyone who remembers a time when American Gangster and Gladiator would have been considered complete artistic failures, know better and can take heart in some new CD releases of the music from Scott's genuine accomplishments. First, and most surprising, is a 2CD set of Jerry Goldsmith's complete score to Alien, released just in time for the holidays. Word on the street for a long time had been that the original masters were lost, and so the (terrible-sounding, incomplete, and prone to CD rot) release from 1988 was going to have to do. But some film music restoration experts found the multi-track masters and, theoretically, gave them a good spit and polish. And they remastered the original album too. Finally on CD will be the original version of Goldsmith's main title, which he always described as a great piece of music. (Editor Terry Rawlings, who unwisely disses Goldsmith on the special edition DVD, explains how they made Jerry replace the main title he wrote with the creepy, quiet string cut in the movie, a piece Goldsmith disdainfully said he wrote "in five minutes.")

Also forthcoming is a remarkable 3CD set that may finally, after 25 years of bitching, satisfy the fans of Vangelis' score to Blade Runner. The first CD is a remaster of the album that Vangelis put together in 1994, featuring some but not all of the original music. (Theoretically this will still have the dialogue snippets on it that annoyed everyone the first time around.) The second CD will have a bunch of other music from the movie, including material that wasn't used. (This will theoretically cover some of those 10-minute cues that showed up on the various bootleg CDs over the years.) And, unbelievably, Big V has composed an entire new CD of music to round out the set, and he got Sir Ridley himself to do some spoken-word segments.

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