We have a whiteboard on the fridge to keep track of family schedules and appointments. My wife typically maintains it. One year for Thanksgiving, she drew a turkey—but as the world’s worst artist (by her own admission), she drew it with two wings AND four legs. So it looked like a bizarre, long-necked turtle. When the kids and I pointed this out, she drew a bunch more legs—and thus, the legend of the “Turkeypede” was born. She draws one on the board for every Thanksgiving no

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody, and here’s something to be thankful for: Thomas Newman is scoring the Star Wars: Starfighter movie . High hopes!

What an outstanding cliffhanger on Pluribus last night! Now I am annoyed I have to wait over a week for the next episode. Meanwhile, Stranger Things season 5 premieres later today, in which the kids schedule their first colonoscopies.

I am enjoying The Chair Company as it approaches its season finale next Sunday. I admire that it’s one of those things that’s so execution dependent that even describing it doesn’t make much sense. It’s a domestic drama, character study, a conspiracy thriller, and an absurd comedy—with surrealist Lynchian flourishes. Good work! It’s also a reminder that you can kind of make anything work as long as it’s grounded in humanity. Make the feelings relatable and you can get away w

Attention humans: we’ve put Cloudfare protection onto the message board. This is to keep out the bots that were trawling it and using up all the server resources. I know it’s annoying and apparently some people can’t get in—so sorry about that. All this will be done with in a few weeks, certainly by next year, as we get our next programming team on board. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I saw such a good concert last night! It was the Scott Dunn Orchestra playing “The Hollywood Modernists: The Second Golden Age of Film Scoring” at the Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills. This was music from Psycho , Our Town , To Kill a Mockingbird (so beautiful!), Rebel Without a Cause (extended suite), North by Northwest , Six Sequences for Orchestra from A Streetcar Named Desire , Too Late Blues (a “deep cut” by David Raksin, beautiful!) and East of Eden . The orc

We are essentially done with the Best of FSM 35th Anniversary book—just taking a final proofreading look over the weekend. I think people will really enjoy it. It was something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but it became kind of overwhelming to get going, because of all the decades of material to sort through. In the end, we’ve chosen a meaningful array of articles and provided new essays by FSM’s reliable stable of writers. I am so thankful to the writers for their perm

Many thanks to everybody who bought from FSMCDs.com this week as we launched a new sale. Here’s a spreadsheet of the current inventory . I know the message board often slows to a crawl. It has to do with the “bots” that trawl it from all over the world. I can’t stand it but it’s just the modern Internet, apparently. Our current programmer is moving on so we’re in the process of getting somebody new. I put an ad on Upwork and holy crap, I was inundated in pitches. So we’re ma

Thanks for the orders at www.fsmcds.com ! As a lot of customers have found out, ordering two or three times is NO PROBLEM for us! We will combine the shipments and refund any excess shipping charges—provided, of course, the first package hasn’t gone out, but usually in these busy times it takes us a couple of days to get to everything. Here’s a spreadsheet of the stock as of this morning . Thanks!

Thank you all for your orders from yesterday’s new CD sale . We had a big day! There is still lots more to pick up if you’re interested. Visit www.fsmcds.com or see this spreadsheet for easy review . Thank you!

Let’s GOOOOOO! FSMCDs.com is live with the new titles. And here is a spreadsheet for quick review . Just keep in mind the spreadsheet does not update as titles sell. I woke up to news that Cloudfare sites around the world were being hit by a bot attack and going down. Yay. Our sites are working for now, and hopefully will remain stable. But on that note: FSM is looking for a new Wordpress programmer to continue to refine and build upon our new website. This is paid work! If

The boxes are full again! Tomorrow’s BIG CD sale (around 2,000 pieces) goes live at 10AM Pacific (1PM Eastern), Tuesday, November 18, 2025, at www.fsmcds.com . Lots of collector goodies in this batch—see you tomorrow!

We’re done processing the collection we just got in, and nearly 2,000 listings will be added to FSMCDs.com Tuesday at 10AM, Pacific time, November 18, 2025. There are a LOT of “collector goodies” in here, the kinds of things you see on eBay for hundreds of dollars—and, of course, I don’t price gouge like that. So prepare yourself for some bargains, and the feeding frenzy starts promptly at 10AM. See you then!

Pluribus by Vince Gilligan on AppleTV is an instant favorite for me. But watching the third episode last night, it feels like there is another shoe that has to drop. (Mild spoilers ahead—but not really.) The Borg on Star Trek: The Next Generation were such an awesome villain because they were so completely uncaring, monolithic and unstoppable. But the writers quickly found that writing a hive mind for a villain became boring. When the adversary is incapable of change as its

I really loved Task on HBO and was impressed with the score, too. I was like, who is Dan Deacon? Where can I read more? Turns out the answer was in FSM Online . We need FSMO subscribers to populate the new subscription system. Please see this column for more info . Thanks!

Our CD boxes are full again and we are processing an approximately 2,000-piece collection as fast as we can to list and sell next week. Lots of collector goodies in here! I don’t know the exact date yet, but I don’t want to push it because of Thanksgiving and Black Friday stuff happening afterwards. Stay tuned. Thanks!

We are almost done with the Best of Film Score Monthly 35th Anniversary book, which was part of our Kickstarter (and will be made available to everybody to purchase after the donors receive it). Just some final proofreading remains. Editing it was a vibrant trip down memory lane, but one thing really blew my mind: the CDs we reviewed in the earliest issues. They were, not kidding, things like the original Twin Peaks , Home Alone and Dances With Wolves . Dances With Wolves !

If you’re enjoying the slow roll-out of the new FSM website—and I’m not—I was just thinking of the fact that FSM has been underfunded since 1990. There just aren’t enough soundtrack collectors in the world for us to have all the great and nice stuff we deserve. By that measure, we’re lucky beyond belief to have so many thousands of amazing CD releases the labels have given us. We’re presently getting FSM Online back on its feet. First we had to do the magazine itself, now we’

I just posted this update to our Kickstarter: Thank you for making our 2025 projects a reality!  The Best of FSM 35th Anniversary book is in the final stages of proofreading and we hope to get it printed ASAP—and then we’ll mail out all the perks together. If you have yet to do the Pledge Manager , please do! This means paying tax and shipping on the physical goods—and unfortunately Kickstarter's system is not smart enough to fine-tune some of the rates. So as I posted last t

I upgraded my desktop Mac to the new Tahoe OS—with trepidation because these major updates always foul up something in my routines. But I figured I might as well get it over with. The new Apple Music has inexplicably relocated the play bar to the bottom of the screen—and there seems to be no way to select a group of tracks and quickly get the playing time. This is a feature I use all the time—or should say, I used to use—especially when putting together CD productions. You te

Thumbs way up for Vince Gilligan—he’s done it again. Pluribus is wonderful. Rhea Seehorn stars as a cranky romance author who becomes somehow immune to an alien transmission that turns humanity into a (benign) hive mind. It’s a fresh and bizarre, but grounded, spin on Body Snatchers . So excited to watch something new that’s great!

Thanks to everybody for your patience in awaiting the new FSM Online. It’s almost ready to re-launch. As you’ve probably noticed, the new website has been a kind of “rolling soft launch” as we get it up on its feet. The board is reasonably working well now, although there’s more I’d like to do. Next will be FSM Online, and the blogs, then the print backissues—and I will keep investing in the programming as funds and time allow to get it where it needs to be. And it’s all than

We are in the final proofreading stage of the Best of Film Score Monthly 35th Anniversary book. It’s come together well and I think everybody will enjoy it. We are including the two-part Elfman interview I did circa 1995 but it reminded me of an incident at the time. I don’t know if I ever confessed this in the magazine or online? The reason this interview was published as prose, instead of a Q and A, was because I made one of the all-time, hall-of-fame amateur blunders: I h

The last of the living Star Trek: The Original Series directors, Ralph Senensky, has died at 102. Obituary here from Trekmovie . And here’s the one from Hollywood Reporter . He was a consistently excellent director in televison for a long time. He also stayed active until the very end, and his own website is full of memories from throughout his storied career, including of his Trek episodes . He was fired halfway through “ The Tholian Web ” because the new spacesuits slowed