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

The CD boxes are filling up again! We have two significant collections incoming that we have partially received. In the meantime, we’re still selling the small new batch we listed yesterday—plus another 4,000 or so titles. Visit www.fsmcds.com or see the spreadsheet on Google . Thanks!

FSMCDs.com is live with 195 titles added, around a third of those being Goldsmith CDs. Check out the site and/or here is a spreadsheet if it is easier to review . (Please remember: the spreadsheet does not update as items sell.) Please buy from us! I need to use these proceeds to continue/finish development work on the FSM website . We have the board largely up and functioning, though more work will help refine it. The programmers are now working on getting FSMOnline back u

That was quite the World Series. Congrats to the Dodgers. But I have to feel bad for the Blue Jays and their fans. They were so close and should have won several times. It reminds me of the agony of being a Red Sox fan prior to 2004. We hear the fireworks go off after their wins. My wife said, “Remind me, we destroy the city if they win or they lose?”

I’ve always loved the classic Z-A-Z spoofs: Airplane!, Police Squad, Top Secret . I loved them as a kid and they still hold up today. “Do you like movies about gladiators?” The imitators have never been any good, unfortunately. Mostly, they’re just not funny. But they fail from the get-go in trying to spoof things that are frivolous to begin with. The most important thing for any spoof? Source material that is stately, full of itself and totally asking for it. Which is, of co

Posted on LinkedIn this morning... It feels like there’s a generational turnover happening in entertainment. The old stuff isn’t connecting. Movie stars don’t mean anything. Young people (my tweener kids) don’t watch movies or television.  “All this has happened before, and will happen again”—thanks BSG! And Bill Goldman: “Nobody knows anything.” Remember those 1960s studio musicals that bombed, and then Easy Rider cleaned up? (I do, because I know history.) A.I. isn’t the a

We will go live at FSMCDs.com with a small lot of titles (nearly 200) Monday morning at 10AM Pacific, November 3, 2025. It’s good stuff, nothing super rare, but around a third of it are Goldsmith titles. Thanks and looking forward!

We have the message board functioning so that it’s usable. We’re now working on FSM Online. And by “we” I mean the programmer. I don’t understand this stuff at all! That will be done next, and then we’ll go back and refine things and eventually it will be working. Thanks for supporting the Kickstarter to make this happen!

It dawned on us that everybody liked the old board, so we’re trying to make the new board look and feel more like the old board. Thank you for your patience. I wish we had a dozen people working on it round the clock, but the truth is, it’s pretty much one person, and he’s on it every day. We’ll get there!

I woke up to a few very confused emails from people who logged into the new message board only to find other people’s posts/account/history were coming up as their own. Fun! It was a “caching” issue, having to do with memory short-cuts the site uses to work faster. There is no danger of your info actually being combined with anybody else’s, or security problems—just data that was scrambled in the outputs. Nonetheless I can see how this is concerning. The site is down today wh

I’ve written before how much a fan I am of Yoko Kanno, particularly Cowboy Bebop , Macross Plus, Ghost in the Shell and Wolf’s Rain . Wolf’s Rain was a weird anime show created by Keiko Nobumoto from the Cowboy Bebop team, about mystical wolves in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world who can appear as human...very strange and beautiful. So the thing about Yoko Kanno—she’s a genius, but she does use a lot of other music as models. You can hear—oh, that’s the Sting track, that’s

It’s Saturday morning and I know the FSM site is down. They’re working on it and it’ll be back soon. It’s just going to be a couple of weeks as all the site functionality is implemented. We will get there, I promise! Thanks for your patience and understanding.

I watched the first episode of The Chair Company , a weird new HBO show that mixes comedy and thriller—a combo I don’t remember seeing before. I need to watch more to say anything useful. I was struck by the opening music of the pilot, which they use at least one more time, and I knew it must be a needle-drop. Not because I recognized it—it’s the opening of the classic 1970s instrument “Breezin’” by George Benson—but because the silky orchestration comes from another era enti

Above: Our trusty shipping manager gets YOUR orders out today! (This is not me.) Many thanks to everybody using the Kickstarter pledge manager to finalize their address and pay for the postage on their swag. We’re at 68% complete after two days—keep them coming! Any questions or rants, email me: LukasKendallMV@gmail.com . Here’s an updated spreadsheet of goodies at FSMCDs.com . If you sort by price from lowest to highest you’ll see there’s still a bunch of free stuff—please