Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2015 January 05 • Monday

So here we are in the year 2015. (Please keep your "Where's my flying car?" outbursts to yourself.)

We've been doing a Soundtrack of the Week every Monday for about seven years. The last year or so I haven't had the time or energy or the rest of it to do justice to the music. (Probably I never actually did justice to the music. You want justice? Then listen to the music yourself!)

It's become kind of a drag, actually, the whole weekly soundtrack thing, the whole blog thing. I've never been on Facebook and I don't want to lose those bragging rights, not yet, but I get the appeal. It's so much easier.

And then I had to update the OS for our Mac so I could get iMovie to work so I could make these #%£&$@! video projects for my freaking band—another thing, like the Soundtrack of the Week and the Monday-Wednesday-Friday blog posts that should be filed under—or tagged as—"why oh why?"—and the new system wouldn't run Dreamweaver, which I had bought years ago—yes, bought, with money!

The way it works now, you can't buy Dreamweaver. You buy a subscription to it for something like ten dollars a month if you want it to work with Yosemite or Mountain Lion or Yeti or Slime Mold or whatever the hell this operating system is called.

Let's see, I bought Dreamweaver for $60 or whatever it cost at least ten years ago and used it all the time. If they had had this nifty subscription plan going back then, I'd now be out something like $1200, assuming a ten dollar a month rate.

No way.

So I lost it. Even though I bought it and theoretically owned it. And now I'm using some free web designer thing that forces me to write html. (Can I at least get my $60 back, Dreamweaver?)

I was already struggling to keep up with a modest update schedule here and now it got significantly harder, now that I'm doing this crap by hand because I have an aversion to monthly fees. (I have never done Netflix and haven't had cable TV for over seven years.)

As the new year dawned I found myself thinking, "Screw it. I don't have the time, it's a drag and it just got a lot more annoying. Just ditch the blogging.") Seemed reasonable to me.

But then I got this package from Ark Soundtrack Square in Japan. There's some new label called Cinema-kan and they've put out three CDs of music from 1960s Nikkatsu gangster movies. This is the kind of thing I used to dream about it and here it is in real life.

And so the 352nd Soundtrack of the Week, goddam it, is Harumi Ibe's score for Suzuki Seijun's Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards!. It's a jazz/rock and roll hybrid, simple, frantic and effective, alternating intense energy with moody atmospheres.

That's all I've got to say. Buy the CD if you want to know more—or watch the movie. It was released on DVD in the US six years ago. I saw it at the Japan Society at some point and don't remember anything about it.