The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story (P. F. Birch Productions, Röhm Feifer Entertainment, Studio TF 1 America, Lifetime, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 14) Lifetime showed a TV-movie that was, to say the least, an odd choice for Valentine’s Day: The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story. It was actually based, at least loosely, on a true story: Monica White (Lela Rochon), a divorcée whose 18-year-old son Isaiah (Trezzo Mahoro) has been her only companion since her divorce from her scapegrace husband Daniel (whom we never meet as an on-screen character, nor do we learn much about him or why they broke up), is encouraged by her best friend Layla to log onto a dating app called Connections. Monica lives in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, where she teaches pre-school and has to deal with a particularly obnoxious boy named Rayleigh who keeps bullying a Black girl named Tracy. (The reason I’m not supplying more names for the actors involved is so far imdb.com’s credit list has only four names on it.) Meanwhile, Anthony Eugene “Tony” Robinson (the darkly handsome Jarod Joseph) is trolling Connections looking for women he can pick up, not for sex but to kill them. His modus operandi is to meet them in bars after having set up a date via Connections, take them to a nearby motel, kill them by strangling them in the middle of the sex act, then load their bodies into shopping carts and abandon them in the middle of parking lots. Tony lives in Washington, D.C. and works as a garbageman (which gives him a convenient way of disposing of his victims’ bodies) until he gets fired midway through the movie by a typically obnoxious boss for being chronically late to work. Writers Miriam Van Ernst and David Weaver don’t give us much of an explanation as to what Anthony’s motives are. Midway through the movie, when he and Monica finally meet face-to-face, he tells her that he had a girlfriend named Skye Allen who suddenly and without warning dropped dead of a heart attack, but we suspect that’s a B.S. story he just made up. (The reporting on the case in The Washington Post stated there was a real Skye Allen who died in a hospital, and her death was ruled accidental but there’s the possibility that Anthony killed her.)

The film was expertly directed by Elisabeth Röhm, who as an assistant district attorney on Law and Order for five years (2001 to 2005) certainly learned something from working in Dick Wolf’s atelier on how to do suspense. Also, since February is Black History Month, this is one of Lifetime’s “race movies” in which the central characters are Black; the only significant white role is that of the no-nonsense woman police chief in Fairfax County, Virginia who leads the investigation when the body of one of Anthony’s victims is found in her jurisdiction. I didn’t catch her name but I did the racially ambiguous male detective who’s working under her, Det. Lareto. The cops pull the case when a white store clerk working the parking lot picking up shopping carts discovers the body of Tonita Smith (Princess Davis) in one as he’s on duty. The local media immediately dub the unknown murderer “The Shopping Cart Killer” and writers Van Ernst and Weaver can’t resist planting a few clues. When Isaiah learns from his mom that she’s met a man online, he says, “He could be a serial killer,” having no idea that he’s right. Also cinematographer Tony Gorman carefully lights Anthony in shadow as he sits in a spartan room with a bank of computers, while Monica gets full light as she goes about her daily routine, hangs out with Layla and hears out her complaints about Layla’s boyfriend Jaden, and summons Rayleigh’s mother Beverly to school for a parent-teacher conference about Rayleigh’s behavior. Beverly is instantly hostile and pulls the how-dare-you-summon-me-when-I-need-to-be-at-work routine, but Monica and we both notice a bruise on her chest that signals that Beverly is being abused at home by Rayleigh’s dad and that’s the reason for Rayleigh’s bad behavior. There are a few close calls, including a woman in a red dress who meets Anthony at a bar but is so weirded out by his odd behavior she bails on him in mid-date and we’re of course thinking, “Lucky her.”

When Anthony and Monica finally meet in person he immediately wants to move in with her, and she’s appalled but allows him to sleep on her couch. When they finally do have sex together, for what’s her first time since her divorce, he literally can’t get it up and the implication is that only by killing his partner can he have a release. There’s an intriguing story on the real Anthony Robinson on the Arts & Entertainment Web site (https://www.aetv.com/articles/monica-white-shopping-cart-killer) which suggests that he was into S/M (the only hint of that we get in this movie is a scene towards the end in which Monica references his previously expressed desire to tie her up, surprises him and ties him up instead) and he was also Bisexual and once expressed his anger at Monica by literally peeing in her bed. In the movie there’s no hint of that, but Monica gets a complaint from her 19-year-old niece Jasmine that Anthony hit on her at Monica’s 50th birthday party. She immediately orders Anthony out of her house, and he responds by waiting outside until he’s able to find an unlocked door, let himself back in, and threaten her. Just then the police arrive; that quite imposing woman police chief in Fairfax has figured out his identity by discovering a surveillance photo of him taken with Tonita way back when as he was escorting her from the bar to the motel room where he killed her. Anthony tries to escape by taking a Silver Streak bus back to D.C., but the woman police chief and Det. Lareto are onto him. They have the bus re-routed off the highway and order the driver and all the other passengers off so they can arrest Anthony. Anthony Robinson is due to be sentenced in May 2026, and the real Monica White told The Washington Post that she’s been too scared by the whole experience to date again. The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story is actually pretty good Lifetime fare, redeemed by Elisabeth Röhm’s direction and an appropriately chilling performance by Jarod Joseph as Anthony. It’s true that this is yet another Lifetime movie in which the hottest, sexiest guy in the cast is the villain, but Joseph brings the role a kind of smoky intensity that makes his performance special even though of course we can’t stand him. Just as I got a used videotape of the 1996 film The Phantom because I’d been so impressed by Billy Zane’s performance as the bad guy in James Cameron’s Titanic I wanted to see a movie in which he’d been the good guy, so I’d love to see a film in which Jarod Joseph played a character I could root for and lust over!

The Kate: Karl Denson's Tiny Universe (Connecticut Public Television, American Public Television, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, February 13) I switched channels after the Winter Olympics telecast went on a half-hour hiatus to accommodate the all-important 11 p.m. news shows and put on KPBS for The Kate, the latest episode of the intriguing music show from the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Center in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, the late movie legend’s home town. I’ve compared this series to the local San Diego show Live at the Belly Up, which features similar club-sized attractions at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, but this one hails from the other end of the country. This time the featured attraction on The Kate was a band called Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe. Denson’s Web page lists the personnel as Karl Denson, alto sax, flute, and vocals; Ricio Fruge, trumpet, flugelhorn, and vocals; Ricky Giordano, guitar and vocals; Rashon Murph, keyboards (a Hammond B-3 organ, Rhodes electric piano, and assorted electronica); Parker McAllister, bass; and Alfred Jordan, drums. There were definitely two guitar players on the program and I don’t know who the other one was, but they did some quite good and interesting duels. One irony was that Karl Denson, an African-American alto saxophonist and flutist with a shaved head and white goatee beard (which will give you an idea of how old he is), talked a much better set than he played. He mentioned that his first exposure to music came from his parents, first Motown and then James Brown, and later he got into artists like Marvin Gaye (who was on Motown but pushed the limits of their formula until in 1970 he created his masterpiece, What’s Goin’ On?). Still later he acquired an interest in jazz via John Coltrane and especially Rahsaan Roland Kirk – and if you’ve never heard of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, get on YouTube and look him up right now. (A good sample of Kirk on the Ed Sullivan Show is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRO1W5twBes&list=RDjRO1W5twBes&start_radio=1.) Kirk was a blind reedman who was famous for playing up to five saxophones at once – one of his most stunning records was a cover of Duke Ellington’s “Creole Love Call” in which he reproduced Ellington’s entire sax section on his own and in real time. He mounted his horns, including such oddball sax variants as the manzello and the stritch, on a rack so he could move his mouth between them. Kirk also doubled on flute, as did Coltrane on his very last album (Expression, recorded in February and March 1967, just four months before Coltrane died), so Denson took up flute. He also said he realized that all the great jazz musicians had their roots in the blues, so he started listening to blues greats like Son House. Denson said he picked up on the fact that all the white British bands in the 1960’s had learned from the great African-American blues players.

He was in Lenny Kravitz’s original band until he left in 1993, and in 2014 he got a call from a blocked phone number that turned out to be Kravitz’s reaching out to him to ask if he’d be interested in doing a tour with a major British band. The major British band turned out to be The Rolling Stones. He’s also played with or opened for Stevie Winwood, The Allman Brothers, the late Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, and George Clinton’s Parliament/Funkadelic combo. Denson recalled being asked how it felt to play before an audience of 65,000 at a Rolling Stones concert, and he said he was really playing for just four people: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, and the late Charlie Watts. Denson said he was actually more comfortable playing in a club before an audience of 500 to 600 because then he’s playing his own music. Oddly, Denson talked a much better set than he played; in the hour-long time slot of The Kate, he did nine songs and all but one of them featured Denson’s singing, which isn’t bad but it’s a typical funk-soul rasp that got wearing after a while. Basically Karl Denson and Tiny Universe play the sort of funk-soul that was popular in the mid-1970’s and evolved (or devolved) into disco. They opened with a song called “Shake It Out” and then played an instrumental that defeated The Kate’s chyron writers but was the best thing in the show. Denson began it quietly and lyrically on the flute before he put it aside, picked up his alto sax, and turned up the tempo and volume. The instrumental featured solos by Denson, Fruge on flugelhorn, one of the two guitarists, Murph on the Hammond B-3 (the organ that Jimmy Smith popularized and made the go-to sound for jazz, pop, and rock organists), and McAllister on electric bass. Then Denson played a batch of good but pretty indistinguishable songs, all featuring his foghorn vocals, with generic titles like “I’m Your Biggest Fan,” “Change My Way,” “Time to Pray,” “Satisfied,” “Gossip,” and “Hang Me Out to Dry.” In between “Change My Way” and “Time to Pray” the band was heard playing a brief snatch of something called “Gnomes and Badgers” which Denson explained was a reference to the current American political situation and particularly the polarization between the Republican and Democratic political parties. That could have made for a more interesting song than any of the ones Denson actually sang on the show, but alas we were only allowed to hear it under the interview. (Playing musical selections under interviews, so it’s hard to hear or enjoy either, is one of my pet peeves about music documentaries, and blessedly the producers of Live at the Belly Up avoid it.) I enjoyed the music but with reservations, and I think my husband Charles put his finger on the problem when he said, “It’s too raucous for me in my current condition.” I could see his point; I could have used Denson playing a song or two that was slower, gentler, more jazzy, and one that used a different singer (his Web site lists Danielle Barker as a second vocalist but there weren’t hide nor hair of her on the show) or was an instrumental.

The Librarians (Radical Gaslighters LLC, Doc Society, Arizona Rising Productions, Cuomo Cole Productions, Good Gravy Films, ITS International, Independent Lens, Independent Television Service, K. A. Snyder Productions, Pretty Matches Productions, The Brandt Jackson Foundation, The Harnisch Foundation, Two Chairs Productions, World of Ha Productions, iDeal Partners Film Foundation, 2025)

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On Monday, February 9 PBS aired a powerful and unflinching 2025 documentary called The Librarians, about how librarians are being dragged into the culture wars being waged by an ascendant radical Right (it’s really a perversion of language to call these people “conservative” when their political, cultural, social, and moral ambitions are anything but “conservative”). Their ultimate goal is to turn the U.S. into a Christian theocracy, and one of their immediate goals is to eliminate any opinions they disagree with from public discourse, including critiques of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

The Librarians, directed by Kim A. Snyder in collaboration with Janique L. Robillard, Maria Cuomo Cole, and Jana Edelbaum, tells the story of how librarians across the country, especially (though not exclusively) in Southern states, have essentially been drafted into the culture war. They’ve been torn between the ethics of their profession, which among other things call them to oppose censoring the content of their libraries simply because other people don’t like certain books; and the increasingly vociferous demands of organizations like the well-funded, powerful nationwide group “Moms for Liberty” which demanded that school libraries in particular censor books with anti-racist or Queer themes.

Moms for Liberty was founded on New Year’s Day 2021 by three Right-wing activists in Florida. They were originally opposed to mask requirements instituted in 2020 to slow the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19, but their agenda soon broadened to include running candidates for local school boards who were pledged to support their racist, anti-Queer agenda. In 2022 their campaigns were successful in 11 Texas school districts, including one in a town called Granbury that became a major focus of the film.

The campaign was started by a Texas state legislator called Matt Krause, who in October 2021 released a list of 850 books he wanted banned from Texas public school libraries. Krause also said his list was not all-inclusive and he reserved the right to add future titles. Krause explained that the books he wanted removed from state school libraries were ones which “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” That seemingly unexceptional statement is actually radical-Right code-speak for anything which “might make white people uncomfortable by pointing out that the U.S. built its prosperity on the backs of enslaved Africans.” (For more information see https://www.npr.org/2021/10/28/1050013664/texas-lawmaker-matt-krause-launches-inquiry-into-850-books.)

Krause included with his blacklist a demand that the Texas Education Agency and school districts throughout the state asking each individual he sent it to whether their schools had any of the books on his list. He also asked for a detailed accounting of where the books were and how much money had been spent on them. Among the books cited by Krause and other would-be Texas censors were Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, Peggy J. Parks’s How Prevalent Is Racism in Our Society?, a picture book put out by Amnesty International illustrating the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and novels like Tim Federle’s The Great American Whatever, Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy, and “Pink Is a Girl’s Color” … and other silly things people say, a children’s picture book by Stacy and Erik Drageset.

One of the key people involved in the radical-Right takeover was successful school board candidate Courtney Gore. She was a prominent activist in the area with solid Right-wing credentials. After the school district removed 130 books from school libraries on grounds they were “pornographic,” Gore did something unusual for someone with her background. Instead of meekly going along with the pressure from her colleagues and funders to ban whole lists of books as “pornographic,” she actually read them and realized they weren’t pornographic at all. Though Gore maintains that she still considers herself a “conservative,” she posted on Facebook in May 2022 that “I’m over the political agenda, hypocrisy B.S. I took part in it myself. I refuse to participate in it any longer, it’s not serving our party. We have to do better.”

Another quirky story told in the documentary concerns Granbury parent Monica Brown, one of the leaders of the book-banning movement. What made her story unusual is that the oldest of her nine children, son Weston Brown, is Gay. When he came out to her at age 23, she immediately and irrevocably banned him from any Thanksgiving dinners and other family functions. Weston ultimately moved to San Diego, found a partner named Andrew, and agreed not to have anything to do with the birth family that had raised him, homeschooled him, and kept him as insulated as they could from any intimation either that Queer people existed or he might be one.

Then he saw Monica Brown testifying before the Granbury school board on a social-media video that had gone viral. “It was one thing when my parents’ beliefs were causing this rift between us and it was just a family matter,” Brown told NBC News. “But seeing now that she’s applying those same views to public activism, at a time when so many basic rights are being challenged, I couldn’t stay quiet about that.” The Librarians includes a scene in which Weston Brown spoke to the Granbury school board and pleaded with them not to ban Queer-affirming books like the one he says turned him around, George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue.

"It’s been nearly five years since I came out to my family,” Weston Brown told the Granbury school board. “I'm not allowed to join in family celebrations or holidays, or be part of my eight siblings' lives, all because I’m not straight. I’m here to implore you to listen to librarians, educators and students, not those speaking from a religious perspective or at the bidding of a political group. If you choose to marginalize differences and remove representation, you will only cause harm.” Monica Brown immediately followed her disowned son to the podium and spewed the usual radical-Right nonsense. She ignored everything her son had said and didn’t have anything to do with him – until the meeting ended. Then, as Weston was being interviewed by a reporter in the parking lot, she walked up to him and started filming the interview herself with her cell phone.

As I’ve noted in previous posts about the American radical Right and its position on Queer issues, one thing most pro-Queer people don’t understand about the radical Right is that it doesn’t believe in the existence of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender people. They believe we are all naturally heterosexual and cisgender, and any people who express themselves as homosexual or Transgender are either deliberately rebelling against God or suffering from “trauma-induced sexual sin.” Weston Brown recalls that when he came out to his parents as Gay, “They thought that I was mentally ill or demonically possessed.” This is the ideology behind so-called “reparative therapy,” the various attempts to “cure” Queer or Trans people from their “trauma-induced sexual sin” and turn them into cisgender heterosexuals.

One thing we’ve learned about the radical Right since its political ascendancy, which predated the Presidencies of Donald Trump but was kicked into high gear by the Trump phenomenon, is the thug-like way they go after their enemies, especially ones like Courtney Gore who were formerly on their side. Gore reported receiving death threats. So did Amanda Jones, a 20-year veteran librarian in Louisiana who in 2021 won the School Librarian of the Year award from School Library Journal. The award was in recognition of an innovative program she devised during the COVID-19 lockdown. She reasoned that as long as students couldn’t go to the outside world, she would use computer technology to bring the world to them by presenting virtual tours of other countries.

Then in 2022 Jones ran afoul of the would-be book banners. In July 2022 she spoke publicly against censorship at a meeting of the Livingston Parish Public Library Board. (In Louisiana, counties are called “parishes.”) As a result, she got viciously attacked by various organizations, including Citizens for a New Louisiana and Bayou State of Mind. Bayou State of Mind accused Jones of "advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” Citizens for a New Louisiana put out a leaflet showing a photo of Jones inside a red circle with a white border, and captioned it, “Why is she fighting so hard to keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials in the kids’ section?” She was, of course, doing no such thing, as any member of these organizations who’d actually read the books in question the way Courtney Gore did in Granbury, Texas would have found out.

Since then Jones, who is still a librarian at the same school in Louisiana she attended as a child, has published a memoir called That Librarian detailing her struggle against book-banning and the attempts of the radical Right to turn librarians into censors. She still gets awards, but now they have names like the Association of School Librarians’ Intellectual Freedom Award and the Louisiana Library Association’s Alex Allain Intellectual Freedom Award. When Jones was honored at the National Book Awards in 2023, Oprah Winfrey said, “Amanda Jones started getting death threats, all for standing up for our right to read ... but she's not stopped fighting against book bans, or stopped advocating for access to diverse stories.”

Librarians, especially in schools, have become one of our principal lines of defense against the Radical Right’s depressingly successful campaign to end America’s experiment in self-governance and make the U.S. a neofascist dictatorship. They already control the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court. They also have organized at the state and local levels in ways progressives can barely dream about. They want a world in which Blacks are once again in the back of the bus, women are once again stuck in the kitchen, Queers are still in the closet, Fundamentalist Christianity becomes a state religion, and giant corporations are able to extract maximum surplus value from their workers without any nonsense about health, safety, or decent pay.

The Librarians is a chilling account of how a handful of individuals are courageously fighting an often lonely battle to maintain and expand America’s and Americans’ freedoms in the face of a well-organized, well-funded campaign to destroy them. It deserves to be seen by every American who wants this country to remain a democratic, secular republic.

Songs of Black Folk (Orange Grove Films, 100 Percent, Stay in the Music LLC, GBH, WNET, KQED, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, February 10) at 11 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a half-hour show on P.O.V. Shorts on PBS called Songs of Black Folk, about an intriguing event that took place on June 16, 2021 in either Seattle or Tacoma, Washington (the narration wasn’t clear about just where it took place) to commemorate former President Joe Biden signing a bill making “Juneteenth” – the day in 1865 when slaves in Texas learned a fact that had been carefully concealed from them: that the Civil War was over, the South lost, and they were legally free – a national holiday. The event was promoted by two members of the same family: Black church pastor Leslie Braxton and his nephew, Ramón Bryant Braxton. Ramón was raised by his grandmother because his father had spent most of Ramón’s childhood in prison for one offense or another (the show didn’t say just what he was in for, though it really didn’t matter). Ramón’s grandmother forbade him from playing football but encouraged him to study music, and after exploring other instruments Ramón settled on piano. He became good enough that in 2002 he gave a school recital as a classical pianist, which was rather shakily filmed by someone with a hand-held camera from the audience. When Biden signed the bill making Juneteenth a national holiday both Leslie and Ramón decided to promote a concert commemorating it and making people in the Pacific Northwest aware of the major musical heritage of African-Americans even though, as the narration noted, there are surprisingly few Black musicians of note from there. (The one real legend is Jimi Hendrix, who was part-Black, part-Native, and came from Seattle.) The two assembled an orchestra and choir and performed a rather sedate-sounding concert featuring Ramón’s arrangements of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and “We Shall Overcome.” What made the event especially poignant was that while preparations were underway Ramón’s grandmother was in a nursing home with dementia and was clearly on her last legs. Often Ramón had to tear himself away from rehearsals to go see the woman who’d raised him when he still could, and he expressed hope that she would last long enough for him to give the concert while she was still on this plane of existence. She died the day after the concert, on the actual June 17 Juneteenth holiday. Incidentally, it’s worth noting that under the command of our current President, Donald Trump, U.S. national parks no longer offer free admission on Juneteenth or on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday – but they do offer it on Donald Trump’s birthday, yet another example of the personality cult America’s Führer is building around himself.

Super Bowl LX Halftime Show (National Football League, Apple, aired February 8, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Sunday, February 8) my husband Charles and I both stayed in and watched Super Bowl LX (“60” in those oppressive Arabic numerals New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has forced all New Yorkers to use – that’s a real Right-wing meme I’ve seen online). The Bears San Diego were having a Super Bowl watch party but it was in El Cajon; the AWOL Bar in Hillcrest was also doing a Super Bowl watch party but I decided not to go and instead watched the game here at home with Charles. At least I got in three walks during the day, including a short one just before the game’s official start time at 3 p.m. – though the kickoff wasn’t until 3:40 because there were all the extended preliminaries before actual play began. (I wonder if the ancient Romans put the crowds at the Colosseum through this sort of thing.) I was particularly anxious to see the much-ballyhooed and, in Right-wing media circles, much reviled Super Bowl halftime show featuring Puerto Rican singer and rapper Bad Bunny (true name: Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio: “Martínez” is his family name and “Ocasio” his matronymic), which turned out to be marvelous. I wish it had been subtitled so we monolingual English speakers could have understood it, but otherwise it was vividly staged and as strong as I could have hoped for. It began with a crew of campesinos (Latin farmworkers) doing something with a crop that grew in high stalks; at first I thought it was corn but it turned out to be sugar cane, the main cash crop of Bad Bunny’s native Puerto Rico. There were nice traveling shots (courtesy of NBC’s drone camera, which also made periodic appearances during the Super Bowl itself) that came to rest in front of a barrio street set. Midway through Bad Bunny’s number he cut to two other singers, a blonde woman performing in English and a man with a guitar singing in Spanish. Once again I was put off by the lack of chyrons to tell us who they were – the woman was Lady Gaga and the man was Ricky Martin – but the music itself was so powerful and the vibe so strong I enjoyed it all anyway.

This morning I saw a clip from the so-called “All-American Halftime Show” put on by Turning Point USA, the Right-wing political organization formerly chaired by the late Charlie Kirk and headed since his murder by his widow Erika. The clip I saw was from Kid Rock’s performance, and even though it was nominally in English it was just as unintelligible as Bad Bunny’s and considerably meaner, nastier, and more in-your-face. At least part of the problem was that for some reason Kid Rock decided to lip-synch to a pre-recording instead of performing live. I was a bit disappointed in the cast list for the alternative halftime show because Brantley Gilbert, a country singer who attracted my attention for being the only person on Tim McGraw’s Academy of Country Music show Tim McGraw and Friends on May 19, 2013 to use a pedal steel guitar in his band, was on it. (This once-paradigmatic country instrument has been pretty much relegated to the sidelines as most modern country acts play music closer to the 1970’s “Southern rock” sound of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers than the music of Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, or Johnny Cash – though, come to think of it, Cash never used the pedal steel guitar either.) It’s taken me a while to realize why I like Bad Bunny’s music even though he raps (in Spanish) through most of his songs when I strongly dislike most rap. After the last Grammy Awards show I think I’ve figured it out: Latino rappers like Bad Bunny rap over a much more interesting, more complex set of rhythms derived from Latin vocal and instrumental music instead of the strict militaristic style in which most Black and white rappers perform. (“Hip-hop,” the alternative term for rap used by people who like it, reportedly comes from the strict cadence of military drill, which to an old peacenik like me is one more reason not to like it.)

I’ve seen a report that at the viewing party Donald Trump hosted for the Super Bowl at Mar-a-Lago (he didn’t attend in person, reportedly because he was afraid of being booed) he kept his TV on the regular halftime show instead of the “All-American” one, though of course he let rip with a nasty tweet on his so-called “Truth Social” site afterwards. Bad Bunny had already been causing Right-wing snits when he used his acceptance speech at the Grammy Awards to denounce the tactics of Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) squads in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the country, though he ended his speech with the ennobling words, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” He used those words in his Super Bowl performance, too, projecting them on giant screens over the Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California where the San Francisco 49’ers regularly play their “home” games (even though Santa Clara is 45 miles southeast of San Francisco). Bad Bunny even included a real-life (straight) wedding in his show; both Charles and I assumed it was play-acting but later we learned from online sources that it was a real bride, a real groom, and a real officiant marrying them to each other. And one thing I loved about this year’s Super Bowl is that Bad Bunny was not the only performer they hosted who was guaranteed to draw hackles among the Trumpsters: in the pre-game concert the 1990’s punk band Green Day performed four songs, including their signature tune, the anti-George W. Bush song “American Idiot.” And before Charlie Puth sang the national anthem (surprisingly well; he managed the song’s notorious high notes adequately if not spectacularly), “out” Lesbian singer Brandi Carlile, one of my favorite modern-day country music performers, did an intense acoustic version of “America, the Beautiful.”

As for the game itself, the Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots 29-13, though the relatively high score was deceptive because it was mostly a defensive battle. Seattle made four penetrations deep into New England territory in the first half but had to settle for field goals each time. Indeed, Seattle’s field-goal kicker, Jason Myers, set a new record for most field goals kicked (five) in a Super Bowl. I made a joke about the ad for TD medication, which (specially produced for a football telecast) made a pun on the fact that “TD” stands for both “touchdown” and “tardive dyskinesia.” Alas, the ad ran at a point in the game when neither team had scored a touchdown! Much of the play reminded me of the 1936 film Pigskin Parade, a largely forgettable movie except that it was Judy Garland’s first feature and it had a great voice-of-reason performance by Patsy Kelly in which she hears out newly appointed coach Stuart Erwin’s lament that his players know how to play basketball but not football. “Then teach them to play basketball-football!” she tells him. It was advice both coaches in last night’s game seemed to have taken to heart, since there were plenty of passes that were broken up and rendered incomplete by a defender leaping up and batting the ball away from the intended receiver in mid-air. Seattle running back Kenneth Walker III was named most valuable player of the game even though his most spectacular play, a 49-yard touchdown run, was nullified by a holding penalty. Still, he gained 135 yards on 27 carries. It’s been a long time since I followed football – it’s a game that has left behind too many brains permanently damaged by concussions for my comfort – though put me in front of a TV broadcasting a game and it all comes back to me from my childhood when my mother, stepfather, brother and I all kept track of the NFL. I’ve been to both baseball and football games “live” and I long ago came to the conclusion that baseball is more fun live than on TV while for football it’s the reverse. The reason, I suspect, is that the action in baseball is spread out over the entire expanse of the stadium, whereas in football it’s centered around wherever the ball happens to be at that moment.

Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking (Quoiat Films, Sky, Kino Lorber, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later that night (Sunday, February 8) Turner Classic Movies ran Within Our Gates, a truly great 1920 silent film written, produced, and directed by pioneering African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux which I’d seen at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/02/within-our-gates-micheaux-book-and-film.html, and then followed it with Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking, a 2021 documentary produced in Italy by Quoiat Films in association with Sky (Rupert Murdoch’s satellite video channel) and Kino Lorber, which has several of Micheaux’s films available on DVD and Blu-Ray. Oscar Micheaux (the family name was originally “Michaux,” without the “e”) was born on January 2, 1884 in Metropolis, Illinois, the fifth of 13 children born to parents Calvin and Belle Michaux, both of whom had been slaves. His parents were farmers and managed to scrape together enough money to move to a city, where Oscar began his education. But they soon fell on harder times and had to move back to the country, which turned Oscar into a rebel of sorts. Dad sent him off to the city to work in marketing, where Oscar had the chance to meet different sorts of people and broaden his horizons. At age 17, Oscar moved to Chicago to live with his older brother and worked in the stockyards and steel mills. Then he got a job as a Pullman porter, which oddly was one of the most prestigious employment opportunities then available to African-American men. Though the pay was pretty good for a menial job open to Blacks, it was reduced by management which insisted they had to pay for their own uniforms and meals. Still, it gave employees quite a lot of travel and allowed them to see new parts of America. According to the documentary, Micheaux supplemented his salary by skimming from the customers’ payments for meals aboard the train – as did a lot of the porters – though after he was fired in Illinois he got a similar job assignment in the South with no one the wiser in those pre-Internet days. When he’d saved enough money to do so Micheaux moved to Gregory County, South Dakota, bought land and set himself up as a homesteader on a farm he called “The Rosebud.” He prospered for a few years and also developed a second career as a writer, getting pieces published in the African-American newspaper The Chicago Defender.

When his farm finally went bust in 1911, Micheaux wrote a novel about his experiences as a farmer called The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer. The first edition was self-published in 1913 without an author’s credit, but in 1917 he reissued the book as The Homesteader and put his name on it. It attracted the attention of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, run by brothers Noble and George Johnson, both actors (Noble Johnson would eventually have a film career and be best known as the native chief in the 1933 King Kong). The Johnsons were the first African-Americans to form a movie company, but negotiations between them and Micheaux broke down. So Micheaux decided to film The Homesteader himself, doing what would now be called crowd-sourcing to raise the production money. The film, which like all too many of Micheaux’s films is lost (of his 42 films only 20 survive in whole or part), was enough of a commercial success that Micheaux followed it up with Within Our Gates, a stunning movie that was widely interpreted – as it is here – as a pro-Black response to D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915). Though Micheaux denied having intended Within Our Gates as a response to The Birth of a Nation, he had certainly learned from Griffith. Within Our Gates and his later film Body and Soul (1925), which cast Paul Robeson in his screen debut as two brothers, a scapegrace phony minister and an inventor (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/02/body-and-soul-micheaux-book-and-film.html) are both major works of cinematic art. One can watch Micheaux’s films – at least the surviving silents – and appreciate them not only for their historical importance but as great movies in their own right. Micheaux would not only fund the production of these films but also market them directly, taking his prints on trains and traveling from city to city, showing up at movie theatres in Black communities and offering to show them. (Charles pointed out that this meant he was taking highly flammable materials on passenger trains and risking a fire or explosion.) The documentary mentions in passing that Micheaux had watched the German Expressionist masterpieces of the 1920’s when they were released in the U.S. and learned from them, which accounts for the film noir-like sequences in many of his films.

As I’ve written before about Micheaux, the twin blows of sound films in 1927 and the Great Depression two years later blew his business model. In the silent era it was relatively easy to create a professional-looking film on a low budget and end up with a product comparable to that of the major studios – especially if you had a ready talent pool, which Micheaux did from all the underemployed Black actors in the U.S. In the sound era that became much harder, as state-of-the-art recording equipment was so expensive you practically had to have a major studio behind you to afford it. Micheaux settled in New York City and bought a house in Harlem with the money he made from his books and films, which put him in the middle of the “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920’s, but once sound came in he lost the ability to self-finance and had to go hat in hand to white financiers for his production money. One Micheaux talkie that is shown being restored in this film is Midnight in Harlem (1935), based on the notorious Leo Frank lynching case. Leo Frank was a white Jewish man who was lynched in Marietta, Georgia on August 16, 1915 for having allegedly raped 13-year-old Mary Phagan. His story was filmed by Warner Bros. in 1937 as They Won’t Forget, but Micheaux beat the major studio to the punch by two years and, of course, changed the victim from a Jewish white man to an African-American. Alas, Micheaux didn’t have enough money to gain the production experience needed to transcend the limitations of early sound film. His 1930’s productions have many of the same crudities of major-studio talkies from the late 1920’s, including stiff, wooden line deliveries and those obnoxious pauses between the actors hearing their cue lines and speaking their own. A lot of his sound films feature musical numbers, but it doesn’t appear he was as capable of recruiting top-tier musical talents for his films as he’d been fine actors like Robeson and Evelyn Preer in his silents.

It also didn’t help that Micheaux had his own racial agenda; he was big on stories contrasting hard-working “good” Blacks who got ahead and succeeded with lazy ones who stayed poor and blamed racism for their failures. Micheaux also frequently told stories about Black men who fall in love with white-looking women but are frustrated until the last reel, when a sudden last-minute revelation shows that the “white” woman the hero has been taking an interest in is actually Black, albeit super-light skinned. This reportedly came from an incident Micheaux went through in his homesteading days, in which he fell in love with a genuinely white woman of Scottish descent (though his biographers have so far been unable to come up with her name), only the relationship went nowhere because in the 1910’s interracial marriages were illegal throughout the U.S. (In 1946, Lena Horne and the white conductor/composer Lennie Hayton had to get married in Paris because no U.S. state then allowed white and Black people to marry. The California Supreme Court threw out the legal ban on interracial marriage in this state in 1949, 18 years before the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated it nationwide.) Micheaux’s later career was, in the words of Black author and film historian Thomas Cripps’s book title, a “slow fade to black.” After The Notorious Elinor Lee (1940) Micheaux made just one more movie, The Betrayal (1948), and died at age 67 in Charlotte, North Carolina. (A number of interviewees for this documentary wondered how someone who’d led an urban life in Chicago and New York ended up dying in so remote a locale as Charlotte.) Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking features interviews with African-American filmmaker John Singleton, film historian Richard Peña, actor Morgan Freeman, musician Stace England, biographer Patrick McGilligan (who’s also written books about Frank Capra and Fritz Lang), and Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Nights” host Jacqueline Stewart (who’s shown at least three Micheaux films ¬– Within Our Gates, The Symbol of the Unconquered, and Body and Soul – on her program). The film was written and directed by Francesco Zippel, who got his title from a strange quirk in the history of Micheaux’s birthplace, Metropolis. The city government has commissioned a giant statue of Superman and given it pride of place in the town square because in the Superman mythos his home town is “Metropolis.” Zippel argues that instead of embracing a fictional white hero who isn’t even from this planet, the town should have hailed Oscar Micheaux, the Black film pioneer who made it both artistically and commercially despite the long odds against him.

Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch (Above Average Productions, Broadway Video, Rutle Corps, Warner Bros. TV, NBC-TV, 2003)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, February 7) at about 9:45 p.m. my husband Charles and I had finished dinner and were ready to watch a movie. Since he’s expressed interest in lighter fare, I picked out Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch, the 2003 sequel to the marvelous 1978 TV-movie The Rutles: All You Need is Cash. The original Rutles film is the first “mockumentary” at once depicting a fictional rock band and lampooning it – This Is Spinal Tap (1984) usually gets the credit for that, but Eric Idle and Gary Weis beat Rob Reiner by six years. It was also a beautiful coming together of the original casts of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Saturday Night Live for a spoof making fun of The Beatles but also paying loving tribute to them, especially in Neil Innes’s songs, which cleverly tweaked the Beatles’ oeuvre and managed to sound “right” and original at the same time. Charles and I got Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch as a bonus item when I ordered the original The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash on DVD, and for some reason the version they got was significantly abbreviated: the running time listed on imdb.com for Rutles 2 is 84 minutes but the version we got was just over an hour. It showed Eric Idle, who directed (solo this time) as well as starring as a mock newscaster hosting yet another documentary about The Rutles, the infamous “Pre-Fab Four” (actually The Monkees, the fictional rock band organized by Columbia Pictures for a TV series that lasted two seasons, were also nicknamed the “Pre-Fab Four”) from Rutland, England who conquered the world’s culture and changed the face of music as we knew it. It wasn’t quite as funny as it was the first time round (sequels usually aren’t, though I can think of at least three movie sequels that surpassed their originals: The Bride of Frankenstein, Ivan the Terrible: Part Two, and The Godfather: Part Two), and all too much of it just repeated gags that were done better and funnier in the first film. One new gag was that Eric Idle as Melvin, the narrator, was continually being attacked by another, much younger newscaster who’s also doing a documentary about The Rutles and going to the same places he is. This character is played by the young Jimmy Fallon and gets into a series of knock-down drag-out fights with Idle until at the end it’s revealed [spoiler alert!] that he’s really Idle’s long-lost son, and the two hug. This part reminded me of the Monty Python sketch “Wicker Island,” in which the joke was that the entire population consisted of newscasters continually trying to interview each other.

Part of the poignancy of this film is in the many people featured in the cast who have passed on since, including Robin Williams (brilliantly cast as a German scholar who keeps veering off the Rutles’ history to talk about other things), Carrie Fisher, David Bowie (who thinks Idle is there to interview him about his own music and abruptly ends the interview when he realizes all Idle wants to ask him about is The Rutles), Mike Nichols, and Neil Innes, who wrote the marvelous pastiche songs sung by The Rutles. Innes actually had a connection with the real Beatles; he was in the Bonzo Dog Band, which played a number in the film Magical Mystery Tour alternately called “Baby, Don’t Do it” and “Death Cab for Cutie.” (The later title was ultimately used as a name for an entirely different band, founded in 1997 in Bellingham, Washington.) This film also went into more detail about the private life of the Rutles’ manager, Leggy Mountbatten (patterned after the real Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein), and in particular his sexual orientation. One interviewee said Leggy knew what sort of men girls would be attracted to because he was attracted to them himself – though the real Brian Epstein went quite the other way in his attractions, towards “rough trade” men who often beat him up after having sex with him. (One of the most interesting stories about Epstein is that when he went on vacation in Spain with John Lennon, when the two were eating in restaurants together Lennon kept asking him how he decided which men were sexually attractive. Obviously Lennon was treating it as a sort of anthropological expedition, investigating what turned a Gay man on and comparing it to what Lennon, a straight man, found attractive about particular women.) There were also some interesting interviews with Billy Connolly, playing himself as a Scottish actor, singer (he had a 1960’s hit in Britain covering, of all songs, Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”), entertainer, and game-show host who was put in to be the contrarian voice denouncing everything the Rutles ever did, said, sang, performed, or acted. Aside from that it was an O.K. documentary spoof which fulfilled my hope for giving Charles and I a nice light evening’s entertainment to take his mind off his current health issues, even though it was hardly at the level of the savagely brilliant original!

2026 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony (International Olympic Committee, Banijay Live's Balich Wonder Studio, Olympic Broadcasting Services, NBC-TV, aired February 6, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, February 6) my husband Charles and I watched the opening ceremony of the 2026 Winter Olympics from Milan and Cortina, Italy. The Olympics themselves are being held in both those cities, which are 200 miles apart from each other, and the opening ceremonies spanned over four Italian towns: Milan, Cortina, Livigno, and Predazzo. The whole event lasted three hours and 39 minutes, though typically for American TV we only got three hours of it, less commercials. The coverage on NBC featured one of the most annoying parts of how the Olympics are presented in the U.S.: the insufferable jingoism. An international event that is supposed to use sports as a way of bringing the various people of the world together gets turned into a bizarre display of chauvinist patriotism. It didn’t help that rapper Snoop Dogg, one of the most repulsive media presences on earth, was on hand to hang out with the U.S. team and cheer them on while the rest of the world’s athletes awaited their turns in the procession of teams that marked the opening ceremony. I was also amused by some of the spellings of the names of the countries, which were in Italian, and the teams themselves marched alphabetically in order of the Italian versions of their names. Thus Saudi Arabia appeared under the “A’s” because their name in Italian is Arabia Saudica.

One thing that I noticed was that the Czech Republic, which split off from Slovakia in the so-called “Velvet Revolution” of the early 1990’s, is now just called “Czechia,” and I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s a sign of the times that “republics” are “out” now and dictatorships are “in.” I was a bit startled that the parade jumped from Austria to “Cechia,” as it’s spelled in Italian, without any “B” countries. It seems that Belarus, a major ally of Russia in its war against Ukraine, was covered by the same ban the International Olympic Committee (IOC) imposed on Russia: its athletes are allowed to compete as individuals but not as representatives of a country. There was also a bit of “let them eat cake” in the sheer extravagance and outrageousness of the ceremony, which was directed by Marco Balich and produced by his company, Banijay Live’s Balich Wonder Studio. Balich, Lida Castelli, and Paolo Fantin designed the cauldrons – plural; there were two, one in Milan and one in Cortina. From the moment the Olympic torch bearers arrived I said to myself, “Thank you, Leni Riefenstahl,” since it was she who, tasked with making the documentary Olympia about the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, cooked up this whole notion of having a relay run from Greece (the site of the original Olympic Games in antiquity as well as their revival for 1896 in Athens) to wherever they’re being held now, with a torch being carried en route and used to light a cauldron at the final destination, so she’d have a spectacular opening sequence for her film. (I remember one year before the 2016 Summer Olympics that NBC ran a promo for their coverage announcing that they’d mounted a camera on a catapult to follow the sprinters as they raced. They made it seem like their own idea, but sorry, guys, that was another Riefenstahl innovation from 80 years earlier.)

Most of the performance took place inside the San Siro soccer stadium in Milan. It began with a troupe of surprisingly androgynous dancers supposedly re-enacting the story of Cupid and Psyche, though I doubt I could have told you that if the sportscasters hadn’t said that. Then there were three bobble-headed dancers supposedly representing three of Italy’s greatest composers, Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini, to the strains of a disco-ized version of Rossini’s William Tell overture. (Charles once told me a joke he’d heard that the definition of an “intellectual” was someone who could hear the ending of the William Tell overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.) Three giant paint tubes, each emitting a long ribbon of cloth in its designated color (red, blue, yellow – I joked to Charles,” Shouldn’t I say ‘magenta, cyan, yellow’?” Charles joked back, “It’s not a printer”), descended from the rafters and hung in an uncertain position over the action. After that they had two rings descend from the stadium’s rafters, each carrying an acrobatic artist, one male, one female. As the two came down they joined hands in the middle and lowered themselves on a cable to the stadium floor to illustrate the event’s theme, “Armonia” (“Harmony”). Then three more rings emerged and formed the famous Olympic symbol. After that there was an appearance by Mariah Carey, whom I generally like but was miked so badly it was hard to tell just what she was singing, or in what language. First she sang “Volare,” an international hit for Italian singer Domenico Modugno in 1962, though she prefaced it with a verse I’d never heard before because Modugno hadn’t performed it. Then she sang one of her English-language hits, “Nothing Is Impossible.” There were more interminable dance numbers, including one that paid tribute to Chamonix, France, where the first Winter Olympics were held in 1924. The gimmick here was that the dancers would first perform in 1920’s style, then in 1970’s style, then in the style of today – though both the choreography and the music were too tacky to illustrate that.

There was also a strange number featuring an unseen violinist named Giovanni Andrea Zanon playing the 1716 “Berthier” Stradivarius violin while more dancers cavorted and an Italian actor read a poem by The Leopard author Giacomo Leopardi. Then came the procession of the athletes from various countries, following which a surprisingly strong tenor voice sang the aria “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s last opera, Turandot. For a moment I thought I was hearing Luciano Pavarotti reincarnated, but it turned out to be Andrea Bocelli delivering one of the strongest performances I’ve ever heard from him. My husband Charles took strong exception to the choice of music: he pointed out that “Nessun dorma” is an aria sung by a prince who’s about to force himself sexually on a princess who’s had all her previous potential mates killed because, centuries before, one of her ancestors was abducted and raped by one of his. Charles said he would have preferred “Ritorna vincitor!” from Verdi’s Aïda, though that too would have been problematical: it's sung by the soprano lead, Ethiopian princess Aïda, who realizes she’s been so caught up in the crowd’s enthusiasm she’s openly rooting for the Egyptian general (who’s also her boyfriend) to conquer, occupy, and lay waste to her country. Then there was a performance by South African-born actress Charlize Theron and Ghali, an Italian spoken-word artist who was described as a rapper even though his act has little or nothing in common with the “rap” I’ve come to know and despise in the U.S. The idea was to illustrate the commonality of the world’s peoples and offer a prayer for world peace. There was also a weird sketch by Italian actress Brenda Lodigliani, who pretended her microphone was not working and illustrated Italian hand gestures. The ceremony ended with the hoisting of the Olympic flag in both Milan and Cortina and mezzo-soprano Cecelia Bartoli singing the Olympic hymn backed by Chinese pianist Lang Lang (who, though he wasn’t nearly as flamboyantly dressed, reminded me a lot of Liberace in his willingness to turn up in various locations and play quasi-classical schlock) and the children’s choir of Milan’s famous opera house, La Scala.

The show came to a sudden ending at 11 p.m. our time when NBC’s local affiliate abruptly cut to their regular news show. This was billed as the longest Olympic ceremony in history, though I remember an even longer one at the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010, which climaxed with a stunning performance of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” by k. d. lang, who I think sang it better than anyone besides Cohen himself (sorry, Jeff Buckley fans). The most spectacular Winter Olympics opening ceremony I can remember was the one at Lillehammer, Norway in 1994, featuring a dance by supposedly evil spirts from Norwegian mythology called vettas. Their closing ceremony featured “good vettas” to counteract the malign influence of the evil vettas from the opening. I enjoyed the sheer over-the-topness of the whole kitschy spectacle, even though compared to k. d. lang, Mariah Carey was a definite step down in the pop-vocal department.

68th Annual Grammy Awards (National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, Fulwell Productions, Grammy Studios, CBS-TV, aired February 1, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 1) I watched the 68th annual Grammy Awards on CBS, hosted by Trevor Noah (the not-very-interesting Black South African Comedy Central brought to the U.S. as a replacement for Jon Stewart, who’s now returned). Noah began the show by announcing that this would be the last Grammy Awards show broadcast on CBS. He didn’t say what’s going to happen to it after that, though my fear is it’s going to end up on one of those abominable and expensive “streaming” services that have systematically destroyed all the media through which I prefer to experience entertainment. Noah also said it was the last time he would host it, which is fine by me. The show was the usual lumbering beast; it was slotted for three hours (5 to 8 p.m. Pacific Time so the East Coast media mavens can have it on so-called “prime time” in their part of the country, though at least starting it at 5 is better than tape-delaying the whole thing, which used to be the norm before the Internet) but actually ran three hours and 40 minutes. I just downloaded an article from Billboard magazine by Joe Lynch that gave the names of the performers and their songs better than I could decipher them easily from my notes (https://www.billboard.com/lists/grammys-performances-ranked-2026/tyler-the-creator-thought-i-was-dead-like-him-sugar-on-my-tongue/), though I noticed that my critical judgments didn’t always coincide with his. For example, he has a much greater tolerance for rap – or “hip-hop,” to use the euphemism for rap by people who actually like it – than I do. The program started with a typically over-the-top opening song by Bruno Mars and a white baby dance diva-ette named Rosé doing their joint hit “APT.” Next up was Sabrina Carpenter doing a song called “Manchild” and cavorting around what looked like a replica of an old-fashioned propeller-driven airliner labeled “SCA,” as if she has an airline named for herself.

After that came the first on-camera awards presentation for Best Rap Album to the despicable Kendrick Lamar for an album called GNX. I’ve loathed Kendrick Lamar ever since an earlier Grammy telecast on which he did an extended, largely incomprehensible rap (the only words I made out with clarity were “insufficient funds”) which the Los Angeles Times reviewer the next day proclaimed the highlight of the show. I couldn’t have disagreed more; Lamar’s piece of shit came on right after the cast of Hamilton performed their show’s opening number, and just as I was starting to think based on the Hamilton excerpt that rap could be beautiful, moving, and express an artistic point, along came Kendrick Lamar to remind me of what garbage it usually is. Then Lamar won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for music, and I went around for several days bitching, “They wouldn’t give it to Duke Ellington, but they gave it to Kendrick Fucking Lamar.” I even found myself rooting for Tyler, The Creator last night in hopes that Lamar wouldn’t win for Best Rap Album, but not only did Lamar take home that prize, he also won Record of the Year for a song called “Luther” on which he was accompanied by the genuinely talented and musical neo-soul singer Sza (pronounced “Sizzah”). “Luther” sounded lyrical, though I suspect that wasn’t due to Lamar so much as to Sza and the origins of the track in a song by Luther Vandross (hence the title). Lamar said during his acceptance speech that the Vandross estate’s one condition for licensing the song to him was that his track contain no swear words (good for them!).

After the “Best Rap Album” award came a medley of all eight Best New Artist nominees doing abbreviated versions of their big songs: The Marías doing “No One Noticed” (a quite beautiful and lyrical ballad); Addison Rae singing “Fame Is a Gun”; KATSEYE (apparently their all-caps spelling is correct) doing “Gnarly” (appropriate since Charles and I were eating a pizza from Gnarly Girl for dinner); Leon Thomas singing “Mutt” (I wonder if he’s any relation to the 1960’s/1970’s jazz singer Leon Thomas, who sang on Pharoah Sanders’s “The Creator Has a Master Plan”; according to Joe Lynch, he’s been around the business for 20 years even though he broke through recently enough he was eligible for a Best New Artist nomination); Alex Warren doing “Ordinary” while being lifted off the stage and suspended in mid-air on an elevated platform held up by wire cables (it reminded me of the 1943 film Presenting Lily Mars, with its big number showing Judy Garland singing on the stage floor while Tommy Dorsey’s entire band was suspended above her, and I feared for her safety in case the cables broke and the platform smashed her like a pancake); Lola Young doing a version of her song “Messy” backed only by her own piano; Olivia Dean (the ultimate Best New Artist winner) doing a nice bit of neo-Motown soul called “Man I Need”; and sombr (the all lower-case spelling is correct) singing “12 to 12.” Nobody noticed his vocal because I suspect everyone was oohing and aahing over his outfit, a jacket and pants made up entirely of glass (at least I think they were glass; I hope for his sake they were plastic!) mirrors. I joked to my husband Charles that this was a costume Mick Jagger and David Bowie had rejected as being in bad taste. Of all the Best New Artist nominees the one who most impressed me by far was Lola Young; while a later sound clip of “Messy” indicated that it’s a normal pop ballad in the modern style, for the show itself she reduced it to just her own voice and piano, in the manner of the late Laura Nyro or the still-living Carole King (who later appeared on the show as an awards presenter). I’d love to hear her do a whole album that way!

After the Best New Artist award, Justin Bieber came out wearing nothing but boxer shorts and socks to perform his song “Yukon,” which was actually one of the better pieces of the evening. He came out carrying an electric guitar (not an acoustic, as Joe Lynch reported) but it wasn’t plugged into anything and all the guitar chords, like his other accompaniment, came from a samples box he manipulated on stage. I’m guessing he performed (mostly) undressed to show off the stunning set of tattoos on his chest. Then came the award for Best Musíca Latina Album – or was it Best Musíca Urbana album – to Bad Bunny for Debí Tirar Mas Fótos (when Bad Bunny came on Stephen Colbert’s show to talk about the album – not, alas, to perform any of it – both Charles and I misheard the last word as “Hótos,” a derogatory Spanish slur for Gay people). Bad Bunny gave a speech denouncing Donald Trump’s immigration policy and the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but said our response should be rooted in love, not hate. This was actually an unusually political awards show for the start of the second year of President Trump 2.0, since most awards presenters and recipients have shied away from direct political comment for fear of retribution from the notoriously thin-skinned Trump and his minions. Not the Grammys, however; Bad Bunny is performing at the Super Bowl halftime show this year, which led to a slew of half-baked Trump screeds on his “Truth Social” Web site denouncing the National Football League for doing something as unpatriotic as inviting Bad Bunny to appear. Trump has also announced that he won’t be attending the Super Bowl this year (though more likely that’s due to the likelihood that he’d be booed there the way he was at the World Series), and it’s amazing that Trump is treating Bad Bunny as an “alien” when Bad Bunny comes from Puerto Rico, a commonwealth territory of the United States. (That puts Puerto Ricans in a curious Kafka-esque bind: they can’t vote in U.S. elections in Puerto Rico, but if they move to an actual U.S. state, they can.)

After Jelly Roll won for Best Contemporary Country Album with Beautifully Broken (like Merle Haggard, Jelly Roll – true name: Jason Bradley DeFord – is an ex-convict and has made a great deal of that in his marketing strategy; he devoted virtually his entire acceptance speech to thanking God and Jesus for turning his life around), Lady Gaga did a stunning performance of “Abracadabra” dressed in a typically spectacular outfit featuring a wicker headdress through whose grill she sang. Then she won Best Pop Vocal Album for Mayhem. I’ve always liked Lady Gaga since, unlike most dance-music artists, she actually writes songs with recognizable beginnings, middles, and endings. She doesn’t just bark a few words over a dance beat and call it a “song.” While I still like her even better as a standards singer (memo to Gaga: don’t let the death of Tony Bennett stop you from recording those sorts of songs!), she’s still one of my favorite current performers. After that Bruno Mars, who’d appeared in the opening number, returned to sing his current Billboard No. 1 hit, “I Just Might.” Every time I’ve seen Bruno Mars before this I’ve got the impression that he’s been auditioning for a biopic of Michael Jackson. Now that the Michael Jackson biopic has been made and is scheduled for release April 24 with someone else playing him (an actual blood Jackson: Jaafar, son of Jermaine and nephew of Michael). Mars definitely needs another act. Lola Young won for Best Pop Solo Performance for “Messy” (though as I mentioned above, the sound clip from that song with full band backing was hardly as haunting as the voice-and-piano version she’d performed earlier) and Carole King came out to present the Song of the Year award. Both she and the eventual winners, Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell for “Wildflower,” were wearing “ICE OUT” buttons.

Then there were an O.K. rap number (and for me to call a rap number “O.K.” is high praise indeed given my usual detestation of the form): Tyler, The Creator with a medley of “Like Him,” “Thought I was Dead,” and “Sugar on My Tongue.” Between the latter two songs he drove a prop red car on stage (which reminded me of the red Jaguar a Metropolitan Opera director and the management recently fought over in a modern-dress production of Bizet’s Carmen; the management thought the mechanism to move the car around on stage was too expensive and cut it, and the director and set designer withdrew their names from the credits in protest; you can read the whole story at https://apnews.com/article/met-opera-carmen-dispute-cracknell-levine-fb2d40ec878eaac756a8c00930fb4d73) and crashed it into a gas pump. After another preposterously named award – the “Dr. Dre Human Impact Award” to Pharrell Williams (surprisingly he wasn’t wearing a strange hat, but the person who presented it to him, rapper Q-Tip, was), the show segued into a seemingly interminable “In Memoriam” segment. It began with brief tributes to Brian Wilson (by Bruce Springsteen despite the opposite poles of their music, both geographically and stylistically) and Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead (by John Mayer). Then it segued into two ultra-extended musical sections, one paying tribute to Ozzy Osbourne (and the nicest thing I can say about his death in 2025 was that it didn’t happen well before that; I’ll never forget the scene in the documentary The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years in which the film’s producer attempted to interview Osbourne while he was pouring himself a glass of orange juice, only he was so stoned he was missing the glass completely and pouring orange juice all over his floor) and one a joint tribute to producer D’Angelo and singer Roberta Flack.

The Osbourne tribute featured Slash from Guns ‘n’ Roses, Duff McKagan, Chad Smith, and singer Post Malone doing Osbourne’s song “War Pigs,” while the D’Angelo/Flack number presented Lauryn Hill (in her first Grammy appearance since 1999) and an assortment of mostly African-American performers opening with the Hill/D’Angelo song “Nothing Lasts Forever” and closing with an incandescent reading of Flack’s hit “Killing Me Softly with His Song.” Between the awards for Record (single) and Album of the Year, the Grammy producers squeezed in another song, this time a rap number by Clipse (brothers Gene “Malice” and Terrence “Pusha T” Thornton), the Voices of Fire choir, and Pharrell Williams doing some actual singing on a number called “So Far Ahead.” Then the Album of the Year went to Bad Bunny for Debí Tirar Mas Fótos. I wonder if the Los Angeles Times writer who did that article about Kendrick Lamar which pissed me off so much was gratified to see that a rap album finally won, but I didn’t mind so much because Bad Bunny’s style is the so-called “Nuyorican” variant of reggaetón, which uses elements of rap but with a genuinely infectious and creatively deployed Latin rhythm instead of the strict marching cadence of most rap (which is where the term “hip-hop” came from; when I heard that the term “hip-hop” derived from the rhythm of military drill, that gave me one more reason to hate it). Overall the Grammy Awards were a good temperature-taking of the current pop music scene (which is one reason I still like to watch it even though my musical tastes run far more to the past than the future these days), and if Lola Young makes a CD featuring just her voice and piano, I’ll gladly buy it.

The Symbol of the Unconquered (Micheaux Book and Film Company, 1920)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 1), after the 68th annual Grammy Awards lumbered to a close, my husband Charles and I watched a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies. One was The Symbol of the Unconquered: A Story of the Ku Klux Klan (1920), written, directed, and produced by Oscar Micheaux. Oscar Micheaux was the pioneering independent African-American filmmaker who made 44 films between 1919 and 1948, including at least two near-masterpieces, Within Our Gates (1920) and Body and Soul (1925). Micheaux was born in Metropolis, Illinois on January 2, 1884, one of 13 children in a farm family headed by his father, an ex-slave. After flipping back and forth between rural and urban life, Micheaux moved to Chicago at age 17 and lived with his brother, a waiter. Disappointed in his brother’s relatively low status, after stints in the legendary Chicago stockyards and steel mills, he opened a shoeshine stand near a popular African-American barber shop and started learning how to run a business and save money. Micheaux became a Pullman porter at a time when this was one of the higher-status jobs available to Blacks; it meant good pay, steady work, and the chance to travel. Then Micheaux moved to South Dakota and bought land, setting himself up as a homesteader, which inspired his first novel, The Conquest (1913), and his first film, an adaptation of The Conquest called The Homesteader (1919). According to the Wikipedia page on Micheaux, “His theme was about African-Americans realizing their potential and succeeding in areas where they had not felt they could. The book outlines the difference between city lifestyles of Negroes and the life he decided to lead as a lone Negro out on the far West as a pioneer. He discusses the culture of doers who want to accomplish and those who see themselves as victims of injustice and hopelessness and who do not want to try to succeed, but instead like to pretend to be successful while living the city lifestyle in poverty. He had become frustrated with getting some members of his race to populate the frontier and make something of themselves, with real work and property investment.” Micheaux’s second film, Within Our Gates, fortunately survives and is a great movie; essentially it’s an “answer film” to D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915), though Micheaux denied that was his intention. Though Micheaux had no use for Griffith’s politics, it’s clear he learned from Griffith how to make a movie; Within Our Gates is state-of-the-art technically for its time, filled with close-ups, moving-camera shots, creative lighting, and the other innovations Griffith had pioneered. (Within Our Gates is being presented on Turner Classic Movies’ "Silent Sunday Showcase” Sunday, February 9, at 9 p.m. Pacific time, midnight Eastern time. If you haven’t seen this remarkable film, you owe it to yourself to grab that opportunity. I wrote about it on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/02/within-our-gates-micheaux-book-and-film.html.)

As it stands, The Symbol of the Unconquered – Micheaux’s fourth film – doesn’t seem to be on the level of Within Our Gates or Body and Soul, though that may be because it doesn’t survive complete. The only known print is a partial one found in Belgium (which meant that the French titles had to be laboriously back-translated into English) that’s missing key footage, including the scene we’d most like to see (more on that later). It’s basically a frustrated love story between Eve Mason (Iris Hall), a light-skinned Black woman; and Hugh Van Allen (Walker Thompson), a virtuous Black prospector. In the opening scene, Eve is stuck in a big city and seeks shelter in a hotel run by light-skinned Black man Jefferson Driscoll (Laurence Chenault, who frequently appeared in Micheaux’s films as well as other relatively high-end productions aimed at Black audiences). Unfortunately, though Driscoll is Black (and looks it on screen), he’s tried “passing” for white, only to be repeatedly “outed” by his mother (Mattie Wilkes) in a situation Fannie Hurst would recycle for her 1933 novel Imitation of Life. This has given Driscoll an intense hatred for his own race, which he expresses by forcing Eve (whom he’s “outed” as Black by looking at her eyes) and a Black male who’s shown up the same night to sleep in a barn. Running out of the barn to seek shelter in the countryside, Eve encounters Hugh Van Allen, who’s also Black and is attracted to Eve but hangs back from expressing it because Eve looks white and he doesn’t want the opprobrium of an interracial relationship. According to TCM’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart, Micheaux used this plot situation again and again – a Black man falls in love with a woman he thinks is white but turns out to be a light-skinned African-American – because during his homesteading days he’d fallen in love with a (genuinely) white woman who wanted nothing to do with him because of the racial divide. So he used his authority as a writer to imagine a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the happy ending he hadn’t had in real life (though the real Micheaux was married three times and his last wife, Alice B. Russell, stayed with him from 1926 to his death in 1951). Skulduggery ensues as Jonathan Driscoll hooks up with discredited white ex-judge August Barr (Louis Dean, whom for some reason Micheaux billed as “Déan”) and Indian fakir Tugi (Leigh Whipper) to swindle local landowners.

From a letter accidentally dropped by a sloppy mail carrier, Driscoll learns that Van Allen’s land is valuable – though it’s not until later in the film that we learn why – and intends either to force Van Allen to sell or get him to give up the property some other way. The “some other way” is to get a local thug-type white guy Judge Barr knows to lead raids on the Van Allen property in the white-sheets regalia of a Klan-like organization called the “Knights of the Black Cross.” They take advantage of a two-day trip Van Allen has taken to buy furniture for his home (though all we’ve seen him living in is a shack and a tent). Eve learns of this and gets on a horse to ride to Van Allen and warn him, but in the meantime the Klan is doing a number of night rides, first with just one Klansman waving a firework and then with a whole cadre of them. (There’s a certain Ed Woodian uncertainty as to when this is taking place because Eve’s ride is taking place at twilight while the Klan’s is happening in the dead of night.) In the missing scene whose absence is the most frustrating part of the film because it’s the one we’d most like to see, the Blacks successfully beat off the Klan’s attack by throwing bricks at them. The only way we know of what these scenes contained was by a contemporary review of the film in the New York Age, a Black-oriented paper founded in 1887, which is quoted in the restoration’s intertitles. When the film resumes it’s two years later, Hugh Van Allen is now an oil millionaire, his land is a broad expanse of derricks, and he’s running the entire operation while Eve is still in touch with him. But he won’t pursue her because he still thinks she’s white until she gets a letter from “The Committee for the Defense of the Colored Race” (read: the NAACP) documenting that she’s really Black, and the two clinch as the movie ends. The version we were watching was put together in 1995 and the soundtrack was by the legendary jazz drummer Max Roach, though instead of assembling a band to score the film with the sort of music Roach had brought to his early-1960’s albums We Insist! Freedom Now Suite and Percussion Bitter Sweet, Roach used his drums as the only instrument. The effect is to watch the film while hearing a great jazz drummer practicing in the next room. The Symbol of the Unconquered is a frustrating film, not only because of its incompleteness – imagine the thrill, just five years after D. W. Griffith had glorified the Ku Klux Klan in The Birth of a Nation, of seeing the Klan vanquished! – but because Micheaux didn’t bring the same level of directorial skill to it that he had to Within Our Gates or Body and Soul. Still, one thing Micheaux knew how to do as a director was get great, understated performances from his cast, and so he does here.

Mozart: The Magic Flute (Sverige Radio, Svensk Filmindustri, 1975)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 1) my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies showing of one of the most delightful movies ever made: Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 film of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 1791 opera The Magic Flute. This was originally produced for Swedish television, though it was released theatrically elsewhere in the world. Charles and I both saw it in the late 1970’s in its initial U.S. theatre run. I’m not sure if this was the first time I saw it, but I remember a screening at San Francisco State University when both my then-girlfriend Cat and my first boyfriend Bruce were students there. I invited both of them to attend it with me and read them a synopsis of the plot, and Bruce started giggling every time the synopsis contained the word “gay.” Cat got irked with him and said, “The word ‘gay’ does not always mean ‘homosexual’!” Bergman cast his opera with then little-known singers from the Swedish National Opera and had them sing in Swedish, though the sonorities of Swedish are close enough to those of German (the language in which Mozart and his librettist, Emmanuel Schickaneder, wrote the original) that the overall sound was right even though it was weird, in the scene in which Papageno (Håkan Hagegård, one of two singers in the cast who went on to international careers) is contemplating suicide and intends to do so on the count of three, says “en … två … tre” instead of “eins … zwei … drei.” Bergman and his co-writer, Alf Henrikson, did something that made the plot of The Magic Flute more sensible and dramatically coherent. In the original, Prince Tamino (Josef Köstlinger) is recruited by the Queen of the Night (Birgit Nordin) to rescue her daughter Pamina (Irma Urrilla) from the clutches of the sinister wizard Sarastro (Ulrik Cold). Only when he gets to Sarastro’s compound he finds that Sarastro is actually an enlightened spiritual leader and the Queen of the Night is a villainess who wants to kill him so she can take over the world. What Bergman and Henrikson did was to make Sarastro Pamina’s father, so the story becomes simply a particularly nasty and violent custody battle – even though it’s hard to imagine Sarastro and the Queen ever having had a sexual relationship. (I had the same problem with my parents; my mom and dad broke up when I was 1 ½, and so I not only never experienced them as a family, but they were so different from each other, and seemingly so incompatible, that my own existence remains the only evidence I have that they ever had sex.)

Papageno, the birdcatcher, is the comic-relief character; early in the opera the Three Ladies of the Queen (Britt-Marie Aruhn, Kirsten Vaupel, and Birgitta Smiding) kill a serpent that is menacing Tamino and thus save his life. When Tamino comes to, Papageno tells him that he killed the serpent, and the Three Ladies respond by literally putting a padlock over his lips so he can’t lie any more. The titular “magic flute” is given Tamino by the Three Ladies, who tell him that its music will cast a magic spell over anyone in the vicinity. They also give Papageno a set of magic bells, and one night in the original 1791 production (which was a major hit, by the way) Schickaneder, who was on stage playing Papageno, was startled when Mozart, who was leading the orchestra in the pit and also playing the glockenspiel to supply the magic music, got out of synch with him so his motions on stage no longer matched what the audience was seeing him do. According to Alicia Malone, TCM’s host for foreign films, Bergman originally wanted to shoot it inside the Drottningholm Theatre in Stockholm because it had been built in the 18th century and therefore was historically accurate for the production. Alas, the Drottningholm management vetoed it as a location because of the fire hazard, so Bergman had to re-create the Drottningholm’s stage machinery on a Swedish soundstage. Bergman cuts back and forth between a theatre audience (in modern dress) supposedly watching the opera being performed, charmingly anachronistic sets representing how The Magic Flute would have been performed when it was new, and a few scenes of striking realism: notably the one in which Pamina, put out by the fact that Tamino won’t say a word to her (because of a vow of silence Sarastro extracted from him as one of the three trials he’d have to go through to prove himself worthy of her and Sarastro’s order), contemplates suicide with the dagger the Queen of the Night gave her to kill Sarastro. (Among the audience members shown on screen were Bergman himself, actors who’d appeared in his previous films like Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann, and his cinematographer, Sven Nyqvist.)

According to Malone, Bergman deliberately cast singers with relatively small voices to preserve the intimacy of the drama. He failed with just one cast member, Ulrik Cold as Sarastro, whose voice is nice enough but does not have the weight and gravitas to sing what George Bernard Shaw once called “the only music fit to come from the mouth of God.” Bergman also cast a tenor, Ragnar Ulfung, as Monostatos, the Moor who’s part of Sarastro’s entourage but is secretly an opportunist whom the Queen recruits to her side by promising him Pamina. Mozart originally marked Monostatos as a tenor role, but he wrote the music low enough it can be sung by a baritone and usually is in modern productions. Bergman also wisely avoided the temptation to have Monostatos play the part in blackface, and Ulfung was the other singer besides Hagegård in this cast to go on to an international career. The rest of the casting is fine and the film itself, with its magnificent shifting between the various levels of realism and stage artifice, is one of the best examples of filming an opera and making it live as a movie. Charles and I both found it charming in the late 1970’s, and we still do. It also makes me curious to watch Ivor Bolton’s 2012 DVD of The Labyrinth, Emmanuel Schickaneder’s 1798 sequel to The Magic Flute. With Mozart having died just two months after The Magic Flute’s premiere, Schickaneder needed a new composer, and after Beethoven turned him down (though Schickaneder signed Beethoven for another opera which became Fidelio) he signed a man named Peter von Winter (1754-1825) to compose it and concocted an even more convoluted plot than he had the first time around.

Sister Boniface Mysteries: "Are Ye Dancin'?" (BBC Studios, Britbox, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, January 31) I watched two of the quirky British mystery shows that abound on the PBS schedule, Sister Boniface Mysteries and Father Brown, and then stayed on KPBS for a tribute show to Johnny Cash, We Walk the Line: A Celebration of the Music of Johnny Cash. The Sister Boniface Mysteries episode was called “Are Ya Dancin’?” and took place at a public event in Scotland that was supposed to be a folk music festival but was secretly a surprise birthday party for the widow Mrs. Clam (Belinda Lang). The surprise party was being put on by Mrs. Clam’s sister and her husband in an effort to bring her out of her shell. Alas, a middle-aged man named John Adams (John Mackay) gets murdered and the main suspects are his son Jimmy (Joseph Prowen) and his daughter’s boyfriend, aspiring musician Callum McIntyre (the incredibly cute Calum Gulvin, whom I have vague memories of having seen before on previous BBC productions). John has a confrontation with Callum in which he smashes Callum’s newly purchased 12-string electric guitar, which Callum is counting on to make it big as a rock star so he can marry the daughter, Maggie Adams (Alyth Ross). We also learn via a flashback that Jimmy wasn’t John’s biological son, but the product of an extra-relational liaison between John’s wife and another man. Later we find that [spoiler alert!] Maggie Adams was the actual killer; she and her dad had a confrontation over his treatment of Callum and she stabbed him with the ceremonial knife included in the kilts a number of the menfolk at the festival/party are wearing. Sister Boniface (Lorna Watson) figures all this out with her skills as a forensic scientist (at a time when most real-life police departments had little to no understanding of forensic science), and the police gallantly allow Maggie to perform the song she was scheduled to sing at Mrs. Clam’s party before they take her into custody.

Father Brown: "The Horns of Cernunnos" (BBC Studios, BritBox, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Father Brown episode, “The Horns of Cernunnos,” was considerably better than the Sister Boniface Mysteries I watched before it on Saturday, January 31. Cernunnos, in case you were wondering, was an ancient pagan deity worshiped by some of the indigenous people of Britain before the Roman conquest. Marianne Gelbert (Zoe Brough), a young woman living in the ancestral castle of her father, Sir Benedict Gelbert (Christian Anholt), is convinced that the god Cernunnos is stalking her and haunting both her waking hours and her dreams. The moment I heard that I assumed that someone was disguising himself or herself as Cernunnos to terrorize poor Marianne for some sinister reason. Marianne wakes up one morning to find her father dead in the bed next to hers, and along the way we learn that Sir Benedict was actually in a Gay relationship with an African-British doctor, Marcellus Lansden (Clarence Smith). He’d just written a dear-john letter to Dr. Lansden breaking off the relationship when he was killed, and naturally the official police assume that Lansden was the murderer because he has the obvious motive. But Father Brown soon deduces that the real killer was [spoiler alert!] Sir Benedict’s wife Lilith (Phoebe Price), who agreed to marry Sir Benedict even though he was Gay because it would give her possession of Sir Benedict’s castle, which happens to be located on the ancestral land where Cernunnos had been worshiped way back when. She was the one who dressed herself in Cernunnos drag in order to intimidate Marianne. There’s an exciting climax (as exciting as a BBC production budget could make it, at least) in which Lilith entraps Father Brown and threatens to push him off a convenient cliff because according to the rules of the Cernunnos cult, the ground can be re-sanctified with the killing of a minister in a rival religion. Father Brown actually rescued Lilith from falling into her own trap and rather sanctimoniously tells her that his religion doesn’t believe in human sacrifice.

We Walk the Line: A Celebration of the Music of Johnny Cash (Blackbird Productions, Southside, 2012)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The main event last night (Saturday,Jaunary 31) was the fascinating tribute concert to Johnny Cash, We Walk the Line: A Celebration of the Music of Johnny Cash, given in Austin, Texas at the same theatre where the Austin City Limits show takes place on April 20, 2012 as a commemoration of the 80th anniversary of Johnny Cash’s birth. (Johnny Cash was actually born on February 26, 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas, but never mind.) I suspect that we were getting just a portion of the full program shot in Austin and released on DVD in 2012, partly because imdb.com give 107 minutes as the total running time (KPBS slotted it for two hours but burdened it with the interminable “pledge breaks” that afflict all too many of PBS’s music shows) and partly because the cast list on imdb.com included people like Amy Lee and the stunning Rhiannon Giddens who weren’t featured on the portion we got to see. Most of the performances took Cash’s songs (both his own and his covers, including Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” Tim Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter,” and Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night”) and remodeled them into the standard sound of modern country music, which is closer to the so-called “Southern rock” of 1970’s groups like the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd than to the music of Johnny Cash and his great predecessors, Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams. The show opened with one of its best performances, Brandi Carlile’s version of “Folsom Prison Blues,” and while I was startled to hear a pedal steel guitar solo in the middle of the song (Cash was famous for never using pedal steel guitar in his bands), Carlile projected the song honestly and as powerfully as she does her own material. Next up was Andy Grammer doing “Get Rhythm,” the closest Cash ever came to doing rock ‘n’ roll. Though Cash has for some reason been inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame as well as the Country Music Hall of Fame, he really wasn’t a rock singer, and he knew it; he once said, “My voice is no good for frantic chanting.” Cash wrote “Get Rhythm” for Elvis Presley and recorded it himself only after Elvis turned it down. Grammar’s version was fun (like the other artists, he was backed by a terrific band including Small Faces keyboard player Ian McLagan, session drummer Kenny Aronoff, and bassist Don Was, a well-known producer of roots records), though he was hardly as intense as Carlile (or as Cash was in his original record).

Then the band’s lead guitarist, Buddy Miller, took his turn with a performance of “Hey, Porter.” Miller was momentarily confused about whether “Hey, Porter” was Johnny Cash’s first record (it was), but he turned in a fine performance of the song. After that Pat Monahan, lead singer of the rock band Train, did a moving version of “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” one of the Kris Kristofferson songs Cash recorded. Then Monahan duetted with Shelby Lynne for an oddball version of Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” which in spite of the clear meaning of Dylan’s breakup song they tried to turn it into a celebration of a working relationship. They modeled their version on Sonny and Cher’s breakthrough hit, “I Got You, Babe,” down to over-emphasizing the word “babe” at the end of every chorus. The next song was “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” which Kris Kristofferson introduced to Johnny Cash in an unusual way. He rented a helicopter and flew it to Cash’s home, landing on his back lawn while Cash was hosting a party. That anecdote made more sense when I watched Ken Burns’s Country Music documentary, which mentioned that before he pursued a musical career he’d been a helicopter pilot during the Viet Nam war. Jamey Johnson performed it with a duet partner whom I later realized was Kristofferson himself – a surprise because nothing about the show had given away that it was filmed in 2012, 12 years before Kristofferson died. The next song was “Jackson,” a duet for Cash and his second wife, June Carter, which was ironically about divorce. It was performed here by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an African-American ensemble who are sort of a neo-jug band. Then Brett Miller, who was the lead singer for a band called the Old 97’s that did mostly covers of old country classics, came out for an O.K. if rather over-dramatized version of “The Wreck of the Old 97.” This was a song that was introduced by Vernon Dalhart, who recorded it three times: for Edison in 1920 and Victor in 1924 and 1926. The Victor version sold over a million copies, the first country record to sell that well, though for some reason that still baffles me Dalhart wasn’t mentioned in Ken Burns’s Country Music documentary. Johnny Cash had covered this in his early days at Sun Records (1955 to 1958), and Brett Miller did it too fast and threw too much emotion into a song which needs the restraint Dalhart and Cash gave it to depict the tragedy.

After that Shooter Jennings, Waylon Jennings’s son, duetted on “Cocaine” with Amy Morrison. The next song was “Hurt,” a Nine Inch Nails song Cash covered on the fourth of his six American Recordings albums produced by Rich Rubin for his independent label. (So Johnny Cash ended his recording career as he’d begun it: on an indie owned by a visionary producer.) The producers of this show trotted out Lucinda Williams, a singer I wish I liked better than I do; I’ve read interviews in which she’s made all the right noises about wanting to preserve America’s musical heritage. Her problem is she simply can’t sing. That may sound strange coming from someone who loves Bob Dylan, Yoko Ono, Captain Beefheart, Randy Newman, and Lou Reed as much as I do, but I draw the line at Lucinda Williams the way I do at Tom Waits. At least Williams’s relentlessly ugly voice suits Trent Reznor’s tale of a burned-out junkie surprisingly well, even though both Reznor and Cash got much more out of this song. Incidentally Reznor’s original included the line, “I wear this crown of shit,” which Cash refused to sing. Fortunately Reznor had recorded a bowdlerized version of the song for radio play in which he changed the line to “I wear this crown of thorns,” and Cash agreed to sing that version. Not only did it tie in with his life-long love of Jesus (Cash even made a film about Jesus, The Eternal Road, with Bo Elfstrom directing and playing Jesus while Cash narrated the story in song and June Carter Cash played Mary Magdalene), it’s just a much more poetic line. I was wondering whether Williams would go with “crown of shit” or “crown of thorns,” but luckily she did the latter. After “Hurt” the next song was “Ring of Fire,” sung by Ronnie Dunn of the country duo Brooks and Dunn, with two women providing both backing vocals and the mariachi trumpets that helped make Cash’s original so special. “Ring of Fire” was actually written by June Carter Cash and a songwriting partner named Merle Kilgore, and one night Cash woke up his wife after a dream and said, “You know what your song needs? Mariachi trumpets! I just dreamed it.”

Then Iron and Wine (which, like Nine Inch Nails and St. Vincent, is a nom de groupe for a solo artist, Sam Beam) did a lovely version of “Long Black Veil,” a song by Lefty Frizzell which Cash covered on his Live at Folsom Prison album in 1968. Live at Folsom Prison was one of Cash’s most audacious albums because, instead of just going there and doing his regular concert set, he cherry-picked his repertoire to focus exclusively on songs about crime and prisons that his audience could relate to. He also wrote a surprisingly radical liner-note essay denouncing the entire concept of prison: “All of you have had the same things snuffed out of you. Everything it seems that makes a man a man — women, money, a family, a job, the open road, the city, the country, ambition, power, success, failure — a million things. Outside your cellblock is a wall. Outside that wall is another wall. It’s twenty feet high, and its granite blocks go down another eight feet in the ground. You know you’re here to stay, and for some reason you’d like to stay alive — and not rat.” After that Kris Kristofferson returned for “Big River,” a song Cash wrote after a TV Guide writer said, “Johnny Cash has the big river blues in his voice.” Then Sheryl Crow came out and did “Cry! Cry! Cry!,” the hastily written flip side Cash wrote for “Hey, Porter” when Sam C. Phillips of Sun Records told him he needed another song for the back of the “Hey, Porter” record. She was joined by Willie Nelson for a tribute to Cash’s cover of Tim Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter,” and then the next number was Jimmy Webb’s “The Highwayman.” It was the lead song for what amounted to the first country-music supergroup – Cash, Nelson, Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings – which generated three albums and a number of lucrative concert tours. On “The Highwayman,” Shooter Jennings joined Kristofferson and Nelson to fill in for his late dad, and Jamey Johnson took Cash’s part.

Afterwards the whole cast joined together for the usual all-out finale of these productions, a version of “I Walk the Line.” It was an ironic choice given that Cash wrote it after he returned from a long concert tour proud of the fact that he’d virtuously stayed loyal to his then-wife, Vivian Liberto, and resisted the many opportunities being on the road created for extra-relational activities. The irony was that Cash started his relationship with June Carter while both of them were married to others. Songs I wish had been included were “Man in Black,” one of Cash’s signature songs and the title of his autobiography; Cash’s biggest hit, Shel Silverstein’s novelty “A Boy Named Sue”; and the song I’d pick as my all-time favorite of his, “Train of Love,” a superb lament for love lost to wanderlust he’d recorded at Sun: “Every so often everybody’s baby gets the urge to roam/But everybody’s baby but mine is coming home.” Still, We Walk the Line is a moving tribute to one of America’s greatest musical talents and was well worth watching, though it’s an intriguing sign of the times that the promo being offered for a sufficiently large contribution to PBS was a set of vinyl records – two full-length LP’s and a seven-inch EP – with accompanying DVD rather than a CD!