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 at about 9:45 p.m. 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 are, 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.