Tuesday, May 17, 2022
2022 Billboard Music Awards (GMR, Billboard, NBC-TV, aired May 15, 2022)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
On May 15 at 8 p.m. I turned on NBC for the 2022 Billboard Music Awards, which have been going on for quite some time (if I can make things out from their Wikipedia page, the awards were first given out in 1992 and first telecast in 2007) and, unlike the Grammy Awards, are determined by so-called “inteactions” between the artists and the audience: music sales (this being 2022, as measured by downloads and streams as well as physical sales), radio play and live performances. The show’s host was rapper Sean Combs, a.k.a. Puff Daddy, a.k.a. P. Diddy and now just Diddy – and if I thought Snoop Dogg was a repulsive presence that significantly hampered my enjoyment of the American Song Contest, Diddy was even worse – and because he was one of the show’s producers in addition to its host, the talent list was also a lot more rap-heavy than the American Song Contest had been. Diddy also performed the opening number, a typical piece of rap nonsense called (as near as I could make out, since almost no song titles were announced in advance) “Get In the Bag, Stay In the Bag,” which segued into another song which I think was called “We Won’t Stop,” which featured two guest stars that at least livened things up from Diddy’s ramblings, a white rapper and a Black woman singer with a quite nice soul voice.
After the first actual award presentation – to Doja Cat for Best R&B Artist (this was one of those “awards” shows where the actual awards seem like an afterthought) came a nice piece of inoffensive pop by the band Silk Sonic that appeared to be called “I Wi9ll Be Your Righteous Lover.” and then what I believe was an act called POOLCLVB (one word, all caps,and with a “v” instead of a “u” in “club”) doing a song called “Love Track” (well, there had to be something the O’Jays’ “Love Train” would run on!) even though the only lyric seemed to be something like “You make me feel my love again.” The next artist up was someone named Rauw Alejandro (I’m presuming he’s Latino because of his name and because his two songs were both in Spanish – and I wasn’t eben about to try to guess their titles – but “Rauw” is a new Hispanic first name on me)m after which the Top Rock Artist award went to Glass Animals, whole British-accented lead singer joked about how little their music actually has to do with rock. (If they’d been around in the 1960’s or 1970’s they’d have been considered pop, not rock.) The next performers were Florence + the Machine (the word “and” is so 20th century in band names) playing a song whose title sounded to me like “I Didn’t Kno\w Where to Put My Love,” though their Wikipedia page suggests it’s simply called “My Love.” (Well, at least it’s a better song than Paul McCartney’s “My Love,” one of the most terrible songs he’s ever written and one in which he drowned what could have been an O.K. ballad in the same sort of gloppy string arrangement he’d earlier complained about Phil Spector putting on his very similar Beatles song, “The Long and Winding Road.”)
Then, after another interruption in the performance schedule to present an actual award – to Dan + Shay for Best Country Duo or Group – Elle King and Miranda Lambert did a quirky duet called “I’m Drink and I Don’t Want to Go Home.” The song features a bartender who realizes both women are too drunk to drive on the roads, so he confiscates their keys. It’s a fun song, and goodness knows drinking is one of the A-Number-1 themes of country music, but somehow I expect more from Miranda Lambert, who had the good sense to break up with Blake Shelton and the even better sense to write and record a Grammy Award-winning Album of the Year about it. (I can hardly wait for the masterpiece Gwen Stefani will probably give us after she breaks up with him.) After that came a song from a large, heavy-set Black woman whom I thought was rap star Megan Thee Stallion but who turned out to be Teyana Taylor, doing a song called “Tell Me How You Want It” – or, rather, doing just the parts that didn’t have to be censored on network television because the whole song is way too raunchy and sexually explicit for airplay on American radio or TV. The next performer was by far the best of the night: country singer Morgan Wallen who did two songs in a stripped-down style – just two guitars, bass and drums with no frou-frou (no pedal steel guitar or violin, and no blasting rock instruments either) called “I Don’t Think Jesus Did It That Way” and “Wasted on You.”
The next artist was Megan Thee Stallion – the real one – a big but well-proportioned Black woman wearing as little as she coud get away with on network television and doing a hot two-song medley. There are a lot of things I like about Megan Thee Stallion, including her willingness to take pride in her size instead of trying to slim down to the dimensions of a concentration-camp survivor, her chutzpah in naming herself after a male horse, and her use of “Thee” as a middle name (as I’ve said here before, if you’re going to use a variant spelling of “the,” “thee” is a lot more appealing than “tha”!), but I don’t think I’d like just listening to her as much as I enjoy watching her perform and seeing just how athletic her body is. After that was Dan + Shay doing an O.K. song called (I think) “I’ve GotYou for the Rest of My Days.” It was a perfectly nice piece of pop music but it certainly didn’t sound particularly country! Afterwards Janet Jackson, looking very much like middle-period Michael in drag and wearing the kind of bashed-in top hat that was once associated with Harpo Marx, came out to present the Icon Award to Mary J. Blige, who gave an interminable speech after tributes from various other Black women artists, including H.E.R. (one of my favorites).
The next performer was Travis Scott with a two-song medley, “Cover Your Eyes” and “Never Been Lost,” and afterwards neo-punk singer Machine Gun Kelly did a surprisingly beautiful ballad which he said was about his wife and their unborn child. According to Billboard’s own post about the show (https://www.billboard.com/music/awards/megan-thee-stallions-face-best-memes-2022-billboard-music-awards-1235071274/), this was a surprise because it had been publicly known that he and actress Megan Fox were a couple but not that they were legally married or expecting a baby (and given what the United States Supreme Court is about to do to Roe v. Wade any mention of a fetus as an “unborn child” is going to send chills down my spine!). Only the blasting instrumental break at the end of Kelly’s lyrlcal ballad sounded at all like punk rock. The next song was Ed Sheeran piped in live from Belfast (doing an outdoor concert in daylight) singing a song called “Two-Stepping with the One I Love” that for once in his career was fast, peppy and not drowning in its own sentimentality. The next performer was Becky G, who I’m assuming is Latina despite her Anglo name because she did a song in Spanish, “Baila con Me” (do I really have to explain that this means “Dance with Me”?)
Then Maxwell did a 40th anniversary tribute to Michael Jackson’s Thriller (has it really been that long?) with the last and one of the least-known songs on it, “The Lady in My Life.” Then, after Diddy put on a woman who’s under contract to his record label for a brief snippet of a song, the final artist was Nigerian singer/rapper Burna Boy with yet another two-song medley, “Shiloh” (also called “English Have Breakfast”) and “Kalume” (also called “Back Where You Came From”). As throughout this article, these guesses as to the titles might be way off, given that they’re based on my guesses during the show as recorded by me in my chicken-scratch handwriting, but I liked the infectious percussion. Still, easily the best part of the show was a segment that had nothing to do with music: the “Changemaker Award” given to Mari Copeny, who as a nine-year-old girl ini 2014 wrote a letter to then-President Barack Obama pleading with him to help the citizens of Flint, Michigan – most of them, like Copeny herself (and Obama, for that matter), African-American – who had just been poisoned by a Republican state government who had shifted the city’s water supply from the relatively clean Lake Michigan to the horribly polluted Flint River just to save a few bucks. The Flint water crisis became a cause célèbre nationwide not only because it was a horrible monstrosity that inflicted heavy damage on the still developing brains of Flint’s children but also because it was man-made and totally preventable.
On her Web site, https://www.maricopeny.com, as “on the front lines helping kids to embrace their power through equal opportunity. When the Flint Water Crisis began in Flint instead of feeling helpless Mari decided to use her voice to help out her community and to fight for the kids in Flint. Since then she has expanded her effort to help communities across the nation dealing with toxic water.” It quotes Copeny herself as saying, “My generation will fix this mess of a government. Watch us.” Copeny got to take the stage in the same green outfit she’s wearing on her Web page photo and, in an awards show otherwise devoid of political or social commentary (save for a pre-credits title expressing sorrow over the weekend’s mass shootings in Buffalo, New York and Laguna Woods, California), she gave a blistering speech critiquing everything from the global climate crisis to the U.S. Supreme Court’s impending evisceration not only of Roe v. Wade but the entire notion that the U.S. Constitution guarantees people a right to privacy, and in particular the right to make their own decisions about how they have sex, with whom and how tney may deal with the consequences therefrom, both good and bad. I didn’t think a young woman just at the edge of her sexual maturity would have to deal with the possibility of legally enforced motherhood, but there you are: thanks to a long campaign by crabbed old men from rural states who think they know better than the rest of us how we should live and reproduce (or not), the U.S. is about to become one of the most reactionary countries in the world im terms of how it deals with women and what sorts of opportunities they have – and Mari Copeny is finding herself in the cross-hairs of that counter-revolutiion in ways her parents probably had no idea what would happen. It will take the people of her generation to figure out how to undo all the harm those radical Right-wing creeps are doing – assuming the crash-and-burn energy policies they’re insisting on don’t destroy the entire planet’s ability to sustain human life.
Invitation to the Dance (MGM, 1953, released 1956)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film my husband Charles, a friend and I watched last night was Invitation to the Dance, an oddball musical from Gene Kelly at MGM in 1953, though it was not released (except for a special screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival at which Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and Princess Margaret were in attendance) until 1956. It was made during a period in which Gene Kelly was living in Europe as a tax exile, intending to take advantage of a loophole in British immigration law that a non-citizen could work in the U.K. for up to 186 days in a year – and the days did not need to be consecutive – but if he went so much as one day over he would have to pay taxes on his income both in Britain and America. Kelly’s idea for the film was to work with top-notch ballet stars and make a film that would be what Sergei Eisenstein had called “a sound film” rather than a talkie: a movie that would tell its story through images combined with synchronized music and sound effects,.but no dialogue. The original plan was to have three ballet sequences and one in which Kelly and guest stars would dance to popular songs, and originally Kelly was going to appear only in the pop-song sequence (titled “Dance Me a Song”), but MGM’s condition for green-lighting the project was that Kelly appear in all the sequences, and in the end the pop-song sequence was dropped anyway. I first heard of this film in The World of Entertainment, Hugh Fordin’s 1975 biography of MGM musical producer Arthur Freed, and this book went into so much detail about the trials and tribulations of this movie in general and the “Dance Me a Song” sequence in particular that it was not until I actually saw the film that I realized the pop-song sequence was not in the released film.
What was in the film was three stories told entirely in the dance language of ballet. The first was “Circus,” a Petrouchka-like story in which a circus clown (Gene Kelly) has an unrequited crush on a woman in the troupe (Claire Sombert, wearing an all-in-one gold lamé jumpsuit that practically becomes a character in itself), only she just has eyes for the handsome, hunky tightrope walker (Igor Yousekevitch). Along the way we get to see several scenes showing other circus performers and the audiences for them, before we finally cut back to the clown, who attempts to tightrope-walk himself to impress the woman – but, unsurprisingly, he ultimately falls to his death. The music for the “Circus” sequence was composed by Jacques Ibert, a specialist in light-classical music for ballet, and he arrived in Britain to work on the score just after he’d suffered a personal tragedy: his sister, also a well-known musician, had mysteriously disappeared. Later her body was found at the foot of a flight of stairs in the boarded-up home she and Ibert had shared. Fortunately for the film, Ibert took a stiff-upper-lip attitude to his tragic loss, writing MGM musical director Lela Simone, “There is only one thing for me to do and that is to work, Furthermore, I have a contract I must fulfill.” While it might have made more sense for Kelly and the production crew to use Stravinsky’s Petrouchka for the score (especially since, as a product of pre-Revolutionary Russia, it was in the public domain), Ibert turned in a quite remarkable piece that works well enough in context.
The film’s second sequence was called “Ring Around the Rosy” and was based on Reigen, a notorious play by German author Arthur Schnitzler, whose elaborate tales of marital infidelity were the basis of movies as different as Cecil B. DeMille’s The Affairs of Anatol (1920) and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Reigen deals with a bracelet that is passed around to various people, all of whom are engaged in unauthorized sexual relationships. Schnitzler wrote the play in 1897 and it was privately performed in 1900, but it wasn’t until 1920 in Berlin that it saw its first public performance – and it was savagely attacked by critics who pointed out that Schnitzier was Jewish and accused him of moral degeneracy. Schnitzler’s play was already turned into a French movie, La Ronde, in 1950, with German expatriate Max Ophuls directing, when Gene Kelly grabbed hold of it. In Schnitzler’s play the bracelet is passed from a prostitute to a suldier, who gives it to a parlor maid, who gives it to a young gentleman, who gives it to a married woman, who gives it to her husband, who gives it to his own extra-relational “little miss,” who gives it to a poet, who gives it to an actress, who gives it to a count, who gives it to the same prostitute who had it in the opening.
In Kelly’s only slightly more decorous version, the bracelet starts out as a gift from a husband (David Poltenghi) to his wife (Daphne Dale), who gives it to an artist (Igor Yousekvitch again), who gives it to his model (Claude Bessy – that’s right, a woman named Claude), who gives it to a “sharpie” (Tommy Rall), who gives it to a femme fatale (Belita, the marvelous skating actress who starred in the 1946 film noir Suspense), who gives it to a nightclub croooner (Irving Davies), who gives it to the hat-check girl at the club where he works (Diana Adams), who gives it to a Marine (Gene Kelly), who gives it to a mysterious “girl on the stairs” (Tamara Toumanova), who gives it back to the husband. The ballet was originally scored by British composer Malcolm Arnold, and most dance sequences are filmed to a live or recorded piano accompaniment. The orchestral version is added in post-production on a recording stage, in which the conductor watches the film on a large screen and cues his or her beats to it, but when Arnold’s score was first rehearsed by conductor John Hollingsworth, he compared it to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. “It soon became apparent … that Arnold’s score was not in tune with what Kelly had photographed,” Fordin wrote in his Freed biography. So Kelly commissioned a new score from American pianist and composer André Previn, who not only wrote the piece as a concertante work for piano and orchestra but played the piano part himself and is even seen in the movie as “The Composer At the Piano.” Previn’s task was the nightmarish one of composing a musical score to fit a film sequence that could not be changed at all.
The third sequence was “Sinbad the Sailor,” set to the final movement of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s tone poem Scheherazade very heavily rewritten by arranger Johnny Green (who had previously done the same thing for George Gershwin’s An American in Paris to fit the big Kelly ballet that ends the film of that name). The sequence was an extension of an experiment Kelly had previously done in the 1944 film Anchors Aweigh, in which he had appeared as a live-action performer in what was otherwise a cartoon sequence featuring MGM’s animated stars, Tom and Jerry. For this film Kelly brought on the same people who had created the Tom and Jerry cartoons, producer Fred Quimby and directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (who, when MGM closed down its cartoon division in 1957, launched a highly successful and profitable independent studio producing films for TV). What they came up with was an elaborate Orientalist farce featuring Sinbad (Kelly), Scheherazade (Carol Haney), and a boy genie (David Kasday), along with two scimitar-wielding palace guards who partner Kelly and give him a hard time throughout the sequence. (It’s interesting that two of the three sequences in Invitation to the Dance both feature Kelly in the same starched white sailor’s uniforms he previously wore in Anchors Aweigh and On the Town.)
Invitation to the Dance sat fallow on MGM’s shelves for three years while the “suits” at the company’s American home base tried to figure out what to do with it. They rather gingerly opened it in April 1956 at the Plaza Theatre, the usual showcase for MGM films since U.S. antitrust litigation had forced the big studios to sell off their theatre chains a decade earlier, and not surprisingly it bombed at the box office. Seen today, Invitation to the Dance dazzles with its sheer inventiveness, and among other things it shows that Gene Kelly might have been a great star in silent films if he’d lived during that era (in 1948 Kelly starred as D’Artagnan in a remake of Douglas Fairbanks’ 1921 silent blockbuster hit The Three Musketeers, and clips from it appear in the 1952 film Singin’ in the Rain) even though he takes the most haunting scene in Singin’ in the Rain – the ineffable closeup in the ballet scene in which he realizes Cyd Charisse has no interest in him – and rather runs it into the ground, especially in “Circus.” It’s an intriguing film and it’s hard to imagine anyone else who would have made it in the 1950’s (though my husband Charles reminded me that three years earlier director and co-writer Russell Rouse had made a film called The Thief, a mystery thriller which also used no dialogue), and it’s the sort of film one wants to like more than one does – though Charles liked it more than I did.
Sunday, May 15, 2022
The Killer Is Loose (Crown Prudictions, United Artists, 1956)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 9:30 my husband Charles and I watched what turned out to be a very good movie on the “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies: The Killer Is Loose, a 1956 film based on a story by brothers John and Ward Hawkins published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1953. Even before the Post put out the story, 20th Century-Fox bought the movie rights and intended it for an all-star cast, including Victor Mature as the male lead – a police officer who investigates a bank robbery and in the process inadvertently kills the robber’s wife – and Orson Welles as the robber. (Mature and Welles had first crossed paths in the early 1940’s when they were both rivals for Rita Hayworth’s affections after she broke up with her first husband, car dealer Edward Judson – Welles won the battle and briefly married her – and again in 1961 when they finally made a movie together, an Italian sword-and-sandals epic called The Tartars.) Alas, Fox decided to pass on the property (maybe because Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck had just committed to making all his films in CinemaScope, and he ended up dumping a lot of properties, including On the Waterfront, that he didn’t think would lend themselves to wide-screen and color) and sold the rights to producer Robert L. Jenks, who organized a company called Crown to make the film for distribution by United Artists. He hired a stellar cast – Joseph Cotten as the police detective, Sam Wagner; Rhonda Fleming as his wife Lila, whom the bad guy threatens to kill because Sam killed his wife and he thinks that would be appropriate revenge; and Wendell Corey in the role of a lifetime as the bad guy.
The plot starts in the bank where Corey’s character, Oscar “Foggy” Poole, works – he’s nicknamed “Foggy,” a name he detests, because he needs really thick glasses in order to see at all. His old army sergeant from World War II shows up at the bank and rags him about his name,much to his disgust. Then a crew of robbers shows up at the bank and it looks like Poole is a hero in trying to slow them down – until later, when the cops deduce that instead of heroically trying to stop the robbers he was actually their inside man. (Charles noted that the script by Harold Medford based on the Hawkins brothers’ story doesn’t bother to explain why Poole signed in to rob his own employer’s bank in the first place.) Detective Wagner and two other officers show up at Poole’s apartment and he stages a shoot-out by firing his gun at the officers; they fire back and ultimately obliterate the front lock, but though Poole is taken alive his wife is killed and he’s broken-hearted about it. Poole is tried and convicted of his role in the bank robbery and sentenced to 10 years in prison, though his attorney tells him that if he behaves himself in prison he can get “good time” and an early release. After 2 ½ years he’s kept his record in prison so clean he’s released to the state prison’s honor farm, where they grow lettuce for the civilian market. Poole gets assigned to the honor farm but his real motive is to escape so he can hunt down and kill Lila Wagner, and one day he does so, fashioning a crude knife from the business end of one of the hoes he uses at the farm and killing the driver of the delivery truck that’s supposed to take the farm’s produce to market.
He then steals the driver’s identity documents and uses them to slip through the police roadblocks set up around the prison farm, and afterwards he kills at least two other people, including his old army sergeant after he’s crashed the sergeant’s home and terrorized his wife. Eventually he traces Lila Wagner to her neighborhood, where she’s returned after leaving the hideoot with family friends Sam arranged for her. Poole puts on a woman’s raincoat to stalk her without the police noticing, and he’s about to kill her when Sam successfully tracks him down and kills him instead. The Killer Is Loose is a taut melodrama, an example of the later 1950’s round of the film noir cycle in which instead of shooting on elaborate replicas of real streets shot in highly dramatic chiaroscuro style, the filmmakers took advantage of the greater portability of film equipment and shot on actual city streets. This loses them the high-intensity contrasty look of earlier noirs but gains in realism, and director Oscar “Budd” Boetticher and cinematographer Lucien Ballard (whom Boetticner once said was the greatest person ever to work in that job) take advantage of the real locations to produce a tightly-knit thriller. After the movie TCM hose Eddie Mueller gave some of Boetticher’s early background: he and his brother were orphans who never knew their actual family name. The “Boetticher” came from the family that adopted them, and this is the first film under which he was billed as “Budd Boetticher” instead of “Oscar.” He then went on to make a series of “B” Westerns for Columbia, mostly starring Randolph Scott, and the first of these – the very next movie after The Killer Is Loose in Boetticher’s canon – was Seven Men from Now, in which Scott played a similar character to Wendell Corey’s here: a man whose wife is accidentally killed during a robbery and who determines to track down and kill the seven men he holds responsible for her death.
While this sort of vigilante plot line works better in a Western than in a film set in the present day, in which we read Oscar Poole as a villain no matter how much we may sympathize with him over his loss (a problem Clint Eastwood faced as well in his film Mystic River, in which a group of grown men seek revenge against the people who molested them as children), Corey gets one unforgettable moment in which, explaining his behaviors to the woman he’s holding hostage, he says that because of his bad eyesight everyone around him ridiculed and bullied him except his wife, who alone loved him for who and what he was. While this doesn’t explain why he put her in harm’s way first by joining the bank robbery in the flrst place and then shooting it out with the police instead of calmly and quietly surrendering, it does give him a powerful and understandable motive for his subsequent actions. Eddie Mueller said he presented this film “live” at one of his film noir festivals with Budd Boetticner in attendance, and while Boetticher said he felt really proud to be working with an actor the caliver of Joseph Cotten – especially for a film so low-budget he had only two weeks to shoot it – while watching the film anew he noticed a certain stiffness in Cotten’s performance. I did too, but I thought the movie actually worked better that way; given that ome of the issues between Sam and Lila is over his job – she wants him to quit police work and adopt a less risky career – I think we “read” Cotten’s character as a man so pitilessly and emotionlessly committed to law enforcement (once again, a prototype of Clint Eastwood in his modern-day police officer roles) that absolutely nothing computes, including his wife’s fears.And Mueller also mentioned the sad fate of Wendell Corey, who got active in Republican politics (he saw how George Murphy and Ronald Reagan had parlayed screen careers into political success, and he got as far as the Santa Monica City Council, but his run for Congress ini 1966 went nowhere) and ultimately he died from the ill effects of alcoholism at just 54.
Saturday, May 14, 2022
Live at the Belly Up: Jake Shirabukuro (San Diego State University, Belly Up Tavern, KPBS-TV, 2022)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night my husband Charles, a friend and I watched a Live at the Belly Up eupside featuring Jake Shirabukuro, a Hawai’ian of Japanese ancestry who has become a ukulele virtuoso. Fortunately, the show was a new one, copyrighted 2022, instead of a rerun from pre-COVID times. It was also an extraordinary performance. Using a larger than usual ukulele and plugging it in via an inside pickup similar to those used to amplify an acoustic guitar (as opposed to the body-mounted pickups of a true electric guitar), Shirabukuro gets an amazingly full sound: once you hear him, you’ll never think of the ukulele as just a toy instrument again. I was struck by some of Shirabukuro’s pronunciations: he pronounces his own last name “She-ra-BOO-ku-ro,” with the accent in the middle, and the name of the state he’s from as “Havai’i,” with a German-style “v” sound for the “w.”
Jake Shirabukuro turned out to be an absolutely fabulous musician with a rare sense of artistry as well as virtuosity; Charles lamented after the show that someone that good is playing “a novelty instrument,” and I pointed out that Shirabukuro is working hard to make sure we don’t think of the ukulele as a novelty instrument. Charles replied, “If he were a pianist or a guitarist that good, he’d have a much bigger career and wouldn’t have to play places like the Belly Up.” Shirabukuro played an eclectic set of 12 songs, including some haunting Beatles covers (“In My Life” – which he played as part of a four-song medley that also included Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and two songs I didn’t recognize – along with “Something” and “Eleanor Rigby”), what I think was a version of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” (though he transformed it so radically I couldn’t be sure) and some rather quirky originals, many of which had numerical tlties. He opened with “Ukulele 5-0” and later on in the evening he played “1-4-5” (referring, I presume, to the succession of three chords – the tonic, subdominant and dominant – at the root of virtually all Western music) and “6/8” (almost certainly a time signature).
Shirabukuro also played an original called “Piano Forte” which he composed for two ukuleles, one representing the left-hand part of a piano piece and one the right-hand part. To perform the work solo he recorded his own performance and played it back on a tape loop, so the first half was the left-hand part alone and the second half was him accompanying himself, playing the left-hand part on the record he’d just made while adding the right-hand part “live.” Shirabukuro also played one of my favorite pieces, the beautiful Japanese folk song “Sakura” (which I have heard before in versions by Harry Belafonte and Yoko Ono – Yoko’s version was from the week of February 14-18, 1972 in which she and John Lennon co-hosted the Mike Douglas Show and brought in various people as guest stars, including Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale and rock icon Chuck Berry). Shirabukuro explained that the song was written for the koto, a sort of 13-stringed Japanese zither with a haunting effect, and his challenge was to figure out how to play it on the ukulele without losing the percussive sound of the koto.
For the last five of his 11 pieces he was joined by Jason Wildhoff on electric bass, and the two instruments actually blended surprisingly well – at least in part because, as Shirabukuro explained in one of his interview segments (which were more frequent than usual – they occurred between every song, which normally would drive me up the wall but this time Shirabukuro’s act was so off-beat and unique I was grateful for the running commentary from him on what he was doing and why), the range of the electric bass begins just where the range of the ukulele ends. The last two pieces on the program were “Orange World” and “Kwiko,” in the latter of which I suspected Shirabukuro was once again using tape-loops and delay, and some of his playing was absolutely spectacular and reminiscent of flamenco guitar. All in all it was a fascinating program and a welcome return to Live at the Belly Up after they had to stop producing new shows and do reruns instead because of COVID-19 restrictions.
Friday, May 13, 2022
Law and Order: "The Great Pretender" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired May 12, 2022)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 8 p.m. I switched on NBC for the three Law and Order programs: the flagship Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The Law and Order episode, “The Great Pretender,” deals with the murder of a 24-year-old woman who calls herself “Ella Whitlock” and claims to be from an old moneyed family in New York, but when the police investigate the crime (she was killed when she was pusled off the balcony of a space in the warehouse district she was having renovated as a nightclub) the lead detectives, Kevin Bernard (Anthony Anderson) and Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan), go to notify the Whitlock parents about the death of their daughter and they’re told they never had a daughter, just two sons. Further investigation based on an image of “Ella” recovered from social media reveals that her real name is Mary Costello, she’s a working-class woman from New Jersey and she doesn’t have the proverbial pot to piss on; she’d been running up credit-card charges all over town to pay for her “nightclub” and had left a lot of people holding the bag for her. The police winnow down the plethora of suspects and find that the killer is the genuinely rich Wyatt Ackman (Patrick Heusinger), who dated “Ella” for a while until he realized she wasn’t who and what she said she was, whereupon he pushed her off the balcony of the “nightclub” and left her to die.
Only Wyatt Ackman’s attorney offers prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) a deal: in exchange for allowing Wyatt to plead out to manslaughter instead of murder, Wyatt will agree to rat out his uncle Charles Ackman (Ian Blackman), makers of Oxycodone, to which Wyatt got addicted along with millions of other Americans nationwide. Among the victims was Eric Howe (Graham Powell), Wyatt’s sponsor in his rehab program (which he attended three times) until he relapsed, overdosed and died. The prosecutors indict Charles Ackman for manslaughter based on a tape Wyatt made of a conversation with his uncle in which Charles admitted that he knew Oxycodone was addictive but he not only marketed it anyway, he essentially bribed doctors to tell their colleagues that it was safe. Unfortunately, the judge in the case rules that the tape is inadmissible because, while Wyatt was in New York when he recorded it (and New York law requires only one-party consent to recording a phone call), Charles was in Massachosetts, which requpres the consent of both parties. Nonetheless, Price and Maroun get their conviction, albeit only because at Wyatt’s request Maroun went to Wyatt’s home and obtained a box of Oxycodone pills from his housekeeper because he was jonesing badly and needed the pills to be able to testify. Charles’ attorney learns this and tries to use it as part of his cross-examination, but the judge rules it inadmissible and Charles Ackman is duly convicted and hauled off to prison in the sort of wish-fulfillment climax we get to see on Law and Order episodes but almost never in real life. (Tell me, is anyone so naïve to think that Donald Trump will ever serve so much as one afternoon in jail for all his multiple crimes?) And I was also surprised that writer Pamela Wechsler got to use the name of a real drug instead of a fictitious one.
Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: ""Confess Your Sins to Be Free" (Dick Wolf Productions, U(niversal, NBC-TV, aired May 12, 2022)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
If anything, the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit that followed, “Confess Your Sins to Be Free,” was even better than the
Only it turns out that the real culprit is Father Regis, and Duffy knew that because Regis had confessed it to him but because of the unbreakable seal of the confessional he couldn’t tell that to the police or anyone else, though he could act on the information himself. The script by John Martin and Christian Tyler travels some of the same paths as George Tabori’s script for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1953 film I Confess, a marvelous and grossly underrated movie in which Montgomery Clift played a Catholic priest in Quebec who is accused of murder and cannot clear himself because the real killer confessed the crime to him and he can’t use any of the information from the confession without breaking the seal. (The original ending was going to be Clift’s character actually being executed for the crime, and only afterwards would the real truth come out, but Warner Br.s vetoed that ending and forced Hitchcock and Tabori to write a chase-scene finale in which the real killer is himself killed but with his dying breath “confesses” the crime in the secular meaning and exonerates Clift’s character.) In the end the cops figure out how to get the goods on Father Regis – who, according th the Catholic church’s foul practice, has been moved from one parish to another when he was too near to getting arrested in one – without forcing Father Duffy to break the seal of the confessional. It seems that Father Regis regularly “confesses” to his mother, even though she was killed by his father when the boy was nine – which is supposed to explain his jaundiced view that women who cheat on their husbands deserve to be raped. Instead Father Regis goes to his mother’s tombstone and talks to her about everything, and the cops bug the tombstone, get his confession in a form they can use, and arrest him.
Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Streets Is Watching" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired May 12, 2222)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
As usual, the Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed was the weakest of the three, mainly because while the other two shows in the sequence started in 1990 and 1999, respectively, Law and Order: Organized Crime started in 2021 ande therefore emerged at the height of the worship ofr the Great God SERIAL. As a result, the plot lines are structured as a series of so-called “story arcs” and the show quickly loses all credibility and sense unless you religiously watch every single episode (or sign u p for “Peacock,” NBC’s streaming channel, and binge-watch all of them in quick succession). I understand lots of younger TV viewers not only like but expect this sort of serial crap – I even heard one person tell me when he’s tried to watch the original late-1969’s episodes of Star Trek they’re put off because each episode is a completely contained story and only the central characters carry over from one episode to the next.
A lot of thins happened in this episode of Law and Order: Organized Crime, includingt the revelation that Preston Webb (Mylekti Williamson), the corrupt Black businessman who secretely runs the Marcy Gang of drug dealers from behind a respectable and even p;hilanthropic front, has taken out a nit on Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni), whom he thinks is a crooked cop who stole $2 million from him. The professional assassin he hires is actually a woman, a part-Ugandan (and therefore Black) U.S. veteran named Natalie Dumont (the formidable Adrienne Walker, who looks like she could be a linebacker in the Women’s Professional Football League – which really exists, by the way). The highlight of the episode is the fight scene between the two, and whale i suspect Christopher Meloni may have had a double through much of this sequence (the man just turned 60, after all!) , it was still exciting to see these two in deadly combat. We also learned that Dumont had been given photos not only of Stabler himself but his surviving family members, particularly his mother Bernadette (Ellen Burstyn) and his kids Kathleen (Allison sikes) and Eli (Nicky Torchia), who long-time fans of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit was ther result of a mercy fuck Elliott and his then-wife had when he was separated from her but came home one night and …
The news that the assassin targeted at least two of Stabler’s children as well as his mom leads the police department to ramp up the level of security protection around him. Meanwhile, Frank Donnelly (Denis Leary), head of “The Brotherhood” – a gang of corrupt cops who steal from the other crooks they arrest and who believes in the sort of muscular law enforcement that got George Floyd killed, never mind such niceitites as the U.S. Constitution and its pettyfogging limits on “due process” – announcing that he’s stepping down from leading it and wants Stabler to take over. Since Stabler is really an honest cop infiltrating the Brotherhood to take it down, he was already in an uncertain,nerve-wracking and dangerous enough position when Donnelly elevated him to the organization’s Number Two and he’s naturally even more scared of becoming Number One. Actually there’s a hint in Erica Michelle Butler’s script that Donnelly putting Stabler in as his successor is really part of the plot to have him killed, especially since a Donnelly agent used Stabler’s credit card information to rent the van that carried away the several million dollars in cash from the professional money-launderer, including the $2 million Webb gave Stabler and for which he wants his revenge, either by stealing back the money or killing him.
One chilling line in Butler’s scrupt has Webb telling Stabler, “I will take my repayment in the form of my own choosing,” and clearly he doesn’t seem to mind losing the money so much as he does being double-crossed and killing Stabler will restore his street cred – hence the episode title, “Streets Is Watching,” which otherwise is hopelessly ungrammatical. Stabler also has another character arc going: he’s dug out two old bullets he fired from his father’s gun in a childhood flashback in a previoius episode and in this one he gives them to a ballistic technician because he wants to find out once and for all whether his father, also a cop, was the hero he and his family had been led to believe or a corrupt cop who shot an unarmed man and then shot himself in the leg to make it look like the suspect was armed and was killed in a legitimate gunfight.
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