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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death in Paradise, season 14, episode 4 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, January 30) my husband Charles and I watched a Death in Paradise episode and then a quite compelling performance by The Wood Brothers on The Kate, a PBS show that’s something like Live at the Belly Up except it’s done from the other side of the U.S. (more on that later). Alas, the Death in Paradise episode was surprisingly boring – I had a hard time staying awake through it. It was about a murder at a rum distillery called Ambrose whose founder had suddenly died. The founder had left behind two children, son Patrick (Ansu Kabia) and daughter Cora (Madeline Appiah). For the previous 18 years Cora had worked her ass off to keep the distillery going while Patrick left the fictitious Caribbean island of Saint-Honoré or Marie or whatever the locale of Death in Paradise is called and didn’t return until his dad died, whereupon the will was opened and Patrick inherited the whole business even though he hadn’t had anything to do with running it for 18 years. His sole interest in the distillery is in cashing it out, so in order to make his money quickly and get the hell out of there again he cuts a deal with a larger company to buy the place. The deal papers are supposed to be signed at a private celebration with several other people there, and they’re supposed to drink from the same bottle of Ambrose rum to commemorate. But when he takes a second drink from the bottle, Patrick suddenly collapses and ultimately dies, while the others get sick. One of them, Saunders, dies later, and for about 52 minutes of running time the Black constabulary try to figure out whodunit.

The resolution is not that surprising – Cora murdered her brother to stop the sale of Ambrose Distillery and get back at him for having inherited the business even though she’d been running it all those years – though her murder method is. Cora killed Patrick and Saunders and sickened the others by injecting the rum with methanol, also known as wood alcohol, an incredibly toxic substance (I remember the warnings from my own childhood never to drink it because at worst it would kill you and at best it would leave you blind). But she did it in a quirky way; she poured the first round of drinks from an uncontaminated bottle, then injected both the bottle and a previous soft drink Patrick had had with the methanol, so Patrick would get the immediately lethal dose and the others would get sick but not croak. Not only that, she also spiked the ice cubes with methanol; Patrick, who drank the rum “neat” without ice, got the pre-dose of methanol from his soft drink and Saunders got his methanol from both the spiked rum and the spiked ice cubes. It’s yet another one of the preposterous murder schemes beloved of so many mystery writers that seem flamboyantly unrealistic in the actual world, and frankly I felt sorry and hoped that Cora would not turn out to be the murderer because I liked her and what she’d done to keep the place running. It didn’t help that the producers of Death in Paradise have maintained the annoying comic-relief character of apprentice police officer Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah), who as I said about him in a previous post seemed there to prove they didn’t break the mold after they made Frank McHugh and this time they put black plastic into it. It also doesn’t help that the lead cop, detective inspector Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet), is so dour as a personality. There’s a bit of pathos in the end as Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington), the avuncular executive who’s Wilson’s direct supervisor, sees an online posting for a petition aimed at saving his job from whatever “genius” in the island’s administrative hierarchy decided to lay him off.