Saturday Music Club on Monday: some rather funny songs

Maggie and Terre Roche (featuring the Oak Ridge Boys): "If You Emptied Out All Your Pockets You Could Not Make the Change"


Karen Kilgariff: "Couldn't Love You More"


Tom Smothers: "Mediocre Fred"


Fairport Convention: "Million Dollar Bash"


The Kinks: "Wicked Annabella"


Utopia: "Everybody Else is Wrong"


The Damned: "Grimly Fiendish"


Trusty: "Goodbye, Dr. Fate"


The Virgin-Whore Complex: "The Coldest Night of the Year"


Annie Ross: "Twisted"; Lambert, Hendricks & Ross with Williams: "Every Day I Have the Blues"

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links

Mozart in the Jungle

Anne Billson: The 10 Most Undervalued Crime Movies of the 1990s

Bill Crider: Wag the Dog; John Wick [trailer]

Brian Arnold: Scrooge (1935 film)

Brian Busby: Earthbound

BV Lawson: Media Murder

Comedy Film Nerds: Still Alice

David Vineyard: Father Brown (2013-date TV)

Ed Gorman: Dirty Harry

Ed Lynskey: The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery

Elizabeth Foxwell: Routine Job

Evan Lewis: Left Coast Crime 2015

George Kelley: Dig

Halli Casser-Jayne: James Grady and Dennis Lehane

How Did This Get Made?: Zardoz and the sequel episode

Iba Dawson: Girlhood

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: The Connection

Jack Seabrook: Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "Lamb to the Slaughter" (by Roald Dahl)

Jackie Kashian: superhero movies, and enough

Jaqueline T. Lynch: Paddy O'Day

James Reasoner: All About Steve

Jerry House: Rio Rattler

Jonathan Lewis: The Jayhawkers

Kate Laity: SpeakeasyRadio

Kliph Nesteroff: Art Metrano

Laura: The Milky Way

Lucy Brown: Pride and Prejudice (1940 film)

Martin Edwards: Marathon Man

Marty McKee: The Octagon

Michael Shonk and Randy Cox: The Future of TV Watching

Mystery Dave: Frank

Patti Abbott: Buffalo Bill

Peter Rosovsky: Street of No Return: The David Goodis Pilgrimage 2015

Prashant Trikkanad: LA Confidential

Randy Johnson: Light the Fuse...Sartana is Coming

Sergio Angelini: Fedora

Stacia Jones: Panic Button

Stephen Bowie: Then Came Bronson

Stephen Gallagher: The Prisoner reboot

Todd Mason: Mozart in the Jungle, Nightmare in Chicago, Man in a Suitcase, Schitt's Creek

Yvette Banek: 10 Romantic Films for Snowstorm Cuddling

TV notes: MOZART IN THE JUNGLE, NIGHTMARE IN CHICAGO, MAN IN A SUITCASE, SCHITT'S CREEK and on never having Just Three TV Channels...

Capsule reviews of some of what I've liked a lot over the last few months:

Mozart in the Jungle: a sitcom based on oboist Blair Tindall's memoir, has charmed me, for the most part, and while it didn't change my life nor is it "necessary" viewing, it had most of the good elements of the previous rather good series from producer/supporting actor Jason Schwartzmann, Bored to Death, with less celebration of protracted adolescence than was on display in that series. And, like Bored, it seems to be getting essentially no attention compared to other series on its platform (HBO for the older series, Amazon for this one). Saffron Burrows and her character are only the best of several good reasons to give this a try.

 

Nightmare in Chicago is a telefilm I've been meaning to see for decades, since first reading about it in an early Leonard Maltin guide (Bill Warren might've written that review for all I know)...originally broadcast in the first season of Kraft Suspense Theater as "Once Upon a Savage Night" (and based, as it turned out, on William McGivern's novella "Death on the Turnpike"...I keep running into McGivern texts, he the too-forgotten Chicago/Philadelphia noir master; the director was the young Robert Altman).  Unfortunately, neither the full cut of Nightmare, beefed up for syndication from the Kraft episode, nor any form of KST episodes seem to be available outside the gray market,  nor does the episode version seem to be in the Crisis/Suspense Theater package that the Antenna TV network reran recently (a few scattered stations, broadcast and cable, might also be offering it). The link above is to a blurry black and white taping that I suspect was one of those made (several duplicate generations back?) on the fly to reassure Kraft and their ad agency that all the ad spots ran properly during broadcast...so, better than nothing, if not enough better (you do get the full complement of Kraft food ads, and the recipes are often as unnerving as anything about the episode itself). Barbara Turner is particularly good as the kidnap victim of a serial murderer of young women, and Ted Knight is full of appropriate bluster as a police commissioner juggling the suddenly newly active psycho and a nuclear weapons convoy coming through town on the QT.  I look forward to seeing a good copy.

Man in a Suitcase is a bit of a mutant version of a typical 1960s ITC spy drama, since it involves an inappropriately disgraced US ex-spy, with an attitude, who now works in the UK as a sort of private detective/fixer or perhaps a bit more like what The Saint would be like if crossed with irritable youngish Ben Casey. It lasted only one season (ran on ABC in the US). I'm mildly surprised how much I'm enjoying these, put together by some of ITC's better talent of the era.  The first episode (in both the UK and US, apparently, though another is the true pilot), as with several Danger Man/Secret Agent episodes, rather anticipates The Prisoner...others much less so...the influence of The IPCRESS File was probably strong. (Wikipedia notes that this was essentially a replacement series for Danger Man on ITV, the UK commercial network, which certainly makes sense.)

Actual pilot:


Pilot as shown:


Schitt's Creek is a new sitcom on the CBC, imported to US cable with language censored (! sigh) by the Pop Channel, which used to be the TV Guide channel, but is now a joint project of Lionsgate (who bought it) and CBS (who more recently bought in).  Catherine O'Hara and Eugene Levy are not breaking too much new ground, but nonetheless are expertly portraying somewhat washed up former Canadian television icons, fallen on hard times and living in the motel in the tiny town Schitt's Creek that is one of their few remaining properties...adding to their joy, their spoiled adult children, a daughter and son, live in the room next door (I've only seen two episodes so far, and missed the pilot, so assume the non-kids had been living on parental largesse till that ran out). Chris Elliott and some fine younger actors (including Levy's son, the co-creator) are the supporting cast. I'll watch O'Hara in anything short of a Home Alone movie (Away We Go would be about the far limit), but this is rather good fun so far.

principals of Schitt's Creek

As things wrap up and the layoffs continue from the corporation where I have served as the national public broadcasting scheduling reporter for 17 years (beginning about six months after I started at what was still TV Guide magazine, primarily), entering and editing the data about PBS, nationally syndicated, Create, MHz Worldview and Deutsche Welle North America programming for products ranging from PBS.org through TV Guide products to Comcast and some other cable systems and sub channel guides, I'm about to join the laid off, and it's hard not to think back about my engagement with television, both professionally and beforehand.  

I'm fifty years old, and one thing I've heard repeatedly from peers over the decades has been how they, when young, had only three broadcast channels to choose from when watching tv, at least till cable became available and was actually subscribed to by their families. Seems strange to me, since I guess I was spoiled, from the age of five onward, to never live anywhere where there weren't at least four network stations (including PBS) and usually at least some interesting independents broadcasting within viewing range. In 1969, my parents and I moved from Fairbanks, Alaska, to the Boston suburb of West Peabody, MA, with a summer stopover in Oklahoma City (we traveled by pickup truck with camper atop it. I spent a lot of that trip, while the car was moving or stopped, in the bunk over the cab, which would probably not be an advisable way of going about such a trip today).

So, in Boston, there were no fewer than eight broadcast stations in 1969 or in the months shortly thereafter, and the relatively fuzzy New Hampshire stations to complement them: on VHF, the four big network stations (with National Educational Television/soon PBS powerhouse WGBH on 2, NBC on WBZ 4, CBS on 7, ABC on 5, and those NH stations WMUR, an ABC affiliate on 9--and run on such a shoestring that it didn't begin broadcasts in color until well into the 1970s, apparently--and WENH, the PBS anchor for the state network, soon on 11), and on UHF the commercial independents 27, 38, 56 (the Kaiser Broadcasting channel) and WGBX 44, the little sibling that ran as much local and syndicated programming as NET/PBS items...if 44 wasn't the first station in the US to run Doctor Who, for example, it was one of the first.  (To be continued.)

Saturday Music Club: late shift

Thelonious Monk, Charlie Rouse, Larry Gales, Ben Riley: "Round Midnight"


The Duke Ellington Orchestra: Night Creature Second Movement: "Stalking Monster"


The Charles Mingus Band: "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting"


Billie Holiday and The Sound of Jazz band: "Fine and Mellow"


Zero: "Mr. Broadway"


Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Joe Morello, Gene Wright: "Winter Ballad"


The Modern Jazz Quartet: "Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise"


Thelonious Monk/John Coltrane Quartet: "Crepuscule with Nellie"

Friday's Not Too Forgotten Book Guest Post: Mildred Perkins on 11/22/63 by Stephen King

Mildred reported on her reading the King novel to the Horror List at Indiana University:

I finished reading this book, and though the content is only marginally horror, the author can stand a little more discussion I guess.  The first two hundred pages are interesting and occasionally exciting, and the last two hundred pages the same.  The middle three hundred, however, was a real slog.  It was an important set up to the end, of course, but man that was difficult.  I’m sure most of you know the premise, that a thirty-something Maine English teacher decides to save the world by using a hidden time portal to go back in time to stop the Kennedy assassination.  In an epilogue, King says that he wrote the treatment for the thing (14 single-spaced pages) in 1972, but didn’t have the resources for needed massive research and felt that it was just too close to the event and so he shelved it for most of a half century.

The end of the book was not exactly what I expected.  Some of it I had been predicting for about five hundred pages, and even though I knew the action surrounding the assassination would be tight, I was still impressed with that part.  Very tense.  Well done.  But then the denouement…  It was both what I expected and then a whole lot more.  Basically he took it a lot further than I thought he was going to, and the very, very end (after Jackson’s “end” of The Return of the King, it behooves one to say which ending you’re talking about) actually was very poignant.  I don’t remember ever feeling that with a King novel before, so bravo.

I actually find myself wishing they’d make a movie or mini-series from this.  And it also makes me want to find my copy of It and read it again for the first time in years and years, because he spends some time in Derry, and that was one of my favorite parts.

And as the list-bot advises:

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to horror-subscribe@indiana.edu *** 

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For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Saturday Music Club, Music Savings Time edition: Better 1? Better 2?

Betty Everett: "You're No Good"


Dee Dee Warwick: "You're No Good"


Dinah Washington: "Soulville"


Aretha Franklin: "Soulville"

Fairport Convention: "Si Tu Dois Partir"


Bob Dylan: "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"


The Hollies: "I Can't Let Go"


Linda Ronstadt: "I Can't Let Go"

Glenn Miller Orchestra with Ray Eberle: "Serenade in Blue"


Glenn Miller Orchestra with Pat Friday (singing for Lynn Bari): "Serenade in Blue"


The Bangles: "Dover Beach"


Charles in Charge theme