What Game of Thrones needs more than dragonglass is Henry Louis Gates Jr., so that he could stop Jon from banging his Auntie Dany

This is the 10th of 13 or 14 all-new blog posts that are being posted until this blog's final post in December 2017.

Game of Thrones, the most popular TV show in the world right now, is a show I've been ride-or-die for since the eerie White Walker attack that opened its 2011 pilot episode. It's a rare small-screen soap opera in which the action filmmaking on display during certain set pieces--marshaled by directors like Miguel Sapochnik and Breaking Bad veteran Michelle MacLaren, a.k.a. the original director of Wonder Woman before she quit over creative differences with Warner Bros.--is intriguingly on a par with the work of master craftsmen in the action genre like the "Johns": the late John Frankenheimer, John Woo and Johnnie To, Woo's much more grounded (as in there are no fucking doves in his movies) but similarly skilled Hong Kong compatriot.

Tango uniform November echo India November: "AFOS Incognito" begins transmitting Monday, January 12 at midnight on AFOS

A spy genre music block made up of score cues from both completely fantastical genre pieces (Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol, A View to a Kill) and much more grounded genre pieces that are closer to former CIA agent Valerie Plame's tastes in spy fiction (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Russia House) has been in the works for the nighttime part of the AFOS station schedule for a while. With both the premiere of the eagerly anticipated Agent Carter--it's basically Alias in bobby socks--and the return of Archer on FX this week, as well as the February 13 American release of Kingsman: The Secret Service, X-Men: First Class director Matthew Vaughn's adaptation of Mark Millar's Secret Service comic, now is the perfect time to launch "AFOS Incognito," a midnight block that will begin airing Monday, January 12.

The regular time slot for "AFOS Incognito" will be Mondays through Thursdays from midnight to 2am Pacific, with a bonus one-hour airing on Fridays at 9am. "AFOS Incognito" will rotate many of the espionage genre score cues that are scattered throughout "AFOS Prime" in the middle of the day, as well as 15 tracks that won't be streamed anywhere else on the AFOS schedule.

The 15 "AFOS Incognito" exclusives will include Sammy Davis Jr.'s theme from 1965's The Second Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World--which was memorably sung by drunken Christmas party attendees in one of my favorite scenes during Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy--and Christopher Lennertz's Bond-inspired score cues from the 2013 Marvel One-Shot short film "Agent Carter," an enjoyable little extra on the Iron Man Three Blu-ray that marked Hayley Atwell's first solo outing as her '40s British spy character from Captain America: The First Avenger. Lennertz has also scored Atwell's Agent Carter miniseries, and some of his themes from the 2013 short have resurfaced on the new show.





A few years ago, I was considering adding to AFOS an all-electronic midnight block that would have been called "Nightspeed," due to the popularity of both the Daft Punk/Joseph Trapanese score for Tron: Legacy and The Chemical Brothers' score for Hanna. But I think "AFOS Incognito"--which, at one point, was going to be called "Channel D," as in "Open channel D" from the original Man from U.N.C.L.E.--would be better suited for the midnight hour because of the jazzy and melancholy nature of several of the tracks on the playlist, particularly Alberto Iglesias' "George Smiley" from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, where the lonely trumpet basically says, "This ain't Bond. This is le Carré. No bloody invisible cars or steel-toothed thugs here." With some nighttime Scotch, of course, "AFOS Incognito" might also bring back memories of some of your favorite old spy shows and make you ponder over how the Steed and Peel Avengers' "Mrs. Peel, we're needed" scenes would be much different--or even be rendered obsolete--in the age of texting.

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: The John Gregory Orchestra, "The Avengers"

I gave myself an assignment for the entire month of July: I've been writing one post per weekday in which I say a few words about a selected track from A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Rome, Italian Style" block of imaginary soundtrack music and covers of '60s and '70s film and TV themes. Sometimes, I've found myself not being able to say much more than "It's dope" or "It's shiny," and other times, the TV series where the piece of music originated from is a more interesting subject to write about than the music itself, which is the case with today's post. The "'Rome, Italian Style' Track of the Day" series concludes this Friday, but the block will continue to air Mondays through Thursdays from 11am to noon on AFOS.

Song: "The Avengers" by The John Gregory Orchestra
Released: 1961
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: It's a faithful cover of the other Avengers theme, the lesser-known one from the British spy show's pre-Emma Peel seasons that was composed not by Laurie Johnson, but by the late British jazzman John Dankworth. Those rarely seen (due mostly to the British TV networks' love of throwing their archived shows away) and shot-on-videotape first three seasons were more serious in tone, and Dankworth's crime-jazz theme reflected that harder-edged tone.

A show that's turned 50 years old (!) this year, The Avengers started out as a total sausage fest, with Patrick Macnee's John Steed partnered with Ian Hendry's David Keel, a doctor seeking vengeance on the drug dealers who murdered his fiancée. When leather-clad anthropologist/judo expert Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman) arrived as a replacement for Keel (Hendry, the show's original lead actor, decided to bounce after the first season to pursue a film career), the once-grim procedural gradually evolved into the eye candy-filled, sexy and playful spy-fi classic we know and love today.

"When the women came, it coincided with the rise of women's lib. So women were totally excited to see, in what was after all a comic strip type show, a woman [who] actually does things," said Macnee in 1998, when he was promoting his memoir The Avengers and Me. "At that time, to see a women like Diana Rigg, with that beautiful auburn hair throwing men over her shoulder, then tossing her hair out of her eyes, smiling and saying 'Where do we go next?' was highly attractive--particularly to young women. And to young men, particularly with the clothes, because they were... err, revealing and interesting. Suddenly a woman was vibrant in a medium in which [that] normally didn't happen."

The Avengers 50th Anniversary Press Launch from Avengers 50th on Vimeo.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Neil Richardson, "The Riviera Affair"

Song: "The Riviera Affair" by Neil Richardson
Released: 1970
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: When I first saw Ocean's Thirteen, I dug the old-sounding Warner Bros./Village Roadshow logo music.



I wasn't aware that the logo graphics and music were a reference to '70s and '80s TV, in keeping with the film's nostalgia for things like '60s and '70s caper flicks and the camaraderie of the Rat Packers who starred in the original version of Ocean's Eleven (as heard in "You shook Sinatra's hand," the film's frequently repeated line to Al Pacino's villainous character about how much of a backstabbing asshole he's become). I didn't grow up in New York, so I learned on YouTube that the swanky Ocean's Thirteen logo music--"The Riviera Affair," a library music cue written by British composer Neil Richardson, who died in October at the age of 80--was the same instrumental that used to open and close the "4 O'Clock Movie" broadcasts on New York's WOR.



Steven Soderbergh's shout-out to the WOR movie broadcast graphics is the director's way of saying, "Ocean's Thirteen is just like those old, breezy caper flicks that used to turn up at 4:00 on WOR."

Richardson's instrumental was left off the Ocean's Thirteen soundtrack album, but it's part of 1996's Sound Gallery '60s and '70s library music instrumental compilation. An Amazon.com user review of The Sound Gallery sums up "The Riviera Affair" well. "Picture David Janssen and Diana Rigg cruising in a turquoise convertible along the open highway with the wind in their hair and the glorious possibilities of the future before them," says the reviewer. "This will give you just a small idea of how glorious and transcendent this tune is!!"

True, although when I hear "The Riviera Affair" and picture nearly the same thing--a relaxed playa cruising in a turquoise convertible along the open highway with his woman by his side--the twitchy star of the original Fugitive TV series doesn't exactly come to mind.

In 2009, another one of Richardson's loungy library music instrumentals was used to great effect when director Michel Hazanavicius gave ample screen time to Richardson's "Rio Magic" in the French spy spoof sequel OSS 117: Lost In Rio.

All the other "Rock Box" Tracks of the Day from this week:
Iggy and the Stooges, "Search and Destroy"
Raekwon feat. Inspectah Deck, Ghostface Killah and GZA, "Guillotine (Swordz)"
Dinah Washington, "This Bitter Earth"
Earth, Wind & Fire, "Reasons"