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.
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.
1. "Somebody Start a Fight or Something" by TISM (The Green Room with Paul Provenza)
This rousing 2004 track by the Aussie alt-rock band TISM delivers a message of "Drop your pretentious airs and start keeping it real" ("Listen, motherfucker, let me make this clear/I've had your fucking poetry up to here... If I wanted Chekhov, I'd have worn my polo neck"), so it's the perfect theme music for a frank and uncensored Showtime stand-up comic panel show that's the anti-Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen.
In other words, the stand-ups are required to have an actual conversation with each other, instead of pretending they're having a conversation when what they're really doing is just reciting their routines. Moderator Paul Provenza's anti-Comics Unleashed format has resulted in lively and thought-provoking discussions like the one Provenza, Bill Burr, Lizz Winstead, Russell Peters, Colin Quinn, Caroline Rhea and Tony Clifton (!) had about Tracy Morgan's apologies for his homophobic jokes during a recent episode that took place at Montreal's Just for Laughs festival. (Also in that same episode, Peters, an Indian Canadian comic, gives the funniest description of what porn flicks are like in a country where its movie stars can't even kiss onscreen. I can't do Peters' Indian porn joke any justice if I attempt to repeat it, so I won't attempt to.)
During an interview to promote The Green Room, Provenza said one of the purposes of his show is to get stand-ups who are always "on" to leave behind their one-liner comfort zones or stage personas and just be themselves. The frequent archness of the present-day stand-up world is a trend he dislikes:
Many comedians these days "take on characters. It's a lot of winking and nodding. Some comedians almost even apologize for the fact that they're working in the form of comedy, and they make fun of the form as they're doing it. That's the overriding trend. So what you get is people who are not actually talking from the heart. They're always putting some layer of detachment from their real, you know, emotional and intellectual passions."
In other words, he wants them to pull no punches, whether it's onstage or on The Green Room. Somebody start a fight or something.
2. "Yalili Ya Aini" by Jah Wobble's Invaders of the Heart (The Smartest Man in the World)
I first heard this hypnotic 1994 track by former Public Image Ltd bassist Jah Wobble, his band Invaders of the Heart and singer Natacha Atlas (Allmusic calls it "one of the best bits of sexy, North African lurch that Wobble and [guitarist Justin] Adams have ever set to tape") while tuning in to SomaFM's Secret Agent, which has it on constant rotation. So when it wound up as the theme music for comedian Greg Proops' stream-of-consciousness podcast The Smartest Man in the World, I thought, "Sweet! It's that Arabian-sounding chillout joint from Secret Agent with the title that always escapes me."
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."
Whenever I try to finish drawing an arc of The Palace, like during last week and this week, I avoid logging on to the Web for a few days because I find it to be such a distraction. When I did allow myself to log on earlier today, I learned about the Saturday death of British jazz artist John Dankworth, whom I know best for his theme from the rarely rebroadcast first few seasons of The Avengers (back when the show was shot on videotape and was more serious in tone--Dankworth's theme reflected that harder-edged tone--and Emma Peel wasn't around yet to sex up the joint) and his catchy Modesty Blaise theme...
... which I was first exposed to via the Gorillaz/Del tha Funkee Homosapien collab "Rock the House."
One of the greatest compliments a musician can receive is being frequently sampled. Dankworth has been the source of many excellent samples (and what I'm sure are hours of giggles from stoners because of his last name).
One of the books I picked up at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con was an early copy of Viper Comics' The Middleman: The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse, which, according to Middleman creator and Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse co-writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach on his Twitter page earlier this week, "has shipped to the distributor and should hit comic book stores this or next weds."
After JGM wasn't able to film the 13th and final episode of his rejected TV series pitch-turned-Viper comic-turned actual TV series due to budgetary issues, he did what Buffy creator Joss Whedon and Farscape creator Rockne O'Bannon have done with their respective shows after the end of their runs. Like those two cult TV masterminds, JGM decided to pick up where his show left off--in comic form instead of onscreen.
Without giving too much away, The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse is an entertaining and bittersweet farewell to the TV incarnations of the Middleman and his trainee sidekick Wendy Watson (wonderfully brought to life on the show by Matt Keeslar, the most prim and proper action hero on TV since the days when Paul Gross' polite Canadian Mountie neatnik literally cleaned up the streets of Chicago on Due South, and newcomer Natalie Morales, who once called herself "the child that Amanda Peet and Rosario Dawson would have if they could procreate"). But the graphic novel, which JGM co-scripted with his fellow Middleman co-executive producer Hans Beimler, also opens the door for more adventures with the Middleman characters, although if JGM decides to resume the comic, I doubt we'll see them drawn again as Keeslar, Morales and the other actors (in the comic, Wendy is a redhead and is white instead of Latina).
I wasn't familiar with the comic before the TV version premiered on ABC Family last summer, but I instantly became a fan of the show because of its perfectly cast actors and amusing dialogue, which was loaded with pop culture references that were never forced and bizarre-sounding exclamations like "Story of O!" and "Eyes without a face!" For those who have never watched The Middleman--and really ought to now that Shout! Factory has released all 12 wordily titled episodes on DVD--the show is about Wendy, an unemployed art student who becomes the apprentice to a mysterious, Eisenhower jacket-wearing secret agent known as the Middleman, the latest in a long line of agents who take on adversaries other agencies are too chicken to fight, from evil extraterrestrials disguised as boy bands to corporate tycoons with hidden agendas like Manservant Neville (serial guest star Mark Sheppard), a Steve Jobs-esque mastermind with nefarious plans for his iPod-like uMaster product (rhymes with "View-Master").
Superbly illustrated by Armando M. Zanker, The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse pits the Middleman and Dub-Dub against a more-insane-than-usual Manservant Neville and further explores the Middleman's conflicted feelings for Dub-Dub's hot and leggy performance artist best friend Lacey, who was continually referred to by the show's chyrons as "the young, equally photogenic artist whom Wendy shares an illegal sublet with." On the show, the Middleman's love interest started out as yet another annoying Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but both actress Brit Morgan--an interesting cross between a young Frances McDormand and Zooey Deschanel who could have been perfect as a relative of McDormand's mother character and Deschanel's daughter character in Almost Famous--and the show's writers developed the Middleman's biggest admirer into something more nuanced than an MPDG. I usually don't care for the romantic subplots on my favorite shows--I'm not one of those viewers who "squee" over the "shipping" of two characters, and I wish those two slang terms would go away and take the equally grating "bromance" with them. But Lacey's crush on the Middleman--who's attracted to her and shares her love for Randolph Scott westerns, but doesn't want another relationship because of both his loyalty to his job and a rarely discussed previous romance that ended in tragedy--brings some welcome depth to an otherwise lightweight, '60s Avengers-style series.
Speaking of The Avengers--my second favorite spy show, right below Burn Notice--Jeremiah Chechik, who co-produced The Middleman and directed several of its eps, previously made the ill-advised Ralph Fiennes/Uma Thurman feature film version of The Avengers. Chechik was able to do something with The Middleman that he failed to accomplish with his bloated reimagining of Steed and Mrs. Peel: he captured the spirit of the original, lower-budgeted Avengers. There's no sexual heat between the Middleman and Wendy like there was between Steed and Peel (the Middleman views Wendy as the little sister he never had), but the enthusiasm the Middleman and Wendy have for their work is as infectious as it was when that other pairing of "top professional and talented amateur" did their duty for queen and country.
I recommend watching Shout! Factory's Middleman: The Complete Series box set before reading the series finale, which contains tons of callbacks to the show's running gags and makes little sense if you've never seen the show. At Comic-Con, the cast and crew performed the entire novel as a table read (which I wasn't able to catch, but meeting JGM and having him and previous Middleman GN artist Les McClaine sign my copy of The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse compensated for missing the table read). On Facebook, readers won't be able to see this, but here on Blogspot, I'm juxtaposing a Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse moment between the Middleman, Wendy and Ida the android secretary with the table read version of the scene (it takes place between 7:06 and 8:12 on the embed), performed by Keeslar, Morales and Ida's portrayer, Comic-Con audience favorite Mary Pat Gleason. Ida is what you get if you mash up Ray Bradbury's Electric Grandmother with Roz from Monsters, Inc., Blanche Devereaux from The Golden Girls and Joe Flaherty's pothead-hating Harold Weir from Freaks and Geeks ("Go back to Jamaica, greenie!").
