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| • | The Man Who Turned Blues Into Rock & Roll
Muddy Waters got it right with his anthemic song, ?The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll.? And few figures ever personified that evolutionary link as clearly as Big Joe Turner, the blues shouter?turned?early rock and roll hero, who celebrates a birthday ? it would have been his 102nd ? on May 18. ?Shake, Rattle and Roll,? Turner?s signature 1954 hit, is a crystal clear example of a spirited traditional blues that, with a slamming beat grafted onto it, gets instantly transformed into a new musical form. In Turner?s epochal vocal performance you can hear the blues, boogie-woogie and rhythm-and-blues melding together, announcing that big changes were in the air. A sudden pop star at age 43, the mighty Turner?a mountain of a man with vocal power to match his girth?had already been singing the pants off the blues for decades. Had his career ended in the early 1950s, Turner would still be remembered by aficionados as a vocal titan, a dynamic stylist whose collaborations with legendary pianists including Pete Johnson and Art Tatum, as well as such R&B hits as ?Chains Of Love? and ?Honey Hush? remain classics. But with ?Shake, Rattle and Roll? and a short run of later R&R hits, notably, ?Flip, Flop and Fly? and ?Corrine, Corrina,? Turner became a pioneer of a burgeoning new genre. He was rightfully inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, two years after his death. “Shake, Rattle and Roll” With its earthy lyrics, drums and handclaps pounding out the beat, and full-force vocal from Turner, the hit version is proto-Rock and Roll at its best. “Shake, Rattle and Roll” The swinging lilt of this version suited Big Joe, who grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, a bedrock of jazz and blues in the 1920s and 30s. “Cherry Red” In 1956, Turner recorded his masterful album, The Boss Of the Blues, supported by his longtime partner, pianist Pete Johnson and a host of jazz luminaries. On this remake of an earlier blues hit, 
| | • | Is Star Trek Into Darkness Too Dark?
When I think about it, any worries I might have had about Star Trek Into Darkness didn’t really begin with the announcement of the movie’ title last September, as much as I like to pretend otherwise. I mean, the title is just a little too on the nose, isn’t it? Not only in the way that it seemed to be an all-too-obvious signifier that, Hey, this time out we’re going after the Dark Knight audience, but also that it turned the title into a sentence, and, in the process, reminded the audience of just how weird a title Star Trek actually is. “Trek,” is a word that’s always seemed a bit archaic and old-fashioned, even with “Star” preceding it. But it wasn’t the title that made me worried. All told, it just seemed silly, and a little embarrassing. I was still on board the Into Darkness train with the release of the first teaser trailer, filled with Benedict Cumberbatch’s grumbling monologue, and all those scenes of destruction, and Kirk, Uhura et al looking particularly concerned about everything that was going on. It was, after all, only a minute of footage ? and if things looked particularly grim, isn’t that the point of teasers? To get your hackles raised and your anxiety going? Watching the Enterprise crash into San Francisco Bay made me want to know why, and who, and, most importantly, what happened next. As a teaser, it did its job. No, for whatever reason, it took the second (longer) teaser, released less than two weeks after the first, to make me feel a bit uncertain about Star Trek Into Darkness. Watching the trailer again now, I know exactly what it was that worried me: It’s doing everything it can to impress upon you that things will get sad. Listen to the music, all low, slow and filled with haunted vocals that dull the otherwise exciting visuals. Or the voiceover in the first half of the trailer, which warns Kirk that he’s “gonna get [himself] and everyone under [his] command killed,” while 
| | • | High Five! The Latest K-Pop Trend to Hit the U.S.
As Korean pop music (K-pop)?of which Psy is perhaps the best known example in the U.S.?continues to make inroads with American ears, another popular Asian music-world trend has finally made its way stateside: the “high touch.” The concept is simple enough: Fans, selected via a contest or proof that they purchased an album or random drawings, get to give their K-pop idol a high five. Such events, thought to have originated a few years ago in Japan, can draw tens of thousands of fans. As part of their “LIVE ON EARTH” U.S. tour, the K-pop sextet known as B.A.P hosted high touch events in Los Angeles, San Francisco, D.C. and New York City, which the tour’s organizers say are the first ever held in the United States. The events, which took place alongside concerts, were open to 100 lucky contest winners each?and although the events were more modest in attendance numbers than their analogs in Asia, their impact on the fans was anything but. (MORE: Beyond PSY: 5 Essential K-Pop Tracks) For one thing, many American K-pop fans were introduced to the concept for the first time. A number of entrants for the May 16 event in New York City?even those who had traveled from as far as Puerto Rico and Canada, hoping to meet B.A.P?had never heard of a high touch before. Neither had the tour’s organizers: Verizon has sponsored K-pop tours in honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage for six years now, but the idea for the high touch came from the members of B.A.P themselves. “We thought hard about how to connect with our US fans who always support us from far away. So we decided to do the high touch to allow for a more personal experience,” said B.A.P’s Bang Yong Guk, in a translated statement to TIME. Verizon spokesperson Esmeralda Diaz Cameron says the band had to teach the concert sponsors what a high touch was, but that the appeal of the idea was clear once it was understood: it’s not just that the band gets high fives, she said, 
| | • | The Past: After the Oscar-Winning A Separation Comes the Divorce
When Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) clears customs at de Gaulle Airport, his estranged wife Marie (Bèrénice Bejo) speaks to him urgently on the other side of a glass partition. They communicate with sign language and words the audience can’t hear. If The Past (Le Passé) continued in that fashion for the next two hours, it might be an elaborate tribute to Bejo’s performance in The Artist, the virtually silent comedy that swept the Oscars in 2012. But this is the new drama from Ashgar Farhadi, the Iranian writer-director of A Separation, winner of last year’s other big Academy Award: Best Foreign-Language Feature. It’s very much a reprise of that film’s themes: grownups who tear their marriages apart, and the children who suffer in their wake. (READ: Corliss’s review of A Separation) After A Separation comes the divorce. Amad has returned to Paris, after four years back in Iran, to finalize the dissolution of his marriage to Marie, a pharmacist, so she can wed her current beau Samir (Tahar Rahim), a dry cleaner. However acerbic the Ahmad-Marie relationship must have been ? at the crest of one argument, he asks, “Miss our fights, dear?” ? the family tensions on display in Marie’s sprawling suburban house seem ready to ignite into a Syria-level civil war. Teenage Lucie (Pauline Burlet), Marie’s elder child by her first, Belgian husband, comes home only to stomp up to her room. Her opposition to Marie’s impending marriage are mirrored by Samir’s young son Fouad (Elyes Aguis), who wears his resentment like a conscientious objector’s badge of honor. Only Léa (Jeanne Jestin), Marie’s younger daughter by the Belgian, doesn’t lash out at her keepers. She quietly observes the combat from a neutral corner. The Pearl Harbor equivalent for all these hostilities is Samir’s wife Cécile, in a coma after swallowing detergent in a suicide attempt in his store. She was a chronic depressive, Samir insists ? but what drove her to try killing herself? Had she learned of her husband’s affair with Marie? And if so, how? Did someone tip her off, through a phone call or 
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