Archive for April 12th, 2007

EXCELSIOR!!!

And Welcome to the introduction to Uncoolkids’ weekly comic book geek-out, hosted by your own Geek on the Street.

I must preface this with a bias warning: I am a Marvel Comics partisan. Marvel, in it’s recent format, is much more real-world that DC.

Where DC Comics relies mostly on mythos, cosmic and intergalactic conflicts and mining the same handful of heroes for as many knock-off characters as possible (The Superman “family” the Batman “family” the Green Lantern “Corps.” The same rehash since the 1940’s.)

Marvel, however, has stood on and expanded brilliantly from the four pillars of Stan Lee since the 1960’s: (Fantastic Four, X-men, Avengers and Spider-man) and focusses on the character in comics, and how these super-powered beings fit into a world of politics, militarism, prejudice, vulnerability, and the basic ethical dilemas of power vs responsibility.

I’ve been a comic book stalwart since my tweens, in the era of the deeply psychological Spectacular Spider-man and Jim Lee’s X-men, but the late nineties were a sad, sorry downhill spiral for Marvel, A.K.A. “The House of Ideas” storylines bogged down with too much drama, over-hyped storylines and the endless piling up of unanswered mysteries.

After a nearly catastrophic downturn right about millenium-time, Marvel got serious about revamping its image, just in time for the blockbuster hit X-men. All glossy pages; condensed, easy to follow storylines; dialouge that you’d expect from a prime-time hit TV show, rather than a Sunday afternoon B-movie and: “previously in” page before each issue, to help neophytes learn the ropes.

And so, each weekly “issue” of PANELGEEK will have two features:

ONE: A piece about what’s going on in comics now (or an editorial)

TWO: PANELGEEK’S Book of the week (either a particular issue, or a TPB)

STARTING TOMORROW: PANELGEEK #1: Know your Comic Shops, and Civil War. . .

It’s fitting that Thurston Moore’s first solo exhibition, Street Mouth, is debuting directly across from the Knitting Factory, at KS Art. As it turns out, the Sonic Youth front man brings the same DIY attitude to his art that made him famous at the experimental-rock club.

In his own words, Moore is “utilizing some kind of punk Photoshop method” to make collages that showcase New York’s underground scene. Cut-and-paste style, he rips up vintage newspapers from the 1970s, fastening them alongside press photos and overlapping those with personal letters, without ever making a piece look cluttered. News clippings that could have easily been dumped in yesteryear’s trash suddenly become Art in the hands of someone infatuated with counterculture New York.

“I am basing the work on exercises I did as a teenager cutting out pictures from Rock Scene, Creem and Circus magazines and collaging them as an obsessive diarist,” says Moore. You can almost picture a pre-Sonic Youth Thurston Moore, awkward and uncool, rifling through stacks of magazines for the latest pictures of his favorite bands in hopes of someday making his own rock-star dreams come true.

In large (24 X 21 1/4 inches) collages, Moore the devoted rock fan creates montages of Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, the Ramones, and Patti Smith. He pairs his rock iconography with images of Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and Kathy Acker, nodding his head to the fact these downtown musicians hung out with the great writers and artists of their era. In places like St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery and Max’s Kansas City, the subterranean elite united, riffing off each other’s work and inspiring each other.

Now, all grown up and famous, Moore says, “I can actually drop myself and other referentials into the pieces [and it] has allowed me (starting) at age 47 to create an ongoing open-heart bio-historagophy.” The Sonic Youth clippings and personal letters that Moore pastes into his collages do not feel self-promoting. Rather, they seem like another page torn out of the collage-filled diary from his teenage years. He comes across as posing to be cool but really being homespun dorky in his letters, writing, “I’m going to the rodeo. I just had some fried grits, bacon and root beer. . . . I’ve been doing some boss water skiing.” Even placing Sonic Youth within the context of such legends as the Velvet Underground seems more like a kid sticking his unknown, local band’s bumper sticker on his guitar case next to famous acts’ professional stickers than an egotistic display of stardom. Despite being one of the most influential bands on the scene, Sonic Youth and its front man seem to stay true to their roots.

Street Mouth opened last week to a large crowd. “His mom even came,” said Kerry Schuss, owner and director of KS Art. Schuss assures the readers of Uncool Kids that he did not choose to exhibit Moore’s work simply because he’s a famous musician. He likes Moore’s collages and gave him a solo show after first showing his work alongside Jocko Weyland in 2005.

By now, Moore is no stranger to the art world.
This past February Moore curated Free Living Papers, an exhibit focused on the same sort of magazines that inspired his own collages. Meanwhile, his wife and band mate, Kim Gordon, is an artist with her own exhibit, Dead Already, on display this month.

Street Mouth will be on display at KS Art (73 Leonard Street, NYC) through May 12. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 - 6:00. Admission is free.

It’s exciting to see a young actor grow from childhood sitcoms to serious films, and I’m proud of the strong choices that Joseph Gordon Levitt is making.

From his hillarious romps with his fellow covert aliens in 3rd Rock from the Sun to his intensely powerful turn in the High School Noir film Brick, which I consider the sleeper of 2006.

And now he continues on that trend with the small-town, lonely winter bank heist film The Lookout

The film begins with beautiful tragedy. Gorgeous teens on prom night, driving down farm roads in search of a specific type of beauty that can only be found in small farm towns. Then tragedy strikes.

Chris Pratt, played by Levitt is now, four years later, still re-learning basic sequential functions like remembering to grind the coffee before making it, and where to find, (and how to use, and what the hell is a. . .) can opener. He’s helped along with his clever, blind roommate Lewis, played by the always wry and brilliant Jeff Daniels.

Chris also works as the night custodian of the local bank. Which is just a coincidental convenience for the local seductively charming bad-boy. Gary

The bank-heist formula is familiar: patsy gets sucked in by Gary’s charisma. As well as the chance to somehow get out of this “trap” that the accident put him in, (because money solves everything. . .) and of course, the chance to be “cool” again.

The tender folds of a former stripper named Luvlee Lemons (named WHAT? hahaha) of course helped as well.

The bank heist unfolds as movie bank heists often do, and the writer/director Scott Frank doesn’t score any major points in that department. He really shines in his artistry in revealling how this flawed man, struggling just to keep up with the world and weighted down by his guilt can rise to the call of heroism.

The Lookout is a beautifully crafted and magnificently acted, if predictable film. In the deluge of celluloid shit that comes out in theaters from January through March, The Lookout might just be the first good film of 2007.

Although. . . if you’ve seen Momento, as I’m guessing Mr. Frank has many, many times. . . well, I’m just saying you might also experience a strong sense of Deja Vu. . .