Ken Tucker’s Pop Culture

For the immediate future, all blogging will be done, guaranteed almost daily, from

Ken Tucker’s Watching TV

http://watching-tv.ew.com/

Also, for more Tucker writing on different subjects, go to my Best American Poetry blog :

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/ken_tucker/

And my Facebook page for links to my music reviews for NPR’s “Fresh Air with Terry Gross.”

Thank you.

Ken

It’s nice to have one’s prose appreciated by both the Best American poetry blog, and, now, England’s Guardian newpaper.

Went to see “Iron Man” this weekend, and liked it a lot more than I expected. One big reason? It had not just laughs and comic-geek thrills, but real, first-rate, non-F/X… acting! When Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark pulls Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts out onto the dancefloor for a little dipping and cooing, the romantic-comedy byplay is superb.
Which made me connect a few movie-industry dots. Hey, remember the whining about the last Oscar telecast, with its low-wattage star vehicles and lower ratings, and all the hand-wringing the media, including EW, did about how to improve the Oscars?
Here’s a thought. Hey, Hollywood and the Motion Picture Academy: Take a closer squint at the big summer movies. Take them seriously. As far as I’m concerned, Downey’s performance should go on any short-list that anyone draws up of potential Oscar nominees.
Oh, and another thought. “Iron Man” at my multiplex was preceded by a trailer for “The Dark Knight.” And if Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker is as good as these clips suggest—and my brain starts bubbling every time I see his deliriously-committed, smeared-make-up personification of pure, nut-job Evilness—then we’ve got a potential Best Supporting Actor nominee that will be much more than just a sentimental gesture to a cherished, departed actor.
“Iron Man “and “The Dark Knight” as Oscar-worthy—think about it… seriously.

I was very sorry to read of the death of Dave Stevens, a wonderfully sly, witty artist best known for his comic book creation The Rocketeer. He died at age 52 of leukemia.

Stevens’ Rocketeer, a super-hero homage that featured lovely, meticulous color drawings of 1930s Los Angeles, was made into an earnest 1991 movie starring Billy (then “Bill”) Campbell. “Earnest” was not an adjective otherwise applicable to Stevens wily art. His Rocketeer comic books were small, perfect, and original creations. It told tales of Cliff Secord, a stunt pilot who happens upon a jet-pack; when strapped on his back, he zoomed into the air as the helmeted Rocketeer. Cliff’s love life was centered on Jenny, a wide-eyed innocent with curves that didn’t quit.

It was his drawing of women—lushly proportioned, provocatively posed, sometimes scantily-dressed—that gave Stevens cult status. Well, that and his notorious perfectionism, which never allowed him to churn out enough work to make him well-known to a mass audience. (Stevens, living in the belly of the beast, also did storyboard work for Hollywood movies, including “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”) But he was one of the most imaginative—and last—practitioners of what comic nerds call “good girl art,” non-porn pictures of stylized-sexy women.

One of Stevens’ chief inspirations was Bettie Page, whom Stevens admired long before the establishment Hollywood film industry and Gretchen Mol got to her. Page’s innocent sex-kitten poses were exactly the sort of sensuality Stevens raised a notch in his meticulously rendered drawings and paintings. He drew scores of variations on Bettie Page-like women. Certainly The Rocketeer’s Jenny was a Bettie homage. When it was announced that Disney had cast Jennifer Connolly as Bettie in the Rocketeer movie, it sounded like a great idea—the Connolly of that era was just the right physical “type” for Betty, but the movie, compromised as family fare, never hinted at the clever naughtiness Stevens maintained throughout his art career.

Is it disrespectful to say that Stevens was a first-rate artist whose chief motivation was not money, but horniness? I think not. By all accounts–and certainly from the very brief professional correspondence we had when I lived in L.A. in the 1980s—Stevens was a polite, modest man who seemed constantly surprised that other people admired his skill. That he managed to combine the artful with the disreputable in his work is one mark of an original pop-culture creator, and Dave Stevens persued his interests with the assiduousness and unceasing vitality of a first-rate artist by any definition.

1. Website Of The Week: undercoverblackman.blogspot.com I’m embarrassed to say I wasn’t until recently aware of this terrific website overseen by the first-rate TV writer (NYPD Blue, Kingpin) and journalist David Mills. Mills discusses politics and music (okay, we share an obsession with George Clinton’s P-Funk, and the archives to Mills’ old fanzine “Uncut Funk” are worth bookmarking alone). And be sure to contribute to his regular feature, “Misidentified Black Person,” which calls out media outlets who regularly cannot, as he puts it, “tell black people apart.” Even really famous ones. Check it out.

2. Radical Politics Are Juicy in “Eat The Document,” by Dana Spiotta (Scribner paperback) I just caught up with one of the best novels of 2006: Spiotta’s tale of early-1970s radicals who commit crimes in the name of revolution, go underground, build new identities, and inevitably suffer for it. This scenario has been told many times in fiction and non-fiction, but not with Spiotta’s remarkable gift for period detail and clear-eyed lack of sentimentality. I loved the late Abbie Hoffman, but do not, as his book title had it, “Steal This Book”: Buy it, now.

3. Most Artful Super-Hero Comic of the Month: Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil (DC) In the first part of this four-issue miniseries, writer-artist Jeff Smith has re-told the origin of the classic old superhero Captain Marvel and his not-so-secret identity, the little boy Billy Batson, and in the process done something notable: Smith has created a comic book that can be savored and admired by everyone from kids to the most sophisticated graphic-novel devotee.

4. Finally, Stuff To Watch on PBS: Frontline’s “News War” (Tues., 9 p.m.) and Independent Lens’ “Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes” (Tues., 10 p.m.) As PBS continues its steady, wholly unnecessary slide into utter irrelevance (my truncated advice to the network: grow a spine), Frontline remains its sole beacon of consistently adventurous programming. This week, Frontline continues its acerbic four-part examination of the mostly-sorry state of the press as it covered our entry and continued involvement in the Iraq war and the government’s resistance to allowing the press to do its job. The far more uneven Independent Lens series follows Frontline in most markets with a fascinating hour exploring everything from the glorious verbal and musical creativity to the woeful misogyny and homophobia that remains the genre’s vexed paradox.

5. Power Pop Song Of The Month, Maybe The Year: “I’m A Tool For You” on Jeff Murphy’s Cantilever (BlackVinyl) Murphy, one-third of the legendary 70s-80s-90s power-pop trio Shoes, has released his first solo album, and begins it with this glorious instant-classic, an irresistible proclamation of love with chiming harmonies and guitars, and propulsive drumming; all played and produced by Murphy himself.

[As always, this and other 5 Reasons columns can be read on EW.com]–Ken