The money will roll right in...

I went to go see "Under the Big Black Sun", the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's exhibit of modern art from 1974-1981 on Saturday. It was a free day for most of Los Angeles' museums, so I figured I would make the most of it with a journey downtown, via train, through the barren wastelands of Downtown LA on the weekend, to Little Tokyo.

Now, with an exhibition named after an album by LA punk band X, and scheduled events involving Henry Rollins and another one involving X performing with the Dead Kennedys and the Avengers, you'd think this would be a very punk-centric exhibit.

Well, actually, if you know much about punk, the fact that MOCA is honoring the LA arts scene in the punk era with performances by two SAN FRANCISCAN punk bands would probably be a warning that we're going to get a very selective and self-serving exhibit.

And that's exactly what we get. The main portion of the exhibit is devoted to the expected modern art conceptual pieces, recordings of performance art and video pieces, strange abstract stuff, and borderline tongue-in-cheek anthropological photography.

And then, shoved into two rooms in the very back of the building, hidden behind an unrelated exhibition on Theaster Gates and Civil Rights, are the majority of the punk pieces.

Which amount to two Gary Panter pieces, some random collective propaganda art (for benefits or protests, etc.) and a wall of Raymond Pettibon art.

So MOCA has basically segregated the punk rock culture items from the rest of the modern art. And I don't totally blame them.

Because while one or two pieces of the main exhibit are "creative" or "interesting", most of it disappeared from my mind the instant I walked away. But the Gary Panter art and the Raymond Pettibon art stuck. Pettibon's pop-art/Chick-tract/comic book-damaged art especially is a million times more shocking, scary and witty than anything in the rest of the exhibit. If you put any Raymond Pettibon flyer next to a series of matches placed on top of quarters representing the Soviet armored cavalry (no, I'm not joking), I doubt you'd really care about the latter.

And, strangely enough, MOCA must realize what the real draw is, because in addition to a marketing campaign trying to springboard off of punk, 9/10ths of the gift shop is given over to punk memorabilia. You don't see any coffee table books about left-wing post-modernists who white out newspaper headlines or take blurry stills from inaugural videos. You see copies of Black Flag's discography and oral histories of punk.

I don't think there's any question that punk is an art form, not a revolution, at this point. But it's hilarious that, even as co-opted and compromised as it is, it still has more lifeblood than your average piece of contemporary art.

Let a Thousand Audrey 2s Bloom...

Idea 1: The American film industry's best hope is a hundred modern-day Roger Cormans: profit-minded entrepreneurs with some artistic curiousity and cost-motivated desire to seek out and train new talent.

Idea 2: Perhaps the American film industry stands as the final titan of America's monolithic industries. I think it also the one that that has experienced the least government interference and/or support. Hollywood as the next Detroit?

Idea 3: Hollywood's creative destruction and the rise of the modern Cormans would be capitalism perfected. The pro-business, pro-family wing of the conservatives will be dismayed by this exercise of capitalism. The aesthetic/creative wing of the modern left will face incredible discomfort at the products.

I promise I will actually explicate and expand on these. But for now, whet your appetite with an article that points out how Corman was an auteur and craftsman in one of his most atypical films.

The geeks were right

Seriously, Richard Corliss? Netflix is ruining the movie-watching community?

He does remember that most of us were going to Blockbuster or Hollywood Video or some other awful video store which carried 50 copies of the latest blockbuster (with a little b) and maybe one copy of Gone With the Wind, if you were lucky? Right?

I mean, growing up in Raleigh, we didn't have a trendy place like Kim's Video to go to. My video store never even carried a copy of The Taking of Pelham 123.

Corliss is right that wait times suck, and Netflix's recommendation software isn't as good as a knowledgeable video clerk. But then again, in my memories of Blockbuster, you were lucky if there were two guys on register on a Friday night and a third person working the floor. That's awful customer service. Good luck getting out in 10 minutes with the movie you wanted, let alone getting recommendations!

I don't want to just snark Mr. Corliss. There are probably some cool video stores driven out of business by Netflix. But 99% of the places were crappy, ill-stocked chains that wanted to sell you over-priced popcorn and never carried a video that wasn't put out by a major studio.

And the thing is, I've been learning a lot about movies from the film blogosphere, by people not motivated by the urge to move product, who aren't in a hurry to get me out so they can serve someone else. Most of the people who blog about movies that I read care about more than the latest blockbuster and they want to have a conversation. Isn't that the kind of community that Richard Corliss misses?