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Friday Music Cue: Express Yourself

After I told him Vampire Bill was my ideal man my roommate reminded me of something he'd texted me very late one night--that what I needed was a big man to hold me. When I came across Joe Gordon-Levitt's version of 'Express Yourself' this morning and caught a similar line in Madonna's lyrics.

Got To Give The People, Give The People What They Want.

Typepad blogs list the referring address for visitors, and I’ve discovered that the single biggest tag that drives search engines to Meerkat is 'Joseph Gordon Levitt'. Closely followed by 'Prison Porn'. The combo of Gordon Levitt’s predominantly underage body of work and that factleaves me a little uneasy, but I’m not above exploiting a little light pedophilia for traffic's sake.

The posters for JGL's new film The Lookout caught my eye on the Bowery yesterday. Looks promising, even if the trailer casts it in a way-too backwards narrative light, the most overused trick in the quasi-indie playbook. Director Scott Frank did write Out Of Sight, however, a movie so good that even Jennifer Lopez came off as a credible Fed, as well as delivering the most gorgeously narcotic cinematic pas de deux in recent memory.

JGL looks soulful and raw entirely without cant in this one, as is usual for this anomaly in glossy young Hollywood. Good chin, too.

Palorazzi

Check out the array of new shots on Meerkat’s longtime associate Lorenzo di Flaneur’s flickr page. Lorenzo is the nom de photo of a fellow who’s worked in the indie film scene and camped out at some cool bars and music venues around the world for the last decade plus, leading me to define his job description at one point as “attending every important cocktail party in the world.”  He got friendly with a lot of cool cats along the way and snapped pictures all the time. I’m hereby coining the term ‘Palorazzi’ in reference to Lorenzo, which I define as the taking of photos of celebrated and talented people but  from the perspective of a fellow party-goer than a sweaty shouting man on the other side of the velvet rope. Lest this be confused with something fabricated like the patent unreality of reality TV, homeboy really is pally with a lot of these folks, and as a professional partygoer with an iconic photographer’s eye, you’ll often feel as though you were living his very rock and roll, very glamorous life, too. And he doesn’t discriminate on the basis of fame--to him the go-go boy at Eastern Bloc can be as fascinating as the Oscar nominee (has anyone else noticed the tattoos on Helen Mirren’s hands-very visible as she poses with all the awards she’s picking up lately? Could she get any cooler?). I’m so completely into his vision and am making it a project to promote his work—I’d so much rather see shots of these folk in their natural habitat, drinks in hand, than standing and posing for a bunch of soulless photographers in the employ of Bonnie Fuller. Check out his take on Helen, Parker, Jake, Lina, Madsteez, Antony, JCM, Yoko, and Joe G-L (above).

It's All Connected..

Here’s an interesting chain of connectivity. In the odd, rather brilliant teen-noir film Brick, Lukas Haas (left) plays a sinister Tolkein-loving drug kingpin who styles himself after the star of the 1966 vampire soap Dark Shadows, Barnabas Collins (right). Brick’s lead, one Joseph Gordon Levitt, was actually in a short-lived 1990 revival of Dark Shadows. Which provides an excellent opportunity to post this gratuitous shirtless shot of JGL from Mysterious Skin that I found at CyberZine, a site devoted to screen grabs of guys that skews so young you may go to jail just for visiting it. See you in Sing-Sing!