Requiem for a Geek-Out...

It's all well and good being a geek these days. It's easy for you young folk. See, nerd is now the new cool, so it's hip to be into all kinds of genre stuff, and know your Boushh from your Bossk.

But it was not always so.

No, there was a time when being a geek meant leading a solitary, shunned existence on the periphery of adolescent society. When roleplaying and quoting Dr. Who episodes made you a social pariah. In those days, it was something to rejoice about whenever you came across others who shared your interests, people you could commune with and debate the weighty issues, like who was the coolest X-Man and whether or not Ricardo Montalban wore a fake rubber chest in Wrath of Khan. These things were important to you, and if you met the rare other person to whom they were also important...well, then that person was cool in your book.

Those days are gone now, and yet I couldn't help but be reminded of them thanks to the experience of discovering and taking part in an amazing phenomenon known as Kevin Geeks Out. The brainchild of writer/comedian Kevin Maher, co-produced by Meg Sweeney Lawless and Jay Stern, Kevin Geeks Out was a nearly monthly multimedia extravaganza paying tribute to all sorts of themes in genre entertainment. Held at Manhattan's 92YTribeca, the comedy-variety clip show devoted whole evenings to Vincent Price, werewolves, sharks, robots, monkeys, Frankenstein, superheroes, the post-apocalypse, and so much more. And now it's over.

Last Friday night marked the final edition of Kevin Geeks Out, with a special show that was all about aliens. And just as I had the other times I got to experience it, I felt right at home. It was that same feeling from back in high school, meeting the kid in the cafeteria with a bootleg VHS of Slime City tucked under his arm. As my wife looked around the darkened theater at her first and final KGO, she said it best: "Yep, these are definitely your people!" And they were.

It saddens me to have discovered KGO so late in the game, only having the opportunity to catch three of the 23 events presented since the whole thing started in January 2008. And yet I'm glad I got to enjoy it before it disappeared. I'm especially glad I got to enjoy it with other very cool people, some of whom I previously knew only as a name on a computer screen, others whom I didn't know at all: folks like Tenebrous Kate, Emily Intravia, Dylan Santurri & Christine Makepeace, Matt Glasson, Heather Buckley and others.

Being a fellow family man, similarly forced to balance home life and a real-life job with a hungry compulsion to discuss the career of Gil Gerard, I completely relate to Kevin's tough decision to bring the curtain down on the Geek-Outs. But it doesn't mean I have to be happy about it. At least I got one last night full of Mac & Me clips and green cupcakes, got to introduce the Mrs. to the KGO phenom, and also got to close out the show by impersonating an FBI agent and escorting Kevin from the theater for the unlawful exhibition of copyrighted material...

So here's to cherishing the opportunity to get together with like-minded fans and have so much fun with the stuff we all love. It might be cool to like all this stuff now, but for all those who remember when it wasn't, thank you Kevin, for giving us a place to geek out among friends.

NYC Nerds Take Note! The Ultimate Geek Event Returns This Friday...

I've made it my pet project in recent months to help spread the word about Kevin Geeks Out! to all fans of horror and genre entertainment in general living in the approximate vicinity of New York City. If you haven't checked it out yet, you're doing yourself a grave disservice--but one which you will have the opportunity to amend this coming Friday. That's because 92Y Tribeca is once again hosting the hilarious Kevin Maher's masterfully funny (and informative!) multimedia extravaganza. Much like Moses, I may not be getting down there with you (thankfully due to family obligations and not being smitten by the hand of God), but that's no reason why you can't enter the geek Promised Land.

This time out, it's the "April All-Stars" edition of Kevin Geeks Out!, which means it'll be a veritable smorgasbord of delightful esoterica. Oscar-nominated screenwriter Will Rokos will take you through a scene from Monster's Ball, from script to screen. Cartoonist R. Sikoryak will act out scenes from his Golden Age comics/English Lit. mash-up, Masterpiece Comics (which I must own pronto). Cinema Journal editor Heather Hendershot will give a presentation entitled "Don Knotts: Reluctant Sex Object", which, as far as I'm concerned, defines the phrase "worth the price of admission." Jay Ruttenberg of TimeOut New York will explain why Billy Madison is the greatest comedy ever made. All this, plus tasty treats, Jesus vs. Magneto, and much, much more.

The show is currently half-sold, and tickets go for a piddling $10, so get yourself over to the Kevin Geeks Out! page at the 92Y Tribeca website and snag yourself a seat before it's too late. I'm currently in a state of angst over having to miss this one, so a bunch of you will just have to go and let me know how it was. Worst case scenario, you'll at least get to meet the terminally cool Tenebrous Kate, who will be on-hand for all the shenanigans.

Past Kevin Geeks Out! reviews:

• The Future!
• Sharks!

Shark Shenanigans at 92Y Tribeca!

Y'all know me... Know how I earn a livin'... Well, not actually a living--more like a time-consuming hobby/obsession. But be that as it may, let me just say that I was as pleased as Jabberjaw with a brand new drum set when I learned that 92Y Tribeca's amazingly hysterical film-clip/variety series "Kevin Geeks Out" would be using a shark theme for its next show. Some folks might remember how I extolled the virtues of Kevin Geeks Out About the Future last January, and I was supremely bummed that I could not join in the simian hijinks last month at Kevin Geeks Out About Monkeys. But I'm happy to report that spending an evening in NYC cinematically swimming with the sharks has more than made up for it.

I can honestly say that I never truly comprehended what a vast and varied (well, maybe not terribly varied) subgenre the whole "sharxploitation" thing was (new pop culture term?) But thanks to Emmy-nominated TV writer Kevin Maher and his co-host, writer/director Matt Glasson, I now grasp more about the breadth of shark cinema than I previously thought possible.

The event was timed at precisely 124 minutes--the exact running time of the original Jaws. How's that for dedication? And although that might seem like a long time for a clip show, Kevin and company filled every moment with aquatic predatory madness to such a degree that not one person would have dared question the decision. For instance, we learned all about one of the ultimate "what-ifs" of movie history--a John Hughes-scripted (!!) 1980s parody of Jaws that never came to be. We got to see sharks fighting Batman (shark-repellent bat-spray, anyone?), giant alligators, giant apes, and yes, zombies (the infamous underwater fight scene actually got the loudest cheer from the crowd, much to this blogger's delight.)

New Yorker cartoonist Karen Sneider regaled us with a true romance comic strip of unrequited shark/human love. Matt lovingly detailed the sordid history of the Italian movie industry's relentless attempts to shamelessly rip off Jaws, including screening a super-rare bit of footage (courtesy Tenebrous Kate) from the most blatant of all Jaws copycats, Enzo Castellari's Great White, a movie whose very existence was almost completely stamped out by Universal.

If it was even tangentially shark-related, it was referenced in this exhaustive tribute to maneaters at the movies, from the early days of pre-Jaws cinema, through Spielberg's mega-blockbuster and its many imitators, through the Jaws sequels, and right up through the modern era of CGI sharkitude. Throw in Scatman Crothers, the Olsen twins and Mario Van Peebles, and you can begin to understand the magnificence that was on display. Oh, and did I mention that all audience members received an authentic 1978 Jaws 2 trading card? Because we did.

In keeping with the tradition of themed treats, this time around we all got delicious shark cupcakes, made by artist/blogger Sara Reiss. Unlike with the Dippin' Dots of last time, I was not sent home with a giant styrofoam container of cupcakes; but that was a disappointment I was willing to bear. After all, there were so many other incidental joys throughout the evening. Kevin's Quint costume, for example (although a recreation of the U.S.S. Indianapolis speech would've been appreciated); or witnessing Matt debating with Dread Central's Heather Buckley as to whether John Landis killed Vic Morrow. If these aren't reasons to sojourn hundreds of miles from the soil of my homeland in southwestern Connecticut, I don't know what would be.

The best thing about the Kevin Geeks Out series is that it's a bona fide underground New York fandom phenom growing larger and larger via word-of-mouth. I'm not kidding when I say that it was significantly tougher scoring a ticket this time around than it was two months ago! And I'm sure it's only going to get tougher, so if you're in the NYC area and you'd like to be a part of this completely unique genre geekfest, head to the 92Y Tribeca website and secure tickets to the next event. It's billed as Kevin Geeks Out: April All-Stars!--and while it's not fully clear yet what this entails, I do know that Don Knotts will be prominently featured. And that's really all I need to know.

Fun with the Post-Apocalypse!!

Just when I thought there were no more reasons for me to feel superior and arrogant as a native New Yorker, along comes the Kevin Geeks Out series at the 92Y Tribeca in downtown Manhattan. A very unique comedy-variety film clip show, it was first brought to my attention back in October by Tenebrous Kate of Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire, back when Emmy-nominated comedy writer Kevin Maher was hosting an installment of Kevin Geeks Out pertaining to Vincent Price.

Sadly, I couldn't make it to that particular event, but I did leave my suburban stronghold last night to at last take in the majesty that is Kevin Geeks Out. The subject of last night's event: Visions of the Future! And let me tell you, I never realized the future could be so hysterically funny.



Dressed as Orson Welles from when he narrated the 1981 Nostradamus "documentary" The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, Kevin regaled the unsuspecting audience with a series of vintage film clips, and brilliant presenters who walked us through various bizarre interpretations of the future from pop culture past, including lots and lots of stuff about the world being destroyed by nuclear war. In fact, Kevin's co-host, Scott Christian Carr, is an award-winning author and filmmaker whose favorite theme is the post-apocalypse.

What really got me down to Tribeca was the participation of Kate herself, who introduced some inspiredly awful clips from the Italian post-apocalypse cheese-fest The New Barbarians, featuring Fred "The Hammer" Williamson and that little boy from The House by the Cemetery. Clearly I need to track this film down post-haste and watch it from beginning to end.

But we also got Daily Show writer Elliott Kalan taking us through his own personal obsession, the 1939 World's Fair, complete with stories from his own grandmother, who attended the event. This fascinated me very greatly, as I too, had always heard the stories of this legendary futurist extravaganza, and even own an authentic collector's coin from the exhibition given to me by my grandfather.

Plus, Popular Mechanics technology editor Seth Porges was a riot dissecting his periodical's woefully inadequate attempts to predict the future over the past 100+ years. Real-life psychic Jane Doherty enthralled the crowd with some creepy Criswell-like predictions of what is to come (woman president in 2020, and a vegetarian fast food chain by 2015, who knew?) And of course, we learned all about the sad saga of Electro the smoking robot (pictured at top).

And there was much more, including perhaps most importantly of all, generous servings of Dippin' Dots, the Ice Cream of the Future, for everyone on-hand. So generous, in fact, that I was actually given the rest of the unconsumed Dippin' Dots to take home to my appreciative kids in a giant styrofoam case filled with dry ice. Said case was later mistaken for a container of body parts by a group of inebriated party-goers who spotted me walking back to my car. To prove them wrong, I happily shared my Dippin' Dots with said drunken revelers before disappearing into the night, the mysterious Dippin' Dots Guy, as I'm sure they'll forever remember me...

But back to Kevin Geeks Out. If you happen to be in the NYC area, I implore you to check this show out. You can find out more about it on the 92Y Tribeca website, where you will also learn that Kevin's next installment, Kevin Geeks Out About... Monkeys!, is coming up next month. Judging by the trailer alone, I will say it's a safe bet I will be there again. I had a blast watching the brilliant Kate do her thing, and also enjoyed the company of Emily I. from The Deadly Doll's House of Horror Nonsense, as well as Dylan and Christine of Paracinema Magazine. In short, a splendid time was had by all, and I look forward to geeking out with Kevin more... in the future!