Okay, let’s ditch this boring stuff: Jeffrey Lewis is an underground comic book artist/anti-folk hero who releases his rekkids on Rough Trade and does cool shit like draw comics and write funny folk songs that sound like Jonathan Richman if he had a sizeable package. He also put out an album of Crass covers (TMT Review) (bad ass!) and is releasing a new album called Em Are I sometime in ’09. Oh yeah and he also blogs occasionally for the NY Times and is setting off on a tour of Australia and the works over the next few months, but fuck it -- I’m too lazy to format and post the dates here, so just jump to his MySpace and save us all the trouble, ya knuckleheads!
Phew! On to the interesting bit! So if you didn’t already notice from all the comic talk in that first ’graph, Jeffrey Lewis is a man who loves himself some visual narrative. So fond is he of the graphic stuff that on February 24 Lewis will be giving a lecture on Alan Moore’s um-yeah-it’s-pretty-good-I-guess graphic novel Watchmen at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Now don’t think this will be another one of your Pop Tart-toting, Dragonforce-worshipping buddy’s Mountain Dew-fueled tirades about why Watchmen is one of the most important works of modern fiction and why you should totally read it ASAP before the movie fucking ruins it (even though it is and you should and the movie will almost definitely suck balls). Jeffrey Lewis, on the other hand, knows what the fuck he is talking about. His acclaimed college thesis “The Dual Nature of Apocalypse in Watchmen” serves as the basis of his lecture in addition to his many years of scholarship and study on the book.
So if you happen to be in London town on the 24th, check out his talk and please let this poor Midwesterner know what the hell he talks about. Just make sure you’ve read Watchmen at least once beforehand -- as requested by Lewis -- and I will really appreciate it! Toodles!
