MUSIC

Kathryn Calder, junior New Pornographer and purveyor of souped-up cuddle pop, is at Iota tonight with Himalayan Bear. 8:30 p.m. $12.

Local blog All Things Go's latest All Things Gold Night includes British synth-soul monsters Monarchy, British nu-disco bliss dispenser Edwin van Cleef, NYC nature-pop kids Xylos, and Philly fukt-pop DJ Xaphoon Jones. 9 p.m. $10.

THEATER

Data analysis plus improv! Make sure you come with a smartphone or something. E-Geaux (Beta) has shows at 7 and 9 p.m. tonight at Artisphere. $15. Read our Fringe & Purge review!

The genius of the Muppets has always been the show’s ability to cut its gee-whizness with winking self-deprecation and a hint of cynicism. The somewhat insufferable Kermit the Frog has his rainbow-connectedness karate-chopped by an always-insufferable but realist Miss Piggy. Fozzie Bear and his terrible jokes are heckled by cranky balcony-dwellers Statler and Waldorf. And in the new film The Muppets, chickens sing — to Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You.”

Resuscitated by lifelong fan Jason Segel, who co-wrote and stars in the film, the Muppets are back to win over a new generation of fans. No, they won’t get the jokes about Benson or Tab, and they probably won’t recognize Mickey Rooney or Dave Grohl (the latter winning Coolest Cameo Ever). In fact, much of the script’s dry humor will go over little ones’ heads, such as Amy Adams playing an elementary-school teacher who heads an auto-mechanics class (“And that’s how you fix a 12-volt starter!”) or when her character, Mary, says when the inevitable conflict is introduced, “This is going to be a really short movie.”

And Los Angeles, where Segel’s big-kid Gary, his girlfriend, Mary, and his Muppet brother, Walter, go for vacation? It’s not quite Tinseltown but a city alight with police sirens. There’s even a barbershop-quartet performance of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” (Hard to imagine Courtney Love giving the go-ahead, but it must have happened.)

There’s gotta be a good-versus-evil angle, of course, and in this case it’s saving the dilapidated Muppet Studios from an oil baron (Chris Cooper) who says he’s going to turn the place into a museum but really plans to drill, baby, drill. (As the character, who embarrassingly raps in one of the film’s more misguided numbers, would say, “Maniacal laugh, maniacal laugh.”) So the Muppets, now spread all over the world pursuing different careers, must regroup to put on a last-ditch telethon show. (Kermit and Gary et al. gather a couple of the crew before Kermit’s helper robot says, “May I suggest we save time and pick up the rest of the Muppets using a montage?”)

Though there are multiple setbacks, the show eventually comes together, and when the Muppet theme song is finally played — well, members of a certain generation may feel a little tingle if not a happy tear. It’s no spoiler to say the telethon is a triumph, as is the movie itself: Segel’s pitch-perfect in his gee-whiz performance (though Adams is underused), he’s written the Muppets true to their characters, and every sentimentality is counterbalanced with a hit of dry wit. Even Statler and Waldorf would approve.

Roger Langridge

Washington City Paper: What type of comic work or cartooning do you do?

Roger Langridge: Mainly I write and draw funny comic books intended for a general audience, which is to say an audience consisting of both kids and adults, although over the past couple of years I've dabbled in writing some more straightforward adventure stories for other artists to draw.

WCP: What work are you best-known for?

RL: Over the last couple of years my profile got a bit of a boost due to my involvement with the Muppet Show Comic Book and Marvel's Thor the Mighty Avenger, so I guess it's probably those two these days. Before that, I guess it would have been my self-published comic book Fred the Clown.

WCP: How do you do it? Traditional pen and ink, computer or a combination?

RL: A bit of both. Although I still draw everything in pencil and I still ink with a brush, there are a few more steps these days where the computer is involved, as my pencils are very small and I blow them up to ink them, printing them out from the computer in light blue so the pencils won't reproduce. And I'm lately toying with a few pieces created entirely digitally, just to see if I can do it as much as anything, though I don't see myself giving up paper and ink any time soon.

WCP: Can you tell us a little about your books that you'll have with you at SPX?

RL: I'll be there with Boom! Studios, who will be launching a collection of older material of mine called The Show Must Go On. I'll also have copies of the preview issue of my new series, Snarked!, and I believe there'll be a limited-edition Snarked! print available as well.

WCP: You've attended the Small Press Expo in the past—do you have any thoughts about your experience?

RL: I've attended a bunch of times in the past, and it's always a fun show. It's a nice size, great atmosphere, not too big, very comics-focused (which is not something you can take for granted these days), and you get a great mix of established professionals and hobbyists and everything in between. And there are always tons of great books there that you can't get anywhere else; the minicomics alone usually double the weight of my luggage.

WCP: What are you looking forward to buying or seeing or doing for this year's event? Or who do you want to see, to catch up on old times, or to have a fanboy/girl experience?

RL: I'm looking forward to seeing a bunch of people I only ever see when I attend a show in the US, as I'm schlepping over from London, UK for this. I've been traveling for the past several weeks, so I'm not 100% caught up on everyone who's going to be there, but I know there'll be plenty of friends to catch up with.

WCP: What do you think will be the future of your field?

RL: It's hard to say right now because everything's in such a state of flux. If I had to take a wild guess, I'd say Marvel and DC will switch to movies, TV and merchandising entirely and let their print departments quietly die away, leaving the medium to those of us who actually regard the comics as the point, the end product, rather than a stepping stone to other media. And we'll watch our readers grow old and die, leaving comics with the kind of audience numbers poetry now enjoys (not that that will stop us!), with the exception of a few wildly successful webcomics, which seem to be to the current generation what newspaper strips were to our grandparents.

WCP: Do you have a website or blog?

RL: Yes I do! You can find me at http://www.hotelfred.com

The Small Press Expo takes place 11 am–7 p.m. Sept. 10 and noon–6 p.m. Sept. 11 at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center, 5701 Marinelli Road, Bethesda. $10-$15. spxpo.com.

Fresh off detonating an n-bomb and other ordnance in an interview with Playboy, John Mayer descended into the bosom of Obama’s Post-Racial America to play a two-hour gig at the Verizon Center Saturday. In a remarkable show of restraint, the embattled musician managed to limit his word vomit to innocuous musings about how he's thinking about putting all his money toward inventing a “heli-boat.” WaPo calls Mayer’s performance self-consciously “G-Rated”—which could also describe its write-up, in which an allusion to the musician’s use of the pre-censored word “a-hole” in a recent Twitter post was redacted in favor of “[jerk].” Family paper and all.

Mayer’s been uncharacteristically reticent on Twitter since. Not so WCP alum Mike Riggs, who tweeted that the opener, Michael Franti & Spearhead, sounded worse than a nearby group of pre-teen girls howling “Happy Birthday.” See, John? It is possible to be arch without offending entire populations of people.

Speaking of racial insensitivity, you may recall a few months ago we cited a Mental_Floss item about discarded Muppets characters, which included Roosevelt Franklin, the black muppet who taught kids about the geography of Africa. Well! Taking a cue from the Potter Puppet Pals, Jim Henson’s children are now hoping to go viral with YouTube covers of classic rock numbers, WaPo reports. Happily, these videos are not racist but merely insufferable.

After the jump: Michael Jackson, Avatar, slug porn, and other words that come up on auto-fill whenever I use Internet on my roommate’s computer.

Speaking of YouTube, Idolator points out this gem from Brazil. Suck it, Daft Hands!

Speaking of sucking it, check out this slug porn! OMG, they do it just like in Avatar!

Speaking of Avatar, The Hurt Locker scored a few more pre-Oscar points against James Cameron’s phantasmallegorical masterwork by receiving copious bling from the Writer’s Guild and BAFTA. Hey, did you guys know Kathryn Bigelow and Cameron used to be married? Why isn’t the media covering that angle with sociopathic tenacity? Oh, right.

Speaking of sociopaths, Christopher Walken is tired of playing them. NYTimes reports that Walken told his agent he wanted his next role to be “a nice guy with a wife and a family and a dog and a house.” She got back to him with a script for play about a man inquisitioning various corpse dealers in an effort to locate his missing hand. Walken determined the character to be sufficiently wholesome; “A Behanding in Spokane” opens on Broadway Thursday after next.

That’s what it is, folks. Now get to workGchatting!

Photo via Flickr user kiyomi3631.

Green Day on Broadway, sex trafficking, shit-ton of Muppet love, Playgirl and Levi Johnston explained, fall vinyl giveaway, and more, after the jump.

- The Vinyl District is giving a way a shit-ton of vinyl as part of "TVD's Fall Vinyl Giveaways Week." Here's the best part: to win, you simply need to make your case for winning in the comments section of whatever album you're jonesing for (as of now, you can choose from the debut LP from Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, Damon and Naomi's 1001 Nights, AND AND Gossip's Music for Men). So far, ONLY ONE PERSON HAS COMMENTED! DO NOT LET THIS PERSON WIN ALL THAT VINYL! SUPPORT DISTRICT VINYL BY FIGHTING AMONG(ST) YOURSELVES!

- Tonight, pour some out for an icon, y'all: "Sheldon Dorf, who founded the world famous Comic-Con International comic book convention, died Nov. 3 in San Diego of kidney failure. He was 76."

- Sesame Street was the only show I was allowed to watch growing up, until my mom disconnected the TV in the fall of 1995, and then I was not allowed to watch anything. Still, I got three or four good years of SS before a Luddite fog settled over our house, and yet I do not remember most of these characters on Mental Floss' list of "9 Muppets Kicked off Sesame Street." The only one I do remember is Don Music, the pianist who is constantly slamming his head into the keys in frustration, and who I remember thinking was being abused by his handler in a not funny way. BUT the most important character on this list is Roosevelt Franklin, a black, hip Muppet "who had his own school (named Roosevelt Franklin Elementary School)" and "often taught the class important lessons about things such as the geography of Africa and how to avoid drinking poison." Why is this significant? Because I think Ron Howard (or somebody) may have "borrowed" the concept of Roosevelt Franklin and turned him into Franklin, Gob Bluth's black puppet on Arrested Development (UPDATE: Wikipedia has confirmed my suspicions!)

- American Idiot (the play) will be soon moving to New York from California. Will any of you go see it?

- Jessanne Collins, former managing editor of Playgirl, knows the real reason why the magazine has pushed so hard to get Levi Johnston naked: "From day one this has been little more than a publicity stunt orchestrated on behalf of two fallen icons: a floundering brand that's completely lost its identity and a teenager who's trying to define his, in the wake of his incidental introduction to the bright, bizarre lights of American quasi-celebrity." Zing!

- This video is disturbing:

OK, short roundup today. Go to work, everybody, and remember to stop by the Arts Desk throughout the day for more of what you love: me arts coverage!

The bike under the tree: As a devout fan of The Muppets, the guest-Sleigher finds some pleasure in hearing a version "Silent Night" that sounds as if it is being sung by Beaker.

The lump of coal: With its unsteadily oscillating tones the singing saw might rival the slide-whistle for the title of "Most Depressing Instrument Ever." It is difficult for the guest-Sleigher to listen to Koster's interpretation of "Oh Come All Ye Faithful" without being plagued by visions of sad clown-hobos shivering in a rail yard alongside a starving dog and a dwindling campfire.

Cheer factor: Zero. Negatory. Practically non-existent. Still, as far as non-traditional Christmas music goes, the ethereal and downright bizarro sounds that Koster elicits from the saw make a preferable alternative to whatever Mannheim Steamroller is up to this year.