AVB
Jesus of Cool, I'm bad, I'm nationwide
I gotta go see this.
From the NYT
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: August 27, 2009
AMBLER, Pa. — Now listen, you knuckleheads!!! I don’t want you thinking that I’m some kind of skillet-brain just because I spent three hours in the Stoogeum recently. I’m not one of the 2,000 active members of the Three Stooges Fan Club. I don’t go around poking my siblings in the eyes or saying “Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk,” or wiggling my fingers under my chin, or setting my fist circling around to crash on some numbskull’s numb skull.
And when I was at an age when I could indulge in fantasies of social mayhem, I took much more readily to the brothers Marx than the brothers Stooge: it’s difficult to imagine Groucho trying to saw Harpo’s head apart or Chico slamming Groucho with a lead mallet. The Marx Brothers joined forces against the world’s pretense; the Stooge brothers —because that’s at least what Moe and Curly (of the original Three) and (later) Shemp were— bring it all crashing down on one another’s skulls.
So why would anybody not aspiring to an unusual hairdo — mop-top, Brillo-top or bare-top — want to visit this cleverly named museum stuck in an out-of-the-way suburban office park a half-hour’s drive from Philadelphia, particularly when it can only be seen on one-day-a-month open houses? It would be easier to take lessons in apocalyptic plumbing directly from the Three Stooges Collection of 190 short films now being released in chronological order by Sony. (So far 12 DVDs in six sets cover the ensemble’s career from 1934 to 1951.) And while I have acquisitive tendencies, they don’t involve Moe shot glasses, Curly figurines or even the vintage inflatable plastic Three Stooges punching bags seen here. In other words, I don’t identify too heavily with Gary Lassin, 54, who created this museum in 2004. He has put just a fraction of his collection on display — some 3,500 items out of about 100,000 — on three floors in a 10,000-square-foot building equipped with an 85-seat screening room.
Mr. Lassin has the passion of a childhood fan, the support from his day job as an executive in a family-owned mail-order catalog company, and the good fortune of having married the granddaughter of Larry’s brother.
But there is something here worth attending to. It has no resemblance to one of those mangled construction jobs the Stooges specialized in. It may not be a typical museum — it requires no admission, sells no souvenirs and allows no spur-of-the-moment visits — but it has been impressively designed by UJMN Architects. Open the front door, and the voices of the Stooges chime in with harmonic hellos. A display called Stoogeology 101 offers biographical information on touch screens that at first show only a wild-eyed image of Curly; to bring the screens to life, we are told, “give Curly an eye-poke.”
That display reminds us that the Stooges grew out of a vaudeville act starring Ted Healy in the 1920s that first included two brothers, Moe and Shemp Howard, with their youngest sibling, Curly, ultimately replacing Shemp in the act. They were joined by another comic, Larry Fine, as “stooges”: victims of the straight man but also clownish intruders, unruly disrupters. These were the very roles Moe, Larry and Curly played when they began their independent film career and took on their enduring moniker in 1934.
The museum itself plays straight man to the Stooges without returning their jabs and brawling, laying a patina of devotion over the irreverence and provocation. Life-size bellhop statues of the Stooges usher you in, and galleries are filled with memorabilia: movie posters, magazine covers, a 1980s video game, comic books and displays of new acquisitions. There’s a ceramic cat made by Moe, rare family photographs of Curly, Larry’s driver’s license.
An art gallery mixes amateur kitsch with more professional efforts, crowned by a looming mural of the Stooges by David McShane showing the original Three Stooges along with Shemp Howard, who, in a peculiar reversal, ended up replacing the brother who had once replaced him in vaudeville. Shemp took Curly’s place after he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1946. (In the knotty history of the Three Stooges, this was also the first of three transformations of the trio, each involving a replacement in the Curly role.)
But the museum is not only a shrine; it also supports a cult of devotees who have sent photographs to be mounted in a display Mr. Lassin calls “Stooge-a-holics Unanimous.” They show vanity license plates that read “NYUCK X3” or “Y CRTNLY.” And Three Stooges store signs from widespread locales suggest that any enterprise desiring this association — like Three Stooges Food and Liquor, Three Stooges Pawn Shop or Three Stooges Carry Out — is as distant from the commercial high end as those working-class stiffs were from the stuff-shirted men and matrons sucked into their maelstrom.
Some of the lure here is surely a matter of finding common ground with a cultural community of fans, in which vulgarity is celebrated and celebrity is honored in the vulgate. One display of commercial products is labeled “Mass Market Morons” and is stocked with Three Stooges masks, Three Stooges plates, Three Stooges party decorations and Three Stooges toilet paper, marionettes, stamp sets, board games and art kits.
But if you are not particularly attracted by such items, why visit the Stoogeum? That may be a question that strikes nearly everybody below a certain age. As Mr. Lassin acknowledges, Stooge appeal faces a growing generation gap. Forty to 50 years ago the Stooges saturated the television airwaves, creating a surge of fame long after vaudeville acts and film shorts had faded as commercial genres. In the early 1980s there was another full-scale revival of interest; in 1983 The New York Times reported that a Stooges fan club had 20,000 members, 10 times the current number.
Where, though, are the Stoogeans of yesteryear? Is the Three Stooges film planned for 2010 by the Farrelly brothers going to bring the Stooges into the 21st century for a new generation of dunderheads? Or will that film be a hapless rehearsal of antique gestures by high-priced impersonators? (News reports of the casting, which once included Jim Carrey and Sean Penn, now name Paul Giamatti as Larry and Benicio Del Toro as Moe, with the role of Curly up in the air.)
The museum doesn’t help much in interpreting the Stooge phenomenon or the passions of its visitors. It is still too much the museum of a collector rather than of a curator, a public display of devotion rather than an interpretation of it. And yet the Stoogeum is almost revelatory about the scale of the phenomenon if not its cause; it sent me reeling back to the DVDs.
The original Three Stooges were all children of Jewish immigrants. Moe (Moses Horwitz), Larry (Louis Feinberg) and Curly (Jerome Lester Horwitz) were stooges the way all immigrants are: outsiders who could seem less competent and more idiotic than those around them, rubes in mainstream manners, volatile in temper, less able to talk without slipping into a baffling tongue. (Yiddish is sprinkled in the babble of the early short films.) They take on one menial job after another, with disastrous results. They are dislocated disrupters trying to make their way. In this ambition, too, they are similar to the Marx Brothers.
But the Marx Brothers always succeed. The Stooges almost always fail. Or seem to, since there also remains something unbroken in them — both in spirit and in skull — which is more than can be said for everyone around them. Curly is the key: he is the youngest, almost a newborn, like the immigrant child who grows up here, feeling most fully at home. He seems a wide-eyed innocent, a specialist in preverbal grunts and exclamations, almost infantile in his frustrations and his vulnerability to pokes and prods. Like a baby, he will put anything into his mouth, devouring wall plaster, a stick of lipstick and all manner of crunchy inorganic matter.
But he is also otherworldly in his powers: sounds and smells inspire superhuman strength; pipes are dented and rocks broken when they strike his skull. In much of this mixture of innocence and power he resembles the persona of Harpo Marx.
While Moe is like the older father figure of immigrant literature, impotently lashing out with ridicule and physical attack, Curly can stand anything Moe dishes out and remain unscathed. It is no wonder that with Curly’s combination of strength and infantilism he was an inspiration for Michael Jackson, who paid him homage in the preface to a Curly biography. Mr. Lassin suggests that even Jackson’s moonwalk may have been suggested by Curly’s leg-swinging, backward-moving slides.
Of course Curly’s invulnerable immaturity doesn’t erase the acid aggression to which even he is prey. The Three Stooges’ interactions are more raw and internal than those of the Marx Brothers, almost as if demonstrating the realities of familial strife that accompanied any accommodation to the New World. But isn’t it clear that for all the hard knocks they exchange, these morons would stand up for one another, and be prepared to face down all the demands propriety would make of them? Why, soitenly!!!
From the NYT
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: August 27, 2009
AMBLER, Pa. — Now listen, you knuckleheads!!! I don’t want you thinking that I’m some kind of skillet-brain just because I spent three hours in the Stoogeum recently. I’m not one of the 2,000 active members of the Three Stooges Fan Club. I don’t go around poking my siblings in the eyes or saying “Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk,” or wiggling my fingers under my chin, or setting my fist circling around to crash on some numbskull’s numb skull.
And when I was at an age when I could indulge in fantasies of social mayhem, I took much more readily to the brothers Marx than the brothers Stooge: it’s difficult to imagine Groucho trying to saw Harpo’s head apart or Chico slamming Groucho with a lead mallet. The Marx Brothers joined forces against the world’s pretense; the Stooge brothers —because that’s at least what Moe and Curly (of the original Three) and (later) Shemp were— bring it all crashing down on one another’s skulls.
So why would anybody not aspiring to an unusual hairdo — mop-top, Brillo-top or bare-top — want to visit this cleverly named museum stuck in an out-of-the-way suburban office park a half-hour’s drive from Philadelphia, particularly when it can only be seen on one-day-a-month open houses? It would be easier to take lessons in apocalyptic plumbing directly from the Three Stooges Collection of 190 short films now being released in chronological order by Sony. (So far 12 DVDs in six sets cover the ensemble’s career from 1934 to 1951.) And while I have acquisitive tendencies, they don’t involve Moe shot glasses, Curly figurines or even the vintage inflatable plastic Three Stooges punching bags seen here. In other words, I don’t identify too heavily with Gary Lassin, 54, who created this museum in 2004. He has put just a fraction of his collection on display — some 3,500 items out of about 100,000 — on three floors in a 10,000-square-foot building equipped with an 85-seat screening room.
Mr. Lassin has the passion of a childhood fan, the support from his day job as an executive in a family-owned mail-order catalog company, and the good fortune of having married the granddaughter of Larry’s brother.
But there is something here worth attending to. It has no resemblance to one of those mangled construction jobs the Stooges specialized in. It may not be a typical museum — it requires no admission, sells no souvenirs and allows no spur-of-the-moment visits — but it has been impressively designed by UJMN Architects. Open the front door, and the voices of the Stooges chime in with harmonic hellos. A display called Stoogeology 101 offers biographical information on touch screens that at first show only a wild-eyed image of Curly; to bring the screens to life, we are told, “give Curly an eye-poke.”
That display reminds us that the Stooges grew out of a vaudeville act starring Ted Healy in the 1920s that first included two brothers, Moe and Shemp Howard, with their youngest sibling, Curly, ultimately replacing Shemp in the act. They were joined by another comic, Larry Fine, as “stooges”: victims of the straight man but also clownish intruders, unruly disrupters. These were the very roles Moe, Larry and Curly played when they began their independent film career and took on their enduring moniker in 1934.
The museum itself plays straight man to the Stooges without returning their jabs and brawling, laying a patina of devotion over the irreverence and provocation. Life-size bellhop statues of the Stooges usher you in, and galleries are filled with memorabilia: movie posters, magazine covers, a 1980s video game, comic books and displays of new acquisitions. There’s a ceramic cat made by Moe, rare family photographs of Curly, Larry’s driver’s license.
An art gallery mixes amateur kitsch with more professional efforts, crowned by a looming mural of the Stooges by David McShane showing the original Three Stooges along with Shemp Howard, who, in a peculiar reversal, ended up replacing the brother who had once replaced him in vaudeville. Shemp took Curly’s place after he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1946. (In the knotty history of the Three Stooges, this was also the first of three transformations of the trio, each involving a replacement in the Curly role.)
But the museum is not only a shrine; it also supports a cult of devotees who have sent photographs to be mounted in a display Mr. Lassin calls “Stooge-a-holics Unanimous.” They show vanity license plates that read “NYUCK X3” or “Y CRTNLY.” And Three Stooges store signs from widespread locales suggest that any enterprise desiring this association — like Three Stooges Food and Liquor, Three Stooges Pawn Shop or Three Stooges Carry Out — is as distant from the commercial high end as those working-class stiffs were from the stuff-shirted men and matrons sucked into their maelstrom.
Some of the lure here is surely a matter of finding common ground with a cultural community of fans, in which vulgarity is celebrated and celebrity is honored in the vulgate. One display of commercial products is labeled “Mass Market Morons” and is stocked with Three Stooges masks, Three Stooges plates, Three Stooges party decorations and Three Stooges toilet paper, marionettes, stamp sets, board games and art kits.
But if you are not particularly attracted by such items, why visit the Stoogeum? That may be a question that strikes nearly everybody below a certain age. As Mr. Lassin acknowledges, Stooge appeal faces a growing generation gap. Forty to 50 years ago the Stooges saturated the television airwaves, creating a surge of fame long after vaudeville acts and film shorts had faded as commercial genres. In the early 1980s there was another full-scale revival of interest; in 1983 The New York Times reported that a Stooges fan club had 20,000 members, 10 times the current number.
Where, though, are the Stoogeans of yesteryear? Is the Three Stooges film planned for 2010 by the Farrelly brothers going to bring the Stooges into the 21st century for a new generation of dunderheads? Or will that film be a hapless rehearsal of antique gestures by high-priced impersonators? (News reports of the casting, which once included Jim Carrey and Sean Penn, now name Paul Giamatti as Larry and Benicio Del Toro as Moe, with the role of Curly up in the air.)
The museum doesn’t help much in interpreting the Stooge phenomenon or the passions of its visitors. It is still too much the museum of a collector rather than of a curator, a public display of devotion rather than an interpretation of it. And yet the Stoogeum is almost revelatory about the scale of the phenomenon if not its cause; it sent me reeling back to the DVDs.
The original Three Stooges were all children of Jewish immigrants. Moe (Moses Horwitz), Larry (Louis Feinberg) and Curly (Jerome Lester Horwitz) were stooges the way all immigrants are: outsiders who could seem less competent and more idiotic than those around them, rubes in mainstream manners, volatile in temper, less able to talk without slipping into a baffling tongue. (Yiddish is sprinkled in the babble of the early short films.) They take on one menial job after another, with disastrous results. They are dislocated disrupters trying to make their way. In this ambition, too, they are similar to the Marx Brothers.
But the Marx Brothers always succeed. The Stooges almost always fail. Or seem to, since there also remains something unbroken in them — both in spirit and in skull — which is more than can be said for everyone around them. Curly is the key: he is the youngest, almost a newborn, like the immigrant child who grows up here, feeling most fully at home. He seems a wide-eyed innocent, a specialist in preverbal grunts and exclamations, almost infantile in his frustrations and his vulnerability to pokes and prods. Like a baby, he will put anything into his mouth, devouring wall plaster, a stick of lipstick and all manner of crunchy inorganic matter.
But he is also otherworldly in his powers: sounds and smells inspire superhuman strength; pipes are dented and rocks broken when they strike his skull. In much of this mixture of innocence and power he resembles the persona of Harpo Marx.
While Moe is like the older father figure of immigrant literature, impotently lashing out with ridicule and physical attack, Curly can stand anything Moe dishes out and remain unscathed. It is no wonder that with Curly’s combination of strength and infantilism he was an inspiration for Michael Jackson, who paid him homage in the preface to a Curly biography. Mr. Lassin suggests that even Jackson’s moonwalk may have been suggested by Curly’s leg-swinging, backward-moving slides.
Of course Curly’s invulnerable immaturity doesn’t erase the acid aggression to which even he is prey. The Three Stooges’ interactions are more raw and internal than those of the Marx Brothers, almost as if demonstrating the realities of familial strife that accompanied any accommodation to the New World. But isn’t it clear that for all the hard knocks they exchange, these morons would stand up for one another, and be prepared to face down all the demands propriety would make of them? Why, soitenly!!!
:thumbs: 
