Photo by Hunter Gorinson

Jason Kothari (Left) and Dinesh Shamdasani are now the heads of Valiant Comics

In 2005, Dinesh Shamdasani and Jason Kothari, two slight, sleep-deprived undergrads from USC and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, respectively, sat in Kothari's dorm room surrounded by the towering boxes of legal documents that had consumed their lives for the past six months. The childhood friends had just failed in their quest to purchase Valiant, their favorite comic book company.

It had been a long shot. In the 1990s, Valiant was the third largest comic book company in the world, rivaling DC Comics for market share and boasting more than 1,500 characters. With no prior experience in the industry, and only Shamdasani's vast knowledge of Valiant's library and Kothari's nearly completed business degree to guide them, the two fans had gotten in the ring with millionaire Marvel execs and wealthy industry insiders to fight for the rights to Valiant.

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Courtesy of the artist

Daido Moriyama's photograph Untitled (2011)

This week, artist and sunglasses designer Alex Israel debuts the talk show he shot in the Pacific Design Center, trombonists perform in a downtown art space, and fringe physicists reinvent gravity.

5. They're a collective, not a choir
The trombone is purportedly the brass instrument with a range closest to the human voice -- it's like a Southern preacher, only "with greater amplitude," said poet James Weldon Johnson. It's also one of the oldest instruments. "Trombone choirs" are old things, too, with centuries' worth of arrangements made just for them. But because the Los Angeles Trombone Collective is expressly not a choir, it avoids all of this. Its members favor retooled trombone solos or music not meant for trombone at all. This weekend, at alt-art space the Wulf, the collective will interpret John Cage and debut new live trombone electronica. 1026 S. Sante Fe Ave., #203, dwntwn.; Sat., May 19, 7:30 p.m. (213) 488-1182, thewulf.org.

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Edward Norton in Moonrise Kingdom

It's 1965, the rainy end of summer on the rocky, isle-strewn coast of New England. Sam (Jared Gelman), a scrawny, bespectacled outcast with an unusual aptitude for cartography, disappears from the Khaki Scout camp supervised by Scout Master Randy Ward (Edward Norton), absconding with a couple of bed rolls and an air rifle, and leaving a "resignation" letter. Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) -- a just-pubescent bad seed, straddling the line between innocence and sexual precocity in pre-mod peacock eyes and mini dress paired with knee socks and "sunday school shoes" -- disappears from her own dollhouse-like home, her self-absorbed, distracted lawyer parents Laura (Frances MacDormand) and Walt (Bill Murray) initially none the wiser.

After they're paid a visit by the law of the island, Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), on his door-to-door rounds in search of Sam, Laura finds a box of "intimate" correspondence between her daughter and Sam (an orphan who, unbeknownst to the kid, has been dumped by his foster family), suggesting the two have run away together. Aided by what remains of Ward's troupe ("It's a chance to do some first-class scouting!"), the grown-ups mobilize to find the fugitive young lovers, and bring them to safety, if not to justice.

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Courtesy of DanceOn

Elle Walker burning the floor with Bryan Tanaka

Take a look at Dance Showdown, the first original show created for the YouTube channel DanceOn. This is reality-style, competition dance crossing easily onto an online format -- and doing it better than network television, frankly.

It's pretty hilarious.

Launched in April, Dance Showdown is a cross between So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing with the Stars, with a little Charlie's Angels thrown in (the Charlie character being the show's host, hip-hop crew star D-trix). Individual episodes have topped more than 500,000 views, with series' totals of more than 6 million.

The show pairs YouTube "stars" with a slate of "superstar" choreographers -- best to ignore the hyperbole because there is lot of youth and inexperience here. But that is part of the charm. You, dear internet voters, are the judges, and you will determine the final winner of the $25,000 prize, to be announced on May 31.

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Courtesy Liz Magic Laser

Actors Annie Fox and Rafael Jordan in Liz Magic Laser's work I Feel Your Pain (A Performa Commission)

Shakespeare famously wrote, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." He was speaking metaphorically of course, but in this age of total media saturation and dominance, when everything we see on TV and in the movies is choreographed and manipulated for maximum audience response, his words now have the disturbing ring of literal truth.

It is this observation that galvanizes much of the work of Liz Magic Laser (her real name), a New York-based artist who just opened "The Digital Face," a show of videos and collages at Various Small Fires in Venice. Laser is an up-and-coming young artist known for directing provocative performance art pieces with a heavy degree of audience interaction. She has been receiving strong notices for her work from New York art critics, and this is her first showing in Los Angeles.

The centerpiece of this well-curated introduction to Laser's oeuvre is I Feel Your Pain, a long video work with several tricky layers. Laser first pored over thousands of hours of news interviews, political speeches, press conferences, and even self-help and advice books, adapting and splicing together chunks of their texts to shape a melodramatic narrative script.

She then hired professional actors to bring life to the script and had them enact the play while sitting amongst a theater audience that had been gathered for this purpose. The play was filmed in episodic scenes and projected onto the screen of the theater, at the same time that it was being acted out. Thus, the audience members were both viewers of the play and extras acting in it.

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Craig Schwartz

Ron Raines in "Follies," now at the Ahmanson

Rapturous reviews this week for pianist Mona Golabek

in The Pianist of Willesden Lane at the Geffen, and the Kennedy Center's Follies, now at the Ahmanson after a Broadway transfer. Click here For all the latest New Theater Reviews, or after the jump.

We asked artistic directors from around the region what they would produce had they unlimited resources and the cast of their dreams. See what our theater would look like without such constraints in this coming week's Stage Feature, online Wednesday eve.

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Courtesy of Tom Daniels/Black Army 1850

Black Army 1850 members raise their mega trapo.

There are two groups of soccer "types" everyone is familiar with. There's the "soccer mom," scooting across town in her minivan with her 2.5 children, and the "hooligan," a soccer fan whose sole purpose in life is to beat the living shit out of anyone who doesn't support his favorite team. There is also a third type, the "ultra," and Los Angeles now has its fair share of them.

Ultras, also known as supporter groups, are bands of diehard soccer fans who root for a particular team. They've existed in the U.S. since Major League Soccer had its first kickoff in 1996, taking inspiration from their European counterparts. They're the fans you'll find in the same section in every game chanting, singing, cheering and jeering along to the action on the field while drumming, tossing streamers and, on occasion, setting off a flare or two. A growing number of them in Europe have deep political affiliations, but so far that hasn't been the case in the U.S.

L.A. is currently the only city in the country hosting two MLS teams -- the L.A. Galaxy and Chivas USA, who share the Home Depot Center stadium in Carson and play each other this Saturday. The former was established in 1995 and is one of the league's first teams, while the latter was founded in 2004 and is the sister team to Mexico's Club Deportivo Guadalajara, aka Chivas de Guadalajara.

Each team recognizes three groups per team as official supporters: the Galaxians, Angel City Brigade and the L.A. Riot Squad on the Galaxy side; and Legion 1908, Union Ultras and Black Army 1850 for Chivas USA.

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© Kevin Parry for Paley Center

Ferguson at the Paley Center

The Late, Late Show With Craig Ferguson heads to Scotland this week, with episodes that see the host returning to his hometown and confronting some of the ghosts that have haunted him since his youth. Of course, those same episodes also feature dancing horses, gay robot skeleton Geoff Peterson ("I don't know that there's anything that makes me laugh like that fucking skeleton," he said), David Sedaris discussing colostomy bags over dinner, and Ariel Tweto being adorably clueless -- so it's all much the same mix as usual.

Thursday night was Ferguson's first evening in the spotlight at the Paley Center for Media, and in a post-screening chat with Entertainment Weekly's Lynette Rice, he was his usual self-deprecating self.

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Photo by Lenika Cruz

Arcana Books settling into its new space at Helms Bakery

If you're one of those shoppers who struts into bookstores, clutching a latte in one hand and wrangling a book off the shelf with the other, Lee Kaplan thinks you should be a little ashamed of yourself. Lee and his wife, Whitney, own Arcana Books on the Arts, one of the best bookstores around for new and used books on contemporary visual arts. Not only is that latte a threat to the merchandise in a commercial sense, but it's also a nasty slur against the bound and printed page.

"We're not big fans of liquid in our store," says Lee. Embarrassed, I recall that I walked in for our interview with a big, dumb, styrofoam cup of coffee. "A majority of people would walk in with their bag from Barnes & Noble and their cup of coffee. We'd say" -- his voice becomes light and decorous -- "'Can we please check those at the counter for you?' And they'd assume we were accusing them of stealing, turn on their heels and walk out." Lee swivels his eyes as if to say, I don't get it. "But most people would peek their head in and think we were too weird."

Thanks to a series of fortuitous events, Arcana has happily ditched the Barnes & Noble foot traffic runoff and its longtime home on Third Street Promenade -- where it had been since 1989 -- for newer, much nicer digs at the Helms Bakery building in Culver City. A soft opening is set for Tuesday, and customers will be able to look around and make purchases, but there is still much work left to be done for Lee, Whitney and their seven employees.

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Terry Richardson's James Franco in Drag, Courtesy of the artist and OHWOW Gallery

Franco poses in drag for fashion photographer Terry Richardson, as part of the "Rebel" exhibit currently on display at JF Chen.

"There's just a lot of dicks in there. A lot of porno," painter Ty Williams says, shaking his head. "But I get it, though. I understand the prevalence of penises."

We're standing in the alleyway behind JF Chen, a collectible-furniture showroom and exhibit space, at the opening party for "Rebel," an off-site MOCA multimedia extravaganza produced by the world's most famous grad student, James Franco, in collaboration with an all-star cast of contemporary artists, including Ed Ruscha, Aaron Young, Terry Richardson, Paul McCarthy and Douglas Gordon.

Though Franco was somehow involved in all of the projects shown here, and his ongoing obsession with the sexual secrets and adolescent turmoil behind James Dean and Rebel Without a Cause drives the exhibit, the lineup of bigwigs confers an air of legitimacy lacking at some of Franco's previous shows and stunts.

The exhibit itself has been impressively built-out, looking like a soundstage resembling the Chateau Marmont, with videos playing in individual bungalows and shrubbery strewn with blow-up sex dolls and other detritus referencing the art.

And yes, there were a number of penises on display inside, as Franco and his partners grappled with the pent-up, feverish sexuality of adolescence by exploring, among other themes, the homoerotic tension on-screen in the 1955 film, Dean's real-life bisexuality and a smattering of behind-the-scenes affairs that reportedly took place before and during the shooting of the movie.

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