qboro: Arts, Culture & Living

Since Time Warner owns both DC Comics and Warner Brothers Pictures, it makes complete corporate business sense to produce a retelling of the Superman saga every few years.

When baby boomers think of “Superman,” they think of the 1950s TV series that starred George Reeves and the late ’70s and early ’80s films that had Christopher Reeve in the blue bodysuit and red cape. While it was always good versus evil, it was done with a wink of the eye.

Artist Felix Sherman loves quoting Picasso, who said, as an older artist, that he had tried his whole life to paint like a child and now he finally could.

Sherman can relate.

With a stadium named in his honor at the National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, jazz and entertainment legend Louis Armstrong’s name has long been associated with the sport.

But with the Major League All-Star Game coming to Flushing this year for the first time in 49 years, the museum in Armstrong’s former Corona home is calling attention to Satchmo’s passion for baseball in an exhibit that will run through August.

People love mash-ups. There’s the bi bim bop taco (Korea meets Mexico), the Beatles meet Bob Marley (“Let It Be” and “No Cry” mix), sculptures that are paintings and paintings that are sculptures.

The list goes on of mix-ups and mash-ups, and Flushing Town Hall has been getting in on the fun with its Cultural Crossroads series, featuring musicians from different countries coming together to jam.

When you search “New Music” on Google, the results are overwhelming. New hip-hop, pop, Latin, new wave, classical and other genres are listed for what seems to be an infinite number of pages. But while none of these genres are new music, they aren’t entirely wrong either, as the new music genre cannot be confined or compared to any other music type.

New music is classical, in that many composers write for violin, piano or flute, but it is also pop in that it uses electronic sounds and riffs; even still, it is also opera, rock, hip-hop and other music types.

“You end up making a lot of words in the world of neon,” Krypton Neon Studio co-founder and artist Kenny Greenberg said as he sifted through a pile of discarded words in his Long Island City shop. Twisted white tubes that turn a spectrum of bright colors when plugged in lay on the concrete ground — “smile,” “come,” “the,” “a” and “extraordinary.”

The words come from broken signs and Broadway play displays. The “a” came from a neon piece for the traveling performance of “The Producers.” During the show’s travels they broke the “a” several times, and Krypton would have to ship a replacement to wherever they were. After several last minute Fed-Exes they decided to make a backup just in case.

One day, while biking to work, Jessica Findley noticed her jacket flapping in the wind. She was working on a project with inflatables at New York University at the time and conceived the idea of a group of bikers wearing inflatable costumes. She mentioned her idea to a friend, but soon forgot all about it.

Following the September 11th attacks when Findley was “not in a good place,” her friend called and encouraged her to pursue the idea.

From 1975 to 1979 the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia.

Its leader, Pol Pot, envisioned a preindustrial society centered around small rural villages. He vacated the cities and forced everyone to move to the countryside where they were born. Artists, intellectuals, urbanites and anyone with even a hint of opposition were the first of the two million people out of a country with a population of eight million executed.

Don’t go to this show looking for works that just please the eye. Some are pretty or entertaining, yes, but all have a complex theory or analyze a social issue that goes beyond the aesthetics. Grab the curator’s essay and study the plaques.

‘Better Homes’ calls up images of women in pearls with their fine china as seen on the glossy pages of the iconic magazine Better Homes and Gardens. The SculptureCenter’s current exhibit by the similar name plays with this idea.