#the Clint Eastwood zombie ape

[art]

Creator Spotlight: @scottlava

Scott Campbell has illustrated numerous children’s books, including SKULLS!, Sleepy the Goodnight Buddy, and Zombie In Love. He was author/illustrator of the much-loved HUG MACHINE. He enjoyed a long career in video games, where he art directed the critically acclaimed game Psychonauts and Brutal Legend for Double Fine Productions. Great Showdowns is his ongoing online series. Scott’s work has appeared in galleries and publications around the world. You can see more of his work at ScottC.com.

Check out our interview with Scott below!

How did you get your start in art, and more specifically, with Great Showdowns?

I went to art school in San Francisco and have been painting, making comics, and designing video games ever since with Double Fine Productions. The Great Showdowns began at the first Crazy 4 Cult exhibition at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles back in 2007, an exhibition of artwork inspired by the cult classics of cinema. The first 10 little paintings were intended to be snack-sized pieces for people to easily collect. They began with perhaps the most iconic of wild west showdowns from A Fistful of Dollars with Clint Eastwood. I pulled some of my favorite moments from films like Ghostbusters, Predator, Exorcist, and Planet of the Apes and placed them all in simple little dust-colored squares as if they were in the dirt streets of a wild west town. They began as good versus evil but grew to all kinds of showdowns between people and objects and often moments of great love between people. I started a tumblr for them a few years later, and I have been posting them ever since. We have published three Great Showdown books and have had 3 solo exhibitions along with worldwide scavenger hunts. There are over a thousand of them up on the site by now, and i do not plan on stopping any time soon.

Which 3 famous artists (dead or alive) would you invite to your dinner party?

I would like to gather Jim Henson, Walt Disney, and Richard Scarry together for dinner and chats. They have all created my favorite and most joyful worlds. I think we would have some of the most delightful chats.

What is a medium that you have always been intrigued by but would never use yourself?

I love collage, but every time I try it, I get frustrated and just quit. Someday I will get into it when my kids are old enough to really mess around with various mediums. I plan to have boxes of textiles and magazines for them to just annihilate.

What does your work set up look like?

Oh, it’s just a table with an old mug for water and an old plate for my watercolors and not much else. I share a studio with a bunch of very inspiring people who make wonderful things, from fabricated creatures to VR experiences and films. I have probably the simplest little area in the space. I do have an old oak flat file that I love to look at.

Advice you would give to an aspiring creator?

The biggest thing I would push upon everyone would be to not fret about one’s visual style. The style will grow and present itself as you experiment with mediums and expose yourself to various cultural delights. Just have fun and try all kinds of things.

What is one interaction you had from a fan of yours that has stuck with you over the years?

I gave a game design presentation many years back on a game I had art directed at the time called Brutal Legend at a game conference in Leeds. The game followed a roadie to the age of metal in the land of metal, with demons and chrome volcanoes and hot rods growing from the ground, and rivers of happy and cheering fans. After the talk, I spoke with someone whose work I had seen in earlier portfolio reviews at the conference. She was very shy but incredibly talented. She came up to me after the talk feeling pretty emotional and inspired to the point of tears and sobbing. It was probably the most extreme reaction I have ever gotten from someone, and it touched me deep down in my guts. That’s why we make things! To bring on the tears!

From video games, to illustrations, and children's books, you've worked on many projects. What was the most challenging, yet rewarding one?

Video games take an enormous amount of work over a long period of time and rely on the skills and talent of many like-minded people. It is sometimes difficult to corral such an effort, but it is incredibly rewarding to see it all come together to create such epic worlds. That said, though, children’s books are very enjoyable in a cozy way. It’s just me right there working on a world and all the pressure is on me. I cannot rely on all the talented people around me to make it look great.

Who on Tumblr inspires you and why?

I love perusing old fashion and film blogs and artists like Bob Jinx and Neil Sanders and collections like Its Colossal.

Thanks for stopping by, Scott! Be sure to check out the Great Showdowns over at @scottlava!

[tune-collective]

The 15 Best Gorillaz Songs

The 15 Best Gorillaz Songs

Every band has a story, but the Gorillaz are a story. We all know it’s Damon Albarn behind the mic with a rotating cast of collaborative characters, but the stellar, genre-blending electronic music is only half of the band’s greatness. Jamie Hewlett’s cartoons are rife with personality, and the foursome’s outlandish comic antics and adventures bring the project to life. They were breathing in the virtual before society realized its own cyber destiny.

Gorillaz proves that you don’t have to let experimentation and originality fall to the wayside in the name of commercial viability. You can still have songs on the radio and sell a bunch of albums even if you continuously push yourself to be strange, dark, and a little twisted. Gorillaz are virtual beings, and yet they are continuously one of the realest acts on the market.

The proof? Here are 15 of the best Gorillaz songs ever recorded.

15. Gorillaz – “Rhinestone Eyes”

This electro-funk song from Gorillaz’ third album Plastic Beach stands out for its delicious weirdness. That pumping, synthetic organ surrounded by swirling ghost voices is some kind of wonderful. It’s dark, because almost everything by the Gorillaz is dark, but it’s got a jolt of energy that makes you wanna get up and adventure, as 2D’s deadpan delivery is fabulously juxtaposed against stabbing samples.

14. Gorillaz – “Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head” feat. Dennis Hopper

This Gorillaz song features Dennis Hopper, from effing Easy Rider, reading to you the damned destiny of men who do not heed the warnings of nature. The only other song I can think of anywhere remotely similar to this is The Velvet Underground’s “The Gift,” which is equally narrative-based and disturbing. Put this one on next time you’re sitting around a campfire exchanging ghost stories.

13. Gorillaz – “Don’t Get Lost in Heaven”

Right after the demise of the Happy People in “Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head,” “Don’t Get Lost in Heaven” sweeps you into the bright lights of the afterworld. It bleeds just as seamlessly into Demon Days‘ album-ending title track This whole little closing act of the LP is quite brilliant, running beautifully on a theme with this tune as a reflective centerpiece. And who doesn’t fall victim to the charms of an angelic chorus?

12. Gorillaz – “Every Planet We Reach Is Dead”

This Demon Days deep cut has a Western feel, the crashing symbols sound like a cowboy’s heavy walk punctuated by the clinking of spurs. Albarn could be a man singing a sad song of love lost in an old saloon. The bright keys could be the dusty piano. It’s a cinematic piece that grows ever more interesting and noisy in a sweeping, chaotic build, before coming down in a sunset of strings. Nothing is resolved, and everything is as it should be.

11. Gorillaz – “Plastic Beach” feat. Mick Jones and Paul Simonon

The title track from the Gorillaz’ third studio album is a real creamy dream. Funky creaks and croaks and wonks plop here and there among the cascading keys. It’s also, essentially, a collaboration with punk all-timers The Clash, as both guitarist Mick Jones and bassist Paul Simonon grace the tune with classic cool. This is a summer song for when everything is wrong, but partying is still on the docket.

10. Gorillaz – “Rock The House” feat. Del The Funky Homosapien

’90s alt-rap great Del comes through for his second appearance on Gorillaz’ debut LP. He plays the role of drummer Russel’s dead MC friend. Russel is possessed by Del, which is really not that bad of a deal. While comments from the cartoon members of the band in faux-tobiography Rise of the Ogre reflect a certain distaste for the tune, “Rock The House” stood out on Gorillaz with its bright horn sample (courtesy of “Modesty Blaise” by John Dankworth) as one of the most fun and fanciful moments on the record.

9. Gorillaz – “Superfast Jellyfish” feat. Gruff Rhys, De La Soul

Any song that opens with a clip of a commercial is a winner in my book. De La Soul’s Trugoy grabs the baton of sarcastic capitalism and runs with it right into a bubble of cheeky fun. The bouncing beat lulls you into a false sense of happiness as you crunch on your sugar-coated mind-control bites. Slurp up the pink-and-purple swirl of milk and wash away the feeling that there might be something more meaningful at stake. There you are! You’re ready for the dance floor called life.

8. Gorillaz – “Andromeda” feat. D.R.A.M.

There’s no denying the fabulous funk of this Humanz single. It’s got an interstellar groove that boldly goes where no cartoon band has gone before. It’s a fun, seemingly innocuous song, but it’s actually very personal to Albarn. It’s named after a nightclub from his youth, and it was the only place that played soul music in the area. He tried to capture the spirit of those nights in the song. He also dedicated “Andromeda” to the mother of his longtime partne,r who recently passed. It’s an emotive dance track with highs, lows, sick synthlines; in short, everything you need in a dope dance hit.

7. Gorillaz – “Ascension” feat. Vince Staples

Sirens and Staples’ apocalytpic party-starting mark the impending dopeness that will certainly leave your ears damaged and demanding more. The off-beat melody creates images of women twerking in dirty streets as buildings crumble and people spontaneously combust. Ain’t no club like the end of the world, and when this world meets its demise, put this Gorillaz song on full blast.

6. Gorillaz – “19-2000”

If you were a nerdy kid around the turn of the Millennium, it’s highly likely you remember that night when Cartoon Network’s Toonami ran a bunch of animated music videos. It was the first taste a generation of youngsters got of Daft Punk’s Interstellar 5555, and it was also the most we’d ever seen of Gorillaz to date. This song blew my mind when I was 13 – I’d never heard anything quite so strangely, electronically funk – as did its explosive and hilarious video. It’s like a modern day Looney Tunes episode, and it helped introduce us to the characters we know and love today.

5. Gorillaz – “Tomorrow Comes Today”

This lo-fi beat comes straight from the band’s debut LP and hits you right in the soul. It’s the kind of rainy-day rhythm that turns you inside out and has you thinkin’ all deep and stuff. It’s all blues and grays — the underlying melancholy sucks you in, but you can’t help but head-bob. It’s a little sad, but it’s still a mean groove.

4. Gorillaz – “El Mañana”

This is one of those rare Gorillaz singles that isn’t a down-and-out dance tune. It’s beautifully sad, the melody of one stuck between a rosy yesterday and the far-off gleam of a better tomorrow. The music video depicts the destruction of the band’s floating island: This is the point in the story where Noodle got lost. As a single, it didn’t perform as well as its Demon Days predecessors, but as a song, it’s haunting and honest, the kind of melancholy sing-along that lives in your heart on rainy days forever.

3. Gorillaz – “DARE” feat. Shaun Ryder

This was our introduction to Noodle’s singing, brought to us via the vocal chords of Roses Gabor. 2D, a.k.a. Albarn, is on the backing track, with Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder chiming in alongside him. Did you know “DARE” samples Daft Punk’s “Revolution 909” at the end? It’s a downright danceable track, though it keeps that Gorillaz’ creepiness running throughout with those slinking synths and ghostly chorus vocals. It’s got bits of disco, trip-hop, and new wave peppered throughout for a fresh take on commercial viability that doesn’t have to put brakes on experimentalism, a cornerstone of what Gorillaz are all about. It remains the band’s only U.K. number one hit. Ryder is actually saying “It’s There” on the hook, and that was the working title for the track, but the singer’s accent is so intense, they just went with it and changed the name. The music video is full of horror film references, from The Birds to The Brain That Wouldn’t Die and The Ring.

2. Gorillaz – “Clint Eastwood” feat. Del The Funky Homosapien

I remember the first time I saw this music video. I was 13. My bestie was sleeping over. She got scared. I fell in love. “Clint Eastwood” is the first rap song I knew every lyric to, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone: This eerie, drum-driven synthetic experiment is the musical equivalent of Damon Albarn creating his Frankenstein’s monster, which might explain the zombie apes in the visual. That red Japanese letting under the logo? It’s a quote from Dawn of the Dead, and it reads “Every dead body that is not exterminated, gets up and kills. The people it kills, get up and kill.” A couple months after this tune came out, every single one of my friends had a favorite Gorillaz member. It inspired me to listen to the group’s debut every time I did my homework for about two years straight. “Clint Eastwood,” much like it’s namesake, is America at its most goddamn iconic. Nothing sounded like it before. Nothing will ever sound like it again.

1. Gorillaz – “Feel Good, Inc.” Feat. De La Soul

This tune broke the top 10 in 17 countries (and came just four spots away on the Billboard Hot 100), and it’s not hard to see why. It’s got classic Gorillaz rump-shaking buffooner, a cool hook, a cartoonish attitude, and blistering verses from De La Soul. The feature won each a Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration. “Feel Good Inc.” is actually the band’s most successful single, and it perfectly encapsulates the group’s vision. That wild laugh in the background is everything that makes Gorillaz what they are — they’re mad with genius, and the only way off their twisted carnival ride is to dance.

This article originally appeared on Billboard.

https://tunecollective.com/2017/07/18/15-best-gorillaz-songs/

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Monkey Around with a Simian Cinema Series

Still from Mighty Peking Man

With 2017 bringing the two latest entries in long-running film franchises featuring clashes between humans and apes, Anthology Film Archives’ upcoming exploration of this ongoing fascination, Simian Vérité, is perfectly timed.

“The series is predicated on something of a joke,” Anthology guest programmer Steve Macfarlane explained via email. “The tension between primate and human can be taken in so many different directions that the hook is mostly just an excuse to watch movies about monkeys.”

Macfarlane explores some of those directions with 11 examples taken from the rich tradition of man/monkey movies. You can see Oscar nominee Charlotte Rampling as a diplomat’s wife who becomes enamored with a chimp in Max Mon Amor or watch an ape become infatuated with a human in the Dino de Laurentiis–produced 1976 version of King Kong. Other entries take more oddball inspiration from that 1933 classic, including King Kong Escapes, a 1967 Japanese remake incorporating pop-art design, and Bye Bye Monkey, in which Gérard Depardieu and Marcello Mastroianni rescue a chimp found near the giant ape’s decomposing corpse. In what is likely the strangest film in a series full of strange films, zombie maestro George Romero’s Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Terror contains the sight — rare in real life but repeated in this flick — of a quadriplegic man slow-dancing to Peggy Lee with his helper capuchin monkey.

Still from Primate

While Simian Vérité’s hodgepodge of cinematic primates spans genres, three movies provide the best cross-section of the series’ many representations of apes. The offerings can be divided into portrayals that are fictional (a live orangutan going on a road trip with Clint Eastwood in 1978’s Every Which Way But Loose), factual (documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s account of scientific testing on live apes in 1974’s Primate), and farcical (a man in a suit in the 1977 Hong Kong King Kong ripoff Mighty Peking Man).

In the fictional realm, Every Which Way But Loose starts from a fairly outlandish premise: Eastwood’s truck-driving protagonist travels across the American southwest seeking his runaway lady love — an aspiring country singer — with the help of his friend Orville (Geoffrey Lewis) and his pet orangutan Clyde. They are hunted by disgruntled police and a vengeful biker gang but manage to best their adversaries via slapstick contrivances. For this kind of wackiness to resonate with the audience, the comic timing and execution need to be pitch perfect, But director James Fargo has a faulty instinct to overemphasize the least funny aspects of his film’s comedy. This proves especially compromising in the portrayal of Clyde. Manis, the orangutan who plays Clyde, is a great performer, seamlessly interacting with his co-stars. The director, though, tends to take Manis’s gift for mimicry and showcase it in static shots of the animal behaving like a person, a trope that most often presents itself in the form of the ape raising a middle finger at an enemy. Even before an age where “orangutan doing human things” could return about 4,109 clips on YouTube, these shots lack the originality and wit that could have made them compelling. Considering the degree to which Fargo restricts Manis’s natural charisma with stilted, self-conscious shots, his decision to use a live animal in the first place is baffling.

Still from Every Which Way

Still from Every Which Way

Unlike Every Which Way, Wiseman’s Primate uses real apes to its advantage. In much of his work, Wiseman is content to simply allow images, naturally occurring sounds, and conversation to speak for themselves. He typically avoids the exposition-spouting talking heads of most documentaries; all dialogue comes in the form of conversation. In fact, Primate’s audience watches more than 55 minutes of animal experiments as well as conversations between researchers before a goateed, bespectacled scientist lets the camera know that he and his colleagues seek to “elucidate human and great ape evolution.” Here Wiseman embraces the talking heads that he normally eschews because humans in this instance are not the main characters. Since apes — the film’s true protagonists — cannot speak, knowing the scientists’ goals and motivations does not compromise the objective distance that Wiseman strives to maintain.

The gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans provide the type of spontaneity that typically attracts Wiseman’s camera. Unlike Manis in Every Which Way, the animals are thoroughly resistant to stiff blocking and staging, moving as they please and drowning out all other sounds with their shrieks of captivity. Their expressive faces and familial gestures toward each other remain at the center of shots as often as possible. While scenes of mechanical masturbation and one dissection are not for the faint of heart, seeing Primate on the big screen is essential for any ape fan, as the large canvas at Anthology puts these animals’ humanity on vivid display.

Still from Mighty Peking Man

Ho Meng-hua’s Mighty Peking Man finds another way to shine a spotlight on apes’ humanity. This riff on King Kong — re-released in the United States in 1999 by Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder Pictures — begins with the reassuring trumpet fanfare and logo shield of Shaw Brothers Studio, the producers of so many classic kung fu films. However, the remake has more in common with the output of Japan’s Godzilla factory Toho Studios, using a human in a suit instead of a live animal to portray its titular monster Utam. This choice creates a comfortable balance between the wooden staging of Every Which Way and the unpredictability of Primate. With “suitmation” (as fans have affectionately named it), Ho has the opportunity to plan and rehearse his shots without sacrificing fluidity of movement, painting the creature as essentially human.

Besides the ape suit, special effects nerds have plenty more to enjoy. Back projection makes human beings appear miniscule in comparison to the images of a giant raging ape displayed on a screen in the background. Model vehicles ground the action in reality, especially in a plane crash sequence where fire mangles actual physical material. On a grander scale, the ape is often represented by a large replica of his hand that grasps the protagonist explorer (Danny Lee) and provides affection to Samantha (Evelyne Kraft), his childlike human companion and Fay Wray analogue. Like most of the selections in Simian Vérité, Mighty Peking Man favors practical effects over CGI — a preference Macfarlane shares. “Avoiding CGI was not an entirely conscious choice, except insofar as I’m trying to avoid it for the rest of my life as a movie lover,” he joked.

Still from Primate

While the works in Simian Vérité provide an extensive cross-section of ape portrayals on film, Macfarlane lamented, “If there were a great ape film without human characters, that would have been ideal [for the series] too, but we’re not there yet.”

Perhaps this dream represents the future of simian cinema. While the dreaded CGI could readily accomplish this feat, a recent example of live animals in film might provide a better blueprint. Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó’s 2014 canine revenge story White God is a misanthropic slog, but its choreography of a dog army is a breathtaking accomplishment. Imagine an ambitious animal trainer turning similar attention toward apes at feature length. This approach could yield the type of once-in-a-lifetime spectacle that only the cinematic experience can deliver, reigniting the wonder and awe that audiences feel every time they see their genetic ancestors on the big screen. Until then, the fictional, factual, and farcical portrayals on display at Anthology will more than suffice.

Simian Vérité runs at Anthology Film Archives (32 2nd Avenue, East Village) from June 16 through 27. Spectacle (124 South 3rd Street, Brooklyn) hosts Missing Links, a companion series programmed by Macfarlane, until June 30.

The post Monkey Around with a Simian Cinema Series appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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