Tag: damned dirty apes

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a trouble with bad – Mercredi Express #6



Friends of mine love bad movies. They enjoy laughing at failed special effects, improbably motivated dialogue, absurd situations. They gather on Zoom or in rec rooms to heckle the screen with commentary every bit as witty as Mystery Science Theatre. (I have some extremely clever friends, by the way.) And I “get it,” — please invite me to the next screening!  We are surrounded by crappy exploitation/entertainment products, swimming in them, drowning in them. They appear relentlessly and there is power in choosing how we react. What I hate is how our hip decision to read these works creatively has itself become a market and a reason to make more crap. Our mockery made possible “Sharknado.” 

It’s enough to make me cynical about being cynical.

Because there are many “bad” movies that I genuinely love. The picture above is based on Tor Johnson in Ed Wood’s “Plan Nine from Outer Space” which I kind of love. As a movie, it is not masterful or even successful on any level, but it feels authentic. What little I know about Ed Wood’s life and work come from the far more successful movie “Ed Wood” directed by Tim Burton. I watch it every year to renew my sense of naive optimism which I feel is essential to creativity. The closing line of the movie sticks with me. Wood is settling in to watch the world premiere of Plan Nine and he says to himself, with genuine satisfaction,“This is the one. This is the one I’ll be remembered for.” The irony of his statement is that Plan Nine was later named the Worst Movie Ever Made by a couple critics in the mean-spirited Hollywood old boys network. It gave Wood’s work perhaps undeserved notoriety. I probably never would have seen Plan Nine if not for that reverse publicity.

The trouble with “bad,” for me, is when folks call an artwork “bad” primarily to dismiss folks who like it. “Don’t yuck someone else’s yum” expresses this sense. There are many shades of yuck, too. From self-aware trolling to self-oblivious comments when viewers just don’t get it. Some works are weird, hard-to-classify or just out of their time. To really be doing art, maybe as opposed to exploitation/entertainment, means your work will be misunderstood at least some of the time. And some works – lots of them, maybe MOST artwork at any moment – is simply not meant for you. Instead of jumping to label it bad, maybe be a better use of time to look for artwork that IS meant for you. 

It’s never been easier to find.

 WHAT MAKES YOU GO YUM? I love getting clarity on what I love and then focusing in on the aspects that make it so yum-worthy. I like to believe that this clarity and focus will help me attract more delight into my life, or at least recognize it when it appears.
One astute reader last week noticed that my Blue Mama stickers and magnets were NOT YET available in my ON-LINE ART STORE — To make amends, I will send one FREE to anyone who emails me their physical mailing address. Just tell me magnet or sticker.And from now on, anytime I SAY that a work is NOW AVAILABLE in the store and it is not, the first person to reply to my email WINS THE ARTWORK. I may ask the winner to pay for postage. That should keep things interesting.
I promised that this month would be “Monkey March” and I simply did not deliver so here are a couple apes from my archives. The one on the bottom mashes up a 70’s Dirty Harry hairstyle, riffing on the “damned dirty ape” idea.”You feel lucky, punk?”
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Monkey See… Mercredi Express #2

Planet of the Apes (1968) was my Star Wars (1977), a science-fantasy epic that I watched WAY too young to understand fully but which continues to shape my worldview. I saw it all chopped up with commercials on broadcast TV and that still did not dull the effect of the wonderfully jarring, beautifully alien score by Jerry Goldsmith or that Rod Serling inspired script. At my first viewing, I’d not seen The Twilight Zone, so POTA might have been my first taste of a bizarre narrative twist, that shift in perspective that changes everything. I was hooked.

And I’ve stayed hooked, in one way or another. From my current interests in New Weird fiction and Imaginative Realist painting, back to my graduate work studying Bertolt Brecht and his alienation/estrangement technique (Verfremdunseffekt) to my home decorating aesthetic of Wonderful Oddities, I owe a profound debt to those “damned dirty apes” and the sensation of productive surprise.

Is a synopsis needed? – A human astronaut, Taylor, crashes on a desolate planet. He easily reconciles himself to his fate, never to return to Earth, stating “Somewhere in the Universe, there has to be something better than man. Has to be!” Taylor discovers humans on this planet who live wild and free without the strictures of civilisation or language. He soon finds himself captured by armed, horse-riding gorillas and subjected to scientific experiments by curious, somewhat compassionate chimpanzees. Taylor attempts to gain freedom through appeal to the administrative orangutan class, fails and uses force to escape… alas, only to find a bizarre realization about humanity and destiny in the film’s final moments.

Though POTA is best remembered for the final reveal — do I really have to warn of spoilers after half a century? — delightful turns are sprinkled throughout the movie. Even as a kid, I got the joke when the orangutan politicos adopt the pose of “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” The scene where the gorilla hunters pose for a photograph with a pile a dead human “game” gives a more chilling punchline. In the image above, I sketched Zira, one of the curious scientific chimpanzees, as she herself experiences a shift of vision. It occurs in the movie just after Zira discovers that Taylor, a mere human animal, can talk. It’s a moment when her whole worldview is challenged, and Zira is presented with an opportunity to see things differently. Zira largely rises to the challenge and confronts the power structure of her simian world in order to gain rights for Taylor. (There HAS to be fan-fiction somewhere telling the whole story from Zira’s point of view — if you know of it, please share.) To twist the adage, “Monkey sees differently, monkey DOES differently.”

To this day, I cherish moments when a narrative turns radically and in a surprising direction; that is, I enjoy them when they appear in art. When such disruptions, such opportunities for radical change appear in life, I fear I react more like Cornelius, Zira’s partner, who as I recall, would rather keep such revelations purely on the level of scientifically detached knowledge. Cornelius, come to find out, has discovered archeological evidence of intelligent humans which he hasn’t widely published for fear of reprisal. Cornelius prefers to see… and not do. In my actual life, I suspect I’m often more like Cornelius, sometimes like Zira, and hardly ever been actually threatened existentially like Taylor.

I painted this sketch of Zira early in the Miasma of 2020. It’s 4” x 5” oil on panel. I was inspired by a challenge from Michell Avery Koncyk (https://www.michelleaveryart.com/  who’s on Instagram as velvetmush) She intended to get through lockdown by painting a picture of an eye every day, and she encouraged other artists to do the same. I painted over a dozen eyes, from Neil Gaiman, Bela Lugosi, Tor Johnson to friend’s selfies and the self portrait I use as a logo. As studies, some worked better than others, and I learned a lot, mostly about what I yet need to learn. I respond well to dares and challenges, so I’m setting myself a “Monkey March” for my personal artwork. Fair warning: there may be more simian smiles in coming newsletters.

Is Productive Surprise what you need for yourself and your work?

When was the last time your own work surprised you? Were you open to changing your perspective and work habits? If your current project turned to you right now and spoke, what might it say? What are other radically different ways to consider what you do, ways that could open it up to be more productive, more just and inclusive, more fun…? How many different ways of seeing could you list in, say, five minutes with a pad and pen? Come up with something great? Share it with the “Email Me” button below

I continue to add items to my ON-LINE ART STORE as pieces sell so check back frequently.