Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamps.

Do the Right Thing (1989): Rosie Perez’ Dance

Watercolor on 9” x 12” watercolor paper

#5 in the 40 movies I haven’t seen from the AFI 100!

It’s a buffet of tones that left me confused when I first watched it, but after letting a couple weeks pass the movie’s stuck with me. It opens with this warning shot across the bow that is Rosie Perez dancing to Public Enemy’s suburb-scaring Fight the Power. It’s such a subversion of Hollywood tropes that it forces you to sit up and pay attention that this is going to be…different.

It’s an unsanded, gritty response to Ann Margret’s opening performance Bye Bye Birdie, where the original is about subservience and this movie is about, well, fighting the power. Except…then it’s not for quite a while.

A good chunk of this movie is instead almost a comedy about a multicultural but predominantly black New York block on the hottest day of the year. A lot of different characters weave in an out of each other’s lives until temperatures and tensions overheat and a mini-riot breaks out.

That’s when the big tonal shift happens and this becomes a monumental tragedy and a commentary on police violence and extrajudicial killings. It gets hotter and more violent until it finally cools back down. And then, it’s back to the original tone. At first I thought it was very disjointed but instead I feel like writer/director/lead actor Spike Lee was speaking to how a community oddly goes back to normal after an event like this, albeit on the surface and internally they’re all haunted by it.

Because a community never goes back to normal after something like this.

For the painting, of course I went with Rosie Perez’ dance. It’s one of the coolest damn things I’ve ever seen. The woman is a phenomenon. This was a notoriously bad experience for her on the movie, with allegations about Lee’s behavior on set. She seems to have found reconciliation with him, but I still wanted to center the painting on her and her unreal presence in that opening. It’s all about capturing the combination of ferocity and power and sexiness she brought to this undeniable performance.

Next week: FW Murnau’s silent spectacle Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

Here’s a preview of Thursday’s new Thekla painting.

Card subject to change.

Rob’s Art on ShopAEW
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Rob and Jason Arnett's novella Rudow Can't Fail!
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Rob’s prints and shirts at Pro Wrestling Tees
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Bluesky
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Katy’s book Oldest Kansas City

Hey, my brain actually let me read this week!

I listened to the audiobook for Real Tigers by Mick Herron, the basis for the third season of Slow Horses. I’m finding I prefer the books over the show and I LOVE the show. Herron has a good handle on the characters by this point and I like that a lot of the over-the-top action from the show isn’t in here. It’s way more personal and character-centric.

I’ve started catching up on the Energon Universe collections. They’re a blast to read.

First up was Void Rivals volumes 3 and 4 by Robert Kirkman, Lorenzo de Felici, Conor Hughes and friends, the book that’s the spine for this shared universe. The secrets start to get revealed, naturally only leading to more questions for the characters to answer. It’s fun to see Cobra-La tied into this and it makes me wonder if the Lunatrix characters will become a part of this. Yes, I had to do a little internet sleuthing to find the ‘Lunatrix’ name.

Scarlett by Kelly Thompson and Marco Ferrari is one of the GI Joe prequel books, setting up the various forces that are allied and at odds. This one is like if Mission: Impossible starred Cynthia Rothrock, seeing Scarlett go undercover in Clan Arashikage and getting in over her head. There’s also a nod to a classic episode of the original GI Joe cartoon featuring a certain sword.

The other prequel I read was Destro by Dan Watters and Andrei Bressan, where Destro goes to war with the Crimson Twins. It establishes both groups well, introduces another, and looks at their ties to Cobra Commander. Plus, it’s a bit of an interesting metaphor throughout about how AI consistently fails in dangerous ways.

Transformers volume 4 by Daniel Warren Johnson, Jorge Corona and Ludo Lullabi is the end of Johnson’s excellent run as the writer and steward for the series. It does a solid job of wrapping up the arcs he and the team were working on while leaving plenty of fertile ground to be explored. Corona’s art is especially gorgeous, making these very geometric robots move with fluidity and style.

Lazarus volume 8 by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark is totally bad ass. It’s the beginning of the end for the series and nothing and no one in the story is safe. It’s fascinating, the book was originally speculative dystopian fiction and in the years since it started it’s now, unfortunately, a little too on the nose for the state of the world.

While I was reading it I realized I’ve been following Rucka and Lark since the beginning of their respective careers. It’s rad to see them not only still at it but doing career-best work.

I’m not done with it yet but I’m enjoying We’re Taking Everyone Down With Us by Matthew Rosenberg and Stefano Landini a lot. Again, I’m still reading it but it feels like The Venture Brothers meets Despicable Me with Ian Fleming’s total-bastard version of James Bond thrown into the mix. The book’s a series of surprises and reveals so I don’t want to give too much away, but the inciting event is a young girl trying to play hide-and-seek with her scientist dad and his robots and makes a discovery that changes everything about her life. There’s also man-eating apes.

Fun batch this week. The first one was a sketch for one of my AFI100 paintings that you’ll see in a few weeks. It was a complicated painting, so the next two were playing around with the color palette I was using to see which combinations would work well. The bisexual color-schemed one was simply splashing some paint around and seeing what happened. The fifth one was a little color study for a portrait of Lincoln I did for a friend (I’ll share that painting in a week or two once the friend has seen it). The last one was playing around with the differences between Payne’s Gray and Payne’s Gray Violet Shade. Mostly, the violet shade is great for underpaintings and the regular Payne’s Gray (basically just a mix of blue and black) is a fabulous alternative for Lamp Black.

CONTENT ADVISORY: After this I’m going to write a bit about what happened yesterday in Minneapolis. If you don’t want to read that it’s totally fine. Your feelings are real and valid. If you’re jumping off here, just know that I appreciate and love you and I’ll see you again on Thursday.

That was the last thing said by VA nurse Alex Pretti yesterday morning before ICE murdered him outside of a donut shop on Nicollet in Minneapolis. I’ve stayed on that street before, eaten at other restaurants next to the donut shop. It’s a lovely little area.

“Are you okay?” He said to a woman that ICE had just pepper sprayed in the face as he helped her up from them shoving her to the ground. They then rushed Pretti while he filmed them. Eight soulless husks held him down and then shot him in the back nine times.

One of the ICE goons can be seen clapping as the shots are being fired. APPLAUDING A MURDER AS IT HAPPENS.

It’s unconscionable. All of this is unconscionable, what this administration is doing. It’s unconscionable that people voted for this administration. It’s unconscionable that people continue to support this administration. I have nothing left for them but contempt, disgust and anger.

I honestly love Minneapolis and I hate what the ghouls in the federal government are doing there and what they’re doing across the country.

My favorite vacation as a kid was when my mom and I drove up to Minneapolis to see a friend of hers. We spent the day walking around the town and I was impressed by how…how ALIVE it was. I only have good memories of that trip.

I have a lot of friends up there now, some as close to me as family. I’m terrified for them, that they’re simply trying to live their lives and have to worry about running into secret police. I’m also amazed by the people of the Twin Cities who rose up on Friday in response to this brazen federal lawlessness. The bravery and the empathy is inspiring. It’s contagious.

The bravery. Renee Good’s last words were, “I don’t hate you.”

The empathy. Alex Pretti’s last words were, “Are you okay?”

Love you more,
Rob

PS: Abolish and prosecute ICE.