I’ve been meaning to do something with this for a couple of weeks. It’s a video from something called the Knockout Network featuring a young woman named “Vivian Kellie.” She is identified as a “sexy geek,” although she is almost certainly not a geek in any sense of the word that I am familiar with—that is to say, she is not a depraved, D.T.-ridden career alcoholic who gnaws the heads off of animals in a traveling carnival, a la Nightmare Alley, nor is she, at least as she appears today, the sort of person who would attract undue attention in the classroom for her over-studious demeanor.
Vivian, after a short montage which includes a quick peek at her ass, proceeds to read a quote from the Danish-German film director Douglas Sirk—“In movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble.” This is certainly one of the more banal things that this tremendously cultivated and clever man ever said on record, but it seems to have made its way onto a lot of these quotesyoulike.com sites on the internet, and for all I know, Sirk might have even said something very like it at one point. I am not going to cross-reference with Jon Halliday’s Sirk on Sirk for confirmation—though I will give that book the highest possible recommendation.
There are several things that I find particularly mirth-inducing about this video. Not least is the fact that it has, as of the date of this writing, 6,289,044 views (By contrast, this clip of Douglas Sirk speaking about his art, from A Personal Journey Through American Movies with Martin Scorsese has 1,075.) The first time Mr. Sirk’s name comes up, Vivian seems to call him “Douglish.” After delivering the quote, she inquires of the viewer: “Are you a gambler, or are you more of the safer type of person?”
Like most cognizant people, I am well aware that nothing means anything anymore. I often find myself thinking of scraps of the inner monologue by David Mitchell’s perpetually miserable small-c conservative, Mark, on the superlative BBC show Peep Show, such as this gem which accompanies a shopping trip with his fiancée, where Mark is befuddled by such phenomena as ironic Chairman Mao tees and extraneous zippers: “That’s the way things are these days. Let’s just put a zip here, a Swastika there. Why not? Who knows what these things were once used for? Who the Hell even cares?” But little moments like Vivian and Douglish Sirk still retain the power to astonish and, after a fashion, delight.
Speaking of which, I sure do hate those “Auteur Names Rendered in Heavy Metal Band Logo Fonts” shirts, which apparently originated at CineFile video in Los Angeles, and have long been for sale in the lobby of the IFC Center. Ozu/Ozzy. Herzog/Danzig. Bela Tarr/Black Flag. Scorsese/Scorpions. (The worst of them all.) They’ve been around for a few years now and have consistently upset me every single time I’ve thought about them, as they pair two things that have positively no logical association with one another (The Tarr/Black Flag parallel, I’ll admit, comes the closest to making some kind of sense), save as an attempt to make the “cool” cache of rock culture rub off onto cinephilia. Certainly plenty of bands have drawn subject matter and imagery from the film world, but this is more a matter of enforced commingling by some shadowy third party, selling structuralist cinema to the cool kid crowd. I suppose a cogent argument could be made that the very bold disparity of this juxtaposition of unlike objects creates a kind of bracing surrealist humor, like the celebrated “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!” of Comte de Lautréamont’s Maldorer. But quite honestly, I tells ya, sometimes I feel more and more like:
I get a particular thrill when Andy points to Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Admiral Farragut statue in Madison Square (setting by Stanford White, of McKim, Mead, & White, who was shot in the face while watching chorus girls on the Roof Garden of the nearby second Madison Square Garden, which he also designed!), which also happens to be one of my favorite public sculptures in New York City. (What are the others, you ask? Why, the Dungeons & Dragons masterpiece that is The King Wladyslaw Jagiello Monument in Central Park, of course!)
Yes, this is the tack to take, as so much dyspeptic venting threatens to become tedious. If I’ve learned one thing from St. Armond White—and in fact I’ve learned everything from him—it’s that a critic should never tear something down without offering an alternative in its place (i.e. “the hipster nihilism from Movie A receives a stern rebuke from the pop savvy of Movie B”) So, here are the two things that have given me more pure aesthetic pleasure than anything else in this third week of March, 2012:
Absolutely love the forearm-block “Don’t look at me” post-squirt-shame faces.
Whatever your vocation, this is always how you should be visualizing yourself operating in your given line of work.
Whelp, that about covers it this week for “Zee good sheet,” as Kickboy Face used to say. And remember, if it doesn’t say Bombast, it’s not the real thing.
