Category Archives: Art

If Lucy Fell: HANS!

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If Lucy Fell (1996) would be a mostly forgettable movie, except for the way some of the performances are plainly early versions of characters the actors would take up later. Lucy Ackerman, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, is the template from which her portrayal of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City was drawn. Bwick Elias, flower-child idiot artist, is the ur-goon of every idiot Ben Stiller has played thereafter (notably Zoolander).

But there’s also this great scene, at 0:56. Lucy and Bwick are on a date, at Bwick’s apartment:

^^^

{Bwick joins Lucy on a couch, facing a painting we’ve seen him working on previously.}

BWICK: It’s symbolic. {He gestures at the painting, which stays unseen.} Life equals love which actually equals death. Life equals death.

{We cut to see the painting}

LUCY: It’s symbolic?

BWICK: Yeah.

LUCY: Symbolic death?

BWICK: Symbols of life, and death, and love. Life equals death which is in the middle. The sub-set is love. Which is really what the symbol is. Love. Life equals love equals death. It’s symbolic.

LUCY: Wait. {She gets up off the couch, and walks over to the painting} You have a woman with “LIFE” painted on her, uh… area, and she’s stabbing to death a man with a knife that says “LOVE” on it. And then in big, bold letters it says, “LIFE=LOVE=DEATH.”
{beat}
I don’t know that it’s very symbolic, Bwick. It’s kind of spelled out.

BWICK: So… It sucks. HANS!

LUCY: No. It doesn’t suck. It’s just that it’s not really… You know, it’s… It’s a literal painting.

{As she says this, an assistant who looks like Fabio — long blonde hair, overalls, no shirt — splashes some sort of fluid onto the painting.}

LUCY: It’s not symbolic. Which is… Fine.

BWICK: Hm-hm.

LUCY: It’s literal.

BWICK: Right. It just… Literally sucks.

{We see that Hans is patiently standing next to the painting, now with a blowtorch in his hand.}

LUCY: No.

BWICK: No, you’re right. You’re right. It just symbolically sucks. HANS!

{Hans turns on the blowtorch, and sets the painting ablaze.}

BWICK: It certainly isn’t very literal any more, is it?

{Lucy turns to the painting, as it continues to burn.}

LUCY: No, it’s… It’s symbolic.

Interestingly, this morphed when we got a Mercedes wagon. When trying to figure out some arcane feature of the car, I always imagined some engineer in Stuttgart, whom I had to think like to understand: HANS!

(Although sometimes I would credit his partner, Fritz.)

This method also is required for Microsoft products, both apps and operating systems. Step back, and think like a programmer in Redmond, not like a general computer user.

The Shovel Breaks

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(This was first written in August, 2010 for LiveJournal, and is now on Dreamwidth. But it really needs to be at this site.)

=================

So tonight we were watching Glee S1:D3 from Netflix, and I made an observation about how unlikely this was from choral standards — but, hey, what do I know? I only sang in grade school, high school, and college choirs for 12 years.

And Ulrika said, “I wonder when the shovel will break?”

We both realized there was a lexicon entry — because she got that phrase from me.

*^*^*

There I am living in Harwood Court, a dorm on the Pomona College campus.

I’m talking to Doug Shepherd, class of ’84, and some other folks, and I forget just how this came up, but he says, “Night of the Comet is so bad, the shovel breaks before the opening titles.”

“Oh?” I say. “What do you mean by that, Doug?”

“Well… All fiction is basically the art of throwing shit in your general direction. When you’re in the hands of a master — Tolstoy, say, or Hitchcock — they shovel the shit out of the way so quickly and so cleanly you don’t ever really notice it. Their shovels are made out of a mix of titanium and carbon fiber. But let’s face it — not everyone is that good. So, sooner or later, the shit is just so heavy their shovel breaks. Then the shit the story depends on starts piling up. I mean, it becomes a big pile. Then it starts stinking. You just can’t pay any attention to the story, because this steaming pile of shit is between the story and you, and it keeps growing, because their shovel has broken, and they just can’t get it out of the way.”

“Night of the Comet starts with this text prologue on the screen. And this text is so lame, and so ridiculous… I’m telling you, the shovel breaks before the titles show up.”

“So it becomes something of a measure of quality, y’know? Just when does the shovel break in a story?”

*^*^*

This was the thing Doug told me I remember best, and have found most useful in the passage of time. And now I pass it on to you.

*^*^*

EDITED TO ADD: I was wrong. It’s not a crawl of text. Such is the world in which we live I was able to download the movie to look, check, and verify. It opens with John Carpenter-ish synth riffs, and deep, dark narration by Michael Hanks. It was tough to punctuate the following, because many times you’d think a sentence was over, and then it would go on.

Since before recorded time it had swung through the universe in an elliptical orbit so large that its very existence remained a secret of time and space. But now, in the last few years of the twentieth century, the visitor was returning.

Animated comet goes whooshing by.
Title: NIGHT OF THE COMET

The citizens of Earth would get an extra Christmas present this year, as their planet orbited through the tail of the comet. Scientists predicted a light show of stellar proportions – something not seen on Earth for 65 million years. Indeed, not since the time that the dinosaurs disappeared virtually overnight. 

There were a few who saw this as more than just a coincidence. But, most didn’t.