COOL OK THEN

Absolutely gutted to hear of the passing of visionary filmmaker Dimdrim Vonnegan today at 33:7 standard time. He passed at the age he was at in his home surrounded by family and his moviemaker friends who also liked his movies.

I’m still reeling from the loss of this. He was an absolute icon that reinvented cinema as we know it. I watched his seminal film “This Dish Is This,” a cult classic, when it was in theaters back in the year it was in them.

A spellbinding neo-noir sûl paradigm con détenté, the film follows Breppering Carnigam, an amateur filmmaker who follows his dream of making films. At first he does well, establishing himself as a vintage man of the people, loved by all, admired by peers, full of vue d'esprit and passion for all that is felt by him! He is a remarkable man, a man's man, a woman's man. He cares little for what he does not care for and even if he does care he pushes it down and suppresses it deep down because he cannot be bothered with this weakness, no, not a weakness such as this, the weakness of spirit, a weakness of the world, verily, for it is junk. It’s bullshit. Therapy doesn’t work. You’re just paying some guy to follow a script and convince you something’s wrong with you so you come back the next week. “Weakness,” he mutters in his great vacant hall, usually bustling with people on the weekends but not today. Today he is alone. He cannot abide his loneliness so he calls for Morier, the local woman.

“Morier!” he calls.

Morier shuffles into the hall from one of the side halls. This hallway is connected to the main chamber at the southwest end, lit by one or two sconces that flicker in the dusty half-light of evening and reflect a certain somberness characteristic of the time. Solid concrete. It’s a hall made of that by order of the king. The hall was designed by Sir Von Bran Vontersheeth, a famous man. Paint it a neutral gray was his only directive. He had other orders but he never voiced them, having forgotten to do so, a decision he would regret immediately but could not change because orders are orders.

There are two paintings on each side of this hall. The paintings are just big squares with a circle inside them. In each circle another square sits at perpendicular angles to the outermost square shifted 10 pixels along the x-axis by 30 units east. These squares contain another square rotated aft. Within this inner square a black splotch sits offset by 30 degrees to port, Captain!! She’s takin a beating! I canna hold her any longer. Bring forth the gunships and show no quarter!! Load the fireballs! Release the frenzy on my command!! Hold!!! Hold!!!

Hold I said! Yonder east resides thy fellowship! A day may come when the courage of that time may come, but it is not on the day that I speak. Forsake your bonds and release all bond of duty keeping you. It is that day. This day, we

Some time later, the film ends. It’s my favorite.

I had the distinct honor of meeting Drimber Vannegar once. I’ll never forget it. I was watching the behind the scenes features on his classic film “Which Wish Was Worn For Thee,” and they were interviewing him. The interviewer asked, “Mr Varnagant, what advice would you give to people who are conditioned to passively consume slickly-produced surface-level video summaries of any given topic, causing them to destroy their attention span and drift aimlessly within a swamp of distractions for most of their waking hours?”

Drimdrap Volleger turned to the camera and said, “You listen to me. You listen to me right now. This thing, this apparatus, this hodgepodge amalgamation of systems and processes and protocols that buzz and whir and click and fling around the room and crash into things, this dilly-dally ship-shap, that’s all it is. There’s nothing else. I want some recognition for this god dammit, I don’t care what it takes! I sacrificed my youth for this! All on the promise of some beat-down downtrodden belief? Please. A wise man and a poor man go down into the valley. The wise man looks at the sky and says ‘rain tonight, on account of it raining now here.’ The poor man says nothing. He doesn’t need to. There’s a lesson in that, I think. I try to live my life by this principle. That’s all I’ve tried to do with my work. So yes, I do think there’s merit here.”

I’ll never forget that moment. He always seemed really down to earth, like a dude I could get a beer with and talk about movies. He would like me because I like his movies.

Let’s all raise a toast to Drimbert Vonneger, an artist, visionary, pioneer, master of cinema. His movies made me feel emotions and I saw myself reflected in them so that means I knew him personally because his work was honest and everything he put on film was a window into him directly. That’s just how it works. If an artist says something in his work that means he believes it and I idolize him. Unless he turns out to have different political beliefs, then you separate the art from the artist and be proud of your nuanced thinking. This is the right approach until allegations come out that the artist is really bad at which point you have to publicly disavow them in an online community and announce you’re getting rid of their books or whatever and also condemn everyone else who still likes their work. Then you’ve followed all the steps correctly. Good job. Very good work here.