Sometimes instead of watching a movie, I’ll go to YouTube and watch good lectures or video essays. But last night I stumbled into watching two random videos that were suggested for me. The first one was from a YouTube channel called “Scratch off or Die.” This man buys scratch offs and scratches them off in real time. In this episode he purchased an entire packet of $20 scratch offs (thirty of them, $600 total). It took him 30 minutes to scratch all of them off. You can get caught up in the suspense of will he win big on scratch off #009? I fast forwarded a lot, I’ll admit. He wound up only winning $245, less than the average one-half (from a whole pack, $300 in this case) he said. Next up was one of many videos someone (I’ll assume it is a man) posts to the “Florida Life” YouTube channel. He goes to Spring Break each year at Fort Lauderdale and photographs the crowd on the beach. For some reason he only recently posted his videos from last year. Spring Break vacations last year were controversial, occuring in March, a month after COVID-19 was known to be in the U.S. None of the mostly young people on the beach are wearing masks. The videographer shoots long smooth traveling shots in high definition, seemingly driven by seeking out two things: the hottest girls and weirdest sights. I wish he had kept the original sounds instead of dubbing it with some really bad music. He uses slow motion and everyone seems oblivious to him, although some people will mug for the camera. You can’t see people in the ocean and the focal length he is using makes the scene look very claustrophobic. People are just day drinking and talking. This tame “Girls Gone Wild” video is also an accidentally valuable record of social photography. There are sequences that remind me of the work of August Sander in 1930s Germany (if he shot in color) or American social photographers of the late twentieth century, especially in the happenstance combinations of different groups of people, young women with neon-colored wrist bracelets and, here, a man with a huge “MASTER” tattoo across his chest. Mute it and play something dark and sardonic.
