So I've been wasting a lot of film while picking parts. Here are some, with one of my favorite passages from The Crying of Lot 49:
"Yet at least
he had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could he not,
seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a
parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins:
motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what
their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a
stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath,
fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if
not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket booze,two, sometimes three generations of cigarette
smokers, or only of dust–– and
when the cars were swept out you
had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no
way of telling what things had been truly refused
(when so little he
supposed came by that out of it had to be taken and kept) and what
had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising
savings of 5 or 10 cents, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising
specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads,
Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or
dresses that already were period costumes,
for wiping your own breath off the
inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a
movie, a woman or a car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over
just for a drill all the bits and
pieces coated uniformly, like a
salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust,
body wastes—it made him sick to look, but he had to look. If it had
been an outright junkyard, probably he could have stuck things out,
made a career: the violence that had caused each wreck being
infrequent enough, far enough away from him, to be miraculous, as
each death, up till the moment of our own, is miraculous. But the
endless rituals of the trade-in, week after week, never got as far as
violence or blood, and so were too plausible for the impressionable
Mucho to take for long.
Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray
sickness had somehow managed to immunize him, he could still never
accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a
dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as
futureless, automotive projection of somebody else’s life. As if it
were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless,
convoluted incest."
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