l∅ckedinab∅x: Little Death scene.... the later

25 August 2004

Little Death scene.... the later

Here is the other scene I wrote for Little Death. The intertexuality that occurs here, which I'm quite proud of, is in the anecdote Trent tells Elsbeth, which is actually the plot from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

#. INT: TRIPLE MEAT PALACE (A FAST FOOD CHAIN)
6:13 EVENING

TRENT: You ever wonder what the secret ingredient in the Triple Meat Spectacular® is?

ELSBETH: I can't say I have.

TRENT: (between mouthfuls): 's meat...

ELSBETH: huh?

TRENT: You see, the triple meat spectacular, at least the supposed meat in it, consists of nothing more than textured vegetable extract with added rendered beef fat for flavour....

ELSBETH: hmmm... That doesn't really sound like something that is public knowledge...

TRENT: well, it isn't, it's a secret. Hence 'Secret Ingredient'.

ELSBETH: but you know...

TRENT: yes, I know.

ELSBETH: and you know because?

TRENT: well, when I was in college, scraping an existence on ramen and stir-fry, staying out all night and sleeping through my lectures it was necessary for me to take a part time job in order to pay my fees. Not all of us have wealthy parents living in New York.

ELSBETH: Huh

TRENT: so anyway, I took a job at my local Meat Palace, working the graveyard and occasional day shift, in between lecturers and parties. I spent many an hour slaving over a grinder, and frying burgers and onions. Constantly surround by this... smell. This smell that penetrated every orifice of my body. It drove me crazy... It didn't quite smell RIGHT. Like it wasn't quite meat or something, like... I dunno. Anyway, after a long night shift spent pondering, among other things, the origins of the meat patties I'd been grilling all night I decided I would once and for all find out WHAT they were. So I took a burger over to a friend of mine who was studying chemistry and asked him to run an analysis on it. You know what he found?

ELSBETH: That the burger wasn't meat?

TRENT: Uh-huh. It wasn't.

A SILENT PAUSE

ELSBETH: So then what?

TRENT: what do you mean?

ELSBETH: Well, what did you do with your new found forbidden knowledge?

TRENT: nothing, my curiosity had been quenched.

ELSBETH: Didn't you tell anyone?

TRENT: No...

ELSBETH: why not?

TRENT SHRUGS.

ELSBETH: You tell the most pointless stories.

THEY EAT SILENTLY. TRENT IS UNEASY AND FIDDGETS A LITTLE.

ELSBETH: What's bugging you?

TRENT: The body...

ELSBETH: the one that they found in the turnpike?

TRENT: yeah... I knew him. I mean, I knew who he was.

ELSBETH: Really?

TRENT: yeah... His name was Jimmy, he was drug dealer. Used to sell me bennies when I needed to pull an all nighter.

ELSBETH: Bennies?

TRENT: Amphetamines.

ELSBETH: Ah....

TRENT: Well, they haven't identified him yet, and I'm wondering whether I should come forward... The thing is I don't want to.....

ELSBETH: incriminate yourself?

TRENT: Yeah.

ELSBETH: then don't. They'll figure out who he is sooner or later.

ELSBETH TURNS VERY PALE

TRENT: are you okay?

ELSBETH: Feel kinda faint....

TRENT: I'll drive you home, you never should of gotten out of bed.

ELSBETH: Oh, really? Should I of just left the lab in your capable hands?

TRENT: and why not?

ELSBETH: You don't even know what day it is half the time.

TRENT: That doesn't mean I'm a bad Forensic Scientist.

ELSBETH: no, just that you make a pretty lousy human being.

TRENT: Fuck you.

ELSBETH: You wish.

[qu∅tes]

"one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly by laying hold of some little odd or end, some sound, some sight." Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

[on cinematography] "After you have done a picture you forget everything you have ever known, so that you become a child again, or an infant or a void into which the new picture creates a whole new evolvement... So that you do not have to keep doing the same thing all over again. In other words you take what yourself back to ground zero. Of course you cannot unlearn what your brain knowns. But I mean it emotionally. I mean you just become scared again, as if you do not know anything... I never felt on top of it. I neverfelt that I knew so much that I could sit back with a cup of coffee and it would all turn out wonderful." - Conrad Hall

[on cinematography] "When the budget is minimal you are forced to look at light as you find it, and to make it look good." - Haskell Wexler

"Rock 'n' roll is like an attitude, it's not a musical form of a strict sort. It's a way of doing things, of approaching things. Like anything can be rock 'n' roll." - Lester Bangs

"The capitalist mind perceives the world purely in terms of material resources to be used for its benefit, to increase productivity and profit without thought of long-term consequences." - Daniel Pinchbec, Breaking Open the Head

"In shamanic cultures, synchronicities are recognised as signs that you are on the right path." - Daniel Pinchbec, Breaking Open the Head (excerpt), Book of Lies

"...reality is up for grabs, so learn the codes through which the narrative is crafted and participate in its unfolding." - Douglas Rushkoff

"Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomized at a time when the Japanese were suing desperately for peace. The American leaders were acting with almost inconceivable treachery by denying that they had received requests for peace…The bombs were exploded on congested cities filled with civilians. There was not even the slightest military justification, because the military outcome of the war had been decided months earlier." - Dave Dellinger

"We're living in a new Beat time, in my view. And it's very difficult for us to hang on." - Tilda Swinton

"Pursue the small utopias: nature, music, friendship, intimate love." -The Fugs

"We have reconstructed the Tower of Babel, and it is a television antenna: a thousand voices producing a daily parody of democracy, in which everyone's opinion is afforded equal weight regardless of substance or merit." - Ted Koppel

"There are alot of things you have to sacrfice. It all depends on how deep you want to get into whatever your gig is. Whatever you're there for. So like the deeper you get into it the more sacrifices you have to do, maybe even on your personality or your outward this and that. I just dedicate my life to this whole art. You have to forget about what people say. If it's art or anything else, whatever you really, really dig doing, you have to forget about what people say about you sometimes. Forget about this or that-when you're supposed to die or when you're supposed to be living. You have to forget about all these things. You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven. Once you reach that point of where you don't give a damn about what everybody else is saying you're going towards heaven. The more you get into it, they're goin' to say "Damn, that cat's really flipped out. Oh, he's gone now". But if you're producin' and creatin', you know, you're getting closer to your own heaven. That's what man's tryin' to get to, anyway." - James Marshall Hendrix

"With its totalizing claim, the system created the conditions for this horrible retaliation. The immanent mania of globalization generates madness, just as an unstable society produces delinquents and psychopaths. In truth, these are only symptoms of the sickness." - Jean Baudrillard

"If poetry is what you can't translate, as Robert Frost once suggested, then art is what you cannot define. Nevertheless, it's fun to try." - james monaco, 'how to read a film'

"This spectacle of banality is todays true pornography..." - Jean Baudrillard

"...today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. We are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms." - Philip K. Dick

"There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose ideas, shining in his head, frighted people and for whom delirium is the only solution to the strangulation that life has prepared for him." - Antonin Artaud

"The way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out from the heart." - Charles Bukowski

"Tea heads are a sociable lot. Too sociable for my liking." - William S. Burroughs

l∅ckedinab∅x

25 August 2004

Little Death scene.... the later

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