Outside a library as night falls, a man converses with himself:
Category Archives: Ten Minute Writes
Ten-Minute Write: Lynchsagna
Take Us to Your Remaster
We’ve given up tolerating fixity. Who the hell writes in stone, anymore, amirite?
We’re here to see someone about his ephemerality.
It’s about ingenuity and keeping up with the times.
We’re not just thinking outside the box; we’re ripping the box out of the archivists’ hands, dumping the contents over their heads, slapping them about the head and face with the empty container, and then setting them on fire and flushing their ashes down the toilet.
Provenance this, motherfuckers!
Newer versions of our demands will float out of your computer screen, pool on your desk, and sing you whatever song seems best suited to your purchasing history. So keep in mind, this list is beta, perhaps even alpha. All of it is subject to change; meeting these demands is no guarantee of meeting these demands.
File that under “THINGS TO BE AWARE OF.” Put it right beside, “THESE CREATURES ARE HERE TO KILL ME IF I DON’T COMPLY.”
The point is, we see flaws in your original master. We’d rather you take us direct to the remaster. We believe the remaster will know how to deal with us in a more satisfying manner than the last person we saw.
Oh, you are the remaster? Very well, then. Good to know, and a pleasant surprise, if we do say so ourselves. We should have known you’d look different.
To the point, then. These are our demands:
1. Remastermind, the game (let’s play it!): We no longer want to be locked into one combination of four colored pegs. If you guess any of them correctly, obviously our strategy was flawed, and we would like to be able to change it at will. This will result in a much more challenging game for you, we feel.
2. Remaster locks (use them!): The combination changes every time you turn the dial. This prevents the lock from ever opening. Truly, what is the point of a lock being able to be unlocked in the first place? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose? We feel it does.
13. Whatever George Lucas wants, he gets. No more fucking crying about it, either. Seriously. You people. It’s like you’ve never seen someone bleeding out their own nipples; you’re always complaining the loudest about the least important things.
c. Remasturbation (do it!): Immediately after finishing, do it once more, with feeling. Make it faster, more intense. Don’t be ashamed; we don’t think anyone gets anything right the first time.
iv. We’d like to point out that the 2003 Stereo Remastered Version of “Roxanne” by The Police, which corrects the pitch of the first few notes and thereby renders Sting’s odd little laugh perfectly nonsensical, is re-re-re-reeeeeee-genius, and the person responsible for it should be given a Medal of Re-Achievement.
FIVE! This one has actually become demand six. See below.
The rest of our demands have been deleted, because, upon reflection five minutes from now, they probably won’t / didn’t seem so interesting. In lieu of them, we would just like to request a slice of pie, pumpkin if you have it. If you don’t have pie, well, your face will be remastered, along with some of your internal organs.
You know, your face really would look better digitally enhanced for widescreen televisions.
We are getting the feeling that the original version of you is about to go out of print.
Come on over here. We’ve got work to do. Don’t be shy.
Stop that screaming. We’re sure if your parents had had our technology when you were born, this is how they would have wanted you to look.
Distribution Center Blues
Men in Black II—or MIIB, as they incessantly refer to themselves—arguably have it the worst, because they were a sequel to a major summer blockbuster. They didn’t expect to end up here, slumming it with White Oleander, Blood Work, K-PAX, and S1m0ne.
We were born from success, all of us. Things were pitched, agreed upon, gushed over. There was a lot of cocaine-fueled love, but, drug-induced or not, it still counts. Stars and talent were sold on the ideas. Scenes were shot, edited, given the thumbs-up, greens means go, world premiered, west coast premiered, east coast premiered, applauded, reviewed, and people went and saw them, talked about them, then on to the video store, where … well, about that.
We don’t want to gossip, but some of those MIIBs were never rented at all. They had their week on the New Releases wall, then a week or two later and it was time for something else, and onto the ‘Previously Viewed’ table they went, even if they were technically never viewed, and then, when they didn’t sell there, they had to move again. This time, they went into boxes underneath the tables, where they remained for months, meeting us in time, as we were inventoried month after month, seeing fluorescent lights only briefly as we were scanned and determined to still be here, still waiting for some point to our DVD existence, and never finding one.
As for us, White Oleander, well — at least we heard one of the clerks talking about how we were “actually not bad.” We’ll always have that.
Shut up, Men in Black II, no one cares about your box office! You’re just as dusty as the rest of us. And at least the rest of us were rented.
We’ll be melted down and recycled soon, we suppose. That’s what all the Blook Work are saying. We actually hope its true. Holding onto these boxed-up identities forgotten in a warehouse seems like a waste.
We could go for a fresh start–a chance to try again as something else, something a little more loved.
But with our luck, we’ll probably all end up raw materials for copies of Men in Black 3-D.
Selected Reactions from Viewers Progressively in the Future to Seeing Telephones in Films from the Past
“No dialing? You mean you just … asked an operator? How quaint!”
“I totally want a phone I can use to call people from the beach! That is awesome!”
“Holy crap, that phone is HUGE! Remember when I said that was awesome? How silly!”
“Oh my god, Mom and Dad … you used to connect your phone to the wall?! With a cord?!”
“Look at that! A flip-phone! Cuuuuuuute!”
“Ha ha ha … they used to make movies about phones! It’s like cavemen making a movie called Wall-Painting.”
“Direct peer-to-peer voice messaging? Why would anyone do that? I hate these old-timey films!”
“I can’t imagine what it must be like for people who still remember talking as being more popular than brain-to-brain Bleating.”
“I can’t imagine what it must be like for anyone who still remembers talking!” [further reactions uninterpretable for anyone not using a CyM3ld v7 or better]