coincide, and I could quit my job at the showroom.
Though I wasn’t due at the Regnor’s bar until 6 p.m., I decided to go early and check out one of the Lost Film Conference panels. Alwyn had recommended “The End of Scarcity” since it was being moderated by Lydia, owner of the tweed coat.
The Regnor’s lobby was empty save for a lone weeper crying into the handset of the lobby’s busted courtesy phone, a sight that made me think, not wrongly, of me on my red phone in the showroom, a person speaking in public to the disconnected air.
I took the elevator to the third floor. Save for the flapping crepe paper sounds emitted by the floor vents, the hallways of the Regnor were silent, as though the building were host to a Zen meditation retreat rather than a film conference. I’d hoped that the door to Room 337 might be open to latecomers. It was not. I contemplated the door’s faux-wood paint job, wondering if I should knock or just enter.
I knocked.
The door opened; a person hushed me inside. People sat cross-legged on the bed and on the floor or stood against the wall; the four panelists occupied folding chairs pushed against the drapes, which were drawn.
One panelist, a sexpot in fishnets and ankle boots, eyed my awkward attempts to puzzle myself against a wall blank. She, possibly Lydia, announced that, prior to the panel, she planned to screen a few vanishing films rated “inspirational” by focus groups.
She killed the lights and, using a remote, thrummed up the room’s TV.
Each vanishing film began the same way: a black screen with a white identification number that cut to a person standing before afake backdrop—of the Tokyo skyline, or of the Matterhorn, or of a Mars-scape roamed by mustangs.
A woman in her thirties, identified as 3298732-MU (backdrop: file closet interior), read an Elizabeth Bishop villanelle (“the art of losing isn’t hard to master/so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster”) before reciting, for the remaining four minutes, the sentence “I thought that I could love you.”
The blandly pretty 7865456-BK (backdrop: rain ticking down a window screen) told stories about her childhood summer lake vacations in Minnesota. All of the people in her stories came off as charming and decent, her parents and siblings, her cousins and grandparents, even the stepfather who, she maintained, had molested her when she was twelve, but not without her permission.
A twenty-something man with a chapped upper lip, 8764533-WE, told a story about himself in the third person when he was babysitting the neighbors’ two-year-old son. The neighbor’s son was prone to running into the road, and so he’d decided to strap the boy into a plastic toboggan on the lawn, but then the family’s dog ran into the path of an oncoming car, and the car, in order to avoid the dog, swerved onto the lawn and crushed the boy, who was strapped into the toboggan and unable to save himself.
“But the truth was that the man had never liked that kid,” he said of himself. “He’d even, on occasion, wished him dead.”
We watched three more films, the most squirmy-making an homage to Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou , in which a man slit open a cow’s eye with a razor blade while speaking dispassionately about the pains of his dyslexic childhood.
The films ended, the TV screen cataracted by a brilliant block of cobalt. The room shifted as the people readied themselves again to be seen. Possibly-Lydia cued the lights.
A hippie panelist with Asian coin earrings opened the discussion by raising the issue of scarcity. Was scarcity scarcer than ever?
“My specific question,” she said, “is whether or not reproductions—of paintings, of people, but specifically I suppose I’m speaking about these films—create scarcity or negate it.”
“But we’re not talking reproductions,” countered a panelist who resembled, with her asymmetrical bob, a brunette Cyndi Lauper.
Though I wasn’t due at the Regnor’s bar until 6 p.m., I decided to go early and check out one of the Lost Film Conference panels. Alwyn had recommended “The End of Scarcity” since it was being moderated by Lydia, owner of the tweed coat.
The Regnor’s lobby was empty save for a lone weeper crying into the handset of the lobby’s busted courtesy phone, a sight that made me think, not wrongly, of me on my red phone in the showroom, a person speaking in public to the disconnected air.
I took the elevator to the third floor. Save for the flapping crepe paper sounds emitted by the floor vents, the hallways of the Regnor were silent, as though the building were host to a Zen meditation retreat rather than a film conference. I’d hoped that the door to Room 337 might be open to latecomers. It was not. I contemplated the door’s faux-wood paint job, wondering if I should knock or just enter.
I knocked.
The door opened; a person hushed me inside. People sat cross-legged on the bed and on the floor or stood against the wall; the four panelists occupied folding chairs pushed against the drapes, which were drawn.
One panelist, a sexpot in fishnets and ankle boots, eyed my awkward attempts to puzzle myself against a wall blank. She, possibly Lydia, announced that, prior to the panel, she planned to screen a few vanishing films rated “inspirational” by focus groups.
She killed the lights and, using a remote, thrummed up the room’s TV.
Each vanishing film began the same way: a black screen with a white identification number that cut to a person standing before afake backdrop—of the Tokyo skyline, or of the Matterhorn, or of a Mars-scape roamed by mustangs.
A woman in her thirties, identified as 3298732-MU (backdrop: file closet interior), read an Elizabeth Bishop villanelle (“the art of losing isn’t hard to master/so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster”) before reciting, for the remaining four minutes, the sentence “I thought that I could love you.”
The blandly pretty 7865456-BK (backdrop: rain ticking down a window screen) told stories about her childhood summer lake vacations in Minnesota. All of the people in her stories came off as charming and decent, her parents and siblings, her cousins and grandparents, even the stepfather who, she maintained, had molested her when she was twelve, but not without her permission.
A twenty-something man with a chapped upper lip, 8764533-WE, told a story about himself in the third person when he was babysitting the neighbors’ two-year-old son. The neighbor’s son was prone to running into the road, and so he’d decided to strap the boy into a plastic toboggan on the lawn, but then the family’s dog ran into the path of an oncoming car, and the car, in order to avoid the dog, swerved onto the lawn and crushed the boy, who was strapped into the toboggan and unable to save himself.
“But the truth was that the man had never liked that kid,” he said of himself. “He’d even, on occasion, wished him dead.”
We watched three more films, the most squirmy-making an homage to Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou , in which a man slit open a cow’s eye with a razor blade while speaking dispassionately about the pains of his dyslexic childhood.
The films ended, the TV screen cataracted by a brilliant block of cobalt. The room shifted as the people readied themselves again to be seen. Possibly-Lydia cued the lights.
A hippie panelist with Asian coin earrings opened the discussion by raising the issue of scarcity. Was scarcity scarcer than ever?
“My specific question,” she said, “is whether or not reproductions—of paintings, of people, but specifically I suppose I’m speaking about these films—create scarcity or negate it.”
“But we’re not talking reproductions,” countered a panelist who resembled, with her asymmetrical bob, a brunette Cyndi Lauper.
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