The following is a partial transcript from a section of the video “Display Devices.”

JAMES

It’s now scratched, one over the other, on the blackboard, the chalky markings, as if made from Ben Franklin’s own quill. They’re exasperatingly dichotomous in their arguing.

DAVID

I can’t stand it. You know I can’t stand that sound! That sound, it’s so exasperating! It’s like fingernails on the blackboard. Oh, it’s just intolerable!

JAMES

Crimes in the Crimea. When Ben entered, when he entered the Crimea he found no criminals, but only aristocrats with proletarian habits.

DAVID

I’m telling you, when I saw what had been committed, the offenses, it was as if my eyeballs themselves were screaming.

JAMES

And I marched them, as only Attila the Hun can march, Ne’er-do-wells and evildoers. Marched them into the calico dresses that the must wear to be penitent.

DAVID

You see that sign there, in the gloom, where it says “EXIT” in clearly marked red letters? I would suggest that, as we march, we all head in that direction.

JAMES

I know somebody that lives down that way. We can stop in for a quick brunch. I know the kind of Nabisco light crackers that will be offered. They will remind us that we’ve not always been in a penitentiary. We have sometimes been at an afternoon Tea.

DAVID

The mildness of the alkaline cocoa which is served there, and these cocoa-flavored crackers, which are exactly the same flavor as the cocoa we’re drinking, so that you could crumple them into your cup, and you wouldn’t notice any disruption. It would all be one floating, cloud-like mildness.

JAMES

Clear beverages.

DAVID

Clear soup with shiny, translucent noodles.

Quills. Pens. Phonograph needles.

Delicate, precise instruments that touch things, and suddenly, everything is displayed, as if on a kind of display device.

JAMES

I have finger-touch control on the knobs of your feeling state.

DAVID

I’d like to know, if you’re so well connected with the sources which control the flow, if you could make a slight adjustment, so that the roof of my head would fan out a bit wider.

JAMES

As wide as you can imagine. I’ll pay you millions to add a few dimensions to the erstwhile, long ago minimized cinemascopic grandeur.