For me, a strength of Opulence is also a point for which it received criticism: there is no explanation of where the money comes from, of how the country gets its riches. The film noirs were about the bad things that people would do for cash, but Opulence imagines a world where there is endless money. Desperate everyday calculations about work and finances are removed, and citizens have more time for pleasure and contemplation. This allows us, and them, to focus on the real question: if we have everything we want, what comes next? Isn't that an important idea in itself? But as audiences we've been trained to view wealthy characters with suspicion.

Inadvertent magic is, we think, the best kind: the hazy coincidence, the series of signs not quite decoded. It can be the first recording of a song, before the words have clicked into place, when the flawed syntax catches the edge of a chord, and the hum of a misplaced microphone spills into the mix. But there comes a point, and this can be dangerous, when the artist can fall prey to a confidence borne of this early fizzing success: she wants to harness the power without understanding it, and seeks a do-over, never understanding that the misplaced passes and fudged lines of the imperfect first incantation were vital to its construct.

Greil Marcus, Lost Locales

[...] He must have smoothed over his footprints with snow in order to make this shot look perfect, Olga says at one point, referring to a composition called The Arrival. As the search goes on, they discover that some of the shots defy physics, particularly an image of Jan and the party on top of a peak looking up to the camera high above them, an effect that might be achieved with a modern helicopter shot.

A Book of Books: Quotes, Aphorisms and Sayings From The World of Literature (Norton 1985). We used this book as a doorstep to keep the living room door open. I referenced it when my homework needed some extra juice. The more tired or distracted I was, the quicker I turned to it. In April 1993 Mrs White pointed out that while quotations should be ornamental rather than bearing the brunt of your story, lately yours have been bordering on the superfluous. It feels as if you've been shoehorning them into your essays where they are not needed. I nodded. Many a poem is marred by a superfluous word, I said. (Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, as quoted in A Book of Books: Quotes, Aphorisms and Sayings From The World of Literature (Norton 1985)). [...]

[...] There he found a group already churning out copies of Hollywood thrillers, and with them he'd make over five hundred films between 1948 and 1956. They were filmed in a mixture of English and Spanish, and starred American nobodies, European never-weres, and young Hispanic talent. These pictures were largely shot with Mexico City standing in for LA, Chicago, or New York, and with their pulpy concentration of crime and lust became known as Sexy Mexys or Sexiguns. The group made several films simultaneously, with as many as thirty in production at once. Sometimes the cast and crew did not know which film they were working on, and some films are clearly a collage of several others, causing their plots to be a hash of tangled clichés and narrative non sequiturs. No matter who acted as director (and as many as twenty might serve the role on any one film) the films are attributed to a fictional director, Hermoso Equipo (inverted Spanish for beautiful team). The group found strength in this approach, with Jensen even believing that the more different films we get in one film, the more authors involved, the more plots we refer to... the closer to the centre of fiction and humanity we get. These quotes were originally attributed to Hermoso Equipo, as if he were a real person, in an interview with the LA Times in 1961.

[...] They'd never find it. They'd never find me. I was strong. I was quick. I knew every shortcut. I was the town, I was a continuation of every cul-de-sac, and I was the point beyond every dead end, the thread in the stitching. I was underground, below everyone, able to move unseen, cover my mistakes with more mistakes, able to divert and subvert. I was the future of the town, its present, its past; I was a Saxon burial mound I was a Roman suffix, I was the dead centre of England, a bullseye. And tomorrow was L's birthday.

Lara: I was trying to distract myself from L, but she was everywhere, her name shouted down the corridors of every film. She was the subtext that swelled to swallow the story, the footnote that spilled over many pages. I buried myself in films and recorded everything in my film binder. She showed up everywhere. An above average number of characters shared her name, or her face shape, or her walk. I tried to write to her, but didn't know what to say. There were many abandoned efforts filled with jokes, stories, and confessions. The ones I actually finished were more careful and restrained, like a soldier's letters home that had been redacted by his government. New school is fine. Not as good. Everything will be ok. Weather not bad. Write soon. They were so below par I couldn't send them.

At this point it is easy to forget the feverish early excitement of that particular part of the internet age. We're now embedded in it, we're used to our online lives, and our online deaths. At least four of my school friends on Facebook have passed away. Their profile pictures are frozen tributes to themselves, not as I remember them, but at a point between 2007 (when the site began) and now. Their last status updates serve as epitaphs. A girl in my English class (cancer): Surprise breakfast in bed from hubby: So lucky. A boy whose head obscured L from me in science (car accident): What's with this government? And David H (unnamed disease): Saw this video and had to share. Just a few hours of life undocumented between the choice to share these thoughts and death.