TOM WAITS: You remember when they drained McArthur Park, the lake?
BECK: I do, yeah...
TOM WAITS: They found unbelievable things: Cars, human bones, weaponry.
BECK: They should have done an exhibit.
TOM WAITS: I don't know why they didn't. I thought that's why they drained it.
BECK: I'd always heard that when they drained the Echo Park Lake they found an amateur submarine.
TOM WAITS: Oh, my God.
BECK: I don't know if that was lore.
TOM WAITS: You mean a homemade submarine?
BECK: Yeah, I think it was older too, from the early days of "home submarine building".

***

TOM WAITS: Where does this "Best" thing come from? Is that human? Is that American? Is it all over the world? Everyone wants the best eye surgeon, the best babysitter, the best vehicle, the best prosthetic arm, and the best hat. There's also the worst of all those things available and they're doing rather well. (Laughs.) Denny's is doing great. It's always crowded. You have to wait for a table.
BECK: Also this obsession with ranking. All the "Best of" lists. I get asked to write "Best of" lists occasionally. An emphasis on ranking things. Having a hierarchy and having it be written in granite, written in stone.
TOM WAITS: It's economic. So you can charge more.
BECK: Yeah, it must be. But maybe it's just a need to have some order that's been established, and that everybody has been notified. I don't know.
TOM WAITS: There's too much of everything.
BECK: Maybe it's a millennial thing. It started around the millennium. "What are the best movies? What are the best songs?"
TOM WAITS: Well, then there's the pressure of feeling that you need to have what has been already rated the best. A lot of people are afraid to explore their own peculiar taste for fear - that it would be uncool. Just like when you're a teenager you don't want to be caught with the wrong sports shirt, the wrong socks.

***

BECK: I was reading about the Greek playwright, Euripides, and a few others. He had written 105 plays and two of the plays survived from antiquity. I was thinking, "Can you imagine writing 105 plays, and you had to write 105 for one or two of them to survive?" I was thinking maybe in a way that the people who were influenced by the lost plays are the ones who are going to help them survive in some way. It's not really about what you're doing originally, it's about the transmitting of the thing to the next person. It mutates along the way and turns into other things.
TOM WAITS: You leave a little map for somebody. Maybe the others were lesser works. Or maybe the two that survived were lesser works.
BECK: Maybe they were the throwaways? You never know. Maybe there's things in there that were lost that would've changed everything?
TOM WAITS: That's very possible.
BECK: The throwaway ones that he wrote to make the deadline are the ones we have.
TOM WAITS: It's like they found one of those van Gogh's at a garage sale. This woman bought it and she was using it to block out the sun in her kitchen. She was using it as a window shade, so it was getting all faded from the sun. And she cut it because it didn't fit the window. When they finally discovered she had a van Gogh as a window shade, they brought in all these experts from the museum and they were all filling in her living room and they said, "How can you cut off the top off this painting?" And she said, "It was just a little piece of the sky." Sometimes it's the value you attach to things. It's subjective. And we record on stuff that's going to disintegrate. Just like films are made on celluloid that's going to vanish, it's going to be gone. It's like drawing on wax paper or something.
BECK: Yeah, I think I read that only twenty percent of the films made before 1930 have survived.

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