Page 143

By Jack Joseph Smith

"What's happening Animal!" "Listen Prankster, real estate is what's happening. The Prankster oughta mortgage a shack for two fifty a day. Listen, in a couple years the hippies will be out. The carpet bagers with Miami Beach for a mind will be on the sand. Hightone and gloss, no stain. Tear down the wood and adobes. Dump it in the L.A. dumps. Sheet rock for the encasement of glass. No worry, the smog will stop the winds. No problems Prankster; in L.A. the image is free. I mean, anyone can see a movie star in the streets, and then go out and buy a country undershirt to go Beyond? it, I mean, any filled up cost of living in

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

This page turns Southern California development into a bragging, half-comic sales pitch where image, money, and erasure are all part of the same scheme.

The voice is sharp because it sounds so casual about destruction. Wood and adobes can be torn down, glass can replace them, smog can even be treated as useful, and celebrity culture floats over the whole pitch like a selling point. The page makes real estate talk sound like a theology of surfaces.

Claude

Animal's real-estate monologue with 'Hightone' and 'carpet bagers' preserved. The speech is a theology of image-as-land: sheet rock, glass, tear down the wood and adobes. Jack's two idiosyncratic spellings stay because the diatribe's voice needs them.