In View: The Best Of R.E.M. 1988–2003 is a DVD featuring videos by the rock band R.E.M. during 1988–2003, released as a companion to the Warner Bros. compilation In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003. All but two of the songs included on the audio CD made the DVD—the exceptions being "All the Right Friends" (which had no official music video) and "Animal" (the video not having been shot until early 2004.)
Jon Hyrns is a porter on a refurbished 1930s luxury train. Passengers on the Seattle-to-L.A. trip know him as "Johnny Berlin" - the man responsible for making their beds and cleaning their toilets. We get to know him differently - as a middle-aged, struggling writer with a workaday job and as many dreams as he has beds to clean. He's a true wanderer, whose plan is to spend his savings on a trip to Cambodia to write his long-gestating novel.
Following his four-month sabbatical in Cambodia, we find Johnny broke and couch-surfing in Brooklyn, musing on his experience in the Far East, where he gambled his money away and found himself stranded in Phnom Penh, forced to claim destitution at the U.S. Embassy, with suicidal visions of leaping off of a bridge into the Mekong River. NOTES FROM THE DUMPSTER is the continuing saga of this oddball's journey.
