Review: 'David Lynch' Revised & Updated Edition

Break the code, solve the crime. One thing that draws a lot of viewers to the films of David Lynch is Lynch's refusal to express his intentions on the surface. In an age when every film's message must be explicitly stated for an audience with the attention span of a puppy, David Lynch's dogged refusal to ever play that dull game is especially thrilling. 

It also means that theories about what, say, that blue box in Mulholland Dr. means are more plentiful than donuts in Agent Cooper's mouth. Whether they be glib brain farts or endless exegeses, explanations of what Lynch really meant are everywhere. To the late filmmaker's credit, he rarely validated any, but also rarely outright said any were wrong either.

Review: 'A Place Both Wonderful and Strange: The Extraordinary Until History of Twin Peaks'

A Place Both Wonderful and Strange: The Extraordinary Until History of Twin Peaks had already been on my radar for a bit when my wife told me she'd listened to Glen Weldon's podcast, and self-described Peaks superfan Weldon said he was surprised by how much he'd learned from Scott Meslow's book. 

Review: 'David Lynch: His Work, His World'

Over the course of a lovely but tiring seventeen years of Psychobabbling I've scaled way back on writing anything but reviews here. So I allowed a big, awful milestone to pass without much more than changing the banner at the top of this page. I'm talking about the death of David Lynch, my favorite artist, one who was so versatile, open, and willing to tap into dreams and nightmares, so old-fashioned hardworking, that he has been nothing short of the biggest creative inspiration in my own life. 

I got my start as a writer when my article on the role of dream worlds in Lynch's work was published in the final issue of the Twin Peaks fanzine Wrapped in Plastic way back in 2005. Although I've since published a couple of books, and even got to work on one of them with one of my top music heroes, Dave Davies, the biggest thrill of my career was seeing my name on the cover of Wrapped in Plastic beneath those of Peaks co-creator Mark Frost, star Catherine Coulson, writer Bob Engels, editor Mary Sweeney, and David Lynch. 

Review: 'Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror and the Spectre of Nostalgia'

As a place for me to babble about my favorite rock music and horror movies of a century that only exists in the rearview, Psychobabble is nostalgic by definition. So a book like Ghost of an Idea, which ostensibly studies and derides the tendency of the horror film to look back with both fear and longing, probably isn't aimed at me. Nor is the almost willfully dense academic voice that dominates the first third of the book. 

Review: Velocity Girl's 'UltraCopacetic'

When Maryland's Velocity Girl came shimmering out of Sub Pop with their debut album in 1993, Bob Weston's wall-of-noise production couldn't hide the gleeful melodism of the singles "Crazy Town" and "Audrey's Eyes" (and if this song doesn't automatically force you to picture Sherilyn Fenn in saddle shoes, you and I might have trouble relating to each other), the squalling "Pretty Sister" (my personal fave), or "Pop Loser", which is totally pop despite a lyric mocking those who sing la-la shit. And no group in that lo-fi scene had a singer like the opera-trained Sarah Shannon. Burying her clarion pipes way down in the mix couldn't hide that either.

Review: 'Inland Empire' Blu-ray

Whether they were loved (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet) or loathed (Dune), David Lynch's films always had a rich, textured quality that made them more like worlds to inhabit than stories to watch on a screen. Even his first foray into network television, Twin Peaks, looked unusually deep and cinematic for an age of flat video images and 25-inch screens. 

Ten Vinyl Releases Psychobabble Would Like to See in 2022

 It’s official: the Vinyl Revolution has been fought and won. 2021 was the first year since 1987 that the vinyl LP outsold the CD. Vinyl pressing plants can’t keep up with demand for new product. Consequently, 2022 should be another boon year for grooved plastic, but there are several platters I’d particularly like to see and hear in the coming year. Here are ten (actually, more than ten) of them: 

1. The Beatles’ Anthologies-Expanded

 

Despite a bit of a COVID-related hiccup in 2020, a big, beautiful box of Beatles has become a new annual tradition. This year saw the release of an anniversary set devoted to Let It Be, and the vinyl edition is the first of these to completely mimic the CD one, right down to the inclusion of a hardcover book. What will come next is a bit of a floating question mark. Logic dictates that now that Sgt. Pepper’s through Let It Be have received their obligatory deluxe boxes, series-mastermind Giles Martin will next skip back to the beginning and start remixing the early Beatles records. However, Martin has said that there are limited limits options for remixing the early Beatles albums because they were recorded on two-track machines (never mind that he has already remixed a bunch of pre-Pepper’s tracks for projects such as the remixed edition of Beatles 1 and the Yellow Submarine Songtrack). 

Review: 'Northern Exposure: A Cultural History'

After Twin Peaks became a sensation on the strength of its complexity, filmic aesthetic, mysticism, quirkiness, and small-town appeal, it was inevitable that other such oddball shows would follow. The first one that seemingly slipped onto a network while clutching Twin Peaks' tail was Northern Exposure, but Joshua Brand and John Falsey actually had their series in the works for a while and had already proved their quirk credentials when they created St. Elsewhere. Northern Exposure also outlasted Peaks' mere season and a half by playing nicer with audiences and not depending on a central mystery said audiences demanded be solved before completely losing interest upon its solution.

While Northern Exposure survived longer as a first-run series than Twin Peaks, it has not survived nearly as long in terms of impact. While there are dozens of books, articles, and doctoral theses devoted to Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure has attracted far less interest. So Michael Samuel's new book Northern Exposure: A Cultural History should fill a void, though there just isn't enough to it to really get the job done. The bulk of the book is a five-chapter, 100-page survey of the series' inspiration, development, content, and legacy. One chapter is mostly made up of short descriptions of characters and bios of the actors who played them and another is a series synopsis, and neither is likely to reveal anything new to NX cultists. By far the most interesting sections are the ones on Roslyn, Washington, the real life setting of Northern Exposure that had a love-hate affair with the series that put it on the map, and the one on the series' background that sheds a lot of light on the decisive role Brand and Falsey played in forcing TV to grow up. 

Beyond page 100, the remainder of Northern Exposure: A Cultural History is mostly an episode guide with brief plot descriptions, script quotations, and occasional explanations of how particular episodes reflect important themes in the show. Samuels also contributes some simple and rather charming line drawings to illustrate his text.

[Disclosure: Northern Exposure: A Cultural History is published by Rowman & Littlefield, which owns Backbeat Books, the publisher of my own books The Who FAQ and 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Minute.]

Watch New Edit of David Lynch's "Rabbits"

A few weeks after releasing the haunting short film "Fire (Pozar)", David Lynch's You Tube channel continues to host interesting content. Today, Lynch has unveiled a new edit of his bizarre-even-for-Lynch Internet series "Rabbits". 

"Rabbits" originally appeared on the long-defunct website DavidLynch.com. Each episode consists of Mulholland Dr. stars Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, and Scott Coffey having non-sequitur conversations to the delight of a sitcom laugh track. Plus, they were dressed like giant, feature-less rabbits.

"Rabbits" found a more formal and permanent home scattered among the disturbing debris in Lynch's most recent feature film (assuming you don't subscribe to the theory that Twin Peaks: The Return is an 18-hour film), 2006's INLAND EMPIRE. This latest edit is titled "Rabbits 1", which implies that additional installments will follow. Watch it here:

6/26/20 Update: Part 2 is now up:

Review: 'The Greatest Cult Television Shows of All Time'

Regardless of quality, nearly every TV show develops some sort of following. But earning the classification “cult television show” requires more than a following. By definition, cultists must be relatively few in number but legion in devotion. They stage conventions in honor of their favorite shows. They dress up as their favorite characters. They communicate in a secret language of quotes and catch phrases. They organize fervent letter-writing campaigns when their favorite shows risk cancellation.

Watch David Lynch's "Fire (Prozar)"

David Lynch always said that his main impetus for transitioning from fine artist to filmmaker was the desire to see his paintings and illustrations move. While he has certainly made his share of moving (in all senses of the word) art, an animated short he made in 2015 is Lynch's film that comes closest to fulfilling his original wish. "Fire (Prozar)" essentially looks like one of David Lynch's charcoal illustrations twitching and vibrating to life (with much assistance from animator Noriko Miyakawa). 

With its images of flames, theaters, isolated houses, and elongated deers that look like they just danced off the stage of Industrial Symphony No. 1, "Fire (Prozar)" is very recognizably Lynch. The string score by Marek Zebrowski (who worked as a Polish-to-English translator on INLAND EMPIRE) is highly reminiscent of the late Krzysztof Penderecki, whose work Lynch used to unforgettable effect in INLAND EMPIRE and "Part 8" of Twin Peaks: The Return. In fact, Zebrowski actually wrote it for the Penderecki String Quartet. All of these elements coalesce in what is likely Lynch's best animated work since 1968's "The Alphabet" (sorry, "Dumbland" fans). 

Lynch just released "Fire (Prozar)" on YouTube. See it here:

Review: 'Conversations with Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer'

David Lynch is responsible for the immediately recognizable visual language of Twin Peaks, but as far as its story goes, Mark Frost had the most control over its direction on an episode-to-episode basis. Yet Frost is serially left out of the conversation because he does not have Lynch’s flair for self-promotion and because he did not have as audacious a resume as Lynch did before the show began.

David Bushman’s new book Conversations with Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer sets the record straight in a few ways. Between February 2018 and October 2019, Bushman conducted a series of 22, one-hour phone interviews with Mark Frost after clearly doing a lot of homework. Bushman asks the right questions to fill in each significant phase of Frost’s family, personal, and creative history. And that history is startling and peppered with odd anecdotes. His grandfather was one of the first doctors to work with Margaret Sanger on Planned Parenthood. His dad Warren (Twin Peaks’ Doc Hayward) once had dinner with FDR. Mark investigated UFOs with a guy from MUFON in the late seventies. He worked alongside Michael Keaton in the lighting department of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and dubbed either Bennie or Bjorn’s voice (he can’t remember which) in a documentary about ABBA.

Review: 'TV Milestones: Twin Peaks'

Few twentieth century TV series have been as closely examined as Twin Peaks has been. Because it is so mysterious, evocative, experimental, and elliptical, David Lynch and Mark Frost’s series has invited deep, deep, deep analysis since the days before the Internet was ubiquitous. In an Internet-mired age, the analysis has gotten deeper than ever. A fan recently posted a four-and-a-half hour (!) video analysis of all three seasons and the Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me feature film that has received more than 600,000 visits as of this writing.

So what can Julie Grossman and Will Schiebel’s 88-page monograph on Twin Peaks for the TV Milestones series possibly bring to the conversation at this analytical oversaturation point? Well, without necessarily being essential, the book does accomplish a few things. Most obviously and fundamentally, it is the first printed book devoted to the analysis of Twin Peaks published since season three aired in 2017, so for those who can’t be bothered to wade through all of that Internet material, it is the handiest and most encompassing look at the Twin Peaks phenomenon to date.

Review: 'The Women of David Lynch: A Collection of Essays'

Like almost all artists worth discussing, David Lynch is highly controversial. Some viewers praise his ability to place you in an unsettling, beautiful, transcendent, and completely realized world. Others dismiss him as a purveyor of weird for the sake of weird. He has also split viewers in terms of his treatment of women. Some feel that the way he portrays women is complex and ultimately empathetic. Many others have dismissed him as a misogynist who gets off on forcing his female characters to suffer.

This particular issue has continually resurfaced since the release of Blue Velvet 33 years ago and on through the debut of the long-awaited third season of Twin Peaks just a couple of years ago. The argument regarding Lynch’s treatment of women is so pervasive that Scott Ryan decided to devote an entire issue of his Twin Peaks ’zine The Blue Rose to the women of David Lynch. Ultimately, he has devoted an entire book to that subject. Since Ryan is a man, he is not the most qualified writer to dive into this sensitive topic, and he very wisely keeps a low profile in The Women of David Lynch. Instead he cedes control to thirteen women to explore such topics as Dorothy Valens’s role in Blue Velvet, the roles of non-white women in Twin Peaks, and the roles of all of the female characters in The Elephant Man. There are also interviews with Mädchen Amick of Twin Peaks and Charlotte Stewart of Eraserhead and Twin Peaks, which provide firsthand accounts of what it’s like to be a woman in Lynch’s world.

Most of the authors who contribute to The Women of David Lynch lean toward a more positive assessment of his treatment of women. They believe that he is generally intent on presenting a realistic idea of what it is like to be a women struggling through a patriarchal society. Understandably, the writers who tackle his treatment of non-white female characters are less forgiving, particularly Melanie McFarland, who is the only writer who is very emphatically not a fan of Lynch’s work. However, even she admits that it’s all a matter of interpretation as she cites other women writers who continue to admire Lynch’s work. Lynch is certainly an artist who demands active interpretation from those who take in his often confounding and troubling work.

As much as I love that work, I am one of those fans who is often troubled by the ideas behind his dreamy/disturbing imagery, and I found it very enlightening that many of the women of The Women of David Lynch found some of Lynch’s more controversial characters, such as Dorothy Valens and Mary X of Eraserhead, worthy of empathy and praise. I guess it does come down to interpretation, though just as a guy like Scott Ryan is not the ideal assessor of Lynch’s treatment of women, a guy like me is not the best assessor of the conclusions of the women who contribute to The Women of David Lynch. I can say that several of these writers confirmed some of my negative assessments, but some challenged them for the better, helping me to gain a more thorough appreciation for work I already loved with definite political reservations. While a couple of the more experimental essays didn’t work for me at all (one is written in the parlance of a Facebook post complete with excessive all caps and “LOLs”; another briefly reviews each of Lynch’s features from the pov of a misogynistic murderer on acid), most of these essays are accessible and enlightening, though I’m sure this particular issue will continue to be debated as long as people continue to study the work and women of David Lynch.

Farewell, Peggy Lipton

In a town of cuckoos, criminals, murderers, and demons, Norma Jennings was the token normal person in Twin Peaks. Peggy Lipton played the owner of the R.R. Diner with both a soothing sense of calm amidst the chaos and a sort of quiet toughness when confronted with bozos like lunkhead husband Hank Jennings and crass capitalist Walter Lawford. 

Of course, Lipton's career started well before the 1990 debut of Twin Peaks. Perhaps her biggest claim to fame was her role as counterculture cop Julie Barnes on Mod Squad, but she'd also appeared in a multitude of other series such as Bewitched, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and The Virginian. She had a side career as a singer, as well, releasing versions of Laura Nyro's "Stoney End" and "Lu" and Donovan's "Wear Your Love Like Heaven". 

Peggy Lipton was diagnosed with cancer in 2004, but following treatment, she resumed acting on series such as Rules of Engagement, Crash, and Psych, and even resumed the role that most endears her to Psychobabble when she returned to Twin Peaks as Norma Jennings in 2017. Sadly, Peggy Lipton died from cancer yesterday. She was 72.

Review: 'David Lynch: Someone Is In My House'

David Lynch is mainly known as a creator of film and television, but that is only because film and television are the most popular visual art forms. He actually started living his art life as a painter and illustrator, and has been much, much more prolific in creating such works than film and TV over the past 55-or-so years. This is not news to fans, who have long known that Lynch only began filming in the first place because, as he said in one of his most oft-quoted statements, “I wanted to see my paintings move.”

In a sense, Lynch’s art always moved with or without celluloid. His paintings burst off the materials on which he oozes them. They are swirling, tactile. They are three-dimensional, either because Lynch applies his oils with such a heavy hand or because he actually sinks objects such as glass eyes or dead rats into them. They stare back at you. They seem to decay before your eyes. They speak. They move.

It must madden Lynch to see such massive, dimensional works shrunk down and reproduced on flat paper as they are in the new collection Someone Is in My House (a tie in with an exhibition at the Bonnefantenmuseum in the Netherlands), but as far as art books go, this is a nice one. It infuriates me when artworks are unnecessarily shrunk down for the sake of showing as much white border as possible, and this book does not commit that crime as egregiously as too many other art and photography collections do. This collection also provides a very wide look at Lynch’s varied career, not only presenting many of his paintings, but also his photographs, sculptures, film stills, and even a selection of his “Angriest Dog in the World” comic strips.

Someone Is in My House is also notable for presenting a great deal of work I’ve never seen before. One striking thing about much of this work is how it offers a completely unfiltered gaze into the abyss of his imagination. The dichotomy between Lynch’s affable, charming, sedate personality and the violence and nightmarishness of his films is familiar to anyone who has ever seen Eraserhead or Twin Peaks, but some of the material in this book may shock even the most hardcore fans of his films. Body are mutated and twisted to the extreme across his paintings and manipulated photos. Sexual violence looms queasily in works such as E.D., I Take You to My House, and Do You Want to Know What I Really Think? Works such as Change the Fuckin’ Channel Fuckface and Pete Goes to His Girlfriend’s House distill the explosive anger of Lynch’s most loathsome screen villains from Frank Booth to Fred Madison, and tempt the viewer to conclude that Lynch is only able to suppress similar anger with dedicated meditation. An early sketch depicts an al fresco bestiality orgy. The work is disturbing, sometimes repellant, though sometimes beautiful, like bits clipped from his most harrowing cinematic scenes and dipped in dark oils.

New Computer Game Based on Films of David Lynch

We all crave a new toy in our stockings at this time of the year, so many thanks to Caveware Digital for delivering one down the chimneys of those who prefer backwards talking demons in red rooms to ho-ho-ho-ing beardos in red suits. 

David Lynch fans may enjoy Ghost Dance: An Unauthorized David Lynch Adventure, a nineties style computer game that involves roaming through environments based on the Red Room from Twin Peaks, Winkie's Diner from Mulholland Dr., the rabbits' abode from INLAND EMPIRE, and a dark corridor occupied by the Mystery Man from Lost Highway in order to collect pieces of Lynch's paintings to help him "rebuild his world." 

The game is low tech, low action, and a little difficult to get working (helpful tip: when you see that spinning cube with the Lynch's face on the the black screen, you have to use the up arrow on your keyboard walk toward it and click in order to get the game started), but it is completely free of charge, so stop your belly aching, drink full, and descend. 

You can download Ghost Dance for Windows, Linux, or macOS here. 

You can also watch a walk through video for the game here:

Review: 'Thought Gang'

In 1992, David Lynch was involved in a welter of projects, including producing the soundtrack for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, which some (myself included) rate as the finest non-pop soundtrack album of all time. It would feature the sounds most associated with Lynch and his musical main-man Angelo Badalamenti: jazz percussion, guttural double bass, and dreamy synths.

At the same time, Lynch and Badalamenti were dabbling with a side project that used those signature sounds as a foundation to graffiti with dreadful drones and disturbed spoken-word yarns. They called the project Thought Gang, a good name considering the music’s dual goals of stimulating your intellect with its jazz overtures and assaulting you with its demanding discordance and sheer scariness.

While any plans to release the project in the nineties didn’t come to be, significant chunks of Thought Gang’s music emerged, most notably “A Real Indication”, “The Black Dog Runs at Night”, and “Frank 2000” in Fire Walk with Me (though only the first two tracks made its soundtrack album) and the hip-hop-ish “One Dog Bark” in the “Missing Pieces” bonus feature on the Fire Walk with Me Blu-ray.

Now, 26 years after the project began, Thought Gang is finally receiving a proper release from Sacred Bones Records. Not surprisingly, the two weirdest tracks from the Fire Walk with Me soundtrack sound practically prosaic in the context of this other stuff. “A Meaningless Conversation” is as queasy as music gets and the concluding two tracks, “Frank 2000” and “Summer Night Noise”, drop the rhythmic safety net altogether for more than 25 minutes (and nearly half of the album’s run time) of nightmarish noise. Thought Gang sounds like the lost soundtrack to a David Lynch movie so disturbing it was permanently shelved. If that sounds appealing to you, dive in and brace yourself for nightmares.

Review: 'Twin Peaks and Philosophy: That’s Damn Fine Philosophy'

Appearing at a time when television’s greatest philosophical questions were “How will MacGuyver save the day with nothing but a wad of  gum and an enema bag?” and “Which toddler will fall on his ass this week on America’s Funniest Home Videos?”, Twin Peaks seemed like an intellectual breath of Douglas Fir-scented air. David Lynch and Mark Frost’s series swam in the murky waters of metaphysics, synchronicity, duality, and other philosophical concepts, and these were not just set decorations for a show often dismissed as arbitrarily weird; they were central to its plot and purpose. So Twin Peaks is an ideal topic for Open Court Books’ Popular Culture and Philosophy series.

My Story "Denise Bryson" is on Welcome to Twin Peaks.com

To promote Mark Frost's book Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, the Welcome to Twin Peaks web site called for fans to submit their own dossier entries on Twin Peaks characters whom Frost did not chronicle in his book. Frost himself was the fan-fiction contest's judge. So I whipped up a story about FBI Agent Denise Bryson. Frost didn't pick my story (you can read Matt Latterell's winning entry here), but it is currently posted on Welcome to Twin Peaks as part of the site's ongoing Fan Dossier series, which features one of the non-winning entries every Friday. Last Friday's entry was my own "Denise Bryson", which you can read here. Thanks to Pieter Dom for posting it, hosting this series, and creating the damn fine banner above!