Oral histories are fun reads. I recently enjoyed Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks by Brad Dukes. It has interviews with folks that had something to do with the show: cast, crew, writers, producers -- the author interviewed a whole lotta folks involved in the Twin Peaks. Featuring first-hand accounts from series co-creator Mark Frost and cast members including Kyle MacLachlan, Joan Chen, Sherilyn Fenn, Piper Laurie, Michael Ontkean, Ray Wise, Billy Zane and more.
I'm wondering with how awesome this book is, knowing that the author pretty much published it himself, if some publisher will scoop it up to reprint it. I saw that he was pretty much really only selling it on Amazon, and I wanted to make sure we had it at Quimby's, so I tracked the author down on Facebook and convinced him to consign it with us. He was very receptive and sweet about consigning it, and I was thrilled to provide a brick and mortar venue for him to sell it in Chicago. Also, I love sharing a good book with folks that I know would appreciate it, especially if it's independently published.
Stuff That Sticks With Me From this Book & Thoughts:
-Mark Frost, co-creator of the show, said that when they could, they'd add little asides in the show. It might have been references to old movies or other peoples work, even right down to the casting. For example, Peggy Lipton who played Norma Jennings on the show, was on Mod Squad, and they had her run into a co-star from Mod Squad in the diner that her Twin Peaks character worked in. Frost said, "Nobody was using this word then, I don't think I'd ever heard it, but this is a meta-level of conception, that in the show became a 'show within a show.' It became organic to our process. We knew we were making fictional narrative entertainment and we were also paying homage to things that tread similar thematic ground in the past." (p. 193) Oooooooo mashy-uppy goodness. I love this. This method of working in real life meta-ness adds to the mystique of the show, giving extra meat to conspiracy theories about Twin Peaks. Yes yes yes.
-Catherine Coulson who played Margaret "Log Lady" Lanterman said that some Japanese company wanted to buy the log because Twin Peaks was really popular in Japan. She told them, "No, the log is not for sale." She lamented that her daughter had just graduated from college, and she thought they really could have used the money but she could never bring herself to sell it. (p. 149)
-Phoebe Augustine who played Ronette Pulaski said that when she was filming the scene in the pilot where she was found walking down the railroad tracks in a torn up nighty, that she was really cold and that she had to walk across the railroad ties without looking down. There was a guy on the crew who looked really scary even though he wasn't doing anything. She told David Lynch that this guy was frightening her, and Lynch said "Don't tell anyone, but he's the bad guy." It turned out it was Frank Silva who played BOB, the scariest part of the show. (p. 176)
-Grace Zabriskie who played Mrs. Palmer (Laura Palmer's mom) said about Sheryl Lee, who played Laura Palmer: "She gave everything she had, she gave more, she gave more than she could afford to give, and she spent years coming back. I can't separate 'what her performance says to me,' from what I know it both gave to her and took from her. The performance itself tells this story. No one walks away unscathed from work like that." (p. 205)
-Sort of along the lines as the above quote from Ms. Zabriskie, Sheryl Lee (Laura Palmer) said, "Playing Laura was a painful place to live for a long time. It's hard, in acting school they teach you how to develop a character but they don't teach you how to let a character go." (p. 205) It reminded me of this amazing poem Ms. Lee wrote about it, a sort of letter to Laura. I was inspired to revisit the poem on-line, and upon rereading it, one of the stanzas really jumps out at me:
I offered my whole self
In honor of your life
And in exchange
Was tricked quite well
When you rewrote my rights
Soooooo haunting. The notion of being so emotionally and permanently affected by something you had a creative hand in, as well as being typecast because of it, it's the logical and poetic extension of being haunted by something.
-Wendy Robie who played Nadine Hurley on the show said of her character: "Nadine looms large in my career. I was just a small part of the series, but if you put it all together over that amount of time it was a huge role that I was allowed to create. She loomed large, just to be playing a character for that long, but I do know that especially for the first season it had to carry underneath it - that pain of Nadine. I had to carry that to do her justice. I've never played a character that hurt as much as she does. She lived in her own private firestorm of madness." (p. 250) I love the term "private firestorm of madness." I MUST USE THIS IN ALL CONVERSATIONS EVER.
-Another quote from Wendy Robie (Nadine Hurley), also talked about Owl Cave and said, "There are areas where the membrane is very thin and those are portals where you can see captive spirits down in there." (p. 254) Oooooooooo I love this. This idea of a membrane between our known reality and the mystical realm, it being thinner in one place more than another is very intriguing. Add "thin membranes" to the list of things that intrigue me that also explain paranormal occurrences, including but not limited to: portals, vortexes, black holes, singularities, hellmouths and ancient burial grounds.
-Co-creator Mark Frost said that the reason Josie Packard's fate ended up the way it did was because him and David Lynch decided to make her be imprisoned in another realm in a way that it shouldn't be physical as much as metaphysical, mythological without being melodramatic. (p. 256) It must be difficult to get metaphysical and mythological without being melodramatic, but somehow they managed it.
-Sherilyn Fenn who played Audrey Horne on the show didn't actually do the trick with the cherry stem in a knot with her mouth. That didn't stop Letterman from asking her three times in one year to demonstrate it.
-Leslie Linka Glatter (director episodes 5, 10, 13, 23): "What I loved about the reality of Twin Peaks is that it examined human behavior in microscopic detail so you saw the humor of it, the absurdity and also the truth." (p.25) So true, so true. I feel like in so many of my daily interactions with people all of those things come forward -- how my favorite art can sometimes shine an illuminating light on the humor and absurdity of human behavior.
Oooooo! Perhaps once the new Twin Peaks airs in 2016 there will be cause for another volume of a Twin Peaks oral history! I hope Brad Dukes does another one!!!
There's so much love for Angelo Badalamenti's classic, and for Julee Cruise vocal version entitled "Falling." And there are so many versions out there. There are tutorials on how to play it on every instrument ever. And so many different style interpretations. A bluegrass cover! A death metal cover! Several punk covers! People singing it in different languages! People performing it on stages! In their messy rooms! There's at least three dance remixes, two chill-wave versions, and one "Urban Jungle" mix! There are midi files! People playing it on flutes! Lutes! Cellos! Pianos! Varieties of guitars! Varieties of guitars to test out their new amps! At least three people busking with accordions! A number of video game-influenced versions with their respective video-game influenced videos! Some versions are mashup-y, others sound like they should be demo settings on casio keyboards. My favorites tend to be ones where they really do something new with it, really taking it to a whole new level, or interpreting it in some way that I hadn't thought could be done. There is a variety of stuff along the spectrum of professional to amateur, especially in terms of video production. Sometimes the more amateur it is, the more it amuses me -- like someone will have an otherwise messy room but have the framed picture of Laura Palmer displayed nonchalantly. Or maybe a band is really going to town but there are like four people in the audience. But they're gonna SELL IT, if you know what I'm saying. Sometimes the comments section alone is what sends me into chuckles. All of these bring me immense amounts of joy. -Liz
I curated this for the fan group Twin Peaks Freaks, which you should totally check out.
I recently revisted David Foster Wallace's book of essays A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments to re-read the essay he wrote called David Lynch Keeps His Head, about hanging out on the set of David Lynch's Lost Highway. It was such a pleasure to revisit it after having watched Twin Peaks. DFW, was a self-admitted Lynch freak, and this article is thoughtful, funny and pithy. He talks about more than just Lost Highway though -- pretty much his thoughts on Lynch's work in general. This essay was originally in an issue of Premiere in 1996. I also noticed it gets quoted a lot in other articles I stumble on, usually in reference to helping define what "Lynchian" actually means as an adjective (and I'm paraphrasing DFW here): macabre but mundane irony, a deconstruction of a weird 'irony of the banal.' One example he gives is in reference to serial killers: Dahmer storing body parts in the fridge next to chocolate milk, that's pretty Lynchian, but Ted Bundy, well, not so much.
Things I loved in the essay:
-Lynch's work is not quite art film (as a viewer, DFW explains, with art films you pay to get in and have to do then do some intellectual work, essentially paying to have to work). But Lynch's films aren't quite commercial films either (as a viewer for commericall films, you pay once to get in but have an unspoken assumed contract with the filmmaker that the fee you paid to get in is the only "price" you pay; you don't have to do any work.) DFW speculates that Lynch belongs to a third class of filmmaking that is more about just getting "inside your head," (p. 171) or as British critic Paul Taylor says, Lynch's movies are "to be experienced rather than explained" (p. 170). I agree with this. I think about many of the dream sequences in Twin Peaks and the argument I have heard many people make, that what is really being communicated is a mood. Or something. Something that comes to mind in regard to this point is that I saw the Chicago premier of the documentary film about Lynch's 16 city speaking tour entitled Meditation, Creativity, Peace.In it, a student told him that while watching Inland Empire that once they dimmed down their conscious mind always trying to make sense of the movie, that they felt like they intuitively understood it more, and Lynch agreed that that is the best way to understand his films. I have a hunch that other people who work with him would agree. In fact, off the top of my head I'm like 77% sure I read a quote from Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost (from Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks by Brad Dukes), where Mark Frost said something to the effect that Lynch is the master of communicating a mood. However, I should point out that DFW does say on page 161 of this essay "Lynch seems to run into trouble only when his movies seem to the viewer to want to have a point -- i.e. when they set the viewer up to expect some kind of coherent connection between plot elements and then fail to deliver any such point." I have a hunch that that may have been a criticism of both Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, but it probably depends on the person.
-this quote, which appropriately (and you will see why this is appropriate once you read this quote) can be used about art in general: "Art, after all, is supposed to be a kind of communication, and "personal expression" is cinematically interesting only to the extent that what's expressed finds and strikes chords within the viewer. The difference between experiencing art that succeeds as communication and art that doesn't is rather like the difference between being sexually intimate with a person and watching that person masturbate. In terms of literature, richly communicative Expressionism is epitomized by Kafka, bad and onanistic Expressionism by the average Graduate Writing Program avant-garde story." (p. 199) YESSSSSSSSSS. Like good art says something universal. Bad art is so specific to that person that it's uninterestingly embarrassing. Quirky is OK, but there has to be something universal being communicated in spite of it.
-the fact that Balthazar Getty is sort of a douche, illustrated with examples
I loved all the little crystalized gems of insight David Foster Wallace had about how to perceive Lynch's oeuvre, things that I realized I kind of had been chewing on in the back of my head too, and it was nice to see it honed into well-articulated crystals of logic and wit.
And the snarky stuff was good too, because being snarky can sometimes really just be a slightly higher IQ version of gossiping. Which, I, um, well, looooooooved.
So I read Blake Crouch's first book in the Wayward Pines series entitled Pines. I read it because people I know who were into Twin Peaks talked about the series in that tone of "If you're into TP, you'd be into this." So I thought I'd give it a try.
At first notice, yeah, it's pretty Twin Peaks-y. Initially anyway. Once I got passed the "secret service agent who loves coffee traveling to a town in the Pacific Northwest to investigate a case," the plotline pretty much departs from similarities to Twin Peaks, and becomes more The Prisoner meets Cabin In the Woods. There's a lot of bits to the effect of And then he crawled slowly through the heating duct and the angry mob chased him and he fought gravity andsluggishly moved his bloody foot forward business that made me wish I was watching it on something I could fast forward through, what with all the tense descriptive moments, like if Dickens wrote a full fledged horror novel, with a an excess of it to where I felt my eyelids drooping.
Enough "trying to escape" action already! I wanted something that was more interesting, that would develop the story more then just "guy trying to outrun some crazy people." I know the big thing is "show don't tell" but the Hitchcockian tension bored me. How about we change the "Show don't tell" writing policy to "show but then also sometimes tell more stuff, hopefully a little more frequently"?
In fact, when I was done reading the book, my husband asked me what I thought, and I started complaining that there were too many of those thenhe wedged himself between the wall and the dumpster to hide type of scenes. I tried to act out what I meant to help illustrate my point and my husband said I sounded like a drooling caveman. I think that's a pretty good indication of the mood of some of the bigger chunks of the book. It moves slow, sort of like a drooling caveman at times, communicating very little other then "ME STRUGGLE." The big explanatory ending could have come a lot sooner. Yeah, yeah, I know you have to "earn" the big reveal but the journey at times kind of made me feel like I was pulling a bag of wet rocks uphill. This would have been more enjoyable to me as a novella instead of a 300 page book, but then apparently, I am a cave woman with a short attention span.
All of that being said, complaints aside, there are some really interesting developments in it that unfold and make it interesting that, I imagine, will be more interesting in later books in the series that I will get to eventually. I just well, SPOILERS, people.
TOTALLY INTENTIONAL, right? Right? Please say it is intentional. Is this the part that's homage?
Peaks!
I don't want to be one of those people who's all WELL I READ THE BOOK THE SHOW IS BASED ON and but well, I did, and the second book is on deck. It wasn't until I got to the author's Afterward that I got some confirmation for his Twin Peaks love, which warmed my heart (and confirmed my suspician). He wrote about how Pines was inspired by his love for Twin Peaks, and it occurred to me that he probably intentionally put that at the end of the book instead of in a preface in the beginning. I assumed that he didn't want people cynically thinking he was ripping off Twin Peaks when they first cracked open the book, and somehow if they'd already read the book, the Afterward would illuminate the reading they already did instead of inform what experience they were supposed to have while reading it. He writes, regarding Twin Peaks:
"Shortly after the show was cancelled, I was so heartbroken I even tried to write its mythical third season, not for anyone but myself, just so I could continue the experience."
This is adorable to me, that Mr. Crouch was basically writing fan fiction to continue the series that aired when he was twelve. I loved that he did this. He did also say in the Afterward that it has taken twenty years to create something (this book) that makes him feel the way TP made him feel, and that though he doesn't want to suggest it's as good as TP, he did want to express how much the show inspired him and that it wouldn't exist if it weren't for TP. So I'd like to think Wayward Pines isn't a rip off of Twin Peaks, but neither is it a tribute to. I think it's enough just to say it's "inspired by." Nothing wrong with that. But I guess I'll have to read more books in the series and see how they make the show to really judge that. I reserve the right to change my mind but I want to give the benefit of the doubt, especially from one TP fan to another. Mr. Crouch also wrote, "They say all art-whether books, music, or visual-is a reaction to other art, and I believe that to be true." I also agree. This thought makes me feel better about the kind of creative stuff I do, which is essentially reacting to other people's work by sort of mentally chewing on it, which is a valid form of, well, art. The art of criticism.
There seem to be a lot of posts on the internet that imply that in making a Wayward Pines series, FOX is trying to capitalize on the success of shows like True Detective (which is actually on HBO). Sure, money moves a lot of the decisions made for television, but in terms of the artistic angle, it is really Twin Peaks that is the bigger influence. That is to say, Twin Peaks is the real historical influence on shows like True Detective here, just like the many of the obvious descendants of Twin Peaks that many people seem to agree that might never have existed if it weren't for TP (X-Files, Lost, Northern Exposure, etc.).* Maybe FOX wants to "cash in" but I wonder how that matches up with the folks who actually write/direct/produce the show? Blake Crouch writer of the novels? M. Night Shyamalan who adapted it for TV? Creator Chad Hodge? Honestly, I ask these questions but truthfully, I don't really care. If I enjoy Wayward Pines as a TV show then I enjoy Wayward Pines as a TV show. All of that being said, I know how people are. They'll say "Oh, it's just a rip off of Twin Peaks" but then also watch it and secretly like it, the way you would if you like a certain band you probably like other bands that sound like it. So there's THAT.
More importantly, I totally understand Mr. Crouch's angle from his Afterward of wanting to relive the Twin Peaks experience so much that he created an addendum to it in order to continue capturing the magic of it. Trying to prolong the ending of that world one is immersed in is what fan fiction, Harry Potter amusement parks, comic cons and cosplay are all about, which is pretty awesome. Even though I came to Twin Peaks much later then Blake Crouch did, who watched it in its original run, I can understand what he means when he talks about the devastation he felt when the series ended. When I read that he felt devastated when Twin Peaks ended, it was like he read my mind. I too, was deeply shattered by the end of the show.
When I run into people who have seen Twin Peaks, I want to talk with them about it,** because I feel like I'm on an island with my thoughts about things that happened on the show as if they were real life events; I have a little bit of a PTSD thing going on, and I'm looking for someone to talk to about it, in a sort of therapy kind of a way. It's kind of a low-rent schizophrenia, a form of not being able to distinguish between fantasy and reality, but only on a purely emotional level. I feel a little bit like a victim of some kind of trauma, and then I'm relieved to meet someone else who went through what I went through. I just know they'll understand me! And that's what I feel like fan fiction or fan communities are -- (besides a way to continue on the narrative of a departed show) -- a support group for having gone through the trauma that is the internalization of the show's narrative. Not only was I traumatized by the events of the show, but then I was equally as traumatized just by the fact that the show ended, as we always are when a show you love ends, especially if you've been binging on it at once as I did on Netflix. It feels a little bit like being dumped. I think that's part of the appeal of conventions for things that have been cancelled, like Twin Peaks, Firefly*** and so on. Sure, conventions are a place where you meet people who are into what you're into, but it's also a place where you meet people who have gone through the same sort of "narrative trauma" that you've gone through. You cannot imagine the exhilaration I felt when they made the big "we're making more Twin Peaks" announcement last year. Like many other fans, I felt "Maybe I'll get some closure!" I just hope nothing happens to me before they release it in 2016!
Some them footnotes from above: *Would TP have existed if it weren't for The Prisoner? **I've written a variation of this point in Xerography Debt before. ***Fans wrote letters about both TP and Firefly such that TP had a second season and Firefly made a movie! Right? I have my info on that right, internet? Correct me if I'm wrong (oh, I'm sure you will).
Watching the biopic Liz: The Elizabeth Taylor Story I couldn't help but freak my shit out a little bit watching Sherilyn Fenn (as Elizabeth Taylor) and Ray Wise (as Mike Todd) get lovey dovey alternating with going to fisticuffs, which until Mark Todd was killed in a plane crash they (Liz Taylor and Mark Todd) had a passionate marriage. The biopic was a Twin Peaks reunion, only MORE surreal. In Twin Peaks, Ray Wise played Sherilyn Fenn's father's attorney. And considering that there's all this weirdo daddy daughter stuff in Twin Peaks for multiple lady characters and their fathers, this seemed Freudianily creepy and poetic. It's possible that the significance of how surreal this is can maybe less impressive if you're less of a Peaks fan, but if you are, these images are super surreal. Although Fenn and Wise don't share an immense amount of screen time together in Twin Peaks, the fact that they're both is it makes these moments in the Liz Taylor biopic weird and awesome and kind of pop culture-y-mashy-uppy in a way that is always interesting to me.
Fenn (Taylor) & Wise (Todd) being lovey.
Fenn (Taylor) Wise (Todd) fisticuffs!
Peeled off by Debbie Reynolds (Judith Jones)!
...and back to lovey...
What I really wanted to find was Liz Taylor's reaction to Fenn playing her because she was still alive when the movie was made. I have seen the Lindsey Lohan Liz & Dick movie and was surprisingly touched by it. Yeah, yeah, kitsch kitsch rotten tomato and all that but whatever! I liked it. So sue me. I did see that there was another Liz Taylor biopic with Helena Bonham Carter on BBC4 from what looks like about a year-ish ago. I guess I will have to go watch that one too. It's not even like I'm a huge Liz Taylor fan though I do have an appreciation for her. I did read her book Liz Takes Off about weight loss, and let me tell you...the recipes are super gross! I only got it because I like a preposterous celeb autobio. But I liked all the memoir-y stuff in it. I have seen a number of her movies so I guess, well, I'm noticing that as I lay all this out, I'm realizing that I guess I kind of know a lot about her now. How did that happen? Oh I know! My sister-in-law did some video installation art performance thing where she appropriated pieces from a variety of Cleopatra performances from different movie versions of Cleopatra, including Taylor's. This got me on a Cleopatra roll, where I added a ton of Cleopatra movies to my Netflix queue (this was before Netflix was prominantly streaming) but since my queue is so long, by the time the movies got there it was like three million years later, and I was all, "Oh, I see I was going through that Cleopatra phase when I put these in my queue." Putting stuff in my Netflix queue was like this reverse gestating period, where I'd put something in the queue and then by the time I "had the baby" (ie: the DVDs arrived) it was like forgetting about a baby I "conceived" (as in, getting interested in the movie).
But really that is all neither here nor there. The most important thing, what I REALLY found awesome from the Sherilyn Fenn-Liz Taylor biopic was how amazing Fenn was. She played such a wide range of ages in the film, convincing as all of them and so compelling to watch.
Well, OK, actually, the most, most, most important thing about this particular biopic was that I could capture this particular screenshot of Ray Wise as Mark Todd looking suitably creepy with two dogs:
One chants out between two pooches, dogs walk with me!
A photo posted by Quimbys Bookstore (@quimbysbookstore) on
I feel like I let too many moments of creative inspiration escape me. I think "I really should write that down, or follow up on that idea I had!" But if I don't act on it at that moment it's gone forever.
Nikki Sixx said in The Heroin Diaries: A Year In The Life Of A Shattered Rock Star that Rick Rubin bought him a tape recorder, because Nikki said he would wake up in the middle of the night with an idea that was amazing but he wouldn't write it down so he'd lose it. Hence the tape deck.
I should really find something that works for me in the same way. Too many moments of inspiration in my life go unfollowed up on. Or at the very least, too many good quotes I encounter go unwritten down, or at least assembled in one place for easy access.
Too many moments that lend themselves to potential creative elaboration go lost forever. I hear or read something awesome, and then because I don't do anything to document, I lose out on the opportunity for further meditation on whatever the idea or quote is. These are potential opportunities for expanded revelation and celebration.
It's just that I don't usually take time out from the moment to stop everything and write down the quote or idea. It doesn't get recorded for myself in any way other then at the most a doodle in the book I'm reading next to the quote. More times then I care to remember, I haven't done anything to bookmark/record/notate/ the quote, idea, the revelation, the theory. For every ten awesome things I encounter, maybe I get around to relishing the awesomeness of the quote or idea or whatever maybe once or twice. So many missed opportunities for processing what I've encountered in a fabulous way.
I'm not talking about recording or capturing an experience by just taking a picture. Although pictures do capture amazing moments and things, the sign of a truly good moment is that there might not be anything actually capturing it, unless it's the type of thing that you just always have the tape running in some kind of media recording experience. I just mean, when I'm talking about missing opportunities for documentation, I'm not talking about pictures.
I should add though, that often, the mark of a really good party is that there is no documentation of it anywhere because nobody wants to stop the good time they're having to stop and take a picture. I think sometimes people take pictures not to actually commemorate the experience but to prove to to social media contacts that they're popularity (I'm partying at a party!) and having a great time, when actually, the exact opposite is true. When you're truly "in the moment," the last thing you want to do is stop and interrupt it. I know a party was awesome because there's no documentation of it anywhere.
When I say moments of missed creative opportunities, I'm talking about reading or hearing something awesome that I want to write down, maybe a snippet of something that as an isolated quote, is awesome. Or maybe I hear something really great in an interview or some dialogue in a movie or TV show, and I'm like, "That is sooooo true. I really should write that down that for posterity somewhere."
Sometimes what I feel needs to be recorded is an idea I have for a mashy-uppy sound art piece or a hilarious collage I could make, or maybe some zine article I could write about. (To be fair, there are only so many hours in a day, and it's not like I have the time to follow through on every single idea I have.) But still. I could do more.
Sometimes I make notes in the margins of things I'm reading. Most of the time it's not really even a note as much as a little star I put next to something, or underlines I've made. It'll be a part I think is particularly pithy, funny, worth marinating on or just resonates with me in some way. If I could illustrate, I would do visual representations of these quotes in the vain of fan geek art.
I've been inspired by a lot of fan geek art lately, artists making art inspired by and specifically about the movies/comics/shows they love. Sometimes artists illustrate something from a movie, like a scene, character or reoccurring image or object. Sometimes they do their own version of an ad for the movie or book, almost as if it's fan-made advertising which is an interesting phenomenon to me. Some people do fan fiction. Some people do fan art. And some people do fan advertising I suppose.
Specifically, I've been really inspired by all the Twin Peaks art people make. And then there's all the geek art where people really go to town with illustrations inspired by things in the geek community (video games, Star Wars, comics, etc.). If I had visual art talent, I would illustrate quotes I liked from books I read. I suck at drawing/painting, and even my graphic design skills while passable, are more hack in nature then creative in nature. I can parody and I can ape, but I can't create.
However, the least I could do is start actually putting the quotes of things I read that I mark up in one place. That I can do. Anthologize, document, curate, celebrate. Those are things I can do well. Comment on, make fun of, parody, theorize, satirize, feed through the Weird Al-ometer, these are all forms of hacking I can do that can sometimes lead to smart theoretical criticism, when I'm operating at my best. But that's definitely not always. When I can get my operate at that higher level, it's a very creative thing, but it definitely has to be inspired by someone else's creation (their song, their book, their movie, their TV show). I can't draw or create the original work itself, but I can definitely, once it's created, add layers of celebration of that work that manifest as multilayered icing of thoughtfulness of their original work. I'm good at celebrating awesomeness, which when done well, is a form of creativity (or so I try to convince myself).
So I'm going to try to start actually writing in the things I note in the things I read, the stuff I think is mark-it-up-worthy. I suppose that's not unlike the concept of the sixteenth century commonplace books; they didn't quite have the printing press, so people just had to write down the things they liked in their own book, but if you had to write it down, you'd probably just write out he stuff you like. I guess that's kind of what TUMBLR is, really just people putting things they think are awesome in one place for easy access. I guess TUMBLR is kind of like one big digital sixteenth century commonplace book.
I lent Morrissey's Autobiography to a friend and he told me, "I saw what you marked in the book."
"Oh shit," I said. "I am such an asshole. How pretentious of me."
"No actually, I could see why you marked it. It was a pretty good quote," he responded.
So maybe I will share my notes! Maybe you will like the quotes in books I like too. I'll do the Morrissey book a different day, because I happen to have a different book sitting next to me at this moment. So here's stuff from the a book I read recently, which I will share momentarily.
First, a description of this book: Each book in the 33 1/3 book series focuses on an different individual album, and each title in the 33 1/3 series is written by a different writer. Sometimes the book is a look at the making of the album, sometimes it's more personal because it's about the writer's experiences with the album and why it's significant so that title might end up more autobiographical in nature. Sometimes the book is about the album's place in culture. Sometimes the book is fiction inspired by the album. The format is all over the place. The point is, every book in the series is different. I really only read a 33 1/3 book if it's an album I like, soo even though I have read a number of them haven't by any means read all of them. Not all of the books I've read in the series are good, but some are really really good. I enjoyed Marc Woodworth's book based on the Guided By Voices album Bee Thousand. His book was eclectic. It was kind of a cross between oral history, listener response and personal history. A lot of my favorite parts were ones in which people who had some involvement with the band, whether it was people who played in the band or who just recorded them, talked about what the recording sessions were like. If I could draw, I would illustrate these quotes from Woodworth's book in some way from the book like how some geek art does, like this wonderful piece by Jerod Gibson:
Anyway, from 33 1/3's Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth:
p. 16-17, where the main songwriter/autour of GBV Robert Pollard talks about the writing of their song "I Am a Scientist":
What am I? What exactly am I? I's kind of a self-analyzing song. I'm a scientist studying myself. I'm a journalist recording and reporting what I find. I'm a pharmacist prescribing a medicine, a drug I could ingest to do something to help me find out. In the end, rock and roll's the religion, the source of redemption. The way out. With all the confusion of not knowing which direction to go in or what I really was during that time, rock and roll seemed to make it a little clearer. What am I going to do? Rock and roll's what I'm going to do. That song was the answer. That song was the decision.
The importance of finding your path and it being what guides you. And the redemptive power of rock!
p 21 (Robert Pollard, talking about recording):
It was important to me that we capture a song in the least amount of time from when I conceived it to when we put it on tape. That's the way to capture the purest essence of a song. When we were recording the songs for Bee Thousand, spontaneity was important to me. When you don't establish a set of ground rules and you don't care about mistakes, it's easy. Some of the best music is recorded exactly the way the way that it's conceived and created-it's all happening simultaneously. At any rate, there has to be a point when you say, "that's good enough."
I love that quote. It speaks to the importance of letting it flow without having that internal editor that seems to take all the fun out of any sort of artistic endeavor for me, something I battle with. When I'm operating at top level awesomeness on a creative endeavor I can sprint and flow and save the editing and bleeding for later. If only I could channel that method more often. (I've had to kind of train myself to do more sprinting and less bleeding to get the ball rolling.) I also like the bit in this quote about how at some point, when you're working on something, and you just have to say OK, it's good ENOUGH, though I don't feel like it's ever really gong to be done. I could fuck with something until the cows come home, but the thing usually has a somewhat arbitrary cut off point, most likely a deadline, where you're forced to stop working on it. Plus, you really CAN actually work on something too much and make it go from being awesome to horrible. You might add too much extra language if it's writing. Or if it's music maybe you add in too many noises and bleeps and blops and effects and layers. I always know when a song has been overproduced: they add horns. Oh shit, when they roll out the brass it's over. Or extra fake violin flourishes of something. And oh! You know who else overproduces their music with too many extra layers of bullshit? The Flaming Lips. Did we really need sleigh bells there? No. No we didn't.
p.40-41 from an interview with collage filmmaker Lewis Klahr talks about the song "Echos Myron"
In "Echos Myron" the lines "Most of us are quite pleased with the same old song" and "We're finally here and shit yeah it's cool" are powerful, autobiographical glimpses into GBV's reworking of the British invasion of their youth and mine, and their arrival at a place of greater visibility and recognition. I latched onto these as signposts of my own attachment to the past often at the expense of the present (what I call when describing my work "the pastness of the present") and when things are going better in my career there is a sense of arrival embodied by the Beatles and "A Hard Day's Night" of what one hopes the world will produce but of course never does. This little bit of this that Pollard got quickly spoiled him. For me, well, I thought I arrived several times only to experience the disappointing sense of the limited way this is true."
I love, love, love this idea of "the pastness of the present," and the past being embedded in the present. So many layers of awesomeness to unpack. Hoping the world will produce something as earth-shattering as something amazing from the past, but how rarely that does; the past has spoiled us. And then on a more personal level this quote is great because it describes the feeling of being so preoccupied with your own personal past that it overshadows the present. Sometimes the nostalgia is totally unwarranted, because you're just putting a rose haze over something that, if you were able to actually go back to the moment, you'd realize the past wasn't actually as good as you "remember" it being.)
That "pastness of the present" can sometimes overshadow our abilities to really enjoy the present, what's really in front of us.
And then one more layer of this quote is a more general sense, which is about artistic success. There's this notion of wanting to attain some level of success inspired by artists you've loved from the past, perhaps wanting to experience the success in the way they did. I love that he talks about the British invasion and also Hard Day's Night, as if the Beatles are a case study for this point. "Hard Day's Night" is basically about the Beatles being so famous that they spend most of the movie trying to escape their screaming fans. Right? Wasn't that kind of also the plotline of SpiceWorld? I thought I was soooo smart when I made that connection, and then I saw that Roger Ebert wrote that in 1998.
p.44 "Making something from what we remember-making art from the memory of art that we love, making art that we love, making art from our own lives and imaginations-is not incidental to our being, but central to it."
Isn't this true? Whether the art you make is orignal or tribute to art you love, it all deserves a a place. And more then deserving a place, it's necessary for it to exist, to nourish our souls.
P.S. The idea of Nikki Sixx talking into a tape deck is hilarious, as if he was Agent Cooper, is the most hilarious thing to me ever. Like he picks up the tape deck and is like, "Diane, it's 3:16pm. What has 48 legs and 12 teeth? The front row in Alabama."
So there's part of me that thinks that all I'm really capable of doing creatively is either a) making fun of things and/or b) making parodies of things. In some ways, I'm like a shitty critic who can't actually write original material but can totally make fun of other people's material. Shame on me! But then there's another part of me (perhaps a part of me that rationalizes things) that feels in making fun of a thing, or parodying it, I'm synergystically creating something new. Sometimes also, the parody comes from a place of appreciation for the source material. This push and pull negotiates territorial control in my brain and sometimes the "make fun of" wins over the "synergystically creating something new" or vice-versa.
On the entertainment podcast Ray of Blight I do with my friend Sacha, we do a segment called *NSYNC Fan Fiction, which is basically us reading aloud from a binder full of some anonymous girl's *NSYNC fan fiction that our friend found at a thrift store here in Chicago. Before we start the reading though, there's a recap of what's happened previously on *NSYNC Fan Fiction. At some point I started making these recap segments into parodies of "previously on" segments from television shows I enjoy. It amuses me that I could take these unrelated things like a boy band from the early aughts and shows like Twin Peaks or Battlestar Galactica and tie them in together. That stimulates the part of my pop culture psychic third eye consciousness that thrives on a good mash up. Edited lunacy, the best kind, especially when there's a poetry that evolves from the pairing of two opposites. Sometimes a hilarious poetry evolves from pairing two things, like when you're reading multiple books at one time and they start to fuse in your head, and then you start drawing awesome connections.
But I flatter myself that my edited lunacy is in any way poetic; sometimes the Weird Al part of my brain wins over the Greil Marcus part of my brain. Occasionally however, I can't separate the two, and those are my favorite moments.
So here are the recaps, in descending starting with the most recent. I hope you like them!
So I was watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D and Kyle Maclachlan is on it. I'm watching him break mirrors and ipads and anything that has an image of himself and I can't help but think, WHY DOES THIS LOOK FAMILIAR?
...And then I realized, OH THAT'S WHY.
A good indication of where the third season of Twin Peaks might go?
Posts
