Give Everybody Everything: The Financial Life of Bernadette Mayer
The Organist
The life of a poet is rich with meaning and beauty. But the financial life of a poet is decidedly less rich. The poet Bernadette Mayer is a case study in how literary influence does not translate into income. She dedicated herself to art knowing it...
info_outline
The Narrative Line
The Organist
We’re constantly telling ourselves stories — who we are, where we’re going, what comes next. But what happens when the story you’re telling yourself turns out not to be true? Or, more fundamentally, what if the narrative form you’re...
info_outline
Consider the Grackles
The Organist
Touring a punk act pushes the limits of physical endurance — driving all day, sweating on stage, eating badly, sleeping worse. What keeps a band going for 14 years without a major commercial success? And what would possess someone old enough...
info_outline
Death in Twin Peaks
The Organist
Twin Peaks was never just a TV show: it was an obsession and an apparition. In its 2017 incarnation, the real-life deaths of several cast members hang spectrally over the proceedings. Legendary critic Howard Hampton meditates on how the show’s...
info_outline
A Call in the Night
The Organist
Your phone rings at 3:30 in the morning. You answer the call, and a person who's just been woken up with a call from you is on the end of the line. The call is being recorded. Both of your lives are changed forever. In this episode we explore the...
info_outline
Angelyne
The Organist
For decades, Angelyne pouted down from Hollywood billboards, looking like a New-Wave Jayne Mansfield: a dense cloud of bleached blonde hair and abundant cleavage barely contained by furry pink bikini tops. No one was sure what to make of the...
info_outline
The Dogfather
The Organist
Today’s episode is about dogs.
info_outline
The New World
The Organist
Where do speech balloons come from? How does time move from panel to panel? This week we explore the techniques of comic-book storytelling through Chris Reynolds’s graphic series, newly anthologized as The New World. Join us as we travel deep into...
info_outline
Low Fidelity
The Organist
What sounds don’t we hear when we listen? What sounds are discarded in digital processing, whether it’s through hearing aids or mp3s? This week we travel to Scottish lighthouses, professional sound-testing facilities, and animal slaughterhouses...
info_outline
Between Speaking and Singing
The Organist
Will spoken language become obsolete? What if, in the future, a simple conversation between two adults becomes a rarity, like an obscure musical piece that involves months of rehearsing and vocal training to be able to perform?
info_outline[Explicit language]
In 2017, David Lynch’s metaphysical detective soap opera Twin Peaks returned to cable television screens 26 years after its network cancellation. Most of the original characters resurfaced, but in several cases, either those characters or the actors playing them—or both—were dying. Over its 18 new episodes, this specter of commingled on- and off-screen mortality became as much the substance of the show as the narrative of mysteries, disappearances, violence, slapstick, romances, and resurrections that played out in the foreground.
In the original series, Kyle MacLachlan, as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, investigated the murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), the all-American high school student with a double life. From there, the show spiraled into a web of secrets, conspiracies, red herrings, in-jokes, and epiphanies. Twin Peaks: The Return jettisoned much of the original series’ plot-based baggage. Instead, it explored the abstract possibilities of the form, tracing mystical and mundane contingencies that ran along a live wire from Lynch’s 1977 film Eraserhead directly into the circuitry of present-day Twin Peaks.
It is here critic Howard Hampton locates his own kinship with the world of Twin Peaks, together with the true source of the show’s screwball gravitas: the late Catherine Coulson as “the Log Lady,” Margaret Lanterman. Coulson had been with Lynch since his Eraserhead days. A beacon, a cipher, a beloved emblem of Lynch’s universe on the verge of death herself, she delivers a benediction disguised as an oracle’s warning.