Twin Peaks “Traces to Nowhere” [1990)

Before 9/11.

Before the Oklahoma City bombing.

There was a skeleton key.

Dangling.

Word.  To the wise:

it is not easy to pick this show back up after a long hiatus.

Leaving the Rosetta Stone in the mud…to return knee-deep in crypticism.

Almost makes you want to become an FBI agent.  A special agent.

Because your mind likes puzzles…

Plenty of shows on TV like that now.

It’s the law enforcement arm of the propaganda machine which gives us the sexier James Bond.

Word.  To the wise:

Never Say Never Again is really painful (unbearably so) without John Barry.

Or Monty Norman.

Even Kasparov lost to Deep Blue.

On a rematch.

Maybe.

Barely.

And we’ve discussed the much-vaunted anti-Semitism of Fischer.

Word.  To the wise:

there’s a fish in the percolator.

And so Duwayne Dunham (who?) turns in a masterfully-directed episode of Twin Peaks.

The first real episode (after the lengthy pilot).

Which is to say (viz.)–don’t neglect your studies.

Only you are you.

And you are fighting the greatest enemy in the known world.

The hydra-headed logarithm.

Ask my log.

I thought so.

Sherilyn Fenn is painfully attractive.

Like Martha Vickers in The Big Sleep.

C’est-à-dire, Twin Peaks is the Picasso of television.

A once-in-a-lifetime experience.

That this show was broadcast on a major American TV network (ABC) is a miracle.

It was the Armory Show of 7-Eleven culture.

The priceless amidst a shitstorm of mediocrity.

Sometimes the rag pickers find a gem in our disposable civilization.

At which point we chiffonniers are mandated to return it…to its rightful owners.

You.

America.

America is everywhere.

An amoebic blob phenomenon bleeding porn and missiles.

Hasta la vista!  Hava Nagila!

Git er done.

We all need to return to the beginning.

In matters so complex.

And I wish you sharp swords in slicing through the bollocks.

Sincerely.

 

-PD

 

Alphaville: une etrange aventure de Lemmy Caution [1965)

I pray before this film.  Before the thought of this film I bow my head in reverence.  Every time 1984 is read and misunderstood, it is cheapened.  Fahrenheit 451 was Truffaut’s best film.  It has nothing to do with French or English.  It is semantics.

W.K.L. Dickson.  Not Henry.  I votes in my hole.  Wernher von Braun.  SS.  He was once Nosferatu.  At Los Alamos.  Now that vampire only exists in Anna Karina’s teeth.  She has her father’s eyes.

And then there is Alpha 60…like Tom Waits meets Siri.  Sigrid…und set!  Beauty.  Victory.  Logic.

This was three years before HAL 9000 graced screens everywhere…tactfully letting us know what it couldn’t allow.  “I’m sorry, Dave.  I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

I pray before Alphaville because there used to be poets…Rimbaud, Beethoven, van Gogh.  A computer will destroy itself trying to reason through the processes of such an imbroglioWhy?  Because.  Write again.  And again and again.  The palimpsest is still readable with memory.

Thus the crux.  Technocracy seeks to control memory.  Through elimination.  It’s history.  Gone with the wind.

But speak a word of Eluard.  The Capital of Pain.  Sorrow.  It comes off as a code of significance and meaning.  Perhaps even A.I.-enhanced machines feel as if they are reading R.D. Laing’s Knots.

Planck’s postulate.  E=nhv.  E=hf?  Tarzan versus IBM.  Lucifer.

Are not to be found in the book.  Ninotchka.  Kisses for comrades.

2001.  IBM and the Holocaust.  Edwin Black.  Yeah.

Is it Borges vs. Eluard in a fight to the death?  No past.  No future.  Only the present.    Nueva refutación del tiempo.  Nueva York.

There is no time.  It’s not just of the essence.  New York.  Lou.  Lemmy.  Bogart.  What did Hume assume?  Sentient beings destroy time by obsessing on the past.  Memory.  E = mc 2 (time would cease to exist).  Beginning/middle/end.  Not necessarily in that order.

And so Godard ruined Eddie Constantine’s career…and made him immortal.  To achieve immortality, and then die.  Aspiration in life.  Melville.

Siri’s victory over death?  No.  Cortana.  Nefertiticaca.  Buxom Bolivia.  Looks like Eva Green to me.  Perhaps.

Larynx sphinx.  Sphinx.  Sphinx.  Sphinx.

None of this matters.  Erase erase erase.

I love you.

-PD