Author: Jason

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Twin Peaks Season 3 Soundtrack Albums Part II: Screaming on Your Knees at the Roadhouse

One of many refreshing left turns in the Twin Peaks revival is its disinterest in traditional television cliffhangers. Episodes end with dangling questions galore and turning points left up in the air, but David Lynch never gives us a hard cut to credits after a gunshot in the night. Instead he often goes out on a song, a “live” performance on stage in the long-standing Roadhouse. Like Mr. Rogers changing his shoes and jacket, the moment the neon bar sign hits the screen, you know the show is almost over. What young band in Lynch’s iTunes is playing this week?

Far from superfluous though, these scenes have two powerful effects on the series:

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Twin Peaks Season 3 Soundtrack Albums Part I: Angelo & Friends

Composer Angelo Badalamenti was the Great Missing Man For the first few hours of Twin Peaks season 3.

It began almost eerily quiet. There was the typically meticulous David Lynch sound design, but there was nothing like the nearly wall-to-wall jazzy snap and shuffle of the old series. Still, it made sense. This was a world slipping back into its skin and feeling its way through the dark. Characters we hadn’t seen in twenty-six years were in no rush to open up to us about where they’d been all this time (except for Lucy and Andy). It was mystery on top of mystery on top of mystery, right from the first scene.

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Thrift Stores and Other Delights

When you see Whipped Cream & Other Delights by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass in a thrift store, you buy it. Just to have it. It’s like a membership card into the club of cheap-bin record hunters (all of us have it). This LP in your possession says that you’ve been there. You know the fluorescent lights. You know the dirt. You know the smell. You know the pain.

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The Basics on BASIC INSTINCT

BASIC INSTINCT (1992; director: Paul Verhoeven)

This early 90s meisterwerk is so dedicated to being trashy, sleazy, steamy and light on the logic that it’s real easy to love if you have a taste for the tasteless. It’s slick in that Paul Verhoeven way, which means that there’s a faint smirk underneath the perfect Hollywood lighting and the troubled cop/femme fatale cliches. Everything is over the top. Verhoeven lays on the close-ups and the opulent San Francisco views. The Joe Eszterhas script is hard-boiled to the max, all snap and innuendo, with scarcely two lines of dialogue in a row that sound like anything that an actual human would say. Meanwhile, Jerry Goldsmith’s booming orchestral score lays countless exclamation points all over this cinematic purple prose.

You’ll know in the first twenty minutes if you enjoy this movie or if you think that the original film negative ought to be fed to rats. I’ll lay it out for you.

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Vampire Brats

Poppy Z. Brite
Lost Souls
Dell Publishing, 1992

At my advanced age I felt like a real drip reading (and enjoying) this novel of angst-ridden vampires and goth kids.

On the other hand, I’m glad that I didn’t read it when I was a teenager because I would have been INSUFFERABLE afterward–and I was annoying enough already back then. I know how obsessive I can get. This book would have effected me. It would have changed my life. I would have started to wear all black. I probably would have gotten into eyeliner. I would have dug deep into Sisters of Mercy B-sides. I would have spent my senior year prom night hanging out in a cemetery. There’s not a doubt in my mind, no sir.

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Rebelling Against THE OUTLAW

THE OUTLAW (1943; director: Howard Hughes)

As a sordid “sex western”, this hasn’t aged well. Also, there’s not one soul on Earth who praises it for good acting, tight pacing or making a nickel’s worth of sense.

Even Jane Russell’s legendary bra for this film, custom designed by hornball Howard Hughes to cantilever Russell’s already-abundant breasts to look like nothing short of two Boeing B-17 bombers in her dress, wasn’t actually used on camera (according to Russell).

See this in the 21st century and watch one of the cinematic scandals of the 1940s reveal itself as clumsy and quaint, impotent and befogged.

With its shocks worn down to nothing and its gasps turned into yawns, what’s left today is still one strange piece of pulp, nonetheless.
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I Don’t Believe in Ghosts, But I Do Believe in A GHOST STORY

A GHOST STORY (2017; director: David Lowery)

In 2017, we could use a reminder that movies don’t have to be loud enough that your ears ring for three days afterward. Movies don’t all need to shove you onto a rollercoaster that loops through a dozen explosions before it careens into a brick wall. No one needs to overact their way to an Oscar. An entire CGI city doesn’t need to blow up. Musical crescendos don’t need to pound you into cerebral dislocation. We don’t need a cut every three seconds. Movies don’t need to be filled with noise like an amateur radio show that’s terrified of one second of dead air.

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The Importance of Female Wrestlers for a Growing Boy

GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (2012; director: Brett Whitcomb)

The women of GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling will never forget the years from 1986 to 1990 when they grappled with each other every week on syndicated national television while dressed in skimpy showgirl outfits.

I understand completely.

I was a preteen when GLOW was on the air and I can’t forget it, either. Never in my life have I been as big a sports fan as when I sneaked peeks at all-girl wrestling on TV when I was 11 years old. It was a challenge. GLOW was not the kind of thing that you could watch with your family (or at least I couldn’t). No, a boy had to spend time with this alone. It was all girls in skintight costumes flinging each other across a wrestling ring and, for that, a young man needs some privacy in order to properly sort through his feelings. That’s just how this particular path works. In retrospect, I think I only got to watch GLOW twice back then, but both experiences made valuable contributions to my pubescent years. Especially when that blonde in the little denim shorts showed up.
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Discovering the REAL YOU with The Platters’ ENCORE OF GOLDEN HITS

Sometimes I get to thinking that I’m a real mean guy. A hard ass, a walking scowl, one gruff customer, a storm system coming in from the south, a beer bottle that’s been pissed in, a bruised banana, a carcinogenic soul with an abortion clinic dumpster for a heart, a dead dandelion in a winter field, a tornado that carries away your kitten, a broken cookie jar, bad news in old blue jeans, a hair in your fettuccine alfredo, a spoonful of bitter medicine that doesn’t help, a straight-up jerk, a bad dream, a bus station restroom, a carton of curdled milk, a human skull that you find in the grass on your Easter picnic, a soiled towel, one foul fella.

I think you get the picture.

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