I watched “Twin Peaks” and have some mostly incoherent thoughts below, which seem apt. Working on a Ramble podcast about the power of the TP music, which helps collect my thoughts. But what’s the point? Thoughts on this thing defy collecting, which is what annoys some people, and fascinates the smart people who can live with difficult ambiguities in art. KIDDING. But really, the people who expected Coop giving them thumbs up over a cup of coffee were probably disappointed. Me? No. Although I wish Coop had given a thumbs up over a cup of coffee.

Not much else to report; just writing and editing and filing and resizing and waiting for the moment when the day pivots from the scurrying hours to the better time. That occurs in the middle of the nap. It wipes away whatever’s gnawing and replaces it with the sense that the day has presented its second opportunity, and I’d best grab it.

But felt ill earlier. Felt better later. Wife felt ill tonight. Feels better now. It’s like there was some psychic disturbance that came out of the TV between 11 PM and 1 AM and rolled into the distance like thunder.

There is noting as inscrutably unsettling and wrong as a single frame from a Lynch movie.

Unless it’s this!

Something else from the Postcard Show I never got around to explaining, because it's possible that one cannot.

There were pages and pages of these. All sorts of styles.

This was the Seventies. This was the sort of thing matchbook collectors because there wasn't anything else.

Just kidding! There was so much more.

Your name on the back, so people would say "I remember that bar. I looked at a cartoon about logs there."

The famous campaign.

Draw Spunky and Winky! And Biffy and Muffy and the rest of the gang. All those earnest efforts went to Minneapolis, where the HQ was - and still is.

If you are not interested in this, click here to go down to this week's Product section. I won't be insulted. But you'll miss the nameless woman of the old photo. Just warning you.

That was a movie. That was the TP movie we wanted after the show ended, but we needed the one we got. I can't believe what I felt - just gratitude, in the end, when it ended at the Roadhouse with the fargin’ Chromatics -

Back up. Two years ago, I think - end of the summer’s Europe trip, tired, happy to be going home, in a disconnected state from everything. I found the Chromatics on the IcelandAir music system, and was transfixed because I was so exhausted and emptied out by all the travel. I didn’t know it was the Chromatics in the Roadhouse until the end, but when I saw that credit I just cheered because of course, it fit, it worked.

Opening with the giant in the Black Lodge - perfect. I’m watching it in HD on a big TV, and the blacks and grays made it look like a strange, burnt, lifeless ancient place.

It's an arresting sight. And then:

Twenty-five years.

Dr. Jacoby taking off his glasses to reveal his glasses: laughed. So many shovels.

New York - as if observed by aliens for the first time, or as if seeing an alien place for the first time.

The sound design of the entire show had this you hear this world under the world, these hums and whines and otherworldly sounds. During the New York observation scene it just pasted me to my seat, intent - even though nothing was going on, because you knew something was. And would.

Never thought I’d be glad to see Jerry Horne, but the scene could have used music. If only a tune from the original show. Something to give you a quick shot of TP

Bad Elvis Coop had the best introduction possible - the harsh music, the move to disarm the rube guarding the shack.

Callbacks: Hawk says he’ll bring the coffee and donuts. The flashlight flickers like the examination-room overhead light. These were the bits of fan-service that existed - particularly in the latter example - to say “we know you get this reference, and it’s obvious, which means we did it to make sure you know we know it’s obvious.”

The sound design on this thing is astonishing - you hear this world under the world, these hums and whines and otherworldly sounds. During the New York observation scene it just pasted me to my seat, intent - even though nothing was going on, because you knew something was. And would. Because it's the sort of vision where something like this . . .

. . . makes you sad and fearful.

Final thoughts:

I am afraid to read the reviews because I think it’s going to be hip to bash. There’s the TP contingent that wants donuts and damn good coffee and thinks we’re going right back to the tone of a network drama - which was anything but, of course, but seems like one in retrospect. It broke for commercials. This didn’t break for commercials. It held a scene until it hurt.

While it was going on I wished there was more, you know, Twin Peaks, but I imagine we’ll get back to that. I wished Coop was free, but I imagine we’ll get around to that - although not at the end, please. 16 more hours of walking around curtained rooms is not a wise decision.

I know we’re not supposed to think about these things too deeply and say oh, I figured it out, but one of the mystifying aspects seemed clear at the end. The thing that came out of the glass box and killed the couple was the doppelgänger of the dancing backwards-talking Man from Another Place. In the last visit he said “the next time you see me I will look different,” and in the movie Fire Walk With Me he called himself The Arm. So he does look different, I guess: a brain with a mouth on a tree. At the end when Phillip Girard said “something is wrong,” The Arm said it was his doppelganger. That’s what’s loosed into the world.

Oh, and the black thing in the cell was the log lady’s husband?

This week: another batch of photos rescued from a basket in the basement of a Midwest antique store.

This one's quite arresting.

She could be mad. She could be brilliant. She could be both.

You wish you could answer what she was asking.

Let's see what they're selling people in the lean years of the Depression. Anti-ambivance pills?

Be careful, young couple: Stalin is watching

She has the expression of someone who's suddenly found herself in the Slaughterhouse District. What's the problem?

Surely it couldn’t be this BO; surely there’s another reason there are dead flies heaped around every chair in which I sit.

Phrases that advertisers now wisely avoid include “BO, you’re licked”

After all that, they still have to spell out what BO means, twice.

I can’t remember if I’d gone to the trouble of getting the artist’s bio, or whether someone did in the comments, but now I have it: Harry Laverne Timmins was his name.

Here’s something from a bio page of his son:

Harry L. Timmins (1887-1963), was a celebrated magazine illustrator and co-owner with Frank H. Young (1888-1964) of a successful Chicago advertising agency called Young & Timmins Advertis
ing Illustration Studios. In 1923 Timmins and Young co-founded the American Academy of Art in Chicago.

Timmins son’ William was an artist as well, selling covers to the pulps while he was still in his early 20s.

Timmons had another son, Harry L. Timmins Jr., born in 1917. It seems odd that a Harry Laverne Timmins II was fighting the draft board in 1969. From an account of the legal proceedings:

On August 11, 1969, appellant registered with his local board and thereafter returned his completed Classification Questionnaire, Form 100, wherein he signed Series VIII claiming to be a conscientious objector. On October 24, 1969, Form 150, Special Form for Conscientious Objector, was mailed to him. He wrote the board on November 4, 1969, that he could not fill out the form because he had not had much "formal religious training", but nevertheless claimed to be a conscientious objector on moral and religious grounds. On November 25, 1969, the board wrote appellant, stating succinctly, "the local board requests that you return [Form 150] completed or not immediately". This was not done. Thereafter, on February 2, 1970, appellant was classified I-A and was so notified.

It went on like that for a while, until Timmins was convicted. The citation above was from a Circuit Court ruling that tossed out his conviction.

It’s a musical instrument, you see:

Don’t you see? No? Well, technically, I suppose it is - but check out the two tiny circles at the bottom. UNBALANCED RADIO is the one on the left, and shows a trumpet player with . . . shadows. Aren’t you tired of shadowy radio? Of course. So you’ll want BALANCED PHILCO sound.

The use of PHILCO to replace RADIO is ingenious - it suggests not only a different standard but a different medium, somehow.

		It was a mainstay for decades, but I’m not sure how it perked up the tootsies.

		Of course it works: it has beechwood creosote.' If you have to tell people how to pronounce it, maybe you went a little crazy with the inventive spelling.

Google the name, and a high-school teacher comes up.

It does sound dashing, doesn't it? Mr. Conrad Blades, Private Detective. No - Conrade Blades, Captain of Industry. He'd be the guy who hires Sam Blakes, Private Detective.

That'll do. This week feels off, but that just means we'll have to set it right.