Archives, eh
-
# Oh god, not you again
I sort of mostly remember when Twin Peaks first aired on Australian television. I was still in high school but only just barely, I think. It can’t have been too long after Bundaberg got a third and fourth television channel; I certainly remember it being strongly associated with Channel Ten, as opposed to the mishmash of Channel Seven and Channel Nine shows that the old local network, SEQ-7, used to buy.
Wow. I can’t believe I still remember the name of the old channel. SEQ. Those were the days, when it was just the ABC and SEQ – Dad would make me switch from SEQ back to the ABC for the cricket because he didn’t like the ads during the cricket but I preferred the stats that Channel Nine broadcast. Or a few years earlier he would come home in the evening and make me switch to SEQ from the ABC because he wanted to watch cricket and I wanted to watch Masaaki Sakai beating up those three stunt guys in that quarry. Sorry? What do you mean, ‘which episode?’
So anyway, my clearest memory of Twin Peaks is the advertising campaign that preceded it. Actually, one specific ad. And even then, only a small part of that ad. There was probably some random scenes from the pilot at the beginning of the ad, maybe even the shot from the opening credits of the buzz saw being sharpened since that gives me such a sharp feeling of deja vu. But then cut to Some Guy from Channel Ten who turns to camera from watching the show and burbles something about it being “quality television”. What, really? You’re not going to tell me that you laid out a sizable chunk of change on some shit dribbled onto the screen by monkeys dressed in chinos and ponytails? What a fucking shock, eh?
My sister loved it. I, on the other hand, distinctly remember killing myself, dissolving my corpse in acid and having resulting liquid sprayed over a thousand square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean so that I wouldn’t have to watch it, so that I couldn’t even accidentally see a moment of it and be driven insane by it’s unfathomable inanity. My quest, my long quest to insulate myself from it and its fucking dopiness has failed. D bought the god damn box set of it with all the episodes, both the US and International pilots and presumably a bazillion incomprehensible-because-there-is-no-there-there added extras which hint at content that only exists somewhere on the tenth dimension, hidden between two pathologically antagonistic vibrating super strings.
And I see I was right to avoid it; or at least I was right to avoid it then, back when I was a dopey teenager who didn’t know shit about shit. Now that I am a dopey thirty-something who doesn’t know shit about shit but with a better developed sense of the ludicrous, I can appreciate those bits of the plot that are so insanely fucking stupid that your mind can’t help but go boing when they hit it like a rubber express train. Like:
- That’s a biker bar? That place, where Julee Cruise, in a beret no less, is singing her two beats an hour, one hit wonder leitmotif to the floppy haired, shoe-gazing teenagers? That’s a biker bar? Man, if a real biker walked in he’d be contractually obliged to beat them all to death with a tire iron; not that he would need the contract, he’d probably do it on principle.
- The homecoming queen is a prostitute and nobody knows but her customers? Yeah, right. If that had happened in Bundaberg, a town considerably larger than Twin Peaks, the entire town would have known about it – and in some cases you wish weren’t quite so memorable, gone for sloppy twenty-seconds – within a week. Random marginalised senior girl, yes; prom queen, not so much.
- That guy is a biker? Andpried the astronomically damaged prom queen away from the football hero who, despite his cavernous arseholery, appears to be fucking half the surprisingly un-white-trash white trash girls in the town? Surely he’d be reluctant to be riding that bike and working in a garage for fear that he might damage his poetry writing hand.
Yes yes, it is supposed to be “quirky” i. And it is television, that highly accurate mirror of reality. There is a line, though, past which quirky, funhouse reflections cease to allow disbelief to be suspended, when disbelief comes rushing back in waves of irrepressible stone monkeys. Twin Peaks didn’t just cross that line, it went so far beyond the line that it clocked reality and ended up back at the beginning, only to come up behind all of us at the line trying to see if we could spot it, and ran us over in the twenty-four metre long stretch limo it bought with all the money paid out to by the Julee Cruise dance remix (a jitter-bugging five beats a minute) and the Laura Palmer brand plastic tarpaulin.
i Yes, and thanks so much for that, Lynch. You just had to open the gate for all the rest of the quirk that washed over us after we’d kicked over the traces of the eighties and numbed us to the point that we ended up thinking the cast of Friends were charismatic and Colour Me Badd were cool instead of illiterate. I’m looking at you, Northern fucking Exposure.
-
# Really, I'm just playing with inserting images and wanted a longish post
Californication. It’s all right. Dying inside is the perfect role for CalculˆHˆHˆH Duchovny.
But first, a short anecdote involving Duchovny.
Reading a yearbook is like traveling in time; except of course you can – and do – always come back, and you never change the present. So, not really at all like traveling in time, but I like the metaphor so I am not deleting it.
In the course of cleaning up in the garage over the weekend I was re-organising all my stored-in-a-plastic-box books. As all Good and Right people should, I have more books than I can possibly store in shelves. Anyway, in the course of this cleaning up, as I was craftily and cynically performing a kind of three-card-monte on my old university textbooks that I will never ever read or even consult again in this lifetime but will also never discard, I came across an old copy of a Rolling Stone yearbook. From 1995.
I expect I kept it because it had David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson on the cover, in bed. Presumably I thought it would be worth something in the months after publication, worth something to frustrated US-located X-File fans, ‘shippers to be precise, because it was an Australian Rolling Stone and upon publication the US fans were refusing to accept that the picture even existed let alone have copies of their very own.
I more or less knew about this magazine, its not like I had forgotten I had it. I’ve even spied it a number of times; just a few months ago I was looking for one of the afore-mentioned textbooks – An Introduction to Formal Specification and Z Notation, an unequivocal denunciation of the hopelessness of my IT degree if ever I saw one – and had pushed the magazine aside. This time though, I actually looked at it, judging whether it was time to admit that, hey, The X Files is so 1990s. Besides, that Mulder and Scully might be doing some investigations in dark rooms together is not exactly an X File anymore. But there, just left of Anderson’s left arm as it snaked around to clutch at Duchovny’s right shoulder, appears the name Helen Demidenko.
My younger, or less-Australian readers – which covers all of my readers except me – wouldn’t really recognise that name. Nevermind, it isn’t important except that I kind of sort of tenuously know her now and it was kind of a spin out to see the name. At that point I, of course, had to read it. And I do mean read it, not re-read because I am quite sure I wouldn’t have read it when it was first published. I’ll keep my opinions to myself except to say how quaint – and dare I say, undergraduate – it all was.
But still. Time travel.
Anyway, Californication. That sixteen year old that was being statutorily raped? D thought she looked kind of familiar, asked me if I thought it was one of the yummy mummies from Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. A bit young, I thought i. But D was on to it, was already looking at imdb just in time for the sex scene.“zomg, it’s Gracie. From The Nanny.”
“But…she’s naked.”
They were very nice boobs; but I’ll have to close my eyes when they are on the screen from now on because they make me feel so dirty-old-man ii.
Naturally, there are objectors to the show and its contents.
But Family First senator Steve Fielding said the complaints process and the industry codes were flawed.
“Family First is concerned that it is very difficult for families to get action against such programs,” he said.
Yeah. That Off button can be a right fucking bitch to get your finger to.
Another short anecdote. D and I are fairly liberal in terms of content tWM can hear or see. The last time I turned off Southpark because she was in the room is at least a few years back now – she’s fourteen now. Back in the day D was singing along to You Oughta Know and realised that so was tWM, in the back seat, except tWM was radio-editing as she went.
A couple of weeks ago D was taxi-ing some other kids home from dancing class when she suddenly realises that the song that is playing on the stereo is Sexy M.F. ; realises it at the penultimate point, almost too late, but her arm lashes out like a striking rattlesnake, and skips to the next track before the ten-year-old in the back seat could be subjected to our lax morals and poor parenting.
i And by the way, that wikipedia entry is so the collected effort of many ex-Romys and Micheles.
ii Old (adj): To be born prior to the mean birth year of Playboy centrefolds for the preceding twelve months.
-
# Links for 2007-07-09
-
# Links for 2006-01-02
-
# Links for 2005-03-20
- DGrassi Is tha Best Teen TV N da WRLD!
I loved the original show; I’d probably cringe now at it and its descendent though :- ) ✴
- DGrassi Is tha Best Teen TV N da WRLD!
-
# Links for 2005-02-22
- The constituent parts of The Goodies have a new stage show
#Run. You better run. You better run. I’m coming to get you! ✴
- The constituent parts of The Goodies have a new stage show
-
# Oh god, not you again
I sort of mostly remember when Twin Peaks first aired on Australian television. I was still in high school but only just barely, I think. It can’t have been too long after Bundaberg got a third and fourth television channel; I certainly remember it being strongly associated with Channel Ten, as opposed to the mishmash of Channel Seven and Channel Nine shows that the old local network, SEQ-7, used to buy.
Wow. I can’t believe I still remember the name of the old channel. SEQ. Those were the days, when it was just the ABC and SEQ – Dad would make me switch from SEQ back to the ABC for the cricket because he didn’t like the ads during the cricket but I preferred the stats that Channel Nine broadcast. Or a few years earlier he would come home in the evening and make me switch to SEQ from the ABC because he wanted to watch cricket and I wanted to watch Masaaki Sakai beating up those three stunt guys in that quarry. Sorry? What do you mean, ‘which episode?’
So anyway, my clearest memory of Twin Peaks is the advertising campaign that preceded it. Actually, one specific ad. And even then, only a small part of that ad. There was probably some random scenes from the pilot at the beginning of the ad, maybe even the shot from the opening credits of the buzz saw being sharpened since that gives me such a sharp feeling of deja vu. But then cut to Some Guy from Channel Ten who turns to camera from watching the show and burbles something about it being “quality television”. What, really? You’re not going to tell me that you laid out a sizable chunk of change on some shit dribbled onto the screen by monkeys dressed in chinos and ponytails? What a fucking shock, eh?
My sister loved it. I, on the other hand, distinctly remember killing myself, dissolving my corpse in acid and having resulting liquid sprayed over a thousand square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean so that I wouldn’t have to watch it, so that I couldn’t even accidentally see a moment of it and be driven insane by it’s unfathomable inanity. My quest, my long quest to insulate myself from it and its fucking dopiness has failed. D bought the god damn box set of it with all the episodes, both the US and International pilots and presumably a bazillion incomprehensible-because-there-is-no-there-there added extras which hint at content that only exists somewhere on the tenth dimension, hidden between two pathologically antagonistic vibrating super strings.
And I see I was right to avoid it; or at least I was right to avoid it then, back when I was a dopey teenager who didn’t know shit about shit. Now that I am a dopey thirty-something who doesn’t know shit about shit but with a better developed sense of the ludicrous, I can appreciate those bits of the plot that are so insanely fucking stupid that your mind can’t help but go boing when they hit it like a rubber express train. Like:
- That’s a biker bar? That place, where Julee Cruise, in a beret no less, is singing her two beats an hour, one hit wonder leitmotif to the floppy haired, shoe-gazing teenagers? That’s a biker bar? Man, if a real biker walked in he’d be contractually obliged to beat them all to death with a tire iron; not that he would need the contract, he’d probably do it on principle.
- The homecoming queen is a prostitute and nobody knows but her customers? Yeah, right. If that had happened in Bundaberg, a town considerably larger than Twin Peaks, the entire town would have known about it – and in some cases you wish weren’t quite so memorable, gone for sloppy twenty-seconds – within a week. Random marginalised senior girl, yes; prom queen, not so much.
- That guy is a biker? Andpried the astronomically damaged prom queen away from the football hero who, despite his cavernous arseholery, appears to be fucking half the surprisingly un-white-trash white trash girls in the town? Surely he’d be reluctant to be riding that bike and working in a garage for fear that he might damage his poetry writing hand.
Yes yes, it is supposed to be “quirky” i. And it is television, that highly accurate mirror of reality. There is a line, though, past which quirky, funhouse reflections cease to allow disbelief to be suspended, when disbelief comes rushing back in waves of irrepressible stone monkeys.
i Yes, and thanks so much for that, Lynch. You just had to open the gate for all the rest of the quirk that washed over us after we’d kicked over the traces of the eighties and numbed us to the point that we ended up thinking the cast of Friends were charismatic and Colour Me Badd were cool instead of illiterate. I’m looking at you, Northern fucking Exposure.
