Tibet

Oh me, oh dear, dear me. . .

I've been soooo sick, and I'm tired of being sick! I spent the entire weekend in bed, watching Twin Peaks. I thought I was out of the woods but today at work when I tried to eat my lunch, I just couldn't. So I drove home, where I lost it. Now, I feel like I'm never going to be able to eat again. And I'm freezing! And ready to go to the gym! And I'm full of aspirations! It's so frustrating! I was just about to conquer the world!

I'm not that old, but you know, the more years you accumulate, the more of a concern illness becomes. Am I dying? Are these just the symptoms of some kind of incurable disease? Will I, in fact, ever be able to hold down a meal again, or am I going to starve to death, slowly, here in my freezing apartment? Right now I'm drinking hot water with honey, and though I'm kind of uncomfortable, so far I've been able to keep it down.

So while I was sick and Satan tricked me into thinking I was on the way to recovery, I realized that I've never watched Twin Peaks in its entirety. It's just amazing, up until the middle of the second season when I guess Lynch was pressured to reveal who killed Laura Palmer, after which he mostly abandoned the show; forced to prematurely string together a bunch of clues, the solution feels forced. He wanted the story to be an unsolved mystery and to allow the powers of evil to remain on the fringes while we learned about (and he discovered through trial and error) his fascinating characters, and I wish he'd had his way. I'm just about done, and from what I understand there is an unsolved mystery in the end, or maybe it's no mystery at all.

Anyway, over the holidays I went and saw the Joseph Cornell installation at the SFMOMA. The parrot-boxes you see here are the works of Mr. Cornell, dime store alchemist (& correspondent of Henry Darger! Creepy! Cool!). I wish I could show you here what exactly I saw, but I only had an hour to rush through & since I'm on my deathbed you're going to have to put up with my inadequate description. Of all the exhibits, the one I loved best was this free newsletter Joseph Cornell put out; it was written in a reporter's style, with editorial comments and lots of pictures Cornell had collected and then pasted into the body. The articles in the paper corresponded to the pictures, and many of the pictures were of birds, animals, and people in unusual situations. Clearly, the news stories had been written to make sense of the pictures, and the results were quite funny! Then I realized where McSweeney's gets their ideas (and, to an extent, The Onion). Interesting. . .

Now, Tibet

This is probably my favorite scene from Twin Peaks, wherein Agent Cooper reveals the kind of thinking that makes him the greatest FBI agent on the planet. Maybe there is more to the universe than meets the eye. . .