So many great scenes over the seasons from episode one up to last year's singing Cooper thing, but obviously 'The Carousel' remains the standout.
The final run begins next week.
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No work of art has given me more pleasure than the two seasons of Twin Peaks from the early 90s.
I watched every episode 'live', then several times over on video during the following week.
I bought all the books, the VHS, the DVD of the first season, the (Spanish only) DVD of the second season, the eventual DVD box set with all the features, and most recently, the bumper Blu-ray remasters (the first Blu-ray / DVD I've purchased in 6 years).
I don't know where to start in explaining the show's appeal, so I won't. It's just the best. At everything. It touches every human emotion. It's David Lynch's masterpiece.
A picture of the Black Lodge has been my last.fm avatar since day one, there are two Twin Peaks images in my Twitter profile. My obsession with Sherilyn Fenn is well into a third decade. A trip to the Snoqualmie Falls area is number one on my bucket list.
The new Twin Peaks was announced on the same day that the Juliana Hatfield Three confirmed they'd reformed.
A week on, and I'm still not coping very well with this news.
Lindy West:
“I wish I could still listen to those podcasts. I wish I could still follow Ricky Gervais on Twitter. I wish I could bring myself watch Derek (kind of). I mourn that loss. But if there’s one thing I took away from the Office and Extras, it’s the importance of never losing sight of people’s humanity. Even David Brent, the irredeemable, is redeemed, and I always took that as a clarion call for empathy, a challenge to see people more deeply. I hold the media I consume to a higher standard now, because of Ricky Gervais.
”
It's a great article and pretty much sums up my feelings on Gervais.
People make terrible decisions and say awful things. I know I do, but I like to think I learn from them and apologise. When Gervais gets called out on these things (like the 'mong' business and the recent tweet about celebrity nudity referred to in the linked post) I think he knows he's messed up. He sees that he was wrong but like a child cannot admit it and ends up making him look even more like a dick.
And of course film has already changed a great deal: streaming is not analogous to the videocassette or DVD. Now we have instant access to an unparalleled library of films, books and recordings, we are wallowing about, really, in an atemporal zone of cultural production: none of us have the time – unless, like Kermode, we wish to spend the greater part of our adult life at it – to view all the films, read all the texts, and listen to all the music that we can access, wholly gratis and right away. Under such conditions the role of the critic becomes not to help us to discriminate between "better" and "worse" or "higher" and "lower" monetised cultural forms, but only to tell us if our precious time will be wasted – and for this task the group amateur mind is indeed far more effective than the unitary perception of an individual critic.
An outstanding piece of writing by Will Self, reviewing Mark Kermode's book but offering so much more on where technology has taken society and the arts.
Grace Dent:
I mention West because the summing-up by Mrs Justice Thirlwall – whom you may have noticed to be a female judge – raised in my mind several stomach-churning similarities between the two cases. Thirlwall issued a judgement so razor-sharp that when I read the full transcript I felt like punching the air. Because while the nation bickered about Philpott’s access to housing benefit, Thirlwall spelled out the true matter at hand about Philpott’s systematic campaigns reaching back over 40 years of violence, mental abuse, manipulation and blackmail against vulnerable women. She spelled out why many men like Philpott – regardless of class – have multitudes of children. Thirlwall was determined there would be no neat summations of Philpott’s unfortunate “mistake” in 2012, because this was a far longer, detailed story that needed telling.
The best article I've read on the Philpott case.
Zoe Williams:
But the paragraph that had me churning with impotent rage was this one: "Michael Philpott is a perfect parable for our age: his story shows the pervasiveness of evil born of welfare dependency. The trial spoke volumes about the sheer nastiness of the individuals involved. But it also lifted the lid on the bleak and often grotesque world of the welfare benefit scroungers – of whom there are not dozens, not hundreds, but tens of thousands in our country." It is vitriolic, illogical depersonalisation to ascribe the grotesqueness of one wild, unique crime to tens of thousands of people on benefits.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, the Harold Shipman case had nothing to do with middle England, middle-class professionals. Yet, somehow, the Mail and others have been able to bring social politics into the Philpott case.