Counter Esperanto Podcast: Winds Of The Weird

Greetings Listeners! We continue our series of guest-packed Twin Peaks: The Return re-watch discussions with author, scholar, and all-around lovely gent Rob E. King!

Rob E. King is an associate librarian at Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library and a doctoral student in English at Texas Tech University. He has contributed to 25YL, Blue Rose Magazine, Twin Peaks Unwrapped podcast and published in New American Notes Online and the West Texas Historical Review. 

Rob is also co-editor with Christine Self and Robert Weaver of a book of essays titled David Lynch and the American West: Essays on Regionalism and Indigeneity in Twin Peaks and the Films.

We begin our discussion with classic Weird writer (and creator of Conan the Barbarian) Robert E. Howard, discuss regionalism in that author’s writings, and bring it around to Twin Peaks, discussing the importance of the Las Vegas bits, Jerry’s Odyssey,  the role of electricity and telecommunication, and much more.

Greetings listeners! This week we are excited to have on, as our first guest in a five-part retrospective of Twin Peaks: The Return, none other than John Thorne, author and co-creator of the Wrapped in Plastic magazine, and more recently Blue Rose magazine, and co-host of In Our House Now Podcast: An Inquiry Into Twin Peaks.

John, Jubel and Karl have a free-wheeling discussion which was ostensibly supposed to be about Parts 1-4, but who are we kidding? We talked about it all: What’s really happening in those Audrey scenes? Who’s dream is this, anyway? Who’s reflected in the rear-view mirror of Jade’s Jeep? And is Evan Williams whiskey a new mystical substance? We’re not promising answers, but we have a lot of hunches.

When Karl and Jubel realized that they had passed the five year mark of the podcast, they thought it would be fitting to return to their “Tangents About Twin Peaks” roots, and use Mark Frost’s The Final Dossier as a springboard to dive into Twin Peaks as a whole.

What resulted is our longest episode yet, which bounces between the text of the book, and our memories and reflections on the whole saga as it stands. Twin Peaks is a dense knot of mystery and Weirdness, and we hope you will join us, perhaps over the holiday weekend, as we, to pull a phrase from H.P. Lovecraft, “correlate its contents.”

Here’s a short reading by your Humble Co-Host Jubel Brosseau, of “Yule Horror,” a short poem by H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft made a habit of writing Christmas poems every year that he sent to friends and family, but generally they were mild, festive affairs. This poem delves into a dark vision of the pagan origins of the Christmas mythology, and is consummate Lovecraft.

Happy Holidays everybody!

“Dreams are messages from the Deep”

In this episode, a review and impromptu analysis of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” Karl and Jubel are surprised to find their views and thoughts on the film evolving as they break it down. They share a few laughs as they compare/contrast the film with David Lynch’s adaptation. Bear with us folks, this is a bit of a ride!

“It never got weird enough for us”  Here’s some audiovisual notes about today’s podcast:

Guild Navigator – Dune

Ben (Dean Stockwell) from Blue Velvet

The “Bum” behind Winkies

Mr. and Mrs. X (Mary X’s parents from Eraserhead

Mrs. Tremond (and her grandson Pierre)

Lil from Fire Walk With Me

“The Baby” – Eraserhead

“Oh You’re Sick”

Mr. Gotta Light – TP: The Return, Part 8

The Cowboy – Mulholland Drive

Mystery Man: Lost Highway

Jubel and Karl give in to the lure of nostalgia and return to movies that they haven’t seen in 25 years or so: The Keep and Phantasm.  These are weird movies, and also really Weird movies.

We talk about them, how we enjoyed them in our salad days, and what they mean to us now.

Other subjects include high school cabals, sci/fi fantasy video crash pads, and the good-old bad days of cocaine-fueled media.

….But Counter-Esperanto will return:

Greetings Listeners, Jubel Brosseau here.

We are doing something a little different with this episode. Late June saw the release of the long-awaited sequel to The Last of Us, a fan-favorite and critically heralded game exclusive to the Sony Playstation platform. The Last of Us Part 2 had a lot to live up to, and I was absolutely floored by the game. The original was a beautiful, heart-rending game, but this release is absolutely a watershed moment when it comes to elevating video and computer games to the level of high art and literature.

I knew I needed to talk this over with someone, but our co-host Karl Eckler doesn’t play video games, so it was time to improvise. I decided to invite Twin Peaks Unwrapped and Geekonomics Podcast co-host Bryon Kozaczka and Red Room Podcast, and In Our House Now Podcast co-host Josh Minton, who are avid gamers, to do a big crossover episode which will be available on our respective feeds.

I hope you enjoy it, and Karl and I will be back with our regularly (not so scheduled) programming soon.

Millennium is Coming 

“We apologise for the inconvenience.”

In this episode, your hosts delve into two jungles; one 8,000 miles removed from from familiar Twin Peaks psychogeography, and the other in the very center of America’s heartland.  One set in, arguably, the most hopeful American Decade, the 1960s.  The other marinates in the psychic despair of “The End of History.”

Both, in their own ver different ways could be called Cold War movies.  They depict the varied fields the first Post-Modern War took place on: one at its figurative and literal hottest, the other in the chill of its coldest pyrrhic victory, where the forces of Liberal Democracy declared themselves winners of the conflict, and in so doing managed to grab defeat from the rushing jaws of victory.  This juxtaposition became even more interesting to us when  we realized that both “Apocalypse Now” and “Candyman” have their tap roots sunk deep into the 19th century, the slave trade, and the most murderous ghost to ever stalk the world: Colonialism.

So, what does a psychedelic war movie based on Joseph Conrad’s 19th century critique of Belgian murder in the Congo, “Heart of Darkness”, have in common with a ghost story set in Chicago’s most notoriously failed housing project?  Join us and find out what we think about domineering, even cannibalistic power structures, the desperate revenge and stratagems of resistance by oppressed lands and peoples, and the weird nature of very real evil have to do with it.

If you are patient with us, we will trace Conrad’s river of blood through its roots in a disturbingly mundane 19th century colonial genocide to the weirdly repressive focus of slasher mythopoetics up to the present moment (“The horror. The horror.”) we find ourselves in.  If you are very, very patient with us, we might even say something about how all this relates to how Lynch and Frost see the World.

Some jungles are made of Douglas Firs.