The holidays are holiday-rific as they say, and their multi-spectral horror and insane blandishments have had certain “insalubrious” effects upon your humble hosts.  Rallying against this tinseled terror, we present for your hopeful approval, the initial results, interpretations, commentary and tangential matters arising from Jubel’s academic study of folklore.

We asked for your help to fill out our understanding of how Peaks viewers understood and processed modern folklore, and your support and responses just blew us away.  Over a hundred of you took the time out of your day to answer a survey to a level of completeness and deep thought that I have never before witnessed–and as a former pollster, I’ve witnessed more than I can say.

Both Jubel and myself pondered how to best process your exquisite thoughts, but in the end the load was too heavy for just the two of us. We’ve therefore asked a few members of the Twin Peaks community to be surprise guests on today’s show, and they have very generously agreed.  For this reason, Michael Wilson and Caemeron Crain of the Drink Full and Descend podcast, and Eileen G. Mykkels of the 25 Years Later site deserve some seriously good slices of cake, they are fabulous human beings and incredibly knowledgeable scholars.

Thank you again for lending us your expertise and insight!

Much like the corpus of our favorite TV Show/Movie/Franchise/Intellectual Property/… “Art”, this story has something of a tortuous production background, interference from the studio…er, the publisher (Weird Tales) resulted in at least two versions, and later editors have combined these in various arrangements. A number of synopsizes further confuse the issue of original authorial intent, and so we present here Clark Ashton Smith’s masterful tale, “The Beast of Averoigne” as originally printed in the May 1933 issue of WEIRD TALES. Many thanks to The Eldritch Dark for their work in preserving and presenting Smith’s tales, poems and other writings to the greater public through their website http://www.eldritchdark.com/ as well as the tireless efforts of Karl Eckler the Elder, who lent his time, patience and voice to this recording.

This reading is presented here both as a surprise Hallowe’en Treat to our listeners, but also because over the last 18 numbers of Twin Peaks, we have learnt well that, “strange abominations pass evermore between earth and moon and athwart the galaxies; and the gulf is haunted by that which it were madness for man to know.” What seems at first a simple werewolf tale in disguise hints at a meaning as deep and old as the stars, and the dark between them, which is the dark in the woods and the human heart.

Enjoy!

In their first post-finale podcast about Twin Peaks: The Return, Karl and Jubel begin what will surely be the long task of parsing out what the hell just happened. Setting aside the cross-textual analysis for the most part, they look at how Lynch/Frost structured the Return, discuss some of their favorite (and least favorite) elements, the chances of another season, and break down that haunting final scene. Some outside tangents are explored: Orpheus and Eurydice, Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” and the phases of human sexuality are brought in as tools to understand both the text of Twin Peaks, and the phenomenon of such a challenging piece of art, and popular entertainment.

Graphics provided by http://www.int33h.com/test/tc/

To Listen, Punch It up to 88MPH: 

After some major technical issues, your intrepid hosts are back and talking about Twin Peaks: The Return, with a focus on Parts 9 through 12.  True to form, we live up to the “tangents” part of our title, talking about everything from the intricacies of story structure in modern premium television, to why we love Dougie so damn much.  We discuss H.P. Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” as a key Weird text, and some intriguing parallels between that story and The Return’s approach to sound and energy as a way to split the barrier Between Two Worlds.

An overarching theme of The Weird is that some knowledge is–or should be–forbidden. That seeing into the abyss means that it’s denizens may see you, reach you, touch you… and do worse than see and touch. In various ways, Twin Peaks has always dealt with this idea. Sara Palmer, the Log Lady, and Cooper himself all found themselves seeing beyond the normal 5 senses that most humans share, and all of them have paid a steep price. The Return has gone even further, introducing devices, spaces and places that offer glimpses behind the curtains of reality, and what we have seen there has been the exact opposite of safety and mundanity.

Therefore we offer you a chance to reset your clocks 97 years into the past and witness the very first time that the foundational horror writer H.P. Lovecraft ventured to set down the facts relating to what issues, From Beyond.

Today, ladies and gentlemen, we will concentrate on “Eight”.

The 8th installment of Twin Peaks: The Return, we feel, will be looked on as the beginning of a new thing in the world of Television. It is also the best information we have today about the ultimate beginnings of BOB, Laura, and… Gnosticism? It’s a hot take everyone, so grab some Iced Tea and focus on our 11th secret, “A Beginning is a very delicate time…”

In this episode, we wrestle with the awesome beauty and genius of David Lynch’s triumphant Return to Twin Peaks by way of Buckhorn South Dakota, Philadelphia and… New. York. City? We won’t get a rope, but we will explore what is in The Box!

It’s hard to believe that we have already made it to the 9th secret of Counter Esperanto, and because 9 is a magic number we talk a lot about magic this time. The magic of 25 years ago and the anticipated magic of next week. The power of poetry, the nitty-gritty of pulling down the moon for fun and profit, and an intense speculation into the real secret history of Annie Blackburn, a character having a most amazing and intricate background… or lacking one entirely. It’s not that we are vacillating, it’s just that, “Depending on how one looks on the situation, it appears they both have merit.”

Because of that, we’ve gone back to the textual ur-text of Counter Esperanto, Mark Frost’s The Secret History of Twin Peaks, in order to investigate why Annie does not appear in it, and what that (and other things) may reveal. From there we have put out our feelers in order to really get the lay of the land as it sits, take the current temperature of Twin Peaks, and nail down some things that we think about David Lynch’s Enigmatic tales that bridge the gap between the small screen, the big screen and the mental screen.

To wit, this episode contains:

(1) Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan: Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.” read by Karl Eckler the elder.

Typecast:

The Music of Erich Zann is a haunting reminiscence of a place found outside the normal rules of society, order and physics.

Something exists behind the high wall that only Erich Zann can see over.

Does he long to see?

Or is he afraid of the cold fire from beyond that longs to walk with him?

Like the town of Twin Peaks the Rue d’Auseil cannot be found on any map, and those who seek for it fail, unless they walk with their inner sight. We Invite you then to close your eyes in a tightly curtained room, and shudder along with us a we walk up that steep hillside street where the houses bend together like supplicants in prayer, they and we are anxiously awaiting the concert to begin.

Waiting through the long meanwhile to again catch the haunting strains of…

Read by Karl Eckler the Elder.

Music and Engineering by Jubel Brosseau

Typed shownotes by a 1963 Hermes 3000:

For artists, their outlook of the world can be expressed in the form of discrete symbol systems, and in this way artists are likely to refer to their art as their children. For this is true in a partially incestuous way. Our start positions in life are given to us primarily by our experiential parents: Those brave humans who choose to raise us. We take on that gift (or baggage) and transform it over the course of our lives, our lived encounters with the human and natural world. This forms individual outlooks on the world, for none of us see all of it, or even an identical portion of it.

An artist cannot help but incorporate this subjective model of the unknown objective world into their object ‘d art, or can they? In this episode, we discuss the work and lives of a number of authors working in the genre of “The Weird.” From H.P. Lovecraft to David Lynch. Yes, it’s Arkham to Twin Peaks, by way of Cross Plains, Texas and Detroit, Michigan.