I love Twin Peaks. I also love art, pie, and Clifton’s Cafeteria. So you can imagine the immeasurable magnitude of my excitement when all of these things collided last weekend at “In The Trees,” an art exhibition celebrating the 20th anniversary of David Lynch’s masterpiece.

Nowhere else on earth could have been more appropriate to host such an event than downtown L.A.’s world-famous surreal woodland forest-themed cafeteria, Clifton’s. Supplementing the already-perfect surroundings, they gave us free pie! And donuts! A red-curtained Black Lodge filled with David Lynch art pieces! Grace Zabriskie decoupage! I’m hyperventilating, simply reminiscing about the glory of this event. Take a look at some pictures from the opening, below.

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That lovable scamp Ben Aqua has teamed up with Mitch Trale, the clever artist-programmer behind the kaleidoscopic virtual reality mind-trip walled.in, to bring us the most terrifying vision of Shaq since Kazaam. You can’t escape him. “Zoom into his teeth” – Ben Aqua.

Via the awesome Ida Lehtonen.

Julee Cruise’s “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart” wormed its way into my ear yesterday, and it won’t leave. Cruise sings it at the Twin Peaks roadhouse in one of the series’ most sublime episodes, “Lonely Souls.” That incredible hour of television, which aired twenty years ago this week, is one of just a handful of episodes directed by David Lynch himself. He casually swings the episode’s narrative from unfathomable heights of bittersweet melancholy to the depths of gut-churning terror, and this haunting tune helps shape the mood.

Here’s a clip of Cruise performing the number in Lynch’s little-seen ballet Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted. After the jump, watch the scene from “Lonely Souls,” complete with Lara Flynn Boyle lipdub.

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Go back in time, before there was TiVo, before there was Internet, back when you relied on the TV Guide to soak up the smallest shreds of TV trivia. Imagine being a kid again, on the shag carpet of your parents’ wood-paneled den, wasting away the long summer days indoors. The fan’s blowing as hard as it can, pushing hot air around, and you’re propped up on your elbows waiting patiently for Star Trek reruns to start. “Space,” finally, “the final frontier.” And for the next 30 minutes you’re somewhere else entirely, sucked into the set, and you wish you could just live in there forever, with these characters you’ve come to love. They’ve been with you through so many hard times, and you with them. Especially the handsome, severe (but secretly sensitive, and somehow sexy) Captain James Kirk.

Painter Luke Butler calls Kirk “a model of vulnerability … a most stout and reliable figure,” and notes “if you have watched enough TV, you know this to be true.” In Butler’s Enterprise series, we’re granted the chance to linger in the golden fantasy-land of Kirk, his deep space compatriots, and the suave ubermensch buddy cops of Starsky and Hutch, frozen in moments of strong emotion, tender affection and terse action. All unnecessary elements have drifted away, as Butler isolates these beautiful, irreplaceable cathode-ray men, amidst a universal expanse of resounding gray silence.

Along with Future Shipwreck favorite– and fellow TV-devotee– Desiree Holman, Butler sits on the roster of San Francisco’s tremendously rad Silverman Gallery. His other bodies of work include a haunting tribute to “The End” and a creepy-funny series of porno-political collages depicting 1970s world leaders luxuriating in the nude.

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For those of you who haven’t heard (which means you did not watch the newest season of Drag Race in its entirety, which, in turn, means you really need to rethink your priorities) RuPaul has recently come out with a new book: Workin’ It!: RuPaul’s Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style. In this multi-part series I will attempt to integrate some of the many profound insights contained in this rosy tome into my own ways of interacting with and thinking about the world. Come, friends, follow me on my mystical journey to attain Ru-vana.

[ Read Part 1 ]
[ Read Part 2 ]

I’ve always been intrigued by people who are able to have a totally practical relationship with their own bodies. Usually, they seem to be professionals whose careers depend in some way on their physical attributes: dancers, ultimate fighters, and of course our beloved Supermodel of the World. On the flip side though, there are also those who place paramount importance on the spiritual and intellectual self like religious ascetics, eccentric geniuses, and, again, RuPaul (see part one for more about his philosophy on the denial of the ego.)

The rest of us, myself included, occupy a kind of psychophysical grey area. We go about our lives drinking, smoking, and indulging in the occasional extravagant meal, only sporadically pausing to wonder if the pleasures of our consumption equal the satisfaction of the other, more disciplined half’s strictly regimented self-denial. The benefits we gain from acquisition are obvious, whereas the joys of elimination seem to be a far more dubious.

Workin’ It addresses these anxieties in a surprisingly detailed account of Ru’s first foray into colon cleansing. Airing one’s “dirty laundry” (i.e. “butt junk”), and in front of a medical professional no less, can be a strange if oddly attractive proposition. “Add to all of that the embarrassment our culture has with anything to do with bodily functions. Yes, I’m talking about ‘shit shame.’ I’m pretty sure that shit shame is what kept me (and most people) from doing a ‘high colonic’ before. But it was the promise of erasing my past from the inside out that kept me intrigued.”

Upon closer examination, we find that “shit shame” in both a literal and figurative sense is not necessarily a negative thing. The thought of our physical and emotional baggage can be shameful, even repulsive, yes, but it is also the most effective incentive towards renewal and reinvention. Nietzsche called this drive to reexamine our assumptions the “intellectual conscience.” Not to be confused with the residual guilt instilled in us by religious dogma, the intellectual conscience is the tool which allows us to transcend the values handed down to us by society and achieve something great and entirely personal. Or, in Ru’s case, “A rootie-tootie fresh-and-fruity booty!”

Next Week: A Life in Pictures, or A Look Inside the Closet of a Character Illusionist

The recent M.I.A./New York Times controversy has just been kind of boring on all fronts. I’ve skipped a lot of the web chatter on the matter, but I did read Nitsuh Adebe‘s thoughtful and measured analysis for Pitchfork, and the one good thing I took away from it was an appreciation for M.I.A.’s Nigerian (by way of London) protege, Afrikan Boy.

His image of a third-world hustle is a hundred times more resonant than most of M.I.A.’s– it involves standing out on the highway selling sugar. On one of his own tracks, “Lidl”, it’s about sneaking into the UK and getting caught shoplifting from supermarket chains.

Compare this with M.I.A., who so often wraps herself in the idea of political violence and armed resistance– things that make a much more exciting package for Western audiences, but can also be a lot more cartoonish and self-aggrandizing. Part of it is surely just the background difference between Nigeria and Tamil Sri Lanka, but M.I.A.’s the one trying to bridge these things. If she ever talked about a plastic bag full of gasoline, you get the feeling she’d add a match and make it a bomb. If it were Afrikan Boy, it’d just be something kids sell to people with cars to make a little money. Afrikan Boy is being funny in “Lidl”, and yet I still take what he’s saying way more seriously than I take the popstar who introduced me to him.

With or without authentic third-world street cred, Afrikan Boy’s music is just plain fun and catchy. Plus he’s adorable and never seems to stop smiling!

For those of you who haven’t heard (which means you did not watch the newest season of Drag Race in its entirety, which, in turn, means you really need to rethink your priorities) RuPaul has recently come out with a new book: Workin’ It!: RuPaul’s Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style. In this multi-part series I will attempt to integrate some of the many profound insights contained in this rosy tome into my own ways of interacting with and thinking about the world. Come, friends, follow me on my mystical journey to attain Ru-vana.

[ Read Part 1 ]

Once in a while, a great philosopher will find a way to express an incredibly complex idea in such a way that it is easily, almost naturally understood and yet, still, hard to explain. The issue being addressed isn’t reduced or solved, it’s simply well put. “God is dead.” OK, good to know, Nietzsche. So, now what?

Wigs: they’re a vital source of RuPaul’s undeniable glamour, but their essential meaning remains mysterious. Do they symbolize a deep-seated shame of one’s natural deficiencies, a refusal to accept the body’s inability to express the mind’s ideal self-image, or are they like magical talismans, calling forth a new, better, more confident you from the obscure recesses of your being? Ru’s ruminations on the subject are filled with cryptic wonder:

I was mesmerized by those hairy marvels of modern man. To me, the whole concept of being able to instantly transform your identity with a mop of synthetic hair represented the totality of advancements made in the industrial age: a cheap, non-biodegradable tool of vanity. It made me feel proud to be an American.

The rest of Workin’ It delves deeply into the logistics of wigs and the insanely intricate processes required to purchase, maintain, ship, and attach them, but this passage seems to effortlessly epitomize the central tenets of wigging out. The tools of transformation are strange things indeed. Usually, when they work well it’s almost like they’re not even there. An expensive, high quality synthetic wig just looks like natural hair. As technology advances it becomes less and less distinct from the person using it.

That being the case, scientific innovation depends as much on creative people using the materials available to them in novel, perhaps even radical ways just as much as it does on the increasing sophistication of corporate manufacturing techniques. All of your latest internet sensations (Twitter, ChatRoulette, etc.) were technologically feasible long ago, but it wasn’t until they captured the public imagination that they “became a thing,” a recognizable entity in and of themselves without which much of the wisdom of Ashton Kutcher may have been lost to history.

The point here is that, yes, wigs might be pretty to look at, but they wouldn’t be worth discussing at any great length if not for great pioneers like RuPaul who chose to use them in a way that permanently altered our cultural consciousness for the better. Maybe technology will eventually overcome illness and death, but it’s people like Ru and the inspirational value of what their imaginations can achieve that make us happy to be alive.

Next Week on Future Shipwreck Book Club: RuPaul Makes a Pit Stop or Food for Thought, Fuel for the Race

For those of you who haven’t heard (which means you did not watch the newest season of Drag Race in its entirety, which, in turn, means you really need to rethink your priorities) RuPaul has recently come out with a new book: Workin’ It!: RuPaul’s Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style. In this multi-part series I will attempt to integrate some of the many profound insights contained in this rosy tome into my own ways of interacting with and thinking about the world. Come, friends, follow me on my mystical journey to attain Ru-vana.

“The most important thing… is to not take life too seriously.” RuPaul begins his introduction with the claim that this little nugget of wisdom is the most important piece of advice he has ever received. Now, at first that endorsement may come off as a bit of a contradiction coming from someone who is obviously so meticulous about the way they present themselves to the world. I’ve never done drag myself, but it seems to me that anyone who regularly engages in an intricate process of wholesale self-transformation on which their entire livelihood depends would be hard-pressed to maintain a carefree attitude. How are we, his disciples, to interpret this apparent paradox?

Though the importance of continually challenging yourself to succeed is stressed throughout the book, it turns out the crux of Ru’s philosophical argument rests not on the irrefutable strength of his own work ethic, but, in a much broader sense, on the transcendental nature of human identity. “Whatever you proclaim as your identity here in the material realm is… your drag. You are not your religion. You are not your skin color. You are not your gender, your politics, your career or your marital status. You are none of the superficial things that this world deems important. The real you is the energy force that created the entire universe!”

What is alluded to in this passage is the true danger of “taking life too seriously”, of attaching too much meaning to a particular facet of our identity: we become a disconnected, hollowed-out mess of social categories rather than a fully integrated self. Buddhist doctrine has been grappling with this phenomenon for more than a millennium and, more recently, brilliant scholars like Jean Baudrillard and Judith Butler have made it their life’s work to deconstruct the systems of meaning-making which stifle rather than articulate our sense of being.

Anyone who has seen RuPaul’s show knows that, in an open-minded environment, concepts of gender which have been hotly debated in our society for generations can be rendered border-line meaningless. Likewise, anyone who has seen RuPaul at all, in any context can tell that she, as an individual, is something far more spectacular than all elements of her ensemble. This is a serious achievement, my friends, but not too much so.