party trick is my Substack, where I post criticism, literary journalism, and travel writing.
I hope I never see that face outside of a dream
“I could write a response every time I watch any David Lynch film and come up with something new each time; that’s not to call myself the most interesting thinker in the world, but rather to say that when given the proper attention and respect, his works conjure something profound and inexplicable. It’s like being mesmerized by a painting, it evokes a feeling that’s almost beyond words. Mulholland Drive, to me, captures a feeling that there is no succinct word for. It’s holding hope and dread in your hands at the same time, the duality of dreaming. Not just dream as aspiration, and not just dream as where your mind goes when you sleep. The space in between. Where Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet take place in reality that interacts with strangeness and evil beyond explanation, Mulholland Drive and the rest of Lynch’s LA trilogy take place in a different reality altogether.”
Why are we still writing about Taylor Swift?
“The Life of a Showgirl as an album is just as detrimental to Swift’s legacy as its horrific and desperate rollout. “The Fate of Ophelia,” the album opener, is rather inoffensive, if not a woefully inaccurate spin on Hamlet. It feels like she then repeats herself in “Opalite,” “Elizabeth Taylor,” and later “Honey,” saying nothing more interesting than what she already did with the first track; she gushes over her new love, how she never thought she’d find it, and how she doesn’t care what anybody else thinks. She repeats bits and pieces of reputation in the album’s ethos, hopes for some 1989 in the production, and even reaches for folklore and evermore in her attempts at unique lyricism, but in trying to reheat her own nachos, so to speak, fails to produce anything new or original.”