Sarah Nicole Prickett

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  print September 2022

  THE ART WE LOVE

  RYAN PONDER McNAMARA

  After seeing Lucinda Childs’s Dance, my boyfriend, a recent initiate to performance, said to me, “Dance—and by extension Dance—is the closest approximation of freedom available in human life.” Thank God he gets it.

  A quick rundown for the unacquainted: Dance is a 1979 collaboration between Childs, Sol LeWitt, and Philip Glass. Contemporary productions feature Childs’s coursing, insistent dance performed by her current company behind a transparent scrim, onto which is projected a film of the same score performed by the original dancers more than forty years ago. In this inversion

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  diary December 13, 2019

  Inside Job

  A WOMAN IN A RED JACKET, doing her job, walked through the halls of the Miami Beach Convention Center on VIP Preview Day. An older, whiter man in navy blue walked beside her. They paused to look at a John Currin painting. “In the end, visual art is all about light,” said the woman. “Have you ever been to Ohio?” asked the man. He had a point.

  The point of Miami, both Beach and Basel, is that you don’t have to visit to understand it. “I am not here to do drugs,” said a man in a Panama hat, pacing the exhibition floor with a skull-topped cane. “It has nothing to do with drugs. It has to do with my

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  print Summer 2018

  A BAD DAWN

  THE ENLIGHTENMENT was over when bohemians and yuppies both started calling themselves enlightened. No tragedy there: Born two centuries earlier, it had had a good life. The New Age wasn’t as inauspicious as it sounded, either. Enlightened is in fact, happily, the title of a very original series on HBO about a spiritualized woman named Amy, played with thrilling sensitivity by Laura Dern, who yearns to speak with her “true voice . . . without bitterness or fear.” That Amy has never heard of parrhesia is not her problem. That Amy’s “true voice” can only be heard in her head, i.e., in her calmly

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  print February 2018

  SERIOUS SEX BATTLE

  ONE
  A WOMAN OF INORDINATE STRENGTH
  

  Beyoncé went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and saw, at an exhibit called “Superheroes,” a costume worn by Lynda Carter for the purposes of being, on television, the first official live-action Wonder Woman. Beyoncé, a Carter herself, was impressed by the tiny waist and the spangliness. She wanted the lasso. “To make everybody tell the truth? I need that,” she told the Los Angeles Times. It was 2008. Superhero films were entering the prestige era, and the singer was on her way to what in pop music is called “worldwide domination.” Beyoncé Gisele Knowles-Carter

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  film January 05, 2018

  Point of No Return

  I.

  INTERVIEWER: Is Laura Palmer really dead?

  DAVID LYNCH: Ummm. [Thirteen-second pause.] I’m pretty sure.
  —Lynch on CBC Radio, 1990
  

  LAURA WAS DEAD, but her problems kept hanging around. It was as if they hadn’t buried her deep enough, to quote from her best friend’s scream by Laura’s grave in the Twin Peaks, Washington, cemetery where her body, unwrapped from plastic, had been inhumed six days earlier in 1989. One problem was the body itself. Another was the family, where odds are made. As for the rest, they were the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself, the only thing worth writing

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  slant September 02, 2017

  Peak Peaks

  PARTS 1 & 2

  EUCALYPTUS TREES, WEAKENED BY DROUGHT, are on their last legs all over Los Angeles. One fell and knocked out the power lines next to my friend’s house, where I am staying, in Eagle Rock, and we stood on the deck drinking Vinho Verde––delicious, like if wine were beer––watching the action. A fire truck loitered for an hour, produced no helpers, and left. Disruption made the street its own neighborhood. Homeowners came out wondering, hands synchronized on hips. One man retrieved his digital camera and tripod and took commemorative photos. Another ambled the length of his driveway twice

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  film September 01, 2017

  Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream

  A WORLD WHERE TWIN PEAKS is the center is horrifying and moral because there is, obviously, no God. There’s no sense of God, no shadow or presence. There’s not even a church, astounding for a town with a diner, a roadhouse, a hospital, woods, waterfalls and rivers. There is a church in the unincorporated community of Twin Peaks, California. There are three churches of the Mormon kind by the foot of the Twin Peaks range in Utah. A work so wholly American, American as Underworld, as A Face in the Crowd, and yet not Christian exists nowhere else. But in Twin Peaks, Washington, in lieu of a creator,

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  film September 01, 2017

  Screen Time

  OVER THE LATEST HOURS of Twin Peaks: The Return, two time lines emerge, one stronger, one fainter, like lines on a pregnancy test. (If my husband is reading this: I’m not pregnant.) Old Dougie Jones (Kyle MacLachlan) comes off a bender with the Mitchum Brothers (James Belushi and Robert Knepper) and the bunny-type girls (Amy Shiels, Giselle DaMier, and Andrea Leal) and swerves into the Lucky 777 Insurance office, horrisonous music, a marching song for manic-depressive clowns, playing behind him. Anthony Sinclair (Tom Sizemore), a double agent at the company, calls his criminal boss, Mr. Todd,

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  film August 06, 2017

  Saving Face

  CORRECTION: I SAID “WE CAN GUESS” that Miriam’s letter, bearing witness to Richard Horne’s (Eamon Farren) manslaughter of a boy, would make its way to the sheriff and would be believed. But she is not dead—yet. Emerging on all fours from the woods, she is found and taken to the emergency room, where she, uninsured, requires a life-saving operation. Sheriff Frank Truman (Robert Forster) delivers the update to Ben Horne (Richard Beymer), who says he will pay for it. A bad thought arrives: He could pull a Leland Palmer and suffocate the witness at her bedside. But from now on, “we” will refrain

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  film July 21, 2017

  Electric Sheep

  “ELECTRICITY IS HUMMING,” says the Log Lady to Hawk in the tenth hour of Twin Peaks: The Return. She says “electricity” like she’s a kid with a crush on Ben Franklin. She says it flows like a river and is heard in the river, too, and in the mountains, and is seen to glow around the moon. It’s a long conjure, electricity: a literal expression of magic that also connotes the satisfying pop of eureka, the blue purl of genius finding its vessel, a longed-for apotheosis, like when wires burst and flood the walls with lightning as Henry unites with the Lady in the Radiator in Eraserhead (1977). Drama

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  film July 07, 2017

  Tonight, Atomic

  FLAMMABLE AND INFLAMMABLE both mean “easy to burn,” though many people have tested their luck by reading inflammable as “fire-proof.” Flammable is, in one sense, how Lynch pronounces human. On the eighth and finest hour of Twin Peaks: The Return, his elegant pyrotechnics commemorate the birth of today’s America, and a near-wordless script shows that whether you describe a monstrous act as human or inhuman, you are right. But you are not trying to be right, you’re trying to be sincere, an effort so helpless as to defer meaning. Igor Stravinsky, a man so depraved he once asked the Nazis—nicely—to

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  film June 29, 2017

  Theme and Variation

  THE SECOND-BEST USE of “Falling” outside the original Twin Peaks is on the fourth hour of Twin Peaks: The Return. Those vespertine keyboard notes, which used to go off with the regularity of an egg timer at an all-day diner, are saved until the moment you stop listening for them, and then: Officer Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) sees the portrait of Laura Palmer at the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department and cries like he’s never cried in his life. He cries like he’s never seen the very first episode of Twin Peaks, the one where everybody—hilariously—cries, or like he’s on a Twin Peaks–themed Saturday