It’s a Beautiful Night Out There

The sun has charred the other side of the world and come back to us and painted the smoke over our heads an imperial violet.

You are listening.

WIth “It” Being an Appealingly Possum-Like Expression Conveying a History of Being Socially Downtrodden

I knew I liked Edith best of all the Crawley girls. Countess Cora sold Edith short when she said that she had been less blessed than her sisters, because she didn’t account for the striking resemblance to George Michael Bluth.

If the Hollywood machine can now start rolling its gears towards a Michael Cera-Laura Carmichael meet-up, we TV snobs can begin vacillating between been really stoked and really creeped out. Also: Lucille Bluth versus the Dowager Countess. Make it happen, someone.

Hunt for the Gay House Elf

Examine this indisputable evidence for yourself.

All efforts to locate the inhabiting elf have so far proved futile, but I least I have the evidence to prove that I found his footsteps in the hall.

The First Name in Sideburns

With his masterfully grown sidefuzz flowing so perfectly into his under-the-nose walrus-spotch, General Ambrose Burnside seems suitably named. In fact, I'd always thought it was remarkable that his last name sounded so much like the man-growth that he wore so proudly.

I shouldn't have been surprised, then, to learn that it is not a coincidence: The word sideburn does, in fact, come from Burnside's name. Initially, the name Burnside became burnsides, referring specifically to the Civil War-era variety of facial hair in which sideburns and mustache collided in a reckless orgy of facial hair. However, by 1887 (and only twenty-two years after the end of the Civil War), the elements of Burnside's name flip-flopped and began referring only to the before-the-ears hair growth whose borders stop long before those of the mustache began. It makes sense, though, why the name caught on as a generic term: The association of Burnside's name with this particular style of facial hair has to be the most harmonious marriage of name and meaning since South African white supremacist Eugene Terre'Blanche, who, yes, was real.

Circle Cubes

Apparently in the last word in the name Bed Bath & Beyond refers to the sections of the store in which geometry is bent into shapes impossible anywhere else on Earth.

Question: Would it not be dangerous to bring such an anomaly into the house?

The Giant Rabbit of Long Beach

Given that David Lynch’s immediate follow-up to Mulholland Drive was a short film series about man-sized, anthropomorphic rabbits, this is actually as sensible a thing to post now as it would be ever. There is a giant rabbit in Long Beach. I saw him myself, sitting in the front yard of a house on 3rd Street. I took a picture, but I fear the limitations of the iPhone camera don’t really convey just how large this rabbit is.

It’s not a trick of perspective: From toe to ear, he is taller than I am, and I’m just under six feet. He’s on Google Street View, in case you want to examine from a different angle. See?



I can only imagine that whoever lives there placed the statue in the front yard because they felt too few people were driving distractedly in their neighborhood. It’s that much of an eye-catcher, this fucking rabbit.

You know what? Screw it — here’s David Lynch’s Rabbits.

Warning: It gets weirder than you might expect.

With “It” Being a Very David Lynchy Sense of Hollywood Tragedy

So there’s a singer named Lana Del Rey. Perhaps you’ve heard of her?

In the interest of full disclosure, I didn’t put this one together until Spencer alerted me to a particularly insightful comment on a Del Rey-centric Gawker post. But yeah — now that you mention it, she’s like a character who spiraled straight out of Mulholland Drive, hobbled onstage and started singing a little dirge ditty.

Consider this her name: Lana Del Rey, with the first name presumably intending to evoke the old Hollywood glamour of Lana Turner and the two-part last name skewing very Los Angeles — the Del Rey neighborhood of Culver City or Marina del Rey or Playa del Rey over on the far west side. That’s Lynchy in itself, if you think about his Los Angeles-focused Mulholland Drive period, but it’s also a trick he’s tried before: the FBI agent that Chris Isaak plays in Fire Walk With Me is Chet Desmond — half jazz musician Chet Baker and half Sunset Boulevard character Norma Desmond. (And that’s all ignoring those Hollywood stand-ins for Los Angeles, Chinatown’s Hollis and Evelyn Mulwray.)

In one sense, you could view Lana Del Rey as a Camilla Rhodes figure — the blonde on the top left, the girl whose dreams of show business success come true for no good reason. Like the character in Mulholland Drive, it has simply been deemed that “this is the girl,” without any real explanation. She’s selected by the powers that be to be the one basking in the spotlight instead of anyone else who might be more deserving of the attention. But on the other hand, there’s also a sense that Lana Del Rey is a version of Mulholland Drive’s Rebekah Del Rio — the woman on the bottom with the painted-on tears, the singer whose entire persona is an illusion. Think about it this way: In the Club Silencio scene in Mulholland Drive, Betty and Rita watch Rebekah sing on stage, and they’re incredibly moved by the performance. Before she can finishing singing her Spanish-language take on “Crying,” however, she falls to the ground, as if dead. The song continues anyway. Her whole thing — her presence on stage, her schtick as a singer, her song itself — doesn’t really need her. She’s just one part of an elaborate show. In my head, anyway, this works because her performance on Saturday Night Live revealed that the physical existence of Lana Del Rey, live and in person, pales in comparison to the reputation that precedes her. Watching her fumble through “Video Games” on SNL was sort of like watching her slump over dead on live TV, only we all knew that the song would keep playing no matter how lifeless she seemed.

Aside from all that, the lighting alone in this one shot I’ve found would totally make David Lynch smile. And, of course, if it turned out that Lana Del Rey were both Camilla Rhodes and Rebekeh Del Rio at the same time? That would make David Lynch even happier.

David Lynch, previously:

• Megan Mullally in Blue Velvet
• Laura Dern in my parking lot
• The video game that thought it was Twin Peaks
• The weird intersection of Twin Peaks and Legend of Zelda