Fix Your Hearts…
I was 12 years old when Twin Peaks first aired. It wasn’t a show that my family watched- too creepy and weird for them, but it was a show that my best friend’s family watched, so I remember being intrigued by it. I definitely saw the pilot, and remember Laura Palmer wrapped in plastic. From there I sporadically caught episodes as it aired, but wasn’t able to follow the plot completely. As I got older I dove into the world of David Lynch and his compulsion to make weird art, and recognized that was something I also wanted to do. I sometimes struggle with trying to make art that I think others will like, versus making art my brain needs me to make. Lynch didn’t try to find a lane that worked for everybody, he just found a lane where people were excited enough to see what weird stuff he’d come up with next to support him in his creative process. What a dream.
In the world of Twin Peaks, Denise, the trans-femme FBI agent played by David Duchovny, was an early moment of me seeing possibility on the screen. As far as representation goes, it was imperfect at best, but it was also honest. When Lynch created The Return of Twin Peaks, 25 years after the original series aired, Duchovny reprised his role as Denise, and through Gordon Cole-the character played by Lynch- he let us know what he thought the transphobes should do. “When you became Denise, I told all of your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die.”
David Lynch died January 15th. He started doing daily weather reports amidst the early days of lockdown in 2020, and continued to share little moments of joy with the world as many people started to go “back to normal” and he watched his world grow smaller and more isolated. A lifelong smoker, he had emphysema and the risk of COVID was too great for him to be able to “go back to normal.” When the fires (that are still burning) in L.A. forced his evacuation, he heeded the call, but his body couldn’t take it. He was a big believer in transcendental meditation, and that once our bodies were done that we as beings certainly were not. He spoke of friends he’d lost, like musical collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, in the present tense, because he knew they were never truly gone. As a person with a funky immune system and even funkier lungs, I’ve also watched my world get smaller and more isolated. It’s frustrating. Now more than ever. I’m grateful for David Lynch and all the weird art he created, for the goofy stuff he did, for the lives he touched, and for showing me one of the first examples of people accepting their trans friends for who they are…and then growing into the future and becoming champions for their trans friends.
The thick red velvet curtains and zig-zag black and white floor is an iconic image from the world of Twin Peaks. I first made the Black/White Lodge woodblock as a print for a birthday card for my friend Christa who is a fellow Twin Peaks/Lynch geek. In light of the current trajectory of navigating life in the “U.S.” as a queer, trans, non-binary, immuno-compromised human, making a second block to overlay with the text “Fix Your Hearts or Die” felt cathartic, and like an appropriate homage to Lynch.
This is the print of the month that’s been mailed out to all my Brayer, Paper and Baren, and Art Studio Print Club subscribers. There are also individual prints up for sale in the shop.
Thanks as always for supporting queer art. We need daily reminders that we’re not alone in this fight, that we are part of this world, and that even if you don’t share our identities, that you’ll tell folks who say we shouldn’t exist, to FIX THEIR HEARTS or die.