One year after launching Night Blooming Jasmine, we’re diving into one of the biggest questions lurking behind the red curtains of Twin Peaks: what, exactly, are we?

From Laura Palmer’s radiant light to Sarah Palmer’s terrifying abyss, David Lynch spent a lifetime exploring masks, doubles, dreams, identity, and the possibility that something exists beneath them all. But was Lynch pointing toward an eternal soul—or showing us that the self is nothing more than a beautiful illusion?

In this anniversary episode, we wander through Buddhism, classical yoga philosophy, Jungian psychology, Transcendental Meditation, reincarnation, and Twin Peaks: The Return to ask whether there is a permanent self beneath the mask, or whether the mask is all there ever was.

David Lynch believed that light overpowers darkness. This episode asks what happens when we follow that light all the way into the unknown.

Rate, review, subscribe, and meet me beneath the sycamores…. or above the convenience store ☠️

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In this episode of Night Blooming Jasmine, we return to the eternal present - a post-David Lynch Los Angeles, where the surreal has collapsed into the everyday.

The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer is essential reading. The act of keeping a diary is an instinctual tradition - from Joan Didion to Pamela Des Barres to Eve Babitz’s sun-drenched fragments of Los Angeles life, this episode traces the diary as artifact, weapon, map, and mirror.

A diary is not safe.
But neither is silence.

KNOW THYSELF.

Write it in your diary.

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David Lynch’s Twin Peaks becomes a kind of bardo—an in-between space where identities split and time folds in on itself.

What if your thoughts don’t disappear?
What if they take form?

From ancient Buddhist practices to modern anxiety loops, this episode explores how the mind constructs reality—and what happens when those constructions begin to look back at you.

Do you know what you’re looking at?

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Merry Christmas from the FBI!

This year we lost a real one (another one), Assata Shakur. Freedom fighter, political refugee, mother, and MOTHER. From growing up under Jim Crow, to the Black Panthers, and on to the Black Liberation Army - from COINTELPRO to Cuba, this episode is about hope in times of chaos. Assata’s story is crazy, it’s unbelievalbe no one has made a blockbuster out of it yet. Rest in Power Assata, and Merry Christmas ALL!

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Little bits of “Song For Assata” by Common & Cee Lo Green

“Money’s Too Tight To Mention” - Simply Red, a band I have always deeply disliked, up until this moment. The tides are turning on the old definitions of self, if my softening in Simply Red’s direction is to be trusted.

Check out The Tao of Twin Peaks by William Dickerson here

This Body Podcast is about the darkness in Hollywood, where beauty, morality, and memoir meet. Hosted by Sofia Mella. This is the final installment in The Black Dahlia series, in which a line is traced from the murder of Elizabeth Short in 1947, all the way to the rape trial of Danny Masterson, and the Me Too Movement.

With love and respect for the victims, this is The Black Dahlia by This Body Podcast. Listen to the first episode free, or purchase this one as a stand alone.

I’ve been writing and producing my David Lynch–loving podcast, Night Blooming Jasmine, since June of this year. It began as a way to build an altar in the ethereal sky to the memory of Lynch—a man who illuminated the darkness for so many of us. The proposition of stepping up to that level, of believing I could even attempt to discuss his work, had never entered my imagination until he passed away in January. Prior to that, the idea of analyzing a genius’s output would’ve made me feel mightily ridiculous.

I lived in Altadena, California, on January 7—the night of the historic Santa Ana winds that set alight the bookends of Los Angeles. From the Pacific Palisades to Eaton Canyon, our City of Angels burned, wailed, screamed, died. I ran. At 5 a.m., evacuating hours later than I should have. As we waited for word in the early hours, the houses above mine had already been gone for hours. A cursed night—seventeen people died in my neighborhood, most of them elderly, unable to reach safety.

I got out, driving past overturned semis on the 210 East, all the way to Joshua Tree, where I let my cats and dogs out of their crates and collapsed in a safe cabin. Then the snow started. Fire and ice, literally within seventy-two hours. I was in shock. And then the news came down—like an iron curtain, like a cruel bookend to the destruction.

David Lynch was dead.

The devastation was complete. I paced in my snow boots under ancient Joshua Trees, on the phone with people whose houses were gone, and who had just heard about David’s passing. He had been housebound in his Hollywood Hills outpost for a few years, due to emphysema—a lifetime of glamorizing cigarette smoking to perfection. He was the best to ever smoke, and it was what it was. But when the Palisades fire came, the smoke was thick everywhere.

David was evacuated, and later passed away.

I had never felt a cleaner, more sickly, more surreal leveling of my life. With the hills still burning, and the snow coming down in the desert, David Lynch—my guru, whom I never met but loved beyond reason—had shed this mortal coil at seventy-eight.

In the weeks and months that followed, as I moved through an elementally changed world, the fires and David Lynch were all I thought about. That’s when I suddenly felt very clear about making Night Blooming Jasmine—my podcast in loving memory of the genius, the sweetheart, the great artist, and all the work he left behind to help us find our own creative paths. Twin Peaks had bookended my teens and my late thirties. David’s death marked the end of a personal era in my one wild and precious life.

In 2021, Eve Babitz and Joan Didion died within a week of each other. Two bookends of Los Angeles who drew their own maps of the city—and of what it meant to be an artist. Their vantage points were as far apart as Malibu and Pasadena, but they were friends and rivals. When one passed, the other didn’t waste any time in following. I remember being on the phone with a friend when Joan died, and I said, “Who is it going to be for us now? Who will light the way?”
“It’s… us,” she said. “Oh my gosh, it’s us.”

Unbelievably, that time has come. A certain kind of L.A. woman has no parents left. Artists and writers of my generation have to pick up where the recently departed left off. The time comes in everyone’s life when they have to become their own parent. Luckily for me, David Lynch left a lot of clues—dozens of maps toward the treasure.

So it’s with reverence and confidence that I feel empowered to discuss his impact on my life. Part critique, part memoir, a little autofiction, and a lot of learning as I go—that’s what Night Blooming Jasmine has become.

I get the speed wobbles from time to time. But there are too many signs in the real world, those coincidences and synchronicities we tend to forget soon after they occur. I’m trying to remember them, because they’re too significant to be meaningless.

For example: I was writing in a café the other day, scripting the next episode, when I overheard a man talking loudly about the David Lynch Foundation—how he’s painting something for them in Pioneertown.

Or three nights ago, on October 27—the Mexican Día de los Muertos for animals, when especially pets come back to share the evening with their living families. I had just finished uploading Night Blooming Jasmine: The Lolita Episode when a great horned owl flew above my house and perched on the power line outside my cabin. There’s nothing more Twin Peaksy than an owl on a power line. If you know, you know.

“That’s you, isn’t it, David? I know it’s you!” I exclaimed, grabbing my binoculars. Could’ve been the ghost of Frank Silva, too—the actor who played BOB—whose birthday is Halloween. If you can believe it? In either case, a long visit from an owl on El Día de las Almas de las Mascotas doesn’t mean nothing.

Whenever I feel those speed wobbles about Night Blooming Jasmine—and the audacity of inserting myself into the conversation around Lynch—whenever I feel like an imposter or a joke, I get a sign. Like the owl.

And I wanted to write this down, to remember: magic is real. The veil is thin between worlds. And I am doing what I was born to do. One of many things—all of which scare me, all of which excite me.

Goethe said, “Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.”
David, stay with me. Help me remember that, when self-doubt creeps in, doing anything worth doing will always feel this way.

New episode: Lynch & Lolita — out now 🤍

Mentioned: The Black Dahlia Lynch discusses Lolita Star Dream Girl

The Black Dahlia murder shocked postwar America and ignited a media frenzy that reduced her to pulp headlines and grotesque speculation. The LAPD’s bungled investigation faded into silence, until the incest trial of George Hodel thrust the Dahlia’s specter back into the spotlight.

In episode 3 of This Body - The Black Dahlia, we trace a line from Elizabeth Short’s depersonalized body in Leimert Park through Tamar Hodel’s testimony, and into the next generation of Hollywood daughters: Michele and Chynna Phillips, Mackenzie Phillips, and Bijou Phillips.

From Chinatown to Lolita, from the Mamas and the Papas to Scientology, this is a story of how Los Angeles devours its daughters, and how some live to tell the tale.

Elizabeth Short’s life began with abandonment—and ended as a grotesque surrealist tableau, her body transformed into a nightmare that still haunts Los Angeles. But she wasn’t the only girl destroyed by the darkness of mid-century Hollywood. In this episode 2 of The Black Dahlia, we trace the fractured childhood of Elizabeth Short and the parallel story of Tamar Hodel, daughter of the wealthy, decadent physician George Hodel.

We follow Elizabeth’s vulnerable path to Los Angeles, her hopes colliding with predation. We enter the surrealist world of George Hodel’s Franklin Avenue “Jaws House”—a space where art, sadism, and sexual perversion merged, and where his daughter Tamar became both witness and victim. Her testimony would spark one of the most disturbing incest trials in California history.

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Elizabeth Short’s life began with abandonment—and ended as a grotesque surrealist tableau, her body transformed into a nightmare that still haunts Los Angeles. But she wasn’t the only girl destroyed by the darkness of mid-century Hollywood. In this episode 2 of The Black Dahlia, we trace the fractured childhood of Elizabeth Short and the parallel story of Tamar Hodel, daughter of the wealthy, decadent physician George Hodel.

We follow Elizabeth’s vulnerable path to Los Angeles, her hopes colliding with predation. We enter the surrealist world of George Hodel’s Franklin Avenue “Jaws House”—a space where art, sadism, and sexual perversion merged, and where his daughter Tamar became both witness and victim. Her testimony would spark one of the most disturbing incest trials in California history.

Content warning: This episode contains discussions of sexual assault, incest, child abuse, and graphic violence.

Meow meow... it's time... The Black Dahlia murder remains unsolved 78 years later, and Los Angeles has never stopped dreaming about her.

Elizabeth Short's story is the story of Hollywood itself. A city that projects it's dark fantasies onto the female body like film on screen, and devours what it gazes upon. A place where beauty and brutality are bound together.

We follow the threads that connect the Black Dahlia murder of 1947, to Joan Didion's Helter Skelter 1960s on Franklin Avenue, and the paranoid circle that surrounded it. Welcome to Episode 1 : The Body In The Lot. Join Patreon for the rest!

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Thank you Anna, Ivy, Xavier, Tess ♥️

Marilyn Monroe and Laura Palmer—two luminous blondes devoured by image, myth, and men.

Join ny séance through Hollywood shadows, Twin Peaks fog, and the ache of girls who became symbols..

Paid Patrons get the upcoming Black Dahlia / George Hodel hellscape episode. Buckle up. It’s a trip. ***JOIN PATREON 💋***

Listen, rate, share, and remember: Keep your eye on the donut. Not the hole. 🍩

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