TWIN PEAKS, GALAXY & DAMN FINE COFFEE

Finding a multi-sensory perfection in life is rare where your sight, sound, taste, and thirst are all satisfied equally in a single ecstatic moment, like a gesamtkunstwerk but with the addition of food and drink.

I found one such perfection as a teenager when I would gate-crash Gorodish's apartment (Stroud Central) after school and catch up on the latest episode of 'Twin Peaks' that he'd recorded the night before on his VCR. After a day of conventional learning at the secondary school where I attended there was nothing better than decompressing with some TV watching and having David Lynch happily scramble my brain with his heady mix of surrealism, daytime soap opera, and of course Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn).

But even more than my infatuation with Audrey and hero worship of coffee-obsessed Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) was the magical synergy Gorodish discovered of black coffee combined with Galaxy chocolate. Up until this revelation of his, I had always suffered from the eternal problem of finding that all the alkaloids of chocolate would routinely dry out my mouth leaving it with a sticky cloying feeling that I would typically wash down with Coca-Cola. But the contrast of Coke with cocoa was too extreme, too violent with the tart carbonated phosphoric acid eviscerating any lingering taste memory of the delicious chocolate a bit like burning the evidence from the scene of a crime in a panic not unlike the Packard Sawmill being destroyed by arsonist Leo Johnson in Episode 8 of Season One.

At this point, I would like to state that Gorodish did not simply have his 'Eureka' moment regarding coffee, Galaxy and Twin Peaks without a significant contribution of mine that had some part to play in the epiphany. It just so happened that I had discovered a 1950's-style electric percolator from a car boot sale that was in perfect working order which I had given to my friend for his birthday and which not only matched the 'Twin Peaks' aesthetic of the show but also Gorodish's minimalist Zen apartment where the only real decorations in the place were a few custard yellow containers of banana Nesquik on deliberate display in the kitchen a la Delacorta.

There was just something about the way this old percolator would slowly bring the coffee to the boil as you'd see the black bubbling java hit the top of the glass top in a near frenzy the aroma permeating the apartment like a caffeine-infused perfume and its beech wood handle and base that brought to mind the impressive wood paneled interior of The Great Northern Hotel in 'Twin Peaks' that belonged to Ben Horne (father of Audrey).

Of course, there's also that first snap of a chocolate bar that sets a tone for a TV groove, it's the couch potato's equivalent of the conductor tapping his baton on his music stand to bring his orchestra players to attention.

And so there we were, with the familiar opening title music of Twin Peaks with those iconic twangy notes of a bass guitar vibrating like pulsing heartbeats, the hot "black as moonlight on a moonless night" coffee in our hands and the first squares of chocolate being lined up for eating.  It felt as if we had achieved some perfect three-dimensional experience aligned with the show which became for a good amount of time our shared satori experience.

Recently I recreated the ritual of this groove with all its chief components but somehow it just wasn't quite the same. The coffee wasn't quite as hot, the Galaxy not quite as sweet and I already knew who killed Laura Palmer.