The New Yorker:

For the President, a name can become an instrument by which to exert his will upon our shared reality.

By Jessica Winter

Among the many sources of inspiration that the filmmaker David Lynch acknowledged throughout his career, from Transcendental Meditation to Bob’s Big Boy chocolate milkshakes, one was a creative exercise involving what he called the “ricky board.” Twenty near-identical images or objects are neatly lined up in four rows of five, and each item, or “ricky,” is labelled with its own unique name. For example, Lynch once exhibited a photograph of a ricky-like assortment of dead flies, whose ranks included Harry, Don, Eric, and Sid. And, for a spell in the nineteen-eighties, Lynch kept a proto-ricky group of identical Woody Woodpecker dolls in his office, named Chucko, Buster, Pete, Bob, and Dan. “They were my dear friends for a while but certain traits started coming out and they became not so nice,” Lynch later said of the woodpeckers, adding, “They are not in my life anymore.”

Lynch, who died earlier this month, promised that ricky-makers “will be amazed at the different personalities that emerge depending on the names you give.” He summarized the instructions for the ricky board in a short poem, which concludes, “It isn’t tricky / Just name each ricky / Even though they’re all the same / The change comes from the name.”

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