________________________
Doug Wasted
Syndicated movie columnist Roger Ebert's insane Lynch hate trip
After taking a shine to "Eraserhead", Roger Ebert spent the next twenty years ragging on every Lynch movie, before "The Straight Story" brought him down nice and slow and prepared him for "Mulholland Drive".
Elephant Man
Two stars out of four
"The direction, by David (Eraserhead) Lynch, is competent, although he gives us an inexcusable opening scene in which Merrick's mother is trampled or scared by elephants or raped (who knows?) and an equally idiotic closing scene in which Merrick becomes the Star Child from 2001, or something."
Dune
(Which, admittedly, is shit)
One star out of four
"DUNE looks like a project that was seriously out of control from the start. Sets were constructed, actors were hired; no usable screenplay was ever written; everybody faked it as long as they could. Some shabby special effects were thrown into the pot, and the producers crossed their fingers and hoped that everybody who has read the books will want to see the movie. Not if the word gets out, they won't."
Blue Velvet
One star out of four
(He hated it so much he reviewed it
twice)
"If "Blue Velvet" had continued to develop its story in a straight line, if it had followed more deeply into the implications of the first shocking encounter between Rossellini and MacLachlan, it might have made some real emotional discoveries.
Instead, director David Lynch chose to interrupt the almost hypnotic pull of that relationship in order to pull back to his jokey, small-town satire. Is he afraid that movie audiences might not be ready for stark S & M unless they're assured it's all really a joke? I was absorbed and convinced by the relationship between Rossellini and MacLachlan, and annoyed because the director kept placing himself between me and the material. After five or 10 minutes in which the screen reality was overwhelming, I didn't need the director prancing on with a top hat and cane, whistling that it was all in fun."
Wild at Heart
Two and a half star out of four
"Take away the surprises and you can see the method more clearly. Like "Blue Velvet," this is a film without the courage to declare its own darkest fantasies. Lynch wraps his violence in humor, not as a style, but as a strategy. Luis Bunuel, the late and gifted Spanish surrealist, made films as cheerfully perverted and decadent as anything Lynch has ever dreamed of, but he had the courage to declare himself. Lynch seems to be doing a Bunuel script with a Jerry Lewis rewrite. He is a good director, yes. If he ever goes ahead and makes a film about what's really on his mind, instead of hiding behind sophomoric humor and the cop-out of "parody," he may realize the early promise of his "Eraserhead." But he likes the box office prizes that go along with his pop satires, so he makes dishonest movies like this one."
Lost Highway
Two stars out of four
"Lost Highway'' plays like a director's idea book, in which isolated scenes and notions are jotted down for possible future use. Instead of massaging them into a finished screenplay, Lynch and collaborator Barry Gifford seem to have filmed the notes.
Is the joke on us? Is it our error to try to make sense of the film, to try to figure out why protagonists change in midstream? Let's say it is. Let's say the movie should be taken exactly as is, with no questions asked. Then what do we have? We still have just the notes for isolated scenes. There's no emotional or artistic thread running through the material to make it seem necessary that it's all in the same film together. The giveaway is that the characters have no interest apart from their situation; they exist entirely as creatures of the movie's design and conceits."
The Straight Story
Four stars out of four
"Because the film was directed by David Lynch, who usually deals in the bizarre ("Wild at Heart," "Twin Peaks"), we keep waiting for the other shoe to drop--for Alvin's odyssey to intersect with the Twilight Zone. But it never does. Even when he encounters a potential weirdo, like the distraught woman whose car has killed 14 deer in one week on the same stretch of highway (". . . and I HAVE to take this road!"), she's not a sideshow exhibit and we think, yeah, you can hit a lot of deer on those country roads."
And then ...
Mulholland Drive
"David Lynch has been working toward "Mulholland Drive" all of his career, and now that he's arrived there I forgive him "Wild at Heart" and even "Lost Highway." At last his experiment doesn't shatter the test tubes. The movie is a surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir, and the less sense it makes, the more we can't stop watching it."
He hasn't reviewed "Inland Empire" yet, though
________________________
Chris Goode
OK, well this is not how I planned it. I was trying to make something around the opening titles of Lost Highway, which is the only title sequence ever to make me cry. I saw the movie (for the first time) at eleven in the morning at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1997, I had half-run to the cinema because I thought I was going to be late, and I got there just in time, and I was pretty tired and I was sitting very close to the screen, and for some reason that sequence (created by Jay Johnson) completely overwhelmed me. It was an awesome thing to be crying helplessly ninety seconds after taking my seat.
But I couldn't quite figure out what to make with that sequence, and anyway I ran out of time to do anything cool. So instead I was just going to offer some thoughts on The Grandmother, which is probably the Lynch film that has influenced my own work the most and which I thought might otherwise get overlooked. But that only seemed like a good idea on the basis that the whole film could be watched in decent quality streaming video at Stage6, and it turns out that Stage6 has shut down since I was last there.
So, this is a slightly lame third-choice offering. It occurred to me that I had to hand four versions of the Lady in the Radiator song from Eraserhead (the Pixies cover, a gorgeous version by Helios, and, dredged up from the dark recesses of my overwrought student days, Miranda Sex Garden; and the version from the original soundtrack, sung by Peter Ivers). So, I wondered if there were any other interesting versions out there. It turns out the answer is pretty much no, but I thought I might as well share what I found. Actually I guess the Bauhaus version has something compelling about it.
This feels like a pretty meagre tribute to an artist who's been of immense importance to me. These days, my admiration for his work feels almost occluded by the things I don't like about him and I'm glad this day is happening, I hope maybe it'll clear away some of that murkiness and help me feel close to him again.
_________________________
Scott Coffey
I've had the extraordinarily, peculiar, and prodigious experience of knowing David Lynch for 25 years. I've worked with him on a few of his movies including Inland Empire - as Jack Rabbit -- and Mulholland Drive. He's become a friend and a mentor. When I was making my own first movie, Ellie Parker, he was always encouraging, my secret super hero who would obliterate my foes and guide me through the endless obstacles of movie star bullshit. My mother Gaye Pope (punk rockest name ever, my brothers and I always fantasized about forming a punk rock band and naming it after her) was David's trusted assistant and very close confident and friend since Twin Peaks. When she died in 2003 after being diagnosed with cancer, David helped the process of her death with such grace and spiritual wisdom that it suddenly occurred to me that his connection to the larger Self and collective consciousness was effortless. I realized that was the great theme of his work. The buzz of consciousness is the artery through all his work that haunts and infects even the most mundane inanimate object. Think of the ceiling fan in Twin Peaks or the hose in the opening of Blue Velvet. Even the furniture in his films and paintings are alive, sometimes with threat and other times as a sanctuary. There is concurrently a deep morality to every piece of his work and a striving for unity with peace and stillness. It's as if he can dream with his eyes open. Like Kafka he seems to have unlimited access to his unconscious. Being on set with him as an actor is a totally singular experience it's like being in a bottomless beautiful dream.
Here are a couple of shots that I took on The Mulholland Drive set.
David directing Melissa George
The dummy bodies of the car accident that opens the film
__________________________
Stan_cz
Love Letter to Lynch
A Personal Appreciation of David Lynch
David Lynch operates in a realm that, while fascinated by the glamour and history of Hollywood, totally opposes its way of working. He’s one of the few contemporary filmmakers who uses popular actors and A-list technical collaborators and yet makes films that could hardly be more different than studio products. His determination to final cut and inability to compromise makes him a towering figure in the history of a medium which he continually reinvents.
My first encounter with the films of David Lynch was at an age that the MPAA would’ve classified as way too young. One ominous night I caught “Blue Velvet” on TV, not knowing anything specific about it except the film’s generally high acclaim. I missed the beginning and tuned in during what is probably the most disturbing scene of the film: Frank Booth violating Dorothy Vallens in her living room. At that age I was shocked to see such an intense fusion of sex, violence and insanity and Dennis Hopper’s performance terrified me. Yet the images were absolutely fascinating and each step the film took caught me by surprise. The dark scenes with Booth and his gang taking Jeffrey Beaumont on a “joyride” were immediately exciting, yet I was also mesmerized by the way Lynch filmed a small suburban town, not unlike the one I lived in. On the surface Lumberton looked as conventional and peaceful as any town I’ve ever seen, yet there were strange, subtly surrealistic touches here and there that created an indelible atmosphere. It all felt familiar, yet odd. I didn’t know at that point that this would be the key theme of Lynch’s oeuvre, the relationship between surfaces and the mysterious forces beneath them.
In my pursuit through Lynch’s body of work, “Lost Highway” followed, which entranced me even more than “Blue Velvet”. The theme of personality disorder and the switching of identities got me from the word go and was even heightened by Lynch’s impeccable style, with its neo-noir shadows, vivid light sources and attention to the textures of the surroundings. “Lost Highway” is also an extraordinary audiovisual symphony, as it finds a way to combine the hard-driving rock of Rammstein, Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson with David Bowie’s hypnotic “I’m Deranged” and This Mortal Coil’s ethereally sensual “Song to the Siren”. The film is a masterclass in non-linear narrative construction and has a mirroring story arch that reminds one of Hitchcock at his best.
My obsession with the work of Lynch continued with each film of his that I’ve seen, and I was rarely disappointed. “Wild at Heart” delivers what the title promises. It is David Lynch’s wildest ride, yet also the least complicatedly plotted of his films. Yet Lynch’s modern surrealism is inherent in every image and throughout the film we get the impression that it must’ve been a very enjoyable shoot. “Wild at Heart” also offers a wide assortment of deliciously lunatic characters, from Crispin Glover’s Jingle Dell to Jack Nance’s OO Spool, who delivers my favorite line in the film: “But I warn you, my dog is always with me.” Part of the humor in pieces of dialogue like this one certainly comes from the pointlessness of what Spool says, yet it’s Lynch ability to make Jack Nance understand how to pronounce the sentence and to put the emphasis on the word “dog” that makes it immortal.
Oddly enough “Wild at Heart” came to me with a lot of negative baggage. Many fellow Lynch fans have told me in advance that it’s a minor effort and maybe even one of the master’s follies. Yet I disagreed from the first viewing. While “Wild at Heart” may not be Lynch’s most beautiful or emotionally affecting film, it is a deliriously entertaining joyride with a very touching love story at its centre. A lot of that has to be attributed to Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage, who both seem born for their parts.
From the moment I read about “Eraserhead” it became my goal to see that film. At that time it was the hardest of Lynch’s films to get one’s hands on, so I had to be patient. The images I saw in books and descriptions I read promised to deliver yet another masterpiece, maybe the most fully abstract of Lynch’s works. Yet due to the unavailability of the film on DVD I had to continue dreaming about it.
Once I received my copy of the film’s DVD I immediately dropped all other plans for that day and devoted it entirely to “Eraserhead”. I closed the curtains in my room, made it as dark as possible, moved as close to the screen as I could, put on headphones and cranked the volume up to the max. I put in the DVD and entered a world that was everything I had hoped it would be.
“Eraserhead” didn’t just meet my expectations, it even exceeded them. It was even more fully realized and accomplished than I had expected a director’s first feature to be. The film went beyond mere narrative and plunged into depths that only cinema could touch. Having, at that time, been recently exposed to the equally dreamlike, non-narrative worlds of Kenneth Anger, I immediately connected with “Eraserhead” and its abstract way of telling a story. As in all of Lynch’s best work, there is total balance in all the elements of the film. The humor in the family dinner sequence (“We've got chicken tonight. Strangest damn things. They're man made. Little damn things. Smaller than my fist.”) works as well as the terror that the baby produces.
Lynch likes to refer to “Eraserhead” as his most spiritual movie and I have my own theory why. After Henry goes through a journey of terror and sadness, loneliness and despair, he finally unites with the Lady in the Radiator, who greets him surrounded by blinding white light and embraces him. For me that has always been a parallel to Lynch’s own experience with Transcendental Meditation, which he started doing in the middle of the “Eraserhead” shoot. Lynch has often told the story that once he started with TM, all the anger, sorrow and despair that was inside him suddenly lifted. Lynch’s new found peace and inner harmony was so strong that even his wife noticed it. He also said in various interviews that the Lady in the Radiator wasn’t scripted and that the film without her would’ve been much darker. So my conclusion is that in the final scene of “Eraserhead”, the Lady takes Henry out of his misery into a higher sphere, not a religious heaven but the inner heaven that Lynch found in himself while meditating. Henry enters an unbounded ocean of bliss and realizes that the Lady was right. In this kind of inner heaven, everything is indeed fine.
At that point I still had to discover “Twin Peaks”, so when I first watched the series’ pilot, I was captivated right away by its palpable emotional intensity. For the first time in television one was really able to feel the loss of a character and the impact that death had on a community, Laura Palmer’s family and friends. Somehow Lynch and Mark Frost were able to capture an emotional purity and honesty that reverberated through the screen unlike anything else in that very commercial and compromised mass medium. At the centre of the story is the mysterious and sad figure of Laura Palmer, yet the show’s main character is Special Agent Dale Cooper, played with utmost delicacy and warmth by Kyle MacLachlan. What made Cooper such a special character was the fact that he was completely unspoiled by cynicism and appeared to be a kind of remnant from a generation of kinder, more generous people. I never understood why people considered Cooper to be a particularly odd character, since I always found his mannerisms very charming and his friendliness quite affecting. And of course I shared his coffee addiction (and still do).
As almost every TP-fan I had a major crush on one of the extraordinary female characters in the story, in my case Audrey Horne. From the moment that Sherilyn Fenn danced in the diner I looked forward to every scene she was in and naturally wanted her and Cooper to get together. And of course I immediately had favorite supporting characters, such as Jack Nance’s charmingly naïve Pete Martell, Michael Horse’s dedicated Deputy Hawk, Russ Tamblyn’s ever-surprising Dr. Jacoby and of course David Lynch’s own Gordon Cole.
Everything was working together in perfect harmony. The episodes were ideally paced, the dramatic rhythm was established flawlessly and the score by Angelo Badalamenti remains one of the most haunting and enigmatic I ever heard. It was this entire fictional world that Lynch and Frost created in which I loved to spend time. It became a ritual for me to make myself a cup of coffee and plunge into the world of “Twin Peaks”. There are so many highlights in the show that I could talk about it for days, as I’m sure every fan could. It was a high and mighty moment in the history of television where the medium transcended itself and created a show that was not only highly entertaining but also of remarkable artistry.
The Lynch work that I have seen most often though is “Mulholland Drive”, which makes me go back to it over and over again because of its magnificent shifting of moods and its sensuous texture. I have recently analyzed the film for the way that Lynch works with narrative structure and was struck by his impeccable ability to shift from dark and disturbing scenes like the one behind the diner and the Club Silencio sequence to the black humor of a homicide gone wrong or the enchanting casting scene where the song “16 Reasons Why I Love You” is sung. “Mulholland Drive” clearly shows a mature artist at the top of his game, experimenting with an ever-changing medium in an utterly surprising way while still retaining the ability to tell a compelling “Love Story in the City of Dreams”.
The first Lynch movie that I ever saw in a theatre, under proper conditions, was “Inland Empire”. I’m sure that everyone who has been introduced to a filmmaker via DVD knows what a special occasion it is when one finally gets the long-desired chance to see one of that director’s films in a theatre. So the screening was obviously an enormous event for me and to this day remains one of the most astonishing experiences I’ve ever had in a movie theatre. I didn’t care for a second that there were only about five other people in the huge auditorium, I just wanted to see the film on that fortunately huge screen.
To anyone familiar with David Lynch’s work on his website davidlynch.com, “Inland Empire” seems like the apotheosis of a new stylistic development. It is immediately obvious that Lynch felt right at home in the DV-medium and was able to transport his magic from celluloid to digital film. “Inland Empire” is an extraordinarily dense film, so filled with enrapturing images, wondrous appearances and spectacular moments that, when walking out of the theatre, one feels as if one just awoke from a very intense and otherworldly dream. Yet among all of the technical bravura, “Inland Empire” also proves Lynch’s superb way of getting the very best out of actors. I am not afraid to say that Laura Dern’s performance in the film ranks with the finest achievements of movie acting. The range of emotions that she has to go through, the complex psychological landscapes through which her character has to wander would have destroyed the psyche or exhausted the talent of a lesser actress. If you compare this effort to some of Dern’s other performances, you should be able to see and appreciate what Lynch has permitted her to do. He has the almost uncanny ability to light up an actor’s flame and make it shine brighter and stronger than ever before.
The reason why Lynch’s work is holding such a continual spell on me on a legion of devoted fans is because he explores the boundaries between dreams and reality and makes films that operate on multiple layers at once. It is that plurality of vision, that complexity of perception that makes him an exceptional artist. In dreams, he walks with us.
A tribute to Lynch
Cooper's dream from Twin Peaks
Behind the scenes of Lynch's Gucci commercial
Lynch on his art exhibition
Lynch cooking Quinoa
Trailer for Lynch documentary
Lynch on Leno
Scene by Scene Interview
Lynch's short film 'The Amputee'
Some links:
Lynch @ UC Berkeley: here
Lynch Interview from Dutch TV: here
Lynch Documentary on Surrealist Film, Part 1: here
Part 2: here
Lynch on Leno 2001: here
Deleted Mulholland Drive Scene from the Pilot: here
Simpsons Homage to Twin Peaks #1: here
Simpsons Homage to Twin Peaks #2: here
Premonition Following An Evil Deed: here
Lynch's Paintings: here
In response to your search for material for the David Lynch-Day feature I remembered an article that I don't know if you can use or not. It's an interview from 1993 with actor/stagehand Frank Silva, who by sheer luck wound up portraying one of Lynch's most notorious characters - Killer Bob in Twin Peaks.
Frank Silva was originally trained as a lights director and stagehand, but Lynch accidentally found out that he acting skills as well. His 'Killer Bob' is a haunting acquaintance. He has a latent twisted and utterly perverted side to his scary character. Without being a monster he's still one of the most frightening thriller characters ever. Silva never did any other real acting work after Twin Peaks, and sadly he died in 1995 at the age of 46.
Here's the link for the interview.
it's very interesting:
1. ________
2. ________
David Lynch Story
by Wagner Israel Cilio III
----David Lynch is in a pickle. He is late. He is supposed to be somewhere soon. He jumps into a taxi cab and gives the driver the directions on a little piece of paper. Where is this place, the driver asks. David Lynch tells him. The driver shrugs and starts driving. David Lynch sits in the backseat looking at traffic and trying to see if there are any better ways of getting through it. The driver is going, like, super slow. David Lynch is pounding his hands on the seats like chimpanzee. He jumps out of the cab and runs down the street.
***
----I am looking through my roommate's spindle of burned DVDS. I see a DVD. It is labeled: Twin Peaks. I think it is a porno. I want to watch this porno but my roommate is in the room. I choose to talk about the porno instead.
----I say to my roomate, very slyly: Twin Peaks. Is this dirty?
----Our other roommate says: No. It's a television show that David Lynch did in the 90s.
----I ignore him and think how funny it is to do that, to ignore my other roommate. My roommate and I like to give our our other roommate shit. This is one of those times when we are giving him shit. We smirk at each other, discreetly.
***
----David Lynch is getting more and desperate. He is fucked, he knows it, he's absolutely fucked. He has very little time to get where he is going and if he isn't on time, he will really pay for it. He is running through packed traffic on 115th. He loosens his tie and his face is bunched up like he's going to cry but really, he can't breathe. David Lynch needs a cigarette. He stops someone on the street.
----He is breathing hard: Hey buddy...could you spare...a cigarette?
----The guy gives him a face like, Fuck off, pervo.
----David Lynch gets all dramatic and leans on the wall like he can't get enough air and he's going to die. He closes his eyes. He hears a car horn. He opens his eyes and it is the taxi he was just in going by. The driver gives a little wave. David Lynch suddenly realizes again how fucked he's going to be and starts running again.
***
----I say to my roommate: Isn't Twin Peaks is the name of a porn star?
----My other roommate says: No. Her name is Tawny Peaks.
----We keep ignoring our other roommate.
----I'm looking it up on Wikipedia, I say to no one.
***
----David Lynch kicks in the door of a chinese restaurant. The door doesn't open because it is locked so he kicks in the glass part and ducks in through the frame. The lady at the cahsier looks at him like, WTF? Two patrons look up with bibs in their collars. David Lynch runs down the length of the restaurant and bursts into the kitchen. When he does this, he also knocks down a fat Asian man carrying a vat of hot water with towels on his hands. The hot water scalds the poor Asian man and David Lynch keeps running. He runs out the back door. The fat Asian is on the floor crying and no one is helping him. All the cooks stare at him and nobody moves. The man is writhing on the floor and his skin is peeling. He looks at his skin and lifts it with his fingers and screams because this shit is bananas.
***
----I get on the Internet and I type in: http://www.wikipedia.com. An error message comes up and I don't know why. Is Wikipedia down? I realize that Wikipedia is an organization. I type in: http://www.wikipdia.org. The same error message comes up and I wonder why.
----I say: I think Wikipedia is down.
***
----David Lynch is ragged and sweaty. His luscious pompadour is a mop of oils and pomade.
----David Lynch is racing through an alley and the sleeve of his suit gets caught on the nail of a telephone post.
----David Lynch totally falls on his ass.
***
----I realize that the URL is totally off.
----I say: Ohhhh! Wikipedia isn't down! I've just been getting the domain suffix wrong and misspelling "Wikipedia".
----I type in: http://www.wikipedia.org. The Wikipedia homepage shows up. There is a search bar and I type in: Twin Peaks.
***
----David Lynch reaches a door in an alley and rams his weight against it, once, twice, three times. The door topples and David Lynch falls in.
***
----The Twin Peaks wiki comes up on my computer. I get a sly look in my eye.
----I say: Oh look, Twin Peaks isn't the name of a porn star! It's the name of a 90s television show--I read a little bit longer--directed by David Lynch!
----My other roommate jumps up from his chair, his eyes fixated on me. He is pissed.
----At just that precise moment, David Lynch breaks through the ceiling of our living room on 3919 S. 48th St and lands on the couch where our friend April had vomited lentil shards during our drunken Christmas party that year, right in time to say with my other roommate:
----I JUST FUCKING SAID THAT!
----David Lynch starts screaming and whooping face-down on the couch. He kicks his arms and legs up and down. He gets little bits of lentils in his mouth. He is okay with this. He jumps up and laughs.
----We cheer and yell things like, Da-vid Lynch! and Hey, you're David Lynch! and the Lynch-er!
----He cheers with us and gives us all high fives. Then we sit down and watch a porno starring Tawny Peaks. David Lynch masturbates quietly behind the recliner.
TOM McCARTHY – author of Remainder – muses fleetingly about DAVID LYNCH in the context of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Finnegans Wake, Dorian Gray, and Tintin.
“Lynch’s latest film Inland Empire is stunning: completely literary, labyrinthine, regressive. It’s the best piece of art in any medium I’ve come across for years.”
“In terms of now, I think some of the most interesting literary figures aren’t necessarily writers. The films of David Lynch, for example, have an extremely literary logic; his latest, Inland Empire, is structured like Finnegans Wake or the novels of Robbe-Grillet, with a set of repetitions regressing inwards, modulating as they repeat. He’s grappling with questions of narrative and representation and identity in a way that mainstream novelists simply aren’t, and is therefore much more interesting as a ‘writer’, even if he isn’t strictly speaking one.”
“In the ‘geological’ time of the arts, Finnegans Wake happened a few seconds ago: we’ve hardly even realized that it’s happened, let alone set up a coordinated response. The really good artists have realized and are responding: look at David Lynch’s films, or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novels - but most of the players in the mainstream cultural industries are trying to pretend it didn’t happen, or doesn’t matter; and they’ll be washed away, forgotten, as a result.”
“The necessity — and impossibility — of watching yourself from the outside is what drives The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Frankenstein, or the films of David Lynch.”
“I hold out little hope for Spielberg’s Tintin film. I suspect it will be sanitized and anodyne, devoid of the complexities that make Tintin so compelling. Hergé complained in his last years that his creation was killing him. The final sequence in the incomplete Tintin and Alph-Art shows, in what I’ve always seen as a cryptic cry of desperation on its author’s part, the hero being led off to have plaster poured on him and thus be turned into an artwork called “Reporter” — condemned, that is, to die inside his own simulacrum. This is dark stuff, Dorian Gray territory. If I had my way, the film would be directed by David Lynch.”
1) Crispin Glover, Wild At Heart:
And more, for fun:
2) Crispin Glover, Happy Days:
3) Crispin Glover, uh, dancing:
Henry’s Hair
1979. Glasgow. In between bands, in between boyfriends, at university cos it was easier than getting a real job, in between classes we used to go to see films at a small cinema in Renfield Street called The Classic, which screened sleazy porn, off-beat horror and for some reason had a runway type construction leading down from the screen and bisecting the seats. We fantasized the place doubled as a sex club, after hours. It smelled as though it should, a heady mix of cigarettes, wet coats and sweat.
In the autumn that year, The Classic showed ‘Eraserhead’. We liked the look of the poster outside. So we went. We watched. We emerged dreaming and babbling to each other ninety minutes later: the throbbing noise soundtrack, the dinner with the parents, the hideous baby, the lady behind the radiator. And Henry’s hair.
At the time, I was nursing a massive crush on this guy in my Old English tutorial group. He didn’t look like a student. He carried a leather briefcase and a rolled-up umbrella. He wore a non-belted grey Gabardine raincoat and his shoes were always highly polished. And he had Henry’s hair.
I kid you not. Of course, when I first caught sight of him at the start of autumn term I had no idea his hair was Henry’s. Until the moment when ol’ Henry shambled on screen at the Classic, this guy’s hair was just this mousy-coloured, rather dry and probably badly-in-need-of-conditioner mass which grew up from his scalp in a startling almost exclamation mark. It both contradicted and simultaneously completely matched his otherwise hyper-conservative – and thus to my post-punk, post-modern sensibilities, potentially rebellious and statement-making – attire, but apart from that I never gave it a second thought. Until I acquired a context. A Lynchian context.
Of course, my existence barely registered with this guy. Why should it? For a start, while he was the star of my Old English tutorial group, I was hardly ever there, and when I did go I was always under-prepared and quite content to sit in silence and lust, listening to the object of my adoration and the tutor endlessly discuss the Old Norse influence on Beowulf. He had a deep voice and what sounded to my West coast ears like an English accent but could’ve just been educated Scottish. He had a big mouth and a nice laugh. But I wondered if he knew he had a hair-doppelganger out there. I wondered if Henry knew someone had stolen his hair-cut. I spent way too much time wondering about all sorts of stuff like this when I should have been thinking about Old English poetry. The day after I saw David Lynch’s first film, my crush was referred to for ever after by us as Eraserhead. Like the film he acquired a cult following. Of one. He – or maybe just his hair – came to embody the same non-verbal poetry as Lynch’s series of disjointed, haunting images. The rolled-up brolly. The briefcase. The polished shoes. That fucking grey Gabardine raincoat. And Henry’s hair. Taken individually, they’re nothing’s special. Put together, they’re pure poetry.
Coincidentally, Eraserhead’s now Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at St. Andrew’s university and is regarded as an important Scottish poet. I found a photo of him online recently. The hair’s calmed down a lot and looks nothing like Henry’s these days.
David Lynch on Product Placement
David Lynch Cigarette Commercial
David Lynch on the iPhone
David Lynch Talks About the 9/11 Conspiracy
I'm sending these clips in case everybody gets so wrapped up in the semiology etc of Lynch that they forget the unique and haunting music.
Twin Peaks Theme
Laura’s Theme
Julee Cruise/Falling
Blue Velvet
Inland Empire Locomotion
Rockin Back Inside My Heart
In Heaven Everything is Fine
Meat is Murder
The last two are my nightmares on screen.
__________________________
Mark
5 of my favorite things about David Lynch
David Lynch Swearing
Part of Lynch's allure is the kinda slightly crazed yet kindly grandpa persona he's put forth for the past 10+ years. I kinda get this buzz when he drops F bombs, the way I did when I was a kid and my grandfather would start screaming at someone.
Inland Empire
I've seen Inland Empire 2 times. the first time I saw it I thought it was really good, but about 30 minutes too long. The second time I watched it I thought it could go on forever. Someday I'll sit down and plot out my thoughts on the structure but the way I feel in my gut right now is the structure is a Send double helix dna type spiral. what I mean is each change in the character's persona's and local is part of an overall schema, but is also completely separate, and can only really be referenced to the immediate preceding character and persona. Also- I think everything Laura Dern is in is just part of a documentary the Polish girl is watching in the beginning. Throw that all away though, what makes it genius is how you can respond to it on a gut level something which carry's over from lost highway and mullholland drive.
His Hair
He eat Panties
Twin Peaks
In 1990 I was 15 years old. I remember it struck me that i wanted to be creative, to draw, or write, or something. I knew this was different from the rest of the world. The only thing I had to 'mentor' me was Twin Peaks. That show inspired me, and showed me what could be done. While I still find it amazing, if not a bit dated., I really respond to it as a teenager who found himself totally inspired by it's short run.
_________________________
Nomoreteenagekicks
A NOVEL IN SYCAMORES
These days I’m finishing up my first novel, Green Zone Kidz. The book is by no means shy about incorporating its influences, and David Lynch, in particular, is worn on the sleeve. The sycamores of Twin Peaks are an incredibly powerful and enduring image for me – and one that I shamelessly seeded throughout the book. When I saw the Lynch day Dennis proposed, I thought that it would be interesting to rip out all the sentences where I used the word “sycamore,” in a few cases adding contextual sentence or two. But here, in brief, is my novel, condensed to a couple dozen sycamores.
(this is, btw, a much less cool/funny version of one of the all-time great youtube videos, the “fucking short version” of Lebowksi)
We race through the sycamores of Dupont Circle and don’t see the sycamores.
And the shadows of the sycamores that cut my cheeks ‘til the wind comes along, ‘til it shakes the patterns from the trees.
I’m not 16 anymore, I’m 25. I’m not a shirt and a tie on the floor of Congress, I’m just another shadow slipping between sycamores in Dupont Circle.
The ring of sycamores, the traffic cutting in both direction outside the ring, three rings altogether.
I pass from sycamore to sycamore touching them until the rivers of light cutting both ways join.
All day long the boys tumble up from the red line and through the sycamores, not seeing the trees, not seeing the older boys. The new boys in their white shirts and ties! For hours I move from tree to tree, until at last a light detaches itself, and a door opens.
You don’t see the door, you hear it. The sound of an opening door, so smooth. The workings of a luxury vehicle door, the rustling of the sycamores, the trees you know by heart. And you would stop yourself from going there, you would halt and press your hands to your head, you’d try to understand how this new story opening in front of you might fit with the other parts of your life-story, if you weren’t already inside, already speeding somewhere else
The darkness, the sycamores, something like silence, our rings of light. We thought we came here to escape the darkness.
And I think how beautiful we were, tumbling up from the redline, not even seeing the sycamores.
When he tries to throw the rope over the limbs of a sycamore he falls short – he needs two tries, three tries.
Those not already here vanish from the floor of the house and the cloakroom and sprint for the sycamores, sneakers jamming off the hoods of the cars piled up on Massachusetts Avenue. The noose swings from the branch and he crouches below, paying no heed to the rope, suddenly fascinated by a blade of grass, a torn lottery ticket.
The sycamore will raise you raise you child like a snapshot, like a struck match
He says: these sycamores, fuck.
Couldn’t abide, left home, the beeches, sycamores, paintings of Granger and Kidd, hell out of Dodge.
Past the beeches, not among them, or rather through them, or just at the perimeter, between the sycamores and beeches, I think, passing from tree to tree, slender trunks like bone, Melinda Gates surpassingly or ideally graceful, gliding, almost dancing as she moved, simplest dance, expressing or opening onto the most profound inner silence, Melinda Gates falling, rising between sycamores, or simply erased from one tree, present at the next, ponytail, wrists-bands, whole person glinting complexly in the golden
Many hours of struggle through the beeches, the sycamore perimeter, at long last tumbled face-down in the mud, path of Melinda Gates.
We played cowboys and Indians under the sycamore trees, we swam in the river, we posted stickers and opened cans of stew.
Some mornings the horses stood among the pines and sycamores, our childhood horses, we only ever saw them in the daybreak fog, eyes alert, heads raised, each one just like the last, horses spaced 20 or 30 feet apart, our identical horses, you began counting and there was no end, hundreds and even thousands of horses in your field of vision, horses so still, ears pricked, eyes wide, a multitude of horses spaced among the trees, we looked until we could no longer look, no horse moving, no horse blinking, we left sugar cubes and shut the door, we held each other so tight.
Throughout our childhood we came upon the murdered girls in boxcars, arms bound here and here, and meanwhile, strung from the sycamores, loop after loop of the boys’ intestines were pulsing, and meanwhile the gathering crows.
One day I will, one day again, at last I’ll have back the life of the forest, return there, die there, the sun sinking past the pines, branches of the sycamores like bones overhead.
When the lamps are refilled a warmer light spills through the chamber and my birds lift their heads and call to one another, black eyes flashing, as though the darkness had been banished through their own agency. All but the snipe, who flap away from the light, batting demented at the slender sycamore bars, crying for a night they think they’ve lost.
The birds ignore the noise, they continue tearing at the beetles the boys have scooped off the floor and sprinkled into the sycamore cages, I insist that the boys tend the birds before they tend me, if not the birds squawk and chatter as the blood goes out through tubes that hook the machine to my arms, and I can’t escape the feeling, as I look overhead at the vaulted stone that spirals higher and higher, far above the lambent fingers of my dozen oil lamps, that the blood too is squawking and chattering.
The bird boy has finished gathering his birds, and he slides shut the door of the largest sycamore cage.
I haul him down to the ground, then we wrestle the bird-cube back to the pot, with all our strength we stand on opposite sides and grip the sycamore branches, which – even if they have a bit of give – don’t snap, will never snap, dozens of beaks pecking furiously at our fingers.
When I first heard of David Lynch and his work I was too young to rent or go see his films on my own, but I was so inspired by what I'd read and the stills I'd seen that I checked out whatever cinema I could, beginning with '8 1/2'. For today I had meant to transcribe from an ancient journal my emotionally shocked (to life)and teary response to seeing 'Blue Velvet' for the first time but as I don't have time to peel through those notebooks in search of that text I've instead skimmed youtube for some quick visual treats. These aren't, in most cases, the exact scenes I was looking for but I'm pretty happy with what I found. Anyway, once I did see Lynch's work it was everything that I had imagined and actually a bit more. He's influenced me in how I think about sound all the way to structure and visual poetry and yeah, his films are wonderful and I think he's a genius. And while my love of cinema has transformed into something else it's still from the same seed Lynch's work planted in me all those years ago.
Georgia Coffee ad - scenes for an alternate Twin Peaks universe
Coffee in Twin Peaks
Twin Peaks - Harry, I'm gonna let you in on a little secret
Twin Peaks - Damn good coffee
Eraserhead (1977) trailer
Elephant Man - final scene
Blue Velvet (1986) final scenes (wish this started a minute or two earlier)
Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me (1992) Laura sees Bob
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) Philadelphia scene feat. Lynch & Bowie
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) Lil scene (pre-explanation)
Final scene from Twin Peaks (1991) - How's Annie?
Lynch on product placement
... and now a speculative blast from the past via an article for something which I believe metamorphosised into the eventually abandoned (for whatever reasons) 'Woodcutters From Fiery Ships'
Synergy, KDD To Make 3-D Twin Peaks Sequel With David Lynch
TOKYO (Nikkei)-Synergy Inc., a Tokyo-based multimedia contents production firm, will team up with Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co. (KDD) and another Japanese partner to produce a 3-D movie featuring advanced computer graphics, company officials said. The movie will be made jointly with U.S. director David Lynch, probably as a sequel to his popular TV series Twin Peaks.
The movie, described as a sci-fi horror movie, is slated for completion in summer 1999 at a cost of 250 million yen.
Multimedia Finance Co., a finance firm affiliated with Bandai Co. (7967), will put up 150 million yen, while the remaining cash will come equally from Synergy and KDD.
Synergy plans to produce a video-game version of the movie on DVD-ROM (digital videodisc read-only memory) for use with the Internet, plus music CDs, company officials said, aiming for 1 billion yen in total sales.
taken from the NIKKEI NET News, Thursday March 5, 1998, Volume 3 #614, Issued: 10:00 a.m. JST via The City Of
Absurdity
Let's say that you could see something and mistake it for something else - a man walking across a window at night with something in his hand. Maybe you saw exactly what you thought you saw, and all of your imaginings are exactly what was going on. But more often than not, if you were actually able to go in there and see what was really happening it would be a letdown from your imagination trip. So I think fragments of things are pretty interesting. You can dream the rest. Then you are a participant. We know that things are going on. Not in every house, but enough. Things that we can't even imagine are going on. And that's why all these talk-shows on TV are happening. People come on and say these things. It's like a cleansing. It's like you always sort of knew it, and now they're naming it and showing it. But therefore a lot of mystery is going away.
Going into something, like a story, there's so much more to discover. Like scientists. They start on the surface of something, and then they start delving. They get down to the sub-atomic particles and their world is now very abstract. They're like abstract painters in a way. It'd be hard to talk to them because they're way down there.
I learned that just beneath the surface there's another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn't find the proof. It was just a feeling. There is goodness in those blue skies and flowers, but another force - a wild pain and decay - also accompanies everything.
(Funny How Secrets Travel: David Lynch interviewed by Chris Rodley in the introduction to the Lost Highway screenplay).
"I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable."
-David Lynch
'Fred Madison/Pete Dayton (for The Weaklings)'
by Humors
Download
Spokane is an affiliate city for the American network television channels, a squid of 1950's social engineering, along with the highway and the suburb. Broadcast networks transmit content generated on the coasts, on Madison Avenue and in Hollywood, through the airwaves, although soon the digital signal will replace the airborne signal of the past, that thing in the air, so to speak.
I get American media through the city of Spokane when I am in Canada, through KXLY, KSPS, KREM, the affiliates beaming to locations in Washington, B.C., Alberta, Idaho, Montana. Somehow I knew of the Lilac Fest, and place-names throughout the Inland Empire as though they were famous. I never visited Spokane, so it doesn't speak memory, but it has spoken to me. In high-school I became a devotee of Twin Peaks. I had a weird friendship with a girl that liked the show too, all we ever had was good clean fun, but she looked like a Twin Peaks girl. I was terribly in love with her. There were a pair of sisters too, who I was in love with, who looked like girls in trouble. Somebody told me that Spokane had the highest proportional rate of serial killers in the world, and I took that as fact without thinking too much about it. It seemed to make sense. I doubt it now, and I attribute the claim to media residue from the so-called "Green River Killer", Robert Lee Yates. Yates killed 13 hookers, and was a Army helicopter pilot, a 50's crew-cut sort of guy. He used a .25-caliber shot to the head to finish his victims. They gave him lethal injection. Yates was from Spokane, though the state of Washington does seem disproportionately prone to producing serial killers: Ted Bundy was from Tacoma, the "Hillside Strangler" from the town of Bellingham. It isn't too hard to include Robert Pickton into the same group, conveniently oriented around geography, and Spokane, there are so many killers. That is the way, predation is the remainder of industry.
When I hear it spoken that is what it sounds like: Spokane is spoken. The idea that killers come from where the television networks have their stations, from where the absolute emanate word is spoken, makes some poetic sense, just as much as with the depression of rain, and the absence of light, and the Salish spirits causing men to run wild and kill, or the deprivations of public secrecy and sex. Just as well, it is the industrial message that has insinuated itself inside, transmitted, the cathode mass-consciousness like hornets in your head. Pictures and voices of girls in trouble, so much like the girls that you know, the ordinary day-to-day living women of society: mothers, daughters, seductresses, eunuchs, starlets, vamps, hysterics, like but unlike the representations that keep speaking, and can never be spoken, always sublimated until found in the flesh. Gender identifiers and cinema obscurantism aside, the Spokane girl is unspoken, the flesh of cinema fantasy wrapped up in a plastic tarp, washed up on the beach. The exoticism of romantic poetry since Petrarch, of lost love, awash, unspeaking, ungazing, cold, empty, beautiful, and dead, dead, dead.
I'm too scatter-brained at the moment to translate my thoughts on Lynch into words, so I'm just submitting a sketch I did of the "Eraserhead" poster which I drew sometime during my first year at college.
Philip Halsall 2002 ()
As the sound design of Lynch's films introduce an extra dimension to what the audience perceives, so too do Badalamenti's compositions. It could be argued that film scores in general only serve to create atmospheres and generate feelings, but I would argue that Badalamenti's scores provide something extra. They create themes for characters, which then become ingrained on the viewer's audio perception and symbolise different aspects of what the audience is viewing. The eerie ambience of his pieces give an ethereal and dream-like quality to the films, creating an air of tenderness, but also a feeling of intense depth, an otherworldly undercurrent.
One cannot help but feel that the extra dimension of Badalementi's scores gives Lynch's films wholeness, like the final piece in a jigsaw puzzle, albeit a difficult and intricate three-dimensional puzzle. It could be argued that those of Lynch's films that are devoid of Badalamenti's musical input are lacking a certain something, but on the other hand Lynch's films pre-Badalamenti are each very different. Eraserhead's use of sound as a film score worked perfectly and The Elephant Man's film score was chosen by the producer not Lynch, whilst Lynch's choice of the rock group Toto for Dune (1984) was questionable, but ultimately proved fruitful considering how badly received the film was. It appears that the musical relationship between Badalamenti and Lynch, which was established on Blue Velvet and carried through to the present, has established a strong and effective link between the visual and audio vision of David Lynch. Badalamenti's music is instantly recognisable in each and every Lynch film and serves to enhance the visual feast laid before the audience without being too dominant. When Lynch talks of Badalamenti he comments, "He's got this musical soul, and melodies are always floating around inside. I feel a mood of the scene in music, and one thing helps the other, and they both just start climbing." (Lynch in www.geocoities) This notion of climbing could certainly be attributed to Lynch's films, where the audience often finds themselves climbing and falling through complex plots not unlike the scores that accompany them. In particular the score for Lynch's Lost Highway clearly reflected the tumultuous plot that meandered and undulated from start to finish, although like Lynch's Wild at Heart (1990), original songs from various artists were used throughout the film. But the original dark and noirish music composed by Badalamenti formed the backbone of the film's audio content, even being altered with and incorporated into the sound design of the film . This was done when Lynch experimented with recording techniques at the studio of the Film Symphony Orchestra of Prague who performed Badalamenti's score for Lost Highway. The writer David Hughes explains, "Lynch experimented with recording techniques, just as he had during his innovative sound work on Eraserhead, placing microphones inside bottles and lengths of plastic tubing to try and capture a unique sound." (Hughes, 2001, p.211) It is interesting to see how Lynch has managed to combine music and sound design in this way, and it is particularly poignant that he has been able to adopt Badalamenti's music and subvert it in order to produce sound effects. It appears to be the negative of Lynch's notion of sound effects being used to create a musical score; here music is creating the sound effects.
Gossip
David Lynch and Werner Herzog are supposedly collaborating on a horror film with the tentative titles "Son" or "My son".
Sources:
I believe the original source were published on Hollywood Reporter.
Here are two other sources:
1. ________
2. ________
Here are a few of his commercials which caught my eye:
Pregnancy test, there is something disturbing about this:
PS2 commercials that stand out:
David Lynch on product placement:
Premonitions Following An Evil Deed
These days I’m finishing up my first novel, Green Zone Kidz. The book is by no means shy about incorporating its influences, and David Lynch, in particular, is worn on the sleeve. The sycamores of Twin Peaks are an incredibly powerful and enduring image for me – and one that I shamelessly seeded throughout the book. When I saw the Lynch day Dennis proposed, I thought that it would be interesting to rip out all the sentences where I used the word “sycamore,” in a few cases adding contextual sentence or two. But here, in brief, is my novel, condensed to a couple dozen sycamores.
(this is, btw, a much less cool/funny version of one of the all-time great youtube videos, the “fucking short version” of Lebowksi)
We race through the sycamores of Dupont Circle and don’t see the sycamores.
And the shadows of the sycamores that cut my cheeks ‘til the wind comes along, ‘til it shakes the patterns from the trees.
I’m not 16 anymore, I’m 25. I’m not a shirt and a tie on the floor of Congress, I’m just another shadow slipping between sycamores in Dupont Circle.
The ring of sycamores, the traffic cutting in both direction outside the ring, three rings altogether.
I pass from sycamore to sycamore touching them until the rivers of light cutting both ways join.
All day long the boys tumble up from the red line and through the sycamores, not seeing the trees, not seeing the older boys. The new boys in their white shirts and ties! For hours I move from tree to tree, until at last a light detaches itself, and a door opens.
You don’t see the door, you hear it. The sound of an opening door, so smooth. The workings of a luxury vehicle door, the rustling of the sycamores, the trees you know by heart. And you would stop yourself from going there, you would halt and press your hands to your head, you’d try to understand how this new story opening in front of you might fit with the other parts of your life-story, if you weren’t already inside, already speeding somewhere else
The darkness, the sycamores, something like silence, our rings of light. We thought we came here to escape the darkness.
And I think how beautiful we were, tumbling up from the redline, not even seeing the sycamores.
When he tries to throw the rope over the limbs of a sycamore he falls short – he needs two tries, three tries.
Those not already here vanish from the floor of the house and the cloakroom and sprint for the sycamores, sneakers jamming off the hoods of the cars piled up on Massachusetts Avenue. The noose swings from the branch and he crouches below, paying no heed to the rope, suddenly fascinated by a blade of grass, a torn lottery ticket.
The sycamore will raise you raise you child like a snapshot, like a struck match
He says: these sycamores, fuck.
Couldn’t abide, left home, the beeches, sycamores, paintings of Granger and Kidd, hell out of Dodge.
Past the beeches, not among them, or rather through them, or just at the perimeter, between the sycamores and beeches, I think, passing from tree to tree, slender trunks like bone, Melinda Gates surpassingly or ideally graceful, gliding, almost dancing as she moved, simplest dance, expressing or opening onto the most profound inner silence, Melinda Gates falling, rising between sycamores, or simply erased from one tree, present at the next, ponytail, wrists-bands, whole person glinting complexly in the golden
Many hours of struggle through the beeches, the sycamore perimeter, at long last tumbled face-down in the mud, path of Melinda Gates.
We played cowboys and Indians under the sycamore trees, we swam in the river, we posted stickers and opened cans of stew.
Some mornings the horses stood among the pines and sycamores, our childhood horses, we only ever saw them in the daybreak fog, eyes alert, heads raised, each one just like the last, horses spaced 20 or 30 feet apart, our identical horses, you began counting and there was no end, hundreds and even thousands of horses in your field of vision, horses so still, ears pricked, eyes wide, a multitude of horses spaced among the trees, we looked until we could no longer look, no horse moving, no horse blinking, we left sugar cubes and shut the door, we held each other so tight.
Throughout our childhood we came upon the murdered girls in boxcars, arms bound here and here, and meanwhile, strung from the sycamores, loop after loop of the boys’ intestines were pulsing, and meanwhile the gathering crows.
One day I will, one day again, at last I’ll have back the life of the forest, return there, die there, the sun sinking past the pines, branches of the sycamores like bones overhead.
When the lamps are refilled a warmer light spills through the chamber and my birds lift their heads and call to one another, black eyes flashing, as though the darkness had been banished through their own agency. All but the snipe, who flap away from the light, batting demented at the slender sycamore bars, crying for a night they think they’ve lost.
The birds ignore the noise, they continue tearing at the beetles the boys have scooped off the floor and sprinkled into the sycamore cages, I insist that the boys tend the birds before they tend me, if not the birds squawk and chatter as the blood goes out through tubes that hook the machine to my arms, and I can’t escape the feeling, as I look overhead at the vaulted stone that spirals higher and higher, far above the lambent fingers of my dozen oil lamps, that the blood too is squawking and chattering.
The bird boy has finished gathering his birds, and he slides shut the door of the largest sycamore cage.
I haul him down to the ground, then we wrestle the bird-cube back to the pot, with all our strength we stand on opposite sides and grip the sycamore branches, which – even if they have a bit of give – don’t snap, will never snap, dozens of beaks pecking furiously at our fingers.
_________________________
You-x
When I first heard of David Lynch and his work I was too young to rent or go see his films on my own, but I was so inspired by what I'd read and the stills I'd seen that I checked out whatever cinema I could, beginning with '8 1/2'. For today I had meant to transcribe from an ancient journal my emotionally shocked (to life)and teary response to seeing 'Blue Velvet' for the first time but as I don't have time to peel through those notebooks in search of that text I've instead skimmed youtube for some quick visual treats. These aren't, in most cases, the exact scenes I was looking for but I'm pretty happy with what I found. Anyway, once I did see Lynch's work it was everything that I had imagined and actually a bit more. He's influenced me in how I think about sound all the way to structure and visual poetry and yeah, his films are wonderful and I think he's a genius. And while my love of cinema has transformed into something else it's still from the same seed Lynch's work planted in me all those years ago.
Georgia Coffee ad - scenes for an alternate Twin Peaks universe
Coffee in Twin Peaks
Twin Peaks - Harry, I'm gonna let you in on a little secret
Twin Peaks - Damn good coffee
Eraserhead (1977) trailer
Elephant Man - final scene
Blue Velvet (1986) final scenes (wish this started a minute or two earlier)
Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me (1992) Laura sees Bob
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) Philadelphia scene feat. Lynch & Bowie
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) Lil scene (pre-explanation)
Final scene from Twin Peaks (1991) - How's Annie?
Lynch on product placement
... and now a speculative blast from the past via an article for something which I believe metamorphosised into the eventually abandoned (for whatever reasons) 'Woodcutters From Fiery Ships'
Synergy, KDD To Make 3-D Twin Peaks Sequel With David Lynch
TOKYO (Nikkei)-Synergy Inc., a Tokyo-based multimedia contents production firm, will team up with Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co. (KDD) and another Japanese partner to produce a 3-D movie featuring advanced computer graphics, company officials said. The movie will be made jointly with U.S. director David Lynch, probably as a sequel to his popular TV series Twin Peaks.
The movie, described as a sci-fi horror movie, is slated for completion in summer 1999 at a cost of 250 million yen.
Multimedia Finance Co., a finance firm affiliated with Bandai Co. (7967), will put up 150 million yen, while the remaining cash will come equally from Synergy and KDD.
Synergy plans to produce a video-game version of the movie on DVD-ROM (digital videodisc read-only memory) for use with the Internet, plus music CDs, company officials said, aiming for 1 billion yen in total sales.
taken from the NIKKEI NET News, Thursday March 5, 1998, Volume 3 #614, Issued: 10:00 a.m. JST via The City Of
Absurdity
_______________________
Paul Curran
Let's say that you could see something and mistake it for something else - a man walking across a window at night with something in his hand. Maybe you saw exactly what you thought you saw, and all of your imaginings are exactly what was going on. But more often than not, if you were actually able to go in there and see what was really happening it would be a letdown from your imagination trip. So I think fragments of things are pretty interesting. You can dream the rest. Then you are a participant. We know that things are going on. Not in every house, but enough. Things that we can't even imagine are going on. And that's why all these talk-shows on TV are happening. People come on and say these things. It's like a cleansing. It's like you always sort of knew it, and now they're naming it and showing it. But therefore a lot of mystery is going away.
Going into something, like a story, there's so much more to discover. Like scientists. They start on the surface of something, and then they start delving. They get down to the sub-atomic particles and their world is now very abstract. They're like abstract painters in a way. It'd be hard to talk to them because they're way down there.
I learned that just beneath the surface there's another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn't find the proof. It was just a feeling. There is goodness in those blue skies and flowers, but another force - a wild pain and decay - also accompanies everything.
(Funny How Secrets Travel: David Lynch interviewed by Chris Rodley in the introduction to the Lost Highway screenplay).
________________________
Bernard
"I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable."
-David Lynch
________________________
Jheorgge
'Fred Madison/Pete Dayton (for The Weaklings)'
by Humors
Download
___________________________
JW Veldhoen
Spokane is an affiliate city for the American network television channels, a squid of 1950's social engineering, along with the highway and the suburb. Broadcast networks transmit content generated on the coasts, on Madison Avenue and in Hollywood, through the airwaves, although soon the digital signal will replace the airborne signal of the past, that thing in the air, so to speak.
I get American media through the city of Spokane when I am in Canada, through KXLY, KSPS, KREM, the affiliates beaming to locations in Washington, B.C., Alberta, Idaho, Montana. Somehow I knew of the Lilac Fest, and place-names throughout the Inland Empire as though they were famous. I never visited Spokane, so it doesn't speak memory, but it has spoken to me. In high-school I became a devotee of Twin Peaks. I had a weird friendship with a girl that liked the show too, all we ever had was good clean fun, but she looked like a Twin Peaks girl. I was terribly in love with her. There were a pair of sisters too, who I was in love with, who looked like girls in trouble. Somebody told me that Spokane had the highest proportional rate of serial killers in the world, and I took that as fact without thinking too much about it. It seemed to make sense. I doubt it now, and I attribute the claim to media residue from the so-called "Green River Killer", Robert Lee Yates. Yates killed 13 hookers, and was a Army helicopter pilot, a 50's crew-cut sort of guy. He used a .25-caliber shot to the head to finish his victims. They gave him lethal injection. Yates was from Spokane, though the state of Washington does seem disproportionately prone to producing serial killers: Ted Bundy was from Tacoma, the "Hillside Strangler" from the town of Bellingham. It isn't too hard to include Robert Pickton into the same group, conveniently oriented around geography, and Spokane, there are so many killers. That is the way, predation is the remainder of industry.
When I hear it spoken that is what it sounds like: Spokane is spoken. The idea that killers come from where the television networks have their stations, from where the absolute emanate word is spoken, makes some poetic sense, just as much as with the depression of rain, and the absence of light, and the Salish spirits causing men to run wild and kill, or the deprivations of public secrecy and sex. Just as well, it is the industrial message that has insinuated itself inside, transmitted, the cathode mass-consciousness like hornets in your head. Pictures and voices of girls in trouble, so much like the girls that you know, the ordinary day-to-day living women of society: mothers, daughters, seductresses, eunuchs, starlets, vamps, hysterics, like but unlike the representations that keep speaking, and can never be spoken, always sublimated until found in the flesh. Gender identifiers and cinema obscurantism aside, the Spokane girl is unspoken, the flesh of cinema fantasy wrapped up in a plastic tarp, washed up on the beach. The exoticism of romantic poetry since Petrarch, of lost love, awash, unspeaking, ungazing, cold, empty, beautiful, and dead, dead, dead.
________________________
SYpHA_69
I'm too scatter-brained at the moment to translate my thoughts on Lynch into words, so I'm just submitting a sketch I did of the "Eraserhead" poster which I drew sometime during my first year at college.
_______________________
Pisycaca
Philip Halsall 2002 ()
As the sound design of Lynch's films introduce an extra dimension to what the audience perceives, so too do Badalamenti's compositions. It could be argued that film scores in general only serve to create atmospheres and generate feelings, but I would argue that Badalamenti's scores provide something extra. They create themes for characters, which then become ingrained on the viewer's audio perception and symbolise different aspects of what the audience is viewing. The eerie ambience of his pieces give an ethereal and dream-like quality to the films, creating an air of tenderness, but also a feeling of intense depth, an otherworldly undercurrent.
One cannot help but feel that the extra dimension of Badalementi's scores gives Lynch's films wholeness, like the final piece in a jigsaw puzzle, albeit a difficult and intricate three-dimensional puzzle. It could be argued that those of Lynch's films that are devoid of Badalamenti's musical input are lacking a certain something, but on the other hand Lynch's films pre-Badalamenti are each very different. Eraserhead's use of sound as a film score worked perfectly and The Elephant Man's film score was chosen by the producer not Lynch, whilst Lynch's choice of the rock group Toto for Dune (1984) was questionable, but ultimately proved fruitful considering how badly received the film was. It appears that the musical relationship between Badalamenti and Lynch, which was established on Blue Velvet and carried through to the present, has established a strong and effective link between the visual and audio vision of David Lynch. Badalamenti's music is instantly recognisable in each and every Lynch film and serves to enhance the visual feast laid before the audience without being too dominant. When Lynch talks of Badalamenti he comments, "He's got this musical soul, and melodies are always floating around inside. I feel a mood of the scene in music, and one thing helps the other, and they both just start climbing." (Lynch in www.geocoities) This notion of climbing could certainly be attributed to Lynch's films, where the audience often finds themselves climbing and falling through complex plots not unlike the scores that accompany them. In particular the score for Lynch's Lost Highway clearly reflected the tumultuous plot that meandered and undulated from start to finish, although like Lynch's Wild at Heart (1990), original songs from various artists were used throughout the film. But the original dark and noirish music composed by Badalamenti formed the backbone of the film's audio content, even being altered with and incorporated into the sound design of the film . This was done when Lynch experimented with recording techniques at the studio of the Film Symphony Orchestra of Prague who performed Badalamenti's score for Lost Highway. The writer David Hughes explains, "Lynch experimented with recording techniques, just as he had during his innovative sound work on Eraserhead, placing microphones inside bottles and lengths of plastic tubing to try and capture a unique sound." (Hughes, 2001, p.211) It is interesting to see how Lynch has managed to combine music and sound design in this way, and it is particularly poignant that he has been able to adopt Badalamenti's music and subvert it in order to produce sound effects. It appears to be the negative of Lynch's notion of sound effects being used to create a musical score; here music is creating the sound effects.
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Kid.Mitch
Gossip
David Lynch and Werner Herzog are supposedly collaborating on a horror film with the tentative titles "Son" or "My son".
Sources:
I believe the original source were published on Hollywood Reporter.
Here are two other sources:
1. ________
2. ________
Here are a few of his commercials which caught my eye:
Pregnancy test, there is something disturbing about this:
PS2 commercials that stand out:
David Lynch on product placement:
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Rigby101
Premonitions Following An Evil Deed
from the largely failed experiment Lumière et Compagnie David Lynch was given the chance to show his genius against his current (selected) peers.
the rules were:
1. Use the mock-up of the original Lumière Brothers cinematograph crank camera (supplied)
2. The film is 55 (maybe 52) seconds (original length of film stock)
3. No synchronous sound
4. They have to get it within three takes
there may have been other rules but it's been a while and i've only seen its entirety once.. DC or someone may intervene here..
if you haven't seen it (start sitting down now) you will see that within this small amount of time Lynch has told you everything in is inimitable eery and suggestive way. of course Lynch has personal (iconic?) meme's to draw from.. but still a DL n00b would get this.. no one i know who has seen it hasn't fallen in love with it.
PLOT SPOILER:
policemen find the body of a boy, lying dead in a field. a woman waits at home. a garden scene of three beautiful women stir, one leaves to white out.. a sci fi scene of humanoid clones wandering through a factory as a human specimen (female) is trapped and distressed in a tank of fluid. 1910 burn out effect. the police arrive at the house.. familiar they enter without invitation to standing occupants.. torsos gripped for news.. a shadow moves at the window
The Q DL was asked in 'LeC'
"Why do you make movies?", and he answered: "I like to make films because I like to go into another world. I like to get lost in another world. And film to me is a magical medium that makes you dream...allows you to dream in the dark. It's just a fantastic thing, to get lost inside the world of film."
btw. i found watching Lumière et Compagnie as a whole.. VERY hard work.. most of the stuff that is included is poor.. lacking in imagination or just tired.. the stupid questions the directors are asked doesn't help.. and the ego of the 'editors' grates. The directors selected is very westerncentric & so Lynch is one of the few highlights for me and i probably wouldn't have watched it otherwise.
A lot of my paintings come from memories of Boise, Idaho, and Spokane, Washington. Some people, just by their nature, think about the President of United States and Africa and Asia. Their mind thinks over thousands of miles, big problems and big situations. That just completely leaves me cold. I can’t get there. I like to think about neighborhoods – like a fence, like a ditch, and somebody digging a hole, and then a girl in this house, and a tree, and what’s happening in that tree – a little local place I can get into. The two are really the same: it’s all based on human nature and the same sorts of things.
The home is a place where things can go wrong. When I was a child, home seemed claustrophobic but that wasn’t because I had a bad family. A home is like a nest – it’s only useful for so long. I use Band-Aids in my painting because I like their colour, and I like the way they have a connection with sores. Cotton has a similar appeal – it has a sort of medical feeling to it.
My farther frequently experimented on tree diseases and insects. He had huge forest at his disposal to experiment on. So I was exposed to insects, disease, and growth, in an organic sort of world, like a forest, or even garden. And this sort of thrills me –this earth, and then these plants coming out, and then there’s the things crawling on them and the activity in a garden – so many textures, and movements. You could just get lost for ever. And there are lots of things that are attacking the garden. There’s a lot of slaughter and death, diseases, worms, grubs, ants. A lotta stuff going on.
My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it’s supposed to be. But on that cherry tree there’s this pitch oozing out – some black, some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.
Because I grew up in a perfect world, other things were a contrast.
I saw life in extreme close-ups. In one, for instance, saliva mixed with blood. Or long shots of a peaceful environment. I had lots of friends but I loved being alone and looking at insects swarming in the garden
It’s sort of like, if you could take bits of writing that you did sometime, or even somebody else did sometime, and just chop them up and arrange them at random, and just throw them, you know, like people have done, and then read that, it could be fantastic. It could spark a whole other thing. And then you always have to leave an opening for other forces, you know to do their thing. When you’re on your own, just writing these things down, it’s so limited, and you wanna somehow open it up and throw it out and let other things intervene. More ideas come out of that, and it becomes really unbelievable. By trying to remove yourself you can see some fantastic things sometimes.
Moving paint around with my fingers and letting everything go on automatic pilot I sort of get into…I don’t know exactly what, but I think it has a lot to do with childhood occurrences. For me, the fact that they’re childlike doesn’t cancel out the sexuality in the paintings because I think children are pretty hip sexually. They don’t know the words for it and have clumsy ways of expressing it, but there’s certainly a lot going on sexually that we don’t fully understand when we’re kids.
I’d like to bite my paintings, but I can’t because there’s lead in the paint. Which means I’m kind of chicken. I don’t feel I’ve really gotten in there yet, and the paintings still seem safe and tranquil to me.
The paintings come from paint, and action and reaction. As to exactly where they are, well…some people open windows in houses, but I like to go deeper into a house and find things underneath things. Maybe that’s where they are. I love factories too. A serene landscape is totally boring to me. I like the idea of man and earth together – like a pit mine with heavy machinery and maybe some pools with sediment, and all sorts of little organisms growing, and mosquitoes lifting off like little helicopters.
But I like certain things about America and it gives me ideas. When I go around and I see things, it sparks little stories, or little characters pop out, so it just feels right to me to, you know, make American films.
I like the nowhere part of America. Eraserhead is an American film, but it’s a little bit in an in-between place. It’s like a dirty, little, forgotten, hidden corner. And I love those areas. You can discover secrets. They’re little truthful places, but they’re not obvious. You have to sink in and find them, and you don’t even know sort of what they are till the elements come together. Then they start talking to you and you start seeing more about the truth of the thing. At first you fall in love with them but you haven’t started sinking in yet.
The nowhere. The Red Room.
Anything can happen there. It’s a free zone, completely unpredictable and therefore pretty exciting but also scary. And those kinds of places are just fantastic to visit. And a pine tree and a cup of coffee – the combination of those things is pretty dramatic to me.
The one artist that if feel could be my brother – and I almost don’t like saying it because the reaction is always, ‘Yeah, you and everybody else’ – is Franz Kafka. I really dig him a lot. Some of his things are the most thrilling combo of words I have ever read. If Kafka wrote a crime picture, I’d be there. I’d like to direct that for sure.
I love Fellini. And we’ve got the same birthday, so if you believe in astrology…His is a totally different time, and an Italian take on life. But there’s something about his films. There’s a mood. They make you dream. They’re so magical and lyrical and surprising and inventive. The guy was unique. If you took his films away, there would be a giant chunk of cinema missing. There’s nothing else around like that. I like Bergman, but his films are so different. Sparse. Sparse dreams.
And it think Herzog is one of the all-time greats. Really great. When I was in England once I saw Stroszek on TV. I’d missed the beginning of it so I thought it was, like, some real documentary. I was just captivated in the first two seconds. I’d never seen anything like it.
Later I met him in New York and he showed me a journal that he’d kept for the past year: Walking the Perimeter of Germany. He’d notated every single day, and I said he must have had the world’s sharpest pencil! Because this writing was crystal clear, but so small you’d need a magnifying glass to read it. The journal was very small – about two inches by two inches – and each page was filled with, you know, four or five hundred sentences. It was unbelievable!
I’m real fascinated by presences – what you call ‘room tone’. It’s the sound that you hear when there’s silence, in between words or sentences. It’s a tricky thing, because in this seemingly kind of quiet sound, some feelings can be brought in, and a certain kind of picture of a bigger world can be made. And all those things are important to make that world.
There are things that come into the home, you know…things that are built or created outside the house, which all speak about the time, about the life. And then if something goes wrong with those things, or of they’re not in good working order, it can mean something else too.
I just happen to like electricity but I’m not really wild about the new plugs America. I like forties and thirties electricity. And I like smokestack industry. And I like fire, and I like smoke, and I like the noise. But sounds have become little. The sound of a computer is just a Mickey Mouse thing compared to real power. And yet there’s a lot of power there, but it’s a different sort of thing and it doesn’t thrill my soul.
Electricity becomes linked with the inexplicable.
Yeah, but scientists don’t understand it. They say, ‘It’s moving electrons.’ But there’s a certain point where they say, ‘We don’t know why that happens.’ I’m not a scientist and I haven’t talked to these guys that are into electricity, but it is a force. When electrons run down a wire – do they have that power. It’s amazing. How did a plug or an outlet get to be shaped that way? And light bulbs: I can feel these random electrons, you know, hitting me. It’s like when you go under power lines. If you were blindfolded, and drove down a highway under those power lines, and really concentrated, you could tell when they occurred. There’s something very disturbing about that amount of electricity – they know these things now. A tumor grows in the head. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not, you know, whacking you.
Something strange is happening when Bob is around. There are, maybe, some worlds coming together. It’s not like dancing in the living room in the evening on a normal summer night! Other things are going on. There’s like a wind or a disturbance, and openings for different things to come in.
I am big on that. Girls crying, men crying, women crying: crying in general. It’s powerful if they really are feeling it. It’s like a yawn: it transfers over. Like Andy. He’s a man and he’s crying. It’s a rare thing, you know, to see a policeman crying. It comes from Roy Orbison, I guess! No. In this case, it’s when something cements this identification, and it’s unleashed. When the person can’t speak the rest of a sentence and chokes up in a certain way, you’re gone. You know that feeling and it sweeps over you.
With some people, you see a picture, and you get like a dream, and then when you see them the dream goes away. But the dream was still alive, so I started telling her I wanted to dip her in grey dye, and she was gonna be dead on the shore. And she said, ‘Fine’. She said later that she was really nervous, and she was sitting on her hands. But no one – not Mark, me, anyone – had any idea that she could act, or that she was going to be so powerful just being dead. Or how important that small decision was.
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Alp Ilyas Klanten
i just saw your snippet on you blog about david lynch and it came to my mind that the fanzine "wrapped in plastic" is a very good soure of information especially about "twin peaks" but also beyont the series.
see this link
this is mine btw, if you would like to take a look at my newbie stuff.
cheers
alp
Now I see what DL saw in her:
When I was in high school and was lucky enough to get to choose my classes, I chose 'Mass Media.' Stoners did that. It was the first class in the morning, then I'd get two hours off for lunch, then something called 'Independent Study' (which was basically pot and sex in the woods), then 'Mass Media' again before it was time to go home.
I was usually stoned before I got to school at 8:15am. We just did that, whether we walked, were driven, or had to hit the bus.
One of the best things about 'Mass Media' was that there were couches instead of cramping, stupid desk-like things. So, my neighbors and I would pile ourselves onto the couches, watch movies, and then go mess about in the video studio.
The first movie shown to us was Lynch's 'Eraserhead.' I knew it was a commonly featured midnight movie. We got it in the morning. It was the opposite of most of the midnight movies I was aware of at the time. Almost zero dialogue, totally bizarre, not crowd-pleasing at all. It formed most of what I consider to be quality in art. I guess it was my introduction to art.
Lynch hasn't done anything I don't admire in some way. I've aped him in my own work, without realizing it. He dug in.
The film that really does it for me is the one most people hate: 'Wild At Heart.' I guess that's because I am. The casting of Laura Dern and her mom, Diane Ladd, is insane. I first saw it at the Detroit Institute of Arts. I had to go alone. When a bunch of people walk out during a movie, my spazzed-out attention span grows. People were screaming at the screen. I loved it's violence, it's humor, it's sexuality. The opening scene where Nicolas Cage bashes his would-be assassin's head open might be the most influential. I don't know. I shouldn't know. That's the point.
I had a brief encounter with a guy who hung out on Lynch's website. We hung out in a Greektown restaurant after a Belle and Sebastian concert - with my mom and other friends. He liked 'The Straight Story' the best, because there's not a violent moment in it. We just didn't get along.
Around 2003, I think, there was a meeting of Lynch-heads in some bowling alley in LA. Rebekah Del Rio, the chick who lip-synchs the song 'Crying' in Spanish in 'Mullholland Drive,' showed up. She didn't bowl. Everyone else confused me and Auriel Willette (I've posted his excellent photography here) to be boyfriends.
Everyone I try to get to watch some version of Lynch ends up pissed, then thoughtful, then, a few days later, awed. That's the way it works for me.
I could go on about how 'Twin Peaks' defined what I do and do not (will not) see on TV. That's common knowledge.
I'm going to put on 'Inland Empire' for the new boyfriend, and observe his reactions. When the lovely Grace Zabriskie says, '...yes, a brutal fucking murder,' I will cue my binoculars.
Here's Hebb:
On Jul 14, 2008, at 7:18 PM, Dave Hebb wrote:
Dead on. My fave is... Well, there are a few. Lost Highway got me because of a few things - creepy Robert Blake, anonymous video tapes of long slow walking down dark suburban hallways, a first half that has absolutely nothing to do with the second half, Henry Rollins as a prison guard (fitting), good bowie song - plus the fact that everyone else hated it cuz it made no sense. I also loved "Dune", both as a Lynch fan and having read and loved Dune prior to the movie. Fuck the sci-fi pricks who didn't get it - fuck the Lynch fans that don't like sci-fi. I haven't finished "Inland Empire" yet - I started it late at night and was intrigued, but it's slow pace didn't work well with no sleep. Frankly, Laura Dern kind of annoys me, but not as much as Kyle Machlachlan or Nicholas Cage. I know those choices were purposeful, but nothing compares to the Dean Stockwell - Dennis Hopper - Isabella Rosellini team up in Blue Velvet. Fucking brilliant casting.
When I saw "eraserhead" In gibb's class, I had nightmares for a week - no joke - something about the girl in the radiator singing "in heaven" really creeped me out. Still, the gibb movie that forever influenced my understanding of art and has been somewhat of a guiding light was "Koyaanisqatsi". That movie pretty much said it all for me.
My response:
You fucking hippie. I am trying to fit some of this into my post.
I love Laura Dern, at least in her Lynch distractions. For me, Nicolas Cage did a super job in 'Wild At Heart,' but I'm still in cream-jeans mode over him in 'Birdy.' That's a lie (uh, not much of one, though). I was in ultra-cream-jeans mode over Matthew Modine for years. Still am. I reserve the right, as if I need to.
That Koyannisqatsi thing bored the living black shit out of me. I know why you liked it. There was another one of those, too, right? You go earthy, I'll go dicky. Or ass-y. What was the other one called? Q-something. Q my lack of interest? Oops. Quasimoto?
Dennis: I'd hope you can see we're on it, off it, on it, etc...
totally normal pregnancy test commercial directed by lynch from the late 90s:
scary psa from the 80s:
lynch's segment from the 1995 film "lumiere and company" shot on the original cinematographe developed by the lumiere brothers in the late 19th century
what an awesome dude
oh yeah, and this spectacular commercial for ysl
Winter Rates' Lynchian Lifecycle
-Best friend and film geek turns me onto Blue Velvet shortly before Twin Peaks premires. At age 15 or 16 he tapes all the episodes and we watch them every Friday night while smoking joints and drinking coffee. We love Audrey Horne with teenage passion (said friend was already familiar with Sherylin Fenn via a horrible softcore flick called Two Moon junction where she plays a debutaunt repeatedly debauched by a carny, she's bleach blond and we realize her tits are slightly lopsided, in an endearing way.)
-age 16 have severe asthma attack and attempt quitting smoking for the first time. (started at 13) see Wild at Heart in the theatre. Fail to quit smoking.
-go to college and drop acid the first week of school with new dorm mates. end up reading each other our poems etc. this strange frat type guy reads us his valedictorian speech inspired by annie dillard, plays peter murphy in candle light, i stare at his gigantic poster of audrey horne and then go wank off in the bathroom.
-visit olympia,wa, get loaded, wake and bake and go to a mall to see lost highway. leave movie freaked out and discover there are these motorcyclists in the mall with tents that fold out of their cycles. they pretend to camp out in the mall with tin cups of coffee and fake campfires. i'm still wondering if this was real.
-find out wife's step dad went to high school with david lynch in idaho. no good stories. he was a nice guy, a boy scout. they still occasionally talk on the phone.
-watch twin peaks with the wife in winter of '97. there is a broken window in our attic room that we are two dumb and lazy to fix. we huddle in blankets and watch a 13 inch t.v. the roommate never lets us turn on the heat. first marathon viewing and Baldamenti's score is burned into synapses.
-"i'm not gonna get on a bus in a blizzard to travel across town to see a creepy-ass david lynch movie" says the wife. some how she gives in, i eat pot chocolate and bring a flask of absolut, and assure her it won't be creepy. spend 3 hours utterly freaked out in movie theatre viewing inland empire. i apologize to her re: creep factor. i convince myself that the movie is too fucked up to deal with. the next day i immediately want to see it again.
-have seen eraserhead two or three times but cannot remember any of it.
-read Lynch's book about Transcendental Meditation. try to get into meditating. fail.
-finally own the gold edition of twin peaks. circle is complete.
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Thomas Moronic
Listen to David Lynch for the day
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5 comments:
Wow. Just fucking wow. This is some massive Lynch Day. I'll take my time with it and comment about it later.
indeed, what a day! Lost Highway is still my favourite for some reason though Inland Empire might be becoming a close second, three viewings in ;-)
(There was a staging of Olga Neuwirth/Elfriede Jelinek's newish opera of "Lost Highway" in London recently which was quite faithful to the film and mostly worked to my eyes and ears, I wrote a little bit about it here: http://theonionfield.blogspot.com/2008/04/lost-highway-opera-at-young-vic.html )
Hey Dennis- never been much of a Lynch fan... but am sitting in my apt in Chicago wondering what would be happening if I was in Paris having a coffee w you? Man and I are sitting here listening to the Bernstein conducted version of WS Story and drinking really good champagne... just did the preview of the new Coldplay and processing on that. Good crop of slaves... we must discuss where you find these byz- as well as what Antoine is up to? Can we borrow him? :-) Anyhoo- hope you will give Paris a big psychic hug for us! I'm seeingpastred.blogspot.com, primary partner is petroniuspettingzoo.blogspot.com. He digs you greatly- visit his blog and leave him a comment! Very artsy bold. Have fun- Christopher in Chicago. hug time for some late 70s Dr. Who- City of Death- also Paris. Such an underestimated show- new Dr. David Tennant is doing Hamlet at the RSC- w. Patrick Stewart as Claudius!? now that's sum fun!! perfecto
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