Tag: David Lynch

Liked https://archive.md/1gI1K (archive.md)

There is an assumption that great artists, especially subversive ones, live radical lives and embrace progressive politics. But Lynch was closer to Ralph Ellison, another artist from America’s heartland who peeled back the veneer of the political consensus to show both the fundamental cruelty and tender humanity of ordinary life. He was a filmmaker for whom conventional electoral politics were as sterile as conventional realism was stifling. But as Mel Brooks supposedly said, David Lynch was actually “Jimmy Stewart from Mars.” He was both all-American and something alien.

Source: David Lynch was America’s greatest conservative filmmaker by Tim Carmody

ᔥ “Jason Kottke” in Provocative from Tim Carmody: David Lynch was America’s grea… ()

Liked Susan Wilson (openculture.com)

Take a suf­fi­cient­ly long road trip across Amer­i­ca, and you’re bound to encounter some­thing or some­one Lynchi­an. Whether or not that idea lay behind Inter­view Project, the under­tak­ing had the endorse­ment of David Lynch him­self. Not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, it was con­ceived by his son Austin, who along with film­mak­er Jason S. (known for the doc­u­men­tary David Lynch: The Art Life), drove 20,000 miles through the U.S. in search of what it’s tempt­ing to call the real Amer­i­ca, a nation pop­u­lat­ed by col­or­ful, some­times des­per­ate, often uncon­ven­tion­al­ly elo­quent char­ac­ters, 121 of whom Inter­view Project finds pass­ing the day in bars, work­ing at stores, or just sit­ting on the road­side.

Source: David Lynch Releases on YouTube Interview Project: 121 Stories of Real America Recorded on a 20,000-Mile Road Trip by Open Culture

Replied to David Lynch on getting ideas (austinkleon.com)

Thank you Austin for sharing. I love this reflection on ideas from David Lynch:

If you catch an idea, you know, any idea, it wasn’t there and then it’s there! It might just be a small fragment, of, like I say, a feature film or a song of a lyric or whatever, but you gotta write that idea down right away. And as you’re writing, sometimes it’s amazing how much comes out, you know, from that one flash…

This reminds me of an interview between Kevin Parker and Rick Ruben in which Parker talks about the challenge of capture ideas when they come to you. Ruben shares how Neil Young always responds to ideas no matter how rude it may be. This excerpt captures Young’s thinking:

Usually 1 sit down and 1 go until I’m trying to think. As soon as I start thinking, I quit… then when I have an idea out of nowhere, I start up again. When that idea stops, I stop. I don’t force it. If its not there, it’s not there, and there’s nothing you can do about it… There’s the conscious mind and the subconscious mind and the spirit. And I can only guess as to what is really going on there. (Zollo, 1997, pp. 354-5)

Ruben then gives Parker permission to stop what you are doing and capture the ideas when they come.

Liked David Lynch’s chillingly prescient vision of modern America (The Conversation)

Lynch’s body of work implies that the cruelty of such people isn’t really what we should fear most. It is, instead, those who laugh, cheer or simply turn away – responses that enable and empower such behaviors, while giving them an acceptable place in the world.

When they were first released, Lynch’s films may well have appeared as funhouse mirror reflections of society.

Not so anymore.