Tag Archives: art

David Lynch – Room to Dream

My mistake, I suppose, was expecting a conventional book tour interview.

This was David Lynch after all, the guy who’s given us the Lady in the Radiator, Frank Booth, and those miniature demonic grandparents who slip under apartment doors.

The setting was perfect. It’s hard to beat the cavernous decadence of The Theatre at Ace Hotel, originally built in 1927, the “former flagship movie house of United Artists.”

But then the lights went down and the evening started with all 8 episodes of Dumbland, Lynch’s crudely drawn and animated web series about a brutish mouth-breather (literally), his traumatized wife, and their hyperactive son in the suburbs. This is David Lynch’s suburbs, however, so a neighbor is a man with a removable arm who has sex with ducks, ants do a song-and-dance number calling attention to the main character being a “dumbturd,” and another character has the stick caught in his mouth removed by way of his eye sockets. It’s funny in a punishing way. To me, the series is more a testament to Lynch’s genius with sound design, which he employs to great unsettling effect.

Still, my heart sank a little because these events don’t usually run very long and the “Dumbland” screening ate up over half an hour. I was not encouraged, then, when Kristine McKenna, moderator and co-author of Lynch’s new hybrid memoir-biography, said she wasn’t going to ask him anything about the book. Instead, she had a few questions about “Summer,” as in the season, the first day of which is when this talk took place.

Okay, all right, I could go with this. Lynch is too interesting a person not to have something intriguing to share. He doesn’t like summer vacations. His ideal day is waking up refreshed, having a cup of coffee, doing some meditation, and then getting to work on a project, which can mean a painting, a film, or just daydreaming. He compared phones to sugar, meaning they’re as hard to give up as a “bag of really good cookies.”

That portion lasted about 10 minutes and then it was time for audience questions, which were submitted prior to the start of the program. Most of them concerned Twin Peaks, with one question prompting him to tell the story of how the pivotal character of Bob was inspired by set dresser/actor Frank Silva being in the “wrong” place at the right time. Another got him to reveal that he’d written and abandoned a film adaptation of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. An inquiry into his recurring dreams had him describing one where he’s in the desert watching his approaching father become distorted by the waves of heat coming off the sand, and not knowing whether this was his “good” father or his “bad” father. Later in the dream he’s hiding at the very top of a marble structure listening to the footsteps below, presumably one of the fathers looking for him. The best question was “How do you keep your hair up?” Smiling slyly, Lynch replied, “I have a heart-to-heart talk with it every morning.”

Good stuff, I thought, but then it was all over, six audience questions answered in 20 minutes. And the long, long, long line for the book signing still awaited……which I admit I abandoned.

Sure, I was disappointed. Not so disappointed I was going to cut off someone’s ear so Kyle Maclachlan could find it in a field later. No.

But look, I love Lynch’s movies and how his mind works. He’s a master of mood, of atmosphere, of residing very comfortably in that often discomfiting zone between dreaming and waking life. I do find him inspiring and an influence on my writing. I just wanted more time with the guy.

Hey, at least I have the book, Room to Dream, which I must say is pretty impressive in its depth and breadth. We’re cautioned that answers to the puzzles that are Lynch’s art do not reside here, but that’s fine, I’m not looking for answers. I just find him, the work, and his creative process fascinating and stimulating. If books are where I have to go to access that as well as the perspectives of his family members and creative collaborators, there are worse places to look. I mean, imagine being inside Kenneth McMillan’s Baron Harkonnen fat suit.

On Violence In My Stories

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“Ensnared” – Illustration by Scott Ritchie

The recent tragic events in Aurora, Colorado and both their apparent and alleged link to the most recent Batman films spurred me to reflect on the use of violence in my own writing, as well as what my responsibility is as the creator of such elements and images in my stories.

First and foremost, I believe in the First Amendment and that the duty of any artist is to avoid self-censorship and be unsparingly honest in his work, whatever the subject matter or medium. Personally, I do tend to explore the darker side of humanity in my writing, mostly expressed through psychological terror, or emotional violence, but also occasionally through the depiction of physical acts of violence. Should I be concerned that a reader or audience member after reading or viewing something I’ve written will personalize and pervert it, use my imagination as inspiration to commit a heinous act?

If I worry about that, I’m already censoring myself and the work suffers.

Nature vs. Nurture. Does violence in books, film, art, video games, etc. turn seemingly normal, everyday people into sociopaths or psychopaths? I say no. Perhaps I’m more concerned that its ubiquity in our popular culture is having the opposite effect: desensitizing us to the point where we simply shrug our shoulders after reading about tragic and senseless death that occurs in the real world.

I have a choice. I have free will. I can write about anything I choose, so why do I choose to depict violence in my stories at all? What about it attracts me? Well, in the spirit of free speech there is, admittedly, and I know I’m not alone here, a small part of me motivated by an exhibitionist impulse to shock or elicit an emotional reaction from people via my somewhat twisted imagination.

And I am intrigued by the dark pocket I believe exists in each of us, the contents of which we’re secretly (and not so secretly) titillated by: the things that frighten us or seem most prurient to our more surface, public sensibilities. But it’s quite healthy, necessary even, to dip into this pocket and bring the darkness up into consciousness through creative expression.

What has suppression ever done but create walking talking powder kegs?

To be clear, I’m not interested in putting purely exploitative material out into the world, the only purpose of which is to debase and disgust. No thank you. I want to be provocative, yes, but in the pursuit of something with a point of view, where substance and style can achieve equilibrium.

In regard to violence (again, both physical and emotional), I feel a need to examine the act and its perpetrators in an attempt to understand why we behave the way we do, why we hurt each other, and to shine a light on the damage and the cost inflicted. The nature vs. nurture debate when it comes to violence can be spun into so many various and fascinating narratives, and ultimately the end result I’m striving for is a confluence of the thoughtful, unflinching, entertaining, and often uncomfortably humorous.

Sometimes the results of my “investigations” are ambiguous because there aren’t any clear, obvious answers. And some of the best writing doesn’t provide answers, but rather inspires more questions. But that doesn’t mean I’m hiding behind fiction or afraid to assert an opinion. There are artists who are not compelled to explain or defend their work, but if so challenged I will stand behind anything I’ve created and enter into any reasonable debate about its merit, about its right to exist.

I’m curious to hear from other writers, readers, filmmakers, filmgoers, artists and consumers of art in general. What’s your opinion on violence in the arts, the impact it has on our society, and the responsibility of the artist?

LATFOB – What Stuck With Me Part 2

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Photo by Carolyn Kraft

“Fiction is like a trust fall. Sometimes the story catches you and sometimes it doesn’t…and you wake up with a bump on your head.”

“Why is calling something realistic a compliment? Just because something’s realistic doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“Everything that talks about the human situation is political.”

“The point of every story is that there are two sides of things, both good and bad, optimistic and pessimistic.”

“I tend to write when I’m upset about something.”

“I spent fifteen hours on a plane to Argentina with a fat German next to me who farted the entire time.”

“Freeze your jeans. Kills the germs from farting.”

“Eventually every Wikipedia article leads to squid.”

“The Internet is a terrible distraction for writers.”

“Starting is just about writing sentences, collecting voices. Need to be comfortable being in the dark.”

“People really want short stories. They buy novels, but really they don’t want them.”

“Reading a work in translation is like kissing someone through a handkerchief…which does have a kinky charm to it.”

“Robert Louis Stevenson based the character of Long John Silver on a friend with all of his finer qualities removed.”

“Fiction is the exploration of the self in the world.”

“All of us are many people and writing is a way to expose our other personalities.”

“You know who’s got great beer? The Czech Republic. You should go there.”

“I write with the feeling that the book could go anywhere, that the whole premise could change in the middle of a sentence.”

“Form is what makes fiction transcendent.”

“As Robert Frost wrote, ‘No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.'”

“Does reading have to be a totally immersive experience? Can’t it be ‘I like this story/I like this sentence.’?”

“I like transparency in art, the idea of knowing that this was created by someone. Jackson Pollack included his own detritus in his paintings: tobacco, dirt, lint. It’s nice to feel like you’re interacting with the creation of the work.”

“There’s this whole idea of momentum in modern fiction, that the writer has to pick a reader up and carry him or her forward and then drop them off at a certain point, unchanged, probably, at the most a bit breathless and flushed.”

The preceding witticisms and wisdom were recorded on a miniature yellow notebook on Sunday April 22 at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The purveyors of said perspicacity were an anonymous festival-goer and the following authors: Etgar Keret, Sara Levine, Ben Loory, Amelia Gray, Elizabeth Crane, Ben Ehrenreich, Mark Leyner, and Aimee Bender.