A young David Lynch makes a brief appearance on New Wave Theatre sometime in the early 1980s.

New Wave Theatre‘s host, Peter Ivers, wrote Eraserhead‘s “In Heaven,” the number sung by the “Lady in the Radiator,” for Lynch in 1976. Ivers was found bludgeoned to death in his Los Angeles apartment in 1983 and his death remains unsolved.
 

 
“In Heaven”:
 

 
I can’t decide which non sequitur confection best captures the morbid nature of the Lynchian milieu, what say you?
 

 
(The artist behind the cake pops also does full casts of Vincent Price’s head in chocolate!)

 
David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti’s Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted was a nonsensical, non sequitur musical play directed by Lynch, featuring singer Julee Cruise.

It begins with a filmed sequence with Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern, who were then filming Wild at Heart with Lynch. Cage’s character dumps Dern’s who then somehow turns into Cruise who floats over typically Lynchian industrial dreamscapes. Michael J. Anderson, the mysterious dwarf in the red room from Twin Peaks saws wood and repeats Dern and Cage’s break-up conversation, mocking them.

Industrial Symphony No. 1 was staged for two performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the “New Music America Festival” in November of 1989. I actually saw one of the performances. Although I was massively into David Lynch at the time, to be honest, I thought it was pretty—and very well-staged (everything is well-staged at BAM)—but a bit… boring. I’ve read that they only had two weeks to put it together and that seems plausible!

The video is probably something that you can dip in and out of, if you know what I mean.
 

 
An oldie but still freaky. David Lynch sells coffee. Which, for some reason, reminds me of Family Guy‘s Peter Griffin doing his Danny Aiello impression….
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
With thanks to Krystin Ver Linden
 

 
An exclusive clip of the fabulous Anne Pigalle performing to a packed house at David Lynch’s Parisian night club Silencio, where she sang a selection of songs from her recent album, L’ Ame Erotique, and a some of her classic early work. Ms. Pigalle was performing at a special event, created by Diane Pernet, to celebrate the international Festival A Shaded View on Film Festival.
 

 
Bonus clips of Anne Pigalle, after the jump…
 

Helmut Newton’s famous portrait of David Lynch with Isabella Rossellini
 
Are you an undecided voter? Do you feel you haven’t properly gleaned the character and/or policies from either of our two presidential candidates? Do you ever just wish that the guy who directed Twin Peaks, Eraserhead and Blue Velvet could offer you some super wacked-out political insight?

Well, you’re in luck! Last Thursday, director and doe-eyed brunette enthusiast David Lynch gave Obama his endorsement on the unaffiliated pro-Obama blog, 90 Days, 90 Reasons. On a site of celebrity endorsements, some intelligent, some impassioned, and some that are just funny, Lynch’s testimonial stands out as a singularly earnest declaration in anagrams.

Dear Americans, Republicans, and Democrats Alike,

I am going to vote for re-electing President Obama. I have noticed something in Mitt Romney’s name, which I think speaks to what he is about. If you just rearrange a few letters, Romney becomes R MONEY. I believe Mitt Romney wants to get his Mitts on R Money. He would like to get it and divide it up with his friends, the Big Money Bunch.

I believe he would like to get his Mitts on R Money, R Resources, R Freedoms, and R American Dream. I do not trust Mitt Romney to look after the best interests of 99% of Americans. I think electing Mitt Romney would be a catastrophe for our country—one which would be real difficult to straighten out later. Please do not let Mitt Romney get his Mitts on R Money or R United States of America.

—DAVID LYNCH
Los Angeles, California

It’s kind of a relief, actually. There have always been rumors floating around that Lynch was a Reaganite Republican, but I think his rhetoric about the 99% quashes them pretty effectively. It’s sincere, yet removed, and avant-garde in its mundanity—Lynchian elegance at its finest, and another great artist against oligarchy.

David Lynch - describing the one that got away?
 
Confidence has nothing to do with David Lynch’s endless supply of ideas. He credits meditation for that. It helps his ‘ideas flow through like these beautiful little fish, and you catch them,’ as he tells Miranda Sawyer, in this interview from The Culture Show in 2011.

The interview is loosely anchored around the release of Lynch’s album Crazy Clown Time, and bobs around various subjects before fading out on Lynch’s flow of ideas.

Going by how long the likable Ms. Sawyer is on screen (compared to Lynch), this interview has been heavily edited. Perhaps because Lynch rambles? Or, is he too intelligent for BBC viewers? Or, more likely he wasn’t giving the Beeb the sound-bites they required - which is always an issue with interview packages like this.

And note also, there are no cutaways of Mr Lynch, or any shots of the great man pottering about the beautiful Idem Studio in Paris, where he was working last year. Still, these are minor quibbles, as Lynch, with his Jack-Nicholson-on-helium voice, and Stan-Laurel-grimace, is always watchable and never less than interesting.
 

 
This is an oldie but goody. A trailer for Dirty Dancing re-cut to replicate the look and feel of a David Lynch film. I think it succeeds magnificently.

Things do get weird up in the Catskills.
 

 
This mash-up is from 2008, but I just discovered it and dig its sexy spookiness. It was produced by Wax Audio and Reborn Identity, the guys behind the Mashed In Plastic project.

David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti: “The Pink Room” (from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me)
AC/DC: “The Jack”
Dead Can Dance: “Dawn of the Iconoclast”
 

 
Hard-of-hearing cowboy Slim (Harry Dean Stanton) encounters an alien spy - or maybe not - in this goofy short film from David Lynch.

From Lynch’s website:

After the international success of Blue Velvet, Lynch was approached by Fiagaro Magazine and Erato Films to create a film as a part of their “The French as Seen by…” TV series. At first Lynch turned them down, but then he caught some ideas and agreed. The Cowboy and the Frenchman was the first time Lynch worked with veteran actor Harry Dean Stanton, who would later be featured in several other Lynch projects.

Stanton is a real hoot.
 

 
Here’s a rarely seen video of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” directed by David Lynch in 1990. It was included on the original VHS release of Wild At Heart and hasn’t appeared on any commercially available video or DVD since.

I find this alternate video far more interesting and true to the spirit of the song than the much better known official video which was directed by Herb Ritts and therefore looks like a Calvin Klein commercial.
 

 
David Lynch made a video for his song “Crazy Clown Time,” the title track from his debut solo album, and it is exactly what you might expect from the master of suburban weirdness: violent, sexy and nightmarish.

With this kind of brain wave activity, no wonder Lynch practices Transcendental Meditation.
 

 
This 20 minute mood piece composed of clips from films by or about David Lynch plays out like one long extended epiphany. Lovingly put together by Richard Vezina. 

Music : Angelo Badalamenti/David Lynch : Questions In A World Of Blue, The Pink Room, Into The Night, Mysteries of Love
Vocal : Julee Cruise

Films:
Inland Empire, Mulholland Dr., The Straight Story, Lost Highway, Fire Walk with Me, Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet, Dune, The Elephant Man, Eraserhead, The Grandmother, The Alphabet, Pretty as a Picture: The Art of David Lynch, Blue Velvet - Mysteries of Love: Documentary
 

 
Via Open Culture

Billy Gibbons Painting by Eileen Martin from Fine Art America

This is taken from today’s Guardian newspaper’s Film & Music section, which has been guest edited by David Lynch, and it makes for one of the most bizarre “music” interviews ever published:

Gibbons and Lynch – but mainly Gibbons, with the occasional “Doggone right” and “Exactly right, Billy” from Lynch – are talking about the beauty and power of industry. About the roar of factories, the growl of engines, about how the clang and clank speak to something within us. We’re meant to be talking about the block and tackle pulley system, but it’s pretty clear from the start that none of us can sustain a conversation about that, and so the block and tackle is just the key that starts the motor that in turn drives our discussion down the highway.

For Lynch, in any case, the block and tackle seems to be as much metaphor as literal device. It’s a system of pulleys, designed to enable a person to lift a greater weight than they could unaided. The pulley was invented around 2,400 years ago by the Greek philosopher Archytas, a scientist of the Pythagorean school (he’s also thought to have been the first person to invent a flying machine. Bright boy; his mother must have been proud). Then Archimedes realised the simple pulley could be expanded into something with even greater power – the block and tackle system, which he designed to help sailors lift ever greater loads, according to Plutarch. Thousands of years later, the basic system is unchanged: the block is the pulleys – the more pulleys you put in the block, the less the force you need to apply – and the tackle is the rest of the of the apparatus.

“I heard about the block and tackle and I’ve seen it work and it seems so magical,” Lynch says of his fascination. “It’s connected in my mind with the American car” – one of its common usages is to lift the engine block from the body of a vehicle – “and it’s kind of perfect that Billy talks about it. Billy had got a kind of guitar power – I always like the idea that his guitar is gasoline-powered.” That’s not quite the only reason Gibbons is joining us today. When Lynch originally asked for a piece about the block and tackle in this week’s Film&Music, we pointed out that the section dealt with film and music, rather than physics and mechanics. Lynch, though, was insistent. OK, he said, if you’re only going to do it if it’s got a film or music angle, then you can have ZZ Top talking about the block and tackle. And here we are

.

Read the full article David Lynch and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons dream about machines over at The Guardian.

 
The new David Lynch album Crazy Clown Time is exactly what you would expect from America’s greatest contemporary surrealist: crazy clown shit.

Moody, sexy, spooky and hypnotic, this is perfect Halloween music. I fucking dig the way the country-noir voodoo merges with Lynch’s Transcendental Meditation mind trips, riffs on dental hygiene, melting slide-guitars, funereal drum beats and rinky-dinky new wave rhythm tracks that would sound absolutely corny without Lynch’s serial killer vocals. I’m looking for an adjective to describe this tantalizing mix of the ordinary with the mad and all I come up with is “Lynchian.”

It’s streaming right now at NPR. Turn down the lights, pour yourself a glass of wine or fire up your favorite herbal blend and let Doctor Lynch perform his psychic surgery on your frontal lobes.

Fans of Johnny Dowd should really dig the fuck out of this. I’m guessing Lynch has heard a fair share of Dowd.

Crazy Clown Town will be released in the USA on November 8.

Lean in and listen:
 
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/30/141598329/first-listen-david-lynch-crazy-clown-time