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David Lynch sings Bob Dylan
12.06.2018
01:30 pm
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David Lynch’s second solo album, The Big Dream, seems to have made less of a splash than its predecessor, Crazy Clown Time. I have no empirical evidence to support this claim, just the practiced eye of a former record store clerk and lifelong cheapskate.

The Big Dream should not be overlooked, because it includes David Lynch’s reading of “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” by Bob Dylan. You may prefer the Stooges’, the Neville Brothers’, Nina Simone’s, or perhaps even Entombed’s version of Dylan’s take on “Pretty Polly,” but I’m partial to the particular feeling of emptiness Lynch summons.

In the movie David Lynch: The Art Life, the director tells a story about walking out of a Bob Dylan show as an art school freshman in 1964, leading to a bust-up with his roommate Peter Wolf, future singer of the J. Geils Band. As Lynch tells it, back in their room after the concert, Wolf scolded him—“Nobody walks out on Dylan!”—and Lynch responded “I walk out on Dylan—get the fuck outta here!”
 

David Lynch and Scotland’s answer to Bob Dylan, Donovan (via Pinterest)
 
Bob doesn’t appear to have played “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” that night in Boston, but the song, released earlier that year on The Times They Are a-Changin’, is a murder ballad about a man who kills his five children and his wife before turning the shotgun on himself—Dylan’s “Frankie Teardrop.” I suspect Lynch was drawn to “Hollis Brown” as much by the violence in the song and the blankness of the singer’s persona as by the cosmic perspective that appears in the last verse. It’s worth considering that this move to a God’s-eye view of the Wheel of Birth and Death isn’t necessarily redemptive. I take it to mean that a murder–suicide is as natural as the weather.
 
Listen after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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12.06.2018
01:30 pm
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Miscreants rejoice! Artist Krent Able’s new ‘appallingly filthy’ illustrated book is coming!
11.19.2018
01:54 pm
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The cover of the forthcoming book ‘The Second Coming of Krent Able’ by Steve Martin.
 

“This book will make the perfect Xmas gift for elderly relatives, beloved friends, and hated enemies.”

—London-based artist and illustrator Krent Able (the alter-ego of author Steve Martin) on his upcoming book, The Second Coming of Krent Able.

If you think Mr. Able’s statement about the follow-up to his gritty Big Book of Mischief (2012), The Second Coming of Krent Able, sounds like a warning wrapped in a delicious piece of candy, you would be correct. There is nobody quite like Krent Able, a long-time illustrator of morally questionable comics, that initially ran in the UK bi-monthly mag The Stool Pigeon (RIP, 2013). Able’s work has also disgraced the pages of the Guardian and NME, often depicting musician Nick Cave as the no-good chain-smoking “Doctor Cave.” Or meat-is-murder crusader Morrissey, looking forward to devouring a plate of bloody entrails topped with a skinned animal head—one fixated dead eyeball staring right at you because, even though it’s dead, it is as confused about this fucking situation as you are. 

Does this mean Krent Able is a malapert of the highest order, here to provide us with “appallingly filthy” comic book tales full of mayhem, dicks, and death? Assuredly the answer to this question is yes, and knowing Krent’s Second Coming is coming is great news indeed. As a graphic novel enthusiast (amusingly, my last was 2017’s Nick Cave: Mercy on Me), and proud owner of Big Book Of Mischief, I can safely say The Second Coming of Krent Able will be chock full of vitriolic comics which will disgust and delight you at the same time. If you enjoy subversive subject matter, I’m sure you will enjoy looking at some NSFW images from Able’s forthcoming book, courtesy of the artist himself. If you’d like to learn more about Able, check out the engrossing, award-winning short documentary, Ink, Cocks, & Rock ‘N’ Roll (2017) which will give you yet another reason to appreciate the artist and his ultra-salacious take on satire.

The Second Coming of Krent Able is due out in the UK and U.S. on December 13th, 2018. Signed copies of the book can be pre-ordered here.
 

The not-so-good Doctor Cave by Krent Able.
 

William Burroughs and his creepy pal.
 

 
Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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11.19.2018
01:54 pm
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Marlon Brando and Harry Dean Stanton in drag, directed by David Lynch: It almost happened
06.26.2018
10:43 am
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David Lynch has a new memoir out named Room to Dream, and it looks fantastic. He co-wrote it with journalist Kristine McKenna. Lynch also did the audiobook, which is great news because that means we now have fifteen or so more hours of Lynch saying “bladder” and “pretentious bullshit” and other interesting words.

In the book Lynch tells a story about a movie script that he generated with Robert Engels around 1994 that never got made with the name Dream of the Bovine. Around the same time Engels co-wrote Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me with Lynch.
 

 
The things Lynch and Engels have said about this screenplay are really weird. Engels actually said of the script that it was about “three guys, who used to be cows, living in Van Nuys and trying to assimilate their lives.” For his part, Lynch has said of the project that it was “a really dumb, really stupid, meant-to-be-pitifully-bad-quality budget thing” and also that it was to be a “very stupid comedy.” On The City of Absurdity, a website devoted to Lynch, it is stated without attribution that the action of the movie “should take place in Paris 1911.”

In the new book Lynch discloses more about Dream of the Bovine in which we learn that Brando enjoyed mirth with tomatoes at every opportunity. The part about Brando’s conception of the project comes at the end.
 

Around that time I was also trying to get Dream of the Bovine going. Dream of the Bovine is sort of in the same realm as One Saliva Bubble in that they’re both about misunderstanding and stupidity, but One Saliva Bubble is more normal and is kind of a feel-good movie. Dream of the bovine is an absurd comedy. The script needs a lot of work, but there are things in it that I really like. Harry Dean and I went up to talk to Marlon Brando about the two of them doing it together, but Brando hated it. He looked me and I and said, “It’s pretentious bullshit,” and he started telling us about these cookies made out of grass that grows in salt water that he wanted to promote. Then he told us about a car he wanted to build that had this bladder underneath that would cook this grass and make fuel, like the car would digest the grass. You could never tell if Marlon was putting you on or he was serious.

The thing about Marlon was, he just didn’t give a shit about anything. Every business has bad behavior going on, but there’s something about this business, with all the egos and lies and backstabbing, that makes you want to do something else rather than be in it. For sure, if anybody had that feeling it was Brando. He played the game for a while, then he couldn’t do it anymore because it made him sick, and he’d reached a point where he just wanted to have fun. In a weird way I think he was having fun, too, and it was fun talking to him. This was around the time he went on The Larry King Show and kissed Larry King.

He came here to the house a couple of times. One time he came up here by himself––I guess he’d driven himself––and he came in big, you know, just being Brando in this house. It made me a little nervous because I didn’t know why he was here or what we were going to do. I figured I’d make him a coffee, but right after he got here he says, “So, you got anything to eat?” I thought, Oh my God, but I said, “Marlon, I don’t know, let’s go look.” There was one tomato and one banana in the kitchen and he said, “Okay, that will do,” so I got him a plate and a knife and fork and we sat down and started talking. Then he says, “You got any salt?” So he was salting the tomato and cutting it up and eating it while we were talking. Then Mary came over with Riley, and Brando says, “Mary, give me your hand, I want to give you a gift,” so she put her hand out. He’d made a little ring out of the Del Monte sticker that had been on the tomato and he slipped it onto her finger.

Marlon was dressing in drag now and then during that period, and the thing Marlon really wanted to do was dress up as a woman and have Harry Dean dress up as a woman, and the two of them would have tea together and ad-lib while they were drinking tea. Think about that. It would’ve been fucking incredible! All I’d have to do is turn the camera on, but Marlon chickened out. It would drive me nuts. He should’ve done it!

 
More after the jump…...

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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06.26.2018
10:43 am
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David Lynch’s memorably pointless comic strip ‘The Angriest Dog in the World’
05.16.2018
11:31 am
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It was hiding in plain sight, and yet it was almost designed not to be noticed at all. For several years from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, an experimental four-panel comic strip conceived and written by David Lynch ran in a handful of alt-weeklies under the title “The Angriest Dog in the World.” If you were the type of person who might have been flipping through the Los Angeles Reader or the New York Press or Creative Loafing or the Baltimore City Paper around 1987, you surely remember the peculiarly unfunny strip with the never-changing image of a tiny, spermatozoa-esque pooch straining at his lead in which the deadpan resolution was almost always a transitional nighttime image of the same godforsaken yard. 

It is said that Lynch came up with the idea for the strip during the long gestation period for Eraserhead in the early to mid-1970s, but it was only after the prominent releases of The Elephant Man and Dune that Lynch was able to convince anyone to run the strip. James Vowell, founding editor of the L.A. Reader, was the first publisher to bite. Vowell told SPIN in 1990 that Lynch drew the template for the strip a single time and sent it on, and after that it was the task of David Hwang, the alt-weekly’s art director, to receive the dialogue for each new installment from Lynch himself or Lynch’s assistant Debbie Trutnik, and draw the new dialogue on a piece of wax paper that was then superimposed over the strip’s template. (It’s noticeable that the handwriting in the captions changes over time, but I don’t know if that represents the input of different people or what.)

“The Angriest Dog in the World” had a memorable intro text, which was presented at the start of every installment:
 

The dog who is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can just barely growl. Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis.

 
The dog itself never did anything but growl, while whatever “action” there could be said to occur emanated from inside the house. Speech bubbles indicate the existence of human beings named “Bill,” “Sylvia,” “Pete,” who were apparently fond of trading street jokes creaky enough to make Henny Youngman himself die of embarrassment. A typical example runs:
 

Person A: Bill…. Monopoly jam?
Bill: What the hell is that?
Person A: They say it’s a game preserve.

 
Other times the strip veered into non sequitur, with pronouncements such as “It must be clear even to the non-mathematician that the things in this world just don’t add up to beans.” The introduction of fiery panels apparently ignited by an unseen hand on the rightward side of the strip did liven things up in a suitably apocalyptic register.
 

 
The evidence on the matter of the strip’s popularity was decidedly mixed. SPIN stated that in a 1989 survey, 20% of New York Press readers selected “The Angriest Dog in the World” as their least favorite feature, but when the Baltimore City Paper asked its readers what they thought a few years earlier, the outcome was 5 to 1 in favor of keeping it. In the mid-1980s an enterprising parodist named Jeff Murray aptly skewered Lynch as “The Laziest Cartoonist in the World.” 

In their volume on the director, Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc described “The Angriest Dog in the World” as “a masterpiece of minimalist cartoon writing,” nailing its appeal thus:
 

The simple, black and white, harsh style of the strip, with its nervous, edgy lines and picket fence suburbia turned into a Dadaist battlefield, would later reflect the look of his animated series Dumbland.

 
Oh right: if you haven’t heard about Dumbland, you really owe yourself a peek.

Lynch has always had a knack for writing against type, if you will: his “dramas” are consistently crammed with amusing and odd bits of business, and here, in what is ostensibly a vehicle for mirth, what you mainly get are stale punchlines and what must be apprehended as a considerable quotient of pain, no matter how ironically presented.

The meditating master of misdirection is notoriously hard to pin down on any subject, but David Breskin managed to get a straight answer out of the director in Inner Views, his charming book of interviews with famous directors:
 

Breskin: And what makes you the angriest dog in the world?
Lynch: Well, I had tremendous anger. And I think when I began meditating, one of the first things that left was a great chunk of that. I don’t know how it went away, it just evaporated.

Breskin: What was the anger like? Where did he come from?
Lynch: I don’t know where it came from. It was directed at those near and dear. So I made life kind of miserable for people around me, at certain times. It was really a bummer. Even though I knew I was doing it, there wasn’t much I could do about it when the thing came over me. So, anger––the memory of anger––is what does “The Angriest Dog.” Not the actual anger anymore. It’s sort of a bitter attitude toward life. I don’t know where my anger came from and I don’t know where it went, either.

 
The strips are difficult to find online, and those that are available are, for the most part, blurry and indistinct. To be honest, these self-consciously stupid strips are crying out to be collected in a book. Until that happens, we’ve presented a healthy collection below.

We’ll give the final word on the subject to Vowell, the strip’s very first patron, who once explained to Rob Medich of Premiere, “It’s just the same bad jokes. They’re really pretty dreadful. You can quote me. But they’re still fun. I think sometimes he tests to see what it would take for us to throw him out of the paper.”
 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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05.16.2018
11:31 am
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How they brought ‘The Elephant Man’ back to life

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It started with making false noses. Christopher Tucker was studying opera at drama school when he was asked to appear in a production of Rigoletto. He decided to give his character a noticeably larger hooter. He began fashioning different designs and discovered he liked making noses. That was when Tucker gave up Verdi and opera for a career as a makeup artist.

You may know the name, but if you don’t you will certainly know Tucker’s handiwork. He designed Mr. Creosote for Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life—“And finally, a wafer thin mint.” He came up with the designs for the lycanthropes in Neil Jordan’s werewolf fantasy The Company of Wolves. He also worked on Dune and even made an unfeasibly large prosthetic penis for porn star Long Dong Silver. Somewhere in among that lot you’re bound to have seen Tucker’s incredible craftsmanship.

He is best known, however, for his prosthetic makeup designs for David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, in which he recreated the severe deformities of Joseph Merrick, a man whose head was grossly enlarged and his body disfigured by an unknown disease—it is still a matter of debate as to the cause of Merrick’s illness. Because of his deformities, Merrick was exhibited as a freak in Victorian sideshows. The main problem for Tucker was not to make his designs look like “a cheap horror” but as “something approximating but not an exact clone of the ‘Elephant Man’.”

Lynch had originally planned to design the makeup for Merrick himself but the enormity of the task and his inexperience almost left the film without its “Elephant Man.” Eventually, Tucker was called in to rescue the movie and create its unforgettable makeup designs.
 
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Hurt as Joseph Merrick, or rather John Merrick as he is called in the film.
 
The late, great John Hurt was tasked with bringing Merrick to life on the screen. Hurt was one of those rare and subtle actors who brought tremendous sensitivity and humanity to each of his performances. He was one of those actors the press often “rediscovered” every so often—as they did after his performance as Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, or when he appeared as the deranged emperor Caligula in I, Claudius, or the broken, drug-addled Max in Midnight Express, or the vulnerability he brought to the doomed Stephen Ward in Michael Caton Jones’s film Scandal. But Hurt never really went away. He was consistently good in all of his roles, so good that the press took his quality of acting for granted, and only commented on his work when he was truly exceptional.
 
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Tucker’s photograph of Hurt as Merrick.
 
It took seven to eight hours in makeup for Hurt to become Merrick. It then took up to two hours to remove the fifteen layers of prosthetics Hurt wore. The designs for the “Elephant Man’s” head and limbs were taken directly from original casts of Merrick’s body kept at the Royal London Hospital. The long, laborious procedure of becoming Merrick led Hurt to quip: “I think they finally managed to make me hate acting.”

The BFI has a fascinating interview with Tucker about his designs for The Elephant Man which you can find here, while below, Tucker and Hurt discuss the process of bringing Merrick to life on the screen.
 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
David Bowie wows Broadway as ‘The Elephant Man’
‘The Elephant Man’: David Bowie on Broadway, 1980
‘Little Malcolm’: George Harrison’s lost film starring John Hurt and David Warner

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.24.2018
10:39 am
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Transcendental Meditation-inspired jewelry line designed by David Lynch
11.27.2017
09:11 am
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The Meditating Eye Color Infusion Expandable Necklace by David Lynch. A part of the jewelry collection the ‘Meditating Eye.’
 
Director David Lynch is so multi-talented it can often be challenging to keep up with his prolific work in film, TV, music, art and beyond. In October Lynch released the ‘Meditating Eye,’ a line of jewelry inspired by the practice of Transcendental Meditation (known as TM). Lynch has been a practitioner of TM for more than four decades. In 2005 he formed the David Lynch Foundation which promotes the use of TM to help people cope with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and stress-related trauma, and in 2007 he authored a book on the subject Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. Here’s an excerpt from the book in which Lynch speaks to the benefits of TM and its link to feeding artistic creativity he called “Catching Ideas”:

“Ideas are like fish.

If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.

Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.

I look for a certain kind of fish that is important to me, one that can translate to cinema. But there are all kinds of fish swimming down there. There are fish for business, fish for sports. There are fish for everything.

Everything, anything that is a thing, comes up from the deepest level. Modern physics calls that level the Unified Field. The more your consciousness-your awareness-is expanded, the deeper you go toward this source, and the bigger the fish you can catch.”

Right now and through the end of December 2018 Lynch’s online retailer pals at ALEX AND ANI are dontaing 20% of the purchase price of each piece from the Meditating Eye collection they sell to the David Lynch Foundation. Images of Lynch’s thought-provoking charitable jewelry (sold in either gold or siver tones) follow.
 

Men’s cuff.
 

Color infusion charm bangle.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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11.27.2017
09:11 am
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Behind the scenes with David Lynch on ‘Eraserhead’
11.09.2017
03:39 pm
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David Lynch and Jack Nance on the set of ‘Eraserhead’

I was reading a review of the new season of Twin Peaks in The New York Review of Books and came across an absolutely hilarious line about David Lynch I hadn’t seen before. The speaker is Mel Brooks, who (amazingly) hired Lynch to direct The Elephant Man on the strength of Eraserhead and an earlier short called The Grandmother. Brooks related that meeting Lynch in real life confounded his expectations: “I expected to meet a grotesque, a fat little German with fat stains running down his chin and just eating pork.” Instead he was confronted with a “clean American WASP kid ... like Jimmy Stewart thirty-five years ago.”

Looking for further context for the “fat little German” that never was caused me to go down a few Lynch wormholes dating back to the 1970s (the word wormhole is carefully chosen, because after all, this is also the man who directed Dune).

In their 1983 book Midnight Movies (which actually features Eraserhead as its cover image), J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum include the following exchange:
 

Hoberman: I’ve never seen a scholarly article on Eraserhead, have you?
Rosenbaum: No. It’s funny–-it’s almost as if it’s too perfect. Maybe in order to have an academic cult film it also has to be unhinged. Except what we are calling “unhinged” and “cult,” they’re calling “classic texts.”

 
Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that an 88-minute industrial-surrealist art film that played a major role in catapulting its director in the ranks of internationally renowned directors was not tossed off as an afterthought. On the contrary: the movie took nearly five years to make, the director actually lived on the set of the movie, and through his force of belief in the project was able to inculcate an almost cult-like mystique among the stalwart crew, who were hardly getting paid anything.
 

Lynch applies makeup on the face of Laurel Near, preparing to shoot a scene as the Lady in the Radiator
 
As fans of Lynch, we are very fortunate that a man named K. George Godwin attempted to document as much as he could about the making of Eraserhead before the coals had gotten too cold. In 1982 he published a detailed account of the years-long shoot called David Lynch and the Making of Eraserhead, which is available for you to read online. Most of the pictures in this post come from that book.

Sometime in the mid-1960s, Lynch, having informally studied art at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., and thinking of himself fundamentally as a painter, made serious plans to visit Europe for three years. Remarkably, he instantly felt out of his element in Europe and broke off the trip after just 15 days. He returned home. Lynch has said of this experience, “I didn’t take to Europe. ... I was all the time thinking, ‘This is where I’m going to be painting.’ And there was no inspiration there at all for the kind of work I wanted to do.”

Lynch had submitted his short movie The Alphabet to the American Film Institute for a grant, where it had won distinction because it was so unlike the other movies in that year’s grouping—in a technical sense, they could not group it with the other entries. He ended up getting grant money for a short, which was to become The Grandmother. After The Grandmother Lynch tried to get a grant at a new AFI-affiliated organization called the Center for Advanced Film Studies. He submitted a script called Gardenback.

At the same moment, a producer at 20th Century Fox expressed interest in turning Gardenback into a feature-length movie, the prospect of which ended up creating problems because the AFI had recently gotten burned on a student feature-length project In Pursuit of Treasure and was reluctant to fund a student for anything similar. Interestingly, Lynch’s scripts tended to be on the short side because of his own instinctive understanding to allow nonverbal “scenes” to stretch on indefinitely. AFI looked at his script for Eraserhead, which was only 21 pages long, and concluded that the final movie would be 21 minutes. To his credit, Lynch told them that he expected it to be much longer. AFI agreed to fund a movie lasting 42 minutes, exactly double the original estimate. (As mentioned, the final product would run 88 minutes.) The funding for the movie amounted to $10,000. Actually, Frank Daniel, the dean of the AFI, threatened to resign if the funding for the movie were to be rejected. Obviously, he got his way.
 

In a scene cut from the movie, Henry, searching for a vaporizer to ease the suffering of the baby, opens a drawer and finds vanilla pudding and peas instead
 
Amazingly, the initial projections for the shoot were for a few weeks, approximately six weeks. The shoot ended up taking more than four years. The movie was shot on some disused stables that belonged to AFI, where Lynch also lived. Lynch’s close friend Jack Fisk, a well-regarded production designer and art director who met Sissy Spacek on the set of Badlands and married her soon after, appears in Eraserhead as the Man in the Planet. He and Spacek donated money to keep the movie afloat, as did Jack Nance’s wife Catherine Coulson, who was working as a waitress. Coulson, a production assistant on Eraserhead, many years later achieved fame as the Log Lady on Twin Peaks. For a while Lynch supported himself by delivering the Wall Street Journal, which paid $48.50 a week.

During the shoot, it can be fairly said that Lynch mesmerized his crew somewhat with his commitment to his artistic vision. Elmes tells of coming on board several months in because of the untimely death of the original director of photography, Herb Cardwell:
 

Everybody knew where everything was and what everything was and how David worked—what to do and what not to do. So I went into it the way I normally would, which is to, in a very quiet way, take charge of what needs to be done and to do it myself. In the case of Eraserhead I really had to do it myself because there was nobody else to tell to do it. We were doing a closeup of the baby and David had looked through the camera and lined it up and it was all ready to go. And I went over to the table and I moved this little prop over so that it was not hidden so much by something else. And Catherine turned to me and said, “Fred, we don’t move things on that table.” And I said, “Well, it’s just that it was blocked and I wanted to see it more clearly.” And she said, “Well, David has never moved anything on the table.” So I put it back. ... Heaven forbid David should see!

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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11.09.2017
03:39 pm
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David Lynch recites Captain Beefheart’s ‘Pena’
07.20.2017
09:09 am
Topics:
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Don Van Vliet, ‘Crepe and Black Lamps’ (via beefheart.com)
 
Among the treasures stored on Magic Band alumnus Gary Lucas’ Soundcloud is this recording of David Lynch reading “Pena” from Trout Mask Replica.

The director, who also appears in Anton Corbijn’s short movie about Beefheart, Some YoYo Stuff, recorded “Pena” for a Beefheart tribute show Lucas put on at the NYC Knitting Factory in 2008.

“Three little burnt scotch taped windows.” Where Antennae Jimmy Semens shrieks “Pena” like it’s his last words at the gallows, Lynch’s measured recitation lets you picture every image. They could come from one of his own paintings:

Pena
Her little head clinking
Like uh barrel of red velvet balls
Full past noise
Treats filled ‘er eyes
Turning them yellow like enamel coated tacks
Soft like butter hard not t’ pour
Out enjoying the sun while sitting on
Uh turned on waffle iron
Smoke billowing up from between her legs
Made me vomit beautifully
‘n crush uh chandelier
Fall on my stomach ‘n view her
From uh thousand happened facets
Liquid red salt ran over crystals
I later band-aided the area
Sighed
Oh well it was worth it
Pena pleased but sore from sitting
Chose t’ stub ‘er toe
‘n view the white pulps horribly large
In their red pockets
“I’m tired of playing baby,” she explained

Listen after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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07.20.2017
09:09 am
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Former Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain’s strange obsession with ‘Twin Peaks’


A tweet from former presidential candidate Herman Cain’s official Twitter page from Monday, July 17th, 2017.
 
A friend of mine hipped me to the weird tweets coming from idiotic 2012 presidential candidate and Fox News “personality” Herman Cain. It appears that over the last five or so days Cain has been tweeting images from David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks along with short rants.

If you’ve successfully blocked memories of Mr. Cain out of your mind, let me help you with that. This is the same guy that once referred to strategic U.S. ally Uzbekistan as “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan” so it’s probably not all that surprising that his Twitter account would be a bit unhinged. However, this new stuff seems a bit nutty even for Cain. I mean, he even went so far as to post a photo of Morning Joe‘s Joe Scarborough next to a picture of John Nance in character from Eraserhead. What are you doing Herman Cain? I don’t know if I should get behind this or get to the bottom of it. Perhaps some of our more investigative-minded DM readers will be able to figure out the meaning of these strange dispatches. For now, I’ll leave you to check out screenshots of Cain’s Twin Peaks related tweets below and after the jump…
 

July 18th, 2017.
 

July 17th, 2017.
 

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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07.18.2017
07:03 pm
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Stunning stills, movie posters and lobby cards from David Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’
07.18.2017
11:35 am
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A fantastic movie poster for ‘Blue Velvet’ by Italian artist Enzo Sciotti.
 
I found the movie poster pictured above for 1986’s Blue Velvet, by Italian artist Enzo Sciotto, so inspiring that I decided to write this post just so I had an excuse to showcase it for you. If for some reason you’ve never seen Blue Velvet, I hope this will help convince you to change that as quickly as possible—though I’ll warn you that after watching the film for the first time, you might not be so eager to answer your front door for quite a while, even if it’s just the pizza delivery guy because in your mind it very well might be “Frank Booth,” the beyond sinister character masterfully played by Dennis Hopper in the film. For those who have seen Blue Velvet, you are probably reminded of the movie anytime you see a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. There is an abundance of trivia and folklore associated with Blue Velvet that is as fascinating as the movie itself, some of which I was unaware of before I took this deep dive into the Lynch classic today.

So since we were just talking about good-old Heineken-hating Frank, let’s start with some tidbits regarding Hopper’s experience on the film. Blue Velvet was the first time Hopper and ethereal actress Isabella Rossellini had ever worked together. Their relationship in the film is complicated, to say the least, and Hopper’s character was charged with subjecting Rossellini’s character to some pretty awful stuff including a horrific rape scene. Unbeknownst to Hopper, when it came time to shoot that particular scene, Rossellini was completely naked under another object of Frank’s affection, her blue velvet robe. When Hopper finally opens Rossellini’s robe he got an unexpected eyeful of the gorgeous actress and her lady parts which left the seemingly unshakeable Hopper rather stunned.

Another interesting piece of trivia concerning Hopper’s portrayal of Booth is his excessive use of the word “fuck” and its many variations in nearly every line of his dialog resulting in more than 50 “fucks” (55 in total I believe) coming from Hopper himself exclusively.
 

A French lobby card for ‘Blue Velvet.’
 
According to Hopper, David Lynch himself would never utter the four-letter word, choosing instead to simply point to the word in the script instructing him to say “that word.” Lynch would later somewhat dispute the claim by the newly sober Hopper who used to snort a terrifying amount of coke which he washed down with 28 beers and a bottle of rum on a daily basis before he went into detox. And yeah, I just dropped another Blue Velvet bombshell—Dennis Hopper was booze and drug-free for the first time in a very long time while playing Frank Booth—a frenzied drug addict with a penchant for PBR and murder.

Lastly, if you’ve ever wondered what exactly was streaming through Booth’s oxygen mask, the details about that are also quite compelling. Lynch’s vision for further mythologizing the character of Frank Booth involved altering Booth’s voice to reinforce the concept that he would regress to, at times, a child-like persona while huffing an unidentified “drug” through his gas mask. To do this, Lynch wanted to have Hopper inhale a bunch of helium through the mask so he sounded like a deranged version of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Hopper made a sage recommendation based on his not-so-long-ago drug days saying that using amyl nitrite (a drug used to treat chest pain) would help enhance the sexual energy of the scene. Lynch agreed and the result is one of the most savage and unhinged moments in movie history. Though Hopper had been warned by Hollywood insiders and his agents to run away from the role, the actor would correctly refer to the part as “a fucking dream, man.” Beautiful. Rossellini was also concerned about her role being too “risky” but immediately identified with her character saying that she saw a woman who was totally “victimized,” who had lost all her “rationality” and was left with “only emotions.”

Another point of interest concerning the film, and one some of you may already be aware of, is the fact that David Lynch and Isabella Rossellini developed a serious romantic relationship while filming Blue Velvet. The two spent four years together and were engaged to be married, though they would part ways shortly after the premiere of another one of Lynch’s films, 1990’s Wild At Heart in which Rossellini played the blonde ex-girlfriend of Nicolas Cage’s character. Rossellini has gone on the record as saying that Lynch was the “big love of her life” and after he ended their love-affair she was “broken-hearted.” Another curious item of note regarding the role of Dorothy is that Lynch originally wrote the role for Deborah Harry who turned the part down because she was sick of playing “weirdos.” Wow. I’ve included some beautiful and rather brutal images from the film, from French lobby cards to stills, and a few intriguing movie posters for you to scroll through below. Most of them are NSFW. 
 

A Turkish movie poster for ‘Blue Velvet.’
 

Dennis Hopper as the demonic “Frank Booth” in ‘Blue Velvet.’
 

Director David Lynch looking into the “face” of an artificial Frank
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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07.18.2017
11:35 am
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Laser-cut jewelry based on ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ Siouxsie Sioux’s ‘eyes’ & other pop culture icons
06.19.2017
09:36 am
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A laser-cut image of actor Malcolm McDowell from ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ A triangular cameo and necklace by Fable & Fury.
 
Based in Seattle, Fable & Fury’s often gonzo wearable offerings run the gamut from necklaces with cameos of David Lynch and Vampirella to devilishly stylish takes on famous verbiage from Stanley Kubrick’s violent mindfuck, A Clockwork Orange. One such homage—derived from Anthony Burgess’ 1971 novel on which the film was based—includes the word “Devotchka” attached to a chain. The word, which means “young woman” is a part of the colorful fictional slang “Nadsat” created by Burgess himself which Kubrick incorporated into the film. Another great homage to the film by Fable & Fury designer Jennifer is her grim nod to “Alex DeLarge” (memorably played by actor Malcolm McDowell) and his prison number “655321” done in gleaming stainless steel. Nice.

Fable & Fury has been cranking out their bad-ass statement pieces for almost a decade and many of Jennifer’s pieces sell out quickly. The vast majority of the necklaces I’ve posted below run from $21 bucks to $32 or so depending on the style and material, and most are currently in stock at Fable & Fury’s online store.
 

 

 

Another clever reference to ‘A Clockwork Orange.’
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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06.19.2017
09:36 am
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‘Eraserhead’ fans, you’re going to want this silver vinyl soundtrack reissue
04.26.2017
09:12 am
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It’s been five years since Sacred Bones put out limited-issue box set reissue of the Eraserhead soundtrack, complete with tons of extras, the newly released track “Pete’s Boogie,” and so forth.

That product came in three pressings, all of which together totaled a good deal less than 3,000 copies, and today you’re lucky if you can score any of them for fifty bucks….. eighty is more like it. So if you’re looking to expand your LP collection with some primo and fucked-up ambient works composed by David Lynch and the movie’s sound designer, Alan R. Splet, you’ll be happy to hear that Sacred Bones has another pressing coming up this summer—this time on super-evocative silver wax.
 

 
Just as the earlier pressings did, this “limited deluxe edition” will include a 16-page booklet, three 11-by-11-inch prints, and a limited-edition Peter Ivers 7-inch A-side of the single “In Heaven” with an Ivers recording, “Pete’s Boogie,” as the B-side. As DM readers no doubt remember, Peter Ivers was a very interesting fellow who was one of the guiding spirits behind the legendary Los Angeles TV show New Wave Theater but was unfortunately murdered in March 1983. As stated above, he composed “In Heaven (The Lady in the Radiator Song),” by far the most popular music from Eraserhead that was ever covered by the Pixies (and Tuxedomoon).

The release date is June 16 and you can pre-order it on Amazon right now for $39.98. This is some of the creepiest “music” ever recorded, so get on it!
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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04.26.2017
09:12 am
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In heaven, everything is funky fresh: David Lynch’s dance mix of the ‘Eraserhead’ soundtrack
03.30.2017
09:05 am
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People used to approach me about my Eraserhead T-shirt in the nineties; I suppose that was part of the reason for owning an Eraserhead T-shirt. A staggering percentage of them were men in record stores who wanted to tell me about drug experiences they’d had with the Eraserhead soundtrack in college (short version: “It was like AAAAAAHHHH!!!”), drug experiences they’d induced in a tripping roommate with the album’s aid, or some variation on this theme. No one had a word to say about whooshing, hissing, or gushing, much less about Fats Waller, Peter Ivers, or Alan R. Splet. I came to understand that, if there were others like me who listened to the record for pleasure, they were not the gregarious sort of people who strike up conversations with strangers in record stores.
 

 
Around the millennium, Lynch and sound engineer John Neff worked on a number of projects together, one of which was their band BlueBOB (whose “Thank You, Judge” was an example of high-quality streaming video at the time). Another was a “restored” CD of the Eraserhead soundtrack released on Lynch’s Absurda label in 2001. “Eraserhead Soundtrack cleaned with Waves Restoration-X Plugins for ProTools treated with the Aphex 204 Aural Exciter,” the liner notes explained.

Listen after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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03.30.2017
09:05 am
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Tuxedomoon, Cult With No Name & John Foxx make music inspired by ‘Blue Velvet’


 
In 1985 a German photographer named Peter Braatz traveled to North Carolina and ended up filming a good deal of behind-the-scenes footage of the making of one of the best movies of the 1980s, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Diverging from what most people would have done, I’d say, Braatz declined to make a regular documentary and opted instead to make a free-standing work of art called “No Frank in Lumberton”—we wrote about it a while back.

In late 2015, as part of its “Made To Measure” series, Brussels-based label Crammed Discs put out an “original soundtrack” composed by Tuxedomoon and Cult With No Name for the documentary Blue Velvet Revisited, a more recent reworking that Braatz forged from his original footage. In 2013 and 2014 Braatz came to realize that the contributions of Cult With No Name and Tuxedomoon would complement his images perfectly—in short order an agreement was made for the two groups to create a “joint soundtrack.”

Of the collaboration, Braatz commented:
 

In July 2013 I first heard the album ‘Above as Below’ by Cult With No Name. As the song ‘As Below’ came on I immediately had the idea to use it for my ‘Blue Velvet Revisited’ project, and to edit a trailer to the track that would showcase my footage.

...

I was keen to hand over the making of the soundtrack to one group of musicians, particularly as much of my film would have no dialogue. The soundtrack would need to carry the feel of ‘As Below’ throughout. Erik Stein revealed to me that the amazing trumpet part on ‘As Below’ was played by Luc Van Lieshout of Tuxedomoon, a group I also knew well and greatly admired. Because it was the trumpet part that I found so perfect, we soon pitched the idea of a joint soundtrack between Cult With No Name and Tuxedomoon.


 
Later on Braatz added a track by John Foxx, the original lead singer of Ultravox. Originating in the Bay Area, Tuxedomoon were one of the most important and influential bands of the post-punk movement. Self-described “post-punk electronic balladeers” Erik Stein and Jon Boux collaborate as Cult With No Name.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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12.23.2016
01:22 pm
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John Malkovich reenacts some of David Lynch’s most iconic characters
10.10.2016
10:19 am
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Late last week PlayingLynch.com unlocked all their videos of John Malkovich recreating some of David Lynch’s most iconic characters. The Log Lady, Special Agent Dale Cooper, Mystery Man from Lost Highway, the Lady in the Radiator, Frank Booth, Henry Spencer and even Lynch himself.

Directed by Sandro Miller, the series of vingettes are excellent and I suggest you go to PlayingLynch.com to watch them all. I added the Eraserhead video, below, to give you a taste of what’s in store for you.


 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Tara McGinley
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10.10.2016
10:19 am
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