Ladydiode

David Lynch I knew David Lynch a little. Based on his work as an artist, I don’t know how anyone could claim to know him well, beyond blood relatives and his wife. Maybe wives. Movies are “public dreams” and no filmmaker wove dreams like Lynch. His name became an adjective and synonym for “dreamlike” or surreal. As the fires devoured the city that defined him he was dying. Lynchian. I asked him once in LA “Why do you like it here?” “The light.” He said. He wouldn’t put out the incessant cigarettes he smoked on his glazed concrete floors but just let them drop and burn out - “it marks them” he said. I’m not suggesting the whole city went ablaze as a result of his negligence but I reckon that Lynch’s death as a coda on those dreadful conflagrations helps us see them as epochal and epoch ending; the Hollywood of Lynch is gone. Lynch is gone. Trump is in office now and that very American “Jimmy Stewart from Mars” yet somehow “French” true auteur of Outpost Drive is dead as the embers smolder. Everything was art to him. I saw stalls he’d made, they were amazing. A lamp that blew my mind. Mad cartoons, demonic and full of droogish violence and toddler-carnality. I asked him what he thought enlightenment was and he drew me a picture. Seriously. He drew a picture of consciousness and how ideas emerge from some ulterior field of oneness. He enjoyed and accepted decay. Our mutual friend Bob Roth who runs his TM (transcendental meditation) foundation said “David is equally intrigued by every chapter of life. He’d be fascinated by a baby rabbit, an adult rabbit, a dead rabbit, a rabbit’s decomposing corpse.” He had an overview of life, an under-view of life, he was a True Artist. He said to me “If you fail while living by your principles as an artist you die once, if you fail while living by someone else’s you die twice.” David Lynch only died once.