slow down - - - - everything’s connected - - - - look around
Last week dUneMeancompetitor gave me a copy of the audiobook of David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. Now I re-gift it to you.
Here’s a sample clip I particularly like about Inland Empire:
The whole book is inspiring and convincing; we’re totally gonna Transcendentally Meditate with the cast every day of the Blondes in the Jungle shoot (March!!!). David Lynch reads the audiobook, and his calm, friendly, American voice goes a long way in making his case. Oddly, while only polite and pragmatic talking about meditation, he does get a bit dogmatic when it comes to the film vs DV debate. But that’s a minor complaint.
Enjoy!
L
BTW, have you seen Cowboy and the Frenchman? Do you LOVE it?!
Anonymous Said on January 8th, 2008 at 6:35 pm quote
lev I will hopefully have time to post more fully on this soon but I urge you to be skeptical about TM! I’ve been doing a bit of research, and urge you to read at least this, all the way through if you can, it’s just one account but it seems to ring true, and definitely makes the lynchian filmmaking logic make a hell of a lot more sense -
http://web.archive.org/web/20050309220336/www.trancenet.org/personal/kellet.shtml
L Said on January 8th, 2008 at 9:12 pm quote
Dear John, thanks a lot for the link. As you know, it’s hard for me to find contemporary filmmakers to look up to. So with the ones I do admire, I sometimes tend to suppress my critical faculties - and in this case that was a mistake. Hearing Lynch’s book, I didn’t realize that t.m. meant T.M.(tm). I understood transcendental as an adjective.
And yeah, Kellet’s piece does explain Lynch’s dogmatic stance against film stock as well as his annoying “scientific” justifications of TM.
On the other hand, I do suspect that most TM followers are of the relatively harmless/beneficial 2×20 type, and mitigate TM’s dogma with a healthy laziness and pluralism. This article puts TM’s history in Hollywood and its relationship with Lynch in perspective. And I think he honestly is suggesting a 2×20 kind of lifestyle in Catching…
The meditation we’ll be doing in La Ceiba will be whatever Oliver’s mother (casa verde ≠ green lodge?) deems best for us. See my correction above.
Anonymous Said on January 9th, 2008 at 12:20 am quote
fooled me too for a minute, I had ‘learn t.m.’ on my new year to-do list until I did a little research. of course most people are not super serious but I bet Lynch is deep in it in potentially fucked up ways - I mean doesn’t Bill Pullman’s psychotic break in Lost Highway (and or major parts of most of Lynch’s movies that I’ve seen) seem awfully similar to the ‘deep unstressing’ experiences described in the Kellet essay, with the headaches and heavy dissociation etc’? I was dismayed at first but I’m having some success in rationalizing it with my growing love for his stuff - how appropriate is it, how much sense does it make for him to make movies about how kindly small-town types and outward ‘peace’ conceal insanely disturbed worlds of inner torment etc, that is kind of who and what he is! I mean he is raising money to indoctrinate little kids in a dharma-esque personality cult from the ’60s! authentically fucked up!