David Lynch is a groundbreaking filmmaker, but he’s also maintained a lifelong studio practice as a visual artist producing paintings, prints, sculpture and photography. David Lynch: The Factory Photographs made a selection of Lych’s snaps available in book form in 2014. Lynch also published a book of photos of melting snowmen seven years earlier. The subjects of Lynch’s industrial landscapes were familiar to fans of the director’s last feature film, Inland Empire. That said, industrial spaces show up in the director’s other movies like Blue Velvet. Blue Velvet is also noted for its dark eroticism and shocking use of nudity, and in his latest photographs Lynch turns his attention to the female form in a manner that speaks to both the director’s earlier pictures as well as his filmography.

There’s a documentary about Lynch’s early films, music and paintings called Pretty As A Picture. Lynch has gifted movie audiences with some of the most memorable frames in the past 40 years of American film, but I wouldn’t call the director’s images “pretty.” Strange, surreal, disturbing, beautiful — Lynchian images undulate with deep, broad implications, inspiring the same in their descriptors. That said, Lynch’s photography is mostly a formal affair about lines and gestures, and blacks and whites whether his subjects are factory or feminine.

David Lynch’s factory photographs feature crisscrossing staircases, the looming angles of electrical towers, the spiral cycles of barbed wire looping across the top of a perimeter fence, shadowy exteriors silhouetted in golden hour light. There are senses of solitude captured in the massive interior spaces Lynch lenses, and the stillness he captures in his un-populated industry-scapes sometimes sacralizes his smokestacks and ritualizes his razor wire. But, mostly, I like these as damn fine photographs of sites most artists wouldn’t document.

Nude women are exactly the opposite of something most wouldn’t document. Female forms are art’s most prevalent subjects but Lynch’s take is mostly more stylized than sexy, more studied than smutty. There’s nothing about these photographs that smacks of pornography, but their not strict, stuffy pictures either. These hips and elbows and thighs and breasts are still meditations on line and light, and the black and white pictures in this volume clearly belong to the same eye behind those shadowy sheds and sunlit loading docks.

Among the more formal black and white photos occasional images suddenly channel the otherworldly frames found in Lynch’s films — a snap of a solitary cloud of light-filled smoke floating above a living room couch comes to mind. But the artist’s photos resemble his films most when Lynch opts for color images and gives us crimson finger nails, ruby red lips and open mouths full of cigarette smoke. These images are all cast in orange and yellow like Lynch lit his models with a bonfire, and the book’s center section of heavy glossy printed pages reads like stills from scenes cut from Wild at Heart (1990).

Here are some images from the book…

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Last week we lost Harry Dean Stanton. Stanton was one of those character actors who never played the dashing leading hero or achieved cinema sweetheart status. But Stanton’s body of work over about a half century of acting gathered together the kind of gravitas that swirls around true artists of the screen, and it’s a kind of poetic coincidence that Stanton takes his leave so shortly after Sam Shepard, the screenwriter of Stanton’s masterpiece, also exited this stage. Here’s the actor talking about Paris, Texas in an interview in The Guardian from back in 2013…

There is indeed a peculiar kind of sadness about Harry Dean Stanton, a mix of vulnerability, honesty and seeming guilelessness that has lit up the screen in his greatest performances. It’s there in his singing cameo in 1967′s prison movie Cool Hand Luke, in his leading role in Alex Cox’s underrated cult classic Repo Man in 1984 and, most unforgettably, in his almost silent portrayal of Travis, a man broken by unrequited love in Wim Wenders’s classic, Paris, Texas. “After all these years, I finally got the part I wanted to play,” Stanton once said of that late breakthrough role. “If I never did another film after Paris, Texas I’d be happy.”

Now, with mortality beckoning, Stanton still gives off the air of someone who, as he puts it, “doesn’t really give a damn”. In his room in a hip hotel on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the aircon is on full blast despite his runny nose and troubling cough, and he smokes like a train as if oblivious to the law and the health police. He looks scarecrow thin, but dapper, in his western suit, embroidered shirt and ornately embossed cowboy boots: a southern dandy even in old age. His hearing is not so good, but his voice remains unmistakable, that soft trace of his southern upbringing in rural Kentucky still detectable. “I’ve worked with some of the best of them,” he says. “Not just directors like Sam Peckinpah and David Lynch, but writers like Sam Shepard and singers like Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson. I could have made it as a singer, but I went with acting, surrendered to it, in a way.”

Here’s Stanton as a youngster in the cult classic 92 in the Shade (1975)….

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There’s no telling which big tent movie might own the summer, but David Lynch has definitely owned the spring — the new Twin Peaks series is confounding viewers and sparking debate online, and Nashville fans of the man were recently treated to an expansive Lynch retrospective at the Belcourt Theatre. In the middle of all this it’s easy to forget that Lynch’s debut feature, Eraserhead, is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.

Here are a few words about the Eraserhead screening that I wrote for my coverage of the Belcourt’s Lynch retrospective in my weekly film column for The Contributor…

David Lynch’s debut feature influenced everyone from Stanley Kubrick to the Coen Brothers while throwing back to the naturalistic horrors of the Grand Guinol theater of 19th century Paris. Eraserhead is the most purely surrealistic film in Lynch’s oeuvre. The black-and-white movie has a timeless look, and while themes about abortion and the fear of intimacy occasionally surface, Eraserhead is an underwater dream of a film that announced Lynch as a director who was equally obsessed with the absolutely ordinary and the shockingly extraordinary.

Here’s the making of documentary, Eraserhead Stories. This version is slightly sped up and color shifted to avoid being taken down from YouTube, but the overall effect just makes it even weirder…

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I’ve been seeing a lot of old David Lynch posts popping up as Facebook “Memories” lately, and I was reminded that we’re still celebrating the 30th anniversary of that strange, sad, scary and sensational film, Blue Velvet. It looks like we’ll be getting a new doc about Lynch and his visual art practice soon, but now’s a great time to re-watch Blue Velvet. As a teaser here’s a great little conversation about the film, the Twin Peaks series, and Pussy Riot between Lynch and Patti Smith…

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This year we celebrate the 30th anniversary of David Lynch’s surreal skewering of suburbia, Blue Velvet. A 2002 documentary illuminated that story’s darkest shadows. Here’s IndieWire with the word…

The 70-minute-long, 2002 documentary The Mysteries Of Love dives deep into the 1986 film, with interviews with key members of the creative team, including Lynch himself, along with Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern, and Dennis Hopper. It has some great insight into how the film came to be, both in terms of the financing and in the creative origins, as well as some great Lynch anecdotes from the actors, almost all revolving around Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank. The doc also talks about the use of nudity, the first reaction from producers and test audiences, and much more. This is one Lynch fans have to watch.

Here’s The Mysteries of Love…

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Sam Weber’s paintings supply the gorgeous illustrations in the Folio Society’s new edition of Dune. Go to http://sampaints.com/2015/02/02/dune/

This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the novel Dune. I’ve been following the remembrances the book is getting in the form of online articles and new releases, and I wanted to share a couple of recent favorite discoveries connected to Dune‘s half-century birthday.

The Folio Society has released a gorgeous version of Dune complete with a slipcase and gorgeous illustrations. This post’s title image is from the book. Click the link above to go to the Folio Society’s page and check out all the details of this wonderful celebration of the book’s first half-century.

Of course, talk of the Dune book automatically reminds me of the Dune movie/movies and I’ve been trolling YouTube watching lots of docs/interviews/retrospectives about the David Lynch film of the story. Here’s a cool remembrance featuring movie critics that gave the movie positive reviews despite the general skewering Lynch and his movie received upon its initial release.

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Perhaps it’s just the coming, new Twin Peaks season, but it seems that all things Northwestern, surreal and Lynchian are in the air. The most recent iteration of this wave before the flood is a recent article by Leigh Anderson which collates instances of the series appearing in video game mode…

It sure is a boom time for the odd intersection of Twin Peaks with video games. There are game-y reimaginings everywhere, and a few commercial projects in recent years pay tribute to David Lynch’s 90s mystery television: 2010′s janky but beloved Deadly Premonition went heavy on the similarities, for example. In the just-released first episode of Life is Strange, set dreamily in the Pacific Northwest, a main character’s vehicle bears the license plate “TWN PKS”.

The 1990s make a good setting in general for modern games with unconventional goals. The trend toward creating more laid-back, sentimental experiences of reading and discovery — like the nostalgic Riot Grrrl story the Portland-based Fullbright Company told in Gone Home — means lots of developers might be seeking settings where physical technology (tapes, notebooks, VHS), ripe for rifling through, intersects with poignant generational angst.

I track my young adulthood through the 1990′s and I can’t think of a better summing-up of the slacker/bohemian culture of Generation X than trying to play “modern games with unconventional goals.” Twin Peaks still appeals to my generation because it still resonates with the weird idealism of that era, and it continues to win fans because, well, we were really on to something.

Or not. Agent Cooper would never fall for the straitjacket of belief and neither will I. The spice must flow.

The Welcome to Twin Peaks site has a great breakdown on the gameplay including this anxiety inducing description that left me reaching for my joystick…

A day in the FBI was never like this before! You are Special Agent Dale Cooper and you’ve found yourself trapped inside of the Black Lodge, a surreal and dangerous place between worlds.

Try as you might, you can’t seem to find anything but the same room and hallway no matter which way you turn. Worse yet, your doppelganger is in hot pursuit! You have no choice but to keep running through the room and hallway (or is it more than one?) and above all else, don’t let your doppelganger touch you! Your extensive physical training in the FBI will provide you a seemingly limitless supply of energy to run as long as necessary, but running out of breath is the least of your worries!

I don’t have an Atari 2600 anymore and this game was never actually available as a cartridge as it wasn’t produced until 2011. That said, the game master, Jak Locke, recreates vintage gameplay here while simultaneously immersing players in a thoroughly disorienting tour of Twin Peaks’s alternative reality.

Here’s a video from inside the Black Lodge…

Read the rest of the article and download the game for yourself at the Welcome to Twin Peaks link above…

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This year we celebrate the 25th anniversary of my favorite David Lynch film, Wild at Heart. Released in 1990, Wild tells the tale of Sailor and Lula, a red-hot couple who are reunited when Sailor is released from prison. The pair take off on a cross-country road trip that turns into a journey that resembles The Wizard of Oz on mushrooms. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival before becoming mired in controversy. The movie’s opening scene finds Sailor (Nicolas Cage)smashing the head of a would-be attacker hired by Lula’s (Laura Dern) mother against a marble stair step until his brains slurp out of the back of his head. Commentators claimed to be shocked by the scene — and they probably were — but the reaction against the film seemed to have more to do with the overall violence of the bizarre imagery and strange set scenes that make up this weird and wonderful tale.

Here’s an interview with Lynch, talking about the film in 1990…

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In 1963, William S. Burroughs wrote down his photographic manifesto: “Take. Rearrange. Take.” For Burroughs, photography wasn’t an art form so much as it was a weapon he employed to disrupt time.

Ideas about the interactions between time, space, words and images will be familiar to any reader of Burroughs’ works, but it’s less likely that those same readers will recognize the camera-created images on display in Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs. Published by Photographers’ Gallery of London and Prestel, the book is co-edited by Particia Allmer and John Sears who curated a show of Burroughs photographs at Photographers’ Gallery earlier this year. The new book also features an essay by erstwhile Beat biographer Barry Miles.

The Taking Shots title refers directly to Burroughs’ no-nonsense approach to the camera, but also to the artist’s famous addictions to heroin and guns. Among Burroughs’ visual creations, his shotgun paintings are much more familiar than these pictures, but his collaged images created by re-photographing arrangements of photographs often burst and scatter with the same energy.

The book and exhibition both premiered during this year’s centenary celebration of the author’s birth and there’s not a better memorial for Burroughs’ work than this remarkable collection of images which reminds us that we’re still catching with this hombre invisible.

Burroughs’ show at Photographers’ Gallery hung alongside an exhibition of factory photographs by filmmaker David Lynch. David Lynch: The Factory Photographs is also a Prestel publication and this is the first time I’ve tried to name my favorite art book of the year only to be torn between offerings from the same publisher.

Lynch has been documenting empty, unpopulated factory interiors and industrial landscapes for decades and the book collects 80 images captured by the artist between 1980 and 2000. Fans of Lynch’s films won’t be surprised at his ability to evoke surreal and ominous moods from these mundane spaces and the gorgeous black-and-white images directly invoke the poetic light and shadows of the director’s haunting early features like Eraserhead and The Elephant Man.

Before Lynch went to Hollywood he was primarily a painter. Here, his modernistic compositions recast walls and pipes, staircases and boilers into adroit abstractions that recall the lines and grids of Mondrian. Many of Lynch’s abandoned spaces have since been demolished, becoming the actual ghosts that the photographer only alludes to, and it’s odd that looking at an unnecessary silo or an inefficient generator might evoke the same emotions as staring at an ancient monument or the last buffalo, but that’s what Lynch captures here. I’m reminded of those yellow highway dividing lines zooming past the camera in Lost Highway: the faster they approach, the quicker they fade into the distance.

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Continuing with the scary October posts, and reveling in the announcement of the return of Twin Peaks, I found an example that distills the aesthetics of the original, providing a map back to the place where Laura Palmer and a beloved, bizarre television series were both killed.

While the mind reels at what David Lynch might do with a long form television series one is always uneasy when a beloved work of art gets a revisiting. I’d love to see the show re-invent itself — a lot of time has past since the last episode, and the hints that Kyle Maclachlan may be back for the new show, and the “25 Years Later” text in the series’ new lo-fi trailer, all necessitate a contemporary updating.

That said, fans also want Twin Peaks to feel like a familiar place, and they want the new season to feel like a continuation of the first two. Here’s the clip I found that boils down the nuances, techniques, actors, creators, places and characters that make this return a worthwhile one: breaking the fourth wall; the use of antiquated slang in place of contemporary profanity; sets that recall a timeless, mid-century America; an appearance by “David Finch,” “Laura” and a talking log; Diane’s tape recorder; suspenseful music, and a diner that serves “darn fine” pie.

Here is Sesame Street‘s darn fine version of Twin Beaks…

While most loved the first season, many loathed the second. Overall, I love the entire series thus far and I felt the end of the second season marked a return to form before its ill-timed end. I’d like to to see Lynch pick up the Wyndaham Earl storyline from the beginning as I never felt Earl got a chance to really show us the evil. Here’s looking forward to the darkest chapter of the story yet.

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