Das Tagebuch Murnaus

WSB on current events.

2024-11-15T21:46:07Z

I was in Washington DC on election night, and the day after.
The general attitude was one of stunned grief.

Meanwhile, as the new Cabinet takes shape it appears we are in a William S. Burroughs routine come alive, for the second time.

https://youtu.be/AOhEkOLuyEU

Roosevelt after inauguration:

Immediately after the inauguration Roosevelt appeared on the White House balcony, dressed in the purple robes of a Roman Emperor and leading a blind, toothless lion on a gold chain, hog-called his constituents to come and get their appointments. The constituents rushed up, grunting and squealing like the hogs they were; men who had gone gray and toothless in the faithful service of their country were summarily dismissed in the grossest terms, like:

“You’re fired, you old fuck, get your piles out of here,” and in many cases thrown bodily out of their offices.

Hoodlums and riff-raff of the lowest caliber filled the highest offices of the land. When the Supreme Court overruled some of the legislation perpetrated by this vile route, Roosevelt forced that august body, one after the other on threat of immediate reduction to the rank of congressional lavatory attendants, to submit to intercourse with a purple-assed baboon so that venerable honored men surrendered themselves to the embraces of a lecherous, snarling simian while Roosevelt and his strumpet wife and veteran brown-nose Harry Hopkins, smoking a communal hookah of hashish, watched the immutable spectacle with cackles of obscene laughter. Justice Blackstaff succumbed to a rectal hemorrhage on the spot. Roosevelt only laughed and said coarsely,

“Plenty more where that came from.”

Hopkins, unable to contain himself, rolled on the floor in sycophantic convulsions saying over and over,

“You’re killin’ me chief! You’re killin’ me!”

Now Roosevelt then appointed the baboon to replace Justice Blackstaff, deceased. So henceforth the proceedings of the court were carried on with a screeching simian; shitting and pissing and masturbating on the table and not infrequently leaping on one of the justices and tearing him to shreds.

“He’s entering a vote of dissent”, Roosevelt would say with an evil chuckle.

The vacancies so created were invariably filled by simians, so that in the course of time the Supreme Court came to consist of nine purple-assed baboons. And Roosevelt, claiming to be the only one able to interoperate their decisions, thus gained control of the highest tribunal in the land.

Then Roosevelt gave himself over to such vile and unrestrained conduct as it is shameful to speak of. He instituted a series of contests, designed to promulgate the lowest acts and instincts of which the human species is capable. There was ‘The Most Unsavory Act Contest’, ‘The Cheapest Trick Contest’, ‘Molest-A-Child Week’, ‘Turn In Your Best Friend Week’, (professional stool-pigeons disqualified), and the coveted title of ‘All-Around Vilest Man of the Year’.

Roosevelt was compelled with such hate for the species as it is that he wished to degrade it beyond recognition.

“I’ll make those cocksuckers glad to mutate”, he would say, looking off into space as if seeking new frontiers of depravity.

So let us all scan the horizon for new frontiers of depravity; this is the space age, and we are here to go!

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Looky Looky!

2020-05-13T03:26:41Z

I got a box in the mail all the way from ljoveljy Ljubljana, Slovenia!

Oooooh, what's inside?

A note for me!

And what else? It's a pretty filled box....

It's my Laibach Revisited box set I ordered so long ago!
It's #11 of 1500 (that is, unless they are all numbered 11 of 1500, which is just what those Balkan jokers might do...)

A CD box with 3 CDs
- LAIBACH - the first album, from 1985, reissued (they could not use the band name so this appeared with no title, it is sometimes called "SKUC" after the company that released it)
- REVISITED – an album recorded in 2010 of new interpretations of songs from the first album
- UNDERGROUND - a live Laibach concert recorded in 2012 in the Velenje Coal Mines, 200 m underground
TERROR OF HISTORY – a 160-page book with 69 authentic Laibach linocuts and a long essay on Laibach, plus other texts
BOOKLET – a 36-page CD size booklet with historical photos and lyrics with translations
BADGE - a numbered recreation of the original metallic Laibach badge from 1982 in nickel finish (also numbered "11")
And a really nice T-shirt for extras!

Perhaps a bit of an indulgence but it goes with my other Laibach memorabilia.
There'll be some thumping on the old boombox tonight....

Sorry for bad images, I have been defeated by Dreamwidth's clunky interface that wouldn't accept its own HTML.

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Meme Again!

2020-04-11T21:43:15Z

I was looking through my old LJbook (your LJ blog made up into a large single PDF document, don't think you can get these made anymore but I did it not long before I finally left there) for something I wrote a long time ago, and it reminded me again how many q&A memes I did, and how I sort of communicated through them at a somewhat troubled time in my life.

But this one's for fun, yoinked from pal Sabs:

1. Are you an Essential Worker? No, I'm working from home. Don't really care for it.

2. How many drinks have you had since the quarantine started? None.

3. If you have kids... Are they driving you nuts? My kid is 25 and out, He worries about his health a lot, and caught a bad cold recently that he thought was the Plague, but he is back at work now. You never stop worrying about kids, but my main worry right now is that he keeps his job (working at a small manufacturing company). He's just getting started on his career, and now this nonsense.

4. What new hobby have you taken up during this? None, I had plenty to keep me busy before, and working from home has not given me a lot more spare time.

5. How many grocery runs have you done? Two.

6. What are you spending your stimulus check on? I'm still earning my regular income.

7. Do you have any special occasions that you will miss during this quarantine? I was supposed to go to Hawaii for the first time in my life in about two weeks! Also, all of the professional wargaming conferences I was planning to go to this year have been cancelled or moved, and the one big gaming convention I was planning on is not likely to be a go either.

8. Are you keeping your housework done? Ish? Lianne is cleaning everything, and then cleaning it again.

9. What movie have you watched during this quarantine? Lots of movies so far, but I like to watch movies anyway. New to me were Joker and It Part Two or whatever it's called. Also re-enjoyed were How to Get Ahead in Advertising, Tunes of Glory, Battle of Algiers, Repo Man, A Very British Coup, etc.

10. What are you streaming with? I have Netflix but don't watch it.

11. 9 months from now is there any chance of you having a baby? Mmmm, no!

12. What's your go-to quarantine meal? I've been cooking a lot of different things, one thing I've made a few times is roast chicken parts and potatoes on a sheet pan.

13. Is this whole situation making you paranoid? I was kind of rattled and worried the first week or two but I think that was a reaction to having my work routine disturbed; also I was very worried about my mom and sister, who would be killed pretty quickly by this virus if they got it but they seem to be OK so far. I'm getting more angry than paranoid about the stupid hand-lickers out there who have gotten tired of their brief spate of responsibility and are out there wandering around. It's a long weekend with nice sunny weather so I expect another spike of infections in about, oh, 8 days. Above all else, I am more than ever aware of just how privileged I am, in so many aspects.

14. Has your internet gone out on you during this time? No, thankfully. Cable boxes/PVRs are screwing up a bit which causes major domestic disruption (not to me).

15. What month do you predict this all ends? It won't. First wave should be receding by May, but there will be others.

16. First thing you’re gonna do when you get off quarantine? I will go back to working in the office. There's lots to do.

17. Where do you wish you were right now? Actually, this isn't bad right now, but I kind of resent the division I used to have between "day job work" and "home creative work", they are in the same place right now.

18. What free-from-quarantine activity are you missing the most? Eating in restaurants, I suppose, though I never did much of that before.

19. Have you run out of toilet paper and hand sanitizer? No.

20. Do you have enough food to last a month? We are victualled for a siege, verily.

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We are Living in JG Ballard's World

2020-04-11T21:03:28Z

Y'all know I love me some JG Ballard.

A very good piece from the New Statesman:

1 APRIL 2020

Why we are living in JG Ballard’s world

The visionary English novelist’s dystopian imagination, defined by cataclysmic events, quarantines and technological isolation, has never felt so prescient.

BY MARK O’CONNELL

There are certain writers who, once you’ve read them, forever take possession of some part of your experience of the world. If you’re enduring sustained exposure to a confoundingly complex bureaucracy? That’s Kafka. Going anywhere or doing anything or talking to anyone in Dublin? Joyce. Feeling bored and sort of fancily anxious and also for some reason harassed by the wind in Southern California? That would be Joan Didion, obviously. But the writer who owns the largest part of the world right now is JG Ballard. He might not be as great a writer as those just mentioned, but much of our present reality now falls within the jurisdiction of Ballard’s imagination.

Especially now that life is presided over by a lethal viral pandemic, it’s hard to even glance at the news without coming across a story that could be the result of some kind of Ballard-inspired role-playing exercise. A luxury cruiseliner quarantined in San Francisco bay, its well-heeled passengers confined to their cabins for weeks on end. Holidaymakers on lockdown at a quarantined hotel in Tenerife after an Italian doctor comes down with coronavirus. A world of isolated individuals rarely leaving their homes, keeping a wary distance from one another in public, communicating with their friends and loved ones via exclusively technological means. These situations are so Ballardian as to be in the realm of copyright infringement.

Ballard’s oeuvre is filled with enforced quarantines and self-isolations, with riots breaking out among the bored middle classes. His 1982 short story “Having a Wonderful Time” is narrated in the form of brief postcards from a young woman on holiday in the Canary Islands with her husband. As the cards progress over time, stretching out eventually over months, it becomes clear the Canaries have been converted by the governments of Western Europe into a kind of mass detention camp, where members of the managerial classes, for some unspecified reason no longer employable, are to live out their days in a state of suspended leisure. It’s hard to think about this story now without immediately picturing quarantined cruise ships and all those holidaymakers confined to their resorts, lounging by the pools in protective face masks.

His 1977 story “The Intensive Care Unit” takes place in a world where humans live their entire lives in contented isolation, interacting with others, even their own immediate families, solely via cameras and screens. It delineates a way of life that is both intolerable to consider and uncomfortably close to our present reality. The narrator has never encountered another human being in the flesh, living out his days in a kind of lavish and sophisticated Skinner Box. (“My own upbringing, my education and medical practice, my courtship of Margaret and our happy marriage, all occurred within the generous rectangle of the television screen.”)

The roots of this condition of maximal social distancing – this “archaic interdiction against meeting another human being” – are never clearly identified, but the narrator gestures at a context in which people have come to fear intimacy for reasons both psychological and, presumably, microbial. “As a child,” he tells us, “I had been brought up in the hospital crèche, and thus spared all the psychological dangers of a physically intimate family life (not to mention the hazards, aesthetic and otherwise, of a shared domestic hygiene).” He is, however, quick to forestall any suggestion that such a condition might be one of sadness or alienation. “On television I was never alone. In my nursery I played hours of happy games with my parents, who watched me from the comfort of their homes, feeding on to my screen a host of video games, animated cartoons, wildlife films and family serials which together opened the world to me.”

The story would have had obvious resonances with our contemporary culture even without the sudden catastrophic intervention of coronavirus, which has radically intensified the most alienating aspects of contemporary life. But now, at what seems like the dawn of a new age of human interaction, it feels almost unbearably prescient. There is a chilling moment halfway through when the narrator and his wife take the rash decision of meeting in real life, and she travels 30 miles across the city to visit his home. Needless to say, it all goes horribly wrong. Without the make-up everyone wears on camera all the time – a detail which anticipates the video chat masks people wear in David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest, as well as the present phenomenon of Instagram-specific make-up techniques – the couple seem to each other strange and wrong, and physically repulsive.

Once the whole family is brought together, the story devolves into an orgy of psychopathic violence. This was customary in Ballard’s work; in a sense, it was his great theme. His vision of the world was cheerfully bleak, and relentlessly anti-human: society as a thin and brittle construct that would always give way to a cruel and animalistic human nature. He was, as the Irish writer Rob Doyle puts it, “at heart a surrealist comedian and a perverse optimist: he wanted us to immerse in the destructive element, give free rein to the boundless psychopathology provoked by media technology.”

This theme of bourgeois psychopathy is most fully and effectively worked out in the 1975 novel High-Rise. The book is a coolly surreal depiction of a luxury apartment complex as it descends into surrealist chaos; the upper-middle-class residents gradually abdicate all connection to the outside world as they commit themselves to an ongoing orgy of destruction and violence. Its infamous first line tells you most of what you need to know about Ballard’s Freudian obsession with the violence and depravity lurking beneath the veneer of civilisation: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous months.” (Say what you like about Ballard’s skills as a prose stylist, he knew how to write an opening sentence.)

He wrote a series of more straight- forward sci-fi novels early in his career – The Wind from Nowhere; The Drowned World; The Burning World; The Crystal World – in which his apocalyptic mind produced various forms of imagined catastrophe. But the theme of civilisational collapse, of mass regression to barbarism, reverberated through his entire oeuvre. (In Kingdom Come, the last novel he published before his death in 2009, a hyper-consumerist modern Britain slides inexorably towards fascism – a fictional scenario that you could barely describe as “speculative” today.)

This dystopian imagination has its source in the author’s strange and turbulent early life. James Graham Ballard was born and raised in the Shanghai International Settlement, and during the Japanese occupation of the Settlement in the Second World War he spent two years of his early teens living with his family in an internment camp for Allied civilians. His autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984), based loosely on this experience, goes some way towards illuminating the origins of his obsessive themes and motifs. Martin Amis – a founding member of the cult of Ballard – put it as follows: “While sharing in the general reverence for Empire of the Sun, the true cultist also felt minutely betrayed by it. Not because the novel won a wide audience and punctured the cult’s closed circle. No: we felt betrayed by it because Empire showed us where Ballard’s imagination had come from. The shaman had revealed the source of all his fever and magic.”

The book is filled with moments where artefacts of a ruined upper middle-class life are surreally set against a background of total collapse. In one bleakly funny scene, Ballard’s fictional avatar Jim observes the weird abundance of leisure items the mostly British internees have seen fit to take with them to the camp. “Recreation,” he remarks, “had clearly come high on the prisoners’ list of priorities while they packed their suitcases before being interned. Having spent the years of peace on the tennis courts and cricket fields of the Far East, they confidently expected to pass the years of war in the same way. Dozens of tennis racquets hung from the suitcase handles; there were cricket bats and fishing rods, and even a set of golf clubs…” (A quarter-of-a-million punters crammed, as they were recently, into the stands at Cheltenham, while a viral contagion of unprecedented force and scale threatens to cause millions of deaths and plunge the global economy into the abyss? Ballard levels off the charts.)

Of all the images of a leisure class in steep decline in Ballard’s work, the presiding symbol is that of the drained swimming pool. In Hello America, drained swimming pools “seemed to cover the entire continent”. In High-Rise, the sloping floor of a drained pool is described as “covered with the skulls, bones and dismembered limbs of dozens of corpses”. In Cocaine Nights (1996), there is a deserted sports club, “its tennis courts dusty in the sun, its swimming pool drained and forgotten”. In Empire of the Sun, Jim’s parents drain their pool after leaving for the camp; when he returns later in the novel, he jumps into it and cuts his knee, and a fly descends to feed on the residue of fresh blood he leaves behind on its surface.

In his 2008 memoir, Miracles of Life, Ballard writes about his lifelong preoccupation with this symbol, and its origins in an interlude in Shanghai after the outbreak of war. “Curiously,” he recalls, the house we moved to had a drained swimming pool in its garden. It must have been the first drained pool I had seen, and it struck me as strangely significant in a way I have never fully grasped. My parents decided not to fill the pool, and it lay in the garden like a mysterious empty presence… In the coming years I would see a great many drained and half-drained pools, as British residents left Shanghai for Australia and Canada, or the assumed “safety” of Hong Kong and Singapore, and they all seemed as mysterious as that first pool in the French Concession. I was unaware of the obvious symbolism that British power was ebbing away, because no one thought so at the time, and faith in the British empire was at its jingoistic height."

If you’ve read even a small amount of Ballard – a writer of whom you really only need to read a small amount to get the gist – you will be incapable of seeing an empty swimming pool without doffing your cap in his direction. A while back, as research for a book I was writing about the apocalyptic mood of our time, I spent two days on a guided tour of the Chernobyl exclusion zone in Ukraine. In the abandoned city of Pripyat, as I stood at the edge of an empty Olympic-sized swimming pool, piles of dead leaves gathered at the lower ends of its sloped floor, I couldn’t help but think of Ballard, and of how much he would have relished the spectacle.

Twenty-first century life was already Ballardian. The rapid transition, under the new viral order, into further extremes of technological alienation has only made it more so. Western Europe is now a vast quarantined sprawl of empty streets and deserted motorways. People are confined to their homes, communicating almost exclusively via electronic means. Face-masked shoppers in the aisles of Marks & Spencer keep a wary distance from one another while stockpiling halloumi and organic wines against the coming tribulations. There is widely shared video footage of a pampered little showdog being walked through abandoned streets by aerial drones, operated by a pet owner too fearful of contagion to leave the house. All of it is unadulterated Ballard.

He is often spoken of as an experimental writer. This description is certainly justified by an exercise in Burroughsian narrative disjuncture like the The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), with its condensed descriptions of the Kennedy assassination as a sporting event. But in most of his work, Ballard seemed uninterested in the endless possibilities of the novel form, or in the sentence as a realm of artistic endeavour.

His characters are all more or less interchangeable pasteboard figures designed to move among the flat-pack constructions of his imagined scenarios. Committed Ballardians tend to dismiss this criticism as beside the point. They see vivid characters and interesting sentences as essentially bourgeois preoccupations; if that’s the sort of thing you’re after, they say, you can move along the shelf to Barnes, Julian.

The cultural critic Mark Fisher, in a 2003 essay about Ballard, acknowledged that the protagonist of Millennium People was “little more than a spokesperson for the author’s theories”, but went on to clarify that this “is fine, of course: we need more ‘well-drawn characters’ like we need more ‘well-wrought sentences’. The UEA Eng Lit mafia are as ripe for immolation as are any of the other cosily depressing targets of Ballard’s pyromaniac prose.”

I’ve never found this argument particularly persuasive, not least because Ballard’s prose is anything but pyromaniac; it is, at the level of language, mostly devoid of trickery or experiment or any sense of aesthetic play. A less softball comparison than the poor old UEA mafia – Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan – would, I think, be the contemporary Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a writer as obsessively concerned as Ballard with civilisational entropy, but whose work manages to be both formally radical and filled with fascinating characters and sentences of force and precision.

“Prosperous suburbia was one of the end states of history,” Ballard wrote with customary didacticism in Millennium People. “Once achieved, only plague, flood, or nuclear war could threaten its grip.”

Several times over the last few weeks, between bouts of millenarian melancholy and unease, I have found myself regretting that the old boy is not around to see all this. Perhaps it’s not quite right to say he would have loved it – because who could love the world right now, in its drastically reduced circumstances – but it is surely true to say that he would have recognised it. He would have felt at home in this strange new existence.

The lives he wrote about were insular, self-contained, contentedly devoid of real interpersonal relationships. The forms of human connection they yearned for are the fundamentally Freudian ones: sex and violence. And so there is an area of our current experience that remains outside the jurisdiction of his cataclysmic imagination. What the coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated is that we don’t want to be isolated, communicating only at a technological remove. Suddenly thrust into this state of Ballardian suspension, what most of us want, most of the time, is to be out there, in the world of friends and strangers, together. Right now, we all live in Ballard’s world, but we are not all Ballard’s people.

Mark O'Connell is the author of To Be a Machine (2017), and Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back (2020). He writes for the Guardian, Slate and the New York Times.

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July 27 is Ginger Goodwin Day

2018-07-27T22:30:11Z

Yeah!

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-government-proclaims-july-27-ginger-goodwin-day-1.4764622

B.C. government proclaims July 27 Ginger Goodwin Day

The Canadian Press · Posted: Jul 27, 2018 12:16 PM PT | Last Updated: 3 hours ago

The B.C. government has declared July 27 as Ginger Goodwin Day, celebrating a man considered a pioneer of B.C.'s labour movement.

Friday marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Albert Goodwin, who was also known as Ginger due to his red hair.

He played a key role in leading the two-year-long coal miners' strike on Vancouver Island from 1912 to 1914 as workers protested frequently deadly conditions.

A conscientious objector, Goodwin took to the woods near Cumberland after refusing to enlist in the Canadian Army in the First World War.

After authorities decided to track down draft dodgers in the area, Goodwin was shot dead at the age of 31 by a special constable near Comox Lake on July 27, 1918.

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Semi-annual update

2018-06-19T17:57:10Z

Yikes, half a year passes like nothing.
Lots of things have happened:

Aki bailed on school (he was crashing and burning academically) but is now working at a technologist job that uses his talents very well, is adequately paid, he's happy and is solving problems for his boss. He moved out for a little while but first my mom didn't want anyone around, then he found another place but the landlord was insane so he fled in the middle of the night, and is now back with us. I'd like him to move on by the end of the year as he really ought to be more independent and out with chimps his own age. Frankly, it took me a while to get used to the idea of him not getting his degree, but he's old enough to make and take consequences now.
Been very consumed, perhaps too much, with game designs. See http://brtrain.wordpress.com for the blow by blow.
- So far this year I have had three games appear: Tupamaro, Chile 73 and Strike for Berlin, and decided I will not ever work with a particular publisher again, bringing the list to three.
- Next week I am off to Tempe AZ for the Consimworld expo, bringing nine, maybe ten items with me: a set of four system games on brief border wars (El Salvador-Honduras 1969, Turkey-Cyprus 1974, China-Vietnam 1979, Israel-Hezbollah 2006); a set of four system games on operational level counterinsurgency that don't use dice (Algeria 1959, Vietnam 1969, Afghanistan 2009, Made-up Megacity 2019); a game on the battle for Mosul in 2017 that was designed by two students of a professor friend of mine, that I am developing and hope to hawk to a French publisher; and maybe my next (and last) COIN system game on China 1937-41, if I can come up with 48 ideas for cards in the next three days.
Aside from the publisher's expo, I am planning on going to Washington DC for a wargaming conference in mid-late July, and another in London in early September. After that I want to take another week to go to Paris, where I have never been, and Berlin, where I haven't been since the Wall came down.
In between work is getting crazy, and (more) organizational chaos looms. Partly avoiding it by posting here, so I shall end... and maybe write more in future. It's not as if nothing is going on!

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New Paint in Office

2017-12-19T07:15:54Z

Next week I will have worked on the same floor of the same building for 20 years.
In all that time, the walls have never been repainted, and the carpet has remained.
Now we are getting new of both.

But the new wall colour on our floor, which thankfully won't be everywhere but an "accent" on the pillars and end walls, is a vaguely disturbing yellow that I could not place at first... then it came to me:

Going to take some getting used to, I think... but I must whip it, into shape...

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Krissmus Kreativity

2017-12-19T06:43:29Z

Okay, so I normally don't do this... but at work they are having a gingerbread house decorating contest, with the houses sold off for auction and the $$$ goes to the Community Service Fund.

So this is what I made, inspired by this famous cartoon: files.explosm.net/comics/Kris/gingerbread.png

I coloured the gingerbread with a food colouring wash and painted the "snow" on the front lawn with gray acrylic.

Aki thought the deformed little metal dude on the front lawn (one of my metal pin castings) was a Lynchian touch.
More literal-minded observers might notice the upside-down Christmas tree and say, "Ooooh, Stranger Things!"
A current pop-cult reference never goes amiss, I've found.

View of the interior, showing the occupant and the demotivational poster that forbids his exit.
Per Sartre, there is No Exit.

Very likely no one will appreciate or bid on this one except myself.
But if I can't amuse myself, then what's the point....

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Ten Days in London

2017-09-15T21:29:27Z

I just got back from ten days in London!

Copiously illustrated account on my game design blog, since main purpose of visit was to attend conference on professional wargaming.
I got to role-play Kim Jong Un, saw where Throbbing Gristle used to live and work, went to a puppet play, and traveled to far-off Dagenham.

Check it out!

https://brtrain.wordpress.com/2017/09/15/ten-busy-days-away/

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Here is something new...

2017-06-20T03:00:41Z

...insulting spam!

I got this today in my email:

***

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: advice
Date: (today)
Subject: Hi (my name)
To:

I always wanted to tell you that the cloths you wear do not look that good on you.
Please be more classy! It is for your well-being.

Just an advice from a friend.

***

I think this is absolutely brilliant.
Instead of pretending to be a Nigerian prince in difficulty or a dotty solicitor offering money, insult the rube and provoke him into replying, letting them know they've got a live one.

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A Sort of Circle

2017-05-05T21:37:29Z

Last week I hookied out of work 40 minutes early to see "David Lynch: The Art Life", a documentary that is mostly just Lynch talking, or smoking and painting while talking, about his early life and the people and influences that got him started on painting, then film.
Chronologically the film goes up to the point where he got an American Film Institute grant and went to Los Angeles to make Eraserhead.
Five people were there, including me.

I went to see this because I was of course interested in Lynch and his creative process, but more to the point, I wanted to see it in this particular theatre.
It's near where I work, and it has been a theatre since 1974, opening shortly before I moved here.
I would see movies there over the years.
I saw Star Wars for the first time there, but I needn't have hurried because it played there for nine months straight.
But later it started to run cult films, in a regular event it called "Midnite Madness".
And it was in that very theatre that I saw a double bill of Liquid Sky and Eraserhead in 1983.
Five people were there then too, including me.

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First post

2017-04-09T21:54:48Z

Just migrated here from LJ.
Still waiting for my boxes of stuff to catch up.

Lt.

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