David Lynch’s Interview Project has recently and quietly come to its scheduled end. The well-produced online-only project comprises a full 121 video interviews with random people, shot by Lynch’s team (led by his son Austin) on a year-long road-trip around the United States.

Lynch and co. manage to tap deeply into the wealth of personal stories in the great American working class that was first mined by the likes of oral historian Studs Terkel. But Interview Project filters Terkel’s ultra-earnest approach through the post-thereputic present, often getting a surprising amount of confessional material from a literal stop-and-talk encounter.

(Portrait of Nan, New Mexico, 1984)
 
How to now make sense of that master of the dark tableau, Joel-Peter Witkin?  Unlike some photographers whom I seem to have an ongoing fascination with (Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin to name a few), Witkin came along in the ‘80s, and I’ve hardly paid attention to him since.  His images, though, continue to startle and provoke—as does the rigor with which he makes them.

With his relentless focus on freaks, deformity, and the ravages of the flesh, Witkin’s obsessions back then overlapped a bit with ‘80s David Lynch.  In fact, you could easily plop the Eraserhead baby into a Witkin still-life.

My entirely spontaneous—and possibly reductive—theory as to why Witkin peaked in ‘80s?  AIDS was peaking, too.  The horror of what the body was capable of was, sadly, all too apparent everywhere.  Witkin perhaps was simply channeling that dread.

The photographer’s own version of what sparked his obsessions is as fitting as it is notorious:

It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived.  We were going to church.  While walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help.  The accident involved three cars, all with families in them.  Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother’s hand.  At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars.  It stopped at the curb where I stood.  It was the head of a little girl.  I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it—but before I could touch it someone carried me away.

To hear, and see, more of what makes photographer Joel-Peter Witkin tick (including an account of his initiation into sex with a pre-op transexual), check out the following segment from Vile Bodies, a ‘98 Channel 4 documentary made on the body and the “crisis of looking.”  A link to Part II of Witkin’s segment follows at the bottom.

 
Joel-Peter Witkin Vile Bodies Part II

 
For some time, bizarro auteur David Lynch has paid the bills by directing quirky/beautiful television commercials for products like Clear Blue home pregnancy tests, Gucci perfume and Nissan’s Micra. (He directed a particularly odd one for cigarettes.) Now Lynch is back with “Lady Blue Shanghai” a 16-minute short for Dior with French actress Marion Cotillard making mysterious moves around Shanghai locales searching for a glowing purse. All the (in)famous Lynchian touches are there, with the addition this time of John Galliano’s stunning art direction.

Translation: It’s a weird little film. The House of Dior is getting double its money’s worth by funding this project: every hip blog on the planet—including this one—will race to post about the latest from David Lynch. This is a good thing, of course. How else would these diversions get funded?
 

 
While the sandstorm clouds of another Dune movie threaten to gather once again, tidbits of the visually striking David Lynch version keep rolling in.  Back in ‘83, the one-time future Mrs. Novicoff actress Sean Young, who played Chani against Kyle MacLachlan’s Paul Atreides, brought her video camera to Mexico City’s massive Dune set.  Here’s a bit of what she experienced:

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds: Frank Herbert & David Lynch discuss Dune

 
How did David Lynch and Mark Frost capitalize on the zeitgeisty momentum sparked by Twin Peaks?  With 1992’s On The Air, an unlikely mash-up of, well, Happy Days and 30 Rock.  From its Wiki entry: “The program followed the antics of the staff of a fictional 1950s television network (Zoblotnick Broadcasting Company or ZBC), as they tried to put on a live variety program called ‘The Lester Guy Show’ with disastrous results.”

I loved it.  America did not.  ABC took On The Air off the air after airing only 3 of its 7 filmed episodes.  Why not decide for yourself, and watch some of it below?  If you like what you see, you can, for now, find a whole lot more of it here.

 
Photorealistic David Lynch head by contemporary sculptor Jamie Salmon. From the artist:

I like to use the human form as a way of exploring the nature of what we consider to be “real” and how we react when our visual perceptions of this reality are challenged. In our modern society we have become obsessed with our outward appearance, and now with modern technology we are able to alter this in almost anyway we desire. How does this outward change affect us and how we are perceived by others?

(via Nerdcore)

Thanks to the never-ending French love of Frank Herbert’s Dune, we’re in store for a new adaptation of the book to film. What is this?

 
Vodka brand 42 Below is the creative sponsor behind One Dream Rush, a Beijing-based film festival of incredibly short films.  42 filmmakers from around the world were given 42 seconds.  The results from David Lynch, Dream #7, and Kenneth Anger, Death, follow below:

 
More on OneDreamRush

In that case, so must growing up reading William Burroughs, the Illuminatus trilogy, conspiracy theory books, dropping acid and listening to Firesign Theatre records!

From Science Digest:

Reading a book by Franz Kafka ?

 
From David Ng in the LAT‘s Culture Monster:

Not many big-name movie directors deserve to be called artists.  Among those who do, few take the label as seriously as David Lynch.  The director of “Mulholland Dr.” and “Blue Velvet” has avidly pursued painting, photography and sculpture in between his idiosyncratic film projects.  Starting Sept. 12, the master of weirdness will exhibit some of his recent works in the solo gallery show “David Lynch: New Paintings” at Griffin in Santa Monica.  The show, which is being presented in collaboration with the James Corcoran Gallery, will be Lynch’s first solo exhibition in L.A. in more than a decade, according to Griffin.

Lynch will present a series of his “monumental” (or large-scale) paintings, said the gallery.  The only work available for preview is “Crucifixtion” (2008-09), a mixed-media on canvas painting that is 6 feet tall and 10 feet wide (pictured).  The director has had a lengthy relationship with James Corcoran Gallery, which organized solo shows of his work in 1987, 1989 and 1993. This will be the director’s first show at Griffin.  “New Painting” is scheduled to run through Dec. 12.

Well, I’m definitely looking forward to this one!  As much as I admire David Lynch the filmmaker, he’s notoriously unforthcoming with explanations as to what his films mean.  That’s fine by me—even preferable. 

But when it comes to describing his own process as an artist, Lynch has been as generous as he’s been expansive.  There are many clips out there detailing what Lynch does to “catch the big fish,” and its relationship to transcendental mediation.  One of the more lucid ones follows below.

 
From the BBC: Scene By Scene Clip With David Lynch
  
The Griffin Presents David Lynch: New Paintings

Director David Lynch worked up a number of images in his patented surrealistic style for a book to accompany the new album by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse (featuring an A-list team of additional collaborators like The Flaming Lips, Iggy Pop, Suzanne Vega, Frank Black, James Mercer (The Shins), and Julian Casablancas).

But there’s a bit of a catch: the limited edition packaging for the album comes with no music. That’s right, all you get is a blank CD with the message “For Legal Reasons enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will” stamped across it. The reason for this is that EMI would sue Danger Mouse were he to release the CD properly (he’s been in this situation before, obviously, with “The Grey Album”).

The idea, if you haven’t figured it out already, is to download the music wherever you might find it (I just found nearly 5000 results leading you right to it on the various torrent trackers) to burn to the enclosed blank CD.

Our friends at Dazed and Confused spoke to Lynch about the collaboration:

Dazed: Do you approach painting and photography in the same way as you would creating a scene for one of your films?

David Lynch: Yeah, exactly. If an idea comes for furniture, you will see a table in your brain. You will see what it’s made of and the shape of it, and if that idea is something you love, then you go into the wood shop and start making that table. If you get an idea for a painting and you’re all fired up about it then you go right into the painting studio and start working on those. Making a film is just a longer process, but when you’re in love you don’t care how long it takes to make something.

Dark Night of the Soul official website