Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
5.03
Don’t Make Me Say David Lynch
by Travis Hedge Coke
The concept of a, “contemporary pop figure,” has to be detached from moment of creation, be that the conception of a bone and blood person, their codification as a celebrity, the breakthrough work or achievement, the pen to paper or diatribe over the phone syncretizing of a fictive being.
Celebrate the day. Celebrate the course.
Maya Deren may not have been the most significant author of Meshes of the Afternoon, but she made the movie. The keys, wood, visits, imaginary, imagery, and visitations of David Lynch movie move in every cross-ripple of Deren’s body and work.
Hercules was an American contemporary pop figure of the 1990s. Hercules appeared in televised serial, in major motion pictures, toy lines, collectible plates, comic books, bedspreads, and t-shirts.
The John Lennon pre-Jack Dane McGowan sees and hears in 1994 can come on like a young man Ghost of Liverpool, while the spirit evoked by King Mob in ritual, as Grant Morrison did outside the comic, is a platonic, but also a more mature John Lennon. Maybe, pre-death and post-life, but probably pre-celebrity-life and in-celebrity-death.
Why shouldn’t John Lennon fractal out?
As intuition enters our frame and work, we must know how to not interfere. In Chinese this can be called, wu-wei, and in Japanese, mushin, yet mushin and wu-wei are not identical. All meditational states are inequal, and so, too, all attentions.
The first feature film of David Lynch has been hailed as, “the greatest home movie ever made,” and much as been said of Lynch as an idiot savant, a lucky dope, a genius in his one way, making outsider art and distinguished from the academe of film bros and lit crit and my friends, my good friends, David Lynch has either been at or involved with schools his entire life. Without the American Film Institute, their services, education, patronage, and facilities, there is no “first feature film of David Lynch,” and no what we know as David Lynch or the Lynchian movie.
Good for marketing or not, considering Lynch as a chump who knows nothing but makes this great stuff, this unexamined, unconsidered, uneducated burst of natural brilliance is as silly as when we argue that birds migrate by instinct and still have to teach abandoned baby birds where to migrate to and how. Fans and critics like to pretend David Lynch has never seen anyone else’s motion pictures or that he has no education because it makes them feel rewarded in their antagonism against addressing their own ignorances or influences.
The naive in naive art, the outsider in outsider art, the market in the marketplace.
Or, did I just make that up because it fits the narrative I am selling you and selling myself, right now?
When King Mob says, “It’s David Lynch directs!” he brings for us a David Lynch of the late 1990s, which is not the David Lynch of today, and will not be the David Lynch of tomorrow. It was not the David Lynch of 1982.
Remember, when early 1990s David Lynch movies could make a critic or another filmmaker so mad? Quentin Tarantino getting mad about Fire Walk With Me or Roger Ebert saying, of Wild at Heart, “I was angry, as if a clever con-man had tried to put one over on me”?
The naive in naive art. The outsider in outsider art. The market in the marketplace.
Somewhere between The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive, that kind of anger just became too silly to maintain. Nobody gets angry any more. David Lynch gives a free access weather report online. David Lynch made an audio-edit-heavy short in which a spider attacks a bee in his backyard workshop. He uses a power tool to draw emphasis around Black Lives Matter and his not having a movie to show at Cannes one year, not that he ever said he would, made more news in some circles than anyone’s motion picture that was at Cannes that year.
When King Mob says it, we are still in an era in which David Lynch directing made people angry. Or, confused. Or, made them feel cool.
King Mob, you and I know, likes to feel cool.
“Everything is fine
In Heaven
Everything is fine”
Barbelith is epinosic. Pyknotic. Epiphyllous as a placenta.
We can and should use simpler language. David would.
It is good to feel smart and cool. The David Lynch line comes up quick like the Mason Lang quote they pull out about James Bond and all the scenes being sex scenes. It is unprovable, it is sustainable because it is an unsustainable proposition, and inarguable because it is incomplete frisson of a position. And, so is, “David Lynch directs.”
“We are very much in a position of a color-blind man in a beautiful flower garden… this limitation in us is known in theology as the “Fall of Man…” to see God is to apprehend Truth as it really is.”
In similar fashion, Edith is able to use Josephine Baker to diffuse a threatening situation in the 1920s, by intimating a sexual familiarity with Baker to someone who admires her. Our Josephine was a spy, a messenger, a carrier of secrets. Our Josephine Baker, as audience at time of publication or now, is not the Baker of Edith in the 1920s or Papa Skat, to whom she is speaking, and whom holds a gun on her. Our cups overflow with a gathering of forces and facets, play and invocation – all Josephine Baker.
It is nice that Barbelith, Epinnoia, breaks as soon as she is touched. And, when we are touched by Barbelith, we break. It is not really a mirror if you are reaching at yourself.
In Heaven You will see Me twice. But, is it only one time?
Celebrity saves the day. Celebrity sets a course.
*******
Nothing in There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles) is guaranteed factually correct, in part or in toto, nor aroused or recommended as ethically or metaphysically sound, and the same is true of the following recommendations we hope will nonetheless be illuminating to you, our most discriminating audience.
It Is Finished. Nina Simone.
To Dwell Among Cedars. Connilyn Cossette.
The Attic. Mary Lambert.
We Dissolve. Christabell.
