180. On David Lynch's } Revenge of the Jedi.

What fauna is there is my Jedi essay? Fabulous fauna, I suppose. Wookiees and Ewoks, Jabba the Hutt and a Third Guild Navigator. (My Jedi essay = “On David Lynch’s Revenge of the Jedi,” Bennington Review, issue five—the “fauna” issue.)

Other fauna caught my eye.

Lesley Jenike’s “Exit, Pursued by a Bear” thinks about bears via natural history museums, children’s books, poet Norman Dubie, Elizabethans, essayist Jon Berger, and Werner Herzog. According to Jenike’s website, she’s writing a book that “mix[es] memoir and creative criticism,” built around “the creatures of the nursery.” “Exit…” can only be read in the print issue, but “The Birthmark” at Tupelo Quarterly will give you a sense of Jenike’s project. “Exit…” is far and away the best prose in the issue that’s not an essay about David Lynch.

Kalil Zender’s essay “A Contemplation of Beauty and Foulness” and Olivia Clare’s short story “What She Has” are good too.

I’ve no experience editing a journal that publishes so many authors—are there 70 in this issue? The following letters are not represented in the table of contents: I, Q, T, U, X, and Y. My hope is the next issue will correct that oversight.

Two new poems by Joana Klink appear among the verse. I like “On Wanting.” This stanza intrigues: “A child sees a stream / and thinks of sharks.” I liked Claire Donato’s “The [Redacted].” I was most delighted to read Meghan Maguire Dahn’s “Shrift”—it’s very good: “What thread I lent / to the endeavor.” Dahn was a member of the loose collective of Real Art Ways poets, along with me, Kristin Kostick, Andrea Henchey, and C. S. Carrier. Last we spoke, she planned to start a journal; apparently, it was The New Yorker.

167. Fire walk } with me.

Blue &—beneath—black patches shift. Ovoid small screen. “The glad hand.” No! Elle & me. At the Nickelodeon. She warned me— “Adam. I will let you down.” Elle told me about the bad memories her therapist reclaimed. A television set. Same as the televisions we watched at home.

While Elle turned a chrome clothes rack at Filene's Basement she asked me, “Do you know what we’re here for? I need to buy a dress. For tonight.” Elle was my date to the semi-formal dance.

On either side of the screen were dark curtains. “He’s getting to know me.” Every lost page made Elle tremble. We were alone in the theater & a man in the front row who wavered. “There are pages torn out that is real….” We were afraid.

Elle told me about her beautiful twin cousins. She didn’t want me to meet them because “Adam, you will fall in love with them.” Her cousins screamed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Quit trying to hold on so tight.” Elle’s older brother was a filmmaker. He recut, on video tapes, When A Stranger Calls (’79). What he left was all terror.

Behind the screen was a hall. The only light red “Exit.” Credits rolled & the man from the front row stood. Elle whispered, “My boyfriend is t-r-o-u-b-l-e.” He wasn't a warning, he was the truth. We couldn’t open the door to leave the theater.

We held each other. Elle put on the dress she bought with me earlier, she dressed in the bathroom at my high school. We stowed her street clothes in my locker where she would forget them. We danced in the gymnasium. No one knew Elle & no one spoke. “Are you my best friend?” She had to go home.

Our own houses frighten us. We walk warily through. Hide when we see our parents. My bedroom walls were pure white, lit white with fluorescent lights mounted on the walls. “I’m your friend always.” My dark suit over the back of my desk chair. Growled from my cassette deck: “the black dog runs at night / the black dog runs at night / the black dog runs at night.”

Elle was in a booth at her hometown Friendlies. She wore her new dress and the blue corsage I pinned above her breast. Her boyfriend arrived. He was a piece of shit. I climbed out my bedroom window & wandered my dumb empty town. Listened to the signal box click loud. Dark caught up in the leaves. Change from green to yellow to red.

[ Photo: Lottie doll blue velvet outfit set, courtesy of Lottie Dolls Outfits Pinterest page. ]

160. Found notes on } David Lynch’s “Boat.”

--> “At the start of the film boat, a voiceover appeared. That is a girl’s voice….” “When this voice talking… trying to cope with the flashbacks that she’s receiving.” “She woke up in a forest, the light was so bright that she couldn’t….” “…[W]e can see forest… we can see water….” “…[V]oiceovers they seem more knowledgeable about what’s going on in their lives during the moment and what point changed it forever. The women in Boats seems not to know anything about what happened to her prior and what is happening during the moment.” “She is tired and wants to sleep…. She begins to describe what are on the boat just like the string with strange shape.” “The film starts with a tree in a forest, the light is so bright that we can’t see anything clearly. …[T]here is too bright… the bright light changes into dark night….” “Then everything became dark, the girl’s voice appeared again, ‘boat still moving fast, I feel tired…’.” “The camera turned to the man and he said ‘It worked.’” “…[T]he story stopped with the picture of the moon. ... We want to see beautiful things….”

139. David Lynch’s } The Darkened Room.

My friend sits in the dark in the room.

“Do you see her? I cannot see my friend.”

An object that’s not ordinary to me because I have no use for it is ordinary to you because you use it all the time.

“Don’t look at her.”

A slip, for instance,

“You haven’t been listening.”

or Tokyo.

137. Thirtieth anniversary } Blue Velvet.

8:17pm

cable car

           

            May 4, 2016

Wed.

…audience member explains (to his son?) what D. Lynch does (in Blue Velvet or in general?): “what’s underneath. It’s like everyplace.” Patently untrue. Conventional read of Blue Velvet / Twin Peaks. Repeated by the un-thoughtful. Awful-ness reveals itself, be it the awfulness of a downtown with nothing but chain jewelers and chain coffee shops and a furrier or a rt. X strip of lighting and appliance stores and car dealerships and donut shops or the floor of a valley fitted with box stores. The phrase “Blue Velvet is about.” …audience member sets up Blue Velvet (to his friend? “I’m just glad you were able to come out. I thought I was going to go alone” ) “…on VHS. A long time ago. My brother… an actor… the theater… I was 16, you can imagine, completely mind-blowing… it really started me being interested in film… a big ginger ale... to have that experience… I’ve seen it a few times since… it’s just, like, crazy. No, I’m psyched.”

A frosty-blond woman with a leopard-print coat will pass in front of me four times.

A crush of beetles crackles.

Bored rock toss.

Father weeps in his hospital bed.

Jeffrey Beaumont “When he discovers a severed ear in an abandoned field” and ants instead the world abruptly revealed the torso of Karina Holmer in a dumpster. Jeffrey Beaumont wears an earring. Jeffrey: I found an ear. Detective Williams: Yes, that’s a human ear alright.

Sandy Williams emerges from shadow pink and blond. “I just know that’s all” and “It sounds like a good daydream but actually doing it is dangerous.” The wind and the trees, the long sidewalk. An environment meant for daytime at night.

The sounds stairs make when left all alone.

How the hall must smell; “it’s this new stuff, there’s no smell”; like ash cans and industrial carpet.

Television set in Dorothy Vallens’ apartment is “encased in wood” (29,  Nieland).

Horror of, “Do you like me?” I thought I was involved, that something important was happening to me; instead, the situation revealed: I am  stupid, ignorant, and weak.

The light is Sandy’s dream. Theater’s speakers buzz fire.

Red roses, red shirts and suspenders, red drapes, pink and purple neon Slow Club, pink neon This Is It, red carpet, red walls, Jeffrey’s red car, hot pursuit, prostitute’s pink mini skirt, Dorothy’s red lips, ruby slippers, Isabella Rossellini and David Lynch at Cannes on the red carpet and David Lynch’s red box, red-brown robins.

I know what it's like to unlock doors that lead someplace forbidden.

133. Works in Progress } Mon Mothma's Brood.

Description of a 2:11-min. video parody of the 1982 trailer for Return of the Jedi called “David Cronenberg’s Return of the Jedi”:

TITLE CARD: 20^th Century Fox presents a Cinepix tax-shelter incentive CUT TO: Stars. Voiceover: “A shocking new vision from David Cronenberg, and the final chapter of the Star Wars saga. Play it. Live it. Exterminate all rational thought: Return of the Jedi.” CUE MUSIC by Howard Shore (strings processed through a black panel Synclavier II). CUT TO: A pair of ROYAL GUARDS, clad in the red robes and surgical masks worn by the doctors in Dead Ringers (’88), exit as DARTH VADER and LUKE SKYWALKER arrive for their audience with the EMPEROR. Voiceover: “Return for the climactic clash between the forces of good and evil.” CUT TO: JABBA THE HUTT. Ensconced on his throne, he inserts a video cassette directly into his stomach and his massive eyes light up blue and static. Voiceover: “The battle for freedom rages on.” PRINCESS LEIA struggles against her chains while NICKI BRAND extinguishes a cigarette on her left breast. CUT TO: The SARLACC PIT; it groans with lascivious pleasure as various HENCHMEN are drawn toward its moist innards. CUT TO: Rebel headquarters frigate. MON MOTHMA, after briefing the Rebel forces before the Battle of Endor, opens her white gown to reveal an external womb that is also the head of ADMIRAL ACKBAR. A deformed baby drops from his mouth. CUT TO: Endor. Close up of LUKE’s speeder bike entangled with a BIKER SCOUT’s speeder. Voiceover: “The heart of a hero, the strength of a leader, beyond pleasure, beyond pain.” CUT TO: LEIA as her speeder bike crashes. The Ewok WICKET finds the princess amid the wreckage. They tumble together in uncontrollable, accident-inspired lust. CUT TO: outside the shield generator bunker, HAN SOLO reaches into LEIA’s laser-inflicted wound and removes an organic pistol. HAN SOLO: “I’ve got a serious urge to kill someone here.” LEIA: “Do it. It’s just a game.” CUT TO: the DEATH STAR, main docking bay. Voiceover: “A destiny revealed, the circle closes.” LUKE watches as VADER’s head explodes. Voiceover: “To becomes the new flesh, you have to kill the old flesh.” CUT TO: Stars and, superimposed: Return of the Jedi. CUE MUSIC by John Williams (triumphant Star Wars “End Titles” theme). END.

[Excerpt from the essay “Of David Lynch’s Revenge of the Jedi”—from which I’ll read at the Works in Progress reading, hosted by the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University, Wednesday, March 2, at 6:30pm, Wilson Hall, room 206. More information here.] 

109. A new print of } David Lynch’s Eraserhead.

Brattle Theater, Cambridge. Aug. 23, 2014. 11:30pm. 35mm.

She attends all six films in the “Reel Weird Brattle” series: Dark City (7.19), Hausu (7.26), Dreamscape (8.2), Paprika (8.9), Videodrome (8.16), and Eraserhead. Her reward is an Eraserhead t-shirt, size small (the face of the “radiator woman” in a circle  surrounded by the legend “In Heaven everything is fine”). We all get pencils and pins.

Janus is the god of thresholds.

Born from the head out of the mouth sound. In a crater on the moon the whole cosmos born.

David Lynch wrote in Catching the Big Fish that while he was in England filming The Elephant Man a group of “guys who were working with George Lucas” told him that they met Stanley Kubrick and “he said, ‘How would you fellows like to come up to my house tonight and see my favorite film?’ They said that would be fantastic. They went up and Stanley Kubrick showed them Eraserhead. So right then I could have passed away peaceful and happy.” Via another anecdote, reported in an interview with Lynch, Kubrick showed his crew Eraserhead while they shot The Shining, because Kubrick liked Eraserhead’s atmosphere.

Mary X: Henry’s very clever at printing.

Mrs. X: Yes. He sounds very clever.

The horror of people’s kitchens. The carving orgasm horror. Mr. X: She’ll be alright in a minute.

Guard dogs pregnant abortion the front yard frozen.

Eraserhead was compared with old German silent films not because it is like those films but because it’s shot in black and white and there is very little dialogue. An obvious mistake. Eraserhead eschews exposition. It shows and sounds its story. Just like Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I see other similarities between the two films. Fetuses, for instance.

Mary X: Mother! They’re still not sure it is a baby. (How does mother feel when she loses control of herself and shouts at her child?) The baby is not cute. In 1977, David Lynch wouldn’t tell interviewers Stephen Saban and Sarah Longacre how he made the baby. What are you talking about? A lack of sleep = to losing your mind. Henry takes the baby’s temperature: it’s perfectly normal but—jolt! the baby is covered in boils. Water. Boils.

Worm in a box [the worms from Lynch's Dune].

Am I going to follow her out of the theater?

A black and white floor. Curtains. A mysterious woman. Lamps. [Agent Dale Cooper visits the Red Room (“redrum”). Fred Madison slips into the dark mirrors in the “Gray House.” Laura Dern gets lost in the sets of On High in Blue Tomorrows.]

Sparks from an electrical outlet. Scissors to cut the baby’s swaddling. Its death is huge. The moon as egg and light. Black and silent.

1:22am, we are on Brattle Street.