Skip to main content

David Lynch Creates Daily Weather Reports for Los Angeles: How the Filmmaker Passes Time in Quarantine

David Lynch hasn't directed a feature film in thirteen years, but that doesn't mean he's been idle. Quite the opposite, in fact: in addition to the acclaimed Showtime series Twin Peaks: The Return, he's recorded an album, written a memoir, taught a Masterclass, overseen the development of a Twin Peaks virtual reality game, and made a short film about ants devouring a piece of cheese. In his home studio, he's also continued the visual art practice he started before turning to filmmaker in the 1970s. We may know Lynch best as the man behind Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive, but he seems equally comfortable working in whichever form or medium is at hand. In this time of COVID-19 quarantine, which has suspended filmmaking, filmgoing, and other kinds of human activity, one such medium is the weather report.

"Here in L.A.... kind of cloudy... some fog this morning," says the respected filmmaker in his weather-report video for May 11, 2020. "64 degrees Fahrenheit; around seventeen Celsius. This all should burn off pretty soon, and we'll have sunshine and 70 degrees." All just what one would expect from the climate of Los Angeles, the southern Californian metropolis where Lynch lives and which he often praises — and which, it's recently been reported, will likely extend its stay-at-home order for at least three more months.

The sudden lack of movement in this famously mobile city has done wonders for the air quality, but so far that element hasn't figured explicitly into Lynch's reports. "We've got clouds and kind of foggy weather, with some blue shining through," he says on the morning of May 12th. But just as the day before, that fog "should burn off later, and we'll have sunshine." Longtime followers of Lynch's internet projects will recognize these as a sequel to the daily video weather reports he posted in 2008:

They'll also recognize most of the objects that surround Lynch in his office, from his set of drawers to his wall-mounted phone to his angular-handled black coffee cup. But the dramatic increase in the resolution of internet video over the past dozen years has made everything visible in a newly crisp detail, right down to the steam rising from Lynch's hot beverage of choice. More daily weather reports will presumably appear on the David Lynch Theater Youtube channel, each one colored by his signature (and, given the unrelentingly disturbing qualities of his best-known work, seemingly incongruous) optimism. "It’s going to be a different world on the other side," he told Vice last month. "It’s going to be a much more intelligent world. Solutions to these problems are going to come and life’s going to be very good. The movies will come back. Everything will spring back and in a much better way, probably."

Related Content:

Discover David Lynch’s Bizarre & Minimalist Comic Strip, The Angriest Dog in the World (1983-1992)

David Lynch Made a Disturbing Web Sitcom Called Rabbits: It’s Now Used by Psychologists to Induce a Sense of Existential Crisis in Research Subjects

David Lynch’s New ‘Crazy Clown Time’ Video: Intense Psychotic Backyard Craziness (NSFW)

How David Lynch Got Creative Inspiration? By Drinking a Milkshake at Bob’s Big Boy, Every Single Day, for Seven Straight Years

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

David Lynch Creates Daily Weather Reports for Los Angeles: How the Filmmaker Passes Time in Quarantine is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2LmNlVR
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more