R.I.P. David Lynch

David Lynch. Image: Adam Bordow/BW

It's hard to know what to say when someone of David Lynch's cultural stature passes away. Anything even half intelligent one might say about the facts of his career as a director, painter, musician (and transcendental meditation advocate, amongst other things) has already been covered by the time one can even begun to process the information. Others have almost as quickly filled countless megabytes and column-inches with reflections on the possible 'meanings' within the work, and wider significance within the cultural landscape. In the time it took me to get here, I've even read one semi-poetic discussion of the life-long (and life-shortening - as it transpired) smoking habit which almost seemed to define him as much as the work for some.

On reflection, perhaps the whole smoke thing is as good a signifier as any for an artist whose work was so saturated in the ineffable, and so resistant to being pinned down. It also speaks to his approach to life as an endlessly unfolding creative process. Lynch himself spoke of the 'Art Life', describing with relish how each creative gesture would blur seamlessly with his endless chains of coffee and cigarettes - each becoming the next in real time. Ultimately though, that's in danger of becoming yet more romanticised 'myth of the artist' stuff really. It feels like the only meaningful response at this stage is a more personal one, accompanied by some of the man's own unmediated words.

Image: Studio Canal/Les Films Alain Sarde/Asymmetrical Productions/

Babbo Inc/The Picture Factory/Bridgeman

When all else is said and done, Lynch's films and TV work (and let's face it - this is what will be remembered longest) have moved and stimulated me more than pretty much anything else achieved in those media. In my view, no one else has managed to blur the boundaries between moving images and dreams quite like Lynch. The logic at work within them is dream logic. This is why, just like the dreams we experience immediately prior to waking, they seem more vivid, more affecting, more divorced from convention, and more engaging of thought and feeling as sides of the same coin than any other cultural artefact I've encountered. It's why they resist traditional analysis so pleasingly. It's why even Lynch himself didn't always know what might happen - even as a mood or association emerged in real time on set. It's why, for those of us who relish questions and possible interpretations, far more than answers and definitive statements, Lynch is the go-to, par excellence. And I really don't care if he is the kind of film director 'someone like me' would like. I just do.

'Eraserhead', 'Twin Peaks', 'Lost Highway', 'Mulholland Drive' - these are works I can return to repeatedly, and never quite get to the end of. Certain scenes and images will remain indelibly stamped on my memory in perpetuity (I've mentioned more than a few on here before). The concluding credits may be rolling, but my response is slightly different each time, and I'm already anticipating the next time I can fail to '(ex/mans)plain it all away. Each work seems to mean so much, but I really don't want to know exactly what. In the process of not knowing, I may have been horrified, haunted, baffled, or felt like I'm falling in love. I may have gasped, laughed out loud or chuckled inwardly, confronted my own deepest fears, or just gazed longingly at the sheer formal elegance of Lynch's craft. I may have loved and despised humanity in equal measure. I may have gasped at the sheer audacity of it all (on a spectrum from the gleefully cheesy to the truly profound), and even, most surprisingly - meditated without irony on the existence/nature of good and evil). I'm not sure what else I could ask from an art experience, and I thank him for it.

Anyway, enough of me. Lynch really should get the final/not final words...

"If you get an idea that’s thrilling to you, put your attention on it and these other fish will swim into it. It’s like a bait. They’ll hook on to it and you’ll get more ideas. And you just pull them in."

"I don’t know why people expect art to make sense when they accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense."

"Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there’s humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd. But I don’t just find humor in unhappiness – I find it extremely heroic the way people forge on despite the despair they often feel."

"In a way failure is a beautiful thing, because when the dust settles there’s nowhere to go but up, and it’s a freedom. You can’t lose more, but you can gain."

"A film or a painting – each thing is its own sort of language and it’s not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there. The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and the English language – it’s not going to translate. It’s going to lose."

"Certain things are just so beautiful to me, and I don’t know why. Certain things make so much sense, and it’s hard to explain."

All quotes: David Lynch.

Individual sources can be found in: Adrian Horton, 'A life in quotes: David Lynch', London, The Guardian, 17.01.25

R.I.P Julee Cruise (The World Spins)

 

Sometimes, a certain piece of music, or the resonance of a particular performance, just stays with you through the years - regardless of how often you hear it, or how celebrated or overlooked the artist attached to it may have been. Clearly, Julee Cruise - who just passed at the tragically premature age of 65, was a talented artist, and one with her own (ethereally distinctive) voice. Nevertheless, she wasn't necessarily a household name (in recent years, at least). So I think it would be foolish not to admit that she wasn't largely ingrained in the psyche of many of us, through her associations with the film and TV director, David Lynch - and especially, as one of the angels presiding over the world of his 'Twin Peaks'.

That's hardly to diminish her legacy, however. Lynch has long been the master of embedding immaculately appropriate pieces of music within his film and TV work, in order to magnify their (often devastating) emotional impact. I think we might argue that Cruise's dreamlike and unworldly interpretations of songs like 'Falling' [1.], 'The World Spins' [2.], or 'Rocking Back Inside My Heart' [3.], are the absolute epitome of that. More than anything else, she seemed to capture perfectly a sense of the fragility of love, and the yearning for something pure within a  corrupt world, lying at the very heart of Lynch's small-town vision. As is the case for many other Lynch-casualties, a small part of me may never actually make it back from the Black Lodge. It's even less likely now - without Julee's pristine voice to guide us.

Those seeking a little more factual background regarding Julee Cruise's life and work can find it here. But for now, it seems far more appropriate to just let her music, and those truly timeless performances, speak for themselves...

[1.]: Julee Cruise, 'Falling', Lynch/Badalamenti, Warner Bros/WEA,1989 (From the Album, 'Falling Into The Night', and the Soundtrack to: Mark Frost/David Lynch, 'Twin Peaks' (Series 1), CBS, 1990.

[2.]: Julee Cruise, 'The World Spins', Lynch/Badalamenti, (From the Soundtrack to: Mark Frost/David Lynch, 'Twin Peaks' (Series 2), CBS, 1991.

[3.]: Julee Cruise, 'Rocking Back Inside My Heart', Lynch/Badalamenti, Warner Bros/WEA,1989 (From the Album, 'Falling Into The Night', and the Soundtrack to: Mark Frost/David Lynch, 'Twin Peaks' (Series 2), CBS, 1991

Elephant's Memory

Central Leicester, February 2016

At first glance, the site depicted here may not look like much.  At best, it might just look like more evidence of my madness; sorry - I mean my fascination with lacunae and interim sites of transformation within the urban landscape.  There’s no doubt it also feeds into my even more current interest in visualising absences, erasures and what is ‘there-but-no-longer-there’.  Even seen in those terms, it’s not an especially spectacular example, although my camera was delighted to record those pleasing traces of long-lost staircases.

However, for a couple of reasons, the site has slightly more significance than might at first meet the eye.  It lies in a slightly overlooked backwater of central Leicester, on the corner of Wharf Street South and Gladstone Street, in a down-at-heel neighbourhood of sporadic light industry and more recent housing.  Even within living memory, this was a far more bustling, (if slightly edgy), district, and the site is actually located close to Leicester’s old Central Telephone Exchange building, and once futuristic Lee Circle Multi-Story Car Park, (both of which have featured here before).  What commercial activity lingers on now seems vestigial at best, and the most obvious contemporary life-signs come from the largely Asian and North African denizens who drift through in waves, between the City Centre and nearby Belgrave or St Matthews Estate.

Wharf Street South, Central Leicester, February 2016

In a previous professional incarnation, I worked as a Scenic & Display Artist for a company - based just round the corner, and used to regularly visit the building that once stood on the vacant corner plot.  In those days, it housed a Motor Factor’s business, - where we often purchased car paints and related sundries.  In the course of such workaday errands, I wondered about the building’s former usage, intrigued by its rather ornate frieze, and how the structure appeared to have been abruptly truncated, - suggesting it had once been at least one story taller.

Hints and rumours at the time suggested some connection with the tragic story of Joseph Cary Merrick, - preserved in popular memory as The Elephant Man; and a little research suggests this may in fact be the case.  Merrick’s struggle to find some place in society, despite the hideous deformities that blighted his short life, is pretty well-known, both from fictions, such as David Lynch’s film ‘The Elephant Man’, (1980), and from slightly patchy contemporary accounts.  What is certainly known is that he was born just a few metres away, in Lee Street.  It’s also the case that, during the years Merrick scraped a living as a theatrical Freak Show attraction, his Impresario, Sam Torr owned a theatre, - The Palace Of Varieties, on the very site under discussion.

Joseph Carey Merrick: 'The Elephant Man', c.1889

                                                                                                      

Film Poster: David Lynch (Dir.), 'The Elephant Man', Brooksfilms/Universal Pictures/
Paramount Pictures, 1980

As is usually the way with such Psychogeographic conjecture, there’s a certain amount of ‘what - if’ about all of this.  There’s no explicit evidence that Merrick actually appeared at The Gaiety, although it would seem more than likely.  That establishment was itself rebuilt in 1893, - as the building I knew; and it continued to operate as a theatre, and later a cinema, well into mid twentieth century.  Therefore, Merrick can never have physically climbed those actual staircases; yet it’s almost impossible not to imagine him doing so in the poetic imagination.  What’s more important is that some resonance of his passing seems to cling to the site, - and indeed to the wider neighbourhood.  This aspect of imaginative projection is what actually interests me most about the whole Pychogeographic project, - far more than any stickling over strict, historical accuracy.

Joseph Carey Merrick, 1888

In passing, I note that a certain raffish reputation always clung to the once-energetic Wharf Street area.  The Gaiety rubbed shoulders with a Pawn Shop, which possibly doubled as a brothel, - and may itself have been a nexus for amorous liaisons of the more commercial variety.  During my period of employment up the road, the prophylactic remnants of such activities regularly punctuated our car park; not to mention the day The Police fished a discarded murder weapon from the roof of our premises.  On another occasion, I left a nearby Techno All-Nighter, around dawn, to witness a quartet of primary-age urchins sitting in a parked car they’d smashed up, whilst making “brrm, brrm” noises.  Some things change; others – not so much.

Time Tunnels 2

…Being the second installment of a meditation on subways and underpasses.

These subways are a major draw for me at the moment.  It seems to be the case that certain (often, seemingly insignificant or mundane) corners of the city can suddenly acquire a particular resonance for me, as if seen in a new light.  The specific location depicted here certainly fits that bill, being a small portion of Leicester of which I’ve been aware for many years, but which I’m currently relishing, as though encountering it for the first time on each of my recent visits with bicycle and camera.

A recent Quietus piece focuses on the parallels between comic book Magus, Alan Moore, and modern Psychogeography’s presiding literary genius, Iain Sinclair.  It seems to point towards a particular way of looking and reading cities to which I would generally subscribe.  In it, Moore states,

“…it was the the remarkable quality of Iain’s writing that blew me away as much as the concepts he was utilising; it was his approach to language itself; this incredible intellectual density, which I think a lot of people find off-putting at first, but the richness, that Iain can bring to a crack in the pavement.” [1.].

And later, speaking of his own ‘Jerusalem’ [2.],

“…it’s a work that is not just focused on Northampton but on the half a square mile of Northampton in which I grew up, and is approaching half a million words, and I can imagine that my next book will be a million words and focused entirely on one paving slab…” [3.].

In my previous post on the subway theme, I embarked on a somewhat woolly reflection on the socio-historical significance of such sites, before concluding that, once the theories are all stripped away, my core response to is as much subjective or poetic as conceptual.  In reality, I think what I really want is for the spontaneous recognition of some resonance of place to coexist on equal terms with the subsequent possible associations and theories that may adhere to it.  It’s a kind of internal/external or micro/macro perception of the world around me, I guess, and some kind of justification for the way my own lens keeps focusing in, somewhat obsessively, on the grimy details and eloquent patinas of the places I document.  I certainly can’t claim to be working on the same elevated plane as Sinclair and Moore, and certainly lack their intellectual rigor, store of acquired knowledge, or research skills, but Moore’s references to ”A crack in the pavement” and “One paving slab”, certainly strike a chord with me.

Anyway, I’ll devote the rest of this post to exploring what exactly excites me so much about one shabby little spot in Leicester.

This particular place is a combination of pedestrian subways and road underpass beneath Leicester’s St Margaret’s Way.  It’s actually a few yards from another favourite haunt, shown on here more than once, where that main artery is borne over the River Soar.  However, here, it’s Friday Street that passes beneath, - a relatively quiet, slightly eerie thoroughfare, linking one drab warren of industrial units with a more varied, but hardly less glamorous zone to the east, where numerous businesses occupy premises varying from the contemporary shed, to larger, crumbling edifices from Leicester’s industrial heyday.  It thus forms an important link in exactly the kind of overlooked ‘Interzone’ [4.] that regularly captures my imagination.

I love the way the excavation creates a small pocket of resonant underworld that most people are oblivious to as they soar above it on the dual carriageway.  Like many towns that experienced significant post-war redevelopment, Leicester has numerous examples where such newly swollen roads were driven through pre-existing street plans, often creating intriguing non-places and a sense of truncated communities where established neighbourhoods were bisected.  A disheveled metallic plaque commemorates the opening of the subways in 1971 and the site seems to symbolise the way that the planners of that age envisaged an environment in which pedestrian access was deliberately separated out from motor transport, whilst unquestioningly assuming the new primacy of the car in modern towns.

On a more immediate level, however, what I really respond to is the opportunity to literally scratch beneath the surface of the city, and to experience a dynamic, sensory environment rendered as a deterministic physical statement.  Such places only really resemble themselves, and there are a whole set of instinctive responses often pertaining to them.  For me these include a distinct thrill at the hard angled edges and monumentally functional architecture of sculpted concrete.  It’s almost like a kind of bold Land Art in which dramatic topographical interventions are made in order to find out what it feels like to traverse this passage, descend beneath that level or pass between those high, overbearing walls.

Seen through unjaded eyes, there is actually a sense of a vaguely futuristic playground about it all and, as with all good ones, a touch of implied jeopardy lies at the core of its appeal.  There’s a palpable edge of claustrophobia as one descends beneath ground level, and our hard-wired unease at entering the unknown is magnified by the broken sight lines created amidst 180-degree switchback ramps.  Only having emerged at right angles into the underpass proper does one really get a view of what lies in wait and the light flooding in at each end. 

Friday Street and its accompanying footpath perform a short, parabolic swoop through what is effectively a tunnel of corrugated concrete walls and a ceiling formed by the underside of the main road.  It would be disingenuous to pretend that some of my attraction to this place isn’t partly due to my child-like enjoyment of navigating it by bike.  The ramps and changes in grade and direction provide a mild technical riding challenge and some scope to go ‘wheeeee!’ once the brakes are released.  Consequently, I’ve deliberately built this place into my route on those days when I cycle to and from work.

Like all such places, acoustic qualities contribute massively to its impact on the visitor.  Indeed, the relative paucity of traffic on Friday Street mean that one can really appreciate the sonic spaces between each sound event that emanates from both above and below, before reverberating from the surrounding concrete.  I’m also struck by that slight sense of mistrust one always has of those travellers in less frequented thoroughfares.  Often, the quieter places are the most forbidding in cities, as one speculates on exactly what brings those occasional visitors that are in evidence, to them, [5.].

Illumination is another important element in my apprehension of this place.  This is most obviously experienced in the juxtaposition of the shadowy netherworld of the underpass and the daylight flooding in from either end.  As ever, a little time spent in such places reveals that they are not, as often thought, dead, grey environments, but that the concrete can both absorb and reflect light in a number of intriguing ways specific to itself.  To this is added the dramatic reflections that can bounce from puddles of standing water after heavy rain [6.].  Inevitably, the whole place also takes on a completely distinct quality after dark when greyish concrete is lit up by the alien, (and potentially alienating), glow of yellowish public lighting.

As so often witnessed in such portions of under-maintained infrastructure, the intermittent flickering of faulty lighting creates a deliciously unbalanced quality.  I’m always reminded how often David Lynch has used that particular effect in his films to suggest moments of psychic fracture or unidentified threat.  Whilst we’re on with sinister motifs, it’s impossible to ignore the bulbous spiders eagerly devouring their prey from webs they construct in the illuminated halo around each light unit, (another Lynchian device, I now realise).

In terms of illumination, my favourite time to visit is twilight, when the juxtaposition is most dramatic between the artificial light from within the little subterranean complex, and the increasingly blue light infiltrating from beyond.  There are usually a few magic minutes when I can force my hand-held exposures far enough to capture a few elusive and distinctly hyper-real images.  I’d be lying if I said I don’t enjoy the wholly fictitious, fiery glow resulting from my camera’s struggle with its White Balance in such situations.

There is one other affecting way in which light and colour manifest themselves in the subways, namely through the rather startling sky blue tiles cladding the walls of the ramps.  Although stained and regularly augmented by tags, these retain a kind of tired beauty, particularly when reflections are caught by their still glossy surfaces.  The grouting between has also absorbed a sporadic polychromatic residue where graffiti has been removed from the impermeable tiles themselves.  I find something poignant in this slightly tawdry attempt to beautify an otherwise functional environment on the part of the architects, and their faith in the quality of tough, hard-edged materials to do so.  It may have all been fairly pragmatic in construction, but it still hints at a now faded belief in the wholly rational ideals of Modernism to create a better world.

In an age when the only justification for any new contribution to the built environment is the bottom line, such idealism, however misplaced, actually seems rather quaint.  There’s no doubt this idea of a failed Utopian vision exerts a powerful hold over my imagination in such places.  It is, after all, a world into which I was born, and yet one in which once-lofty ideals only engendered a seeming alienation that has become, largely, just taken as read by subsequent generations.

All Images:  St Margarets Way, Leicester, April. July & August 2014

[1.], [3.]:  Nick Talbot, ‘”A Funny Kind Of Relationship” Alan Moore On Iain Sinclair’, (A Quietus Interview), www.thequietus.com, 7 June 2014.

[2.]:  Alan Moore, ‘Jerusalem’, (A sprawling novel about Northampton.  Still, as yet unpublished, - as far as I can ascertain).

[4.]:  I can’t claim ownership of this particular term.  William Burrows, Joy Division and Will Self have all employed it at different points, to my knowledge.  My own fascination is often as much with the kind of liminal zones of connecting vacancy or supposed insignificance that often lie well within city boundaries, as with the more peripheral locations with which it is often associated.

[5.]:  I can only speculate about how suspicious I myself might look to others, lurking around under there with my camera.

[6.]:  In fact, although it’s a nominally dry environment, water plays a distinct part in my impressions here, be it the sinister greenish ooze extending across the footpath from a manhole at the foot of one subway ramp, or the spontaneous, slightly alarming spring witnessed spurting from between two sections of the underpass wall after a recent deluge.