#217: Albert Speer's Last X-Rays (David Lynch, pt. 3)
Filament-heated cathode, voltage signal swinging on the grid, all lens-flared out of daylight. Watchman, What of the Night?
(kµ)
Comments (42)
Re-listeningthis episode and there's an excellent small dip into sound. You seem to not use the term "timbre" as the descriptor of the difference harmonically, between say, a piano striking and a guitar plucking at the same frequency. Any reason?
Eraserhead was shot entirely in Los Angeles.
Repo Man is the Eraserhead of LA.
I didn’t understand being terrified by the concept of architecture until I started reading “Addiction by design” by Natsasha D. Schull. The book goes in depth on the ways that every single detail in the design of casinos is focus tested to draw you in and disorient you, leading you into comfy nooks and crannies where you can spend hours blowing your life savings on slot machines. Got me thinking about TPR and how the first thing Cooper does when he’s back in our world is go play the slots.
You mentioned architecture a lot recently or maybe just in the back episodes that I've listened to recently. I have a couple loose thesis there. I think most of the problems with psychosis but also trauma and a lot of other weird anthro phenomenon in general come from a glitch in the way that we make self-reflexive interoceptive and associative memories especially emotional and somatic memory. I think a lot of the problems with psychosis and trauma come from a mismatch in the way that we have learned to use memory related to an internal and external world. They're supposed to reflect and mirror, but when there is a mismatch in the inner and outer world conceptualization then small changes become big changes through endless reflection. We get strange emotional reactions to the way things actually work and double down on trying to change that through doing an internal ritual the external world is supposed to respond to or vice versa. Architecture is a really interesting way to visualize this process. There are sort of cultural values that you want to communicate that you're semi-conscious of through style. You also have just the practical realities of what makes a building not fall down and function. then additionally there are nonsensical visual ideas that humans are designed to like that we gravitate back to universally that are neither of the other two. Some of the longest lived "rules" in architecture satisfy all three of those conditions. Think about how there is still a visual hearth space that everything has to skew and reflect towards in design. Even if that hearth is now a TV or a shelf or something, the visual language maintains it. I want to approach design the way that most people approach linguistics. No one remembers that Roman's hearthfires for penates had to be central structurally and visually to their home but we're still keeping that idea going. We do it because there's always some sort of cultural value that the home orients to even if it's a TV now. It usually works pretty well spatially in a practical sense. It also satisfies some unique need to order and centralized space.
I only had that realization about every decision in a movie or show being deliberate when I got really high and terrified, because I became convinced that "the creators of Adventure Time knew I would watch this and knew what I'd think," which is profoundly stupid but it has to happen sometime I guess
Hey bud long time no talk. donno if anyone else confirmed it but it was alan splet 🫡great ep
Hello, Michael! New subscriber here. Came by way of TrueAnon, by way of a Pynchon/GR analysis on SubStack. Currently listening to all your Gravity's Rainbow episodes since I'm going through my second read of it. Just listened to the episode where you speak on 9/11. Have you done a 9/11 episode? And if not...could ya, would ya? Cheers, love your work, -S.
I would be extremely interested in hearing your thoughts on Timothy Morton’s new book “HELL” towards a Christian eschology where after years of object oriented ontology and ecology studies he’s concluded we’re living in hell and starts to imbue his theory in Christian eschatology and vamping off of William Blake. Feels up your alley
MSJ, not sure if you're still checking replies on this ep, but I was wondering if you could recommend some reading on the subject of forerunners to the CIA. I'm fascinated by the idea of the 20th/21st century intelligence apparatuses being birthed from capitalist entities who already had established channels and real estate everywhere abroad: law firms, investment banks, etc. I'm particularly interested in the 19th century. I'm aware of the East India Company, I'm aware of Francis Walsingham, but that's about it. Thanks!
Check out Wild Bill Donovan (OSS).
I am a professional boom operator in film and television. Something that shocks and dismays me is how many of my coworkers will gather round the lunch table, talk about what shows they're watching, and very quickly reveal that they think watching a period drama like Chernobyl, or Deadwood, constitutes some kind of historical education. It makes me want to scream. I want to drag them back into the studio set we were working in all morning and ask them "What is real here? How do you (of all people) not recognize how fake this all is?"
Did u fuck with the EQ on the outro track??
as an architect who has spent many hours drafting while listening to death corner i have to say that msj it's interesting to hear your thoughts on architecture and i encourage you to share any more you've got
Great ep, and sorry to hear you are going through withdrawal right now. Since you've mentioned both benzos and kratom on the pod, I just wanted to give a heads up to you and any other DC-ers that I've heard kratom and benzos don't mix well. Though kratom is relatively safe, it can make it so your body can't process benzos as well, and can end up making a benzo OD more likely. Obv grain of salt and all that, I don't have any studies to cite. But wanted to put that out there because better safe than sorry.
I watched Eraserhead for the first time just a month ago which solidified the need to go through basically all his work (had only watched mulholland, dune, blue velvet). Coming to it having passively absorbed some of what he's doing conceptually in the return, it immediately jumped out that he has just apropos of nothing an unframed photo of a nuclear explosion stuck to the wall by his bed. it's never in a closeup, just set dressing. I was like, 'damn, it really has been there since the start'. Good ep!
Has anyone here watched the series Too Old to Die Young? I really loved it.
Is that the Nicholas Winding Refn series? If so, it certainly has me curious.
I have been thinking, in one way or another, about some issues that this episode helped me think more deeply about ever since you commented on Pynchon's treatment of Slothrop's zoot suit (and of course the detritus in the cars in Lot 49 and numerous other instances in Pynchon). Great episode as always. Thank you.
Mushrooms changed my internal eq and my sensitivity to sound sm. It took me months to stop being afraid of machine noises I'd heard my whole life. Suddenly they all sounded like electrical torture devices or a giant meat grinder coming to rip me apart or somebody tunneling deep into the earth. Took me a couple years to readjust to that being my reality. I was noticing all kinds of frequencies I didn't before and sounds were getting stuck in my body. I came to the conclusion that the far away highway noises are obviously actually evil, but they're still just a highway. But maybe someone is tunneling deep into the earth nearby too who knows?
One of the most horrifying things I've ever googled is screen time statistics for children and teenagers.
Hypernormalization by Adam Curtis, the Brit doc-maker. He broke down the faux/reality of our “world” before it was cool. Right up your existential alley…. And sorry about your benzo kick. That was as bad as kicking smack for me - heard voices for a year, and they weren’t saying anything nice….
If you haven’t already, check out
Beautiful episode, I'll be listening to it many times.
As a brief aside, I am reminded that I’ve always in my way, linked use of sound in Eraserhead with the atmosphere evoked by keyboardist Allen Ravenstine’s work on the early LPs of the punk rock band Pere Ubu. “ Ravenstine didn't so much 'play' his homemade EML synthesizer as much as he coaxed bizarre noise out of it and placed these sounds in unlikely places within each of Ubu's songs”. Matched with lead singer David Thomas’ overall presence in the music there is sometimes sweetness but mostly a surfacing menace. Anyway post-industrial Cleveland where they originated in the early 70’s would seem a very similar landscape of the Philadelphia of Lynch’s Eraserhead.
Oh absolutey for certain THE MODERN DANCE is the official band/album of ERASERHEAD. The fact that I'd been binging MODERN DANCE on repeat for 18 months before I knew about the movie is almost certainly a reason I was able to get through it the first time. It's a home, it's a chair, it's a wall, it's a bed, it's a home, it's a wall ...
‘What would you think of an architect who arrived at his building wondering where to put the staircase? You don’t ‘compose’ a film on the set; you put a predesigned composition on film. It is wrong to liken a director to an author. He is more like an architect, if he is creative. An architect conceives his plans from given premises – the purpose of the building, its size, the terrain. If he is clever, he can do something creative within these limitations. Architects do not only create monuments and palaces. They also build houses. How many houses are there in Paris for every monument? It’s the same with movies. When a director creates a little gem from time to time, an Arc de Triomphe, he certainly has the right to make some run-of-the-mill pictures.’ - John Ford
Shout out listening to Mourning Doves
if that's a band, I wasn't talking about the band, I was talking about actual mourning doves. They're my favorite birdsong. A clique of them live in the eaves of my house, and as the environment gets more and more fucked, they've had to move their nests to the decrepit grapevine arbor (it's an old old house that was fancy when built & is now constantly springing leaks or just partially collapsing). Anyway, the mourning doves, they had to move their nest to the arbor right over my left shoulder, in the spot where I sit when I'm working outside (and that's what I'm doing no less than 12 hours per day, working on my laptop outside and chain-smoking). The lattice of the arbor & the composition of the rickety little nest kept making me think "Oh no no no no I'm gonna come out here one day and find a newborn mourning dove who fell out of the nest and died and I'm gonna start weeping like a Russian grandmother and have a panic attack." But! It turns out! Mourning doves go from "just born" to "essentially adults" in 10-14 days! I had no goddamn idea. They can make sketchy little provisional nests anywhere because they're born almost ready to go. So both the babies (now adults) are fine and both the adults are off to build another shitty nest and have 2 more babies next year. But I mention them because the mourning dove, to me, is the most ancient animal sound in nature. I'm transfixed by that sound. Every time I hear it, I see the people of some unknown civilization, walking single file across the desert, wrapped in clothes that cover their faces except for the eyes and are blowing backward in the wind, and they're carrying the dead person totally wrapped in a white winding sheet, and they're all headed to the little cavern or niche in a mountain or rock formation where they bury their dead, to keep them safe from jackals and carrion birds, and that sound – the call of mourning doves – is what I'm hearing, five thousand, ten thousand, fifteen thousand years ago. (I think it might be derived from the incredible shot in FELLINI SATYRICON where the disgusting old rich man decides he wants to see his tomb and make people cry for him, and they're all walking out to the desert.)
Tati's PLAY TIME is the ultimate architecture movie, in no small part because it's basically 2-hour marathon of sight and sound gags about "the built world"; I think it was Dave Kehr who correctly dubbed it "the last word on Mies van der Rohe" and it's up to the viewer whether Tati is being kind to MvdR or unkind. (Or why not both!)
Speaking of Tati - cause I'm old - back when Eraserhead was new-ish (when he was getting interviewed after making The Elephant Man, etc) he cited Tati as a huge influence. I had seen Eraserhead numerous times and before any Tati. and Play Time happened to be on PBS one night while I was flipping channels. So I land on that station not knowing what it was and it's immediately captivating and I though *goddamn this is Lynchian*
This is @ MSJ but also any fellow D/C heads: There's a precious few filmmakers who care so much about the construction of their sound mix that you can legitimately say that EVERY single sound in their movies was a choice, and the two absolute kings where this is concerned were Robert Bresson and Jacques Tati. If you want to watch two masterpieces that will unscrew your head from your neck, make them L'ARGENT (Bresson) and PLAY TIME (Tati). One of Bresson's better-known adages/thoughts/scribbles (which he collected in book form, NOTES ON THE CINEMATOGRAPHER*) is that, whenever possible, he resisted having the image convey the exact same information as the sound that accompanied the image, and vice verse. That and other guiding principles would give us a ton of really uncanny image/sound collisions - and elisions - across his body of work. * The English title implies he's talking about "cinematography" i.e. the director of photography, the person on the set who's responsible for lighting a shot, among other things. The French title, Notes sur le cinématographe, makes it more clear that Bresson is talking about a filmmaker, a film artist, as "one who operates the cinématographe", alluding to the machines invented by the Lumière brothers to shoot, develop, and project movies. I feel safe in assuming Bresson meant to refer to all three processes (shooting, developing, exhibiting) as something the "cinematographer" wields, as a tool.
This is so much better than the typical “David Lynch was afraid of fatherhood” analysis.
oh I ain't even done with ERASERHEAD yet, there's still lots to say, and none of it is about fatherhood
My only complaint is that all these eps keep reminding me I need to find time to watch Twin Peaks the Return and Fire Walk With Me.
Prediction: You will dig them
During a brief period when Hollywood was actively courting the darlings of the ’60s European film industry - like how François Truffaut was almost going to direct BONNIE AND CLYDE and Michelangelo Antonioni landed a 3-picture deal at MGM - one of the projects Godard was “circling”, as the trades like to say, was a post-apocalyptic horror novel by Richard Matheson called I AM LEGEND. It’s my strong intuition that the soul of whatever movie that was going to be became the animating force of ALPHAVILLE.
IIRC Lynch thought it was absolutely hilarious that Philadelphia’s nickname (and rough translation) is “The City of Brotherly Love”. His reaction was “… No, it is not.”
Next: layer on reality tv to that whole detachment and scripted movies and tv. Also the abstraction thing reminds me of the kiddos who’ve decided to learn to play guitar and have been playing plugins the whole time and have never actually played through an amp, let alone played in a garage with their friends and doing dumb shit in between jamming.
Also I’m assuming that they recorded saxophone that way because if you mic’d it too close you/the SPL would blow up a very expensive 50s vacuum tube mic, but correct me if I’m wrong on that.
That shared comment sheds a lot of light on how dumb tech people are and helps me justify my loathing of them
Anechoic chambers look like a type of hell