This is a hard one to write. I’ve been writing and dumping and rewriting it and I’ve given up on this coming anywhere close to capturing what David Lynch meant to me creatively, what getting to meet and know him meant to me personally and artistically, and what his loss means to everything else.
My youngest, Nate has been here for the winter break from school, and had been asking to see The Elephant Man a lot recently so we decided to play hooky from work, and do an afternoon spontaneous screening here off the Criterion Blu Ray I have. The credits had just rolled up when I got the text that he was gone. It didn’t seem real, or at least it didn’t feel real. Not until after. The film is so beautiful still, a story about a pair of people trying to keep a gorgeous fragile flower alive in a winter of cruelties. It just swept us up, every scene made pregnant by his sudden absence.
The Elephant Man was the first film of his I ever saw and it caught me in his net right then and there. I was about 12 years old when it came to the dollar cinema at the end of my neighborhood in Houston, Texas. It’s hard to remember how different things were when that film came out. We take for granted how endemic to our culture David has been, how entrenched his brilliant blend of humor and horror and human myth had become almost a cliche. In 1982, this film was like a gorgeous black rose in a sea of cabbages. I had never seen anything like it, and I made sure never to miss any of his projects ever again, and I kept that promise now as I sit writing this knowing I’m going to miss every project he didn’t get to finish before he left.
I think we were all shocked by David’s approval of the massive 62 piece series of drawings when my friends at Mondo agreed to take on a series of prints and a gallery show to showcase them. David is notoriously sticky when it comes to other artists interpreting his work, and it will always be one of the greatest affirmations I have ever received that he embraced these. Twin Peaks landed like a bomb going off when it first aired. I was in my first year at Pratt at the time, and in ‘89/90 there was no internet to share, and not a lot of students had tv’s on campus, so we’d often crowd around someone’s in their dorm room Saturday nights when the new episodes aired. NYC on a Saturday during Twin Peaks time, was at least on campus, a graveyard for any other activity. It was like watching someone dream on film and I was absolutely taken by it. Wild at Heart, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, the music and the paintings and the art that came after became like a creative fountain of youth for those of us who revel like maniacs in his waters.
If I could have gone back in time to whisper into that goofy ding dong’s ear and tell younger greg that one day I would get to do what we did with that Twin Peaks, and meet and chat with him and meet much of the cast here and there throughout since that spring show. The community of fans around Twin Peaks remains my absolute favorite group of people ever, and they feel like relatives now out there all over as we have shared his abrupt departure.
David’s influence on how I think about stories, the ability to blend comedic moments with terrorizing ones, to put mundanity next to the extraordinary… they all permeate everything I’ve ever made and despite all the other massive influences of painters, draftsmen, writers and storytellers that have inspired me almost the whole of my lifer as a creative, David Lynch absolutely holds the crown over them all. THE LOST BOY is as much an homage to David as anything else I’ve ever done. It was always meant as a love letter to his spirit and getting to send him a copy was a tremendous full circle joy. He had this affect on so many of us working in art and pop culture. David’s particular brand of storytelling, the twanged delay of a guitar even a simple cup of coffee in a diner became the hallmarks of cool thanks to him. We’re all of us reeling a bit in our community of art and artists at his passing, another bad piece of news in a sea of them that seems to be ceaselessly coming since the year turned already, and easy to lost sight of when the next one drops. But David had a presence that leaves us with a hole I think will be resonating for a long while and a long while more to come. He was one of us, a weirdo with a weirdo vision and a magnificent brush to paint it with. A goal and a lighthouse we will miss, but whose work will bring us in us for generations to come.
They say never meet your heroes. Well I met one of mine, and got to know him and it was amazing and such a blessing and for all the loss and pain of his passing, the gift of that meeting and knowing beats like a glowing golden orb in a White Lodge seeking a landing place on earth to birth itself into something beautiful. You can’t walk around my house without seeing something of David’s or inspired by him. That crysknife from the Dune set, the photo Richard took of Kyle peeking out from behind the curtain in the Black Lodge with a devious smile as we walk down the stairs each morning. The overloud laughing when he saw my ugly Twin Peaks themed tie I wore to the opening of the show in Austin, the many LPs spinning Angelo Badalemnti’s eternal music in the air… He brought an utterly unique and powerfully rooted vision to the world of film and television, gave permission to the weird to weird aloud. To us he was our Dr. Trieves who keeping us safe from the animals in the world outside.
So writing anything about him will never feel like enough for me, personally. There’s just too much to say, too many stories to tell. The Dreamer has become the Dream again, distant now, but never far from us. You left us with your heart and we get to see and feel it every time we look at the work that flowed from it while you were here. Godspeed, David, we’ll see you in the trees.
You can dig through most of the work for Twin Peaks, HERE
BLUE VELVET ost featuring music by Angelo Badalamenti is available HERE
*(We. To answer all the incoming questions about it- yes we do have a fair amount of Twin Peaks and other Lynchian art that will come back to the shop, but just not right now. Not yet, but soon I promise).