cody frank

on Sunday, lightly hungover from a wedding at which I was, thank God, only a secondary guest, Julia and I watched two movies in one day, something I always want to do but rarely get the chance to. the first movie is one I’ve seen countless times; the second I knew by reputation but had never seen. both are “hangout movies,” ensemble productions with little in the way of plot and heavy on dialogue; both deal, in divergent ways, with nostalgia; both are about everyone’s favorite generation, baby boomers. and both made me think a lot about youth, idealism vs. cynicism, and the urgency I feel to find something to be committed to, now, so that I don’t regret my choices later.

Dazed and Confused (dir. Linklater, 1993)

there are a handful of cultural works that so shaped what I expected life to be like that had I not encountered them, I would be an entirely different person. for better or worse, Dazed and Confused is one of those. I remember watching this movie in college (not for the first time) and someone saying “that’s Cody” when Slater shows up on screen asking if he can buy weed from Pickford after school. I still quote about a dozen of lines from it all time. so I’m going to try my hardest to do a detached critical assessment of the movie’s engagement with its themes, but it is entirely possible that my appraisal is a post-hoc justification for how dearly I love this movie.

the vast majority of people who love Dazed and Confused think it would be awesome to spend the summer in Austin with these kids. I felt the same way, many years ago as an aimless white suburbanite. this is I think the opposite of what Linklater was shooting for. Dazed and Confused so effectively depicts what nostalgia does to your memory of the “best days of your life” that it’s pretty easy to miss how boring and shitty it must feel to be one of these suburban teenagers. the negative reviews on Letterboxd actually clock what makes this movie more than just a teen stoner flick better than the ones that gush over how immaculate the vibes are. yes, the hazing rituals are brutal and nasty; yes, plenty of the characters are meanspirited and unlikeable. but where the negative reviews go wrong is in thinking that the movie is somehow glorifying youthful boomer stupidity. what it is doing is being honest about how when you look back at those aimless days of youth, when the biggest conflict was wondering whether or not there’s going to be a party that night, even all the shittiness gets cast in a hazy, affectionate glow.

as inconsequential as it may actually be, there’s real gravitas to Pink’s struggle over whether or not to sign the anti-drug pledge his football coaches are demanding. it’s silly and pretentious, but not inaccurate, when Mike calls the whole thing an example of “neo-McCarthyism.” Wooderson is no doubt the most pathetic character, a 20-year-old still hanging around his high school haunts, but he’s also right when he says, echoing the more famous line about high school girls staying the same age, that “The older you do get, the more rules they’re gonna try to get you to follow.” as I get older, day by day even, a vice tightens around my once boundless sense of wonder and possibility—not because I think those possibilities disappear, even though they do, as a necessary result of making series of choices. but the feeling is because so many of those choices seem to be made for you in advance, and if you aren’t constantly and vigilantly defending your freedom, one day you look around and realize how much of it you’ve lost.

which is to say, boy do I feel it of absolutely critical importance that I “keep livin’, man. L-I-V-I-N.”

The Big Chill (dir. Kasdan, 1983)

now, with The Big Chill, I sympathize a little more with the negative reviews on Letterboxd. not quite with the one I saw that says this movie is “as evil and anodyne as the white supremacy it depicts.” that seems a little excessive to me. nonetheless, The Big Chill could accurately be responded to with the classic online rejoinder: OK, Boomer.

as a bit of a gambit here, I want to publicly declare that I think the hate for boomers is overblown, misguided, and, frankly, often seems like projection on the part of millennials. no question that many many many many many many of the problems we face now are a result of boomer complacency, selfishness, cruelty, and narcissism. the ideals of the sixties were coopted and betrayed by the very boomers who espoused them—this is the cultural context of The Big Chill. but, boomers also at least had those ideals, and many even fought and died for them. to me, the major advantage (early) boomers have over we millennials is that at least they can look back at those days of youthful passion and conviction with wistfulness, while most millennials jumped straight to being cynical yuppie sellouts without the detour through radical playacting.

this is what watching this movie made me think about. I don’t want to excuse or minimize the shortcomings of the 60s counterculture and the backlash it inspired, which culminated in the Reagan Revolution and, later, the introduction of the noxious Clintons into the national political consciousness. but I am envious that those who came of age in the late 60s and early 70s had the opportunity to genuinely feel that the times were a-changing, compromised as that prospect may have ultimately been. (I really could go on and on about this subject, throwing barbs at those online parapolitics leftists who argue that the 60s were actually an op orchestrated by the CIA or whatever, but we’ll never get anywhere if I follow that thread).

I don’t actually have that much to say about The Big Chill because while it is an enjoyable movie, I don’t think it really grapples with the questions it raises. but during dinner at the wedding I attended, I was seated next to a friend of mine from high school who I haven’t seen in about 15 years—the same span of time that precedes the reunion depicted in The Big Chill. my old friend and I were cordial, almost painfully so, and the interactions made me think about a distinction Nick makes during an argument between the cinematic friends: Sam says that he and Nick “go way back,” and Nick retorts “Wrong, a long time ago we knew each other for a short period of time.”

how is it that someone you shared so many formative experiences with can one day be functionally a stranger? is that the real significance of entropy, that as time marches inexorably forward, a subtle force insinuates itself between bonds too weak to maintain cohesion, until by chance one day those constituent parts reencounter each other only to find themselves utterly incapable of activating whatever mechanism brought them together in the first place?

anyway, one “advantage” we millennials have over boomers is that as we get older, we are not finding a world abounding with opportunities for a comfortable life. as material conditions continue to deteriorate, we may not have the luxury of selling out our ideals. thank God.

last night I finished rewatching Twin Peaks: The Return. I’d like to say that means I can move on with my life, but my desire to write something about it requires that I rewatch it. that won’t happen for at least a few weeks, because I do want to move on with my own creative work, and watching Twin Peaks at night was taking up the time I want to use for writing. also I’ll be purchasing the television collection on Blu-Ray so that I don’t have to depend on the Paramount+ subscription I’m leeching off to watch, and I won’t, ahem, return to Twin Peaks until then.

I’ll have more to say about Twin Peaks later, probably in a newsletter. in the meantime, one sequence of scenes, in Part 13 (“Whose Story is That, Charlie?”), has rattled around in my head for the past week or so. they’re scenes that are easy to overlook, because they’re all centered around secondary characters, inhabitants of Twin Peaks, their lives having taken them in directions all too logical, but nonetheless surprising, twenty-five years after the events of the original series.

(I’m not usually one to care much about “spoilers,” but Twin Peaks unfolds such a wondrous mystery that I would feel guilty if I were to ruin someone’s experience of watching it without any preconceived notions. so, even though the following reveals little in terms of the saga’s “primary” story, be forewarned that ahead lie descriptions of plot points.)

first, we see Norma meet with a man named Walter, who is her business partner in an expanded Double R franchise chain. she’s apparently romantically involved with Walter as well; she brushes off Ed, despite their obvious yet still furtive love for one another, to meet with him. Norma and Walter’s discussion reveals that there are now five Double R locations, and three of them are performing extremely well. but one of the locations that isn’t turning a profit is Norma’s, the original diner. we learn that this is partly a result of Norma’s insistence on doing things her way, with all natural, local, organic ingredients, making her famous pies too expensive to earn profits. she is resolute in this decision, to Walter’s consternation. additionally, she refuses to heed Walter’s advice about changing the name to “Norma’s Double R,” which he says performs better according to whatever market research he’s done. Norma is unconvinced, preferring the classic name, betraying a sincere humility. the two fail to compromise, and Walter changes the subject to confirm that they’ll be having dinner that evening. Norma smiles and agrees. (for the sake of rounding out this scene’s significance, it’s worth noting that a few episodes later, Norma sells her shares in the other locations to Walter, effectively ending their business partnership, and, as the ensuing scene suggests, their romantic involvement.)

next, we see Dr. Jacoby. in the world that The Return depicts, Jacoby broadcasts a radio/YouTube program under the pseudonym Dr. Amp, whom I’ve seen described as a “low level Alex Jones,” a raving paranoid who asks every day at “seven o’clock!—do you know where your freedom is?” before decrying that “THE FUCKS ARE AT IT AGAIN!” schoolmarmy lib types find it easy to write off this version of Jacoby as a “conspiracy theorist,” a characterization that in some ways stems from the same school of interpretation of The Return I’m implicitly making here, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, I quite like Dr. Amp’s rants, even if he is something of a reactionary grifter. the content of Amp’s broadcasts aside, one of his biggest fans is Ed’s wife Nadine. in this scene, at night, Jacoby walks by Nadine’s store, where she sells her trademark silent drape runners. hanging in the window, behind the silently opening and closing drapes, is a shovel painted gold—a product Jacoby sells as part of his call for people to “shovel your way out of the shit!” delighted to see his own merchandise in the wild, he knocks on the door, and his enthusiasm is eclipsed by Nadine’s own at seeing her virtual guru in the flesh. their interaction is strange, given that they know each other IRL but haven’t seen each other in years, with Nadine expressing ardent appreciation for what Jacoby’s broadcasts have meant to her. Jacoby is genuinely touched by the outpouring of praise, as any artist who encounters someone that seems to really internalize their art might. but then the scene lingers a few beats longer, with some mild discomfort arising from the collision between Nadine’s fanaticism and Jacoby’s creative efforts, suggesting that the good doctor doesn’t know what to do with the kind of appreciation he hopes to inspire.

the final scene in this triptych shows us Sarah Palmer. this is the second time we watch Sarah sitting in her home, drinking lazily mixed Bloody Maries, smoking cigarettes, and watching television. on the television is an old boxing match, black and white. as the scene drags on, it turns out that what’s playing is actually only a 30 second clip of a boxing match, looped over and over and over. how it’s looped isn’t explained, nor is why Sarah would be watching a boxing match at all, let alone such a particular section of a boxing match, endlessly. she pours the last of her vodka into a glass and splashes in some Bloody Mary mix, drinks it, and within a few moments is trying to pour another, but grows frustrated at the emptiness of the liquor bottle. the announcer continues repeating the same commentary. these scenes of Sarah in the Palmer living room are among the most disconcerting of the series. in the previous one, she’s watching a nature documentary of panthers mauling a gazelle, but otherwise she’s doing the exact same thing as always: drinking and smoking cigarettes.

if we understand Twin Peaks to be, in one aspect, about television, about the audience’s relationship to what’s broadcast into our homes; if we understand, as I like to, great art to always in some way be commenting on its own creation, and on the nature of the artistic process generally; with these interpretative lenses, this particular sequence of scenes very clearly expresses the complicated ambivalence of Mark Frost & David Lynch towards their creation. no doubt they have abundant love for Twin Peaks, or else they would not have signed on to produce 18 more hours of it. but the disturbing pathos of Sarah Palmer, obviously trapped by the trauma visited upon her decades ago, hints at the danger awaiting those who, unable to move on with their lives, insist on revisiting, on a loop, while sitting on their couch, story lines long since past. but even if Sarah is one of The Return‘s most frightening characters, the audience can’t help but pity her. contrast this pity with what we feel for scuzzbag Walter, who privileges financial concerns and pandering to the audience in his dealings with our beloved Double R. Norma’s insistence on doing things the way she wants to seems a not-so-subtle dig at the network pressures that interfered with Frost & Lynch’s vision for the show’s original run—which famously led to an early revelation of the show’s central mystery, precipitating an aimless and confused stretch of episodes through the show’s second season.

sandwiched between is Jacoby’s interaction with Nadine, who by all accounts is the “perfect” audience member who takes to heart Jacoby’s call for self-reliance and spiritual growth. Jacoby relishes the validation, but then doesn’t know what to do when faced with Nadine’s fanatical smile. and what artist ever does?

I promise I won’t post about Twin Peaks for at least a few weeks.

these days I’m thinking a lot about time. I’m growing my hair long, haven’t gotten it cut since December. my jeans will fade from deep indigo to electric blue as the months pass. yesterday I started jumping rope again, knowing that it’ll be at least a few weeks before I can feel my heart and lungs adjust to the increased strain. since picking up yoga back in the fall, I now can touch my toes for the first time in my life.

at the beginning of the year I decided to rewatch all of Twin Peaks from the beginning. five months later I’m four episodes away from finishing the 2017 limited series reboot. The Return is, among many other things, about how you can’t ever return, especially not 25 years later. time waits for no one, and it’s often the case that trying to dredge up what time has long since submerged only leads to pain and sorrow. forgetting the past is equally perilous—this is also something Twin Peaks is about—but holding too tightly on to a moment that’s gone will perpetuate the cycle of suffering. one must step bravely into the future, a future that guarantees terror, darkness, and mystery, but also wonder, novelty and maybe, just maybe, hope.

I took some time away from writing. the self-recriminating workaholic in me won’t ever let me feel totally okay with that, but I couldn’t muster the energy. what I had been writing bored me. I didn’t feel capable of creating anything worthwhile. this stems from a couple sources, one I’m not at liberty to discuss. the other, related, to be sure, to the secret one, is that there are certain thresholds through which one must pass on the nonlinear, not-necessarily progressive path to achieving a certain mastery. far be it from me to claim I’m close to the summit of that path, but what separates the plateau I’m at now from the one I want to ascend to is to ability to embrace uncertainty, to make a much greater leap than any previous plateau required, a prospect that inspires fear, especially in someone, such as myself, who, despite protests to the contrary, needs to appear as though he knows what he’s doing. note I said “appear as though,” which is very different than knowing (though “intuiting” is probably more appropriate). “appearing as though” means making sure the audience can follow along, and this insurance is bought by conforming to expectations. in short, the fear of appearing stupid, incomprehensible, offensive, or alienating was and has been a huge impediment to my diving headlong into the work.

but aside from courage, what’s important to learn is patience. with myself, with the process, with the world. nothing comes out perfect in an instant. it took Lynch and Frost 30 years to be able to deliver the crowning achievement that is Twin Peaks: The Return. time. patience. a willingness to let things reveal themselves at their own pace. creative agility and adaptability and improvisation. embrace fait accompli.

oh, and if at some point in the last week you saw this landing page:

what was that all about? I’m definitely the same old cody frank, real name, nobody’s operative, never recalled anywhere for reprogramming or anything sinister like that :).

first weekend of march. straggling el niño rains keep dousing the already lush green hills, ensuring that, when the sun does peak through the clouds of late winter, southern california remembers its technicolor heritage. it’s this time of year that adolescence, a feeling tone that long outlasts the time period it arises out of, blossoms in my heart. i want to listen to emo music descended from Rites of Spring. i want to feel the terror of infatuation. i want to make movies. Taṇhā seduces me and I rediscover an intense attachment to life.

currently reading john gardner’s the art of fiction, a book I always had a vague aversion (Arati) to, but of late i rather enjoy reading books on craft, and also self-help, a genre of publishing that deserves plenty of scorn but that’s also weird and useful, given the right grindset mindset. perhaps i would benefit from putting the ambition to publish aside for a while in favor of really dedicating myself to practicing, because in honesty i don’t actually believe myself yet ready to start putting out fiction. i’ll likely share some of the stories that i have written via my newsletter because i don’t want to think about them any more and putting them out will make me think of them as “done” in some way.

last night watching My Week with Marilyn, an otherwise mid movie, I remembered that my adolescent ambitions weren’t to write, but to direct films, and while I’ve cycled through a wide variety of creative practices in the last 23 years or so, filmmaking is the only one, aside from writing, that i still believe I’d be very good at. that being said, if I thought breaking into the publishing world was hard, or that publishing was in a bad way, it looks positively inviting and healthy compared to the terminal state of the american film industry. idk. maybe i’ll write a screenplay with the intention of it being a piece of fiction, and if i can somehow manage to actually film it then great.

my therapist is advising me to engage more with art forms that aren’t writing, to help clear away my creative blocks. trying to watch lots of movies this weekend, i should reacquaint myself with all the visual artists i admire, and i’m thinking of, as a kind of memoriam to pitchfork’s former glory, listening to all 200 albums on their best of the 2000s list, and writing a little something about each one here.

hoping to set up more things to post consistently while i “build a platform” so that i can “have an audience” ready when i’m also ready to publish.

a corrupted file fails to load the necessary protocol for execution. stuck in boot loop. would you like to? would you like to? somewhere a laugh, derisive and hollow. which way? that way isn’t it, but the other way is dark. if only the circuit could be shorted. something is missing. blood red light flashes DANGER DANGER.

the Palestinians are dying. an American airman burns faster than the urgent message on the back of your retinas. what’s all this for? the trees are dying.

hooting in the night. crawling up the spine is a reminder of what’s been left unsaid. will it ever emerge? my dreams only remind me of what i’ve given up on. get out of the way or you will be destroyed.

some things I’m thinking about:

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The inherent natural state of the skateboarder is the state of constant failure: Learning to exist on a board means failing to accomplish your goal over and over again. Every failure is accompanied by pain, having to pick oneself up, dragging the pain into the inevitable next try. It’s an extremely inconvenient affair.

There is no easy way of becoming a skateboarder. If you can skate, you really wanted to. If you cared for its cultural clout in the first place, the process of skateboarding converted you to a believer in its essence.

source

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Something that’s been a constant throught Lynch’s life is that he’s like catnip to women. “There’s no malice in Dad and he doesn’t do these things out of selfishness—that’s not it at all,” said Jennifer Lynch. “It’s just that he’s always been in love with secrets and mischief and sexuality, and he’s naughty and he genuinely loves love. And when he loves you, you are the most loved, and he’s happy and giddy and he has ideas and gets creative and the whole thing is insanely romantic.”

Room to Dream, David Lynch & Kristine McKenna

this morning I read an essay written by Jay Isaac, a painter and instagram mutual of mine. in the essay, he discusses the situation of the fine artist under the capitalist ruling class, how the job of contemporary artists is essentially the creation of luxury consumer products, and how that task requires complicity in the neocolonialist genocide and resource extraction that buttresses the global capitalist system. Isaac succinctly lays all this out so as to provide a foundation for rallying workers in the creative industries to imagine ways of noncompliance outside that framework.

since I’m not a painter or any other kind of fine artist, the particulars of that problem, while of interest, and cause for solidarity, don’t exactly translate to what I face as a writer. but as I’m striving to in some way participate in the business of publishing, since I believe an artist does have a duty to at least try to interface with the public of their time, it would be useful to particularize, since I am not interested in either allowing my work to legitimize The System or in bending myself into the shape demanded by such a System, as so many careerist writers do nowadays.

the visual arts have long been entangled with the desires of the ruling class. one need only think of the paradigmatic patronage of the Medicis to see how entwined the history of painting and sculpture are with the highest stratum of society. literature, and specifically novels, have a more complex relationship to social class. in theory, reading is a widely accessible form of artistic engagement; in practice, the ability to read novels, especially those novels that partake in the high cultural tradition (value neutral: not saying these novels are necessarily “better,” not right now at least) requires, at minimum, literacy, and usually a working familiarity with the history of (western) ideas, which, prior to (and after) the middle of the 20th century, was unavailable to the vast majority of people. not to mention the leisure time to read them. if painting is the emblematic artform of the highest social classes, then novels are the bourgeois artform par excellance. and like the bourgeoisie, novels occupy an ambivalent position, equally liable to undermine traditions as they are to cozy up with power when it suits them.

that’s all very philosophical, and not where I’m trying to go right now. in practical considerations of the nature of publishing nowadays, let us consider Penguin Random House, the biggest, by a big margin, of the Big Five publishing houses. Penguin Random House is owned by Bertelsmann, a German multinational media conglomerate. “German multinational conglomerate” should be setting off alarm bells in your head, and rightfully so here: despite painting itself as a Christian publishing company that aided resistance to the Nazis in order to be granted a publishing license by the Allies after the war, C. Bertelsmann Verlag was the number one supplier of printed media to the Wehrmacht. the man in charge of Bertelsmann at the time, Heinrich Mohn, was a supporting member of the SS; his son, Reinhard Mohn, was responsible for transforming the company into the international behemoth it is today. the number one book publisher in the US is owned by a conglomerate that lied about its support for the Nazi war machine as late as 2002, when Bertelsmann was forced to apologize.

(tangentially, another subsidiary of Bertelsmann, BMG, recently cut ties with Roger Waters over Waters’ criticism of Israel. Bertelsmann really loves running cover for fascism.)

that’s all only one example of course, but an illustrative one. HarperCollins is, as everyone knows, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. Macmillan is owned by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, another German company with a Nazi past. it is only natural that corporations trend towards a corporatist vision of the world.

none of this is to say that everything published by these companies is inherently fascist. I might argue that there are certain ideological inertias that would work to prevent something truly revolutionary from being published—it’s here that I should acknowledge that I haven’t yet read Dan Sinykin’s recent Big Ficiton, about the effect that the conglomerate era has had on what kinds of works get published. but fiction, done right, is elusive, tricksterish, undefangable, a double agent in the offices of publishing executives. Pynchon calls it “the ever-subversive medium,” a characterization I want to believe in, despite the myriad works being published nowadays that seem so eager to legitimize the corrupting influence that corporate agendas have on the human spirit.

there are many small independent publishing outfits putting out what I assume is interesting work: I admit I’m not very good at “keeping up” with what’s being published. perhaps I should change that; perhaps I should also try my own hand at publishing, at building alternatives to the corporatist model that’s dominated literature for the past 70 years.

this week I’m practicing what Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way calls “reading deprivation.” a while back my therapist half jokingly recommended that I take a break from reading, because while it is important for an artist and especially a writer to read a lot and widely, reading also has a narcotizing effect, or maybe more like a benzodiazepinizing effect. too much engagement with what others have written tends to cloud the awareness, and to write with anything like power requires acute awareness with what’s going on in my own psyche. plus, I’m trying to get out more, and cultivate experiences, and the time I use to read amounts to plenty of opportunity to fuck around IRL.

but w/r/t delving into the material of my own psyche, I’ve been thinking a lot about surrealism lately. if you’ve read my newsletter essays, you know I’m pretty good at clearly articulating information; in a different life I would have been a very good technical writer. but all my fiction writing efforts in the past few months have left me cold, because what I’m writing isn’t very evocative, and the narration is boring, and the plotting is plodding. there’s no energy in any of it. literature gets its power when it’s dug out of the writer’s soul, when it deals with those aspects that don’t lend themselves to “explanation”—what can’t be articulated via technical writing. (though I’d argue even technical writing betrays itself and can suggest Mystery, but that’s a different subject). plus, dealing with reality by means of Techne is why we find ourselves in the dire straits of Modernity in the first place; privileging Magic and Mystery and Poetry is an existential necessity at this moment in history.

surrealism, in theory, offers a method for devaluing the rational in favor of the irrational, a rebalancing of the scales between the ego and the subconscious. complicating this, though, is that surrealism as it was practiced by many of the official Surrealists was boring, contrived, an evasion of the actual potential of the movement. Breton was a coward, Dalí was a fascist lapdog, Magritte treated art as a parlor game.

that being said, Dalí’s method for surrealist creation, the paranoiac-critical method, nonetheless promises a way of evoking the situation of terror that the postmodern subject finds themselves in. Rem Koolhaas describes it thus:

Dali’s Paranoid-Critical Method is a sequence of two consecutive but discrete operations:

1. the synthetic reproduction of the paranoiac’s way of seeing the world in a new light — with its rich harvest of unsuspected correspondences, analogies and patterns; and

2. the compression of these gaseous speculations to a critical point where they achieve the density of fact….

imagining that there are connections unseen by the everyday person and striving to convey those connections on a level beneath (or sur-, ie “above”) the perfectly rational is the task of any artist, even ones who believe themselves to be depicting “reality.” if you wanted to be perfectly rational, you would write journalism, not fiction.

it is here that I admit I miss the practical use of marijuana for inducing such a paranoid state of mind, but before I get back to smoking fat doinks, it would benefit me to first cultivate the skills for creating from this perspective on the natch, because back when I smoked too much weed I often mistakenly thought doing so would help inspire me, when more often than not it only inspired distraction and horniness. so having practice and discipline with writing while sober would set me up to actually seize upon weed’s ability to help its users be taken by surprise by unexpected connections: exactly what the act of writing does for me, at its most potent.

what I’m doing now to try and get at that is “automatic writing,” another surrealist method. for a set period of time, 25 minutes in my case, I try to write nonstop, as quickly as possible, in an effort to bypass or short circuit the conscious reasoning faculty and give vent to the process of thought unfiltered. it is a good exercise, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to anything effective as art. sometimes it does, sometimes an image or a striking juxtaposition emerges, but this is the trouble with a lot of surrealism: it’s not enough to throw together at random elements for the sake of weirdness. in an interview about Inland Empire (the one Lynch movie I haven’t seen), David Lynch says:

[You] need to have ideas. You can’t sit down and start writing—I guess the Surrealists did, they’d just start writing anything: you, know, “The kiln is silver, and it has red.” Or whatever you see, you write down, or whatever just starts flowing. But when it starts flowing, that’s the flow of ideas, just a flow, but it may be total baloney. So, yeah, you can write pages of baloney, but you need ideas.

(interestingly, despite his status as the most widely popular Surrealist in film history, David Lynch doesn’t much care for Surrealism as such. elsewhere he admits to not even having seen many of Luis Buñuel’s films.)

compare Thomas Pynchon on surrealism:

Having as yet virtually no access to my dream life, I missed the main point of [Surrealism], and became fascinated instead with the simple idea that one could combine inside the same frame elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects. What I had to learn later on was the necessity of managing this procedure with some degree of care and skill: any old combination of details will not do.

all of which is to say that automatic writing can be a useful exercise (David Lynch says as much elsewhere), but it’s only useful as an exercise. what’s produced by it can be mined for “ideas,” or can provide “access to my dream life,” but it won’t in itself create anything with power or energy. power and energy being somewhat mystical concepts I’m using to describe writing that I think taps into whatever it is that feeds the greatest works of art.

the utility (or necessity) of surrealism is something of an open question for me still: the world we live in now, with the media landscape acting as a kind of electrified miasma permeating the ether, schizophrenizing reality, makes us all paranoid subjects locked in personalized solipsistic hells. here’s Rob Horning on the matter:

The “false facts” we might spontaneously generate in interacting with social media — whether we are feeding our paranoid fears or indulging in their flip side, unrepentant self-aggrandizement — are no more or less false than the ideological interpretations of reality that pass as “real facts,” the ones convenient to power and the reproduction of existing distributions of privilege and so on. In fact, they fit that ideology’s individualist bias, the belief that it is our duty to aspire to fashion a private reality for ourselves and that our social status hinges on the success of that project.

a reactionary tact to take against the individualized surrealist thrust of electronic mass media would be to reassert, in a High Modernist way, some contrived metanarrative, to derive from Tradition the Source of Ultimate Meaning despite the waste lands created by a fractured reality field. surely there’s value in seeking new meaning from sources of old meaning. but rather than turn away, paranoiacally, from the general motion of the world as it futher splinters, is there not the possibility that running with that trend might lead to some hitherto unglimpsed wholeness? perhaps ahead lies only disintegration: it’s what the laws of thermodynamics suggest anyway. I have no answers, and I no longer wish to provide coherent analysis. instead I’ll skip above the widening cracks in the melting ice of reality until I inevitably slip down into whatever abyss lies beneath.