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#216: Êlektron Nekrópolis (David Lynch, pt. 2) (Patreon)

Published:
2024-06-07 09:16:40
Edited:
2024-06-08 08:55:48
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Alchemy, from lead to gold; electricity, from gold to cobalt, lithium, and U-235.

(I might unlock some of these Lynch shows, so tell me in the comments if you wanna share this with people.)

Files

Comments

Taylor Leibel

We're all wrapped in plastic now.

Justin Reid

Man, what the fuck. I’ve just returned to The Return and Lynch again on a whim. There is something in the air. We’re all drinking it.

Joey Fazzoli

No link to buy golden shovels?

AJ McKenna

I support unlocking these, I have a Lynch buff friend who I think would get a kick out of them.

NYCM&AHole

Glenn Fricker would beg to differ that changing tubes changes the sound (as recorded)

Heath Iverson

Thanks for getting at the black boxing of modern technology and the foreclosure of human meaning and freedom. I’m gonna drop the quote from Arendt here because you’re thinking right along with her: “The trouble concerns the fact that the ‘truths’ of the modern scientific world view, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought. […] It could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will be forever unable to understand, that is, think and speak about the things we are nevertheless able to do. It would be a though our brain, which constitutes the physical material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.” That’s here on earth, but “In Heaven, everything is fine.”

Heath Iverson

On electricity, how does Lynch’s satanic electricity stack up against Pynchon’s conception of electricity a la Byron the Bulb and Skip the ball lightning?

Jaime Christley

This isn't to detract from or modify anything you describe re: the invocations of the JFK assassination in TP:TR - but someone who's a little closer to these things explained to me that Mark Frost is the more literal-history-minded of the duo; to any degree that one can parse who contributed what to the series (specifically TR), Frost's imagination would somehow veer towards both the prosaic/pulpy AND speculative-historiography... not to disparage the guy but, say, take all the historical/parapolitical events and phenomena that you cover on your show and instead of you talking about it it's a James Patterson airport novel. Just glancing at the stuff Frost gets up to when not collaborating with Lynch - foremost among them the "Secret History of Twin Peaks" book he put out in 2016, a year before TP:TR - leads me to think that, had Lynch never been involved *at all* in TWIN PEAKS, you end up with, maybe, one season of a quirky small town mystery/local color/pastoral program, upon which the "fringe" (for lack of a better word) story elements don't integrate nearly as well because there's no Lynch to imagine it all as inhabiting the same -sphere.

glenn mohre

Great episode. Solid pacing, love the inversion of form to create a pseudo coupling. Couple of notes/qs: - Tristero -> Trio of Lumberjacks. You implied this through the CIA connection but were never explicit - It is my understanding that the nerve net/open circuit tree was a stand in for the man from another place. Exploring his character might expand this analysis. - When describing the interference of the mantle between humanity and the Earth, you didn't use the term "grounding" which seems right on with using the electrical grid as a crux. - Reverse echo / backwards talking technique: I figured out a pretty good approx of his backwards talking approach using a small sampler. Cut the word(s) into syllables. write them backwards. record these backwards syllables. reverse the recordings and stitch them together. Voila! I hadn't tried adding some reverb in the pre-reversal step. I'll give that a shot. - Reverse reverb: This term is abuses out the wazoo. sometimes it refers to a linear reversal of the waveform, but it can also refer to using the positive edge of the input envelope to shut down the reverb, causing it to prolferate during decay. The TC Electronic NovaReverb does this, as does the SPX-90, popularized by Kevin Shields.

Zach

Makes me think about how threats by the U.S., Israel, and their allies to turn enemy states into "parking lots" and promises by the U.S., Israel, and their allies to turn these same enemy states into utopian consumer paradises are expressions of the same underlying impulse: to extinguish any country or any people that operates even slightly outside the logic of the World, by any means necessary. To turn the entire Earth into a "parking lot."

breakdownshakedown

Another vote for unlocking the Lynch - I'm sure my friend would love to hear these

Jaime Christley

somehow I managed to get a hold of ABSURD ENCOUNTER WITH FEAR, which I assume he would have made at the Pennsylvania Fine Arts Academy, the same year (1967) as SIX FIGURES GETTING SICK and some others. It's on YouTube in extremely poor quality but if you watch it, it'll be completely obvious "Oh .... right - he was never not David Lynch." (The man, incidentally, is played by legendary production designer Jack Fisk, semi-secretly one of the guys most responsible for the way some of the best American films post-1968 look the way they do.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDqN9-VD9dM Time was, being able to see ERASERHEAD, let alone his student films, was a real hipster tell, like they were grease-stained chapbooks, churned out by black market printing presses and passed around among dissidents. I'm glad those days are mostly behind us, that there are significantly fewer ways someone can be a dick by lording over someone else that THEY AND A SELECT FEW had access to Some Really Rare Shit. (And no, I'm not referring to Netflix and other streamers, who, at best, are working hard to make their own new release movies as difficult to find as possible.)

Sage

Worth taking a look at the screenplay for David Lynch's unproduced film Ronnie Rocket. Reading parts and hearing what other David Lynch fan's took from it unlocked a of Lynch's 'electrical' themes for me. Fans have done some interesting work connecting Ronnie Rocket's electrical themes back to his other works. "A closer look at some of the buildings reveals a thirties style architecture, although quite plain and very massive. Office buildings with heavy industrial factories. A smoke stack pours tons of heavy black smoke slowly and silently into the dark night sky. Hundreds of heavy electrical wires crisscross through the sky and electricity hums come from giant boxes on the poles. The headlights and then a car--it moves slowly below, down a street then turns out of sight. An old neon sign over a diner says "City Diner." A large old hospital and the, front steps. Inside a nurse goes by wheeling a patient on a rolling bed. The corridor is now empty. Moving slowing through the empty corridor. An open steel door."

big microbe

I liked the guitar episodes though

Nathan

Great ep, looking forward to this series. An aside, but would you ever consider doing something on electronic music, its history, and how it fits into all of this? I think I remember you mentioning at one point that electronic music came to be as an accidental consequence of the MIC/ atomic bomb research. Lot 49 also touches on this a bit with the Yoyodyne employees in the bar after work. Would be interested to know your thoughts on synthesizers and shaping sound through purely electronic means as an art form, as opposed to music created acoustically/mechanically

rwn

Hey Michael, great episode. Thank you for it. I was wondering if you have ever engaged with the work of Friedrich Kittler, the German literary scholar and media theorist. I've long sensed resonances between your thought and his, although I have never heard you mention him. For example, Kittler engages with Pynchon (see, e.g., his article "Pynchon and Electro-Mysticism" [2008] https://pynchonnotes.openlibhums.org/article/id/2700/). This essay gets into gramophones and sound reproduction, as well as the interface between the mechanical and the electrical, right away. His media theory extends some of the basic contributions of McLuhan, who you have regularly referenced. In this episode, you mention that one reason that you were inspired to explore amplifier electronics was to better understand electricity—because electricity mediates between everyday, concrete experiences and commonsense intuition, and a realm of world-shaping technicity that is opaque to the average person. (Pardon my rephrasing of your words from recollection. Also—side note—FWIW, as a music scholar, I loved your episodes on guitar amplifiers.) Kittler, in what seems to me to be a resonant way, studied programming languages, as well as their evolution. Consider this summary of an aspect of his media theory from Wikipedia: '[Kittler] sees in writing literature, in writing programmes and in burning structures into silicon chips a complete continuum: "As we know and simply do not say, no human being writes anymore. [...] Today, human writing runs through inscriptions burnt into silicon by electronic lithography [...]. The last historic act of writing may thus have been in the late seventies when a team of Intel engineers [plotted] the hardware architecture of their first integrated microprocessor."' Kittler draws connections between technology, media, and cosmology in his book "Discourse Networks 1800/1900." He also makes frequent reference to the origins of magnetic tapes and films, among other technologies, in or connection with Nazi Germany in his works. The volume of Kittler's essays called "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter" is especially relevant, I think. If you, or anyone else reading this comment, hasn't read the Gramophone essay, in particular, I would highly recommend it. It discusses, among other things, a piece of writing by Rilke, where Rilke muses the possibility of understanding the mind by dragging a gramophone needle over the suture of a human skull. If you have engaged with Kittler, I'd be very curious to know what you think. Thank you again for the episode! This is my first comment to you; I've been a huge fan of your work since I found out about your work a bit over a year ago. Best wishes to you and yours.

John Waaben

Really excited to see where this series goes- this is definitely an episode I’m gonna come back to again and again to take notes on like “Terrorism as Public Art”. I’ve met so many guys (filmbro archetype) who love Lynch but can’t begin to explain why they do or what the hell he’s trying to say in his movies.

John Waaben

I would also like to share this episode with my friends

MirrorOooMirror

Первый—Очень Хорошо! Second, and maybe im Skippin ahead here, but curious to hear your interpretation/thoughts on the role transcendental meditation plays in the Lynchoshpere. Like, what does it all mean man?

Enk

Also a vote for unlocking the DL stuff, and I wish Patreon would let you gift subscriptions because I have some friends who are not so well off financially. I really want them to get some Death Corner and even more, talk about it w them.

Escheloned Confusions

There are so many layers of abstraction within the electric, which bring their own echeloned confusions. I work in software engineering, and a lot of the programming that happens these days is done by programmers who don't really understand how assembly works or what the code they write actually does. It's why modern software is slow as shit, buggy, and a multitude of security defects keep getting discovered every day with no end in sight.

kallampero

A nod to the first usage of the term 'deliquescence' I have ever heard of outside of mycology, specifically the study of coprinoid fungi. Coincidentally, the "ink" formed by these mushrooms' autodigestion (aka deliquescence) made them useful to the third reich. Hitler is said to have used it in signing high-ranking documents. Only by examining the signature under a microscope to check for the presence of coprinoid spores could the document's authenticity be verified.

Adrian

I fucking NEED more JFK/Lynch connections.

M Wigby

"shall i project a world" no choice left there, Oedipa

M Wigby

after years of listening to this show, this episode finally made me understand the centrality of music recording for your mythic constellation; the transformation of the actual into an increasingly complex abstraction which then becomes more dominant in structuring perception than the real thing.

Daniel McVeigh

loving the radio and electricity discussion so much I keep forgetting the topic is Lynch

Pear Is A Patsy

For the record MSJ I loved the guitar and amplification episodes

Billybobby

Lars von Tier can be excruciating, but The Idiots (1998) is phenomenal.

Joel Blackstock

I had an argument the day before I listen to this about how for me world WWII ushered in a new era not just because a lot of people felt like it was some cleaner line between good and evil but because after WWII two we understood how technology worked. You could understand it as a set of electrons jumping around, diodes, copper wire windings, relatively simple wavelengths, etc. afterwards it became a impenetrable and largely disposable product you had to buy as one thing and then throw away but could no longer understand. I was working on something about how psychosis changes over time based on technological development and even though I haven't really found anyone else to agree with those ideas I think that they're pretty uniquely linked to the way we understand politics and technology through metaphor or our inability to understand it as a simple metaphor. The changes in psychosis are completely documented It's just the theory of why. As a relatively new listener I'm shocked about how this podcast will tap into the thing that I've already been feeling in the world and arguing and writing about for a few days or weeks before it comes out.

r b

I'd kill to hear you talk about Eraserhead at length

Justin Reid

The one schizoid connection I’ve sat on for years, from about when I watched Twin Peaks not long before discovering your show, is the name of the radio station in Part 8 of The Return. The Woodsman, played by an actor notable for being an Abraham Lincoln impersonator, enters the radio station and kills everyone who works there in a way eerily reminiscent of JFK’s head wound. The radio station, which Lynch could have named anything, is KPJK. My mind reads it as Kill President John Kennedy. I may have just been very Pynchon/DC-brained at the time, but I can’t not see some kind of coincidence there. One assassinated President broadcasts a message of evil from the other side, which leads to the consequential death of another. It is happening again.

Justin Reid

It is also incredibly important to mention: - I believe it is Sarah’s voice calling out to Laura which she screams in response to. - After she screams and the lights go out on the Palmer house/whatever this reality is, the credits play over a frozen image of Laura whispering to Dale in the Lodge, and then when Lynch and Frost’s production logo plays at the end of the credits, there is no longer an electrical sound that plays over it - something that is a chilling absence considering how notable that sound effect has been at the end of every episode of Twin Peaks.

Kamran Husain

buddy i love the amp and guitar eps do not let the haters tell you otherwise i listen to them all in a day about every month

Jaime Christley

MSJ, I want to EXHORT you to see a 1974 British film called PENDA'S FEN, directed by Alan Clarke. It's an episode of the long-running anthology series "Play for Today" which, despite its name, was often a gateway for some of the biggest headfucks ever to air on the BBC or any other national broadcasting venue. Basically it's about an adolescent boy in the English Midlands, the son of a vicar, who simultaneously figures out he's gay and also that the whole of England as it presents itself "in real life" is an elaborate mechanism to elide its pagan roots. There's a scene where he's visiting a playwright who lives in town and the playwright's wife says of him "My husband's what people call a paranoid" The boy interjects "Persecution mania?" Her: "That's right! Trouble is his twisted notions usually prove true." Who does that sound like? I ask you. There's always 1-2 surprisingly acceptable-looking uploads on YouTube at any given time. Hope you give it a whirl. On the whole, Clarke rewards a full career survey, but this is the one that almost seems to be dreaming up Death/Corner long before you entered the scene. https://youtu.be/Ghu0ITA8aSE?si=_nklBJzbyNm7tehN

Gabe Foss

Recently made a connection between the kettles/teapots (for lack of a better term) that appear in the return, including Phillip Jeffries, and the first spy satellites used by the NRO, namely the Corona. When you see the kettle/teapot machinery alert the fireman in episode 8, we move to the theatre room where a film projector shows us the scenes of the nuclear explosion in black and white from above, as if we’re watching the film from the reel inside the satellite. Won’t go too far into this idea in this comment but it’s unlocked a whole new reading of episode 8 and the show as a whole for me. Id love to hear your thoughts on this.

No

I’d like to say that your guitar amp series one of my favorites (not to discount the other work), but just the overall mechanics and “this stuff is a lot touchier and weirder than you’d think” really made me think a lot harder about electronics in general

Nathan

Whats the word/phrase you used at 7:45 for a image used to represent the entirety of a work? Lol not sure if this was a subtle joke or an actual term but every phonetic combination I’ve tried to reassemble and search for has yielded no fruit

arden wezenberg

Late to this party. But both Mr. C and Agent Cooper drive Lincolns at one point, and Lynch considered Laura Palmer to be Marilyn Monroe. Here is the quote: “You could say that Laura Palmer is Marilyn Monroe, and that Mulholland Drive is about Marilyn Monroe, too. Everything is about Marilyn Monroe.” Then there is Lincoln, the image of him looming largely in the classroom when Laura Palmer’s death is announced, the lucky penny, the woodsman in the Return. Of course there is also Sheriff Harry S. Truman, and the Nixon theme with the mayor and his brother.