Jacques Audiard, Sean Baker, Brady Corbet, Coralie Fargeat, and James Mangold.

I'm reading the list of movie directors nominated for an Academy Award — the nominations were announced a few minutes ago — and I don't recognize any of the names.

I even care about one of the movies — the one about Bob Dylan — though I haven't gone out to see it, not yet at least. But I have to recognize that I don't care about present-day movie directors. They're not these giants of the culture like they were in past decades, not to me anyway. I cared when David Lynch died, and I never even particularly liked his movies. But he was an important cultural figure, and I felt interested and reverent about that. Maybe it's me, and I'm getting not just old but very old. 

What do you think? Have we lost something? Is there any way back? Or should we not even want to go back — back to that era of giants. I know Francis Ford Coppola had a movie this year. He's one of the giants, one of the names that used to come up time and again in the nomination lists. But he's not there this year, nor was he expected. Nobody liked his magnum opus. Hollywood is not growing giants anymore, and it has no use for magna opera.

Goodbye to David Lynch.

"David Lynch, Maker of Florid and Unnerving Films, Dies at 78 A visionary, his films included 'Eraserhead,' 'Blue Velvet' and 'Mulholland Drive,' which was considered his masterwork" (NYT)(free-access link).

Made by a man with a longtime devotion to the technique of “transcendental meditation,” Mr. Lynch’s films were characterized by their dreamlike imagery and punctilious sound design, as well as Manichaean narratives that pit an exaggerated, even saccharine innocence against depraved evil. Mr. Lynch’s style has often been termed surreal, and indeed, with his troubling juxtapositions, outlandish non sequiturs, and eroticized derangement of the commonplace, the Lynchian has evident affinities to classic surrealism. Mr. Lynch’s surrealism, however, was more intuitive than programmatic. If classic surrealists celebrated irrationality and sought to liberate the fantastic in the everyday, Mr. Lynch employed the ordinary as a shield to ward off the irrational....

ADDED: If you go to Criterion Channel right now, the first thing you see is: 

What should we watch?

 

"In 2019, Criterion started a streaming service called the Criterion Channel, which a few months ago added Criterion24/7, a nonstop live-stream feed..."

"... from its wide-ranging library of releases.... I watched the Criterion live stream (free to the channel’s subscribers) for 24 hours straight, recording the highlights and lowlights and whatever else seemed notable as my brain numbed and my eyes struggled to stay open...."

Writes Lucas Trevor, in "Criterion is streaming movies 24/7. I stayed up all night to see them. The films were from Hollywood and abroad, scripted and unscripted, good, great or unwatchable — and I watched them anyway" (WaPo)(free-access link).

I can't imagine watching movies for 24 hours straight (or even staying up that long), but it's an interesting experiment, because you're accepting what's on — like in the days of TV before Betamax and VHS — instead of selecting what you want. It's a way to push yourself out of your limitations, and Criterion is especially trustworthy. I've made it a free-access link so you can see what the movies were and read Trevor's description of them.

It's a really exciting sequence. He begins at 6 a.m., and by late morning, he's watching 2 of my favorite movies:

A new chapter in The History of Ears.

I'm reading "From Van Gogh to Mike Tyson: a brief history of ears," a 2009 Guardian article, by Lucy Mangan.

Found after trying to think of a list of famous ears, a list to which Trump's ear will now take one of the top 2 spots. I think Van Gogh's ear still belongs in first place.

I'd thought of the ear Mike Tyson bit off but had forgotten whose ear it was. (It was Evander Holyfield's.)

I'd thought of a movie ear —

"Whatever style pants look like [expletive] to you are the pants you’re supposed to wear..."

"... and as soon as they start to look normal to you, those are not the right pants anymore. You should always be wearing pants you think look stupid."

Said the comedian Noah Garfinkel, as quoted in the New York Times "Why Are Pants So Big (Again)?/And what the latest swing from skinny to wide tells us about ourselves."

There's also this quote from David Lynch: "I am searching for a good pair of pants. I never found a pair of pants that I just love. If they’re not right, which they never are, it’s a sadness."

Netflix seems to believe I'll be interested in the "Offbeat, Cerebral" type of movie, and it is correct.

I watched this 17-minute David Lynch movie last night.

I made that screen capture just as the monkey is saying "Who's going to believe an orangutan?" The monkey, Jack, is being interrogated for whatever it is the title "What Did Jack Do?" refers to. The interrogator is played by David Lynch, and the taunt "Who's going to believe an orangutan?" is aimed at the Lynch character. 

The movie came out in November 2017, so I don't know if the orangutan accusation has anything to do with Trump — who was famously taunted about looking like an orangutan— but maybe some resonance was intended. Lynch has something of a resemblance to Trump....

That ran in the NY Post. Lynch was clarifying his earlier remark, "Trump could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history." Oh! It's sad that Lynch should have had to clarify anything. Clarification isn't his lane. Let's get back to interrogating Jack the monkey. 

I'm going to need to rewatch "What Did Jack Do?," and I'm going to do it more offbeatly, more cerebrally. My hypothesis is that the interrogator (Lynch) is Trump, and We the People are the monkey. What did we do?

"I'll share with you my urinal — swing-out urinal. In England, they call it the your-RYE-nall..."

Says the eminent filmmaker David Lynch, speaking from his L.A. workshop:



More David Lynch theater here.

Isn't it interesting that the figure at the center of mass delusion is named Sandmann?

Wikipedia tells us:

The Sandman is a mythical character in Western and Northern European folklore who puts people to sleep and brings good dreams by sprinkling magical sand onto the eyes of people while they sleep at night, i.e. rheum....

Hans Christian Andersen's 1841 folk tale Ole Lukøje introduced the Sandman, named Ole Lukøje....

There is nobody in the world who knows so many stories as Ole-Luk-Oie, or who can relate them so nicely. In the evening, while the children are seated at the table or in their little chairs, he comes up the stairs very softly, for he walks in his socks, then he opens the doors without the slightest noise, and throws a small quantity of very fine dust in their eyes, just enough to prevent them from keeping them open, and so they do not see him. Then he creeps behind them, and blows softly upon their necks, till their heads begin to droop. But Ole-Luk-Oie does not wish to hurt them, for he is very fond of children, and only wants them to be quiet that he may relate to them pretty stories, and they never are quiet until they are in bed and asleep. As soon as they are asleep, Ole-Luk-Oie seats himself upon the bed. He is nicely dressed; his coat is made of silken fabric; it is impossible to say of what color, for it changes from green to red, and from red to blue as he turns from side to side. Under each arm he carries an umbrella; one of them, with pictures on the inside, he spreads over the good children, and then they dream the most beautiful stories the whole night. But the other umbrella has no pictures, and this he holds over the naughty children so that they sleep heavily, and wake in the morning without having dreams at all.

ADDED: Yes, yes, I know, and I knew when I wrote the post.... A hundred people are nudging me to include the candy-colored clown (which by the way sounds like another sobriquet for Trump):

The New York Times takes a positive look at the benefits of prayer in public schools.

"On the first day of the new school year, the schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, stood in an elementary school classroom in Queens beaming at a hushed room full of fourth-grade children sitting cross-legged on the floor. 'Please let your eyes close,' said a small boy named Davinder, from his spot on the linoleum. Davinder gently struck a shallow bronze bowl. Gong! 'Take three mindful breaths,' he said, and the room fell silent.... "

In schools in New York City and in pockets around the country, the use of inward-looking practices like mindfulness and meditation is starting to grow. Though evidence is thin on how well they might work in the classroom, proponents say they can help students focus and cope with stress....

“It used to be that you wouldn’t say ‘meditation’ in polite company,” said Bob Roth, executive director of the David Lynch Foundation, a charitable foundation founded by the director of “Blue Velvet,” that promotes and teaches transcendental meditation to adults and children, including those at Brooklyn Urban Garden. “Now we’re working with all the large banks, we’re working with hedge funds, we’re working with media companies. People are having us come in as part of their wellness programs, and that wasn’t the case even two years ago.”

It's the religion corporations love! Remove the pesky "God" character, and you're good to go.

“We’re putting it in a lot of our schools,” Ms. Fariña said about mindfulness, on the first day of school, “because kids are under a lot of stress.”...

Last year, [Public School 212 in Jackson Heights, Queens] converted a large closet in a subbasement into a room devoted to mindfulness, complete with dim illumination and a string of rainbow Christmas-tree lights, allowing users to switch off the harsh fluorescent light overhead.

Oh! We're still saying "Christmas"? I guess it's good for balance when the religion you're practicing in public school is not Christian.

IN THE COMMENTS: About that Bob Roth quote — "It used to be that you wouldn’t say ‘meditation’ in polite company" — Terry says: "When was that? Just another bit of liberal fantasy." And I say: "After the Beatles had their bout with the Maharishi, being into TM marked you as a bit of a flake." That's why we all got the joke in "Annie Hall" in 1977, when Jeff Goldblum (unknown at the time) made that phone call:

David Lynch makes a nail polish ad.

Via Wired, which explains it, in case you have trouble understanding the color red.

I didn't know when I started watching that the brand of the polish was Christian Louboutin, so I was a bit distracted thinking this better be Christian Louboutin nail polish or there's going to be a lawsuit. (Remember this lawsuit?)

"A black briefcase on the side of Bernard Road was found to contain not business files but a dead animal."

And:

A mortified motorist called the Flathead County Sheriff’s Office after going through a Whitefish Stage Road intersection and having another driver come running up to her vehicle and pound on her window, yelling at her to open her door. She said she may have turned out in front of the vehicle but that there was plenty of room, and that she was now in a parking lot getting her composure back.

The police news from Montana, where, also, a boulder fell on U.S. 93 South. Cars drove around it.

It seems like a David Lynch film, perhaps one that is a distillation of traditional Chinese culture.

"It's like a man is in a car and the car is old and the man gets out of the car and rolls the car into the water into a lake."

The filmmaker David Lynch talks about death on the occasion of the death of his guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi:

What does it mean to you that Maharishi is dead?

Well, Maharishi dropped his body. It's like a man is in a car and the car is old and the man gets out of the car and rolls the car into the water into a lake. Do we feel sorry for the man? The car is gone but the man is there. No problems for Maharishi. People are sad because that voice of wisdom is gone.

Did that car image come from the Maharishi himself? It made me think of this song lyric (audio) from George Harrison, another devotee of the Maharishi:

I got born into the material world
Getting worn out in the material world
Use my body like a car,
Taking me both near and far
Met my friends all in the material world...

I’m living in the material world
Living in the material world
I hope to get out of this place
By the lord Sri Krishna’s grace
My salvation from the material world

Do you think of your body as a car that you're driving, and death as a matter of getting out of that car? When you see a dead body, do you think of it as a car wreck or an abandoned car from which the driver emerged unscathed?

Do you hope they got a new car, or do you — like Harrison, apparently — hope they took to walking from then on?

"It’s like the suffocating rubber clown suit begins to dissolve."

David Lynch explains Transcendental Meditation. He's into it. Is it going to change his films?

“You don’t have to suffer to show suffering,” he said of the violence in his movies. The filmmaker sees no contradiction between inner harmony and external edginess.

“I heard Charles Bukowski started meditation late in his life,” Mr. Lynch said, referring to the poet laureate of Skid Row, who died in 1994. “He was an angry, angry guy, but he apparently loved meditation.”

Of course, just as meditation never got Mr. Lynch over a taste for the macabre, it never quenched Mr. Bukowski’s famous thirst for whiskey. “Well, maybe in time, it would have,” Mr. Lynch said with a smile. “In the meantime — just more enjoyment of the whiskey.”

I wonder how it would go with blogging. All the same old taunts and snark, but inside: new mellowness!