David Lynch's Forecast: You Will Submit To TM
Blogger *glassShallot caught David Lynch's travelling lecture, "Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain," last night at USC, and apparently, the man who brought us the backwards-talking-soft-shoeing-dwarf and daily LA weather reports is starting to get a little weird:
David Lynch has started his own foundation dedicated to raising $7 billion so he can make transcendental meditation (TM) available for students, and help build in Washington, D.C. a university for world peace. [...]
Last night’s event went like this: David Lynch appeared with the caveat that he doesn’t like to speak in public (a fact that proved completely untrue as the night wore on), and then proceeded to solicit questions from the audience for a presentation that on paper should have been meticulously planned out. Well, guess what? It was meticulously planned out. People were stationed in the audience to ask the man specific questions (the first one, about his personal feeling about the “light in in Los Angeles”).
He then went on to construct numerous circular sentences that didn’t answer any specific questions about how to meditate. Terms and phrases he threw out over and over without further clarification were “diving in,” “pure consciousness,” “bliss consciousness,” “being,” etc. It was like speaking to my yoga teacher in Topanga Canyon. Which is fine. But it didn’t answer questions, and it didn’t explain what his plans are for the $7 billion, or why he was organizing a presentation that felt like a first date at the Scientology Celebrity Center, or how he met the “scientists” (including a self-described super-string theorist) he works with, or anything about ayurvedic medicine, or how he came to partner with all these “doctors,” or, or. It was also obviously being filmed and photographed by Lynch’s own staff who focused on numerous audience members for large amounts of time as the man spoke. Was this all a stunt? Part of a forthcoming film? A giant performance art project he will continue to perform until the very end?
Unfortunately, Lynch's big finish to the lecture, in which the director scaled a 20 foot tall model of the human brain, dropped his trousers, and thrust his manhood into a pulsing convolution while yelping "Look at how I fuck your brain! Look!" did little to dispel some audience members' suspicions that the whole event was some kind of artsy put-on.
