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#217: Albert Speer's Last X-Rays (David Lynch, pt. 3)

Filament-heated cathode, voltage signal swinging on the grid, all lens-flared out of daylight. Watchman, What of the Night?

(kµ)

#217: Albert Speer's Last X-Rays (David Lynch, pt. 3)

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I didn’t understand being terrified by the concept of architecture until I started reading “Addiction by design” by Natsasha D. Schull. The book goes in depth on the ways that every single detail in the design of casinos is focus tested to draw you in and disorient you, leading you into comfy nooks and crannies where you can spend hours blowing your life savings on slot machines. Got me thinking about TPR and how the first thing Cooper does when he’s back in our world is go play the slots.

Joey Fazz

You mentioned architecture a lot recently or maybe just in the back episodes that I've listened to recently. I have a couple loose thesis there. I think most of the problems with psychosis but also trauma and a lot of other weird anthro phenomenon in general come from a glitch in the way that we make self-reflexive interoceptive and associative memories especially emotional and somatic memory. I think a lot of the problems with psychosis and trauma come from a mismatch in the way that we have learned to use memory related to an internal and external world. They're supposed to reflect and mirror, but when there is a mismatch in the inner and outer world conceptualization then small changes become big changes through endless reflection. We get strange emotional reactions to the way things actually work and double down on trying to change that through doing an internal ritual the external world is supposed to respond to or vice versa. Architecture is a really interesting way to visualize this process. There are sort of cultural values that you want to communicate that you're semi-conscious of through style. You also have just the practical realities of what makes a building not fall down and function. then additionally there are nonsensical visual ideas that humans are designed to like that we gravitate back to universally that are neither of the other two. Some of the longest lived "rules" in architecture satisfy all three of those conditions. Think about how there is still a visual hearth space that everything has to skew and reflect towards in design. Even if that hearth is now a TV or a shelf or something, the visual language maintains it. I want to approach design the way that most people approach linguistics. No one remembers that Roman's hearthfires for penates had to be central structurally and visually to their home but we're still keeping that idea going. We do it because there's always some sort of cultural value that the home orients to even if it's a TV now. It usually works pretty well spatially in a practical sense. It also satisfies some unique need to order and centralized space.

Joel Blackstock

I only had that realization about every decision in a movie or show being deliberate when I got really high and terrified, because I became convinced that "the creators of Adventure Time knew I would watch this and knew what I'd think," which is profoundly stupid but it has to happen sometime I guess

Noah Barlow

Waking me up from the psychotic alienation of fascist brainwashing over here

hypervigil

I’ll be impressed if it’s darker than red riding: 1980

NYCM&AHole

FIre Walk With Me is one of the most upsetting films I've ever seen. It's just filled with doom from the get go. He truly tapped into something evil

Ricardo

A fantastic album as long as you’re okay with having the “merdre merdre” earworm ringing through your brain for months on end (I am).

Heath Iverson

Hey bud long time no talk. donno if anyone else confirmed it but it was alan splet 🫡great ep

Athena

Hello, Michael! New subscriber here. Came by way of TrueAnon, by way of a Pynchon/GR analysis on SubStack. Currently listening to all your Gravity's Rainbow episodes since I'm going through my second read of it. Just listened to the episode where you speak on 9/11. Have you done a 9/11 episode? And if not...could ya, would ya? Cheers, love your work, -S.

Scott

I would be extremely interested in hearing your thoughts on Timothy Morton’s new book “HELL” towards a Christian eschology where after years of object oriented ontology and ecology studies he’s concluded we’re living in hell and starts to imbue his theory in Christian eschatology and vamping off of William Blake. Feels up your alley

otherstuffandthings

MSJ, not sure if you're still checking replies on this ep, but I was wondering if you could recommend some reading on the subject of forerunners to the CIA. I'm fascinated by the idea of the 20th/21st century intelligence apparatuses being birthed from capitalist entities who already had established channels and real estate everywhere abroad: law firms, investment banks, etc. I'm particularly interested in the 19th century. I'm aware of the East India Company, I'm aware of Francis Walsingham, but that's about it. Thanks!

Rohmer Simpson

I am a professional boom operator in film and television. Something that shocks and dismays me is how many of my coworkers will gather round the lunch table, talk about what shows they're watching, and very quickly reveal that they think watching a period drama like Chernobyl, or Deadwood, constitutes some kind of historical education. It makes me want to scream. I want to drag them back into the studio set we were working in all morning and ask them "What is real here? How do you (of all people) not recognize how fake this all is?"

Alex Hennessey

Also everyone I tried to get to watch it hated it. It’s slow. But it’s so pretty.

Smizmar

Yes! Watch it! I’m dying to talk to someone about it and it seems no one has seen it.

Smizmar

Did u fuck with the EQ on the outro track??

dimdimKing

Is that the Nicholas Winding Refn series? If so, it certainly has me curious.

EGRESS

*disguising? Distinguishing

Christopher Johnson

I “discovered” or better, rediscovered Pere Ubu in the early 00’s couldn’t believe how overlooked they were by me in parts but generally. Lots more good stuff came out under various iterations of the band, DT being the one disguising mainstay. I finally did see them perform in person in Williamsburg Brooklyn maybe six, seven years ago. While hobbled by poor health Thomas performed the entire show seated mostly but nonetheless the mercurial presence was still there fully intact. The band was also very present and it was more than a very satisfying performance.

Christopher Johnson

as an architect who has spent many hours drafting while listening to death corner i have to say that msj it's interesting to hear your thoughts on architecture and i encourage you to share any more you've got

John Turnbull

my bones do that too but I can't fly

Michael S. Judge

I wish it were otherwise, because good music writing was the first thing that got me excited about writing – the realization that if you apply the right words to the right music, there's a chemical reaction, and suddenly both are different, and you hear things you never heard before – but I have been a professional music critic in various capacities for maybe 3 years?, 4?, something like that, and 99.9% of it is untreated sewage as brutally trivial as any David Brooks column. I've been around newspapers my whole life, and with very very rare exceptions (people who really care and want to do it right, which also means they'll never advance and are the first to get laid off), every critic and reporter starts with a story "hook" before the thing they're covering has even happened, then they sift through it for something they can hang on the "hook," and they are utterly disinterested in anything else. Seeing smart decent people get tricked by cunts like Robert Christgau and Lester Bangs makes my fuckin' blood boil. I can't remember exactly why I started down this line of inquiry, so what I'm really saying here is simple: fuck Robert Christgau

Michael S. Judge

There's a whole big category of musicians, artists, writers, etc. who have been tarred as "adversarial pricks" by the critics, and very often, I have found that what the critics meant was "(S)he does not enjoy being asked questions so dumb and so perfunctory that nobody who sincerely wanted to know the answer couldn't have found it on their own"

Michael S. Judge

I’ve always been obsessed with the mourning dove call. The minor key, the crepuscularity, the way their bones become flutes when they fly. I’ve noticed their numbers increasing greatly over the past several years here in Brooklyn as songbirds decline. Mourning indeed, huh

Susan Beal

Great ep, and sorry to hear you are going through withdrawal right now. Since you've mentioned both benzos and kratom on the pod, I just wanted to give a heads up to you and any other DC-ers that I've heard kratom and benzos don't mix well. Though kratom is relatively safe, it can make it so your body can't process benzos as well, and can end up making a benzo OD more likely. Obv grain of salt and all that, I don't have any studies to cite. But wanted to put that out there because better safe than sorry.

Benjamin West

“Well Hello Stranger put your loving hand in mine, hello stranger—put your loving hand in mine, your are a stranger—but your a pal of mine, weeping like a willow—mourning like a dove, weeping like a willow—Im in mourning like a dove. Theres a gal at the country that I really love.” —JDG & the Flatlanders

MW

I watched Eraserhead for the first time just a month ago which solidified the need to go through basically all his work (had only watched mulholland, dune, blue velvet). Coming to it having passively absorbed some of what he's doing conceptually in the return, it immediately jumped out that he has just apropos of nothing an unframed photo of a nuclear explosion stuck to the wall by his bed. it's never in a closeup, just set dressing. I was like, 'damn, it really has been there since the start'. Good ep!

Robert Maynard

Has anyone here watched the series Too Old to Die Young? I really loved it.

Smizmar

I emailed David when I was probably 22ish too! I had just gotten the Data Panic in the year Zero box set and it has that Pressler Morgan song I loved it so much so I asked him if there was any more PM to be found anywhere. He replied there was not. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe he replied.

Smizmar

I meant the bird! And fledglings are fun to watch :)- I used to watch baby American Robins mature outside my window a few springs ago. Are Mourning doves your favorite bird overall? Im always recommending “birding” to people as a hobby because it helps me escape this electrical world of bullshit…

John Waaben

I have been thinking, in one way or another, about some issues that this episode helped me think more deeply about ever since you commented on Pynchon's treatment of Slothrop's zoot suit (and of course the detritus in the cars in Lot 49 and numerous other instances in Pynchon). Great episode as always. Thank you.

ectoslavia

Mushrooms changed my internal eq and my sensitivity to sound sm. It took me months to stop being afraid of machine noises I'd heard my whole life. Suddenly they all sounded like electrical torture devices or a giant meat grinder coming to rip me apart or somebody tunneling deep into the earth. Took me a couple years to readjust to that being my reality. I was noticing all kinds of frequencies I didn't before and sounds were getting stuck in my body. I came to the conclusion that the far away highway noises are obviously actually evil, but they're still just a highway. But maybe someone is tunneling deep into the earth nearby too who knows?

Jack

You and your brother being true Kubrick heads bodes well for cracking into Tati. PLAY TIME might still be the most expensive flop in French movie history, but the upside is that people keep discovering it.

Rohmer Simpson

One of the most horrifying things I've ever googled is screen time statistics for children and teenagers.

Jack

Worse than dumb they're lazy and lack curiosity. They are technicians become the technologies they operate. The technologies their forefathers created in their own dumb, lazy, pacified image.

Jack

Lynch is one of the last and best at navigating the funny/creepy/depressing matrix of making something happen at exactly the wrong time, which I'll get to in the next show somewhat

Michael S. Judge

you motherfuckers are not helping my very real surveillance paranoia, since I recorded this show 36 hours after asking my mom "Who the fuck was Jacques Tati"

Michael S. Judge

I got MODERN DANCE for my 15th birthday, immediately got mega-fixated on it, and over the years I heard the stories of what a hyper-mercurial guy David Thomas is – not intentionally a prick, not a bad person, just a man who changes violently and often. So at maybe 23?, I decided to write him a letter, not expecting a response, and if I did get one, I assumed it would be something like "UBU IS DEAD. YOU ARE DEAD. JOIN THE LIVING." Instead, he wrote me the sweetest possible reply about what a privilege it was to influence young people in their teens and 20s, to realize the dream of making people you'll never meet in places you've never gone absorb & understand all the things you wish YOU'D known at 15, and he thanked me super courteously for letting his work have a place in my brain. Not long later, in a schizophrenic-break-related series of circumstances, I lost that email forever, along with lots of other great ones – I used to take a shot at emailing anybody whose work I loved, so I had messages from Van Dyke Parks and dozens of Zappa band members in there, et al. But I promise you, it did happen, and he was incredibly nice.

Michael S. Judge

if that's a band, I wasn't talking about the band, I was talking about actual mourning doves. They're my favorite birdsong. A clique of them live in the eaves of my house, and as the environment gets more and more fucked, they've had to move their nests to the decrepit grapevine arbor (it's an old old house that was fancy when built & is now constantly springing leaks or just partially collapsing). Anyway, the mourning doves, they had to move their nest to the arbor right over my left shoulder, in the spot where I sit when I'm working outside (and that's what I'm doing no less than 12 hours per day, working on my laptop outside and chain-smoking). The lattice of the arbor & the composition of the rickety little nest kept making me think "Oh no no no no I'm gonna come out here one day and find a newborn mourning dove who fell out of the nest and died and I'm gonna start weeping like a Russian grandmother and have a panic attack." But! It turns out! Mourning doves go from "just born" to "essentially adults" in 10-14 days! I had no goddamn idea. They can make sketchy little provisional nests anywhere because they're born almost ready to go. So both the babies (now adults) are fine and both the adults are off to build another shitty nest and have 2 more babies next year. But I mention them because the mourning dove, to me, is the most ancient animal sound in nature. I'm transfixed by that sound. Every time I hear it, I see the people of some unknown civilization, walking single file across the desert, wrapped in clothes that cover their faces except for the eyes and are blowing backward in the wind, and they're carrying the dead person totally wrapped in a white winding sheet, and they're all headed to the little cavern or niche in a mountain or rock formation where they bury their dead, to keep them safe from jackals and carrion birds, and that sound – the call of mourning doves – is what I'm hearing, five thousand, ten thousand, fifteen thousand years ago. (I think it might be derived from the incredible shot in FELLINI SATYRICON where the disgusting old rich man decides he wants to see his tomb and make people cry for him, and they're all walking out to the desert.)

Michael S. Judge

Oh absolutey for certain THE MODERN DANCE is the official band/album of ERASERHEAD. The fact that I'd been binging MODERN DANCE on repeat for 18 months before I knew about the movie is almost certainly a reason I was able to get through it the first time. It's a home, it's a chair, it's a wall, it's a bed, it's a home, it's a wall ...

Michael S. Judge

Hypernormalization by Adam Curtis, the Brit doc-maker. He broke down the faux/reality of our “world” before it was cool. Right up your existential alley…. And sorry about your benzo kick. That was as bad as kicking smack for me - heard voices for a year, and they weren’t saying anything nice….

Jerry Stahl

If you haven’t already, check out

Jerry Stahl

Beautiful episode, I'll be listening to it many times.

Louie Van Patten

As a brief aside, I am reminded that I’ve always in my way, linked use of sound in Eraserhead with the atmosphere evoked by keyboardist Allen Ravenstine’s work on the early LPs of the punk rock band Pere Ubu. “ Ravenstine didn't so much 'play' his homemade EML synthesizer as much as he coaxed bizarre noise out of it and placed these sounds in unlikely places within each of Ubu's songs”. Matched with lead singer David Thomas’ overall presence in the music there is sometimes sweetness but mostly a surfacing menace. Anyway post-industrial Cleveland where they originated in the early 70’s would seem a very similar landscape of the Philadelphia of Lynch’s Eraserhead.

Christopher Johnson

‘What would you think of an architect who arrived at his building wondering where to put the staircase? You don’t ‘compose’ a film on the set; you put a predesigned composition on film. It is wrong to liken a director to an author. He is more like an architect, if he is creative. An architect conceives his plans from given premises – the purpose of the building, its size, the terrain. If he is clever, he can do something creative within these limitations. Ar­chitects do not only create monuments and palaces. They also build houses. How many houses are there in Paris for every monument? It’s the same with movies. When a di­rector creates a little gem from time to time, an Arc de Triomphe, he certainly has the right to make some run­-of-the-mill pictures.’ - John Ford

EGRESS

I don’t doubt it. It’s between work and small children. It took me months to watch Dune part 2.

NYCM&AHole

The first 3 Hulot films chart the incursion of "the modern era" into bucolic/rural life - MON ONCLE illustrates this in miniature in that wonderful opening sequence, IIRC we follow a pack of happy dogs as they (and we) move from rural to suburban to urban environments. But what's cool about Tati is he never seems to fully hate anything or anyone: even the "ugly American" (played by Billy Kearns, and boy is that a whole other tangent) gets to be a fun/loose guy who genuinely enjoys the awful restaurant dissolving into chaos. I think I would feel differently about PLAY TIME if he was simply commenting that the sprawl of terrible cities was, exclusively, a Bad Thing... but (and I think this goes for all the best satirists) he laughs with, as much as at, the things/folks he's making fun of.

Rohmer Simpson

I would say honestly that what Lynch really took from Tati is a kind of anxiety in spaces/framing and timing that can go either way to being funny or upsetting and Lynch is fantastic at it? Like in Eraserhead (this post industrial world where nothing of what was promised to a mid century American exists? Or did and has died or never really was but was held out to be) - when Henry goes into the lobby, gets into the elevator and pushes the button and waits.. for the perfectly, awkwardly wrong amount of time for the doors of this old never maintained elevator to close - it's both funny and awkward and depressing.

Enk

I didn’t know that! Thank you for that. The man has great taste! Not sure if this will make sense but I doubt I laughed more than 1-2 times while watching a Tati film but I love them so damn much and they always fill my heart. Maybe I’m an odd case but I’m reluctant to revisit a movie that makes me laugh a lot.

Rohmer Simpson

Speaking of Tati - cause I'm old - back when Eraserhead was new-ish (when he was getting interviewed after making The Elephant Man, etc) he cited Tati as a huge influence. I had seen Eraserhead numerous times and before any Tati. and Play Time happened to be on PBS one night while I was flipping channels. So I land on that station not knowing what it was and it's immediately captivating and I though *goddamn this is Lynchian*

Enk

Room “reverb”. Also funny to hear the origins of what is now the mimiq pedal. On a related note (pun not intended), have you found a harmonizer pedal that’s any good?

NYCM&AHole

Shout out listening to Mourning Doves

John Waaben

oh I ain't even done with ERASERHEAD yet, there's still lots to say, and none of it is about fatherhood

Michael S. Judge

Tati's PLAY TIME is the ultimate architecture movie, in no small part because it's basically 2-hour marathon of sight and sound gags about "the built world"; I think it was Dave Kehr who correctly dubbed it "the last word on Mies van der Rohe" and it's up to the viewer whether Tati is being kind to MvdR or unkind. (Or why not both!)

Rohmer Simpson

This is @ MSJ but also any fellow D/C heads: There's a precious few filmmakers who care so much about the construction of their sound mix that you can legitimately say that EVERY single sound in their movies was a choice, and the two absolute kings where this is concerned were Robert Bresson and Jacques Tati. If you want to watch two masterpieces that will unscrew your head from your neck, make them L'ARGENT (Bresson) and PLAY TIME (Tati). One of Bresson's better-known adages/thoughts/scribbles (which he collected in book form, NOTES ON THE CINEMATOGRAPHER*) is that, whenever possible, he resisted having the image convey the exact same information as the sound that accompanied the image, and vice verse. That and other guiding principles would give us a ton of really uncanny image/sound collisions - and elisions - across his body of work. * The English title implies he's talking about "cinematography" i.e. the director of photography, the person on the set who's responsible for lighting a shot, among other things. The French title, Notes sur le cinématographe, makes it more clear that Bresson is talking about a filmmaker, a film artist, as "one who operates the cinématographe", alluding to the machines invented by the Lumière brothers to shoot, develop, and project movies. I feel safe in assuming Bresson meant to refer to all three processes (shooting, developing, exhibiting) as something the "cinematographer" wields, as a tool.

Rohmer Simpson

This is so much better than the typical “David Lynch was afraid of fatherhood” analysis.

Tyler

Prediction: You will dig them

Rohmer Simpson

My only complaint is that all these eps keep reminding me I need to find time to watch Twin Peaks the Return and Fire Walk With Me.

NYCM&AHole

It was partly that and partly for a little isolation from room bleed, but it was also because you'd get several different saxophone signals hitting the mic at times that differed by just a few microseconds – off one wall, off the other, off the ceiling, from the sax itself, off the floor – which would give the track a sort-of-echoed, fattened, "more THERE" quality that made it sound like it had already been double-tracked. That's how the Beatles & their engineers came up with ADT (Automatic Double Tracking), by taking the sound source and then recording a copy with some very slight time delay, either mechanical (messing with one of the 2 tape reels during dubbing, etc.), or electronic (intentionally de-synching the original and copy just a bit). And all modern common modulation effects are rooted in the same practice of creating a doubling delay and then fucking with it juuuust a little. A flanger is a doubling delay where the delay time oscillates between about 5 and 15 milliseconds, a chorus is the same at around 15 to 25 milliseconds, a phaser creates a delay that doubles your sound peaks and then "slides" them first in front of the originals, the behind the originals, so you get the whole sweep of two (essentially) identical sounds tracking through the usable spectrum of phase relationships, etc. (That's why a lot of slow phasers, and a lot of the people using them when they were new in the ’70s, seem to disappear from the mix sometimes – if you set a phaser very slow and very "deep," i.e. the out-of-phase copy is as loud as the original, you'll spend considerable time in the perfectly-out-of-phase zone, where the sound nearly disappears, and you gotta wait for it to swoop back in. You can hear that on some Hendrix solos, tho' he and Eddie Kramer would've been doing it with tape machines, not a pedal, since there weren't any yet.)

Michael S. Judge

Also I’m assuming that they recorded saxophone that way because if you mic’d it too close you/the SPL would blow up a very expensive 50s vacuum tube mic, but correct me if I’m wrong on that.

NYCM&AHole

During a brief period when Hollywood was actively courting the darlings of the ’60s European film industry - like how François Truffaut was almost going to direct BONNIE AND CLYDE and Michelangelo Antonioni landed a 3-picture deal at MGM - one of the projects Godard was “circling”, as the trades like to say, was a post-apocalyptic horror novel by Richard Matheson called I AM LEGEND. It’s my strong intuition that the soul of whatever movie that was going to be became the animating force of ALPHAVILLE.

Rohmer Simpson

Very Glyphic, yet another banger :)

Brennan Utley

IIRC Lynch thought it was absolutely hilarious that Philadelphia’s nickname (and rough translation) is “The City of Brotherly Love”. His reaction was “… No, it is not.”

Rohmer Simpson

Next: layer on reality tv to that whole detachment and scripted movies and tv. Also the abstraction thing reminds me of the kiddos who’ve decided to learn to play guitar and have been playing plugins the whole time and have never actually played through an amp, let alone played in a garage with their friends and doing dumb shit in between jamming.

NYCM&AHole

There is DEFINITELY a Godard-Lynch connection. Mulholland Drive is some kind of bizarro remake/remix of Godard’s Contempt, very deliberately—from the car crash to the wig to the theme of contempt to the sleazy film producers to the out-of-sync lip syncing, right on down to the “Silencio” at the end. (And plenty of other things, but I’m on my phone here.) He takes every element of that (already Weird) film and twists it firmly into the zone of the Weird…

Yarrow Paisley

Anechoic chambers look like a type of hell

NYCM&AHole

That shared comment sheds a lot of light on how dumb tech people are and helps me justify my loathing of them

NYCM&AHole


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