In the early days of the pandemic, I found myself living in Los Angeles, the city where I grew up, and back in the San Fernando Valley, the flat suburban sprawl I’d fled when I was 18. It's normal for me that Silicon Valley always feels repressive; it makes me, a weirdo, self-conscious. Now that I'm there again, this time missing the casual weirdness of a New York City subway car, I can be included in it. To relax, I would drive around and the palm trees and sunshine were just where they were, and the shopping malls stretched as far as the eye could see. But one morning I turned the dial on the radio and there came the lizard-like voice of David Lynch. He is making a weather forecast.
Lynch, the singularly baroque filmmaker who died this week aged 78, will be remembered as a giant of cinema. blue velvet and mulholland drive and twisted television soap operas twin peaks and its avant-garde sequel, Twin Peaks: The Return. But what I want to recall is the much smaller gift he gave me and other Angelenos when he began broadcasting daily weather forecasts on local public radio station KCRW in May 2020. Life under coronavirus It’s becoming a long term life. difficult.
These flashes are ridiculous moments, many of which last just over a minute. Of course, the Lynchian joke is that in La La Land, the weather is almost always the same.
He would start with the date and day of the week, then read out the weather (Fahrenheit and Celsius), almost always saying it was "clear" and "very quiet right now." Then he'll ponder for a moment: "Today, I was thinking..." What follows is a nugget in the man's head, almost always the title of a song, and you can actually imagine what he's thinking about while he's brewing a pot of wine . Black coffee that morning – Mazzy Starr’s “Fade Into You,” “Moon River,” or the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” Sometimes he just recounts his plans for the day, but in a surreal tone: "Day two of a weekend project and the fun work train is rolling. I'm going to the dining car to get a hot cup of coffee, maybe a cookie, maybe some popcorn. Today. I will be using oil paint, tempura paint, mold making rubber, resin and... varnish.”
But the best part is the last 10 seconds of each broadcast, when Lynch describes the sky that afternoon: "We might have some clouds until lunchtime. After that, it should be pure blue and gold all the way. of sunshine,” or “It looks like these clouds will disappear by mid-morning and we’ll have beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine all the way.”
“All the way” became a buzzword. it always reminds me The Wizard of Oza touchstone for Lynch—both Glinda’s smooth wildness and the evil witch’s sickly green skin. That’s it: “Have a nice day, everyone!”
(Another of his catchphrases was "If Yo yo Believe it or not, it’s Friday again! "Especially in the early days of the pandemic, this felt like a lifeline in normal times, with a heavy dose of irony.)
I heard these messages on the radio every morning while driving aimlessly, but then I learned that Lynch had posted videos of these reports in which he wore a black shirt buttoned all the way to the top , his thick white hair standing straight up, - always, always - big sunglasses. Mel Brooks gave Lynch his first big studio directing gig (Elephant Manproduced by Brooks), once called him "Jimmy Stewart from Mars." It also seems correct to say that if Mars had a weatherman, this is what he would look and sound like. (Maybe: "Guys, the sun is shining brightly outside, but tonight the temperature is going to drop to –153 degrees.")
David Lynch's ultimate weather forecast.
These daily zen moments open up my heart and make the valley seem less mundane. After all, Lynch manifests in these reports a duality that characterizes his aesthetic, an excessive, pathological normalcy. He referenced many 1950s songs, his clothes and hair, and the idea of a jolly weatherman to provide a tether to sunny physical reality. Yet the eerie, creaky edges, and the excitement with which he declares "very still" every day, point to something dreamier, darker. It acclimated me to the highway underpasses, brightly lit and menacing, to the sadness of the flashing neon lights of the liquor stores, to the hills surrounding the valley, which grew dark and clunky at night. Listening to Lynch on the radio suddenly made me feel like I was living in some kind of noir, as if Raymond Chandler was narrating my very boring and predictable days of blanching vegetables and washing face masks during the pandemic. event.
Lynch's weather forecast is charming. He seems to really enjoy spending a few minutes a day playing this character. It worked. My editor told me that his then-7-year-old son considered Lynch his "favorite weatherman," thinking that new generations see the director as a grandfatherly figure who wishes them well as they open their own windows. Have a great day, it’s fun. Laptops for remote schooling. Wait until they see Dennis Hopper doing drugs blue velvet.
Weather reports stopped at the end of 2022, just as the world was trying to get back to normal, around the time I moved back to New York. But I like to think that Lynch seized on this brief moment to live out his own fantasy of disturbing us all a little while also delivering something that he's not always known for, but should be: a An innocent joy. I know I want him to have blue skies all the way.