It didn't work for me. It just got all passive aggressive about my browser. I should install Chrome just to keep it happy or something.
Well, the threadjack is in the post itself, so I don't feel bad. I mostly don't get the David Lynch thing. Twin Peaks (season one!) was indeed awesome, but I didn't enjoy Blue Velvet or Lost Highway at all, and although there are parts of Mulholland Drive which, taken by themselves, are very well done, I found the movie as a whole incoherent. I don't remember watching anything else of his.
I spent a fun lunch plotting with a friend of mine in Oxford who had the idea to open a David Lynch-themed bar & grill. I suggested he reserve the parking space directly outside the door for the John Deere mower from The Straight Story. I recall the menu was the source for a lot of laughs.
David Lynch-themed bar & grill
David Lunch?
If you're going to talk about David Lynch at least have this playing the whole time.
But what did you think of Dune?
6: The movie was better than all but the first book, because Sean Young. Which isn't saying much. I still don't understand the voice-weapon thing.
"My name... is a killing word... Moooooooooby HICK!"
Near where I used to live in Boston there is the intersection of Gurney and Halleck streets. The intentionality of the reference is unknown.
"Never one drop of rain on Arrakis. On the plus side, you can shit without taking off your pants."
Dude, I hate David Lynch. The utter tedium of Eraserhead set me against pretty much everything else that its fans thought cool in the '90s (Fugazi, conscious hip hop, Dr. Martens, dreadlocks, etc.).
For real cred you are supposed to say that only the first season and the last episode are any good. (Which is basically true.)
Mulholland Drive is great though. It's a mess because it was supposed to be a tv pilot but as messes go...
I remember "Wild Palms"... very odd indeed. "If you're afraid of the rhino, the dream goes away. Then you'll be just like everyone else."
Why is it a Mobius strip and not just, like, a circle?
Wow...Wild Palms. I haven't thought about that in years.
I didn't even watch it, but I remember what an "event" it was supposed to be. My impression was that it pretty much fizzled, it that right?
Because it's got more dimensions that a circle?
16: Okay, then why not, like, a cylinder?
Moebius Strip is a better name for the David Lynch themed exotic dancer joint in the back of Alex's friend's bar.
17: Because the radius isn't constant.
15: yeah, it was part of that great Virtual Reality revolution of the early 1990s that everyone's vaguely embarrassed about now. (Lampshaded in the latest William Gibson novel.)
I suppose I really meant annulus instead of cylinder, but anyway. The distinguishing feature of a Mobius strip is that it's not orientable. Constant or nonconstant radius has nothing to do with it.
I was just thinking that if it is actually a strip, if it has a twist, the radius has to vary. But not I'm just delighted to that "annulus" is a term in geometry and looking for ways to apply that knowledge in conversation.
David Lunch?
I think we considered that, but trimmed it to just Lunch for reasons of design austerity. Which is a profoundly un-Lynchian virtue.
I suppose I really meant annulus instead of cylinder....
Whatever floats your boat. No judgments!
David Lynch's cameo in Louie was very funny.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/louis-c-k-and-the-ballad-of-jack-dall/
"I wish this west Texas highway was a Möbius strip"
28:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging
As far as I can tell it has nothing to do with circles, annuli, or Möbius strips.
11: I saw Eraserhead in college in the early 1980s. I remember a few people making a fuss over it like it was the coolest thing ever. I may have been embarrassed to admit I didn't get it at all -- parts bored me and parts grossed me out, but that was all.
Christopher Priest's "Inverted World" is written with the plot in the shape of the solid of revolution of a hyperbola - starts off slowly, the climax is in the middle, and then it tails off again.
Eraserhead!! Yes, yes, that was the third movie that made me conclude that he sucks. God I hate that movie so much.
Okay, then why not, like, a cylinder?
I think the two entirely separate plot lines are supposed to be the two sides of the moebius strip...wait for it...it's all the same plot line!
Ignore the fact that millions of other movies have already have merging plotlines in order to accomodate an actual story to tell.
Thank God. I thought I was the only one who hated David Lynch.
33: Isn't that just a pretentious rephrasing of the standard "pyramid" shape of a five-act play? Or does he give a proof that the derivatives of the plot are as expected for a hyperbola? I'm not sure what being the revolved solid gets you since you're presumably looking at it from the side. I'd also think you'd revolve the hyperbola the other way around--parabolas seem better for a rising-and-falling action.
Actually, I rather like David Lynch.
Maybe I'll watch Twin Peaks. I think it is on Netflicks and I've never seen it.
Yeah, I'm also confused by the idea of a plot in the shape of a revolution of a solid of a hyperbola. And why a hyperbola instead of a parabola or any other valley-shaped curve? Are we really determining the location of the loci and subtracting R and r?
To a large extent anything like Twin Peaks is past its sell-by date. Some of it "holds up," some of it doesn't, but watching it now for the first time does not capture where it resided within culture (and TV culture in particular) at the time. I think this Michael Bérubé description of watching TP years later on his old videocassettes with the commercials gets to some of this.
And if you don't believe me, get your hands on one of those old videocasettes; for obvious reasons, the DVDs won't do it. You have to see Twin Peaks with the commercial breaks for Cepacol and Tide and the new 1991 Civic. That, I thought, was what made the show so surreal--the twisted David Lynch version of Peyton Place next to television as usual. I especially loved watching college football on Saturdays and seeing promos for Twin Peaks pop up here and there; on one especially memorable occasion, ABC's Keith Jackson, who had been calling football games since the days when the Harvard-Yale matchup mattered, had to do the "stay tuned for Twin Peaks" bit, and when he was through, his color commentator asked, "Keith, have you ever seen that show?" After two long seconds of dead air, Keith replied, "nope." Then there were four more seconds of dead air. It was great.
Overall, I think Blue Velvet was stronger and holds up better. Nothing else of Lynch's is that memorable in my opinion, but I think those are enough.
I thought it held up circa 2003, but you're right that it is deeply weird to think that it aired on primetime 1991 TV.
41: This could be why: the world the book takes place on is a truncated solid of revolution of a hyperbola about one of its asymptotes. That would give it negative curvature and gives the name "Inverted World" some meaning. But if the plot was rising and falling it'd have to be rotated around a different axis.
I like this part: "There's a twist concerning the planet's shape towards the end of the book, but since it's a major spoiler and a bit of a letdown for math-savvy readers, I won't write about it." That's exactly how I felt about the end of Iain M. Bank's The Algebraist.
Ok, so they really do mean what they say they mean. Fair enough.
Confession: I've never bothered to read Flatland.
It's a heartwarming story about how the two-dimensional polygons we know and love are actually sexist and classist bigots. Most of which didn't make it into the animated version.
44: I guess it's hard for me to assess how it would play seeing it the first time. Per a comment of mine in that MB thread, I did re-watch it sometime in the last 10 years and still generally enjoyed it. Having just this summer re-watched it with the kids on DVD - it does work in that medium and they appreciated it - but my wife and I both felt the need to emphasize that this had been on television* for God's sake.
*But of course, for someone like my kids who've grown up with a TV experience strongly influenced by things like BV that is still pretty much a "meh."
33, 38: Gravity's Rainbow is structured as a series of overlapping, occasionally nested parabolas.
50: That was the book Fran Lebowitz used to make jokes about nobody ever finishing. And maybe she still does, but not in print.
Presumably many more people have not finished it than have finished it. Finishing it is pretty satisfying, though. All those people should get on that.
52: To read Byron the Bulb in context if nothing else (basically Milo Minderbinder, only more confusing).
More important were items like tungsten. Another reason why Phoebus couldn't cut down bulb life too far. Too many tungsten filaments would eat into available stockpiles of the metal--China being the major world source, this also brought in very delicate questions of Eastern policy--and disturb the arrangement between General Electric and Krupp about how much tungsten carbide would be produced, where and when and what the prices would be. The guidelines settled on were $37-$90 a pound in Germany, $200-$400 a pound in the U.S. This directly governed the production of machine tools, and thus all areas of light and heavy industry. When the War came, some people thought it unpatriotic of GE to have given Germany an edge like that. But nobody with any power. Don't worry.
I just finished watching season 1 of Twin Peaks. It's (intentionally) soapier than I remembered, but it holds up. My foremost reactions:
a) I can't believe they broadcast this on network TV in 1990.
b) There exists no series with hotter actresses.
I love love love Mulholland Drive: it's far superior in terms of. structure and coherence, but Twin Peaks was so formative for me I find it more viscerally affecting.
The idea that a story is shaped like anything makes me cross.
I sat behind Fran Lebowitz at a Wallace Shawn play once. I summoned my courage afterward and said sqeakily "I have always enjoyed your work" to which, rather than saying something devastating, she said sweetly "thank you so much!" This is a kind of thing I will miss about New York.
Noooo I love The Algebraist!
We also recently rewatched season 1 of Twin Peaks and spent a lot of time talking about the weirdness of it + 1990 broadcast TV. It also ends earlier than I remembered -- my memory of "season 1" actually runs about a quarter of the way into season 2.