While the Apocalypse – Blog

At this point, there’s no need to point out the dangers posed by smoking. Those who do it these days do it in full knowledge of the health risks involved, for reasons of their own. Sometimes those reasons are artistic ones: “I had this idea that you drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint, and that’s it,” says David Lynch in Jon Nguyen’s documentary David Lynch: The Art Life, describing his youthful conception of what it was to be an artist. “Maybe girls come into it a little bit, but basically, it’s the incredible happiness of working and living that life.” Though much better known as a filmmaker than a painter, Lynch has never stopped living that life, cigarette-smoking and all.

The “you drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint” line surfaces in the audio mix of the video above, which mashes up that and other of Lynch’s observations from various places and times with looped footage of him silently smoking and listening to the rain falling outside. Most of his words here have to do with “the art life”: how he conceives of it, how he lives it, and how he made his way into it in the first place.

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