Beautiful Blue Skies and Golden Sunshine

David Lynch was the coolest. While I haven’t always been a superfan of all of his films and shows, I have always appreciated his work immensely, and respected his fierce independence and deep creative spirit. And…he had amazing hair.

So when we lost this visionary black belt ninja last month at the age of 78, it was really moving to see such a broad outpouring of admiration and respect. Creatives of all types came out to honor Dr. Lynch and his vast contributions to the worlds of art, film, photography. It almost seemed universal, in that if you make stuff for a living, it was Lynch that gave you permission to veer off on creative tangents and break free from linear thought. Things didn’t need to connect anymore. They could just exist in their own weird, wonderful glory. What a contribution!

This was his jam — crafting creepy, ethereal, dream like narratives that rattle and break our sense of logic and order. As an artist, once you embrace this approach, you can do anything.

A few adjectives used to describe his work:

Hypnotic – drawing viewers into strange, atmospheric worlds.
Noirish – influenced by classic film noir, with themes of crime, corruption, and shadowy characters.
Macabre – dealing with dark, morbid, or grotesque themes.
Hallucinatory – evoking the feeling of a dream or altered state of reality.
Offbeat – unconventional, quirky, and often humorously strange.
Melancholic – carrying a deep sense of sadness or nostalgia.
Distorted – warping time, space, or sound to create a sense of unease.
Ethereal – otherworldly, floating between reality and fantasy.
Oneiric – resembling or relating to dreams.
Tenebrous – dark, shadowy, or obscure.
Chiaroscuro – marked by stark contrasts of light and dark, both visually and thematically.
Hypnagogic – evoking the state between wakefulness and sleep.
Esoteric – deeply mysterious or understood only by a select few.
Fugacious – fleeting, ephemeral, slipping away like a half-remembered dream.
Ophidian – serpentine, sinuous, and subtly menacing.
Aphotic – lacking light, descending into psychological or literal darkness.
Lurid – shockingly vivid, grotesque, or eerie.
Sibylline – cryptic, prophetic, and enigmatic.
Thaumaturgic – seemingly magical or mystical, as if conjured.
Eidolic – ghostly, phantasmic, like an apparition.
Acroamatic – obscure, esoteric, or difficult to interpret.
Gelid – icy, emotionally or atmospherically cold.
Echolalic – full of eerie repetitions and echoes.
Velutinous – strangely smooth and soft, yet uncanny.
Phantasmagoric – shifting, dreamlike, and surreal in a nightmarish way.
Synesthetic – blending senses in an unexpected or hallucinatory manner.
Ominiferous – foreboding, carrying an air of doom.

What a list! And, when you do something as well as he did it, and for as long, you eventually earn your own adjective:

Lynchian – a term coined to describe a unique mix of the mundane and the bizarre.

During Covid, our family spent a lot of time listening to KCRW. And in May 2020, I was so happy to learn that KCRW would be including David Lynch’s daily weather report as part of their Morning Becomes Eclectic program. Lynch had been reporting on Los Angeles weather since 2005 in his signature deadpan, and he was shockingly consistent. Because Los Angeles weather doesn’t really change very much, these reports were sort of frivolous. But they were also sort of comforting. It’s inspiring to see someone engaged in a ritual that is meaningful to them. We always loved the way he would usually end his reports, saying “we’re gonna have beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way. Everyone, have a great day!”

These weather reports were just one small manifestation of his immense creative energy and insanely prolific output. Every single thing he did adhered to his principles of endless curiosity, ignoring the rules, and staying true to his vision. He was the real deal and will be missed.