A Strange and Beautiful Conversation Between David Lynch and Patti Smith
When the BBC2 Newsnight Encounters brought together Smith and Lynch to talk about anything, this happened.
One of the distant pleasures we can enjoy as if we had planned it ourselves is when two characters from the “folklore of the strange” meet to converse. This is what happened recently when the BBC2 Newsnight Encounters gathered Patti Smith and David Lynch to talk about… anything.
Against an indubitably Lynchean backdrop, they both shared their creative experiences and the first time they heard the song “Blue Velvet” (which opens the film by the same name). With her characteristic wit, Patti Smith weaves every string of the conversation with Lynch’s cinematographic world —which she publicly admires—, and thus the interview flows in a river of complicities evinced through half-veiled smiles —and everything sprawls upon the love for the strange and perfect synchronicities of nature and creation.
He loves factories, Lynch says. Loves the smoke. Loves the fire. Would love to bite his paintings; and he loves that nature works upon these things. Smith loves that the lawn in her garden overgrows and there’s dandelions and there’s weeds and wild roses growing everywhere —The natural chaos of nature. They both smile in complicity towards something delicious and unexplainable. They don’t care, they say, if something is beautiful or horrendous. They don’t care about knowing what is beautiful and what isn’t. They care to keep creating with the inflow of those natural accidents.
Even if only 8 minutes long, the video is testimony to a lucky encounter of the third kind. “Great minds think alike”.
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