That Gum You Like Is Going to Come Back In Style.

I no longer feel I have anything to prove. To myself or others. I’m at an age where I want peace. And as hard as that location is to find, I know it exists. It exists for all of us. Although the landscape is different for each soul alive. This acknowledgement has changed my relationship with art. And my life.

Lynch appeared to have resided in that realm of bliss. As an artist and human. In many ways, he was the person I admired the most. For the gifts he gave to the world through his art and ideas. He was loved by many. I loved him. The truth is that if someone has found peace. They are loved unequivocally.

It’s been fascinating witnessing a collective moment of grief and genuinely feeling a connection in that moment. Grief is harrowing yet often beautiful.

I am rewatching Twin Peaks with one of my sons. It’s a joy to witness as he drifts deeper into the dream. There will be no pause in the story of two and a half decades. There will be an instantaneous jump of twenty-five years once he starts season three. I wonder how it will impact his young mind to see the actors age two and a half decades in moments.

Last month, researchers at University College London released a report that found that an average cigarette takes 20 minutes off a smoker’s life. Lynch, I suspect, smoked at least one pack a day, which would add up to a decade of lost time. Or to put it more crudely, it equates to two or three unmade films and maybe a hundred-odd paintings that never found their way to the canvas. That feels tantamount to the Pompidou burning down.

It hurts to accept that Lynch took ten to fifteen years off his life due to his addiction to smoking. Over the years, I have spent too long thinking about what smoking does to those you love. My mum smoked. She managed to stop. But as a child, there were many nights when I lay awake thinking about the chance I’d be left orphaned due to the fact she smoked. And it could kill her. I recall the oddness of knowing people paid to make themselves weaker and sicker. And how it felt to know that Superman was anti-smoking. And the deep weirdness of having him as an ally in the fight to get my mum to stop.

I have never smoked in my life. I hate it.

I think about the work he never got to make. The theft of his genius. And feel guilty for doing that. And I consider the work I want to create. And the dichotomy of existing as an artist. To create is to prove you exist. And as much as I would like to believe, I have nothing left to say. Nothing left to share. There is always more that needs to be explored. And the art life is one of paradox and mystery, learning and unlearning.

I would have never become the human I am today if it weren’t for Lynch and his impact on my life and work. And there is a creative debt owed to those who inspire us, and the fact this is not discussed does not mean the contract doesn’t exist.

In August of last year, I shot a new feature. I did this with the help of a community that emerged through many different aspects of my work. I experienced this as an evolution of my work within groups; it may be that this is an evolution of F00lishPe0ple or something entirely new. We will see.

This film led to miracles and all manner of emergent phenomena that I’m still witnessing playing out around me and in the lives of those who joined me in the ritual.