Cosmic Lynch-pin [or] You've Got Your Good Thing And I've Got Mine

Aside from all of the movies I've been watching, I also managed to catch up on some reading. The December 11th issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine features their 5th annual "Year In Ideas". Many bloggable bits there, but this particular one piqued my ire... er, interest.

Long story short (or straight), auteur terrible David Lynch recently established the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace, hoping to create "universities of peace" where students will study Transcendental Meditation, "yogic flying", and for-credit "peace-studies" alongside regular coursework. I'm certainly not averse to incorporating spiritual life within one's academic studies. What seems a little odd to me, perhaps in a log-lady sort of way, is that the cracked genius behind Blue Velvet and Lost Highway is as equally interested in smilin' on his brother as he is in freakin' him out.

As Lynch notes in the NYTimes article "You don't have to suffer yourself to portray suffering." Fair enough, but I feel pretty confident in asserting that DLynch is probably not the healthiest, most well-adjusted creep in the diner. Eraserhead, Lynch's cinematic reaction to the birth of his first child, should be more than enough to indicate that. I think it was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (of TM fame) who said "in order for the forest to be green, every tree must be green". Blissful is as blissful does.

To make things more interesting, a few pages away from the article on Lynch's cosmic philanthropy is this item about the effects of violent and erotic imagery. Referred to as microblindness or "attentional rubbernecking", a psychology study at Yale found that exposure to visual sex and violence results in a type of temporary blindness and a sort of momentary loss of mental functions.

I can hear the lady in the radiator now...