Jimmy Stewart — The Real Thing

by Bart Bull
published in Vogue (excerpt)

On the wall nearby is a precisely rendered watercolor of a red-brown horse, a little swaybacked with age, standing alone outside a weathered stable. He gets up, stands to gaze at Henry Fonda’s painting of Pie, the horse Stewart rode in movie after movie. “This is when he was — he had to be, had to be twenty-eight years old. Half quarter-horse, half Arabian. I rode him for twenty years. Hank Fonda did this on his days off, and I didn’t know anything about it. That was Pie.” They were making Cheyenne Social Club,  and the air was too thin for the old horse, the altitude too high. “He couldn’t make it. He couldn’t make it.”

Staring at a friend’s portrait of another friend, he can’t help but admire it once more. Fonda and Stewart were practically the last of their generation, and now there’s just one of them left. But there’s more to it than that. “This friendship with Fonda over the years was tremendous. I valued it so much. Tremendous friendship, tremendous admiration for him. He was good at his job if anybody was ever good at his job. It was a terrible thing to lose him. Which happens so much, you know. I think about it every once in a while — I try not to think about it. I’ve lost so many — I’ve lost so many people. You think of somebody and then you think, ‘When did she die?’”

The rims of his eyes go moist, nearly wet, not quite. Not quite. He won’t cry, not here, to be observed and written about in a magazine. Instead, he speaks, quickly now, to distract himself. “But Fonda was a wonderful, close friend.”   The eyes contain.

Now he’s the last one left, the last star of his era. He doesn’t know why it’s worked out that way, and clearly it bothers him, confuses him just a little. When he was headed off to England during the war, his father slipped the Ninety-first Psalm into his hand — “For He shall give His angels charge over thee. . .” and maybe that helps explain it some, but it’s hard not to wonder. His last movie was made half a decade ago, but even as the unseen voice on the current Campbell’s soup ads, he moves miles past the typical too-sweet lemonade commercial grandfather, lulling us with that querulous voice and then always adding more edge than we could expect. If he were sent the right script, something he could sink his teeth into, would he be ready to do another picture?

“Sure,” he answers. Not a moment’s hesitation, none of his legendary pauses. “Sure.” No stammer, no stutter. “Sure. Sure.”

He considers a moment. “Can’t play cowboys anymore.”

L.A. International

In Los Angeles, a new, multi-ethnic generation is redefining young American style.
By Bart Bull
(published in Vogue)

I'm looking -- staring actually -- at a handkerchief.
It's more than a handkerchief, though; it's an epiphany.
It is, without a doubt, the single most perfect isosceles triangle in all of Los Angeles tonight. It droops, languid in its linen perfection, from the breast picket of a navy blue blazer worn over a white boat-neck sweater, white linen pants, white silk shirt, and a firmly knotted navy silk tie. The handkerchief itself is a brave ocher-gold, a grand gesture against all that blue and white. But it's the droop that counts, that studied droop, much like one of Dali's soft watches oozing down from the pocket, a profound counterpoint to those precise angles. Frankly, I'm proud to be in the same room with a handkerchief so eloquent.

It's worn by Jose, who is nineteen and standing in the lobby of the Ukrainian Culture Center with his left hand resting lightly -- just so -- in the pocket of his high-waisted baggy trousers, acessorized by his fully achieved air of distraction. Jose is anything but distracted, of course. His attention is no less perfectly ponted than the cheese-slicing edge of his isosceles ocher-gold linen handkerchief. This is war, style war. The Ukrainian is tonight's central stop of the Fashion Crowd circuit and no one is anywhere near as distracted as the poses they're striking would suggest. Reputations will be reupholstered tonight, egos will suffer shattering defeats, and when the smoke clears, style will reign supreme.

What I noticed about the Fashion Crowd was that no one else in Los Angeles seemed to be noticing them -- and how could you miss them? They dress. They wear clothes as if their lives depend upon them. Grammar and syntax and vocabulary skills take time, but clothes are something you can shop for next Saturday morning.

The boys are especially devoted to staying in front of the pack. Ever alert to shifts in style, they are, like Jose of the isosceles droop, master of delicate nuance. These are guys who would rather die than be seen wearing drab socks, who can quite literally identify the designer of a tie at twenty paces. These are teenage boys who can walk around wearing their double-breasted jackets unbuttoned and still manage to look polished.

A great number of them live at home in order to avoid wasting money best spent on clothes. At lunch, they haunt the very best sections of the very best department stores. Their bedrooms are stacked with fashion magazines, and their phones stay busy with updated comparisons of last weekend's triumphs and disasters. Although the open-air alleys and wholesale showrooms of downtown LA's garment district are thick with them every weekend, only the most daringly secure would ever admit to buying anything other than their most playful shoes there. It's not true, of course, but they truly with it were.

The truth is that for many of the Hispanic members of the Fashion Crowd, their peers are still living in an old world of low riders and gangs, of fierce barrio territorialism that leads nowhere more glamorous than jail or a janitor job. There are gangs among the Asians too, as well as the equally terrifying Old World option of fulfilling the role of scrupulously dutiful son or daughter. But the more limiting those older possibilities seem, the more important the distinction becomes between the Fashion Crowd and their less fashionable peers.

The best-dressed guys -- known as "GQs" -- put considerable distance between their looks and anything that smacks of gangster style. Since low riders and gangbangers have been dressing for more than a decade in revisisionist variations on on the '40s zoot suit, the GQs are rapdily moving away from the formality of suits and ties, and on toward something more fanciful, more freewheeling. Last summer's GQ cliche was the omnipresent varsity look, crew sweaters over ties with the hair buzzed almost comically short on the sides in apparent emulation of the Princeton sculling crew of 1926. Currently, though, the GQs prefer long hair tied back or flying free, and the most daring are adopting entire looks built around rough suede cowboy boots or white turtlenecks worn tunic style. "I'm tired of ties," one of the GQ trendsetters told me. "I work at a law firm downtown -- all I see all day long is ties."

The Vogues are evry bit as intent on widening the gap between themselves and their counterparts, who are referred to, in the deepest tones of derision that a teenager can muster, as "Cha-Chas." While the Vogues are inclined toward hats and gloves and Chanel-inspired ensembles, the Cha-Chas (though no one will ever admit to being a Cha-Cha) settle for miniskirts, high heels, and dramatic makeup that is only a small evolutionary step away from the girl-gangsters' "loca" look. The Cha-Chas, less willing to abandon traditional Latin styles, will typically have longer hair, often teased into the high-crowned look the Vogues call "lionhead." Vogues, ever inclined to emphasize the distance from everyting the Cha-Cha represents, are currently acquiring Louise Brooks bobs or dramatically brief pageboys. No cocktail parties exist in thier lives, but should an invitation appear, they're dressed for the occasion.

Given the social mobility available in California, in the West, in this truly New World, it's entirely possible that the elegant cocktail party will be their next accomplishment. Young as they are, these kids dress with more verve and wit and can actually be seen at any contemporary evening affair, and the clubs and dances they attend on the party circuit exist, everyone agrees, essentially for display. They even dance together in large groups, in circles rather than couples, the better to admire each other, and the better to remind the outsider of the supreme uniqueness of their clique. At a time when the ouside world seems fixated on archaic fantasies of hot-blooded Latin style, no one here takes particular pride in their dancing. It's the look, the style, the leaps and flourishes of fashion that count. And for tonight, in their remarkably polyglot beauty and taste, they looke even more stylish than they have ever looked before. Tomorrow night is just an evening in the future, a fashionable instant yet to be invented.

My Separation From Cindy Crawford

from Vogue

My relationship with Cindy Crawford was not a long one, but while it lasted, we were very close. Maybe it wasn't the deepest of relationships — Cindy is deep, I'm not — but it was close. Perhaps too close. Maybe we meant too much to each other. You know how these things are.

I was staying at a friend's place and Cindy — I call her Cindy — lived in the same building. As it happened, I spent a terrific amount of time in the elevator that week. No sooner would I get to the ground floor and through the lobby than I'd remember something I'd forgotten upstairs and have to get back in the elevator and go get it and come back down again. Sometimes I'd remember something else I had to go back and get. I had a lot on my mind at the time.

It was tropical in Manhattan than month, and only the brave dared venture out before the sun was on the wane. My friend Theresa and I cabbed over from her place late Sunday afternoon, stopping off at the deli for some beer and juice and some of that potato salad you ladle into those plastic containers. And Cindy was there, radiant, over by the cracker and cookie section. It would be ungentlemanly of me to to speak of her purchases; let it suffice to say that nothing she bought had the least bit of a percentage of butterfat. That figure and that complexion may be God-given, but she attends to a healthy diet just the same. I find that so admirable.

It has been my experience that not all models are as fabulous-looking in person as they appear in photos. In person, Cindy is a goddess. I think I can speak objectively here, because this was before Cindy and I were truly close. Unequivocally, she is a goddess. She takes a lousy photograph comparatively. She looks a lot better in real life.

At last, with a heavy heart and a cold six-pack, I left the deli. Theresa, not always as good a friend as she might be, was sort of dragging me by the elbow. Trudging down the block toward the apartment, a block that seemed a thousand miles, fumbling and fumbling with keys to a doorway to happiness that could never be mine, I wept silently, inwardly, tearlessly. "Takes you forever just to open a simple door, doesn't it?" inquired Theresa.

Then it happened. Cindy was there. She had followed me! I held the door; she held the elevator for me. Theresa got in too. At first, none of us said a word. The silence was eminent, profound. It was bosky.

No one in all the rest of our species looks as good in a gray t-shirt as Cindy Crawford. Cindy Crawford was who those t-shirt inventor guys had in mind when they invented the t-shirt. She was sweating. I was sweating. We were both sweating. I guess Theresa was probably sweating, too. I didn't notice.

We didn't have much to say to one another then, Cindy and I. How could we? What is there to say at such times, arms full of groceries? "Would you push the button for the fifth floor for me?" Words only interfere with life, force powerful feelings into tiny categories. What Cindy and I had to say to each other was larger than words, and quieter too.

That little mole thing, by the way, is as cute as can be.

Tracey Ullman: Just Being Herselves

by Bart Bull
(published in Vogue)

To get to Tracey Ullman's closet, you need to go through the bathroom. You don't really need to go through there, but she wants you to; it makes for a more colorful tour. The color is purplish, in fact, or lilac, sort of, or actually a turbo-charged neon mauve. "The man who lived here before was a Czechoslovakian plastic surgeon," she says, delivering the next line in the cigar-chewing gurgle of an elderly Las Vegas lounge comic, complete with perfectly-timed pause for the drummer's rim shot: "And if he does this to his house, what does he do to your body?" Ullman plans to have his remarkable upholstered toilet seat enshrined in a clear Lucite case and mounted on the wall.

She has fewer shoes than Imelda Marcos but they make a far more interesting mess at the bottom of her closet. She's down there now, flinging out Tony Lama cowboy boots and alarming French wedgies with rock star photo patches sewn to the heels and then this . . . this fairly restrained bustier. "Every girl has one of these Madonna bodice-type tops, these slaggy Stevie Nicks-type things. Though they look terribly sad on someone like me, who breast-fed a nine pound infant." She sweeps an unmatched pair of her daughter Mabel's Barbie dolls off the dressing table to clear more room and discovers a complicated sweater by her idol, her all-time absolute favorite, Jean Paul Gaultier. "My friend last night said it falls into every cardigan category. He said, 'You like it because you're not wearing one cardigan, you're wearing every cardigan.' But I do love it, because you wear it and people get frightened."

When it comes to Gaultier, it's impossible for her to keep from rhapsodizing, and she readily admits it. "He's the king for me. I just think he's brilliant, I really do. He still has an element of street about him as well. I went to his shop in Paris last summer — I'd never done any shopping in Paris until last year. I told my husband, 'Go bog off — I'm going shopping in Paris.' First time I'd ever had the money, I'm in Paris, and it was a truly debilitating experience. They were so rude to me. [Smarmy French accent, wreathed in Gauloise smoke]: 'What do you want, stupid British girl?'

"They were so rude — the only people who were nice were a couple of Japanese people who had just opened a shop and were desperate to sell gear. It was horrible. At one boutique, they practically spat at me. Until I got my Platinum American Express card out and said, 'Look! Look!'" She laughs uproariously at the sheer folly of it. "They didn't give a damn.

"It wasn't good fun at all shopping there. Then again, in Beverly Hills, the people who work for the top places are all like [pursed lips, dysfunctional adenoids]: 'Millie, seventy-two, I've worked in sales a long, long time . . . Oh, this is just beau-ti-ful! The colors this season are so gwargeous!'"

"Here's a bit of Christian Lacroix," and she yanks free a finely detailed glass-beaded top. "Had a skirt that went with it — it's here somewhere. I wore this to an awards show and the zipper burst as I went onstage.

"I love clothes," she declares from deep inside the closet, where the hangers are all clumped together. "I love fashion. I used to work in shops on the King's Road when I was sixteen. I was always one who saved up weeks for a decent skirt." Her head is buried deep in the closet again. "And always somewhere I have a leather miniskirt. I just bought another one, and I know it will be the last one of my life, 'cause I know I'm getting too ridiculously old to wear leather miniskirts. I put it on and I do look a bit tragic.

"I mean, I don't even keep my clothes in a very nice state or anything. I'm like a magpie; I'll wear anything unusual or bright. But when yousee these Beverly Hills women who pay twelve thousand dollars and they're sitting at one of those functions with their big freckly armpits hanging over the edge of their bustier— I'd like to bring Christian Lacroix to a Beverly Hills function. 'Don't look now, Christian, but there's a fat tart in one of your frocks.' 'Merde! '

"The Japanese gear, I haven't really gotten into that — the black, baggy, shapeless trousers with the big sort of platform shoes. I mean, some people spend like four thousand dollars they look like a bag of spanners. So they have to keep reminding you who designed it. [Voice of a schlumpf]: 'Djya like the jacket? It's by, uh, Matsudo, ya know?'"

She's back in the closet. "This is the first piece of Gaultier I ever bought," she says, cradling a charcoal shirt in both hands. [Elaborate stage whisper] "Cost me three hundred pounds. I couldn't believe i had a Gaultier shirt. It was like a dream. Always looked a bit strange on me, though.

"Here's my Tracey Ullman Show jacket." It's a perfect example of what fashionable Hollywood cameramen can be seen wearing in supermarkets. "Can you imagine if I wore that? [Dopey TV star]: 'Hey, that's ME! It's MY SHOW!'"

Her own closets revealed, Ullman can't resist invading her husband's. "these are the suits he buys now he's got a bit of money. These over here are the ones he used to buy off the back of the lorry. All men in England have to buy stolen suits. They can't bear to pay the retail price. And these" — she laughs even as she touches them — are his trendy shirts."

Mabel's closets are next. Ullman sweeps up a blue wool coat with wooden toggle buttons down the front. "I love this, her little Paddington Bear coat — so very British. She wore it once and threw up all down the front. You can still smell the vomit on it." She acquires a thoughtful, puzzled look. "So hard to remove the smell from designer wear, you know."

David Lynch; Mild At Heart

When David Lynch was a boy in Boise, he blew things up and burned things down.
In Hollywood, he burns things up and shoots movies.
by Bart Bull
(published in Vogue)

There is a house on fire in a park in the desert just below a dam. The lights are on. Standing outside, looking through wide picture windows the way no neighbor is supposed to look into someone else's home — especially at night —we see a man on fire stumble through the kitchen and toward the living room, his clothes in flames, spreading fire everywhere. He grabs at the curtains, knocks over the table, lurches to the piano, and collapses on the floor as the fire takes the house.

The pyrotechnicians extinguish him first, then spray the curtains, the table, the piano. When the smoke and the dense fog from the fire extinguisher clear, they'll prepare the house for another burn. It's cold out here in the desert. People are drinking coffee and hot chocolate.

When David Lynch was a boy in Boise, Idaho, he blew things up and burned things down. "We were all, um, heavily into making bombs at that particular place and time." The time was the 1950s, and Idaho was the idyllic Pacific Northwest, pines and cedars and alders, wild blackberries, raspberries, huckleberries. His father was in the U.S. Forest Service. David had a friend down the street who blew his foot off with a homemade rocket. "Kinda stupid in a way, but he was tamping the match heads down with a metal rod, just to keep 'em packed. And his mother was pregnant..." — all this has the offhand, somewhat nasal sound of a David Lynch plot, macabre and matter-of-fact —"and it went off, the rocket went off, and these match heads had such a force that it drove the rocket through his ankle and it blew fire and burnt match heads all over the porch. He fell down because he couldn't stand up, and he was in a pool of blood with these little burnt match heads and smoke all around him. When his mother saw that, she almost lost the baby." The boy's brother was at the swimming-pool when he heard about the accident, and passed out and had to be saved. An orderly row of dominoes tumbled, and then, even more mysteriously, order fell back in place. "They took him and sewed his foot back on, and he was OK after that."

And when David Lynch was in art school, he built a machine. It was during the 1960s, and painting was widely considered an archaic and outmoded practice, lacking conceptual rigor. David's machine was an orderly contraption, a Rube Goldberg art operation. A ball rolled down a pipe, was routed along a series of ramps, rode teeter-totters, tripped hair-triggers, and completed electrical connections that caused the mouth of a sculpture woman to fly open and a red light to come on. Then a match would strike and light a firecracker. The firecracker would blow up and the sculpted woman would scream. Then David could reset all the triggers and do it again.

It's wrap day, the last day of shooting David Lynch's next movie, Wild at Heart, his first since Blue Velvet, and Laura Dern is handing out gifts, small, southwesterly adobe huts made to burn tiny cedar logs from inside. Parting gifts to the crew from Nick --- Nicolas Cage --- and herself. This is her second David Lynch movie. Is there a better way to feel? Is there a more respected director today than David Lynch? Directors are a debased currency in today's Hollywood --- producers count, studio heads are stars, stars are social philosophers, agents inspire fear, but instead of wielding the staff of power as they once did, directors stand in line now for a chance to kiss it. In our day, David Lynch seems to be a genuine exception, seems almost accidental. He may well be. In any case, Laura feels just wonderful. She's gifted everyone now and cuddled in alongside David. "Da-vid," she calls him, accent on both syllables. She wants him to hear about her shopping trip. "Da-vid, I want to shop for you! Let me shop for you!" Laura Dern was raised in Los Angeles. It seems a sensible thing to offer.

Most of the boutiques on Melrose are likely to be fresh out of long-billed fishing caps like the one David is wearing, though smart money suggests they'll be available at The Gap by next fall. Lynch takes the businessman's slant on the Artist of the Eighties look: shirt buttoned up against the Adam's apple, mildly anonymous khaki pants when at work, hair left thoughtfully long at the crown and trimmed severely at the sides. A charter member of Esquire magazine's very embarrassing "Register" of yuppie achievers, Lynch did, after all, in his 1977 film Eraserhead, successfully predict the fashionable art guy's hair architecture for the eighties. So far, he's managed his look without Laura Dern's help.

Eraserhead began in film school, where Lynch landed after art school — he's something like the quintessential grad student. He attended the prestigious American Film Institute on a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Film Studies, which placed him prominently among the first generation to receive academic training in filmmaking. A boxed set of wonderful stories from this period is available: he supported himself with a paper route that paid forty-eight dollars a week; he lived secretly on the Eraserhead set at the mansion that housed the AFI; and, in what could be viewed as a perfectly executed conceptualist's joke about grad student thesis-release anxiety, he spent five years completing Eraserhead. The movie went on to enduring success on the midnight movie circuit, assembling Lynch's core audience from hipsters who had grown past The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

His next movie, The Elephant Man, did nearly as much to help his artistic case as it did that of the producer, Mel Brooks. A critical and financial success, nominated for eight Oscars, it left Lynch established. Hollywood had been waiting, it appeared, for someone exactly like David Lynch, someone with vision and taste and the nerve to make his own kind of movie. Critics adored him if only for giving them the chance to use the term "painterly"; studio heads loved the idea of making money and art and awards all at once.; producers loved the idea of happy studio heads. Any direction David Lynch turned, a door opened before him.

Someone asks about Pepino, Lynch's dog. Pepino has wandered off into the Hollywood hills behind Lynch's Frank Lloyd Wright home, out Lynch's forbidding yard of cacti to the hills where the coyotes prowl. He's worried, he says, about what might have happened to Pepino. He wonders. And then he wonders aloud, "How many times can we burn the house down?"

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Something rotten is out there, corrupt, diseased, only just hidden by the smoothest surfaces, the most placid of facades. If hip taste in our time is embodied by David Lynch -and there is no other creative figure as uniformly admired by those with even the least claim to hipness - the queasy imagery that invariably appears in each of his films, the secret shocking squirm that stirs beneath the mundane, is surely a source of his power. Giant intestine-ish sandworms, malformed bodies, vicious bruising sex, membranous tissue in a slick and sticky-wet state  — these occur in Lynch's films as predictably as other movies avoid them. Rather than truly upsetting anyone — for only those who know nothing of David Lynch are really shocked by such stuff — the images confirm the faultless taste of his audiences. They are his peers, after all: graduate students and the art-inclined, city dwellers who need make no leap of the imagination when confronted with the idea that something icky is going on out there in the woods. Partly the classic modernist tactic of shocking the bourgeoisie while elbow-nudging the hepcats, it's also a case of making aesthetically sophisticated gross-out movies — films that will make even the most icily urbane date squeeze your hand with Saturday night drive-in dithers.

"Because of his AFI background, he's a classically-trained director," says Mark Frost. "He just applies it in unconventional ways. But if you were to put up his work against any major director of the last thirty years, the strength of his visual work is every bit as good as theirs, in a structural or formal sense." Frost and Lynch are partners, collaborators, friends. Frost types, Lynch doesn't. Together they wrote One Saliva Bubble, a script that acquired a certain legendary status as it made the rounds and managed to stay unmade, and they wrote and directed Twin Peaks, an episodic television series debuting on ABC prime time as a midseason replacement. Twin Peaks is an ambitious multistoried melodrama, compared in its own publicity to Dickens, Peyton Place, and Blue Velvet. However much Frost, who wrote for Hill Street Blues in its palmy early days, had to do with it, Twin Peaks feels like nothing so much as David Lynch's sensibility stretched at full length, hour upon hour of oddities piled on banalities piled atop non sequiturs. It can't miss, at least as far as the converted are concerned – it's nothing if not Lynchian — while more typical television viewers have yet to be consulted.

What may be most fascinating about Twin Peaks is the degree to which the show acknowledges actor Kyle MacLachlan as the director's alter ego. MacLachlan, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, looks like Lynch's younger brother, and just as he was an impromptu investigator in Blue Velvet,  in Twin Peaks he plays an FBI agent mysteriously endowed with the abstract mannerisms of Inspector David Lynch. "In a way," says Lynch, "Agent Dale Cooper – and Kyle would admit it – takes some things from me, you know. It may be a bit of an influence." He'd really rather talk about detectives. "To me, a detective is the most magical type of character, because mysteries are to me the greatest thing. Puzzles and things like this are thrilling, clues, things like finding money. Everything is a mystery and we're all detectives. Even scientists are detectives and they're all looking for clues to solve the big mystery. There are so many detectives going around, and so many mysteries."

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Dune was intended to be a blockbuster among blockbusters in the Christmas season of 1984. An extravagant special effects epic in the science fictional mode, Dune was supposed to be Star Wars, actually, but with the mark of Lynch's hand on it – the merchandising deals called for Dune toys, T-shirts, vitamins, sleeping bags. After The Elephant Man, Lynch had signed a multipicture deal with Dino De Laurentis: he would make Dune, then a picture called Blue Velvet and another called Ronnie Rocket, and then he was obligated to do Dune II and Dune III.

Dune was a disaster. Hazily remembered these days by Lynch aficionados as something of an art film hurt by unsympathetic editing. Dune was merely a wildly ambitious mainstream movie gone bad. Everything went wrong — it had all been a mistake. As in any David Lynch movie, something rotten, diseased and corrupt squirmed just below the surface, but in this case, it was giant lamprey-style sandworms, plus an evil warlord whose pustular boils were popped in place of the action the plot failed to supply. It wasn't the sort of thing that sells sleeping bags.

"In retrospect," Lynch says, "I can see that I started getting into trouble on Dune early on, and it wasn't just the final editing that did it, although I think the film could be way, way better. I still worry that I don't know if it could ever be a great film, or even a real good film. I don't know. I forget so much about it."

"Like they say, nobody sets out to make a bad picture. And when you make a picture that's very successful but you don't like it or one that's not successful and you don't like it – both – that's a devastating thing. Devastating. What's amazing to me is how you can play tricks on your mind, or your mind can play tricks on you, and it keeps you from seeing what's really happening. I don't know. I really suffered a huge...you know, kind of...depression, and filmmaking was no longer fun at all. It was filled with fear and I questioned everything. All the great things you have with success, I felt the opposite in every category and it was bad news. You don't trust yourself. You don't trust anything. It's very bad." There was every reason to believe his career in Hollywood, his career as a director, was entirely over. It had all been a mistake. The doors had closed.

In the days of Dune, the art student in Lynch had created the very conceptual Fish Kit and Chicken Kit, made up of actual animals that had been dissected and disassembled and labeled so as to resemble the kits sold to kids to make model planes or cars. After Dune, he painted. He has been working with oils for the past two years. Art school was twenty years ago, and painting is perfectly acceptable now. Lynch's work has little dabs of paper stuck onto a lightly underpainted surface, with little hand-done block-type capital letters inked out to say things like "WHEN I RETURNED THERE WERE BUGS IN THE HOUSE AND FIRE AND BLOOD IN THE STREETS BY GOLLY," "IT'S A GREAT BIG WONDERFUL WORLD," and "ON A WINDY NIGHT A FIGURE WALKS TO JUMBO'S KLOWN ROOM." (Jumbo', just so you'll know,  is a reasonably sordid topless bar in a seedy section of Hollywood.) Just to make certain no one mistakes the work for mere abstraction lacking in irony, sketchy elements like house shapes are etched onto the cake-frosted surface, and sometimes there are oddly shaped clouds. These are paintings that could hang over the bed in any tasteful postmodern hotel room.

He's a cartoonist as well, in an appropriately conceptual sort of way. For the last seven years, his four-panel cartoon has run in the weekly Los Angeles Reader — the same relentless four panels.  The exact same ones,  The strip's title is "The Angriest Dog in the World." Each of the panels features a growling dog shaped much like a pollywog: "The dog is so angry he cannot move...Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis." Word balloons appear in one or two of the panels, with the words phoned in each week from Lynch and printed by one of the paper's staff. A few month's back, the paper's art director whimsically added a bone and then more bones and at last a pile of bones directly in front of the dog, explaining instantly why it had been so rigorously straining against its leash for so long. It took several weeks for anyone to notice, and when it at last came to Lynch's attention, he was more than a little miffed. Seven years, week upon week, of precisely nonlinear conceptual rigor ruined. It was bitter.

He starred in the film Zelly and Me with his girlfriend, Isabella Rossellini. His album, Floating Into the Night — singer Julee Cruise has her name on it, but it's a David Lynch project – was released last fall. Already known for this role in helping revive Roy Orbison's career with Blue Velvet's masterfully incongruous use of "In Dreams," Lynch has attempted cloudy, atmospheric mood music in the manner of Orbison, although if there is anything that David Lynch seems unlikely to achieve, it is the grand unfettered emotion available in any Roy Orbison hit. Something seems a little frantic about all this ultrabusy creativity, about a maker of movies doing television shows and comic strips and paintings and chicken kits and moody albums, and that's even without mentioning Industrial Symphony No.1, a sort of dream-sequence performance-art experience with music that he's racing off to stage at the New Music America festival. Even in today's Hollywood, where every star leads a Renaissance existence, no one has more irons in the fire of Art. His coffee-table book of writings, sketches, and photographs is forthcoming from Harper & Row.

His own home, the Frank Lloyd Wright dwelling in the Hollywood hills, has no coffee table. That's because, said one journalist, paraphrasing Kafka's "A Hunger Artist," "he's never found any furniture he likes." He lacks a dog now as well, since Pepino never returned. "He's gone now. Pepino was a mutt, given to me by Isabella. When she met Pepino, she said, 'Aha, this is a dog for David.' I didn't really want a dog that much. I had a dog, Sparky, that was the love of my life. I got him on The Elephant Man. I think Spark died of old age — that's what we're hoping. Anyway, Pepino was a smiler. He really and truly smiled. And it was out of happiness. A real smile, not one that you think because you' re the parent your dog is smiling. Everyone saw it. Big smiles. Sometimes just on one side, sometimes a full smile, and it depended on what was going on. But Pepino was shaping up to be one of the all-time great dogs, and then one day he disappeared. For the next two days, I saw coyotes in front of the house. This coyote really looked guilty. Skulking, skulking. And almost...I, I, you know. I knew. And the coyote knew that I knew."

When David Lynch was a boy growing up in Boise, in the idyllic timber green woods of the Northwest, and one of the other boys nearly blew off his foot, and got it sewn back on,  did the others learn their lesson at last? "No. We blew up South Lake Junior High swimming pool. I was arrested. We made the Salt Lake City papers and the Boise papers, four of us. We didn't blow it up, we set off a bomb in there – actually for safety reasons. The pool was built off the ground. These bombs we were making were pipe bombs, and they would hit the ground and not explode until they were about eye level. And they would explode with such a force that the pipe would just completely turn inside out, and shrapnel would blow. We threw it in the pool so that the shrapnel would hit the side of the pool. We threw it in around ten o'clock Saturday morning, and the smoke came up shaped like the pool. This thing rose up just instantly shaped like the pool. Just for a moment, till the wind blew it." In his pause, you can see it too, a cloud in the shape of a pool. "It filled the pool with smoke and it just took that shape. And you could hear it for, I don't know how far, but it shook windows supposedly for five blocks. It was a big bomb."

The last scene, the last shot on the last day of David Lynch's next movie. A house is on fire, all lit up behind plate-glass picture windows, living room walls painted swimming-pool aqua green. Flames are moving everywhere now, first small and almost too slowly, then almost too quickly. Much too quickly, far too quickly, much too quickly. Technicians yell, "Save it!" There is no saving it. One of the front window cracks, goes gray with smoke, shatters. It's hot. There is nothing inside but flame now. The other windows explode with the heat. The heat is a wall, solid, moving out from the house. David Lynch and the cameramen are pushed back, pushed away from the house. They run away, they leave the cameras behind. The fire roars. Lynch stands and watches the cameras standing alone watching the flames swallow the house. A cloud of smoke is overhead. He has his hands in his pockets.

Aphorism Number Ten; Cindy Crawford (one of a series; collect 'em all)

My relationship with Cindy Crawford was not a long one, but while it lasted, we were very close. I held the door for her; she held the elevator for me.

Bart Bull, from Vogue