Richard Perez, author of the excellent book The Loser’s Club, has this in his MySpace blog:
My favorite David Lynch tidbit, which he talked about in person, but is also in his new little book, is when he was in the middle of making Eraserhead and his father and brother sat him down in a “dark living room” and told him he needed to quit what he was doing and get a real job.
At the time Lynch had a baby daughter, and they were saying he had to be more responsible. So here’s the funny thing, he got a job. What was it? Delivering the Wall Street Journal. At $50.00 a week. And the first night he tried delivering the paper it took him 6 hours!….. Anyway, I think that was the only “responsible” job he ever had. I also have an article somewhere — a great article, in fact — about his Eraserhead days, and in it, he goes on to say how he was basically living in a shed, fixed up with wood he found on the street. He would shoot and work on Eraserhead during the day, then do his paper route, then at night a friend of his would lock him in the shed with a padlock from the outside! That’s how he was living. Anyway, it took him 5 years to do his movie. And the rest is history.
This makes me of think of the hard choices people sometimes have to make. Henry Miller was also living in a situation where he was married and with a daughter, and he walked away from all that, at the age of 40, to begin his precarious career as a writer. Jerry Garcia was also married and with a child, and one day, he just picked up and left. Quit his day job and took up with a bunch of hippies on the Haight to pursue his true love: music. Charles Bukowski quit his job at the Post Office at the age of 49, his pension be damned, to write his first novel. Tom Waits lived in a van for 10 fucking years before he made it — that’s right, a van.
So it seems, there’s quite a bit of suffering involved, regardless of what anyone else thinks. Art has a price.
And I’m supposed to feel sorry for some spoiled little shit of a kid who can’t put up with some insults? Get a fucking clue, kids: Life is one big insult!
