Back in 2013, David Lynch was in his home recording studio late one morning, surrounded by electric guitars of different shapes and colors. With effects pedals scattered at his feet, he opened a case with an orange sunburst lap-slide guitar inside. “This is the guitar that Ben Harper gave me,” Lynch said with a smile and genuine awe in his voice, dressed in a black suit jacket and shirt, gray hair piled high on top. “That thing makes a hell of a sound.”
The occasion was the coming release of his second solo album, “The Big Dream,” but it wasn’t the first or last time we talked about his music. He was a self-taught improviser on guitar, and a high school trumpeter, but he was drawn to any sounds that tapped meaningfully into feelings of heartache and tension, beauty and noise.
Over a half-century of work, he built a well-earned reputation as a surrealist auteur and master filmmaker. But Lynch, who died last week at 78, was equally passionate about other creative mediums, from painting and photography to designing furniture, and nothing held his imagination more powerfully than the music that filled his life and work.
We were in his fully equipped recording facility, called Asymmetrical Studio — built inside the house he once used as a location for his 1997 film “Lost Highway.” He spent a lot of his time there, and it was just one sign of his lifelong obsession with sound. It held an essential role in his life as a filmmaker and, eventually, a recording artist, songwriter and producer.
Angelo Badalamenti performs at the David Lynch Foundation Music Celebration at the Theatre at Ace Hotel in 2015.
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(Chris Pizzello / Invision / AP)
Lynch was a rare director with a recognizable musical aesthetic, created with the help of composer and close friend Angelo Badalamenti, among many others. He was attracted to smoky electric guitar twang and the most abrasive industrial sounds, and to rich female voices and lush layers of strings and organ. The through-line were sounds that leaned toward the smoldering and idiosyncratic — from his use of achingly passionate songs of heartbreak by Roy Orbison and Chris Isaak to his own shadowy recordings with modern torch singers Julee Cruise and Chrystabell.
Among his musical collaborators was Karen O, singer for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who appeared on his first solo album, 2011’s “Crazy Clown Time,” and remembers Lynch’s sound as tense and passionate. “There’s an eroticism, there’s an urgency, there’s mystery, there’s darkness, there’s the edginess, the rebellion,” she says. “All that is in David’s musical taste.”
They recorded an ominous, twangy, thunderous tune called “Pinky’s Dream,” featuring a breathless Karen O vocal. “I’ve never met a Pinky,” she says now with a laugh. “It’s a character that inhabits a David Lynch dreamscape. The music is chugging along and you just feel like you’re on one of those lost highways.”
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“I guess I like it low and slow, but I also like so many kinds of music,” Lynch told me during a 2015 visit to the painting studio behind his home high up in the Hollywood Hills. “I love what sound can do, what music can do, and to marry to the picture and make the whole thing greater than the sum of the parts.”
As a director, he showed a gift for placing music with stunning impact, from Samuel Barber’s deeply emotional “Adagio For Strings” in 1980’s “The Elephant Man,” to the raging thrash metal riffs of Powermad in 1990’s “Wild at Heart,” and Rebekah Del Rio’s torrid Spanish a cappella reading of “Llorando” in “Mulholland Drive.”
In “Blue Velvet,” Lynch created an eerie moment of romance and nostalgia in an otherwise disturbing scene as actor Dean Stockwell, in paisley tuxedo jacket, lip-syncs Orbison’s 1963 hit “In Dreams.” The song’s use in the film helped spark an Orbison revival, and Lynch soon co-produced a new version of the song with the singer and T-Bone Burnett for a 1987 retrospective, “In Dreams: The Greatest Hits.”
That love of music ultimately led the director to begin dabbling in creating some of his own, starting with his distinctive collaborations with Badalamenti, which stretched from “Blue Velvet” in 1986 until the composer’s death in 2022. It was an especially close relationship between director and composer that Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran compares to Federico Fellini and Nino Rota, who scored all of the Italian filmmaker’s films from 1959 to 1979.
Likewise, Lynch and Badalamenti were “so closely linked that they almost can feel each other’s heartbeats,” says Rhodes, whose band of hitmakers also worked with Lynch on a few occasions, including his remixing two of their songs.
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“I always say Angelo Badalamenti brought me into the world of music,” Lynch said. “I played the trumpet when I was young and I understand music, but I was in love with sound effects. So I wanted to build a studio to experiment with sound, but I knew I wasn’t a musician really. Angelo said, ‘David, I need lyrics.’ So I started writing lyrics for Angelo, and we worked together. And that was a combo — the David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti combo, and it brought out those things. That gave me more confidence.”
By the late 1980s, that impulse led the duo to Excalibur Sound Productions in New York City, where they worked on music with a young unknown singer, Julee Cruise, who had recorded their song “Mysteries of Love” for “Blue Velvet.” An album, 1989’s “Floating into the Night,” emerged after a year and a half of sessions, launching the single “Falling,” which had a second life as a theme for “Twin Peaks.”
In 2017, as the acclaimed third-season revival of “Twin Peaks” unfolded on Showtime, Cruise recalled to me the original directions from Lynch during her sessions. “He said, ‘Julee, you are a child full of wonder,’” said Cruise, who also performed the dreamy, mournful “The World Spins” on the series.
Julee Cruise sings the show’s theme song, “Falling,” in the pilot episode of “Twin Peaks.”
(CBS Photo Archive / Getty Images)
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“I will always be known as this, and I will always be proud of this,” said Cruise, who died in 2022. Lynch also directed a one-hour musical film starring Cruise, “Industrial Symphony No. 1,” released in 1990 by Warner Bros. Records.
In subsequent years, Badalamenti was based in New Jersey, and made occasional trips to L.A. “Wherever we were, we would sit and make music,” Lynch said. Last year, the director expressed lasting sadness over the 2022 death of Badalamenti, who he called “my brother.”
“It just doesn’t seem possible that he’s gone,” Lynch said. “It just seems like I could call him up and we could make music again.”
In time, Lynch created multiple workspaces adjacent to his home in the Hollywood Hills: the recording studio, painting studio, wood shop and offices. He performed music live only one time, with his band Blue Bob in 2002, an experience he called “a traumatic thrill,” and something he wasn’t anxious to repeat.
“He wasn’t a musician. He couldn’t tell you, ‘I want an E minor here, and then I want to have eight bars of this,’” says Isaak, whose “Wicked Game” became a hit after appearing in 1990’s “Wild at Heart.” “We didn’t talk in that language.” Lynch went on to direct the music video for “Wicked Game.”
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Aside from creating music alongside Lynch, Isaak appeared on camera in a prominent role in “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.” “I sure got lucky for how the stars aligned, that I got to work with him and hang with him and get to know him a little. I must have somebody up there looking over me because what a treat.”
Lynch was a filmmaker who treasured music enough to turn the Roadhouse bar in the 2017 season of “Twin Peaks” into a world-class nightclub, and included performances of complete songs in many episodes from the likes of Moby, Eddie Vedder and “The” Nine Inch Nails. In 1997, he’d recruited NIN’s Trent Reznor to create a soundscape for “Lost Highway,” and together they landed on the cover of Rolling Stone. (Lynch would later create a music video for NIN’s “Come Back Haunted.”)
Trent Reznor arrives at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2019.
(Evan Agostini / Invision / AP)
Some collaborations were less expected but just as rewarding. In 2011, Duran Duran asked Lynch to direct the livestream of a concert from the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles, as part of the American Express “Unstaged” series that matched musicians with filmmakers. The result was fully in character, photographed in murky black-and-white for a worldwide online audience, and layered with Lynchian imagery and juxtapositions: smoke, fire, strange objects and dead animals superimposed over the band.
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“When something magical like that happens, you embrace it as quickly as you can,” says Duran Duran’s Rhodes. “I just love his vision and the world that he creates. I knew that merging with Duran Duran would be something mad, something surreal and beautiful and extraordinary that nobody would’ve ever expected. I felt that he had the same intention with what he was making with us. It was an absolute joy.”
For several years, Lynch harnessed his musical connections to raise funds and awareness for the David Lynch Foundation, established to promote the benefits of Transcendental Meditation. He hosted a series of music and art events on both coasts, including his popular Festival of Disruption, and a 2009 benefit concert with former Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr at Radio City Music Hall.
On his next solo album, 2013’s “The Big Dream,” he recruited Swedish singer-songwriter Lykke Li soon after she relocated to Los Angeles. He handed her a coffee-stained note with a few lyrics jotted down and said, “Make this into a song.” She accepted Lynch’s note as “a clue, a puzzle, a question” toward something new. She recast his words “I’m waiting here” as the title of the aching bonus track “I’m Waiting Here.” Recording the track was unlike a normal session.
“I’ve never done that again with anyone else,” Lykke Li says now. “He stood next to me and it was almost like he directed me how to sing. It was almost like a seance. It was really based on feeling and intuition.”
Lykke Li also notes that Lynch “saved my life,” by introducing her then to Transcendental Meditation at a time when things were fast-moving and chaotic in her life. “It was like only when I started meditating that I really found a center and it’s unlocked everything for me,” she says.
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A David Lynch photo of himself with singer Chrystabell, with whom he collaborated on his final musical project.
(David Lynch)
The final project Lynch finished and released before his death was “Cellophane Memories,” a collaboration with Chrystabell, recorded at his home in 2023 and 2024. Unlike the songs of romance from their previous work together, the record was marked by an experimental layering of vocals and other effects that eased it deeper into the avant-garde.
“We were both doing what we love to do, which is to experiment and to create,” Chrystabell says now, days after Lynch’s passing. “His mind was always alive, always inspired. There were always things brewing.”
Along the way, the duo recorded several other songs in different modes, including an unfinished project that was to be called “Strange Darling.” But the filmmaker-painter-musician was already looking to their next round of songs together.
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“David loved a great pop song,” the singer recalls. “That was the next thing we were going to do. He was like, ‘Chrystabell, should we write some hits next time?’”
Instead, Lynch’s musical friends and collaborators have been in mourning this week, grateful for their moments together, diving back into the work he left. Chrystabell says she has dealt with her close friend’s death by listening to music left behind.
“So much of our music is really tailor-made for these moments,” she says, recalling Lynch lyrics like “the great unknown,” “angel star” and “10 trillion miles of dark.” “He was right there, and we explored that territory. Lyrics could be cute and fun backseat kind of sexy or cosmic, otherworldly, spiritual, almost hymnal music. I was marveling at that. It all hits different now.”
A still from ‘Song Sung Blue’.
| Photo Credit: Focus Features/YouTube
There is something unputdownable about Mike Sardina (Hugh Jackman) from the first moment one sees him at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting celebrating his 20th sober birthday. He encourages the group to sing the famous Neil Diamond number, ‘Song Sung Blue,’ with him, and we are carried along on a wave of his enthusiasm.
Song Sung Blue (English)
Director: Craig Brewer
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Kate Hudson, Michael Imperioli, Ella Anderson, Mustafa Shakir, Fisher Stevens, Jim Belushi
Runtime: 132 minutes
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Storyline: Mike and Claire find and rescue each other from the slings and arrows of mediocrity when they form a Neil Diamond tribute band
We learn that Mike is a music impersonator who refuses to come on stage as anyone but himself, Lightning, at the Wisconsin State Fair. At the fair, he meets Claire (Kate Hudson), who is performing as Patsy Cline. Sparks fly between the two, and Claire suggests Mike perform a Neil Diamond tribute.
Claire and Mike start a relationship and a Neil Diamond tribute band, called Lightning and Thunder. They marry and after some initial hesitation, Claire’s children from her first marriage, Rachel (Ella Anderson) and Dayna (Hudson Hensley), and Mike’s daughter from an earlier marriage, Angelina (King Princess), become friends.
Members from Mike’s old band join the group, including Mark Shurilla (Michael Imperioli), a Buddy Holly impersonator and Sex Machine (Mustafa Shakir), who sings as James Brown. His dentist/manager, Dave Watson (Fisher Stevens), believes in him, even fixing his tooth with a little lightning bolt!
The tribute band meets with success, including opening for Pearl Jam, with the front man for the grunge band, Eddie Vedder (John Beckwith), joining Lightning and Thunder for a rendition of ‘Forever in Blue Jeans’ at the 1995 Pearl Jam concert in Milwaukee.
There is heartbreak, anger, addiction, and the rise again before the final tragedy. Song Sung Blue, based on Greg Kohs’ eponymous documentary, is a gentle look into a musician’s life. When Mike says, “I’m not a songwriter. I’m not a sex symbol. But I am an entertainer,” he shows that dreams do not have to die. Mike and Claire reveal that even if you do not conquer the world like a rock god, you can achieve success doing what makes you happy.
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ALSO READ: ‘Run Away’ series review: Perfect pulp to kick off the New Year
Song Sung Blue is a validation for all the regular folk with modest dreams, but dreams nevertheless. As the poet said, “there’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.” Hudson and Jackman power through the songs and tears like champs, leaving us laughing, tapping our feet, and wiping away the errant tears all at once.
The period detail is spot on (never mind the distracting wigs). The chance to hear a generous catalogue of Diamond’s music in arena-quality sound is not to be missed, in a movie that offers a satisfying catharsis. Music is most definitely the food of love, so may we all please have a second and third helping?
Stephen A. Smith is arguably the most-well known sports commentator in the country. But the outspoken ESPN commentator’s perspective outside the sports arena has landed him in a firestorm.
The furor is due to his pointed comments defending an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fatally shot a Minneapolis woman driving away from him.
Just hours after the shooting on Wednesday, Smith said on his SiriusXM “Straight Shooter” talk show that although the killing of Renee Nicole Good was “completely unnecessary,” he added that the agent “from a lawful perspective” was “completely justified” in firing his gun at her.
He also noted, “From a humanitarian perspective, however, why did he have to do that?”
Smith’s comments about the agent being in harm’s way echoed the views of Deputy of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who said Good engaged in an “act of domestic terrorism” by attacking officers and attempting to run them over with her vehicle.
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However, videos showing the incident from different angles indicate that the agent was not standing directly in front of Good’s vehicle when he opened fire on her. Local officials contend that Good posed no danger to ICE officers. A video posted by partisan media outlet Alpha News showed Good talking to agents before the shooting, saying, “I’m not mad at you.”
The shooting has sparked major protests and accusations from local officials that the presence of ICE has been disruptive and escalated violence. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frye condemned ICE, telling agents to “get the f— out of our city.”
The incident, in turn, has put a harsher spotlight on Smith, raising questions on whether he was reckless or irresponsible in offering his views on Good’s shooting when he had no direct knowledge of what had transpired.
An angered Smith appeared on his “Straight Shooter” show on YouTube on Friday, saying the full context of his comments had not been conveyed in media reports, specifically calling out the New York Post and media personality Keith Olbermann, while saying that people were trying to get him fired.
He also doubled down on his contention that Good provoked the situation that led to her death, saying the ICE agent was in front of Good’s car and would have been run over had he not stepped out of the way.
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“In the moment when you are dealing with law enforcement officials, you obey their orders so you can get home safely,” he said. “Renee Good did not do that.”
When reached for comment about his statements, a representative for Smith said his response was in Friday’s show.
It’s not the first time Smith, who has suggested he’s interesting in going into politics, has sparked outside the sports universe. He and journalist Joy Reid publicly quarreled following her exit last year from MSNBC.
He also faced backlash from Black media personalities and others when he accused Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas of using “street verbiage” in her frequent criticisms of President Trump.
“The way that Jasmine Crockett chooses to express herself … Aren’t you there to try and get stuff done instead of just being an impediment? ‘I’m just going to go off about Trump, cuss him out every chance I get, say the most derogatory things imaginable, and that’s my day’s work?’ That ain’t work! Work is, this is the man in power. I know what his agenda is. Maybe I try to work with this man. I might get something out of it for my constituents.’ ”
In 1977, a man named Tony Kiritsis fell behind on mortgage payments for an Indianapolis, Indiana, property that he hoped to develop into an affordable shopping center for independent merchants. He asked his mortgage broker for more time, but was denied. This enraged him because he suspected that the broker and his father, who owned the company, were conspiring to defraud him by letting the property go into foreclosure and acquire it for much less than market value. He showed up at the offices of the mortgage company, Meridian, for a scheduled appointment regarding the debt in the broker’s office, where he took the broker, Richard O. Hall, hostage, and demanded $130,000 to settle the debt, plus a public apology from the company. He carried a long cardboard box containing a shotgun with a so-called dead man’s wire, which he affixed to Hall as a precaution against police interference: if either of them were shot, tackled, or even caused to stumble, the wire would pull the trigger, blowing Hall’s head off.
That’s only the beginning of an astonishing story that has inspired many retellings, including a memoir by Hall, a 2018 documentary (whose producers were consultants on this movie) and a podcast drama starring Jon Hamm as Tony Kiritsis. And now it’s the best current movie you likely haven’t heard about—a drama from director Gus Van Sant (“Good Will Hunting”), starring Bill Skarsgård as Tony Kiritsis and Dacre Montgomery as Richard Hall. It’s unabashedly inspired by the best crime dramas from the 1970s, including “Dog Day Afternoon,” “The Sugarland Express,” “Network,” and “Badlands,” and can stand proudly alongside them.
From the opening sequence, which scores the high-strung Tony’s pre-crime prep with Deodato’s immortally groovy disco version of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” played on the radio by one of Tony’s local heroes, the philosophical DJ Fred Temple (Colman Domingo); through the expansive middle section, which establishes Tony as part of a thriving community that will see him as their representative in the one-sided struggle between labor and capital; through the ending and postscript, which leave you unsure how to feel about what you’ve seen but eager to discuss it with others, “Dead Man’s Wire” is a nostalgia trip of the best kind. Rather than superficially imitate the style of a specific type of ’70s drama, Van Sant and his collaborators connect with the essence of what made them powerful and memorable: their connection to issues that weighed on viewers’ minds fifty years ago and that have grown heavier since.
Tony is far from a criminal genius or a potential folk hero, but thinks he’s both. The shotgun box with a weird bulge, barely held together with packing tape, is a correlative of the mentality of the man who carries it. His home is filled with counterculture-adjacent books, but he’s a slob who loudly gripes during a brief car ride that his “shorts have been ridin’ up since Market Street,” and has a vanity license plate that reads “TOPLESS.” His eloquence runs the gamut from Everyman acuity to self-canceling nonsense slathered in profanity . He accurately sums up the mortgage company’s practices as “a private equity trap” (a phrase that looks ahead to the 2008 financial collapse, which was sparked by predatory lending on subprime mortgages) and hopes that his extreme actions will generate some “some goddamn catharsis” for himself and his fellow citizens, and “some genuine guilt” among Indianapolis’ lending class.
He’s also intoxicated by his sudden local fame. The hostage situation migrates from the mortgage company to Tony’s shabby apartment complex, which is quickly surrounded by beat cops, tactical officers, and reporters (including Myha’La as Linda Page, a twenty-something, Black local TV correspondent looking to move up. Tony also forces his way into the life of his idol Temple, who tapes a phone conversation with him, previews it for police, and grudgingly accepts their or-else request to continue the dialog and plays their regular talks on his morning show.
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Despite these inroads, Tony is unable to prevent his inner petty schmuck from emerging and undermining his message, such as it is. He vacillates between treating Hall as a useless representative of the financial elite (when the elder Hall finally agrees to speak with Tony via phone from a tropical vacation, Tony sneers to Hall the younger, “Your daddy’s on the line—he wants to know when you’ll be home for supper!”) and connecting with him on a human level. When he’s not bombastic, he’s needy and fawning. “I like you!” he keeps telling people he just met, but Fred most of all—as if a Black man who’d built a comfortable life for himself and his wife in 1977 Indiana could say no when an overwhelmingly white police force asked him to become Tony’s fake-confidant; and as if it matters whether a hostage-taking gunman feels warmly towards him.
Ultimately, though, making perfect sense and effecting lasting change are no higher on Tony’s agenda than they were for the protagonists of “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Network.” Like them, these are unhinged audience surrogates whose media stardom turned them into human megaphones for anger at the miserable state of things, and the indifference of institutions that caused or worsened it. These include local law enforcement, which—to paraphrase hapless bank robber Sonny Wirtzik taunting cops in “Dog Day Afternoon”—wanna kill Tony so bad that they can taste it. The discussions between Indianapolis police and the FBI (represented by Neil Mulac’s Agent Patrick Mullaney, a straight-outta-Quantico robot) are all about how to set up and take the kill shot.
The aforementioned phone call leads to a gut-wrenching moment that echoes the then-recent kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, when hostage-takers called their victim’s wealthy grandfather to arrange ransom payment, and got nickel-and-dimed as if they were trying to sell him a used car. The elder Hall is played by “Dog Day Afternoon” star Al Pacino, inspired casting that not only officially connects Tony with Wirtzik but proves that, at 85, Pacino can still bring the heat. The character’s presence creeps into the rest of the story like a toxic fog, even when he’s not the subject of conversation.
With his frizzy grey toupee, self-satisfied Midwest twang, and punchable smirk, Pacino is skin-crawlingly perfect as an old man who built a fortune on being good at one thing, but thinks that makes him a fountain of wisdom on all things, including the conduct of Real Men in a land of women and sissies. After watching TV coverage of Tony getting emotional while keeping his shotgun on Richard, Jr., he beams with pride that Tony shed tears but his own son didn’t. (Kelly Lynch, who costarred in another classic Van Sant film about American losers, “Drugstore Cowboy,” plays Richard, Sr.’s trophy wife, who is appalled at being confronted with irrefutable evidence of her husband’s monstrousness, but still won’t say a word against him.)
Van Sant was 25 during the real-life incidents that inspired this movie. That may partly account for the physical realism of the production, which doesn’t feel created but merely observed, in the manner of ’70s movies whose authenticity was strengthened by letting the main characters’ dialogue overlap and compete with ambient sounds; shooting in existing locations when possible, and dressing the actors in clothes that looked as if they’d been hanging in regular folks’ closets for years. Peggy Schnitzer did the costumes, Stefan Dechant the production design, and Arnaud Poiter the cinematography, all of which figuratively wear bell-bottom pants and platform shoes; the soundscape was overseen by Leslie Schatz, who keeps the environments believably dense and filled with incidental sounds while making sure the important stuff can be understood. It should also be mentioned that the film’s blueprint is an original script by a first-timer, Adam Kolodny, with a bona-fide working class worldview; he wrote it while working as a custodian at the Los Angeles Zoo.
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More impressive than the film’s behind-the-scenes pedigree is its vision of another time that unexpectedly comes to seem not too different from this one. It is both a lovingly constructed time machine highlighting details that now seem as antiquated as lithography and buckboard wagons (the film deserves a special Oscar just for its phones) and a wide-ranging consideration of indestructible realities of life in the United States, which are highlighted in such a way that you notice them without feeling as if the movie pointed at them.
For instance, consider Tony’s infatuation with Fred Temple, which peaks when Tony honors his hero by demonstrating his “soul dancing” for his hostage, is a pre-Internet version of what we would now call a “parasocial relationship.” An awareness of racial dynamics is baked into this, and into the film as a whole. Domingo’s performance as Temple captures the tightrope walk that Black celebrities have to pull off, reassuring their most excitable white fans that they understand and care about them without cosigning condescension or behavior that could escalate into harassment. Consider, too, the matter-of-fact presentation of how easy it is for violence-prone people to buddy up to law enforcement officers, especially when they inhabit the same spaces. When Indianapolis police detective Will Grable (Cary Elwes) approaches Tony on a public street soon after the kidnapping, Tony’s face brightens as he exclaims, “Hi Mike! Nice to see you!”
And then, of course, there’s the economic and political framework, which is built with a firm yet delicate hand, and compassion for the vibrant messiness of life. “Dead Man’s Wire” depicts an analog era in which crises like this one were treated as important local matters that involved local people, businesses, and government agents, rather than fuel for a global agitprop industry posing as a news media, and a parasitic army of self-proclaimed influencers reycling the work of other influencers for clout. Van Sant’s movie continually insists on the uniqueness and value of every life shown onscreen, however briefly glimpsed, from the many unnamed citizens who are shown silently watching news coverage of the crisis while working their day jobs, to Fred’s right hand at the radio station, an Asian-American stoner dude (Vinh Nguyen) with a closet-sized office who talent-scouts unknown bands while exhaling cumulus clouds of pot smoke.
All this is drawn together by Van Sant and editor Saar Klein in pop music-driven montages that show how every member of the community depicted in this story is connected, even if they don’t know it or refuse to admit it. As John Donne put it, “No man is an island/Entire of itself/Each is a piece of the continent/A part of the main.” The struggle of the individual is summed up in one of Fred’s hypnotic radio monologues: “Let’s remember to become the ocean, not disappear into it.”
