David Lynch and the Big Fish

Lynch on creativity and meditation

'I used to go to Bob's Big Boy Restaurant just about every day from the mid-seventies until the early eighties. I'd have a milkshake and sit and think.

'There's a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milkshake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.'

David Lynch

We all have our heroes, and most of us have more than one. Different people can speak to us at different times in our lives, or all come rushing in to influence us at once. As an undergraduate, I had a fascination with the late 70s David Bowie: his distinctive look and austere philosophy of life appealed to me at the time. As a result, Bowie's collaborators and influences also had an affect: I became interested in Brian Eno, Iggy Pop, NEU! and Kraftwerk all in the same breath. And they were all heroes. (No pun intended.)

I know that these characters have had a lasting impact on my development, and without them I wouldn't be quite the person I am today. But there have been others who held my attention in more subtle ways, and I can imagine that their influence on me has been even greater still.

I've been a fan of the film director David Lynch since I was a teenager. I connected with his films, his television series Twin Peaks, and certain strains in his personality. But although I've never emulated Lynch as such, his interviews and his work have held a strong, if largely unrecognized grip.

I think on some level I've adopted my neat and simple dress sense from Lynch (with a passing nod to Bob Dylan). My love of jazz was partly sparked by music in the soundtrack of Lynch's films. And there's no doubt that through Lynch I discovered an enduring love and adoration for strong black coffee. Black as midnight on a moonless night.

I've recently finished reading Catching the Big Fish, a book where Lynch discusses his preoccupation with transcendental meditation, and his love and enthusiasm for the 'art life'. The book is as close as we are ever likely to get to a discussion of meaning in his work. Lynch is famously evasive about his personal interpretations, and always stresses the importance of an audience finding their own way through. But what drew me to the book was his zest and joy for the magic of cinema, and the charms of entering a fantastic, imaginative world.

What I love most about David Lynch is his willingness to follow an idea, and let it grow and develop into something new. He seems to see the world with a certain childlike wonderment, and it's inspiring to hear the way he sees film, and art, and culture as a way-of-life rather than a passing entertainment. If there is any one influence that David Lynch has held over me, it's this simple and impassioned view.

Of course, I don't agree with everything the man says. There are certain experiences I do not relate to, and I can't say his love for transcendental meditation has rubbed off on me. But nonetheless, there is so much to love and to enjoy. Catching the Big Fish is very short, and comprised more of short asides or observations than sustained discussions. It's more aphorism than autobiography. Here are a few lines that struck me in particular:

[On solitude:] Bushnell Keeler, the father of my friend Toby, always had this expression: 'If you want to get one hour of good painting in, you have to have four hours of uninterrupted time.'

[On the experience of cinema:] It's so magical - I don't know why - to go into a theatre and have the lights go down. It's very quiet, and then the curtains start to open. Maybe they're red. And you go into a world.

[On artistic suffering:] Right here people might bring up Vincent van Gogh as an example of a painter who did great work in spite of - or because of - his suffering. I like to think that van Gogh would have been even more prolific and even greater if he wasn't so restricted by the things tormenting him. I don't think it was the pain that made him so great - I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.

[On a sense of place:] A sense of place is so critical in cinema, because you want to go into another world, and its own feel, and its own mood. So you try to put together all these things - these little details - to create that sense of place.

[On Beauty:] When you see an ageing building or a rusted bridge, you are seeing nature and man working together. If you paint over a building, there is no more magic to that building. But if it is allowed to age, then man has built it and nature has added to it - it's so organic.

[On working with wood:] Wood is one of the greatest materials to work with. There are soft woods and hard woods, and they all have their own beauty when you are working with them. When I saw through a piece of freshly cut pine, the smell of it just sends me right to heaven. The same goes even for pine needles. I used to chew Ponderosa pine pitch, which is the sap that oozes out of the tree and dries on the outside of the bark. If you can get a fresh piece of pitch, it is like syrup. It will stick to you and you won't be able to get it off your hands. But sometimes it hardens like old honey. And you can chew this, and the flavour of pine pitch will make you crazy, in a good way.

[On Fire] Sitting in front of a fire is mesmerizing. It's magical. I feel the same way about electricity. And smoke. And flickering lights.

What a guy.

Samuel Beckett's 'Ping'

On Beckett's late, experimental short story

"White ceiling shining white one square yard never seen ping perhaps way out there one second ping silence. Traces alone unover given black grey signs no meaning light grey almost white always the same. Ping perhaps not alone one second with image always the same time a little less that much memory almost never ping silence."

Samuel Beckett, 'Ping'

I don't know whether it's the caffeine, or simply my nature, but I've always been a night owl. Thinking it over, it's probably a handsome blend of the two: nature and nurture working together. But whatever the cause, the symptom is always the same: insomnia. And for better or for worse, I'm constantly searching out ways to occupy my time.

Tonight I found myself skipping through some of Samuel Beckett's shorter works, rereading First Love and discovering Dante and the Lobster for the first time. The latter story, composed early in Beckett's writing career, recounts the first adventure of one of the writer's recurring characters, Belacqua. Drawn from incidents in Beckett's own life, the Belacqua stories were published together in the More Pricks Than Kicks collection.

Dante and the Lobster has a certain playfulness about it, and is written in a third-person narrative that allows us to identify with its protagonist while being aware of his pretensions and shortcomings. It offers a glimpse of the young Beckett as an exuberant and ostentatious writer, keen to display his wit and erudition with stylistic wordplay and knowing references. But while his knowledge can be daunting, the prose still feels warm and approachable, in its way.

At the end, I thought I would skip a few hundred pages and peruse some of Samuel Beckett's later prose work. Short prose. Nothing that would take too much time; I was looking for something easy on the early-morning eye.

In the end I settled for Ping, weighing it at just two and a half-pages. From the first few sentences I was completely hooked. Its style is completely at odds with More Pricks Than Kicks, with all ornamentation stripped away. Instead of the security of knowledge, we have a cold, bare image of a bright white room. There is, perhaps, a protagonist, perhaps another, and perhaps a narrator. But nothing is certain. We have little more than a hint of a consciousness, precarious at best. And it expresses a something so close to nothing it's scarcely anything at all.

I love it! The text refuses to give the reader anything concrete to sink their teeth into, and there is a struggle to comprehend both the scene, the central character, and the narrator. We are given no easy answers, and barely two clues to rub together, but there is something compelling about it. It reads like the expression of a mind barely aware of itself, but expressed in a beautiful and poetic way - even if it is impossible to grasp, or to understand. There is something imploring the reader to take time over it. To think it over. To quote a line from Dante and the Lobster:

'Still he pored over the enigma, he would not concede himself conquered, he would understand at least the meaning of the words, the order in which they were spoken and the nature of the satisfaction that they conferred on the misinformed poet, so that when they were ended he was refreshed and could raise his heavy head, intending to return thanks and make formal retraction of his old opinion.'

Ping is impenetrable, but it is beautiful. David Lodge has attempted to summarize it as 'the rendering of consciousness of a person confined in a small, bare, white room, a person who is evidently under extreme duress, and probably at the last gasp of life.' Typically, Beckett's short piece asks far more questions than it answers, but for me that is what is so compelling about it. And, perhaps bizarrely for some, I do not feel impelled to seek the answers out. Probably because I don't think the text conceals them. To draw on a line from Beckett's Molloy: 'this is something I can study all my life and never understand.'

In Frescoes of the Skull, James Knowlson and John Pilling define the 'telegrammatic briskness' of Ping as a reflection of the 'impotence and ignorance that Beckett has always carefully distinguished from Joyce's omniscience and omnipotence.' Even for those familiar with Beckett's characteristic motifs, and literary style, there is a 'strangeness and opaqueness that prevent it, like [Finnegans Wake], from ever being perfectly apprehensible'. For me, this is precisely the charm and beauty (that word again) that draws me to Ping in the first place.

But, for those who are drawn to the riddle wrapped in the enigma, there are some key questions to be answered. Stanley Gontarski and C. J. Ackerley pose just a few of them, with a description of the scene: 'Although the story lines of the late tales are simple, narratologically they are complex. The reader focusses not only on a figure in a closed space, but on another figure and a narrator imagining them. There is not just the psychologically complex image of a self imagining itself, but a self imagining itself imagining itself, often suspecting that it, too, is being imagined.'

It doesn't get much better than that!

Unknown Pleasures

On Saturday night, a strange experience. I found myself on the first floor of Dempseys in Cardiff, sitting in a corner near the bar. It was music night Twisted by Design, and there were people dancing everywhere. Many were regulars: young, hip, indie types. Blazers, badges, Converse sneakers, the works. But a Madonna concert ending just an hour before had left thousands of fans in search of a night out in the city, and a surprising number of them found their way to this particular dancefloor.

Many of the newcomers looked unfamiliar but happy with the music selections, and seemed fairly comfortable dancing to upbeat indie and alternative music. No doubt alcohol helped to swell their enthusiasm, and perhaps allowed them to throw caution to the wind - along with their arms and legs. And it was nice to see two such disparate social groups moving in relative harmony. Who says music doesn't bring people together?

I spent most of the night sitting with a friend, making idle chit-chat and wishing that I was back at home: the phrase 'nice hot coffee, nice warm bed' had become a makeshift mantra over the past few hours. I had endured enough youthful debauchery for one weekend, and was still recovering from what was now a mild hangover. My friend was in the same predicament. But, never one to pass up an opportunity, I went along regardless. We all have our motivations for such outwardly peculiar behaviour, and I'm no exception: a heady mix of curiosity, restlessness and loneliness does it every time. So here I was.

As I looked out onto the dance-floor, still thinking about a good book waiting back home, the most peculiar thing happened. The first beats of Joy Division's Transmission fired up. Out of nowhere came a threat. Half of the crowd moved with comfortable recognition, and went through their motions. The other half suddenly looked alienated and self-conscious, but only for a few seconds. It was remarkable. The bass-line suddenly leapt up and Martin Hannett's ethereal production added a guitar-line. The atmosphere (no pun intended) was electrical.

So here I was, sitting with a quiet drink and rubbing my eyes in disbelief. Could it be true? Joy Division were the soundtrack to all my quiet adolescent frustrations, and now I could see rugby players, indie kids, and girls in miniskirts all dancing together. It was absurd and exhilarating at the same time.

After just a few minutes the fire died down and the song came to an end. Just like that. The DJ faded into another song, and everyone continued dancing. I don't know why, but I felt deep down that it was time to leave. I said my goodbyes, took my coat off the chair, and walked out into the rain.

The Simpsons

The decline of one of the greatest television series ever produced

I spent some of this afternoon watching some fantastic old episodes of The Simpsons on DVD. And I haven't laughed so much for a long time.

For years I considered it to be my favourite television show, and I was constantly surprised by its erudition, sharp wit and intelligence. The Simpsons always had a firm grip on the currents of contemporary culture, and was equally at home with subtle satire and silly slapstick. It often managed to remain topical, but kept a certain timelessness about it; and an old episode packs just as much punch now as ever. A perfect half hour of television.

The characters in The Simpsons always appealed to me. They were grounded in a sense of reality, however absurd, that I could relate to in a down-to-earth way. Many of the characters are all-out stereotypes, but ironic stereotypes that make us aware of how cliched and hackneyed they really are. And this has always been funny to me. The Simpsons might have been a cartoon, but it's something I've appreciated differently as a child, a teenager and an adult. It's always been evening entertainment with an edge.

But somewhere along the road the laughter stopped. I don't know what it is, but whatever charm attracted me to the show has faded away. With the broadcast of each new season, The Simpsons just doesn't seem funny anymore.

I'm not quite sure what's wrong. There are still moments in the latest series where I'll raise a smile. There'll be some small gem lurking in the rough. But on the whole it's a downward spiral. The jokes have become predictable and hackneyed, and the show appears to have embodied all of the qualities that it once lampooned.

During its long run, The Simpsons has almost always remained grounded in a certain sense of reality, and then taken its audience on absurd and surreal leaps out of the domestic. Now, the domestic has been jettisoned altogether as each episode attempts to bend over backwards for a cheap laugh. And believe me, the laughs are getting pretty cheap. As the show continues, on and on, it seems to be lunging out into hollow plots and nonsensical twists.

Even the characters, who are undoubtedly the stable staple of the show, have begun to act uncharacteristically: no doubt to suit the requirements of each ever-outlandish narrative. Why, just the other day I saw Mr. Burns not only evade a wild animal with speed and dexterity, but block its path by carrying three heavy boxes over his head. Anyone aware of who Mr. Burns is would see how these actions seem to rub against the grain.

There was a time when Mr. Burns would struggle to use a tin-opener, or even to lift his thumb in approval! And it is precisely this kind of weakness that makes Mr. Burns who he is: his wealth, power and influence perfectly balanced with a spineless, feeble persona. His new antics might have served a joke in this particular episode, but they didn't serve the character.

More than anything, I feel a little sad and a little nostalgic. I know that it's a trap to become accustomed to a particular set of rules and traditions, or attached to a format where change is such a constant necessity. But my attachment to The Simpsons was based on its very ability to change and to adapt; what attracted me was the show's willingness to mock, satirize or even get sentimental from time to time - but be witty about it. The Simpsons seems to have lost its plot, its characters, and all its laughs in the process.

Samuel Beckett's 'Breath'

Beckett's shortest play

In case you were wondering, this isn't a discussion of Samuel Beckett's oral hygiene. Instead, it's a brief look at Beckett's briefest and perhaps most willfully perverse play: Breath. For those who are new to it, the play is almost absurdly straightforward. It begins with a faint light illuminating the stage, 'littered with miscellaneous rubbish'. As the light increases in intensity, a 'faint brief cry' is heard. 'Silence and hold for about five seconds'. Then the light falls gradually to darkness, and the cry is heard one final time. The end.

The Beckett on Film project, celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of the writer's birth, set about putting all of Beckett's dramatic work on screen. In the case of Breath, contemporary artist Damien Hirst was selected to direct; a suitable choice, not least for the controversy his career has prompted over some of his conceptual work. Actor and friend of Hirst, Keith Allen, was selected as the breath itself (or faint cry), and the artist got to work on creating a landscape of trash for the play.

I can still remember the first time I caught the play on DVD, having no previous knowledge of Breath's strangeness or its brevity. I laughed, completely bewildered, and watched it again. I could see Hirst's obsession with pharmaceuticals and medical paraphernalia all over the stage, but couldn't quite understand how it had been coupled with a human breathing in and out.

One way of looking at it was straightforward enough. In Beckett's text the cry is described as an 'instant of recorded vagitus', a Latin word describing the cry of a newborn infant. And although this part of the text doesn't carry through to Hirst's adaptation, there is a suggestion that the breath and the few brief moments of light could be seen to represent life itself - its shortness, and its desolation. To take a line from Waiting for Godot, we 'give birth astride of a grave'.

But what's the real story behind this bizarre little play? While the idea might look interesting on paper, less than one page of text(!), why would anyone go through the effort of arranging and directing such a production? James Knowlson and John Pilling have suggested that 'Breath has either been treated too reverentially, surprising though this may seem, or has been considered a rather weak joke.' Both interpretations sound inadequate, and perhaps both miss the point. While one can see Breath as a signal of the kind of direction Samuel Beckett's theatre was to take - short, essential and to-the-point - I think the play has received a little too much critical attention over the years: long, rambling and diffuse.

Breath was a play written on the request of Kenneth Tynan, for a series of dramatic work produced for his long-standing avant-garde revue Oh! Calcutta! Beckett wrote that his 'contribution to the Tynan circus is a forty second piece entitled BREATH... It is simply light coming up and going down on a stage littered with miscellaneous unidentifiable muck, synchronized with sound of breath, once in and out, the whole (ha!) begun and ended by the same tiny vagitus-rattle.' (From Knowlson's Damned to Fame, p.565.)

Oh! Calcutta! - a pun on the French 'O que cul t'as'! (Oh, what an ass you have!) - consisted largely of sexually based productions and erotic sketches. Beckett wrote that if '[Breath] fails to titillate I hand in my aprob.' Knowlson has suggested that Beckett's play was intended as an 'ironic comment on what was to follow in the show [...] funny simply because of its deliberate failure to live up to audience's expectations.' But the text, as written, did fail to live up to expectations, and to great surprise of its writer was modified: 'including naked people' in its first production.

According to C. J. Acklerley and S. E. Gontarski the play ran through 1,314 performances and was seen by 85 million people, 'making it easily SB's most viewed SB play.' I can't help but smile at the idea of so many people watching Breath among a packed audience, not knowing what to expect or whether to take what they see seriously. In one sense, a play implying the waste and desolation of a short human life is both tragic and poignant; but it's the shortness of the play that makes it so absurd, and ridiculous, and most of all funny.

Breath has ultimately proved to be a popular success, and rightly or wrongly has garnered critical attention for its themes and its length. But to me the play's strength is in its sense of humour. It's baffled audience expectations, dumbfounded critics, and offered us a valid portrait of human life: nasty, brutish and short. And absurd, funny, strange and bewildering.

Samuel Beckett's 'Not I'

On Beckett's groundbreaking short play

"when suddenly she felt . . . gradually she felt . . . her lips moving . . . imagine! . . her lips moving! . . as of course till then she had not . . . and not alone the lips . . . the cheeks . . . the jaws . . . the whole face . . . all those- . . what?. . the tongue? . . yes . . . the tongue in the mouth . . . all those contortions without which . . . no speech possible . . ."

Samuel Beckett, Not I

I've spent the last few days reading James Knowlson's Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett, a collection of uncollected interviews published for the centenary of Beckett's birth in 2006. Knowlson, the authorized and acclaimed biographer of Beckett's life, publishes many accounts of the evasive writer here for the first time, including memories and anecdotes from colleagues, friends, family members and even Beckett himself.

What struck me as particularly interesting were passages relating to Samuel Beckett's role as a theatre director. A writer by trade, Beckett had no previous experience of working with actors, but adopted a hands-on approach to adaptations of his work from the 1950s up until three years before his death in 1989.

Actors recounting their experiences sometimes felt frustration at Beckett's reluctance to develop back-stories for his characters; for Beckett, each character existed on the stage, and on the stage alone. Rick Cluchey of the San Quentin Drama Workshop, a friend and collaborator of the writer, puts it plainly enough: 'They went nowhere but backstage. They ceased to exist."

And Beckett was similarly reticent about the meanings and interpretations of his character's actions, often shrugging that 'it is of no consequence'. Actors sometimes struggled to relate to the characters they portrayed when so little information was offered them. All that existed was the text: alienated characters in austere circumstances, often completely divorced from any kind of realist representation. But for Samuel Beckett the text was enough, and he refused exegesis or explanation on what he saw as self-contained and self-explanatory. Speaking of Waiting for Godot in an interview, Beckett was definitive:

"I don't know who Godot is. I don't even know (above all don't know) if he exists. And I don't know if they believe in him or not - those two who are waiting for him. [...] All that I knew I showed. It's not much, but it's enough for me, by a wide margin. I'll even say I would have been satisfied with less. [...] Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo, Lucky, their time and their space, I was able to know them a little, but far from the need to understand. Maybe they owe you explanations. Let them supply it. Without me. They and I are through with each other."

But there were a number of actors with whom Samuel Beckett felt a strong and lasting affinity. A fondness existed for French actors Jean Martin and Roger Blin, who acted in the premiere of Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot) back in 1953. The aforementioned Rick Cluchey became a long-standing friend of Beckett, and performed to acclaim as many of his characters. Jack MacGowran and Patrick Magee served to prompt and inspire him. And actress Billie Whitelaw not only became a close friend of Beckett's, but a favourite interpreter of his work.

Billie Whitelaw not only occupied prominent roles in plays such as Come and Go and Happy Days, but was directed by Beckett in his production of Footfalls (a play that according to Knowlson was written with her in mind). They both appeared to find an immediate rapport, informed by a mutual understanding and Whitelaw's seemingly selfless dedication to her particularly challenging roles. As though being buried up to the neck in Happy Days wasn't enough, Whitelaw played Mouth in the British premiere of Not I under Beckett's specific guidance.

For those not familiar with the play, Not I is essentially a monologue for female voice, depicting a troubled and often silent mouth that has erupted into an uncontrollable speech. For the duration, only a mouth is illuminated on stage, and the lines are delivered in a voice close to monotone; in fact, when Whitelaw would veer close to a sensitive or emotive delivery, Beckett would shake his head and complain 'Too much colour! Too much colour!'

Aside from the challenges inherent in remembering the character's speech, Billie Whitelaw was also placed in an uncomfortable position. To quote James Knowlson, 'Whitelaw was covered in a hood, except for her mouth, shrouded in black and placed high up in a chair on a podium.' While firing out lines to the audience, Whitelaw was blindfolded and restricted, breathing more and more rapidly within her confined space. The result, although Whitelaw does not attribute it to Beckett's supervision or to the play itself, initiated hyperventilation and prompted her collapse at a rehearsal:

"It was nothing to do with Sam, nothing to do with Not I; it was all to do with sensory deprivation. If you are blindfolded and have a hood over your face, you hyperventilate, you suffer from sensory deprivation. It will happen to you. And I hung on and hung on until I couldn't any longer. I just went to pieces because I was convinced I was like an astronaut tumbling out into space. And I thought I can't be tumbling out into space, but I am tumbling out in space and that's when I fell down; I couldn't go on."

But, in typical Beckettian style Whitelaw eventually insisted that she would go on after all. Adjustments were made to her hood that gave her a sense of space and stability, and she continued with her performance. In fact, Billie Whitelaw also performed Not I for a television adaptation in 1973 - the first performance of Not I that I saw.

What strikes me most is the simplicity of the image. Not I is in some ways ideally suited for the film medium, as it allows the audience an extreme close-up of its subject. The image of Mouth is not only a powerfully simple one, but disconcerting and disturbing. It belongs to a universe where nothing else seems to exist at all. Nothing but a constant stream of words. And Whitelaw's performance is easily the best that I've seen so far.

Another prominent interpretation came from Julianne Moore for the Beckett on Film centenary project. But there is something about Moore's performance that has always left me cold. Neil Jordan's direction feels too bright and colourful to me, even sensual, and takes something away from the light and dark contrasts of the previous production.

What bothers me most about centenary adaptation is the decision to include more of Julianne Moore's face on-camera, which seems to miss one of the central points of the play. The audience is no longer aware of Mouth simply as what it is: a mouth. Instead it becomes the mouth of a famous Hollywood actress.

There are also numerous cuts made to the film to present different angles and perspectives, perhaps to keep the audience interested. But these cuts, while self-consciously disorientating, give the impression that the speech has been patched together with different takes - rather than offering a single, unbroken and unrelenting speech.

If Not I is a play about a mouth that speaks alone, utterly divorced from the character of its subject, then this dimension is absent in the Jordon production. We not only lose the sense of a Mouth as a character in and of itself, removed from all other context, but we also lose the strange and abstracted image of a human mouth struggling to express itself.

If you're curious to find out more, you can see Billie Whitelaw's 1973 performance of Not I by clicking here. As you can imagine, Not I probably isn't everybody's cup of tea... but for me there is a strange power in Whitelaw's constant and unrelenting delivery. It's theatre of the most extreme kind.

Pure Anecdote

On my fascination with biography

French philosopher Jacques Derrida once introduced a seminar on autobiography with a quote by Martin Heidegger; speaking on the life of Aristotle, Heidegger had said, 'he was born, he thought, and he died. The rest is pure anecdote.' And it's an interesting point to make. Regardless of what Aristotle may or may not have done during his lifetime, all that is relevant to us is the work he left behind.

Aristotle's ideas form some of the central touchstones of Western philosophy, and continue to influence our understanding of who we are and where we are going. Do we really need to know what the man ate for breakfast?

While visiting art galleries in Berlin during his youth, Samuel Beckett made a point regarding conjecture and speculation in history books. He wrote in one of his travel diaries:

"I am not interested in a 'unification' of the historical chaos any more than I am in the 'clarification' of the individual chaos, and still less in the anthropomorphisation of the inhuman necessities that provoke the chaos. What I want is the straws, flotsam, etc., names, dates, births and deaths, because that is all I can know."

The rest, as Heidegger suggests, is at best pure anecdote; at worst, wild speculation. The lives of historical figures will always remain a mystery to us, despite our best efforts to uncover hope for the contrary. I can read a biography of Franz Kafka. I can read two, or three. I can read Kafka's private journal. If I was so disposed, I could even read letters to his friends, family and loved ones. But all the details I would accumulate, and all the facts I could list, would still read cold off the page. They don't bring me any closer.

But what is it that makes me scurry off in search of these biographies, authorized and unauthorized alike? Is it my attempt to get to the heart of a man or a woman that has held my attention so closely, and do I really think I'll succeed? Does it really make a difference if there's a selection of black-and-white photographs from someone's personal archive on the central pages? Will I know them any better? Do I really want to?

I suspect that I track down autobiographies when I feel an affinity for someone's art. That's where it all begins. I might listen to a Miles Davis or a John Coltrane record, and hear something that speaks to me in some way. I wonder what this sensation is, this sense of recognition, and hope that knowing the artist in more depth might reveal something more. Perhaps it will explain something to me about myself, and why I am drawn to it.

I often I feel I can identify with the people I read about, and it gives me a sense of comfort and satisfaction to find a kindred spirit with similar preoccupations. But the end result is always the same: at the end of the book I become at least partly disillusioned with the life and return to the original work. What is it people say about meeting your heroes? Ultimately, it's not Miles Davis that holds my interest, but his music.

I'm currently reading James Knowlson's biography of Samuel Beckett, Damned to Fame, and I'm repeating the same process all over again. I'm a huge fan of the writer's plays, novels, poetry and short stories, and for years I've been interested to know more about the creator. His work has, like Kafka's, always felt close to me, so I was keen to discover whether I would form a similar impression of the man himself.

I'm finding that there are dozens of facts about Beckett's life that I identify with very strongly, from similar personal experiences to shared opinions and outlooks. And these small details accumulate to form a satisfying feeling. However, before I even finish the book I can tell you that there's something missing. Not only is there a vast wealth of detail that I do not relate to, and on some level choose to overlook or ignore, but the facts ultimately do little more than emphasize Beckett's absence. The biography, after all, is not the man. More shocking still, neither is the work.

It is often tempting to uncover what an artist thinks about their work, to gain a greater appreciation of the qualities that drew you to it in the first place. But it's easy to forget that we might not agree with the author's interpretations of his or her work, and that it might conflict quite strikingly with opinions of our own.

Interviewed by Mark Cousins in the late 1990s, director David Lynch was asked for his interpretation of scenes from some of his films. The releases shown included Blue Velvet, Elephant Man and Fire Walk With Me, a film that accompanies the Twin Peaks television series. Lynch admitted that all of his films have meant something deeply personal, but declined to reveal anything on camera. Instead, he focussed on the importance of the audience becoming involved with the films for themselves, and drawing their own conclusions. 'It's a beautiful thing,' he said.

And I can't help but agree. That's not to say I won't stop reading biographies, mind you. Old habits die hard, after all. But I'm no longer in search of any authoritative answers to my big questions. After all, a biography can only offer us the facts, pure anecdotes and wild speculations. Why settle for someone else's when you can have your own?

Die Brücke

One of the great artistic movements of the 20th Century

A few years back a friend and I decided to spend a week in Berlin. We followed the tourist handbooks and navigated our way through the city. After a few days, with growing confidence, we even began to explore with the guidebooks tucked away in our pockets, and gradually started to establish our bearings. I loved the experience, and to this day I feel that Berlin is one of the greatest places I've ever visited.

I found it amazing to see the way Berlin accepts and adapts to its own history: a history that shaped much of twentieth-century Europe, and which manifests itself in every street and every square of the city. There are so many signifiers of a dark and troubling past, amid so much optimism and urban development. The collision of the present with the past, light with dark, was often more than a little on the uncanny side.

We saw bars and restaurants located around Checkpoint Charlie, where tourists can sip a cold beer and contemplate the divide; fragments of the Berlin wall outside shopping malls and train stations; and memorials and high-rise buildings constructed over underground caverns of Nazi administration. Walking through the city was, at times, awe-inspiring, and at others it was frightening.

It was in Berlin that I first came across the work of Ernst Ludvig Kircher, Ernst Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, painters of the Die Brücke expressionist movement. Their name, literally meaning 'the bridge', derives from a desire to merge traditional artistic techniques with the evolving avant garde movement. I was initially drawn to investigate the group while reading about David Bowie, who emulates the pose of Heckel's Roquairol on the cover of his Berlin album "Heroes". Iggy Pop strikes a similar pose on the cover of his album, The Idiot, released the same year.

Despite their expressionist techniques, I always saw a certain realism in their work that always appealed to me. I was drawn to the lone figures, that seemed to be trying to comprehend their surroundings. At times I was reminded of some of Kafka's short stories, at others I thought of Edward Hopper's anonymous city dwellers, but sometimes I didn't think of anything specific. I just daydreamed. That was what I loved about them.

I was reminded of Die Brücke again just recently, while reading James Knowlson's fantastic biography of Samuel Beckett, Damned to Fame. In the mid-1930s, as national socialism began to gain momentum, Beckett embarked on a kind of cultural pilgrimage, touring the museums and art galleries of Germany.

Ironically, many of the modern pieces that interested Beckett most, including those of Kirchner, Heckel and Schmidt-Rottluff had recently been declared decadent by the Third Reich and were taken out of the public eye - either to be stored, bought by private collectors or destroyed. Beckett witnessed the censorship first-hand, and was appalled to meet painters and artists who were suffering from the new policies. But despite this, Beckett did find numerous opportunities to see the works he had been looking for, and retained an interest in the Die Brücke movement, and painting in general, all of his life.

Lying in bed this morning, I spent some time in a dreamless haze, watching the sun move gradually up the wall. I was contemplating the morning coffee, but couldn't quite find the motivation to get up and do something about it. It was at this point that I noticed some of the postcards that have been tacked about the place, here and there, to give my room a bit of colour. Two such postcards were bought from an art gallery gift shop in Berlin: two paintings by Kirchner. I decided to make myself a fresh pot of coffee and go in search of some more paintings online.

And I found them. The Museum of Modern Art in New York is currently holding an exhibition of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's work. There is a website filled with great examples of his painting, and plenty of information about his life and that of the Bridge movement. You can see it for yourself by clicking here.