· 2004
Kristine McKenna's work as a journalist began in the late 1970s, when she covered the Los Angeles punk scene for various domestic and international publications. During the '80s and '90s she wrote art, film and music criticism, and profiled directors, musicians and visual artists for a variety of publications including Artforum, Playboy, Rolling Stone, The Los Angeles Times and New York Rocker. Talk to Her is McKenna's second collection (the first was 1999's Book of Changes) of favorite interviews culled from McKenna's files, and the book reveal's McKenna's highly intimate technique as an interviewer. That she manages to get such candor out of her subjects is remarkable. The stunning list of interview subjects includes: Filmmaker Robert Altman; Jackie Onassis's cousin Edie Beale; punk rocker and poet Exene Cervenka; the musician Elvis Costello; surf guitar legend Dick Dale; the postmodern critic Jacques Derrida; Beat poet Allen Ginsberg; Television's Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine; art curator Walter Hopps; Pretenders frontwoman Chrissie Hynde; country music legend Rickie Lee Jones; the Sex Pistols' John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten); singer and songwriter Joni Mitchell; the Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man; punk rock legend Joey Ramone; New York rock legend Lou Reed; the actress Eva Marie Saint; and the recently-departed Joe Strummer of the Clash. Also included are brief oral histories of Andy Warhol and Orson Welles.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An unprecedented look into the personal and creative life of the visionary auteur David Lynch, through his own words and those of his closest colleagues, friends, and family “Insightful . . . an impressively industrious and comprehensive account of Lynch’s career.”—The New York Times Book Review In this unique hybrid of biography and memoir, David Lynch opens up for the first time about a life lived in pursuit of his singular vision, and the many heartaches and struggles he’s faced to bring his unorthodox projects to fruition. Lynch’s lyrical, intimate, and unfiltered personal reflections riff off biographical sections written by close collaborator Kristine McKenna and based on more than one hundred new interviews with surprisingly candid ex-wives, family members, actors, agents, musicians, and colleagues in various fields who all have their own takes on what happened. Room to Dream is a landmark book that offers a onetime all-access pass into the life and mind of one of our most enigmatic and utterly original living artists. With insights into . . . Eraserhead The Elephant Man Dune Blue Velvet Wild at Heart Twin Peaks Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me Lost Highway The Straight Story Mulholland Drive INLAND EMPIRE Twin Peaks: The Return Praise for Room to Dream “A memorable portrait of one of cinema’s great auteurs . . . provides a remarkable insight into [David] Lynch’s intense commitment to the ‘art life.’ ”—The Guardian “This is the best book by and about a movie director since Elia Kazan’s A Life (1988) and Michael Powell’s A Life in Movies (1986). But Room to Dream is more enchanting or appealing than those classics. . . . What makes this book endearing is its chatty, calm account of how genius in America can be a matter-of-fact defiance of reality that won’t alarm your dog or save mankind. It’s the only way to dream in so disturbed a country.”—San Francisco Chronicle
"'The air is on fire' is the first exhibition to comprehensively present David Lynch's work as a visual artist. Created for the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain and shown in Paris from March 3 to May 27, 2007, it includes diverse forms of his artistic expression, culled from his extensive collection of his own artwork that dates back to 1965. Initially trained as a painter, he has continued to prolifically produce artwork - from paintings to photographs to drawings - throughout his career as a filmmaker, and has broadened his practice to include animation, music composition and sound production." - page [15]
Edited by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna. Essays by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna and Stephen Fredman.
· 2009
In 1950s California, and especially in Los Angeles, there existed few venues for contemporary art. To a whole generation of California artists, this presented a freedom, since the absence of a context for their work meant that they could coin their own, and in uncommonly interesting ways. The careers of Ed Ruscha, Wallace Berman and Ed Kienholz all begin with this absence: Ruscha turned to books as a means of dissemination, Berman pioneered mail art through his magazine Semina and in March 1957, Ed Kienholz, in collaboration with curator Walter Hopps, co-founded one of California's greatest historical galleries, Ferus. Within months of opening, Ferus, which is Latin for "wild," gained notoriety when the Hollywood vice squad raided Berman's first--and, in his lifetime, last--solo exhibition, following a complaint about "lewd material." Shows by Kienholz and Jay DeFeo followed, but 1962 was Ferus' annus mirabilis, with solo shows by Bruce Conner and Joseph Cornell, and the first solo shows of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol on the west coast. The following year, Ferus also hosted Ed Ruscha's first solo exhibition. After Kienholz and Hopps parted ways--Hopps went on to mount the first American Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Musuem--the reins were handed to Irving Blum, who got Ferus out of the red and ran the gallery until its closure in 1966. A Place to Begin is an illustrated oral history of this heroic enterprise. With 62 new interviews with Ferus artists and more than 300 photographs (most previously unpublished), it retrieves a lost chapter of twentieth-century American art. Edited by Kristine McKenna, noted expert and co-editor of the critically acclaimed Semina Culture.
Ein einzigartiger Einblick in das persönliche und kreative Leben des visionären Künstlers David Lynch, erzählt von ihm selbst und seinen engsten Kollegen, Freunden und Verwandten. In einer faszinierenden Mischung aus Biografie und Memoire schreibt David Lynch erstmals über seine vielen Kämpfe und auch Niederlagen; wie kompliziert es oft war, seine zahlreichen unorthodoxen Projekte zu verwirklichen. Lynch kommentiert ungefiltert und auf sehr offene Art und Weise die biografischen Ausführungen seiner Co-Autorin Kristine McKenna, die für das Buch über hundert Interviews mit erstaunlich gesprächigen Ex-Frauen, Familienmitgliedern, Schauspielern, Agenten, Musikern und sonstigen Kollegen geführt hat. Traumwelten ist ein besonderes Buch, das dem Leser eine tiefe Einsicht in das Leben und die Gedankenwelt eines der schillerndsten und originellsten Künstlers unserer Zeit gewährt.
Um mergulho sem precedentes na vida pessoal e criativa do visionário cineasta David Lynch, por meio de suas próprias palavras e do olhar de colegas de trabalho, família e amigos. Uma combinação única de biografia e memórias, talvez Espaço para sonhar seja mais precisamente descrito como uma história oral da carreira de Lynch. O livro traz intercalados capítulos escritos por Kristine McKenna pelo próprio cineasta, mesclando depoimentos de familiares, amigos e profissionais que trabalharam com Lynch e a perspectiva do próprio diretor. O resultado é um livro que acompanha o estilo único e a reverência peculiar de Lynch, uma obra singular que dá ao leitor acesso único à vida e à mente de um dos artistas vivos mais originais e enigmáticos da atualidade.
· 2001
Kristine McKenna is an L.A based author who has been writing about art, film, music and literature since 1977 for nearly every major music and arts related magazine in the US. This is a collection of interviews she conducted with the famous and the great, with illustrations by seminal comic artists, Crumb, Roth, Woodring, Hernandez, Bagge and many more. McKenna's list of interviewees reads like a who's who in music and literature. James Brown, Beefheart, George Clinton, Leonard Cohen, Eno, Nici, Iggy, Burroughs, Ginserg -nearly every great mind of the 20th Century.
David Lynch realiza una original incursión en el género biográfico. Un libro magnético y particular. Espacio para soñar ofrece una mirada insólita a la vida personal y creativa del cineasta David Lynch, a través de sus propias palabras y las de sus colegas más próximos, amigos y parientes. En este libro singular, a caballo entre la biografía y las memorias, David Lynch se sincera por primera vez acerca de una vida dedicada a perseguir un imaginario único, deteniéndose en las penurias y las luchas que soportó para llevar a buen puerto sus proyectos heterodoxos. Las reflexiones de Lynch --líricas, íntimas y sin tapujos-- parten, capítulo tras capítulo, de las secciones biográficas que aporta su estrecha colaboradora Kristine McKenna, sustentadas en más de cien entrevistas inéditas con ex mujeres sorprendentemente francas, miembros de su familia, actores, agentes, músicos y colegas en todo tipo de disciplinas, cada uno con su propia versión de lo ocurrido. Espacio para soñar es un libro llamado a no perecer jamás, un pase exclusivo a las bambalinas de la vida y la mente de uno de los artistas más enigmáticos y sustancialmente originales de nuestro tiempo. La crítica ha dicho... «Si esperaban que la biografía de David Lynch fuese como cualquier otra, es que nunca han visto una de sus películas. Un libro fascinante.» The New York Times «E spacio para soñar bien podría ser el evangelio según David Lynch. Aquí hay infinidad de informaciones inéditas incluso para los más fanáticos. Y todo estácontado con el formidable encanto del cineasta, una mezcla de entusiasmo juvenil y sabidurá cósmica.» The Washington Post «Las memorias de David Lynch iluminan los orígenes de su arte. El humor y las excentricidades de sus recuerdos y observaciones son uno de los innegables atractivos de este libro.» The Economist «Lynch es todo un maestro para los locos perversos e inquietantes, y también para los locos del montón.» The Sunday Times «Un libro gozosamente fuera de lo convencional. Lynch escribe como habla. Esplana y llanamente directo, alegremente profano y se entusiasma repentinamente con lo más inesperado.» The Big Issue «Descubrimos o redescubrimos aspectos singulares de su singular personalidad, todo ello desde una perspectiva honesta, algo excéntrica y también a ratos divertida y cálida. [...] A medio camino entre la biografía y las memorias, es un documento esencial para comprender mejor su a veces incomprensible universo.» Fotogramas «Para los que aman el delirio cinematográfico lynchiano. Espacio para soñar acaba por convertirse en un artefacto biográfico curioso e inevitablemente extraño.» Zenda Libros
Dans ces mémoires uniques et hybrides, qui sont aussi particulières que l’homme lui-même, Lynch se confie pour la première fois sur sa vie, toujours en quête d’une vision singulière, et sur les nombreux chagrins d’amour et épreuves qu’il a affrontés pour mener à bien ses projets peu orthodoxes, parfois avec succès, parfois sans. Les réflexions lyriques, intensément intimes et sans aucun filtre de Lynch sont précédées de sections biographiques, écrites par sa proche collaboratrice Kristine McKenna et basées sur plus de cent interviews inédites avec des membres de sa famille, des acteurs, des agents, des musiciens et des collègues dans plusieurs domaines, qui ont chacun leur propre version de ce qu’il s’est passé. Room to dream est un livre-monument qui offre un exceptionnel et accessible voyage dans la vie et l’esprit de l’un des artistes vivants les plus timides, énigmatiques et authentiques. Traduit de l’anglais par Carole Delporte et Johan Frederik Hel Guedj