POP OCCULTURE: JODOROWSKY REDUX

The New York Times of all places has just published an excellent overview of two seismic events that have rocked the Jodoverse, that being the expanded fictional universe where all the various works of maverick cinematic sorcerer and comic book auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky take place.

No, the news is not that the director of such legendary films as El Topo, The Holy Mountain, and Santa Sangre has made a second career writing hugely popular, beautifully illustrated European comic books such as Incal, Metabarons, and Technopriests. Rather, what drove the Journal of Record to devote so many precious column inches to the man is the arrival of two new cinematic projects: The Dance of Reality – Jodorowsky’s first new film in over two decades – and the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune, a chronicle of the Greatest Film Never Made. And yes, I include Kubrick's Napoleon in there.

From the Times:

Jodorowsky the filmmaker is legitimately back. "Jodorowsky’s Dune,” a documentary by the American director Frank Pavich about Jodorowsky’s two-year quest to adapt the Frank Herbert science-fiction novel, and “The Dance of Reality,” a trippy but big-hearted reimagining of the young Alejandro’s unhappy childhood in a Chilean town, will each make its stateside debut this spring (on March 21 and May 23). As the rapper Kanye West, whose “Yeezus” tour was inspired by “The Holy Mountain,” put it last November to a packed (and very likely perplexed) house at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center: “I don’t know if . . . y’all ever heard about Jodorowsky, the director. . . . Y’all don’t know who the [expletive] he is. . . . Everybody copied off him. . . . And there’s gonna be [expletives] in this arena in a few months dancing all sloppy off him.”

Anyone wondering what Jodorowsky has been doing since his previous movie, “The Rainbow Thief” — a bust of a Peter O’Toole-Omar Sharif vehicle from 1990 — would find the answer in his overstuffed apartment. Shelves of “The Incal,” “The Metabarons” and other comics he wrote line the entryway. Books on tarot, philosophy and religion are stacked eight rows high in his study. Posters of his films and portraits of his family decorate many of his walls.

“I waited 22 years to make a film, but not sitting here in this seat,” he said to me in his baritone Spanish. “I did 40 books, 80 comics, theater performances, exhibitions of my drawings, tarot courses — ”

Yer old pal Jerky is absolutely tickled to see one of his personal heroes getting some well deserved attention after years of inexplicable neglect. I include here a photograph of one of the high points of my life, meeting Jodorowsky just over 10 years ago. We got a chance to talk briefly (after I toweled off the sweat I worked up standing in line two hours to shake his hand) and he was so much cooler and more amazing than I could have ever hoped he would be. They say meeting your heroes is a sure fire way to lose your respect for them. I'm happy to report this is not ALWAYS the case.