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Elektrik Karousel, a new release on the Ghost Box label by The Focus Group. “For a clue to its moods, think Czech animation, Italian Giallo, early Radiophonics, HP Lovecraft stories, 1960s underground cinema, Lewis Carroll and baroque psych.” Julian House’s package design is “heavily inspired by 1960s underground press and conceived as a kind of [...]

Le Faune (1923) by Carlos Schwabe. • “When I recently attended a conference in China, many of the presenters left their papers on the cloud—Google Docs, to be specific. You know how this story ends: they got to China and there was no Google. Shit out of luck. Their cloud-based Gmail was also unavailable, as [...]

Lonesome Echo (1955) by Jackie Gleason. Not a definitive list, I was merely browsing Discogs.com out of curiosity. For an artist eager to infiltrate every medium you’d expect there to be more involvement from Dalí with the music world. The Jackie Gleason is included here as the earliest entry for which the artist apparently provided [...]

Yet another Dalí documentary, Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí is a welcome arrival at the splendid Ubuweb for its being the source of a number of sequences that turn up in later Dalí documentaries, notably the scenes of the artist and wife Gala emerging from giant eggs, and Dalí clattering away at a piano in [...]

My phone line problem still hasn’t been resolved but I am able to get online again for longer than two minutes at a time…for now. Posting may remain sporadic for the next few days. This is the third time I’ve written about Impressions de la Haute Mongolie, a 50-minute film made by José Montes-Baquer in [...]

Russell Harty and Salvador Dalí, 1973. This would have been a real find if the quality wasn’t so poor. Hello Dali! was a 50-minute documentary film about Salvador Dalí broadcast in the UK in 1973 as part of ITV’s Aquarius arts strand. The whole thing is on YouTube chopped into five parts and is unfortunately [...]

Or So It Seems (1983) by Duet Emmo. Design by The Brothers Quay. • “Make things, no rules, but be quick.” Bruce Gilbert, musician in (among others) Wire, Dome and Duet Emmo is interviewed. Related: Daniel Miller, Mute label boss and another member of Duet Emmo is interviewed (and provides a mix) at The Quietus. [...]

From the Ornamental Age series (2009) by Seher Shah. Seher Shah has recently updated her website giving us a better view of her extraordinary art. • The Demon Regent Asmodeus, my short film of Alan Moore’s reading from the first Moon & Serpent CD, has been posted to YouTube. In other self-promotion news, Mahakala, a [...]

August 13th, 1967. More psychedelia of a sort although it’s arguable whether Alejandro Jodorowsky’s cosmic surrealism can ever be pigeon-holed so easily. Fabulas Panicas (Panic Fables) is a comic strip that Jodorowsky was writing and drawing for a Mexican newspaper in the late Sixties. The text is all in Spanish, of course, but going by [...]

Re-release poster by Bemis Balkind. Alien was a big deal for me when it appeared in late 1979, one of those films which seems to arrive at exactly the right moment. I’d just left school, I was eagerly reading reprints of French and Belgian comic strips in Heavy Metal magazine, and also paperback reprints of [...]

Lennon, Manson and me: the psychedelic cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky

“I’m the last crazy artist” Alejandro Jodorowsky, who else?

Several disparate pieces of news worth mentioning recently, so here they are gathered together. • Some of my Lovecraft art is to be featured in a lavish limited edition volume from Centipede Press. Artists Inspired by HP Lovecraft Centipede Press is now accepting pre-orders. A unique art book available in a cloth slipcase edition and [...]

I am an artist. Now the pictures are not made by artists. They are made by companies and produced by multinationals. The art in the picture is lost. Now when artists make pictures, they make them for museums. But museums, for me, are cemeteries. Alejandro Jodorowsky. More from the About-Bleeding-Time Dept. (emphasis on “bleeding” in [...]

Subterranean Cinema has the El Topo screenplay online, taken from the Douglas Book edition from 1971 (above is the cover of my John Calder UK reprint of the same). As well as a screenplay with annotations by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the second half of the book featured a lengthy, fascinating and at times bizarre and hilarious [...]