I want one!

Kenneth Anger's crazy, gorgeous, disturbing films almost landed him in jail. The avant-garde pioneer talks Simon Hattenstone through all his demons

Wednesday 10 March 2010 21.30 GMT

'I was too smart to be involved in badness' ... Kenneth Anger. Photograph: Linda Nylind

The gallery is so tiny I think I've walked into somebody's front room. A 10-minute film plays on a loop. Weirded-out rock stars who look like Mick Jagger, or who are Mick Jagger, preen, strut and do their late-1960s satanic thing. White dots form a pyramid on a black background, naked boys lounge on a sofa, marines jump from a helicopter. There's a cat, a dog, an all-seeing Egyptian eye, people smoking dope out of a skull. A synthesiser makes an unbearable noise. There are no words, no story.

Around the screen, in London's Sprüth Magers gallery, a bunch of 21st-century trendies and stoners are watching this film, called Invocation of My Demon Brother, in awe, their ages ranging from late teens to late 80s. Next door, hallucinogenic photographs eyeball you from the wall. You walk in, you walk out – and the show's all over in a flash. It can only mean one thing. Kenneth Anger is back in town.

Anger is a Hollywood legend. He has created some of the most disturbing, gorgeous, crazy and influential films ever, even if he has yet to make a feature. This great avant-gardist is also a writer, best known for Lalaland's two most scurrilous gossip digests: Hollywood Babylon 1 and 2; the first was published in 1965, banned immediately and not published again until 1975. Among the books' more scandalous passages are allegations that Lucille Ball started Hollywood life as a prostitute; that James Dean had a "disconcerting interest" in a 12-year-old boy; and that Bette Davis killed her second husband.

We meet at a London hotel that smells of cabbage. Anger is 83 years old; his hair is jet black, his shoes red, his trousers tan. One eye is bigger than the other, and his face is unlined. He is both beautiful and grotesque: Warren Beatty meets Frankenstein's monster. Anger wasn't always an outsider. He trained as a dancer, and as a boy danced with Shirley Temple. He was handsome enough to have been a leading man. But he did not want to be part of the system. "There was a possibility of going into the industry, but there was a very unpleasant atmosphere in the early 50s, the ridiculous witch-hunt of reds. I wasn't a communist, I just found it very unpleasant." His voice is a cat's purr.

Although he made films as a boy, Anger's earliest surviving work is 1947's Fireworks. This appeared three years before Jean Genet's groundbreaking homoerotic prison masterpiece, Un Chant D'Amour. Fireworks features a young man (Anger) wet-dreaming a sequence in which he is seduced/gang-raped by a group of sailors after he tries to pick one up. As with all his films, there are no words, and the story, such as it is, has a dramatic music score. The camera lingers on his apparent erection – which turns out to be a model of an African soldier. Blood pours from his eyes as he is pulverised by the sailors, and a firework explodes from his zip. His heart is ripped apart to expose a ticking time-piece. It's not only surreal and scary, it is devastatingly beautiful.

Astonishingly, it was made in the McCarthy era. Anger was arrested on obscenity charges following its release. The case went to the California Supreme Court, which declared the film to be art. Anger made it in his parents' Beverly Hills home when they were away at an uncle's funeral. "I just put the furniture in the garden and the living room was the set. Luckily it didn't rain."

How did public screenings go? "Well, it was shown to an elite audience," Anger says. "Among the people who came was James Whale, the British director of Frankenstein, and I became friends with him. Dr Alfred Kinsey, the sex researcher, also came. I became friends with him, too." Did his parents see it? "Um, no. My grandmother saw it. She was like my sponsor: she bought my camera for me. She said it's terrific. She was a painter." Did he know what he was trying to do with films? "Well, I knew all about French avant garde, so I was the American avant garde."

Six-packs, scorpions, swastikas

Anger was born Kenneth Anglemeyer in 1927. His father worked for Douglas Aircraft and his brother went into the airforce, but it was his grandmother who was his inspiration. She took him to exhibitions, introduced him to art and film. At Beverly Hills High school, he remembers looking out of the window watching The Song of Bernadette being made at 20th Century Fox next door. He was friends with Harry Brand Jr, son of Fox's head of publicity. They would swap Hollywood gossip during break.

In his teens, he founded his own film society to screen obscure European movies. By the time of Fireworks, Kenneth Anglemeyer had disappeared. The sole opening credit reads: "A film by Anger." Was it a name that reflected how he felt? "I just condensed my name," he says. "I knew it would be like a label, a logo. It's easy to remember."

It is Anger's use of music as a substitute for dialogue that marks him out from other film-makers of his time. He set 1954's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, inspired by Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan, to Janácek's Glagolitic Mass. His most famous film, Scorpio Rising (another sadomasochistic montage of bikers, beatings, six-packs, scorpions and swastikas), has possibly the greatest pop soundtrack in movie history: Fools Rush In, My Boyfriend's Back, Blue Velvet, Hit the Road Jack, He's a Rebel. Scorpio Rising would later encourage Martin Scorsese (in Mean Streets) and David Lynch (in Blue Velvet) to use pop songs to help tell a story.

Lucifer Rising, a celebration of pagan ritual featuring Marianne Faithfull, had a soundtrack written from prison by Bobby Beausoleil, a convicted murderer and an associate of the Manson family. Wasn't Beausoleil a boyfriend of his? "He was a friend. We lived together." Has he known a lot of bad boys? "I seem to be attracted to bad boys, but I never let it go too far. In other words, there's always, 'OK, it's time for me to move out.'" I ask Anger if he was a bad boy. He smiles. "I was a smart boy. Too smart to be involved in badness." He has always preferred badness by association.

Anger was also a friend of Anton Szandor LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in the 1960s. Is he a satanist? "No, I am not a satanist. I am a pagan. Satanism is another thing." But, I say, people look at your dystopian films, with their myriad references to the devil, and assume you are a devil-worshipper. "Well, I can't help what people see in them," he says. Were you playing with ideas or was it your belief system? "Well, I suppose, a belief." In what? "Underneath it all is an appreciation of nature."

In Lucifer Rising, Faithfull plays Lilith, a demon. It was Anger's most expensive film because it involved a trip to Egypt. "I said to Marianne Faithfull, don't bring any drugs because they'll execute you. So she hid her heroin in her makeup box underneath her face powder. I think she was powdering her face with heroin."

'Hollywood is a dried-out prune'

Anger often found it hard to finance his films. This is where the Hollywood Babylon books came in useful. Although it took him years to get them past the lawyers, they became bestsellers. Many of their stories are still disputed. For years, we have been waiting for Hollywood Babylon 3. Anger says it is written, but it's on hold. "The main reason I didn't bring it out was that I had a whole section on Tom Cruise and the Scientologists. I'm not a friend of the Scientologists." He says today's Holly-wood is a dried-out prune of a place, its stars not even worth gossiping about. "I covered most of the people who were interesting to me in the first two books."

Not only is Anger still filming in his 80s, he tells me he is in the middle of a purple patch, having recently made a number of shorts: one about military uniforms called Uniform Attraction; another about football warmups called Foreplay; and a third, Elliott's Suicide, about his friend, singer/songwriter Elliott Smith, who killed himself in 2003 at the age of 34. "He stabbed himself in the heart after a quarrel with his girlfriend. It's the most ridiculous reason to kill yourself."

Although Smith's songs feature in Elliott's Suicide, it is a film without dialogue. After all, why change a winning formula? Actually, there is one thing I have always wondered: does Anger ever watch, say, Lucifer Rising and wonder what the hell it's all about? He smiles for a long time, casting his mind back over all those years, all those films. "They are close to being dreams – and in dreams, you don't have to analyse what everything means."

Kenneth Anger is at Sprüth Magers, London W1, until 27 March. Then touring. Anger appears in person tomorrow at Tyneside cinema, Gateshead. Details: avfestival.co.uk

Richard Wiseman
Published: 12:01AM GMT 09 Jan 2003

A decade ago, I set out to investigate luck. I wanted to examine the impact on people's lives of chance opportunities, lucky breaks and being in the right place at the right time. After many experiments, I believe that I now understand why some people are luckier than others and that it is possible to become luckier.

To launch my study, I placed advertisements in national newspapers and magazines, asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me. Over the years, 400 extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research from all walks of life: the youngest is an 18-year-old student, the oldest an 84-year-old retired accountant.

Jessica, a 42-year-old forensic scientist, is typical of the lucky group. As she explained: "I have my dream job, two wonderful children and a great guy whom I love very much. It's amazing; when I look back at my life, I realise I have been lucky in just about every area."

In contrast, Carolyn, a 34-year-old care assistant, is typical of the unlucky group. She is accident-prone. In one week, she twisted her ankle in a pothole, injured her back in another fall and reversed her car into a tree during a driving lesson. She was also unlucky in love and felt she was always in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Over the years, I interviewed these volunteers, asked them to complete diaries, questionnaires and intelligence tests, and invited them to participate in experiments. The findings have revealed that although unlucky people have almost no insight into the real causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their fortune.

Take the case of chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities.

I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper: "Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250." Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.

Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people's ability to notice the unexpected. In one experiment, people were asked to watch a moving dot in the centre of a computer screen. Without warning, large dots would occasionally be flashed at the edges of the screen. Nearly all participants noticed these large dots.

The experiment was then repeated with a second group of people, who were offered a large financial reward for accurately watching the centre dot, creating more anxiety. They became focused on the centre dot and more than a third of them missed the large dots when they appeared on the screen. The harder they looked, the less they saw.

And so it is with luck - unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

I wondered whether these four principles could be used to increase the amount of good luck that people encounter in their lives. To find out, I created a "luck school" - a simple experiment that examined whether people's luck can be enhanced by getting them to think and behave like a lucky person.

I asked a group of lucky and unlucky volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck.

One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic: 80 per cent of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier. While lucky people became luckier, the unlucky had become lucky. Take Carolyn, whom I introduced at the start of this article. After graduating from "luck school", she has passed her driving test after three years of trying, was no longer accident-prone and became more confident.

In the wake of these studies, I think there are three easy techniques that can help to maximise good fortune:

• Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell - a reason to consider a decision carefully.

• Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.

• Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.

Richard Wiseman is a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire.

Paul McGuigan, Grant Morrison, Stephen Fry In New BBC Thriller

Submitted by Rich Johnston on February 23, 2010

      

 

Paul McGuigan, director of Gangster No 1, Lucky Number Slevin and the upcoming Sherlock Holmes TV series by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, has confirmed for LiveForFilms that he will be indeed working on a new TV series for BBC Scotland, written by Grant Morrison and starring polymath Stephen Fry. Bleeding Cool reported on this possibility previously, and McGuigan says that currently Morrison has written a treatment. McGuigan describes the series;

It's seven episodes. It takes place over seven days around an event that happens in Scotland. It's a modern take on an old fable or fairy story. If you know Grants work you might have an idea of what it will be like. It's like Twin Peaks meets Brigadoon! It's off the wall and smart but in a watchable commercial way. It's still in the early stages but I'm very excited about it.

An exhibition of work by cult filmmaker Kenneth Anger will open at London’s Sprüth Magers gallery on February 19.

According to The Wire, the show will feature Anger’s 1969 film Invocation of My Demon Brother – which was scored by, and starred, Mick Jagger – as well as a site-spefific installation based on Hollywood Babylon (1959), his semi-fictional written account of LA scandal, corruption and transgression.

In addition to the exhibition, Anger will present a screening of his work at Tate Modern’s Starr Auditorium on February 19, at 7pm. You can find more information and tickets here.

Check out a clip of Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle here, courtesy of The Wire.

01.14.2010

11:37 am

Recently finished Martin Starr’s epic “The Unknown God: W.T. Smith and the Thelemites,” published by Teitan Press, an immaculately researched history of Aleister Crowley’s neo-religion Thelema after Crowley’s personal story trails off. Crowley’s life has been documented ad nauseum, what hasn’t been is the history of his ideas after his death and what happened to the people who took them seriously (“By their works shall ye know them”). Martin Starr fixes that historical oversight here, providing fascinating insights not only into occultism during the two World Wars (including all the bickering infighting between the various occult orders—like Freemasonry, Theosophy, AMORC, Self-Realization Fellowship and others—over who would be top dog) but also into the weirdo Californian spiritual climate that led up to the sixties.

Here’s the jacket copy:

The first documentary study of Aleister Crowley’s contemporary followers in North America, told through the life of their de facto leader, Wilfred Talbot Smith (1885-1957). Smith, the unacknowledged offspring of a prominent English family, emigrated to Canada where he met Charles Stansfeld Jones and through him, the works of Aleister Crowley. Although Crowley and Smith met only once, their twenty year correspondence proved to be a major link to the few and the faithful attracted to Crowley’s work in the United States and Canada. Smith’s spiritual life centered first on the initiatic structure of the Order of the A.·.A.·., complemented by the emerging fraternal and social schemes of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). Smith followed Jones into a few long-forgotten movements like the Universal Brotherhood and the Psychomagian Society, but he declined membership in C.F. Russell’s Choronzon Club.

To promulgate the Crowleyan teachings, in 1934 Smith incorporated his own “Church of Thelema”—known to Los Angeles newspaper readers as the “Purple Cult.” The following year he initiated OTO activity in Los Angeles which attracted its own cast of occult characters. Smith’s life reached a strange conclusion when Crowley, taking a page from Louis Bromfield’s novel, THE STRANGE CASE OF MISS ANNIE SPRAGG, which explored “the twin mysteries of love and religion and the confusion that lies between” and combining it with a reading of Smith’s natal chart, sent him off on a retreat to determine which God he was incarnating. It was a journey from which Frater 132 never returned…

THE UNKNOWN GOD is a fascinating and complex human story, intimately interwoven with the lives of most of Crowley’s disciples in the United States including C.F. Russell Jane Wolfe, Max R. Schneider, Jack Parsons, Louis T. Culling, Frederic Mellinger and Grady L. McMurtry as well as occult teachers like H. Spencer Lewis (AMORC) Paul Foster Case (BOTA), and Wayne Walker (OM), Hollywood actors such as John Carradine and even the founder of the Mattachine Society, Harry Hay. Students of 19th and 20th century esoteric movements, including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Theosophical Society and the Crowley-derived organizations, will find THE UNKNOWN GOD worth reading.

The book focuses on Wilfred Smith, a protege of Crowley’s “magical son” Frater Achad who would become the connecting thread for Thelema in America; a railway worker present at the initial founding of the OTO (Crowley’s primary cult) in Vancouver, Smith goes on to head the OTO in Los Angeles in the 40s and 50s in time for young rocket scientist Jack Parsons to show up and do the occult equivalent of wailing on his Stratocaster so hard that nobody else can hear or talk over it.

We get the antics of Smith, Achad, Parsons, Phyllis Seckler, Jane Wolfe, Karl Germer and, of course, Aleister Crowley, who can do little more than flame people via snail mail from England (where he has been confined by the government) after getting constantly irritated at their magical pratfalls and mysterious reticence to keep sending him regular smack money. With high ideals, high spirits, and just plain being high, the Thelemites work to establish their magical empire ceaselessly but the mantra seems to be “let the bodies hit the floor”... wife-swapping, ego-clashes, psychotic breaks, scapegoating, in-fighting, paranoia over “magical attacks,” and just plain cultiness constantly dog their heels. While the early Christians were fed to the lions, the early Thelemites seem to have done the job themselves by feeding themselves to they own bad selves.

This is essentially the history of “OTO Mark 1” in America; the group would go dormant after the death of Parsons until it was resurrected by Grady McMurtry in the late 60s as a wholly new organization. (Kenneth Grant’s group in the UK, of course, was a wholly different matter with wholly different goals.)

Great stuff for those interested in Crowley, religion, cults or Californian history. I had to read it in only a few sittings, Nobody has tried a book like this before, and it cuts straight to the heart of the bullshit around Crowley just perfectly, showing the reality of what went on in the physical world, not the mythology lived on other planes. Excellent, excellent book.

First recorded in Chicago in 1994, this previously unreleased audio session with the renowned Robert Anton Wilson has been stored away for fifteen years…and almost lost entirely. If Bob knew how many synchronicities surround the rediscovery and release of this “lost” studio session, he would be chuckling in that half jolly, half mischievous way of his. If you believe in any kind of afterlife, maybe you can imagine him laughing right now. I like that image: Bob the laughing Buddha, still having one over on us from the great beyond.

Available from Original Falcon

Animal magic as warlock reveals mystery behind plaits found in horses' manes

Bizarre animal braids that puzzled horse owners in Dorset are part of a white magic ritual

• Steven Morris
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 December 2009 14.49 GMT
• Article history

They consulted equine experts, farmers and a neighbouring police force, but detectives only solved the mysterious case of the plaited manes when they turned for help to an unusual source – a friendly warlock.

Horse owners in Dorset had become perplexed when they kept finding that the manes of their animals seemed to have been twisted into plaits.

At first some thought that the wind had by chance whipped them into shapes that seemed to have been created by a human hand. Another theory was that thieves were sizing horses up and plaiting the manes of those they wished colleagues to steal at a later date.

But after consulting a warlock, police in Dorset concluded the horses were being used in witch "knot magick".

It is not clear exactly how many horses have been targeted but at least a dozen are known to have been involved.

Horse owner Harriet Laurie from Bridport, Dorset, and a member of the Shipton Riding Club, said: "When one of my horse's manes was plaited it took me some time to unpick and the wind had whipped it into a sort of dreadlock, but underneath were three strands neatly plaited. It is most bizarre.

"Whatever it is there is a lot of fear and anxiety. I know of about 12 horses that have had it done."

Dorset police said there was no evidence that the horses, some of whom were kept in fields in very remote spots, were being eyed by thieves. A spokesman said that it appeared to be a "harmless tradition".

PC Tim Poole, who has investigated the incidents, said: "We have some very good information from a warlock that this is part of a white magic ritual and is to do with knot magick."

"It would appear that for people of this belief, knot magick is used when they want to cas t a spell. Some of the gods they worship have a strong connection to horses so if they have a particular request, plaiting this knot in a horse's mane lends strength to the request. This warlock said it is a benign activity, albeit maybe a bit distressing for the horse owner."

The El Topo and Holy Mountain director thrilled the 1970s counter-culture. Now his crazed visions are turning on everyone from Santigold to Kasabian

• Steve Rose
• The Guardian, Saturday 14 November 2009
• Article history

Alejandro Jodorowsky. Illustration: William Sweeney

Eyebrows, hopes and ceremonially lit bongs were all raised earlier this year with the news that Alejandro Jodorowsky was finally making another movie. The high priest of head-trip cinema, Jodorowsky blew the collective mind of the counter-culture with a handful of supremely odd movies in the 1970s, such as El Topo and The Holy Mountain, but despite continual promises and rumours, Jodorowsky's long-awaited return never seemed to materialise. In the meantime, his work has been seized upon by a new generation of hipsters desperately seeking out-there inspiration, as we shall see. This year, though, at the Cannes film festival, Jodorowsky announced he had raised the cash for his next movie. It would be called King Shot, and it would be a metaphysical western set in a desert casino, featuring a man the size of King Kong and Marilyn Manson as a 300-year-old pope.

So with some excitement, here's Jodorowsky on the line to tell us about it: "It's not happening. They didn't find the money," he says in his thick South American accent.

Oh. "But, I am making another movie instead! I have signed the contract already with some Russian producers. I will do Son Of El Topo – a sequel. It's a conflict between two brothers who need to come to a solution. I am about to start four months of preparation. I can tell you nothing today."

If you've never seen one of his movies, they're difficult to explain. You could start by throwing together Sergio Leone, Luis Buñuel, Hieronymus Bosch, and Buddha, and perhaps spiking their Kool-Aid for good measure. They're filled with wild beasts, cosmic symbolism, freaks, naked women and spiritual masters. Where else, for example, could you find a re-enactment of the conquest of Latin America with costumed frogs and chameleons? Or a geriatric hermaphrodite squirting milk from breasts that appear to be the heads of ocelots?

You could get away with that sort of thing back then. The original El Topo, made in 1970, was Jodorowsky's breakthrough, a wild mix of spaghetti western and eastern spiritualism. It became a favourite on the American midnight-movie circuit, and among its many fans were John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who persuaded Allen Klein, then the manager of Apple, to buy the rights to it. Lennon also put up $1m for Jodorowsky's next movie, The Holy Mountain, an extravagant psychedelic odyssey about a thief's quest for immortality. But Jodorowsky and Klein later fell out when he refused to make The Story Of O, an erotic movie. In revenge, Klein refused to show Jodorowsky's movies anywhere. The director had a brief resurgence with 1989's Santa Sangre, but otherwise Jodorowsky has languished in obscurity.

'These days a picture only has value if it makes a lot of money. I want to make a picture to lose money'

Painting from Alejandro Jodorowsky's latest exhibition

"Movies are a commercial industry," he says. "Today a picture has value if it makes a lot of money. Myself, I declare I want to make a picture to lose money. Really! I want to lose money."

Why's that? "Because it is not the finality of art to make money. Today you make conceptual art. You try to astonish the people, but you are saying nothing deeper for the human soul. Nothing! I always think that art is a form of sacrifice." By now, it should be becoming clear why Jodorowsky has had such a hard time making another movie: as well as being unorthodox, he's utterly uncompromising. "You can search in order to find the way, or you can just wait for it to come to you. For example, Bodhidharma came to China from India and the only thing he did was to sit in front of a wall meditating and waiting for his disciples. And they came after eight years."

Jodorowsky has never been one to sit still. He seems to have led a life as incident-filled and incredible as one of his movies. A Russian Jew who grew up in Chile and Paris, his career spans the Surrealist movement, mime, experimental theatre happenings, psychedelia, comic books and mystical therapy, and takes in figures such as Marcel Marceau, Dennis Hopper, Salvador Dalí, and Marilyn Manson, to name but a few. He's now 80 years old, although he seems a good deal younger, which he puts down to his lifelong abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, coffee or an y other drug. Not to mention his 37-year-old girlfriend, an artist named Pascale Montandon. Writing comic books is still his principal way of making a living.

'Marilyn Manson is a very delicate, intelligent person. I see him a lot but he's always in disguise'

Scene from Jodorowsky's El Topo (1971). Photograph: Alamy

Like Bodhidharma (who was a fifth-century Buddhist monk, by the way), Jodorowsky has also collected disciples along the way. Like Marilyn Manson, who called up him up out of the blue one day a couple of years ago. "He proposed me to work with him, and to marry him," he says. So Jodorowsky duly conducted the ceremony for Manson's wedding to Dita Von Teese. "It was in Ireland, in a castle," he recalls. "He took my measurements and made me a costume like the alchemist I play in The Holy Mountain. His wife changed costume five times. Three months later they split up!"

Manson was also trying to make a film expanding on his Holy Wood concept album, modelled on The Holy Mountain. "I said to him, you will never do it because you need $20m from Hollywood, and you want to destroy Hollywood!" They're still friends, though. "He's a very delicate, intelligent person. I see him a lot of times but he's always in makeup. He's always disguised as Marilyn Manson. I don't know who the real person is."

Another unlikely admirer was Erykah Badu, who invited him to her Paris gig last year and paid public homage to him. "She said she admired only two persons. I remember only me! Who was the other one? Oh yes, Elvis Presley." That's just the start: Jodorowsky has legions of disciples he doesn't even know about. He's become a well-spring of weirdness for anyone looking to out-alternative the competition. Now his name is being dropped and his movies referenced everywhere you look. That bit in MGMT's wonderfully psychedelic Time To Pretend video where they push all their money into a fire in the middle of the table? That's from The Holy Mountain. As is the premise of Santigold's LES Artistes video, the one with people gushing coloured fake blood when they're shot. The list goes on: the Mars Volta, Late Of The Pier, Empire Of The Sun, even Kasabian. Next thing you know, Susan Boyle will be warbling on GMTV in a bikini made of ocelots' heads.

Jodorowsky hasn't heard of any of these acts, and asks for links to some of their work. Last time I checked, he hadn't looked at them, though. He's been busy. He's been in Moscow, Florence, Barcelona, and last week he was in London opening an exhibition of his paintings with Pascale Montandon, as part of a month-long Jodorowsky celebration.

He even made his peace with his nemesis, Allen Klein, shortly before his death in July this year. "We were fighting for 30 years," he says, "then his son arranged a meeting in London. When I was walking to the hotel to knock on his door I was thinking, 'I will kill him! He will kill me! What will he do?' And then the door opened. He was an old man. White hair, like me. He say to me, 'But you are beautiful!' I say to him, 'You are like a spiritual master.' And we take each other in the arms. In a second the fight was finished. My father was a monster. And all the hate I had for my father I put into Allen Klein. Allen Klein hated his father also. For him I was his father and for me he was my father. This is the story of Son Of El Topo: two brothers who hate each other but in the end they become one."

Should we expect his next film to be as crazy as the original El Topo? "Of course! I am the same," he says. "I am still radical!"