More bloody Jodorowsky
King Shot was due to start shooting this month, if anyone's interested, but it's not clear whether it actually did or not.
Some strange comments upthread about The Holy Mountain feeling like the product of drug-related psychosis. I've never had that vibe at all; Jodorowsky's never been a drug or alcohol user, either.
Also: anyone who's read Mount Analogue and watched The Holy Mountain will know that suggesting the latter is "based on" the former stretches the phrase to breaking point. Mount Analogue is a fine little adventure story with a divertingly weird 'spiritual' aspect to it, but really the film owes no more to it than the idea of rounding up some people to climb a mountain, which it doesn't really begin to do until halfway through.
Perhaps it's partly down to the translation, but I didn't find Mount Analogue that great a novel, I have to say. It doesn't yield much: there's almost a sense of given superiority that Daumal/his main protagonist is on such an important quest that he doesn't have to open it up, or the experiences that led to it, for plebs like us. I think the Gurdjieff influence did him no favours at all; its kind-of-prequel, A Night Of Serious Drinking, is fist-chewingly awful for the most part. He's going for Swiftian satire in that one, but he's hopelessly out of his depth: his starting point seems to be unstated esoteric ideas, so what you're left with – again, only more so – is an unexplained sense of superiority bordering on adolescent misanthropy. And you don't want misanthropy from your spiritual questers, now, do you?
It's a shame, cause I was really looking forward to reading them, on the grounds that I've discovered lots of fascinating stuff through Jodorowsky interviews, DVD commentaries and the like – mainly things you tend not to come across in Anglophone culture.