Over the weekend, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s recent Kickstarter campaign made its goal of $300,000 and was closing in on $370,000 with five days to go at the time of this posting. It looks to me like it might end up just beyond the $400,000 mark.

My girlfriend and I supported the campaign to make Endless Poetry a reality, and I’ve been posting to the film’s poetry archive via Twitter. I don’t write poetry as often as I do critical writing, songwriting, blogging etc. I usually feel moved to actually practice poetry with more attention in the fall, but this year that didn’t really happen.

I’m really happy that this Jodorowsky archive has popped up as its given me a framework and a set of rules for writing poems and I’ve found it to be completely engaging. People think writer’s block denotes a lack of ideas, but, in fact it’s usually an abundance of ideas that stops the process, and it’s often limits and lacking that finally stoke the fires again. Of course, Twitter poetry is nothing new and I’m sure lots of poets have found the character limit inspiring — a Silicon Valley haiku of sorts. Search #EndlessPoetryMyPoem on Twitter to find my verses and read through the other intense, lovely, hilarious words on offer there.

Consider throwing a few bucks to the Kickstarter campaign before it’s over. Here’s the magician himself talking about money and desire at a Zen center in Japan…

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Nashville, TN is experiencing a Alejandro Jodorowsky renaissance this month with the Belcourt Theatre’s screenings of some of the auteur’s most important works, leading up to the local premiere of his new film, Dance of Reality.

My fellow local film writers and I all respect the master’s outlandish visuals, his passion for the surreal and his esoteric spiritual explorations, but, of course, his movies aren’t for everyone. After last week’s screening of The Holy Mountain I kept thinking about the film — I’ve watched it many times and this most recent viewing was the second time I’d seen it on the big screen. I came away wondering if I’d seen any other films that paved the way for Jodorowsky, and while early surrealist cinema certainly deserves a nod, if you want to know where Jodo’s roots really dig in, you have to look to the stage, not the screen.

Here’s what the Mutantspace site has to say about Jodorowsky’s “Melodrama Sacramental” performance piece from 1965…

Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s ‘Melodrama Sacramentral’ was a happening presented by his group, The Panic Movement at the Paris Festival of Free Expression in 1965. Inspired and named after the God Pan and influenced by Luis Buñuel and Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, the group concentrated on chaotic and surreal performance art, as a response to surrealism becoming mainstream. And this performance set their stall out.

This film is a 15 minute edit of the four hour absurdist performance that is, quite frankly, impossible to articulate. You just have to watch it. Melodrama Sacramentral combined religious themes and violence and is both funny, disturbing, provocative, ridiculous, a work of it’s time, a surreal mind bender that has everything from naked performers convulsing to free jazz drum solos, a leather clad Jodorowsky slitting the throats of geese, taping two snakes to his chest and having himself stripped and whipped, there are naked women covered in honey, a crucified chicken, the staged murder of a rabbi, a giant vagina as well as the throwing of live turtles into the audience.

The nudity, crucified animals, hair-cutting, cross-carrying and the giant vagina here all make it into The Holy Mountain. If you want to know where Jodo’s visionary costumes, sets and makeup — not too mention his actor’s bizarre performances — come from, you have to dig into his work as a mime, an actor and a director on the stage. Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, I’ve got your master’s degree in Jodorowsky right here:

This is “Melodrama Sacramental”…

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