Day: January 26, 2011

Alejandro Jodorowsky on David Lynch’s Dune (and Other Matters)

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The AV Club’s Noel Murray interviews Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, he of Holy Mountain and apocalypse-Western El Topo fame. Jodorowsky famously almost adapted Frank Herbert’s Dune before David Lynch picked up that gauntlet. Here’s Jodorowsky on Lynch’s adaptation–

AVC: For a long time, you were involved with developing Dune into a feature film, before the project fell through. Did you ever see David Lynch’s Dune?

AJ: Yes, I’ve seen it. I was very scared when I saw it, because Dune was for me very important in my life. I was very sad I could not do it. When I saw that David Lynch would do it, I was very scared, because I admire him as a moviemaker, and I thought he would do well. But when I see the picture, I realize he never understood this picture. It’s not a David Lynch picture. It’s the producer who made that picture, no? Who made this horror. For David Lynch, it was a job. A commercial job. It never was that for me.

Jodorowsky’s version of Dune had entered pre-production, including early art from Jean Giraud (French comics artist Moebius). You can see some of Giraud’s character designs and storyboards here.

Jodorowsky famously wanted Salvador Dali to play the Emperor and Mick Jagger to play Feyd Rautha (a role that went to Sting in Lynch’s version).

Girl with Death Mask — Frida Kahlo

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Reminder: The Lost Books of the Odyssey Giveaway Ends This Friday

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The kind folks at Picador are offering you, dear reader, a chance to win one of two copies of Zachary Mason’sThe Lost Books of the Odyssey, a dazzling re-imagining of Homer’s epic tale. And you’ll want to read this book, folks. Here’s a snippet from our review–

In his preface to The Lost Books of the Odyssey, author Zachary Mason tells us that before the story we now know as the Odyssey was organized by the poet Homer, the “material was formless, fluid, its elements shuffled into new narratives like cards in a deck.” Mason’s goal in The Lost Books is to echo these older versions of the story of Odysseus, omitting “stock epic formulae in favor of honing a single trope or image down to extreme clarity.” He succeeds admirably — Lost Books is an engaging and perplexing work that challenges our assumptions about one of the most foundational stories of Western literature. Mason’s “novel” (it is not really a novel, of course) strikes a wonderfully resonant and deeply upsetting chord, disrupting our sense of narrative satisfaction, breaking us away from the outcomes we thought we knew.

So, how do you get your grubby little hands on a copy? First, you need to have a U.S. mailing address. Second, you need to email us at biblioklept.ed@gmail.com, responding to this simple prompt: Who is your favorite character in The Odyssey, and why? Our esteemed judges will choose the winners from the best responses and post them as an announcement this Friday Saturday. Good luck!

“It Sounds Like the Title of a David Lynch Film” — A Passage from Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

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A passage from Roberto Bolaño’s opus 2666—

The card for the Santa Teresa cybercafe was a deep red, so red that it was hard to read what was printed on it. On the back, in a lighter red, was a map that showed exactly where the cafe was located. He asked the receptionist to translate the name of the place. The clerk laughed and said it was called Fire, Walk With Me.

“It sounds like the title of a David Lynch film,” said Fate.

The clerk shrugged and said that all of Mexico was a collage of diverse and wide-ranging homages.

“Every single thing in this country is an homage to everything in the world, even the things that haven’t happened yet,” he said.

After he told Fate how to get to the cybercafe, they talked for a while about Lynch’s films. The clerk had seen all of them. Fate had seen only three or four. According to the clerk, Lynch’s greatest achievement was the TV series Twin Peaks. Fate liked The Elephant Man best, maybe because he’d often felt like the elephant man himself, wanting to be like other people but at the same time knowing he was different. When the clerk asked him whether he’d heard that Michael Jackson had bought or tried to buy the skeleton of the elephant man, Fate shrugged and said that Michael Jackson was sick. I don’t think so, said the clerk, watching something presumably important that was happening on TV just then.

“In my opinion,” he said with his eyes fixed on the TV Fate couldn’t see, “Michael knows things the rest of us don’t.”

“We all know things we think nobody else knows,” said Fate.