By shelz.

One cool thing about this job is the opportunity to dig into the artistic catalysts of new stuff to find out things I didn’t know about old stuff. We all know very little is original these days. Well, it’s not always cool. Like that time I read both of Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays so I would have a better understanding of Metallica and Lou reed’s joint venture, Lulu. I enjoyed reading Wedekind’s work just as much as I enjoyed the album it spawned. Which means I didn’t. I guess I’m a more urbane person for the experience, but the album was terrible and that Lulu chick was just straight up ratchet.

My most recent venture into obscure artistry based on something new I totally didn’t understand was checking out the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky due to Marilyn Manson’s video for Born Villain. Okay, maybe this Jodorowsky guy isn’t all that obscure. He’s responsible for the first midnight movie cult following. His film El Topo created the movement that was helped along by flicks like Polyester and Rocky Horror Picture Show. And he was the first filmmaker selected to make Dune into a movie, but he was relieved of that job after he spent most of the budget in pre-production and suggested to financiers that his epic interpretation would be about 14 hours long.

Anyway, Marilyn Manson is about to drop another album and his disturbing re-introduction to the masses was thanks in part to Jodorowsky’s signature film, The Holy Mountain. After watching this video a couple of times and feeling more depressed about humanity’s future with each view, I decided to hunt down the film responsible for this craziness with the help of Odeisel, of course. I’m still not completely sure why he cosigns my tangents into nuttiness, but he found the movie for me.

Dead people with birds flying from their wounds, frog wars, ceremonial booty washings prior to pooping rituals during which excrement is turned into gold, and men paying for hookers with their eyeballs. I read that the cast was required to take drugs during the filming of this movie and it shows. The film seems to contain several statements about society and its godlessness. He touches on the commercialism of religion, misogyny and the evils of war, but that still doesn’t detract from sheer weirdness of it all. The movie maker himself says is about searching for enlightenment. I just don’t know how that is achieved by shitting in a glass pot. Then again, I’m an art commoner.

This all leads me back to the Marilyn Manson video that’s started me on this long journey in the first place. (The movie is an hour and 52 minutes long. It took me a week to watch it.) Manson borrows heavily from the imagery but at just under 5 minutes is unable to piece them all together into any semblance of narrative. Hell, Jordorowsky had two hours and he couldn’t do it either. Holy Mountain has a sense of hopefulness that isn’t present in Manson work and there’s one part where he sews an eyeball into a woman’s va jay jay. I guess that’s what he paid her with.

So has any of this served me in any way? I don’t know. I guess being up on this Jordorowsky guy could make for some interesting cocktail party chit chat, then again talking about vaginas with eyes may have me relegated to the back corner as I become the topic of all that chatter. It still wasn’t as bad as Lulu and I have something new to share with you.

So without further adieu here is the video for “Born Villain.” Don’t be mad if you are a Manson fan, I know this is months old. This video is also VERY NSFW, so watch at home. It’s okay though. It’s culture.

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