Esoteric Source

As Tom Stoppard writes in Arcadia, “The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?”

For a man who has spent two-thirds of a century actively pushing himself into the unearthly realm, the filmmaker Kenneth Anger has a pretty firm grasp of the minutiae of the earthly one. He’s 82, he reckons, but when we stop to speak during a break in the schedule of his whirlwind European tour — he’s in London for a show based around his films ”Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” and ”Invocation of My Demon Brother’‘ at Sprüth Magers in London, a collaboration with Valentino for its autumn-winter show in Paris, and a celebrated guest appearance at the AV festival in Newcastle — he has a recall for the details, facts and figures that make up his constant stream of historical anecdotes and gossip that would put Rain Man to shame.