TV
We often think of out-of-body experiences as ghostly apparitions entering the bodies of other sentient beings. Now imagine if the thing your spirit entered was the body of your own mother 40 years ago, pregnant with … you! This is the premise of the recent second season of Netflix’s Russian Doll, in which main character Nadia , after grappling with the metaphysics of immortality in the first season, must now grapple with the metaphysics of time travel. It’s a thrilling sci-fi comedy, although the question of what you would do if you entered your own mother’s body is perhaps more appropriate in a gruesome horror. Jason Okundaye
***
Film
Early in Gaspar Noé’s lurid, lascivious lullaby Enter the Void, the protagonist, an American drug dealer in Japan, dies. The rest of its 161-minute running time is spent floating around a neon-soaked Tokyo demi-monde, swooping in and out of equally starburst-illuminating and black-hole-enervating memories. Like almost all Noé provocations, this wild flight of afterlife fancy is peopled by grimily glamorous desperados: would it work were it about the perimortem perambulations of, say, a middle-aged dental hygienist from Basingstoke? Show-offy and indulgent as it is, Enter the Void mesmerises and, weirdly, motivates: better make as much of life as possible, you’ll be reliving it all soon enough – even the boring bits. Jessica Kiang
***
Classical
The Dream of Gerontius by John Henry Newman charts a dying soul’s journey towards judgment. Lifelong Catholic Edward Elgar knew Newman’s poem long before Birmingham’s Triennial music festival approached him to write a new choral composition, and the emotionally charged score that followed is one of his finest achievements. The whole piece is a kind of out-of-body experience, particularly in Part II as the soul of Gerontius realises it has become uncoupled from the departed body: “I hear no more the busy beat of time … nor does one moment differ from the next”. Hugh Morris
***
Books
The hyperactive New Journalism that Tom Wolfe pioneered in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test now feels quaintly old-fashioned, but he still tells a remarkable story. The acid tests were parties at which Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and his disciples the Merry Pranksters took themselves right out of their minds by drinking LSD-laced Kool-Aid. Wolfe details their bacchanalian excesses, their crazy journeys across the United States in a bus called Furthur alongside their more serious attempts to park their egos. The book also boasts memorable appearances from a who’s who of 1960s counterculture, including the Hells Angels, Allen Ginsberg and, inevitably, the Grateful Dead. Sam Jordinson
***
Stage
The opening stage direction in Samuel Beckett’s Not I reads: “Stage in darkness but for a mouth”. From the audience, all we can see is a hovering pair of lips glowing in the spotlight. As the words begin to tumble out, it feels a bit like a seance, a search, an awakening. It’s best not to push too hard for any meaning: just let the words wash over you. If it is a good production, you’ll end up feeling loose and untethered yet acutely tuned into the world around you, nerve-endings exposed and firing like crazy into the darkness. Miriam Gillinson
