One of my formative musical experiences, small but important, was tuning into John Peel’s late night Radio 1 show, early in the Eighties, and hearing …and the Native Hipsters’ “There Goes Concorde Again”. It was, quite simply, the weirdest “pop music” I’d ever heard – lo-fi, abstract and deranged, most of it consisting of a female voice, sounding funny-farm pie-eyed, repeatedly announcing, “Ooh look, there goes Concorde again”. It had a whiff of actual madness and, setting aside Guardian-style agonising over pop revelling in mental illness, to my junior self this was thrilling.

The Hourglass Sanatorium tells the surreal story of a man’s visit to a dilapidated medical institution where his ageing father is being held in suspense between life and death. From start to finish, the film portrays a dream world in which time is constantly subverted, as if the hero were freely wandering between parallel universes.

Louise Bourgeois tirelessly, obsessively documented her 32 years of psychoanalysis. Before the discovery of her secret cache of personal musings – sheaves of hand-written notes outlining dreams and psychic burdens, doodles and self-excoriating lists – nobody had any idea that the celebrated French-American artist, who’s often been associated with Surrealism, had undergone such protracted, intensive therapy, even though it’s really all there in her work in terms of its feverish Freudian symbolism.

Yayoi Kusama, one of Japan’s best-known living artists, has spent the past 34 years as a voluntary in-patient in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. Now 82, she was part of the New York avant-garde art scene of the Sixties, making work that anticipated both Andy Warhol’s repeated-motif “Cow Wallpaper” and Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures. Her nude happenings included orgies and naked gay weddings, over which she presided fully clothed like a psychedelic high priestess.

Some theatre openings will be legendary for all time. One such was the Parisian evening of 10 December 1896 when Alfred Jarry’s character Père Ubu stepped onto the stage at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre and intoned “Merdre!” (roughly translated as Shittr!). The effect was electric, and the scandal outlasted the show's run. In Simon Stephens’s new version of the play, which opened last night, the original story has been supplemented with a longer second half that updates the action to today, and sees mad boy Ubu tried for war crimes.

Graham Sutherland and George Shaw have two things in common. They are both painters and both are associated with Coventry: Sutherland made his famous altarpiece work – a tapestry –  for the city’s rebuilt cathedral, while Shaw grew up in Coventry’s Tile Hill, a housing estate that’s become familiar to us through Shaw’s beautiful and melancholy Humbrol enamel oil paintings.

What a curious curate’s egg Tate Liverpool has pulled out of its hat with Alice in Wonderland. And what a complete rag-bag of minor, uninteresting artists.

Excepting the cows, Guernsey’s most famous resident was probably Oliver Reed, who lived there as a tax exile. The barmy This is Jinsy, the creation of Guernsey natives Chris Bran and Justin Chubb, probably isn’t a faithful depiction of the island’s life, but it’s got to be its most notable cultural export. If not that, then its most curious.

It's grin and bear it - even on occasion bare it - time at Shakespeare's Globe, which closes its 2011 season not with a bang but with a wearyingly facetious whimper. A nice idea that in differing ways evokes such previous Globe newbies as Helen and The Frontline while paying homage to the Bard's own penchant for many and varied couplings, Chris Hannan's latest aims for a giddy, carnival atmosphere that it only fitfully achieves. As for its apparent obsession with scatology, Hannan at least allows for conversational variety where least expected: "I'm shitness," our heroine Natty (Emma Pierson) remarks late in Act I. There's a linguistic first, at least to me.