Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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WHO

FILM & TV

COMICS & BOOKS

31.5.05 To The Public: Wait! Wait! Wait! Read and reflect!

What the people want is a Place to go, and Something to see!

Mr Jonny Nagl (Falling Sky) and Miss Alex de Campi (The Artful Dodger), having embarked upon a new era of colossal enterprise, announce their intention to create the beau ideal of attraction & acme of audiovisual achievement, in the form of an animated music video.

Mr Nagl desiring work for his animation show-reel, and Miss de Campi having directorial ambitions, these two individuals propose to create a first-class and well appointed video, free of charge, for a song of their choosing. An offer of whose like you will never look upon again!

SUBMISSIONS are now invited from potential musical co-conspirators in the form of songs of approximately 3 minutes in length. Mr Nagl especially begs your indulgence and quick response, as otherwise these two shall have to fall back on Miss de Campi's dubious hoard of 1930s Delta Blues songs and Django Reinhardt CDs. Contact details may be found here.

( 9:03 PM ) (0) comments

30.5.05 The Fourth Rail gives SMOKE a 10/10!

EEEE EEEE EEEE EEEE.

Highlights: "De Campi's work reminds me of a lot of the strengths of other British (and one Scottish) writers. The finely honed sense of futurism and social satire of Smoke is a descendant of Warren Ellis's work on Transmetropolitan, the corruption of the British government reminiscent of Moore's V For Vendetta or even some of Garth Ennis's work on Maggie Thatcher's England in Hellblazer and the "Beauty Brigade" are villains who seem right out of Morrison's fertile imagination. Which is not to say that De Campi doesn't have her own voice, because she absolutely does, just to say that her work resonates on the same level as these creators, and has a similar "British" flavor. This is, as far as I know, De Campi's first comics work, but she's working at a level far above "first comics work" here."

"It's always nice when something you're anticipating as being good lives up to those expectations, and that's what happened with me and Smoke. De Campi and Kordey have created a fascinating near-future setting, populated it with interesting characters and wrapped it around an all-too-believable and yet just exaggerated enough conspiracy plot to keep the reader engaged from start to finish."

SMOKE 1 hits shops on Thursday (North America) and Friday (UK). Certain shops are offering very limited edition sketch bookplates, signed and doodled on by myself and Igor. If you see other reviews, drop me an email with a link - the internet is a large place, and I'm sure I'll miss a few. Meanwhile, stay tuned. In the works is another Dispatch (the amazing, and absolutely true, story of how drag queens saved me from a career at Goldman Sachs), and a fairly cool announcement.

( 1:26 PM ) (1) comments

29.5.05 What's Your Function In Life?

I know that of late, this blog has seemed like endless film, gig and theatre reviews. I promise to stop - but indulge me in this last one: Sekiguchi Gen's Survive Style 5+. The only thing I love as much as film noir is Japanese avant-garde film. It's not just the hyper-saturated visual expressivism. It's the way that a film like Survive Style 5+ can be a lunatic, no holds barred freakshow of violence, and at the same time one of the most philosophical, lovely, and life-affirming films I've seen this year. Psychedelic Kafka. It's disarming, to be reminded that fast-paced action films don't have to be dumb. The Complete Japanese Showa-Songbook was the same way - it's still one of the most sensitive portrayals of middle-aged women in film, and you don't often find that in any film, much less one involving bazookas and vendetta murders.

Survive Style 5+ is loosely the story of five interconnected groups of characters: a career-woman commercial writer; a hit man (Vinnie Jones) who asks everyone he meets what their function in life is; a normal suburban family of four; three teenage burglars; and a strange millionaire hippy and his Bride of Vengeance. Hugely stylised sets and costumes are made believable by the utter genuineness of all the character moments throughout the film. The plot goes off at 100mph in surreal, but ultimately wonderful, directions, as all the characters' lives start falling apart and the consequences of actions get ratcheted up to absurd levels - until the characters start accepting their own imperfections.

The impossibly good-looking Tadanobu Asano is in everything now, but he's still excellent here, walking through his nearly silent part with a Robert Mitchum-like air of cool ambiguity which makes it that much more striking when he does start to lose it. Ittoku Kishibe steals the show as the metamorphosed sarariman Kobayashi-san. Survive Style also has one of the best climactic-scene song choices since Otomo dropped in that Ray Charles tune at the end of Tezuka's Metropolis. Sublime. Mad. Go see.

( 12:16 AM ) (0) comments

28.5.05 Being There

Music is free.

So are films and TV shows. The powers that be just haven't admitted it yet. You can get it all via the magic blue cable in the back of your computer.

Pay for it if you like, or steal it. Doesn't matter. The point is that when everyone can have everything all the time, the only important thing is the experience you can't hold on to. The moment in itself. The little flaws and improvisations of live performances. You can record it, but the playback never captures the energy of being there, right then. And with the economics of music undergoing their greatest sea-change since the record was invented, the only thing bands can rely on getting people to pay for is live performances.

That suits the kids, because remember how it was - you always want to be the first one to discover the new cool band among your friends, to have that rare track or go to that secret gig. But there are no rare tracks anymore, because someone, somewhere will whack it up on a file-sharing system as soon as it's released, for anyone to find when they search under the band's name. That leaves nothing but gigs: "I was there. Were you?" Ironically, the ubiquity of recorded music is sending us back to the behaviours of the pre-recorded age.

Sure, it means a whole musical culture is dying. Liner notes. B-sides. The special import-bin edition from Over There that had three tracks not on the copy sold Over Here, that made you the envy of your friends for a precious, golden week back in 1987. Boo-hoo. Stuff dies all the time.

I wonder how long it will be until we get bands that never record more than a couple of tracks, just to entice punters to their live shows? Menlo Park pretty much do this, and Vincent Vincent & The Villains. But whether that's due to Machiavellian cunning or simply not getting their shit together and into a studio, I have no idea. Imagine if a band with five or six albums' worth of music only had two songs done in a studio, and for the rest you had to go see them live. There would be tonnes of gig bootlegs; you can't stop that. But... Jesus. I've just realised. Everyone's becoming the Grateful Dead.

On that cheerfully horrific note, on to a week of black coffee, alcohol and ticket stubs. Saturday was a Fernando di Leo filmfest at the ICA, the highlight of which was Milano Calibro 9 (Milan 9mm), one of the most stylish and tight crime noirs I've seen. It stands out among di Leo's sub-average Saturday afternoon pulp like it was beamed in from another planet. Everything from story and cinematography to its superb early-70s Euro-funk soundtrack is miles better than the rest of di Leo's oeuvre. It doesn't have the moments of exquisite visual lyricism, or the deeply unsettling ideas of Bertolucci's Il Conformista, but as a discrete package it's an absolute wonder.

To Menlo Park at Koko (the old Camden Palais, now with delusions of grandeur) that evening, with Mr Watson. I adore the high-octane bravura craziness of Menlo Park, but this gig fell flat thanks to crap sound mixing, and the girl standing next to me, who would not shut the fuck up. When I go to see a band, I go to see a band. Sure, there may be the odd bit of barbed repartee with my companion, but we save it to between songs. This girl, she spent the entire time talking to her boyfriend, or accosting the frontman to let everyone know that she had been to their previous, secret gig about six months ago. "Chriiisss! CHRIS! Where are our masks and cloaks?" (Menlo Park have a sense of the dramatic that puts other bands to shame. Their last gig was held in the Masonic Temple above the Great Eastern Hotel in Liverpool Street, and everyone was given a domino mask and a cape to wear.) I could barely hear the vocals anyway due to the bad mixing, but she put paid to any hope I had of making out the lyrics. She was the kind of girl that when you finished fucking her she'd still be talking about what colour to paint the ceiling. "Chreee-isss!"

It was an odd night anyway. The headliners were Mylo, who don't even exist in the same musical galaxy as Menlo Park. Supporting Menlo Park were a band that Mr Watson fairly accurately pinned as Frankie Goes To Hollywood meets The Streets. It was the sort of synth-rock I didn't even like the first time round, when I was 13. It hasn't improved with age. I stared, fascinated, as I couldn't be sure if the band were taking the piss or not. I mean, I'm all for playing from behind a veil of irony, but these people needed a burqa of irony before they even approached vague acceptability. Still, they seemed happy to be putting the "past" into pastiche.

Sunday was more di Leo, and Monday was Guys & Dolls with Mr Wheeler. I refer you to his review, and urge you to go see it. Get to the box office at 8am on the day you want to go, and queue for a couple hours. Every day there are 18 front-row seats available for the evening's performance, at £20 each. I'm so soured to musicals thanks to the satanic combination of Ben Elton and Andrew Lloyd Weber that I'd quite forgotten how marvellous they can be when they're not sub-Puccini screechfests or cash-in devices for over-the-hill stadium-rockers. Guys & Dolls won't change your life, but it will make you happy, at least for a little while.

Tuesday, inexplicably, was an embarrassment of musical riches. There was a free Earlies gig at 93 Feet East. I love the Earlies, really I do, but live, they always play the same seven songs. Until they start airing some new material, their shows aren't high on my must-see list. So instead, the Graf von Sarll took me to the Spitz for The Real Tuesday Weld's single launch party, after he heard me go all gooey over Dreams That Money Can Buy. How do I explain The Real Tuesday Weld? Imagine the deadpan, laconic delivery of a Home-Counties Chet Baker (but with an uncanny resemblance to Jean Marais), backed by a cross between the Betas and the Hot Club Quintette. That may not put you exactly on their street, but it gets you in the right neighbourhood. They're a band made to be heard in a smoky old-fashioned club like Ronnie Scott's, and the Spitz stood in pretty well for that. Anyway, it was a storming set, full of a verve and energy that their studio sessions only hint at. The only slight jarring note were the lead singer's sunglasses, which seemed desperately uncomfortable. There's suffering for style, and then there's looking like you're suffering.

I've already told you about Thursday. Last night was Vincent Vincent & The Villains, who are pretty much the unholy love-child of Brian Setzer and Operation Ivy. Fun, hard-edged doo-wop/pop, porkpie hats and co-respondent shoes, and a bassist in the corner quietly holding it all together with some of the most inspired work I've heard outside Fugazi. Left the gig with a big stupid grin on my face and hummed songs the whole walk home to Primrose Hill.

It was all going so well. And then at lunch today I landed myself in trouble again. I agreed to DJ a big, posh party in the Channel Islands this August in exchange for mooching a friend's house for a week. I haven't DJ'd since 1992-93, when I played clubs in Hong Kong for partying money and free food. Hey, how wrong could it possibly go? Besides, I love trouble. We've already decided I'm to bring my projector and screen a few obscuro-films like Decasia and Orphee during the set, and to accompany it I'd like to try to make some mash-ups of the 1920s and 1930s esoterica sitting in my Music folder. Could any of you recommend a free and idiot-proof bit of mixing software? I'm a digital child, and it's all got to be done on my laptop. And if anyone has an electronic rip of the old Proclaimers B-side, "It's Over & Done With", I'd be much obliged if you'd send me a copy. I always used to close with it.

( 5:59 PM ) (0) comments

27.5.05 This Is How Weeks Fly Past

I've been out every night since I got back from Cannes. There's some blindingly good stuff going on in London right now, and I planned to summarise all of them for you over the weekend. But I can't wait. I need to tell you about the new Neil LaBute play, This Is How It Goes, right now. I caught the first preview at the Donmar last night. It's blindingly good. You think you know what it is, and where it's going, and then it just sticks two fingers up at you and launches into something else entirely. It's a bravado feat of structure and plotting, because all the hairpin turns in the narrative feel completely natural. Oh, hell. I probably just like the play because it reminds me of Pirandello. Go see it. Don't read any reviews. The less you know going into it, the better.

At my usual Thursday night pub engagement before the show, a friend alerted me to the first print review of my comic. After buying an advance copy at Bristol, Paul Gravett (him at the crossroads) makes SMOKE one of his Picks of the Month in Comics International:

"A financially and morally bankrupt government, a wave of bizarre terrorism, and a soldier boy turned official assassin. All thrown together in a disturbingly plausible near-future London. This comes in three 48-page monthly chunks of barbed satire and steely intelligence. A health warning - SMOKE is good for you."

More information on SMOKE and my other comic work here. If you are new to this farrago of a website, might I recommend the Amphigory section, as it contains short stories to while away a dull afternoon. From misguided adventures with hookers, to sneaking across the Russian border or breaking into hotels in Cambodia - it's all true, and makes me realise how boring my life has become. Not mine, but I wish it were: Conversations Overheard On The Underground.

Tonight, off to see some new anime at the ICA, then Vincent Vincent & The Villains at Barfly. Until we speak again, I remain, your devoted purveyour of fine pulp entertainment &c...

( 9:00 AM ) (0) comments

25.5.05 The Pirates (Fragments of Abandoned Novels, 1)

(She began, a thousand years ago, a-many stories of places far away but dear. Shall she now reveal these quaint antiquities, these broken pieces of fancy? Go easy on her. She was young and foolish then. She is older now, and foolish still.)

The South China Sea in April spoils one for yacht racing elsewhere in the world, just as living in the two cities at either end of the sea's most famous race spoils the white man for going back to the cold climes from whence he came. In Hong Kong he learns the love of money, for the honeyed life of the rich is always in one's face, and the discomfort of living so apart from the native Cantonese that one can perch there for a decade and never be invited into a Chinese home.

In Manila, he learns the love of ease, with company bungalows in lush, gated suburbs, afternoons of polo or golf, and Filipinos who still treat him as king even though the Americans' sway technically ended sixty years ago. Hong Kong, its granite headlands thrusting out of the water, lies at the beginning of the China Sea Race and, 650 nautical miles down the rhumb line, Manila, flat and dreaming, waits at the end. Each city is hot, exotic, strange, but - thanks to the lingering mark of their former British and American landlords - still contain most of the comforts of home. Chopsticks, and marmite.

A century ago, when the map was still girdled in the pink of empire, adventurers to the Far East would have little in common bar their youth and their lack of money or skill. Hong Kong was the logical first port of call for the Englishman, with its international atmosphere, devil-may-care attitude, and the simple fact that most people spoke English.

The Spanish ne'er-do-well or youngest son arrived in Manila, searching for the endless estancias of sugarcane or banana storied in Seville. The American, too busy exploring his own Wild West, never left much of a brand on the Far East until his government purchased the Philippine Islands out of the Spanish for $20 million in 1898. Even then, he was too honest to prise the jewels out of the country during his 50-year rule.

In the past the young English pirates of Hong Kong became opium traders, industrialists, bankers, affiancing themselves to the machine of Empire. They climbed their way up to the Peak - Hong Kong's socioeconomic ladder is in fact a mountain, with the residents at the top of the hill looking down in all manner on those who live in houses or cramped apartments on its lower slopes.

As recently as five years ago, Hong Kong was still full of young Englishmen and women seeking their fortune, crowding the bars of Lan Kwai Fong and frantically reinventing themselves. Now the only job left in the Far East for those with no appreciable skill or vocation is that of stockbroker, and in the wainscoted halls of Exchange Square's many investment banks lurk many slightly older specimens of pirate. They survey with ill-disguised animosity the attempts of youngsters fresh off the boat to talk their way into a job the same way they once did.

In Manila, people care less if they are successful, because the Philippines is undoubtedly one of the most pleasant places on Earth in which to rot. For the rent on a three-room apartment in Hong Kong, one can engage a house in Makati, the wealthiest mini-city within the endless sprawl of Metro Manila, complete wtih maids, car and driver. Some of the world's most beautiful beaches lie forty minutes' flight away. It takes longer to navigate the traffic from Makati to the airport, than to fly to the beach. Within a month of arriving, it is quite possible to have befriended a comfortable selection of wealthy and powerful Filipino families, who tend to show off a white friend with the same gusto they might a prize thoroughbred from one of their estancias. It is easy to make one's mark in Manila. One's fortune is a different story.

Hong Kong's handover to the Chinese in 1997 stemmed the tide of London failures prospecting in the East, possibly because they no longer saw the island as part of their empire; possibly because the Chinese began to require new arrivals to obtain a work visa, which required the pirates to find employers who would stand witness to the Immigration Department for them. Perhaps the pirates will become extinct, killed off by the spread of civilisation the same as the tigers which used to frolic in the palm plantations around Singapore. Or perhaps there will always be pirates, just as there will always be "emerging" countries, for the urge to leave home in search of fortune and adventure will always be too strong in some.

( 12:23 PM ) (0) comments

23.5.05 SMOKE Special Offer: Signed Bookplates

Book 1 of SMOKE hits stores on Wednesday 1 June . To help promote the book, a select 30 Lovely Comic Shops (LCS) are each offering 10 sketch bookplates signed by both Igor and myself if you buy SMOKE 1 from them. The bookplates are expected to go quick, so it might be worth asking the shop to lay one aside for you. These 30 shops have been extremely supportive of us and our book - please reward their kindness and willingness to promote new talent by spending money in their shop.

LOVELY COMIC SHOPS
USA:
Comickaze, San Diego, CA
Comic Relief, Berkeley, CA
Flying Colors Comics, Concord, CA
The Isotope, San Francisco, CA
Comics Conspiracy, Sunnyvale, CA
Ralph's Comic Corner, Ventura, CA
Bunjee's Comics, Griffin, GA
Twilight Comics, Belleville, IL
Pop Culture Comix, Overland Park, KS
Comic Book World, Louisville, KY
Comicazi, Somerville, MA
Green Brain Comics, Dearborn, MI
Big Brain Comics, Minneapolis, MN
Chapel Hill Comics, Chapel Hill, NC
Collectible Dreams, Sims, NC
The Record Store, Howell, NJ
Earthworld Comics, Albany, NY
Main Street Comics, Middletown, NY
Speeding Bullet Comics, Norman, OK
Phantom Of The Attic, Monroeville, PA
Rainbow Comics, Sioux Falls, SD
Lone Star Comics, Arlington, TX
Dragon's Lair, Round Rock, TX
Dave's Comics, Richmond, VA

CANADA:
Another Dimension, Calgary, Alberta
Redd Skull Comics, Calgary, Alberta
Strange Adventures, Halifax, Nova Scotia
The Beguiling, Toronto, Ontario

EUROPE:
Amazing Fantasy, Hull, UK
Kingpin-Of-Comics, Lisboa, PORTUGAL

If you are in the USA but do not live near any of these shops, you can also buy SMOKE from e-tailer Khepri, who are also participating in the bookplates offer. Click here and scroll down a bit. In Europe, Kingpin offers a mail-order service. Otherwise, if you are in UK and your LCS won't stock or order the book, email me and I will suggest some UK mail-order companies. The Diamond order codes are: SMOKE #1 (OF 3) MAR05 2962; SMOKE #2 (OF 3) APR05 2961; SMOKE #3 (OF 3) MAY05 2812.

If you work at a Lovely Comic Shop that would like to participate in future marketing for SMOKE or my other projects, please contact me. I'd be happy to add you to my list!

( 1:35 PM ) (0) comments

20.5.05 Cannes Without A Clue, Part II

Tuesday, 11.30am: Great Moments In Career Suicide. Cannes is where nouveau riche go to die and bad films go to be born. My producer has given me a day pass to the Marche (aka the Bunker, in reference to its architectural charms) and I spend an hour walking amongst its countless stalls of producers, distributors, DVD packagers, and national film-marketing boards. Jesus, the world is full of awful films. And many of them star name actors. I choke back a crazy urge to return to Cannes with a documentary film crew and a fake film, complete with a promo reel and someone posing as the director, and record the adventures of our fraudulent attempts to raise money and distribution for a film that doesn't exist. It would be hilarious. It would also be career suicide. I file this with the "let's do SDCC Saturday on acid" idea and retreat to the UK tent to check emails and read the Cannes editions of Screen and Variety. Producer C appears, and says we must be off to the New Zealand tent. Although our film is set in London, they might give us a significant proportion of our budget to film it elsewhere, and then we can just film some pickups for the London scene-setting. But then C gets a call, says he'll go by the NZ tent later, and disappears.

Tuesday, 4pm: What am I doing here? I sit in a cafe. My producers are at meetings where I am not needed. We're supposed to be at the Shepperton/Pinewood garden party, but it's raining again, so we skipped it. Depression has set in. Writers are at the bottom of the film industry food chain, and at Cannes, a writer whose film isn't completed yet has less status than the average waiter. I also have Badge Envy: those properly accredited for the Marche have a plastic badge they wear on a string around their neck, and a measure of your standing in Cannes is how many other plastic passes you have on the string - club IDs, party passes, the Kodak tent pass, and more. I have nothing but a purple paper badge. I am nobody. I need an agent, I decide for the millionth time. I need to concentrate on writing spec film scripts. Music composer Rob and lovely TV producer James B have offered to hook me up with agent friends of theirs, and I must actually follow up on this. I've been working solidly for a year, so I haven't thought it necessary to get an agent. I mean, I got my first film deal and I look like I'm getting my first book deal without assistance. I know I can get my own gigs. But it's exhausting me, and I would like help.

Tuesday, 7pm: The Pussy Whisperer. The phone rings. I've just settled down for a little nap. I groggily answer. Producer B is finished his spreadsheets and is at a bar next door to the Brasserie Splendid, a pizzeria where we seem to eat every meal. I mumble that I'll be there in a second, and appear an hour later, groggy and dishevelled. My producers want to do a micro-budget feature in time for Cannes next year (our big feature will be still in the edit suites by then) and last night I had pitched them a couple ideas that have been kicking around my head: a road movie, a remake, and a half-hour short. As I stagger in to the bar and order coffee, the first thing Producer B says is that he loves the road movie idea. Depression lifts. We're all tired, so things get silly very fast. Producer B, after launching into a diatribe about how well he can understand his girlfriend's cat, and animals in general, is re-christened "The Pussy Whisperer." If we end tonight without getting punched, I'll be amazed. We have dinner with a nice LA distributor named John. He's fascinated by screenwriters. He never gets to meet any.

Tuesday, 11pm: Three Shots, No Chaser. We're supposed to be at the Penthouse villa party, but instead we're at the Century tent. No, not THAT Penthouse. You really think we'd skip a Guccione party? The Penthouse is a posh London media club, apparently. But so is the Century, and crucially, its party is walking distance from the hotels, and is indoors. Producer B and I are getting drunker while the DJ plays funky 80s tunes. B turns to me: "Favourite three shots in all of film. Silent shots, no dialogue. The ones that made you want to be in pictures." I waffle. All I can think of are two from CERCLE ROUGE: The cigarette scene in the muddy field, and the sharpshooting scene in the jewel shop. Both real, unexpected, character moments. And then - embarrassingly - one from the MIAMI VICE TV series. A cut from someone washing their hands after a murder, to a baby being baptised. I think I saw it when I was about 10, and it marked the first time I understood how two images placed in startling combination can express a story. His were: the ball-being-thrown-back-from-the-shed scene from ET, the rock scene from INDIANA JONES, and the scene from EMPIRE OF THE SUN where the young Japanese boy runs into a fighter plane to play his part in his nation's defence - but the plane, like the nation, is broken. Two highly metaphoric scenes, and a shameless action one.

Wednesday, 1.30am: Shaking It vs Just Kind Of Shuffling. The DJ at the Century tent cranks on Walk This Way and the Stones' Start Me Up, and suddenly we're all dancing. Just around the time I am thinking this guy is the best DJ ever, he makes an abrupt shift and plays nothing but soulless Eurodance. Now, I suppose there is a place in the world for wishy-washy music like this, but when all you want to do is DANCE YOUR ASS OFF, it just doesn't hit the spot. I pray for a little James Brown or Grand Funk, but all I get is more dance music for people who can't dance. I whinge to my producers. Where's the funk? I demand. They indicate the tent and its crowd of shuffling, off-beat revellers. "Alex, this is as funky as the film industry gets."

Wednesday, 4am: You Need To Think Bigger. The Century tent shut down at 2am. The remaining two producers and I go on to the Petite Majestique, a popular if basic after-hours bar. Producer A and I are in the midst of a massive mutual admiration society (she loves the quote from Dante's Inferno which is my symbolic basis for the film), although she takes me to task for dreamcasting the three major parts with actors known for British theatre work more than film work. "You need to think bigger, Alex," she says. "We need at least two names that can open the film." I wave my hands around and explain that Michael Sheen was godlike in CALIGULA, and because the character of the husband is a great tragic role which requires a difficult shift in audience perception over the course of the film (as well as having a breakdown scene which is among the best things I've written), we need someone who can really act; and that Toby Stephens out-shone everyone else in HAMLET and is both pretty enough and sinister enough to take on the character of M, and so forth. Two pints later, and we're arguing about Keanu Reeves vs Laurence Fishburne. This is how art dies at the hands of commerce, ladies and gentlemen. It is slaughtered at 4am in the back streets of Cannes.

Wednesday, noon: Scotland's First Gay Kung Fu Film. The victims of the previous night assemble, bloody but unbowed, at the Brasserie Splendid, clutching the morning's dailies. Last night, John the LA distributor asked us if we wanted to do cheap remakes of some old Hong Kong kung fu films to help extend their copyrights. We of course said yes, but we couldn't remember if he actually offered us the money to do it, or just access to the rights. Twelve kung-fu remakes at $3m a pop? Count us in. We make grand and stupid plans for tapping into regional film funding groups up and down the UK: since every major city has a Chinatown, we can set one film in each city. I suggest that, as karmic revenge, we start with the Highlands & Islands Film Council, hosts of Monday night's Scottish Country Dancing party. And so was born the saga of Dougal "Crouching Haggis, Hidden Dram" MacCheung, Inverness' kilt-wearing homosexual kung fu avenger. It just writes itself.

Wednesday, 3pm: And What Do You Do? I wait in the queue at Nice Airport to check into Easyjet. Ahead of me, an expensively blonded American lady in a Kermit-green shirt is going on at length to the rather mousy girl in front of her about her trials and tribulations as a London-based film producer and also scion of a Famous American Retailing Family. Because said family is notoriously tightfisted, she is forced to produce films using - gasp - her own resources. I eavesdrop shamelessly for a good 15 minutes. It's a slow queue. At the end, Miss America asks the mousy girl what her name is and what she does. I realise that Miss America - despite repeatedly telling Miss Mouse that they simply must hook up in London - had no idea who Miss Mouse was aside from that she had a Cannes badge and was a good listener. But Miss America was content. She had just told someone how important and hardworking she was, so it must be true. That's the rules.

( 1:40 PM ) (0) comments

19.5.05 Cannes Without A Clue, Part I

Monday, 12.30pm: I have sand in my shoes. Cannes smells like jasmine flowers, and melted ice cream, and the sea. The scent of flowers is pervasive, but always unexpected. Every piece of hoarding space along the Croisette is filled with posters advertising films in pre-production, in production, or opening soon. 95% of the films advertised look staggeringly, epically bad. So bad they make Michael Bay look like Orson Welles. A file of dumpy middle-aged Americans brush past me, intently following a woman holding a white plastic paddle emblazoned with "Cannes Celebrity Tours". Exhausted, I rock gently in their wake and try to get my bearings. I arrived via 5am car to Luton, 7am flight to Nice, then 11am bus from the airport, after a hectic weekend marketing comics at the Bristol Expo. I am without map, agenda, or clue. It's cloudy. Warmer than Bristol, but not by much.

Monday, 4pm: Everything's coming up rose. My producers have conned me in via text message along the Croisette to a lavish tent on the beach which serves as the Cannes outpost of London's Century Club. I only find this out later, as now all I notice is that the decor is lovely and food and drink are being proffered to me. We sit outside, but just as the first bottle of a truly delicious rose arrives the sky opens. We scuttle inside and the weather proceeds to chuck it down for the next several hours. We proceed to chuck down rather a lot of the aforementioned rose. Nobody is in much of a rush - strangers exchange the sort of guilty, pleased, conspiratorial grins of two kids doing a bunk off school who recognise each other in the town game shop. Some film lawyers join us for a meeting. The producers kick me under the table and I do the funny and charming writer schtick, jazz hands, describing my film. The lawyers nod and smile and say It All Sounds Very Interesting.

Monday, midnight: Scottish Country Dancing: The Horror. I shiver in jeans and leather jacket on the patio of the old Soho House villa, hiding in the shadows as unattractive and suspiciously happy people of Gaelic descent try to convince me that Scottish Country Dancing is a good idea. I point at the band and mime that I can't possibly hear them over the deafening music, and clutch my drink. I'm sure that flying out of the UK this morning only to be nearly trampled in the freezing-cold Cote d'Azur by overly-enthusiastic Scottish country dancers is some sort of new irony record, even for me. Horribly lifelike wax heads and animatronic animal parts dot the entrance to the villa, products of S/FX company Artem. Some coked-up boys take phone photos of each other sticking their heads in the animatronic coyote head's mouth. My prayers for a freak electrical accident with the coyote remained sadly unanswered. I eye up the wax head next to the bar and decide that yes, I really need another drink.

Tuesday, 12.30am: Lovely Hannah, Party Plannah gives me a list of parties my producers are supposed to be attending over the next two days. I duly write them down. But this remains the only party we say we are going to, that we actually then show up at. Cannes is a mess of shifting schedules, delayed meetings, and chance encounters. And films? I remain unconvinced that they actually show films at Cannes. It's all a myth. Saying that, I would have quite liked to see the new Jarmusch (BROKEN FLOWERS, starring Bill Murray) and the new Cronenburgh (A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, with Viggo Mortensen), both of which got strong reviews. I mean, the Jarmusch is a Jarmusch, and you either love him or wish that he'd give his films a proper fucking ending. Then there were lots of boring Euro-films about the misery of the human condition... which brings us nicely to Lars von Trier. The 5am start to the day catches up with me. I bail, and walk the 15 minutes home to my hotel. There are taxis in Cannes, allegedly, but none passed me. I find out later that the police busted the party at 1am due to excessive noise, and my producer, Lovely Hannah, and other friends went on to a boat party full of rich Americans. Damn. I could have used a rich American.

Tune in tomorrow for further adventures of the clueless girl.

( 3:03 PM ) (0) comments

12.5.05 Gone Baby Gone

I am away at the Bristol Comic Expo and then the Cannes Film Festival. I return Thursday 19 May, hopefully armed with anecdotes.

( 3:15 PM ) (0) comments

11.5.05 SMOKE for only $5.60 at Khepri: Go, Pre-Order!

Internet comics retailer Khepri is doing a deal on SMOKE: pre-order, and pay only $5.60, vs the $7.49 cover price. Click here and scroll down. You can also pre-order Issue 2, where it all kicks off and it's gunplay-a-go-go. (note: series is in colour, this is a B&W unlettered page).

Want to know more about the book? I talk about it here and here. Both interviews have extensive preview art.

Book 1 arrives in stores June 1 (June 2 in the UK), but I'll have about 15 advance copies to sign/sell at Bristol this weekend. If you miss them, stop by the COMMERCIAL SUICIDE/J1P booth anyway and spend money on our other books, and pick up a free SMOKE postcard.

( 10:44 AM ) (0) comments

8.5.05 Sweet Sweet Suicide

Don't say I never do anything for you.

A further 100 pages of insanity like this in COMMERCIAL SUICIDE 3, coming Friday to... Bristol. If you're at the con, stop by our table and say hi. Ade, Kieron and I will be the ones who have had too much caffeine. We'll be selling the JUST ONE PAGE charity comic, CS 3, DEFECTIVE COMICS, SMOKE, Paul Gravett's JACK KIRBY QUARTERLY, and whatever else we agreed to when we were drunk.

Also, is Dave Marquez just the best artist ever or what? "I'm not a pro", he says. "You are now", Kieron and I respond. "You have no choice in the matter." "Erm... you guys are kind of scary," he says.

( 2:27 PM ) (1) comments

5.5.05 Self-Publishing Hell v3.0

Why do I do this? WHY? Whatever possessed me to think that self-publishing two 100+ plus anthologies for the same convention was a good idea?

Argh. I hurt.

I am also strangely obsessed with this image.

New SMOKE interview up with Igor and myself at PopImage: "You should also remember that I came to full-time fiction writing fairly late - in my early 30s - and as a result of this my attitude to what I do is pretty uncompromising. In 2003, I was having an annus horribilis similar to the one Igor describes below, and I finally just said, that's it, no more fucking about. I'm going to write. I don't have a lot of time left. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow - and considering I'm one of these dreadful greenies who bicycles everywhere, that's more likely than you think. I have a day job, so the rent gets paid. The writing I do because I love it. So no, I'm not going to waste time writing things people think I should write, for my "career". And I'm not concerned with bagging scalps by working with certain publishers or on certain characters. I'm just going to write my stories, find people I like to illustrate them, and we're all going to have some fun, and make a little magic. " More.

SMOKE will be in stores on 1 June. I should have 18 copies to sell at Bristol. No, don't email me asking me to reserve one for you.

( 9:14 AM ) (0) comments

2.5.05 The Long Weekend

A bank holiday weekend here in Blighty. I have spent it doing my favourite things: standing in dark bars listening to bands nobody's heard of yet; sitting in dark screening rooms watching films everybody's forgotten; and loafing in the park doing nothing of use at all.

(Brief self-promotional interlude: I am one of the first UK-based creators to have her comics work available via PSP.)

Saturday night was a screening of Hans Richter's DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY with live accompaniment from The Real Tuesday Weld. Richter's film is a forgotten 1940s gem encompassing short films by some of that era's greatest artists: Ernst, Leger, Duchamp, Calder, Man Ray. Music composed by Paul Bowles, John Cage, and Darius Milhaud. You can now imagine the level of artnerd-glee with which I approached this screening. And you know what? It was fucking fantastic. Weird, deeply flawed in places, but with this beat generation swing to it - presaging the Beats by a good 10 years - and the lyrics! I wanted to see the entire film again as soon as it finished, just to soak down the rhythm of its rhymes into my little red notebook.

I adored The Real Tuesday Weld so much that I bought their CD I, LUCIFER as I left. It turns out that the CD is a soundtrack to a book by Glen Duncan. After reading an excerpt in the liner notes, I ordered the book. Ladies and gentlemen, Glen Duncan's I, LUCIFER:

"I've always had a soft spot for London, the patched and tattered cloak of its history (some of my best work, obviously; I feel the same about old Byzantium), its dog-eared wisdom and inky humour. You know - you provincial British humans know - what it's like when you crack under the weight of lost love or ingested desire and Move to London: the city's ready for you. You take your precious miseries there and unpack them - only to find that the city's already assimilated them, centuries ago, along with grand Elizabethan passions and mortal Victorian sins. The assimilation's encoded now - in the chemistry lab colours of the Underground map, in Trafalgar's punk pigeons, in the thousands of ticking stilettos and caffeine yawns and downed pints and adulterous snogs. You turn up on a rainy Monday afternoon proud of all your woeful particulars - and London humbles you with its wealth of generals. You've seen your life. London, it turns out, has seen Life..."

Damn you, Glen Duncan. You rite gud.

Sunday was the Track and Field Organisation's All-Dayer at Barfly with Mr Brown, interrupted by a dash to the ICA to catch Bertolucci's THE CONFORMIST. Through sheer luck, I managed to see the two best bands at the gig. Mr Brown had been talking for some time about The Broken Family Band and, as usual, he was correct. However, new group The Eighteenth Day of May was a revelation to us both. I await with unholy desire the release of their first CD in a few weeks.

And now, back to the keyboard, to toil over Issues 3 and 4 of FAUST.

( 11:22 AM ) (0) comments

1.5.05 Angels + Anatomy

Otto Preminger. He's the Chet Baker of filmmaking. The thing about Chet Baker is he just sings the fucking song. No ornamentation, no emoting, no showing off. This is what confuses a lot of people when they first hear Baker. They expect... more. But the entire point of Baker is that there's just this guy, singing this beautiful song, in this kind of quiet and fragile way. And precisely in singing such sentimental lyrics so simply, he suggests so much more than if he tried to put emotion into them.

Preminger just shoots the fucking film. No screwing about with structure*, no cleverclogs cinematography, he just points the camera and lets the actors tell the story. And because the camera forms no comment or judgement on what is going on in front of it, these hugely morally ambiguous, no-easy-answers stripped down noir scripts he films become so powerful. There are no good guys in a Preminger film. There is also no exposition, and the dialogue is so minimal that every line is pregnant with subtext.

Chet Baker was by all accounts a very nice person, and you can tell from his songs. Preminger was a nasty, bitter man, but he made some wonderful films. Go, all of you, and see LAURA, ANGEL FACE, and oh my god the sheer joy of two and a half hours of James Stewart and George C Scott facing off against each other in ANATOMY OF A MURDER. (And look at the advertising poster for THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM and then the cover of the first SLEEPER trade...)

*except Bonjour Tristesse, which was a weak remake of Angel Face, really, even though it is partially redeemed by being 2 hours of DAVID! NIVEN! and Givenchy dresses.

( 11:17 AM ) (0) comments