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Yes, still writing doggerel.

My days are packed. I'm writing so much and either I'm losing my mind or most of it is quite good. This is why I have been slightly incommunicado, gentle strangers.

I have been thinking a lot about the link between mania and creativity, thanks to one of those odd little London art-world synchronicities: an overlap of biopics about Joe Meek and Daniel Johnston. The most excellent Telstar has been playing in the West End to critical acclaim and half-empty houses, which is tragic because it is one of the best-written plays about manic-depressive genius I have ever seen.

The tourists, those cattle, are all off seeing Andrew Lloyd Garbage, and the hipsters are possibly staying away from Telstar out of a sense of schadenfreude: when most people can't even be mediocre in one creative discipline, they don't want to see someone like actor-playwright Nick Moran succeed in two. The hyphen is in some ways the creative kiss of death, which is odd because what most people don't understand is that it all comes from the same well. The end format of what you create is almost... irrelevant. Con O'Neill and Linda Robson act the hell out of the parts of Joe and his landlady, and the breakdown scenes had my companion Mr Brown (a psychiatric nurse) nodding in appreciation at their accuracy.

Then last night was the preview of Jeff Feuerzeig's The Devil and Daniel Johnston, about another reclusive musical genius who could barely play an instrument and who created hundreds of recordings locked in his bedroom-cum-recording-studio. Alan Moore once said that of the eight or nine true writers he knew, six were mad. He never said how he defined "mad," but my overwhelming reaction to the Joe Meek and Daniel Johnston stories is "there but for the grace of God go I..."

I spent most of Bank Holiday weekend on a 24-hour sail from Brighton round the Isle of Wight and back, testing out the boat for the ARC race. Off Chichester Harbour, the night sky was filled with glittering pink confetti: 15 or more aeroplanes, queued up to land at Gatwick. Their dazzle put the stars to shame. These celestial bodies, perhaps wishing to reclaim some of their heavenly primacy, riposted with shooting stars throughout the night.

We were somewhat preoccupied, however, for during the darkest part of the night we were navigating the Solent. The Solent is a bit of water that doesn't love boats and, between its tides and its hazards, seeks to do them ill at every opportunity. We hit it around 2am on Sunday night/Monday morning, playing a game of chicken with one of the Palmerston Follies (looming huge and black in the night) that guard its Eastern approach.

Dawn brought us to the Needles, shining white against the hot sun and spotless blue sky of the August morning. I thought how much less I would love the Needles if they were not punctuated by their red lighthouse, and this got me thinking about mankind's relationship to landscape. Can we love an unspoilt landscape? (Hell, have any of us ever seen an unspoilt landscape?).

I struggle to think of a well-known landscape painting that does not contain some sign of man in it. An unspoilt landscape has no story to it. It's a beginning, nothing more. The eye skims over it, not knowing where to rest. A landscape scarred or amended by mankind tells a tale, gives the eye a way in. And sometimes it is the ugliest and most exploitative use of land which becomes the most strangely beautiful.

My favourite seascape is the western anchorages outside Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong, as seen from the Lamma Ferry: the leviathan masses of thirty container ships moored mid-channel, becoming a sort of architecture, a silent sea-city in their own right. Would San Francisco Bay be as striking without the Golden Gate Bridge? Would we love Devon so much without its neat pastures and hedgerows? Is it the scars of humanity that we adore, or the tension between the landscape and the scar?

Gigs: King Biscuit Time at Cargo on Sept 26th. KBT is ex Beta Band frontman Steve Mason's solo project. Cargo is a lovely venue full of achingly hip and laughably-dressed Hoxtonites. Vincent Vincent & The Villains and Somebody's Mind at 93 Feet East on Sept 21st.

When I was 15, going to RISD summer school in Providence, Rhode Island and spare-changing to get into punk gigs up and down the East Coast, my main method of musical discovery was the compilation tape. Usually a 90-minute cassette filled with third or fourth generation copies of songs, label caked with white-out and scrawled on with biro, the construction and trade of these items were the ne plus ultra of our teenage existence. Do a couple, bring them to a gig, swap them.

Over a decade on, and nothing's changed except that we've all gotten a little less lo-fi. Aside from the ongoing music trade between Messrs. Sarll, Brown, Watson, Nathan and myself, every year at this time the V organises a CD swap. You're given three victims to inflict your musical taste on, and a few basic rules. In return, you get three CDs full of songs you might otherwise never hear from people you've probably never met. It's cool. Introducing a little random chaos into one's life is always good.

Most of my victims this year are American, so my playlist is weighted heavily towards local London bands. It's not the careful, over-intellectualised construct that my mixtapes are; just an infodump of what I'm currently digging. Hence the name: The Bargain Basement. Liner notes here, in case you want to try this at home. Some assembly required.

Amanda from the Dresden Dolls has quite a good blog/diary. On the songwriting process: "My relationship to this new batch [of songs] is a weird one. These songs are, generally, a lot less personal than the batch on Record Number 1 and for some reason that makes me feel very funny inside. I'm just not as attached. On the last record, every song was The Song and had been The Song for some period of my life. Bad Habit was The Song for a few years and so was Slide and so was Half Jack. But on this record... none of these songs have rooted themselves inside me and festered. So they feel... well, not Not As Good but maybe Not As Real. I think this will be the case for every record I make from now on. I think the first record is like the first true love, or losing your virginity. For better or for worse, I don't think you ever feel that way again, ever." Haven't been initiated into the Dresdens' punk cabaret yet? Go, download Coin Operated Boy.

Lastly, best genre name ever: Spy-Fi. I discovered this via SomaFM's station Secret Agent, which plays sophisticated, loungey Continental tracks (Gainsbourg! Seks Bomba! Gare du Nord!) interspersed with audio clips from James Bond films. Yes, gentle strangers, it's like they created an entire radio station just for me.

Entanglement is a principle of quantum physics which says the properties of two or more particles can become invisibly linked. Do something to one entangled electron, and the other one is instantly affected, even if they are separated by tens, no, hundreds of miles.

The physicist John Bell posited that if entanglement is true, then one (or more) of three basic physics assumptions is wrong: First, that experimenters are freely able to choose to measure the spins of the particles using any axis they desire. Second, that the experiment reflects some real, pre-existing property of the particles. Third, that nothing can move faster than light.

To put this more poetically, either there is no free will and everything is pre-determined; reality does not exist until we attempt to measure it, at which time it hurriedly belches up any old bit of backdrop with just enough detail to keep us happy; or Einstein was wrong and a large amount of things regularly outpace light.

At the very moment yesterday that I was lying indolently on the long grass of Primrose Hill reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Tristan Crane in San Francisco was writing about City Visible, a photography exhibition featuring his work and curated by mutual friend Laurenn McCubbin. The exhibition is based on Invisible Cities, a book Laurenn adores. Laurenn and I shared a room in San Diego a month ago. We never spoke about Calvino.

The City Visible exhibition is 9 Sept-3 Oct at the Buzz Gallery, 2316 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland. Oh, and if you are in LA, you only have about 10 days left to see the wonderful, wonderful Tim Hawkinson exhibition at LACMA. Now, LACMA has one of the most crap permanent collections of any art museum anywhere. Other than the statue of Satan, which Mr Wheeler and I intend to steal someday, the collection is filled with the sort of cloying, looks-pretty-over-the-sofa 19th century French Academy art that nouveau riche Californians would have bought in 1910 to demonstrate they had Culture, capital C. If I say Bouguereau, will you be afraid?

But occasionally LACMA does good special exhibitions. It has exceeded itself with the Hawkinson retrospective, which singlehandedly made me feel excited about conceptual art again. After the humourlessness of the London art scene, it's invigorating to experience great art with a sense of whimsy; body-conscious work that reflects wonder and exploration rather than self-obsession. And then there's the Signature Machine, which just beats all.

I leave you with a few passages that have been occupying my mind. The first is from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which ties Maupassant's Bel-Ami for the title of nastiest book ever written. They are brutal in very different ways: Bel-Ami is a cutting word behind your back from supposed friends, and As I Lay Dying is a punch in the face. The second is from the ragbag of poems that leads into Paul Muldoon's Madoc, a book more clever than it is good.

Faulkner: "And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words. Like Cora, who could never even cook."

Muldoon: "He flounced off into his cubicle. Though this, our only exchange, was remarkable for its banality, Foley has had some profound effect on me. These past six months I've sometimes run a little ahead of myself, but mostly I lag behind, my footfalls already pre-empted by their echoes."

(Foley is the dubbing process where sound effects are added to a film - most notably, the sound of footsteps.)

And now back to work, to be haunted by dreams of cities. I have been writing for the past year about memory and identity, and now I find myself writing about possibilities. A new twist, a leaving-behind; an ox-bow in the river of my obsessions.

Desperate August, with its curious mix of restlessness and lassitude. Everything moves like treacle. The music video inches along; London List inches along; I storm and fret, awaiting feedback on the many things I have thrown out there into the void. But then 4pm rolls around and the sunshine gets the better of me. Fifty feet out the door and I am on Primrose Hill, with a book of love stories under my arm, and the dog trotting behind. Long afternoons of lying on the grass unavoidably ensue.

This hopefully will be my last summary of London events before the List launches. The NFT is having a Michael Powell season; if nothing else you should see A Matter of Life and Death: poetry, love, bombers, quintessential Englishness and, most importantly, David Niven. On the 30th, the ICA is screening a documentary on songwriter Daniel Johnston, and - if his mental health issues allow - Johnston will be there for a Q&A. There were rumours of a gig as well, but I think it's been cancelled. If you don't have The Late Great Daniel Johnston (Discovered Covered) album, get it. Just trust me. If you hate it, you can write me angry emails. I don't care.

At Frightfest, see A Bittersweet Life (26th) and Night Watch (28th). Bittersweet Life is going to hit bigger than the first John Woo film. There's an open-air double feature of Shaun of the Dead and Land of the Dead on the 20th at Somerset House (they're also screening Life & Death on the 17th). No booze served, so plan ahead and tuck a flask about your person. There are certain things in life you should never do sober, such as get married, or watch zombie films.

Beg, borrow or steal to go see Mary Stuart at the Donmar; it's supreme theatre. Schiller is the great chronicler of power and Catholicism, and the way he places every character in a web of compromise is intimidatingly masterful.

Two must-have books come out this month. First is The Wild Highway, the latest adventure chronicle from Mark Manning (Z of Zodiac Mindwarp) and Bill Drummond (KLF). You may remember these two gentlemen decided that they could bring about world peace by taking an icon of Elvis to the North Pole. The events arising from this were recounted in their previous book, Bad Wisdom. For their next trick, they retraced the journey of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness:

"As will be revealed to you in the following pages, Z and I realised that we had sold our souls to the devil and that if we wanted to retrieve them, then we should head for darkest Africa, confront Satan and demand our souls back and, if that didn't work, nick them back off him when he wasn't looking. As for why Gimpo is here, I've no idea. He's obviously never been stupid enough to have lent his soul to anyone, much less sell it to the devil."

Bill Drummond is my favourite person I've never met who isn't Peter O'Toole. Like O'Toole, Drummond seems to squeeze more out of one year than most people do out of their entire lives. Remember when he and Jimmy Cauty burned a million quid? You should.

Drummond and Z will be signing and reading from the new book at 6.30pm on the 25th, at the Borders on Charing Cross Road. This presents a difficulty: is it advisable to meet one's heroes? I am quite sure my fiction of them is superior to the reality. Still, it would be foolish to turn up the chance.

I was lucky enough to be sent an advance copy of Swimini Purpose, Brendan McCarthy's codex of 30 years as an illustrator and comic artist. It knocked me clean sideways. You know, this thing I do, writing films and comics - I try to balance my own voice and brand of madness with the requisites of a commercially acceptable story, and then something like Swimini Purpose comes along and reminds me that there is no need whatsoever for balance and compromise. Not in comics, which in any case has always been a cult stepsister to the "proper" arts.

There is more inspiration and joy and wonder in this one volume than in anything else I've seen in the past five years. It is at turns Dadaist, psychedelic, scatological, minimalist, satiric, but always beautiful, always playful. It helps that McCarthy is one of the most effortlessly talented illustrators and graphic designers of his generation (imagine a cross between John Tenniel and Basquiat), and the book is worth buying just as a piece of design pornography alone.

Somewhere, Dan Goldman is smiling. "You're gushing, Alex. Get back to work." Ah, so I am. So I will.

"Dissolution in Favour of the Faith," I am instructed. Yes, I admit, I am technically a godless creature, but in the middle of the China Sea, on a racing yacht who picked her way through the waves with a neatness so elegant I cannot describe it to you who have known nothing but land, I swear I walked with God, do you believe me? Ah, I see. No, of course, I understand. But I am crossing the Atlantic this November, perhaps it will happen again. If so, should I remember you to Him?

They look away. Sign here. We shall call your parents to confirm you were not baptised. Fine. I've briefed them. We all play our part in this pantomime, as I played for three years my avant-garde performance art of being a Guards officer's wife. Shooting parties, regimental balls, Ascot, the Turf and all. This Spring another shall replace me. I wish her a fairer wind than I had.

I rushed the mix a bit yesterday; I was running late and keen to go out. (Gentle strangers, it was an epic night.) However when I checked the mix this morning, I noticed the first couple of songs ended up distorted. Grr. I've uploaded a corrected version, and fixed the ID3 tags. What that means in English is that those dozen hardy souls who downloaded the mix on Saturday night need to go download it again because I'm an eejit. Thank you. I am crawling off to die now, so I can summon enough energy to go to Love Your Enemies tonight. Sundays: they're the new Thursdays.

I've had funk on the brain since that screening of Milano Calibro 9, the best crime-noir film you'll never see. Its insistent, squelchy Euro-funk soundtrack hooked me.

Also, August in London lends itself to a bit of dirty, sexy funk: coming in from a day on Primrose Hill, skin smelling of sunshine and fresh-cut grass, throwing the windows open, slinging a cold bottle of beer out of the fridge and dancing slowly around the flat as that eternal, wonderful English summer evening stretches its rosy self across the sky.

But this mixtape? It's Doris Day's fault.

Me and Doris, we never really got along. You see, I'm the sort of girl that boys go out for a martini and a cigarette with. She was the sort they married. Doris always wondered what we got up to during that smoke, the lads, Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, and me.

Well, mostly we talked about her. "Ask her out to dinner, you dolt. She'll say yes." (Or sometimes we just got drunk and made fun of Greta, sitting in the corner all in black and carving her ex-boyfriend's name in her arm.) But if Doris asked what we talked about, we just smiled mysteriously. "Oh, this and that. You know."

She didn't know. It drove her crazy. We liked torturing her, because she was perfect, and there's a specific joy to be had from hurting perfect things.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I am sitting in the back of Dan Evans' car, on the highway between LA and San Diego, reading the liner notes on a Sly & The Family Stone CD I had just bought. I realise with awe and wonder that I owed Doris an apology: "Que Sera, Sera: Sly's greatest transformative act of all is this version of the Doris Day standard. Cut amid rumours of an affair between Sly and the film star..."

Instantly I am seized by an image: Doris burying her bare toes (nails done in blush-pink lacquer) into white shag-pile carpet, in a room filled with afternoon sun. She's just come out of the bath, and she's wearing nothing but a stage coat and hat of Sly's. The coat, several sizes too big, is wrapped around her tiny frame like a bathrobe.

She pulls the hat - a hugely exaggerated trilby, butterscotch-brown leather, turquoise and crystals, down over one eye. Sly sits back on a cream leather sofa, that gorgeous, feline half-smile of his lighting up his face.

Doris grins at him, reaches over, lifts the needle onto a record, and begins to dance.

My imagination did a quick couple of laps of the galaxy with that in its teeth, and I haven't fully been able to drop it since. Pink feet, long white carpet, a leather and rhinestone coat slowly slipping to the ground. A hand absently tapping rhythm on a glass and chrome table. Since my head is a land where all lies are true, I choose to believe this really happened. The Day Stone Affair is its soundtrack. Enjoy. As usual, listen first blind, then go read the liner notes.

Please note: I have made this mix as a way of introducing friends to some music I adore and think should be better known. If you enjoy the mix, please purchase these or other tracks by the artists. If you are a rightsholder or the representative of one, and you object to this mixtape, please email me and I will take it down immediately. I am not making money off this, and I do not have lawyers.

Issue 3 of Smoke comes out on August 10. There is a nice review of the series in tomorrow's Entertainment Weekly. For those that have been asking, yes, we want to do more issues. No, we have no schedule yet for when we will do them. If our publisher (or another one) thinks there is enough support for the book, we get to do more. If not... well, that's that. Igor is away on holiday right now so all is on hold until he returns.

What am I doing next? My first manga series, Kat & Mouse, debuts in April. I have two more series in development: a girls' action series, and a rather nasty little horror series. My first French series, Messiah Complex, debuts sometime next summer. Over the past few weeks I've been reviewing sketches and sample pages for my second French series, Adam in Chromaland. We've found an amazing Italian artist who is bringing to life some of the insanely psychedelic fine art-related imagery in the book, and making it feel as drenched in wonder as it should. Stay tuned for sample images and more about the story, which can best be described as The Phantom Tollbooth meets Being John Malkovitch.

That's really it on the comic side, aside from some possible anthology work. My problem is that I have three screenplays banging around in my head that need to get out, plus writing M, plus managing the universes and complex plotlines of the five series above, plus maybe more Smoke - so right now I'm less interested in creating new worlds than polishing up the existing ones. Although I have, of late, begun to compose satirical doggerel, for no reason at all.

If you wish to download my July mixtape, Bright Hollow Town, but haven't yet done so, act quickly as it will disappear on Saturday and be replaced with the August edition. I've finished the noir screenplay for which Bright Hollow Town was a soundscape, so it is time to move on.

Finally, I leave you with Bob Mould, who is possibly my favourite musician, discussing his creative process. Much of what he says holds true for writing as well:

"Here's my deal: I sit in a room and make music that I want to listen to. When I can listen to a song more than a hundred times, and still feel moved by it, I place it in the A-pile. A theme or overall sentiment gathers and makes itself known. I start looking for the beginning and end pieces of the album. The other songs fall into place, dependent on key, mood, pacing, and context. Equally good songs get relegated to second discs or B-sides (Surveyors And Cranes, for example) because they fall outside the prevailing theme. When I'm happy with the content and flow, I call it an album, and share it with the public. It's a collection of my favorite work in a given time period, presented in the order of my choosing. Do you remember old-fashioned photo albums?" (continues).

Londoners: he is playing on the 6th September at the Mean Fiddler as part of the tour for his new album. Not a gig to miss.

The most beautiful phrase in the English language is "Fade Out", and I'll fight anyone who says different. You can trot out "I love you", that old bit of flim-flam, any time of day or night, to anything. But if you type "Fade Out", it means you've reached the end of 90 to 120 pages of blood and toil and that, ladies and gentlemen, is a commitment not to be taken lightly.

Sunday afternoon I was 20 pages shy of Fade Out, on that gorgeous Cresta Run glissando to the end, but I was also 48 hours shy of food. My stomach refused to suffer in silence any longer, and I was forced, grumbling and resentful, to leave my cave and trek up the hill to the Cafe of Crossed Destinies, purveyors of scrambled eggs and strange coincidences.

My first encounter with this place was at 7.30am on a Sunday when I was jazzed on too many cigarettes, a fine and late Saturday night, and a story rattling round my head so hard that I couldn't get properly to sleep; no, the night train didn't go through to dreamland, only as far as that odd fugue country on its borders, inhabited by imaginary characters hungry for conversation. No, I couldn't lie in bed any longer. I went out in search of caffeine. It was barely light and everywhere was closed. Everywhere, except the Cafe of Crossed Destinies.

I got an inkling of the cafe's strangeness when I bumped into a big ginger bloke on my way in, and nearly lost my whisper-thin grasp on sanity right then and there. There are certain things you really don't want to see at half seven on a Sunday morning when you're electric with insomnia, and Chris Evans is top of the list.

Weeks pass. Second visit to the Cafe: Derek Jacobi wanders in. I had seen him only the night before in Don Carlos, a performance so terrifying that I still shrank back as he walked by. Third visit: guy sits down next to me who I haven't seen since Hong Kong, and who is one of the few people from my university (a small one, and far away) I ever want to see again. Since then I've breakfasted with rogues and blowhards, fantasists and bums, and a goodly number of the local bourgeoisie.

The Cafe isn't a place for the faint-hearted. Anything can happen there, especially at the communal tables out on the pavement. But this day, I was a focused demon of preoccupation: serendipities be damned; give me eggs. My head was stuffed with thoughts about the screenplay. Was it too old-skool noir for modern audiences? Was the bit where X happens too subtle? Do the scenes in Vegas drag? Will people accept the incredibly dysfunctional (but to me, realistic) relationship between the two leads? Is my agent going to hate it, because all the violence is quiet and personal, rather than operatic action-explodo?

Not even the sound of my local's Sunday afternoon ragtime pianist playing "Lullaby of Birdland" could slow me down, and a day when I don't pause in the sunshine to give "Lullaby of Birdland" its due is a dire day indeed. I stomp on. Eggs, then home. Eggs, then home. Dum tiddly-tum. But it was sunny, and Sunday, and all the Cafe's pavement tables were full. Arse.

I swoop in on the only empty chair, at a small table already occupied by an old lady of matchstick proportions and cotton-wool coiffure. "Might I sit here?" She doesn't react. I move more into her field of view and repeat my question. She smiles, blinks apologetically, and cups her ear. It's almost painful. I at last get my question across, and she daintily motions a fragile, nearly translucent hand to the empty chair. Take it. She smiles again and I sit down.

She had sherbert. It's the cheapest thing on the menu. And she had it some while ago; the residue of the melted pink liquid was already starting to darken in the bottom of the glass. She had no reading material, just a small purse, and a nearly-empty Tesco bag.

I caught her eye and we smiled again. When the waitress delivered my eggs (oh eggs, how little there is that a cheese and mushroom omelette can't solve), she took away the old lady's sherbert glass and asked if there was anything else she wanted. It took three tries.

There was a palpable curtain of silence around her. She sat; the world rushed and eddied around her, always about three feet away, just out of reach. A preoccupied horse of an American girl wolfs down eggs on the other side of a cafe table, and it might as well be on the other side of the world. I recognised this silence; I had wrapped myself in it in Buenos Aires, in Mexico City, when I didn't speak the language and didn't know a soul. I felt all the meaner, then, for not trying to alleviate hers with a few friendly words, an offer to share my newspaper. Perhaps she was content in the sunshine by herself, underwater. Perhaps a chat would have been too tiring. Perhaps I feared I saw my future in her; perhaps she saw her past in me.

I finished my eggs and left, cursing myself for selfishness, for not listening to the stories sitting right next to me. She remained, blinking in the sunshine and looking out at England's Lane with motions both quick and hesitant, like a new-whelped bird who knew that soon enough, she would be beyond this confused and lonely place, and would fly.

I have not seen her since.

SYNDICATION: LiveJournal

ARCHIVES: October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007

& FOR HER NEXT TRICKS:

KAT & MOUSE 2
January 2007
ISBN-10: 1598165496
$5.99 / All Ages

AGENT BOO 2
January 2007
ISBN-10: 1598168037
$4.99 / All Ages

***

RECENTLY:

MESSIAH COMPLEX 1
October 2006
ISBN-10: 2731617667
EUR12,90 / Teen

AGENT BOO 1
Sept 2006
ISBN-10: 1598168029
ISBN-13: 9781598168020
$4.99 / All Ages

KAT & MOUSE 1
July 2006
ISBN-10: 1598165488
ISBN-13: 9781598165487
$5.99 / All Ages

SMOKE
December 2005
ISBN-10: 193323928X
$24.99 / Teen

***

Brief Loves:
Music: Berlin Cabaret Songs
Film: Chetyre (4)
Book: Camera Lucida