***

WHO

FILM & TV

COMICS & BOOKS

INTERVIEWS

AMPHIGORY

MYSPACE

LIVEJOURNAL

FEED

*

HOME

The news comes that the Catholic Church is to abolish Limbo. Apparently it is feared that the converts of today are too sensitive to accept that unbaptised dead babies don't go directly to Heaven like they do in Islam. Roman Catholicism decrees they spend eternity in Limbo, which you can (if you so desire) approximate by spending a rainy February night in Crewe train station.

My relationship with Catholicism is... complicated. I love its pageantry, its charmingly blatant hypocrisy, and its richly-coloured tapestry of associated fable and image. Now they are trying to rub out one of their more interesting shades of grey, at the same time as pretending that no priest shall evermore be pink. Really, how very dull. I mean, can't they keep Limbo and just retcon the baby thing? Issue an, ahem, Papal Bull? After all, it worked for Superman comics, and for Stalin.

In any case, I object most strongly to this wholesale rewriting of the topography of the Hereafter, because it undermines one of the greatest passages ever written in the Here and Now: the third canto of Dante's Inferno.

"Questo misero modo
tegnon l'anime triste di coloro
che visser sanza 'nfamia e sanza lodo.
Mischiate sono a quel cattivo coro
de li angeli che non furon ribelli
ne fur fedeli a Dio, ma per se fuoro.
Caccianli i ciel per non esser men belli,
ne lo profondo inferno li riceve,
ch'alcuna gloria i rei avrebber delli."

"...This dismal state of things
Is what the paltry souls of those must bear
Whose lives attracted neither praise nor infamy
They're mixed together with that squalid choir
The angels who were neither mutinous
Nor true to God but served themselves alone;
And Heaven to keep its beauty unimpaired
Rejected them, and even Hell's own depths
Won't welcome them, for fear its criminals
Might profit from some glory they would bring"

If you can't hear the beauty in that, you have a J-cloth ear and a bakelite soul. I bought my first copy of The Inferno as a freshman at university. It was Tom Phillips' illustrated one. (The English version above is his. I have an irrational hatred of the Longfellow translation). I fell in love with Canto III at first sight, and it became a guiding principle in my life. I realised that it's a matter of luck whether your actions attract praise, or attract infamy. The important thing is to make sure you attract one or the other. I can imagine no worse fate than living a mediocre little life thinking only of yourself, and ending up in Purgatory, where the rains go on forever and the trains are always delayed.

The good news: something called The Poetry Archive has been set up in the UK, with recordings of poets such as Sassoon and Betjeman reading their works. The bad news: its collections are at present rather anaemic. Yeats reading "Lake Isle of Innisfree" is possibly the high point. I had hoped against hope that Eliot's rare recording of "The Waste Land" might be up there, but alas no. Gentle stranger, if you truly love me, you will locate this.

EDIT: A kind friend has found the Eliot recording.

Phonomancy: "Music is Magic. You know this already. You've known this from the first time a record sent a divine shiver down your spine or when a band changed the way you dressed forever. How does something that's just noises arranged in sequence do that? No-one knows. It's just... magic. Everyone knows that. It's just that some realise that it's more than metaphor." Kieron Gillen on his upcoming series Phonogram, which I was lucky enough to see in very early stages. (2006 will be a good year for my tribe. Gillen - who more or less singlehandedly sparked a revolution in videogame journalism - also has a big, shiny hardback book coming out next year collecting the best of his and his friends' critical writing on games.)

Pataphysics: "The science of imaginary solutions, which will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one." Alfred Jarry. Yes, everyone goes through their Ubu phase at university, around the time when clove cigarettes seem - briefly and inexplicably - like a very good idea. But it's the simple, beautifully absurd concept of Pataphysics (from a rare Jarry story in an obscure journal) that has cast the longest influence over literature. From it we have Oulipo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle), whose members' list contains some of my favourite writers, and Oubapo. There are precedents for this sort of formal gameplay: Diderot, of course, and even the Prince de Ligne (a personal hero of mine, the ne plus ultra of fopdom) writing letters back and forth to his mistress with absurd rules such as "no use of the letter A". But it took Mad Alfred to call the name of the game.

I took down the October mixtape as I needed free space to send a thing to this guy. A December one will be up soon, all 1920s and 1930s cabaret songs mixed with my usual exotica. Partially a sonic exploration of a very Weimar project I'm working on at the moment; mainly because Christmas makes me run screaming into the embrace of cynicism and decadence. You keep your tinsel and your eggnog, mein liebe herr; I only want glitter and absinthe.

A scene in the High Court of the Empire of Imagination, from Adam in Chromaland, my Humanoids series with the fantastically talented Luigi di Giammarino. Luigi is somehow able to read my mind, and puts the elephants from Dali's Temptation of St Anthony (which are, officially, Best Things) and Edward Gorey's Doubtful Guest into crowd scenes. The non-crowd scenes are just as amazing, too - I'll post some soon. Clicky on the image to see bigger.

Also, I contribute to Newsarama's Holiday Gift Guide, with a few offbeat recommendations for lovers of sequential art and/or the craft of visual storytelling.

I can't be bothered to look up if it was Oscar Wilde who described two friends as: "X has a lot of taste. Unfortunately most of it is bad. Y has very little taste, but all of it is good." Me, I fall firmly into Category X. I use the word "Genius!" frequently in its secondary meaning of "awesomely stupid". And I have an undeniable love for kitsch religious art. When I go to Very Catholic Countries, only bodily restraint by concerned friends keeps me from coming home laden with glow-in-the-dark Madonnas and neon-and-gilt plastic dioramas of the Sacred Heart.

Before I blew all my money on fast living and a bad divorce, I used to collect art fairly seriously. Much is gone now, but I still have a few nice things. I've dropped off the auction houses' list, except for Sotheby's Old Masters department, who kindly still send me the big sale catalogues. (You may remember me nattering on about Cupid & Psyche before the summer sale.) I tear through them eagerly over a pint in the Beloved Local, until I find something like the below. Ladies and gentlemen, who wouldn't want to own this:



(Circle of Lucas Cranach, first half 16th Century. Lot 29 in Sotheby's Evening Old Masters Sale, 7 December 2005)

Of late I've begun putting together a soundscape for my next screenplay. In researching it, I've discovered that my all-time favourite melancholy jazz song, "Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most", is based on my all-time favourite poem: The Waste Land. See. And, in fact, hear. This is the Rickie Lee Jones version, from her sublime little Pop Pop album of jazz standards. (Song posted for evaluation purposes only; link will expire after 7 days; buy the album.)

The odd thing is that this screenplay is a thriller, and its symbolic framework requires a very aggressive soundscape - in my head, it's all Fugazi, early Big Black (was there ever a better album cover than this? I think not), X-Ray Spex and Metal Machine Music. But this delicate, sad little jazz song has attached itself limpet-like to the final scene and refuses to budge. "Spring arrived on time, only what became of you, dear..."

Of potential interest to Londoners: this Friday (25th) is the Comes With A Smile 'zine's farewell gig (it's going with a frown after the next issue), at the 12 Bar Club on Denmark St, WC2, with The Last Town Chorus and others. I can't make this for reasons of Kirsten Scott Thomas and Pirandello. The Real Tuesday Weld play a rare (and free!) gig in, oh dear, Elephant and Castle on the 2nd December as part of something called Elefest. I have the sneaking suspicion I'm busy that night. If any of you are going, do report back.

Lastly: go download Nancy Sinatra's "The Last of the Secret Agents" right now, because it is gloriously stupid. If that puts you in the mood for more, try Rosemary Clooney giving it "Mambo Italiano".

And it could be that it was Sunday, and the weekend washes you up on its far shore like a shipwrecked jack-tar, head muddled with strange memories of nights of splintering wood and sea monsters.

It all began on a blizzard-wrapped February morning in 1972, but I think we'll skip ahead to last Wednesday. To Devendra Banhardt and others at the Astoria. I have a new favourite band: Akron/Family. They sound like Polyphonic Spree would like to once their balls drop. Or possibly like Unledded-era Page & Plant teamed up with a Baptist revival choir to sing the Doctor Who theme music. My companion compared them to "being like the time I got to a Sparklehorse gig early, and came in halfway through a Neutral Milk Hotel set", and that was just it: that same, "oh my God, what's that? It's magnificent!" (What? You don't have In The Aeroplane Over the Sea? Go, remedy.)

Following on was The One True Warren Ellis and the Dirty Three, the instrumental trio once part of the Bad Seeds. (I know another Warren Ellis, but we suspect his real name's actually Kevin.) Ellis brandished his violin like a guitar and launched into long, Hunter Thompson-eque narratives about sniffing airplane glue and angels, which were almost better than the instrumental songs they introduced.

Then some beardy gits came on, sang smugly about love, and used the phrase "right on" without the slightest veil of irony: ah, it must be the headliners. I'm suddenly and completely over my Devendra moment. The delightful high-wire looniness of "Little Yellow Spider" seems gone and he is rapidly on the road to becoming just another folk singer. Also, whoever scheduled that gig must have had it in for Devendra. He just couldn't hold up to his opening acts.

I left the Astoria feeling rather glum; there's nothing more blue-inducing than a much-anticipated gig being A Bit Shit, Really. But Thursday was The Decemberists, a band who truly understand the concept of Best Things like pirates, F Scott Fitzerald, Bonnie & Clyde, ghosts, and frock coats. And oh my, gentle stranger. What a show! At the gig I bought Picaresque, their new album, and it is beyond fantastic. What more can I say about an album whose first song (an ode to a Velasquez Infanta) opens with the cries of peacocks? We go on to boppy Casiotone pop about catastrophic school sports-day embarrassment, more Victorian ghost stories (long a Decemberists staple) and chipper ditties about double suicides. Colin Meloy: I mean, really. He looks like Billy Liar, dresses like The Great Gatsby, and uses words like "palanquin" in pop song rhymes. I dub him A Friend Of This House.

Then on to Brighton for a weekend with the comics crowd, which is a bit like partying with the carneys at the circus. We beautiful sideshow freaks, working in our funny little half-industry, dancing on the dark margins of respectability. Bryan Talbot declaimed poetry in Italian restaurants; Andrew Wheeler and Rich Johnston sang Motown in soul food restaurants while the strangers at the table next door harmonised; Andy Diggle lectured me on the nature of magic; vile alcohols were consumed and amusing lies were told. The only thing I purchased was Daniel Goodbrey's latest minicomic, The House That Wasn't Her. It carries on his own brand of strangely emotionally resonant absurdia, and I hated it with that pure hate of a writer who knows that someone else's idea is that much better, that much fresher.

I return to find that the one internet forum I frequent, the V, has relocated. I am truly, deeply bored of the internet, and aside from the V (less a forum than an online charabanc for a weekly pub night) and a few friends' blogs, I have pretty much turned it off chez moi.

Everyone I know has a novel coming out. I feel quite inadequate. Admired quasi-stranger Tom McCarthy has just published his first novel, Remainder, from Metronome Press in Paris. I have not yet read it, but Tom's other works have been ridiculously talented works of intelligence that would be insufferable if they weren't so charming and playful. Order Remainder from the website, or try shops like Magma in Clerkenwell.

Admired friend Mike Carey is also publishing his first novel, The Devil You Know. Warning: Be very careful when ordering this, as there is a Poppy Z Shite novel of the same name that is of a direness so extreme as to make one wonder if it is deliberate. Certainly one can't commit an act of literature that bad in ignorance? One shudders. Anyway, Mike's book is a pulp novel about an exorcist based in London. No, not a huge departure from Mike's usual stomping ground, but when he does modern-gothic supernatural stories so well, why must he depart?

I am too tired to do anything tonight except pour a whisky, put Picaresque on repeat and stick my nose into The Conversations, Michael Ondaatje's utterly engrossing book with Walter Munch on the nature of creating and editing films and novels. 'Tis a shame, the rather well-spoken-of Ralfe Band is on at the Borderline tonight, but I am far too exhausted to leave the barricaded isle of Primrose Hill. Next time, I tell myself, I shall not behave so badly: and once again, hope triumphs over experience.

I grew up in a house steeped in art. At the dinner table, my mother would read to us out loud poetry, or bits of books she was enjoying, or news pieces that caught her fancy. Thanks to her, I've stayed wedded to poetry throughout my life. I love the electric clash of language of people like Rilke, Berryman, grumpy old Frost and Yeats, even good Andrew Marvell. And while I appreciate rhyming structures (Shakespeare's Sonnet 98 and Roethke's "I Know A Woman" are two of the best seduction poems ever written), I remain a massive apologist for the delights of blank verse, no matter what Stephen Fry might think.

The volume of poetry of which I'm fondest is indeed blank verse: John Ashbery's A Wave, a book I stole from my school library because it had a pretty cover. I later found out the cover was by Vija Celmins. I dived in, and in the long acquaintance this slim book of poems and I have had with each other, I've grown to understand and adore Ashbery's lively, unexpected, wilfully obscure and often quite humourous language. I became a big fan of Celmins' art, too. (There's a monograph on her at the ICA Bookshop that will be mine, someday soon.) The new edition of A Wave still bears the same Celmins painting, though with updated typography.

The other day, in need of a bit of linguistic solace, I pulled my now dog-eared copy down from its shelf. It opened at random, to a poem called "Darlene's Hospital", one that I had never really engaged with before, being too busy untangling "Trefoil" or "More Pleasant Adventures". Today, now, "Darlene's Hospital" hit the older me like a fist wrapped in velvet. It's about a woman who is dying. I excerpt a stanza from it below. Read it out loud. All good poetry should be read out loud - preferably in front of friends, with a drink in your hand. Listen to the way the words bump and hustle up against each other; the mad images phrases paint as they collide. That's what it's all about:

Now we're often happy. The dark car
Moves heftily away along low bluffs,
And if we don't have our feelings, what
Good are we, but whose business is it?
Beware the happy man: once she perched light
In the reading space of my room, a present joy
For all time to come, whatever happens;
And still we rotate, gathering speed until
Nothing is there but more speed in the light ahead.
Such moments as we prized in life:
The promise of a new day, living with lots of people
All headed in more or less the same direction, the sound of this
In the embracing stillness, but not the brutality,
And lists of examples of lots of things and shit-
What more could we conceivably be statisfied with, it is
Joy, and undaunted
She leaves the earth at that point,
Intersecting all our daydreams of breakfast and lunch.

- Darlene's Hospital, part of second stanza, circa 1987, John Ashbery.

Benjamin Ong at top comic news site Newsarama interviews me about my girls' mystery series Kat & Mouse, which debuts in May 2006: "'It's the president of Harvard's fault, you know, saying that us ickle girls' pretty heads weren't suited to science or math,' de Campi exclaimed. 'So I thought, up yours, academic dude who probably hasn't gotten laid since Carter was president, I'm going to write a book that gives girls a science hero. Kat solves mysteries using science, and Mouse chips in on the programming/maths side. But the science stuff isn't done in a preachy way - it's more like, KA-BAM! Cool stuff! Okay, on with our story.'" More, including hot guys, a European princess, and a mysterious school thief - not to mention some serious bitchiness. Um, in the story, not from me. For once.

Below, some of Federica Manfredi's art from the book:






In other news, I'm drowning. With the writing I do, I get paid six months after finishing books. This means that although I have more work than I can handle right now, I still can't quit my part-time job. My editor on the illustrated kids' series has just said she wants to commission books 1 and 2 back to back. I don't know whether to dance with joy or collapse from exhaustion.

I am interviewed by Tim Leong at ComicFoundry: "The creative life is hard work, and miserable occasionally, because no matter how good you are, there are long periods where no rain falls. What keeps me going through those times (aside from bourbon, anger and a petty lust for revenge) is knowing that I am creating new worlds and new characters that I love - and that are mine. And hopefully, some of them will outlive me." More.

In other news, I had my first day on the film set today. It was like... it felt like coming home.

Stories are tarts. When you desperately need to focus on one, a good one, a payer, others come sidling up in their silky dresses and scent to whisper empty promises in your ear. You know from experience that the frocks are Topshop and the perfume, drugstore - but sometimes, you just don't care. Below, a 300-word conversation piece that I picked up around King's Cross at 6am last night:

The star got up, ashen, and hurried out of the hotel lobby. I looked at the woman who had sat down opposite and nonchalantly placed my napkin over the tape recorder. It was a good recorder, the latest model, but whatever she had whispered to him she had done so quiet-like there wasn't a chance in hell of it being on the tape. She was a redhead, the kind men get in fights over, the kind that make you wonder where those freckles stop. She smiled at me, unreadable as the surface of a lake at sunrise.

"You know each other?" I asked.

"From Papua New Guinea," she said, crossing her legs and smoothing the skirt of her green dress. "A long time ago. We used to get high on bathtub gin, jack cars, then crash them on the coast road. I don't know why - to show we were immortal, or to prove we could hurt ourselves as badly as other people hurt us. They were good times, after a fashion, those Port Moresby years. But then came that... regrettable incident, with the one-armed Fijian. He took all the blame. He was a gentleman, even then. His uncle sent him back to Canada. My parents weren't fools; they knew exactly whose fault it was and packaged me off to a particularly brutal boarding school in Switzerland. We never saw each other again. There were his films, of course, but... he had changed his name."

She glanced around the lobby, pushing aside one of the palm fronds that overhung the sofa. There was no sign of him. Her eyes became wistful. "I'm sorry about your interview," she said.

I didn't notice until after she left that she'd palmed the recorder.

The Fifth of November. Fireworks boom over Primrose Hill. My dog caprioles and levades, the sound of the shells urging something primal in her blood to dizzy glee. Seven years ago I arrived in London, from Mexico City by way of Argentina, the Philippines and (longest and most lovely) Hong Kong. My first landfall that year was to a friend's wedding, with a houseparty the weekend before down near Kingsbridge in Devon. I rolled up looking like Steve McQueen: white jeans, leather jacket, sunglasses. Mexico clothes. They stared at me like I'd just walked in from the moon, and asked if I brought a coat. I looked around and saw palm trees, and thought "how cold can it get?". It snowed. I froze. They busied themselves re-landscaping a garden or three (it was that sort of slave-labour houseparty) whilst I refused to budge more than five feet from the sitting-room fire, wearing clothes borrowed from everyone else and swearing I was about to die.

I moved here for good in September 1998, transferred by the French investment bank I was working for at the time. I hadn't yet admitted the blindingly obvious: that I was completely unsuited to any sort of corporate work. I tried my hardest, and frequently worked late. November 5, 1998 was one such night, and I didn't start bicycling home until about 9pm. Halfway along the South Bank, a volley of fireworks crashed cerise and green and white over the Thames and I, still fresh out of the Third World, dived off my bike and rolled, head down, convinced I'd ended up in the middle of a government coup. I'd never heard of Guy Fawkes Night.

It seems incredible, fantastical now, but such things had been a quotidian risk where I lived for much of the 1990s. I used to hang out at nightclubs where there was a special waiting area for bodyguards and drivers, and a "check your guns at the door" policy. (Nobody did, of course. At least, nobody important.) These weren't dives. These were the top nightclubs in the city. If a couple really rich Manila teens wanted to go for a spin in their brand new Z3 convertible, they'd be flanked in front and behind by bulletproof SUVs filled with automatic-toting minders. The tiny, ground-hugging red convertible looked like a Matchbox car next to the black Land Cruisers, like if the one in front stopped too suddenly the Z3 could carry on beneath it.

The fireworks don't bother me any more, but they do make me remember: all the lives I led, the choices I didn't make, the things I could still become. The measure of seven years.

Meet Agent Boo:



On the left is her cat/mentor, Pumpkin.

Just got new pages for Messiah Complex as well. Ed's detail is so amazing; I'll have to post a few panels in a day or two when I have more time.

...may be found here, and includes new art samples for most of my forthcoming projects. This won't be everything I'm doing for 2006, but is merely everything I can announce so far. Not bad, though: four series and a short story.

I've also revamped the Film & TV section of the website, after getting caught short by a producer asking me about out of date projects listed there. Gah. I need minions. Oh, and thanks to the lovely people at FeedBlitz, if you want to receive my occasional blog updates via email, you can sign up to do so on the left hand side of my site.

...

Yes, I realise this is the most boring blog post ever. Deal with it.

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