Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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WHO

FILM & TV

COMICS & BOOKS

29.3.06 Station.

We haven't moved an inch, and everything has changed.

The American humourist James Thurber and essayist E.B. White shared an office when both first worked for The New Yorker; they had been friends. When Thurber died, blind and warped by fame, E.B. noted that Thurber said he wrote humour "the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good." E.B. said: "Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes."

Heck, it's anybody's story,

It's been one of those brilliant good days in the creative life, for reasons I can't even begin to discuss, and which aren't anywhere near certain.

And yes, I'm still quoting Ashbery at you. And yes, nobody used the colour blue like Jean-Pierre Melville. And yes, it will all likely fall to pieces. But at the moment it hasn't, and that's all we really have, isn't it, the moment? Yes, and yes, and....

...and in this rash of partings and dyings (the new twist), there's also room for breaking out of living...

( 9:15 PM ) (1) comments

20.3.06 PSA: Life is grand, and other things

PSA 1: FILM. Show And Tell Week draws to a close with the soft-launch of my new film & music video website, Lot 49 Films. Go, peruse. My very talented team of collaborators and I are looking to do a couple more freebie / £500 budget music videos for indie bands to build up our showreels. So if you know anyone who is signed to a label and wants a top-notch if slightly mad and artsy video, tell them to get in touch. We're very good at digital aftereffects as well, so we can do some pretty amazing things in live action. I keep vaguely threatening Jesse from Flipron that once we finish the Raindrops video, I'm going to do a Ray Harryhausen monster-movie video for them. Meanwhile, have a couple Angel Girl images from Ryan's Raindrops video sketches:

PSA 2: KAT & MOUSE. As the more eagle-eyed among you may have noticed from the top right "her next trick" section of my website, the debut date for Book 1 of Kat & Mouse has been moved from May to July. This is purely to allow even more of Tokyopop's considerable marketing might to be thrown behind my little book, and it has even more chance of being racked in the Young Readers section of the bookshop as well as the Graphic Novel section. But on the other hand, there is no more pathetic creature than a writer who doesn't have a book coming out, and the wait until July may just kill me. I know I've been working; I've been writing nearly nonstop since Smoke came out. But I don't have any books out soon, and it burns. Don't introduce rationality into this conversation; it has no place.

PSA 3: KEN TYNAN EXPLAINS: "To be great, at least in England, you have to write a big book... I've skimmed, I burned up the moment, I spent my life writing to deadline. A performer with a flair for words... That's all." I have realised I will not get over my sense of inferiority that I have not attempted the Big Book. I don't know what I intend to do about it, but it's nice to know that I'm not the only one with that particular chip on my shoulder.

PSA 4: HELLO ORANGE COUNTY. My new friends in that area, who have been echoing some of my posts on their Xanga blogs, might enjoy this old one or that old one, or any of these.

PSA 5: COPLAND! Cranking up the second-to-last movement of Appalachian Spring to window-rattling levels of volume results in a feeling of life being a very, very grand thing indeed, albeit in a slightly Clockwork Orange kind of way. (That would also suggest that Appalachian Spring is the Yankee version of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which is probably accurate.) In any case: long live people named Alex, and brain-meltingly loud classical music.

( 12:25 PM ) (1) comments

16.3.06 The lay of the love and the death of the Moor Street Peacock

I think it began in August.

Freelancers always go a little crazy in August. Our editors are on vacation; no new books are being launched; and we are not getting nearly as much attention as our vast and sensitive egos require.

I'd been coping by listening to a lot of old blues, and I'd developed a habit of making up blues lyrics about life in London to the general pattern of Son House's "My Black Mama" or Ella Fitzgerald's storming version of WC Handy's "St Louis Blues". It passed the time, and got me thinking in rhyme again.

So there I am, sitting at my desk rolling the sound of some words around in my head, just messing around and feeling a little sentimental. I scratch out a few lines, drink a little coffee.

"On any given night in Soho
A thousand stories start
Some broken souls are made complete
And some are torn apart"

It continues. Before I realise, it's 44 verses later and I've written a love story.

Yes. Me.

I mean, all stories are love stories, and everything I've ever written has had a love story in it, somewhere. But I'd never written a Love Story, capital L, capital S. No, I'm way too cool for that.

What do I do now, I thought. Hide it? Throw it away? I mean, I've just written a really long poem about an artist and a showgirl who keep meeting each other at the wrong times in their lives. If anyone finds out, I might have to turn in my Cynic Card.

On a whim, I email frequent collaborator Lee O'Connor and rather sheepishly send him the poem. What do you think about making it into a little illustrated book, I ask. A6 size, so pretty tiny, and with a stanza or two on each left-hand page, faced by an illustration on the right? You know, the kind of thing they sell next to the cash register at the ICA Bookshop. Then I waved my hands around a bit and muttered about Toulouse-Lautrec and acid-green and Soho at night.

Lee of course understood this instinctively, was amused by some of the more satirical parts of the poem, and crucially understands the mysterious and undeniable appeal of fit girls in top hats. Then we all got rather busy and took our eye off the... uh... pole.

We've finally gotten around to working on The Artist & The Showgirl again, and I'm starting to get roughs in my inbox. We don't have a home for it yet, but if anyone is crazy enough to publish it, we'll let you know.

Meanwhile, you can smile to yourself at this brief slip in my veil of irony.

But then again, it was August, and I'm always a little crazy then.

( 2:06 PM ) (0) comments

Phantasmagory: Original Sins

Some of you might be under the impression from this that pitching a creator-owned comic series requires nothing more than a little message-board banter about Stalin and then, dum tiddly-um, a couple months later you have a series. Ha. No. Or at least, not in the case of Phantasmagory.

Longtime Friends Of This House may remember my describing how in early March 2005 my wayward and eccentric muse held me hostage one night and forced me to write a horror story. That was Phantasmagory. But the origin actually begins a little earlier than that.

My birthday is in late February, and I had gotten my usual crew of the decadent and unemployable together to celebrate having survived another year on Earth. Well, we got good and... oh yes, I almost forgot that we're PG-rated now. We stayed up very late, gentle stranger. Fill in the blanks on your own. Add in that (if you don't know me well) I'm a bit of a closet Goth. I spend the latter part of the evening deep in conversation with Mr Watson, who in comparison has never hid his darkness under a bushel. We get onto the subject of a certain mainstream American horror comic (and latterly, indifferent Hollywood film), moaning that It Isn't As Good As It Was. The lead character is old, the story is so caught up in its own continuity as to be impenetrable to new readers, and it's just... tired. Shopworn. The greatest writer in the world, given the existing corporate and editorial constraints, couldn't lift the title above the dizzying heights of Average. This isn't anyone's fault. It's just the natural result of a series that has gone on for almost 20 years now.

Fuelled by... erm... late-night enthusiasm, Mr Watson and I argue about how to make magic and the supernatural, subjects dear to our hearts, feel new and interesting. How to bring a sense of wonder back to it all. We discuss all sorts of mad things, absolutely none of which would be allowed on said American comic. At this point, the pub staff are pointedly and loudly stacking chairs onto nearby tables, and shooting us dirty looks. I go home, but as usual cannot sleep. I stare at the ceiling through the low blue hours, imagining demons horrible and rare.

.

This is the thing about writing: you pick away at your own psychological scars as fodder for stories. What horrifies me? What disgust me? Why? If it hurts me, if I can barely speak about it without a cold shudder down my spine, I bet it will have the same effect on you. Alan Moore speaks in interviews about great writers being a little crazy, and even a mediocre pulp-fiction hack like myself can understand why. It's the daily trip to the coalmine of the subconscious, the grubbing around in the mud of things best left undisturbed.

I write a pitch for Phantasmagory and send it off to a friendly editor with whom I've wanted to work for some time. The company for which he works is probably the best in America at getting graphic novels in bookstores and then in the hands of teenagers, which is exactly the audience I wanted to hit. Editor really likes it, and we embark on searching for an artist. This is about late March 2005.

(Briefly, you can think of Phantasmagory as True Romance meets Hideshi Hino/Junji Ito/J-horror films. It will be a manga series of circa 180-page B&W volumes. We've thrown out all the cliches of the genre and, per Yeats, gone to "lie down where the ladders start, in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart." Crucially, I think we have a really new and interesting twist on how we handle the magic elements. I don't want to go into too much detail as the book won't be out until 2007 and the central idea, like all good ones, is deceptively simple.)

Back to the Process. The Editor and I find an artist. He's great; we're thrilled. We can barely wait for the sketches to come through the email every week. He gets halfway through the sample pages, then goes quiet. By late May 2005, we realise we have to give up on him. I get distracted by the Smoke launch, and we get back onto looking for an artist in June. I find an English guy for whom this would be a pretty big gig. He's also got a really fresh, unusual horror style. But the song remains the same - promises, then silence, then a few half-hearted sketches. We're up to August 2005 now. In September or so, a friend mentions Dan Kim's work to me. It's perfect - an original twist on manga horror, and as I get talking to Dan I realise he's a kindred spirit who doesn't want to pull any punches on the horror side. Let's really scare the living daylights out of people, we said. Let's give 'em nightmares. Share the wealth of sleepless nights.

But Dan is a computer sciences student at a Canadian university, so he has to balance doing work for the book around his other comic projects and his coursework. It takes us until January to get the pitch ready to take to the Editor-in-Chief, what with story and character-design tweaks. Then it was like we looked away for a moment, and somewhere around the first anniversary of the muse kicking my door down and yelling and screaming at me, Phantasmagory was greenlit. This is it: sometimes the only difference between writers who get published and the writers who don't is a pigheaded ability to not give up, and not care what others think about you. Well, that and good friends with whom to rant about ideas late at night.

I start writing Book 1 in April, and the book should be in stores in early 2007.

( 11:18 AM ) (11) comments

15.3.06 Les jeux sont faits

Now on its way to the Cannes festival office:

Final soundtrack still needs composing; some issues on the sound mix still need smoothing out... but a working copy is in, on deadline. Now we wait.

More screen grabs and production stills to come, once I design the Lot 49 Films website.

( 1:57 PM ) (0) comments

14.3.06 The season of thunder

Briefly: Phantasmagory, a new supernatural/horror series with Dan Kim. The Artist & The Showgirl, a fable of Soho, with Lee O'Connor. The long-delayed Flipron video, now progressing rapidly in the capable and hugely talented hands of Ryan Parker. O'Brien Plays The Devil, the short film, with a whole army of people. Transmission, the noir/psychological thriller screenplay (and probably the best thing I've yet written), now with my reps in LA.

And THAT's why you haven't heard from me recently.

Show and tell begins tomorrow, and continues all week.

( 6:54 PM ) (0) comments

3.3.06 The slow pleasures of Roland Barthes

36. "...It is the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself. The noeme of language is perhaps this impotence, or, to put it positively: language is, by nature, fictional; the attempt to render language unfictional requires an enormous apparatus of measurements: we convoke logic, or, lacking that, sworn oath; but the Photograph is indifferent to all intermediaries: it does not invent; it is authentication itself; the (rare) artifices it permits are not probative; they are, on the contrary, trick pictures: the photograph is laborious only when it fakes. It is a prophecy in reverse: like Cassandra, but eyes fixed on the past, Photography never lies: or rather, it can lie as to the meaning of the thing, beng by nature tendentious, never as to its existence."

38. "The only way I can transform the Photograph is into refuse: either the drawer or the wastebasket. Not only does it commonly have the fate of paper (perishable), but even if it is attached to more lasting supports, it is still mortal: like a living organism, it is born on the level of the sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then ages... Attacked by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes; there is nothing left to do but throw it away.

Earlier societies managed so that memory, the substitute for life was eternal and that at least the thing which spoke Death should itself be immortal: this was the Monument. But by making the (mortal) Photograph into the general and somehow natural witness of "what has been," modern society has renounced the Monument. A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything whic denies ripening."

For the past two days I have been sick with exhaustion, and with the existential horror of directing. The tonic has been slow, gentle swims in the sargasso syntax of Barthes' Camera Lucida, a delight of a book, impossible to read in one week, let alone in one sitting. Although I think he's labouring the point a bit at the end of 38 (what, after all, was the latter 18th century if not the Age of Revolutions?), I have been known, after a little too much bourbon and in the right company, to go on about the replacement of memory with the photographed image, and how too often things are not actually looked at, only seen long enough to be recorded - recordings which are then filed away never re-examined. The proof of the experience has become more important than the private enjoyment of the experience itself. Disagree? Next time you're at a gig, watch how many people spend the entire time taking camera-phone snaps rather than actually listening to the music.

( 1:00 PM ) (0) comments