Alex de Campi: We'll have a poodle, a Baby Grand, and roses every day

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WHO

FILM & TV

COMICS & BOOKS

25.8.06 Crimes to Passion

"Romance has been mugged by convenience
And lies bleeding in a ditch
Everyone's searching for someone
But they don't want to take any risks"

The second part of my Newsarama interview is up. The above isn't from it. That's a blues song I'm noodling around with.

It's taken me a long time - almost a year - to get back into rhyme. It's tough as hell when you haven't done it in a while. Now I'm starting to stay up late and fill notebooks again. I suppose the first effort was The Artist and the Showgirl, a 40-verse ballad I spontaneously wrote while feeling especially romantic last September. Lee O'Connor is eventually going to illustrate it, once I rewrite it (some of the verses are... cringe-making, in retrospect) and bother to find a publisher for it.

Then came Nil, the sprawling Ulysses-esque novel which I will probably never finish: for reasons obscure even to me, it has a Greek chorus of three magpies who speak in a sonnet. They pop up every few chapters and argue in iambic pentameter on what's going on. The sonnets are Shakespearean, but organised in Petrarchian style: turn, counter-turn and stand - four lines per magpie - with the final couplet being an omnes. ("How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin, She taught me turn, and counter-turn, and stand..." ...ah, one of my favourite love poems.) There's also an amnesiac girl in a bear costume, a boy who hasn't slept since his 16th birthday despite the best efforts of doctors ("and these are pills that were my eyes"), a Parliament of Mice, and a talking cancerous tumour in a jar. And lots of references to The Waste Land and Greek tragedy.

In a perfect world, I will finish Nil someday, send the manuscript to Brendan McCarthy, he'll draw all over it and design it, and then we'll publish it as this full colour book/art object, a bit like Tom Phillips' illustrated Inferno or Humument. When I have Very Bad Days, I fantasise about running back to America, moving in monastic solitude to an island in Maine, and writing Nil. Although the likely result would be insanity... But still, it's good to have an Innisfree - as per Chamfort, "Someone asked a bishop to lend him his house in the country, to which he never went himself. The bishop said, 'Don't you know that we must always have a place where we never go,but where we think we'd be happy if we did?"

I do adore Chamfort. "Weak people are the light infantry of the army of the wicked..."

"You called for Eumenides and all that came were magpies." I also love the great and flashing magpie, who flies as artists might. They strut London's parks in their natty black and white long-tailed coats, like they're in on some great conspiracy we leaden humans barely suspect. Like we are the passing birds in their garden.

Now, a year after my first fumbling verses, the rhymes are coming easily. More importantly their rhythm is starting to be right... and unexpectedly, I find myself writing snatches of blues songs. The one above is turning into a cynical re-telling of various Disney fables, where Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White et al have considerably more... real-world ends to their stories, than the ones they fed us as little girls. Ah well. Yet another pointless creative endeavour by yours truly. Perhaps someone will eventually take an interest in the things I do and pay me enough to survive.

It's 1:30am, I've been wittering on about rubbish, and I have pressing business with a circus tomorrow. Good night, gentle stranger. May you dream of amazing things.

( 11:18 PM ) (0) comments

24.8.06 Urban Pirate Girl

"Adam is more slapstick comedy than anything else, but it's slapstick involving Picasso paintings, Wagner, and Freud. The kids aren't meant to notice, because we never say HEY THIS IS PICASSO AND YOU KNOW HE WAS A REALLY IMPORTANT ARTIST, we just go, look! funny painting of blue guy. Oh, he's blue because he's under water. Check out his swimming trunks under his coat! The book is basically me and Luigi di Giammarino making really lowbrow humour and visual jokes about things we love a whole lot. Like Cy Twombly. And Hiroshige. And Basquiat. But we don't stop to explain, or even say who made the images, because the kids are smart enough to go search out this information for themselves if they like it. [...] If I get remembered for one book, it will be Adam. Such a simple concept, so much to be done with it, so elegantly. More.

New interview with me at Newsarama! I'm taking questions there, so if there's anything you've always wanted to ask me, here's your opportunity.

New photo of me on my site!*

Same old Alex! Zooming around London today on my cherry-red mountain bike, from set to pitch meeting to checking out a Soho rooftop location and back again, dressed like Tank Girl's mom, with a bandage on my wrist and a videocamera in my messenger bag, Operation Ivy on the iPod... and I had one of those moments where I thought, yeah, this is what it's about. I may be broke, single, and exhausted, but I'm nailing around Soho at unsafe speeds listening to finest ska-punk and doing exactly what I've always wanted to do. (Complete my life: send money, and men of easy virtue.) One of these days I probably should grow up, but... I really don't see the point.

*How wrecked do I look? That was a still from some stuff on set after I had no sleep in... days. Speaking of which, it's 11pm and I haven't even started the edit I need to do tonight.

( 9:43 PM ) (0) comments

23.8.06 Whipcrack Karma

Lady Luck, rough mistress mine, gives with her lily-white left hand, and with her red right hand she takes. So it goes, so it has always been. Examples to follow.

UP: got picked up to direct the DVD extras for a horror film called Credo a week ago. Having a blast on set (it's going to be a great little film), getting fantastic footage. I've always loved documentary shooting, that pure grabbing moments of time. One of the stars is ex Boyzone singer Stephen Gately, who is utterly sweet and far more down to earth than someone of his fame should be.

DOWN: Last weekend. "It was excellent in parts," demurred the Curate.

UP: Said weekend caused me to write my first blues song, and actually get up off my arse and sign up for blues guitar lessons.

DOWN: Knocked off my bike today and sprained my left wrist. My writing wrist. I can't put any pressure on it without nausea.

UP: Snap-slated to direct another music video, which will also involve directing (on three cameras) and editing a film of a circus performance. It's terrifically exciting, and given the outrageous amount of other work I have on, it may just break me. But as we used to say in Etchells sailing, if you're not over the line early at least a third of the time, you're really not racing.

DOWN: My short The Swain (think Buster Keaton meets the Coen Brothers) didn't get picked up for ScreenSouth's digital shorts funding. I don't know whether it was the kilos of coke, the happy slapping, or the homosexual subplot that put them off handing me taxpayers' money... or perhaps they just bear no love for silent film. A shame, as Flipron were on to do the score, and I had an excellent cinematographer lined up. I've also submitted something to the BBC New Music Shorts scheme, but that's equally wrong (giant CGI hula dancers and nodding dogs, drunk CD players making magic, bad mothering, small children robbing banks...). I hold out little hope that Auntie will smile on my peculiar brand of cinematic madness.

And now for some audience participation. The producer of Credo has asked me to cut together some of my behind-the-scenes footage for the website. The only non-boring way I can think of doing this is cutting it to a song. Thus, if you are in a band, and you have a good, rocking tune that you think would be fun to stick some demon-summoning horror-film images to, please get in touch. You'd need to release (on a non-exclusive basis) some usage rights, and I'm afraid all we can offer is publicity and a big old credit in the film (plus possible inclusion in the film, which would involve you getting actual money). The shame is, I heard a rough mix of a perfect tune the other day - it was even called "Satan's Favourite Rock and Roll Song". But for a variety of reasons too tedious to explain, I must look elsewhere now.

Up, down, around we go, where she stops, nobody knows.

( 3:32 PM ) (0) comments

8.8.06 How I Came To Dream Of Clouds

Summer in England, when all right-thinking people should be spending their afternoons lying in the long grass watching the mute quadrilles and transformations of clouds. Staring at the sky is one of the few times you can look at something without seeing mankind's mark on it. That's why I love Alfred Steiglitz's cloud photographs: one of the handful of examples in Western art of nature in and of itself. (Look closely at 99% of "landscape" paintings: there is always a house or a man or some spoor of our species tucked away in it, to say "Look, I was here; you can be here too. I have left you a place to put yourselves into. Look, I have made nature familiar.")

But I have not been cloudwatching much this past month. I have been working.

nb: "Spooks" is simply a nickname for this scene. It has nothing to do with the British TV series of the same name.

I have wanted to write to you of so many things, gentle stranger. Of dog dreams. Of misty mornings and the queerly perfect solitude of Wigmore Street at dawn. Of moments caught, of time sculpted onto digital tape. But instead I leave you only with half-formed thoughts about clouds and an already out-of-date image. I'm too busy for much else. I still have the daydreams, but there's not the time to write them down. More, anon.