Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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FILM & TV

COMICS & BOOKS

7.4.07 Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most

Old friends of this house will know my obsession with TS Eliot's Waste Land, a poem that doesn't have that much nice to say about April. Even older friends may know of my equal obsession with Landesman & Wolf's blues number, "Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most" - which is based on The Waste Land. I fell in love with the song (via Rickie Lee Jones' Pop Pop album) long before I knew about its Eliot connection, but finding that out somehow made it perfect. Rickie Lee Jones is playing the Jazz Cafe this month and I must somehow scrape together the money to see her, as that chick's music has gotten me through a whole hell of a lot of bad times.

Speaking of which, life continues to be an enormous set of ups and downs at present; I've just released a couple more music videos and gotten selected to take part in Channel 4's 4Talent Inspiration scheme for promising young filmmakers (in Birmingham, a town I am quite convinced is nothing but a giant shopping mall surrounded by derelict warehouses); a friend and I are going to set up a Shynola-style commercial directing venture (he's awesome at The Hustle, and I am awesome at The Geek, so it all works and I can just make films without dealing with ad agency people), and last of all I may have a book deal.

But I've also just found out that no, in fact my father hasn't beaten his cancer, and it's now spreading to really uncomfortable places. Thanks to non-payment by a couple of clients, I've also lived for the past week on less than £1 and was so exhausted thanks to general malnourishment I nearly crashed my bike on Friday. In great irony, one of the few ways I've survived lack of food is via cigarettes, which are exactly what caused my dad's cancer.

Sketch by Tim Hamilton

White Mischief is now about 10 tickets away from being completely sold out, and got mentioned as the Club of the Week in the Times' Knowledge section today. We'll also have an article in the 11 April London Paper, so if you're a local, pick one up and laugh at my inability to answer interview questions at 1am when not having eaten in 24 hours. I have ONE £10 ticket left for White Mischief from my friends & family stash, so if anybody wants it, email me.

Lastly, I am in the market for artists for a few things - one of which will be an Image-type series, 3x 96 page digest books, B&W crime noir (think Road to Perdition/History of Violence). A good friend is also in the market for an artist for a yaoi "surf noir" Tokyopop book... well yaoi might not be the right name for it, as I always think of yaoi as written by girls for girls, and this is written by a gay man for everyone. In both cases (my book and my friend's book) it's just a case of finding the right artist; the stories have already been accepted in principle. Email me if interested with links to your work.