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Alan Moore’s New Feature Film And Spin Off TV Series, Jimmy’s End

October 12, 2010 /

Alan Moore and Mitch Jenkins

Who knows if this will ever make it out of production hell:

As readers of Dodgem Logic #2 will know, photographer Mitch Jenkins took a striking series of portraits of performers at a Northampton burlesque review. He decided to film a 10-minute short featuring the dancers for his showreel and, wanting to help out a friend, Moore offered to write a shooting script. It was called “Jimmy’s End”.

As soon as word got out that Moore was writing something for film, people quickly got interested. Jenkins and Moore were approached by Warp Films (producers of Shane Meadows’ This is England and Chris Morris’ Four Lions), who offered to fund a feature version of the film.

These discussions grew to accommodate the idea of spinning off a Channel 4 series from the film, in the manner of This is England ’86. Moore said that initially he’d been dubious about how the story could be extended in this way but had now figured out a longer ongoing narrative.

Bleeding Cool: Jimmy’s End – Alan Moore’s New Feature Film And Spin Off TV Series

(via John Reppion)

Alan Moore Message Projected Into Space

September 18, 2010 /

Alan Moore

Alan Moore’s message for the beings of space:

Yeah, Hello? Uh, if you’re there pick up, okay listen it’s Alan calling, Alan from Earth. You probably don’t remember, it’s over in the western spiral of the Milky Way although obviously you might have named it after a completely different brand of chocolate. Basically just find the Oort Cloud and ask for directions from there. Anyway just calling to catch up. We’re doing alright with the carbon base lifeform thing. Kids are diversifying nicely, going through a bit of a fad for spines and brains at the minute but it’s probably the same where you are. Well, that’s about it really, we just hadn’t heard from you in a while, like when we killed Michael Rennee or Klaatu a you knew him in The Day The Earth Stood Still. So if you received this, get in touch, but actually thinking about it, don’t bother calling after about, what, 2150, because I’m not expecting anyone to be in. Oh and I’m sending this song along it’s called God Song by Robert Wyatt. I hope you like it. And that you don’t communicate through perfume or minor variatrions in your sense of balance or something. Okay, you take care and I’ll talk to you soon. Love you, Bye.

Explanation (sort of) at Bleeding Cool

Alan Moore Turns Down Offer to Regain Rights to Watchmen in Exchange for Authorizing Sequels

July 23, 2010 /

Watchmen

“They offered me the rights to Watchmen back, if I would agree to some dopey prequels and sequels,” the influential comics legend told Wired.com Wednesday by phone from his home in Northampton, England. The subject came up in a wide-ranging interview about his Moore’s multimedia spoken-word box set Unearthing (right) and other topics.

“So I just told them that if they said that 10 years ago, when I asked them for that, then yeah it might have worked,” he said. “But these days I don’t want Watchmen back. Certainly, I don’t want it back under those kinds of terms.”

Wired: Alan Moore: ‘I Don’t Want Watchmen Back’

Alan Moore Interview in The Quietus

July 12, 2010 /

Alan Moore

I’ve been aware that Moore doesn’t use the Internet for several years now (though he recently admitted in the page of Dodgem Logic that he’s now seen the Dodgem Logic web site but it’s the first and only site he’s ever seen), and I’ve always been curious as to why not. He explains:

I’m practically Amish when it comes down to it. I practically mistrust any technology that came after the buggy. What I tend to think is that the internet is fine for everyone else in the world. I can see that it may have some disadvantages. In fact, I can see a few problems arising from it, but, by and large… everybody in the entire world apart from me uses the internet and seems to get on quite well with it. For my part, I don’t want to be connected to that all-pervasive kind of cyber culture any more than I want to be connected to the physical world that is around me, more than I can help it [laughs]. I’m largely a solitary creature, just by nature and by my work. That said, I venture out into town, but I very seldom leave Northampton.

He also talks a little bit about hypersigils (but of course doesn’t use the term):

We look into the place, but it’s more an excavation of Steve’s peculiar life which crosses into all sorts of different areas and crosses over with my life to a certain degree. It was certainly an odd little story that was self-referential. I’ve often found that if you write self-referential stories that feedback into your actual life then all sorts of weird things start to happen, or at least appear to start happening.

And:

Working as a writer, one of the reasons I got into magic was because you start to notice this feedback between the writing and real life. It might be entirely in my head, but it seems significant. I mean, there was a conference last weekend in Northampton called Magus. It was academics coming from all over the world to talk about me and my work. So I went down with Melinda. They were nice people. One of the academics at this conference was saying that he was working on a book which was about Watchmen as a post-9/11 text. I can see what he means to a degree. One of my friends over there, Bob Morales, said he’d been talking to some people on Ground Zero on September 12, 2001 and he was asking them if they were alright and what it had been like. Two of them, independently of each other, said that they were just waiting for the authorities to find a giant alien sticking half way out of a wall.

The Quietus: Hipster Priest: A Quietus Interview With Alan Moore

(Thanks Josh)

Alan Moore Documentary from 1987

June 11, 2010 /

YouTube playlist

Audio preview of Alan Moore’s new spoken word project

May 23, 2010 /

Unearthing

Pitchfork has a 3:22 minute preview of Moore’s latest work – Unearthing, a spoken word biography of Moore’s frequent collaborator (but otherwise unrelated) Steve Moore. The soundtrack is by Crook&Flail, and the album has guest appearances by Faith No More’s Mike Patton, Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite, Jesu’s Justin Broadrick, and Hella’s Zach Hill.

Pitchfork: Hear an Excerpt From Alan Moore’s Unearthing

You can pre-order it now from Lex Records

Alan Moore interview from Vice

May 12, 2010 /

Alan Moore

From last December:

I was initially very skeptical about magic due to the enormous number of idiots associated with it. However, science cannot explain or rationalize the concept of consciousness because it cannot replicate it in a laboratory. That leaves the single biggest area of our experience of the world unexplained. With magic, all sorts of possibilities are offered as to what consciousness might be, what areas of consciousness might have strange qualities, and what might be practical applications for those qualities.

It used to be that intellectuals and philosophers could be openly interested in magic without getting ridiculed.
Magic is simply a way of exploring the world. It involves following concepts that certain individuals have been exploring since humanity’s inception. Some of them were charlatans, some of them were deluded maniacs or attention seekers, but some of them are the pillars upon which our entire reality is based. Paracelsus basically put forward the concepts of modern medicine, as well as being the first person to explore the concept of the unconscious—centuries before Freud or Jung. He was also a magician. He wouldn’t have used that term himself. He probably would have thought of himself as a natural philosopher—

Maybe we need to go back to that term. But please go on.
Many of the cornerstones of our culture have roots in the occult. The earliest writers and artists came from shamanic culture, and science comes from alchemy. Isaac Newton was an alchemist. Einstein apparently died with a copy of Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine on the corner of his desk, and there are certainly similarities between that work and Einstein’s theory of general relativity. However, magic tends to be viewed as this deranged relation that we don’t want to bring up this far along in the advancement of our culture.

Vice: Alan Moore

Alan Moore Working with Mike Patton, and with the Gorillaz on Opera About John Dee

May 6, 2010 /

Mike Patton and Alan Moore

The project has finally been confirmed. Patton and Broadrick are both attached to Unearthing, “a bewitching story written and narrated by Moore set against an epic score”. Although the soundtrack is led by Crook&Flail, a partnership between Fog’s Andrew Broder and rapper Doseone, there are a slew of cameos, including Hella’s Zach Hill and Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite. “It is about, uh, a co-worker of Alan’s and somehow seemingly about Alan himself,” Doseone told Pitchfork last year. “And it’s about the comic industry, the world of magic, the world we live in, the world we don’t live in.”

Also, last I heard Moore said the Gorillaz project had been “overblown,” but now it appears to be moving ahead:

Moore presently has his fingers in another musical pie – a team-up with Gorillaz’s Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewitt. The trio are collaborating on an opera about John Dee, a mathematician and mystic who advised Queen Elizabeth I. In an interview this week, Albarn said he is doing his homework, reading “Euclid and Pythagoras and all of that stuff”. We hope Moore is holding up his end of the bargain, and is listening to Parklife and the Good, the Bad and the Queen.

Guardian: Alan Moore collaboration with Faith No More’s Mike Patton confirmed

Is Ozymandias from Watchmen based on David Bowie?

February 13, 2010 /

David Bowie & Watchmen

Ozymandias

So here’s a question/ observation – Ozymandias is based on David Bowie, right?

Maybe slight explanation – after going on a Bob Dylan binge at the end of 2008, and it really threw Watchmen into a new light for me. Watchmen is two creators in dialog with Dylan’s work – it’s as much an element of the piece as the Charlton characters. Aside from being littered with references to Highway 61 Revisited and Bring It All Back Home, the tone of the book owes almost everything to “Desolation Row”, all sickly mocking the apocalypse as it breathes down your neck and nervously cackling as the fires start across the street. Watchmen’s treatment of Dylan’s influence is a lot like the relationship between the Velvet Underground and The Sprawl Trilogy, less an influence but a dialog. So why wouldn’t the villain of the piece be David Bowie?

Read More – Supervillain: Stray Thought

RAB’s comment is key.

(via Blustr)

Alan Moore interview at Wired

December 31, 2009 /

Interview is here.

Reactions to a few things:

There is a particular line I remember from The Sopranos where I think Tony Soprano says, “There are only two businesses that are recession-proof. There are certain elements of the entertainment industry, and this thing of ours”

I’m surprised that Moore watched the Sopranos, but it further confirms my thesis that television is the new cinema.

Where comics are starting to score heavily is in the documentary approach. People are starting to tell coherent stories that are autobiographical or documentary comics dealing with a particular situation. There has been a heartening surge of those, and they are largely coming from outside the comics industry. The comics industry, meanwhile, seems to be going down the tubes, as far as I can see. And it’s largely their own fault, that they did not embrace change heartily enough, that they didn’t have any new ideas, that they didn’t have a clue.

I think this is a little too pessimistic, but maybe that’s because I live in Portland and when I think of the comics industry I think of Floating World and The Stumptown Comics Festival and stuff. On the other hand, the only ongoing series I’m currently reading is the documentary series Reich.

would like to think that in our present time, not just in comics but in almost every form of the arts, I think that creative expression is within the reach of more people that it ever has been. Now, that is not to say that there are more people with something to say than there ever have been before. But I would like to see a situation where people finally got fed up with celebrity culture. Where people started this great democratic process in the arts where more and more people were just producing individually according to their own wants or needs.

This, on the other hand, is far too optimistic.

On the subject of writing an opera with the Gorillaz (previously mentioned here):

Well, that is a bit premature. We were having talks, but it was much too early to be talking about it. It got onto a website and then it went all over the place and got incredibly inflated. There’s a possibility of us working together on a project, but it wouldn’t be for a long, long time. But they are hopefully going to be doing something for Dodgem Logic’s third issue. And we’ve got some other fine people lined up for the future.

Consider this a correction.

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