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An Interview with Alan Moore

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Destro
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« on: February 01, 2008, 01:00:35 am »



He's the most respected name in comics, but he's leaving it all behind to focus on multimedia performance and magic. To mark our 100th week, Ninth Art talks to Alan Moore about sorcery, opera, and psycho-geography.
31 March 2003

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In 1994, Alan Moore announced to the world that he was dedicating his life to magic and had begun worshipping a snake. Amid puzzled looks from fanboys patiently awaiting a sequel to KILLING JOKE and scoffs from the magic-with-a-'K' community, Moore embarked on a string of new projects, including a full-length novel (VOICE OF THE FIRE) and a series of powerful mixed-media performances.

With a troupe of like-minded individuals that he dubbed "The Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels" (which included New Age musician Tim Perkins and former Bauhauser David J), Moore began constructing elaborate multimedia happenings, often inspired by the exact place and time of the performance itself. The shows were sensory experiences, featuring fiercely experimental music, avant-garde film collages and Middle Eastern dancers, and even a ghost, though that only made the rehearsals.

Over time, it became clear that the performances had become Moore's chosen medium for expressing his spiritual beliefs and philosophies in their purest form, undiluted by narrative restrictions or editorial guidelines. These were stark works - labyrinthine prose poems that attempted to explain the very nature of the universe itself. They were beautifully constructed, emotionally charged, and more than a little creepy.

His latest performance piece, the North London-inspired SNAKES AND LADDERS, has just been released on CD through Steven Severin's Re:Records.

SNAKES AND LADDERS is a story of spiritual awakening told through the eyes of 19th century pulp novelist Arthur Machen. Where did the fascination with Machen come from, and what inspired the piece itself? "With the SNAKES AND LADDERS piece, it was a daylong event, a 'symposium of real magic' - although I think I'll be the judge of that - and we decided to try and do one of our performances that was entirely based on the place where the event would be taking place, which happened to be Red Lion Square in Holborn.




 "Working on my basic assumption, which is that every square metre on the planet is probably a repository of wonderful things if you dig deeply enough, we got to work researching the square - trying to find out what, if anything, was interesting about it.

"So we started to dig up all this stuff, the stuff about the disinterment of Oliver Cromwell, and how his body was laid out in Red Lion Fields overnight; the fact that at least two or three of the major Pre-Raphaelites had lived there during one period; all of these other little threads, and the fact that Arthur Machen had been living on the Gray's Inn Road, which leads directly onto the square, just at the point where his wife had died and where, according to his autobiography, he'd had these peculiar visions, or shifts of state, probably brought on by the depression that followed his wife's death.

"The thing that's interesting about all of these performances, or at least interesting to me, is that you start with a fairly mundane area of London or Northampton or Newcastle or wherever you're doing it, and the unique character and essence of that area reveals itself to you. It's quite striking. I mean, Highbury is only a couple miles away from Holborn - they're both areas of North London - and yet when we started to dig into Highbury's past we found all of these very different kinds of energies represented.

"We found that there'd been freak shows, that there'd been an awful lot of people, from Aleister Crowley to the record producer Joe Meek, who'd been taking quite a lot of drugs. We found that this even extended to the 1925 Arsenal team, who had apparently been taking some sort of speed - must have been a prototype. They referred to them as 'courage pills'. We found that there was an awful lot of drugs, phantasmagoria, freak shows, ghost shows - there was a freakish atmosphere to Highbury. In Holborn, it seemed mostly to be about Death and Resurrection."

And love is a big theme in that one as well. "Love and Death and Resurrection. It's a different character. The character of Highbury is kind of freakish, garish, drugged, phantasmagoric. Holborn and Red Lion Square seem to have this natural Pre-Raphaelite palette, where it's all these images of love and death and resurrection. I don't think it's something we imposed upon the area; I think it's something that we revealed through our research into the area.



 "It's really interesting doing these things, you find that places definitely do have their own unique essence, made up of their history all of the rumours and legends about them - all of the people who passed through there, leaving a kind of historical imprint. You've just got layers and layers of historical meaning and mythological meaning that somehow go together to make the place what it is."

What are the advantages to performing these works live, as opposed to just writing a book? "Well, that's partly to do with how the things originated. About ten years ago now, in 1993, when I turned 40, I suddenly decided to announce that I'd become a magician, just for a bit of a laugh really. But everyone took me seriously, so then I had to actually do some magic. I had initial experiences which seemed, at least in my book, to be magical experiences.

"As with most things in my life, I will try to process them in some creative way. Having had all of this extraordinary new information pouring into my head as a result of this magical experience, my first thought was 'How do I process this?' Following a kind of instinct, along with a couple of other friends who were experimenting with magic of a similar bent, it kind of felt that the most natural way to express some of the ideas I was receiving on account of the magic was in some sort of mixed-media performance.

"At the time I hadn't realised that a lot of significant magicians in the past had done exactly the same thing. Aleister Crowley did a kind of theatrical, musically-accompanied, mixed media ritual called THE RITES OF ELEUSIS, SL MacGregor Mathers had performed THE RITES OF ISIS - even John Dee back in the 16th century had frightened everybody with a mechanical flying beetle he had produced for one of the Greek dramas."

Moore noted that this practice was even more widespread than he thought. "The biggest thing that I found out was that Opera itself originated as an outgrowth of alchemy. That people like Monteverde, who were basically the fathers of opera - they were alchemists. They'd conceived opera as kind of an ultimate art form because it included all of the others. There'd be a libretto, so that there'd be words; there'd be music; there'd be painted sets; there'd be costumes; there'd be theatrical drama.

"Apparently, this is also why so many of the early operas have alchemical themes. Whether it's THE RING CYCLE, with all the trolls and the gold in the North, or THE MAGIC FLUTE, opera originated as kind of a mixed-media performance vehicle to get across magical ideas. It seems like it's a natural way that people came up with to express magic - in these kinds of overwhelming performances."



 Will an audience listening to a CD of an Alan Moore performance be sufficiently overwhelmed, not having the benefit of the multimedia aspects? "Well, obviously, it would be better if they saw the whole performance. But I think that, because there is so much in the words and the music - those are the main parts of the performance - that it's still easy to get an approximation of the night. Yes, it probably would have been more powerful if they had a fire-breather in their living room with them. That probably would have gotten them to sit up and pay attention. But they can probably get the gist of it with a CD.

"I think this kind of multimedia thing is entirely natural, thinking about it, because if you look at most of our religions - the Catholic Church, for example - in the kind of 'high ritual' Catholic Mass; you can see a multimedia performance there. You've got the incantations, you've got the impressive, resonant music; you've got the light show of the stained glass window; you've got the perfumed incense. We use incense at some of our performances, just to try to engage and, to a degree, overload all of the senses.

"The actual experience is very much like psychedelic drugs, like your head is suddenly receiving information on sixteen channels at once. It's a bit like listening to a musical fugue, where if you try to follow just one of the voices, you can't hear the overall music. So the best way to deal with a fugue, or the sort of 'fugue state' that LSD provokes, is to just not worry about processing it in your normal linear way. Just let it wash over you.

"I think that there's things in common between the sort of things that we do, opera, and high Catholic ritual. It's all working upon similar principles."

How comfortable is Alan performing these pieces for an audience that may or may not get it, for people that might have just have come because he's the guy who wrote WATCHMEN? "I'm very comfortable in practice, because actually, these performances... I don't know if you do get the full effect off of the CD, but they're quite riveting. I'm sure there have been members of those audiences who have come along because I wrote WATCHMEN, but you can generally get a pretty good feel as to how the audience is receiving it.

"As yet, there's not been a bad performance. If you're in a rock band and you're performing the same set every night, you're going to have good nights and you're going to have bad nights. But there just seems to be something about these one-off performances, where you're never going to do it again and you haven't rehearsed it countless times before - there seems to be something that gives an intensity and an immediacy to the performance, just by virtue of the fact that it is a completely unique event that will not be repeated. [The audience] seem to be fairly spellbound.

"During a lot of these performances, there have been a lot of other performances that they probably came to see. During the William Blake performance there was Billy Bragg and Jah Wobble and Deepspace and this weird supergroup that was made up of Glen Matlock from the Sex Pistols, Dave Rowntree from Blur, and Ewan McGregor. The people at these events - a lot of them haven't come to see me at all.

"But I think we're getting quite good at this performance business. We can generally hold an audience and - I think - captivate them for 40 minutes or an hour or however long the performance takes. And if they did enjoy WATCHMEN, and came to see what I was like in the flesh, then hopefully they'd have gotten an experience that in many ways was every bit as interesting as WATCHMEN. That's what I hope anyway."

In part two, Alan Moore talks about Eddie Campbell, VOICE OF THE FIRE, and the end of his comics career. 

Frank Beaton is a freelance writer and journalist based in Portland, Oregon.

This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.

http://www.ninthart.com/display.php?article=532
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Destro
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« Reply #1 on: February 01, 2008, 01:03:45 am »



Between his groundbreaking comic work and his psychedelic occult performances, Alan Moore has acquired a reputation as a rather odd fellow. He talks to Ninth Art about urban legends, collaborating with Eddie Campbell and Jose Villarubia, and the end of his comics career.
07 April 2003

It's hard not to be intimidated by Alan Moore. In addition to being an acclaimed and hugely influential writer, Moore is also a big scary man with an enormous beard and an absolutely biblical voice. He's also been the subject of more urban legends than any author since JD Salinger. I'm sure we've all heard them:

Alan Moore hasn't left his bedroom in over a decade.

Alan Moore has tea with the ghost of Aleister Crowley every second Tuesday.

Alan Moore is wanted by the CIA. No one knows why.

Alan Moore sacrifices things in his basement. Usually journalists.

Having acquired a reputation as the Mad Genius of Comic Books, you have to wonder what Alan Moore himself thinks of the Alan Moore stories. "I'd probably like it if they were more elaborate. People are not fantasising hard enough. They can come up with better stuff than that. I probably don't even hear most of these rumours because I tend to just stay here in my kind of - well, I wouldn't say it was normal - my slightly unusual terraced house in Northampton. I don't venture far outside. I mean, even the other end of the living room is a bit of a mystery to me, so I tend not to hear much of that."

'Most of my ideas these days tend to be heavily coloured by magic.' What about the Howard Hughes-style recluse stories: 'Alan Moore hasn't left his house in twenty years,' etc.? Alan laughs. "Well, Alan Moore goes out nearly every day, if only to walk downtown. For example, today I went and took my laundry to the launderette where the really nice ladies always return it to me nicely pressed and folded.

"I don't really leave the country anymore, that's true. I can't be bothered; don't really have the time. I leave Northampton very seldom. I'll go to London if there's pressing business that needs attending, or go up north to see my daughters, but Northampton's got pretty much everything I could possibly need, obscurity and silence being two of the most attractive features.

And what about the more sinister rumours? "Yeah, I have heard the rumours about how I'm not allowed to visit America because the CIA are still cross with me about BROUGHT TO LIGHT. That's not true. The reason I can't visit America is that I haven't got my passport renewed, and getting one doesn't really sound like something I can see myself doing at the moment.

"Apathy is the key to an awful lot of my behaviour. It's the reason I've got this ridiculous beard and haircut. It's just simple laziness. I can't be bothered to shave every morning like ordinary people do. I can't be bothered going to the barbers or places like that. I could be sitting here writing my silly-arse comic books or composing some new incomprehensible magical tract, which is much preferable to me."




 Alan's first full-length novel, VOICE OF THE FIRE, is finally getting a mass-market release. What does he think of the new edition? "It's going to get an American release via Top Shelf, and this will be this new lavish edition with the José Villarubia illustrations. José has done an awful lot of stuff in comics, and he's a master of digital artwork. He did a wonderful digital section in one of the early PROMETHEAs [issue #7, "Rocks and Hard Places"] where he'd actually found models that looked like the various characters. I though it was one of the best comics sequences I've seen, it had some marvellous things in it.

"José is a wonderful photographer. He's doing an adaptation of THE MIRROR OF LOVE, which is a poem that I wrote for an anti-government homophobia magazine back in the late 80s as a protest for the some anti-gay legislation that the conservatives were trying to bring in. I'd written this fairly comprehensive, if condensed, history of gay culture, and I'd squeezed it into about eight pages. What José's going to do is expand that into an 80-page book, with one verse on one page, and one of his images on the other page.

"At the same time he suggested this, he suggested doing an American edition of VOICE OF THE FIRE, with him doing a series of twelve of his digitally-manipulated photo images, with one image to represent each of the different narrators in the book. So he'll be doing an image of the eleventh century crusader, the 1930s burning car murderer, the Jacobean head on a spike.

"One of the big advantages - and probably why I really agreed to it - is that I'm the writer of the last chapter, so he had to take a glamorous-looking picture of me. I think my extraordinary physical beauty really does deserve a full-page picture, instead of one of those little panels on the back cover. I'm looking forward to that. I still don't know if anyone will be able to make heads or tails of the novel itself, but when they find the text incomprehensible, they can always sit and stare at the pictures for an hour or two."

"José is a great performer [as well]. He did a performance of THE MIRROR OF LOVE at some kind of queer fest or something in Boston - sort of a queer film festival. José did a performance which he sent us a video of, which he performed entirely naked. And I've got to say, you know, nice arse."

 How has Moore's performance work gone over with the occult community? "The only time that we've done one specifically for the occult community at large was the SNAKES AND LADDERS performance, and the audience as a whole seemed to love it. The magicians that I met there - at least the ones that I have respect for - seemed to be quite bowled over, because nobody in magic does this. Nobody in performance does stuff involving magic in the way we do, and nobody in magic does stuff involving performance in quite the way we do. It's a fairly new idea for them.




"The occult community is as easily impressed as anyone is in these matters, you know. The days of Crowley doing his performances are long gone. People haven't seen anything like this since the 20s or 30s; so, consequently, the reception in the occult community has been very, very encouraging. I think to a lot of them it might be like a breath of fresh air."

Artist and long-time friend Eddie Campbell has done a few comic book adaptations of Alan Moore's performances, and some have criticized them for being too literal. Moore disagrees. "I love it. I think it was with THE BIRTH CAUL that Eddie first asked if he could turn something into a comic book adaptation, and I genuinely hadn't considered turning one of these performances into a comic strip. But I've obviously got a very good relationship with Eddie and I tend to trust his instincts.

'Even the other end of the living room is a bit of a mystery to me.' "I was very pleased with the way he had interpreted THE BIRTH CAUL, so when he asked if he could interpret SNAKES AND LADDERS as well, I said 'Yeah, I've got no problem with that,' mainly because I didn't actually have to do anything - I didn't have to write out a script, or anything like that, I can just leave it all to Eddie.

"[The SNAKES AND LADDERS adaptation] is very much his work, his interpretation of the piece, and there were some very poetic images in there. Particularly the way that he cleverly used all of Rosetti's angels from that golden staircase picture - he'd managed to fit that exactly onto the DNA spiral, so you've got a whole bunch of Rosetti's angels walking down a double-helix. Very poetic, very lovely."

Moore has great admiration for Campbell's adaptation skills. "I think that these are probably difficult works to adapt, when it's just sort of a string of sometimes semi-disconnected ideas. Sometimes you might have to make choices; to handle one section in a more impressionistic way, another section in a more strictly literal fashion - these are the choices that Eddie has to make. But by and large, I've been very happy with the choices that Eddie's made."



 A lot of the themes and symbols used in Moore's magical performances - especially SNAKES AND LADDERS - are echoed in his comic PROMETHEA, including the idea of Imagination personified as a woman. How closely would he say the two works are related? "Well, they're both outgrowths of my thinking during this stretch of my life. The performances seem to be a natural way of expressing magical ideas, and since I know my way around writing a comic, it seemed natural to try to express magical ideas through PROMETHEA as well.

"I suppose the reason for doing both is that there are things you can do in the comics medium that you simply can't do in performance, and vice-versa. In some of the issues of PROMETHEA we've done quite complex interplays of words and images, or complex structures, things that are a novelty for the comic book that you couldn't do in any medium other than in a comic book.

"Most of my ideas these days tend to be heavily coloured by a magical world view. You get similar ideas finding their way out and expressing themselves in different terms - in comics or in performance or in the CDs, or whatever I happen to be doing.

Moore plays around a bit with the comics world on SNAKES AND LADDERS, making sly references to "back continuities" and talking about the time he claims to have actually met John Constantine. Does Alan Moore the magician ever feel the need to distance himself from Alan Moore the comic book writer? "Funny you should ask that," he says with a laugh.

"I'm certainly not ashamed of the work I've done in comics. SNAKES AND LADDERS [contains] the only specific reference I've made to the fact that I'm a comic writer, because it was relevant in terms of what we were talking about. Not that I'm ashamed of the comics, or that in the comics I'm ashamed of the magic stuff. I'm pretty open about all of it."

So what does the magician have up his sleeve at the moment? "What I'm trying to do at the moment is finish off all of the mainstream comics work around the end of this year, at which point having retired effectively from mainstream comics, I want to play around with things I've been neglecting. Like, I used to quite enjoy drawing at one point, and although I could never draw quickly enough to actually have a career as an artist, it would be nice to have the freedom to play around with a bit more artwork, some sculpture, more performance work.

"There will probably still be comics in the mix somewhere, almost certainly. It's a medium that I have a great deal of fondness for, and that I feel there's still a lot of potential in.

"But, yes, I will be putting distance between my mainstream comics career and my magical work, simply by closing down my mainstream comics career and becoming a full-time magician." 

Frank Beaton is a freelance writer and journalist based in Portland, Oregon.

This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.

http://www.ninthart.com/display.php?article=536
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