Newsgroup: it.arti.fumetti
Titolo: Un altra intervista ad Alan Moore

...stavolta del Glasgow Herald!  
Non e' recentissima, ma e' molto divertente la reazione del giornalista
di fronte all'Uomo di Southampton...  :-)
Un grazie a "smithand44" che ha postato l'intervista nella mailing list
su Alan Moore.
**********
Yet another Moore interview from a few weeks ago. There have been so 
many recently that they really do start to repeat themselves...
http://www.theherald.co.uk/magazine/archive/26-11-19101-21-46-31.html
Hell raiser
TEDDY JAMIESON 
Alan Moore reinvented the comic book at a stroke. Now his dark 
imaginings are lining Johnny Depp's pay packet
After all that hair, it is the rings that catch your attention. 
Intricate, dangerous-looking things - some in the shape of scorpions, 
complete with little metal legs and tails that look as if they'd 
scuttle away up his arms given the chance - that stretch the whole 
length of his fingers. They glitter and sparkle in the dingy, low-lit 
front room of Alan Moore's terraced house in Northampton as he uses 
them to part the curtain of hair that veils his face. 
The rings add to the sense of menace that some have perceived 
surrounds the man once dubbed the "Orson Welles of comics". Add the 
fact that he's over 6ft tall, says he is a practising magician, is 
apt to quote Aleister Crowley at regular intervals and has spent the 
best part of a decade writing a graphic novel about Jack the Ripper 
and you could be forgiven for thinking "scary bugger". Certainly some 
of his editors are inclined to see him that way. He has something of 
a reputation, he admits. "I don't get much pressure from editors 
because I'm a bit eccentric and unpredictable. I sometimes throw 
tantrums - not very often, I'm not Elton John - just to keep people 
in line."
Yet as soon as he opens his mouth it is hard to take his threatening 
demeanour seriously. It's that Black Country accent. You just have to 
smile when you hear it. And if you spend any time in his presence it 
is soon obvious that Moore is less Charles Manson, more Neil from The 
Young Ones. When he starts to skin up, it becomes all too obvious. 
Moore is just a great big harmless hippy.
His house seals it. The chairs are worn, the carpets, where there are 
any, are threadbare. Piles of books and comics litter every available 
corner. The only colour is provided by the
mystical paraphernalia on the walls - the Kabbalistic stained glass 
window alongside the double-headed, serpent-topped cane. Alan Moore 
is 48. His home has the look of a student flat gone to seed. 
If your idea of success is an open-plan loft straight out of the 
pages of World of Interiors, Moore's property isn't going to cut it. 
But make no mistake, he is a success. He has spent the last 20 years 
writing some of the world's most successful and critically acclaimed 
comic books, including Watchmen and V for Vendetta and he has been 
courted assiduously if unsuccessfully by the movie business for much 
of the last two decades. He's even been the subject of a minor pop 
hit by eighties band Pop Will Eat Itself ("Alan Moore knows the 
score"). And now he's about to be nudged a little further into the 
mainstream when his take on Jack the Ripper, From Hell, becomes the 
first big film of next year. 
The 500-page epic illustrated by Scottish expat Eddie Campbell - 
which is worthy of a Booker nomination according to some critics - 
takes in everything from the poetry of William Blake to the 
architecture of Nicholas Hawksmoor and treads similar ground to 
writers such as Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair. Whether Hollywood, 
in the shape of film-makers the Hughes Brothers (Menace IISociety, 
Dead Presidents), Johnny Depp as Inspector Abberline and Robbie 
Coltrane can match the tone of Moore's dark and sometimes shocking 
story remains to be seen. The American reviews have been mixed.
Moore has not seen the film and unless his daughters drag him along 
to the British premiere he is in no hurry to. "I'm fairly divorced 
from the film so it's not going to be a big emotional event for me," 
he says.
Inevitably, Hollywood has simplified and reduced his quasi-mystical 
take on Victorian culture which is something, he says, he always 
understood would happen. "And the bits that would be excised would be 
the bits I was most personally interested in - the long, droning 
rants on architecture and occultism and things like that which are 
not going to play in Peoria."
Or possibly even Northampton. Certainly it requires a conscious leap 
of the imagination to imagine Moore's murky den could be the 
launching pad for a Hollywood blockbuster. But then conscious leaps 
of the imagination have been Moore's stock in trade since he first 
started writing for 2000AD in the early eighties.
Equally his conversation tends to range far and wide from any given 
starting point. Moore is a garrulous host. When arranging the 
interview he asks how long I'll need. I suggest an hour and a half, 
hoping for an hour. Yet three hours after we meet he's still babbling 
away and I'm starting to worry about missed trains.
You don't so much ask Moore questions as vaguely point him in a 
particular direction and let him loose. In the space of an afternoon 
he tells me, among many other things, about the history of 
Northampton (Samuel Beckett,
Buffalo Bill, the man who helped decode DNA, and Mary Queen of Scots 
have all been seen in the vicinity. "In Northampton we started 
persecuting Jews before everybody else and stopped burning witches 
after everyone else. That gives you some idea of the character of the 
place."), the influence comic strips had on the making of Citizen 
Kane, and how much contemporary science owes to the world of magic.
Magic, he claims, is now a central part of his life. You would think 
being a comicbook writer would be marginalisation enough, but on his 
fortieth birthday Moore opted to eschew a midlife crisis in favour of 
something truly spectacular. "I think a boy's got to have a hobby. 
And with magic you get some really good toys. And it's really good 
for your interior decor," he says. Laurence Llewelyn Bowen has some 
competition, it seems.
"It was very easy to dismiss magic because of the people you met in 
occult shops. Then I started to look at people I couldn't dismiss so 
easily. People like John Dee. This was the guy who largely invented 
the concept of the British Empire. He wrote the book on navigation. 
He was the classic Renaissance man, difficult to dismiss as a 
credulous idiot. Yet he spent half his life conversing with angels. 
The more I got into it the more I realised everything came out of 
magic. It was very difficult to find a musician, an artist, a 
scientist or a politician who wasn't in some way guided by some kind 
of occult order, some vision or some sort of esoteric thinking."
At this point I'm mentally scrambling for names to challenge him 
with. P G Wodehouse? Cole Porter? But he's already moved on to 
deconstruct the importance of magic to Sir Isaac Newton. "Newton said 
there were seven colours in a rainbow. But there are only six. 
There's no indigo. Mood indigo doesn't exist. The reason Newton put 
it there was because he was an alchemist and of course seven is a 
mystical number. Indigo was purely included for occult reasons."
It's difficult for those of us who are dyed-in-the-wool materialists 
to take this all too seriously. (My eyes begin to glaze over at the 
point where he tells me the gods of writing and magic are one and the 
same.) But Moore speaks with the eye-shining certainty of the 
converted. 
"I've judged it purely by results. I don't have time to indulge in 
something that isn't going to reward me. And I wasn't even writing 
this much stuff when I was 25 and full of piss and vinegar." Perhaps 
so, but since his current output is dominated by a tranche of 
superhero comics, albeit well-written ones, that doesn't seem quite 
the claim it might be.
Alan Moore was born in the oldest and at the time poorest area of 
Northampton, The Boroughs. After passing his 11 plus he became one of 
the few working-class boys at the local grammar school, at the mercy 
of a headmaster who wasn't fond of the ones who were. "The headmaster 
had it in for me," Moore suggests. "I'm sure I was a nightmarish, 
sociopathic teenager but he wrote to a lot of the art schools and 
colleges and universities telling them not to take me for the sake of 
their other pupils, which I think is a little harsh. I'm sure I was 
evil but at the same time was 17." Moore's crime was dealing acid. 
("I wasn't really making any profit out of it.") Expelled from school 
and with no qualifications to fall back on, he was reduced to a 
series of menial jobs at the local skinning yards and as a toilet 
cleaner in one of Northampton's hotels.
It was while he was working as a clerk for the gas board that he 
decided to make an effort to pursue his interest in comics for fear 
that he would be stuck in the same office when he was 40. The day 
after he handed in his notice his wife phoned him to report that a 
pregnancy test had proved positive. For a while he lived at 
the "tender mercies" of the social security system, before selling a 
cartoon strip to the rock weekly Sounds. He then progressed to 2000AD 
and an adult comic Warrior, his work for which earned him a string of 
Eagle Awards. "The Americans are very awards conscious and they 
didn't realise it was just 30 tragic blokes in anoraks that voted for 
the Eagles. And they headhunted me."
Moore began to work for DC, home of Superman and Batman and by the 
mid-eighties helped prompt a mini fad for comicbooks in the style 
mags courtesy of V for Vendetta, his vision of a future Britain 
(circa 1997) under the jackboot of fascism (this was the Thatcher era 
after all) and Watchmen, his take on what would happen if superheroes 
existed in the real world. The detailed, intricate, novelistic 
layering of story and symbolism in Watchmen prompted the Orson Welles 
comparisons (overblown as they were) and Moore became a minor 
celebrity, interviewed in the broadsheets and on the tube (and indeed 
on The Tube). At the height of his fame he had one of his "Bette 
Davies-style tantrums" with his publisher and stormed off to reshape 
the comicbook artform off his own bat. "So started the Alan Moore 
wilderness years," he grins. 
If Watchmen was his Citizen Kane then his next major project, Big 
Numbers, could be seen as his Magnificent Ambersons - an ambitious 12-
part exploration of life in a town not unlike Northampton a world 
away from the inbuilt adolescence of the superhero genre. And like 
Welles, Moore was unable to bring it off. Two issues appeared, only 
for it to end abruptly when not one but two artists went awol.
It didn't help that Moore's marriage was also in trouble. It had 
already mutated when Moore and his wife allowed her girlfriend to 
move in with them. "It worked for three years," he says now. "It was 
a statement as much as anything else. We were totally open. It wasn't 
some drunken threesome after a party." As a relationship, however, it 
was not sustainable. "It's a pretty f*****g emotional situation and 
it ended explosively as you might expect." 
These days Moore shares his life and work, though not his house, with 
former Californian underground artist Melinda Gibbie. "We've got this 
whole other room. We've got a collaborative space. I'd recommend it."
The duo are currently putting the finishing touches to Lost 
Girls. "That's the one I will be burned at the stake for," Moore 
claims. "It's pornography. Ten or 12 years ago it struck me that 
there's something odd that very few of us make our living as cowboys, 
private eyes or vampire hunters. Yet all of us have some kind of 
thoughts about sex. Yet the only kind of artform that deals with this 
is this shabby, despised
artform where there are no standards. Pornography is sordid, ugly, 
and offensive. But is that because it is necessarily like that or 
because that's what we get? A collaboration between a man and a woman 
seemed at a stroke to solve the potential problems. I can't imagine 
doing Lost Girls with a man because there would be an inevitable 
locker-room mentality. Hopefully what would come out of this is 
something both men and women find sexy."
Lost Girls explores the sexual experiences of three women who meet in 
Austria in 1913, around the time of the assassination of the Archduke 
Ferdinand. "It sets intimate sexual narratives against a dark, 
imposing background," Moore says, though it sounds as if it can be 
summed up in that familiar hippy mantra, "Make love not war." How 
very sixties. As I said, just a great big hippy.
It's getting dark outside now and Moore is calling me a cab to take 
me back to the train station. We've not had time to discuss his 
attempts to be a musician or his career as a performance artist, or 
even his one shot at being a "proper" novelist (which amounted to one 
book, Voice of the Fire, the first chapter of which was written in an 
invented Neolithic language - not the wisest commercial move) but 
then I don't want to miss Christmas. 
On the way back to the train station the cab driver tells me 
Northampton is the centre of England, halfway between London and 
Birmingham. At the centre, perhaps, but not at the heart. It's a 
marginal place. Which makes it perfect for Moore. Performance art, 
pornography, comic books, magic rituals - he's a man at the margins 
himself. 
From Hell, by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, is published by 
Knockabout Comics at £24.99. The film of the book is released in 
February.
- Nov 26th
 
--
Ciao, 
/\/\oreno

 converted.
Tra questo, e i Watchmen, mi sto convincendo sempre di piu' che a Moore
piaccia Jung (a chi e' curioso sui legami tra magia, creativita' e
espressione simbolica dell'inconscio consiglio "Alchimia" di M.L. von
Franz). Strano che, per quanto io sappia, non l'abbia mai citato
esplicitamente... Forse preferisce divertirsi a disorientare le persone
^___^

 piaccia Jung
Per certi versi vedo molte similitudini fra il lavoro di Moore e le teorie
dell'antipsichiatria, certi passaggi di watchemn sembrano usciti da un trattato
di R.D. Laing (ad esempio il bellissimo "Nodi").
Per chi fosse interessato: 
http://www.decaelo.com/rdlaing/
--
R.D.mauZ!
-- 
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http://www.Mailgate.ORG

 su Alan Moore.
...esiste una mailing list su Alan Moore?
Devo saperne di più! -__^
Ciao,
FABIO
