The Emergence of the Posthuman Subject

Early Bird Fee
2-3 July 2010

To be Held at University of Surrey, Continuing Education Centre (CEC), 2nd Floor Senate House.
Full Description
The Emergence of the Posthuman Subject
An Interdisciplinary Conference at the University of Surrey
2-3 July 2010.

Over the past two decades the theories and critical practices associated with the field of posthumanism have become an increasingly significant presence in the Arts and Sciences. Inspired by the radical innovation that period has seen in information and communication technology, philosophers and writers have hailed what amounts to a break with the humanist tradition that has underpinned western civilisation for over five-hundred years. The formerly absolute differences between human and inhuman, set out, for instance, by Rene Descartes in his Discourse on the Method, have blurred. It is now easy to imagine a machine that might think as rationally as a man and increasingly difficult to believe that an animal is little more than a machine, without the consciousness that makes suffering possible. With every new species discovered to possess language-skills, the capacity for logical thought, or the ability to make and use tools, some quality once cited as a trait which distinguished the human, a rational animal, distinct from the rest of creation, is dissolved. As Jacques Derrida noted in his final book, Cartesian Humanism in now in crisis; the traumas inflicted on the validity of the concept “humanity” by Darwin, Freud & Marx are at last beginning to change the way people perceive their world, permitting subjects in the west to cast off a “normative” category that has been used to suppress those modes of being not in line with the supposedly “natural” order characterising the “Family of Man”.

Posthumanist thought is therefore right at the heart of developments taking place in critical theory since the 70s. The posthuman is the point at which the most pressing concerns in gender studies, post-structuralism, cultural materialism & postmodernism converge. Crucially, posthumanism provides what is perhaps the one vital theoretical point of crossover for research taking place in the Arts and Sciences. Posthumanism can be defined as the attempt to think on how the latest technological innovations and the considerable advances that are even now taking place in the fields of physics and biology, impact on our concept of the human and on our perceived place in the world.

This conference presents papers from academics and postgraduates working in disciplines as diverse as Literature, Psychology, Philosophy, Anthropology, Film Studies, Palaeontology, Zoology, Theatre, and Theoretical Physics: on the Emergence of the Posthuman Subject. The conference is to take place at the University of Surrey, the institution at the forefront of space exploration technology in the UK, and situated right in the centre of the territory west of London criss-crossed by flight-paths and motorways celebrated as a source of endless fascination in key novels by JG Ballard.

Potential topics would include but not be limited to:

1. Key issues of discussion
the evolution of homo sapiens; the cultural assimilation of quantum physics and string theory; the emergence of cyborg sexualities; the shifting boundary-line between the Human and the Animal; the “avatar” and the virtual world;

2. Cultural and artistic prototypes and responses
the prototypes of the posthuman in the modernist movement; apocalyptic literature; the impact of information-communication technology on the form and content of film, music, literature and art; visions of the planet after the extinction of our species;

3. The work of relevant artists, scientists and philosophers
JG Ballard, Jean Baudrillard, Charles Darwin, Philip K. Dick, Jacques Derrida, R.D. Laing, William Burroughs, Italian Futurists, Isaac Asimov, Judith Butler, Steve Mann, Stelarc, Wyndham Lewis, H.P. Lovecraft, Steven Hall etc, etc.

E-mail submissions and any questions to David Ashford (D.Ashford@surrey.ac.uk) and James Riley (rjer2@cam.ac.uk).

Another Green World, by Geeta Dayal. New York and London: Continuum, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-8264-2786-1.

Among the more misleading clichés surrounding Ballard is this: for a writer who claimed never to listen to music, he has had an inordinate influence on an entire ecosystem of musicians. While this effect is often undeniable, in many cases the unblinking canonisation engendered by Ballard’s entombment in the Collins English dictionary forces commentators to wedge musicians into narrow ‘Ballardian’ parameters in the rush to explain the providence of a hint of car-crash sex in the lyrics or urban noir in the synthscape. But as with Ballardian film adaptations, sometimes the most fruitful connections for those looking to map a hypothetical Ballardosphere can be found in the slipstream, between categories, in the work of artists in different fields but working the same philosophical terrain. The thematic, aesthetic and conceptual affinities are neither implied nor explicit, but inherent in the cross-linkage between them.

Brian Eno is such a musician, and while as far as I am aware he has never drawn attention to Ballard’s work, Ballard has to Eno’s. This acknowledgment belies JGB’s public image (which he playfully encouraged) as some kind of mythical Man with the Tin Ear. Describing his Vermilion Sands stories in 2001, he said: ‘Vermilion Sands is a kind of cross between Palm Springs and Juan-les-Pins, a version of the leisure society we were about to enter, though for some reason we stopped and turned away at the door. Music by Brian Eno, metal foil architecture by Frank Gehry, dreams by Sigmund Freud, decor by Paul Delvaux’. There is the sense that Ballard recognises in Eno’s ambient music (I can’t imagine he’s responding to the pop albums) the peculiar sense of willed isolation it seems to induce, centrally represented by the dreamy illusionism of Music for Airports (1978) and its planned amniotic effect on travellers fearful of dying in an air crash. Eno’s vision of the modern airport, piped in with the kind of soundtrack he made to order, is of a facility that functions similarly to Ballard’s psychotropic resort, which responds to the fears and needs of its residents while adjusting itself accordingly with sentient architecture and ’singing statues’. As Owen Hatherley, a perceptive commentator on both Eno and Ballard, asks of Vermilion Sands: ‘could there be here a sort of affirmative retort to the insistence that all Modernist or utopian communities inevitably end up in dystopia?’

More overtly, the music critic Simon Reynolds has judged Ballard and Eno to be ‘the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th Century’. He even nurtured a ‘fantasy project’ about them, admiring how both ‘take ideas from science and set them loose in culture, find applications. Ballard is like a British McLuhan, except better because he’s a far better writer and thinker – more original, more convincing… Eno is almost like a British Barthes’. However, the project foundered because, for Reynolds, ‘in some ways the affinity seems as much temperamental as anything conceptual’. In addition, he felt that because ‘they are so eloquent about what they do and such brilliant writers, that there’d be zero role for any critic or commentator. There’d be very little to mediate or interpret, as they’ve said it all, so much better’. That seems an appropriate note to end this introduction on, which has attempted to outline a tenuous, hidden logic of shared working methods and thought processes between these two cultural figures. It was meant as a sop to those wondering why I am reviewing a book about Brian Eno on a site about J.G. Ballard, and having delivered it, I shall now commence the review, leaving any further Ballard/Eno connections to be made by the reader herself.

An oblique strategy.

In the introduction to her book on Eno’s Another Green World (1975), Geeta Dayal explained that the manuscript was a long time coming as she struggled to come to terms with one of the most storied productions in art-rock history. There has been so much said, hypothesised and guessed about the album (amplified by Eno’s refusal to analyse the relics of his past) that one wonders: what more can be added? Dayal’s solution is to delve into the process behind the album’s making, not so much the actual mechanics of the music making but more the conceptual and theoretical alignments Eno brought to the studio. These include his abiding interest in cybernetic systems and the element of chance in the recording process, famously represented by his Oblique Strategies cards developed with the painter Peter Schmidt. The cards contained sets of non-specific instructions that, when picked at random, were designed to break creative deadlocks by forcing the artist into counter-intuitive intellectual space. Dayal, at an impasse herself, allowed the cards to guide the writing of every page and the results are somewhat mixed, yet rewarding.

The book is part of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, which produces short texts about influential albums in rock history. I’ve never been wholly convinced by the series, due to its canon (Celine Dion, but not The Stooges) and the patchy, hipsterish quality of much of the writing. But who can argue against Another Green World as an ‘influential’ album? It is a sound choice, and with it comes the attendant pressure to satisfy not only the hardcore Eno nerds (of which, sad to say, I’m one) but also the Nick Hornby-style 33 1/3 fanboy audiophiles. Dayal has come in for a deal of criticism, as she admits on her blog, for recycling old Eno interviews. But it’s hard to include new interviews with Eno about his 35-year-old album when, as she explains elsewhere, he is only interested in talking about his latest art installation these days. To compensate, she knows her way around the Eno interview archive, weaving together a selection of quotes from the past that place the album’s creation in a tangible historical context. In addition, she has interviewed a small but quality roster of Eno collaborators and associates including Robert Fripp, David Toop and Harold Budd. Their brief but incisive insights add weight to the text.

But not all the research is solid. Dayal asserts that Another Green World is the first record to be credited to ‘Brian Eno’, rather than the pop-flash of his first two albums, which simply announced ‘Eno’. Yet the cover of Another Green World (and the centre label of the original vinyl pressings) clearly reads ‘Eno’ – it’s even emblazoned on the reproduction on the cover of her book. Dayal’s implication is that the switch from ‘Eno’ to ‘Brian Eno’ meant a shift in perspective and approach from the earlier pop records, whereas the reality suggests that Eno saw Another Green World as a continuation of early experiments, perhaps even early personas. This could have engendered fruitful analysis, given that Dayal does not spend much time discussing the creative leap between Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) from 1974 and Another Green World, released less than a year later.

However, such omissions are pretty small beer and do not undermine the experience, although they have for others. Much of the criticism levelled Dayal’s way has come from people who admit that they have read ‘everything’ on Eno but that the book fails to tell them anything new about the music. But, as she takes care to outline in the introduction, the book is all about ‘process’ and context, and she displays courage for refusing to offer yet another meaningless subjective interpretation about one of the most mysterious and ambiguous of pop albums. Dayal does not pore over the actual music so much as the context of the record in time and intellectual space (although there is the occasional lapse: the end of a track is described as sounding ‘like a UFO landing’, a strained attempt to interpret the ‘otherworldliness’ of Eno’s work). She examines the popular music scene of 1975, as well as Discreet Music, also released that year. In fact, she spends two chapters on Discreet Music, attracting further criticism from Eno fans, mainly because she does not explicitly state the connection between it and Another Green World, although it seems clear to me that, for her, both albums are two sides of the template for future Eno music. This is an interesting tactic, as the two are not usually discussed in this way, Discreet Music bracketed off into Eno’s parallel ambient body of work and Another Green World in the pop stream, despite the fact that just 5 of its 14 tracks contain words.

Dayal rightly undercuts the cliché that Eno is a ‘painterly’ musician in favour of the more useful metaphor of filmmaking, which she identifies ‘as a better model for how Eno works with other people in practice. He has a knack for indentifying and assembling the right mix of people to serve a larger vision, and the ability to coax unexpected performances out of these collaborations … And like any great director of the cinema, everything Eno touches bears his subtle but unmistakeable fingerprints, regardless of who the stars in the foreground might be’. This is a perceptive point, especially applied to Eno’s production career, in which he marshals casts of musicians like ’stars’ and ‘directs’ them (literally, using hand gestures and even hip gyrations) to evoke the mood he wants. On some tracks on Eno’s early productions for Robert Calvert and Phil Manzanera, where his vocals are so distinctive and his synth sheens and production touches so identifiable, you would swear they were Eno solo records if you knew no different. This is the mark of the musical ‘auteur’ who directs other people’s work, yet bears a singular imprimatur. It is somewhat disappointing, then, that Dayal fails to record the links between Eno’s Music for Films (1978), among the more under-analysed entries in his back catalogue, and Another Green World. Eno recycled tracks from Another Green World into a pre-release, promo version of Music for Films that also contained tracks recorded at the same time as the former, presumably with the same theoretical framework (cybernetics; chance) in place. Eno designed Music for Films as a collection of imaginary soundtracks for films that did not exist, but which nonetheless could be licensed by directors for films to come. It is a compelling case of the irreal creating the conditions for the real, and in line with Dayal’s observations about both Another Green World and Eno’s working practice: ‘He approaches music the way a director might approach a soundtrack – as a means of establishing a mood, a sense of time and place’.

Elsewhere, Dayal’s curiosity allows her to productively follow many tangents in pursuit of what she describes as the ‘connective tissue’ linking the album with other ‘people and ideas bubbling under the surface of popular culture’. These are attractive digressions, although she is finally defeated by the 33 1/3 format, which does not allow the scope to flesh out multiple, big ideas. I get the sense she has only begun to scratch the surface, and that a larger work of this sort could easily have been written by her. Despite Reynolds’ reservations, there is much potential for a volume on Enoesque philosophy, and Dayal would be ideally placed to write it, as her various extraneous articles on aspects of Eno’s career testify (and which, in some cases, best the writing on display here).

In the end, though, such a feeling of incompleteness is easy to reconcile with the record, which, after all, comprises a series of musical fragments that fade in and out seemingly at random, as if you are coming into and out of ’scenes’ that have already started and that will continue on after you leave. This book will bring open-minded Eno fans back to the ideas and theories that permeate his work, and, ultimately, back to the music with renewed vigour. For novices, it will lead to interesting discoveries. In this, Dayal has exceeded the expectations of the 33 1/3 design.

Here’s hoping she’s not so sick of the process that she does not want to continue to explore the critical enigma of her subject matter in future works.

..::: PREVIOUSLY ON BALLARDIAN:
+ Tribute to J.G. Ballard & Brian Eno

+ Excerpt from the introduction to Another Green World, by Geeta Dayal
+ Excerpt from Chapter 5, ‘Abandon Normal Instruments’
+ Geeta Dayal’s blog, The Original Soundtrack

Landing Sites from Simon Sellars on Vimeo.

This is vaguely Ballardian… It’s my short film based on the ‘reversible destiny’ theory of the architects/conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins.

It was made for a seminar I taught at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory, RMIT University, which attempted to weave connections between mythogeography/psychogeography and Arakawa and Gins.

Results from the seminar, including my students’ ongoing design work with Dr Pia Ednie-Brown, can be found here.

Text: Arakawa + Gins.
Music: Melanie Chilianis.

TURN UP THE VOLUME.

Click on the poster below for a closer look…

The author of Lord Horror.

Interview by Simon Sellars.

This, the second of our three-interview series with Savoy luminaries, covers the company’s musical and spoken-word output. Part 1, with Michael Butterworth, discussed Savoy’s publishing arm, and part 3, with John Coulthart, will cover Savoy’s visual/comics/graphics output. To coincide with this series, we also ran a Savoy/Ballardian Microfiction competition.

This interview is in two parts. In the first, David Britton discusses PJ Proby, Ballard, Fenella Fielding, Ian Brady, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds magazine, Heathcote Williams and his own upbringing. In the second, he discusses New Order, Joy Division, punk, Manchester music, Kingsize Taylor, The Cramps, Zappa, Beefheart and Springsteen. Interspersed throughout both parts are sound clips from Savoy releases [NOTE: sound clips don't work in Google Reader].

..:: Don’t forget Part 2 of this interview!

Excerpt from forthcoming release: Fenella Fielding reading from JG Ballard’s Crash. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

Savoy music and talking books can be purchased from eMusic, iTunes and Savoy Books.

IN PART 1 OF THE SAVOY INTERVIEWS with Michael Butterworth, we learnt all the gory details about Savoy Books, “England’s only truly alternative and autotelic publishing company”, founded by Butterworth and David Britton in 1976. The Savoy roster includes many writers who appeared alongside Ballard in New Worlds magazine — including Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, Charles Platt, Samuel R. Delany, Langdon Jones and M. John Harrison — and the company itself has been hit by multiple scandals, including the imprisonment of Britton twice on obscenity charges. But what about the musical arm of this black empire? Savoy Records is the company “responsible” for resurrecting the career of PJ Proby, the trouser-splitting redneck-rock anti-hero from the 60s and repackaging him as a return-of-the-repressed Frankensteinian monster. It’s the company that claimed Madonna guested on one of its records with Proby, singing a song that “glorified sex with young girls”. It’s the company that used a “quote” from Prince Charles on one of its record sleeves, in which the Bonny Prince was alleged to have said: “Only dickheads die from cocaine. The best people used it and are still using it”. It’s the company that turned horrorshow characters from its demented comics into recording “stars”. And today, it’s the company attempting to resurrect (despite her apparent protests) the actress Fenella Fielding’s career, with a covers record of modern-day pop songs and — of all things — her spoken-word rendition of Ballard’s Crash. Nestled like toad in the hole among all that headspinning madness is a brace of great tunes, embracing muscular dance, redneck folk and way-more-punk-than-punk theatrics. Stuff New Order, Joy Division, Ballard, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Prince Charles, Lord Haw-Haw, the Queen, the IRA, Bowie, Phil Collins, Proby, the Cramps, the Stooges and Prince into a blender filled with flesheating worms, and the brown goo flowing from the nozzle is nothing less than Savoy Records. But handle with extreme caution, for the worms will still be alive.

LEFT: PJ Proby and Peter Hook of New Order in Suite 16 recording studio, Rochdale, circa 1984. From the “Love Will Tear Us Apart” sleeve.

Savoy Records seems to anticipate, heighten or subvert certain commercial trends. The work they did with Proby ironically comments on all those cynical marketing exercises whereby old has-beens like Tom Jones re-record hip songs like “Kiss” by Prince. But instead of trying to revive old careers, Savoy amplifies all the reasons why these “has-beens” fell from favour. The furore surrounding the sleeve of the Lord Horror record, with its fake Prince Charles quotes and other unspeakable anti-semitic rants attributed to nasty Savoy characters, seems to say that punk never went far enough. For Savoy, the equation could be something like this: “Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious wore swastikas on their clothing, but it was only for show. They were never really interested in pushing people’s buttons. If punk really wanted to shock with Nazi imagery, this is how it should be done”. Here is a parallel universe where punk was always shocking, and never mere window dressing for clothes horses.

In part 2 of the Savoy interviews, we have David Britton himself to tell us all about the music biz, in what amounts to only the second full-length interview he’s ever given. David is very much a man of mystery — not only does he rarely speak on the record, but to this day, as far as I know, there have been no adult photos of him published. It was with that puzzle in mind that I went to sleep one night in 2008, when I first had the idea of approaching these people for their story, thinking intently about the Savoy empire and what it all meant…

That night I dreamt a very strange dream, which I recall very well. David Britton and Michael Butterworth had invited me to their glamourous beach shack. After a few drinks, they gave me a rather expensive surfboard and, smitten with the board, I excused myself, took my leave and paddled out to sea. But I pushed out too far, and being a hopeless swimmer panicked and turned back. The water was red by the way, but it wasn’t blood — that’s just how it was in this world. On the way back I noticed a crack in the board. I was apprehensive but felt that David and Michael wouldn’t mind, and that they would understand that it was a design flaw rather than my clumsiness that had cracked it.

When I got back to their shack, they had, according to a note from David, decided to go on holiday, although they had left me keys and the note said to let myself in and make myself at home. I remember thinking that although I had met Michael before in the dream world, David always kept himself hidden when he spoke to me, talking from behind doors and curtains. When I opened the door, they were inside after all — they were running late, and were still packing. And I had to catch my breath because there, right in front of me, was the mysterious David Britton! Returning early from the water, I had caught him by surprise, and he hadn’t had time to hide himself from me. In fact, he was frozen in mid-stride like a statue — having heard the door open, he was attempting to run for cover behind the curtain. I took in the sight of something I’d never seen before: David Britton. He turned out to be very tall and lean, although not skinny, more the naturally athletic type, with swept-back medium length hair. He was wearing shorts and had some kind of snake tattoo on his lower legs and ankles. He seemed very graceful and, after he had relaxed from being caught out, said hello to me in a cultured English accent.

Then Michael offered to sell me some books, David some records, and I woke up…

Two years later, I conducted this interview with David Britton by email. I still have no idea what he really looks like.

Prince’s “Sign O’ Times”, performed by PJ Proby. Courtesy Savoy Records (1989).

SIMON SELLARS: David, in our interview with Michael, he said that New Worlds was the inspiration for Savoy Books. Looking back at New Worlds, there seems an obvious rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic through the magazine — a savage blend of experimental pop culture shot though with various rock allusions. Was this in turn an influence on Savoy Records?

DAVID BRITTON: In the 1960s, New Worlds was the literary equivalent of the Beatles. That decade produced some fine magazines, literary ones like Evergreen, Transatlantic Review and Encounter. Only New Worlds possessed the true primogeniture of a rock ‘n’ roll quality. In my mind it sat well with the music experiments of the day, and had a harder edge than the best of the underground magazines — Oz, IT and so on. It was rock ‘n’ roll in literary form, and to me Ballard and Moorcock were as revolutionary and exciting as Beefheart and Zappa. As a boy I’d been very taken with Weird Tales. Its pulp ambience, Virgil Finlay’s illustrations and the writer-triumvirate of HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard and Clark Ashton Smith held a special appeal. To find a magazine in the 60s that seemed as exciting as Weird Tales must have been in the 30s was a real inspiration. To perhaps overstretch an analogy, you might say that Ballard was the equivalent of Lovecraft, Moorcock was Howard and, at a push, Aldiss was Smith. Michael Butterworth had already made his presence felt in New Worlds. I’d seen advertisements around Manchester for readings he did with New Worlds regulars such as Libby Houston, and I was conscious at the time of being an onlooker staring through a window into a creative world out of my reach. Michael had been at the heart of New Worlds at the peak of its run; I was jealous of that but also inspired that a writer from Manchester had actually made it. When I met up with him in the early 70s, I began to feel that my time might be coming.

LEFT: David Britton’s copy of Passort to Eternity.

SS: Michael detailed in length the influence of Ballard on his own writing. Was it the same for you?

DB: As a teenager, Ballard’s short stories constantly looped through my mind in a way his novels did not. The “compact” novels with their strange, evocative compelling prose were both adult and original. I was familiar with some of them from Ted Carnell’s New Worlds/Science Fantasy magazines, but they didn’t properly come into focus for me until I read them collected together in the Berkley paperbacks — The Voices of Time and Passport to Eternity — which I read while living in my North Manchester home, in Blackley, going to and from work in a rather pointless way.

On my route to the factory to combat the boredom that lay ahead, I played games, giving certain plots of ground “Ballardian” qualities. A grass verge, so nondescript, became significant. The steep incline in Victoria Avenue concealed the approaching ocean from “Now Wakes the Sea”. The dead waters of the Rhodes Wood Reservoir, ringed with poinsettia, twinkled alienly. These internal miseries came to be a ticking clock of my life, a way of measuring the passage of time. Later came the more intense fiction of “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race” — Ballard rewriting a hero of mine, Alfred Jarry — and the one piece that really connects to Lord Horror, Ballard’s article “The Alphabets of Unreason”, the first piece I’d read that put a modern finger on the appeal of the Third Reich and Hitler. No moralising, just a recognition of the Reich’s genuinely seductive theatrical power: “The psychopath never dates”; “Hitler is completely up to date”; “Hitler’s revulsion against the Jews was physical, like his reaction against any peoples, such as the Slavs and Negroes, whose physique, posture, morphology and pigmentation alerted some screaming switchboard of insecurity within his own mind”. This was powerful stuff in 1967, and it came courtesy of New Worlds. The only other person whose force of opinion hit me that hard was Professor George Steiner, many years later, talking on The Late Show about Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph Of The Will. Very eloquently he said that while the appeal of Reifenstahl’s film was beguiling and the imagery of the Nazi state sucked you in, the correct response to it was a very emphatic, “Thank you, but no.”

In my writing, however, Moorcock had been more of an inspiration to me than Ballard, and I played to that influence in the early manifestations of Savoy; you might say Michael Butterworth filled a gap in the Savoy ethos with his own Ballard influence. Our collaboration on Lord Horror came out of the editing partnership on the small press magazines, and developed with the founding of Savoy. M John Harrison worked with us for two years and his presence was probably as much of a catalyst for Lord Horror as my later imprisonment in Strangeways; these things opened the doors to my beginning in writing. Harrison was a friend and an inspiration, I’ll be forever grateful to him for that. It’s frustrating that Lord Horror never appeared in New Worlds; I’d come of age too late to be a part of those wonderful heady days. But the novel is inspired by the New Worlds philosophy. It’s a homage, and an attempt to continue the tradition of Ballard and Moorcock, Harrison and Langdon Jones. The connection was continued when we published Lang’s story collection, The Eye of the Lens, and later hired him to proofread Motherfuckers.

SS: How did growing up in Manchester influence your worldview?

DB: There’s a notorious — to us — moment in the TV interview which Ballard gave to Jeremy Isaacs on Face to Face where he says that his writing career took the imaginative route it had because of his childhood in Shanghai, and he doubted if he would have become a writer if he had grown up in a suburb of Manchester. Well, he’s on record all over as saying the dullness of the suburbs gives birth to anarchy and strange impulses — that’s the entire subject of The Unlimited Dream Company — so, actually, I think he would have faired better than he thought. Though I spent nearly all my younger life trying to escape it, determining that it would not be my limit, North Manchester in the 50s and 60s where I was born and grew up is, in a sense, my Shanghai. By my teens, its terraced slums had been razed and replaced with a nondescript mess growing into a landscape of quiet desperation, a bleak “Ballardland”, artistically and spiritually, that pushed me to make the local library a second home in search of a richer imaginative life. I did escape, finally. But since I have left, its disaffected characters and its underbelly of absurdity, grimness and black humour has risen in significance in my mind, providing an unlikely creative font that I drew on for Lord Horror and all my subsequent books.

Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire”, performed by PJ Proby with the Savoy Holman Hunt African Orchestra. Courtesy Savoy Records (1990).

SS: What was the impetus behind Savoy branching out into making records?

DB: Michael had been friendly with Heathcote Williams and his London-based anarchist press, The Open Head Press, in the 1970s. Open Head were releasing records, and one of their 45s, “Sid Did It”, an anti-punk song, was a truly demented parody of the Sex Pistols. That had a big influence on us: a book publisher releasing records. Also, the biography we were meant to be doing with PJ Proby wasn’t getting anywhere, and I began to realise we were being irrevocably drawn into recording him.

“Shoot Yer Load” by Meng & Ecker. Courtesy Savoy Records (1989).

SS: Is there a conscious continuity between Savoy books, records and comics, aside from the integration of characters like Meng, Ecker and Horror?

DB: Rock ‘n’ roll’s spirit is hopefully always with us. It’s the bottom-line inspiration for Lord Horror, Meng & Ecker, La Squab and everything I’ve written. The rhythm of psychomorphic Horror is set to a rock ‘n’ roll beat. Rock ‘n’ roll and Auschwitz spell Lord Horror. To me, there’s inevitability in their blending. The bittersweet euphoria of rock ‘n’ roll with the most perverted campaign of terror in the history of the world. One breeds heightened life, the other depletes the human spirit. Positive and negative in the extreme.

The seeds were all there from the beginning. I don’t know how conscious a process it was, but I didn’t see there were boundaries. We were already mixing genres. It was a mindset we had together, and the multi-media approach unfolded quite naturally. Jack Trevor Story’s novel Man Pinches Bottom has a central character that comes from the world of Fleetway comics. The main protagonist in Nik Cohn’s novel I am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo was a rock singer amalgam of PJ Proby and Elvis. All the threads of Savoy — books, music, graphics — can be knitted together to make a matching coat of its colourful contributors, real or imagined. You could easily place PJ Proby into the Meng & Ecker comics without it seeming contrived. The real life William Joyce/Lord Haw-Haw had been a comic character in Radio Fun in the 1940s, so right there Horror had visual ancestry. During the Second World War, Joyce’s radio broadcasts came from the Nazi station Reichsrundfunk via Radio Luxembourg. Ten years after Haw-Haw, Luxemburg happened to be the station from where young cockney Gus Goodwin, the first English rock ‘n’ roll disc jockey, beamed out his loon-a-tickery to grateful teenagers. Simultaneously, Alan Freed was banging his shoe on the table, also broadcasting on Radio Luxembourg, exhorting his clarion call to “get with it”. Gradually, through a glass darkly, the real and the unreal intertwined. It was a logical if deviant sideways step to have Haw-Haw by way of Horror broadcasting rock ‘n’ roll from Auschwitz into Albion. It doesn’t matter whether they’re from the world of comic, books or music or real life.

The authors co-opted by Savoy — Henry Treece, Heathcote Williams, Harlan Ellison, Ken Reid, David Lindsay, Maurice Richardson — dance to the same magical fugue. As we went along, it became more of a conscious process. We set out to replace what we saw as a bogus mainstream with an alternate reading list. Membership to the Savoy Irregulars was regulated stringently. It was an elite membership, with no room for a “Martin Amis”, a “Bono” or an “Art Spiegelman”. Moorcock probably supplied the blueprint here. Over his career he championed so many eclectic people, joining them together in New Worlds and in his own fiction.

Image from PJ Proby promotional booklet, Savoy 1984.

Iggy’s “The Passenger”, performed by PJ Proby. Courtesy Savoy Records (1995).

SS: What’s remarkable about Proby’s story? What does he signify to you?

DB: Proby’s appearance and general demeanour coincided with the psychology of a particular group of 1950s American actors and singers who appealed to me during my formative years. They conveyed the image of the romantic rebel that belonged to a world so remote from the everyday world of North Manchester. That “Rebel Without a Cause” sneer of Dean, Brando, Dennis Hopper, Rod Lauren and Vic Morrow. The pedigree extends to Lash LaRue, Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe, and is rockabilly’d up further in pre-army Elvis, Eddie Cochran, Johnny Burnette, Gene Vincent and, the honorary overseas member, Vince Taylor. They had a mean-as-shit hero/hoodlum look, the wild kind of chaps that creep through a David Lynch film. The attitude is no better formed than in PJ Proby. When our paths finally crossed, I had a first-hand chance to experience the most charismatic, angry, anguished and flawed man I’d ever encountered.

“A very good friend of ours”: The Beatles introduce PJ Proby in 1964.

PJ Proby: Three-week Hero. Part 1 of a short film about the man himself. Part 2 is here.

Proby was, still is, a very talented individual, who had the top of the showbiz world dangling just out of reach whilst being psychologically incapable of controlling himself. He was a redneck visionary who ran out of his natural decade into another, even stranger one — the 1960s. Nik Cohn’s take on him in Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, the first serious book on rock ‘n’ roll, is a perfect summation, encapsulating what was so great about him. A magnetic ball of self-destruction, a swaggering egomaniac who could have been the greatest star in the world. He either had it all taken away from him by internal psychosis, or he was a joke that misfired. He could have joined the Beatles or Led Zeppelin, taken the Elvis route or, completely at home, sauntered into William Burroughs’s world. He could have been tattooed with William Blake’s The Red Dragon and given Hannibal Lector a run for the aperitifs. He was Dennis Hopper out of Blue Velvet displaced to Manchester and the Yorkshire Moors.

In 1985 [Proby] was living in the Yorkshire village of Haworth, home of the Brontës, when he was visited by the founders of Manchester-based Savoy Books, Mike Butterworth and his partner David Britton, who has devoted his life to blasphemous sedition. Britton wrote the notorious novel Lord Horror, most copies of which were seized, on publication in 1990, by the Greater Manchester Police

“Jim was lying low, after the affair with Alison,” says Butterworth. “We wanted to relaunch his career.”

PJ Proby’s collaboration with Savoy produced a number of intriguing recordings, including his versions of “Anarchy In The UK” and TS Eliot’s The Wasteland.

“I had no idea who TS Eliot was,” says Proby. “But the more I do The Wasteland, the better I get.”

“One day the world will realise what a genius he is, and by then it will be too late,” Britton said. “Proby is a walking piece of art. His talent needs preserving for future generations.”

After Britton’s mother died, the three gathered at her house at Saddleworth, overlooking the scene of the Moors Murders. There, with Proby larking about on the Zimmer frame that had belonged to the deceased, they worked on his single “Hardcore”, which, unless I’ve missed something, remains the most offensive record ever released. (“Everything y’all think is fun,” Proby once said, “I think is boring.”)

Butterworth says Savoy stopped working with Proby, “because he asked for £2,000 to read one poem. I said: ‘Jim: it’s only nine lines.’ He said, ‘Maybe – but you will have my voice forever.’”

Robert Chalmers, “PJ Proby: Could the now-penniless singer be ready for a comeback?”, The Independent, 30 September, 2007.

SS: Proby lived in Manchester — an intriguing prospect. Tell me about it.

DB: By the 1980s, Proby was moving between bedsits and squats and sleeping on pub floors in the same North Manchester streets I’d been born in. How incredibly coincidental is that? What force of fate had dragged him from Texas to 1950s Hollywood, then over to England in 1964 and dropped him twenty years later in the arsehole of England? Mr Teen Spirit comes to Oldham, marching pie-eyed down Brompton Street, once the home of William Joyce/Lord Haw-Haw. Another coincidence. Joyce wasn’t physically a presence during my youth — he had lived around Shaw, Mumps and Oldham in the early 1920s and was hanged as a traitor after the Second World War –– but he was a local legendary bogeyman. What Proby and these kinds of outsiders signify for me has induced much speculation, but a common factor seems to be the need to transcend the normal in all of its ambivalent complexity. These dark pilgrims must fascinate anyone with a fiery imagination, even if in reality you wouldn’t like your life to go down some of the paths they tread. Above Oldham, for example, on the looming moors, lies the everlasting presence of another disenfranchised North Manchester man, Ian Brady.

RE/Search publisher V. Vale & J.G. Ballard, 1982. Photo courtesy RE/Search Publications.

SS: Is it too farfetched to draw a connection between Brady and the environment he grew up in?

DB: Brady lived alongside me. He, and I — as a very young man growing up in the slums of North Manchester (Harpurhey and adjacent Gorton) — never met, but geographically we were separated by only a couple of miles. His world was my world, annexed between factories, offices and abattoirs. Both of us faced a life of futility with few options and seethed together in our impotency, disenfranchised by inclination from what was on offer around us. I lucked in, escaping into books; Ian lucked out, performing the ultimate act of alienation.

Excerpt from forthcoming release: Fenella Fielding reading from JG Ballard’s Crash. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

In the first of the Ballard RE/Search books, Ballard commented that he found Brady’s juxtaposed tape-recording of “The Little Drummer Boy” with the cry of a tortured child significant, something new on the annals of crime, the bringing of electronic technology into the act of murder. He believed Brady had subsided into a deep depression, and was totally institutionalised. But nothing could be further from the reality. Over the years, I’ve struck up a correspondence with Mr Brady, and he remains articulate, well informed. He knows who Mr Ballard and Mr Burroughs are, and has come to some kind of terms with the way his life has played out.

A Texas boy, a Glasgow boy, a local boy: at overlapping times we have inhabited the same two square miles of the city, and have all run foul of authority. Lord Horror was banned in the courts, Proby was banned from stage and television, a complete blackout that ended his career, and Brady is in prison for killing children. And Joyce. That a traitor to England, the writer of Lord Horror, the infamous killer of children and a doomed rock ‘n’ roll showman have voyaged through the same miniscule wasteland is a beguiling fact. There’s something of Iain Sinclair’s psychogeographical potency about it.

SS: Do you have a favourite Proby story? Something that sums up the man’s essence?

DB: Jim Proby came up with the best epitaph in the history of the world. When asked by an Irish reporter what he would like engraved on his headstone, he instantly replied, “Rather be here than with you, cocksucker”.

Excerpt: PJ Proby reading from Lord Horror. Courtesy Savoy Records (1999).

SS: What was the approach with recording the Lord Horror reading? How did Proby feel about such extreme material? When he breaks out laughing, is he in character, or is he amazed at what he was been given to read?

DB: He spoke the words to Lord Horror as easily as pulling on an overcoat. When Michael and I were writing Lord Horror I was in weekly contact with Proby, and his personality was a constant in my mind. I attempted to carry his schizoid menace into the book. When Jim reads the dialogue “Move now, or I’ll release you right here”, that gives life to a whispering, serpentine intonation of his that I’d transferred into the book. I rhymed the words, the inflections suggested in them, to mirror his real-life speech patterns. When Jim came to deliver these lines and others, it was no surprise that they sounded exactly as I imagined they would. Nothing over-the-top disturbs PJ Proby. During the recording, which took two days, for sure he laughed often, and welcomed the excesses of the book. It didn’t strike him as being beyond the pale. God bless the man and his good heart!

Fenella Fielding at Strongroom Studios. Photo courtesy Savoy.

PiL’s “Rise”, performed by Fenella Fielding, from the as-yet-unreleased Fenella Fielding: the Savoy Sessions. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

Fenella Fielding IS! A 21st Century Goddess of Audio Art and Noise Illusion!
…
Her Succulent/Velvet-Blue-Saloon vocal tones made me believe I was having Naked Lunch in a Berlin bubble-bath, next to Marlene Dietrich… Somewhere in Berlin, circa 1928-1932.

Hence, we have a message in a bottle, from a 21st Century, Axis Sally/Tokyo Rose: Fenella Fielding.

Bring on the smelling salts! Then give me the Silver-Spoon and Golden Needle, so I can blend into the Wonder-Word Void, where Ms Fielding must surely reside.

Excerpted from Kim Fowley’s liner notes for the as-yet-unreleased CD, Fenella Fielding: the Savoy Sessions. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

SS: I think I can guess why you got Kim Fowley in to do the liner notes for the new Fenella Fielding CD… There’s something Probyesque about him, isn’t there?

DB: Kim Fowley is another of rock ’n’ roll’s mavericks, with an appreciation of culture that goes a lot farther than the music scenes to which he’s been attached over several decades. We needed someone who could put Fenella’s Savoy recordings in an imaginative context, and recognise the impulse behind such atypical compositions. There is also a whacky menace to Fowley. You find that in the music which birthed his persona — “Esquirita and the Voola”, “Rockin’ Bones”, “Alligator Wine” — at the head of which is the surreal snake of “Papa Oom Mow Mow”, which he produced. He’s also responsible for the daffyness that is “Alley Oop”.

I’d followed his progress since he came to England with Proby in the mid-60s. Zappa’s first album, Freak Out, used Kim’s spooky vocals. His “Help, I’m A Rock”, was the high point — and the strangest — of a very strange album. A few years ago I downloaded some interviews and part of his self-penned history from Rock’s Backpages. Was there ever a more astute all-seeing chronicler of the rock ‘n’ roll business, I thought? The man could write as insightfully as Nick Tosches and as colourfully as Hunter S Thompson. Kim had another unique quality. He wrote from the inside out, almost without peer, documenting rock history firsthand. In one of the articles he says this: “I’m not a purist.… In other words, I do all this stuff for reasons that nobody else makes records. I think, ‘What would happen if Vera Lynn sang “Louie Louie”?’ Well, I’m the kind of person who’d find Vera Lynn and persuade her to record ‘Louie Louie’ and then I’d make a better record of Vera Lynn doing ‘Louie Louie’ than the Kingsmen would’ve ever done, y’know what I mean?”

We’d approached the Fenella and Proby projects in exactly this manner. When I re-read that quote last year, it was obvious that he was the man for the job.

It’s fairly easy to grasp — if not necessarily empathise with — the inflammatory aims of [Savoy's] most controversial book. Britton was driven, among other things, by a desire to bait his long-standing enemy, the then-chief constable of Manchester, James Anderton. In Lord Horror, one of Anderton’s homophobic outbursts is replicated with the word “homosexuals” replaced by “Jews” throughout. Britton was duly rewarded with a four-month sentence, served in Risley Remand Centre and Stafford Prison. The overall tone of some passages of Lord Horror is such that reproducing quotations in a family newspaper is simply not an option. As I recently explained to Britton, my own preference, if I ever find the copy that is festering somewhere on my shelves, would be to incinerate it rather than sell it for the £300 that the edition now fetches.

Britton says he was interested in the “subtext of menace” in Fielding’s voice. The actress, for her part, says she knows nothing about Lord Horror, but does add, “Historically, I have never thought of the police as great literary critics.”

Robert Chalmers, “The lady vanishes: What ever happened to Fenella Fielding?”, The Independent, Sunday, 24 February 2008.

SS: How did you come to work with Fenella? Obviously, she’s a very charismatic person, but how does she fit into the Savoy story?

DB: It was in the Savoy offices, sometime at the beginning of the new century, a winter fire blazing. “We should do a reading of the ‘Oi Swiney’ chapter from Motherfuckers,” Michael said casually. “And get Fenella Fielding in to do the dirty deed,” I replied. Laughter. Twenty minutes later. “You know, that’s not a bad idea,” Michael eventually says. So that was the start.

I’d heard her on Radio 4 performing Noël Coward, and on BBC 2 providing the narration for a version of Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin. Jonathan Meades had also used her voice for one of his BBC films so we knew she had a formidable character. But it took us two years to bargain with her before she came into the studio. Wisely, we decided that “Oi Swiney” was a non-starter for such a refined lady of the theatre and the BBC. We decided it was more appropriate for her to read the first couple of chapters of La Squab, the new Lord Horror novel, more quirky, not as scatological. She came into the studio professionally prepared and did the most magnificent reading — Art Nouveau by way of Wind in the Willows, with a drip of steel in her voice. Totally spellbinding. It sent a chill up our spines and we fell in love with her. How lucky, so late in the day, we were to come into contact with yet another charismatic performer, this time one with such a deep understanding of culture, opera, theatre and literature. Here was an opportunity to take Savoy in a fresh direction and for us to learn new tricks.

Fenella Fielding on the Morecambe and Wise show, 1969.

Her first reading at the Strongroom, Shoreditch, impressed us so much we doubled her fee and proposed a new commission, Eliot’s Four Quartets, which she subsequently recorded. Over the next couple of years we did extracts from various books. Her reading from Love, Moorcock’s forthcoming memoir of Mervyn Peake, was a high point, as were her takes on “Pale Roses” and extracts from An Alien Heat, which opened out the stories and truly capture the prose. We then moved operations to Lisa Stansfield’s studio in Rochdale, and after a further year spent on and off there the Fenella project came to a sudden end. She decided after all that work that she didn’t want a music album we’d done with her to be released.

Even at this late date I’m still not exactly sure what she objected to, but the door is not completely closed.

Excerpt from forthcoming release: Fenella Fielding reading from JG Ballard’s Crash. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

SS: But her reading of Crash will be released?

DB: Yes — it’s just a question of timing.

Fielding has the allure of Hollywood about her, while having an eccentric English demeanor, and has what we think is the perfect voice for reading Crash. It took us a great deal of effort to get her to do it. At first, she was cautious, because she didn’t want to do anything that she thought might demean women. After protracted discussion, which went on for about a year, she finally took the advice of an ex-BBC director friend, who assured her that it would be OK. She did the reading, but would not read some of the more violent heterosexual sex scenes involving women.

Michael Butterworth.

SS: Michael explained in his interview a little of the circumstances behind the Crash reading. It’s a strange mix, but she pulls it off really well. That steely ambivalence in her voice, especially describing some of Ballard’s more outre passages, seems made for the job. Could you tell us whether you instructed or directed Fenella in any way, or was it just a matter of her voice being suitable for the project as is?

DB: Right from the start, she was on top of the material. We respected her, and encouraged her to go as far as she could. In the end, she went farther than she, or us, thought. Her Crash reading had the same quality as her Four Quartets — it was perfect naked. To put on a musical backing would dilute the words and lessen the power of her reading.

SS: As the author of Lord Horror, do you see any affinity between that work and what Ballard was trying to do with Crash — in the sense of offering a provocation so shocking and alienating, yet one shot through with an undeniable, if undoubtedly perverse, logic?

DB: Shortly after first reading Crash in the early 1970s, I’d seen Dr Chris Evans [Ballard's long-time friend; SS] give a talk at an SF convention. It was quite a revelation: here in the flesh was Vaughan in all his feral erotic intensity. Evans prowled the stage just oozing sexuality. He wore a black biker’s jacket and a blue denim shirt open to the midriff. You might have got into a car with the Doctor, but you wouldn’t have accompanied him up a dark alley. Of his talk, I can’t remember anything, just his physicality remains in my mind. No doubt this subjective observation made by a stranger isn’t a full picture of Evans’s personality, but I’m sure it was this aspect of his friend that Ballard homed in on. Evans had been one of the catalysts for the book, lifted from life and conjured into a deviant Minotaur by Ballard’s imagination. A sweet image to me: Evans and Ballard haunting the motorways of England for auto-sensation.

Crash and Empire of the Sun are probably Ballard’s best books because both are based to a greater or lesser degree on real people: Evans and Ballard himself. In Ballard’s other books, the central characters tend to be ciphers rather than real individuals. They’re still great works but don’t possess that extra quality that gives authority to Crash and Empire of the Sun. Using real people and recreating them as fiction is, of course, not original, but Ballard’s use of Evans stayed a potent one with me. Perhaps it was at the back of my mind when William Joyce — as Lord Haw-Haw — came into focus. Certainly, Crash was the yardstick book for Lord Horror. Ballard showed great courage in following through with a book that has transcended every other English work of groundbreaking fiction. It’s the rock upon which every “dangerous” book published since has foundered. How inauthentic American Psycho and its ilk look next to Crash!

SS: Could you offer any other thoughts on Ballard’s legacy?

DB: His legacy? Perhaps trying to encourage Will Self that he is capable of writing a convincing novel.

Excerpt from forthcoming release: Fenella Fielding reading from JG Ballard’s Crash. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

..:: Now move on to part 2 of the interview, in which David discusses New Order, Joy Division, punk, the Manchester music ’scene’ in general, more Proby, Kingsize Taylor, The Cramps, Zappa, Beefheart and Springsteen. Interspersed throughout are more sound clips from Savoy Records releases.

Back-cover sleeve for “Blue Monday”, by Lord Horror with the Savoy Hitler Youth Band.

Interview by Simon Sellars.

This is the second of a three-interview series about Savoy Books. It discusses Savoy’s musical and spoken-word output, and the interview is in two parts. In the first, David talked about PJ Proby, Ballard, Fenella Fielding, Ian Brady, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds magazine, Heathcote Williams and his own upbringing. Here, he discusses New Order, Joy Division, punk, Manchester music, Kingsize Taylor, The Cramps, Zappa, Beefheart and Springsteen. Interspersed throughout both parts are sound clips from Savoy releases [NOTE: sound clips don't work in Google Reader].

New Order’s “Blue Monday”/Springsteen’s “Cadillac Ranch”, performed by Lord Horror with the Savoy-Hitler Youth Band. Courtesy Savoy Records (1986).

SS: Why is “Blue Monday” such a touchstone for Savoy? You first recorded it as “Lord Horror with the Savoy Hitler Youth Band”, and now Fenella has sung it for you — twice.

DB: When we first recorded it, just a couple of years after the original, the song was very much a touchstone for a generation, an anthem. We tended to choose anthemic songs, and most of the covers we did signified something special to different types of contemporary music fans: “Sign O’ The Times”, “Anarchy in the UK”, “Heroes”. We became quite accomplished at putting the clog in. Our version of “Blue Monday” is a tongue-in-cheek piss-take, with a dash of venom on the blade. With “Blue Monday”, quite intentionally, we had connected into the zeitgeist of the 80s. Over the years, the song’s reputation has grown into something rather extraordinary. Twenty years after the first recording we went back into the studio with Fenella, and this time adhered to the original “Blue Monday” lyrics. Fenella delivered these in a sort of mock serious way that had been denied to us using a male vocalist. The song happens to work better with a female. And no woman could do it better than Fenella. She first sang “Blue Monday” knowing nothing about its meaning. After Michael gave her more details about the band and explained the significance of the song, she insisted on doing it again. We led off Fenella Fielding: The Savoy Sessions with this second version of “Blue Monday”, with its controlled feeling, and closed with the first version, which I meshed with Cochran’s “What’d I say”. Those are probably our final takes on the song!

New Order’s “Blue Monday”, performed by Fenella Fielding, from the as-yet-unreleased Fenella Fielding: the Savoy Sessions. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

SS: With the original “Blue Monday” single, how on Earth did you come up with the idea of splicing Springsteen with New Order?

DB: There was a touch of the Don Quixote about the venture, wasn’t there? I didn’t think “Blue Monday” merited the reputation it received in the press — or that New Order deserved the weight placed on them by music critics. The percussive throb of the record, and Hooky’s bassline, was good, I thought, while the lyrics seemed fifth form, weak and ineffectual, like the group’s other lyrics. But Michael had been present at New Order’s original Power, Corruption And Lies session at Britannia Row Studios, and had come away with the suspicion that something quite unique had occurred. Despite my misgivings, this was something I took on board. I was attacking something — “Blue Monday”/New Order — with a reputation that has increased year by year.

But the idea behind mashing it with Springsteen’s “Cadillac Ranch” is actually more complex. I wanted to see what would happen blending together the 50s with the 80s like that, fusing the chain of rock’s history. And choosing Springsteen was a gambit, to lure Kingsize Taylor out of retirement. At that time, Springsteen was writing credible pastiches of 50s-type rock ‘n’ roll songs, and we thought they would act as bait for Kingsize, who had retired from the music business in 1966 and was refusing all attempts to get him to return. We knew he wouldn’t be able to relate to Bernard’s original “Blue Monday” lyrics, but he might be receptive to “Cadillac Ranch”. We made demos of “Blue Monday”/”Cadillac Ranch” and “Born in the USA”. Unfortunately, when we sent him the tapes, it came back that he wasn’t interested at all. So eventually, Bobby Thompson, second lead singer in The Dominos, Kingsize’s original band, laid down the “Cadillac Ranch” vocal for us. We had to forget “Born in the USA”, which remains unreleased, because Bobby couldn’t hope to get his larynx around such a big song. On the other hand he could — and did — do a great job on “Cadillac Ranch”, despite having a cold on the day.

The vocals were recorded in Peter Hook’s Rochdale studio, from where we nicked a couple of “Blue Monday” samples. A couple of years later, Michael Butterworth nearly managed to get New Order to record with Michael Moorcock. We had in mind Moorcock doing “Blue Monday”, singing the original New Order lyrics.

SS: There is some irony in Savoy’s “Blue Monday” being banned for its “Nazi” sleeve, while New Order, and indeed, Joy Division, gained mass acceptance by using Nazi imagery.

DB: They only whispered it. We shouted it.

SS: On the other hand, can you really be surprised about the single being banned, given the sleeve and the temper of the times? Could you really expect a different result? If you had that time again, would you handle Savoy Records differently? It seems a shame that these great songs and arrangements have rarely been heard.

DB: We wouldn’t do anything differently, and cheerfully didn’t give a fuck about the times or what people thought. The packaging of the records had to stand out, be visually arresting, and remain true to our ethos. We weren’t a band, and couldn’t promote the records in the usual way, so the cover artworks had to pique people’s curiosity, which to an extent they did. Unfortunately, although we were very happy with the choice of graphics, the sleeves could have been better designed. Neither of us knew John Coulthart then, and we couldn’t find a designer who would touch them — too offensive.

No matter how outrageous the sleeves were, it was important that the music stood outside of the packaging, and had an independent validity of its own. You can’t wave an iconoclast’s flag and, beneath its twirl, not deliver a sound musical recording. Encouragingly, we got quite respectable reviews in the music press.

Sleeve for “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, by PJ Proby.

Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, performed by PJ Proby. Courtesy Savoy Records (1985).

SS: Savoy’s take on “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was hardly reverential.

DB: I didn’t have any reverence. I couldn’t see virtue in it. In making our version I was just marshalling another kind of Manchester attitude — get in there and give it some turmoil, and see what would come out of that.

Manchester, since the 50s, has been a rock ‘n’ roll city. By 1964 I’d seen all the original American rockers passing through — Cochran, Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. The blues guys had been here — John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, and so on. The Beatles, before they were nationally famous, made their television debut in Manchester’s Granada Studios. I remember watching their regular television appearances on Scene at 6.30pm, presented by Michael Parkinson and Bill Grundy. They played live in Manchester, but I never saw them live. All through this period there were dozens of local bands, interspersed with Liverpool bands, playing clubs like The Oasis, the Twisted Wheel and the Manchester Cavern, minor forerunners of the Hacienda.

So as the 60s progressed, I’d seen most of the bands that appealed to me — Stones, Who, Hendrix, Floyd, Zappa and Beefheart. By the time we’d reached the mid-70s and the punk era, I was pretty jaded musically. The seminal wonders of the rock ‘n’ roll world had passed before me. With the exception of the Pistols, who had genuine attitude, and Ian Dury and the Blockheads, there was little in punk to impress. The Clash were an imitation, created by sweat, the Damned an Alhambra pantomime. But I have to admit that even the worst proponents of punk were better than prog rock! They satisfactorily swept that away, at least. Punk’s fuck-off quality was a native characteristic of my own city, and was familiar to anyone sentenced to spending time in North Manchester.

SS: Do you like any of the post-punk Manchester bands?

DB: The advent of Joy Division, The Fall and the others didn’t really touch me. Besides, there wasn’t a decent singer amongst any of the Manc groups. I’d had a lifetime of hearing flat Mancunian vowels and consonants, and didn’t want to listen to more of such shenanigans on record. I had to cross my legs when Morrissey started bleating, and chuckle at that Cheeta-impersonating chappie from the Stone Roses attempting to wrestle a decent noise from a stillborn larynx. Then Oasis showed up, demonstrating how to do poor karaoke Beatles. Singing ability wasn’t the point, any more than knowing how to play a guitar, or knowing how to draw properly if you were a cartoonist. These Manchester bands were promoted in the NME, written up by a posse of Manchester-based journalists, including Paul Morley and Jon Savage, who I often saw in the Savoy shops. Before the late mid-70s the music papers were dominated by old-guard journos, and these new writers were able to push Manchester groups in a way that was not possible until then. Writing about The Smiths, Joy Division, The Buzzcocks, they cemented Manchester’s musical reputation.

Ironically for me, the Savoy shops were a mecca for this generation, and we sold everything to attract them. Our main source of musical attraction were bootlegs. Consequently, most of the local groups would come in individually. I related better on a personal level than I did admiring their music, and it was most interesting talking with them. Mark E Smith spoke about Bo Diddley and Arthur Machen in the same breath. Ian Curtis and Stephen Morris enthused about Moorcock, Ballard and Beefheart. When the young managers of our shops took over the music play list, they hammered-out “Totally Wired” or “She’s Lost Control” fifty times a day, so this stuff was a daily background I was conscious of. It was when I was listening to it that I started thinking about Kingsize Taylor, a man with a voice that could ignite solvents.

The more I heard of the local bands and the kind of music they were playing, the more I thought how interesting it would be to get Kingsize over from Liverpool to put that hard, scalding voice on something contemporary. Since buying his album, The Shakers, in 1964, I saw him as being the most authentic of English rock ‘n’ roll singers, and his band The Dominos the best English instrumental rock ‘n’ roll outfit.

SS: What’s your opinion on the Curtis and Joy Division reputations today? Are they a a fair musical legacy for the city to carry?

DB: Joy Division and the Hacienda are to Manchester now what the Beatles and the Cavern have been to Liverpool for years: marketing tools for the council and property developers.

Front-cover sleeve detail for “Raw Power”, by Lord Horror and the Savoy King Cocaine Band.

Iggy & the Stooges’ “Raw Power”, performed by Lord Horror with the Savoy King Cocaine Band. Courtesy Savoy Records (1987).

SS: Do you think classic Savoy tactics — fake Prince Charles quotes, recording redneck homophobic stars, plastering sleeves with satirical anti-Jew statements — could cause such outrage today in the 21st century?

DB: Political correctness runs rife through the mainstream media. Even given the Internet, sensitivities seem almost to be of a lower tolerance than at any time in the past. The media is hypocritically full of “outrages”. On certain subjects there is less freedom now than there has ever been. I mean that most sincerely. These days you cannot part your hair to the right without some crossbred cunt being “outraged”, creating headlines in the papers. I don’t think we could even get those particular record sleeves printed today. Then again, I’ve not seen art as satirically offensive as it is on our record sleeves. Racism, cold and hard, is the new rock ‘n’ roll.

SS: What part did you and Michael play in the actual recordings: as producers or musical directors? What was your approach to production?

DB: Leiber & Stoller at one end, and Rick Rubin at the other. It’s a general rule that usually it’s the producers who make successful records, not the artists. The 50s were full of one-hit producers who made great records but were a backroom force. I’ve diligently read the history books of rock ‘n’ roll, particularly in the byways of rythm’n’blues and rockabilly. Take Art Rube, the man responsible for the 18-month run of Little Richard hits on Speciality Records. Without his input, the records wouldn’t have sounded anything like as thrilling, something not lost on me when we set to do our own recording.

Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight”, performed by PJ Proby with the Savoy Holman Hunt African Orchestra. Courtesy Savoy Records (1990).

We work obsessively at the tracks, coming back time and time again until we have an optimum mix that we have taken as far as we can. By careful editing and re-recording, we were able to keep control, eventually ending up with the all-round performance we had planned. That Flaubert saying, “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work”, is true with records. You have to drop on the chance as it occurs. That’s a sweet guitar. That’s a good rimshot. Did the singer just belch, there? Keep the melody, but don’t let it get smooth. Do the unexpected. Come away from the studio with a record that contains elements of our personalities. So when Michael and I mesh together, at its best the result is “Hardcore” and “In The Air Tonight”, and at less than best, “The Mugwump Dance”. We won’t mention “Tainted Love”.

Nothing is slapdash, even though it may superficially appear to be. Essential to avoid is the Jools Holland effect, producing a poor phantom of the original. Our records have to power, squeak and thunder, have an independent life, and if they fall out of time and over the edge, so what?

“Hardcore: M97002″, performed by PJ Proby. Courtesy Savoy Records.

SS: Why was the house style of the early Savoy records hi-NRG electro-type stuff?

DB: When we first started recording, there were no decent local musicians capable of playing the kind of antediluvian rock ‘n’ roll we wanted. Having to rely on technology was no bad thing. It gave us control over the way the records sounded. You couldn’t tell a drummer that he was drumming like a muppet and lacked timing, however you could adjust a knob on the desk to produce the most wonderful motherfucking drum Ragnarök. With a studio full of techno tricks, it was the ideal time to be making records. Rick Rubin’s work with the Beastie Boys — tracks like “Brass Monkey” — was an inspiration.

We gradually gathered about us a group of really good people who could come at the technology from both ends — Peter Saynor, a local musician-producer is tippety-top notch and has a rough edge, ideal for us on early stuff like “Heroes” and “Blue Monday”, cut in the 80s. With our covers Peter can interpret what we want, and help us to achieve something that adds to the original. He returned to help us with tracks on the Fenella album. Stephen Boyce-Buckley, our right-hand in the studio for the last twenty years, is one of the best engineers/arrangers in Manchester. He is classically accomplished. We used him like a ratting-dog for all the Fenella tracks. At the Strongroom, for the talking-book tracks, it was his ear we relied on for nuance, for the “space in between”, that helped Fenella get a grip on material that she wouldn’t normally have done. He has good people skills, great personal empathy and can get the best out of the most unlikely people and situations.

Back cover sleeve of “Jessie Matthews” for the Reverbstorm comic, vol. 1 no. 8. Design by John Coulthart.

“Reverbstorm”, performed by “Jessie Matthews”. Courtesy Savoy Records (1994).

SS: “Reverbstorm” is probably my favourite Savoy release, a track that seems to reconcile the energy of Britain’s dancehall culture of the 60s and 70s with the momentum of the electronic scene of later years. Can you reveal the story behind it?

DB: That’s our take on it, too. But to me personally the marvel of “Reverbstorm” is Paul Temple’s lyrics. “Literate” and “exciting” are hard things to mesh. He did it with such unlaboured panache. Northern Soul was his drug of choice, of course. He’d absorbed it in a way that only a true enthusiast could. It was a spectacular sight to watch Temple’s Wagnerian Soul Fraternity (WSF) at a soul night at Wigan Casino. When Paul sallied out on the dance floor, ahead of his group, he proceeded to whirl like a cool dervish.

Classic Northern Soul dancing.

He came to us as a journalist from the Melody Maker, because he admired the records we did with Proby and wanted to offer us something as intense. He had the whole of “Reverbstorm” worked out on a marvellous little demo. We translated that, kicked up the high energy a bit by adding saxes and Jessie Matthews on vocals — after thirteen years staying cold, Jesse very kindly jumped out of her grave to sing for us. The record came easier than almost anything else we did. The song lit the fuel — the WSF ethos of “jumping the ether” — that drives the Reverbstorm comics, and gave them their name.

SS: I was most surprised to learn that Savoy published fan books on bands like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. I find it bizarre that you were addressing these rock behemoths in what seems a relatively straight and reverent fashion! How did these publications come about?

DB: We didn’t take them seriously. They occurred during a transient period between the first Savoy phase (Savoy Books Ltd) and the new Savoy post-1984, between bankruptcy and renaissance. We did the books to keep our hand in, slyly using them to push our own agenda. In David Bowie: Profile, we ran a photo of Harlan Ellison, suggesting in the caption that his short story “A Boy And His Dog” had been an influence on Diamond Dogs. In The Legendary Ted Nugent we ran a picture of Harlan, a Burne Hogarth Tarzan illustration, a photo of Hunter S Thompson and a set of Jim Cawthorn’s illustrations eulogising Nugent. Heathcote Williams and William Burroughs went into the AC/DC book. It was a way of retaining a slight balance on the bollocks we were producing. Omnibus Press, where Miles worked as an editor, and Proteus Books were the two publishers we worked most with. Bob Wise, the MD at Omnibus, looked over Miles’ shoulders the whole time, interfering and applying censorship. We had to leave out the more interesting pictures of Ted and AC/DC!

Right at the start of Savoy, I edited a cut-and-paste booklet called The Lives and Times of Captain Beefheart, with Jim Cawthorn’s lettering on the cover, for another publisher. Also a Frank Zappa booklet. These were closer to my and Michael’s tastes, and when packaging the later music books we tried to interest the publishing houses in Beefheart, always our main man — the only legitimate genius in rock — but no editor would commit. When we tried to get a deal for a PJ Proby biography, we were laughed out of every publishing house in London. Packaging books was never going to be our metier. It’s a shite-pit out there, and basically we ended up just adding to the crap. The heading on our Kiss book says it all — “The Savoy Kiss of Death” — absolute rubbish! We feel guilty that we were unable sell a good book on The Cramps, but it wasn’t for not trying. Although there are Cramps books now, at the time there wasn’t the remotest interest. We left the field with no regrets, and moved into actually doing the music.

SS: The Cramps are another of your rock ‘n’ roll touchstones. Why?

DB: They represented, as far as possible, the nearest thing that a modern band can come to the ultra-primitive genuine 50s rock ‘n’ roll music.

SS: I love The Cramps — first three albums only. I’m far less keen on their later career, when they traded on their horror-rock legacy and steadily diluted that primal appeal. I imagine you feel the same way!

DB: They never lost it as a live act, but as you point out, on record they ended up in a blind alley. As a band, they were never as convincing after allowing Nick Knox to exit. Bad judgement. Their later albums were rather embarrassing. They’d lost that sense of the real thing, and Lux’s lyrics were contrived and asinine, lacking his previous wonderful poetic gift for words. It’s probably unrealistic to expect any band to be creatively valid after their first couple of years. I’ve never managed to quite come up with a satisfactory explanation as to why this should be. Youth, testosterone perhaps, is the cause. Little Richard (a demon broken out of Hell) cut his major records in eighteen months. The next forty years were a creative dead end; nothing worked for him. That “magic” in his voice had fled. The Cramps lost it, but throughout their career, however unconvincing they became, they championed the Right Stuff. Lux’s and Ivy’s enthusiasm, and the legacy their musical knowledge have left us, remain a beautiful bounty. Can you imagine the Ramones being as articulate and knowing as the Cramps were?

Front-cover detail for “Garbageman” (Cramps cover), by Lord Horror with the Savoy Gustave Flaubert Salammbo Orchestra. Art by Kris Guidio.

The Cramps’ “Garbageman”, performed by Lord Horror with the Savoy Gustave Flaubert Salammbo Orchetsra. Courtesy Savoy Records (1990).

The Cramps retained mystery. A move to Europe where they’ve always had a big following would have made financial sense, but Ivy cannily understood that half the nature of their appeal was their absence from the everyday. Their decision to stay in downtown LA, forging an intriguing rock ‘n’ roll myth about themselves amongst legends of the starlost — the Three Stooges, Republic serials and The Little Rascals — was the right one. On his trip to Los Angeles, Ballard commented that he found LA a “scary place”. Ideal for the Cramps, then. What would Ballard have made of the Cramps, if his allegedly tin ear hadn’t got in the way of accessing them? And the reverse — what would the Cramps have made of Crash? Being film buffs, they very likely caught Cronenberg’s film of Crash. I can’t believe they wouldn’t have loved it. They knew what they were doing and why they were doing it, what to touch and what not to touch, and to home in on the essence. In their heyday they were a key to unlocking my imagination. “The Human Fly” and “New Kind of Kick” would be the background accompaniment to Lord Horror as he made his septic way through the teeming Judenhäuser.

SS: Do you agree with Dave Mitchell, who wrote in A Serious Life that “the musical equivalent of Savoy’s programme is the early Mothers of invention”? If not, what is?

DB: Well, certainly the Mothers are an influence. They mixed-and-matched in a unique manner and had a sardonic edge that was most refreshing. Zappa took Varèse, Stravinsky, Don & Dewey, The Penguins, and conjured an original hybrid. It is a brew to intoxicate the most questing. I preferred the early Mothers to say, Hendrix, or The Who. Hendrix was a showman and a great musician (impressive, cultivating ‘Purple Haze’ from Philip José Farmer’s Night of Light), but those Mothers’ albums had more meat on their bone. They had an other-world quality to them; a nice line in cod operatics that punched the point home, too: “A world of secrets on the earth”, delivered in high-pitched pachuko weasellings. The first tour of the original Mothers was a revelation, as impressive as fuck. They stretched what you knew. So theatrically avant-garde and freaky and quite New Worlds. As a group they mirrored, in their oddity, speculative fiction writers like Spinrad, Farmer, Sladek and Disch. A Dada/Surrealism. “The Heat Death of the Universe” and “The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod” are New Worlds titles that could have come off any Mothers album. Zappa’s outfit was musically sophisticated and complex, yet down and earthy, and nodded to the future while being conscious of the past. Zappa name-checked Kafka’s “In The Penal Colony” the way Moorcock would George Meredith’s The Amazing Marriage. Dave Mitchell got it right, but underneath the 60s freakery was, you know, 50s rock ‘n’ roll, and my lifetime’s obsession with Larry Williams’ Speciality Records.

Interior artwork by David Britton from the Captain Beefheart booklet, circa 1972.

SS: You’ve said that the dictate of Savoy Records is “deconstruction, angst and the Spirit of the furies”. Can you elaborate?

DB: Just a fanciful way of saying that good records can often come out of conflict. Decades, styles-in-flux, misfits, jammed together, upsetting the unwritten tenets of musical genres, marrying the old and the new. The true spirit of the furies was P J Proby. Add to that the crossover between maverick literature and maverick music. I’m sick to death of music hacks referencing Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners, or wretched Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity being toted as some kind of valid rock ‘n’ roll literature. The cross between pulp and rock and maverick literature is seldom touched on in a way that is illuminating, yet there’s a whole deeper world here. It’s always surprised me the worlds of pulp and music don’t interact more than they do.

In our records we try to carry an enthusiasm for the mysterious emissaries from the world of pulp — Cornell Woolrich, Clark Ashton Smith, Boris Vian, Hope Hodgson, Alfred Jarry as well as Planet Stories, the Olympia Press, Black Mask, B-movie westerns and the Saturday morning serials. In all this subterranean material, there’s a correlation with the underbelly of rock ‘n’ roll, particularly classic rock ‘n’ roll. One of my ideas was to make this apparent, to charge it into the fabric of our records. In our version of “Anarchy in the UK”, Harlan Ellison jostles with TS Eliot. We have PJ Proby saying, on the lead-in to “Jim Dandy”: “My name is Jimmy, I’ve been around a long, long time”. Proby comes on as Walter Cronkite on the Lord Horror recording. “Bumble Bee” by Laverne Baker rears up in “Shoot Yer Load”. Tiger Tim is sampled snuffling in the background thunder. Aubrey Beardsley is pictured on the centre label of the “I’m On Fire” 12″. A Frank Frazetta’s illustration of Buster Crabbe is on “Hardcore”, a photograph of C L Moore on “Raw Power”. On the sleeves there are quotes from the likes of Kierkegaard, Spinoza and Shelley. A bit of the literary underworld and a bit of the overworld carried into our records in the way they look and sound.

This history of yesterday is important to us, but we don’t altogether “live in the past”. We’re not blind to the enjoyables of now. Iggy and Lydon remain as great on stage as they ever were. The White Stripes, Imelda May and young Amy Winehouse, not sounding an echo of someone else’s hard won individuality, are brilliant. I’ve never read better books than Blood Meridian and The Kindly Ones. Jimmy Ballard and Lux Interior might have left us, but Mike Harrison and Mike Moorcock are still producing. So right there is the best reason to carry on living and working.

SS: Looking back at the history of Savoy Records, what stands out in your mind? What are you most proud of?

DB: The answer is: I’m proud that we accomplished such successful records as a by-product of our main aim. We followed on from Moorcock’s idea, in The Condition of Muzak, of Jerry Cornelius fictionally making records… To have Lord Horror making records in real-time was an amusing notion — and didn’t he do it with some panache?

David Bowie’s “Heroes”, performed by PJ Proby. Courtesy Savoy Records (1986).

+ Savoy Books.
+ Savoy Records.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ “Driven by Anger”: An Interview with Michael Butterworth (the Savoy interviews, part 1)
+ Ballardian/Savoy Microfiction competition winners
+ James Cawthorn, RIP: 1929-2008
+ Ballardcraft: Ballard/Lovecraft
+ ‘Get Lost’: Burroughs on Curtis
+ Bunker Tales
+ Horror Panegyric
+ A Home and a Grave: Mike Holliday on The Unlimited Dream Company
+ Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard

Ed Ruscha. Fountain of Crystal, 2009. Acrylic on canvas. 30 1/8 x 36 1/8 inches (76.5 x 91.8 cm).

CRASH: HOMAGE TO JG BALLARD

Press Release
Gagosian Gallery
6-24 Britannia St London WC1X 9JD
t. 020.7841.9960 f. 020.7841.9961

Gallery hours: Tue – Sat: 10:00am– 6:00pm

Thursday, 11 February – Thursday, 1 April 2010

Opening reception: Thursday, February 11th from 6 to 8pm

I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society.

JG Ballard

Gagosian Gallery London will present “Crash,” a major group exhibition opening on 11 February 2010, which takes its title from the famous novel by JG Ballard.

Ballard’s novels stand among the most visionary, provocative literature of the twentieth century, with his ominous predictions regarding the fate of Western culture and his insights into the dark psychopathology of the human race. This exhibition is a response to the enormous impact and enduring cultural significance of his work, following his death in spring 2009. Highlighting Ballard’s great passion for the surreal and his engagement with the artists of his own generation, “Crash” includes examples of his specific inspirations as well as works by contemporary artists who have, in turn, been inspired by his vision.

Ballard’s first published short story “Prima Belladonna” appeared in 1956, the same year as the celebrated Independent Group’s exhibition “This is Tomorrow” at the Whitechapel Gallery, which marked the birth of Pop Art in Britain. It was here, and in the work of Surrealists such as Salvador Dali and Paul Delvaux, that Ballard found the seeds of what he called a “fiction for the present day”. With its dystopian depictions of the present and future, its bleak, man-made landscapes and the recounting of the psychological effects of technological, social and environmental developments on humans, his work has resonated strongly among other writers, filmmakers and visual artists. The exhibition “Crash” brings together works by artists tuned to the Ballardian universe, from his contemporaries such as Ed Ruscha, Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol and Helmut Newton, to younger artists such as Tacita Dean, Jenny Saville, Glenn Brown and Mike Nelson.

The exhibition is organised in association with the Estate of JG Ballard.

List of artists: Richard Artschwager, Francis Bacon, JG Ballard, Hans Bellmer, Glenn Brown, Chris Burden, Jake & Dinos Chapman, John Currin, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Tacita Dean, Jeremy Deller, Paul Delvaux, Cyprien Gaillard, Douglas Gordon, Loris Gréaud, Richard Hamilton, John Hilliard and Jemima Stehli, Roger Hiorns, Damien Hirst, Dan Holdsworth, Carsten Höller, Edward Hopper, Allen Jones, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Vera Lutter, Florian Maier-Aichen, Paul McCarthy, Adam McEwen, Dan Mitchell, Malcolm Morley, Mike Nelson, Helmut Newton, Cady Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Steven Parrino, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Saville, George Shaw, Cindy Sherman, Piotr Uklański, Andy Warhol, Rachel Whiteread, Christopher Williams, Jane and Louise Wilson, Christopher Wool and Cerith Wyn Evans.

For further inquiries please contact the gallery at london@gagosian.com or at +44.207.841.9960.

More information here.

Jeremy Reed at the JG Ballard Memorial, 2009. Photo: Rick McGrath.

West End Survival Kit, by Jeremy Reed. Furze Hill, Hove: Waterloo Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-906742-07-2.

JEREMY REED IS A HUGELY PROLIFIC poet, novelist, biographer and spoken-word musician, the author of 15 novels, 16 poetry collections and 14 works of non-fiction since 1984. Yet despite that phenomenal output, he remains an exile in British letters. According to Reed, ‘People have reacted so nastily to me and tried to airbrush me out of the picture… The establishment never forgave me, because I used to give readings in heavy make-up’. That’s not a working method that was ever going to appeal to Sir Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, who famously dubbed Reed ‘that effete little pseud’. He also sledged him as the ‘David Bowie of the poetry circuit’, an especially backhanded insult, given Reed’s sartorial style and the fact that among his back catalogue are biographies on Lou Reed, Marc Almond and Brian Jones. In fact, the latter provided one very revealing insight into the mind of Jeremy Reed. Once asked what he thought was the defining moment of the 60s, he replied: ‘I’d say it was the first time Brian Jones wore a girl’s polka-dotted blouse. It had never been done before’. In the same interview, he derided ‘the barbiturate poetry of Andrew Motion and those post-Larkin poets. Very grey, very drab’. And so the stage is set.

Following the pattern of this exile, whenever there is talk about the latter-day British writers who enjoyed the friendship, patronage or thematic repertoire of J.G. Ballard, invariably the same names are mentioned: Will Self and Iain Sinclair. Not Reed. Yet Reed and Ballard enjoy a long and very intriguing relationship. Reed’s science-fiction novel Diamond Nebula (1994), set in the 23rd century, even featured a film-director character obsessed by Bowie, Ballard and Warhol:

Her eye was arrested by an open photograph album … David Bowie at the Rainbow Theatre, 1972; at the LA Forum in 1976; Hiroshima, 1973; LA Amphitheatre, 1974; Wembley, 1976: the images seeming to have been chosen for their visual diversity and metamorphoses. Over the page were weirdly angled shots of Ballard getting into his car at Shepperton after the publication of Crash; and then the publicity photographs of him that had appeared on the jackets of High-Rise and Myths of the Near Future, together with a series of solarized images in the manner of Man Ray, in which the writer’s head was superimposed on Brancusi sculptures. Cindy flicked through the obsessive preoccupations: Warhol screened by black glasses on a couch at the Factory, and then seen filming Edie Sedgwick and Gino Persicho in Beauty 2; and a few pages on, isolated, filming Chelsea Girls.

Jeremy Reed, Diamond Nebula.

These aren’t the ordinary images of Ballard (let alone Bowie) that get bandied about. They are cult snapshots, taken by a writer with a fan’s eye for obscure detail surrounding the object of worship. As an alternative biography, then, of its three avant-garde celebrities, Diamond Nebula is a tantalising work, drawing on Reed’s main obsessions: style, flashy pop, mutation (both psychic and physical), cult fame, inner space … and Ballard. In the preface to the book, Reed describes ‘Ballard as the chief proponent of the futuristic novel … seen as the person most receptive to occupying a colony that looks towards the arrival of mutants from another galaxy’. Reed talks of creating an environment in which ‘the external world provides a backdrop to the exploration of inner space, a vanishing-point rather than a structure for continuous reference’, and with further reference to the ‘geography of the unconscious’, it’s easy to realise the superficial similarities with Ballard’s own working methods and obsessions.

Jeremy Reed speaking to Nicky Singer at the ICA.

In interview, too, Reed always pays his dues, recording his writerly debt to Ballard’s ‘visionary present’ – an especial act of linguistic engagement that ‘transform[s] the universe into its imagined equivalent’ and provides an instruction manual in ‘blowing up the social structure’. He sees Ballard’s work as a hotwire to the pure, uncut imaginative spirit that also powers the work of Stephen Barber and Edmund White:

They all have that very charged language. When I began as a writer, Ballard was the writer who had a new language that I was looking for, the way he crystallised the modern world into images. It’s something that he has never lost. Ballard is not part of literature at any level, he’s got no concern about it at all. He’s a rogue gene which is what attracted me to him from the start. And work is all he is, what he writes is so integral to him. That’s all he does all day, write all day and live in Shepperton.

But the admiration cut both ways. According to Rick McGrath, Ballard provided blurbs for 12 of Reed’s books and wrote forewords to two others, more JGB endorsements than for any other writer. One of the forewords was for Reed’s latest collection of poetry, West End Survival Kit (2009), possibly the last writing Ballard had published, in which he enthuses about Reed’s ‘talent … almost extraterrestrial in its brilliance’. For Ballard, Reed is ‘Rimbaud reconfigured as the Man who fell to Earth, a visitor from deep space whose time machine was designed by Lautréamont and de Sade, and powered by the most exotic fuels the imagination has ever devised’. That’s a very dense sentence, pricking imagistic sensors of recognition in almost every one of its 36 words: Bowie, Roeg, symbolism, science fiction, surrealism, film, sadomasochism, inner space…

And so it is with these poems, which are compacted like diamonds, an intent signalled by this excerpt:

firing ideas at me like big hitters
for work we do
shape-shifting architecture into words,

the way 10 million atoms colonize
an inked full stop.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream’, West End Survival Kit.

The back cover gives no real description of the contents, save for general endorsements from a stellar cast: Ballard, David Gascoyne, David Lodge and Seamus Heaney. We are led to believe that this is a collection of free-standing poems, and reading them is simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. Reed is obsessed with both surface flash and the hidden layers of meaning inherent in modern urban life, with which we constantly negotiate and are in dialogue with: the meaning of ‘junk DNA’ and the enigma of Michael Jackson, the sigils in corporate signage, the mental cross-chatter engendered by rapid communications technology. His street-level descriptions are often as unfathomable as conspiracy theory, and shot through with a selection of barely glimpsed, constantly rotating characters (including a first-person narrator), invariably described within a mesh of techy jargon:

meditating in front of his mezzanine.
His girlfriend paints her toes
in Howard Hodgkin moods,

reads Holy Anorexia and grooves
at being air
she’s molecules wired to neuronal drive.

He’s into ‘dark matter’, lab neutrinos,
thermonuclear fusion
generating energy in the sun.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Astroparticle Physicist Chills’, West End Survival Kit.

The writing is a rush, a blur. It’s slippery, emphasised by quick-fire, three-line stanzas:

They share headphones on the new R.E.M.:
a shimmering slice of post-modern pop,
impersonal as an airport lounge,

riffy, mid-tempo anomie
for the 21st century.
He wears a Titian red Gucci jacket,

as though it’s cut out of the sun,
and she two dollops of mauve eye shadow
co-ordinating with her top.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Endgames’, West End Survival Kit.

Certain motifs begin to gestate a picture in the mind as you gradually learn through half-remembered, diaphanous glimpses that Mars and the moon have been colonised; dispossessed astronauts wander the Earth; drugs are rampant; and technological virtuality is encoded into the very fabric of everyday life. By the end, you are left with the inkling that the poems are perhaps not free-standing, but part of a continuous (albeit fractured) narrative, illuminated snapshots of a mordant near-future world seen from multiple, cross-linked perspectives. They could be interior hallucinations, or the exterior unspooling vision of CCTV cameras all over the city, but whatever they are, they are engendered by Reed’s very effective trick of repeating a motif, phrase or word from one poem to the next, but never more than two poems in a row. Subliminally, you become aware of a deep, unfolding narrative, even if consciously you assess that you are reading two poems with very different characters:

ten miles above Cape Canaveral.
He journeys back in his neurology
to pink skies over the oxygen plant,

graffiti discovered on a rock face –
RAD51D — the king’s returned —
and gantried higher up a gold statue

Jeremy Reed, ‘Red Planet Blues’, West End Survival Kit.

Someone’s got the dangling hexagonal
molecule RAD51D
under scrutiny for cell death

like a registration number
on a top security Jeep.
She’s paid to disinform. Each day

Jeremy Reed, ‘Drug Giant PA’, West End Survival Kit.

Given all the Ballard associations, it’s tempting to read Ballardian themes into the work (the damaged astronauts fit well) and the densified prose method strives to convey as much meaning as the ‘condensed novels’ in The Atrocity Exhibition. Vaughan from Crash (and Atrocity) even makes an appearance, enmeshed in a shady deal with the clone of Princess Di:

H.R.H. has a contract out
on this blonde afterlife simulacrum:
Di as an endlessly repeatable clone.

Vaughan knows he’s watched. The Jeep outside
has on-board machine guns, a snoop
positioned in it with a cold black eye.

Jeremy Reed, ‘The Reckoning’, West End Survival Kit.

Jeremy Reed – photograph courtesy Waterloo Press.

But in the end, the most obvious reference point seems to be the glistening, cypher-filled, pop-artefact worlds of William Gibson. The characters in West End Survival Kit come on like Case from Neuromancer crashlanding in London (which has merged with Tokyo, as it did in Reed’s 2008 novel The Grid), as if Case was too burnt out to even care about fixing his damaged neurosystem, too jaded to even muster up any more passion for his beloved cyberspace. In her review of The Grid, Bidisha wrote that ‘one wishes Reed would produce a scholarly work about Jacobean theatre instead of an inexpert cyber-romp. His next work should be excellent, but it shouldn’t meddle with the future. Reed’s seriousness and intelligence emerge when he drops his coolness and cleaves to the past’. But this sounds more like the kind of genre snobbery Ballard was forced to endure when he, too, dared to write science fiction. Reed does post-cyberpunk very well: he has a real feel for the imagery, the characters and the worldview, and like both Gibson and Ballard, he is interested in the next 5 minutes rather than the next 500 years. For Reed, too, science fiction is the sociological study of the present. Yet he infuses this with his own ‘extraterrestrial’ brand of theatricality, poetic sensibility and mutant, gender-bending attitude to create a hybrid form. As science-fiction poetry, it recalls the work of Robert Calvert, the late Hawkwind lyricist and lead singer, and another tortured anti-hero whose own life story could easily inhabit the Reed pantheon.

Towards the end of West End Survival Kit, Reed ties it all up with two poems about, of all things, the history of Pink Floyd. And given all of the above, it makes perfect sense. As the poem identifies, the classic-era Floyd, despite being saddled with what people assumed was an intergalactic persona, was always more about inner space than outer (like Ballard’s anomie-infested astronauts), producing a brace of albums that reflected with sensitivity on battered individuals like their founder Syd Barrett, as in Wish You Were Here, and the assorted lunatics in the cast of Dark Side of the Moon. The Floyd poems make a fitting coda to Reed’s painful folio of snapshots from a numb world. They solidify his eulogy to people too disconnected, too exiled in their own minds to ever tread ‘meaningful’ paths through life, but who nonetheless retain a unique sense of self allied to their damaged intelligence:

Barrett’s the rock astronomer
boating the Cam’s lime green spine,
wristing downriver like a water-boatman

listening to voices, his schizophrenia
big in the mix
like invasive radio.
…
Echoing slide. It’s paranoia synthesised –
their moon trip – dark side in reverse.
Barrett’s still running through a corridor

As undertow, a brain damaged psycho.
The music road maps inner space.
It’s like a river knocking at the door.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Brain Damage: a short history of the Pink Floyd’, West End Survival Kit.

It’s out there somewhere, while the London rain

slashes the light-polluted scuzz,
wacks down fried leaves, keeps me inside
this rainy, orange October day,
retrieving the Floyd’s mission to locate
the alien in the psychopath.
Outside my window a wet jay

jabs at a red berry gash.
I go out on their dimension,
beamed by the music’s escalating curve,
back to my youth and Apollo
cargoing human hardware to the moon –

their weighted boots grating on dust,
Pink Floyd the terrestrial soundtrack
to space conquest, a white plateau
opening out to three astronauts
learning by hesitant degrees to trust.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Wish You Were Here’, West End Survival Kit.

West End Survival Kit is not wholly successful (although it’s pretty close). It briefly falls flat, for example, when Reed makes reference to ‘psychogeography’, a loaded concept degraded through cultural overuse that, although undoubtedly inherent within the work, sounds inauthentic when actually named and nudged up against his own dream geographies. Yet mostly, Reed’s innate ability to explore new genres, new forms and new plans of attack in the hope of creating something extreme and unique makes the work well worth reading. As Bidisha implies, it is probably this genre slippage that is the real cause of Reed’s exile, but somehow, given the figures with which he identifies, you get the impression that on some level that’s how he likes it.

‘Video surveillance sights the street. The city leaks pathology…’ We know exactly what Jeremy means, though we may never have thought of our everyday world in these terms. The poet is our extraterrestrial visitor, calmly surveying everything, the highspeed neural networks of his poetic gift assessing the landscape, making only the most important connections, linking the present moment to the most vital possibilities of itself … Use this volume of poems as a guide-book to the present, to the real world of possibility that most of us ignore. It’s the poet’s job to be a seer, to seize us by the shoulders and force us to out-stare the mirage. Reading these poems, I find myself marvelling at their cleverness and brilliance, and saying: ‘…yes, yes, absolutely.’

J.G. Ballard, foreword to West End Survival Kit.

West End Survival Kit can be purchased direct from the publisher.

Jeremy Reed performing with Itchy Ear as The Ginger Light, ‘a progressive poetry act’.

Jeremy Reed – photographer(s) unknown.

Thanks to Shane for help with research for this article.

..:: More information:
+ Jeremy Reed
+ Waterloo Press

REFERENCES
Bidisha (2008). ‘The Grid, by Jeremy Reed’. The Independent, 28 September.
Carter, Randolph (2006). ‘Dreaming with his eyes open’. 3am Magazine.
Lachman, Gary (2006). Jeremy Reed: A supernova in orange and purple ink. The Independent, 30 July.
Reed, Jeremy (1994) Diamond Nebula. London: Peter Owen.
———- (2008). West End Survival Kit. Furze Hill, Hove: Waterloo Press.

Lord Horror (1997). Image by John Coulthart.

Back in November, we announced our first microfiction competition, to promote our three-part series of interviews with luminaries from Savoy Books. As the second interview, with David Britton, is due online within a couple of weeks, we thought now’s the time to announce the prizewinners.

There were three judges: Michael Butterworth, John Coulthart and myself. We each took what we thought to be the top ten and ranked them. Then, we each assigned points to our top ten: 12 for 1st, 10 for 2nd, 8 for 3rd, then 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

And so, in first place with the most points: ‘NW3, wet, dark, cold, two days after Christmas, 1968′ by Rob Keery. In second place: ‘Escapology’ by Craig Hughes. And third: ‘Catchgirl’ by Jim Donnely. Congratulations to Rob, Craig and Jim! We hope you enjoy your booty. And many thanks to all who entered — microfiction’s not the easiest form to master, but there were many great entries.

Following are the stories from the top three, followed by the honourable mentions (the remaining stories that received points from at least one of us).

FIRST PRIZE

‘NW3, wet, dark, cold, two days after Christmas, 1968′
by Rob Keery

As the big blue pig pushed him to the ground JTS reached for the small penknife in his sock, the one they missed, the mordant gift from the Guinness rep he met outside the bankrupt’s court that time. They brayed and snorted high above him, haloed in exaltation of dominance by the cell light glare. He lurched on the floor like a brokeleg cane toad and opened the flat blunt blade. That stopped them, quiet for a second, till he reached for the nearest ankle.

When they opened the door next morning, it was like the lift in ‘The Shining’.

Rob wins:
1) A copy of Lord Horror (yes, the very rare, extremely notorious and long out-of-print novel, currently fetching over US$800 for second-hand copies; Savoy has kindly decided to sacrifice a file copy for Ballardian.com).
2) A really special, rare Lord Horror book, The Truth About Horror (Savoy’s second-rarest gem, published for private circulation only).
3) A Tea Dance at Savoy, by Robert Meadley.

SECOND PRIZE

‘Escapology’
by Craig Hughes

I suppose you could say I’ve found him. We’re always being told we are our ID cards, that we are no one and nothing without them, so here he is, lying in a cold, gritty puddle in an underground car park. All six, square, laminated inches of him. Could they really tell me I’d let him get away? Not by their own rules. Not that they’ll see it that way. Is that blood in the water? Here they come. That engine, Benedict’s car, no mistaking it. He won’t be happy. Safety off. I’m not taking the blame for this.

Craig wins copies of:
1) A Serious Life, by D M Mitchell; and
2) Sieg Heil Iconographers, by Jon Farmer.

THIRD PRIZE

‘Catchgirl’
by Jim Donnelly

Rosie Idolwound, a catchgirl, rainbow hunter. She has spent most of her, so far, short life looking for pots of gold, and credit it or not she has found some. Admittedly they have been small pots, barely enough to make a living from, but then again rainbows are a life not a living.

Today, undercover of driving horizontal rain, which would make most bleed, she crawls, digging deep with broken fingernails toward the necessary end. As the arc of the rainbow emerges she digs deeper, but she is simply too slow this time. Another ray of hope gone.

Jim wins:
1) Savoy Wars CD. Compilation of Savoy’s ‘greatest hits’;
2) The Waste Land CD, TS Eliot read by PJ Proby; and
3) Fuck Off and Die. Another ‘luxury’ item from Savoy – a 160-page hardback comic book in b/w and colour, the follow-up to the notorious Adventures of Meng & Ecker. Written by David Britton and illustrated by Kris Guidio, with an introduction by Alan Moore and an afterword by Dr Benjamin Noyse. Jacket design by John Coulthart.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

‘Appreciation’
by Ben Soper

Nowhere was hit harder during the great storm than the library. Soon after a committee was formed and by winter enough money had been raised for the library to be rebuilt. The librarian was immensely grateful but being a man of small means he knew that kindness would have to be its own reward. However after the re-opening he noticed a change in his patrons. Books were returned damaged or late, small talk was hurried and gradually people stopped visiting him altogether. The librarian realised the community despised him and decided to leave town that night without saying goodbye.

Untitled
by Matthew Sheret

Mister Murray wondered if, should he drag the mirror over the granite corridor, the occupant of the opposing cubicle would notice the difference. Mister Murray wondered idly if, by hiding himself in the image of another, he may perhaps render himself invisible to the directions of another. Mister Murray wondered if, by reconciling the differences in communication protocol suggested by a mirror and the absence of activity behind it via application of clippers, grit and a hand-axe, he might find himself removed from the burden of interaction entirely. We know Mister Murray wondered this, because we found the yellowing notepaper.

‘Riveting’
by Kevin Clement

Candice awakes to a loud BANG! Then another and another. Thin walls shake to a sinister rhythm. Beside her, an assembly line softly chugs. Pulleys and gears turn; rubber conveyor belts contort around a bulbous, concrete column.

She rolls to the door and pushes it open. The grommet in her neck squeaks as her lens peers into a dim, steamy enclosure. She processes the scene and recoils in disgust.

Amidst a cacophony of smashed vacuum tubes, strewn diodes, and rusted hydraulic rams, two humans embrace. Their hips gyrate in tandem, pumping like a defective riveting machine.

‘Breathe on the window’
by Mark Noonan

Breathe on the window Evelyn, give the glass a bit of life. Squeak your name into it with your finger, make a smiling face. Lick it. For the love of all that’s Holy, I command you to lick that window Evelyn, it’s my last desperate wish to see your tongue touch the sweet drops of your condensed breath on the glass – I can’t even *articulate*. What I have to do is watch, and hope that among this room’s pumping machines and peeling paint you will take it upon yourself. ‘Cause what’s killing me now is the fucking tension.

‘Purlin Obstructs The Passage Of Time’
by James Dibley

A small dragon scales the bedroom wall, unheeded by coupling bodies below.

One of these, Purlin, has the upper hand. His radiant limbs shift through Sadowitz sleights. A high-gain antenna still has to be tuned, and his is the long wavelength. The signal that endures. The auction block shuffle. The girl can’t help it. She prays with her knees upward.

Terrible violence should follow, but compression doesn’t allow for release. It can only sustain. Unbearably. Not one inch of skin is parted. No keloid dares bloom in these jaws.

The dragon falls stupefied to the floor. It dreams of eating clocks.

‘Street Furniture’
by Mat Ranson

Saturday: it had cracked on impact and the car had driven away. But the lamp-post stood, angled, grey and resolute, a soldier in a town that ignored it. Saturday evening: from its wounded, brutalist, concrete core, long forgotten memories began to seep into the air like invisble vapour. Curious dogs approached, barking and snarling. Pedestrians walked close by and were visited by phantom memories of sun-blazed mornings, the rain-soaked windscreens of car crashes and of the tides of dark nights. Sunday morning: it was all over. The lamp-post had split, fallen and shattered across the road.

‘Wrecked and Wasted’
by Tim Maly

He bought the wine at auction. Included, was a certificate of authenticity showing the bottle’s lineage traced backward from auction house to warehouse to boathouse. Before that, the ocean floor. It had lain there for decades, wedged in the doomed ship’s hold.

He opened the wine at home. The bottle had aged gracefully, he decided. He admired the worn label and salt-textured glass. The cork was decisively intact. People had been dancing on deck when the torpedo hit.

He drank the wine alone. Exquisite. The last of his fortune was spent tracking down beer from the Hindenburg.

‘Penumbra’
by Jesse Thrall

Led through the heat shimmer to the dais where the banyan tree shattered the tiles, bound standing with arms outstretched. A necklace of broken silicon thrown over his neck. By sundown, a noticeable grey tinge to his naked calves, a dust flaked off with his sweat when he shifted.

Morning. They came to see his pillared legs, the jagged silicon penumbra of his collar bone, links of chain that merged with the tendons of his wrists. His eyes looked inward.

‘Live-Work’
by Will Wiles

“After the crash, all the money went out of urban renewal,” said the property developer, Maxinalon. “This warehouse conversion was slumming itself anyway, so …”

He had moved in the dealers and the people-traffickers. The live-work units were now meth labs, and the niche coffee outlet was a burned-out husk. The redundant creatives had adapted marvellously, because the hours were flexible.

To the sound of the exhausted police beating down the period-feature, iron-braced doors (wires trailed from the smashed entryphone), Maxinalon smiled a smile that was all percentages. “We’ve exhausted the potential of regeneration; the future is obviously degeneration.”

‘My despair at the demise of Willow Run’
by James Mansfield

I looked towards the soon-to-be-closed factory at Willow Run, Michigan. A great brown rectangle, I couldn’t see how far back it stretched. Throughout the war it had spat out B-24 bombers. I wondered where the metal, plastic, leather of these aircraft now existed? Burnt, shredded, reused? Cologne, Manchester, Dubai? Of course, my grandfather’s plane was now embedded in a skyscraper overlooking the Persian Gulf. At this moment, a British couple were consummating their marriage on the very wings which carried the bombs that killed Hans Naumann, my wife’s great uncle. What would Henry Ford think?

Untitled
by Damien MacIntyre

They met in person at a conference in Tampa. They both worked in teleconferencing. He was from London. She was from Denver. They found this ironic, and joked about it over drinks at the hotel bar the first night. The second night they spent together in his hotel room making more than just jokes. The thrid night they both caught flights back to their separate cities. His flight was still aloft when the terrorist seized control of her plane. Fifty flights over fifty states rained-down that evening. All hijacked with empty soda cans. All cleverly orchestrated using his teleconferencing software.

‘Inhumanly Divine’
by Poppy Varela

He nervously embodied events, his taut body a choreography of micro-spasms in concert with his surroundings. Watching him, I increasingly longed to inhabit this microanatomical dance, to penetrate his jerking trembles. Imagining his body twitch around mine, I felt a wet pool gathering, a tingle swelling into a mass of vibrating balls in my groin, like a gelatinous raft of quivering caviar. The contours of nearby laughter flickered through his gestures. I felt every micro-shudder of this rhythmic transmission vibrate my throbbing mass of balls. Sitting demurely on the couch, I quietly spasmed in orgasm. Inhumanly divine.

‘Summit’
by Greg Marsh

Leonard Krest began to climb the brutalist remains of the hospital, his Colt Diamondback revolver wedged awkwardly within the breast pocket of his dinner jacket. The detritus of the shattered building had now settled, and with each step he levitated upwards with increasing ease, his feet finding footholds without effort. In the higher slopes, beige plastic computer monitors and telephone handsets poked through the steel and concrete avalanche, the dusty pages of medical textbooks flickered silently in the breeze. At the summit, Krest found the slumped body of his wife, a single bullet hole punched through her temple.

‘Eaters of Time’
by Simon Machine-Cooke

England frayed most at the edges: the border towns, the rural pile-ups.

No love. No law.

Diana spun her dansette a final time, pressing her legs into the quilted satin bedspread.

The party’s over now

Bundled clippings grew yellow and mildewed under the staircase cupboard.

Unspeakable crimes in empty rectories. Gothic manses crumbling to dust,

Intermittent gunfire replaced the rattle of commuter trains passing out from the greenbelt.

A murder of crows banded the vegetable patch, eyes the colour of curdled yolk.

‘A New Pornography’
by Martin Gillespie

Hunter considered his recent past as he stood before the Bauhaus building. The failure of his NO/cGMP system, or so-called arousal function, his wife’s obsession with conventional pornography, the makeshift institute where he had rediscovered desire as a by-product of architecture.

Or was architecture the externalisation of male function?

He followed the lines of the building; it rose like the perfect representation of his arousal. He felt himself respond to the structural demands for purpose. He would attempt to embrace this architecture with his own physicality, growth. The ultimate union.

He pressed himself against the grey exterior.

“You’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, and you’re barely print-literate”
- William Gibson, Neuromancer

“Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.”
- J.G. Ballard

“Twitter is like little animated hieroglyphics in the margins of a working manuscript, offering obscurely breaking news”
- William Gibson, Twitter.

LINKS 8/1/10-14/1/10

Links etc harvested from my Twitter account.

2010-01-14 23:20:15
ballardian: I’m in love… Vincent Fournier’s photos of the “retrofuturistic space industry”
http://bit.ly/5oKwcp | http://bit.ly/5nMbWE
via @paleofuture

2010-01-14 23:06:16
ballardian: Finally, some sense. Re: Nitin Garg – “On both sides, a lot of hot air and finger pointing – a dialogue of the deaf”
http://bit.ly/5OAkbv

2010-01-14 22:57:26
ballardian: RT @Glinner: seen the blog devoted to exposing ad agencies who copy ideas from the interweb?
http://bit.ly/1VgNdo /via @cslyons

2010-01-14 21:27:37
ballardian: I miss the future… Geoffrey Hoyle’s 2010: Living in the Future children’s book (‘72), now digitised:
http://bit.ly/5dxd8u | via @bigstanno

2010-01-13 23:47:13
ballardian: Ballard’s Vermilion Sands…. RT @ethel_baraona: Book Review: Interactive Architecture |
http://tinyurl.com/y8ehh2b /we make money not art

2010-01-13 23:39:31
ballardian: RT @marcusod: Superb visual reporting. Big Picture’s heart-rending insight into the horrors of Haiti
http://bit.ly/7jMwZ3

2010-01-13 22:49:03
ballardian: Nick Sowers & the architecture of war: RT @soundscrapers: The End of the Grand Tour |
http://is.gd/6dtCL | my military travels in 2009

2010-01-13 21:53:24
ballardian: The Sweeney & Brutalism: “a hardhatted transition between decaying, smashed-to-fuck factory & modernist housing regen”
http://bit.ly/5HQZ79

2010-01-13 09:02:39
ballardian: @alanbenzie I’ve got this: http://bit.ly/5NW7Tb. Artemiev revising excerpts from Stalker, Solaris, The Mirror.

2010-01-13 09:00:22
ballardian: @paul_h_williams Yes, the Stanislaw Lem school of alien contact is very different from the James Cameron school!

2010-01-13 08:50:46
ballardian: My house, hopefully. RT @VariousArch @bryanboyer: What will be the 2000s gasometer? Ruins beautiful enough to renovate rather than replace?

2010-01-13 08:46:35
ballardian: My friend visited with his 2-year old daughter. I was playing Artemiev’s Stalker s/track. She wouldn’t stop wailing until it was turned off.

2010-01-13 05:16:29
ballardian: “The baggage reclaim hall was a Ballardian experience, when the arcane support systems of modern life stop working” http://bit.ly/6rBlxp

2010-01-13 02:36:23
ballardian: “Brisbane needs Dubai-scale high rise boom” Wow. Brissie must be the only city still looking to Dubai for inspiration:
http://bit.ly/6Q1Swm

2010-01-13 01:57:41
ballardian: RT @Glinner: Wow. I missed the “effective immediately” part RT @kalimkassam Google.cn now shows Tiananmen tank man pics
http://bit.ly/6jyfA0

2010-01-13 01:49:16
ballardian: RT @mrphoenix: Interview w/ 3rd & 7th creator Alex Roman:
http://bit.ly/5HkokQ
—-> film here for those who missed it:
http://bit.ly/8HU05q

2010-01-12 05:50:56
ballardian: Boo! RT @BoingBoing: Facebook blocks “Web 2.0 Suicide Machine,” now a cease-and-desist reported
http://bit.ly/7Kk8Ec

2010-01-12 05:31:54
ballardian: “Has the Internet changed your thinking?” Eno, Coupland, Dawkins, Shirky, Rucker etc
http://bit.ly/7m631w | http://bit.ly/7C6VfL
via @bruces

2010-01-12 04:31:35
ballardian: Zomia, Asia’s “shattered zone”, a region “deliberately constructed to keep the state at arm’s length”
http://bit.ly/4GEsxX | via @harikunzru

2010-01-12 04:28:35
ballardian: Oh dear, that’s a bit wrong… “Movie-goers feel depressed & suicidal at not being able to visit utopian alien planet”:
http://bit.ly/5y8nK2

2010-01-12 04:11:52
ballardian: More on mythogeogaphy from things magazine: “walking as exhibitionism”
http://bit.ly/63E599

2010-01-12 04:10:18
ballardian: Ha ha! On the other hand: the Web Suicide Machine! “Lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles”
http://bit.ly/5aLtCV

2010-01-12 23:20:50
ballardian: RT: @bengoldacre @iankatz1000: Stop press: Google ends censorship in China
http://bit.ly/7SzeIB

2010-01-12 23:20:00
ballardian: RT @daj42: The Madness of Crowds and an Internet Delusion. Jaron Lanier rethinks “open” information culture {@nytimes}
http://bit.ly/4PYjWs

2010-01-12 22:38:02
ballardian: Must be out of touch: had no idea William Gibson designs bags:
http://bit.ly/kqHas (Check out the comments: who spilt blood in the water?)

2010-01-12 21:51:40
ballardian: “Porn more more valuable than politicians” … porn joins a long list, then…
http://bit.ly/62Pof7

2010-01-12 07:31:45
ballardian: RT @lyndons: Watched Ch9News for 1st time in yrs. Heard the word ‘Aussie’ 20x & only political news seemed to be contents of PM’s winecellar

2010-01-12 07:13:05
ballardian: Albert Speer Jr: “‘The Slums of the 21st Century Are Being Built in Dubai’” [Spiegel] |
http://bit.ly/8B5WkF via @archinect

2010-01-11 05:16:01
ballardian: More on Phil Smith’s mythogeographical process, including ‘mental exercises for sideways walkers’:
http://bit.ly/7a1j41

2010-01-11 05:13:06
ballardian: This is mythogeography, of a sort: Aussie rocker Billy Miller’s guide to old Melbourne footy grounds:
http://bit.ly/6Y6f0z | via @davegraney

2010-01-11 05:09:48
ballardian: Phil Smith’s new book, Mythogeography: Walking Sideways “levels of the city reflected back in the levels of the walker”
http://bit.ly/8rmn47

2010-01-11 05:01:54
ballardian: The Baja coast: “a peaceful getaway or a lawless frontier?”
http://bit.ly/7Keltf | via @centrifugalcity

2010-01-11 04:49:47
ballardian: “Burtynsky has a Ballardian eye for the incongruous, vast machine shapes out of place & time”
http://bit.ly/62wFgZ | http://bit.ly/5rWJL3

2010-01-11 00:22:09
ballardian: I visited Guam & thought there needs to be a film about its 2nd-class US status. And there is:
http://bit.ly/5ahDuy | via @soundscrapers

2010-01-11 00:13:32
ballardian: Man throws 2 bottles of acid from above into crowded Hong Kong tourist spot:
http://bit.ly/4wttpx

2010-01-11 22:49:14
ballardian: Not sure why I am doing this, but here goes: my thoughts on Twitter – “Defending the Indefensible”:
http://bit.ly/7ZzZEp

2010-01-11 22:20:04
ballardian: “Welcome to the age of robot reporters”:
http://bit.ly/6BjX1r

2010-01-11 21:26:32
ballardian: Just what was life like in the UK in ‘08? RT @somebadideas: the ancient ley lines of Woolworths
http://bit.ly/7k02bf | via @Richard_Kadrey

2010-01-11 21:21:16
ballardian: RT @GreatDismal: Twitter is like little animated hieroglyphics in the margins of a working manuscript, offering obscurely breaking news.

2010-01-11 20:37:14
ballardian: RT @lyndons: How Twitter was born: the first 140 users – guardian.co.uk
http://bit.ly/7m7cqe

2010-01-11 18:27:22
ballardian: ‘Journicide’ – the well-written story is becoming extinct:
http://bit.ly/4rgBAU

2010-01-11 17:57:29
ballardian: “Porn studios lead the stampede into 3D TV”:
http://bit.ly/83F8lL

2010-01-11 17:44:00
ballardian: Gothik/erotic. RT @johncoulthart: ‘Crash’, Bethany Shorb’s photo series inspired by JGB & The Normal’s Warm Leatherette
http://bit.ly/6YAexA

2010-01-11 13:03:16
ballardian: Last night, I dreamt I raced James Taylor for pinks.

2010-01-11 12:46:29
ballardian: Weird uplifting timeshifting downbeat phased Carl Sagan/Stephen Hawking lock-loop mashup:
http://bit.ly/L4WZg | via @paleofuture

2010-01-11 12:32:50
ballardian: Die Dubai, die… RT @LittleMonsta: Trailers for video game set in a Dubai reclaimed by the desert
http://j.mp/4ZBuij | http://j.mp/4nn3tW

2010-01-11 10:59:35
ballardian: RT @factmagazine: BBC’s Brian Eno documentary premieres this month:
http://bit.ly/52SYau

2010-01-11 10:09:44
ballardian: RT @bigstanno: Assault on Precinct 13 “I’ve got a plan, it’s called save ass. We jump out that window and run like a bastard” BEST LINE EVER

2010-01-10 23:43:12
ballardian: Radiophonic legends… rare photo of Delia Derbyshire & Daphne Oram, taken by Malcolm Clarke:
http://bit.ly/774QRY

2010-01-10 21:34:44
ballardian: Could you make it with Roxxxy? Sex robot with articulated skeleton, built-in cooling system and five personailities:
http://bit.ly/5e8GU8

2010-01-10 12:16:28
ballardian: “A bridge between imagination and reality must be built” – Raoul Vaneigem

2010-01-10 12:07:39
ballardian: “Piece now!” Watched Weather Underground doco. Fascinating period of history. Will follow up w/ a viewing of Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park.

2010-01-09 06:17:41
ballardian: Dr George Miller: from Mad Max to Babe & Happy Feet…. strangest career trajectory of any director?

2010-01-08 23:21:41
ballardian: Hey, all of you who like abandoned utopias, post-civilisation ruins & Ballardian malls in disrepair, visit Second Life!
http://bit.ly/7I2IAw

2010-01-08 23:08:42
ballardian: RT @theauteursdaily: Viewing (2′27″). RED RIDING trilogy, HD, opens w/blurb from @kpunk99:
http://bit.ly/5DN49J

2010-01-08 22:12:09
ballardian: Finally saw District 9. Wow! It’s not perfect, but it is GREAT. Owns Avatar. Oh, for a parallel universe where D9 rakes in a billion bucks.

2010-01-08 09:31:17
ballardian: Two reverse perspectives on the Nitin Garg murder, from within both countries involved:
http://bit.ly/8lCl6q | http://bit.ly/7eCnEd

..:: PREVIOUSLY ON BALLARDIAN:
+ Twitter: Defending the Indefensible

“You’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, and you’re barely print-literate”
- William Gibson, Neuromancer

“Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.”
- J.G. Ballard

“Twitter is like little animated hieroglyphics in the margins of a working manuscript, offering obscurely breaking news”
- William Gibson, Twitter.

I’m aware that people think this site goes through fallow periods where it seems nothing is happening in terms of research into Ballard and Ballardian themes. But as I’ve mentioned before, I am posting nearly all links on my Twitter account and saving ballardian.com for longer posts and articles. I’m also aware that some readers don’t give two hoots for Twitter, but it works for me as a linksharing hive mind, ready and able to be plugged in for instant feedback. It may well be a “fad”, but as one of my students remarked last year, who cares? Fads serve to focus creativity. And he’s right. The aggregate clusters around a particular medium, breaks up, moves on to something else. What does it really matter if it’s gone in a year, two years, three? For the moment, Twitter works – Twitter is the lightning conductor.

Besides, with the likes of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling using it regularly, do I really need to justify it? Perhaps. Here is my perspective. Updating a blog is hard work; Twitter less so. You do it in down time. At least I do. I recently remarked that I had written around 42,000 words on Twitter in ‘09, less a boast but more an expression of surprise at the amount because it happened so intuitively. And if I can write like that, so quickly and honestly, then I should not be agonising over my forthcoming book — which, too, is supposed to be 40,000 words. I look back over many of those posts and can see clear and direct lines leading to, away and back to the articles, essays and chapters I wrote last year, as well as links, jottings and hurried notes about future projects and ideas. (And there are tools available to archive this stream, which can then be searched for keywords and themes.) When I was updating this site regularly with blog posts, I would agonise over getting a post right, sometimes spending so long that the moment would evaporate. The post would never get written, and the link/person/project I had found would be lost in the temporal backwash. With Twitter, I record the link quickly and go back to it later if need be. I align myself here with Geoff Manaugh, who writes:

Twitter is very obviously not the answer to everything, and it never should have been portrayed that way; but it also very obviously is not the death of humanism. Twitter is just another option for people to use when they want to take notes – and it’s no more exciting than that, either, to be frank. It’s a ball-point pen.

Get over it.

Still, some people will always snigger, that’s just how they’re wired. Today, you can still read articles in newspapers that go out of their way to denigrate the experience, their comments recalling exactly the criticisms levelled against blogs when they first became a popular interface. It’s supremely boring. As for me, I’ve heard it all before. I have one particular interlocutor (a friend, I might add!) who loves to belittle my experience. Here is the latest witticism, posted on another forum:

Simon did note recently that he’d written some 40,000 words on Twitter, which he saw as a very promising portent for the progress of his book. I didn’t think of the analogy in time to reply, but that’s like saying 2,000 quick wanks is good preparation for marriage.

Ho ho. Shut the door on your way out, dude. Oh, and turn out the lights.

In this exchange with one of his followers on Twitter, Gibson sums up the link between Twitter and creativity. He was asked if he was spending too much time on Twitter, when he didn’t spend nearly as much time as on his blog. The interrogator’s fear was that excessive tweeting would negate any potential new book from Gibson. Gibson replied: “I see zero adverse effect. In fact, quite the opposite. The blog was *work*. I do this [Twitter] in the *margins* of work. The other thing about twitter is all the web-browsing time it saves you. People do it *for* you. Twitter: like rattan bones *for your mind*!”

I know from experience that any reasonably popular blog most definitely is work. This site was only updated so much because I was writing my PhD on Ballard at the time, and I was completely saturated in the research material. Now, unfortunately, I have to make a living and sourcing and writing lengthy posts for free every few days doesn’t seem like such an attractive, or healthy, option. On this score, I like what Momus has to say about why he is stopping his own regular blogging. Its an explanation that resonates with my own feelings:

Because there’s a kind of tumbleweed feel to my Friends List these days, as people migrate to Twitter (and “ship” their inconsequential tweets back to the old haunt as if to place a big “Nothing to see here folks!” sign over both locations) or Facebook. Because I don’t feel that blogging either can or should be as big a part of the next decade as it has been of this one. Because I wonder what would happen if I put the energy I pour daily into this blog (and I’ve established a great working routine!) into something like a book, or something else … Because I’ve probably said everything I have to say about my opinions and worldview, on a certain level (which isn’t to say that the positions I’ve adopted have won or been accepted; many will never be). Because switching to another medium (fiction, for example) will be a way for me to put those views and hunches and feelings into new and fresh relationships with each other…

Because I don’t like the chain letter pressure to come up with something interesting every day, or the way that a couple of missed entries lead to a whole week in which nothing happens, and how I care about that and battle to bring the ratings back up. Okay, I’ve cited this before as a plus, calling it the Scheherazade Challenge, but look at poor Scheherazade’s motives for inventing a new tale every day: all the king’s other wives were killed. Is that the kind of pressure I want in my life? Have I considered gardening as a hobby?

But Twitter is like thinking aloud, occasionally to others, often to yourself. A brain stream that is sometimes inspiring, sometimes energising, sometimes dumb and silly, but always for the open-minded person creative in the way that only playful self-reflection and considered world-gazing can be. The other important note to consider is the network effect: a good deal of the links I post/tweet are sent from other Twitter users. I have 1500 followers — I repost that link, and even if it is picked up by a handful of those people, they may have many more followers than me, they retweet it to their followers, and the chain continues. The aggregate effect is the most phenomenally powerful element of Twitter. This is why news often breaks on Twitter before it hits MSM. So, I am indebted to the many kind users who send me interesting news and information, and I hope I’ve been able to add value in the same way. So if you’re intent on hating on Twitter, think of each user as a node or a switching station if that makes the experience any more palatable.

In short: to my mind, Twitter is the best research tool available at this moment in time.

Nonetheless, as a service to my Twitter-challenged friends — and to the loyal readers who visit this site regularly and who expect/want/would like to see new material/research/insights — each week I am going to try to post my previous 7 days’ worth of Twitter links and quotes, plus some observations. I’ll spare you the asides to other users and extended conversations: that’s a realtime conversational/feedback element that can’t necessarily be relayed here, but that must be experienced via Twitter itself, preferably through a client such as TweetDeck. I think this is also good practice for people who visit the site through an RSS reader and therefore can’t see the little Twitter box at the top right of the ballardian.com home page, and who may therefore never even know there’s any action at all over there.

So, my real motivation has never been to preach about Twitter, but simply to share some fairly interesting Ballardian/Ballard-inspired artworks, theory, social upheavals and projects that I have found (or disseminated), and that I hope you will enjoy also. But just to restate: ballardian.com is still alive, and reserved for articles, long posts, essays and photofeatures as they arrive from me and other contributors. There are many exciting features coming up, of which Paul Roth’s recent brilliant essay on Burtynsky is just the beginning.

So, let the link dumping begin. I’ll start from the new year. For the other 42,000 “wanks” from 2009, you’ll need to check the archives.

Jan 1, 2010-Jan 7 2010

2010-01-07 04:57:41
ballardian: “I look forward to the transformation of Britain into the ultimate departure lounge. After all, we have every reason to leave.” – JG Ballard

2010-01-07 02:14:05
ballardian: The Ballardian forum has been offline for months due to hassles with web hosts etc. Now, it has been revived! Enjoy: http://bit.ly/60Jcwy

2010-01-06 22:53:32
ballardian: I’ve been looking forward to SW myself… RT @geetadayal: A review I wrote on “Sonic Warfare,” a new book by @kodenine: http://bit.ly/4qx5uX

2010-01-06 22:49:09
ballardian: A Truffauldian dystopia would not care. RT @SpaceSyntaxGirl: RT @GreatDismal UK pensioners burning books to keep warm http://bit.ly/6GI8Ff

2010-01-06 22:32:17
ballardian: RT @bldgblog: Great photos of the rapidly decaying Biosphere 2 project, referencing “buildings that die,” Ballard & more: http://is.gd/5PlJE

2010-01-06 21:32:55
ballardian: “Like most CGI extravaganzas, it flares on the retina but leaves few traces in the memory” @kpunk99 on Avatar: http://bit.ly/63MNY2

2010-01-06 21:16:07
ballardian: RT @GreatDismal: Ballard would have so brilliantly articulated the nitrous eroticism of our full-body airport security scan imagery.

2010-01-06 12:56:37
ballardian: “Mutation or metamorphosis was taken for granted, indeed welcomed” Christopher Hitchens reviews Ballard’s shorts: http://tinyurl.com/ygjq3dc

2010-01-06 09:04:27
ballardian: Hawkwind, Ballard, Hieronim Neumann… “Flat block / of two dimensions / It’s a human zoo / a suicide machine” http://bit.ly/5d7fZM

2010-01-06 06:43:27
ballardian: “I’m an urban guerilla / I make bombs in my cellar / So watch out Mr. Business Man / Your empire’s about to blow” http://bit.ly/5LDtOi

2010-01-06 05:48:52
ballardian: Understand: the public is not the problem. First the Newark fiasco, now this: explosives smuggled onto plane in ‘test’ http://bit.ly/8q7wec

2010-01-06 03:37:52
ballardian: RT @Richard_Kadrey: Makers, wankers and vampires! RT @martyhalpern: The 10 most pirated digital books of 2009 http://tinyurl.com/yfhoy5r

2010-01-06 01:10:12
ballardian: “A time that no longer occurs” Will Viney, ‘The Romantic Ruin’ http://bit.ly/8AFvAr (also, Viney on Ballardian ruins: http://bit.ly/6Pd1K1)

2010-01-06 00:00:13
ballardian: There are some very strange spam bots patrolling Twitter. One retweets w/out attribution, and then announces it is unfollowing the victim…

2010-01-05 03:28:39
ballardian: Fabulous piece equating Burj’s “vacant stare” w/ the emptiness of the post-recession/post-apocalypse: http://bit.ly/5hymnv | via @bldgblog

2010-01-05 03:22:34
ballardian: RT @bldgblog: Weird new year’s reading: “nfantryman’s Guide to Combat in Built-Up Areas,” U.S. Army urban combat handbook http://is.gd/5IYAD

2010-01-05 02:46:58
ballardian: “Ballard’s stories… well made, full of supposedly contemptible components, yet irreducibly strange” Zadie Smith http://bit.ly/8ZY58Y

2010-01-05 00:37:20
ballardian: RT @johncoulthart: Expect babies or small children to be put to work as bomb mules from now on http://is.gd/5MhZI

2010-01-05 00:18:39
ballardian: RT @ColinPeters: two great panics that taste great together. Body Scan vs. Child porn law RT: @juliangough @Fergal: http://is.gd/5MhZI

2010-01-05 23:42:33
ballardian: RT @paleofuture: NASA’s 1965 press kit for the Gemini V mission [pdf] http://bit.ly/4Pa4OQ (via @alexismadrigal)

2010-01-05 23:14:53
ballardian: RT @stephenhero: RT @jojeda Parkour flip book-style http://post.ly/HKUV

2010-01-05 22:46:21
ballardian: Just discovered Google Chrome’s “incognito” function, which is wicked sick! Especially this bit: “Be wary of surveillance by secret agents.”

2010-01-05 22:24:33
ballardian: Pot, meet kettle… In the UK, “rich, swollen”, ISPs smack Bono down: http://bit.ly/6EQfxv | via @Glinner

2010-01-05 12:40:56
ballardian: “Foretelling human ends” – Ballardian.com: Paul Roth views Edward Burtynsky’s work on oil through a Ballardian lens http://bit.ly/5rWJL3 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
12:28
ballardian: RT @jimrossignol: More camera-confiscation madness from British police: http://bit.ly/5XOkB7

2010-01-05 11:01:32
ballardian: RT @timmaughan: The original #Avatar story – shame so much of this depth is missing: http://bit.ly/7o7xA3 (@MariKurisato)

2010-01-05 10:49:56
ballardian: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Lewis Carroll

2010-01-05 07:19:21
ballardian: “Time does not exist. The universe is static. Movement is an illusion.” – Julian Barbour, Killing Time (film) http://bit.ly/QBMOv

2010-01-05 06:30:30
ballardian: “The only way through a crisis of space is to invent a new space” – Fredric Jameson

2010-01-05 06:10:00
ballardian: RT @melchil: Janek Schaefer’s ‘Recorded Delivery’, sound-activated tape recording sent through British post http://bit.ly/5mAEyR 1995

2010-01-05 05:40:41
ballardian: The only thing better than William Basinki’s Disintegration Loops is William Basinski’s shortwave loops.

2010-01-05 04:34:23
ballardian: Delhi’s Raqs Media Collective – interstitial urban capillary veins: “conversing about the ‘debris of the unrealizable’” http://bit.ly/7SGros

2010-01-04 23:48:21
ballardian: Believe it when I see it… Dubai & Moscow’s rotating skyscrapers, “made possible by 79 giant wind turbines”: http://bit.ly/171p02

2010-01-04 23:44:05
ballardian: RT @soundscrapers: U.S. Military is Meeting Recruitment Goals With Video Games – But at What Cost? http://is.gd/5Mjqa

2010-01-04 23:40:45
ballardian: So the reports *are* true: the Newark airport lockdown *was* hell… Hey Jude sing-a-long: http://bit.ly/8Kful3

2010-01-04 23:11:38
ballardian: RT @johncoulthart: So if the Burj Khalifa needs to be bailed out in the future will it change its name again? Burj Walmart, Burj Tesco?

2010-01-04 23:08:44
ballardian: I feel sick… BASE jumping off the Burj (video): http://bit.ly/xc7cu

2010-01-04 22:54:36
ballardian: “Life is getting friendlier but less interesting. Blame technology, globalisation and feminism” http://bit.ly/4XydbF | via @cityofsound

2010-01-04 22:52:52
ballardian: I’m all for ‘injecting playful moments into the urban fabric’: PlastiCity FantastiCity design comp http://bit.ly/7ZlYA8 | via @pruned

2010-01-04 22:38:56
ballardian: Remember Pillars of Wisdom, Paul’s great film about Abu Dhabi’s artificial skyline? It can be downloaded w/ new s/track http://bit.ly/8zs3rd

2010-01-04 22:22:41
ballardian: Narrow Streets LA, a Fantasy Urban Makeover: “Century City, a Ballardian complex of futuristic ruins preserved intact” http://bit.ly/59HDFz

2010-01-04 22:19:56
ballardian: Disney’s RiverCountry Rotting in Fittingly Ballardian Way: http://bit.ly/87t3ns

2010-01-04 21:29:40
ballardian: RT @LittleMonsta: 10 Sci-Fi Weapons That Actually Exist http://bit.ly/8wq5EK

2010-01-04 21:13:10
ballardian: My mate Paul arrived just in time to see the Burj explode into life. Here’s his film of the opening – incredible stuff: http://bit.ly/8J1FWI

2010-01-04 21:08:30
ballardian: RT @jomc: “alpha fail” : man who says obvious and/or officious things in a booming voice with overwhelming confidence.

2010-01-04 13:22:53
ballardian: I’m off to bed now, to dream of the Burj…

2010-01-04 13:00:33
ballardian: Open lecture series, School of Architecture, Sheffield U: “emergence, dead-zones, edge spaces, terrain vague, subcults” http://bit.ly/4Fj7LE

2010-01-04 03:26:38
ballardian: Window cleaners on the Burj Dubai. Only 142,000 sq m to go. “Get a move on, lads!”: http://bit.ly/2E7CWS

2010-01-04 02:13:47
ballardian: @johnny_neurotic Vincenzo Natali, who is directing High-Rise, has apparently based the building’s design on the Burj: http://bit.ly/4CUHFV

2010-01-04 02:09:06
ballardian: Burj Dubai opens today: “designed so that those who so wish will never have to leave, or descend below the 108th floor” http://bit.ly/5qbbIa

2010-01-04 02:04:36
ballardian: Newark airport: this phrase scares me more than terrorism “this act breached the ’sterile’ sections of the terminal” http://bit.ly/59pMGQ

2010-01-03 23:26:35
ballardian: RT @ethel_baraona: Lost Formats Preservation Society http://tinyurl.com/loxvjr <------- reminiscent of @bruces's Dead Media Project

2010-01-03 22:48:13
ballardian: "Disneyland & Las Vegas rolled into one" - minus the people. Utopia pt 3: Sth China Mall (film): http://bit.ly/6ch9hn | http://bit.ly/7qBF1c

2010-01-03 22:30:58
ballardian: A model to believe in? The “slow-budget” film approach” http://bit.ly/843Hbh | via @christydena

2010-01-03 22:29:30
ballardian: @The_Art_Life I’m interested enough in Avatar’s ideas & tech to see it again. The debates are enlightening. At least film matters again.

2010-01-03 22:17:59
ballardian: Reading the comments = deja vu; will publishing learn from music biz mistakes? Ebook piracy increases http://bit.ly/6SUSnN | via @bruces

2010-01-03 11:15:51
ballardian: A quote for the times (again): “You’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, & you’re barely print-literate” (William Gibson, Neuromancer)

2010-01-03 10:54:26
ballardian: “The Burj Dubai – just the latest example of mankind’s edifice complex (Times): http://bit.ly/4yFuIY

2010-01-03 10:52:24
ballardian: Times: “Burj Dubai, the first superscraper, opens for business tomorrow – if it can find any” http://bit.ly/76rEYj

2010-01-03 10:13:01
ballardian: RT @morphocode: Beautiful parking structures: http://bit.ly/7rZvJD | also: http://bit.ly/rVZaL

2010-01-03 10:11:37
ballardian: @The_Art_Life Good pts re Avatar. Yet I still feel certain aspects undermined Av’s cleverest ideas. Twitter not best medium for elaboration.

2010-01-03 09:22:48
ballardian: Moorcock on Ballard: “There were fights, bad acid trips, wild drives through the London night” – http://bit.ly/4MGxm5 | via @johncoulthart

2010-01-03 08:19:37
ballardian: Backing up my Twitter account, I was astonished to find I’d written over 42,000 words on here in 09. Hope yet for getting my book done!

2010-01-03 08:14:07
ballardian: Great to see a savvy MSM Twitter angle for a change (NYTimes) “the real value is listening to a wired collective voice” http://bit.ly/7pIqmQ

2010-01-03 08:00:31
ballardian: Happy NY! After R.A. Wilson, my 2010 goal is to “create the happiest, funniest, most romantic reality-tunnel consistent w/ my brain signals”

After Robert Anton Wilson, my 2010 goal is to “create the happiest, funniest, most romantic reality-tunnel consistent with my brain signals”. And so the following is probably of no interest to anyone but me…

But here goes, anyway: for 2009, ballardian.com’s top 10 most-read posts, search terms leading to the site and links from other sites:

TOP 10 MOST-READ POSTS ON BALLARDIAN.COM FOR 2009
(Note that most of these are old posts, and, surprise, surprise: the X-ray porn comes in at no. 1; there’s depravity also at no. 5, 6 & 10. Good to see urbanism and film posts making a strong showing, too.):

1. ‘The fusion of science and pornography’ (WARNING! Exceptionally unsafe for work) – 1 July 2008

“Wim Delvoye’s ‘Kiss’ series of x-ray art echoes The Atrocity Exhibition and the illustrations of Phoebe Gloeckner. WARNING: this post is indisputably unsafe for work. No, seriously: you have been warned.”

2. Coming Never: Richard Gere as Blake – 7 May 2008

“Aside from the films of Empire and Crash, Ballard has had almost all his novels optioned for the screen at some stage. Suitors include Richard Gere, Samuel L. Jackson, Jack Nicholson, David Frost and a trio of scantily-clad cavegirls.”

3. Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon – 10 August 2007

“Although little known, Harley Cokliss’s 1971 short film Crash!, based on passages from The Atrocity Exhibition, has something even more prized, something else the Cronenberg and Spielberg adaptations could never have: it stars J.G. Ballard. With his brooding, hypermasculine presence, Ballard plays a version of Atrocity’s ‘T’ character alongside Gabrielle Drake, her own role a composite of the book’s archetypal ’sex-kit’ women.”

4. Michael Jackson’s Facelift – 2 July 2009

“‘As Michael Jackson reached middle age, the skin of both his cheeks and neck tended to sag from failure of the supporting structures. His naso-labial folds deepened, and the soft tissues along his jaw fell forward. His jowls tended to increase. In profile the creases of his neck lengthened and the chin-neck contour lost its youthful outline and became convex.’”

5. Dead Models – 31 October 2007

“A photo shoot for America’s Next Top Model, on the subject of dead girls. The judges’ comments have to be seen to be believed.”

6. Triple Transgression – 26 December 2007

“This disturbing photo feature focuses on peeping toms in Japan and Kohei Yoshiyuki, the photographer who documented them in the 1970s.”

7. ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic Clear – 24 December 2008

“Nic Clear leads the remarkable Unit 15 course on the built environment at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. In this interview, Nic explains the course’s focus on the work of Ballard as a way to counter the lamentable state of current discourse on architecture. The article includes clips of six stunning films produced by students as part of this Ballard-inspired methodology.”

8. Crown Casino: ‘A snarling, digitised mutilation’ – 27 May 2009

“Simon Sellars, Mel Chilianis and Melb Psy take an audiovisual tour of Melbourne’s Crown Casino, seeking to map the coordinates of this micronational zone — consumer-driven control space with a raging need.”

9. R.I.P. JG Ballard, 1930-2009 – 20 April 2009

“Goodbye, Jim…”

10. Love Among the Mannequins – 15 January 2008

“Here’s a new campaign from fashion label Dsquared2, featuring sex with crash-test mannequins. But it doesn’t appear to be selling anything. What exactly *is* it selling? Note the photographer: none other than our old mucker, Steven Meisel.”

TOP 10 MOST-FOLLOWED LINKS TO BALLARDIAN.COM FROM OTHER SITES:
(surprise: no porn)

1. http://www.radiohead.com/deadairspace/index.php?a=469
2. http://www.jgballard.com
3. http://www.planetaki.com
4. http://www.metafilter.com
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_Come_(Ballard_novel)
6. http://www.facebook.com
7. http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=7221
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._Ballard
9. http://twitter.com/ballardian
10. http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org

TOP 10 SEARCH-ENGINE TERMS LEADING VISITORS TO BALLARDIAN.COM:
(very surprised at the paucity of porn, also that ‘ballardian’ beats ‘jg ballard’)

1. ballardian
2. jg ballard
3. gabrielle drake
4. ballard
5. medical fetish
6. make love
7. computers internet blog
8. concrete island
9. ballardian.com
10. atrocity exhibition

interview by Simon Sellars.

In the wake of J.G. Ballard’s passing, Berlin’s 032c magazine asked me to rework my 2007 Simon Reynolds interview. I put some new questions to Simon, and here is the result…

“‘Magisterial, precise, unsettling’: Simon Reynolds on JG Ballard”, originally published in 032c, no. 18, winter 2009/10, pp. 126-9.

Simon Reynolds is one of the most recognizable music critics around. He possesses a willingness to tackle pop music as an art form worthy of intellectual discourse rather than a fleeting moment of adolescent flash. Reynolds breaks new ground, melding unchecked enthusiasm with a robust theoretical foundation in a body of work that is exciting for its eclecticism alone: he’s just as compelling writing on hip hop, Britney, and rave, as he is on grunge, prog rock, and grime.

Reynolds’s work reached a peak with the publication of Rip It Up and Start Again, a timely excavation of post-punk: Cabaret Voltaire, PiL, Magazine, and so on. What’s more, J.G. Ballard was a thread throughout the book, as Reynolds charted the influence of JGB — and especially his experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition — on the era.

Simon Sellars: For you, what’s the relationship between J.G. Ballard and music?

Simon Reynolds: Obviously I always loved music, but it was things my parents had introduced me to — Beethoven, or Hollywood musicals, plus stray things I’d heard on the radio like the Beatles. And then when I was around fifteen, I was inducted into that whole rock apparatus of taking music -pop culture, youth culture, rock criticism — seriously. And what I was into on a fanatical level immediately before entering rock culture was science fiction, and particularly Ballard. The new fanaticism simply replaced the old one, and I stuck to music journalism!

SS: Do you still return to his work?

SR: It’s only in the last decade or so that I rediscovered science fiction, and particularly Ballard. I’ve also started reading more of his critical work, his interviews and journalism, and become more impressed by him — he was clearly the most advanced writer and thinker in his field.

SS: Which of his books have impacted you the most?

SR: In some ways the one that grabbed me most, and has yet to relinquish its hold, was the first one I read, The Drowned World. Penguin used to do these great science fiction paperback editions, and they had one series with really evocative paintings — glossy, garish, almost hyperrealist — on the covers. The Drowned World, The Drought, and The Wind From Nowhere were all in that series and looked particularly good. But in The Drowned World, the severity of Ballard’s imagination was what hooked me, and just the idea of the protagonist who — as in all Ballard’s cataclysm novels — is perversely drawn towards the heart of catastrophe, and finds his true self in the transformed landscape. That really grabbed me.

Also, the idea of the world you know being drastically transformed … I lived near London, in a commuter town 30 miles north of the capital, and went down to the city quite frequently; so imagining it submerged was exciting.

Two David Pelham-illustrated ’softcover classics’ (both Penguin, London, 1974).

SS: Has he influenced your work in any way, either as a critic of popular culture, or stylistically?

SR: Actually, the influences on my writing and thinking come from a totally different place, although there are certain affinities — a sense of the power of the irrational, these atavistic drives pulsing inside culture. I’ve long felt that pop music is driven by ambivalent, sometimes outright malevolent energies. But I’ve probably derived that more from various French thinkers, and Nietzsche; or certain rock writers. Still, you can see the connection between music and the Ballardian worldview, which sees human culture as fundamentally perverse. And the self-reflexivity in science fiction is very similar to music criticism, because neither genre gets respect from the literary establishment, give or take a Kingsley Amis or an Anthony Burgess in science fiction. Both science fiction and rock writing have an inferiority and superiority complex. Science fiction writers love to think of what they’re doing as one really crucial, contemporary form of literature — a literature of ideas with elements of speculation and an estrangement effect.

Rock critics are just the same: they crave that validation from mainstream art criticism, but they also like being the renegade form. Ballard exemplifies this meta aspect of science fiction, although he goes beyond it as a great cultural critic.

SS: His work can also be read as philosophical inquiry, an approach that seems to sum up a particular late-capitalist mode of being. What makes the Ballardian worldview so prescient?

SR: He was dealing with similar things as Marshall McLuhan, and, later, as Jean Baudrillard. But he was doing it with far greater clarity, sharper perceptions, and more style and wit than either. All the obscenity of mass communication, simulation, and social implosion in Baudrillard’s books was being explored earlier, and more effectively, in Ballard’s fiction. He was dealing with the pornification of everything very early.

SS: You’ve remarked elsewhere that Ballard’s short stories have more appeal to you than his novels.

SR: After the disaster novels, the mid-1970s urban breakdown ones like Concrete Island and High-Rise, I think that, as a critic, Ballard’s shorts are his supreme achievement — so magisterial, so distilled and precise, atmospheric and unsettling. I recently re-read “The Ultimate City,” which is about a young man who lives in a near future that’s very green-conscious and placid and dull. So he goes to the deserted city and starts up urban life again — gets generators going, and then misfits start to flock in from the eco-communes and garden towns. But of course the whole thing goes haywire.

It was only a few years ago that I finally read Crash all the way through. I was writing Rip It Up and Start Again, and I wanted to understand why it had such a big influence on post-punk. In away, I prefer the side of Ballard that relates to someone like John Wyndham over the side that relates to William S. Burroughs. I like that dour, flat Britishness confronted by something alien or catastrophic.

SS: I was surprised by your Ballard tribute in Salon, in which you wrote: “While his novels of the late 1980s and thereafter, such as Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, have admirers, few would argue they’ve contributed a jot to his enduring cult.” For me, Super-Cannes seems to be one of his very best, a hyper-aware distillation of the “pornification” you were talking about earlier, a sense of entrapment within a system that only recognizes exchange values as authentic modes of being.

SR: It’s not about the relative merits of his books, but about what his cult is based on. It’s a bit like with rock stars. Morrissey put out a number of solo albums, ranging from dire to mediocre to excellent. But the basis of his cult will always be the Smiths. The same goes for the Rolling Stones — their last album, A Bigger Bang, was actually a really fine album, but “Stones-iness” was defined by the 1960s albums, plus Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street. It’s hard to imagine many people starting their Stones fandom with A Bigger Bang, just as it’s hard to imagine many people becoming obsessed with Morrissey on account of You are the Quarry. I think the same thing applies to Ballard’s work. Not to say you’re wrong about Super-Cannes.

SS: You’ve mentioned Ballard’s influence on post-punk. Growing up on this music, Ballard was always a vague referent, glimpsed through obscure Cabaret Voltaire or Ultravox interviews. So I appreciated the way Rip It Up and Start Again unpacked the connection. But what about today’s crop? Is there a continuum from then to now? For example, the dubstep musicians Kode9 and Burial — every second review of their albums seems to invoke the dreaded word “Ballardian,” possibly becoming as much a cliché as it was during the post-punk period.

SR: That relates more to the Spaceape’s contribution to the Kode9 album Memories of the Future. His lyrics and delivery are a bit like Linton Kwesi Johnson reading excerpts from The Atrocity Exhibition. With Burial, the connection is that his album is supposed to be a concept record about South London becoming flooded when the Thames Barrier breaks in the global-warmed near future. I think Katrina and New Orleans is more likely to be the inspiration, but there’s an obvious parallel there with The Drowned World.

There is also an urban psychogeography thing going on in Burial’s music that recalls Ballard in Crash. The album draws a lot from South London, this inter-zone of semi-suburbia between Brixton, where the tube line stops, and Croydon, which is on the city’s periphery. So it’s a hinterland similar to the outer London areas near Heathrow where Ballard situated Crash. A real anomie zone, but possessed with a certain desolate beauty. Burial has also talked of putting his tunes through the “Car Test,” driving around South London playing music from his car to see if it has the atmosphere he wants, the “distance” he’s looking for.

People have also compared Burial to Joy Division in terms of bleak urbanism. And Martin Hannett, their producer, used to do a similar thing: drive around Manchester’s most brutally industrialized zones in his car, stoned, listening to Joy Division, PiL, or Pere Ubu.

SS: Does “Ballardian” mean anything substantial to you, or do you think Ballard’s work is too complex to be contained in this way?

SR: It has become something of a cliché, and that’s perhaps the inevitable result of having an impact and becoming famous — that your ideas become simplified, reduced to a caption. So Ballardian equals “picturesque, postindustrial decay,” “kinky technophilia,” and “perverted obsessions with celebrities.”

When the Diana and Dodi crash happened, people in TV newsrooms were apparently like, “Let’s get Ballard on the phone.”

SS: You’ve casually mentioned that Ballard and Brian Eno are “the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th century.”

SR: That’s slightly over the top, isn’t it? I wonder if it really stands up. Then again, as thinkers specifically on culture, in the British context, I can’t honestly think of too many rivals, especially for the generation who came out of the 1960s and developed during the 1970s.

One of the fantasy projects that I’ve toyed with for a while is a book on Ballard and Eno. They feel like the patron saints of post-punk to an extent. But it’s difficult, because they’ve said it all better than anyone else. I suppose you could historicize or contextualize them – Ballard with the ICA milieu and Eno with the UK art schools. In some ways the affinity seems as much temperamental as anything conceptual. They have this wonderful Englishness — you imagine they would get on like a house on fire, trading ideas over whisky in a Shepperton living room. One thing they both do is take ideas from science and set them loose in culture, find applications.

Ballard is like a British McLuhan, except better because he’s a far better writer and thinker — more original, more convincing. In some ways, Eno is almost like a British Barthes.

SS: While explaining his collage method in The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard said he wanted to produce “crossovers and linkages between unexpected and previously totally unrelated things, events, elements of the narration, ideas that begin to generate new matter.” Could you draw parallels to Eno’s formulation of “generative” music?

SR: I’m not sure about that. It seems more related to Burroughs, and perhaps also to Ballard’s debt to surrealism.

Eno’s generative music is much more cybernetics-meets-Zen, emptying out the authorial ego, setting up a process and then withdrawing. I don’t think Ballard has that Eastern mystical aspect. With Ballard, there’s always more of a violence bubbling up from below, even though the writing is cold and controlled. If Eno is a British Barthes, a languid sensualist, Ballard would be a British Bataille. I can also imagine Ballard enjoying Camille Paglia’s writing, which I can’t imagine Eno doing — it would be too passionate for him.

SS: Both Ballard and Eno inverted, retooled, and then abandoned the genre they started out in. As Richard Sutherland writes, “To call Ballard’s work science fiction is a bit like describing Brian Eno’s music as rock ‘n’ roll.”

SR: Yes and no. Eno is like the culmination or extension of certain ideas within rock to the point where they verge on un-rock. But when he started he owed a lot to Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, a certain English kind of psychedelia. And he could do the “idiot energy” thing with “Third Uncle.” As for Ballard, to divorce him from his genre is unnecessary. The methodology in his disaster stories and in the bulk of his short stories is totally science fiction.

SS: As someone who has successfully integrated critical theory into writing about music, what do you think of the growing incursion of theory into music criticism?

SR: I’d make a distinction here between theorizing about music and applying critical theory to music. The former happens a lot, obviously — and you could argue that any critical position is at some level theoretical. What I don’t see a lot of is people using ideas from critical theory or philosophy to explicate pop music. Even I don’t do nearly as much as I used to. But I certainly still generate theorems and analytical ideas that go beyond the thumbs up/thumbs down consumer guidance aspect.

SS: To return to Ballard, is it possible to imagine, after his death, what his enduring legacy might be?

SR: That’s too big a question really. But I guess his legacy is due to his invention of a completely original way of perceiving reality, which merges reality with the unreality of the entertainment-scape. He did this to the point where it seems almost obvious, even cliché, as we discussed earlier. You see that a lot in music. I’ve argued that coming up with a cliché is the highest achievement in dance music, a sound or a beat or a riff pattern that everyone wants to copy. Becoming a cliché is, in lots of ways, a triumphant success for any artist.

www.ballardian.com
www.blissout.blogspot.com

Images by Michelle Lord, from Future Ruins (inspired by JG Ballard’s ‘The Ultimate City’), 2008.

‘Pulled apart by the elders, many of the sets revealed their internal wiring. The green and yellow circuitry, the blue capacitors and modulators, mingled with the bright berries of the firethorn, rival orders of a wayward nature merging again after millions of years of separate evolution.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

Originally published in Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design (ed. Nic Clear), September-October 2009, pp. 82-7.

The fiction of JG Ballard was centred almost wholly on the built environment. Ballard took architectural design to its logical extreme and then contorted it further. Simon Sellars looks at how architects can learn from Ballard and, specifically, his use of urban sound as a metaphor.

In JG Ballard’s ‘The Sound-Sweep’,[1] the sonic strata of everyday urban life – a ‘frenzied hypermanic babel of jostling horns, shrilling tyres, plunging brakes and engines’[2] – is so without respite that it is literally embedded within walls and surfaces and must be vacuumed away with a device called the ’sonovac’. The central character, Mangon, is a mute who has developed hyperacute hearing, making him a valued sound- sweep. His main client is Madame Gioconda, an ex-opera singer whose career ended with the advent of ‘ultrasonic music’. Ultrasonic producers electronically rescore classical symphonies into musical notation that operates on a subliminal level, making use of the sensorium beyond the normal range of the human ear. Supposedly the new music, ostensibly silent, has richer texture, theme and emotion, but whether this is merely a placebo effect to placate the frazzled masses remains ambiguous.

Mangon strives to resurrect Gioconda’s career, but when he does eventually stage her comeback, she botches it, her voice so cracked, out of practice and out of tune that it causes great distress to all who hear it. The story ends with Mangon driving off in his sound truck as he turns on the vehicle’s inbuilt sonovac – filled with the city’s sonic detritus – to drown out Gioconda singing like an ‘insane banshee’. Effectively, Mangon manipulates the sounds of the city to assuage his psychological turmoil.

Ballard’s story anticipates R Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape project, which aimed to reduce the noise pollution of industrial environments in favour of an ‘acoustic ecology’, eliminating so-called ‘bad’ sounds in favour of prescribed ‘good’ sounds, returning to ‘the Ursound’ supposedly found in nature, where, Schafer rhapsodises, ‘listening blindly to our ancestors and the wild creatures, we will feel it surge within us again, in our speaking and in our music’.[3] But as Geoff Manaugh notes: ‘Where the Project went wrong … was when it thought it had a kind of sonic monopoly over what sounded good. Industrial noises would be scrubbed from the city … and a nostalgic calm … infused in its place. Think church bells, not automobiles. But where would such sensory cleansing leave those … who enjoy the sounds of factories?’[4]

‘Halloway had the distinct impression that this solitary young mute was a prisoner here, high above this museum of cars in the centre of the abandoned airport.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

For Ballard, too, neither full reliance on technology (represented by the sterile, calming aesthetic of ultrasonic music) nor the reactionary turn to nostalgia and a safe retreat into the past (ie Mangon’s initial deification of the opera singer) is posited as an adequate solution. Instead, a middle ground is sought, a strategy found throughout his career, grounded in the sense that the built environment must be met on its own terms.

In the novella ‘The Ultimate City’,[5] Ballard moves beyond Mangon’s half-aware thumbnail sketch and into a three-dimensionality: a full-scale cognitive remapping. A future ecotopia, Garden City, has developed wind power and alternative technologies after New York has fallen into ruins from the exhaustion of fossil fuels. The central character, Halloway, dissatisfied with what he sees as the dulling of the imagination in Garden City, with its organic conformity, makes his way back to the abandoned New York, where he attempts to restart the metropolis and its power supplies. Significantly, it is the noise of the city that he misses and that he is inescapably drawn to. With the help of Olds (another mute), Halloway manages to restart the generators and power supplies of a small sector of the city, bringing to life neon and traffic lights, while broadcasting sound- effects records of automobile and aircraft noise:

Halloway moved from one apartment to the next, flicking lights on and off, working the appliances in the kitchens. Mixers chattered, toasters and refrigerators hummed, warning lights glowed in control panels … Television sets came on, radios emitted a ghostly tonelessness interrupted now and then by static from the remote-controlled switching units of the tidal pumps twenty miles away.

It was only now, in this raucous light and noise, that the city was being its true self, only in this flood of cheap neon that it was really alive …[6]

Like Mangon, but on a grander scale, Halloway tunes the city rather than shutting it out, rejecting the sterile, affectless Garden City for a complete reimagining and re-envisaging of the city’s technological grid, including the acoustic footprint that so disturbed the inventors of ultrasonic music. This time, the story anticipates the Positive Soundscapes research project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and comprising five British universities, which aims to convince architects and town planners to think beyond the traditional focus on reducing noise levels and to pay attention instead to ‘the many possibilities for creating positive environments in the soundscapes in which we live. People can completely change their perception of a sound once they have identified it. In the laboratory, many listeners prefer distant motorway noise to rushing water, until they are told what the sounds are.’[7]

I have cited these examples of urban sound in Ballard because they represent the key components of a framework he uses to critique the psychological and perceptual dimensions that are saturated in the built environment, but that seem lacking in the discourse that generates architectural practice. In a sense, Ballard’s work is about nothing but the built environment. It is often said that technology and the liminal zones of suburbia and non- place urban fields are his main characters, and indeed the buildings and zones he erects – the motorway system in Crash,[8] the apartment block in High-Rise (‘an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence’),[9] the secessionist shopping centre in Kingdom Come[10] – all seem imbued with an artificial intelligence determined to eradicate human life as if it were a disease.

This is a gambit that brings sociologist Ron Smith’s observation into stark relief: ‘If you want to see what’s wrong with architecture today, pick up the latest issue of almost any architectural design magazine. They’re filled with pictures of interesting architecture, but you rarely see any people actually using those buildings.’[11] In Ballard, trends (and flaws) in architectural design are pursued to their logical extremes, and then bent backwards or forwards through time to go completely beyond logic. In the real world, people might complain about an escalator too far away from a baggage chute in an airport or a concourse in a mall that heats up too quickly, or overly processed floors that make far too much noise when walked upon. In Ballard, the unspoken tension and psychopathology engendered by such scenarios is recycled, reheated and allowed free rein to play itself out to the bitterest of ends.

‘Buckmaster tried to point out to Halloway how the Twentieth Century had met its self-made death. They stood on the shores of artificial lagoons filled with chemical wastes, drove along canals silvered by metallic scum, across landscapes covered by thousands of tons of untreated garbage, fields piled high with cans, broken glass and derelict machinery.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

In High-Rise, which charts the breakdown of the social order in a neo-Corbusian residential building, at first it is the little things that niggle. These then overlay and overlap, each new escalation of hostilities a clear and logical progression from the previous strata, however bizarre each incident might seem in isolation. Parents find that the building hasn’t been designed for children: there is no free, open space, only ’someone else’s car park’. Shared garbage disposal causes anxiety and division between residents. Raucous parties occur on the upper floors, and residents in ‘better-sited apartments’ are unsympathetic to those living below them. Dog owners are attacked for allowing their pets to urinate and defecate in the elevators, culminating in the fateful moment when one resident’s Afghan hound is drowned in the swimming pool.

Thereafter, things really take off: incidents of violent aggression morph into tribal skirmishes and warring groups cut off escalator access, barricading their apartments and ‘Balkanising’ the middle section of flats to form a buffer zone. Yet, after the system has collapsed and failed, what we are left with is more than a mere glimmer of hope, and clearly akin to a programme of resistance based on emergent psychologies and a radical new approach to the built environment: ‘Even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways.’[12]

Yet just as Positive Soundscapes has encountered resistance in persuading architects and engineers to re- evaluate environmental sound, ‘perhaps because of barriers to communication across different disciplines’[13], chances are you will not find Ballard on the syllabus. According to Nic Clear, who has used Ballard’s work as an aid in architectural learning: ‘Within academia and architectural criticism, if such a thing still exists, there is a general disdain for “popular” fiction – writing on, and about, architecture is still very elitist – and I have met quite a bit of resistance when discussing Ballard as a serious subject.’[14]

Yet architects have no compunction about appropriating critical theory to their own ends. Peter Eisenman drew heavily on Deleuze and Baudrillard for his conception of ‘interstitial’ architecture and ‘blurred zones’, where the aim was to examine the way the virtual has invaded the actual, displacing architecture’s traditional role as an anchor for the real. Eisenman’s ‘philosophy lite’ sought to invite architecture to explore conceptual spaces located within the ‘folds’ of the built environment, with the aim of ‘refram[ing] existing urbanism, to set it off in a new direction’.[15] But surely the theory of Deleuze (which has more than a few correspondences with the work of Ballard) is designed to inspire affirmation in the reader, the user, the inhabitant; surely it must be tangible and must work in practice, in real-world terms, in that it must inspire thought and positive action to affirm its validity.

‘Halloway was fascinated by the glimmering sheen of the metal- scummed canals, by the strange submarine melancholy of drowned cars looming up at him from abandoned lakes, by the brilliant colours of the garbage hills, by the glitter of a million cans embedded in a matrix of detergent packs and tinfoil, a kaleidoscope of everything they could wear, eat and drink.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

That to me seems the Deleuzian ideal – indeed, the Ballardian ideal. It would seem apposite to say the majority of criticism of Eisenman’s buildings implies that not only are most users unaware of the inner workings of the ‘process of the interstitial’ that built the thing, but that in the final product antagonism and negation is placed before affirmation and interaction. As Roger Kimball writes: ‘When we encounter a stairway that leads nowhere … we need [Eisenman's] help to understand that we are being given a lesson in linguistic futility. Otherwise we might foolishly conclude that it was just a stairway that led nowhere and wonder about the sanity of the chap who paid the architect’s bill.’[16]

Ballard is interested in urbanism and spatial dynamics as a way to understand the city as narrative. The psychological dimension of urban life plays an important part, ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ the city on a sensory level. Indeed, he should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in making architecture more ‘user friendly’, or to anyone who thinks that architecture should be more than a series of shiny icons designed by remote starchitects. In this, he is ideally matched with the aims of Smith, who believes that ‘to become truly great architects [architecture students] also have to be great social psychologists, community sociologists, and organizational theorists’,[17] and also those of Michael Kroelinger, who teaches a course in ‘Architectural Sociology’ at the University of Nevada that ‘underscores the importance of understanding people’s values, needs, and attitudes, from an individual level to an organizational one’.[18]

Architects: read, study and learn from Ballard’s writing. Because it should not be the job of the architect to build worlds and indulge the luxury of allowing them to fail at our expense, but that of the writer, the constructor of virtual worlds that live, breathe and, indeed, die in virtuality so that we, in the actual, do not have to expire to prove a point. Only then should we overlay the virtual with the actual to create a stereoscopic representation, a truly interstitial process that places the user at the centre with the power to inform, direct, stage and manage the terms of his or her movement through time and space, perhaps nudging us one step closer to a read/write city in which we are free to ‘tune’ the built environment, [19] free to contribute to the conditions of our cohabitation.

In fact, an interdisciplinary, specifically Ballardian approach may be exactly what is required to shake architecture out of its ‘business as usual’ mentality, forcing it to confront the global economic and environmental crises just over the horizon. Ask the question: is another ’shiny, happy’ building really what we want or need to see or inhabit?

‘He knew now that he would never return to Garden City, with its pastoral calm … he would set off on foot, … following the memorials westwards across the continent, until he found the old man again and could help him raise his pyramids of washing machines, radiator-grilles and typewriters.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

Notes
[1] JG Ballard, ‘The Sound-Sweep’ [1960], in The Complete Short Stories, Flamingo (London), 2001.
[2] Ibid, p 106.
[3] Quoted in Brandon LaBelle, Perspectives on Sound Art, Continuum (New York and London), 2006, p 204.
[4] Geoff Manaugh, ‘Audio Architecture’, BLDGBLOG, 10 August 2007. See http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/audio-architecture.html, accessed 26 January 2008.
[5] JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’ [1976], in The Complete Short Stories, Flamingo (London), 2001.
[6] Ibid, pp 902, 907.
[7] Positive Soundscapes, ‘Project Overview’, Positive Soundscapes: A Re- evaluation of Environmental Sound. See www.positivesoundscapes.org/project_overview, accessed 26 January 2009.
[8] JG Ballard, Crash [1973], Vintage (London), 1995.
[9] JG Ballard, High-Rise [1975], Flamingo (London), 1993.
[10] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, Fourth Estate (London), 2006.
[11] Quoted in Gian Galassi, ‘Community by Design’, UNLV Magazine, Fall 2004. See http://magazine.unlv.edu/Issues/Fall04/community.html>, accessed 26 January 2009.
[12] JG Ballard, High Rise, op cit, p 147.
[13] Positive Soundscapes, op cit.
[14] Simon Sellars, ‘Architectures of the Near Future: An Interview with Nic
Clear’, Ballardian, 24 December 2008. See www.ballardian.com/near-future-nic-clear- interview, accessed 26 January 2009.
[15] Peter Eisenman (ed), Blurred Zones: Investigations of the Interstitial: Eisenman Architects 1988–1998, Monacelli Press (New York), 2002, p 132.
[16] Roger Kimball, ‘Architecture and ideology’, New Criterion, December 2002. See http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3345/is_4_21/ai_n28962509>, accessed 26 January 2009.
[17] Quoted in Gian Galassi, op cit.
[18] Ibid.
[19] I’ve borrowed the concept of the ‘read/write’ city from Steve Lambert of the Anti- Advertising Agency who, writing about the visual environment and street art, states: ‘Why is read/write better? Because you can consume, process, and respond. This is how we think critically. This is how we learn. You can talk back. You can express yourself. You don’t just consume expression, you create expression. Read/write is how democracy works. There’s a reason kids want to write their names on walls. There’s a reason why people take graffiti seriously. Granted, graffiti writers don’t always know how to direct this energy, but I’d argue there’s some overlap with the reasons one writes their name on a wall and the reasons one runs for the school board. Being able to write means being able to affect your environment. To change it. You exist in the world not as a consumer, but an active citizen. Read only culture creates apathy.’ From Steve Lambert, ‘Demand a Read/Write City’, The Anti-Advertising Agency, 3 October, 2008. See http://antiadvertisingagency.com/news/demand-a-readwrite-city, accessed 26 January 2009.

Text © 2009 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Michelle Lord.

…:: Previously on Ballardian: + ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic Clear