Soundwalk by MELANIE CHILIANIS; photography by Simon Sellars.

“The consumer society is a kind of soft police state. We think we have choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens. Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness.”

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come (2006).

We took a recent jaunt to Melbourne’s Crown Casino, prime Ballardian space, in order to map the coordinates of this micronational zone, this city state — consumer-driven control space. We took photos on a Nokia 6288 — photography disguised as furtive texting — while Mel Chil performed a secret sound walk. Her head bowed and her eyes averted (for soundwalkers must not allow the other senses to interfere with the keen art of listening), she strode silently behind us through the Zone, her super-powered, omidirectional microphone and optimal recording unit stuffed into her bag to note the results.

Her sound file* is below — play it loud while reading for maximum effect, for clearly the audiospatial disorientation engendered by Casino space plays a critical role in maintaining the illusion of languid disconnectedness.

* Note: you won’t see the audio player in Google Reader.

Crown Casino increases people’s perception of frequency of winning not only by having big visual displays and advertisements but also by having announcements over a loudspeaker of a poker machine jackpot winner. If every gambler who has lost everything is announced over the loudspeaker in the same way, problem gambling would be greatly reduced. Moreover, the promotion of the illusion of winning is also built into a poker machine in which a winning pay out is made with a loud noise as coins come crashing into the metal pay out tray to remind nearby players that winning is a real possibility.

Public Gambling Enquiry, Australian Vietnamese Women’s Welfare Association.

It’s a unique phenomenon… [a] metropolis … utterly devoted to leisure, something close to suspended animation. And it’s very inviting. But people lying on their backs are very vulnerable to predators.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Live in London’, 1996.

The signage declares, ‘We’re creating a new world at Crown’, a come-on none can resist. But even before entering the Casino, we were aware that we were no longer in the world of quotidian politeness. The first task was to pass through the borderzone, out on the concrete apron surrounding the complex, where brutal expediency in combat with pornographic greed meant that even bag ladies had to secure their shopping trolleys if left unattended.

But this isn’t reality, it’s not even a dream. It’s sort of a halfway house between the two.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Live in London’, 1996.

Opposite the Crown Entertainment Complex, bordering the west side, is the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. Its constructivist lines slice the sky like an obsolete, forward-thinking city of the immediate retro-future to come, a take-off ramp into the ozone that seems to suggest the only way out is through an ascent to heaven, or … this way, down, deep into the east, into Crown — into half-life.

He stared at the silent aisles, working out his challenge to this eventless world. We left the liquor store and paused by a Thai restaurant, whose empty tables receded through a shadow world of flock wallpaper and gilded elephants. Next to it was an untenanted retail unit, a concrete vault like an abandoned segment of space-time.

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights, 1996.

We enter, ‘wearing the Crown‘, instantly absorbed by the otherworldliness of the Casino. The effect is total — there are no clocks anywhere to be seen, creating a timeless zone in which the breakdown of the biological clock (the legend of old ladies urinating at poker tables, rather than missing a hand, for example) is the only indication of chronometry. Perhaps the only remaining link to temporality is the schedule of the televised horse racing. A horse — horses? — seem to haunt the interior…

There is no natural light of any kind, no windows. Mirrors take up entire walls, distending the innards of the place into infinity. The long walk between the mid-section of poker machines and blackjack tables seems to never end. Hovering alien ectoplasm, the sickly UV of Giger-style nightmares, falls into view. Magic mushrooms hang from the ceiling, glowing lysergically. We are in a bunker, are we in a bunker? Miles below the Earth’s surface, below the Earth’s surface? Drinking, gambling and watching spooling sports. Palms itchy.

The first shrines had begun to appear, wayside altars for passing shoppers, places of pause and reflection for those making endless journeys within the universe of the dome.

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come, 2006.

Hanging from the ceiling, a plaster-cast altar of motorcycle fascism, its strident coat of arms larger than the machine itself. Lest the devotees become too overwhelmed and seize the handlebars, a sign warns: “Display Model Only”. Trinkets pile up on the carpet around the altar, burnt offerings of cigarette butts, an unused condom packet, coins, keys. No passing cleaner makes an effort to clean this up and it seems arranged in a perfect concentric ring. Skin hurts.

The resilient carpet is custom designed and can soak up blood, vomit and semen without leaving visible trace. A crazy man says he knows the man who made it and he makes a fortune, too. He also designs bodybags for prom queens addicted to cocaine and ultraviolent bondage. Did a crazy man really say that he knew a man? (Bringing new meaning to the game of ‘craps’, another urban legend tells of sliding compartments in the toilets that can quickly open to dispose of suicidal high-rollers who lost everything without bringing the corpse back through the main arena.) Very near by, another man looks over suspiciously at our furtive photographic activity, but then he seems distracted by what would appear to be an insect buzzing around his head. He bats at it but there is no insect anywhere to be seen. As we walk away, he seems to be madly shaking invisible bugs out of his hair. Is he shaking invisible bugs out of his hair?

The people no longer wish to be freed from their chains, preferring to use them to accessorise their designer handbags instead. Eyes pop.

The neon façades of the casinos and hotels were now so many cataracts of white lava, walls of incadescent pink and purple that seemed to set alight the surrounding jungle, turning the Strip and the downtown casino centre into an inflamed, shadowless realm through which the occasional armoured car would appear like a spectral dragon on the floor of a furnace.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981).

This green-skinned hepcat appeared to us as if in a dream, doffing his cap with sleazy grace. ‘Come with me to the Food Court’, he moaned in our already twitching ears. ‘I know a mystical place — a snack bar — where they spike the Alcoholic Super Slushies with Viagra, and where cyborg men with vat-grown muscle can inflate their pecs with a bicycle pump to 150psi. It’s called Food & Booze Express City and it’s open 24/7, natch, because you know it, don’t you, man, that Dreamland never sleeps. Oh, and dig: the women are unFUCKINGbelievable’.

Crawford gazed across the peninsula at the gutted shell of the Hollinger house.
‘A year from now some hotel or casino complex will stand there. On this coast the past isn’t allowed to exist.’
‘Why not keep the house as it is?’
‘As a tribal totem? A warning to all those time-share salesmen and nightclub touts? That’s not a bad idea…’

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights.

The final sane act of Nietzsche, that great admirer of self-serving individualism, was one of pity — to collapse to the floor and cradle a beaten horse. In this one compassionate act, he disavowed a lifetime of celebrating self-interest. At Crown, they have decapitated the horse and mounted its suffering head as a totem of gambling law: ‘Let he who is strong fill his pockets, and he who is weak empty his’.

This glowing tube filled with inanimate coin is in actuality a super-computer that runs on pure cash. Pulsing throughout that pile of super-compacted currency is a liquid charged with megawatts of electricity and data, a new breed of viscous fibre optics that draws upon the inordinate strength of abstract social wealth to create simulated neurological pathways with highly complex processing power greater than military mainframes. This super-computer runs the whole operation here at Crown Casino and it is called ‘Mr Severin’. Mr Severin’s word is law and he will not tolerate any deviance from that law at any time.

A lake of neon signs formed a shimmering corona, miles of strip-lighting raced along the porticos of the casinos, zipped up the illuminated curtain-walling of the hotels and spilled over into mushy cascades. Under the ultramarine sky, so dark now that the tone had left their faces, the spectacle of this sometime gambling capital seemed as unreal as an electrographic dream.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America.

We became touched by a presence that was almost entirely indescribable except in rhyming couplets of ever-increasing incredulity, ridiculous-sounding as we mouthed them aloud, like cod Shakespeare. An alien intelligence reaching deep into our souls to finger our pathetic humanity with a cold machinic rationalism that was actually a little bit naughty and a little bit nice. A mystical vision appeared — for we were in the circuit, now — a monolith slowly, slowly descending from the ceiling. White light grew and grew. In the zone.

‘Remember, Richard, consumerism is a redemptive ideology. At its best, it tries to aestheticize violence, though sadly it doesn’t always succeed.’
…
‘Every shopping mall and retail park turning into a local soviet. A popular uprising that starts at the nearest Tesco. It’s possible. There’s a hunger for violence, that’s why sport obsesses the whole country. Everyone’s suffocating — too many barcode readers, too many CCTV cameras and double yellow lines. That second bomb really got them going.’

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

While their wives indulged in the more passive pursuits of bingo and fruit machines, the mankind gathered in their pit to drink, watch high-volume, biff-and-bash contact sports and back their armchair punditry with hard cash. The more they drank, the more they lost. The more they lost, the more they drank. A gloom began to permeate the air, so much so that condensation seemed to drip from the walls like Amityville house blood, and one sensed that sporadic, remorseless violence might break out at any moment. On the sport screen, some rugby players tore off their clothes and compared biceps and for a moment it seemed the crowd might follow suit. Only one measure could prevent this — a variety show. Mr Severin: call on Elvissey!

Completely Elvis: The Elvises are in the building! Their uncanny sound and appearance will make you feel as if you are watching the King himself. Amazing musicianship elevates the entertaining and genuine portrayals of the famous songs we all know and love. The incredible authenticity of the show takes you on a ride that is unprecedented. Costumes, charisma and charm are coupled with the songs that made Elvis the undisputed ‘King of Rock and Roll’. This combination of artists is not like any ever seen in Australia before.

Crown Casino, 2009.

This man, this fat, tubular, tubercular man – his impersonation was no longer of Elvis, but of a thousand other Elvis impersonators. A discount simulacrum. His women had feathers up their bums and on their heads, and these vixens liked to conga-line to within an inch of some men’s lives. Beer boiling in the glass.

“The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich”

Hunter S. Thompson.

Projected above our heads, 20 feet high, on the big sports screen: the manifestation of schizoid hyperactivity.

Fleeting impressions, an illusion of meaning floating over a sea of undefined emotions. We’re talking about a virtual politics unconnected to any reality, one which redefines reality as itself. The public willingly colludes in its own deception.

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

The horse equine reporter man reads the racehorse results, stutters in vertical hold, image flickers and splits straight down the middle to finally reveal the really real reality underneath. A snarling, digitised mutilation. Mr Severin has had a breakdown — someone, somewhere in here has won far too much cash. The system cannot cope, gets stuck in an infinity loop, cracks and breaks. The noise of clinking coin and tolling fruit-machine bells seems to increase to unbearable levels. But that is the great release, for we have pierced the veil, seen beyond, out into the desertified Racecourse of the Real. No gears and pulleys behind the mask, Phil K Dick-style, but a roiling, raging black void of utter nothingness.

Headaches and a necessary evacuation followed.

One day there would be another Metro-Centre and another desperate and deranged dream. Marchers would drill and wheel while another cable announcer sang out the beat. In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise.

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

ABOVE: El Prat Airport, Barcelona. Photo: Simon Sellars.

A man shrugs off the clucking of his family and makes his way to International Departures. With the ticketing formalities over, he slumps at the bar and orders drinks.

He sits and waits.

To escape.

A wicked love gone horribly, horribly wrong. Sour times polyfill the cracks, forcing him to seek joy in sepia-youth: he remembers Mum and Dad so beaming and proud and pictures the first time he was here. The first time, all those years ago…

He was all of ten years old then, sitting in the Airport Bar, and there was a big crowd because it was Sunday and the place was always packed on Sundays. Not just travellers — it was the only pub open in Melbourne on our Day of Rest. The bar was decked out like a sleazy suburban beer-and-brawl-barn: purple skylights meshed with brown and yellow carpet, fake-wood panelling. God knows what new arrivals thought. But it was exciting for him because he was just a kid and they were at the airport and those people all around were drunk and everyone seemed to be forging an incredible bond with each other, animatedly discussing the cricket and Packer’s Revolution.

‘Wow, a revolution,’ the boy marvelled. ‘Here in Melbourne!’

And where were those planes going? They were all going somewhere and he was just a kid, just ten years old, imagining the Moon or Mars, the stars their destination.

His father impatiently looked at his watch. Mother wiped the boy’s face with a spit-worn hankie. They were waiting for some long-forgotten cousin to arrive from the UK, another straggler from their far-flung clan. Father had a Scotch on the rocks, Mother a shandy. The boy sucked on raspberry lemonade. Australia — their Australia — had a freckly innocence, an immature nation finding its feet.

A bloke at the next table introduced himself as ‘Thommo’: he gave the boy a wink and sang the South Melbourne footy club’s theme song. Behind Thommo’s back, his mate — ‘Bazza’ — flashed the wanker sign at Thommo, eyes rolling for the youngster’s benefit. The boy giggled shyly.

Thommo and Bazza sported handle-bar moustaches and feather-cut hairdos. Their women drank from ‘ladies’ glasses’ and kept quiet; everyone knew their place. It was a strange time but the boy savoured the moment, relishing the cartoon caricatures around him. His cousin and Mother and Father faded into nothing because he knew that soon, all this would be his. Life seemed impossibly easy, so neat. That’s the myth of mateship, of male pride.

It’s now. Today.

Years later.

He’s old. Smells the crackle of neon. The ugly ockers of his childhood have vanished, replaced by Aussie gold Olympians: Cuthbert, Landy, Ford. A gallery of sporting heroes adorning the walls of the bar, spirit of the ‘56 Olympics, touched up and sprinkled with star-dust and Photoshop magic. Can technology proselytise the past? Can it invest those clapped-out icons with a metallic sheen, to cover their dried rot?

ABOVE: Tullamarine Airport, Melbourne. Photo: Simon Sellars.

A wide-bodied jet rumbles into view. He stares in awe. The windows of the bar are massive and he can see that the jet is a beautiful machine, a work of art.

He trusts it to deliver him to safety.

His mind races. He feels the lattice of power, underpinnings, strings that pull the puppets: Melbourne Airport’s secret industry. What dramas are played out behind those white walls? Reinforced concrete, strong and able, houses the sub-structure through which electronics peep. Luggage chutes reach for the skies, inclined upward to who knows where. And how many lives have been saved by last-gasp quarantine dumps? Suspended between Touchdown and Customs, old norms and new; last chance to ditch your contraband, all to be forgotten, as the flowers turn rotten and the plastic is old and grey.

Who speaks their own body language well enough to play the game?

Sweaty palms, shaky-legs… versus complex surveillance systems that count the hairs on your mole.

galactic eyes
sharper than a poison claw
see into the beyond

Easy prey, the jet-lagged walk the gleaming chrome, resolving to greet the future head-on.

A flat, synthetic boarding call and he remembers his trip: ‘Last call for Silverwing 501. Please make your way to Gate 23.’

Just enough time for a slash. He makes for the toilet.

The international pictogram for ‘man’ is suspended over the toilet door: straight-backed, featureless, brain-pan wiped clean. His ‘partner’, not ten metres away, is identical except for two half-triangles on either side of her legs. Some distinction! Merged seamlessly with tomorrow, poor Bazza and Thommo never had a chance to evolve. No time. How humiliating for them to witness their wives sprouting careers, orgasms…

Even robots need love.

On his way to Check-In he passes a glass cabinet marked QUARANTINE SEIZURES, prohibited goods snatched from hapless voyagers:

:: snake wine from Hong Kong
:: .22 calibre ‘purse-guns’ from Freedom, Wyoming
:: used opium pipes from Marrakesh
:: ’Harrods Dog Treats’ from the Mother Country

Next to this, an overlit ad sells Southbank Apartments — ‘opposite Casino’.

This airport is hyper-life, sniff-dogs pissed in the gene pool turn rabid on command. Robo-shotguns blast unattended luggage, a suspected bomb; hidden eyes spy digital ghosts, spool-and-replay eternal. There is a lack of overt ‘heat’ — where are the uniforms and sunglassed meat? They melt into light. Take one last look: flesh-and-blood for the dear, dying, departed. It’s a system built on deception and shadow-play, set up to tame its own kind.

He doesn’t know where this is going, anymore. Do you? Write to him, often…

Write him.

Silverwing five-oh-one holding short of runway. I request start-up clearance. My initial route is Barcelona two-eight, via Singapore and London. Wind two-six-oh at one-two. Eight-oh knots. Vee-one.

Autopilot engaged.

ABOVE: El Prat Airport, Barcelona. Photo: Simon Sellars.

…:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Kosmopolis 08: Landing Gear
+ Kosmopolis 08: Switching Stations

Thermonuclear noon at Sydney airport (photo: Simon Sellars).

Further to this….

You cannot claim to be truly versed in international travel until you have taken a flight from Australia to Europe. Flying to Spain took me the better part of 24 hours and shunted me through no less than five airports: Melbourne, Sydney, Singapore, London, Barcelona. I have travelled to Europe before, but never, as far as I can recall, through so many terminals.

It was absurd. Little parts of my brain leaked at every stop. In Sydney I thought I was in Melbourne; in Melbourne I thought I was home. I was reading Irvine Welsh’s Porno
on the flight and I began to think wholly in the flourescent Leith dialect that peppers the book. Welsh manages this narrative technique so well, and combined with the cognitive sponge-wipe that is a 24-hour plane flight, immersion was complete. From Sydney to Singapore I sat next to a guy whose nose was constantly running, and himself constantly sniffling. He just would not blow it. I was so very tired and borderline hallucinating. The noise of his honker was destroying me, some kind of water torture. I dozed off and dreamt that I actually turned to him and screamed, ‘Blow yer f****** nose, ya radge, yis nipping ma heid, so ye are!’ When I awoke, although he still did not blow his nose, he refused to look at me for the rest of the way to Singapore and seemed visibly nervous. Even now, I am just a little paranoid that I may have actually spoken (Irvine) Welsh to this poor man in my sleep.

Ballard has said that his work, Crash in particular, is not meant to evoke specific examples of place (in the case of that book, reacting to reports that it is a ‘London’ work). Instead he says he is interested in an international zone of the type that you find around motorways and airports, areas geographically distant but interchangeable and, essentially, eventless. Thus, the experience of passing through five international terminals in 24 hours — none more Ballardian. I had the sense of progression through a giant airlocked tube connecting every country on the planet, the outside world a geodesic dome perhaps, or as an irradiated landscape sealed off out of harm’s way. Time folded in on itself. I forgot to change the time on my phone with each stop. It didn’t matter. The physiological morning was encased in an environmental night. Stumbling through Singapore Airport’s dutyfree shopping zone, I had the sixth sense that I might bump into a version of myself from one year ago, passing through on the way home from London to Melbourne. Maybe I had always been here. I have lost a serious amount of weight in the space of the past year and to people who have not seen me for a while, there is often considerable surprise expressed at the extent of the transformation. I imagine that I, too, would be shocked to run into this past version of myself, itself casually strolling through Singaporean non-space, perhaps even as shocked as the man at the end of La Jetée confronting his younger self. In these circumstances, in transit, in-between, freefloating in interstitial space, it is just so hard to keep one’s molecules oscillating wildly enough to form a coherent body and therefore avoid complete disintegration, but one does the best one can.

Sydney airport … or so it would seem (photo: Simon Sellars).

From Heathrow, I caught the British Airways redeye special to Barcelona at 7am on Wednesday morning. The jet was suit city; in jeans and a t-shirt, I felt like a zoo exhibit, a savage allowed to sit up the front. Onboard, the papers were all British. I picked one up and began to read of feverish intrigue about businessmen and society elite conspiring on Greek islands about something shadowy and unavailable to the rest of us. The last front-page story I read in the local paper before leaving home was about a sportsman who had lost his pants while drunk. Truly I am out of place as well as time. Almost as soon as the plane touched down at Barcelona, virtually every businessman and woman on the jet reached for their Blackberries and began tapping away furiously. The man next to me, in a slick charcoal grey suit with gleaming black Crackberry dancing to the tune of his fingers, was intent on beaming himself into the future. I cannot sleep much on planes. I was tired, I’m telling you. Jellied, floating crabs danced in my field of vision. They evaporated and I looked up and there was an identical man in the aisle as the one sitting next to me, with exact same hairstyle, suit and Blackberry, similarly tripping on subwire desire. And I mean an exact double, or so it seemed. Once inside the terminal I went to a mirror to check if I, too, had similarly transformed — would Barcelona for me prove to be the final stage in the globally linked Switching Station for the New Man? But no — oozing back at me was still the same doughy, jetlagged face with the same rudimentary stubble and also there was the same shabby t-shirt and jeans.

I have now been in Barcelona for three days. Later, I will write to you about my impressions of Kosmopolis 08, of the city itself, of the virtual reality of the Ballard exhibition and of my encounters with the ghosts of Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. But first, at 5pm today, there is the panel I am appearing on with Jordi Costa, Bruce Sterling and V. Vale. I will wait until after that to record these further thoughts as I would like to spend today prepping myself.

Until later then,
Simon in Barcelona for Kosmopolis 08

Soundtracks to inner space: Roxy Music — ‘Out of the Blue’, ‘Mother of Pearl’, ‘Prairie Rose’; Fleetwood Mac — ‘Big Love’, ‘Landslide’, ‘Tusk’ [USC intro mix], ‘You Make Loving Fun’; Future Engineers — ‘Future Engineered’ mix; Temple Records — ‘Wax Label Showcase’

San-Zhr Pod Village. Photograph: Craig Ferguson.

The Tomorrow Museum is a new blog that I have really been enjoying. It’s curated by Joanne McNeil, a freelance writer on science and technology, and Jerry Brito, an academic researcher. Their brief is to ‘explore how technology, science, and economics are affecting the fine arts’ and the tendency is towards longer, thoughtful posts.

Joanne has just posted a great piece on ‘the world’s strangest housing communities’, an overview of micronational estates the world over. Joanne includes Alphaville in Brazil, patterned after Godard’s film and a place where the residents watch TV Alphaville, a 24-hour telesurveillance channel composed of nothing other than people coming and going into and out of the estate. This is my idea of heaven.

Joanne opens the piece with a riff on Super-Cannes:

“People at Eden-Olympia have no time for getting drunk together, for infidelities or rows with the girlfriends, no time for adulterous affairs or coveting their neighbor’s wives, no time ever for friends,” Wilder Penrose says in J. G. Ballard’s Super Cannes. The “great defect is that there is no need for personal morality. Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems.”

Many of Ballard’s later novels investigate the coven-like nature of suburbia — gated communities, high rises. The architecture and technologies designed to save us time and make our lives easier, only dull our senses. Or, as Gang of Four put it, “The problem with leisure, is what to do for pleasure.” Penrose, the psychiatrist in Ballard’s fictional French business park, believes there’s a science to it: “Part of the mind atrophies. A moral calculus that took thousands of years to develop starts to wither from neglect. Once you dispense with morality the important decisions become a matter of aesthetics. You’ve entered an adolescent world where you define yourself by the kind of trainers you wear.”

Ballard isn’t the only writer to explore these themes. Jingoism at the backyard level is the target in TC Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain. Neal Stephanson wrote about “burbclaves,” lots of franchised nations in suburbia. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower takes place in a walled Los Angeles suburb. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino sees housing communities optimistically as chocolate boxes. Then again, every example comes from the main character’s imagination. Here are several examples stranger than fiction…

In addition to Alphaville, Joanne goes on to detail the mythical Midgetville in Virginia; the quasi-religious compound Auroville in India; the peopleless pod city of San-Zhr in Taiwan (very Ballardian — to paraphrase JGB, a ‘city designed not for man but for man’s absence’); and the fake Orange County in China.

San-Zhr is amazing. It’s an SF-tinged housing project, a network of multicoloured pods that was abandoned in the 1960s just before completion due to a number of unexplained deaths. According to photographer Craig Ferguson, the ghosts of these dead workers haunt the site:

As news of these accidents spread, no one wanted to go there, even to visit, and the project was subsequently abandoned. The ghosts of those who died in vain are said to still linger there, unremembered and unable to pass on. The complex was left in its unfinished state because no amount of redevelopment will bring people to the area due to superstitions about ghosts, and it can’t be demolished because destroying the homes of spirits and lost souls is taboo in Asian culture.

Craig managed to persuade some locals to get him into the site and he’s published a series of remarkable images detailing his visit. In my former life as a travel writer, I myself might have spent a night there.

One further remark about Joanne’s article. She says that the fake Orange County, rather than patterning itself after the US gated community, should model itself on Melbourne instead, referring to a Treehugger article that lauds Melbourne’s pro-pedestrian and bicycle culture. Yes. As a Melbourne resident I’d love to visit overseas simulacra of my home town. I think then my mind would finally explode in an inverted subjective/objective feedback loop overload. But the Treehugger article only explores Melbourne’s inner city. The suburbs are a different matter. Perhaps the overseas versions might weed out the worrying strain of Mad Max style behaviour that sees cyclists as game to be hunted.

But then again, such behaviour inspired Mad Max itself, one of the finest films ever made.

Oh I don’t know. You decide.

ABOVE: Richard Gere as Blake: more vapourware…

None of my books are being made into films at the moment, all is quiet. A lot of Philip K. Dick’s books have been filmed; they fit the American mood. His novels are very paranoid and I think that touches a nerve in America.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed in SFX magazine, 2007.

I have been working my way through a stack of Ballard interviews from the 70s and 80s, and one consistent note is JGB’s regret at never cracking the American market. But his US stocks might have been very different if a few more of the film options taken out on his books had come to fruition, an observation brought home to me after reading David Pringle’s 1990 conversation with Ballard (published in Fear magazine and kindly sent to me by Martin J.).

In this interview there is much tantalising detail about these vapourware films, including the news that Steven Spielberg’s partner Kathy Kennedy was keen to option Running Wild a couple of years after Spielberg’s film of Empire. Ballard, however, feared it was “slightly too strong a dish for Spielberg” while speculating that “one of those John Carpenter directors might have fun with it”. He also talks of stalled development on a proposed film of The Day of Creation, before bemoaning the fact that “nobody has ever got it together” to film Concrete Island, despite the fact it has “been continuously optioned ever since it was published” and that it “would be quite easy and cheap to film”. The latest option on Concrete Island (at the time, 1990), Ballard reveals, was from someone in Australia!

But the biggest revelation is that Richard Gere wanted to make a film of The Unlimited Dream Company. According to Ballard:

Richard Gere … has taken an option on The Unlimited Dream Company with a view to playing the hero himself. I met him in London and was very impressed by him — highly articulate, thoughtful, serious-minded. He’s very interested in Buddhism, does work on behalf of various Buddhist missions. Reincarnation through one species to another is very much a part of Buddhist thought, and obviously that is what intrigued him about the novel. What would have been the insuperable obstacle of filming the flying sequences is no problem these days — they can do that extremely convincingly. But one must assume, to be sensible, that nothing will come of it.

Richard Gere as Blake! The mind curdles! I wonder if Gere intended to keep the Shepperton setting? Perhaps it would have suffered a fate similar to the remake of The Wicker Man, sadly ripped from its pagan context on a remote Scottish isle and relocated to a “repressive matriarchal” island off the coast of Washington. In any case, Gere’s star was soaring at that time, riding on the back of Pretty Woman, so I imagine the film would have exposed Ballard similarly, the way Spielberg pulled him into his slipstream.

Well, with all this new info addling my brain, I thought I’d compile a list of Ballard’s brushes and near-brushes with the film world. If anyone has any more info, I’d be glad to receive it.

BOOKS

The Drought (1964)
According to JGB in 1976:

I … wrote a script from my early novel The Drought, which was bought up for TV by David Frost, but he’s never used it.

And 20 years later:

People have tried to buy [the rights] back from David Frost, but he’s put an incredibly high price on them, so I’m afraid that novel will remain unfilmed… Hazel Adair [who bought the rights with Frost] read the novel, and she was very familiar with my stuff. She just wanted to film it straight, as it was. She saw it as exotic, with a strong story — when the taps run dry what do people do? You take it for granted that you’ll be able to find water somewhere if the taps run dry, but if the rivers run dry as well you’ve got a problem on your hands. Against that background, there is this urban disaster story going on, with the characters losing their suburban virtues and becoming more and more archetypal. So I think she saw it as having good roles, and all the rest of it. But, ah well, this was 25 years ago; I think it was ‘69 when they bought the rights, and by then, of course, the British film industry had just fallen through the grilles in the floor.

Quoted in Ballard’s 1996 interview with David Pringle for SFX magazine.

The Crystal World (1966)
According to JGB (again, from the 1996 Pringle):

The Crystal World has been optioned quite a few times over the years. I think the film-makers are attracted to the visual possibilities of the crystallizing forest, and crystallizing helicopters and crocodiles and the like, but it would be very difficult to portray convincingly.

The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)
Filmed by Jonathan Weiss in 2000.

Crash (1973)

ABOVE: Jack Nicholson in Crash: “Heeere’s Vaughnie!”

1) Filmed by David Cronenberg in 1996.
2) B.C. (Before Cronenberg), Ballard told the RE/Search crew:

I’ve seen a filmscript of Crash by a very good English writer named Heathcote Williams. Some film company wanted Jack Nicholson to star in it. This version was set in Los Angeles with American characters, an American landscape — obviously that’s where the money is to make movies. It was a genuine translation, not just of language but of everything. I didn’t really like it. It was almost Disneyfied — “Walt Disney Productions presents Crash!”

Concrete Island (1974)
1) According to JGB in 1976:

I wrote a script from my novel Concrete Island, that a French director wanted to film. That was last summer. I don’t know if he’ll actually make the film.

2) Option from someone in Australia, as above (1990).
3) According to JGB in 1996 (SFX interview):

A French company holds the option at present, and is developing it: whether they can actually get the money together to finance it I don’t know.

High-Rise (1975)
1) Currently in development hell with Vincenzo Natali attached.
2) Optioned in the 1970s with Nic Roeg as director and Paul Mayersberg as scriptwriter. Roeg and Mayersberg of course made The Man Who Fell to Earth, a bittersweet reminder of what might have been: sweet because it’s such an amazing film, bitter because it’s not Ballard.
3) Bruce Robinson, writer/director of Withnail and I, wrote a High-Rise script in 1979. According to an IMDB commenter:

Bruce put a lot of work into it. He researched the architectural side of the story, as well as some particularly gruesome torture devices available to ‘ordinary’ people. He was commissioned by Euston Films, ending up writing a $35 million film. It was dumped because Bruce believed it would never be made. Please read ‘Smoking In Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson’ by Alistair Owen, for more about this script.

The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
Optioned by Richard Gere, as above.

Empire of the Sun (1984)
Filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987.

The Day of Creation (1987)
1) “Some interest”, as above.
2) In a 1987 interview, it was noted: “There are no immediate plans for a movie version of The Day of Creation, although Ballard says, ‘My film agent is getting a lot of response from directors and producers.’”

Running Wild (1988)
1) Interest from the Spielberg camp around 1990, as above.
2) In 2003, Samuel L. Jackson was bitten. Running Wild was supposed to be filmed by David Leland (Mona Lisa, Wish You Were Here), starring Samuel as “a forensic psychiatrist who investigates an unusual crime on a Pacific Northwest island. Running Wild is slated for production summer 2004 on Vancouver Island. The producers have partnered with Alliance Atlantis for this project.” Although the film was headed for the Wicker Man route, relocated to an American island, it, too, disappeared off the face of the earth.

UPDATE…
Sam is back in the game!

Cocaine Nights (1996)
1) Last year, Andy Harries, one of the producers of The Queen, optioned Cocaine Nights with Peter Webber (Girl with A Pearl Earring; Hannibal Rising) attached as director.
2) According to my snout, Tim C., Paul Mayersberg was set to write a Cocaine Nights miniseries for ITV. It never came through, of course.

Super-Cannes (2000)
In 2002 Jeremy Thomas (Naked Lunch; Crash) optioned Super-Cannes for John Maybury (Love is the Devil; The Jacket) to direct from a script by Mayersberg (The Man Who Fell to Earth; Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence; Croupier). At the time Thomas said, ‘Until we have a finished script there can be no decisions on casting, budget or start of shoot.’ Can we assume that Mayersberg never delivered that script, since the production has completely disappeared off the map? By the way, in Ballardian terms, that makes three strikes for Mayersberg: Crash, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes. None of them happened.

SHORT STORIES

The Vermilion Sands stories (1957-70)
According to Tim C., in 2000 the BBC planned a series based on Vermilion Sands:

This from a posting to the JGB list (no one ever managed to dig up further details): “The BBC is producing Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence and working on adaptations of Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, Kingsley Amis’ Take a Girl Like You, JG Ballard’s Vermillion Sands and Alex Garland’s Tesseract.”

‘The Sound-Sweep’ (1960)
As Tim C. notes, there was a mooted “BBC opera version of ‘The Sound Sweep’, as mentioned in Judith Merrill’s anthology England Swings SF (1968) and nowhere else.”

‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ (1962)
Filmed by Peter Potter in 1964 for BBC television.

‘Minus One’ (1963)
Filmed by Simon Brook in 1991.

‘Low-Flying Aircraft’ (1975)
Filmed as Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude by Solveig Nordlund in 2002.

‘The Enormous Space’ (1989)
Filmed as Home by Richard Curson-Smith for BBC television in 2003.

Special mention must be made of Crash!, the 1971 short film made by Harley Cokliss for the BBC. It stars Ballard and is based on fragments from The Atrocity Exhibition as well as drawing from various ideas Ballard was working on at the time. I always assumed Ballard wrote the script, but in the SFX interview he reveals it was in fact Cokliss:

The screenplay, or whatever you want to call it, wasn’t written by me; it was written by Cokliss. So I just did what he told me. He’d say, ‘walk across the roof of this multi-storey car park, Jim, and get into that car,’ so I’d do that. I think I wrote a voice-over, which I remember recording at Ealing Studios. But I can scarcely remember the film. I’ve no idea whether it was any good or not. The past is another country.

I’d say Ballard did write the voiceover, not Cokliss, given it features concepts that would later pop up in his non-fiction pieces and in the introduction to Crash. We’ll give Harley credit for the actual shooting script, though.

ORIGINAL SCRIPTS

‘Gulliver in Space’ (1964)
Original script for this episode of Jackanory, the British children’s show. According to JGB: “I really wrote it for my children, who were keen viewers at the time.”

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)

ABOVE: “Ooooga Booga…” Imogen Hassall as Ayak, Magda Konopka as Ulido and Victoria Vetri as Sanna in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. “No dialogue, just a lot of grunts” said Ballard.

Screen treatment for Val Guest’s prehistoric potboiler. According to JGB in a 1991 interview with Pringle and Richard Kadrey:

Back in the 60s, Hammer Films made a remake of the original One Million Years B.C. with Raquel Welch. The remake was a success, and they decided to make a sequel to their remake. They asked if I would do the original treatment, which I did. This was a film without dialogue, you would just hear a lot of grunts. I didn’t actually write a script; the shooting script was written by the director. For my treatment, I got a ’screen credit’, my only screen credit up till Empire of the Sun. I’m very proud that my first screen credit was for what is, without doubt, the worst film ever made. An appallingly bad film that only distantly resembled anything in my original treatment.

While in Miracles of Life he really goes to town:

I was contacted by a Hammer producer, Aida Young, who was a great admirer of The Drowned World. She was keen that I write the screenplay for their next production, a sequel to One Million Years BC… She steered me into the office of Tony Hinds, then the head of Hammer. He was affable but gloomy, and listened without comment as Aida launched into a chapter-by-chapter account of The Drowned World, with its picture of a steaming, half-submerged London and its vistas of dream-inducing water.

… Hinds asked me what ideas I had come up with. Bearing in mind that the promised contract had yet to arrive, I had given little thought to the project, but on the drive from Shepperton to Soho I had produced several promising ideas. I outlined them as vividly as I could.

‘Too original’ Hinds commented. Aida agreed. ‘Jim, we want that Drowned World atmosphere.’ She spoke as if this could be sprayed on, presumably in a fetching shade of jungle green.

Hinds then told me what the central idea would be. His secretary had suggested it that morning. This was nothing less than the story of the birth of the Moon — in fact, one of the oldest and corniest ideas in the whole of science fiction, which I would never have dared to lay on his desk. Hines stared hard at me. ‘We want you to tell us what happens next.’

I thought desperately, realising that the film industry was not for me. ‘A tidal wave?’

‘Too many tidal waves. If you’ve seen one tidal wave you’ve seen them all.’

A small light came on in the total darkness of my brain. ‘But you always see the tidal waves coming in,’ I said in a stronger voice. ‘We should show the tidal wave going out! All those strange creatures and plants…’ I ended with a brief course in surrealist biology.

There was a silence as Hinds and Aida stared at each other. I assumed I was about to be shown the door.

‘When the wave goes out…’ Hinds stood up, clearly rejuvenated, standing behind his huge desk like Captain Ahab sighting the white whale. ‘Brilliant. Jim, who’s your agent?’

We went out to a glamorous lunch in a restaurant with Roman decor. Hinds and Aida were excited and cheerful, already moving on to the next stage of production, casting the leading characters. I failed to realise it at the time, but I had already reached the high point of my usefulness to them. I should have heard the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the ebbing tidal wave, but it was exciting to have an idea taken up so quickly and be plied with enthusiasm, friendship and fine wine. Already they were discussing the complex relationships between the principal characters, difficult to envisage in a film with no dialogue, where emotions were expressed solely in terms of bare-chested men hitting each other with clubs or dragging a handsome blonde into a nearby cave by her hair. In due course I prepared a treatment, some of which survived into the finished film, along with my ebbing wave.

As Hammer films go, it was a success, but I am glad that they misspelled my name in the credits [as 'J.B. Ballard'].

NOVELIZATIONS

Alien (1979)
Ballard was offered $20,000 to write the novelization of Alien, Ridley Scott’s classic film, a job which went to Alan Dean Foster in his stead. As Ballard told Pringle in 1984:

It was surprisingly easy to turn down. I wouldn’t mind doing the novelization of Alphaville, or even Huston’s Moby Dick or Hawks’s Big Sleep (Welles’s Macbeth would pose some problems).

(Still, there does appear to be some evidence that Ballard gave the Alien project more than a glancing thought…)

But despite what Ballard says in the Miracles quote above, that “the film industry was not for me”, in the SFX interview he actually regrets not being more closely involved with film. In fact, he sounds a little down about it. This is another interview I’ve just come across recently, and from it I was rather surprised to learn that Ballard’s burning passion was to write original screenplays and to collaborate with a gun director, forming a similar partnership to Graham Greene and Carol Reed.

Let me just catch my breath for a bit…

Someone really, really should have made that happen.

(But then again, precious egos would be at stake: today’s director’s are far too focused on writing their own scripts, to the detriment of good storylines.)

Here are Ballard’s closing remarks from the SFX interview:

I’ve had a lot of invitations, in recent years, to write a drama series — or to write original plays in the days when they existed. But I’ve always declined them because I’m not at my best working with a committee, and television is a world entirely made up of committees. It’s a huge collaboration. That doesn’t suit me. Cinema is quite different, actually; film is entirely driven by one or two people at the most — usually the producer first. The creative importance of the producer is underestimated by people who think that cinema is entirely the work of the director.

Not true: in my contacts with the film world, the producers have been more important than the directors, really (Spielberg and Cronenberg are virtually their own producers). Films are driven by (a) the producer, and then (b) the director, and you’re dealing usually with one person. I’ve never worked in film, and I regret that very much. Because I’ve always responded so to film, I regret that I’ve never been able to collaborate with a director I felt close to or in sympathy with — in the way that, say, Graham Greene was able to collaborate with Carol Reed. It’s a pity, but it just never happened, partly because most of my career as a writer has coincided with a period of two or three decades when the British film industry has virtually ceased to exist. Had my career as a writer begun 20 years earlier, say in the 1940s, probably more of my novels would have been filmed and I might well have got involved with some sort of simpatico director. But now it’s too late.

All photography by Simon Sellars.

In May 2007 I found myself in England for the J.G. Ballard conference at the University of East Anglia. With that out of the way, I did what comes naturally. I took the train to Shepperton: Ballardian Ground Zero. I had intended to take photographs of the arena that has supplied so much raw material for Ballard’s writing, but at the same time I had no intention of infringing on JGB’s privacy. So, no shots of his house and street here. What I was aiming for instead was the traversal of a distinct psychic terrain (while avoiding the dreaded “p*****geography” word), the blanket overlay of Shepperton with a mental template gleaned from so many Ballard novels and short stories.

In the end, despite Shepperton’s reoccurrence across Ballard’s ouevre, just one book coloured the day, so brilliant is its corona: The Unlimited Dream Company, that beautiful, mad, lush waking dream wrenched direct from Ballard’s cerebral cortex. In the book an airport worker, Blake, seeking to escape his mundane life in London, steals a Cessna and crashes it into the Thames River in Shepperton. He is rescued from drowning by a troupe of locals and discovers that he is unable to leave the town; there seems to be an invisible psychic barrier that denies him egress. Giving in to it, he learns that he now has strange powers. He can fly unaided (although still unable to leave the town boundaries) and he can shapeshift into different animals: birds, whales, deer. He can also conjure into being menageries of birds and packs of wild animals from thin air, or even from the orifices of his body. His sexual appetite grows polymorphously perverse and he attempts to mount anyone and anything. Galvanized by his raw libido, the townsfolk forget about their London office jobs and their safe suburban lives, and a cult soon forms around Blake as he teaches them to fly, to reject their hyperreal consumerist lifestyles in favour of a journey into the sun, an ultimate realm in which they would celebrate “the last marriage of the animate and inanimate, of the living and the dead”.

Throughout, Ballard allows Shepperton to glow lysergically before the mind’s eye, a flaring vision of the suburbs and post-industrial liminal zones that threatens to negate the entire world. It’s no wonder he’s such a powerful influence on artists and filmmakers: the writing has a pure visionary quality that, as I’ve always maintained, transcends literature, that bends time and space (but of course). Here, then, are my photos and commentary from my trip to Shepperton — my small tribute to this remarkable book and the marvellously vivid quality of Ballard’s work, my attempt to provide an on-location correlation for the film of The Unlimited Dream Company playing in the cinema of my mind.

I must thank Jo M. for her company throughout the day. Jo’s marvellous insights into the town and her knowledge of Ballard’s work enriched the experience, and her maps and keen navigational skills greatly surpassed my own wretched sense of direction.

This feature is presented in two parts. In Part 1 we set out from the train station, making a direct line for the fields and water meadows surrounding the motorway just past Ballard’s street. Crossing this metallized river by bridge, which Blake was unable to do, we make our way to the film studios, which feature prominently in the book (doubtless Blake made it by flying). In Part 2, due next week, we explore the reservoirs near the studios, also a prominent feature of the book, before crossing back over the motorway and into town, and then on into Old Shepperton where we attempt to locate the exact spot where Blake ditched his plane in the Thames.

Outside the railway station the last of the office-workers were once again making a half-hearted attempt to set off for London. But as I approached they gave up all thought of work. Ties loosened, jackets over their shoulders, they strolled through the holiday throng, their sales conferences and committee meetings forgotten.

J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979).

I live in Melbourne, where if you travel in certain directions 40 minutes out from the centre you find outlying suburbs and satellite towns that are basically parched-concrete aprons with brick-veneer boxes on them in which entire families somehow cohabitate. Parks are rare, greenery is sparse and everything is geometric and regimented, with great swathes of freeway cut through the middle. (Here is an example of the type of ennui this leached Australian suburbia can inspire; here is another.) Somehow from reading Ballard I expected similar of Shepperton, 40 minutes from the capital by train, especially given that most people who interview Ballard at his house remark on the dominance of the motorway and the terminal nature of the town.

Ballard himself has been known to play this up, as in his 1988 interview with Paul Rambali. “Post space race, when the moon was discovered to be merely dust,” Rambali writes, “his novels caught the imagination of a young generation that sensed an imminent everyday apocalypse, the future shock of the homogenous new suburbs”:

“I fear this is the future,” says Ballard… He is talking about Shepperton… “Driving through the suburbs of Germany in the Seventies I could see it. Everything is controlled. Even a drifting leaf looks out of place… Once you move to the suburbs, time stops. People measure their lives by consumer goods, the dreams that money can buy. I think that’s more dangerous. People have no loyalties anymore.”

But Ballard continues to live in this suburb where time has stopped, a sort of self-imposed alienation. In this, he is like a character from one of his novels, accepting the entropy that surrounds him.

Paul Rambali, “Visions Of Dystopia”, The Face (1988).

Thus I was a bit taken aback upon arriving at Shepperton station to be greeted by what looked like a picturesque town with a homely village atmosphere, winding streets with real-ale pubs smack in the middle of them, greenery galore and heritage-style red-brick housing. Sure, time has stopped but it’s hardly the dehumanised non-space of Ballardian lore. I’ve certainly seen far bleaker residential areas elsewhere in the British Isles. Still, it’s what’s under the surface that counts in Ballard…

Completing my transformation of this suburban town, I walked along the main roads leading to the perimeter of Shepperton. To the south I threw my semen at the foot of Walton Bridge. Standing in the centre of the main road to London, I ignored the hornblasts of the passing drivers. Once again I was sure that none of them realized I was naked, and thought they were looking at an eccentric villager trying to throw himself under their wheels.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

In 2004, why did the stars align in such a cataclysmic way in Surrey, the county in which Shepperton nestles? As the Shepperton sign above indicates, it was a bumper year. But that’s not the whole story: in 2004 Surrey was in the top 10 for child road deaths in Britain. What would 2006’s final tally be? The sign’s single interrogation point for 2006 almost begs us to beat the 2004 record. Death Race 2006, perhaps?

Is Surrey, and Shepperton, somehow responsible? Is there any truth to the rumour, spread by Mikita Brottman in her introduction to the book Car Crash Culture, that Ballard in Crash “charts a parallel between road intersections and astrological signs”?

Perhaps the truth is rather more prosaic, yet far more disturbing:

Are we just victims in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it in fact take place with our unconscious, and even conscious, connivance? Each year hundreds of thousands of people are killed in car crashes all over the world. Millions are injured. Are these arranged deaths arranged by the colliding forces of the technological landscape, by our own unconscious fantasies about power and aggression, our obsessions with consumer goods and desires, the overlaying fictions that are more and more taking the place of reality?

Ballard, Crash! (short film; 1971).

[The] demise of feeling and emotion has paved the way for all our most real and tender pleasures… our apparently limitless powers for conceptualisation — what our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.

Ballard, “Introduction to the French edition of Crash” (1973).

For some reason known only to the interior of my head I was trapped in this riverside town, around which my mind had drawn a strict perimeter, bounded on the north by the motorway, on the west and south by the winding course of the Thames. I watched the traffic moving eastwards to London, certain now that if I tried to leave by this last door of the horizon the same queasy perspectives would unravel in front of me.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Ian Allan Ltd. is a travel agent based in Terminal House just near the station. “The Terminal Beach” (1964) is one of Ballard’s finest stories and the blueprint for The Atrocity Exhibition. Set on the Pacific island of Eniwetok, which has been blasted into an undifferentiated slag by American nuclear testing, the story follows a possibly irradiated ex-US airman who wanders around on the island attempting to find the beach that reminds him of where he was born. Detaching himself from reality, he communes with the dead and reinvents — and destroys — himself according to the “any space whatever” of postwar globalism, represented by the sad spectre of the nuclear-poisoned island.

Before we ventured further into the dark heart of Shepperton, I was tempted to ask Ian Allan himself if he would later sell me a ticket to “the white leviathan, zero”, as the spirit of a dead Japanese man describes the terminal beach. But inside I suspected that like the travel agent in The Truman Show, he would conspire to ensure I could never leave Shepperton, that the only journey I would be undertaking would be deeper and further into my skull.

“Our latent psychopathy is the last nature reserve,” said Ballard in 2000. “A place of refuge for the endangered mind.”

The helicopter had retreated to the water-meadow across the river. Swept along towards the church, I saw Miriam knocked from her feet by the running crowd. As she knelt on the grass she was seized by the young women, a group of secretaries who happily stripped the clothes from her shoulders and lifted her into a head-dress of feathers.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

At the end of Ballard’s street is a walking trail that passes through verdant parks and meadows. It’s completely unexpected as you follow the winding road and come out the other side. We pictured Ballard, on first arriving in Shepperton, exploring his environs, going for a walk to the end of his street and discovering this wonderland that is like a theme park torn from its context and thrust into the middle of suburbia, like the geodesically preserved forests in Silent Running. The effect is quite unreal, and gazing into these ponds I was summarily transported to that mystical long shot in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, in which vegetation ripples and sways under flowing water, at once completely artificial in the intensity of the film’s colour and focus but at the same time so organic it transcends reason and logic.

Everywhere a macabre vegetation was emerging. Strange predators moved through the grass. Snakes climbed from the banks of the creek. A plague of spiders cast webs of pus across the trees, drawing silver shrouds over the dead flowers. Above the grave white flies festered in a halo. As a pale dawn filled the meadow I could see shrike attacking the last of the hummingbirds and impaling them on the thorn-bushes. The whole of Shepperton was sickening, poisoned by the despair flowing from me.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

It was then, fifty yards from the motorway, that I made an unsettling discovery. Although I was walking at a steady pace across the uneven soil, I was no longer drawing any closer to the pedestrian bridge… the motorway remained as far away as ever. If anything, this distance between us seemed to enlarge. At the same time, Shepperton receded behind me, and I found myself standing in an immense field filled with poppies and a few worn tyres.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Where we found ourselves, a tiny river cuts under concrete slabs and leafy vegetation snakes around motorway pedestrian bridges. The sound of trickling water blends with the Doppler effect of speeding vehicles. Here, where we found ourselves, “the last marriage of the animate and inanimate”, the absolute state to which Blake craves, would be fully apparent to a man of Ballard’s imaginative powers, in fact would appear fully formed. How many of his books were inspired by walks through this backstreet terrain? The Drowned World, with its vision of a lush, overgrown London? The Unlimited Dream Company itself? Even Concrete Island, despite the austerity of its title?

According to Peter Linnett:

The island isn’t concrete at all. It seems to live, organically. Admittedly it overlays the ruins of some old streets, a cinema, an air raid shelter; but on first sight: simply grass.

Linnett, “The Greening of Ballard: A Review of Concrete Island” (1976).

An unvarying light calmed the waiting nettles along the motorway palisade. A few drivers watched me from their cars, demented priest in my white sneakers. I picked up a chalky stone and set out a line of numbered stakes with pieces of driftwood, a calibrated pathway that would carry me to the pedestrian bridge. But as I walked forward they encircled me in a spiral arm that curved back upon itself, a whorl of numerals that returned me to the centre of the field.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

The house that Sam built … from Pam.

MelbPsy gets all Atrocity Exhibition on Sam Newman’s ass house:

“As he stood beneath the fractured, glacial stare of Pamela Anderson, her linear geometry echoed a television howl. Vomit, violence, tabloid architecture. Was this, he wondered, the denouement of the French Revolution?”

For those outside of Australia, Newman is a local type, an ex-footballer who built a new career out of being an all-purpose media boor. So the script goes, nothing is beyond him, whether it’s allegedly monstering pregnant women in supermarkets or, yes, erecting a larger-than-life facade of Pamela Anderson (“we’re just good friends,” says Sam) to breast his inner-city property.

MelbPsy’s ironic appropriation of the Atrocity aesthetic is completely appropriate, then, given that book’s concern with irradiated images of celebrity culture beamed aloft on 400ft-high billboards:

“He recognized the woman from the billboards he had seen near the hospital — the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor Pammy Anderson. Yet these designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her. The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies. The presiding deity of their lives, the film actress provided a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness.”

JGB, Atrocity, 1970.

Sam Newman: “Most people are wankers…”

In Atrocity, when the main character erects mindscapes and celebrity billboards, he’s using the radiation of the media landscape against itself in order to clear autonomous zones — “neural intervals” — ready for inscription by brand-new auratic powers…

…while Newman has been run over by his girlfriend in her car (giving him a broken leg and ankle) and has been beaten up by an ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend (giving him a broken nose). Yet Sam has used these highly publicised sexual pecadilloes to create his own independent nation, the United State of Sam, seceding from Australia on the back of its strident Constitution, customised and retooled from all that negative publicity and now reoccupying and re-broadcasting across all media:

“Most people you meet are wankers, pure and simple. Women are schemers, men are liars. That is all you have to remember … I’m just about the only heterosexual left in my street. I’m thinking of leaving the country before being gay becomes compulsory. I like women. Just remember they are schemers.”

Sammy, 2003.

He has been punched out not once but twice by separate footballers live on air, and is renowned for his trademark phrase, “You idiot,” hurled indiscriminately at the public — at mental defectives, immigrants, grannies, junkies, any old trash — while doing his roving “Street Talk” segments for The Footy Show, the sport-hooligan fest that made his TV name and on which he appeared in blackface after Aboriginal footballer Nicky Winmar failed to make his scheduled slot. He has more enemies than Max Gogarty, yet remains a wildly popular and highly paid celebrity.

According to this puffpiece, he serves an all-purpose role, functioning equally as virtual gigolo and cathartic release for the pent-up violence of ordinary lives:

“No small part of Newman’s attractiveness to women (and make no mistake about it, Sam Newman has a good deal to do with “The Footy Show”’s enormous popularity with women, who watch it in greater numbers than do men), is the impression he conveys of being a man who does not lose his temper. This is a man you can thump in the chest, reprimand, tease — without risking being hit. And this is a man you can flirt with, show your legs to (as did one elderly woman in a notable “Street Talk” segment), without fear that he will “lose control.”
…
Sam does not “control” himself. Sam calls idiots idiots. It does not really matter (to most of the audience) whether or not they are idiots, whether or not Sam has quoted them or represented them fairly. It matters that someone says what he bloody well reckons. Those without Sam’s license (women, for instance) can enjoy this vicariously.”

If you’ve read Kingdom Come, which of course charts The Rise and Fall of TV hack David Cruise and his Minders from Staines, Sam might be sounding familiar by now:

“It was tuned to the Metro-Centre cable channel, and showed an afternoon discussion programme transmitted from the mezzanine studio. The suntanned face of David Cruise dominated everything, and covered the proceedings like a cheap but over-bright lacquer. He was smiling and affable, but faintly hostile, like a bullying valet. Perhaps people in the motorway towns liked to be shouted at.”

“‘So David Cruise is the führer? He’s fairly benign.’

‘He’s a nothing. He’s a “virtual” man without a real thought in his head. Consumer fascism provides its own ideology, no one needs to sit down and dictate Mein Kampf. Evil and psychopathy have been reconfigured into lifestyle statements. It’s a fearful prospect, but consumer fascism may be the only way to hold a society together. To control all that aggression, and channel all those fears and hates.’”

“Cruise’s obsessions and sexual hang-ups were the compass-dance of a demented king bee, guiding the hive to a destination it had already chosen. His chat-show act, based on scripts I tailored around him, might be a performance, but it validated the hunger and restlessness of his audience. The housewives mailing their photographs to him were performing rituals of assent, expressing their longing for a faith beyond politics.”

“David Cruise casually referred to the ‘enemy’, a term kept deliberately vague that embraced Asians and east Europeans, blacks, Turks, non-consumers and anyone not interested in sport.”

“‘One thing David Cruise had was an unlimited supply of enemies. That was part of his strategy. You know that, Richard. You planned it that way.’”

All quotes, Ballard, Kingdom Come, 2006.

Oh yes. Now I remember how Kingdom Come ends…

Our man David Cruise in his latest campaign… Photo courtesy Metro-Centre.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Melborea Moronica: New ‘Depraved Species of Electric Flora’ Found Growing in Melbourne, Australia
+ The Rats that Ate Mill Park
+ The Drought: Water Vigilantes
+ John Howard: The Conspiracy of Grey Men

Damme, Ackroyd just keeps pumping them out doesn’t he? He must have a whole crew of cheeky culture vulture mudlarks and fey, fettlesome and febrile Oxonians slaving away in the secret cellars of his Limehouse Penthouse. He makes James Michener look like some lollygaggin’ Yankee.

I always liked what the real magus of secret London, Iain Sinclair, said about Peter Ackroyd. “He’s Colonel Mustard and he did it in the library with a research assistant.” And Ackroyd does look a lot like the good Colonel Moutard.

Yes, Ackroyd’s written some brilliant books. Hawksmoor, The House of Dr Dee, Chatterton, are all superbly written and psychically charged tales about the hidden human bones of London. And Albion: History of English Imagination is the best book ever about a subject no one realised existed until he wrote about it.

But both Ackroyd and the other strange geomancy warlock of English letters, JG Ballard, are now in their own deadpan, sly and slightly bitchy english way, sorta coughing and nudging their audiences towards Iain Sinclair.

It’s like a quincunx (cue Durrell, Fowles and Golding. Fellow magicians but self-imposed exiles from Old Lud). Currently you have Ackroyd, Ballard, Amis fils (although his batteries are ebbing a bit) and Alan Moore setting up the four points of blokish energy (This is a male incantation thing. I’m sure you chicks are up to equally weird shit with the London Energy. Looking at you in particular Miss Angela Carter. Death is no excuse) and in the centre is Iain Sinclair assome kind of lightening rod cum Leyden Jar for it all.

Fuck it. FDB, just read Downriver for starters. Imagine if Burroughs was a Londoner with Blake’s gift of transcendental vision. Whether you love it or hate it, you’ll know you’ll have read something by someone really plugged into that big grim green secretly exuberantly and dourly surrealistic metropolis spawning ever outwards from a river named after time.

A city where a statue of a (Darkest) Peruvian bear greets you at the Heathrow train terminus at Paddington Station while it’s biggest folk hero is a mass murderer.

This gallery is in two parts: 1) Work that hasn’t been featured on this site (below); 2) and work previously featured.

‘Crystal Forest’
by Maia Valenzeula

Based on the book “The Crystal World” by JG Ballard.

‘Crash’
by Marie Meier

A little tribute to J.G. Ballard and David Cronenberg.

‘The Drowned Giant’
by Shafeen Alam

This is a story moment I chose to illustrate in which the main character, a young librarian, sees the Giant for the first time, days after it had washed ashore and the excitement over it had died down. I submitted my work on ACME and have gotten some really helpful comments from the pros. So here is my revision as a result.

Illustrations by James Nicholls

ABOVE: ‘The Terminal Beach’ by J.G. Ballard.

LEFT: ‘The Drowned Giant’ by J.G. Ballard. RIGHT: ‘Billennium’ by J.G. Ballard.

The Menzies Building, Monash University: Conference HQ. Photo: Simon Sellars.

I recently gave a paper on Ballard at Demanding the Impossible: the Third Australian Conference on Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction at Monash University. The conference, spread over three days, was intensive and impossible to digest in its entirety (of the 76 papers, I attended just 15 including my own), but various themes emerged. Terry Eagleton was a keynote speaker, meaning that, as another attendee (who goes by the very academic name of ‘Superdave’) has noted, ‘A lot of the people at the conference were Marxist theorists, which is natural considering the theme. Marx may have condemned utopianism, but Marxism is essentially utopian nonetheless–as its repeated failure attests.’

DAY 1: Welcome, Catastrophe

The work of Kim Stanley Robinson seemed to be a focal point, from what I gathered from some of the papers and from many of the conversations I engaged in. On the first day, keynote speaker Tom Moylan, in his talk entitled ‘Making the Present Impossible: On the Vocation of Utopian Science Fiction’, took up Fredric Jameson’s assertion that Robinson’s Mars trilogy is the ideal expression of utopian literature, in that it presents multiple possibilities for utopian expression and moves between them in a state of flux. As Moylan said, this type of work ‘nominates and explores new alternatives, not to find immediate answers, but to alleviate and enlighten political strategy.’ As I tried to tease out in my own paper, I see Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise as fulfilling a not-too-dissimilar function, my conclusion being that this book (and, to a lesser extent, the rest of what I term Ballard’s ‘Pacific fictions’) is both uniquely Ballardian and exquisitely Jamesonian.

Moylan’s presentation basically served as an introduction to current utopian thought in literature. Again echoing Jameson, it concluded that the form, rather than being associated with the nasty stench of various dictatorships that have co-opted utopianism in the name of genocide, should be reclaimed and thought of as ‘a device to cut through quotidian reality and open up a gap through which we can see a better world.’ There was an interesting question from the audience, in which Moylan was asked, ‘If utopian writing should be conceived as a disruption, an alternative, should it therefore embody disruptive, ie, experimental, form?’ Moylan’s answer was, ‘Perhaps, but the virtue of SF is that it’s both immediate and accessible’, and this exchange immediately made me think of recent conversations in which people have wondered why Ballard abandoned the experimental form of The Atrocity Exhibition for more conventional structures and narratives. My feeling is along similar lines to Moylan, that the subversive value of Ballard’s later work lies precisely in the fact that it is ‘immediate and accessible’.

As Iain Sinclair has said, Ballard ‘has shifted from something that’s manufactured or tooled to fit in magazines where there was a market for these short sharp pieces, to something that now sits and pretends to be a mainstream literary novel. It comes out looking like a literary novel — Cocaine Nights has almost the form of an Agatha Christie novel, it’s comfortable — except that they’re doing stranger things. There’s a much darker kick in it.’

My paper, ‘Zones of Transit: J.G. Ballard’s Pacific Fictions’, was in the early afternoon and I was pleased that it was well received. Thinking back I wish I’d included footage or slides of A-bomb tests and perhaps some photos of the WWII aircraft I found abandoned in the North Pacific jungles. Still, my paper seemed accessible enough, even though, disappointingly, I was asked just half a question (directed to me and the other speaker on my panel, who also referenced Ballard). That paucity would normally be a sign of audience incomprehension, but to my relief a few people told me in the break that they enjoyed my presentation. And to also tell me that they love Ballard but can’t stand Rushing to Paradise. Well, I don’t think it’s Ballard’s best work at all but the ideas are most intriguing and underexplored compared to the rest of his canon. I’ll refrain from further comment as I think I’ll post my paper here in the New Year.

The question asked of myself and the other speaker was, ‘If Ballard is essentially writing the same story over and over again, does that therefore spell the end of the concept of utopia as a historical concern?’ The audience member used Ballard’s ‘Ronald Reagan’ piece from Atrocity (as prefiguring anti-celebrity culture) and Crash (as prefiguring cyber- and virtual sex) and their temporal location in the late 60s and early 70s as examples of the writer mining a prophetic wave of inspiration and then revising and refining that template to the present day. I wasn’t entirely sure of the point of this question, so my rambled and thoroughly non-academic answer was that Ballard, of course, is out of time (or ahead of his time, if anything), and if he has been writing the same thing since the 1960s, that simply means to me that the rest of us are still yet to catch up. As to the utopian angle, to my understanding Ballard has never been especially concerned with the past or the future, or any sense of historicity, focusing instead on a collapsed present, and that in any case it’s arguable as to whether his work is utopian (or rather, dystopian) at all. Instead, as I tried to make clear in the paper, the notion of an ‘affirmative dystopia’ is the key to his work, an oscillation between the poles that is neither one nor the other, but that plays on the elements of both. Actually I was a little surprised that Ballard was so under-represented in the rest of the conference: like I say I don’t classify him as a straight utopian or dystopian writer, but his work very definitely plays with the conventions in an innovative and provocative fashion.

With my paper out of the way, I made it to an afternoon panel featuring Kate Rigby, whose paper, ‘Apocalypse Now: Whither Utopianism in the Midst of Catastrophe?’, was rooted in reality, in an acceptance of the parlous state of climate change and the notion that things are only going to get worse. What role, asked Kate, can utopianism serve in the face of such a dire state of affairs? Looking to the biblical narrative of Noah’s Ark, she examined ‘non-human’ life and called for a ‘radical extension of hospitality towards more than only human others’ as a means to mobilise action in a world in which the utopian impulse seems to be well and truly exhausted as we slide downwards into eco-disaster.

Now this was a very stimulating presentation, with issues you could really sink your teeth into. Of course, what I wanted to ask Kate was, informed by Ballard’s early eco-disaster novels, how does one account for the fact that there actually might be a certain strata of the populace that would welcome the catastrophe for whatever reasons: psychological, psychopathological, aesthetic, evolutionary, etc. But I was beaten to the punch by another attendee. In response to Kate’s assertion that ‘If we see the apocalypse as a purifying event, that almost legitimises inaction’, he said (and I’m paraphrasing from memory), ‘There’s an unwarranted belief that eco-disaster can be averted. The world will run down of its own accord anyway, so why bother prolonging the inevitable for our children and grandchildren, who may only grasp a habitable world for just a few generations’.

Kate’s response was that for her it’s an ethical question, it’s ‘about allowing life to flourish, for however long that may be’. I wish I’d had the insight to follow this up along Ballardian lines, but I was still mulling all of this over as this exchange was talking place. Unfortunately I’m a bit slow like that. Interestingly, Geoff Manaugh asked something similar of Kim Stanley Robinson in their recent BLDGBLOG interview, and Robinson’s answer is perhaps similar to how Kate may have responded:

Robinson: The crash scenario that people think of … as an escape to freedom would actually be so damaging that it wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be an adventure. It would merely be a struggle for food and security, and a permanent high risk of being robbed, beaten, or killed; your ability to feel confident about your own – and your family’s and your children’s – safety would be gone. People who fail to realize that… I’d say their imaginations haven’t fully gotten into this scenario.

After Kate’s presentation I sat in on the Comparative Utopias workshop (overheard before I went in: ‘What on earth is a utopias workshop? Lessons in how to build a utopia?’). This was useful in that it extrapolated the utopian impulse beyond Western culture, although, as Jacqueline Dutton asserted, ‘There’s no real tradition of utopias outside the West’. But for me, Roberto Gonzalez-Casanovas’s paper, ‘Utopian and Dystopian Typologies of Arawaks vs. Caribs: Relativising Cannibals in Colonial Myth and Postcolonial Critique’ was the standout, with its fascinating account of the role cannibal cultures have played in the Western mythos, as a composite cut-out, symbolising and embodying the insecurities and ambitions of the West.

And that was it for me for the first day. On the train home, I sat next to a retired chap who’d been at the conference. Funnily enough, he wasn’t even remotely involved in academia — instead, he was your archetypal sci fi ‘fanboy’ who told me he has worn Star Trek outfits at conventions. He’s a smart and engaged chap who came along to gain a different perspective on science fiction, and this to me was a sign of the conference’s success.

DAY 2: The Eagle(ton) Has Landed

The Menzies Building, Monash University: Conference HQ. Photo: Simon Sellars.

I missed Day 2 as I had to work, but I was informed that Eagleton’s presentation, ‘Utopia and the New Testament’, was like stand-up comedy. See Superdave’s blog for info on Day 2 and for some Eagleton hot gossip… (he calls it ‘Day 3′ on his blog but he’s actually talking about Day 2).

DAY 3: This Argument Did Not Take Place

The Menzies Building, Monash University: Conference HQ. Photo: Simon Sellars.

Australian SF and fantasy author Lucy Sussex was the keynote speaker for the third day. As Andrew Milner noted when introducing her, ‘Lucy, unlike those of us in academia with our tenure, actually lives off her writing’. And she’s very good at it, too. Lucy’s presentation, ‘A Tour Guide in Utopia’, for me was the highlight of the conference. Her style was witty and imaginative, taking the time to explore the absurdities of her subject matter.

Lucy took us through the history of utopian literature in Australia, from 100 years ago to now. The early account was fascinating as I had no idea there was such a strong utopian tradition in Australian writing — it’s something ‘official’ histories never discuss. Early Australian utopias, as Lucy explained, were propelled by a stew of influences, including the threat of Western Australia seceding, the advent of Federation, the prospect of New Zealand becoming a state of Australia, and from elsewhere, the advent of Freud, electricity, Einstein, Marconi, Wells, suffragettes, you name it.

For Lucy, Australian politics today cries out for the form to be revived and she pointed to some examples that take up the call, with the caveat that dystopian literature has replaced the utopian mode in Australian writing, fuelled by the Howard government and Australia’s involvement in the ‘War on Terror’. She referred to an Australian novel that sounded most intriguing (unfortunately I’ve lost the author’s name), with its vision of terrorists beheading their victims, and via some weird technology, forcing them to live on in a kind of half-life as headless slaves. I can’t quite get that image out of my head and I must seek out that book. If anyone knows of it, let me know. Lucy also mentioned Andrew McGahan’s novel Underground, which depicts Canberra wiped out in a jihad attack. Imprisoned in Parliament House, the protagonist has nothing to read but Hansard — a vision of hell if ever there was one.

Lucy finished up by relating the answers she was given when she asked some prominent writers about the need for utopian writing today. Ursula Le Guin said (and, again, excuse my paraphrasing from memory), ‘How can anyone draw up a blueprint for utopia when science and technology today are changing so rapidly?’ While for Dorothy Porter, ‘The Howard Government’s years were a literal dystopia. I didn’t need to write about it.’

That was a wonderful note to end on.

At lunchtime I got chatting to a chap who informed me that he identified as a Marxist but that his university department was all Derridean; the way he told it, it was like he was a black man who had wandered into a Klu Klux Klan meeting. When he asked what I identified as, I was stumped and eventually answered, ‘a Ballardian?’, which was very lame, I know. Then he was stumped too. And then we had some more wine and talked about something else.

In the afternoon I chaired a panel on utopian themes in film. Both papers were uniformly excellent. Julia Vassileva’s paper, ‘On Imagination, Energy and Excess: the Lasting Legacy of Eisenstein’s Utopias’, was a deep examination of the manner in which Eisenstein, like Freud, sought to ‘represent the non-representational’. Julia made the excellent point that for Eisenstein, the use of montage generates a parallel narrative that makes ambiguous comment on the main narrative, a stimulating concept with vast utopian potential. As Julia explained, for Eisenstein who ‘dreamed of a classless society’, utopian ideals were simply not able to be realised in the time in which he lived. However ‘it is the very insistence on utopian ideals despite a knowledge of their impossibility that creates the inner spring’ — or an energy that can be realised — a similar conclusion reached by other speakers examining other writers and artists at the conference.

Rachel Torbett’s paper, ‘The Silence Afterwards: Lyotard with Haneke’s “Le Temps du Loup”‘ focused on Haneke’s film “Le Temps du Loup”, with its post-apocalyptic world in which the catastrophe is never explained and which is alluded to only in the most oblique of terms. Rachel played an edited copy of the film behind her, timed to finish when her paper finished, a fabulous touch that really enhanced her presentation. For Rachel, ‘Speculating on the human opens up a space of indeterminacy’ and she noted that this film accomplishes that, with its vision of ‘gross inhumanity’ and the barbarism that people descend into when their technological safety nets are stripped away (a Ballardian theme too, as it happens; earlier Rachel had told me she had originally considered a paper on Ballard’s High-Rise). Weaving Lyotard into this argument, she explored the concept of the ’sublime’ and how the film presents ‘the threat that something will happen in this void; that it’s not over’. I hadn’t seen the film, but with the video behind her I clearly saw how Haneke, with his use of darkness and snatched, whispered dialogue fully explores this idea, as characters lose themselves in the landscape which is shot in fading, natural light.

For Rachel, the problems raised in the film ‘linger because they go unresolved’. Withholding vital information from the audience, then presenting a final scene in which a train passes through a countryside that is beautiful once again, Haneke promises pleasure emerging from the terror only for it to be deferred as we realise that we don’t know who is on the train, where they are going or what they intend to do. The endpoint, I believe, was that we ultimately come to question the notion of ‘humanity’ itself and whether it is to be desired at all. This paper made me want to explore Haneke’s work in more detail, and watching the extracts from the film, I couldn’t help but compare that ending with Children of Men’s, in which the humanity is virtually rammed down your throat.

After this I caught Andrew Milner’s paper, which he co-wrote with Robert Savage. The paper derived from a great central conceit: what would happen if the German philosopher Ernst Bloch had included the Golden Age of science fiction in his ‘magnum opus’ The Principle of Hope? (Originally Milner and Savage had planned to write a short story exploring this idea; that would have made a great paper.) Bloch wrote of ‘the colportage novel, the circus and the fairy tale’, but ignored the SF pulps, which were being produced at the same time he was working. Milner then took us through an examination of utopian themes in the pulps. All in all an engaging paper. Andrew is a hyperactive speaker, almost tripping over his own words in his enthusiasm for his subject matter, an infectiousness transmitted to the audience.

And then the conference, for me, was over (there was another workshop but I had to leave).

That night I was having drinks with some friends when someone I didn’t know wandered into the group and heard me talking about Ballard, Baudrillard and the conference. Immediately he began attacking me, saying that Baudrillard (and Ballard) believe that nothing is real, and that they are wrong and irresponsible. He kept saying that the body is real, that if someone attacks you on the street then you will bleed, you may even die, and you will then know that your corporeal self is very very real, and not part of some fantasy virtual reality theory. None of which I’ve ever argued against. Weary from too many beers and suddenly being put on the spot and forced to defend theory in the middle of a packed and noisy pub filled with steroid heads and Paris Hilton clones, I tried to explain that my interest in media landscapes, informed by Ba(udri)llard, lies in the way advertising and media has changed to become nomadic, fluid and omnidirectional, rather than top-down, hierarchical and sticky, and that because the so-called spectacle is so complete and so enveloping, this renders traditional notions of ‘authentic’ behaviour obsolete. (Behind me, as if to emphasise my point, one of the Paris clones threw up on the pavement). But this doesn’t mean I believe that nothing is real, even though I may feel overwhelming ennui and deflation, even something approximating fear, from time to time because of it. It’s purely a mode of enquiry into something that’s basically unanswerable, but still worth questioning for anyone remotely interested in the forces of cultural production in the early 21st century. In fact, the idea of the mediated ’spectacle’ is so ingrained now in popular culture that it — in and of itself — has become a tedious marketing cliche in films and advertising (cf. the Matrix, with its pop-cult take on Baudrillard, and hyperware and self-reflexive ads that consistently ‘break’ the frame), so it was somewhat surprising to hear someone argue that there was no such thing.

Even more shocking, I couldn’t believe this guy was dredging up a stock argument against Baudrillard, an argument over 10 years old in fact, regurgitating the whole ‘Gulf War Did Not Happen’ gambit and using that to discredit him. I mean, honestly, this is such an old and tired argument. After all these years I don’t think you need me to explain that Baudrillard was not claiming that the physical event of war didn’t happen, but that the war was the first to be almost entirely mediated by technology and therefore was not ‘real’ according to traditional theatres of warfare. And that that notion is very applicable to today, in the midst of our pervasive and all-invasive FaceSpace culture. But this just didn’t wash with this fellow, and he kept pushing and pushing until I finally asked him what he studied at university. Surely nothing French?

And he said: ‘Derrida. I’m a Derridean, of course. A realist’.

Derrida? A realist? That’s a new one on me.

(By the way, see the blog Obscene Desserts, in which Anja relates a similar scenario — only in reverse, and in Germany).

..:: Previously on Ballardian
+ ‘If I had a pound for every time someone mentioned psychopathology’: A Review of the First International Conference on the Work of J.G. Ballard

Here’s my abstract:

‘Zones of Transition’: J.G. Ballard’s Pacific Utopias
Simon Sellars, Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, Clayton, Australia

This paper examines how J.G. Ballard’s writing ambiguously deploys abandoned Pacific islands as sites of radical reinvention, tracing the decline of Japanese imperialism in the region and the rise of American-led globalisation. The Pacific’s history is riddled with examples of coup-ridden and colonised islands, and islands used as nuclear testing grounds. I explore how Ballard, using the language of micronationalism, retools such ‘zones of transition’ as ’states of mind’, metaphoric buffer zones representing the sovereignty of the imagination, which he sees as a vital strategy in the post-war age of simulation. But the ‘dark side’ of Ballard’s utopianism is also apparent in the novel Rushing to Paradise, about a feminist ecotopia in the Pacific, which I read not only as an indictment of utopian gurus such as David Koresh, but also as a clear warning about the danger of extrapolating utopia from the imagination into reality.

Seriously, this is a new area for me: I’ve written on the Pacific as a travel writer, and even refracted it through a Ballardian lens, but not academically. Partly I’m attempting to read Ballard through Fredric Jameson’s writings on utopia and my paper is very much a work in progress. Any and all feedback is appreciated. I believe there is talk of publishing selected papers from the conference online, but if that doesn’t come off for me, I’ll post mine here on ballardian.com.

Here are the conference details:

Demanding the Impossible: The Third Australian Conference on Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction
5th-7th December 2007
A conference organised by the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University

+ Home Page
+ Conference Programme

Keynote Speakers
TERRY EAGLETON
Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow at the University of Manchester.

TOM MOYLAN
Glucksman Professor of Contemporary Writing and Director of the Ralahine Center for Utopian Studies, University of Limerick

LYMAN TOWER SARGENT
Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Missouri, St. Louis, and Visiting Fellow, Mansfield College, University of Oxford

LUCY SUSSEX
Distinguished Australian science fiction writer and author of A Tour Guide in Utopia

Other Speakers will include:
Andrew Benjamin (Professor of Critical Theory, CCLCS), Roland Boer (Associate Professor, CCLCS), Ian Buchanan (Professor of Critical Theory, Cardiff University), Verity Burgmann (Professor of Politics, University of Melbourne), Jacqueline Dutton (Senior Lecturer in French, University of Melbourne), Andrew Milner (Professor of Cultural Studies, CCLCS), Chris Palmer (Head of English, La Trobe University), Kate Rigby (Associate Professor, CCLCS).

Further Information

http://arts.monash.edu.au/lcl/conferences/utopias3

Carlo Salzani or Dimitris Vardoulakis
Tel: +61 (3) 99059009
Fax: +61 (3) 99055593
Email: Utopias@arts.monash.edu.au

..:: Previously on Ballardian: John Howard: The Conspiracy of Grey Men (which is the only post on this site I’ve left with a comments box completely unmoderated, as the comments are completely priceless and apparently fairly sum up the level of political debate in this country).

‘Tourism is the great soporific. It’s a huge confidence trick, and gives people the dangerous idea that there’s something interesting in their lives. It’s musical chairs in reverse. Every time the muzak stops people stand up and dance around the world, and more chairs are added to the circle, more marinas and Marriott hotels, so everyone thinks they’re winning.’

‘But it’s another con?’

‘Complete. Today’s tourist goes nowhere. … All the upgrades in existence lead to the same airports and resort hotels, the same pina colada bullshit. … Travel is the last fantasy the 20th Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself.’

‘And that can’t be done?’

‘There’s nowhere to go. The planet is full. You might as well stay at home and spend the money on chocolate fudge.’

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J.G. Ballard. Millennium People.
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LEFT: Photo: Simon Sellars. Walking past STA Travel in Collingwood (Melbourne), I was struck by this advertisement: ‘I was mugged in Mexico.’ STA targets the thrillseeking youngish backpacker scene, and it seems to have finally realised the futility of promoting Mexico via the standard travel-industry imagery of tacos, burritos and tequilas to a street-smart, apparently narcissistic audience that has seen it all and done it all before. The logical next step: marketing its target group’s nightmares.

Mass tourism accelerates the shrinking-globe effect. The spidery net of information technology means forward planning is negligible and the time between decision and departure minimal. Dirt-cheap air fares wrap the planet in a grid of many-tentacled route maps, itineraries and carbon trails. The romantic notion of ‘untouched areas’ becomes extinct due to countless package tourists blithely following guidebook trails laid out in advance, and the cumulative effect is that we have reached a stage in which anything and everything is able to be seen and experienced simultaneously, an ‘accident of reality’, after Paul Virilio.

When asked ‘But what shall we dream of when everything becomes visible?’, Virilio replied ‘We’ll dream of being blind’. But to follow the Ballardian line of sight means the only place left to visit when the world has been stripmined of experience is the inside of your skull — and your deepest, darkest fears.

Next in the series: ‘I was bashed and left for dead by a pack of rabid alpha males high on ice in the Melbourne CBD.’

For a target group brought up on Eli Roth films, that would sure beat the taco-and-tequila-style cliches of ‘Melbourne: World’s Most Livable City’.

J.G. Ballard at KURBgallery.

Please pass on to anyone who might be interested.

From Pippa Tandy & David Bromfield:

“From January 11 to 20 2008 KURB gallery, an artist run non-profit art gallery, studios and performance space at 310 William Street Northbridge, Perth, Australia, will hold an exhibition, forum, programme and events in celebration of J.G. Ballard.

Interested visual artists, writers, film-makers, performance artists and all others are invited to submit proposals and/or send works which might be considered Ballardian, as for example:

(adj) 1. of James Graham Ballard (J.G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J.G. Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments (Collins English Dictionary)

We welcome any image, photograph, text, collage, movie, experimental novel, sound piece installation or performance instructions, semaphore, sculpture (singing or otherwise) cd, dvd, that can be sent here via email, post, balloon, submarine, bicycle pigeon or intercontinental ballistic missile…

Or presented in person at:

KURB gallery
310 William Street
Northbridge Perth
WA 6000
Australia.

No practical contribution will be refused, however unreasonable.

Contributors may wish to consider Ballard’s single reference to Perth, the most isolated city on the planet, the nearest thing we have to a moon base on the planet. They may also wish to reflect on the central role played by Perth and Australia in the Cold War and its aftermath.

We intend our exhibition to follow Ballard’s prescription for an autopsy on reality—

In a sense, I’m assembling the materials of an autopsy, and I’m treating reality – the reality we inhabit – almost as if it were a cadaver, or let’s say, the contents of a special kind of forensic inquisition… I regard all these as data which will play their role in whatever hypothesis I am proposing to offer, to explain the significance of mysterious and apparently unrelated objects, this huge network of ciphers, and encoded instructions – perhaps – that surround us in reality.

– J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Graeme Revell (Summer 1983)

BALLARD DEADLINES/GUIDELINES

There are no strict deadlines for this event; we will accept work for the exhibition and contributions to the forum up to January 11, the opening date for the exhibition. After that we will accept responses to the exhibition until the day it closes.

Forum Participants: November 30 2007

It would help us if participants in the forum could let us know their intention to participate by November 30 2007.

We do not expect that many will choose to travel to Perth. We are happy to read contributions and/or project or play tapes. Those who may intend to travel here should let us know. We will able to help with finding accommodation and so. Visitors should note that this is the sunniest, hottest period of the Australian summer.

Exhibition participants: January 5 2008

If would help us if exhibitors could let us have their works or instructions in any form by January 5 2008. For further information or to express interest please contact KURB at:

KURBgallery@westnet.com.au

or write to:

KURB gallery 310 William Street. Perth WA, 6000 Australia

Those who wish to follow up the range of our interests may like to read Pippa Tandy’s The ‘DNA of the Present’ in the Fossil Record of the Cold War—Through the Imagery of JG Ballard, Related Sources and Documents in Various Media.

+ MORE INFO: Ballard at KURB.

We look forward to hearing from you

Pippa Tandy & David Bromfield (co-curators: Ballardian Art)
(PS Pippa did finish the doctorate)”

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+ FUTURE RUINS EXHIBITION

June 15-23

Press release:

Inspired by author JG Ballard’s mid-period novels, Michelle Lord’s ‘Future Ruins’ connects the remaining architectural examples of Birmingham’s concrete past with Ballard’s vision of the contemporary landscape, his prophetic views on Brutalist architecture and the technological demise of the urban environment.

The Birmingham and Midland Institute
Margaret St.
Birmingham B3 3BS
UK

Further detail available here.

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+ BALLARDIAN ART IN THE ANTIPODES

Press release:

In Jan 2008, KURBgallery in Perth, Western Australia, will hold an exhibition programme and events in celebration of J.G. Ballard. Interested visual artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, performance artists and others are invited to submit proposals for works which might be considered ‘Ballardian’, that is:

…of James Graham Ballard (J.G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J.G. Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments”. (Collins English Dictionary.)”

The organisers welcome any image, photograph, text, collage, movie, experimental novel, sound piece or installation or performance instructions, semaphore, sculpture (singing or otherwise), CD or DVD that can be sent to KURB via email, post, low-flying aircraft, balloon, intercontinental ballistic missile or presented in person.

No contribution will be refused however unreasonable.

For further information or to express interest, please email KURB. Alternatively, write to:

Pippa Tandy & David Bromfield
KURBgallery
310 William St,
Perth WA 6000
Australia

Some of the following news is a little old; forgive me. I’m catching up on the last few weeks, after all. If there’s anything I’ve missed, please contact me.

UPDATE: passport located; and me, homeward-bound.

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+ BUT ISN’T IT JUST A NOVEL ABOUT WANKING?

Inspired by Alistair Cormack’s talk, ‘The Unlimited Dream Company: Blake and Ballard’, at the JGB conference, Mike Holliday has onlined ‘A Home and A Grave’, explaining how to read UDC, one of Ballard’s most ignored works, as a fascistic novel. Along the way, Mike offers up an intriguing match, suggesting that the ‘way in which [UDC's narrator] Blake wants to take the very existence of Shepperton’s inhabitants into himself is rather reminiscent of another, more notorious, fantasy novel – Lord Horror’:

…the transcendence that Blake offers up in The Unlimited Dream Company is as empty as that suggested by Adorno and Horkheimer or as portrayed in Lord Horror … all we are left with are vague phrases and the promise of the ending of all differentiation and individualization, a process which can only result in the annihilation of everything: “the last marriage of the animate and inanimate, of the living and the dead”.

Now, who among us will dare to rehabilitate The Day of Creation or Rushing to Paradise? (actually, I’m working on the latter).

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+ ULTRA-MAN

Speaking of the conference, k-punk posted a riposte to the perceived ‘feel-good’ vibe of that event. He found it ‘dispiriting’, apparently because of its focus on Ballard’s ‘exhausted novels’ and a desire to celebrate JGB’s work. k-punk suggests that the latter is especially pointless, given that he sees Ballard as already ‘ultra-canonic’ for ‘any group that matters’ (although virtually every entry in the list of cultural nodes he provides as evidence features k-p at the centre or orbiting near by).

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+ HEAD TO THE SOUTH

Still from Silent Running.

Dan Lockton Dan Hill has done it again with another superb post, this time meditating on James Birrell’s ‘Brutalist-lite’ architecture at the University of Queensland campus and the ‘rampant sub-tropical foliage engulfing it’. Mouth watering — he ties in one of my very favourite SF films, Silent Running, as well as The Drowned World before motoring on to the crux of his argument:

Australia seems poised at this junction right now, beginning to explore new and old ways of dealing with its water supply, from divining, to not-building dams – “a 20th-century response to 21st-century problems” – to finally recycling.
…
How to reconcile urban development with climate change? How to build a sub-tropical architecture that adapts to the environment? How to use dangerous environmental conditions to the benefit of a nation, a culture, a people?
…
Like Ballard’s hero, head to the south, into the sun, to find the future. It’s counter-intuitive, but it might just work

(For my own musings on a Ballard-refracted vision of Australia, see ‘The Drought: Water Vigliantes’ and ‘The Rats that Ate Mill Park’).

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+ BLDGBOOK

Another fine archi blog, the one and only BLDGBLOG, announces a publishing deal for a ‘book of the blog’ that will include two subjects very dear to my heart: Ballard and micronations. Congratulations, Geoff.

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+ CHUCK SOUNDS OFF

Chuck Palahniuk disses Ballard in a recent interview:

MT: Were you inspired by J.G. Ballard?

Palahniuk: The Crash book, you mean? Not really. I mean, God bless J.G. Ballard, but that whole ponderous eroticism of car crashes? You know, the idea of putting a hood ornament in Elizabeth Taylor’s pussy and all of that, I thought that was just too much.

[ thanks, Tim ]

Dunno about you, but to me, Palahniuk’s blatant misreading of Ballard’s intentions (violating Liz; there’s nothing of the sort in Crash, not even remotely) seems nothing more than a rebellious kid telling lies about Dad, when deep down the kid knows Dad has influenced him more than anyone will — or can — ever know. The other thing to note is that Palahniuk wrote a short story, ‘Guts’, in which the narrator has his colon sucked out of his anus by a pool pump — all described in clinical detail. Many people found *that* too much.

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+ SECHERESSE

The French edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, looking more like an early Kraftwerk album cover.

Herve Lagoguey has put together a comprehensive gallery of French Ballard cover art. We await the two Ricks verdict on these.

(For more JGB cover art, see Ballardian’s interview with Rick McGrath and our reprint of Rick Poynor’s ‘Collapsing Bulkheads’ article.)

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+ GRAVEST HITS

From the latest RE/Search newsletter:

Dominika Oramus sent us her disturbing, intelligent book: Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard, published by Univesity of Warsaw. For a copy write DORAMUS ul OSTROBRAMSKA, 84 m 129, 04-163 Warssawa, Poland. (I’m not sure how to send payment, or what the total cost is.)

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+ AND NOW, A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR…

Still from Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou.

Finally, let’s hear from the man himself, this time in Ballard’s ‘review’ of the Dali & Film exhibition at the Tate Modern (although there are no new revelations, Ballard instead relying on familiar riffs; k-punk’s ‘exhausted texts’ assessment is useful here):

[In Un Chien Andalou] there are no clues to behaviour. Ants pour from a hole in the young man’s palm. Rebuffed, he puts on a curious harness and drags towards the young woman a huge contraption consisting of two priests lying on their backs, tied to a grand piano across which is draped a dead donkey. What comes through this 15-minute film is the feeling that it would all make sense if its scenes were assembled in the right order. But of course it would not make sense, whatever the order, and I take this to be the point of the film. The reality we inhabit daily, our domestic interiors and their emotional dramas, the hands helplessly caressing a young woman’s breasts, the tennis racket she uses to drive away her unwanted suitor (the surrealists were intensely middle class), the small section of space-time we blunder through, are all equally unreal, though meaning and sanity seem tantalisingly within our grasp.

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J.G. Ballard. ‘Shock and gore’, The Guardian, Saturday May 26, 2007.
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Toby Litt is an English novelist who published his first book, Adventures in Capitalism (a volume of short stories), in 1996, when he was 28. He’s since won praise for the dark inventiveness of his writing, a combination of cinematic prose, apocalyptic imagery and sharp wit that freely dissects contemporary relationships and the sociopathic glue that binds them. Litt’s latest book, Hospital, was released in April, and was likened in a recent review to ‘Stephen King, in his gory horror phase, scripting a feature-length episode of Holby City.’

Given that he’s one of the special guests at this weekend’s J.G. Ballard Conference at the University of East Anglia, we thought we’d quiz Toby on his relationship to Ballard’s writing.

G.R. & S.S.

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GWYN: Ballard famously eschews ‘dinner party London’ in favour of the orbital suburbs, both in his fiction and in his life. Your work, on the other hand, has emphasised the drudgery and boredom of growing up in the suburbs (I’m thinking of Beatniks in particular). Do you agree with Ballard that the suburbs are where the ‘real’ England is?

TOBY: Clearly, it’s not in one place. That’s the reason why England is such a good subject, because it’s a hugely large number of subjects, all under the one heading. My understanding of Ballard is that he’s being slightly paradoxical: the suburbs are usually seen as innately conservative (small ‘c’), but they are where new phenomena are constantly emerging — rather than in the smug centre, which prides itself on being ‘cutting edge’. And because these phenomena are suburban, and widely accepted almost immediately, they aren’t seen as in any way interesting. In this, I think Ballard is right. Hanging on to a sense of the weirdness and extremity of everyday life is very difficult. Particularly in empirical England which lives in constant denial of being weird or extreme.

GWYN: What you mean by ‘empirical England’?

The traditional values of England are often seen to be those of scepticism, common sense and conservatism. These are often contrasted to the values of France, which, from this English point of view, appear perverse and paradoxical, or the values of Germany, which appear metaphysical, obfuscatory and generally dubious. This strain of thought is particularly strong in English philosophy, right up to the present day. A philosopher like G.E. Moore wouldn’t have got started in Germany. And in France he’d have been taken to be some faux naïf prankster.

GWYN: Could you give us some examples of the weirdness and extremity you mentioned?

I’ll give you one idea of extremity. I was at Birmingham airport last week, and along came a stag party. The groom-to-be was dressed as the tooth fairy. He wore a pink leotard, a tutu and a silver plastic tiara. He was carrying a can of Special Brew. Nobody paid him much attention. He was a perfectly normal emanation of suburbia. He wasn’t in any way extreme. Nor was what he was going to get up to in the next week.

Everyone’s in denial. Or they’ve been sectioned.

GWYN: Is there a particular phase of Ballard’s career that you think has produced his best work?

TOBY: An invidious question. I will answer by saying that I think that there is a particular rhythm to Ballard’s sentences. It was there right from the start (The Wind from Nowhere; I don’t understand why he disowns this), and it’s still there now. But, to my ear, this rhythm in his writing was most distinctive in The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise. His rhythm now seems to me slightly faster, slightly less sure of itself.

SIMON: I agree with you about The Wind from Nowhere; I re-read it recently and found it surprisingly decent. There’s a real sense of psychological disintegration, of claustrophobia as the survivors hole up; the ambient menace of the wind was terrifically drawn.

TOBY: Yes. It seems to be very much the start-point for his oeuvre, if you want to call it that. It’s certainly not comparable to, say, Graham Greene’s disowned novels — which, from what I’ve read, aren’t only very badly written but are also acutely anti-Semitic. As Ballard started with the four elements [in his first four novels], it seems odd and imbalancing to leave one of them out. Everyone realises it’s an early novel.

GWYN: What’s your favourite Ballard?

TOBY: The Drowned World. I find the imagery very satisfactory. But Crash probably had the most influence on my own writing. I put it in the acknowledgements to Corpsing, because I felt the influence should be openly acknowledged.

GWYN: Corpsing has sections that read like ballistics reports, describing the path of a bullet through someone’s body in minute detail. Like Ballard, do you read and find inspiration in invisible literature?

TOBY: Yes — medical textbooks. There’s quite a bit of that in Hospital. But I am probably more influenced by non-literary non-verbal sources: paintings, music.

SIMON: I read where you said critical theory was another influence — Deleuze, in particular. What’s the appeal there? Does theory feedback into your writing?

TOBY: I have been reading Deleuze in the past couple of years, yes. Both in his own books and those he wrote with Guattari. It’s important to remind yourself that there are many different ways of thinking. I find the French theorists fascinating. Much more so than any English philosophy of the same period. It is an assault on common sense. I tend to assume that common sense, because it’s common, is wrong. I don’t believe the truth is simple.

When we looked upwards we saw beneath us a sky of rosebushes, gravel paths, equipment and thick, healthy, but slightly too-dry grass. (Not that it would ever go razor-edged and cut you. It was too purely English for that. Tensed between thumbs, it would give a farty vibrato like that of a badly beaten-up cello.) The ground above us, on the other hand, was blue, blue as the deep end of a very wide swimming pool. A swimming pool seen not from the diving board, but suspended motionless above it. Suspended so that no shadow is projected down, and there is no idea of edge at all. A swimming pool splash-virgin, quite unruffled. At the horizon, a rough line of oak trees was interrupted halfway along by the leap of pylons and wires.”

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Toby Litt. Deadkidsongs (2001).
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Original cover ideas for Deadkidsongs.

GWYN: Like Ballard in Running Wild, you’ve dealt with pre-meditated murder committed by children — in Deadkidsongs. What draws you to writing about violence?

TOBY: I really don’t know. It may be that I feel that everyone is capable of violence — if only imaginary violence. To portray the world honestly, you have to include that.

GWYN: As a father, do you worry about violence, especially in the wake of recent moral panics to do with inner-city London?

TOBY: I try not to. But it’s not merely moral panics. The corner shop at the end of my road was recently robbed by a group of six or seven men, each one of them carrying a gun. They hospitalised the guy working behind the till — hit him several times on the back of the head with the butt of a pistol. I probably worry more about a general callousness — callousness as entertainment.

SIMON: That worries me, too. In Australia recently, there was a case where a group of school kids sexually assaulted a girl, set a homeless man on fire, filmed it all, sold it to their mates on DVD, and uploaded parts to YouTube. Discussing this case, Stephen Smith traces this strand of ‘callousness as entertainment’ back to Abu Ghraib, and the desensitisation of images of torture. I’m guessing you’d agree with his very Ballardian conclusion, that ‘violence has become part of consumerism’…

TOBY: I think we could go further back, and become even more Ballardian. How about the Kennedy assassination? Perhaps what we need to do is realise how consumerism has become violence, and nothing but violence. That was, perhaps, the message of Kingdom Come. However, in talking about these things, an even longer perspective is sensible. In the eighteenth century, crowds used to attend executions; criminals were placed in the stocks, entirely at the mercy of the mob. Capital punishment was probably the most entertaining thing people saw from one end of the year to the next. Clearly, a festival atmosphere surrounded these deaths.

What seems, to me, to have changed is an unmistakable feeling that unless the victim is seen to be suffering, a prank isn’t really funny. If you look at English film comedies of the 1940s, they appear to be almost entirely without ill will. In fact, they are based on a kind of communal good humour, rather than any kind of wit. This continued into the fifties, though that may be where things started to change. No-one actually wanted Norman Wisdom to suffer permanent injury. Maybe it was the Angry Young Men who first admitted they wanted someone to be bloody well hurt.

SIMON: Stephen Smith uses Kingdom Come to bolster his argument. Similarly, in your interview with Ballard, you suggested the book is ‘more directly political’ than Ballard’s previous work. Why, then, do you think KC — so attuned to today — wasn’t so well received by the majority of critics?

TOBY: Probably because it is so easy now to read Ballard in a Ballardian way. By which I mean, people are very inward with his thought. He is always going to be compared with himself, with his own previous bests. And because the Ballardian reading places a value on the extremes, most readers following this logic will compare Kingdom Come to The Atrocity Exhibition or Crash, and find it lacking. It isn’t as extreme. It isn’t ahead of it’s time – it’s, as you say, ‘attuned to today’. Accurate social commentary is less sexy than prophecy.

The point is that what see as threatening about the all-pervasive and all-powerful consumer society is that it’s not any specific individual who is responsible for anything nasty that may happen in the future. This is a collective enterprise. All of us who are members of consumer society — all of us are responsible, in a way … I think it may be that in the future we’ll be dominated by huge masochistic systems. Soviet Russia was an example of this. I mean, people tolerated their own abuse because for some reason they wanted to be abused. Someone says in [Kingdom Come] that the future is a system of huge competing psychopathologies. I’d say that was true of the 20th century. It sort of sums it up, in a way. So I’m not talking about an individual impetus that will drive the engine. This engine has been assembled, and will be started, by everyone probably working unconsciously.

————————————————————————————-
J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Toby Litt, 2007.
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When I said that Kingdom Come was ‘more directly political’ I meant that it would be fairly easy to make a case for it as an anti-fascist novel. Yet the seductions of a different kind of techno fascism in Ballard’s earlier novels, those containing his deranged leader-figures, are more convincing — perhaps because they are, on occasion, almost given in to. You don’t know what’s really going on, morally. The glamorous psychopaths seem, at least, to have energy going for them. They are often surrounded by wastelands of apathy. In such circumstances, the person who makes change — however objectionable — is always going to be a delight of sorts.

GWYN: Would you like to see any of your books filmed?

TOBY: I would be happy to see any or all of them filmed. So far, there have only been short films made from short stories.

GWYN: Some of your most vivid and memorable writing takes the form of short fiction. In your Ballard interview, he bemoaned the recent lack of places to publish short stories. Do you find this as well?

TOBY: I agree. However, I think the American scene — with which ours is often compared — can be immensely smug. It is easier to be published in anthologies, over here, than in magazines.

GWYN: What can be done to improve the situation?

The only thing that can really be done is developing an audience specifically for short stories. I think it’s there, if only because of the number of people now attending creative writing courses.

GWYN: What do you appreciate about the shorter form, as opposed to novel-length fiction?

TOBY: It is a far less reasonable proposition. Hospital is an attempt to be unreasonable at novel length. But, most of the time, a novel requires the novelist to moderate their extremity.

GWYN: Some of your writing — particularly some of your short stories — are experimental in form; you use internet culture and email as narrative in the ‘Betamax Boy’ story in Adventures in Capitalism, for example. Where, if anywhere, do you see the best current avant-garde/experimental fiction?

TOBY: I don’t really believe in literary experiments. If a writer writes experimentally, that suggests they don’t know what the outcome of their experiment will be. Whereas, when I write, I have a fairly good idea of the outcome, I just don’t know what the effect will be — on readers. That’s a very different proposition. If I misjudge, I misjudge the readers rather than the work itself.

GWYN: In Ghost Story you begin with an apparently autobiographical, long introduction and make it clear that the novel is based, at least to some extent, on your own experiences. Ballard has, of course, written extensively about his life, in a highly fictionalised form, in Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women. In the latter, especially, it is not clear to what extent he projects his own obsessions and character types onto the people around him, and to what extent events have influenced his fiction. Presumably all novelists base ideas and characters on people and events from their own lives, but does this work the other way around as well? Do you ever interpret reality through your own fiction?

TOBY: It’s all I do.

SIMON: Ballard recently said in a couple of interviews that he thinks internet culture has a tremendous vitality. And in your recent interview with Ballard, you spoke about the MySpace phenomenon. As a writer, and a successful one, how have you found your experience on MySpace, in terms of interacting with your audience? Has it been beneficial?

TOBY: I have a better sense of my audience now, I think. Whether that is a good or a bad thing, I’m not sure.

SIMON: There’s a bit more to it than that, though, isn’t there? Didn’t readers of your MySpace blog suggest characters for Hospital?

TOBY: There was a competition to suggest names for characters who might have appeared in Hospital. But that was only after the book was completed, and I’d put a full list of Staff & Patients online. Two real-life readers do appear in the book, because they bid for that dubious privilege at so-called ‘Immortality Auctions’. The money went to charity, and Peter Dixon and Melanie Angel went to Hospital.

SIMON: Can you see yourself opening up sections of your work to readers in the future?

TOBY: I may, at some point, show readers work in progress, to see how they react. At the moment, though, I’m happy to work in private. Over the past few years I’ve read episodes from my next book (called I play the drums in a band called okay) out at festivals. The reaction led me to make a few changes.

SIMON: Do you find MySpace addictive? Your MySpace Doppel idea suggests that you’d like to go deeper and further into the whole social networking aspect. Could you explain a bit about the Doppel concept and how you think it would enhance the MySpace experience?

TOBY: It was the idea that instead of just searching for a single thing you have in common with another MySpace user (My Chemical Romance, for dull example), you could compare the entirety of your profile. In this way, you could find someone who had pretty much identical tastes in everything. That’s why they’d be your doppelganger.

This idea has already been nixed by someone at MySpace. Apparently there are child safety issues. Paedophiles might pose as fans of The Sugababes.

I do find MySpace addictive. I may stop.

GWYN: How do you see the state of fiction writing in this day and age? Are we in a positive place?

TOBY: The state of publishing is not good. A lot of pseudo-literary writing is passed off as the real thing. The real thing is very rare. But that’s always been the case. There is a real problem that many readers are offended by anything which asks them to work. Books must go to them, not the other way round. I’m sure that, from the point of view of the future, much of our fiction will seem simplistic and banal. Any decent novel should require rereading, probably more than once.

GWYN: What do you mean by ‘pseudo-literary writing’?

TOBY: Writing that makes no genuine attempt to extend what writing is capable of.

Around Nurse Swallow, the Trauma Team was moving smoothly into action. To her left, bending over the patient’s held open mouth, anaesthetist Sarah Felt slid a breathing tube down into the trachea. Patricia Parish, one of the most senior team-members, inserted a cannula into a vein in the left forearm, then attached the long plastic tube flowing out of a transparent saline bag. Other nurses moved swiftly in and out, bringing things, removing them.

Opposite her, standing back a little, Surgeon John Steele looked calmly on – it was not yet his time.

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Toby Litt. Hospital (2007).
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SIMON: In Hospital101, a list of 101 influences on Hospital, you include Ballard’s High-Rise — how so?

TOBY: In that the book is, to a great extent, the biography of the fabric of the building rather than of any particular character in it.

GWYN: You’re a guest at the Ballard conference at the UEA in May. What can we expect from your talk?

TOBY: I’m taking part in a panel. So, I’ll wait to see what questions come up. We should be discussing the most recent books.

SIMON: You actually took the creative writing course at the UEA, didn’t you? Was that helpful as a way into your professional writing career?

TOBY: It got me my break. Malcolm Bradbury chose four of my stories for an anthology called Class Work. It contained writing from the twenty-five years he’d been teaching there. Once that happened, I had a publisher approach me. Up until that point, I’d had about five years of solid rejection.

SIMON: Any final words on Ballard?

TOBY: I’d just like to say I admire his writing immensely. I think he is unique among British writers for the consistent extremity of his vision, and his willingness to engage with the stuff of now.

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..:: MORE INFO

+ From Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard
+ Toby Litt interviews J.G. Ballard
+ Toby Litt on MySpace
+ Toby Litt homepage
+ Short film of Toby Litt’s short story, ‘Rare Books & Manuscripts’

Suburban Badlands: the Mill Park aftermath. Photo: Angela Wylie (from the Age newspaper).

The system is self-regulating. It relies on our sense of civic responsibility. Without that, society would collapse. In fact, the collapse may even have begun.”

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J.G. Ballard. Millennium People (2003; p. 104).
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On the morning of 2 January 2007, Melbourne woke to disturbing news. Under cover of night, a street in the northern suburb of Mill Park had been gripped by vigilante attacks. Cars had been torched and threats spray-painted onto vehicles and walls: ‘No more burnouts’; ‘You’re next’; ‘Tell your mates I know where they live’; ‘Any more and you will pay’; ‘We have had enough of this shit’. A series of news photos laid bare the currency of autogeddon, snapshots of vehicular expulsions littered about this quiet suburban enclave like the sigils of an initiatory consumerism. In the aftermath, residents told reporters of a long-standing hoon problem (‘hoon’ being Aussie for ‘hooligan’, with an automotive twist), with young petrol heads using the street for late-night drags and the obligatory, ultra-offensive round of tyre-squealing burn outs. Clearly, the burnings and graffito were the work of local vigilantes, fed up with their street being desecrated by these so-called hoons.

Autogeddon: Mill Park’s scorched-road policy. Photo: Angela Wylie (from the Age newspaper).

This was chilling stuff — apocalyptic reportage that bled car-crash fiction into reality. Flung headfirst into the uncanny valley, I was struck by the similarities with The Cars that Ate Paris (1974), the Peter Weir film set in the fictional Australian country town of Paris — it’s a Ballardian film of the first order. In this Parisian/Ballardian community, the locals manufacture road accidents, luring travellers to their death, or — if they survive — to a date with the town doctor, who performs medical experiments that turn accident victims into ‘veggies’: brain-damaged reflex mechanisms no longer capable of independent thought, only a group (re)action. Meanwhile, the crashed cars are scavenged for parts: old ladies polish carburettors as if they were prize jewels; the village idiot wears radiator emblems around his neck; and the mayor steals the best stereo systems for himself. In the background, the youth — Parisian hoons — rev their hotted-up cars in all-in drags, performing burnouts and generally disturbing the peace; this behaviour is tolerated by Parisians, with the hoons perceived as a kind of byproduct of the town’s peculiar economy.

However, when the hoons overstep the line by destroying the mayor’s property during a late-night drag, he orders the cars of the two gang leaders to be burned in a public display of humiliation, assisted by a vigilante squad caught up in forces its members don’t fully understand (they provide the support for the mayor’s reign, oiling the mechanism that powers the town’s closed-loop economy in support of vague rhetoric and empty civic pride).

‘You can’t burn a bloke’s fucken car!’. Still from The Cars that Ate Paris (1974; dir. Peter Weir).

That’s it — that’s the moment.

As we watch the burnt-out shells of cars smouldering in Paris’s main street, their drivers shackled and stripped of their metal skin, we feel the warning signals rippling out through the ocean of deep time, 33 years later, homing in on the events of Mill Park. The Cars that Ate Paris ends in civil war as the hoons take revenge, coming back bigger and badder than ever with lethal, spike-encrusted vehicles, destroying the town hall and other cornerstones of Parisian society in an orgy of tyre smoke and gear-crashing destruction.

After Mill Park, would Melbourne’s suburban badlands erupt in a similar fashion?

The catchment area of Heathrow extends for at least ten miles to its south and west, a zone of motorway intersections, dual carriageways, science parks, marinas and industrial estates, watched by police CCTV speed-check cameras… I welcome the transience, alienation and discontinuities, and its unashamed response to the pressures of speed, disposability and the instant impulse.”

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J.G. Ballard. ‘The Ultimate Departure Lounge’ (1997).
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An ‘unashamed response to the pressures of speed, disposability and the instant impulse’ — here, Ballard could be describing the events of Mill Park, a similar catchment area dominated by the vectors of speed (the suburb is bifurcated by Plenty Rd, an enormous dual carriageway) and ‘the instant impulse’. According to Wikipedia, ‘Mill Park is not short of fast food restaurants, with McDonalds, Hungry Jacks, KFC and Pizza Hut all within proximity of one another’. That’s a strange aspect to highlight, but one that the author obviously felt was significant enough to include.

Noble Park Maccas, the scars of autogeddon clearly visible in the foreground (photo: Simon Sellars).

As I was attempting to digest the significance of the Mill Park attacks — as hard to swallow and keep down as a Big Mac — another outlying region, Noble Park, erupted in violence. One Friday night, in the shadow of the Noble Park McDonalds (or Maccas), the meeting point for what is by all accounts Melbourne’s biggest illegal drag meet, the newspapers told us that 1500 spectators lined the Princes Highway (’some with babies in prams’), watching rice rockets and muscle cars put the pedal to the metal for a few hundred metres, culminating in smoking orgiastic burnouts for the crowds:

Friday’s crowd was incensed at a police cordon and the use of anti-hoon laws to confiscate cars, and rampaged through a business at the intersection, looting and trashing. The McDonald’s restaurant, which has no official link to the drag racing but which is viewed by those attending as its spiritual home, was not trashed.”

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Michelle Coleman. ‘Hot cars, hot tempers: trouble flares at hoon HQ‘ (2007).
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When the police — just 50 of them, severely undermanned and disorganised — arrived and attempted to break up this scene, they found they were no match for the huge crowd, which, recognising its superior numbers, went in hard, driving the cops back…and then some. Presumably hopped up on a fuel-injected perfume of burning rubber, hoons and spectators alike went on the rampage, destroying the nearby Blockbuster video store and attacking traffic signals. Remarkably, the Noble Park Maccas was saved from harm, watching over the protagonists like a benevolent dictator (a worrying detail that could just about supply the basis for an entire separate essay).

‘No money, no grudging; pure fun’ — ‘car enthusiast’ Matt gives it some. Photo: Angela Wylie (from the Age newspaper).

Everyone knows Noble means Noble Park Maccas,” says Matt, 28, who has been attending illegal street drag racing at the corner of the Princes Highway and Elonera Road, Noble Park, for six years.

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Coleman. ‘Hot cars, hot tempers: trouble flares at hoon HQ‘ (2007).
—————————————————————————————————

Just as The Cars that Ate Paris predicted, the hoons did return after Mill Park — bigger and badder than ever, trashing suburbia, overwhelming the cops and utterly destroying civic sensibilities, fuelled on by media coverage and trapped in a feedback loop of violent one-upmanship — an ‘autopian’, consumptive, synchronous economy. Like the Metro-Centre in Ballard’s Kingdom Come, the suburb of Noble Park was turned into a temporary autonomous zone, where mob rules and the game of ‘hypertrangsression’ ensures chaotic perpetual motion.

Benjamin Noys summarises the process:

Ballard’s recent work…puts into play the necessity for an apocalyptic or catastrophic violence to exceed the regulated violence of contemporary culture…to literally blow apart the limits of the existing order. Again the only way to exceed licensed transgression is through an out-bidding by another hypertransgression. This process recalls Baudrillard’s analysis of potlatch, the gift exchange of so-called ‘primitive’ societies, as a process of ‘continual higher bidding in exchange’… It also conforms to Baudrillard’s description of the terrorist act as ‘at the same time a model of simulation, a micro-model flashing with a minimally real event and a maximal echo chamber’… It belongs to the order of simulation, as it will be spectacular and an object of media interest…”

—————————————————————————————————
Benjamin Noys. ‘Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard‘ (2006).
————————————————————————————————–

Maximally echoing unto infinity, mobile-phone footage of the riot was uploaded to YouTube, sparking a fresh orgy of outrage in the mediascape. More vigilante attacks were threatened. Police threatened to impound the cars of all known hoons. The Noble Park perpetrators were promised they would be hunted down. TV current-affairs programs licked at the aftermath like a rabid dog. And dob-in-a-hoon telephone hotlines were set up, building on the post-9/11 hysteria that Australia has capitulated to so completely, a continuation of a process we succumbed to a long time ago.

It’s a process that maintains a disturbing convergence with car culture. According to Catherine Simpson, Australia has ‘a cultural fascination with road tolls; they are often detailed on the nightly news, as if they somehow signify how “we” are doing against the “enemy”…the rhetoric of warfare was often employed to curb rising road toll statistics. In 1946, the Australian Automobile Association declared…that traffic accidents: “constitute an enemy which takes almost as great a toll of Australia’s already sparse population as did the enemy nations in the second world war”.’

This notion of a faceless enemy, drilled into the collective psyche through popular culture, helps to explain why Australia has been so thoroughly aligned with US foreign policy and the War on Terror — this country is the perfect petri dish for injecting paranoia about the ‘faceless, unknown threat’ of terrorism. But today, as Bush and his war rapidly loses support, it’s becoming clear that Australian Prime Minister John Howard can’t back down for fear of admitting the last five years of unblinking US-aligned foreign policy were built on less-than-transparent foundations. So the machinery of anti-terrorism must continue to churn, as Howard insists on maintaining Australian troops in Iraq; meanwhile, back home, we have miserably failed to find suicide bombers under every bed.

And so we have the ludicrous image of ‘elite terrorism police’ stationed at Melbourne airport: unable to find actual examples of the menace we’ve been so primed to receive, they impotently issue parking tickets instead. As the narrator of Ballard’s Crash observes, while stuck in the frustration of a traffic jam going nowhere fast, ‘The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause’ (p. 151).

Beware the water cops (photo: Sandy Scheltema; from the Age newspaper).

But wait, there’s more: as Australia continues to be beset by drought, terrorist culture gives rise to water vigilantes, with citizens afraid of sneak attacks by members of their community for visibly watering their lawns. And all of it leads to the latest example: these dob-in-a-hoon hotlines, encouraging us to pick up the phone and anonymously ‘dob’ in young offenders in a kind of state-sanctioned vigilantism (‘dobbing’ is a very Australian term for turning someone in, lagging, grassing, ratting, informing).

I keep returning to Ballard’s ‘immense, motionless pause’ — as good a way as any to describe the bureaucratic Moebius strip that is the ‘Mill Park solution’. Mill Park’s local council has known about the hoon problem for some time: as the newspaper reports made clear, residents had been complaining long and hard — for the last 10 years, in fact. You’d think the obvious solution would be to install speed humps (‘road cushions’) — simple, effective, and safe. But that’s not the Australian way. When residents of a hoon-plagued street in another suburb, Dandenong South, dug up the road and installed their own speed humps, the council removed them within a day, without replacing them with road cushions of their own (and fining the residents to boot!) leaving the problem to fester still.

(Man, it’s hot in here…)

For 10 years Mill Park residents also tried to go through the correct channels, petitioning the council for ‘traffic calming’ measures including the fabled speed humps (‘traffic calming’ has been defined as the goal ‘of reducing vehicle speeds, improving safety, and enhancing quality of life’). The council responded with one of the most ludicrous civic pacification schemes in memory. As the minutes for June 2006 outline, this involved a multi-stage ‘Traffic Safety Education Program’, consisting firstly of a ‘mail-out to local residents advising of community concerns regarding excessive traffic speeds and inappropriate driver behaviour in their street, [reminding] them of their responsibility to drive safely and within the speed limit.’

A mail-out — that’ll teach ‘em.

(We’re at boiling point, now).

To enforce the suburban 50km/h speed limit, the second stage involved ‘the placement of THINK 50 50km/h bin stickers on rubbish bins.’

Stickers on bins — those hoons won’t know what hit ‘em.

(Too late: it’s all over. Mill Park bursts into flames).

The hoons return, bigger and badder than ever before. Still from The Cars that Ate Paris (dir. Peter Weir, 1974).

Faced with this sequence of events, you have to wonder if Mill Park is being used as some kind of exurban laboratory. Perhaps you could even identify the stages in the chemical process: sell cars as indestructible and sexy (how many recent car ads show vehicles morphing into Transformer-style robots? It’s a whole new genre in advertising); transform a suburb from isolated enclave to chaotic catchment area via inadequate traffic management, so that it becomes overrun by drivers and their indestructible attitudes (according to the council minutes, the streets off Plenty Rd have been increasingly used as ‘rat runs’ by motorists wanting to escape the traffic lights and interminable traffic jams of that monstrous thoroughfare); ignore residents’ complaints when the rats overrun it, or soft-soap them with Band-Aid solutions; sit back and watch the fireworks finally explode; move in with ’solutions’ that promote divisiveness, mistrust and a ’soft fascism’ perhaps best articulated by Ballard in Kingdom Come:

‘No slogans, no messages. New politics. No manifestos, no commitments. No easy answers. They decide what they want. Your job is to set the stage and create the climate. You steer them by sensing their mood. Think of a herd of wildebeest on the African plain. They decide where they want to go.’

Cruise chuckled… ‘How do I control them, impose some kind of focus? The whole thing could start to go mad.’

‘Mad? Good. Madness is the key to everything. Small doses, applied when no one is really looking’.”

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J.G. Ballard. Kingdom Come (2006; p. 146).
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Just like Paris, just like the satellite suburbs in Kingdom Come, Mill Park is a self-regulating system: auto-violence fuels the economy; the economy is auto-violence. Inescapably, through blatant inaction and a covert escalation of hostilities, the Mill Park councillors lit up the cars in Mill Park just as surely as the mayor of Paris did in Peter Weir’s parallel film world (where the mayor didn’t actually light the torch, but remained a malevolent presence in the background, pulling the strings).

To what end we can only speculate, but drip-feeding an approved ‘terrorist culture’ into local politics in response to the anarchic ‘horror’ of vigilantism seems to be an end result. By dobbing in a hoon, we have one more compelling reason to mistrust each other, to see ‘how we are doing against the enemy’ — safely, anonymously, and with the cloak of government sanctions to protect us.

There’s one final, Bizarro-world parallel: the image of the dobber picking up the phone to inform on the evil hoon (who, of course, is a product of the system). It’s a mirror of Paris’s mayor, in the film’s denouement, encouraging the previously ineffectual protagonist, Arthur (crippled by road trauma early on, but intoxicated by the thrill of violence in the end), to kill the leader of the hoons, who no longer serves a purpose save as a very public sacrifice.

As the Melbourne-based Fossil blog notes:

The Howard Government’s national security hotline (DOB IN A TERRORIST, 1800 123 400) received 42,000 calls in its first two years, between December 2002 and December 2004. Clearly there are a lot more dobbers than terrorists. In 2005-06, following the “support the system that supports you’’ campaign, Centrelink [the national organisation responsible for social-security payments] received nearly 120,000 calls to its dob-in-a-dole bludger line, alleging overpayments. About 2 per cent were genuine ['dole bludger' is Aussie slang for someone cheating the welfare system].

This is by no means an exhaustive list but if you wanted to you could reach for the phone right now and dob in: a hoon; a drug dealer; a drug cheat (sport); a water cheat; a “dodgy seafood retailer’’ – yes really; a litterer; a rubbish dumper; a wife-beater; an illegal immigrant; a “scammer’’; a dodgy cab; a dodgy taxpayer; a burglar; a backyard mechanic; a cockfighter; a dogfighter; and a software pirate, RRrrrrrrrrrr.

That’s a lot of dobbin’.”

Indeed it is.

Up against that critical social function, traffic calming — ‘enhancing the quality of life’, in other words — just doesn’t cut it in this day and age.

Simon Sellars.

————————————————————————————————
..:: REFERENCES
Ballard, J.G. (1973) Crash.
————- (1997) ‘The Ultimate Departure Lounge’.
————- (2003) Millennium People.
————- (2006) Kingdom Come.

City of Whittlesea (2006) ‘Ordinary Council Minutes’, June.

Coleman, Michelle (2007) ‘Hot cars, hot tempers: trouble flares at hoon HQ’. The Age, January 16.

Crawford, Carly (2007) ‘Dob-in-a-hoon hotline’. Herald-Sun, January 7.

Crawford, Carly and Cameron, Kellie (2007) ‘Mobs go on wild rampage’. Herald-Sun, January 14.

Elder, John (2007) ‘Vigilantes emerge in times of fear’. The Age, January 21.

Fossil blog (2007) ‘Are you a dobber?’. Fossil, March 14.

Inguanzo, Shaun (2007) ‘New humps for hoons’. Star News Group, 28 February.

Noys, Benjamin (2006). ‘Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard’. Ícone 9: 29-38.

Oakes, Dan (2007) ‘Car burns as hoon street anger bubbles over’. The Age, January 3.

Russell, Mark (2007). ‘Elite cops hand out parking tickets’. The Age, January 14.

Simpson, Catherine (2006) ‘Antipodean Automobility and Crash: Treachery, Trespass and Transformation of the Open Road’. Australian Humanities Review, Issue 39 – 40.

Weekes, Peter. ‘Sign of the Times — Water Vigilantes’. The Age, January 14.

Last night I attended the second (and last, for now) screening of Philip Brophy’s 50-minute film Northern Void, billed as a “live cinema performance” accompanied by the real-time sonics of Ph2 (Brophy and Philip Samartzis). Northern Void is set along Plenty Rd, in the northern Melbourne suburb of Preston — specifically a three-kilometre, decaying industrial zone. The film is divided into three sections: The Present, set in 2013; The Future (2085); and The Post-Future (3079).

“The Present”: Northern Void (dir. Philip Brophy).

In “The Present”, a series of tableaux unfold: factories, blank business parks, decrepit office buildings, brutalist petrol stations. They look like still shots, but close examination reveals subtle motion: clouds inch along; a bird flaps in the distance. There are no people. The shots are looped; almost imperceptibly, the clouds return to their original position. Is this a deliberate aesthetic? Or a a necessary suturing to prevent the intrusion of offscreen elements irrelevant to the plot? In any case, it’s very effective: nothing happens. Everything remains the same, trapped in an eternal loop. The sound design begins with processed field recordings: birds, insects, magnified to unbearable levels. It settles down and melancholic piano chords pick their way through.

Madeline Hodge in Northern Void (dir. Philip Brophy). Photo by Pancho Calladetti.

In “The Future”, the same shots appear, except this time the factories and buildings are pockmarked and scarred, and everything is infested with a queasy, irradiated digital-pink glow. Glowing red clouds gather overhead, and suburban zombies begin to appear: young people, spectral — they are see-through at the edges — repeating bizarre facial and physical tics.

Left: Nat Bates in Northern Void (dir. Philip Brophy).

One poor soul scratches his ear over and over again; another (played by Nat Bates, director of the Liquid Architecture sound-art festival) looks to the ground and back up over and over, mimicking the film loops in the first part of the film. The sound in this section is brilliant, with Samartzis generating extremely unnerving electrical effects — like dying power stations — and violent feedback via what appears to be hyper-magnified recordings of fire. Brophy, meanwhile, triggers some kind of funky synth-bass line, obviously unable to escape his iconic 80s past.

In the “Post-Future”, nothing remains of the buildings, or the zombies, really, except their shapeshifting ghosts, which float around a blasted landscape, totally devoid of life. The sound design amps up a notch. Yep, you guessed it: it’s positively unearthly. Who knows what these guys have done here? Fed cicadas through a cheese grater and processed it in a digital blender, for all I know. It’s freaky stuff. And that colour palette: it’s the colour of rotting pork or severed heads. Or something.

“The Post-Future”: Northern Void (dir. Philip Brophy).

Northern Void is a savage vision and continues Brophy’s aim — started in his feature film, Body Melt — of completely irradiating Australia’s suburban “non-places” and seeing what bizarre life forms sprout in the aftermath. An extrapolation, of course, of what he perceives as a process that’s already in place in a late-capitalist society, specifically Plenty Rd, where, he writes, “cracked 60s brickwork, shrivelled 70s council shrubbery, peeling 80s computer-typeset signage, 90s Day-Glo painted lettering on darkened windows [represent] the corpus of business: dying slowly while tethered to an indifferent life-support system.”

At first glance, Brophy’s vision seems similar to J.G. Ballard’s: the latter is also concerned with laying waste to the suburbs in different and imaginative ways. Both are concerned with a type of posthumanism. But Ballard sees the total breakdown of society as a chance for people to “embrace the catastrophes for their own psychological needs” (quoted in The Sunday Times, 1990) — to reinvent themselves free of the restraints of technological society and its “toxic imagery”.

Brophy’s world is far bleaker. There is no reinvention, no way out. For Brophy, late capitalism is the end of history. Entropy and the serpent’s tail of consumerism wins. It’s too late to do anything about it except go down clicking your fingers to a funky bass line.

Still, I wouldn’t call the film wholly successful. Fifty minutes seems far too long for a plotless conceit such as this, as visually stunning and as sonically challenging as it is. Northern Void outlines an exasperating 22 scenarios that develop over the three stages of the film (although I’m aware there are valid points to be made about repetition and boredom and so on). Half that, or even less, and I don’t reckon I’d be fidgeting in my seat, as I was.

I’d be exhilarated, in fact (although that would be more a Ballardian conceit than a Brophyism).

Note: Northern Void is now moving onto screenings/performances in London and Moscow.

Nigel Brown in Northern Void (dir. Philip Brophy). Photo by Pancho Calladetti.

..:: MORE INFO
+ Philip Brophy home page
+ Philip Samartzis home page
+ Brophy’s overview of the project
+ Brophy on the genesis of Northern Void
+ Brophy interview with Nat Bates on Sleepy Brain

“Believe me, the next revolution is going to be about parking.” (J.G. Ballard. Millennium People.)

It’s becoming harder to keep up with the swelling tsunami of Ballardian world events. First we had to come to terms with the hidden meaning behind the Lisa Nowak story and Australia’s recent flag-waving menace. Then we had to wait for the latent malevolence underlying Australia’s water vigilantes to show its full face. And now we must digest the recent spate of letter bombs in the UK aimed at traffic-regulation targets (speed-camera providers; the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority, and so on).

As a reader, Gordon, emailed last week, “I’m sure I can’t be the first to mention it, but the more I hear on the news about the bombing of DVLA offices, the more I think this could be the start of the sort of middle-class uprising that Ballard writes about in so many of his novels. If they take over an airport next then I know exactly who to blame!”

Class is of course a key to the secret history — in Ballardian terms — of this particular story, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out as the investigation unfolds.

Meanwhile, the Guardian reports that:

An angry motorist could well be responsible for the latest attacks, according to “Captain Gatso”, the campaigner responsible for attacks on speed cameras and who operates under a pseudonym. “What we are looking at now is a war on the motorist,” said the man who represents Motorists Against Detection (Mad). “And the motorist is fighting back,” he said. “It’s payback time.” Captain Gatso’s group claim to have carried out 1,000 attacks on speed cameras, causing more than £29m damage.”

Bizarrely, the “Gatso” effect has spread to Australia, according to the Age newspaper:

Police believe a disgruntled motorist is responsible for shooting two red-light cameras and will examine recent offenders at the Melbourne intersection where four lenses were damaged. A witness has told police he saw two men with a pistol shooting at the fixed cameras… Police searched for the men overnight using dogs and helicopters, but failed to find them…

Acting Sgt Martin said, “It’s extremely disturbing for this sort of thing to be happening out in the suburbs.” … Police said the witness heard two explosions, like gunshots, then saw two men loitering on the side of the road. “He then stayed and watched … and one of the males approached the camera, put his right hand up and pointed at the camera and another two, what he said were like shots, rang out.”

I love Acting Sgt Martin’s incredulous tone: “How could this happen in the suburbs?”, he effectively says.

Clearly he hasn’t read Kingdom Come, where it’s in huge letters on the back cover: THE SUBURBS DREAM OF VIOLENCE.

J. Carter Wood, over at Obscene Desserts, has posted a long and thoughtful rebuttal of Rob Liddle’s recent dismissal of Kingdom Come. I posted about Liddle’s piece earlier, but J. Carter’s articulate response cuts far quicker and deeper to the heart of the matter:

First and foremost, anyone who thinks Ballard’s fiction fits comfortably with a New Labour mindset has either absolutely no idea about literature or has to provide proof that Blairism is a far more kinky and interesting ideology than is generally acknowledged.

More to the point though, in Kingdom Come, many of the ‘plebs’ who run riot in the book are of the ‘professional classes’ themselves, and the dividing lines between good and bad are hardly drawn by income alone. Moreover, in books such as High-Rise, Super-Cannes and Millennium People (and others) Ballard has long made clear that the darker aspects of humanity (i.e., those upon which he tends to dwell) are something to which the cappuccino swilling middle-classes have at least as much access to as anyone else.

Indeed, if I had to name any single class which comes off badly in Ballard’s books, it would be the pretentious middle classes. The silly, Guardian-reading, Habitat-shopping revolutionists of the ‘upholstered apocalypse’ depicted in Millennium People are a prime example.
…
A closer reading … might have pointed out to [Liddle] that what binds the members of the riotous mob in Kingdom Come more than anything else is not that they are working class but rather that they are largely a consuming class to whom few of the traditional social ties which used to bind people together are available.”

It’s an excellent point. Football is pure commodity. Ballard reports this fairly and accurately, including cataloguing his own weaknesses as a so-called “middle-class” writer observing Liddle’s so-called “working-class pleasures”. Maybe there’s more invested in supporting a club (or nation) by, say, someone who grew up during the Depression era where sport was something to really believe in, but to many present-day observers, it looks far more ominous.

Liddle takes exception with KC’s depiction of sporting mobs “dressed in identical St George’s shirts and interested only in consumerism and sport.” But football is a supply line that leads directly to the Bentall Centre (or Kingdom Come’s sinister equivalent — the Metro-Centre), if a club (or nation) can sell enough strips by conning supporters that they are part of a Liddle-style “noble tribe” rather than supporters of a corporate brand.

It’s not just an English thing, either, and it’s not confined to sport — the “religion of consumerism” does not discriminate. At the recent Big Day Out music fest, the organisers called on attendees to leave Australian flags at home for fear of riots and racial tension, after various mass-flag-waving violent incidents over the past year or so.

This from the ABC website:

The Australian Democrats say political leaders should face up to the fact that the Australian flag has been misused by racists and ultra-nationalists. … Prime Minister John Howard has called the move stupid and offensive… But Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett says the Big Day Out organisers have made a sensible decision because some people misuse the flag in a racist way.
….
Jeremy Smith says he was the victim of an attack by a man carrying an Australian flag at last year’s Big Day Out… “Looking back, it was definitely prevalent during the day and from the other Big Day Outs I’d gone to,” he said. “It … turned into more of a sporting hooligan event more than anything.”

Music as sport; violence as patriotism — on the face of it, is it really drawing that long a bow to suggest that consumerism can lead to fascism? I’m taking Ballard’s stripped-down perception over Liddle’s reactionary romanticism any day.

Final words… On the matter of Ballard’s politics, Iain Sinclair, in Tim’s interview for Ballardian, manages to hit the nail right on the head:

Ballard’s politics are quite curious. I don’t know whether you could call him conservative, with a small ‘c’, because he celebrates the nature of the bourgeois in its exile: the people that … are anonymous and separated from the mob. Whereas his early partner, Michael Moorcock, said he was a man of the urban mob, who celebrates the crowds and smells of cafes and markets and all of that stuff, which is totally alien to Ballard. He’d like to chuck away all the old buildings, pull them down, get rid of all that heavy 19th-century furniture and have everything straight out of an Ikea catalogue.

In that sense, I think there’s something conservative, but in other senses there’s something incredibly anarchic and furious about what he does, which doesn’t fit with any contemporary sense of politics. He doesn’t belong, he’s completely an outsider, although when you meet him he appears to be quite an Establishment person. He’s got a very fruity voice and genial persona, and would fit into the colonial society in which he grew up.”

Here in Victoria we’re undergoing a severe drought; heavy water restrictions are in force and things are projected to get much worse.

A sign of the times is the appearance of “water vigilantes”, as reported in the Age newspaper:

MARGARET Norriss is living in fear. The retired teacher is so scared of the emergence of water vigilantes that she doesn’t dare hose her front garden, even though she has been using a rainwater tank for the past nine years. “The whole thing is turning the community against one another,” Ms Norriss told The Sunday Age. “It’s becoming like Big Brother and I’m starting to feel very uncomfortable.”
…
She is not alone. Garden envy is rife and threatening to spill over to open hostility as the State Government asks the community to anonymously “dob in a water cheat”. Monash University academic David Dunstan fears the growing hysteria about water is threatening our sense of community as “neighbour is pitted against neighbour”.
…
Like an increasing number of Melburnians, Ms Norriss is terrified of being wrongly accused of breaking the new water restrictions. Terrified at the thought of a knock on the door from the “water police”. She has hung a sign on her front fence declaring only non-town water is in use. But that hasn’t stopped the abuse and glares of people as they slow to pass her Northcote home.”

Anyone who’s read Ballard’s Drought will surely notice the chilling parallel with the book’s Reverend Johnstone and his tub-thumping militia. Of Johnstone, Ballard writes:

By a strange logic he seemed to believe that the battle against the drought, like that against evil itself, was the local responsibility of every community and private individual throughout the land, and that a strong element of rivalry was to be encouraged between the contestants, brother set against brother, in order to keep the battle joined.
…
Johnstone brushed aside the money with the barrel of the shot-gun. ‘We take no cash for water here, son. You can’t buy off the droughts of this world, you have to fight them. You should have stayed where you were, in your own home.’ “

As we swelter down under, I’ll keep you informed as to whether the remainder of the Australian summer follows the prophecy outlined in the rest of Ballard’s book.

…what truly annoys me is … the way in which this government — and previous governments — view football supporters. If you’re unsure what this attitude is, read JG Ballard’s new novel, Kingdom Come.

This is, as usual, a dystopian fantasy set in a fictitious chavtown, just off the M25, called Brooklands. The local population — save for a few concerned members of the professional classes — are a brutal and brutalised morass of plebs, dressed in identical St George’s shirts and interested only in consumerism and sport. Sport is what happens to a society mired in boredom and existing in a moral vacuum; it necessarily leads to a kind of fascism, or is a symptom of it, Ballard avers. After football matches, the workers go on rampages, attacking Asians and chanting nasty things. They are viewed as dumb animals, to be led, manipulated and exploited.

Kingdom Come is a deeply silly and patronising novel, but it does at least encapsulate the contempt and lack of understanding with which working-class pastimes are viewed by our political leaders and, in Ballard’s case, our intelligentsia. And, as a corollary, why successive administrations have sought to make football more middle-class by stripping it of all those things that once made it vital and compelling.”

I never felt that in KC Ballard was writing anything approaching realism (surrealism, yes)…just like I don’t think the director of Wolf Creek really believes that women should be nailed to posts and tortured with hunting knives. My first impression on reading KC was to laugh out loud at the sheer number of references to sporting supporters in St George’s shirts, almost on every page…it seemed absurd, a joke…maybe it actually is.

These scenes reminded me of the old Monty Python cartoon depicting waves of “Red Chinese; three deep” flooding over the continents and into Europe. The book is satirising a primal, irrational, classist fear, isn’t it? (“the square root of J. G. Ballard divided by Monty Python” = Kingdom Come, to retool a line from a Max Barry review). Or am I being incredibly naive? Is Ballard? I don’t think Ballard really understands sport — or sports fandom — that well, but I think he is dead on in identifying the ways in which it’s all become just another floating signifier.

Allow me to make a connection from where I’m standing — Australia — because Ballard’s vision makes total sense round these parts. Here, in the state of Victoria, the Aussies Rules football teams have absolutely no connection to their suburbs or their original grounds anymore; nine teams share two grounds on the fringes of the Central Business District under the league’s cloning policy (officially known as the “ground rationalisation policy“). Of course, this is completely driven by money and big business. There’s no connection to any “working class”; corporate sponsors stick like shit to pigs, though. These days, you may as well support “McDonalds” or “Microsoft” rather than “Collingwood” or “Carlton”, to name the two most-famous Aussie Rules clubs. To an outsider, someone from the “middle class”, say, or a “member of the intelligentsia”, with limited sporting or supporting background, it may seem like waves of cloned oiks belting crap out of each other out of boredom (while swearing allegiance to consumer-driven “soft fascism”) and it may seem like they were next.

Someone like Brian Eno, perhaps, who once said, “I’m becoming increasingly anti-sport. I think sport is encouraged by governments to channel what would be male revolutionary energy into totally pointless activities. Sport is a great technique of social control. I always watch the Olympics, mind you.”

(Is Eno being totally serious here? I suppose there could be an element of pisstake.)

Ballard escalates these thought processes to their absurdist conclusion. In KC, it’s all a background blur. A simulation. And more self aware than Liddle imagines: Pearson, the muddled protagonist is clearly a Ballard proxy, described by the author as being “beyond psychiatric help”; he dresses like the “public” Ballard does and there are all the in-jokes Ballard makes about his own public image via Pearson. Pearson lives and breathes the media landscape; he’s an ad man, and his perception is shaped by tubes and lenses. The St George’s hordes are mise en scene, maybe a bit like old Road Runner cartoons, where the same rocky outcrops whizz by over and over again.

For Liddle to imply that Ballard is so blinkered as to be unaware of the contradictions inherent in a member of the ‘intelligentsia” commenting on so-called ‘working class’ pursuits is ‘deeply silly and patronising’ in itself. It’s the same pointless argument that cyberfeminists used to make against Crash, that it’s a ‘deeply misogynist work’ or some such, or that early critics made against Drowned World, that it’s ‘bourgeois decadence’. Ballard writes honestly and unflinchingly from his vantage point, stripping perception down to its base metals — including cataloguing his own foibles and failures — and is no less relevant for that.

It’s often suggested that Ballard doesn’t sell in America because ‘irony doesn’t travel’…by the sounds of things, it hasn’t even made it to Wapping.

On 5 May 2007, ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard’, apparently the first-ever conference on the work of Ballard, will be held at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. Guest speakers include the novelist Toby Litt; Roger Luckhurst, author of the exhaustive Ballard work, The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard; and Ballard archivist David Pringle, a veritable walking encyclopaedia of Ballardiana. The conference has been organised by Jeannette Baxter, who currently has a number of Ballard-related publishing projects in the works. Faced with all of this mouth-watering news, I grilled Dr Baxter in the time-honoured fashion about Ballard, the conference and Ballardian tricks of perspective.

NOTE: proposals for papers and panels for the conference are still being accepted.

Simon Sellars

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Jeannette, how did you come to Ballard’s work?

I first encountered Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women as a postgraduate student at UEA, and I was drawn immediately to the irreverent nature of those novels, specifically the way they flaunt, formally and contextually, the instability of monolithic structures such as truth, history and reality. Intrigued by Ballard’s idiosyncratic visions of contemporary history and culture, I read the rest of his novels and short stories, and, much to the delight of Lorna Sage, who was my tutor at the time, I shelved my plans to write a thesis on African-American women’s writing. I went on instead to write a PhD on Ballard and Surrealism, which I’m revising as a book.

And the conference — how did it come about?

Well, even though I’ve just spent the last few years working almost exclusively on Ballard, I’ve realised that I’m more interested in his writing than ever, so a conference seemed like the next step. My ambition for the day is really quite modest, namely to get as many Ballard readers (be they academics, students or general readers) together in order to discuss the work of one of the most significant and popular contemporary authors.

Why is the time right?

A conference on Ballard is not only long overdue (to my knowledge the event at UEA is the first of its kind), but, as Roger Luckhurst reminded me recently, it’s also 50 years since the publication of Ballard’s first short story, ‘Prima Belladonna’. To have sustained a highly successful literary career for more than half a century is a magnificent achievement, and I’d like to see the conference as something of a celebration of that. It’s just a shame that Ballard will not be coming along to join in the event with us. I did invite him, but he joked that he was too old and infirm to travel all the way to Norwich!

Your list of guest speakers features a strong professorial focus. Do you feel that the conference will be, or should be, accessible to the layperson? Will there ever be a day when Ballard’s work is discussed by doctors, pilots, architects, psychologists, S&M mistresses etc?

There’s certainly nothing exclusive about the conference. I really hope that anyone with an interest in Ballard’s work will feel that they can participate in it. As for whether Ballard’s work will ever be a topic of conversation amongst doctors, pilots, architects etc, I think that it already is (and, indeed, has been for a long time). One only needs to visit the various internet sites, such as your excellent Ballardian.com, to gain a sense of the diversity of Ballard’s audience.

‘SF was ALWAYS modern, but now it is “postmodern” – bourgeoisification in the form of an over-professionalized academia with nowhere to take its girlfriend for a bottle of wine and a dance is now rolling its jaws over an innocent and naive fiction that desperately needs to be left alone. You are killing us! Stay your hand!’ ”

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J.G. Ballard. A Response to the Invitation to Respond (Science Fiction Studies, #55 = Volume 18, Part 3, Nov 1991).
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Why is Ballard notoriously intemperate when it comes to academia? What do you make of his riposte to the Science Fiction Studies crew [above]?

I suspect that Ballard’s attitude towards academia arises, in part, from the belief that the literary imagination is in danger of being compromised, and even tamed in some way, when it became the focus of academic discourse. Ballard’s attack on the “postmodernisation” of SF, for instance, seems to suggest that academic jargon might be nothing more than a linguistic strategy for explaining a text away without engaging with what that text is actually saying. Indeed, the example you cite is part of a larger dialogue which features a much-debated instance of critical theory overriding the literary imagination. I’m referring to Jean Baudrillard’s essay ‘Crash’ (which is in Simulacra and Simulation) in which he hijacks Ballard’s novel as the platform from which to launch his own theories of hyperreality and simulation. Although massively compelling, Baudrillard’s thesis pretty much erases Ballard’s novel altogether, and the reader is left wondering whether the critic has read the text at all. Having said all of this, however, I’m very pleased to say that Ballard has just agreed to work with me on an edited critical collection of his work, so I think it’s safe to say that he hasn’t written academia off altogether!

That does sound exciting. Can you tell us more about it? How will Ballard be working with you? Will he have a hand in the selection process?

I’m co-editing a series of books on contemporary British authors called Contemporary Critical Perspectives. I’m overseeing the Ballard volume which is one of three (the other two are on Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro) to be published by Continuum Press in 2008. As well as covering Ballard’s major works (from the early SF through to Kingdom Come), the volume will look at Ballard’s short stories, his collection of non-fiction writings and the translation of his novels into film. Ballard hasn’t been involved in the selection process (although he was extremely impressed with the line up of topics and contributors), but he has agreed to give an interview for the volume, and I’m also hoping that he’ll be involved in the brief biographical section which I’ll be putting together.

For the conference, your call for papers features a long and eclectic list of suggested topics. Why do you think Ballard resonates so deeply and so widely across so many disciplines and areas of enquiry? Do you think any other writer has come even close to matching this?

Yes, the list is rather long, but it really could have been much longer! As you’ve suggested to me before, there’s simply so much to consider when one thinks about Ballard. He is an incredibly diverse author, and I think his range of insights stems, in part, from his own voracious reading of what he terms ‘invisible’ literatures — scientific journals, pharmaceutical company brochures, think-tank manuals, copyright guidebooks, marginalia, telephone directories — the kind of literatures, in other words, which construct the realities that we inhabit on a daily basis, but which we either don’t have access to, or never think of reading. Ballard simply has a different reading list to most of us (it begs the question as to how he gets his hands on these materials), and it is this, together with his indefatigable desire to question and penetrate the myriad surface realities of our disturbed modernity, which gives his writing such breadth and depth. Ballard is in a category of his own, I think, in terms of the formal and contextual eclecticism of his writings, and also for the sheer tenacity of his imagination.

You list ‘humour in Ballard’ on the conference site as an ‘especially welcome’ topic. Will Self once wrote, ‘I think the big difference between me and Ballard is that there are no jokes in his books at all, or at least not intentionally any jokes,’ which I certainly don’t agree with. What are your thoughts on Self’s comment?

I don’t agree with Will Self either. Ballard is a very funny writer and humour has, I believe, a strong critical function in his work. Whilst texts such as Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition flaunt dead-pan observations on sex, death and historical violence in order to confront the reader with the nightmare realities of late C20th history, other works such as Running Wild and Millennium People employ surrealist black humour as a force of critical resistance. When Ballard’s pseudo-revolutionaries (in MP) draw an analogy between the Olympia Cat Exhibition and the eugenic cruelties inflicted by Joseph Mengele on concentration camp victims of Auschwitz, one has to laugh out loud. But this is not a reaction to authorial bad taste (which Ballard has been accused of many times). Rather it’s an example, I think, of how Ballard employs black humour in order to expose the absurd sense of historical relativism which the middle-class revolutionaries of Chelsea Marina display, as they hijack historical atrocities for purely aesthetic purposes. Like you, I find the role of humour in Ballard’s writing absolutely fascinating, yet little consideration has been given to it so far.

Do you find Ballard to be an especially British writer? Why is it that his commercial appeal is largely limited to the UK?

Ballard’s novels are certainly concerned with exploring notions of ‘Britishness’ – from the post-imperial narratives of The Drowned World, The Crystal World and Empire of the Sun which set out, in part, to dismantle Imperial mythologies, right through to the more recent works, Millennium People and Kingdom Come, which pose a number of urgent questions about the erosion of social, political and national identity within C20th and C21st Britain. At the same time, of course, there’s nothing distinctly ‘British’ about the high-tech business parks, ultra-modern shopping malls, sprawling motorways, or vast media-landscapes which Ballard writes about. In an age of globalisation and consumer-capitalism, Ballard presents a version of British society which is largely indistinguishable from other consumerist societies such as America and Japan, and that, I presume, is part of his critique.

I suppose one explanation for Ballard’s lack of commercial appeal outside of the UK may go back to your earlier question about humour. I remember talking to Ballard about this, and he said how the ‘over-moralistic Americans’ were unable to locate the humour in his work because it is so often deadpan. Their perception of him, he believes, is that he is pessimistic and utterly humourless. As for Ballard’s popularity in other countries I’m not really sure. I know that Crash was a huge success in France, but I don’t know how his other works have fared. How commercially successful is Ballard in Australia?

In Australia? Not very. His name gets blank stares most of the time I mention it. I don’t really know what sells well here in Australia; probably cricket and fishing books. Among those that do know his work, there are some interesting reactions. For example, ever since I first took an interest in Ballard, I’ve been accused a few times of ‘playing with toys for boys’, the implication being that Ballard, via Crash especially, is some kind of misogynist.

Yes, this is a question which has occupied me (and indeed it still does) because I’ve been looking at Ballard in relationship to the Surrealist group (which has also been accused, historically, of being a club for the boys). I do not think that Ballard is some kind of misogynist. I read earlier works such as Atrocity and Crash more as critiques of contemporary representations of violence against women than anything else; extreme acts of violence against the female body are either imagined or they operate metaphorically in these texts. This is, of course, the Surrealist position, and I do recognise the convenience of this deferral to the imaginary and the metaphoric. There is more to it than this, I think, but I haven’t quite teased it out yet.

What’s the key Ballard text for you?

This is a difficult one, because the key Ballard text always seems to be the one that I’m reading. However, if I had to choose one it would be The Atrocity Exhibition. For me, this is the most relentless of Ballard’s fictional enquiries into the deviant logics and emerging psychopathologies of late C20th history and culture. From the very first fragmented paragraph, Ballard plunges his reader into an extraordinary range of desultory narratives – post-war history, pornography, violence, technology, sex and death – and he challenges us to get our hands dirty. I like the discomfort of reading the text, the way it hits the reader with an overwhelming proliferation of atrocious images of war, torture, mutilation, celebrity culture, and offers us no place to hide. I also thought that the annotated version of The Atrocity Exhibition was a work of brilliance. I love the explicatory pretence of Ballard’s marginal scribbles, and all of those disturbing black and white images – Gloeckner’s pseudo-pornographic medical illustrations, and Barrodo’s photographs of anonymous bombs. I haven’t managed to see the film of The Atrocity Exhibition yet, have you? What do you make of it?

Still from The Atrocity Exhibition (dir. Jonathan Weiss)

Yes, I have seen it — I actually interviewed the director, Jonathan Weiss — and I felt the film was half-successful. Which brings me to something I must ask every interviewee, as it’s a bit of a pet subject of mine: what Ballard book would you like to see filmed, and who would you like to see film it?

I’d like to see David Lynch have a go at translating Super-Cannes onto the big screen. The physical and psychological landscapes of that novel are utterly unnerving, and I’d like to see how Lynch would try to sustain the atmosphere of unease.

What’s your opinion of the Empire and Crash films, purely in terms of the Ballardian effect they induce?

The film of Empire wasn’t as saccharine as I had expected, but I was frustrated by the way in which Spielberg contained Ballard’s representations of the sheer horrors of war within a series of pseudo-surrealist images. The film lost a good deal of power and momentum through this act of taming – but I suppose that’s a market-led decision. As for Crash, I felt utterly numb at the end of Cronenberg’s version which I suppose is an indicator of the film’s success.

What did you think of Kingdom Come? It received some dull reviews, but I liked the book and I saw it as a shift in execution — Ballard parodying himself — rather than a ‘lazy rehashing of themes’, which seemed to be the standard response.

Yes, I now what you mean about self-parody. I had a distinct feeling of déjà vu when reading this novel. I especially liked the image of Brooklands being dominated by huge conceptual adverts of the kind that Ballard published back in the late 1960s. In some ways, Kingdom Come might be regarded as a shift in direction from the last three novels. Only content appears to matter in this text. Iain Sinclair made the astute observation that Kingdom Come could have been pared down into a series of essays on contemporary consumer culture with a few dramatic events in the middle. I agree with him. Ballard is a novelist of ideas, and things like character development simply aren’t important beyond the need to articulate those ideas. But Kingdom Come is more blatant in this respect than say Cocaine Nights, which is wonderfully complex and elusive in its narrative structure, and for that reason I found Kingdom Come to be one of the most detached works that Ballad has produced in a while. For me, only the ideas remain, but that might just be the point.

In The Age of Unreason, your interview with Ballard, you asked, ‘Is [Ballard's] prescience born out of prophecy, or is it the product of something else?’ Two years later, are you any closer to answering that?

I see Ballard as something of a flâneur who is engaged in a prolonged exercise in the close reading of contemporary culture in all of its absurdities and vulgarities. As Will Self once put it, ‘Ballard doesn’t describe; he anticipates.’ Ballard pays attention, he reads the signs around, and subsequently he manages to keep one step head of the rest of us.

Note: Dr Baxter is still accepting proposals for papers and panels for the conference. The deadline is 1 February 2007 has been extended to 15 February 2007. Individual requests from international delegates who require earlier notification of acceptance (for funding applications etc) are welcome. See here for more information on submitting proposals.

..:: LINKS
+ From Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard

JG Ballard. Photo: Paul Murphy.

In the year that this website’s been in operation, it seems to have had a momentum — a secret logic — all its own. Our interviews with such luminaries as Bruce Sterling, John Foxx, Mike Ryan and Iain Sinclair — even the irascible Jonathan Weiss — have been undisputed highlights, but in hindsight they were clearing the ground for the ultimate statement of intent: a conversation with J.G. Ballard. With the release of Kingdom Come, Ballard’s new novel, it suddenly struck me: we can’t keep orbiting around the sun forever. I had to speak to the man — especially since KC represents some of his most interesting work for a long while.

The negative notices this remarkable vision have received don’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Here’s a man who admits he doesn’t read novels; instead he devours ‘invisible literature’: marginalia, copywriting, medical journals, psychiatric reports, Ikea catalogues. He’s influenced by Freud, film noir, science fiction and Surrealist paintings; film, more than anything. To compare him with some literary type who practices the art of ‘tight plotting’ and ‘well-rounded protagonists’ is woefully inadequate. Reviewing KC in the Telegraph, David Robson wrote: ‘The plotting is clumsy … and the violence, integral to the whole design, belongs to the world of comic-strips’. Well, yes. Precisely. Honestly, do we still live in an age where popular culture is considered second-rate to the almighty ‘novel’? Funnily enough, it’s Robson rather than Ballard who puts me in mind of my 78-year-old father, who refuses to watch The Simpsons because ‘cartoons are for kids’.

The novel is still largely a 19th-century form which has completely excluded … any consideration of the impact of science and technology on human beings from the main body of its work … most mainstream 20th-century novelists are still working with a 19th-century form that’s concerned not with dynamic societies but with static societies where social nuance is still important”.

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J.G. Ballard, quoted in C21 (1991).
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The cable channels had reverted to an anaesthetic diet of household hints and book-group discussions. Once people began to talk earnestly about the novel any hope of freedom had died.

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J.G. Ballard. Kingdom Come.
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In some ways I felt liberated conducting this interview by phone from Australia. It meant that I didn’t have to make the pilgrimage to Shepperton on the motorway before being deposited at JGB’s door, where I would be admitted and compelled to comment on the Ballardian nature of the journey. Nor would I feel compelled to comment — as so many do — on his run-down semi-detached house that’s in dire need of a paintjob. Or the objects on his bookshelf that haven’t moved in 30 years. (As JGB told an interviewer in 2003, “Please! Don’t ask me about the dust! Everyone is fascinated by my dust — there must be more interesting things to talk about”.) I wouldn’t need to ask — as so many have before — how Ballard’s childhood in Shanghai shaped his fiction, before expressing surprise that such a grandfatherly figure could produce such a nightmarish vision. (Actually, Jeffrey Dahmer looked pretty average, too. So what?).

No — ensconced on the other side of the world, I felt I could safely ask J.G. Ballard what really makes him tick.

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Simon Sellars
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SIMON SELLARS: I’ve been keeping up with the Kingdom Come reviews: people are criticising you for repeating the template of your last three novels. But it seems to me you’re actively parodying your own style.

J.G. BALLARD: I think there’s an element of that. But I think there always has been in my novels. I can’t resist having a dig at myself.

A character describes Pearson as ‘beyond psychiatric help’.

Ah yes – that is a deliberate little in-joke for those who are interested. The publisher’s reader for Crash made that comment years and years ago, so I couldn’t resist inserting it.

[The reader's famous verdict: "This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish"].

Perhaps the most obvious shift in your style occurs in Pearson himself: he’s more active in shaping the events around him than equivalent characters in previous books.

The thing is, I wanted the protagonist — the narrator — to be more involved professionally, and emotionally, in the events that are unfurling. If you go back to my previous novels, something like Super-Cannes — the narrator of that finds himself in this strange business park in the south of France by chance, really, whereas the narrator in Kingdom Come is directly involved. I wanted to show how disaffected and deracinated intellectuals often get drawn into political conspiracies that turn out badly. We have a clear example at the present time with many of the leading American intellectuals who are involved with President Bush and his neo-cons — someone like Fukuyama, although I think he’s recanted. These think-tank intellectuals in America provided a lot of the rationale for the whole neo-con response to 9/11. And earlier than that, you see people like Joseph Goebbels — a fully-fledged intellectual, without any doubt — becoming the propaganda chief of the Nazi regime. Albert Speer’s another one. I wanted to show how rootless intellectuals do get involved in these conspiracies.

And so we have Richard Pearson — this advertising man, who’s been trying to liven up the advertising business with a bit of psychopathology and has failed — arriving at this huge shopping mall and seeing a chance to put his theories into practice. He finds David Cruise, a third-rate Fuhrer running a cable-TV show and gets to work, not realising quite what he’s doing.

The reviews have been mixed.

They haven’t been all that great, to be honest. There have been some good ones, but on the whole they’ve been rather downbeat. And that’s something one just has to live with. But also I just get the vague feeling that this is a subject that the sort of people who review books would rather not look at too closely. Perhaps I’m deluding myself, there, but after all, Kingdom Come is a full-frontal attack on England today. I think in many ways this country has lost its direction, lost its purpose, and there are some very strange things going on under the surface. And that’s what I’m writing about — I have been for years.

The book’s themes travel beyond England, though.

Well, my feeling about this country — that we have nothing left but consumerism — does, as far as I know, translate to other consumerist societies like America and Japan. My impression is that Australians, however, have got other things to do with their spare time. They’re not besotted with shopping, because the country’s so large and there are so many opportunities for recreation — that’s probably another delusion of mine, I’ve no idea. But I’ve been to Canada several times and no-one would call Canada a consumerist society, because people have got more things to do — there’s more space. The peculiar thing about England is that we’re so densely populated. When I say there’s nothing to do except go shopping, that’s almost the truth. You know, you can’t climb into your car and drive off into the wilderness. Shopping is all we have. But I think, translated overseas, the general principle of Kingdom Come will hold: there is something about consumerism and late capitalism that is too close for comfort to fascism. There are echoes.

Carradine pointed to the concourse. On a circular plinth stood three giant teddy bears. The father bear was at least fifteen feet tall, his plump torso and limbs covered with a lustrous brown fur. Mother and baby bear stood beside him, paws raised to the shoppers, as if ready to make a consumer affairs announcement about the porridge supply.

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J.G. Ballard. Kingdom Come.
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‘Play with us’ — bears at the Bentall Centre, the real-life inspiration for Kingdom Come’s Metro-Centre. Photo by Joanne Murray.

Well, we like to indulge in a little cathartic violence in Australia, too. I don’t know if you heard about the riots on Sydney beaches last year…

Oh yes, I did. Rival gangs attacking immigrants.

Kingdom Come resonated with me because its clockwork mobs were so reminiscent of this incident. Except instead of football, it was organised around surfing — a typical Aussie touch.

I think sport is the key catalyst. England doesn’t have a very good soccer team, but we’ve always had world-class hooligans. And I think the English take a certain pride in that.

Why is that? To compensate for loss of Empire?

I’m not sure it has anything to do with that. The British Empire was lost a long time ago, and most British people didn’t benefit directly from Empire. In fact, there are economic historians who claim we made a loss from the British Empire — that it cost more than we gained from it. Most British people didn’t share in the Empire at all, and I don’t think the loss of all these possessions scattered around the world was a tragedy for the British. It was probably a relief when it collapsed. It’s like when you read accounts of the Republican movement in Australia, which has my 100% support, of course…

Mine, too.

I can’t understand why an English queen is the Australian head of state. It’s bizarre. I mean, why not have a Japanese head of state? A Swedish head of state? I can see that there are ties to Britain, and perhaps one shouldn’t make light of these things, but most English people wouldn’t be in the least bit upset if you decided to have your own head of state and declare Australia a republic. I don’t think the end of Empire is such a big thing, now. It might have been true thirty or forty years ago, but not now.

I had seen the flag as I drove into the town, the cross of St George on its white field, flying above the housing estates and business parks. The red crusader’s cross was everywhere, unfurling from flagstaffs in front gardens, giving the anonymous town a festive air. Whatever else, the people here were proud of their Englishness, a core belief no army of copywriters would ever take from them.

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J.G. Ballard. Kingdom Come.
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Off Edenham Way, Notting Hill, London. Photo by Simon Crubellier.

Nationalism, though, plays a big part in the events you describe in Kingdom Come. Same as with these beach riots: they were propelled by an intense nationalism — republicanism taken to its logical extreme.

Well, that does happen, doesn’t it? People will seize on any symbol or banner or slogan that comes in handy. Like here, during the World Cup a couple of months ago: English supporters seized on the St George’s cross, a flag that was virtually unknown ten years ago. It was only when the National Front, the ultra-right party, started draping themselves in the Union Jack that the possibility that a flag might sum up one’s ambitions came into play. I live in a very quiet suburb, absolutely docile, and a couple of years ago — it may have been during the European football championship — I looked out of an upstairs window and saw that two of my neighbours, about 100 yards away, had erected flagpoles in their garden and were flying the St George’s cross. It sent an odd feeling down my spine, because it was clearly saying something. You don’t go to the trouble of buying a flagpole — and these were real flagpoles, much taller than the bungalows next to them — and then put a big flag on it without it meaning something. I wouldn’t even know where to buy one!

At Ikea, perhaps? Surely the 2005 riots at that shrine to consumerism were another influence on Kingdom Come.

Well, the Ikea riots happened when I was writing the book. ‘There we go,’ I said to myself. Yes — that was an incredible event in many ways. It fed into the novel. England is a much more socially divided, unstable and violent place than people realise. This is not some sort of Switzerland floating in the North Sea. We’re not a Scandinavian country, like Norway or Sweden. We ought to be part of that bloc, but we’re not. I don’t know what we are. That’s the problem.

Spending had a strong social incentive, and the desire to be the highest spender in the neighbourhood was given moral enforcement by the system of listing all the names and their accumulating cash totals on a huge electric sign in the supermarket foyers. The higher the spender, the greater his contribution to the discounts enjoyed by others. The lowest spenders were regarded as social criminals, free-riding on the backs of others”.

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J.G. Ballard. ‘The Subliminal Man’ (1963).
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Kingdom Come’s theme of violent consumerism seems to be an update of some of your earlier work — I’m thinking of your short stories ‘The Subliminal Man’ and ‘The Intensive Care Unit’.

Those stories were so long ago… Yes, perhaps there are elements in them. Maybe you’re right. I hadn’t thought of it.

Your short stories are just superlative. Why don’t you write them anymore? I think that’s an aspect of your work that is deeply missed by many people, including myself.

The problem is that there’s nowhere to publish them. Very few magazines or newspapers these days carry them. It used to be very common in the English papers 50 years ago — some papers had a short story every day. But also, if you’re going to write them, you’ve got to cast your mind into the short-story mode and think in terms of short stories. You can’t just turn that on for one piece. Every so often I get rung up by a newspaper or magazine, and they say ‘We’re doing a special number with three or four short stories, specially commissioned. Would you write one?’ But they want something very short to start off, and mine tend to be much longer, and then they want something rather conventional — something that’s not going to unsettle the advertisers. Well, I’ve tried to devote my entire career to rattling other people’s cages and it’s difficult to do that these days with a short story.

A company of beautiful women moves through the palatial corridors or gazes into the opaque depths of ornate mirrors, waiting for a last act that will never unfold. Even those women who are naked seem scarcely aware of themselves, as if their sexuality is defused by the strange bedrooms where they wait for the rich and powerful men stepping from their limousines in the courtyards below”.

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J.G. Ballard. ‘The Lucid Dreamer’ (on Helmut Newton; Bookforum, 1999).
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In our Iain Sinclair interview, Sinclair said that ‘Kingdom Come could have been stripped down to be a series of savage essays or presentations about the motorway corridor with dramatised events happening in the middle’. I started thinking along similar lines: perhaps your non-fiction writings — the short journalistic pieces you do for newspapers — have taken on the characteristics of your short stories.

Yes, I think there’s a germ of truth in that. I mean, people have long complained that my book reviews have nothing to do with the book in question! And that’s something I apologise for, because it’s extremely irritating to the author.

You once said the key image of the 20th century was the car. What do you think the key image of the 21st century will be?

That’s interesting. It’s hard to tell — it’s so early. If I had to pick an image now, it’d probably be an internet screen. It obviously plays a big part in peoples lives. But it’s pretty early — contact me in 50 years’ time and I’ll update that!

An image from the Japanese Gallery of Psychiatric Art.

I’m not hooked up to the internet, which is rather bad of me. I write all my books in longhand – don’t believe all this stuff I say about technology! My girlfriend has a PC and a modem, but we don’t seem able to connect it up. But I love the idea. My dream would be to download the entire Harvard University database, or to consult every psychiatric journal ever published. However, I’m terrified that if I do get the modem working, I’d never do anything else!

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– JG Ballard, ‘JG Ballard Live In London’, Sub Dee Magazine (1997).
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I found myself in London in 1996 for a talk you were giving, and I remember you saying your dream would be to hook up to the net and download every psychiatric journal ever published.

Lovely thought.

So, it’s nine years later — have you done it yet?

No. I don’t have a PC. I’m not on the internet and I think that’s a matter of age. I’m nearly 76 now and I think the personal computer and the internet really came in about 10 years ago. And by then I was an old dog and the internet was a new trick. I mean, I still write my novels in longhand and type them out on an old electric typewriter. I don’t have any modern appliances. I have a mobile phone but I hardly ever use it. And all these things like iPods and Blackberries – I am interested in them, but I’m too set in my ways.

The ‘environmental disaster’ theme of your earlier work doesn’t get namechecked as much as the ‘urban disaster’ themes in your later work. Why is that?

I suppose it’s because the kind of urban disaster imagery that I wrote about in Atrocity Exhibition, and Crash, and High-Rise is closer to people’s lives. Not many people have visited a jungle recently, or a desert. People are very concerned about ecological damage to the planet, but it tends to be something you see on television, whereas decaying, inner-city ghetto blocks, high-rise blocks and car crashes are part of everyday life if you live in a big city in the west — or in the east, for that matter.

As the sun rose over the lagoon, driving clouds of steam into the great golden pall, Kerans felt the terrible stench of the water-line, the sweet compacted smells of dead vegetation and rotting animal carcases.”

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J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).
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But the ecological vision in your earlier work is getting a bit too close for comfort, though. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was reminiscent of The Drowned World.

Yes, it did remind me of Drowned World. An extraordinary event, really — that something like that could happen to the most advanced nation on Earth.

How do you feel about having your own dictionary adjective — ‘Ballardian’?

I’m surprised, actually, but I suppose it’s a compliment. It’s a shorthand phrase, but the trouble with shorthand phrases is that they often conceal more than they state. Take a term like Orwellian: it immediately sums up 1984, but of course there was a lot more to George Orwell than 1984. In fact, most of his books are not ‘Orwellian’. Animal Farm is not Orwellian in the sense that 1984 is. But, no — it’s a huge compliment. I do take it as a compliment.

According to Collins, ‘Ballardian’ is defined as ‘resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in JG Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity’. But surely your writing is far too playful to be branded dystopian. I find your characters and situations affirming, for all the darkness they willingly surround themselves with.

I’m glad you said that. I think my work is superficially dystopian, in some respects, but I’m trying to, as you say, affirm a more positive worldview. I lived through more than two-thirds of the last century, which was one of the grimmest epochs in human history — a time of unparalleled human violence and cruelty. Most my writing was about the 20th century, and anyone writing about the 20th century writes in a dystopian mode without making any effort at all — it just comes with the box of paintbrushes.

You know, to be a human being is quite a role to play. Each of us wakes up in the morning and we inhabit a very dangerous creature capable of brilliance in many ways, but capable also of huge self-destructive episodes. And we live with this dangerous creature every minute we’re awake. Something like The Atrocity Exhibition sums up my fiction: the attempt by a rather wounded character — in this case, a psychiatrist having a nervous breakdown; there are similar figures throughout the rest of my fiction — to make something positive out of the chaos that surrounds him, to create some sort of positive mythology that can sustain one’s confidence in the world. Even something like Kingdom Come is affirmative, where I show a clear and present danger being dealt with, and one of the key figures responsible realising the error of his ways. So in that respect, I agree with you completely: my fiction is affirmative.

Mr Ballard indulging in the ‘Playboy lifestyle’. Screenshots from Crash! (1971), dir. Harley Cokliss.

Playboy thinks so, too. Did you know that they recently voted Crash the fifth sexiest novel of all time?

Who said that?

Playboy magazine.

Playboy?

Yes.

Playboy magazine?

Yes!

You mean Hugh Hefner’s magazine?

Yes — Hugh Hefner!

Good God! I’m amazed.

Me, too.

I’m genuinely amazed.

It came in at number 5.

Well, I take that as a compliment. Usually, crashing expensive sports cars would not figure highly in the Playboy lifestyle. What you want instead is a glamorous blonde in the seat next to you and a martini cooler in the rear seat as you drive at 150 miles an hour. And no talk of crashing!

What do you know about the film of High-Rise that Vincent Natali’s working on?

I think it’s in the early stages of development. I think there is a script, and they’re still working on it. ‘In development’ in the film world generally means that they’re looking for the money. We’ll see. I’ve seen Natali’s Cube and I liked it. I thought it was original. I think he can bring something fresh to the idea.

Before I knew Natali had signed on, I remember seeing Cube and thinking he’d do a great job filming High-Rise. The themes and obsessions seemed to parallel your book.

Yes, very similar. I agree with you.

What other films have you seen recently?

Oh… Well, I live in a small town called Shepperton, with just a single high street and about 40 shops, two of which were DVD and video rental stores. I patronised them regularly — I used to see about three films a week. I was tremendously up with what was going on in the film world, but over the past couple of years, both those stores have closed down. And this means that I’ve stopped renting. So I’ve hardly seen any films at all for a long while. I mentioned this to someone recently, and she said, ‘Ah, this is because people are downloading films from…’ I couldn’t make out what she was talking about, actually — from their mobile phones, it sounded like. Downloading from somewhere — they don’t need to go to video stores anymore. I also think people are moving into a kind of post-TV, post-film world, where they’ve got so many other things to do. Recreation of every conceivable kind. The idea of passively watching a screen seems to be passing. I think that part of the appeal of the internet is that it’s interactive — an obvious thing to say, of course. But also, films are so bloody awful these days.

And just plain bloody, too. What do you think of this trend towards horror films that depict hyperreal scenes of torture and sadism? Films like Wolf Creek, Hostel, Severance, and so on.

Horrible. I’ve never liked horror films.

Why?

Oh, I don’t know. Fear of death or something. The earliest horror films I saw were Dracula movies — never liked those. The whole idea of horror, particularly wrapped up in touches of the occult — ugh. They’re saturated with the fear of death and displaced sexual anxieties. No, thank you. Not for me.

Well, they’re much more sadistic these days. It really is ‘violence as spectator sport’ — to quote yourself.

Absolutely. You see this dimension of anatomical frankness even in popular TV programs like CSI. Every one ends with a cadaver being cut up, and a heart or a brain being removed and held up to the light. Pretty frightening stuff. But I think we’re anesthetised — our sensibilities are dulled. There may be all the frankness on this screen, but most people, in England anyway, wouldn’t have seen a dead body, let alone an autopsy. Put it all down to the diseased brain that helps to run human affairs.

I know you feel differently about science fiction: you once said it was ‘the only true literature of the 20th century’. What about today?

Well, the problem is that at the heart of science fiction was novelty: it was predicting the new all the time. I remember reading science-fiction magazines from the 1950s and one was constantly excited by the vision of the future dominated by television, advertising, space travel — the modern world, in short. As far as I can see, science fiction has lost that sense of the new, because its vision has materialised around us. We take it for granted. The future envisaged by science fiction is now our past, and the result is it’s probably come to a natural end. That doesn’t mean that one can’t continue writing it: one just has to move into a different terrain.

A psychogeographical terrain? There’s a recent book that has co-opted you into the psychogeographical literary movement.

I’ve seen that book. It doesn’t apply to me. No, that’s Iain Sinclair’s terrain.

You once said you were becoming more left-wing as you got older. Does that still fit?

I think it probably does, actually. I don’t know about Australia — it strikes me as a pretty wonderful place, from everything I’ve read about it — but here, the gap between rich and poor is widening to such an extent that, particularly in London, it’s begun to shift the whole demographic. The middle class, the people who sustain modern society — the nurses, junior doctors, teachers, civil servants and so on — are being forced out because vast sums of money are pouring into the housing market and distorting it. Gated communities are springing up everywhere, and the moment they can, people are opting for private medicine, private teaching, private hospitals — cutting themselves off from the rest of society, and that’s not a healthy development. One thing I’ve always liked about America, and I think it’s probably true of Australia, is that the children of well-to-do people and the children of people on modest incomes go to the same schools. I think that’s good. It’s not true over here and that’s bad! A class-ridden society with huge divisions — that’s bad. Something ought to be done about it, but I’ll leave that to another generation.

Well, things are becoming more divisive in Australia. Our Prime Minister wants to test immigrants for ‘Australian values’: it’s worryingly undefined so it could be anything — Australian slang, Aussie songs and so on — as the PM has hinted. Maybe people will be deported if they can’t say ‘you bewdy’ or talk like Steve Irwin with conviction.

God.

Things are changing all over.

And not necessarily for the better.

Mr Ballard, many thanks for your time.

It’s been a pleasure.

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Many thanks to Mally Foster and Helen Ellis at Harper Collins; Mel Chilianis for the tech set up; J.M. Rudder for the films; Simon Crubellier, Paul Murphy and Joanne Murray for permission to use their photos; Andres Vaccari, Raymond Tait, Ben Austwick, Chris Nakashima-Brown and Tim Chapman for invaluable research assistance; and Bruce Sterling, Mike Ryan, John Foxx and Iain Sinclair for their thoughts on Ballard.
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…:: LINKS
+ Review by Steven Shaviro Praise the Lord — an intelligent review of Kingdom Come for a change
+ An Evening with J.G. Ballard
+ Bruce Sterling on J.G. Ballard
+ Mike Ryan on J.G. Ballard
+ Jonathan Weiss on J.G. Ballard
+ John Foxx on J.G. Ballard
+ Iain Sinclair on J.G. Ballard

Here’s a Vogue Italia photo shoot by Steven Meisel that posits supermodels as new-age terrorists (thanks for the link, FJ Torres). As Tim has already commented, “If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot stamping on a supermodel’s throat forever.”

Yes, it’s Ballardian. Yes, it’s JGB’s imagined “sinister marriage between sex and technology”, the final realisation of “violence as consumer spectator sport”. Yes, its disturbing — living in Australia, as I do, and reading about the horrific details of the Dianne Brimble case, it’s difficult to adjudicate otherwise. And yet…and yet…it operates on so many levels I wouldn’t even begin to know where to start in beginning to even imagine formulating an analysis.

Is it a comment on the war on terror? On the place of women in society? On the predominance of anorexic models in the fashion industry, which the industry is attempting to self-regulate? Or is it, as Tim again astutely summarises, merely a point “for academic and media handbags to be flapped”? Certainly Joanna Burke, writing in the Guardian, is under no illusions. For her, “the most disturbing thing about these photographs … is that they have taken their inspiration from the torture photographs taken in Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere in Iraq … we see how those images of torture have been translated into consumer products”.

Despite Jonathan Weiss’s claims to the contrary, that’s what Andres’s review, for whatever faults Jonathan thinks it may embody, was trying to get at: how much more shocking is the type of ‘libidinization of violence’ (thanks to k-punk for the clarity of terms) defined by Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition when spliced with today’s terror porn: September 11…Iraq, etc — a complete fetishisation of mediated violence. That’s at least one level on which Meisel’s shoot operates. And that’s the point Andres was at least attempting to make in his review and which Mr Weiss ripped us to shreds over.

I’m all for updating, expanding, modifying and recasting the Ballardian template…and I now know, after reading Kingdom Come, that JGB is, too. Is Steven Meisel? Perhaps Kingdom Come could form the basis of his first feature film…

Then again, perhaps Pippa, on the same chat group as Tim, is closer to the mark, when she says, “Hmmm. Pretty anodyne really. It just looks like a fashion shoot. Which makes one ask whether fashion shoots are looking more like atrocity images, or the other way around. Isn’t this the real death of affect, when it’s all pretty damn boring?”.

There’s no doubt about it — this is definitely a job for k-punk…I’m sending out the Bat Signal…

Indeed. I’m about a third of the way through Kingdom Come and I’m finding it far more localised and inward looking than previous Ballard. I’m wondering how the theme of football fascism will translate to other territories… Probably really well. Racist attacks sprung on immigrant communities by clockwork sporting mobs happen here in Australia, too. The difference being that it’s more likely to be surfers than football fans who are the reactionary nationalists (as happened on Sydney’s Cronulla beach last December).

And we have identikit Bentall Centres (the Centre being the inspiration for the foreboding Metro-Centre in Kingdom Come).

As usual, JGB has his finger on the pulse, but as far as the football fascism goes, isn’t he some way behind John King who was identfying nationalist, mobile-phone-linked mobs in his ‘Football Factory’ trilogy? Of course, Kingdom Come rapidly springs off into other directions, so perhaps this is a minor point.

In any case, I hope that with this book we see more reviews of JGB from outside England…having said that, here’s an absorbing review from M. John Harrison, published in the Times, which raises some very interesting points about the ‘Ballardian template’: “we … understand with a shock that it is the author who feels bored and trapped, not the characters”.

John Foxx live at Shrewsbury, 1998. © Extreme Voice.

This is part 2 of my interview with John Foxx, former lead singer of Ultravox before the band’s Midge Ure era, and an on-and-off solo artist for the past 25 years. Foxx’s Ultravox purveyed a damned, dreamy, paranoid — and often playful — weave of electronics and motorik-tinged new-wave beats: seductive, lush and totally unique. Later, his first solo album, Metamatic (1980), birthed the all-synthetic ‘metal beat’ sound, a streamlined, neon-punk electroclash that continues to exert a palpable influence today, with its blend of ‘monochromatic, urban surrealism’ and supercharged Kraftwerkian analogue motor. All of this was heady stuff for one Gary Numan, an unabashed fan of the group, who took Foxx’s blueprint and rebooted it with a mainstream sheen.

I spoke to John on the back of the release of his latest album, Tiny Colour Movies, and the remastering and re-release of the three Foxx-led Ultravox albums: Ultravox! (1977), Ha! Ha! Ha! (1977) and Systems of Romance (1978).

Simon Sellars

Note: Part 1 is here.
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John, I have to make a confession: in 1980, when Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ was a huge hit, I became a fan of the Midge Ure version of the band. I was dimly aware that there was a previous incarnation led by you, but at that time I never bothered exploring it. The music press was so vitriolic to your version, as an impressionable kid reading the NME and Melody Maker in distant Australia, I never questioned it.

Don’t worry — I’ll protect you at the trials. There are several aspects to this. If anyone has the patience — mine’s threadbare. Here goes. First, I always enjoyed moving countercurrent. Much easier to swim that way. You can watch things from a distance. Very early on, we decided to investigate and develop lots of what had then been declared ungood and which we felt were manifesting themselves and were worth recording. These included psychedelia, electronics, cyberpunk, environments and elements suggested by the likes of Ballard and Burroughs, cheap European music and modes, and strange English pop, such as some aspects of the Shadows and Billy Fury which seemed to relate to a sort of undiscovered English retrofuturism. We were interested in a sort of ripped and burnt glamour. I was also taken with a detached, still stance. And some new things: Urban Bipedal RExploration. The City as Memory.

Pretty much everything that made life worth living, really.

We never saw ourselves as being in any way counter to what was happening, and nor did the other bands we knew. It’s true that some of the press of the moment seemed caught up in an enthusiastic, but surprisingly conservative view of what was admissible to the party. Whose party was it, exactly? As to the causes of this, I’m not sure – I suspect they may have felt caught off guard by the whole thing and had to swiftly cobble together some orthodox view to deal with it.

Ultravox have come in for their share of criticism since Island Records launched them with a bang eight months ago and amidst the flashing lights and polyvinyl jackets the band looked like they would bow out with a whimper. However, if their Marquee appearance was anything to go by, Ultravox are finally ‘getting it all together’. They were patchy enough and the bad bits were well on the mediocre side — obligatory loud and throbbing guitar and some empty posturing. But the good bits were quite blinding in their excellence and power. In places Ultravox were almost awe-inspiring”.

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Chas de Whalley, New Musical Express, September 1977.
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John Foxx ’s controversial polyvinyl jacket, 1977.

Today, with ‘UltraFoxx’ getting namechecked by loads of people (including me), I just can’t comprehend the hate that was directed at your version of the band. Has the benefit of hindsight given you any insight into a cultural and critical climate that must have stung quite a bit?

It was an interesting play of peculiarly English, inverted class snobbery. I’ll attempt to explain something of this. We were entirely a working class band, so we were determined not to act out the pleb role the more middle-class writers seemed to expect. It would be letting the side down. We weren’t interested in pretending to be dumb, because we weren’t. We wanted a much wider frame. I suspect this irritated a few people entranced by their own view of what constituted the correct vision of punk behaviour and mores. A strange farce of inverted English class etiquettes ensued.

Later Vivienne Westwood named her shop ‘Nostalgie De Bou’ — a typically apt French term which means a nostalgia felt by the middle classes for the land, the mud, which they would not, of course, deign to touch themselves, but enjoyed vicariously through observing peasants. It also perfectly encompasses such activities as slumming and going to Harlem, as well as the Georgian predilection for a Sunday outing to watch the lunatics incarcerated in Bedlam. So, as usual, Vivienne was spot on.

Our stance was much less convoluted and more akin to my father’s ambitions as a boxer — to get out of the bloody mud and get out of those bloody towns and live like a human being for as long as possible. Get free enough to be able to redesign ourselves. Have some adventures along the way. Sure we were clumsy at times and we stumbled and got things wrong even according to our own lights, but we knew what those lights were and we certainly weren’t going to take instruction from any wet mockney.

By early 1977 we decided to let the whole thing rush by us while we made a still place to conduct our own experiments. It was all dead by early ‘78 anyway — a beautiful bit of upheaval at just the right time. In retrospect, I think that was a good thing, because we became the first new wave band after punk fell off its perch. We got a brief time and space to make Systems of Romance, which contains several blueprints, including New Psychedelia, Electro, New Guitar, — many of these are still present in the gene code. I still see things through a sort of punk lens — one eye only, though. It’s always been valuable.

Although they are one of the most important British art rock bands, Ultravox have always been ignored or sneered at in the UK. But with re-mastered versions of their first three LPs just re-released, featuring extra tracks and sleeve notes … it’s long past time to rescue their legacy as synthetic rock pioneers…

The first three Ultravox albums, recorded when the band were led by John Foxx … have been most scandalously neglected … Systems of Romance produced a template for synthetic rock that Gary Numan, Duran Duran and others would follow. In Chicago and Detroit, the future producers of techno and house also listened attentively. This was rock from the future, all the more compelling at a time — now — when groups reheating twenty-five year old ideas are being sold to us as new”.

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K-punk, Fact Magazine, July 2006.
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Ultravox. L to r: John Foxx, Warren Cann, Billy Currie, Chris Cross, Robin Simon.

Why is the time right to remaster and re-release the first three Ultravox albums?

I think perhaps because they are getting mentioned with increasing frequency on people’s DNA checklists. It’s taken this long to allow a clearer view of just what was laid down there.

Brian Eno produced the first album. Is it safe to say that you took more from this partnership than the rest of the band? [Ultravox drummer] Warren Cann is quoted as saying that working with Eno “was absolutely NOT what we had actually envisaged. Eno was far more of a conceptualist, an ideas man”, and that Eno’s ideas were pretty much discarded in favour of a group production effort. Whereas you’ve said on a few occasions that you’ve been inspired by his work and theory.

Warren Cann, after undergoing Enossification. Altogether, now: “He wants to be a machine…”

I think Billy, Chris and I enjoyed Eno’s involvement a lot. I think Warren did too, and I also valued Warren’s scepticism. When we got to doing ‘My Sex’ it was the three of us working in the studio with Brian.

I was alert to the fact that there were certain forms of music that couldn’t be arrived at in any other way than operating in a recording studio and I wanted to discover what this could mean for us. Eno encouraged that and things took off in a new way, one that became a long stream of work: ‘My Sex’, ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’, ‘Dislocation’, ‘Just for a Moment’, and onward to ‘Lieutenant 030′, ‘Glimmer’ and ‘Mr No’, ‘The Garden’, ‘Smoke’, and today with ‘A Room As Big as a City’ and ‘Never Let Me Go’.

I stole a cathode face from newscasts
And a crumbling fugue of songs
From the reservoir of video souls
In the lakes beneath my tongue
In flesh of ash and silent movies

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– ‘I Want to Be A Machine’, Ultravox, 1977 (written by John Foxx)
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So his involvement was valuable for that. And for many other things, too: I also felt liberated from the usual ‘hands off the controls’ attitude of engineers at that time. We’d grown very tired of ‘can’t do that’. Brian encouraged use of the studio as a means of communal transport. Can do. Just drive the damn thing. Lets see what this does. The fact that he may not have been so technical wasn’t the issue. What mattered was the view of the craft we were operating.

Later, when Billy and I used to drop into Bob Marley sessions run by Lee Perry at Basing St studios, we saw a similar view of the all hands operating the spacecraft/ouija board. The studio becomes an organic extension of communal desire, and you suddenly experience an important event, piloted by Perry. It was something like that we glimpsed through Eno’s presence.

You once said you like to instil an emotional response in your listeners, and I experienced that the other day with Cathedral Oceans III. The feeling is extremely difficult to describe and I’m well aware that it will vary from listener to listener, but I felt dislocated, surreal, nostalgic, melancholy and sad all at once. I’m always amazed when music does this to me, and it always feels mystical and magical to me — a process beyond reason, theory and language. However, I know some theoretically minded musicians who argue that emotion in music is purely a function of music as ‘language’, a language they say is heavily influenced by film and visual mediums — certain chord sequences representing doom and tragedy, for example. They conclude that intrinsically there is no emotion in music. Can you explain a bit more about the role of emotion in your own work — and how you believe it’s generated?

Big subject – but fascinating. Here goes. What you say is accurate. At best, I think music operates mercifully beyond the reach of language and the intellect at first — one of the few forms capable of getting through the remaining gaps in a civilised psyche. It allows us to be Sensual Civilised Primitives — and don’t we just love that.

So, you have to experience the stuff first: sensuality as a vital component of intellect. Only then can you begin to apply intellect to choreograph your reactions, to begin our usual crafty dance out of experience. Enough to begin to categorise and connect, maybe even justify and compress what happened to you and reconcile this with other experienced elements — memory etc — to finally allow you to talk about it.

This first experience is the ‘Pleasure Despite’: it happens despite ideas and neuroses and discomfort and all the other necessary static. That is partly why it can provide such an efficient private transport — or connector. It only becomes anything akin to language afterwards — after the experience.

Language isn’t experience. Very far from it. Yet music is experience. A subjective surrender to something that can efficiently bypass most of our filters. Speaks to us directly. Also — it only exists in time. Music can never be experienced as a whole, except through memory. Therefore it requires a massive amount of a sort of seemingly passive — but actually tremendously active — subjective attention and objective connectivity to maintain its resonances throughout the duration of a piece.

A sort of furious knitting takes place. At one very simple level, the process is vaguely analogous to saying ‘blue room’ to a hundred people. What you do in that instant is create a hundred Blue Rooms in those heads — rooms that have never existed before and will never be the same again. They are manifested through all the neural pathways corresponding to ‘Blue Room,’ filtered through individual experiences and memories to date. If you were to say ‘Blue Room’ again to those people a year later, there would be a further layer of memory on the ‘Blue Room’ palimpsest, and so on, for the rest of their lives.

Music does all this in a much more abstract and subtle way, the neural equivalent of several cities worth of rooms and interior and exterior spaces of every imaginable hue. That’s just a little of how I think it operates- the listening, subjective bit. How it gets generated and transmitted is another story.

JG Ballard photo © Steve Double.

I’ve enjoyed the various short stories of yours that are reproduced all over the web — there’s a lot of Ballard in them, as we’ve discovered. What’s the status of your mooted ‘Quiet Man’ book of short stories? Will it ever be released?

It exists mainly as a means to write songs. Things get manifested there and I move them into music. There’s been some talk of releasing sections that have been read and recorded recently. K-punk did one that I haven’t heard yet, but which seems to have been of interest. Hard to say how it would work as a book. I think it’s probably better as fragments.

I’m doing some Super-8 filming of ‘The Quiet Man’ for a project called ‘Grey Suit Music’. It’s continuing something I began in 1978, and contains some scenes shot then using Eddie Milov from Gloria Mundi.

Do you have a novel or film script in you?

That’s a challenge which I’d love to take on one day. But it would take much more of that time thing, of which I have none at present. Barely time to take a walk.

What on Earth is going on with the track ‘Ray 1/Ray 2′, from your album with Louis, Crash and Burn? Surely this is a Billy Joel parody — a cheeky nod and a wink to ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’? You once said you wanted to bring a ‘more instinctive, human element’ into your work — a sense of play. Is this an example?

Yes. Technofun. It’s Subterranean Homesick Electron Rock of the most shameless kind. Leave Billy Joel out of it though, and insert Dylan Drunk, backed up by the Virtual Velvets. A long list of TechnoLies and SellSpeak. I’m always fascinated by the jargon of certain trades and their delicious absurdity. We fell over several times recording that.

What’s your position on the free trading and downloading of music? Mainstream artists react against downloading, pointing to lost income, while underground musicians say that they get no income from CDs anyway, and rather more from concerts and gigs, so therefore they welcome ‘illegal’ downloading as a promotional tool…

It will obviously be the only way you can derive income from music in future, apart from playing live. At present it’s a mess. Everyone involved acted too slowly and the rug was duly pulled. Survivors may be OK in future. But it will all take time to sort out. Not many people have it.

The next generation will benefit most. Work it out: 1% of the net downloading x 1 song at 1p = ? I haven’t done the figures — Negroponte did it in dollars but that was some time ago and things change daily. Of course, the usual suspects will inevitably attempt to interpose themselves between you and the money.

Why don’t you offer mp3 downloads on the Metamatic site? Tiny Colour Movies is on iTunes, but it’s DRM-protected and the bit rate, as with all iTunes wares, is a ridiculous 128kbps. I think most music lovers want to pay for downloads but part of the reason they continue to download illegally is because official stores like iTunes are so expensive and so restrictive in terms of the sonic quality and the rights management of the music. There has to be a better way, and I’m just wondering why more artists don’t offer downloads on their web sites. Cutting out the middleman, this could be done at a reasonable price and at CD quality, and I truly believe that the artist would in fact make more money this way.

Things will improve. Evolution takes time, administration, attention, persistence, knowledge. Plus effective distribution of music is actually only a single fraction of the aspects of the entity we like to call ‘musician’ — which is actually a swarm organism. It will cease to exist without all the buzzing components that make up its substance. The web simply can’t carry all that yet. I’m sure it will one day. But not quite yet.

You once described the music of the mid-80s as a “double-breasted dumbness”. Who excites and inspires you among the current crop of artists?

Mercifully it’s all become much more various since the mid 80s. I like elements and aspects of Depth through Surface, Peaches, Goldfrapp, Ladytron, Adult, Perspects, White Stripes, Radiohead, Robin Guthrie, Harold Budd, Oasis, The La’s, Aphex Twin, Vincent Gallo, M82, Fatal Love Triangle, BuzzBoy, Blofish, The Boards of Canada, Radon, Virus 252, Formal Equation, Louis Gordon, The Virtual Girls, Composite Human, Restricted Vision, Iggy Pop, The Machine Harmony Committee, Touch, Cannibal Clothing.

You’ve said that your career was shaped by your public image — that of a ghost among the city, finding dignity among the static — and that you had no choice in adopting that persona because you didn’t like being observed when you didn’t want to be. In some ways, it seems adopting such an outlook was prescient, in fact necessary for survival, given the rise of reality TV and the severely devolved notion of private space these days.

I think any sort of career I have is more a long accident. It is firmly shaped by deep personal inadequacies. Not shy but innately reserved. No good at being the object of attention in public. Need to go in for repairs frequently. Begin to feel like a shadow – time to leave swiftly. Only thing I could do was manifest someone who was tailored by all this, then operate him at one remove, in order to survive at all. No choice. Either that or: 1) Give it up. 2) Perish by degrees. 3) Hire someone else to do it for me. Being short of funds at the time I did the next best thing. What would you do?

John Foxx and his admirer, Gary Numan, as seen by Japanese magazine Music Life.

Does the rise of “reality” culture — mediated by technology — fill you with dread? Or do you still believe, as you once said, that “we’re now entering a world where technology is more elegant. There are problems and we can see them — social, political, etcetera — but things will work themselves out”.

Technology is elegant and we aren’t. An interesting effect of technology is it enables people to do the opposite of many previous norms.

For example, we can…

• Be dirty and have long hair (not that the two necessarily go together, of course). We have soap and antiseptics: no lice, fleas or septicaemia.
• Pierce ourselves for fun and status – with antiseptics and antibiotics.
• Have many sexual partners: we have contraceptives and some effective STD treatments.
• Get impossibly fat: we have liposuction and media attention for the truly high achieving.
• Become drug addicts: we have clinics and media attention.
• Wipe out small populations of civilians: we have remote devices (fortunately this looks like coming to an end).
• Use everything up: we have oil (fortunately this looks like coming to an end).
• Move and live and holiday away from home: we have transport (ditto)
• Buy pornography in the supermarket: we now have conventional media forced to compete with the Internet.
• Die of body development: we have steroids and ingestible synthetic hormones.
• Wear Nylon: we have effective deodorants and anti-perspirants.
• Drive everywhere and expect a road: we have cars.
• Live packed into vast cities: we have antibiotics, transport, aircon, water filtering, heating, sewers, and everything else which supports the ecology.
• Have fun surgery: we have developed lifesaving techniques we can now misuse for entertainment, art and money.
• Talk to anyone in the world, in public: we have mobile phones – closest thing to telepathy — yet people still shout.

I think that statement of mine you refer to was evidence of a desire to go home after being exhausted by questioning. Sure, it all may work itself out — but it’s going to need some very acute and constant current awareness. Logic is a form of insanity and needs to be judiciously suspended occasionally, in order to check on what is actually happening. Technologies operate in similar ways and likewise can create self-justifying ecologies of thought and behaviour. I think we constantly need to keep checking and suspending.

I can’t look at Big Brother or any sort of reality show. Brat Panto. Might watch the Cronenberg Variation if it arrives.

Will your Antonioni soundtrack ever be released?

No. It’s long gone.

Will you ever tour Australia?

I’d like to. But it will most likely be as drifting molecules about twenty years from now.

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..:: LINKS
+ A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture: The John Foxx Interview Part 1 of this conversation
+ Metamatic Official John Foxx site
+ Cathedral Oceans Official site
+ Lively (and obsessive) Foxx forum at the official Ultravox site
+ K-punk review of the first three Ultravox albums
+ ‘Old sunlight from other times and other lives’: John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies K-punk analysis
+ Rockwrok UltraFoxx tribute site

As part of our Ballardian Music series, Cat Hope looks back at Howard Shore’s soundtrack for the David Cronenberg adaptation of Crash.

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Cat Hope is an Australian musician and academic, based in Perth, Western Australia. Besides performing in the bands Lux Mammmoth and Gata Negra, she also performs solo noise music using bass guitar. Cat lectures in classical music at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.
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‘Crash is a psychopathological hymn and I’m singing it’ — J G Ballard

JG Ballard has always had a musical sensibility, despite his claims to possess a ‘tin ear’. He’s quoted in The Face as saying ‘there’s no music in my work. The most beautiful music in the world is the sound of machine guns’. In an interview with the French magazine Paris Review in 1984, Ballard says he didn’t even own a single record or player, though he didn’t mind listening to Serge Gainsbourg if his girlfriend put it on. Then again, his short story ‘Sound Sweep’ (1960) discusses the ultrasonic possibilities for music, and he was quoted in 2001 as saying that music by Brian Eno alongside architecture by Frank Gehry would best describe the ‘leisure world’ depicted in his Vermilion Sands stories. In an interview with the New Musical Express in 1985, he claimed that the music genre in the arts is the carrier of the ‘real news’.

And some of Ballard’s favourite films are created by directors who work in a fruitful and continuous tandem with composers. David Lynch, whose Blue Velvet (1986) was the best film of the ’80s according to Ballard, usually collaborates with composer Angelo Badalamenti. Alfred Hitchcock, who Ballard has written about in many contexts, had a long-standing partnership with Bernard Herrmann. Fittingly, the film adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash was made by one of the most important director/composer teams of the last 40 years: Canadians David Cronenberg and Howard Shore.

Ballard declared that Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) was ‘the first film of the 21st century’, and in a review of the director’s latest, A History of Violence (2005), he wrote that ‘all Cronenberg’s films make us edge back into our seats, gripped by the story unfolding on the screen but aware that something unpleasant is going on in the seats around us’. True enough, though this author tends to believe that it’s the complex relationship between Cronenberg and Shore that creates this effect.

Shore understands about space, silence, dynamics and layering in the context of film music and its ability to manipulate the viewer’s perception of the images, and he says he uses his visceral reactions to the director’s rough cut in order to start creating a score, allowing it to fuel his ideas. Before Crash, Shore and Cronenberg had made six films together, starting with The Brood (1979). Shore says Cronenberg has always granted him considerable freedom, often remarking that Cronenberg was his favourite director to work with — not bad from someone who has scored over a hundred films. Shore says he ‘thought of movies as BEING film scores’ — that for him, film and music are intertwined, not unlike film and sound editor Walter Murch, who says we ’see/hear film’. Shore claims that the act of writing music for film actually allowed his music to eventuate in the first place, and that films perform his music for him in a way.

Crash features a reverb-drenched score that mixes electronic, modified and acoustic instruments, classical arrangements and experimental electronic manipulation. The score successfully creates an atmosphere that allows the violence and sexuality to seep out, rather than representing it in some way. It is unlike any other score Shore has created before or since, and saw him return to a smaller ensemble. He had created full-blown orchestral scores for Dead Ringers (1988) and Naked Lunch (1991) but the budget wouldn’t allow for such indulgence in this film. As in the more experimental scores in the earlier films, this led to a much more interesting musical product. The repetitive melodic patterns, the limited tonal and thematic range, and the reluctance to change key creates a claustrophobic environment for the film enhanced by an unusual instrumental combination.

Image: © Fine Line Features

Around a quarter of the score was written, then recorded, then manipulated electronically in the studio. As the film progresses, the music becomes stranger, perhaps representing the psychological unravelling of James Ballard, the main character. In the car-wash scene, Shore creates a sort of ‘music concrete’ by sampling Foley recordings gathered by the sound designer (music concrete can be best described as electronic music produced from editing together fragments of natural and industrial sounds) — not unlike Wilder’s tape-recorder manipulations or Laing’s observations of the acoustic properties of water pipes in Ballard’s High-Rise (1974).

The car-wash piece begins with detailed recordings of the convertible as it reconfigures: the sound of the window enclosing the occupants in the hermetic booth of the car, giving way to the mixture of shimmering water sounds and thick wads of cloth against metal. The sound of the pulsating machines builds to an intensity measured by the sexual activity inside the car. Elsewhere, the music is rarely louder than other film sounds — dialogue, breathing, car engines and traffic noise dominate the sonic landscape.

The throaty sound of Vaughan’s huge car is perhaps the most prominent sound in the film, a delightful contrast to the delicate, interweaving music score. Shore’s contribution almost acts as a sublime muzak, never intruding on the fabric of the film yet evoking qualities from it. Shore and Ballard have both expressed a dislike of background music, yet muzak plays an important part in Ballard’s vision of a bland future. Similarly, the intelligent balance of music and sound in Crash creates an interesting equilibrium between the idea of music creating an environment for action — magnifying the images and meanings — and the non-music often featured in Ballard’s work, like Super-Cannes (2000).

I wonder what genre of film Shore would classify Crash. In some ways, he has included elements of the ‘love story’, as the lush strings featured in the film’s conclusion suggest. In another film, this music could be heard as romantic, but here it adds a type of lyricism to the possibility of death, to the ugly distortions of form. The only other place this writing style appears is in a jump cut to James’s bedroom after the car wash and its score of sound effects — a similarly distorted ‘romantic’ scene.

The score uses six electric guitars, three harps, three woodwinds, prepared piano, strings and a percussionist. The guitars are the only instruments run through effects, creating what Shore calls a ‘harp sound’. This subtle use of electronic effect is mirrored in Ballard’s comments about technology in Crash: that the car is a part of technology that we are most involved with, providing a kind of marriage of human imagination and technology. These terms could apply to the modern electric guitar, but also to describe Shore’s take on his score for the film. The ingenious mixture of electronic instruments (guitars) with acoustic instruments (winds, piano, strings, percussion) is left raw but at times subtly altered — in the studio or through preparation. Whether it’s manipulated guitars or classic string arrangements, each idea is carefully considered, tapered and applied. The luscious antique sound of harps — strings plucked over images of slow-moving, heavy traffic — provides a connection between old and new technologies. The sensuality of the flute in the sex scene between James and Catherine belies the crudeness and somehow formal nature of Catherine’s sexual monologue about Vaughan.

The different colours provided by these instruments reflect the relationship between the cold machine and the warm body. The electric hum of a guitar amp, the slow decay of a delay effect, the eerie breath of flutes — music has long held a power to effect the body, and the construction of instruments may arguably represent one of the earliest uses of technology for art. This score polarises that most ancient of instruments (the harp and flute) against the more contemporary (electric guitars, computer manipulation), perhaps reflecting Ballard’s pairing of basic human needs (sex) with contemporary culture (cars).

Image: © Fine Line Features

The prepared piano is an excellent addition, carefully embedded in the score. It delightfully mirrors the adapted body of Gabrielle, with her additions and adjustments to what is considered a ‘normal’ body, as well as James’s ‘prepared leg’, examined in silence after his accident. The prepared piano is the musical parallel to the modified body — a classic structure adapted. When Vaughan rams Ballard’s car in the scrapyard, the prepared piano brings out the sound of metal on metal — via metal objects placed in the piano.

Unlike many film soundtracks, much of the best music from the film is included on the CD release. The CD frees the pieces from the heavy sound effects of the film, and tantalising titles such as ‘Mechanism of Occupant Ejection’ and ‘Chromium Bower’ add to the new experience of listening without seeing, and also cause us to wonder if this music would indeed be so interesting without having seen the film. This is perhaps answered by the occasion of a live performance of the score in Australia in 1998, when the music was presented as an assemblage of the cues from the film, configured to a continuous 40-minute piece. The musicians were positioned in a spatial pattern to reconstruct the spacing used for the recording of the score, which was originally produced in 7.1 (SDDS). The film was not screened for the presentation; the focus was on the music and its live spatialisation.

Film director Bernardo Bertolucci apparently told Cronenberg that Crash is a religious masterpiece.

Maybe it was Shore singing Ballard’s psychopathological hymn after all.

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– Cat Hope, 2006
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>> Buy Howard Shore’s Crash soundtrack from Amazon.

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..::: BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Online (all web sites accessed April 2006)
>> Ballard, JG. The Killer Inside. Guardian Unlimited.
>> Boston, John (rickmcgrath.com). JG Ballard’s Second Wave. rickmcgrath.com.
>> Fine Line Features. Crash: Official Site.
>> Hall, Chris. Future Shock. Spike Magazine.
>> Kadrey, Richard and Stefanac, Suzanne. J.G. Ballard on William S. Burrough’s Naked Truth. Salon.

Print
>> Brockman, Mikita (ed). Car Crash Culture, 2001, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
>> Brophy, Philip (ed). ‘Howard Shore in Conversation: Composing With A Very Wide Palette’, Cinesonic: The World of Sound In Film, 1999, Sydney: AFTRS
>> V. Vale; Ryan, M (Eds.). JG Ballard: Quotes, 2004, San Francisco: RE/Search Publications

Some lovely London-based reader could, though, and perhaps summarise Steve ‘kode 9‘ Goodman’s ‘Urban Delay: the Sonic Fiction of J.G. Ballard’ paper for this site. It’s free, apparently. Go on — I’ll be your best mate.

Here’s the line up:

All sessions held in the Small Hall (Cinema), Richard Hoggart Building (Main Building), Goldsmiths

Thursday 15th June

9:00 – 9:30
Registration

9:45 – 11:00
Greg Tate, ‘Closer to the Edit: Race Paper Scissors Islam Science Fiction’

11:15 –12:45
Panel #1: Potentialities

Owen Hatherley, ‘Art is a Branch of Mathematics’: Zamyatin’s Socio-Fantasy’
Wissam Mansour, ‘The End of Science Fiction With a Twist of Fiction’
Dene October, ‘The (Becoming wo)Man Who Fell to Earth’

12:45 – 1:45
Lunch

1:45 – 2:45
Anthony Joseph, ‘“Using the Future to Reconcile the Wrongs of the Past”: Building the African Origins of UFOs’

3:00 – 4:45
Panel #2: Sonic Science Fictions

Mark k-punk, ‘Consensual Hallucinations’
Susan Schuppli, ‘From Here to Eternity’
Mark Broughton, ‘Dyschronia in Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape’
Steve Goodman, ‘Urban Delay: the Sonic Fiction of J.G. Ballard’

Friday 16th June

10:00 – 11:00
Roger Luckhurst, ‘Science Fiction: From Subculture to Network Portal’

11:15 – 12:45
Panel #3: Sci-phi

Nina Power, ‘Science Fiction and Philosophy in Kant, Sartre and Philip K. Dick: What Does the Extra-terrestrial Think We Are?’
James Burton, ‘Fabulation and Messianic Time: a Science Fictional Logic of Salvation’
Maeve Pearson, ‘Progeny: The Political Uses and Abuses of Childhood in Some Stories by Ursula Le Guin and Phillip K. Dick’

12:45 – 2:00
Lunch

2:00 – 3:00
Luciana Parisi, ‘Affective Sensorium’

3:15 – 4:50
Panel #4: Onto-mutations

Jessica Edwards, ‘“Running Out of Her Skin”: The Fold of Deep Time in the Black Female Body’
Oliver Belas, ‘“Transhumanism” and Metonymy in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis’
Michael Metthey , ‘Nanotechnologies’
James Trafford, ‘Nanotechnics and SF Capital’

5.00 – 5:40
Final Panel: keynote speakers in discussion
Chair: Kodwo Eshun

5:50 – 6:30
Performance by Anthony Joseph and the Spasm Band

Victor Slezak as ‘T’ in The Atrocity Exhibition

Ballardian presents an exclusive interview with Jonathan Weiss, director of The Atrocity Exhibition, the film based on the J.G. Ballard collection of ‘condensed novels’.

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NOTE: This is a revised and expanded version of the original interview. The new additions are a reworked introduction, the addition of notes, and the inclusion of JW’s original, lengthier reply to one question (which I missed the first time around; see the note), plus my follow-up response and JW’s follow-up response. See the postscript for more background to this interview. SS
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When film adaptations of JG Ballard’s work are discussed, it’s Crash and Empire of the Sun that grab the headlines. And then there’s Jonathan Weiss’s Atrocity Exhibition. For ages, JGB watchers have speculated about this film — because it’s had just a few screenings since its completion six years ago, it’s gathered a thick crust of secrecy. Weiss, working with very limited resources, oversaw a stop-start production that unfurled over a number of years. Originally running at 105 minutes, the film was edited down to its present 90-minute form after its screening at the 1999 Slamdance festival. And that was pretty much it for The Atrocity Exhibition — it never had a theatrical release, was never marketed. Very few people have seen it. But now, thanks to the Dutch company Reel 23, which recently released this buried work on DVD, we can finally see what Weiss was up to — as Andrés Vaccari did in his review of the DVD for Ballardian.

And now here it is, flawed, fatal and totally flammable — the Jonathan Weiss Interview.

– Simon Sellars

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All images © Jonathan Weiss and Reel 23
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How did you first come across Atrocity Exhibition, the book?

I had been hunting for the book for a long time, maybe without even knowing it. I never went to film school and initially had no desire to be a filmmaker in the traditional sense. I had been making some truly ‘experimental’ films (I usually hate that term) in that I really was experimenting with film structure looking for what worked, what did not. I started to realise that the duration of short films might be posing inherent problems for what I had in mind. But I found very few feature length films that did what I was interested in, perhaps only Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, and a bit in some of the Derek Jarman Super 8 films blown up to 35mm, like Last of England.

And then somehow I found the RE/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, and I knew in about two pages that I had the book I was looking for. It was absolutely perfect. It was already a shooting script for a film, but since Ballard was an author, he called it a book. I had read other Ballard works, but of course they are totally different from The Atrocity Exhibition, which is the ultimate distillation of his thinking, rendered in a poetically scientific style.

How did you approach Ballard?

I wrote a letter to his agent asking for permission to use the text to do a Super 8 version. I received some sort of vague permission, which would have been worth entirely nothing later. But the film became a real production, as people who were commercial entities in New York City at the time found out about what I was doing and begged to sign on. You cannot believe how enthusiastic people were to help me make it into a ‘real’ film — something that could be projected from 35mm in a typical movie house. So we just made it. It reminds me of the children’s book, Stone Soup: you start making a cauldron of soup with nothing but stones and water, but if you do it right, at the end it’s filled with vegetables and meat.

Anna Juvander in The Atrocity Exhibition

At the end of the filming process, when we had a rough cut that was close to the finished version, a friend from England who knew Ballard’s daughter offered to deliver a copy of the VHS to him. He called a few days later to report it delivered. The next day, I heard my wife at the time, Anna Juvander, who plays many roles in the film, screaming. I went to see what the ruckus was about. She was standing by the fax machine, shaking, reading a fax. It was the first one from Ballard, praising the movie. The next day, I kid you not, we received another. He loved it. He loved it so much, in fact, that when I read the faxes I thought, ‘Maybe he’s not quite right any longer’. I was not ready for him to call the movie ‘a poetic masterpiece’ — I would have been happy just hearing that he could watch it in one sitting, or something similar.

We subsequently were able to buy the rights, very reasonably, because of that. In the nick of time, too, as Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa company were after it. I shudder to think what would have happened if JGB did NOT like the movie. Moral of this story: don’t ever, ever, ever do anything as stupid as making anything without getting the rights, in stone, for one million years minimum.

Did Ballard have any input into the film?

JGB indeed helped after the film was finished with a suggestion for a little introductory sequence, which makes the film a tad bit more accessible. I liked the inaccessible opening, but saw the wisdom in his approach. Other than that, he essentially rubberstamped the film with his good wishes.

What was the funding structure like? Was it entirely private?

You are obviously not an American. There is NO such thing as public money for this kind of film in the USA. There might be public money for making a documentary about Eskimos with Down Syndrome, but not for features. That is one reason why American film is the way it is and why other countries’ films are, also, the way they are.

Why did you cut 30 minutes from the original running time?

We took out all the good parts. Like the serious sex and violence.

OK, but why?

Just kidding. I did have a funny interlude with the head of programming for the Sundance Channel, who wanted to buy the film but wondered whether the few frames (less than one second) of hard-core penetration would make it through corporate headquarters. I suggested I replace the footage, because it did not have to be penetration to do what I wanted in that scene. She looked at me like I was a naughty child: how dare I contemplate ‘compromising’ a work of art by self-censoring it. So I said, ‘Fine, leave it in’. She was fired or left the station soon after, anyway. The porn is still there. We just did some necessary editing. I am happy with the length of the final version of the film. Longer was not better.

The film took a number of years to complete. How did you maintain the look and feel over time?

Formaldehyde works wonders. The film took more than a year to shoot, mainly because the shooting schedule coincided with the worst winter in about one hundred years. The editing took forever and went through three different editing houses, because we had no money — it was done as a labour of love, and love runs out.

How did Reel 23 come into the picture?

They liked the film.

That’s it? You suggested to me that the parent company, Filmfreak, actually created Reel 23 so your film could finally be seen. That must have been a huge boost to your confidence.

The people at Filmfreak and Mr Ballard have been the only bright spots on an otherwise very depressing and bleak landscape since making the film. The problem, of course, is that the film is SO very different from other films that to sell it you need to differentiate it from the rest of the stuff in the store. To do this the wonderful people at Filmfreak really went out on a limb and made a very risky investment to market Atrocity and, importantly, other films like it or in the same spirit. This includes very different material, like David Cronenberg’s first films. They had Atrocity subtitled in most languages necessary for a wider release and even had the master made for a NTSC DVD, which to date is waiting for the right distributor to take on the film for America. They’re a European company and not in a position to do distribution for the USA and Canada.

How do you feel about your home audience missing out?

It’s tragic.

Are you being sarcastic?

Wouldn’t you be sarcastic about the prospects of finding distribution for a tiny Ballard adaptation in the ultra-commercial, competitive American market if the main Ballard website thoroughly trounced your film? It’s like asking a thirsty man if he wants something to drink, whilst turning the spigot off. I was at an event a week ago that precipitated this — where someone asked if I had read Vaccari’s review of my film. It was clear from my conversation with them just how damaging this is to TAE in terms of finding a distributor. You may not think so, but you are not in the film business, to my knowledge.

You may not realize the irony of the situation, but having started TAE at the age of 25, (I turned 42 yesterday), I now find myself having to try and undo the damage that some two-bit clod has perpetrated, so that some people might still want to see my film. You talk about the “dire” situation of film in Australia, due to a lack of funding, you say.

[ NOTE: I mentioned to Weiss that I have interviewed many independent filmmakers here in Australia. I told him this mainly in an attempt to establish some kind of common ground -- also to express sympathy with him and with the concomitant plight of independent filmmakers working with extremely scarce resources. I needn't have bothered. Jonathan refused to meet me halfway, and my attempt was swiftly used against me. ]

Do you realize that the problems with film, on the level of something like my film, for example, are far more complex than getting the government to give you some cash? Imagine working for more than 15 years on a difficult, little film which one would expect at least Ballard fans to appreciate. Then having some ham-fisted moron who authoritatively pronounces Ballard to be “outmoded” in his thinking (on a “Ballardian” website, no less) trashing the film as being “dated” because it does not mention Britney Spears and Paris Hilton!

NOTE: Andrés mentioned Britney and Paris, in his comment after the review, as an example of how cultural icons become dated, not of how Weiss’s film is dated; he never calls for either woman’s inclusion in the film and to suggest otherwise is a clear misrepresentation. Also, Andrés never calls Ballard outmoded; rather he suggests that the one book, Atrocity, has not worn as well as some of JGB’s other works. I don’t agree with that, but it’s Andres’s opinion and he’s entitled to it.

Don’t you feel embarassed publishing that? Would you really want to have a drink with Jim after he read that? What would you say to him? Something like, “Sorry to publish that blather, but its not my opinion. Really.”

[ NOTE: That's 'Jim Ballard', in case you're wondering. ]

Put yourself in my shoes for a moment, Simon. Your website, and others like it, are about the only portal through which prospective audiences for TAE will likely travel. At the moment, the world walks the Google path and the first place they are going to start is yours, as far as this is concerned. Google “Atrocity Exhibition” and film and see where you go. For most people the first stop, with an authoritative name like Ballardian, is also going to be their last. How many people who read the review will go to the trouble of trying to see TAE? I would not waste my time, if I were the usual sort, having read such a cursory dismissal of not only the film but the book itself.

[ NOTE: I can't wear this charge. I never look at one review when deciding whether to see a film; I always like to gather a range of opinions, and as far as I can tell that's a pretty normal attitude... By this stage I was getting thoroughly tired of Jonathan’s attempts to bully us into giving him a favourable review, tired of him belittling my journalistic credentials, tired of him abusing my colleague despite repeated requests to stop, and tired of this website bearing the brunt of being the only site to review Weiss’s film. I suggested to him that he publish his own website devoted to the damned thing. Jonathan could then shape public opinion the way he wanted to shape it. As it is, Reel23’s graphics-intensive Atrocity page does him no favours — with no text, merely images of text, it is nowhere to be found on Google. In this day and age of instant access and instant publishing, Jonathan really has only himself to blame for Google searches returning at No. 1 anything other than the official, sanctioned Atrocity product. ]

In short, I think you have done a disservice to the only small, independent film ever made of one of Ballard’s works, and you worry about the “dire” condition of film? Rather ironic. I would be extremely suprised if either you or Mr Vaccari ever gave any thought whatsoever about the effects of your actions on a film like this. Mr Vaccari’s motivations seem clear — this is his little moment of authority and attention. Your motives escape me.

Reading what you have up now, you would never even know what Ballard himself (namesake of your site, remember) thought of the film, which is quite extraordinary. Most authors quietly hate what is done with their work on film.

I’m sorry the review played a part in your decision to not contact distributors, but neither I nor Andres should feel any responsibility or obligation to you in that regard. What if a major newspaper like the Guardian published a negative review in their online section? What then? You really need to get out of the trap of thinking that this site has some kind of obligation to publish a positive review of your film. I’m sorry to say, but I don’t run a Ballard ‘fan site’. I am as interested in publishing critical opinions of Ballard’s work and related products (like film versions) as I am in praising the man. The site is not hagiography.

Would you care to expand upon your responses to Andres’s criticisms? It would seem he is not alone in voicing some of these points. Other reviewers make similar claims, like this one.

Anyone who thinks that the world depicted in The Atrocity Exhibition has been rendered obsolete in anything but its decorative attributes is severely deluded. That review suggests I ‘made a grave error’ in thinking that the content of Atrocity is still relevant. So what is that content: that we DON’T live in a pervasive media landscape where reality checked out long ago? That we are not obsessed and consumed by psychopathologies that create and determine our relationships with ourselves, our family and friends, our celebrities, our governments? That our cars and other vehicles stopped having polyperverse identities, and are no longer sexualised fetish objects? Has sex itself receded from the flood plains of our time and gone back to its purely procreative origins?

The problem is that as subsequent generations are born into this upside-down world, they see it as normal and natural. It is not. They see the wardrobe, props and sets change and use these ephemera as a surveyor sets his stakes.

NOTE: Weiss originally emailed me the following ‘postscript’, which I missed the first time around, but which I recently discovered at the bottom of another message. I’m publishing it here, for completeness’ sake.

Mr Vaccari’s contention that the book, the film, or both, are “dated”, seems to be making two points. One is that the film belongs to a certain specific historical period (I assume the late 60s) and that is bad. It’s bad to be dated. Which means that all historical films, for example, anything that tries or simply does evoke a period is bad (TAE, by the way, does not do that as a matter of course). Bad meaning dated. Toss all Merchant Ivory, not because it’s sickly film culture, but because it’s historical, it’s dated, thus it’s bad. Toss Andrei Rublev, too, I would assume. Where we stop tossing, I don’t know.

The second point pertaining to this line of attack would be that the references themselves, being historic, are dated and getting old and grey. They don’t work anymore, don’t have the power they used to. Nobody can identify with Marilyn Monroe anymore (excepting yesterday’s Wall Street Journal dated April 10 06, discussing the economics of control over her image). Mr Vaccari must know this problem himself from rereading his own torturous attempt at recreating Ballardian fictional prose and style in “Chariots of Fire”, a delightful piece I found on his website, using Princess Di to “update” things a bit from Ballard’s “dated” original. Actually, if truth be told, Mr Vaccari has quite the hard on for Atrocity Exhibition, despite his professed disdain, as he copies it yet again in form and function in the wonderful short bit, “Why I Want to Fuck John Howard,” a real treat and topical to boot.

But back to Mr Vaccari’s major point of criticism — the point of referencing. References function in a myriad of ways, and no film, nor any work of art, can possibly be divorced from the culture and icons which comprise it. People have no problem watching films set in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, etc. Why? Because whether a film is good or not has nothing to do with the period in which it is set or the references it contains. If you needed a Rosetta Stone to watch the film, that would be another story.

There’s an interesting quote over at Senses of Cinema: ‘Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair have never done anything so vulgar as attempting to “adapt” a Ballard fiction. They understand too well that we now live in the landscape that Ballard has been faithfully anatomising and populating with characters since the 1960s. Why bother ‘adapting’ when you can hit the motorway and find all the sets, the actors, and the (CCTV) camera positions ready and waiting for you?’

Mr Petit and Mr Sinclair do not make feature films. They make arthouse installations, but call them ‘films’. Here’s an IMDB comment on their London Orbital: ‘Pompous, pretentious, meaningless and totally pointless’. Maybe they should try being vulgar next time. Since you bring up Mr Sinclair, please note that his BFI book on Cronenberg and Ballard [also called Crash] was so filled with fabrications and outright lies in its discussion of my film, still then a work in progress, that when I spoke to JGB about it he was as appalled as I was. That some of the self-appointed gatekeepers of ‘avant-garde’ culture in the UK, and, for that matter, Ballard’s work, have to invent things about The Atrocity Exhibition, as Sinclair did, suggests another agenda at work.

That shocks and surprises me. Do you want to set the record straight and point out exactly what Sinclair got wrong?

Sinclair invented erroneous figures for how much the film cost and where the money went — having NEVER having talked to me or communicated with me in any way. I even called Ballard as some of the errors were actually attributed to him. JGB assured me that these things were fabricated and indicated he had his own issues with the veracity of the book.

I can live with a so-called serious author trying to belittle my little film, in a book on a relatively big film by Cronenberg, by saying it cost a fraction of what it did, and that the money was spent in a trivial way, et cetera. What I cannot abide by was Sinclair’s central premise: that all filmic adaptations of serious literary work have to be divorced in spirit from their progenitors. If not, Sinclair insists, they have no integrity. Well, I consider Ballard to be a very good judge of things like integrity. Ballard loved the film and has been the film’s biggest support. But Sinclair could not mention that, because his premise and his pay check was to write a book praising Cronenberg’s take on Ballard, which compelled him, I assume, to denigrate my approach.

Why would Sinclair do that? Because you’re from outside the UK? I haven’t read the book; I’m just speculating…

The problem, well understood in academia and minor cultural zones like this, boils down to territoriality. The stakes, understood in terms of money or power, are miniscule. This breeds the worst kind of petty territorialism, where supposedly intelligent adults behave like spoiled children not wanting to share their sandbox. I assume Mr Sinclair, who later went on to try and make a Ballardian film with a small budget himself, was trying, like a dog pissing on a hedge, to mark off his own little fiefdom. The fact that some unknown American with no pedigree had actually made a full-length adaptation of the most difficult-to-adapt book Ballard ever wrote, and having Ballard LIKE the movie, may have pissed off some people in the UK, Sinclair included.

I also, in retrospect, now think the same of Mr Vaccari’s very strange dismissal of both the book and my film, as he has obviously been inspired enough by The Atrocity Exhibition to write his own undisguised copies of parts of the book.

NOTE: I have since read Sinclair’s book and I cannot see how it could have provoked such a reaction. As Tim Chapman mentions in the comments at the end of this interview, Weiss’s film is barely mentioned in Sinclair’s book, but even so Sinclair actually notes that Ballard praises the film. Tim has reproduced the relevant excerpts in the comments section: see it and decide.

Have you ever confronted Sinclair?

I would not know how to reach him let alone expect him to come clean. If you fabricate a bunch of garbage and someone confronts you with your malfeasance, would you expect contrition?

I had a similar thing happen at the same time with the BBC. They had requested a copy of my film to include in a program about adaptations of Ballard’s work. I was thrilled, of course. Imagine my shock when they used footage from my film as if the BBC had shot it, with no context and no proper acknowledgement of my film. They even used an actor to narrate OVER my film, from the book! No mention at all that I had made The Atrocity Exhibition. When I demanded an explanation and retraction, it was a month later and all I got was a curt letter admitting what they had done and removing my footage from their piece.

This is how even the BBC behaves with small films. It’s truly shameful, and no one cares.

Is a Ballardian aesthetic still needed in film and literature these days? Is Ballard’s worldview still relevant?

If it was not relevant, why operate a Ballard website? Nostalgia?

The question isn’t whether I think a Ballardian aesthetic is relevant today, but whether you do. Do you? I’m not attacking you; I’m genuinely interested in your answer.

Ballard’s work is essentially dystopic. Its subject is the world gone wrong, usually a slightly-in-the-future world which makes the whole thing easier for the reader to accept. In the last several decades, the Ballardian project has become centred on the decline of a value system which has held sway for Western Civilisation for centuries, even millennia. What is supplanting this value system — something extremely nihilistic — Ballard seems to see very clearly and be able to capture in his work. I felt that is true in The Atrocity Exhibition, and I feel it compelling his most recent work, perhaps even more strongly. Very few authors have the ability to both sense and capture this seismic change. He is a philosopher as much as an artist. Thus his aesthetic, his thinking, is more relevant than ever.

That does not even begin to come to terms with Ballard’s prescription for the malady, which is truly, majestically radical. It can be summarised, perhaps, by not rejecting or resisting the process of decline, but by abetting it.

Because your film deliberately subverts traditional narrative and contains some fairly disturbing imagery, people perceive it as ‘difficult’ viewing. Did that make it hard to market the film? How did audiences initially react to it?

The film has never had a theatrical release. And perhaps it should be that way, given the ‘vulgarity’ (to use the word properly) of film marketing and the realities of theatrical distribution today, worldwide. Where the hell is it supposed to play? At my local multiplex? I can count all of the theatres in New York City that play other films such as this on the fingers of one hand, with a few fingers left over. It’s not exactly March of the Penguins, now, is it? The film was never marketed because marketing requires money, hiring a publicist, et cetera. We never had the money to do that. I was hoping that a few influential critics or cultural figures (besides Ballard) would help the film in that regard, but I was mistaken. This website constitutes marketing, because the readers here are the core audience for the film, and look at how well that is going.

As for being difficult, if people call a film difficult, then it becomes so. I have had numerous instances of people showing up at private screenings with NO idea of what the film would be, dragged there by a friend, with no warning. At the end of a typical screening, it is usually very, very quiet. For some minutes. People are usually very still. They are in some kind of other state — maybe it’s shock, but I don’t think it’s that. Quite frequently, people who have nothing to do with the film business, or the culture world generally, are the best viewers, the ones who get the most from the film — the ones who understand the most, precisely because they THINK the least. The most difficult aspect of the film is actually seeing it.

Was the 1999 Slamdance screening the first?

The film first showed at Rotterdam in 1998, as a work in progress. As for festivals in general, they are not very good places to expect people to seriously watch films. They are essentially big parties, or rather disgusting, stupid, frenzied greed fests with people desperately running around, literally, looking for the next indie film that could make them a few million bucks. Considering that the problem with indie film (meaning everything save studio megaliths) today is the utter triumph of the worst kind of commerciality, it is really pathetic to see adults spend the kind of energy they do in the film world to make a few, paltry bucks. If you want to be a capitalist, it’s such small change.

You could, for example, be a hedge-fund manager and make in one year the total gross of all of those films. Then you could finance or even make yourself any films you wanted, and not give a shit how much money they made or lost. Obviously, the rewards are elsewhere.

You co-wrote the script with Michael Kirby [who also plays Dr Nathan in the film]. How did the working process between the two of you evolve?

Normally, a script is extremely important, as a film is about characters and you understand them through dialogue and action. The Atrocity Exhibition is very different. It is about places, space — meaning architectural space — time, events, unusual forms of consciousness, et cetera. There is no narrative. A non-narrative film. How do you make a ‘non-narrative’ film? They don’t teach you that in film school, which I had no interest in going to, anyway. You cannot read books or magazine articles on this subject. Michael, who was a very smart man, realised that the best approach for a book and a project like this is to create the illusion of a narrative.

People are so thoroughly conditioned in narrative, they will project it ANYWHERE they can. Everyone who watches The Atrocity Exhibition will construct a narrative of their own, and I have never heard two that were identical. Some viewers become quickly frustrated by the lack of narrative and think of it as a personal affront, an insult to their intelligence. Since they do not ‘get it’ because they are looking for ‘it’ in the wrong place, they become upset and dismiss the film. But others, who just let it flow over them, have reported experiences usually found during serious drug episodes, extended periods in isolation tanks or other attempts to get beyond the purview of quotidian consciousness. I guess that means Michael was on to something.

I wrote my part of the script visually, seeing the scenes happen. Michael did most of the dialogue, which is often lifted from the book. We were not looking for a ‘natural’ effect, but it might be worth noting that I spent most of my time directing the actors to stop acting, and deliver their few lines in as natural a way as possible. Michael did most of his writing for the Wooster Group, a very famous theatre company in SoHo, New York — funny how no one complains that the Wooster Group, people like Willem Dafoe, are doing non-narrative stuff.

The best way to look at dialogue in the film is like traffic signs for a motorist. They are there to keep you from getting lost — or worse.

Anna Juvander in The Atrocity Exhibition

The film is full of striking imagery — in parts it plays almost like a photo-roman. Do you have a photographic background? Is Chris Marker’s La Jetee an influence on your work?

I adore that film, and often wonder why so little came after it in the same vein. As for imagery, my issue with cinema is that it is not about film, it’s just filmed theatre — if you want to do film, it’s about the image. So if you make a non-narrative film, what is on the screen had better be compelling visually. Other than my sensibility, I have no photographic background and am a crap photographer.

Many people are surprised to learn that’s there’s a film version of The Atrocity Exhibition. How does it feel being the father of the ‘bastard child’ of JGB film adaptations? How do you see your film in relationship to David Cronenberg’s Crash and Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun?

I don’t see any relationship with those films.

Right, but what I’m getting at is this: do you feel your film has suffered unfavourably when Ballardian adaptations are discussed, considering you were up against the King of Hollywood on one side and the Indie King on the other?

It would be nice if people could just watch my film for what it is and not compare it to something as heterogeneous as the other Ballard films. But that does not usually happen, and considering the hostility to The Atrocity Exhibition, I have to wonder why? What is so threatening about this film? It has nothing in common with the other films — is that the issue? I truly do not know myself.

Victor Slezak as ‘T’ in The Atrocity Exhibition

I see some similarities. Just as the Atrocity book seems a prototype of Ballard’s novel Crash — a prequel in many ways — I wondered if you saw your film as serving that function to Cronenberg’s Crash. There seem to be similar stylistic choices: the blue light bathing some scenes; Victor’s acting as ‘T’, which seems to share mannerisms and tics with Elias Koteas in Crash; Anna’s Novotny, again sharing traits with Holly Hunter in Crash; the framing of scenes in car parks and so on. Or are such similarities merely functions of Ballard’s writing and its remarkable consistency?

Just to set the record straight, I shot The Atrocity Exhibition BEFORE Cronenberg shot Crash, so there is no possibility of influence from his film, nor would I copy his look, because I never liked Cronenberg’s cinematography, though I like some of his earlier films, like Videodrome. Anything shared between the two films is due to the books emerging one from the other, as Cronenberg, ‘parasite’ that he is (to use your fellow reviewer’s terminology) also lifted the exact same lines from Crash as I used in Atrocity. Ballard actually repeated material word for word in both books.

Cronenberg took a literal, ‘narrative’ approach to another supposedly ‘unfilmable’ book, Naked Lunch. Now, on the DVD’s commentary track you say you had no idea how to film Ballard’s ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ scene, and so you went for the most literal approach [in the film, T has sex in an automobile with Karen Novotny as she wears a Ronald Reagan mask]. But wouldn’t a literal approach have simulated some kind of mental therapy group, with patients masturbating over pictures of Ronald Reagan?

The issue, which keeps coming up in the comparisons with Cronenberg, is that I am literal in my adaptation of Ballard, but in fact Cronenberg is not. Just as he was not in Naked Lunch. Read that book and tell me that it is anything like the text. My problem is simple: Naked Lunch or The Atrocity Exhibition are essentially exceptional vehicles, which if read properly, will take you someplace very different from what is considered normal life. Cronenberg’s very style, which is extremely mainstream from a cinematographic and editing point of view, will always be at odds with his subject matter, at least when it comes to a book like Crash. To me, that is a fatal flaw. If you want to ride the vehicle to the end of the line, it has to be stylistically consistent or at least not fighting the material, the essence of what is being portrayed. I thus had to use a style as extreme as the book itself, something Cronenberg NEVER does. All his films look the same to me, visually speaking, the only difference being that over the years they got a bit slicker and better produced.

Anna Juvander as Karen Novotny in The Atrocity Exhibition

Regarding my ‘literal’ approach to the Reagan scene, I simply ask myself, ‘What is really happening here — in the text?’ People are in a constant sexual flux, consistent with the chaos of images we have created for ourselves, continuously overlaying images over objects and vice versa, often to sexual ends. In the film, there are scenes where ‘literally’ people are confused as to what is more ‘real’ — the image of a thing or the thing itself.

You’re keen for me to emphasise to our readers that Ballard was totally sold on your vision of the film. But Ballard was also keen on Empire of the Sun and Crash. So, it seems to me that Ballard would rubberstamp any filmed version of his work. Obviously, though, his reaction means a lot to you. Can you tell us a bit more about your relationship with Jim?

This is a tricky subject. As it is no mystery what I think of the films you mention, it may seem contradictory that I actually believe what JGB thought of my film. With Empire, Ballard was paid a lot of money and had access to a huge new audience for his work. If I were Ballard, I would not be complaining about Cronenberg, either. Ballard is certainly not biting the hand that feeds him. I honestly don’t know what Jim said about Crash. I know he was generally positive, but I never discussed the other films or directors with him. I thought that crass. I do not, however, see what Jim could possibly gain from spouting a bunch of goo about my film. He was very clear, for example, in those initial faxes, that he thought the film might fall irretrievably between the cracks. In private, he completely dismissed other attempts to film his work. So I believed him, and especially so since he did the DVD commentary, something to my knowledge he has not done for either of the other films. There is really no motivation, in this instance, for Ballard to fluff The Atrocity Exhibition. Unless you think he is some senile old geezer who just loves anyone making a film, however bizarre, of his work.

If I have to choose who, as an authority and a critic, to listen to regarding Atrocity, I will choose Ballard and not chimps like Vaccari and Sinclair. Since I gather your readers might follow my inclination, I noted the omission of Jim’s positive comments in the negative criticism of Vaccari and Sinclair, whose motives I find suspect on a host of counts — such as the fact that they are both guilty of trying to make really bad versions of Ballardian film or writing.

The two commentaries on the DVD (yours and Ballard’s) suggest there was a great deal of congruence between your interpretation of the book and Ballard’s views on his own text. Was there any area or aspect of the book where you found Ballard’s interpretation substantially at odds with your own?

I must be the most sheep-like of all possible interpreters of Ballard’s work, as I found no place I was at variance with the material I worked upon. Because of this, some reviewers enjoy using the term ‘parasitic’ in discussing my approach. A parasite, however, is defined by its negative effect on its host. JGB has yet to voice his objections.

My DVD copy is very grainy. Is that a deliberate effect?

You need a better TV set.

The set I have is just fine. The grainy texture merges the filmed footage with the archival film — it’s a good effect. So, is that a deliberate effect or a bad transfer?

I spent a great deal of time in pre-production choosing film stocks, lenses and exposure settings to create a very different film look, almost a vintage look, a bit like the visual texture of some of Tarkovsky’s films (I am only talking about the texture or grain here.) We used an Agfa stock, discontinued about when the film commenced shooting, which looks completely different from Kodak or Fuji, what everyone else uses. Same with the black and white, which was Ilford.

Would a bigger budget have changed the film? Would you have retained the archival footage?

I set out to make a film that I had never seen before. That much I accomplished. Having no money made it a much better, more interesting film than if I were better endowed. I moved out of Manhattan and found a large, industrial loft space in a very bad area of Brooklyn where I could shoot and live at the same time. That enabled a much different mode of production, where I could actually cook for my crew while a shot was being setup, for example. It was far more human, less hurried and stressed. It’s hard to work on a train when it’s doing 60mph, they say, and it’s true.

The archival footage was an interest of mine long before making the film. With the book, I found an ideal project to put such material to work. There is a very special psychological effect that comes from using decontextualised real footage, even after our little reality TV epidemic. When you view plastic surgery footage, or car crash simulations with dead bodies, outside the context of a documentary or program on that subject, the result is entirely different from watching the same material with a narrator droning on. The archival footage I used in Atrocity, which required months of searching in US government archives, brought another level to the film, one that could not have been achieved in any other manner. All the footage I used, by the way, was obtained gratis, contrary to what Mr Sinclair wrote in his book, where he asserts that my film’s budget was consumed by purchasing archival footage.

North American directors are all over Ballard film adaptations, but to me much of Ballard’s work is especially British. Obviously, much of his work is set in Britain, but there’s also a peculiar kind of British reserve regarding issues of class and sexuality that JGB appears to be sending up. Any thoughts on that?

I don’t see the book I adapted as having much to do with these issues. I actually went to University at London School of Economics, and understand what you mean in terms of British pomposity and sexual repression, but don’t find it relevant in this instance.

In your DVD commentary, you say that people watch narrative films to escape their ‘dull, boring’ lives? Isn’t that a little patronising?

Is it really patronising, or just true? Do you think I was talking about everyone else’s life whilst my own is so brimming full of excitement, sex, violence and generally interesting conflicts that culminate in highly satisfying denouements? Come on.

The modern world is replete with slaves: you have office slaves, factory slaves, agricultural slaves. The ones who have enough money to spend on two hours of escape go to the movies. That includes, of course, the rich, bored slaves, too, of which there are plenty. In fact, in 20th-century terms, just about everyone leads dull, boring lives, as seen relative to the lives of people like Tom, Brad and Angelina, whose real lives are mythologised on checkout-stand magazines so that the illusion is complete and pervasive.

Just go back to the film:

Traven: ‘Don’t you want to be in the movies, Karen?’
Karen Novotny: ‘We’re all in the movies’.

Are there any current directors at all whom you feel kinship with? Or do you feel that you’re at the vanguard of a new sensibility?

I would suggest that I am merely a leftover from an older sensibility, of directors inconceivable today. Unfortunately Tarkovsky died prematurely and all the other directors I admire, like Antonioni, Kubrick, Passolini, Teshigahara, Ozu, Kurosawa and the like, are long gone. Men who cared about what humanity is and what it is becoming. That especially is what I am interested in and is the sole concern of my filmmaking. Other people can make the entertaining stuff.

That would tie in with your DVD commentary, where you claim Atrocity is some kind of ‘nurturing’ film rather than a ‘junk food’ film.

‘Nurturing’ sounds like I made a granola bar into a film. Or that I’m some sort of wet nurse. At least the part about Atrocity not being the filmic equivalent of junk food is indeed correct. It’s not some empty crap that when consumed gives the illusion of fullness and satisfaction, if only for an instant. And then leaves you fat and sick.

I did not set out to make this or any other film as a stepping stone to a greater career in film, which was obviously my first, and perhaps my last, mistake. I’ve found that people in the film world, even the part of that world that pertains to my kind of films, really take you seriously only if they sense you are a ‘player’. They want to see where you are going. Lest you think I am kidding, Darren Aronofsky made PI around the same time I did Atrocity. It looked to me like a bad student film, but it was shrewdly marketed and now the guy is making Batman films.

That is the state of films today — it’s total sell-out land. So no, I don’t feel any kinships with people working today, not even people like Gaspar Noe, who I am sometimes compared with, because I am no fan of either gratuitous violence or doing anything in a film for the sake of effect or shock value.

Is it possible to change audience perception within a narrative-driven film industry? You must feel under siege from critics who see a non-narrative aesthetic as some kind of fault.

Go back a hundred years and look at the art world. How many artists were leaving traditional painting and representation for abstraction? What happened to them? Does that answer the question?

Not really — I’m not especially versed in the art world and its history.

My point is very simple: when abstraction arrived in the art world it was met with total derision, condemnation and refusal by the academy and the mainstream. Today, in a world where everyone is supposed to go to art museums, if only to catch the King Tut or Van Gogh megashow, we actually delude ourselves that we are culturally more astute than our forebearers, that a development like abstraction would immediately be greeted today with open arms, and/or that the avant garde has been subsumed into culture generally.

Cinema is the most comprehensive current art form, also the one uniquely of our time. Yet there is virtually no filmmaking being done that deserves the name of art. Film is entertainment, which is basically what art has become, as well. Abstraction, a bastard child of art which came to define modernism, is obviously kith and kin with the departure from narrative in film. And I can tell you from personal experience that you get the same reception making non-narrative films today as abstract painters or some poor bastard like Van Gogh got one hundred years ago.

Narrative film for me is pretty much dead. All the stories have been told, in their essence, to death. Every conceivable plot device has been done, every combination has been done, the only thing that changes is the time, place, etc. This is why there is a continuous progression towards ever greater violence and pornography in film (notice the ‘new’ movement in Asian cinema of ‘extreme’ violent film.) The elements of shock and titillation try to cover the banality and exhaustion of the form of what I call ‘filmed theatre’.

Anna Juvander in The Atrocity Exhibition

Beyond the narrative horizon lies this incredible territory of possible films, but no one is brave enough to go there. If you do go, the people in the industry, morons that they are, don’t get it. Ordinary people do, however. But for the film industry, ordinary people are like subatomic particles for quantum physicists. As soon as they are placed under observation, their true nature becomes suspect, impossible to ever verify. All their research and focus groups suggest remaking Mission Impossible until the Rapture. Or for the independent crowd, assuring that every gay, lesbian, minority and special interest group receive their just due on screen, albeit using the same stories traditionally reserved for the mainstream.

Given the criticism you’ve faced, and the lack of exposure the film has received, do you feel the whole experience has been worthwhile?

I cannot say whether making the film was worthwhile. I made a worthwhile film, yes. It cost me dearly. It may never be seen by many people, and if it were up to some of the so-called Ballard ‘authorities’ like Mr Vaccari, it would not even be seen by Ballard fans, which would truly be a shame. I still hold out hope that a few people will somehow see the film and realise that it is possible to make a different kind of cinema and be inspired to make better films themselves. That would be enough for me.

What do you think JG Ballard’s greatest contribution to the 20th century is?

TBD.

Come on — let’s talk about Ballard. He deserves it. What do you appreciate about the great man?

I’ve basically spent my entire life trying to figure out why everything is so fucked up. Most people either don’t seem to know that this is the case, or pretend not to notice. When I discovered Ballard’s writing, it was obvious that he was one of those very few people who confront the world with astonishing honesty, insight and intelligence. The reason he is considered prophetic is simply his degree of awareness and his imaginative force. He sees around him, today, what others miss, understands the conflicting forces at work, and suggests probable or at least interesting outcomes that will occur in the future. It’s like watching balls go flying by. If you see the direction they are going, and their speed, you can predict fairly accurately when, where and what they will hit. Placing this process in the near future makes it appear prophetic.

Ballard is a new breed of philosopher, a far more interesting type, and maybe the only one to survive as the traditional ones are doomed to extinction. He is able to take very complex, subtle ideas and give them aesthetic form, give them import. This is so very rare.

The Atrocity Exhibition is your only feature film. Do you have plans to make more?

Given that Atrocity took all my energy and money for such a long time, and that the film world and the art world still don’t know what to do with the thing, I have been reconsidering making another film. As I have often said when people remark how wonderful it must be to be a film director — it’s a task I would not wish on my worst enemy.

…:: THE END

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POSTSCRIPT: Since this interview was first published, a couple of positive reviews of the film have appeared online, notably from influential British film magazine Sight & Sound, which renders Weiss’s claims that North American distribution solely rests on what this site has to say in a very different light. I haven’t included everything in the interview, but rereading our email trail today, I am still as shocked and bewildered as I was at the time. The clincher, as far as my decision to tell the story of this encounter open and honestly, was in Jonathan’s very last email, where he branded me ‘journalistically corrupt’ for editing the interview down from over 10,000 words, and for slightly rewording some of my original questions to him. I just couldn’t win. Not only did I do this after Jonathan pointed out that some of my questions unnecessarily referred to negative reviews, which I agreed with, but also because the nature of email interviews means you throw everything in, as you might not have a chance to ask follow-up questions — then you edit down later. The changes to my questions were minor and I stand by them — the originals exist for anyone who wants to see them. It’s not like I was hiding anything, either — the reason Jonathan knew about this was because I showed him the transcript before it went online. I was also accused of altering the tone of the interview with this rewording, which is why I have expanded the interview to include replies from Jonathan that were originally left out. The tone was already confrontational, right from the start.

Having said all that, I do wish Jonathan all the best for the future. I’m positive his film will find the audience it deserves. In the end, though, as far as he’s concerned, it probably doesn’t matter — a lot of people have taken quite an interest in this interview and have said to me that it’s made them even more determined to see the film. Some guy on a film forum even called it ’superbly vitriolic’. So, ‘every cloud’, eh Jonathan?

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MORE INFO
+ Andrés Vaccari’s review of the DVD.
+ See Reel23 for bios of Weiss and Ballard; a Director’s Statement; and letters from Ballard to Weiss praising the film; a trailer from the film; and information on how to order the DVD.

“Narinda Reeders wants to photograph the secret fantasies of Melbourne’s office workers for her exhibition. Simon Castles offers one of his own . . .

I’m sitting with a couple of mates, telling them how I just interviewed Narinda Reeders, a young photo-media artist doing a project about work environment fantasies.

“Sexual fantasies?” they ask innocently. And what can I say, except that I initially thought the same thing. It’s a straw poll, sure, but I’m publishing the findings: the mind hears the words “office fantasy”, and pronto takes a leap to a fuzzy, soft-focused, porno land where everyone wants to lose their suits and skirts and white shirts and heels and
stockings and get it on by the water cooler.

But Reeders, 30, is musing a little more broadly. She’s been reading the urban dystopia novels of J.G. Ballard and the like. “I’ve got so many office scenarios in my head,” she says.

“Most of mine are kind of apocalyptic, where everyone in the outside world kind of disappears, and suddenly there is a survival thing going on, and you have to use your work space in a completely different way.”

But Reeders isn’t interested in documenting her workplace fantasies; she wants to know ours. With White Collar Undone, she wishes to give ordinary workers an outlet and involve them in her art.

She has set up a website, www.whitecollarundone.com, and is asking office workers to anonymously email in their daydreams. “Tell us how you imagine your workplace erupting,” the website advises.

Reeders will attempt to simulate the fantasies submitted, or at least some of them, and photograph them. It’s about capturing the fallout in an image, she says.
…
Many fantasies reflect fear and paranoia, and envisage the breaking down of structures and the descent into tribalism.

One email talks of workers’ grievances finally boiling over and of old animosities being released as fire breaks out and individuals reach for office stationery as weapons.

Workers become like animals, until the few remaining staff members, “looking around at the carnage and seeing what they have become, smash open the windows. (They stand) surrounded by huge shards of glass, the micro-blinds
fluttering in the wind, hold hands and step out into the sky.”
…

The following is an excerpt from an official report prepared by Andrés Vaccari, on behalf of the JG Ballard Institute for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra.

DISCLAIMER: The following photos have been modified by the patients referenced by this report. The JG Ballard Institute for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra implies no endorsement of any kind whatsoever by their publication.

The Conspiracy of Grey Men

“The Grey Men,” Dr Travis explained, “play a pivotal role in these kinds of fantasies. The appearance of this archetype is contemporary with the dawn of large bureaucracies and the rise of pseudo-rational economic ideologies. The Grey Men share the ideal traits of bureaucrats, accountants, lawyers, businessmen and other exemplars of the human fauna spawned by industrial capitalism. They are emblems of efficiency and procedure, to whom people are abstract quantities, and society a series of equations of greed and demand. Their code words are ‘inevitability’, ‘invisibility’ and ‘profit’. Their language is a mixture of esoteric jargon and mathematical ephemera, with constant references to quasi-alchemical concepts like ‘The Invisible Hand’, the ‘Balance of Trade’ and ‘The Trickle-Down Effect’. It is not surprising, therefore, that we are witnessing a marked increase in these paranoid fantasies after the Liberal Party’s rise to power in 1996. It is not a coincidence either that patients are becoming fixated sexually on the figure of John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister – the living embodiment of Grey Man.”

The Mechanics of Inhumanity

During one of the studies, a series of photographs was presented to a group of schizophrenic patients, who were instructed to group them in a meaningful schema. This series included: 1) a diagram of a Watt steam engine; 2) Liberal Party figureheads; 3) the disfigured genitalia of anonymous car crash victims; 4) well-known environmental disasters; 5) Jeanette Howard, the Prime Ministers’ wife, eating at a corporate dinner; 6) queues at banks and Centrelink offices; 7) victims of police brutality; Victorian ex-Premier Jeff Kennett’s hairstyle; 9) Iraqi refugees at Port Hedland Detention Centre.

Sixty-five per cent of patients strongly associated the disfigured genitalia with various powerful figures in the Howard Government, a phenomenon doctors interpreted as expressing powerlessness – projected as psycho-sexual impairment – before a divisive and hermetic political regime. The Liberal Party figures were the objects of mutilation scenarios, and often the photos themselves were torn or cut. Also, forty-nine per cent of patients reported various elaborate, Sadean erotic fantasies. In these, they took submissive roles, often involving binding and genital disfigurement.

The Sleep of Reason

Dr Travis explained that the advent of discourses like “Scientific Management”, “Human Resource Management” and “Economic Rationalisation” had introduced a novel figure into the pantheon of modern psychosis. These prophets of efficiency and mechanism had become insistent iconic presences in the cosmologies of the deranged. Dr Travis said that the new millenium would bring nightmarish variations on these archetypes. He cited a recent US study, where patients in various states of terminal psychosis described terrifying meetings with cold female inquisitors, who would read out long strings of numbers, soliciting detailed information such as physical characteristics and financial assets.

These visitors, clad in neat, spotless grey suits, dictated intricate megalomanical theories that explained society through the workings of a cryptic “Economic Realm”, which they described as a land of milk and honey where the souls of workers and managers travelled after death, and which was ruled by a benevolent, all-seeing entity.

Assassination Fantasies

During one of the studies, long-term inmates were provided with Conceptual Assassination Kits, and the ensuing fantasy-elaboration process was monitored closely.

In 87 per cent of cases, the figure of Prime Minister John Howard emerged as a favourite target of assassination. Elaborate death schemes were put forth, many of which involved multiple automobile disasters and byzantine torture machinery. Twenty-one per cent of patients singled out Minister for the Environment Robert Hill as a preferred object of death, with the proposed methods of execution clearly echoing the present global devastation: death by toxic waste poisoning, melanoma and famine.

Psychotherapists concluded that the Prime Minister’s lack of any vital human traits – such as compassion, imagination or sexuality – made him a favourite vessel for various paranoid projections and erotic decontextualisations. In a minority of cases, this perceived emptiness facilitated reconceptualisation of Howard as a robot or a computer-generated image.

John Howard’s Conceptual Pudenda

Shortly before his unexplained disappearance, Dr Travis outlined the results of his research in a manuscript presently in the possession of a Federal Police Task Force.

“In a sense, I’m assembling the materials of an autopsy, and I’m treating reality – the reality we inhabit – almost as if it were a cadaver, or let’s say, the contents of a special kind of forensic inquisition… I regard all these as data which will play their role in whatever hypothesis I am proposing to offer, to explain the significance of mysterious and apparently unrelated objects, this huge network of ciphers, and encoded instructions – perhaps – that surround us in reality.”

– J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Graeme Revell (Summer 1983), RE/Search: J.G. Ballard (San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1984)

“Cadillacs, Coca Cola and cocaine, presidents and psychopaths, Norman Rockwell and the mafia… the dream of America endlessly unravels its codes, like the helix of some ideological DNA.”

– J.G. Ballard, Introduction to Hello America (1981)

Mallory stared at the distant gantries of Cape Kennedy. It was difficult to believe that he had once worked there. ‘I don’t think even Perth, Australia, is far enough. We need to set out in space again…’ ”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982)

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J.G. Ballard’s imagery reveals the fossil record of the Cold War as it remains in ruined installations, text, movies, photos and the contemporary psyche – the ‘helix of some ideological DNA’ as he puts it. Growing up here on the edge of the world – Perth, Western Australia – I have always been very interested in Cold War iconography, partly because of childhood memories such as the flights of the Soviet Sputnik and of John Glenn. Less fondly, I recall mucking in with a neighbour’s children to fill sandbags for his nuclear fallout shelter.

This piece – originally presented as a Powerpoint presentation containing 39 slides and attendant discussion – is intended to promote these connections. It’s a kind of sketch for a longer piece I plan to make in another life. It comes out of a paper I presented at The American History of Science Society Annual Meeting at Milwaukee in November 2002. I planned it as a presentation where I read a paper and screened images. It didn’t quite work that way and I ended up running back and forth to a photocopy service to produce overhead transparencies as there were not enough data projectors to go around. The paper itself is an offshoot of my PhD dissertation which I am currently ‘finishing’.

– © Pippa Tandy

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Harvey’s anatomy of blood circulation (circa. 1628)

Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire.”

– J.G. Ballard, Ambit, No. 33 in 1967

For over forty years, in the late twentieth century, the Cold War and its omnipresent technologies provided the matrix, the essential mediating structure for experience of all kinds. The Cold War conditioned the possibilities, the pattern of a new culture, which was determined almost entirely by the technologies that it threw up. Through these and the cultural processes they initiated, it delineated, measured and defined the space in which newly emerging conditions of human existence came to be configured and consolidated. The priorities of the Cold War were embedded within the human, essential to life as we know it. The language and imagery of this configuration were hinged on powerful determinant metaphors making visible the relations of anxiety, power and desire that mediated the changing relations between human beings, their culture and technology.

Still from Atomic Café, documentary film by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty (1982)

I had seen these fossils before. Each of the bones I had remembered clearly, etched by the moonlight as I lay on the floor listening to the screaming of the birds as they struck in their sexual frenzy at the church tower. I remembered the shin bones of the archaic boar, and the barely human skull of a primitive valley dweller who had lived by this river a hundred thousand years earlier, the breastbone of an antelope and the crystalline spine of a fish – together the elements of a strange chimera. I remember too the terrifying skeleton of the winged man.”

– J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)

The work and writing of J.G. Ballard offers a field guide to the Cold War life world and its cultural productions. He applies his ruthless imagination to charting its phyla, to treating the evolving phenomena of the Cold War as a problem in taxonomy. He constructs sets of documents, charts, descriptions that open up the violent fusions, the unquestioned imperatives of the era of forensic inspection. For Ballard this new planet earth is ‘a deranged zoo and someone has left the cages open’. He describes his imagination at work, feeding on the ‘compost’ of ’strange crossovers in the new communications world’, scientific and technological ‘plankton’, discarded documents from wastepaper baskets, images from World War II and the Cold War. Ballard calls all this ‘ideological DNA’ (J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Jonathan Cott, Rolling Stone, December 1987, Issue 413, p.57).

It is the key to understanding the present moment. It is not that the Cold War began and is now ended. Rather, it constitutes the cultural genetic inheritance that continues to shape our lives at every level and will do so for the foreseeable future. While the actual origins of the Cold War go further back, its structure becomes visible with the Manhattan Project and the American decision, against the advice of nuclear theorists and practitioners such as Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard and others, not to share discoveries and developments in nuclear weapons research with the Soviet Union.

Student textbook image of Klinefelter’s Syndrome chromosomes

In the field office he came across a series of large charts of mutated chromosomes. He rolled them up and took them back to his bunker. The abstract patterns were meaningless, but during his recovery he amused himself by devising suitable titles for them. (Later, passing the aircraft dump on one of his forays, he found the half-buried juke box, and tore the list of records from the selection panel, realizing that these were the most appropriate captions. Thus embroidered, the charts took on many layers of associations.)

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’, (1964)

Ballard states that ’science fiction is a response to science and technology as perceived by the inhabitants of the consumer goods society’. The Cold War thus redefines the scope of literature and literary practices. There is no longer one literature but rather ‘fictions of every kind’. The writer must approach his subject matter ‘like a scientist or engineer’ and ‘out-imagine everyone else – scream louder, whisper more quietly’ (J.G. Ballard, ‘Fictions of Every Kind’, Books and Bookmen, Feb. 1971).

Still from Dr No (dir. Terence Young, 1962)

The subject matter of SF is the subject matter of everyday life: the gleam on refrigerator cabinets, the contours of a wife’s or husband’s thighs passing the newsreels on a color TV set, the conjunction of musculature and chromium artifact within an automobile interior, the unique postures of passengers on an airport escalator”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘Fictions of Every Kind’, Books and Bookmen, Feb, 1971

Ballard’s work and life parallel the growth and change in industrial technologies of World War II and the Cold War. He is both product and critic of the cultures effected by these technologies. His life experience brought him up against the material conditions of experience. His writing is informed by patterns, by repetition and return as he visits and revisits his subjects, He opens them to changing angles of vision and shifting distances and focus, as though through a set of variable focus lenses.

Still from Alphaville (dir. Jean-Luc Godard,1965)

Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia.

– J.G. Ballard, Introduction to the French edition of Crash, (1974)

In 1951 Lancelot Law-Whyte wrote of the ‘increasing awareness of the morphological character of many of the sciences, which are now seen to be concerned with complex structures or forms of particular kinds’. He anticipated the ’simple and comprehensive method of describing the changing form or structure of a complex of relationships’ which was highlighted by the determination of the double helix structure of DNA two years later (Lancelot Law White, Note to ‘Chronological Survey on Form’, in Aspects of Form: A Symposium on Form in Nature and Art, 1951).

Still from Atomic Café, documentary film by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty (1982)

Television has glamorized war for us, whether the movie drenched jungle palette of the Vietnam newsreel or the sinister black-and-white film relayed to our living rooms from the nose-cone cameras of Desert Storm’s smart bombs, which almost incite the television viewer to become a cruise missile.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The last Real Innocents’, The New York Times, 1991

Awareness of and interest in morphology is central to Cold War culture. Morphologies of the time are frequently articulated into culture through images. According to Lawrence Alloway, the word ‘image’ became a term that could be used to ‘describe evocative visual material from any source, with or without the status of art’, in the early 50s (Alloway, ‘The Development of British Pop’, Lucy Lippard, ed, Pop Art, 1966). This was when Ballard was reading medicine or wandering around London picking up work, writing advertising copy and selling encyclopaedias.

Still from Kiss Me Deadly (dir. robert aldrich, 1955)

In essence, science fiction is a response to science and technology as perceived by the inhabitants of the consumer goods society, and recognizes that the role of the writer today has totally changed – he is now merely one of a huge army of people filling the environment with fictions of every kind. To survive he must be far more analytic, approaching his subject matter like a scientist or engineer. If he is to produce fiction at all, he must out-imagine everyone else, he must scream louder, whisper more quietly.

– J.G. Ballard, ‘Fictions of Every Kind’, Books and Bookmen, Feb, 1971

Also in the fifties, mechanical reproduction, spurred on by new technologies, increased the availability of images and their use in advertising and popular culture. Images thus became specimens, to be collected, reconfigured and exhibited, and ‘accessioned’ into taxonomies of desire. Both artists and the mass media gathered images from all sources into their archives.

Still from Ice Station Zebra (dir. John Sturges,1968)

It’s photography and the cinema above all which provide us with reflections of this landscape. Television seems to me to supply a particularly important role, in the continuous flood of images with which it inundates our brain: it perceives things on our behalf, and it’s like a third eye grafted onto us.”

– J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Robert Louit, Magazine Littéraire no.87, April 1974

Magazines such as Life and Look increasingly exploited the potency of modern consumer imagery in the context of the culture and the technological events of the Cold War. Reiterated cycles of images became the currency, the everyday iconography, of the times. These images are now a vocabulary of the twentieth century, on the one hand a repository of cute kitsch, on the other, a powerful set of revelatory devices, as attested by the fact that many of the ‘key’ images of the period are now ‘owned’ by corporations.

Ballard is very aware of the power of these images. He is a visual writer, deploying images from his own archive, those of other artists and of the mass media. In collaging these images Ballard is also making a taxonomic frottage of the visual culture of his time, and a map of the human condition they inspired.

Still from Ice Station Zebra (dir. John Sturges,1968)

The Image Maze. Talbot followed the helicopter pilot across the rain-washed concrete. For the first time, as he wandered along the embankment, one of the aircraft had landed. The slim figure of the pilot left no reflections in the silver pools. The exhibition hall was deserted. Beyond a tableau sculpture of a Saigon street execution stood a maze constructed from photographic billboards. The pilot stepped through a doorway cut into an image of Talbot’s face. He looked up at the photograph of himself, snapped with a lapel camera during his last seminar. Over the exhausted eyes presided the invisible hierarchies of the quasars. Reading the maze, Talbot made his way among the corridors. Details of his hands and mouth signposted its significant junctions.

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The University of Death’, The Atrocity Exhibition, (1970)

Ballard’s palaeontological treatment of technologies as cultural artifacts is essential for any analysis of the culture of the period. Ballard’s imagery makes visible the ontological structures of the emergent Cold War subject. It reveals the relationship between the body and the technological prosthesis of the ‘outside’ world, in which nature and artifice are violently conjoined.

Still from Psycho (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1961)

The series of weapons tests had fused the sand in layers, and the pseudo-geological strata condensed the brief epochs, microseconds in duration of thermonuclear time. Typically the island inverted the geologist’s maxim, ‘The key to the past lies in the present.’ Here, the key to the present lay in the future. This island was a fossil of time future, its bunkers and blockhouses illustrating the principle that the fossil record of life was one of armour and the exoskeleton.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964).

The relationship between the body and the technological prosthesis of the ‘outside’ world, in which nature and artifice are violently conjoined, is apparent in both his method and subject matter, as in the ‘Terminal Beach’ quote above.

B-29 flying over Tinian Base in the Marianas, 1945, courtesy Smithsonian Institute (National Air and Space Museum) Washington DC

In all probability the airplane is banked and is turning, although your sensations make you feel it is in straight and level flight. Don’t act according to your sensations. Check and cross check your instruments.”

– Pilot’s Information File, 1944: The Authentic World War II Guidebook for Pilots and Flight Engineers, Schiffer Military/Aviation History, Atglen Pennsylvania, 1995, Section 4, Man Goes Aloft, ‘Sense of position in Flight’, Part 9, 1 (Revised August 1, 1944)

For Ballard, the conditions of thought, action and desire are shaped by technology, via the exterior, by technology’s tropes as images and artifacts, in their military form, or, in their familiar domesticated manifestations. They are the sites for ramification of power, authority and sexuality such as the freeway, the cine-camera, the interiors of cars and fighter aircraft and most especially the omnipresent imagery of conflict and technological apocalypse, such as World War II air battles, in particular those of the Pacific war, and images of Vietnam and atomic bomb tests.

Still from Kiss Me Deadly (dir. robert aldrich, 1955)

Brushing the flies from his mouth, Jim walked into the men’s ward. The decaying air streamed down the plywood walls, bathing the flies that fed on the bodies pied across the bunks. Identifiable by their ragged shorts and flowered dresses, and by the clogs embedded in their swollen feet, dozens of Lunghua prisoners lay on the bunks like sides of meat in a condemned slaughterhouse. Their backs and shoulders glistened with mucilage, and the splayed mouths in their ballooning cheeks still gaped as if these bloated men and women, dragged from a banquet, were gripped by a ravenous hunger.

He walked through the darkened ward, the tin of Spam held tightly to his chest, breathing through the magazines cupped over his mouth.”

– J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (1984)

These figures, actual and imagined, have entered social and individual consciousness as recognizable and meaningful entities. The abandoned motels, rusting rocket gantries, drained swimming pools and deserted bars of Ballard’s fiction are ’spinal landscapes’, the settings which arouse liminal memories of ‘the formation of the brain’s visual centres’ (‘The Assassination Weapon’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970), revealing the evolutionary development of vision and consciousness and the informing power of technology over this development.

Still from Alphaville (dir. Jean-Luc Godard,1965)

At dusk on the second day he left the bed and went to the window for his first careful look at Cocoa Beach. Through the plastic blinds he watched the shadows bisecting the empty pool, drawing a broken diagonal across the canted floor. He remembered his few words to the cab driver. The complex geometry of this three-dimensional sundial seemed to contain the operating codes of a primitive time-machine, repeated a hundred times in all the drained swimming pools of Cape Kennedy.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982)

They even suggest a parasitical relationship, in that technology exploits and mimics the structures of human consciousness in order to evolve. Ballard’s practice examines the man-made environment as a field of scientific investigation to discover the shaping processes of human subjectivity.

Still from Atomic Café, dir. Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty (1982)

Identifying the island with himself, he gazed at the cars in the breaker’s yard, at the wire-mesh fence, and the concrete caisson behind him. These places of pain and ordeal were now confused with pieces of his body. He gestured towards them, trying to make a circuit of the island so that he could leave these sections of himself where they belonged. He would leave his right leg at the point of his crash, his bruised hands impaled upon the steel fence. He would place his chest where he had sat against the concrete wall. At each point a small ritual would signify the transfer of obligation from himself to the island.

He spoke aloud, a priest officiating at the eucharist of his own body.

‘I am the island.’”

– J.G. Ballard, Concrete Island (1973)

The middle decades of the twentieth century were crucial in the establishment of the rule of what Herbert Marcuse called ‘technological rationality’. The same imperative dominates military, industrial and domestic life, having entered and consolidated its authority in these spheres during this period. Futurism and its attendant discourses of streamlining, speed, growth and progress both describes and assists this colonization of the present.

Still from Edward Steichen’s film for The Fighting Lady (1944)

Airports and airfields have always held a special magic, gateways to the infinite possibilities that only the sky can offer. In 1946, when I first came to England, a dark and derelict shell of a country, I used to dream of the runways of Wake Island and Midway, stepping stones that would carry me back across the Pacific to the China of my childhood. At school in Cambridge, and later as a medical student at King’s College, I would flee all that fossilised Gothic self-immersion and ride a borrowed motorcycle to the American airbases at Mildenhall and Lakenheath, happy to stare through the wire at the lines of silver bombers and transport planes. Airports then were places where America arrived to greet us, where the world of tomorrow touched down in Europe.

– J.G. Ballard in Blueprint: Architecture, Design and Contemporary Culture, No. 142, September, 1997

The future gets closer and closer, and even co-exists with the present in the many signs of its potential. It is glimpsed in the 1950s, and earlier in some places, in a freeway flyover, a city skyline, in the images reproduced from a biologist’s microscope or a physics laboratory. It is this period and imaginative crucible of the co-existence of present and future that J.G. Ballard calls ‘the near future’. The near future is the potential of the future in the present.

Eventually the present and future collide and the effect is that described by the computer Alpha-60 in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville: ‘But no one has lived in the past and no one will live in the future. The present is the form of all life.’

Still from Kiss Me Deadly (dir. robert aldrich, 1955)

The pallid skin was marked with a hatchwork of weals where his fingers had tried to scratch away the names of the cities. For a moment he resembled an Aztec priest ready to dismember himself.”

– J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981)

To put it another way, the future is latent in the present, and the near future is the place in which this latent meaning becomes manifest, the ‘inner space’ or psyche of the everyday. Ballard creates a mythic, speculative time and space and uses it to explore the relationships between humans and technology. (‘The future is the key to the present’ – Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’ 1964).

Observation bunker at Trinity Site, still from video, Pippa Tandy (2000)

Wings of light hung from his shoulders, feathered into a golden plumage drawn from the sun, the reborn ghosts of his once and future selves, conscripted to join him here in the streets of Cocoa Beach… The flow of light had begun to slow, layers of time overlaid each other, laminae of past and future fused together. Soon the tide of photons would be still, space and time would set forever.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982)

The unifying technological ‘achievement’ of the century is the nuclear bomb. The first atomic device exploded at Alamogordo in July 1945 and turned the desert at ‘ground zero’ to glass. The nuclear explosion itself is a metaphor of sophisticated transformation, involving both implosion and explosion, and generating the mutative effects of radiation. As the most powerful metaphor of the century it also diminishes the power of metaphor to discriminate experience, as though the science and technology of this event appropriates language and imagery to its own ends in one momentous displacement of energy.

Still from Alphaville (dir. Jean-Luc Godard,1965)

I want a mythology that starts now, this moment in time, and runs forward… This is a mythology that obviously draws heavily on science and technology, and also on the communications landscape (which is a completely new thing, a parallel world which we inhabit), because they play such an important part.

– J.G. Ballard interviewed by Graeme Revell, J.G. Ballard, RE/Search: (San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1984, 1991)

While this effect may not have been immediately apparent, the development of nuclear weapons ultimately ‘reordered’ everything from time, space and sex to food and sleep. The Cold War induced a nuclear ‘reality,’ a unitary, monolithic fact so ‘extreme’ as to be beyond metaphor. The single most extreme metaphor became banal, a mere fact of life. It provoked the ultimate, very public, death of metaphor as the primary practical means to structure knowledge, culture and the quotidian.

Ballard imagines the means to resist and revalue its received representations, to recover language and imagery from the grip of both the technocrat and the literary moralist.

Student textbook image of Klinefelter’s Syndrome chromosomes

Around the brass vent at the deep end lay a small museum of past summers – a pair of his mother’s sun-glasses, Vera’s hair clip, a wine glass, and an English Half-crown which his father had tossed into the pool for him. Jim had often spotted the silver coin, gleaming like an oyster, but he had never been able to reach it.

Jim pocketed the coin and peered at the damp walls. There was something sinister about a drained swimming-pool, and he tried to imagine what purpose it could have if it were not filled with water. It reminded him of the concrete bunkers in Tsingtao, and the bloody handprints of the maddened German gunners on the caisson walls. Perhaps murder was about to be committed in all the swimming-pools of Shanghai, and their walls were tiled so that the blood could be washed away?”

– J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (1984)

His ‘even more extreme metaphors’ respond to this process at its end point in the everyday. Their luminary, repetitive quality parallels the reiterative, neurotic monolith of Cold War imagery but tilts it to give the reader a sideways view of the machine at work. Like the Los Alamos ‘gadget’, the monolith is now vaporized but its images and artifacts remain, a powerful mysterious presence that is the subject of Ballard’s work.

Still from Ice Station Zebra (dir. John Sturges,1968)

In the centre of the table was a huge roulette wheel, its transparent bowl illuminated from below. It was spinning slowly, and the projected light raced across the walls and ceiling, dappling the display map of the USA and everything else in the room with a series of racing letters.

… BALTIMORE … TAMPA … NEW ORLEANS … PORTLAND … TOPEKA … TRENTON … KNOXVILLE …

As the names circled the room, Wayne felt Paco nudge him forward. Sitting at the head of the table, in the place reserved for both President and croupier, was the naked figure of Manson. Illuminated by the roulette wheel, his waxy skin glowed like a painted corpse’s…

Reflected from the glass target wall, the names of all cities of America rippled across Manson’s skin so that he resembled an aging harlequin in an alphabet suit. His left hand scratched absent-mindedly at the electric names that glimmered across his skin.”

– J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981)

‘The nuclear reality’ – ‘technological rationality’ taken to its extreme – produce the conditions that Ballard observes in the late 1960s, that he calls ‘the death of affect’, an ‘ambiguous world’ born of ‘the marriage of reason and nightmare’. The term implies a paralysis generated by ’sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.’ The television screen, ‘a third eye grafted onto us’, is one of the vectors that admit technology and its implications directly to human desire.

In the leaflet handed to guests at his exhibition of crashed cars in 1970, Ballard writes:

The 20th century has given birth to a vast range of machines – computers, pilotless planes, thermonuclear weapons – where the latent identity of the machine is ambiguous. An understanding of this identity can be found in the automobile.”

– J.G. Ballard, leaflet distributed at new sculpture, New Arts Laboratory Gallery, Robert Street, London (1970).

Ballard sees in the car, or in cars and roads, the stylisation of human cruelty, sexuality and obsession, and human bodies echo this stylisation in the gestures and postures of death, disfigurement and sexual congress which take place in the site of the motorways of the modern city. And the freeway is the domestic version of the runway and weapons testing site.

Map of The Atomic Bombing of Japan, August 1945 from The Manhattan Project, United States Department of Energy, 1999, p.52

The series of weapons tests had fused the sand in layers, and the pseudo-geological strata condensed the brief epochs, microseconds in duration of thermonuclear time. Typically the island inverted the geologist’s maxim, ‘The key to the past lies in the present.’ Here, the key to the present lay in the future. This island was a fossil of time future, its bunkers and blockhouses illustrating the principle that the fossil record of life was one of armour and the exoskeleton.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964).

Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930. He enjoyed the p