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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Reed, Diamond Nebula.

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

Jeremy Reed speaking to Nicky Singer at the ICA.

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

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

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

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

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

the way 10 million atoms colonize
an inked full stop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Reed – photograph courtesy Waterloo Press.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s out there somewhere, while the London rain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Reed – photographer(s) unknown.

Thanks to Shane for help with research for this article.

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

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

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.

All photography by Simon Sellars.

Bizarrely, it has been almost a year since I posted the first part of this photo essay. There are so many loose ends dangling from this site, frayed and incomplete due to the mad scramble to complete my PhD in the latter half of 2008. Now it’s my mission to clear the backlog as best I can, beginning with this, the conclusion to ‘”Paradigm of Nowhere”: Shepperton, a photo essay’, my attempt to traverse the fantasy-film of Ballard’s Unlimited Dream Company playing in my head. As I wrote in Part 1, I had intended to take photographs of Shepperton, 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 his privacy. What I was aiming for instead was the traversal of a distinct psychic terrain (studiously avoiding the dreaded “p*****geography” word): the blanket overlay of Shepperton with a mental template gleaned from so many Ballard novels and short stories, UDC in particular.

In Part 1, we set out from Shepperton 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 in The Unlimited Dream Company was unable to do, we made our way to the famous film studios, which feature prominently in the book (doubtless Blake made it by flying). Now in Part 2, we explore the reservoirs near the film studios before crossing back over the motorway and into town, finally alighting in Old Shepperton, where we attempt to locate the exact spot where Blake ditched his plane in the Thames.

I was struck by the fact, when I [first] came [to Shepperton], that I was living in a sort of marine landscape, most unusual. There are these enormous reservoirs, the nearest is only four or five hundred yards away, the Queen Mary Reservoir, which is a gigantic reservoir about a mile in diameter. The whole area in fact is infested with reservoirs and settling beds and conduits and little private canals. When you fly from London airport, when you look down while the plane circles around, you will see what looks like a huge expanse of water, with the Thames of course here too.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Alan Burns, 1974.

Above is the entrance to the reservoir that worked its magic on Ballard’s psyche. Although we were disappointed that the reservoir embankment was fenced-off and inaccessible, it must be remembered that for a man of Ballard’s imaginative powers, it would not be necessary to empirically observe a water body to imagine Shepperton — or London — submerged.

Rather, the reservoir is high above us; we are literally ‘under water’.

In fact, [in Shepperton] we’re living … on little causeways. There are huge gravel lakes as well; for a hundred years they’ve been digging sand out, and some of these old pits are damn big, ten times the size of the Serpentine. We’re living in these houses, these little quiet suburban streets, which are little causeways running between these reservoirs. Most of them are invisible because there are high embankments for obvious reasons; the Water Board doesn’t want people peeing in them, throwing cigarette ends in and so on. So they’re well screened off, but one is aware of a sort of invisible marine world, of living below the water line. It works on you imaginatively after a while.

JGB, interviewed by Burns, 1974.

It was plainly not by chance that I had crash-landed my burning aircraft into this riverside town. On all sides Shepperton was surrounded by water — gravel lakes and reservoirs, the settling beds, canals and conduits of the local water authority, the divided arms of the river fed by a maze of creeks and streams. The high embankments of the reservoirs formed a series of raised horizons, and I realized that I was wandering through a marine world. The dappled light below the trees fell upon an ocean floor. Unknown to themselves, these modest suburbanites were exotic marine creatures with the dream-filled minds of aquatic mammals. Around these placid housewives with their tamed appliances everything was suspended in a profound calm. Perhaps the glimmer of threatening light I had seen over Shepperton was a premonitory reflection of this drowned suburban town?

J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

I am a scholar of Ballard’s interviews, especially the ‘Golden Age’ spanning the late 60s to the mid-70s. I find them endlessly fascinating. Once you have a good knowledge of the many interviews he has given, you begin to unravel themes and motifs that he has discoursed on at length before committing to fiction. These interviews are laboratories in which Ballard unleashes thought experiments upon his unwitting interrogators, who sometimes are unable to keep up (see his 1974 conversation with Carol Orr, where Orr seems quite flustered, taken aback at the brutal clarity of Ballard’s futurology). Having taken his creations for a dry run, we then find them machine-tooled and recalibrated in his writing: compare the previous quotes from the Burns interview (‘I was living in a sort of marine landscape’), with the one above from UDC (‘I realized that I was wandering through a marine world’). It’s a fascinating, holographic process, and in some cases appears to work retrospectively. In the Burns interview, for example, Ballard is talking about when he first settled in Shepperton with his wife and kids in 1960. Now we know where the inspiration for The Drowned World, published in 1962, really came from…

Or is it all an elaborate metaphysical game — another version of Ballard’s maddening, yet emancipatory, version of circular time?

It was now late afternoon, and the bridge approaches were filled with traffic returning from London. Although Walton lay to the south of Shepperton, even further from the airport, at least it would spring me from this zone of danger.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

…back across the bridge and into town, crossing the always-flowing metal sea that seems to both energise and enervate the citizens in UDC’s version of Shepperton.

I … set off for the pedestrian bridge that spanned the motorway. Poppies and yellow broom brushed my legs, hopefully leaving their pollen on me. They flowered among the debris of worn tyres and abandoned mattresses. To my right was a furniture hypermarket, its open courtyard packed with three-piece suites, dining-tables and wardrobes, through which a few customers moved in an abstracted way, like spectators in a boring museum. Next to the hypermarket was an automobile repair yard, its forecourt filled with used cars. They sat in the sunlight with numerals on their windshields, the advance guard of a digital universe in which everything would be tagged and numbered, a doomsday catalogue listing each stone and grain of sand under my feet, each eager poppy.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

To my utter amazement, the virtual and the actual continued to merge down to the smallest detail: as we began walking back to Shepperton centre through the parkland just over the bridge, we noticed pollen from poppies and yellow broom dusted on the legs of my jeans. Suitably tagged with Ballardian seed, I dutifully followed the road back into town.

That evening I saw the faces of the three crippled children watching me through the damp light, small moons quietly circling each other. They squatted among the dead flowers and macaws, and played with the pennants of my blood. Rachel fondled them, her blind eyes flickering raptly, trying to read their mysterious codes, cryptic messages from another universe transmitted by the ticker-tape of my heart.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

When you observe Shepperton through a Ballardian lens, everything seems in code. I imagined Rachel had daubed the back of this sign with the glyphs of her psyche, marked out using the pennants of Blake’s blood.

Already I was convinced that there was no evil, and that even the most plainly evil impulses were merely crude attempts to accept the demands of a higher realm that existed within each of us. By accepting these perversions and obsessions I was opening the gates into the real world, where we would all fly together, transform ourselves at will into the fish and the birds, the flowers and the dust, unite ourselves once more within the great commonwealth of nature.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

In the book, Blake encourages all to slip the noose of consumerism, to rouse from the waking dream of late capitalism, to throw down whitegoods and gadgets and escape into the unfetettered realm of the imagination, passing through into a micronational realm, ‘the commonwealth of nature’, responsible to no master, least of all bored London admen selling lifestyles to the satellite towns. Pyramids of discarded goods line the streets, expanding upon the consumer bricolage of ‘The Ultimate City’ and presaging the razed shopscapes of Kingdom Come.

Here, the barbaric razor wire surrounding something as banal as the Shepperton Carpet & Flooring Centre triggered something suitably apocalyptic in my mind.

Over my head the sky brightened, bathing the placid roofs in an auroral light, transforming this suburban high street into an avenue of temples. I felt queasy and leaned against the chestnut tree outside the post office. I waited for this retinal illusion to pass, unsure whether to halt the passing traffic and warn these ruminating women that they and their offspring were about to be annihilated.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Above: Shepperton’s placid high street, over-ripe for transcendence and transformation…

There is an antiseptic quality about Pangbourne Village, as if these company directors, financiers and television tycoons have succeeded in ridding their private Parnassus of every strain of dirt and untidiness. Here, even the drifting leaves look as if they have too much freedom. Thirteen children once lived in these houses, but it is hard to visualize them at play.

J.G. Ballard, Running Wild.

I recalled the above quote from Running Wild when I came across this leaf that had been embedded in the tarmac. It seemed to be lacquered solid into the road surface, losing any semblance of nature, losing its ability to drift, its colours supervivid and oversaturated; the organic encased in concrete, the fusing of the animate with the inanimate: UDC in a nutshell.

Waiting for release…

Soon after dawn the river had disgorged this antique Pegasus on to the same beach where I had swum ashore. I approached the horse and pulled it on to the bank. The fresh paint silvered my hands, leaving a speckled trail across the sand. As I wiped the paint on to the grass, the pelicans watched me from the flowerbeds. The same vivid light flared from their plumage. The foliage of the willows and ornamental firs seemed to have been retouched by a psychedelic gardener with a taste for garish colours. A magpie swooped across the overlit lawn, feathers brilliant as a macaw’s.

Stimulated by this display of light, I stared into the stained water.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

The levels in this photograph have been messed with to give it a suitably lysergic feel — as much a cliche as it sounds, UDC feels like an acid trip; but the synaesthetic elements of tripping, rather than any notions of ‘cosmic consciousness’. Ballard’s work, after all, is relentlessly about reordering and recoding the senses to subvert dominant systems of control.

We were soon more than a mile above Shepperton, this jungle town surrounded by its palisade of forest bamboo, an Amazon enclave set down here in the quiet valley of the Thames.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Above: the jungle-like gateway to Old Shepperton, the third part of the town’s tripartite structure (high street/reservoir/old town)… and representing our best chance of locating the sunken Cessna.

Pinned to the wall were the X-ray plates of my head, deformed jewels through which a ghostly light still shone, like that corona of destruction I had first seen over Shepperton.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

In interviews, Ballard has often said that in the suburbs one needs to perform a deviant act almost daily — like kicking the dog — to get a charge out of one’s flaccid existence. This ‘report vandalism’ sign, itself vandalised by a blob of incoherent spray paint, amused me, as I imagined it to be the first bumbling stirrings of Blake’s legions awakening themselves from their perimeter-town stupor.

The sun hid itself behind my naked body, dazzled by the tropical vegetation that had invaded this modest suburban town. Pausing to rest, the crowd began to settle itself. Mothers and their infants sat on the appliances in the shopping mall, children perched on the branches of the banyan tree, elderly couples relaxed in the rear seats of the abandoned cars. There was a sense of intermission.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Intermission: lurking in the background, the invading chaotic rhizomes of supernature prepare to engulf the arboreal trap-cars and litter patrols of civic duty.

Father Wingate unlocked the doors of the church. ‘So it was a dream … ? I’m relieved to hear you say so, Blake.’ He stepped through the doors and beckoned me to follow him. ‘Right — we’ll get this over with.’

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

If I had known that only ten minutes after taking off from London Airport the burning machine was to crash into the Thames, would I still have climbed into its cock-pit? Perhaps even then I had a confused premonition of the strange events that would take place in the hours following my rescue.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

When Blake crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, I can’t help but think of Ballard hitting the town in 1960, wondering what he had got himself in for, but deciding after all, in a strange way, that his perverse talent could be explored to the hilt here. When Blake’s love interest, Miriam St Cloud, dies, I can’t help but think of Ballard’s wife, Mary (known as “Miriam” in The Kindness of Women, of course), and her sudden death in 1964. When Blake teaches the townspeople to not only fly but to explore the farthest reaches of their sexuality, I can’t help but think of the obsessed Ballard, stricken with grief at the death of his wife, hatching The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash on an unsuspecting world; what must the good people of Shepperton have thought of this ‘madman’ lurking in their midst? When Blake is shot down by Stark, I can’t help but think of the storms of outrage that greeted Crash on its publication — and perhaps of Ballard’s later, more cautious narrative approach, when he managed to touch the same veins of psychopathology in his work, but without flying as close to the sun himself.

The final pages of UDC are touching, as Blake yearns to once again merge with Miriam in the afterlife. Ballard has always stared with extraordinarily clear, unmisted eyes at the spectre of death, perhaps never more so than in this book. Ballard’s announcement that he has cancer is very sad, of course, but I can think of no other writer more prepared for whatever may follow.

I decide to visit J.G. Ballard at Shepperton. How does he feel about predicting, and thereby confirming, the psychogeography of Heathrow’s retail/recreation fallout zone? The river was my target… We drove to a riverside pub and, too hot to sit outside, lounged under an overhead fan in a comfortable, clubbish atmosphere. … He’s here, but he doesn’t belong. I think of him as a long-term sleeper, an intelligence operative forgotten by his paymasters.

Iain Sinclair, London Orbital.

The Cessna was almost submerged, its wings tipping below the sweeping tide. As I watched, the fuselage turned and slipped below the coverlet of the water. When the river had carried it away I walked across the beach to the bone-bed of the winged creature whose place I was about to take. I would lie down here, in this seam of ancient shingle, a couch prepared for me millions of years earlier.

There I would rest, certain now that one day Miriam would come for me. Then we would set off, with the inhabitants of all the other towns in the valley of the Thames, and in the world beyond.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Here it is: the exact spot where Blake crashed his plane into the river. How did we know? Call it instinct…

Ballard said that The Unlimited Dream Company was yet another preview of his, at the time, still-to-be-written autobiography; thus the book’s transformation of Shepperton is about ‘the writer’s imagination, and in particular my own imagination, transforming the humdrum reality that he occupies and turning it into an unlimited dream company’ (interview with David Pringle, 1996).

The book is a beautifully vivid evocation of Ballard’s love for Shepperton. He may playfully run it down in interviews, but it’s precisely Shepperton’s anonymity that has allowed Ballard to play out his own psychopathology in the pages of his books. He has lived there for almost 50 years now and virtually his entire ouevre has been composed within its boundaries. If, as Ballard has repeatedly claimed, the nature of fiction and reality has reversed in the post-war era, with the imagination the only true node of reality left in a world of endlessly mediated fictions, then The Unlimited Dream Company can be read as more autobiographical than either of Ballard’s so-called ’semi-autobiographical’ works, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women.

In this light, visiting the place is an enriching experience, as Iain Sinclair identifies from his own Shepperton sojourn:

“To be here, in bright sunshine, a small Thames-side town where nobody hurries, is to balance on a hinge. Specifics of the geography that inspired a writer seem, in their turn, to be responding to that ouevre.”

To take a trip to (or even in) Shepperton, ‘the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere’, as Blake declares, is to submit to a form of virtual reality that anyone admiring of Ballard’s work simply must experience.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘Paradigm of nowhere’: Shepperton, a photo essay, part 1
+ JGB: a ‘billionaire’ in Shepperton?
+ J.G. Ballard: The Oracle of Shepperton
+ Sam Scoggins: ‘Unlimited Dream Company’ film
+ A Home and a Grave: Mike Holliday on The Unlimited Dream Company
+ Shepperton under water

interview by Mark Goodall

The following is a short interview with JGB conducted by Mark Goodall in 2006 for his book Sweet & Savage: The World Through the Shockumentary Film Lens. The book is published by Headpress, and the interview is posted here with the kind permission of Mark Goodall and the publisher.

News reporter turned film director, Gualtiero Jacopetti, kickstarted the trend for outrageous documentaries — ’shockumentaries’ if you will — back in 1962 when he made Mondo Cane. MARK GOODALL talks to J.G. BALLARD, a fan, about Mondo Cane, its successors and its influence on his own work as a writer.

LEFT: Gualtiero Jacopetti.

MARK GOODALL: What were your initial impressions of the films of Gualtiero Jacopetti (Mondo Cane, Mondo Cane 2, Women of the World, Africa Addio etc.); where did you see them; what was the audience like?

J.G. BALLARD: I was very impressed by Jacopetti’s films — I saw all of them from 1964 or so onwards — they were shown in small cinemas in the West End, and to full or more or less full houses, and my impression is that the audiences completely got the ‘point’. As far as I remember, the response of the people sitting around me was strong and positive. I think there was comparatively little sex in the first Mondo Cane, and I can’t recall even one dirty raincoat. The audience was the usual crew of rootless inner Londoners (the best audience in the world) drawn to an intriguing new phenomenon. At the time, some twenty years had gone by since the war’s end, and everyone had seen the World War 2 newsreels — Belsen, corpses being bulldozed, dead Japanese on Pacific Islands and so on. All grimly real, but safely distanced from the audiences by a sign that said ‘horrors of war’. What the Mondo Cane audiences wanted was the horrors of peace, yes, but they also wanted to be reminded of their own complicity in the slightly dubious process of documenting these wayward examples of human misbehaviour. I may be wrong, but I think that the early Mondo Cane films concentrated on bizarre customs rather than horrors, though the gruesome content grew fairly rapidly, certainly in the imitator’s films.

I was a great admirer of Mondo Cane and the two sequels, though if I remember they became more and more faked, though that was part of their charm. We, the 1960s audiences, needed the real and authentic (executions, flagellant processions, autopsies etc) and it didn’t matter if they were faked — a more or less convincing simulation of the real was enough and even preferred. Also, the more tacky and obviously exploitative style appealed to an audience just waiting to be corrupted — the Vietnam newsreels on TV were authentically real, but that wasn’t ‘real’ enough. Jacopetti filled an important gap in all sorts of ways — game playing was coming in. Also they were quite stylistically made and featured good photography, unlike some of the ghastly compilation atrocity footage I’ve been sent. It is lovely to think that he had his retrospective in a British university (as in The Atrocity Exhibition, which is not set in the US, as some think).

J.G. Ballard.

But the audiences were fully aware that they were collaborating with the films, and this explains why they weren’t upset when what seemed to be faked sequences (they might have been real in fact) started to appear in the later films — there was almost the sense that they needed to appear ‘faked’ to underline the audience’s awareness of what was going on — both on screen and inside their own heads. We needed violence and violent imagery to drive the social (and political) revolution that was taking place in the mid 1960s — violence and sensation, more or less openly embraced, were pulling down the old temples. We needed our ‘tastes’ to be corrupted — Jacopetti’s films were part of an elective psychopathy that would change the world (so we hoped, naively). Incidentally, all this was missing from the way audiences (in the Curzon cinema I think) saw another 1960s shockumentary — The Savage Eye (directed by Joseph Strick) — when I saw it I, like the audience, shuddered but felt no complicity at all. A fine film.

ABOVE: Still from Mondo Cane.

MG: Can you recall any critical or other ‘professional’ reactions to Jacopetti’s films when they were released?

JGB: I remember the critical/respectable reaction to the Jacopetti films was uniformly hostile and dismissive. As always, this confirmed their originality and importance.

MG: Jacopetti has distanced himself from the films that later copied Mondo Cane labelling them ‘counterfeit’. What were/are your impressions of the copies of his films?

JGB: I can’t remember any specific imitations, though I must have seen one or two. They were too obvious, ignoring the delicate balance between ‘documentary’ footage on the one hand, and on the other the need to remind the audience of its role in watching the films, and that without its intrigued response the films wouldn’t function at all. The balance between the ‘real’ and the ironic simulation of the real had to be walked like a tightrope.

MG: How did mondo films influence your own work/ideas/thought processes (in particular The Atrocity Exhibition)?

JGB: For me, the Mondo Cane films were an important key to what was going on in the media landscape of the 1960s, especially post the JFK assassination. Nothing was true, and nothing was untrue (The Atrocity Exhibition tried to find a new sense in what had become a kind of morally virtual world) — ‘which lies are true?’

I think that Jacopetti was genuinely important, and opened a door into what some call postmodernism and I call boredom. Screen the JFK assassination enough times and the audience will laugh.

J.G. Ballard.

MG: What in your view was important about Jacopetti’s films? Do you think the films have any relevance to the present day, or to the future?

JGB: I suspect they’re very much of their time, but that isn’t a fault, necessarily. But there are many resonance’s today as in the Bush/Blair war in Iraq — complete confusion of the simulated, the real and the unreal, and the acceptance of this by the electorate. Reality is constantly redefining itself, and the electorate/audience seems to like this — a Prime Minister, religiously sincere, lies to himself and we accept his self–delusions. There’s a strong sense today that we prefer a partly fictionalised reality onto which we can map our own dreams and obsessions. The Mondo Cane films were among the first attempts to provide the collusive fictions that constitute reality today. Wartime propaganda, and the Believe it or Not (Ripley) comic strip of bizarre facts in the 1930s, were assumed to be largely true, but no one today thinks the same of the official information flowing out of Iraq — or out of 10 Downing Street and the Pentagon and significantly this doesn’t unsettle us.

A Gualtiero Jacopetti retrospective occurred as part of the 2003 National Museum of Photography Film and Television’s Bradford International Film Festival. The retrospective was a collaboration between the festival and the department of postgraduate studies at the School of Art and Design, Bradford College.

‘An Exhibition of Atrocities: J G Ballard on Mondo Films’ is taken from the book Sweet & Savage: The World Through the Shockumentary Film Lens by Mark Goodall. Published by Headpress.

UK £9.99 / US $19.95
ISBN 1900486490

..:: MORE INFO
+ Headpress

..:: POSSIBLY RELATED
+ Escaping the gaze: A review of John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies

ABOVE: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

[In The Atrocity Exhibition] Traven explores what most people would regard as pretty frightening pornographic imagery; he explores with the kind of eye of a forensic pathologist. He treats sexual desire as if it was something stretched out on an autopsy table; he takes a woman’s body and dismantles it – not literally, but almost literally – and constructs a kit which is literally that. I mean inside of a suitcase, as you show in the film, there is a set of the key elements that we respond to when we become sexually aroused – a pair of latex breasts, nipples, detachable pubic hair…

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Jonathan Weiss in 2006, commentary track on The Atrocity Exhibition (2000; film directed by Weiss).

Peter C. emailed to tell me of his discovery of the work of Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, whose ‘Kiss’ series of x-ray photographs involved Delvoye asking friends to ‘paint themselves with small amounts of barium (that liquid used in x-rays for digestion and such like) and then be “photographed” having sex in medical clinics. The resulting images are… striking’ (according to Joseph Brett).

Peter says:

I feel a bit weird submitting this, and you might not find it relevant at all, but I just discovered this “X-Ray Porn” and it, for whatever reason, reminded me of Ballard! It’s rather striking how unpleasant it is!

Actually, it’s very relevant, given Ballard’s medical background and his observation in the introduction to Crash that we live in a time in which ‘Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography.’

Elsewhere, he elaborates, suggesting that we are:

moving ever closer to that junction where science and pornography will eventually meet and fuse. Conceivably, the day will come when science itself is the greatest producer of pornography. The weird perversions of human behaviour triggered by psychologists testing the effects of pain, isolation, anger, etc. will play the same role that the bare breasts of Polynesian islanders performed in the 1940s wildlife documentary films.

JGB, quoted in Linda S. Kaufman, Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture, 1995.

Of Ballard’s books, it’s The Atrocity Exhibition that most clearly makes the case for this fusion, something the RE/Search edition of Atrocity brilliantly enhanced with its anatomical art from Phoebe Gloeckner, art that very much anticipates the spirit of Delvoye’s ‘Kiss’. See for yourself: I’ve interspersed some of Gloeckner’s illustrations with a few of Delvoye’s x-rays, along with the usual allotment of Ballard quotes (although I think the one heading this post says it all, really).

ABOVE: Illustration by Phoebe Gloeckner from The Atrocity Exhibition (RE/Search edition, 1990).

BELOW: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

A preoccupation with forensic detail characterises [Ballard's] writing: one thinks of the numerous accounts of sex in his extraordinary autobiographical novel The Kindness of Women. “I placed my hands on her hips and began to kiss the small freckles on her abdomen and the spiral scar whose pearly silver curved around the small of her back and ended below her appendix. This marked her kidney operation 10 years earlier, the Anderson-Hinds resection of the renal pelvis.”

Mick Brown, ‘From Here to Dystopia’, Telegraph Magazine, 2 September 2006.

ABOVE: Illustration by Phoebe Gloeckner from The Atrocity Exhibition (RE/Search edition, 1990).

BELOW: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

Traven sees pornography as a kind of hyper-analytic response to sexuality. Normally, traditional sexual activity involves a sort of warm bath where physical activity and a world of mental affections blur into each other, and give rise of course to a huge number of problems. Traven takes the view ‘What is actually going on?’ — his own body and the body of his wife and of his on-off girlfriend, Karen Novotny, he sees their sexual identity as a mystery that needs to be decoded and dismantled. He sees pornography, which is emotionally neutral — pornography is sex with the emotions deleted — pornography is a useful technique for exploring what exactly is going on when two people copulate, when a penis enters a vagina, when a hand embraces a breast, when fingers explore clefts (which are obviously geometric structures which powerfully cue innate responses laid down in the central nervous system a hundred thousand years ago). Pornography is a way of dismantling all the excrescences that have grown around this sexual activity at its most basic, and finding the actual sort of operating elements.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Jonathan Weiss in 2006, commentary track on The Atrocity Exhibition (2000; film directed by Weiss).

ABOVE: Illustration by Phoebe Gloeckner from The Atrocity Exhibition (RE/Search edition, 1990).

BELOW: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

Science is moving into an area where its obsessions begin to isolate completely its subject under the lens of its microscope, away from its links with the rest of nature. This is always the risk with science as a whole. The pornographic imagination detaches certain parts of the human anatomy from the human being and becomes obsessively focussed on the breast or the genitalia, or what have you. That sort of obsession with what I call quantified functions is what lies at the core of science; there is a shedding of all responsibility by the scientist who is just looking at a particular subject with a tendency to ignore the contingent links.

JGB, quoted in Jeremy Lewis, ‘An Interview with J.G. Ballard’, Mississippi Review, Volume 20 Numbers 1&2, 1991.

PS: Good old Wim, when not tattooing pigs, even turned the ‘Kiss’ series into a stained-glass window…

Wim Delvoye
Euterpe, 2002
steel, x-ray photographs, glass, lead
78 3/4 x 31.5 inches
200 x 80 cm
SW 02299

Conducted by Evelyn Finger.

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

ABOVE: JGB in recent times. Photographer unknown (image courtesy The Terminal Collection).

The following interview appeared in the German newspaper Die Zeit in September 2005, hence its initial focus on Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent evacuation of New Orleans. For the most part, Ballard’s on auto-pilot, fending off what seem to be journalistic devil’s-advocate provocations with stock responses; yet his view is all the more persuasive given the ease and directness with which he meets such questions.

Some of the imagery he uses here is not so common, however, and the conclusion of the interview, which addresses the issue of social control, is fascinating. Ballard notes that religions no longer have a monopoly on the ‘domestication of the psyche’, and asks who is now playing the zookeeper. His image of a chimpanzee’s tea-party that ends in violence is a neat allegory in this respect. Chimps might have memories, but they have little concept of the future – something which could hardly be said of Ballard’s fictions. His attitude here – that of the writer-as-anthropologist, studying the patterns of human behaviour so as to prognosticate the future of the species – underlines the urgent need for writers who explore the future, especially when we live in an era and society that’s proved itself incapable of or unwilling to do so.

Dan O’Hara

EVELYN FINGER: Again and again you’ve described the collapse of enlightened society when faced with deadly threats to its existence. Do you feel that applies to the events in New Orleans?

J.G. BALLARD: I’m afraid it does. All my books deal with the fact that our human civilization is like the crust of lava spewed from a volcano. It looks solid, but if you set foot on it, you feel the fire. Events in Louisiana remind us that the freedom of the rich still depends on the oppression of the poor. Since we repress this fact, we’re ill-prepared to pay the price for our society’s functioning.

Were you surprised by the hurricane’s aftermath?

I was as shocked as everyone else. But I wasn’t surprised when I saw that most of those left behind in New Orleans were black. America takes no responsibility for its abysmal racism, although the blacks still constitute a gigantic underclass in American society. It’s no wonder that it took so long for the National Guard to begin rescue operations. Had it been middle-class whites stuck in the filth, the aid would have been in more of a hurry.

In your 1962 novel The Drowned World you described the world after climate change: flooded, mired, a subtropical hell. What symbolism do you see in the scenes from New Orleans? Are the harsh words of rapper Kanye West justified?

What happened in Mississippi was a kind of ethnic cleansing, in which the hurricane played something of the role played by the civil war in former Yugoslavia. Katrina offered a pretext for attacking the underprivileged blacks. Katrina ensured that a particular section of the population were uprooted and driven from their homes. Now armed whites are flying in, wearing police and army uniforms, and they’re carrying their guns ready to shoot. They’ll take care that the displaced blacks are dispersed in every direction, so that they won’t come back for a long time. They’ll most certainly make it out of bounds for them.

Why should white Americans take an interest in the misfortune of the blacks?

From fear. If one travels across the United States, one meets countless intelligent middle-class Americans who are afraid of their fellow black citizens. They’re nervous when faced with their former slaves: they don’t want to share schools with them, they don’t want to be bumping into them in their own neighbourhood. At the same time, however, they deny their fear. They maintain that everyone is equal in law. But it’s not true. If there’s something good about this hurricane, it’s the fact that it’s brought racial discrimination to light. The black refugees are completely aware of that, by the way. One can sense it in every TV interview.

Most of your books are set in a western nowhere. Racial conflict doesn’t occur. Why?

My plots are international. They deal with the neuroses, the manias of the postmodern. The American race problem is too specific. In Europe we also have many immigrants, it’s true – in Germany the Turks, in Great Britain the Asians, in France the North African muslims – but despite tensions and outbreaks of racist violence, the West European countries manage to get along with their immigrants.

What’s the problem with the idea of a cultural melting-pot?

The idea has never worked. It’s still not so long ago that America abolished slavery. It was after the Second World War, during the presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson, that civil rights for all were first established. Up to the sixties, there was segregation in the South: separate places on the bus, separate tables in the restaurant. The memory of that is still too fresh. It will take a long time to be forgotten.

You once wrote that, sooner or later, all science fiction comes true. When you see the pictures of the helpless hurricane victims, are you afraid that you were right?

Naturally, I’m afraid, above all for my children and grandchildren. This planet is moving towards dangerous times. There are many kinds of war and terror, but the worst thing is that violence holds a subliminal attraction for us. If we want to combat it successfully, we have to admit that humanity is not completely civilizable. Regrettable, but true.

In 1996, David Cronenberg filmed your novel Crash, a highway-thriller about the death drive and the urge towards self-destruction. Most of the victims in New Orleans, however, don’t look like they’re enjoying the disaster.

But we the audience do. We live in masochistic times. Our societies are driven by conflicting psychopathological impulses. A huge natural catastrophe like Katrina fits perfectly with our fundamentally apocalyptic mood. One has to realize that we live in principally secular societies: God is dead. And these huge cataclysms like Katrina or the tsunami in the far East now assume the function of God. They are the violent forces that punish us for our immoral lives. That can be very satisfying, so long as one isn’t affected oneself.

In your latest novel Millennium People, the leader of a revolt says, “There is a profound need for meaningless action”.

For meaningless violence! Unfortunately. We live in civilized conditions, but we are not rational creatures. German history proves that. Or take Soviet Russia, a nightmarish dystopia based on a brilliant idea. The European Enlightenment that began with Newton and Voltaire, which successfully preached belief in human reason and which dominated our philosophy and our politics, is most certainly at an end. Man, as one sees in New Orleans, does not necessarily act in his own best interests.

If the situation is so hopeless, was it not therefore reasonable of President Bush to hold off from intervention for as long as possible?

No. One must, unreasonably and in spite of everything, strive for unity with one’s fellow humanity all the more. Europe is at present split between the anglo-saxon social models as they’re represented by Reagan and Thatcher, and the social-democratic model as it’s been realized in Germany and France. On the one hand: economic freedom, unrestricted trade, denationalization. Business must go on! On the other hand: the welfare state, high taxes, state control over almost everything. Some people find this confining. But this model was very successful, since it helped the notion of a friendly togetherness to be accepted. It’s unimaginable that France and Germany would go to war with each other again. In that, strong government has succeeded.

Do you think that a stronger state, and possibly even a strong army, can protect us from ourselves and our own irrational urges?

Yes. In an emergency. But such a state must be founded on a sense of community. After the tsunami in Indonesia there was hardly any rioting. Nor after the atrocious earthquakes ten years ago in Japan, or two years ago in Turkey. Evidently there was a stronger social cohesion at work there. That doesn’t exist in America.

Because the Americans are fickle egocentrics?

No. But everything in America has become subordinate to economic demands. If your company says, leave your home in Los Angeles and move to New York, you do it. The Americans like to fly the flag. But this demonstrative patriotism is no substitute for real solidarity.

Can one prepare for apocalypse?

Naturally. Katrina is a warning. We may not be able to prevent the hurricane itself, but we can plan in advance what to do after the event. The American government did far too little.

ABOVE: JGB in recent times. Photographer unknown (image via The Telegraph).

Should George Bush have read your books?

It’s a comical idea. But in truth, it wouldn’t have done any harm. However, I’m astonished that my books are read in Germany, even though they no longer appear there. I was published for a couple of decades, but all of a sudden it ceased.

Yes, it’s incomprehensible.

No, I understand it well. The Germans are sensitive. And the writer James Graham Ballard seems to glorify violence. He seems to approve of chaos.

If it’s true that, at some point, all science fiction comes true, which of your apocalyptic visions are we yet to face? The demolished skyscraper in High-Rise, the ghostly New York in Hello America! [sic] or the car races in Crash? What comes next?

That’s a treacherous question. I’m afraid that scenarios such as those in Crash and High-Rise are almost contemporary already. Not, it’s true, as outbreaks of violence such as those depicted in the literature, but as subliminal aggression. People will continue getting up in the mornings, climbing into their cars and driving to the office, but in their heads there’s something dangerous happening. Because they’re suffering from middle-class boredom. Nothing happens. One can’t take politics seriously. Our monarchy here in England is a joke. What should people still believe in? Everything exciting is happening in their heads. That’s a dangerous place.

Were people more humane when they still went to church regularly?

No. The religions of the past tried to control the human psyche, to domesticate man as though he were a horse, so as to ride him. Religions wanted to exorcize man of his savagery. But who’s doing that today? That’s our problem.

In High-Rise the solid middle-class tenants regress into barbarity for no reason, they live in their luxury apartments like primates. With hurricane Katrina, the disaster had a concrete cause.

The catastrophe in New Orleans was an affliction There seem to be more natural catastrophes today than 50 years ago, and we’ve become accustomed to thinking that it’s to do with global warming. But maybe it’s not so much the globe that’s heated up, as our minds that are boiling. It’s like the chimps in the zoo. If one sets a table for them, for a time they’ll sit calmly and drink a cup of tea. But all of a sudden they’ll start to smash everything up, because they can’t stand the boredom, the absence of incident. They’d rather resort to violence. I’m afraid that we’re still much more closely related to the chimpanzees.

But how are we to escape on the one hand boredom, and on the other decline? At the end of your novel The Wind From Nowhere, the hurricane blows itself out.

I don’t want to sound pessimistic. But I think that the real hurricanes are starting to blow more strongly. And the wind in our heads is getting stronger day by day. I can only advise: look out for yourself!

Originally published in German as ‘Gewalt ohne Ende’, Die Zeit, 8 September 2005.

We’re all suffocated by the consumer society and its entertainment culture, where everything is an image or imitation of something else. We’re so starved of the real, as we think of it, that we’ll happily watch CCTV footage of motorways, rain-swept precincts and corner shops.

J.G. Ballard, Literary Review, 2001.

White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice—it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)

“Up and then down: The lives of elevators” by Nick Paumgarten.

Is there anybody out there?

Tell me honestly, what would you do? Say you’ve installed SurveillanceSaver on your computer and you’re scanning the far reaches of inner space for signs of life. You stop, breathless, halted in your tracks by — at long last! — intimations of deviant activity. Because that’s what you’re really looking for, isn’t it? Low-level crime. Subterranean sexuality. State-sanctioned scopophilia. You’re not really interested in static civic squares and motionless, humanless hospital parking lots. For you know these are really blank slates, switching stations for ‘the new man’: enter one end, exit via any number of alternate universes.

After the umpteenth feed of pigs in pens, Eastern European building sites and spotty students looking at porn on university computers, you see this: a man nervously pacing around an elevator car, clearly trapped as the car is going nowhere. He opens the doors, sees only a brick wall. He sits back down. Sleeps. Wakes up. Panics. Screams soundlessly, for there is no soundtrack to inner space, in inner space no one can hear you scream, CCTV being as silent as the tomb. Of course, if you have trouble racking up your empathy a notch or two, you could always try playing some melancholy piano music in the background to enhance the humanity.

After a while, White decided to smoke a cigarette. It was conceivable to him that, owing to construction work in the lobby, the building staff had taken his car out of service and would leave it that way not only through the weekend but all through the week. That they could leave him here as long as they had suggested that anything was possible. He imagined them opening the doors, ten days later, and finding him dead on his back, like a cockroach. Within hours, he had smoked all his cigarettes.

“Up and then down: The lives of elevators” by Nick Paumgarten.

Would you applaud and cheer, like it’s some kind of panopticon performance art? Are you so desperate for reality that you would watch this man disintegrate without once trying to summon help? He’s fated to be trapped in that elevator for 41 hours: enough time for you to go out on the town and come back late at night to find out how’s he doing before you retire to bed. You wake up in the morning, log on, hoping to see if he’s resorted to masturbation to block out the pain of a featureless world closing in all around him.

Idea for a new reality-TV show: trap unassuming citizens in urban environments. An elevator, say, or an office-block toilet. A car wash. A factory. The garbage enclosure of a high-rise housing estate. A concrete island. Leave them there for the weekend. Beam the security-camera images to the world. Do they die? Play with themselves? Talk to God? Talk to you?

Record their emotional response. Rate it and vote on it.

The end.

I find “reality TV” absolutely fascinating. I think people are so desperate to find what they believe to be “reality”, that they will happily watch programs of CCTV footage filmed in underground car parks, rainy shopping malls and motorway junctions… in a sense, the drabber the better.

J.G. Ballard, BBC Online Chat, 2002.

..:: Previously on Ballardian…

+ Trompe l’oeil corridors
+ ‘What would Borges do?’
+ Gargle, don’t swallow
+ The Ballardian Primer: Surveillance Cameras
+ One Nation Under CCTV

In the autumn of 1954 we sailed on one of the Empress liners, then spent a month at an RCAF base near London, Ontario, not far from Niagara Falls. We were all eager to embrace the North American way of life. We arrived at our training base in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, as the first snow was falling, and I think it was still falling when I left the following spring. A wilderness of ice and snow was not the best location for a flying school. For long periods we had nothing to do but sit in the flight rooms, reading magazines and watching the snow fall on the buried runways. Now and then a moose would leap the perimeter fence and gallop off into the mist. In the very comfortable mess, virtually a four-star hotel, I would sit by the picture windows and watch the snow carried horizontally by the icy wind.

With a great deal of time on my hands, I wrote a few short stories and tried to find enough reading matter to keep me going. Most of the paperbacks in the bus depot were popular thrillers and detective stories, but there was one type of fiction that occupied a lot of space. This was science fiction, then enjoying its great postwar boom. I had read little, apart from the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon strips of my Shanghai childhood. I would later realise most professional SF writers, British and American, were keen fans from their early teens, and many began their careers writing for fanzines. I was one of the very few who came to science fiction at a relatively late age. By the mid1950s there were some 20 SF magazines on monthly sale in America and Canada, and the best of these were in the Moose Jaw magazine racks.

These I seized on and began to devour. Here was a form of fiction that was actually about the present day, and often as elliptical and ambiguous as Kafka. It recognised a world dominated by consumer advertising, of democratic government mutating into public relations. This was a world of cars, offices, highways, airlines and supermarkets that we actually lived in, but which was completely missing from almost all serious fiction. Nobody in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. Nobody in Sartre or Thomas Mann ever paid for a haircut. Nobody in Hemingway’s postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.

And in this one, Ballard discusses the stimulus for Crash:

In 1970, I began to write Crash. This was more than a literary challenge, not least because I had three young children crossing Shepperton’s streets every day, and nature might have played another of its nasty tricks. I have described the novel as a kind of psychopathic hymn, and it took an immense effort of will to enter the minds of the central characters. In an attempt to be faithful to my own imagination, I gave the narrator my own name, accepting all this entailed.

Two weeks after I had finished, my tank-like Ford Zephyr had a front-wheel blowout at the foot of Chiswick Bridge. The car swerved out of control, crossed the central reservation and rolled onto its back. Luckily I was wearing my seat belt. Hanging upside down, I found the doors had been jammed by the partly collapsed roof. The car lay in the centre of the oncoming carriageway, and I was fortunate not to be struck by approaching traffic. Eventually I wound down the window and clambered out.

Looking back, I suspect that if I had died, the accident might well have been judged deliberate, at least on the unconscious level. But I believe Crash is less a hymn to death than an attempt to buy off the executioner who waits for us all in a quiet garden nearby. Crash is set at a point where sex and death intersect, though the graph is difficult to read and is constantly recalibrating itself. The same is true of Emin’s bed, which reminds us that this young woman’s beautiful body has stepped from a dishevelled grave.

Earlier in this extract, Ballard talks about the violent reception his infamous exhibition of crashed cars received, where spectators attacked the cars and the hostess, and how that reaction gave him the ‘green light’ to go ahead and write Crash:

It occurred to me I could test my hypothesis about the unconscious links between sex and the car crash by putting on an exhibition of crashed cars. … The cars went on show without any supporting graphic material, as if they were large pieces of sculpture. A TV enthusiast at the Arts Lab offered to set up a camera and closed-circuit monitors on which the guests could watch themselves as they strolled around. I suggested we hire a young [topless] woman to interview the guests about their reactions.
…
I have never seen the guests at a gallery get drunk so quickly. There was a huge tension in the air, as if everyone felt threatened by some inner alarm that had started to ring. Nobody would have noticed the cars if they had been parked in the street, but under the unvarying gallery lights these damaged vehicles seemed to provoke and disturb. Wine was splashed over the cars, windows were broken, the topless girl was almost raped in the back seat of the Pontiac (or so she claimed: she later wrote a damning review headed “Ballard Crashes” in the underground paper Frendz).
…
My exhibition had been a psychological test disguised as an art show, which is probably true of Damien Hirst’s shark and Tracey Emin’s bed.

Interestingly, the Guardian is currently featuring a story about ‘13 unlucky works of art’. Hirst and Emin (with her storied bed) appear, but not Ballard and his crashed cars:

11 Damien Hirst is rubbished and inked

Art not recognised as art has often fallen prey to cleaners. The most celebrated case is cleaner Emmanuel Asare’s bin-bagging at London’s Eyestorm Gallery in 2001 of Damien Hirst’s installation Painting by Numbers, a representation of his studio and its detritus. ‘I didn’t think for a second it was art,’ explained Asare. Hirst found this ‘hysterical’. Less so the pouring of black ink into his sculpture Away From the Flock during an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 1994. The perpetrator, artist Mark Bridger, re-labelled the piece Black Sheep. ‘I was providing an interesting addendum to his work,’ said Bridger in court.

13 Tracey Emins bed springs are tested

In 1999, at Tate Britain, artists Yuan Cai and JJ Xi intervened in Tracey Emin’s installation My Bed. ‘Although they got on the bed for a few seconds, mostly they just threatened guards with kung-fu kicks,’ said witness Harry Pye. ‘They realised we were serious artists – doing it purely from a creative point,’ said Xi. ‘Don’t take seriously Emin saying we were “like failed artists threatening to jump off Waterloo Bridge unless given a gallery” – probably she got drunk.’ In 2000, Cai and Xi urinated on Marcel Duchamp’s La Fontaine to alleged cheers from Tate Modern visitors.

Annoyed with myself, I set off along the narrow street, past the surveillance cameras that guarded the lacquered doorways, each lens with its own story to tell. Hidden perspectives turned Estrella de Mar into a huge riddle. Trompe-l’oeil corridors beckoned but led nowhere…

J.G. Ballard. Cocaine Nights (1996).

Every good Ballardian needs this: SurveillanceSaver, a screensaver that displays live feeds from over 600 Axis surveillance-camera networks (found via Boing Boing).

Surveillance cameras by necessity record interzones, the hot spots where crime might breed or deviance might spontaneously generate, in locations beyond the reach of our unenhanced optic nerves, or where everything and everyone has simply shut up shop. Business parks at night, city squares cast in gloomy shadow, empty swimming pools, the hooded entrances of hospitals, the city-like scale of airport perimeters, motorway feeder roads where human interaction is factored out of the landscape and the only transaction occurs between speed and machinery. Ballard’s work precisely records such territory, a rich topography inset with mysterious ley lines, weaving a grid to support shadowy lifestyles enacted far away from mainstream thought.

This screensaver is your privileged window onto Ballardian space.

It cycles through the feeds, lingering for around 3 minutes on each. The action is jerky, frame by frame. At times it takes on the quality of a La Jetee-style photo roman: frozen scenes, no movement, absolutely still, until the glare of a sodium light almost imperceptibly flickers on and off in the foreground. On the occasion that someone walks across the ’set’, their movements are rendered like some stop-motion Harryhausen creature. In a city square somewhere very late at night in Eastern Europe, the scene is empty except for two motionless civic statues; only one isn’t. Within a second, this man’s legs move, then freeze, then move…trapped in the molasses-like gravity of CCTV time sickness. Behind him, there’s actually only one statue and it remains behind, rooted to the spot.

Every time I return to my computer to find the screensaver in action, I’m transfixed. Versed in Ballard’s work, when a grey and forbidding car park appears, I hope for a Lincoln Continental to cruise into view, with a ‘hoodlum scientist’ in a black leather jacket receiving a blow job in the back seat, watched passively by the blank gaze of a man in the driver’s seat, his lack of affect matching the camera lens precisely. Or a porno shoot on a construction site on the far edge of town, the camera watching the cameras. I find myself scanning the feeds, examining every inch of the grainy black and white image, to locate some kind of deviation from the norm: waiting, perhaps, for a casually dressed urban professional to scope the aisles in a video store, a mysterious brown package under his arm; or an office worker staying back late in her cubicle, injecting some unknown substance into her arm, unable to bear the thought of returning home to whatever it is that awaits her there. I watch mannequins in store windows, wondering if they’ll ever break the window and go into a club, where they’ll start to dance. I stare at what looks like frozen tundra, hoping for a Tunguska-like object to explode… And then I am jerked from my reverie: the next feed is a pig pen on a remote farm. A huge snout fills the screen, and then the software cuts to a new feed, a dolphin swimming in a zoo, then yet another feed, the underwater underside of a woman’s body doing laps in a pool.

But most of all, I am alert for the offices and the university computer labs and the library reading rooms that randomly cycle through, waiting for the uncanny shock of catching someone I know watching a screen, wondering if they are watching this screensaver, too, watching for me, under the passive gaze of this camera behind me, above and to my right, somewhere out in space.

Far from installing SETI software on our computers to assist in the search for life in outer space, we should be installing this wonderful screensaver, scanning the farthest reaches of inner space, where it is even less certain than in the cosmos that intelligent life exists.

Photo: Eamonn McCabe.

Lee Rourke at the Guardian’s book blog has posted on Ballard, casting his vote for JGB as Britain’s ‘greatest living author’ and Crash as the ‘most prophetic novel written by a British writer in the last 50 years’.

Lee has some sharp observations:

Crash is the definitive novel of technocentrism: where the blurring of our technologies and functionality is evoked through a cultural and political desert in the urban environment, revealing a society governed by the car and the – mostly sexual – violence we are left with. A crumbling world where we are dwarfed by a new machine age that has no real need for us – a world we are ill-equipped to understand as it leaves us standing – forcing us to worship its gleaming by-products and ignoring its manipulation of us. To put it simply: Ballard understands that modernity has left us to our own basal needs – and we’re not coping too well.

Interesting, too, are the reader reactions.

Some get it:

* ‘Even ‘Empire of the sun’, his most biographical novel, reads like a forensic report written by visiting aliens.’
* ‘Empty cities and stuff. Cool.’
* ‘Yes, he is kind of unreadable, but the ideas and narratives are obviously super.’
* ‘The emotional distance from which he observes often means that the full horror only dawns on you after you’ve finished the book and taken a step back.’
* ‘I think the problem I have with Ballard is that I read Atrocity Exhibition first, and everything else was something of a let down. Not really a criticism of the other books, more a compliment of how utterly brilliant I think Atrocity Exhibition is.’
* ‘Reptilian coldness is not always the best attribute but Ballard at his best begs to differ.’

Some don’t:

* ‘Millennium People by JGB – i did find the experience of reading the novel’s first few pages extremely painful. i’ve read nothing else by Ballard and am proably being unfair – but i’m afraid of the pain coming back.’
* ‘Ballard: great as a conceptualist, lousy as a novelist. Sorry J.G, if you read these things, but all reviews send me rushing to your books only to give up after about 10 pages.’
* ‘I can’t stand him – I’ve read about three or four of his books and they all bored me to tears. The characters were utterly unconvincing and lacked any kind of psychological depth.’

Read the rest.

The European Space Agency (Esa) is after volunteers for a simulated human trip to Mars, in which six crewmembers spend 17 months in an isolation tank. They will live and work in a series of interlocked modules at a research institute in Moscow.

Once the hatches are closed, the crew’s only contact with the outside world is a radio link to “Earth” with a realistic delay of 40 minutes.”

Sounds like the perfect opportunity for an enterprising Ballard fan to take the plunge and find out first-hand what it’s like to be one of JGB’s damaged astronauts.

Especially since the psychological effects will be closely monitored:

But, while Esa says it will do nothing that puts the lives of the simulation crew at unnecessary risk, officials running the experiment have made it clear they would need a convincing reason to let someone out of the modules once the experiment had begun.

“The idea behind this experiment is simply to put six people in a very close environment and see how they behave,” Bruno Gardini, project manager for Esa’s Aurora space exploration programme, told BBC News. “

The simulated behavioural experiment disguised as a working spaceship is also the theme of Ballard’s short-story ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’, in which a scientist chooses to remain inside the mock environment, rather than ‘return’ to Earth.

I’ll be posting something on ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ and its 1960s TV adaptation sometime over the next few days, if you’re at all interested.

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.”

——————————————————————–
J.G. Ballard. Millennium People (2003; p. 104).
——————————————————————–

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.”

—————————————————————————————-
J.G. Ballard. ‘The Ultimate Departure Lounge’ (1997).
—————————————————————————————-

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.”

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

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.

—————————————————————————————————
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’.”

————————————————————————-
J.G. Ballard. Kingdom Come (2006; p. 146).
————————————————————————

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.

Rick McGrath is a writer and former adman. He is also the curator of what may be the world’s largest collection of J.G. Ballard first editions; he’s the ‘go-to man’ whenever a TV station or glossy mag does a rare feature on Ballard and needs some book covers. Rick has written analyses of Ballard’s work, which you can find — along with ephemera, scans of Ballard’s cover art, and a sizeable selection of criticism from heavyweight Ballard scholars — over at The Terminal Collection.

Thanks to Rick for the book scans and Mike Holliday for the collages and ephemera.

..:: Simon

———————————————————————————–

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

How did you become interested in Ballard’s writing?

I was turned onto Ballard by Lawrence Russell, a now-retired professor of creative writing in Victoria, Canada. The classic 1974 Penguin softcover reprints had just been published, so I bought them all and went home to read The Wind From Nowhere. The writing style was punchy — fine by me — and the plot zipped along in normal adventure narrative mode — no surprises there — but it was the slow burn of the concept that blew me away. Up to this time the furthest into the SF apocalyptic pool I had ventured was Kurt Vonnegut’s Ice Nine. Hardly deep. By the time I waded through The Drowned World I was hooked. The Terminal Beach, my first foray into the short stuff, basically kicked psycho sand in my eyes. It’s a book you’d create a desert island for. My ardour was finally slaked with The Drought, which I still find a lesser god. When I finished that fab four I went out and bought more. I’m still buying.

What interested me then, as it does today, is Ballard’s bald-faced technique of inversion — it’s the elephant in the character’s room — which I still take as a kind of dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, flatly played out against painterly backgrounds in Ballard’s insular little pop-art worlds. Oh yeah, I’m also drawn to enigma and paradox, darkside fantasies, and free-flowing clever imaginations.

You like Wind from Nowhere, don’t you? Even Ballard can’t bring himself to mention it, these days.

It was, admittedly, the first Ballard I ever read. So it’s a little like a first kiss. I was fascinated with the concept of the increasing wind. It had a sudden newness to it. And you have to admit, tentative prose or not, that Ballard’s imaginative powers are already flexing in his minutely detailed descriptions of the disaster. The plot is well paced, with cutaways to the secondary story, and basically the book only fails at the end when Ballard realises he’s written himself into a corner: either they all die, or the wind abates. So it’s no great surprise when, with only a hundred or so words to go, Ballard has to toss this in: ‘Amazed, they looked up at this incredible defiance, intervening like some act of God to save them.’ At least he had the nerve to call it a deus ex machina before his readers did.

The writing style is lucid and honest; the intricacies of just how such a wind would affect the earth seems plausible and the tension is well maintained. It just doesn’t have that inversion of ‘civilised’ reality for Maitland to ponder, and ultimately accept.

In the rest of the apocalyptic quartet the action takes place after the denouement, much like in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and as such has a lack of tension because the time frame is extended — all the way to infinity in The Crystal World. My position, of course, could prove to be untenable, but I’d still defend Wind as a guilty pleasure on a wild winter night, curled up with a Lagavulin in front of a reassuring fire.

I’m not very good on the archival side of things. I throw away my manuscripts. You’ve got to understand, I can’t take all that stuff. I hate that instant memorialising…frankly it’s of no interest to me whatever. All those things that obsess archivists, like different variants of a paperback published in 1963 (on the first run something is deleted from the artwork, or the Berkeley medallion is not on the spine)…it leaves me cold!”

———————————————————————————–
J.G. Ballard. ‘Interview by A. Juno & Vale’. RE/Search: J.G. Ballard (1984).
———————————————————————————–

You’re known for your huge collection of Ballard first editions, flying in the face of Ballard’s attitude towards archivists and collectors.

Sure. But whaddya gonna do? Ballard seems to have no ego-attachment to specific objects. He even has a fake painting! Is it part of his general aversion to the past? He certainly isn’t nostalgic. And I can understand where he’s coming from — collecting first editions is a totally wacky expenditure of time and energy. The point of a book is the story, not the time it was published or the way it was packaged. I’m sure there’s some unsavoury Freudian explanation for this irrational desire to surround (extend?) yourself with these symbolic cultural objects, but the trip seems fairly harmless.

LEFT: Detail from Vermilion Sands (artist: Peter Jones; Panther, London 1975).
RIGHT: Richard Powers: Surrealism Lite (The Burning World; Berkley, New York 1964).

Actually, the trip is very instructive. Looking at the myriad examples of Ballard cover art on your site, one thing that strikes me is the fact that no publisher has ever really nailed it. Take the Panther cover (see above) for Vermilion Sands — it’s like a futuristic Fantasy Island — ‘De spaceship! De spaceship!’ Surely there’s something to be said here about the difficulties publishers have had in categorising Ballard’s genre-defying work: ‘we can’t work this weirdo out, so we’ll call it science fiction’.

Ballard’s cover art has been woefully under conceptualised. It tells me that either publishers don’t care and/or the artists just used something that was lying around the studio. Stupid. Lazy. Cheap. Choose any two.

The most probable reality is that genre-defying work, ipso facto, makes categorisation difficult. It seems to me Ballard is an intellectually pure writer, one who follows his own instincts and apparently isn’t concerned with hacking up a best-seller. So he doesn’t sit still long enough for a publisher to box him up. I think this happens because of Ballard’s voracious appetite for imagistic input. He devours TV, magazines, oddball scientific journals – invisible literature – and collages it back at us in his never-ending rush of story ideas. His books invariably have topical references, as he basically burrows through the prevailing zeitgeist and projects its imaginative dark side back at us.

JGB at home, showing them how it should be done… (photo: Martyn Goddard).

It’s just about possible to divide Ballard’s career into roughly four periods. What’s the best and worst cover art in each? Let’s start with his early pulp, sci fi period, say from 1956 to 1969…

LEFT: Designer uncredited; The Drowned World; Gollancz, London, 1963.

OK, here Ballard had three publishers: Gollancz, Cape and Berkley. The low points are certainly the Gollancz efforts, which used no art and just two colours on a bilious yellow stock. Most of the press run probably went to libraries. Cheap to do. Garish on the shelf. The Berkleys are almost as bad, as they use the completely irrelevant ’surrealist’ art pumped out by the prolifically puffy Richard Powers. Low point is his cover art for The Burning World (see above), which shows a scene that is (a) not at all representative of the story, and (b) is antithetical to the book’s theme. My favourite Berkley is a tossup between the Wind From Nowhere cover and the Drowned World effort.

The Capes are by far the best. The Drought (see below) is powerfully minimalist, relying basically on ripped horizontal colour bands; The Crystal World is the first to feature a Max Ernst painting, and the pile of skulls adorning The Disaster Area is also somehow appropriate, with its implication of atrocity. Cape also did wrap-around covers, which extended the effect, and if I have any quarrel with them, it’s their choice of cheesy typeface.

:: Cape’s wraparound Drought (artist: David Fawcett; Jonathan Cape, London, May 1965).

Next up: Ballard’s ‘experimental’ period, lasting approximately from 1970 to 1978…

Here, of the hardcovers, again Cape is the major publisher. Atrocity (below), Crash (see later) and Low-flying Aircraft (see later) are the high points. The Doubleday cover for Atrocity Exhibition is an odd choice, given the other 12 drawings (see later) Mike Foreman did for the book (perhaps it’s the least offensive), and Grove’s Halloween cover for Love & Napalm: USA was obviously developed on bad drugs.

:: The incomparable Dali; a very successful union (artist: Salvador Dali; Jonathan Cape, London, 1970).

Of all the hardcovers, however, I think the best overall is the Farrar, Straus & Giroux cover for Concrete Island (below). It’s just the kind of visual perversion I think Ballard would like. At least it’s clever.

:: The 1970s was a very strange decade.
LEFT: Crash (artist: Lawrence Ratzkin; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, NY 1973).
RIGHT: Concrete Island (artist: Paul Bacon; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 1974).

The soft covers are more varied. Berkley’s Vermilion Sands and Chronopolis editions have dull covers by the still uninspired sub-realist, Richard Powers, and Panther’s Vermilion Sands in 1975 — as you’ve already highlighted — goes deep retro with a busty woman and distracted midget. At least it’s better than the haunted Gregory Peck figure they put on their reprint of Concrete Island in 1976 (below), and the clothing-challenged waif in front of an inappropriately destroyed building in the 1977 reprint of High-Rise (below). What were they thinking? How could they ignore the dead dog in the pool?

:: Gregory Peck meets a bedraggled, semi-naked nubile wandering dreamily around a post-apocalyptic urban war zone.
LEFT: Concrete Island (artist: Richard Clifton-Dey; Panther, London, 1976).
RIGHT: High-Rise (artist: Chris Foss; Panther, London, 1977).

The third major period of Ballard’s writing is a mish-mash — basically mainstream — lasting from 1979 to 1995. A lot of ground is covered, a lot of different styles…

But really, does anything stand out? In hardcovers, Cape starts to sputter a tad with the enigmatic family portrait on the cover (below) of The Unlimited Dream Company (granted, a silly title — but Brit gothic art?) and the oddly understated cover (below) of Hello America, surely a story with more visual treats than a bulbous car slithering over a brown desert. Carrol & Graf’s version of the same title looks like an old set from Planet of the Apes.

:: Detail from The Unlimited Dream Company (artist: Bill Botten; Jonathan Cape, London, 1979).

The Dragon’s Dream 1981 edition of Drowned World is a visual treat — one of very few ’special editions’ of Ballard’s more visual works — and Cape continues to milk defeat from the breast of victory with a totally inappropriate fantasist illustration adorning Myths of the Near Future (below).

LEFT: Hello America (artist: Bill Botten; Jonathan Cape, London, 1981).
RIGHT: Artist: Paul Wright; The Day Of Creation, Gollancz, London, 1987.

No wonder Ballard switched to Gollancz, who at least got the project done with Empire of the Sun. I thought Gollancz also did a good job with The Day of Forever and The Venus Hunters (illustrated by Mark Foreman, son of Mike Foreman), although their take on The Day of Creation (above) looks like the Little Tugboat Annie that could… more like Daze of Creation. Hutchinson’s oddball art for Running Wild is cool — at least they’re kids — although Farrar’s attempt looks like they thought the book was called Sitting Wild And Out Of Focus.

LEFT: Myths Of The Near Future (artist: Bill Botten; Jonathan Cape, London, 1982).
RIGHT: Running Wild (artists: Chip Kidd and Barbara de Wilde; Hutchinson, London, 1988).

The oddball Arkham entry, Memories of the Space Age (see later), safely offers up another Max Ernst — and ignores the endless possibilities of a wasted Cape Canaveral, and the Collins hodgepodge of War Fever is yet another example of the ‘more is less’ school of cover design. Bore Fever. Although I think they recover nicely with The Kindness of Women (below), even though the timecode has been wound back to the 40s with the hat/lip styles. This period ends with Rushing to Paradise (below), a nicely executed cover on an unfortunate book. It’s like Ballard says: death has the best architects.

:: Two thumbs up from Rick.
LEFT: The Kindness of Women (designer: Neal Stuart; Harper Collins, Toronto, 1991).
RIGHT: Rushing to Paradise (designer: Chris Moore; Flamingo, London, 1994).

LEFT: Myths and Feathers (detail from Myths of the Near Future; designer: Chris Moore; Panther/Paladin, London, 1984).

In softcovers, Panther/Paladin hit a high point with a reissue of the classics using a more conceptual approach during the 1980s, such as the feather-encrusted pilot’s helmet in their 1984 issue of Myths of the Near Future, a nice, fetishishtic image for Crash, and a strong watch-like visual for Low-Flying Aircraft. Paladin reissued a number of new titles in the early 1990s, but, along with a Dent re-issue, these covers didn’t seem to have the on-the-shelf snap of the previous designs.

:: Two flamboyant Flamingos.
LEFT: Cocaine Nights (designer: Jerry Bauer; Flamingo, London, 1996).
RIGHT: Millennium People (designer: Jerry Bauer; Flamingo, London, 2003).

Now we’re into Ballard’s ‘urban detective’ period — from 1996 to the present…

In which it’s hard to argue with Flamingo’s flamboyant covers, starting with the expensive Cocaine Nights, and moving up the marketing budget ladder to Millennium People, with its flagrant metal emboss and Ralph Steadman-inspired cover art of the melting underside of London. Then, splat: Kingdom Come has an atrocious cover, once again presenting an incongruous image, given all the visual opportunities presented in the novel, and a title made more difficult to read by having it split with Ballard’s name.

Patrick Ness wrote that Kingdom Come’s design ‘is so very much more drab than David Hasslehoff’s autobiography’.

It’s a piece of shite. Amateur design and idiot concept. That cover and the suspect title — Ballard’s titles are often hit or miss, too — no doubt hurt sales as much as the crappy reviews. And what a letdown after Millennium People… Bargain basement productions. Any moron could have thought of the St George Cross, or Brooklands…or, given the plot, one of Pearson’s ads!

LEFT: Splat! (image: Getty Images; Kingdom Come; Fourth Estate, London, 2006)

Speaking of reviews, you’re one of the few to defend KC. Cover art aside, why do you think critics have reacted so savagely to Kingdom Come?

I think their reaction is a result of misreading the book. Ballard is complex, and a lot smarter in a philosophic sense than many critics realise. I think he’s been pigeonholed over the last few years as a sort of cranky old iconoclast with a sharp wit and ready opinion, and this — wait for it — media image tends to colour critical reaction, which means the Brits tend to confuse the books with the writer, and dismiss them as the repetitive hyperbole a sort of cranky iconoclast with a sharp wit and ready opinion would write. In contrast, the book received generally positive reviews in Canada, where Ballard is unencumbered with any prevailing public persona.

KC is a densely plotted story, made even more difficult to follow because of the linear Richard Pearson POV. You have to pay attention. Poor JGB. He writes a ‘cry wolf’ story about manipulation of the instincts (the true fascism?) and how easily an ego-damaged adman can carpet bomb a nuclear noir campaign over a suburban sandbox, and how the resultant mental wrench ironically proves deadly for inherently boring consumerism and life enhancing for the survivors. As a bonus, the book is full of clever and funny insights and asides. Critics completely miss the point, blathering about consumerism, fascism, all the links twixt centre and church, sports mobs, characterisation, repetition, etc etc — all the surface noise.

Ballard is not a writer easily digested, as I discovered myself. His modus operandi is to set little creative enigmas for the reader to imaginatively riff on. Mass-media critics have neither the time nor the depth of interest to really think about what The Man is saying, and with KC they focus on the central premise, consumerism and fascism, and entirely miss the ironic criticism of advertising. The entire plot is dependent on Pearson’s campaign. No wonder it generated an army. And Pearson is the great-grandson of Atrocity’s Travers, insofar as his environment is also mediatised, and both seek ‘closure’ in the creation of public, pop symbolism. Pearson’s ad campaign is thematically connected to both the collages and concepts fashioned by Travers.

But critics are part of the media landscape themselves, and their comments about the book have to be expressed in the language of their readers. That’s how you keep your job. In marketing reality, it really doesn’t matter that much if the review is good or bad — what counts is the mention and a picture of the cover. Reviews are, in their own way, just another advertisement for the book. It’s because it doesn’t look like an ad that we confuse it with commentary.

LEFT: J.G. Ballard Quotes (designer: Brian MacKenzie; RE/Search Publications, San Francisco, 2004).
RIGHT: J.G. Ballard Conversations (designers: Brian MacKenzie and Marian Wallace; RE/Search Publications, San Francisco, 2005).

Back to the art, and stepping away into the secondary sources, RE/Search’s covers for their two recent JGB volumes struck me as, in a word, bizarre.

Honestly, I think these reflect more RE/Search’s sense of their design standards. I’m not sure how a pastiche of retro SF images in any way either symbolises Ballard or represents his philosophy. Why not show a pic of The Man himself? Who’s the hero of the book, anyway? And just to show how the publishing industry is in comparison with the guys who really know — Hollywood — check out the sophisticated cover art for the DVDs and CDs of Empire (film; CD) and Crash (film; CD). What is it? Publishers can’t visualise?

LEFT: J.G. Ballard (image: uncredited; Manchester University Press, Manchester & NY, 2005).

However, the cover for academic Andrzej Gasiorek’s Ballard volume utilises the classic Ballardian stereotype: a human-effacing motorway image (a cliché I’m also guilty of using with the banner for this site). It’s clearly the deep cultural resonance of Crash that has generated this widespread visual shorthand — good or bad, do you think?

I’m not surprised… barren roadways have, I think, replaced the empty swimming pool as the modern Ballard image. Academics have tended to focus their attention on Ballard’s more difficult works – Atrocity Exhibition and Crash — and the dominant image of this creative period is the car and its associative images. Good or bad? More like predictable, as some representative image will be chosen, and the car is certainly a Ballardian creation.

What do you think of today’s crop of book covers in general? A number of commentators have bemoaned an over-reliance on computers rather than collage or hand-drawn art, and certainly you can see this in the recent Flamingo Ballard editions: metallic embossing, boxes around the text, and so on.

Funny. I’ve never been a cover-art hound. First editions have dust jackets and the book’s value is 90% determined by the condition of this stupidly fragile piece of paper. What’s on the cover is basically immaterial. As for the production process, I’ve never thought twice about technique — it’s how well the cover draws the eye to itself, and then suggests it might be a good idea to pick me up. Doesn’t matter how it’s done if the idea is on concept.

Is there a computer-generated Ballard cover, say within the last five years, which has caught your fancy?

Not really, as my taste in covers is to either (a) express the mood, or (b) reveal some action. The Flamingos are examples of the triumph of form over content. Do they give you even the slightest idea of the story behind them? Not in the slightest. The tone? OK, Millennium People suggests a breakdown, but the zebra-hipped hottie on Super-Cannes and the fireworks-splayed stab of coke on Cocaine Nights are merely marketing-generated eye candy. Cool, but candy.

Designers have consistently turned a deaf ear to [my] entreaties that someone, please, sit down and draft some original art… Over-reliance on…clinical [computer] technology is estranging in the decorative arts. That’s why, at my wit’s end…I hauled out my coloured pencils. I drew my own damn book cover — luminous, one-of-a-kind, and, like one of Tolstoy’s real beauties, not quite perfect.”

——————————————————————————————————–
Lionel Shriver. ‘Now that pixels have replaced pencils the art of drawing has vanished. I’m so exasperated I’m designing my own book cover’. The Guardian, 2/8/06.
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Should writers — like rock stars — be allowed to design their own covers? Or should they never be allowed near a scanner and a copy of Photoshop for as long as they live?

Ha. That’s good. But perhaps it’ll all be moot in the future anyway, as self-publishing and on-demand publishing increase with the expansion of the digital world. Personally, I can’t see why a writer shouldn’t also design, except in those instances where a lack of any skill or interest would diminish interest. With Ballard’s background in art, I don’t know if he’s ventured any suggestions (perhaps he has), but I think the system has a built-in reticence with agents as intermediaries. One suspects that a lot of writers rarely deal with their publishers.

:: ‘Venus Smiles’: one of five Ballardian ‘ads’ published in Ambit magazine (designer: J.G. Ballard; Ambit, #46, Winter 1970/71).

On the strength of Ballard’s advertiser announcements for Ambit, at least he would have made a good go of it. The Atrocity Exhibition would have especially benefited from this approach, don’t you think?

I have to disagree — I’m afraid Ballard’s concepts are so private that there’s little room for viewer overlap, and without that shared language there’s no understanding. I think those Ambit ads were products of their time, and possibly an in-joke with da boys. Times have changed. I’m not sure how Ballard might have handled Atrocity. Even his pro pal, Michael Foreman, had a tough time, falling back on a predictable collage solution himself.

Appropriating a Blake watercolour, say, or a Durer etching or an Ingres painting for the cover’s pictorial element puts the text in excellent company without diluting its descriptive authority. Nobody confuses these artists’ representations with the author’s, but their validated excellence may rub off.”

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John Updike. ‘Deceptively Conceptual’. The New Yorker, 10/10/05.
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:: ‘Europe After the Rain’ by Max Ernst: put to good use? (artist: Max Ernst; Memories Of The Space Age; Arkham House, Sauk City, 1988).

Following Updike’s lead, do you think some of the best Ballard covers are the Ernst paintings used for Crystal World and Memories of the Space Age? (Ernst’s usage for the latter was obviously missed on Evelyn C. Leeper, though…).

If Updike’s pissed, he should write a book about the conservation of symbols through disuse. Is that pre-modern? I like Ballard’s Ernst covers, but invariably they’re badly printed and perhaps too dense an image for your eye to easily resolve. The Dali cover on Atrocity was also an odd choice, I thought, with the primary image on the back cover. You can be too subtle. It’s also poorly printed.

What other artists would you like to see adorning a Ballard book?

I can detect Ballard thematic links with artists as disparate as Magritte and Escher, Russian Stalinist posters and almost all outsider art.

LEFT: Low-Flying Foss (artist: Chris Foss; Low-Flying Aircraft Panther; Panther, London, 1978).
RIGHT: That’s more like it — Cape’s first edition. Although the Monty Python-style vehicles and Gilliamesque cartoon font are a worry… (artist: Bill Botten; Low-flying Aircraft; Jonathan Cape, London, 1976).

You mentioned the low point of Richard Powers earlier. But what about Chris Foss? He seemed even more wide of the mark. For Low-Flying Aircraft, he supplied one of his patented starships that had nothing to do with the contents — it seemed that Ballard would be forever burdened by his sci-fi beginnings, even long after he’d maintained escape velocity from it.

Foss’s Low-Flying Aircraft cover is a joke compared with the Cape first edition — but then I grew up on an air-force base when they still had Lancasters.

Superb, in many ways the best ever. Quasi-realistic, but in the right way, like a movie poster of the 1950s — brought into brilliant focus by that line, ‘A brutal, erotic novel’.”

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J.G. Ballard on Chris Foss’s cover for Crash, quoted in Rick Poynor, ‘Archive: Crash Covers‘. Eye Magazine, 2004.
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Monstrously bad, one of the worst book jackets ever — for sheer ugliness and crudity, impossible to beat.”

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Ballard on Cape’s Crash cover, quoted in Poynor, 2004.
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LEFT: Foss’s Crash (artist: Chris Foss; Panther, London, 1979).

I was very surprised to learn that Ballard praised Foss’s cover for Crash — a lurid, pulpy depiction of a naked woman and a monstrous, Christine-style demon-car. It’s less of a surprise to learn he hates the Cape edition: it’s very 70s, and very crass, although it’s strangely evocative of the poster art for Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange and all of the stylised, morally ambivalent violence that signified.

I hate to admit it, but I don’t have Foss’s Crash cover, although if Ballard liked it, that could be part of his proclivity to provoke when possible. If it has sex, I’m going to bet The Man will find something to like about it. The Cape Crash is fine by me as it fits my criteria of selling the book as quickly as possible. The name and a gear stick. Doesn’t get much simpler than that. The colour helps.

Do you agree with Rick Poynor, who after analysing the various covers for Crash, concluded that the novel ‘is peculiarly resistant to attempts to summarise it with a single image. On the whole, image-makers have been defeated by Crash’.

If Poynor thinks Crash is beyond an image, he just hasn’t found one he likes yet. As I’ve said, the DVD cover is brutally erotic. If image-makers have been defeated by Crash, then they’re either not very good or their imagination is better suited to other themes. Half the battle is matching the right artist to the job.

:: Two Capes: Ballard hates one; McGrath can’t stand the other.
LEFT: Crash (artist: Bill Botten; Jonathan Cape, London, June 1973).
RIGHT: Concrete Island (artist: Bill Botten; Jonathan Cape, London, April 1974).

Poynor also wrote with regards to Ballard that ‘few of the hardback covers produced by Cape in the 1970s and 1980s were any good’. I don’t mind Cape’s Concrete Island cover: it’s full of the Pop-Art allusions that Ballard so skilfully assimilated.

I agree with Poynor. Cape’s Concrete Island has been taken to a level of abstraction as to be meaningless. And it’s literal, not descriptive. The island is green, with a concrete shoreline surrounding it. Suffice to say publishing is a business, and there is a balance between projected sales and what you’ll spend on art.

According to Jeremy Dennis, ‘The Drowned World causes endless problems to cover illustrators, provoking some of the most tedious and literalistic of Ballard’s covers’.

LEFT: Drowned Tanguy (artist: Yves Tanguy; The Drowned World; Penguin, London 1965).

History probably proves him right, although Berkley did choose to show Kerans at the end — a bold move. Dick French does a pretty good job showing the Rousseau-like jungle of Ballard’s imagination in the Dragon’s Dream edition, but even then the hotel is hardly the dominant image. A big crocodile has been used, but perhaps the oddest of all is the 1965 Penguin with a detail of Yves Tanguy’s Le Palais aux Rochers. Now, that’s a stretch.

Does book-cover art have an image problem, compared to rock-album art for example?

Interesting question, but it’s a little like comparing car crashes and wall angles. I’d say book-cover art doesn’t have an image problem — it’s always the answer to the simple question of how to attract the eye in a busy visual environment. Do people really buy a book simply because of the cover design? I doubt it. The cover’s job is to ‘get you in the store’ — pick up the book. After that, other purchase decision criteria kick in. Title. Plot summary. Price. Popular book covers are simply print advertisements. In the old days (before CDs) rock albums had an advantage, simply because the size of the product gave you more space for compelling art. Then they invented foldout albums, and you had a bloody poster to play with. And music is less specific than a story in terms of the images you could use. The bigger acts, as well, could retain creative control over their print image and ensure their album art didn’t go off into marketing department mayhem.

LEFT: A Mike Foreman illustration for Doubleday’s edition of The Atrocity Exhibition (Doubleday, NY, 1970).
RIGHT: A Phoebe Gloeckner illustration for the RE/Search reprint (RE/Search, San Francisco, 1990).

Returning to Mike Foreman: you have an extremely rare copy of Doubleday’s pulped Atrocity edition, which featured Foreman’s illustrations inside. In capturing the essence of the work, how do they compare to Phoebe Gloeckner’s gynaecological art in RE/Search’s Atrocity reprint?

Foreman’s 13 illustrations are line-art mini-collages or posters of the book’s major images and themes. There are the expected images of Kennedy and Monroe, but the great bulk of them basically attempt to visualise some of the book’s themes of war, death, sex and politics. There are quite a few lurid illustrations of Karen Novotny in various stages of déshabillé, and a number of freaky landscapes, and one great image of a worker looking out a window under an eye of Marilyn’s projected face. To tell you the truth, I was somewhat disappointed with the illustrations. Given the flamboyant visual atmosphere of Atrocity Exhibition, it’s actually quite amazing that Foreman’s collaboration is as understated as it is. Foreman’s style is reminiscent of the times, which was dominated by quasi-cutesy little creatures bracketed by Yellow Submarine and Peter Max, and you can see influences of this style throughout, although the obsessively fine line art adds a bit of psycho zing in comparison to the bright, flat colours of Max et al.

Gloeckner’s art is, I think, another example of bringing together a set of drawings and the book. In other words, I’m not sure she did her illustrations as a specific commission for this book. Are they erotic without being sexual? Or the other way around? Her drawings are, undoubtedly, strangely evocative, and certainly reinforce the hallucinatory nature of the work.

:: Two more from David Pelham (both Penguin, London, 1974).

What’s your favourite of all Ballard covers?

I’d vote for the 1974 Penguin paperbacks, designed by David Pelham. These little airbrushed minimalist masterpieces somehow seem to catch the singularity of Ballard’s obsessions, and the clarity of the image immediately attracts the eye. The font is well chosen — a strong stencil — and each cover is true to the overall design themes of the project. These I’d like to have as paintings.

Enough about cover art: what’s your key Ballard text?

There are two…

1) The Drowned World: without it, there is no ‘conceptual landscape’, and Ballard would not have staked out the stupendous idea of how to have his protagonists go with the flow, no matter how irrational it appears.

2) Empire of the Sun: JGB’s artistic pinnacle, and a rosetta stone of images. Without it, we wouldn’t be here…and JGB would be just another cult footnote.

..:: LINKS
+ Richard Powers
+ Chris Foss
+ Phoebe Gloeckner
+ Michael Foreman
+ Rick McGrath’s Terminal Collection
+ Ballardia: Jeremy Dennis’s JGB Cover Art Gallery
+ J.G. Ballard Bibliography at Ballardian
+ Mike Holliday’s guide to collecting Ballard

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Geoff Manaugh is a writer and essayist whose work has appeared in Contemporary, Space & Culture, Blend, Lumpen, Inhabitat, WorldChanging, the Oyster Boy Review, the Urban Design Review, Subtopia, Vector, things magazine, and The Allen Ginsberg Audio Collection (a short essay in the CD liner notes). He’s also a contributing editor at Archinect, and Senior Editor for David Haskell’s Urban Design Review. And he’s the main man behind BLDGBLOG, a blog devoted to ‘architectural conjecture, urban speculation and landscape futures’. BLDGBLOG is very popular — it’s namechecked in the current Blackberry Pearl ad campaign featuring Douglas Coupland. It’s also wildly divergent, eclectic and challenging, and it never fails to command the attention, as Geoff examines the built world from all angles, and even from the upper atmosphere (via Google Earth), leaping around from posts on London’s subterranean system of drains, sewers and bunkers to whole suburbs thrown into space; from Indian superhighways to acoustic landscapes; from cathedrals made of magma to ‘psychovideography’; from military urbanism to sustainable urbanism; from derelict utopias to 3D models of plate tectonics.

I spoke to Geoff Manaugh about BLDGBLOG, and Ballard, and Geoff’s as-yet-unpublished novel, and a lot more.

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Simon Sellars
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SIMON: What motivated you to start a blog devoted to “architectural conjecture, urban speculation, and landscape futures”?

GEOFF: I was reading Super-Cannes, writing my own first novel, recovering from abdominal surgery, and auditing a university course about Archigram, the 1960s British pop-utopian architecture group; those things just came together somehow – and, one morning, on a whim, I started BLDGBLOG. Now I work on it almost constantly. It’s been two years.

BLDGBLOG became pretty well-defined, with a small but growing readership, and it had a voice, a tempo, an energy, a feel. It was no longer just an ‘architecture’ blog; it had its own direction and orientation, and it was even verging on science fiction in some ways. Short stories in the disguise of architectural theory. Ideas for screenplays. In that regard, BLDGBLOG became more literary – by which I don’t mean to compliment my writing abilities, but to say that the site became its own kind of genre: architectural criticism as a kind of literary form. Somewhere between science fiction, a short story collection, a Don Delillo novel, and a kind of technical catalogue for a world that didn’t exist. Which, incidentally, is how I view a lot of Ballard’s work. So if BLDGBLOG could ever equal Ballard in that regard, I’d be a very happy man!

It’s worth adding that a lot of the architects I admire also use architecture as a form of social critique, or political allegory: Archigram, Rem Koolhass, even Piranesi or Will Alsop. The Agents of Change. Speculative architectural treatises are an extremely exciting, if totally unacknowledged, branch of the literary arts. Look at Thomas More’s Utopia. Or China Miéville. Or, for that matter, J.G. Ballard.

Testing, testing… Is this on… Corporate, automobile test-landscapes. Deserted beach resorts. Ruined stripmalls.

‘Highways, office blocks, faces and street signs are perceived as if they were elements in a malfunctioning central nervous system’. J.G. Ballard

More soon.

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BLDGBLOG’s first post. Wednesday, 7 July, 2004
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BLDGBLOG has covered diverse territory, but your basic obsessions were clearly set out in your very first post. Can you elaborate on the Ballardian elements in your work?

One of the things I like about Ballard is how he treats architectural space: highway flyovers, corporate campuses, flooded hotels, suburban home-development projects, abandoned swimming pools, army camps in the desert. He presents the modern, built environment as this kind of psychological field lab for testing new ways of being human. He encodes all this, or hardwires it, into the actual landscapes of his novels. You get humans trying to understand and psychologically accommodate themselves to the presence of vast, empty car parks, derelict hospitals, redundant freeways, under-subscribed exurban high-rises and so on. It’s a ‘malfunctioning central nervous system’ in spatial form, on the scale of a whole civilisation.

Ballardian space is psycho-spatial. His books are full of artificial lakes, highway medians, multi-storey car parks, strangely over-air-conditioned corporate boardrooms – and these all take on a kind of menacing, even confrontational, gleam, as if you’ve just stepped into some kind of unspoken mental challenge. The buildings and cities and landscapes in Ballard’s novels are more like psychological traps built by management consultants – not architects – who then fly overhead in private jets, looking down, checking whether their complicated theories of human cognition have survived the test. Where ‘the test’ is the world you and I now live in.

Each day, the towers of central London seemed slightly more distant, the landscape of an abandoned planet receding slowly from his mind. By contrast with the calm and unencumbered geometry of the concert-hall and television studios below him, the ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis”.

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J.G. Ballard. High-Rise.
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Of course, any built environment has a psychological impact on the people who live there. In Super-Cannes, for instance, the book’s setting – an office park – is haunted by a kind of ‘controlled and supervised madness,’ Ballard writes. One of the characters explains, at great length, how the too-perfect and over-manicured landscapes of this new corporate enclave inspire sexual violence and anti-immigrant raids – a rebellion against the boredom of tennis courts and well-mowed lawns. Every artificial landscape is the diagram of a certain psychological state – even if that just means reflecting the dominant aesthetic of the day. But the idea that the built landscape can be read as an ‘encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis,’ as Ballard writes, crossing generations and countries, just fascinates me.

Space in Ballard’s novels is never deeply textured or deeply described. Instead, you get these abstract non-places – a corporate campus, a media center, a fitness complex. You drive down feeder roads and airport roundabouts and cross-city motorways. You never enter a world of rich, Dickensian details. He’s like the anti-Dickens. You don’t walk past churches and bookshops and local bars and farmers’ markets and whatever else makes a believable urban setting; you’re always out in this weird edge-world of import warehouses and corporate development projects. Sports-car dealerships. The very lack of detail is what makes a setting Ballardian.

That’s Ballard’s fabled inner space, isn’t it — a neurological world unable to be verified beyond the shifting data of sensory input?

Yes and no. I think there’s a shift in Ballard’s work, from the earlier, almost psychedelic concerns of something like The Drowned World — where all the characters verge on an evolutionary regression to this kind of quasi-reptilian psychological state — compared to the more socioeconomic concerns of Ballard’s later novels, like Millennium People.

In other words, I’d agree with you that there’s a mental/cognitive/neurological world at play in Ballard’s work — but I think the larger significance of that world has shifted over the course of his career. For instance, Ballard’s early stories might suggest that one of the characters has an inability to perceive anything outside his own nervous system, for neuro-anatomical reasons; but now Ballard would emphasise something else. He wouldn’t blame anatomy — the human nervous system — but would use instead his own peculiar version of psychoanalysis to say that the reason you can’t understand or fully interact with the outside world is because of sexual repression or cultural hang-ups — or sheer corporate sociopathology — not because of your reptilian cortex, or because of certain hormones.

So I think Ballard’s gone from blaming the body, or neuro-chemical imbalances, on behalf of his narrators to blaming culture and the economy and sexual mores for his characters’ often hilariously bizarre activities.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Too many car parks – always a sign of a troubled mind”.

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J.G. Ballard. Super-Cannes.
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On BLDGBLOG, you once wrote, “Super-Cannes is a novel – but it’s also a work of architectural criticism”.

Yes — it’s about architecture and corporate real estate as much as it is about the central murder mystery we’re meant to solve. I think it’s a great book. Ballard managed to write a bona fide page-turner, with a genuinely gripping plot and loads of hilarious throwaway lines, and to do so even as he took the same kind of socio-architectural analysis from High-Rise – even Concrete Island – to a new level, critiquing global capitalism itself and not just suburban condo politics. Too often Ballard just comes up with a setting, or an image, while all the rest stalls, like in The Day of Creation, which I think is a failure. There’s nothing there — it’s a military camp in the desert, near a polluted river, with a derelict cinema and an unused airfield and … who cares? The book goes nowhere. Just write a poem, or take a photograph, or use that as one image in a much larger project — because there’s not enough there for a novel.

Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise are often spoken of in the same breath, given that they’re the most airtight, hermetically sealed Ballard novels of all, but I’ve never seen BLDGBLOG quote, or refine, or retool Crash in any way. C’mon, man – it’s got cars, motorways and a totally self-contained psychopathology completely mediated by built space. It’s the spinal landscape projected onto the media landscape, the Ballardian thought lab par excellence, stuffed with in-jokes, satire, surrealist smart-bombs…

I found Crash almost unreadable – not because it offended me, but because I found it badly written and just incredibly obvious. More to the point, it didn’t read like Ballard was having a good time when he wrote it. It reads like he’d rather have been doing something else – and so the book feels dry. It feels sterile. His other books just zip along – and that feeling of effortlessness carries you with it.

I think Ballard said somewhere that if he ever got an erection while writing Crash — because of its weird, auto-centric eroticism — then he would have failed. But I think that’s exactly why the book itself fails: if Ballard actually had created a world of sexualised car crashes and literal auto-eroticism that had succeeded in turning him on, then that enthusiasm would have found its way into the writing. You would have felt it. As it is, the book was empty for me. Even the humour doesn’t ring true. It should have been a short story — because then, of course, I’d be saying it’s brilliant!

I think Crash is maybe too close to The Atrocity Exhibition. To some extent, Crash doesn’t even read like it’s meant to be published in novel form. The Atrocity Exhibition is very upfront with its nonlinear structure and its somewhat improvised – if also completely nonexistent – narrative, and so it works for me; but Crash neither rid itself of that Atrocity Exhibition-like fragmentation nor fit itself fully into the structure of a novel. Maybe it shouldn’t be called a novel: it’s just a text…

What do you think of Cronenberg’s Crash?

It’s alright — but I’m not a big fan. It takes itself way too seriously, for instance, and ends up just boring the shit out of everyone. I think it was miscast, badly paced, and not explicit enough about its themes. As it is, the movie appears to be about a bunch of dull and uninteresting Canadians who get into a car accident one day and end up wife-swapping. Yet, having said that, the movie isn’t funny at all.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

A film of High-Rise is in development, with Vincent Natali attached to direct. But does the symbolism of the high rise really apply to America? It’s not really a ‘high rise’ culture, is it?

I think only in low income, public housing projects — like Chicago’s Cabrini-Green — does high-rise architecture have any sort of psycho-sociological place in the United States. Obviously, you have high-rise living in Manhattan and Chicago and Boston and even L.A. — and Miami, Atlanta, and so on — but I don’t think the buildings themselves have been marketed to their future residents as ‘an experiment in modern living’, or some such, where the narrative of the building itself implies that something will be different there, something will happen there that has never happened before… Which I think was the explicit promise of London high-rises in the 1970s — especially Canary Wharf, later, during the Thatcher years — thus setting up the Ballardian twist: an architectural experiment gone awry. Of course, an American version of High-Rise would undoubtedly be set in a gated Orange County suburb. And I think it’d be brilliant. If I was a publisher I’d commission it, in fact,

Much of the discourse on Ballard springs from English critics. As an American, do you see him as an especially British writer?

Actually, no. I think, aside from vocabulary and punctuation and spelling — and Ballard’s settings, of course — it’s not at all obvious that Ballard is English. You can make points about sense of humour and so on, but Ballard doesn’t strike me as a British writer in the same way that Ian McEwan does, or Iain Sinclair. Or even Iain Banks. Ballard’s book don’t sell well in the U.S., but that’s entirely a top-down problem. I think the American publishing industry is in a state of free-fall, marketing all the wrong books in all the wrong ways. Trying to market Ballard would never occur to them. They want to sell people John Updike novels in hardcover — despite the fact that no one wants John Updike novels, and hardcover books are completely obsolete as a format. So they ‘experiment’ by publishing 900-page hardcover epics about farm life in 1920s Nebraska — and then still seem surprised that no one’s reading fiction in this country.

Short, good, fairly priced, intellectually progressive paperback books — that’s all you need.

Which Ballard book would you like to see filmed?

You’re going to think I’m out of my mind, but I’d like to see Steven Spielberg direct The Drowned World — as long as he didn’t add any kids to the screenplay. Or Danny Boyle film Concrete Island. Or, for that matter, Wong Kar-wai could film Concrete Island, in Chinese, set in Hong Kong. Or Shanghai — a nice bit of Ballardian symmetry there.

Spielberg? Wow. Interesting answer.

When I say ‘Steven Spielberg’ I really just mean the budgets, and the production values, and the technical abilities — the sets, the matte painting, the look — that went into something like Minority Report, or even the first forty-five minutes of War of the Worlds. I wasn’t thinking of Empire of the Sun at all, in fact. I think The Drowned World starring maybe Daniel Craig and Christian Bale, directed by Steven Spielberg — although I’m just thinking out loud here — might be good. But who knows. It could also be horrific.

Reversing the question, I’d love to see J.G. Ballard write a novelisation of Panic Room — or something else like that. I wonder if he could novelize Die Hard…?

Do you feel that Blade Runner’s an overrated text as far as architectural criticism is concerned? It always gets name checked, but one thing I feel it missed was the ‘invisibility’ of new technology. It’s probably the last of the old-school dystopian sci fi films, where the city itself was a major character, imposing and present…

As an architectural film, yes: I do think Blade Runner is over-rated. Even as a film about urban design or the urban future. But as a film about the overwhelming sadness of being alone in the world – in that regard I think it’s unbelievable, and deserves its reputation. The self-distrusting madness of thought, doubting your own reality, your own solidity, whether or not what you did yesterday was real: all obvious questions, of course, and all themes already done by the Existentialists, the Romantics, even The Matrix – but what I mean is that, in a world where it’s possible to work and grow old and be completely alone for the whole thing, self-disappearance is an interestingly under-explored phenomenon. And I think Blade Runner really tackles that. It’s a sad movie. It can sometimes be almost unbearable to watch.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Ballard once said that the “future will be boring”. From your enthusiastic mapping out of the future on BLDGBLOG, you clearly don’t agree.

Arguably, nothing’s boring — it comes down to whether you’re alert enough to find something of interest. If you’re willing to embarrass yourself expressing unexpected enthusiasms, for instance, then nothing’s ever boring. Weird things happen everywhere if you look for them. The international departure lounge at the Chicago airport, for instance, may sound like the most boring place on earth, but the whole point of the Ballardian project — the whole point of Ballard’s novels — seems to be to reveal the secret currents that exist in such a space: Freudian/sexual interest, Marxist/revolutionary interest, rightwing/Monarchist interest. Whatever interest. So there’s no real way of predicting whether or not the future will be boring. Arguably, the world will be at its most boring once everyone recycles their tins and eats vegetarian. Perhaps manufacturing AK-47s is the only way to liven things up.

I mean, if bird flu and nuclear terrorism and 9.0 earthquakes in the heart of Los Angeles — or even global currency deflation — all come to pass, then the future will be insanely fucking interesting, even exciting. It will be terrifying, obviously — but then the future won’t be boring at all. And, if you believe Ballard, even after the whole world gets turned into an endless highway system there will still be a million things to look forward to. Mega-crashes being only one of them.

It’s through enthusiasm — not anger — that Ballard’s major characters all discover their strange perversions. Crash, for instance, whether I liked the novel or not, is the ultimate example of this: being willing to admit that you’re sexually fascinated by car crashes. It’s not nihilism, after all; it’s falling in love with totally weird shit.

Can you elaborate on this BLDGBLOG statement of yours: “We have more to learn from the fiction of J.G. Ballard than we do from Le Corbusier?”

Sure. First, that statement should be contextualised a bit. The ‘we’, for instance, was referring to architects and architectural critics, not to mankind, or the human species. Or primates. That said, it was a comment more about genre than it was about Ballard’s, or Le Corbusier’s, own intentions. Whilst Ballard, to my knowledge, would never dream of designing some new urban development in which thousands of people will live — or a new shopping mall — Le Corbusier had a very naive and vaguely imperialistic earnestness, wherein taking his own ideas too seriously, as architecturally realisable plans, was part of the package. That kind of over-self-seriousness, in my opinion, offers very little to learn from. But Ballard also realised — and articulated, in brilliant ways — what constructing huge high-rise apartment blocks, surrounded by empty parkland, would actually accomplish: domestic violence, race-based social segregation, and utterly pointless rivalries between makeshift gangs over everyday services. Le Corbusier either didn’t care and so he designed those buildings anyway, or he assumed that everyone in the world goes home at night — quiet, well-disciplined, educated and middle-class, listening to Schoenberg … which is quite obviously not how everyone lives.

That’s why I think architects should read Ballard. At the very least, his sarcastic reaction to over-earnest housing plans and suburban mega-malls is quite sobering. Along these lines, I’ve often thought that if the evening news included a daily primer about how to live inside modern architecture — what the actual point of modern architecture was; that it had a point, for instance — then more people would be excited by Le Corbusier. Or by Richard Meier. Or even by Norman Foster. If you don’t understand how a certain blank, white wall, with no windows, is supposed to challenge your ideas of domesticity, then you just think it’s a shite design and you want your money back. Constant dissatisfaction with your architectural surroundings becomes a kind of quiet aggression, an unarticulated suburban angst, that Ballard is so good at capturing.

The problem with architecture is that it’s still there in the morning; you can’t turn it off. Unless you’ve been stockpiling bombs.

Of course, this is also why I found the youth riots outside Paris last year so interesting — because almost every journalist covering the story began by all but channelling Ballard. You had major international newspapers implying, or even explicitly stating, that the high-rises themselves were to blame. At least one op-ed even specifically cited Le Corbusier, as if he should be tried in court! It goes without saying that many architects found this deeply offensive, and they instead blamed class tension, French racism, etc. And they had a point, obviously — in fact, a very good point — but the idea that buildings are these innocent shells that can do no harm to anyone is a total intellectual failure. Frankly, it insults the power of architecture! Look at supermax prisons, or Guantanamo Bay. Architecture has psychological effects.

The spectacular view always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape. Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence”.

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J.G. Ballard. High-Rise.
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I’ve long thought Ballard should be taught in architectural schools. How would you design an architectural syllabus based around JGB?

I would love to do this — it’s actually a conscious fantasy of mine, so who knows. I think it’d be relatively easy, and exciting, to use Concrete Island, for instance, in a course about the history of urban infrastructure. And it’d be hilarious and great to assign chapters from High-Rise to students in a class about public housing, or about Manhattan condo development, or even about the career of Le Corbusier. I would jump at the chance to lead a class like that! Getting urban hydrology designers — engineers of canals and levees — to read The Drowned World. It’d be so much fun — and so incredibly interesting — and the ensuing conversations, I think, would be phenomenal.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Not only do I think more architects should read Ballard but I also think that more Ballard fans should read architectural treatises: Archigram, Superstudio, Rem Koolhaas, Victor Gruen. I think fans of The Drowned World would be totally blown away by Guy Maunsell’s anti-aircraft towers now rotting away in the Thames estuary; fans of The Day of Creation would be awed by, say, the Great Man-Made River of Libya. Look up Drift Station Bravo. Look up architectural Brutalism. Look up the stock prices of firms in the private security industry. Even Halliburton, or the U.S. Department of Transportation: that’s Ballard’s strange race of highway builders right there. The world is already Ballardian.

Take that whole affair with Mark Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher’s son — a few years ago he tried to lead a private coup in Equatorial Guinea. He’s the perfect Ballardian protagonist: right wing, wealthy, elite schooled, a descendent of what amounts to secular royalty, former owner of a race car firm for god’s sake, and then president of an international business consultancy — but he takes all his money and buys helicopter gunships. It’s like he’d been reading Super-Cannes!

The whole city was now asleep, part of an immense unconscious Europe, while he himself crawled about on a forgotten traffic island like the nightmare of this slumbering continent”.

———————————————-
J.G. Ballard. Concrete Island.
———————————————-

The architect is a reoccurring figure in Ballard’s fiction. There’s Anthony Royal in High-Rise who hovers over the inhabitants “like some kind of fallen angel”. Concrete Island’s Robert Maitland is also an architect.

I think a lot of this comes out of an era when the architect was a much more influential figure — a kind of Ayn Rand–like utopian world-engineer. In post-war England, in particular — in a country full of bombed cities and destroyed docklands — the importance of the architect was almost hyperbolically exaggerated. There was a war to recover from, and thus a country to rebuild. I think there was a sense that architects could start the whole world over from scratch. They could literally build the future. Architects had power beyond mere aesthetics or land development strategies.

So everyday people — the people in Ballard’s novels — have the air of being mere spectators and unwilling participants in someone else’s social planning scheme, someone else’s utopia. It wasn’t their fantasy, in other words, but someone else’s, and they had to wake up within it everyday. You see that especially in High-Rise, as you say, with its dandyish architect living on the top floor, training his Alsatians, whilst everyone else, on the floors below, have to put up with the inadequacies of the man’s design.

I think the importance of architects in Ballard’s fiction — or, later, psychiatrists and doctors — is a factor of the time period, to some extent. Who would Ballard write about today? Who’s built our world? I suppose that’s the new obsession with multinational CEOs and their ilk. For what it’s worth, by the way, I think Max Barry’s novels supply an interesting next step, in that regard, after Ballard. Not in every way, of course — but it will be interesting to see where Barry goes.

You once wrote, “just about everything in the fucking universe has something to do with architecture”…

What I really mean is that, in any discussion of architecture, there are these inevitable holes through which you might glimpse something else, something supposedly outside the bounds of architecture entirely: gravity, say, because you’re calculating stress-loads, or plate tectonics as you design a building in an earthquake zone – Tokyo, Los Angeles, Istanbul. For that matter, you have to decide where to put the windows, and so the movement of the sun comes into play – and, thus, you’re talking about astronomy, and terrestrial rotation, solstices, the equinox, constellations. Soon you’ve got the climate, and topography, and even forestry and botany and global trade and labour law – etc. etc. Global economics. The list expands and expands until ‘everything in the fucking universe has something to do with architecture’. Good moods, bad moods; enclosure, frustration, claustrophobia, imprisonment. Freedom. The price of steel. Natural history. Military bases, oil derricks, mining camps. It’s all architectural.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Over the swimming pools and manicured lawns seemed to hover a dream of violence”.

———————————————-
J.G. Ballard. Super-Cannes.
———————————————-

Ballard once said, “I’m frightened that the possibilities of a genuine dystopia may be much more appealing than any utopian project that people can come up with”. Any thoughts on that?

Well, I agree. People love to see all hell break loose — look at Hurricane Katrina, for instance, which no one wanted to admit they actually wished was much worse. I think there’s a real curiosity now to see an Orwellian world take shape. What would it look like? How would you feel living there? It’s like taking a holiday into another political system — only dystopia is something you may not ever come back from. Perhaps that’s the appeal: the irreversibility of dystopia.

He also waxed lyrical about Michael Manser’s Heathrow Hilton, saying he waits for the day “when the whole of London resembles this future design classic”. Which architects would you commission for the job of rebuilding London, and what would you build (and demolish) first?

I don’t think my answer will sound very appealing to hardcore Ballardians — especially not to Ballard himself — but if I had to rebuild London, I’d probably use some weird combination of Christopher Wren, G.B. Piranesi, Michael Sorkin, Richard Rogers, Nicholas Hawksmoor, Palladio, John Soane, Norman Foster, Ed Mazria, Peter Zumthor – and, I don’t know, a million others. Whoever designed Angkor Wat. Angkor-Wat-on-Thames. Even some more buildings by A.W. Pugin. I’d build more tunnels, and more pedestrian bridges, and lots of artificial ruins, and I’d throw up hundreds of industrial-gothic warehouses near the Thames foreshore and add stone statuary everywhere. Meanwhile, I’d open a new private space-port in the southeast, near Eltham Palace; you’d watch international space stations take flight over experimental greenhouses and well-designed, leafy suburbs full of affordable housing.

Everyone would hate it.

I think I’m something of a classicist when it comes to London architecture. Or maybe that’s inaccurate — but it’s a beautiful city, and I wouldn’t want Archigram, for instance, or some group of neo-Brutalists, to redesign the place — despite my incredible enthusiasm for both Archigram and Brutalism. Genuinely liking something — an idea, a design — doesn’t mean you have to build it.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Who else? Single Speed Design, from Boston, do amazing, amazing work — and they deserve much more coverage and many more clients. And they’re very modern, not classicists in any way. I like Andrew Maynard, as well, an Aussie, and think he could do some great new flats. Really great, even. I could go on and on. I just like architecture, so it’s probably easier to say who I wouldn’t hire. And Daniel Libeskind would be at the very top of that list. Followed closely by Frank Gehry. Peter Eisenman would also make my blacklist.

I like density, detail, pedestrianised streets and stonework — quite frankly, the exact opposite of a Ballardian world. But I also like tropical gardens — and perhaps a flooded city themepark, in the very center of the city… And who can resist a purpose-built Ballardian labyrinth of concrete motorways?

When all’s said and done, has Ballard made a difference?

It’s hard to say whether Ballard has actually contributed anything — perhaps a deranged enthusiasm for all things suburban? Maybe it’s more accurate to say that he’s taken something away: the naive belief that modernity leads to anything other than sexual deviance and violent nationalism or corporate sociopathology. Though I feel like a member of the Taliban, saying something like that.

After all, it’s not a rigorous science we’re talking about here — which is why I think Ballard is so good as a novelist. If he was writing social theory — if he was Malcolm Gladwell — he’d be laughed out of the fucking bookstore. Or is the difference really that the Taliban see modernity and they accuse it of sexual deviance and violent pathology — and so they hate it — while Ballard sees modernity, and he also accuses it of sexual violence and so on, but that’s exactly why he loves it so much? Ballard, we can’t forget, is perhaps suburbia’s biggest fan — not because he likes father-son bonding and family picnics and a good barbecue but because everyone comes out of there completely insane.

The Taliban would nuke the suburbs; Ballard would build more of them. Is that the difference? Perhaps the dichotomy’s false, and I don’t know what I’m talking about — but the politics of Ballard’s enthusiasm are definitely worth discussing at greater length.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Can you tell me more about the novel about technology and surveillance you’ve just finished?

Sure. The book follows surveillance camera installation teams around greater London, dropping in on these events they’ve organised, called ‘film nights’ – which is also the name of the book: Film Night.

The two main characters are architects; they went to design school together, and the book begins as they bump into each other more than a decade later at the Barbican. Things have changed. One of them now works as a consultant in private security: he helps London architects make their designs more secure (which means easier to film, basically, using CCTV – designing better lines of sight and so on). Surveillance, in other words, becomes an architectural concern: how easily can this building be filmed? In any case, the guy’s been making short films on the sly, using footage taken from his company’s surveillance cameras, and these are then shown — along with pornos, and car wrecks, and building demolitions, and so on — at the film nights I mentioned. Which almost always take place in abandoned buildings, or in office buildings after they’ve closed down for the day — but always in places patrolled by this guy’s firm. He’s got a key, an access code, a friend on-duty — and so they come back in at night and watch films.

To make a very long story short, then, a larger film project comes along involving the narrator’s newfound acquaintances, and he’s soon helping them make a feature film — without any obvious storyline, using nothing but surveillance cameras, and only cameras that they themselves have installed. Etc. etc. The book is actually quite funny, believe it or not — it probably sounds boring as shit — and it’s short. Full of dialogue. Terrorism, art, surveillance, even some Andy Warhol. Bits of it — little details — are very consciously Ballardian, as you can probably tell. On the other hand, I still have to get the thing published.

Finally, a question that all architecturally minded Ballard fans want answered: does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?

The angle is just the beginning.

—————————————————————————————————————————
Many thanks to Tim Chapman, Matt Smith and Joanne Murray for help with the questions.
—————————————————————————————————————————

..:: LINKS
+ BLDGBLOG
+ Single Speed Design
+ Archigram
+ Superstudio
+ Office for Metropolitan Architecture (Rem Koolhaas)
+ Victor Gruen
+ Andrew Maynard
+ Emiliano Granado

OPENING LINE:
“In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money”. (from ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’).

From the 1996 Harper Collins edition:

The first-ever collection of J.G. Ballard’s articles and reviews, published over the last thirty years. In a long and highly-acclaimed career, J.G. Ballard has established himself as one of Britian’s most distinctive and admired writers, the author of such influential novels as Crash, The Drowned World, High-Rise, Empire of the Sun and, most recently, Rushing to Paradise. Throughout his career he has also been a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers. Now, for the first time, he has gathered together the finest of these pieces and grouped them under themes such as film, lives, the visual world, writers, science, autobiography and science fiction.

Marlon Brando, Nancy Reagan, Elvis Presley, Deng Xiaoping, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, William Burroughs and Graham Greene are just some of the people who feature in the ninety articles, together with many of the themes familiar to readers of Ballard’s fiction, includign Shanghai, television, surrealism, cars, motorways and the atom bomb.

The result is an astonishingly varied and fascinating collection — a provocative and entertaining review of the modern world, as seen through the eyes of one of this country’s most original writers.”

I happen to think that some of Ballard’s best writing can be found in the non-fiction realm; in fact, there was a time, when I first chanced upon his work, that I was convinced he was a superior journalist than a novelist. Although it’s not in this collection, I especially savour Ballard’s phrasing in his lovely meditation on Helmut Newton:

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.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Lucid Dreamer’.

The Edge features a typically acerbic review of User’s Guide, by Gerald Houghton:

In 1977 Ballard wrote one of his most experimental and most brilliant short stories, ‘The Index’. Did the attached book ever actually exist? Was it all a figment of some deranged imagination? All that remains of this autobiography is a collection of names and page numbers; tantalising nudges and winks, like a road-map with the motorways rubbed out. It’s a game we can play with A User’s Guide To The Millenium: Hitler nuzzles up to Mae West, Dali to Nancy Reagan, Derek Jarman with Walt Disney, Lee Harvey Oswald and the young Jim interred in the Japanese camp. What, if anything, do all these and the rest have to do with this rather unpresupposing British author?

Ballard is never less than urbane, but his best dinner party manners mask real teeth. Thus he adores the Surrealists, Henry Miller, Joyce and Genet, but is dismissive towards others (Warhol), occasionally outright scathing (Nancy Reagan). The Ballard in these pages is clearly in awe of Burroughs’ reupholstering of narrative form, while describing himself as an old-fashioned storyteller. (It’s fulsome praise that should be tempered with a reading of his superb interview with Will Self in Self’s recent Junk Mail.) He is mystifyingly rhapsodic over Dali, surely the most overrated artist of the century. (What, one wonders, would Ballard make of the comment that Dali is the ‘kind of artist you think is brilliant when you’re 15′? Are you listening Damien Hirst?).”

..:: CONTENTS

1. FILM
Casablanca, Brando and Mae West, Star Wars and Blue Velvet…

• ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’ (1990)
• ‘Magical Days at Rick’s’ (1993)
• ‘Hollywood Sex Idols’ (1991)
• ‘Push-button Death’ (1991)
• ‘Hobbits in Space?’ (1977)
• ‘A User’s Guide to the Millennium’ (1987)
• ‘Courting the Cobra’ (1993)
• ‘The Samurai of the Epic’ (1991)
• ‘La Jetee’ (1996)
• ‘Blue Velvet’ (1993)

2. LIVES
Nancy Reagan, Elvis, Howard Hughes and Hirohito…

• ‘The Chain-saw Biographer’ (1991)
• ‘Survival Instincts’ (1992)
• ‘Fallen Idol’ (1991)
• ‘The Killing Time’ (1979)
• ‘Mob Psychology’ (1991)
• ‘Closed Doors’ (1977)
• ‘Last of the Great Royals’ (1989)
• ‘Sinister Spider’ (1992)
• ‘Lipstick and High Heels’ (1993)

More contents to come.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us.” (from ‘Prima Belladonna’).

From the 2001 Flamingo edition (originally one volume; reprinted in two volumes in 2006):

For the first time in one volume, the complete collected short stories by the author of Empire of the Sun and Super-Cannes — regarded by many as Britain’s No.1 living fiction writer.

J.G. Ballard is firmly established as one of Britain’s most highly regarded and most influential novelists. Throughout his remarkable career, he has won equal praise for his ground-breaking short stories, which he first started writing during his days as a medical student at Cambridge. In fact, it was winning a short-story competition that gave him the impetus to become a full-time writer.

His first published works, ‘Prima Belladonna’ and ‘Escapement’ appeared in Science Fantasy and New Worlds in 1956. Ever since, he has been a prolific producer of stories, which have been published in numerous magazines and several separate collections, including The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever, Vermilion Sands, Low-Flying Aircraft, The Venus Hunters, Myths of the Near Future and War Fever.

Now, for the first time, all of J.G. Ballard’s published stories — including four that have not previously appeared in a collection — have been gathered together and arranged in the order of original publication, providing an unprecedented opportunity tp review the career of one of Britain’s greatest writers”.

Plus the obligatory endorsement:

Ballard is one of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilirating imagination — and a national treasure.”

Nicholas Royle, Guardian.

A large body of opinion says that Ballard’s a better short-form stylist than novelist. On some days, I agree. My first exposure to Ballard, aside from Crash, was his short story ‘The Subliminal Man’. It hung in my imagination like a sharp blade over a heifer’s neck. Absolutely incredible, the imagery of it:

The old cities were surrounded by the vast motion sculptures of the clover-leaves and flyovers, but even so the congestion was unremitting.
…
Then the flicker of lights cleared and steadied, blazing out continuously, and together the crowd looked up at the decks of brilliant letters. The phrases, and every combination of them possible, were entirely familiar, and Franklin knew that he had been reading them for weeks as he passed up and down the expressway.

BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY
NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
…
They walked out into the trim drive, the shadows of the signs swinging across the quiet neighbourhood as the day progressed, sweeping over the heads of the people on their way to the supermarket like the blades of enormous scythes.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Subliminal Man’ (1963).

All the criticisms that are usually applied to Ballard’s novels — style over substance; lack of characterisation; thin plot — simply don’t apply in this format. In fact, in this realm they become virtues, as the sheer weight of Ballard’s imagination is compressed, and then unpacked, with full force. He didn’t dub the short pieces that make up The Atrocity Exhibition ‘condensed novels’ for nothing. Ballard’s a radical, a man who saw that the 20th-century novel was stifled by 19th-century function and set about stripping it to its very essence. That aesthetic became his body of short stories: quite simply, the man’s a master of the form and it’s a damn shame he doesn’t write them anymore.

I have the hardback, single-volume, supposedly complete version — a fallacy, for it only includes three pieces from The Atrocity Exhibition. I’m not sure if the new two-volume set rectifies that — probably not, considering it would take away sales from Atrocity itself.

It’s a bit of a cheat. If the publisher considers Atrocity to be a novel (as Ballard does), rather than a collection of short stories, then the Complete Short Stories shouldn’t contain any Atrocity pieces at all. According to Ballard expert David Pringle, there are three Ballard shorts that weren’t included, seemingly at the expense of the three Atrocities: ‘Journey Across a Crater’ (1970), ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B——” (1984) and ‘The Dying Fall’ (1994).

I call that a missed opportunity.

Update: reader Mike Holliday contacted me with some further comments on this collection:

Despite its title, the book does not include all of Ballard’s short stories. If we discount those that are shortened versions of Ballard’s novels (Storm-Wind, The Drowned World, Equinox), then the following are missing:

(i) The Violet Noon, an early non-professional story published while Ballard was at university

(ii) most of the stories included in the original edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, namely You and Me and the Continuum, The Assassination Weapon, You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe, The Atrocity Exhibition, Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy, The Death Module, Love and Napalm: Export USA, The Great American Nude, The University of Death, The Generations of America, The Summer Cannibals, Tolerances of the Human Face, Crash!

(iii) the so-called ’surgical fictions’, Coitus 80, Princess Margaret’s Facelift, Mae West’s Reduction Mamoplasty, Queen Elizabeth’s
Rhinoplasty, Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty

(iv) a few other pieces, namely Journey Across a Crater, The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B******, Neil Armstrong Remembers His Journey to the Moon, and The Dying Fall. It also excludes those items classified as Miscellaneous Media [including Ballard's collages for Ambit magazine].

In 2006, The Complete Short Stories was republished in two paperback volumes, but this edition omits the novella The Ultimate City.”

Disappointingly, there’s not a lot of decent criticism surrounding Ballard’s short-form work. Over at Rick McGrath’s site, however, John Boston has posted a thorough and interesting account of “the four short stories that got [Ballard] back into writing science fiction: Now: Zero (1959), The Waiting Grounds (1959), The Sound-Sweep (1960), and Zone of Terror (1960).”

..:: LINKS
+ J.G. Ballard’s Introduction to the Complete Short Stories

..:: CONTENTS

+ ‘Prima Belladonna’ (1956)
+ ‘Escapement’ (1956)
+ ‘The Concentration City’ (1957)
+ ‘Venus Smiles’ (1957)
+ ‘Manhole 69′ (1957)
+ ‘Track 12′ (1958)
+ ‘The Waiting Grounds’ (1959)
+ ‘Now: Zero’ (1959)
+ ‘The Sound-Sweep’ (1960)
+ ‘Zone of Terror’ (1960)
+ ‘Chronopolis’ (1960)
+ ‘The Voices of Time’ (1960)
+ ‘The Last World of Mr Goddard’ (1960)
+ ‘Studio 5, The Stars’ (1961)
+ ‘Deep End’ (1961)
+ ‘The Overloaded Man’ (1961)
+ ‘Mr F. is Mr F. (1961)
+ ‘Billennium’ (1961)
+ ‘The Gentle Assassin’ (1961)
+ ‘The Insane Ones’ (1962)
+ ‘The Garden of Time’ (1962)
+ ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ (1962)
+ ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ (1962)
+ ‘Passport to Eternity’ (1962)
+ ‘The Cage of Sand’ (1962)
+ ‘The Watch-Towers’ (1962)
+ ‘The Singing Statues’ (1962)
+ ‘The Man on the 99th Floor’ (1962)
+ ‘The Subliminal Man’ 63 (1962)
+ ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ (1962)
+ ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1962)
+ ‘The Time-Tombs’ (1962)
+ ‘Now Wakes the Sea’ (1962)
+ ‘The Venus Hunters’ (1962)
+ ‘End-Game’ (1962)
+ ‘Minus One’ (1962)
+ ‘The Sudden Afternoon’ (1962)
+ ‘The Screen Game’ (1962)
+ ‘Time of Passage’ (1964)
+ ‘Prisoner of the Coral Deep’ (1964)
+ ‘The Lost Leonardo’ (1964)
+ ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964)
+ ‘The Illuminated Man’ (1964)
+ ‘The Delta at Sunset’ (1964)
+ ‘The Drowned Giant’ (1964)
+ ‘The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon’ (1964)
+ ‘The Volcano Dances’ (1964)
+ ‘The Beach Murders’ (1966)
+ ‘The Day of Forever’ (1966)
+ ‘The Impossible Man’ (1966)
+ ‘Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer’ (1966)
+ ‘Tomorrow is a Million Years’ (1966)
+ ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’ (1966)
+ ‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’ (1967)
+ ‘The Recognition’ (1967)
+ ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ (1967)
+ ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968)
+ ‘The Dead Astronaut’ (1968)
+ ‘The Comsat Angels’ (1968)
+ ‘The Killing Ground’ (1969)
+ ‘A Place and a Time to Die’ (1969)
+ ‘Say Goodbye to the Wind’ (1970)
+ ‘The Greatest Television Show on Earth’ (1972)
+ ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ (1974)
+ ‘The Air Disaster’ (1975)
+ ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’ (1975)
+ ‘The Life and Death of God’ (1976)
+ ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976)
+ ‘The 60 Minute Zoom’ (1976)
+ ‘The Smile’ (1976)
+ ‘The Ultimate City’ (1976)
+ ‘The Dead Time’ (1977)
+ ‘The Index’ (1977)
+ ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977)
+ ‘Theatre of War’ (1977)
+ ‘Having A Wonderful Time’ (1978)
+ ‘One Afternoon at Utah Beach’ (1978)
+ ‘Zodiac 2000′ (1978)
+ ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978)
+ ‘A Host of Furious Fancies’ (1980)
+ ‘News from the Sun’ (1981)
+ ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982)
+ ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982)
+ ‘Report on An Unidentified Space Station’ (1982)
+ ‘The Object of the Attack’ (1984)
+ ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985)
+ ‘The Man Who Walked on the Moon’ (1985)
+ ‘The Secret History of World War 3′ (1988)
+ ‘Love in a Colder Climate’ (1989)
+ ‘The Enormous Space’ (1989)
+ ‘The Largest Theme Park in the World’ (1989)
+ ‘War Fever’ (1989)
+ ‘Dream Cargoes’ (1990)
+ ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (1992)
+ ‘The Message from Mars’ (1992)
+ ‘Report from an Obscure Planet’ (1992)

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY VOLUME 1

..:: BUY VOLUME 2

Leonard’s choice is JGB’s Crash…with unpredictable results.

“J.G. Ballard’s CRASH
Field-Tested by Leonard Pierce in Reagan Airport in Washington, DC

October 14th, 2001: D.C.’s National Airport (actually, Reagan Airport, but that name is still much reviled by a few holdouts, the modern liberal equivalent of the old conservatives who called Franklin Roosevelt “that man”). I have never seen an airport in such a state. It’s nearly deserted; I’m waiting to return from Natural Products Expo East, the first trade show to open in the capital since the terror attacks in September, and the airport has only been open for ten days. Flights are still limited to a dozen or so a day; the hallways and runways are equally empty, the innumerable shops and restaurants are closed, and uniformed, rifle-toting soldiers seem to outnumber passengers and workers by a two-to-one margin. It’s eerily like being in a zombie movie; there’s something profoundly unsettling about being in a center of commerce like a shopping mall or an airport when no one is there.

Not surprisingly, my flight is delayed, so I pass the time by enjoying a novel I picked up at Chicago’s O’Hare airport before I came out to Washington — J.G. Ballard’s visionary novel of our complex, often-eroticized relationship with technology, Crash. Though, really, ‘enjoying’ isn’t the right word; it’s not really a novel one ‘enjoys’ in the breezy, entertaining way you might expect from an airport fiction purpose…”

The full article is here.

>> Buy J.G. Ballard’s Crash from Amazon.

Boredom’s not all bad
Phil Miller  

Review of A Philosophy of Boredom, Lars Svendsen, Reaktion Books, £14.95

‘ "Boredom is life’s own gravity" is a wonderful conclusion. Also one that is entirely fitting for this amusing, learned, and articulate philosophical study of one of humanity’s prime afflictions.
…
Svendsen goes on to analyse the influence of boredom in J G Ballard’s Crash, the works of Andy Warhol and Samuel Beckett, all in his terse and penetrating style. In the end, Svendsen says, boredom is a key problem of modernity. He concludes that you can be bored all your life, and search for "meaning" to alleviate it, but it will never come. Boredom is the unsolvable realisation that the majority of our lives are not memorable, exhilarating, interesting or meaningful.
… ‘