Adam McEwen. Honda Teen Facial, 2010. Boeing 747 undercarriage. Approximately: 137 13/16 x 118 1/8 x 71 11/16 inches (350 x 300 x 182 cm).

JG Ballard’s writing has a strong connection to visual art, from surrealism to Pop. It informed his work and led to him befriending some of the leading artists of his time, while in turn his work has been an influence on today’s crop. The Crash: Homage to J.G. Ballard at the London Gagosian attempts to represent these diverse strands. It’s a timely exhibition, organised in the wake of Ballard’s death but a long time coming given his growing influence over the last few years. Works have been sourced to the best abilities of a private if respected gallery, explaining a haphazard exhibition that, although at times stretching the definition of its remit, always holds interest.

The first item on entrance is Adam McEwen’s “Honda Teen Facial”, an imposing Boeing 747 undercarriage that summons half-remembered, grainy footage of the Lockerbie bombing, or more appropriately Ballard’s short story The Air Disaster. McEwen’s aims are ambiguous. In an aerospace museum, this piece would mean something quite different, but in connection with Ballard it can only mean violence and death. This simple juxtaposition, summoning connections that aren’t necessarily there, is reminiscent of some of Ballard’s earlier writing and was also a mainstay of the surrealists, some of whose work is in an easily-missed room to the left.

Hans Bellmer. Story of the Eye, 1946. Etching, red ink and pencil on paper. 12 x 9 3/4 inches (30.5 x 24.8 cm).

John Currin. Rotterdam, 2006. Oil on canvas. 28 x 36 inches (71.1 x 91.4 cm).

Salvador Dali, Man Ray and Hans Bellmer are represented, each with rather underwhelming works that belie the Gagosian’s limited pulling power. Dali’s pencil drawing of a head with a lobster holding a sewing machine on top is self-derivative as only Dali can be. Unsurprisingly, Bellmer’s drawings exhibit a twisted sexuality that is cringeworthy yet fascinating. His illustration for Bataille’s The Story of the Eye (itself a work of displaced sexuality with obvious Ballardian resonances) depicts the pucker of a lady’s anus, acting like a magnet to the eye. While Ballard’s love of surrealism excuses Bellmer, John Currin’s “Rotterdam”, a contemporary painting of a sex act copied from a pornographic magazine, is not only irrelevant but misrepresentative, suggesting the curators have taken inspiration from false media imagery surrounding the author.

Detail from Ballard’s “Project for a new novel” (1958).

There is a suggestion that this odd little room is meant to be a look into Ballard’s psyche, and one of the most interesting works is the writer’s own “Project for a New Novel”, a collage of photocopies from the pages of Chemistry and Industry magazine, where Ballard worked briefly after leaving Cambridge University. The yellowed pieces of text deserve academic scrutiny but fall short compared to the more rounded works around them. They feel unfinished, a prototype for later work, which in a way, of course, they are. Next to them is a simple Man Ray photograph of a woman, different from his more famous manipulated precursors of filmic special effects. The photo is uncanny in its similarity to an often reproduced photo of Ballard’s dead wife Helen. Perhaps I’m also making unnecessary juxtapositions, but it is an otherwise baffling edition to the exhibition, though quite possibly the only Man Ray the curator could get hold of.

LEFT: Chris Foss’s artwork for the cover of Ballard’s Crash (Panther, 1975). RIGHT: Dinos & Jake Chapman. Bang, Wallop. By J and D Ballard, 2010. Book: 7 3/4 x 5 x 3/4 inches (19.4 x 12.8 x 2.2 cm.

LEFT: Louis Gréaud. The Future, 2009. Oil on canvas. 57 x 41 inches framed (145 x 104 cm).

Other rooms aren’t as themed, revealing an eclectic and extensive exhibition that can be hard to take in, with its almost random sensory overload. Some of the least successful works are the ones most obviously inspired by Ballard. Loris Gréaud’s “The Future” is a canvas displaying painted text of Ballard’s famous equation “sex x technology = the future”, along with a reproduction of his signature. It is an uninteresting work that buys into Ballard’s cachet with little effort. Another piece of text painted onto a canvas, Ed Ruscha’s “Fountain of Crystal”, which reads “A Fountain of Spraying Crystal Erupted Around Them” vies with it for blandness. The Chapman Brothers’ manipulated Ballard texts, “Bang, Wallop. By J&D Ballard”, a stack of fake paperback books on sale for a tempting but ultimately mercenary 25 quid, at least inject a bit of disrespectful humour, despite a familiar shallowness of thought. Who knows, though — maybe there is something hidden in their exhausting pages of random sentences.

Of the famous contemporary British artists on display, the divisive Damien Hirst is most successful. “When Logics Die”, a metal table covered in surgical instruments overlooked by glossy photographs of medical procedures, is both a nod to Ballard’s experiences as a medical student and a simplified expression of the connection between technology and flesh that Ballard found so philosophically interesting and that Hirst finds so rewarding visually. Turner Prize runner up Roger Hiorn is represented by an engine coated in his trademark copper sulphate crystals, which inevitably reminds of the more famous “Seizure”, an entire council flat given the same treatment.

Paul McCarthy. Mechanical Pig, 2003-2005. Silicone, platinum, fiberglass, metal and electrical components 40 x 58 x 62 inches (101.6 x 147.3 x 157.5 cm).

Works with an, at-best, tangential connection to Ballard stand out, foremost being Paul McCarthy’s “Mechanical Pig”, an astonishingly life-like plastic sow cruelly wired up to machinery, twitching and heaving in a tortured coma. This freakshow attraction goes beyond sensationalism to bring us face to face with our mechanised use of livestock, and is a great example of contemporary art’s relationship with impact advertising. I was mesmerised by its laboured breaths, each one threatening to be its last. In the same room, a strange, ramshackle structure of untreated timber and plywood juts from a wall. Accessed through an innocuous but incongruously aged door in the adjacent room, Mike Nelson’s “Preface to the 2004 Edition (Triple Bluff Canyon)” is a replica of a public room, a theatre lobby perhaps, its expert, dusty detail indistinguishable from the forgotten spaces it draws inspiration from. Like German artist Gregor Schneider, who creates replicas of the anonymous cellars of his suburban childhood, Nelson’s installation is eerie and unsettling. The familiar is made unfamiliar and we are inevitably reminded of fiction, ghost stories and horror films, finishing Nelson’s artwork ourselves.

Mike Nelson. Preface to the 2004 Edition (Triple Bluff Canyon), 2004. Film booth. Dimensions variable.

These two works are the most immediate in the exhibition and rightly stand out, but Crash’s real triumph is the handful of pieces that marry both a deep, unequivocal connection with Ballard and artistic brilliance. Inevitably some are by well-known names, but there are a couple of surprises. Easily missed is Malcolm Morley’s “The Age of Catastrophe”, an oil painting of a sunny, Mediterranean harbour overlaid by a plummeting aeroplane and a submarine suspended from an abstract frame. Chaotic and complex, the painting’s creation date of 1976 is important, suggesting a fascination with WWII’s long-lasting, violent psychological presence — familiar to any reader of Ballard.

Tacita Dean. Teignmouth Electron, Cayman Brac (Ballard), 1999. Color photograph. 44 1/8 x 51 3/16 inches framed (112 x 130 cm).

Dan Holdsworth. Untitled (Autopia), 1998. Chromogenic print. Diptych: 41 7/8 x 52 3/16 inches each (106.5 x 132.6 cm).

Photography is well represented. Tacita Dean’s “Teignmouth Electron, Cayman Brac (Ballard)”, where an abandoned scientific concrete structure barely reveals itself through lush trees, provides a perfect visual accompaniment to Concrete Island or Rushing to Paradise. Dan Holdsworth’s photos of empty, night-time motorways directly and effectively channel one of Ballard’s most familiar obsessions. But it is the in moving image that Ballard’s vision really comes to life. Jane and Louise Wilson’s DVD installation, “Proton, Energy, Blizzard”, with its footage of a rusting and seemingly abandoned Soviet rocket installation that nevertheless clanks and hums with mechanical life, is an hypnotic film that posits an answer to the perplexing problem of translating Ballard’s work to film. Stripped of narrative, this purely visual film manages to convey the awesome majesty of failed, large-scale scientific endeavour, and the mundane machinery behind nuclear annihilation, as well as our pathetic attempts to explore the universe. It reminded me of the human insignificance and terrible entropy so beautifully explored in one of my favourite Ballard stories, “The Voices of Time”.

Eduardo Paolozzi. Two prints from the General Dynamic F.U.N. series (1970). 50 plates. 20 frames: approx. 12 x 18 1/8 inches each (30.5 x 46 cm).

Eduardo Paolozzi’s two sets of screen prints, “General Dynamic F.U.N.” and “Zero Energy Experiment Pile (Z.E.E.P.)”, go further, dealing with the fundamental philosophical ideas behind Ballard’s work. Paolozzi was an influence on a youthful Ballard and later a mentor and friend, and his prints are both dazzlingly original and directly tuned to Ballard’s vision. In an overwhelming array of brightly coloured pop-culture images taken from space-exploration books, boys’ comics and Jane’s weaponry textbooks, images of missiles, bombs, rockets, tanks and submarines — along with diagrams, motifs and cutaway illustrations — are infused with a gaudy joy at odds with the often frightening technology they depict. The light-speed rate of change in the 60s, which Ballard cannily emphasised as technological and communications based, as opposed to more commonly referenced societal critiques, is expressed brilliantly by Paolozzi, who cleverly adds a sheen of psychedelic colour — the filter through which society saw, and dealt with, this technological future shock.

Andy Warhol. Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice), 1963. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas. 48 x 41 3/4 inches (121.9 x 106 cm).

A more familiar artist from this period is Andy Warhol, who Ballard believed was one of the few Pop artists to stand the test of time. Warhol’s “Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice)” is an almost perfect depiction of the changes in communication in the 60s – the immediacy, sensationalism and brutality. The rapid deployment of mass visual entertainment in television, coupled with existential attitudes to morality brought about by WWII, combined to produce a bloody but newly distanced fascination with death, tempered with the fetishisation of celebrity explored by Ballard in The Atrocity Exhibition and, later, Crash. The piece is understated and easily overlooked. A green monochrome print featuring repeat images of a car crash complete with supine victim, it presents these ideas in their very simplest terms and is devastatingly effective. The celebrity side of the equation is of course represented by Warhol himself, the first artist to present himself as a product, churning out signed works in his Factory. This aspect of Warhol is often dismissed as egotistical, money grubbing, but that viewpoint ignores his nuanced reflection of the world he existed in. Ballard wrote about celebrity while being scared of it himself; Warhol embraced this new phenomenon, revelling in it.

It is Warhol’s brilliant translation of the changes around him that connects him to Ballard and makes “Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice)” the most important work in the exhibition. Both men represent a mature artistic culture that distanced itself from the political hectoring of pre-WWII art, and absorbed and translated a world of rapid change with cool detachment. The exhibition’s motorways, cars, aircraft and sexual imagery are only superficially Ballard. Tucked away on a back wall, in a small and at first insignificant-looking work, is where you find the essence of Ballard’s work presented succinctly by another twentieth-century great.

Many thanks to Mike Bonsall for his help with this review.

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.

From the files of Dr Ricardo Battista’s assistant, School of Specialization in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Melbourne, Australia.

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

The eminent plastic surgeon Ricardo Battista has remarked that one of the great misfortunes of the cosmetic surgeon is that he only has the technical skill, ability and understanding to correct this situation by surgical means. However, as long as people are prepared to pay fees for this treatment the necessary operation will be performed. Incisions made across the neck with the object of removing redundant tissue should be avoided. These scars tend to be unduly prominent and may prove to be the subject of litigation. In the case of Michael Jackson the incision was designed to be almost completely obscured by his hair and ears.

Surgical Procedure: an incision was made in Michael Jackson’s temple running downward and backward to the apex of his ear. From here a crease ran toward his lobule in front of the ear, and the incision followed this crease around the lower margin of the lobule to a point slightly above the level of the tragus. From there, at an obtuse angle, it was carried backward and downward within the hairy margin of the scalp.

The edges of the incision were then undermined. First with a knife and then with a pair of scissors, Jackson’s skin was lifted forward to the line of his jaw. The subcutaneous fatty tissue was scraped away with the knife. Large portions of connective tissue cling to the creases formed by frown lines, and some elements of these were retained in order to preserve the facial personality of the King of the Pop. At two places the skin was pegged down firmly. The first was to the scalp at the top of his ear, the second was behind the ear to the scalp over the mastoid process. The first step was to put a strong suture in the correct position between the cheek flap anterior to the first point, and a second strong suture to the neck flap behind the ear. The redundant tissue was then cut away and the skin overlap removed with a pair of scissors.

At this point the ear was moved forward toward the chin, and the wound was then closed with interrupted sutures. It did not matter how strong the stitches were behind the ears because that part of the King of Pop’s scarline was invisible in normal conditions.

Complications: haematoma formation is a dangerous sequela of this operation, and careful drainage with polythene tubing was carried out. In spite of these precautions blood still collected, but this blood was evacuated within 48 hours of the operation. It was not allowed to organize. In the early stages the skin around the area that had been undermined was insensitive, and it was not difficult to milk any collection of fluid backward to the point of drainage.

Scarring was hypertrophic at the points where tension was greatest: that is, in the temple and the region behind the ear, but fortunately these were covered by the King of Pop’s hair. The small fine sutures which were not responsible for tension were removed at 4 days, and the strong sutures removed at the tenth day. The patient was then allowed to have a shampoo to remove the blood from his hair. All scarlines are expected to fade, and by the end of three weeks the patient was back in social circulation.

At a subsequent operation after this successful face lift, Michael Jackson’s forehead wrinkles were removed. An incision was placed in the hairline and the skin lifted forward and upward from the temporal bone. The skin was then undermined and the excess tissue removed. The immediate result was good, but as a result of normal forehead movements relapse may occur unduly early after the operation. To remove the central frown line, the superciliary muscle was paralysed by cutting the branches of the seventh nerve passing centrally to it. A small knife-blade was inserted from the upper eyelid upward for 3 cm and then pressed down to the bone. External scars on the forehead often persist, and even in the best hands results are not always reliable. It was explained to Michael Jackson where the scars would lie, and the object of the intervention.”

Based on ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’, by J.G. Ballard.

“I feel a tremendous rapport with pop artists and in a lot of my fiction I’ve tried to produce something akin to pop art. For instance, I’ve just published a piece in New Worlds called ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’, in which I’ve taken the text of a classic description of a plastic surgery operation, a facelift, and where the original says “the patient”, I’ve inserted “Princess Margaret”. So I’ve done precisely what the pop painters did, using images from everyday life — Coca-Cola bottles, Marilyn Monroe — and manipulated them. The great thing about pop painters is their honesty. They’ve turned their backs on the traditional subject matter of the fine arts — which had hardly changed since the Renaissance — and looked at their own environment and decided: yes, the shine on domestic hardware, like the refrigerator or the washing machine, the particular gleam on the mouldings of a cabinet, the moulding of doorhandles, are of importance to people, because these are the visual landscapes of people’s lives, and if we’re going to be honest we’re going to use reality material instead of fiction. I want to do the same.”

‘Sci-fi Seer’, interview with J.G. Ballard, Penthouse Magazine, 1970, Vol. 5 No. 5 (pp. 26-30).

“The relationship between the famous and the public who sustain them is governed by a striking paradox. Infinitely remote, the great stars of politics, film and entertainment move across an electric terrain of limousines, bodyguards and private helicopters. At the same time, the zoom lens and the interview camera bring them so near to us that we know their faces and their smallest gestures more intimately than those of our friends.

Somewhere in this paradoxical space our imaginations are free to range, and we find ourselves experimenting like impresarios with all the possibilities that these magnified figures seem to offer us. How did Garbo brush her teeth, shave her armpits, probe a worry-line? The most intimate details of their lives seem to lie beyond an already open bathroom door that our imaginations can easily push aside. Caught in the glare of our relentless fascination, they can do nothing to stop us exploring every blocked pore and hesitant glance, imagining ourselves their lovers and confidantes. In our minds we can assign them any roles we choose, submit them to any passion or humiliation. And as they age, we can remodel their features to sustain our deathless dream of them.

In a TV interview a few years ago, the wife of a famous Beverly Hills plastic surgeon revealed that throughout their marriage her husband had continually re-styled her face and body, pointing a breast here, tucking in a nostril there. She seemed supremely confident of her attractions. But as she said: ‘He will never leave me, because he can always change me.’

Something of the same anatomizing fascination can be seen in [this] present piece… which also show[s], I hope, the reductive drive of the scientific text as it moves on its collision course with the most obsessive pornography. What seems so strange is that these neutral accounts of operating procedures taken from a textbook of plastic surgery can be radically transformed by the simple substitution of the anonymous ‘patient’ with the name of a public figure, as if the literature and conduct of science constitute a vast dormant pornography waiting to be woken by the magic of fame.”

Annotations: “Princess Margaret’s Face Lift”, J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), RE/Search edition, 1990.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Jimmy Ballard’s Hospital Review
+ Chariot of Fire: Preliminary Analysis & Damage Reconstruction of the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales

Growing up [in Shepperton] from 1987–1998 I knew the mysterious J G Ballard lived in the house next door to my sister’s best friend Tara. Your beautiful photographs bring back so many memories for me, especially the curly bridge from the end of my road. Living there and walking past his house every day I never once laid eyes on the man himself but so many stories circulated about him that he was almost like a mythical character. We believed he was a billionaire but he refused to leave his semi in Shepperton and that he had a car in his living room. I’m sure there were some nudist rumours too. Does he still live there?

A billionaire! Not quite…

One of the things I really love about Thomas Cazals’ Ballard docudrama is the way it taps into this mythical strata, exaggerating it for supreme comic effect (but still with all the affection due our favourite writer). I think I agree with Toby Litt, who said on his panel at Kosmopolis that he sometimes wishes Ballard had never excavated at length his Shanghai background in interviews.

What would we be left with? How should we fill in the gaps, answer the questions asked of us by his work, without the distorting lens of biography? With musings similar to Vicky and Thomas, trying to make sense of this warped genius who seems to have drifted into our reality from a parallel dimension, where he is indeed enjoying a hearty laugh at our expense.

Photo: Simon Sellars.

Sorry for the long absence — I promised ‘daily updates’, well, that didn’t happen. It’s taken me ages to get my thoughts down about Barcelona and Kosmopolis because the experience was so rich, but contributing factors included jet lag, computer problems and a lengthy spell of writer’s block. But mainly it was the richness and how to process it. Kosmopolis was the best literary festival I’ve attended for the intrigue in the program as well as for the organisation — even as one of the lesser participants (in terms of career and achievements), I was made to feel like a king. The Kosmopolis team are a genuinely interesting, creative and dedicated bunch and this transmits into every facet of the show. Thank you Jordi, Miquel, Barbara, Teresa, Juan, Marta and everyone else!

Arriving in Barcelona is a sensory delight. The rhythm of the city is completely different to Melbourne. You get a valid sense of this via traffic flow, the true index of civility. In Barcelona cyclists are treated as road vehicles with equal rights on the tarmac, and traffic signals for both vehicles and pedestrians are adhered to insofar as it facilitates smooth egress for all. This does not mean a nation of automata. When there are no cars, for example, pedestrians cross against the lights, and vice versa it’s the same with vehicles. The police don’t seem to mind. It’s organised chaos (the traffic flow is dense and perpetual, and seemingly balancing on a knife’s edge) and it works. This idea of ensuring harmonious flow by treating rules as guidelines, with the safety of right of way observed above all, seems a simple and obvious point, but in Australia in inner-city areas traffic flow can often be bloody chaos with everyone lockstepping onto their neural GPS to the total exclusion of the rights of others. When I compare the two situations, I think of Barcelona as an organism that knows how to breathe in, and when to breathe out, and that can regulate its breathing for an easier life and stress-free relaxation; I think of urban Australia as a heart-attack victim with fatty arteries and severely constricted breathing.

This can also be indexed by the approach to alcohol. If people were drunk and out of control on the streets of Barcelona, they kept it very well hidden. Is binge drinking popular there? I wouldn’t have thought so. In Melbourne, smashed beer bottles are a common sight on the streets and broken glass is everywhere in the inner city following Friday and Saturday nights. In Australia the government wants to tax alcohol to combat this, to make it so expensive that it will be prohibitive to have more than a few drinks, thereby taking out as collateral damage those who are responsible and who can handle their drink. This is the Nanny State in motion, proffering band-aid solutions that do nothing to get to the heart of the problem, which is cultural and is rooted in Australia’s frontier approach to binge drinking. Try to limit people’s enjoyment of wine in Spain and see how far you get. Alcohol is not the problem in Australia — the problem is social. I felt safe walking around Barcelona at midnight, because there’s none of the paranoia and edginess that is increasingly a feature of Melbourne street life. Instead, there is conviviality — more on that later. I’ll even declare this despite having my wallet stolen on La Rambla just two days into my stay. I was with Mike Bonsall, who was in town for the festival as a punter (along with Tim Chapman and Mike Holliday; great to see you all!). We’d ingested a few drinks and I just didn’t think. Stupidly, I put my wallet in my back pocket, even though I’ve worked as a travel writer and I’ve written on travel scams and dangers — including putting your wallet in your back pocket on La Rambla. So, before we knew it, we were running the gauntlet of a large group of young women who began groping us (!) — ‘Oooh la la, come home with me, baby’. We would have been in their clutches for no longer than a minute before breaking free, but I knew straight away my wallet had gone. The girls had gone, too, melted away into the crowd. But it didn’t ruin my trip because Barcelona’s delights far outweigh its petty crime. Every city has its hazards and I was warned about this one, but I let my guard slip. I don’t think I should blame Barcelona for that idiotic lapse in concentration. Besides, there was an upside. The next day, Teresa from Kosmopolis took me to the police station and gave me a guided tour of the neighbourhoods we passed through, pointing out beautiful historical architecture on the way and filling me in on the unique character of each area. Thank you so much, Teresa — for your wonderful company, it was worth losing my wallet.

Detail from Andrés Hispano’s ‘Autoscan’ installation, at the ‘Autopsia del nou Mil.leni’ exhibition at CCCB, Barcelona. Photo: Tim Chapman.

For the first few days I explored the Ballard exhibition. Unfortunately I had an unfamiliar camera with me so my most of my shots, taken in low light, were unsatisfactory. Of course, Rick McGrath was at the opening of the exhibition back in July and he took many excellent photos, so please refer to his batch in lieu of mine. As for descriptions, I won’t go into too much detail given that McGrath has covered the ground thoroughly in his report, so well in fact that much of it felt very familiar on first visit. What I will say though is that it is an impressive achievement, and one of the most imaginative displays of its type that I’ve seen. I saw the Kubrick exhibition when it came to Melbourne and this matches it, perhaps even surpasses it, because it gives free reign to creative interpretation of Ballard’s metaphors, and all on a budget a fraction of the Kubrick. Jordi and his team have allowed their imaginations to run wild and this has resulted in something quite stunning, in particular the skeletal car body buried in sand. One thing Rick didn’t really comment on was Ann Lislegaard’s black-and-white computer-art rendition of themes from The Crystal World — I spent almost an hour sitting in a darkened room watching this creation, with its looped 3D scenes of interiors and outdoor scenes bathed in an ambience that morphs from light to shade, seemingly crystallising at the meridian into shards of solid, jagged matter. Punctuated with quotes from Crystal, one of Ballard’s most lyrical works, this was a stunning monument to the fashion in which JGB attempts to reorder the senses to provide a deeper, more meaningful existence that cuts against the grain of convention.

Jordi Costa on the left, me on the right. Photo: Tim Chapman.

LEFT: Claire Walsh, circa 1968.

In a very pleasant surprise, Claire Walsh, JGB’s partner, was a last-minute guest of the festival and I was thrilled to meet the face of two of Ballard’s advertiser’s announcements. Jordi Costa and the CCCB’s Miquel Noques took Claire on a guided tour of the exhibition and V. Vale and I were able to tag along. Claire was full of interesting background regarding some of Ballard’s most famous works. For example, discussing Ballard’s crashed-car exhibition, a focus of one of the autopsy rooms, she echoed JGB’s description of the confrontational aspects of the show. Claire was at the event and she emphasised that it was meant to shock, that it was meant to jolt people out of their complacency. According to her, JGB’s oft-repeated descriptions of a drunk, confused and enraged audience were no exaggeration — the public had never butted up against a man of Ballard’s dark intelligence before. Intriguingly, the effect was echoed in the present exhibition, held under similar circumstances — I’m told that in Spain Ballard is virtually unknown, and that many people attending this exhibition were witnessing his work for the first time. Combine this with the fact that Jordi and his team pulled no punches in framing Ballard’s work, presenting often queasy images of medical procedure, wartime horrors and mediated violence, and the effect sometimes approached a similar level of outrage. In the guestbook, there were examples of patrons expressing their anger at the imagery on display — ‘The worst exhibition I’ve ever seen!’ (on the same page as another quote: ‘This is the best exhibition ever’); ‘Scandalous!’; ‘This man is sick!’ — nestling comfortably alongside the words of praise (which far outweighed the negatives, of course). There were also, perhaps predictably, just a few too many examples of mutilated and mutated penises.

‘Frank Ghery [sic] rules’: guestbook hijinks at the Ballard exhibition. Photo: Simon Sellars.

Before we entered the exhibition, I realised I’d forgotten my camera battery so I raced back to the hotel to get it. Downstairs I saw Lou Reed, Kosmopolis’s star guest, sloping laconically through the CCCB lobby followed by a tightly coiled media scrum. He looked very bored in that distinct Lou Reed way, and I was struck by the image of him standing stock still against a Kosmopolis banner while scores of paparazzi took pictures, their flashes firing simultaneously. At one point Reed stretched his palms slightly outwards, while retaining the same rigid face, before puffing his chest out. This image made me recall old interviews where he would talk about channelling feedback from his guitar in the same breath as he would eulogise the mech-human jolt of messing with the nervous system through systematic methamphetamine abuse. Watching him bathed in a hundred flashes, I saw him as a creature raised under electric light, feeding off the popping bulbs, absorbing the photo-synthetic light into his body, allowing it to course through his veins to produce a pure artificial being harnessed to the electric sun and to the raw power of the media. The ever-popping flashes illuminating his body were so rapid and intensive, I expected his bones to start glowing beneath wafer-thin skin.

LEFT: Lou Reed: electro-shock therapy. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

This was on the Thursday, and until his performance with Laurie Anderson on Friday night, I kept seeing him out of the corner of my eye, in and around the CCCB courtyard, heading his entourage, a study in ‘jaded’, causing a commotion with the crowds, at one stage roped off in an enclosure like a zoo exhibit, bored and expressionless, waiting while the fans lined up for his book signings and while rubberneckers like me watched him studying his fingernails. I’m not the biggest fan of his music, save for the Velvets, but his real-life presence was so inorganic, so bloodless in a completely compelling way, it had to be tracked and followed. It was pure celebrity reaction in action (although, funnily enough, I’d never imagined Lou Reed as inhabiting that rarefied level; he always seems ‘cult’ to me… let’s face it, he’s no Jagger) and I noted the delicious juxtaposition of the virtual Ballard on the top floor of the CCCB, a man who has dissected the celebrity process with clinical and unerring precision. I imagined his presence radiating pure waves of insight down on the proceedings below.

On Friday night Lou and Laurie read Catalan poetry and writing, which was utterly bizarre. I’m not sure of the background of this event, or of how and why it happened. Do Lou and Laurie have a connection to Catalonia? I can’t say. All I can tell you is that Lou was on stage at Kosmopolis while Laurie was at the University of California, Berkeley, reading her parts in a live video feed projected on a massive screen behind him. No music, no singing. Lou sounded as if he was reading from the usual tales of heroin, transvestites and Warhol back in NYC — there was that same, familiar raspy drawl that everyone associates with him — whereas Laurie was more engaging and injected multiple personalities into her reading. The whole set up was so strange. When Lou would turn to her, dwarfed by her image, and she would smile benevolently back at him, it seemed like a fairy tale in which Lou, a dark knight, had been shrunk to size by a Queen who wanted to keep him all for herself. But they are in love, I know it’s not like that, I just had a sensory blipvert channel jump induced by the scale distortion and the jumbled spatial dynamic.

Lou and Laurie: telepresent love. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

There was a funny moment when Lou mispronounced a list of Spanish surnames and place names, and the audience erupted into laughter. But the biggest cheer was reserved for the duo’s reading of the Yellow Manifesto (1928), written by Salvador Dali, Lluis Montanyà and Sevastià Gasch. A futurist ode to the extremes of the imagination and to the beauty of machinic art, it occurred to me that it was surely an influence on Ballard’s ‘What I Believe’:

We have eliminated from this MANIFESTO all courtesy in our attitude. It is useless to attempt any discussion with the representatives of present-day Catalan culture, which is artistically negative although efficient in other respects. Compromise and correctness lead to deliquescent and lamentable states of confusion of all values, to the most unbreathable spiritual atmospheres, to the most pernicious of influences… Violent hostility, in contrast, clearly locates values and positions and creates a hygienic state of mind.

After reading through the Manifesto, with its litany of things to be smashed, Lou quipped: ‘I wonder what they’d think of the internet?’ With its call to dismantle bourgeois complacency and the blandness of youth in favour of Catalan independence based around the beauty of enigmatic art, the Yellow Manifesto is a powerful call to arms that clearly still has relevance in today’s political climate. Indeed, I saw anarchist and independence graffiti everywhere in Barcelona, as in the following example, which was stencilled onto a series of mobile-phone advertisements. At first I thought it was actually part of the ad, in a depressingly familiar instance of corporations co-opting revolution, because it was so accurately placed in the exact same spot each time, until I twigged that the stencil artist had actually targeted this particular ad for whatever reason.

‘Anarchy in Catalonia, it’s coming sometime and maybe…’. Photo: Simon Sellars.

When they’d finished their performance, Lou looked up at Laurie and they had a little telepresent moment together, strong love coursing through a hi-def internet link; Laurie gave Lou a radiant smile and made little pincer-like movements with her fingers at him, clearly some kind of secret sign, and he smiled sheepishly at her, this woman who is perhaps the only person in the world that can make Lou Reed self-conscious.

The Ballard segment of the festival kicked off with a panel, ‘Postcards from the Interior Space’, chaired by Jordi and featuring Marcial Souto, Agustin Fernandez Mallo, Marta Peirano and Toby Litt. Unfortunately no one told Mike B and I that the translation of the Spanish/Catalan speakers was being transmitted through portable headsets, so we sat through most of the session in bemusement, perking up when Litt spoke in English. This was a Ballardian experience in itself. Understanding Litt only, we attempted to decode the questions and replies from other speakers that led to Toby’s answers. Sometimes we got it and sometimes the old brain would go into freefall, much the same as it does when it reads Ballard and must submit to the process of unworking the similes and parallel narratives that form the shifting strata of his work. Litt told the audience that the foreword he wrote to a forthcoming volume of academic essays had been rejected on the grounds that it wasn’t likely to entice people to read more Ballard, given his position, which is that it’s impossible to truly understand or truly ‘get’ Ballard’. From there, Toby suggested that all academics have got Ballard wrong. He then read the rejected foreword (which he revealed was finally accepted as the afterword to the book), which built an extended metaphor around the notion of Ballard tunnelling out from the ground under his Shepperton house. Funnily enough, perhaps even appropriately enough, given Toby’s main point about academia, I can’t pretend I fully understood the analogy.

‘Postcards from the Interior Space’: Marcial, Agustin, Marta, Jordi and Toby. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

Litt also referred to psychogeographical interpretations of Ballard, mentioning Will Self, but said he had problems with this angle, with writing about London in this way. I have sympathies with both academic/theoretical and psychogeographic readings of Ballard, but I also agree with Litt when he says that Ballard translates because he maintains a floating parallel world on top of the ‘physical’ world of his novels. It’s a good point, but why then criticise specific readings of Ballard? Surely the indeterminate, open-ended nature of JGB’s writing supports, even encourages, this in its drive to resist categorisation? Well, that’s my position anyway, that this open-endedness generates a program of resistance. Litt also critiqued readings of Ballard that accept Ballard’s version of his life as the truth — I presume Empire of the Sun is the reference — and said he wished that Ballard had never expanded upon his Shanghai childhood in interviews, so that readers would be forced to confront his parade of surrealist war imagery and violent technofutures on their own terms. I do understand what he means — I’d read Atrocity, Crash, High-Rise and Concrete Island before Empire or the bulk of the interviews, and they did seem like the work of mad genius bleeding through into the frame from a parallel dimension. But even now, with the full weight of Ballard’s history informing my study of his work, I see his autobiographical retellings as another fiction to be decoded. His obsessive restaging of the Lunghua theatre is a form of circular time that again resists definition, resists commodification, resists classification — a guerrilla war against the type of ‘eventless present’ that he sees as a by-product of consumer capitalism and its drive to erase history and collapse the future into the present.

There, I’ve just given you the gist of what I spoke about on the panel the next day with Jordi, Vale and Bruce Sterling, where I felt unusual, but happy, appearing as the ‘academic’ among two larger-than-life personalities. Vale showed a 10-minute film of his work with RE/Search and the relationship with Ballard he has forged, and then talked about Ballard’s role as visionary and dreamer. Bruce talked about Ballard’s influence on his own writing and on cyberpunk. But I’ll leave further summaries for now, as I believe Tim C is preparing a transcript of the talk which I hope to post here soon.

‘Myths of the Near Future’: Me, Bruce, Vale, Jordi. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

After the panel, we had a beer in the courtyard. In another welcome surprise, Iraklis from Athens showed up, with his mate Antony! Iraklis is a long-time reader of ballardian.com, from around 2005 onwards, so it was great to meet him. We had an interesting chat about the public perception of Ballard; it seems the situation in Greece is the same in Australia in that he is still regarded as a ‘cult’ author. Perhaps he is. I think Mr Ballard should be proud of getting under people’s skins so thoroughly. It was here that we saw Robyn Hitchcock wandering around with his guitar. He was due on stage that night but was serenading random strangers in the meantime, and we watched him perform a Doors song for a small child, who was clearly delighted and/or bemused by this colourful man. The next night I saw a selection of Catalan poets at the CCCB’s Cafe Europa, and they were doing very interesting things with collage sound and sampled voices. My favourite was the guy who attempted to replicate the way we hear our own voices and the process by which it is filtered through the vibrations of the skull and ear canals, rendering it completely different when heard on a recording. I hate hearing my recorded voice, so this was repellent and fascinating for me. He related all this to the way we cannot trust our own interior voices and memories, which may or may not be creations and constructs of the media — Catalan poet, meet J.G. Ballard. Another poet repeated combinations of words and phrases and looped them through a bank of samplers, creating music from the beauty of the Catalan language. I find it a nice language to listen to, and I chose not to hear the translations on the portable headsets this time. I wanted to free-float and concentrate solely on the musicality of the phrases and intonations, the meaning of which I was clueless, but the poetry of which I immediately and instinctively responded to.

Robyn Hitchcock does his wandering troubadour thing in the CCCB courtyard. Photo: Tim Chapman.

Afterwards, talking to the MC, this poet said something interesting, about how he prefers ‘ignorance’ to ‘knowledge’ because with ignorance, interesting ideas emerge. He gave the example of people who believe that white wine removes blackberry stains or that spirits are good for headaches; in the gap between perception and recognition, ignorance occurs and new and surreal juxtapositions emerge that inspire radical art and thought processes. These performances again put me in mind of the Yellow Manifesto and how it really sums up the appeal of Kosmopolis, with its focus on grassroots, independent, innovative and creative literary ideas. There were no real superstars at this festival, but instead successful writers and artists who have proved that you don’t need to sell your soul to make it. In this respect Ballard, a true maverick, is the perfect fit.

Lydia Lunch at Cafe Europa. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

Lydia Lunch was also appearing on this night, as she now lives in Barcelona. She performed a spoken-word piece to a fractured jazz-rock soundtrack, typically angry and very ‘fuck you’ and all about the war on terror and global conflict tied in with Spain’s history of conflict. After, she said to the MC that she chooses to live in Barcelona because in the US she would be reminded every day of the hypocrisy of that society and the violence it wreaks on its citizens. In Barcelona, by contrast, she says that every day people wake up and forget about the horrors of the past because each day is seen as a new chance to drink, fuck and forget. To my surprise, I found myself agreeing with this angry and loud American called Lunch: there is indeed a mood of relaxed optimism in this city and it touched me even on my brief stay. It invigorated me in fact, and in the week-and-a-half since my return I’ve been inspired to make a number of important and long-delayed changes to my life and lifestyle, which are already in motion, a direct result of my nine days in Barcelona and the deep impact it and Kosmopolis had on me and the possibilities I can now envisage for creative work that is symbiotic with a healthy inner life.

ABOVE: Kafkaesque. Photo: Simon Sellars.

ABOVE: Brechtian. Photo: Simon Sellars.

If you are a writer, or literary minded, how could you fail to love this city? I came across stencils of Kafka, and graffiti that quoted large chunks of Brecht. It’s a city made for walking, for inspiring thought. The back alleys and side streets are immersive and the architecture across all styles is superb. I walked many kilometres each day, directionless but always finding something to inspire. I did so much walking and uncovering of back streets that I didn’t make it to any of the Gaudi attractions (I’ve been to Barcelona before, and did the whole Gaudi thing, so I’d subconsciously made the decision this time around to see the more of the quotidian fabric of the city instead).

Gala, is that you? Photo: Simon Sellars.

It was during one foray into a back street that the lady in this shot came into view. She saw me taking photos of buildings and stopped right in front of me, extending her walking stick out towards me, smiling radiantly all the while but not saying a single word. Look at the amazing way she is dressed and that face that knows all: she looks like a female Dali. She struck this pose as soon as she saw me, as if to say: ‘Hey! What about me? I’m the finest architecture here’. For a moment I wasn’t sure what she was doing and then I realised she was offering herself as a model to be photographed. As soon as the shutter clicked, she turned on her heel and walked briskly away, still smiling that same brilliant smile, still uttering not one word. And that is what I love about Barcelona, the casual surrealism that is woven into the fabric of the place. Included with the pack given to Kosmopolis participants was a series of monographs published by the CCCB that explored urban space and the need for a vital public space in order to maintain a healthy society. One, ‘Collective Culture and Urban Public Space’ by Ash Amin, is especially relevant. Amin writes about the need for a ‘post-human perspective’ on urban space that brings together ‘the most promising examples of surplus made to work as such’:

These would include bazaars and shopping malls in which difference is treated as a virtue, streets and squares of free and safe mingling, parks and other recreation spaces resonating with vitality and mixed use, libraries and schools that sustain public interest and reach out to the reluctant, bus shelters and car parks that are not the dumping ground for the dregs of society, buses and trains that work and offer a pleasant experience to the travelling public. Here, the qualities of multiplicity, conviviality, solidarity and maintenance can be expected to crowd out malfeasance, reinforcing a sense of shared space.

It is no accident that Amin had been commissioned by the CCCB to write about public space. He repeatedly emphasises conviviality as the key to a healthy and dynamic urban fabric, and as I was reading this, I thought, ‘That is Barcelona’. Whatever problems there may be with the Spanish government or economy, what Barcelona in particular has is convivial public space, and I, like Lydia Lunch, would be willing to give up many other things to experience that on a daily basis.

I have a final observation about Barcelona: I have never seen so many young men on crutches in any city I’ve visited. Are Catalan males very sporty, are they just really clumsy, or do they have very brittle joints?

The Dali Museum. Photo: Simon Sellars.

On my last full day in Spain, I travelled to Figueres to see the Dali museum. I am staggered by how popular his work continues to be. The queues and crowds were massive and the whole complex was like a warped theme park, Disneyland nightmares for the masses. There were plenty of school groups there and I could only think that being introduced to Dali at a very young age must be a very good education indeed, exposed to images of young virgins being auto-sodomized by their own chastity and labia-faces. This is what I mean by casual surrealism, which appears to be threaded into the Catalonian DNA.

And now it’s encoded into mine. On the way home, I picked up some British newspapers at Heathrow to find that the UK was in the midst of the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand/Andrew Sachs scandal.

And every time I read the name ‘Georgina Baillie’, I was convinced they were referring to ‘Georges Bataille’.

ABOVE: Barcelona street scene. Photo: Simon Sellars.

ABOVE: The thrill of it all: nu-architecture at Port Olympic, Barcelona. Photo: Simon Sellars.

..:: Soundtracks to inner space: Future Engineers, ‘Studio Mix 2007′; Underground Resistance, ‘First Galactic Baptist Church’; The Martian, ‘The Stardancer’; Simple Minds, ‘Themes for Great Cities’; PiL, ‘Radio Four’; Lalo Schifrin, ‘Jaws Theme’; Ennio Morricone, ‘Come Maddalena’.

The exhibition JG Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium, celebrating the work and enduring influence of J.G. Ballard, opens tomorrow at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

Please enjoy the CCCB’s wonderful promotional film for the exhibition, a Lynchian, impressionistic cut up with main ingredients: Marilyn Monroe’s ghost, Ballard’s mellifluous tones, snatched Aphex Twin, what looks like James Dean’s car and a severe case of the night terrors.

And below is the prologue to the exhibition catalogue, a deep tribute to JGB composed by Josep Ramoneda, Director of the CCCB.

ABOVE: SLJ in JGB’s RW: Ballardé with cheese?

Like millions of other television viewers, I had already seen selected extracts from the film in numerous documentaries about the massacre, and I hardly expected any sudden revelation. But as I relaxed in the viewing theater, I soon realized what a remarkable film this was, and how well it conveyed the curious atmosphere of Pangbourne Village–in its elegant and civilized way a scene-of-the-crime waiting for its murder.

J.G. Ballard, Running Wild (1988).

After authoritively announcing last week that Samuel L. Jackson had missed his chance to work with the best material he’ll ever get, we discover Sam’s back in the game. Tim C. again takes up the story. “Stop the presses!” Tim tells me, “Samuel L Jackson’s Running Wild again has a green light, this time filming in South Africa and Germany (now there’s the smell of international funding)”.

Here’s the news from Hollywood Reporter:

H20 puts ‘Wild,’ ‘Gate’ sequel on fast track
Thriller, horror sequel green-lighted

By Scott Roxborough
May 13, 2008, 12:50 PM

CANNES — Andras Hamori’s H20 Motion Pictures has green-lighted two new productions: the thriller “Running Wild,” based on the novel by J.G. Ballard and starring Samuel L. Jackson, and “The Gate — 20 Years Later,” a sequel to the 1987 hit teen horror title.

Jackson will act as a co-producer on “Running Wild,” a detective story about the investigation of a mysterious massacre at a wealthy gated community. Television and music video helmer Kevin Kerslake will direct in his feature film debut, from a script by David Leland (”Mona Lisa”). Shooting is set to begin this year in South Africa and at MMC Studios in Cologne, Germany.

I hope the film will retain the documentary-style aspect of the book, even as I’m imagining it probably won’t. Note the press release talks of a “mysterious massacre”. In the book Ballard has no interest in maintaining suspense: from the start we’ve never in doubt about who committed the crime. As JGB likes to say of his “crime” stories (Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes et al), this one’s a “whydunit”, not a “whodunit”.

Place your bets. Will Sam’s film strip the CCTV/doco aspects in favour of a linear crime narrative with the perps revealed at the end?

The twenty-eight-minute film was taken by officers of Reading CID soon after eleven o’clock on the morning of June 25, 1988, some three hours after the murders. Thankfully, there is no sound track, and one is glad that none is necessary, unlike the TV programs with their hectoring commentaries full of lurid speculation. This minimalist style of camera work exactly suits the subject matter, the shadowless summer sunlight and the almost blank facades of the expensive houses–everything is strangely blanched, drained of all emotion, and one seems to be visiting a set of laboratories in a hightech science park where no human operatives are employed.

J.G. Ballard, Running Wild.

In true Ballardian fashion, there is more than a touch of megalomania to him and it becomes clear that HRH has his own plans for world domination. Believing himself to be telepathic and claiming the existence of extraterrestrials, he forms a religion called the Perfect Light Movement and is compared to Jesus Christ by André Malraux, eventually using his growing power and influence to sieze the UN where he attempts to spark off world war against the US and the USSR. Eventually he is incarcerated on the Isle of Wight where it’s presumed he wrote his life story.

The story’s conceit is that it is typeset like an index, apparently the only surviving fragment of HRH’s “unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography”, and all of the plot details above, plus much, much more, can be gleaned from the brief fragments in the index itself. It’s a format that allows for some humourous moments, as in this entry, in which we discover that Hitler impressed and then disappointed HRH within the space of two pages, an arc of disillusionment that reflects the greatest schism of the 20th century yet comically reduces it to just one line:

Hitler, Adolf, invites HRH to Berchtesgaden, 166; divulges Russia invasion plans, 172; impresses HRH, 179; disappoints HRH, 181

Eventually we come to learn that the story, despite the form of the piece, actually unfolds in a linear fashion from “A” (including Avignon, HRH’s birthplace) to “Z”. In the entries for “U”, “V” and “W”, for example, HRH’s downfall is revealed:

United Nations Assembly, seized by Perfect Light Movement, 695 – 9; HRH addresses, 696; HRH calls for world war against United States and USSR, 698
Versailles, Perfect Light Movement attempts to purchase, 621
Vogue (magazine), 356
Westminster Abbey, arrest of HRH by Special Branch, 704
Wight, Isle of, incarceration of HRH, 712 – 69
Windsor, House of, HRH challenges legitimacy of, 588

While the very last entry is revealed to be that of the indexer himself:

Zielinski, Bronislaw, suggests autobiography to HRH, 742; commissioned to prepare index, 748; warns of suppression threats, 752; disappears, 761

Thus in one fell metaphysical stroke the indexer actually indexes himself out of existence, causing the editor to speculate, “Perhaps the entire compilation is nothing more than a figment of the over-wrought imagination of some deranged lexicographer”.

But what’s really going on in this story? Did HRH really play a part in changing the course of human affairs, with all facets of his existence covered up to the general public? Is this index then a giant conspiracy of which now have only vague, shadowy knowledge? As the editor again speculates, “A substantial mystery still remains. Is it conceivable that all traces of his activities could be erased from our records of the period? Is the suppressed autobiography itself a disguised roman a clef in which the fictional hero exposes the secret identities of his historical contemporaries?” Or has HRH somehow collaged himself into world affairs, rewriting postwar history with himself in a starring role? The latter would then beg the question: is Woody Allen a JGB fan? For by now you must have detected the obvious similarities to Allen’s film Zelig, made six years after this story was published.

Funnily enough, “The Index”, for all its brilliance, seems to be an extension of ideas first aired in two earlier, markedly less successful Ballard shorts: “Minus One” (1963), in which the existence of an asylum patient is inferred (and then covered up) from a few scraps of medical papers, and “Now: Zero” (1959), in which the reader, like the “deranged lexicographer” in “The Index”, obliterates himself via the act of participation. I guess this only goes to show that Ballard never wastes an idea, or that he really is writing the same story over and over (the latter is not a criticism in my view, I must add).

“The Index” is also in a direct continuum with The Atrocity Exhibition, whose central character, T-, represents all sides of the equation. On the one hand, T-, like the reader of “The Index”, feels as though he is amidst a vast conspiracy, the conspiracy of existence itself. But T-, driven mad by the new communications landscape fracturing the late 1960s, forms a strategy, as HRH possibly did, cutting and pasting the cultural and political events of the late 1960s into a bricolaged version of reality playing inside the cinema of his mind — with himself in the lead role. Eventually, T-, like HRH, is indexed into his own storyline, even appearing in one chapter as a fragmented, diffuse entity, aligned to Christ, again like HRH:

Readers will recall that the little evidence collected seemed to point to the strange and confusing figure of an unidentified Air Force pilot whose body was washed ashore on a beach near Dieppe three months later. Other traces of his ‘mortal remains’ were found in a number of unexpected places: in a footnote to a paper on some unusual aspects of schizophrenia published thirty years earlier in a since defunct psychiatric journal; in the pilot for an unpurchased TV thriller, ‘Lieutenant 70’; and on the record labels of a pop singer known as The Him — to instance only a few. Whether in fact this man was a returning astronaut suffering from amnesia, the figment of an ill-organized advertising campaign, or, as some have suggested, the second coming of Christ, is anyone’s guess.

Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition.

Thus it’s not completely accurate to say that Ballard abandoned the methodology of Atrocity in the 1970s, as many commentators do. As “The Index” shows, his experimental bent was still evident, and as always aligned to a strong storyline. I have read a few pastiches of Atrocity and the importance of plot is something that their writers do not fully grasp for the most part: it’s not enough to pay homage to JGB by simply cutting up text and fiddling with form and structure. Underpinning Ballard, always, is the bones of a strong plot that can be summarised in a linear synopsis and “The Index” (and Atrocity) is no exception. But this sparse framework also makes the work a “readerly” text, in which inference allows the reader to substantially flesh out the bones. In this respect, I see “The Index” as the logical, extreme outcome of the experiment began by Atrocity, in which the text is pared back as far as possible without sacrificing narrative legibility.

This is especially apparent in light of comments Ballard made in a 1983 interview:

In a sense, I’m assembling the materials of an autopsy, and I’m treating reality — the reality we inhabit — almost as if it were a cadaver… the contents of a special kind of inquisition. We have these objects here — what are they?

If you move into a house that hasn’t been properly cleaned up, you find these strange unrelated items: a pen, a hair clip, a copy of Auden’s poems, and without even thinking you begin to assemble from these materials some sort of hypothesis about the nature of life that was lived in this house, or the nature of people who’ve left this debris on the beach after they’ve vanished in a plane crash or what have you.

I assemble materials and I draw from them. I treat the reality we inhabit as if it were a fiction — I treat the whole of existence as if it were a huge invention.… this huge network of ciphers, and encoded instructions — perhaps — that surround us in reality.

“Interview by Graeme Revell”. RE/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard

Now, having reflected on one of my favourite Ballard stories, I am therefore naturally delighted to report that Lucy Vickery in The Spectator recently ran a competition to “submit a revealing fragment from an index which is all that remains of the autobiography of someone who has privileged access to the great and good”.

Lucy writes:

To give you an idea of what I was after, here are a couple of snippets from J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Index’, a story implied through an index, which is the only surviving part of the unpublished autobiography of Henry Rhodes Hamilton: ‘Churchill, Winston, conversations with HRH, 221; at Chequers with HRH, 235; spinal tap performed by HRH, 247; at Yalta with HRH, 298; ‘iron curtain’ speech, Fulton, Missouri, suggested by HRH, 312; attacks HRH in Commons debate, 367’.

But as she admits this was a pretty tough ask and subsequently “entries were thin on the ground”. However, Lucy did manage to unearth four winners who received £30 each, with a “bonus fiver” going to G.M. Davis. I’ve run two Ballard-inspired competitions here at ballardian.com, and I’m insanely jealous I didn’t think of this for the third — it’s a brilliant idea.

Reproduced below is G.M. Davis’s entry (which includes an entry for Will Self’s “snoring”), but special mention must also go to Basil Ransome-Davies, whose submission featured this hilarious detail: “Eagleton, Terence. Asks me to smooth his way with the Vatican, 246″.

G.M. DAVIS:

Mandela, Nelson, surprisingly short when you meet him, 526; political errors of, 828
Miners’ strike, author’s resolution of, 917–8
Mosley, Max, ‘kindred spirit’, 42; ‘Nazi pervert’, 1620
Nabokov, Vladimir, aesthetic fallacies of, 301
New Statesman, author’s rejection of editorship, 559; sales slump, 560
Portillo, Michael, deaf to good counsel, 338
Price, Katie, seeks author’s advice on mammary enlargement/reduction, 844
Prince Charles, personal hygiene problem, 208; bares soul, 443
Principia Mathematica, discussion of with Allen Ginsberg, 71; author’s refutation of, 113
Quantum theory, author’s contribution to, 12, 19, 47, 77, 101–114, 298–306
Rice, Condoleezza, ‘not so black as she’s painted’, 866; good in bed, 992–4
Rooney, Wayne, spotted by author as four-year-old, 1083; ingratitude, 1119
Sarkozy, Nicholas, requests author’s help in drafting European constitution, 1443
Scorsese, dissuaded from abandoning cinema, 636; as drug-crazed egomaniac, 665
Scotland, faulty central heating at Balmoral, 460; as failed state, 700
Self, Will, snoring of, 1757

The rest of the entries can be found at The Spectator.

Dan Mitchell of Hard Mag writes with news of a very interesting exhibition he’s co-producing called “Zodiac 3000″ at the International Project Space in Birmingham. It’s one of a plethora of recent JGB-themed events, and sounds like it’s one of the more elaborate, too. According to Dan, “Ballard gave us permission to use his name and that of two of his characters for the show. There is also a publication featuring an essay by ‘Dr. Robert Laing’ titled ‘The Emerging New Psychology’”.

The J. G. Ballard Centre for Psychopathological Research presents: ‘Zodiac 3000′
Curated by: Dr Robert Laing and Karen Novotny.
Including: Merlin Carpenter, Alastair MacKinven, Dan Mitchell, Josephine Pryde, and Rachel Reupke.

+ 26 April to 31 May 2008. (Preview: Saturday 26 April 3.00pm to 5.00pm).
+ Open Monday to Saturday 12.00pm to 5.00pm. (Wednesday 12.00pm to 7.00pm) Closed Sunday.

International Project Space
Bournville Centre for Visual Arts, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design
University of Central England, Maple Road, Birmingham B30 2AA
tel +44 (0) 121 331 5785
info@internationalprojectspace.org
http://www.internationalprojectspace.org/current.htm

From the press release:

Introduction to ‘Zodiac 3000’
by Karen Novotny, April 2008

‘We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.’
Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

‘You see, people these days, who give the impression that their minds are a complete vacuum – no dreams or hopes of any importance, even to themselves, emanate through the sutures of their skulls… But that doesn’t matter, in a sense, because the environment does the dreaming for them.’ J.G. Ballard, 21C (1997)

In April 2007 I met Dr Robert Laing at Kingston University, and it was from this initial encounter that the exhibition ‘Zodiac 3000’ has formed. At the time, we were visiting a series of talks for another exhibition; one based on the theme of new forms of criticism, which took place at Stanley Picker Gallery, the university’s contemporary art space. After the event we both went our separate ways, but it wasn’t very long until we spoke again; affected by the critical context of the exhibition, Laing proposed that we meet about the potential of a project based on J.G. Ballard’s literary oeuvre, and most of all the suggestion of a New Psychology within his writing. Laing referred to the power of the surrounding suburban area of our initial encounter – Ballard has resided in Shepperton close to Kingston in South West London for the majority of his life – and so our discussions moved on to explore a series of contemporary visual representations that might suggest a deeply Ballardian view of the world.

The decision to use the International Project Space (IPS) became pertinent for the context within which the gallery is set. One could say that the original utopian philanthropy of George Cadbury’s Bournville Estate, within which Bournville Centre for Visual Arts (BCVA) and IPS are situated, holds a darker side. When functioning as a factory village, the generous architecture of the workers’ houses masked the area’s purely economic function of creating an effective workforce. In fact, slave labour effectively operated in Birmingham in the 20th century because people in Bournville felt trapped for a whole host of reasons, including not being able to escape the institutional confines of Cadbury’s ‘philanthropic’ enterprise. Now a predominantly well-to-do population occupies the area, one that is at odds with the wider demographic of Birmingham. On the one hand, the contemporary nature of Bournville still contains a utopian flavour; its Quaker run committee insists on the area being maintained to a high degree. It is dry, has no pubs, and recent achievements have included the blocking of a planned Tesco Express on the edge of the estate’s boundaries. However, the area is desirable and increasingly bourgeois, and it’s perhaps this fact that situates the area as appropriate for the theme of this exhibition. If the utopianism of Cadbury’s original endeavour is historically embedded in Bournville’s architecture or plan, then its current population might be relevant to Ballard’s theme of unexpected revolutions, which take place in middle class suburbs or ghettos. In this sense the exhibition deals with the flip side of the utopianism represented by places like Bournville and the dystopian class-based split contained in Ballard’s oeuvre.

One of the persistent themes in Ballard’s writing is an investigation into the heart of things, a fact that stems from the writer’s internment in a prisoner of war camp as a child in the Second World War. Rather than attempting to escape the boundaries of his given circumstances – to jump over the fence of his confinement, or escape the frame of the picture, so to speak – he attempts to burrow into the centre of his captivity and incarceration, to achieve a solid and disturbing investigation of his institutional surroundings. With this in mind, the exhibition attempts to enquire into the nature of the gallery’s environment, its position within a university, and the possibility of applying a new set of institutional parameters to contemporary art. To carry this theme further, IPS has been turned into the foyer of the J.G. Ballard Centre for Psychopathological Research, an institute built to interrogate the New Psychology explored in Ballard’s fiction. This subterranean institution, constructed by Laing, will effectively try to explore and enhance new psychological tendencies.

Within this context, Dan Mitchell will focus on middle class sexual boredom and its relationship with the desired prize of interior design. This obsession dominates time and represents occupational therapy as a battleground of castle decoration, together with a fight for survival. In this respect, the floors of products on display at Habitat become sacred, full of brooding vibrancy, and contain dark and textured themes of repressed rage.

Alastair MacKinven’s project for the exhibition will physically divide the gallery in two. A partition will extend through IPS to the gates of BCVA, across into Cadbury’s chocolate factory, and out through the entire estate. Indicated by wooden pegs holding flat signs, MacKinven’s work intends to socially segregate the area, and aims to provoke a division between two future warring communities – The Cocoshuffters and The White Chocolateers – within the currently peaceful Bournville Estate.

Along with his Burberry flags of style, which represent notions of class and consumer identity (these works, The St. George’s Cross, The Homecoming and The Riot take their titles from Ballard’s Kingdom Come (2006)), Merlin Carpenter has proposed a ready-made sculpture redolent of Ballard’s fetishised fixation on sex and disaster, and contemporary Britain’s obsession with royalty, celebrity, death, and unresolved conspiracy theories. He plans to drive a dilapidated black 1997 S-type Mercedes at high speed straight into IPS’ interior sign situated within BCVA’s courtyard. The resulting crash scene will become a prop for the duration of the exhibition.

Rachel Reupke has chosen to use found images gleaned from billboards and posters on the street. Her video, or rather her animated ‘presentations’, announce the promise of a new society filled with lifestyle choices – a modern arcadia of high-rises, shopping malls and parkland. Based partly on Eden-Olympia, the high-tech business park in the hills above Cannes in Ballard’s Super Cannes (2000), and on illustrations of architectural developments on construction boom hoardings in Beijing, her work speaks of the future inserted into the present. Containing the strange yet banal directorial feel of a corporate video, faith in these images’ vision falter, as symbolic motifs become unreadable and the architecture remains generic. We are left to observe a half true record, and a half faux artifact.

Similarly, Josephine Pryde takes her photographs into the darkroom and beyond. Ballard’s thoughts on photography questioned whether the camera was a ‘Cyclops eye of the late 20th century, recording everything but seeing nothing,’ and observed that the planet was drowning ‘in an ocean of photographic emulsion.’ Pryde’s images surf above this wave of recorded and flattened photography, which clutter our imaginations; they flood the drained mind with fantastic scenes that render our consciousness open and changed. As Pryde has said in her 2004 Secession catalogue ‘…all this fantastic image stuff and style, and the consumer world, can leave me very confused and over-excited, and making my own photographs is quite a good way for me to try to stay calm.’

At a certain point during the research for the project, Laing and I wrote to Ballard in Shepperton to ask his permission to make a project based on his concept of a New Psychology. He responded with a message written on the back of two postcards that depict surrealist paintings; Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory (1931) and Paul Delvaux’s La Rue du tramway (Street of the Trams) (1938-39). ‘All I ask is that you keep my “participation” within reasonable bounds… there are too many madmen out there who think that they are completely sane.’ he wrote. Taking Ballard’s advice, we have attempted to take an ethical stance on our motivations for this exhibition, and have tried to do justice to the disturbing view of the world represented in the writer’s work. What follows in this exhibition is a series of projects that try not only to open up a contemporary psychological viewpoint on our surroundings, but which also attempt to present new possibilities for psychology through the effect of contemporary sociological, cultural and political tendencies that we are we can all see around us on an increasingly powerful level. We hope that you enjoy the exhibition.

For further information and images please contact International Project Space curator Andrew Hunt tel +44 (0)121 331 5785 / +44 (0)7828 537 989 email info@internationalprojectspace.org

This project has been generously supported by Arts Council England and Birmingham City University.

The house that Sam built … from Pam.

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

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

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

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

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

JGB, Atrocity, 1970.

Sam Newman: “Most people are wankers…”

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

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

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

Sammy, 2003.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All quotes, Ballard, Kingdom Come, 2006.

Oh yes. Now I remember how Kingdom Come ends…

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

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

Newsnight Review: Tony Parsons, Kirsty Wark, Julie Myerson and John Harris.

More Miracles discussion… Here’s a transcript of the Newsnight Review segment on BBC 2. Not as revealing as the interviews, and having Tony Parsons say that Empire is ‘possibly the great novel of the 20th century’ isn’t necessarily a good thing. Still, all publicity is good…

Mike Bonsall

Kirsty Wark: The writer JG Ballard responded to the diagnosis of advanced cancer in 2006 by writing his autobiography. He says Miracles of Life is the last story he will ever tell, and it’s one of early sensory overload, beginning in Shanghai, the place of his birth in 1930, and his home until the age of fifteen. Shanghai fuelled his imagination for novels, starting with sci-fi, to more modern dystopias. His time in a Japanese internment camp was the inspiration for his two semi-biographical novels; Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women; with death as a part of his life in occupied Shanghai. His preoccupation with violent sex and death resulted in his 1970 novel Crash, later to be one of the most controversial films of all time. Miracles of Life: from Shanghai to Shepperton, is the key to JG Ballard’s extraordinary life.

Reader: In Shanghai the fantastic, which for most people lies inside their heads, lay all around me, and I think now that my main effort as a boy was to find the real in all this make-believe. In some ways I went on doing this when I came to England after the War, a world that was almost too real. As a writer I’ve treated England as if it were a strange fiction, and my task has been to elicit the truth, just as my childhood self did when faced with honour guards of hunchbacks and temples without doors.

KW: Tony, I think I’m right in saying that, for a long time he said he wasn’t going to write an autobiography and he has, for you, did it illuminate his writing more?

Tony Parsons: Well it did, I mean, if you love Ballard, as I love Ballard, then you’ve certainly read Empire of the Sun, and you’ve seen the Spielberg film, and you’ve almost certainly read The Kindness of Women. So, when I was reading the early part, and the Shanghai years, there were so many images that seemed incredibly familiar to me; the beggar expiring at the gate of the family home, the young Chinese peasant who’s being tortured by Japanese soldiers at the end of the war, the boy, the English schoolboy who’s never been to England, riding round Shanghai on his bicycle. And I did have a sinking feeling, you know, I was worried that I was going to be disappointed, that so much of this stuff was familiar to me, but the glory of it is, it fills in the gaps, between what he is — you know his parents were with him in the prisoner-of-war camp — and he’s very illuminating round around about why he left his parents out of Empire of the Sun, but they were actually there. And when he gets back to England, it’s always — it’s a life that’s permanently dislocated, it’s always out of step, you know, he loses his wife at a tragically young age, he becomes a single father — at a time when there are no single mums around — and just does — I mean he’s a genius, and he’s got the genius eye for the killer detail, after his wife dies, he sees a happy couple embracing in the car in front of him and he sounds his horn with anger.

Newsnight Review: Julie Myerson and John Harris.

John Harris: Um, Ballard’s writing style, and I sort of had to remind myself of this by going back to the books of his that I own; I’ve read Empire of the Sun, Super-Cannes and um, another, name of which I’ve forgotten…

TP: Crash?

JH: … No, it’s the other piece with that. Anyway, very, very dry and dispassionately he writes, but the imaginative conceit behind what he writes is, what, kind of, enlivens it and renders it spectacular. Clearly, in the case of his real life, large parts of it are so spectacular that the same thing happens but it is written fantastically dryly and dispassionately and there are occasions when you start to think that it was written under duress and in a hurry, he does, he does race through. I mean he could have written his autobiography about twice as long; a good example is the early death of his wife which is dealt with in a matter of paragraphs, but you have to take into account that it was written under duress and in a hurry because he’s very seriously ill; once that’s happened, I’ll cut him all the slack in the world because I can’t think of anybody who’s had as interesting a life as him.

KW: There are some extraordinary scenes aren’t there, in Shanghai?

Julie Myerson: Oh yes, so many. I haven’t read any of his novels and this makes me want to read them; obviously I have an awareness of what his novels are. I came to it, sort of, not knowing about his novels and also, actually not knowing about the cancer diagnosis, so when I got to the end, having really got to know and like this extremely likeable man. It really took me by surprise, that did. I didn’t know his wife was going to die either and he does deal with these things with great economy and he’s not at all self-indulgent and he’s had the most extraordinary life, so, lots of things, first of all Shanghai but also, becoming a single parent. I think he’s writing Crash, looking after three young children, making bangers and mash, between bangers and mash and Blue Peter he’ll write a chapter and as a writer you so identify with that and he said ‘my greatest ally was the pram in the hall’.

TP: That’s an incredible line, that’s an unbelievable line…

JM: There is a warmth to him, he’s passionate about family and children, and what I love best about this book, even, not having read any of his books, is that it’s the story of someone who had quite an undernourished childhood and found huge artistic fulfilment through writing, but also found joy and fulfilment through family life, despite his wife dying, he’s really got something from family.

KW: And I suppose what happened was, that he had this extraordinary childhood that almost gave him enough in his bag to write for the rest of his life without having to do other extraordinary things.

Newsnight Review: Tony Parsons and Kirsty Wark.

TP: And it’s extraordinary too that I think it wasn’t uncommon for people to come back from China, or India, or Hong Kong, in their mid-teens, never having seen this place — and this is home — you’re home — you’re home now, and then moving from, I mean, you know, he had both extremes in Shanghai, he was in a prisoner of war camp and he also had armies of servants indulging him and so he’s always been dislocated, he’s always been out of step. I would urge you, and I would urge anybody, to read Empire of the Sun because I think it’s really, it’s possibly the great novel of the twentieth century.

KW: You talk about him writing very dispassionately but what he writes about is the most extraordinary — for example the Buick is going through — the families go out of the international settlement, and go through the old battlefields and there’s bodies lying here — and he’s only ten.

JH: The best illustration — Cocaine Nights was the book, I forgot — the best illustration of why dry and dispassionate writing often serves its subject matter well, is the occasion when he gets out of the prisoner of war camp and he goes to find Shanghai again and he’s on a railway platform, and he watches a party of Japanese soldiers slowly murdering a Chinese man — and he’s not florid — he doesn’t have to ladle on metaphor, he just says I was, what, nine or ten years old and this is what I saw, that’s so powerful…

TP: That’s one of the key scenes of Empire of the Sun and when I was reading this — and that’s when I thought — am I going to get the same stuff all over again but it’s…

JM: One of the most amazing things about the book is the way his experience in Shanghai, the way it comes back through his life in unexpected ways, so it isn’t till when he’s cutting up dead bodies as a medical student in Cambridge that he realises he’s embarking on a kind of moral and emotional journey to deal with that.

TP: He loves Shanghai, despite all the horror and death, he calls it the magical place, he calls it.

KW: Well, Miracles of Life by JG Ballard is published by Fourth Estate.

Ballard’s in there at no.25 no. 27, where he is appraised like so:

With Empire of the Sun (1984), the fictionalised account of his adolescence in a Second World War Japanese prison camp, Ballard found the wide readership denied to his earlier novels. In the Ballard canon, Empire feels like a sobering glass of water next to a row of hallucinogenic drug cocktails, yet it shares one theme with his second most famous book, Crash, filmed by David Kronenberg [sic] in 1996: the sexualised fetishisation of technology. Literary circles view his blend of dystopian science fiction and modern sociology with suspicion, but Ballard’s impact on wider culture has been immense: The Atrocity Exhibition influenced Joy Division’s album Closer, and Radiohead and Klaxxons [sic] have championed his work. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, enthused by more than just the likeness of their names, hailed Crash as the first great postmodern novel.

One to read: Crash (1973)

Aside from the misspelling of ‘Cronenberg’ and ‘Klaxons’, one thing baffles me: Where exactly does Empire of the Sun deal with ‘the sexualised fetishisation of technology’?

The Daily Mail reports on a recent sighting of the pop star on a late night bookstore run in Las Vegas. He apparently purchased a large quantity of SF. Begging the important question: what is Michael Jackson’s favorite literary science fiction? I’ll bet you dinner at Picasso that right now he’s curled up in the overstuffed armchair of his penthouse suite at the Bellagio, giggling at The Atrocity Exhibition.

Who knew such an activity could be subtly transformed into a bit of media jamming performance art? MJ’s continued pushing of the boundaries of the new weird, straddling some unexplored territory between late Marlon Brando and The Man Who Fell to Earth, is appreciated. Can you think of a more science fictional figure in the contemporary celebrity landscape?

How strange is this: Rosanna Arquette, and Crash, popping up in all sorts of places. This film, Ballard’s story, still packs a powerful psychological enema.

First up, Maxim Magazine, anointing the scene with Spader/Ballard fucking Rosanna’s leg wound as no.2 in ‘The Worst Love Scenes of All Time’:

Regardless of how distasteful most of the previous couplings have been, at least they all involved the use of normal human orifices. In Crash (David Cronenberg’s movie about car crash fetishes, not the racism lecture penned by the rich white guy), we have the unfortunate airing of Spader’s penis and a huge gash in the back of Arquette’s leg. Sorry, even we have limits.

According to MelbPsy (who brought this bizarre ripple in the space-time continuum to my attention): ‘Thirty years on and even a magazine which shamelessly promotes the sexiness of dangerously fast cars alongside the geometric fetishisation of specific bodily contours hasn’t the stomach to look Crash in the face. How little we have travelled.’

The other weird detail is that in their excerpt from the film, Maxim has blacked out Rosanna’s breasts and vagina. Are we therefore to infer that ‘normal’ female sexuality is even more distasteful to these people? Do they in fact have any sex life at all? Or do they simply hate women? What a messy, confused, distorted signal they send.

And then, unbelievably, Heather Mills of all people weighs in:

SIR PAUL McCARTNEY’s estranged wife HEATHER MILLS is reportedly “disgusted” by his new girlfriend ROSANNA ARQUETTE for her controversial role in 1997 movie CRASH. The former model – who lost a leg in a motorcycle accident in 1993 – is sickened by Arquette’s portrayal of a disabled woman who gets sexual enjoyment out of car accidents in the David Cronenberg-directed movie, according to a pal. Mills’ alleged attack follows reports of a romance between the ex-Beatle and the Hollywood star, which first surfaced last month (Nov07). A close friend says, “When Heather saw Paul’s new girlfriend appearing on screen with a similar injury to herself, she was disgusted. Rosanna’s character gets turned on by accidents. Heather told pals she finds this reprehensible.” Mills and McCartney – who have a four-year-old daughter, Beatrice, together are currently embroiled in a bitter divorce battle.

Are we therefore to infer from this that Heather wants all amputees and accident victims to live chaste lives, segregated from ‘normal’ society? You can’t have it both ways. Maybe Paul shouldn’t have dated Heather in the first place, as he could be seen to be getting his jollies from accident victims.

Emily, who alerted me to this story, says that ‘Crash still retains the power to shock’, and indeed it does, but so does Beatle Paul. I had no idea he was going out with Rosanna Arquette.

What next? Holly Hunter shacking up with Gerry and all his Pacemakers? Elias Koteas shagging Elton John?

..:: RETROSPECTO REWIND ::..

Here’s a reminder of the throbbing paroxysms generated by Crash on its release in 1996. Alexander Walker was one prominent critic generating most of it; Christopher Tookey was the other. Here’s the latter responding to *his* critics after he called for the film to be denied an 18 certificate:

One perk of being a freelance journalist who writes for the Daily Mail is that there is always the chance of becoming a leftwing hate figure. Last month, it happened to me. I was denounced in the Guardian, Observer and Time Out. Normally friendly fellow critics accused me of being “very, very, very, very bad” (Ann Billson, Sunday Telegraph) or setting myself up as “moral guardian to the nation” (Alan Frank, Daily Star).
…
Perhaps the weirdest response was a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission by a media studies lecturer convinced that I was prejudiced against disabled people having sex. Actually, I used to be director of an ATV programme about disability called Link, and we covered the subject several times, usually in items presented by disabled people.

I duly reassured the commission that what I had found questionable in Crash was not disabled people having sex, nor able-bodied people being interested in having sex with the disabled, but the attempt by the filmmakers to eroticise mutilations and fetishise orthopaedic appliances.
…
Whatever course of action, or inaction, the BBFC takes about Crash, my belief remains that David Cronenberg’s film might well have a “copycat effect” on a few unstable individuals-particularly if it became available on video, where it could be studied obsessively. The lethal weapons that Cronenberg fetishises are, after all, not guns, which are not readily available to the British public, but cars, which are. Joyriding, ram-raiding and reckless driving by youths are already social problems. Cronenberg’s reputation among the young as a cult, “shock horror” director might tempt many more to seek out his film than would normally watch a boring art-house film.

Crash could also have a far more insidious longterm effect by eroticising sado-masochism and orthopaedic fetishism for people previously unaware of being turned on by acts of mutilation. To allow Crash an 18 certificate would set a precedent for even more pernicious-and commercial-films in the future.

“Fetishising orthopaedic appliances”? Like Dr Scholls sandals, for example? Seriously, this is seriously hard to take seriously.

So, what does Tookey think of Hostel and Wolf Creek, then? Surely, 10 years on, in the age of ‘torture porn’, he can’t feel the same way about all of this? And sure enough, he doesn’t…after a fashion. Compare his recent review of Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises:

Such brutality may be hard to watch, but it’s more truthful than most big-screen violence, and it doesn’t have the flippancy that so degrades Eli Roth, Tarantino and other purveyors of “torture porn”. Cronenberg’s intention is probably neither moral or humanistic (there seems to be something about blood and brutality that he finds erotically stimulating) but the effect of Eastern Promises is undoubtedly to bring home the nastiness of violence. And that is moral, humanistic and responsible, whether the film-maker intends it to be or not.

Yes, you guessed it, Tookey has found a couple more straw men to rail against. Thus, although he still begrudges Cronenberg the artistic due the filmmaker so richly deserves, Tookey — in crab-like fashion, two steps forward, 10 steps sideways — ever-so-slightly admits, fighting with all his might against his better nature, that there’s more to Cronenberg than mere ’shock horror’. As for finding ‘blood and brutality’ erotically stimulating, I would like to direct Tookey’s attention to the charming Dead Girls Fashion Parade and to Steven Meisel’s state-brutalised models. And to those beheading videos with which his review makes reference, the ones that were so virally and virulently propagated all over the internet.

This is the world we live in. We’ve been living in it for a very, very long time now. Tookey makes a good first move by acknowledging the ‘truthfulness’ of Cronenberg-style violence. Now he needs to take the final leap: acknowledging the erotic element, which he seems to find so thoroughly distasteful in both his Crash and Eastern Promises rants.

And delivering that sermon must surely be the task of Cronenberg himself:

I can imagine some wouldn’t want to acknowledge the homoerotic element [in Eastern Promises], but to me it seems pretty obvious. I wish I could be the first to claim to see the connection between sex and violence, but it goes back about 5,000 years. I’m just acknowledging things that are there that seem apparent to me. We’re in a bizarre place with the Internet right now, where we can see snuff porn any minute of the day or night in the comfort of your own home—courtesy, often, of Muslim extremists. I’m sure they would be pretty shocked to think that I was seeing homoerotic stuff in their beheadings and so on, but I do see it, and very clearly. And it drives me crazy that they’re so self-righteous about what they’re doing, because I see it as a very complexly perverse act. The beheading I saw was like a homosexual gang rape, really. Despite the religious chanting and the beards, it was very apparent to me.

Image by Pedro Armestre and Mario Gómez.

The influence of BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh is spreading far and wide, so much so he is now featuring in a personality profile (disguised as a walking tour) in the Los Angeles Times in which the colour of his hair is discussed! Luckily, the writer, architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, leaves space for Geoff’s thoughts, which as always are impressively concise, intelligent and jargon-free:

And that means he thinks of L.A. as a historical place?

“Yes! Not in the human history sense but in the sheer sense of Earth time. And as dumb as that may sound, I feel that you can actually see it — you can see it in the species of trees and in the natural landscape. In the Grove, for example, where the shops have methane meters, because gas is leaking out of the tar deposits.”

We walk back toward his apartment, along surprisingly crowded sidewalks and past a hulking SUV with a license plate reading “00 MPG.” We pause at the intersection of Washington and Keystone. At the northeast corner sits a collection of building-sized satellite dishes, crammed like huge barnacles on a small pier. They are responsible, Manaugh says, for sending most of Sony’s programming to China. He turns in the direction of his apartment building.

“They send the signals basically in this direction, so the whole time we’ve been living here there’s been this constant stream of movies and TV shows going above our heads as we sleep, across the Pacific.”

Also, check out Geoff’s recent BLDGBLOG post on ‘Climate Change Escapism’, which looks at artists’ renditions of a drowned Spain exposed to climate change, as commissioned by Greenpeace. Far from seeing these as the warning they are intended to be, Geoff sees a Ballardian, transcendental beauty:

What we see is a world transformed, made unearthly, like something from a J.G. Ballard novel. Where there once was a pristine beach, the sea has returned, giving us modern ruins: sandbars in the lobbies of hotels, tide pools accumulating on the boardwalks of towns you didn’t like in the first place. What appear to be coral reefs are the underwater remains of marinas. What look like atolls are lost subdivisions, or banks at the bottom of the sea.

[Geoff includes a quote from Ballard's The Drowned World here]

Lush, science fictional, Romantic: apparently this is the future of climate change.

My point in saying all this is simply that these images don’t shock; they’re more like posters for tomorrow’s specialty tourism firms.

Fabulous stuff. We need Geoff back here on Ballardian.com to deliver more of these funhouse-mirror-image world views. Especially with killer blows like this:

Only half-jokingly, I might even suggest that the real way to scare people about climate change – assuming that fear is the correct tactic to use here – is not through referring to landscape at all, but through threats involving 1) sex and 2) children.

All that pollution… so much carbon in the atmosphere… dirty water, social unrest, lack of food…

Well, your prostate will swell with metal and your kids will all drown.

..:: Previously on Ballardian
+ The Politics of Enthusiasm: An Interview with Geoff Manaugh

J.G. Ballard is being suggested as a nominee in the arts section of the Morgan Stanley Great Briton Awards, which seek ‘to explore, express and celebrate what it means to be British according to people living in Britain today’. Morgan Stanley recently held a ‘Great Britons debate’ which asked, ” ‘Can Britishness be taught?’ The debate discussed the challenges of engaging young people in questions of national identity, as well as moving to a broader discussion of Britishness.”

Here’s the JGB blurb (click on ‘arts’; with each refresh of the page it throws up random suggestions, and Ballard’s in there somewhere):

JG Ballard: A prominent member of the New Wave in science fiction, who is best known for his controversial book Crash, and autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, both of which have been adapted to film. His style of writing is so distinctive that the adjective “Ballardian” has even been entered into the Collins English dictionary. His recent novels, particularly Cocaine Nights, have continued to be well received.

Past winners in this category include Philip Pullman (2004), Alan Bennett (2005) and Dame Helen Mirren (2006).

A Ballard nomination would be interesting, given that he has effectively ’seceded’ from England (and Britain), building his own non-place urban field in Shepperton. As the Electronic Labyrinth notes, ‘Ballard’s post-War Britain, like The Atrocity Exhibition itself, is a hypertext, a non-sequential space of heterogenous materials. The connections between these images must be made according to an ever more dangerous logic of submission and always at the risk of disconnecting completely.’

Ballard’s fiction evokes liminal urban zones that are as interchangeable as late capitalism dictates — it’s why I’ve been able to find so much in my immediate surrounds here in Melbourne that’s able to be identified through the lens of his work.

So, while I would never begrudge a writer of Ballard’s calibre the chance for further recognition, and while I in no way speak for the man or his views, with this site being a very unofficial examination and extrapolation of his work, the fact remains: Ballard has always taken great pains to divorce himself from any notion of ‘Britishness’, famously turning down an OBE on the basis that it recognises ‘a non-existent Empire’.

As Andrzej Gasiorek writes in his invaluable volume on Ballard: “In response to a question about the British landscape, Ballard responds bluntly: ‘Didn’t like that. Didn’t like the English psychology, the class system … Didn’t like anything about it at all. Still don’t!’ ”

What do you think? I’d be especially interested in the reactions of UK-based readers. Perhaps ‘Britishness’ these days means a tacit acceptance that the notion of traditional British values doesn’t exist. In fact, the Morgan Stanley awards seem to acknowledge this in the section of their website that lists the judging criteria for ‘British characteristics’:

1. Adaptability … people who work within the system are sometimes perceived as more “typically” British than those who subvert it, but there is also a strong school of thought that Britain is fundamentally a subversive, revolutionary, challenging society – which is why we have such a strong record of invention and creativity.

As I’ve outlined, Ballard certainly does subvert ‘the system’. Actually, looking through the rest of this list, Ballard seems to meet all criteria:

+ 2. ‘Modesty’
Ballard possesses that, as interviews with him consistently demonstrate.

+ 3. ‘Sense of humour’
Despite the one-dimensional, po-faced readings his writing often attracts, Ballard does have one, a marvellously self-deprecating, dry, absurdist wit.

+ 4. ‘Strength & determination’
Ballard survived wartime incarceration under the Japanese, then forged a successful writing career under extreme circumstances, bringing up three children as a single father after his wife died unexpectedly in 1964.

According to Morgan Stanley’s test, then, Ballard is wholly British.

So, vote for him. If you dare.

Meanwhile, here’s an interesting appraisal of the whole process: ‘Gong Show for Brand Britons’:

With the potential for anyone to become someone almost overnight, the old tried and trusted formula for selecting a person who exemplifies the best in Great Britons has been turned on its head…

The princess, as a largely self-invented figure, is a gift to fiction, not least because the reasons she might have been killed are finally less arresting than speculation on her untimely death: the swansong of the last century and a black fairytale for the surveillance age, captured in those final smeared security-camera pictures of her leaving the Ritz, reduced in that moment to a walk-on extra in her own unfolding tragedy.

Much of this is material forecast by JG Ballard’s autopsies on celebrity and desire, The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash. McNamee moves through a similar world of airports and underpasses, alert to emerging technologies, the cadences of modernism and to the terminology of stalking, before arriving at that pathological space where crash and violent death become the fulfilment of collective fantasy, satisfying the need for sacrifice on the altar of celebrity.”

[thanks, Tim]

While I think Jonathan Weiss’s film of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition was successful in its own right, I still believe there’s potential for a version (maybe not a straight adaptation, perhaps an obliquely angled ‘nod and a wink’; maybe even a sequel) that updates the notion of celebrity culture, that takes up the direction hinted at in the book’s second-last chapter, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’. A version that replaces Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

In ‘Fuck Reagan’, ‘patients in terminal paresis’ are encouraged to devise the ‘optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan’. A ‘unique ontology of violence and disaster’ takes shape, as the ordinary public — the patients suffering from paresis; impaired movement, paralysis — reanimate by tearing down the lustre surrounding celebrity culture, the forcefield that has prevented the ‘little people’ from realising their full potential.

In Ballard’s piece, originally published in 1968, the cultural class system that has impaired, or paralysed, ordinary people with feelings of guilt and inadequacy in the face of a galaxy of radiant stars is destroyed in a savage, air-strike of the imagination:

Patients [placed] Reagan in a series of simulated auto-crashes, e.g. multiple pile-ups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks… Subjects were required to construct the optimum auto-disaster victim by placing a replica of Reagan’s head on the unretouched photographs of crash fatalities.”

—————————————————————
J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (165).
—————————————————————

This literally is SLASH fiction. Blood drips from it.

‘Fuck Reagan’ marks a distinct break from the rest of The Atrocity Exhibition, in which, despite the instability of the central character’s fantasies, there was a certain awe underlying his imaginative sorties into the world of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, John F Kennedy and so on — an awe that prevented him from making the final leap. It’s also present in the character Vaughan, in Crash, who yearns of killing Elizabeth Taylor in a celebrity car crash but ultimately ends up annihilating only himself, terminally unfulfilled (along with a busload of innocent bystanders who got in his way).

In ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’, Ballard tested the wind, pushed the equation to its outer limits, predicted the rise of a new kind of ‘celebrity uncontaminated by actual achievement’ (as Ballard later termed the second wave of celebrity culture), a celebrity that causes resentment when ‘ordinary people’ finally have the means to dismantle the image, trying it on for themselves like a serial killer tries on a woman’s skin. There is no further truck with reification, with celebrity-deity because ordinary people have built a web 2.0 culture (or have been given the power, the means to build it) that will answer back and that will destroy those who seek to involve an unwilling public in their fantasies.

In further studies sadistic psychopaths were given the task of devising sex fantasies involving Reagan… Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.”

—————————————————————
J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (168).
—————————————————————

But a web 2.0 culture doesn’t need to employ technology — doesn’t need the web, even — to do so. So, let’s use this term ‘web 2.0′ to denote a free-for-all that translates into the real world, an attitude that’s hardwired into the brain through constant exposure to the media landscape. As Ballard clearly outlines, the media colonisation of all available public and personal space means that there is nowhere to go, nothing to do but feed on the corpses…

Fame and celebrity were again on trial, as if being famous itself was an incitement to anger and revenge.”

——————————————————-
J.G. Ballard, Millennium People (2003).
——————————————————-

…spiraling down a black hole eating white stars, ported into Second Life, which lies just below the whirlpool, landmarked over there.

Paris Hilton is being consumed as we speak, just another star imploding. The savage public will not be placated by her talk of finding God in a jail cell. The savage public will not be wooed with her repentance and renunciation of vacuity. The savage public wants to feast on the corpse of empty celebrity. The savage public wants revenge. Like an anonymous would-be web 2.0 commenter leaving bile in the comments box of some blog that’s got too big for its boots, the savage public wants to break through the screen, wants to pierce the rump of unattainable stardom until blood oozes through the pores. So the savage public goes further, building its own ‘blog’ that becomes a destroying machine that becomes the body, drinking the blood and becoming infested with the knowledge that no one is better than ‘me’. The savage public wants to wank over serial killers and murderers, taking revenge for celebrity being attached to the cult of death. The savage public devours torture porn, bathes in the Bathory blood of actresses hogtied upside down. The savage public ensures that the most searched term leading to this very website is, in fact, the term ‘Princess Diana car crash’ and its multiple variations: ‘Di death fuck’; ’sex Di death crash’; ‘fuck exhaust sex Di car Dodi died’.

The savage public wants to kill kill kill until there is nothing left, just a flat, smoking wasteland.

The savage public demands that torture porn be indistinguishable from snuff.

The savage public has no imagination and will feed off that corpse before turning on you, too.

Without doubt Oswald badly misfired. But one question still remains unanswered: who loaded the starting gun?”

——————————————————-
J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (173).
——————————————————-

————————————————————————————————————–
…:: ATROCITY II: Notes Towards a Sequel
————————————————————————————————————–

+ ‘R.P.M’ by Chris Nakashima-Brown
+ Invisible Celebrity Literature
+ Gallery of the Absurd by ‘14′
+ The Brangelina Exhibition
+ ‘Chariot of Fire: Preliminary Analysis & Damage Reconstruction of the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales’ by Annik Hovac
+ ‘Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s State of Emergency’ by k-punk

I’ve just discovered the Gallery of the Absurd, maintained by the artist known simply as ‘14′ and devoted to her sharp, witty and frightening caricatures of A-list celebrities. There’s TomKat recast as TomRat — two furry, grotesque rodents cradling their hideous offspring; there’s The Three Disgraces: Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, their scabby firecrotches on display in a gross distortion of Botticelli’s La Primavera.

And then there’s an entry titled If Dali Had Painted Angelina Jolie [see above], with its distinct Ballardian tinge. In Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, the character T’s fractured psyche, trying to make sense of the imploding late 60s media landscape, is awash in a distorted world of gigantic billboards featuring images of celebrities and traumatic, media-irradiated eruptions of violence (the Vietnam War; the Kennedy assassination) — all of it filling his mind and consequently the skies that hang above the coded landscape of telecommunication towers, satellite arrays and filling stations.

Here are some representative passages:

For hours they drove through the endless suburbs of the city. The billboards multiplied around them, walling the streets with giant replicas of napalm bombings in Vietnam, the serial deaths of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe terraced in the landscapes of Dien Bien Phu and the Mekong Delta.”

—————————————————————————————-
J.G. Ballard. The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), RE/Search edition, p. 11.
—————————————————————————————-

During the past week a series of enormous signs had been built along the roads surrounding the hospital, almost walling it in from the rest of the world… Looking at it more closely, Dr Nathan realized that in fact it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest. Glancing at the billboards, Dr Nathan recognized other magnified fragments: a segment of lower lip, a right nostril, a portion of female perineum. Only an anatomist would have identified these fragments, each represented as a formal geometric pattern. At least five hundred of the signs would be needed to contain the whole of this gargantuan woman, terraced here into a quantified sand-sea…”

—————————————————————————————-
J.G. Ballard. The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), RE/Search edition, p. 15.
—————————————————————————————-

Ballard borrows the concept of the mindscape — the mind as landscape — from Dali, explaining that he wanted ‘to explore the subliminal connections between, say, the Marilyn Monroe figure on a giant billboard, one’s own personal life and sexual relationships, and the unconscious layers of sexual memory and desire stowed away in the cargo hold of one’s psyche. All this is creating a mix that is unique to the 20th century.’

In the 21st century, that mix is hypermagnified, hyperintense — celebrities are famous simply for being famous (or for flashing their crotch in public). Again, Ballard was quick off the mark:

Celebrity uncontaminated by actual achievement has enormous lift-off capacity. It can float instantly in the air and we all stand back in amazement. This puzzles us and triggers a curiosity about the real nature of these people whose fame you can’t justify. Fantasy then rushes in to fill the vacuum, which is a very different thing from the way fame operated in the past. I don’t suppose the average Londoner living through the Blitz had any fantasies about Winston Churchill.

——————————————————————
J.G. Ballard, quoted in Frieze, 1996.
——————————————————————

This chimes in with the artist’s statement:

One of my favorite Salvador Dali paintings is Sleep. I place Angelina Jolie in this painting because she’s larger than life and needs several Daliesque pedestals to support her fame. Not only is she considered one of the most beautiful women in the world, she also donates time, money and energy toward the betterment of others. Her qualities of rebellious vixen combined with doting mother generate intrigue and devout fandom.”

———————————————————————-
‘If Dali Had Painted Angelina Jolie’. 14.
———————————————————————-

Indeed, 14’s brilliant, timely Dali pastiche, featuring the monstrous, suspended head of uber-celebrity Angelina Jolie backlit by a Surrealistic sky, is nothing less than a portrait from a 21st-century Atrocity Exhibition.

But did you also know that William Gibson appeared in Wild Palms alongside Jim Belushi; that Philip K. Dick guest-starred in a 1971 episode of Bewitched; that Jorge Luis Borges stole the show in an ep of The Love Boat; and that J.G. Ballard tore up the scenery in the 1973 actioner Airport as Dr. Maitland, ‘the enigmatic psychoanalyst who diagnoses the condition of pilot Charlton Heston, a grounded astronaut who endeavors to pierce the stratosphere in a bulky 747 bearing the flag of an imaginary American airline’?

That’s according to the fearless Chris Nakashima-Brown, who gets his freak on over at No Fear of the Future.

Tired after my meeting with Zander, I sat down and ordered a vin blanc from the young French waitress, who wore jeans and a white vest printed with a quotation from Baudrillard.”

—————————————————————————-
J.G. Ballard. Super-Cannes. (p. 88).
—————————————————————————-

Or Bono, a proud and rebellious Irishman, who recently accepted an honourary knighthood from the country that oppressed his people for centuries, awarded by a Prime Minister who looked suspiciously like he was trying very hard to curry favour with a thickened stem of popular culture far more influential than his own sphere of influence.

Well, as always, Ballard sums up the process far more eloquently than this blog ever could. Here’s JGB on the reasons why he rejected a Commander of the British Empire award in 2003:

I am opposed to the honors system. The whole thing is a preposterous charade. Thousands of medals are given out in the name of a non-existent empire. It makes us look a laughing stock and encourages deference to the crown. I think it is exploited by politicians and always has been…”

————————————————————————————-
J.G. Ballard, quoted in the Sunday Times, 2003.
————————————————————————————-

The dreams of empire were only swept away relatively recently, in the ’60s. Suddenly, we seem to have a prime minister who has delusions of a similar kind… It uses snobbery and self-consciousness to guarantee the loyalty of large numbers of citizens who should feel their loyalty is to fellow citizens and the nation as a whole…

I think it’s deplorable when leftwing playwrights like David Hare, who have worn their socialist colors on both sleeves for so many years, should accept a knighthood. Godalmighty, this man actually knelt down in front of the Queen.”

————————————————————
Ballard, quoted in the Guardian, 2003.
————————————————————

And finally, a mini-interview from the Independent in 2003:

Independent: Why did you refuse your honor?
Ballard: As a republican, I can’t accept an honor awarded by a monarch — all that bowing and scraping. The whole system of hereditary rank and privilege should be swept away.
Independent: How would you change the present system?
Ballard: Demolish it altogether.
Independent: Who would you give an honor to?
Ballard: No one.

Many thanks to RE/Search for collecting these quotes, and much more, in their indispensable J.G. Ballard: Quotes volume.

Now, having said all that, the specific Ballard Myspace profile does intrigue me. And my point, for what it’s worth, was simply that it gives the impression it’s set up and endorsed by Ballard, right down to the man’s correct age and star sign in the profile details (compare this Noam Chomsky profile for transparency). And people are commenting and friending ‘Ballard’ and inviting ‘him’ to give readings under that impression, which is a *very* intriguing proposition…come on, admit it!

I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, but I will say that anyone raised on a diet of cyberpunk, Baudrillard and Ballard, as I was, will be licking their lips at that equation — as I am!

For that type of interaction, seemingly a trick of the light peculiar to Myspace, also conforms to the model of an online ‘hyper-market’, as Baudrillard formulated it. And the Ballard profile is in the order of simulation — a product, again as formulated by Baudrillard, with ‘a radicalized functionalism, a functionalism that reaches its paradoxal limits and then burns them away. Thus, it becomes an undefinable object, and hence fascinating. Not good, not bad: ambivalent. Like death or fashion, it becomes a short-cut…a more rapid road than the main highway, or going where the main highway doesn’t go, or, better yet (to parody Littré in a pataphysical manner) “a road going nowhere, but going there faster than the others”.’

There are strong Ba(udri)llardian resonances right across Myspace as a whole, including the gated community aspect and the hyperreal celebrity culture aspect. But I’ll concentrate my energies on a future, dispassionate analysis of that — at the risk of coming over as an ‘evil academic’ — rather than resort to the misplaced sarcasm of my last post and the risk of fanning an online flame war on the back of J.G. Ballard’s good name.

The only thing left to say, for now, is this: to all present and future JGB sites, however they may be coded — may they find the audience they deserve.

Rich, car-crashing idiot No. 2: Stefan Eriksson.

Over at The Wrong Advices, Dan writes, ‘After watching Eddie Griffin destroy a Ferrari Enzo I was reminded of some of the other times rich idiots have killed beautiful and expensive cars. I’ve put together a list of some of the more memorable crashes.’

My favourite is No. 2:

Car: Ferrari Enzo
Value: US $1.2 million
Idiot at the wheel: Stefan Eriksson – Former Gizmondo Exec
What happened: Crashed into a pole at 199 mph (320.61 km/h). Tried to
blame it on his imaginary friend Dietrich.”

Surely Vaughan’s shaman, Jimmy Dean, should be on this list…

[ via Spinopsys ]

————————————————————————————————————————

+ BUMPER HUMPER

Mechanic Chris DOES have a girlfriend — just one of the Sun’s charming photos.

Speaking of idiots and cars, Keith emailed to remind me of this news story, reported a few weeks back in the UK’s bastion of truth, the Sun newspaper, about a man who has sex with cars. Keith says: ‘Not sure whether it’s a joke or not. The guy sounds so goofy talking about his lust for cars that it makes you understand just how artful Ballard’s descriptions in Crash are.’

It’s *got* to be a joke:

MECHANIC Chris Donald loves his work — he has sex with CARS… “Some men like boobs and bums, but I much prefer curvy bodywork.”

Chris, 38, has a recognised psychological condition that makes him physically attracted to motors. He has had sex with more than 30 different models in 20 years — plus two motorboats and a pal’s JETSKI. Chris, who DOES have a girlfriend, confessed: “A nice car for me is a feast for the senses. It’s about smells, feelings and tastes. If I see a gorgeous Mercedes I know I’d love to jump into bed with it.”

His weird obsession mirrors that of electrician Karl Watkins, who The Sun revealed was jailed for having sex with pavements in Redditch, Worcs, in 1993.”

————————————————————————————————————————

+ PLEASURE SHOPPING

LEFT: Where pleasure is a way of life…

Look what’s just opened for business! The Metro-Centre, no less, billed as ‘the largest shopping mall in the south of the UK. Located at Brooklands, off the M25 near to Heathrow… This is the Metro-Centre where shopping is a pleasure and pleasure is a way of life.’

According to the Centre’s blog:

Want to try alternative types of medicine? Want to see what the healing power of crystal can do to your life? Then get over to the east wing on the second floor to The Crystal World. Featuring a wide variety of crystals, for both decorative and practical uses, The Crystal World could be your gateway to a new existence!”

The Metro-Centre’s only been open for a few weeks, but I’m predicting that pretty soon the blog is going to be reporting a secession that turns the Centre into an anomalous enclave, following a dark and mysterious ‘ad-noir’ campaign featuring a charismatic cable-TV host and a subsequent takeover by paramilitary goons…

The signs are already there: when you click on ‘map’, it says: ‘AT THE REQUEST OF THAMES VALLEY CID, THIS PAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED.’

————————————————————————————————————————

+ PUBLIC DISORDER AS ENTERTAINMENT

A Ballardian community?

For a taste of what you can expect when the Metro-Centre does kick off, Mountain*7 informs us that a ‘remarkable set of images, taken from a mini-riot that took place at the Gare du Nord in Paris on the 26th March’ has been uploaded to Flickr:

Apparently the whole thing kicked off after a passenger caught travelling without a ticket was arrested with ‘excessive force’ – there were 9 arrests made and some mild injuries (although the vending machine appears to have borne the brunt of the damage).

There’s a banality to the images somehow, as if the whole thing were a media set; and the sheer presence of so many cameras almost doubles the unreality of the event. We’re so inured to the idea of simulation now that the very mention of it seems superfluous, but this seems to have tipped over into something else, a Ballardian sense of community-through-violence, public disorder as entertainment.”

————————————————————————————————————————

+ SERRENIA NIGHTS

Serrenia: layer upon layer of invisible security.

Matteo emailed to direct me to Dan Hill’s mashup of Cocaine Nights and promotional material for the Serrenia project, the waterside development that ’sits where the Red Sea meets the Eastern Sahara, mountain ranges to the west silhouetting the horizon, and beyond them the ancient city of Luxor and the timeless Nile.’

Dan goes on to say:

…can anything in literature be as bizarrely late-period Ballard as the actual Serrenia promo video and website? Is it even for real? Perhaps most of all, this section from the ‘PEACE OF MIND’ section of the website:

“Discreet, effective and efficient security is all part of the Serrenia experience. The security is there, all but invisible, building layer upon subtle layer. The very latest in high-technology protection, ‘laser’ fences, detect movement and 24-hour CCTV monitors constantly. Even after having been granted access to Serrenia through the main Sahl Hasheesh gate, visitors will still have to pass through one of the three main entry gates. The Hotel and ‘exclusive zone’ will be controlled by another security layer each with extra gates. Finally access to Palace Island is regulated by an additional layer of security and another gate. Experienced professionals, recruited from across the world, have given their expertise to create a secure haven, and to supply the most unobtrusive of safeguards, while all staff are rigorously vetted. Highly trained personnel are available at all times to offer support, though chances are you’ll never even know they are there, to guarantee your safety and freedom, so that you can enjoy the luxury of protection without feeling confined.”

One’s tempted to say “you couldn’t make it up” except that, essentially, Ballard already had.”

————————————————————————————————————————

+ THE CAR CRASH AS SEDUCTION TECHNIQUE

LEFT: Robert Maitland, eat your heart out.

And finally, via Rodcorp, we learn that Paul Thorp — a real-life Maitland from Ballard’s Concrete Island — is in the news again:

“Anyone who’s driven on the M62 between Manchester and Leeds will have seen the farm in the middle of the motorway and wondered: what’s it doing there? And is it, as most people believe, a monument to stubbornness?
…
Its sole occupant is Paul Thorp, a sheep farmer with just his dogs for company and 2,000 acres of land. Living 20 yards from the fast lane has its ups, downs – and near misses – as Paul reveals.

“It has its moments. We’ve had a few visitors over the fence. They’ve put a crash barrier up to stop ‘em, but before my time a wagon came through knocked the wall down landed on its side touching the garden wall. We’ve had plenty of accidents wagons and cars stuff coming through fence not that often but enough.”

…making Stott Hall Farm attractive to the opposite sex has proved difficult… Paul admits it can be a lonely place: “I guess you don’t want to be on your own all the time. It’s just a bit of a bleak place to bring somebody out in the wilds, all that traffic round you, and you’re a long way from anywhere – two miles from the nearest village. The postman only comes to the bottom of the hill and some days you won’t see anybody except those zipping past on the motorway – apart from people ringing you might not see anyone else to talk to.

“I just need someone who likes the outdoor life to have a breakdown outside and then come round!”

Paul, we have just the lady for you…

Read recently…

+ Via Fanny Magnate, David Chandler’s essay on the work of photographer Stephen Hughes:

Over the last five years Hughes has worked all over Europe, developing an interest in what might be called ‘peripheral places’, sometimes places literally on the edge — of cities perhaps, or by the sea — but also pockets of space that seem self-contained, primed with their own sense of purpose yet often empty, unnoticed, in between. They may be the by-product of urban development, they may be border areas or roadside wastelands, or simply off-centre, marginal to the flows of human existence … re-sited in South-East England, J.G. Ballard seemed more than content to exist in this future, in a ‘peripheral’ landscape now more rational and systematic.
…
Like the travel writer Charles Prentice in [Ballard's Cocaine Nights], Stephen Hughes would confess to being a ‘professional tourist’ in this world, funding his own work by operating as a travel photographer. In Prentice’s appraisal of the Costa del Sol as a place of ‘willed limbo’, the images of Ballard and Hughes come into even closer proximity…”

——————————————————————————–

+ Via Futurismic, ‘R.P.M.’, the latest short story from Chris Nakashima-Brown. Now I fully understand Chris’s long-standing paparazzi death-drive obsession, as codified in his recent analysis of Operation Paget, ‘eight-hundred-plus pages of pure clinical Ballardian detail remixed with Spectacular Baudrillardian celebrity media fireworks’. That piece ended with a meditation on real-life incidents involving Reece Witherspoon, Justin Timberlake, Cameron Diaz and bone-snap-happy photographers — raw fodder for ‘R.P.M’, as it turns out:

The doors blow open and Jessica Astart, 21-year-old phenom, basks in the flash bulbs of the paparazzi. Teen Titan, a pop cultural icon manufactured overnight, with a likely half-life measurable in months. Star of the new War-on-Terror dramedy Homeland Insecurity…

The starter hacks like a geezer trying to kick a four-pack a day habit. 0z0 pumps the gas pedal… Cardwheel clicker of Percy’s Super-8 as she starts burning her reel. I check my seat belt and adjust the focus on my Nikon… Jessica’s driver pulls the Navigator into traffic, white metal tuna ready for the kill.

KKKKKKEEEERRRRUUUUUUUUUUNCHH.

The windshield fills with white as the Monte Carlo punctures the left drivers’ side door and rear quarter panel… Tinted windows shatter and blow, exposing Jessica as she screams, the secret sphincters of her facial muscles contorting her pampered dermis into a horrifying rictus a hundred times over, once for each of the dilating shutters excitedly popping off in her face—our half-dozen cameras and those of the true paparazzi excitedly seizing upon the sudden scene.”

It’s a long time since I’ve read fiction written in the present tense (the horrible Mad Max novelisations put me off PT for life), but it really works in this instance. Given the immediacy of Chris’s concerns, I doubt it could be told any other way. Also, I wonder, is Mr N-B a Jack Womack fan?

——————————————————————————–

+ Via Johnny Strike, more on the mad astronaut meme. According to this article:

What would happen if an astronaut came unglued in space and, say, destroyed the ship’s oxygen system or tried to open the hatch and kill everyone aboard? … It turns out NASA has a detailed set of written procedures for dealing with a suicidal or psychotic astronaut in space. The documents, obtained this week by The Associated Press, say the astronaut’s crewmates should bind his wrists and ankles with duct tape, tie him down with a bungee cord and inject him with tranquilizers if necessary.

The instructions do not spell out what happens after that. But NASA spokesman James Hartsfield said the space agency, a flight surgeon on the ground and the commander in space would decide on a case-by-case basis whether to abort the flight, in the case of the shuttle, or send the unhinged astronaut home, if the episode took place on the international space station.

The crew members might have to rely in large part on brute strength to subdue an out-of-control astronaut, since there are no weapons on the space station or the shuttle. A gun would be out of the question; a bullet could pierce a spaceship and could kill everyone. There are no stun guns on hand either.
…
Depression, feelings of isolation and stress are not unheard of during long stays in space in tight quarters.
…
During missions in 1985 and 1995, shuttle commanders put padlocks on the spaceships’ hatches as a precaution since they didn’t know the scientists aboard very well. Some crew members, called payload specialists, are picked to fly for specific scientific or commercial tasks and do not train as extensively with the other astronauts.

The article admits that NASA does not really know what would happen to the mad astronaut who needs to be restrained and shot back to Earth. But Ballard, in his short story, ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ (1974), does:

As if watching a film, [Melville] remembered his … single abortive mission as an astronaut. By some grotesque turn of fate, he had become the first astronaut to suffer a mental breakdown in space. His nightmare ramblings had disturbed millions of television viewers around the world, as if the terrifying image of a man going mad in space had triggered off some long-buried innate releasing mechanism.
…
These illustrations of the Pacific atoll, with its vast concrete runways, he had collected over the previous months. Melville’s real interest had been in the island itself, a World War II airbase and now refuelling point for trans-Pacific passenger jets. The combination of scuffed sand and concrete, metal shacks rusting by the runways, the total psychological reduction of this man-made landscape, seized his mind in a powerful but ambiguous way.
…
Melville prowled along the mantelpiece of the beach-house, slapping the line of photographs. ‘Look at those runways, everything is there. A big airport like the Wake field is a zone of tremendous possibility — a place of beginnings, by the way, not ends’.
…
He resolved to make his world-wide journey, externally to Wake Island, and internally across the planets of his mind”.

When the Guardian referred to Martin Amis as ‘Britain’s greatest living author’ last week, one reader was so outraged she threatened to emigrate – or worse. So if not Amis, who? Stephen Moss assesses the field.”

[ via Ben Austwick ]

Again, Ballard doesn’t make the cut. But wait. In the wake of the outrage, various writers were asked to name the best, with John Crace opining that “…I would not plump for Amis, or any of your McEwans or Ishiguros…JG Ballard has written some good books and fewer shit ones than some other people.”

And this from Ballard himself:

This is one of those questions that makes one suspect we are in the trough of the literary wave. It is not a great time for writing in the English language. The last literary classic was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and that was published in the early 60s. That is the only novel in English that I can imagine surviving until the middle of this century.

It is mysterious why that is. We have lived through some incredibly stirring times, but where are the great writers? When I came to Britain in 1946, George Orwell was about to publish 1984, and Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh were all producing important work. We have talented writers such as Amis and Will Self, but I don’t see anyone of the stature of these postwar writers.

We no longer live in a literary culture and have not for some while. The American novel is a huge self-indulgent bore, playwrights are flattered and self-indulged, and most of the poets have never produced a memorable line. The last book to influence the English-speaking world in a serious way was 1984. No book since then has changed the world. Literary culture was based on certain notions about social reality. But we are not interested in that any more — everything is up for grabs. The most important thing now is a celebrity chav called Jade Goody.”

[ thanks, Simon Rees ]

Abraham Zapruder was a tourist in Dealey Plaza whose amateur cine-film captured the President’s tragic death. The Warren Commission concluded that frame 210 recorded the first rifle shot, which wounded Kennedy in the neck, and that frame 313 recorded the fatal head wound. I forget the significance of frame 230.

The Warren Commission’s Report is a remarkable document, especially if considered as a work of fiction (which many experts deem it largely to be). The chapters covering the exact geometric relationships between the cardboard boxes on the seventh floor of the Book Depository (a tour de force in the style of Robbe-Grillet), the bullet trajectories and speed of the Presidential limo, and the bizarre chapter titles — ‘The Subsequent Bullet That Hit,’ ‘The Curtain Rod Story,’ ‘The Long and Bulky Package’ — together suggest a type of obsessional fiction that links science and pornography.”

——————————————————————————————————–
J.G. Ballard. Chapter 2: “The University of Death” (annotations).
The Atrocity Exhibition.
——————————————————————————————————–

Sold! For $3 million, to the barechested man in the engine-coolant-and-semen-stained white coat…

Although Chris Nakashima-Brown alerted us a week ago to the news that “the *actual* JFK assassination shooter’s perch window from the 6th floor of the Texas
School Book Depository was up for sale on eBay”, I neglected to post about it, presumably because I was too preoccupied with false idols and guru-spotting.

No matter. Geoff over at BLDGBLOG has come up with a typically imaginative response to the news that the perch has just been sold for over $3 million:

…the auctioning off of JFK’s fatal window also opens up the possibility that we could chainsaw, chisel, or otherwise reclaim – i.e. steal – historically important bits of architecture, removing them from their original contexts and exhibiting them elsewhere. The balcony over which Michael Jackson dangled his baby in Berlin; the terrace from which Juliet addressed Romeo; the windows through which administrators were defenestrated in Prague.

Perhaps we could even re-assemble all these into a complete, if eclectic and quite controversial, new building – add the JFK window as the coup de grâce – and you’ve got a 21st century version of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London.

But, of course, archaeology is full of such acts of structural burglary. Whole temples and friezes and doorways and rooms have been removed and transported elsewhere. Just ask Lord Elgin – or, for that matter, ask the Getty. In light of all this, then, are we witnessing some new Lord Elgin of the 21st century, raised on the novels of J.G. Ballard, as he or she begins a new quest to collect pieces of architectural morbidity?

The sale of JFK’s window would thus be the opening salvo in this death-obsessed archaeology of tomorrow.”

———————————————————–
..:: FURTHER INFO

More Ballard for your buck:

Oswald was the starter.

From his window above the track he opened the race by firing the starting gun. It is believed that the first shot was not properly heard by all the drivers. In the following confusion Oswald fired the gun two more times, but the race was already under way.
…
The starting point was the Texas Book Depository, where all bets were placed on the Presidential race. Kennedy was an unpopular contestant with the Dallas crowd, many of whom showed outright hostility. The deplorable incident familiar to us all is one example.

The course ran downhill from the Book Depository, below an overpass, then on to the Parkland Hospital and from there to Love Air Field. It is one of the most hazardous courses in downhill motor racing, second only to the Sarajevo track discontinued in 1914.”

—————————————————————————————————-
J.G. Ballard. Chapter 15: “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race”. The Atrocity Exhibition.
—————————————————————————————————-

I referred to [J.G. Ballard's Crash] in some depth when discussing ‘Airbag’, the opening track of OK Computer, in my forthcoming book. … The sexual/spiritual rush that Thom Yorke’s narrator seems to achieve from near-annihilation on the road is prefigured by Ballard’s deadpan prose. Many people have also remarked on the extent to which Ballard seemed to foresee the extent to which Princess Diana’s fatal crash became a media event, riddled with psychosexual potential, even as she lay dying.
…
It’s as if the various stages in the narrative arc of Diana’s life are scripted by different writers: Barbara Cartland for the introduction and development; Jackie Collins for the crisis and its immediate fallout; and a bizarre switch to Ballard for a highly unlikely (but, in retrospect, utterly inevitable) finale.

Which opens things up to you, dear reader. Take a historical or contemporary figure, and decide which writer or, even better, which peculiar combination of writers could best have written his or her life. And no conceptual gewgaws this time. As penance for the implication that I’d read a book when I hadn’t, the author of the best one will receive a signed copy of my Radiohead book when it comes out.”

————————————–
Tim Footman. ‘Auto biography‘.
————————————–

No Fear of the Future, a new group blog that’s recently come on line, features a jaw-dropping analysis of celebrity culture from the talented Chris Nakashima-Brown.

It begins by outlining the Ballardian aspects of Operation Paget, the inquiry into the death of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed. Chris sets Paget up as the sequel to Ballard’s treasured Warren Commission Report, describing the Diana fest as “eight-hundred-plus pages of pure clinical Ballardian detail remixed with Spectacular Baudrillardian celebrity media fireworks”.

Chris draws a long list of Paget’s ingredients, including:

+ Deadpan evaluations of conspiracy theories involving MI5, MI6, Mossad, CIA, NSA, the Freemasons, the Scientologists and the Royal Mafia.
+ Voyeuristic views from every surveillance camera in Paris.
+ Unintentionally fetishistic dissections of the black Mercedes.
+ Oliver Stone film clip glimpses of the Princess’s contorted post-crash body position and cryptic last words.”

Finally, he bathes in the vectors of speed, violence and celebrity, visiting Halle Berry, Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake along the way, before ending with a hypothesis to chill the blood of any 21st-century urban dweller:

Imagine if [the paparazzi] acted with deliberate revolutionary intent, seeking to capture the most hideous possible images of movie stars, the pampered skin of their faces pulled back into horrifying contortions by disused tendons provoked out of their Botox slumber. Surely that would hack the Spectacle, at least for the fifteen minutes before it morphed into the new sexy commoditized cool.

In the meantime, we wait for the secret boxes of evidence collected by Operation Paget to trickle out into the Internet-of-Things via eBay.”

Our Man in Shepperton would indeed be smiling at the remix of neon ghastliness described in this, Chris Nakashima-Brown’s “perfect pathology report on the end of the twentieth century”.

..:: RELATED
+ Chariot of Fire: Preliminary Analysis & Damage Reconstruction of the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales

OPENING LINE:
‘There’s gold, Wayne, gold dust everywhere! Wake up! The streets of America are paved with gold!’.

From the Carroll & Grad 1981 edition:

A century after America’s financial collapse and the climactic upheavals of the 1990s, Wayne stows away on SS Apollo, bound for the New World on a voyage of rediscovery. He and the crew encounter hazards at every turn and ghosts from the past as they travel West. In Las Vegas, roaming bands of Mexican teenagers welcome them to the citadel of late 20th century glitter. Their charismatic leader — a William Burroughs look-alike addressed reverently as President Charles Manson — invites Wayne into hs cybernetic stronghold. But suddenly the erratic president takes fright at Wayne’s alien presence and threatens to play deadly war games with an arsenal of leftover Titan warheads. Now it’s not just the Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe holograms that are at risk…

According to Ballardian contributor Umberto Rossi:

As we read Hello America we trek along a historical horizon, led by what we should call a historical-mythical imagery. The recession is not a retrogressive movement of evolutionary time, but a hallucinatory replica of American history. If The Drowned World celebrates the divorce of humans from their historical civilisation, Hello America offers a lucid and ironic anatomy of the American Myth (but we could call it the American Dream), a myth with a historical genesis and a historical unfolding. Every dead city visited by the research team led by Captain Steiner is the embodiment of a chapter of the American legend. At the same time, it is a transmutation of events and stages in US history.

Las Vegas is the ultimate telematic metropolis and Manson is its emblematic citizen until the end. It is no accident that his army is made up of teenagers. The model citizen of Videogame City is the eternal teenager, who can contact the world only through its image, through TV screens and computer networks. In the age of the information industry and data networks, the accomplishment of technical evolution, the process that Heidegger calls imposition [Gestell] of technics — the possibility of a total control, a total representability of the world — is the playability of the world. The world becomes a game. In this horizon of electronic simulation, any difference between true and false, between real and fictional, between presence and representation, becomes obsolete.”

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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

“Me and JG Ballard” — by Dan Melchior’s Broke Revue

me and jg ballard, we walk down different streets
going to the supermarket for something to eat
jg ballard gets there first, buys some frozen peas
they were the last packet and there’s none there left for me

me and jg ballard in our respective rooms
i’m watching my tv, he’s contemplating doom
he opens up his microwave, retrieves his frozen peas
i decide to take a walk and turn off itv

jg ballard’s sitting there eating with his mouth
wondering what his next novel is gonna be about
on my way out to the park i pass before his drive
he’s no idea i’m out here, i’ve no idea he’s inside

this morning jg ballard he drinks a cup of tea
his eyes are red and blurry, he didn’t get much sleep
i decide to buy some milk, bump into an old friend
i talk to her, buy the milk then go back home again”

JGB’s not the only Poet of Shepperton, according to the allmusic guide:

“Shepperton, England’s tight-throated guitarslinger Dan Melchior is one ofthose intriguing performers who just sort of seem to have appeared out of nowhere, fully formed and freaked out. Melchior is a wild-eyed misanthrope playing the role of troubadour in a community too busy to take notice, which only inspires the racket to grow louder. Indeed, it is a glorious racket. Off-kilter garage-meets-country & western rhythms serve as the fuzzy backdrop for Melchior’s shouted vocals and lyrics that are by turn absurd and brilliant. “Me and JG Ballard” details something as seemingly mundane (but in fact bitingly clever) as unknowingly shadowing reclusive writer JG Ballard through the course of his daily routine. Ballard’s always a few steps ahead of Melchior, even buying the last of the peas at the grocery before Melchior has his turn.”

>> Bitterness Spite Rage and Scorn on Amazon

By MICHAEL R. BLOOD
Associated Press Writer

SAN DIEGO

Actors Warren Beatty and wife Annette Bening tried to crash a campaign appearance Saturday by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as the governor sought to drum up last-minute support for a group of statewide ballot measures.

The Hollywood couple strode side-by-side to the entrance of an airport hangar where several hundred of the governor’s supporters had gathered.

A Schwarzenegger aide told the “Bulworth” star he was not on the guest list and did not have the appropriate wristband to get inside.

“You have to have a wristband to listen to the governor?” Bening asked. “He represents all of us, right?”

The couple’s appearance caused momentary confusion. Just before the governor took the stage, the hangar door was closed _ literally in their faces. It was later reopened as Schwarzenegger spoke.

Inside, Schwarzenegger told cheering supporters that his slate of four ballot proposals on Tuesday’s ballot would “reform the broken system.”

Beatty planned to shadow Schwarzenegger throughout the day as the governor campaigned. He has been repeatedly mentioned as a possible challenger to Schwarzenegger, but he said Saturday that he would not be a candidate in next year’s gubernatorial race.

“To me, this is an abuse of the initiative process,” Beatty said of Schwarzenegger’s campaigning for the ballot measures.

In a later interview, the governor alluded to Beatty only indirectly.

“There’s the main event, then there is the sideshow,” Schwarzenegger said. “I don’t care about the sideshow.”

Earlier, Beatty boarded a bus draped with a banner reading “Truth Squad” and urged people to vote against the ballot measures supported by Schwarzenegger.

The Democrat and longtime political activist, told reporters he had no plans to run for public office in the future, but he didn’t rule it out entirely.

“I don’t want to run for governor,” he told reporters. “I want to say what I think.”

Schwarzenegger, who later appeared with Arizona Sen. John McCain, is pushing several measures that would curb the power of the Democrat- controlled Legislature and the state’s public employee unions. Another measure he backs would extend the trial period for teaches to get tenure.

GRAVITY’S PEAK IS SURVIVABLE
“About midnight, Diana walks out, all green eyes and friendly breast velocity. Dodi, her Prince, is there to sweep her away from the insatiable paparazzi.”

The following extract is presented by the JG BALLARD INSTITUTE for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra.

“On August 31, 1997, Princess Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed died in a horrific car crash. At the exact moment of impact, the conspiracy nuts sprang into action. Was she murdered by the British government – or overseas interests? Did she in fact commit suicide? Indeed, the public seems unwilling to accept the official version of events, culminating in the claims this year that Prince Charles was somehow behind a sinister plot to murder his ex-wife.

For the last 5 years, the JG Ballard Institute for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics has been studying this most Ballardian of celebrity deaths and is finally in a position to make its findings official. Under the guidance of the Institute’s Dr Annick Hovac, the following report – a worldwide exclusive – is sure to blow all previous theories surrounding the incident out of the water.

Now, finally, the truth can be told…”

An extract from a forthcoming paper by Dr Annik Hovak, of the JG Ballard Institute for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics.

————————————————————————————————
DIFFERENT INJURY OUTCOMES
Dinner at the Ritz seemed the perfect dreamy Paris interlude. Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed, heir to the House of Harrods, spent their last day enjoying each other’s company. During their summer romance, the couple had exchanged phase acts in order to increase the structure of the relentless public eye. She was snapped on the deck swathed in a towel while Fayed smoothed her hair, in full view of the tourists on shore. But after nearly three weeks, the equivalent velocity of the relationship endured a string of disappointing love, and the media reported that the couple had interpretation errors.

Over fatal seafood dinner, Fayed presented a stunning $205,400 diamond solitaire glistening like warm oil sun on a distant beach. Known as the Playboy from the Maximum Deformation, it was noted that in his business and social life, Fayed only addressed women to the point of five Ferraris. The boy grew up in a world of privilege in Egypt and France. Later, he worked briefly as a fixture on beautiful London women. However, it had appeared that from Reference 26 the negligible fairy-tale marriage fell apart amid others (e.g. tests 415, 425 and 448) and that Diana was mentally unstable. The data for the dynamic model, combined with the proposed abandonment of A, B and G variables, prompted speculation that the Princess forced (note that no mention of Charles) the erratic nature of the plots.

POEM TO HER INHERENT ERROR
Flashback to a week before (time is a voyeuristic membrane in the tragic life of the beloved): Dodi wrote a poem for her and had it inscribed on public flesh. He had walked off the plane, and saw her waiting in central London, a grieving human in her arms. Calculations of Delta-V ranged from her skirt too short to be examined.

FORCE VS DISPLACEMENT THEMES! rhapsodised the airport daily headlines.

That afternoon, on the Mediterranean beach, Fayed had presented his oil-covered fingers, circular motion glistening in the warm sunlight. Princess Di dropped one hand to his pants, soft on his deep and passionate Mediterranean journey. Later, in the hot tub with him giggling, sailing up and down the French and Italian Rivieras of the mind. (Or at least so claim the doubles who never leave Diana’s side).

Nothing life threatening. Further tests (18, 334 and 426) show Diana and Dodi in a close embrace, corroborating the ghostly reports of imminent prayers and national blame.

GRAVITY’S PEAK IS SURVIVABLE, WITH FUTURE
When the doors close, the two people in love push the stop button. The elevator doors open and everyone is the result of dynamic collisions, of residual control. She is aware of what is going on, the waiting photographers. However, from the news media, linear relationships are gifts. They had decided to use Fayed’s driver as a decoy in another car. About midnight, Diana walks out, all green eyes and friendly breast velocity. Dodi, her Prince, is there to sweep her away from the insatiable paparazzi. The appointed personnel are also there: the lucky (and belted) bodyguard and the drunk Frenchman. Every one is ghostly, their flesh glistening under the video gaze and the white grip of death. The eyes of the cameras zoom in and out chronicling grainy stills, gray glare and flash of blonde.

They climb in a Mercedes S280 soon owned by speed across accurate westbound lanes of a four-lane coefficient. Candles and chilled champagne wait in Fayed’s apartment near the Arc de Triomphe.They make their getaway through a linear fit, drunk through central Paris at fatal conceptual speeds. The couple’s blue Mercedes signals a speed-change river to escape the paparazzi- who insisted in referring to it as the period of deforce. With romantic track animation and angle view from ominous advise, the duration of central Paris at an average of 90′/sec narrows to a limited number of staged collisions (e.g., References 34, 50-52).Then, in the bridge, not far from the Eiffel tower, Diana gives him a pair of pictures of the wide contact collision with her son Prince Harry. This is one of many simulations, rehearsals. Dodi laughs. In her clear headlight gaze glow Egyptian joy and the midnight algorithm of her white slacks and heeled sandals. Twin stars of whirlwind love that will never see the tunnel’s end.

OUR THOUGHTS & PRAYERS
“At the time of the crash the couple hugged at 60 mph (90 ft/sec), divorced from the average deceleration and contemplating a new peak value of about twice the psychic medium.”

Hollywood Psychologist calls self-examination of Tabloid Voyeurism
Diana reaches in. Dodi outlines the main anatomical regions. They explore each other’s tongues. The Romeo and Juliet of the Twentieth Century reciprocate coefficients in the back seat of the hellbound S-280. The lovebirds’ every move lingers in the spirit of the underground road tunnel. But the Mercedes is now the object of a chase. Pursued by five or so photographers, running into the obstruction crumpled and out of control. From the unidentified sideways, the impact will occur close to where the couple has missed an angle of a few degrees still being pried from the eyewitness reports screeching for the British newspapers before impact. Even if Paul floors the brakes, rages and then backs his car where little steering left, he only has half the vehicle’s width at the limits of traction to position on the road somewhat.Left side damage, the car spinning around.

Shocking, the vehicle can’t be spinning! The car hits a pillar of related data points. At the time of the crash the couple hugged at 60 mph (90 ft/sec), divorced from the average deceleration and contemplating a new peak value of about twice the psychic medium. Paul can’t induce much of a steer centerline even if it’s grilled at original formulation of the crash. Besides, he does not steer to avoid the problematic recognition, since it is obvious that he should still not exist simultaneously over a few demurely plastic concussions to avoid the impact. The vehicle does not roll over, probably cut from the roof by avoidability. The windshield and the roof collapse. The grill of the Mercedes is pushed back into the front seat. The Princess of Wales reaches in to feel the peak of dynamic crush caressing it, sunning herself in the initial impact to the point of maximum time. Acceleration that would have been experienced by the chest is about 70 times the force of gravity (70 g’s), or about seven times what a fighter pilot experiences. The head experiences acceleration about 100 times the force of gravity.

Diana is happier than she had been in a dynamic state. She is delighted as the automobile structures dissolve in acrimony, as the vehicle undergoes godmother impulse for the last several inches of static crush, coupled with photographers in motorcycles and buzzing police. Her hardened nipples glisten as she accepts the paparazzi into her. Speed is anywhere. Dodi Fayed gently takes the maximum collision force and her suit straps, ignoring the restitution phase, the residual crush, the amount of severity. Princess of Wales dies 4 a.m. Paris time. Maybe she is asleep, or mortally injured in the land of public tragedy. There is smoke. People are standing around the car. The Delta-V intercept at zero with photographers crowding within bloodied victims to snap their positions at a forked distance.

This can hardly be the couple that had eaten dinner. The body of a woman sticks out 60′/sec turns to the awful lapse under 0.1 sec. Her head wanly linear, her favorite chest acceleration. During this period, additional cardiac arrest and more damage to the left side.

Crews arrived and worked for more than itself. Emergency residua would need an hour to free Diana from the smashed resistance force. The occupants are freed from their bodies. The bodyguard has survived, but Fayed and Paul die instantly, the latter expiring in continuity with some prior consciousness, a stream of cognition going back to tonight’s top speed.

TABLOID VOYEURISM
Last dialogue between Dodi and Diana:
Dodi: “We have the pattern, not the substance; but in your eyes I pour us each a living being.”
Diana: “True. We can’t live forever.”

Flustered bystander: “We heard the noise of the accident, intended to be humorous. In the tunnel, it was a real massacre. In a state of shock, I pushed on the biological problems of aging. I did not offer assistance. And then I left.”

Another witness says he saw smoke, ran to the wreck. “I was taking pictures of it.” Then he said he turned to the woman: “I freed her breathing and opened her irregular mass. By way of explaining the physical, she was moaning and gesticulating. I put an oxygen mask on her.”

He wanted to testify, because notions of reality are ridiculous when those are signs of choking faster than about 30 degrees.Was she belted? Diana herself later squelched rumors. Thus, trauma is generated, the most erotic strip ever.

Last dialogue between Dodi and Diana:
Dodi: “We have the pattern, not the substance; but in your eyes I pour us each a living being.”
Diana: “True. We can’t live forever.”
Dodi: “Whenever there is a cognition, I must lean across and kiss your lips with the passion I feel for beginningless time.”
Diana: “Oh, my Prince! It is just the fatal state of knowledge about the biomechanical circumstances under which we live.”

The opulent ring, still in its box, is recovered from the floor of the crushed windstorm romance. Hundred photos are no longer distant and grainy.

References
25. Early reports described Diana’s original algorithm, the neglected mirror of the accident scene. While her arm and leg injuries were demonstrated in Reference 26, Princess Diana’s unidentified posture was formulated later, as the pale phase and hardened
forces increased in the total speed change.
26. The impact coefficient for a number of Diana’s measurements and damage determines the amount of additional Fayed after going into severity by prolonging the accelerating conference of residual damage.
27. The rate, both in terms of force and of the injuries received, is restored from the peak structure. But the magnitude of the news report, including the proposed damage time, was overestimated. The angle view from front passenger window shows that both head and chest experienced acceleration a hundred times the force of gravity.
28. The significance of the fitted coefficients still does not void linearity between her Delta-V and Fayed.
29. Any reconstruction which utilises a CRASH3 based damage analysis procedure should add to the predicted speed change a variable of approximately +10% at 30 inches of residual crush to +25% at 10 inches for the predicted total speed change.
30. What’s more, a careful inspection of the site implies a linear relationship between conceptual complication and the smashed windshield.
31. Despite media reports that Dodi and Diana did not hit head on, the crash technique rarely, if ever, has been known to produce uniform crush, or centralised collisions that might have otherwise been lived. At the time of the crash formulation, the restitution effects of the vehicle structures intercepted pulmonary trajectory with the judicious engineering approach to offer the curve damage profile. Thus, injuries in an accident are always assumed to be unnamed.

Addendum
1. Reports of ninety-degree skid marks: ABS systems tend not to leave pronounced skid marks, these are probably scrub marks. Even if they represent locked wheel skid marks they only bring a 75/mph speed down to 55 at impact.
2. Pacemakers or electronic stimulators have been used after abdominal surgery when the intestine and bladder are paralysed.
3. Reports of the driver’s impairment clear up a lot of things.

Then Beatty got serious and ripped the governor, who once had a road crew create a huge pothole so he could be photographed filling it with a shovel of tar.

“Governing by show, by stunts, by cosmetics, by photo ops and fake events and fake issues and fake crowds and backdrops – that’s a mistake. … That concept of reality should be saved for action movies and show business.”

Several heavyweights of the literary world were impressed to have an unexpected new novelist in their midst.
JG Ballard, the veteran author of more than 30 books including Empire of the Sun, said: “I hope she has every success. It might win the Booker Prize. One has to accept that we are living in times when the only things that matter are celebrity and money, and if Jordan writes a novel, that will bring the two together. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing I’ll leave for you to judge.”

“Ms. [Cameron] Diaz recalled walking in the street with Mr. [Justin] Timberlake and a friend and his dog about two years ago, when a photographer in a Toyota 4Runner roared up from behind them, knocking the friend to the ground, then shot pictures of her and Mr. Timberlake coming to the friend’s aid. "We’re so used to not having any rights, we didn’t think we should call 911," she said. Photographs of the incident wound up in the next US Weekly with a caption saying, "Cameron and Justin race to help a friend" after the friend’s dog was nearly hit by a car.”

More info: Justin Timberlake v. Vaughan?

The Atrocity Exhibition is a profound and disquieting book. The nonsexual roots of sexuality are explored with a surgeon’s precision. An auto-crash can be more more sexually stimulating than a pornographic picture. (Surveys indicate that wet dreams in many cases have no overt sexual content, whereas dreams with an overt sexual content in many cases do not result in orgasm). The book opens: ‘A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition … was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses’.

The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments: ‘In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac, the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, Eichmann in drag, a dead child …’ The human body becomes landscape: ‘A hundred-foot-long panel that seemed to represent a section of sand dune … looking at it more closely Doctor Nathan realized that it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest …’ This magnification of image to the point where it becomes unrecognizable is a keynote of The Atrocity Exhibition. This is what Bob Rauschenberg is doing in art — literally blowing up the image. Since people are made of image, this is literally an expensive book. The human image explodes into rocks and stones and trees: ‘The porous rock towers of Tenerife exposed the first spinal landscape … clinker-like rock towers suspended above the silent swamp. In the mirror of this swamp there are no reflections. Time makes no concessions’.

Sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image: ‘Each afternoon in the deserted cinema: the latent sexual content of automobile crashes … James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, Albert Camus … Many volunteers became convinced that the fatalities were still living and later used one or the other of the crash victims as a private focus of arousal during intercourse with the domestic partner’.

James Dean kept a hangman’s noose dangling in his living room and put it around his neck to pose for news pictures. A painter named Milton, who painted a sexy picture entitled ‘The Death of James Dean’, subsequently committed suicide. This book stirs sexual depths untouched by the hardest-core illustrated porn. ‘What will follow is the psychopathology of sex relationships so lunar and abstract that people will become mere extensions of the geometries of situations. This will allow the exploration without any trace of guilt of every aspect of sexual psychopathology’.

Immensely magnified portion of James Dean subsequently committed suicide. Conception content relates to sexual depths of the hardest minds. Eichmann in drag in a waste lot of wrecked porous rock.

– William Burroughs, preface to The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970