Lord Horror (1997). Image by John Coulthart.

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

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

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

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

FIRST PRIZE

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

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

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

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

SECOND PRIZE

‘Escapology’
by Craig Hughes

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

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

THIRD PRIZE

‘Catchgirl’
by Jim Donnelly

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

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

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

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

‘Appreciation’
by Ben Soper

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

Untitled
by Matthew Sheret

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

‘Riveting’
by Kevin Clement

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

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

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

‘Breathe on the window’
by Mark Noonan

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

‘Purlin Obstructs The Passage Of Time’
by James Dibley

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

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

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

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

‘Street Furniture’
by Mat Ranson

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

‘Wrecked and Wasted’
by Tim Maly

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

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

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

‘Penumbra’
by Jesse Thrall

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

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

‘Live-Work’
by Will Wiles

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

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

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

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

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

Untitled
by Damien MacIntyre

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

‘Inhumanly Divine’
by Poppy Varela

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

‘Summit’
by Greg Marsh

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

‘Eaters of Time’
by Simon Machine-Cooke

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

No love. No law.

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

The party’s over now

Bundled clippings grew yellow and mildewed under the staircase cupboard.

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

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

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

‘A New Pornography’
by Martin Gillespie

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

Or was architecture the externalisation of male function?

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

He pressed himself against the grey exterior.

Lord Horror (1997). Image by John Coulthart.

Coinciding with our three-part interview with Michael Butterworth, David Britton and John Coulthart of Savoy Books, Ballardian.com is pleased to announce the Savoy Books Microfiction Competition.

NOTE: Due to popular demand, the Ballardian/Savoy microfiction competition deadline has been extended to 15 December. Winners will be announced in early January 2010, coinciding with Part 2 of the Savoy interviews.

UPDATED RULES: The rules are very simple: write a 100-word (or less) short story on anything with a ‘Savoyesque’ or ‘Ballardian’ theme (note: hyphenated words count as one word). If you are unfamiliar with Savoyesque themes, please see the interview with Mr Butterworth. For the dictionary definition of ‘Ballardian’, please see here. And if you would like to know more about writing microfiction (a.k.a. ‘flash fiction’), we recommend checking these links for all the ins and outs. Remember, you can use significantly less than 100 words if you wish — the so-called ‘six word memoir’, inspired by Hemingway, is pretty popular right now.

Limit of 2 entries per person.

The prizes (for 1st, 2nd, 3rd) have been very generously supplied by Savoy and cover all their bases: novels, CDs, comic books. Prizes for first: David Britton’s notorious and long out-of-print Lord Horror novel (currently fetching over US$800 for second-hand copies), the almost-as-rare The Truth About Horror, and the A Tea Dance at Savoy book; prizes for second: the books A Serious Life and Sieg Heil Iconographers; prizes for third: the Savoy Wars and The Waste Land CDs, plus the Fuck Off and Die comic book. For more information on these prizes, see below. Entries will be judged by David Britton, Michael Butterworth and Simon Sellars, and the winning entries will appear on ballardian.com.

The deadline is 5 December 2009 15 December 2009. Please use this contact form to send your entry. Don’t forget to include your name, story title and email address.

But why a competition and not just a giveaway? Because the idea of humanoids competing for something as outré as Lord Horror has a certain black appeal.

And why microfiction? Because Ballard in The Atrocity Exhibition and Butterworth in his ‘Concentrate’ stories could be said to be early adopters of the form. Also, because (yes, you guessed it) microfiction is extremely ‘hip’, ‘trendy’ and ‘à la mode’ right now.

FIRST PRIZE

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

Only one alternate history series confronted Nazism with appropriate originality and passion. Published by the independent Manchester firm Savoy, David Britton’s surreal Lord Horror and its sequels entered the mind of a deranged surviving Hitler whose visions grew increasingly insane. Britton’s graphic novel Hard Core Horror turned William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) into Lord Horror, while James Joyce became his brother, and his rival for the hand of singer Jessie Matthews. Britton’s narrative moved inevitably towards Auschwitz. The novel’s final issue, with its deliberately blank narrative panels among pictures of the concentration camp (followed by actual photographs of victims), was a silent memorial to the murdered, an indictment of our own moral complicity. Soon after they appeared, Hard Core Horror and Lord Horror were seized by Manchester’s vice squad. The books were destroyed and their author went to Strangeways, suggesting that successful Nazi alternate histories must take profound psychological, moral and physical risks.

Michael Moorcock, The Daily Telegraph.

“At the end of the 1970s, among innovative fictions by the likes of JG Ballard, the literary journal New Worlds included a handful of mysterious, highly accomplished pieces by one RG Meadley. Some were short stories; others illustrative collages, oddly captioned, like Victorian broadsheets issued from some parallel universe. As far as the literary arts were concerned, RG Meadley might then have vanished into such a universe, so this first volume of his writing is not so much long awaited as a total surprise. Such a book, we might have hoped, would collect his early work. Nothing so straightforward. Gorgeously designed, lavishly illustrated, A Tea Dance at Savoy is a collection — but of what? Gonzo journalism? Hallucinatory rhapsody? A “stew”, its author calls it, and so it is: a paranoiac-critical gallimaufry.”

Colin Greenland, The Independent.

SECOND PRIZE

1) A Serious Life, by D M Mitchell.
2) Sieg Heil Iconographers, by Jon Farmer.

“The main voices in A Serious Life belong to David M Mitchell—his evaluation of the books, records and comics produced by Savoy Books over the last thirty years—and the company’s founders, David Britton and Michael Butterworth, publishers of the eclectic, the maverick and the marginalised. Here they give their first ever extended interviews concerning the company’s history, and state their aims and intentions from Savoy’s inception in the early 1970s to the present day. Topics featured include their personal creations Lord Horror and Meng & Ecker, the 20-year confrontation of the company with the Greater Manchester Police Force, and the involvement of Index on Censorship and Geoffrey Robertson QC in the same, culminating in the defence of their works at the Royal Courts of Justice in 1996. Designed by John Coulthart.”

Savoy press release.

“This beautifully produced oversize paperback [Sieg Heil Iconographers] is the third in a series of Savoy biographies, or ‘manifestoes’… Savoy’s wayward eclecticism means that the books don’t overlap as much as you’d expect, each author providing his own idiosyncratic take on the company’s origins, output and obsessions, and while Farmer shares the rambling tone common to all three books, his bold, opinionated prose, enlivened by occasional flashes of brilliance, makes this the pick of the bunch. You may not agree with what Farmer writes, but his approach is so ballsy that the book is never less than entertaining, even with the absurd enthusiasm informing references to ‘eager jig gash’ and the following paean to Fenella Fielding: ‘I would crawl ten thousand miles over ground glass because of that voice, just to wank in her shadow.’ It’s also perhaps the most beautifully designed Savoy production to date (no mean feat considering designer John Coulthart’s characteristically high standards), the bounty of Lash Larue western posters and James Cawthorn fantasy illustrations rarely bearing any relation to the text but providing yet another version of the Savoy story to run alongside Farmer’s celebration.”

London Book Review.

THIRD PRIZE

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

“Many of the songs [on Savoy Wars] are covers. But these are no ordinary covers. The original lyrics to Blue Monday are dropped in favour of Springsteen’s Cadillac Ranch, with Proby providing a deep Southern American drawl, as he does on the other tracks. Musically, there’s some amazingly seedy and muscular dance arrangements, which add a whole new spin to the songs. In particular In The Air Tonight, which actually sounds dangerously deranged and eminently listenable. Unlike the original. Savoy Wars is all the more fascinating by virtue of the people who crop-up on the various tracks: Melanie Williams (Sub Sub and now with her own solo deal), Rowetta (Happy Mondays), Denise Johnson (Primal Scream, Electronica, ACR and now also with a solo deal),Yvonne Shelton (Secret Society, Evolution, and another solo artist), Inner Sense Percussion, ’60s rock’n'roll vocalist Bobby Thompson and, of course, Proby. And regardless of Savoy’s joy of upsetting, shocking and generally winding people up, the label has produced some genuinely exciting, innovative and powerful pop songs. ‘Prime cuts of musical perversity’ is how Savoy describe it. A definition which is difficult to dispute.”

Chris Sharrett, City Life.

“PJ Proby’s collaboration with Savoy produced a number of intriguing recordings, including his versions of “Anarchy In The UK” and TS Eliot’s The Wasteland. “I had no idea who TS Eliot was,” says Proby. “But the more I do The Wasteland, the better I get.”

“One day the world will realise what a genius he is, and by then it will be too late,” Britton said. “Proby is a walking piece of art. His talent needs preserving for future generations.” After Britton’s mother died, the three gathered at her house at Saddleworth, overlooking the scene of the Moors Murders. There, with Proby larking about on the Zimmer frame that had belonged to the deceased, they worked on his single “Hardcore”, which, unless I’ve missed something, remains the most offensive record ever released. (“Everything y’all think is fun,” Proby once said, “I think is boring.”)

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

Robert Chalmers, The Independent.

“[Fuck off & Die] is a black and excellent collection, sharp as gall, a fine display of Britton’s acid voice and splendid gallery of Guidio’s elegant and decadent designs. La Squab is a sophisticated howl of anger and disgust disguised as a Violet Elizabeth Bott tantrum, Minipops conceived by Bertolt Brecht with set designs by Harry Clarke and camera work by Leni Riefenstahl. A paedophobic gymslip gem, it should be on the shelves of anyone hoping to fathom the lurid, fractal mess of turn-of-the-century British culture, a must for those of us who cannot stomach Cute unless it’s gnawed down to the painful cuticle. Go out and order six more copies of this book immediately.

Tomorrow belongs to her.”

Alan Moore, from the introduction to FOAD.

Illustration by John Coulthart.

WINNER
Ben Slater; ‘Vista 8′

JOHN: Monochrome location scouting inside a high-rise hotel that looks half-finished. Remnants of an affair litter the piece: photographs, a high heel and the cutting to two cars so close together it would be difficult not to predict a Crash. As Christopher Brookmyre said, beware half-finished places, you know, the Death Star, Jurassic Park, Nakatomi Plaza…

SIMON: Ben’s film, shot among the Vista 8 high-rise in Singapore, seems to me like it’s recording the last moments of a suicide. You chance upon a mobile phone discarded in the high-rise’s courtyard; you press ‘play’, and this is what you find… I do like the snatched inclusion of Bowie’s man-machine classic, ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’.

MORE ENTRIES BELOW…

I’d like to organize a Festival of Home Movies! It could be wonderful — thousands of the things… You might find an odd genius, a Fellini or Godard of the home movie, living in some suburb. I’m sure it’s coming… Using modern electronics, home movie cameras and the like, one will begin to retreat into one’s own imagination. I welcome that…

J.G. Ballard, quoted in ‘Interview with JGB by Graeme Revell’, RE/Search No. 8/9, 1984.

We had eight entries in our little competition for 1-minute-or-less films shot on cameraphones, modelled after Ballard’s 1984 call for a ‘festival of home movies’. A reminder of the requirements:

+ Shoot a film using your mobile phone’s video function, no more than one minute in duration, and using no post-production or processing — the film must be shot entirely ‘in camera’.
+ The theme: anything at all to do with either one or both of the Collins English Dictionary definitions of ‘Ballardian’:

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

Mounting this exercise was hugely enjoyable for me and I was delighted to discover some real gems among the eight. I have been inspired by those Ballard ‘home movie’ quotes ever since I first read them years ago, and just the very the idea of unearthing ‘a Fellini or Godard of the suburbs’ has always excited (and humoured) me. So have we found one? Perhaps not. But we just may have discovered, finally, what lies in the angle between two walls…. (not even John Foxx, you may recall, could crack that conundrum).

To determine a winner, John Rivers from HarperCollins assigned points to each film, as did I. We then combined our rankings. The result is that Ben Slater, with ‘Vista 8′, came out on top. Ben wins a copy of Miracles of Life, plus these HarperCollins reissues: Millennium People, The Drought, The Crystal World, The Drowned World and The Unlimited Dream Company.

The runner-up is Pablo Sgarbi from Brazil, with ’120 Days of an Angle Between Two Walls’ (see below), and he receives a copy of Miracles. Congratulations to Ben and Pablo, and many thanks to all entrants and to everyone who supported and promoted the festival. Extra special thanks to HarperCollins UK for getting behind the idea, and to JGB for everything: always and of course.

Next year, who knows? Perhaps we’ll get entrants to simulate the filmed ratissages in Super-Cannes, or Bobby Crawford’s home porno movies in Cocaine Nights…

Here now are the remaining entries direct to you from BallardoTube, the Net’s only dedicated Ballard TV channel, where ‘history is just a first-draft screenplay’ (according to JGB in ‘The Greatest TV Show On Earth’), and where ‘premium subscribers can experience transexualism, paedophilia, terminal syphilis, gang-rape, and bestiality (choice: German Shepherd or Golden Retriever)’, as decreed by JGB in ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’.

RUNNER UP
Pablo Sgarbi; ’120 Days of An Angle Between Two Walls’

JOHN: A voice simulator spews forth graphic prose like a poetry machine from Vermillion Sands. Juxtaposed with images of ordinariness, a ceiling corner, a kettle, a cup of coffee. Reminding us what lies in the dark psyches of people everyday.

SIMON: Beautiful and hilarious: a robot reads a passage from the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, dispassionately intoning squirting buttocks and jets of blood, while common household objects ‘star’ on the screen: those elusive wall angles, a coffee cup, and so on. In its juxtaposition of extreme and violent sex with banal home appliances, this is perhaps the most ‘Ballardian’ film of them all. I love this entry a lot.

..:: Remaining entries (not ranked; in alphabetical order)

Shahin Afrassiabi; ‘Home’

JOHN: A static shot, half composed of white, with red material intruding beneath. A seemingly random collection of sounds from talk radio or television are heard, slowly snatches emerge. Mopeds, a body found on a golf course. Murder on the roads, in the suburbs. “They shouldn’t be here,” claims a politician or letterwriter and as if to answer the listener appears to move away.

SIMON: An effective study in boredom, the psychological blank slate against which all manner of deviant behaviour is exposed and spontaneously generated, like flyblown maggots on rotting meat…

Mike Bonsall; ‘Day of Creation’

JOHN: Machine noise, loud and abrasive. A tool kit, saws, cutting tools. The slow reveal of a pile of Ballard titles leads you to wonder if here JG’s works are being recut, sliced, diced and served again. The Day of Creation is the final title to appear. The maker has taken Ballard and chopped him up.

SIMON: Mike B. is the creator of the JG Ballard Short Story Concordance, and he is currently working on a concordance of Ballard’s novels. These projects required him to buy extra copies of Ballard books and to razor their pages for easily digestible scanning under the all-powerful OCR software, before they could emerge out the other side as digital mulch. This film, then, is a delightful little in joke aimed squarely by Mike at his own obsessiveness, but it also functions as a sly and clever appraisal of Ballard’s entire ouevre, which has always relied on repetition, recycling, détournement, collage, bricolage…

Julian Gough; ‘Flesh Frame’

JOHN: Micro-entertainment, as flesh is exposed on a computer screen. That it only takes up a quarter of the screen makes it look like the body has been filmed and is being edited. Only to blur into a sunset. Consumerism takes over as the computer screen turns and pulls away to a credit card rectangle ready to accept your chip and PIN.

SIMON: This film chases its own tail, eventually disappearing into the black hole of inner space. Utterly beguiling.

Russell Miller; ‘A Journey Through A Distant Land’

JOHN: Concrete, bleakness, a travelator that moves vs. a river refusing to run. CCTV-positioned footage of a seemingly empty street lined by lock-ups hiding ephemera, memory junk, yesterday’s crashes. Daylight as harsh as the artificial strip lighting. In a denial of creation we return to the water from which we emerged.

SIMON: Classic Ballardian imagery, here: the flyovers, the apartment blocks, the obsessive stalking of nothing in particular. An artificial eye scanning the ruins of a humourless Earth, perhaps…

Jack Strain; ‘Ballardian’

JOHN: An urban warrior applies his warpaint in slow-mo before a projection of traffic is destroyed in a deliberate act of vandalism. The whole process seems to be watched or logged.

SIMON: A fabulously evocative film, menacing and dark, and making full use of the competition’s ‘in camera’ editing stipulation. The burning frame is a wonderful touch, and the glimpse of madness at the very end is bizarre and unsettling, behaviour that is perhaps the only response to the crushing insanity of the outside world.

Supervert; ‘Superego’

JOHN: Big Ballard is watching you! And joined by a smaller version of himself. Ballard argues with himself over an unheard question. As we watch, we are given permission only to be refused a second later. We are eventually told ‘no’ twice and our audience is over. That the responses are from Sam Scoggins’s movie about The Unlimited Dream Company and the ’90 questions from the Eyckman Personality Quotient test’ give the film a different meaning, that you’re being fed the results of a psychological experiment, while appearing to participate in one yourself.

SIMON: This film manipulates footage from the Scoggins film and is just a little disconcerting. It’s like being given a glimpse into a malfunctioning brain, with its psychopathology unashamedly on show, brandished like a weapon. Ultimately the synaptic process is unfathomable and the viewer, like all readers of Ballard, is left on the outer, able to only impotently guess at the intent, forced to fill in the dots herself…

..:: Previously on Ballardian…

+ J.G. Ballard Pastiche Competition

Everybody will be doing it, everybody will be living inside a TV studio. That’s what the domestic home aspires to these days; the home is going to be a TV studio. We’re all going to be starring in our own sit-coms, and they’ll be strange sit-coms, too, like the inside of our heads. That’s going to come, I’m absolutely sure of that, and it’ll really shake up everything…

J.G. Ballard, quoted in ‘Interview with JGB by Andrea Juno and Vale’, RE/Search No. 8/9, 1984.

The mobile phone can be seen as a fashion accessory and adult toy as well as a break-through in instant communication, though its use in restaurants, shops and public spaces can be irritating to others. This suggests that its real function is to separate its users from the surrounding world and isolate them within the protective cocoon of an intimate electronic space. At the same time phone users can discreetly theatricalize themselves, using a body language that is an anthology of presentation techniques and offers to others a tantalizing glimpse of their private and intimate lives.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Impressions of Speed’, in Speed : visions of an accelerated age / / edited by Jeremy Millar and Michiel Schwarz (1998).

“Television crime series…were filled with their huge carapaces, swerving in and out of alleys, reversing in a howl of burning rubber. Watched with the sound down, episodes of Starsky and Hutch resembled instructional films on valet parking”.

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J.G. Ballard, 2005
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Announcing the winner of our J.G. Ballard Pastiche competition, sponsored by the kind people at Harper Collins.

THE PREMISE
We know that as a struggling writer, J.G. Ballard originally moved to Shepperton to be near the famous movie studios, in the hope he’d be able to snare some scriptwriting work. Now picture a parallel world where Jim Ballard achieved that goal, becoming so successful that he relocated to Hollywood, where he became much in demand.

THE TASK
Write an imaginary 500-word extract from an imagined novelisation of Starsky and Hutch (either the original TV series or the recent movie)…as written by J.G. Ballard.

THE PRIZE
A copy of Ballard’s new novel, Kingdom Come, supplied by Harper Collins.

THE JUDGE
Lyle Hopwood, the reigning JGB Pastiche Champion. Lyle, of course, was the winner of Interzone magazine’s 1993 competition for “the best short extract from an imaginary novelization of the science-fiction movie Alien as it might have been written by leading British novelist J.G. Ballard”.

To help you on your way, we’ve reproduced Lyle’s winning story in — what else — the pastiche section. Sorry, Fredric.

THE CLUES
1) In his 2005 feature on CSI, Ballard wrote: “Television crime series…were filled with their huge carapaces, swerving in and out of alleys, reversing in a howl of burning rubber. Watched with the sound down, episodes of Starsky and Hutch resembled instructional films on valet parking”.

2) In his interview with this site Iain Sinclair declares, “Ballard’s a very easy writer to pastiche badly. I think he’s there with someone like Graham Greene as a stylist. There used to be a New Statesman competition to parody Greene’s style, and Greene came second when he entered”.

And the winner, as judged by Lyle Hopwood, is Steven Craig Hickman, whose entry is below. A copy of J.G. Ballard’s latest novel, Kingdom Come, courtesy of Harper Collins, will be winging its way to Steven. Runner up was Rocky Morrow, whose entry can also be found below. Special mention must be made of Rick McGrath’s entry, the movie poster at the start of this page: while it didn’t meet the requirements of the competition (sorry, we wanted text only), it’s certainly good enough to reproduce.

Many thanks to all who entered, and to Lyle Hopwood and Harper Collins, of course. Lyle’s comments on the top two entries follow Steven and Rocky’s ‘novelisations’.

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STARSKY & HUTCH: NOVELISATION BY J.G. BALLARD
Winner: Steven Craig Hickman

At dusk Starsky was still sitting in the cockpit of the Grand Torino like the pilot of an alien spacecraft. Unconcerned by the shifting tide of traffic advancing toward him across the blackened beach of this urban nightmare, he watched the luminous sun melt into the metalloid dreams of Bay City.

Hutch walked out of the shadows of the glass city like a new Apollo of the marketplace, flames sparking from his spectral torso as if the sun in one last desperate attempt to attain eternity had suddenly found in this strange flesh the perfected incarnation of a delirious thought.

Starsky held the key in his hand as if it were a secret accomplice to the dark mysteries of an arcane religion. He prepared himself for a final departure, one that would ennoble both himself and his partner into the greater mysteries of Time. The sparking flesh of Hutch moved steadily toward him as the neon dolphins flew above chromium air.

The last vestiges of the sun’’s decay flashed on the horizon like an angel of the apocalypse, as if to awaken the sleeping minds of all the lost souls before the great and terrible conflagration breaks over the glass sea of Time. In the finale every element of the universe, however abandoned, would take its place on this terminal stage in front of him.

As he watched Hutch suddenly rise into the air on luminous wings, he was reminded of all those ancient astronauts that still flamed above in their dead cages of steel like derelict gods thrown into the emptiness of this vast wasteland. He started the car and began moving toward his old partner in crime, the winged god of a new earth. He would embrace this flaming god of the sun one last time in a torsion beyond time.

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LYLE’S COMMENTS: I particularly liked the length (short) of Steven’s story, the sheer compactness of similies per line and the impression it gave of absolute, almost mechanised intensity. It was, in more than one sense of the phrase, concentration city. And anything that ends with a sentence like that deserves a prize.
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STARSKY & HUTCH: NOVELISATION BY J.G. BALLARD
Runner-up: Rocky Morrow

Starsky has begun to piece his world together. It has been three weeks since a traumatic cerebral injury rendered Detective Starsky an amnesiac. This report intends to inform the department head, Captain Harold Dobey, and his superiors of my partner’s present condition, a revolutionary cure suggested by a renegade mental health professional, and a possible danger.

I have been briefed by the doctors in charge of Starsky’s rehabilitation that mood swings are to be expected during this period of rediscovery. In particular, any presentation of depression and anger on the part of Starsky is to be understood and forgiven.

Starsky is sticking to the textbook. He is stubborn and refuses, almost violently, to be told point-blank of the particulars of his identity up to and including any information regarding his education, profession, sexual orientation, medical history, family history, military history, or the case of Starsky and I on Playboy Island parts 1 and 2.

He is certain that he will come back to himself.

According to notes provided to me by the trauma counselor, Lyndia Toxwater, David Starsky is open to learning about the present world. A quote from page 23: “He is a voracious reader of anything brought to him. The doctors tell me that he is not so much willing to ‘learn about the present world’ as he is trying to ‘lose himself in the written word’.”

The period of recovery for a person in Starsky’s situation is anywhere from a day to a lifetime. Toxwater suggested that an attempt be made to meet Starsky in the place where he most desires to be lost and, thus, is least resistant to being found.

Toxwater claims that the rate of success for this media neurotherapy is much higher than reported in the “big three” major mental health reference journals: Zepter and Hodges Illustrated, The New Journal of Disorders, and Abnormal Models (published in Spanish as The Aztec Cortex). Toxwater insists that there are at least a half-dozen medical journals dedicated to this, and related endeavors, in the Soviet Union. A telephone call to the Maywood Cesar Chavez branch of the County of Los Angeles Public Library was flirtatious but inconclusive.

With Toxwater’s advice in mind, I have placed the following three advertisements in several Los Angeles dailies:

Under the classification of Automobiles For Sale:

Must sell! Gran Turino red 2-dr
hardtop w/ white striping.
Chrome exhaust, bumpers, grill.
Great suspension, hugs road.
Perfect for the off-duty policeman.
Meets all fed regulations. New tyres.
Reply to box 4343 c/o this paper.

Under the classification of Miscellaneous For Sale:

Picture Yourself Watching This!
1970s era television.
Good condition, retro look.
Perfect for dedicated bachelor’s pad.
Reply to box 4343 c/o this paper.

Under the classification of Personals:

Have You Forgotten Yourself?
Sad SWM seeks Lonely SWM for
male bonding over cars, busting crime rings.
Slobs OK. Reply to Box 4343, c/o this paper.

It is my hope that “voracious reader” Starsky will see these “fragmentary allusions” (a phrase taken from a personal consultation regarding David Starsky with Lyndia Toxwater) and snap out of his fugue. As a bonus, all responses to box 4343 will be checked against our records for bail jumpers and fugitives. In the cases of paroled felons, any address change will be noted and filed.

Toxwater says that it is fortunate that the Los Angeles Police Department has chosen to not publicize David Starsky’s condition in local news media. A photograph of David Starsky accompanied by a caption with his name and medical condition would be a psychotraumatic event on a caustic level, effectively obliterating not only the progress that has been made, but also…

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LYLE’S COMMENTS: I liked this as a story a great deal. It’s something that I would not be surprised to see published in a magazine (without references to Starsky and Hutch, of course). It works very well as a story and I found it engrossing and moving. I did not award it the prize for a similar reason: it was so engaging and the character seemed to have such an emotional need that I felt it was not quite Ballardian enough to take first prize. Excellent story, though, and the Ballard elements were carefully thought out and well rendered.
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…LINKS
+ More Ballardian pastiche